The Relevance of Capital to Studies of Bureaucracy

In this day and age when problems of bureaucracy have become increasingly the concern of professional sociologists, it is in vain to hunt through the pages of Marx's and Engels' works for any direct contribution to the subject. Neither Marx nor Engels had anything profound to say on the matter. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, bureaucracy is simply a term for state officialdom, likened to an artificial caste alongside the actual classes of society. Similarly, in his work on primitive societies and the origin of the state, Engels equates bureaucracy with the entire state-apparatus down to the shabbiest police servant. Although the Marxian critique of the state involves a nominal theory of bureaucracy, the use of the term in this restricted sense has long ceased to be of interest to social scientists.