On David Graeber’s Ideas About the Structural Stupidity of Bureaucracy

“I like to think I’m actually a smart person,” the late American anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber told me one evening in a restaurant near his office at the London School of Economics. “Most people seem to agree with that,” Graeber said. “OK, I was emotionally distraught, but I was doing things that were really dumb.”

In 2012, Graeber’s mother had suffered a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance program for people on low incomes. So he did, only to be sucked into a vortex of form filling and humiliation familiar to anyone who’s ever read Kafka.

At one point, the application was held up because someone at the Department of Motor Vehicles had put down Graeber’s given name as “Daid;” at another, because someone at the telecommunications company Verizon had spelled his surname “Grueber.” The matter became academic, because Graeber’s mother died before she got Medicaid. But the form-filling ordeal stayed with him. “Having spent much of my life leading a fairly bohemian existence, comparatively insulated from this sort of thing, I found myself asking: is this what ordinary life, for most people, is really like?” he wrote in his 2015 book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. “Running around feeling like an idiot all day? Being somehow put in a position where one actually does end up acting like an idiot?” As we sat together in the restaurant that evening, he asked himself: “How did I not notice that the signature was on the wrong line? There’s something about being in that bureaucratic situation that encourages you to behave foolishly.”

Graeber’s life and works were a systematic resistance to the dead hand of what he called structural stupidity.

Graeber’s sense was that stupidity like his is cultivated by capitalists and bureaucrats to extend their power. In The Utopia of Rules, he wrote:

Bureaucratic procedures, which have an uncanny ability to make even the smartest people act like idiots, are not so much forms of stupidity in themselves, as they are ways of managing situations already stupid because of the effects of structural violence… Stupidity in the name of fairness and decency is still stupidity, and violence in the name of human liberation is still violence. It’s no coincidence the two so often seem to arrive together.

What’s striking here is that the kind of stupidity that Graeber experienced and he took to be pervasive in capitalist societies is not of the kind that can be measured by intelligence tests or diagnosed by doctors in white coats but is nonetheless, he argued, a real force with deleterious consequences. The anarchist rebel, for a few harrowing months, become soulmate to Kafka’s Josef K.

The stupid and stupefying rules he experienced while filling in forms to apply for Medicaid is, he argued, a structural stupidity experienced both by those who deliver the services and those who use them.

Exposure to this structural stupidity was a shock for Graeber since he had managed to live, for the most part, outside its remit until his death aged 59 in 2020. This was a man who led not just a relatively bohemian existence but also a charmed life, mostly outside what Virginia Woolf called the machine. Born in 1961 to working-class Jewish parents in New York, Graeber had a radical heritage. His father, Kenneth, was a plate stripper who fought in the Spanish Civil War, and his mother, Ruth, was a garment worker who played the lead role in Pins and Needles, a 1930s musical revue staged by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.

Their son was calling himself an anarchist at the age of 16, but only became heavily involved in politics in 1999 when he joined the protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Later, while teaching at Yale, he joined the activists, artists, and pranksters of the Direct Action Network in New York. Even as an academic, he worked mostly away from the epicenters of academic bureaucracy: he cut his teeth as an anthropologist doing fieldwork in Madagascar, and it was there that he became fascinated with the antinomian hearties of the ocean wave, a fascination that ultimately resulted in his eulogy to the lawless buccaneers of yesteryear, namely his Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia: Buccaneers, Women Traders and Mock Kingdoms in Eighteenth-Century Madagascar.

It was on Madagascar that, briefly in the 18th century, a small stand was attempted against the rising tide of bureaucratic control, Graeber supposed, when the self-styled king of pirates Henry Avery—AKA Long Ben—established a pirate republic there with his henchmen called Libertalia, a proto-communist utopia where all goods were held in common. It was in this experiment in post-bureaucratic living that Graeber imagined a society free from structural stupidity.

In 2005, Graeber went on a year’s sabbatical from Yale, “and did a lot of direct action and was in the media.” When he returned, he was, he said, snubbed by colleagues and did not have his contract renewed. He reckoned this was in part because his countercultural activities were an embarrassment to Yale. But that didn’t stop him. He carried on combining academic work with battling what he took to be structural stupidity. As he put it in The Utopia of Rules: “Bureaucracies… are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity—of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence.”

