Wondering About Books That Don’t Exist, Jamming, 16/11/2017

So I’ve been reading an old book by a kind of obscure author these days. A totally serendipitous find. I grabbed The Fall of a Titan when McMaster’s Philosophy Department library was clearing out a lot of old books.

I’m not going to get into the storyline or the themes of it today. I want to talk about a curious little feeling that you get as a reader when a book surprises you – a sensible decision for the story that still shocks you.

So, no serious spoilers. I won’t be too specific. But there’s a character who’s been acting as a petty bully all the way through the first half of the book. He’s a teenaged jackass – Biff Tannen, but in 1930s Russia instead of 1950s California.

Whether or not the photo is real, Stalin could laugh.

But he's 19 years old, a student at the local university. He’s coasted by his whole life on just pushing people around. Now, he tries to do the same thing to the protagonist, rough him up and intimidate him into doing what he wants. On top of that, he has stupid, short-sighted, damned idiotic reasons for wanting to push the main character around.

This history professor is a veteran of the Russian civil war – when he was 19, he was sneaking up on Menshevik soldiers in the woods and slicing their throats open. Of course, you know what’s going to happen as soon as the kid starts a fight with this guy.

Yet the narrative has set this character up as a major foil to the novel’s female lead. So we expect him to follow her through the entire narrative, tormenting her. The sudden end to that relationship is a shock, given the expectations we had through watching their story.

Perfectly logical, yet utterly shocking. It’s a beautiful moment.

The Fall of a Titan is definitely not a perfect book. Some of his descriptions are a little too straightforward. Sometimes, Gouzenko strains to find the best image. But the careful logic of how his characters build his narrative is beautifully assembled.

Igor Gouzenko only wrote one book of fiction, this one. Other than that, he lived a quiet life in Mississauga, in a modest apartment. He had the remarkable distinction of being the first Soviet defector to the West. Three days after the final surrender of the Second World War, he marched from the Soviet embassy to RCMP headquarters with a pile of evidence of Russian espionage.

Yet The Fall of a Titan was his only book of fiction. I would have liked to see him pen more stories of the Stalinist era, or develop some dramatic novel about life in an immigrant community in the grey years of mid-20th century Ontario. Those don’t exist.

But what beautiful, fine-tuned books they’d be. Maybe I’ll imagine them.

Echoes of Future Politics, Composing, 02/10/2017

I haven’t posted about it in a few weeks, but I’m still working on my Doctor Who project. These are the essays on the Peter Capaldi years that I’m revising into a book, which I hope will be released independently in the gap between Capaldi’s farewell this Xmas and Jodie Whittaker’s official premiere later in 2018.

Filming The Caretaker on the set of Doctor Who in those innocent
times of the year 2014.

I wrote these essays first as reviews – episode by episode as they played, I took a philosophical lens to them. Like all my writing on the blog, these posts improved over time. So when I go back to earlier posts – like this initial review of The Caretaker – I can see that they’re in serious need of revision.

Sometimes, it’s a style issue. Sometimes, it’s way more complicated. The case of Gareth Roberts, for instance. When I first ranked the stories of Capaldi’s first season, I put Roberts’ The Caretaker on top of the list.

The reasons were clear to me. For one, it was a perfectly constructed farce, which threaded complex characterization and relationship-building among the plot itself. It was a masterful fusion of the sitcom style with a Doctor Who adventure story about an alien robot.

The Caretaker also confronted a political issue that had drifted away from prominence in Doctor Who since Steven Moffat took over as creative producer – class. The central source of conflict in the story was the misunderstanding between the Doctor and Danny Pink over class.

The Doctor – keeping with the war, peace, and sacrifice theme of the season – presumed Danny to be a bit stupid when he first learned that he’d been a soldier. When Danny learned that the new school caretaker was actually a Time Lord, he presumed the Doctor was the same kind of Lord who gave him his mission in Afghanistan.

The sort of upper-class bastard who’s content to start wars and burn bridges to prop up his rightful place at the top of the social world. The Doctor didn’t yet understand that Danny was a victim of war, someone who’d killed but who wasn’t a killer. Danny didn’t yet understand that the Doctor was a Lord who’d turned against his class for the exact same reasons Danny despised the lordly caste.

Understanding all the facets of Clara Oswald is more than I think one
book can manage.

Clara was literally caught in the middle – dealing with this massive misunderstanding between the two most important men in her life – her lover and her best friend. That’s not to mention how the Doctor’s friendship with Coal Hill troublemaker Courtney or the motives of the Skovox Blitzer robot played into the same themes.

Roberts did a beautiful job weaving all these elements together. I consider it a masterclass in the craftsmanship of thematically rich comedy narrative. In the moment of that season, the story also did a wonderful job of maintaining the hopeful outlook of Doctor Who.

After a bleak season finale with Death in Heaven, Roberts offered a refreshing model for the show going forward. Writing as I was a few days after its broadcast, I also presumed that this would be Clara’s exit from Doctor Who, a terribly depressing place to leave the character.

Clara’s future – and how I’ll deal with her in this book – are subjects for another post. Probably several as I hammer out my ideas. Clara Oswald contains multitudes, as you know.

