How David Graeber predicted the Election of Marcos, Jr.

The secret is in The Utopia of Rules (2015) — review and analysis

Filipino voters chose to rehabilitate the Marcos family, 36 years after the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., was chased away. (Marije Vlaskamp, Volkskrant, 10 May 2022)

The impending official declaration of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. as the incoming seventh president of the Fifth Republic of the Philippines is a failure from the liberal democrats and the Left, more broadly. A cyclical pattern of failure unheeded from the previous Philippine election cycles. With the biggest alarm, with little sustained outrage, of the recent burial of his father in the Cemetery of Heroes.

In The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber outlines some ideas that diagnose some of the fault lines of the left and liberal democrats. To summarise, Graeber uses ‘bureaucracy’ (1) to talk about the Leftist project and how they can change it; (2) the consequences of total bureaucratisation on our current political and economic structure; (3) and finally, what bureaucracy reveals about the hidden structures of power. Although Graeber refers to the Euro-American tradition and the Global North as his framework, I argue that it remains applicable to the Philippine case and movement since much of the political economic events I refer to are largely shaped by U.S. colonial and neocolonial approaches to Asia.

David paves the way with key concepts and frameworks to become self-aware about the language we use, create an alternate vocabulary, and one way to think about the movement today. I think offer a diagnosis and areas where we can think about solutions.

Foundation

Definition of Concepts — I selected this from his text that helps to understand his overall framework.

Bureaucracy — David identifies the bureaucracy as stemming from the old model of the welfare state. It is a system of government intervention, ‘framed as high-minded schemes for trying to solve social problems through administrative means.’ Therefore, those that believe that the government has a role in assisting others, tended to be identified in the liberal democrat or Left side.

The Left — Given the previous position, David characterises the Left as accepting a hybrid ‘market solutions’ within the bureaucracy. As a result, he argues that the result is a fusion of ‘the worst elements of bureaucracy and the worst elements of capitalism.’ This positioning leaves the Left without space for the Left to critique against the system.

The Right — In contrast, David characterises the Right as an anti-bureaucratic individualist using ‘market solutions’ to every social problem.’ The Right has a better platform for folks who are angry against a bureaucratic culture whereas the Left is left with little argument and could only engage a watered-down version of their position.

This general typology of activists and their relationship to bureaucracy as a concept result in what he identifies as the risk in the democracy project. He says that now ‘‘democracy’ comes to mean the market and ‘bureaucracy,’ in turn, government interference with the market.’’

This is actually a great problem when citizens become fed up with bureaucratic inefficiencies, institutional and individual corruption, and punitive system for the working class. This is where David argues that the Left project suffers because the term ‘deregulation’ or to reduce bureaucracy, is used by the Right which reflects the citizen’s frustrations. Here, David identifies the Right uses the ‘bloated bureaucracy’ to argue that the poor and masses pay for the inefficiencies. It is unsurprising that we get people voting for the other side.

David, of course, criticises this normative view of these terms and ideologies. For instance, he argues that the opposition should understand that ‘deregulation’ actually means not a reduction of bureaucracy but actually, ‘moving away from a situation of managed competition between midsized firms to one where a handful of financial conglomerates are allowed to completely dominate the market.’ Ironically, he emphasises all throughout his work, that the ‘iron law of liberalism’ or free contract requires producing more regulations and not actually reduce it.

Why is the Left losing the conversation?

When the Left believes in the bureaucracy, the role of government, and to change within it, the consequences are the following:

1. The liberal democrats or the Left succumb to a culture of complicity necessary in working within a bureaucratic system. David traces several evolutionary changes that has happened to the bureaucracy that resulted in what he calls ‘predatory bureaucratisation’ whose function is what he says as to extract wealth in the form of profits by fusing public and private power into a single entity, a corporate bureaucracy.
2. Culture of complicity happens on both public infrastructures and also private companies. David’s examples include for instance, the point of view that college is a mandated requirement for jobs that do not require it. He calls this as credentialism but without sufficient merit. Yet, we accept this as a meritocracy for instance, miring poor people in predatory loans, colleges, and scams for the sake of a job that may not be available. A punitive fake system for the unknowing public.
3. Culture of complicity happens in the legal system when it becomes ‘a means for a system of increasingly arbitrary extractions.’ For example, you may pay atrocious amount of taxes or penalties or even go to jail, and yet, banks that get caught in fraudulent transactions, merely pays about 20–30 percent of their fees as penalty. And no one goes to jail.

This is the paradox and dilemma facing the liberal democrats and the preservation of their ideology.

A critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these threats — financialisation, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private — knit together into a single, self-sustaining web.

Diagnosis

The visible Philippine Far Left stems from a long Maoist tradition since the 60’s following the post-colonial nationalist reimagination of the nation-state. It represents a competing ideology with the US-led capitalist ideology. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Philippines was left with what Walden Bello (2009) calls as the ‘anti-development state,’ that is, a country with a political economy in permanent crisis. We have a punitive, irregular economy for the masses driven by failed land reform and outcomes of a neoliberal capitalism driven by global economic structures that favour the Global North. This left countries like the Philippines in a perpetual state of economic servitude — labour export and the telemarketing outsourcing capital following India — as the main trajectory of social mobility for the working classes.

The Philippine Liberal Democrat (roughly termed) consists of the middle to upper middle class, largely college-educated, Catholic or suitably religious, with a strong moral worldview following religious precepts. While this group contrasts with the far Left, this group can be identified as a centre Left in the spectrum. This rough typology, of course, radically shifts following the explosion of the Facebook era in 2007, in which some of these groups have shifted into what I now term as the Philippine Right.

The Philippine Right also consists of both elite and working-class characteristics — middle to upper middle class, working class, conservatives, largely college-educated, but also with little formal education, religious and secular, mix of religious conservative views. In the end, my attempt at a demographic typology here is fairly useless as it can be all or none of them.

