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

Putting the Grid to Good Use, Research Time, 12/08/2016

When I was writing it the other day, I thought Thursday’s post would be the last I’d have to say about the ideas I’ve been mulling over in For Marx. But as I was thinking yesterday, there’s one surprising way I can use that grid.

That's a curious way to talk about a piece of philosophy – as something you can use. Especially considering the life the career of the person whose work was where I found it.

However much Louis Althusser styled himself an activist and participated in France’s Communist Party, he was always primarily a professor. He wrote. Quite often, he wrote some pretty heavy, technical shit. Dense essays that packed complicated ideas and analyses into long sentences, complex prose. 

When he did try to use his writing for political purposes, that style of erudite intelligence slips away. Instead, he spews the most transparent propaganda. It doesn’t even sound authentic to his own voice anymore. Althusser was that introverted hyper-nerd who was most alive when writing furiously dense technical marxist philosophy.

Political advocacy? The kind of writing that most people could read without years of education preparing you for it was beyond him. At least it was beyond him as something where he could be successful.

Because when Althusser’s “Marxism and Humanism” paper gets into his defence of the Soviet Union, he loses his own plot. The lies of his propaganda are transparent. Cheap, even. At first, I thought it was weird to see his tone change so radically and so quickly. And in the same essay as an insightful summary of his own work on Marx’s own intellectual development.

Then I realized what made those sections of naked propaganda so strange – yet also so authentically Althusser’s. They express his own ideology, the statements of his own dogma. They’re his abstract thought, the beliefs that he can’t even conceive of questioning himself. 

That’s the practical political purpose of the grid – Theory, Practice, Ideology, Dogma. First, it’s a tool to identify what’s real, engaging political thinking and talk that’s actively trying to understand and change the world. And it can identify the political discourse that isn’t meant to be thought about, only repeated strategically to identify who lies inside and outside your group, your tribe.

But it can also be a tool to measure your own progress. It can help you identify the few elements in mostly dogmatic talk that can grow into genuine theory and practice if you let it. 

The precious moments in the cheap discourse of politics where you can leave the horse races and tribalisms behind to build and start a powerful conversation about the shape of society and how we’re to live. Transitioning from one to the next in that description is transforming dogma and ideology into theory and practice.

Transforming cheap talk that divides and sows violence into a path of progress, peace, and understanding. That's what all political activists ultimately have to do if they care about democracy at all.

True/False & What Else? V: Thought Conditions Life, Research Time, 11/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . If you'll grant me a little interpretive leeway, the notion that Louis Althusser’s personality could have influenced his philosophical thinking is a twisted mirror-image of his own theory of ideology.

The external and global – society’s ideological-ethical-moral structures – appear from inside an individual personality as psychosis, neurosis, horror, and utter madness. It’s very Freudian in a way, but not the bad kind of Freudian that reduces every psychological problem to Œdipal family dynamics. 

The external and global express themselves internally and psychologically. Also very Jungian, but not the bad kind of Jungian that gets tripped up on making a set of recurring mythological symbols into a mystical collective unconscious. 

Despite the strongly deterministic nature of his structuralist framework for thinking about reality, there’s a path to make our world better as individual actors. At different points in those essays of For Marx, Althusser discusses how ideology can change.

Because it does change. Societies change radically over time – just contrast how different human society is today from three centuries ago. Even fifty centuries ago, social and ethical values and discourses could change. The engine of that change is the interaction of life’s material reality and practice with how we think and speak about that practice.

We can act to tweak that interaction, shift it in some directions over others. This is the pragmatic radicalism I’ve been discussing – shifting the limits and boundaries of what society considers possible. Pushing more and more people to think what was previously inconceivable.

Maybe we can have a government without a king – Democracy. Morality without the underwriting authority of a god – Kindness. A conception of our nationhood that excludes no one – Brotherhood. 

Yet beyond this idea that I’ve already pretty much figured out, there is more in Althusser that I can pilfer for my own philosophical work. For example, there’s a grid.

Well, he doesn’t actually lay it out as a grid. Althusser’s For Marx is the produce of a French academic writing essays about marxist theory in the early 1960s. So he lays it out in immensely long and over-wordy arguments with sentences more than seven lines long.

But you can make a grid. It has four squares. It lays out the concrete and the abstract versions of thought and material or life.

Theory is thought that keeps its focus on understanding the concrete, concepts that have real, worldly power to change lives and social structures. They can be as elaborate and derive into all kinds of wild structures if the problem in view demands it. But its focus is always thought that increases and augments your power.

Practice is concrete material, the lived reality of daily life in all its drudgery and majesty. This is the tough work of getting shit done. This doesn’t reduce to the dusty old dualism of theory vs practice, airy-fairy thoughts and real work. Too often, that dichotomy is just used as a tool or a trick to denigrate intelligence or critical thought. 

