Public Child Care Petition

It's only a petition when really movement building is what's needed, but it can't hurt, right? Here's what you'd be putting your name to:

We are calling on you to work together to honour the promise of a national child care program. The place to start is by protecting the early learning and child care agreements between the Government of Canada and the provinces. The federal-provincial agreements on child care were negotiated in good faith. They lay a foundation for a full system of early learning and child care that can meet the needs of all Canadian families. Canceling them sets back the development of a national child care program for years to come, leaving families with young children to fend for themselves. Breaking federal-provincial child care agreements would be a breach of public trust and would lead to a cut of almost $4 billion from child care funding. The federal election results were not a mandate to turn back the clock on child care. While income support for families is a valid policy goal, a taxable family allowance and a tax credit for employers will not create early learning and child care services that are high quality, available and affordable. Families need income supports and publicly funded child care services. We call on all governments to protect and enhance progress on child care.

Please sign on!

Ethics, Analysis, and Food

First of all, I need to stress that I'm not intending to pick on vegetarians. I've been one for seven or eight years, after all. Some of us just provide a useful example of what I want to talk about.

There are lots of things out of our control that shape who we are and how we act in the world. Each of us also has a range within which we can act deliberately. Within that range, it seems to me that a big part of how we act in the world is shaped by a combination of two things.

The first is a basic, gut-level, commonsense impulse -- an impulse that wraps together a kind of moral or ethical sense, a basic golden-ruley-ness that comes from humans being social animals, an instinct about fairness and justice and how I want to be treated and how others should be treated and how things should work at the personal level. This shouldn't be romanticized, of course. Our commonsense is colonized. Lots and lots of folks who would swear themselves blue that they see everyone as equal and the same still have gut reactions that make others into Others, people into less-than-people. Commonsense grounded in the experience of privilege is part of the otherwise "good" man talking down to the woman helping him find material at the library, or the flash of white liberal fear at the Black face walking the other way down a night-time street, or how natural it seemed for strangers killed in the World Trade Centre to weigh so much more heavily on North American hearts than strangers killed by U.S. troops in Fallujah or by the IDF in occupied Palestine. So it ain't at all perfect, but it is still there: a gut-level instinct based in our sociality that helps guide how we act in the world, whether we are conscious of it or not.

The other thing that shapes the actions within our deliberate range is our analysis of the world, our brain, our conscious mental construction of how the world works based on things we've read and seen and heard and deduced and hypothesized.

These two things are obviously not completely independent variables. I'm sure in most people they are in a constant, complex dialogue, and the ways in which they work together to shape each other and the overall consensus self are different in different people and at different times within the same person. But I think it is fair to say that they are not the same either. Certainly that's true of my own experience of self, though perhaps others experience their selves differently. I would imagine it has something to do with the fact that the analytical level can be shaped by both local, direct experience and by material imported from other people's local, direct experiences (i.e. reading books and blog posts). On the other hand, your commonsense is only shaped by your own local, direct experience -- the experiences of others only influence your commonsense as filtered through your analytic self. I could be wrong, though.

The point I'm trying to make is that those of us trying to make the best of the space we have to act deliberately in the world need to pay attention to both the gut-level ethical impulse and the more cerebral analytical contribution.

Both of these things function in all of us, I think, whether we acknowledge it or not. But I have encountered people who so value one that they refuse to admit that the other either exists, or they admit it exists but deny it has anything useful to add.

On one extreme I have encountered certain people of faith -- not all people who ground their identities in living a certain faith, but some. That subset tends to push people to follow their gut-level ethical instinct (albeit often with rigid influence from some doctrinal text or other) but are aggressively disinterested in the kind of learning about the world that could turn that inclination to "do right" on the interpersonal level into a well-informed political response. Admittedly, some of this flows from commonsense that is oppressive, that thoroughly rejects the experience of Others as worthy of consideration. But some of it is a refusal to admit that dialogue between ethical instinct and intellectual analysis is inherent to making decisions about the world -- they see it more as "text informs gut instinct informs action" with no input from the intellect.

On the other extreme are certain people who identify as Marxists. Again, not all Marxists, but a certain narrow subset tend to scorn basic human ethical impulses as undeserving of any input into internal or external debates about action. This grouping is so wedded to a dogmatic and schematic picture of the world and social change that timid questions like, "Is causing millions of Ukrainian peasants to starve to death really a suitable action to take in the name of human liberation?" are dismissed not as a legitimate expression of instinctive human desires for a free and just world, but as "sentimental bourgeouis morality" or some such intruding on the proper revolutionary path.

But for most regular people, I think, even if they might not conceptualize it quite as formally as I have above, there is a recognition that some combination of "what our gut tells us" and "what our brain tells us" do and should combine to form "what we do."

Back to the Vegetarians

This whole line of thought started for me while I was struggling to push a stroller down a snow-covered sidewalk not long ago and thinking, for some reason, about vegetarians.

I have been a vegetarian, like I said, for seven or eight years. I was heading in that direction for a few years before I finally took the plunge. Partly, it was fostered by particiaption in an environment that was explicitly called "student activist," but which also tended to bring unspoken (and, for most of its middle-class white participants, including myself for much of that time, unnoticed or at least unanalyzed) labels like "middle-class" and "white-dominated" with it. I never felt peer pressure to be veggie, but being in that very pro-veggie space certainly helped me on my way. Intellectually, the biggest reason for me was the environmental one, that eating a non-meat diet tends to leave a smaller footprint on the earth, all else being equal. At a gut level I also wasn't keen to be a part of the ways in which industrial agriculture does horrific things to animals, though I was never as emotionally invested in that side of things as some vegetarians are.

In practice today, I still eat eggs and dairy, so I am veggie but not vegan. I also eat things like jello, and I drink wine and beer that might contain isinglass, which is a clarifying agent derived from fish parts. And I even occasionally stray so far as to have some gravy on french fries, though not too often. But intellectually, politically, culinarily, and deep in my gut, I am completely happy with this path for me.

I also make a point of not proselytizing about it. That has always been true. It is even more true now that I have learned about how insistence on the dominance of certain lifestyle practices as markers of political purity in some "activist" spaces can function to help keep those spaces white and middle-class. People of colour (or even working-class white people) who make different decisions in their everyday lives are forced to either adopt the dominant microcultural practices and reject their own heritage, to refuse to do that but stay in the space and have yet another marker of "not belonging" repeatedly made visible, or to stay separate from the space -- assimilate, be tacitly marked as lesser, or leave.

That doesn't mean I see no political value in vegetarianism. Our current food system as it relates to animals is horrible. It is also one practical way for those of us with the great material privilege of middle-class North American lifestyles to reduce our impact on the earth. Of course radical change in nasty systems will only come because of changes at the point of production, not (beyond a certain narrow range) because of changes in isolated consumer behaviour. But changes in an individual's choices can still be an important part of that individual's political journey, to reorient their consciousness and material practices with respect to oppressive systems, to symbolize and embody commitment that permeates all facets of life. We just need to be aware that a privileged group trying to universalize a practice that restricts the choices of others rather than expands them, in the context of structures of power that already give us the highest degree of individual choice and restrict that of others, is just not on.

