Organized Religious Bigotry in Canada

I'm not aware of any of my ancestors, in either Scotland or Canada, belonging to the Orange Order, but some may have. The Order is an organization focused on British ethnicity, loyalty to the monarchy, and Protestant Christian religious identity, and on being not-Irish or not-French, not-republican, and most definitely not-Catholic. It was once a powerful organization in Canada, particularly Ontario and New Brunswick, but its membership and power have declined sharply over the decades. It remains a powerful institution in Northern Ireland, and a player in the sectarian strife that plagues the region.

This is a PDF file of an academic study comparing the differing trajectories of the Orange Order in Canada and in Northern Ireland. According to this study, between 1870 and 1920 as many as one in three adult Protestant males in this country belonged to the Orange Order. Canadian Prime Ministers, including Sir John A. Macdonald to John Diefenbaker, were members. I have trouble believing this, but the paper says the city of Toronto did not have a single city councillor who was not a member of the Order until the 1930s. Membership in the Order in Canada has been declining since World War I, except in Newfoundland where the decline began in the 1960s. This article takes the Order's decline as part of a more general decline in religious sectarianism in Canada, and tries to draw lessons from it that might provide insights relevant to Northern Ireland.

Anyway, the article contains some interesting Canadian history that you don't normally hear about in school. You'll have to go to other sources, however, to really get a flavour for the Order's unpleasant political role in earlier Canadian history.

Seeing Constraints

I have always been fascinated by issues of scale. How do the personal and the social intersect? How do phenomena at the population and institutional level play out on the terrain of the body? What does it mean that individual participation in activism often feels so hopelessly miniscule compared to the enormity of the problems that we face as to be irrelevant, yet social movements as a whole can and do make positive changes?

One way of coming at those kinds of questions is how social forces constrain and shape daily lives. Anybody who has pretensions of being an ally can probably name some ways and that kind of intellectual recognition is an important step. But a more visceral appreciation for constraint -- for having the nexus of individual reality and social forces limit the space you can occupy and how you can use it -- is something else entirely. Of course you can never truly understand an oppression you don't experience, and even oppressions you do experience may not play out exactly the same for another. But the more general issue of life being constrained -- that is something we all feel at some point even if we have access to privilege of various kinds, and however incomplete a means it is of understanding experiences beyond our own it can still be politically edifying to take the time to understand those exeperiences we do have in a political light.

I'm saying this now, of course, because I'm feeling kind of constrained, and I am feeling like I have lots of personal fuel to construct examples.

I think I'll just use one: the built form of the city of Los Angeles. This is a city built around the automobile. I'm not even talking about the suburbs of Los Angeles, but the city proper: It is built in a way that assumes you will be travelling by car. Things are far apart. Pockets of street-level activity, enterprise, and culture are few and scattered. Public transportation networks are inadequate and because of the way that resources are distributed across the city, they have to cover a much larger scale than in most cities to get people to destinations that matter to them.

In the context of not owning a car (by choice in general, but reinforced by inability to afford one at the moment), providing primary care to a 15 month-old toddler during the week, and trying to write a book, this has certain consequences. Within the time that he is awake during the day, there are limited destinations that I can get to if I want to make sure I have his nap time for working at home. In combination with the time constraints mentioned above, it has certain impacts on my ability to get involved in social movement activity. It has a significant impact on the shape of the social networks that we are gradually developing in this city. It even shapes my conceptual picture of what Los Angeles is like by constraining how widely I can range within the city, and the source of inputs that I have from which to construct this picture.

In the short run, seeing constraints in this way may seem kind of pointless; they remain constraints, after all, no matter how you contextualize them. But there is something empowering as well, and something that pushes in the direction of solidarity. I have no illusions about the built form of the greater Los Angeles area being radically transformed during our tenure here, of course, but the mere fact that I can feel in my gut and see with crystal clarity in my imagination how social change could change my individual reality so pracitcally and drastically for the better is a more general reminder, in a time in which I am feeling relatively disconnected in a number of respects, of the ongoing and overall importance of staying engaged with the social.

Critiquing Buy Nothing Day

Here is an interesting posting criticizing Buy Nothing Day, as well as the related analysis of consumerism as the source of the problems of society and anti-consumerism as our salvation. It argues that such an analysis and such events are anti-worker and anti-woman.

I have to admit, I have celebrated BND with street theatre-type actions before, though not in a number of years. The first critique I read of it was an essay advocating that we celebrate Steal Something Day instead by some anarchists up in Montreal — they captured the class-related problems, though if I remember correctly there wasn’t a gender component to that analysis as there is in the link above.

Anyway, I agree that the consumerism/anti-consumerism paradigm has problems, and treating it as the problem/the answer leads to limited and even oppressive goals and activities. However, I think perhaps the above post throws the baby out with the bath water, as it were. I’m only tentatively adopting this position as I need to think about it more, but I do think there is still value in problematizing unsustainable consumption. Obviously there are environmental implications, and I think fostering awareness of that is important. I think there are also solid radical reasons for activists within working-class and poor communities to problematize it — encouraging collective resistance and solidarity not by demonizing consumption and consumers, as some BND-related activity does, but by honestly pointing out (in the process of creating alternatives) that it is never really going to fill the void created by alienation. And I think it is also important to problematize it amongst the middle-class because sooner or later we are going to have give up that level and kind of attachment to consumption — giving it up won’t create the change, as the Adbusters folks claim, but an openness to giving up consumption-related privilege might make the inevitable middle-class insistence on a repressive response to the movements that will ultimately demand radical changes (workers, women, national liberation movements in the global south, and others) a bit less unified and strident. It won't prevent repressive responses, but even weakening repressive responses can be important to supporting those who are being beaten down.

