A friend questioned me the other day on the distinction between Heller's and Badiou's account of bureaucracy -- or at least the versions I fumbled out in my earlier post. As Badiou's reference is a passing one and Heller's a more systematic engagement, it is perhaps unfair to pin Badiou down to a mere phrase. But I get the feeling that he is positing precisely what Heller is arguing against.In the lead-up to the section I quoted, Heller points out that: "All Soviet leaders, from Lenin on, regularly blamed the inefficiency of the system on bureaucracy; they launched campaigns against it, against the dimensions of paper-production, against the lack of initiative and the narrow-mindedness." (p175) Which is to say that they were the scapegoat, the whipping boy, for the endemic problems of the system itself. The centralisation of power cannot avoid bureaucracy. "The totalisation of the whole society (economy included)," she writes, "cannot function without a hierachic administation of immense dimensions.... [I]n order to realise its set aims, it needs bureaucracy." To blame bureaucracy, as I think Badiou may have been doing, is to engage in the game of the party leaders. "These charges cannot be taken seriously," Heller writes, "not because they were not true, but because they localised the source of the decay in the wrong spot."