But I digress...this post started from me thinking about a very specific issue: Why is it that your average North American vegetarian sees a problem with one aspect of the typical North American diet, but is much less likely to see problems with other aspects? Aside from those folks who just don't like meat, presumably there is some component in the motivation of most vegetarians that rejects the eating of meat under our current system of food production because it is exploitative or cruel or environmentally harmful in some way. The problem is, any vegetable or grain or legume or dairy product or other non-meat food that we obtain via our industrial agriculture system is also drenched in suffering and blood. And I don't mean this the way that a right-wing relative once cited evidence that plants respond to the presence of light so they can at some level be argued to be sentient and therefore it makes no sense to quit eating meat -- see above for why I think vegetarianism can still be a good choice.

So what do I mean by "problems with other aspects" of our food systems? Many vegetable crops are harvested with human labour that is highly exploited. It is often migrant labourers admitted to the country without full rights of citizenship, severely underpaid, and kept in situations where their ability to struggle against their exploitation is minimal. Note that this is not just an issue for, say, California, but is true in Ontario as well.

But perhaps even surpassing the general exploitation of farm workers in the production of many food crops is the ways in which our food system is dependent on oil via the importance of transporting most food over long distances and the petrochemical basis of many fertilizers and other chemical additives to the crop production process. This has serious environmental implications for a start. It also has implications for human suffering: all over the world but particularly in West Asia you can link the need of our current political economy for cheap oil to all kinds of war and suffering and oppression. Just to take the most recent blatant example, as wiser heads than mine have frequently opined in the last few years, does anyone honestly think that the United States would have invaded Iraq in 2003 and recolonized it, at a cost of tens to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary Iraqi civilian deaths, if their main national product was cucumbers and lettuce? That blood soaks our fruits and veggies, our bread and waffles, our tortillas and canned soup.

I think the obliviousness of many vegetarians to these realities, or at least of how they relate to our food, comes from a few different sources. The first that I came up with is that the necessary knowledge to understand these aspects of the food system is not as easily accessible as a basic understanding of certain aspects related to meat. I mean, you look on your plate and see a bit of cow or pig or chicken, so if you have issues with benefiting from that which has been done to said animal then it is right there staring you in the face. But the exploited human labour and the oil-related blood dripping from your tomato or grapes is less obvious. In other words, more of the input to make decisions about eating or not eating meat comes from immediate, local experience. Turning that into action that involves not eating meat requires certain things in terms of what your gut tells you and what your head tells you, but it is less dependent on inputs outside of your local experience, and is therefore less dependent on having accessed specific information and analysis -- information and analysis that does not tend to be made widely available by our current media systems.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's the whole story. For some people, at least, the colonized nature of our gut-level commonsense is at play as well. For many people, thinking about animals that are suffering results in a direct, simple, gut-level, emotional/ethical response. But when it is human beings that are suffering, I think many people are less likely to have that simple, direct response, or are more likely to repress it or distract themselves from it for various reasons. Once it involves people it is no longer, "Ohhhhh...poor chickens...," but rather it turns into a political question, which many people instinctively flinch away from and avoid. For many people, animals are by definition innocent, but with human beings it becomes "more complicated" and often people "deserve what they get" and, oh, well, things have to work that way, don't they? And I think, unfortunately, that this kind of moral equivocation and avoidance is easier for white North Americans when the people in question are people of colour, as is overwhelmingly the case for those who suffer and die in oil wars and who are directly exploited to produce the shiny tomatoes on our tables.

And I think there's another issue, as well, which is more abstract but still real. I think that the mainstream conception of vegetarianism results in (or is at least consistent with) a fairly simple understanding of the world: there is a problem but it can be addressed by a fairly simple set of eating choices, in which foods are easily divided into "good" and "bad." You avoid the bad ones and eat the good ones, and your ethical/political responsibility is addressed. But a more wholistic understanding of the nastiness that is inherent in our current industrial food system makes everything more complicated because there is no easy set of consumption choices that can wash our hands of it. Yes, it is possible to make efforts to eat locally and organically and so on, but to go completely "off the grid" when it comes to food choices is not something that will be possible for most people. So you are left with a situation where you are complicit in oppression no matter what you do as an individual, and in ways that can only be changed by collective political change. And that kind of reality is a difficult one to face for most people raised with privilege in North America, who are trained to see problems as largely or exclusively individual in scale. Even scarier, it can force us to face up to broader question about how our privilege, how the material substance of our day-to-day lives, depend on suffering by oppressed and exploited peoples here in North America and around the world. And that's psychologically hard to deal with, and easier to just avoid. Ethically and politically necessary to deal with, but not psychologically easy.

So, yeah. Mainstream vegetarianism is often grounded in a fairly direct and simple gut-level reaction. Often the accompanying analysis of the food system leaves important stuff out. And often those blindspots are supported by the more colonized gut-level "stuff" that most of us have, which encourages us to avoid complex pictures of the world in which we cannot as individuals completely (or even mostly) escape our complicity in oppression, and which mean we must seek answers not solely in consumption choices but in participation in and support for collective social and political struggle by human beings -- human beings that are often, in our colonized commonsense and in the external systems that give us material comfort in our lives at their expense, marked as Other.

As I said above, I'm not bashing vegetarians, and I still think that for many people becoming vegetarian is a sensible political and ethical choice, if seen in a broader context and not held up as some sort of marker of moral or political purity. And I think that the ethical impulse embodied in the fact that increasing numbers of North Americans are making that choice is a good avenue for raising deeper and more difficult questions about where our food comes from and, by extension, the oppressive institutions that surround us and structure our lives.

Anarchist Quote

Each step towards economic freedom, each victory won over capitalism will be at the same time a step towards political liberty...and each step made towards taking from the State any one of its powers and attributes will be helping the masses to win a victory over Capitalism.

-- Peter Kropotkin

Social Movement Rumours

Everyone who is involved in social movement activity, or grassroots social change activity however defined, should read this. It is an article by Justin Podur from The Killing Train called "Stop the deadly rumours: False accusations against activists are corrosive, and have gone on long enough."

Podur writes:

An important tactic in the COINTELPRO arsenal was the spreading of rumors. False accusations about trusted activists and important organizers broke the bonds of friendship and trust that people needed in order to challenge authority, challenge themselves, and maintain their courage in the face of repression. Once those bonds of trust and friendship were broken, the organizations themselves were easy prey.

The power of such operations is that they can be used to undermine a movement while retaining plausible deniability. And the sad truth is that it is often hard to tell if our organizations have been infiltrated because all too often we don’t need to be infiltrated to implode, because of our own political errors, personal insecurities, and mistakes.

He goes on to talk about the case of Manuel Rozenthal, who has been involved in social movement work in Canada and in Colombia, and the ways in which a whisper campaign against him -- whether state-run sabotage or peresonal spite has never been clear -- put his life at risk and ruined a politically important and effective social movement organization in Canada.

Most importantly, Podur outlines four simple principles that can help keep our groups from self-destructing and can make it harder for the state to take us out using such tactics:

1. Unless I have seen credible and convincing evidence that an individual working in the progressive movement is a CIA agent or a paramilitary agent, that he has personally enriched himself from his political work, or that he has denounced other activists, I will not make claims or rumors to that effect.

