Vague Outlines
It occurs to me after my last rant in the comments section elsewhere that I may need to make a few loose notes here as a way of enlisting others in the project of re-orientation.
I have been closely involved for a while now with a group that talks about “left refoundation.” Other groups refer to “left regroupment,” which is similar, but not the same. The intermendiate goal is to (re)establish the left as a serious political force; the long term goal is social transformation toward a more egalitarian, sustainable, and non-alientated society that as much as possible supports the maximum creativity, accountability, and development of personhood for the individual and the minimization of suffering.
The reason I am substituting the word re-orientation relates to the root of my argument that the impasse of the metropolitan left is reproduced by the very concept of organization and strategy that is supported by the building metaphor of refoundation and the corpuscular metaphor of regroupment. In both cases, there is an underlying assumption about organization, and beneath the assumption about organization there is an assumption about strategy. These assumptions have remained largely unchallenged, because they are treated as if they are axiomatic.
While we are seeing these very same strategic assumptions, as employed by the American hyper-state, being undermined by the emergent realities of the 21st Century world system, we ourselves cling to them ourselves. They are all, by the way, also military strategy concepts. We emphasize line of march, aim-the-main-blow, concentrate mass, centralize decision-making. As the system itself fragments globally, this strategic orientation is failing for the US military. They are discovering what it means to have your lines thinned by a more agile force that has no specific goal except to weaken you.
There are a number of reasons why this does not work except when one’s enemy is playing by the same rules, ie, when a state is at war with another state. Example, WWII. The state of Germany had to be defeated. This state was geographically fixed, institutionally brittle, and based on its ability to impose its will within spatial boundaries. In Iraq, the destruction of the state was a fairly simple matter for a superior conventional (state) military force.
In a (de facto) stateless Iraq, however, there are no obligations for the resistance to stay in one place. There is no capitol. There is no office-bulding for an administrative apparatus. There is no centralized command. There is no need for an overarching strategy. The goal is simply (1) to survive, and (2) to disrupt the enemy. Every time the occupier breaks the code on one tactic or target-set and develops counter-measures, the resistance shifts tactics and target-sets. Their two necessities are to (1) sustain themselves and (2) disrupt the enemy. How they do that is entirely flexible, and in fact the more decentralized their actions and command structures, the more effective and secure they can be.
What they have is agility. One reason they have agility is that they are not bound by some precise strategic goal aside from explusion of the occupier. In fact, given the unpredictability of their situation, any precisely mapped strategy would serve to hinder and expose their operations. They have a Felix-bag of tested tactics, and they employ them at times and places of their choosing, often against targets of opportunity.
Brownie Ledbetter, a woman who organized in Little Rock for many many years, told me once that the notion of constantly unifying reflects the inability to concentrate on more than one task simultaneously… and that this is a predominantly male trait. Just food for thought.
Boyd’s theory of warfighting and the OODA Loop, which I have referenced more than once, can be generalized to some extent as a conflict strategy, including, imo, social movements. It incorporates one of the basic tenets of chaos theory, sensitivity to initial conditions. That is, all complex systems are inherently unpredictable. This is exaclty why precise strategic plans with centralized control can never succeed without substantial alteration and rapidly diminishing returns at increasing cost.
Boyd made reference to Gödel, Heisenberg, and the 2nd Law:
* Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem: any logical model of reality is incomplete (and possibly inconsistent) and must be continuously refined/adapted in the face of new observations.
* Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: there is a limit on our ability to observe reality with accuracy. Any small observational error introduced in calculations can produce ever widening mismatches over time. (see Butterfly effect)
* Second Law of Thermodynamics: The entropy/chaos of any closed system always tends to increase, and thus the nature of any given system is continuously changing even as efforts are directed toward maintaining it in its original form. Furthermore, whatever actions we take to influence any system will have unintended side-effects that may actually increase the rate of entropy increase (and hence the chaos) of the system.
The left’s organizational models and strategic assumptions reflect an absolute failure to come to terms with any of these phenomena. Democratic centralism is the operative organizational fetish on the left, and it allegedly emphasizes Lenin’s “freedom of discussion, unity of action.” In many cases, as left grouplets have become ore autocratic and taken on the character of a cult, the freedom of discussion was replaced by the demand for absolute ideological conformity. Louis Proyect’s essay on this is quite good, particularly because he is himself a veteran of one such organization. The fact is, given the unpredictability of conplex systems, we might better adopt the slogan “unity of goals, diversity of action.”