Any demographic differences between these groups remain difficult. Partly because the language has shifted — we are now moving away from class to status groupings and now identity politics more than demographics. The latter, identity politics, David says, has come to replace Marxist working class concepts. In the Philippine case, class and status are backdrops to the identity politics.

What distinguishes these groups? Reactions to disappointment.

David Graeber talks about the disappointment and betrayal. That the promise of technology was at an impasse. Unspoken, lest we break further. We have no flying cars. Instead, we have what he says is the diversion of money and resources towards cheaper and cheaper labour to produce even more useless goods, rather than develop anything of substance. What we have is the intensification of ‘technologies of simulation’ — whether it is social media platforms, greater ‘financial abstraction’ or self-knowledge management tools (he calls this ‘individualistic fascism’). The disappointment in technological progress follows the disappointment in social progress as promised. The liberation from work, the liberation of strife, the efficiency of life…in other words, the good life (whatever that would be). Instead, the current socio-political climate spells doom with little hope.

In the Philippines, this conversation between promise and fulfillment and the elite and masses is expressed in Philippine elections. The establishment of the Fifth Republic follows a mass uprising in 1986 against a twenty-year reign of Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. by civic groups, the elites, academics, and ordinary people. It was called the EDSA movement, named after a national road highway (Epifanio delos Santos Avenue) that traversed the financial district in the south, to the government centres, schools, and encompassed expensive and cheap real estate in the National Capital Region. Remarkably, it was where the rich and poor mingled for a single cause. The peaceful mass movement ousting a dictator made this globally lauded with the then incoming president, Corazon C. Aquino, being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

What follows are the cycles of perpetual disappointment and betrayal that the EDSA movement fought for. You can only take a look at the list of Philippine presidents in the Fifth Republic to see these ongoing tensions between two groups — the liberal elite and the masses:

1. Corazon C. Aquino — landed elite and member of the the elite liberal democrat
2. General Fidel V. Ramos — her former defense secretary but also Armed Forces Chief during the Marcos Era, technocrat, ushered in the Philippines into the WTO
3. Joseph Estrada — former movie actor, won a landslide from the masses but ousted by the second EDSA movement for corruption (but also moral transgressions from the liberal democrat POV) and failed constitutional change
4. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo — daughter of a former president who completed the term of Estrada and then winning re-election-pushing her reign for 9 nine years; technocrat, member of the elite liberal whose position was riddled with massive corruption including her cronies; pushed into office by EDSA 3 but ultimately failed to be impeached in office
5. Benigno Aquino, Jr. — son of Corazon C. Aquino, former Senator and member of the Catholic, morally guided, liberal democrat elite; low-key former political career
6. Rodrigo Duterte — former Mayor of Davao City in Mindanao, an area riddled with threats from armed guerilla movements, strongman figure
7. Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. — son of the former dictator; low-key political career

It is easy to see that this list is nothing but cycles of electoral reaction between class and status groups. It is also a list of failures by the Left, Liberal Elites, and Liberal Democrats.

Technocrat leaders work within the bureaucracy and there lies the pitfalls, David says, for the liberals and left-leaning individuals. The corrupt ridden term of Gloria Arroyo, for instance, takes the coup for its term length and inability of the legal apparatus to punish her or oust her from office. The liberals replaced a goofy figure of Estrada with a technocrat and ultimately failed. We placed Fidel V. Ramos, a former chief of the Philippine Constabulary, the same group involved in political disappearances, yes political snatchings. I have yet to hear what atrocities he did or witnessed during the Marcos Era. Nothing.

Graeber diagnoses this culture of impunity with the culture of complicity. Ultimately, the Left and Left leaning individuals suffer from complicity when they work within the bureaucratic apparatuses to address social change. Or at least the language. The Philippine Right do not necessarily advocate for the market view or reduction of the bureaucracy. They want symbolic figures that mock the Left and contrasting values and rationality of the Left. Think, anti-Aquino moral, social, and economic worldview.

Solutions?

The Left elements must cease moralising and pandering to the identity politics currently in place. There are much more insidious transformations taking place within the bureaucratic structures. Corruption is on top. Another is what David describes as the corporatisation and financialisation of the bureaucracy mimicking companies who are ultimately making money for shareholders and punishing its citizenry with onerous red tape, pernicious fees, and equally pernicious ways to maintain poverty and evaluate poverty assistance.

Over thirty-one million voters voted for Marcos and over fifteen million identified with the Liberal Left. Forty-six million engaged in the mock war that is the Philippine elections.

David warns, let us not be distracted. David offers the Global Justice Movement as a model of organisation with minimal bureaucratic hoops to initiate change. Mainly, this group works to unmask and prevent wider macro structures of global control of corporate bureaucratisation (anti-globalisation movement as is commonly known). This is suitable in the Global North where institutions and invisible systems serve to extract profit and labour from elsewhere.

What of the Global South? The Philippines?

1. New Economic Model — where are the ideas for new economic models post-Mao and post-class? The old model and language are unsuited when much of economic life of ordinary citizens are now digital. For instance, taxation of online businesses should serve to support rather than punish or extract what little these entrepreneurs earn.
2. New Social Model — outside of the moral high group purported by the liberal elites, where is a model of anger? a language of anger?
3. New Legal Model — where can citizens access better, time-saving, and swift justice?

David Graeber observes that with purported technological progress comes a poverty of new ideas. The Left and Left leaning can succeed when we create a better language and competing ideas. We have six years.

References:

Bello, Walden, Herbert Docena, Marissa de Guzman, Marylou Malig. 2009. The Anti-Development State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the Philippines. Manila: Anvil.

Graeber, David. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. London: Melville House.