Anyway, Occupy Wall Street is in full swing, and we’re excited about checking that out. Meeting up with an old friend of Meg’s who is in the city at the same time as us, and we all figure a protest gathering is an appropriate place to reconnect. And Mica is excited about Central Park and fashion and cool shops and cafes, as a 13 year old girl is inclined to be. Mostly I’m just glad to have some time with my brother, who I don’t see nearly enough and who has been going through a rough time lately.

And Conrad. Tonight I sent an email to an old friend and professor. Conrad came to UBC in the mid 90s as a visiting professor, fresh from his PhD at Austin. Coming out of the autonomist Marxist tradition and having worked with the awesome Harry Cleaver, Conrad landed in the Latin American Studies Dept at SFU while I was beginning my MA and the post-modern assault on class analysis was in full swing. He electrified the place – teaching us to read intelligent conservative thinkers if we wanted to really understand capital’s strategy for the class struggle; reminding us that there is lots to learn in voices we fundamentally disagree with; showing a communism that was not about the state, not about abstract ‘contradictions’, but about struggle, hope, struggle, hope, and ever wider horizons.

There were a few autonomists and anarcho-communists around at the time. Nick Dyer Witheford, Dorothy Kidd and others. And good radicals from other traditions -  Mike Lebowitz and the much loved and much missed Bob Everton. And a few of us students from various departments, too. And we talked and we organized and we learned from each other and tried to sort out how marxism and anarchism and post-structuralism informed one another and how they didn’t, and we formed a little reading group – the infra-reds – that met every few weeks to have our own little radical university.

It was an amazing time, and profoundly impacted me intellectually and politically. And there were lots of important mentors and comrades. But when I think of those days, when I think of the lasting impact on my thinking and my analysis, I think of Conrad. And I miss him. So it’s awesome to have found him, now teaching in New York, to have made contact again, and to soon have time to see him and catch up.

So this is a thanks. To Mike L., to Nick and Dorothy, to all the infra-reds. To Bob, who so impacted me politically and personally, and to Conrad, who so impacted me intellectually. Can’t wait to see you, comrade.

I am intrigued, though, more this time than I have been for a long while. OK, skip the provincial end of things, which looks exactly like it has for a couple of decades, with a super hard right wing and a bull-shit “social democratic” alternative that is continuing its tried-and-failed strategy of playing to that right. But on the other levels, something interesting is happening.

Municipally, we’ve got a centrist bunch running the show. They broke with the electoral left (COPE) a while back to chart a more “voter-friendly” and business-friendly course that included support for the Olympics, privatization under guise of “public-private parnerships” (meaning privatization that the public still pays for, basically), and expanded venues for gambling. Fuckers. However, as I look now it is interesting to see that this municipal government has got pretty solid support in the city and is looking to coast through the election barring some unforeseen scandal. And the reasons given for that support, in poll after poll, are not linked to its tack to the right, but to the new things it’s been doing around sustainability. Bike lanes, community gardens, increased grants to neighbourhood groups. This is the shit that people are talking about and listing as reasons to keep the current bunch in.

Believe me, I hate the lot of them, and think they’re some of the slimiest opportunists I’ve ever come across. But beyond that, the fact that Vancouver seems to have built a pretty solid consensus around some old-school liberals and more focus on communities and ecology is an interesting development after such a lengthy period of pervasive neoliberalism.

Jump now to the federal level, where the Liberal Party, which has for decades been dancing farther and farther to the right, occupying the old conservative spot while former Tories jump full-on into fascism…these folks are actually running a traditional liberal campaign. Social programs. Spending. Rolling back tax breaks for corporations. Government investment in infrastructure, environmental protection and so on. Again, this ain’t the left. Hell, it ain’t even the most mild social democracy. But it is a difference from what we’ve seen over the past many elections, in which the whole tenor of the debate was formed around the tax-cut/ deficit/ free market discourse of the far right.

And, like in Vancouver, it’s resonating, at least so far. These guys are up in the polls, getting lots of press, and good press, and increasingly there is some actual discussion about a substantial shift – not from the right to the left, but from the far right to the old-school centre, to something that at least resembles the liberalism of old. And that is exciting.

Pathetic to say that, I know – to see liberalism and feel a rush of hope. But after a hugely successful run for the neo-fascists over the past twenty years, liberalism is a pretty welcome change. And the fact that it is working for them, and for our municipal government, provides me at least a small bit of hope that the era of wholesale self-interest, hyper-individualism and straight up mean-spiritedness might be facing a backlash, finally.

Anyway, I’m watching it all, and I’m interested, and I’m crossing my fingers without actually letting myself get too hopeful about a return to more liberal times.

Voting for any of it? Nope. No can do. They’re all bombing the shit out of Libya. They’re all privileging profits over equality. But I’m not so blind as to fail to recognize the difference between fascism and liberal democracy, not so blind as to equate traditional liberal capitalism with the market of the neo-con wet dream. And I am one to believe that cultural shifts matter, small and slow as they come.

