Wither Universities? Whither Universities, Composing, 29/05/2018

So I ended up taking an extra day off the blog because election campaign season can be pretty draining. I don’t know how Americans live like this nearly every day, with some kind of intense election happening all the time.

But the extra day off marks a decent transition. I’ve finished going through all my most meaningful notes on Paul Patton’s stuff about Gilles Deleuze. At the time, when I finished that book, I wanted to walk away from secondary material on Deleuze.

You could kind of tell that I was getting a bit annoyed at how Patton’s focus on writing secondary material on Deleuze kept him from exploring his most interesting ideas. So I thought I’d pick up a direction that engaged more in political work. Focus on the real world.

There’s one part of the real world that embodies some of the major political problems we face today. Universities have been battlegrounds of radical politics over the last few years. They’re also deeply corrupted spaces – wide-scale underfunding and the growing influence of a culture of greed have made universities into parodies of the values the institution supposedly embodies.

Apparently, when this comic was first published, it described how
the Russian Bolshevik Communist party would infiltrate and
overthrow the free society of the United States. But when I see this
panel, the first person I think of is Rupert Murdoch.

Writing Utopias, I don’t want to focus entirely on the student movement. But I think there should be a passage there that reflects on what the universities of North America are, and the terrible processes that make the institutions fall short of what we tell ourselves we want from them.

There’s an ideal to the university in a democratic context – in our ideals and our political rhetoric* – as a place of impartiality, of the pure pursuit of learning for the sake of knowledge alone.

* Or as I could call it, our ideals turned into soundbites for political parties, business leaders, and TED Talks.

Who’s laughing yet? I know I am.

So I turned to a book that examines how the university system has fostered left-wing radicalism in its faculties, and what that radical thought has done to make real change in the world. Of course, I didn’t go to any of the right-wing works. They tend to be filled too much with stereotypes and cheap character assassination. Or else full on delusional theories about globalist communist conspiracies in our secular education system.

I wasn’t going to go down that road. Conservatives tend to do a terrible job of understanding how left-wing politics actually works. It’s their greatest weakness against the left – the total inability to know their enemy.

No – no one can trace the failure of the left better than a leftist. So a friend told me to get hold of a book by Jeremy Gilbert, called AntiCapitalism and Culture. It’s an insightful study of the role of Cultural Studies as a university-based research discipline in actual agitation against the neoliberal economic system and the institutions that uphold it.

It asks if the core right-wing smear of the university system is really true – Is it really a place that fosters dangerous radicals capable of helping overthrow the state and the industrial capitalist economic system?

Or are they all just jerking off?

Time to Give Up Your Fear, Research Time, 25/05/2018

One final criticism of liberal thinking in Paul Patton’s use of Gilles Deleuze’s weapons on the subject.* It's based on liberalism’s aversion to risky, rapid political change.

* This was already a good book. But it would have been so much better if he’d done that very thing, without ever referring directly to Deleuze.

Liberal thinking is inherently gradualist. There was an old joke in Canadian politics that a New Democrat is a Liberal in a hurry. Well, that’s the Liberal Party at its best, anyway. The next generation really is farce.

We live in a time of unprecedented political developments.
The most powerful social movements emerge from
complex, self-organizing networks of cooperation.

What the Liberal doesn’t realize when he tells that joke is that the joke is on him. What a liberal calls careful caution, it's more sensible in some circumstances to call fearfulness. What a liberal calls a commitment to gradual reform, it’s more sensible in some circumstances to call cowardice. Or worse, a blatant willingness to prefer an unjust status quo to the risks of a radical change.

Risk averseness is its own kind of risk when circumstances require risky behaviour. Here are some political examples that are bound to be controversial. The anger they generate in simply discussing them is enough to frighten a liberal away from mentioning it at all.

An oil pipeline is slated to move through ecologically sensitive territory, where an Indigenous nation also has its territory. The protests from environmentalists and Indigenous people are unprecedented. The situation is manifestly not okay.

What does a liberal do? Well, in the case of what a Liberal does, they put their fingers in their ears and talk seriously about compensating the oil company for their trouble, like they can’t afford it or something. Because The Economy™.

And that follows pretty much what liberalism does as a philosophy. Social change, in this perspective, is always a matter of slow-moving reform, mitigating all risk. That has its problems.

I’m not about to be one of those left-wingers who grumbles about the reformists. When I read Antonio Gramsci, particularly some of his pre-prison essays, there are a lot of slugs thrown at “reformists.” The social democratic parties, the trade unions that are happy with general improvements in work conditions – everyone who falls short of full revolution against the ruling class comes in for scorn.

Gramsci gets a little more chill once he’s had a few years to rot in a cell. You can really reflect on yourself when you’ve been reduced to the barest murmur of a life. But I see some of this talk when I check out the forums and articles of young marxist academics and Communist Party members.*

We shouldn't ignore our democratic instincts which show us that the
current trends are not something you can negotiate with. You can
only achieve social progress through reforms when there's a social
consensus behind their goals. We can't rely on the consensus that
privileges human rights and peace about police and war.

* You don’t see the Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada getting into this pettiness. So I respect them that much.

That kind of talk just doesn’t work anymore. The progressive social movements aren’t interested in taking over the state – we’re much more radical, in that way, than the Communist guerrillas of the 20th century. Radical in our peacefulness.

The progressive social movements of the 21st century have largely understood that the structure of the state is the problem. States were designed as police apparatuses. You can’t liberate people by forcing them into obedience to an authority, no matter who’s in charge of that authority. An order is still an order.

Liberation is about having to rely less and less on the state to live a good life. And where we have to rely on states, they should be tools always at our disposal. That’s a deeply radical shift in the entire way we treat our states, our governments, our leaders.

I’ll get into it over the next while, once I catch up to my notes about Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s new book Assembly. But for today, I want to make this last point about the weakness of the liberal state of mind.

It’s that presumption that nothing fundamental needs to change. Reformism that takes all the underlying system of institutions and relationships as basically okay, just in need of a tweak. Some more funding going here, tax things a little differently over here. Enforce those laws, but decriminalize these other things. Fine enough.

But good intentions can still be part of a problem. Sometimes, polishing the status quo isn’t good enough to achieve the world you want.

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.

Each Together IV: A Family of Millions, Research Time, 21/09/2017

I’m not going to answer that question about our mortal desire for immortality right away. I don’t really have one right now. When I do, it’ll probably involve some complex examination of the relationship between memory, personality, culture, history, and knowledge of the past.

Instead, I want to riff on a few more ideas I encountered about community, social unity, and nationhood in the early chapters of The Human Condition. I’ll lay it out with a bold, blanket statement that I feel isn’t getting through to enough of popular culture as it should.