Because each political action and each political struggle is concretely taking place in a very specific and emerging environment, tactical agility in the service of disrupting the system might prove far more effective than trying to massively shift the ideological orientation of “the masses” (who are anything but homogenous in character OR circumstance).
But this means letting go of some of the fetishes that grow directly out of the flawed strategic assumption of “aiming the main blow.” One in particular is the fetish of collectivity. Small groups and individual leaders need to be given MORE latitutde and allowed more creativity. The weird notion that collective thinking is always better than individual thinking has not one iota of evidence to support it. Collectives do not think; they do not learn; and they do not develop intuition — the keystone of efficacious employment of tactical agility. “Collective learning” is a figurative notion. The actual biophysical process of learning is individual. What the fetish of collectivity accomplishes more often than not is stifling creativity, and taking clear and-or audacious ideas and chipping away at them with the highest level of inhibition, opportunism, and-or timidity in the collective.
The smaller and more cohesive the group, and the more well-developed the leadership skills and intution of its individual leaders, the more effective (agile) that group will be. This is where intiative resides, and the bigger and more bureaucratic an organization, the more inclined it is to stifle intiative. Collectivity becomes a euphemism for conformity.
Here is a quote from one ML grouplet:
“Our Party is a collective organization, not just a collection of individuals. We decide things collectively and we act collectively. Our power resides in our collectivity–this enables us to correctly link with, unleash, and lead the initiative of the masses and give it its most powerful revolutionary expression in conformity with the fundamental interests of the masses. This collectivity is expressed and realized through the collective functioning of the units of the Party on the various levels, and through the Party’s chain of knowledge and of command up and down throughout the Party.
“Our Party is organized on the basis of democratic centralism, a method which allows us to combine a high degree of individual input and initiative (from individuals and from units of the Party on all levels) with a high degree of unity of will and action and enables us to fight the enemy in an organized and disciplined way. It makes possible the functioning of the Party’s chain of knowledge and of command in a way that links the Party with the masses to lead them in fighting for their revolutionary interests. Democratic centralism is an organizational expression of mass line.”
These are not logical or supportable claims. They are decrees residing in dogma. Who in the fuck would want to join this organization nowadays? It is, btw, now effectively a cult led by one (male naturally) Supreme Leader who is considered by the handful of bright-eyed acolytes to be the heir to the mantle of Marx-Lenin-Stalin-Mao. No one in this cult has yet bothered to ask why, if they have been enabled “to correctly link with, unleash, and lead the initiative of the masses and give it its most powerful revolutionary expression in conformity with the fundamental interests of the masses,” the masses wouldn’t generally give them the time of day.
“Chain of knowledge and of command”!?!? Oh yeah, sign me up right now!
Joaquin Bustelo’s excellent essay on democratic centralism is a must read, imo.
These organizational models and methods are a direct reflection of the strategic delusion of control. Moreover, they are extremely male in character. The very idea of imposing order on “chaos” is part and parcel of Enlightenment masculinity, and the adoption of hierarchical military models for struggle organizations brings with it the culture of masculinity that is in the very fiber of military organization. The fact that Boyd’s theory — a warfighting theory — proves to have greater efficacy than the older models is a bit of delicious irony… in that it reliquishes control, and “makes an ally of chaos.”
In the larger view, the left has fallen behind the times because — as Boyd pointed out — conflict has an inescapably temporal dimension. Time IS change, and without adaptation, models become anachronisms. While certain core truths have endured, class struggle, national oppression, and gender struggle, eg, the forms and circumstances have changed, and not merely quantitatively.
In the OODA formulation, the requirement for keeping up with those changes in order to intuit the most effective response — the one that puts one “inside the opponent’s decision cycle,” is to first “observe,” then “orient.” Ergo, my contention that we need re-orientation. We have already observed the left’s malaise until our eyes have crossed.
