Conflict is Necessary to Resolve Conflict 

About fifteen years ago, I was working for a large telecommunications company on trying to figure out why their administrators couldn't agree on how to implement a broad new retraining plan in their firm.  The executives felt that the administrators were holding things up, and the administrators, the people trying to implement the policy the executives had decided on, thought the higher-up's were just plain loco.  They said the plan wasted too much time, contained a lot of information their employees already had, and was impossible to put in place in the time allotted and with the resources allocated for it.  After looking at the issue for a while, and collecting as much information as I could, I decided that it was my rather unattractive task to tell the executive that they were wrong--the new training was both confusing and unnecessary in exactly the way it was being portrayed within the company--and the people who worked for them were right.  They should drop the plan, scrap it entirely, and, if they still wanted to think about retraining staff, start over in a different, even contradictory, direction.

They did not like my suggestion.  Eventually--and mostly because I had the trust of the CEO, CFO, and a few other board members--I won them over.  They scrapped the plan, changed direction, and everything calmed down.  Things could have gone very differently, but they didn't, and that was largely due to the fact that I'd developed a good personal working relationship with some of the most powerful individuals in the organization.  However, that's not the end of the story...

About two years later, the skills that were supposed to be added by the new training became very important in the field, due to changes in technology and the aggressiveness of my former employer's competitors.  The firm I had consulted with, and convinced not to follow through on their plans, had to scramble to keep up.  As a result, they experienced a loss in market share, a down-turn in customer service satisfaction, and a general decline in reputation.  They never did entirely regain their footing in certain areas of service within their sector.  Of course, there were many factors involved, but on some level, my success at ending a conflict caused a general debacle in terms of overall performance.

This is probably one of the worst professional mistakes I ever made.  So, why am I telling you about all this?  Regret?  Self-flagellation?  No.  I'm not really into those things.

It's because it taught me something about conflict.  What I should have done in the situation was to let the conflict between the executive and adminstrative levels in the organization play out.  The upper level would have exerted itself, incorporated some of the suggestions coming from below into their plans, and the organization would have moved on, albeit with a lot of complaining and maybe even a little mutiny from below (there's an awful lot of mutiny that goes on in large organizations around unpopular plans, and that was one of the reasons I gave the executives I was working with for abandoning their proposal).  It would have been rough going within the company for awhile, but they would have been better positioned to counter their competition in the long run.

The lesson of the story--that sometimes conflict needs to be allowed to play itself out if you want to avoid future disaster--is not an easy one for many of us to absorb.  I saw my role in the company at the time as one of peace-maker.  Conflict, it seemed to me, was a bad thing, an obstacle that had to removed at all cost.  I ignored external facts, at least those external to the way I conceived of my position, and did what I thought was right.  There were plenty of signals telling me otherwise; however, I ignored them. 

Some of the adminstrators I interviewed at the time told me, reluctantly, that they thougt the new training was necessary, they just didn't like the way the company was going about it.  They resented being left out of the decision making process, since they were the ones who had to implement what they saw as a flawed, time-consuming policy, and they wanted someone to listen to their point of view.  The executives who had designed (actually they hired other consultants to do this) and put the policy in motion thought they were being disrespected.  I did try to reopen the decision-making process, so the adminstrators would at least feel that they had a say in it.  These efforts were rebuffed higher up.  I appealed to the top, but they were not interested in the subtleties of the situation, and despite my relationship with the CEO and others, they wanted "actions, not words."  At least that was the attitude. 

Next I tried relaying some of the suggestions of those who had to deal with the new policy up through the chain of command.  Such surreptitious short-circuiting of an organizaition is sometimes necessary, but it's a dangerous game for a consultant to play.  If you're found out, you can lose your influence with decision-makers.  That started to happen, so I decided to go for what I saw as my final option: get rid of the troublesome policy.  I armed myself with data--there are always counter-opinions on any issue, if you only look for them, and in this case I found many of them buried in reports from the consulting agency originally hired to design the new training material--and I went on a two-week blitzkrieg of criticism.  By the time I was done, I had everyone above the level of vice president convinced that implementing the new plan would sink the company into the sea.  Hubris can be very persuasive.  They gave in, and pulled the plug.