Speaking of tricks to denigrate critical thought and protest, ideology. Ideology is, on Althusser’s thinking, abstract thought. It’s speculation without an interest or focus on our powers. Thinking disconnected from what we can do, distractions from developing our real potentials to focus on imaginary dream worlds instead. 

We can still act on the principles derived from ideology. But it makes no sense to. Quite literally. When we examine any of the moral principles that are based in thought entirely abstracted from our real powers, their logic falls apart. There’s no reason to believe in any of these principles beyond the fact that you believe in them. 

“It’s always been done this way.” “That’s just not right!” “Why would anyone do anything different?”

That’s why Althusser calls those principles dogma. Dogma – material life made abstract. So if I’ve learned anything from reading this very flawed thinker, it’s this quite useful way of distinguishing productive from self-destructive thinking. Thanks, Louis, you mad old commie murderer.

True/False & What Else? IV: Thought Conditions Life, Composing, 10/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . As much as I opened up Louis Althusser’s theoretical works for enlightenment, I’m more than a little disappointed. There are a few reasons why, but a I found a distinction of ideas that will probably be useful.

Thinking about his structuralism, I don’t think it works well as a framework for the more ecological priorities that I want my philosophical writing* to pursue. Reality is assembled from feedback loops – mutual affectivity. That makes no sense in the strong structural determinism of Althusser’s thinking about the nature of reality.

Today's post is about the mental health problems of
professional academics, with one prominent example.

* And human civilization more generally, if I can sound more than a little pretentious.

Then there's the reputational damage. Even though Althusser is generally acknowledged as an insightful and influential figure in left-wing and marxist political philosophy, some pretty terrible clouds hang over his career and thought. Literal and metaphorical. 

For one, as I wrote about yesterday, he murdered his wife in the depths of a bizarre psychotic-manic-depressive-bipolar-maybe-schizophrenic episode. We can separate the artist from the work however much we like, but ultimately, character does inform ideas – if only implicitly and contextually.

Then there are the allegations of fraud. The ones he brought on himself, that is. In his autobiography The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser admits to having read very little of the history of philosophy. I’ve read more of the canonical texts at age 33 than he had by his late 60s and retirement from a lifelong career as a professor and lecturer.

While I don’t truly believe that his fraud was complete, his collapse makes it difficult to draw on. After killing Helene Rytmann, he collapsed into a profoundly intense neurotic state. Althusser was a neurotic for most of his life, lacking self-esteem and plagued by sexual hangups and doubt.

Consumed by self-hatred and self-doubt, I can see how the hazy memories of a life before the total shattering of his personality can transform the impostor syndrome common in academia into a full-on delusion of intellectual fraud.

I don't believe he was a fraud. Just an immensely troubled
man. Who murdered his wife. Let's not forget that. He
also killed the woman who'd been his companion for
literally half his life.

I’ve experienced life with a close family member whose personality had been shattered by a powerful mental-neurological trauma. Such people are detached from reality, socially isolated by continuing mental derangement even when in regular contact with people. 

They believe their own delusions about the present and past because they can no longer process the present as factual. For the severely traumatized, the world becomes immaterial, and only the personality – narrative memory constantly rewritten, edited, rearranged – is real. 

Nonetheless, I find Althusser too dangerous a thinker to adapt as a fellow-traveller, whether for Utopias or wider political activism and writing. Althusser so deeply gave in to the horror of his life and political compromises that it infects his writing – from his structuralism to his lifelong defence of Stalinism.

You can have a mental collapse without it tainting the rest of your life’s work, as Nietzsche did, becoming an organic mannequin for his proto-nazi sister. You can be ridiculously neurotic but still develop a philosophy of joy and creativity, as Deleuze did with his six inch fingernails, unwashed hair, and maddeningly boring personal life.

Oh, were you surprised that Althusser defended Stalinism? Well, even though he devoted long, technically dense essays like “Overdeterminism” to a defence of communist thinking against accusations of Stalinism, he regularly defended the USSR and even the Stalinist regime throughout his life.

The entire last section of his essay “Marxism and Humanism” is a full-throated defence of the USSR in 1963 as an emerging utopia where there would be no want and all would be free. Where the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the “cult of personality” necessary to maintain it were quickly transitioning to the paradise of full communism.

Yeah, not so much.

So what did I ultimately gain from reading Althusser’s For Marx? I’ve rambled in my preamble too long, so I’ll have to save it for tomorrow. . . . To Be Continued

True/False & What Else? III: Terror in Powerlessness, Research Time, 09/08/2016

Continued from last post . . . Louis Althusser is the first author I came across to have discussed that undercurrent tradition of political thinking. The materialist democrats – Baruch Spinoza, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Karl Marx.

Now, I discovered this not in one of his books of philosophy, but in his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever. This is in many ways a very disturbing book – I recommend it highly. 

Althusser wrote two autobiographies. The first was a fairly straightforward description of his life up to his general retirement from teaching in the mid-1970s. The next was The Future Lasts Forever, a blur of memories, traumatic terror, fragmentary recollections of the collapse of his subjectivity, and philosophical reflection on society and individuality.