In my years of voting, though, I’ve made on exception to the above. When I’ve lived in her riding, and there’s been an election, I have always voted for Libby Davies. But not this time.

I wrote to her a couple of days ago to indicate that I couldn’t do it anymore, and though there is ample reason to boycott the NDP based on its total-failure to develop any domestic vision that seriously breaks with the neoconservative trend, for me the breaking point has been foreign policy. Last year, Libby made some pretty tame comments about Palestine and the Israeli occupation. She was raked over the coals for it, not just by the right but by her own party, and was made to issue general statements of apology and a targeted apology to the Israeli ambassador. Now, on the one hand that bolstered alot of support for Libby – she spoke out, vocally, despite her party’s crap position on Palestine. On the other hand, though, when called on it, Libby issued the apology rather than taking the opportunity to make an issue of the NDP’s moral cowardice on the matter. As one of the most popular NDP politicians in the country, and one whose constituents are intensely behind her like no one else, Libby of all people is well-placed to push this issue, and so I felt both a pride in her for making the statement in the first place and then a real disappointment that she took it all back when faced with the threat of party discipline. Mostly, though, what it demonstrated so clearly is that, regardless of the personal integrity or hard work of an individual candidate, the party system we have in place and the all-pervasive party discipline means that those good intentions mean pretty much fuck all when it comes to the policies a party will actually enact. So, Libby as awesome neighbourhood elected rep might mean good things for the access diverse local voices have to their member of parliament, but – policy wise, large-scale election-wise – a vote for Libby is and can only be a vote for the party as a party.

The final straw came this year. As the campaign to drum up support for military action against Libya began, as the conservatives jumped to the front of the line to start the bombing, all the major Canadian parties loudly proclaimed their unanimous support. And yes, by all the major parties we include the NDP. Really? The party that for many years had Canada’s withdrawal from NATO as one of its central principles is now wholeheartedly schilling for NATO bombings? I mean, even if we decide to buy wholesale the news coming out of Libya – which, really, all indications are has been profoundly biased and little more than PR for the always-anticipated military strikes – even if we buy this, are we really backing bombs for better oil access? After watching Iraq, after watching Afghanistan? This party still wants to make some claim to represent the left in Canada? Give me a fucking break.

Sorry, Libby. I like you. I like the way you represent this neighbourhood. I like that you speak out more vocally than your party apparatus is comfortable with. But it’s not possible to vote for you without voting for them. I tried for a long long time to make the distinction, but I just can’t justify it anymore. If you ever break from those folks, or make a push to reclaim the NDP as a party of the left – even the soft left, for god’s sake – I’ll give you my vote again. But not now. We are, in part, judged by the company we keep.

And yet, there it is. That hollow feeling, that boredom, that emotional blank space, that feeling of being entirely disinterested, disengaged. Been with me for the last couple of weeks, and I’m having a hard time shaking it. And an equally hard time making any sense out of why, why now, why for?

I guess it’s all just part of the cycle – we have times of joy and celebration, times of excitement and creativity, times of anger, or sadness, or reflection, and times like this – times of pretty much nothing, that can be described only as ‘blah’. And those times look so different for each of us, as we feel them and deal with them in different ways. Me? As to dealing with them, I mostly just try to carry on, knowing that eventually they pass and I find my way to contentment again. How I feel them? That’s kind of an odd one. Like lots of folks, I just lose energy, lose interest in the stuff I ought to be doing while simultaneously spending a whole lot of time enumerating all the things I want to do and can do and that would, by the doing, pull me right out of this in a hurry. But also, I fantasize about going off the rails.

I think how great it would be to hit the bars and sit up all night drinking and smoking cigarettes. I think how much I want to be a part of the party scene, laughing and fucking and using all kinds of whatever. I imagine a whole other life, in which I’m a bit of an asshole, sitting in the dark and sneering with disinterest at the world around me, knocking back shots of rum. I want to walk away from responsibility and work and the realities of keeping a home together, to disappear with Megan into a place where all we do is party and play. And I know this ain’t where I am, and I know how fast that all gets really old, and I know how good I feel in my life as it is and how much less good it’s felt in earlier times. I feel guilty for my fantasizing and I tell myself to snap out of it and I beat myself up for not doing the things on my mind that I know will get me out of this place and I realize that this kind of state is not conducive to being a good partner or father and I try like hell to drive these things from my mind. But they remain, always there, always this imagined world where all there is is the pursuit of immediate gratification and that picture of cool I have carried around since I was a kid and never entirely goes away.

That is my state today. That’s been my state awhile, I suppose, but it’s only today I’m naming it, feeling it in any kind of coherent way I can understand and articulate. It’ll pass, I know. And sooner rather than later, I know, too. But it’ll be back, too, a regular part of the cycle of my emotional life, a familiar place I visit and have visited for a whole lot of years.