The problem, I think, is not problematizing excess consumption per se but doing it (a) in a way that is not conscious of the broader context of power and privilege and exploitative relations of production, and (b) in a way that uncritically reproduces the puritanism that pervades so much of North American culture (including many other facets of activist culture, unfortunately).

15 Ways To End Violence Against Women

Check out this campaign from the Canadian Labour Congress, timed to coincide with the fifteenth anniversary of the Montreal Massacre:

December 6, 2004, will be the fifteenth anniversary of the day 14 women were murdered while attending engineering classes at the École Polytechnique in Montreal. Ever since that terrible day, people across Canada and Quebec have gathered on December 6 not just to remember those women, but to mourn for all women and girls who have been lost to violence and to fight for change.

This year the Canadian Labour Congress has launched a campaign that looks at 15 ways to end violence against women. To be safe at home and at work, to feel free from threat in the world, women need social, political and economic equality:

• Women need safe and affordable housing.
  
• Women need reliable economic safety nets like Employment Insurance.
  
• Women need to know that welfare rates will keep them above the poverty line.
  
• Women need universal access to quality, dependable childcare.
  
• Women need the opportunity for an education that is affordable.
  
• Women need better wages and pay equity.
  
• Women need security in their old age that a solid public pension brings.
  
• Women need support and shelter from violence.
  
• Women need better protection from sexual violence under the law.
  
• Women need a justice system that protects them from abuse.
  
• Women need shelters that can accommodate their disabilities.
  
• Women need organizations that promote their equality on many fronts.
  
• Women need better harassment protection in the workplace.
  
• Women need to be treated fairly in the immigration process.
  
• Women need to be safe around the world from war and abuse.
  

The campaign asks Canadians to send one post card to their MP every day between November 22 and December 6, the anniversary, each featuring a different demand. You can also fax your MP via the link above. Please do so if you are in Canada. If you are not, please consider sending a letter in support of these demands to our Prime Minister or the nearest Canadian embassy or consulate, and push with your own government to pursue similar policies.

The White Left

One of the things that has surprised me about the political culture in the United States is the place held by race and racism in white progressive/radical discourse. On the one hand, race and racism as issues are more visible here than in Canada and have space in the mainstream in a way that they do not have there, where a peculiar brand of (sometimes) polite racism and denial of same keep most white activists happily ignorant that it is even worth thinking about. Racism gets mentioned in mainstream newspapers more consistently here than in Canada, and mainstream book stores have more space devoted to books on the subject. This is not because racism is any less important in the basic structuring of Canadian society, but rather has to do, I think, with superficially different ways that racism manifests and differences in history of struggle between the two countries.

Despite what appears to be greater space open to discuss issues of racism in the U.S., that does not seem to translate into it actually getting talked about any more often than in Canada, at least in the white progressive spaces I have been in here. Those spaces include the corner of the peace movement that I'm familiar with, much of the progressive U.S. blogosphere that I have surfed, and the Americans for Democratic Action conference/book fair I attended (Eric Mann's interventions excepted). Perhaps all of this shouldn't surprise me, but it does.

In particular, as I have surfed parts of the post-election discussion in the blogosphere, outside of Paul Street's post-election analyses, white bloggers I have seen have given issues of racism far less attention than they deserve.

I happened, yesterday, to come across what I think is an important article on The Black Commentator site. It reminds the white left of a charge placed before it three decades ago by the the Black liberation movement: go forth and organize the white working class.

A few select paragraphs:

In between sobs, many Kerry supporters have condemned and ridiculed those who voted for Bush, but this only compounds the errors that led to the election results. Although Africans have been pointing out the strategic errors of the white left for more than 30 years, this advice has been largely ignored.

By abandoning even the evangelical right, the white left ignores some of the most decent people the U.S. has produced. Many white evangelicals may be intolerant, racist and reactionary, but they often arrive at those positions out of an honest, good faith belief that they are doing the right thing. Because the white left has not been present to counter the vile lies of the right wing, white evangelicals are left to accept the right wing’s theology and agenda as gospel.

The white left’s reluctance to undertake this task is not solely because of stubbornness. They understand intuitively, if not consciously that the consequences of trying to organize Middle America are great. Capitalists understand that if white workers can be persuaded to adopt a radical agenda, dramatic, fundamental change is inevitable. Therefore, the full might of the state and corporate America will be unleashed without mercy on anyone who makes significant headway in changing the analysis of white workers. It is safer for the white left to organize in communities of color.

I definitely agree with the basic point: Unlike, say, a worker in London, England in 1935 who might have joined a fascist party after being exposed to arguments from across the political spectrum (while many more of his co-workers joined leftist parties), I think most people who make up the radical right populist movement in this country have never had a chance to hear a left argument. They may have been exposed to liberal perspectives -- albeit in the context of the current media environment that demonizes liberalism, the neglect of class and other justice issues by much of organized liberalism, and the inherent limitations that have always been a part of liberalism -- but never leftist ones. As the article says, just presenting such a challenge, such a different analysis, in a sustained way in working-class white contexts, particularly in Middle America, could have significant impacts.

But I'm not sure the diagnosis of the problem presented in the article captures all of the angles. I've been trying to write at least an outline of what some of the other important facotrs might be, but I have run up against my own ignorance of the facts on the ground. I can't say for sure, but I have a feeling that at least to a certain extent the problem is not only a white left that has made poor decisions but also a white left that is tiny and scattered, a white left that is constantly (and often for very compelling, material reasons) pulled away from its agenda by a stronger but still beleaguered liberalism, and a white left that (outside of those activists actually organizing in communities of colour) is still pretty clueless about issues of racism.

Amin on Imperialism

On the one hand, I have trouble relating high Marxist theory like this article by Samir Amin on the current state of imperialism to the realities of me making individual choices about how to live and how to be active and how to participate, and all of that stuff. On the other hand, I still think there is something important about occasionally taking a look at things on the lofty scale of "world systems." And besides, I like reading this stuff once in a while!