The picture, if you note, is not one of gradual self-conviction on my part.  Since I assumed from the beginning that conflict was something that had to be gotten rid of, I also assumed that I should do whatever it took to accomplish this goal.  By not examining my own assumptions, I set the company on a rather disastrous course.  In my own defense, this was not the only issue I was dealing with in the organization, and it wasn't primary in my work until I made it so.  

The point is that conflict is a passage, and not an obstacle, and it needs to be treated with more respect.  Sometimes it's necessary for an organization--or for that matter, a country, I believe--to go through a period of conflict, even intense conflict, if it wants to avoid future trouble.  And sometimes those dedicated to removing conflict, on principle, are the last people those in charge of a situation should be listening to. 

Like I said, if I had to do it all over again today, I'd let the conflict play out, and perhaps provide additional lines of redress for those who were worried that the new policy was going to put impossible pressures on them and their workers.

Conflict and Control

Of course, a corporation is very different from a country.  We've become so used to regarding them as analogous structures, we often make the mistake of saying "company" when we mean "country," and I don't just think this is because the words sound alike.  The too close relationship between government and corporations, at least the biggest corporations, is one of the most talked about political issues of our day, and for good reason.  People feel that democracy is being subverted.  And, once again, I believe there's good reason for them to feel that way.  After all, the corporation is not a democratic structure.

Anyone who has ever been to a large stockholders meeting can tell you that what you witness is not some sort of exercise in parliamentary procedure.  You may have a vote, if you own stock, but that doesn't give you the right to say whatever you want.  In fact, at most of these meetings all the comments from the audience are pre-approved, and pretty tame.  A few wild, critical things get through, and a few are allowed, so as to give the appearance of "process" running its course.  But the truth of the matter is that what you are faced with is a financial junta.  The people sitting at the front of the room are the generals in charge, and since they own more votes than anyone else, by virtue of being the majority investors (or at least their representatives), what they say is going to happen will happen.  They're really not there to hear your opinion about it.  They're there to give you and the other small investors your marching orders.  It's more like a pep rally, a pep rally for a dictatorial regime.

What rides above everything is the corporation itself, a kind of supra-natural substance that the speakers often refer to in the third person.  The words used might include phrases such as, "we propose doing this...," or "we think the best course of action at the present time is...," but the meaning is clear: "this is what is going to happen, so get behind it and don't cause any trouble." 

This is in the nature of the beast.  Corporations are steeply hierarchal, top-down, routinized structures.  Everything, including complaints, has its channel to go through.  Everybody is expected to adhere as close as possible to this structure.  And interestingly enough, every attempt to make the structure more open, more democratic, actually tends to impose new regimes of power, hierarchal, top-down, routinized power.  Go figure.  In this day and age, only the hopelessly naive still believe in "corporate governance reform," at least as anything other than a ploy to gain more power for those who already have it.

The criticism may sound strange coming from someone who says he would, given another chance, do nothing to save the administrators I talked about above, those who complained vocally about the unfairness of policies that were imposed without any real debate.  But then that's because I'm not naive about the corporation.  I have no real hope that the structure can ever be anything other than what it is today.  Or worse.  I'm quite suspicious of those who posit some kind of anarchism based on small corporations--that's a lot like saying one wants to have a lot of little dictatorships in place of one big one, because, I suspect, it's easier to keep an eye on people that way.  Really I think that it's the corporate structure itself that determines such suggestions--they're emanating from the corporation, in some indirect way, even though they appear to be aimed at changing it.

Now that there are corporations that generate and handle more revenue than many small countries do, and many governments have taken up a relationship with the biggest corporations within their countries that make the two structures almost indistinct, it's not surprising that we find it harder and harder to maintain democracy everywhere.  A close relationship with a tyrannical person tends to rub off, and the same holds true with big structures like governments and corporations.  The corporatizing of politics has largely meant that politics has become more authoritarian, more based upon the power of the one (a chief executive) or the few (a small committee meeting behind closed doors), while input from the rest of us is limited to the allotted time and required to be done in the allowable forms (Wikileaks, shame on you, for violating the bully's rules that way).

So it's not surprising that given all this confluence, and collusion, between big corporations and government, that my time in corporate America taught me a few things about politics, too.  For example, despite the popular and official impression, distraction is not the essence of a successful politic.  Experience is.  It's more important to give people a "taste of what's to come" if they don't submit, than it is to distract them from what you're doing while you're doing it to them.  The goal is to be able to exercise power right out in the open, all the time, while the distractions suggest there's something more, something grander, going on behind the scenes.  The distractions are a shadow-play all right, but that's all they are.  Power is always right in your face.

