Because not everything is political
Challenging This Magazine’s conventional wisdom
BY Rick Salutin
I was in Poland in 1986, during the Cold War, just after the Chernobyl reactor melted down across the Soviet border. I went mainly out of interest in the opposition movement, Solidarity, which shook the Soviet-controlled government and precipitated martial law. I found myself in a highly intricate political situation that I did not navigate well. I’d been asked to talk in the royal palace, for the writers’ union, and naively agreed, partly because I was told the head of international PEN had spoken there. I discovered later that he spoke under very specific conditions, while I was being used to try and compromise or co-opt writers who’d left the union in protest against the regime. Everything was “complex,” the word I heard most often there. Even many fervent dissidents told me I should speak, for various complex reasons. I considered cancelling till the last minute, then threatened to bolt when they brought in a TV news camera as I began to talk, which they’d promised not to do. Afterward, I knew I’d been seriously overmatched. I considered myself “political,” but had no idea how difficult and challenging politics can be.
Late that night I walked over to the cosy apartment of a couple I’d met, who were not particularly connected to the current political strife. I described the snakepit I’d gotten into and how shaken and uncertain I felt. “There it is,” said one, “the imperialism of politics.” I didn’t feel sympathetic to this remark; I probably thought everything is political. But the phrase stayed with me, as things do when they strike a chord. On the way back to my hotel, through foggy streets, I heard people moaning on their balconies. Poland had just lost a match in that year’s World Cup, and was out of the tournament. They sounded ready to leap off their balconies in despair, as if the defeat touched them even more deeply than the defeat, for the moment, of Solidarity and the hopes it embodied.
The claim that everything is political is an example, and maybe the credo, of the imperialism of politics. In a society like ours, which often seems underpoliticized, it’s easy to understand how the impulse arises. One wants to politicize the genuinely political, insist on it, where that quality has been concealed. But that doesn’t mean everything is political. It means lots of things are. I don’t think it is true except in the trivial sense that you can find some shred of politics, depending on what you understand by the term, in anything. Having said that, let me say what I mean by politics. Politics is rooted in the fact we are all interconnected with others: some in the past (on account of whom we have language, for instance, or agriculture), some in the present and future. _Everything we experience, including our moments of solitude, emerges from and is conditioned by that interconnectedness. It is our social and historical nature, though it is not in itself political. Politics is that realm in which we acknowledge their interconnectedness and attempt to take conscious charge of its effects, to the extent those are under our control. It is where we don’t just live with the reality of interconnectedness, our social nature, but try to shape it deliberately and collectively. I don’t expect everyone (or anyone) to agree. But choose your own definition. Whatever it is, I don’t think the notion that _everything is political follows.
That’s because it is reductive and formulaic, in the same objectionable sense that identity politics is (or was). Identity politics took one aspect of each multifaceted person—their colour, ethnicity, sexuality etc.—and turned that into the fulcrum of their political engagement. It denied their right to choose among many sources of commitment and action. The claim that everything is political is the identity politics of politics. It reduces everything, not just the political realm proper (however you understand it) to “politics.”
The alternative is not being apolitical. I believe there’s more to a well-lived (or badly lived) life than politics. But a life without politics would be missing a large chunk of its potential. It might be admirable and contributory; it might well be happy. It wouldn’t be fully human, that’s all. It would not have realized one of the main possibilities available.
I think about people who have defined their lives as political, “because everything is.” I used to wonder about the Bolshevik who died on the steps during the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg at the decisive moment of the 1917 Russian Revolution. (I made him up; it’s possible the storming of the Winter Palace is an exaggerated romanticization by Soviet propagandists.) As he gasped his last breath, he didn’t know if the cause for which he gave his life would succeed or fail. Did he feel comforted because everything is political in the sense that all human existence, including his own, was part of an implacable chain of events rolling inevitably toward a revolutionary socialist consummation? So that, if the assault failed, as the 1905 revolution in Russia had, another would eventually succeed, nourished by earlier sacrifices, like his own? What if he had known the attack would succeed, and that 72 years later, the entire Soviet world would dissipate like a mist? Would he continue to believe in the inevitable result, further nourished by those failures, convinced history would absolve him? Or would he have found comfort in something else, his own act of political courage in the face of evil or futilty? In that case his act and choice would stand—unjustified by anything (or everything) except its intrinsic moral quality, his own determination to do what was right.
What about Fidel Castro, who did say history would absolve him, at his trial in Cuba in 1953? For almost 50 years, he has had the opportunity to make the history that will absolve him. Does Castro feel absolved? He has played the game of politics to the hilt, pursued his goals and accomplished a lot. It’s odd to see him frail, after his recent operation. Does it matter what comes after he is gone, now that the end seems near? Does he wonder about the aftermath? Is he still confident that in the long run he will be absolved, as the exiles in Florida and plotters in the White House prepare to roll back his efforts? Or is his remarkable life and his defiance of imperial might, just across the water, what absolves him, regardless of the future. If everything is political, only history can absolve you. But if you’ve lived a good, brave life, why wait on history to declare absolution? Maybe he ought to have said, history should absolve me, and die, like General Wolfe, content. I’d settle for that.