One major concept of horror is that unspeakable terrors
exist under the comforting fabric of ordinary life. I've
been thinking a bit about horror tropes lately.

He was prompted to write that second, much more fascinating, autobiography by a need to set the record straight. See, Althusser had a catastrophic mental breakdown in 1980 and murdered his wife Helene Rytmann, strangling her. He was in such a state at the time that the French courts declared him unfit to stand trial. 

So not only did Althusser never face punishment for the killing, but there wasn’t even a detailed investigation into the causes of the act. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution and stayed there for about four years. 

When he was released, he wrote The Future Lasts Forever to set the record as straight as he could, and at least take some of the power over his public image back from the tabloid press. 

It wasn’t a matter of mounting a counter-argument to the press’ allegations that Althusser was a killer who got away with it. You can't really take that book as anything but an unfolding portrait of a broken mind. It was a demonstration that Althusser as a subject was in a far different, more disturbing world than the terms of sensationalist hackery could understand.

Some of his claims I can’t take seriously. I can’t consider his claim that he never finished reading Capital, never really studied much Marx in the first place, as a straightforward confession. He writes and interprets with too much creativity to plagiarize or spin his wheels. 

The Althusser of The Future Lasts Forever is a collapsed person, shattered completely. You don’t read that book looking for facts – you read it looking for the moments of lucidity. 

What kind of horror does a person experience when they
try to reckon with their own mental breakdown? When
that breakdown was so intense that he strangled his
wife and lifelong companion to death?

Their emergence is the most terrifying tragedy in the story, the moments when he realizes the magnitude of what he did, even if he’s talking about something else entirely.

One of the many terrifying threads in that autobiography was his devotion to that tradition of political philosophy – materialist democrats. In this tradition, the world was incredibly complicated, unable to be reduced to any simple schema and have your ideas remain at all adequate. Politics was rough and gritty. 

Society could be transformed, but it would mean literally revolutionizing the terms in which that whole society lived and understood their own lives. 

And what was Althusser’s contribution to that? To me, he makes for a profound challenge. By removing agency from individuals, he made each person a function of their society. 

He presents a conundrum that I don’t really see any way out of, unless you simply reject his terms. If individuals are functions of their societies – expressions of an ideology – then you can’t really be a revolutionary. Even though he was a communist activist his entire life. 

When he’s talking about the structure of an ideology – the social imaginary and moral framework of a people – Althusser provides some valuable insights. I'm going to get into that next post. 

But the paradoxes of his thinking – when you look at them on the large scale of his entire corpus and life – are all vicious. Such a deterministic structuralism – macro determining the activity of the meso – just can’t fit with being a revolutionary. You can't think that changing the world is possible if you think that the world always has agency over you.

Even with being a philosopher. It's an individual's conceptual creativity that lets us understand events and processes of universal importance. Individuality as an organism can't be denied without a kind of willful ignorance of real life.

The parts have to shape the whole just as the whole shapes the parts. Activity is a feedback loop among all constituents. Either everything is active, or there’s no activity at all. Passivity – being the object of an action – is only relative to the action itself. Not determining, but overpowering. 

Individuality can’t be escaped. The belief itself would be a false ideology. But what does that even really mean? False ideology from true ideology? Or is it more complex than that? Of course it is. . . . 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

True/False & What Else? I: Brutal Facticity, Research Time, 05/08/2016

When I worked in the academy, one question I largely stayed away from was the one that’s probably the most stereotypical question in philosophy – What is truth?

Except for the occasional uncertain remark or request for clarification, I’d steer clear of these conversations and let the fists fly otherwise. It’s not that I didn’t find the question interesting – it’s one of the most provocative and evocative lines of thought in the whole tradition. 

From Hannibal, a brilliant television show that I haven't
seen enough of. This was from an image search of the
phrase "nature of truth," and was part of an article on
the American obsession with true crime stories.

But what makes that question – What is truth? – interesting is exactly what made me steer clear of so many discussions of it. There isn’t really a univocal answer. No simple response that would settle the debate entirely. No way one or a few people could be right and everyone else wrong.

Yet most debates in philosophy departments tended to unfold along these lines. Especially regarding the nature of truth. I think the reason why tends to be cultural. Most of the discussions I experienced about this problem were with Analytic-leaning theorists of knowledge. 

All bright people, and some of whom remain good friends. But the field itself I consider too focussed on finding simple answers. Or right answers. Or answers at all.

Popularly, we often think of truth as a very simple matter. What are the facts? What happened? But knowledge is more complicated than facticity, whether some body is what it’s said to be, or whether some event unfolded as you understand it. Truth isn’t just correspondence, and while a lot of folks in the professional academy accept this, they’re in a minority when you take all people into account.

