Two World Orders Burning Up, Research Time, 16/02/2016

Globalization has been a buzzword since I was a kid. But I don’t know how many people really understand what this process actually is. 

Globalization is the end of the power of the state, when the flow of trade, investment, and labour across the Earth moves so fast, with such high volume and intensity, that states can no longer control what happens in their own territory. Unless they want to go the full North Korea and become a basket case.

State armies hit their highest power when they conquered
the world as the engines of imperialism. But they
couldn't last forever.

You read Antonio Negri, like I’m doing, or maybe read any critical history or philosophy of the development of the state. You see a process where autonomous cities and towns were taken under the authority of massive militaries controlled by kings. 

After the kings consolidated their power over formerly free people and against each other, they turned to the rest of the world to find more riches and power. Even in those early days before the kings and elites of Spain, France, Holland, and England cared about any lands overseas, imperialism happened in Europe itself. Imperialism is the consolidation of state control.

That consolidation doesn’t just happen with pure military might. It’s inherently unstable for the same reason workers never respect a boss who does nothing but bully and abuse them. People chafe at the explicit violence of control. 

So the most effective forms of control are ideologies that obscure what our interests – freedom from dictatorial, state, or military control – really are. That’s why we grow up praising our ethnic group, feeling national pride, feeling hatred, fear, and resentment toward different ethnic groups. 

Such people worship their state as the ultimate form of solidarity. It’s a false solidarity because it excludes people on the grounds of a fiction. A false, mutant, violent solidarity, because a working man sees more of himself in common with the pampered oligarchs and heirs of his own nation than the fellow working man of a different colour, language, or culture. But it’s still a solidarity.  

That's why interracial love is such a radical, transformative act. It makes the most fundamental parts of your own life – your family and your children – a living up-yours to values of ethnic purity and violent nationalism. Your very life breaks boundaries.

Globalization breaks boundaries. Even though we may decry its own injustices – its global exploitation more intense than workers have ever been exploited – we can’t understand globalization unless we also accept its real vectors of freedom.

From the anti-globalization protests of Seattle in 1999.

The embrace of exclusive solidarity as a response to globalization trades the violence of nationalism for the violence of exploitation. And a truly global resurgence of imperialism – states with enormous armies conquering whole continents – would destroy globalization. 

Negri acknowledges this, and decades of critical thinkers (Negri particularly cites Rosa Luxemburg) have understood it. Imperialism is about erecting borders and subsuming other lands and peoples within them. Globalization, or as Negri calls it Empire, is about breaking down and eroding borders. 

But it’s too late for a resurgence of imperialism. The First World War was imperialism’s first major moment of self-destruction. Imperialism began with the consolidation of the modern state in the European wars of the 1600s. It came to a crashing halt when those states finally ran up against each other as they parcelled out the world.

Today, we’re dependent on forces beyond the control of any one state for our prosperity and our basic economic functions. I talk to a lot of my friends who, like me, are suffering from shitty economics – jobs are unstable, many underpay, and many of us face serious issues building a livelihood.

Many of us blame the government, either the last one or or the current one, depending on your existing beliefs and proclivities. But when you look at the way our global economy works, it’s really the wrong place to blame. The Prime Minister or Premiers, for example, can’t save the economies of Alberta or Newfoundland from a cratering oil price.

That’s a globalized process. And it’s beyond the control of any one state. The politics that responds to these globalized processes can’t stop at the state alone, if we want it to be effective. We need a truly global movement.

How to End Racism (No, Really), Research Time, 15/02/2016

Something you notice after you live in Toronto, or any city like it, for a while is that you see a lot of interracial couples. And because there are so many ethnic groups around this city, you see pairings from all these different combinations. 

These pairings have been happening for more than a generation already. Enough time has passed that there are already a significant number of people of a mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity background walking around continuing to mix traditionally separate ethnic lineages.

For all the mass racism that's sprung up throughout
America in response to his presidency, the very
existence of Barack Obama and people like him of
mixed ethnic heritage is a sign of humanity's
utopian possibilities.

This is utterly fantastic. Not just in that general warm fuzzy sense of everyone leaving racism behind in a funky spirit of gettin’ it on. But it’s that too. There’s a much more profound social and cultural transformation going on in this generation of ethnic blending and blurring. And it’s awesome.

In the last chapters of Empire, Antonio Negri gets a little utopian about the shape of the more anarchist alternatives to our current global economic order threaded with injustice.* You might think that these kinds of utopias are inconceivable. That we’ll always have a global economy based on exploitation and injustice.

