The Munificence of Bureaucracy

'But there was one semi-public body that had a far profounder influence. In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, a high standard of design was set by the cultivated taste of an aristocracy. Though our modern bureaucracy, which acts in the same capacity, has not yet succeeded in acquiring definite enough standards of its own to exert a similar influence, we have had the benefit of some equivalent: namely that of certain big public and industrial corporations, notably the London Transport Board, whose influence on design in the between-war period was incalculable'.
J.M Richards, Modern Architecture (1953)
Lately, I have been unashamedly giving in to my inner trainspotter - using the excuse of my birthday to admire the collected ephemera of the London Transport Museum, reading a this new book on Holden and this older one on London Transport boss Frank Pick. What is fascinating here is the outlines of a parallel universe of munificent bureaucracies who carry out Five Year Plans (London Transport had two in the 1930s) and attempt to create an 'earthly paradise' via sober design and bureaucratic branding. And this parallel universe is secreted in London's most unprepossessing places. On the Eastern edges of the Central Line are spaces of strange Eastern Bloc Englishness, the products of the second Five Year Plan: Redbridge Station, its empty tiled space the perfect place for a spy to meet a 'contact'; Gants Hill, a Moscow Metro vestibule with a Constructivist clock, Newbury Park, with its Brasilian concrete hangar; and Leytonstone, transformed into a station devoted entirely to the career of Alfred Hitchcock, with mosaics of The 39 Steps and Saboteur on the wall adjacent to the Metropolitan Police setting up their new knife barriers.

The Five Year Plans of the London Transport Board suggest something that never quite happened - the transformation of bureaucracy from a pejorative into an honorific. Frank Pick was once compared to Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Richards' curious comparison imagines a Modernist Renaissance via a corporatism very different to our own. New Labour has managed to claim for itself the worst elements of bureaucratism - meaningless targets, idiot optimism, a contempt for privacy and an obsession with surveillance and control - without a hint of the benevolent despotism of the LTB, that being too paternalistic, not frivolous or populist enough, not to mention deeply alien to the PFI ethos. This can be seen most neatly in TFL's 'Platform for Art', with their shrill, ironic Mark Titchner posters and that queasy tunnel of Pot Pourri at London Bridge. The LTB didn't provide a platform for art - in Saler's argument it was itself art, industry, bureaucracy, corporation and social democratic wing of the state all at once.

In the next few years, we'll most likely see the term 'bureaucracy' become yet more pejorative, as a libertarian Rightist Tory party attacks New Labour in the name of the business fundamentalism that Blair and Brown's bureaucracies have acted to protect and strengthen. To damn 'statism' is usually the refuge of the neoliberal scoundrel, especially in the context where it's the state's treason to its own citizens that has created the mess. The idea, hinted at by the Blairites and reiterated by Cameron that charities and businesses can take on the functions of the (remains of the) welfare state is sinister, Victorian, and increasingly prevalent. Yet it seems to be working, with people who should know better imagining the Tories might be the non-authoritarian face of the Blatcherite consensus. But would it be a step too far for the Left to try and valourise in response the idea of bureaucracy as patron of the arts and paragon of civilised order...?
J.M Richards, Modern Architecture (1953)
Lately, I have been unashamedly giving in to my inner trainspotter - using the excuse of my birthday to admire the collected ephemera of the London Transport Museum, reading a this new book on Holden and this older one on London Transport boss Frank Pick. What is fascinating here is the outlines of a parallel universe of munificent bureaucracies who carry out Five Year Plans (London Transport had two in the 1930s) and attempt to create an 'earthly paradise' via sober design and bureaucratic branding. And this parallel universe is secreted in London's most unprepossessing places. On the Eastern edges of the Central Line are spaces of strange Eastern Bloc Englishness, the products of the second Five Year Plan: Redbridge Station, its empty tiled space the perfect place for a spy to meet a 'contact'; Gants Hill, a Moscow Metro vestibule with a Constructivist clock, Newbury Park, with its Brasilian concrete hangar; and Leytonstone, transformed into a station devoted entirely to the career of Alfred Hitchcock, with mosaics of The 39 Steps and Saboteur on the wall adjacent to the Metropolitan Police setting up their new knife barriers.

