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Micropolitics and the Left
This article is an attempt to investigate certain problems of the left via the lens of micropolitics and macropolitics, terms first introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (D&G).
Submitted by Shorty on February 28, 2014
Faced with the challenging nature of texts from post-structuralist thinkers like D&G or Foucault, many people make the assumption that they are really motivated by an elitist desire to confuse, intimidate and befuddle the masses and divert theory into useless abstractions, far removed from the concerns of ordinary people for social transformation and liberation from oppression and exploitation. However a careful reading of D&G's Micropolitics and Segmentarity chapter in "A Thousand Plateaus" (ATP) reveals they have two main objects in their theorising there - to make sense of the experience of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s and the (then) more recent uprisings of Paris May '68. We will try to extend that to looking at more recent problems, passing via the Poll Tax riots of 1990 to looking at today's current controversies around intersectionality
What is Micropolitics? Two possible definitions
There are two ways to understand the macropolitics/micropolitics distinction: the common sense way and the uncommon sense version from D&G's ATP. We will examine each in turn, see what the relationship between them is and then see how we can use either or both to examine certain problems of the left.
The common sense way to understand the macropolitics/micropolitics distinction is by analogy to macroeconomics and microeconomics and the usual meaning of the macro- and micro- prefixes as "the big" and "the small", respectively. So micropolitics would be the politics of interpersonal relations and macropolitics would be the politics of large entities or collectivities. The politics of nations, classes, masses and races and genders taken as a "whole".
Now pretty much all political discourses that make sweeping generalisations about differences between "nations", "races" and "genders" tends to be the kind of reactionary right-wing bollocks that the left in general is pretty unanimous in rejecting. However, there is a division between those who, on the one hand, go on to generalise the idea that if statements about "macro" categories like nation, race and gender are invalid, then by extension so too must those referencing classes, and on the other hand, the more explicitly socialist left, who reject the former idea as "liberalism". The scare quotes around liberalism here are less to do with the fact that this is an incorrect use of the term and more to signal that liberalism is one of those words that tend to get thrown around with gay abandon, sometimes appearing as little more than a lefty or socialist swear-word for "things I don't like". However, in this particular case, the use of liberal has technical merit because it is explicitly linked to a particular ontology. Let's grab a quick refresher from wiktionary on what ontology means:
ontology (plural ontologies)
1. (uncountable, philosophy) The branch of metaphysics that addresses the nature or essential characteristics of being and of things that exist; the study of being qua being.
2. (countable, philosophy) The theory of a particular philosopher or school of thought concerning the fundamental types of entity in the universe.
3. (logic) A logical system involving theory of classes, developed by Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939).
4. (computer science, information science) A structure of concepts or entities within a domain, organized by relationships; a system model.
So a social or political ontology is one which addresses the nature of which social entities can be said to really exist, insofar as they have observable influence on social processes. As I have argued elsewhere (see Rethinking Class) there is such a thing as a liberal ontology, which is precisely linked to this idea of reducing all social existence to the individual level, for which Thatcher's famous "there's no such thing as society" is simply the same idea taken to its logical conclusion. In this liberal ontology large-scale or "macro" entities such as race, class and gender, are simply imaginary abstractions that may be useful to refer to the sum of individuals' experience of racist, "classist" or sexist discrimination from other individuals, but do not "really exist" to the extent of being able to exert force on individuals lives in and of themselves. Marx's characterisation of capital as being a "real abstraction", for instance, is literally nonsense in a liberal ontology.
In a liberal ontology then, macropolitical processes do not really exist, there is only the sum total of inter-personal or micropolitical processes, understood in the common sense way. The opposition between a liberal ontology and a socialist one that accepts that macro entities such as capital and class have a real existence, is clear and relatively easy to understand from the outset, without any need to go further than the common sense version of these terms.
"And now", as Monty Python used to say, "time for something completely different…"
Four errors
In "A Thousand Plateaus" Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (henceforth D&G) wrote a chapter entitled "Micropolitics and Segmentarity" which outlines a macropolitics/micropolitics distinction that is, at first sight, greatly at odds with the more common sense take outlined above. After introducing their conceptualisation they move to inoculate the reader against a more common sense understanding by listing four errors to be avoided in their framework:
Four errors concerning this molecular and supple segmentarity are to be avoided. The first is axiological and consists in believing that a little suppleness is enough to make things "better." But microfascisms are what make fascism so dangerous, and fine segmentations are as harmful as the most rigid of segments. The second is psychological, as if the molecular were in the realm of the imagination and applied only to the individual and interindividual. But there is just as much social-Real on one line as on the other. Third, the two forms are not simply distinguished by size, as a small form and a large form; although it is true that the molecular works in detail and operates in small groups, this does not mean that it is any less coextensive with the entire social field than molar organization. Finally, the qualitative difference between the two lines does not preclude their boosting or cutting into each other; there is always a proportional relation between the two, directly or inversely proportional.
Even with the supporting context that D&G equate micropolitics and macropolitics with "supple segmentarity" and "rigid segmentarity" on the one hand, and the "molar" and "molecular" on the other, the above quote will be mostly impenetrable to anybody who has not already read the full chapter out of which it is plucked. But at least the third error quoted is enough to make clear that we are dealing with something other than the simple small scale versus large scale opposition of the common sense definition above.
D&G's macropolitics and micropolitics both operate simultaneously on all levels from small to large scale. What makes them micro or macro is not the scale of the network of interactions being looked at, but the scale of the components (or sub-components) interacting in the network and the nature of the interactions between them. So in theory you can have a macropolitics of a two person interaction, or the micropolitics of a large group. In more everyday language the term "group dynamics" usually implicitly includes the ghost of the notion of its micropolitics to the extent that it accepts that there is more going on in the dynamics than the more visible "macro" elements of formal organisation, overt declarations, etc.
Fascism & May 68
But what is the point of such a confusing departure from common sense notions of micro and macro and the introduction of unfamiliar and, at first sight, difficult to understand social ontologies? Well, as we said in the introduction, amongst other things D&G set themselves to task of trying to make sense of the experience of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s and the Paris May days of 1968.
In relation to fascism they pose the question whether there was a significant qualitative difference between the fascist totalitarianism of Franco's Spain and Mussolini's Italy on the one hand, and Hitler's National Socialist "revolution" in Germany, on the other. The answer they come up with relies on their version of the macropolitical/micropolitical distinction. The concept of totalitarianism they find fits well with the macropolitical form fascism takes, but the grassroots level agitation and intense popular enthusiasm National Socialism managed to generate in Germany and Austria, they attribute to micropolitics, specifically to a network of "microfascisms" that permeates society
We would even say that fascism implies a molecular regime that is distinct both from molar segments and their centralization. Doubtless, fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising: there are totalitarian States, of the Stalinist or military dictatorship type, that are not fascist. The concept of the totalitarian State applies only at the macropolitical level, to a rigid segmentarity and a particular mode of totalization and centralization. But fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular focuses in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole. There is fascism when a war machine is installed in each hole, in every niche. Even after the National Socialist State had been established, microfascisms persisted that gave it unequaled ability to act upon the "masses." Daniel Guerin is correct to say that if Hitler took power, rather than taking over the German State administration, it was because from the beginning he had at his disposal microorganizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society," in other words, a molecular and supple segmentarity, flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell. [...] What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism.
Similarly the great uprising of May '68 in France took the country and most of the existing left, entirely by surprise, escalating from a small protest over a minor Parisian university cracking down on female students smuggling their boyfriends into their women-only student accommodation block, to barricades on the street of the capital, a state of virtual insurrection and the flight of the President from the country, in a mere matter of days. And the insurrectionary vanguard atop the barricades were not factory workers or Communist party card-carrying proletarians, but a mostly unorganised mass of students. Again D&G find the answer to the riddle of "where the hell did that come from?" in micro politics.
May 1968 in France was molecular, making what led up to it all the more imperceptible from the viewpoint of macropolitics. It happens that people who are very limited in outlook or are very old grasp the event better than the most advanced politicians, or politicians who consider themselves advanced from the viewpoint of organization. As Gabriel Tarde said, what one needs to know is which peasants, in which areas of the south of France, stopped greeting the local landowners. A very old, outdated landowner can in this case judge things better than a modernist. It was the same with May '68: those who evaluated things in macropolitical terms understood nothing of the event because something unaccountable was escaping. The politicians, the parties, the unions, many leftists, were utterly vexed; they kept repeating over and over again that "conditions" were not ripe. It was as though they had been temporarily deprived of the entire dualism machine that made them valid spokespeople. Bizarrely, de Gaulle, and even Pompidou, understood much more than the others. A molecular flow was escaping, minuscule at first, then swelling, without, however, ceasing to be unassignable. The reverse, however, is also true: molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes, and parties.
