[Martha C. Nussbaum. Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.]
I'm approaching this book from a specific place, with specific intent and interests, so I need to say right off the top that there are some things about it that I find interesting and useful, but other aspects that I just would not, no matter how well or poorly they were done.
The goal of this book is to explore the existing and appropriate roles for emotion in the social world, particularly with respect to the law. It focuses specifically on disgust and shame, but also presents more abbreviated discussions of fear and anger. It explores how each of these emotions is put together, and takes the approach that each is not just an affect -- a state of feeling -- but that each has cognitive content. The shape and kind of cognitive content is specific to each emotion, and Nussbaum argues that it is this cognitive content that determines how best to relate to it when it comes to the law.
For instance, she says that the common law tradition is predicated on the relevance of fear and anger to the making and the application of law, even if such is not commonly acknowledged. She says that law as it exists only makes sense if you accept that it is reasonable for human beings to fear certain things -- like being assaulted or robbed -- and to be angry at certain things -- like having a loved one murdered. Law is, in some very basic ways, a social response to the importance and validity of those emotions. Anger and fear are not necessarily but can be reasonable and rational and useful pointer towards harm that has happened and actions that can be taken in response. She argues in contrast that disgust, and in a more limited way shame, have cognitive content that is sufficiently frequently not reasonable or rational -- social manifestations of disgust, for instance, are often based on "magical thinking" and things like contamination by association -- and so are not ever (disgust) or in many situations (shame) a good basis for making law.
I find this book's talk about the social relevance of emotion to be reasonably interesting. I'm intrigued by the idea of emotions having cognitive content, and that its specific shape varies with the emotion in question. I was a bit disappointed with its specific take on shame as it draws rather more heavily than I was hoping, and much more heavily than its take on any of the other emotions, on the psychoanalytic tradition. It does say that it is also basing it on other things, like experimental psychology, but it does not draw those epistemological connections very explicitly. Still, despite my wariness of psychoanalytic knowledge, this account of shame did feel somewhat more grounded than some I have previously encountered.
The book loses my interest, however, with its heavy focus on relating these understandings of emotion to liberal-democratic theory and to liberal-democratic legal systems. I certainly see some value in understanding the law as it currently exists, so the connections drawn with emotion are interesting in that regard, but generally I don't think liberal-democratic theory is the best place to start to really get a good understanding of the law. Or a good understanding of much of anything. The only reference to traditions other than the liberal-democratic one is to what it calls "communitarianism," which it associates with particular contemporary, mostly conservative, theorists in the United States. The text feels no need to make any reference to the more critical traditions that I am more interested in when it comes to understanding the social world. Because of this, I think it's important to hold onto its theorizing of the social relevance of emotion quite tentatively, given that particular assumptions embedded in liberal-democratic theory about how the social world works and is put together, and about the state, are likely silently incorporated. There was also no discussion of the many powerful ways in which social regulation, including social regulation related to emotion, happens that are not directly dependent on law.
So this book has some limited usefulness to me, but lots of other content that holds little interest, and an overall framework much different from anything I would be tempted to use. I would say, then, that it is only worth reading if you, too, have a specific interest or piece of work to which it is relevant.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Friday, October 22, 2010
Risks in an Anti-Austerity Focus
I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be facing the austerity agenda that currently looms so large across the globe. In particular, I've been thinking about what it means for acting in the specific kind of context that I happen to be in. I've come to the conclusion that the most obvious responses available to us might end up further marginalizing people who are already the most marginalized, but I'm not quite sure what to do with that observation.
The reasons for this issue being on my mind should be obvious. In the lead-up to the G20 summit in Toronto this past June, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney predicted a global "age of austerity." Sure enough, this summit of the leaders of the world's most powerful states ended with a communique endorsing the slash-and-burn approach. There was a moment in 2008 and 2009 when neoliberalism, and even capitalism, were open for questioning, with the automatic granting of their claims to legitimacy faltering even in the mainstream, in ways not seen in at least a generation. Yet despite this opening, and despite the fact that elites have failed to fully recussitate neoliberalism's mainstream legitimacy, it continues to lumber forward -- "zombie liberalism," some have called it. That is what this austerity agenda is: the same neoliberalism that has dominated elite politics for the last three decades, with any novelty coming from the increased intensity with which it is being applied and the fact that it is happening all over the world in a somewhat more coordinated way than before. There has already been lots of resistance -- the nearly constant turmoil in Greece; a recent Europe-wide day of trade union action (which, admittedly, some radicals were skeptical of); the current massive wave of strikes and demonstrations in France; and the efforts by radicals to push British unions to act more quickly and more resolutely in the face of attacks on ordinary people far more severe than anything Margaret Thatcher ever accomplished, by the new Liberal-Conservative coalition government.
It is my sense that things are not quite as stark in Canada, though I have not seen anything directly comparing the early stages of implementing austerity in Canada to other places. To the extent that this is true, I suspect it has to do with the fact that the crisis that is being used across the globe to shift wealth from ordinary people to the rich and powerful (and to reorganize social relations in other ways) hit Canada more mildly than most other countries. It may also be connected to the specific political situation at the federal level -- I suspect the Conservatives know that if they were to go beyond the piecemeal patriarchal, racist, anti-poor programmatic nastiness that has characterized their years of minority government into a fullscale implementation of the sorts of socially conservative-inflected neoliberal awfulness that I know fills their dreams, they would promptly face an election in which the Liberals would win a majority government. At which point the Liberals would then implement all of the same neoliberal awfulness, with a bit less of a socially conservative inflection.
Yet despite the fact that this intensified neoliberalism seems to be happening in a somewhat more muted way in Canada, it is still happening -- things like Ontario's Liberal government implementing wage restraint and taking money out of the hands of poor people. Because of personal connections, I have a window into some of the ways that intensified neoliberalism is playing out in the broader public sector, specifically in universities, where it is meaning pressure to make all kinds of little changes in how things get done that are adversely impacting working conditions and learning conditions. I expect this is true a lot more broadly. I also expect that we will face years of this kind of attack, which ordinary people will have no choice but to resist in whatever ways we can.
I wrote earlier this year about at least one aspect of the political environment in Sudbury, and though certain specific events have shifted since then I think my overall analysis is still applicable. That is, Sudbury exhibits stark social divisions and plenty of instances of oppression and exploitation, and there is the inevitable resistance to this in everyday and individual ways, via informal mutual aid, and via certain kinds of dispersed or institutional collective expressions that are not focused on mobilization. As I concluded in that earlier post, "despite all of that, struggle mostly does not -- in this place, in this moment -- tend to be public, collective, and based in ordinary people mobilizing."
I think this is true in a lot of smaller communities in Canada. And this means that as austerity hits, by and large we do not have vibrant networks of ordinary people who have tools to translate their moments of everyday resistance and refusal into collective action.
So what does our response look like, then?
Well, it might not look like much of anything at all -- it might mean more and worse moments eliciting everyday resistance, but nothing that becomes collectively visible. More likely, though, there will be some instances where it does bubble forth in particular ways into collective expression. Take two recent Sudbury examples: existing organizations that did not have a default orientation towards mobilization and activism responded by shifting, in crisis, to more confrontational modes of doing things. The examples I'm thinking of are the massive, year-long mining strike that ended in defeat earlier in 2010, and the current strike by administrative, office, and technical staff at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The former was not in response to the intensification of neoliberalism that gets labelled "austerity" but to neoliberal shifts in the global organization of the mining industry, but it is still a useful example, while the latter very much is about public sector neoliberalism (though it is politically important in the context of that struggle to understand that in a nuanced, not a flat, way).
In both of those instances, happening as they are in a socially divided community in which collective struggle is largely decomposed at the moment, activists from beyond the directly affected organizations have come together in support. We haven't done so quickly enough, in sufficient numbers, or effectively enough, but people have done and are doing things. In fact, the presence of such struggles provides those of us who have energies for social change not taken up exclusively by our own unchosen struggles with an answer to the question of what to do that is obvious and important. Such answers will, I suspect, become increasingly common in the next couple of years, and it would be relatively easy for activists with such discretionary energy to find their time completely taken up by such responses to austerity.
On a certain level, this makes perfect sense. Resisting intensified neoliberalism is important. Generally speaking, struggles that become collective and visible in the Canadian context today are going to need all the support they can get in order to win. And supporting those struggles that reach this stage in a generous way could be absolutely crucial to creating an environment in which diverse struggles become more clearly linked and in which collective and confrontational moments of struggle begins once more to circulate more generally through society. This, in turn, could release collective energy that advances many different sorts of struggles.
It becomes more complicated, however, when you think about where these struggles are most likely to occur. That is, given the lack of any already-composed, mobilization-focused spaces, groups, or movements of any size -- in Sudbury and in many centres across Canada -- it will be mainly among relatively privileged people that resistance is able to take this form. It will be unionized workers. It might be other constituents of organizations in the broader public sector, like universities. And, well, I'm not sure who else. What other groups in Sudbury and similar centres will be able to mount timely, collective, confrontational, and at least potentially effective resistance when austerity threatens their interests, given the current state of decomposition of movements?