* Though he goes into the real detail in the next two books in his trilogy, Multitude and Commonwealth. That’s coming soon.

Well, I call shenanigans. Because the best way to argue that we can achieve the unimaginable is to remind you of how we very recently achieved something that was culturally unimaginable to the same degree.

Now, I’m not saying racism is over. We no more ended racism with an increased frequency of inter-ethnic marriage and dating than we did when the United States elected a black President.

But people in a society where a significant number of folks come from mixed racial heritages is going to have a very hard time believing in any essentialisms about race. And anyone who knows them is going to have a similarly hard time believing in race essentialism.

Anything beyond amusing stereotypes and cultural jokes will be more easily seen for the divisive, hateful bullshit that it’s always been. Racism has only ever been believed because we’ve chosen to believe it. Throughout most of our modern history, we’ve let our drives to tribalism and division overcome our drive to love and oneness.

That desire for unity in the massive diversity of humanity is more important now than ever. The worst decision we can make in fighting the destructiveness of globalization is embrace localism, national unity, and the purity of social isolation as an antidote. 

Globalization became so powerful because those processes developed the ability to break down nationalisms and state-territorial boundaries. Any attempt to revive nationalism won’t be an antidote to globalization because globalizing forces already have the ability to break national autarkies down incredibly easily.

No, if you want to succeed against globalization, you have to globalize yourself. The utopian movement that works to heal the injustices of global capitalism – the slave labour, exploitation, oligarchical domination, massive ecological destruction – can only work if it exists on the same global plane of activity.

So we have to be individuals living our globalized lives, building relationships and friendships around the world. And procreating. Procreating people whose identities necessarily have to break with the old boundaries of the past. Love itself creates people whose very existence is a slap in the face to racist beliefs. 

Toronto – to take the example physically closest to me at the moment – is becoming a city where ethnicity is no more or less important in drawing one person to another than hair colour or tone of voice. Love now grows between people who, only a few generations ago, would have been considered different species in mainstream popular belief.

That utopian achievement turned out to be perfectly possible. No reason the power of human love and our creativity in building communities together can’t achieve a further utopia.

• • •

I once met somebody who told me that he felt sorry for all the ethnically blurred people in the world, because there was always going to be racism and they could never avoid being the victims of racism. 

People from their mother’s race would hate them, and people from their father’s race would hate them. So it was best to build families only with those who had the same skin colour as you.

Man, fuck that guy.

This Mad British Monster II: “He’s My Hero, Man” Jamming, 13/02/2016

This weekend, I’m back to my series on the production eras of Doctor Who. After pausing it for weeks and writing the last part second. And again, the history of Doctor Who has been catalogued for decades by better qualified people than me. 

Katy Manning's Jo Grant was a key part of the Letts-
Dicks era aesthetic. She was cast as a generic screaming
peril monkey companion, because Terrance could be
pretty sexist sometimes. But they cast an actress with
the bubbly energy to take over the whole screen like
an adventurous elf.

But there's a development in Doctor Who of the 1970s that changed the show forever. The Doctor became an action hero. 

Now, the Doctor had been a hero since pretty much the seventh episode just after the start of 1964. But he wasn’t an action hero. The original TARDIS crews of the Doctor, Barbara, Ian, Susan, and then Vicki were ensemble casts. 

William Hartnell played the role as a mischievous wizard. In Hartnell’s actual stories on TV, it was only his last full season that moved his character to the centre of the cast. And this was under a producer whose approach did the character few favours, either outright losing, winning with unacceptable costs, or standing up for racist regimes. 

It was really only in The War Machines that Hartnell’s Doctor played the lead hero unambiguously, though we can write all kinds of ancillary stories and fan fiction can explore his character in that role. Patrick Troughton’s Doctor was unambiguously heroic, but always maintained a similar aura of the elfin wizard or mad scientist.

Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was a clear, in-your-face action hero. He played a large role in shaping his own performance, but Doctor Who’s creative producers themselves had similar ideas about the character.

Terrance Dicks, script editor during the Pertwee years, was probably the most traditional adventure writer ever to work for Doctor Who. You can see it most clearly in the novelizations of televised stories, many of which he wrote, and which have a cracking, fast pace typical of mid-20th century young adult books targeted toward boys.

Barry Letts on the left, Terrance Dicks on the right.

