"Resistance Is Prior to Power" – Antonio Negri. 13/01/2019

Here is the opening monologue from last week's episode of Radical Democrats Radio, "Resistance Is Prior to Power." You can support the podcast and other projects at our Patreon.

• • •

I want to open with a quote from Antonio Negri in Assembly: “Resistance is prior to power. . . . revolutionary movements and struggles are the source of political innovation.”

What that means, is that new approaches to how we can live together in communities, build links of mutual dependency and aid, always emerge from situations of people trying to create power for themselves. 

Remember, when I talk about people creating their power, I’m not talking about taking control of the state here. This is one point where radical democracy departs from the revolutionary marxist tradition in which it began. 

But that’s with good reason, because there’s something very important about revolutionary marxism’s beginning – you know, back when Karl Marx was actually alive – that has shifted radically. The West is not controlled by autocratic states anymore.

I make this statement with rhetorical reservations, of course.

Let’s be clear about our situation today, though. This show has gone live the week after, in the United States, the Democratic Party has taken over the federal government’s lower legislative chamber. 

The leading activists and candidates in that election openly branded themselves as the capital R Resistance. Many were from marginalized communities and cultures who, as a whole, have suffered from state institutions dominated by social conservatives and oligarchs. 

The state of which Donald Trump is President allowed them to organize, run, and take office. I’m serious about that term ‘allowed.’ 

Because the physical machinery of police, surveillance, and security services in the United States is more than capable of rounding up political agitators and opposition party members to disappear them into the prison system forever. 

Marxist philosophy began in a population living under governments that arrested and executed people for organizing communities of marginalized people – the poor in Germany and Russia, the colonized in Britain, Belgium, and France, the enslaved in the United States. Their revolutions all turned out to be fairly successful over a century or more.

But those revolutions against autocracy, colonization, and dictatorship revealed more complex ways culture itself was a political force – a force that could liberate or oppress people. 

Yes, state laws enforced socially conservative beliefs – Like when homosexual acts and divorce were illegal in Western countries. But the state had no power over a woman’s parents deciding to advocate for her husband in the breakup of a violent marriage. The state had no power in family and friends ostracizing a young person for their sexuality or gender.

Here’s where contemporary radical democracy departs clearly from that marxist tradition. Where there are vectors of oppression, there is politics. That includes, state, economics, morality, and culture. All of that is political.

Oppression is a simple activity, no matter how many big bureaucratic agencies a state might use to oppress people. That just complicates a simple act. The stomp of a boot into the ground. 

The real nature of oppression is why Negri can write that political creativity comes from resistance to power instead of power itself. 

In resistance, you act to escape control from some oppressive institution or cultural practice. Such an escape requires agility – Not just in organizing, but in life. 

Of course, an oppressive practice, morality, or institution will react to people openly organizing against it. But the presence of oppressive networks and relationships also work in a more insidious, if equally simple, way. A pervasive morality or social practice will work to make any resistance appear futile.

Picture the residents of a community that’s been in economic depression for decades, who’ve been so dominated by the power of local oligarchs over their institutions that they see any resistance to this order as bound to fail. That’s how oppression encourages apathy.

Even worse is the oppression of morality – It’s how you convince a person to desire their own slavery, to see their oppression as good. They understand fundamental right and wrong in terms of a morality that justifies the power of oppressive institutions, classes, and people. 

I’m talking about moralities that create figures like Uncle Tom, the Dutiful Wife, the Mimic Man. Such a system of beliefs defines what is morally right as to submit yourself utterly to some figure, institution, or state. You are raised to accept without question, as intuitively true, that you are subservient, that you do not deserve freedom.

All this reactionary activity seems very complex, since it flows across so many planes of human activity: 

Moralities that shape subjectivities and social practices.

 

Institutions that shape legal, administrative, and police bodies.

 

Economic relationships that open opportunities for some and erase or block the formation of opportunities for many others.

But it all amounts to a simple movement – the block, the suffocating blanket that drains the energy of your own freedom.

Overcoming that movement requires complexity because of the many paths through which the suffocation of freedom moves. Overcoming moral suffocation requires different concepts and strategies than overcoming institutional suffocation. 

Convincing a woman to understand her “good Christian” marriage as actually incredibly abusive takes utterly different strategies than ending city planning practices that segregate neighbourhoods ethnically to marginalize and impoverish minorities. 

The tools of oppression change by context, but not its actions – suffocate freedom. Resisting and overcoming that suffocation requires actions that are utterly different in each context. 

Unfortunately, that ends up interrupting unity among activists to transform the entire oppressive system on a global basis. People who learned how to resist in one or a few contexts will not understand intuitively what’s in common with resisters in other contexts. 

Example: White union movement activists in Canada oppose environmental and Indigenous movements because they see these activists as roadblocks to their community’s prosperity. 

The solution is unfortunately difficult – outreach and education. People who understand how all oppressions enforce each other have to teach fellow progressives who define their interests too narrowly. 

That education also requires a lot of creativity – New kinds of intervention that can overcome people’s partial perspectives, prejudices, disgusts. Healing an Arab/Muslim activist’s anti-Semitism takes a different educational strategy than healing a Christian human rights activist’s homophobia, and a different strategy than healing a feminist activist’s Islamophobia.

“Resistance is prior to power.”

Rising Tides Lift Only Boats That Can Pay for Maintenance, Research Time, 17/07/2018

So yes, the conception of prosperity as abundance has all those problems I talked about yesterday. Ultimately, the concept can’t escape the perennial problem in human history – the conflict of the powerful and powerless.

I'm wondering – Do they all have to wear the shirts?

Lords and peasants. Nouveau riche and factory boys. Oligarchs and Taskrabbits.

Society is always much more complex in all the dynamic processes and knit us all together, of course. But this question of distribution always comes up because of the disastrous results of extreme inequality. When so much of a civilization’s wealth is locked up and never returned to the market, there’s a mass slide into poverty.

