Sudbury: Building a Popular Anarchism

Not too sure what exactly this event will be like, but I'm interested to hear what they have to say. Years ago I heard a talk from some anarchist labour organizers from the southern U.S. who were part of a related group, and they were doing some pretty amazing stuff.

Building a Popular Anarchism: The Story of the Irish Workers' Solidarity Movement

An illustrated talk in which speakers from the Workers Solidarity Movement will outline the growth of anarchism in Ireland in the last decade, the struggles that have been fought and the role of the WSM in the process that has seen anarchism move from a tiny marginal current to a prominent force on the left.

6:30 pm, Monday, September 17th, 2007.
Myths and Mirrors in Victory Park, Frood Road, Sudbury, Ontario.

Call (705) 929-2377 for directions if needed.
Email ontarioac(at)gmail.com for details on event content.

If you are interested in anti-authoritarian politics and happen to be in the area, come and check it out!

Prevalence of Violence Against Women in Canada

Just because this was stuff I happened to be looking up for my work today:

• In the best national survey of such things done to date, in 1993, it was found that 51% of Canadian women had experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16, and of those women at least 60% had experienced more than one such incident. More than twice as many of these women had experienced violence at the hands of men known to them that at the hands of a stranger. (Statistics Canada, 1993, "Violence Against Women Survey", The Daily, 18 November)
  
  
• "According to a 1996 Canadian government statistic, Indigenous women between the ages of 25 and 44 with status under the federal Indian Act, are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence." (Amnesty International (Canada). Stolen Sisters: A Human Rights Response to Discrimination and Violence Against Aboriginal Women in Canada. Ottawa: Amnesty International (Canada), 2004.)
  
  
• Almost 60% of those who reported experiencing sexual assault to the police in 1998 were younger than 18 years old, and the median age was 17. (Juristat, Vol. 19, No. 9, p. 6)
  
  
• Fewer than 10% of women who experience sexual assault actually report it to the police. (Federal-Provincial-Territorial Ministers Responsible for the Status of Women. Assessing Violence Against Women: A Statistical Profile. Ottawa, 2002. p. 19)
  
  
• 54% of girls under the age of 16 have experienced some form of unwanted sexual attention. 24% of these have experienced sexual assault, and 17% have experienced incest. (J. Holmes and E. Silverman, 1992, We're Here, Listen to Us: A Survey of Young Women in Canada)
  
  
• 40% of women with disabilities have been assaulted, raped or abused. Further, it is estimated that 83% of women with disabilities will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.(L. Stimpson and M. Best, 1991, Courage Above All: Sexual Assault against Women with Disabilities)
  
  
• In U.S.-based research, 92% of homeless women were found to have experienced severe physical and/or sexual assault at some point in their lives, and there is no reason to expect a significant difference in Canada. (Research by Angela Browne cited in Jyl Josephson, "The Intersectionality of Domestic Violence and Welfare in the Lives of Poor Women", in Natalie J. Sokoloff with Christina Pratt, eds., Domestic Violence at the Margins. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005.)
  
  
• "Almost 40% of women assaulted by spouses said their children witnessed the violence against them (either directly or indirectly) and in many cases the violence was severe. In half of cases of spousal violence against women that were witnessed by children, the woman feared for her life." (Holly Johnson. Measuring Violence Against Women: Statistical Trends 2006. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 2006.)
  
  
  

Here are some references that you may find useful.

Thoughts on Decolonizing Canada

Check out this document.

It's the text of a paper or speech (in PDF form) called "A Transformative Framework for Decolonizing Canada: A Non-Indigenous Approach" by someone called Paulette Regan, a PhD candidate in the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria. Basically, it is an exploration of the potential role for non-indigenous people in the struggle to decolonize Canada. It is worth a read.

She begins:

This evening I will talk about the impetus behind developing this framework to explore the role and responsibility of non-indigenous people – the Canadian public - in decolonization. I begin by telling you about a conference dialogue, and the writings of two indigenous thinkers and activists.

She goes on to talk about some of her own experiences and observations and to summarize some key ideas from two important indigenous thinkers from within the Canadian state, George Manuel and Taiaiake Alfred.

Here are a few of the paragraphs that were key for me:

To get ‘unstuck’ the non-indigenous - not just in government and legal circles, but more broadly as a society - must focus not, as we have done so often with disastrous results, on the problem of the “other” (that is, Indigenous peoples) but turn our gaze, mirror-like, back upon ourselves, to what Roger Epp calls the “settler problem.” In essence, we must begin to take a more proactive responsibility for decolonizing ourselves.

I am curious as to how these themes of imagination, history and myth, struggle and transformation, might suggest new ways for the non-indigenous to take up our role and responsibility in the work of decolonization. I also found myself thinking about my own experiences of being uncomfortable, working as a non-indigenous woman within indigenous contexts over the years. I realized that my own deepest learning has always come from those times when I was in unfamiliar territory-culturally, intellectually and emotionally.

It seems to me that there is power in this place of ‘not knowing’ that may hold a key to decolonization for non-indigenous people. As members of the dominant culture, we have to be willing to be uncomfortable, to be disquieted at a deep and disturbing level - and to understand our own history, if we are to transform our colonial relationship with Indigenous peoples.

For it is in this space of “not knowing” and working through our own discomfort that we are most open to deep, transformative learning. The kind of experiential learning that engages our whole being – head, heart and spirit.

And she concludes:

The promise of working within a transformative framework is that our dialogue about history – our stories and our myths – beckons us not just to understand our paradoxical past, but to finally take that “genuine leap of imagination” to guide our steps today and into the future. Although the way is not clear and there will be struggle – the “new fork in an old road” is a powerful place of transformation if we are willing to take it. George Manuel knew this in 1974. Taiaiake Alfred, thirty-one years later, invites us again to choose this path. And they are right. We cannot leave this critical task up to governments and the courts. In reality, institutions do not lead social change. The people do. And so it is up to us.

Please read the whole thing.

(Found via this post at Indigenous Solidarity: A Settler's Place.)

Rambling Thoughts on Oil Sands

I have recently been thinking about the Alberta oil sands. I don't know much about the issue yet, but it is becoming increasingly clear to me how important it is.