My friend Mel Watkins was one of This Magazine’s editors for many years. He has led a far more political life than most Canadians. As an economist, he authored the Watkins Report on American corporate takeover of the Canadian economy. In a single act it created a nationalist frame for political discussion which remains in place. As an NDP member and leader of the “Waffle” group, he raised the call for nationalism and socialism as the basis for a left Canadian politics. The Waffle nearly succeeded in winning leadership of the NDP. Then, in a sure sign of its significance and appeal, its members were expelled from the party. Mel went into a sort of exile to work in the north with Aboriginals. He participated in the 1988 fight over free trade. He ran, from time to time, as an NDP candidate. He is the only member of the non-parliamentary Canadian left who became a recognizable figure in political cartoons. I have known him through all that, and through a number of wrenching tragedies in his family. I would say, were I asked to assess his contribution to the world in his lifetime, that I’d place his contribution and support to his family at those moments, above everything he did in the political realm. It may sound absurd but I almost think you could quantify the values involved (perhaps it’s because he’s an economist); and the intensity and depth of those moments of searing personal engagement would outweigh even his undoubtedly historic contribution through politics.
What about Kent Rowley, also associated with This Magazine, who died in 1977. I’d call him the finest labour leader of his era—which encompassed the labour explosion of the Depression, the anti-union 1950s, and the activist nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s. He was survived by his wife and co-worker, Madeleine Parent, but no other family. Was his life entirely political then, along with his legacy? I hardly know. I wrote a biography of him. He stuck to his commitments, he was brave and steadfast. He liked to quote Castro’s cocky phrase about history absolving fighters like himself. Before he died of a stroke at the young (I now think) age of 60, he told some union comrades in BC, with whom he’d shared various battles, to take his ashes and throw them in the face of the head of the board of trade. That sounds like an ultimate affirmation that everything is political. But only because Kent chose to make it so. History had not absolved him, but it had embattled him. He was interned during the war, jailed by Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis, fired by his American union headquarters for refusing to sell out his Canadian members, isolated for decades from the mainstream labour movement here and stigmatized by it, supported mainly by a scattered band of loyal workers. (All badges of honour.) The institutions he led or created had been lifted from under him or were absorbed, after his death, mainly into the Canadian Auto Workers union. There they will have some influence on its direction, but may also be transformed so there is little discernible influence of his left. His defiant, funny words about his ashes were a refusal to accept any apparent defeat or futility. Perhaps history will absolve him, perhaps not. But he chose to make his life a political one anyway. It was an act of will, not destiny or submission, to the “political” nature of reality.
There are other ways, besides politics, to connect your life to something larger. Love is traditional. Kent’s life, for instance, involved a hard-to-believe romance. Madeleine was married to another union organizer, who’d gone to war. She and Kent worked together, fell in love, her husband returned, they all worked together, he “found out,” yet they continued to work together in the union. Madeleine divorced and then married Kent. After being fired by their US union, they spent 15 years apart, her in Quebec and him in Ontario, trying to keep a tiny base of workers going. After they reunited, and following the launch of a small, feisty counter-movement that embodied their beliefs about what Canadian workers needed, he died of a stroke, in her arms. It could have been an opera. It’s true the romance sprang from a shared political vision. But does that make it less about love and more about politics? Another route has to do with devotion to kids. Moms tend to that, though not just moms. You can sense people often take this route not just out of commitment to their own kids but as a way of making their best contribution to the future. Everything is generational. I’d include teachers. There’s the route of artistic creation: works for the ages, the enhancement of the world. Everything is aesthetic. Or good deeds and efforts to mitigate pain and suffering. Everything is—well, that starts to sound like love. All these routes often shade into politics. It’s a matter of choice, chance or idiosyncrasy, which of them you choose to activate your life around. Personally I think politics is a good bet if you can work it in, but it would be smug to think the political option is built into reality in a pre-eminent way that removes the burden of choice, or makes the decision unavoidable. That would be at best a theoretical, overly intellectual, approach. Everything is political—when we choose to make it so.
It’s sometimes said that revolutions are for the young—as Castro was when he overthrew Batista, or Mao and his comrades in photos taken in the caves at Yenan after the Long March. In that sense, politics too may be for the young. They have time, energy and, if they think everything is political (and politics is the realm in which we act collectively and consciously), a deep source of hope and optimism. If everything is political, then anything is possible. I don’t think a sense of the need for revolution or politics has to diminish as one ages, but you may grow more aware that everything is not political. The limits of politics become clearer. There are matters which political solutions won’t encompass. Not merely the obvious: suffering and death; but some apparently intractable and primitive components of human nature. Or the tragic, in the sense of what might have been but was not and will not be. Wasted lives. This is about ends, not means. It’s about what goals are attainable, not their urgency or how to reach them: electorally, through grassroots movements or more desperate means. It is all still worth doing—the revolutionary, socialist or just political project. You remain a socialist, even a revolutionary socialist: but a revolutionary socialist-imperfectionist.
