Review: 'No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit'

[Margaret Jane Hillyard Little. 'No car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit': The Moral Regulation of Single Mothers in Ontario, 1920-1997. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998.]

Moral regulation is one of those concepts that entered my consciousness sideways. I couldn't tell you where I first encountered it. I think it had at least partially seeped into my commonsense before I could've given you a halfway decent formal definition of it, and it is quite possible that I still think about related phenomena in ways that differ from those academics who make it the focus of their work. For me, it has been particularly important as a tool to talk about one important way in which struggles around sexuality and relationship practice intersect with a wide range of other struggles, but it certainly has broader applicability.

In the case of 'No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit', the focus is on moral regulation, including but not limited to sexuality, as part of the functioning of class oppression and the reproduction of patriarchal social relations. I went into reading this book with high expectations, and I was not disappointed. Little traces the 77 year history of Mother's Allowance in Ontario through exploring how it has actually shaped the lives of poor women, by looking at surviving case files for the earlier years and through extensive interviews with women who were on the system (as well as a few non-recipient advocates) for the most recent period.

Mother's Allowance originated in large part in organizing by middle- and upper-class women around their perception of the needs of poor women, though without any participation or consultation with the latter. This program broke new ground in important ways in that it represented the first regular, large-scale cash payment from the Ontario state to individuals, and it played an important part in the transition from the private welfare of the 19th century, oriented around charity and around very explicit and harsh determinations of the "worthy" and "unworthy" among potential recipients, to the supposedly rights-based public welfare systems that arose in the 20th century. However, it also served as a way for privileged women to become active agents and authorities in the public sphere -- a new development in that era -- in ways based on differentiating themselves from and otherizing poor and minority women. The amount of Mother's Allowance was never, at any point in its existence, adequate for a single mother and her children to live on, and most of those who lobbied for its creation never intended it to be. And though the form of moral regulation embodied in Mother's Allowance shifted over time, it never, contrary to the mythology, ceased to be a central component of the program's functioning.

In the initial years of the program, Mother's Allowance was conceived quite explicitly as the state paying certain women, who were without the support of a male breadwinner, for their labour in raising their children. Women needed to apply, and they were exhaustively investigated based on both financial and moral criteria. The primary beneficiaries initially were widows and women who had been abandoned by their husbands. Women who got pregnant outside of marriage were not eligible, and in fact were widely assumed to belong to the category "feeble-minded" in those years, and therefore unsuited to raise children. Among those who qualified, widows were scrutinized less stringently than women who had been abandoned, who seemed to have been under suspicion that perhaps they were to blame for their husband's departure. One expression of this much lower level of sympathy for abandoned women was that initially they were not eligible for support until seven years after their husband left them, and only if they and none of the friends, neighbours, and acquaintences contacted by investigators had any idea where the husband might be now. Women were expected to work part-time while caring for their children and receiving the allowance, but they were largely expected to do "women's work" -- they were not encouraged to work full-time or to engage in work that might facilitate their advancement and prosperity later in life, thus ensuring their continued poverty and/or dependence on a male breadwinner and helping to reproduce our gender segregated labour market. For many years, mothers with one child were not eligible, which seemed to mostly be about saving the Ontario treasury money.

Changes in Mother's Allowance were ongoing from its creation in 1920 until the Conservative provincial government of Premier Mike Harris abolished it in 1997. Some of these were changes in how the program was administered. Initially there were local volunteer boards supervised by a provincial board, which later shifted to an active role for municipal administrations, and later still to a purely civil service-based provincial approach to running things. Some had to do with eligibility, with a general trend towards increasing the proportion of single women with dependents who qualified and a gradual easing of the differential treatment for different categories of women. In the period of the growth of the welfare state after World War II, the rates did finally increase significantly, but the amount was never even close to enough to live on. The attitude of the program officials towards paid work also shifted -- there was an interval in the middle in which any paid work by the woman in question was frowned upon, but by the end of the program women were being encourage to work as much as possible, as soon as possible, with minimal consideration of the challenges involved in doing so while trying to raise children.

As I said, moral regulation was a persistent feature of Mother's Allowance in Ontario for its entire duration. This is in contrast with the liberal and social democratic illusion that the public, professionalized welfare state dispensed with the demeaning and intrusive character of 19th century charity-based welfare. This illusion is possible because the nature, location, and textual basis of moral regulation changed over time. Initially it was quite explicit in the legislation that to receive the allowance a woman had to be a "fit and proper person." This lead to the blanket exclusion of unwed mothers and to regular reporting on everything from how deferential recipients were to school and welfare officials to how clean their homes were to whether there was any hint of romantic relationships with men. (One of the most ridiculous contradictions in this era was that women were actively encouraged to get off the Mother's Allowance rolls by marrying, yet any hint of involvement with a man put their allowance at risk, so it was not clear how they were supposed to find someone to marry.)

In the years immediately before the program was discontinued in 1997, moral regulation worked very differently. Any explicit moral requirements to qualify for the allowance had long been expunged from its governing documents. Yet, somehow, there remained such requirements in practice, usually not with the broad focus of the early years but with more exclusive attention to women's sexuality. Often these forms of regulation were given financial justification but had clear moral elements.