Saying that does not make such struggles any less important. But it does invite the question of whose moments of everyday struggle, under these circumstances, are unlikely to find the same kind of collective and confrontational expression, and therefore receive little or no attention from activists with some discretionary energies to expend. What about tenant struggles? What about people on social assistance? What about struggles grounded in the experiences of survivors of misogynist or anti-queer violence? What about low-wage, precarious, service sector workers? What about people of colour? In a very white corner of the country like Sudbury, such struggles are unlikely to be responsive in any direct, meaningful way to the experiences of people of colour, even though some people in the worker or student or whatever organizations that are pushed into struggle by intensified neoliberalism will certainly be people of colour. So in investing our energies and attentions largely in struggles by constituencies that are already relatively privileged and already have some sort of organizational expression, even if that is not a mobilization-focused one outside of moments of crisis, we are further marginalizing struggles by people who are starting from already-more-marginal places. We are making choices about who and what matters, and those struggles that lose out in this choice-making are those that are already most likely to lose out.
So what do we do? I don't know. I mean, when there's a strike, you support the strikers -- that's politically imperative, and we shouldn't not do it.
I also know what I think needs to happen. I think there needs to be concerted, deliberate, anti-hierarchical organizing -- organizing understood not as getting people to be passive members of some organization, but organizing understood as working with people to co-create collective ways to engage in struggles that already permeate everyday lives -- with a long-term, basebuilding approach. In Sudbury, I think such work could be very effective with an anti-poverty focus or an environmental justice focus, and others probably would have some traction as well. (I think there might also be space for new kinds of indigenous-lead, indigenous-specific political work, but I have much less of a sense of what might be appropriate or possible in that regard.) I think this kind of work might allow for resistance to intensified neoliberalism that would be much more responsive to the experiences of people who are already more seriously harmed by it. But I know that myself and the small group of people with whom I regularly do political work here do not have the capacity, and perhaps do not have the skills, to make this happen. I would happily plug into such work in a subordinate way if it were already happening, but it isn't.
So I don't have a solution, or at least I don't have one that I've figured out how to act on. But I still think it is essential to see beyond the temptation that I'm sure will be present in the coming period to focus exclusively on overt, collective conflict related to austerity. We must continue to figure out how to engage with and support struggles that are no less crucial but that do not have the structural advantages that make the path to collective, confrontational expression a short and obvious one.
The reasons for this issue being on my mind should be obvious. In the lead-up to the G20 summit in Toronto this past June, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney predicted a global "age of austerity." Sure enough, this summit of the leaders of the world's most powerful states ended with a communique endorsing the slash-and-burn approach. There was a moment in 2008 and 2009 when neoliberalism, and even capitalism, were open for questioning, with the automatic granting of their claims to legitimacy faltering even in the mainstream, in ways not seen in at least a generation. Yet despite this opening, and despite the fact that elites have failed to fully recussitate neoliberalism's mainstream legitimacy, it continues to lumber forward -- "zombie liberalism," some have called it. That is what this austerity agenda is: the same neoliberalism that has dominated elite politics for the last three decades, with any novelty coming from the increased intensity with which it is being applied and the fact that it is happening all over the world in a somewhat more coordinated way than before. There has already been lots of resistance -- the nearly constant turmoil in Greece; a recent Europe-wide day of trade union action (which, admittedly, some radicals were skeptical of); the current massive wave of strikes and demonstrations in France; and the efforts by radicals to push British unions to act more quickly and more resolutely in the face of attacks on ordinary people far more severe than anything Margaret Thatcher ever accomplished, by the new Liberal-Conservative coalition government.
It is my sense that things are not quite as stark in Canada, though I have not seen anything directly comparing the early stages of implementing austerity in Canada to other places. To the extent that this is true, I suspect it has to do with the fact that the crisis that is being used across the globe to shift wealth from ordinary people to the rich and powerful (and to reorganize social relations in other ways) hit Canada more mildly than most other countries. It may also be connected to the specific political situation at the federal level -- I suspect the Conservatives know that if they were to go beyond the piecemeal patriarchal, racist, anti-poor programmatic nastiness that has characterized their years of minority government into a fullscale implementation of the sorts of socially conservative-inflected neoliberal awfulness that I know fills their dreams, they would promptly face an election in which the Liberals would win a majority government. At which point the Liberals would then implement all of the same neoliberal awfulness, with a bit less of a socially conservative inflection.
Yet despite the fact that this intensified neoliberalism seems to be happening in a somewhat more muted way in Canada, it is still happening -- things like Ontario's Liberal government implementing wage restraint and taking money out of the hands of poor people. Because of personal connections, I have a window into some of the ways that intensified neoliberalism is playing out in the broader public sector, specifically in universities, where it is meaning pressure to make all kinds of little changes in how things get done that are adversely impacting working conditions and learning conditions. I expect this is true a lot more broadly. I also expect that we will face years of this kind of attack, which ordinary people will have no choice but to resist in whatever ways we can.
I wrote earlier this year about at least one aspect of the political environment in Sudbury, and though certain specific events have shifted since then I think my overall analysis is still applicable. That is, Sudbury exhibits stark social divisions and plenty of instances of oppression and exploitation, and there is the inevitable resistance to this in everyday and individual ways, via informal mutual aid, and via certain kinds of dispersed or institutional collective expressions that are not focused on mobilization. As I concluded in that earlier post, "despite all of that, struggle mostly does not -- in this place, in this moment -- tend to be public, collective, and based in ordinary people mobilizing."
I think this is true in a lot of smaller communities in Canada. And this means that as austerity hits, by and large we do not have vibrant networks of ordinary people who have tools to translate their moments of everyday resistance and refusal into collective action.
So what does our response look like, then?
Well, it might not look like much of anything at all -- it might mean more and worse moments eliciting everyday resistance, but nothing that becomes collectively visible. More likely, though, there will be some instances where it does bubble forth in particular ways into collective expression. Take two recent Sudbury examples: existing organizations that did not have a default orientation towards mobilization and activism responded by shifting, in crisis, to more confrontational modes of doing things. The examples I'm thinking of are the massive, year-long mining strike that ended in defeat earlier in 2010, and the current strike by administrative, office, and technical staff at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. The former was not in response to the intensification of neoliberalism that gets labelled "austerity" but to neoliberal shifts in the global organization of the mining industry, but it is still a useful example, while the latter very much is about public sector neoliberalism (though it is politically important in the context of that struggle to understand that in a nuanced, not a flat, way).
In both of those instances, happening as they are in a socially divided community in which collective struggle is largely decomposed at the moment, activists from beyond the directly affected organizations have come together in support. We haven't done so quickly enough, in sufficient numbers, or effectively enough, but people have done and are doing things. In fact, the presence of such struggles provides those of us who have energies for social change not taken up exclusively by our own unchosen struggles with an answer to the question of what to do that is obvious and important. Such answers will, I suspect, become increasingly common in the next couple of years, and it would be relatively easy for activists with such discretionary energy to find their time completely taken up by such responses to austerity.
On a certain level, this makes perfect sense. Resisting intensified neoliberalism is important. Generally speaking, struggles that become collective and visible in the Canadian context today are going to need all the support they can get in order to win. And supporting those struggles that reach this stage in a generous way could be absolutely crucial to creating an environment in which diverse struggles become more clearly linked and in which collective and confrontational moments of struggle begins once more to circulate more generally through society. This, in turn, could release collective energy that advances many different sorts of struggles.
It becomes more complicated, however, when you think about where these struggles are most likely to occur. That is, given the lack of any already-composed, mobilization-focused spaces, groups, or movements of any size -- in Sudbury and in many centres across Canada -- it will be mainly among relatively privileged people that resistance is able to take this form. It will be unionized workers. It might be other constituents of organizations in the broader public sector, like universities. And, well, I'm not sure who else. What other groups in Sudbury and similar centres will be able to mount timely, collective, confrontational, and at least potentially effective resistance when austerity threatens their interests, given the current state of decomposition of movements?
Saying that does not make such struggles any less important. But it does invite the question of whose moments of everyday struggle, under these circumstances, are unlikely to find the same kind of collective and confrontational expression, and therefore receive little or no attention from activists with some discretionary energies to expend. What about tenant struggles? What about people on social assistance? What about struggles grounded in the experiences of survivors of misogynist or anti-queer violence? What about low-wage, precarious, service sector workers? What about people of colour? In a very white corner of the country like Sudbury, such struggles are unlikely to be responsive in any direct, meaningful way to the experiences of people of colour, even though some people in the worker or student or whatever organizations that are pushed into struggle by intensified neoliberalism will certainly be people of colour. So in investing our energies and attentions largely in struggles by constituencies that are already relatively privileged and already have some sort of organizational expression, even if that is not a mobilization-focused one outside of moments of crisis, we are further marginalizing struggles by people who are starting from already-more-marginal places. We are making choices about who and what matters, and those struggles that lose out in this choice-making are those that are already most likely to lose out.