2. If I do have credible and convincing evidence of any of these things, I will make my accusations in public immediately, providing the evidence, and standing behind it personally.

3. I recognize that making unsubstantiated accusations is an unethical practice, and takes on a particularly unethical dimension in contexts where such accusations can be fatal.

4. If I have political disagreements with any activist, I will raise them in an appropriate way, publicly, according to the norms of public debate and discourse. The usual rules of evidence, the presumption of innocence, and the right to face one’s accuser, should all apply.

Kind of sounds like guidelines for basic "good relationship process," eh?

I don't think any group I've been a part of has fallen apart/been destroyed in quite this way. But I know I have felt the tides of rumour and innuendo and, often enough, sectarian spite swirl around movement spaces I have been a part of, and even though the touch has been light, in my experience, it has felt unclean and dangerous.

Read the article. Adhere to the principles.

Poverty Report

A new report has been released in Hamilton, Ontario, looking at poverty issues in the city. It is framed as a report on conditions in Canada to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. It is notable that this report has been endorsed by Hamilton city council. Not that their endorsement means more than a hill of beans to getting anything changed, of course.

The report is worth reading, in that it contains a lot of important facts that illustrate that poverty and related issues in Hamilton (and, by extension, in Canada as a whole) are bad, that they are getting worse, and that governments are not really doing anything about it. However, most of the statistics are just the latest iteration of stats that have been appearing in reports for years, to the profound indifference of the state, the media, and the general public -- including, when it comes to actually doing things more substantive than endorsing a report that most of their constituents will never know exists, the city councillors who voted to wish this document well. I don't know a lot about what is going on in terms of social movement activity around poverty issues in Hamilton at the moment, but even though it does not mention social movements once, in its own way via its echo of so many past documents that have gone unheard, this report is another sign that such activity is essential to winning even the modest kinds of changes for which it argues.

I feel weird about this paragraph because I know two of the authors, and both like them personally and have lots of respect for their politics, but I do have some concern with the analysis in the report. My main issue is the lack of integration of race and gender. One short section, called "Vulnerable Groups," serves as a catch-all for stats related to every group that disproportionately experiences poverty, while those issues are largely unmentioned in the rest of the report. And though the disproportionate poverty of Aboriginal and people of colour communities is noted, the word "racism" does not appear in the report once -- a dubious circumstance for any document dealing with modern-day urban poverty in Canada. However, I know from personal experience in the sector that attempting to insert that word into documents coming out of mainstream social services in Hamilton (or most Ontario cities), let alone a more substantive analysis around race and gender, is a seriously uphill battle. Mainstream social service agencies can be vicious even towards other mainstream agencies if they try to talk about racism or suggest that related changes are necessary in how such institutions function.

Overall, though, it is a very useful collection of information, and if it helps to embarass the Canadian state on the world stage, then it is serving a good purpose.

And here are a few tidbits that jumped out at me as I read:

"During the period, the after-tax income of families in the bottom 5% of income decreased by approximately 21.4%, while the after tax income of the top 5% of families increased by a corresponding 21.2%."

"In a survey of over 300 food bank users in Hamilton, 81% of parents admitted they go without food, often or sometimes, so that their children can eat."

"For instance, while the poverty rate for male-led single parent families with children aged 6 and under is 37%, the corresponding poverty rate for female-led single parent families with children aged 6 and under is 81%."

A Passing

I just received an email that Isabel Showler passed away last Thursday morning. I interviewed Isabel and her husband Frank for my social movement history project. In fact, two friends and I interviewed them before there was any sense of a project to interview them for, and the wonderful experience of hearing their stories was one important factor that lead to me down a path that has involved interviewing 48 other long-time Canadian activists and trying to make a book out of what I heard.

Here is the notice of a memorial service from the Star, as forwarded by Toronto Action for Social Change:

SHOWLER, Margaret ''Isabel'' Alice - Died peacefully at home after a lengthy illness on Thursday, February 16, 2006 in her 85th year. Isabel was the daughter of her dear late parents John A. and Alice (nee Wright) Alexander. She was married to her beloved husband Frank Lloyd Showler for 58 years and loving mother of Stephen Showler and his wife Lynn, Carolyn Lee and her husband Robert and Ted Hoigaard, whom she treasured as her own son. She will be lovingly remembered by her 5 grandchildren. Isabel was predeceased by her brothers Stuart, Howard and Walter. She lived most of her life in Toronto and retired from her job as an Occupational Therapist at The Queen Street Mental Health Centre after 19 years. Isabel was an active member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). There will be a Memorial Meeting at Friend's House, 60 Lowther Ave., on Saturday, February 25, 2006 at 2 p.m. In lieu of flowers at Isabel's request, donations can be made to the Canadian Friends Services Committee.

Throughout her long life, Isabel worked to make the world better. She will be missed.

Sexual Conservative Privilege

I learn from almost everything Darkdaughta posts, but I think it is particularly worth drawing attention to this recent piece. It uses the classic essay on white privilege by Peggy McIntosh, "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," as a model for addressing the privilege held by those who are sexually conservative and the connected oppression of those whose desires take them to places that are more transgressive in terms of sexual and relationship practice.

Unfortunately, I don't feel like I'm in a position to respond to these important ideas right now quite as completely, personally, and publically as I would like and as they deserve, which is politically problematic of me but it is where I'm at. However, I will say a few things.

I suspect that the reactions of more than a few people to the essay will be a gut response based not in what it actually contains but based on previous encounters with superficially similar language coming from quite a politically different place. I have heard/read the use of words like "erotophobia" and "sex-negativity" and so on deployed in a very atomized, individualistic, power-blind liberal framework, where they are used as a political-sounding response to legitimate concerns about oppression, usually of women, in a way that functions to deflect rather than engage with questions of oppression. The critical thing that I would point out about this essay is that it is most definitely not using some sort of abstract, liberal notion of sexual freedom as a distraction or depoliticizing opposition to, say, an anti-patriarchal politics. Rather, it is integrating an axis grounded in sexuality into a larger framework that is intimately concerned with power and privilege and oppression, and seeking to understand how they work together.

Some political perspectives refuse to see the difference between atomized, selfish, liberal individualism on the one hand, and ethical, anti-oppressive, anti-hierarchical autonomy on the other. Even those who try to live the latter, especially those of us with a certain amount of privilege, can fall fairly easily into the former without seeing or understanding it. But the two really are quite different.

The next question, I suppose, would be whether sexuality deserves to be its own axis in anti-oppression analysis. I seem to remember encountering some fairly politically sophisticated argument that would come down on the "no" side, and I don't think I understand that argument (or remember it) well enough to respond to it effectively at this moment. But my gut is on the "yes" side.