Just as the May revolt of the Parisian students, and indeed the anti-Vietnam war protesting students, hippies, feminists, black power and gay liberationists, vexed a traditional left who "evaluated things in macropolitical terms" exclusively, back in 1968; so today, this article argues, does intersectionality provoke similar vexation and outright hostility amongst the contemporary "macro-reductionist" left. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Before we can see whether it makes sense to even talk of a macro-reductionist left we need to outline a minimally-functional sketch of the unfamiliar D&G version of the term and then compare and contrast it with the common sense version to decide what the most useful meaning of the term might be.
To clarify one of the features of the D&G macro/micropolitics distinction we need to look at one feature of their complex and original (read intimidatingly alien, at first sight) ontology. Namely the cybernetic or system dynamics aspect incorporated in their concept of the "machinic". "Cybernetic" itself is a difficult enough concept to get across given that the available definitions are clear as mud and most people associate it with something to do with computers, machines and robots, rather than human interaction.
Norbert Weiner, the first formaliser of the discipline, originally defined cybernetics as "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.". One of the basic concepts of cybernetics is the feedback loop - that you have some kind of system that both receives stimulus from its environment and has behaviour that acts back upon its environment, the behaviour changing in response to changes in the stimulus and the environment being changed by that behaviour and producing altered stimuli. Although this can be in relation to a single individual machine, animal or human and its natural environment, it can also be a network of individuals representing anything from a small group up to a massive organisation like General Motors or the US State Department.
The key here is that cybernetics looks at the role of communication links between the network of individuals (or nodes) in the system and how the flow of signals between them, in response to external stimuli, affects the behaviour and evolution of that system - and potentially, the individuals that compose it.
The point here, when applying a cybernetic perspective to a system made up of humans, is to contrast it with a more traditional "person-centred" approach. In the person-centred approach, all the intelligence of an association is contained within the individual intelligences of the people that make it up. That is, all the thinking takes place within the head of one or more individuals, and then the communication links between them are relatively neutral or passive conduits that neither add or subtract from the results of these individual processes of using personal intelligence.
The cybernetic approach, by contrast, sees the map of how individuals in the system are linked, how signals flow between them, as having an active determinative effect on the system as a whole. In other words that there is a kind of collective or emergent intelligence of the system's behaviour that is not to be found entirely siloed in individual brains, but comes from what passes between people, and how. In a similar way, ant colonies or swarms of fish, birds or insects can demonstrate collective intelligent behaviour not reduced to the consciousness of its individual components.
This is a key part of the D&G ontology, that when looking at the dynamics of groups of people what passes between them, what circulates between them, is at least as important a factor, if not the most important one, in determining the outcome of the social process as a whole. If this shift in perspective is a little disconcerting for anybody used to a more traditionally humanist perspective, it should be noted that D&G's ontology is far more radically anti- or post-humanist than this, but we don't need to look at that right here. For our purposes we can remain focussed on the implications for human interactions. The significant takeaway here is that we are inverting the more common perspective that, in terms of creativity or social dynamics, people are the active part and the communications between them passive, to one where the communications themselves take on agency - we focus on what passes between people.
And here we can illustrate the difference between the micropolitical and macropolitical for D&G, even at the smallest scale. At the scale of the individual and her environment, we can distinguish between affects and feelings. A feeling is something the individual brings to their consciousness by internally checking their emotional state, and saying "I am happy" or "I am sad" or even "I don't know how I feel right now". Feelings are then macropolitical because they relate to the conscious self. However, underneath the (arguably illusory) whole of the conscious self is the seething multitude of, mostly-unconscious, simultaneous complexly-interacting processes that make up a living mind. Affects circulate in that mind regardless of whether they are brought to the attention of the conscious self and then articulated/subsumed into a conscious feeling, or not. Hence we say that the feeling/affect distinction mirrors the macropolitical/micropolitical one, even at the individual level. But more interesting from a social dynamics point of view, is that both feelings and affects can circulate directly between individuals in communication.
We understand implicitly that someone bringing us great news of a positive development for us will engender the same feelings of happiness and excitement as the news-teller. But what is less obvious is that affects, whether of hyper-stimulation, agitation, calm, etc, can also pass between people, without being explicitly articulated at a conscious level. By being self-aware and perceptive we can become aware of them "Wow, this person's really nervous, and that's making me nervous too". But even if we don't become consciously aware of it, the affect can still pass from them to us, and vice versa.
To take a slightly oblique example, small talk is a concept that can be difficult for many people on the geek-spectrum to grasp. A friend, a self-confessed geek-girl, once told me she didn't use to get the point of it at all. Why did people insist on talking about trivial or seemingly meaningless topics? Although she tried to respond politely and in a friendly manner to women at work who engaged her in such conversation, internally she was frustrated by the seeming pointlessness of the conversation. She even suspected that people's motives for indulging in such trivial topics must be because they were trivial people in some way. Then one time she was having a lot of unfair pressure at work, catastrophic personal life and things being overall shit in general, and was feeling upset and miserable at work. A female colleague saw how upset she was and came over and casually engaged her in a conversation about nothing very much at all. My friend felt so much better after this conversation that a light bulb went on in her head. I felt like such a fool, she recounted, to have never realised before that the topic of the conversation wasn't necessarily the point of the conversation. That sometimes the purpose of a conversation is just reassurance or emotional support or validation and the ostensible topic is entirely secondary. To most people that may seem so obvious as to be a weird thing to draw attention to. But for those of us on the geek-spectrum, the discovery that the surface meaning of a conversation may be entirely secondary can be alarming as it means that the amount of stuff in the big black box of "does not compute…" we find around social interaction suddenly got a lot bigger.
Small talk then, is an everyday example of how people instinctively or consciously make use of the micropolitical passage of affects between people, unconstrained by the macropolitical literal meaning of conversation. Going beyond the feminist slogan that "the personal is political", D&G propose that "everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics."
The proposition that "everything is political" may seem deliberately provocative or exaggeration, but it usefully challenges the notion that human interaction can be neatly divided into boxes of "political" and "not-political". Sometimes some of what the traditional left summarily dump into the "not-political" box is a case of not listening properly or not understanding the real context, in the same way that the friend in the anecdote dismissed small talk as meaningless or trivial.
But if small talk is a relatively benign micropolitical phenonemon, we need to understand that micropolitical dynamics can also be as dangerous or as fatal as macropolitical ones, in certain cases. When D&G talk of "microfascisms" they are not limiting this phenomenon to being the micropolitical underpinning of macropolitical fascism alone:
Only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; nor do they "want" to be repressed, in a kind of masochistic hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is never separable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into molecular levels, from microformations already shaping postures, attitudes, perceptions, expectations, semiotic systems, etc. Desire is never an undifferentiated instinctual energy, but itself results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions: a whole supple segmentarity that processes molecular energies and potentially gives desire a fascist determination. Leftist organizations will not be the last to secrete microfascisms. It's too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.
Sekigun
In 1969 a small breakaway group from the Japanese Communist League calling itself the Red Army Faction (Sekigun-ha), believing the time for revolutionary armed insurrection had come, declared war on the Japanese state and committed a number of small but violent attacks on some police stations and other symbolic institutions. The Japanese state duly responded by arresting most of them, over 200 arrests, including the original founder and chief ideologue Takaya Shiomi. The handful of remnants still at liberty merged with a Maoist breakaway group from the Japanese Communist Party to form the United Red Army (Rengo Sekigun) with a grand total of 29 members. Having lynched (literally) two of their contingent as suspected defectors or collaborators, the remaining URA hid out in the mountains in Gunma Prefecture where they set up a "Guerrilla training base camp". During the winter of 1971-72 the URA conducted extreme self-criticism sessions which ended in the murder, by beatings, slashing with knives or tying to trees to die of exposure, of a further 12 of their ever-shrinking number. The URA leaders who oversaw this horrific slaughter later refused to accept the deaths as murders, referring to them instead as "death by defeatism". Finally in mid-February 1972 two men escaped and the police closed in on the URA and arrested nearly all of the survivors, apart from five who escaped and holed up in a mountain lodge taking the wife of the lodge-keeper hostage. The resulting ten day siege was televised across Japan along with the lurid details of torture and murder the police were extracting from the survivors of the URA "anti-defeatist" purge.
The most natural first reaction to this horrific episode is to dismiss it as insanity. Indeed the standard response of the traditional left to other episodes of tyrannical behaviour or internecine violence - of which there are actually quite a lot in past and more recent socialist and irish republican history, if truth be told - is also to drop it in a big bin marked "madness". This may conveniently side-step the challenge of whether - and how - microfascist dynamics could arise within the left, but it is ultimately problematic on a number of levels.
On the one hand the dismissal of episodes of excessive violence and/or negative intensities simply adds to the general stigmatisation of madness that equates madness and violence generally. Secondly it is dangerously close to conceding the prejudice of the dominant capitalist ideology that violence in pursuit of money and profit is rational, whereas violence in pursuit of non-monetary political aims is, ipso facto, irrational. But most dangerously of all, it implicitly gives an alibi for any and all behaviour of leftist individuals or groups on the grounds that if I/we are not mad, then any line we take, no matter how wildly disproportionate or callous in regard to the harm imposed on others, cannot be anything other than justified by our macropolitical commitment to proletarian emancipation. Thus the various factional splinters of the British WRP attacking each other with baseball bats and iron bars in the 1980s, is not evidence of metastizing microfascisms, but commitment to "our noble cause". Similarly, also in the 80s, when the rad-fem militants of Women Against Violence Against Women attacked S&M dykes at the "Chain Reaction" night with iron bars, they failed to see any irony (unlike their bloodied victims).
