the plausible possible

Possibilities for New Internationalism

emmi bevensee and frank miroslav Report · ch. 6 First published here

While few acknowledge it, the internet has immense potential in the ends of left internationalism. The old internationals were centralized affairs which were necessary because the cost of communication made it difficult for individuals. The congresses where delegates from various workers movements would come together to discuss strategy and demands that they would then distribute to their respective organizations. This approach, which emphasized mass, had several problems, one of which was that it can only work by ignoring the underlying values and motivations of those involved. This is seen in the various splits of the workers movement, such as that of the anarchists and the Marxists in the First International or the nationalists and the internationalists in the Second support over the former supporting their respective nation-states in WWI. These organizations couldn’t contain the differences in values and as such would predictably fall apart when the papered-over differences were pressed.

Thankfully what the cheap communication tech that underlies the internet enables is people to bypass the need for such centralized institutions. Instead of deciding on a particular demand that the masses in a particular region can work togethers under the supervision of some organization, they can instead pursue a multitude of strategies

Such an approach might not have the sort of lockstep discipline that typified prior labor movements, but this sort of looseness is a virtue in a constantly changing world, both for reasons of flexibility and redundancy. Our internationalism must be an antifragile network that can take advantage of opportunities afforded, while also being resilient to the inevitable attacks in reaction to it.

Emerging technologies also allow us to more easily give material support to those in need. While travel is certainly possible - leftists and Indigenous campesinos traveled to Chiapas from all over the world to support and learn from the Zapatistas or went to Rojava to fight ISIS - the fact of the matter is that we’re just going to be less capable of moving materials around the world than the people we fight against. If we ever get to the point where we have the logistic capacity to rival states, we’ve probably already won.

It’s here that the aforementioned advances in productive technologies have value. One of the biggest problems with prior leftist movements is the incentives that encourage nationalism. As Adam Przewoski noted in Capitalism and Social Democracy, social democratic parties would inevitably find themselves appealing to “‘the masses,’ ‘the people,’ ‘consumers,’ ‘taxpayers,’ or simply ‘citizens’”1 to win elections and in doing so would dilute their radical program for mass appeal. Likewise working class movements have been responsible for horrid acts of racism that colonizers attempted to justify by saying that immigrants were in competition with them for jobs.

But open source technology overcomes the zero sum aspect of national struggle by ideally creating a common pool of software and hardware that everyone can access and contribute to. Indeed in the long run it’ll probably be those who face extreme poverty who have the most to contribute to such technologies because they have the strongest incentives to cut costs while retaining quality.

If we can get technologies that allow individuals and communities to bootstrap capacity at scale, then the amount of material we need to move across borders to make a difference decreases significantly. Tools like 3d-printers, renewable energy generators, computers, etc are much easier to move across borders and can be used by communities to bootstrap their capacity. Learning materials and digital communications can allow people to educate themselves or learn remotely about phenomena, skills, and history from experts without having to have them in-person. Actions like open-source intelligence, digital payment systems and hacking can allow concerned parties to influence those on the ground while remaining remote.

Spreading technologies of resistance that let the marginalized fight asymmetrically has a storied history. One such example is the AK-47, which was originally designed for Soviet resistance against the Nazis, but ended up playing a vital role in decolonial struggles after World War II. The weapon was simple and durable, which made it perfect for the illiterate dispossessed who could use them to win drawn-out insurgencies.

However these technologies are also available to our enemies.2 An international leftism would be fighting not just the decaying neoliberal world order, but also post-modern “international nationalists” who are also capable of employing bottom-up forms of organization. The actual dynamics and lines of such a conflict are still emerging, but we will assume that the leftist coalition will be more diverse, both in terms of race/gender and occupation. This is a significant asset given the evidence that more diverse teams are better at solving problems in complex domains than heterogeneous teams. As Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor write in The Diversity Bonus:

“There is a bonus to be reaped in bottom-line performance when diverse groups function effectively together as teams in the highly charged, competitive, fast-changing work settings we face increasingly in today’s world—be it in business or in scientific discovery, in classrooms or on the battlefield. The relevant ability of an individual may not suffice— especially if those in the room share almost the same knowledge and set of approaches to problems that require the flow of all kinds of insights and the application of varied tools. Success may depend on the cognitive diversity that makes for intelligent teams, as Page demonstrates in this volume. What we want today are high- ability people who think in different ways and can function together, playing off each other and maximizing the emergent properties of diverse, inclusive, well-functioning teams.

In everyday parlance, the diversity of a team will likely be described as a function of the social identities, complex and intersectional as they surely are (arrayed along dimensions such as race, heritage, sexual orientation, class, and so on), of its members. … [I]t is the cognitive diversity of a team— measured by the lack of overlap in its members’ repertoires— that produces a diversity bonus.”3

However while diversity is an asset, it requires (like anything complex) more time to nurture and grow than simpler approaches. Hence carelessly pursuing diversity without putting in the proper care to create robust teams ends up. Scott Page uses the example of a Norwegian law that mandated 40% female representation of the boards of directors for companies that ended up reducing productivity because it was imposed in such a top-down fashion.

