"Resistance Is Prior to Power" – Antonio Negri. 13/01/2019

Here is the opening monologue from last week's episode of Radical Democrats Radio, "Resistance Is Prior to Power." You can support the podcast and other projects at our Patreon.

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I want to open with a quote from Antonio Negri in Assembly: “Resistance is prior to power. . . . revolutionary movements and struggles are the source of political innovation.”

What that means, is that new approaches to how we can live together in communities, build links of mutual dependency and aid, always emerge from situations of people trying to create power for themselves. 

Remember, when I talk about people creating their power, I’m not talking about taking control of the state here. This is one point where radical democracy departs from the revolutionary marxist tradition in which it began. 

But that’s with good reason, because there’s something very important about revolutionary marxism’s beginning – you know, back when Karl Marx was actually alive – that has shifted radically. The West is not controlled by autocratic states anymore.

I make this statement with rhetorical reservations, of course.

Let’s be clear about our situation today, though. This show has gone live the week after, in the United States, the Democratic Party has taken over the federal government’s lower legislative chamber. 

The leading activists and candidates in that election openly branded themselves as the capital R Resistance. Many were from marginalized communities and cultures who, as a whole, have suffered from state institutions dominated by social conservatives and oligarchs. 

The state of which Donald Trump is President allowed them to organize, run, and take office. I’m serious about that term ‘allowed.’ 

Because the physical machinery of police, surveillance, and security services in the United States is more than capable of rounding up political agitators and opposition party members to disappear them into the prison system forever. 

Marxist philosophy began in a population living under governments that arrested and executed people for organizing communities of marginalized people – the poor in Germany and Russia, the colonized in Britain, Belgium, and France, the enslaved in the United States. Their revolutions all turned out to be fairly successful over a century or more.

But those revolutions against autocracy, colonization, and dictatorship revealed more complex ways culture itself was a political force – a force that could liberate or oppress people. 

Yes, state laws enforced socially conservative beliefs – Like when homosexual acts and divorce were illegal in Western countries. But the state had no power over a woman’s parents deciding to advocate for her husband in the breakup of a violent marriage. The state had no power in family and friends ostracizing a young person for their sexuality or gender.

Here’s where contemporary radical democracy departs clearly from that marxist tradition. Where there are vectors of oppression, there is politics. That includes, state, economics, morality, and culture. All of that is political.

Oppression is a simple activity, no matter how many big bureaucratic agencies a state might use to oppress people. That just complicates a simple act. The stomp of a boot into the ground. 

The real nature of oppression is why Negri can write that political creativity comes from resistance to power instead of power itself. 

In resistance, you act to escape control from some oppressive institution or cultural practice. Such an escape requires agility – Not just in organizing, but in life. 

Of course, an oppressive practice, morality, or institution will react to people openly organizing against it. But the presence of oppressive networks and relationships also work in a more insidious, if equally simple, way. A pervasive morality or social practice will work to make any resistance appear futile.

Picture the residents of a community that’s been in economic depression for decades, who’ve been so dominated by the power of local oligarchs over their institutions that they see any resistance to this order as bound to fail. That’s how oppression encourages apathy.

Even worse is the oppression of morality – It’s how you convince a person to desire their own slavery, to see their oppression as good. They understand fundamental right and wrong in terms of a morality that justifies the power of oppressive institutions, classes, and people. 

I’m talking about moralities that create figures like Uncle Tom, the Dutiful Wife, the Mimic Man. Such a system of beliefs defines what is morally right as to submit yourself utterly to some figure, institution, or state. You are raised to accept without question, as intuitively true, that you are subservient, that you do not deserve freedom.

All this reactionary activity seems very complex, since it flows across so many planes of human activity: 

Moralities that shape subjectivities and social practices.

 

Institutions that shape legal, administrative, and police bodies.

 

Economic relationships that open opportunities for some and erase or block the formation of opportunities for many others.

But it all amounts to a simple movement – the block, the suffocating blanket that drains the energy of your own freedom.

Overcoming that movement requires complexity because of the many paths through which the suffocation of freedom moves. Overcoming moral suffocation requires different concepts and strategies than overcoming institutional suffocation. 

Convincing a woman to understand her “good Christian” marriage as actually incredibly abusive takes utterly different strategies than ending city planning practices that segregate neighbourhoods ethnically to marginalize and impoverish minorities. 

The tools of oppression change by context, but not its actions – suffocate freedom. Resisting and overcoming that suffocation requires actions that are utterly different in each context. 

Unfortunately, that ends up interrupting unity among activists to transform the entire oppressive system on a global basis. People who learned how to resist in one or a few contexts will not understand intuitively what’s in common with resisters in other contexts. 

Example: White union movement activists in Canada oppose environmental and Indigenous movements because they see these activists as roadblocks to their community’s prosperity. 

The solution is unfortunately difficult – outreach and education. People who understand how all oppressions enforce each other have to teach fellow progressives who define their interests too narrowly. 

That education also requires a lot of creativity – New kinds of intervention that can overcome people’s partial perspectives, prejudices, disgusts. Healing an Arab/Muslim activist’s anti-Semitism takes a different educational strategy than healing a Christian human rights activist’s homophobia, and a different strategy than healing a feminist activist’s Islamophobia.

“Resistance is prior to power.”

Political Strategy Without Leaders, 04/12/2018

When Occupy first blew up, the most tiresome, empty-headed critique was that one question, over and over. “Who are their leaders? What is their concrete agenda?”

Exactly the wrong question, I realized after maybe a week of thinking on it myself. I never participated in an Occupy movement as a member. I was a visitor, happy to see that we still had space for rebellion. And I knew from my experience that the space itself was the point.

It was a movement to bring people together, exchange ideas and philosophies, and make a space where rebellion was possible. The point was to assert the possibility of rebellion in the West.

