"Resistance Is Prior to Power" – Antonio Negri. 13/01/2019

Here is the opening monologue from last week's episode of Radical Democrats Radio, "Resistance Is Prior to Power." You can support the podcast and other projects at our Patreon.

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I want to open with a quote from Antonio Negri in Assembly: “Resistance is prior to power. . . . revolutionary movements and struggles are the source of political innovation.”

What that means, is that new approaches to how we can live together in communities, build links of mutual dependency and aid, always emerge from situations of people trying to create power for themselves. 

Remember, when I talk about people creating their power, I’m not talking about taking control of the state here. This is one point where radical democracy departs from the revolutionary marxist tradition in which it began. 

But that’s with good reason, because there’s something very important about revolutionary marxism’s beginning – you know, back when Karl Marx was actually alive – that has shifted radically. The West is not controlled by autocratic states anymore.

I make this statement with rhetorical reservations, of course.

Let’s be clear about our situation today, though. This show has gone live the week after, in the United States, the Democratic Party has taken over the federal government’s lower legislative chamber. 

The leading activists and candidates in that election openly branded themselves as the capital R Resistance. Many were from marginalized communities and cultures who, as a whole, have suffered from state institutions dominated by social conservatives and oligarchs. 

The state of which Donald Trump is President allowed them to organize, run, and take office. I’m serious about that term ‘allowed.’ 

Because the physical machinery of police, surveillance, and security services in the United States is more than capable of rounding up political agitators and opposition party members to disappear them into the prison system forever. 

Marxist philosophy began in a population living under governments that arrested and executed people for organizing communities of marginalized people – the poor in Germany and Russia, the colonized in Britain, Belgium, and France, the enslaved in the United States. Their revolutions all turned out to be fairly successful over a century or more.

But those revolutions against autocracy, colonization, and dictatorship revealed more complex ways culture itself was a political force – a force that could liberate or oppress people. 

Yes, state laws enforced socially conservative beliefs – Like when homosexual acts and divorce were illegal in Western countries. But the state had no power over a woman’s parents deciding to advocate for her husband in the breakup of a violent marriage. The state had no power in family and friends ostracizing a young person for their sexuality or gender.

Here’s where contemporary radical democracy departs clearly from that marxist tradition. Where there are vectors of oppression, there is politics. That includes, state, economics, morality, and culture. All of that is political.

Oppression is a simple activity, no matter how many big bureaucratic agencies a state might use to oppress people. That just complicates a simple act. The stomp of a boot into the ground. 

The real nature of oppression is why Negri can write that political creativity comes from resistance to power instead of power itself. 

In resistance, you act to escape control from some oppressive institution or cultural practice. Such an escape requires agility – Not just in organizing, but in life. 

Of course, an oppressive practice, morality, or institution will react to people openly organizing against it. But the presence of oppressive networks and relationships also work in a more insidious, if equally simple, way. A pervasive morality or social practice will work to make any resistance appear futile.

Picture the residents of a community that’s been in economic depression for decades, who’ve been so dominated by the power of local oligarchs over their institutions that they see any resistance to this order as bound to fail. That’s how oppression encourages apathy.

Even worse is the oppression of morality – It’s how you convince a person to desire their own slavery, to see their oppression as good. They understand fundamental right and wrong in terms of a morality that justifies the power of oppressive institutions, classes, and people. 

I’m talking about moralities that create figures like Uncle Tom, the Dutiful Wife, the Mimic Man. Such a system of beliefs defines what is morally right as to submit yourself utterly to some figure, institution, or state. You are raised to accept without question, as intuitively true, that you are subservient, that you do not deserve freedom.

All this reactionary activity seems very complex, since it flows across so many planes of human activity: 

Moralities that shape subjectivities and social practices.

 

Institutions that shape legal, administrative, and police bodies.

 

Economic relationships that open opportunities for some and erase or block the formation of opportunities for many others.

But it all amounts to a simple movement – the block, the suffocating blanket that drains the energy of your own freedom.

Overcoming that movement requires complexity because of the many paths through which the suffocation of freedom moves. Overcoming moral suffocation requires different concepts and strategies than overcoming institutional suffocation. 

Convincing a woman to understand her “good Christian” marriage as actually incredibly abusive takes utterly different strategies than ending city planning practices that segregate neighbourhoods ethnically to marginalize and impoverish minorities. 

The tools of oppression change by context, but not its actions – suffocate freedom. Resisting and overcoming that suffocation requires actions that are utterly different in each context. 

Unfortunately, that ends up interrupting unity among activists to transform the entire oppressive system on a global basis. People who learned how to resist in one or a few contexts will not understand intuitively what’s in common with resisters in other contexts. 

Example: White union movement activists in Canada oppose environmental and Indigenous movements because they see these activists as roadblocks to their community’s prosperity. 

The solution is unfortunately difficult – outreach and education. People who understand how all oppressions enforce each other have to teach fellow progressives who define their interests too narrowly. 

That education also requires a lot of creativity – New kinds of intervention that can overcome people’s partial perspectives, prejudices, disgusts. Healing an Arab/Muslim activist’s anti-Semitism takes a different educational strategy than healing a Christian human rights activist’s homophobia, and a different strategy than healing a feminist activist’s Islamophobia.

“Resistance is prior to power.”

Meditating on the Flows of Power, Jamming, 01/05/2018

Today has been a good day. At the college, I got to give a really intriguing presentation to a group of international student recruiters from different places around the world. A crew from Korea, a couple of folks from Mexico, one from Colombia, one from Brazil, and even one from Kazakhstan, which was a pleasant surprise to me.

