No Simple Victory in a World Such as Ours, Research Time, 18/06/2018

Being a pretty active member – and occasional contractor – for the New Democratic Party in Toronto means I regularly have conversations with lots of different kinds of marxists.

That includes self-identified marxists, and folks who are only considered marxists according to the new popular conception of marxism. You know it – where people who think there should be a state-subsidized pharmacare plan are functionally indistinguishable from Josef Stalin.

The caption reads, "Study! Because we will need all your intelligence."
The painting is by the Italian artist SOLO. Its location is the entrance
to Antonio Gramsci Secondary School on Affogalasino Street in Rome.

See, I don’t really like to call myself a marxist because it always gets people ascribing philosophical views to me that I don’t actually hold. Telling someone that you’re a marxist tends to make a lot of folks think that all your ideas are just regurgitated from the Cliff’s Notes of Kapital. That’s true whether or not you actually want them to think this. Usually, you don’t, but it can’t be helped once you use the m-word.

But it’s a much more complicated tradition that folks in the popular media give it credit for. A lot of that is because of the nuanced analyses of political economy that you find in Marx’s own later works. I was reading about that Sunday morning on a pleasant deck in Riverdale.

Today, I want to go over some of my notes on Gilbert, his take on how Antonio Gramsci transformed the marxist tradition.

As you might remember from my last post, a major task for my district association’s policy work is figuring out the key differences in the drift of working class union folks from the New Democratic Party in Canada. It’s a shift that puts the lie to the Cliff’s Notes version of marxism – class is always the primary vector for social consciousness.

I’ve had self-identified marxists tell me this. They should know better. Don’t act like Antonio Gramsci didn’t exist. His influence remains strong today, in many parts of the world.

Gilbert focusses on what he takes to be a central transformation in how the term ‘hegemony’ was used, giving it an entirely new philosophical spin. He remixed and mangled this old concept from political science – the direct or indirect leadership of a privileged class (inside a state) or a military power (internationally).

The slogans of my own country's current
leading intellectuals aren't quite so
inspiring to me.

He turned this term into a concept that we could use in all vectors of activism that seeks cultural and economic transformation. For a group to have hegemony in a culture means that the group’s mainstream and accepted images, political frameworks, economic systems, moralities, and ethical principles pressure all other such cultural and economic elements around the globe to conform to its own structures.

In other words, the old 19th century political science concept of hegemony: imagine an American fleet pulling into your harbour and forcing you to open up a McDonald’s. Military power backs economic and cultural transformation.

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony: imagine an American businessman flying to your country, co-opting all your local businessmen to open McDonald’s franchises, and then the popularity of their menu causes people to drift away from their more traditional foods. Economic power backs cultural and moral transformation.

Then Gilbert flies through an account of how Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe updated Gramsci’s concepts. They brought research on how the global economy was changing from the era of Western stagflation onward. So from the 1970s.

Laclau and Mouffe – in their joint and solo books – described how cultural power can lead the way in a hegemonic transformation, not only military and economic power. Identity politics like nationalism bind communities together in movements for economic change and even military civil insurrection.

Any aspect of human existence can become the leading edge in a liberating or a revanchist social revolution. It could be violent or peaceful, or a mixture of all degrees of inspiration and blood. What matters is that circumstances align to bring one vector into a hegemonic intensity of influence.

What are those circumstances? How do we manage them? How do we understand them? Change them?

Whither Capital III: Troubles With Apu, Research Time, 01/06/2018

What were you going to do about it? What were you going to do to resist the socially and ecologically destructive forces of globalizing industry and finance?

Throughout the 20th century, the default* course for the Western left to take was to look to the Soviet Union. Not the real Soviet Union, of course, which had far too much an excess of gulags, secret police, and general misery. I mean the Soviet Union that existed in its government’s international PR materials, and in the naïve hearts of privileged socialists of the Reagan Years.

* That is, the easiest and laziest.

Fighting the cultural and ethnic stereotyping you face in a mainstream
is an important element of revolutionizing a people's morality. And
the academics of Cultural Studies developed a lot of important
concepts for that critique. But is it sufficient to transform an entire
culture's morality to the necessary degree? That I don't think so.