And in case any Irish readers think that this kind of thing only happens in imperialist countries like Japan and the UK, let's not forget there are plenty of examples closer to home. In fact talk to anybody who's been on the left for a couple of decades and ask them for their favourite stories of past "madness" and prepare to be boggled. Dismissing these episodes as mental illness not only does injustice to the actual social problems and stigmas of genuine mental illness, but acts not as an explanation but a barrier to serious discussion of the social dynamics that can lead to such disastrous outcomes.
Organiser model
Another example that we can examine not just the distinction, but also the interrelation of the macro- and micropolitical, is the practice of the organiser model in workplace and community organising.
Traditional unions have a strong tendency to reduce all questions of union power to "density", i.e. what percentage of the workforce in a given industry or shop are union members. This reduction to union power to pure extension, a simple head-count of numbers, makes sense from the perspective of the union bureaucracy whose pay comes from the members subs, but also their rank at the negotiating table in social partnership talks, etc, comes from how many people they can claim to represent.
However even the highest density figure does not magically convert into much union power if the majority of the membership have neither the confidence, the skills or the inclination to take on the bosses in an actual fight. Just as an oil film that covers a puddle can be made to disappear with a simple drop of detergent, shallow density without any depth or intensity of member engagement or organisation can lead to a union that will roll over and play dead at the first sign of determined attack by employers or government. The Irish teachers unions have a union density in the high 90s, but that hasn't helped them fight the swinging cuts in pay and conditions that the government have inflicted on them in the last few years. But if most of your membership treats the union more as a professional body, like the equivalent ones for doctors or lawyers, we shouldn't be surprised at the lack of actual power all that density adds up to, or doesn't.
The organiser model, seeks to undo some of the most damaging effects of "third-party" style service unionism by re-engaging the membership as active participants with ownership of their own demands and having the capacity and will to lead their own fights and fight to win. The process of reconstruction this involves relies heavily on one-to-one conversations aimed at finding members issues, and ultimately "moving" them (to use the jargon) into making a personal commitment to actively participate. This process of "moving" people is unquestionably a micropolitical technique, at least in the common sense, basing itself as it does on the specific issues, hopes and fears of the individual involved, rather than a macropolitical appeal to a general abstractly rationalist argument. Of course organising needs to deal with the macropolitical question of density as well, if it is to have any chance of winning, but it is a good example of the operation of political activism that balances the macropolitical and micropolitical together in the attempt to make them interact productively.
If the application of the organiser model to workplace or neighbourhood organising is an activity most often associated with a broadly anti-capitalist ethos, or at least a vaguely "socialist" consciousness of the need for workers and tenants to assert their needs pro-actively so as not to suffer the depredations of unfettered capitalism, our next example has no such starting point. For anybody who hasn't heard of Neuro-Linguistic Programming before, the short version is that it's a load of old hooey. However it is hooey that has a certain success in propagating its meme amongst some sections of the salespeople and corporate trainers who make a living from selling hooey to the middle-managers and unfortunate underlings in the medium to large corpo sector.
The reason NLP is so popular amongst salespeople and their ilk is that it holds out the promise of getting an edge in their own struggles to "move" people. Briefly it promises through certain techniques of listening and close observation to form a model of the psychological makeup and inner processes of their targets so as to be better able to make an end-run around their conscious mind and appeal to their unconscious triggers. Essentially they want to have the capacity for the same kind of manipulation that stage and TV hypnotists or "mind controllers" such as Derren Brown or Keith Barry entertain their audiences with.
Of course here we are in danger of falling into D&G's second error as seeing micropolitics as being merely a psychological phenomenon. What's more, given that in this case one side is consciously trying (with a greater or lesser real understanding) to exploit micropolitical channels or openings in the manner of a computer hacker trying to use vulnerabilities in software for an "exploit", this is not really a case of micropolitical flow. It simply demonstrates that the channels exist, the openings through which behaviour-influencing signals can flow without going through the macropolitical "front door" of consciousness.
Brick on plexiglass
On the afternoon of the Anti-Poll Tax demonstration of Saturday 31st March 1990 this author was on the corner of Whitehall and Trafalgar Square as three police vans from the British Transport Police rammed their way down through the packed crowd. Some rioting had already begun further down the road by Downing Street and the MoD green, but this reckless driving of vans into a packed mass of people was the real flashpoint that lit the conflagration that a stunned world watched on the news that night. As the vans entered Whitehall the crowd surged forward in their wake. A thin line of round-shield riot cops tried to hold of the top of Whitehall as the missiles rained down on their plexiglass shields and helmets, the staccato of clunks set against the background bass roar of the crowd, creating that unmistakable drum & bass sound of the Great British Riot.
The crowd would surge forward, the riot cops would counter-charge as far as they dared without losing their line or risking getting flanked. In this as so many other riots the crowd moved mostly without explicit communications or any pre-planned coordination. Yet there was, and always is, coordination in these situations, whether in riots or in the immediate reactions of people to disasters.
Even in the initial absence of macropolitical organisation, communication and coordination, the crowd of people who have mostly never met before, without knowing the person stood next to them, can act together and in concert to achieve a common aim. Micropolitical flow is an absolutely essential part of coordination in any riot, battle or rapid response to emergency.
Of course to supplement this "emergency mode" use of swarm or herd tactics, a complementary, reinforcing element of macropolitical coordination soon appears. The experienced or inspired see the opportunity to overturn a van and call out for support. Someone needs people to come a get ammo from a nearby building site. Sharp-eyed observers with tactical nous warn of impending police pincers trying to cut the front-line off. Small affinity groups of rioters who know each other and have fought side by side on many previous occasions move in to reinforce the line. The macro and micropolitical flows of the riotous mob cooperatively form its collective power and intelligence, without requiring generals or standing orders.
Two definitions revisited
It's now time to return to the question signalled at the start of how to relate the common sense notions of what macro and micro mean in relation to politics and the more "leftfield" (as in, "out there", rather than specifically left-wing) D&G take on the matter. In my opinion the D&G take, despite it's initially alien-sounding language and the unfamiliarity of conceptualising the subject, does usefully refer to actual experiences and processes that are familiar to everyone. What's more, whether it's the challenge of facilitating/moderating a tense meeting with clear divisions and feelings running high on both sides, or the more one-to-one process of the organiser conversation, the practice of having to pay close attention to not only what is being said, but what is being simultaneously communicated without being explicitly said, is a vital necessity to get productive outcomes.
If we accept the need to pay attention to two parallel processes in practice, then there should be no reason to not pay attention to this duality in theory as well, so as to guide our practice. In my opinion the D&G focus on macropolitics and micropolitics as the flows that pass between people's interactions usefully extends our ability to do this, beyond the simple "inter-personal versus collective" common sense distinction.
Further that the two different distinctions are not entirely in conflict with, or mutually exclusive to, each other. The inter-personal listening skills of the organiser in the one-to-one conversation is focused on the macropolitical (in the D&G sense) process of teasing out a person's real issues from behind the smokescreen of "first response" issues that they initially give because they think that's what you want to hear, or because, for some reason they think they are more socially acceptable than their genuine issues. Part of the listening skills that allow the organiser to do that are micropolitical ones of putting the other person at ease, detecting signals of hesitation or unsureness and so on.
The proposal here, in other words, is that the D&G conceptualisation does not so much contradict the common sense version, as extend it into an additional dimension, analogous to turning a 2D picture into a 3D one.
Above we've only really talked about how the macropolitical and micropolitical processes can work in harmony, reinforcing each other, or at cross-purposes, countering each other. However we can also use a dualistic analysis to understand how capitalism's division of the social sphere into the political and the economic actually affects the differing ways that relations of exploitation and domination or oppression manifest themselves to us. This is actually a way bigger topic than we really have room for here, in an already overlong post, but it's worth touching on briefly, before moving on to the core issue of the relevance of all this to the current backlash against intersectionality in many left-wing circles.
Assuming that large-scale or "macro" in the common sense, entities do exert influence on individuals, the means by which they do this may be either macropolitical or micropolitical in the D&G sense. Or, more correctly, although the entity/individual relations will actually pass through both simultaneously, albeit in different ways, the dominant manner may be one or the other.
The first proposition here is that categories of domination and oppression, such as race or gender, manifest themselves primarily to individuals on the macropolitical level - i.e. you are made conscious of them, to have their effect on you. In fact, it could be argued that the point of domination is to put your conscious choices at the service of the interest of the dominating force. Which is not to say that effects of race, gender, heterosexism, etc, do not also impact through more subconscious channels - as in fact numerous critics of the oppressive effects of these categories have pointed out (Fanon springs to mind, for e.g.).
