"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.”

“He Was the God of Abundance,” Research Time, 16/07/2018

Here’s a really interesting idea about how the concept of prosperity has developed in Western thinking. It’s an idea that I really wanted to work into my review of The Quest For Prosperity,* but that couldn’t quite fit the general direction.

* Forthcoming in about a couple of weeks.

A prominent idea in one concept of prosperity that you can perceive in Western culture over the last few centuries is to define prosperity as abundance.

There's a complex relation of our visions of abundance with our anxieties and fears. To live in abundance is to never want again – more than that, it’s the security of never having to worry that you’ll want again. Not only do you live in a situation where you’ll always have comfort, but you know that this comfort will continue – that it won’t end.

Pictured: A succinct expression of ethical, psychological, and cultural
economic anxiety.

This is the dream of abundance. But it was popularly believed, and as a popular image still exists in our culture.** The image functions as a response to individual anxiety, showing that anxiety is a central component of the concept.

** Probably also in a bunch of other cultures as well. The title is a way-too-layered joke about how abundance imagery operates in many non-Western contexts. Sassower sticks with the Western context, because that’s the tradition he knows best.

The concept of prosperity as abundance expresses anxiety – depending on the context where we analyze how the concept plays out in thought, it’s an individual anxiety, or a cultural anxiety. Anxiety is your motivation to achieve prosperity, and abundance is the dream of an end to the torture of daily life.

The anxiety of poverty – whether you live it or have to avoid it – fuels the intensity of how a person or a public discourse conceives of prosperity’s abundance.

This image of abundance has painted the goals of socialist movements from the 19th century to today. Raphael Sassower draws from the recurring image to understand this driving concept of abundance – prosperity as the achievement of comfort. As a political movement, socialism aims for the basic dignity of comfort for all, that no one need live in poverty, penury, misery.

It’s admirable. But I can’t roll with this concept in my own approaches to progressive activism anymore. Basically, it’s because the concept turns out to be more destructive when it animates our current political priorities. When you make universal prosperity your political goal, and you understand prosperity as abundance, then you presume that your world can be made to create that abundance.

Is this really all that matters to you? The temptations of consumerism are
pretty intense, but the question remains of whether this is even
something you can achieve without facilitating a disaster.

Karl Marx himself thought this way about the ultimate goal of socialism. As he conceived the material achievement of communism, it was a world where technological industry would produce prosperity and comfort for everyone. But we have to move beyond the thought of the 19th century.

Environmentalist political movements being as mainstream and powerful as they are, we largely have. If we think of prosperity as everlasting abundance for all people, then we rapidly run up against the carrying capacity of the Earth.

I don’t mean this in some cheap Malthusian sense – no simple ratio of resources to population to consumption intensity. I mean it in the larger sense that the exploitation of material resources for economic prosperity will destroy the means of physical comfort. We may relieve our monetary anxieties, but our health and quality of life anxieties will be worse.

If the ecological side effects of the technology to create abundance makes life a torture, that’s no prosperity. Just look at the water quality in cities that prosper economically from the high-paying secure jobs of oil or metal extraction, or steel foundries and oil refineries.

This continues to be a conflict in our society. Obviously from the extremist extraction politics of state leaders like Hugo Chavez, Stephen Harper, and Vladimir Putin. These people who’d build an entire economy around spreading the wealth of oil money inevitably and quickly come into conflict with environmentalists.

But the most telling – and depressing – such conflict among priorities of extraction and ecology is among the progressive set. Take the Canadian case.

Right now, the provincial leadership and membership of the New Democratic Party in Alberta and Saskatchewan support prosperity-by-extraction with similar zeal as Chavez. In each case, they’ve come into conflict with Indigenous activists and their settler environmentalist allies, who refuse to accept the bargain of the land’s utter destruction for the economic abundance of consumerist values.

To Act Means to Think, Jamming, 13/04/2018

Some more notes reflecting on Deleuze’s broad ideas. This time about politics, activism. Particularly the relationship between theory and practice.

Gilles Deleuze’s politics operated in a marxist tradition, or at least a tradition of social, political, and economic critique that began with the work of Marx. He was far from an orthodox marxist – anyone in the marxist tradition worth reading is never an orthodox marxist.

Economic, political, technological, and ecological circumstances are too different from Marx’s own time and place to be uncritical about his own theories and social science concepts. But the relationship between theory and practice – between philosophy and politics – is a recurring question in the tradition.

Above, an act of practice to change the world, impossible without the
theories and thinking that guides them.

Marx himself put the relationship of theory and practice at the forefront of his work. Philosophically speaking, it was one of the most reaction-inspired parts of his thinking – his need, as the saying goes, to stand Hegel on his feet instead of his head.