No, my biggest problem as I rethink the Caretaker essay is its author. See, when Gareth Roberts first wrote The Caretaker, her politics were kind of a non-issue. He was just an ordinary British middle-of-the-road decently-off gay liberal.

I followed him on Twitter, and quite enjoyed a lot of what he said. Roberts would fairly often post about political issues, and I could often sympathize with him at first. Given the political choices Britain was offering its people for government early in the Capaldi years, I could see how someone in his position could be frustrated.

Gareth Roberts hasn't written for Doctor Who on television since
Capaldi's first year, and I think his increasingly extreme turn in
politics have been a key reason.

Suspicious of Jeremy Corbyn and his reputation for being too far on the left for most people. Feeling a bit frozen out of the Tories, whose austerity budgets were putting too much of a squeeze on the British people. Unable to accept the perpetual damp squib of Liberal Democrat organizing and opposed to separatism, there seemed to be nowhere to stand.

Well, there was one other place. And over the next few years, I saw Roberts drift there. The key issue seems to have been anti-gay violence by extremist Islamists, particularly the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Florida. Over 2017, Roberts flew very quickly to oppose Islam, painting all Muslims as supporters of massacring and oppressing LGBTQ people.

This is a major path that alt-right activists use to turn liberals into anti-Islam bigots. All Muslims are conflated with the most violent extremism, this time on the wedge issue of gay rights. The Chechen crackdown on LGBTQ people – concentration camps included – is an important touchstone, since Chechnya is a Muslim-majority Russian republic whose president is Muslim himself.

Of course, the alt-right’s radicalization narrative avoids the fact that anti-LGBTQ strongman Ramzan Kadyrov executes white nationalist Vladimir Putin’s own anti-LGBTQ and nationalist agendas. Kadyrov is an ally in the Eurasian imperial project motivating modern Russian global affairs.

So what am I supposed to do with a script that celebrates love, joy, and comedy, when its author has fallen into the radical racist politics that Doctor Who fundamentally stands against? I honestly don’t know. Any suggestions?

History as Back Catalogue II: Liquidation Sale, Research Time, 01/09/2017

When I said “no tolerance” was I ever right. Perry Anderson, in the early chapters of that first book he wrote on the history of marxist theory, describes the intellectuals and theorists working in western European communist parties in the 1930s.

Back then, those communist parties were getting their doctrinal and policy marching orders from the Soviet Union. Essentially, I’m going to stare that libertarian / new liberal message setting Stalinist communism as the necessary endpoint of all socialist democratic politics.

Igor Gouzenko reads one of the first editions of his novel to two
marginally interested bystanders. The Fall of a Titan is a terse drama
about the fateful assignment of a young historian and university
administrator – who has also been a top-quality NKVD spy since
joining the Bolshevik side of the Russian Civil War at age 19 – and
the fiery and frightened community of people wrapped up in what
amounts to a secret police public relations job.

Let’s start in the moment, with a voice who lived that moment. Lately, I’ve been reading The Fall of a Titan, the one novel of Igor Gouzenko. Gouzenko defected to Canada from the Soviet embassy in Ottawa. He came with piles of evidence of Soviet spying on Canada, the United States, Britain, and many of its other ostensible allies against Germany.

This was only a few days after the official end of the Second World War. For the rest of his life, he and his wife Svetlana* lived relatively quietly in Mississauga for the rest of their lives.

* Svetlana usually went by Anna after defecting, so her name at least wasn’t nearly as ridiculous as Igor’s – George Brown.

Igor would sometimes appear on television as a pundit expert on Soviet culture and spying. He would also do it with a bag over his head to protect his face from being seen by KGB monitors.

Gouzenko lived his young adult life in the Soviet Union at the highest intensity of Stalin’s purges. Year after year, Stalin would prepare another edit of the official history of the Soviet Union. Accompanying this, Stalin would have hundreds of thousands of people killed.

Gouzenko starts one chapter with a common, but sly – and for me, informative – joke. “People go to banquets for different reasons: the Frenchman to shock people with the low neckline of his lovely wife, the American to tell his neighbour a couple of spicy jokes, the Russia to prove to his comrades that he is not yet liquidated.”

This was the atmosphere in Russia all through the 1930s – a country whose religion was no longer Christianity and not even communism, but anxious fearful submission to the NKVD. That same violence came upon the communist parties of Europe before the war broke out.

NKVD agents were at conferences and gatherings of the Communist International, giving the parties of neighbouring countries their doctrinal marching orders. Most importantly, they were reporting which Comintern members seemed skeptical or hesitant about those orders.

Such skeptics would occasionally have some unfortunate accidents shortly after enough time had passed for such a report to wander through an NKVD management committee. Funny, that.

So Stalin’s secret police was crushing any doctrinal creativity in the communist parties of Europe at the height of the NKVD’s power. Even after the NKVD was purged out of existence and Stalin had his convenient heart attack, the relationship continued.

Anyone with a hint of theoretical or philosophical creativity wouldn’t have been welcome as an active member of the communist party. But after most of their truly restless intellectuals settled into university positions, the university turned out to be a great place to be if you were a truly open-minded intellectual.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replicating Glory II: Strategy Games, Research Time, 03/08/2017

So you want to overthrow your government and entire economic and political system. Fair enough. There are crazier goals out there.