If we get some Kazakh students coming to join my business program, it’ll be a real education for me as well. I know a few things in general about the history and culture of Kazakhstan, but I’d be fascinated to learn more about everyday life in cities like Astana and Almaty, life in a social and political culture so different from where I grew up. Where there is no popular public conception of democracy as such.

Turkmenbashi, a man who made himself the state.

How does someone who’s lived all their life in a country like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, or North Korea think about freedom? Or duty? Or love of country?

The state is a powerful presence in the lives of so many. But we should keep in mind the central lesson of the ontology of the social for politics – all relationships in society generate power. They’re dynamic exchanges of energy among people as individuals, groups, organizations, institutions.

The state is one institution among many that people have developed to shape their lives and govern their communities. The major failure of left-wing political movements over the last century and change has been their frequent focus on using the power of the state to affect and ensure change.

There are alternatives. The state, when all of its institutional powers are marshalled over a population, constitutes this brute force of pressure on all these people. A society is crushed by its police, bureaucracy, and agencies. People are stamped flat with the imprint of a statue made of gold.

Symbiosis. That's one alternative way of organizing a society's power, and institutions that shape those relationships. Gilles Deleuze – and Paul Patton following him – call symbiosis a double-capture. Two processes link with each other, and develop together. It’s an alliance that builds a mutual dependence, an interdependence. Each of them become more together than what they could have been alone.

It’s a model that offers an alternative to the heavy hand and coercive machinery – and the guns, always all the guns in the hands of people with the sole right to use them – of the state.

What are some models of politics, society, and friendship that work according to a logic of symbiosis? Something to think about, as this is just a short post of reflections that I’m writing almost as a diary tonight. It's been a long and tiring day, and I’m scheduling this to post early tomorrow morning.

I hope everyone’s had a good sleep. The world remains dangerous. But there’s power in all our hands.

What Does It Mean to Be an Anarchist? Research Time, 19/04/2018

When I started the research for Utopias a few years ago, one of the first traditions of political thinking I looked into was anarchism.

I wanted to explore a tradition that I thought was a clear alternative to many of the political systems and concepts we take for granted. You ask what it means to live without a state. You investigate what relationships can constitute a strong community.

Thinking about anarchism also encourages you to rethink how many institutions you need in your society to hold it together. It encourages you to analyze the real powers of brotherhood in a community. You wonder how much we really need coercive authority to keep a community from becoming violent.

Anarchist thinking often works better as a guide for resistance to an
unjust and violent state apparatus than as a concrete political
program. There's just so much work we have to do on ourselves
as people before anarchism can become a viable framework for
organizing our lives as communities.

You wonder if we really need the police? The army? Any institution of the state that we typically think we have a duty to obey. You come to doubt the truth of our entire heritage of political thinking that has an ancestor in Thomas Hobbes.

So you come to doubt pretty much every principle taken for granted in Western political philosophy – the social contract, the authority of the state, the obligations of citizens to police and military authority. That’s the value of looking into thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Emma Goldman.

Yet I have my doubts about the power of a straight-ahead anarchism to provide actionable values for human society. Frankly, anarchist values like mutual aid and intuitive social solidarity are too difficult for most humans to live by.

Paul Patton makes this point in one of his books about Gilles Deleuze. He writes about how people often take Deleuze and Guattari to have been anarchists. It’s true that their political thinking was very critical of state authority. And they were involved as thought leaders and activists with real anarchist and communist political movements in Europe during their lives.

But Patton makes one very insightful point in the early stages of that book – anarchism requires an optimism about humanity’s inherent goodness and kindness to each other that Deleuze and Guattari didn’t really share.

Humans are too terrible to each other. We resent each other. We make aliens of each other. We hate each other for no real reason, both as individuals and as groups. We need a long period of education and moral training to be as kind to each other as the mutual aid principles of an anarchist society would require.

And it would be even more difficult to prevent the xenophobia that can so easily arise when we let communitarian values drive our us vs them cultural imagery. Humans are, for the most part, simply not good or kind enough creatures to live according to a thoroughly anarchist political morality.

Anarchism’s most important contribution to practical political thinking in the 21st century, I think, is its spirit. Rebellion against taking coercive authority, the power of the state over society’s development, for granted. Critiquing the institutions that we’ve been taught almost all our lives are beyond reproach.

That spirit – maybe you could call it punk philosophy – should inspire any approach to political thinking that takes seriously the possibility of change. Demands for political, social, moral, and ethical change requires conceiving of the radically different. Maybe it’s achievable. Or maybe we’ll always fall short of our ideal.

What matters is the image of a different path.

Is Freedom Really Free? II: Exodus, Research Time, 13/07/2017

Is it really freedom if your only choices are between a cruel, abusive, barely-subsistence, dangerous job and starving to death?

The doctrinaire libertarian perspective states that this is freedom. When I say doctrinaire, I’m talking about the libertarian shock troops – the ordinary folks who provide the street and online activist core of the libertarian right wing as a political movement.

Demand better. One of a series of old posters from when we
thought the fight would be easier than it is now.

If a free market is only offering you barely-subsistence wages under terrible conditions or poverty and starvation, then that’s the choice you can freely make. Freedom is the right of exit from any negotiation before the promise is made.*

* Yes, I know there are many other dimensions of freedom as a concept in libertarian thinking, but I’m just sticking to this one for now! It’s a blog – I’m not going more than 800 or so words at a shot with this.

But is there an additional path to follow? Jokingly, in my reviews and posts about that show, I’ve described this ethical argument against the libertarian decision between two bad choices as Doctor Who ethics. When the system you live in offers you two unbearable choices, you break the system.

This is where I see the anarchist-leaning left providing a corrective to the libertarian right. Think of it as a helping hand. The libertarian, as I’ve described them, sticks with the choices you’re given. But you can also upend the table.