For instance,

In keeping with the male-breadwinner ideology, the state is reluctant to financially support single mothers when fathers could do so. Consequently, there are a number of administrative procedures to track down or identify the male breadwinner, which involve intrusive investigation into a mother's intimate life. Single mothers often refer to these investigative procedures as 'manhunts'. These intrusive questionnaires and the time-consuming investigations conducted by state workers to identify and locate a male breadwinner are not cost efficient, especially given the low incidence of fraud. This suggests that there is more at stake than merely balancing the government's books. [173]

Similarly, moral scrutiny has often been at the heart of the informal, volunteer monitoring of women on social assistance by neighbours, landlords, teachers, fellow church members, and others. As well, women cohabiting with a man regardless of the character of their relationship or of his relaitonship to her children, were ineligible for the allowance except for a brief period in the late '80s and early '90s in which, under some circumstances, cohabitation was allowed for up to three years without automatic assumptions the he should be supporting her. Even that window, though, was not so much a space of liberation as a mandate for workers to be extremely intrusive in establishing exactly what kind of relationship the recipient had with the man in question. (Little reports that almost all of the women she interviewed talked about workers doing offensive things in investigating their relationships with men -- from inspecting their bathrooms for masculinity-associated grooming products to forcing one woman to try on her unisex winter boots to make sure they were really hers.) Women of colour, of course, were targeted even more harshly than white single mothers. And it should be noted that Little conducted her interviews before the attack on welfare recipients reached fever pitch in the mid- to late-'90s -- it is likely that the imperative to shrink the rolls at any cost made the moral scrutiny of women on assistance that much nastier.

I guess I have just two more points.

The first is how angry this all makes me. I am super touchy about things that I perceive as attempts to morally regulate me even when the actual coercive power behind them is minimal. I can hardly conceive of how awful it must be to face it under the threat of, "If you and your kids want to eat, you must...." Ghastly. I can only vaguely imagine what it was like for my partner's widowed great-grandmother raising her two sons on Mother's Allowance in the 1930s, or for one of my sisters during her time on general social assistance as a single mom in the years after Mother's Allowance was dismantled.

The other is to relate Little's conclusion that the renewed attack on poor people by the Ontario state reached its most intense levels under the Harris Tories (and continues largely unabated under Dalton McGuinty's Liberals) but its logics were initiated in important ways by Bob Rae's social democratic NDP government of the early '90s.

What these two things say to me is that however we balance pragmatic goals with radical vision, whatever we understand to be the potential for positive change based in the state form, the answers "vote for social democrats" and "restore the welfare to how it used to be" are simply not sufficient. To argue for those things without also having some kind of critical vision of how to move beyond their limitations is to accept a world in which the price of bread for some, particularly single women with children, is humiliation, subordination, and moral regulation.

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

Review: Ideologies of Welfare

[John Clarke, Allan Cochrane, and Carol Smart. Ideologies of Welfare: From Dreams to Disillusion. London: Hutchinson, 1987.]

This book examines the approaches of several key political traditions to social welfare issues at three different moments in the evolution of the British welfare state. It looks at liberalism (in its classical, "new" quasi-Fabian, and reborn Thatcherite variants), Fabianism (a kind of top-down, planning-based, idealistic, school of thought that grafted itself onto the Labour Party quite early on and that combined both "new liberal" and socialist elements, somewhat similar to the League for Social Reconstruction that existed in Canada in the '30s and '40s), feminism, and socialism, and it does this both by summarizing some of the key aspects of each in the authors' voice but also by presenting extensive excerpts from primary texts by thinkers in those traditions in each era. It does not present a detailed history of the evolution of the British welfare state but it does draw some attention to the quite different ways that each tradition related to state practices over time.

If my book project was about the British context, this would be an extremely useful resource because it is both an overview and a way to access key primary sources. Its actual relevance to me is a bit less obvious, given that I am currently preparing to write about the Canadian welfare state, but of course Canadian political culture has always existed in dynamic relation with the British and U.S. scenes, and this area is no exception. The point of closest contact is perhaps the report issued by Sir William Beveridge in 1942. That document was the blueprint for the post-World War II British Labour government's creation of the modern welfare state in that country in the course of a single, five-year term of office. In Canada, the welfare state that resulted after World War II was quite a bit more partial and was created over about 20 years, with certain differences in organization from its British counterpart. Nonetheless, the Beveridge Report was tremendously influential in Canadian circles during and just after the war.

The other eras covered by the book map less closely between the U.K. and Canada than the post-WWII moment. Certainly the meaningful challenge to the hegemony of laissez-faire liberalism that had begun in Britain by the first decade of the twentieth century was not matched in Canada, which was still in the process of industrializing at that point. And the onslaught of neoliberalism has had quite different trajectories in the two countries, though the general trends are much the same.

The relative weight and complexion of the ideologies discussed in this book have existed in some crucially different ways in the two countries as well. There seemed to be different elements of tone and emphasis in British feminism in the three eras compared to what I would expect in the Canadian context, though much basic underlying similarity. The post-WWII welfare state in Britain might be described as Fabianism that was dominant and that cloaked itself in more socialistic garb than it ever actually embodied at its heart, and that had distinctively "new liberal" origins and outcomes; whereas in Canada the compromise was actually the push that caused liberalism to jump the way from its classical origins to "new liberalism," in large part by cherrypicking key ideas from the Canadian equivalent of the Fabians (the League for Social Reconstruction and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation). And Canada has never really had as much of a tradition of socialist discourse on the welfare state that was clearly non-Fabian, non-Communist Party, and interested in making practical policy suggestions, or at least only more recently and quite sporadically. I thought the socialist (and feminist) contributions from the most recent era were actually among the most interesting material in the book because of their emphasis on making the welfare state more participatory, more based in community control, more deliberately aimed towards prefiguring a new society rather than towards preserving current social relations.