"in a time of war"

The phrase that is the title of this post comes from an article by liberal Democrat Marc Cooper in this week's LA Weekly. The article is about Alberto Gonzalez, torture-advocate turned Attorney General nominee, and the phrase is not at all a focus of the piece, just a quick characterization of the historical context in which Gonzales' confirmation hearings will occur. It is a description of our current moment in history that is used all over the mainstream media in the United States, even (as this example demonstrates) at its liberal periphery, with little or no interrogation.

Someone I worked with back in Canada told me about visiting in-laws in the U.S. At one point he asked innocently what was with the enormous flag on the living room wall of their gated-community home. The answer? "Well, we're at war." That was, apparently, answer enough for his brother-in-law.

Way back in the early '90s after the first crusade against former U.S. ally Hussein I read a letter in my local paper at the time, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, from a high school student that included the sentiment "So now we know what it's like to be at war..."

In the sense of having soldiers engaged in combat operations, all of these statements are true, I suppose. But there is something about describing the current context in that way that makes me want to say, "Oh, give me a break."

There is something about saying a country is at war that carries overtones of the potential for devastation and being forced into unconditional surrender. I hear echoes of the humiliation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, of the twenty million Soviet dead in World War II, of the capture of Paris by the Prussians, the endless massacres of the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia, the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese armed forces. I hear danger and tragedy so vast that an entire nation may be brought to its knees, a state's essential core interests or even existence might be disrupted.

What is most disturbing is that many, perhaps most, of the people who characterize the current U.S. context as "a time of war" would not see any contradiction between now and the examples in the preceding paragraph. In saying this, I do not intend to disrespect the 9/11 dead, nor trivialize the worry of those with loved ones at risk in the services of the despicable recolonization of Iraq and other U.S. military adventures. Neither do I wish to imply that I think another terrorist attack on the U.S. fatherland -- sorry, make that "homeland" -- is unlikely; in fact, I think it is quite likely, sooner or later.

But let's be realistic: There is absolutely nothing the fanatics lumped together by the mainstream media under the term "al-Qaeda" could do to bring the U.S. to its knees. They could not occupy Florida. They could not set up concentration camps in Wisconsin. They will not impose Sharia law on Schenectady. They won't even be able to drive the U.S. out of Iraq -- it will be nationalists, both religious and secular, that do that. In fact, if you pay attention to the stated goals of the bin-Ladenites, they are entirely regional and focused on the Middle East. They want U.S. troops out, an end to the occupation of Palestine, and other things in that vein, as well as some vicious anti-Shiite nonsense.

Uncritically repeating that we in the U.S. are living "in a time of war" reinforces the (very successful) efforts by the imperialists to mobilize fear to divide, confuse, and cower the people in this country.

So what kind of time do we live in? It is certainly not a time of peace -- just ask the residents of Iraq. Let us make an effort, then, to not make the realities of where power lies disappear: We live in a time of conquest, a time when the masters of war send young people off to die and thereby increase the likelihood that more will die at home.

Reading Dworkin

I have been meaning to read work by Andrea Dworkin for years. I know that her ideas have influenced some activists that I know and respect greatly, and that they would challenge me and force me to expand my own analysis. Of course there are lots of writers like that for me -- "So many books, so little time," right? -- including Marx and Thich Nhat Han and Starhawk and Franz Fanon and tons of others.

But I think one of the things that has kept me from reading Dworkin is my own internal struggles about sexuality and oppression -- sorting out stuff about how sexist (and other) oppression is expressed through and uses male sexuality as a tool, as well as stuff about how sexuality itself is distorted and attacked by various oppressions, and what the heck practicing a liberatory (and fun!) straight male sexuality might actually mean, all in the context of trying to deal with my own internalization of early-life puritanical and sex-negative messaging. She has a sex-negative reputation, and even though I know enough not to believe what the mainstream says about any feminist (or other progressive/radical), I still figured it would take a great deal of intellectual and emotional energy to adequately process and respond to what she has to say about sexuality, and I have never quite felt that I have that energy to spare. I still think it's true that it will be a lot of work to read; after all, if it was easy would it be worth reading? But this post helps chip away at the unfair stereotypes of Dworkin's ideas on sexuality that have accumulated in my head despite myself. My queue is a little long for me to be adding books of any kind at the moment, but maybe this will help me overcome that particular inertia in the months to come.

Widening Vision

I'm all for socially engaged writing. And for socially engaged reading, socially engaged work, socially engaged consumption choices, socially engaged conversation. I firmly believe that the comfortable-for-some prison constructed of individualism and alienation, guarded by dogs called Fear and Arrogance, and padded (for the lucky among us) by narcotic consumerism, must be dismantled brick by brick. Love may conquer all and the moral arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but not without us naming, sweating, speaking, connecting.

Then I see an interview with bell hooks where she talks about pieces of literary criticism she writes that perhaps only a dozen people will ever read being important, too; or I read an essay by Edward Said that meditates on classical piano performance. From most academics I would likely dismiss such things as frivolous, even careerist or escapist, while yearning for such escape myself.

But partly the jolt I get from such works written by authors of such unquestionable political commitment is not into escape but rather into a fuller kind of connection. It reminds me that the puritanism of mainstream North America is never far away, and it can steal opportunities for joy under the guise of dedication to bringing about a better world. Those of us who try to be allies and do not ourselves bear the brunt of oppression all too easily overdo our need to prove that we're doing the right things in the struggles for bread, to such an extent that we forget that those struggles are for roses, too -- we forget Emma Goldman and fetishize one vision of revolution that almost always turns out to be sadly lacking in dancing.

This is not art for art's sake that I'm defending, but rather art because every engaged, balanced life deserves aesthetic vitality, deserves things done for little reasons, deserves to engage with the spirit and with passions narrowly shared but deeply enjoyed, even as that retains and in an indirect but undeniable way reinforces broad commitment to community and to justice.

