PART TWO: Plutocrats and Taxocrats
CHAPTER VI

RULE BY BUREAUCRATS

Taxocracies are regimes dominated by dogmatists and bureaucrats. The same term can be used to cover non-national organization too, be they churches, unions, companies, or parties, provided they are pervaded by dogmatism and bureaucracy. They exhibit extremely large official classes and make a great many decisions by means of authoritative planning agencies. Ideally, to their view. every action is either prescribed or forbidden. Even "free time" loses its meaning. If we leave people to their own devices in free time, not occupying it with constructive activity, all sorts of tendencies will arise, and they may even resort to crime". So, typically, declared one Soviet official.

Max Weber writes:

...experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization-that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy_is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks.2

Here is the sublime statement of officialdom, written by a sociologist of heroic proportions who has received the worship of a generation of social scientists.

It is a prodigious myth. Its very details contain their own destructive contradictions. For man, as soon as he is embraced by such a system, loses all those unmentioned psychological traits upon which the mechanism depends for its achievements.

Then immediately the vaunted "rationality" of the bureaucracy crumples. "Experience tends universally to show" the contrary. Bureaucracy, "from a purely technical point of view," is incapable of "the highest degree of efficiency" and is therefore irrational for the control of human beings except by the extremely reductive definition of the objects of its control. Therefore, it is inferior to other forms, such as the Kalotic, in precision" (given extended definitions of goals), in "stability" (for it sages,reduces, and privatizes in its operations), in "the stringency of its discipline" (which wanders lost into the maze of private habits of officials and personal deviationism), and in "its reliability" (which is a euphemism for a huge corpus lying lifeless). It is the height of folly for anyone in charge or acting relative to it to expect "a particularly high degree of calculability of results." It is inferior, finally, in "intensive efficiency" (because of the precipitous drop in morale as its external features approach the Weberian model and as "the scope of its operations increases). Its formal applicability "to all kinds of administrative tasks" is no less or greater than any conjured model, including a monkey pecking at a typewriter over infinity: in other words, its "formal" capability means nothing in practice, because historical experience affords us no "formal" cases.

The Fossilization of Communist Regimes

Taxocracies are often governed by a communist party that has revolutionary origins. The hierarchical nature of the party and the "sacred scriptures" of Marx, Lenin, and local supplementaries inspire a dogmatic, deductive form of policy-making and conduct. "All communisms are... identical in their dogmatic, total exclusiveness, but each one of them is adapting and foundering-in its own... national way."3

The pseudo-rational character of taxocracies helps them to proliferate in an age that has been both collectivist, scientoid,and nationalistic. Taxocracy is ancient; the Sumerian, Egyptian,and Persian Kings, not to mention the Incas,4 the Chinese, and later Romans, were impelled to the same system of government,For a long time the reasons for their development seemed to modern man anachronistic, but today these reasons have taken on enlarged meaning. Historically, centralization and the cult of rulers have developed hand-in-hand. Rulers came to be worshipped as gods. Their subjects became divided into ever ascending, non-autonomous divisions for doing state business, and for the worship of the imperial god.5

Today, the rhetoric is different but the implicit intent and effect are the same. "The Cult of Personality" in communist states is flagrant; Stalin was worshipped as he stood atop the dead bodies of 700,000 communist party members, who were themselves heaped upon millions of other liquidated Soviet citizens.

A field of learning called the science of administration has, in addition to providing a great many practical inventions in human relations, cultivated a perspective on large-scale organization that identifies central planning, identical routines, and chains of command as the ideal mode of organizing any group, including nation-states, for action beneficial to the people.

Taxocracy brings scientoid rule. If Stalinism (which is still the guts of world communism) is the quintessence of primitive capitalism. It is also primitive science. It inherits and then exceeds the positive realist scientism of Karl Marx. Memories of Bulgakov's 1927 novel of Catherina and the Master echo in the 1970 news of the imprisonment for criminal insanity of General P.G. Grigorenko who had publicly protested the official condemnation of Soviet writers and the invasion of Czechoslovakia.6

Communism began as an anarchic and syndicalist theory of the state, but it ended with espousing and practicing the most rigid and detailed centralism. The Soviet Union itself has become a "highly bureaucratized and stratified society resistent to change."7 Every communist state is a taxocracy, constructed on a faith in human engineering that outstrips the wildest dreams of the pioneer authors of theories of scientific administration. Instead of the communist state advancing beyond the stratocratic ideal, it has retrograded to "catch up" with stratocracy. Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav revolutionary, politician, and social analyst, is certain that by 1984 "the dominant role of the militarists in public life will be unconcealed and frankly accepted" in the Soviet Union.8

There is no proof of the belief, common among plutocratic neo-liberals, that, although communism may not be able to do great things for advanced countries, it is indispensable for the poorest countries-China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other dystrocracies. They are simply inviting the slowest, most excruciating kind of development, with build-in guarantees of dikaic and pneumic regression.