Milton Friedman called the right to walk away from a bad deal the right of exit. As he unfolded the concept, it was left with that vulnerability – You could walk away from any shit deal, even if your only alternative was an even more shit deal. You were still free.

The problem of following Friedman is that you may always be stuck with some kind of shit deal. Antonio Negri takes the right of exit farther than the libertarian model – literally an exodus.

One most brutal and blatant commodification of humanity was the institution of black slavery in the Americas. Labour was literally bought and sold, and there was a continual urge in the black population to escape. Negri makes this a starting point for the human drive to liberation.

Friedman stays at the level of the bad job offer – walk away and find something better. Negri carries this principle farther, as far as it can go and where the concept itself would actually lead you if you follow its logic to the end. The human drive for freedom is expressed in the act of walking away to find or create something better.

You keep moving until you can't go any farther. But you still have to.

You’re walking away from any form of exploitation, brutality, or generally horrible conditions of life. You could be walking into a much worse deal. One example. Ask any of the South Asian or African immigrants who come to work in the Saudi Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates.

Thousands once sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. Millions now move across Asia. And that’s just counting the economic migrants – the job seekers. The war refugees throughout the world are millions more.

But there’s also the people who leave their home countries – overpopulated, crushed by climate disaster, autocratic, or still stricken with grotesque inequality – and come to places like Toronto. People like some of my students who come to Canada in search of a better deal.

The best of them are coming here not just to ask for a better deal, but to build one for themselves. That’s the human desire for freedom – don’t just choose the lesser of two evils, but walk away and make the good.

Writing A New Master, Composing, 27/06/2017

So I took a break from my Doctor Who blogging, just for this one episode. Next Monday 3 July, I’ll post a review of the Epic Wicked Awesome Body Horror Master Team-Up, taking both episodes as a single story.

A separate essay on World Enough and Time will probably be part of the ebook I’ll publish later in 2018 on the Peter Capaldi years. Now that the Capaldi era is closing, I can actually get a pretty good idea of what that book would look like.

Right now, I have a general count of themes that I’m going to pursue through the Capaldi book. I’m not sure where any principle of unity would come from. I mostly just want to release a pleasantly stimulating book of essays about Doctor Who.

So what would it be about?

Sexual fluidity, for one. Russell T Davies introduced a universe of sexuality’s possibility into Doctor Who, but the TARDIS team itself was dominated by straightness throughout the Tennant and Smith years.

If the TARDIS team of the pansexual Captain Jack’s, the more open character of Rose’s first year, and the queerness of Eccleston’s Doctor had lasted more than three episodes, maybe things would have been different. As it is, we only got to explore a queer TARDIS crew in the Capaldi years.

Clara’s implicit queerness in her final season brought the idea openly into the TARDIS team again, and the main cast has doubled down on queerness through Bill.

But the regeneration of the Master into Michelle Gomez solidly slots 21st century Doctor Who into a queer narrative space. The Time Lords are now canonically and openly able to change genders casually. It’s become so taken for granted in the Capaldi era that there’s an expectation that the next Doctor will be a woman.

Even aesthetically, Gomez's Master dresses in a style that evokes
William Hartnell's Doctor, a science-fictional god in Victorian
inventor's garb.

I do want to explore the centrality of the Master in the Capaldi years. Her power as a narrative force, the new story ideas that Steven Moffat developed for her character. The Master in these years was a destructive anarchist. She no longer thinks of amassing power and conquest – she primarily loves to tear the world down.

Right there is the centre of her redemption arc. All previous versions of the Master were variations on power-hungry schemers. They were tinpot dictators and wannabe authoritarians.

Gomez was the first Master who fully gave in to the Master’s own impulses for destruction for its own sake. She was still a delightful sadist, but was content enough to leave a trail of chaos in her wake.

Just like the trails of chaos and revolution that the Doctor leaves behind him. At this critical point of the Master’s own embrace of the thrill of anarchism and destruction, she’s ripe for an intervention.

The Doctor can train her to channel her revolutionary energy into tearing down the world to provide it new life rather than simply tearing it to pieces. He can teach her that it’s more fun that way.

Just an idea for now.

Obsolete Democracy II: The Origin of Most Welfare States, Research Time, 06/10/2016

Earlier this week before our interruption to yell at people about the Syrian war, I ended on a question about the dangers democracy may face in the post-colonial world.

“So in India – as well as former colonies across Asia and Africa – the state and its administration was well-established. Then civic institutions plopped on top.
"If the civic institutions of democratic representation and national unity are an afterthought to your administrative institutions, can you still be a democracy? . . . To Be Continued”

A lot of the states in the world that used to be imperialist colonies inherited institutions that were generally geared toward two activities. One was delivering services. The other was dividing up the population into categories and classes based on what services they’d receive.

Now in the time when these institutions were run by a bunch of racist Europeans, the population was usually divided to stir up resentment and hatreds, prevent them from forming social links strong enough to overthrow the empire.

Movies are sometimes the only ways most Westerners learn anything
about another culture, especially Asian ones. You don't exactly get a
lot of detail in between the Bollywood tropes.

So colonial states were built to discourage and break apart any civic nationalist solidarity before it could even form. That’s good management from an imperialist’s sense. That way, the population will be less likely to organize themselves to kick you out of their country. 

Once all the colonial empires did get kicked out of those countries, there was a bit of a dilemma. Here we had a state institution all ready to run, but it was built to segment the population into separate groups and treat them totally differently.

Remove the divide-and-conquer motivation from the state institutions,* but keep an administration that minutely identifies different classes in a population by need and situation. What you have left after that is a quality welfare state. 

* And not all of them did, to their horrifying detriment usually.