How are you going to do it? Well, a hundred years ago, the Russian Bolshevik Communist Party did it thanks to the widespread civil unrest as the First World War rippled through their society. That popular uprising against the Czarist regime of the Russian Empire didn’t have much leadership two political parties, the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

The biggest problem democratic governments and cultures face is
the idea that elections and parliaments are all you need for
democracy. This notion killed pretty much every ham-hocked
attempt of the George W Bush administration to install democracy
in the Arab Middle East, and it led to some unfortunate
complacency against the surreal autocracy of Silvio Berlusconi's
humiliating leadership of Italy.

Communists all over Europe were so inspired by the (eventual) victory of the Bolshevik Party that they planned exactly the same kind of revolutionary action. Antonio Gramsci himself offers an excellent example of how most of them ended up.

Needless to say, one of Gramsci’s main intellectual occupations in prison was a question many of us have asked at one time or another. Where did I go wrong?

In short form, the failed revolutionaries were dazzled by success that they didn’t see the real differences between their own countries and Russia. All you needed to do to throw Russian society into chaos in 1917 was engulf the country in an unwinnable war that ruins the power of the aristocracy.

Small potatoes. Happens every other Thursday.

You couldn’t pull that kind of revolution in Italy, France, or England because there was more to the establishment than just the throne and a bunch of landed gentry. The rest of Europe had already gone through bourgeois revolutions. Sometimes several. They’d built parliamentary institutions, constitutional monarchies.

There were trade and business owners’ associations. The shorthand term is civil society.

The industrialized – even sort of industrialized – countries of Europe even had trade unions that were perfectly happy with this arrangement. Or at least not so upset that they wanted to overthrow the whole society. If you read any radical communist texts from this period, you’ll see them talking up a storm about “the reformists.”

You know who those people are? Trade unions. If I can steal a term from my old country, it’s the b’ys from OPSEU local 2079. They have the big barbecue tables at the annual town regatta. They just want better wages, health benefits, and better attendance at next year’s regatta barbecue. Nothing wrong with that.

This photo of Turi Prison in Apulia* where Antonio Gramsci spent
virtually all of the last decade of his life. It was taken in 1928. I'm
amazed that any creativity was possible here, let alone some of the
most remarkable left-wing political theory of the last century.
* That's the boot's heel, if you don't know Italian geography.

Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with that, unless you want a revolution that upends the entire social, economic, and political system. Asking people to take resources away from the regatta barbecue? That’s a pretty big ask.

Seriously, though – in Italy by the time Gramsci died, even the folks organizing the regatta barbecue would have been rotting in a sunless cell. But even in secure democracies, the order of the day was under no threat.

Democracy – even one with ruthlessly unequal and discriminatory social structures – allowed people enough voice in their institutions that they saw routes to solve their social problems short of total revolution. Maybe they’re false routes, but there are still possibilities open to folks that stop short of that extreme risk.

The risk that paradise could become Stalinism.

So what do you want to do if you can’t achieve the total mobilization of everyone in a society, as the Bolsheviks did? You stick to what Gramsci called the “war of position.” A complex game of public relations, targeted direct action, attacks on concrete injustices, and complex, multidimensional political lobbying of every other interest group in the society to join an alliance with you to change the raw deal you all experience.

The problem is, if you’re doing all this, are you still a revolutionary? Or are you just another political party, with a bit of a more radical end-game program than the others? Does it even make a difference anymore?

To Be Continued . . . 

Replicating Glory I: Knowing What Kind of War You’re In, Research Time, 02/08/2017

So, like I said I would on Monday,* on to a few more words about Gramsci. It’s so nice to explore these ideas. It’s not a matter of my political sympathies alone, at least not in terms of making it only personal.

* I meant to post this yesterday, but it was actually a super-tiring day with other stuff that I had to do. By the time I was able to sit down with the blog, I was too tired to think.

Italians really know how to throw a communist party.

There’s a greater insight in a minor perspective than a majority’s. You learn more from a perspective that’s under the boot of power than you do from the ones who wear the boots or cut the leather. The ones who have to be wily are more creative, less predictable.

They twist major language and culture to make a hidden space. Call it a safe space. Or not, because the life of the strange is always a little dangerous. This is one of my personal favourites of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts – the minor.

I’m twisting it when I use it to talk about Gramsci, but I think – when I sit down and write Utopias – I’ll weave together some of what Deleuze and Guattari wrote about the literary voice of the minor cultural perspective with the position of Gramsci as a political prisoner and maybe even as a Sardinian.

What’s nice about reading Perry Anderson’s books about the history of Western marxism, is that he emphasizes the ideas in Gramsci that were immediately important to the community of communist activists and marxist academics. So the ideas that gained Gramsci his quickest fame were his arguments on strategy for revolution.

There’s a dualism at the heart of this strategy – war of maneuver and war of position. When Antonio Gramsci was a young man building the Italian Communist Party in the aftermath of the First World War, communists all over Europe looked to the Russian revolution of 1917 as a model for victory.

As you know, that didn’t really work out. Gramsci learned the hard way that it wasn’t going to work out. Italy was the first of the major European powers to install a reactionary conservative government after the war. Mussolini’s ideology and propaganda literally invented fascism. The left-wingers never stood a chance.