Here's how I’m coming to think about this. Put it down to a division over the character of knowledge. Is knowledge primarily mental or social? Mental – essentially a property or possession of an individual, a relationship of thought with the world. Social – emerging from communication, institutions, and relationships. I lean more toward knowledge being primarily social.*

* Maybe it’s the fact that my institutional home for philosophical writing is now largely at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. Funny suspicion, is all. 

Of course, thought is involved in knowledge. But what knowledge is relies primarily on relations and communications – thinkers in interaction.

Not a universal imperative.

Now, this makes knowledge way more complicated as an aspect of human existence. I mean, it is a very complicated aspect of human existence, and we shouldn’t presume that the simplest account you can make of something is going to be the most truthful one.

What matters is whether how you understand something is adequate to its existence. If it’s complex, you’ll need a complex conception. I sound a little like a correspondence theorist of truth here, but I’m not talking about truth – I’m talking for the moment about understanding.**

** Cheeky monkey, I know.

But I understand why you can prefer to lean toward the easier answers and clean lines of correspondence-style theories of what truth is and how truth works. When you accept the social character of knowledge, it can be disquieting too. 

Accepting any pluralism into your theory of knowledge can sometimes signal that pluralism is absolute – that the peace activist and the white supremacist or the doctor and the anti-vaxxer are on equal footing. Now, this isn’t the case. But making the case requires more than simply the declaration that one is true and the other isn’t.

Facticity isn't brute. 

At the moment, I’m reading some Louis Althusser, and he’s one of the many folks whose ideas helped develop our conceptions of knowledge as a social phenomenon. For Utopias, I think the most important element of his thinking on this issue is his theory of ideology. 

The next few posts will expand some of the thoughts I’ve had on it lately. Needless to say, I don’t pitch my reflections as the final word – just a few more contributions to the theory of truth, falsity, and lies. . . . To Be Continued

Is Your Power an Illusion? Research Time, 04/08/2016

Talking about putting together some ideas for Utopias today. For one, it will engage with a bunch of different lines of marxist thought. And it’s going to be super-critical of everything. Not just the marxist stuff, but especially the marxist stuff.

I mean, Utopias is going to be a book about achieving a complete social revolution to craft a perfect society. A few ideas from the marxist tradition are required, if only to manage social expectations. 

A life of deprivation and pain can uplift itself to create
great wealth and beauty.

There are so many marxisms, I really only need to choose a few that are most useful to my thinking for my focus. After all, I’m not writing a book of marxism scholarship, but a work of creative political philosophy that draws from different elements in the marxist tradition. 

Some of those ideas come from Louis Althusser, as you can tell by the last week or so of posts about his book For Marx. This and the next series will also explore Althusser’s ideas. One thing I want to talk about today is an idea of Althusser’s that squeezes the heart of Utopias as a book and a philosophy – the implications of his structuralism.

Particularly, how he expresses one of these implications. Basically, Althusser argues that the only way to bring a universal dignity to humanity is the total transformation of our economic, social, and moral orders. 

A pretty reasonable assessment.

The devil is in the implications, though. Theoretically, Althusser leans on his structuralism to conclude that all human agency is only expressed in these macroscopic structures. The entire capitalist set of relations, basically, is all that acts. 

In contrast to this structuralist idea, we have the notion – common in political activism – that each of us, no matter her station in life, has the power to help transform the entire world. We might not always be able to develop or grasp that power, for many different reasons and causes, but that potential is always in us.

A life of privilege can be beset with difficulties like
mental illness, and success can come crashing down
in horrifying tragedy.

His theoretical structuralism leads Althusser to reject this notion, but his politics leads his rejection to a peculiar form. He dismisses it as a “bourgeois illusion.” In the pages of the book, he spits it out. It’s an epithet, an insult. 

That the common people have power as individuals is, says Althusser, a dogmatic idea central to bourgeois capitalist ideology. It convinces people that they have power when they’re really powerless. So they spend their energies essentially spinning their wheels instead of hammering away at the macroscopic structures where human agency really rests.

I have a pretty strong ontological belief in emergence – that macroscopic structures are constituted from the aggregate activity of mesoscopic and microscopic bodies and processes. The macroscopic also constitutes smaller-scale processes, but these are all in feedback loops, mutually determining each other. 

So I’m no structuralist. But I should still develop an argument against structuralism. That argument is, basically, developing that ontology. A lot of that was done in Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, and Utopias will return to that argument in its more explicitly political context.

For the sake of this blog, I have the ontological argument against Althusser’s rejection of individual agency taken care of. Just read my last book. But the political-ideological argument is another thing. 

I’ll get more into how I understand Althusser’s concept of ideology in the series of posts that will start tomorrow. But the political argument runs something like this. There are basically two possible ethical consequences of rejecting individual agency on structuralist terms. Two implied conceptions of humanity’s powers. 

1) You become a docile revolutionary. The kind of revolutionary that so frustrated Antonio Gramsci’s own activism – the man who thinks he doesn’t even have to do anything himself to change society because its macroscopic structures will do all the work for him.