Humanity in servitude is a mass of indistinguishable organs.

My blanket statement:

There are a ton of people who hate all forms of socialism and even just basic caring for your community because they think it’s all creeping communism. And I’m sick of that ignorant shit.

I mean, there are clear sources for this. Ever since Friedrich Hayek helped launch the Mt Pelerin Society and the network of think tanks it inspired, that notion has flooded our popular culture through pretty much all channels of media.

It’s been in the right wing ever since The Road to Serfdom blew up – that any form of collective action or identity contains the conceptual seeds of totalitarian communism. Whether it’s a trade union, a single-payer state-funded health care system, or even simple community organizing to lobby a government or a private company.

For Hayek, solidarity is the same as communism. So it’s gone for a growing chunk of conservative North America. The idea began in the populist work of a Nobel Prize winning economist, and is now in the mouths of dim-witted pundits with terrible moustaches.

At least when Hayek was talking about this, his ideas had some bite. They were wrong, but they bit.

Here’s how the most brutal communism conceives of humanity. Each person has no real meaning in their lives as individuals. Our authentic roles are as members of a class, so our individual personalities express only our general class interests. Because class interests are fundamentally shared, each of our lives are indistinguishable from each other.

Friedrich Hayek gets his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974.

For Hayek and the modern North American right wing that followed him, this is the ideology of any political philosophy which accepts any kind of collective action or identity. They see this in the labour movement and marxism.

But Karl Marx didn’t invent this concept. Hannah Arendt identifies the root of how comradeship becomes collectivization in nationalist movements and the modern concept of nation itself.

The heritage is pretty straightforward. European society was dominated by feudal relationships through the medieval period. The ethics of these feudal societies were based on paternal responsibility expressed on the scale of entire towns.

The local lord or royal is the father, and the only political relationship of which anyone is capable is subjection. The community consists of one paterfamilias and all others are bowed heads. The lord has the unquestioned authority of a household head, and all members of the community are one family.

As lords disappeared, says Arendt, the morality of subjection and the community as family persisted. That morality became a force of peer pressure to conformity in your identity and political beliefs.

A political morality of subjection, without a monarch to which we’re subject, becomes subjection to the popular morality itself. Dissent of any kind is considered immoral. It would be dissent from the only body that makes your existence legitimate – the nation.

A community of millions who subject themselves to the will of all, as popular morality expresses it. That’s the vision of the dedicated nationalist. Human dignity is only realized in the achievements of the nation itself. This is the ideology that brought us racialization, colonialism, and the two Great Wars of the 20th century.

The nationalism that consumes the modern Western right wing makes them more like their boogeyman communists than the social democrats they hate.

History as Back Catalogue II: Liquidation Sale, Research Time, 01/09/2017

When I said “no tolerance” was I ever right. Perry Anderson, in the early chapters of that first book he wrote on the history of marxist theory, describes the intellectuals and theorists working in western European communist parties in the 1930s.

Back then, those communist parties were getting their doctrinal and policy marching orders from the Soviet Union. Essentially, I’m going to stare that libertarian / new liberal message setting Stalinist communism as the necessary endpoint of all socialist democratic politics.

Igor Gouzenko reads one of the first editions of his novel to two
marginally interested bystanders. The Fall of a Titan is a terse drama
about the fateful assignment of a young historian and university
administrator – who has also been a top-quality NKVD spy since
joining the Bolshevik side of the Russian Civil War at age 19 – and
the fiery and frightened community of people wrapped up in what
amounts to a secret police public relations job.

Let’s start in the moment, with a voice who lived that moment. Lately, I’ve been reading The Fall of a Titan, the one novel of Igor Gouzenko. Gouzenko defected to Canada from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. He came with piles of evidence of Soviet spying on Canada, the United States, Britain, and many of its other ostensible allies against Germany.

This was only a few days after the official end of the Second World War. For the rest of his life, he and his wife Svetlana* lived relatively quietly in Mississauga for the rest of their lives.

* Svetlana usually went by Anna after defecting, so her name at least wasn’t nearly as ridiculous as Igor’s – George Brown.

Igor would sometimes appear on television as a pundit expert on Soviet culture and spying. He would also do it with a bag over his head to protect his face from being seen by KGB monitors.

Gouzenko lived his young adult life in the Soviet Union at the highest intensity of Stalin’s purges. Year after year, Stalin would prepare another edit of the official history of the Soviet Union. Accompanying this, Stalin would have hundreds of thousands of people killed.

Gouzenko starts one chapter with a common, but sly – and for me, informative – joke. “People go to banquets for different reasons: the Frenchman to shock people with the low neckline of his lovely wife, the American to tell his neighbour a couple of spicy jokes, the Russia to prove to his comrades that he is not yet liquidated.”

This was the atmosphere in Russia all through the 1930s – a country whose religion was no longer Christianity and not even communism, but anxious fearful submission to the NKVD. That same violence came upon the communist parties of Europe before the war broke out.

NKVD agents were at conferences and gatherings of the Communist International, giving the parties of neighbouring countries their doctrinal marching orders. Most importantly, they were reporting which Comintern members seemed skeptical or hesitant about those orders.

Such skeptics would occasionally have some unfortunate accidents shortly after enough time had passed for such a report to wander through an NKVD management committee. Funny, that.

So Stalin’s secret police was crushing any doctrinal creativity in the communist parties of Europe at the height of the NKVD’s power. Even after the NKVD was purged out of existence and Stalin had his convenient heart attack, the relationship continued.

Anyone with a hint of theoretical or philosophical creativity wouldn’t have been welcome as an active member of the communist party. But after most of their truly restless intellectuals settled into university positions, the university turned out to be a great place to be if you were a truly open-minded intellectual.

Scattered Thoughts on Cultural Paranoia, Jamming, 30/08/2017

Call this the epilogue to “Hey! Cultural Marxism!” Just a few reflections on how we got into this mess as a society. No claim to completeness or even an escape from my partiality.

I do suspect that there may have been a little systematic causation between the old moral panic movies of the 1930s and the hysteric paranoia of anti-communism from McCarthy to John Birch to Goldwater to Breitbart. But since this is an idea that literally came to me over the last few days, I don’t exactly have a huge pile of pre-existing scholarship backing me up.

The paranoia of modern American culture is one of the strangest
social phenomena I've ever thought about. Such fear of all aliens is
only possible through profound and thorough solipsism.
My thanks to the source.

That said, there is a common tone – a paranoid fear bordering on ecstasy, expressed in the aesthetics of a live-action cartoon.