Never forget what I mean when I talk about the West: the lands and cultures of globalizing colonial empire, that started in the 1500s. It’s an entire set of cultures and institutions that have been shaped by the desire to justify worldwide conquest.

Can you transform a culture so radically in a single generation, a single place, a single organization led by one person? We make statues of individual people – Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Ho Chi Minh. We celebrate what they achieved, and how they inspired people. We call them leaders.

They changed laws and governments. But it takes more than the organization of just one social movement to transform the moralities of a population of millions. The 1964 Civil Rights Act did not end racism in America.

Imagine the force you'd need to transform a culture that had been developing for hundreds of years, to have a totally different character. Turning a concept of virtue as conquest and superiority all over the West into mutual inclusion and equality. That task is way beyond the work of one generation, let alone one person. One leader.

That was the ontological point of Antonio Negri’s concept of assembly, which he writes about with Michael Hardt in the book called Assembly. An assembly is a social force that can grow in power and longevity enough to transform the morality of an entire culture.

Even when the institutions of that culture – police, security forces, spy agencies, churches, governments, laws, schools – turn against such a social force, that force has the potential to overthrow and revolutionize those institutions.

Does it always, every time? Oh hell no! Individual political movements are crushed, but the force itself can survive as a story, an idea, a few books that still sell really well. The single biggest corporation in the world sees no need to censor Marx from the online store. They sell everything just shy of the Turner Diaries too.

So ideas continue in all directions, in favour of a lot of different moralities. Moralities of conquest and freedom are always in conflict. An assembly, in its loosest form, is a morality – the concepts that channel our desires into action, action that crafts our desires.

One of Negri and Hardt’s tasks in Assembly was working out how to channel that resilient social power of the mass movement in thought and action. Leaders, it’s said, are needed to formulate strategy. Generals overlooking the map. And the ordinary people of their organizations are the soldiers. Leadership meant plotting from a position detached from the action.

That’s a dualist way of thinking about the nature of political and social movements. It separates action from thought.

Assembly merges them. So when you think about social movements as self-directed, leaders aren’t your generals. They become figureheads, spokespeople who follow the moral directions that are developed among the ordinary people.

Regular activists develop strategies for outreach and conversation (and moral conversion) specific to the needs of their own territories. Who knows a place better than the people who live there?

Certainly not some egomaniac game show host. Certainly not some over-insulated multi-millionaire career political party leader.

I’m talking in that last example about Hillary Clinton. I now have one more Festivus grievance against her as a politician, and that’s her new advocacy for caving to the white nationalist movement on immigration in the hopes that they’ll leave the rest of us alone.

Clinton’s 21st century update of appeasement ran in the Guardian last week. It’s appeasement by focus group. Having identified what message encourages the most enthusiasm from the supporters of nationalist parties, she says that we can win their votes by also becoming nationalist parties.

It’s an absurd, ridiculous, and frankly stupid idea. Do you really think that someone who hates Hillary Clinton as much as a dedicated anti-immigration Republican would vote for her? Even if she personally suffocated a four-year-old Honduran girl with tear gas, he’d call it a false flag. Just like the Sandy Hook massacre and the moon landing.

Even beyond this, the real problem with Clinton’s approach in that Guardian article is that she thinks that her DC focus groups can tell people what to think so that they will vote for who they want to. The ones who pay for the focus groups.

That’s not how you lead a democratic movement. Here’s how.

You don’t. The movement is the leader – ordinary people percolating ideas through society that change our culture’s entire morality, one social network node at a time.

Effacing Solidarity I: Their Language Is Absurd, Composing, 08/08/2018

Four years ago, when I trained in corporate communications, there was a brief introductory lecture in one class about the history of public relations. One discussion that seemed very anachronistic at the time was distinguishing between public relations and propaganda.

It went over strangely because propaganda seemed quaint, something no longer done. A horror of the past.

I wish that had stayed true.

Anyway, the definitions of propaganda and public relations that we discussed in that lecture were ultimately a little flaccid. It ended up amounting to “You know it when you see it.” Let me illustrate this with a hard case.

When the powerful laugh, they're usually mocking ordinary folks.
When we laugh at the powerful, it's a means of self-defense.

In our Ethics of Public Relations class, one of the main presentations we covered was the contract between the Hill & Knowlton PR agency with the American government to help convince United Nations leaders and other international influencers to go along with the war against Iraq in 1991, after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The Hill & Knowlton team developed a comprehensive public relations plan. They regularly monitored the American public through opinion surveys to test the strength of their messaging. They helped dress the Kuwaiti ambassador for his public appearances in styles that Americans would find charismatic. Those public relations techniques are ethically reasonable.

Where things get freaky is in the most harrowing message. Testimony from a young Kuwaiti woman, presented to the US Congress as a hospital nurse, that Iraqi soldiers occupied a hospital and killed an entire ward of infants in a maternity ward by throwing them out of their incubators.

None of it was true. Iraqi troops never committed massacres in Kuwaiti hospitals during the occupation. The woman who testified to Congress that they did was actually a daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. Members of the Hill & Knowlton team had done a great job of training her in acting.

Would you call it propaganda? I’m not sure that’s quite appropriate. I’m looking for a conception of propaganda that’s a little thicker than “public relations actions that I don’t like.” It works fine as a designation, an insult, a way to tell people my own feelings. But it isn’t actually useful to learn anything about the world.

Some speculations. I think I could characterize the stupidity of United
States geopolitical strategy this way: They rely on alliances with
ruthless people, groups, and factions around the world to do their
dirty work for them, so United States leaders can continue to defend
the country's international and domestic image as virtuous guardians
of democracy and freedom. Since the Reagan era and with
increasing frequency, this strategy has backfired, causing spirals
of cascading political violence as ruthlessness compounds on
ruthlessness.
In that way, I appreciate Trump for his honesty. He never
pretends to be anything other than ruthless.