The second proposition here, is that categories based on exploitation, such as class, operate predominantly through channels akin to the micropolitical (actually "axiomatic", within the D&G ontology, but no time for that...) in bypassing and being indifferent to conscious subjectivity. In fact, getting away from the psychological idea of micropolitics as flow of affects, exploitation is as completely indifferent to affects as it is to feelings/emotions as it passes through individuals. In the 19th century factory workers were reduced to mere "hands", not just verbally, but practically, in operational terms. In an entirely different 21st century context, users of Facebook do not pay to use its "service", nor are they paid by it, nor are their interactions with it governed by anything other than their own interests. Nonetheless, shareholder value, profit, is being extracted from this activity, without any macropolitical command over the Facebook user's activity. This too is one of capitalism's flows of exploitation, without any obvious sign of dominance or oppression.
If categories such as race or gender on the one hand, and class on the other, seem in some way different to us, this cannot be divorced from that fact that they "appear" differently to us, in the sense of the way they initially manifest themselves in our individual lives. If race or gender appear to us directly in the form of interpersonal and institutional relations, then "consciousness-raising" is an appropriate activity to make the link from individual experiences of oppression to the systemic oppression. On the other hand, if the class relation appears to us in the form of individual one-to-one voluntary contracts between us and an employer in the labour market, then the operation of exploitation takes place "behind our backs", as Marx put it, and the class relation is not immediately apparent on an interpersonal level. It's operation has to be seen first on a collective level, and then the link back down to one's individual experience be made in that order.
As noted earlier, this is a big topic, but we need to move on.
Macroleft versus Microleft
We can now move to a consideration of what we might mean by such a term as the "macro-reductionist left". The term proposes that there is a substantial section of the left that insists either that only macropolitical dynamics really exist, or, alternatively, that maybe some of that "touchy-feely" stuff (the knee-jerk stigmatising term is itself revelatory) does have some relevance in relation to "personal matters" (personal relationships and such-like), but any focus on it runs the risk of quickly transforming into "bourgeois individualism" or, inter-changeably, "identity politics", both cardinal sins. The macro-reductionist left, then, is characterised by an instinctive suspicion of, and hostility towards anything that smacks of micro politics.
Partly this is to do with a "rationalist" or positivist discomfort with dynamics and communications that are inherently hard to directly detect, quantify and measure by objective methods. But more fundamentally it is an implicit prejudice that, when it comes to ontology, "there can be only one". In other words, any departure from a one-sidedly macropolitics must be setting itself up as a one-sidedly micropolitical alternative, which would imply the liquidation of vital macropolitical ontological entities such as class.
In other words, the macroleft see any effort to take micropolitical issues seriously as evidence of a liberal ontology, as we outlined at the start. However, how credible is this? If we look at the social critiques advanced by feminists, anti-racists and others, either back in the 60s or today, most of them explicitly put forward racism or gender as "real abstractions" in a similar vein to Marx's characterisation of capital (ok, technically according to Sohn-Renthal, but it's a popular interpretation). In a recent interview with Rabble, guardian journalist Gary Younge said, in response to a question about how Martin Luther King might have reacted to the Obama presidency:
I think it would be consistent with the way [MLK] spoke during his life to say that Obama highlights some of the contradictions of the post-Civil Rights era. Some people are allowed to get on. Racism is a system – it is not about individuals, it is about groups.
Now whether Younge counts as a "liberal" for not being an advocate of the revolutionary overthrow of capital, is not the issue here. In terms of a liberal ontology that refuses the existence of racism as other than the sum of individual racist prejudices, his assertion that racism is a system, doesn't fit. And it's a pretty common position amongst anti-racists. Similarly, many feminists, of a range of different varieties, would hold that gender exerts real power as a systemic social relation. And ditto, no doubt, queer theorists and others. The acceptance of the importance of micropolitical issues does not, in and of itself, imply a necessary rejection of the macropolitical such as in a liberal ontology.
It's important to grasp, however, that there does exist a mirror image of the macroleft which is a micro-reductionist left that focuses on micropolitical dynamics either to the complete exclusion of macropolitical categories like class, or mistakenly trying to articulate it as a purely micropolitical construct, like "classism". However this does not mean that any politics that addresses micropolitical dynamics seriously, is necessarily restricted to such a microleft. A dualist ontology that addresses both macropolitical and micropolitical dynamics is not only possible, but is ultimately the only comprehensible and consistent reading of both in the sense exposed by D&G.
However, to the macroleft, the notion of a dualist ontology where dynamics are always simultaneously macropolitical and micropolitical, is anathema. Which is ironic given that the ideas of Marx, which most of the macropolitical left still take as a primary reference point, is one of the primary sources for the understanding that the historical specificity of capitalism is precisely its original fracturing of the social ontology into the "ontological doubling" of political and economic spheres operating to autonomous, if necessarily interconnected, logics. How could such clearly dualist origins have been transformed into such an aggressively monist ontology?
The solution to this conundrum is that much of the orthodox Marxist left, while paying lip-service to Marx's ontological dualism, in practice hold a more pseudo-dualist ontology where one of the poles - the economic - is "more equal" than the other, tending to the extreme of vulgar economism where the economic "base" determines the political "superstructure" - or at least in the most significant cases of "in the final instance". In essence the ontological problem of the macroleft's hostility to micropolitics, and by extension intersectionality, is not due to being too Marxist, but not being Marxist enough.
That the hostility of the macroleft is really to micropolitics in general, rather than intersectionality specifically is evidenced by the strong parallels between the arguments and attitudes deployed by the former against the latter and those only recently deployed by the SWP against "creeping feminism" and "autonomism" and the reaction against feminism, gay and black liberation politics in the 1960s and 70s by the macroleft of the day.
Of course today's "defenders of real class politics" (sic) against intersectionality declare that they are in favour of feminism, anti-racism and fighting homophobia, and distance themselves from the "unfortunate" attitudes of their forerunners against same. And, subjectively-speaking, (despite often being ardent critics of the acceptability of subjectively-based judgements in other circumstances), they are speaking the truth for the most part. And here I think the position of some intersectionalists that macroleft hostility to them can only be evidence of unrecognised misogyny, racism or homophobia is incorrect. For the macroleft is not exclusively populated by men, or white or straight people. And, for that matter, even a good number of the macroleft who are straight white men, have demonstrated their sincere opposition to sexism, racism and homophobia in past deeds as well as words. Unless we are to take a page out of the Zionist playbook and adopt their repulsive habit of slandering their Jewish critics as "self-hating Jews", clearly we need to look for political motives that go deeper than simple prejudice on the part of women, gay or PoC advocates of the macroleft opposition to intersectionality.
The key to deconstructing the inconsistency of this opposition lies in the ambiguous use of the word "divisive" by the macroleft when summing up what they find most objectionable in intersectionality. On the one hand "divisive" invokes the spectre of a zero-sum game, a "class-as-identity" perspective that sees any attention given to any category other than class as necessarily subtracting from it. It's not so much that they refuse to admit the existence of categories of gender or race, but that they see them as in direct competition with class, so that in terms of "primary identity", class is mutually exclusive with all other categories. This sense of "divisive" as being in competition with class presupposes a monistic or at best merely pseudo-dualistic ontology that confuses class and identity, exploitation and oppression.
The second use of "divisive" is in the accusation of intersectionalists causing divisive arguments and alienating people by an overly confrontational or abusive manner. The actual validity of these accusations are open to question, to say the least. But have been challenged and criticised more than adequately elsewhere, so other than saying there is something of Irish right-wing columnist John Waters' claim to being oppressed by the liberal-feminazi establishment about some of these claims, the merits of the charges themselves are not at issue here.
What is at issue - the ambiguity already mentioned - is that the critique is effectively a charge of microfascistic behaviour on the part of intersectionalists.
Now if we accept that microfascisms can arise within the political dynamics of any group, regardless of it's stated macropolitical principles, then that challenge can be put to any group, not just authoritarian socialists of the orthodox Marxist ilk, but no less anarchists (libertarianism is a macropolitical affiliation and "manarchism" actually is "a thing" rather than the slur some dismiss it as) and feminists, intersectionalists and anybody else.
However there is a direct contradiction between, on the one hand, claiming that any acceptance of micropolitics as valid grounds for criticism is "divisive", and on the other forming a critique of "divisiveness" that is itself micropolitical, on the other. And indeed, the few critiques from the macroleft that rise above the level of pure ressentiment and apolitical hostility, does unmistakeably have this content. Let's take as an example a recent statement from the Anti-Capitalist Intiative's Charlie Winstanley on the recent International Solidarity Network split, rejected by the ACI but gleefully reprinted by the ever-trollish Weekly Worker:
The total effect is to create an environment in which free discussion of ideas is impossible. Oppressed groups and individuals operate as a form of unassailable priesthood, basing their legitimacy on the doctrine of original sin. To extend the analogy, discussions become confessionals in which participants are encouraged to self-flagellate and prostrate themselves before the holy writ of self-awareness. Shame and self-deprecation are encouraged to keep non-oppressed groups in their place, and subvert the social pyramid of oppression, with oppressed groups at the top.