So what do we do? I don't know. I mean, when there's a strike, you support the strikers -- that's politically imperative, and we shouldn't not do it.
I also know what I think needs to happen. I think there needs to be concerted, deliberate, anti-hierarchical organizing -- organizing understood not as getting people to be passive members of some organization, but organizing understood as working with people to co-create collective ways to engage in struggles that already permeate everyday lives -- with a long-term, basebuilding approach. In Sudbury, I think such work could be very effective with an anti-poverty focus or an environmental justice focus, and others probably would have some traction as well. (I think there might also be space for new kinds of indigenous-lead, indigenous-specific political work, but I have much less of a sense of what might be appropriate or possible in that regard.) I think this kind of work might allow for resistance to intensified neoliberalism that would be much more responsive to the experiences of people who are already more seriously harmed by it. But I know that myself and the small group of people with whom I regularly do political work here do not have the capacity, and perhaps do not have the skills, to make this happen. I would happily plug into such work in a subordinate way if it were already happening, but it isn't.
So I don't have a solution, or at least I don't have one that I've figured out how to act on. But I still think it is essential to see beyond the temptation that I'm sure will be present in the coming period to focus exclusively on overt, collective conflict related to austerity. We must continue to figure out how to engage with and support struggles that are no less crucial but that do not have the structural advantages that make the path to collective, confrontational expression a short and obvious one.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Quote: Movement Intellectual as 'Conscious Wolf Man'
[W]e have to face the reality that intellectuals can be more easily co-opted by the status quo and may not have much at stake if they withdraw from the movements. Given these considerations, elsewhere I argue that the intellectual should see him/herself as a "conscious wolf man," rather than a movement leader. The conscious wolf man is aware of his capacity to cause harm; therefore, before the full moon, he tries every means to avoid causing fatal damage. He constantly reminds people around that he might betray them and helps them learn all of his expertise and skills so that the people can carry on with their struggles after he eventually betrays. This metaphor of conscious wolf man illustrates the role of intellectuals in the movement is not to lead, but to constantly empower more people to build their analytical capacities, avoiding the possibilities of inflicting a vital wound on the movement up on their future betrayal.
-- Hsiao-Chuan Hsia
(p. 116 in "The Subjectivation of Marriage Migrants in Taiwan: The Insider's Perspective," pp. 101-118 in Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor, editors. Learning From the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. References in original.]
Monday, October 11, 2010
Social Relations, Struggle, Affect, Shame
I think it says something about the political culture in many left-ish spaces in North America that politicized investigation of emotion might need to be extensively justified to be seen as "legitimate" and "serious" activity. Despite corners of interesting work on affective dimensions of social movements (e.g. see here), I think that need to explain and justify is common enough that, as much as I don't like it, I think I should probably do it.
As I've explained before, there are a few broad clusters of interest that I've decided to explore in leisurely ways in reading and writing now that my movement history project no longer dominates my time in quite the way it did for many years. The way I described these clusters originally was something like this: history/race/gender/nation, taking action (in both everyday and more collective senses), popular culture, and sexuality/gender/relationship practice/shame. Talking about them in this way is arbitrary and artificial because they aren't actually distinct like that -- I can't imagine thinking or talking about any of these clusters without talking about things like race and gender and capital, for instance, even though I don't name those in each and every one -- but they have been provisionally useful to me in organizing various choices about how to focus my activities. How these clusters of interest might translate into larger writing projects remains to be seen, but I have various nascent ideas about how that could happen.
You'll notice that in one of those clusters, one of the elements that I name is shame. All I've written about it so far is a single book review, and not a particularly good one at that, but more are on the way. And in that first one I largely glossed over the question of how it is a topic that fits in with the rest of the writing that appears on this site -- the connection feels obvious to me, but I suspect this is not widely the case, and given the common occurrence of skepticism or puzzlement about the importance of seeing a connection between affect and radical social change, I thought I'd talk about it a little more explicitly.
I think the place to start is to revisit material I've talked about lots over the years on this site and in other writing and give a quick back-of-the-envelope sketch of how I understand the social world to work.
So.
Our social world is organized in particular ways, not random. As each of us move through our days, our choices are constrained and regulated by the other people with whom we co-create our immediate, local environment. And we and those around us have our activities organized in extra-local ways by both identifiable written texts and somewhat more amorphous clusters of ideas/discourse/ideology, both of which get any social force they have through people taking them up and acting on them. An example: A police officer on traffic duty has their activities organized by particular sets of legislation, regulation, and policy (not to mention by past urban planning choices), and their actions, in turn, impinge on and regulate ours as we drive through the city. Our desire to be safe ourselves and to keep others safe and the common acceptance of certain rules to organize traffic are often enough to keep our actions organized by those same rules, but the presence of individuals whose activities are organized around intervening punitively in response to violations of those traffic regulations also plays a role in shaping how people choose to take up and act on traffic rules. But that's not all. Though in important respects it is a product of other, deeper aspects of the social organization of police work and not a product of individual agency at all, when this officer stops someone for "driving while Black", they are also acting in the space that people have to make choices as they activate specific texts. As well, they are taking up and acting on longstanding elements of the discourses that organize racist social relations that identify Blackness with danger and criminality. In so doing, the cops help to reproduce in material ways the division of people into groups based on racialization, and differences in power and privilege. That is one of a million small but material ways that every moment of our everyday lives are socially organized, which in turn add together to produce and reproduce the broader strokes of current social relations, dividing humanity into groups, oppressing some, privileging others, exploiting many, and giving extreme power to a few.
Our selves, our subjectivities, are produce by those experiences. At the same time, our choices in taking up the texts/narratives that organize our lives, in making use of the space we have for agency, comes out of that socially produced sense of self. That doesn't erase choice, but it is a way in which the power of the social world to shape us has duration, and it is not just the social of the current moment that matters.
Given this picture, it feels obvious to me that emotion, affect, structures of feeling -- I'm still sorting out how to talk about it all -- can be socially produced and are intimately a part of projects of ruling and of struggles for justice and liberation.
An obvious example is fear. There are times and places where fear is deliberately cultivated as part of social control, whether that is the crude fear of overtly repressive regimes, or the somewhat more sophisticated fear of terrorism cultivated by Western states as part of getting their populations to accept particular agendas (along with the fear that the national security apparatus of those states, including the Canadian state, have at moments instilled in domestic Muslim populations). Fear is also an element of maintaining oppressive social relations in more distributed, less obviously centrally decided, ways -- the specific terrors inflicted by white people on Black populations in the Jim Crow south, for example, or the fear of gender-based sexual and physical violence that regulates the space for making choices for many women (and queer and trans people). Fear of not knowing where your next meal will come from, fear of having your children taken from you, fear of rape, fear of humiliation, fear of losing your job -- not necessarily deliberately planned or centrally coordinated, though often preventable and allowed to exist or even actively propagated in a dispersed kind of way by those who benefit from them, and definitely integral to the "how" of power-over, whatever mechanism by which the fear is produced.
That's kind of a quick-and-dirty account done off the top of my head, and I'm sure there is much more depth and nuance to the role that fear plays in our social relations, but it is enough to be an example of what I mean, I think.
So what about shame, then? How does it happen? What do its origins look like/feel like in individual experience? How is proneness to it in individuals or groups socially produced? Who does it happen to? How does it get mobilized in the service of power, in the maintenance and reproduction of oppression? What about resistance -- does it ever have a role there? Those are the questions I want to explore.
All of which invites a further question: Why shame? Why not fear or anger or arrogance or sorrow? Partly it is an arbitrary choice, since I think it makes sense to think through issues of the role of emotion with a concrete example in mind, and it is not the only one I'm interested in -- for instance, I think there are multiple, often mutually contradictory, ways in which North American movements don't have good ways of thinking about and dealing with anger and I'm sure I'll come back to thinking and talking about that. However, a more complete answer is probably an obvious one: Shame has rather more of an impact on me personally than I would like, in a bunch of ways, and not only is that rather an unpleasant state of affairs, it also sometimes gets in the way of sound political practice and certain kinds of choices about writing. And that just will not do. A friend suggested that one useful response, given how I move through the world anyway, might be thinking about it a bit more deliberately and theoretically, and then writing about it. So here I am.
As I've explained before, there are a few broad clusters of interest that I've decided to explore in leisurely ways in reading and writing now that my movement history project no longer dominates my time in quite the way it did for many years. The way I described these clusters originally was something like this: history/race/gender/nation, taking action (in both everyday and more collective senses), popular culture, and sexuality/gender/relationship practice/shame. Talking about them in this way is arbitrary and artificial because they aren't actually distinct like that -- I can't imagine thinking or talking about any of these clusters without talking about things like race and gender and capital, for instance, even though I don't name those in each and every one -- but they have been provisionally useful to me in organizing various choices about how to focus my activities. How these clusters of interest might translate into larger writing projects remains to be seen, but I have various nascent ideas about how that could happen.