For those who aren't aware, the oil sands is an absolutely immense deposit of oil in the north of the Canadian province of Alberta. This oil is not in nice, easy to extract pools close to the surface, as is found in Saudi Arabia, but instead saturates sand at and beneath the surface of an area of land about the size of Florida. This oil is very expensive and energy-intensive to extract so it is only in recent years as the price of oil has surged upwards (in a trend that is likely to stick around, and have huge consequences on our lives) that it has been profitable to extract it. As the price of oil has jumped even more in the last couple of years, Alberta has seen a frantic boom that the social and physical infrastructure of the area is unable to handle. It is also extremely dirty to extract this oil. A goal set in 1995 was to have production up to one million barrels a day by 2020. That target was met by 2004, and the new target is five million barrels a day by 2030. Greenhouse gas emissions due to oil sands production have doubled in the past 15 years and a mainstream environmental NGO says, "Not surprisingly, Alberta is now Canada's pollution capital for industrial air pollutants. And the oil sands are the single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions growth in Canada."

An interesting online documentary on the subject produced by some folks from New York can be found here. It is a useful way to get a sense of what it all looks like, as well as a glimpse at the human face of the boom and its various impacts.

I'm not going to try and write a cohesive and complete post at this point, just list a few observations and reflections.

The first is the obvious point that this is really important stuff. Partly, it is important because of the centrality that greenhouse gas emissions and other aspects of environmental destruction should have in our programs for change because of the massive suffering that they are likely to cause in the coming decades. Partly, it is because this is a project that cuts right to the heart of social relations in Canada. A central function of the Canadian state within the context of global capitalism has always been to manage the extraction of the extensive natural resources in northern North America, including overseeing details like the reproduction of the workforce as well as guiding the process of creating and enforcing colonial relations with indigenous peoples so as to ensure that said resources are available to be extracted. This function was central during the initial years of Canadian state formation back in the late 19th century and this project shows how true it still is.

Second, I wonder how this is going to impact the shape of conventional domestic electoral politics. By that I mean, Alberta is the most right-wing area of the country and has been for a long time. Will this concentration of globally important resource extraction and profit-making in that province shift the balance of Canadian domestic politics at all? I don't really know. I know there has been a shift towards a neoliberal state and more right-leaning politics going on across the country for a couple of decades at least, for reasons much in harmony with what is going on in most other rich countries. That process has included victory in the long civil war within Canada's right by social conservatives, like our current government, who have their strongest of strongholds in Alberta. I don't know if these things are related. I do know there is a long history of political resentment of central Canada in the political class in Alberta, going back at least to the refusal of the Bennett and Mackenzie King governments to do much of anything about the horrendous suffering of Alberta farmers during the Depression. In other parts of the prairies, this discontent found progressive outlets, such as the provincial victory of Tommy Douglas' CCF party in Saskatchewan in 1944. However, the nominally progressive government that ruled Alberta at the start of the Depression, which was based in a party that came out of the farmers' movement, was incompetent and corrupt. From what I understand, that helped to isolate progressive forces in the province. Instead, a combination of fundamentalist protestantism and the bizarre philosophy of social credit, which made populist noises at first but became very right wing soon after winning government, seized the opportunity. At the time, Ottawa had the power to disallow provincial legislation, and the resentment of Alberta conservatives was intensified because several important proto-fascist measures by the Alberta social credit government were disallowed while proto-fascist measures by the Quebec government of Maurice Duplessis were permitted, largely because the Liberal Party depended on seats in Quebec but did not depend in the least on votes in Alberta. Interestingly, the second Alberta premier under Social Credit was Ernest Manning. His son is Preston Manning, who was the initial leader of the formation of social conservatives that now dominate the federal Conservative Party and form the government. What impact will the increasing importance of Alberta in the national economy have? I have no idea. Perhaps one hopeful aspect is implied but not examined for its political implications in the video I linked above: lots of poor and working-class people from other regions of the country that have stronger left traditions are flocking to Alberta to find work, and they are not always thrilled about what they find there.

Third, I wonder about what we should be aiming for in terms of this issue, where the content of "we" is purposefully kept vague. In general, I think the world requires of us a transformed Canadian settler state, to the extent that the words "settler" and "state" no longer apply even if "Canadian" is kept around for sentimental reasons. In that context, we would want control of a great deal of the land, including the area of northern Alberta I think, to pass back to the nations that are indigenous to it. This would mean that, ideally, I would not be a part of the collective in whose name decisions about extracting oil from the oil sands would be made. It would also mean that making and doing in this part of the world would be reorganized to make them not depend upon non-renewable, world-killing, oil-based energy sources, and to make them not depend on the suffering and deprivation of ordinary people. That's the goal, at any rate. However, at the moment, with the Canadian state existing as it does, I am part of the largely passive grouping of humanity in whose name it functions, and we will all suffer (albeit unevenly) from climate change. So it seems to me that we would want there to be no extraction whatsoever, given the huge contribution that process makes to greenhouse gas emissions and the urgency of the climate crisis, and whatever investments and programs would be necessary to address the very real needs of the working people drawn there by the chance to earn a living. A massive investment in projects based in renewable energy sources might be a good start. Anyway, from what I can tell, mainstream green demands at present include seeking a moratorium on new oil sands development and tighter regulation of extraction processes. (Two NGO's keep useful "watch" sites going, here and here.) This paragraph in particular is just thinking in print, and I am interested in developing a clearer idea of what our intermediate goals should be, so speak up if you have suggestions.

My final thought is about what it will take to achieve some of our goals. Let's leave aside some of the more world-shaking transformation that I dream of above. Let's instead imagine an intermediate goal, whereby significant barriers -- some combination of increased indigenous control and massively increased regulation by the state, perhaps? -- are put in the way of a few people making profit by destroying the largest intact forest on the planet and making lots of people sick and even more people suffer through contributing massively to climate change. What would it take to achieve that? The answer is pretty depressing. Now, I don't feel I know as much as I'd like about struggles that are specifically related to resource extraction. There is lots to be said, I think, about things like the dangers of falling into a situation in which environmentalists and workers (or the communities they are a part of) work against each other. What interests me at the moment, though, is who and what is invested in the success of the development being opposed.