Anyway, this one is for fun. A set of reflections.

Thought One. The dominant mode of Cold War anti-communism was paranoia. This was the engine of Joseph McCarthy’s hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC had existed for decades, but McCarthy’s leadership brought it into legend.

Those hearings and the cultural atmosphere they created basically burned the socialist left out of American consciousness as a society.

Thought Two. That paranoia was a reactive fear. Obviously – its name is ‘anti-communism.’ But the wildest delusions of the anti-communist paranoid was precisely that of McCarthy. They could be anywhere; It’s possible they’ve infiltrated everywhere; Won converts who keep their actions secret; A demoniacal cabal.

I never saw this in action in my own lifetime until it became about Islamist terrorists, not communists. Terrorism paranoia differed quite a bit from anti-communist paranoia. Mostly, the paranoia I experienced in 21st century Canada (watching America on TV) had an extra racializing flavour.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the expression of McCarthy's
paranoia in techno-horror cinema.

The Arabs and South/Central Asians who faced that stigma had distinct ethnic differences that were pretty quickly racialized into a vector to marginalize them. It’s sad, because Salafists would have a lot in common with radical American Evangelicals.

Thought Three. Lots of Americans were anti-communist in the 1930s, the same time those moral panic films first exploded. But that was actually the United States catching up with Europe’s anti-communism – it was oligarchical and right-wing opposition to the trade union movement.

This first American anti-communism strikes me as very much like the European version. Communism at the time was the farthest left wing of the trade union movement. Radical communists as fellow travellers with Eugene Debs, Woody Guthrie, and Jimmy Hoffa. Mostly, it was a vehicle for America’s money’s WASP class to remix their traditional anti-Semitism.

Thought Four. The hysterical lunacy of it all. That’s the only way I can think to describe the tone of that paranoia. I’m talking about McCarthyism, but it shared the same tone, the same deranged outlook on the world as those moral panic films.

Reefer Madness and all those others. It could be weed, cocaine, sex. Eventually, it was motorcycle gangs. Above all, those films were about fear. Fear that ordinary looking people could turn their whole lives upside-down – one act of deviancy was all it took to send your life to hell.

The Puritan bides his time through eras of liberalism until at last, the
more moderate among them reaches a breaking point of even their
disgust. Public acceptance of homosexuality is too much for them.
A group of Evangelical extremists published The Nashville Statement
standing against LGBTQ rights yesterday, and I saw one social media
exchange. "How could you condemn Christians praying for gays
when Muslims kill gays all the time?" Well, Christians kill and
persecute LGBTQ people all the time. The American money goes
to Africa so their sensitive domestic audience doesn't see the blood.

The 1930s wasn’t just the era of the Great Depression – it was also Prohibition, the greatest triumph of the temperance movement. Temperance was the most powerful expression of Puritan Christian popular asceticism since the foundation of the United States.

The Puritan was the most extreme ascetic ideology. Beyond the traditional asceticism of an elite, powerful holy one’s path. No, Puritanism and the temperance movement was devoted to mass asceticism. The denial of all deviancy was necessary to save the soul.

Electric fear of total destruction – death, murder, the surrender of your own identity to a deterritorializing desire. “Play faster! Faster!”

They were education-exploitation films. Reefer Madness was itself first financed by a church organization. Did that Puritan energy somehow mutate through McCarthy and John Birch to become hysteric anti-communism?

Thought Five. I don’t actually know. But the possibility intrigues me.

Hey! Cultural Marxism! II: Missed Connections, Research Time, 25/08/2017

The philosophers went to the universities. The group of thinkers at the centre of Perry Anderson’s short book Considerations on Western Marxism are, more commonly, called the Frankfurt School.

They're at the centre of the great right-wing conspiracy theory of our time – cultural marxism. Part of what I want to do with the next few posts is clarify my ideas about this conspiracy image – the product of Andrew Breitbart’s weird interpretation of this existentialist marxism.

The cultural impact of this angry, angry man fascinates me.

I’ll be getting back to Breitbart’s interpretation later on, riffing from his book Righteous Indignation. I want to stick with Anderson for now, because Anderson describes accurately the history of the Frankfurt School and the other theorists of Western marxism.

So when I left off yesterday, Stalin had just purged the entire Soviet Union of any communist philosopher with any originality of thought beyond dutifully transcribing and explaining ideological directives from the Central Committee. Those people were all dead by the end of the 1930s.

It’s not as though the study or continuation of marxist theory was doing much better in Europe. The central clique of these thinkers in the university sector were at Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Hence the name.

They ran into some trouble when Hitler came to power. So Horkheimer and the rest of his crew picked up whatever they could and moved to New York.

Here was the break in the Cold War’s West* between philosophical creation and community organizing among working class people. The main institution the theorists used to become community activists was the Communist Party of each country where they lived.

* And the Cold War wouldn’t even start for another 15 years.

Anderson wrote his book in the 1970s, so there was no sign on the
horizon of the ironic movement in universities happening today:
Squeezed by large-scale underemployment, many humanities
researchers are pursuing careers outside the university campus,
and many on the left are becoming journalists and activists.

Already, the link between philosophers and activists was getting strained. The philosophers no longer worked for the political parties or the radical newspapers. They taught in universities. But there was still the party itself, where the theorists could work with the folks who pounded the streets and the factory floors.

Uprooting the entire intellectual rank and file of the western European workers’ movement** across the Atlantic Ocean had two effects.

** Or killing them. Many of them were also killed. Taken out of their homes and shot. Bundled into a car in the middle of the night, tortured, and never seen again.

Here was the first effect. I don’t even know why I included that note about so many socialist philosophers and theorists being killed. Because I can just say it here. The rise of Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Europe resulted in many original thinkers getting bullets in their brains. That’s one obvious loss to the community of writers and activists.

The other loss was a bit more subtle. While Horkheimer and the other political refugees from Hitler’s Europe were working in New York, they had no Communist Party to draw on.

Now, there were plenty of communist parties and groups in the United States. But none of them had the unity of the European communist parties. It was a literal unity, another function of the social organizing work Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did in the 19th century. They built an international conference for all the communist parties of Europe. It strengthened the unity of the European workers’ movement’s social network.

The flaw of the marxist tradition – and all traditions named after a
person – is excessive fealty to Marx himself. It hobbles a thinker
or an activist from adapting to changing times.

None of that existed in the United States. Its movements for workers’ rights developed in very different directions in an extremely different set of cultures from those in Europe. Left-wing politics in the United States was much more fragmentary, with different parties across the states all holding different principles and doing their own things.

