Canadian Lefty In Transition

Blogging may be erratic over the next few weeks. The movers come for our stuff tomorrow morning. We fly out on Saturday. We then spend a couple of weeks in southern Ontario before heading up to Sudbury. During that period I'll have easy access to a computer but I may not have a lot of time. Once we're in Sudbury, it is not clear how long we'll have to wait until our stuff gets there -- it may arrive before us or it may take as much as a week longer, so my computer access might be limited for an additional period. And, of course, there is all the hassle of painting and unpacking and so on, which takes lots of time. So activity on this site will probably fall off a little bit over that period, but hopefully not to nothing and not for too long.

Wish us luck!

Mass Movements

Here's a good article on mass movements from Black Commentator.

One of its many good points:

If a progressive mass movement is to be built in this era of sprawl and locked down media monopolies, organizers must develop and deploy alternative communications strategies to get and keep the movement’s message into a sufficient number of ears to sustain its influence and momentum.

And another one:

When the antiwar movement loses its reverence for judges and elected officials, and discovers some creative and popular ways to break the law, it will be a mass movement.

And a point I think many outside the U.S. don't fully appreciate, about the nature of the right in this country:

The religious right possesses a mass base, along with ambitious and profoundly scary leaders. With corporate support it has been successful in building its own communications networks and influencing or seizing outright control over many civilian and military institutions. The religious right does not follow politicians. Politicians pander to it. Whenever the religious right starts being civilly disobedient, we will see a mass movement with the potential to take us far down the road toward fascism.

It concludes that the African American community is the only constituency that will likely be able to spearhead the next progressive mass movement in the United States. I'm inclined to agree.

Read the whole thing!

Understanding Harper

Equal marriage legislation passed in the House of Commons in Ottawa yesterday, according to this article. It still has to pass the senate, but that is not expected to be difficult.

One of the most interesting features of this saga has been the stupid things that Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservative Party, has been saying. At times, despite initial intentions to avoid this, he has come across as homophobic, illogical, and even gratuitously anti-Quebec. I have also heard that even many members of his own party were embarassed by the viciousness of his opposition to the budget ammendment that passed last week (which moved a few billion dollars back from tax cuts and into things like housing and foreign aid, so that the Liberals could count on NDP support to pass the budget) even in the face of the ammendment's popularity.

One way to understand this behaviour is that Harper is screwing up. He is trying too hard to shift poll numbers in his favour for that day that is never far in the future for any minority government, election day. He is trying to ignite simplistic, polarizing "single issue" outrage that will cause large numbers of people to give up on the Liberals and vote for the Conservatives. The outcome thus far has been to cause his party to fade in the polls, but he keeps trying. In the process, he is making sure that lots of ridings that would vote for a red Tory or even a socially moderate blue Tory will not be interested in voting for candidates in any party headed by him, not to mention writing off all of the seats in Quebec.

But I worry that he has something else going on. I worry that he may, as unlikely as it sounds, have a longer term agenda. One of the big victories of the conservative movements in the United States is that they have managed to take a sizeable chunk of the electorate and shape their ways-of-knowing in such a way that any ridiculous thing said by someone on the right is accepted regardless of facts. This chunk is still a minority, but it is sufficiently well organized and mobilized that it has been wielding increasing influence over the media and educational institutions that comprise much of the ways-of-knowing for the rest of the population, thereby shifting the perceptions of a much larger group of people to be more in line with their own. Moreover, this proactive chunk has been mobilized in such a way that partially innoculates it against defeat -- every victory is a sign that Good is triumphing, but every defeat is a sign of a great liberal conspiracy that is ruining the nation and therefore requires everyone to struggle that much harder. Because of the warped ways-of-knowing that this proactive minority uses, the fact that they dominate the state apparatus and much of the rest of the institutional life of the country in no way makes the blether about a great liberal conspiracy any less effective in mobilizing its members.

So what I worry is that rather than ill-considered political grandstanding to try and win some kind of short-term gain, that this is part of a more deliberate plan by the Conservative Party to galvanize a portion of the electorate in ways that can try and duplicate the quasi-social movement power of the right in the United States. Sure, they might not gain much ground at first, but then Barry Goldwater didn't get too far in 1964, did he? Is the use of rhetoric around equal marriage that seems way out of proportion to much of the Canadian electorate part of some scheme to implement a Canadian version of the Southern Strategy, tied to conservative movement building? Are Harper's advisors egging him on knowing that they won't come to power in the next few years, but hoping to wage a "war of position" to build up a social base that can eventually come to dominate the Canadian political landscape in the way that the right does in the U.S.?

Beyond asking whether this is the intention, of course, we need to ask whether it will work. I'm skeptical. But I think we need to be aware of the possibility, and those of us who are keen to attack liberalism from the left need to take this threat seriously.

TBS: "You're a Communist!"

This will be the first in what I hope will be an occasional series of posts giving some leisurely consideration to common comments, arguments, rhetoric, and situations faced by people who support justice and liberation. "TBS" stands for "Thinking Before Speaking."

I've decided to start off by lobbing myself an easy one: Who to the left of Pat Buchanan (U.S. readers) or Preston Manning (Canadian readers) has not at one time or another been ritualistically dismissed from the bounds of acceptable opinion by that dread label, "Communist"? Even moderate conservative, destroyer of welfare, and starver of Iraqi children Bill Clinton was at times so labelled by prominent rightists without giving rise to a wave of laughter from sea to shining sea. Although, except for the hardcore right in Canada (who wanted it to be met with a chorus of, "Well, now, if an American says it, it must be true!") when Buchanan (I think) branded the country "Soviet Canuckistan," giggling and eye-rolling were quite widespread north of the 49th parallel.

