"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.

• • •

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.”

We Do Need Governance, But Can Do Without Sovereignty

I just finished reading my friend Bernie Wills' book Believing Weird Things. I’m writing a review of it at Social Epistemology, but today’s monologue will work through some of my initial reactions to what he had to say. As well, I’m going to see what can come out of playing Bernie’s ideas off some arguments from Antonio Negri’s latest book Assembly, available in intelligent bookshops and online stores near you.

So the last two essays of the fourteen in Believing Weird Things were published on the open-access side of Social Epistemology early this year. They confront different aspects of the resurgence of nationalist politics in Europe and the Americas. 

I’ll expand a little more on this in my official review, of course. But the last essay, “Conservatism: The End of An Idea” made me think of a curious idea. It wasn’t something he said, but something he never said.

The essay identified and explored the nihilism driving all the most radically destructive forms of extremism. 

Since the show is called Radical Democrats Radio, I thought I’d at least consider the implications for the brand. 

If I can distill the argument to a single sentence – Bernie saw the nihilism of nationalist right and anarchist left ultimately leading to the same ends. The radical nationalist replaces rule of law with fascist kleptocracy. The radical anarchist replaces rule of law with social chaos.

Here’s my problem with this idea. I think it departs from the material situation we’re in, veering a little too conceptual. 

In the actual political situation of Europe and the Americas in 2018, our popular political conflicts are realigning into a new order. 

The general right wing blends two ideologies: 1) economic libertarianism that enables cronyism and kleptocracy, 2) xenophobic nationalism. The particular flavour of xenophobia in a country, is usually cobbled together from what’s available. 

For example, xenophobes in the United States are deepest dedicated to being anti-Hispanic and anti-Black, and Islamophobia is a bold new vector of aggressive racist paranoia. They’ve resurrected their fear-mongering anti-communist messaging to describe anything in favour of a welfare state, environmentalism, or social liberalism in general. The most extreme xenophobes are more marginalized Nazis.

I say more marginalized because you can’t say k-i-k-e on FOX. At least not yet. So I’m speaking relatively.

Bernie’s right about that designation. So what about the left? 

Well, I’ve hung out in some pleasant anarchist communes. But they aren’t exactly networked into the new progressive mainstream. Because the conservative mainstream includes open dedicated racists like US Representative Steve King, FOX News’ Tucker Carlson, Presidential Advisor Stephen Miller, and President Donald Trump.

Today’s new alignment in the progressive left is toward a new social democracy that includes ecological priorities in its economics, and a cosmopolitan ethnic, religious, sex, and gender freedom in its cultural liberalism. 

An essay that seeks to diagnose our times leans too heavily on a concept instead of the real. That’s my main problem with that last essay in the collection. 

Yet. I have to say yet. There is a very subtle kind of opposition to the state that the 21st century social democrats of the West share with the most nitrous-addled anarchist shack-dweller. It’s the opposition to sovereignty.

Sovereignty is a conceptual framework of what governments are for. But a government can be organized according to a lot of different conceptual frameworks. Sovereignty is an ideology that unites two principles – 1) Borders become sanctified; 2) A state’s borders create a united social entity, the nation.

This is what Negri diagnoses. Sovereignty ideology defines the purpose of the state as maintaining the population in order. So the primary institutions of the state are the police and military.

The new social democratic vision defines the purpose of the state real economic and personal freedom. Everyone has the capacity and opportunities to make a decent living and avoid indebtedness. Everyone has the right to live however and wherever they want. 

What are the institutions of a state with those priorities? It’s not keeping order. It’s about preserving the lives and dignity of the population. Those institutions would be public health infrastructure, social security, schools and universities. 

This wouldn’t be a sovereign state that prioritizes social order. It would be a people’s state that prioritizes social dignity. 

Political Strategy Without Leaders, 04/12/2018

When Occupy first blew up, the most tiresome, empty-headed critique was that one question, over and over. “Who are their leaders? What is their concrete agenda?”

Exactly the wrong question, I realized after maybe a week of thinking on it myself. I never participated in an Occupy movement as a member. I was a visitor, happy to see that we still had space for rebellion. And I knew from my experience that the space itself was the point.

It was a movement to bring people together, exchange ideas and philosophies, and make a space where rebellion was possible. The point was to assert the possibility of rebellion in the West.

Never forget what I mean when I talk about the West: the lands and cultures of globalizing colonial empire, that started in the 1500s. It’s an entire set of cultures and institutions that have been shaped by the desire to justify worldwide conquest.

Can you transform a culture so radically in a single generation, a single place, a single organization led by one person? We make statues of individual people – Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh. We celebrate what they achieved, and how they inspired people. We call them leaders.