But the question begs, to what ends? Whom does it benefit to have oppressed groups sitting atop a conversation increasingly restricted to a tiny and declining far left, becoming ever more exclusive and alienated from social discussion with its hostile and complicated etiquettes and procedures? What individual in their right mind would seek liberation in this movement, riddled with its own internal inquisition?
In passing, let's note that the subverted social pyramid of oppression echoes the earlier critique of inverted hierarchies found in the anarchist - and intersectionalist - writer, Gayge Operaista in their critique of liberal gay politics in "A critique of anti-assimilationism". In the quote here the ACI writer is clearly critiquing (however unfairly) the creation of an affective environment of shame, guilt and inquisition that would have no doubt been familiar to the poor wretches of the Japanese United Red Army. While we have yet to hear of people being lynched or knifed to death by the putative "intersectionalist inquisition" in the same way as the URA, the point here is that the critique is not of the overt or macropolitical commitments of the intersectionalists to combatting racism, sexism, etc, but to an imputed micropolitical "will to power" for domination and control of what constitutes acceptable discussion.
So how do we get beyond the stale and unproductive mutual hostility and confrontation between the macroleft and the microleft?
In terms of those advocates of intersectionality or other micropolitical-issue addressing political tendencies that actually do exhibit a left liberal ontology, the response is obvious. Firstly, simply drawing attention to all those parts of the works of the writers and activists from the particular tendency they take inspiration from that explicitly talk of the reality of social relations and categories of oppression. Secondly pointing out the inconsistencies of trying to reduce exploitation in money terms (and what other terms are there?) to being a type of oppression (often inversely proportional in practice). Thirdly exposing the contradictions in casting class as a form of oppression, rather than exploitation. Finally in pointing out that while you don't necessarily have to be into authoritarian and representational politics to advocate a monist ontology, it is enough of a convenient fit for such reactionary politics to give serious liberationists pause for thought.
In relation to the macroleft, the most obvious contradiction is that a tendency that prides itself on having a rational macropolitical critique of all social phenomena simply does not have such a critique of intersectionality. The emperor has no clothes. Every critique they have attempted to formulate so far, in the rare case of progressing beyond simple abuse and slander, has been a micropolitical one, which contradicts the premise of their argument, and indeed their basic ontology. To genuinely criticise the monist liberal ontology they would have to examine the limits of their own monism, and self-criticism is precisely the thing that the current macroleft hostility to intersectionality is trying to avoid. For decades the macroleft has convinced itself that it was keeping the flame of working class anti-capitalist rebellion alive, waiting for the inevitable coming capitalist crisis. The crisis has come and the result for the left has been massive defeat, rather than growth or victory. The resulting demoralisation has led to the current aggressive seeking for enemies to blame or witches to burn. Whatever you may think of Keynes (and the macroleft's dirty secret is that it claims Lenin but demands Keynes) his question that "if the facts contradict my theory, I change my theory. What do you do?" has never been so relevant.
In addition, the one problem that both the macro-left and liberal intersectionalists and other tendencies of the microleft actually have in common, is a failure to really engage with the looming environmental catastrophe that overshadows 21st century radical politics. Again this is a problem stemming from the ontological similarity between the two. In this case an overly "person-centred" or humanist bias.
A more genuinely materialist (rather than economistic) ontology has to include the intersection of three relational logics - 1) the relation between people and the macropolitical social relations that define our current capitalist mode of production, framed by property, the law of value and producing exploitation the class struggle; 2) the relation between people and big-O "Other" people, framed by identity, subjectification and producing hierarchies of domination and oppression; 3) the relation between people and the environment, framed by "externality" (in value terms) and producing environmental destruction and unsustainable resource overuse. In the context of these, the struggle of the revolutionary movement is towards economic emancipation, political liberation and environmental transition. Neither brain-dead "development of the forces of production" (aka "Jobs & Growth!"), nor personal liberation from all interpersonal oppressions is going to deal with the environmental crisis. Neither will leaving it to those who think a new "green" state authoritarianism is the answer either, for that matter.
Enough. Exploring D&G's notion of the macropolitical class relation having its micropolitical counterpart in masses, important as it is to understanding both the force and the limits of the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the movement of squares, etc, will have to wait for another time.
This is one of those pieces you start off in the complacent conviction that you have a clear idea of what you're going to write about, how the argument will be structured, with a start, middle and conclusion, only to discover that you were utterly, utterly mistaken. It was some way in before I realised that I couldn't hope to finish this piece I would just have to settle for quitting at some point. Once I started pulling on this conceptual thread more and more things kept popping out, more connections, more things to be explained, more questions to be answered. In a way the text itself became a mini D&G-style war machine, insatiable, uncontrollable and unstoppable. The result, I'm afraid is an unruly rambling mess. I can't say if the attempt to read it will bring you any benefit, but from an entirely selfish point of view, I found writing it amazingly productive in terms of the lines of future enquiry it has opened up for me. I can only offer commiserations if the process of reading it turned out to be painful, frustrating or mystifying, though.
My first encounter with Deleuze and Guattari was through my comrades in the Free Association, one of whom, Keir, suggested that our next reading group work should be A Thousand Plateaus. He claimed that reading it had changed the way he thought about politics, life, everything, even if he couldn't explain it. Grappling with ATP was a bit like that bit at the start of Alien where the crew explore a shipwrecked alien spaceship. Most of our reading group conversations started with "What the fuck does this bit mean?" usually responded with "Dunno, but I think maybe… not sure, though". Like the alien infection, you walk away from your encounter with ATP and initially think you're unchanged and unaffected. And then some time later, even years afterwards, it suddenly bursts out of your chest, mewling its monstrous desire to devour the world. So I blame you for this Keir, it's all your fault… ;)
Finally, I was going to include the following as a header quote, but as one of my draft reviewers rightly pointed out, that sort of thing is OK for book chapters, but doesn't really work with online pieces, particularly if the relevance is oblique, rather than obvious up front. As a musician I find the analogy between a dualistic analysis, such as the one macropolitics and micropolitics gives us, and the "dialectical unity" - until recently mistaken by Western musicology as polyphony - of the African cross-rhythm to be irresistible. One day soon, perhaps, the left will have the confidence to venture beyond the "four-four-to-the-floor" marching band monometric rhythm of past dogmas and start learning to dance to a different beat, one more complex and yet more true to life. We live in hope.
"cross-rhythm: A rhythm in which the regular pattern of accents of the prevailing meter is contradicted by a conflicting pattern and not merely a momentary displacement that leaves the prevailing meter fundamentally unchallenged"
New Harvard Dictionary of Music
"By the very nature of the desired resultant rhythm, the main beat scheme cannot be separated from the secondary beat scheme. It is the interplay of the two elements that produces the cross-rhythmic texture"
Foundational Course in African Music, C.K. Ladzekpo
"[The] resultant [3:2] rhythm holds the key to understanding . . . there is no independence here, because 2 and 3 belong to a single Gestalt."
Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, Kofi Agawe
Refs: Deleuze & Guattari, Micropolitics and Segmentarity
http://www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/TP-Micropolitics.pdf
Original article: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/sidewinder/micropolitics-left
poll tax
Paul Bowman
Joseph Kay
In reply to Welcome by libcom.org
Like the alien infection, you walk away from your encounter with ATP and initially think you're unchanged and unaffected. And then some time later, even years afterwards, it suddenly bursts out of your chest, mewling its monstrous desire to devour the world.
This is very true. You read D&G and think it's a load of bollocks, but then you find yourself unable to think in quite the same way. A performative proof of the materiality of ideas, residing in texts and neural circuits...
Faced with the challenging nature of texts from post-structuralist thinkers like D&G or Foucault, many people make the assumption that they are really motivated by an elitist desire to confuse, intimidate and befuddle the masses and divert theory into useless abstractions, far removed from the concerns of ordinary people
Searle claims Foucault told him: "In France, you gotta have ten percent incomprehensible, otherwise people won't think it's deep–they won't think you're a profound thinker." When Searle later asked Pierre Bourdieu if he thought this was true, Bourdieu insisted it was much worse than ten percent.
http://www.critical-theory.com/foucault-obscurantism-they-it/
D&G --- Dolce&Gabbana
D&G --- Deleuze&Guattari
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text:
Flowers v. Commonwealth, 2011 Va. App. LEXIS 310 (VA Ct. App. 2011)
Defendant: Flowers
ARDIE CORNEILUS FLOWERS, JR. v. COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA
Record No. 1822-10-2
COURT OF APPEALS OF VIRGINIA
2011 Va. App. LEXIS 310
October 11, 2011, Decided
COUNSEL: William T. Linka (Richmond Criminal Law, on brief), for appellant.
Jennifer C. Williamson, Assistant Attorney General (Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II, Attorney General, on brief), for appellee.
JUDGES: Present: Judges Humphreys, Beales and Senior Judge Clements. MEMORANDUM OPINION BY JUDGE JEAN HARRISON CLEMENTS.
