Two World Orders Burning Up, Research Time, 16/02/2016

Globalization has been a buzzword since I was a kid. But I don’t know how many people really understand what this process actually is. 

Globalization is the end of the power of the state, when the flow of trade, investment, and labour across the Earth moves so fast, with such high volume and intensity, that states can no longer control what happens in their own territory. Unless they want to go the full North Korea and become a basket case.

State armies hit their highest power when they conquered
the world as the engines of imperialism. But they
couldn't last forever.

You read Antonio Negri, like I’m doing, or maybe read any critical history or philosophy of the development of the state. You see a process where autonomous cities and towns were taken under the authority of massive militaries controlled by kings. 

After the kings consolidated their power over formerly free people and against each other, they turned to the rest of the world to find more riches and power. Even in those early days before the kings and elites of Spain, France, Holland, and England cared about any lands overseas, imperialism happened in Europe itself. Imperialism is the consolidation of state control.

That consolidation doesn’t just happen with pure military might. It’s inherently unstable for the same reason workers never respect a boss who does nothing but bully and abuse them. People chafe at the explicit violence of control. 

So the most effective forms of control are ideologies that obscure what our interests – freedom from dictatorial, state, or military control – really are. That’s why we grow up praising our ethnic group, feeling national pride, feeling hatred, fear, and resentment toward different ethnic groups. 

Such people worship their state as the ultimate form of solidarity. It’s a false solidarity because it excludes people on the grounds of a fiction. A false, mutant, violent solidarity, because a working man sees more of himself in common with the pampered oligarchs and heirs of his own nation than the fellow working man of a different colour, language, or culture. But it’s still a solidarity.  

That's why interracial love is such a radical, transformative act. It makes the most fundamental parts of your own life – your family and your children – a living up-yours to values of ethnic purity and violent nationalism. Your very life breaks boundaries.

Globalization breaks boundaries. Even though we may decry its own injustices – its global exploitation more intense than workers have ever been exploited – we can’t understand globalization unless we also accept its real vectors of freedom.

From the anti-globalization protests of Seattle in 1999.

The embrace of exclusive solidarity as a response to globalization trades the violence of nationalism for the violence of exploitation. And a truly global resurgence of imperialism – states with enormous armies conquering whole continents – would destroy globalization. 

Negri acknowledges this, and decades of critical thinkers (Negri particularly cites Rosa Luxemburg) have understood it. Imperialism is about erecting borders and subsuming other lands and peoples within them. Globalization, or as Negri calls it Empire, is about breaking down and eroding borders. 

But it’s too late for a resurgence of imperialism. The First World War was imperialism’s first major moment of self-destruction. Imperialism began with the consolidation of the modern state in the European wars of the 1600s. It came to a crashing halt when those states finally ran up against each other as they parcelled out the world.

Today, we’re dependent on forces beyond the control of any one state for our prosperity and our basic economic functions. I talk to a lot of my friends who, like me, are suffering from shitty economics – jobs are unstable, many underpay, and many of us face serious issues building a livelihood.

Many of us blame the government, either the last one or or the current one, depending on your existing beliefs and proclivities. But when you look at the way our global economy works, it’s really the wrong place to blame. The Prime Minister or Premiers, for example, can’t save the economies of Alberta or Newfoundland from a cratering oil price.

That’s a globalized process. And it’s beyond the control of any one state. The politics that responds to these globalized processes can’t stop at the state alone, if we want it to be effective. We need a truly global movement.

One and All Flow Together IV: The People as State, Research Time, 04/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . I meant to get to this idea yesterday, but my preamble ended up taking damn near the whole post. But here's Negri's basic argument against the core of Hegel’s philosophy and the essence of modernity it expresses.

The core concept of modernity, as far as the purpose of Empire goes, is mediation. As I wrote this weekend. Politically speaking, for our rights to exist, they need a mediating body to recognize those rights, administer them, and protect them.