As it is expressed in the linked diagram, readers will note the frequent use of the term “unfolding.” In Dimitrov’s essay on emergent decision making (note the similarity between the term “emergent” and “unfolding”), he states the following:
“Decision Emergence versus Decision Making
“Under conditions of complexity and chaos, the process of making a decision becomes not only difficult and unreliable - often it turns to be meaningless. The reason for this is that any temporarily discrimination between right (good) decisions and wrong (bad) decisions loses its validity in the chaotic flow of the decision process considered in its wholeness.
“What is considered to be a wrong decision at a current moment T could appear as the most appropriate (right) decision when looking at it from the moment T when the decision process terminates, and vice versa: a decision classified as the best one at a moment t can be seen at T as the worst decision ever made during the whole decision process. Instead of being currently made ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ’satisfactory’ or ‘unsatisfactory’ - characteristics that make sense only at a meta level, that is, from a position where one is able to have an integral look at the decision process in its wholeness, decisions are allowed freely to EMERGE out of the process as it unfolds (moves, flows) in time. As far as the potential for emergence is an intrinsic characteristic of any complex dynamic, the less the external pressure (constraints) on the decision process, the easier the manifestation of its spontaneity. In this sense, freedom is a crucial factor for any decision emergence.”
“…as it unfolds (moves, flows) in time…”
More:
“In human systems, emergence implies serendipity and creativity both at individual (intrapersonal) and group (interpersonal) levels of interaction. For creativity to take hold and flourish, emergence needs space and freedom. Emergence cannot be designed. Emergence cannot be imposed.”
Unity of goals. Freedom of action.
Resistance to this on the left is understandable. It threatens existing controls; it is unfamiliar; it allows for (sometimes dangerous) mistakes to be made as part of a learning process; and it does not provide the false comfort of a “plan”.
The left, in my hypothesis, needs to re-orient, because well-intuited orientation at the tactical level is the key to success. The current US War Department think they have studied Boyd and and applied his concpets to Iraq. But they have not. They did not relinquish central control. They continue to spin out silly strategies that take no account of emerging realities. They stifle initiative among their junior leadership. And they have tried to substitute technological decision-making for human intution.
This is the 21st Century. There are multiple logics at work in contradictory ways. Harvey points out, for example, that the territorial logic of the state is at odds with the logic of capital accumulaiton that constantly seeks to transcend territorial (and all) boundaries. We are now seeing the most powerful state in the world losing its power to do anything except destroy.
Taking this on directly and frontally with a bunch of stale tactics, given that the whole government is now consolidating its political defenses, is colossally ineffective.
At the same time, capitalism metastasizes into every dimension of our environment and our lives.
I’ll add more later, but this is enough to open the conversation, should anyone be so inclined.
Next addition: Exposure & Self-Organization.
elaina:
Whoa Nelly!!! Fractal to the max!
I think my head just imploded. But in a good way.
I’ll have to come back and comment more when I can think of something more intelligent to say. Right now I’m dog-assed tired from working, like, 147 hours in the past 11 days. I think I’m just gonna go to bed now.
But I really ate this one up, Stan. Can’t wait till the next installment.
28 July 2006, 10:37 pmRockdropper:
I still have friends, but mostly family members who ask me to produce plans for my life … Ha. My learning process has brought me to the conclusion that when you make plans, you produce an opportunity for the whole universe to laugh at you behind your back… or right in your face. So being reasonably intelligent, I discovered that decisions usually make themselves if you let them. This was put as a metaphor by a friend: ‘It is easier to ride the horse if you face the same direction as the horse.’ You can call it going with the flow (of life). But my experience is that plans from a planning session regarding something as simple as my own life have always been a waste of time and the effort would have been better spent taking the simplest of actions. ;o}
28 July 2006, 11:53 pmElki:
Given I’m reading this post after your resistance post, you could draw on a discussion that; in the way the hezbollah in Lebanon exist and carry out their resistance, which is as an ‘underground’ group that has no formal government - and tactics that make them largely unpredictable; they are an example of what you are critiquing here, which has drawn in Chaos Theory.
It has the feel of a feminine regime, one where there is no strategy but changing the tactics; it is organic in nature.
29 July 2006, 12:06 amStan:
Hezballah is also literally an underground organizaiton now. They used massive deep tunneling as a preparation for this fight. The extensiveness of the tunnel networks provided them with the redundant material structure for protection, mobility, and flexibility. They had to learn to love the shovel as much as the rifle.