One of Marx’s most tweet-worthy sayings was about the theory-practice relationship. From the Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

So you’d think someone working in the marxist tradition would follow a strict separation of theory and practice. Interpreting and understanding the world is separate from changing the world.

But of course, it’s not that simple. Not in Marx’s own work and certainly not in Deleuze’s. Most of Deleuze’s energy was spent crafting philosophical concepts. He attended his fair share of protests and demonstrations, and regularly advocated for greater social justice in western Europe during his lifetime. But first and foremost, he was a writer and thinker.

Theory and practice exist in a feedback loop. You can’t have a sensible or even coherent theory if it isn’t developed through understanding the world, and doesn’t include a purpose of helping you understand the world. Theory is a guide for practical action, because the most wise practical action is driven by theory.

Theory without input from practice is intellectual masturbation. Practice without input from theory is flailing your arms like a crazy person. The problems of practice need theoretical work to come up with solutions. Theory has no order or direction without application in practice.

Feeding Off Its Own Destruction, Research Time, 19/03/2018

I live in Toronto. It’s a vibrant economy and culture, but there’s plenty of simmering conflict here. The tech, finance, and film/tv industry are the major drivers of the city’s economy, but there are plenty of people left behind.

Rent control and housing affordability is a crushing pressure on people all over the city. There’s pressure on the middle classes. People now able to afford a condo’s mortgage are locked out of a townhouse market with not enough supply, and a detached home market whose value has ballooned ridiculously.

I have plenty of bias – my New Democrat affiliation is in my Twitter
bio. What amazed me was, when my part association posted this
image, how quickly we got our first racist comment about Muslims.
Far from our last, too. The real irony is that, the more shit-posters
we get on this image – and the comment thread is ridiculously long
without my having to do a thing – the more visible Facebook's
algorithm will make it in news feeds all over the networks of the
commenters.

There’s pressure on the lower classes. High demand entices building owners and property managers to raise rents beyond what many in already run-down buildings can afford. Elected political leaders in city and provincial offices are no longer interested in subsidizing low-income housing directly, which pushes more disadvantaged people out of housing and into cars or parking garages with few security cameras.

Both Ford brothers – alive and dead – have given lip service to affordable housing. Former mayor Rob would visit the city’s public housing to highlight its unsavoury character.

For the most part, the Ford brother who has a good chance of becoming Ontario’s next premier has taken a Not-In-My-Neighbourhood attitude toward disadvantaged people.
• • •
Toronto’s housing pressure is a function of a very basic process of capitalism, one Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in Anti-Œdipus. It’s a social / economic system that’s remarkably durable, which is strange.

There have been plenty of economic crises in capitalism – 47 major recessions in the history of the United States alone. The system was unstable enough that a union activist turned social scientist could write an analysis of capitalist economics describing it as a system heading inevitably for self-destruction.

The contemporary left doesn’t take Marx’s ideas at face value anymore. At least the intelligent ones don’t. Anti-Œdipus was another generation’s updating the basic idea of Capital to unexpected, contingent, new conditions.

Parkdale has been a source of artistic creativity in Toronto for a while,
and a big part of that was how many affordable – if kind of scuzzy –
homes were available in the region. It's been a poor neighbourhood
for a while, which means artists and new Canadians often end up
living here. The Tibean and Roma communities have made serious
impacts here for a while. But they're also squeezed by condo
developers putting pressure on property owners to seek bigger
profits. All those poor and weird people who made the place
interesting and drew people to the area will have to leave so the
boring people with fat wallets can live in this interesting place.

Capitalism’s promise is prosperity and freedom – growth of the whole economy is good for everyone.* But capitalist economic systems drive these cycles of expansion and collapse. Usually, a key commodity’s value is inflated beyond sustainable price ranges by wider economic conditions, and there’s a lot of direct and collateral financial damage in the crash.

* As long as the size of some people’s shares of the pie grows at a greater rate than the size of the pie. That’s how an oligarch’s class is created.
• • •
Toronto’s high-pressure real estate market is one of those systems squeezed by affordability crunches. Profiteering people and organizations – property owners, investors in new condo developments – build these massive structures for middle class and professional class renters and homeowners.

Protests of these developments happen when people worry that they’ll be squeezed out of their homes – squeezed out of any homes at all – by the pressure of ubiquitous development that leaves them behind. That’s the injustice of property development – growing supply of middle class housing can stabilize the pressurized prices, but force those of more modest means away.

