 What do Extinction Rebellion and Hollywood superheroes have in common? They both uncritically preserve the bureaucratic status quo by breaking the rules of everyday conduct. The problem of reading so many books is that sometimes I can't remember where an idea came from. It's like having a word on the tip of your tongue and not being able to say it. A few days ago I needed to explain why superhero films are ideologically statist and I couldn't remember the source. Just now a random comment made me remember. David Graber's The Utopia of Rules. Published in 2015, The Utopia of Rules is a book about bureaucracy, how bureaucracy, not politics, is a true organised force in modern society, and why the basis of state bureaucracy is a regularisation of force and violence. As Graber says, This essay is not just about bureaucracy, it's primarily about violence. What I would like to argue is that situations created by violence invariably tend to create the kinds of willful blindness that we normally associate with bureaucratic procedures. To put it crudely, it is not so much that bureaucratic procedures are inherently stupid, but rather they are invariably ways of managing social situations that are already stupid because they are founded on structural violence. This approach, I think, has the potential to tell us a great deal about both how bureaucracy has come to pervade every aspect of our lives and why we don't notice it. Graber's idea of bureaucracy being invisible, something that we are accustomed to, not only hides, it regularises the violence inherent in the system. Bureaucracy represents a means of power to facelessly enforce order, by making people do things to one another that, without the justification of bureaucratic rules, would ordinarily appear callous or inhuman. As in Graber's beautiful one-liner, police are bureaucrats with weapons. Written as a collection of essays, the book outlines why bureaucracy is a force or power which operates above politics, or even capitalism, and so acts to reinforce the ills of society, as well as frustrating any efforts to change those rules, as Graber says. One thing that the Global Justice Movement taught us is that politics is, indeed, ultimately about value, but also that those creating vast bureaucratic systems will almost never admit what their values really are. They will, like the Robert Barron's at the turn of the last century, insist that they are acting in the name of efficiency or rationality, but in fact this language always turns out to be intentionally vague, even nonsensical. Without understanding how bureaucracy, as an impersonal force, works, it is not possible to seriously challenge the functioning of that system. The rules-based global order is powerful because of the way those rules frustrate change, and to hack that system it's necessary to reveal the truth of those rules in order to subvert them, as Graber says. A critique of bureaucracy fit for the times would have to show how all these trends – financialisation, violence, technology, the fusion of public and private – knit together into a single, self-sustaining web. The process of financialisation has meant that an ever-increasing proportion of corporate profits come in the form of rent extraction of one sort or another, since it is ultimately a little more than legalised extortion. It is accompanied by the ever-increasing accumulation of rules and regulations. Indeed, they become so omnipresent that we no longer realise we're being threatened since we cannot imagine what it would be like not to be. Graber explains that one of the reasons the movements fail, not just progressive movements but even the neoliberal lobbyists trying to shrink the state, is that they tinker with the mechanisms of bureaucracy without really changing it, leading to more elaborate and complex rules that frustrate the intent of reform. As Graber says about the situationists called to be realistic, demand the impossible. Why do movements challenging such structures often end up creating bureaucracies instead? Normally they do so as a kind of compromise. One must be realistic and not demand too much, but this raises another question. When we speak of being realistic, exactly what reality is it we are referring to? This is a trap that allegedly radical movements fall into. For example, Extinction Rebellion. Rather than challenge the iniquities of the system, they want to preserve it, but without the existential threat of climate change. By seeking to stop climate change, without dealing with the structural inequalities which are the basis of the Western lifestyle, they cannot change the basis of how the economy damages the climate. This is where superheroes come in. As Graber says, The heroes are purely reactionary. By this I mean reactionary in the literal sense. They simply react to things. They have no projects of their own. In fact superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination. The villains in contrast are relentlessly creative. They are full of plans and projects and ideas. As Graber points out, heroic societies, which is what Western cultures have followed since Ancient Greece and Rome are based upon stories. The problem is, those hyper-individualistic stories of the hero's role isolates their individual actions from that collective superstructure of bureaucracy. The hero only fights the actions of the villain, and so cannot change the nature of the system which gave rise to that villain. The Utopia of Rules expresses some profound ideas about how people strive to make change, and how easily those actions can be negated by bureaucratic rules. We cannot change the system without overturning its bureaucracy, and we can't overturn that bureaucracy without fundamentally redefining our identity and relationships to society. In that sense, reason demands that we seek the seemingly impossible. Some afterthoughts on the Utopia of Rules. Fundamentally, I'm a geek. I started out with an interest in electronics and engineering and then progressed to computers. Later, when I took up activism, I found that the functional of council departments or public