They changed laws and governments. But it takes more than the organization of just one social movement to transform the moralities of a population of millions. The 1964 Civil Rights Act did not end racism in America.

Imagine the force you'd need to transform a culture that had been developing for hundreds of years, to have a totally different character. Turning a concept of virtue as conquest and superiority all over the West into mutual inclusion and equality. That task is way beyond the work of one generation, let alone one person. One leader.

That was the ontological point of Antonio Negri’s concept of assembly, which he writes about with Michael Hardt in the book called Assembly. An assembly is a social force that can grow in power and longevity enough to transform the morality of an entire culture.

Even when the institutions of that culture – police, security forces, spy agencies, churches, governments, laws, schools – turn against such a social force, that force has the potential to overthrow and revolutionize those institutions.

Does it always, every time? Oh hell no! Individual political movements are crushed, but the force itself can survive as a story, an idea, a few books that still sell really well. The single biggest corporation in the world sees no need to censor Marx from the online store. They sell everything just shy of the Turner Diaries too.

So ideas continue in all directions, in favour of a lot of different moralities. Moralities of conquest and freedom are always in conflict. An assembly, in its loosest form, is a morality – the concepts that channel our desires into action, action that crafts our desires.

One of Negri and Hardt’s tasks in Assembly was working out how to channel that resilient social power of the mass movement in thought and action. Leaders, it’s said, are needed to formulate strategy. Generals overlooking the map. And the ordinary people of their organizations are the soldiers. Leadership meant plotting from a position detached from the action.

That’s a dualist way of thinking about the nature of political and social movements. It separates action from thought.

Assembly merges them. So when you think about social movements as self-directed, leaders aren’t your generals. They become figureheads, spokespeople who follow the moral directions that are developed among the ordinary people.

Regular activists develop strategies for outreach and conversation (and moral conversion) specific to the needs of their own territories. Who knows a place better than the people who live there?

Certainly not some egomaniac game show host. Certainly not some over-insulated multi-millionaire career political party leader.

I’m talking in that last example about Hillary Clinton. I now have one more Festivus grievance against her as a politician, and that’s her new advocacy for caving to the white nationalist movement on immigration in the hopes that they’ll leave the rest of us alone.

Clinton’s 21st century update of appeasement ran in the Guardian last week. It’s appeasement by focus group. Having identified what message encourages the most enthusiasm from the supporters of nationalist parties, she says that we can win their votes by also becoming nationalist parties.

It’s an absurd, ridiculous, and frankly stupid idea. Do you really think that someone who hates Hillary Clinton as much as a dedicated anti-immigration Republican would vote for her? Even if she personally suffocated a four-year-old Honduran girl with tear gas, he’d call it a false flag. Just like the Sandy Hook massacre and the moon landing.

Even beyond this, the real problem with Clinton’s approach in that Guardian article is that she thinks that her DC focus groups can tell people what to think so that they will vote for who they want to. The ones who pay for the focus groups.

That’s not how you lead a democratic movement. Here’s how.

You don’t. The movement is the leader – ordinary people percolating ideas through society that change our culture’s entire morality, one social network node at a time.

Revolution Is Automatic for the People, 28/11/2018

Hey, everyone. So I'm returning to the blog as a place to store my old monologue scripts for Radical Democrats Radio in a single publicly accessible place. My blog served as a place where I could examine ideas and pass through them again, refining them and better understanding their implications and relationships. 

When I started the podcast, these scripts tended to vanish into the ether. So I'm throwing them up here now, for my reference, and your perusal. 

• • •

Lenin on the Rostrum, by Aleksandr Gerasimov, 1929

From 21/11/2018

I'm doing some interesting philosophy reading at the moment. Downloaded a pdf of Vladimir Lenin’s What Is To Be Done?, and it has me thinking about methods of social change. 

Democratic revolutions are always anti-elitist in some genuine sense. Unfortunately at the moment, Western nationalist messaging has gotten a tight hold on the word. So it’s difficult to talk about “the elites” without people hearing you say “liberals” or “the Jews” anymore.

I MANIFESTLY DO NOT INTEND THIS, BY THE WAY.

When I say “elites” and “elitism,” I’m literally talking about the hyper-wealthy class – individuals and families whose personal wealth numbers in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, and whose properties and businesses have revenues of billions. Plus the groups of politicians and bureaucrats who govern states and international organizations, who do the bidding of this hyper-wealthy class.

Oligarchy is the word.

Basically, the modern left is about organizing against oligarchy. The open question is how you do it. 

Over the next few episodes of Radical Democrats Radio, I’ll explore a theoretical approach to the practical work of organizing that aligns itself to our contemporary technology and communications media. This will be a walk through some of the concepts in the latest book by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Assembly.