In recent years, I think Canada has made great progress in
building a conception of the national identity that
genuinely embraces difference. Modern Canada, as a
state and a culture, seems to have (for the most part)
successfully broken ethnicity, nationality, and
cultural continuity from the legitimacy of your
citizenship. All you need to do is accept a particular
democratic morality and political approach.

In other words, we can only be complete individuals acting in the full freedom of our fundamental rights as citizens of a state that recognizes, notarizes, and administers those rights. Our individual freedom requires that we subsume our individuality to the bureaucracy of the state. 

Only in leaving your individuality behind can you be free. 

Now here’s Negri. He interprets the political meaning of Hegel’s entire system of metaphysics. The state of living in absolute knowledge resolves the human sense of alienation from perfection. 

Hegel builds a complex structure of relations among concepts. Reasoning properly leads you from being dumbfounded at the contradictions of the world, to understanding how all of these contradictions perfectly reconcile in the fullness of reason. 

The path to absolute knowledge and its structure has the firm necessity of a logical proof. Because it is one. That's Hegel’s Logic, working through the fundamental structure of universal reason as a logical proof.

And what does this total reconciliation look like in a political context? It's such a deep submission to authority that you subsume your own will into the actions of the nation, the collective ethnic-cultural-linguistic entity of which you've always been a member. 

You just weren't yet rational enough to realize that you were more than a disconnected, alienated individual. 

But this submission of will and subsumption of being is only possible once the nation follows the necessity of reason’s structure to achieve its own absolute knowledge. It's become the administrative engine through which our individual rights can be realized, notarized, and guaranteed.

The state. The nation achieves the culmination of its essence as the state. The individual achieves the culmination of its essence as a citizen. 

You’re subsumed into the collective, but retain your individual rights. They’re guaranteed in all the forms that legitimate your existence as a citizen, whether they’re a birth certificate or a citizenship oath.

Donald Trump at a rally in Mobile, Alabama. Trump's
politics embody most openly the ethnic nationalism of
the United States of America, the vision of that nation
as the culmination and sole legitimate state of a
white European cultural history and people.

Liberation is finished with the citizen in the liberal state that guarantees individual rights.

Sounds fine in the abstract, but look what the state is composed from in the Hegelian picture. It’s the culmination of the logic of nationhood. And all that nationhood implies: historical continuity, cultural continuity, territorial continuity. 

A territory is for one nation alone, throughout its history. Otherwise, you break continuity and you prevent the nation from realizing its highest form (and humanity's highest form) as national unities subsumed into the nation-state.

This is not the foundation of freedom, but of nationalist violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. If you refuse to accept difference into your community, then variation will always be your enemy. This is true in all contexts of human thought and action.

Value unity and conformity over rebellion and difference, and you’ll never have a new idea in your life. You'll stop innovating, stop growing, stagnate into a pool of racist, discoloured, screaming, acid-melted flesh of human toxicity.

Progress comes from rebellion against the rules, restlessness in the face of “how things have always been.” Freaks, visionaries, and immigrants are the fuel of progress and its engine too. 

Freedom is never perfectly realized. The demand for freedom isn’t striving for a perfected state of humanity. Believing that you're perfect is the worst thing anyone can do, because you’ll never change yourself anymore.

Freedom the demand for freedom. It's the struggle against the weight of how things are.

We Are the Collective (or, Damn Sociology Redux), Research Time, 02/04/2015

One of the earliest concepts to have been figured out in network theory is the primary group. In his introductory book on social network theory, Charles Kadushin includes a quote from Charles Cooley, writing in 1909. I’ll include it here in full.

“By primary groups, I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. 

Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a ‘we;’ it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which ‘we' is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.”

When a contemporary person like me reads Hayek
talking about sociologists, this is the image that
comes to mind from his talk of people who
understand humanity as essentially collectives. Yes,
he's that intense about it.

It’s quite a coincidence to have come across this so soon after reading The Road to Serfdom, the foundational text of the modern liberal conservative political movement, which expressed such hostility to the discipline of sociology. The ideology implicit in sociology was so repugnant to Friedrich Hayek, such an egregious insult to human freedom, that his descendants in modern politics (to take the example of my country) consider sociology something you “commit” like a crime, and they destroy the government's ability to conduct detailed sociological studies of its population to provide the ground for policy.