In 2011, at New York’s Zuccotti Park, Graeber became involved in Occupy Wall Street, which he described to me as an “experiment in a post-bureaucratic society,” and was responsible for the slogan “We are the 99%.” He continued:

We wanted to demonstrate we could do all the services that social service providers do without endless bureaucracy. In fact, at one point at Zuccotti Park there was a giant plastic garbage bag that had $800,000 in it. People kept giving us money, but we weren’t going to put it in the bank. You have all these rules and regulations. And Occupy Wall Street can’t have a bank account. I always say the principle of direct action is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.

In that sense, Graeber’s life and works were a systematic resistance to the dead hand of what he called structural stupidity. He quoted to me with approval the anarchist collective Crimethinc:

Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the nature of habit, law, custom or prejudice—and it’s up to you to create the situations.

Academia was once just such a situation, he reckoned. The university was a haven for oddballs. “It was a place of refuge. Not any more. Now, if you can’t act a little like a professional executive, you can kiss goodbye to the idea of an academic career.” Why was that so terrible? “It means we’re taking a very large percentage of the greatest creative talent in our society and telling them to go to hell… The eccentrics have been drummed out of all institutions.” Well, not quite: the US’s loss was the UK’s gain: Graeber moved to London, becoming a professor of anthropology at the LSE in 2010.

The forces of stupidity-inducing conformity, he maintained, were boosted by something that happened in the 1970s: technological innovation shifted from extending the frontiers of possibility to facilitating ever greater control and bureaucratic impediments to human flourishing. But technological advance was supposed to be about the former, wasn’t it? When Graeber was a little boy, he watched the Apollo moon landing and supposed, in his naïve way, that technological advance would produce other marvels, and that he would witness more giant leaps for humankind.

As a disenchanted grown-up, he wrote in 2015 of his disappointment that all the technological wonders being touted in the late 1960s never happened. Where were the flying cars, suspended animation, immortality drugs, androids, and colonies on Mars? Instead of boldly going, humanity had surely stagnated. “Speaking as someone who was eight years old at the time of the Apollo moon landing,” he wrote in The Utopia of Rules,

I have clear memories of calculating that I would be 39 years of age in the magic year 2000, and wondering what the world around me would be like. Did I honestly expect I would be living in a world of such wonders? Of course. Do I feel cheated now? Absolutely.

Technological progress seemed to promise, not just the 15-hour weeks Keynes envisaged, but also something like the communist utopia Marx briefly sketched in The German Ideology.

If only we were intelligent enough to realize our own stupidity, we might enjoy our lives more. But we aren’t.

So what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory was that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. As he put it to me:

The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that “My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.” You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.

Consider, he suggested, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft, and Prozac—all of which, Graeber said, were “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy.”

Instead of 15-hour weeks, then, vast numbers of humans, Americans and Europeans in particular, are working harder than ever at jobs that are more or less meaningless. It is a form of society-wide structural stupidity, Graeber claimed. In a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” he wrote: “A world without teachers or dockworkers would soon be in trouble… It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, or legal consultants to similarly vanish.” It’s a bracing point, but more bracing yet is the possibility that anthropologists’ work might be seen as no less meaningless. When I put this to him, Graeber didn’t exactly disagree: “There can be no objective measure of social value.”

Graeber’s bullshit jobs argument could be taken as a counterblast to the hyper-capitalist dystopia argument favored by proponents of artificial intelligence whereby the robots take over and humans are busted down to an eternity of playing Minecraft. Summarizing predictions in recent futurological literature, the British novelist and critic John Lanchester wrote: “There’s capital, doing better than ever; the robots, doing all the work; and the great mass of humanity, doing not much but having fun playing with its gadgets.” Lanchester drew attention to a league table drawn up by Oxford economists of 702 jobs that might be better done by robots: at number one (most safe) were recreational therapists; at 702 (least safe) were telemarketers. Anthropologists, Graeber might have been pleased to know, came in at 39, so he was much safer than writers (123) and editors (140).

Before artificial intelligence advanced the possibility that human stupidity, even if it were not to be abolished, might be neatly sidestepped by rendering our species intellectually obsolete, Graeber was railing against the stupidity-causing bullshit jobs that you’d think were better done by machines—if at all. He wrote:

It’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient Socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to. (This is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat.) But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix.

Graeber believed that the most basic level of being is play rather than economics, fun rather than rules, goofing around rather than filling in forms. If only we were intelligent enough to realize our own stupidity, we might enjoy our lives more. But we aren’t.

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