Insider Problems
I’m more of a community organizer than an academic: no one pays me to do research, and my work aims at problems that have come up in different community campaigns. I’ve also never held a job in any large, professionalized, hierarchical organization. As far as institutions go, I’m an outsider twice over—which is one reason why I’m so interested in bureaucracy, managerialism, and power in organizations, all of which are insider problems. By that I mean that each of these topics raises questions about insiders: people and groups whose capacities are amplified by their status in organizations and networks. Status also constrains the capacities of insiders, particularly those at the lower levels of the pecking order.
Simplistic critiques imagine bureaucratic insiders as cartoonish buffoons or villains, but that style of critique is a dead end. The goal has to be understanding how institutions come to project the power of small groups of elites, so that we can remake those institutions as sources of democratic power. The question is how status in organizations translates into power and influence, in concrete ways for particular people and with better or worse outcomes—for example, how foreign policy and military action are decided in the US national security state, the arms industry, and its think tanks. Here the “War on Terror” has brought back levels of secrecy not seen since the peak of the Cold War, preventing any restraints the public might place on an immense sphere of government—one that makes deadly interventions all around the world and stands always ready to provoke and be provoked. The revolving door between official positions and elite academic networks produces a class of “experts” who rarely disagree over anything of substance and yet somehow are at odds with the majority opinion of outside experts and the American public they claim to serve. The result is a public/private partnership that produces never-ending, “low intensity” military interventions policing the global population, all the while offering prestigious, well-paid positions in the military-industrial complex for those who toe the institutional line. To understand this world of insiders, we can ask who benefits, who’s excluded, and who are its victims; what ideas it promotes to justify its actions, what ideas it suppresses; and so on.
We have to be specific and compare different bureaucracies with their different commanding elites, their divergent tendencies, the various networks of professionals they draw on, and the diverse effects they have on the world. We can compare by sector (for example, the national security state vs. philanthropic foundations) but also within sectors (for example, mainline liberal foundations such as the Ford Foundation vs. supposedly disruptive for-profit foundations such as the Gates Foundation or the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative). As these examples imply, we also have to expand our frame beyond the usual assumption that bureaucracy is primarily a problem of government officials: modern bureaucracies were pioneered in multi-national corporations, and despite significant differences between corporations and government offices there are problems of power that run through all professional organizations. These are the problems I’ll explore in this blog.
But insider problems also imply outsider problems, because those on the outside of major institutions are not merely ‘low status.’ Too often they are non-status, so that their desires, their values, their lifeways, and even their lives are devalued, neglected, and run into the ground. In the US, violent, bureaucratic policing preys on poor people of color who live in hyper-policed neighborhoods, but also on poor white people especially in rural areas. In the Global South, neo-colonial militaries and paramilitary units terrorize indigenous and poor communities, often as the local enforcers of the demands of multi-national corporations. Examples like these are a primary concern for this blog, so we’ll ask why and how “security” bureaucracies perceive particular lives as worthless, and what their violent methods tell us about these sorts of institutions.
Yet accountability is out of reach even for organizations that are less obviously violent. As planetary crises pile up, our ability to survive and thrive—even for low-status insiders—is increasingly contingent on whether we can make institutions accountable for the harms they cause in the world. We urgently need to democratize institutions, public and private. In other words, we need to make outsider problems matter on the inside.
Of course, there are numerous obstacles to that effort. Multi-national corporations have outgrown the territorial containers of their national governments and defy most attempts at regulation. US foreign policy and military intervention are waged at the whim of presidents and dreamed up by hawkish “experts” in think tanks, academia, and the national security bureaucracy. Efforts to reduce suffering and build people power get coopted and channeled into projects that perpetuate or sharpen the status quo—the special province of philanthropy and social enterprise. And in mundane ways, professional norms and the ideology of meritocracy serve to legitimize the elite networks that turn institutions into closed, self-serving, inward-facing worlds.
These obstacles are so imposing that they might seem insurmountable. Large-scale actors and their fleets of experts are naturalized, as if they’re just facts of life: most people would think it’s a fool’s errand to try to resist them. This might explain some of the desperate fantasy and paranoia that bubbles over in claims about the “deep state.”
It helps to recall that these formations all had a beginning, and their current forms took shape just in the last century. Nothing lasts forever. The work of planetary survival requires us to get together and build some kind of power that’s altogether different from what we have now. For those of us who want to shift power away from the cliques, cabals, and yes-men, we have to confront the strategic problems they and their institutions represent: the status quo is thoroughly ensconced in institutions, and it’s an on-going struggle to build the world we want. This blog addresses such obstacles in a way that’s practical but still acknowledges their complexity. We’ll raise questions, look at case studies, and consider alternatives, all in order to build the power of regular people.