See, while Hill & Knowlton’s incubator strategy was built on lies, there was still one aspect of respect for truth in their strategy. They wanted you to believe in the truth of what they said. They were trying to convince you to support a military action by convincing you to believe a set of propositions. They maintained respect for the logic of reason.

Doesn’t propaganda try to do this too? Well, it doesn’t if we’re going to make a useful distinction between public relations and propaganda. Why make the distinction? So we can use our new conception of propaganda to understand a real difference

That’s a key part of what philosophical creativity is – developing concepts to understand real differences.

Propaganda looks like public relations but differs because it doesn’t concern truth or whether the content of its propositions and messaging is believed as fact. I’ll offer two quotes from a pair of French thinkers of the last century. First, from Gilles Deleuze, discussing a kind of language he calls “order-words.”

 “Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.”

Propaganda messaging isn’t about encouraging people to believe what’s said as fact, or truth. It’s about transmitting orders and how to give signs to your leaders that you’re following their orders.

That’s why Trumpists continue to repeat Donald’s blatantly false statements, even when you physically demonstrate their falsity in front of them. They don’t believe and follow Trump because they think what he says is right. They repeat what he tells them to repeat and believe what he tells them to believe because he is their leader.

You know what my problem is with Sartre scholarship in the
university sector? They rarely, if ever, discuss Sartre as a fundamentally
political thinker. I think that would clear away a lot of the confusion
that I see about his own flavour of existentialism.

Now for a longer quote. It’s going to lock down for sure the kind of communications I’m talking about with the term propaganda. It’s from Jean-Paul Sartre, and I’ve seen it floating around my Twitter circles lately.

“Never believe that [propagandists] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
“The [propagandists] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.
“They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

He was talking about the anti-Semites of Europe in the days and years laying the conditions for the Shoah. At the time he wrote it, within months of France’s liberation from German occupation, Sartre – as well as most of the everyday population of France – didn’t know that the Shoah had happened.

Today, we call it by the silly, defanged name of trolling. But these words describe the bullying indifference to truth and amusement at others’ pain and confusion that freed people’s minds to create the Shoah.

Nostalgia Feeding Fascist Dreams of Cackling Joy, Research Time, 21/06/2018

We’re in a fascist moment right now. I don’t have to tell you this. Not only is the United States government locking away families seeking asylum from war and violence, but the guards enjoy their jobs, there are already allegations of abuse in the children and infants’ detention camps, and there’s a pretty big minority who doesn’t care or believe any of this is going on.

Maybe they really do think that everyone ICE is arresting and throwing into prison camps are all thousands of MS-13 gang members who constantly stream into the country.

Very little about the Trump family is subtle. The Republican Party
apparatchiks like Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen may prefer to be
more slippery, cagey about what they're actually doing. They won't
say what they're doing. The Trump family is different. They tell you
what you say, but it's so ridiculous that you know it's a stupid excuse.

Maybe that’s just what they tell people who they suspect would be a little disturbed by their real thoughts. Maybe they’re genuinely happy that thousands of Central American Hispanic and Indigenous people are locked in prison camps, degraded, and beaten. Children and infants included.

Stare at that hatred. It’s a human desire. It is not monstrous. It is not somehow inhuman. It is ordinary.

Different trends of research examines the images that warp a personality to express such intense hatred against the ethnically different. Many of those research trends percolated through the academic discipline of Cultural Studies. Jeremy Gilbert provided a damn good bibliography section for this end of my research.

An important set of fascist concepts is rooted in the appeal to stability. You could call it the desire for freedom from fear. Any change brings risk, and a major shift in the nature and makeup of your society is riskier than if little to nothing changed at all.* Fear is the most intuitive response to the notion that your world is growing riskier, more dangerous.

* This is, of course, not the actual nature of risk, which is way more complicated. The point isn’t about what risk is, but people’s intuitions about risk.

When our world feels more dangerous, we dream of peaceful times. If we associate our feelings of danger with the change happening all around us, we’ll idealize a time in our society before that change began. We’ll want to return to that state.

Make America Great Again.

That’s how nostalgia becomes the driving image of a fascist political movement. When you’re so motivated by a fear growing in the most important desires of your personality, you’ll condone whatever violence needed to make that dream come true.

He gives you permission to use his moronically stupid excuse so that
you have something to say when a less racist person talks to you at
a party. And you can, happily and relatively privately, sit back and
enjoy watching thousands of people you hate suffer and die.

If you fear a society where your ethnicity and cultural heritage will be a minority so much, you’ll be relieved those detention camps are booming. They’ll turn back the desperate civil war refugees by conclusively demonstrating that Central Americans will find no shelter here.

The imagery of nostalgia can turn to better purposes, of course. Nostalgic themes play an important role in the environmental movement. I find it naïve that people would think of a non-technological world as a Garden of Eden.** Simply false when you learn anything about the very turbulent history of Earth.

** As a cultural image of a peaceful, harmonious Nature before human corruption. Not some silly story about a naked couple living in the woods with a talking snake.

If you come from a culture and a community that’s treated ethnic minorities with terrible oppression for centuries, wouldn’t you fear becoming an ethnic minority? You’d associate being a cultural minority with oppression, unable to imagine people of different cultures and ethnicities living together peacefully.

When you’ve grown up hating by instinct, you have an instinctive feel for how terrible it is to be the object of that hatred. When you see yourself in danger of becoming that object, your survival instinct kicks in. Luckily, what you’ll do to survive supports your disgust at having to share space with them. You’ll be relieved that these disgusting creatures won’t come to find you so disgusting.

Reading Gilbert, he brings it back to neoliberalism. How all of this becomes a way to dupe people into supporting an oligarchic economic system. He’s not wrong. But let’s understand this aspect as well – an ethical phenomenology of the racist.