And this kind of welfare state ends up with a curious form of politics attached to it. The politics of community lobbying. 

Think back to the example of Kolkata’s Railway Gate shantytown in Partha Chatterjee’s The Politics of the Governed. They're able to maintain their existence as a thriving community of poor people on the side of the tracks because they formed a leadership group.

The People’s Welfare Association organizes to lobby for government services and coordinate how they’re distributed. And they rarely meet with elected officials. They meet with the administration officials and workers who actually get work done.

The shantytown and its concerns are on such a small scale compared to the entire city of Kolkata that municipal representatives don’t have the remit to deal with it. Let alone elected officials in any higher level of the Indian government. So they deal directly with government administrative workers.

Men hoping to join India's civil service line up expectantly. According
to Chatterjee, they're important organs of Indian democracy. I think
he's on to something really interesting here.

Civil servants. They have their welfare budgets and can largely direct it as their offices see fit. So if you’re a small-scale self-organized group like the Railway Gate shantytown, you can get the most effective results from your lobbying efforts. The officials give out the money and the services.

This is the kind of democracy that exists in a lot of post-colonial countries, where people are still beholden to multiple identities and solidarities, and no one national identity need take precedence. This is the democracy of community organization itself.

It preserves the desires, identities, and lifestyles of each peculiar group. And it creates solidarity within all these groups because of the social organization needed to thrive. The flow of money and goods from the general population to different communities within it helps build a social solidarity across the country that has nothing to do with the drive to conformity that comes with nationalism.

This is the ideal of what the lobbying democracy of the administrative welfare state can do. It can revive civic organization on a local, micro level to demand entitlements – the satisfaction of needs. 

Ideals are rarely achieved, of course. One obvious way this kind of democracy can corrupt itself is with literal corruption. 

The formerly democratic lobbying organization ossifies into a static office. The loyal leader of his people becomes a stodgy lifetime-appointed official himself. Lobbying for public resources for your community becomes bribery for government lucre. 

But the potential is incredible. A democratic culture of organization from the micro-level to lobby large and larger scale state institutions – there is nothing more democratic than the demand. The demand for a better life and the assistance to build one.

What happens when nationalism collides with this new kind of democracy? . . . To Be Continued

Anarchist India, Research Time, 30/09/2016

We in the West have a lot to learn from others. I mean, everyone has a lot to learn from everyone else – that’s just the nature of singularity. All of our experiences and life narratives are different, and we can all learn from each other. 

But speaking more specifically (and without empty hippie platitudes), I think Western progressive activists have a lot to learn from community organizing in India. At least, from my first tentative investigation into the curious new kinds of political associations that modern Indian society produces, we have a lot to learn.

We Westerners (as far as I can speak for a whole society spread over
four continents) tend to think of slums as sad, pathetic places. And
their people lead difficult lives. But revolutionary political creativity
can emerge from these places.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Western political thinking is stuck in a bind. In our political tradition, states first developed as civil organizations. Their purpose was to unify disparate people across wide territories behind a common mission and a common identity. 

The Western state was the material articulation of the spirit of the nation – such was the philosophy. And the institutions of the state were designed to build that communal spirit of nationhood in the first place. It was supposed to take real associations and societies of plurality and unify them, homogenize them. 

We’ve run into quite a problem with this, which is that national identity never matches borders exactly. People who identify with one nation live outside it, and we feel a strange legitimacy when a national state tries to protect nationals (even non-citizen nationals) outside its borders. Even when it results in aggressive expansion or subversive invasion.

The nation-state has been obviously obsolete since, as far as I’m concerned, 1945. So what kind of political institutions can be alternatives?

Chatterjee identifies – without using the phrase itself – the welfare state as a vibrant, functional alternative to nationalism and the nation-state. When the state and the government is a service provider, it focusses on identifying differences, not smoothing them into unity.

There are populations with different needs, different situations, and different histories. The state has obligations to help all these populations in its territory develop better lives for themselves. That results in a much more empowered citizenry.

Here’s an example from Kolkata: Rail Colony Gate Number One. This is a shantytown of about 1500 people in a Kolkata suburb on the side of railroad tracks. Everyone knows their settlement is completely illegal. They’re squatters on private land – political and ecological refugees, as well as economic migrants, from Bangladesh and East Bengal.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become the face of Hindu
nationalism, a label he's embraced. And while he's managed to
control the public image in the West of what India has embraced,
his power over a dynamic population of more than a billion is not
quite as considerable as the propaganda suggests.

Everyone – squatters included – acknowledges that they’re squatters, and so their community is legally precarious. It’s subject to forced removal at any time. But these very poor people literally have nowhere else to go. 

And that’s why the railway and municipal authorities let them stay – because they have nowhere else to go. Also, they’ve formed their own relationships with the surrounding neighbourhoods as care workers and day labourers. They’ve become economically integrated over the decades the Colony has existed.

The welfare state owes these people resources to live and improve their lives. Now, they way we think about the government coming to help in the West, we’d expect disasters to unfold. It’s become obvious in our culture that the government is a disconnected, distant, barely competent service provider. But that’s not what happened in Kolkata.

Community leaders in Rail Colony Gate #1 formed Jana Kalyan Samiti – The People’s Welfare Association. It’s an organization of community organizers in the shantytown itself, which coordinates with the government and other stakeholders in the neighbourhood for service provision and diplomacy.

As far as principles go, it’s an anarchist organization. Again, this has a very different meaning than mainstream Western ideas. We tend to think of anarchism as Black Bloc crust-punks who live in squats, beg or wash dishes for a living, and reject education or social advancement.

That’s a false picture of how anarchism as a philosophy works. In the Western academic world, anarchism tends mostly to be a negative argument about the oppressive powers of national governments and authoritarian institutions. 

