Ruminations on Bureaucratic Violence

Hi fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down Level 3

Originally Circulated on 10 July 2020

Greetings from  day 105 of lock down. I have had repeated requests to rerun a previous Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™ submission on the topic of zombie companies as the distribution list has grown significantly. I do not want to do this so I posted that separately for those of you who may be interested. All I will say is that COVID 19 has significantly increased the number of zombie companies as debt relief programs have provided even more debt to companies that were over indebted to start with.

It remains my hope to be able to complete my service at Sasol without having to go through a disciplinary hearing with a policy determined final written warning. A couple of years ago I did not certify by the deadline date and I narrowly avoided a disciplinary hearing. Other colleagues have not been so lucky. I guess I did learn an important lesson and I now prioritise certification above all else. Certification this year was more difficult because I don’t have remote access which is required for certification. I have tried to get remote access but the polite person on the IM helpline said I need to just tick remote access on the IM trolley. When I said I need remote access to access the Intranet to get to the trolley there was a long pause and then he said “mmmmmmm yes this is a problem” but could offer no solution and would not open a ticket. We reached stalemate. Fortunately I have certified manually – disciplinary hearing averted. I will also persevere by asking some of my helpful IM colleagues if there might be a way around this stalemate because I’m also getting bi-weekly nagging mails that my induction training is long overdue. This requires remote access. So the spectre of a disciplinary hearing with a final written warning is still hanging over me.

This brings me to today’s topic of bureaucratic violence. This is a concept explored by the academic David Graeber. He has been the source of inspiration for an earlier Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™ submission on the concept of “bullshit jobs”.

Graeber has written a book entitled, “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy”. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00MKZ0QZ2/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1. He has also written an essay which is more accessible which you can find here. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2.2.007. He argues very convincingly that bureaucracy can be a form of violence and that it can be a means of expressing power and dominance just as effective as physical violence. Although the essay is lengthy the story about his mother is worth reading. I leave you with this quote:

The experience of bureaucratic incompetence, confusion, and its ability to cause otherwise

intelligent people to behave outright foolishly, opens up a series of questions about the

nature of power or, more specifically, structural violence. The unique qualities of violence

as a form of action means that human relations ultimately founded on violence create

lopsided structures of the imagination, where the responsibility to do the interpretive labour

required to allow the powerful to operate oblivious to much of what is going on around

them, falls on the powerless, who thus tend to empathize with the powerful far more than

the powerful do with them. The bureaucratic imposition of simple categorical schemes on

the world is a way of managing the fundamental stupidity of such situations.

Now that my 10 year UK visa has expired I’m not sure I am ever going to summon up the courage to apply for a UK visa ever again. I remember that this took me days and that they asked me questions about my family history that I did not know the answer to. If they had an alternative where I could go to the embassy bend down and get six of the best and then get a visa I would happily do that.

Please keep the submission ideas flowing.

Regards

Bruce