1) in family stuff, one person who is regularly abusive and always unpredictable went on a little bit of a tear recently, making daily life so unbearable for some others that they began to feel they had to leave their own home to appease the bully; this, in turn, spilled over into several days of highly emotional exchanges in the family generally, touching folks in those deep places of memory and pain that we’ve all got. Now, in any other situation it would be possible to walk away, to disengage, to refuse to play into the drama this one individual so loves to stir up. In family, though, it’s a whole other thing, both because those emotional triggers are so much more powerful and because, really, we do have to suck it up and deal with the traumas and soap-operas in a way we don’t have to do with non-familial relationships.

2) in community stuff, ongoing drama and bullying in the activist community and a strategy of appeasement from those who I wish knew better or were prepared to act with a little more courage and integrity. I am very aware of the similarity between this and the family scenario – bully screams and shouts, hurls accusations and makes demands; peacekeepers try – over and over again – to satisfy the bully by giving in a little more, a little more, a little more to the demands, hoping that the strategy of appeasement will one day work, despite all the evidence in the world that appeasement does, in fact, only further encourage the shitty behaviour by rewarding it. Here it’s slightly easier to disengage than on the family front – it is possible to make more distance in relationships or say goodbye to them altogether, it doesn’t hit buttons quite so deep as those scars from childhood. But not easy, by any stretch, and it all creates a weight, a tension, a sadness that is sitting pretty heavy on our household these days.

3) in work, I am dealing with a hunger-striker. Yes, that’s right, a hunger-striker. A member who is so isolated and alienated from his professional community that he has decided the only way to draw attention to his pain is to refuse to eat and try to get the press to pay attention. Oi. That’s about all I can say. Oi.

It’s all a bit much. And all the more exhausting as we’ve had a house-guest flitting in and out over the past while, which though not bad has introduced a more manic and anxious energy to the place and made it tough for Meg and I to simply collapse and get the rest and recovery we normally find in another.

Finally, Friday. Finally, we hope, a couple of days to normalize a bit, to lose ourselves in task and routine, to clean the house, work in the garden, watch a movie, brew some beer and generally just do what we do – live and enjoy the everyday living. All this madness ain’t going anywhere anytime soon. So the moments of retreat are just that much more important.

A few moments to remember, then, dealing with various interests of mine: books, radical left politics and heavy metal.

1) First publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, in 1850.

In 17th century Massachusetts, in a small Puritan-dominated town near Boston, Hester Prynne is pregnant out of wedlock. Dragged before the religious and legal authorities she refuses to give up the name of the father, taking upon herself instead a life of condemnation and isolation, forever marked with the great letter A of the adulteress. A romance, an historical drama, a critique of the hellfire and damnation religion that was so central to the founding of America, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous work is a love story rooted in personal and social tensions of sin and repentence, shame and redemption, law and morality.

Born in Salem, and counting judges of that town’s infamous witch-trials as his ancestors, Hawthorne’s book is a personal reckoning with his own family history and the legacy he has inherited as well as an attempt to grapple with the broader cultural inheritance of the United States. Just the novel presents the character of Pearl – Hester Prynne’s young and troubled daughter – as in many respects the human embodiment of the scarlet letter, she is likewise Hawthorne himself and America as a nation – born of and fully immersed in the legacy of Puritanism and the accusation of witchcraft, she is passion and freedom and the hard work of redemption.

We read this aloud, a chapter each night before bed. Highly recommended, if you can do the same. We also watched the movie, with Demi Moore and Gary Oldman. Whatever else you do, don’t make that mistake.

I’ve already put up a post on the Required Readings site today, but in honour of the day I did the above. which can be found at its proper home here.

2) Kidnapping and later assassination of of Italian politician Aldo Moro in 1978, by the Red Brigades.

An underground armed resistance movement of the radical left, the Red Brigades went on quite a tear in the 1970s and 1980s for bank robberies, kidnappings, and attacks on symbols of capitalism. After a split in the mid-1980s and mass arrests later in the decade, the Brigades were done. But they have remained hugely important, not least for their historical connection to what are often called the autonomist Marxists and Antonio Negri, in particular.

Negri was arrested and accused of being the strategist behind Moro’s kidnapping and faced charges related to numerous crimes, including some some 17 murders. Though charges related to the specific actions of the Brigades were dropped, he was charged for his role as their inspiration, charged with being their intellectual and political face. Awaiting trial, Negri fled to France where he lived in exile and taught university for 14 years, becoming one of the most significant radical thinkers of the late twentieth century. When he finally returned to Italy to serve his sentence, Negri was as much a superstar of the radical left as a pariah of the state, and today – following the incredible success of his and Michael Hardt’s Empire – is recognized as already a major figure in communist history as well as the communist present, a synthesizer of anarchism, post-structuralism and Marxism, and a profound inspiration for not only the Red Brigades of the 70s but also the anti-globalization movement of the mid 1990s and contemporary anti-capitalist networks.