One of the reasons why my gut comes down on that side of the issue so clearly is because I have become aware of how powerfully present sexuality is as a force in so many public contexts, yet how invisible mainstream analysis tends to make it. Anti-poverty and social welfare issues, for example, are intimately tied up with sexuality (and gender and race and ability, of course). Welfare systems tend to be organized around regulating the sexuality of poor women. And mobilizing the desire to regulate and/or the fear or hatred of the sexuality of poor women (particularly women of colour) is a standard ploy by the right in debates about welfare. Or look at the way that fear/hatred of transgressive sexual practice was used (along with lots of other things) to get working-class white voters in the U.S. to turn out in large numbers to vote for the more blatantly imperial and oppressive of the two permissible parties in the 2004 federal election. Or even look at the book that I reviewed a few days ago, which talked about how 700 years ago the Church was using fear/hatred of sexuality as a core element in mobilizing the populace against Jews and heretics and other Others as part of a broader strategy to consolidate its own power.

Some would argue that all of this is reducible to gender, I think. I'm willing to learn more about that perspective, but I don't think I agree. It is very closely related to gender (and other axes of oppression) but it is not one and the same.

One place where I might quibble a bit with the essay is around some of the the choice of vocabulary, particularly the ways that "conservative" and "radical" are used. It feels that using those terms in those ways muddies some distinctions that might be important. It seems to me that it would be useful to more explicitly distinguish between sexual practice ("fucking against the grain," as Tenacious delightfully describes it) and political practice around sexuality. For example, is someone who has engaged in a serious, self-challenging way over the course of years with their own desires and practices, and has come to a set of sexual practices for themselves that is not particularly transgressive, but who takes personal risks in supporting the creation of space that allows for sexual autonomy and expression of transgressive sexualities, really most appropriately labelled "conservative"? And is someone who practices non-monogamy, for example, but who refuses to really engage with their own "stuff" and who has trouble being honest and engaging in the commitment to process (self-oriented and with partners) that it seems to me is essential to ethical, anti-oppressive non-monogamy, really worthy of the label "radical" (which is, in many of the subcultures that most people who would read this blog inhabit, a valourizing label)?

Of course I don't mean we should lose sight of the fact that being drawn through engagement with one's own desires to sexual and relationship practice that is transgressive but not oppressive is the basis for experiencing this type of oppression; or that sexual and relationship practice (regardless of whether this is arrived at through long personal process or through unexamined acceptance of socialization) that is in line with what society tells us is and enforces as "normal" conveys privilege. I just wonder whether there might be better language for capturing it -- language that would make it more emphatically visible to people who are privileged in other ways but who want to go out and get their rocks off that being sexually transgressive is not all there is to being sexually radical, and that there are elements of responsibility that are integral to the struggle to create spaces for genuine and widely experienced sexual autonomy as well.

Other interesting reading on related issues that may not be quite as thorough in taking an integrated anti-oppressive standpoint as Darkdaughta, but that I have found useful: The Trouble With Normal by Michael Warner; a few different things by Lisa Duggan; and a few of the essays in Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme Vol. 24, Nos. 2,3, "Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Transsexual/Transgender Sexualities."

Support Veteran and Survivor March to New Orleans!

Heard about this action from Feral Scholar. He posted it under a banner saying "Every bomb dropped in Iraq explodes over New Orleans." That's one powerful idea, if you ask me.

There are all manner of activities out there which deserve attention and support. Generally I post actions which are close to home in some sense -- geographically near to me, organized by people I know, affiliated with groups or networks that I am involved with myself, or connected to who and what and where I am by a cord of political responsibility. This is an example of the last one. Even though it is taking place in the U.S. South, I feel strongly that it should at the very least receive endorsements and donations from far and wide, including Canada. We all need to get involved where we are, but I think one of the most potent things to create change in the heart of empire would be renewed social movements grounded in the U.S. working class, particularly in working-class communities of colour. This action is one small peek into a whole lot of largely invisible-to-us activity and ferment among both anti-war veterans and communities of colour devastated by the double-barrelled attack of Hurricane Katrina and a state that didn't care if they died then and doesn't care what happens to them now. It is significant that privileged radicals from out of town are not invited; this is by, for, and about veterans and survivors standing up for themselves. It will be a powerful, material way to link empire abroad with inequality at home. And if movements with this social base and this orientation are able to build serious momentum, oppressed peoples throughout the entire world will be the better for it.

Here are the details:

“WALKIN’ TO NEW ORLEANS”
Veterans’ and Survivors’ March for Peace and Justice
Mobile to New Orleans
March 14-19, 2006

Friends and allies:

Antiwar veterans groups and Katrina survivors are planning a very politically significant action this coming March 14-19. They need your endorsement and support.

Hurricane Katrina is in the news again, as thousands of hurricane survivors who were housed at hotels in New Orleans and other cities are now being summarily evicted. In New Orleans, evictees were not even allowed to collect their belongings. The National Guard, which was sent in at night almost as a surprise attack in conjunction with police, was tasked to collect people’s meager possessions, as these serially-displaced residents were herded aboard buses to be shipped off to overcrowded shelters in other cities, or left to fend for themselves as homeless people.

Concurrently, the lunatic-right that advises the Bush administration is not only stubbornly adhering to the disastrous course of militarily occupying Iraq, the same clique is now advocating military action against Iran (Perle), and publishing enemies lists (Horowitz) of antiwar activists even in the midst of a domestic spying scandal.

The colonial treatment being meted out to poor people and people of color on the Gulf Coast is mirrored in the viscious neo-colonial war the Bush administration is continuing against Arabs and Muslims. It is hard to decide whether Iraqis are being treated like African Americans by the Bush administration, or African Americans are being treated like Iraqis.

March 19, 2006 is the 3rd anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, and hurricane survivors’ organizations (SOS, PHRF, Common Ground, United Peace Relief, MS Immigrant Rights Alliance, and others) are organizing a five-day march along Gulf Coast Highway 90 to demand:

(1) the immediate return of our troops from Iraq, and to call for U.S. tax dollars to be spent on human priorities and

(2) rebuilding of the devastated Gulf Coast, under the democratic direction of the residents of the Gulf Coast, instead of the illegal occupation of Iraq.

HERE ARE FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO HELP.

1. ENDORSE the march as an individual or organization. Click here and type in your information. If you have difficulty (the web site is not quite finished.), email your endorsement (name, occupation, location) to stan@stangoff.com.

2. SUPPORT the march. Click here and find how to DONATE financial support (donate button on page) or in-kind support. We still have a substantial amount to raise, so this is very important.

3. PUBLICIZE the march, by sending this along to as many individuals and lists as you can.

4. HOST events (house parties to public venues) to raise support for the march. Contact Iraq Veterans Against the War or Veterans For Peace to determine if there are vets available to speak at your event. Also contact The Empowerment Project to obtain a copy of “Soldiers Speak Out” (a 28-minute film featuring Iraq Veterans Against the War) to use in conjunction with your event.

5. IF YOU ARE A VETERAN, A MILITARY FAMILY MEMBER, OR A GULF COAST SURVIVOR, you are encouraged to JOIN part or all of THE MARCH. See details here.

Please endorse and/or donate.

Review: Sex, Dissidence and Damnation

[Jeffrey Richards. Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages. New York: Routledge, 1990.]

This may seem rather far afield from the history of twentieth century Canadian social movements, but I at least officially read it because of its relevance to my work. Along with introducing readers of that work to new facts about Canadian history, it is also central to my purpose to introduce new ways of thinking about history. In the introductory section to a chapter that focuses on the activism of two white men involved in gay liberation activities in Winnipeg, one of the points that I try to make is that, mainstream preconceptions to the contrary, queer sexualities and mobilization around them have always been present in human society, even if that struggle has most often not looked like it does in post-Stonewall North America.

