What You Wish For Might Ruin Your Country, Research Time, 20/06/2018

Life is often ironic. Sometimes, you can laugh at the irony. Sometimes, all you can do is cry.

One thing I cry about, when it comes to folks who self-identify as progressives, is how everyone feels about globalization. In many contexts, most of us think it’s bad.

That’s the simple version. I mean, the modern popular movement against new liberal economic policies and political philosophies began with a demonstration against a World Trade Organization summit. One of the major controversies in Canadian politics right now is the Trudeau government signing the country into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement among many Pacific Rim countries.

When you demand the return of economic borders, you open yourself
to seduction by people who want borders closed overall. When you
blame trade with foreigners for the ills of your economy, it's easy to
start blaming all the people outside your country, not just the
powerful ones. That's how an anti-globalization activist becomes a
racist nativist.

People’s problem is that these trade agreements give too many rights to transnational corporations, which allow for increasingly intense concentrations of wealth among the oligarchs’ class.

Typically, all the major political parties jockeying for electoral control of state government institutions in the West have supported these corporate-driven trade agreements. There have been different emphases in those agreements and treaties.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party here in Canada focussed on resource extraction sectors. Typical of a party with a strong support base among Alberta’s petro-industrialists. Jean Chretien’s and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party encouraged growth in the financial sector. Typical of the party that has represented the interests of Canada’s banking sector since the founding of the current state. Both of those parties doubled down on our continental trade deal, met with opposition from social and economic justice activists around the country.

There has been plenty of resistance to these legalistic acts of corporate piracy: networks among the multitude, groups of radical anarchists who’ve largely dropped out of society, trade union and student movements, progressive electoral political parties, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations.

Then, amazingly, in the heartland of the Washington Consensus, a political movement that put people first ripped apart all the presumptions of one of the most revanchist state parties in the West. The movement against corporate-led globalization had a new champion, and against all expectations, he entered the White House as President of the United States.

The politics of rage, demonization, and hatred are all too often
depressingly effective.

You see the problem here now.

Globalization in itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s the intensification of many physical, financial, and communicative processes that have linked different regions of the Earth for centuries already. It’s passed several major thresholds in the last few decades, which is why it feels like an entirely new phenomenon.

Yeah, it’s had plenty of drawbacks. Massive industrial pollution, the exponential growth in the power of global oligarchs to hide from public accountability and to hide their wealth.

But there are also plenty of benefits. Communication among people around the world can happen with incredible speed now, and we can learn about people in all parts of the globe. We can make friends from the other side of the planet. Communication connections can help build camaraderie, friendship, and community among people throughout the Earth.

People can move more freely than they ever have before. The late 20th century’s globalization had an amazing impact on a lot of the West: Asian, African, Pacific, and South American immigrants could come to our countries. If our labour markets throughout the Earth ever become truly open, it would be a genuine revolution of working people.

Imagine the economic and cultural booms that would result if Indian and Pakistani workers could come to the UAE or Saudi Arabia and have full rights, responsibilities, and legal protections of citizens who’ve lived there all their lives. If we had no borders, practically speaking, and everyone could move wherever the work was as long as they could learn the language(s) of the majority.

Globally open labour markets and globally-organizing union movements would take people out of the yoke of corporate wage slavery and state suppression as second or third-class citizens. Or worse.

Globalization can open our society to fantastic, unpredictable new paths of cultural creativity as traditions, languages, ideas, and moralities all merge and interact.

At this point, Earth’s progressives have to accept that globalization is a fact. You can’t turn it back now, without becoming the kind of xenophobic racist you hate. Those among the left who are taking advantage of the current moment to turn back economic globalization are racists and xenophobes. So screw them.

The 21st century left needs to accept that full-on anti-globalization is a failure. It’s been co-opted by some of the West’s most brutal racists and revanchists. The task of progressive politics now is to do globalization right. Globalization for the multitude.

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?

Whither Capital II: The Toughest Reparations, Research Time, 31/05/2018

Here’s something interesting and troubling that Jeremy Gilbert points out in his history of Cultural Studies integrating with anti-capitalist social movements. It starts from the fact that this social movement was against globalization.

From that perspective, you could almost co-opt that branch of the movement into an intense nationalism. After all, when political leaders across many ideologies call for slowing down globalization, or how globalization has hurt us and our industries, the call to build more walls becomes implicit.

Canadians are now rushing to defend NAFTA, but when it was being written, it was protested and mocked just as vigorously as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Those actions against the TPP, by the way, are still going on.

From a protest against the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Santiago, Chile.

See, globalization is a powerful force for improvement in people’s lives across human civilization. Now, there’s plenty of Victorian-style mass poverty and exploitation. But the sweatshops of Bangladesh and Indonesia are a few labour movements away from proper reform. Democracy is a powerful social force – its fuel is human frustration with injustice, and that’s never going to run dry.

Globalization’s harm to the working class populations of the West was a form of reparations. The Western countries no longer had a monopoly on industry. So they were undercut by the competition. We were undercut by the competition.

This was the economic end to colonialism. The countries that European militaries used to occupy, control, and loot were free to become capitalistic themselves. They’d industrialize on their own terms as much as they can. Old-fashioned trade links have taken some time to fray. But many countries now hold economically dominant positions that used to be prostrate.

Ask a Chinese person about the Opium Wars, and you’ll see someone immensely proud of how his country has succeeded after such colonial degradation. Even if in the next breath, they call Xi Jinping a dictatorial megalomaniac and the Communist Party a living disaster area.

So that aspect of globalization is good. It’s the first time the Earth has had a globally integrated economy without the overpowering dominance of a single pole by military domination.

The problem is that it broke the possibility of the 20th century social democratic bargain. The welfare state – especially as it existed in Europe – required high taxes and full employment. Otherwise, it became unsustainable. But people had no problem working good jobs in diverse industrial economies, with generally solid benefits and wages, if that also got them cheap medical and welfare services from their governments.

