A Face of Canada’s Future, Advocate, 03/10/2017

He really is that good-looking. Photo by
Bryan Adams because: Why not?

I had a feeling he was going to win, but I didn’t think he’d do it on the first vote. I’m really glad he did, and that his support across Canada was so widespread.

Jagmeet Singh is a historic figure in Canadian history as of Sunday afternoon. I’m happy to have been in the room to see it. Jagmeet faces some unique challenges that fit our moment unfortunately well. I think he’ll come out on top, but not after confronting the essential challenge of progressive politics today.

I’m talking about race.

A few years ago, I wouldn’t say that race would soon become the essential challenge of politics. But I didn’t expect such an intense reaction to the two major popular movements against systemic racism – Black Lives Matter and Idle No More.

I saw nothing wrong with those protest movements – their goals of being treated as genuine equals in their countries and communities are perfectly benign democracy. Yet the reactionary movement has been horrifying.

There’s Donald Trump, the elderly racist dick who’s become President of the United States. There’s the revival of genuinely genocidally-aiming white supremacist groups through social media communities.

In Canada, our own militia groups are forming, thanks to the online radicalization of white nationalism worldwide. There are the Proud Boys, Soldiers of Odin, and the folks who organized the Storm Alliance protests last week.

Tommy Douglas, David Lewis, Ed Broadbent, Audrey McLaughlin,
Alexa McDonough, Jack Layton, Tom Mulcair, Jagmeet Singh.

They and their supporters have tricked us into giving them space to organize by appealing to our democratic values. These very energetic, confident young men may tell you they support free speech and democracy. Freedom to be who and what you want to be, believe what you want to believe.

They’re lying. They are radical white nationalists. They want to enforce a permanent black underclass in America, slaves in all but name. They want to finish the genocide that John MacDonald ramped into high gear – there’ll be no more Indigenous languages whispered or religions appearing. No more Indigenous people, by any means expedient.

This is what white nationalists want. And they want you to want it too.

There is nothing the New Democrats could do to provoke such people more than elect a young, hip, charismatic, intelligent Sikh politician our federal leader, and give him a mandate to work as hard as he can to become Prime Minister. The first Prime Minister from Canada’s only political party to consistently embrace social democracy.

Barely 24 hours after his election as federal leader, other federal leaders were so condescending to him, treating him like a fool who didn't even know how parliament worked. I doubt that if Charlie Angus had won, and his speech included an appeal to make him Prime Minister, Elizabeth May would have read from her tenth grade civics textbook.

Then, Elizabeth May has always been more malignant than she appears.

Even Jagmeet's brightest hopes are tainted with epithets disguised as double entendres. Is his appearance not 'secular' enough to earn Quebecer's support? Let's just call a spade a racist here.

I happen to think that the political party founded by a Baptist minister has room for a leader who defines himself in part through piety to his religion. In Jagmeet's case, that's a religion whose founding values are community solidarity and the fundamental equality of all people. Social democracy, the values of the New Democratic Party.

Jagmeet’s election was a direct message to the white nationalist radicals who threaten to overthrow the principles of equality at the heart of democratic values. Jagmeet’s campaign slogan was “Love and Courage.”

Well, in Punjabi, the phrase also translates* as, “You want to mess with us? Come at me, bro.”

* Very, very, very, very loosely.

I never thought I’d spend my political life in my 30s fighting Nazis. But I’m fighting a bunch of fucking Nazis. So put me on Team Jagmeet.

Real Republican Freedom III: Institutionalized To Keep Us Free, Research Time, 30/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . That title sounds a little bit ominous. A little bit too much like “Work Sets You Free.” It’s ominous because that’s the paradox of putting the insights of two correct groups of people together.

There is always the danger, as I said last time, that reliance on an institution for your survival will turn against you. By this, I’m talking about the government.

In my own era, government officials in the United States kill and arrest black Americans at disproportionately high rates. Many of these deaths are needless, brutal, and grotesque. We don’t talk about the names of murdered black people as often anymore because apparently the only newsworthy events on Earth today involve Donald Trump.

Not only does the state have the power to kill you horribly, the
institution itself is capable of laughing at you while you die. That
is the power of human cruelty.

The frequency of police murder and brutality toward black people in America has not gone down. Under the Trump administration, American state violence toward people looks set only to grow. But that’s no reason to forget their names. All the more reason to speak.

I started this post with a deliberate reference to Auschwitz because it is a real example of what can happen when evil people turn all the machinery of the state against its own population.

Mass state violence in the democratic West is a genuine danger of our time. But it’s no reason to turn against the institution of government. It’s a more profound reason to lament this political turn toward mass imprisonment and deportation.

Because our government institutions normally bring us incredible benefits. Real material foundations of our basic standards of living.

Governments build our roads and transit systems, maintain our public services like hospitals, welfare and public insurance systems, the mail. They’ve built or helped build all our telecommunications infrastructure. Governments fund massive amounts of scientific research, and use numerous ways to finance every industry in a country.

If all these services and infrastructures were to disappear, our civilization would collapse. Hell, if they were privatized, our economy would collapse from the weight of unrestrained profit-maximizing user fees on every step we take.

More than these immediately material goods, governments are responsible for the constitution of our culture. By building all these systems, they bring their users in contact with each other. By providing a common source for all these systems, they encourage communication and alliances across the country.

Machiavelli's Florence.

States didn’t do nearly so much materially for their people back in the 1530s – there wasn’t as much for them to do. But they still built the roads and walls, administered services, and provided the public venues to build a common culture and community. Machiavelli knows how important institutions are to human life.