When the bulk of a population slides into penury while a small elite become earthly gods from their extreme wealth, you have a potential revolution on your hands. Oligarchy’s survival mechanism is to bring all the counter-revolutionary powers of the state – both military and messaging – to bear.

The counter-revolutionary state is a fascist one, because its purpose is to suppress and deceive the desires of its people. That’s why such an important message in democratic organizing is “fight the real enemy.”

I was lecturing in my Business class today about how inadequate general measures of a country’s wealth – like Gross Domestic Product – are to understand how that economy actually functions. Pure aggregates of economic measurement collapse too many distinctions to make the world comprehensible. They measure nothing about how many people in that society are comfortable and who is not.

So what does the concept of prosperity as abundance show us? It does lead us, productively, to focus on the phenomenology of economic anxiety. Abundance is the image of the world’s perfection for the economically insecure.

It’s what you dream of as you weigh how much you can fill up your car today against how many groceries you can buy that week. Progressive political philosophy could use a few more phenomenological accounts of that state of consciousness.

Nostalgia Feeding Fascist Dreams of Cackling Joy, Research Time, 21/06/2018

We’re in a fascist moment right now. I don’t have to tell you this. Not only is the United States government locking away families seeking asylum from war and violence, but the guards enjoy their jobs, there are already allegations of abuse in the children and infants’ detention camps, and there’s a pretty big minority who doesn’t care or believe any of this is going on.

Maybe they really do think that everyone ICE is arresting and throwing into prison camps are all thousands of MS-13 gang members who constantly stream into the country.

Very little about the Trump family is subtle. The Republican Party
apparatchiks like Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen may prefer to be
more slippery, cagey about what they're actually doing. They won't
say what they're doing. The Trump family is different. They tell you
what you say, but it's so ridiculous that you know it's a stupid excuse.

Maybe that’s just what they tell people who they suspect would be a little disturbed by their real thoughts. Maybe they’re genuinely happy that thousands of Central American Hispanic and Indigenous people are locked in prison camps, degraded, and beaten. Children and infants included.

Stare at that hatred. It’s a human desire. It is not monstrous. It is not somehow inhuman. It is ordinary.

Different trends of research examines the images that warp a personality to express such intense hatred against the ethnically different. Many of those research trends percolated through the academic discipline of Cultural Studies. Jeremy Gilbert provided a damn good bibliography section for this end of my research.

An important set of fascist concepts is rooted in the appeal to stability. You could call it the desire for freedom from fear. Any change brings risk, and a major shift in the nature and makeup of your society is riskier than if little to nothing changed at all.* Fear is the most intuitive response to the notion that your world is growing riskier, more dangerous.

* This is, of course, not the actual nature of risk, which is way more complicated. The point isn’t about what risk is, but people’s intuitions about risk.

When our world feels more dangerous, we dream of peaceful times. If we associate our feelings of danger with the change happening all around us, we’ll idealize a time in our society before that change began. We’ll want to return to that state.

Make America Great Again.

That’s how nostalgia becomes the driving image of a fascist political movement. When you’re so motivated by a fear growing in the most important desires of your personality, you’ll condone whatever violence needed to make that dream come true.

He gives you permission to use his moronically stupid excuse so that
you have something to say when a less racist person talks to you at
a party. And you can, happily and relatively privately, sit back and
enjoy watching thousands of people you hate suffer and die.

If you fear a society where your ethnicity and cultural heritage will be a minority so much, you’ll be relieved those detention camps are booming. They’ll turn back the desperate civil war refugees by conclusively demonstrating that Central Americans will find no shelter here.

The imagery of nostalgia can turn to better purposes, of course. Nostalgic themes play an important role in the environmental movement. I find it naïve that people would think of a non-technological world as a Garden of Eden.** Simply false when you learn anything about the very turbulent history of Earth.

** As a cultural image of a peaceful, harmonious Nature before human corruption. Not some silly story about a naked couple living in the woods with a talking snake.

If you come from a culture and a community that’s treated ethnic minorities with terrible oppression for centuries, wouldn’t you fear becoming an ethnic minority? You’d associate being a cultural minority with oppression, unable to imagine people of different cultures and ethnicities living together peacefully.

When you’ve grown up hating by instinct, you have an instinctive feel for how terrible it is to be the object of that hatred. When you see yourself in danger of becoming that object, your survival instinct kicks in. Luckily, what you’ll do to survive supports your disgust at having to share space with them. You’ll be relieved that these disgusting creatures won’t come to find you so disgusting.

Reading Gilbert, he brings it back to neoliberalism. How all of this becomes a way to dupe people into supporting an oligarchic economic system. He’s not wrong. But let’s understand this aspect as well – an ethical phenomenology of the racist.

Whither Capital VI: Unlike Attracts Unlike, Research Time, 06/06/2018

Political alliances are marriages of convenience. That’s true when we’re talking about the coalitions of political parties. But it’s also true in other contexts. Some straightforward illustrations first.

If things go well in the Ontario election tomorrow, the province will have a government led by the New Democratic Party. In the popular gathering places of conservative and reactionary folks, it’s painted as a monolithic left – an undifferentiated mass of feminist trans gay communist black Jews.* But reactionaries don’t really understand the left.

* You can fill in what they really call us yourselves. But I’ll give you a hint. Actually no. I’ll just tell you, so that you can know how much progressive people are really hated. Bitch tranny faggot commie nigger kikes. That’s the language of Ford Nation.

This election campaign has been consuming significant amounts of my
life. It better, because I'm paid staff putting in 25 hours per week. So
naturally, I'm invested. And while I don't think the state is the most
effective machine to drive political transformation, its oppressive
machinery is extremely effective. So I want the state's purpose
perversely channeled toward helping the poor and the marginalized
instead of helping to destroy and enslave them. The New Democratic
Party, in Canada, is the best vehicle for those lewd perversities,
prosperity and peace.

So let’s go over who the coalition of the New Democrats really are. In broad swaths, of course.