Anyway, it's a book that I think only people with quite specific interests will want to read, but in that context it is a valuable resource. And, no, I don't know whether the author who bears the name of "John Clarke" is the same one who has been an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty for many years -- he did move to Canada from England and I have no idea what he did before he emigrated, but it is not an uncommon name, either.


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

Chomsky on Education

A great clip from an old talk by Noam Chomsky wherein he answers a question about the role and nature of education:



I'd maybe quibble with some of the details of what he says -- I think his characterization of Japanese society is too monolithic and a bit orientalist, for instance. But his basic points about education are bang on.

(Found via radio free school.)

Review: Women and the Canadian Welfare State

[Patricia M. Evans and Gerda R. Wekerle, editors. Women and the Canadian Welfare State: Challenges and Change. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.]

Social policy analysis tends to be pragmatic and oriented towards solutions. Feminist social policy analysis is both of those things plus it tends to be much more successful than the mainstream to which it is attached at keeping attention on politics and power, at least in certain respects.

Social policy analysis is also predicated, in ways that usually don't get spelled out, on particular sets of practices to enact change and assumptions about the kinds of change that are desirable, possible, and necessary. This organizes and limits social policy discourse in important ways, so there are all kinds of things that cannot be addressed or that it is nearly impossible to deal with in a politically adequate or satisfying way.

In reading this book, however, I found my thoughts not drawn to the practical incremental strengths or unavoidable limits of its answers so much as to the way that both point towards problems that all strands of the left have a long way to go in addressing plausibly.

Women and the Canadian Social Welfare State is fairly standard feminist social policy analysis produced in the moment when neoliberalism triumphant was still something new for Canada. Overall, I would describe it as solid though dated. There is still useful history, useful statistical data, and useful analysis. There is a call and a preliminary attempt to try and wrap feminist social policy around the tidal wave of neoliberalism that had been rising in Canada since at least the early '80s, perhaps since the early '70s, but that crested in the federal Liberal budget of 1995 and the Conservative election victory in Ontario shortly thereafter. There is detailed attention given to housing issues, migration policy, pay equity, the uses of constitutional entrenchment of social rights, long-term care, work, unions, and more. Unfortunately, though I think there are serious limits to the extent to which social policy discourse can be transformed by a radical recognition of the intersection of oppressions along multiple axes and still be recognizable as social policy discourse, it is understating the case to say that this collection fails to push the limits of what might be possible in that regard.

Three specific essays are worth mentioning. The first is "The State and Pay Equity" by long-time Canadian Marxist feminist Pat Armstrong. While it raises some important criticisms of Ontario's 1987 pay equity legislation, it seems that the main point of the piece is to attack a somewhat caricatured and almost completely unexplained understanding of academic "postmodernism" and associate it with the practical political problems that can come with attention to specificity and with a particular kind of skepticism towards the state. While there is value in pointing out how some lefty academics, including some feminists, have been enticed by high theory to lose any grounding they might have had in actual struggles against oppression and exploitation, the complete disregard for the ways in which attention to specificity and skepticism of the state can and do flow from the experiences of people who are actively in struggle and are not just a matter of all of us being hoodwinked by ivory tower frauds is a bit shocking.

On the positive side, I particularly liked "Challenging Diversity" by Patricia Daenzer, which talks about the history of organizing by Black women in Ontario around the welfare of their communities, and which defends the choice by some Black women in the '90s to organize around separate, racially or ethnically focused services. I also liked Sue Findlay's "Institutionalizing Feminist Politics," which again looks at the struggles around Ontario's pay equity legislation but in a way that concretely illustrates how engagement with state practices can organize and regulate the politics of feminists even as they struggle for important reforms.

The book itself points towards the ways in which social policy discourse and related activities are limited as a strategy for improving the lives of ordinary women and men. I'm thinking particularly of the first and last of the entries written by non-editors. In the first, Marjorie Griffin Cohen puts quite bluntly in her opening sentence the impact of the neoliberal shift: "Social policy as a progressive force has been more or less dead in Canada for the past ten years" [28]. There are different ways to talk about what she's pointing to, but it amounts to a description of neoliberalism. That is, for a period of time, not beginning in Canada until the middle of World War II, technical descriptions of collective need accompanied by careful, practical programs crafted to address some of that need while minimally disturbing the overall shape of social relations and often by a certain kind of public pressure were taken up by state relations and (usually partially) implemented. The reasons for this had to do with fear of revolution or socialist electoral challenge, Cold War politicking, the unprecedented (and probably not-repeatable) scale of economic expansion after WWII, a particular openness to central planning in the wake of the war effort, and, for some at least, a genuine interest in doing what was possible to meet needs without rocking the boat too much. Many of those circumstances have changed, and state relations no longer respond to the combination of technically-framed, limited, practical, needs-focused social policy discourse (with or without mostly symbollic public pressure) in the same way. There is infrastructure that has developed around producing that discourse, and so, despite the recognition that such discourse is no longer taken up in the same way, it still gets produced.

