Clues, Signs, Traces, Imperatives II: Seekers, Research Time, 23/01/2018

After the last near-rant,* I actually don’t have much more to say. A list of conditions and ideas. In a way, I think that’s for the best.

* Who am I kidding? That was a rant.

One of the most important aspects of Gilles Deleuze’s conceptions of political revolution is what he never said. He described in great detail – in political and ontological contexts – what it means to transform radically.

In a human context, it means transforming your character completely. He and Guattari described that process, but never an end product. Even in their most political works, they never gave a prescription for what kind of person they thought would be the best to emerge.

I always enjoyed the character of the Doctor when s/he was being
something of a detective. Exploring some complex sci-fi setting,
the relationships among characters, their interests and conflicts. To
discover the mystery of what horrible event is happening.

Of course, that defeats the whole structure of what they were doing – an ontological description of how a process can only move freely when it moves without adopting a plan from some other source, when it acts, thinks, and plans immanently.

To give orders and expect them to be followed is overcoding – that’s what despotic societies do. So if you’re going to live by your convictions, you won’t give a prescription for what kind of person you want to emerge from the revolution.

At most, you can say what that revolution would have to satisfy to repair or escape what caused the metamorphosis in the first place. Conditions for success, but whatever you do to meet them is your business.

You don’t even know what the revolution will be anyway. In the 1970s of Paris, when Deleuze and Guattari were composing A Thousand Plateaus, you’d be pretty perceptive for thinking a new communist revolution was brewing.** By the 2010s, I could write a book about what conditions an ecological revolution in thought would have to satisfy.

** Whatever its prospects for immediate success. I’ve read interpretations of Paris’ May 1968 revolution as having lost the battle and the war, but won the culture. You want to call that victory? I’m not sure if I do.

Then you have to leave it up to people to figure their own way there. You live in your world, with your concerns. You can’t just give people a generation or two away, in a world that could be totally different from your own a set of direct orders and expect them to apply. We all have to work out the details as the world changes.

It may not be religious – per se – but I think the myths of human
cultures in the 21st century are the most narratively advanced
they've ever been. We're able to record them and watch exactly
the same story over and over again – so we can search through
it and discover more of what's happening. That's how we can
make myths that critique and take apart themselves.

I’ll put it to you this way. Someone who died in 2010 would have considered Donald Trump nothing but a billionaire asshole game show host.

So on your way to become a revolutionary new person, you have two main concerns. 1) Take the process as far as you can to leave as little of your old, shitty self and world behind. 2) Don’t mess up and become a disastrous failure who aimed for more than you could reach and broke apart.

Yeah, those two don’t exactly fit. Revolutionize your ass! But watch yourself!

Being serious again. What would make the detective a fitting persona for a revolutionary? A combination of care, attention to detail, commitment to ideals, understanding causes and conditions.

Obviously, I’m not talking about real police detectives. I’m talking about the cultural image of the detective, the detective ideal that we see on television – the myth.

I’m going to spell out those detective myths tomorrow. Here’s one last concept I’m developing about myth. It’s only in note form right now.

Semiotics made us mistake our myths for symbols – we now understand the images and narratives that materially function as myths, as if they were symbols. All the detectives in our televisions, movies, games, and books are different iterations of a myth. A narrative icon of a cultural ideal.

So the detective.

Where We Can Stare the Madness in the Face, Jamming, 17/11/2017

So the horror film project is coming together way faster than I thought. The Ghost actually wants to get this all done before the end of the year. He’d shot about half the footage already, but I’m now part of the project writing the scenes that deliver the context.

It’s a five minutes into the future scenario, but I still think of its themes primarily as a horror film. As I assemble the ideas, I’m thinking philosophically too. Not in a pretentious way – just about the broad themes that are holding the piece together.

Orson Welles directs Anthony Perkins in his adaptation of The Trial.
In the philosophical discussions I've had about absurdity, few ever
touch on how useful absurdity is to depict truth in societies where
no one is allowed to speak.

I was talking about existentialism the other day. That’s definitely a big part of my ideas here. But I always found one important limitation in the traditional existentialist writing. The best ones are deep, satirical attacks on the real danger of a hostile world and hostile institutions.

Ever since I first came across the storyline and read it, I found it clear that a book like Kafka’s The Trial is a depiction of how ridiculous the law, police, and justice institutions truly are – the arbitrariness of the application of the law, and of the law itself. This was all clear to me as soon as I read it.

But I’ve long been a bit of an anarchist at heart. So the idea that the law’s content is pretty damn arbitrary and the police have a horrifying tendency to let the power go to their heads, growing abusive and corrupt?

I've known this to some degree since I first watched Serpico as a kid. So Kafka’s point was clear to me from the start.

But the popular reception of Kafka’s stories is that they’re pure absurdities. Their depiction of our world is so strange that we disconnect them from reality. The Trial’s K goes through an obviously absurd justice system. Yet it was just an intensified, comically cartoonish version of real institutions.

At the end of the day, K’s story is of a man who’s arbitrarily detained on charges whose content he never knows, his arguments to defend himself are utterly disregarded on the flimsiest of contexts, authorities order him around arbitrarily. Then he’s just taken out to an alley and summarily shot.