2) Resentful resignation. You resign yourself to your lot, but let the frustration of your situation rot your soul. This description will probably lean a lot on Nietzsche. No shit.

His shadow is everywhere in Western politics,
whether you like it or not.

Both of these amount to quietism. You believe that nothing can be done, so you do nothing. That’s the tricky thing about admitting that macroscopic structures do have power. They can seem overpowering, dwarfing the ability of people from downtrodden demographics to succeed and change the situations of their communities along with them.

J. D Vance is one writer who’s theorized how that can happen on the individual and community level, and his new book Hillbilly Elegy is going on my list of sources for Utopias. And there are many examples of people who’ve used their success for activism and community uplift. Artists like Elza Soares are notable and vibrant examples.

That's the paradox of that “bourgeois illusion.” While people can spin their wheels and dig themselves in deeper if they misdirect their energies, the idea that they can change their lives and the world can really work. Believing a better life possible is the first condition for the possibility of achieving it.

Tainted Left VI: No Necessity But Faith, Research Time, 26/07/2016

Continued from last post . . . I started this series a week ago with some reflections on an essay about the perennial critique and doubt that left-wing politics always faces. The contention that all progressive politics leads to government control over daily life, the most extreme expression of which was Stalinism. 

The essay was by Louis Althusser, writing in the 1960s. He faced a more intense problem than democratic progressives typically have, because he was actually a member of France's Communist Party, and a pretty prominent activist in the Paris branch. 

There are people out there who take this image seriously.

But lately, all progressives in Western democracies face that accusation, that we’re really all wannabe Stalinists. That’s rooted in the radical libertarianism of the alt-right, the most powerful grassroots reactionary movement in decades. 

Althusser’s defence against this accusation rests on an argument about the contingency of history. It's a difficult concept for him to straddle, because he also dismissed the democratic notion that all individuals – no matter how poor or marginal – contribute in some small way to their society’s historical development.

Althusser dismissed that idea as a bourgeois illusion to hide the genuinely abject nature of most human existence. In other essays in For Marx, he argues that civilization’s cause and engine is a product of its superstructure. That civilization is a grand machine that dwarfs the actions of human individuals. 

It's some pretty unforgiving structuralism, at least that's the sense I get so far. But you don’t have to embrace that conception of what drives social change to land at history’s contingency. If anything, Althusser’s extreme structuralism is in a pretty intense tension with his arguments for history’s contingency.

As I said yesterday, history’s contingency is a function of its overdetermination. Every event has a ton of different causes, more causes than would be needed to bring it about in isolation. So you can tell a huge number of stories about how the world got to be the way it is.

If there’s no necessity to the development of history, then we can keep trying different attempts at building a just society where people don’t have to live in poverty. All the hardcore dictatorships of the alleged proletariat fell apart? The soviet councils all fell to pieces and were purged by a totalitarian dictator? The Great Leap Forward caused a massive famine when it turned out farming villages were shit metallurgists?

No situation is ever perfect, but you have to marshal all
your powers to assess what you've done, see what can be
done, and get to work. Sometimes, you just don't win
the vote, but that doesn't mean you can't ever succeed.

Well, it looks like those plans didn’t work. But if history’s development is contingent, there’s no reason for you to presume that every attempt to wrestle the state into becoming an actual servant of the people will fail. One day, we can get it right and make it last. 

That's the engine behind the basic income movement and the revival of social democracy that the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Occupy movement has driven in the United States. It comes down to the faith that we can build a better society together.

That faith rests on the principle that not every attempt to push society toward a more utopian existence will fail, that it is actually possible to figure out how to get it right. 

It’s a faith that refuses cynicism and fatalism. That embraces the potential of humanity, even in the face of our most cruel and violent impulses, from the individual to the civilizational. It looks into humanity’s greatest abyss and demands that we make light shine, no matter how difficult.

I’m not a religious person, but that’s the only faith I have. 

Tainted Left V: More History Than We Can Understand, Composing, 25/07/2016

Today’s post won’t wrap up this “Tainted Left” series. That’ll be tomorrow’s post when I string together a few semi-connected thoughts on how progressives can overcome the legacy of the worst mistakes made in the name of our values.

Today is, instead, a first go at answering that question I ended with on Friday. “So what does a theory of history that embraces contingency completely even look like?”

Today will be a very pure form of what I originally conceived the blog to do. Adam Riggio Writes is a lot of things – a simple, utilitarian home for thoughts on the internet, a cheap branding device, in its original purpose a motivator to overcome the hopeless doldrums of depression. And I’ve come up with quite a few other ways to use this space since then.

Every post is a walk through the woods with a pen and paper.

But I conceived this blog as a space to think through ideas as I was researching and writing larger projects. Writing out a rough draft – in total transparency, where anyone could see my process of developing ideas. Not even a rough draft, but a notebook. 