If this segment is mostly about Negri, why did I bring up Lenin at the beginning? Because What Is To Be Done? is a classic work of radical socialist activism that unites theory and practice in an analysis of what methods work for which goals, and which of those goals are genuinely the best means of ending oligarchy in our economy and society. 

In some ways, Lenin is a productive complement to be reading while I’m writing monologues for the show about Negri. Among many of the traditional communists I’ve interacted with over the years, Lenin’s theoretical works – in particular, What Is To Be Done? – have been important touchstones for their own activism. 

And a lot of that activism has failed.

What Is To Be Done? was written, in part, as an instruction manual – arguing for what to do and what not to do. You can adapt the conceptual arguments about that to the present, very different, world of communication we live in today. But the manual itself is a study in historical irrelevance.

That’s why my turn to Negri as I read Lenin works in a pretty trippy way. Negri and Hardt, in their collaborations, have developed a complex set of concepts to understand how social movements develop without leaders. Assembly tackles the problem of leaderless activism directly.

Lenin makes such a great contrast because, despite his emphasis on empowering and educating the entire population of workers to join the anti-oligarchy movement, he still emphasizes the necessity of leaders. Guerillas. The hardest of the hard core.

An elite within an anti-elitist movement. Can you overcome the viciousness of this paradox? That’s what Assembly tackles.

For a political movement to succeed, it needs to institutionalize itself. It has to change governance and economic institutions, or straight-up destroy them and replace them with new ones. But leaderless movements have a really hard time building institutions. Horizontal organizing creates swarms in protest, mobilizes a population to destroy institutions. 

Horizontal organizing most easily organizes an explosion. When that political explosion is powerful enough to topple a government, a regime, an entire institution, we have a revolution. When it falls short of that energy . . . well, as a Syrian or an Egyptian what happens.

Creating institutions requires channelling the energy of a successful revolution to build new institutions. New ways of running society. Institutions that can encourage, enforce, educate, and accustom people to new norms. New moralities of thinking about and interacting with government, with political leaders, with those very institutions. 

Here’s the paradox of democracy. Pure democracy is a revolution that constantly rebels against established order in the name of more freedom. Yet we need institutions to teach us that if we shout for freedom, we’re shouting for more than its name. Quite often, a shout for freedom is a shout to be enslaved. 

Democracy always stands against sovereignty. It stands against violence and coercion that expects its authority to be accepted universally. But building and maintaining institutions requires leadership – requires authority, coercion, keeping membership in line. Even a virtuous institution is an authority.

Is pure democracy possible if it permits no authorities? If not, then is it best to give up on democracy entirely? 

Resignation or revolution. 

The Anxiety of Having to Work For a Living, Research Time, 13/06/2018

We think of the millionaire – or billionaire these days – businessman as the bold entrepreneur. A fearless experimenter. We hear the rhetoric all the time, and have for years. The startup business is where people take risks – develop new ideas – transformative new ventures.

Can't spell adventure without venture (capital), after all.

Look, I know that wasn’t even funny. It wasn’t supposed to be. I just want to make one brief point that I found very insightful – it appeared in Jeremy Gilbert’s book on the history of Cultural Studies, and Antonio Negri’s new book Assembly.

The will to become epochal is equally inspirational and ridiculous.

Entrepreneurial culture is a homogenizing force, risk-averse to the point of cowardice. Their fear is a psychological affect of life in capitalistic economies. It’s the fragility of the wealthy.

The entrepreneurs we lionize in our culture are those few who’ve taken great risks and been incredibly successful. They’ve transformed our culture with new technologies and business models. For better or, from many perspectives, worse.

But that’s only a very small number of people. They were uncommon, not just in their luck but their personalities. Every biography of a legendary entrepreneur is fascinating because they are genuinely remarkable, singular personalities. Brilliant to the point of mysticism, ruthless to the point of infamy, driven to the point of mania.

Such people are rare. Very rare.

So what about all those thousands of people I see in shared office spaces all over Toronto?

Graphic designers. Intellectual property lawyers. Call centre. Dudes developing an app to create insurance packages for you. A really good SEO guy.

But innovators? People out to transform the structure of an entire economic sector? An entire global economy? My buddy is a really good SEO guy, but that is not his goal. Dude just wants to pay off the mortgage on his condo, maybe pump out a kid or two with his wife in a couple of years.

Only a few people understand how rare that combination of the
inspirational and ridiculous truly is in society. So rare you can, for
the most part, only find it in fiction. Usually, they're the
supervillains. The fictional versions too.