Yet he also knows how dangerous a corrupted institution can be. So here’s the problem of politics* – How do you prevent an inevitably corruptible creature like people from corrupting the institutions that we need to live, but which are so dangerous?

* I feel comfortable making a stab at a universal definition for the first time in my writing career. I’ve only been working on the research and thinking for this book for four years.

One provisional definition he makes in the Discourses on Livy is that you can set up an institution that completely removes incentive from ambition. An institution where the most ambitious are stymied and blocked at every turn. Where everyone will always find someone to block their ego and desire.

For Machiavelli, the institutions of the Roman Republic achieved that. The balance of powers in government between the Senate, the Consuls, Magistrates, and Tribunes all prevented any one man, clan, or faction dominating the whole government.

The framers of America’s constitution in 1788 applied the same principle to their government, with the opposition of legislatures, the White House, and the judiciary.

Machiavelli's Rome.

However, an essential element of the current American crisis is that one group of politicians have figured out how to game the balance of forces in their constitution. One political party and ideology has come to dominate all branches and levels of government.

Rome itself fell. An alliance of ambitious military officers carried out a coup, and the most ruthless of them arranged dictatorial powers for himself within a few years. Julius Caesar neutered the power of the democratic institutions of Rome.

His assassination didn’t stop the long coup because his family and military partisans defeated and killed the democratic aristocrats who wanted to restore power to the institutions. But power came to rest with men instead.

Can you counteract humanity’s tyrannical gravity forever? . . . To be continued

Knowing Yourself Without the World, Research Time, 14/12/2016

It speaks to the weird complexity of our time at the end of 2016 that Steve Bannon once called himself a Leninist.

Yeah, it’s bloody weird that one of the most right-wing figures in American politics today says he follows the philosophy of the founder of the Soviet Union. But there’s a lot about Lenin’s revolutionary theory that Bannon has embraced.

Not the content, of course. Just the methods. In the interview where Bannon discussed this idea, he discussed how he wanted to destroy pretty much the entire political establishment of the United States.

The grotesque, dilated capillaries of his eyes stare into your soul.

Basically, he’s an accelerationist. He wants an entirely new political and social order for his country, and considers the best way to achieve that is driving all the destructive processes that burn down everything that exists.

What would he replace it with? He may deny it – and there’s plenty of room for plausible deniability – but I’d say he wants an ethnically cleansed white nationalist order for America. He’s already given hipster white nationalism* a high-profile, mainstream forum.

* And what is the alt-right but white nationalism gone hipster? I mean, just look at Richard Spencer’s haircut.

Then there’s that rumour that he refused to let his daughter attend a particular private school because it had too many Jewish students. He denied that one. But I have my doubts – just gut feelings, based on what I’ve seen of him. And no one knows a man like his ex-wife.

Now, we should consider the possibility that Bannon was trolling. The man runs Breitbart, a website at the centre of the internet’s right-wing reactionary provocations. But there’s the gleeful nihilist evil of Milo Yiannopoulos,** and there’s the real racism and incitement of the general population of Brietbart’s comment boards.

** I’m pretty sure he’d consider that a compliment.

And their editors.

White nationalism today – hipster white nationalism, if you will – has taken on many techniques of identity politics in a horrifyingly twisted form. Because no matter what seemingly every other earnest, yelling internet pundit*** has to say about the problems of identity politics, when done right they are a path to liberation.

*** You know, bloggers like me, on every scale of pay and prominence.

I wrote that last week, and McGill professor Jacob Levy makes a solid case here. Identity politics is recognizing some aspect of yourself that’s racialized, and organizing a movement to end that in your society.

Lead poisoning is one invisible vector of racializing oppression in
North American society – thanks to a variety of urban development
policies and processes across the United States, black children were
disproportionately affected by lead paint on their houses and lead
poisoning as a result.

Levy discusses the LBGTQ rights movement and Black Lives Matter. These are movements that call attention to cultural morals and state institutions which – intentionally, unintentionally, and systematically – put great harm on people because of their identity.

These are movements that fight racialization – racialization being that hierarchy of material deprivation perpetuated through morals and institutions.

White nationalism doesn’t fight racialization – this movement aims to beef up racialization and make our current moral and institutional hierarchies more intense and immovable than they are already.

So how can white nationalism call itself identity politics? Only because the popular conception of identity politics is a twisted and demented version of what it really is.

This twisted vision is sort of right – it touches on some of the methods, how identity politics gets started. But it skips the core because the popular conception of identity politics pays no attention to systematic racialization processes on a society-wide scale.

Identity politics gets started through a moment of self-consciousness: I understand myself in terms of this particular feature of my identity – my sexuality, my skin colour, my religion. The core method of this popular idea is to organize and mobilize communities to have their own such moment of self-consciousness – to see themselves primarily as this identity.

So a pundit will call white nationalism an identity politics because it’s a movement organized around seeing themselves primarily in terms of their whiteness. Their grievance is ridiculous because whites have historically been the benefits of our civilization’s racializing hierarchies. Losing systematic privilege is seen – bizarrely – as discrimination.

Of course, real white nationalists don’t feel this. They never believed they were equal – equality insults them. But folks who aren’t full-on white nationalists who support Trump and fear anti-racist movements? They believe equality has always existed, or at least that the proper order is equal enough.