Who stole the soul from black folk?
Same man that stole the land from Chief Black Smoke
And made the whip crackle on our back slow
And made us go through the back door
And raffle black bodies on the slave blocks
The new plantation, mass incarceration

It unfolds like a cartoon, but that’s daily life for anyone who grew up under the authoritarian states of Europe – like Kafka’s Austria, or Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Assad’s Syria. But in those countries themselves, you couldn’t say so directly.

That’s why Kafka’s books were received so weirdly in the West – with our democratic institutions, we didn’t know to recognize the reality they depicted. Westerners saw the cartoons only as absurdities. Not the absurdity as the only way to depict the truth.

We’re in the middle of something very different now. You can make a pretty strong case – and many do – that the police, military, and justice systems of the United States and many other democratic countries are not focussed on true justice.

Mass incarceration is the absurd system of modern criminal justice in the democratic West. The United States is at the leading edge of developing this system, and it’s most intense there, but most Western democracies have developed terrible incarceration rates, and even more terrible racial disparities in prison populations.

My country Canada has a mass incarceration problem of its own, mostly focussed on Indigenous people. It’s the latest phase of the Indigenous genocide that the Canadian state was designed to facilitate and complete.

Here’s the difference between what we can say and what Kafka – or whatever Kafka will emerge from the haunted dust of Syria’s revolution – could say. We can call it what it is.

Democratic states of the West currently live out a terrible conflict of conscience – we have free speech and free press rights and laws built into our constitutions. It’s immensely difficult to prevent a journalistic outlet or a social media forum from talking about whatever embarrassing fact of state violence they want to discuss.

More than that, we all generally stand by their right to talk about it. A 1910s Czech living under Austrian dictatorship or a 2010s Syrian living under Assad’s dictatorship could never say in public the horrible things their government did. Everyone knew, but no one could say so where they could be heard – the public square was happy, patriotic, living as if nothing at all was wrong.

We can still defend our rights to call a genocide a genocide, and accuse the icons of our nation of mass murder. No one comes to arrest us for it.

In a way, it’s even more absurd. We can keep calling attention to it, and show how ridiculous the defenders of genocide are whenever they speak. We can mock them in public. Yet the genocides and enslavement continue. It’s like they aren’t afraid of us.

In Syria, at least the government was scared enough of people who spoke the truth to put them in prison. Here, they just laugh at the SJW libtard.

The Utopia of the Mass Grave, Research Time, 19/10/2017

There’s a common right-wing argument against utopian thinking, which is rooted in the libertarian impulse for small government. The emotional ground of that argument is an appeal to the horrors of totalitarianism.

Stalinist* Russia and Nazi Germany are the real-life outcome of what the modern libertarian (and generally conservative) right-wing considers socialist utopias. Now, for my purpose at the moment, I don’t want to argue over the facts of whether secret police states are the logical, conscious, or unintentional end-points of socialism. I want to talk about the structure of the argument itself.

Rick Sanchez, hero to those who don't know that he's actually
there to be laughed at.

* That is, Russia when it was run by the NKVD in the 1930s-40s.

You can see the structure very clearly in a straightforward reading of Plato’s Republic. Put all the metafictional and metaphilosophical readings of Plato’s work to the side. They don’t matter for the sake of this argument.
• • •
The most straightforward reading of any book is usually the most popular, if only because it’s the easiest to make. Same reason why The Catcher in the Rye inspires so many jerks** – Holden Caulfield’s voice dominates the narrative. Literally, because he’s the first-person narrator of the whole thing.

** And at least one murderer.

The easiest way to read the book is to let the dominant, most charismatic perspective – and the perspective that’s always justifying his actions in his own moral terms – dominate your own thinking with its charisma.

I sympathize with pragmatic libertarians who are careful and complex
in their justified criticisms of state power. But the more dogmatic folks
– and yes, I'm mostly thinking of the Rand disciples – are surprisingly
dim planners of the most obvious failures.

Same reason why so many misogynist, immature jerks love Rick and Morty – you hear Rick justifying all your worst inclinations, but you don’t realize that his words are meant to indict themselves. You have to step back from the text – get metafictional about it – to get the point. But that’s a step beyond just going with the flow.

The same problem happens with The Republic. Going with the flow of the text, without getting meta about it, it’s Plato arguing for the ideal structure of a community and its institutions. Its content is absolutely horrifying – rigid caste system and community-wide family structures. Now think about the book as a model for your own political action.

How do you build a better society? Sit around with your friends and colleagues, figure out a hypothetical structure for society that you think would be perfectly harmonious. Then, when you control your state’s military, police, nationalized corporations, bureaucracy, tax authority, organize the entire society according to that exact plan.

Change the entire country – from law to culture to thought – in a generation.

What a paradise it was.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. You’ve conceived of politics as a craftsman or engineer conceives of a problem to be solved. Conceive of the best possible end state, and move your society toward that state using the quickest and most intense means.***

*** Of course, the quickest means is rarely the quickest possible means.

Thinking of politics that way – as a pre-planned organizational structure to which you want all of society to conform – enables massive state violence. Consider the end, and its perfection justifies all means to achieve it.