But anarchism, in a positive sense, is network politics. Organizations arising from communities themselves, as people build networks that grow to become huge associations with core and periphery members. 

The leaders of the Rail Colony’s People’s Welfare Association are relationship brokers between the people of the shantytown, neighbourhood organizations, the rail company, and all levels of the Indian government. This Indian organization – to take it as one example – has shown us how to do anarchism right.

Politics as relationship brokerage for the betterment of everyone in the community.

You Want the Lot Fees Suck Them Out of the Tip of My Cock: Money Worries, Sunnyvale, 16/04/2016

Sunnyvale is in danger again. If it wasn’t, then we wouldn’t be making a series. Maybe that’s why Ricky gets so upset with the camera crews whenever they come back to the trailer park. Because whenever they’re around, things get upended again.

But it’s not Jim who’s causing trouble. Jim is out. Jim’s gone. Jim’s done with Sunnyvale for good. He’s figured out exactly how to live a balanced lifestyle – a breathalyzer to optimize his liquor levels, a comfy little trailer just for him, and a campsite where he can live in a sedate, trouble-free environment.

This is why Sunnyvale could become the happy place that it was at the start of this season. Jim Lahey was gone. Not only was he gone, but he didn’t want to come back. Lahey has always been the source of law in Sunnyvale. He disrupts it, fucks everything up for everybody with his interference and his resentfulness of free, joyful people like Ricky, Julian, Bubbles, and all the rest of the gang.

And Lahey leaving Sunnyvale wasn’t just good for Sunnyvale. It was good for Jim! He’s happy at last. Content with himself. His own struggles are finally over. When he thinks of Sunnyvale and Julian, you can see the anger still seething. But he can still walk away from it. Jim may not have moved on from Sunnyvale completely, but he’s moving on. You see him come out of this little camper van surrounded by liquor bottles smiling and more relaxed than you remember him all series long, and you love him. He’s literally an overgrown kid with a paper route. He’s lovable now. He’s left the real world behind.

But there’s a new Lahey in town. Barb appears with her goons Donna and Candy to bully Jim into joining her scheme to retake Sunnyvale. Watching this sorry scene on Jim’s paper route unfold, it’s like some horrible succession ceremony. You’re watching Barb inherit the mantle of Lahey. She’s become the villain of Sunnyvale, the one whose very nature drives her to destroy the community’s joy and harmony. 

She’s the new villain of Sunnyvale now, just like Jim was for nine seasons and 15 years. But she’s not the law, definitely not. She’s not there to bring anyone into line or make them conform to some bland existence. Barb Lahey is no authority. But she is an authority in another way – the bully, the aggressor, the tyrant. She intimidates and scares, threatens and destroys.

Look what she does to Jim. Interrupts him on his paper route, speaks condescendingly to him – her words flowing out of her in a flirtatious tone, but only because they’re insults and threats. She’s chilling in her effectiveness – which is a fancy way of saying that she clearly has him by the balls. Candy is nothing but a goon pushing Jim around, and Donna’s been reduced from what she was to nothing more than a goon. Jim can get in a brief sneer early in the conversation, but he’s quickly overpowered.

This used to be Jim Lahey, the scourge of everything fun in Sunnyvale Trailer Park. Now he’s just a sad old man named Jim, and Barb Lahey is out to destroy all that goodness in the world.

Even when she’s off screen, Barb Lahey’s presence is on the screen. Ricky and Julian are panicked and scrambling just as much as Jim is, desperately trying to scrounge up the money to fend off her lawsuit as it bears down on them like a speeding truck. They’re thrown back into the world of money, debt, and capital again from the paradise they had in Sunnyvale.

Now, that's a weird thing to say, isn't it? Isn't Julian a businessman running his country bar? Doesn’t it make him a bunch of money? That’s certainly what his blonde girlfriends seem to think. And doesn’t Ricky love running his Drugs Store? It’s the centrepiece of his family business – he even has his little grandson packing joints for him with those perfect fingers. Bubbles plays in the bar and plies away at his cart business.

But look what happens when Julian and Ricky have to start raising actual money to pay their lawyer. Julian announces that he has to ask people to pay actual money for drinks instead of getting everyone to pay on credit. They walk out in disgust. Or else openly mock and insult him. So Julian has to send his flunkies after him – Cory and Jacob, then Randy.

Yes, it’s true. Randy has become Julian’s idiot flunky, just like Cory and Jacob. But Randy knows better – he remembers being the instrument of the law, the right hand of the force that would normalize Sunnyvale and bring it to order. Now he chafes at being an instrument of Sunnyvale’s new order. Or rather, it’s the true order of Sunnyvale finally having won. Against what he’s fought to achieve for more than a decade, the natural anarchy of joy and community have established themselves as the dominant order of Sunnyvale.

But the need for money has ruined that joy. People have to pay for their drinks. Worse, they have to pay for their trailers’ lot fees. The need for money has forced Julian and Ricky to become the law. 

Well, Julian anyway. Even though Ricky is part of the plan to raise money to fight Barb Lahey by collecting lot fees, he still refuses to hand over the lot fees he owes. He and Randy end up fighting like a pair of idiot schoolboys. Ricky refuses to give in to the law when its agent – Randy – comes to enforce it.

But Randy is working for Julian, and Julian needs to collect the lot fees to defend Sunnyvale. This is the vicious paradox that’s wrapped Julian this season. And it reveals a lot about the fundamental nature of Sunnyvale and Sunnyvale’s freedom, if you want to look. The paradox works like this.