3) Twisted Sister becomes the first band ever to sell out the Paladium in New York without ever releasing an album. This was back in 1979, way before the ridiculous videos we all loved, and back when they were actually a pretty damned good heavy metal band. In honour, two videos today that are not the ones you’ve seen but are the real reason that TS is worth remembering.

Oh, and by the way. Remember the whole PMRC thing in the 1980s? Twisted Sister was pretty awesome there, too, as frontman Dee Snider testified before Congress and became one of the most well-recognized faces of that particular anti-censorship struggle. Yeah – politics are everywhere.

I expect if I were less secure in my accomplishments the joke would have hurt me. But I expect, too, that if that were the case the joke never would have been made, cause Faye’s a fabulous sister-in-law, and the whole point was to poke fun at the fact that I tease my brothers’ fairly regularly for their hyper-achievements and my life of relative leisure. Now, it’s not like I do nothing. I do have community projects I work on, a couple of blogs to maintain, a kid to spend time with, many dinner parties to host, house-stuff that always needs doing and a love affair I am committed to keep as awesome as it is. And it’s not like I’ve achieved nothing. I’ve seen and learned about large portions of the world. I’ve been, at various times, heavily involved in political projects and labour and international solidarity activism. But I have a pretty big resistance to the stress and work associated with capital-S “Success”. I got promoted to pretty much the top of my field and pretty quit cause I didn’t need the extra work that came with the honour. I got my doctorate and immediately dumped any thoughts of academia cause the slog to tenure seemed such a big drag. I start projects and do’em kinda half-assed – enough to get them done but not so much that the doing might interfere with my sitting-on-my-ass time. You get the point, I’m sure.

I come from a pretty accomplished family. Not a rich family, but a hard-working one, a constantly-moving and always-engaged one. I have a brother who at 42 is a medical doctor with a separate Masters degree, was director of a hospital by the age of 32 and now is a medical school prof and health policy advisor, all while being a pretty involved dad for his four kids. I have a brother who finished top of the province in school without even trying, composes music and plays a shitload of instruments, became one of the top chefs in the country by his mid-twenties, and can do everything from building electronics, designing kitchens and interiors and crazy-high level math in his sleep. And I have a little brother who is a mathematics professor also trained in chemistry and physics who in his spare time cooks gourmet meals, grows tropical plants in New York from pieces of fruit he gets at the local grocery and manages to be very intelligently-conversant in everything from global politics to philosophy to literature at the same time. They are all a hard-working bunch. They are all top-of-their-game at whatever they’ve chosen to do. And somehow, through it all, they are also all good people who generally treat people well. I’m proud of every one of them. But proud, too, to be the lazy brother.

I am thinking of all this today, and writing about it here, not because I particularly felt some need to talk about my brothers or to reflect on accomplishment. No, truer to form, I am writing this today because I am bored at work, and because I have a few projects I really ought to be working on but just can’t muster the energy to deal with.

I have a stack of partially-written songs that need finishing, plus half a dozen that have decent melodies and draft lyrics that need a little re-writing;

I have a few poems that really ought to be submitted somewhere if I could get off my ass and mail the damn things in;

I have a full draft of a novel that has some promise and needs an edit, but has remained untouched since late 2009;

I have a near-complete draft of an academic article that I really would like to submit but needs about two hours of solid work to get it ready;

I have a PhD dissertation that could be a book with a thorough re-write;

I have a number of blog posts that could be turned into personal essays fairly easily;

Oh yeah – and I have my job, too, which I am not doing right now as I type these words.

I am, then, procrastinating, wasting time, doing what I always do – coming up with ideas and plans, getting half-way through and moving on to sometime else cause the thrill of the newness is gone. I am making a list of the things I could be doing in the vain hope that the act of writing them here will get me to actually work on one of them one of these days.

I am, it is true, the lazy brother. And mostly that’s pretty good, giving me a relatively low-stress and laid-back kinda life. Sometimes, though, I think a little extra drive might not be a bad thing. Ah well, whatever. Time for a coffee break.

So much promise and hope, and yet so much, still, of all the worst of us. That is, though, the stuff activism is made of, I suppose. While so much is so good, with many dear friends and promising small-scale commons, our little household has also been dealt with a whole lot of shit over the last year, as we came up against a hostile and profoundly aggressive radicalism that seems to be more interested in inventing ever more enemies for itself than in building alternative communities of solidarity, mutual aid and respect.

