Bureaucratic Realism
Description
Simoun Magsalin:
"If Mark Fisher suggests there exists a 'Capitalist Realism,' then perhaps we can also posit a 'bureaucratic realism.' If capitalist realism considers the capitalist status quo and capitalist social relations writ large as natural, or even inevitable, then just so, bureaucratic realism looks at the bureaucratic-form and (like Margaret Thatcher) says, 'There Is No Alternative.' Just as bureaucracy is a natural organizational-form for humanity, so must it be for supernatural beings (and vice versa).
If the popular imagination under capitalist realism finds that 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,' it is similarly the case that the bureaucratic realist imagination may imagine an end to the capitalist mode of production and capitalist social relations, but find an inability to imagine the end of the bureaucratic-form, the State, and statist social relations.
Not being merely an infection of public imagination, bureaucratic realism is an infection of the revolutionary imagination. Self-professed liberation movements—especially those professing to be Marxist—structure their forces into… a bureaucracy. This is essentially what the vanguard party-form is. A vanguard party really is just a bureaucracy whose goal is to capture and keep power.
...
There are Taoist schools close to anarchism that have been critiquing bureaucracy for more than 24 centuries. It is quite bizarre that despite literally thousands of years of critiques of bureaucracy from Taoism to anarchism, Franz Kafka, and Parks and Recreations, that bureaucracy continues to present itself as natural—even inevitable.
Bureaucracy does not merely present itself as the natural (or even supernatural) order of things; it is desirable. This is what leftism tells us through old-school German social-democracy, Bolshevism, Leninism, and Stalinism."