A public notebook. Being in public would force me to develop the notes more intensely than if they stayed in my binders and files. And, I hope, the resulting larger, more formal works would be suitably more conceptually rigorous and fine-detailed. Ideas begin as very vague suspicions, and it takes time to refine them.

One of the worst philosophers I ever met during my time working in the academy used to attack aggressively every idea someone would throw out in a conceptual conversation as if it was a final draft. A brainfart doesn’t survive if it’s attacked as if it were a fully-thought-through philosophical system. But if you give it room to grow, it can become brilliant.

• • •

Continued from last post . . . History begins as human experience. Experience as a society is constructed as an aggregate of the experiences of all the individuals that make up that society, interacting in trillions of complex connections. 

The development of a society is a massively complex web, its changes being the shifts in connections and macroscopic shapes. We remember those massive shifts – the transformations of the human world itself – as history.

But how does the macroscopic appear in daily human experience, which always occurs on an individual scale? The macroscopic – the civilizational, the structural – is real because it’s the wider context and network of our life. Our individuality would be impossible without existence at this scale. 

It's inescapably pretentious to refer to Marcel Proust in any context of
conversation, but he's a genuinely insightful theorist of memory, and
will probably be important to the concepts of Utopias. And I think I've
left the pretence train leave the station long ago.

We could no more live without our social environment than we could without the physical. We’d be adrift in an airless emptiness. 

The necessary shift in our perspective as thinkers comes in bringing ourselves from considering what it is to be civilizational to an individual human life. How can we bring our deeply local thinking to the scale of the macroscopic? 

In the experience of our daily thinking, humans engage with the past as memory. Now, memories themselves are disjointed and fragmentary, and our recollections can be just as shattered. But our identities are rooted in the coherence of our pasts. 

That coherence comes from building a narrative of our chaotic memories. We thread them together with stories. But that storytelling doesn’t reflect the fragmentary nature of our actual memories. 

All narratives of our own lives involve more creativity than fidelity – we make otherwise separate moments fit seamlessly together, place events next to each other to reveal how one may have caused the other, make theme and purpose emerge from brute fact.

It makes our histories constructed, but it doesn’t make them lies. Narrative is the common human way of making sense of the world. They are fictions without being lies. Truths with less than absolute fidelity to the source material. “Based on a true story” but still condensed to a succinct season of television.

Looking at real events on a macroscopic scale, you end up having to do a lot of the same that you did to make sense of your memories. Tracing past events, you have a lot of concurrent developments all interacting in complex ways. 

But they’re also largely disconnected from each other. Some are recorded in more detail, but others are sketchy, hazy. Mere traces in dust. You want to discover a coherence in them, so you assemble a picture, a narrative, a timeline. A set of causes and relationships, along with their shifts as those relationships affect each other. 

Life is a narrative, wrote Hannah Arendt. Well, really,
life is a whole ton of narratives and logics fitting all
their pieces together. That's history's overdetermination.

You can make more than one narrative from all these fragments, and all of them would correspond to the evidence that assembled them. You just concentrate on some details over others, think one cause more likely than another for some coincidence.

But if you stick to that raw material in the construction, all the narratives you can tell are faithful to the material of history. From the same events, you can construct many different narratives. 

This is what Louis Althusser means when he talks about history as overdetermined. You can construct a narrative from the same fragments of history according to many different logics. There is more than one logic to the construction of history, so more than one logic could connect all these events themselves. 

If there are, simultaneously, many different logics operating in the causes of human society, then some future event can be the product of many different logics. There is always more than one cause for the same event. That event could turn out to be many different things, depending on what historical logic is in material play at some decisive moment to shape the future. A single history can have many outcomes.

Now we begin to see the ground for repudiating that old accusation of progressive politics. “Your socialism led to totalitarianism, so that’s what socialism does!” Well, no, not necessarily. And ‘not necessarily’ is the best anyone will ever be able to say. . . . To be continued

Tainted Left IV: History Without Logic, Research Time, 22/07/2016

Today is a late post simply because I came home from work so tired yesterday that I could only watch some TV with GF and go to sleep. Today, I’m feeling a little better, but I still woke up in the middle of a dream.

I was wandering around a huge bookstore looking for their sci-fi section. But all they had were rack on rack of too-mainstream pablum, enormous technical cartography books (one of which was written by Ernob Bal, a name too similar to an old friend), and expensive history hardcovers whose texts were scrapbooked handwritten notes recollecting the events themselves. Even from hundreds or thousands of years ago.

And the bookstore’s mascot was a two-foot-tall yellow slug with the personality of a puppy. I have weird dreams. Anyway, what about history?

Could any coherent law of historical development have
predicted any of this? Really?

Continued from last post . . . So what is the antidote to this too-simple version of history as having a necessary logic? The appeal of that philosophy is that it offers us a simple science of human history. 