29 July 2006, 9:28 amjay taber:
This appears to be a personal sequential formula. A social model might be research, education, organizing, action.
29 July 2006, 2:02 pmRobin Hering:
For a long time I was exasperated that the left couldn’t seem to “organize,†but now I see that if you want “social transformation toward a more egalitarian, sustainable, and non-alienated society that as much as possible supports the maximum creativity, accountability, and development of personhood for the individual and the minimization of suffering†then the last model you’d want to emulate is a controlled hierarchy. Better that the left operates like the natural world, planting seeds here and there, using diversity as a survival strategy, and where each of us is uniquely suited to meet certain others where they are.
That’s why, when things were as bad as they were by 2004, you go ahead and do the Nader thing – to try to break the system.
I like your bubbling group, Walkin’ to New Orleans. Self-selected and lively diversity.
For what it’s worth, I do think readers here at Feral Scholar have much more in common with what I’d call traditional conservatives than with the liberal left. Like people who have radical ideas like public libraries where you can get books and access to the world, for free.
29 July 2006, 7:52 pmStan:
OODA Loop is far from a descripton solely of individuals in conflict. In Mao’s articulation of guerrilla strategy he summarized: “The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.†This is a framework for OODA.
Orientation is paired in every case with action, yet what the enemy will do is not predictable.
30 July 2006, 9:56 amOla Inghe:
But consider this about Hezballah, which hardly is a picture of a non-centralistic type of organisation (at least not at the regional/local level):
Guardian, Saturday July 29, 2006
As the shells fall around them, Hizbullah men await the Israelis
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, south of Tyre
Inside a well-furnished apartment in a village on the outskirts of Tyre, with shelves of books piled from floor to ceiling, a black turbaned cleric and three men sit sipping bitter coffee. By the door is a pile of Kalashnikovs and ammunition boxes; handguns are tucked into the men’s trousers. The four are Hizbullah fighters, waiting for the Israelis.
“Patience is our main virtue, we can wait for days, weeks, months before we attack. The Israelis are always impatient in battle and in strategy,” says the cleric, Sayed Ali, who claims to be a descendant of the prophet. “I know them very well.”
As if to make his point, the sound of Israeli shells blasting the surrounding hills shakes the door and shutters every few minutes. Ali does know the Israelis. He started fighting them at the age of 17 when they invaded Lebanon in 1982. Three years later he was arrested with two of his comrades and spent a few months in an Israeli prison. Within weeks of his release he was fighting them again.That’s what he did for the next six years.
For the last five years he has been finishing his theology studies in Tehran. A month ago, he was asked by Hizbullah to return to southern Lebanon. He arrived a week before the fighting began.
Standing at the window, he points to the banana plantations between us and the blue Mediterranean. “I have fought for years in these groves. We used to sit and wait for them [the Israelis] to make a move and then we would hit. They always moved too quickly, too soon.”
All over the hills of south Lebanon hundreds of men like Sayed Ali and his comrades are waiting - some in bunkers, some in farm houses - for the Israeli troops to arrive. Sayed Ali and his men spend most of their time in the building where his apartment is, moving only at night.
“We stay put and we don’t move till we get our orders, and this is why we are not like any other militia. A militiaman will fire whenever he likes at whatever he likes,” explains one of the men, who says he has been involved in firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. “We have specific orders. Even when we fire rockets we know when and where [to fire] and each of the men manning the launchers runs to a specific hiding place after firing the rockets.”
He says Hizbullah fighters expect the site of a rocket launch to be hit by an Israeli airstrike or shell within 10 to 15 minutes.
Another of the men, who says he is Sayed Ali’s brother, explains how Hizbullah teaches its fighters patience: “During our training we spend days in empty buildings without talking to anyone or doing anything. They tell me go and sit in that building, and I go and sit there and wait.”
According to Ali, Hizbullah operates as “a state within the state”, with its own hospitals, social organisations and social security system. “But we are also an Islamic resistance movement, an indoctrinated army,” he adds. “I would go and knock the door at someone and say we need $50,000, he would give me [that] because they trust us.”
The fighting force of the organisation is divided into two: the “active” group, whose task is to serve in Hizbullah, and the reserve, or Ta’abi’a, as it is known in Arabic. The active fighters get monthly pay. The reserves are called on only in time of war, and receive bonuses but no regular pay. A third section, the Ansar, comprises people who support or are supported by the organisation.
