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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kill Your Idols VIII: The Best Raw Deal, Research Time, 17/08/2017

Here is the sort of political activism you need when you understand how complex the relationship between society, culture, and state is.

Your activism has to aim for hegemony. This is more than just control of the state. In fact, hegemony means a lot of different things. The term ‘hegemony’ whose meaning is continuous with present use, began in international relations theory in the 19th century.

Boys at war.

Essentially, the theory that sees all relations between nations and peoples as states at war. Whether by military or some other means. Conquest, dominance, hostility, suspicion, mistrust, fear, and hatred.

The language of what’s called realist IR theory is dispassionate, almost meditative. They talk in terms of interests, calculations of different risks and their mutual impacts, game theory. But I’ve long heard a whisper, an implication in a little too much of this talk, which sounds like little boys in a park playing at war.

Hegemony here is the dominant power – the state at the centre of military and economic power for an entire region or the world. The state to whom every other government pays loyalty if they know what’s good for them.

Antonio Gramsci’s innovation was to adapt the term to a domestic political context. He was thinking of states, cliques of oligarchs or aristocrats, and classes. Hegemony here means the power of a ruling class through the state to force obedience through violence, or else seduce them into it.

This is where those institutions come into play. Most of them – especially in Gramsci’s own time and place, early 20th century Europe – were organs of the state. The different military and police bureaus could force you to obey. One important reason (among many) why Gramsci’s revolution in Italy failed was because the Italian Communist Party thought those violent institutions were all that mattered.

Nothing phallic about this at all.

Consent of the governed is a much more powerful force. Many people who were desperately and inescapably poor under the current way of doing things in 1920s Italy – factory workers, farmers, labourers – simply weren’t up for revolution. They were okay with the way things were.

There are a lot of people who, in situations of terrible injustice, are still okay with things. They can see the real circumstances of wretchedness that the status quo results in, and they’ll just make excuses, or simply act as though it doesn’t matter.

You want an example? Introduce yourself to a middle-class white Canadian from a reasonably affluent suburban community. Ask him about the number of Indigenous rural communities don’t have access to a clean water source.

He’ll be filled with excuses, half of them blaming Indigenous people themselves for not having a basic government service we take for granted everywhere else in the country.

Now why would he believe that? These are ideas that proliferate culturally – in conversations and mass media, whether some media platform or channel is state-run or private. They’re the conversations that condition public morality.

Yeah, I'm going there. At least for a little while.

Powerful institutions, organizations, and sometimes even individuals can control channels and platforms. Effective political activism has to work on all these forces at once. Agitating against unjust government actions isn't enough.

Maybe it’s through direct ownership – the state runs the CBC, Facebook is a company that shapes our online life, several oligarchs become think tank funders or outright buy media companies. Maybe it’s through influence, building a profile in these media or influencing people in states and private organizations.

Together – say it with me now – all these forces manufacture our consent.

So is Noam Chomsky just warmed-over Antonio Gramsci? Pretty much, and not even as interesting. But I think I’ll go into more detail why tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It shouldn’t be that hard.

Dictating Freedom V: The Image of the Nation, Research Time, 31/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . So much has been written over the centuries about what sovereignty is, what it implies, its legitimacy, its nature. Philosophical thought is a method of figuring out the nature of phenomena too complex to describe in simple terms. 

It’s a mistake to enter a philosophical debate with the preconception that your purpose is to settle it. As I hope yesterday’s post made clear, big, complex institutions are at their most dangerous when we’ve settled debate about their nature, function, and existence. When we’ve accepted their existence and taken them for granted. 

When they become so invisible to us that we look right through them, even as we can’t imagine a world without them. Like a glass window through which I see my neighbourhood.

A protestor raises a banner against immigration
restrictions. A little context here.

Think about how complicated real communities of people are, especially in our globalized world of easy planetary travel and frequent migration. But it’s always been the case that any economic centre becomes a culturally diverse, plural community. Once diversity sets in and you leave people alone to get on with life, it compounds as people create whole new identities and cultures.

Human communities tend toward creating more social and cultural complexity. So why do we all take for granted this idea that a peculiar patch of territory controlled by a government institution needs total ethnic-cultural unity, homogeneity, and conformity to be a stable political entity?

How did the nation-state become the default political institution for the entire world?* The answer is in the philosophy of the modern period – attempts to work out a way of thinking that would shut down the violence of Western Europe’s religious wars.

* You can’t just answer “colonialism.” Yes, that’s technically correct. But that only accounts for the spread of that political form. Not its genesis. Europe (mostly Britain) had conquered about half the Earth by the 1930s, and Westerners equated political freedom with having your own nation-state. So decolonization was the institution of 100 or so sovereign states where there were once imperial possessions. It had become the default already.

Etienne Balibar draws from Jean Bodin’s ideas – as he tried to find a common image of France that would prevent Catholics and Protestants from killing each other. His solution – to describe it in very simple terms – was a state whose law was officially secular, unifying all people as subjects to a common crown.

That was fine for monarchies, but things got complicated when Western culture began developing democracy as a political ideal. Democracy means that we can’t be subject to a crown, so can’t rely on that subjection to produce social unity and peace. How can a community of diverse people be free without conflict? 

The West's most important innovator in the
philosophy of what a nation is.

The idea that millions (and now billions) of people could live together in mutual love and respect wasn't really getting much traction at the time. It was the 1700s, and people weren’t really taking Spinoza mainstream yet. 