I’m not going into it. I will say only this. People who struggle, communities that resist, individuals and groups who throw their whole lives into the battle against the machine – these people deserve our respect, regardless of whatever differences of opinion we might have. I can analyze the shit out of old-school socialism and its very explicit role in targeting left-communists and anarchists for repression. But that does not mean those activists affiliated with traditional socialist movements are my enemies. I can understand the role of unions and other organizations in repressing class struggle, shutting down worker autonomy, and partnering with capital and the state to create an industrial regime in which the traditional weapons of workers are largely lost, and yet still recognize that workers join unions for a reason, and those unions play an important role in the day to day struggles of working people. I can disagree without contempt. I can recognize that all of our movements, our organizations, ourselves are sites of contradiction. That’s just the nature of humanity.

There is, however, a recurrent radicalism that demands no weakness, no frailty, no contradiction. And in so doing it posits the most glaring of contradictions itself: a hyper-authoritarianism, a contempt for working people and for community-building, a derision of anyone and everyone who disagrees  – and does so, whether calling it socialism or anarchism, in the name of autonomy, freedom and the centrality of the commons. It is a variety of radicalism that cannot distinguish between the union as a workplace support, a legal advocate, a political organization, and an instrument of law. It does not recognize that protesters who would rather not confront the cops with bricks and bats nonetheless may surrender their lives to the struggle in more ways than any of us can imagine, nor that those who are opposed to or afraid of such confrontations are no less committed to struggle and no less a part of the movement.  It does not recognize the humanity in activists – that they are people with  homes, families, jobs, fears, secrets, regrets. And it does not recognize that activists are made and lost in large part by the extent to which a movement becomes not just a struggle but a community. In short, it is simplistic in its analysis, it is divisive in its organization. It is, as a politics, driven by the making of enemies rather than the building of communities, and it cannot, in no way no how, get us anywhere worth going.

An odd introduction to what I am thinking of today, though, which is that much of the left – socialist and anarchist – has some serious work to do on understanding why such a fierce hostility is emanating from some circles. And I’ve been reminded of a couple of short pieces that were doing the rounds a few months back in response to The Coming Insurrection (TCI), a manifesto put out by what is called “The Invisible Committee” (and available in full here). The Invisible Committee are well-read folks, coming out of the same kind of Marxist/ anarchist/ poststructuralist nexus that initially inspired the Situationists and more recently shaped the autonomist Marxist current and related anarchisms. The same kind of nexus, I would add, that has shaped so much of my own thinking on class and class struggle, and which continues to ground my own political identity. And while the theory they spin is exactly of the kind that is used to justify the shitty behaviour of some small but vocal groups of people, I think it is a mistake to entirely write off the analysis because it is sometimes used in simplistic and even destructive ways by those whose hyper-radicalism becomes just a cover for bullying. What is more, to not engage seriously with ideas such as those advanced in TCI is, I think, a huge mistake for the more traditional left, for two reasons: 1) because radical critiques of the left do not come out of nowhere, but are indeed the result of very real failures of the left; and 2) because to do so is to make precisely the same error – i.e. to disregard, wholesale, the contributions of an entire segment of the left simply because of the bullshit behaviours of a few.

The two pieces that started me off are these: Anarkismo’s review, from the perspective of other anarchist-identified activists, who use the piece to distinguish what they refer as “insurrectionist anarchism” from “class-struggle anarchism”; and this, from Chris Spannos – a critique from the more traditional socialist left, which frames the insurrectionist approach as just so much “suicidal nonsense”. Both pieces identify the same basic problems with TCI’s “Coming Insurrection” and the kind of activism it inspires. And in both, those are what I appreciate about the reviews. What I was a little disappointed in, though, is that both Anarkismo and Spannos show the same weaknesses in their critiques, and set up a straw-man to knock down rather than seriously engage the issues. That is, they are right that there is much that is immature and simply inane in the strategic framework TCI puts forward; however, there are also pieces of an important analysis here, and an analysis focused on real weaknesses and failings of the traditional left. And in this, neither Anarkismo nor Spannos does The Coming Insurrection justice.

The Coming Insurrection is a significant piece of work, and I will not pretend to deal with it exhaustively here. Rather, what I am interested in are the key issues raised by the other reviewers, and their responses. So, with that in mind, these are the issues in TCI that arise most often, and that both Anarkismo and Spannos raise for discussion:

1) Rejection of cooperation with non-revolutionary organizations, and particularly traditional labour organizations – the TCI does not just reject cooperation with trade unions, mainstream political parties and the like, but suggests that such organizations are the enemy, and that while there may be a few well-intentioned individuals operating in the traditional organizations of the left, ultimately the organizations will always and everywhere betray the revolutionary impulse for stability and organizational power. It’s an overstatement, and one that lacks nuance and fails to analyze the constant tensions and frequent fractures within left organizations. It is not, however, fundamentally wrong. The TCI is right in its basic assessment – organizations arise of out of struggle, but once formalized they take on their own logic and function to sustain themselves above all else; struggles that demand legal recognition, legal rights, legal status do, by their very success, create organizations that are bound up in a legal framework and limited by that framework. TCI fails to do a very sophisticated analysis of how this works, fails to recognize that there are indeed differences between how a union operates as organization and how it can still on occasion operate as movement, how unions themselves are contested sites of struggle. But its basic impulse – that the organizations of the left are not the places to seek radical social change and indeed have frequently played a shitty and reactionary role – ain’t all wrong, or even mostly wrong.

