David Graeber, OuiShare: The Era of Predatory Bureaucratization
Merged private-public bureaucracies have one effect: extracting rents. Graeber argues that this is closer to feudalism in form, something we’ve used as a figure of speech for some time — corporate feudalism.
Also some insights on the difficulty of driving change between movements and institutions.
We are living in the era of predatory bureaucratization. What percentage of the typical American household revenue is directly extracted by the financial sector? Oddly, this is the one economic statistic you cannot easily get, but when economists make estimations, it falls somewhere between 20% and 40%. Most of the profits are not coming from the industry anymore. Yet, when we think of the history of capitalism, we think of industries, wage labor… Clearly, that’s not what we have today. There is no more reason to believe that capitalism will be around forever. For centuries, the Roman Empire was able to absorb barbarian tribes, to draw them into the Roman system, to give their chiefs titles and offices… And one day, they forgot to give Alaric a promotion, which got him pretty upset. We all know what happened then. It’s permanent until it’s not, every contradiction is absorbed until it isn’t.
