Market bureaucracy is more Kafkaesque than centralized totalitarian rule

Evidence

Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 133

Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience. — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 133

Categorization

• XREF: Connects forward to the later claim that audit and market bureaucracies exceed central-authority bureaucratic horror; echoes Soviet-functioning-through-ambiguity from earlier in this chapter’s book. — connects to: Dreamwork’s confabulated consistency models how contemporary power maintains itself — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 123; Kafka’s bureaucracy describes market capitalism more than totalitarianism — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 133; Neoliberal marketisation imposed its own new bureaucracy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1724 (+8 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 133

Related

• Kafka’s bureaucracy describes market capitalism more than totalitarianism (similarity 0.93)
• Neoliberalism decentralized bureaucracy instead of abolishing it (similarity 0.79)
• Bureaucracy has proliferated under neoliberal capitalism rather than vanishing with it (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism decentralized bureaucracy instead of abolishing it #corroborates (0.85) — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 43
• Neoliberal marketisation imposed its own new bureaucracy #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1724
• Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186
• Neoliberals rejected the pure state-versus-market binary as a false dichotomy #expands (0.78) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 9
• Hayekian neoliberalism requires active rule-design to insulate markets from politics #expands (0.75) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 360
• Market economies require deliberate political construction, not natural emergence #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 364
• Ordoliberalism governs market rules but forbids steering market outcomes #expands (0.74) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 613
• Market ideology functions to repress freedom rather than secure it #exemplifies (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 600