See, I kind of see it as analagous to the question of comparisons between the U.S.-lead imperial war against Vietnam and the U.S.-lead imperial occupation of Iraq. Lots of people draw comparisons between the two, and often there are good reasons for doing that, but a fundamental difference has to do with exactly that question of who and what is invested in success. In Vietnam, as Chomsky has argued, the maximal goal of the U.S. was setting up a compliant client regime that would keep the rabble in line and keep the country running to the satisfaction of U.S. business needs and U.S. foreign policy goals. They failed in that, but their minimal goal was to counter what is known as the "threat of the good example" and let other peoples in the world know the consequences of trying to pursue an independent path to development. In this, for all that they were driven out of Vietnam, they won -- they killed two or three million people, reduced several countries to rubble, sprayed great amount of poison upon people and nature alike, and showed exactly what would happen to subordinated peoples who got uppity. This is much different than the situation in Iraq, where the strategic imperative to control its oil resources -- not have access to, but control the taps so as to exert power over industrial rivals who depend on that oil -- is foremost. Just blowing stuff up and pulling out to leave the devastated people of the nation to figure things out for themselves is not an option. Pulling out completely and genuinely is much, much more contrary to U.S. interests in Iraq than it was in Vietnam. I think much of the anti-war movement misunderstands this point.

So in trying to understand exactly what popular movements might face in dealing with the oil sands project, it is important not to depend too simplistically on comparisons to other resource-based struggles. Stopping the logging of old growth forest in Temagami, say, or supporting the struggles of the Lubicon Nation for self-determination and respect from settler governments and logging companies have both proven to be long, hard fights. But as hard as those are, that is nothing compared to the kind of opposition that would be mounted when the resource in question is massive amounts of oil, given the relationship oil has both to the current functioning of capitalist relations of production and to the interests of the trigger-happy U.S. state. Given that, what will be necessary to win even modest reforms that would limit the currently unfettered access to the oil sands? I think an uprising of greater scale than anything that seems to be on the immediate horizon in Canada would be necessary for even those sorts of modest reforms, let alone the kinds of changes that the world really needs. Which is kind of a depressing thought.

So there you go. If anyone who happens by knows of useful resources on this particular issue, let me know because I'd be interested in seeing them.

Police Try To Provoke Violence

We know they do it, along with all sorts of other dirty tricks, but it appears that the cops may actually have been caught this time. It seems they tried to provoke an incident at the protests against the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership summit in Montebello, and some clever folks caught evidence in snapshots and videos.

Take a look at this piece at the Ottawa IMC site, which takes a good look at the mounting evidence that this mysterious threesome were police agents deployed to instigate violence. Then there is this story on the CBC site, which of course takes a softer tone but which, interestingly, quotes a retired Ottawa cop as conceding that the evidence presented in video and pictures seems to support the assertion of the protesters that these men were cops or in the employ of the cops.

Thanks to red toque for the heads up.

Radical Parenting Resources

• Here is a list of radical parenting resources with an anarchist slant.
  
• Here is a PDF document called "Don't Leave your Friends Behind: anarcha-feminism & supporting mothers and children".
  
• Here is the blog associated with a great zine that I subscribed to for a couple of issues and then lost track of called Rad Dad.
  

Knowing and the Problem of Scale

Some years ago, while discussing with a mutual friend her decision to redirect her professional life and go to law school in her forties, someone I know made a very interesting observation about the law. He pointed out that law as it exists in the modern world constitutes a regime of boundaries to legally sanctioned behaviour that we (meaning ordinary people) are simply incapable of knowing in their entirety because of the sheer amount of state-based textual regulation of our behaviour and because of the extensive specialist knowledge required to truly know what those texts mean. At the same time, we are all expected to obey these rules, always and without exception -- as the old piece of lay wisdom tells us, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." Being expected upon threat of some sort of punishment to obey what we cannot possibly understand in full is, by definition, oppressive. Therefore, the law as it exists, even before you consider anything else about the details of particular legislation or the uneven ways that laws get activated by individual and collective agents of state authority or the ways that ostensibly neutral laws play out in the context of the existing hierarchical social relations, is inherently oppressive.

There is something I find not entirely satisfying about this characterization of the law, and I haven't been able to figure out what, but that is not why I raise it here -- it is still a worthwhile point, I think. I mention it because it is a useful illustration of one important set of implications of what I've come to think about as "the problem of scale." That is, the world is really, really big, and one human life is, compared to that, really, really tiny, and we can only begin our decision-making about acting in the context of the social from our own space for agency as individuals. In other words, we must navigate and attempt to influence the immense based, at least at the first level of analysis, upon the miniscule.

In this example, we bump up against the limits that the problem of scale places on our ability to know. This limit has significance far beyond the initial example. Each and every one of us has only twenty-four hours in each day. Within those twenty-four hours, we have limits on our energy and we have all sorts of tasks that we must engage in other than building knowledge about the world as it exists outside of our own local everyday context. And yet, somehow, because our actions inevitably have impacts far beyond our local everyday context, we have an obligation to build adequate knowledge so that we can direct those actions in ethically and politically responsible ways.

Variations in Our Knowing

Let's first consider what variation exists among people in terms of knowing about the world beyond our local everyday experience.

Different people have different capacities to process the kinds of information that are required for building this kind of knowledge, a difference that may appear at the surface to be "inherent" or "natural" but almost certainly isn't in any simplistic understanding of those words. I would argue the difference is largely socially constructed by the ways in which our social organization assumes that these tasks must be done in terms of how information is produced and transmitted and so on. Still, wherever it comes from, and for all that it does not give anyone a greater or lesser right to dignity and respect and autonomy and all of that, there is some modest variation here.