Most of the people to whom the "C-word" is applied have the option of responding, "Don't be silly. Of course I'm not." While I have used that response myself, it has some drawbacks that mean further consideration might be useful:

1. People likely to use such a label (particularly category 2 in the next numbered list) probably don't care about the actual facts and have less than no interest in the detailed schemes that liberals, progressives, radicals, and leftists of various stripes have for distinguishing amongst ourselves, so it's not as if sticking to this point and avoiding more difficult issues will actually win any kind of argument.
   
   
2. It leaves unchallenged the ways in which the power of the label is used (often effectively) as a slander against all progressive ideas, particularly any which try to get beyond simplistic liberalism.
   
   
3. It breaks solidarity with our comrades who are Communists. I'm not saying I would necessarily want 'em running the world, but they often do good work in the community and they don't deserve to be the butt of "Oh, I'm not one of those" from supposed allies.
   

So who is likely to resort to such labelling?

1. People who have little experience with politics at all, especially with politics outside the mainstream. They encounter a political stance or action that is a bit unusual and reach for a framework in which to place it, and all they've been given by the mainstream media and education systems is the vague, scary label "Communist."
   
   
2. Those on the right who either know an actual thing or two about the left and intentionally use the rhetorical power imbued in the "C-word" by decades of hysteria to demonize the broader left, or those in the intellectual/emotional/rhetorical thrall of such people. Lots of right-wing commentators use this kind of attack-by-association; David Horowitz, for example, does it all the time. Mike Harris, when Premier of Ontario, made comments using this device to trivialize the quarter of a million citizens that closed down Toronto to demonstrate their opposition to his policies during the Toronto Days of Action. I encountered it when doing anti-war leafletting in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in the months after 9/11 -- a disgruntled passer-by responded to my assertion that the lives of all innocent civilians are worth the same, whether they were residents of Pearl Harbour or janitors in the World Trade Centre or residents of Hiroshima or villagers in Afghanistan, by saying, in effect, that my point was the kind of argument that Communists used during the Vietnam era, therefore I was a Communist, therefore basic points made by me (or anyone) about the universal value of human life did not need to be taken seriously.
   
   
3. Left-liberals and social democrats who use a more sophisticated version of the same thing. In this approach, the speaker or writer styles themselves as having the key to the absolute most progressive social change that can be reasonably accomplished, and anyone pushing for something more than that must therefore be a Communist and therefore be deluded, and perhaps evil. I've heard the label used this way, for example, by a Hamilton city councillor who at times styled himself as a left-liberal (though the accuracy of this was very much debatable) and by a prominent NDP trade unionist in Hamilton, and it is used this way by former NDP Premier of Ontario Bob Rae in his book, The Three Questions. It has also been a common device among cold war liberals in the U.S.
   

The label doesn't come up as often as it used to, of course, because with the fall of the Soviet Union it just isn't as ideologically useful to those who wish to support hierarchies of power and privilege. But it still does get used. This is despite the fact that the Communist Parties have not exerted decisive influence on the broader left in North America since at least the early '50s. Though a resurgence in groups that could realistically carry the label occurred in the late '60s and early '70s, they were still a small and divided minority, and not a dominant one in the broad mass of people struggling for social change in that era. But the use of the label persists because it has power.

The power of the "C-word" is built from (a) the historical crimes committed by some people and groups and states that have worn the label proudly; (b) the hysterical distortions built upon that base by those who have opposed them; and, (c) a willful blindness towards the evils of capitalism.

Yes, Stalin was a monster. He killed millions. He had no interest in the liberation of working people, just in his own power. The historical and organizational and personal factors that lead to those events need to be understood and they need to be prevented from happening again (even as we refuse to let the crimes of a statist bureaucrat scare us away from useful analytical and political tools presented by the many disparate things that can be semi-accurately labelled "Marxism"). Later Bureaucrats-in-Charge in the USSR and its satellites were significantly less flamboyent about drinking the blood of opponents and innocents, but there were still lots of reasons to seek a more just and free social order in the so-called "workers' states."

But such oppressive realities, particularly spectacular ones a la Stalin, have been used in a very particular way by Western elites and propaganda institutions. For the most part, massacres alone do not evoke sympathy, let alone hysterical name-calling, by Western elites. As other authors have ruthlessly documented, massacres by those who oppose private ownership of the means of production are treated much more seriously than massacres by those who support it. This distortion in how crimes against humanity are treated in the dominant media and historical narratives in North America is vital because for the "C-word" to have the power that it has, Stalin's crimes need to be seen in a certain distorted context and certain other realities need to be forgotten.

It requires conceptual blurring in the minds of the audience.

It requires that all ideas about how to organize economic activity that are other than how it is done in North America be blurred together and considered to be more or less equivalent to each other and to the authoritarian, centrally-planned state economies that existed in the countries that claimed the label "Communist."

It requires that the element of Communism that the capitalist owning-class and their faithful servants actually oppose -- private owners not being able to control the apparatus of the economy any more -- be portrayed as being unavoidably linked to horrible consequences (massacres, repression, etc.) that said people are quite willing to support if done by those on their own side of the ideological divide. I see no reason why other ways of organizing economies are only and inevitably oppressive. Each must be judged on its own merits and, in fact, I think the key to a liberatory economy is opposing authoritarian economic structures regardless of whether they are private or public. However, efforts to try and get beyond the false polarization between the terms "Communist" and "capitalist" to actually understanding the world are usually ignored or treated as some kind of dirty Commie trick.

