“War as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massive deciding event in a dispute in international affairs: such war no longer exists.” Sir Rupert Smith, Deputy Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War
When robots are cheaper than workers in production, then drones are cheaper than soldiers in war. It’s certainly not Industrial Era warfare anymore. Electronics and digital technology have had the same impact on warfare as they have on every other institution of society. Just as a CEO in corporate headquarters can reprogram the production of a single machine half-way around the world, so can a general use a robot to take out a family at a wedding in Afghanistan or Yemen.
Digital technology is a qualitatively new means of production since it is the nervous system of laborless production. The technology is not only changing production systems and factories, it is also transforming every institution of society that was consolidated during the Industrial Era. From marriage to music, to how Congress makes political decisions, every structure is being forced to adapt or dissolve.
The question is whether the massive communist parties that formed in the Soviet Era – institutions that formed in the Industrial Era – also have to adapt. It is not a question of
whether they use cell phones and computers. The issue is far more fundamental. Is there another way of organizing traditional communist organizations that can allow them to take advantage of the new technology? The pressures on these parties are the same as on those other institutions that took their modern form 100 years ago – the corporation and the military.
How have they adapted?
Is there a new model for communist parties in the Digital Era of the 21 st Century?
Today both the corporation and the US military have undergone massive reorganization in order to adjust to and express the power of digital technology. They are putting the limitations of Industrial Era organization behind them. Both capitalist institutions have concluded that improper organization produces large-scale organizational “learning disabilities” that prevent organizations from achieving their goals. Both institutions discuss how organizational learning and group learning should be encouraged, where it should take place and how it should be organized.
Needless to say, neither corporations nor the military have sacrificed the overall authority of central commanders. However they are changing the missions of both the center of the
organization and the organizations at the periphery. Neither absolute centralism, nor absolute democracy, but a changing interpenetration of both, depending on time, place and condition.
Learning Organizations
Alberts and Hayes wrote Power to the Edge, Command and Control in the Information Age, (2003) to address issues of decentralization that the US military has been studying since the Vietnam War. Just as digital technology made it possible for a single soldier to fire a missile that takes down a plane, so has this technology made organizational agility both possible and necessary.
“Industrial Age organizations are, by their very nature, anything but agile. Agile organizations must be able to meet unexpected challenges, to accomplish new tasks in new ways and to learn to accomplish new tasks. Agile organizations cannot be stymied when confronted with uncertainty or fall apart when some of their capabilities are interrupted or degraded. Agile organizations need to be able to tolerate (even embrace) disruptive innovation. Agile organizations depend on the ability of individual members and organizational entities to get the information they need to make sense of a situation and combine and recombine as needed to ensure coherent responses.” (p 59-60)
World Wars I and II expressed classic Industrial Era forms of warfare. Giant armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers faced off against each other with the purpose of advancing to take territory. Such armies reflected the vast division of labor that was organized into production in industrial factories. Both workers and soldiers specialized in one operation, whether screwing on a car bumper or simply loading a cannon. Just as Industrial Era corporations, such armies were massive and ponderous.
The model for communist parties of the Comintern formed precisely in this period. These parties tried to establish a single model that likewise matched Industrial Era forms of organization. The command and control structures of both the armies and the corporations were highly centralized and based on following orders from someone above you in the chain of command, someone who is supposed to know more.
Digital technology reduces the division of labor in industry; it also reduces the effectiveness of organizational hierarchy and changes the meaning of following centralized orders. The US military quickly re-organized itself based on the concept of achieving a Mission, rather than the extreme industrial division of labor. Focused on achieving the Mission, a body of soldiers work together as a team to realize it. Then the team accepts a new Mission.
From the ‘70s through the ‘90s, corporations mostly assumed that the giant, centralized main frame computer was the best way to organize work. The rise of the computer-augmented work-station, immediately gave rise to the idea of the work-team. This lead to the replacement of the “Ford” model of production by the “Toyota” model. Work-teams need access to information in order to make autonomous decisions. They also need the autonomy to make decisions, within the scope of their authority.
Visionary corporate leaders of the time ridiculed Lee Iacocca, CEO of Ford Motors, who bragged that production of new vehicles could not begin until he decided the colors and shape of the headrest. When the US invaded Iraq in 1991, then-President George Bush the first made a big point of declaring in public that he, as commander-in-chief, would not be micromanaging the war, as Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam.