She doesn't take it this far herself, but it seems to me that Findlay's essay at the end of the book points not just to the ways in which the neoliberal shift has rendered social policy discourse much less useful than it used to be, but to the inherent limits in reform-focused engagement with the state even in its more social democratic moments. Her focus, as I said, is describing in detail a particular instance in which feminist politics were shaped in ways detrimental to the interests of women by reform-oriented engagement with the state. The ways in which certain strands of state-focused feminist anti-violence work have developed in relation to broader trends in state practices around policing and "law-and-order" reforms is another example. However, there are lots of other limits to approaches that are state-focused and that concentrate on meeting need while leaving social relations largely unchanged -- the inability of this approach to respond adequately (or, often, even see) domestic colonization, its dependence on wealth generated through historical and contemporary colonial relations on a global scale, its inevitable lacing of its redistributive function with oppressive regulatory functions, and others.

But -- and I ask this out of my own political interests rather than on because it is dealt with by the book at all -- what exactly is that current of folks who are both anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian to do? Though there is a superficial appeal to the idea of building non-market, non-state, collective approaches to addressing need in the present, this answer -- or, at least, its most glib version -- runs afoul of another aspect of the needs in question that should be obvious but that it is often easy to forget: their sheer magnitude. We have no answers, not even plausible experiments and proposals, for how to address need across millions of people in ways that are non-state, non-market, yet socialized in terms of their burdens and participatorily democratic in terms of their governance. What does it even mean to have a socialized response to need and suffering that isn't based in the state? Particularly the essay on long-term care in this volume made it clear to me that, while there is value in collective efforts in the present that try to do things in non-state, non-market ways, it is easy for anti-authoritarians to overestimate the political significance of such efforts -- which is to say, the vast majority of activity that happens in our society to meet human needs is already not directly organized by either state or market and is mostly done on an unpaid basis by women, and shifting more labour to that often invisible space is potentially a serious political problem. Sure, small scale collectivization of the labour can help us prefigure and experiment in building the models that we want in our future, but on its own it suffers from one of the same basic problems as social democracy: it denies market relations access to a corner of our lives, but it leaves them otherwise unchallenged and, depending on how it is done, it may reinforce patriarchal social relations.

Anyway. I feel like I've veered rather spectacularly off the course of reviewing this book, so I think I will stop soon. I feel like this book has, quite without intending to, left me in the middle of contradictions that I feel unable to do much with. Despite our skepticism of the state, we (meaning the anti-authoritarian left) cannot abandon or even stop pushing for expansion of the welfare state because there is nothing that currently exists on even close to that scale which can address key human needs, except perhaps the market but that is even worse. Neither can we be satisfied with the welfare state -- we have to challenge its regulatory aspects, ceaselessly draw attention to its dependence on predation, and attempt to radically democratize it. And somehow we must begin to think/talk/act about need, both in the context of struggles related to the welfare state and in the context of developing radical alternatives, in ways that refuse to isolate attention to meeting it from attention to how it was caused in the first place.


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

Sudbury Event on Canadian Foreign Policy

Check out this media release for an event by Sudbury Against War and Occupation happening on September 21st:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Email: sudburyawo[at]gmail.com

CANADA ON THE WORLD STAGE: A FORCE FOR GOOD OR A BAD ACTOR?

SUDBURY, ONTARIO, September 15, 2009 – On Monday, September 21, 2009, Sudbury Against War and Occupation will host author Yves Engler, who will give a talk and audiovisual presentation taking apart popular myths about Canada's role in the world. This talk will be based on his new book, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (Fernwood Books Ltd., Halifax). The event will take place in the 4th floor resource centre of St. Andrew's Place, 111 Larch Street, Sudbury, at 7 pm.

The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy is the first critical overview of Canada's role on the world stage. While most Canadians believe their country's primary role has been as peacekeeper or honest broker in difficult-to-solve disputes, the book cites hundreds of examples of colonialism, racism, naked self-interest and willing participation as a policeman for the British and then American empires. World renowned intellectual and social critic Noam Chomsky has written, "Yves Engler's penetrating inquiry yields a rich trove of valuable evidence about Canada's role in the world."

Here are the top ten things Engler thinks you may not know about Canadian foreign policy:

10. On dozens of occasions since 1915 Canadian gunboats have been deployed to the Caribbean and Central America.
9. Canada has been the fifth or sixth-largest contributor to the U.S. war in Iraq.
8. Ottawa asked London for its Caribbean colonies after World War I.
7. Days after elected President Salvador Allende was overthrown, Canada's ambassador to Chile called victims of dictator Augusto Pinochet's repression the “riffraff of the Latin American Left.”
6. In a number of countries Canadian “aid” has been used to rewrite mining codes to the benefit of Canadian mining companies.
5. Canada had between 250 and 450 nuclear-armed fighter jets based in Europe in the 1960s.
4. Washington did not press Ottawa to break relations with post-revolution Cuba because it wanted Canada to spy on the island.
3. Throughout Pierre Trudeau's time in office and before, Canadian companies were heavily invested in apartheid South Africa.
2. Canada helped depose Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, one of Africa's first independence leaders, who was then killed.
1. Many commentators, including the world's leading intellectual, Noam Chomsky, consider Lester Pearson a war criminal.