It requires that the actual oppressive behaviour by parties and states identifying as Communist be exaggerated ridiculously. Gains made in terms of economic productivity, literacy, social equity, and other things are dismissed or ignored. The oppression of stifling, hierarchical bureaucracy in the later Soviet era -- which in itself was bad enough -- is conflated with the mass death of the Stalinist era. Demons like Stalin are much discussed, whereas things like the progress fostered by the CP in its years of governing the Indian state of Kerala are ignored. People who gravitate to CPs as a mechanism which they can use to struggle for their own liberation, in areas where they are active in opposing local state and capitalist and colonial oppression, are falsely equated with Stalin. Here's an anecdote that neatly illustrates the way this exaggeration has wormed its way into popular consciousness: At a lunch in the late '90s, my partner actually witnessed a supposedly highly educated woman from the American midwest make casual conversation by asking a scientist from the former Soviet Georgia how old she was when they took her away from her parents and made her go into biology.

It requires that the actual oppressive behaviour by parties and states that are part of the capitalist world system be downplayed or outright ignored, even when they are comparable to or worse than the Communist supervised crimes mentioned above.

When folks starved or were killed by the state in the Ukraine, or the Prague Spring was crushed, it was -- to take the right-wing line to its illogical conclusion -- because a small clique of wealthy men were prevented from owning all of the factories; when folks starved in India, were killed by the state in Suharto's Indonesia (with U.S. support), or when the U.S. sponsored a coup to overthrow Allende in Chile and tens of thousands of deaths followed, this was all written off as unfortunate accident if it was acknowledged at all, rather than seen as an inherent feature of capitalism. I cannot at this time support this with references, but I would hazard a guess that more deaths between 1925 and 1955 can be attributed to Communism than can be to capitalism, but between 1955 and 1985 I would suspect the reverse would be true. The genius of capitalism is that it does its worst to people outside of its core states, or to groups that are physically within but have been built up as being psychically and socially excluded, like Aboriginal peoples and African Americans. The elites in the core capitalist states can then appeal to their own (white) citizens by saying, "No, of course our system doesn't result in anything bad like that," and have it widely believed, because it doesn't happen (at least not very much) to the folk whose belief matters most to the ongoing viability of those states/economies.

So. Death and suffering and oppression have occurred both under Communism and under the economies dominated by private tyrannies which claim to be its opposite. Despite this, dominant propaganda institutions in the West have done their best over the course of many decades to link death and suffering only with Communist structures in the popular imagination. Also, the "C-word" has been systematically and deliberately applied in an imprecise way so that its power to demonize can be applied as widely as possible. It can now be used to discredit any who attempt to point out the crimes inherent in the domination of the world by capital and who struggle against oppression that occurs under whatever banner, regardless of the actual politics or vision or ways of acting in the world that such people have.

By responding the the "C-word" solely by trying to deny its relevance to us without raising the larger context of where that label comes from and why it is used the way that it is, we leave intact a powerful rhetorical tool that the right uses to police and dismiss us regardless of where in the varied landscape of struggles for justice and liberation our politics actually fall.

Learning From LA

As the end of our time here approaches, I have been reflecting on what I have learned from slightly over a year spent living in Los Angeles.

It has been a quiet year, in many ways. The isolation of being in a new city has worked together with the isolating nature of LA itself, and the ways in which being a stay-at-home parent shapes life, to help make it so. As well, the parenting has enforced a kind of balance I normally find elusive, and has mandated that I spend much larger blocks of time than ever before with no opportunity for intellectual or experiential distractions from just being. How these experiences translate into enduring learnings is yet to be determined, I think, and in any case life in Sudbury will be little different in these ways over the short term.

On a more intellectual or professional or externally political level, I'm not sure I've learned a whole lot. Though it has been less than I'd hoped, I suppose I have learned about the political culture in this country and this city in ways that I wouldn't have from Canada. But I think perhaps the most potentially significant learning of this type has been a subtle shift or deepening in how I think about concepts like "nation" and "state." I'm not sure I can articulate it any more clearly than that, at the moment -- I tried to write a brief essay on my reflections as an anti-nationalist Canadian leftist living in the U.S. for a friend's 'zine and I found it to be a very difficult and frustrating experience. I ended up writing about something else just to get it done. I figure that means either I really have nothing to say on the subject or I should write a book about it; only time will tell which, and this project has claim on at least another year and a half of my non-parenting time before I can think about striking out in new directions.

Towards a Christian Left in the U.S

My year of living in the United States and my intensive reading of the history of Canada in the first few decades of the twentieth century have left me increasingly convinced that any significant progress towards transforming politics in the United States in a progressive or even (gasp) democratic/libertarian socialist direction will involve liberal, progressive, and leftist Christians organizing and reclaiming their faith from the death-grip of anti-rationalist, bigoted, war-mongering nutters in the pay of big business. Liberation theology, the radical social gospel, and Christian socialism need to find a renaissance if this country and this world are going to ease their way out of the prison created by the enormous hierarchies of power and privilege to which right-wing Christians give God's supposed blessing. Only when a significant part of a renewed charge in this country's heartland is lead by folks who can't just be dismissed, as I can, as being not worthy of consideration because they aren't Christians; and only when the lefty Christians in question are organized not as pallid apologists for the Democrats but true evangelists of the radical love and the lovely radicalness embodied in the best elements of the gospels (and significant parts of the Old Testament as well) will there be a glimmer of hope for, if not salvation, at least meaningful progress towards justice and liberation in this world.

Anyway, I don't know a whole lot about them, but this group (found via PageOneQ) seems to be taking steps in that direction.

And while I'm at it, here's a link to the Student Christian Movement, a group for Canadian university students motivated by their Christian faith to get involved in struggles for peace and social justice. It was founded in 1921 by veterans who returned from World War One with a vision for restructuring society in the interests of peace and justice, and by the '30s it was an important institution of Christian socialism and the radical social gospel in Canada -- at least three of my interivew participants were involved with the group back in that era. I don't know much about its history since then, but judging by the website it seems to have kept up a tradition of doing pretty cool stuff.

