Advantages Of Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy:

Bureaucracy is the group of expert officers who performs rationalized performances in large scale organization, especially government ones. Thus an organization is said to be bureaucratized when its procedures for action and decision have become formalized and impersonal through elaborate rules that are "public". The growth of modern government is thus been as intimately tied to the development of bureaucracy, and no modern state could operate without bureaucracy. The popular antithesis between bureaucracy and democracy is an oratorical slogan that endangers the future of democracy. For a constitutional system that cannot function effectively, that cannot act with dispatch and vigor, cannot alive. Fortunately, both the Swiss and the British have shown that an effective, responsible bureaucracy is quite compatible with second constitutionalism.

Bureaucracy is not only a privileged oppressive group but a new exploiting class, a class characterized by a new type of oligarchic regime that is neither socialist nor capitalist and that is rapidly spreading both in East and West.

Soviet bureaucracy constituted a new ruling class that exploited the proletariat as much as the capitalist had in the past. It differed from capitalism only in that the new type of domination was based not an individual but on group ownership of the means of production. In differed from capitalism only in that the new type of domination was based not an individual but on group ownership of the means of production. In fact, in the Soviet system the means of production represent not "socialism" but "stateism". They do not belong to the whole collectively but to the state and to the bureaucrats who control it. In the last analysis, it is these bureaucrats the technicians, directors and specialists holding key positions in the party and state administration- whole exploit the proletarians and steal the surplus value of work. This new type of regime called bureaucratic collectivism, was not limited to the Soviet Union. Similar tendencies could be discerned in fascist countries and even in the "welfare state" type of capitalist democracies.

The American philosopher and critic James Burnham says "Bureaucracy, a theory of the managerial revolution", technological progress and the growth of large scale economic as well as political bureaucracies deprived the old capitalist class of the central of the means of production. The effective control of the economy and of political power had passed to the managers-that is, to the production executives and to the administrators of the state bureaucracy. He predicted that at a large stage of development, private ownership would be abolished and the bureaucrats would appropriate collectively, through the state, the means of production. These managers would impose a new type of oligarchic order".

The french sociologist Michel Crozier, says "Bureaucracy means fundamental exercise control on the basis of knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational, the social structure consists of highly cohesive occupational groups, each presenting a unified and rather hostile front toward the others. Corruption at all levels, political as well as bureaucratic, is a fact of life in Pakistan that is eating into the vitals of the country's economy. This reality has been affirmed by independent studies carried out by reputable international agencies as Transparency International (TI) which has classed Pakistan as the second most corrupt country in the world after Nigeria.

It is Universally recognized that corruption always move from top (politics) down (bureaucracy). This implication is there even in the aforesaid remarks of the caretaker Prime Minister Malik Merag Khalid. His predecessor has been even more categorical in insisting that in Pakistan in general, and during her regime in particular, there has been hardly any corruption at the political level.

In support of her claim, the ousted PM presented the evidence, that when the list of top defaulters was presented in the National Assembly , 97 percent of them were not politicians, but businessmen. No bureaucrats were, of course, identified in this rogues gallery of bank defaulters.

Even the 3 percent share of politicians in the rogues gallery is rather surprising, since in all civilized countries, politicians and businessmen have been separated into at least formal non-competing groups. That does not mean that politicians do not reap the rich fruit of business. They do but do it through surrogate, conversely, most big politicians are surrogates of big business in developed counties. 

As for the higher ratio (97 percent) of non-politicians among the top bank defaulters, the political involvement of politicians must obviously be for too high. Without effective big politician interest, it is impossible in this country to secure big business loans, deliberately with heavy under collatualisation, that are hard to recover, whatever stringent recovery laws are enforced.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A bureaucracy becomes autonomous and exercise near absolute power when the process of class formation is weak or when no class is dominant. This is certainly not the case in Pakistan, where the feudal or landlord class still retain dominant position. Once a class becomes dominant and retains its dominance, the autonomy of bureaucracy ceases of exist and it becomes an instrument in the hands of the dominant class. Since the Pakistan bourgeoisie is also now in the process of establishing its dominance , the Pakistani bureaucracy will soon loose its autonomy and power still further.

Even when the position of dominant classes in a society is fully crystallized, the need of bureaucracy, civil and military, as junior partners in the crime of corruption still remains.

Army officers are inducted in the civil services and also appointed on lucrative posts in the civilian organisations but had never been held accountable even if there were reports of corruption against them. They are appointed as heads of public sector organisation like Pakistan Steel Mills, Pakistan ordinance Factories, Oil and Gas Development Corporation, Water and Power Development Authority, Pakistan Telecommunication Corporation, Sui Gas Company etc.; Military Procurements have also traditionally been notorious  for kickbacks and commissions.

The President of our country has been excluded from a accountability because of constitutional protection to him under article 248 (2), a similar immunity has also been extended to provincial governor. Whatever the constitutional provision, the fact of the President's wielding absolute power needs to be duly considered.