What You Wish For Might Ruin Your Country, Research Time, 20/06/2018

Life is often ironic. Sometimes, you can laugh at the irony. Sometimes, all you can do is cry.

One thing I cry about, when it comes to folks who self-identify as progressives, is how everyone feels about globalization. In many contexts, most of us think it’s bad.

That’s the simple version. I mean, the modern popular movement against new liberal economic policies and political philosophies began with a demonstration against a World Trade Organization summit. One of the major controversies in Canadian politics right now is the Trudeau government signing the country into the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement among many Pacific Rim countries.

When you demand the return of economic borders, you open yourself
to seduction by people who want borders closed overall. When you
blame trade with foreigners for the ills of your economy, it's easy to
start blaming all the people outside your country, not just the
powerful ones. That's how an anti-globalization activist becomes a
racist nativist.

People’s problem is that these trade agreements give too many rights to transnational corporations, which allow for increasingly intense concentrations of wealth among the oligarchs’ class.

Typically, all the major political parties jockeying for electoral control of state government institutions in the West have supported these corporate-driven trade agreements. There have been different emphases in those agreements and treaties.

Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party here in Canada focussed on resource extraction sectors. Typical of a party with a strong support base among Alberta’s petro-industrialists. Jean Chretien’s and Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party encouraged growth in the financial sector. Typical of the party that has represented the interests of Canada’s banking sector since the founding of the current state. Both of those parties doubled down on our continental trade deal, met with opposition from social and economic justice activists around the country.

There has been plenty of resistance to these legalistic acts of corporate piracy: networks among the multitude, groups of radical anarchists who’ve largely dropped out of society, trade union and student movements, progressive electoral political parties, think tanks, and non-governmental organizations.

Then, amazingly, in the heartland of the Washington Consensus, a political movement that put people first ripped apart all the presumptions of one of the most revanchist state parties in the West. The movement against corporate-led globalization had a new champion, and against all expectations, he entered the White House as President of the United States.

The politics of rage, demonization, and hatred are all too often
depressingly effective.

You see the problem here now.

Globalization in itself isn’t a bad thing. It’s the intensification of many physical, financial, and communicative processes that have linked different regions of the Earth for centuries already. It’s passed several major thresholds in the last few decades, which is why it feels like an entirely new phenomenon.

Yeah, it’s had plenty of drawbacks. Massive industrial pollution, the exponential growth in the power of global oligarchs to hide from public accountability and to hide their wealth.

But there are also plenty of benefits. Communication among people around the world can happen with incredible speed now, and we can learn about people in all parts of the globe. We can make friends from the other side of the planet. Communication connections can help build camaraderie, friendship, and community among people throughout the Earth.

People can move more freely than they ever have before. The late 20th century’s globalization had an amazing impact on a lot of the West: Asian, African, Pacific, and South American immigrants could come to our countries. If our labour markets throughout the Earth ever become truly open, it would be a genuine revolution of working people.

Imagine the economic and cultural booms that would result if Indian and Pakistani workers could come to the UAE or Saudi Arabia and have full rights, responsibilities, and legal protections of citizens who’ve lived there all their lives. If we had no borders, practically speaking, and everyone could move wherever the work was as long as they could learn the language(s) of the majority.

Globally open labour markets and globally-organizing union movements would take people out of the yoke of corporate wage slavery and state suppression as second or third-class citizens. Or worse.

Globalization can open our society to fantastic, unpredictable new paths of cultural creativity as traditions, languages, ideas, and moralities all merge and interact.

At this point, Earth’s progressives have to accept that globalization is a fact. You can’t turn it back now, without becoming the kind of xenophobic racist you hate. Those among the left who are taking advantage of the current moment to turn back economic globalization are racists and xenophobes. So screw them.

The 21st century left needs to accept that full-on anti-globalization is a failure. It’s been co-opted by some of the West’s most brutal racists and revanchists. The task of progressive politics now is to do globalization right. Globalization for the multitude.

A Principle Without Limits, Jamming, 21/05/2018

So I read this fascinating and very sad article about Alan Dershowitz. He pretty much single-handedly invented the political theory and ideology of civil libertarianism, the activist path of the principles in John Rawls’ liberalism of ideal fairness.

Very short version – because I actually want to keep today’s post short. The article is a pretty detailed argument, based on Dershowitz’s history and approach to his career, that his natural ego is leading him into a substantive mistake. He doesn't want to leave the media limelight yet, and so he’s continuing to advocate for the rights of a prominent individual against government scrutiny.

Trouble is, that individual is Donald Trump. Now Dershowitz’s rhetoric has gotten pretty slippery, probably because the atmosphere of his more frequent conversations on FOX News* will tend to push you into more heated casual declarations than you’d make if you were able to think for a second.

* If you're going to defend Donald Trump, then this is the only American network that’ll have you on quite so regularly.

Consider for a moment what kind of person would think intuitively
that civil liberties are always of absolute importance. It would be
someone who never had to question seriously his access to the
material grounds of all the other liberties he needed.

Read the article as Dershowitz becoming an example of the limits of his own ideas. Ever since the brief flowering of open naziism in the United States last summer, circles on the left have been talking about the paradox of tolerance.

If you're going to allow free speech for all perspectives, that has to include perspectives that all those who live differently than me deserve no rights. So the liberal, taking his views to the absolute, can allow people to destroy liberalism. People can elect a dictator at the ballot box who will never allow them to exercise democracy again. And they’ll want it.

A liberal can’t conceive of someone who would want to be enslaved, or would want to enslave others. They’re unable to conceive of enemies.

The nationalist right can definitely conceive of enemies. I see it every day in the everyday talk of nationalist circles online. Their entire political agenda is based on identifying the enemy and purging it from their society.