Thinking Before Speaking

Earlier today, I was reading this post on IMC Hamilton. Now, normally it's not the sort of thing I'd link to or talk about. It's a post that was meant to spark discussion in the comments section, and it succeeded in doing so. The subject is one that interests me -- the reality and perceptions of the role of violence in social change -- but there isn't much about the discussion that I would normally feel compelled to bring to the attention of others.

Except I was reading through the comments and I was struck by the fact that one particular commenter, who has adopted the nom-de-net of "Kimberly," in her multiple comments manages to regurgitate quite a number of the things that people working for social change always hear from others who don't agree with us. I've seen them couched in a lot of different language and deployed in a lot of different ways, some sincere and some just to "take the piss" (to borrow a British expression). I've heard them shouted from the windows of passing cars, said with patient tolerance by friends, and muttered angrily at family dinners. They aren't always an actual invitation to dialogue, and the structure of any particular interaction may severely limit our ability to respond in a thoughtful, engaged way. But say we felt safe, we had time, we were with someone else who was willing to listen. What would we say?

I'm not always very happy with how I deal with opportunities for dialogue, particularly when they happen in the flesh but even sometimes when they happen asynchronously online, and I'm sure many other folks feel the same way. More often than not, I have to go away and think to really understand what the other person was saying and why they might be saying that, and come up with a good response, and by then it is too late. It occurred to me, as I was reading the IMC post, that maybe it would be useful to think and write in advance about some of the kinds of things that come up regularly -- maybe not in ways that can easily be spit out in the short, tense moments that contain such discussions, but in ways that can serve as background thinking both for me and for anyone else who happens by this blog and is interested to kind of smooth the way for the thinking-on-the-fly that has to happen in the moment at each occasion.

Here are some choice phrases that came up in this person's comments:

• "The police, under law, cannot simply decide to arrest someone or use tear gas because they feel like it...Police just doing their job and following the laws of this country is not brutality; it's not injustice."
  
  
• And right after that "If there is any form of government that supports and encourages police brutality, it's your precious communist system."
  
  
• "I don't agree with the government either, but you change the system by casting your ballot...not by causing havoc in the streets."
  
  
• "Instead of innocently sitting on the ground, holding hands and singing (and you're not that innocent) why don't these people get jobs and start contributing to society like the rest of the hard working populace does? They seem to have a lot of time to protest."
  
  
• "[T]o improve relations and image, it would be best of protest organizers to ensure that anarchists are NOT involved. Those in the crowd should help the police if these individuals are around to stop problems before they start."
  
  

Those are the choicest gems from this particular thread, and other commenters say some detailed and interesting things to rebut these and other comments along the same lines.

But I think, when inspiration strikes and time permits, I may do my best to compose posts on this site addressing such things, probably with titles that look something like "TBS: (Specific Issue)", where TBS stands for "Thinking Before Speaking."

More Haiti

Here's an article from Rabble with a little more depth about Haitian blood on Canadian government hands, including a larger snippet of the Naomi Klein interview with Aristide.

Haitian Blood on Canadian Hands

Here is a post from The Killing Train about the disgusting Canadian complicity after the fact in the U.S.-sponsored overthrow of the democratically elected leader of Haiti last year, and one Canadian's dramatic direct action to draw attention to it. It includes a snippet of an interview done by Naomi Klein with the deposed president, Jean Bertrand Aristide, and mention of a book coming out soon on the topic by Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton, who have both written lots of great articles on the subject that can be found in various places around the net.

Peace Studies Lectures

This is likely of interest only to folk in southern Ontario, but I'll post it anyway...it is a listing of the major lectures being put on by the McMaster University Centre for Peace Studies (and other groups) over the next year:

1. Wednesday, September 28, 2005. Sulak Sivaraksa will deliver the Mahatma Gandhi Lecture on Nonviolence in HSC 1A1.

2. Saturday, October 1, 2005. The Gandhi Peace Festival will be held at the Hamilton City Hall, commencing at 11:00 am. Co-sponsored by the India-Canada Society of Hamilton and Region.

3. Tuesday, March 7 and Wednesday, March 8, 2006. Hans-Christof von Sponeck will deliver the Bertrand Russell Peace Lectures in HSC 1A1.

4. Thursday, March 30, 2006. Nobel Laureate Bishop Carlos Belo will speak in MDCL 1305. Co-sponsored by the Chaplaincy Office.

(From email from JW.)

Some Reading/Listening

Sorry to do two mainly-linky posts in a row, but I haven't had time for much blog-oriented original writing...too busy trying to make sure I get one more chapter of this done before the big move.

• A discussion by the Ontario Women's Justice Network of the annual report released by the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario from the Domestic Violence Death Review Committee.
  
  
• A brief history of the "roads not taken" by the U.S. labour movement -- it's failure to embrace community unionism, and to challenge racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and empire. (Via Monthly Review.)
  
  
• An MP3 interview with MP Libby Davies on the private member's bill she has introduced to try and start combatting racial profiling in areas under federal jurisdiction. (Via Radio4All.)
  
  
• Judy Rebick writes about struggles around reproductive choice in Canada, then and now. (Via Rabble.CA.)
  
  
• The book page for Pink Blood: Homophobic Violence in Canada, a look at instances of queer bashing in Canada between 1990 and 2004. I haven't read it, but I heard about it from a friend -- one who is quite excited to have been mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. It is the first book of this kind focusing on Canada, and it looks quite interesting.
  