In December, I pointed people towards a fascinating review of a book called Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. (I subsequently read the book itself but didn't feel I had anything to add, so I did not post a review on this site.) A footnote in this review introduced me to the interesting idea that a number of heretical sects in the Middle Ages had a queer component to them, and listed a couple of the books that discussed related ideas, and this book by Jeffrey Richards is one of them. Unfortunately, though I learned a lot from it, I didn't learn what I was looking for.

Richards' book examines the experiences of six minority groupings in the Europe of the Middle Ages: heretics, witches, Jews, prostitutes, homosexuals, and lepers. All of this is deliberately linked to sexuality, and how sexuality was mobilized in the persecution of all of these groups. Indeed, as the persecution of these groups increased in intensity, all were linked together in official church and state rhetoric: most or all came to be regarded as heretical, most or all were reputed to spread disease, most or all were described as sexually promiscuous and engaged as a matter of course in homosexuality (including heretical sects that were in actual fact largely celebate and sexually conservative).

Unfortunately, I had the impression going in that this book would dissect out the slanders designed to incite public outrage against heretics from possible actual space for expression of queer sexualities within heretical movements, and it didn't do that.

Nonetheless, it is still an interesting read. For example, for me it is one more step in appreciating a more complex sense of motion in history. We have this illusion that space for those who deviate from oppressive norms was uniformly minimal or absent before about 1965, and only since then have we supposedly enlightened moderns allowed such space to exist. In fact, history is full of examples of change in both directions. For a variety of reasons, persecution of all of these groups actually intensified over the course of the middle ages.

I also found this book useful because it made me think of certain changes going on in the world today, namely the rise of fundamentalisms in a variety of faith tradtions. These fundamentalisms are often associated with a particular way of understanding knowledge that tends to undercut the need for what I would actually consider to be evidence. They are often also associated with the use of torture to gather information, whether through doing it themselves or through the euphemistically named "extraordinary rendition." In the Middle Ages, because of the use of torture, which lead the victims to say whatever they thought would make the torture stop the fastest, and because of a dominant epistemology that was openly inclined to award the status of "fact" to information that was consistent with its needs to dominate, you had the construction of a widespread commonsense about the evils of these oppressed groups that later historians have discovered bore very little resemblance to anything these groups might actually have done in most respects. And as I've argued before, liberal-democracy is perfectly capable of similar fact-bending and "knowledge" creation in the service of maintaining oppression, and has been fundamentally based on it all along, but it works harder to pretend such distortions aren't happening and hangs its legitimacy at least partly on its ostensible fairness and objectivity, which can be a useful rhetorical tool in struggling against oppression. However, there are powerful forces at work today trying to move the world back towards a space that does not even officially value things like facts, due process, and fairness.

It is interesting that this book quotes what may be the first ever example of someone saying, "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out." The church had been waging war against a quite successful heretical sect. After a few defeats, they made a deal with the moderate wing of the heresy, which then abandoned the radical wing and allowed it to be taken out militarily. When a particular official -- don't remember if it was a church or a state representative -- was asked how the military folks were to tell the difference between the moderates, who should be spared, and the radicals, who should be killed, something to this effect was the answer.

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

Review: The Collapse of Globalism

[John Ralston Saul. The Collapse of Globalism: And the Reinvention of the World. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2005.]

I have a soft spot for John Ralston Saul because he contributed to my politicization. Reading his Voltaire's Bastards was an important proximal step in taking a second-year biochemistry student who was rather underwhelmed with his academic path and unsure of where he wanted his life to go, and tipping him towards...well, towards where I am now, which is to say still quite unsure about where I want my life to go, but at least quite a bit more practically and intellectually engaged with the social and political world than I was back then.

Saul's politics served as a catalyst in a particularly propitious moment, but the space defined by his worldview was never really a resting place for me. I still appreciate his clever writing and his occasional understated mocking of those closer to the levers of power than himself. I still think that reading his writing is a useful way to learn about how the world works, as long as you are careful to mentally compensate for his deficiencies. And I still enjoy the way he is able to approach issues in novel ways, to tease out new insights and encourage new and important ways of thinking about things even if I disagree with some of his underlying assumptions.

This book, his latest, takes as its starting point the idea that the neoliberal globalization pushed with bubbling enthusiasm by Western elites after the mid-'70s and the supposedly borderless and prosperous world that it promised has, a few die-hard ideologues aside, largely collapsed and we are in a period of transition between one Big Idea and the next. This change of direction may not be immediately obvious because elites haven't gone out of their way to advertise to their populations that things are different, in part because a new course has not yet gelled. Still, a close examination of facts and behaviours shows that many mainstream politicians no longer share quite so completely the ideological enthusiasms of a particular set of academic economists as they did, say, in the mid '90s. He argues that we must do what we can to ensure that wherever we head next -- and it seems to be a sort of renewed nationalism -- involves a much greater space for rational choice and the public good than the last three decades has allowed. He traces the trajectory of globalization, with particular attention to what its proponents have said it is and could be. He shows how its proponents have been right and how they have been wrong or even foolish. Most usefully, he relates this particular historical period to the larger ebb and flow of history over the last few centuries.

All of which is well and good, and I think useful to a non-specialist lefty such as yours truly in understanding shifts in power and practices and history at the global level. But.

Saul is, it seems to me, an example of liberal-democratic thinking at its best. He is willing to go farther than most who claim that mantle in actually putting in to practice the often undeserved reputation the tradition has for skeptical and critical thought. But despite that, he is still unable to escape some of the tradition's longstanding limitations.

For example: He is willing to see systemic causes for suffering and death under systems that called themselves Communist, which is a good thing, but refuses to see systemic causes for suffering and death under capitalism. At what point does a system's tendency to repeatedly create situations of starvation, disease, massacres, and other forms of suffering and death become enough for it to be recognized as an inherent feature of the system rather than a series of discrete policy issues? If you're asking liberals and the system in question is capitalism, the answer appears to be never.

Another example: I definitely appreciate his tendency to connect the present to the past. That is something that people across the ideological spectrum do too seldom and too simplistically, and when he does it I always learn. But he never identifies his standpoint explicitly or acknowledges that the particular rhythms of history to which he connects the present are those most relevant to Western elites and Western white middle-classes. The most important rhythms of history, and therefore the most important way of conceptualizing current political problems, would likely be seen quite different from an indigenous North American standpoint, for example -- though details have shifted somewhat over time, the basic structural determinants of why life on the rez is oppressive, and in fact why indigenous peoples live on reserves at all, were much the same in 1925 and 1935 and 1965 and today. You could similarly argue that for populations in Asian and African nations, the points of continuity in their relationships to the imperial nations of the West over the last few centuries are much more important to understanding both past and present than exactly what mechanisms have been used to dominate them in any particular era. Anyway, I still feel it is important for me to learn about the rhythms Saul talks about simply because the dominant nature of those standpoints mean they shape life for everyone. It is basing one's analysis and political practice only on the dialogue between that present and that past that leads to very limited political decisions in the present.