So they see movements against racialization and they feel threatened. Because they think the world is already equal and fair, they see movements to redress inequalities as movements for supremacy. And they start to see racist politics as movements for white equality in the face of oppression from rising rebel groups.

That’s how Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and even such a horrorshow as Matthew Heimbach are going mainstream.

So What Is “Pragmatic Radicalism” Anyway? Composing, 03/08/2016

The wonderful photo SERRC published with my last piece.

Last week, I published a new essay at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I thought of the idea in response to an essay by my colleague and long-standing argument partner Steve Fuller, “Prolegomena to the Deep Sociology of Brexit.”

Now that I’ve returned from the wild woods of central Quebec,* I wanted to start the month with a breakdown of that essay – so you can see what I’m doing with it, and how that work expresses my newly-formulated mission statement as a writer and researcher.

* It was a very pleasant and necessary vacation, thank you, but I really am quite happy to be back in Toronto and returning to my work. More like my many works.

I’d say I learned two things from my time at this May’s Canadian Philosophical Association. 1) Progressive politics among academics lags far behind the actual activists developing new ideas, approaches, and outreach methods. This was more of a re-confirmation than a discovery. 

But most important was 2) There doesn’t really seem to be a place in the academic community for voices that aren’t affiliated with professorial positions in universities. I had a lot of very good conversations, but I was essentially an alien among this crowd. 

Even in seminars where my contributions went over well, some attendees appeared completely unable to process what I was – a researcher unaffiliated with a university who wasn’t at all jockeying for a university position anymore. Just someone here to share their research, able to write, publish, and speak on the same level as the university-based folk.

I had a guiding ideal of what I suppose
became pragmatic radicalism when
writing my last book, but I couldn't
get its publication out of academic
marginalization of high prices and
the catacombs of libraries.

So I’ve begun developing a brand for myself as a public intellectual whose institutional home is in activist communities and political parties. A blue-collar scholar, if you want to put it in a rap.** Part of that brand and identity is developing a philosophical language that addresses immediately relevant public issues while simultaneously crafting complex concepts.

** Please don’t do that. It would be terrible.

That’s what my “Pragmatic Radicalism” essay is. A work of philosophical creativity in response to an occasion. I mean ‘occasion’ in the sense of, “the event that occasioned this response.” An event in our public life of such a significance and complexity that it prompts a public work of philosophical reflection and creativity.

One thing that frustrated me about philosophy as a discipline, from the time I started work on the project that would be Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, was the disconnect of its creative thinking from the concerns of the world. 

In turbulent times like these, we need contributions to our politics that encourage thought – not thought instead of action, but thought that is one with action. Protest that generates policy. Creativity in harmony with activism.

I’m developing a new brand of blended philosophical research and creativity with worldly activism and social engagement. And my essay at the Reply Collective, “The Pragmatic Radicalism of the Multitude’s Power,” is both a sketch of what that writing style would be, as well as an example. 

How it’s an example I’ve already explained: a work of abstract philosophical creativity, produced on an occasion. But what’s the concept? What is pragmatic radicalism?

When I first floated the title to Fuller, he told me it sounded paradoxical. And that’s definitely part of its spark. A paradox – broadly speaking – is the juxtaposition of several ideas that don’t typically fit together. To me, there are two kinds of paradoxes. 

Vicious paradoxes confuse, frustrate, and arrest thought. But creative paradoxes let you work through a new way of thinking while you figure out the logic by which the juxtaposed ideas make sense together. A new harmony emerges from a dissonant collision.

Pragmatic radicalism is fundamentally about expanding
the realm of the conceivable in your society's public
conversations and thinking.

Pragmatic radicalism sounds paradoxical. Radicalism is a pure idealism, usually thought of as a refusal to compromise, the refusal to give up on anything but your opponents’ total capitulation. A radical’s hopes are usually so distant from the real world that their achievement seems impossible, but they’re committed to them totally anyway.

Pragmatism appears the precise opposite. You have ideals, but you’re prepared to accept compromise with opponents or askew allies – to make allies from opponents – to achieve some progress toward those ideals. Pragmatism is political realism, while radicalism is a refusal of the real’s resistance to your ideals.

Pragmatic radicalism embraces ideals, but also acknowledges and pushes against the resistance of the world as it is to achieve those ideals. It is the admission that practical achievement in politics can take other routes than compromise alone. 

Pragmatic radicalism is philosophical in that it develops new and revolutionarily different frameworks for our political and social institutions and relationships. It’s pragmatic in its resolute focus on material action to achieve those goals. Not compromise, but community organizing to bring these radical ideas to public discourse and make them seem ordinary.

Our current political climate is full of pragmatic radicalism, for both democratic and fascist ideals. One impressive achievement of the Trump campaign has been rapidly bringing ideals of white supremacism and strongman leadership to mainstream political discourse. Though it took much longer, UKIP has been successful in not only making Britain’s exit from the European Union popularly plausible, but apparently a coming reality.

More details at the website.

Thankfully, the Sanders campaign achieved a similar miracle in returning social democratic policy to America’s mainstream discourse – even embedding these ideas in the policy platform of the previously horrifyingly compromised Democratic Party. 

Most importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought its radical critique of America’s police, court, and prison systems to the realm of mainstream plausibility. BLM has launched several concrete policy platforms for institutional reform, first the policing reform packages of Campaign Zero, and recently the larger policy framework of Movement 4 Black Lives.

The Arab Spring – and its ripples throughout the Arab world, as well as the refugee movements from the Syrian Civil War and Iraq’s war against ISIS – was similarly a movement of pragmatic radicalism. An explosive moment of democracy’s becoming conceivable in the Middle East. 