2) Insurrection without revolution; vanguardism without the working class – The Coming Insurrection is a celebration of and a call to an immediate and individual rebellion that is not held back, not reliant on or submissive to the general assembly or the mass. It articulates no strategy for broader engagement with a popular movement and indeed scoffs at such a notion. It is contemptuous of real working people, it is isolationist and purist, it is dismissive of the idea of ‘democracy’. Here I am a little more sympathetic to the critiques of Spannos and Anarkismo – such a conception of radicalism does, I think, achieve precisely the opposite of its intent. Rather than meaningfully addressing the limits of democracy, the potential fascism of every mass, the very real fact that many many workers are not interested in revolution and would really prefer to just live their lives, the approach of TCI is to retreat to the shadows, to write off anyone and everyone else as irrelevant, and to encourage a resistance that is fundamentally individual, fundamentally selfish, in which any cooperation is always and immediately a cooptation, any bridging of differences a sell-out. Let the few true revolutionaries rise up on their own; let us behave without regard for the left or for working people, for we see more clearly than they; all those who criticize us are our enemies, agents of the state or fools unwittingly preserving the status quo; resistance for its own sake, and without any clear notion of what is being resisted, for what reason, by what means, and with what implications. It is individualist, short-sighted, and ultimately libertarian not anarchist.

However – and there is always a however – TCI’s political contempt for real people does arise out of an analysis we ought to pay attention to. It is indeed true that the building of mass movements, the use of coalition politics, lends itself to less radical demands and less confrontational strategies. It is indeed true that as we seek to make common cause with a wider array of people we do, in the process, blunt the sharpness of our critique and scale back our demands. Working with people demands compromise. And in the context of political struggle against capital, against empire, that compromise very often means we limit ourselves to a fraction of what we really want and we wind up in movements that are explicitly not revolutionary and all too often end up isolating radicals and making common cause with capital or state in order to protect some immediate gain. Let’s be honest about this – that is a problem, and one that all incarnations of the left have confronted at various times, and one that will continue to confront us all forever and ever amen. That is the nature of political work, and often the long-term result of coalition-building and issue-specific alliances. So rather than simply dismiss TCI’s crappy conclusions, then, does it not make more sense to engage in a discussion about the tension between democracy and fascism? And does it not make more sense to interrogate the important relationship between mass struggle and more radical direct action? I mean, it ain’t hard to see how this works – by refusing to submit to the more scaled-back demands of the organizational and coalition-based left, the more isolationist approach opens space for struggle. Its demands for ‘everything now’ and ‘total confrontation with the state’ create that opening in which others can step in with lesser demands, cut deals and achieve concrete reforms. The existence of the radical who refuses to compromise is necessary to the possibility of compromise. And, by the same token, the existence of the mass movement or the mainsteam organization willing to cut a deal is precisely what allows the direct action isolationist to push the boundaries of what is possible and to have a political impact rather than simply getting locked up indefinitely as a non-political criminal. The two approaches do, in fact, need one another, and need the tension and anger and betrayal that exists between them. Might The Coming Insurrection ultimately make machismo, individualism, contempt and lack of strategy the practical result of its political theory? Yup, it sure is. Do I want anything to do with those folks in my organizing? Nope, I sure don’t. But do I recognize that the ground they stake out, the refusal of compromise, does actually play an important role? Absolutely.

3) Explicit condemnation of reformism and celebration of the crisis – Shore up capitalism? No fucking way. Tear it down without delay. Anything that deepens the crisis brings us that much closer to the end of this profoundly rotten civilization. That, in a nutshell, is TCI’s take on social reform. Spannos and Anarkismo both note the callousness of such a position, its complete disregard of the very human suffering that crisis brings. They note, too, that this betrays a very real fatalism, that it ultimately encourages a political action which arises from hopelessness and can only ever be destructive rather than constructive, that has no faith in the ability of people to work together to wrest concessions from capital and state. Spannos and Anarkismo are right. But, here too, I am also sympathetic to The Coming Insurrection. The whole civilization is rotten. The whole system is profoundly corrupt, is profoundly destructive, is such a tightly-wound ball of relations that there is no out other than to dismantle the whole damn thing. Let’s not pretend otherwise. We need to confront, and confront honestly, the full-on wrong that we live, the depth of the crisis, and the fact that the whole ball must fall apart. Collapse is terrifying, but collapse may also be necessary. The problem with TCI’s take, then, is not with its analysis of collapse per se, but its complete and utter failure to engage in any constructive response – not to shore anything up, but to do community differently. TCI tells us: collapse is necessary so let it happen. TCI does not tell us: collapse is necessary, but post-collapse is potentially disastrous if it’s dominant character is barbarism, so we need to work earnestly on the building of a different kind of human relationship.

