Expertise-based bureaucracies enable capitalist control over democratic regimes

Evidence

It may also be observed that deliberative bodies tend to an ever-increasing extent to distinguish their activity into two “organic” aspects: into the deliberative activity which is their essence, and into technical-cultural activity in which the questions upon which they have to take decisions are first examined by experts and analysed scientifically. This latter activity has already created a whole bureaucratic body, with a new structure; for apart from the specialised departments of experts who prepare the technical material for the deliberative bodies, a second body of functionaries is created—more or less disinterested “volunteers”, selected variously from industry, from the banks, from finance houses. This is one of the mechanisms by means of which the career bureaucracy eventually came to control the democratic regimes and parliaments; now the mechanism is being organically extended, and is absorbing into its sphere the great specialists of private enterprise, which thus comes to control both regimes and bureaucracies. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 331

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the reader’s foundational toolkit: the mechanism by which private capital captures the administrative state, relevant to later Islamophobia readings on state power and institutional racism. — connects to: Capital controls were assumed necessary for democratic domestic policy — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 419; Central bank technocracy was framed as superior to democratic control precisely in democratic ages — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1013; Modern democracy depends on insulated expert knowledge for its administrative state — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 189
• SEED: Angle: how expert/technical advisory bodies function as a quiet vehicle for capital capture of democratic institutions, drawn out through Gramsci’s bureaucratic mechanism.