Consider the notion that “one lives in the feeling of the whole,” and that this feeling arises from the everyday associations of our neighbourhood, jobs, families, friendships, and volunteer organizations. Taken at face value, it implies that, because humans are inherently social creatures, we are only complete through our membership in groups. As such, we would not be true individuals. 

Individuality is about disconnection, separating yourself from your neighbours and friends, shedding your relationships and the moral obligations that come with them. Remember Robert Nozick’s story of the community radio show: I have no obligation to produce a radio show for the other members of my community even though they’ve all produced hundreds for me, because as an individual I’m free to do as I wish.

According to a few online encyclopedia articles I found about Cooley’s life and work, this paragraph is widely quoted in sociology textbooks throughout the discipline when introducing people to concepts like social groups and social ties. As such, it’s fantastically influential. When almost all practicing sociologists think on their own cultural narrative of the discipline’s genesis and development, Cooley’s concepts are part of their core self-definition.

The problem with this interpretation, of course, is that there’s an entire book surrounding this quote, Cooley’s influential book Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. Now, I haven’t read this book, so I don’t know what else about its analytic framework would mitigate this strong collectivist interpretation of this quote. However, I’m sure the more detailed study of Cooley’s work would find a more nuanced picture of humanity. 

There are far more interesting things to say about
images of a humanity that's stripped itself of its
individuality than Hayek's scaremongering, like
Phil Sandifer's trippy exploration of Doctor Who's
Cybermen.

Sociology in practice doesn’t claim that the social phenomena and group identities that are the objects of the discipline say all there is to say about humanity. The problem is that because sociological analysis focusses on this, a skeptical outsider could easily claim that sociologists see humanity entirely as collectives, and not as individuals. And they can point to passages like that quote from Cooley that have become canonical in the discipline to justify their accusation.

Yet sociology itself still faces a problem in its origins. A simple point is that collectivist interpretations of human nature were actually quite widespread in the years before the Second World War. It’s entirely possible that Cooley did think in such an extreme collectivist manner, and that it was quite ordinary to do so at the time.

A more complex point is about contemporary sociological education and practice. You see, one thing I learned about sociological education from my sociologist friends and colleagues is that sociologists rarely read the founding texts of their own discipline. I come from philosophy, where many university-based researchers make whole careers out of the interpretation of texts that are centuries old. 

But sociology operates differently. There’s a march to the future in that discipline, a culture of moving to the next problem and the next theory. Even though theoretical roots are old, the classical texts are things to stand on for further theoretical work, not sources to continually plumb for further ideas. 

A concept that was never openly acknowledged at the time can still do work, sneaking into thinking. There can be philosophical unexploded bombs in the history of thought, leaving a whole discipline vulnerable to an external attack that could have been taken care of much more productively had it been an internal critique. The implications of collectivism that radical individualist philosophers and economists see in sociology may be one such conceptual bomb.

How to Ground a Social Order, Composing, 10/07/2014

The grand old Peter Kropotkin.

I finished Mutual Aid last night, and found it fascinating. Kropotkin ended the book with a discussion of the rural and urban mutual aid associations that were growing in his time, particularly voluntary associations for poverty relief, the resurrection of communal gardens, farming fields, and meadows, the use of industrial equipment for agriculture, and the nascent union movement among workers in the cities of contemporary Europe and North America. But the ideas that I found most interesting of all, I described mostly in previous posts, and can’t really think of any way to elaborate them further just now.

Instead, I thought about one rhetorical point that Kropotkin made throughout the book, his rebuke to the notion that any resource held in common among a community will be destroyed. This is the tragedy of the commons, originally described by John Locke and for us, recently described again by Garrett Hardin. The analysis goes that, because each individual will take the most immediate material benefit out of any resource (like a farming meadow, pasture, or fish stock), the actions of all of them without restraint of property right or police will exhaust and destroy the resource beyond renewal. Kropotkin says it’s bunk. So do I.

