We Ended Racism So Now We Fight Racism, Research Time, 24/01/2016

Part of what I think is wonderful about the contemporary wave of protest movements is that they’re teaching people about systemic causality. Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, and social network feminism all discuss how you can have racism without racists. 

When I was young, I felt alienated from anti-racism
movements because I thought my being white made me
unwelcome in their struggle. That's why I'm glad part of
the outreach of anti-racist movements today makes an
issue of how white people can join without being
condescending, without being some pathetic dork
shouting, "I can't be racist! I listen to Kendrick Lamar!"
But white people can fight white privilege by using
their existing privilege to amplify the message of
peace. I'll always love Kendrick, though.

Systemic racism: A system of institutions and social relations that are generally taken for granted, but which have a massively disparate impact on one group of people over another. 

This is the kind of racism for which punishment and blame make no sense. It’s another thing that reactionaries don’t understand about these movements: they don't seek to punish white people. The goal is education, empathy, and progress toward institutional and social change. These movements seek reparative justice, not retributive.

But that’s not to say that the type of racism whose proper response is a slap to the mouth doesn't exist anymore. 

Antonio Negri has a lot of interesting things to say about racism, as you'd expect from someone whose philosophy comes from such a post-colonial perspective. Better I should say post-post-colonial.

A major goal of Empire the book is describing the difference between the old model of imperialism and the new centreless globalization of empire. One aspect of that I’ve discussed before, the difference between state-driven overseas conquest (imperialism) and omnidirectional market integration (empire). 

Another difference is how people think about race. Modernist racism, the racism of imperialism, conceives of race as a biological category. Race is baked into people’s essences. The difference between whites, blacks, east Asians, and Amerindians is either eternal, or moves at the speed of biological evolution, in epochs so long they may as well be eternal.

The imperialist way of thinking about race considered different races literal sub-species of humanity. They were ranked in power and potential with the same certainty as Linnaeus. 

Only a few decades ago in America, the marriage that
produced Barack Obama would have been illegal. It's
not that progress isn't possible; what's disappointing is
how fucked up and weird institutionalized racism used
to be, even compared to the gross injustices of our era.

Reacting to this, anti-racist activism focussed on how racial differences were the product of culture. Dividing lines between races were cultural conventions, and behavioural and linguistic differences between races were cultural variations among communities all over the globe.

The roots of race lie in the contingency of cultural development, according to anti-racism in the imperialist period. But we can't continue speaking this language, because racism has adapted to that critique.

Racism now speaks in the language of cultural determinism instead of biological essence. The contemporary racist of the imperial / globalization / networked era accepts that racial difference is a function of culture’s contingency. 

But those cultural differences make it impossible for different communities to integrate and co-exist without violence. Here’s an example from contemporary politics.

A lot of the rhetoric against allowing Muslims to move to European and North American countries revolves around cultural differences. 

Muslims, so goes this perspective, are anti-democratic because they demand that all people live under their strict religious laws. All Muslims want to control women, consider rape ordinary, and think nothing of murdering their daughters for minor moral infractions. They accuse Muslims of being inherently violent.

Not only is none of this bullshit true, but it's rooted in stereotypes about the uniformity of Muslim culture. It treats Islam as a total cultural determinant of more than a billion individual personalities. 

These peaceful gun-toting militiamen held a peaceful
protest outside a Texas mosque about a variety of issues
for which they blamed the existence of Muslim people
in America. So that's pretty horrible.

We combat this kind of racism, rooted in ideas of cultural determinism and uniformity, by throwing the singularity of unique individuals in the face of racists. We drag people kicking and screaming into empathy. 

I don't want to say for certain, but I’m pretty sure that an attitude of empathy and genuine understanding is the ultimate cure for racism that, unlike the reaction to biological racism, can't be turned back against the cause of radical liberation.

• • •

One of the things I love about living in Toronto is how ethnically mixed the city is, and how much ethnic mixing goes on in the city. Walk around Toronto, and you won’t just see couples whose love would have been illegal in the days of anti-miscegenation laws. 

You’ll see couples who those old laws wouldn’t even know what to do with. And the kids that those couples produce will contribute to a city’s population that's truly post-racial, and increasingly incapable of racism. They won't even know what race is. 