Julian thrives when no one is paying any money for what he provides. No one pays lot fees. No one pays for their liquor. Everyone is drinking and partying and having a wonderful time. The whole system breaks down in rage and resentment as soon as anyone has to pay any money for what they need – as soon as anyone has to pay to party or pay to live in Sunnyvale. In Sunnyvale’s purest state, all its people don’t need to do anything except party, relax, and express themselves. Sunnyvale is a playground, a paradise of pure joy. I could call it the Land of Do-As-You-Please.

But then Barb Lahey exploded back into Sunnyvale. She isn’t the law, though. She’s a blatant, violent, raging threat. She's a pure force of destruction who controls through intimidation. She’s a shit tornado. 

She forced Julian to run his life with actual money – a real cash payment so his lawyer would be able to defend Sunnyvale against her assault. And in order to collect all that money, Julian had to become everything that’s against his own nature and against the nature of Sunnyvale itself. 

Julian became the law.

The Sunnyvale Psychochronography can’t do everything it pleases without money, so lend your support with the Adam Writes Everything Patreon! It's a fucking good idea.

Freedom 45: The Good Times Never Last, Sunnyvale, 09/04/2016

This is the official first entry of the Sunnyvale project, a journey through the world and community of the Trailer Park Boys, episode by episode. You can support the project – and develop ideas with me for extra essays and easter eggs in the final publications – at my Patreon, which has literally just started. An introduction to the project is here.
• • •
Good old Sunnyvale. It is as it’s always been, and it’ll never change. 

Oh, some superficial details may differ from season to season. Maybe Julian and Ricky go to jail at the end of the season, maybe only one of them does. Maybe someone else does entirely. Maybe Lucy and the family are back with Ricky, maybe they’re on the outs again. But the community is always the same. We know Sunnyvale.

And Sunnyvale is better than ever for our boys Julian, Ricky, and Bubbles. Julian has finally become a successful businessman. He’s running his bar his way – country-style, with all the community gathering to drink and have a good time. All with Bubbles and the Shit Rockers as the best (and only) house band in Sunnyvale. He’s got two hot blonde chicks so anxious to bang him that he has to turn them down half the time just to get his business done.

Ricky has even become a successful businessman. The growing public acceptance and non-enforcement of most marijuana laws means that he can open up his own dispensary as a truly legitimate businessman. So what if “Drugs Store” is probably one of the worse euphemisms for a dispensary? It’s his business on his terms. And he’s a proud grandfather, patriarch of his family of idiots raising his grandson Mo and teaching him the weed business from an early age. Those little baby fingers are perfect for packing joints.

Bubbles is still in the shopping cart business. Playing country music with the Shit Rockers. Julian isn’t letting him have too many breaks, though. 

We know these good times can’t last forever. This is Sunnyvale. You can see their happiness beginning to strain as the show begins. And it isn’t just because damn near everyone is pissed that the camera crew is back. 

You can tell it when you see the too-intense way Julian prods his bar staff the Roc Pile and his house band Bubbles and the Shit Rockers to keep working while the cameras are running. You can tell it when you see Ricky’s exasperation at Lucy’s determination to have a second child when he can barely handle his own grandson’s diapers – he literally needs a gas mask for that shit. You can see it in Randy’s harried, overstressed role as Trailer Park Supervisor. 

Actually, let’s have a closer look at Randy here, and not just because of the irresistible glare of the afternoon sunlight off that glistening gut. Randy is supposed to be one of the core antagonists of Trailer Park Boys. The basic rhythm of the show has always been the pursuit of our charismatic criminal heroes Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles by the Trailer Park Supervisors of varying competence depending on the situation and everyone’s relative average liquor intake. Hasn’t it? The Sheriff chases Robin Hood. Boss Hogg goes after them Dukes Boys. Lahey and Randy chase the Boys. That’s how I remember it.

Randy holds the office of Sunnyvale’s Trailer Park Supervisor, but he holds none of the authority. He takes orders from Julian, the master small-time criminal he spent most of the series trying to put in prison for good. That’s part of Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles’ good fortune – they don’t have Lahey and Randy coming after them to destroy their lives in the name of law and order anymore. Randy’s actually in charge of keeping the most powerful forces of law and order out of the park. He doesn’t kowtow to the police anymore – he protects Sunnyvale from the police.

But look how he does it – trading sexual favours to the beat cops who patrol the streets around the more affluent subdivision creeping up to Sunnyvale’s borders. And he only has so much tolerance for it. A creature of law and order will never embrace the anarchy and joy of Julian, Ricky, and Bubbles’ life.

Because their lives are truly joyful, despite all the tensions tearing at the boys. Bubbles may be overworked between his cart business and his obligations to Julian’s bar. But he’s always just had the ambition of a happy life with his kitties and his Complete Works of Plato and enough money in his pocket that he can get drunk when he wants to. 

Same with Ricky. He may have some tough obligations between running his business and Lucy’s baby fever approaching middle age. But he’s always just wanted a happy life with his family and the love of his life. And he has such love! Ricky still has enough raw sexual energy that he can literally bang the wall off his trailer. 

Same with Julian. He runs the bar that’s the social and economic centre of Sunnyvale. He owns the holding company that owns controlling interest in the entire trailer park. He’s literally the kingpin of Sunnyvale – in all material means, he’s become what he always was socially and informally. He’s won.

Ricky, Julian, and Bubbles are more than scofflaws, more than hoods. They’re intrinsically opposed to the petty resentfulness and authoritarianism of law and order. That’s the essence of the chase between them and the trailer park supervisors that’s been the spine of the show from the start. They’re desire set free. They’re love and brotherhood without constraint. If your life embodies that kind of profound anarchy, it’ll contain the conditions of its own chaos, its own crumbling apart as it flies into a thousand different directions. 

Even the best laid plans can fly to pieces in a shit tornado.