Communication – networked community organizing and cultivating social media communities – is the essential medium of pragmatic radicalism’s transformation of political possibilities. Practicing that communication of simultaneous advocacy and philosophical creativity is the task of the contemporary public intellectual. 

Maybe it won’t be the university or the academy that will product these thought leaders. It seems there’s a wider community of well-educated activists and organizers driving this model of politics and social transformation.

Maybe the occasional blue-collar scholar.

Vectors of Oppression – Freed in a Wave, Research Time, 06/06/2016

So what does probably the most pretentious title for a post in the entire nearly-three-year history of this blog mean? Other than my getting more pretentious tonight. After a long day at the day-job, I feel like I’ve earned it. And frankly I still feel enough energy as I write to pound this out pretty quickly. 

The last panel I attended at the Canadian Philosophical Association in Calgary was titled “Cultural Racism,” and my favourite paper there was the first one. Alia Al-Saji presented a paper on the process of racialization – the social forces at all scales of oppression and marginalization that constitute people as a race.

I've probably learned most about the everyday experience
of oppression from activists' experiences. Definitely not my
own. And the one that's had the most effect on me has
been Black Lives Matter. Following the feeds of people
like Johnetta Elzie can teach more about real liberation
than a hundred philosophical books. The philosophy can
still be a good hand, though.

I was happy to meet Al-Saji, since she was one of the people whose work I had used in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. In particular, I used some of her work on Maurice Merleau-Ponty in my sections on the nature of perception. And while the paper itself was very insightful, I told her that it had one nagging problem.

Compared to how a lot of other academics were treating the nature of race, it was actually a very forward-thinking argument that races are entirely socially manufactured, with no essential underlying physical substrate. That the marginalization of communities economically and socially goes hand in hand with stigmatizing them with ugly, cruel stereotypes. 

Marginalization and stigmatization equals racialization. If I can put an absurdly and blatantly simple gloss on the concept. 

And I move in a social media world where a ton of people already understand this concept intimately and work against it in their activism and communication. The real world seems to have surpassed the debates of the community of academics. 

Now, I’m not exactly surprised. But I’m saddened that a profession that – on the whole – thinks itself literal thought leaders* is now falling being the times. I used to think a position here could position me in the leading edge of progressive ideas. I no longer think so.

* As in, leaders in thought itself.

Antonio Negri talks about the nature of racialization, specifically intersectionality. It’s a matter of liberation. Intersectionality is, in most discussions, about how different oppression vectors can co-exist in a single person. Like the black lesbian in the wheelchair.

But intersectionality is also – and most importantly – about how all those oppressions are ultimately the same process. Gender oppression, for example, is no different than racial or religious oppression in the social process that actually constitutes it. Successful activism has to accept this.

Now, the reason Black Lives Matter has moved me so
much is that I was probably most ignorant about the
different vectors of racial oppression that black people
in America experience. I used to be one of those people
who complained that protestors never accomplished
anything because they were all so violent, believing
everything I heard in media. Paying attention to
DeRay McKesson, for example, taught me so much
about where all those vectors were. Before online
media let me share their experience, I couldn't have
had any of those brutally educational experiences.

Thankfully, this is another way that real-life activists have progressed beyond the so-called thought leaders of the university system. So many in online communities understand their own struggles as intersecting. That you can’t win against one vector of marginalization without progress against all of them.

Negri notes the example of the American union movement. It was focussed on class marginalization and workers’ rights. Liberation for people alienated because of their wealth and social castes. And it succeeded for a while.

One of the places where the union movement in America foundered was as the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation movement kicked into gear. Worker activists could never – overall – get behind movements against racism. 

In many cases, too many workers remained hostile to black liberation and entry into the same social circles as whites. The same goes for their attitudes to women. The only thing close to a rational concern – other than falling back into unthinking prejudice (“I won’t work with n___rs!” “We don’t do women’s work!”) – is fear that increased competition will drive down their wages and make jobs more scarce.

Those attitudes completely ignore the macro-scale reasons for liberation. The more people are wealthy and able to produce wealth, the wealthier society will become. More people will spend money and produce things, relationships, and ideas that can grow wealth.

I see the same danger for the union movement and contemporary environmentalist movement. If union leaders and activists stick only to short term thinking and ignore the intersection of economic and environmental violence, they’ll see industrial shifts as risks to their jobs. Too many already think this way.

What makes that a problem is that all oppressions – gender, race, class, religion, ability, culture, sexuality – are the expressions of the same process. Racialization – to marginalize and stigmatize the marginal. So all liberation has to happen at once.

Politics Without Power II: Changing Societies Is Changing Minds, Research Time, 17/05/2016

Continued from last post . . . I mean, that’s the weird paradox about political organizing, especially around elections. So much of the work of running election campaigns is about getting people to follow orders. 

“This many volunteers to canvass those streets. Leaflet the two blocks adjacent to that zone if you have time, but our polling indicates strong support for The Other Guys among that group, so just make our presence known. 
“The candidate is talking to residents in these two tower blocks and then doing a barbecue at the community centre in the middle of the Tibetan neighbourhood. So I need all the Buddhist volunteers to go there, and bring their freedom flags and the Beastie Boys mixtapes.”

Sir, yes sir. 

I’ve been one of those volunteers. So I know how important discipline and organization is to a campaign. There’s a clear hierarchy – volunteers, organizers, directors, strategists. There’s a clear goal – get our candidate into office. And there’s a clear threshold of victory – win the bloody election.