The losers of a rat race die in poverty. That’s the problem with the rat race of a new liberal economy. It doesn’t actually empower most people to innovate their way to a bold new future. Desperation drives people to anxiety and heart disease, not creativity and risk. When you know you can lose the mortgage on a bad bet, you’re less likely to make bets at all. You’ll just be desperate for some security.

This is how most people live under our economic system. It’s a desperation that breeds poor decision making, anxiety that perverts reason with constant worry. People do not take risks when they are terribly worried, unless they’re so brilliant, ruthless, and driven that they can drown worry out with the raw screams of a sustained explosion of all-consuming volcanic will.

My buddy is a really good SEO guy, but I don’t think he’s really capable of that kind of thing. I haven’t asked him yet, but I’m pretty sure he’d agree.

When a dense theorist* talks about how capital is a homogenizing force, this is one of the actual mechanisms they’re talking about. The anxiety that quiets most people into complacent, frightened, risk-averse, desperate conformists whose judgment has been warped into thinking selfishness is a virtue.

* In both senses of the term.

Concepts express life at its most abstract. A good philosopher unfolds her concepts into reality, not more and more ideas.

How Many Ways Are There to Read Someone? Composing, 03/04/2018

Since I was 25, I’ve worked in different capacities – and different pay as well – as a researcher in the humanities. My orientation was always through philosophy, which has been a solid set of frameworks to guide a trip through material from a lot of different domains of human knowledge.

My work has always had that trans-disciplinary, practical orientation from the first time I got seriously serious about it. When I was a much younger person,* I had my problems that interested me most, yes. But it was only ten years ago that I started thinking about philosophical writing as a vocation as well as part of my career.

* And my early 20s feels like I was a very, very much younger person. Not always in a good way, either.

A while ago, I was talking about starting a YouTube project with a
friend of mine whose philosophical perspective is solidly rooted
in the concepts of Georg Hegel, and I know after five years of
friendship that he isn't going to budge. No matter how much I might
try. I haven't been able to put much energy into it because I'm in
the middle of moving apartments, and it's a bit of a mess right now.

I think that orientation, which I found really productive for my creative sensibilities, caused me some problems in the search for work in universities. It was difficult to fit my work in established labels and sub-disciplines.

I’ve seen friends with more conventional research orientations land tenure-track positions that are secure, prestigious, and pretty well-paid. Granted, I’ve also seen those friends find those positions in smaller or more homogeneous cities and towns where I would have been uncomfortable.

My strangeness would have made me very lonely in some of the places where my friends found work.
• • •
These days, I can pretty easily say that most of my philosophical work is in political theory and political economy. My research and concepts stretch across different domains, but that’s their locus.

Bringing different theories and thinkers into a philosophical project means figuring out how the central concepts fit the trajectory of your thinking, and where they stand in the territory of relations among all the other concepts, influences, and empirical research material that make up your own project.

That was a long sentence, but I’m not sure how to split it up just yet to make it more readable. Maybe just read it slowly again if you find it weird. This is a Composing post, so I’m experimenting a little bit more.

Another of the books I read to mine for concepts in the territory of thinkers around Gilles Deleuze was Deleuze’s Philosophical Apprenticeship. Michael Hardt wrote it. While I like his work with Antonio Negri, there’s a reason I never tag him in my posts on the books they wrote together.

Hardt is a keen thinker and a solid writer. But his ideas are too normal. Negri is the strange one, and Hardt keeps him grounded. That’s great for a big, messy project like their Empire quadrilogy, because it needs to stay connected to the gritty reality of political economy.

Just because I think many fundamental elements of the way
we each think are utterly incompatible, that doesn't mean I can't
run a good YouTube show with him. See, I disagree with the
premise of Hardt's book pretty clearly. Yes, you can engage
with a dominant thinker as an antagonist, try to find a model
for your own thinking that doesn't even coincidentally touch
on concepts that are even like his. I'm pretty sure he's right
that Deleuze actually did think this way about Hegel. But I
don't think that "the primary antagonism" is the necessary
seed of great philosophical work.

But he also needs Negri if his work is going to fly in a direction more creative than fairly straightforward scholarship or investigative fact-gathering.

Let me put it to you this way. Hardt opens the book with a description of how he’s going to interpret Deleuze’s development as a philosopher – “recognize the object and terms of the primary antagonism.”

An original thinker develops creatively by starting from reaction – there’s a mainstream set of presumptions or damn-near-omnipresent influence that she rebels against. In Deleuze’s case, so says Hardt, that philosophical enemy is Hegel.

He spends the book exploring many different directions Deleuze tried out in his early career to overcome the pervasive influence of Hegel-inspired thinking in France’s intellectual scene.