So we on the progressive side have to overcome both problems. We can’t think of the nationalist as an enemy on the racializing terms that they do – that would make us nationalist. We also can’t accept the liberal paradox of tolerance – that would leave what social freedoms we have open to attack.

Our answer is that we recognize our enemies in those who would define politics as eradicating enemies. And instead of eradicating them, we neuter them. We block them from building power. Instead of a strong leader, show them a greasy criminal. Mock their dehumanizing rhetoric as the bullying it always was.

Always encourage people to conceive of the power of their own potential, their own ability to reshape the world if they join in the effort even a little. Let society become revolutionary.

Kill Your Idols VI: Needing to Get It Right, Research Time, 14/08/2017

I find it sadly fitting that I’ve spent the last week talking about the complex connections between state violence and fascist militias, then we get hit with an actual fucking Nazi riot. The fascist revolution of America appears to be here.

See, all these thoughts in my all-over-the-place analysis of patriotism’s psychology all had a central point. I’m drifting around a really curious concept of hegemony that Antonio Gramsci develops.

This weekend makes me wonder if the United States of America has
reached a turning point, whether it's no longer possible for extremist
white nationalists and multicultural pluralist democrats to live in the
same country and live loyally to the same institutions. It could be
either the beginning of the end of the American experiment, or the
threshold of a new era of freedom and justice. Or it could end up
being just one more flare-up in a long and terrifying history of
American racist violence.

There’s been a ton written on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in the last several decades of academic political philosophy. So I don’t want to get into a discussion over whether it was really Gramsci’s, or whether Anderson’s books got it right. Because I’ve been thinking this while reading some of Perry Anderson’s books on Gramsci and the Western left-wing tradition.

He’s a brilliant historian of ideas. The only thing that frustrates me about his work is that he’s such an accurate historian that I have no clue what his own philosophical ideas are. At least not in that abstract sphere of pure concepts.

I read his book on the politics and philosophies of the Indian nationalist movement against British rule, and he had plenty of his own ideas. But those were about political stances – the Hindu-centric nationalism of the Congress Party caused disasters, ethnic cleansing, and immense suffering among Indian Muslims and Dalits.

Anderson is, as you’d expect, not cool with that. His ideas are in the insight of his moral stances in his writing. But when it comes to philosophical concepts, he’s a very meticulous mapper of others’ territory. He doesn’t build his own worlds.

So his map of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is very insightful. In his long essay The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci, Anderson was very faithful to Gramsci’s ideas as they are in the text. He even describes them as paradoxical and contradictory because Gramsci developed a very slippery conception of hegemony.

Sometimes, he spoke of hegemony as if it were about state control and influence of other states through the military. Domestically, sometimes he thought of it as state violence. Sometimes, it was the soft power of the state through cultural institutions. Sometimes, hegemony was ideological. Sometimes, it was just a matter of sanctioned gun violence.

It was rather difficult for me to find a good picture of Perry
Anderson where he didn't look kind of depressed. These days, I can
understand where he's coming from.

If the meaning of a term seems to contradict itself, then it can’t be valid. Fine for a historian, but it’s a rule that makes for terrible philosophy. Oddly enough, Anderson's big history book on the Western Marxist tradition more generally tends to give Gramsci more slack on this hegemony concept. Maybe because his focus is on how the concept changed over time and place.

Look again at all those definitions of hegemony that occur across the Prison Notebooks. What do they have in common? The projection of power as the ability to control and influence. There’s always a hub to that projection, a centre of power.

That power centre is sometimes very blunt, and its projection simple and direct. Think about the Russian Revolution of 1917. It could succeed relatively easily (once it got super-lucky) because there was only one vector of power – from the Czar to the masses through the aristocracy and military elite.

Power centres can also be dispersed. Think about a country and society like the contemporary United States. Institutions and networks of influence all over the country spread a morality of patriotism, love of country and the institutions of the state.

Americans don’t believe in this simply as a matter of following orders – schools, television networks, cultural industries of all sorts spread the moralities of American patriotism, America as an ideology. That ideology itself can come in contradictory forms – racists and pluralists can exist in the same country. They have for centuries.

They’re loyal to the same institutions – American democracy, just as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison described in the Federalist Papers. Even though they believe in radically different moral visions of what those institutions should do.

But it’s always a network of control and influence with a hub, the state institutions themselves. That’s the most philosophically tantalizing take I can find, figure out, or think of for Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. It’s the one that I’ll use in my own work.

Hegemony as the dominant projection of loyalty to a state.

When Federal Government Was Built to Protect the People, Research Time, 04/07/2017

Here's the thing that seriously bugs me when I read The Federalist Papers in the 21st century. Those who most loudly claim fealty to the founders of the United States are in fact the ones who betray most blatantly their vision for how the country’s government should work.

I’m talking about the founders’ philosophical vision for the country in the second constitution, the one they’re still running the US government on.

Happy July 4 to any readers in America. It'll always be a land of
possibility and hope.

Knowing what I’ve learned over the last few years about the libertarian right over the last few years, I think I can make a few general statements. At least I can make some general statements about the intensely anti-Obama, pro-Republican libertarian right.

One. They genuinely believe that the federal government has very few politically and ethically legitimate rights against them, that most laws, taxes, and domestic government departments are immoral because they impinge on individual people’s freedom.

Its most philosophically consistent form is the writing of Robert Nozick. Its most extreme political form is the anti-government militias of people like Amon Bundy, who carry out semi-competent occupations of federal nature reserve. Its most deranged extreme political form is the sovereign citizen movement.

Two. Most also fall in line with the ‘states’ rights’ message from right-wing organizations. This seems to be an incidental detail, but reading Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, you see how important it is.

Hamilton’s argument for having a strong federal government was to protect each individual American.* The main sources of tyranny was in the governments of individual states.

They all know the helicopters are looking at them. He's doing it to
flaunt his power. He knows that in today's America, he can do this,
be roasted in social media, and get away with it.