OPINION BY: JEAN HARRISON CLEMENTS
MEMORANDUM OPINION* BY JUDGE JEAN HARRISON CLEMENTS
* Pursuant to Code § 17.1-413, this opinion is not designated for publication.
Ardie Corneilus Flowers, Jr. (hereinafter "appellant") was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and unlawful wounding. On appeal, he maintains the evidence was insufficient to support his convictions and that the trial court applied incorrect legal standards in rejecting his self-defense plea. Finding no error in the trial court's decision, we affirm.
As the parties are fully conversant with the record in this case and because this memorandum opinion carries no precedential value, this opinion recites only those facts and incidents of the proceedings as are necessary to the parties' understanding of the disposition of this appeal.
"On appeal, 'we review the evidence in the light most favorable to the Commonwealth, granting to it all reasonable inferences fairly deducible therefrom.'" Archer v. Commonwealth, 26 Va. App. 1, 11, 492 S.E.2d 826, 831 (1997) (quoting Martin v. Commonwealth, 4 Va. App. 438, 443, 358 S.E.2d 415, 418, 4 Va. Law Rep. 127 (1987)). On August 9, 2009, Derrick Bynum was in downtown Richmond when his brother Leeshaun ("Shaun") Bynum appeared without warning in his car. Shaun told Derrick he had been looking for him because appellant had "slapped" their mother.
Derrick joined Shaun in his car, and the two brothers immediately went to appellant's house. When they arrived, they encountered appellant's thirteen-year-old son, Trey, exiting the front door. Derrick and Shaun told Trey they needed to speak with appellant, and Trey went back inside while the brothers remained on the front porch. Upon learning the Bynums were waiting, appellant, who was showering, partially dressed and went to the door.
The Bynums greeted appellant in an "aggressive" tone, instructing him to step outside to discuss the "incident that happened earlier between [him] and [their] mama." Appellant asked the brothers to wait while he went upstairs and fully dressed. Following his father upstairs, Trey told him he was "scared" and that appellant should get his gun. Appellant put a loaded gun in his pocket before returning downstairs and inviting the Bynums inside.
The Bynums followed appellant into the kitchen and began to talk to him about the incident with their mother. Appellant sat down at the kitchen table and invited the brothers to do the same, but they refused. Instead, they stood together in the narrow space between the kitchen table and the sink. Appellant denied hitting their mother and suggested that they call her "to straighten this thing out." Toward that end, Trey retrieved appellant's cell phone from upstairs and gave it to Shaun.
Shaun went into the living room and spoke on the phone for several minutes. During that time, Derrick remained in front of the kitchen sink with his arms folded in front of him.1 Appellant continued to deny striking Derrick's mother and told Derrick his mother had stolen money from appellant's closet. Derrick went into the living room and related to Shaun what appellant had stated. Shaun, who continued to talk on the phone, appeared to have no reaction to this announcement.
1 Appellant disputed Derrick's testimony that his arms remained in front of him and contended that Derrick frequently put one hand behind his back, causing appellant to fear he was carrying a weapon. Appellant also noted that the Bynums' mother had told appellant about the weapons they carried.
Shortly thereafter, Derrick and Shaun returned to the kitchen where appellant remained seated at the table. After concluding his phone call, Shaun stated, "All right. All right." Derrick stood by the sink as Shaun approached appellant with the cell phone. As Shaun handed the cell phone back to appellant with his left hand, he raised his right hand and struck appellant in the face. In response, appellant fired his gun twice, wounding both Derrick and Shaun. The wounded men fled toward the front door, but Shaun, who had been struck in the chest, collapsed at the door and died. Derrick, who had been struck in the forearm, ran home.
Appellant testified he fired his gun to get the Bynums "off him" and because he feared they might be armed. He noted that Derrick appeared to be "rushing" toward him at the time Shaun struck him. He acknowledged, however, he saw no bulges in the brothers' clothing or any other indication the men were carrying weapons.
After hearing the evidence, the trial court found Trey to be the most credible witness and noted he testified Derrick never moved toward appellant. The trial court observed further that the bullet's entry into the back side of Derrick's forearm constituted "convincing evidence" that Derrick's arms were folded in front of him when he was shot. As the trial court found no reason, based upon the "way the Bynums presented themselves and the way they were dressed,"2 for appellant to believe they were armed, it determined appellant's response to being struck was "unreasonable" and "excessive."
2 Derrick was dressed in a "wife beater and shorts," and Shaun was wearing a t-shirt and pants.
Having rejected appellant's argument he shot the Bynums in self-defense, the trial court convicted him of voluntary manslaughter and unlawful wounding. This appeal followed.
Appellant raises three arguments on appeal. First, he contends the evidence was insufficient to find him guilty of either offense because he acted in self-defense. Second, he argues the trial court erroneously applied a "three-prong" test in determining whether he acted in self-defense. Finally, he asserts the trial court erred by applying an "objective standard of reasonableness in determining whether [he] acted out of fear of injury."
We begin by addressing the second and third issues, both of which pertain to whether the trial court applied the correct legal standards in rejecting appellant's self-defense claim.3
3 Appellant also argues that the "trial court improperly sustained the Commonwealth's objection when appellant's counsel attempted to question appellant's son about why he was afraid of the Bynums[.]" As that evidentiary ruling is not included in the assignments of error, we decline to address that issue. See Rule 5A:20(c). Likewise, we do not consider appellant's assertion that the trial court erred by failing "to consider that the appellant had the same right to defend his son as he did himself" because the assignments of error do not raise this specific issue.
With respect to the second assignment of error, appellant points out that the trial court made comments at the sentencing hearing indicating it employed an incorrect "three prong test" during the guilt phase in deciding whether appellant acted in self-defense. Appellant contends the trial court's comments reflect it mistakenly applied an excusable homicide analysis, an analysis that required appellant to retreat or take affirmative steps to avoid further conflict before defending himself. Specifically, appellant refers to the trial court's comments that
a couple of things have to happen before you shoot someone. . . . [O]ne, you have to ask them to leave. Two, you've got to call the police if you have the opportunity if they don't leave. And then, three, you've got to brandish the gun to try to make them leave and face the consequences of that, if any. And if things don't go as they should, then perhaps you have to use the gun. None of those things happened in this case.
The Commonwealth responds that the foregoing excerpt does not fairly represent the trial court's comments or the context in which they were made. It contends the trial court was not articulating the legal standard for self-defense, but instead, was responding to appellant's contention that the circumstances of the crime did not warrant incarceration. We agree with the Commonwealth.
After making the comments cited above, the trial court went on to explain that
I don't think this is a case for a suspended sentence, Mr. Linka. I also don't think it's a case for the maximum, which is what the family wants, and that's certainly understandable. . . . I think Mr. Flowers is guilty of what he was charged with. He exercised very, very bad judgment. Mr. Bynum is dead and his brother is wounded. And I think some time has to be served for that, if for no other reason than so that anyone else who may hear about this will not make the same mistakes in judgment that Mr. Flowers has made.
When appellant suggested these comments indicated the trial court had incorrectly applied this "three-part analysis" in convicting him, the trial court explicitly stated this analysis was not the basis for its verdict.
THE COURT: All right. He is revisiting the guilt phase.
[THE COMMONWEALTH]: Yeah. In response, the Court was very clear on the record at the time of trial as to the analysis and employed the appropriate analysis in why you convicted him. I think what the Court stated today is what the Court thought and considered about in reference to what is an appropriate sentence.
THE COURT: Exactly.
However, when the trial court assessed appellant's argument he acted in self-defense at the guilt phase, it summarized the law as follows:
[T]he law of self-defense is the law of necessity, and I think the word necessity is key. If it reasonably appears to a defendant that the danger exists, he has the right to defend against it to the same extent and under the same rules as would obtain in a case — in case the danger is real.
The defendant may always act upon [the] reasonable appearance of danger, and whether the danger is reasonably apparent is always to be determined from the viewpoint of the defendant at the time he acted. But I don't think the defendant gets to judge for himself what is reasonable. I think reasonable implies reasonable under the circumstances, and not just from the point of view of the defendant.
"'A trial court is presumed to apply the law correctly.'" Breeden v. Commonwealth, 43 Va. App. 169, 188, 596 S.E.2d 563, 572 (2004) (quoting Shenk v. Shenk, 39 Va. App. 161, 169, 571 S.E.2d 896, 900 (2002)). Nothing in the trial court's ruling indicates it assumed appellant was obliged to retreat or take affirmative steps to avoid a conflict with the Bynums prior to defending himself. After finding that Shaun struck appellant, the trial court never stated appellant acted improperly by defending himself; rather, it found that "the response of Mr. Flowers to what happened was unreasonable and excessive."
Appellant argues further, however, that the trial court erroneously applied an objective test to his actions in determining whether appellant's response was appropriate. Appellant submits the appropriate inquiry in assessing whether his response was proportionate to the threat was "not what a reasonable man would have believed, but what [he] believed." Citing his belief that both brothers were assaulting him and his knowledge they "sometimes" carried weapons, appellant contends the trial court erred in deciding his use of a firearm was excessive.