You'll notice that in one of those clusters, one of the elements that I name is shame. All I've written about it so far is a single book review, and not a particularly good one at that, but more are on the way. And in that first one I largely glossed over the question of how it is a topic that fits in with the rest of the writing that appears on this site -- the connection feels obvious to me, but I suspect this is not widely the case, and given the common occurrence of skepticism or puzzlement about the importance of seeing a connection between affect and radical social change, I thought I'd talk about it a little more explicitly.
I think the place to start is to revisit material I've talked about lots over the years on this site and in other writing and give a quick back-of-the-envelope sketch of how I understand the social world to work.
So.
Our social world is organized in particular ways, not random. As each of us move through our days, our choices are constrained and regulated by the other people with whom we co-create our immediate, local environment. And we and those around us have our activities organized in extra-local ways by both identifiable written texts and somewhat more amorphous clusters of ideas/discourse/ideology, both of which get any social force they have through people taking them up and acting on them. An example: A police officer on traffic duty has their activities organized by particular sets of legislation, regulation, and policy (not to mention by past urban planning choices), and their actions, in turn, impinge on and regulate ours as we drive through the city. Our desire to be safe ourselves and to keep others safe and the common acceptance of certain rules to organize traffic are often enough to keep our actions organized by those same rules, but the presence of individuals whose activities are organized around intervening punitively in response to violations of those traffic regulations also plays a role in shaping how people choose to take up and act on traffic rules. But that's not all. Though in important respects it is a product of other, deeper aspects of the social organization of police work and not a product of individual agency at all, when this officer stops someone for "driving while Black", they are also acting in the space that people have to make choices as they activate specific texts. As well, they are taking up and acting on longstanding elements of the discourses that organize racist social relations that identify Blackness with danger and criminality. In so doing, the cops help to reproduce in material ways the division of people into groups based on racialization, and differences in power and privilege. That is one of a million small but material ways that every moment of our everyday lives are socially organized, which in turn add together to produce and reproduce the broader strokes of current social relations, dividing humanity into groups, oppressing some, privileging others, exploiting many, and giving extreme power to a few.
Our selves, our subjectivities, are produce by those experiences. At the same time, our choices in taking up the texts/narratives that organize our lives, in making use of the space we have for agency, comes out of that socially produced sense of self. That doesn't erase choice, but it is a way in which the power of the social world to shape us has duration, and it is not just the social of the current moment that matters.
Given this picture, it feels obvious to me that emotion, affect, structures of feeling -- I'm still sorting out how to talk about it all -- can be socially produced and are intimately a part of projects of ruling and of struggles for justice and liberation.
An obvious example is fear. There are times and places where fear is deliberately cultivated as part of social control, whether that is the crude fear of overtly repressive regimes, or the somewhat more sophisticated fear of terrorism cultivated by Western states as part of getting their populations to accept particular agendas (along with the fear that the national security apparatus of those states, including the Canadian state, have at moments instilled in domestic Muslim populations). Fear is also an element of maintaining oppressive social relations in more distributed, less obviously centrally decided, ways -- the specific terrors inflicted by white people on Black populations in the Jim Crow south, for example, or the fear of gender-based sexual and physical violence that regulates the space for making choices for many women (and queer and trans people). Fear of not knowing where your next meal will come from, fear of having your children taken from you, fear of rape, fear of humiliation, fear of losing your job -- not necessarily deliberately planned or centrally coordinated, though often preventable and allowed to exist or even actively propagated in a dispersed kind of way by those who benefit from them, and definitely integral to the "how" of power-over, whatever mechanism by which the fear is produced.
That's kind of a quick-and-dirty account done off the top of my head, and I'm sure there is much more depth and nuance to the role that fear plays in our social relations, but it is enough to be an example of what I mean, I think.
So what about shame, then? How does it happen? What do its origins look like/feel like in individual experience? How is proneness to it in individuals or groups socially produced? Who does it happen to? How does it get mobilized in the service of power, in the maintenance and reproduction of oppression? What about resistance -- does it ever have a role there? Those are the questions I want to explore.
All of which invites a further question: Why shame? Why not fear or anger or arrogance or sorrow? Partly it is an arbitrary choice, since I think it makes sense to think through issues of the role of emotion with a concrete example in mind, and it is not the only one I'm interested in -- for instance, I think there are multiple, often mutually contradictory, ways in which North American movements don't have good ways of thinking about and dealing with anger and I'm sure I'll come back to thinking and talking about that. However, a more complete answer is probably an obvious one: Shame has rather more of an impact on me personally than I would like, in a bunch of ways, and not only is that rather an unpleasant state of affairs, it also sometimes gets in the way of sound political practice and certain kinds of choices about writing. And that just will not do. A friend suggested that one useful response, given how I move through the world anyway, might be thinking about it a bit more deliberately and theoretically, and then writing about it. So here I am.
Monday, October 04, 2010
Striking in a Time of Austerity
The following is a piece I wrote on the strike by staff at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, originally published here. In the brief period since the piece was published a tentative agreement has been reached, though it is still unclear whether the workers will accept it. For an overview of the struggle, read on... [[EDIT Oct 12: Members of OPSEU 677 Unit 2 rejected the tentative offer by a vote of 76.8% and the strike continues...]]
Striking in a Time of Austerity: The NOSM Strike in Northern Ontario
by Scott Neigh
The 150 members of Unit 2 of Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 677 have been on strike since August 16. The office, technical, and administrative workers at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) went on strike after almost a year of negotiations to try and achieve a first collective agreement. NOSM is affiliated with both Laurentian University in Sudbury and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and has campuses as part of both universities; other members of the striking local are located in Timmins and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
At the forefront of the struggle are basic quality-of-work and quality-of-life issues. But lurking in the background are larger questions of how workers in the broader public sector and their employers will position themselves with respect to the austerity agenda declared with such fanfare by world leaders at the G20 summit in Toronto in June, and affirmed in this year's federal and provincial budgets by the Harper and McGuinty governments.
The solidarity activism that this strike has sparked on the Laurentian University campus may be a nucleus of the kind of coalition politics that will be required to win both the bread-and-butter struggles and the broader political challenges that the labour movement faces at this moment.
Contesting Arbitrary Management
Tyler England, President of Unit 2 of Local 677 and chair of its bargaining committee, says that all the workers want is a “fair and respectful first collective agreement.” Wages are one of the issues that remain outstanding. But of greater concern to the workers throughout the strike has been enshrining some fairly standard protections in a binding contract rather than leaving them subject to arbitrary management decisions.
For instance, management is seeking the right to transfer workers between sites. Unit 1 of Local 677, which represents faculty, library, and professional employees at NOSM, already has a collective agreement which protects members from such transfers. The staff in Unit 2 want to be similarly assured, says England, that management will not be “forcing them to move their lives or no longer have a position with the organization.”
Workers are also seeking language protecting them from being shifted from their usual 9-to-5 schedule to evening and weekend work with little notice and no overtime pay. This would be particularly onerous for members with childcare responsibilities, which remains disproportionately women in 21st century Canada.
Contracting out is another hot issue. In the past, when workers have left, management has sometimes refused to fill vacant positions and instead used workers from temp agencies. England said: “We want to keep these as good paying, full-time jobs with good benefits” rather than allow them to be shifted piecemeal to part-time or casual positions with few or no benefits.
Workers are also seeking general language around management rights that requires that they be exerted in “reasonable and respectful” ways, according to England. He said this is standard language in many collective agreements, and it allows members greater flexibility to grieve unreasonable requests from management. Additionally, it was only in the last session of bargaining (several weeks into the strike) that management gave up its attempt to exclude the existing benefit plan from the collective agreement, which would have left it vulnerable to arbitrary changes.
Framing the Strike
There can be no doubt that this strike about bread-and-butter issues and workplace dignity is also a strike that is about neoliberalism. Yet, in this dispute and in the many other struggles sure to erupt as the austerity agenda is implemented, it is important for those of us acting in support to be careful how we draw such connections. A rich understanding of neoliberalism that foregrounds the everyday experiences of the ordinary people struggling against it can be an important tool for building a broader movement; a sparse, simplistic pointer to some abstract common enemy can actually undermine our efforts.
Early in the NOSM strike, management was quite active in drawing links to what those of us on the left would see as manifestations of neoliberalism and austerity. In particular, they situated the strike in the context of the wage restraint policies being forced onto the broader public sector by Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government in Ontario. Wage restraint and other forms of public sector cutbacks are sources of growing concern and focuses of organizing for unions and communities in the province. So it is understandable that, early on in the strike, this way of linking it to broader issues had significant purchase for many pro-labour people in Sudbury. After all, it seemed to connect this local struggle with many other struggles across Ontario and around the globe.