Bernie Sanders never stopped struggling for a better world.
Neither did a lot of people. But the task is a lot harder
than just changing a bunch of laws. People chafe under
laws they think are unjust. Just as Sanders, King, and
countless others chafed under Jim Crow, countless more
chafe under equal rights and anti-discrimination laws.

Movements like Occupy, Idle No More, and Black Lives Matter never had that. Their goal is an immense transformation of the entire society in which they exist. People say the Occupy protests failed. Do you really think they could have succeeded just with a bunch of people sitting in a park for a few months?

Changing society is a long game. It’s literally reaching into millions of people’s heads and changing their wiring around. Using all platforms of communication, demonstration, journalism, theatre, art. You have to create a whole new way of life and then seduce a country’s entire population into joining you.

A few protest marches won’t do the job. There’s no election day to change society itself. 

An election campaign, in contrast, requires a firm trust in the status quo. No one is after a truly radical change in the direct messaging of an election campaign. The main message of any such campaign is “Our candidate would be better at this job you have to vote for than these candidates. Please vote accordingly.”

I’m being a little sarcastic, of course. 

When I think about the history of liberation movements in North America, I remember the Civil Rights Movement – the time of Martin King, Malcolm, Jesse Jackson, Jon Lewis, and Al Sharpton. With that abrasive little Jewish ally Bernie Something hanging around in the background.

When I learned about the history of the King-era movement, I learned about their cause as a great victory. Jim Crow laws were wiped away, state-enforced segregation was illegal in the South for the first time. The law guaranteed equal treatment for people of all races. It was a win.

But the more I learned about the material inequalities black Americans face, the more I realized what a hollow victory King’s movement was. The law no longer kept black and white people separate, but real estate practices and urban development plans did. 

What would Malcolm think if he could see today's
world?

And the crack epidemic first destroyed families and care networks across America’s black communities. Its eventual alleged solution incarcerated millions, justifying the draconian police force in the name of racialized images of superpredators. Which sounds a lot like certain descriptions of young black teenagers as hulk-like bulletproof animals. 

And Donald Trump could very well become President of the United States on a platform built on racism, the incitement of violence, incredibly shady links with Russian oligarchies and organized crime, and the admiration of authoritarianism.

King, Malcolm, Fred Hampton, Medgar Evers. I feel like all these men died for nothing. 

But I was taught in school and countless history shows on television that these men died for the sake of a victory. Didn’t racism end with Jim Crow?

No, because we didn’t change society. And I think this is what the modern social movements for the rights of marginalized people in North America are really all about. I don’t think anybody really serious at Occupy really thought they’d take down a trillion-dollar industry with a sit-in. 

The goal was to change how people thought about that trillion-dollar industry, to hammer home the pain that industry caused millions of people across the world. The Sanders campaign has been the most visible means to continue that conversation, get people thinking about what our priorities as a society should be. 

Once you get people thinking, that’s the start of the process of change. People have to change their own subjectivities, their own mind-sets, their own character. Your role is as a provocateur. To get people to realize that, actually, something is terribly wrong, and you may have a part to play in that wrongness, and that you can correct it.

But there’s one question left: What would be the answer to that wrong? And how do you get people to agree to that one answer? . . . To be continued. 

Trampled Under Feet VII: How Revolution Works, Jamming, 21/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . What would it be to build a better society than the mess of exploitation we can muster today?

It seems so hard to change society because society isn’t just one unified thing, no matter what the political concept of nation and nationhood would have us believe. Society is an aggregate of individuals. 

Large movements can determine individuals, but those large movements are constituted of the actions of many individuals already. So changing the heart of human society means changing the human heart, one person at a time. 

Modern society makes exploitation a virtue. However much we may decry the behaviour of people like Martin Shkreli, Bernie Madoff, Donald Trump, and Travis Kalanick, we're hypocrites about it. We only get upset when the cruelty of their exploitation becomes explicit: 

1) When the exploitation is so obvious that it can’t be ignored, as in the employment conditions of Uber and other sharing economy companies.

Martin Shkreli is actually facing criminal charges not
because of his unethical profiteering from manipulating
the prices of drugs, but from securities fraud. Basically,
he started his current company Turing Pharma to fleece
the startup capital to pay off investors from his previous
company. That previous company was itself started to
fleece those investors to pay off the clients who lost
billions from his incompetently managed hedge fund.

2) When they get caught.

Too often, when we praise the entrepreneurial spirit, we concentrate on the achievement of personal success and wealth. We concentrate on people's right to accumulate a fortune and expect that a few people's achievement of massive wealth will have enough ancillary benefits to uplift a whole community.

But it doesn’t. Praising the mercenary values of entrepreneurship as we too often do simply creates mercenary businessmen for whom personal enrichment is the only virtue. So anything that prevents such a man (and they are so often men) from pursuing this enrichment is, in the values of mercenary entrepreneurship, a form of oppression.

Obviously, this makes a mockery of actual oppression, the systematic articulation of moralities like sexism, which we usually call patriarchy, and racism, which we usually call straight-up racism.

We treat scoundrels like heroes, but we're still enraged when a scoundrel lies to hundreds of people in a pyramid scheme to enrich himself by the billions, or laughs in the face of AIDS victims who can no longer afford the drugs his company owns. 

Yet when our culture values getting rich without any corresponding obligations to use your wealth for any common good, Shkreli and Madoff are where you end up.