Different people are tied to the need to engage in other life tasks to differing degrees, often in ways that have to do with power and privilege -- the lower down you get slotted in social hierarchies, the less of your time is actually yours to determine. And building knowledge takes time. Of course, positing a simple correlation between privilege and extra-local knowledge of the world would itself be an oppressive assumption. Someone who experiences significant oppression may have less time and energy to develop such knowledge but they also may or may not understand themselves to have significantly more incentive to do so, so as to refine and expand the knowledge that their own experience of everyday oppression has already given them access to and thereby enhance their individual ability to navigate the world and their efforts to change it. In contrast, however time-intensive a generic well-to-do white guy's professional job might be, most of the other tasks besides that may be taken care of by the (most often white) woman he married and the various (often racialized) working-class people employed in the service sector who can be mobilized via market mechanisms to meet his needs in a way that makes minimal demands on his time. Yet there is no particular compulsion for him to use that time to work at building extra-local knowledge of the world because, as far as his life goes, the world is just fine. He might as well spend all of that "extra" time playing video games or collecting stamps or watching televised sports or discussing snooty films over expensive wine with other time-rich people who would also misunderstand this activity as "understanding the world" in a meaningful sense. Not that discretionary time spent purely for pleasure is intrinsically a bad thing -- it is something that we all need and more of it for everybody is a feature of the different world that I hope we can create. The point is, however, that just because you have lots of time that is relatively free from the compulsion of necessity doesn't mean you use that time to build knowledge of the world. So having time to build knowledge about the world varies with privilege, but how that opportunity gets used can vary a lot as well, and based on other factors than just its availability.

Different people also have differential access to resources to build extra-local knowledge of the world. Again, this works in complicated ways. Access to dominant media resources are close to universal in North America, for whatever that is worth. Access to the internet varies a lot with class privilege, and the internet can provide access to more diverse sources. Specific institutional roles can provide a person with access to particular kinds of sources produced by or for that institution and not otherwise widely available. Access to books, including non-mainstream ones, is also fairly widely dispersed thanks to public libraries. Access to knowledge that is transmitted orally between individual people or in more collective contexts might seem to be quite equally distributed, but I'm not sure that's true. Certainly the sharing of useful information with people who are in one sense or another peers happens everywhere and all the time, and provides for an informal way of sharing valuable information about how to navigate the contexts which the peers might have in common, but that is mostly about local rather than extra-local knowledge. In terms of oral sharing of knowledge about extra-local circumstances, that probably happens in the most interesting ways in the context of some communities forced into long-term struggles for survival, while in more privileged spaces the oral sharing of that nature is more likely to be a parroting of the dominant media knowledge, and so not really an independent resource.

So there is variation among people. But even so, none of that socially-produced individual variation is more than a flicker when seen in the context of the massive scale of the world as a whole.

The Process of Knowing

The way I see it, we come to know more about circumstances beyond the local context which inescapably bounds our direct experience through a process of dynamic encounters between the current state of our knowledge and the various mediated resources which are available to us. The reason why we can function at all given the immensity of the problem of scale as it relates to knowing about the world is that what results from this process of dynamic encounters is not flat, not a catalogue-like accumulation similar to storing bits in a computer's memory. Rather, it is self-reflexive -- the process of coming-to-know is not just modifying some passive databank, but it is also modifying itself. Building knowledge is not just passively taking in "facts" but rather an ongoing, active process of learning how to learn, learning how to build knowledge. This includes forever refining our capacity to deal with ignorance, with gaps in our knowledge, with uncertainty. It includes building our understanding of the sources from which we get extra-local knowledge, because very often we do not have direct experience to compare those sources to. It includes constantly growing and evolving frameworks into which we organize our knowledge, to give them/get from it meaning. And I don't want it to sound like a purely individual process, either. It's not like we take in some external input and then become the sole authors of our own knowledge. Every step of this dynamic process is a negotiation between our own agency and what we inherit from the social, from the meanings of words to the shapes of discourses to the ways in which our own meaning-creating agency has been trained by the particular circumstances of our existence.

One moment in the creation of knowledge and meaning is, therefore, this process of ongoing encounter in which an active agent engages with sources to build and refine the knowledge that will be the basis for her own future functioning.

Those sources have to come from somewhere, however, and that's another part of the ongoing process of knowledge creation. I'm nor sure I care to take the time to try and think through in this post (which has turned much more philosophical and think-heavy than I was expecting when I started writing it) all of the complicated ways in which that must happen. It must involve dynamic interplay among the ever-evolving processes of knowing of the active agent(s) who created the specific resource, material expressions of social relations in terms of organizations and institutions that are the context in which the resources are created, and more discourse-based manifestations of social relations. By building our own knowledge about how this process of source creation works in different contexts and for different sources, we enhance our ability to build useful and accurate knowledge from them. Often the ongoing credibility of sources that consistently propagate ideological understandings of the world consistent with elite needs (or, to use different language, whose standpoints consistently come from within ruling regimes) depend on significant proportions of the population continuing to accept incomplete, ideological, or just plain inaccurate understandings of how those sources come to be. The dominant media are a prime example of this.

So let me try and ground this back someplace close to where we started. Basic facts of physics limit our ability to know about the world. Though there is variation of various sorts among human beings in terms of the basic elements necessary for this knowledge building process, all of us face certain absolute limits grounded in the very fact of our humanness. We can function despite this because we tend to develop quite sophisticated ways of building our own knowledge, though most of us are not really very conscious of exactly how complicated this process is as we are doing it.

Accuracy

Complicated, of course, does not necessarily mean accurate. Generally speaking, we have two mechanisms by which the accuracy of what results from our processes of knowledge creation can be determined. The first is by far the most likely to prod us to change in instances of inaccuracy: whether or not the knowledge thus created guides our actions successfully. However, because what we're talking about in this post is knowledge from beyond our own inevitably local experiential context, we actually have far fewer opportunities to bump into the directly corrective hand of circumstance than you might think when it comes to this sort of knowledge. It is quite possible, therefore, for the owner of a mid-sized hammer factory in Virginia and John Birch Society member to reach the conclusion that everything in Iraq is actually going pretty well and it's just the media that are making it look bad, and to never actually face any consequences of the dreadful inaccuracy of that conclusion. This is, in fact, one way to look at one way power and privilege operate: inaccuracies or distortions in my knowledge of the world have no consequences for me but contribute to your suffering, and your knowledge is completely irrelevant to my wellbeing.