However, there are a number of serious problems with this rhetorical move by management, and with its partial adoption by some people wishing to support the strikers. For one thing, it paints a misleading picture of what the strike is about. An emphasis on wage restraint in talking about the context centres the issue of wages in public attention, even though wages are not the central concern for most of those on the line. Moreover, it invites the standard anti-union lie that public sector workers are “greedy” and “spoiled,” rather than making it clear that they are trying to protect themselves from the prospect of very real hardships. It creates space for patronizing narratives like those that have appeared occasionally in the local media about evil union bosses who have deluded workers and made them pawns in some larger battle, a story which depends on and reinforces the erasure of the local and specific issues that brought the members of Local 677 out. And, finally, one of the biggest advantages of this frame for management is that it makes it seem like an unwinnable struggle – it paints management as making the best of a bad situation, as powerless before the provincial government, and the union as unreasonable. That is, it invokes Margaret Thatcher's ghost by repeating one of the foundational deceptions of neoliberalism: “There is no alternative.”
There are plenty of reasons, therefore, to seek a way to connect this strike to larger issues that refuses to erase all of the ways that it is about ordinary people resisting impositions on their everyday lives. At the most basic level, doing so is more representative and respectful of the realities of those walking the line. It shows they are not greedy, they are not dupes, they are simply standing up for some basic elements of security and dignity. It is also more likely to evoke public sympathy. It makes it clear that many of the key questions are not centrally about wages, so management does in fact have space to accept solutions that are fair for the workers. And it provides a concrete approach to understanding connections to larger struggles and building solidarity that is grounded in the shared experiences of different groups of workers on campus, students, and many, many people in the broader community.
University Responses
Key actions by the Laurentian University[1] administration in response to the strike seem to be designed to keep those kinds of connections from being made.
For instance, the Laurentian administration has made statements to the effect that the strike has nothing to do with the university and that NOSM is a completely separate entity. While it is correct that the medical school has a separate governing board from either of the universities with which it is affiliated, the implication that they are substantially separate is misleading, even deceptive. Academic matters at NOSM are officially governed by the academic senates of Laurentian and Lakehead (and a joint committee between the two), and it is considered the Faculty of Medicine of those institutions. The only text on NOSM's logo is the words “Lakehead,” “Laurentian,” and “Medicine.” The presidents of Laurentian and Lakehead are chair and vice-chair of NOSM's board, and the respective universities have a heavy influence over decisions made by that body, including a right to override NOSM board decisions in some circumstances. As well, the universities derive significant prestige from having the medical school, and frequently use its accomplishments in promoting the broader university.
Laurentian University also told returning students that Local 677 had guaranteed a free flow of traffic into the university. While negotiations around a picket line protocol are ongoing, the union is quite clear that no guarantees have been made. The lines have generally been oriented around the distribution of information but traffic has been significantly delayed on some days.
Supporters of the union on campus interpret these moves by the administration as attempts to cultivate a mindset among campus users, perhaps especially among younger students who may be less aware of the realities of the situation, that the strike has nothing to do with them and that it is somehow illegitimate for the strikers to be acting in ways that cause some inconvenience for people trying to get onto campus. There are concerns that this may foster hostility directed toward the strikers, something that can be particularly dangerous when cars are facing pedestrian picketers. Thankfully, though there have been a few incidents of cars attempting to rush the line or push their way through, these have been minimal. Of longer term concern, such actions by the administration may present barriers for attempts to build connections among students, faculty, and staff and solidarity for resisting the broader agenda of which the demands by NOSM management are one expression.
Understanding the Connections
Protection from having to move your family a thousand miles to keep a decent job. Protection from other unreasonable and excessive demands by management. Protection from having your full-time, permanent job with good pay and benefits turned into the same work done part-time, insecurely, with poor pay and few or no benefits. Protection from having to scramble to find Saturday care for your three year-old and your one year-old on two days notice without the prospect of overtime pay. Protection from your benefit plan being arbitrarily changed by management, just when you need it.
It is these issues and others like them that are the specific, concrete reasons why the NOSM strikers are striking. Yet they also sound incredibly familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the kinds of changes that lots of people have faced in recent decades and continue to face, both in general and in the context of post-secondary educational institutions in North America.
In the broader society, these changes show up as growing numbers of people forced into precarious and part-time work, as lower welfare payments, as higher user fees, as reduced services. In post-secondary education, it is people who do teaching work finding it harder and harder to make a secure living because that work is increasingly casualized, and those who do have secure positions facing higher and higher workloads. It is core staff jobs at universities, from cafeterias to finance, being privatized and contracted out, which means the same work but for much less money and fewer benefits, often without a union. It is accessibility for students limited by ever-increasing tuition fees and the threat of life-crushing debt. It is policy frameworks that make it harder for those struggling against institutionalized sexism and racism in universities to push administrations into actually responding usefully to those oppressions. It is decreasing space and institutional support for scholarly work that prioritizes the public good, especially but not only in some sciences, and increasing pressure to be responsive only to the needs of private profit. It is the loss of spaces that, however imperfect they have always been, have provided some limited but important opportunities for critical discussion of the important issues of the day – critical discussion that is not just about ivory tower debate, but that has sometimes been a place to name oppression as a step in struggling against it.
In all of these examples, and the thousands of others that could be described, for them it is about money; for us it is about our lives.
Building Solidarity
It is recognition of this forced reorganization of lives that is the best starting point for building solidarity. And people from a broad cross section of the Laurentian campus have been acting to do exactly that. Not long after the workers walked out, an informal grouping began to coalesce, spurred particularly by people conscious of the slow response in the broader Sudbury community to the need to mobilize in support of the year-long miners' strike that ended in defeat earlier in 2010. Referring to itself so far only as “the campus coalition,” it includes individual faculty from Laurentian, including from NOSM, as well as staff and students. It has been consulting closely with the striking workers and its actions have received informal support from other unions and some student associations from the broader Laurentian campus as well as more formal support from organizations representing graduate students and mature and part-time students.
In explaining why the governing council of the Graduate Students Association (GSA) “unanimously supported working in support of the [NOSM] workers as a major campaign for us until the strike is settled,” GSA president Rafiq Rahemtulla pointed toward the impacts that neoliberal changes in post-secondary education have had and continue to have on his members. The GSA has been using its office as a hub for the on-campus organizing.
Rahemtulla said that many of his members also work as graduate teaching assistants, and so are concerned about “the casualization of labour on campus,” and he says there is a broad recognition that “the working conditions of our faculty and support staff are our learning conditions.” He added: “A lot of students see this as a basic issue of fundamental rights and respect” and are committed to working toward the sort of “high quality, accessible post-secondary education institutions” that are responsive to the needs of both workers and students.
The coalition has focused its energies on pressuring the administration of Laurentian University to use its influence to push for a fair settlement for workers. They organized a day of solidarity shortly after classes started. This included members of the Laurentian staff union walking the picket lines with NOSM strikers, several faculty members holding classes at the lines, and assorted faculty and students walking with the picketers. After a brief rally, coalition members marched to the building that contains the office of the president of Laurentian University, Dominic Giroux, where they presented their concerns to senior members of the administration and arranged a meeting with Giroux for the following week. At that point, 15 to 20 members of the coalition met with him and pressured him to use his influence to seek a fair settlement and to correct some of the misleading information that Laurentian has distributed. Supporters have also been walking with the picketers on an informal basis, speaking about the issue in classes, and working to get other campus organizations to show support for the workers. A subsequent solidarity rally on the occasion of a NOSM board meeting attracted a broad crowd of supporters both from campus and from the broader labour movement, including activists from United Steel Workers Local 6500. The labour movement beyond Sudbury has also been generous with donations and declarations of support, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers has been especially active.
The most recent initiative involves organizing specifically among Laurentian faculty. An open letter signed by around two dozen faculty in just the first few days says in part:
If a settlement is not reached, signatories have committed to a range of escalating actions, from regular participation in the picket lines, to devoting class time to teach-ins on the strike, to a last resort of cancelling their classes for the duration of the strike.
Rahemtulla hopes that the connections that have developed in an organic and informal way between campus groups during the strike can be maintained and strengthened once it is over. “Moving beyond this strike, I'd like to see this committee continue to meet even in the absence of any clear and present struggle,” Rahemtulla said. That way, when the next issue comes up, “all the icebreaking is done and we can hit the ground running.” This is particularly key for graduate teaching assistants, who recently organized as Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 5011, and have just entered first contract talks with Laurentian.