Sudbury Against War and Occupation is a group of Sudbury residents concerned with all forms and consequences of war and occupation. The organization started in early 2007 to object to Canadian support for and involvement in the ongoing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. They have also been active in supporting the struggles of indigenous peoples in North America and in opposing the occupation of Palestine.

For an advance interview in French or English and information about the book, contact Yves Engler at yvesengler[at]hotmail.com. For more information about Sudbury Against War and Occupation please email sudburyawo[at]gmail.com.

Please come out and have a listen if you are in the area! (For the FaceBook event, click here.)

Big Rally Against Queer Bashing in Thunder Bay

A little more than a week ago, there was a vicious instance of gay bashing in Thunder Bay. This week there was a rally in Thunder Bay in support of the victim, Jake Raynard, with participation estimated variously at 1200, 1300, and more than 1500.

This sort of violence is awful on many levels. It is a trauma and a tragedy for the person who was bashed and those who know and love them. It can reverberate harshly through the psyches of so many other people, who are forced by it to wonder every day whether this or that manifestation of differing from an oppressive "normal" is going to be the one that gets met with hateful, violent, vigilante enforcement of that oppressive "normal." It is a sad reminder that struggles against oppressions experienced by queer people did not end with the coming of state recognition of a particular subset of queer relationships in the form of same-sex marriage.

It is important to support Raynard's decision to be vocal about his experience. In doing this, he is refusing the intended regulatory effect of this kind of violence, and that kind of refusal is an important moment in resisting more collectively the many forces that push in ways both subtle and gross, both seductive and punitive, for conformity to oppressive norms. I am also just blown away by the size of the event in support of Raynard -- I don't know Thunder Bay at all, but it is a northern Ontario city around the same size as Sudbury, and getting that many people out to an event of that sort here would be amazing. So that is quite heartening.

Here are two videos, the first about the event...



...and the second a statement released a few days before by Raynard himself.



Anyway, I don't feel like I'm very well placed in multiple ways to intervene too directly in the discussions about how to respond to this incident and others like it. However, I have to admit to being concerned with the emphasis that appears more or less explicitly in some of the linked material on increased policing as a solution. I certainly understand why many people, particularly those of us with relative class and racial privilege, have an impulse to turn towards the police as a social response to reprehensible violence like this. However, the ways in which the police are often experienced by people who have been most marginalized by racism, by poverty, by anti-trans oppression, by all sorts of intersecting nastiness, should compel us to make our discussions of the appropriate social response to violent instances of oppression more broad ranging and complex. See, for instance, this statement produced by a number of organizations predominantly composed of queer and trans people of colour in New York City. The details of the political context to which it is responding are quite different, of course, but it gives a taste of some of the issues involved, and they are certainly not irrelevant to life in northern Ontario.

(Thanks to SK for the first link, to My journey with AIDS for the links to the rest of the news articles and the videos, and to a vaguely remembered FaceBook post by AS from six months ago for the idea to search out the last link.)

Demand Local Company Stop Crossing Steelworker Picket Lines

Whether you live in Sudbury or not, please take a few minutes and let this company, Day Construction, know that their blatant disrespect for the rights of working people will not be tolerated. An email I received today:

This morning Day Construction is starting to cross the Steelworkers picket line to remove ore so that the company can circumvent the men and women of Local 6500. This is a disgusting display of profits before people. Vale-Inco is trying to see what kind of resistance they will get from the community and from Local 6500.

We need to prove to day construction that scabbing in Sudbury is unacceptable. Also, the ore is going to be hauled out of Sudbury by CP rail we also need to let CP rail know that if they touch that nickel they're as dirty as the scab management from Day Construction.

I've e-mailed you all because we need to be calling Day Construction to let them know that they can`t touch that nickel that was mined by unionized workers.

705 682-1555 ext.249 Just tell the secretary that you want to leave a message for management. Or e-mail the president of the company at, william.day@daygroup.ca

Please show your support for striking workers and your opposition for this distressing example of profits being put before people.

Review: Private Lives, Public Policy

[Jane Ursel. Private Lives, Public Policy: 100 Years of State Intervention in the Family. Toronto: Women's Press, 1992.]

In the last several years, over the course of writing reviews (or, really, responses) to quite a number of books, I have become increasingly convinced that it makes much more sense to relate to books as interpenetrating puzzle pieces than it does to treat them, as some on the left do, as thrusts and parries in some sort of intellectual political combat.

Which isn't to say that pointed and emphatic commentary is never appropriate. It also isn't to claim that I never get on a roll and go overboard saying critical things rather than exploring that which is useful. And most especially it is not favouring a kind of mushy pluralism when it comes to analysis, as some devotees of "correct line" politics might claim. Rather, it is an approach that starts from how little we really know and how we need to wring whatever insight we can from every available source. It understands knowing as a process that happens where we are, a journey in which our vantage at every moment is invariably situated and partial. Even the most troubling and flawed account of the world or some phenomenon within it may have have insights to offer.