Boondocks Anarchy

The Boondocks is always funny and politically insightful, but anyone who has actually been involved with anarchist-inspired organizing will find this one particularly funny.

The Myth of the Great Liberal Canada

In the last week or so I have seen a bunch of sites allude to the desire for either individual Americans living in states that went for John Kerry, or the states in their entirety to go on up to Canada. It's gone now, but even Rabble had a link on their top page to a spoof site for Canadians offering to marry such Americans to allow them to emigrate. On a certain level, I can understand this. For the most part, I think it is people blowing off steam and finding humorous ways to express the very real pain of facing another four years of George W. Bush. And I suppose there are a few people who seriously mean it, and I think there is some basis for that, too. After all, I may be living in the U.S. at the moment, but I fully intend to return to Canada.

But the vision of Canada inspired in U.S.-based progressives by Michael Moore et al is very, very romanticized. And whether it is Americans echoing this view here in the States, or Canadians at home getting smug, I refuse to sit still and take the myth of the great liberal Canada.

First the good stuff: Okay, yes, the best way to judge these things is by the quality of life of ordinary people, and there are some ways in which genuine, material gains have been made in Canada that have not been made in the United States.

• The cause of queer liberation is a little farther along in Canada, with widespread inclusion of lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgender people in human rights codes and increasing legal recognition of marriage between two people of the same gender. Also (keeping in mind that as a straight person I can never really know this for sure) there seems to be slightly more social space in the Canadian cities I've been in to be "out" than here in LA.
  
  
• Workers rights are, generally speaking, in a better position legislatively in Canada than in the U.S., though Alberta's labour laws are pretty harsh. This translates into union density that is about 30%, compared to about 13% for the U.S. The same basic problems plague the Canadian labour movement as plague the U.S. labour movement, but the balance of forces within the labour movement tilt a bit farther towards the progressive end.
  
  
• Despite more than a decade of neoliberal assault, the social safety net in Canada is still somewhat functional, including socialized medical care -- they're trying to privatize it, but haven't done so quite yet.
  
  
• There are still small corners of state funding for progressive research and community action, via places like Heritage Canada and Status of Women Canada.
  
  
• There is generally less violent crime and stronger gun control measures (even though the current government botched aspects of gun control in a major way, which will make it an easier target for the right for decades to come). As well, the prison population is far smaller relative to the overall population.
  
  
• The CBC does a decent job as a national, public broadcaster, particularly on the radio, though it still very much functions as a mainstream, mass media institution, with all that implies.
  
  

That's a pretty short list. It matters because it impacts on people's lives, but it is short.

At heart, though, the issues in Canada are much the same as the issues in the U.S., and oppression exists in both countries.

• Just like the U.S., the Canadian state is based on stolen land, broken treaties, and the genocide of this continents' Aboriginal peoples. There are proportionately more Aboriginal people in Canada than in the U.S., but they experience the same extremely high rates of poverty and racist treatment. There have been a number of high profile assaults by the state and racist white Canadians in the last ten or fifteen years on First Nations people demanding their rights -- Oka, Burnt Church, a stand-off out in British Columbia whose name I can't recall, and the state murder of Dudley George at Ipperwash come to mind. As well, over the decades there were semi-regular exchanges between the bureaucrats at the Department of Indian Affairs and those in charge of managing apartheid in South Africa. Attempts to extinguish Aboriginal title even to the small area of land they have left and to extinguish Aboriginal culture continue on the part of the federal government.
  
  
• Legislative and judicial gains notwithstanding, there's plenty of homophobia and heterosexism to go around in Canada. In the months before I moved from Hamilton to LA there was a vicious incident of gay bashing that left a gay man of colour with serious injuries. Since I left there was a raid on Hamilton's only bath house.
  
  
• The momentum around labour law is in the wrong direction -- in the mid-1990s there were three major provinces (Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia) that had anti-scab laws. Those are laws that make it illegal for employers to bring in replacement workers during a strike. It is gone from Ontario and B.C., and I'm not sure about Quebec. In Ontario there was a truly draconian Employment Standards Act passed by the previous provincial government, doing things like making it legal for employers to force employees to work 60 hour weeks without overtime. Changes to labour law in B.C. under the Campbell government have made it the only jurisdiction in North America where child labour is legal.
  
  
• Wealth and income inequality are, generally speaking, on the increase in Canada. Notably, this inequality is racialized, leading to what some commentators have accurately described as "economic apartheid" in Canada.
  
  
• Canada has a long history of active cheerleading and support of U.S. imperialism, most recently with respect to the U.S. sponsored coup in Haiti. Canada stayed out of Vietnam but no nation other than the U.S. itself profited more economically from the slaughter of millions of people in Southeast Asia, and Canadian firms are profiting handsomely from U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq.
  
  
• The tradition of fighting for civil liberties is not nearly as well developed in Canada as it is in the U.S. Though legislation similar to the USA PATRIOT Act was passed around that time in Canada, it has received much less attention from activists and the media. There are currently Muslim men in prison with no charges and no publically presented evidence and a great deal of apathy on the part of the public towards this injustice.
  
  
• Even though the mayors of Canada's ten largest cities declared homelessness a national disaster in 1998, the response by the federal government has been largely cosmetic (a program to shore up emergency services and a rental supply program that will benefit mainly the middle-class, at least in many provinces) and some provincial governments have hardly responded at all. According to advocates around one person per week dies on the streets of Toronto in the winter, but the real causes of the crisis -- poverty, lack of affordable housing, and lack of support services -- are not being addressed in any substantial way by the state.
  
  
• The Canadian state has long been an aggressive promoter of the institutions of neoliberal capitalist globalization, and has actively pushed very regressive positions in negotiations. Canada, just like the U.S., benefits from the global economic system that sucks money out of most of the world and pours it into the already-industrialized countries.
  