One of the famous images of Vladimir Lenin during his ultimately
victorious revolution of 1917. Look at the size of that crowd, then
understand that Lenin is trying to make himself heard over that
entire square. There is no microphone. He's just standing on some
rickety stage screaming as loud as he can.

The short version of that story is that Gramsci spent just over a decade of his life in prison, until it ended. Both the prison sentence and his life, in 1937 at the age of 46.

Communist revolutionaries, high on Lenin’s victory in St Petersburg, thought they would replicate that victory in exactly the same way. The Bolsheviks mounted a blitz against their own government when all the state institutions were wracked by the most intense crisis in the history of Russia as an empire.

It almost seems like common sense to me that such remarkable circumstances weren’t going to happen in the rest of Europe. Russia was a very different country than the other major European powers. Russia’s culture and political society was still dominated by the monarchy and the aristocracy that surrounded it. And there was no moment as singularly intense as the height of the First World War.**

** With so many themes from the First World War appearing in my research for Utopias, I feel like one basic idea in my own book will be putting the terror of that war at the forefront of political thinking. Hitler’s war, as horrifying as it was, was a creature of the epoch that the imperialists’ war began.

European powers like Germany, France, Spain, Britain, and Italy all had well-developed, complex class structures. It amounted to a redundancy in the society itself. A resistance to overthrow. So what’s a revolutionary going to do?

To Be Continued . . . 

When Collapse Becomes Humiliation, Composing, 03/09/2016

Today, I want to talk a little more about Vladimir Putin and modern Russia. Reading back over the post I wrote last night, about how Etienne Balibar seems to be the only one who anticipated Russia’s current return to oppressive geopolitics, I didn’t really like what I wrote. 

It was basically just a reiteration of what Putin’s Russia had been up to, and wondering exasperated why no one else could have seen this coming. I admit, I wrote it rather late in the evening. So I couldn’t quite make the ideas clear. 

We saw this moment as a great victory for democracy,
and it was. But victory wasn't finished yet. The symbol
is always easier to deal with than millions of real lives.

Let’s do that today. 

I could make a pretty strong case that this failure of geopolitical prediction is at heart a failure of empathy. In two short years, all the most powerful symbols and the central political institutions of Soviet and European communism had fallen. Figuratively and literally.

The actual political phenomena are so complex that it could take hundreds of history books to give a truly comprehensive account. But in the context of this argument, here’s how I’ll lay it out. With the Soviet economy in crisis, Russian leaders tried liberalizing the economy a little, opening up more flexibility than the crumbling bureaucracy of the Brezhnev era could have allowed.

Economic unrest and a more liberalized political atmosphere provoked protest across the Eastern Bloc, Hungary opened its borders to Austria and East Germany, East German dictator Erich Honecker stepped down, and the government opened talks on reunification. There was a party at the Berlin Wall, and it hasn’t stopped since.

On the Russian side, Mikhail Gorbechev’s economic and political liberalizations weren’t sitting well with hardline communists in the government and army, who deposed him in a military coup. But a protest movement in Moscow encouraged many in the Soviet army to turn against the plotters.

At the front of this protest was former Politburo member turned democratic activist Boris Yeltsin. With Gorbachev under lock and key the entire time, Yeltsin became the public face of the democratic movement in Russia. 

Since most of the anti-Soviet opposition in the other 15 republics was nationalist, the Soviet state collapsed into 16 different countries. Most of them remained autocratic dictatorships – Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. 

The democratic revolution in Russia was genuinely
mind-blowing – an event that we long considered
impossible in the West. Our problem is that our
leaders (and us too) learned all the wrong lessons
from this wonderful moment.

Some of them transitioned to democracies – Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and most importantly Russia. Georgia democratized about ten years after independence. Ukraine’s was a difficult transition, having spent 15 years after independence as a Russian client state, then a democratic revolution interrupted by Viktor Yanukovich’s resurgent nationalism with Paul Manafort’s public relations team.

How did we understand the fall of European communism popularly in the West? Ronald Reagan demanded that they tear down the Berlin Wall, and we did. Reagan wins!

I mean, I oversimplify it to make sense of it here, but that’s basically what the popular Western belief amounts to. That triumphalism – in the wider context of the 1990s’ generally booming Western economy and gung-ho spirit – led no political leaders in the West to question the wisdom of liberalizing the Russian economy by selling off trillions of dollars worth of state assets to a small group of businessmen, even though most of them were former leaders in the Soviet military, communist party, or espionage agency.

Within only a few years of independence, Russia was a basket case. Its economy was in tatters, its people having lost so much of the financial support systems they could once rely on for basic dignity. Unable to contain or control the looting of his country or the downward spiral of his society, Yeltsin became a broken man living at the bottom of a vodka bottle.

We in the West saw the triumph of democracy – blind to the authoritarianism of countries most of us English speakers can barely spell and to the collective depression of the Russian people. 

All we saw, popularly speaking, when we thought of the new Russia, was the triumph of democracy. We saw Yeltsin’s greatest moment standing on a tank in the middle of Moscow, marking an end to dictatorship and Russia’s first experiment in democracy.