In a society where love is possible between anyone, the existence of race is impossible.

One and All Flow Together III: Ridiculous Unity, Research Time, 03/01/2016

Continued from last post . . . A person’s fundamental human rights don’t rest on the decision of a state to grant them. All you need is to demand a right, and if that right helps secure your freedom without jeopardizing or harming your community, then you can legitimately claim it.

Our governments should be a tool for the public and all the communities that constitute a wider public to put some teeth behind securing and protecting those rights. But the history of how the state actually developed made government a tool to administer, police, and control its population. 

The modern state arose from the conservative, reactionary movement that grew up in the face of the revolutions against the absolute monarchies. Philosophies that justify the power of the state over the people were developed as the intellectual wing of this reactionary movement. 

From North Korea's Arirang Mass Games, the
coordinated movements of hundreds of people as one
entity that subsumes all their movements into an
organic whole. I wonder if there's any symbolic
meaning here?

That's true for blatantly authoritarian philosophies like Thomas Hobbes’ theory of sovereignty. But it's also true for more subtle philosophies, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory of the general will. 

In that example, democratic representative institutions like parliaments aggregate and process individual wills to produce the will for what is best for the nation as a whole, at least ideally. 

But the general will doesn’t actually exist any more than the nation actually is some kind of superorganism that all our individual wills jack into like some cybernetic hive mind.* This is true of the nation. Nations aren’t real. They presume uniformity in culture, territory, morals, and history where there's always ever been difference, variety, multiplicity.

* Images from sci-fi are incredibly useful in all kinds of philosophical thinking. Philosophers should be in so much debt to that genre.

Nations. They’re a ridiculous concept. 

But we all believe in them. It’s the work of hundreds of years** of administration, services, symbols, military mobilizations, anthems, history and culture curriculums, media productions, and all the other ways I can't immediately think of right now that a national identity perpetuates itself.

** If not thousands of years if you consider how the Chinese national identity arose from that old empire, a state government and bureaucracy which has been continuous in some form for literally millennia.

Nationhood arises from the unity of government over a long enough time. National unity is imposed on a population with far more differences among each other than there is superficial commonality.

A patriotic symbol that functions to unify a nation.

The unity and uniformity of a population isn't natural. We're all individuals. When we interact, we’re just going to become more different. We should be proud of that creativity, our ability to produce new ways of being.

But so often, we aren’t. We’re told to conform. And so many of the great philosophers, especially in the modern period, have been more concerned with justifying the pressure to conform than encouraging our rebellion, creativity, contrariness, and variety.

Antonio Negri has a very quick argument against Georg Hegel in this regard. I'd like to talk with some of my friends who are still devoted to the study of Hegel about this. Because it's a quick argument. 

So the natural response of a sadly typical Hegel scholar will be to dismiss it, because Negri doesn't reckon with all the details of the Hegelian system and all its possible interpretations. Just the general thrust of the system.

Frankly, why should he play by the rules of traditional, conservative scholars? Traditional, conservative scholarship would never have resulted in a book as remarkable as Empire. 

This is the problem of the academy. It can give you an institutional home from which you can practice your research in peace. But it slows you down, makes you afraid to take anything but the most careful steps. 

So throw caution to the winds! What is the argument? To be continued . . . 

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

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

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

This hashtag used to be a living young boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Globalized capitalism, essentially.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet he rots.

What Are These Wars Really All About? A History Boy, 22/12/2015

This post is going to begin what will probably be a pretty long series. I don't know if I’ll link them. I’m going to talk about Antonio Negri, and the ideas from his work that will inform the Utopias project.

Utopias basically has two major philosophical influences: Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri. The two are pretty closely linked already. Negri introduces Empire by explicitly citing Deleuze and Félix Guattari as forerunners. Essentially, Empire is picking up the approach to understanding globalization that A Thousand Plateaus developed and giving it a clear political mission.

I first read Empire in the summer of 2008. Personally speaking, that was a wonderful summer. I had been accepted into the doctoral program at McMaster University's Philosophy department, I was staying at my mom's house to save on expenses, working at The Rooms gift shop part time to put a little extra away, and hanging out with all my friends in St. John's before moving to Ontario that August.