  
• The prison population in Canada is disproportionately racialized people, particularly Aboriginal people. Racialized communities in Canada experience racial profiling, experience police shootings, and have had to mobilize over the years against systemic racism in the criminal "justice" system. Despite this mobilization, things are probably worse than they were a decade ago in terms of institutional safeguards, at least in Ontario.
  
  
• While less scary than George W. Bush, our current Prime Minister, Paul Martin, is no picnic.
  
  
• In elections in Ontario in the last decade, poor-bashing has often been a successful electoral strategy.
  
  
• Abuse and murder of women by their male partners is epidemic in Canada, just like it is in the U.S.
  
  
• Even though we have the CBC, corporate media consolidation is much more advanced in Canada than in the United States, and community media (particularly progressive community broadcast media) is much less well developed in Canada.
  
  

So there you go. I could go on. It plays out a bit more mildly in some ways in Canada than in the U.S., and those differences can have real impacts on real people, but the basic oppressive structures which confrot social movements in the two societies are similar and interconnected. Canada has had the privilege, through its history, of being a small and unimportant appendage to empire, either British or U.S., so people with some privilege in Canada gain from all of the oppression that these empires wreak on the world (and the oppression Canadian elites wreak at home) but with leeway to be somewhat more liberal. But the struggles are the same and the direction is the same.

I think, incidentally, that there is definitely room in Canada for the radical right populist movement that dominates politics in the U.S. to gain ground. They haven't managed it so far, but speaking as someone who grew up in small town southern Ontario, there is still plenty of room for them to make inroads there with the right organizing. That scares me.

On the up side, I think there are some structural features of the political landscape that argue against this movement being as successful in Canada.

• In the U.S., nationalism drives a chunk of that movement. The corresponding radical right statists in Canada also use nationalism, but (bizarrely) it is U.S. nationalism -- particularly in papers like the National Post there is this weird worship of the United States. There are always going to be limits to how well "they are so much better than us" plays in any country.
  
  
• Quebec is the most progressive polity in North America, and their particular position within the Canadian confederation and their willingness to destroy said confederation if it comes to that, places some limits. The right hates that fact, but the economic elites in the country do not want confederation dismantled so the threat of the seperatists, who have a strong (if not as strong as 30 years ago) social democratic strain, constrains the right too.
  
  
• The existence of a genuine social democratic party in English Canada, however much I and others on the left have criticized them over the years, serves as an important placeholder in the public debate so that ideas that are taboo in the U.S. get voiced in Canada just because there are people in parliament who voice them. The Bloc Qubecois, the federal separatist party, is also brings social democratic ideas to the public via parliament.
  
  

All that having been said, neoliberalism marches on with the enthusiastic support of Canadian elites. Racism, sexism, homophobia and all the other interlocking hierarchies of power and privilege are fundamental to Canadian society. There is no guarantee that the radical right populist movement won't be energized by the success of their U.S. counterparts and manage to destroy whatever gains have been made by genuine peoples' movements in Canada, even if it is fair to predict that they won't be quite as successful. So you're welcome to come to Canada if you want, but you'd better be just as prepared to fight for justice and liberation there as here. And as much as Canada could always use new progressive and radical activists, I have a feeling that most of the world would rather see such social change work happen in the U.S. -- movements to end war and imperialism can have the greatest impact at the centre of the empire, and those most impacted by the triumph of the right domestically in the U.S. are the least likely to have any kind of escape available to them.

Progressive Blog Alliance

I have decided to join the Progressive Blog Alliance. It is a consortium of blogs by writers who talk about political topics. Its members include people who run the whole gamut of the label "progressive" as it is understood in (presumably) the United States; that includes blogs which I agree with and respect very much, and others whose politics resemble various strands criticized in posts on this site. I'm hoping that joining can be an experiment in participating in online cross-pollination of ideas and dialogue, but use the links under the PBA heading in the side column at your own risk -- my personal favourites in the blogosphere remain under the "Interesting Blogs" heading.

The point, by the way, is that all members have that list of links to the blogs of the other members on their site. The list is centrally generated and I have noticed that even though I asked yesterday, this site is not yet on. Hopefully it will be added soon.

Writing, Accessibility, and Standpoint (Part 2)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote the first part of this posting, focusing on questions of specialization and technical obscuritanism as a barrier to people understanding writing -- the role of those things, how they relate to power, when they are okay and when they are not. But I said in that post that I also wanted to deal with issues of standpoint and point-of-view and how they impact on accessibility.

First of all, it is important to emphasize that accessibility of writing is not just a linear path between endpoints labelled "accessible" and "obscure" or "generalist" and "specialist." It is also about social location, i.e. where you are located in the interlocking hierarchies of power and privilege that structure life in the modern world, and also how you relate to your location.

This is put powerfully by Toronto writer and activist Dionne Brand in her essay "Whose Gaze and Who Speaks for Whom" in the collection Bread Out Of Stone -- an amazing essay and a great collection that everyone should read. The excerpt is part of her description of what she said to a panel in Toronto on cultural appropriation:

[T]hat I am a Black woman speaking to a largely white audience is a major construction of the text. blackness and 'whiteness' structure and mediate our interchanges -- verbal, physical, sensual, political -- they mediate them so that there are some things so that there are some things that I will say to you and some things that I won't. And quite possibly the most important things will be the ones that I withhold. The racialised power relations that we live determine what I will say and how I will approach my saying it. Our relative positionings within the society are at the core of these determinations. Notions of voice, representation, theme, style, imagination are charged with these historical locations and require rigorous examination rather than liberal assumptions of universal subjectivity or the downright denail of such locations. Even if my audience here were half Black or three-quarters Black, even if it were fully Black or people of colour, blackness and 'whiteness' -- racial identities -- would still mediate our conversation, though in such circumstances I might become a little more revealing. In such circumstances so much time wouldn't be wasted convincing white people that their 'ruling' culture firstly, exists, secondly, was and is wildly invasive and hegemonic and rationalises all others it meets into subordinated categories. That is, we might and in full cognizance of these circumstances proceed beyond white ignorance, white denial, white fear, white apathy, white lies, white power disguised as concern for censorship. Whites, that is, might proceed into the dangerous territory of knowing, instead of engaging in the sleight of hand Michelle Wallace calls, 'the production of knowledge (that) is constantly employed in reinforcing intellectual racism.' [pp. 152-3]

Similar dynamics function in related but not identical ways along other axes of power and privilege -- for example, talking about poverty and the social welfare system is a much different experience when you are talking to someone who is living in poverty and/or on welfare than when you are talking to someone who is and only ever has been middle-class, even if they identify as progressive.