But just because things can go wrong doesn’t mean they will. Julian can keep the good times flowing, tense as the actual finances of his bar might be. Ricky can keep his family running well, even though Lucy might hit menopause soon and Jacob is a fucking moron. Bubbles and the Shit Rockers play a fucking good set. The weed and liquor is still flowing and the good times can keep going.

There’s one force that always returns to Sunnyvale, though, and blasts this delicate balance to pieces. That force of destruction that’s the voice of the petty, vindictive law. A force that will never be content to just let people live as they wish when no one is hurting each other. That force called Lahey.

Wait? What! That Lahey? What the fuck?!?!?!

Who Owns Revolution? Research Time, 23/03/2016

That title isn’t talking about any particular revolution. I mean who owns revolution as a concept. What political approach best typifies what revolution as a political and social act is ultimately for? Revolution’s ultimate purpose.

The most famous photo of Donald Trump's army of
supporters, a reactionary social movement that I
consider America's contemporary conservative
revolutionaries. But can conservatives of this virulence
genuinely own revolution?

When you read Antonio Negri’s Multitude, he starts you with a meditation on contemporary warfare and how it relates to contemporary revolution. Warfare has become – as the parlance of our time would go – biopolitical. It’s fundamentally about controlling an entire population in every way possible. Through the army and police as well as social and psychological weaponry.

And this kind of warfare-as-control is carried out by states. Which is a weird thing when you come to Multitude after reading the first book in his series with Michael Hardt.* If you read Empire you can easily think that he’s describing a world where states no longer have any power.

* A word about Hardt. I don’t doubt that Hardt is an important part of the composition of Negri’s trilogy. Admittedly, I don’t know how they work together. But I have always associated the spirit of their books together with Negri. Perhaps it’s because the voice of someone who has actually been persecuted speaks louder in any collaboration, at least to me. Hardt has been a tenured professor in the United States for years. Negri spent more than a decade in prison on fabricated charges. 

That’s only because what’s most important in that earlier book is describing the essentially different way power operates when organized in a network. The network is the dominant model of how knowledge and power operate today – distributed and centreless, but also electric, rapid, and transformational. 

The state was the dominant model of power and knowledge in the modern era, with its dynamic of command and obedience. Power itself is controlled through a nerve centre that’s typically thought of as the sovereign authority of the state, the institution that calls the (sometimes terrifyingly literal) shots. 

Because revolution is not the same as populism. Rob
Ford was a populist of the Canadian right wing, but
while his politics rode resentment to state power in
Toronto, his ideas were never really about destruction.

State power is the consolidation of sovereign authority through institutions of command and control. Network power is polycentric, with many different power centres working together from their own autonomous but linked domains. When such a network power does political violence, we call it an insurgency. 

If network power is an insurgency, then the answer is clear when I ask who owns revolution? Or so it appears. It would be the insurgency, wouldn’t it? But there’s a catch.

** There’s always a catch, after all.

I’m writing this post before going to bed on the day that Rob Ford died. Over the last few weeks, Donald Trump has consolidated his lead in the race to be the Republican nominee for US President. These two men lead and have led social movements focussed on winning control of a state government. But they think of themselves and promote themselves as figureheads of popular insurgencies.

Those would be insurgencies against social liberals and “downtown condo-bound elites” in Ford’s case. Trump’s movement is far more complex, but he is the American face of racialized conservative revolution of white (and straight, cis, Christian) power against what his popular and populist armies see as a rising tide of black, hispanic, Muslim, and gay groups who seek to grind white people under their boots. 

The fear of white people who feel threatened by the growing social and economic power of those who have historically been oppressed is real. Fundamentally misdirected, but real. It’s the fear whose premise is the notion that someone’s liberation requires someone else’s oppression. 

The new face of American resentment. But only the face.

If the people who used to be oppressed are freeing themselves, then the free ones are next in line for oppression. Trump supporters, on the whole, believe this. They as a network are mobilizing behind Trump, and their potential has far more violence than the similarly motivated motley assemblage of Ford Nation ever did. 

Trump and Ford rallied their supporters, but they don’t command them. Trump issues commands in the heat of his rambling, dictatorial rallies. But the real energy in the room comes from the power of the people themselves. They are a people controlled by their own resentments and fears, but they’re still people acting with the power that they constitute themselves. 

Does networked power alone constitute revolution? Or does the content matter?

Moving Forward After a New Democratic Party, Jamming, 11/03/2016

Maybe this will be a short post that will actually end in a short amount of time. This week, I attended the New Democratic Party’s first mixer of the Trudeau era, and I was quite happy that this sort of thing is happening. 

There are a lot of reasons for this. Among the several key reasons I think the New Democrats lost a lot of their seats, support, and fairly secure electoral strongholds, was that they focussed too much on winning the election to the exclusion of everything else.

Now, I’m not going to write one of those old-style justifications of losing elections. That was the stereotype of the New Democrats back when I was growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s in Atlantic Canada. 

Jack Layton was brilliant at making the
message of the Canadian left palatable
and relatable to more Canadians than
had ever experienced them. But the point
of his last letter wasn't that there will
never be another Jack. He wanted each
of us to become a new Jack.

Eastern Canada has never had a strongly rooted NDP presence, and the total Liberal election victory there last year shows how relatively weak the party still was. Even in supposed strongholds with noteworthy MPs like in Halifax and St. John’s. 

So local folks in the NDP in Newfoundland often discussed the party's viability in terms of bringing issues into parliament and coming respectably third or fourth. Then I moved to Ontario, Jack Layton brought the NDP to national prominence and a leadership position against Stephen Harper.

Tom Mulcair’s leadership continued to build on the gains Layton made before – and definitely after* – his death, until about two months before the 2015 election. I’ve gone into the philosophical elements before. 