That was Pol Pot’s revolution. The plan was the purest communism, stripped even of basic identity, and the action was to impose that structure with brute force of arms.

You don’t keep the means-end calculation out of political thinking just by declaring a few methods – like mass murder, forced starvation – beyond the pale. You’ve just drawn a limit on the same sociopathic concept to mark where you start to feel nauseous.

If you want your audience to understand the actual ethics that you
threaded into your show, you have to make your most charismatic,
interesting character its voice.

The answer is to avoid means-end thinking in politics altogether, because to conceive of a balance between the virtue of goals and the force of methods is inherently unethical. It nudges us to believe in sacrifice or contribution to common goals as a burden – the limit marks what burdens we consider too much to bear.

The calculation itself of what goals justify which methods is totally perverse because it makes you think of your neighbours, friends, and community members as raw material to build a masterminded social machine.

Making resources of those you should respect.
• • •
Now, for this post, I’ve been following an argument Hannah Arendt makes in The Human Condition. Chapter 31, if you want me to be specific. When she's talking about Plato in this way, she isn’t talking about what Plato actually intended, or her genuine account of The Republic’s meaning.

She's talking about how most people received it. Students who read maybe a chapter in an elective survey course where they got a C+. Media provocateurs who take their straightforward or half-cocked reading way too seriously.

Arendt is talking about the popular reception of Plato – an example to give insight and structure to a popular concept that creating a perfect society is the same as creating a building. Make a plan, bend some resources into shape. To draw attention to how perverse this everyday way of thinking is.

To demonstrate the need for change in human thought itself.

To Be Incorruptible IV: Directions of Force, Jamming, 21/04/2017

Continued from last post . . . Reading Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, you can find a positive, progressive concept of patriotism – knowledgeable devotion to work for the public good of your community and country.

This patriotism of the public good is the patriotism that progressives need to take back from the reactionary and nationalist forces who seem to have a monopoly on patriotism, at least when it comes to public relations. For most of my adult life, folks on the left have been tarred as anti-patriotic.

I came of age at a time when Americans and many Canadians had been overcome with hysteria after the September 11 attacks. We think back on this era with kitsch like Come From Away now, but at the time, a culture of 300,000,000 people were thrown into mass hysteria and rage.

Patriotism was a blunt instrument of intimidation and contempt swung blindly around the Earth’s furniture smashing the architecture of our fragile civilization. It justified the toppling of governments – however grotesque those governments were – and unleashing a never-ending war in the Middle East.

Patriotism was a personality-consuming devotion to country that justified the rapid inflation of the surveillance state. So many patriotic Americans believed the military could do no wrong.

I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.

As a result, there’s enough military equipment trickling down to police forces that every county with more than four cows got its own squadron of armoured personnel carriers, mortar-proof flak jackets, and enough crowd control gear to evacuate downtown Chicago at rush hour.

Patriotism today means that anyone who believes that maybe we should step back from militarizing your own country is a traitor. Patriotism is all-too-often becoming a victim of nationalism. Less than two decades after America’s most recent great trauma, love of country is flowering into hatred of Muslims, Hispanics, and African-Americans.

Machiavelli is a key figure in the tradition of Western thought that gives us a patriotic antidote to this hellmouth.

His patriotism is distinctly minoritarian* – punching up for your own power. Rather like the original American revolution, actually. Machiavelli’s patriotism is the spirit of revolt against oppression or control. It’s the spirit of the colony becoming a country, of a slave breaking her chains. The spirit of a new beginning.

* I’m saying this to emphasize Machiavelli’s connection with modern radical democrats, particularly Gilles Deleuze’s vocab, a radical democratic vision of reality itself. An ontology for free spirits.

Machiavelli’s patriotism is the creative energy of a new society coming to consciousness as they carve out a niche for themselves in a world of long-established powers. It’s national self-consciousness of a shared desire for freedom.

Patriotism is the desire that others respect and recognize your community as an equal. It’s the same drive as an individual human’s desire to be an equal in her society – only articulated on a cultural scale.

It’s an antidote, for sure. But it has its own problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Impotent Liberal III: The Only Possibility is Nothing, Composing, 22/12/2016

This is a Composing post. An extremely Composing post if you know what I mean.

So the previous post was very rooted in real-world concerns – trying to understand what tendencies in the liberal conception of how to do politics made it vulnerable to fascism.

A perennial topic in political philosophy since about 1945. It’s waxed and waned in and out of prominence over the decades. But somebody was always thinking about it. Hannah Arendt did, for example. Now Arendt scholars and more original thinkers she’s influenced think about it too.

No, I can't think of any reasons in contemporary politics why we should
be worried about liberalism's weaknesses in the face of reactionary
authoritarian movements. Why do you ask?

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe think about it from time to time in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Reading that book over the past little while encouraged me to think about it. There seem to be some pretty big reasons for thinking about it in politics today.

Yet despite its weaknesses, the liberal idea expresses a pure and profound drive among humanity to be free. How we live out our desires for freedom may change over the generations. But the desire can’t be restrained – if it ever really was in the first place.

And on an individual level, that’s the problem with desire. Desire has no necessary ending point – just contingent, often reactive, developments. It keeps chugging along, fuelling activity until something cuts it off.