There are trade union folks. There are anti-poverty activists and actual poor people. There are social progressives of the big cities and suburbs. There are people of non-straight sexualities and fluid or trans gender identities. There are environmentalists. There are racial justice advocates and the racialized, especially black and Indigenous people. There are religious people from traditions like the Catholic Social Gospel, liberal Islam, communitarian Sikh, Buddhist, and Hindu faiths, peacenik socialist Jews.

This is a really unstable coalition. For a really obvious example of its instability, look at the conflict between the NDP governments of Alberta and British Columbia over building an oil pipeline from the tar sands through the temperate rainforest of the Rockies, to the fjord network by the Pacific coast.

John Horgan’s NDP government is rightly concerned that this is an inevitable earth-shattering ecological disaster. Rachel Notley’s NDP government is rightly concerned that Alberta’s natural resource industry and the many thousands of well-paying jobs it fuels needs pipeline access to thrive.

This is a conflict between two major components of the party’s coalition – trade unions and environmentalists. I knew it would happen eventually. A dedicated trade union man will gladly drink carcinogenic water and breathe black air as long as the salaries, pensions, and medical benefits are good. A dedicated environmentalist will gladly live in poverty if his world is clean.

There is nothing necessary about any political alliance. As the circumstances of the world change, people will come together and drift apart. Sometimes, it feels like the only thing that brings such a disparate left together is that such a unified reactionary movement hates us all so much.

It feels good to rage. Feels good to steal. Feels good to bully. Do it
because it feels good, man.

What does this teach us about social movements’ need for leaders? It’s instructive because one of the main reasons people will say social movements need leaders is to unify them and give such a disparate collection of people a direction.

When even a political party’s identity doesn’t unify its own social coalition but can win anyway, it’s a sign that total unity isn’t even a condition of victory. Politics is more creative than that.

Believing that unity is necessary for political alliance presumes that the act of allying never actually happens. That has two possible meanings.

One is that the movement is always already unified, making alliance unnecessary and differences among allies meaningless. We know empirically that this isn’t the case because significant differences** persist among those happily in political alliances.

** Differences that make a difference in your lives – just ask Rachel and John.

The other possible implication? That leaders alone inspire political unity, whether through charisma or coercion. So a social movement needs a leader to unify them through their authority. Maybe it’s moral. Maybe it’s steel. The point is that people aren’t capable of action on their own, building networks of cooperation.

Alliances are forged among all the members of different communities learning about each other and helping each other out. They have a lot in common with friendships that way, but coming together faster, spreading at a higher intensity. Friendship, solidarity, alliance are all different words for different contexts of the same phenomenon.

Building a network of self-conscious agents. If you think you need a leader for that, then you depict people as entirely passive, incapable of change on their own power or through their own decisions. Acting only through the will of the leader.

Don’t mistake one model of politics for its necessary essence. Especially when it’s such a horrifying, destructive model.

Cracking at the Paradox of Fascism, Composing, 29/03/2018

Sorry it's been a while. I was actually in hospital for a few days since the weekend, but I’m back in reasonable health now. And as of yesterday, I have a new position as an instructor at a new college in Toronto. So the past few days have been really disorienting.

So getting back to this blog today is very much an exercise in grounding myself again. Returning to a regular research and writing routine, as a habitual part of my day, making sure that even on the messiest days, I’ve got a calm space.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said that philosophy had a therapeutic purpose – He wasn’t the first one to say so, of course, but he was the first one I happened to come across who did. Therapy wasn’t the only purpose, of course. But it could serve that function if you needed it – a minimum expression.

By Brunhilda

Meditation. Focus the mind. Think. An activity that sometimes is much too difficult.
• • •
Here’s a paradox for you. It’s a political and conceptual paradox. Call it the paradox of totalitarianism. Those who are most afraid of losing their individuality will shed it themselves.

It doesn’t make much sense on the face of it. But it’s an old problem in political philosophy – not always phrased explicitly, but quite old. Spinoza was the first to ask it.

Why would a person fight so strongly for their slavery as if it were their freedom?

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari tackle that problem themselves, thinking of the political context of their own time. It was dominated by the same currents as ours. Globalized liberal capitalism was kicking into gear. Ecological pollution was reaching crisis points. States, corporations, and other institutions were developing far-reaching control into the everyday lives of citizens.

In the 1970s, what did people in the heart of capitalist countries fear? Communism. The creeping embrace of an ideology that fused us into a unified, undifferentiated mass. The state and related institutions had total control over your life, down to the smallest details. Individuality becomes forgotten. Conformity is all that matters.

Not all people, of course. But it was a cultural tendency, which the right-wing politicians of many generations opposed violently and intensely. The North American examples are clearest to me, because this is where I live and this continent is the epicentre of the current movement in this direction.

Joseph McCarthy, William F. Buckley, Andrew Breitbart. These are just a few prominent people who aggressively advocated against any political or social ideas that would reject or curtail our individual freedom.

Above is a perfectly reasoned argument.

Not about individual cases, of course, like criminals.* I mean in the sense of the civic contract, the way all citizens of a community regard each other – as individuals, free to pursue their own lives as they wish.

* Heavens to Betsy, we must never think of treating criminals with dignity! If we did, they wouldn’t be criminals. I kid, but sometimes I hear of something so sickening that sarcasm is my only way to keep from breaking down.

Here’s Ian Buchanan’s take on how Anti-Œdipus expresses the paradox of totalitarianism today. You become so afraid of an authority stripping you of your individuality that you suspect all political, ideological, or moral difference from your own individualist thinking.

If people have communitarian beliefs – like a notion that making a promise binds you to keep it – stamp it out as a betrayal. It’s taking advantage of your freedom to give yourself over to the enemy.

And in enforcing total discipline to defend yourselves against the enemy that would rob you of your individualities? There’s your answer.

We Prohibited It Because It’s Illegal!, Research Time, 23/03/2018

I haven’t been in the best headspace this week. All I’ve managed to do is get myself together enough to work on my paying gig at the moment, that think tank paper. Even the last few blog entries were exercises in getting through a conceptual block in the paper’s main argument.

