One of the most consistent effects of the worldwide explosion of right-wing politics over the last 12 months has been to render “bureaucracy” a dirty word. Never a beautiful one, admittedly, these days it calls to mind not only administrative fecklessness and institutional bloat, but actual deep-state conspiracy. In 2025, the surest way for any would-be strongman to prove his reactionary credentials is to slash as many administrative jobs as possible: in the US, President Donald Trump looks set on dismantling the entire US Agency for International Development; in Argentina, Javier Milei has collapsed the state’s capacities for social provision into a single, underfunded “Ministry of Human Capital”. Even in the UK, where the establishment has wrenched back the reins of power for the time being, civil servants privately worry that this period will come to be seen as a brief interregnum between the purges of Dominic Cummings and Nigel Farage. Now they have more immediate problems: with the abolition of NHS England and Keir Starmer’s invective against the “flabby state”, it appears the Labour Party is going the same way.
This has come to the shock of liberals who see themselves as the natural advocates for the public sector. But for anyone familiar with the history of the political left, Starmer’s retrenchments seem rather more understandable. After all, for most of the modern left’s history, anti-bureaucratic politics – the belief that the modern bureaucracy is just a slick new way for the bourgeoisie to impose rules on the worker – has been a core principle. In the 19th century, one of the few ideas on which anarchist, communist and reformist factions could bring themselves to agree was not that the French Revolution had failed because it had overthrown the king, but because it failed to do away with his bourgeois functionaries, who were just as greedy and tyrannical. Indeed, it is hard to find an important left-wing figure from the 19th century who didn’t join in with the anti-bureaucratic pillorying. Christian socialists such as Saint-Simon dismissed all public administration as parasitical, anarchists like Bakunin wanted to replace the civil service with the shifting “authority of the bootmaker”, and even Marx and Engels, for all their posturing about proletarian dictatorship, longed for an “overcoming” or “withering away” of the state.
Even within living memory, the anti-bureaucratic left has been a force. It was anti-bureaucratic conviction, for instance, that animated the “Global Justice Movement” of the late 1990s and early 2000s: a vast coalition of malcontents comprising Indian farmers’ associations, Canadian postal workers’ unions, indigenous groups in Panama, anarchist collectives in Detroit, neo-Zapatista rebels in Mexico, and many others. For these groups, the only way to challenge empire and capitalism was to challenge the bureaucracy that propped them up – specifically, the matrix of global institutions that kept rich countries rich and poor countries poor. Protesters targeted every global bureaucracy they could think of, from unelected trade organisations such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the World Trade Organisation that struck down protectionism wherever it was attempted, to global agencies like the International Monetary Fund whose “structural adjustment policies” kept the developing world mired in inescapable debt. This project was so successful that only a decade ago, one of the Global Justice Movement’s stalwarts, David Graeber, could triumphantly proclaim that the left’s great achievement this century was the formation of a truly global anti-bureaucratic movement. Few of his comrades seriously doubted him.
How did this 200-year affinity suddenly vanish? Perhaps the most obvious answer is the steady creep of American political categories around the world: after all, there is only one country with a real history of consistently designating anti-bureaucratic politics as a right-wing phenomenon, and it is the United States – a country whose political left is dominated by a party still in the thrall of the New Deal, and whose modern right forged its political identity during the Cold War by portraying itself as the antidote to totalitarian Soviet Union. Ever since George Wallace coined the term “pointy heads” during his 1968 Republican campaign, anti-bureaucratic noises have been obligatory not only for candidates on the American right, but even for those of the centre left who wanted to distance themselves from the more sinister members of their party.
The American origin of the new right-wing critique of bureaucracy, however, furnishes it with some rather bizarre blind spots. Perhaps the most important of these is the Cold War tendency to posit “bureaucracy” and “the market” (or “the private sector”) as opposite, non-overlapping alternatives, when in fact – as the partisans of the Global Justice Movement knew – they are complicatedly intertwined. In most modern economies, vast areas of government function have been farmed out to private companies – not just in Europe, where decades of austerity have seen the administration surrounding health, transport and social provision sold off to the highest bidder, but in the US, with its military-industrial complex, where even government agencies as prestigious as Nasa are slowly being replaced by contractors like SpaceX. Even when they aren’t accepting grants or regulatory privileges outright, private companies rely on a huge public bureaucracy just to stay afloat – a court system to adjudicate their conflicts, a police force to protect their property claims, a treasury to secure the value of the currency they trade in, and so on.
In 2015, Graeber described this morass as the “age of total bureaucratisation” – but we can see that the situation has only got worse in the intervening decade. Today, as writers like Mariana Mazzucato have recently pointed out, even the most obviously public types of bureaucracy are unprecedentedly privatised: civil services hollowed out and replaced by private consultancies such as McKinsey and Deloitte, and regulators instructed on the content of new regulations by corporate lobbyists.
Another new development overlooked by the anti-bureaucratic right – though at one time widely expressed by left-wing “autonomist” thinkers such as Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Berardi – is how, increasingly, many of the most nightmarish bureaucratic scenarios have nothing to do with the state, or the government, or the civil service whatsoever. They are private nightmares, borne of market dynamics. This comes across when reading the testimonies of Trump voters in the US, many of whom seem more incensed by workplace diversity, equity and inclusion policies and hypocritical management than the administrative structure of the federal government. But it is also intuitively true in this country: after all, what contemporary phenomenon better captures the spirit of Kafka than trying to extract a refund from a call centre, or an extra afternoon off from one’s HR department, or a payout from one’s penny-pinching insurance provider?
The fact that the left has found it very hard to state this obvious truth is perhaps the main reason why certain important constituencies – prospectless young men, post-industrial working classes – are not being induced to vote for a left-wing candidate, despite it often being in their interests to do so. In an age when most political commitment is parsed in oppositional terms, people want to vote for whichever candidate seems most abhorrent to the particular type of person they most despise – and any demagogue that promises to antagonise form-fillers, paper-pushers, managerial types of every variety, will be supported, unless they are adequately challenged.
What would a revival of the anti-bureaucratic left look like? There are still promising examples of anti-bureaucratic organising waiting to be rediscovered, particularly once one strays outside the Anglosphere towards traditional strongholds of anarchism and syndicalism such as Spain, Italy and Argentina. In the English language, several left-wing anti-bureaucratic thinkers have attracted wide readerships – not just Graeber, but Noam Chomsky, Mark Fisher and Antonio Negri – even if they are not instantly associated with the word “bureaucracy” in the popular imagination. The most important feature that all of these writers and movements have in common, though, is their questioning of the neat oppositions – “bureaucracy” and “market”, “public” and “private” – that conveniently render some of the worst bureaucratic abuses of the modern world invisible. If politicians on the left heeded them, they might find it easier to articulate a vision of the future that does not simply invoke the kind of crisp, measurable “outcomes” that look very good on spreadsheets but sound rather smarmy in front of a tired, disgruntled audience.
This is clearly the hope of Keir Starmer, who admittedly does have a good deal of smarm to exorcise. But it is worth remembering, as the UK gears up for its own Trump-style bonfire of the quangos, that there are plenty of other corners of the UK’s “total bureaucracy” that the British public treats with comparable suspicion – corrupt procurement structures, murky public-private partnerships, and powerful lobbying machines, to name just a few. If Starmer can harness some of the justified animus towards NHS England, and direct it towards some of these nuisances, he might find it possible not just to emulate the anti-bureaucratic right, but to beat them, too.
[See also: Why Starmer will champion a smarter state]
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