Instead Page turns to more organic forms of emergent diversity to justify his thesis. Among the papers he cites are:

  • A 2007 article that showed that diverse online crowds of amatures could outperform experts when solving complex problems.4
  • A 2015 paper reviewing data on collective intelligence that claimed that group diversity was an asset when solving creative or innovative tasks.5
  • A 2011 paper that shows that the majority of high impact papers in the social sciences have atypical connections between different research domains when compared to a random sample of paper published in the same journal.6
  • A 2014 article in Nature that shows that papers who have co-authors who have last names from different backgrounds tend to be cited more.7

While it's difficult to prove absolute correlation because of how complicated working in teams are, we believe that this evidence gives credence to the project of building a global network that crosses both national and disciplinary boundaries to solve complex problems. In order to defeat contemporary reactionaries, we need to leverage benefits that are partially denied to them.

Another possible strategy is building sufficient capacity in key cities that are the centers of global economic activity since so much of the contemporary economy takes place within cities. In today's world when information work is the primary commodity that generates profits, dissatisfied knowledge workers like renegade intelligence contractors or tech giant whistle blowers can have an outsized impact by getting proprietary knowledge into the broader world. As previously mentioned information is easy to move and defend.

Capitalists can guard against this by restricting access to the information within the workplace such as siloing of information in government computer systems, but introducing such friction makes the overall process less efficient. The on-the-job agency that many tech workers have is a direct result of the fact that the sheer amount of possibilities make the sort of work-to-rule management that typified prior forms of capitalism difficult.

Such action has precedent in the Snowden leaks. And while the NSA has taken action to prevent similar breaches of information in the future, the measures they have undertaken hamper the ability of their analysts to do their job. As Hugh Gusterton wrote in the wake of the Snowden revelations:

“American leaders say they will avoid future Mannings and Snowdens by segmenting access to information so that individual analysts cannot avail themselves of so much, and by giving fewer security clearances, especially to employees of contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, where Snowden worked. This will not work. Segmentation of access runs counter to the whole point of the latest intelligence strategy, which is fusion of data from disparate sources. The more Balkanized the data, the less effective the intelligence.”

They don’t call it the central intelligence agency for nothing. Such data siloing and internal bureaucracy is what was directly responsible for intelligence failures like that of 9/11. As Clive Thompson wrote in a 2006 New York Times article:

“[D]uring the cold war, threats formed slowly. The Soviet Union was a ponderous bureaucracy that moved at the glacial speed of the five-year plan.

...

Analysts also did not worry about anything other than their corners of the world. Russia experts focused on Russia, Nicaragua ones on Nicaragua. … Then on Sept. 12, 2001, analysts showed up at their desks and faced a radically altered job. Islamist terrorists, as 9/11 proved, behaved utterly unlike the Soviet Union. They were rapid-moving, transnational and cellular. To disrupt these new plots, some intelligence officials concluded, American agents and analysts would need to cooperate just as fluidly — trading tips quickly among agents and agencies. Following the usual chain of command could be fatal.”

Intelligence agencies have almost certainly moved towards such a model in the proceeding decades. But the underlying tension between the efficiency that could be unleashed by making the system more open and the loss of power that would inevitably result from such a move. If the US government really cared about preventing terrorism, they’d move towards an open-source model wherein far more information was available to the average person.

This distributed approach to intelligence is effectively what networks of antifascist researchers have built organically. They use constantly shifting networks of trust and ad-hoc sharing of information to identify reactionary threats to others. While duplication of efforts occurs because of decentralization, the movement as a whole is resilient, adaptive, and remarkably effective.

But adopting such a model, no matter how many lives it might save, would also undermine the dominance hierarchies that the ruling classes want to uphold. By giving autonomy to those who defend against threats, they risk them turning their efforts to dismantle the privilege and wealth that they have acquired.

But these sorts of trade-offs will only become more pronounced as information warfare ramps up is only growing. As co-author of this report Emmi Bevensee put it in her writeup for Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right: "The opposition to this horror [of patchwork multipolar fascism] is not unipolar, liberal imperialism, but rather complex, adaptive and overlapping networks of anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and internationalist solidarity." To understand why this is the case, let’s take a look at the nature of contemporary information warfare.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Capitalism and Social Democracy, Adam Przewoski, pg 27 ↩

  2. See for example The coming decline of globalism or: How I learned to stop worrying and love multipolarity by the reactionary Keith Woods which argues that the internet and cryptocurrencies will help dissolve the liberal world order. ↩

  3. The Diversity Bonus, Scott Page, pg xiv-xv ↩

  4. Getting Unusual Suspects to Solve R&D Puzzles, Karim R. Lakhani and Lars Bo Jeppesen, 2007 ↩

  5. Collective Intelligence and Group Performance, Anita Williams Woolley, Ishani Aggarwal, and Thomas W. Malone, 2015 ↩

  6. Recombinant search and breakthrough idea generation: An analysis of high impact papers in the social sciences, Melissa A. Schilling and Elad Green, 2011 ↩

  7. Collaboration: Strength in diversity, Richard B. Freeman and Wei Huang, 2014 ↩