The other mechanism for encouraging accuracy, which can actually help deal with that very problem, is about taking a stance that is deliberately critical and self-critical, and that prioritizes listening and dialogical or intersubjective engagement rather than monological or subject-object engagement. Though inevitably imperfect in its realization, and really just one strand of the same process of engaging with mediated knowledge from outside one's own local context, the openness and critical flexibility it can help create can be a crucial antidote to the traps of ideological mystification, self-serving circular certainty, and just plain dumb blindness to what's really out there.

Making Decisions in the World

All of which leads me to one of the other thoughts that was in my brain when I originally decided to write this post: Take a moment and think about the eminently average individuals who (at least officially) Make Important Decisions in this world. Think about people with names like Harper and Chretien and Bush. Think about them not as abstracted roles but as real people -- people who want to see their neices and nephews next weekend, and get sore feet after too many hours without sitting, and like chocolate eclairs but really shouldn't, and relax by watching trashy movies now and then, and who don't have a magical upload link implanted at the base of their skulls but who need to learn about the world just like any of the rest of us. They are in no way exceptionally bright people, nor exceptionally well educated. I doubt there is much that is very special about their own personal knowledge building processes, and I would suspect the fact that they have reached high political office means that their accuracy-correction processes are optimized to respond in a very specific manner to things which will affect their political careers, which is hardly a recommendation. Most of all, they have only 24 hours in a day, a need to sleep, and lots of other commitments, even if seeing to the mundane necessities of everyday life is not usually among them. They are, in other words, ordinary human beings whose specific circumstances may differ a bit from yours or mine, but who operate in the same general range of possibility. Whatever advantages they have are about having a bit more time and having access to the dedicated knowledge-production organizations of the state (which are not responsive to what I would see as the vital elements for accurate, liberatory knowledge production but which feed heads of government what they need to adequately play their role).

We get trained in our society to see status or power or authority as being somehow synonymous with individual merit, but if you sit back and contemplate not only the extreme ordinariness of the individuals who usually fill these roles but also all of what I wrote above about how we know about the world, it becomes clear that noone has enough merit to do these things. It simply is not possible for any individual to have adequate knowledge of the world to claim to be making these decisions in the sense that we claim we decide what to have for lunch or what colour of sweater to wear today. It becomes very clear that the knowledge building schemes of such people are likely to have marginal, or at least highly mediated, relation to the sorts of concerns that really should be informing the fate of the world. They can't know directly and their inputs are highly, highly mediated, so it depends to a large extent on their existing preconceptions -- highly vetted for elite acceptability by the electoral process -- and on exactly how those input sources are created. The decisions made by these supposed decision-makers are only fractionally about the people who make them, and much more about the social organization in which they are embedded -- they can't know that much about the world except via the highly organized social knowledge production mechanisms that inevitably support a prime minister or a president, and by definition those knowledge production mechanisms are integrated into ruling relations as a whole.

Though the conclusion is hardly a very original one on the left, this is a different path to get to the idea that getting distracted by the individual or the party is very dangerous when the underlying institutions are so central to shaping what happens. But there's more than that, I think.

Though I do find something a bit scary about really letting myself think about the circumstances under which decisions that impose reality on the rest of us get made, there is something heartening about it too. After all, one of the excuses that sometimes gets trotted out when we troublemakers are pushing for change is that ordinary people can't be directly involved in decisions that shape our lives and the world because we just don't know enough to make good decisions. Even apart from all the other ways that line of reasoning can be attacked, I think the ramblings in this post show that it is nonsense because no human beings have the access to social truth that this line implies is possible for a select few. The extent to which that select few is capable has to do with social organization that supports their knowledge building, not with superhuman capacity. Given the tools that human consciousness has developed to deal with this problem of scale, we could certainly reorganize things to address whatever grains of substance might be at the heart of this elitist lie and better support the knowledge building that all of us do. We need a more equitable distribution of discretionary time and we need to reorganize our social production of knowledge to make it more responsive to the standpoints of and accessible by ordinary people. These are huge tasks, of course, and I don't want to downplay that, but the point is that they are tasks that can be accomplished by changing how human beings and the social relations among us are organized, not a reflection of some necessary, inevitable flaw which only an elite, deserving few can escape by dint of their magnificent specialness.

More Housekeeping: Getting Back to Normal

As promised in my "Infrequent Posts" post, posting has been infrequent this past week, just as it was the previous week. I did have more time to work than I had expected, but I spent most of that dealing with unexpected 'new computer' issues and working on a piece in response to a call for submissions by a book project looking for relatively informal essays that just happen to be connected to the work-related writing I'm doing at the moment -- didn't get as much of that done as I'd hoped, but I got a decent start on it. I'll share more details at a later date, including the piece itself if it gets rejected.

In any case, though it would be unwise to expect a sudden flood of posts, I will be easing back into what should be a prolonged period of somewhat less scarce work time starting at the beginning of next week, so a more normal frequency should resume, though this remains my top priority.

Oh...and in terms of the new computer...well, I spoke before all the facts were in when downplaying the hardware-related coolness of it all. I found out after I wrote that that I will have unexpected free, if occasionally interrupted, access to a second good monitor, so on the advice of my partner (who at work has operated this way for the last couple of years) I invested a few dollars in a good graphics card. This card can do a lot of fancy things I don't need, but the feature that interests me is that it allows me to run both monitors at once as one big desktop. Getting that working occupied yesterday evening. Right now, its main benefit seems to be that it feels all cool and high tech-like, but my partner assures me that when you are deep into the guts of some multi-window research, writing, bibliographizing, just-like-sausage-making-you-don't-want-to- see-how-it-got-there document production, it does provide efficiencies.

Okay. This is the last self-indulgent housekeeping post for awhile, and I'll be back to my usual fare shortly.

Feminism and the Newest Social Movements

Just a quick post to point people towards "'Becoming-Woman?' In theory or in practice?", an article by Michal Osterweil in Turbulence, a new British "journal-cum-newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them."

In the article, Osterweil celebrates the increasing importance in the newest generation of social movements around the world of "the visibility and centrality of critical and reflective practices captured perhaps most famously by the Zapatista phrase caminar preguntando – ‘to walk while questioning’." She goes on to note a couple of instances where she has heard this and other aspects of the sensibilities of these movements connected explicitly to feminism and an image of the feminine. She writes of her excitement about this connection, or this potential connection, but her simultaneous disappointment that our movements, our spaces, and our projects can so seldom deliver on this connection in a substantive way.