By the ‘80s, discerning corporate eyes could see that the Industrial Era was being superseded by the Digital Era. Peter Senge came out of MIT to write the definitive book that defined the corporation in new era, based on the impact of the new technology. Suddenly corporations became the lean, mean machines that they are today. They actively diffuse decision-making power down the supply chain, out-sourcing, and employing temp labor wherever possible. They recognized what the new technology demanded. And they redefined themselves as… learning organizations!
Summarizing this experience, Peter Senge advocated that the only edge that organizations have in the electronic era is their ability to learn. Senge’s book was called The Fifth Discipline – The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Senge was the first to define a corporation as “a learning organization” and point out that, just as human beings, corporations can develop learning disabilities: “This then is the basic meaning of a “learning organization” – an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future. For such an organization, it is not enough to merely survive.
“Survival learning” or what is more often termed “adaptive learning” is important – indeed necessary. But for a learning organization, “adaptive learning” must be joined with “generative learning”, learning that enhances our capacity to create.” (Senge, p 14)
“The new view of leadership in learning organizations centers on subtler and more important tasks. In a learning organization, leaders are designers, stewards and teachers. They are responsible for building organizations where people continually expand their capabilities to understand complexity, clarify vision, and improve shared mental models – that is, they are responsible for learning.” (p 340)
The military application of learning organizations was developed by Alberts and Hayes. Agility in Organization Power to the Edge discusses what agility means to military organization (p 128) The key dimensions of agility:
“1. Robustness: the ability to maintain effectiveness across a range of tasks, situations and
conditions;
2. Resilience: the ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, damage or a destabilizing perturbation in the environment;
3. Responsiveness: the ability to react to a change in the environment in a timely manner;
4. Flexibility: the ability to employ multiple ways to succeed and the capacity to move seamlessly between them;
5. Innovation: the ability to do new things and the ability to do old things in news ways;
6. Adaptation: the ability to change work process and the ability to change the organization”.
Any political organization, either revolutionary or Democratic Party, would sell their buttons and banners to achieve these capacities. Learning organizations train to develop these skills. Every
one of these abilities depends on having learning capacities actively functioning. This means building in learning throughout the organization, in large scale, from the center to the edge.
Rooting out organizational learning disabilities is also necessary. Proletarian revolutionaries have always used a scientific approach to developing the fighting capacity and initiative in organization. Political reports, the fight for local assessments, dispersing authority and responsibility, the requirements of doctrine, and the notion of the Line of March and the stages of consciousness reflect the demand that everything begins with a scientific assessment of what is possible.
It is particularly essential in these emergent times that learning drives organizations. If we think back only a decade, the smart phone was only developed in 2007; nobody knew what an app was, nor what social media meant. The ongoing objective explosion and resulting synergy of digital technology means that nobody knows exactly what the immediate future will be like. The rising political crisis in the US only adds to this process. In this context, large-scale group learning is necessary and often makes the difference.
The Party of a New Type
Lenin took the mass party, a development of the late 19th Century, and created the Party of a New Type, generally modeled on the Bolshevik Party. He also took the military form of the times and adapted it to create the Red Army, a Military of a New Type. Lenin’s model of the Bolshevik Party was a system or organizations that radiate out from the center like spokes on a wheel, or perhaps tentacles that connect the Party to the spontaneous struggle. This historic contribution established for the proletariat a political party that can lead and direct the class war just as an army general staff directs the army. This was a Party that operated with strategy and tactics so as to turn the proletarian struggle to the political offensive against the State.
Lenin was quite articulate that part of this structure was that organizations at the edge can
operate as what he called “transmission belts”. This places learning directly at the edge of the structure. The basic structures had several functions, one of which is making sense of the situation, making a basic scientific assessment of what is going on within their area of responsibility. This is an early application of the notion of the Party as a learning organization. It connects the function of organizational learning with democratic centralism.
“The traditional hierarchy is no longer the only game in town for militaries. A new kind of organization, an edge organization, has been enabled by a change in the power proposition for
information. Edge organizations are characterized by the widespread sharing of information and the predominance of peer-to-peer relationships …. Edge organizations are, in fact,
collaborative organizations that are inclusive, as opposed to hierarchies that are authoritarian and exclusive …. Edge organizations are organizations where everyone is empowered by information and has the freedom to do what makes sense. They are organizations that embody
a power to the edge approach to command and control.” (p 176-177)
In this context, the notion that the leader, or the leading body, is the “boss” is today as outmoded as the dial phone or the VHS tape recorder. The tasks of leadership are different in the Information Age: “Command in the Information Age involves creating the conditions for success, including the selection of a vision and associated goals, the development of objectives, the setting of priorities, the allocation of resources, and the establishment of constraints. Taken together, these (1) define the problem to be addressed or the mission to be accomplished and constitute command intent, and (2) scope out the solution.”