On the contrary, a case can be made to the effect that communism, like other schemes with a modernizing motive, works best where the country is already technologically advanced on the basis of a plutocratic history. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union exemplify this proposition.

Dystrocracies should aim directly at kalocracy. That is their "Great Leap" forward.

Initially it was hoped that the communist party would check the taxocratic tendencies of the communist state. The party would be the catalyst of innovation and democracy. But despite repeated purges, and the rigorous self-examination and heroic efforts of individual leaders, communist parties every where have inevitably succumbed to taxocracy. Milovan Djilas, who paid dearly for his revelations about The New Class in Yugoslavia, is most emphatic about the same group in the Soviet Union. He exoriates Stalin for his role in the process:

Stalin understood that it was possible to maintain the new order only if the "new class" - that is, the party bureaucracy-appropriated a monopoly over Soviet society. [But], today all the more significant creative spirit of Eastern Europe and of the West European Communist parties are either "revisionist" or alienated from the party bureaucracy and its dogmas.9

Now communism is the quintessence of primitive capitalism: communism embodies the worst features of capitalism-long hours, concentrated work, over-specialization, loss of individuality of life-style, less gratifying free time, less variety of product, more machine-slavery, less pride of work, greater suspicion of bosses, alienation, anonymity, hierarchy.

The curve of income distribution of the Soviet Union resembles that of the United States in the difference between the highest paid employees and the average employee. In education, the great majority of high school graduates (82%) of urban professional parents went on to study in universities, but only 10% of the children of farmers, workers, and sub-professional parents did, American higher education reaches much deeper socially, but still has a strong bias against children of the poor and uneducated, as studies by David Riesman and others have shown.

Communism today, when compared with capitalism today, means more massing of people, more line-ups more serving.10 more soul-murder,11 and as much or more war, communism even means more chauvinism-to stimulate the old-line party members and to drug the young revolutionaries who march out of the mountains, down jungle trails, through concrete alleys, in agonizing struggles for an ideology that has withered in the countries of its birth. Communism today resembles the modern American metropolis, dead in its centre pulp but flapping spasmodically its suburban tentacles.

Universal Gravitation Towards Taxocracy

Modern plutocratic nations gravitate toward taxocracy. Half of the resources and energies of England, France, Italy, Western Germany, Israel, and other plutocratic countries are organized within a single over-arching official structure of agencies. Business in these countries is, in major part, taxocratically organised, even where it is independent of the state.

The history of a country alters the character of its taxocratic tendencies. England, although it has striven to become taxocratic, has preserved plutocratic any dystrocratic elements, in large part because of an ancient propensity to particularize administration and to resist centralized authorities; this tendency is enforced by the common law, a legal system embedded along side beliefs in the virtues of local rule and individual eccentricity.12

At the same time, the English economy has rapidly assumed the features of a mature socialism.

The [nationalized] industries added enormously to the government's responsibilities, not only in appointing their heads and directing their policies, but in allocating their capital. And nationalization changed the whole balance of economic power. [By 1961, the state concerns] invested œ 740 million, compared with some œ 1,200 million spent by the whole of private manufacturing industry. The large corporations, in turn, are in many ways similar to Whitehalls, but much more self-contained and all-embracing, with their own factories and territories and international ramifications. The difference between private and nationalized corporations is decreasing.13

All of this goes along with a standard income tax rate of over 40%, a wide range of social insurance and socialized medical care, allowances for children nation-wide collective bargaining throughout industry, and tight monetary controls.

Socialism (i.e., taxocracy) is not solely a matter of nationalization but also a matter of governmental regulation and controls of many types.14 The Western continental countries are inheritors of the imperial administrations of Rome and Napoleonic France. This inheritance is more calculated and rationalistic in many respects than the administrative traditions of the industrial revolution.15 When, on the 28 Pluviose of the Year 8 of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic regime promulgated the law of local administration, an enthusiastic journalist wrote:

From the First Consul of France to the mayor of a village in the Pyrenees everything holds together all the links of the great chain are tightly bound together. The movement of power will be rapid as it will traverse a line whose points it surpasses. It will find everywhere execution and nowhere opposition, always instruments and no obstacles against it.16

The several mutually supporting historical experiences make difficult any fundamental reform of taxocracy in Western Europe without an extra-legal revolution.