Yet another example: At one point he makes some statement about how the return in significance of nationalism, particularly what he describes as "negative nationalism," is indicative (I'm paraphrasing him) of race once again becoming an important marker of belonging. The idea that certain kinds of nationalism and certain more overt uses of racism seem to be resurgent since, say, the mid-'90s is an important observation, but there are lots of folks who would be pretty surprised to learn that there has been a recent historical period in which it has not been an important marker of belonging or a basic structuring force in North American and European society. Again, a whole multitude of standpoints and analyses and political practices are effectively treated as not worthy of our consideration by this statement, and any analysis or political practice that proceeds on the basis of this statement will reinforce those oppressions.

A final example: I don't know the literature particularly well, but I'm pretty sure that some of the holes that he points out in the rhetoric of the proponents of globalization were identified quite some time ago, if with somewhat different framing, by leftist commentators. For example, I'm pretty sure that some writers coming out of Marxist traditions pointed out quite early on that globalization never for a second meant the withering of the state, whatever its propaganda claimed. Rather, it always intended the transformation of the state. To steal an expression from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu via Paul Street, it meant a deliberate and enforced starvation of the left hand of the state and empowerment of the right hand of the state. A more active engagement with neoliberal globalization's longstanding critics from the margins would have made the book more useful to me.

So, yes...I'm not going to argue that this is a must read. Certainly for me, at this stage of my life, it is the sort of book that I would pick up in a bookstore, flip through, and inevitably put back down, but I am quite happy to have received it as a gift and to have had a chance to reacquaint myself with Saul's thoughtful, witty prose, and with his particular take on the state of the world.

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

OCAP Occupies McGuinty's Housing Tribunal

I wanted to post this media release as soon as I received it, but blogger appeared to have indigestion or something. Not sure if/how this action has resolved. Anyhoo, here it is:

OCAP HAS TAKEN OVER McGUINTY'S HOUSING TRIBUNAL!

CALL/FAX/E-MAIL McGUINTY TO DEMAND A 40% RAISE TO WELFARE AND DISABILITY.

At roughly 9.30 AM this morning, OCAP took over the Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal at 47 Sheppard Ave. East. This is the location where a huge chunk of the evictions that fuel the homeless crisis are given the legal stamp of approval.

The Harris Tories set up the Tribunal as part of their so called 'Tenant Protection Act'. Having cut welfare rates by 21.6% and made it impossible for people to pay their rent, the Tories then created a streamlined eviction process to enable landlords to put tenants on the street with ease. The McGuinty Liberals have maintained this situation and hundreds of thousands still go hungry to pay the rent or give up their housing to eat.

The Liberals have recently gutted the Special Diet Program that enabled poor people on welfare or disability to obtain a food allowance of up to $250/month. We are here today to demand that this decision be reversed and that social assistance rates be increased by the 40% needed to restore their spending power to 1995 levels. If the poor can't have enough to eat and pay the rent, economic evictions must stop. For this reason, we have gone to the Tribunal, today, to challenge its operations and ensure evictions are prevented.

Many directly affected by the cut to the Special Diet will be present at 47 Sheppard. It's just one of a series of actions we will hold to beat back McGuinty and Pupatello's bid to reimpose hunger and poverty on thousands of people.

CALL/FAX/E-MAIL DALTON McGUINTY

Demand that he restore the Special Diet Allowance and that Social Assistance Rates be raised by 40%.

Dalton McGuinty, Premier of Ontario, can be reached at:

E-mail: Dalton.McGuinty@premier.gov.on.ca
Fax: (416) 325-3745
Phone: (416) 325-3777

Let Dalton know where you stand!

Review: Kent Rowley, the Organizer

[Rick Salutin. Kent Rowley, the Organizer: A Canadian Union Life. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, Publishers, 1980.]

I read this book because its subject, Kent Rowley, was married for many years to Madeleine Parent, whom I interviewed for my project. She recommended this book as a source of context for understanding her own activities.

Like Parent and C.S. Jackson, books about whom I have already reviewed on this site, Rowley was a product of the left wing of the Canadian trade union movement in the '30s and '40s. He was born into a middle-class anglophone family in Montreal that fell into working-class circumstances during the Depression. He was active even as a high school student and later began his labour career by organizing office workers in the '30s and then textile workers in the '40s. He and Parent were central to a few of the most important strikes in Quebec in the late '40s and early '50s. After being thrown out of their AFL-affiliated textile union they began a long path of organizing first an independent Canadian textile union and then an entire small (never more than 40,000 members) but vibrant nationalist labour central, the Confederation of Canadian Unions, that harried the much larger Canadian Labour Congress and pushed a militant, class-conscious, nationalist trade unionism as a counter-example to the business unionism in most of the U.S.-dominated CLC affiliates. Rowley and Parent were very effective in turning strikes by CCU unions into larger social issues that drew support from the rank and file of the broader labour movement and other progressive social movements.

Though he was involved in Communist-led youth organizations in the '30s and remained personally close with some party-affiliated trade unionists throughout his life, Rowley was never in the CPC. Though he was a committed socialist, he differed from the CPC on a number of grounds, including his take on the "national question" and how it applied to Canada and the labour movement. Like many on the left, he was interned for a couple of years during World War II. He tried to volunteer for the armed services repeatedly because he wanted to "fight fascism" but was rejected, ostensibly for medical reasons. Despite this enthusiasm for the war he was deemed dangerous to the war effort and locked up. He concluded this had more to do with the fact that when the army turned him down he went back to organizing workers and endangering profits rather than because he was in any way against the war effort. He and Parent were also repeatedly persecuted by Quebec Premier and right-wing thug Maurice Duplessis, including an eight-year saga revolving around groundless charges of seditious conspiracy kept alive by corrupt courts, and for many years they were targeted by more right-wing elements in the labour movement.

The book is well written and accessible. It is a bit more adulatory than I might hope for, but then from my few interactions with Parent, I suspect Rowley was someone well worth admiring. Though the book does not omit Parent's role entirely, and it is after all a biography of Rowley and not of both of them, I think the ways in which the book makes her visible and invisible in different ways are tightly wrapped in the broader phenomenon of how women's contributions to history get underemphasized and excluded. Nonetheless, it is a solid book about an important corner of Canada's labour history.

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

Meditations on Death, Love, and Revolution

"This struggle, the social combat, to change society, is the highest form of engagement in the general struggle to ensure one can be made of more than one, be that two lovers who’s hearts have harmonized with the merger of their bodies, or in that inexplicable sense of embedded communities, or in the unification and mobilization that is part of the great social revolutions.

In the larger scheme of things, it will cause less than a ripple in the universe, true. But that is not the issue. No meanings are made there. They are made between us…

Sister. Brother. Lover. Comrade."

Blogs are not, by their nature, a profound medium. But sometimes you find exceptions.

Me, L, and the State

It is a political obligation to figure out where you are and how that connects to where other people are. This applies not only to broad categories of identity -- race, class, gender, sexuality, ability -- but also to the instituitons with which you interact.