Gentrification’s irony. We all know it. A neighbourhood is filled with people of modest means who are all somehow marginalized from the mainstream. Working class. Artists. New immigrants. Marginalized people, whether by ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or some other racial or caste marker. Home of the minorities of a society.

Even the far-right nutters who think Trudeau and Bill Morneau are
communists just help drive our messaging to more people. Don't
tell them that. Hell, even if you do, they'll probably just keep trying
to start flame wars to own us socialists and libtards. Resentment and
cruelty seem to be the only things keeping North America's
conservative coalitions together these days.

Minorities in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception. People whose existence, identity, way of life separates them from the mainstream, others them. Their central example was Franz Kafka – a Czech man working and writing in German; an intellectual, curious, deeply spiritual Jew living in a Christian, rather anti-Semitic culture. It often puts them at a disadvantage.

Contemporary Toronto has its equivalents. Refugees from all over the world live in the Toronto area, as well as immigrants who come to Canada having to rebuild their entire lives. They’re the disadvantaged of our economic system, where we most value people who are already rich.

Yet a culture of entirely rich people is boring. It’s dull. It’s creatively dead. All this class knows how to do is commodify – invest for a higher return. But if you need sources outside your own class to invest in, you need to find difference-makers – new trends, new businesses, new ideas.

The minorities of our societies are the creative classes – they’re already mixing and realigning cultural codes and traditions in their own identities as they adapt to their new social worlds. Capitalism as a social system needs such people – hustlers, artists, new people – because the elite of a capitalist system don’t have the capacity to think anymore.

The margins of a society bring the energy to the next growth and creative process in a capitalist economy. Yet the very success of those processes force marginalized people out of a society, since the prosperity of an unrestrained capitalist system tends to cluster in oligarchical shapes.

Oligarchs hate those filthy poor people, and they aren’t smart of worldly enough to know how profoundly they depend on them.

From Simple Beginnings a Jungle, Research Time, 30/01/2018

I at first didn’t intend to follow yesterday’s post. I’m still not, really. I’m picking up a thread from a photo caption of all things, spinning it into a new point.

It’s a tricky thing, talking about Karl Marx. In a way, I pity the writers of Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, and anyone else who specializes in academic Deleuze scholarship.

I mean, I pity all academics who devote their entire creative lives to the scholarship and interpretation of one or a small few number of historical authors. Do we need more commentary, or do we need more inspiration? Need we separate the two so radically at all?

The entire process looks immensely well-ordered, a perfect balance
among so many complex parts and processes. Of course, the most
perfect balances are also the easiest to disrupt. One shift too far, one
change at just the wrong place and time – the entire system flies to
pieces through the same energy that kept it all together.

You probably know where I fall on that question.

Marx wanted to stand Hegelianism on its feet – put the conceptual and analytic frameworks of thinking to work. His exploration of the dynamics of England’s industrial-imperialist economy literally invented a new kind of science – empirical philosophy.

Scientific research on social and economic relationships, understood according to Hegel’s frameworks of thought. Identify the true contradiction among all the forces that constitute a society, analyze how those irreconcilably-opposed forces could bring their conflict to the highest intensity.

It turned out that the problem wasn’t how you orient your Hegelianism – it was with the whole theoretical toolbox. Social structures and systems* are assembled in very complex, contingent ways.

* Or pretty much any structure or system in the world, but let’s just talk about the social ones for now.

They fall apart from chaotic processes too – one little change interacts with everything else going on, as if it were some Rube Goldberg machine that builds itself as it collapses to pieces and brings down the whole house around it.

So you understand how societies transform not by looking for high-intensity contradictions – that’s more like understanding how societies explode, if anything. Societies transform much more frequently, and much more subtly. Though even the most subtle transformations can eventually constitute entirely different worlds.

What was one revolutionary transformation that happened from Marx’s time to ours (or at least to Deleuze’s)? Labour differentiated. In England’s 1870s economy, working people were miners and factory workers. That’s it. Dirty, scruffy men who live horrible, soot-covered, ash-breathing lives before dying of lung disease. Plus all the slave labour around the colonies who did all the same stuff, but in the sun dying of heatstroke.

I suppose you could say that every technology is as convoluted as a
Rube Goldberg machine, and maybe just as unnecessary. What would
that gain you, though?
I ask that as a serious question.

Now, we have a ton of different working jobs. The factory workers, the miners, yes. But also the retail workers, the taxi and rideshare drivers, medical trades, waiters and bartenders, communications contractors, paid-by-the-post bloggers.

The key with the current labour system, so goes this essay on Marx and Deleuze, is that none of these different groups see much in common with each other. Few of them really have much in their identities and lives in common – other than worrying about their finances.