Some other demand or desire gets in the way, or its own activity starts to change the world so that it becomes more difficult, or outright impossible. With the desires that constitute societies from individual actions, it’s usually other people that block or shut down our desires.

Political activity is the management of all the desires of everyone in a community for constructive ends. Maybe that community is simply a family, maybe it’s a country of millions, or a planet of billions. People jockey for power, respect, and happiness. No matter the scale, this is human life.

Politics at a family level rarely gets out of control. Even when it does, it’s usually only people in the families themselves who are hurt or killed. Same with small communities and small concerns. Scale this up to a planetary level and you’re potentially dealing with nuclear war and totalitarianism.

This year's American Presidential campaign
saw genuinely powerful appeals to a utopian
vision for freedom. Yet those to whom those
visions don't appeal often misunderstand
them. Pictured here is what
conservatives believe is the average Bernie
Sanders supporter.

Totalitarianism and oppression are major problems with any kind of utopianism. It’s the single vision and direction, imposed on a whole society through state control. Forcing a utopia on the world always has that result.

Yet our utopianism is bound up in our desires for freedom – we conceive of our utopias as the perfect society. A union of the cities of the divine and the mortal. The messiah complex in all of humanity. The positive programs of any utopian vision turned into a political program and state policy is a single prescription for freedom – the society where we will all be free.

But that freedom is false, because totalitarian imposition imposes a single vision of freedom on society. And humanity is a complexifying creature. We always make things more complicated for our society because we’re always drifting toward creating new ways to live, new priorities, new identities, new desires.

This is how reading Laclau and Mouffe got me thinking through this problem. They critique traditional marxism for its premise that industrial advancement will simplify society into two antagonistic classes. But the continuing development of industry and technology actually encourages people to become more complex.

We develop new identities – or become more conscious of desires that have always been part of our society, see how they’re typically suppressed, and bring them out into the light to celebrate their difference.

Cultures merge, new sexualities and genders develop. New social classes and communities develop from new professions and work cultures.

Using the state (or any kind of military-police institution) to impose a single vision of the free society on a whole community of people is the most blatant and horrible oppression imaginable.

So is it even possible to think in utopian terms about politics? To imagine some setup for society that would maximally free us as well as be peaceful?

I think the liberal idea is actually best suited for this task. Because the utopia of a liberal isn’t strictly negative – like a radical libertarian’s reactive, paranoid guard against state activity or control. And it isn’t positive either – like the white nationalist’s dream of a uniform ethno-state.

Liberal philosophy contains the only utopia worth having. A utopia that has no content. Nothing to impose. Nothing to oppress on people. Just the freedom of space itself.

You might be asking: What the fuck does that mean? Well, . . . To Be Continued

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites IV: The Exclusion of Imprisonment, Research Time, 10/11/2016

Continued from last post . . . When I say the fundamental anti-democratic force in society is the police, I'm not necessarily referring to actual police institutions. Though most of them these days aren't exactly all that impressive in their commitment to the rights of the people.

When I say the word 'police' in this context, it helps to think of this as a verb. When police forces solve crimes, help prosecute violent offenders, and actually protect the people of their communities, they’re public servants. They aren’t policing in this sense.

Policing as the enforcement of rules is a brutal means of social control. It's the social control of direct violent intimidation and fear. The spectacle of the tank driving down the street, the line of riot police armoured so heavily as they walk through what was once a thriving market district looking more like robot soldiers than people.

I don't remember ever thinking that guy with the cameo in Home Alone II
is going to be President of the United States one day. Even though I
wasn't even in puberty yet. Definitely not.

One very dark bright light in the victory of Donald Trump for the American Presidency is that I doubt he'd build a secret police institution. His moves to crush dissent will be as blatant and visibly in-your-face as Trump’s entire personality and campaign.

Quite a few of my good friends in Toronto are Syrian immigrants, people who've grown up in a state that controlled its population with secret police. So at least the Trump Administration will likely not embrace this essential institution of totalitarianism.

So in a philosophical sense, policing is control by the explicit and open threat of violence. That violence can take many forms, like actual physical beatings, the insidious buzzing of a surveillance state, or the institutionalized destruction of lives through imprisonment and the social exclusion of former convicts.

Policing is the biggest and most bruising stick of all the ways to exclude people from a legitimate place in a society, for the reason that a person doesn’t follow as they should a set of detailed substantive rules of propriety. As a process and a social force, policing in this sense is the essential anti-democratic activity.

If the nature of democracy as a process – the ontology of democracy – is as the struggle for freedom, then in what does that freedom consist? It’s more substantive than the libertarian sense of freedom, which is the mere absence of state coercion (though that’s incredibly important).

And it isn’t the communitarian sense of freedom either. I’ve been reading some very good critical writing on this concept in a collection of essays by Chantal Mouffe that I picked up from my shelves a while ago.

Communitarian conceptions of democratic inclusion requires such a thick, detailed, and essentially static shared morality in a community that they paradoxically end up embracing policing in the name of freedom. Communitarian conceptions of freedom reduce to a strict and detailed set of social rules that are defined as the proper way to be free. And conformity to these rules means you’ve got to start some heavy policing.

