“Paperwork syncopates the state’s rhythms, destabilizes its structures,” Kafka notes, creating conditions that politicians, clerks, critics, and demagogues can all opportunistically exploit. The range of examples Kafka marshals demonstrate how these seemingly inevitable tales of bureaucratic incompetence and subversion have been put in service across the political spectrum. Kafka joins thoroughly researched narratives of a few notable civil servants of the era with some psychoanalytically oriented speculation to trace the evolution of “the psychic life of paperwork”-how it has served not only as a field for passive-aggressive political action and a source of scapegoats for state authorities but also as a well of perverse wish fulfillment for citizens eager to acknowledge paperwork’s inevitable dominion over them. How did such horror stories of clerical uselessness become so socially useful, so tellable? Where did the conventions of the bureaucratic nightmare tale come from? Media history professor Ben Kafka’s The Demon of Writing attempts to answer this question by way of a tour of post-revolutionary France and the nineteenth-century milieu that helped spawn “bureaucracy” as a pejorative term. Such stories are as safe and neutral as talk about the weather contempt for bureaucrats conveys a comfortable, conventional normality. One can customarily secure conversational sympathy with tales of inefficiency at voting stations, or the impossibilities of decoding medical bills and sorting out insurance coverage. We’ve all had infuriating encounters with customer service divisions, the privatized bureaucracy of consumer capitalism. We have all been to the post office we’ve had to renew passports, file quarterly tax payments, fight phantom parking tickets. We are all familiar with tales of inept clerks wasting people’s time, focusing on inane procedural concerns at the expense of common sense and elevating the protocols of paperwork for their own sake over the functions bureaucracy is ostensibly intended to perform. Photo by redjar, 2000, Flickr creative commons Resistance to neoliberalism is growing and early examples are provided.For reactionaries of all stripes, complaining about the inefficiency and tyranny of clerks has long served as an excuse to call for both limited government and enhanced executive power.
Writ large, there are concerns about democracy itself as neoliberalism works against the will of the people and collective responses to social problems.
#PRIVATIZED TYRANNY DEF PROFESSIONAL#
Because of its prescriptive nature, there is concern that neoliberalism dictates practice, threatening professional authority of social workers and challenging the implicit trust the public puts in professions.
New public managerialism is a common example, as is managerialism more generally they both borrow business management principles and apply them to the management of all aspects of social services. While neoliberal policy design sets public provision parameters, its signature tool is to govern through state public administration. Among its central tenets are that individuals should behave as independent responsible market actors the social welfare state should be downsized and delegated to lower levels of government and public welfare should be privatized, marketized, and commodified. Neoliberalism is at its core a political reasoning, organizing society around principles of market rationality, from governance structure to social institutions to individual behavior in which individuals should behave as responsible and accountable market actors. A third component is neoliberal governmentality -the ways neoliberalism shapes society’s members through the state to govern themselves as compliant market actors. Second, this includes concurrent state governing principles to limit welfare state protections and impose disciplinary governance so service users will be individually responsible and take up precarious work.
#PRIVATIZED TYRANNY DEF FREE#
This entails three dimensions: First, neoliberalism consists of economic governing principles to benefit free markets both globally and domestically to the advantage of corporations and economic elites. Neoliberalism is a governing rationality based on market logic that protects free markets by reducing business regulations, restricting citizen and resident welfare state protections, and increasing welfare state discipline. Neoliberalism is an international, transdisciplinary, and interdisciplinary concept with political, economic, and social dimensions.