Bottom line, I think, is this: The Coming Insurrection is a statement of critique, a call for complete and total resistance. But it provides nothing beyond that resistance, it envisions nothing different, it articulates no hope. Its rage without compromise, its autonomy that bleeds into selfishness, its profound arrogance and contempt for everyone else – TCI doesn’t provide us anything to build, any space to begin dialogue or establish community. And that’s a shame, because there are important pieces of analysis there that we would do well to discuss. And it’s a shame, too, that the reviews by Spannos and Anarkismo do not take that critique more seriously, because the traditional left has failed, the traditional left is in many important ways strategically bankrupt if not morally bankrupt, and all of us could benefit from teasing out of The Coming Insurrection some more sophisticated and nuanced analysis.

I think The Coming Insurrection reflects a more widespread discontent, and I think that matters for the traditional left. It matters because it is precisely the failure of capital-s Socialism to adequately address the issues above that has made the left appear so irrelevant to so many. But it matters, too, for those who appreciate and/ or are convinced by the arguments of TCI, because it is all-too-easy for critique to morph into contempt and to find that entirely appropriate and important arguments become, in practice, justifications for profoundly destructive behaviours. (Isn’t this exactly what happened with the old-school socialists throughout the 20th century, and exactly why anarchists have been so hesitant about engaging with socialists and communists in the first place?)

I’d like to think we can develop thorough and far-reaching critiques without contempt. I’d like to think that we can take things like The Coming Insurrection as places to begin dialogue. Yeah, Pollyanna, I know.

This piece started with a few words on hope from Howard Zinn. I’ll finish with words from Terry Eagleton’s “Reason, Faith and Revolution”, cited on Meg’s blog recently, words that remind us that the best of socialism, communism, anarchism is and always has been in ability to bring together a ruthless critique of everything existing and a profound faith in people, to remember that what is so rotten about the empire of capital is the destruction it does to basic human relationships of mutual aid, compassion, solidarity, and the hope – no, the promise – that we can care for each other better than this. And that the challenge is do so now, in the centre of our critique, in the fiercest of resistance.

Why, then, do some of us still cling to this political faith, in the teeth of what many would regard as reason and solid evidence? Not only, I think, because socialism [or anarchism, or communism] is such an extraordinarily good idea that it has proved exceedingly hard to discredit, and this despite its own most strenuous efforts. It is also because one cannot accept that this – the world we see groaning in agony around us – is the only way things could be, though empirically speaking this might certainly prove to be the case, because one gazes with wondering bemusement on those hard-headed types for whom all this, given a reformist tweak or two, is as good as it gets; because to back down from this vision would be to betray what one feels are the most precious powers and capacities of human beings; because however hard one tries, one simply cannot shake off the primitive conviction that this is not how it is supposed to be, however much we are conscious that this seeing the world in the light of Judgement Day, as Walter Benjamin might put it, is folly to the financiers and a stumbling block to stockbrokers; because there is something in this vision which calls to the depths of one’s being and evokes a passionate assent there; because not to feel this would not to be oneself; because one is too  much in love with this vision of humankind to back down, walk away, or take no for an answer.

Sure, quakes and floods and droughts and such are a normal part of the earth’s functioning, but I think it is beyond doubt now that we are seeing such phenomena happen far more regularly in recent years than even a generation ago. The tsunami in the South Pacific, the Haitian earthquake, the floods in Australia and New Zealand, quakes in Latin America, the devastation that was New Orleans, small but near-constant rumblings here along our own BC shoreline, collapse of food stocks from India to Russia and Eastern Europe. These are unstable times geologically as well as ecologically, economically, politically.

Though I am not inclined to draw direct causal links between each and all, there are connections between the various  manifestations of collapse, certainly. For one, decades of neoliberal restructuring have left all of us, everywhere, with much degraded social and physical infrastructures. The collapse of food stores is driving prices up madly just as the few remaining subsidies are removed, spurring rebellion such as we have been watching unfold across the Middle East and north Africa. Haiti and New Orleans – only two examples of how the failure to invest in infrastructure made natural disasters into human disasters, left populations entirely vulnerable.

Meg wrote a great piece on this yesterday on her blog – a post about deregulation and emergency preparedness which is well worth a read. But it’s not like this is news. We knew all this in the 1980s as we watched drought in Ethiopia turn into widespread famine as a result of political and economic decisions before and during the crisis. But is noteworthy how little we are talking about this now. Oh, there is some talk about the link between ecological collapse and geologic upheaval, and no end of talk about ecological collapse and the unending drive to grow capitalism bigger and faster. But surprisingly little on how hyper-capitalism has made us so so vulnerable at precisely the time the earth is undergoing massive change. Shocking, actually, how little we are talking about this.