No, real democracy is neither of these. It’s the struggle for greater freedom – developing new vectors for liberation and the movement along those directions.

Seen here is a related – but sadly much more literal – example of the
heavy policing we're likely to see over the next four years. Some of
the Trump apologist trolls I've seen in the last while have mocked
progressives' fears of his impulsive, violent tendencies when in
charge of the American state. When I say Trump will likely go to
war, I don't mean war against a foreign country. I mean war on the
people of America.

This is only possible in a society, a network of complex relations between people that, when everything is working as it should, empowers us to develop and progress along liberation vectors. It sounds like the movement toward freedom should tear a community apart if liberation means everyone is creating new ways of life all the time.

In Jacques Rancière’s analysis of this problem, he describes he democratic process as the struggles for including all these proliferating differences in a society’s morality.

People are caught between two possibilities if the choice comes down to liberal or communitarian visions of a free society. Yet each of those two possibilities seem to be parallel visions of the other.

Liberalism leaves us disconnected individuals, little more than a bare life bouncing off other such isolates. Our best hopes for life would be to escape being crushed by our institutions or eaten by our neighbours.

Communitarian conceptions of citizenship and freedom position themselves as the antidote to liberal poverty of the subject’s morality. They are correct that rights can only exist with the real support of a whole community. But bearing rights that a community respects doesn’t require comprehensive moral conformity.

In other words, I don’t have to be the same kind of person as you to respect you, and welcome you to my community. Common identity isn’t the reason to respect someone – it’s simply being a person.

That’s the foundation of democracy.

A Paradox – Inclusive Elites III: A Full Human Life, Research Time, 09/11/2016

Continued from previous post . . . So a quick recap that will actually be quick. Representative democracy lies to us in its ideology in a lot of ways. The most profound is the notion that the act of election constitutes some magical transformation of the will of individuals into the will of the nation speaking through the parliament’s assembly.

But representative democratic institutions fall short of democracy’s ideal in a more ordinary – and no less important – way. The huge amounts of organization and money required to contest an election to a representative assembly restricts those positions to people who run and network with political parties.

Nothing says "Salt of the Earth American people" like these folks.

There are usually norms that party officials shouldn’t jump too easily from their bureaucratic jobs to running for election. But those are mostly vague feelings of squishiness. A decent public relations job usually overcomes those.

And really, the problem is that political parties are big organizations of well-connected people. It’s difficult for folks who haven’t become prominent in their communities to gain power in these organizations. And that cuts off a lot of ordinary people from the actual corridors of state power.

Democratic institutions in industrial civilizations have to be run by elite groups and elite organizations. Even if you lay aside a lot of the usual conceptions of elitism associated with wealth, they constitute an elite stratum of their own – the networks of people connected with political parties and parliamentary institutions.

It's enough to make democracy seem futile. But democracy is an ethical ideal. It’s the sort of thing that motivates your action, not a concrete goal that you can actually achieve, instantiate, make real.

The completely free society is an asymptotic approach. Would the democratic revolutionaries of the founding of the United States – to pick a noteworthy example this week – have anticipated the huge number of freedoms people advocate for today?

Consider the freedoms that only become necessary in an industrialized civilization like ours? Freedom of financial security. Freedom of information flows through decentralized internet media. Or the social and subjective freedoms that are needed today for non-cis, non-straight, non-binary sexual and gender identities?

You bet your ass Ben Franklin would have loved partying in the
craziest gay bars in America. That's what freedom is all about.

Benjamin Franklin wouldn’t have understood any of the many new vectors of freedom that have arisen in the last few decades. But once he got up to speed, he probably would have been loving every minute of it.

The different demands for freedom and the different vectors upon which people can liberate themselves have grown and grown. And this growing freedom is what democracy is. Just as the ideal of the comprehensively free society is the ethical being of democracy, the ontological being of democracy is the real-world growth of liberation vectors and the social and individual struggles to develop and move along these vectors.

The ontology of democracy is literally the social struggle to free ourselves.

So in that sense, while parliamentary institutions have a tendency to build new elite groups, they aren’t truly the enemy of freedom because they can still encourage the growth and development of liberation vectors throughout society.

Only someone who conceives of politics only as civic engagement and the contest for state power would consider institutions themselves inherently anti-democratic or anti-freedom. I’ve met some very smart people who still have this blinkered view of politics, and I think in a lot of ways that’s a failure of education.

So what kind of society and institutions can encourage these liberation vectors to proliferate? It helps to consider what the opposite of such social structures and institutions would be.

They would be institutions that constrain people, sometimes literally. Social structures that encourage strict moralities. We’re used to thinking of such strict moralities as religious, and most of them are.

Police arresting protestors in Baton Rouge earlier this year. Because
you know what to do with the police.

Just consider how stifling it is to grow up in a harshly strict religious community. There are only a few ways to live, you face ostracism or worse punishments for breaking the rules, and those rules can sometimes regard intimate practices like hairstyle, sexual practice, or clothing choices.

But such strict enforcement of moral rules can come from secular cultures just as much as religious ones. We’re accustomed to thinking of headscarves and body covering as signposts of religious oppression – largely because of pervasive racist ideas in our society about Muslims and Jews.