Producer Barry Letts accepted this action-oriented direction for the show as part of his radical transformation of Doctor Who. That radical change was a product of necessity, as the Troughton era was very nearly Doctor Who’s last.

The highs of the Troughton era (The Macra Terror, The Power of the Daleks, The Evil of the Daleks, The Enemy of the World, The Mind Robber, The War Games) were very high indeed. But the psychedelic values and tone that Troughton’s weirdest stories carried clashed with the priorities of the producers to make a straight-ahead action show to compete with American imports of Adam West’s Batman.

The result was a fascinating, but very uneven and schizophrenic show whose audience in 1969 was just over a third of what it was in 1966. Letts’ mission was to save the show.

So just in time for Adam West’s Batman to stop production in 1970, Letts, Dicks, and Pertwee launched a Doctor Who that could have won the competition. Keeping the Doctor mostly on Earth for three seasons and giving him a large supporting cast of camp soldiers tasked with protecting the Earth from science-fictional threats paid enormous dividends throughout the era.

It was full-colour, it was action-packed, it had a large recurring cast that included a regular villain in Roger Delgado’s Master. It fit in perfectly with the spy-fi shows that were popular at the time. 

There's a 12-minute video on YouTube of Jon Pertwee's
Doctor having an adventure in anime style. If I ever get
the opportunity to make whatever Doctor Who property
I want, I think I'll pair up with a comics artist and make
a Jon Pertwee Doctor Who manga. The visual weirdness
of his era is perfectly suited to the style.

Letts and Dicks produced Doctor Who with the high octane style of Adam Adamant, the camp fun of The Avengers, the surreality of The Prisoner, a visual style that was of a piece with the fiery madness of Ziggy Stardust. Even when Letts-Dicks-Pertwee era Doctor Who fell on its face, it did so with such a spectacular insanity that you couldn’t look away.

And Jon Pertwee’s Doctor was the egotistical patrician middle-aged drag queen kung-fu master whose unflappable charm held all this craziness together. He was frequently the (didactic) voice of Letts’ firm ethics, which had fascinating roots in his peace activism, vegetarian morality, and Buddhist religion. It made this Doctor a wonderfully insane assemblage.

But every style runs out of steam eventually and nothing lasts forever. By Letts and Dicks’ fifth year at the helm, they were tired of the grind, and everyone was demoralized by the death of Roger Delgado in a car crash as The Green Death wrapped filming.

So Dicks ceded his script editor’s chair to his era’s best regular writer, Robert Holmes. And Letts helped his successor’s transition, Philip Hinchcliffe. They took Doctor Who into an explicit horror sci-fi style. 

Their stories were designed to frighten, a combination of H. P. Lovecraft’s existential terror at the alien unknowable and a visceral body horror that’s of a low-budget piece with the masterworks of David Cronenberg.

At the centre of it all was Tom Baker, the most famous and longest-running of the classic series Doctors. He had a charisma (and an ego as a performer) that put him at the centre of every scene he was in. 

Tom Baker and the first appearance of Davros, in
Genesis of the Daleks.

Every actor who appeared with him in Doctor Who had to tune their performance in relation to his. This was a virtue in creating a strong, attractive leading man for a show that anchored the BBC’s Saturday night programming. 

And the best scripts put this unflappable anchor in dangerous, horrifying situations – the terror came from the fact that this man was taken from his usual total control over a situation to a position of immense danger. 

That was the drama of the Hinchcliffe era to me. You can talk about the aesthetic of horror pastiche in a sci-fi context, which does define their style. But the narrative hooks of the best Hinchcliffe stories are about making you feel the real danger the characters experience when even the supremely confident Tom Baker gets terrified.

Ultimately, that narrative hook brought the Hinchcliffe years to its premature end. Britain’s highest-profile moralistic Christian whack job Mary Whitehouse had, since the horror pastiche aesthetic took hold on Doctor Who, coordinated a letter writing campaign to the BBC calling for its end.

Whitehouse considered the only appropriate programming for the BBC to be 24 hours of G-rated inspirational programming about Christ and British patriotism, with Blyton-level pablum for the children. But she was able to mobilize enough of her fellow repressed ogres to make BBC brass very uncomfortable.

So they caved. Hinchcliffe took over the cop show Z Cars, and Z Cars’ producer Graham Williams took over the production of Doctor Who. Williams had a mandate to tone down the horror of the show. So he rebuilt Doctor Who as a sci-fi adventure-comedy. 