As this piece is being written, a new round of talks has begun between Local 677 and NOSM management. While all participants are hopeful that a fair contract can be reached, Rahemtulla said that the campus coalition “is still very strong and very motivated...we will continue to work on it (the strike).” As for the strikers, a visit to the line just past the seven week mark of the walkout showed a scene that was quiet and perhaps a bit weary but very determined. England is encouraged by the actions of the campus coalition, saying it “really helps the lines,” and says that he and other strikers remain firm in their commitment to reaching a fair deal. His simple summary: “The lines are strong.” •
Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. For more of his writing, visit his personal blog. For the sake of full disclosure, he would like to add that his partner is a member of the unit of OPSEU Local 677 that is not currently on strike.
Endnotes
1. This account is being written in Sudbury and focuses largely on the shape the struggle has taken at Laurentian University. Related but distinct dynamics are playing out at Lakehead University.
Striking in a Time of Austerity: The NOSM Strike in Northern Ontario
by Scott Neigh
The 150 members of Unit 2 of Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 677 have been on strike since August 16. The office, technical, and administrative workers at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (NOSM) went on strike after almost a year of negotiations to try and achieve a first collective agreement. NOSM is affiliated with both Laurentian University in Sudbury and Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and has campuses as part of both universities; other members of the striking local are located in Timmins and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.
At the forefront of the struggle are basic quality-of-work and quality-of-life issues. But lurking in the background are larger questions of how workers in the broader public sector and their employers will position themselves with respect to the austerity agenda declared with such fanfare by world leaders at the G20 summit in Toronto in June, and affirmed in this year's federal and provincial budgets by the Harper and McGuinty governments.
The solidarity activism that this strike has sparked on the Laurentian University campus may be a nucleus of the kind of coalition politics that will be required to win both the bread-and-butter struggles and the broader political challenges that the labour movement faces at this moment.
Contesting Arbitrary Management
Tyler England, President of Unit 2 of Local 677 and chair of its bargaining committee, says that all the workers want is a “fair and respectful first collective agreement.” Wages are one of the issues that remain outstanding. But of greater concern to the workers throughout the strike has been enshrining some fairly standard protections in a binding contract rather than leaving them subject to arbitrary management decisions.
For instance, management is seeking the right to transfer workers between sites. Unit 1 of Local 677, which represents faculty, library, and professional employees at NOSM, already has a collective agreement which protects members from such transfers. The staff in Unit 2 want to be similarly assured, says England, that management will not be “forcing them to move their lives or no longer have a position with the organization.”
Workers are also seeking language protecting them from being shifted from their usual 9-to-5 schedule to evening and weekend work with little notice and no overtime pay. This would be particularly onerous for members with childcare responsibilities, which remains disproportionately women in 21st century Canada.
Contracting out is another hot issue. In the past, when workers have left, management has sometimes refused to fill vacant positions and instead used workers from temp agencies. England said: “We want to keep these as good paying, full-time jobs with good benefits” rather than allow them to be shifted piecemeal to part-time or casual positions with few or no benefits.
Workers are also seeking general language around management rights that requires that they be exerted in “reasonable and respectful” ways, according to England. He said this is standard language in many collective agreements, and it allows members greater flexibility to grieve unreasonable requests from management. Additionally, it was only in the last session of bargaining (several weeks into the strike) that management gave up its attempt to exclude the existing benefit plan from the collective agreement, which would have left it vulnerable to arbitrary changes.
Framing the Strike
There can be no doubt that this strike about bread-and-butter issues and workplace dignity is also a strike that is about neoliberalism. Yet, in this dispute and in the many other struggles sure to erupt as the austerity agenda is implemented, it is important for those of us acting in support to be careful how we draw such connections. A rich understanding of neoliberalism that foregrounds the everyday experiences of the ordinary people struggling against it can be an important tool for building a broader movement; a sparse, simplistic pointer to some abstract common enemy can actually undermine our efforts.
Early in the NOSM strike, management was quite active in drawing links to what those of us on the left would see as manifestations of neoliberalism and austerity. In particular, they situated the strike in the context of the wage restraint policies being forced onto the broader public sector by Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government in Ontario. Wage restraint and other forms of public sector cutbacks are sources of growing concern and focuses of organizing for unions and communities in the province. So it is understandable that, early on in the strike, this way of linking it to broader issues had significant purchase for many pro-labour people in Sudbury. After all, it seemed to connect this local struggle with many other struggles across Ontario and around the globe.
However, there are a number of serious problems with this rhetorical move by management, and with its partial adoption by some people wishing to support the strikers. For one thing, it paints a misleading picture of what the strike is about. An emphasis on wage restraint in talking about the context centres the issue of wages in public attention, even though wages are not the central concern for most of those on the line. Moreover, it invites the standard anti-union lie that public sector workers are “greedy” and “spoiled,” rather than making it clear that they are trying to protect themselves from the prospect of very real hardships. It creates space for patronizing narratives like those that have appeared occasionally in the local media about evil union bosses who have deluded workers and made them pawns in some larger battle, a story which depends on and reinforces the erasure of the local and specific issues that brought the members of Local 677 out. And, finally, one of the biggest advantages of this frame for management is that it makes it seem like an unwinnable struggle – it paints management as making the best of a bad situation, as powerless before the provincial government, and the union as unreasonable. That is, it invokes Margaret Thatcher's ghost by repeating one of the foundational deceptions of neoliberalism: “There is no alternative.”
There are plenty of reasons, therefore, to seek a way to connect this strike to larger issues that refuses to erase all of the ways that it is about ordinary people resisting impositions on their everyday lives. At the most basic level, doing so is more representative and respectful of the realities of those walking the line. It shows they are not greedy, they are not dupes, they are simply standing up for some basic elements of security and dignity. It is also more likely to evoke public sympathy. It makes it clear that many of the key questions are not centrally about wages, so management does in fact have space to accept solutions that are fair for the workers. And it provides a concrete approach to understanding connections to larger struggles and building solidarity that is grounded in the shared experiences of different groups of workers on campus, students, and many, many people in the broader community.
University Responses
Key actions by the Laurentian University[1] administration in response to the strike seem to be designed to keep those kinds of connections from being made.
For instance, the Laurentian administration has made statements to the effect that the strike has nothing to do with the university and that NOSM is a completely separate entity. While it is correct that the medical school has a separate governing board from either of the universities with which it is affiliated, the implication that they are substantially separate is misleading, even deceptive. Academic matters at NOSM are officially governed by the academic senates of Laurentian and Lakehead (and a joint committee between the two), and it is considered the Faculty of Medicine of those institutions. The only text on NOSM's logo is the words “Lakehead,” “Laurentian,” and “Medicine.” The presidents of Laurentian and Lakehead are chair and vice-chair of NOSM's board, and the respective universities have a heavy influence over decisions made by that body, including a right to override NOSM board decisions in some circumstances. As well, the universities derive significant prestige from having the medical school, and frequently use its accomplishments in promoting the broader university.
Laurentian University also told returning students that Local 677 had guaranteed a free flow of traffic into the university. While negotiations around a picket line protocol are ongoing, the union is quite clear that no guarantees have been made. The lines have generally been oriented around the distribution of information but traffic has been significantly delayed on some days.
Supporters of the union on campus interpret these moves by the administration as attempts to cultivate a mindset among campus users, perhaps especially among younger students who may be less aware of the realities of the situation, that the strike has nothing to do with them and that it is somehow illegitimate for the strikers to be acting in ways that cause some inconvenience for people trying to get onto campus. There are concerns that this may foster hostility directed toward the strikers, something that can be particularly dangerous when cars are facing pedestrian picketers. Thankfully, though there have been a few incidents of cars attempting to rush the line or push their way through, these have been minimal. Of longer term concern, such actions by the administration may present barriers for attempts to build connections among students, faculty, and staff and solidarity for resisting the broader agenda of which the demands by NOSM management are one expression.
Understanding the Connections
Protection from having to move your family a thousand miles to keep a decent job. Protection from other unreasonable and excessive demands by management. Protection from having your full-time, permanent job with good pay and benefits turned into the same work done part-time, insecurely, with poor pay and few or no benefits. Protection from having to scramble to find Saturday care for your three year-old and your one year-old on two days notice without the prospect of overtime pay. Protection from your benefit plan being arbitrarily changed by management, just when you need it.
It is these issues and others like them that are the specific, concrete reasons why the NOSM strikers are striking. Yet they also sound incredibly familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the kinds of changes that lots of people have faced in recent decades and continue to face, both in general and in the context of post-secondary educational institutions in North America.
In the broader society, these changes show up as growing numbers of people forced into precarious and part-time work, as lower welfare payments, as higher user fees, as reduced services. In post-secondary education, it is people who do teaching work finding it harder and harder to make a secure living because that work is increasingly casualized, and those who do have secure positions facing higher and higher workloads. It is core staff jobs at universities, from cafeterias to finance, being privatized and contracted out, which means the same work but for much less money and fewer benefits, often without a union. It is accessibility for students limited by ever-increasing tuition fees and the threat of life-crushing debt. It is policy frameworks that make it harder for those struggling against institutionalized sexism and racism in universities to push administrations into actually responding usefully to those oppressions. It is decreasing space and institutional support for scholarly work that prioritizes the public good, especially but not only in some sciences, and increasing pressure to be responsive only to the needs of private profit. It is the loss of spaces that, however imperfect they have always been, have provided some limited but important opportunities for critical discussion of the important issues of the day – critical discussion that is not just about ivory tower debate, but that has sometimes been a place to name oppression as a step in struggling against it.