Ali, the commander of Hizbullah in his village, and his men are part of the active force, and their orders are to wait for further orders. “Hizbullah hasn’t even mobilised all its active fighters, and the Israelis are calling their reserve units,” he said.
Hizbullah prides itself on its secretiveness and discipline. “We don’t take anyone who knocks at our door and says ‘I want to join’. We raise our fighters. We take them when they are young kids and raise them to become Hizbullah fighters. Every fighter we have believes that the ultimate form of being is martyrdom.” The three men nod their assent.
Shia symbols and mythology play a big role in the ideology of Hizbullah, especially the tragedy of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet who in the 7th century led a few hundred men against the well-organised army of the caliph in Damascus. He was slain in Karbala, and Shia around the world commemorate these events in Ashura.
“Every one of those fighters is a true believer, he has been not only trained to use guns and weapons but [indoctrinated] in the Shia faith and the Husseini beliefs,” Ali says.
He and his fellow fighters have been preparing for the latest conflict with the Israelis for years and he acknowledges the support received from Iran.
“When we defeated them in 2000 we did that with [Katyusha] rockets. We had six years to prepare for this day - the Americans are sending laser-guided missiles to the Israelis, what’s wrong if the Iranians help us? When the Syrians were here we would get stuff through their supply lines, now it’s more difficult.”
The TV is blaring patriotic songs and pictures of destroyed bridges, houses and buildings. The men are feeling confident - only a day earlier the Israelis suffered heavy casualties in the village of Bint Jbeil.
“Our strategy is to hit the commandos and the Golani units like we did in Bint Jbeil,” Ali says. “Those are their best units. If they can’t do anything, the morale of the reserve units will sink.”
For Ali and his comrades, the latest conflict is a war of survival not only for Hizbullah but for the whole Shia community. It is not only as a war with Israel, their enemy for decades, but also with the Sunni community. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have all expressed fears of Iranian domination over the Middle East.
“If Israel comes out victorious from this conflict, this will be a victory for the Sunnis and they will take the Shia community back in history dozens of years to the time when we were only allowed to work as garbage collectors in this country. The Shia will all die before letting this happen again.”
He says that even if the international community calls on Hizbullah to disarm as part of a peace deal, he and his men will not lay down their arms. “This war is episode two in disarming Hizbullah. First they tried to do it through the Lebanese government and the UN. When they failed, the Americans asked the Israelis to do the job.”
Despite Israel’s claims to have inflicted heavy losses on Hizbullah, Ali insists his side is in a strong position. “Things are going very well now, whatever happens we are winning. If they keep bombing us we will stay in the shelters, and with each bomb more people support the resistance. If they invade they will repeat the miserable fate they had in 1982, and if they hold one square foot they will give the Islamic resistance all the legitimacy. If they want to kill Hizbullah they have to kill every Shia in the south of Lebanon.”
And even when the battle with the Israelis is over, he adds menacingly, Hizbullah will have other battles to fight. “The real battle is after the end of this war. We will have to settle score with the Lebanese politicians. We also have the best security and intelligence apparatus in this country, and we can reach any of those people who are speaking against us now. Let’s finish with the Israelis and then we will settle scores later.”
31 July 2006, 8:05 amBob H:
Reading Stan’s essays are always a mixed bag; some gems of insight and prose and some shoddy thinking.
Many things jump out at me. First, the misappropriation of science; I’d say your use of three scientific principles are wrong: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is not just about “any logical model of reality “, it’s about the limitations of formal systems which require a meta-system to handle certain inconsistencies. A small distinction, but the way you use it undermines the value of logical models, kind of like postmodernism is said to do.
Second, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: it only applies to the quantum scale regarding position/momentum, etc., it gets “smoothed out” at the macro level. It has nothing to do with the “butterfly effect”.
Third, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, not open ones. This is more relevant to your writings on energy (e.g. the Earth is not a closed system), but you seem to fetishize entropy. Anyone who’s weeded are garden or cleaned a house (not exclusively male activity, BTW) knows that “imposing” order out on chaos is a useful albeit endless task.