The Williams era also saw the first Doctor-Companion
romantic relationship backstage, between Tom Baker
and his co-star Lalla Ward. They'd go on to get married
and divorced after both left the show. It's now become
accepted in official Doctor Who lore that the Doctor
and Romana themselves had a romantic relationship
during her Lalla Ward incarnation, the invasion of
real life into a fictional world.

This resulted in notes from the BBC brass to tone down the comedy, as executives felt Doctor Who was becoming too silly, at least according to notes from Williams’ therapist.

In terms of quality, the Williams years are something of a mixed bag. A lot of this is because the production values are terrible. Late-1970s Britain was undergoing a period of terrible inflation, and BBC budgets weren’t adjusted in kind. So the money just wasn’t going as far as it used to.

So Williams tried to help his writers develop a tone where the low budgets and largely silly effects contributed to a satirical message. A light-hearted tone that masked incisive messages, themes, and metaphors that explored the injustices of modern Britain and the modern West at every level of cultural analysis. 

Stories explored heady topics like freedom of speech in a religious society, how autocratic governments use welfare state policies to silence opposition to war crimes, the collusion of the wealthy with a violent international drug trade, and the oppression of indigenous peoples to strip natural resources from their land. 

I mean, wow! Why isn’t the Williams era remembered as the satirical tour de force that it clearly is from that description?

Because while the first two of those stories are Robert Holmes’ masterpiece The Ribos Operation and Douglas Adams’ The Pirate Planet, the other two are the disastrously made Nightmare of Eden and Robert Holmes farting up a first draft and walking away from the program with The Power of Kroll.

It takes perfectly pitched writing, acting, direction,
design, and overall on-set production to overcome the
budget difficulties that plagued British television sci-fi
in the late 1970s and create a masterpiece.

That aesthetic is actually very difficult to sustain. For one, the writer must be a genius of balancing tone and characterization while keeping the plot tight and weaving countless themes and ideas into as many different elements of the story as possible. And the rest of the production has to approach the story with the same deft skill, especially when trying to do sci-fi on a late-70s BBC budget.

That’s why the most successful and essential stories of the Williams era were by Douglas Adams.

Because that is, basically, what the Williams era was trying to do. When it was firing on all cylinders, Doctor Who was pretty much indistinguishable from Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. 

The problem is that Doctor Who has always been a massive show to make, and there are so many cylinders that getting every aspect of production up to that quality is extremely difficult. The Williams era was a wonderful idea that rarely had the resources to succeed.

Some modern writers have tackled the aesthetic of the Williams era pretty successfully. Gareth Roberts is probably the most notable, and his scripts for the Moffat era have achieved a tone and approach similar to what Adams did on his best days. But that era remains best for its few highs, and what we imagine that it could have been.

And ideally, what we can write ourselves today.

Cash Rules Everything Around Me, Research Time, 12/02/2016

You could probably guess that yesterday’s post concluded with a note of heavy irony. You could conceivably interpret me as having said that only the super-rich should be political leaders because their immense wealth makes them practically impossible to bribe.

It's been twenty-two long hard years of still struggling

Survival got me bugging, but I'm alive on arrival

I peep at the shape of the streets

And stay awake to the ways of the world cause shit is deep

A man with a dream with plans to make cream

Now, I’m pretty sure Steve was just trolling. But he did have a point.

The liberating power of money’s universal power can only go so far. Granted, it does have the power to break the most powerful engine of brute force oppression humanity has yet invented. So there’s that.

Humanity’s major economic problem over the last 20-30 years is rooted in globalization. When I say globalization in this context, I mean the opening of labour, investment, and production markets that have previously been shut to worldwide trade, either through autocratic communism or mass poverty.

This has created a serious economic problem for working people all over the world. Bernie Sanders talks about it all the time.* It’s the horribly raw deal that’s come with total market globalization.

* Donald Trump too, even though Trump scapegoats Muslims and blacks instead of talking about the real problems.

People who’ve had enough money (or access to enough money) to invest in businesses and manipulate securities markets have grown their fortunes exponentially thanks to new markets for investment in new regions like China, India, Russia, and Africa. This includes investment in real productive developments, as well as stock markets.