In all of these examples, and the thousands of others that could be described, for them it is about money; for us it is about our lives.
Building Solidarity
It is recognition of this forced reorganization of lives that is the best starting point for building solidarity. And people from a broad cross section of the Laurentian campus have been acting to do exactly that. Not long after the workers walked out, an informal grouping began to coalesce, spurred particularly by people conscious of the slow response in the broader Sudbury community to the need to mobilize in support of the year-long miners' strike that ended in defeat earlier in 2010. Referring to itself so far only as “the campus coalition,” it includes individual faculty from Laurentian, including from NOSM, as well as staff and students. It has been consulting closely with the striking workers and its actions have received informal support from other unions and some student associations from the broader Laurentian campus as well as more formal support from organizations representing graduate students and mature and part-time students.
In explaining why the governing council of the Graduate Students Association (GSA) “unanimously supported working in support of the [NOSM] workers as a major campaign for us until the strike is settled,” GSA president Rafiq Rahemtulla pointed toward the impacts that neoliberal changes in post-secondary education have had and continue to have on his members. The GSA has been using its office as a hub for the on-campus organizing.
Rahemtulla said that many of his members also work as graduate teaching assistants, and so are concerned about “the casualization of labour on campus,” and he says there is a broad recognition that “the working conditions of our faculty and support staff are our learning conditions.” He added: “A lot of students see this as a basic issue of fundamental rights and respect” and are committed to working toward the sort of “high quality, accessible post-secondary education institutions” that are responsive to the needs of both workers and students.
The coalition has focused its energies on pressuring the administration of Laurentian University to use its influence to push for a fair settlement for workers. They organized a day of solidarity shortly after classes started. This included members of the Laurentian staff union walking the picket lines with NOSM strikers, several faculty members holding classes at the lines, and assorted faculty and students walking with the picketers. After a brief rally, coalition members marched to the building that contains the office of the president of Laurentian University, Dominic Giroux, where they presented their concerns to senior members of the administration and arranged a meeting with Giroux for the following week. At that point, 15 to 20 members of the coalition met with him and pressured him to use his influence to seek a fair settlement and to correct some of the misleading information that Laurentian has distributed. Supporters have also been walking with the picketers on an informal basis, speaking about the issue in classes, and working to get other campus organizations to show support for the workers. A subsequent solidarity rally on the occasion of a NOSM board meeting attracted a broad crowd of supporters both from campus and from the broader labour movement, including activists from United Steel Workers Local 6500. The labour movement beyond Sudbury has also been generous with donations and declarations of support, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers has been especially active.
The most recent initiative involves organizing specifically among Laurentian faculty. An open letter signed by around two dozen faculty in just the first few days says in part:
"The stakes in this labour struggle are high. Basically we see NOSM management attempting to enforce a contract allowing for the creation of a very 'flexible' workforce with workers having a lack of control over their own work assignments, allowing them to be assigned work wherever and whenever management wishes. This is a major increase in management rights over and against workers. If the NOSM and LU administrations are successful in enforcing this on the NOSM support workers, they will be in a much better position to try to enforce a similar contract on [the Laurentian University Staff Union] and other workers on campus. OPSEU 677 is therefore struggling in the interests of all workers on our campus."
If a settlement is not reached, signatories have committed to a range of escalating actions, from regular participation in the picket lines, to devoting class time to teach-ins on the strike, to a last resort of cancelling their classes for the duration of the strike.
Rahemtulla hopes that the connections that have developed in an organic and informal way between campus groups during the strike can be maintained and strengthened once it is over. “Moving beyond this strike, I'd like to see this committee continue to meet even in the absence of any clear and present struggle,” Rahemtulla said. That way, when the next issue comes up, “all the icebreaking is done and we can hit the ground running.” This is particularly key for graduate teaching assistants, who recently organized as Canadian Union of Public Employees Local 5011, and have just entered first contract talks with Laurentian.
As this piece is being written, a new round of talks has begun between Local 677 and NOSM management. While all participants are hopeful that a fair contract can be reached, Rahemtulla said that the campus coalition “is still very strong and very motivated...we will continue to work on it (the strike).” As for the strikers, a visit to the line just past the seven week mark of the walkout showed a scene that was quiet and perhaps a bit weary but very determined. England is encouraged by the actions of the campus coalition, saying it “really helps the lines,” and says that he and other strikers remain firm in their commitment to reaching a fair deal. His simple summary: “The lines are strong.” •
Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. For more of his writing, visit his personal blog. For the sake of full disclosure, he would like to add that his partner is a member of the unit of OPSEU Local 677 that is not currently on strike.
Endnotes
1. This account is being written in Sudbury and focuses largely on the shape the struggle has taken at Laurentian University. Related but distinct dynamics are playing out at Lakehead University.
Saturday, October 02, 2010
Review: Vimy Ridge
[Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci, Mike Bechtold, editors. Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2007.]
I recognize that the analysis I am about to present is unlikely to be very popular, and I suspect that its intense dissonance with widely cherished illusions will prevent lots of potential readers from engaging with what I have to say in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, I'm going to say it: Though this book is professional, competent, and thorough, if a bit boring, I find the fact that such a book can exist as an unremarkable and authoritative contribution to a dominant discourse to be a sign of deep and tragic social pathology.
When evaluated uncritically in light of the dominant standards of the institutional locations of which it is a product, this book fares quite well. Vimy Ridge was a battle in France during the First World War in which Canadian troops were able to win a victory where French and British troops had previously failed. From the newspaper reports the morning after the battle to rallying speeches by Stephen Harper today, it has been made into a powerful symbol of (English) Canadian nationalism, and so it has received rather more scholarly attention than it might have otherwise. This book is the combined effort of a new generation of military historians to reexamine and re-think the battle.
The organization of the book is straightforward and methodical. It begins with some immediate context in terms of the fighting to that point that had occurred in that area and on the Western Front more broadly (though essentially no larger context of any kind). It then goes through the lead-up to the battle and the battle itself with an essay on each of the four Canadian divisions involved, and other essays on various specialized components of the army that took part, like the engineers and the medical corps. It looks a little bit at the roles that the Canadian troops took in the months after the battle, and then has a couple of essays examining the legacy of the battle in the Canadian imagination, one that looks at war poetry and the other that looks at the history of the monument later built on the battlefield.
I found the bits that talked about the social organization of the mass violence we call war to be somewhat interesting -- though this was not the intent, the illustration of the continuity between capitalist organization of production and capitalist organization of mass violence was striking. I think the bits talking about Canadian nationalism will be potentially useful to me, given that some vague notions about future critical writing on English Canadian nationalism is what prompted me to read this book in the first place. And the detailed accounts of troop movements and the like I found to be mind numbingly boring.
The "reassessment" promised by the subtitle is not anything approaching the critical endeavour that I had initially hoped for. Still, within the painfully narrow bounds defined by military history, it is not insignificant. In particular, it takes on the elements of the dominant Vimy mythology which paint it as a purely Canadian victory, as a product of Canadian tactical innovation, and as a major contribution to future victories. In fact, there was a much larger British contribution to the event than usually recognized, the tactical innovations that were implemented were neither uniquely Canadian nor explanatory for the victory (given that many British units on the same front fighting with the same tactics at the same time made little headway), and the actual importance of Vimy in terms of the larger Allied war effort was in fact relatively minor and it is only its role in subsequent Canadian nationalisms that has lead to it being treated so reverently.
So. Okay. Those paragraphs you just read? Those are me being tactful and restrained.
I found this book horrifying. The norms expressed in the standards of military history (in tight connection with powerful norms in the broader culture) which make it entirely unremarkable to write bland, factual narratives about deliberate and preventable mass slaughter are a sign of awful social sickness. There all kinds of places that this sort of thing happens, of course -- that it is seen as entirely unremarkable to write or talk about something awful and violent and oppressive in ways that only superficially acknowledge the awfulness, if at all. Military history, as an institutionally legitimated subdiscipline of academic history as well as related popular writings, is a prime example of this phenomenon but one that seldom occasions much comment outside of very limited circles. But what does it say about us that we think nothing of the majority of our academic and popular writing about war being done in such a way that it implies, even as it makes superficial obligatory nods towards horror and death, that what really matters is the nationality of the senior officers involved or the details of a how a certain tactic was propagated or what time of day the Fourth Canadian Division reached its objectives? What does it say that we treat as unremarkable and thoroughly normal writing about the kind of mass, awful, pointless violence that occurred in the First World War that is not primarily oriented around raging against it?