* Because as someone who lived through Jack Layton’s funeral and last letter to the Canadian people, that man embraced his own death as a mass mourning event that mobilized hundreds of thousands. If not millions.

But today, I want to talk about a more practical aspect of the NDP’s campaign failure. They went on the defence: prioritizing all their money on the safest-seeming seats, but leaving less likely seats without resources to build a decent ground game. 

When you’re out to gain votes and parliamentary seats, you can’t make your priority consolidation. You don’t have enough in the first place to make consolidating existing gains a safe strategy. Playing it safe exposes vulnerability. 

Add that to the philosophical mistakes that the NDP leadership was making, all of which amounted to playing it too safe, and you have the disaster of our party’s choke on October 19.

And at the NDP social night, I met a bunch of people who were incredibly aware of this. Yeah, the party fucked up. Pretty royally. Now comes the time when we completely change how we go about politics. Bring the ideas of the LEAP Manifesto, Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaign, the philosophy of basic income, and Idle No More’s call for justice to the everyday Canadian political conversation.

Reach out to communities in those beautiful racially-mixed communities around the major cities of the country. Show how NDP ethics are the most natural allies such people have in state politics. To us, immigrants aren’t a photo op to be rushed in before a deadline. They’re the the bedrock of a new era of economic prosperity.

And call attention as much as we can to the hypocrisy of Liberal Party leadership and culture. Like how you can’t balance the books of a province by selling off electricity infrastructure. Above all, show them that economic policies that promote inequality and concentrate wealth undercut socially progressive policies.

Bring those ideas to the wider Canadian public and you won’t have to worry about micromanaging and paranoiacally protecting your every electoral gain until they slip through your fingers. 

I’ve said it before. Build the movement. The election follows.

Ethics: It’s About Changing Your Soul, Composing, 07/03/2016

I felt like Friday’s post didn’t really get into the meat of how much this anti-racism argument actually hits to the core of the ethical ideas I’ve developed in my non-fiction writing. 

It stuck pretty solidly with the framework of Antonio Negri’s stories about Pasolini’s and Moravia’s trips to India. But it never got beyond the level of talking about that story. I wanted it to, but frankly, I was pretty tired when I was writing that one. 

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity deals with this at the end of its narrative. After wandering through the different inadequate attempts from academic philosophy to figure out what environmentalist morality should be or is,* it ends up concluding that this isn’t quite the right question to ask.

One thing, of many, that I wanted to do with Ecology,
Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is make clear that
environmentalism wasn't necessarily about the
rejection of technology or urbanity per se.

* This is a problem with philosophy as a wider tradition – the unfortunately common belief that the discipline is after universal truths that you discover through reflection and argument alone. In other words, the truths of environmentalist morality, if we truly discover them, have always been true. Where I think those truths came to be once humanity became capable of serious and seriously fast ecological destruction.

The individual principles or moral imperatives about living in a more ecologically sustainable way don’t actually matter. What counts is that we transform ourselves to think and act more ecologically than egotistically. Change ourselves ethically, and the moralities will follow.

There will be lots of environmentalist moralities. There already are, actually. And if everyone becomes an environmentalist, there will be many more than there are now. When environmentalism is the top priority of our moral thinking, we’ll all discover different routes to live that ideal.

It’s the same when we deal with racism. I mean, the two problems – ecological destruction and the ideologies of racism – are incredibly different in their content. But I’m talking at a super-abstract level here about the potential in humanity for radical ethical transformation.

At that context, the process is basically the same – transformation of who we are and how we think in our instinctual, habitual aspects. In our most everyday, innocuous moments, we’re totally different people than we used to be. This process of transforming yourself is the essence of political change. 

That’s how I end Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I’ll explore that whole process explicitly, from start to some kind of finish, in Utopias. 

These two books of philosophy – one written and published, the other still inchoate and largely immaterial – are at the centre of more than just my own writing and publishing projects. Their ideas inform my work in politics. 

I remember reading Knut Hamsun as a novelist who
could give me some ideas about how to approach
environmentalist living. But his writing and ideas are
sadly more that of a broken romantic (and Romantic),
as well as being disturbingly sexist in his literary
themes and racist in his everyday life. Pan was a
beautifully written novel, though.

Right now, that’s the Syria Film Festival and its promotion of rights for refugees and war migrants, and my involvement with the New Democratic Party, trying to inject the energy of contemporary social movements back into the organization. 

Art about people who are frequently demonized in more socially conservative conversations help puncture stereotypes and delusions about migrants and refugees. Thinking along with Negri, it helps people see folks they considered utterly alien to themselves as actually having much in common – a desire for peace, prosperity, and democracy. 

Canada’s modern social movements – particularly Idle No More, our chapters of Black Lives Matter, and Basic Income – are about radically reorienting how each of us understands ourselves. Our whole identity transforms. 

And I’m taking this concept to the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings this May in Calgary. There, I’m presenting a morning-long panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. I’ll not only discuss its philosophical themes and methods, but also the implications for philosophy as a profession, discipline, and tradition.

I’ve been going through a lot of financial difficulties lately as I try to get my new career as a business communicator and a writer off the ground. It made me think I should cancel my panel, until friends and former colleagues from my academy days impressed on me what an accomplishment it is to land a panel of this size at the CPA when you don’t even have a university position at all. 

The short version, because this post is already running longer than I’d planned. If philosophy is to regain its public relevance, it has to leave its academic rabbit-holes behind – stop the norms of argument and increasingly technical debate.

Philosophy as a tradition has to be about bringing the most profound cognitive powers of humanity to political activism – about seeing the depth and breadth of change that humanity can bring to ourselves. 

And then do it!