Anyway, this is what passes through my mind this morning as the wind blows, as the food stores in the basement begin to dwindle as they do at the end of the winter, as I prepare to crack open another book on the collapse.

I understand that sometimes the earth’s gotta change, it’s gotta break shit up and move it around. I don’t hold anything against the planet for that. Man, though, do I ever hate capitalism.

Terry Eagleton‘s Reason, Faith and Revolution should be read by everyone on the left, and particularly those of the explicitly athiest left. Not a defense of Christianity, per se, it is a defense of spiritual practice and even religiosity, and makes a strong argument that such practice has always been and continues to be important to us as humans, that contempt for religion demonstrates both an ignorance of what it really is about and often masks a contempt for people in general, and that the left – in particular – has suffered for its all-too-common spurning of religious communities and religious knowledge and insight.

Eagleton isn’t trying to convert anyone to anything; indeed, though raised with Christianity he is not “a believer” himself. And a good portion of the book is devote to a harsh critique of institutional Christianity. But he is concerned about the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and their profoundly weak understanding of the religious values and human motivations they critique., which esentially leads them to mis-name the target of their criticism and miss, in the process, what religion is really about at its core. And so the book alternates between critique of their work and more general commentary on the place of spirituality in our lives and the need for the left to learn to understand and appreciate spirituality.

Slavoj Zizek‘s The Puppet and the Dwarf is something entirely different, and both more significant and less universal in its value. It’s a short but dense little book, with a tremendously important core and a whole lot of psychoanalytic filler that really doesn’t add anything to the central thesis that I can see. So, if you have any interest in theology, read it, but you’d be advised to skim over large sections of hyper-academic musings.

The argument, in a nutshell:

1) Historically, religions evolve – in their earliest incarnations they seek to explain a scary world full of phenomena we don’t understand; later, they serve to bind communities together along lines of common ritual and common myth to protect the community and maintain its identity vis a vis others; monotheism develops to draw together as one a singular explanation for existence and an increasingly-universal code of ethics – or, at least, the articulation of an ethics that ought to be universal.

2) The evolution of religion is the evolution of our understanding of the relationships between humanity and the universe, humanity and history, the individual and society. a) God/s begins as simple, unexplainable magic – entirely outside of and beyond human experience. b) God becomes an ethic, the all-powerful to which everyone is accountable equally – God is expressed as a broken relationship between humanity and the universal, a gap that cannot be bridged. c) God becomes a promise of some future redemption and immortality – there will come a time that gap will be bridged, but its realization is well beyond us and the promise is sustained through periodic prophets. And then, d) Christianity.

3) Christianity is the closing of the God-humanity gap, and effectively the first universal and the first ultimately-athiestic religion. Jesus represents God on earth, God is human form. Jesus suffers, and calls on the greater-than-human God for salvation – “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God does not answer, does not intervene. The external God is powerless, and dies with Jesus on the cross. Jesus rises, appears to his disciples and announces that God continues to live, but only in human community – “where two or three of you are gathered, so I am there”. The gap is closed. There is a spiritual core. There is a universal ethic. There is a promise of salvation. But that promise is not external, the law is not a command from above, redemption is not beyond this world, but in it. God is where community is, full stop.

It’s an incredible argument, and well worth the read if you have any interest in such matters. And speaks, too, to the transition from ethics to politics courtesy of Saint Paul, drawing lessons for the left today. The drag is that, to get there, you’ve got to wade through pages and pages of Lacanian psychoanalysis – not because it matters to the core argument but just because it’s what turns Zizek on so it’s what he writes about. Zizek is great in thirty-second bursts; he’s impossible to follow over hours, though, those moments of brilliance that punctuate his work being only that – brief moments in an endless stream of psycho-babble. Kind of drag for those of us who are not up on our Lacanian psychoanalysis, and not interested in getting up to date.

But despite that, again, a super important book if you are interested in theology at all, and Christian theology in particular. Zizek is a smart dude. Annoying as all hell, yes. But smart, no question.

These books aren’t liberation theology. They are not attempts to read Christian theology subversively. Both Zizek and Eagleton are attentive to the real contradictions in the Jesus thing, and neither is interested in spreading religion. What they are both grappling with is the spiritual poverty of leftist political traditions and the spiritual drive of human beings, and trying to make sense of why what we call religion matters so much and what lessons we on the left need to learn from it. What they both grapple with is Christianity as central and enduring for a reason, and the need to look more closely, with a critical but respectful eye, at why that is so. What they both grapple with is Christianity as an attempt to make an ethics into a politics, and the urgent need for the left to rediscover the importance of having an ethical core to its politics.