Parkinson's Law: work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Obvious Corollary to Parkinson's Law: work expands to occupy all resources available for its completion, including such elements as land, depletables, and finance capital.
[C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law, 1957, p.1]

The author of this semi-humorous proposition, Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson used his analysis to explain why the number of functionaries in a bureaucracy increases regardless of the work they are supposedly administering. For the most part, Prof. Parkinson confines his rant to public sector bureaucracies, and to the number of functionaries they employ. However, taken as a serious matter, Parkinson's Law could be expanded and applied to make reliable predictions. First, the annual salaries of functionaries is only a smallish proportion of the costs of bureaucracies; hence, it is not merely time, but all resources, that are absorbed by administrative functions—particularly energy-intensive industries, such as subsidized farming or warfare. Second, while Parkinson ignores the clause "available for [the task's] completion," and insists it merely expands regardless, in fact the rate of bureaucratic expansion is indeed contingent on (a) the resources available to society, (b) the amount and type of resources available to the organization under analysis, and (c) the methods used by the bureaucracy to expand its power.

Parkinson hinted at this over the course of his book, particularly in Chapter Six, "Plans and Plants." In this chapter, he vividly compares the buildings housing efficient, dynamic institutions, and those housing flourishing, decrepit institutions on the brink of implosion. Invariably the latter occupy the most splendid, while the former function in squalor. His argument is more humorous than convincing; taken with absolute seriousness, I would submit that organizations typically occupy a facility like the Pentagon with an object of perfecting the bureaucratic system of control, rather than the governing object of efficiency. The Pentagon was designed to freeze in place the conceptions of administration embraced in 1947, and as such, any fundamental revolution in military affairs would be oriented not towards making the US military more effective in serving democracy, but more overpowering to democracy. Likewise, by erecting a magnificent office for the bureaucracy of a bank, the edifice ensures that the bank will be administered in about the same way for the conceivable future.

Parkinson's Law and Communism in Decay

The classic illustration of Parkinson's Law at work was the USSR. During its period in power, the Soviet Union was known as a great consumer of raw materials. In essence, it was a party bureacracy with an apparatus of coercion; the bureaucracy replicated itself to shadow every person involved in productive pursuits (as well as lower-ranking shadow-ers). The object of this, obviously, was to ensure the masters of the system were forever beyond the reach of their errors. When the central planners "experiemented" with the collectivization of agriculture, at the cost of perhap millions of lives, there was never any risk to the decision makers for that reason; the risk came chiefly from the bureaucracy's self-defensive paranoia. As a consequence, the outlays of the Soviet State were huge, yet seldom productive; usually, plants operated at a fraction their capacity, and that, only with grotesque wastage of resources. Most spectacularly, almost two-thirds of crude oil recovered by the Soviet petroleum industry was lost to leakage or to inefficient refining methods. Needless to say, this resulted in indescribable ecological destruction.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union regarded the environmentalist movement inside its borders as "anti-Soviet." Ironically, if it had accommodated the environmentalist movement, it would no doubt have survived a lot longer, and even have preserved socialism into the 21st century. But that was inherently impossible for the all-powerful bureaucracy, which only knew how to expropriate more of what was available to the nation, for itself.

Parkinson's Law and Fascism

The fascist states likewise imploded under the pressure of Parkinson's Law. Inded, they were created by Parkinson's Law, and their death reflected the final prognosis of the total state. Unlike the Communist states of China and the USSR, the fascist states emerged directly from the death throes of a particular cohort of capitalist bourgeoisie. Whereas the Soviets grew a praetorian party-state much like a mutant tomato plant, the fascists were carefully cultivated mainly after they had begun to consolidate organizationally. The fascist movement, lacking the sort of organization that could apply theory to governance, instead became a sort of remotely-piloted golem, specifically concentrating its agenda to very specific dangers faced by the industrial managers and their clients, the major family fortunes of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Hence, the economic program of the fascist states involved massive reductions of taxes on capital gains, newfound indifference to corporate income tax evasion, cost-plus contracts by the state to big industry, and the liquidation of the trade unions. The entire fascist states, lacking a doctrine of their own, simply did the bidding of their sponsors whenever, whereever, and in precisely such a fashion, as served their needs.

This might have seemed, from the point of view of the great industrialists, to be infinitely superior to mere falangism, under which the state merely attacked their enemies and left them to fend for themselves. And in the densely populated, resource-poor industrial systems of Germany, Italy, and Japan, that would be true. However, Parkinson's Law explains why the totalitarian fascism of Wartime Europe was far more dangerous to its masters than the diffuse fascism of 1970's-era Latin America was. The bureaucracies of the big industries, assigned with contracts guaranteed to make restore profitability and recoup stranded costs, became stupendously wasteful. All of the regimes passed laws effectively prohibiting the creation of new industries (!), unless for the express purposes of the regime; all of them likewise passed laws that made it virtually impossible to form a new corporation, unless again, for some explicit need of the regime.¹

According to economists such as Joseph A. Schumpeter, the key benefit of the market economy was its power of creative destruction—, a process under which innovative new industries drove inefficient ones out of business. Naïvely, he assumed that the pro-capitalist fascist regimes would prevent the slide towards socialistic protection against creative destruction, although in fact the opposite was true. However, when the Nazi state began implementing this policy, wide swathes of the capitalist stakeholders actually pulled up their stakes and fled. The Nazis imposed controls to prevent capital flight, an expedient that immediately pitted industrial managers against the bourgeoisie. And the system of protecting existing enterprise against competition did in fact protect both profits and the existing managerial bureaucracy, but, over the long run, ensured that investment opportunities would be restricted. To make matters worse, the Nazi/Fascist policies of buying up large pools of commercial equities of insolvent firms, then making them solvent by selling them back at huge losses, essentially protected the most incompetent and politically-minded managers.

But with each measure to preserve the monopoly rents, the "task"of the industrial managers expanded to fulfill the resources required for "completion." The Nazis overran Czechoslovakia, while the Fascists invaded Abyssinia, Albania, then Greece (where they were beaten). The Japanese case is practically a schematic diagram: the "leftwing" fascists, the Kōdō (Imperial Way), favored consolidating Manchuria by investing in its modernization. The rightwing fascists, the Tōsei (Control) favored eternal expansion into China, with the goal of controlling it. The Kōdō never had a chance, governed as they were by mystical daydreams. The Tōsei had, in contrast, an elaborate system of ties to the cadres of professional managers of the zaibatsu. Once in power over the Japanese state (through their surrogates the Tōsei), the industrial management of Japan's heavy industry could regard the entire Pacific litoral as "available," mainly as a conveyor belt for expansion and poilitical leverage. Until late in 1942, this was indeed the case.

While the falangist is extremely favorable to enterprise per se, the competing demands of rival types or sectors of enterprise are seldom favored to a degree harmful to the others. The managerial class is favored, since it is the active arm of the bourgeoisie, but not the extreme that the bourgeoisie is reduced to a figurehead. Heavy industry is usually favored, but not to the point that light industry is driven to the wall. Under fascism, the ambitions of the elite to turn their nation into a mechanized version of Plato's Republic led to ever-more desperate interventions in the operations of the market economy. The operations of the market are strangled out of existence, and in their place, the fascist technocrats are stuck with alone with the terrifying hunger of their own, inexorable mediocrity. (Part 2)

[Fascism] | [Totalitarianism] | [Communism]