And I was reading. Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Dostoyevsky, Gao Xingjian, and of course Antonio Negri. Empire helped me solidify a lot of what I hadn't previously understood about the politics of the 21st century.

I watched the Battle of Fallujah play out on news reports.
In my memory, I always associate it with a description of
the effects of a white phosphorus attack on living flesh.
I would hear very clinical descriptions in news reports on
rumours that American troops and mercenaries
used these weapons in Fallujah, and my imagination of
what these weapons would do to me is still horrifyingly
vivid.

I’ve written many times before about the impact of the September 11 attacks on my own political sensibilities. My own life was perfectly and perversely timed, as they happened on my third day of university.

I was 18 years old, still figuring out what my place was going to be in the world, still figuring out who I was. And the politics of my world were defined by this horrifying act of terrorism and its aftermath.

That aftermath was the war in Iraq. It was a stupid war, even more stupid than most wars. One particularly stupid myth about this war (which I still hear repeated regarding other wars in Iraq, including the military incursions of my own country’s army today) is that it was all about oil.

This is the argument that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was about American imperialism. They were going to capture Iraq's oil supplies for themselves. 

Yet this made no sense. The United States is still a petroleum producing country, and its firm alliance with Saudi Arabia, cemented since the Second World War, means that its oil supplies are in no danger for decades, probably longer. 

The most disturbing possibility was true. George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and others in the W Administration affiliated with the now-defunct think tank Project for a new American Century, actually thought they could invade a country into democracy, and that its people having been freed, would be natural allies of the United States, beacon of liberation that it is.*

* One element of my Utopias manuscript will probably be a sad meditation on the irony of how many peace-minded, progressive intellectuals of the mid-20th century, like Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, wrote so sincerely about America as a beacon of liberation, because of their defeat of Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and standing up to the Soviet Union. Hoo, boy.

A lot of the most vocal left-wing today decries America as an imperialist nation. They support Vladimir Putin's Russia and even Bashar Assad himself because they stand up to Western imperialism. 

I also remember those inspiring marches against going
to war in Iraq in 2003. But I remember a feeling of
hopelessness whenever I saw them. As though I
knew no public demonstration would make anyone
in the US or British governments reconsider invasion.
I don't have that bleak feeling when I see Occupy, Idle
No More, and Black Lives Matter protests.

Negri helped me understand that America’s modern military entanglements aren't actually imperialism. Even when they invaded Iraq, there was no desire among any American leadership to make Iraq the 51st state. 

Imperialism is about conquest, taking control of a foreign land and treating it as if it's a new territory of your own country. This is what I think most of us in the 21st century seem to have forgotten about the imperialist era. 

Britain – its leaders and all of its people – actually considered India to be just as much a part of Britain as Scotland and Basingstoke are today. 

To French people, Algeria and Vietnam weren’t just foreign places where the French army and some French citizens lived. Those soldiers and people were in France.

Portuguese people seriously considered fucking Mozambique just as much part of Portugal as a Lisbon suburb. In the 1960s!

Imperialism is about conquering foreign territory and considering it your own.

Empire, as a concept, is bigger than any one country’s army. It’s not about anything as provincial as conquest. Empire is about how the structure of the global economy includes mechanisms to define who is a person and who isn’t. 

This power no longer rests with governments, where we’ve figured out some minimal accountability strategies like democracy. It rests with systematic economic relationships.

Bit of a difference from just shipping some tanks and hopped-up bodyguards to Baghdad. That’s what Negri taught me.

Who’s Your Enemy II: A New and Tougher Empire, Composing, 11/05/2015

Continued from last post . . . I’ve been talking about George Galloway because he seems so much a relic of another time. Living proof that the old ways of doing dissident politics have just petered out. The orthodoxy is to support organizations that liberate people from colonial imperialism by any means. That’s how people can demonstrate for world peace and for Hamas in the same breath.