But the class consciousness that was so easy when Mordorish factory workers made up the bulk of working people? That’s long gone. Why? Because things changed. Economic and technological conditions diversified the number of ways you could get stuck as an underpaid wage slave.

And I’m just talking about the mostly-financialized Western economies. Leave aside the extra complexity of a globalized world whose parity is improving daily.

The world need not have changed in such a way. Maybe it only did so because all the communist revolutions across Europe between the two World Wars were put down, and because Stalin took the only successful such revolution into totalitarianism.

But that’s what happened. The capitalist territories survived the catastrophe of the two world wars, and developed computer technology that diversified their economies. Class solidarity evaporated because there was no longer enough in the identities of the different working people to say they could even be in the same community.

Take a 24-year-old punk rocker girl working at Dollarama for minimum wage. A 50-year-old lifelong steelworker who’s lost his health insurance. An overstressed 32-year-old ad copy writer who might make $4000 one month, then $400 the next (and maybe the next too). What do they have in common?

You can give them lots of good answers. What are the chances they’d believe it?

History as Back Catalogue I: You Gotta Know More Than Just the Hits, Research Time, 31/08/2017

Those were some interesting (and long) riffs on different ideas I encountered reading Perry Anderson’s book Considerations on Western Marxism. I’m not sure how successful those riffs were, but I think I’ve refined a few more of my own thoughts about the last century or so of history on the radical left.*

* Complicated though that history is. Holy crap, it’s bloody complicated.

A young marx sees the modern age.
August Diehl in costume as Karl Marx filming The Young Karl Marx.

A really important part of Anderson’s thinking here is his analysis of Louis Althusser’s ideas and their significance. I wrote quite a bit about Althusser’s thinking when I was reading his collection For Marx in Summer 2016.

Anderson writes about the impact that the discovery of Karl Marx’s early works had on the marxist tradition. Before the Soviet government published editions of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and other of Marx’s manuscripts from the 1840s and 50s, folks in the commie community only had Capital and some journalism.

Nice enough to become the intellectual foundation of a political movement which would affect the development of Earth’s entire human civilization. It would be as if for decades, no one had ever heard any of Curtis Mayfield’s work with The Impressions.

Yes, Superfly! is amazing, but you understand it so much better when you hear “Keep on Pushin,” knowing that they were part of the same ongoing process of creativity.**

** I don’t think anyone has ever made an analogy between Karl Marx and Curtis Mayfield, though I stand to be corrected. I doubt anyone ever will again. No guarantee I won’t.

So a generation of marxist theorists had their minds blown by the publication of this enormous back catalogue that was so different from all the Marx they’d known before. Naturally, they built that mainstream scholarly picture of Karl Marx as having a radical break in the middle of his life.

The analogy might have been a reach, I admit. Okay, it was kind of
ridiculous. But here's something that's never ridiculous – You should
listen to some Curtis Mayfield. It's good for you.

Althusser’s analyses put the more philosophical aspects of Marx’s thinking at the forefront. He understood the earlier, more explicitly philosophical work as the same project as Capital, but in a different context.

Here’s how Anderson puts it. In both works, he was trying to discover what kind of knowledge and self-image could awaken working people to refuse the wretchedness of their lives.

Capital was a very empirical survey – one of the historical genesis projects of the science of sociology – of the material conditions of the urban working class. Marx investigated their legal rights, working conditions, systematic advantages and disadvantages. Most philosophically, he examined the different ways that working class people could understand themselves – which self-conceptions cowed them and which empowered them.

The early stuff like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology made explicitly philosophical work on the conditions and nature of Europe’s urban working class.

The 1930s generation of marxist theorists were the first to take those works seriously. They built a new, more complex understanding of Marx and his works. They could see more clearly than ever that Marx's writing contained many more vectors and paths for thinking than the straight-up dogmatic reception of Capital.

They could see the multiplicity, the difference, the true complexity of Marx as a philosopher. Just in time to fall under the axe of a marxist political leadership who had no tolerance for multiplicity and complexity.

To be continued

Hey! Cultural Marxism! I: Thought Becoming Action, Research Time, 24/08/2017

That much-too-long meditation on political agency was only one intriguing idea that I picked up reading Perry Anderson’s books a while ago. Here are some thoughts on an idea I found in his book Considerations on Western Marxism.

It's a history of ideas, tracing how the marxist tradition of political philosophy developed in the American-aligned bloc during the Cold War. One of the narratives of this book is how theory was cleaved away from real-world activism in the movement.

All this research in the marxist tradition is part of a strain in Utopias
that will examine the role communism plays in rhetoric against
utopian thinking, from the most florid think tank essays to the
dankest memes. I hope I won't have to get too dank.