It’s been difficult for me to summon energy beyond that, which has caused me to fall behind on some other commitments. And I’m sorry – but depression can be a pain in the ass. A pain in everything else too, which is why they call it depression.

This weekend will be catchup weekend, I’m just going to get tonight’s post finished – actually a short one this time – get a solid night’s sleep, and get back on track.

A long and unnerving shadow.
Art by Marcelo Neira

My thoughts about the nature of law are kind of funny and sometimes too simple. I knew a lot of legal theorists at McMaster, but I shared very different premises about the nature of law than a lot of that research community.

I don’t see law as something you have a moral obligation to obey. I think the law done right encourages ethical activity, encourages people to treat each other with kindness as individuals and with justice through institutions.

Now, that hardly ever happens in real life, so I actually don’t think we have much obligation beyond fear of punishment to follow the law – insofar as it’s the law. If the law happens to coincide with what’s ethically right, we’re obligated morally to follow it – not because it’s the law, but because the law actually encourages justice.

Examples of laws that encourage justice – laws against theft, assault, killing, fraud; regulating acceptable practices for health care, education delivery, utilities provision, record-keeping, ecological protection.

Still rolling through some of my notes on Ian Buchanan’s book about Anti-Œdipus. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts into my projects that involve politics, law, and the institutions of the state means understanding the conceptions of law that they reacted against in their own theoretical development.

What were the concepts that cast the longest shadow?

The Freudian and Lacanian models that dominated French psychiatry around the time of the Paris Uprising was probably the biggest single shadow. Except probably for Marx. That way of thinking had a disturbing concept of law.

Law, on this model, is prohibition. Law exists as one side of a yin-yang complex with desire – each can’t exist without the other. The manifestation of desire simultaneously manifests the law prohibiting it.

Desire can only develop through being continually stamped down.
What kind of political and social philosophy can come from a
premise like this?
Art by Ashley Montague

That law could be institutional if you live in a bureaucratic state, or cultural if you live in what Lacan and the mainstream Parisian intellectual community called a primitive society. But the law is the prohibition of desire which develops along with and in dialectic with that desire.

Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to this was surprisingly practical. You can’t argue against the concept on its own terms, because the concept rests at the premise of the whole discourse. You can’t talk a Freudian out of Freudian thinking by arguing entirely on Freudian terms.

So you stake out an entirely different way of thinking, and show how well those concepts deal with real-life problems the mainstream can’t handle. Psychiatrically, Freudian rationality can’t deal with schizophrenics.

In the legal-institutional context, Freudian rationality understands desire as something that needs its own prohibition to develop at all. It legitimates law as a necessary repression. Law is legitimate because it represses. Politics that considers repression necessary is fascism.*

* Thinking back to Snyder’s essay again. He also lists Freud as a major influence on Ivan Ilyin, the Russian fascist. Ilyin's conclusion that a civilization develops through the collective suppression of our drives as individuals. He seems to be a profound thinker against democracy. Terrifying.

“You Control Information!” II: What Must Be Said, Research Time, 08/03/2018

Yesterday, I talked about what distinguishes dictatorship from authoritarian government. You can have authoritarian institutions in a democratic government, which I know can seem intuitively weird.

But I came of age through the W Bush Presidency, so I saw this paradox in full force. Elections continued, different old and new media companies warred on each other, congressional majorities were toppled.

One of the (many, many) reasons why Americans don't seem to
understand the complexity and mess of the world today is that
there has been no cultural reckoning with the most uncomfortable
fact of the years between the World Trade Centre attacks and
Hurricane Katrina. Literally millions of Americans were in a
patriotic frenzy of paranoia and fear. Media outlets that today
are dismissed as disloyal fake news, like CNN, were little more
than shills for the Iraq invasion 15 years ago.

At the same time, Bush’s government built massive federal police and surveillance apparatus of the Department of Homeland Security, invaded Iraq and committed massacres and war crimes there. President Bush the Elder began over-arming local police forces with surplus military vehicles and weapons.

So authoritarianism is more than dictatorship. Yet the two share so much in common. Trying to parse the differences that count can be confusing. And in today’s political climate, your opponents often exploit your confusion on some points to delegitimize everything you say. So let’s be careful.

Félix Guattari’s concepts from his philosophical inquiries into politics, communication, and political economy can help us here. It starts with how he developed his concept of semio-capitalism.

It's an annoying word, but it does describe an important current of the global economy today. Individual acts of communication are directly monetized. Because money can be made from acts of communication, we’re encouraged to communicate constantly.

As more information flows through our networks, it generates more capital for the companies that control those networks – the hardware like cables and servers, the software like social networking sites and messaging apps.

A lot of the capital communication generates remains pretty concentrated – compare the fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg or Microsoft to the income of even a pretty top-of-the-heap YouTube celebrity. But this media environment can be a very democratic field. If we understand democracy in its sense of (generally) productive social conflict and chaos.

As most of us know by now, radically anti-democratic forces have had remarkable political success by organizing through high-intensity, decentralized communication networks.

But their success was contingent – a very complicated history that required a lot of luck to unfold as it did. There were some elements in the movement – like the anarchist ideologies of many Anonymous hackers – that could have harnessed themselves in radical democratic fashion.

One depressing story of the 21st century West has been
the increasing nihilism and hopelessness of so many
people. It's a dangerous temptation to give in, and I know
how close I've come, as well as how deep I could have
fallen if it weren't for a few contingent factors. Some
people messaged me at what turned out to be pivotal
times in my life, and some didn't. I held on to my
skepticism of some ideas a little longer than I could
have. If everyone can fall, then everyone can be saved.

Instead, we’re stuck with the irony of the most successful scale-free networked political movement putting its weight behind an authoritarian state.

What makes it ironic? Return to the nature of communication in dictatorial governments. In straight-up dictatorships, as I said yesterday, the directives of the Leader are translated into orders for the relevant institutions, corporations, and citizens. The primary mode of communication is the order.