That lack of centralization had one big advantage – it made the workers’ movement more flexible. The core ideas could survive many different attempts to repress them, their devotees could adapt to the most hostile and unstable political contexts. Plus, the movement on a national scale was more immune to pressure and co-optation by Stalin.

Not to say that plenty of communist parties throughout the United States didn’t become puppets of Stalinism. Many did. Which is why the ideas and goals of a social democratic liberation movement mutated away from communist parties themselves. But that’s for later.

The problem was that there was no unified political party on a continental scale for Frankfurt School leaders and other left-wing intellectuals to latch onto. So by the end of the Second World War, the university-based philosophers of the workers’ movement lost all their material connections to politics.

This is where the irony sets in . . . . To be continued

Kill Your Idols II: Power to Which People? Research Time, 08/08/2017

Does the world run like a clockwork, with simple, easily predictable events and processes? Reality is really much more complicated than that.

We may be able to understand the underlying mathematics behind how the world changes, but the relationships of all those actual, ongoing processes cause so many dynamic effects that it becomes computationally impossible to account for them all.

Predictions only occur in laboratory conditions – pristine environments where all relevant processes are controlled. The world is no laboratory. Too much is beyond our control once all the world’s ongoing processes start interacting with each other.

A representation of Ananke, the Greek Pagan name for the necessity
of reality itself, the determination of fate.

Okay, now let’s scale back a bit from the abstract. Step down from this web of time analysis and look at some real historical situations here. That way, we can see how tripped-out abstract thinking is directly and practically relevant to material matters of politics and life.

Let’s go back to Italy in the 1920s. My grandparents are children growing up on farms in the middle of nowhere in Calabria. They know nothing of this, even though this political instability will lead to the wars that determined their coming of age.

Antonio Gramsci is arrested by Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship, as one of the leaders of the Italian Communist Party. He’d eventually die in fascist custody, thanks to the failure of his health in their wretched prison conditions. While dying slowly over ten years, he writes a masterpiece of political philosophy.

He’s wondering where he went wrong. If the time of successful revolutions to build communist societies had begun, why were all the ones in western Europe shut down?

Marxist orthodoxy in early 20th century Europe was that the factory-based proletarian labourer class would gain consciousness of themselves as a class, including their raw deal under capitalism, and that the Communist Party vanguard would lead them into a whole new economic system.

The first I ever learned about the Russian revolution was the story
of Doctor Zhivago, which was one of this movie nerd's favourite
films, even when I was a young kid. The film had an intense hold
on me, sucking me into every scene even though it was nearly
three hours long and I saw it for the first time when I was nine.

That sounds awesome! It never happened. Not even in Russia, where you had an actual Communist Party’s revolution actually being successful.* There was no factory-based economy there to speak of. Most of the country was agrarian and pretty much feudal.

* Sort of. Heavily crippled by a massive civil war in which every major western European power sent armed battalions to help put down Lenin’s government. Causing Lenin so much stress that he died of a stroke shortly after the civil war, and was never able to build institutions around community workers’ councils. Josef Stalin just built a huge secret police state with a bunch of massive collectivized farms. Fuck.

The Russian Revolution itself broke from the doctrinaire marxist script, the script that said human economics and society had a life cycle as natural as an oak tree.

The end of capitalism would come from the industrialization of society and its breakup into a 1% of oligarchs and a 99% of slave-wage factory labourers. The labourers realize their raw deal and the force of their numbers, overthrow the oligarchs, and govern society equally through workers’ councils. The ever-more abundant production of industry would lift everyone out of poverty and we’d live as equals.

Yet the first successful revolution was in a feudal economy, because Czarist Russia had a social division of oligarchs and slaves even more stark than the England whose industry was Marx’s own model for Capital.

To understand time, you mustn't think of it as a necessity, as clockwork,
but as the collision of processes, where even the smallest change
alters the entire system.

European industrialization had taken a turn away from the extremes of the 19th century. Their societies stayed complex, or developed new complexities as the old loyalties and identities fell away. Politics never reduced all the way to economic classes anyway.

Gramsci was stuck in prison trying to figure out why the world wouldn’t go according to the script. Why the conditions of a successful revolution were so different from what he encountered.

Gramsci wrote the template to reintroduce contingency into the marxist tradition of thought. He did more than just do that, though. Because you couldn’t just deny necessity. That becomes a shouting match.

No, Gramsci had to reveal to everyone who philosophized about politics and society the source of contingency in the human realm. That source was the mind of humanity itself, when we all think and talk together. That source is our ethics, values, and morality. It was philosophy in action in the thoughts of every member of a community.

So yeah, no big thing to figure out there. . . . To Be Continued

Kill Your Idols I: Followers, A History Boy, 07/08/2017

When I first started blogging my early research for Utopias, I was concerned to stay away from conventional marxism. I was going to write a very left-wing book, but it wasn’t going to stick to the typical answers of the left.

Yes, I was concerned about oligarchy, just as I am now. I’ve since developed a more communitarian side to my political thinking – the strength and resilience of social networks and bonds of brotherhood throughout a community are the foundation of a healthy culture.

All the typical nationalist idols – religion, ethnicity, language, beliefs in national myths – don't mean shit, if I can put it in technical terms. Solidarity is built from actual friendships among people – from working, playing, clubs, school, partying, volunteering, whatever. The resilience of a society’s networks are its strength.

The basic idea of this series of posts is: If you want to
progress your society, and how you understand the
world, you need to kill your idols.

When I started this blogging project four years ago, I was still sorting out my more political ideas. At the time, I often said I very much wasn’t marxist, for a variety of reasons.

Here’s one anecdote from the time. When I got my proposal reviewer’s notes from Palgrave on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, he kept on talking about marxism, and telling me I should include more marx in a book about environmental philosophy.

He did that because the word ‘alienation’ is really important in a lot of environmental ethics approaches. They’re talking about the different ideologies and concepts humanity has used to separate our self-image from nature. We literally make ourselves alien to the Earth.

But this reviewer kept thinking I was a marxist. All he knew of the idea was Marx’s conception of alienated labour.

At first I was nervous that my book would be rejected because of this misunderstanding. But I got some good advice from my colleague who’d connected me with Palgrave. So I gave my usual response to reviewers who clearly didn’t know what they were talking about. I told the book series editor that the reviewer had no idea what he was talking about.

The bigger question is: What does it mean to be a marxist anyway? I don’t think I’m one, but most folks on the right wing of politics today would call me a cultural marxist.

See, I’ve met some self-identified communists and marxists over the years who are kind of genuine in their very doctrinaire belief in the very basic processes Marx himself was describing. Some see the economy as continuing to cleave into producers and proletariat. Some believe that they can affect a revolution of the working class from an academic’s office.

