Reforming The CIA in The Image Of The Zapatistas?

Introduction written for Korean collection

This short piece was written as an intervention on the Internet. It was a byproduct of my on-going study of capitalist policy makers and their advisors' thinking about how to deal with the rest of us. The issue of "netwar", or "information warfare" more broadly is, for the state, a subsection of intelligence work. The National Security Administration or the CIA may monitor our e-mail through secret programs like ECHELON but they also murder people, use cointelpro operations to disrupt organizations they perceive as enemies, organize the overthrow of governments, and so on. Therefore, it behooves us to keep track not only of their netwar efforts to counter our effective use of computer communications in struggle, but also of their other operations, and reforms of those operations as well. This piece reports on and evaluates one contribution to current debates over the reorganization of American intelligence work.

I found this contribution of interest because it can be read as articulating, in a manner similar to RAND researchers Arquilla and Ronfeldt, the need to reorganize US intelligence in ways homologous to the organizational forms used by its "enemies." For many years, one insight that has profoundly influenced the development of autonomist Marxist thought has been the perception of the way capital follows, rather than leads, labor (or free human activity more generally). Marxists have long repeated Marx's comments about capital as dead labor living vampire-like off of living labor, but they have rarely understood this dynamically. What the autonomist analysis of the historical dynamic of class composition led to was the perception that capitalist processes of class decomposition often involved an imaginative adaptation to innovations introduced by labor. New phases of decomposition were not merely instances of clever capitalist plots to intensify exploitation and domination, but could only be understood in terms of business adaptation to forces that had escaped their command. This way of looking at things seems particularly applicable to the issue of the emerging class war in cyberspace. Although they don't use the same theoretical language, articles like the ones by Arquilla and Ronfeldt and this one by ex-CIA analyst Bruce Berkowitz articulate just such an awareness: adapt or be outflanked and defeated. The article puts the discussion in context and takes up some of the contradictions of such efforts.

In the current (Summer 1996) issue of Foreign Policy, there is an article by ex-CIA analyst Bruce Berkowitz on reforming U.S. intelligence. As Berkowitz points out the need for reform has been under discussion at the highest levels of the state for some time. What is interesting about Berkowitz's contribution to this discussion is his attack on the rigidities of vertical hierarchies in the centralized organization of intelligence work (CIA style) and his call for the creation of a more horizontal "dispersed intelligence network" (p. 47). Although he doesn't discuss it, his argument can be seen as an attempt to co-opt the organizational forms of many of the grassroots movements that the intelligence community sees as growing threats to the current system, e.g., the solidarity and pro-democracy movements in Mexico that support the Zapatistas and have undermined the central authority of the PRI party-state.

Against Centralization

Berkowitz's attack on the centralized organization of intelligence work is focused on the way it slows down the process of gathering, analyzing and getting information to those who need it in forms that are actually of use. He critiques most recent reform proposals as involving only marginal adjustments and demands a more profound rethinking and reorganization. His primary explicit framework of reference is the private sector and he points to the increasing fluidity and speed of corporate adaptations to the shifting terrain of the information society and demands equally rapid adjustment and flexibility in intelligence work. The world, he argues, is "moving toward fluid, distributed, networked information organizations" (p. 42) and so must the intelligence community.

His appeal to corporate models is in tune with the conservative theme of privatization and government downsizing, so popular since the first Reagan administration. Indeed, he suggests that government intelligence shouldn't do anything (including spy satellites and economic spying) that the private sector can be hired to do. Downsizing, of course, still leaves room for state intelligence agencies --because there are certain kinds of work the private sector will not find profitable-- but the surviving state agencies, he argues, should be patterned after the private sector in terms of organization. Instead of a Central Intelligence Agency, he reasons, the US government should cultivate "multiple organizations with the [intelligence] community to develop a variety of ideas for carrying out [particular] missions." (p. 46) He even goes so far as to suggest the use of voucher funding --such as conservatives have proposed for education-- to encourage competition among the multiple organizations. (p. 49)

A New Model

The closest any government intelligence agencies come to an adequate adaptation to the changing structures and flows of information generation and use, according to him, can be found in US military efforts to "create a continuous link connecting intelligence consumers directly to intelligence collectors" as in the concept of "Dominant Battlefield Awareness" where every soldier is fed a continuous flow of all available information and horizontal communications are as permitted as top-down commands. (p. 47) This kind of approach, Berkowitz argues, should be generalized throughout the nonmilitary world.

Although he gives no set definition of the kind of new model of intelligence organization, his examples and his adjectives paint at least a fuzzy picture: "fluid, distributed" (p. 42), "capable of changing continuously" (p. 43), "multiple organizations" (p. 46), "more flexibility" (p. 47), "a dispersed intelligence network rather than a linear hierarchy" (p. 47),"at least as much flexibility as private corporations" (p. 47), less authoritative and more open to interpretation, (p. 48), "less, not more centralized" (p. 49) and "market-style approaches" (p. 49). All of this is consistent with first, some other recent literature on changing intelligence needs and second, the burgeoning literature on flexible corporate adaptations to the mushrooming "information economy."