Frankly, we should put off asking why so many
Russian people prefer authoritarianism to democracy.
First, figure out and accept a good answer to the
question of what made us such a lousy ally in the
most important democratic transition on Earth
since 1776 and 1832. Why we let Russian
democracy fail.

We’d watch spy movies filled with Russian gangsters and – as a society anyway – never connect the explosion of the mafia in Russia’s economy with what we’d enabled in the name of freedom. 

Even the espionage leadership of the United States – who had the intelligence capacity to have known better – had its focus drawn to the Middle East instead. The political leadership of the United States as the 21st century started were all democratic triumphalists. 

They saw the fall of the Soviet Union as vindication of America’s right to dominate the world – Earth itself would run according to the model of the American market and business society. The American military would be its police force and missionary unit – first stop, Iraq. Our leaders were driven by ego and arrogance. 

Reagan spoke, and the wall fell. It was almost biblical to so many Americans, unfortunately even the ones in the White House. Now Bush would speak, and hundreds of democracies would bloom across the world.

We were idiots. Our minds were narrow. Our eyes were closed.

They and so many of us presumed the Russian story was over – the Soviet empire had fallen, so they were a democracy now. The thought of a democratic country returning to dictatorship on its own was senseless to them. So they took their eye off Russia, even as that country’s own espionage agency led a coup against their deflated democrats.

The scattered person could see it happening, could see the failures of understanding, the neglect, the condescension that was turning millions of people against democracy and back toward life under authoritarianism. But no one would listen to an aging academic like Etienne Balibar in his speeches and essays on European nationalism in the late 1990s.

Vladimir Putin surprised Western popular culture two years ago with his invasion and subversion of Ukraine, his intervention in Syria on behalf of a neo-Stalinist dictator. I find most disturbing his military flights into Swedish airspace, purposely intimidating a Scandinavian social democracy as they consider an explicit alliance with NATO against just such Russian military agitation.

If we had been partners to the Russian people instead of looters and arrogant masters, we could have avoided this whole mess. That would have required empathy and understanding the society that had been our enemy for generations. I think we could have done it.

If we’d bothered to try.

In Soviet Russia Victory Wins You! Research Time, 02/09/2016

One thing that strikes me about reading Balibar’s essays on nationalism is how prescient they are about modern politics in Europe. I’ve spent the past week waxing on (and waxing off) about his insights into the still-embryonic European nationalist movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But I find the historical insight that strikes me most is how well he understands that there’s more to the end of the Cold War than anyone in any influential position in the West understood at the time.

Etienne Balibar seems to have been the only one in the
West who never got played by Vladimir Putin.

I’m reading this book at a time when Russian petty imperialism is in a new resurgence. They’ve literally invaded a core ally of the European Union, and wouldn’t have been long for joining NATO either. They invaded and conquered the Crimean peninsula, having already occupied several borderlands in countries like Georgia that used to be folded inside the Soviet Union. 

All this in response to these former Soviet border countries installing more liberal democratic governments – Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine – who aligned more with the European Union and United States. 

They’ve encouraged nationalist movements to destabilize democratic governments in their traditional sphere of influence as well. Russian nationalists in Donetsk have split Ukraine with a civil war. Transnistria has been a semi-recognized non-entity state on the eastern slivers of Moldova, with Russian support. And Vladimir Putin is trying to encourage Russian nationalism in the Baltic region.

This is not how a defeated power acts. Balibar is one of the few, writing in one essay shortly after Putin took over the Russian Presidency, to describe that change as a takeover by the political police – the mean who once led the KGB, in other words. 

Despite all Putin’s shenanigans – interventions, destabilizations, stirring up nationalist movements in newly or soon-to-be democratic regimes in his neighbourhood – pretty much every mainstream commentator and political actor with any real influence was totally surprised by Russian meddling in Ukraine. And every Western leader was powerless to stop Putin’s support of Bashar Assad in Syria.

All the people whose job it was to know enough never to be surprised were completely surprised. It’s the most intense expression of the immense failure the end of the Cold War really was.

Since I was a small child watching the Soviet Union fall on cable news, I’ve been told that the West won the Cold War. And that’s certainly how everyone acted. Balibar, along with many left-leaning critics today, describe the modern European Union as having pushed all the Europe into the global marketplace, where globalized corporations and their leaders can enjoy those regions’ wealth.

Not really how to lead a transition to democracy.

The European Union is thankfully far more than this, and has far more potential than this crude co-optation. But the critics aren’t wrong either. 

This was exactly the wrong way to treat the end of the Cold War. The European Eastern bloc and almost all of Europe’s former Soviet states transitioned to democracy, and Western leaders thought this meant total capitulation to everything about the Western way of life.

Balibar rightly argues that this democratic transition should have been a period to build a new vision of Europe and a new model of Western democracy together. A time when we could have learned from the ideals of socialist Eastern Europe before their corruption by dictatorships. And when the East could have learned from the more experience democracies of the West.

Instead, to the victors go the power. That’s how it went. And I believed for a long time that this was the right order of things. But it certainly didn’t work out.

The mass privatizations – more like mass looting – of the Russian state ended up creating one of the most horribly unjust societies. A mega-elite of oligarchical billionaires owned almost all the wealth in Russia, and the other hundred million or so Russians were left adrift. Putin’s nationalism at least gave them the promise of being part of a feared nation again.