But people in the communist movement believed all this in Antonio Gramsci’s own time, nearly 100 years ago. They thought that all of Europe was going in the direction of the Russian revolution because they believed in a very doctrinaire marxist theory of the totally deterministic nature of human history.

They ended up being horribly wrong, and a lot of them – including Gramsci – paid the price with their freedom and their lives. Why would someone believe something just because it’s in a theoretical, scientific book?*

* That’s a very complex, multifaceted book that’s open to many interpretations. Most of these folks were following a blueprint from Capital, and Capital was never meant to be a straight blueprint in any universal sense. Yet it still became one.

Here’s the truth about social change. Revolutionary change can come from anywhere in society, if the particular conditions are right to enable some class or community to understand that it can act, then actually act.

Civilization is dynamic, always open to change, never clockwork in that too-simple sense of how people used to think about reality. Am I giving people too much credit by not presuming them to believe in a clockwork reality? . . . To Be Continued

Replicating Glory III: The Material Details, Research Time, 04/08/2017

How to revolutionize a society so densely layered with different classes, business and civil relationships, political parties, cultural communities, trade unions and associations.

You know what civil society is? Redundancy in the social networks of an entire country. It does for societies what redundancy structures do in electrical power grids and different server hubs of the internet.

Let’s contrast Czarist Russia during the First World War. There was only one way to inculcate a sense of loyalty to the Czarist state – fealty to the class hierarchy of the Russian aristocracy. Break the people’s faith in that, and you’ve got a nationwide civil uprising.

The progressive politics of mid-20th century Western liberalism
transformed Canada from a polite northern jewel in the crown of the
British Empire, into a culturally more independent country. The
cultural currents led into Canadian state politics by Lester Pearson
(liberal internationalism), Pierre Trudeau (personal liberty), and
Tommy Douglas (brotherhood) literally built the new national
ideology of the Canadian people.

Now look at a society like Canada today. We’re a democracy with regular elections and media highly critical of government. And we have plenty of media criticizing our oligarchical class. Reporting on corporate crime is a popular demographic.

We’re also highly multicultural and permit people to speak whatever language they want in their private lives, and worship freely as long as nobody gets hurt. There are many places in the world where this never happens.

My country is also built on terrible injustices, like the slow, creeping, institutional genocide of Indigenous people. That’s what the Canadian state was designed to do in 1867.

The liberal reforms of the Pearson-Trudeau-Douglas era of Canadian leadership made some major progress on the foundations of a plural society. My generation is on the verge of a similar step, overturning the popular racism against Indigenous Canadians. Like the 1964-84 social revolutions, Indigenous liberation will probably take at least that long.

We’re in year five, if you’re counting.

But look at what this happy, diverse, plural, democratic society has – so many ways to become loyal to the Canadian state. As Antonio Gramsci would say, so many ways I’m loyal to a capitalist power structure.

I just described the exact way I’m loyal to the Canadian state, or at least the institution of Canada. I’m not about to overthrow the state of Canada and its entire economic system, like Lenin in 1917. I’m ethically invested in Canada.

Canada today is facing another revolutionary pressure, just as the
country did in the 1960s. That's the movement for Indigenous
liberation and reparations. It will mean tearing down the last,
most brutal and cruel institutions of the British Empire in Canada:
the reserve system and Indigenous race laws. We'll need leaders of
the same mettle as Douglas, Pearson, and Trudeau Sr. Will Justin
Trudeau have the same fortitude?
I doubt it. Let me put it to you this way. I think the best modern
philosopher to use in understanding Justin Trudeau is Jean
Beaudrillard. Justin Trudeau: the world's first hyperreal PM.

That’s what I mean about redundancy. There are so many different ways to be loyal to Canada that someone like me can exist peacefully with someone like the arch-nationalist, army-worshipping, neo-Loyalist Stephen Harper. He didn’t have to kill me to take power. I’m just in the NDP.

Back in Russia in 1917, the only way you could ethically invest yourself in Czarist Russia was to be loyal to the Czar and subservient to the landed aristocracy. One quick strike in a weak moment and the whole structure could fall to pieces.

If one path to ethical investment in multicultural democratic Canada falls apart, there are still plenty of other routes for the country to earn people’s loyalty. That’s why you need a ‘war of position’ in Gramsci’s terminology.

You need to be a strategist, exploring and analyzing each of these routes of loyalty to Canada. You have to look at each path to a person’s ethical investment in the country and the way things are (or could be with tweaks). Their structure, and their dynamics – the ways in which those loyalties can change but remain strong.

An activist and an ethnographer. A philosopher’s critical eye on ideology with an expert communicator’s power to make people of all stripes understand it. A social scientist who’s also an ambitious experimenter in society. That’s what you have to be to win the ‘war of position.’

That’s a bit of a tall order for a resumé. I think I can understand why this has not been very successful. That’s why Gramsci seems like such a pessimist, I guess.

Replicating Glory II: Strategy Games, Research Time, 03/08/2017

So you want to overthrow your government and entire economic and political system. Fair enough. There are crazier goals out there.

How are you going to do it? Well, a hundred years ago, the Russian Bolshevik Communist Party did it thanks to the widespread civil unrest as the First World War rippled through their society. That popular uprising against the Czarist regime of the Russian Empire didn’t have much leadership two political parties, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The biggest problem democratic governments and cultures face is
the idea that elections and parliaments are all you need for
democracy. This notion killed pretty much every ham-hocked
attempt of the George W Bush administration to install democracy
in the Arab Middle East, and it led to some unfortunate
complacency against the surreal autocracy of Silvio Berlusconi's
humiliating leadership of Italy.

Communists all over Europe were so inspired by the (eventual) victory of the Bolshevik Party that they planned exactly the same kind of revolutionary action. Antonio Gramsci himself offers an excellent example of how most of them ended up.

Needless to say, one of Gramsci’s main intellectual occupations in prison was a question many of us have asked at one time or another. Where did I go wrong?

In short form, the failed revolutionaries were dazzled by success that they didn’t see the real differences between their own countries and Russia. All you needed to do to throw Russian society into chaos in 1917 was engulf the country in an unwinnable war that ruins the power of the aristocracy.

Small potatoes. Happens every other Thursday.

You couldn’t pull that kind of revolution in Italy, France, or England because there was more to the establishment than just the throne and a bunch of landed gentry. The rest of Europe had already gone through bourgeois revolutions. Sometimes several. They’d built parliamentary institutions, constitutional monarchies.

There were trade and business owners’ associations. The shorthand term is civil society.