I’m not a chaos theory expert, but I know enough about dynamics and Lorenz attractors to know there’s a dialectic here: the most ordered systems have a tendency towards chaos, *but* highly random systems can show unexpected tendencies towards order (e.g. crystal formation, of the rings of Saturn).
I’m not trying to nitpick, it’s just that if you misuse theory you can expect your conclusions to be off.
I’ll not comment more on the gratuitous male bashing — no point preaching against the choir.
On the political front, I’ve worked with both extremely centralized DC cults (which make the RCP you quote look like rank amateurs) and the completely structureless D.A.N. post Seattle. I’d say both approaches are dysfunctional. There’s a need for synthesis.
As an exercise, compare the Iraqi resistence to Hezbollah. The IR is so decentralized it can never be crushed; but it’s also unable to stop the extreme religious sectarianism which aliented Shiites who are anti-occupation. That seems like a big weakness.
Hizbollah, by contrast, is super-centralized and highly compartmentalized. That has made it’s military wing impervious to infiltration and betrayal, and has allowed the creation of social services which give it mass support, to control corruption and make strategic descions to unite with other forces. The point is that centralism has it’s value *if* there’s wise leadership and the ability to reproduce leadership.
I’m not a military expert, but it’s seems to me that military structures, like political parties, can benefit from both centralization and independent decision making. Isn’t that what made the German officer corp so fearsome, that young officers where trained to take independent initiatives in the field? Not to praise the Nazis or anything, but Boyd’s accolyte William Lind seems to think the U.S. military was never able to achieve mobile warfare with it’s centralize strategy/tactical initiate the way the Germans did.
Isn’t a synthesis between individualism and centralism a potentially useful thing? Don’t the concepts of institutional memory and culture have some value, or the concept of “el mando nunca muere” (”the leadership never dies” school of regenerating cadre)? Doesn’t the extreme individualism of American culture and it’s reject of centralism, discipline, etc. merit some criticism?
Not to harp on disagreements, just trying to look at the flip side of the coin.
3 August 2006, 12:06 pmStan:
The quotes about Godel, Heisenberg, and the 2nd Law are from Boyd, not me.
But in any case, these connections are also made by Ilya Prigogene. Godel and Heisenberg are deployed against positivism, which is not a critique of science, but of scientism… the issue is both physical and philosophical… a breakdown of those border one might suggest, and a good thing, too. Positivism embodies within it and reproduces bourgeois and masculine assumptions that left unexamined inoculate positivism from any critque. Bourgeois masculinity is fundamentally based on a posture of disinterestedness… called objectivity, as well as a compulson for control and the taxonomies that are necessary to maintain the impression (and sometimes reality) of control. It establishes boundaries between everything that do not, strictly speaking, exist in nature; and that is not saying the same thing the post-modernists do at all. We are still acknowledging at the philospohical level that existence precedes essence, as it were. There is a material world out there; but it is as constituted by relations between things as it is by things… which certainly exist, but in a perpetual state of change, which at some level defies taxonmies. Things and relations, in the real world, are not separable from one another, and that is precisely why chaos/complexity is being developed to achieve a synthesis between the mechanical implications of Newtonianism and the free-for-all implied by quantum physics, which so disturbed Comrade Einstein.
I myself see Godel as a kind of >a href=”http://linas.org/mirrors/www.ltn.lv/2005.01.29/~podnieks/marxism.htm”>mathematical Hegelian. Boyd saw him as a reference for an infinite dynamism. As to Heisenberg, he noted that observation itself changes what one observes, no matter how small the change. This is most assuredly NOT limited to the study of particles, but operates in our daily lives with absolute consistency. The relation to the Butterfly Effect (which is Boy’s quote) is a premise of chaos theory, ie, that small changes over time develop into big ones. If I am following a compass azimuth overland, and I deviate one degree, a distance traveled of one kilometer is not terribly signficant. If I deviate one degree for one thousand meters, then I have gone quite badly astray.