This is the new sound, just like the old sound

Just like the noose wound, over new ground

Western powers used to physically occupy foreign territory around the world all the time, treating those annexed powers as if they were legitimate parts of themselves. It was the convention, after all, to take over and administer (economically and culturally) the territory that was conquered in war. This is how territory transferred from France to Germany or Italy to Austria in wars between European states. It didn’t matter who started the fight. The land transfer from one sovereign power to another through war was determined only by the outcome of war. No other legitimation process was needed. 

And when the armies were ridiculously mismatched in their technological powers, like industrially advanced legions marching into largely agrarian societies all over Africa, well too bad for the Africans not being lucky enough to have developed large-scale industry. Then the slave trades and the attendant racialization kicked into seriously high gear.

It’s a very simplified version of the actual complex history of global colonization as the expansion of state military conquest to feed massively expanding industrial economies. But the point is simple: Imperialism was, in essence, the state military seizure of territory all over the globe. 

That’s why Antonio Negri distinguished imperialism from empire. Imperialism was a specific kind of domination where institutions of centralized military authority took administrative control of territory and populations by armed conquest. Empire is about economic domination without the need to be bogged down in control of territory as sovereign administrators. 

Disconnected from the state, the main vehicle of domination is now economic controls that move much more insidiously into people’s everyday lives everywhere. Authoritarianism is no longer concentrated in a single kind of institution which has direct control over its agents. Authoritarianism is no longer only intentional, but systematic.

An image of Imperialism, Charles Edwin Fripp's painting
of the Battle of Isandhlwana during the Anglo-Zulu Wars.

Now, I don’t mean to say that state military services have no power anymore. Any protester who has faced police violence in Ferguson, or who suffers under the cultural oppression of the Chinese government in Tibet, or who lives under military or monarchist dictators in the Middle East for just a few examples, knows that. 

But the centreless structures of systematic oppression that constitute Empire, those are harder to fight. You can’t just blame a single set of governments for all of the activities that oppress people. We’re now dealing, fundamentally, with systems that require a different kind of radicalism to change. 

This radicalism requires carving new communities and new kinds of relationships out of the spaces that are otherwise warped by economic and corporate interests. Such spaces can still be fraught and violent, as in indigenous resistance to foreign-owned mining interests in the Amazon. State militaries may well be involved as well, as in the suppression of protest movements in Ferguson and Baltimore. 

But overthrowing that military will not be enough, because the globe-spanning relationships that encourage whatever military oppression happens in a given place remain. The dynamic systems of empire are processes bigger than and distinct from the organizations that enact oppression. This is why the new boss always becomes the same as the old boss.

Galloway’s thinking embodies this fundamental mistake, taking Empire for Imperialism. Imperialism was a phenomenon driven by the intentional activities of a few state governments, their leaders, elite classes, and the mass populations who were manipulated into joining colonial armies through patriotic and racializing ideologies. Galloway, and all the other useful idiots of the contemporary left think that these processes are still the only engines of oppression that exist. 

I sometimes wonder if Galloway resembles François, the
protagonist of Michel Houellebecq's novel Soumission,
who thrives under the socially conservative, anti-
feminist rule of a Muslim Family Values government
in 2020s France.

They do still exist, but they are no longer the master processes of global oppression. Imperialism is now one articulation of Empire.

Presuming that the Imperialist era never ended, then the West is still the only malevolent force in the world, making all enemies of the West virtuous allies in the fight against Imperialism. 

This is why Galloway sees nothing oppressive about running the political machine of the Bradford West Respect Party as a system of patronage among the elite Kashmiri and Pakistani extended families who largely control the major local businesses there. The obvious corruption of such politics and the social illiberalism of their anti-Semitic politics aren’t evaluated for their material affects on the people of their community. They’re anti-Western, so they are good.

So it goes with loudmouths of the contemporary left, the useful idiots, the reactionary left. And I say this as a man of the left myself. I’ve been encouraged before to leave aside my support for liberation from unfair economic systems, to renounce environmentalism as a grab for state power, to believe that what’s good for Bay Street and Big Oil is what’s good for the people. I've been encouraged to do this because useful idiots of the right-wing have pointed to the useful idiots of the left and said that the left is essentially state authoritarianism, bureaucratic oppression, the suppression of women, and hatred of Jews.

But I won’t. Because I know who the real enemy is.

Am I the only one?