That’s what brings straightforward dictatorship into the same category as the more insidious form of authoritarian government that can happen in democratically-run institutions. Police and military institutions also issue directives that are to be followed as orders.

The only difference between a dictator and an authoritarian institution is that the orders of a dictator come from a person, and the orders of an institution come from an office. Legitimacy of directives in dictatorship depends on who speaks. Legitimacy of directives in authoritarian institutions depends on what speaks.

Authoritarian communication is inherently about transmitting and following orders. What are the conditions for this kind of political communication to work properly? The most important one is clarity. The directives need to be understood comprehensively, never misunderstood, if the authority of a dictator or an authoritarian institution is to be followed properly.

But the communication networks of semio-capital – of monetized, scale-free, decentralized networks – are purposely chaotic. Control, uniformity, and clarity of messages is damn near impossible in such an environment. Just ask any corporate public relations worker whose branded promotional tweets provoke a firestorm of insults, jokes, and brand failures.

The problems of modern capitalism – at heart – flow from the problems of oligarchy. The concentration of wealth, material power, riches, property of all sorts, and prestige among a small group of people, while the vast majority have to struggle and suffer for ever-more-meagre earnings.

But the capitalization of communications did result in an inoculation against state or corporate authoritarianism. In the productive chaos of modern communication networks, people themselves produce so much noise around authorities’ directives that clarity – and so following orders – becomes practically impossible.

To Be Incorruptible II: Talking and Talking, Research Time, 19/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . You have to laugh. I can barely keep from laughing myself when I say it. To say that democratic institutions encourage trust among people seems ridiculous to someone living in 2017.

Democracy across the West is under siege from nationalists – UKIP and Brexit, Marine Le Pen’s Front National, the Breitbart wing of Donald Trump’s combover.

Nationalists who profoundly distrust everyone who thinks differently from themselves – libtards, SJWs, etc. Conservatives so ideological, they prefer making their own country a functional one-party state to any compromise in running things.

There are many causes for why our society has become, in Machiavelli’s words, so corrupt. I’m going to get to all of those. Reading the Discourses on Livy today is like a diagnosis of our own time in someone else’s history. The institutions of his world were so different, but share so much with our time in the causes of their collapse.

I have, when you have heard what I can say:
And know it now: the senate have concluded
To give this day a crown to mighty Caesar.

One thing at a time.

How would democratic institutions engender trust? Contrast the republican assemblies and elected offices of 1530s Italy with their rivals – absolute monarchies. In a monarchy, a single person is the seat of all state power, so access to the prince is the only way to take part in government.

Not many people can occupy that space – not much space around one man. So only a few people ever make policy and decisions. There are no checks on their power, virtually no time between a command and an order followed. Whole armies can move on the word of an individual. The word could be a solemn choice. Could be a whim.

That’s serious instability. The quick time between command and action makes a dictatorship look stable and strong. But commands could be, and too often are, whims. A command affecting millions requires a small gesture, same as a reversal affecting millions more.

Your life could be upended at any moment, all on the word of a king. You’re always on guard, as if anyone around you could become the enemy, as if you could be declared an enemy yourself. A tailor or a merchant could find himself a soldier or a prisoner as casually as we get our electric bills.

In such a regime, your own fear and anxiety obliterates the difference between soldier, prisoner, and citizen.

There’s lots of room in a parliament, though. Lots of perspectives, attitudes, personalities. Some are organized into political parties, some political parties can barely organize themselves. In Machiavelli’s day, city-state republics like Florence were ruled by the assemblies and elected leaders of workers’ guilds.

All these different people and groups must have their hands in the decision process of the government. The institutions of the state put all these different people in charge of the decision process. It’s literally their jobs.

This slows down the decision process immensely. Legislation, policy, governance activities – all require the input of so many people and offices that it takes a long time to get stuff done. Government may appear decadent and impotent.

Democracy is remarkably stable as a government because it takes so much time to get things done. Everyone – legislators, officials, citizens – can all deliberate and debate on matters of state. So we can at least do our best to understand the effects of everything we do. Governance by whim is practically impossible.

Democracy institutionalizes solemn, patient decision making in government because it forces so many people to be part of the decision process. But will they always make the best decisions?

We Will Never Not Know War, Advocate, 07/04/2017

I’m pretty isolated from war and international brinksmanship in Canada – though I still remind people that we share a border with Russia. We just never think of it because it’s the top of the map.

Bashar Assad is immensely grateful for all the support he gets from
Western progressives, as he continues to bomb his citizens to support
obedience to his police state, while they defend him as Syria's
rightful ruler and government. You know what happens when you
ignore actual Syrian people's voices? You forget that the Arab
Spring was a democratic revolution, not some false flag.

But I watched the news Thursday night of the American missile strikes on the Syrian government air base which launched this week’s sarin gas attack with dread. But it isn’t the dread that’s becoming sadly typical of the Western left.

I’m morosely accustomed to a sad equation in left-wing political debates – opposition to one leads to apologies for another. I've seen it, for example, in so many of my fellow progressives’ uncritical embrace of even the most extreme BDS propaganda.

Such fiery BDS propaganda silences and sidelines the real voices of opposition to settlement policy inside Israel itself. Worse, it lets a principled opposition to Israeli state policy in the West Bank become a vile and twisted anti-Semitism.

In the left-wing approach to United States foreign policy, a principled opposition to American military intervention and global economic policy becomes a blind enemy-of-my-enemy support of anti-American authoritarian and nationalist leaders.

I’ve seen prominent writers and some of my own friends parrot Russian propaganda on Crimea, Ukraine, and NATO, and uncritically fawn over Rodrigo Duterte’s legalization of murder in the Philippines.

Do you know what precedent President Duterte has for his drug war by legalized murder? Hafez al-Assad’s crackdown on anyone suspected of membership in the Muslim Brotherhood after their uprising against him in 1982. Plus his near-complete destruction of the city of Hama, centre of the 1982 Islamist revolution against his regime.