Egypt manages to combine the worst of three types of regime, thought it may have been founded upon the noble aspirations of some young revolutionary officers. A desperate dystrocracy, whose regime is stratocratic its

overcentralism and anti-Marxism-in a state whose official philosophy and policy are described as "scientific socialism"-impart a highly autocratic flavor and style to present-day Egyptian society. Every step forward comes as a decision of the state machine from above, never as an initiative from the people.17

More than half the industry of Italy is nationally owned. The superstructures used to manage a vast, sprawling empire of business were mainly created by the Fascists originally to prevent bankruptcy, preserved by the "free" regime of the Christian-Democratic coalitions, and by no means proposed for dissolution by the Socialist and Communist parties.18 The labor unions and left radical parties are of course, models of rigid bureaucracy themselves. The Catholic Church is equally dogmatic and hierarchic in structure and operations. So the ability of the Italian economy to grow rapidly since World War II is a miracle, without question, but is a miracle of the flexible mentality of a great many Italians, of immigrant remittances of the unquenchable optimism of a number of entrepreneurs, of the tenacious farmers, and of the sunk capital of $100,000,000,000 of antiquities and art (100% "depreciated" in the Budget, badly maintained and managed, but still returning 5% per annum).

The United States "socialist democracy" should be born soon, that is, statistically, taking 50% of major indicators as the threshold, but not psychologically. At that time, over 50% of personal income will be taken in by all forms of taxes. Over 50% of the population will be directly dependent upon governments for a living. Over 50% of the Gross National Product will be directly attributable to governmental spending. Over 50% of the wealth (assets) of the united states - its land, equipment, industries, etc., - will be owned or controlled by the governments. The five hundred largest corporations, most of which will continue to operate autonomously, now have largely taxoctratic internal organizations and external relations. They will be increasingly ruled, though not owned, by government agencies. As Julio Camba, a Spanish writer, has put it, "If tomorrow Standard Oil passes into the hands of the state, none of the employees would notice the change because in reality Standard Oil is a state in itself."19

According to doctrinaire liberal, Socialist, and communist belief, this ought to be a moment of supreme happiness for the United States, just as it should have been all along for each country as it passed this same milestone on the way to utopia, or what the materialists of the past century belived would be utopia. But every thinking person over thirteen years of age and under fifty, whether in Chicago, Odessa, Shanghai, Manila Buenos Aires, or Rome, realizes (or at least already dimly perceives) that taxocracy, the dominion of officialdom, is a hoax on Christian, Jeffersonian, French revolutionary and Marxist ideals. That exponents of these same ideals are often strident trumpeteers of taxocracy merely adds farce to hoax.

Since taxocracies are not quite incompetent as wealth-producers they sometimes exhibit planned or unplanned tendencies to become consumer economies, that is, plutocracies. For example, the Soviet state planning apparatus allocates production according to assumed priorities of supply and tested local demands, making allowances for local free purchasing too. So it ends up with a marketing system analogous to the American, with manufacturers, wholesalers, local wholesalers, and retailers. Advertising is added too nowadays. The U.S.A. system is achieved by a process involving incomparably more bargaining and free decisions; it is less wasteful and incites strenuous efforts at producing more goods and distributing them more widely.20

If the functions are the same, the query arises: "What is the socialist revolution in marketing all about?" The answer has to be that the Soviets cannot admit a "middlemen"; Marxist theory will not allow it. Yet the "middlemen" will be present under both a profit and non-profit system. If American distributing corporations had their profits eliminated on paper (in law), they would still be profitable to manage; the great loss would be to those who receive a certain degree of social and political independence for being shareholders. Of course if quotas and limits on production were set, there would occur an earthquake to the American economy in the course of which a great shift in the stream of power would occur, from a more heterogeneous public to a narrow group of party politicians and officials.