In other words, the standpoint of the writer and the readers matter.

In mainstream writing (and other kinds of text, like television) the writer exists in their own standpoint in an unexamined and unarticulated, usually nearly invisible, way. The reader/viewer is constructed in a way that is mediated by the market -- media depends on advertising money or money from direct sale of the product, so readers/viewers who are more likely to be able to spend money in the way in question are more likely to be assumed to be the target audience. It's more complicated than that, but that's one big factor.

In my movement history project this starts out already a bit more complicated. In a certain respect, the book that I want to result from the project is not coming from a single standpoint -- it is not exclusively my words, but the words of many different participants in social movements (from interviews I have done with them) who have many different standpoints and analyses. It would be perilously easy to slip into an uncritical liberalism in presenting their words. I could use keywords like "inclusivity" and "diversity" and emphasize difference-but-shared-importance in the "liberal assumptions of universal subjectivity" decried by Brand above. In fact, in my early stages of sitting down and making some very basic first attempts and early decisions, I was shocked by how easy it was to fall into something like that -- it was easy to catch, but still kind of disturbing that it had to be caught.

A related but not identical danger is the temptation for me to hover above the text, invisible but the ultimate arbiter shaping, contextualizing, legitimizing and deligitimizing these "other" voices; the straight, middle-class, white male leftist intellectual who gets to resolve (on paper) the contradictions among those who experience and resist different kinds of oppressions in different ways. And this is not just an abstraction: As an example, participants quite explicitly said things to me that reinforce structures of oppression like racism and sexism. On the one hand, it is not my place to sit in judgment of those who have chosen to share their stories with me and pretend that I have never been blinded by privilege into saying oppressive things myself; on the other hand, being an ally to those who experience those oppressions means I cannot pretend that such things do not happen or do not matter. With respect to the more general problem, I cannot hope for some kind of pure or absolute solution, but I think the answer has to do with the word "invisible" in the sentence above. I have to be open about the contradictions among participants (while not targeting any individuals) and explicit about who I am, my role in putting the material together, and my reasons for the choices that I make. The key is not pretending I can make myself disappear, I think.

The question of standpoint and point-of-view also relates to decisions about the prospective audience. As the quotation above from Brand illustrates, for example, you may or may not have to 'prove' the existence of racism, depending on the audience. Hoping for a diverse (albeit generally progressive) audience makes for some tricky decisions: excessively explaining the obvious and failing to explain the obscure will both alienate readers, and the exact same topic will be both of those for different groups of people that I hope will read this book. Though it could easily become cumbersome and hurt the flow of the text, I think the key again is in not letting things disappear and acknowledging the differences that readers will come with. And, of course, when in doubt trying to do things in ways that challenge those with more power and privilege.

A common piece of advice to writers is to imagine that they are writing for a specific person that they know. I initially considered doing something like this for this project, but given the text of this posting so far it should be obvious why that is inadequate. So I'm making a slight variation and applying a few filters based on several likely readers that I know, with different levels of knowledge, different politics, different standpoints. I'm not saying I can please all readers -- in fact, if I don't make some angry or uncomfortable, then I'll have failed. But I am looking upon it as a challenge that I can at least partially meet to work with diverse voices and meet the needs of diverse readers, but in a way that is grounded in my best attempt at anti-oppressive politics (however flawed that might turn out to be) and that does not fall into the trap of uncritical liberalism.

Differences in standpoint and point-of-view mean that a given piece of writing will never be universally accessible, and more importantly that it will not be accessed in the same way by all readers. But I'm hoping that starting with an awareness of this results in work that is more widely accessible and interesting, and that at least makes the faultlines of standpoint and analysis visible.

Unionized Clergy

The United Church is both the largest and most progressive protestant denomination in Canada. A number of participants in my social movement history project are or were connected to the church, and their social activism is very much tied up with their faith. Though they later became Quakers, Muriel Duckworth and Frank and Isabelle Showler started their lives of active pacifism because of the influence of the United Church in the years before World War II. Shelley Finson and David Murata are both ordained ministers in that denomination -- the former is a retired theological educator and played an important role in the movement that brought feminism to the Christian churches in Canada, and the latter is a parish minister in urban Winnipeg with a focus on community organizing.

Another theme that has emerged from the interviews I did in that project is that just because a group, organization, institution, or movement has an orientation towards justice in one way, shape, or form, one cannot automatically assume that to translate into orientations towards justice in other ways.

Because it relates to both of these themes that are part of my current work, here are links to articles from CBC, CP, and Reuters, discussing a new initiative by ministers of the United Church of Canada to become unionized with the assistance of the Canadian Auto Workers (which, coincidentally, also happens to be the largest and most progressive private sector union in Canada). The main complaints from the ministers appear to have to do with working conditions, safety, and lack of responsiveness to their needs on the part of the church's national office. They would be the first clergy in North America to unionize, though certain Anglican ministers and rabbis in England have been unionized for about a decade.

Funny Cartoon

Just a quick, funny link before I head out for the day.