Former London mayor Ken Livingstone is one of the most prominent
current examples of the hypocritical progressive, a Western
politician whose support for Palestinian autonomy and sovereignty
has tipped into an oblivious hatred of Jewish people.

So when I see Trump reverse his long-held pro-Assad leanings and start bombing regime military installations, I increasingly fear that the Western left will start praising the dictator openly. Clueless TV pundits praise Trump for his “Presidential” stand protecting human rights with missiles? You’ll see much more disgusting love of police state dictators coming from the left soon.

And I say this as a leftist! As a card carrying* member of Canada’s social democratic NDP. I want the opinion leaders in the Western left to develop a complex understanding of our profoundly fucked up world. I have growing doubts that this will happen.

* If we still had cards. The New Democrats don’t have cards anymore.

An American Congressional Representative with a growing following, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, secretly visited the Syrian government and met personally with Bashar Assad. She returned to the United States witlessly parroting his propaganda that the entire democratic revolution of 2011-2 was orchestrated by al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other militant Islamist groups.

A pro-Assad left is growing in Western progressive politics, where anti-Americanism becomes the excuse to vomit his regime’s messaging without a critical thought. Now that Trump has become solidly anti-Assad, I expect this love of savage dictators to grow among his opposition.

Donald Trump may have been moved enough by children suffering
under Syrian government chemical attacks to bomb their military
installations, but he's not about to let them into the United States
as refugees. Refugees are all terrorists, don't you know?

Opposition to Donald Trump will fuel progressives’ abandoning their ideals to support a man who sits at the head of a state whose major civil service branch is a network of integrated secret police agencies. A man who arranged for horrifying Russian attacks on hospitals and bomb shelters as he pounded Aleppo to rubble. A man who authorized brutal chemical attacks this week in Idlib and four years ago in Ghouta to demonstrate the ruthlessness of his power over his population.

Gassing war refugees with sarin isn’t a military operation – it’s a policy of governance. It delivers the message to the whole population of Syria – You are mine, and I will do what I wish with you, and you are powerless to stop me; you are powerless entirely.

There are voices on the left saying the Ghouta chemical attacks never even took place. I doubt it will be long before there are apologists and conspiracists about Idlib.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Opposition to one authoritarian President and the destructive military and economic policies of one state doesn’t mean the others get a pass.

I don’t care how much someone may justify it in terms of ‘realpolitik.’ To hear anyone who calls herself a progressive spewing Henry Kissinger’s language disgusts me, and it should disgust anyone of conscience.

Staying true to your ideals means you don’t give anyone a pass. If you oppose Donald Trump, then you oppose Bashar al-Assad, Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi, King Salman, Rodrigo Duterte, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Prayut Chanocha, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, Isaias Afwerki, Yoweri Museveni, Reçep Erdogan, Nicolas Maduro, and anyone else who falls short of supporting universal democracy, freedom, and dignity.

It shouldn’t be that hard.

Real Republican Freedom III: Institutionalized To Keep Us Free, Research Time, 30/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . That title sounds a little bit ominous. A little bit too much like “Work Sets You Free.” It’s ominous because that’s the paradox of putting the insights of two correct groups of people together.

There is always the danger, as I said last time, that reliance on an institution for your survival will turn against you. By this, I’m talking about the government.

In my own era, government officials in the United States kill and arrest black Americans at disproportionately high rates. Many of these deaths are needless, brutal, and grotesque. We don’t talk about the names of murdered black people as often anymore because apparently the only newsworthy events on Earth today involve Donald Trump.

Not only does the state have the power to kill you horribly, the
institution itself is capable of laughing at you while you die. That
is the power of human cruelty.

The frequency of police murder and brutality toward black people in America has not gone down. Under the Trump administration, American state violence toward people looks set only to grow. But that’s no reason to forget their names. All the more reason to speak.

I started this post with a deliberate reference to Auschwitz because it is a real example of what can happen when evil people turn all the machinery of the state against its own population.

Mass state violence in the democratic West is a genuine danger of our time. But it’s no reason to turn against the institution of government. It’s a more profound reason to lament this political turn toward mass imprisonment and deportation.

Because our government institutions normally bring us incredible benefits. Real material foundations of our basic standards of living.

Governments build our roads and transit systems, maintain our public services like hospitals, welfare and public insurance systems, the mail. They’ve built or helped build all our telecommunications infrastructure. Governments fund massive amounts of scientific research, and use numerous ways to finance every industry in a country.

If all these services and infrastructures were to disappear, our civilization would collapse. Hell, if they were privatized, our economy would collapse from the weight of unrestrained profit-maximizing user fees on every step we take.

More than these immediately material goods, governments are responsible for the constitution of our culture. By building all these systems, they bring their users in contact with each other. By providing a common source for all these systems, they encourage communication and alliances across the country.

Machiavelli's Florence.

States didn’t do nearly so much materially for their people back in the 1530s – there wasn’t as much for them to do. But they still built the roads and walls, administered services, and provided the public venues to build a common culture and community. Machiavelli knows how important institutions are to human life.

Yet he also knows how dangerous a corrupted institution can be. So here’s the problem of politics* – How do you prevent an inevitably corruptible creature like people from corrupting the institutions that we need to live, but which are so dangerous?

* I feel comfortable making a stab at a universal definition for the first time in my writing career. I’ve only been working on the research and thinking for this book for four years.

One provisional definition he makes in the Discourses on Livy is that you can set up an institution that completely removes incentive from ambition. An institution where the most ambitious are stymied and blocked at every turn. Where everyone will always find someone to block their ego and desire.

For Machiavelli, the institutions of the Roman Republic achieved that. The balance of powers in government between the Senate, the Consuls, Magistrates, and Tribunes all prevented any one man, clan, or faction dominating the whole government.

The framers of America’s constitution in 1788 applied the same principle to their government, with the opposition of legislatures, the White House, and the judiciary.