To them, the end of the Cold War wasn't any victory for democracy, but a national humiliation. Russians could never have built anything from being forced into the economic system of the countries they considered enemies for decades.

Our apparent victory blinded the thought leaders and political leaders of pretty much all the West into a massive blunder of overreach and condescension. Who knows what promising philosophical, political, and ethical creativity could have come out of a meeting of the minds and moralities of two Europes after the Cold War's end? 

We’ll never really know. Maybe one day, I’ll imagine and write a book about it.

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

A Communist Against Communist States, Research Time, 27/01/2016

So yesterday, I stopped dancing around the issue and openly said that Antonio Negri, the writer whose pretty damn interesting, provocative, and compelling ideas was a communist.

My reason for doing so was to chip away at the popular conception of communists as these evil people. The image of Stalin as standing for all communists. That way, you could be open to the ideas of someone who was a communist all his life.

Bryan Cranston plays Dalton Trumbo in the attempted
Oscar bait biopic Trumbo. Here, he recreates a famous
photo of Trumbo writing a script from the bathtub
while smoking heavily.

More than this, being a communist doesn't mean you're a loyal communist. I remember hearing this smear in the right-wing and sensationalist quarters of the American press levelled against Dalton Trumbo when the biopic of the blacklisted screenwriter was released last year.

Essentially, those smears against Trumbo the movie said that it was right for the state to ruin the career of Trumbo the man. They equated Trumbo’s anti-capitalist politics and activism to his having taken orders directly from Stalin. They accused him of loyalty to Stalin as leader of a totally unified world communist movement.

This is at the heart of the libertarian smear against all left-wingers. It’s the contention that being in any way critical of unregulated free market economics and politics collapses to being a foot soldier of totalitarian Soviet state communism.

Negri was a communist, but he certainly wasn't loyal to any communist state or empire. He served a prison sentence because of false charges based on the same principle. Because he was a communist, so the argument went, he must be a member of the Red Brigades communist terror group. 

It isn’t just Negri's life and political activism that stands against this principle of total unity among all left-leaning people. In so many quarters, his philosophy emphasizes the creative power of diversity as essential to life itself.

Here's an example of how. At least another one. It's connected to what I discussed a while ago about working people being the engine of the world economy’s creativity. But it discusses the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

As a communist, so the argument goes, Negri would necessarily have to lament the end of the Soviet Union, the supposed leader of world communism. But Negri was happy to see the USSR go, and describes in Empire precisely how the Soviet Union’s style of oppression in its last decades hastened its collapse.

We in the West are used to the myths that the Soviet Union fell because they couldn’t sustain their economy keeping up with American military spending and Ronald Reagan told them to change Berlin's urban development plan. 

Negri argues that the Soviet Union fell for the same reason Western workers rebelled against the conformist Company Man attitudes of mid-20th century American corporate culture. Russian workers were part of the same anti-bureaucratic movement as Americans. 

Dalton Trumbo writing in the bath. This
was seriously a thing that he did.

Brezhnev’s USSR was the embodiment of bureaucratic and conformist management.* American workers at least had leisure time and the personal autonomy in their private lives to escape bureaucratic discipline. But in the Soviet Union, every waking moment was embodied the distilled essence of Franz Kafka’s and Robert Musil’s visions.

* Only Stalin's Soviet Union was genuinely totalitarian, defined by the most intense mass-mobilization possible, the death machine that would consume the world or itself, in Stalin’s case largely turned on its own population when not at war with Nazi Germany.

More than that, the USSR never had the democratic feedback mechanisms that American workers could use to change their styles of governance and employment. 

This more flexible mode of work and employment that broke from conformist norms did more than satisfy workers’ demands for personal and professional freedom. The modern economy is driven by computer technology, and innovation in that sector depends on individual creativity and flexibility.

Heavily controlled bureaucratic management can't adapt to the rapid changes and qualitative shifts of the tech economy. The democratic social, political, government, and business cultures of North America and Europe permitted this shift in the foundations of the economy.

The Soviet Union’s bureaucratic dictatorship had no path to start the creative process required for an innovative computer technology sector. By the time of Gorbachev's liberal reforms in the economy and daily politics, the USSR had already fossilized itself.

Negri knew that the most important force for freedom in the world is the creativity of workers. And he knew that the Soviet system suppresses that creativity in favour of obedience to a bureaucratic state. That kind of politics earns no loyalty.

Full Communism Is a Really Good Album, Research Time, 07/01/2016

I’m a bit of a left-wing guy, and freedom is my fundamental political value. I think you can figure that out if you have a look at pretty much anything I’ve written here in the last two and a half years.

But as far as a lot of the popular culture of the modern West goes – at least the loudest mouths and the major icons – freedom and the left don’t go together. Being left-wing today is popularly associated with hating freedom, wanting to control people, regulate them, determine every aspect of their existence. 

Seriously the best punk record I've heard in years.

This is the triumph of popular libertarianism. It’s the mass media and social media insurgency of the only Young Republicans who actually know how to party.

It’s why, on the first anniversary of Jack Layton’s death, G posted a memoriam caption with a photo of Vladimir Lenin.

Very simplified, without getting into the philosophical or media history.* This is the libertarian attack on the left, with two parts.