Statist social democracy, in its traditional form, requires full employment. Otherwise, its tax base disappears. The employment rates of the West took a serious hit as globalization took full effect and local industries were opened to competition with Asian cities for the first time. A lot of those European firms didn’t make it through the heat.

So it had become impossible to return to the old answers. As Gilbert argues, Cultural Studies – those activist university scholars – were one of the few people to see how this would happen in the 1970s and 80s.

It remained an open question what you’d do about it.

Follow the Causes Not the Office Walls, Research Time, 06/03/2018

There's a particular kind of academic thinker in philosophy departments that holds the discipline back from what it can be. I’m not sure how best to label them.

It would be one of those pithy, insulting but accurate labels. The kind of label that would make you chuckle when you’re reading Nietzsche. In my research circles, there aren’t too many of these people. But if you’ve had any experience in different universities’ philosophy departments, or been to a few disciplinary conferences, you’ll know the type.

The Skull of the Smoking Mirror, representation of the Aztec god
Tezcatlipoca – co-creator of the human world, god of time, and
the embodiment of change through conflict. I suppose you could
call Tezcatlipoca the god of creative destruction.
I could see an eccentric egomaniacal Silicon Valley billionaire
building a shrine to Tezcatlipoca in his home.

I could call them the over-specialist, but it’s connected to a term – specialist – that’s still complimentary. Maybe the disciplinary conservative, but that’s too clunky. Here’s a cheeky word – tell me what you think.

Mirror-skull.

Whenever they think they’re looking outside at the world, they’re actually looking at more of what they already know. Here’s their model action, what best exemplifies the way they think.

A student brings a paper to a Mirror-skull prof for comments. The prof reads it, and among his* comments are stars written next to some footnotes, reference list items, and sources throughout the paper. They’re the places where he’s marked “Not philosophy – Remove”

* While they’re often his, sometimes they’re hers as well. One of the most insufferably (and sadly unexpectedly) such academics I’ve met is a woman.

If a work isn’t part of the academic discipline of philosophy, it isn’t worth including in a philosophy paper. For example. Say I’m writing a paper about Richard Rorty, and I refer to Neil Gross’ excellent philosophical biography of Rorty. It’s a book that threads philosophical exploration of Rorty’s ideas with an argument about how his life circumstances conditioned those ideas.

What would a Mirror-skull say? Cut it all – it isn’t philosophy.

Now, there probably aren’t this many people working in academic philosophy who embody this attitude so intensely. I’ve met a few, but they’re just the purest expression of a tendency that I’m not the only one to highlight. It’s a tendency to fly away from any kind of transversal approach to knowledge.

How can people learn from research when all the new material is
locked away where no one can reach it without paying thousands
in subscriptions or tuition?

The Review and Reply Collective has recently posted some pretty brutal critiques of the state of contemporary university philosophy. Kenneth Westphal has published an artful and artistic fist of rage against a university system that has given itself over to elitism and marginalization.

It’s a complex piece, but if I can summarize the basic message in a sentence or two, it’s like this. It’s utter hypocrisy to position your institutions as the leading edge of human knowledge when original research is so heavily restricted from the general public through the enormous paywalls of academic publishing prices.

Here’s another example. The first in a round of reviews of Taking Back Philosophy by Bryan Van Norden is scheduled to post at the Review and Reply Collective next week. The book is a polemic, following up a gauntlet he threw down in the New York Times a couple of years ago.

Van Norden is an American researcher who specializes in Chinese and Indian philosophy, specifically Confucian and Buddhist strains. He writes comparative philosophy for journals. It’s a very respectable university career.

His book is a call for diversification in philosophy departments, for basically two reasons. The one he concentrates on most is, I think, the least persuasive. That reason: North America is becoming more diverse ethnically and in cultural heritage, so departments must design curriculums to speak to the positions of their students.

I don’t think this is the most persuasive because a major movement of political revanchism in the West today is turning all the power of the state machinery to holding and reversing that diversity growth. There’s nothing inevitable about the diversification and pluralism of Western countries.

Western people can no longer treat the cultures and traditions outside
our lineage as unworthy of attention. Business leaders, politicians,
and activists all understand this. Yet there are still so many in
philosophy departments that remain stuck in their minds that have
become mirror-walled prisons.

His other reason for diversifying the philosophy curriculums of the West is more compelling to me, despite Van Norden’s relative de-emphasis. Our world is globalized. As non-Western economic centres grow in power and influence, we’ll need to study their own philosophical, ideological, moral, and political traditions to deal with people from these regions as competitors, friends, and partners.

Just as a study of Western philosophy can help you understand German, French, English, or US-American cultures, a study of East Asian philosophy can help you understand Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, and Indonesian cultures.

The Review and Reply Collective itself is rooted in the global community of Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Science, Social Epistemology and other sub-disciplines that – instead of narrowing their focus – expand and diversify their influences and research bases.

For about a decade now, I’ve understood that breaking through common-sensical disciplinary boundaries improves your knowledge. The causes of real phenomena don’t pay attention to the contingent structures of our university disciplines.

I got to thinking of this reading some old notes on Deleuze and Guattari, about their critique of Jacques Lacan in Anti-Œdipus. They understood how psychological states have their causes and conditions not just in the psychiatric, but in historical, social, and economic processes as well.

It seems common sense to us now, but an academic orthodoxy had fallen across French psychiatry and psychology, stating that mental health had only mental causes. Transversality often breaks with common sense – so much the worse for common sense.

The Limits of Your Universe, Research Time, 09/11/2017

Philosophical thinking sometimes puts you in a tricky place. For example, I’m doing the research for a big book of political philosophy. That research comes mostly from Western traditions of thinking. But it’s going to discuss ideas and concepts that are universal in scope – applying to people no matter their civilization or culture.

Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Now put a bunch of philosophers in the room and see if any discussion of universality can make it out alive. Cultural relativism is a common foil here, especially for Westerners like me who know the Western tradition best.

Thanks to the conceptual framework of colonialism that polluted Western thinking for a good few centuries, it’s dangerous for any Western person to apply their writing on a universal scale. Let me give you an example.