L and I are fortunate enough to interact mainly with one of the warmest and fuzziest tentacles of the state. Several mornings a week we go to a drop-in targeted to parents and children under six, administered by a not-for-profit agency with, I believe, provincial government funding. This post is an attempt to locate this interaction within the broader context of power and the state.

This post is premised on the idea that the provision of services, including services that seem quite unambiguously positive in many respects, is a way for the state to intervene in society and help control and shape people's lives. I'm not interested in arguing whether this is intended; it just matters that this is the impact. If there is a need, people will be drawn to a service that meets that need. Usually without realizing it, this means people surrender control over the details of how the need is met as a kind of trade-off for assuring that it is met at all. Once people are drawn in by the force of the need in question, they can often be smoothly slipped into an entire framework for how to think about and respond to that need, and often even to related needs. How we think about very basic concepts of "health" and "sickness," not to mention the mundane details of how we respond to need in that area of our lives, are shaped by the institutions that meet those needs and the range of options that they present us with. People who are unable to meet their need for income via the market are forced onto social assistance, and thereby to endure the routine indignities, conflicts, and humiliation that the system doles out, and the stigma of being part of a generally disapproved-of and exploited group whose existence is essential to the system and political useful (except when said group gets too stroppy) to elites. Need is a powerful compulsive force.

There are lots of positive things to be said about this parent-toddler drop-in service. It provides a space that is noncommercial and not only child friendly (at least in a mainstream understanding of that term) but child oriented, where you can take your toddler and they can play with all sorts of fun stuff and with other kids their own age. Though I have used neither, they provide a resource centre for parents with books on a wide range of topics, and they allow you to sign out toys. I have had several women from my mother's generation exclaim over how much they would've appreciated having something like this around when they had young kids. I also like the idea of community-based resources that increase options and maximize the amount of control in the hands of individualis, like libraries and drop-ins, rather than the more overtly controlling models like the current school system, the welfare system, and even the health care system.

There are downsides to the service, even in conventional social justice terms. My sense is that this sort of institution became more prevalent during the rule of the Tories in Ontario, as part of their effort to appear to be doing something about the wellbeing of children without actually providing widely available socialized childcare options and while actively attacking children and adults living in poverty. The drop-in as it stands provides an important resource to help those who choose or are forced to be stay-at-home parents keep their sanity, but it does nothing to increase the options of low-income parents in terms of employment and child care. Though the service is in downtown Sudbury, a city with lots of people living in poverty, I don't get the sense that very many of the very poorest people in the community take advantage of it. Very few Aboriginal people use the service, despite lots of liberal diversity-framework inclusion of lots of Aboriginal imagery and messaging in the physical environment, though from things I've overheard the staff say they do offer targeted programming in partnership with Aboriginal agencies at other times during the week.

As far as I can tell, this drop-in serves as a mechanism for the state to shape the lives of parents and children in three ways: through the character of the space, by shaping the resource universe of parents, and through surveillance.

Character of Space

I have written before about my discomfort with spaces created around the parent-with-child unit. Though this character is not unique to the particular state-sponsored space that is the subject of this post -- it seems to be nearly universal, in my experience -- the state is certainly complicit in that it choose not to challenge it. The acceptable topics of conversation, because of a norm that seems to gain a great deal of its strength from the presence of children and the fact that we have to "do it for them," are largely limited to children themselves, heteromononormative families more generally, and consumer practices. Even within those areas, politicized discourse is largely absent. I have done little to challenge this myself at the drop-in, beyond sometimes expressing some disagreement with the gender-essentialist statements that always seem to pop up ("Oh, that's just like a boy!") and making some more assertively pro-feminist statements on one other occasion.

The input from the staff seems to be firmly liberal in orientation. There is pro-equity and pro-multiculturalism paraphenalia in the physical environment, and a commitment by staff (as far as I can see, at any rate) to be proactive about offering extra support where necessary, but nothing to challenge parents with privilege or or to facilitate parents in politicizing their understanding of where that need for "more support" comes from and how to respond to it. And notably, none of the statements or imagery in the space are explicitly pro-queer.

Perhaps the most disturbing intervention by the institution in charge of the space was a media conference to draw attention to their good works on the occasion of the Week of the Child, or some such. The drop-in play area was used as a tot-filled background. Every explicit unpacking of the word "family" in the course of the event involved endorsement of two-parent, other-gender couples, implicitly marginalizing households that include single parents, same-gender couples, and arrangements of co-habitation and care that involve extended family or other multiple-adult situations.

Clearly, though the staff can certainly be individually supportive of people who are oppressed in one way or another, this is not guaranteed, and it does not do anything to facilitate parents, in their privilege or their oppression, in understanding the power arrangements underlying their situation and in disrupting those arrangements.

Shaping The Resource Universe

As we muddle through the raising of our kids, parents often seek outside sources of information. We ask our own parents and our peers; we search the internet and read books; we consult professionals who have been awarded the status of expert by society. I think maximalizing the range and type of sources that are available to parents is a good thing. But how does the drop-in actually function in this regard?

It provides resources both in the form of the women who work there as staff, and a collection of books and periodicals related to parenting.

In my experience, the staff are quite good on a personal level -- warm, open, approachable, and experienced. Their general attitude seems to be open to a wide range of parenting choices, but focuses on listening to the kids and not trying to force them to be who or what they are not. This is good, as far as it goes. But the arrangement is still troubling, at times. For one thing, it is not clear to me how this openness and approachability is or is not maintained with parents and children that more obviously deviate that L and I from the oppressive, normative ideals of what "family" is supposed to be.

As well, though the staff don't tend to be assertive in claiming expert status, the structure of the encounter awards it to them regardless. Even when not explicitly asked, their side of casual conversation often falls into questions that could be considered sureillance (see below) and comments that amount to reassurance or advice. While parents, especially new parents, can often do with repeatedly hearing, "It's okay, you're doing fine," even that content, let alone more instructive advice, reinforces the idea that staff have a right to be dispensing that reassurance and advice: they have and deserve authority.

This is a problem for two reasons. First of all, their advice and directing of parents to other resources is likely to prioritize the mainstream, and even though their take on "mainstream" is relatively broad, that still marginalizes more politicized, radical approaches, and approaches grounded in more oppressed standpoints, and subtley shapes parental responses. For example, I recently overheard the staff providing some guidance to a mama around a potential psychiatric diagnosis for her child. I don't know who introduced it as a possibility, what I heard was certainly within the bounds of a mainstream understanding of acceptable role for the staff, and the intent was to provide supports to a mama that does a great job in what is, for multiple reasons that aren't mine to share even to the extent that I know them, pretty tough. And I can't claim to know exhaustively what was requested and what was suggested. But making some guesses based on what I know of the space, and from my experience working in the agency sector myself, the impulse on the part of staff to help a woman in a tough spot lead to suggested action steps involving further involvement with bureaucratic, hierarchical "helping" structures affiliated with the state that would psychiatrize and possibly medicate her child.