Machiavelli's Rome.

However, an essential element of the current American crisis is that one group of politicians have figured out how to game the balance of forces in their constitution. One political party and ideology has come to dominate all branches and levels of government.

Rome itself fell. An alliance of ambitious military officers carried out a coup, and the most ruthless of them arranged dictatorial powers for himself within a few years. Julius Caesar neutered the power of the democratic institutions of Rome.

His assassination didn’t stop the long coup because his family and military partisans defeated and killed the democratic aristocrats who wanted to restore power to the institutions. But power came to rest with men instead.

Can you counteract humanity’s tyrannical gravity forever? . . . To be continued

Real Republican Freedom II: So What Is the Law For Anyway? Research Time, 29/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . When I was reading the anarchists – Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, Colin Ward – I was meditating on the excess of law. How the very framework of some kind of coercive rule-following institution put pressure on human freedom.

Which those institutions do. I’m not about to say this isn’t an essential feature of legal institutions. When rubber hits road, there’s nothing protecting citizens from police violence except self-restraint on the part of police officers themselves.

We tell stories to remind us that institutional authority can be abused
so that we stay angry when we see it happening. We can't let that
level of corruption become normal, so we tell stories to remind
ourselves that such people are villains.

Think about it as a deranged, cartoonish image if it helps. As a fable told with fantastic imagery and intense drama. Imagine Nicolas Cage as a werewolf hunting the streets of New Orleans with fiery blood.

If that predatory human is really hunting your streets, though, don’t you want police and law enforcement institutions around to protect you from them? Leave aside the issue of violent crime or exploitive behaviour. Think about the truly dangerous criminals – the ones capable of bringing down your society.

Machiavelli is thinking about that last type of criminal. When he discusses the corruption of a virtuous government in Discourses on Livy, he has some very clear examples in mind. He’s talking about military dictators of small countries who raid the treasury, bankrupt the whole place, and flee to let the country be overrun by an expanding foreign empire.

This was the type of people running the independent states of northern Italy in Machiavelli’s time. As a politician, he was directly concerned with preserving a strong government in Florence that could preserve its independence against ambitions of conquest from France, Spain, and Austria.

France, Spain, and Austria in the early 1500s were absolutist monarchies expanding European empires through military conquest. Remember that situation whenever you read Machiavelli. His materialism and pragmatism was so deep and thorough because the times required it.

The problem of how a community protects itself from predators remains. Some predators are murderers, con artists, ruthless profiteers. Some predators join the police and the military. Some of those predators take advantage of a lucky situation to make themselves dictator of a whole country.

Because when the military takes command, the people's freedom
never comes out all that well.

So the best ways to prevent the downfall of your society to military dictatorship is to build strong institution. What makes an institution strong is public belief in its power, over and above the people who hold power through those institutions.

When a country’s institutions are more important to the people than its leaders, a leader who tries to corrupt those institutions will find a revolution on his hands. A revolution to protect institutions before those institutions even become corrupt and turn their violent powers completely against the population has a much better chance of success than one that must start from a position of total submission.

This is why it’s easier to stop a democracy from falling than it is to actually topple one. You may not think this, because of such a long history of military coups against democratic governments around the world.

But most of the world’s democracies are very young. Even the oldest, where democratic values are deeply ingrained in popular culture, have powerful inequities and institutional habits of oppression and abuse.

It takes a long time for a culture to become democratic through to its communal soul, to that one common feature of all citizens. It takes a long time for a people’s fundamental community love to be for freedom and mutual respect, and for the institutions that protect those freedoms.

There are many different objects of patriotism – the ethnic nation, religious dogma, the royals, the leaders, the god-kings, empire. The only good objects of patriotism are ideals and institutions of freedom. Anything else is slavery and war.

And that message is from, of all people, Machiavelli. . . . To be continued

A Villainous Rage, Class: Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart, Reviews, 08/11/2016

Previous philosophical reviews of Patrick Ness' Class:
Episode One: For Tonight We Might Die
Episode Two: The Coach With the Dragon Tattoo
Episode Three: Nightvisiting
• • •
Some critical notes to start my thoughts on this episode of Class. I think it’s a wonderful story, with seamless transitions in tone and style between over-the-top sci-fi spectacle, melodrama, and awkward comedy.

Even when they're disturbed by Cronenbergian alien incursions into
her own body, April and Ram are still pretty adorable. Casting
probably tested all the actors in the top ranks of auditions for
these roles for chemistry with each other.

Patrick Ness sometimes has a tendency to write some very cheesy, clunky dialogue. But he’s also very aware of this limitation of his, and is actually very good at lampshading his dialogue problems. The romantic dialogue between April and Ram is the best example of this I’ve seen in the show so far.

And if we’re going to take all of contemporary Doctor Who into account, he’s far from the worst offender in occasionally clunky writing.

Regarding the philosophical themes of the story, grappling with grief remains a significant part of the Class tapestry. Though it isn’t nearly as important here as in “Nightvisiting.” Actually, the scene where grief as a theme appears, Charlie’s conversation with Matteusz and Tanya about the Cabinet of Light, brings a much more interesting idea to the show.

Of course, I won't even be able to introduce the title of my section about this idea without warning you of some pretty significant

SPOILERS!!

No Royal Wants a Person’s Freedom

I’m not talking about something as ordinary as Prince William being a dick to chauffeurs or anything like that. No, “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” introduces a character dynamic to Class that has a transformative potential for the show.

Quill's storyline in this episode is fascinating in its own right. As plot,
it largely feeds into the following episode, but it's of a piece with the
subtlest trick of the Class storyline – How Ness makes you forget over
the intervening episode from the premiere to this week that Quill is a
freedom fighter forced to become an indentured slave.

The first episode “For Tonight We Might Die” introduced the strange dynamic of Charlie and Ms Quill – Charlie is the monarch of the kingdom that defeated Quill’s rebellion. As I said in my analysis of that episode, if the Doctor had appeared on their homeworld during Quill’s campaign, he more than likely would have been on her side.