Hannah Arendt focussed her energy on understand the core concepts
of Western thought. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Actually, I’ll just link back to the example I gave yesterday when I was writing about something different. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition examines how a set of cultural presumptions about humanity’s relationship with the world and our place in it developed over time.

She talks about it on the terms of those presumptions’ core concepts themselves. Really anal but important thing I want to call attention to – I don’t say ‘in terms of,’ but ‘on terms of.’ In the same sense that, when you ask someone for an eyewitness account, you say they described the incident on their terms.

Her historical references for this analysis are entirely Western – from Polis Greece through Medieval Christian Europe to the Scientific Revolutions and their growing intensity until the Nuclear Age. But the philosophical problems that all these cultural dynamics influence and change refer to existential questions about humanity itself.

Here we have a culture speaking for all of humanity – the West. And it sounds for a second like the argument we’ve all heard before.

European navies and armies spent a few centuries ruthlessly conquering every other civilization on Earth. Our education systems and most of our cultural traditions have trained and raised* most of us Westerners to think as if we deserved to conquer them. Western ideas were universal – everyone else’s were local. Westerners were Man – everybody else were just a bunch of people.

One of the first great thinkers to see the real end
point of decolonization was Frantz Fanon. In The
Wretched of the Earth, the revolution throwing
the colonizers out is only the beginning. A society
can stay on a war footing for much too long. It
has to begin its own cultural renaissance of
creativity and freedom. Only then can they truly
be equals with the bastards who once conquered
them. Rub that freedom to develop your culture
as you want in their face. That's the real victory.

* Respectively.

The typical reaction is to declare this whole pretence to the Western way of thinking being the true universal a general crock of shit. I’m speaking, of course, about the 20th century left. This is the set of progressive attitudes that the paranoid nationalist right believes is the only left.

That old-fashioned progressive attitude is over – in the 21st century generation anyway. The attitude that appears to be shaking out from our culture right now is what I’m about to describe. Basically, it’s the endpoint of cultural decolonization.

At the end of the day, The Human Condition describes one way to think about humanity. It’s a continuous cultural development – a general trend among many different communities.

But those communities grew similar in this broad set of problems – over humanity’s place in the world – that they all developed similar responses at similar times. They shared a lot among each other. Enough to become Europe.

There are other densely integrated communities throughout the world that interacted much more intensely among each other than beyond for long periods of time. They developed their own traditions of thinking about these broad problems – over humanity’s place in the world.

The Western way of thinking is not the one way, standing apart from the many.

The Western way of thinking is one way among many.

In the 21st century, these many civilizational traditions of thought are now interacting more intensely than they ever have before. Let’s all bring our ideas to each other and see what new thinking results.

Everything Is for Sale, Doctor Who: Oxygen, Reviews, 14/05/2017

“Oxygen” is a bold story. Not just for its ending, which seems literally to have created a new kind of cliffhanger for Doctor Who. But socially, it’s bold. Brash, even.

It’s a coincidence, in part at least. When “Oxygen” was written and filmed, no one knew that it would air in the middle of an election whose likely result will put Britain on a fast track to mass poverty and servitude to a few powerful corporate actors.

Pictured: A marching force of commerce, indifferent to the needs of
the humans whose desires ostensibly drive and fuel that commercial
system. No obvious symbolism here.

The Doctor’s World

I can’t say for sure how the British election will go. I can’t say for sure what the eventual result of Brexit negotiations will be. It could be that the entire process will collapse when Theresa May can’t get the perfectly sweet-spot of a deal to which she thinks she and Britain are entitled by winning a large election mandate and voting to leave the EU, respectively.

I care about Britain. On an individual level, I have many friends who are British or have immigrated there, or are studying there on an EU passport in a very precarious position. Plus, it produces Doctor Who, the TV show closest to my heart.

I’ve been exposed to British culture through its television and journalism about the country for my entire life. While I haven’t really ever had much desire to go to England, the culture’s art, ideas, and history have been deeply influential on my sense of humour and personality.

So it makes me sad to see the seeds of Britain’s economic destruction falling into place. Brexit will force the country to lurch with almost no transition time from an economy deeply integrated with the globe, to a country with hardly any trade agreements at all.

I'm disappointed with Jeremy Corbyn and the political movement he's
trying to lead. His platform has proposals that would restore the role
of the British state as a support structure for the dignified life of all
people in the country. But I don't think anyone would say it's
implausible that I think he voted Leave. Corbyn is an EU critic for
the right reasons – lately, it's been locking people into an economic
system that prioritizes short-term fiscal balancing acts and service to
financial industry priorities over the material welfare of people. But
if he thinks a media landscape dominated by the Murdoch press is
going to give him an opportunity to run a left-wing Brexit, he's mad.

In barely a year of its exit, the government will still have managed no trade deals as an individual country to replace the massive web where it lived as an EU member. Britain will snap from a densely and multi-vectored integrated member of the global economy to a near-autarky. Its trade relationships will be on par with North Korea.

A rash judgment. But I think it’s a possibility. Given the density and complexity of negotiating any trade agreement, it’s a near-impossible task to renegotiate entirely new ones in two or three years. Britain needs an army of expert marketers / negotiators to scour the globe at breakneck speed.

Instead, they’re having an election, thinking that a stronger parliamentary majority will give them some kind of mandate to negotiate a better deal with the EU. There is no reason why the election result of a foreign country would affect the priorities of one’s own.

To Rage at Last

Britain faces a future that frightens a lot of the people in that country who’ve struggled with deeper and deeper poverty as its Tory government’s brutal austerity program choked away any possibility of a recovery from the 2008 crash. A stress-free subsistence is now nothing but a dream.

Pearl Mackie's performance in "Oxygen" is fantastic. It's been so long in
the show that we've seen a companion who, in such an intense adventure,
gets so clearly in over her head. She loves the adventurousness and can
handle most situations. But "Oxygen" is the most intense and dangerous
situation she's been in yet, the most number of times she's literally
almost died in a single episode. And they are potentially brutal deaths.