It is well settled that "'a person who reasonably apprehends bodily harm by another is privileged to exercise reasonable force to repel the assault.'" Diffendal v. Commonwealth, 8 Va. App. 417, 421, 382 S.E.2d 24, 25, 6 Va. Law Rep. 69 (1989) (quoting Jackson v. Commonwealth, 96 Va. 107, 113, 30 S.E. 452, 454 (1898)). However, this privilege is "limited by the equally well recognized rule that a person 'shall not, except in extreme cases, endanger human life or do great bodily harm.'" Id. at 421, 382 S.E.2d at 26 (quoting Montgomery v. Commonwealth, 98 Va. 840, 843, 36 S.E. 371, 372 (1900)).
[A] defendant must reasonably fear death or serious bodily harm to himself at the hands of his victim. It is not essential to the right of self-defense that the danger should in fact exist. If it reasonably appears to a defendant that the danger exists, he has the right to defend against it to the same extent, and under the same rules, as would obtain in case the danger is real. A defendant may always act upon reasonable appearance of danger, and whether the danger is reasonably apparent is always to be determined from the viewpoint of the defendant at the time he acted.
McGhee v. Commonwealth, 219 Va. 560, 562, 248 S.E.2d 808, 810 (1978).
These ancient and well-established principles have been recited to emphasize the subjective nature of the defense, and why it is an affirmative one. As Chief Justice Hudgins pointed out in Harper v. Commonwealth, 196 Va. 723, 731, 85 S.E.2d 249, 254 (1955): "'What reasonably appeared to the accused at the time of the shooting, as creating the necessity for his act, is the test and not what reasonably appeared to him, provided it would so appear to some other reasonable person under similar circumstances.'"
The subjective belief of the defendant, without more, however, is insufficient to establish self-defense.
In dealing with apparent danger the jury should be told that before an accused is justified in making an attack with a dangerous weapon upon his adversary he must honestly believe and must have reasonable cause to believe that he was in imminent danger of losing his life or suffering serious bodily injury. . . . "The bare fear that a man intends to commit murder, however well grounded, unaccompanied by any overt act indicative of such an intention, will not warrant killing the party by way of prevention."
Peeples v. Commonwealth, 30 Va. App. 626, 637, 519 S.E.2d 382, 387 (1999) (some citations omitted) (emphasis added).
Here, the trial court, acting as fact finder, was entitled to assess the credibility of the witnesses and to conclude that, contrary to appellant's testimony, Derrick was not joining in the assault at the time appellant fired his weapon. See Sandoval v. Commonwealth, 20 Va. App. 133, 138, 455 S.E.2d 730, 732 (1995) ("The credibility of the witnesses and the weight accorded the evidence are matters solely for the fact finder who has the opportunity to see and hear that evidence as it is presented."). Likewise, based on appellant's testimony he saw no bulges in the Bynums' clothing or any other evidence of a weapon, the trial court could rationally conclude, viewing the circumstances from appellant's viewpoint, that appellant had only a "bare fear" the Bynums might be armed, and, therefore, could not reasonably conclude from a single blow he was threatened with death or serious bodily harm. Cf. Gilbert v. Commonwealth, 28 Va. App. 466, 471, 506 S.E.2d 543, 545 (1998) (assailants openly threatened to kill defendant after beating him so severely he "could barely walk").
Finally, we turn to appellant's assertion the evidence was insufficient to support his convictions because he fired his gun in self-defense. "Self-defense is an affirmative defense which the accused must prove by introducing sufficient evidence to raise a reasonable doubt about his guilt." Smith v. Commonwealth, 17 Va. App. 68, 71, 435 S.E.2d 414, 416, 10 Va. Law Rep. 211 (1993) (citing McGhee, 219 Va. at 562, 248 S.E.2d at 810). "[T]he right to use deadly force in self-defense 'begins where the necessity begins and ends where it ends.'" Couture v. Commonwealth, 51 Va. App. 239, 251, 656 S.E.2d 425, 431 (2008) (quoting Thomason v. Commonwealth, 178 Va. 489, 498, 17 S.E.2d 374, 378 (1941)). "'The law does not clothe [the defendant] with authority to judge arbitrarily of the necessity. He cannot kill, except in case of actual necessity, and whether or not such necessity exists is a question for the [fact finder].'" Id. at 250, 656 S.E.2d at 431 (quoting Hendricks v. Commonwealth, 163 Va. 1102, 1110, 178 S.E. 8, 11 (1935)). "A trial judge's factual findings will not be disturbed on appeal unless plainly wrong or without evidence to support them." Smith, 17 Va. App. at 71, 435 S.E.2d at 416 (citation omitted).
As competent and credible evidence supported the trial court's decision that appellant used excessive force by shooting two apparently unarmed men in response to one of them striking him in the face, the trial court properly rejected appellant's plea of self-defense. Accordingly, the evidence was sufficient to support appellant's convictions for voluntary manslaughter and unlawful wounding.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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MiningWatch in the News
20 July 2020, 7.54pm EDT
Sediment plumes from deep-sea mining could pollute vast swaths of the ocean, scientists say
Subsea mining
BY ELIZABETH CLAIRE ALBERTS ON 20 JULY 2020
A new opinion piece suggests that deep-sea mining would generate damaging sediment plumes and noise pollution that would negatively affect the midwater column, a critical ocean ecosystem that begins 200 meters (660 feet) below the surface of the sea.
Mining plumes will likely distribute sediment and dissolved metals across vast parts of the ocean, compromising organisms' health and introducing heavy metals into the pelagic food chain, according to the paper.
While deep-sea mining has not yet begun, numerous companies have contracts to explore the seabed for minerals, and the International Seabed Authority is set to release regulations governing mining in international waters sometime this year, paving the way for mining to move forward.
The authors say research into the possible impacts of deep-sea mining has tended to focus on seafloor ecosystems but much remains unknown about the effects on midwater ecosystems.
Beyond the sun's reach is a nutrient-rich, species-abundant part of the ocean called the midwater ecosystem. This zone, which extends from a depth of 200-5,000 meters (660-16,400 feet) to 5 kilometers (3 kilometers) below the sea's surface, represents 90% of the Earth's biosphere, contains a biomass of fish 100 times the annual global fish catch, regulates carbon, and supports the pelagic food web through nutrient regeneration. But deep-sea mining, a new activity intended to extract minerals from the seafloor, could seriously threaten the midwater ecosystem, a new paper suggests.
A hydromedusa, seen just above the seafloor along the west wall of Mona Canyon. Image by OAA OKEANOS EXPLORER Program, Oceano Profundo 2015; Exploring Puerto Rico's Seamounts, Trenches, and Troughs.
While deep-sea mining has not yet begun, numerous companies are interested in exploring for minerals near hydrothermal vents, seamounts, and the abyssal plains where polymetallic nodules are found. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body set up to oversee and control mining beyond any country's jurisdiction, is set to finalize a set of rules surrounding deep-sea mining, referred to as the "mining code," later this year, which would allow mining to begin. In the meantime, the ISA has issued 30 licenses for mining companies to explore for minerals over approximately 1.5 million square kilometers (580,000 square miles) of the seafloor in international waters. There's also mining interest within several countries' territorial waters.
The new paper, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), says that past research has tended to examine the possible impacts of deep-sea mining on seafloor ecosystems, but has overlooked midwater ecosystems. Authored by 19 scientists, the opinion piece argues that deep-sea mining "poses significant risks to midwater ecosystems," and that these risks must be comprehensively evaluated to determine whether or not deep-sea mining should proceed.
Each deep-sea mining company will likely use different practices. Most, however, will use a seafloor vehicle to collect minerals and sediment and some kind of vertical system to transport the materials to the surface. Another machine on board a ship will draw out the ore, and discharge unwanted sediment and water back into the ocean.
The potential effects of mining-generated sediment plumes and noise on pelagic taxa. Organisms and plume impacts are not to scale. See text for explanation of effects. Connections between seafloor vehicles and surface ships are only shown for nodule mining. Image by Drazen, et al. (2020).
These activities would generate two types of "environmentally detrimental plumes," according to the paper: one at the seafloor where minerals are collected, and one in the water column where waste is discharged. Both would disperse sediment and dissolved metals in the immediate environment, and eventually over a greater region of the ocean, spanning tens to hundreds of kilometers, the piece suggests. These plumes, according to the authors, will introduce heavy metals into the pelagic food chain, which could even contaminate the human seafood supply; clog organisms' filtration and breathing structures; and introduce visual and mobility barriers that could prevent organisms from properly functioning.
"It's very clear now that mining is going to discharge huge volumes of muddy seawater into these mid waters, and we need to begin discussing what those effects will look like," Jeffrey Drazen, the paper's lead author and a professor in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Mongabay. "And it's not a pretty picture."
Natural levels of sediment in the midwater column are between 10 and 20 micrograms per liter, Thomas Peacock, a co-author of the paper and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, told Mongabay. Right now, it's not clear what increased levels of sediment will do to the midwater ecosystem, but the paper suggests that there would be a "host of negative consequences," similar to the effects of air pollution on land.