If you want to win concessions from employees, you show them what has already happened at other companies where workers did not accept the same cuts to their benefits and wages.  The spectacle--of unemployment, offshoring, deep cuts in healthcare and retirement plans--is meant to inform, that is, to threaten, and not to divert.  This is what Dubord really meant when he said that the spectacle is the reality.  The message is: pay attention, the bully is talking.  In this post-9/11 age when governments threaten their own people on a regular basis with a never-ending spiral of security measures and intrusions into their lives, the message is quite clear: submit, or things will get worse, much worse.  Of course this spills over into everything.  Expecting politicians to limit the threat to matters of "national security" is naive.  Anyway, national security is now defined, under global capital, as economic security.  And that means protecting big corporations...

Recently the operative implication in this process has been that the failure of the economy to recover is due to a failure on the part of workers, and people more generally, to accept austerity measures.  We're told that our economic circumstances have changed, and therefore that means that we all have to bite the bullet.  Of course, if there's any bullet biting to be done, notice how it's always the poorest and most vulnerable who have to do it.  As for the rest of us, we should just sit back and watch decades of hard fought gains by workers being dismantled.  It's an extension of the general corporate rule I learned as a consultant: to get employees to accept their situation, show them what will happen if they don't.  Therefore, all the images from Guantanamo Bay, and the stories about secret renditioning, and other creep stuff and such, filtering through the news for the past nine years, was really intended for us at some level, and not the terrorists.  The spectacle is the reality, and the reality today is the security state, or so we're told over and over and over. 

It's the Law of the Bully in operation: "If you don't submit, I'll bully you some more.  And by the way, why do you keep punching yourself in the face with my fist that way?" 

There are no distractions anymore, not really.  Everything has become brutally straightforward.  Tax cuts for billionaires?  Sure.  Foreclose on the houses of people that are up-to-date on their payments?  Why not.  Declare a greater and greater portion of the public commons private property, off limits to all but those who can afford the entrance fee?  Of course--what do you think we are, socialists?

At the same time, the spectacle is not the system as a whole.  It is unrevealing in that sense.  The thing to remember is that the system is an organic arrangement of social-economic relations.  And as such, it's both unconscious of its own major trends, and unable to arrest them except through further reductions in labor.  There's no solution at the end of all the sadism, just more sadism, more crisis, and more sadism, and so forth.  There's no other way forward for capital, no matter what innovations are implemented or how many services are cut--and this is true even in an age of financialisation, perhaps especially in just such an age when capital is more centralised and less able to arrest its own tendency to crisis.

And there's no proof that this time around the recovery will extend beyond a pretty small fraction of upper middle class and upper class people here and in Europe.  In short, austerity will lead to more austerity and the demand to make more concessions in the workplace.  So the entire debate over taxes in the U.S.--who should pay what and when--is meant to be "educative" in the bullying sense, too.  Here the threat is a double-dip recession.  But the cuts being prefigured in the debate over taxes won't solve the economic crisis in any sense, and they'll assure that there will be less money for needed spending.  They will provide the conditions under which people will be made more and more dependent on their employers for everything.  What we're really learning is that when capital is threatened by a major crisis, caused by one of its own big internal trends, it goes into bullying overdrive.  The debate over the tax bill is one group of wealthy people arguing with another over how to protect their wealth, while the rest of society will be made even more dependent on capital, and will set upon each other. 

Struggle and Alternatives

The antidote to conflict, oddly enough, like I said above, is more conflict.  This isn't the false choice offered by those set on war as the answer to war, violence meeting violence.  There are many forms of struggle short of all-out conflict, just as there are many forms of conflict short of war.  All out conflict, or endemic conflict (which often precedes war in a national setting), has several important characteristics: polarization, marshalling of "troops," and mobilization of ideology or fundamental positions.  It involves a breakdown in the norms of everyday life, a fact that's often seen as definitive of the whole set of characteristics of endemic conflict by those not yet prepared to engage in it.  In other words, for whatever reason--they don't share some of the underlying assumptions presented by the major positions in the conflict, or they don't believe in the ideologies involved, or their experience of conditions is not (yet) as severe as others--some people refuse to participate in all-out conflict even once it's well underway. 