I spoke yesterday about the relatively recent birth of the concept of the radically individualized person, upon which the argument for private property by the inevitably tragic nature of the commons depends. It defines self-interest to be the same as greed, and that the only person whose welfare any of us would ever really care about is ourselves. Such a social order is defined by the war of each against all, and the coercive and violent institutions that keep the peace against the inevitable dissolution of our society.

The entire argument is flawed because it is an expression of dogma. It appeals to a notion of the individual that we have all become too accustomed to thinking is true without actually testing it against the actual behaviour of people. After all, most of our associations with people around us in our everyday lives have nothing to do with accumulating personal wealth and power at their expense. We do our jobs and associate with our friends and neighbours, and are generally quite kind to each other.

Those who do act in such a way as to ruin common goods and profit at the expense and suffering of others are rare enough that we can identify them for what they are and act accordingly. Hobbes and Locke describe radically free individuals as, essentially, assholes. The vision of humanity that Kropotkin and I hold focusses more on human kindness and altruism than egoistic, self-aggrandizing behaviour.

So how do you ground an institutional social order in this circumstance? The entire Utopias project is ultimately about visions for real social orders, and eventually aims to offer explicitly what I think is the best such kind of order, as many political philosophers have done over the years. The question of law is paramount, but I’m not quite sure of how to engage with it.

Kropotkin himself has some writings on the nature of law which I briefly revisited, and some ideas in Alexandre Lefebvre’s The Image of Law go some way into a Spinozist conception of law which I think could be quite interesting. But there’s an enormous field of legal theory that I don’t know well in detail, and there’s only so much that the Utopias project can do in one shot.

The project has three parts. One is understanding the mechanistic vision of humanity that emerged from the First World War and had its essential formulation in European totalitarianism and the Futurist political philosophy of Filippo Marinetti. The second part describes a machinic vision of humanity, a more hopeful political tradition that has its ground in the metaphysical tradition of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze, the four most prominent among a variety of other thinkers who will supply the conceptual centre of the project.

And the final part will describe the core political features of this new world, essentially a self-organizing, anarchistic politics. This is the most amorphous part of the project at this point, and it’s why I’ve been reading Kropotkin again, and will explore Bakunin, Goldman, and others soon enough, along with, perhaps, a little Marx. But no project is ever truly complete, even when it’s finished.

Anarchistic Philosophical Appetizers, Research Time, 03/07/2014

I’ve missed some days of philosophical reading while I began looking for new steady employment, as my freelance editing gig doesn’t seem to be paying the dividends necessary for my lifestyle (rent, food, internet access, occasionally being able to do things like visit Toronto or buy a book). But I did gather some news regarding the Hobby Lobby decision, which already seems to have completely wrecked any attempt in the Affordable Care Act to provide anything approaching a universal subsidy for any contraceptive services. 

The rights of working people have fallen victim to the
purveyors of . . . macramé.

The legal landscape of the United States now seems to be defined by a series of Supreme Court rulings that, in following through on the conception of corporations as legal persons (that personhood most often expressed in their owners), is on track to completely disenfranchise working people of most of their autonomy. The Court seems, at least to me, to be on track to declaring any attempt of workers to establish independence from the demands of their employers in any aspect of their lives, as illegitimate impositions on the freedom of corporate persons. 

The Hobby Lobby decision treats the rights of employers not to have their religious beliefs infringed as paramount over the right of employees to maintain their autonomy in areas of their lives having nothing to do with the smooth functional operation of the company itself. In light of the very strange historical path the United States seems to be on, I have cracked open the singularly strange Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin, a book that is, in large part, a historical narrative of the evolution of human society from the social forms of insects and wild animals through to the humanity that was modern to the author in the late 19th century.

At my current point in the book, Kropotkin has just begun his account of the nature of tradesmen’s guilds in the medieval cities of Europe, covering a period from the 800s to about the 1500s. You can expect more thoughts on where this historical narrative ultimately goes as I get there. Today, I just want to focus on two ideas.

