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]

In Part 1, I briefly mentioned the role of Parkinson's Law in explaining the bureaucratic origins of fascism. In as few words as possible, the tendency for bureaucracies to require more resources to fulfill their mandate leads ultimately to the insolvency of the organization, accompanied by its efforts to hide its failure through resort to state terror. Now, it is necessary to spell out some of the mechanics of this process.

Bureaucracy as Pathology

Bureaucracies are necessary things. This is a fact. The bureaucracy administers state power by assigning resources it controls, through a hierarchy, to specific points of delivery; industrial managers in the private sector also constitute a bureaucracy. Actual civil servants, such as postal carriers and school teachers, are not commonly considered bureaucrats because they don't assign resources. They are compelled to fill the breach in society left by churches, private associations, or NGO's, breaches that will probably with us forever. They are responsible for enforcing the laws, and applying those laws to individual cases. Even when I criticize the conduct of bureaucracies, it's rather like criticizing humans: if they didn't exist, I wouldn't be here to notice.

However, bureaucracies often are driven to invade the space of democracy, and they have very insidious ways of doing so. One is to expand the organization, as Parkinson says, to absorb the budget allocated for the actual mission of the governmental/corporate department. So, for example, conservatives bemoan the "administrative" share of education; liberals bemoan the "administrative" costs of private health insurance. In both cases, the state created opportunities for bureaucracies to expand into that space, and the actual administration of either education or medical assistance has been squeezed into a thin film of overworked technicians.

Why does this happen? Parkinson hints at the desire of administrators to create fiefdoms, although his chapter on recruitment emphasizes its arbitrary nature (it's a joke, get it?). Parkinson logically equates arbitrariness with randomness, with a slight bias towards street wisdom: hence, no serious harm done. Allow the intrusion of modern rational techniques, and the bureaucracy's inability to exercise common sense is imposed on yet another of its biological operations. This is not a particularly unusual idea; it has some merit. However, it is not so that the old methods he (ironically) praises are arbitrary at all. The tradition of choosing aristocrats for high employ in the civil service, for example, was guided by the desire of nascent bureaucracies to make themselves unasailable sinecures for the ruling elites. In order to make them more effective at the increasingly technical job of running a modern state, however, most countries took up the habit of recruiting specialized experts and giving them uniforms, like military men. In the UK, the two 19th century bodies allowed to do this were the military itself, and the clergy; hence, the age was one of British decline in the administrative sciences, and ascendancy in military effectiveness, and in skepticism.

I mentioned before that the rate bureaucratic expansion is 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. These are the rules by which empires are made within a government or within a corporation (as usual, I tend to lump the public and private sectors together; here, they are absolutely identical).

Item (a) is an absolutely limit for the ability of the bureaucracy to expand. In countries such as Egypt, bureaucratic overhang is enormous simply because the paucity of resources per person, leads to a single organization embedding itself by running up big body counts. The state totally dominates the formal economy, a disaster it cannot stop itself from inflicting on the country (much as it would love to). It pays its employees little, but in money, which still has extraordinary commanding power in the economy. The employees grumble, but infinitely prefer the security of a state job to the uncertainty that a market economy would ever expand to give them an alternative. The state maintains security by a virtual monopoly of politically conscious middle class men.

In the USA, resources available to the nation are immense but no organization commands more than a few percent of the total. The federal government, supposedly big and powerful, actually is an arbitrary term for a large cluster of bureaucracies: the armed forces, plus some crumbs from its mid-morning snack. The armed forces, however, has traditionally been held in check by the division of command (a principle going back to Biblical times), and more recently, by its urgent logistical dependency on the civilian market economy. Finally, the armed forces is not doctrinaire. The US armed forces has certain safeguards that tend to protect it from ever offering a safe haven for fascism; one safeguard is that it has been traditionally barred from law enforcement, a safeguard severely damaged by recent efforts to embroil it in the war on drugs. However,

The rise of fascism in the countries analyzed tends to support the conclusion that the leading bureaucratic actor was not even in the public sector: it was the cadre of industrial managers of the affected countries. In Romania and Hungary, we must concede it was not a bureaucracy at all, but rather, the big landlords; in Japan, likewise, the military probably was more important than the zaibatsu, although comparing the two is a rather frivolous exercise: one was a solicitor, the other a client. In Iraq (1979-2003), the fascist regime was instigated by a new cadre of industrial managers, uniformly from state enterprises; but given Middle Eastern capital markets, no other kind could exist.¹ In Germany, Italy, and Austria, however, the role of the private industrial bureaucracies was decisive. The objective of the fascist movement, or its enablers in state/corporate bureaucracies, was to use a merger of economic with state power to eliminate obstacles to expansion. The state was reduced to mere enforcer.

Finally, the state enables bureaucratic expansion by rewarding organizations that shift resources from mission to personnel. A compelling example is when the state allows the formation of monopolies. Industrial managers and their staff will now proliferate simply because the corporate income derives from monopoly rent, not profit, and the ability to award managerial positions to technicians is a crucial way to build a fiefdom inside the organization. The services provided to customers decline, and the costs of the inputs declines, but the costs of the firm increase.

[Fascism] | [Totalitarianism] | [Communism]