Jon Stewart's position of "reasonableness" in the present American political situation--which is also a conflict between different social-economic classes--seems to represent the kind of refusal described above.  It's principled, based upon his lack of willingness (or inability) to share in the assumptions of the class ideologies involved in the conflict which is now widespread and deepening, mirroring in many ways the deepening economic crisis.  At the same time, it should be noted, the tendency of those who continue to deny the situation once the level of endemic or all-out conflict has been reached is to concentrate on tactics.  The form is one of "if only this side didn't do this, or that side didn't do that," everything would be alright.  Notice that is the focus of the new bipartisan "No Labels" coalition.  (Although one suspects in that case it's more a matter of different elements of the upper middle class coming together to figure out how to best screw everyone else.)  The problem with all these "neutral" approaches is that many of the people who act in ways consistent with a conflict do so without adapting their behavior to a tactic.  They simply fall into ways of behaving that are appropriate, and necessary, to the conditions.  The attitude is not one of tactical thinking, or Machiavellianism, but one of "well, I didn't start this fight but I'm in it now, so let's get it over with."

It may seem counter-intuitive, like my discovery about the necessity of allowing conflict to develop fully, but it's actually this last group of people, the "well, I didn't start this fight but..." crowd, who usually represent the solution to the whole mess.  These people are often portrayed as followers, merely the partisan adherents of the tactical set, especially by the very groups and individuals who are trying consciously to exploit them in this way.  And this is why: they are the ones who occupy (to use the phrase familiar to formal conflict theory) the dynamic-operative position.  This role is usually wrongly ascribed to policy-makers or leaders.  But it's the "well, I didn't start this fight but..." group that makes the important, direction-changing decisions in endemic conflict situations because they are almost always the largest contingent, and endemic conflicts are by definition big phenomena.  Big conflicts take big groups of people to resolve, even if they are fed, and started, by smaller groups.

The position of the "well, I didn't start this fight but..." crowd also goes to the root of the problem.  Endemic conflicts develop where there are long-term enmities that belong to the bedrock layer of a society.  In regions where ethnic and religious conflict play a large part, small groups of people, very powerful people like diplomats, politicians, religious and traditional leaders, do not have much of an impact when they try to resolve the situation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a good example.  As we all know, the tendency is for the powerful to give up trying to resolve anything in these situations and instead to manipulate the conflict for their own interest.  The question of what it would take to resolve the conflict is no longer really being asked--just how to contain it, or to put it to some other use. 

The position of "well, I didn't start this fight but..." cuts through those considerations and tends to refocus the situation on the immediate conditions of struggle.  So what it would take to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli situation is for a very large group of Israelis, and and a very large group of Palestinians, to join together and settle the matter once and for all.  But despite the way some activists like to portray it, there has never been widespread consent to this on either side--the violence of the conflict has mostly been sporadic and confined to certain areas.  The issues that re-emerge whenever something like the finalizing "well, I didn't start this fight but..." approach is reached, like disputes over sacred land, take on the nature of "problems between neighbors," that is, problems of a local, bedrock sort, and the endemic conflict remains. 

The problem with those who want to stay on the sideline, stay neutral, in the class conflict being expressed presently in politics, along with those who want to reduce it to a matter of tactics (who will get a tax break, who won't, what should people say, what shouldn't they say), is that they fail to see that what they are dealing with is an endemic conflict, one that has been going on for a very long time.  Endemic conflict, in the long-term, structures not only people's behavior in a more immediate sense, but the domain they occupy.  This prevents a group large enough to play the dynamic-operative role from emerging.  Every institution, every belief, indeed every stone of every building that belongs to the present system is marked in some way as part of the domain of conflict.  To go back to the Middle East analogy, strolling through the streets of Jerusalem one is struck by how few places are not marked out as sites of contention.  On each block there is a holy shrine or ruin or patch of earth that is significant to one side or the other, or both.  But this means that the conflict, when it does get expressed, is confined to those regions, those local sites.  If it spreads, the situation is controlled by the major parties who want to continue to manipulate the situation.  In the case of an all-out class conflict in the context of global capital, the situation is much worse, and much closer to being both truly universal and, paradoxically, more local/national and bedrock in character.

There is an even more intractable aspect to the present conflict though.  Suppose a large enough group who held to the eminently practical, dynamic-operative position of "well, I didn't start this fight but..." were to emerge in the present context.  Would they really be able to do anything?  What?