While that is one of the many things Deleuze was doing in his earlier, difficult years, that’s only one thing. Yeah, it’s a really important trajectory of Deleuze’s thinking. But it wasn’t the only thing going on. When I read Hardt’s book, it felt reductive – like he was pulling back the curtain to say, “This is what’s been going on all along!”

I'm always hesitant about that method. It smacks of intellectual territorial pissing, of Hardt claiming that this is what the thought of Gilles Deleuze is really all about.

But one of Deleuze’s main messages to philosophers was he wanted his work to contain multiplicities – that there were many, many different strands to analyze and directions to explore along with him, with the concepts he worked on for us. Don’t try to fit his ideas in one definition. Stay strange.

Tony on Gil II: How Politics Begins in Thought, Jamming, 05/03/2018

As the principle has been received popularly these days, it’s been kind of a shit show. A disaster. The centrepiece of contemporary reactionary conspiracy. And at the centre of some serious anti-Semitism too.

Yet it is actually true that radical social and political change begins with culture, with how people understand themselves. That includes what resources they have available to understand themselves, whether or not they use them.

Here’s how Antonio Negri put it in his essay on the thought of Félix Guattari – The best way to deal with the death of Man is to celebrate the self-creation of people.

Is nihilism the only response to the impossibility of universal
knowledge?

So what does that actually mean? Let’s unpack it.

The “death of Man” is the old way of thinking about the birth of what’s called postmodernism. There was once, so the story goes, a universal concept of the human that everyone could believe in – the living embodiment of universal reason itself.

Faith in the Man of European culture as the highest yet expression of universal reason peaked in the 19th century, as this image of the universal Man justified the global imperialist occupations of the time. But it was also the heart of Westerners’ conceptions of themselves as individuals and as a culture. Even subordinated people like women, the poor, or well-off members of racialized groups believed it.

But the scientific underpinnings of this self-image – Western Man as the most advanced organism on Earth – began to slip as the implications of the truth of evolution began to be understood in popular culture.

Life developed contingently, and reason was fundamentally instrumental, if not a spandrel. The Western image of Man was teetering from his superiority’s justification. Not only was there no purpose in Nature itself, but such a purpose wasn’t the dominion of Earth and all other peoples.

Frankly, it's easier to think of yourselves as the highest achievement
of the human race when you have everyone who's different from
you treating you like a divinely appointed king.

I’m not going to get into the details of what effects came immediately from this crisis of faith in Western Man. We’ll be here for the length of a thousand* dissertations. I want to get to the last few decades, when the broadly existentialist tradition that flowed from this idea finally started getting creative about how to handle it.

* At least, just to get a vague sense of all that was going on.

Think about the contemporary creative approach in terms of knowledge. What kind of systems of thought and investigations could you use to achieve genuinely universal knowledge?

Here’s the kind that was the only sensible answer to that question during the heyday of that concept of Man – a single, simple field of knowledge that encompassed all the variety of Earth. Lay aside Denis Diderot’s actual thinking, and consider the popular image of the original Encyclopedia – all the facts and truths of the world in a single compendium. One house of knowledge.

If you lose the possibility of that achievement, then you lose your bearings. Compared to that one all-enfolding universality, everything else falls short. I mean, of course it would. Less than perfection can never be perfect. By that standard, no human knowledge can measure up. True may as well be false, good and evil are meaningless, there’s no right or wrong.

But only the fool says in his heart that because there is no universal, there is no truth or good. It only means that there’s no universal, truth, or good.

Jomo Kenyatta in a gathering of Mau Mau liberation fighters. What
was good for Kenya wasn't good for Britain, living demonstration
that not every approach to the world can harmonize together.

This doesn’t reduce to any of this “Good for me and Good for you” relativism that you hear from self-entitled 18-year-old dudes taking their first philosophy course and trying to get the prof to justify their dickishness. At least, that’s where I always heard it.

See, that relativism shut people up in themselves – in their own subjectivity – much deeper than they really are. It ignores the fact that we all share a material world. So our different conceptions of truth and good – as individuals, as cultures, as mass media empires – will overlap and influence each other.

We live in society, in relationships with each other. We all figure out similar problems in the ordinary and profound parts of our lives. We communicate.

We harmonize a whole bunch of different approaches to the world. They overlap and reciprocate ideas, among so many other ways of influencing each other. The best way to organize how to get as many approaches to knowledge as possible working together is so that everyone who has something productive (or at least potentially productive) can contribute to the overall project for knowledge and truth.

The only approaches not permitted are those that denigrate and devalue other approaches. It smacks too much of the false arrogance that there’s one universal truth, and that of course there’s one Man that expresses it.