The logic of contradiction and progressive reconciliation gives us a basic law by which we can understand humanity’s development. The problem is that the real events of history develop differently than that simple law would show. History is contingent, the world a cobbled-together assemblage of conflict, peace, and general confusion.

Given last night’s formal ascension of Donald Trump to the top of America’s Republican Presidential ticket, I don’t think anyone in our age can have any doubt that history has no fundamental or predictable order. I think no one would have said 20 years ago that America would seriously face the possibility of a spectacular dictatorship within a generation. But here we are.

When you read Althusser as a theorist about the contingent nature of history, he draws on different examples than I can, of course. He was writing in the early 1960s from the position of a French Communist activist and researcher. He also died in 1990.

So he was speaking to what was, at the time, the primary historical event for the position of Communist Party members in Western Europe – the Russian Revolution. Because according to all the simple laws of history’s logic that marxist activists embraced at the time, it shouldn’t have happened.

Trump's style of spectacular leadership
actually has its closest precedents in the
post-communist dictatorships of
central Asia. Trump has a personality
quite likely to build a giant gold statue
of himself that rotates to face the sun.
Like this statue of Turkmenistan
dictator Saparmarat Niyazov.

The first communist revolution was supposed to have come in an advanced industrial state, where capitalism had advanced to such a point that its own logical contradictions couldn’t stand together anymore. Yet the first successful revolution was in Russia, a mostly rural country whose society in 1917 still operated more like feudalism.

Althusser derives his new theory of contingent history from this example, as the result of decades of reflection in the marxist community about its meaning. The first starts with Lenin himself, with his concept of “the weakest link.”

Basically, revolution happens not where logic says it must, but where circumstances say it can. A communist revolution isn’t a collision of logical premises, but of material conflicts. Communist revolution in the real world didn’t find its potential in any direct element of capitalist industry. Its key condition had to do with the world’s greatest conflict of imperialist politics: the First World War.

The war turned the social conflicts of the participating countries up to a terrifying intensity. The Russian situation was the most vulnerable, least able to handle such intense social destabilization.

The war fuelled democratic political pressure against the Czarist system – the Russian people were suffering terribly in the war, and everyone knew it was a battle of imperialism. 

With more knowledge about the wider world coming to people, even uneducated people, from the industrialized societies of Europe, they knew what they were missing out on. And people knew the imperial elite kept them from that kind of prosperity because it would mean giving up their immense wealth.

There was also a conspiracy of the Russian aristocracy against the monarchy at the same time, again exacerbated by the war. These anti-monarchist aristocrats saw the economic devastation the First World War was wreaking, and were turning against the Czar.

Lenin’s own revolutionary organization was also the best organized group of communists in Europe. There was also a lot of groundwork for revolutionary activity in Russia, thanks to the previous attempt in 1905 that failed. These are all contingent conditions that are rooted in the particular situation of that place and time. 

So what does a theory of history that embraces contingency completely even look like? . . . To be continued

Tainted Left II: I Am Not Responsible, Composing, 20/07/2016

I started thinking through the ideas of this post series when I was reading Louis Althusser, as I mentioned yesterday. The dilemma I described left-wing people as facing – opponents who believe that even their most innocent ideas like a national health insurance plan is a totalitarian communist institution – is uniquely American. 

Maybe North American at best, now that the right-wing libertarian ideas of the United States have established themselves so deeply among the community of Harper supporters.

Louis Althusser was a very dour man for most of his life.

But Althusser was working in France, and the context of that country was very different. For one thing, communism was pretty mainstream in Europe as a political party at the time. It still is in some countries on the continent.

That didn’t mean being a communist wasn’t controversial, of course. I mean, the essays of For Marx were written in the early 1960s. The Cold War was at its height. The wider world was beginning to learn about and process psychologically the horrific crimes of Stalin. The gulags, purges, accidental and intentional mass famines. 

While Althusser was producing these essays on marxist theory, the development of Karl Marx’s thought, and the philosophy of history, the war of espionage and global tensions between the Soviet Union and the West was threatening to destroy Earth. Literally. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened while Althusser was working on several of these essays.

So the question remained an imperative. But the frame was different in France, mainly because the ideas of Friedrich Hayek had not penetrated French culture by the 1960s. Nowhere near as ever-present as in contemporary America.

Hayek’s idea was that progressive, socialist, or broadly left-wing politics was all – literally and self-consciously – totalitarian communism, because state control of any aspect of human life is totalitarian communism. A bit much, if you ask me, but widely enough believed to be politically powerful.

Althusser confronted the question in the framework of history. His question was not whether progressive ideas – even ideas that fall squarely in the framework of marxist philosophical traditions – were literally totalitarian. 

The problem is, does this picture and others like it
represent a genuine continuity of ideas, activism, and
ideology? Will marxism lead inevitably to the crimes
of the world's most famous (at the time) communist
government.

He instead considered whether any communist activism in the present would inevitably lead to totalitarianism in the future. This is a question about history. It was about whether, once Marx himself began to develop the ideas that we now call marxism, the descent into Stalin’s terror was necessary.