Post Mortem

Of the election, I mean, though the other kind can be cool, too.

Here are some links:

• "Blacks, Whites Live in 'Different Moral Universe'" by, I presume, the Black Commentator editors. Not exactly election post mortem per se, but still important context for understanding the election.
  
  
• "Post-Concession Reflections" by Robert Borosage. I don't agree with a lot of his analysis, but there are some interesting stats in there.
  
  
• "Stand and Fight" by Katrina vanden Heuvel. Not the deepest analysis out there but some good sense in terms of future course.
  
  
• "Why Kerry Lost" by Doug Ireland.
  
  
• "The Election of Homophobia and Misogyny" by Vijay Prashad
  
  
• "The Morning After" by Justin Podur
  
  
• "The Election Hangover of a Lifetime" by Tom Engelhardt
  
  
  

Okay, I may add more to this list later, but I really need to get some other work done.

Moving On

As he had to do, Kerry has conceded. He will probably get flack from some progressives for not putting up more of a fight, but as I posted this morning, he couldn't have won so it probably wasn't that bad a decision. Where he deserves to get flack is over the campaign that he ran, but I'm not getting involved in that.

So what does this mean for the next four years?

The Bush administration will continue their project of consolidating the structures of power in the United States in their own favour. This will include tightening their hold over the judiciary, in particular through the appointment of two or three new justices to the Supreme Court and probably naming a new Chief Justice once Renquist dies or retires. It will probably also include further redistricting shenanigans, a la (most recently) Tom DeLay in Texas, to keep their hold on the House good and tight. Further efforts to remould the media environment and attack liberals and lefties in academia will also occur.

Also look for renewed assaults on the social safety net and the further entrenchment of religious right principles in how the remnants of social services are delivered. The last vestiges of affirmative action and other civil rights victories will be swept away, partly via the courts and partly via administrative action. Poverty and wealth inequality will increase and the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance will decrease.

In terms of foreign policy, the Bush unilateralist approach will be further consolidated, though it's not immediately obvious what this means. Though a popular anti-Bush slogan in the last few months has been "Four More Wars! Four More Wars!" to counter the obvious "Four More Years!", I'm not sure that's going to happen. After all, the recolonization of Iraq is absorbing huge resources, and could easily absorb a lot more without being less of a disaster. I don't see a return of the draft as being on the immediate horizon but if there is another major attack on the U.S. "homeland" then I can see that being part of the wishlist passed in the immediate aftermath. But without the draft, how can they invade more countries? Resistance in Iraq is only going to grow, and the ability of terrorists to recruit people is only going to increase as Americans slaughter Iraqis. (In fact, keep your eyes on Fallujah in the next few weeks to get a taste of what it's going to be like.)

All of which is pretty darn depressing.

So what do we do?

Well, obviously we do, to start with -- though it is a bit of a non-answer, just getting out and getting active however and wherever you can is a place to start.


In terms of me personally I don't forsee any big changes in the short term. I will continue going to events when I can, and participating in both the LA Bus Riders Union and my neighbourhood peace vigil. If I can find ways to deepend my participation in those spaces, I will, though I'm fairly constrained at this particular juncture of my life.

More generally, though I suspect the Democrats will not change from their meek acceptance of whatever the Bush administration proposes, the newly mobilized liberals across the country must, must, must kick and scream every step of the way. MoveON and ACT and all the rest must function independently of the Democratic party. The anti-war movement must not succumb to despair. Both liberals and the left must build community and organizations that are sustainable, and that will not give up. Which is easy to say and hard to do. Personally, I'd like to see the moneyed white liberals in West LA and Santa Monica pouring cash without strings into the coffers of progressive and radical organizations grounded in LA's communities of colour.

I think elements of the left-liberal united front that opposed Bush in this election really need to think about what they're going to do about the heartland of this country. While I think organizing in working class communities of colour is the most important work to support, I think there needs to be some serious thought by those who function at the national level of progressive organizations and coalitions about how gain ground in Kansas and Arizona and Alabama and even in Mississippi and Texas.

The Morning After

Kerry has lost. I figured so last night, despite half a dozen states remaining uncalled by CNN and nobody's electoral college vote count reaching 270.

Even this morning, the top story on the top page of the CBC web site says:

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card declared that President George W. Bush had won re-election early Wednesday, although ballot challenges in the swing state of Ohio could still put Democrat John Kerry in the Oval Office.

Liberal independent media site Alternet is leading with "Too Close To Call".

I refuse to check, but I understand Fox called it for Bush at about noon yesterday -- well, at least by late evening, anyway.

Fox is right. Maybe they're not right if you remove all the voter suppression attacks, particularly in communities of colour. Maybe they're not even right if you ignore the racist, disgusting Republican interventions in the election day ground war, and follow through on technicalities.

But.

Bush won the popular vote. The Republicans gained two to four seats in the Senate and probably about half a dozen in the House. As we saw last time, the Supreme Court votes Republican, and if you want to win on a technicality you have to have them on your side. But most importantly of all, the Republicans can mobilize a lot of angry people on the ground. As I said on the eve of the elections, the liberals seem to have more ability to mobilize people than they've had in a long time, but it is not as deeply rooted as the neocon populism, and they do not have the same vicious determination to win at all costs. As Justin Podur wrote on November 1, "The grassroots fundamentalist constituency of Bush will vote, and then they will start moving to ensure that the person they voted for wins. And they will not back off until they are quite sure they cannot win."

Kerry may hang on for another few days and try and fight legal battles, but I don't think there's much point. In fact, I have the sense that a hypotehtical Kerry win challenged by Bush via the street and the courts would lose legitimacy even if it ultimately won because of the challenges. Unless the Dems and their allies have more spunk and originality left in them than I believe, not only will they lose, but their challenges will actually shore up the legitimacy of the Bush victory.