  
• The shortlist for this year's Sunburst Award, described as being "for Canadian literature of the fantastic." I haven't read any of the nominees this year -- I've hardly read any books about anything but Canadian history this year, to be honest, and not nearly as much fiction in the last several years as I used to, and sadly little "literature of the fantastic" for even longer than that -- but I've read other novels by two of the five nominees, some of which I enjoyed and one of which I did not. Depressingly male list, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was depressingly white as well. (Found this via scribblingwoman.)
  
  
• Joe Bageant on sanity, complicity, and Adolf Eichmann. "All this sanity is killing some of us. To my mind, it is killing the best of us. It drives the artist and the philosopher, dancer, the psychiatrist, the homosexual torch singer and the spiritualist dishwasher toward the cliff with its macabre locust drone. Most of the genuinely beautiful minds and souls I know are in the deepest sort of despair. Rather like the cabaret society of 1930s Berlin, you can hear the high whine of hysteria behind their drunken revelry, their bitter laughter in the face of such black folly."
  
  
• And an article on progressive activism in Texas. I have my usual complaints about the liberal framing of problems and solutions that you tend to find in AlterNet articles, but I think looking at areas that are often written off by liberals and the left is a good idea, and that a sentence in the concluding paragraph has at least the beginnings of some very important political insight: "Texas activists say support from national politicians and progressive activists living in liberal cities would give them more power and influence."
  
  

Housekeeping

I have updated my sidebar to include links to blogs when you're not around threesomes aren't normal..., Lenin's Tomb, Direland, Wood's Lot, Comeuppance, Labor Blog, and Black Feminism.

I have updated RawStoryQ's name and URL to PageOneQ.

I have added Left Hook, The Dominion, and Seven Oaks to the list of regularly updated alt/indy media sites.

I have created a new category for interesting publications that are not updated or published all that frequently. To this category I have added Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch, Alternatives Journal, Monthly Review, New Left Review, Colorlines, Labour/Le Travail, and New Internationalist.

I have added a new category for sites belonging to activists or activist groups, or other sites devoted to content that remain relatively static but are still useful, cool, inspiring, revolutionary, or otherwise worth checking out. To this category I have added Women of Color Web, XY: Men, Masculinites, and Gender Politics, Homes Not Bombs, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, and Darkdaughta.com. This category deserves many more additions, I think...

That's all for now, though!

Sudbury

I suppose it is a bit peculiar that the word "Sudbury" has yet to appear on this site. It is, after all, the name of the city to which I will be moving in a couple of weeks.

I can blame the fact that this move is unexpected and sudden, and the fact that I felt quite vigorously conflicted about it in the first weeks after a change in expectations and a great job offer (both my partner's) transformed a move there into a serious possibility. Certain long-term personal and professional reservations with respect to this destination persist -- things that are peculiar to my own vision for my future, not anything I have against Sudbury, which I expect I'll quite like in and of itself. On a more immediate level I am feeling (a) the usual practical anxieties associated with any big move, though thus far at quite manageable levels; and (b) a mix of anxieties and anticipation overlaying a solid bed of acceptance with respect to our destination. I don't feel any particularly active inner conflict about it and there are definitely things I look forward to about the new situation, particularly when it is contrasted with our current one rather than with some alternative imagined future ideal. So I would say I am feeling moderately positive about it on the whole, though still with occasional bouts of more active inner conflict.

One thing that I regret about leaving Los Angeles is not having a greater opportunity to explore its political spaces and political cultures. Being here about half the time we expected contributes to that only a little bit, though; it is more a product of being a stay-at-home parent, the vast and sprawling built form of Los Angeles, the city's dismal public transit system, not owning a car, and being heavily psychologically invested in the progress of this work not happening any more slowly than it absolutely has to. I will also miss the weekly peace vigil I've attended. It is different than groups I've been active in before and has been a window into at least one corner of LA's activist cultures. And I've had the pleasure of getting to know a real nice bunch of people, too.

However, political involvement is one area where I feel a sense of possibility with respect to the move to Sudbury.

It's not unreservedly positive, of course. Sudbury is quite small, and that can be a barrier to the formation of stable and vibrant politicized spaces. As well, I am very interested in putting my labour towards and being challenged by the range of politics grouped under the broad label "anti-oppression." It is possible to arrive at such politics in lots of different ways but from what I understand the single biggest determinant of whether a reasonably sustainable network of spaces grounded in and/or impacted by those politics will exist in a given city in North America is the presence of large and politicized racialized communities in the city. The Aboriginal community in Sudbury is smaller than I had expected and the communities of colour are tiny, so I will be pleasantly surprised to find a critical mass of anti-oppression grounded/influenced spaces there.

On the other hand, there is lots to be positive about. Though small, Sudbury has a strong union presence, including a more distant history of fairly radical labour politics. As a city that has a significant level of poverty and a significant working class population, it has a more recent history of community-based social justice and anti-poverty activism as well, though I only have a vague idea of what that has involved. I have no sense of what might be going on in these areas at the moment but I am optimistic that I will find things I will want to connect with. (And, yes, I am aware of the privilege inherent in discussions of engagement with social change including words like "want" and "choice.")

I should be more able to get involved, too. Greater financial security and the inevitable aging process will give greater flexibility with respect to childcare, not necessarily right away but in the near term. We are living a few minutes walk from the central bus terminal so any public event that is not within walking distance itself will still be easy enough to get to. The substantial competing interest for my time represented by my work will not change, of course. However, being back in the country in which I was born and in which I hold citizenship will lower one other barrier I've experienced more than I had expected to during my stay in the United States.