* Look through my archives for any of my posts discussing Friedrich Hayek. Kick around those for a while, and you’ll get a sense of the history. 

Part One: All leftists are the same, and ultimately want the same thing, which is total state control of the economy and people’s daily lives. Part Two: The ultimate endgame of that political goal is the Full Hitler and the Full Stalin.

There have been, over the years, some left-wing folks who actually have thought that total control of the economy and citizens’ lives through the state bureaucracy was a good thing. Because the state is the culmination of the people’s existence,** state ownership and control is the same as public ownership and control.

** Hmm, where have I heard that idea before?

Those people largely don’t exist anymore. Either they changed their mind, or they’ve died. Younger people on the left don’t even think according to this right=freedom / left=control axis anymore, because it doesn’t really make much sense. 

What’s more, this dichotomy, which most popular libertarians today believe is complete and has no real exceptions, is false. My hardcore libertarian friends used to tell me that, because I was against state control of people’s lives, I should also be a right-wing libertarian.

But that way of thinking doesn’t understand a left-wing tradition that’s much more profound and powerful than state-centric communism. This tradition and its ideas become very clear when you read Antonio Negri.

As much as Terry Gilliam's Brazil is a masterpiece, I
can't help but find it a little suspicious that this massive,
expensive art film about the oppressive power of state
bureaucracy was greenlit in the middle of the Reagan
and Thatcher years, when opposition to state control of
everyday life was popularly interpreted as the embrace
of new liberal, trickle-down, low-tax, unregulated free
market economics and all their resulting effects.

Here’s how the argument goes. Institutions are about control, and the state is the most powerful control institution that’s ever been built. The natural state of humans, though, is contrarian. We strain at even the most subtle chains as soon as we realize we’re wearing them. 

The true universal of human politics is “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!”

This is why states can only function without oppression by being democratic. The people need to have as many avenues as possible to turn bureaucracy, politicians, police, and other state control institutions to heel. Our political leaders can’t start thinking that they’re our boss – they work for us.

The communist revolutions of 19th century Europe were about overthrowing monarchs – the kings of Germany, France, Italy, Russia, France, Austria, and possibly also France again. In democratic countries, it was about loosening the state from the more subtle control of longtime elites and big business oligarchs.

Institutions that control the people would be replaced by institutions that governed through local councils and community organizations. It was supposed to be a kind of super-federalism.

Then when a communist revolution actually succeeded, they ended up buying into the oppressive power of their new state institution instead of dismantling it. In Lenin’s years, he turned the state against opposition to his rule, having to use horrifying violence to oppress his enemies. 

Stalin’s priorities, after taking over the Soviet state, were never about people power, but about becoming the most powerful state ever. Stalin’s state was the most powerful, violent, shocking, comprehensive, intense, horrifying overcoding of hundreds of millions of wills with the will of one man.

State-centric communism was counter-revolutionary. Humanity’s revolutionary power is always about freeing ourselves. My leftism is about freeing ourselves.

Get Real I: Clashes of Four Civilizations, Research Time, 14/10/2015

When I’m reading a book that was epically influential on mainstream politics – like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History – I find the ignored chapters to have some of the more interesting stuff. Today, I want to talk about his less rosy predictions about future politics – his own take on the clash of civilizations.

About two-thirds of the way into The End of History, there are a few chapters on what his theory means for international relations theory. How will states relate to each other in a world that’s inevitably rolling toward universal capitalist liberal democracy? 

It’s a critique of realist IR theory, that war, suspicion, and power games are the inevitable way states relate to each other. International institutions are only really useful as dispute-settling arenas, and diplomacy is the job of working out compromises between great powers to avoid mutually devastating war.

Fukuyama's book never anticipated that China would
become a global power and the leader among Asia's
authoritarian states. He concentrated more on
Singapore as the key example. But China has made
the world bipolar (for now) again, and its leader Xi
Jinping rules not by straight Confucian principles, but
with ideas from the Legalist schools like Shang Yang's
writings. An innovator in authoritarianism.

Fukuyama thinks that the spread of democracy will change this, because pressure from the people will drive their leaders to peace. It’s the kind of optimism Fukuyama is famous for.

But he also considers a very pessimistic possible future. In this scenario, capitalism successfully spreads throughout the world, but economic freedom doesn’t carry democratic political culture with it. Instead, the world breaks down into three blocs, according to their cultural heritages that resist democracy.

1) There’s the West, with its cultural heritage of liberalism (and the liberatory drive that animated socialist and social democratic movements, though Fukuyama underplays these). This is straight-up liberal democracy.

2) The Islamic world, which Fukuyama describes in simplistic (and borderline racist) terms as fundamentalist. If Fukuyama had any deep knowledge of Muslim cultural heritage, he’d talk about the traditional union of social, political, religious, and state concerns through the concept of the unified community of all Muslims.

Islam’s first wave of expansion was as an empire, and its Prophet Muhammad was the political leader of this empire as well as a religious leader. The legitimacy of contemporary Arab monarchies – especially the most brutal ones like Saudi Arabia – are rooted in their embrace and export of their favoured branch of Islam.