We the breadwinners, baby, make it peel, sippin' blunts

Smokin' guns, taught M.C.'s how these n***s living

Earn, burning word for ya, curb serving

Got you hooked by the first purchase, birds chirping

Cops listening, with the gun sitting on they lap

But freedom to invest means freedom to move labour. The labour market became truly global once China and India began to industrialize at a mass intensity. The new lowest common asking price for wages was no longer the lowest standard in the United States, Europe, or Canada. It was the lowest asking price out of the entire world.

That's literally billions more labourers in the market. So there was a massive adjustment, since the Western economy couldn’t grow at the same rates as the new entrants to the global business market. 

Newly industrializing countries have massive growth rates because, well, industry is literally being built for the first time. A city like Chicago, Philadelphia, or Toronto can only have similar economic growth rates as Shanghai or Mumbai if they, for example, tore their entire public transit system to pieces and built a whole new one from scratch.

We’re never going to do that. So not only were we outpaced by new market participants, but the only ones in a position to profit were the oligarchs of Europe and North America. 

Only they already started with the huge amounts of capital to make worthwhile investments in countries building mega-projects on the scale of their first mega-skyscrapers. The average office manager with an RRSP and a mutual fund can’t compete with investment flows that huge.

This macro-economic phenomenon, the exponential growth of the worldwide labour pool, is the engine of the staggering inequality from which working people suffer today. But controlling a process with such a global scale is beyond the power of any state's government: no government or law can ever control whether jobs are "shipped overseas." There are no democratic institutions on Earth capable of managing that macro-economic process.

Some say a drug dealers destiny is reachin the ki'

I'd rather be the man behind the door, supplying the streets

A hundred birds go out, looking like textbooks

When they wrapped and stuffed

Four days later straight cash, two million bucks

Strictly powder, no cut

Antonio Negri, in Empire, describes this exact process of Western economic stagnation, writing in the late 1990s, when things were still booming. It’s remarkably insightful, revealing aspects of the economic collapse that make perfect sense, but that most of our chattering classes never quite articulate. Even with the benefit of hindsight.

He achieves this insight by focussing on what a rapidly expanding global market with wide differences in industrialization and workers’ rights across the new territory does to the labour market overall. He watches what happens to the workers. 

Money and capital are the great equalizers because they can put a price on everything. A credit agency can give a rating to anything that exchanges money because Moody’s can evaluate its capacity to repay or service its debt. Anything can have its monetary or wider economic value calculated. A hedge fund can make a killing or lose its shirt on anything whose economic value and credit rating can change over time.

There are no exceptions to this. No individual or institution can exempt itself from the regime of exchanging money. No sovereign power for the global market. 

That is liberation. Liberation from the bureaucratic – but more often throughout history, the military – hand of authoritative state control. But that freedom still comes with extraordinary pain.

Globalization needn’t necessarily have unfolded in its new liberal model. The problem was that humanity, at the end of the Cold War, had no alternative. We just haven't figured out yet how to do socialism without states as mediators between people and their larger society. 

I strolled through the books of Job to unfold

And open bibles, instead of hoping on revivals

Calling on His name and screaming hallelujah

When he hardly knew ya, that's how the devil's fooled ya

See look into my eyes brethren, that's the lies of a Reverend

Why should you die to go to heaven?

The closest we’ve come on a global scale are institutions like the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Central Bank, and the United Nations. But they’re largely impotent to develop and implement an alternate model for globalization.

We’re on the verge of working out a kind of people power that can build whole cities working together. Bernie Sanders’ development plan for Burlington, Vermont in the 1980s may have provided one model. But we’re only learning this long after the fact, and there’s still generations of work to do before these lessons can truly go global.

Cash rules everything around me because no authority can rule cash. But the people can.

We’re All Equals Because We Can All Be Bought and Sold, Research Time, 11/02/2016

The past few posts may have given you the impression that I’m not a very pro-capitalist person. And I definitely think theres a lot of room for improvement in our economic system, as it is right now. But that doesn’t actually mean I’m anti-capitalist. At least not in the traditional or intuitive sense of the term.

I’ve never been an ordinary person. And I’ve never fit into the most typical styles of the group. An example. I remember in the early months of my friendship with G the libertarian, he accused me, with a slur of “you leftists,” of wanting Sun News off the air.*

The real greatest right-wing tv star in the world. You
don't deserve to eat Donald Trump's stinking gym
shorts, Ezra Levant, you small-timer.

* And the public spoke.

But I actually didn’t have a problem with a heavily conservative tv station being on Canadian cable. My only problems with Sun TV were that their production values made Wayne Campbell’s basement look like a Spielberg film, and they thought pointing a static camera at Ezra Levant screaming at the viewer for 20 minutes was good television.