This concept of leadership conforms to the rise in political networking that is characteristic of times of advanced political activity that passes over into class struggle:
“This is a very important conclusion for Network Centered Warfare. It explains why it is possible for a network-centric organization to self-synchronize rather than be aimless or incoherent, as some have feared. The reason is that the leader for a particular task at a particular time (and place) emerges. Exactly who “takes charge” will differ as a function of the characteristics of the individuals and the situation …. It also explains why empowerment of the edge is the key to handling large numbers of simultaneous tasks in a dynamic environment. This is because empowered individuals and organizations that constitute an edge organization have a greater ‘bandwidth’ for action than their unempowered counterparts in traditional hierarchies. (Power to the Edge, p 184 – 185)
Mao Zedong discussed this question of the balance of centralization and decentralization
decades before computers in “Problems of Strategy in Guerilla War Against Japan” (May 1938): “Chapter 9 – The Relationship of Command” “… as opposed both to absolute centralization and to absolute decentralization, the principle of command in guerilla war should be centralized strategic command and decentralized command in campaigns and battles.
“Centralized strategic command includes the planning and direction of guerilla warfare as a
whole by the state, the co-ordination of guerilla warfare with regular warfare in each war zone, and the unified direction of all the anti-Japanese armed forces in each guerilla zone or base area….
Centralization, however, stops at this point, and it would be likewise harmful to go beyond it and interfere with the lower levels in matters of detail like the specific dispositions for a campaign or battle. For such details must be settled in the light of specific conditions, which change from time to time and from place to place and are quite beyond the knowledge of the distinct higher levels of command. This is what is meant by the principal of decentralized command in campaigns and battles …. In a word, it means guerilla warfare waged independently and with initiative within the framework of a unified strategy.”
In his masterful piece, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War” (December 1936), the final section is titled, significantly, “The Important Thing is to Be Good at Learning”.
……………….
Appendix – Further quotes from Power to the Edge ——
1) Lack of Agility –
“The lack of agility inherent in Industrial Age organizations is more than simply a result of a
systematic lack of interoperability (ie, combining units and missions in a fluid way to achieve goals and objectives – ed), although a lack of interoperability significantly impacts the agility of an organization. This lack of agility stems directly from an Industrial Age belief in optimization and centralized planning.” (p 59 – 60)
“For centralized planning to work, it must be possible for a relatively small group of people to do all of the following: make sense of the situation, maintain this understanding in the face of a dynamic environment, predict the future, develop an appropriate response strategy, decompose the response into a coherent set of executable tasks, allocate resources, task subordinates, monitor execution, and make adjustments as required, all in a timely manner….
Centralized planning is antithetical to agility because it (1) is relatively slow to recognize an respond to changes in the situation, (2) results in ill-informed participants and (3) places many constraints on behavior.
and….
“The inability of Industrial Age organizations to compete in the Information Age is a result of the way they deal with information. More to the point, they do not effectively take advantage of the information and expertise that are available. An organization that does not promote the
widespread sharing of information will not have well informed individuals and organizational entities. An organization that develops an approach to command and control that takes full advantage of the information available will be at a competitive advantage.
“Industrial Age organizations create fixed seams through which information is lost. They create seams that prevent information from being brought to bear. And they create seams that prevent them from integrating effects. These organizations will survive only as long as it takes for others in their competitive space to take advantage of Information Age concepts and technologies. This will not be for long.” (p 63)
2) On leadership –
“Our traditional views of leaders – as special people who set the direction, make the key
decisions and energize the troops – are deeply rooted in an individualistic and nonsystemic worldview. Especially in the West, leaders are heroes – great men (and occasionally women)
who “rise to the fore” in times of crises. Our prevailing leadership myths are still captured by the image of the captain of the cavalry leading the charge … So long as such myths prevail, they reinforce a focus on short-term events and charismatic heroes rather than on systemic forces and collective learning. At its heart, the traditional view of leadership is based on assumptions of people’s powerlessness, their lack of personal vision and inability to master the forces of change, deficits which can be remedied only by a few great leaders.”
Steven Miller
Oakland, May 2018
Nanodog2@hotmail.com
