Bureaucracy: Communist-Style

[The “Bureaucracy” correspondence begins on July 23rd. Begin there for context and continue on.]

Bartek Wołodyjowski writes:

In my native Poland, before freedom, democracy and Pizza Hut replaced the communist regime, we had our own brand of bureaucracy, embodied in the “Biurwa” (byour-vah).

Biuro – an office or administrative section
+
Kurwa – a whore or prostitute
=
Biurwa – Cholera!, she really made your day.

The Biurwa, sadly, alas, and tragically, was not the office slut. She was, instead, the System’s Bitch: screwed daily by a System that had neither logic, reason nor goodwill behind it, she nevertheless was its love slave.

Do you need a permit? The Biurwa is the one who will stand in your way. Not because she is personally or politically oppressive or antagonistic towards you, but because “Those are the rules, panie, the rules.”

Maybe you need to know what “the rules” are, since so many in the West think that godless, oppressive communism “ruled” every aspect of our lives. I am not to speak for the Soviet Union, but in Poland this was not so.

We were fairly lazy communists, oppressive to no one unless you were a Jew in ‘68 through ’72 or a thinking intellectual or sometimes one in the same. God forbid if you were actually a practicing big-C Communist. Those people pointed out things like corruption and vestigial class divisions and started things like the Solidarity trade union movement and demanded equality of Worker and Red Bourgeoisie pay! (We didn’t have a “Religion” problem, since almost everyone in the country was a Roman Catholic, even the Party chiefs, and the Soviets be damned about that.)

But communism was our “System” (officially “socialism,” but we all knew we weren't Swedes) and our System had a rule for everything. You see, in a communist system, ideally, every problem has a solution and we need only make a rule to address that problem/solution.

Now, along the way, sometimes it was “diplomatic” to prefer certain solutions over others. One of the key diplomatic initiatives in the early days of post-World War II “liberation” by the Red Army was to avoid being purged for accidentally-made pro-bourgeois/anti-socialist administrative decisions.

In a brilliant series of maneuvers by committees of anonymous geniuses, we developed The Rule That Makes No Sense But Looks Good On Paper policy. This was coupled with the Do What You Need To Do But Write Up What They Want To Read unwritten rule-of-thumb.

These two guiding principles built us up from the rubble of War and persuaded the Soviets that they could largely leave us alone, confining their “protective” forces to a few self-contained bases – looking West.

A good programme, yes – but they had forgotten to calculate the Biurwa into the equation.

The Biurwa – ah, she of little influence and infinite pedestrian power.

The Biurwa, unthinking whore to the System.

She was not a True Believer in communism. She could never understand an inkling of Marx’s philosophy and certainly did not think of herself as a “worker of the world, unite(d).” “Worker?” – Pah! That would spoil her fingernails and muss her makeup.

But she had a charismatic faith in her rules and regulations and papers.

Those rules. Those regulations. Those papers. True Bureaucracy. Unthinking, dronelike, without recourse to common sense. True Bureaucracy.

Do you want to know what killed communism? Forget popes and presidents and premiers and politics.

It was the Biurwa.

Marx could call it any name:
Kapital, Communist, all the same.
Bureaucracy, it rules the game.


The Cube responds:

Ummmmm………. Sounds like ISO, 5S, Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma gone awry. But we’re not communists, are we?