And it isn't just the immediate violence that is the issue, either. Military history, as far as I have observed and as represented in this book, also has no space for recognizing the oppressive character of the British Empire, the Canadian state, or English Canadian nationalism. Vast areas of how the world works are assumed and placed beyond question in ways that are almost invisible simply by what questions are asked and how they are answered. This conceals massive amounts of violence and oppression in which the national "we" at the heart of standard military history (and much other conventional history as well) are implicated. It is writing about the past that allows, even encourages, us to avoid difficult and painful questions about the present.
I find it particularly striking in this book because it is about the First World War. The dominant grounding for ideas about war in the Canadian popular imagination is the Second World War. Now, I think that deserves serious critical reexamination as well, but that is not necessary for this post because the particular circumstances that allow the Second World War to pose as "The Good War" have no relevance to the First World War. The side of the conflict that we are taught was "our side" was an empire -- the most powerful empire in the world. It was acting to preserve its imperial power, which it had used to wreak horrible violence and indignity on indigenous popularions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas over the course of centuries. It's allies were entities like Tsarist Russia, whose social organization was still only a stone's throw past feudalism, and Belgium, whose rulers had massacred millions of Africans only a decade before. There is absolutely no basis for any narrative that poses "our side" as "good" and "the Hun" as "evil" (especially when you factor in the role that the behaviour of "our side" upon victory played in setting the stage for the Nazi horrors of future decades. An aside: did you know that Germany's final payment of the devastating reparations imposed on it by the victors in the First World War is happening tomorrow?!?) Though I'm not yet prepared to make this argument in detail, my sense is that there is much, much more basis for a narrative of the First World War that is about elites in within global colonial patriarchal capitalist social relations killing millions of each other's working-class citizens in a quest for global dominance. How is it appropriate for anyone to write anything about this that does not focus on how awful it was, how unnecessary it was, and how important it is to engage in social change work to make sure that such a thing never happens again?
(And for anyone tempted to write a comment full of indignation about respecting "Canadian heroes" and whatnot, though there is a much larger argument about that which I'm sure I'll write at some point, for the moment I'll just preemptively point you towards a piece by Robert Jensen.)
Finally, there is something about the place that Vimy Ridge holds in the mainstream Canadian imagination that is, for all of these reasons, also horrifying to me. What does it say about us that this moment of violence in a larger orgy of violence organized as part of the competition for colonial and capitalist dominance is praised as some glorious national right of passage by people as various as our current hard-right Prime Minister and left-liberal author Pierre Berton? It doesn't say anything good, I don't think -- understandable, perhaps, given the social relations that have shaped us, but not good.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
I recognize that the analysis I am about to present is unlikely to be very popular, and I suspect that its intense dissonance with widely cherished illusions will prevent lots of potential readers from engaging with what I have to say in any meaningful way. Nonetheless, I'm going to say it: Though this book is professional, competent, and thorough, if a bit boring, I find the fact that such a book can exist as an unremarkable and authoritative contribution to a dominant discourse to be a sign of deep and tragic social pathology.
When evaluated uncritically in light of the dominant standards of the institutional locations of which it is a product, this book fares quite well. Vimy Ridge was a battle in France during the First World War in which Canadian troops were able to win a victory where French and British troops had previously failed. From the newspaper reports the morning after the battle to rallying speeches by Stephen Harper today, it has been made into a powerful symbol of (English) Canadian nationalism, and so it has received rather more scholarly attention than it might have otherwise. This book is the combined effort of a new generation of military historians to reexamine and re-think the battle.
The organization of the book is straightforward and methodical. It begins with some immediate context in terms of the fighting to that point that had occurred in that area and on the Western Front more broadly (though essentially no larger context of any kind). It then goes through the lead-up to the battle and the battle itself with an essay on each of the four Canadian divisions involved, and other essays on various specialized components of the army that took part, like the engineers and the medical corps. It looks a little bit at the roles that the Canadian troops took in the months after the battle, and then has a couple of essays examining the legacy of the battle in the Canadian imagination, one that looks at war poetry and the other that looks at the history of the monument later built on the battlefield.
I found the bits that talked about the social organization of the mass violence we call war to be somewhat interesting -- though this was not the intent, the illustration of the continuity between capitalist organization of production and capitalist organization of mass violence was striking. I think the bits talking about Canadian nationalism will be potentially useful to me, given that some vague notions about future critical writing on English Canadian nationalism is what prompted me to read this book in the first place. And the detailed accounts of troop movements and the like I found to be mind numbingly boring.
The "reassessment" promised by the subtitle is not anything approaching the critical endeavour that I had initially hoped for. Still, within the painfully narrow bounds defined by military history, it is not insignificant. In particular, it takes on the elements of the dominant Vimy mythology which paint it as a purely Canadian victory, as a product of Canadian tactical innovation, and as a major contribution to future victories. In fact, there was a much larger British contribution to the event than usually recognized, the tactical innovations that were implemented were neither uniquely Canadian nor explanatory for the victory (given that many British units on the same front fighting with the same tactics at the same time made little headway), and the actual importance of Vimy in terms of the larger Allied war effort was in fact relatively minor and it is only its role in subsequent Canadian nationalisms that has lead to it being treated so reverently.
So. Okay. Those paragraphs you just read? Those are me being tactful and restrained.
I found this book horrifying. The norms expressed in the standards of military history (in tight connection with powerful norms in the broader culture) which make it entirely unremarkable to write bland, factual narratives about deliberate and preventable mass slaughter are a sign of awful social sickness. There all kinds of places that this sort of thing happens, of course -- that it is seen as entirely unremarkable to write or talk about something awful and violent and oppressive in ways that only superficially acknowledge the awfulness, if at all. Military history, as an institutionally legitimated subdiscipline of academic history as well as related popular writings, is a prime example of this phenomenon but one that seldom occasions much comment outside of very limited circles. But what does it say about us that we think nothing of the majority of our academic and popular writing about war being done in such a way that it implies, even as it makes superficial obligatory nods towards horror and death, that what really matters is the nationality of the senior officers involved or the details of a how a certain tactic was propagated or what time of day the Fourth Canadian Division reached its objectives? What does it say that we treat as unremarkable and thoroughly normal writing about the kind of mass, awful, pointless violence that occurred in the First World War that is not primarily oriented around raging against it?
And it isn't just the immediate violence that is the issue, either. Military history, as far as I have observed and as represented in this book, also has no space for recognizing the oppressive character of the British Empire, the Canadian state, or English Canadian nationalism. Vast areas of how the world works are assumed and placed beyond question in ways that are almost invisible simply by what questions are asked and how they are answered. This conceals massive amounts of violence and oppression in which the national "we" at the heart of standard military history (and much other conventional history as well) are implicated. It is writing about the past that allows, even encourages, us to avoid difficult and painful questions about the present.
I find it particularly striking in this book because it is about the First World War. The dominant grounding for ideas about war in the Canadian popular imagination is the Second World War. Now, I think that deserves serious critical reexamination as well, but that is not necessary for this post because the particular circumstances that allow the Second World War to pose as "The Good War" have no relevance to the First World War. The side of the conflict that we are taught was "our side" was an empire -- the most powerful empire in the world. It was acting to preserve its imperial power, which it had used to wreak horrible violence and indignity on indigenous popularions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas over the course of centuries. It's allies were entities like Tsarist Russia, whose social organization was still only a stone's throw past feudalism, and Belgium, whose rulers had massacred millions of Africans only a decade before. There is absolutely no basis for any narrative that poses "our side" as "good" and "the Hun" as "evil" (especially when you factor in the role that the behaviour of "our side" upon victory played in setting the stage for the Nazi horrors of future decades. An aside: did you know that Germany's final payment of the devastating reparations imposed on it by the victors in the First World War is happening tomorrow?!?) Though I'm not yet prepared to make this argument in detail, my sense is that there is much, much more basis for a narrative of the First World War that is about elites in within global colonial patriarchal capitalist social relations killing millions of each other's working-class citizens in a quest for global dominance. How is it appropriate for anyone to write anything about this that does not focus on how awful it was, how unnecessary it was, and how important it is to engage in social change work to make sure that such a thing never happens again?
(And for anyone tempted to write a comment full of indignation about respecting "Canadian heroes" and whatnot, though there is a much larger argument about that which I'm sure I'll write at some point, for the moment I'll just preemptively point you towards a piece by Robert Jensen.)
Finally, there is something about the place that Vimy Ridge holds in the mainstream Canadian imagination that is, for all of these reasons, also horrifying to me. What does it say about us that this moment of violence in a larger orgy of violence organized as part of the competition for colonial and capitalist dominance is praised as some glorious national right of passage by people as various as our current hard-right Prime Minister and left-liberal author Pierre Berton? It doesn't say anything good, I don't think -- understandable, perhaps, given the social relations that have shaped us, but not good.
[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]
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