Okay, you might be thinking, how is that weird? Well, it’s a truism in our society that theoretical thinking doesn’t have anything to do with practical action. I remember when Eric Foreman told his dad that he was thinking of studying philosophy in university, and Red asked if he had plans to work in a philosophy factory.

Say what you will about how well most communist countries worked out.* One really interesting part of that tradition was a deep link of its most profound theorists and researchers with its activism and community organizing.

* Actually, don’t. Because it’s all been said, I’ve heard it, I’ve said it myself, and it doesn’t matter that I fundamentally disagree with a lot of the political and economic principles of a tradition. There is still value here, as in a lot of places. You can read works without devoting yourself to their ideas. It’s called being critical.

Karl Marx himself was a union organizer, first locally in Cologne and Paris, then internationally through the International Workers of the World. Same with Friedrich Engels. It was the same with Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky as well. They all wrote historically significant, philosophically rich books of theory while leading political outreach and activism.

After the First World War, the break happens. Antonio Gramsci is the first philosopher of the marxist tradition to equal the insight, intensity, and influence of Marx himself. But he was a weird spin on the philosopher-activist. Marx, Engels, and Lenin were theorists at the same time as they were activists.

Marx was writing dense and complex theoretical essays and manuscripts while organizing radicals and activists. But Gramsci did all his philosophical work at the end of his active career.** There was a clear break in his own life – the slam of a gavel – of his activism as a political party organizer from his most important and best writing.

Just look at this fucking hipster. Shame what happened to him, though.

** Prison will do that to a guy.

Yet from Lenin’s death onward, theory decisively broke with practice. The main reason was some dirty hipster named Josef Stalin, who took over the Soviet Union with the help of his secret police apparatus. So from about 1924 to 1953, any writer who wrote anything dissenting or even departing slightly from the letter of official government doctrine fairly quickly expired.

In Russia, the intellectual tradition of the radically creative philosopher-activist was stamped into the dirt and buried. Thanks to the international political organizing of communist intellectuals across borders, all countries’ communist parties were networked together.

Over the 1920s, the Russian faction became more powerful and began dictating terms to the other parties – occasionally even making some party members around Europe disappear if they were deemed too Trotskyist. The creativity of the movement disappeared too.

Activists now just parroted standardized doctrine, approved by the Central Committee of the COMINTERN. First because they knew what was good for them. Later because they knew nothing else. Later still, because they knew nothing.

The irony is that Marx himself set up that structure and the incentive for communist philosophers to rely on it. He did it to make sure that community organizing against monarchist rule and for the rights of workers to see more profit from their own labour would always include a philosophically creative side.

The point of including philosophers in your activism organizations is to prevent your activists from letting their thoughts fall into empty dogma. A social movement is only powerful when people understand and embrace those ideas.

But the networks through which those ideas can spread can just as easily expose and silent the creators of new ideas.

Next post: Where did the philosophers go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

True/False & What Else? II: Material Conditions of Production, Research Time, 08/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . If you accept that knowledge is inherently social, then knowledge is going to be a very complex phenomenon. I’m not talking about complexity in terms of truth being ambiguous, as if there were fuzzy middle terms between a proposition’s truth and falsity.

Though that is a problem on the front lines of logical research. 

And I’m not talking about how knowledge primarily being social instead of an individual’s thoughts corresponding to the world introduces an inescapable relativism.

Philosophy isn't about a hard, dedicated search for the
truth above all else. It isn't a tradition of detectives
seeking straight answers. Or at least it should be. When
it tries to be, it stops being interesting.

Because it doesn’t do that anyway. And you only think so if you have a too-simple understanding of truth and knowledge in the first place.

What I want to talk about today – and probably for the rest of the week – is how focussing on the social character of knowledge implies a very different kind of thinking than thinking only of its individual or mental character. A very general and broadly defined distinction that I’m drawing solely for rhetorical contrast. 

Knowledge – on a mental model of thinking about it – is about knowing specific propositions. How we discover facts. When you consider the social character of knowledge, you’re drawn to how knowledge is produced. How we produce knowledge and power.

Looking at the ways knowledge is produced gives a person a pretty broad mandate. Because pretty much every social relation – among individuals, institutions, communities, architectures, ecologies – produces knowledge. So the entire human experience and civilization is the object of your scientific attention.

That’s basically the entire venue of activity for social epistemology or any other social approach to knowledge and its production. Needless to say, nobody in these fields are true generalists until you get to very broad, abstract, conceptual arguments. 

Reading Louis Althusser, he’s the first person I’ve come across to situate Karl Marx’s work explicitly in this context – Marx the first social epistemologist.