This is the Doctor’s world. In a literal sense. It’s the world into which the Doctor is beamed. Britain has always been Doctor Who’s first and primary audience. Even as the last decade has seen the show’s global success on a never-before-seen scale, Britain remains its home.

As Phil Sandifer has built the foundation of his whole career saying, Doctor Who has often been a voice of Britain – its rebellious, utopian spirit. As the tension builds in Britain’s looming disaster, the rage is breaking through the surface.

“Oxygen” is an expression of rage. Jamie Mathieson’s script is a howl of rage. The initial concept from the episode’s publicity is already a campily transparent mockery of capitalist values. The Doctor and company land in a world where even the air has become a commodity to be bought and sold.

A basic enough crime against human decency, and one central to Western politics. One of the most brutal battles in American politics right now is the Republican Party dismantling the health insurance laws and exchanges Barack Obama’s government instituted.

It’s far from a perfect system for delivering health care equitably. But without those institutions, millions will lose their health insurance, ruining their lives. Either you decline far faster without health care, or you bankrupt yourself trying to live. When health care is a commodity, universality is impossible – There’s always someone too poor.

I like watching Matt Lucas in the show too, though he doesn't yet carry
nearly the same dramatic weight as Bill. Right now, he plays an
important role, especially in the more intense and frightening stories
like "Oxygen." He's a needed comic relief. "Some of my best friends
are bluish." Yeah, that's what you say, Nardole.

Who would not be enraged at this?

A Price on Your Life Is Also Its Cost

The central lie of absolutist capitalism as an ideology is that the market and profit motive always promotes the most free and fair society. But when everything is open to commodification, life is horribly profaned.

Now, I’m not talking about some special aura of a being’s essential existence that’s choked away as a commodity. I’m not going the full Walter Benjamin today. Commodification profanes life because a world of total commodification kills people. The people of “Oxygen”s world measure space in breaths because they have to budget their personal oxygen use based on their income.

I don't think there’s been such a transparent condemnation of Britain and the West’s current economic problems since “The Sunmakers.” In that story, Robert Holmes described a world where service fees, charges, and taxes in a corporatized world destroyed every life but that of the officials who administered them.

Jamie Mathieson achieves the same in “Oxygen,” arguably better. Holmes’ story was limited by the semi-censorship Doctor Who faced in 1978 – After the social conservative activism campaign against the show when he and Philip Hinchcliffe were showrunners, Doctor Who had to tone down its frightening imagery. So “The Sunmakers” mostly stuck to broad parody.

The dead crewmembers' scarred nerve pathways and cold, vacuum-
burst eyes makes for the most nightmarish makeup I've seen so far in
this season.

Not so for “Oxygen,” as the TARDIS team and the space station’s survivors are assaulted by the shambling corpses of their co-workers and loved ones. Did I mention that their bodies have been mutilated by the total electronic shutdown of their nervous systems and long-term exposure to the vacuum of space?

No Longer a Viable Investment

Yeah, it’s good and creepy. The makeup is suitably nightmarish. And the central concept of the episode is an even more terrifying indictment of our modern capitalist attitude. I can’t explain it without warning you of

SPOILERS!!!

at last. So here it goes. The space station staff’s survivors, throughout the episode, think that their spacesuits are “deactivating their organic components” because of some malfunction.

But the Doctor figures out the real cause, almost inconceivable even to the characters who live in this perverse world. They’re on a mining station, stripping an asteroid of its copper ore. The problem is, their returns are dropping.

Our heroes enter the system to help destroy it.

Throughout the episode, there are small hints in the dialogue that they’ve had to shut down production. There were errors, issues with their equipment, and repairs were taking a while. Their company’s artificial intelligence and algorithms declared their employees not worth the money.

They were fired. All 40 of the mining station staff were fired. Getting the sack in Mathieson’s imagined future of hyper-capitalist human society doesn’t just mean you could die. It’s literally the axe. Execution on grounds of losing your division’s profit margin.

And I thought some of the contracts I’ve signed for freelance writing and marketing gigs were bad.

It reflects a real fact about our world. Britain today has weakened its safety net terribly over the last decade of Conservative Party rule. People who lose their jobs quite often lose their unemployment benefits because, ever since David Cameron and George Osborne’s austerity regime, social welfare administrators have a mandate to remove as many people as possible from the rolls.

Getting fired or being otherwise unable to work in Britain today can often cause extreme poverty and death. Just ask Daniel Blake.

This is the world we live in now. Doctor Who has spoken directly to the indignity and torture of life as a working person in the West today. Call out the powerful. It’s what art is for.
• • •
So yeah, about that cliffhanger. Only a brief note so far – I want to see how it plays out in the next episode, which looks like another terrifying and creepy story. But it does more than simply teasing the next episode.

The last seconds of "Oxygen" showed that, after exposure to the vacuum of space in this story, the Doctor remains blind. And he isn't sure how or when it will ever heal. It completely transforms how the Doctor will have to act in the next adventure (at least).

Doctor Who's tradition of cliffhangers began when it was a more conventional serialized adventure show. The cliffhangers typically foregrounded a threat to the main characters, which is fine at a surface level.

But the best cliffhangers don't actually do this – the threat to the main cast isn't a profound form of tension. When we see names in the opening credits, we can be pretty sure they'll survive story to story. No one reading Superman will ever think Superman will ever die from a generic cliffhanger.

In such a context, a cliffhanger works best when it has nothing to do with threats to the main cast. It's about some revelation that will transform the story. "Oxygen"s cliffhanger, leading into "Extremis," is one of these radical transformations. The Doctor, at least for now, has been radically transformed in his abilities. And I hope for next week, the story takes seriously how a personality like the Doctor's deals with the sudden onset of a real disability.
• • •
Here are my previous philosophical reviews of this season of Doctor Who. I don't plan on ranking them until I see the whole season this Spring. So seven more weeks to go.