The question of centralism is where and what to centralize. A suggested alternative to Lenin’s formulaton was provided. No doubt military formations growing out of political ones will have a strong element of centralism. The various resistance force in Iraq are also centralized, but they are so numerous, and some so small, that they have greater (reference Boyd here) tactical agility. The problem with regard to the value of individual initiative is that the larger and more politically embedded military organization cannot afford to allow too much initiative, because of political outcomes… like Haditha or Qana, as two wretched examples. Scale matters, and the existence of a state underneath the military matters overwhlemingly because of potential and highly unpredictable disruptions of interstate equilibrium. The scale of organizaton centralization needs to match the scale of the problem at hand. The problem, which you note you have experienced, with left sects is that they treat every question as if everyone’s lives depended on it, and they attempt to impose ideological conformity on the whole organization. This inevitably leads to creepy, backstabbing line-struggles, and if they are not careful, bizarre cults of personality.
On Lind and Boyd, neither was looking at war as a political activity, and therein was THEIR limitation.
Since you seem compelled to throw in a non-remark remark about male bashing, perhaps you’d like to give an example. I don’t feel bashed.
3 August 2006, 3:34 pmBob H:
What I notice is how you sidestep the main point about science I was trying to make: that before you critique it you should be accurate about what you are critiquing. In some of your writings I think mix valid critiques of science
For example Heisenberg. The uncertainty principle describes the contradiction between position/momentum and energy/time; it’s what “allows” an electron to jump past an otherwise insurmountable barrier, which is happing millions of times in the diodes in this computer; it does not allow me to walk through walls. To observe an electron, I have to change it’s state by hitting it with an other particle or wave; but I can observe the sun by opening my eyes; it is not affected by my observations in the least. I’m not trying to be pedantic; I’m trying to point out that misusing theory to give an argument a semblence of scientific basis is a form of scientism.
Similarly, people misuse Godel to undermine logic itself, rather than see its real limitations.
I’m familiar with positivism and scientism, which I think you are using as a straw man here (the critique of positivism is not a new thing, even to Marxists). I think when you imply objectivity is a male conceit you are overstating things. Sure, it can be done that way (”I’m objective, you’re hysterical”), but any kind of analysis or observation begins with objectification, by trying to step outside the thing in question. The point is not to get stuck there, and to understand that our “objectivity” is inherently limited since we can never be completely disconnected from what we observe. Anyway, for Hegel the endpoint is the unity of the subjective and the objective, which I guess is the goal of Eastern thought as well; but I digress.
On chaos, I’m trying to point out that yes, initial conditions and accumulating errors matter, but there is an opposite dynamic as well: systems that at first glance are highly random and chaotic and exhibit suprising degrees of orderliness. I think it’s unwise to only look at one side of a contradiction.
I won’t comment more on military matters, because I’m pretty ignorant. I only know Boyd through Lind’s essays, and he always seems to highlight the political and moral dimension as primary, which is why I see him as one of the few reactionaries who “gets it”. But of course his politics are 180 degrees the opposite of anything progressive.
On centralism/decentralism, I don’t have a good synthesis yet of even my own experiences; what I’m pretty sure of is that both extremes are rotten, and that not everything about D.C. is worthless. That’s trite, I know, but what I’m trying to get at is something like this: yes, I agree, here in the U.S. at this time, D.C.is not a very useful thing. But if things advance it might be the case that we need to reconsider an “improved” version of D.C. I know I’m being vague and idealist here, but it seems to me that every successful revolution has needed a center for strategizing and decision making.
Finally, my snide remark about “male bashing” is because of sentences like this, which pervade your writing:
The very idea of imposing order on “chaos†is part and parcel of Enlightenment masculinity, and the adoption of hierarchical military models for struggle organizations brings with it the culture of masculinity that is in the very fiber of military organization.
I mostly agree with the second part of the sentence, that adopting military models when it’s not appropriate (”the militarization of the party” as I was taught to say) has potentially tragic as well as comic results; but the first part about imposing order on chaos being a result of Enlightenment masculinity strikes me as gratuitious male bashing. One, nature routinely brings order out of chaos (it it didn’t we’d all be gas), and there’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to do so when appropriate. Two, it’s not inherently a male conceit to try and do so (that’s why I used the example of weeding a garden or housework — these have traditionally been viewed as women’s work, etc.) And Enlightenment masculinity? The Enlightment was revolutionary in its day but we’re way past that. I understand that excessive rationalism becomes irrational, but I don’t buy the male/female epistemology. Logic should be common ground, not a battle ground.
I think I’ll leave it there. I’m not trying to score points, believe it or not, just contribute to a useful discussion.
BH
3 August 2006, 6:37 pm