There is also the additional possibility embodied by connection with family, friends, other loved ones, organizations, events, spaces, and various and sundry opportunities in southern Ontario. One of the down sides of living in Sudbury is that in contrast to, say, Toronto, we will have to have a car, but the upside of that downside is that it will facilitate connection with what I have already fallen into thinking of as "the south." Toronto is about four hours drive from Sudbury, we're told, so the other main centres of interest for me -- Kitchener-Waterloo and Hamilton -- will each be about one hour more. Family in K-W, two offers of couch space already in Toronto, and plenty of other folk in all three places from whom it could be begged also help make field trips more practical. Exactly how connection with "the south" ends up working logistically, socially, and politically remains to be seen and will, I suspect, evolve over a period of years. But even having the option of going to, say, a Homes Not Bombs event in Toronto or Ottawa that interests me is a definite plus.

I'm not sure how the move will change this blog. One obvious thing that can't remain the same is its name. If you have any ideas for a new blog title, please be in touch! But I definitely intend to keep blogging, as time and inspiration permit.

Terminating Arnold

Here is an account of actions against Governor Schwarzenegger during a recent visit to Santa Monica College, which is not far from where we live.

Arnold was elected in a bizarre recall election that targetted a much-loathed (and deservedly so) Democratic governor. Arnold positioned himself as a moderate Republican, but has since proven to be anything but moderate. His approval ratings, once sky-high, are now in the toilet, and he has even stooped to doing things like praising the vicious anti-immigrant Minuteman Project to gain points with conservative white voters -- something even Bush has distanced himself from. Arnold has called a special election for the fall, despite the fact that there is scheduled to be a regular election in June 2006, to try and ram through a number of right-wing measures by ballot initiative because he can't get them passed by the Democrat-controlled legislature.

It's always hard in this kind of struggle to know when you are justifiably standing up to a right-wing thug and working for limited but important reforms -- important because they impact real lives of real people -- and when you are being sucked into the swamp of electoral politics-as-spectacle. I suppose, often enough, both are true at once.

Anyway, it's still nice to see resistance of this sort, however symbollic it is on its own. As the article describing the action concludes:

E.P. Thompson talked about how early English workers got satisfaction simply by “tugging the chain” of the ruling class – pissing them off, humiliating them, shaming them, giving them a tiny piece of the banal humiliations of daily life their privilege rests upon.

I’m sure when people saw what we did on local news, and on CNN that night and the next day, there were a lot of smiles around the country and even around the world.

Parliamentary Manouverings on Equal Marriage

In an effort to stall the passage of legislation that would end discrimination against same-sex couples in the state regulation of relationships in Canada, the federal Conservative Party has offered to ease up on opposition to the budget if the government agrees to put the equal marriage legislation off to the autumn session of Parliament, according to this story on 365Gay.com. This would increase the chances of the minority Liberal government being brought down before the legislation could be passed.

Interview With Carol Wall

Here is an interview with Carol Wall published on Rabble. Wall is challenging Ken Georgetti for the presidency of the Canadian Labour Congress at its convention this week.

Naughty Pedestrian Pleasures

Yesterday morning, I was pushing L home from the grocery store in his stroller. We came to an intersection a few seconds after the lights had turned in our favour, so I hustled out into the crosswalk. There just happened to be some cars wishing to turn left across the stretch of road that L and I were crossing at that moment.

The first car in line stopped and its driver smiled and waved us forward, even though his wave was unnecessary because we clearly had the right of way. I smiled back.

The car immediately behind this one also stopped, as it had no choice. The face of the older man driving the car was contorted in rage -- I'm not using that expression to exaggerate, either -- and he was gesticulating wildly at both the car in front of him and at L and I. His windows were closed so I was spared the content of his rant, but I'd put a whole stack of poker chips up against a used sweat-sock that the obscenity content was high. I smiled back.

And not only did I smile back, but I think I may have actually laughed and otherwise, in little ways, been sure to exhibit my enjoyment of the situation. It is petty, I know, but there are precious few ways that a mere pedestrian can, with the full force of the law in support, use his or her body as even the most minor of impediments to the smooth functioning of the privatized steel and concrete circulatory system that dominates the modern, North American city, perpetuates the most idiotic kind of urban built form ever invented, indulges a terminally limited addiction to petroleum, and poisons us all.

Sure, maybe he was on his way to deliver the supersecret antidote that would save Captain Amazing from defeat at the hands of Destructor Man; perhaps he was about to give birth, and needed to get to the hospital; perhaps he was just having a lousy day and a five second delay was enough to trigger him. And it is looking like, in the months after our forthcoming move, I will become co-owner of one of those horrible, mobile, fume-spewing steel boxes myself.

I'm not saying my enjoyment is at all defensible. But enjoy it I did.

Review: Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour

(Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour: The CIO, the Communist Party, and the Canadian Congress of Labour, 1935-56. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973.)

Yep, another book review.

This one is a history of industrial unions in Canada from 1935 until 1956. The start date was chosen because it marked the end of the infamous "Third Period" of Communist activity. During that era they were busy organizing independent, Communist-controlled unions under the banner of the Workers Unity League. There was also a small labour central of national but anti-Communist unions in Canada, called the All-Canadian Congress of Labour (ACCL), and the Canadian Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) was the central for international unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The TLC remained fixated with craft unionism and was adamantly opposed to the organizing of industrial unions.

In 1935, the Communists went back into the mainstream labour movement. Not too long after that, the Congress of Industrial Organizations -- the U.S. labour central devoted to industrial unionism -- came north. Well, kind of. Actually, most of the money and most of the person-power that went into the organizing came from Canadians, many but certainly not all of them Communists. The CIO was reluctant to put resources into Canada but was pushed into at least lending their name by the vigour of local organizing and, particularly, the Oshawa auto strike of 1937. The CIO unions were initially affiliated with the AFL, but were expelled in 1937 (or thereabouts). The blood was not so bad between craft and industrial unions in Canada, but in 1939 the AFL finally forced the TLC to give the CIO-affiliated unions the boot. In 1939 and 1940, the CIO unions in Canada merged with the ACCL to form the Canadian Congress of Labour.