Note that I'm not recommending relating books to one another in simply additive ways -- I'm not dismissing "A or B" in favour of "A and B." Rather, the "interpenetrating" part of the image above is meant to get across the idea that B may transform your reading of A and vice versa -- it may shift what you think is valuable, what you retain for your own analysis, what you actively read into a slightly different frame, all that stuff. Your reading of B may reach deep into your understanding of A, and yank it around by a quarter of a turn. But where you have ended up still required both A and B.

I raise what may appear to be a strangely abstract point about reading strategies because it is particularly relevant to my experience of this book. There are a number of things about this book that are, based on the place it is coming out of, quite predictably present and politically limited/limiting. Yet it remains a very important book that deserves to be one piece of any significant synthesis around themes of Canadian history or the Canadian present.

Private lives, Public Policy is an examination of the development of the welfare state in Canada. It looks to build on a number of sources: Canadian, male-dominated, political economy Marxism and its accounts of the welfare state which examine only the relevance of production; older Marxist feminisms which admit the relevance of both production and reproduction but tend to subordinate the latter to the former in accounting for change and often reduce patriarchy to capitalism; and older radical feminisms which admit the relevance of both production and reproduction but tend to subordinate the former to the latter and often reduce capitalism to patriarchy. This book takes the position that both the productive and reproductive spheres are relevant, and that capitalist social relations and patriarchal social relations exist and interact yet are not reducible to each other. Ursel's thesis, in fact, is that the best explanation for how the Canadian welfare state developed was as part of ongoing attempts to mediate between contradictory pressures exerted by the capitalist imperative to maximize the utilization of human beings in the productive sphere as part of accumulation, and those exerted by the patriarchal imperative to advance and control reproduction. In tracing this history, part of her intent is to develop a historical sense of the possible range of relationships that the state can have to feminist struggle -- when is it potentially a tool, and when is it only a danger?

The areas where I find the above lacking are, as I said, pretty predictable. The book's rooting in political economy Marxism, for instance, carries with it the tendency of that tradition to underemphasize the role of struggle in driving processes of historical change and to see far too much historical agency in the hands of elites. It also, despite its stated intent to materially ground analysis, also tends to reify what it is talking about, sometimes in ways from which a careful reader can decode what a given generalization likely means in terms of actual people engaging in actual actions, but not always. Also, while this book takes an important step in its commitment to analyzing history in ways that see capitalist and patriarchal social relations as having both extensive autonomy and extensive interaction, it stops there -- while there are occasional minor references to race, nation, sexuality, and colonization, none of these things are analyzed as axes for relations of oppression and resistance the way that capitalism and patriarchy are. Sunera Thobani's Exalted Subjects illustrates the crucial importance of relations of oppression and resistance along axes of race, nation, and colonization in understanding the ways in which the Canadian welfare state developed (though it too omits much discussion of relations of heterosexism). This lack in Ursel's book not only results in a partial picture of the welfare state, but also leads to evaluating the possibilities for feminist use of the state with an incomplete set of data -- i.e. one that doesn't attend to the role of the Canadian state in the ongoing colonization and genocide of indigenous peoples, and in relations of white supremacy more broadly.

Yet with all of those things laid out on the table, this is still a very important book that delivers some very important insights. It distinguishes among different modes of patriarchal relations (that is, different forms of domination in the context of relations of reproduction), which are tied to different relations of production. Communal patriarchy, in which production and reproduction were largely the same, involved the organization of society largely through kinship systems. In this mode in European history, women were not necessarily subjected to the authority of an individual patriarch, but women in general became subordinated to male decision-making about reproduction. As class societies developed, primarily in the form of feudalism in the European context, patriarchy shifted to a familial mode -- individual women subjected to the authority of individual men who were legally supported in their near absolute control over their dependents. Finally, the rise of industrial capitalism was interrelated with a shift to social patriarchy.

In the feudal/familial mode, there was significant coincidence of interest between patriarchal control of reproduction, which was decentralized, and class control of the means of production (i.e. land), which was highly centralized. Both benefited from rigid male control of large families. However, with the rise of industrial capitalism, the individual patriarch's control of the family was undermined in significant ways because he no longer controlled access to productive resources; rather, employers did. Capital was driven to wring the most productive use out of any bodies it could gain access to, yet this had the effect of disrupting the patriarchal family as it had existed to that point, and also threatened capital in the long term because it ultimately depends on labour being reproduced. This has lead to a number of different phases of activity in the context of the Canadian state, which Ursel traces through looking at shifts in in family law, labour law, and welfare law at the federal level and in Ontario and Manitoba. She describes four different periods: pre-WWI, 1914-1939, 1940-1968, and, in a less rigorous way, the era since then. The welfare state represents social patriarchy, in which many of the legal mechanisms enforcing individual subordination of women have been removed but socialization of many of the costs and much of the regulation of reproduction amounts to a socialization of patriarchy. In the neoliberal era, of course, the state is attempting to reprivatize many of the costs of reproduction, and at least some elements are pushing for a return to a strengthened familial patriarchy.