So we have to change people’s minds to keep them from praising the values that lead people to exploit others. The 20th century saw quite a few attempts to use the state to change people’s values. 

Whether through formal school education or the oppression of a security apparatus, it didn't work. When an authoritarian structure like a government orders you to do something, the human spirit chafes against it. When chains are as obvious as the ones in a state, we can all see it and we all fight it.

#BlackLivesMatter leader Deray McKesson. Changing
minds and building empathy (or as the terminology
goes, getting people woke) one tweet at a time. It works.

Social movements, organized by the members themselves and publicizing their messages in as many popular media as possible, seems to be an effective way to change minds. 

Because a person’s primary encounter with a social movement is in the visceral image of people who are incredibly upset. The goal is to elicit an an empathetic response: you wonder what could make a person feel this way. You're invited into their experience, their history. You imagine their character as an inner performance.

Once this happens, you join hands. The horizon of your own possibilities has grown and includes fields of human potential that it never has before. This is proper solidarity.

Once we've changed enough minds, we've changed society, because society is the collection of millions and billions of individual people networked together. As I've written before, this is the only way social change can work.

Once you've changed society, you've changed the conditions in which people live. A society with dominant values about empathy and the social obligation of the fortunate to join hands with the less fortunate will have a lower likelihood of producing and promoting people like Shkreli, and similar violent undesirables.

I didn’t always understand this about humanity. It's taken me a long time to figure it out. Maybe over a decade. Some people never do. I consider myself both lucky, and a little happy with myself, for figuring out this process. 

It's not exactly hard. But a lot of people just can’t get past their own stereotypes. I've thought about different people in terms of stereotypes before, I've failed to empathize with people, dismissing them and analyzing them without regard to their own experiences and situations. But I know enough now to try to stop myself from doing that. 

It's farther than a lot of people get in that process. But it's the only way to accomplish legitimate social change.

I didn't realize it when I first read Empire a decade ago, but Negri’s book was part of what primed me to be more receptive to this way of thinking. And there's even more to his complex analysis of modern oppression. . . . To be continued

Trampled Under Feet IV: Bamboozled, Research Time, 18/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . The centuries long genocide of hundreds of indigenous American cultures is one of the most horrifying legacies of the modern United States of America. Beyond all the visceral violence itself, its true terror lies in how essential this genocide was to the American project’s utopia.

Slavery was the fundamental injustice that corrupted
the promise of America.

Recognizing the indigenous cultures of North America as genuine human societies worthy of respect would have put boundaries and blocks on America's expansion. This expansion was necessary for the radical democratic project of America's people building their new country from nothing.

So they had to treat their indigenous neighbours as nothing, if the American project was to get off the ground.

Compounding the horror of this genocide is that there was another genocide built into the founding institutions of America that even short-circuited its radical democracy. So the indigenous were destroyed for the sake of a project that was corrupted before it could begin.

That corruption was slavery.

The indigenous of North America have always been excluded from America. The African slaves that built the initial prosperity of the colonies on the plantations are a different matter. From the start of American settlement, slaves were included in the American system.

African slave labour was entirely above board, official in every way. Not only did the founders of America as an independent country own slaves, but slavery had long been an ordinary part of America’s economy by the revolutionary war of the 1770s and 80s. 

It would be decades after independence that the paradox of being democratic slave holders caused enough ethical dissonance in many and enough soul-churning self-hatred in the radical few that a social movement for liberation began.

Samuel L Jackson's Marquis Warren is the only black
hero from the American Civil War in our pop culture
at the moment. It's okay that he's fictional, but there
are plenty of real black war heroes who's lives would
make fantastic films.

It would be a generation after modern humanity’s first revolution in the name of freedom that the abolitionist social movement kicked into high gear. It was as if a generation of children needed to be raised in an environment that praised freedom that enough of them would understand wretchedness of being a slave-holding democrat.

The paradox is especially abhorrent to an American who genuinely understands the nature of America's productive democracy. Remember how Antonio Negri analyzed the project in the American constitution and The Federalist Papers. 

You took part in America by building America. The freedom of America was in using your labour to build the country. Yet here was this enormous population – the slaves – who invested horrifying, back-breaking, mind-crushing toil in building America.

And they remained in chains. They had nothing. It was repellent.

The ridiculous three-fifths compromise of the constitution in slave-holding days testified to the ad hoc, unsustainable nature of the slave economy in a country whose politics and production was defined by a compact of freedom in and through work and construction.

America’s institutions were going to work themselves into schizophrenic seizures until this problem was fully and completely sorted out. African slaves were a population who were included in the country, and whose work produced the institutions and wealth of America. 

The movement to complete America's promise of
liberation continues.

But as slaves, they had none of the power. A slave was a paradoxical creature, and a destructive paradox at that. The status of a slave in a country whose freedom was grounded on productivity is a fundamental injustice.

A country and a society and a civilization can’t stand on such a fundamental paradox without eventually tearing itself apart. It did.

And since the Civil War, America has proceeded to tear itself apart time after time, if to a lesser intensity. Slavery may be gone as an institution, but the profound anti-black racism that fuelled and justified slavery’s institutions remain in American society.

There are many in America for whom the black population still has the status of a slave, economically and philosophically, if not institutionally and politically. Black Americans are allowed to work and contribute to building and maintaining America, according to the racist, but they have no claim on America's freedom.

Yet the only justification needed for such a claim is that you work and contribute to building and maintaining America. An ‘unless’ clause makes no sense, and worse, makes a mockery of the compact of productivity and freedom from the start.

