Bureaucracy is the control of information
Bureaucracies exert power through exclusive access to knowledge. In other words, bureaucrats are experts.
The first experts were priests--people who claimed special access to divine knowledge and exclusive rights to preform spiritual rituals.
The first examples of ledgers, files, audits, and overseers include:
- Pharaonic Egyptian ancestor cults
- Chinese oracle readings
- Chavín de Huántar's shamanic art
Bureaucracy today more typically takes the form of secular expertise, particularly economics. Money and administration consistently emerge together. Perhaps because they are both sources of impersonal equivalence.
Mesopotamian temple workshops invented money to prevent inequality
The earliest examples of administrative counting and record-keeping emerged in Mesopotamian temples.
The very first ledgers come from Tell Sabi Abyad, in Mesopotamia (present day Syria) from circa 6200 BCE. It wasn't writing. It was marked clay tokens that symbolized access to resources (like food).
In Kurdistan, circa 4500 BCE, quantification was part of a project to deliberately erase differences between people. Innovations in metal-working, textiles, horticulture, and trade seem to have been counter-balanced by deliberate efforts to prevent those technologies from becoming sources of rank or hierarchy. At the same time as ledgers came into use, houses adopted a standard building plan, and pottery became more dull.
Administrative equivalence-making was one tool meant to ensure that everyone was equal. The quantification of debts and labor were initially designed to prevent wealth accumulation.
Inca Ayllus formalized equality into oppression
Similarly, Incan Village Associations, the Ayllu, deeply valued equality. Members wore uniforms. They redistributed agricultural land. They took care of the aged, infirm, widows, orphans, and disabled.
As the Incan state grew in power, the state turned Ayllu community leaders into state agents. They set uniform standards for tribute, the mit'a. While others, who were unable to meet the inflexible demands of the central state, fell into debt. The state ensured compliance by allowing local agents to enriched themselves and their friends at the expense of the debtors. By the time of Spanish conquest, there was a rapidly growing population of hereditary debt peons.
Bureaucracies are dangerous because they are impersonal
Reducing everything to numbers provides a language of equity. But it also ignores the uniqueness of each individual situation.
Giving everyone the same quota ensures that some people will be unable to meet it. Without clear systems of accounting, things can be adjusted, a solution can be found.
When control is "rationalized", people who fall behind become peons or slaves. The oppressors can say: "the rules are the rules."
Sumerian temple-workshops invented wage slavery by doing charity
Sumerian temples took in needy folks, like refugees, criminals, disabled folks, unmarried women, etc... These temples were also centers of economic activity. They were more like factories. They put the objects of their charity to work. And then tracked that work with their new systems of accounting (see above).
Institutionalized charity typically leads to domination.