My brief summary hasn't done the argument justice and it is worth digesting in full. It is certainly a piece worth adding to your puzzle, worth transforming and being transformed by. And I just have a couple of parting comments beyond that. One is to reiterate that the conclusions the book draws about the state are skeptical about its potential as a potentially liberatory social form, but not nearly skeptical enough, because certain key evidence on the question is simply not considered. The other is to reflect on the faintly pessimistic taste that the book left in my mouth. It's probably just a product of the tendency I mentioned above of political economy analysis to make it look like all power and all possibility for initiative rests with capital, but accepting the world this book describes at face value does not give one a lot of hope that pushing for a break with the logics of exploitation and patriarchal domination might be possible. Yet I suppose that often enough with left books this sort of hope is another of the things that must be read in from other sources.


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

Review: Identity, Place, Knowledge

[Janet M. Conway. Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social Movements Contesting Globalization. Halifax: Fernwood, 2004.]

I like this book. Not only does it focus on important social movement activities that happened near the coordinates of some of my own early activist involvement -- just before and just north -- it also is a wonderful example of an activist using the academy as a resource to reflect on what she has been a part of. Not all of the strands of academic knowledge that she draws upon are ones that I would prioritize, but most are, and I agree emphatically that some of her key questions are absolutely crucial ones for us to address.

The book is based on an ethnographic study of the Metro Network for Social Justice between 1992 and 1997. In those years, the author was also a central organizer of the network. Conway frames the MNSJ in these years with reference to origins in the anti-free trade organizing of the late '80s and the very beginning of the '90s, and its role in incubating sensibilities that burst to prominence with the anti-globalization/global justice movement in 1999. By examining concrete practices within the MNSJ, particularly those related to identity and knowledge production, she makes an excellent case for the existence of local resistance to neoliberalism in the pre-Seattle years in the North and for understanding the largely Ontario-based tendency to form labour-community coalitions in the '90s as an important laboratory for exploring and implementing new ways of doing social change work.

I said above that I see this as an excellent example of activist use of the academy. However, that is something that always contains contradictions, and this book is no exception. In saying that, I am not meaning to criticize the author -- it is inevitable to a greater or lesser extent when you work in the academy because there is an obligation to ground what you are doing in what has gone before in ways that can't help but import knowledge shaped by imperatives other than those that guide social movements. But, sometimes, that is worth it.

One example of this is the way the book engages with the strands of academic literature that the author has selected as relevant. There is something about the way that was done in this book that seems to me to embody at least the remnants of how such things are done in academic lit reviews for dissertations. It has lots of great stuff and covers lots of important ground, but there is something buried in how it is organized that is about performing a particular kind of awareness of previous writing for a committee rather than allowing the author to be more completely oriented towards appropriating academic knowledge production for activist purposes.

This engagement with academic strands of knowledge production covers a lot of ground, some that I find very useful and some that I am less interested in. One that I have trouble seeing as useful, for instance, is a strand of social movement studies literature that understands social movements as expressions of collective identity. I can understand how you can do this but I don't get why you would want to. If you understand "identity" to mean something like a changeable/changing but potentially stable self-understanding which is produced where self and social (or agency and experience) interact, then seeing social movements in this way isn't unreasoanble. However, I worry about the tendency for "identity" language to easily devolve into talking about it as if it is a thing -- it seems to me that choosing different language that keeps agency and experience visible might be a bit more cumbersome but also politically safer.

Another way she engages with social movement studies literature is a discussion of its "cultural turn" -- that is, a turn to understanding movements with reference to ideas from cultural studies. I think cultural studies has neat things to offer and am glad she talks about it. If this gives people who are thinking about social movements a way to theorize the importance of the micro-scale processes (material and discursive) which constitute movements and, for that matter, constitute the world, and the ways in which social movements are also exercises in intervening in those processes, well, that's good too. It doesn't necessarily seem like the most direct route to get there, though, and it sounds like at least some people who are taking this approach are also arguing that it reflects a relatively recent trend in practices within social movements, which seems to me to be a bit of a misreading of older movements, or at least an overstatement. Regardless, my reservations about these first two areas are not really about where Conway takes them, I don't think, but are based on the fact that they start from mainstream academic social movement studies, which, at least in its classic forms -- resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory -- I've never found terribly politically interesting or useful for actually understanding social movements.

The second central theme of the theory Conway engages with, as represented by the title, is "place." I'm really interested in radical geography and its ways of talking about spaces as socially constituted, and I'm glad this book starts there. I'm less sure that the framework of "urban movements" is particularly useful, except in that it gives access to the literature about a certain class of movements that uses that language. And I think the use of "world city" literature is also quite clever. It gives access to discourses that have a certain mainstream currency and that can talk about spatial and social organization in ways that are not blinded by the ungrounded primacy given to the state form in lots of academic and activist discourses.

Related to her discussion of place is an interesting discussion of the problem of scale, and how to talk about different scales of the social world when we write about it and how to intervene across different scales as movements. It doesn't come up with any magical answers, but even the act of exploring how to talk about material practices at a local level and their engagement with local expressions of extralocal social and discursive organization of varying origins and scales is important. Interestingly, it feels like where Conway ends up with this resembles rather a lot the alternative sociology known as institutional ethnography, even though she appears to get there by a route that doesn't refer to that approach at all, aside from a couple of references to Himani Bannerji's work. It is also possible that I see a stronger similarity than actually exists because the things I find most interesting about both approaches are similar, and perhaps the less-central-to-me elements are not so much the same.