Then the USSR collapsed. This was no End of History™, no matter how much liberal political tastemakers tried to demonstrate it. The Soviet Union, economically speaking, was the most thoroughly Fordist state that ever existed – the most complete standardization a government had ever attempted. It was a fully state-controlled economy whose purpose was primarily production within its borders.

The forces of globalization raging throughout the rest of the world tore the Soviet economy to pieces like the winds of a hurricane. The USSR’s borders couldn’t maintain their territory – literally. Capitalism destroys institutions of economic control. That’s terrible in some cases, but very beneficial in others.

Here’s where real history dovetails with the flickering shadows of conspiracist thought. Because the academic discipline of Cultural Studies – especially in Britain, where Jeremy Gilbert focusses his analysis – really was a form of cultural marxism.

Broadly speaking, this was a project among politically progressive and radical university professors in a particular discipline to see what cultural fields could promote revolutionary ideas, now that the major state source for socialist inspiration was torn to bits. In this sense, it followed the recommendations of a notorious duo at the forefront of developing revolutionary political philosophy.

No, I’m not talking about Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the devils of the American nationalist conspiracy of cultural marxism. Their actual ideas are remarkably defeatist. Andrew Breitbart just happened to read them, and knew of Adorno because of his friendship with the Black American revolutionary Angela Davis.

Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau are the duo that Jeremy Gilbert – as well as myself – see as the most important in turning marxist thought to issues of culture. But when you read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the direction Cultural Studies went in wouldn’t have been quite what they had in mind.

Here are the people I refer to when I write Cultural Studies. University-based cultural theorists writing analyses of popular culture and arts using concepts adapted from and developing the marxist traditions of thinking.

Here’s an example, “Deadpool Playing Myth: An Analysis of the "Secondary Narrative" in Deadpool's Promotional Images,” which is the title of an actual Master’s thesis at the Cultural Studies department of Queen’s University.

Now, that’s not to say that we don’t have plenty to learn from such an analysis in the art of narrative creation using meta-fiction in marketing communication. But it’s difficult to make the jump from here to a new economic system and political morality.

Because Laclau and Mouffe were talking primarily about social movements of the Global South and of different minoritarian and sub-altern populations across the world. Here we see a problem of method – you can’t really participate in such social movements when you live in a tenured professorship at a prestigious university.

So what can you do to build a social movement from a professor’s office?

The Impotent Liberal VI: Friends and Enemies, Research Time, 04/01/2017

When the influential political figures of your time are sociopathic
provocateurs of political and racist extremism for fun and profit,
a dedication to tolerance for a diversity of viewpoints won't be
quite adequate to deal with this mess.

Continued from last post . . . Like I said when I started this series more than a week ago, liberal democracy has a dangerous vulnerability.

The philosophy’s dedication to total freedom of thought, speech, and expression for all creates a space of tolerance for those who are dedicated to erasing freedom of thought, speech, and expression.

That old question of toleration of the intolerant plagues modern liberalism. I remember it being an issue going back as far as John Stuart Mill. Though I want to revisit his argument itself this year, I remember it basically as being the conviction that self-contradictory stances like arguing for intolerance on an omni-tolerant platform would fail to gain traction in the marketplace of ideas.

About that, John . . .

The free market of ideas was one of the original guiding ideas behind, for example, the founders of Twitter making their platform completely unrestrained. Free speech was sacrosanct, and must be protected at all costs.

The result? Twitter has become a training ground for white nationalists. And the company culture remains completely unwilling, unable, and incompetent at getting rid of them.

The culture of free speech without the restraint of moral respect has made the simple act of telling an obnoxious prick to shut up and go away into a form of censorship and oppression.

Lindy West wrote a deserved lambast of Twitter for its refusal and
inability to curb the Nazis among its user base. But if your approach
to politics is fundamentally about conflict avoidance, someone who
advocates tolerance loudly will be lumped into the same category
as the Nazis – someone who stokes conflict.

The principle of totally free speech rests on a premise that everyone is redeemable by reason and discourse. Reality has convinced me that this premise is not true. We may be able to influence a society as a whole in a progressive, freer direction. But there are many (not a lot, but enough) individuals who are utterly broken beyond repair.