This might be the best option. It might be what she would choose regardless. But did they direct her towards any radical critique of the psychiatric system in general and of this particular diagnosis, in order that she might make the most informed choice? I suspect not. Did they offer to help create a peer-support, non-medicalizing space for her to explore the contributing issues with other mamas, away from influences that would overdetermine the slotting of certain patterns of behaviour into reified diagnostic categories? I doubt it. Did they offer material which might support this mama in building on her understanding of her experiences as a (white) woman in a relationship with a (white) man, and thereby take practical steps to support her own wellbeing in a context of familial stress, given the socially imposed tendency for women in her position to fall into the role of making everyone else feel better at the expense of their own wellbeing? Don't think so. None of this is out of nefarious intent. Rather, it's a desire to help but one that tends to replicate the structures from which the advice springs -- ones that understand problems solely in apolitical, social servicey ways and approach solutions similarly.

Another danger of situations structured by one party's expert status and the other's lack of same is that experts (the party with more power) can get away with insufficient listening and can dispense "wisdom" that is not adequately informed by the particularities of a given situation. I have witnessed no major incidents of this type, but a number of minor ones -- a few situations in casual conversation where a given interpretation is placed on L's behaviour or choices or development that strikes me as patently wrong, and in which casual, low-key efforts to provide a different perspective (as, y'know, someone who spends all day every week day plus more with him) are largely left unengaged with and unlistened to. It has been all very innocuous -- mildly irritating to fainly amusing -- and I'm sure if the situation were more serious and I felt called to be more direct, I would not just be dismissed. But it is still indicative to me of certain underlying assumptions about the space and about the structures of the relationships between parents and staff.

As for the lending library, my inspection of it has been fairly superficial, but the pattern seems to be much as I would expect: lots of standard pregnancy and parenting books, including some that are relatively progressive -- I'm definitely going to have a longer glance at a book about children's books by renowned feminist and writer Michelle Landsberg -- but no copies of Anti-capitalist Parenting for Dummies or Queering Curriculum: Dyke Mamas Talk About Challenging Oppressive Schools. And, yes, I made those two titles up, but there are definitely parenting resources out there along those lines which would just not be included.

Again, this doesn't prevent access to those resources for those who are persistent in seeking them out, but providing a centralized, easily accessed resource centre that excludes them does tend to channel people not already looking for them to less blatantly challenging material.

Surveillance

This includes keeping tabs on child development and status, with the intent to gently intervene by providing advice if that is seen as necessary, as discussed above. I would also imagine it includes keeping tabs on situations that might be seen to require more direct state intervention by child protection services or the police.

The former is a problem because it tends to further marginalize critical perspectives and thereby limit parental options even as it addresses need. The latter is also addressing a real need. As long as we live in a society in which people, mostly men, abuse children, often their own, then we need to respond to that problem.

The state has little credibility in this regard however.

The Canadian state is complicit in killing children abroad. For example, it never opposed the U.S. and U.K.-driven U.N. sanctions on Iraq between 1991 and 2003, which U.N. statistics show killed hundreds of thousands of children, and which drove two successive holders of the office of United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq to resign in protest.

The Canadian state kidnapped many thousands of Aboriginal children in the so-called Sixties Scoop and contributed to cultural genocide and much personal trauma by disconnecting Aboriginal people from their communities and identities.

The Canadian state forced many thousands of Aboriginal children into residential schools, where they were robbed of their language, robbed of family continuity, and often physically and sexually abused.

The Canadian state has yet to respond satisfactorily to the disproportionate violence wreaked by its armed agents (police) on racialized youth.

The Canadian state has yet to respond satisfactorily to the alienation and oppression of queer youth in the school system and elsewhere which leads to disproportionately high suicide rates.

The Canadian state is part of a political economy that depends on people being unemployed. One arm of the state provides the only source of income for such people but refuses to provide adequate income. Another arm of the state then takes away the kids because their parents are supposedly neglectful because they can't feed them properly. (This from a prof of social work that spoke at this action.)

The Canadian state refuses to implement more than the first level of changes required to create women's equality, the only way to adequately respond to the endemic violence by men against women and children.

The responses of Children's Aid services in Ontario have been consistently racist and oppressive in other ways -- racialized and poor communities are often disproportionately negatively impacted as mentioned in paragraphs above, and often just by giving parents in these communities less of the benefit of the doubt when assessing situations.

So. We need to have social and community responsees to the (mostly male) violence against children (and women). We also need social and community responses to the violence that the state is perpetrating in literally taking food from hungry children and their families, and the systemic and everyday oppressions of Aboriginal people, queer people of all racial backgrounds, and people of colour.

If the state really cared about children -- about people, really -- we could do way better than we do right now. The staff who are mandated to act as surveillance are only doing what they have to do, and are acting out of genuine care for children. It is the rest of us that are to blame for attaching this care to systems that sometimes do what they are supposed to do but that have acted in ways oppressive to children time and time again.

L and I deal with, as I said at the beginning, the warmest and fuzziest tentacle of the state when it comes to kids. In most respects, we are unlikely to be directly targeted by the nastier elements. But in some ways that makes it even more important to be conscious in my decision to enter this state-sponsored space, to know how it functions and to know what it is connected to.

In terms of action for me coming out of this reflection, I think what I want to concentrate on at the moment is how I am present in the drop-in space. I reflexively respond to situations that bore me or make me uncomfortable by disengaging and keeping my self hidden. This isn't necessarily wrong, but responding in that way reflexively rather than strategically is uncool. And what I need to do, I think, is focus on being more emotionally present and more willing to show self while in the drop-in. That not only could lead to personal benefits, but has the potential to inject some of my own critical perspective on the world in a small but organic way into the space and to shake up a little bit the limits on acceptable and unacceptable conversational content in the space. I tend to be quite cautious and reserved about such things and have no desire to draw unwelcome attention to myself or L, but I think some additional attentiveness to the opportunities for such action would be a personally and politically useful thing to do. It isn't much, but it's something.

Rebick After The Election

I'm sometimes a bit dubious about Rabble.CA and some of the editorial choices that it makes, but I quite like this post election analysis by founder and publisher Judy Rebick. I admit that I have not been immune to the "Well, it could be worse" school of response to the election outcome, which I still think is technically accurate but admit might not be the best grounding for making decisions about what to do next.

I really like Rebick's emphasis on independent social movement activity, including pressure on the social democrats. She argues that "the election was a disaster for progressive ideas and movements in Canada" and "the NDP ran the most right-wing electoral campaign in recent memory... On three issues the NDP not only broke with party policy but seriously undermined the alliance between the social movements and [the] party..."

Anyay, worth a read. I'm headed out of town in about ten minutes. I may be able to grab an hour while I'm gone, perhaps tomorrow afternoon, to finish that original writing post I've been working at.

Radical Women of Color Carnival #1

The introductory edition of the Radical Women of Color Carnival can be found at Reappropriate.

Read it.

Canada and the Caribbean

Sorry I haven't put up much in the way of original writing in the last week and a bit...I've been busy with other things. I do have a start on a sizeable post that I hope to finish in the next few days.

In the meantime, while looking for historical material relevant to a particular facet of this work, I came across these two interesting articles from Seven Oaks about the historical relationship between Canada and the Caribbean, and Canada's role in colonialism and slavery there.

• "Canada's Shame, Empires Profit: The Caribbean Slave Wars 1788-1807" by David Evans
  
• "Serving Capital: A short history of Canada in the Caribbean" by David Evans