And in local election news, the returns on California propositions did not look good when I went to bed last night. On the up side, a tax on the rich to pay for mental health services passed (Prop 63), as did a resolution on stem cell research (Prop 71) and one enshrining certain principles of open meetings and records in the state constitution (Prop 59). But Prop 64 guts California's consumer and environmental protection regime by preventing the long tradition in this state of allowing private citizens to sue for enforcement. Now only the state can do that (and it isn't doing much of it, these days), and private citizens have to wait, basically, until there is a body for them to be able to sue. Prop 69 allows the opening of a police-state DNA database for anybody ever picked up by the cops, and mandates that everyone who is arrested has to allow their DNA to be sampled. Even Prop 72, which would force medium and large employers to extend health benefits to their employees, looks like it has lost in a squeaker. A resolution to mildly improve California's draconian "three strikes" law has also failed.

Pre-Election Pronouncement

To be honest, I'm mostly doing this out of a sense of obligation. Most of what I'm going to say has been said already and better by others, but I felt the need to say something on the eve of this momentous election.

An email today asked if I expected to have to change the title of my blog. I'm not really sure. Obviously I hope Kerry wins (not because of any enthusiasm for him, but as a tactical necessity) but I don't know what value any prediction from me would have. It's a statistical dead heat, according to the latest polls. The significant efforts by the Democrats and progressive organizations to mount efforts to "get out the vote" in key swing states feels like it should be enough to win it for them. But the depth of Republican dirty trickery to supress the vote already reported in the media is also significant, and their efforts to mobilize their base by things like state-level referenda to enshrine anti-queer bigotry in state laws and constitutions will bring the Born Againers to the polls in huge numbers.

My overriding sensation as I contemplate the five months I've lived in this country and been immersed in its political culture in the lead-up to this election, and as I contemplate the event horizon that is tomorrow, is surreality. And it's not the kind of surrealism you see when you look at, say, a Salvador Dali painting head-on. It's more like being a character in an MC Escher drawing who can tell there is something not quite right about the way all these staircases connect together, but can't exactly pinpoint what.

This feeling of surrealism comes from lots of things, big and little. I probably can't capture it in words, at least not when I'm this tired, but I can list a few things.

I can't find the link any more, but a couple of weeks ago there were several article talking about a survey which showed how profoundly ignorant likely Republican voters were on basic facts -- I can't remember the exact numbers, but something like two-thirds or three-quarters believed completely incorrect things like WMD had been found in Iraq and Saddam was behind 9/11.

This springs from and gives substance to this oft-quoted revelation from journalist Ron Suskind, in which he talks about his interview with an un-named "senior White House advisor":

" . . . then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality ­ judiciously, as you will ­ we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Another contribution to my surreal feelings is getting to appreciate how deeply conservative the white electorate in this country is. The last time the majority of votes cast by white voters in this country went to the Democratic candidate for president was 1964. It was around then, of course, that the Democrats were pushed by the civil rights movement into supporting some legislation and executive action to advance the cause of civil rights -- the African American community largely left the party of Lincoln to become Democrats, and the GOP soon mobilized the famous "southern strategy" to use subtle and not-so-subtle racism to capture, ever since, the majority of white votes.

No less surreal than the passionate neocons are those few people I've met who are actually enthusiastic about Kerry -- at least the neocons are passionate about a vision for the world, however horrid it might be, whereas Kerry is a cipher standing in for the smooth and soulless governance of things by creeping neoliberalism. Yes, I hope he wins, but how can you get excited by what he stands for?

Of course, it is also creepy to see those who are holding their noses as they vote for Kerry get suckered in to a certain kind of enthusiasm. They still know intellectually what they are getting into and why, but the campaign hype pumps excitement into their bodies even as their cynicism remains intact.

And there is the isolation of the middle-class and elite white liberals in this country. You can't really appreciate it if you haven't felt it. And I live in a liberal enclave, here in West LA/Santa Monica, so I'm sure it feels much more intense in much of the country. They are disconnected from communities of colour, whom they fear and have betrayed and are generally clueless about, in the fine tradition of liberal racism. They are actively despised by much of the white working class, because they are seen as pandering only to people of colour (not true) and have abandoned most class issues (true). And of course the more conservative segment of the elite hates them too.

But it's not all Nevernever Land. The liberals, despite their disconnection, remain powerful and well-funded, and appear to have rediscovered the idea that politics happens on the ground and not just through the media. In this week's LA Weekly Harold Myerson gushes

I have spent the past week observing the official Democratic Party and unofficial 527 field operations in the battleground states of Ohio and Florida. And I have found something I've never before seen in my 36 years as a progressive activist and later as a journalist: an effective, fully functioning American left.

He is way too effusive and optimistic, and repeats the frequent error of mistaking the embattled liberals for a largely absent left. This movement-like activity is not nearly so deeply rooted as the neocon/religious right populist movement it seeks to oppose, nor as powerful, nor as ready to play for keeps, but it is still encouraging. It remains to be seen whether this new concerted activity by liberal organizations falls apart on November 3 or does take on some sustained existence independent of electoral politics.

And certainly what does exist of the left in this country has been stirred to action around the election, though I'm not sure where that will go either. In terms of the fight between the Dimesworth of Difference crowd (i.e. vote for Nader) and the Anybody But Bush crowd (i.e. vote Dem in swing states, and your conscience elsewhere), I am firmly in the more movement-oriented and tactically-focused wing of the ABB crowd, with the likes of Progressives and Independents to Defeat Bush and Paul Street (whose demolishing of the DD arguments in numerous posts are well worth reading). I hope this election can be used as a mechanism to build left capacity so that the nightmare of having to support a John Kerry to defeat a George Bush can be overcome in a politically and morally responsible way.

Anyway, I think my words have petered to a stop.

Vote if you can, send wishes for the less evil outcome if you can't.