Tony on Gil I: Anticipating Conspiracies, Research Time, 02/03/2018

Here's a nerdy thing I’m enjoying about all the research of Utopias – a bunch of the key authors knew each other personally and wrote about each other’s work. So when I come across an essay that Antonio Negri wrote about the ideas of Gilles Deleuze, it’s going to have a little more significance than any other category.

Just like the Isabelle Stengers essay I was writing about yesterday, only I’ve read more of Negri’s work so far than Stengers’.

If Deleuze and Guattari had become as
prominent in American humanities
curriculums as the Frankfurt School had,
would Andrew Breitbart even have done
any of the radical anti-progressive activism
that defined his life? A butterfly flaps its
wings and a reactionary movement forms.

So Antonio Negri wrote an essay about Gilles Deleuze. It ranges across their political philosophy in two ways. It discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s own concepts, but it also describes some of the historical factors of how they were received.

In the case Negri discusses, America, it’s how they weren’t received. Because Deleuze and Guattari’s contribution to progressive political philosophy was, for a long time, squeezed out of public prominence by the Frankfurt School.

Historically, it was a matter of contingent historical connection. The Frankfurt School thinkers who survived the Second World War settled in the United States – Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse. Their writing was already prominent enough that they could land professors’ positions at the major elite schools.

Not everybody could do it, but the ones who didn’t seemed to be more effective in inspiring revolution against injustice.

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse ended up locking down intellectual influence on the university-educated progressive left in America. Their books were the basis of critical political studies in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.

This fact is at the centre of why “cultural marxism” has taken hold as a conspiratorial concept in reactionary circles these days. It began from Andrew Breitbart’s misreading of Adorno – he saw the philosopher’s message as saying that social and political change begins from changing the culture, not from the top-down with state control institutions.

As a result, Breitbart shaped his extremist libertarian media outlet with an ambitious mission – change the culture through media activism. His goal was to counter the influence of Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Brietbart and his followers saw these writers as the communist Jews* who spent decades spreading ideologies of state socialism – cultural marxism – into the young generations through their books and the humanities professors who taught them.

* Because this is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, just so we have that clear. The Elders of Zion are now a bunch of elderly university professors.

Another irony is that Negri, Guattari, Deleuze, and
many others who built the philosophy of radical
democracy like Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe,
and Bifo Berardi were all actual political activists.

Breitbart has, by all accounts, been incredibly successful. His brand of frothing anti-communism consumes conservative circles today. They make monsters out of people who support ordinary welfare state policies like government-provided health insurance.

Negri wrote this essay before Breitbart Media’s brand of extremism – rabidly anti-socialist white nationalism – took hold of American culture. But he provides an ironic point through his spin on the Frankfurt School. Even as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse identified the only route to change society in cultural change, they also considered liberatory cultural change impossible.

Theo, Max, and Herb analyzed all the vectors of cultural repression – economic, political, psychological, sociological – and found it omnipresent. It’s actually impossible to find any breathing room in cultural repression to start a positive movement that will actually overthrow the repressive relationships themselves.

The most a real revolution in state or economic power can achieve is changing the character of repression. As Marcuse put it, capitalist vectors of repression reduce people to a single dimension of activity and self-conception. It becomes impossible to conceive of any positive alternative.

So all you can do in the face of a capitalist framework of life is critique and question. Negri identifies the quietism and hopelessness at the heart of Frankfurt School philosophy. Writing more than a decade ago, Negri finds an irony for me – Breitbart didn’t realize that, for all the critique and questions, the writers who became his Elders of Zion already considered him the winner.

More next week.

Is Freedom Really Free? III: Fairness Peace and Fear, Research Time, 14/07/2017

When I was looking back through Antonio Negri’s Empire to prepare yesterday’s post, I found a beautiful line.

“Disobedience to authority is one of the most natural and healthy acts. To us it seems completely obvious that those who are exploited will resist and – given the necessary conditions – rebel.”

It’s a very deep truth about humanity. We rebel in the face of exploitation – we fight for our exit.

The very real division between libertarian-leaning and anarchist-leaning folks these days is over what constitutes exploitation. If you take Negri’s lead, exploitation is a matter of an entire economic system – the global network of relations that constrain the choices of millions of people into a series of shit deals.

One (among so, so many) humiliating result of
signing a contract with Donald Trump. I still can't
believe he's actually the President of the United
States. For fuck's sake.

The libertarian has a much narrower conception of where exploitation could arise. Look at Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, any of the trolling social media activists, and a lot of the popular communications coming out of the major liberal think tanks today.*

* Before you have any conniptions, yes, I do consider libertarianism the logical extension of liberal values about politics and economics. It’s the trajectory of any individualist logic. It needs leavening with values of community and universal brotherhood to avoid its own perversity.