They are racist, sexist conspiracy theorists who believe that the expression of another’s rights and freedoms actually oppress them. For example, men who believe that it is an act of anti-democratic censorship to prevent him from screaming rape threats and ethnic slurs at his family members.

So we have to take a key lesson from Laclau and Mouffe to heart – antagonism is central to politics. Opposition and conflict – rooted in the concepts that define fundamentally our very identities – are the processes that bind our societies together.

Because our societies are constituted through struggles. Human society develops by diversifying – left to our own devices, we create new kinds of identity. We differentiate ourselves.

Sometimes, those struggles are constructive. They build relationships between communities in a society that help inform each other and their wider neighbours about their mutual humanity.

But all these struggles come with conflict. Conflict between systemically or historically disadvantaged groups and a mainstream dominant class – black civil rights activists and whites who don’t even notice that anything is wrong.

"We have got onto slippery ice where there is
no friction and so in a certain sense the
conditions are ideal, but also, just because
of that, we are unable to walk. We want to
walk: so we need friction."
Ludwig Wittgenstein as political philosopher?
Terribly out of context, but maybe needed.

Conflict between different demographics who each have seemingly intractable problems – Christian fundamentalists and reproductive choice activists.

Conflict between groups disadvantaged in different ways as their various members succeed and fail to understand each other – the countless, messy, tense alliances between black, Muslim, gay, women, and trans activists.

Liberalism has an admirable utopian vision because it’s of a world without conflict. Where every fight is settled with calm, friendly, rational reasoning. It’s a beautiful ideal but profoundly realistic.

There’s an intense fear of conflict underlying this vision – the notion that any open antagonism in society will tear our communities apart. It’s not that this can never happen. But conflicts that rip societies to bloody, radioactive messes are rare and especially intense.

Most of the time, we all exasperatedly yell at each other about our differences in how we should live. Most of the time, that’s how we form our different identities. It’s how we each figure out and become who we are. Conflict isn’t just a means of breakdown and collapse – it’s the primal productive force of human thought, society, and morality.

A philosophy that can’t grapple with the reality of conflict will – no matter how many real political parties it inspires – always remain in some fundamental way in an imagined ideal. When the rubber hits the road, those ideals alone can’t go anywhere.

A utopia that can’t honestly and authentically understand the power and necessity of conflict will be as useful as frictionless shoes on ice.

The Impotent Liberal III: The Only Possibility is Nothing, Composing, 22/12/2016

This is a Composing post. An extremely Composing post if you know what I mean.

So the previous post was very rooted in real-world concerns – trying to understand what tendencies in the liberal conception of how to do politics made it vulnerable to fascism.

A perennial topic in political philosophy since about 1945. It’s waxed and waned in and out of prominence over the decades. But somebody was always thinking about it. Hannah Arendt did, for example. Now Arendt scholars and more original thinkers she’s influenced think about it too.

No, I can't think of any reasons in contemporary politics why we should
be worried about liberalism's weaknesses in the face of reactionary
authoritarian movements. Why do you ask?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe think about it from time to time in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Reading that book over the past little while encouraged me to think about it. There seem to be some pretty big reasons for thinking about it in politics today.

Yet despite its weaknesses, the liberal idea expresses a pure and profound drive among humanity to be free. How we live out our desires for freedom may change over the generations. But the desire can’t be restrained – if it ever really was in the first place.

And on an individual level, that’s the problem with desire. Desire has no necessary ending point – just contingent, often reactive, developments. It keeps chugging along, fuelling activity until something cuts it off.

Some other demand or desire gets in the way, or its own activity starts to change the world so that it becomes more difficult, or outright impossible. With the desires that constitute societies from individual actions, it’s usually other people that block or shut down our desires.

Political activity is the management of all the desires of everyone in a community for constructive ends. Maybe that community is simply a family, maybe it’s a country of millions, or a planet of billions. People jockey for power, respect, and happiness. No matter the scale, this is human life.

Politics at a family level rarely gets out of control. Even when it does, it’s usually only people in the families themselves who are hurt or killed. Same with small communities and small concerns. Scale this up to a planetary level and you’re potentially dealing with nuclear war and totalitarianism.