* Yes, he’s only talking about white people. Bracket this for now, just as we do with every other Western political theorist who was only ever talking about white people. Say citizen just as far as understanding the concept goes. Racial justice would bring Hamilton’s country in line with Hamilton’s ideas.

Governors would use their powers to seek corrupt privileges while denying their citizens even a functioning government. State legislatures would deny huge swaths of their citizens the ability to vote or even get basic services. Among other everyday injustices.

A strong federal government was required to defend the rights of citizens from these abuses, and maintain the political and social equality of all citizens across all the states.

Today, so many think of centralizing power in a large federal government as dangerous to individual liberty and freedom. And certainly quite a few federal powers can do a lot to take away people’s liberty and freedom.

But the most dangerous abusers of government power were the local governments, the petty tinpots.

Open Minds to See Necessary Cruelties, Jamming, 30/06/2017

This week has turned out to be a lot busier than I expected, so I wasn’t able to blog as much as I wanted. I finished reading a really intriguing book by Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology.

I thought I’d check it out for my subway reading on the way to work. I want to learn more about life and politics in India today, since so many of my students are Indian newcomers.

Anderson’s book is a break from a 1200 page trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz, which I picked up to return to my habit of reading one ridiculously difficult book each year. The prose is beautiful, but I can’t take 1200 pages of early 20th century Egyptian men’s crises of conscience without a breather.

I had to make this the lead photo. He's just so cute!

So there are plenty of ideas to catch you up on. But I was wandering through the news looking for information about the wider world. As I do sometimes. I came across two really illuminating pieces from very different ends of the political spectrum.

I get a lot of my news from Twitter. I follow a bunch of left-wing people and a few right-wing people, including a few women who work at the Cato Institute and the always-sanctimonious Grover Norquist.

I also follow journalists and media folks who I know personally, and a few friends who are just guys and girls with Twitter accounts who like tweeting about stuff. But I always keep that crowd just diverse enough that I hear stuff from outside my bubble of similar political views.

Gabriel Winant wrote a genuinely insightful article about what the new working class is today in America. Democratic Party leaders, he says, focus on an outdated version of the working class that was minted in the mid-20th century. But that class is itself largely of colour now.

So it’s an utter mistake to think of minority outreach as separate from class-based outreach. This profound mistake in understanding demographic categories has become a catastrophe for the Democratic Party, since they no longer mobilize class-based politics among the people who need it.

Because those people are now largely all black, and the campaign strategists still see blackness overwriting their class needs.

I also learned what needlesticks are, the biggest health risk from cutting corners in the healthcare sector in America.

I learned an intriguing international development from a link to The American Conservative that I saw from one of my libertarian think tank writers. It told how Jared Kushner has caused another serious fracture in the executive branch of the United States.

He simply looks like an idiot all the time. And you know what they
say about people who look like idiots.

This time, it’s because Kushner has such close friends in the government of the United Arab Emirates. They seem to have pushed him to bring Donald Trump over to their side in the fight to isolate Qatar.

That was a huge mistake because Qatar actually has been a strong American ally in their fight against ISIS and in other ridiculous military interventions around the Arab world. They bombed the shit out of Libya very effectively, and let the Americans use their massive air force base.

Rex Tillerson and James Mattis are desperately trying to get the Saudis and Emiratis to play nice with the Emir of Qatar again, because this fight is encouraging the Qataris to get closer with Iran and Turkey, and we can’t have that, now can we.

Of course, Mark Perry was a little more dry in his language than me. Maybe didn’t mock it so much. But that’s why I think the right-wing media is best for learning about the different dimensions of war diplomacy in the Middle East.

Left-wing media outlets get too incensed over the fact that the United States is involved in such ridiculous entanglements in the Middle East. So I can never get past the outrage to actual analysis of what the hell is going on.

I need to read the work of someone deranged enough that they can write dispassionately about global war to understand the causes and connections of global war.

A Disturbing Example of Eternal Recurrence, Research Time, 28/06/2017

I’m making a joke with this title, but it does genuinely allude to a curious feeling I kept getting as I read The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton will describe a major national debate that was gripping the country in the 1780s.

And it will be pretty much the same ideas tearing at the country as Americans face today. I have a feeling this idea will appear somewhere in the Utopias manuscript – How can we believe in progress if we can’t even solve problems with literally centuries of effort?

Mike Pence is experiencing an odd recurrence of his own. I don't
know how meaningful this coincidence is, but I find it funny. Pence
once represented Indiana's 2nd Congressional district, the same as
Earl Landgrebe in the early 1970s, one of the most dedicated and
slavish Nixon loyalists.

I don't want to lean too much on the old idea that eternal recurrence is a straight-ahead ontological principle either. There’s too much about what we know of reality itself – I’m talking actual cosmological and physical knowledge – for me to say that cyclical time is the truth.

I don’t mean the idea that cyclical time is true, like a fact. I mean, the idea of cyclical time being the truth, a fundamental definitive aspect of a whole way of understanding the world. Let’s leave that stuff.

If Nietzsche is an inspiration for Utopias, it’s in how he tells us what real social progress amounts to. His story of the donkey, lion, and child is the model. A donkey accepts his lot and lumbers along though life. A lion throws off his shackles in rage. A child looks around those ruins and builds a new world.

We want to recognize that we can fix the injustice in our world, not just labour under it in hopelessness. You have the power to overthrow an unjust culture and society, but to lock down your victory, you need to build a new culture together.

American history can make you seriously pessimistic about this power. Despite centuries of activism, no one can even manage to throw off the shackles of racism. They only overthrow one version to see it replaced. America isn’t a slave society, but they went through nearly a century of Jim Crow and instituted mass incarceration.