3) Asian authoritarianism. Fukuyama discusses this as East Asia’s Confucian heritage. It’s a political culture that privileges group and community loyalty and deference to established authority over individual assertion and liberties. You can be a business leader, and a powerful one. But a top priority must always be loyalty to your country’s leaders.

It's easy to laugh at Vladimir Putin from a place like
Canada. But he's made Russia one of the most
dangerous and unpredictable states and armies in
the world. And world maps let us forget this, but
Russia is the state along our northern border.

If we want to carry Fukuyama’s analysis into our current world, you can add a fourth great power bloc to the two resisters of democracy.

4) Russia’s Czarist Petty Imperialism, which has been resurrected under Vladimir Putin. He’s returned to the power games of occupying territory along border states to subjugate them into obedience. 

We never stood up to him over the annexation of Georgian territory, and now he’s done the same with Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine. And he’s threatening Sweden and the Baltic states to leave their pro-European stances. Putin hasn’t brought Russia back to communism. He revived the Great Game of the 19th century instead.

In the 21st century, it looked as though Fukuyama’s more pessimistic picture of the future – which he didn’t even endorse in The End of History because he was so certain of democracy’s triumph – came true. 

But there’s one problem in the mix, which I kept coming back to last week.

The Arab Spring happened. Why? To be continued . . . 

Didn’t Democracy Conquer the World in 1991? Research Time, 15/09/2015

As you can probably tell from a lot of my other posts, some of what I discuss on social media, and the fact that I’m a member of the NDP and I volunteer with my district’s candidate this election, I’m generally a left-leaning person. 

And I think it’s important for every left-leaning person to read influential and interesting works of political philosophy from the right-wing, from conservative points of view. Much of this is about getting outside the bubble of social agreement that too many of us insulate ourselves with. 

One of my favourite sets of horrifyingly offensive
comments from the Conservative Party of Canada's
Facebook page.

A hilarious Twitter account that’s sprung up this election is called Conservatives of Facebook, which tweets screenshots of actual member comments from the Facebook page of the Conservative Party of Canada. It’s a wonderful display of ignorance and insularity. 

A lot of this comes down to social insularity. People who only listen to voices that agree with them, that share their own perspective, will never learn to understand why people think differently. They’ll only think different people are evil or stupid. 

The most hilarious and terrifying examples (my favourites are the ones that are both at once) are from the right wing of politics. People who can’t understand why anyone thinks we should help the homeless, refugees, or allow Muslims into the country. 

People who think it’s perfectly common sense and an entirely popular opinion that the homeless are dirty drug addicts who don’t want to work, that all refugees are just lazy bums who want to coast on our generous social services (like the family of seven my current boss knows who survive on a $1600/month stipend in Toronto), and that all Muslims are dangerous radicals who want to enslave and constantly rape all women.

There are people who believe that anyone who thinks differently than this is either stupid or a fascist. 

The same insularity of ideas happens on the left. I know plenty of people who can’t understand why anyone would support Stephen Harper. But that kind of attitude doesn’t actually equal political success, because you don’t know how to deal with opponents as people worthy of respect, and you aren’t able to convince those opponents to change their views. Doing that requires understanding why other people believe as they do.

So I read right-wing, conservative political philosophy. It’s important for my Utopias manuscript too, because part of what that book will engage is the failure of the liberal democratic ideal over the last 25 years. 

This is why I started reading The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. It’s a famous book, a popular success that massively and comprehensively influenced Western (esp. American) political culture, and whose effects are still reverberating today. It’s up with Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and Robert Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia as one of the books that define modern conservative philosophy.

For people of Fukuyama's generation, the long tenures
of Soviet leaders like Leonid Brezhnev (1964-82) was
an expected part of international politics. The Cold
War confrontation of democratic and communist
powers was, best case scenario, supposed to last for
centuries. Instead, the entire Soviet Union fell
within a decade of Brezhnev's death.

Its starting idea is that, as we examine the recently fallen corpse of the Soviet Union, we’ve proven that liberal capitalist democracy is univocally the best possible form of human government and the universal desire of all people. This actually was a vibrant, original, and compelling idea in the early 1990s.

Part of the Utopias manuscript will involve getting inside the perspective of generations very alien to my own, because the conclusions that make perfect sense to someone who came of age during the Bush Administration and sees the Eternal War of the Middle East as he matures, weren’t even conceivable to someone who came of age and matured during the Cold War.

Fukuyama describes this clearly. The popular attitude in the West about the Communist world was that totalitarian government had successfully changed the morality, ethics, and character of their entire population, at least in the Soviet Union. Any desire for freedom had been squashed by the all-pervasive state.

It was taken for granted in the West that no one inside the Soviet Union wanted it to fall, aside from the occasional dissident and defector. Then 1991 happened, and a popular movement overthrew the Communist government and broke up the entire Soviet system. Boris Yeltsin seemed to be leading Russia into democracy.

To someone who grew up under the constant spectre of nuclear annihilation in a war with a Soviet enemy that felt more like a population of Dr Dooms than a human society, this literally was a new era of history. God granted us relief from the nuclear death of Earth.

So Fukuyama’s notion that the world had begun a new, immeasurably fast, unstoppable progress toward democracy and freedom made a lot of sense, given how quickly and radically the world really did change in those two years from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the dissolution of the USSR.

Then look what happened.