But the police officer forcing a woman to strip on the beach is just as much an oppression as a police officer forcing a woman to cover her face on a city street.

Those images expose the essence of what opposes democracy, when we conceive of it as a social morality that encourage the growth of liberation vectors.

The police. . . . . To Be Continued

Reinventing Privacy – Reinventing Ourselves, Research Time, 05/04/2016

Antonio Negri, of all the thinkers I’ve read, probably casts the biggest shadow over my slowly-in-progress book of political theory, Utopias. As far as the straight critique of government and political institutions goes, he and I are fellow travellers. 

At this point, aside from reading the occasional rant on my blog, when someone wants to know more about where I stand on a lot of foundational political issues, I tell them to read Negri. He’s seriously onto something. Let his ideas sit with you. They’ll change your mind about at least a few things. 

He's really onto something, you know.

This is what I tell my friends in the New Democratic Party as well. We’re wondering, in the light of our recent national election defeat and heading into the party convention in a few days, where to go from here. How to remix the roots of Canadian social democracy for the Trudeau era.

Start with Antonio Negri, I tell people. In casual terms, that shit’s the future.

The major message of Negri’s political thinking that I carry into my own work is that globalization is a serious conceptual game changer in how the fundamental concepts of politics work. 

It doesn’t rob states of power – anyone who’s had a police or military apparatus blow up them or their communities knows how powerful they still are. But globalization makes new political rules that are completely foreign to the way sovereign states work. And those new rules have power. 

Think about a distinction so old and ubiquitous, we often don’t think it could be any different. The distinction of private and public. In the same sense that public services became synonymous with state-administered services. And what’s private is the realm where the state isn’t morally allowed to interfere.

The private sphere is the part of each of us that’s purely for me as an individual. Not in a literal sense – the private sphere usually includes my family, my friends and personal networks, my own property. It’s the territory around each of us that we map out always in relation to ourselves.

The private realm is our Earth, at the centre of Ptolemy’s crystal spheres. 

For sovereign states to be democracies, they need a barrier between private and public. Society must have two absolutely distinct realms – the space of an individual’s freedom and the space where the state can exercise control. As long as we’re free from the state, we’re absolutely free.

But there are such powerful capital flows across the world today that going to work in a supposedly free contract – paid according to local standards and a working day of an average local length – can oppress you. 

The equivalent of a few dollars for a 14-or-more hour working day – life is a poverty trap. All this while you’re contributing to the largest fortunes of the world in, for example, major clothing companies. You’re shut out of the true wealth of the world.

Understand that economic subordination – with its roots in networks of capital flows, and not in the direct orders of any monarch, military, or bureaucracy. Understand that it’s just as oppressive to live in that kind of poverty trap as it is to live under a secret police regime. 

They are simply different machines that crush your spirit – the spirit ends up crushed in either one. Our political thinking needs to change radically to reach all the implications of understanding oppression as any set of circumstances that crushes human spirit.

We all know now the scale of power and capital the world's
richest people control. States are mere tools to serve the
wealth of the world's most wealthy individuals. There is
no public and private for a global economy's oligarchs.

Economic injustice should be prevented. But we can’t rely on the state for this because we know that it’s basically just a giant machine of military authoritarianism. That’s what centralized states were designed to be in the first place – the world’s most efficient command structure.

So we need to focus our political activism and (most importantly) thinking to prevent economic injustice by changing the system of economic relations around the globe. Without relying on authority structures like states to do it with armies and police.

Political philosophy that’s just about the proper realm of state action and the proper realm of privacy – about where states can and can’t command – won’t come to grips with this. There are no commands; there are communication networks, capital flows. Oppression that doesn’t come from orders backed by a gun, but deals backed by deeds of ownership.

Politics can’t be only about each of us and the proper boundaries of our individuality, of the realm proper to ourselves, anymore.

Coming to grips with the nature of globalized society and economy would have the same social shock – and similarly transform how we conceive of ourselves and the world – as the Copernican Revolution. A Copernican Revolution for our entire self-conception.

Where have I heard that before?

Words in Memory of a Photojournalist, Advocate, 16/03/2016

This weekend, I spoke at a memorial for the photojournalist Ali Mustafa. He was a Canadian killed in Syria, travelling with the White Helmet paramedic brigades documenting their dangerous activity in Aleppo.

He died at the age of 30 in a March 2014 barrel bomb attack on the city by the Syrian government. 

I was speaking on behalf of the Syria Film Festival, where I’m communications manager. It’s a volunteer position I’ve held since the first festival in November this year. We included, during that festival, a small exhibition of Ali’s photos, along with a poster introducing his work. 

But I didn’t actually know Ali myself. He died a year and a half before I started volunteering with the Syria Film Festival. The organizers, one of whom was a good friend of Ali’s, only thought of the Syria Film Festival months later. 

Yet there I was giving a speech at a memorial for a man I didn’t know. And his mission in life – freelance photojournalism in the middle of brutal crackdowns on the Arab world’s democratic revolutions – is something beyond what I could conceive of myself ever being able to imagine myself doing.

He feels like a very different kind of person than me.