Her concluding paragraphs:

For who can deny the transformative and lasting effects of feminism? No, it hasn’t ushered in an age of equality or the end of patriarchy, machismo, or capitalism, but it has profoundly transformed our social relations, our cultural norms, our very ways of being and seeing in the world. Whatever our gripes with its multi-generational manifestations – and believe me there are many – there was/is something about the feminist movement that has made it effective in truly widespread, durable and still dynamic ways: becoming a part of the ‘common sense’ (at least in the global North). I am not claiming that other movements like civil rights, labour, environmental and others haven’t had important effects, but I do think feminism-as-movement – as an ethic and sensibility that forces people to consciously and continuously challenge dominant norms – is quite special.

Yes, feminism has certainly been rife with conflicts, rifts and problems. Open conflicts have taken place between and among women from different economic and cultural backgrounds, of different sexual and gender identities, and from and within different global regions: it is/was continuously the object of critique. However, understanding these conflicts as wholly negative is in part a problem of how we read conflict and critique. For I believe that one of the reasons feminism has been so significant, despite its most problematic manifestations, is precisely because it has managed (or been forced) to really engage the conflicts and complexities that have traversed it throughout its history: conflicts between universalism and difference, cultural values and rights, North and South, etc. And because the multiple and at times contradictory elements that comprised it have subsequently worked to transform the discursive and lived spaces of feminist articulation to life and politics. Some of the most important insights about organising across differences came as a result of the fact that women of colour, queer women, anarchist women and women from the global South (among others) critiqued, seceded and worked to change what was perceived as a hegemonic feminism. While there is no doubt that the critiques must continue and the conflicts still exist, it is also undeniable that they have been extremely productive, if not constitutive of some of feminism’s most important contributions and insights into the nature of power and social change. This ethos and ability – the experience – of engaging the intersectional complexities of life despite, or even with and through, conflicts and differences without falling apart or disbanding was part of what made the Escanda gathering so powerful.

Concluding Thoughts

I think that at their best our recent movements have the potential to have similar lived lessons emerge from encounters and even clashes among our different elements. It is that potential people were sensing when they referred to the movement as woman, as new, as exciting. However, while the language of networks, affinity groups and difference have been critical additions to our political vocabularies, they can also quite easily justify a level of complacency and comfort about remaining within our differences – as separate groups. Moreover, while we have imagined and deployed this discourse and rhetoric of difference, becoming and affect, I fear we have forgotten about the lived and messy level of experienced conflict, as well as the time and effort it takes to work through them productively. Recognising irreducible differences, attempting to work with forms of organisation that are more fluid, dynamic and based on affect and pleasure, rather than structure and strategy, are key and important elements of the ‘new politics’, but they are not sufficient. Nor, I would add, is theorising and calling them part of a new post-representational political logic.

Ultimately one of the most important lessons of feminism, as well as of Zapatismo and other sources of inspiration for our new politics, is that the most important insights come from lived and unexpected experiences, including lived encounters with difference and lived experiences of the limitations of certain political models and ideologies. If we only talk and theorise amongst ourselves we are very unlikely to come across encounters that disrupt our ways of doing and thinking. So it is not sufficient to come up with a new narrative of social change: the terms and modality of the conversation must be recast as well. However, we need more people talking, arguing even, to truly change the terms of the conversation. That is why despite my serious reservations about the choice to publish this issue of Turbulence, I feel that it may be OK. Or rather I hope that through its attempt at opening up an ongoing space and project of interrogation and reflection – where it may itself be an experienced object of critique – without trying to definitively capture a snapshot of, or define absolutely an adequate politics for our movements, it could turn out to be a good thing. But only if people engage with it, argue with it, add to it…

Read the whole article!

(Found via this post.)

Infrequent Posts

Sorry about my rather scant blogging output this last week -- I had expected it to be a good week for blogging, but several things came up. One of the more exciting was that I got a new computer for the first time in more than six years, so the last couple of days have been taken up with getting it all up and running and tweaked to my satisfaction. It is not the most cutting edge machine I could've bought because I wanted to make 100% sure it would work with linux more or less out of the box, but it is miles ahead of what I've been using (especially since the harddrive in what I've been using has been teetering on the edge for some time and does its work very, very, slooooowly). I'm using the latest Ubuntu distribution of linux, which I think I like better than the older Red Hat distro that I've been using for the last few years. Anyway, I had to spend a few hours tinkering to get the sound working and am still unclear which of the configuration changes I made actually did the trick, but that was the only serious problem I've run into. And then migrating all of my stuff from my previous machine has been painstakingly slow (see the aforementioned harddrive slowness). But it is very exciting overall. For one thing, this new setup will allow me to do something I have been dreaming of doing since I bought my last computer: speedy and non-cumbersome audio editing in linux. I've made a couple of attempts to play around with it in the past, but the combination of old, slow hardware and software that wasn't far enough along in its development meant that my successes were satisfying but took far, far too long to consider using it for any work with regular deadlines. But the unexpected temptation to return to some sort of radio work continues to afflict me, and now I can start figuring out if the tools at my disposal make it practical...

Anyway. Enough self-indulgent technotalk for the moment. Getting back to the point, this coming week is unlikely to result in very many posts either, as it is shaping up to be quite intensive in terms of my childcare responsibilities...but keep checking back here, because I have one book I've been meaning to review for over a week and several other ideas bouncing around my brain, so if I have the energy in the evenings, I may manage an item or two. And if not, I'll be back to a more reliable work schedule the following week.

Social Collapse and Projecting the Future

Check this out:

The world is headed inevitably and unavoidably towards environmental collapse and a corresponding social collapse. Nothing we can do will change this. Therefore, there is no point in getting caught up in urgent or confrontational or radical social change politics, because you are doomed to fail even if you don't just end up locked up or shot. Therefore, what we need to be doing is giving ourselves the skills necessary to survive after a collapse and also doing low-key educational social change work, dialogue, and consciousness raising that is unflaggingly conciliatory in tone and promotes the kinds of values we would like to see reflected in society.