Knock Knock
Thin Ice
Smile
The Pilot / The Girl With the Star in Her Eye

Trumponomics Could Be an Even Bigger Disaster, Jamming, 20/01/2017

First of all, I’m sorry for not having written even a short blog post for Thursday. I had an amazingly stressful day at work Wednesday, and I was so burned out and tired when I got home that I barely had enough energy to eat Chinese food and nap.

Can’t go wrong with the sesame chicken, but sometimes nothing can overcome total nervous burnout.

I spent yesterday doing some much more relaxing research for my communications agency job. I can work this position from my home office, which means that my working uniform usually involves a pair of bear claw slippers. No better solution for any workplace stress or burnout.

In the course of that research, I read up on general economic trends and projections, trying to incorporate them into my strategies and recommendations to clients.

All hail Fearless Leader!

One thing I discovered was this analysis of the centrepiece of the Trump Administration’s economic policy – protectionism.

When I first heard during the campaign that Trump promised a protectionist national economic policy, I knew it was a radical break from political parties’ orthodoxies in America.

Now, I’ve opposed for a long time many of the injustices that unrestrained, corporate-led free trade has created. But I also know that any solutions to the problems of corporate-led free trade can only really come from people-led globalization.

Protectionism and the autarkic ideal that inspires those policies, ultimately leads to disaster. There’s simply no way that an economy – even one with the diversity of the United States – can survive without supplemental goods and services from around the world. It’s a perfect recipe for long-term stagnation.

Look at the effect of Trump’s plan. High tariffs at the same time as you choke off immigration. America’s has a large population of people retiring from the workforce and dying off – the country has a low unemployment rate.

There are millions of people out of the workforce – maybe for their own or a family member’s health reasons, or because they just have no marketable skills. But with no plans to raise wages, or finance a nationwide equitable program of affordable higher education, those unmarketable people won’t find work.

As for Paul Ryan’s plans to gut the Affordable Care Act? Millions won’t be able to get the treatment they’d need to return to work. Nor could those millions afford or the homecare contractors to whom they can trust their ill loved ones, so they could return to the job market.

So the only way to inject capital into the country at a national scale comes from trade links. High tariffs would essentially cut off a lot of the foreign savings and investment entering the United States.

The country imports way more than it exports. But a country makes up its massive global trade deficit by selling huge numbers of state savings bonds. The sale of those bonds brings in billions of dollars in investment money.

Shutting off global trade with high tariffs shrinks your trade deficit, which sounds like a good thing – America becomes a net exporter, drawing money into the country.

But if its people are still poor when this happens, people won’t have enough money themselves to make up for the immediate-term shortfall in bond income.

A wealthy citizenry and a properly funded government can provide the investment income to fuel the economy. People, their banks, and their governments can save money and invest it in developing ventures and companies in their country.

But people in the United States are – as individuals – burdened by hideous debt. It’s a continued hangover of the mortgage crisis at the end of last decade, for older folks. For younger people, it’s the crushing weight of enormous student loans to pay off at the very beginning of their careers in a workforce of insecure labour.

So the economy is choked from two sources. Foreign investment plummets, the government is so underfunded that a budget surplus is impossible, millions of people are drowning in personal debt.

Whatever income first comes from the export surplus won’t make up that difference. The surplus will only come from the same inadequate export numbers the US now has – it’ll only be a surplus because imports shut off. With fewer goods on market, prices will increase, but no one will be making any more money and they’ll have just as much debt.

Some people already live like it's the Great Depression again.
Millions more might if this economic scenario happens.

Low incomes and rising prices means mass poverty.

The solution to unjust globalization led by corporate oligarchs isn’t turning away from the world. It’s a just globalization. Such a thing is possible. Here’s one way to imagine a just, fair globalization.

Governments around the world cooperate to build planetary infrastructure – transit links, internet cables, transnational power lines, ecological preserves, treaties to manage and conserve natural resources properly. Stuff like that.

People build business links around the world through professional networking associations. I’m a member of one – the International Association of Business Communicators. And there may be thousands upon thousands of similar associations all over the world. All building links and making deals. Actually person to person.

Imagine a world built by the world’s governments and independent, hustling businesspeople.

Inescapable Obsolete States, Research Time, 09/01/2017

So after reading through Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, I started looking around for other books that would examine perspectives like his. Conceptions of global citizenship and multinational civic engagement and identity building.

My own country Canada's policy of welcome to all immigrant groups
is part of a program of multiculturalism that's integrated our major
cities and helped build one of the first post-national countries.

I’ve had some limited success so far. I’ve snagged a couple of things by Pheng Cheah which are on my list to get to pretty soon. And I also found an interesting little book by a philosophically inclined journalist named Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen is a title dripping in irony. When I read Appiah’s abstract arguments in favour of embracing cosmopolitan, multicultural, multinational aspects of our identities, I found an optimistic, hopeful vision of humanity’s potential for coexistence and friendship.

Appiah’s philosophy and his life are conceptual and living arguments for embracing our multiplicity. We too often today use strictly defined terms – ex. Muslim, English-speaker, Quebecer, Burmese, Russian – to stake borders around our identities. We make a single or very few of these definitions primary to our identities, and see the world as a collision of these strictly-defined identities and allegiances.

But if we embrace the differences within our own identities and societies, we’ll make ourselves more open to building relationships with people whose cultures have very different thematic concepts and traditions.

It sounds like a paradox, but focussing on our own differences makes it easier to build kinship across cultural and national lines. We explore our many different vectors of cultural creation.

Philosophical journalist Atossa Abrahamian

Sounds fantastic. But Abrahamian’s empirical, journalistic perspective brings a dark angle to the embrace of cosmopolitan identities.

Reading The Cosmopolites, Abrahamian identifies a core source of cosmopolitanism’s corruption – economies and cultural connections have become profoundly global, but massive material power still rests with national, territorially-defined states.

For one, it’s largely the very rich who actually embrace global citizenship in practical terms. Small countries with limited economic possibilities have taken up selling their citizenships.