An illustration of a sea mining machine called a bulk cutter, which is intended to pulverize the seafloor for excavation. Image by N.R. Fuller, www.SayoStudio.com.
"Since the background levels are so low, the threshold could be 2 times, 5 times, 10 times, 100 times background levels?" Peacock said in an email. "Determining threshold levels is central to determining the extent of potential impact of a midwater plume (and also a collector plume down at the bottom of the ocean)."
The mining machinery would also generate a lot of underwater noise, which could stress out marine mammals, fish and other marine organisms, and potentially disrupt key activities like foraging, communication and the ability of larvae, which use sound to navigate through the ocean, to settle onto the seafloor, according to the paper.
"If you're mining sulphide deposits or crusts on sea mounts, you have to actually grind that hard substrate off of the bottom or out of the sea floor," Drazen said. "That's going to be incredibly noisy … [and] because of the temperature and salinity profiles of the ocean sound is conducted for very long distances. So this is bad news."
Midwater animal biodiversity: squid, fish, shrimp, copepods, medusa, filter feeding jellies and marine worms are among the midwater creatures that could be affected by deep sea mining. Images by E. Goetze, K. Peijnenburg, D. Perrine, Hawaii Seafood Council (B. Takenaka, J. Kaneko), S. Haddock, J. Drazen, B. Robison, DEEPEND (Danté Fenolio) and MBARI.
The paper indicates that discharge plumes and sediment disturbance, as well as noise pollution, would impact a range of species in the midwater column, including fish, shrimp, copepods, medusas, filter-feeding jellies, and marine worms. For instance, there's a creature called a larvacean (Bathochordaeus spp.) that uses its gelatinous "house," which consists of two mucus filters, to help regulate nutrients and carbon in the seawater, but deep-sea mining would immobilize its ability to function, Drazen says.
"These animals are really important because they filter all of the little, sinking organic particles that come from surface waters, and they package it into these houses and into their own bodies, and they make all of that food available to other trophic levels," he says. "Their filter houses are going to get totally clogged with mud [from mining plumes]."
Drazen says he is also concerned about the dissolved metals that will be released into the ocean during the mining process.
A close-up view of a "giant larvacean" shows the inner filter of its complex, two-tiered feeding system. New instruments allow researchers to model and study structures and fluid flow inside these filters. Image by MBARI, 2002.
"These metals don't go away very quickly, they are probably going to build up over time," Drazen said. "And we don't know exactly where they'll be distributed, or how they would move through the oceans … [It]'s possible that these toxic chemicals could build up over time as operators begin mining, and that has the potential to affect pretty vast areas of the ocean."
The ISA is required to ensure that the marine environment is protected during any mining activities, but the authors of the paper say the impacts on the midwater column need more consideration. "The ISA does include midwater sampling in its baseline study recommendations to contractors," the paper says, "but the data collected by contractors to date appear to be very limited."
The ISA did not respond to Mongabay's request for comment. Mongabay also contacted several organizations currently licensed to explore the seabed for minerals, including Lockheed Martin, the parent company of UK Seabed Resources; Dredging, Environmental and Marine Engineering NV (DEME), the parent company of Global Sea Mineral Resources NV; Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation; and the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources of Germany. However, none responded to our request for an interview.
A jellyfish seen during the Deepwater Exploration of the Marianas expedition on April 24, 2016, while exploring Enigma Seamount at a depth of ~3,700 meters. Image by NOAA.
DeepGreen Metals, a private company based in Vancouver, Canada, with a 15-year license to explore minerals in the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Pacific Ocean, did respond to our request for comment. Gregory Stone, chief scientist and a director of DeepGreen, told Mongabay that the company's mining activities probably wouldn't have a big impact on the midwater column or surrounding ocean.
"Our major strategy is to isolate our activities from the water column as much as we can," Stone said.
Nevertheless, Stone said that the company will be spending the next three years researching the effects of deep-sea mining on the midwater ecosystem. "The way we approach this is we want to remove every impact we can," Stone said. "And then we want to minimize every impact we cannot remove."
"If we do discover something, and it's really bad, we won't do it," he added.
Stone also said that deep-sea mining could provide the metals and other resources urgently needed for renewable energy sources, and that deep-sea mining was actually far less destructive than terrestrial mining.
A lancetfish observed during midwater transects near Mahler Seamount. Image by NOAA.
However, according to a recent report by MiningWatch Canada and The Ocean Foundation, resources for renewable energy could be obtained from existing terrestrial mineral stocks, electronic waste and other alternative sources.
"The metals can be mined on land … and we don't need to extend the harm that we do with mining on land into the deep sea environment," Catherine Coumans, the Asia-Pacific program coordinator for MiningWatch Canada and editor of the report, told Mongabay in June.
DeepGreen has hired Drazen and three of his coauthors to be part of a team conducting baseline pelagic ecosystem studies for the company scheduled for next February in the CCZ.
"It is so very important that scientists, such as Drazen and his co-authors, are stating unequivocally that deep-sea mining poses significant risks to the web of life in our oceans from the deep sea to the surface, that marine biodiversity and livelihoods are on the line, and even that the carbon sequestration function of the oceans — so critical to slow down climate change — is jeopardized," Coumans told Mongabay in a statement last week. "This article supports a growing number of voices, calling for a moratorium on the development of regulations for deep-sea mining until the likely impacts are better understood."
Drazen, J. C., Smith, C. R., Gjerde, K. M., Haddock, S. H., Carter, G. S., Choy, C. A., … Yamamoto, H. (2020). Opinion: Midwater ecosystems must be considered when evaluating environmental risks of deep-sea mining. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.2011914117
Elizabeth Claire Alberts is a staff writer for Mongabay. Follow her on Twitter @ECAlberts. Originally published at https://news.mongabay.com/2020/07/sediment-plumes-from-deep-sea-mining-could-pollute-vast-swaths-of-the-ocean-scientists-say/


If you thought that having the Nintendo DS is a complete waste of money and time, think again.
There are games on the market that would not just challenge you. For certain types of people, they could actually be helpful.
One such game for the Nintendo DS is "Trauma Center" series.
This game is not only for frustrated surgeons. This game may even be helpful to medical students, as they get to practice their vocation in a less-pressure arena. If you make a wrong cut, no one dies literally.
Practicing one's dexterity on the Nintendo DS sure would help a person's reflexes get quicker, as well as would help him fine-tune his fine motor skills. Hand to eye coordination gets developed, and quick thinking is surely sharpened.
The Trauma Center series is a very addictive game. Just taking those "cancerous tumors" out gives this extreme pleasure and satisfaction that gets you hooked for hours just slicing and dragging those pesky monstrosities out of the "organs" you are "operating" on.
If you are looking to spend hours upon hours learning how to obliterate bacteria, cancer cells, and the like, or if you just get a perverse addiction to slathering "antibiotic ointment" to your "patient's organs" after every operation, Nintendo DS' "Trauma Center" promises hours upon hours of getting lost in the world of surgery: perfect for a long trip or an idle afternoon.
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text:
Abelardo Bonilla Baldares (Cartago, 5 de diciembre de 1898 - San José, 19 de enero de 1969) fue un político e intelectual costarricense, vicepresidente de la República de 1958 a 1962.

Formación académica
Cursó estudios en la Escuela de Derecho de Costa Rica.

Principales cargos públicos
Miembro de la comisión redactora del proyecto de Constitución Política de Costa Rica de 1949, diputado propietario por la provincia de San José (1949-1953), Presidente de la Asamblea Legislativa de Costa Rica (1952-1953), primer vicepresidente de la República (1958-1962). Ejerció interinamente la presidencia de la República en 1961.

Actividad intelectual y docente
Ingresó a la Academia Costarricense de la Lengua en 1955 (Silla G).

Fue profesor fundador de la Universidad de Costa Rica. Impartió lecciones en varias escuelas y fue director de la Cátedra de Historia de la Cultura en los Estudios Generales (1957-1964). Profesor visitante de la Universidad de Kansas.

Honores y reconocimientos
 Premio Nacional Aquileo J. Echeverría en ensayo (1967)
 Benemérito de la Patria (1978)
 Tanto un colegio de Heredia, como el auditorio de la Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad de Costa Rica llevan su nombre

Principales obras
 La crisis del humanismo (1934)
 El valle nublado (1944)
 Introducción a una axiología jurídica (1957)
 Conocimiento, verdad y belleza (1958)
 Historia y antología de la literatura costarricense (1957)
 América y el pensamiento poético de Rubén Darío (1967)

Referencias
LÁSCARIS, Constantino, Abelardo Bonilla, San José, Ministerio de Cultura, Juventud y Deportes, 1ª ed., 1973.

Vicepresidentes de Costa Rica
Diputados de Costa Rica
Ensayistas de Costa Rica
Profesores de Costa Rica
Beneméritos de la Patria
Bonilla Baldares

Grandes cruces de la Orden de Alfonso X el Sabio