Idea 1. I find it quite intriguing how Kropotkin deals with the boundary between pre-historic and civilizational humanity: he acts as if it doesn’t exist. And it doesn’t. It’s easy for us to see the humanity of urban civilization as having made a decisive break from the humanity that was more like the animals. It’s why we distinguish the cavemen from the humans who lived under Hammurabi’s Code. It’s why we even have the word ‘pre-historic’ to describe these ancient people. 

Archaeology of the indigenous Americas and other very ancient settlements and movements of the human race has helped disavow people of this idea. If you get a chance to see Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, you definitely should, because it humanizes humans that are generally thought of as less than human. There is a continuous flow of time and development throughout all life on Earth. We break up our species and our planet’s history into stages because we find such segregated eras easier to analyze and understand. But their ability to describe adequately the flux of history is limited.

Idea 2. Getting back to my rage about the Hobby Lobby decision (which is one more reason why I am no longer interested in the possibilities of moving to the United States), I wonder what a thinker like Kropotkin would make of this madness. His history of human civilization in Mutual Aid is one of growing tensions of the forces that accumulate wealth and power in an increasingly corrupted cabal with the drive in humanity of equality before the laws and judgment of our fellows. 

Peasants were much more sophisticated than our modern
stereotypes usually depict.

This is how, as I read yesterday evening, he understands the growth of the medieval cities. The village communities of post-Roman Europe practiced common agriculture, consensual decision making, and settled conflicts by independent community custom. Feudal lords arose when commerce among communities increased, and conflicts arose with no common context of custom for arbitrators to apply. 

The notable families of a confederated region accumulated power through their legal capacities and wealth through fines and taxes. When these lords were unable to defend their villages against invasions from such forces as the Normans, Arabs, and Hungarians, the most prosperous communities built their own walls and eventually developed into legendary cities like Florence and Ghent. 

The American political and legal system is now in another period of flux, when the gap in power between richest and poorest is growing and legal institutions only seem to be protecting those already so powerful that they need no real protection. I went to sleep last night wondering how a nuanced and original thinker like Kropotkin would understand our strange modern era, which is nonetheless continuous with the strange eras of our past. 

Does Name Make Rank or Rank Make Name? Research Time, 10/09/2013

A further idea for political philosophy that follows from the previously discussed set of ideas in the Critique of Dialectical Reason has to do with the relation of individuals to the groups of which they’re part. The perennial problem of this book is that of the collective, the ways in which humans should belong to groups and identify with those groups, or shy away and live as individuals. 

At heart, it’s a perennial question of political philosophy in general. Maybe even THE perennial such question. But I don’t want to get too grandiose in my statements. Mostly because I find grandiosity kind of irritating, the declaration that you’re the only one in the room that’s right. Nonetheless, I think I might be onto something. Consider the basic framework of questions by which Sartre works out the tensions within this idea of the politically active collective, in his example of the revolutionary riots. 

Philosophy tends to be such a serious discipline
that I enjoy juxtaposing its seriousness with
funny pictures of its greatest practitioners. It
makes us all seem more human.

Each individual in a community recognizes the same common threat. At the same time, these individuals perceive that all the other individuals similarly recognize the same threat that you do. Not only are people aware of a common threat, they’re aware of the awareness of their neighbours. So the politically active group, the neighbourhood watch that decides to overthrow the police, is defined by an incredibly deep self-consciousness. It’s very fragile because it’s very difficult to communicate well enough to continue this multi-levelled self-awareness. That fragility makes it very dynamic.

Meanwhile, once the group gets moving, action happens at too rapid a pace to maintain open and viable communication channels about every little thing. Individual actors within the group have to act, and hope that the appearance of solidarity behind him doesn’t waver beyond a particular threshold of believability. At one point, the unity of the people or the community becomes a background presumption for individual action, and the legitimacy of that action is maintained more by the sustained belief (sometimes against evidence, if you bother or want to look for it) in the unity of the community, than any actual unity the community might have.