Several Caribbean island states like St Kitts and Antigua are the major players in this market. If you can afford to invest a few hundred thousand dollars in property or other support to these countries, they’ll offer you citizenship.

And it’s not just the Caribbean. Abrahamian informed me that, for example, former Thai PM and semi-evil billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra regularly travels on his Montenegro* passport.

* And Montenegro itself has been wrapped up in some freaky old-school imperialist shenanigans from its recent creation as a state until today.

But the weirdest kind of citizenship shenanigans is a practice I didn’t know much about until now. I had known already that many Arab countries have large populations of long-resident non-citizens. That many who were born in Persian Gulf monarchies and emirates had no path to citizenship because their families were foreign-descended.

Activist and writer Iyad el-Baghdadi

This was the situation of my old friend A from university. He and his family were of Indian descent, coming from Chennai. When he was born, they lived in Kuwait. Because they weren’t descended from old stock Kuwaitis, he was disallowed citizenship in the country where he was born.

But I didn’t know that many of these non-citizens were genuinely stateless. They had no citizenship at all. The reporting of Iyad el-Baghdadi – a human rights activist and reporter from the United Arab Emirates – first alerted me to the problem. From him, I learned that the UAE is on a path to a population of 96% non-citizens.

And Abrahamian has produced a report on the strangest solution to this citizenship problem. Kuwait and the UAE, in separate deals, negotiated with the Comoros Islands to buy hundreds of thousands of Comoro citizenships for its stateless citizens.

We’ve come a long way from the philosophies of the founding period of the nation-state. The modern state as a public ideology – a philosophy become dogma – the state is the expression of the nation. It’s an agent of social unity – the state unifies a diverse people, but is also the institutionalization of the universal national essence. It’s the voice of a people and simultaneously creates that voice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the founding
philosophers of the modern concept of nation
as reaching its highest and most proper form as
a state government of free citizens.

Yet today, we see states and governments who treat citizenship as a commodity to be bartered for. Just another thing to be bought and sold.

Should we mourn for the ideal of the nation-state? Its commitment to forging a people in unity together. Or do we admit that it was always kind of a sham?

That a few sophisticated, idealistic, and maybe a little naive thinkers made an inspiration out of an institution that was always about control of populations. That the lofty philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel only ended up giving institutions of exclusion and racialization multifaceted dimensions and a bunch more propaganda material?

That all the talk about the unity of a state and its nation meant nothing when those very nations were building colonial empires, folding wildly different cultures inside their states.

Reality’s hypocrisy doesn’t mean we can simply write off the philosophies of nationhood and the nation-state. The philosophies provided the foundational concepts for how we as people understand our political institutions – their purposes and ideals.

Building a genuinely post-national world means building an institutional, activist, and conceptual toolbox for a model of politics that globalizes democracy. Building the concepts of the new means understanding the concepts of what you want to overcome.

Cosmopolitanism (the philosophy and the book) is a start. But as Abrahamian’s research shows, it isn’t nearly enough.

The Money Is Political Too, Research Time, 18/11/2016

Utopias is going to be a book of philosophy that engages with history – with the currents of political and social change that have shaped the era in which I’m writing it. No matter how abstract and trippy the purely conceptual sections of the manuscript will get, that historical grounding will be in the background of everything I write.

It’ll be a philosophy of social development and history, but it’ll also be a theoretical examination of our ongoing moment in history.

And a hell of a trip.

So when I reached the end of Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy, I was pleased to read one of his final analyses. It was about the historical development of neoliberalism.

My title references the old feminist slogan, "The personal is political."
The democratic vector of politics is about making more and more aspects
of human life politically relevant, something that it's valuable to speak
about as proper to the public values of society. The social movement
whose first moment of wide visibility was the 1999 WTO protests did
the same for matters of the global economy and social welfare.

He didn't get into the finer historical points – in such a short, dense book, you keep your argument conceptual and stay away from the detailed chronology of real-world events. Also, explaining events directly can always be a little messy – events always overdetermine any one explanation of them you can make.

Basically, Rancière’s account of the new liberal way of politics is that it’s fundamentally about depoliticizing economics. If the economic is only the study of a science, then economic developments become a matter of management. Making sure things go as they should means ensuring that you’re guided by economic science.

Now you can employ science for political purposes, but our society’s general ideal of science* is that its laws and concepts are beyond politics. The laws of physics are the same, no matter your political persuasion.**

* At least in the middle 20th century when there was still general respect for scientific institutions and scientists.

** Again, whether or not you believe in science, jumping from a cliff will always make you fall at the same rate. Gravity doesn’t care about party membership (and neither do climate developments).

If you treat economics the same way, then you delegitimize attempts to make economic matters a political question. Poverty alleviation, economic inequality, and trade policy become issues that aren’t really proper to politics.

Now, this is hardly true today, but it’s the trajectory of the neoliberal order. It was the conservative reaction to the New Deal in America and the Marshall Plan turned welfare state in Europe.

Jacques Rancière anticipating the symbolic colours of the concession
speech that ushered in the Trump Administration.

Putting economics at a remove from the subject of politics passed economic matters to institutions run by professionals. These would be technocratic organizations like the World Trade Organization and European Central Bank, or treaties negotiated among bureaucrats and political figureheads like NAFTA and the TPP.

Here we can guess the historical trajectory I’m about to slide into. Because economic matters like trade, labour mobility, and inequality are fundamentally political. The protests at the Seattle WTO summit of 1999 were the first harbingers of this shift.

I think because September 11 and the invasion of Iraq happened so soon after the Seattle protests, it was easy for us in the moment to forget their significance. But the same economic processes of corporatization, short-term profit gouging, and exploitation of the poor resulted in the global financial crisis of 2008.

Arguably, the 2008 crisis laid the foundation of the popular discontent that simmered and boiled until Donald Trump rode into the Presidency on it.

And all this could have been avoided if we had begun the 21st century with a frank, society-wide conversation about how we needed to bring the economy back to politics. Because once it returned there on its own, it crushed a lot of us in the wreckage.