The Five Year Plans of the London Transport Board suggest something that never quite happened - the transformation of bureaucracy from a pejorative into an honorific. Frank Pick was once compared to Lorenzo the Magnificent, and Richards' curious comparison imagines a Modernist Renaissance via a corporatism very different to our own. New Labour has managed to claim for itself the worst elements of bureaucratism - meaningless targets, idiot optimism, a contempt for privacy and an obsession with surveillance and control - without a hint of the benevolent despotism of the LTB, that being too paternalistic, not frivolous or populist enough, not to mention deeply alien to the PFI ethos. This can be seen most neatly in TFL's 'Platform for Art', with their shrill, ironic Mark Titchner posters and that queasy tunnel of Pot Pourri at London Bridge. The LTB didn't provide a platform for art - in Saler's argument it was itself art, industry, bureaucracy, corporation and social democratic wing of the state all at once.

In the next few years, we'll most likely see the term 'bureaucracy' become yet more pejorative, as a libertarian Rightist Tory party attacks New Labour in the name of the business fundamentalism that Blair and Brown's bureaucracies have acted to protect and strengthen. To damn 'statism' is usually the refuge of the neoliberal scoundrel, especially in the context where it's the state's treason to its own citizens that has created the mess. The idea, hinted at by the Blairites and reiterated by Cameron that charities and businesses can take on the functions of the (remains of the) welfare state is sinister, Victorian, and increasingly prevalent. Yet it seems to be working, with people who should know better imagining the Tories might be the non-authoritarian face of the Blatcherite consensus. But would it be a step too far for the Left to try and valourise in response the idea of bureaucracy as patron of the arts and paragon of civilised order...?
12 Comments:
Agree entirely about the Titchner posters and that horrible food montage that links the Jubilee to the Northern at London Bridge – surely someone must have calculated the effect it would have on homeward-bound tube passengers? ‘I know! Let’s have something that looks like the contents of a dead gourmand’s stomach, twenty times larger than life, in a small passage full of disoriented drunkards!’
I sometimes wonder if we don't overuse the term bureaucracy. I certainly tend to use it to pejoratively describe work-related administrative tasks, as well as the pie-chart-churning middle-managers that increasingly populate FE and HE - that’d be your ‘worst elements of bureaucratism’ side of things (although ‘idiot optimism’? Not sure – the language might be demented in this way, but the practice is profoundly cynical).
Your suggestion ‘would it be a step too far for the Left to try and valorise in response the idea of bureaucracy as patron of the arts and paragon of civilised order...?’ Reminds me a lot of Adam Curtis’s position in ‘The Power of Nightmares’, which seemed (in a slightly weird way) in the final part to point to a somewhat nostalgic vision of post-war paternalism as solution to the sickening spin of contemporary politics. This might involve, of course, handing over cultural control to those who used to have it – the cultural elites. I don’t know if we could ever have the right kind any more – the upper classes are relentlessly uncouth, ignorant and unhelpful, as you know.
Apart from this slight concern about nostalgia, I wonder about the power of ineptitude, of ineptitude as a political strategy. In other words, isn’t part of the reason why it is so hard to imagine anything being ‘art, industry, bureaucracy, corporation and social democratic wing of the state all at once’ is because no one would trust any government to be up to it. Hell, if they can’t even keep hold of a few addresses and computers, how are they going to manage a full-on ‘Modern Renaissance’? The more I think about it, the more it does indeed seem that ineptitude is a cunning ruse to prevent all forms of commitment/interest on the part of the population to any form of statism, however well-intentioned.
Maybe the difference here is that between 'a bureaucracy' (in the sense Richards seems to be using it, to mean a nationalised or semi-public corporation acting in the public interest, with large resources, large staff, etc) and 'bureaucratisation' (as in the process of something becoming bogged down in regulation, managerialism, target-obsession, executive and managerial employees proliferating needlessly, cf Stalinism, or somewhat less bloodily, the NHS post-Thatcher).
