On that phrase, "Everything is political"

People say "Everything is political."  That's true, in a way - or, as I prefer to put it, everything can be interpreted politically.  That's one way of interpreting things, and with sufficient mental gymnastics, it can be applied to just about anything.  A person who is addicted to politics is likely to see politics everywhere.

Similarly, you might say, everything is gambling.  That is, everything can be interpreted as a kind of gambling.  Walking across the street is gambling - you're betting your life that you will make it across without being run over.  Breathing is gambling - you're betting that you won't inhale the pathogen of a fatal disease.  Everything involves risk, and all risk has an element of randomness.  Thus everything that humans do could be looked at as gambling, just as easily as we can see everything that humans do as political.

Or you might interpret everything - everything that humans do - as a kind of addiction.  That seems to be how William S. Burroughs looked at the world.  Or you could interpret everything in terms of faith: everyone has a belief system, which is in some sense derived from other belief systems - so we can trace a kind of "theology" of Marxism, psychoanalysis, even quantum physics, and see how it diverged from earlier faiths, like Roman Catholicism, which in turn was derived from earlier beliefs, like those of the Canaanites in Ugarit.  There are so many different ways of interpreting human behavior, so many filters through which we can look at the world.  (You can look at everything as a filter, if you want to....)

One thing that's very interesting is that "Everything is political" is not how Karl Marx looked at the world.  We can debate about whether he was always consistent in the way he applied his analysis, but he presented his general method in "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859).  Here he makes it clear that merely to interpret everything solely on the level of politics is a superficial percipience, for, as he puts it, "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness."  Thus the political is merely part of the superstructure of society, which is determined ultimately by fundamental economic relations of production - the "real" foundation, as Marx puts it, that precedes and determines the superstructure, including the merely political.  To focus exclusively on the political is thus to miss what is most important and most determinative about society.  It is to put ideological blinders on, preventing one from encountering reality.

To this, we could add that the "base" of society not only includes economics but also ecology.  Indeed, ecological concerns are even more "real" than economics - they can be demonstrated more scientifically than economics, which itself contains more than a little ideology, as Marx himself discovered later in his life, in his analysis of the commodity fetish.  Indeed, towards the end of his life, Marx was heading in an ecological direction in his thought, though he never developed these ideas fully.

This is one distinction between liberal analysis and radical analysis.  The liberal, perhaps, may declare that "Everything is political."  They are willing to reduce everything to petty, superficial political categorizations.  For any given phenomenon, they can immediately classify that phenomenon, and determine whether it is on "our side" (the "good guys' side") or "their side" (the "bad guys' side").  (This is something liberalism has in common with Schmittian "friend/enemy" political analysis - indeed, I consider the ideology of Carl Schmitt and his followers to be a kind of liberalism.)  But this is not enough for radical analysis, which seeks to go beyond these superficial political distinction, "to the root" (which is what "radical" literally means) - that is, to the material reality that underlies petty political categorizations.  And so the phrase "Everything is political," which has been called the slogan of totalitarianism, is actually an articulation of nothing but a shallow liberalism.  From a psychoanalytic perspective, the sentiment that "Everything is political" would be considered a kind of hystericism.  (That's another filter through which we can see the world: psychoanalysis.)