It’s the same with my general thoughts on capitalism. It’s a perverse economic system, but it really is an engine of liberation, at least in some contexts. And some of those contexts are remarkably fundamental, even if they may sound paradoxical and weird.

Anti-capitalist that he is, Antonio Negri will praise the elements of capitalism that genuinely liberate people. 

Here's one weird, paradoxical kind of liberation you can find in capitalism. Everything has a price. Literally everything.

It goes like this. The logic of capitalism doesn’t permit exceptions. The logic of the sovereign state, in contrast, does. The sovereign state needs its institution of absolute authority (whether that’s a monarch, constitution, or parliament) to be held, at least in some fashion, above the state’s own law.

Once capital takes hold, though there’s no exceptions to its order. That order is price. Literally. Money is the universal medium of exchange – everything can be turned into anything else through the medium of money. The price system is the measurement of all these relations.

He's always known the secret of power
in capitalism. It's no secret.

Everything having its price (at least potentially) is the great equalizer. There are no exceptions from the order of everything’s relation to everything else. So there can be no sovereign power once capitalism truly takes hold. 

The ability to be bought erodes absolute power, because an absolute power needs a wall between itself and the people it orders around. A sovereign institution needs to hold itself above the fray of the people – it justifies its authority over the people largely because of its separateness. 

Remember the story Thomas Hobbes told in Leviathan about what the sovereign power was: it’s the institution that the people give power to, for the sake of protecting them. It’s constituted as an exemption, because the people cut the sovereign off from them by granting it the power of authority.

If you know an institution or a public figure can be bought, it loses its authority. Nothing more democratic than a bribe – if everyone has a price, you just need to name it. It may not be total equality, but it means we’re all the same.

How Unions Fossilized in the Global Economy, Research Time, 10/02/2016

Right now, I’m the acting President of my electoral district’s New Democratic Party Association. I originally was the Vice-President, then President T-Boz got a contract working on the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire. 

So congratulations on the primary victory, T-Boz! Now, get back to Toronto and make me the Vice-President again.

But I want to talk today about an issue that’s very important to me as an NDP official: the slow, grinding crisis of labour unions as institutions. Canada’s big unions and their leadership are still powerful influences and voices in the NDP. That has its drawbacks (any old guard ossifies) and its benefits (activists aren’t allowed to forget the needs of working people).

Now, the strong influence that the union movement has had on the NDP has waned in recent years. Major union figures like Buzz Hargrove don’t have as much direct hold over NDP policy. The 2012 leadership convention was the first conducted by a one-member-one-vote system, and unions no longer had a block share of the vote. And the old guard candidate Brian Topp lost.

Violent clashes during the 2012 general strikes in Greece
against the government of the time and its austerity
policies. Not much has changed, as Greek people are
still victims of priorities that put corporate profits and
credit ratings above ordinary people.

Also, the party’s tent has had to widen, as the progressive left has expanded into ecological activism, anti-racism, and the movement for the liberation of indigenous people. 

Beyond their shrinking dominance in the party itself, the wider union movement has faced an existential problem from globalization. Unions have historically been able to win their victories by a hostage strategy. 

A strike and threats of a strike are, essentially, workers taking a business hostage. Normal production will return when our demands are met, at least in part. A general strike does the same to all the industries of a country.

But the effectiveness of strikes and labour action depends on one stable factor, which the globalization of the economy has completely disrupted: territory. The factory floor. The city streets. The national state. 

The Earth itself is now the terrain of the business world. This is why union movements are so easily neutered: workers can no longer hold a company hostage. If they take control of a factory floor, the company can simply move the factory to another city whose workers will take the deal on offer.

And the unionizing workers will find themselves wandering around a gutted, idle factory in a ghost town. 

Corporate power today surpasses state jurisdiction. Just as union action has become impotent, so have anti-trust laws. Although international governance institutions have grown over the last century, they aren’t nearly so powerful as sovereign states were a hundred years ago to break up trusts and cartels.

Most of the international organizations that come closest to being governments are either toothless to enforce workers’ rights, or are easily co-opted by oligarchic interests. I’m talking about organizations like the International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank, as well as treaties like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

So what’s happening here? Antonio Negri describes the process very well. Transnational corporations, international organizations, and treaties overcome territorially-defined state governments, but they don’t literally overcome governance. They become the structure of governance itself.