In the heat of the moment, the high self-awareness of everyone in the politically active group at its origin makes every individual feel as though his action was the expression of the general will of the group. But that individual has no knowledge of whether it is, and probably doesn’t have the time to gain such knowledge. As well, an individual may not understand how his own actions can be determined by the pressure of the group. Because he joined the group as a self-aware constructive action, the weight of that action can count for more than it deserves because the origin stands brighter in his thinking than the current, possibly dissolute or corrupt, state of the group.

Throughout all this tension, I feel the subsumption of individuality haunting the analysis. There is always that danger in the collective that the individual will disappear, that group identity and conformity of the personality and identity to a few stereotypes will overpower the capacities of individuals to be peculiar and different. Such a conformist group has more power in the short term, but is also more violent. And it’s less adaptable in the long term because it allows no deviation, and deviation from a norm could invent an ability that would be remarkably useful if circumstances change. 

Deviation and strangeness is good for communities, and popular movements that allow no such deviation in the name of unity or solidarity of the collective are dangerous as the collective becomes a reason and a means for suppression. Yet action is really only powerful politically when it is group action, many individuals putting their idiosyncrasy aside to work for a common goal. A community consisting entirely of deviations is defenseless, because it can’t muster any unity when under threat.

Lost in the Collective, Research Time, 01/09/2013

One of the most dangerous elements of research that comes out of a Marxist tradition, like the Critique of Dialectical Reason, is that of the collective. This never really becomes a problem if you stay within a context of interpreting Marxist theory. But it definitely becomes a problem when you start following the Theses on Feuerbach,* and use your philosophy as a program to change the world. Because you can’t do politics that still respects people while treating them as units of a collective.

* I like to think of the Theses on Feuerbach as Karl Marx’s proto-twitter. Because it makes me laugh.

Sartre pegs the central problem of thinking about humans as a collective first, and as individuals second, which doesn’t appear as a problem to a disturbingly large number of Marxist figures, to the best of my current knowledge. In fact, he’s remarkably progressive on this point in comparison to a lot of left-wing theorists among his contemporaries (like the vastly overrated Frankfurt School). The Marxist tradition tends to believe that identifying the conformity of your interests with a group is a condition of liberation: when everyone realizes they’re equally suppressed by the current political order, they’ll band together to overthrow it.

But Sartre is right to see that this kind of politics of conformity to common interests can just as easily be perverted to destructive ends. Because when the members of a group or a class are treated the same solely because of that membership, that’s what we call racism, sexism, classism, and any other form of discrimination out there. Sartre specifically talks about anti-Semitism, because he’s an upper-middle class Frenchman in the mid-20th century who lived through the Second World War. But it’s true of any attitude that subsumes individual identity within a group identity. And it’s true whether someone does it to you, or whether you do it to yourself.

This is the principle that underlies my suspicion of Alain Badiou’s philosophy as well. I don’t have time to get into the (many, many, many) details of Badiou’s philosophy right now. But his idea that an individual only counts as existing insofar as that individual is counted as one of a collective is, for me, a very dangerous thought. There’s a lot of interesting and valuable ideas in Badiou’s thinking, but this principle makes me distrust him.

I think this is a peculiar insight to which strange people are prone. I’m a strange guy, and I’ve always resisted philosophies that understand humans as assimilating into a group identity. I’m sensitive to the fact that a human’s identity doesn’t fit into easily categorizable boxes. The modern marketing industry is getting better at that, but only because their frameworks of analysis have become far more finely detailed than they used to be. Buzzfeed does this insanely well with demo-listing, absurdly narrowly focussed articles which are targeted to very specific groups. 

But I’ve never fit in well to any group. I’ve always been a misfit, and I’m proud of it, because it’s part of what makes me remarkable. Conformity for the sake of conformity is never liberating. And conformity for the sake of solidarity is dangerous. Eventually, you want to be given the space to grow on your own, especially if you’re strange or unusual enough that you don’t want to assimilate your personality completely to a regime of appropriate behaviour or thinking. This mistake, I think, underlies all the repressive activity of communist regimes: social solidarity and conformity may be required for revolutionary activity, but a society will never be free after a radical political change until we can discard solidarity-at-all-costs for the freedom to think and experiment as individuals.