The years covered by the rest of the book were marked by struggles between Communists and anti-Communists in the labour movement, between the CCL in Canada and the CIO in the United States, and between the national and international unions within the CCL. In 1956, the CCL and the TLC merged to form the Canadian Labour Congress, which is still the name of Canada's central labour body.

This is an interesting and detailed and very useful book, and an important read for anyone wanting to understand the history of Canada's labour movement.

It is also pretty depressing. All of the internal conflicts of this period marked drains on energy that could have been used to organize the unorganized and struggle for better wages and working conditions, and for broader social change. But the one that struck me as the stupidest and most wasteful was the Communist/anti-Communist fight. Both sides were vicious and partisan. Both sides lied and abused democratic process in the worst ways. Neither side had a monopoly in terms of connection to the needs and desires of rank-and-file workers. Eventually the supporters of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation won by either seizing control of unions that previously had Communist leadership or just kicking entire unions out of the Congress.

I suppose I have to temper my gut reaction -- disgust -- with understanding of the historical context. That was an era of extreme polarization within the left, and in fact the battle within the labour movement was a large part of the struggle that ultimately resulted in the transfer of the centre of influence on the left in Canada from the CP to the CCF. It was not an environment that allowed much opportunity for positions distinct from both of those. There were certainly those in leadership positions who tried to carve out positions between the two camps, but sooner or later they became casualties. So, yes, I can appreciate that it was a dynamic bigger than any individual or group, but that doesn't change the fact that I hope that in the future our movements can avoid giving elites such cause for amusement and celebration.

Anyway, another book down, another ten million to go. Or something.

[Edit: For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]

Religious Right Offensive

Here's a great post from Doug Ireland on the current upsurge in frighteningly effective religious right mobilizations to reshape the cultural and political landscape in their image through "a series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America — and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities the Christers don’t like."

Scary stuff.

Reading History

One of the side effects of my intensive reading of history books in the last few months has been to make me more aware of the ways in which lack of knowledge of history allows ahistorical understandings of the present to persist unnoticed in many little corners of my brain -- and, I would not hesitate to assume, the brains of many people out there, including many fellow activists. This makes it all the easier to fall into essentialist ways of talking about people and institutions and identities and schools of thought without realizing that we are doing it.

For example, recently I have read a number of book from a number of different perspectives with a number of different approaches to writing history which have talked about various party-based or party-related socialist efforts in Canada in the first half of the 20th century. I would have been able to tell you before I read these, in an intellectual way, that the battle lines between different schools of socialist thought are not pure and eternal, but rather products of history, and that those which persist mostly serve different functions today than they might have decades ago. But reading these books has helped this surface fact seep more deeply into how I think about things; it has actually applied this idea and shifted in subtle ways the shapes of the concepts attached to various political labels in my head.

Another example: Because of the context in which I have encountered members of the Christian sect known as Quakers, their ancient "peace testimony" (a socially engaged, faith-based pacifism) is central to my image of the group. But according to a book I read recently (sorry, didn't review it for the site) the peace testimony was actually not particularly emphasized in Quaker thought between the 17th and early 20th centuries -- it was pretty key at some points during the early years of Quakerism, and then was revived, especially in England, before and during World War One. Even during this last period, its meaning was hotly contested between liberal-minded elders and socially and religiously radical youth. Its fluctuations over time are just as historical as everything else in this world, not some ahistorical essence that is immutably attached to the label "Quaker."

I'm not sure if I can draw any sweeping lessons from this that aren't obvious and trite, but I'm pretty sure there are lessons for social movements in Canada and the United States related to this observation. It's vague and not original and I'm not sure I really understand fully what I mean by it, but I think it's critical that we work to have a historical rather than an essential understanding of the problems we're facing, and I think too many of us are caught up in the latter without even realizing it. And a more historical understanding can also be an antidote for pessimism in difficult times -- the structures we oppose were made by human beings and they can be transformed by human beings.

Canadians for Equal Marriage

I've received a request for action originally from the Canadians for Equal Marriage on at least three different email lists today, so I'll repost it here. If you are a Canadian concerned about equal marriage, please take your time to let the MPs know that you want this legislation passed!

Here's some info from their site:

We are potentially within weeks of passing equal marriage legislation, so opponents have ratcheted up their campaign and are flooding MP's offices. We need you to send a message to all MPs. Just click here!

Opponents of the bill are actually claiming that the legislation is being fast-tracked. Two years after the first legal same-sex marriages and Parliament still hasn't dealt with the issue. And it's been a busy two years -- cross-Canada hearings of the Justice Committee, eight court decisions, one Supreme Court reference, one election campaign, three House of Commons votes, six months of debate on the Hill. It may be a lot of things, but fast isn't one of them!

Equality opponents have been clear on their strategy. They want to run out the clock on this Parliament. They know a solid majority of current MPs support the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They want to bring down the government before it has an opportunity to pass equal marriage legislation.

The government has clearly stated it will pass the equal marriage bill before summer, even if that means extending Parliament past its scheduled June 23 end date. But anti-equality Liberals are putting huge pressure on Paul Martin. We have to make sure he doesn’t back down!!

MPs are being flooded with messages from a vociferous minority that wants a decision delayed. We need you to send a message to all MPs. Even better, call your MP! Get contact info by finding the info page for your MP at Step 1.

As I think I've said before on this site, my take on the role of the state in regulating relationships is probably quite different from the "equal marriage" camp, particularly those coming from a liberal perspective, but I still think this legislation is an important step and needs to be supported.