Organizations like unions are left behind because their activity still relies on a strictly defined territory to be effective. Governance in our era has been deterritorialized. The sphere of politics as a place autonomous from authority – the places where people can organize themselves and their movements – has disappeared.

The only place where it exists now is on the internet. As such, it can be everywhere, because the speed and interactivity of internet communication can make you think it’s a space without territory. Cyberspace. 

But we should never forget that our online political organizing does have a place. Idle No More, Occupy, and the Arab Spring didn’t just happen in the neighbourhoods of Canada, Zuccotti Park, and Tahrir Square. 

They all happened in the same place, the same territory. A server farm in Cupertino, California. A fragile place.

The Dangerous Myth of “The Third World,” Research Time, 09/02/2016

Okay, so after one inadequate start and another delay, I’m finally going to follow up last Thursday’s post. It probably won’t tell you anything you didn’t already know. But this blog is about working through ideas and sharing the process with readers. As well as just telling the internet who I am, how I think, and what I do.

For decades, literally decades, the world was divided up in a particular way for people, into three worlds. Sorry, Worlds. It all had to do with the polarization of global politics in the Cold War. 

There was the First World, the world of capitalist industrial economies: North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Then there was the Second World, the world of communist, state-managed industrial economies: the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

Some international poverty porn from The Daily Mail.

Everybody else just got one world, the Third World. The general perception (in Western culture at least) was that this was an enormous zone of mass poverty. This image has survived in the modern label of the Global South. 

But there was also a deep racialization and colonial condescension to the term, Third World. Have a look at this video of a BBC report on the 1984 famine in Ethiopia. It dehumanizes – describing people in terms better suited to animals, mixing the din of conversation in the local language to sound like nonsense chatter, featuring government officials but telling no stories of individual victims themselves. 

This is just one example of an attitude that was pervasive in how we learned about and understood the world throughout the Cold War period. All the cultural and economic differences of our enormously diverse world was collapsed into three absolutes: the West, the East, and the poor.

It wasn’t just mainstream political thinking that marginalized and erased the diversity of the “Third World” during the Cold War. Even the front lines of radical political theory gave in to the same impulse.

Antonio Negri talks about an idea in vogue during the 1970s and 80s in radical marxist political academic circles.* It was the idea of the Third World itself as a global proletariat. They were the oppressed masses, labouring in resource industries and sweatshops to build the wealth of the bourgeois First World.

* Everything you may think about how ridiculous this group of people is, yes, is true. Radical marxists who’ve been happily sitting in ivory towers for so long that they don’t even know how to do political activism or really speak in language other than a political-economic analysis from the 1870s.

The idea isn’t totally out to lunch. Poorer regions of the world really do have lower average incomes, and some really serious poverty. But the idea ignores not only the real cultural, linguistic, political and historical diversity of all these countries. It ignores the real nature of economic development.

I discovered the work of Kojo Laing about four years ago.
He's a brilliant example of someone who writes about life
in Africa with its social gulfs. But he also depicts the
singular and beautiful nature of individual life itself.

A country in the so-called “Third World” doesn’t consist entirely of pathetically poor people, as that BBC News clip might have implied. 

A favela exists a short walk away from a gated community of mini-mansions, hundreds may work in a mine in the rural exurbs of a city, and thousands more may work in factories. Many thousands more may work in companies offering long-distance customer service or other IT business. All of this exists side by side, and its arrangement changes over time. 

What’s more, such a theory also ignores the economic and cultural diversity within the First World. It’s utterly perverse to declare a marginalized black neighbourhood in Chicago which suffers from generations of endemic poverty to be bourgeois because it’s in the United States. That’s just one example: I could talk about homeless drug addicts, indigenous reserves whose economies are non-existent, or isolated rural towns. 

The radical academics remind me of the socialist revolutionaries in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison’s white radicals have no interest in the real needs and nature of black culture and society, but only want to use them as powder kegs for a revolution conceived in purely abstract thought and reasoning. So it goes with the wide community of so-called radical professors. 

Why is this relevant to my research for a book about humanity’s utopian impulse? Because the image of utopia is the total unity of humanity in all its diversity. That means building solidarity across cultures that overcomes historical racialization. 

It’s the kind of solidarity that the radical academics thought the theory of the Third World Proletariat was all about. But it has to be a social movement built through real connections among real people across the world. Person by person, link by link.