As what New Labour have managed to do, frankly rather impressively, is increase bureaucratisation at the same time as weakening the bureaucracies themselves. The funding increases to public services get largely eaten up by moronic, ideological PFI schemes, and so as the NHS, the education system, transport, water et al et al get more and more fragmented, at the same time a bureaucracy grows and grows (cf that Private Eye statistic that the state spends 4-5 times as much on the railways as it used to when it actually owned the damn things). So that ineptitude seems a consequence of a de-bureaucratisation and re-bureaucratisation at once. Of course, it's the idea of the Inefficient State Bureaucracy which so often gets the blame, cf that bloke at North Greenwich station a little while ago exclaiming 'bloody British Rail!' This is then the ideal outcome for Blatcherites, as whatever happens the central aim of destroying the public sphere remains in place. So yeah, it's a perfect ruse.
As per nostalgia...guilty as charged, of course. One thing which comes out from the books on the LTB I've been reading is that it's not the upper classes or cultural elites (like Bloomsbury) that pioneered the great projects of the LCC or the LTB, but Northern businessmen, arts & crafts cranks, Labour bureaucrats, Trade Unionists. But none of these exist in the same way anymore (except the Unions, just). So I don't know how such a thing could occur again. More like the (glorious) Jubilee Line extension and less like 'Platform for Art', at least.
Lots of this comes from a sort of political bet-hedging: I wonder sometimes which is more likely, a neo-Keynesian reformism to restore some sort of sanity, a return to a less lunatic regulated capitalism; or, y'know, the proletarian revolution. I think the chances for both are slim, and naturally I'd prefer the latter, but the first is dismissed too often. The NHS or the Tube are obviously greater achievements than practically the entire corpus of Anarchist theory (and, give or take Spain in 1936, practice), and this can't be pointed out often enough. But the risk of over-bending the stick is very high here, hence the final '...?'
‘idiot optimism’? Not sure – the language might be demented in this way, but the practice is profoundly cynical.
Yeah, I was thinking of the language - that current that runs from Stakhanovites and brave shock-workers overfulfilling the plan to today's 'aspirers' and 'achievers', always 'aiming high' - exactly the self-descriptions of the scum interviewed in that Toynbee article. In both cases, it's a mask for thuggery.
I hereby volunteer to be part of the replacement cultural elite.
I'm thinking of a sort of interim benevolent hegemony, until the proletarian revolution gets its act together. Director General of the BBC would be nice, but I'll take whatever's going.
I'd buy a TV if Dominic ran it.
I'd bring back the Wednesday Play, Arena and Tomorrow's World, get Horizon back to doing proper science programs about black holes and buckeyballs, and put Lawrence Miles in charge of Doctor Who.
Other policies would include moving BBC4's content back onto BBC2, where it belongs, and an experimental project to clone Delia Derbyshire from DNA samples found on fragments of tape loop in the basement of Broadcasting House.
Also, I'd commission lots of shit-scary children's dramas, ideally written by Alan Garner.
I'd buy a TV if Dominic ran it.
Hell, if Dominic ran it I'd buy a TV and a license.
this is hypothetical, but, Britain before the 40s constituted the bureaucratic centre of a transnational corporatist system. Then there's the setting up of the war economy. So, isn't the immediate post war period really a period of de-bureaucratisation? Consequently don't the real quasi socialist achievements of this period have to be considered in the light of a low or negligible marginal cost of bureaucracy?
I don't see how that's the case. Surely the war economy, and pre-war nationalisations (London Transport, for instance) paved the way for even greater state control afterwards. And don't forget rationing lasted until the 1950s. It's more an act of making bureaucracies work for people rather than capital and the empire, cf the frequently made observation in the WW2 that 'if only we used all this command economy and these resources for life instead of death' (v Buckminster Fuller, that, incidentally). So I see what you're saying, but it's more of a step sideways (and leftwards) than a dismantling of bureaucracy as such, even with the decolonisation that starts in '47.
Aside: one remarkable element of the 45-51 governments is that despite canard of bureaucracy that it's slow, obstructive, and makes it impossible to get anything done (familiar from Blairite versions of bureaucratism), a pretty astonishing amount of stuff got done, a remarkable amount of (even now) all but irreversible changes were made.
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