Friedman, early in his great popular work of philosophy Capitalism and Freedom, describes the utopian liberal ideal. He describes a society where there’s barely a need for a government because the community can govern itself through free, voluntary associations and agreements.

That does sound genuinely wonderful. In a society where no one wanted to hurt each other and no one ever got hurt, we wouldn’t need government. The idea needs a whole hell of a lot of development. But that’s what the book is for. I'm writing a blog post well before I'm ready to get this thing written.

Instead, I want to focus tonight on a more critical question about Friedman and the libertarian perspective in general. Why does Friedman think it’s good to get rid of government? What’s the reason for his distrust?

Conveniently, it’s in his book. Yes, the most peaceful way to construct a society is through voluntary associations and agreements between all the individuals in that community. But he’s extremely pessimistic about whether an entire community of people can reach genuine agreement in real time.

No constitution is ever accepted by literally everyone. Not even the current (and second) United States constitution. The contemporary right wing in America may worship their dogmatic icon of this document with all the mystic rage of a prophet. There was plenty of opposition. Just read The Federalist Papers and you’ll see that.

But Friedman's focus on government as the only significant force
of constraint on people doesn't hold up to our individual
experiences. In everyday hypocrisy, everyday cruelty, we still
have to fight for our rights. Even if it's just the right to party.

Humans are volatile, changeable, and very different from each other in a lot of different ways – interests, culture, histories, positions, personalities. In all that diversity, agreement in real time at one moment is impossible.

So a society of humans can only be peaceful in a context where our variety is tolerated – everyone must be able to believe, do, and be whatever they want without any force trying to constrain them. Any force or movement that tries to make anyone agree to anything but tolerating disagreement is oppressive.

He counts among those oppressive forces the government. But Friedman also counts the bonds of community, family, and any kind of social solidarity for any purpose or ideal than leaving each other alone.

The existence of the state, says Friedman, is built on a false premise. That falsehood is the presumption that an institutional decree alone is all you need to produce harmony and peace in society. In reality, negotiation never finishes and will never finish.

In a sense, that’s true. That sense is at the heart of libertarianism’s and liberalism’s appeal to anyone who does value freedom. No matter how limited it might be.

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.

Unity & Freedom I: Democracy Corrupt at Birth, Research Time, 16/08/2016

I sometimes think that states on the European model were built for empire, right from the start. That’s not just because Antonio Negri explained in Empire how imperialism is basically the same governance structures of the nation-state on a global scale. 

I mean, my uptake of Negri’s arguments are a big part of that. I first read Empire in 2007, so these ideas have been part of my political thinking for nearly a decade. But they were gestating through my academy years. Only recently did I decide to act on them, getting involved with critical activist voices.

We can't ignore it any longer.

Maybe the times decided for me, even if I was a little late.

Contrasting what I've read of Negri with what I've been reading of Etienne Balibar is interesting, though. I remember reading about how Balibar is considered a liberal counterweight to Negri’s ideas in this broad field of left-wing European academic political thinkers. 

Yet I find their premises and traditions quite similar. At least philosophically. Balibar just seems to have a little more faith in institutions like the European Union to revolutionize how people think of themselves ethically. That is, as communities, nations, ethnicities, identities.

I think the EU had that potential, even though by now it’s been thoroughly squandered. I’d rather we keep a strong memory of what was lost than believe that wrecked potential never existed in the first place. Otherwise, we’d lose all hope that we can do better.

If you read the link above, Yascha Mounk writes that the most powerful political movement in Western society right now is about stripping the liberal values from democracy. 

What he calls illiberal democracy keeps the institutional levers of democracy like elections while enforcing internal racial and class hierarchies, excluding immigrants, and stifling critical speech and political activism. I’d call it nationalism by ballot box.

There's a deeper structural problem that Mounk’s insightful and terrifying analysis doesn’t dig for, though. He takes for granted that the state is the natural home for liberal democracy. He doesn’t hit on Negri’s point: that the state relies on unquestioned authority to function, and so is structurally anti-democratic. 

Being a good citizen of a state means following orders, doing what you're told. The fundamental gesture of democracy – democracy’s birth in every such moment, really – is “Fuck you.”

They should never have let us listen to this in ninth
grade. Now we'll never do what they tell us. Except for
the ones who always do anyway.

One aspect of Balibar’s analysis in his essays on the (philosophical) nature of the EU focusses on the state as an exclusionary body. I discussed this a little bit yesterday. But the details are important. 

The European model of nation-state has a peculiar history, which only appeared like the universal model for government because European nation-states has powerful militaries that literally conquered the Earth a couple of hundred years ago. 