The final theme area in the title is "knowledge," and that is expressed by an examination of a number of theories of knowledge that are very relevant to activist practice in general and my own interests in particular. Conway identifies epistemological practices of the New Left era (which were largely unarticulated at the time), feminist standpoint epistemologies, and approaches to pedagogy that draw on the work of Paulo Freire and the many people inspired by him.

The substance of the study focuses on a particular activist network in Toronto in the 1990s, the MSJ. She gives a very grounded description of the political context in Ontario in those years. One of my first non-student political involvements was with one of the labour-community social justice coalitions of which the MNSJ was the largest and most sophisticated example. I don't think I had really realized the ways in which such coalitions as default elements of the activist scenes of many communities were in some ways a phenomenon quite specific to Ontario in the '90s. I also never appreciated the ways in which their politics emerged from earlier anti-free trade struggles, which this book emphasizes.

The MNSJ emerged most immediately from a specific struggle against threats to funding for social services in the Metro Toronto municipal budget in 1992. It then became a permanent coalition, involving for many years heavy involvement by paid staff not only from the Toronto Labour Council but also from a number of government-funded social service agencies. At its height, more than 250 organizations belonged, a long with individuals. In the period in question, the organization's activities tried to balance campaigns around defending social services, both through lobbying and protest, with a commitment to base-building and popular education work focused on what they called "economic and political literacy."

Conway goes into some detail about the practices of the organization. She talks about the challenges of coalition politics, particularly involving such unavoidably unequal partners. There is a very interesting discussion about anti-racism in the context of the coalition -- there were always people of colour on the steering committee and there was a commitment to anti-racism by many of the core activists, but she argues that the social base of the coalition remained largely white because of a tendency to apply anti-racist analysis to a certain subset of practices of the organization but not to critically examine the political content of the coalition's work. She argues that the ways in which it prioritized the "economic" and focused on defending the welfare state failed to resonate with the particular ways in which communities of colour were impacted by and mobilizing around neoliberalism at the same time. She talks about how underlying a lot of what the network did was a theoretical grounding, often just implicit, in the kind of political economy work that has served as the default basis for a lot of the English Canadian left for several decades, but that there were a variety of efforts to complexify and expand this in the years under study.

The particular interest of the book is the MNSJ's economic and political literacy work. This was the area of work in which Conway herself was more active. She also presents a convincing case that it was the strong presence of this base-building, popular education-oriented work that gave the MNSJ a particularly interesting character in the years under study -- resources were devoted to short-term fightback campaigns too, but particularly after the neoliberalizing budget of the federal Liberals in 1995, many activists in the MNSJ recognized the need for a longer term strategy to respond to neoliberalism. She also sees the knowledge production and pedagogical activities of the network as one key element that made it possible to transcend, modestly and sporadically, the limits of lowest common denominator coalition politics, and that pointed towards a path by which a more lasting transcendence could have occurred.

It was, among other things, tensions surrounding the economic and political literacy work that lead to some intense conflict within the network and that essentially ended the period under study. It was, apparently, a tension that existed throughout the MNSJ's existence, with ongoing differences of opinion about where best to sink resources: long-term focused pedagogy and knowledge production work, or immediate fightback work. It felt weird to be reading that account, like it evoked a conflict of some kind within me as well. I think that had to do with the fact that because of my own connection to Ontario activism in the '90s, I can completely get how polarized those two tendencies could become, how they could appear to be necessary opposities (even though she emphasizes that it isn't really that simple). At the same, it feels like a tragic division to me -- that we will never get anywhere unless we have both, and the critical thing is not balancing them, which is how she mostly talks about it, but combining them. Which, on a certain level, this book recognizes, though Conway is (quite properly) unabashed about having a partisan involvement in those conflicts. Anyway, it just seems to me that there is more to be said to have a full exploration of this tension. Yes, there were elements that styled themselves as "radical" that were probably acting on certain outmoded assumptions about power, on a misunderstanding of the magnitude of mobilization that was possible at the time, and that embodied certain icky masculinist assumptions about what it means to be "radical." On the other hand, I suspect that some (certainly not all, and not this author) of the pro-pedagogy camp were working from troubling assumptions too -- a class-privilege inspired devaluing of a long-term oppositional relationship to the state, for instance, and an understanding of explicitly pedagogical activities that bled into left-liberal (implicit) theories of social change rather than more movement oriented ones.

What is perhaps most interesting about this book is the way in which it speaks to the dilemmas that social movements face today, despite some significant shifts both since the period under study and also since the period when the book was written. This includes things like our lack of capacity, and the importance but difficulty of long-term, participatory, pedagogically transformative knowledge production work in a kind of tension with the importance of mobilizing at the level of events or campaigns around more obviously confrontational moments. As well, she talks about the fact that the (white) left in 1990s Toronto was struggling to find a compelling vision for change and for the future, with the betrayals of social democracy in the form of the Ontario NDP government, the fall of state-based so-called socialism, and the massive triumphs of neoliberalism all feeling so new and fresh. Unfortunately, that sense of a lack of direction is just as present today in many centre left and radical left spaces in Canada. We can see inspiring examples of efforts in the Global South that give us hope for the existence of alternatives with varying orientations towards the state, but in North America we are still struggling to find a resonant way to counter the neoliberal dictum that "there is no alternative." Perhaps the greater emphasis on movement-based knowledge production and pedagogy recommended by this book would be a step in the right direction.

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