That is not a direct quote, but a summary written by me of a particular person's political analysis as told to me by a third person. I don't know the person whose analysis this is supposed to represent, so it is quite possible I may have misunderstood my informant or my informant may have misunderstood the original source. But let's assume that we both have it more or less correct, and that this fairly (if simplistically) represents an actual person's actual take on things rather than some straw-person construction.

It's certainly not how I see the world, but for some reason my thoughts have kept returning to it. Partly, I suppose, it is because it strikes me as a bit peculiar -- that someone should not just arrive at this conclusion by some sort of unthinking default, but after spending a lot of time learning and thinking about the world, as I know this person has. But perhaps more importantly because I have a sense that, as the contours of the oncoming environmental crisis become more clear, this or similar combinations of pessimistic, apocalyptic, and quietistic politics are likely to have a certain appeal to a small but non-trivial subset of people in North America that might otherwise be doing much more politically useful things. So I feel I should have a better handle on my own response to these ideas.

Pessimism

As far as I understand it, there are two different ways that you can understand "pessimism" in political terms. The first type of pessimistic view is one which concludes that, all else being equal, the world is going to get worse, perhaps significantly worse. The other understands pessimism as relating to our capacity to intervene in the world -- in other words, a view that the political "we" with which the speaker or writer identifies really can't do much about the state of the world.

The analysis summarized above is pessimistic in both senses. My own analysis is pessimistic in the former sense, though perhaps more tentatively so, but leaves the question of the latter to be answered by how tomorrow's history actually plays itself out. I'm not sure how much change we can make, but we can certainly make more by doing than by not-doing.

For example, I am definitely part of the sentient majority and agree that global climate change is happening, and happening because of human activity. I have also seen more and more arguments that not only is it real, but it is already at a stage much worse than the popularized understanding in the mainstream that is being used as a basis for so much so-called "green" capitalism and consumerism. I don't feel I know enough to argue convincingly for that position yet, but given the bits and pieces that I have seen and my pre-existing understanding of how a context shaped by capitalist social relations would be likely to push various people and organizations to respond in various situations, it is feeling increasingly likely to me. Add in all of the serious environmental problems beyond just climate change. Add in my understanding of the likelihood that peak oil and the consequent dramatic increases in energy costs are likely to occur, later or sooner, with corresponding dramatic effects on social organization. Also add in the predictions by some, which I think sound likely, that the U.S. will turn increasingly to armed force to maintain its preeminence over the next few decades.

In other words, my guesses about the near- to medium-term future are hardly rosy. Middle-class life in North America is predicated on a particular sort of mindless optimism about the world -- not necessarily overt optimism in the interpersonal attitudes of individual human beings but tacit optimism in the assumptions underlying the norms which are so important in shaping dominant middle-class behaviours. That optimism is going to be sorely tested in the coming decades, I think. And of course most people in the world, who lack the privilege currently associated with middle-class north americanness, are going to feel impacts a lot more severe than having to give up cherished delusions and entitlements.

At the same time, I believe that through doing we can create change. I have no idea whether the doing of which we are capable will be sufficient to deal with the problems at hand. Certainly the state of movement and community mobilization in North America at the moment is very low and quite depressing, but things are more lively in Europe and much more lively in Latin America, and the resistance to colonialism in West Asia is cause for encouragement even if progressive forces within that resistance are extremely weak. And anyone who has paid attention to the history of social movements, community organizing, popular uprisings, and the like knows that things can change very quickly and unexpectedly. So even though we are at a low ebb in Canada at the moment, it could easily be very different in a year or five, and that's only going to happen if we keep working away at what we can do at the moment.

Apocalypse

Another key feature of the analysis summarized at the top of the post is that it posits that environmental and social collapse are inevitable. I disagree.

In part, this difference is just another way of articulating the differences outlined above with respect to the second understanding of political pessimism -- "we can't do anything" versus "we might be able to do something, so let's see." But I think it goes beyond that. I think it also has to do with different understandings of how to deal with uncertainty about the future.

I would be the first to admit that making guesses about the future, even quite vague and general guesses, is a risky business. The world is an extremely complicated place. History has no iron laws of progress. All of my speculation above might turn out to be completely wrong -- perhaps we are early enough in global warming that mainstream reform will be sufficient to defeat it, perhaps enough oil reserves remain undiscovered that peak oil will not occur in my lifetime or other sources of energy will become just as cheap, perhaps unforseen factors will constrain U.S. militarism and allow it to slip quietly into decline, perhaps some unpredicted social factors will put radical social change on the agenda across the globe in unprecedented ways tomorrow or the day after. I don't think so, but perhaps. Because as far as I understand it, once systems reach a certain level and kind of complexity -- and you would have to work pretty hard to convince me that our social world is not this complex -- it is not simply a matter of needing more information to make better predictions, it is a matter that under certain conditions making predictions about what the system is going to do is not just practically difficult but theoretically impossible. There are limits, therefore, on the kinds and scope of predictions we can make about the social world.

Confidently predicting the apocalypse is, I would argue, beyond the bounds of what we can even theoretically do. Because that is not just predicting the general direction that complex social and environmental processes will take, which on its own is difficult enough and should always be done with a certain tentativeness, I think. Rather, it is actually predicting an outcome for those processes. Perhaps when Godzilla has already eaten half of Tokyo or a new plague has already wiped out a billion people or there are no cities in the world that do not see regular gun battles between ordinary people -- perhaps then we can predict that collapse is inevitable. But only perhaps. And as things are now, stating that collapse cannot be avoided is not an assertion that can be debated because it depends not on argument but on faith. Yes, there is an element of gut feeling and instinct and even faith in any projection about the future, but once you move from debate about processes to declarations about outcomes you have rendered discussion that does not have a central theological component next to impossible. I think lots of people who will be tempted by analyses such as the one with which I began the post will not see that they are entering the realm of theology, but I would argue that they are.

Quietism

So why bother talking about the future at all? Well, one of the things that interests me about the analysis I'm addressing here is how effectively it illustrates the ways in which our projections about likely futures influence our actions in the present.

By "quietism" I mean politics that are deliberately inactive or active in ways that are deliberately low-key and avoid high visibility, confrontation, active challenge, and any efforts to actually achieve new forms of social organization. I would distinguish this from ordinary liberalism because it is not based in liberalism's denial of how bad things are or in its illusions about the ability of liberal-democratic forms of social organization to fix things, but rather advances its program for (in)action on an entirely different basis.