Another thing that keeps marxist studies marginalized in
the academy is his being vilified in pop culture as the
prophet of total state control of your life.

Now, before I describe my thinking here, I want to take a note of humility. I’ve read pretty heavily in a lot of philosophical traditions. But marxism actually wasn’t really one of them. Part of that was because marxist studies constituted quite a closed cult in my experience of the academy. If you wanted to study marxism, you had to shut yourself away from any other research but marxism to be taken seriously. 

Who am I kidding. That was pretty much the only reason I never got into marxism as a field of research. Every marxist or Marx specialist I met in the academy was – for the most part – a self-absorbed, hypocritical, delusional dick. And they were all men.

So I’m looking into these different aspects of marxism over the decades – Louis Althusser, Antonios Negri and Gramsci – for ideas that I plan on using in my very-not-marxist Utopias book of philosophy. And I’m stumbling into ideas that have probably been widely discussed throughout the academy already. 

So any of my colleagues who know the history of sociology, marxism, and the related fields better than me, let me know just how warmed over this insight may or may not be. And maybe throw a guy a few pdfs so he can update himself on this angle.

Karl Marx the first social epistemologist. Because when I read Althusser discussing Marx’s great early work The German Ideology, that’s what I see. In the marxist community of the French academy during the 1950s and 60s, there was a mainstream idea that Althusser made his reputation fighting decisively.

When King William IV of Prussia came to the
throne, German democrats thought their land
was entering a period of liberal freedom. But
he continued to rule as a despot, despite his
democratic promises as a prince. Even if you
give him the most credit, it's funny how an
institution can corrupt a good person.

That idea was taking all the details of marxist analysis as the universal terms of political and economic relations. The German Ideology, for instance, laid out the universal structure of how ideology worked. The German Ideology exposed a truth about the human phenomenon of ideology that had always been true and always would be.

Now, I don't know if anyone really thought in this exact way, or if Althusser is inventing an exaggerated version of a general tendency in his academy, to make his work more impressive and path-breaking. 

But I remember the quietist revolutionaries convinced that the necessity of human development would create a revolution and full communism without having to work. And I’ve met a few ridiculously dogmatic marxists in my time. So this feels plausible to me.

His argument was that The German Ideology doesn’t describe universals at all. At least not in this direct sense. It was instead a philosophical diagnosis of a social problem peculiar to Germany in the 1840s. 

Germany at the time had a philosophical establishment whose major thinkers and problems revolved around the underpinnings of democracy. Germany had a whole society of thought leaders who understood humanity as free, and probed the meaning of freedom. 

But their society was a monarchist dictatorship. The “German ideology” was the mass self-deception that made people think that understanding the meaning and essence of freedom was the same as actually living in a free society. That’s what made the belief in freedom a “bourgeois illusion.” Because you could believe yourself free while living in chains. 

The German Ideology was Marx calling his people out. . . . To Be Continued

Seeing the End in the Beginning III: The Point Is Always the Present, Research Time, 24/06/2016

Continued from last post . . . Or the post before, because you can skip the middle. Because here’s the real cliffhanger of this series. 

“The human relationship with time. That relationship is a matter of how we understand the way we relate to our own history, and how our history relates to us.Althusser made his reputation as a philosophy scholar with a series of essays that changed how people read Marx. It used to be there were two general takes on how Marx’s ideas developed. One camp saw a radical break between more idealist early works and a purely materialistic approach after the 1840s. Another read the early books and essays as preparatory material for his real culmination in Capital. Neither is right. The reason why lies in the nature of time, development, and change. . . .”

Here's a sketch of that reason, a schizz* between our conceptions of history as a narrative and the real nature of history as contingent collisions of processes. This example of Louis Althusser’s argument on how to read Marx will be one important illustration of this schizz and the problems it creates.

* What’s a schizz? Aside from an underrated Alan Moore project, it’s a term I’m taking from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work. When two or more processes that seem as though they should go together smoothly, but actually jar and grate into an intense tension – when an expected harmony becomes a cruel juxtaposition and possibly even an explosion – that’s a schizz.

Choosing one story in all of history erases billions of
worlds.

Those two camps of Marxist scholarship seem quite different. The Breakers saw the early works as defined by a heavy Hegel influence – the early Marx was an idealist Marx, in other words, and they talked among themselves about how much and how quickly Marx’s more materialist way of seeing the world manifested in his early life.

The Culmination interpretation was compatible with the Break perspective, but not necessarily. To the Break interpretation, a serious phase transition in Marx’s thinking occurred after the 1840s happened, but those early works are still part of a continuum of development.