Arquilla and Ronfeldt on Netwar

The best known (on the Net) piece of thinking on the changing needs of the state in the area of conflict management is probably the 1993 article "CyberWar is Coming!" by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt published by RAND Corporation, a well-known think-tank. In that piece, Arquilla and Ronfeldt took up the impact of new communications and information technologies on military "structures, doctrines, and strategies." They coined the terms "cyberwar" to denote war-making capacities and strategies and "netwar" to denote "societal struggles" incorporating these new technologies. Arquilla and Ronfeldt's paper became famous on the Net primarily because it highlighted the efficacy of computer communications in grassroots elaborations of network forms of struggle and then suggested that government "may want to design new kinds of military units and capabilities for engaging in network warfare." In their article, Arquilla and Ronfeldt emphasized just those limitations of hierarchical organization and those advantages of network organizational forms which Berkowitz highlights.

Against this background, Berkowitz's article, published in one of the elite foreign policy journals, can be seen as a contribution to a developing line of thinking and argument about how to reorganize US intelligence activities. Both articles are arguing that in order to be effective the form of state organization must correspond in some ways to the form of the perceived threats and as those threats change, so must intelligence. The CIA, the KGB and many Marxist-Leninist organizations had similar forms and played each others games according to more or less the same rules. But an unaltered CIA is likely to have much more difficulty helping the Mexican government cope with grassroots mobilizations for democracy in Chiapas and elsewhere. The urgency of Berkowitz's tone suggests that despite certain steps in the right direction, he clearly feels the opposition is getting too far ahead.

Networks, Communications, Self-activity

I would like to suggest that what we can see implicitly in Berkowitz's article and more explicitly in the one by Arquilla and Ronfeldt is an effort by capitalist policy analysts to understand the characteristics of, and to figure out adequate responses to, historically new forms of self-organization that have emerged within various sectors of the working class (broadly defined). Whether we examine the self-activity in production of "knowledge" workers, or that of Chiapaneco campesinos, or that of a wide variety of other grassroots initiatives we find new forms of self-activity which escape and undermine capitalist authority and control, on the shopfloor, in the community, in the village, across borders and many other previously sharp divisions among workers. Integral to these new organizational forms are new patterns of communication including new kinds of horizontal, rhizomatic linkages. Arquilla and Ronfeldt's effort vis a vis the military and Berkowitz's vis a vis the intelligence community are two responses to a very widespread phenomenon.

We can also find this kind of effort to perceive and adapt to new forms of self-activity throughout society (qua capitalist social factory): in production, in communications, in the environmental movement, and so on. Adaptation is by no means the only capitalist response to autonomous activity that escapes its old mechanisms of control, but it is the most interesting. The state (both national and supranational) and corporations have also responded with vicious repression (firings and downsizings, privatizations, low intensity warfare, structural adjustment programs) but these all fail to build on those activities which are escaping and thus can give no new life to the system. They are destructive of us, but they are not constructive of any new paradigm of dynamic capitalist reorganization.

We can find efforts to cope more positively with powerful new forms of self activity in many areas of both capitalist thought and strategy. Much of the debate of the last 20 years over Japanese versus American industrial management methods has concerned the question of the most efficacious mix of co-optation and repression on the shopfloor and in industry. Neo-Schumpeterian models of structuring the wage/benefit payments to reward and encourage creativity and innovation have vied with more traditional models of managerial monopoly over technological change. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's vision of capitalism continuously converting self-activity in the Net into entrepreneurship and new commodities has vied with more traditional models of censorship and control.

For those of us deeply involved with the promulgation of autonomous social experimentation with new, non-capitalist ways of being and doing, spying on such debates and perusing such literatures as are being spawned by desperate capitalist analysts can be a source of energy and inspiration. Such spying can be a source of energy because in the face of repression we are often distressed by the limits of our power to the point of not being able to perceive it at all (thus the rhetoric of victimization). It can be a source of inspiration in what it reveals not only about our own efforts narrowly defined, but in what we may discover about other related efforts with which we an link or cooperate.

Not only can we read through their worries to discover our own power, but we can read through their most innovative solutions to discover the same thing, once again. At the same time, because they are so worried and are trying so hard to discover strategic options and new tactics to reintegrate our efforts into their game, they are looking so long and hard at what we are doing that perhaps we can learn about ourselves by using their readings as a mirror --as long as we keep in mind just how distorted that mirror can be as it attempts to reflect images of activities whose logic escape its own.

One kind of recognition that the study of such capitalist policy literature can give is both important and amusing. Every effort to find ways to adapt capitalist organization (whether of corporations or the state) to horizontal, network forms of self-activity comes up against the contradiction between the desire to adapt to the rhythms of self-activity and the need to dominate and control it. The traditional quintessential capitalist mechanism for doing this is the market, in which --in principle-- people go their own way but the reduction of their interactions to buying and selling confines their activity to the logic of capitalism. That is to say, acceptance of the market as a framework for self activity condemns most people to the subordination of life to endless, alienated work.

Unfortunately for capitalism during this fin de siecle, a great many of the new kinds of self-activity have emerged out of quite explicit rejections of commodification and all of its alienations. So for example many refuse market oriented co-optations prefering loose, unstructured and free activity. Peasants may refuse to produce for the market, or subordinate their interactions with the market to "subsistence" activities, i.e., those that subordinate work to the meeting of needs. Software programmers may refuse to work for Microsoft and instead hand over the results of their creativity as freeware or shareware to whoever likes it. Much, perhaps most, of the traditional rhetoric equating markets with freedom has lost its glamour and faded to the status of hackneyed propaganda. Fewer and fewer suckers are born each minute.

Austin, Texas
June 6, 1996