Can we imagine for ourselves a force so
powerful in our souls that we can throw off
the burdens of the cosmos itself? Must we
always be donkeys before the cosmic
insignificance of humanity?

The return of injustice happens when people can’t or won’t build a culture of justice.

Specifically, what freaks me out in this instance of Hamilton’s wisdom? He describes the argument, as Americans were fighting over the country’s new constitution, against the federal government having strong taxation powers. It’s the same libertarian argument I hear so often today against government taxation powers.

Not the consistent, nuanced, and complex libertarian argument you’ll see coming from think tank philosophers. I’m talking about the mass media talking point – which drives so many ordinary folks to the voting booth and the public squares – that the federal government must be starved of taxes.

The argument: Federal government powers will inevitably be abused, used to oppress people instead of set them free. Even if the federal government avoids corruption by authoritarians or thieves, it will still oppress people by crushing local cultures and individual citizens under a single ideology and identity for all Americans.

In the 1780s, opponents of a strong federal government made an argument of cultural diversity. Not cultural diversity with our divisions today – differences of religion, ethnicity, sexuality, gender. Back then, it was the cultural diversity of the peoples who composed the Thirteen.

Rhode Island, Maryland, New Jersey, and all the others. These were each distinct societies, deserving of their independence from the homogenizing identity of “America.”

Today, we call it state’s rights. Am I onto something?

Can You Rely on Human Goodness? Research Time, 22/06/2017

A short post today. A fable from Alexander Hamilton about the right and wrong kinds of freedom. Paraphrased from Federalist #23.

So the first constitution of the United States – the confederal constitution – had a specific process for how the national government was to build its army and national defence forces.

In that process, the federal government would make requisition orders out to the individual states. Each of them would give weapons, soldiers, and money according to their needs.

The USS Constitution, built in the earliest days of the republic, at
a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where else could all of
that money come from but the American government itself?

The states would, of course, give freely and faithfully to their federal government. After all, these requests would be for the sake of national defence – the security of all American states acting in solidarity through the efforts and leadership of their federal government.

Such strong bonds of friendship across American state leaders lasted just as long as we would all expect. It took barely a decade for all the Thirteen respond to such requests with mocking laughter.

Every state was a miser. All the leaders from the Carolinas to New England – and especially Delaware – refused to give more than a few trinkets, some spare nickels trickling up from the state treasuries to the capitol.

Where did their virtue and patriotism go? Never trust a leader to be a virtuous patriot. As soon as someone hits the governor’s mansion, that treasury was only for them and their people. Certainly not those people, he’d say, talking about a fellow American. A New Yorker and a Virginian say it to each other.

If the federal government didn’t have the power to raise its own national defence, the leaders of states would starve them of it. So alienated from their fellow Americans people were in the 1780s.

Should Michigan Matter More Than the Michganders? Research Time, 21/06/2017

There are moments when you read The Federalist Papers and you see a bizarre flash into the future.

It’s as if reading the text, for an instant, merges the moment of Alexander Hamilton at the constitutional conferences in New York and Philadelphia, with a moment of Donald Trump laughing, belching in the Oval Office tweeting more and more gloats about his victory.

When Trump won, one of the things that drove non-Trumpist Americans out of their minds was the structure of the electoral college. Understandably – it’s the institution that allowed the candidate who lost the popular vote to win the election. 2016 is the second time this has happened this century so far, and we’re not even one-fifth through it.

A key message of Donald Trump's campaign was encouraging
Americans to revel in open contempt for the poor and ethnic
minorities. Trump won a narrow victory in Michigan, and the
mechanisms of the electoral college resulted in that difference of a
few thousand votes giving the weight of the entire population to him.
Here, a Flint resident carries bottled water.

We’ve all seen plenty of explanations as to how this happens. The electoral college is a form of federal vote weighting that assigns a specific value to each state in the actual institutional votes for the Presidency.

The people of the United States don’t, technically speaking, have one single national election. They have fifty national elections, one in each state. And the state elections determine which candidate that state will throw its weight behind. The electoral votes are functions of a state’s population, and it doesn’t matter if a candidate smashes it or barely ekes out a win – all the electoral votes go to that candidate.

You might be thinking, “Why in the hell do they have this kind of system?” Well, it’s because the United States almost fell apart at the moment of its birth as a country. That’s what you learn reading The Federalist Papers. I don’t think a lot of Americans know this.

The original confederal constitution of the United States vested all the non-explicit powers of government in the individual states. So the confederal government couldn’t do a damn thing. So the second US constitution was written in this moment of intense tension between federalists and all-state indépendistes.

The electoral college’s structure and rules was one of the few concessions that the original indépendistes of the United States could squeeze out of the federalists.

Hamilton argues it well. Democracy must rest a government’s institutional power ultimately in the hands of the people. A government that rests its own power in the people will be the one that inspires patriotic devotion, the sense of community that comes from a common government.

In the first US constitution, the governments that connected their powers with the people were the individual states. The federal government could only act domestically through the mediation of the states. Hamilton warned that this would result in huge inequalities of power from state to state, and erode the sense of common community that the revolution had instilled in white Americans from Maine to the Carolinas.

The electoral college was one last part of the American federal government that mediated the actions and votes of the people through the individual states as entities.

In this century so far, it’s helped exacerbate violent and resentment tensions between different states and regions of the US, as its mathematical quirks have enabled two disastrous presidents to ascend to state power.

I can easily imagine Alexander Hamilton telling the people of the United States, “I told you so.”

What’s Another Word for Getting Big? Research Time, 20/06/2017

A curious idea came to me as I was reading through some of James Madison’s Federalist Papers. If I were to think about them historically – and this is just a riff, really – I’d see them as a forerunner of the pragmatists.

I don't just mean this in the ordinary sense of the term, that they’ll adapt their thinking to changing situations and generally apply their thought to problems in immediate political and social problems. Of course, they did. But that’s not all that was going on.