All the works of Marx were laying the groundwork for Capital. That was the masterwork. Not just the masterwork, but the cumulative achievement of everything that had come before. And the general attitude in the scholarship community was that the literal purpose of each of those earlier books was to make the writing of Capital possible.

Althusser deflated that attitude like a popped balloon. It was by making a very simple point: understanding a writer’s entire body of work as leading up to a single ending capstone is only possible retroactively. Only by looking back after the fact can you understand a life as a narrative.

Aristotle made this point back in ancient Greece. It was the idea that you can only know the value of a life, whether a person achieved a worthwhile existence, once that person has passed and you can examine it as a whole. 

Narrative concepts are, on this view, the central ethical tools to understand people. It’s a judgement of what purpose our lives have, and how successful we are in achieving that purpose. Or how far we’ve fallen short.

But narratives aren’t how we actually live. Our actual lives are much messier. We have many purposes, much smaller than our whole lives. From achieving success in a decade-long career plan, producing some project, raising a family, buying a home and selling it later for a general profit, or just getting through the day without losing your temper.

Karl Marx wasn't always old.

Or in this case, Marx didn’t publish The German Ideology or write any of the articles and manuscripts he produced in the 1840s so they’d be building blocks for the epic masterpiece he’d compose decades later. 

Althusser wrote, "To imagine life in advance is beyond human intelligence."

Karl Marx was a poor labour activist and anti-monarchist revolutionary in the mid-19th century. He might not have considered it possible that he’d live nearly as long as he did. He wouldn’t have acted with these plans.

Marx’s works – each of them, individually – were conceived as being worth producing on their own terms. Each one had its own purpose at the time. 

That they contributed to a decades-long progression of thinking to produce one big career-summarizing work was a matter of Marx himself perhaps thinking back over all he’d done as he developed this massive work Capital in the last years of his own life.

His revisionist narrative of his own history. All narrative is revisionist, as the perspective of the current moment papers over what was immanent to the past as you lived it. So the narrative meaning of a history isn’t true – It erases whatever contingent elements of in a given moment don't contribute or actively schizz with what you want to make of that history.

The open question is whether truth is all we want from history.

Seeing the End in the Beginning II: His Time Not Ours, Research Time, 23/06/2016

Continued from last post . . . Yesterday, I wrote about why I’ve always hesitated about using Marx in the central argument of Utopias. When you use Marx openly as a basis for any of your ideas, you risk being ghettoized as Marxist literature. 

So the only people who read you with any charity are the ones who are already going to pretty much agree with you. There’s one problem for the marketing of the book, that leaning too heavily on Marx will keep it from reaching the potentially larger audience I want for it.

Also, there’s the core problem of Marx’s philosophy: it’s very much of its time. The most common mistake that people throughout the field of scholarship and activism make about Marx’s work is that they take his categories for universals. The structure of class conflict, the nature of industrial capitalism, the engine of history. 

I’ve read people and met people who think that Marx hit on the universal essence of capitalism in Capital. And that’s just not the case at all. I’m largely echoing Antonio Negri and Louis Althusser here when I say that Marx was a man of his time. 

This isn't the universal model for the world of work
anymore. The factory floor is no longer the common
ground for the lives of working people. So one
fundamental aspect of textbook Marxist political
organizing no longer exists.

There have been serious changes in the global structure of our economy since the 1870s. The primacy of the knowledge and communication economy being the most important. Related to that is the primary of online communication networks for commerce and political organizing. 

There’s also the end of states as the massively dominant political actors in the world. And also the creation of real international organizations and NGOs. Plus mass decolonization. 

And global ecological catastrophe. And the advent of nuclear weapons. You can’t just graft analytic categories from the height of the British Empire and the ascent of industrialization onto our very different time.

You can use the analytic frameworks Marx did to learn more about your global economy. That’s what Negri and Michael Hardt did with the decade-long research and writing project of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. 

But I’m going to get meta with my use of Marx in Utopias. I’ve literally made an example out of him. And I think this example will probably make it into the book itself. I’m actually pretty sure by now – after only four years of thinking and researching about it – that I know pretty much what the major steps of Utopias’ argument will be.

The example is simple. I might go into it a little bit more tomorrow, because I didn’t get much time to write or think through it today. The example isn’t even Marx himself, but how people have tended to read Marx.

Whether they’re scholars or activists, Marx is read as if he’s a complete work. Scratch that. As if he’s always been a complete work. The culmination – the gospel, as the mediocre readers take it – is Capital. So all of his prior books and manuscripts are understood in the light of Capital.