In this case, I don't think the apocalyptic projections absolutely require the quietistic program in the present. In fact, I think you could make an argument for quite the opposite -- even if organizing was guaranteed not to ward off some sort of collapse, you could still argue it was necessary based on how the social processes leading up to collapse are likely to happen. In particular, based on my understanding of the last millenium of European and North American history, those with power are likely to use crisis of any sort as an opportunity to reinforce their own power. If the crisis is grave, the efforts to consolidate power by the powerful are likely to be correspondingly blatant and probably violent. So ordinary people would benefit from being organized to defend ourselves, and to push for a distribution of the horrible consequences of collapse that mitigated death and suffering among ourselves. So I don't think the assumption of guaranteed collapse has to mean that no serious organizing needs to happen, though it might make for a quite different focus than what I think is necessary right now.

However, even though the connection is not logically essential, I think accepting the inevitability of apocalypse would make it much easier for people who see the grave state of things to accept that we shouldn't be spending too much of our energy in the presnet actually doing much of anything. After all, why bother? I've made a case above for bothering anyway, but I still think lots of people would see no need. And for those of us who believe that change is possible, every person who disqualifies that possibility a priori is one more person whose energies will not go towards creating the better world that might, just might, be possible, which means social transformation becomes that little bit less likely.

This illustration of the dependence of present action on projected futures is more broadly important, too. The two projections of the future discussed in general terms here are far, far from the only two that exist. It is very easy for activists of my generation to flinch away from too much attention to explicit discussion of such questions, mostly because of witnessing the ridiculous polarization and sectarianism of our elders (and some of our contemporaries) based in part upon vicious arguments about projected futures. But I think this situation illustrates why flinching away is not an adequate solution to the problem. Yes, we need to be careful and avoid the pitfalls of needless ideological division, but we have to be able to talk about it, too.

I am, as I suppose this post and this blog more generally have already amply shown, not at all quietist in my outlook. I don't believe that collapse or any other dramatic endpoint of history is inevitable at this point. We, each and everyone of us, in every moment we are alive, in ways shaped by our location within social relations, shape tomorrow's history. I don't know how we will get there, and particularly in our current depressing moment in North America I am constantly returning in critical ways to the question of what I should be doing as an individual, what "we's" we should be trying to create, and what those "we's" should be doing as we form them. But one thing that I do not hesitate to declare strongly and without reservation is that if ordinary human beings do nothing, the future is not at all bright.

Petition to Oppose Provincial Support for Plunder of Indigenous Land

So it seems that the province is continuing to allow resource extraction on land that the federal government has conceded is the unsurrendered territory of the Mohawk Nation at Tyendinaga. Negotiations are ongoing between the Mohawks and the feds as to how to address this situation -- or at least this is nominally the case, though the federal reputation for obfustication and delay is legendary in cases of this sort -- yet the provincial Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty continues to allow the quarry company to literally truck native land away and profit from it. There is a petition asking that the province end this complicity in the plunder of at least this particular parcel of indigenous land.

I don't have a lot of faith in the power of online petitions to change much of anything. Nonetheless, because the energy investment is next to nill, I'm always open to signing one if I agree with it, and I agree with this one. The well-known Canadian leftists who have signed include such big names as Naomi Klein, Buzz Hargrove, Maude Barlowe, Sherene Razack, Avi Lewis, Judy Rebick, and more.

Here is the text of the petition:

We, the undersigned, are writing to urge the Province of Ontario to end its complicity in the theft and plunder of First Nations land. Specifically, we ask that the Province stop providing licenses for resource extraction from lands currently in the Federal land claims negotiation process.

Recent proposed changes to the Federal Specific Claims land claim process have been proposed and may expedite negotiations on some claims. The large majority however, will not qualify for the "fast track." While claims languish for years and even decades at Federal
negotiating tables, Provincial licenses continue to be issued for the very land and resources that are being talked about.

In 1995, the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte near Belleville, Ontario filed a specific claim for land known as the Culbertson Land Tract. In 2003, the Federal Government acknowledged that the Culbertson Tract had never been surrendered and was in fact Mohawk Land. It was not until late 2006 that negotiations for the return of these lands to Mohawk use and control began in earnest. Despite acknowledgment by the Federal Government that the Mohawks are the rightful owners of the Culbertson Tract lands, the Ontario Ministry of the Natural Resources continues to issue a provincial license to an Ontario company called Thurlow Aggregates. The license allows Thurlow to operate a quarry and the removal of 100,000 tons of gravel annually - or roughly 300 truckloads a month.

Although the Mohawks have repeatedly attempted to have the quarry license revoked while negotiations are underway, the Province continues to maintain that it has no jurisdiction to consider the fact that the Aggregate is on land currently under Specific Claim negotiations.

Conveniently, the Federal government maintains that it cannot deal with ongoing resource extraction because licensing is a provincial issue.

The positioning of the Feds and Province on the Culbertson Tract Aggregate is emblematic of a deceitful and shameful game of "hot potato" played over First Nations land and resources year after year all over Ontario and indeed the country.

If a homeowner suffered a home break-in and robbery, we would not expect him to allow the rest of his belongings to be removed, while, for the next 10 years or so, the value of the items already stolen were determined. Why then are such scenarios permitted when it comes to the Land Claims process?

Not only does it indicate bad faith in land claims negotiations, it is a needless instigator of conflict and confrontation. When negotiations allow such basic unfairness to continue, it can come as no surprise when First Nations people create physical impediments to halt resource extraction, as the Tyendinaga Mohawks have done through their ongoing occupation of the Culbertson Tract Aggregate.

We implore the Provincial Government to revoke the quarry license on the Culbertson Land Tract and thereby commit to negotiating land claims issues in good faith and to honest governance for all Ontarians.

We also strongly encourage the Federal and Provincial Governments to engage in meaningful dialogue to end the exploitation of First Nation lands and resources. We are aggrieved to say that the status quo appears to be a twenty-first century perpetuation of a dismal history of policy that has done great injury to First Nations people and communities.

Please sign it!