This year's American Presidential campaign
saw genuinely powerful appeals to a utopian
vision for freedom. Yet those to whom those
visions don't appeal often misunderstand
them. Pictured here is what
conservatives believe is the average Bernie
Sanders supporter.

Totalitarianism and oppression are major problems with any kind of utopianism. It’s the single vision and direction, imposed on a whole society through state control. Forcing a utopia on the world always has that result.

Yet our utopianism is bound up in our desires for freedom – we conceive of our utopias as the perfect society. A union of the cities of the divine and the mortal. The messiah complex in all of humanity. The positive programs of any utopian vision turned into a political program and state policy is a single prescription for freedom – the society where we will all be free.

But that freedom is false, because totalitarian imposition imposes a single vision of freedom on society. And humanity is a complexifying creature. We always make things more complicated for our society because we’re always drifting toward creating new ways to live, new priorities, new identities, new desires.

This is how reading Laclau and Mouffe got me thinking through this problem. They critique traditional marxism for its premise that industrial advancement will simplify society into two antagonistic classes. But the continuing development of industry and technology actually encourages people to become more complex.

We develop new identities – or become more conscious of desires that have always been part of our society, see how they’re typically suppressed, and bring them out into the light to celebrate their difference.

Cultures merge, new sexualities and genders develop. New social classes and communities develop from new professions and work cultures.

Using the state (or any kind of military-police institution) to impose a single vision of the free society on a whole community of people is the most blatant and horrible oppression imaginable.

So is it even possible to think in utopian terms about politics? To imagine some setup for society that would maximally free us as well as be peaceful?

I think the liberal idea is actually best suited for this task. Because the utopia of a liberal isn’t strictly negative – like a radical libertarian’s reactive, paranoid guard against state activity or control. And it isn’t positive either – like the white nationalist’s dream of a uniform ethno-state.

Liberal philosophy contains the only utopia worth having. A utopia that has no content. Nothing to impose. Nothing to oppress on people. Just the freedom of space itself.

You might be asking: What the fuck does that mean? Well, . . . To Be Continued

The Impotent Liberal II: Knowing Our Enemy, Research Time, 20/12/2016

Continued from last post . . . And I literally mean life and death. As in – people who want to kill you.

How to deal with people who want to kill you was typically a common feature in political philosophy. It’s there in the discipline’s most canonical text – Plato’s Republic considers a basic building block of society the class of warriors.

Liberalism embodies a beautiful idea, given the violent world where we live. Of course, I’m not speaking comprehensively about liberalism – a massive and complicated tradition of political thinking and institution-building.

But that beautiful idea – the most beautiful in the liberal tradition – is that notion of equal rights for all. The principle that everyone should be free to think, believe, live, and do as they please. The only limitation is that no one should harm each other.

Yes, this is most definitely what you call real antagonism.

When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe talk about enemies, it sounds jarring to someone raised in a liberal society. They talk about antagonism – the social forces and tensions that make enemies of people – as a fundamental element of society.

What is an enemy? The definition is unforgiving. It goes beyond the racism of disgust, by a long way. My enemy is those people whose presence in my society prevent me from being true to myself. You feel kept from your true potential simply because these other people are around in your society, your country.

Are you having trouble picturing that? It’s the kind of feeling that motivates Matthew Heimbach to envision a nation-state where only white Christians would even be allowed to live. Which he’s done on a small scale with his organization’s hamlet in Paoli, Indiana.

Racializing nationalism is the ideology of a drive to exile or eradicate an entire other category of people from your life. It’s bad enough when one group of people feel this about another, and it’s not reciprocated. Imagine the constant terror of both partners wanting to dance this dance.

Two groups of people, a substantial majority of whom hate each other to the point of frothing for genocide. And the rest may not froth, but they’re happy to go along for the ride and would be glad to be rid of the bastards.

Only a few dissenters. Barely a whisper of social conscience. Easy to ignore.

What people do to each other in the name of their ideological utopias
is absolutely horrifying.

That kind of antagonism is – thankfully – rare. For all our sakes, we should prevent this antagonism from developing. Integrate communities with many ethnicities all sharing the same neighbourhood. Cultivate an interest in exploring different cultures – Korean dudes stopping for dinner at the Ethiopian restaurant before the German techno party.