inquiries was no different to understanding the operation of an engine, a radio or computer code. All you had to do was understand the general principle of how the bureaucracy worked in that context, and it was possible to create chaos no matter what the issue under discussion. Too often people don't realise that the system is so complex that the people charged with administering it don't understand the rules, and more importantly, their contradictions. Within that misunderstanding exists a potential for subversion. If you take the time to research the bureaucracy and then think creatively about how those rules can be bent or subverted, it's possible to make the system battle itself. I think that's why I like the Utopia of Rules. It reflects somewhat I discovered about how governments worked in the 1980s and later corporations and national campaign groups. Functionally, there's not a lot of difference between the two. More importantly, Graber makes a distinction between falling into the trap of working within the system, where bureaucracy will actively frustrate course of change, and creatively finding ways to, in Sorolinsky's words, push the system beyond his experience and exploit its failure. The first work of Graber's that I read was Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology, published in 2004. He wrote that work in the wake of Seattle, but before his involvement in the Occupy movement. I think one of the really interesting ideas expressed there, equally relevant to how we subvert bureaucracy, was counter power. The capacity for people to imagine a world without the problem they perceive and then identify the necessary steps or mechanisms required to realise that. And of course, if you want to create a different kind of world, it has to be something we can hold in our minds first, because we need to model it in our mind in order to physically create it in the real world. I see the Utopia of Rules as the extension to what Graber began in Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology. I was involved with the Seattle protests, where for the first time, the public emerged as a unified force to challenge the rules-based global order. When the opposition was closed down under the pretense of fighting a war on terror, it came as no surprise that the inherent violence of that system created even greater levels of self-justifying inhuman action, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to the persecution of Julian Assange, and that those practices would then be regularised for deployment across civil society, and in fact, from drone strikes to greater public surveillance, those methods are still being intensified today even though that war has, allegedly, ended. What I think is more important than any historical context though is for people to read this book and then observe and understand why movements fail. If we try to change one aspect of society but keep everything else the same, as so much liberal, middle-class, English activism is wont to do, then it should come as no surprise that little success comes of that. I often use distinction and rebellion as an example here. Their method of throwing themselves into the willing arms of the police, the courts and the prison system unsurprisingly causes little distress to the state, while causing maximum annoyance to the general public. The alternative, actually creating the types of future social structures that can operate without fossil fuels, because they operate outside of the economic and legal structures created by a system dependent upon fossil fuels, doesn't seem to grab extinction and rebellion's imagination. Even Martin Luther King understood this, as expressed in his letter from Birmingham Jail. I must confess that over the past few years I've been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I've almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's greatest stumbling block in his stride towards freedom is not the white citizens' counsellor or the Klu Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice. Compare that with Graeber's point about superheroes. In fact superheroes seem almost utterly lacking in imagination. Bruce Wayne, with all the money in the world, can't seem to think of anything to do with it other than to design even more high-tech weaponry and indulge in the occasional act of charity. In the same way it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily end world hunger or carve free magic cities out of mountains. Almost never do superheroes make, create or build anything. If we really want to change the world, then Graeber would have us look to the role of the villain, not the superhero. In every Hollywood film, as ironically expressed in that famous awful hacker flick, Swordfish, the audience love happy endings, the bad guy can't win, bureaucracy cannot tolerate anyone who will not submit to his rules. What we have to do is move beyond the false dichotomies of the bureaucratic regime. The tool we used to do that is not reform, it is the use of our imagination to tell a different story about ourselves and then working to make that story come true, irrespective of what the bureaucracy dictates. Asking the bureaucracy to change itself is like asking a tiger to be a house-trained pussycat. It cannot change its fundamentally violent or oppressive nature. We can't reform the rules of bureaucracy, we have to render those rules irrelevant to the conduct of our daily lives. On that note, I'll end with Graeber's quote from the Crime Think Collective, which itself echoes the ideas of Albert Camus. We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us. Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit, custom, law, or prejudice, and it is up to you to create these situations. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution, and those moments are not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on constantly and everywhere, and everyone plays a part in it consciously or not. What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action? The defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.