Here’s what I find interesting as a writer about the essay where he considers this problem. It’s one of the longest essays in the whole collection, but he doesn't make this central point of what it’s really been about until the conclusion.

Instead, Althusser’s been talking about causation, the development of human history, the nature of ideology, and the problems of understanding the world narratively. I imagine that this was a matter of rhetoric. If he revealed what his game was from the start, he’s risk alienating even the soft opponents who are the targets of his argument.

If you feel like you’ve reached a conclusion about something, you won’t take kindly to someone confronting them with a contrary argument. You certainly won’t be all that disposed to believe what they say. 

But my keeping so much of the discussion in the abstract before revealing what’s been the essay’s fundamental problematic – proving that there can be a communism that doesn’t lead to Stalin – skirts around an audience’s potential skepticism. 

Accepting an idea in the abstract form, and then being told that it has a practical application that undermines something you’ve always thought was true. That’s certainly a problem. The listener might feel betrayed or angry, but even in the worst case they’ll be in a more sympathetic position than if you got their defences up in the first place.

So that’s the setting at the time, and the fundamental practical problem. We’ve also taken stock of the similarities and differences in these two problematics on the inevitability of Stalinism in the left. 

In particular, we’ve established a solid sense of Althusser’s motivation for writing that essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination” as he did. Even in that more intellectually open era of the 1960s in Europe, ‘marx’ was still a dirty word. 

He wanted to sneak in the essay’s most important implication – why he was writing it in the first place – to overcome popular prejudice about the nature of Karl Marx and marxism. So what did “Contradiction and Overdetermination” spend a lot of its word count doing? . . . To be continued

Tainted Left I: Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, Research Time, 19/07/2016

My two-year online friendship with a pair of radical right-wing libertarians was one of the most philosophically enlightening relationships I think I’ve ever had. 

I don’t mean this in the sense that it made me an equally doctrinaire right-wing libertarian, even though that was their goal. Our relationship was a micro-level anthropology of North America’s radical right – I saw Trumpism in its embryonic form, a new fascism waiting for its catalyst to blossom.

What Sandifer explored through his critical analysis of neoreaction’s central writers (Mencius Moldbug, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nick Land), I saw unfold before me in two real people. 

There's one particular memory I want to share with you, as an introduction to what will probably be a whole week talking about a problem inherent in any kind of left-leaning politics in the West. An image Libertarian G shared with me on the anniversary of Jack Layton’s death.

He wasn't even really all that radical in what he fought for.

It was a picture of Vladimir Lenin, with a short, respectful caption lamenting Jack’s passing.

At the time, I thought his equivalence of Jack Layton with Vladimir Lenin was just a joke, a ridiculous exaggeration for me to laugh at. But after several months more of almost daily interaction, it struck me that G really believed that. And as I learned more about right-wing libertarian society, I discovered that virtually all of them did too.

They believed that all left-wing people – no matter their real diversity of mind – wanted government to act as a fully collectivized communist totalitarian state. 

It seemed ridiculous, like a complete delusion. Finally reading Freidrich Hayek made it clear where this idea came from. From him, naturally. Because he says it – explicitly and repeatedly – in The Road to Serfdom. 

I sincerely believe – given what’s become an immensely powerful political movement in our time – that every academic philosophy department should include The Road to Serfdom in its political curriculum. And they should require students to attack its arguments with all the critical vigour and aggression they can.

Even though The Road to Serfdom can read like a work of philosophy, and be philosophically interpreted, you can make a strong argument that it isn’t philosophy. Following a concept Louis Althusser develops in For Marx, it’s ideology. Specifically, ‘mere ideology.’

We should all study the book critically because it is probably the most influential single book of political thought of the last 100 years. From the ideas of this one book, and the network of think tanks he built with Milton Friedman and other academics to spread their ideas to the wider public, came the foundational orthodoxy of modern conservatism.

The face of a bestseller, the most
influential political thinker of the last
hundred years. He can't be ignored.

A cut-down version of Road to Serfdom was published in Reader’s Digest of all things in 1945, and reached a huge popular audience across America. Hayek wrote the book as an explicit warning about the danger of totalitarian ideas, as the sustained confrontation of the Cold War was looming. 

That popular idea about left-wing people spread to all of society through conservative partisan political messaging for the rest of the 20th century. It spread through everyday conversation with people who came to accept it. It’s an opposition every progressive has to defend against, and can appear at any time.

“How are you not a communist!?” he shouts. 

For the next few posts – however many it’ll take me to work through the idea – I’m going to work through my impressions of how Althusser handles this in For Marx. He asks it specifically about marxists, of course, because he was himself a lifelong communist party activist in France. 

But today, we know the same question applies to everyone on the broadly left side of the political spectrum. How are our ideas not of the same path as the crimes of Stalin? . . . To be continued