Sometimes, I think the only -ism I could ever adopt as a thinker is pragmatist.* Our thinking is rooted in understanding the changeable, contingent, material world. So we strive for our thinking to be as flexible as reality. Not conform to some perfect imagined symmetry.

Just because you wrote more of the papers, that doesn't mean you have
to be the star of the show.

* I just wish academics would stop assuming that all the name means, is that I write commentary on William James, Charles Peirce, and John Dewey.

The world is as it is, and philosophy develops different ways of thinking to deal with that. Philosophy is the craftsmanship of concepts, our mind’s tools. I see that idea in the work of Hamilton and Madison. But it’s especially at the forefront for Madison. If Hamilton is the Federalists’ political scientist and sociologist, Madison is the book’s philosopher.

Hamilton argues for his conclusions through very insightful and philosophically productive analysis of ongoing and oncoming political problems of the post-independence Thirteen Colonies.

Madison will argue for the same conclusions, but through analyzing the possibilities for the structures of communities themselves.

He attacks an argument against large-scale federal government. It has nothing to do with immediate political and military consequences. It’s that the only functional free societies in human history have been the size of small cities. So only small cities can govern themselves democratically.

Madison’s argument was that democratic possibility doesn’t depend on size, but on communication. To deliberate as a public in ancient Greece or medieval Germany and Italy, you had to show up in the same town square and talk to each other.

By the time of revolutionary North America, they’d developed the technology for detailed communication across entire continents. The same public deliberation could carry on through the first continental-scale mass media – printed newspaper and an educated society.**

** Educated among the whole people, at their time; less so among the three-fifths people.

The same media effectively carried out democratic governance in the same way. Election machinery and fast channels of communication between a town and a capital city connected South Carolina to New York, Vermont, and Maryland within a few days.

The mechanisms for representatives to reach a general assembly and communicate with the people for whom they were responsible in government could reach longer than the walk down the road. Detailed communication across continents was possible by the American Revolution.

You could create a public of millions with trains and the postal service. What’s important isn’t size, but the speed and density of communication. Find the difference that makes the difference. You may need new ideas to do it – a butcher can always make a better knife. That’s philosophy.

Grinding the Great Plains in the Teeth of Tank Treads, Research Time, 16/06/2017

The American conquest of North America was more than just a war. The United States is the oldest democracy still functioning. Many times, it’s merely creaked along.

Civil wars, assassinations, uprisings of political violence. Don’t forget the festering wounds of the country’s birth defects – the genocide of indigenous peoples, slavery, then Klan terrorism, Jim Crow, then the War on Drugs.

As the United States government spread out from the original Thirteen Colonies to conquer French, Spanish, and Indigenous territory all the way to the Pacific Coast, the armies and militias carried the name of the USA. But the government came after the conquest.

A mass grave from the killing of hundreds of Lakota warriors and
civilians at Wounded Knee in what is now South Dakota.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #8, describes how the conquest of the rest of the American continent would require war machines. It would not be accomplished through the authoritative violence of the state.

They could conquer the American west only through the high-speed brute force of the war machines – nomadic forces spreading at their own will across the continent’s territory. Only the British and Iroquois were able to hold them off. Other than that, these militias and armies flashed across the continent in wave after wave.

The violence that settled the American West was a force that needed no sanction but its own acts. Nothing enfolds or controls this violence – it’s a pure desire that goes where it will, destroying all that it encounters.

This is the violence of Judge Holden. But where Cormac McCarthy read the conquest as a religious experience – the reign of satan in a world that’s become a continent-wide forest fire – an attentive ontologist sees only the fire itself.

There was no real agency directing the expansion. Yes, there were laws and declarations from Washington, territorial and city governments appeared. But the genocidal violence was autonomous. Violence was the agent, and people were the expression of violence.

We’re accustomed to thinking of forces and processes the other way around. But the war machine of American conquest is a force that becomes the space itself. Its violence moves as space emptying itself of all existing structures of humanity.

Tribes, existing empires, peoples, and people all pushed farther and farther until the sheer weight of intensifying violence grinds all these subjects into particles indistinguishable from the plains.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called the war machine the creation of a nomad space. It’s an effective name, but it does an injustice to nomadic peoples themselves, who’ve too often been crushed by such machines. Just ask a Bedouin.

American people too often depict their old west with too much virtue.

No, what I’m riffing on here is the “smooth space that gnaws, and tends to grow, in all directions . . . they themselves make them grow . . . make the desert no less than they are made by it . . . The variability, the polyvocality of directions, is an essential feature of smooth spaces of the rhizome type, and it alters their cartography.” These are words from A Thousand Plateaus.

The war machine is space and territory itself become violence. A militia reconstitutes land itself as a bloodbath, soaking the soil until the beaches and cliffs of the Pacific coast. The only limit to expansion was the end of land itself. The hungry consumption of violence grows the territory that it razes and fragments into particles.

This was the American expansion west from the Thirteen Colonies, the story of how the United States got its continent-sized shape.
• • •
Alexander Hamilton wrote about the danger that the coming conquest of the American west posed the people of the United States. If, in 1789, the citizens of the Thirteen Colonies decided to split the union into multiple states and confederacies, Hamilton said it would tear the American people apart.

Yeah, like I said, there’d be the internecine wars over territory as the different North American countries expanded west. But it wouldn’t be the same as the conflicts among the different South American states. They mostly had border wars, wars over small territorial possessions, wars of independence, or civil wars.

No, the United States’ expansion from 1810 to the start of its civil war was not the imposition of order. It was the wholesale cleansing of a continent’s territory through the annihilation of all societies, organizations, and cultures but that which extended from the Thirteen Colonies.

The state came later, with its sheen of law. The myth was that the USA’s expansion brought the law to a lawless land. The land was only lawless because they cleared away all the old laws first.