Liberal societies have come up with a lot of excellent ways to create that world where there are no enemies. Definitely, not everyone does them very well. Sometimes, a society or a government’s nationalist leanings outweigh their commitment to openness.

When you start to think, “This is a Christian country,” “a Muslim country,” “a black country,” or “a white country.” And not the only label that matters to a liberal – “This is a free country.”

Everyone can be free. That means no one need be my enemy. Yet here’s an enemy staring me down and calling for my death. And I didn’t do anything to provoke it.*

* Or did I? And if it was my government and I had no genuine idea what the hell’s been going on around the world for the last 70 years? Do you think the average person ever consents to any of the horrible shit different governments do to people around the world? No one runs this stuff by us in a referendum. It’s sold to us. Realpolitik is horrifying no matter who does it. What matters is striking back at the ones who actually harmed you. Not some repairman in Topeka or Mosul who barely cares about politics. The ones who give the orders. A bit of a rant there.

The knowledge that freedom really is universal gives the liberal hope. Hope that no one need be anyone’s enemy. That hope can blind a society to genuine hatred. . . . To be continued

The Impotent Liberal I: My Arms Are Open! Research Time, 19/12/2016

“I may disagree with everything you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it!”

One of the world’s oldest memes of fundamental liberal principles. It’s explicitly about free speech rights. But the right to free speech has implications that reach much more profound corners of human life than our rights to speak and promote our ideas.

The right to free speech means that all ideas are welcome in public conversation. That means you have to welcome the speaker as well – if they’re a partner in your public conversation, they’re part of your society.

The argument goes like this. There are no expressions or ideas that a
free society can never accept. But values based on such horrifying
hatred as white supremacy is utterly unacceptable. Can a democratic
society survive without rejecting Richard Spencer?

So the right to free speech implies – at least potentially – total inclusion in society. And that’s a fantastic idea. It’s the foundation of the ideal of world peace. And world peace is the liberal democratic idea taken to its most utopian ideal – so utopian that it could be spoken by an aging hippie smoking a spliff watching the sunset.

Here's the problem. And I’m far from the first one to say this. Hell, it comes up in nearly every philosophy class when people discuss freedom of speech. Someone enters this community where everyone is included and everyone can speak their mind. And this person says what’s on their mind.

He says that a huge chunk of the people in this open society shouldn’t be allowed to speak their minds, live in our society, or maybe even exist at all. He starts talking about how women shouldn’t work or speak, that hispanics should be deported, Muslims be imprisoned, Jews forced to Israel, and blacks repatriated to African countries.

In other words, into this liberal paradise where everyone is included and everyone can speak and think as they wish pops a white nationalist. Richard Spencer, Jim Dowson, David Duke, or Matthew Heimbach.

This is an old problem for liberal thinkers. And it’s so obvious a problem that it gets into introductory political philosophy classes as a fallback topic. How does a regime of tolerance deal with the intolerant?

Jim Dowson founded the racist white supremacist organization Britain
First, but left a few years ago and founded the white nationalist
Patriot News Network. This is a major source of pro-Trump memes
and propaganda throughout 2016.

Thing is, I don’t think I’ve seen a single philosophy class where the discussion didn’t just leave this question kind of hanging. There are arguments that, to be true to your principle, you have to include everyone – including the intolerant. And you just have to fight their against their arguments in the marketplace of ideas as hard as they fight for them.

You know what I think? How about “bullshit.” I used to believe in this argument, but two things turned me against it. One was the last couple of years in Europe and North America, when violently racist political movements have sprung up in pretty much every major country of the ostensibly liberal democratic West.

The term ‘marketplace of ideas’ was first developed in Victorian England. When John Stuart Mill wrote about this, public discourse was conducted in long, rambling, complex arguments. Even advertisements were full pages of text, complicated arguments for why you should buy this brand of rainboot over any other.

I don’t have to tell you the media doesn’t work that way today. So we can’t exactly argue about the idiocy of white supremacy as a moral philosophy. We have to fight using memes, sharable content, and social media organizing. Because those are the media weapons of white supremacy.