Obsolete Democracy IV: Democracy in Motion, Composing, 15/10/2016

Continued from last post . . . After a very difficult week (and in the face of what could be an even more difficult week starting in a few days), I want to get a moment of real creativity on this blog. After about three years of research on it, I’m about ready to say for sure what the outline of the third part of Utopias will be.

Yesterday, I asked a question that I’ll say, provisionally, is the central question of any democratic thinking. What kind of community is ideal for human life? In that post, I gave a list of examples of how nationalism and ideas of nationhood stand in the way of realizing that ideal.

A protestor at a Trump rally speaks a democracy that blows up
borders and nationhood.

But the ideal itself is pretty simple. An ideal human community is a place where we can all be free to live as we wish and live with dignity. 

This isn’t a tough question. Yet very rarely can any of our political leaders say that this is the goal of democracy, let alone build policies to push our communities in that direction.

Utopias is going to be a very weird book, but I hope it’ll also be fun. Fun in that model of a thought puzzle. A work of philosophy that’s also a game. And the conclusion of the game will be a justification of enlightenment, a way of thinking about society that’s both the ideal and the next step forward in our democratic tradition. Integrating the democratic tradition with a wider metaphysics and history of human becoming itself.

It’ll be some heavy shit.

So here’s basically how it looks. That last section anyway, flowing from a conclusion that nationalism and the very concepts of nation and nationhood now stand in the way of human freedom. The nation was once a vehicle of freedom, but it’s made itself obsolete today. 

Historical influences will come from the radical democratic tradition. Some of them were communists back in the day, but I'm no communist. That's another obsolete idea – an impossibility in a globalized world. 

Start with the ideals of Mikhail Bakunin – that free people must govern themselves, and live under no kings, dictators, or oligarchs, whether they achieve their power through state control or riches. And yes, one important ideal of Karl Marx – that a wage slave is still a slave, that exhaustion merely for a knife-edge escape from poverty is still a raw deal.

A lesson from Emma Goldman – that civic freedoms are useless if you're too poor or otherwise disadvantaged to have any material freedom of choice in your life. Or the words of Antonio Gramsci – that activists can’t trust the global-level conditions of the world to induce change for the better. Building a better community is a shared project.

Once a long-standing bastion of fascist nationalism in Europe, Spain
is now the home of a thriving radical democratic movement of the
left. Hope never dies as long as there's life.

That shared project needs communication, platform-building, common spaces of conversation, public relations and lobbying. All the means of marshalling and organizing social forces so powerful that they can't be ignored. 

And contemporary influences. Antonio Negri’s theories of globalization* demonstrate that the real progressive path is to finish embracing a global society, not shutting it down just because only the few wealthy have benefited so far. Jacques Rancière’s fiery critiques of those who think civic nationalism and legitimate state authority is all a democracy needs. The deceptively steely pragmatism of Etienne Balibar. And most importantly, the insight into the nature and ease of human terror that Hannah Arendt brought to us through her books on totalitarianism and democracy – the social wills to uniformity and diversity.

* And his philosophies of time will be pretty important to developing the ideas in the first half of Utopias too.

Two thinkers that I think I should still draw on from that Western liberatory tradition are Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who integrated their philosophical thinking with the progressive and idealist social movements of Europe.

Thinkers from outside the Western sphere will be needed too, though I’m only at the beginning of this research. There’s the classics like Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, of course. But also Partha Chatterjee, Amartya Sen, Pheng Cheah, and indigenous thinkers like Wab Kinew and Glen Sean Coulthard.

The picture isn’t complete by far and it isn’t meant to be. But Utopias will be my own contribution to what Mouffe calls the radicalization of democracy – visions of human society that reconcile civic and material freedoms, where people can live as they wish in communities of strong bonds and vibrant, singular differences.

Where human creativity keeps driving ourselves forward – new ways of life, new thoughts, new societies. Always adapting to changing times and worlds, and changing those worlds as we act. Social becoming. Democracy in motion.

Dictating Freedom IV: Taking Our Borders for Granted, Research Time, 30/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . When something is taken for granted – and I mean on a social, society-wide level – our experience of the phenomenon has a really interesting structure. How do you experience something that you never notice?

It's like asking what your experience of glass is. We rarely ever experience glass. We literally look through glass all the time. We experience it as an absent presence. I’m having a little trouble, as I write, explaining this idea in the abstract in anything other than a few token gestures. They might remind you of how a mediocre teacher would discuss Husserl or Heidegger’s phenomenology.

But I want to keep talking about the nation-state. Politically, states and their borders are the glass of our politics, according to this tortured metaphor.* We're so accustomed to states and borders as a part of our politics, that we can’t even really see them until their structure gets broken. 

* I feel like this post is a really intense example of the model of blogging as the nakedly public first draft. I’ve grasping really vainly for the appropriate expressions, and I feel like I’m only barely making myself understood. I like the title, though. It feels like something a Trumpist would write, but my actual ideas about borders would make a Trumpist’s head explode.

When the glass shatters, we’re horrified, and can’t pick up the pieces without bloodying our hands.**

** Okay, that’s actually a pretty good metaphor. Getting there was torture, though, and I’m sorry about that, readers. 

Borders are in crisis today, with global flows of migrants making a mockery of their territorial controls. Even so, the legal structures of sovereign borders and state citizenship control can and often do make those migrants’ lives into different styles of hell.

One of Balibar's essays lays out three simple causes of how our state-centric political structure have begun to destabilize. They’re very complex phenomena in their affects, of course, but we can describe them as currents and changes pretty clearly and quickly.

And we can spot them pretty clearly if we have any basic idea about how politics functions today. They’re truisms by now, more facts that we barely take note of because we take them so much for granted. We have trouble conceiving of politics without states – Do we now also find it so hard to conceive of politics without these transformations?

Multinationals are free from constraint. By this, I mean that they aren't dependent for their existence and thriving on the particular state where they began. Corporations used to be dwarfed by the power of states and their laws. But now, the most powerful of them have collected so much financial power and wealth that they can dictate terms even to the more powerful state governments on Earth.