The industrialized – even sort of industrialized – countries of Europe even had trade unions that were perfectly happy with this arrangement. Or at least not so upset that they wanted to overthrow the whole society. If you read any radical communist texts from this period, you’ll see them talking up a storm about “the reformists.”

You know who those people are? Trade unions. If I can steal a term from my old country, it’s the b’ys from OPSEU local 2079. They have the big barbecue tables at the annual town regatta. They just want better wages, health benefits, and better attendance at next year’s regatta barbecue. Nothing wrong with that.

This photo of Turi Prison in Apulia* where Antonio Gramsci spent
virtually all of the last decade of his life. It was taken in 1928. I'm
amazed that any creativity was possible here, let alone some of the
most remarkable left-wing political theory of the last century.
* That's the boot's heel, if you don't know Italian geography.

Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that, unless you want a revolution that upends the entire social, economic, and political system. Asking people to take resources away from the regatta barbecue? That’s a pretty big ask.

Seriously, though – in Italy by the time Gramsci died, even the folks organizing the regatta barbecue would have been rotting in a sunless cell. But even in secure democracies, the order of the day was under no threat.

Democracy – even one with ruthlessly unequal and discriminatory social structures – allowed people enough voice in their institutions that they saw routes to solve their social problems short of total revolution. Maybe they’re false routes, but there are still possibilities open to folks that stop short of that extreme risk.

The risk that paradise could become Stalinism.

So what do you want to do if you can’t achieve the total mobilization of everyone in a society, as the Bolsheviks did? You stick to what Gramsci called the “war of position.” A complex game of public relations, targeted direct action, attacks on concrete injustices, and complex, multidimensional political lobbying of every other interest group in the society to join an alliance with you to change the raw deal you all experience.

The problem is, if you’re doing all this, are you still a revolutionary? Or are you just another political party, with a bit of a more radical end-game program than the others? Does it even make a difference anymore?

To Be Continued . . . 

Replicating Glory I: Knowing What Kind of War You’re In, Research Time, 02/08/2017

So, like I said I would on Monday,* on to a few more words about Gramsci. It’s so nice to explore these ideas. It’s not a matter of my political sympathies alone, at least not in terms of making it only personal.

* I meant to post this yesterday, but it was actually a super-tiring day with other stuff that I had to do. By the time I was able to sit down with the blog, I was too tired to think.

Italians really know how to throw a communist party.

There’s a greater insight in a minor perspective than a majority’s. You learn more from a perspective that’s under the boot of power than you do from the ones who wear the boots or cut the leather. The ones who have to be wily are more creative, less predictable.

They twist major language and culture to make a hidden space. Call it a safe space. Or not, because the life of the strange is always a little dangerous. This is one of my personal favourites of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts – the minor.

I’m twisting it when I use it to talk about Gramsci, but I think – when I sit down and write Utopias – I’ll weave together some of what Deleuze and Guattari wrote about the literary voice of the minor cultural perspective with the position of Gramsci as a political prisoner and maybe even as a Sardinian.

What’s nice about reading Perry Anderson’s books about the history of Western marxism, is that he emphasizes the ideas in Gramsci that were immediately important to the community of communist activists and marxist academics. So the ideas that gained Gramsci his quickest fame were his arguments on strategy for revolution.

There’s a dualism at the heart of this strategy – war of maneuver and war of position. When Antonio Gramsci was a young man building the Italian Communist Party in the aftermath of the First World War, communists all over Europe looked to the Russian revolution of 1917 as a model for victory.

As you know, that didn’t really work out. Gramsci learned the hard way that it wasn’t going to work out. Italy was the first of the major European powers to install a reactionary conservative government after the war. Mussolini’s ideology and propaganda literally invented fascism. The left-wingers never stood a chance.

One of the famous images of Vladimir Lenin during his ultimately
victorious revolution of 1917. Look at the size of that crowd, then
understand that Lenin is trying to make himself heard over that
entire square. There is no microphone. He's just standing on some
rickety stage screaming as loud as he can.

The short version of that story is that Gramsci spent just over a decade of his life in prison, until it ended. Both the prison sentence and his life, in 1937 at the age of 46.

Communist revolutionaries, high on Lenin’s victory in St Petersburg, thought they would replicate that victory in exactly the same way. The Bolsheviks mounted a blitz against their own government when all the state institutions were wracked by the most intense crisis in the history of Russia as an empire.

It almost seems like common sense to me that such remarkable circumstances weren’t going to happen in the rest of Europe. Russia was a very different country than the other major European powers. Russia’s culture and political society was still dominated by the monarchy and the aristocracy that surrounded it. And there was no moment as singularly intense as the height of the First World War.**

** With so many themes from the First World War appearing in my research for Utopias, I feel like one basic idea in my own book will be putting the terror of that war at the forefront of political thinking. Hitler’s war, as horrifying as it was, was a creature of the epoch that the imperialists’ war began.

European powers like Germany, France, Spain, Britain, and Italy all had well-developed, complex class structures. It amounted to a redundancy in the society itself. A resistance to overthrow. So what’s a revolutionary going to do?

To Be Continued . . . 

True/False & What Else? IV: Thought Conditions Life, Composing, 10/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . As much as I opened up Louis Althusser’s theoretical works for enlightenment, I’m more than a little disappointed. There are a few reasons why, but a I found a distinction of ideas that will probably be useful.

Thinking about his structuralism, I don’t think it works well as a framework for the more ecological priorities that I want my philosophical writing* to pursue. Reality is assembled from feedback loops – mutual affectivity. That makes no sense in the strong structural determinism of Althusser’s thinking about the nature of reality.

Today's post is about the mental health problems of
professional academics, with one prominent example.

* And human civilization more generally, if I can sound more than a little pretentious.

Then there's the reputational damage. Even though Althusser is generally acknowledged as an insightful and influential figure in left-wing and marxist political philosophy, some pretty terrible clouds hang over his career and thought. Literal and metaphorical. 

For one, as I wrote about yesterday, he murdered his wife in the depths of a bizarre psychotic-manic-depressive-bipolar-maybe-schizophrenic episode. We can separate the artist from the work however much we like, but ultimately, character does inform ideas – if only implicitly and contextually.

Then there are the allegations of fraud. The ones he brought on himself, that is. In his autobiography The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser admits to having read very little of the history of philosophy. I’ve read more of the canonical texts at age 33 than he had by his late 60s and retirement from a lifelong career as a professor and lecturer.

While I don’t truly believe that his fraud was complete, his collapse makes it difficult to draw on. After killing Helene Rytmann, he collapsed into a profoundly intense neurotic state. Althusser was a neurotic for most of his life, lacking self-esteem and plagued by sexual hangups and doubt.