And that history makes European culture terrible at handling any kind of immigration – even in countries like Italy where immigration can only help the society and economy, thanks to their low birth rates.

Modern Europe's precursor actually was a unified identity: Christendom. Much of its identity forged through military conflicts with Muslim empires and ongoing persecution of Jewish and Roma minorities. As Christendom fractured among internal conflict, the nation-state emerged as the new institution of peace and unity.

However, this did nothing to bring peace to the region, since the nation-states had even narrower identities than the religious definition of European society. Nation-states had clearly defined borders, and those borders were for people with shared ethnic-linguistic identities. All others were excluded.

As long as states define themselves as nations, there will always be those left behind. Exclusion is necessary. And total. Just how total? . . . Hoo, boy. . . . To Be Continued

Beyond the Academy's Style: An Outline, Composing, 18/07/2016

I’m about halfway through writing the draft of an article that will appear at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. It’s a reply to one of the many pieces analyzing the different aspects of Brexit that SERRC co-founder Steve Fuller has published and posted over the last few weeks.

Primarily, it’s a response to his most philosophical article in the bunch: his argument that the best theoretical system to make sense of the Brexit phenomenon is Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of politics as the circulation of elites. I pitched it to Steve and Jim Collier the other co-founder and chief editor, as a Negri-inspired response to his proposition.

At heart, there's a positive argument behind my critique. I don’t write critical essays unless there’s a really strong alternative way of thinking about the same event or idea. I never present it as an either/or. I’d never argue that Fuller is wrong about this, because I think he’s exactly right.

Steve Fuller in his video "What Is Brexit?"

But in terms of what we can learn philosophically, epistemologically, and politically from Brexit, Steve’s insights aren’t comprehensive of all that we can learn about it. When I bounce my own thoughts off his, the illumination makes them more clear. 

That – to me at least – has always been my preferred kind of criticism. In academic philosophy, we were socialized largely to argue against as a form of critique. Disprove. Attack. Tear down. Not my style.*

* ‘Then what were you doing studying and working in philosophy for so long?’ you might ask. It interested me because even though a lot of the journal articles being written and submitted were of that style, the primary texts that were the discipline’s real heritage were largely written in my style. Why join a field if you don’t aspire to the same greatness as its greats?

So what's the lesson I want to take away from Brexit, given the launchpad Fuller’s ideas gave me? My essay is going to explore the epistemic requirements of increasing democracy. 

It begins with my own take on stage setting, describing in my blog-honed tone of intelligent contempt the political movements and jockeying that resulted in Brexit. At the same time, I also give my major takeaways from Fuller’s Pareto-inspired analysis.

Then my interpretation of the rhetoric surrounding the referendum. My most important result is the paradox of considering the Brexit vote morally and politically binding when the UK’s constitution itself – parliamentary sovereignty – fences the referendum into a strictly advisory capacity. 

The reason for this moral/political power is that a referendum is a more democratic state activity than parliamentary sovereignty. The notion that parliament can be sovereign above citizens or residents causes weird paradoxes with democratic ideals. Antonio Negri demonstrates in Multitude that parliamentary representation isn’t really an expression of the general will. 

I very much hope David Cameron doesn't leave behind
a political dynasty. Still, if he did, you could only go up
from his achievements.

Instead, it creates a government of elites that churns more quickly than it used to. The elites now aren’t hereditary aristocrats, but political party operatives and candidates. And you still see the return of hereditary norms. Being Canadian, I’m no stranger to political dynasties of all stripes. 

Rousseau’s idea falls flat on its face once you put it into material practice. In actual parliaments – not just our imaginary and ideal ones – representation builds a barrier between people and their representative. Many layers of institutional mediation.

A referendum doesn’t have that same distance because it’s a direct expression of the will of a people. There are two problems with this. One is temporal, which is that any vote is the expression of a population’s political tendency at the precise time of the vote.

The most important is epistemic. A referendum is political campaign, subject to the same manipulations of public knowledge and the cultural imaginary as any election. And a referendum like Brexit with such high stakes meant that the side with the most desperate, committed partisans were willing to do absolutely anything to win.

That was the Leave campaign, by the way. It was the reason for all the lies about the true nature of EU regulation, single market access, and the mass mobilization of open, aggressive racism. 

Instead of informing and dialoguing with your public on a matter of immense importance, the sides of a referendum campaign have an incentive to become lying demagogues. An ostensibly (or ideally) more democratic route becomes even more corrupted than the creation of a parliamentary elite.

With referendums open to such terrible flaws, is there any democratic alternative for momentous, national-scale decision making? We don’t have one ready to pull out, fully formed, at a moment’s notice. But we can think of one. And I think I have a pretty good idea.

The full potential of political and community organizing.