We broadcast video of my memorial speech on Periscope, but I’m not sure yet if it’s been recorded. I improvised a lot of what I said from notes, but here’s my reconstruction of my own speech. After introducing my role in the Syria Film Festival and the festival’s work so far promoting and memorializing Ali’s life and work, I reflected on how;

I mean yeah, I'm speaking here. But I didn't even know
the guy. 

“The Syria Film Festival wouldn’t exist without the bravery of people like Ali Mustafa. People who pick up a camera or some other kind of art-making equipment and make some kind of art, some kind of record of what happened in the cities of Syria, in the public squares of Cairo.
“And I can understand why someone who lived in Aleppo would join and document the demonstrations against Assad and the civil war that followed. I understand why an Egyptian would go to Tahrir Square with a camera. It’s their country. Their home.
“It's not my home. To consider taking on that kind of danger, such a mission? I’d ask myself, ‘What? Doesn’t anybody in Aleppo have a camera? Oh, you’re going? That’s great. I’m happy for you . . . Stay safe, stay safe. I’ll feed your cat while you’re gone.’
“We owe an ethical debt to Ali and everyone like him. Their bravery isn’t my bravery. I don’t even have to be brave. I live in a democratic country, and I have all my life. I don’t have to be brave to say that I think everyone should live in a democratic country, and be free from violence, poverty, and war. I've been fortunate to live in a democratic country, in relative freedom, and at peace. It’s easy for me to be an idealist.
“I noticed one of the quotes from Ali, from his Twitter account, that's hanging on the walls here, and I wanted to talk about it, even though I've already prepared my remarks. I planned well ahead – I wrote them yesterday.
“He writes, ‘I feel sorry for all the idealists, purists, dreamers of the world; those who never bend, but easily break. This world was not made for you. In the end, it will devour you whole.’
“I don't know if Ali Mustafa considered himself that kind of idealist. I know I try to be. For now I can only stand in awe of someone like Ali. Maybe one day, I’ll understand it.”

The next Syria Film Festival is this November, opening at the Isabel Theatre Nov 6, then at Jackman Hall in the Art Gallery of Ontario for the rest of the weekend. Other screenings throughout the year.

Bullets Sing The Militiaman’s Hymns, Jamming, 05/01/2016

So while I was publishing my thoughts on the lies at the heart of the concept of nationhood and the oppressive power of the modern state, something happened that most of us would call troubling.

Ammon Bundy and about 150 other militiamen occupied the administrative office of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. Ostensibly, it's over two ranchers who were unjustly imprisoned. But there are implications that these two purposely set fire to about 150 acres of the wildlife refuge to destroy evidence that they'd been poaching deer on the territory.

A scene from Ammon Bundy's militia's occupation of
the Malheur Wildlife Refuge.

Reading my posts in the context of this standoff – which I couldn’t help but do, as it’s the most disturbing news about America’s reactionary movement without the name Trump in it – I realized I could sound pretty disturbing.

So I want to explain explicitly precisely where I differ from radical libertarianism. These are the principles that make my left-wing freedom thinking different from (and superior to) the right-wing version called modern libertarianism that dominates most popular discussions of what freedom is today.

I’ve always sort of courted this weirdness smoking from rifle barrels in eastern Oregon, and I think all dissident thought courts it. Some elements of what I’ll call “post-liberal leftism,” “network politics,” or “the globalized people’s movement”* share conceptual territory with the basic philosophies of anti-government militias and radical libertarianism more broadly.

* Because I don’t really know what else to call it right now. If anyone has a better suggestion, let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

1) Individual freedom and dignity

This is the foundation of the philosophy underlying both radical libertarian and network politics. People need the freedom to think and say what they wish, and the material supports to make a decent living, to live with dignity.

The libertarian model is sadly deficient about how to achieve all this, though. Libertarians understand the right to free speech, expression, and thought as the right to bully others and demand that the people they scream at pay attention to them. 

The intelligent, nuanced discourse of the modern
online libertarian activist.

Their right to speech is their right to use verbal violence to silence people they disagree with. Like a rabid Gamergater who bullies a woman who talks about her nerdly loves on social media.

“Fake geek girl wannabe trash whore!” “You don’t even own a console do you?” “I’ll rape your mouth until your brains get all over my cock!” Then he complains that he’s being silenced when the girl blocks him.

I understand free expression rights as requiring a basic ethical principle to function properly: you must listen first. It’s the key condition for reasonable conversation.

The modern libertarian also has a very limited view of what causes the material constraints through which working people suffer and fall into poverty. Basically, they blame it all on government control of the economy, and believe that a totally uncontrolled capitalist free market will bring prosperity for all. Or at least that the only ones in poverty will deserve it because of their laziness.

But there’s never been a market totally free of government intervention – even through such hands-off methods as tort and contract law – that could function, aside from a village market square. 

The libertarian idea of the free market also ignores the basic economic fact that, despite ultimately signing the paychecks and occasionally financing a new venture, business owners and the very wealthy aren’t job creators. 

Job creation is driven through the aggregate of all people spending their money, which encourages business owners to hire more people to deal with the extra business. The people, not the rulers or oligarchs, are always at the root of the people’s prosperity or poverty.