Consumed by self-hatred and self-doubt, I can see how the hazy memories of a life before the total shattering of his personality can transform the impostor syndrome common in academia into a full-on delusion of intellectual fraud.

I don't believe he was a fraud. Just an immensely troubled
man. Who murdered his wife. Let's not forget that. He
also killed the woman who'd been his companion for
literally half his life.

I’ve experienced life with a close family member whose personality had been shattered by a powerful mental-neurological trauma. Such people are detached from reality, socially isolated by continuing mental derangement even when in regular contact with people. 

They believe their own delusions about the present and past because they can no longer process the present as factual. For the severely traumatized, the world becomes immaterial, and only the personality – narrative memory constantly rewritten, edited, rearranged – is real. 

Nonetheless, I find Althusser too dangerous a thinker to adapt as a fellow-traveller, whether for Utopias or wider political activism and writing. Althusser so deeply gave in to the horror of his life and political compromises that it infects his writing – from his structuralism to his lifelong defence of Stalinism.

You can have a mental collapse without it tainting the rest of your life’s work, as Nietzsche did, becoming an organic mannequin for his proto-nazi sister. You can be ridiculously neurotic but still develop a philosophy of joy and creativity, as Deleuze did with his six inch fingernails, unwashed hair, and maddeningly boring personal life.

Oh, were you surprised that Althusser defended Stalinism? Well, even though he devoted long, technically dense essays like “Overdeterminism” to a defence of communist thinking against accusations of Stalinism, he regularly defended the USSR and even the Stalinist regime throughout his life.

The entire last section of his essay “Marxism and Humanism” is a full-throated defence of the USSR in 1963 as an emerging utopia where there would be no want and all would be free. Where the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “cult of personality” necessary to maintain it were quickly transitioning to the paradise of full communism.

Yeah, not so much.

So what did I ultimately gain from reading Althusser’s For Marx? I’ve rambled in my preamble too long, so I’ll have to save it for tomorrow. . . . To Be Continued

Tainted Left I: Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Research Time, 19/07/2016

My two-year online friendship with a pair of radical right-wing libertarians was one of the most philosophically enlightening relationships I think I’ve ever had. 

I don’t mean this in the sense that it made me an equally doctrinaire right-wing libertarian, even though that was their goal. Our relationship was a micro-level anthropology of North America’s radical right – I saw Trumpism in its embryonic form, a new fascism waiting for its catalyst to blossom.

What Sandifer explored through his critical analysis of neoreaction’s central writers (Mencius Moldbug, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick Land), I saw unfold before me in two real people. 

There's one particular memory I want to share with you, as an introduction to what will probably be a whole week talking about a problem inherent in any kind of left-leaning politics in the West. An image Libertarian G shared with me on the anniversary of Jack Layton’s death.

He wasn't even really all that radical in what he fought for.

It was a picture of Vladimir Lenin, with a short, respectful caption lamenting Jack’s passing.

At the time, I thought his equivalence of Jack Layton with Vladimir Lenin was just a joke, a ridiculous exaggeration for me to laugh at. But after several months more of almost daily interaction, it struck me that G really believed that. And as I learned more about right-wing libertarian society, I discovered that virtually all of them did too.

They believed that all left-wing people – no matter their real diversity of mind – wanted government to act as a fully collectivized communist totalitarian state. 

It seemed ridiculous, like a complete delusion. Finally reading Freidrich Hayek made it clear where this idea came from. From him, naturally. Because he says it – explicitly and repeatedly – in The Road to Serfdom. 

I sincerely believe – given what’s become an immensely powerful political movement in our time – that every academic philosophy department should include The Road to Serfdom in its political curriculum. And they should require students to attack its arguments with all the critical vigour and aggression they can.

Even though The Road to Serfdom can read like a work of philosophy, and be philosophically interpreted, you can make a strong argument that it isn’t philosophy. Following a concept Louis Althusser develops in For Marx, it’s ideology. Specifically, ‘mere ideology.’

We should all study the book critically because it is probably the most influential single book of political thought of the last 100 years. From the ideas of this one book, and the network of think tanks he built with Milton Friedman and other academics to spread their ideas to the wider public, came the foundational orthodoxy of modern conservatism.

The face of a bestseller, the most
influential political thinker of the last
hundred years. He can't be ignored.

A cut-down version of Road to Serfdom was published in Reader’s Digest of all things in 1945, and reached a huge popular audience across America. Hayek wrote the book as an explicit warning about the danger of totalitarian ideas, as the sustained confrontation of the Cold War was looming. 

That popular idea about left-wing people spread to all of society through conservative partisan political messaging for the rest of the 20th century. It spread through everyday conversation with people who came to accept it. It’s an opposition every progressive has to defend against, and can appear at any time.

“How are you not a communist!?” he shouts. 

For the next few posts – however many it’ll take me to work through the idea – I’m going to work through my impressions of how Althusser handles this in For Marx. He asks it specifically about marxists, of course, because he was himself a lifelong communist party activist in France. 

But today, we know the same question applies to everyone on the broadly left side of the political spectrum. How are our ideas not of the same path as the crimes of Stalin? . . . To be continued

A Basic Failure of Imagination, A History Boy, 29/04/2016

I finished the film script for You Were My Friend yesterday, I still have a lot of work to do for a bunch of creative projects. Building the profile of Sunnyvale Psychochronography, preparing my presentation material for the book panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity in Calgary in a month’s time and some related articles for the Reply Collective, and building a more robust Patreon page.

On the day I wrote this post (yesterday), I also had an interview for a job that could actually end my last four years of underemployment and low income. It could finally be the start of my second career. So I was a little nervous about that.

But, if I’m going to say one event really hit me this week as part of the narrative of my life, it was when the Newfoundland and Labrador budget came down, and the resulting protest movement kicked into gear.

Newfoundland doesn't have a strong history of effective
protest, like these organizers in Britain, aside from some
oppressed union organizing in the 1950s. But I think
the current generation is finally, at long last, different.

Atlantic Austerity

You might find this weird, because I haven’t lived in Newfoundland since 2008. But I think of the Ball budget as the culmination of the whole reason why I’m glad that I left Newfoundland when I did.

Their provincial Liberal government has produced an austerity budget that essentially turns Newfoundland and Labrador into Canada’s equivalent of Greece. It’s set to become an economic basket case with no real public services of any kind, offloading the fiscal mistakes of Danny Williams’ leadership entirely to its population, who will suffer in widespread poverty for generations. 