Liberal argument and tolerance alone can’t handle these people. Because a regime of universal tolerance will literally accept everyone. It even has to accept the viewpoints in its society of the people who want to reject damn near everyone.

Not exactly the nuanced, calm consideration of detailed
arguments that Mill envisioned in his 'marketplace of
ideas.'

Well, we can’t accept the existence of those people in our society. We have to eject racists and sexists. We have to reject white nationalism if we want to defend our liberal, democratic values.

Doesn't that make for a hypocritical liberalism? That we’ll tolerate everything but intolerance? Doesn’t that mean we fail to tolerate literally everything?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe get to this in the most dense part of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. They identify it as the fundamental weakness of liberalism – liberal thinking twists itself into knots over whether they should tolerate violent intolerance.

And we shouldn’t. Of course, this is the centre of a major critique of liberal thinking and politics. Yes, this is going to take a while to unpack. Yes, I’m going to do it here.

But holy shit, it’s important because the ascent of white nationalism to state power is a major political issue in Western society.

Liberalism can’t deal with enemies. Dealing with your enemies is the most important part of politics. Literally life and death. . . . To be continued

Recognize People’s Real Power, Research Time, 15/12/2016

You know, back when I started this blog, I knew a lot of its posts would follow the research I was doing for Utopias. And one of the first declarations I made in my historical research was that, even though I knew I’d engage with some works in the marxist tradition, I was no marxist.

Reading Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the landmark 1980s work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I’m even more convinced of my non-marxism.

Here's an idea that was really prominent in the history of marxism. Not just the academic marxist scholarship – I’m talking about the early 20th century, when the biggest demographic of marxism was political activists and revolutionary radicals.

People's demands can change their whole society. It's called politics.

This is the idea they criticize pretty robustly: That capital totally dominates labour conditions. In other words, the people, organizations, and broader social forces that own, control, and express a society’s sources of wealth controls its labour conditions too.

The concept is connected with traditional marxism’s social, political, and economic determinism. The macro-level structure of society entirely determines all the conditions and movements that are part of it. Society’s superstructure is its only agency.

Labour, meanwhile, isn’t an activity. That would imply that it has agency. Work, according to the tradition, is a commodity – labour-power. You can negotiate the value of your work as a wage, but work’s only feature is its applications, what a boss sends you to do.

Laclau and Mouffe rip this concept apart, and they do it as part of a sustained attack on the entire marxist tradition – both in the theory and in the activism, which until only the last few decades were two sides of the same movement. That attack is uncovering and tearing down a recurring error in marxist thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the world.

The tradition ignores the contingency of history – sees only the logical necessity of theoretical argument and is blind to the messy dynamism of life.

In this context, the tradition ignores how it wasn’t just capitalist society’s superstructure changing according to abstract internal laws of motion that determines labour conditions. Labour conditions are the product of dynamic struggle between working people and the large conglomerates and elite business leaders who employ them.

In 19th century Europe, the children’s rights movement took kids out of dangerous, dehumanizing factory work. In the early 20th century, the union movement won restrictions on the working day’s and week’s length.

Ernesto Laclau and his partner Chantal Mouffe were two figures in the
group that brought ecological ways of thinking to the philosophical
tradition in complex, multidimensional ways. Their academic roots in
marxist studies made them two of the most explicitly political in that
movement.

Today, workers are changing the conditions of labour through activism again. Business leaders aim to casualize and destabilize all employment through models like the gig economy and the sharing economy. So workers are building organizations that network among each other to pool financial and knowledge resources – essentially a union of contractors.

Organizations like the Urban Worker Project in Ontario, which is developing to look a bit more like a medieval guild than a modern labour union.

Where business leaders want to drive their labour costs lower and lower, workers are organizing to keep their wages fair. And that fairness is in reference to the actual cost of living in their cities. The continent-wide Fight For $15 movement is the spearhead organization here.

These are political movements that have the power to condition and entirely remake economic relationships in society. Recognizing their real power in the world is a fatal critique of traditionally orthodox marxist thinking.

These arguments are all so simple when you think about them that I find it weird that there are orthodox marxists left anymore.