How far a given work approaches the core ideas of Capital. How much groundwork a particular work lays for Capital. How it falls short of Capital. How this particular dry run at Capital came up just a little bit short. 

The thing is, that's not how any of those early works like The German Ideology, The 18th Brumaire, the Critique of the Philosophy of Right, or any of those essays and books that came out before Capital were written. They were written to stand alone on their own rights, for their own reasons. 

Understanding a person's entire life’s work as leading up to some culmination in a late-period masterpiece is always a mistake. You don’t write the masterpiece until it’s been written. So there’s no way it could be the point of all your other writing until you actually get there.

That way, the present, even in the moment, becomes the past. . . . To be continued

Seeing the End in the Beginning I: Assembling Ideas, Composing, 22/06/2016

When I worked full-time in the academy, I met a lot of people who were trapped in very insular worlds of thought. They were worlds of scholarship. 

Academia is a profession where you have to establish yourself by building expertise. I tried a strategy of breadth – building networks across universities, across disciplines, across countries, and developing multiple research projects that draw on related research fields. That’s one way.

It's all too easy to vanish into the library
of babel called academic scholarship and
end up never writing anything of real
cultural importance again.

Others choose specialization. You pick a particular sub-discipline or debate within your field and develop complete knowledge of this narrowly focussed region. 

Nietzsche poked fun at this attitude in Zarathustra with his image of the biologist who knew everything there was to know about the brains of leeches, but nothing else. Not even anything about other leech body parts.

In humanities fields, there are some key figures where, if you want to be known as a specialist on the work of this particular person, simply putting in the required effort makes you a narrowly focussed hyper-specialist. There’s so much secondary material, so much commentary, that it’s barely possible to find any time to focus on anything else.

But the professional culture, especially in philosophy, could get so combative that the least gap in your knowledge of commentary could disqualify you from expertise and damage your professional reputation. 

When it comes to figures who have the most overwhelming commentary volume, I can think of a few easily. There’s Plato and Aristotle. Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Martin Heidegger. Wittgenstein is one. Nietzsche, ironically, is another. Then there’s Marx.

I think Marx is worst of all. Two reasons. There an enormous amount of commentary on the works of Marx by both professional academics and equally respected intellectual revolutionaries from the past. But there’s also that weird hypocrisy of dedicating yourself to advancing Marxist ideas and politics from the position of a tenured professorship in a largely corporate-controlled university.

Now, I plan on using a little bit of Marxist thinking in Utopias. Not a lot. Just a few ideas about the material nature of history and what drives social change. I draw it mostly from Louis Althusser’s interpretation of his work. 

Maybe a little from Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas about social change and group formation in his Critique of Dialectical Reason. Some critical remarks from Antonio Gramsci. A lot of ideas from the anarchist end of the tradition, like Mikhail Bakunin, Colin Ward, and Emma Goldman. I may head for some of Rosa Luxemberg’s ideas later on. 

And, as you can tell from the last couple of months, a hefty portion of Antonio Negri’s uptake of Marx-inspired philosophical tools into the era of the knowledge economy.

You have to be careful with any project involving Karl Marx’s thought because of the immense gravity of the whole corpus. The strength of vitriol and intensity of emotions that Marx’s work inspires in the wider political field only contributes to that gravity. 

German actor August Diehl played the young
Karl Marx in a European television film of his
early years as a scholar and labour organizer,
which was released only this year. I have no
idea if it's actually any good.

If you’re going to use any ideas or references of Marx in any project, you have to be very careful not to get sucked into the maelstrom of the Marxist tradition. Use a pinch, and the next thing you know, your entire project becomes about Marx and Marxism. 

Let’s not do that.

See, Utopias the book isn’t just going to talk about political principles and arguments, though that will happen throughout the manuscript. I’ll frame those political principles in an account of how people understand and interact with history and memory. 

The living human experience of time, basically. Experiencing the present moment or era in terms of the real or imagined past, or an ideal, dystopian, or conservative future. Understanding the past in terms of its future, either as a journey or a purpose. Understanding the future in terms of our past or our present.

And I’m beginning to notice – as I read Althusser’s For Marx, remembering some interpretations from Negri and critical points from Gramsci’s essays – a set of ideas about the human relationship with time. That relationship is a matter of how we understand the way we relate to our own history, and how our history relates to us.

Althusser made his reputation as a philosophy scholar with a series of essays that changed how people read Marx. It used to be there were two general takes on how Marx’s ideas developed. 

One camp saw a radical break between more idealist early works and a purely materialistic approach after the 1840s. Another read the early books and essays as preparatory material for his real culmination in Capital. 

Neither is right. The reason why lies in the nature of time, development, and change. . . . To be continued