Until America overcomes even its most pervasive systemic racism, it will always fall short of its promise of freedom open to anyone.

And America was, in its inception, one of the best chances humanity's had to establish a real society of freedom. It makes me wonder what will be required for real human liberation . . . To be continued.

Police Dog Josephine Is Also a Junkie, Research Time, 29/12/2015

The title comes from a line of Monty Python, about the best drug-sniffing dog on the police force. But it also serves for a good title for a post about what Antonio Negri has to say about the police as an institution.

In our current political moment, there’s plenty of talk about the dangers of uncritical deference to the police. That’s a healthy conversation, one that a democracy needs to have.

This hashtag used to be a living young boy.

The night I wrote this blog post, the news went out that no one was to be indicted for the murder of Tamir Rice. The 12-year-old was shot dead by Cleveland police officer Tim Loehmann, who fired seconds after seeing him playing in a park with a toy gun.

Throughout the protests surrounding Rice’s killing, Ohio state prosecutors and police officials frequently blamed the boy for his own killing. Public statements described Rice as “big for his age,” and said he would play at being a robber with his friends.

Earlier last night, someone briefly replaced Tamir’s photo on his Wikipedia page with that of a chimp.

A centrepiece of the #BlackLivesMatter movement is advocating for reform of police union contracts. Currently, many police officers’ collective agreements include clauses protecting them from prosecution or accountability for killing civilians on duty, among other protections from scrutiny or responsibility for violence.

So even though he talks about police norms in global and international political contexts, Negri has wisdom for understanding our current moment. 

That wisdom appears in how he distinguishes the global character of Empire and the imperial* from the old-school imperialism of naked slavery and conquest. It used to be that only states could control mass military movements. And they still do. But their monopoly is over.

* Globalized capitalism, essentially.

International organizations now have the power to bomb, invade, and sanction cities and countries. Although states supply the tanks, planes, bombs, and soldiers to the United Nations, it’s still an international organization whose constituency is basically the entire human race.

These militaries aren’t armies going to conquer. Their control by the UN makes them a global police force. Their purpose is to stop war crimes from happening, or which are in progress. 

These tanks don't belong to any one army, but to an
international force to keep law, order, and peace. There
are currently 16 ongoing UN peacekeeping missions
around the globe.

Although peacekeeping has a noble motivation, its ideal is to become a global police force. Other international police forces like INTERPOL have grown in prominence over the last few decades. International organizations and treaties control the trade and economic policies of signatory countries, and can issues sanctions for violating agreements.

In all these ways, police structures are becoming ubiquitous across the globe. And we shouldn’t accept this uncritically, because police organizations are ultimately about controlling populations. 

Those of us in populations who don’t regularly face direct police control, well, we don’t really see their danger. Police are, according to the public relations, public servants. Bodyguards for our society. They’re our protectors.

But police action is based on control – making sure people’s behaviour adheres to specific rules. That control should be subject to critique and public accountability if the police are really to be servants of the public. 

Whether at the global, international, state, or local contexts, we can’t accept uncritically increasing police presence, power, and violence. We mustn’t normalize the ubiquity of institutions of control. And we certainly mustn’t justify it.

As Deray McKesson said last night, justice is a world where Tamir Rice is still alive. It’s a world where no one knows who he is yet but his friends and family. Maybe in 20 years, he’ll build a successful business, become a community leader, fight for his country, or make a great film.

Yet he rots.

Get Real II: Real Progress Comes From Movement & Agitation, Research Time, 15/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . There's a unique conservative world-view that’s coalesced as its mainstream since the Thatcher and Reagan eras. Its attitude is a tense, dynamic mixture of brutality, the cruelty of indifference, and naïveté. 

Because jail isn't just about free meals, a decent gym,
and good-quality dope. It's also about poverty and the
daily indignities of the social causes of incarceration.

Of the Big Four thinkers of modern conservatism, Francis Fukuyama is the most openly naïve. His The End of History will probably become (if it hasn't already) the first of new conservatism’s landmark works to be buried. The first one to start digging the grave was Jacques Derrida at the conference whose keynote became Spectres of Marx.

He starts with a point that a lot of academics see. For someone who depends so much on Hegel for how he understands history, Fukuyama has a ridiculously oversimplified version of Hegel. He sees certainty where the text is enigmatic. Clear pronouncements where Hegel himself was extremely ambiguous.

Those philosophical enigmas are why Hegel became a legend in the tradition. The ideas are clearly significant, but there are so many ways to understand him.

But Fukuyama's missteps (mis-thoughts?) are much more profound than this. His whole point is a terribly naïve conclusion that we’ve achieved the perfect form for human society. And it's the capitalist liberal democratic state. 

Why is it perfect? Because human nature is essentially to seek status and dignity among people. Capitalist liberal democracy ends conflict over social status by enshrining each of us as having the highest, equal dignity before the law in our civil rights.

These words feel like nonsense to me. I may as well have written “Staple booger quack-quack cauterizes flagellum footstool Doctor Tulip O’Snap.” 

Because when Jacky from Algeria starts shit with you,
you better look out.

Fukuyama completely ignores that the dignity of equal standing in civil rights isn't enough to preserve you against the material indignity of extreme poverty. It isn't even enough to secure you the material defence of your civil rights if you can't afford to hire a competent lawyer to defend you from a crown prosecutor.

Derrida says it himself, that people's material indignities are intolerable. They're only worse now than two decades ago.

“Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of Earth and humanity.”

Yet there’s an even deeper, more profound oversight here. One that shows what a clear eye Derrida had, despite his (sometimes deserved) reputation for obscurity in his writing.

It's an obvious fact today. So obvious that it's hard to think of this as having been news in 1992. But it was. 

Fukuyama's most naïve, blind mistake was to take for granted that the whole of people's political lives was their relationship to their state and its laws. This way of thinking doesn’t understand that the political actions that most speak to people's hearts lie beyond the relationship of an individual with her institutions.

There's a giant social field whose movements stretch beyond the boundaries of states. Even international institutions can get at best a limited grasp on this field. It’s the whole of humanity.

Most protest movements are, in some very important dimensions, about the relationship of people to their state, laws, government, and institutions. But the need for such a movement has other roots. Take an example. 

Black Lives Matter has a comprehensive political program to change the policies, rules, techniques, and daily habits of police officers so they genuinely serve citizens and protect their civil rights.

But talk of civil rights and institutions doesn’t capture everything that happens in a social movement. It doesn’t capture their actual drive – the reasons, causes, and motives that lie deep within each activist’s character and soul, which all move them to take part. 

The politics of the state and its institutions isn't enough to meet all the challenges of human ethics.

Another one of Fukuyama's major concepts is the essential role the human drive for recognition – for status, for dignity – has in our nature. But running your state institutions on the ideal of equal civil rights isn’t enough to secure human dignity against all possible violations.

Confronting Centuries of Genocide in America, Advocate, 23/08/2015

Vandalism as an act of justice.

Early last week, I tweeted angrily, as a person tends to do on Twitter. It was this image of a defaced Confederate war memorial, Silent Sam. It’s a memorial to 321 alumni of University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, who died fighting for the Confederacy in the American Civil War. It was erected in 1913, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was a major funder.

On it, graffiti is written “Who is Sandra Bland?”

On July 4 of this year, the same statue was apparently vandalized with “KKK” and “Murderer.”

I’m rather happy about that. 

But my friendly antagonist offered a rejoinder, that my disgust for the Confederacy needed some better justification. I at least should make a more detailed argument for my disgust than the expression of disgust. As well, some of my comments did run together the slave economy with Jim Crow, two materially different social regimes. 

In DM a while later, Steve and I discussed the genuine complexity of Southern heritage. Our colleague Jim Collier is the descendant of a Confederate general, Tex Rosser. And there was an entire culture of anti-racism in the South as well, particularly expressed in its experimental literature of the twentieth century – Mississippi’s William Faulkner, Georgia’s Flannery O’Connor, Kentucky’s Robert Penn Warren, Tennessee’s John Crowe Ransom.

The biggest such critical Southern literary voice in the news recently was, of course, Harper Lee of Alabama. Americans, and Mockingbird fans generally, felt a strange sense of shock and sometimes even betrayal on learning that she had always conceived the beloved Atticus Finch as a much more complicated character than the simple first story depicted. Both Go Set a Watchman and its cultural reception made a pointed critique of how Americans understand or ignore the racist elements of their culture and history.

So my visceral disgust at Confederate war memorials appeared to have ignored this long tradition of critique. Southern culture is about more than racism. But the question, for me, remains: What precisely in Southern culture does a Confederate war memorial like Silent Sam express?

You don't mess with Harriet Tubman.

The statue's primary funders were a group of propagandists for the Lost Cause, the idealized, whitewashed vision of the Confederacy as a beautiful society that was crushed under Unionist military invasion and cultural oppression. The United Daughters of the Confederacy were slavery apologists.

Because you can't deny how horrifying slavery was. Millions were worked to death in gruelling conditions, or died of disease in trans-Atlantic travel. Families were routinely broken up, slaves were denied the right to practice their religion and culture. Blacks were dehumanized and treated as property as an essential element of the culture for centuries.

And no matter how much groups like United Daughters of the Confederacy tried to say it was about other causes, the secession of the South and the resulting Civil War was their attempt to preserve the slave economy. Yes, it did have to do with state's rights, particularly their right to maintain a slave economy.

So what about my contention that there's continuity between (white settlement-1865) this slow-moving economy of monetized genocide called slave agriculture, (1865-1960s) the brutal, lynching-enforced caste system of Jim Crow, and (present) the culture of underground white supremacists and habitual police violence against blacks?

I don’t deny the obvious differences. I can’t. But there is one important commonality: the concept of race, particularly a conception of the white and black races as divided by essential caste. That would be white supremacy.

It's a philosophical matter, a common presumption underlying the motives of human behaviour in individuals from Christopher Columbus to Jefferson Davis to Dylann Roof. It’s the presumption that another group of people can be set apart from your own by some obvious characteristic and for that reason treated as less worthy of human rights than you.

To answer the graffiti artist's question, this is
Sandra Bland.

So I’ll continue to be disgusted by monuments to Silent Sam or Robert E. Lee because they romanticize and erase a stain on American history as torrid as the Nazi period in Germany, or the many genocides against indigenous peoples in Canada.

I’d much prefer to see more monuments across the United States to genuine heroes in its history who fought against slavery, white supremacy, and racism. There should be more monuments to revolutionaries like the abolitionist John Brown, or Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman. Frederick Douglass should be given honour throughout America's education systems as one of the country’s great heroes.

And I’ll always be happy to see that someone has defaced a memorial whose purpose is to romanticize white supremacy and dilute its terror. Especially when it’s in the name of a contemporary victim of that terror.