Charlie would have been the sympathetic villain. Perhaps a villain who comes to see a path to peace instead of violence, defeat, and reconquest. But he’d be a villain nonetheless, the dictator of a government that oppresses and disenfranchises Quill’s ethnic minority.

And let’s be honest with ourselves – a monarch is a dictator. It’s just a dictator that we Westerners feel has a little more legitimacy than a military ruler or a totalitarian party-state. That nasty little concept of the king’s divine mandate can take a long time to wiggle out of our cultural imaginary.

See what Charlie does in this episode – acting more like a dictator than he ever has before. Faced with the potential awkwardness of their parent-teacher night, Charlie gruffly orders Quill to come up with some bluff.

Phil Sandifer’s brief review of this episode spent a moment lamenting Tanya’s relatively small role in this episode. But although she didn’t have too many lines, Tanya and Matteusz are the perfect characters to force Charlie’s darker nature into the open.

The most important aspect of Charlie's character that makes him
different from his friends isn't that he's an alien, it's that he's a monarch.

Matteusz comes from a Polish family, an immigrant community in Britain who until only a few decades ago lived under a police state. Matteusz’s parents would have been born and grown up at least into their teenage years under a communist dictatorship whose government included a powerful secret police institution.

He can recognize in Charlie’s talk of duty and a higher morality for kings and leaders the justifications of state violence that killed many thousands of Poles at the hands of the SB.

And Tanya, as a black woman whose parents are Nigerian and Jamaican, stands in the prime positionality to tell Charlie that his forced servitude of Quill constitutes slavery. His appeals to the different morality of Rhodia can’t stand up to their arguments.

It’s not so much that Rhodia’s morality is irrelevant given the total genocide of that society, though that is what Matteusz and Tanya mention. What carries the real power are their universal ethical objections – that Charlie’s stewardship over a weapon of mass destruction and keeping of Quill in servitude is a stand against freedom.

Once the democratic principle exists in any society, its force drives a universalizing impulse. Democratic inclusion will never stop expanding until there are no exceptions to the freedoms it lets you understand and demand. And his central scene in “Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart” shows that Charlie fundamentally stands against that democratic will to freedom.

Quite a big revelation about someone that’s been set up as a hero since the first few minutes of the show.

The words the Shadowkin often have to say make them seem like
they're made of burnt ham. But they also provide some of the
biggest laughs of an otherwise very serious episode precisely
because they're so cartoonishly evil.

Who Is April? A Regicide

At first glance, it might seem that Charlie’s conversation about his kingly ideas appear like a separate storyline from the main plot this week about April. But it’s actually an important thematic parallelism to April’s plot.

So on the surface, April’s storyline is a return to her conflict with Corakinus the leader of the Shadowkin – he wants his heart to stop phasing in and out of her plane of reality so he can regain his full health. His chief scientist’s shadow-technobabble shenanigans help strengthen the link between him and April.

That causes some entertaining and embarrassing fluctuations in both their personalities. April goes on a rant about the glory and necessity of dying foolishly in battle in the middle of a history class. Corakinus the king of the fearsome and hideous Shadowkin gets an urge to cuddle after the brutal, weird, violent sex of his kind.

But what’s really intriguing about April’s story is that so much of her rage doesn’t originate with Corakinus. Aside from the cartoonish anger of her rant about the Dunkirk evacuation, all April’s anger is rooted in the shit-storm of her father’s return.

Huw is a man whose alcohol abuse and mental illness literally destroyed his family, paralyzing his wife and almost killing them all. He was in prison, and is still subject to a restraining order. All the rage that April has bottled up for years to keep herself and her mother in a sane state spills out.

The fundamental trauma of April's family is entirely in the open this
episode. I think the most illuminating moment comes in Jackie's
supremely awkward conversation just after catching her daughter in
the afterglow of losing her virginity to the former captain of the
football team. She's horrified that April would form any romantic
attachment to anyone at all. When April exclaims that Ram isn't
like her father, Jackie responds that her father wasn't like her
father when they met either. Jackie represents that fatalism that
any emotional openness or vulnerability will end in betrayal and
violence.

She's a better vessel for the anger of Corakinus than you expect when you look at her. And I think that’s an extra element of what frightens her about what she’s becoming in this episode.

And the parallel to Charlie’s subtly brutal morality of punishment, power, and entitlement? In the climactic moment of the episode, April is raging at her father, and about to kill him with the Shadowkin scimitars she manifests when she’s channelling Corakinus’ rage. Her rampage is played opposite Corakinus’ own anger at the apparent failure of his new scientist/lover’s plan.

As she’s about to kill her father, Ram appears and says another of Patrick Ness’ clunky phrases – that she’s April and wouldn’t do this. At the same time, Corakinus is spouting dialogue in the Shadow world that’s barely one degree removed in pompous cartoon villainy from “You have faired me for the rast time, Arrec Barrdwin!”

So April uses some Shadow techno-magic to heal her mother’s spinal column and refuses to slice her father in half. Her giving gesture is a strong contrast with Corakinus slashing another subordinate’s torso to bits. You’d think, based on this, that April is fundamentally not an angry person. That she’s not violent, but a healer. And that’s true.

But she is also actually, genuinely violent. She’s not going to sit back and wait for another attack from Corakinus, especially now that she knows he’s coming for her and the Earth again. April is still enraged, filled with anger. But she’s not channelling her rage into killing the pathetic idiot that’s her father.

Ram is the voice of a more pure mercy in this moment. April’s motive remains her anger. But it’s an anger directed at the proper place – at the figure of an autocrat who rules through violence and control. Corakinus is the brutal king of the Shadows, and April dives into the rift intent on a righteous regicide.

And earlier in this episode, our ostensible hero Charlie has been shown to have just the same brutal streak as any king. If Class is taking care of its Shadowkin plot for the mid-season two-parter, then maybe this last conflict will be the heart of the season’s real climax.