But any deviation of taxocratic economics towards plutocratic practices is fought strenuously, especially by stratocrats who would rather lead a country into foreign adventures than relinquish the domestic economic scene to consumer abundance.Prosperity and "liberal thaws," as Premier Khrushchev discovered to his sorrow, do not win much representation among the power elite of a taxocracy.21

The chances of an effective democracy in the Soviet Union exist,if at all, on an inferior level, where the situation is controllable and where, at bottom, only non-political questions are to be resolved. In this regard Soviet industrial society is relatively little distinguishable from those of the west, where equally great efforts are made for the population to utilize more vigorously its political rights on the one hand, but where the great parties have often, and for a long time, given up arousing in the elector a true interest in the final goals of politics. There, where the party programs are pushed by methods of illiterate publicity, like market products, an attitude found in all consumer societies -- a passive rather than political attitude -- is promoted in the elector. Under these conditions just as in the other world, nothing but an appeal to immediate material interests can incite the citizens to participate in a more active way in public life.22

The average person in the U.S.S.R., Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and many another country is little, if any, better off now than he or she was ten years or fifty years ago. Regarding the Russians, "for most of them daily life is still a grinding drudgery, which mocks the splendours of one of the world's super-Powers." The "average dwelling space per person is still only six square yards."23 Alexander Szalai24 publishes statistics of 1924 and 1959 showing a slight decrease of `free time' per day for men and an increase for women (from 1.83 hours to 2.42 hours). The picture is gloomier when one considers the greater strains, less enthusiasm, and even such facts as the shorter time people were taking to eat their meals in 1959. Even more significant is the considerable decline -- owing both to the greater inefficiency of the police and the freer air of experimentation in 1924 -- of dikeos and pneumos. In 1963, I. Tveritiniv and M. Rossinsky estimated that 100 billion man-hours, or the working hours of 40 million workers, were spent yearly on primitive household tasks that could be done better by central services and machines. They stated that an average of 31 hours were spent by Soviet citizens on indispensable housework.25 These phenomena may explain the "Russians" intense, almost obsessive, preoccupation with material things and with the comforts of life,"26 We have shown the same to be true of the dystrocracies and stratocracies such as India, china, and Indonesia. We shall shortly show this to be the case in the U.S.A. as well; yet it has been a period of "peaceful worldwide economic boom." In taxocracies and stratocracies, however, this general economic failure is practically wished upon the people by their regimes.

As a form of kalotic government, taxocracy, is only slightly better than stratocracy or dystrocracy and is inferior to plutocracy; moreover, there are taxocracies less able even to provide emos than are certain dystrocracies. In 1961, Premier Khrushchev predicted that by 1970 the U.S.S.R. would overtake the U.S.A. in industrial production per capita. As the deadline drew near, the gap that had to be made up between the two countries had widened by an extra $150 per capita per year. Slow progress in emos, and no progress in dikeos and pneumos: We have noted the facts above.27 The awesome capacity of people to suffer such a system is also remarkable. "The great Russian people: is a phrase that fondly escapes the lips of their rulers on many an occasion, unfortunately with the same affectionate wonder that ox-drivers regard their beasts of burden.

The proverbial Persian fool Nastradim Hodja once related to people his hope of teaching his donkey to work without food. When encountered downcast one day thereafter, he said glumly, "Just when I had him trained so that he could live without eating, he died."

Taxocracies are able, however, to provide their masses with a sense of impending emos with actual pneumos of a simple and non-controversial kind, at the expense of dikeos, by isolating themselves from the world order-politically, economically,28 and in every other way-acting in ways that frequently are detrimental to cosmarchy. Taxocracies maintain the illusion of well-being by strictly controlling free expression and by making available limited opportunities to large unstratified masses of people. Abetted by stratrocratic elements, they seek to control the press or at least hug it so tightly as to make it suffocate.29 The press is ultimately owned by the government; earlier it is pressured into emitting streams of hortatory and congratulatory propaganda on behalf of the government; in an even earlier phase, in which the U.S.A. and other plutocracies find themselves, the objective social journalists are heavily outnumbered by the paid press agents of the increasingly taxocratic state.

And yet the mass is stupefied but is not converted. It is "turned off." Messages cease to penetrate the public and more absurd contortions of words and images are poured upon the heads of the people. The people cannot be moved; they stand like Buchner's Wozzeck, seemingly dead from the neck up until one last combination of blows sets off an agonized spasm of blind revolt.