Instead, we get the man Balibar regards as the principal innovator of the concept of the nation – Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I’m going to try to explain his conception of the nation in the shortest and most direct form I can here. I want to explain the idea to my readers, but I always want to articulate it in very direct and simple forms myself.

Rousseau took a book to explain a concept whose meaning is still being debated today. Balibar took a few pages of an essay to articulate one particular interpretation. I’ll take a few paragraphs of a blog post to explain my take on Rousseau’s ideas after reading Balibar.

The traditional objection to democracy is that it inevitably falls into discord and chaos that facilities an even worse tyranny to return stability. These objections are still at the heart of notable anti-democratic philosophers today. So peace and freedom requires reconciling the difference between rulers and ruled.

A social movement for democratic government expresses in material action the desire for peace and freedom. That desire is what Rousseau calls the “general will.” This is distinct from the “will of all,” which is his term for the collection of all the conflicting, niggling particulars that every individual in a society wants. 

The general will in its pure expression can only ever be vague – “Peace! Freedom!” Quite general, actually. But it’s still a material desire. That material desire constitutes the unity of the nation. 

Representative institutions channel that desire. In the name of peace and freedom, parliaments and congresses permit the reconciliation of all those individual wills into a more concrete expression – the rule of law, of a state’s legislation and institutions. 

Pictured: The last sovereign of Western culture.

So the law of a state is no longer the expression of a single person’s will – that of the king. It’s the mediated expression of the general will of the people for peace and freedom. 

What prevents cultural pluralism from seeming legitimate in a single state is that mediation in the expression. Only those who can participate in building the parliament – representatives and voters – can materially express their will for peace and freedom in state institutions. If the law excludes someone from participation, they’re excluded from membership in the nation.

But the law is still legitimate because it was produced through institutions mediating the general will of all who participate. That expression can desire the exclusion of others who may want to participate, by whatever quality offends the people and the representatives enough that they’re excluded. So we've solved the problem of unity, but only worsened the problem of exclusion.

The solutions of the present become the problems of the future. . . . To Be Continued

The Responsible Leviathan, Research Time, 15/05/2014

There’s a curious point in Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War, where he reflects on the philosophy of the Responsibility to Protect. This concept is a fascinating idea in itself, not only for its conceptual complexity, but because it’s probably the first serious philosophical concept to emerge from multilateral and multinational political conversations. I don’t think I could ever write on this concept myself, because of the sheer amount of work that I’d need to do to be taken seriously. Unless I had a head start of something like forty years, I’d never be able to read absolutely everything that has been produced on R2P. I’m rarely intimidated by anything in philosophical scholarship, but R2P has done it.

However, Bérubé makes a fascinating assessment of the centrepiece of R2P, the notion that, when a sovereign government commits terrible violence against its people, it loses its claim to sovereignty. Because so much of his book is based around an extended critique of the political writings of Noam Chomsky, Bérubé mostly focusses on attacking how Chomsky has misunderstood so much of this idea. Essentially, Chomsky is one of the most articulate opponents of R2P on the grounds that it is a humanitarian mask on the bog-standard military imperialism of the near-omnipotently powerful United States as it forces its corporate capitalism down the throats of the world. 

Who knew the United Nations would end up following
principles of Thomas Hobbes so well?

So Bérubé unfortunately ignores the most intriguing element of his reading of R2P to engage with Chomsky, when a discussion of how R2P, this defining concept of liberalism in international politics, is a pure Hobbesian doctrine. This makes for a wonderful collision, given that Hobbes is so frequently portrayed as an arch conservative. The reason for his conservatism is, for one, his actual conservatism as a staunch monarchist, having lived through the English Civil War. But the more widespread philosophical reason for Hobbes’ conservative reputation is his conception of the legitimacy of government as grounded in the people’s literal surrender of their will to a sovereign who rules over them absolutely.

Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben take up this idea of sovereignty in their own ways, which Bérubé briefly mentions before moving on again, because he apparently considers yelling at Noam Chomsky more important than formulating a genuinely interesting philosophical idea in much detail. Schmitt is a theorist of the fascist right, and Agamben of the radical European left, but they agree* on a conception of sovereignty which defines that figure as the controller of the power to make someone an exception to civil society, the rule of law, the basic regime of human rights, and even the community of humanity itself. An illustration relevant to Bérubé’s inquiry is how George W Bush became such a sovereign when he exercised the powers of indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition of enemy combatants. 

* Well, they don’t agree, so much as Agamben is following in the tradition of Schmitt, picking up his conception of sovereignty and developing it in wildly different directions. 

In both Schmitt’s and Agamben’s thinking, the sovereign is a genuinely absolute power. The sovereign possesses the power to cast someone out of their personhood for entirely idiosyncratic reasons, and this power is built into the essential structure of state governance. Their own difference is that Schmitt is quite happy about this, while Agamben is horrified. 

But this isn’t Hobbes’ conception of the sovereign. For Hobbes, unlike Schmitt and Agamben, the sovereign can be made illegitimate, and therefore it is justified to revolt against him and remove him from power. The sovereign, in Hobbes’ thinking, is a product of a solemn contract among all citizens, that they enter this arrangement where one person or institution has an overall monopoly on force for the sake of mutual protection. 

In other words, the Hobbesian sovereign has a responsibility to protect his citizens. The legitimacy of a government is founded not literally on the superior force of arms, but on a promise. Where the sovereign power fails or mocks that responsibility, he has lost his right to govern. Whether an internal revolution or an international invasion removes him from physical power after that failure, such an act is legitimate, because the promise has been broken.