The most authentic face of the French
Revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture,
played by Jimmy Jean-Louis in a
2012 television biopic.

2) Suspicion of government surveillance, security, military, and police

This is another place where I can seem suspiciously similar to Mr Bundy. My last four posts were commentaries on Antonio Negri’s philosophical history of the creation of the modern state and the concepts of nationhood, sovereignty, and the racist conception of the Other.

That philosophical history is a narrative of consolidating police and administrative power in reaction to popular revolutions against Europe’s absolute dictatorships. These tyrants had names like Charles I, William V, and Louis XVI. These revolutions’ heroes had names like George Washington, Joan van der Capellen, and Toussaint L’Ouverture.

The revolutions were successful in the short term, but the state apparatus that arose from the later consolidations of power were equally oppressive in all the ways that, for example, Michel Foucault described throughout his work. It’s the apparatus of biopolitics, the administration and control of every aspect of people’s lives. 

Libertarian politics says they’re against this government control, and that’s good. But they ignore the forms of social control that aren’t blatantly enforced through the weapons of federal agents. 

Like the racism that makes a libertarian, who is normally so skeptical of the police and armed forces that they’re willing to kill their countrymen to defend their own liberties, cheer the violent police suppression of black communities or ruthless bombing and hate crimes against religiously-defined Others.

This is really only a brief sketch of how our ideas differ. There are plenty more ways I can get into, but I don’t have the time right now. 

But there are plenty of social movements around the world that my own ideas plug into, and that I participate in, as far as I can. I have a growing real-life presence in the anti-austerity movement here in Canada, and I use my social media to support #BlackLivesMatter, Idle No More, the Syrian Refugees’ movement, and democratic revolution around the world. 

That's true whether I'm talking about the Arab Spring to overthrow the Middle East's autocratic governments, or building new institutions in democratic states that decentralize government power and involve people in their government's decision processes.

This is the real nature of freedom. People like Ammon Bundy are too blinkered to understand that. They’ve blinded themselves. 

Police Dog Josephine Is Also a Junkie, Research Time, 29/12/2015

The title comes from a line of Monty Python, about the best drug-sniffing dog on the police force. But it also serves for a good title for a post about what Antonio Negri has to say about the police as an institution.

In our current political moment, there’s plenty of talk about the dangers of uncritical deference to the police. That’s a healthy conversation, one that a democracy needs to have.

This hashtag used to be a living young boy.

The night I wrote this blog post, the news went out that no one was to be indicted for the murder of Tamir Rice. The 12-year-old was shot dead by Cleveland police officer Tim Loehmann, who fired seconds after seeing him playing in a park with a toy gun.

Throughout the protests surrounding Rice’s killing, Ohio state prosecutors and police officials frequently blamed the boy for his own killing. Public statements described Rice as “big for his age,” and said he would play at being a robber with his friends.

Earlier last night, someone briefly replaced Tamir’s photo on his Wikipedia page with that of a chimp.

A centrepiece of the #BlackLivesMatter movement is advocating for reform of police union contracts. Currently, many police officers’ collective agreements include clauses protecting them from prosecution or accountability for killing civilians on duty, among other protections from scrutiny or responsibility for violence.

So even though he talks about police norms in global and international political contexts, Negri has wisdom for understanding our current moment. 

That wisdom appears in how he distinguishes the global character of Empire and the imperial* from the old-school imperialism of naked slavery and conquest. It used to be that only states could control mass military movements. And they still do. But their monopoly is over.

* Globalized capitalism, essentially.

International organizations now have the power to bomb, invade, and sanction cities and countries. Although states supply the tanks, planes, bombs, and soldiers to the United Nations, it’s still an international organization whose constituency is basically the entire human race.

These militaries aren’t armies going to conquer. Their control by the UN makes them a global police force. Their purpose is to stop war crimes from happening, or which are in progress. 

These tanks don't belong to any one army, but to an
international force to keep law, order, and peace. There
are currently 16 ongoing UN peacekeeping missions
around the globe.

Although peacekeeping has a noble motivation, its ideal is to become a global police force. Other international police forces like INTERPOL have grown in prominence over the last few decades. International organizations and treaties control the trade and economic policies of signatory countries, and can issues sanctions for violating agreements.

In all these ways, police structures are becoming ubiquitous across the globe. And we shouldn’t accept this uncritically, because police organizations are ultimately about controlling populations. 

Those of us in populations who don’t regularly face direct police control, well, we don’t really see their danger. Police are, according to the public relations, public servants. Bodyguards for our society. They’re our protectors.

But police action is based on control – making sure people’s behaviour adheres to specific rules. That control should be subject to critique and public accountability if the police are really to be servants of the public. 

Whether at the global, international, state, or local contexts, we can’t accept uncritically increasing police presence, power, and violence. We mustn’t normalize the ubiquity of institutions of control. And we certainly mustn’t justify it.

As Deray McKesson said last night, justice is a world where Tamir Rice is still alive. It’s a world where no one knows who he is yet but his friends and family. Maybe in 20 years, he’ll build a successful business, become a community leader, fight for his country, or make a great film.

Yet he rots.