Why then should dystrocracies be so eager to become taxocratic? That they move in that direction massively and rapidly is an incontrovertible fact.30 They even do so with anti-communist motives sometimes. To a society whose economy is still in a primitive stage of organization, as in the Balkans, Southeast Asia or Cuba, the machine seems god-like in the material benefits it can produce. To the intelligentsia, who are hopelessly at conflict with traditional culture, the taxocracy means positions at the top-as scribes or technicians. (Stratocracies, on the other hand, prefer to keep intellectuals submissive and subordinate.) For the intelligentsia, the taxocracy is a heaven of secure clerks, circling piously about the Machine in primitive organizational patterns. Of "The Polish Intelligentsia and the Socialist Order," Solomon Rawin declares.31

The Intelligent -- the manager, the professional, or the bureaucrat-does not see himself necessarily in agreement with the regime; he may be critical of the inefficiency of the bureaucratic overcentralization, and may be scornful of the irrationalities arising from doctrinaire rigidity. But at the same time, he has no difficulty in fitting within a system that provides him with a clear definition of status and offers him protection against the uncertainties of a pluralistic structure.

These are the men from whom most of the tutors of Kalocracy must initially come, so we may see how great the task of reawakening is.

The reasons plutocratic countries are moving towards taxocracy are more complicated. For example, it seems exceedingly strange to the intelligent refugee from Eastern Europe that the United States should be walking towards a world from which he has just fled. But he controls his desire to expostulate and is simply grateful for being left alone in what, after all, is still a better situation. He does not perceive the moral chaos (of which more will be said later) of the plutocratic countries that drives Americans, Britons, French, Germans, and Italians along the road to taxocracy. He does not understand that the plutocratic people can see what he, coming from behind, cannot see: a future which seems to bring only more consumption, more blind and frenzied movement, more crowding, more desolation of the natural environment, and no sense of mission, no meaningful goals. Our East European emigre must also understand that the plutocracies have conspicuously failed to establish in the last few generations satisfactory toparchies and cosmarchies. He must take into account too the social security system, so popular and yet basically questionable.32 For the moment this serves sufficiently to explain why countries of high material productivity and large measures of individual freedom are not invulnerable to the attractions of the state-managed society.

Effects of Foreign Policy

Having discussed briefly the material order of the taxocratic state, it is now necessary to look at the relation of domestic conduct to world order. We recall Stalin's "socialism in one country" slogan that was intended to protect Russia by isolation and which gave the dictatorship a chance to murder and imprison millions and to bureaucratize the rest of the people. We recall also the facility with which Stalin turned to imperialism in Europe and Asia. The same behavior can be expected from communist taxocracies elsewhere.

Perhaps the Russo-Chinese conflict may drive home one important lesson, namely, that arrogant bureaucratic oligarchies, incorrigible in their national narrowmindedness and egoism, cannot be expected to work out any rational solution of this or any other conflict; still less can they lay stable foundations for a socialist commonwealth of peoples.

So states Isaac Deutscher, himself a socialist.33

The conventional taxocrat is a socialist. He maintains that there is a profound distinction between socialism and communism: communism breeds violent revolution everywhere; socialism pulls the imperialist and exploitative fangs from plutocracy to make it peaceful and progressive. Or, socialism can become programmatically acceptable in a progressive society.34 Unfortunately this is not true. The difference in attitudes towards violence reputedly held by socialists and communists has not been tested in conduct-no country has ever gone fully socialist without going communist.

For example, let us take the United Kingdom, a country that has, on occasion, voted pro-socialist. Under socialist leadership, Britain has accelerated a course away from plutocracy and towards taxocracy, but at a slow rate and with negligible effects upon the standard of living of the British people. Britain has reluctantly pursued a foreign policy which has allied it with the United States. It has been able to form such a union with the U.S. partly because it is not a true communist state, and partly also because it, along with Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, comes within the gravitational field of American power.

While ostensibly supporting America's foreign policy objectives, the U.K. has deviated towards pacifism and isolationism (mainly the latter) and concentrated its energies upon domestic policies. However, it has been able to maintain its isolationist and pacifistic stance only because it is still mainly a plutocracy. As it advances past the threshold of taxocracy, England (perhaps along with America) will become increasingly hostile and belligerent, a disgruntled country, like France. As George Orwell prophesied, the end result of the trend toward taxocracy will be a world of hostile socialist, even totalitarian, megarchies. Socialism without communism is improbable, not because, as Harold Laski35 and other British socialists thought, the ruling classes will never relinquish power, but because the internal controls over people and the ensuing strains within taxocracies breed hostilities and hence public and private systematic violence, at home and abroad.