The entire world is open for business. Writing these essays when he did – in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Balibar is trying to process a cataclysmic event that we in the West all passed over much too quickly. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the communist bloc of allied states. 

Popular culture, and even our long-experienced political leaders all took the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union as an univocal victory for the West. The conception of the event was much too simple – “The Cold War is over! We won! Yahoo!”

Fuck's sake. I used to think about the end of the Cold War this way. I saw it unfolding on cable news, lying on my mother’s carpet in the basement apartment where we lived when I was a kid. I was eight years old when the Soviet Union fell apart. And our popular understanding of the time – even of the most experienced politicians we had – was no more advanced than an eight-year-old’s.

We're learning now – maybe about a decade too late – that the end of the Cold War was a more complicated social phenomenon than this. One that deserved the kind of philosophical attention that Balibar gives it. 

One part of Balibar’s analyses describes the end of the Cold War in a way that I hadn’t really thought through before. With the end of the communist bloc, there was now no part of the world where the mega-corporations of the world couldn’t go. They were the last states that refused to bend to the command of a multinational.

Enlightenment by communication. After what might at first seem a dour conclusion, Balibar gives us a genuine sense of hope. Our communication networks have spread around the globe. They're faster and more powerful than any such network that's existed before. And literally billions can join them.

We can learn about and support each other’s struggles more easily now than we ever could. As dangerous as that can be, it also comes with potential for liberation. States no longer have such tight controls on what their people can learn. An information underground is much easier for everyone to access. 

That means we can organize for real democracy better than we ever have before. And it’s a truly global process. Our communication networks help demonstrate to each of us individually that the Earth is a single system politically, communicatively, and ecologically.

So what do we do with this knowledge? That’s the key question for global democracy in our century. What would a world without states and borders look like? . . . To Be Continued

Dictating Freedom III: What's So Special About These Shapes? Research Time, 29/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . In the context of today’s global economy, the concept of sovereignty and a state's borders are a kind of weird anachronism. 

Borders have immense power. Just ask anyone who's had their refugee application rejected, who are stuck in an Australian detention camp in Nauru, or fear post-Brexit deportation away from life, livelihood, and friends. 

But the macroscopic flows that constitute the seriously crushing power of Earth's economy today pay no attention to borders. One country can’t stop a currency crisis across its whole region just because the mess started in another country’s stock exchange. 

Australian protestors against their government's detention
centres for illegal immigrants.

Yet a government still has the power to control who can live and work legally within its sovereign territory. This is the great contradiction of globalization. The economic relationships and flows throughout the Earth make borders porous at best and useless at worst, and render the concept of sovereignty obsolete. 

I should hesitate before I call this a contradiction. There’s a tendency in marxist thought, for example, to call any such tension between phenomena a contradiction. That tradition has been pretty influential in how we understand economic transformation, at least from a left-wing perspective.

But this talk of contradiction is a mistake. The most important reason why is that the term implies too much logic in the world. There’s no literal contradiction in state border controls co-existing with globalized macroeconomic flows. It’s not a matter of X and not-X. 

It’s better to talk of tensions, destructive conflicts, cross-purposes, and opportunities for one to exploit the other. It's not as if the continued existence of sovereign powers over borders in a state’s arsenal have stopped illegal immigration. 

You can lock them up in camps when you catch them – and it’s easier to catch them when you’re an island state like Australia – but ultimately, you can’t catch them all. The state government can, in the name of protecting its sovereignty, hold unsanctioned migrants back from being able to make legitimate claims for protections and rights. But that doesn’t actually help anyone.

Migrants move because of the same macroeconomic phenomena that structures international trade and communication. Migration is one of those phenomena that constitutes the global patterns of our planet’s economy. 

Instead of somehow forcing them to return to where they came, the denial of rights common to all legal migrants and citizens-by-birth just makes those illicit migrants easier to exploit. Just consider how many Latin American immigrants to the United States are stuck working under the table for shit wages and no protections. Or consider how the non-citizen labour of many Gulf Arab countries constitutes a literal slave class.

Don't think that just because I’m a proud Canadian, I won’t call out our own government’s abuse of migrants. The Temporary Foreign Worker Program is a festering blight on Canadian democracy. 

This program brings foreign workers to Canadian businesses for periods of several years, where they work without access to basic rights. Their employers are literally their patrons, and they live in Canada at their leisure. Its existence prevents countless poor and working class people from being able to immigrate to Canada. 

As my grandparents did. Italian immigrants in the years after the Second World War, who became patriotic Canadians, living the rest of their lives in Montreal. If the TFWP existed in Canada in the 1950s, they would never have been allowed to stay here, and I would never have been born.

Trudeau's popular image is as a "hero of the left," but he
has changed virtually nothing substantial from the
ideologically-driven Harper era of Canadian governance.

Stephen Harper’s government gets credit for the TFWP, but its current form was a product of Jean Chrétien's Liberal government. When he was running for Prime Minister last year, my own party leader refused to answer my public question about the TFWP because the program wasn’t supposed to be part of the official NDP platform. And that added to my reasons to drop support from Tom Mulcair to lead the party.

Justin Trudeau, despite his “sunny ways” public image, has refused to take action to dismantle this sucker-punch to Canadian democracy. People still come to Canada on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, and are still deported forever from Canada according to its rules. It’s hypocritical and discriminatory against the poor, and it must end.

All this because state governments still have the power to define who within their borders gets access to legal protections and the recognition of their claims to rights. Yet not only do the major currents of a globalized economy make state borders ridiculous, even their own history does.

State borders are ultimately contingent – there is nothing necessary about why any given state has the physical shape on the maps that it does. State borders are the end result of centuries of negotiation with neighbouring governments, the fiat of conquering colonial armies, and more generally, war.

Yet we still treat our governments’ powers over our borders as sacrosanct. Understanding how silly borders are is the first step to democratizing them . . . To Be Continued