The question goes to the heart of what we mean by resolving a conflict.  If the present economic crisis is resolved on the basis of coporations squeezing labor, reducing benefits and wages, along with government cutting programs for the poor, then what?  The internal tendencies of the system will simply re-exert themselves, restarting the cycle of accumulation-crisis-accumulation.  This will lead right back to an outbreak of the same endemic conflict we're experiencing now, only in an intensified form to match the deeper structural crisis that would be the end result of the next round of accumulation.  In other words, the tendency to recurrent crisis in the capitalist system overdetermines the class conflict. 

So in this case my formula, the one I learned at the telecommunications firm, of allowing conflict to run its course, still applies.  Trying to be neutral, or stay on the sidelines, is hopeless both because the conflict is too widespread, and because that's not an effective method at resolving this type of conflict.  And since the nature of the conflict--endemic, long-term--precludes any resolution from emerging from within the system itself, both because the system is dead-set against it and because the dynamic-operative group is not available in large enough numbers right now, we have an impasse.  A true impasse.  A global impasse.

There is another aspect to the present conflict that is troubling.  It's not only a long-term endemic conflict, but also a conflict short of war, one that breaks out into war from time to time (again like the Israeli-Palestinian example).  Remember that nation-states serve their resident capitals today--and no less so in an age dominated by transnationals which are still based in particular states and still do most of their producing in their home states.  The political tendency is not just towards disciplining labor at home during a crisis (the class conflict), but also to increased aggressiveness with other states and their capitals (geopolitical conflict).  We're seeing something like this in the eruption of conflict between China and the U.S. as they each try to protect their largest capitals--the largest areas of value still remaining in their starved national economies--and using increasingly open and hostile means to do so: from protective use of regulations to limit imports, to laws restricting government-supported programs to the use of domestic products ("stimulus protectionism"), to currency manipulation.

It's important to remind people in this situation that there are forms of conflict, of struggle, that are short of an all-out conflict, or different from simple endemic conflict.  In the case of competing states, this means emphasizing forms of conflict short of war.  And in the case of class conflict, this means recognizing the fact that it is an endemic conflict, but taking up a position that does not belong entirely within the bounds of class provincialism.  For a middle class person, this also means becoming a class traitor in the eyes of one's peers.

Being a Class Traitor

Being a class traitor can be considered a kind of counter-spectacle to the bullying spectacle of global capital, a counter to the intimidation and threats of the system against the working class.  By taking action against capital in solidarity one is also countering class provincialism--or the mobilisation of ideology that goes along with class conflict.  Like all ideology, class requires that certain people play certain roles.  By refusing to do this, one not only fights for the working class, one fights against one of the main conditions of endemic conflict.  So the activities of solidarity do not contribute to conflict--though they may involve confrontation of many types, they are meant to short circuit the ever intensifying rounds of endemic conflict which correspond to the ever deeper crises caused by the system.  It is still the position of "well, I didn't start this fight but...," precisely the position of the organized, forward-moving, anticapitalist working class, but it also leads to alternatives.  It breaks down ideology and restores the norms of everyday life, but on substantially different grounds. 

The problem we reach at this point is a philosophical one.  Since the norms of our everyday existence are largely determined by the social-economic system, what would these look like under a substantially different system?  The problem is similar to the one faced by outsiders in an unfamiliar society--they're not used to the "unofficial rules" that the people there live by.  This doesn't just refer to the unwritten codes that cover certain actions--like driving five miles over the speed limit in America--but also and primarily to moral codes.  What would these look like under a substantially different social-economic system from our own?  The answer to the question largely depends upon one's experience of the system.    

For my own part I can't determine what somebody's experience out there reading this might be like.  I know it's hard right now economically for everyone, but different people are experiencing this to a different degree of severity.  I probably have enough money and property equity to ride the crisis out.  Maybe.  As for the next crisis, and the next, and the next....  And I know that most others aren't so lucky right now.  What I can say is that wherever one is opposing capital today--whether it's through opposing rent increases or foreclosures, or striking, or interrupting the moral posturing of various groups of the wealthy busy debating nothing, set upon their own interests--you should do whatever you think is right.

Because right now, you're right, and the system is wrong.

Again, I mean this, every word:

You should do whatever you think is right.