Quote

Women's resistance is resistance in daily life, and it can make clear to men that their resistance also belongs in everyday living.

-- Luise Schottroff

Some Reading

• A scathing review by Marc Cooper of George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, a popular "what do we do next" book among U.S. liberals after the Republican consolidation of November 2004. Cooper is too much the cold war liberal for me to endorse what he has to say unreservedly, but I very much enjoyed most of the vitriol in this piece. I think his concluding advice for action is limited and shallow but his slap across the face of much of U.S. liberaldom is refreshing as far as it goes. (Found via Direland.)
  
  
• This is just disturbing -- I don't understand why this article bothers to try and paint the use of DVD players that can be set to censor what you watch in 14 fun and different ways as a burning legal issue, since I would not favour in the least the state interfering in the availability of this technology. But the very fact that there is a demand for this technology is messed up.
  
  
• An useful overview article on globalization called "Glasgow and Globalization" that I include because it talks a little bit about the city in which my mother grew up. (Via ZNet.)
  
  
• "Rates of violence against women still astounding"
  
  
• A fiery indictment of the white leadership of both sides of the warring factions of the U.S. labour movement by Black trade unionists, and a call for a national convention to renew Black politics in the United States.
  
  
• An essay by Albert Einstein called "Why Socialism?" published in 1949. "[W]e should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society."
  
  
• An article on the gendering of literature directed at pre-pubescent girls. (Via Rabble.CA.)
  
  

Corner Demographics

Tonight, as I stood quietly on our usual corner with my anti-war sign, I couldn't help reflecting on the matrix of power and privilege-relevant demographics (at least those that can be assessed in even an approximate way under the circumstances) and how that relates to the responses we receive to our presence.

The neighbourhood is coded as white-dominated and middle-class. (In Los Angeles, race and racism are expressed very blatantly in terms of geography -- it's a very segregated city.) In the context of the white-dominated neighbourhoods in LA it is among the less affluent, I think, but given the racialized nature of poverty in most of North America's urban areas, in the city as a whole it is still definitely well above average in terms of income. The neighbourhood that starts a few blocks to the south is significantly more working-class and Latino/a, and it is mainly Latino/a Americans who make use of the park that is on the corner we use.

(White) West LA is staunchly liberal and the neighbourhood is majority anti-war, so the responses from passing cars are net positive by a significant majority. I can't count the number of times each vigil when there is a honk and a wave or a peace sign from the driver of a Lexus or a BMW. Despite having stood on this street corner once a week (give or take) for more than nine months now, it still feels strange (a) to receive such a positive response overall, and (b) to have so many luxury cars responding positively.

Generally speaking, middle-class white men of middle-age and above and middle-class white women are more likely to either indicate support in some way, or (I assume) to enact their disapproval of us in ways consistent with the repression that goes along with socialization into middle-class whiteness (yes, mine included) and just look away while turning up Rush Limbaugh on the radio. The most frequent sources of audible/visible negative responses to our presence are young white men driving expensive vehicles -- a demographic prone to aggression, and constantly reinforced in their own right to privilege from birth and therefore more likely to feel they can say and do whatever they want -- and working-class white people of all ages, who according to polls are more likely to support the war.

The responses from people of colour, on the other hand, are almost entirely positive. Over these months, of those who visibly or audibly have responded to our presence, I don't remember a single African American driver who responded negatively, and few Latino or Asian Americans. Of course that may have something to do with the persistent menace of racism: Regardless of what they think of our signs and banners, a history of lack of safety from white people and white-dominated institutions means, I would imagine, that most people of colour would conclude it was not a good idea to respond to a group of white protestors in a white neighbourhood with the kind of verbal abuse that some college-aged affluent white Republican men feel they are entitled to and can get away with. But more significant than that, I think, is that according to many polls a significant majority of people of colour in the United States, again particularly African Americans, are opposed to the invasion and recolonization of Iraq. These communities, again for reasons of long historical experience, are more inclined to express a healthy skepticism of the professed benevolence of the U.S. state.

So there's nothing surprising about any of this response when you take a look at where the protest is and what the polls tell us about public opinion. But it still feels weird to get a thumbs up from someone driving a Jaguar worth more than everything I have ever owned. That would never have happened in my experience doing peace vigils in Hamilton (Ontario, Canada) where, because of the demographics of the city and the somewhat different relationship between class and politics, I think the majority of both positive and negative responses (though still usually net the latter) came from working-class white people.

Defending Choice in Canada

This is from the Toronto Social Forum email list, and follows up on from this earlier post about a suggested action to support the University of Western Ontario in its decision to give an honourary degree to Dr. Henry Morgentaler, an important crusader for reproductive choice in Canada:

I am in London and feel like I have moved back in time 25 years. The anti-choice is really organized and visible here protesting the decision of the University of Western Ontario to give Dr. Henry Morgentaler an honorary degree. So far Western is holding firm but the anti-choice is growing in strength.

The pro-choice majority is starting to have a more visible presence in the City and we can help. The Unitarian Church has started a Morgentaler Scholarship Fund. You can contribute online here.

Just scroll down and you'll see a box where you can specify where you want your contribution to go. Just specify, "Morgentaler Scholarship Fund." You can also mail a cheque to the Development Office, University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond Street, Suite 2, London, Ontario, Canada N6A 5B8

That way with small donations we can make up for any money that the University of Western Ontario has lost.

The Women's Issues Network at Western usc.womens.issues(at)uwo.ca is organizing a "Celebration of Choice" on the morning of June 16 when Morgentaler gets his degree. If you can join them or let your contacts and friends in the London area know about it. Please do.

Please provide support as you are able!