The province’s new tax burden is disproportionately hitting the poor and working class. Services are being cut to such levels that they will not exist – including health care and education. The government is making no attempt to generate demand to stimulate economic activity. They are simply cutting people off from what they need to live decently and saying that it’s all in the need of keeping a good fiscal house in order.

The economic crisis has a cause. The provincial government did not have enough cash reserve or investment holdings to see the province through any tough times that might be caused by any drop in the price of oil. 

I could tell from his first political victories that Danny
Williams substituted superficial patriotic imagery and
rabble-rousing for real political engagement with the
people of Newfoundland and Labrador. It had all the
hallmarks of demagoguery to distract from autocracy
and corruption.
And no one listened to me when I'd say so.

The Most Foolish Hero Worship

In the late 2000s, no one believed the price of oil would ever drop. The universal love of Danny Williams prevented any criticism of his governments’ actions from being taken seriously. He had sincere approval ratings across the province at a level that some dictators feel insecure about faking. 

Williams’ problem was not his high levels of government spending. They were his insistence on also cutting taxes and corporate levies for the resource sector at the same time, and his creation of a state-run energy monopoly in Nalcor. 

He built a government and inspired a culture across the province that revelled in the prosperity of the moment without a single thought to contingency planning or a shred of criticism or accountability. I could tell, as Williams gained a reputation more like a Messiah than a man, that this would not end well. So I left.

And everyone in the old country thought this was wonderful because they were all getting rich from oil money. No one ever thought that spending without saving or economic diversification was a good idea. No one ever thought that a leader whose popularity put him beyond critique could be dangerous in the long run. 

The truth about Newfoundland is that it’s a culture where very few people actually ever think. I hope that will finally change soon. But I cannot be part of any attempt to try.

The politics of empty demagoguery, populism, and Little
Big Man autocracy go back to the beginnings of
Newfoundland and Labrador's story in the Canadian
federal state.

The World’s Only Example of Dependency Theory

Newfoundland is one of the oldest settler cultures of North America. They’re proud of their self-reliance. But that self-reliance has never been political, only a brazen toughness against physical adversity. Newfoundland’s population has never bothered to take control of their own political existence. 

Now, I’m not talking about political independence as a nation-state, which is a centuries-out-of-date romanticism in Newfoundland culture that had a popular revival in the Williams era. I mean that Newfoundland’s political culture has never been capable of finding the resources for prosperity and progress among its own people. 

From the moment of settling, Newfoundland’s population has been entirely dependent on oligarchies for anything beyond basic subsistence. For centuries, the colonizing fishers (after exterminating the indigenous population) let themselves be dependent on whatever food and cash aid they could receive from British fish merchant associations.

As an independent country, the bulk of the population was still economically dependent on trades and handouts from a business class based in St. John’s and Britain. The mythologized 1947-8 referendums never had true independence on the table: only a choice between a return to the pre-Depression status quo of a nation-state economically dependent on a British-linked oligarchy or becoming an autonomous province of what was, at the time, a Canada still dominated by Anglo-Ontarian social conservatives.

When the cod fishery collapsed in the 1990s,
Newfoundlanders never tried to find new ways to make a
living. They just moved away, went on government
assistance, or eventually joined the Nova Scotia
crab fishery. It's a wonderful soil for hardy vegetable
agriculture, but no one has ever thought to grow food
on an industrial scale except for an ill-conceived
government-supported cucumber greenhouse.

As a province, Newfoundland’s political culture shifted from open oligarchy to a kind of hair-brained populism. Smallwood: “Confederation will bring us riches!” Peckford: “Oil revenue and a poorly-organized greenhouse business will bring us riches!” Williams: “Oil revenue actually is bringing us riches!” All this peppered with a little empty nationalism to distract from the emptiness of their claims.

Postcolonial theory developed a concept called dependency. It said, in very short form, that a colonized country remained shackled after nominal independence because its economy and culture would be forever linked to the dictatorship of their colonizing powers. 

This hasn’t quite been true for colonized people in Africa and Asia because they still have strong cultural memories of self-sufficiency. When they’re able to overcome local dictators who use nationalist rhetoric to justify taking over the old oppression machinery of the colonial state, they do just fine.

Newfoundland’s white culture has never not been dependent. They have no real tradition of self-governance. They have never not been controlled by an elite. Newfoundland has never had the cultural cognitive resources for actual democracy: people banding together to build and direct their own lives and communities.

With Bernie Sanders winding down his Presidential
campaign, some moronic pundits will say that his
movement is over. But this was never his movement.
Like Jeremy Corbyn, the movement chose him as an
electoral standard bearer, an established politician with
compatible ideals. But they're both relics from the times
in the 20th century when social democracy was a
reasonable proposition.

Until Now, Maybe

One generational shift that’s been taking place lately is a revival of ideas in the West that were once – and are often today – dismissed and abused as communist: social democracy where local communities work together across the world to build a just and fair society throughout Earth.

Most communist governments around the world didn’t actually do that, of course. The Bolsheviks, Mao Zedong, and the Castro Brothers – the 20th century’s leading communist revolutions – did what I just described those tinpot postcolonial dictators as doing. 

They took over an oppressive state apparatus and exponentially amped up that oppression. They ran their governments on principles of totalitarian collectivization, which eventually scaled back their intensity from mass suicide to state-controlled bureaucratic socialism.

But the communist movement is more complicated than this, despite what the descendants of Friedrich Hayek would have you believe. For example, the first communist activists in the 19th century organized in the popular movement to end the slave trade. And America’s first organized resistance to communism was a society of conservative slave-holders, outraged at this movement that would force them to relinquish their ownership of black people.

We see around the world today social movements that have seen through the lies of new liberal politics and philosophy. We now, popularly, understand that regressive tax systems, deregulation of finance and environmental protections, and the expansion of a global labour pool without expanding workers’ rights results in total economic disaster.

The demonstrations against austerity in Newfoundland
have begun, led by a globally plugged-in generation.
They've learned in solidarity with activists in the US and
Europe. I have hopes that real democracy can finally take
root in Newfoundland, when people realize that they
can control their own lives. Democracy is the politics
of the human desire for freedom. #WeWillWin

In North America, the social movement that began with Occupy is the driving force of this changing popular attitude. We aren’t yet sure what balance we’ll eventually have to strike between the legitimacy of absurdly extreme wealth, progressive tax enforcement, ecologically harmonious infrastructure, poverty alleviation, and demand-driven economic policies. 

It won't be anything like the socialism of the 20th century, with its over-reliance on government bureaucracy and authority. It should be driven by the same network politics that create the social movement in the first place, with a focus not on the state, but on people.

And if the people of my birth province join this movement and fully understand it, they might finally end up ready for real freedom.