Review: Seeing Reds

[Daniel Francis. Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada's First War on Terror. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010.]

We need more books like this -- histories of social change in Canadian contexts written for lay audiences and with an eye to contemporary relevance. Smooth, lively writing and a good eye for the right level of detail and the right kind of illustrative digression make the book a pleasant, easy read.

The focus is Canada's version of the Red Scare, the panic about immanent revolution (which at least in part was a product of elite efforts to stoke fears of revolution they knew to be unlikely in order to achieve political goals) in the aftermath of the First World War and the revolutions in Russia. The trauma of sixty thousand Canadian war deaths, rising prices, stagnant wages, too few jobs, and the sense inspired by events in Russia and elsewhere even in those without Bolshevik inclinations that things really could be different if ordinary people only made it so did indeed lead to a bubbling discontent. Many leaders of workers' organizations and left-wing parties did not hesitate to use strident language. Rather than respond to grievances, elites and the Canadian state chose a mixture of stalling (nominally to investigate, in some cases) and repression. Mechanisms of censorship, spying on its own population, and nationalist and nativist demagoguery built to support the imperial war effort were extended and expanded to crush the aspirations many ordinary Canadians had for better lives and more than a few had for a new order that would ensure better lives. From its roots during the war to the crushing of the Winnipeg General Strike (which marked the defeat of the labour movement, with the exception of the coal fields, for more than a decade), this book traces that story.

Francis' telling of it draws out a number of features that continue to be politically relevant today, even if the text does not go quite so far as to connect all of the dots itself. For instance, though it doesn't frame it in quite this way, the book presents a very clear example of how liberal-democratic institutions and patterns of thought, which proclaim their universality and their commitment to freedom, are never really universal and can only adhere to the pretense by defining some people and groups as outside the bounds of worthiness. So, for instance, certain ethnic groups and people who held on to anti-war ideas were excluded from the bounds of people deserving dignity and due process during the war, and a slightly different constellation of ethnic groups and people on the left were excluded immediately after. (The blending together of the racialized caricature of the Slavic 'Other' with the elite hatred of radical left politics was striking and gross.)

The book also illustrates without quite making the point as directly as it could that excluding people from the nation is just as much about the exertion of power over groups still considered inside the nation as it is an exertion of power over those excluded. Rhetoric and repression that directly targeted certain ethnicities and the radical left for censorship, surveillance, and in some instances arrest was not just about defining those groups as dangerous outsiders, but was also about maintaining the power of Anglo elites over those workers and others who retained their real (if subordinate) status in the national community.

I was also struck by the efforts at knowledge production by elites during this crisis, and the ways in which that informed (or didn't) their other actions. They went to great efforts to place police spies in groups, to gather information from informants, and to generally treat anyone not content with having their lives organized into violence and suffering by dominant social relations as inherently worthy of suspicion and surveillance. Yet despite all of that effort, their attempts to build grounded, accurate knowledge about discontent and dissent rarely produced accounts that really captured the essence of what people were feeling, saying, and doing. Nonetheless, this knowledge was still used as a basis for making strong statements (whether in covert communication with other powerful people or in attempts to shape the public discourse) and taking strong (repressive) remedies.

I would argue that this was because elites and state institutions weren't actually interested in accurate knowledge in the way that such a thing might be understood in the context of a sensitive, nuanced ethnography or a sympathetic movement history. They weren't really interested in how people would've understood their goals, motivations, capacities, and analyses themselves. Elites and high-level state functionaries were interested, rather, in how it affected them.

You see, when we create knowledge, we always have some standard with which we judge what to include, how to assign priorities, and how to determine accuracy. In the case of elites during the Red Scare, developing an understanding of movements and dissidents that truly captured the movements' and dissidents' actions and experiences of the world simply was not the priority. Yes, state institutions gathered some kinds of raw data that bears a superficial resemblance to the raw material for a good ethnography -- detailed accounts of public meetings, for example -- but their organizing principle for assessing relevance and 'accuracy' was the ability of the knowledge thus generated to preserve the current order and/or their own power. This meant that the pressure to get things right applied to much different things. Of course it wasn't simple, and different elites within various security, military, and policing circles had different understandings of how to gather information and produce knowledge, but this was basically how things worked. And what this meant is that priorities in generating knowledge about discontent and dissent -- priorities that informed what was gathered, how it was weighted and evaluated, and how the huge holes were filled with supposition -- leaned towards overestimating risk and to recommending courses of action that would repress (in ways often violating the kinds of justice and fairness valorized in the liberal self-conception) any kind of challenge to elite power and not just things that could in an abstract sense be judged as existential threats to the liberal order as a whole. This is why many conclusions drawn by elites in this crisis look so ridiculous from this end of history, when we compare them with knowledge produced from a standpoint that is actually interested in finding out what those dissatisfied with Canadian society were doing, saying, thinking, feeling on their own terms.

All of this is also a lesson for how we should relate to elite, fear-driven campaigns today. The book draws the comparison with the so-called "war on terror" but is just as relevant if not more so to the smaller but still significant attack on those opposing the G20 in Toronto last year. In these cases, just like 90 years ago, elite accounts, whether they are produced by state practices or appear in the dominant media, generally have only a tenuous connection to lived experiences on the ground inside movements and communities. Yes, there is an element of deliberate lying by ranking cops and politicians and pundits to shape the political environment and crush dissent, but there is also a big part of it that is genuine on their part and that is based in widely diverging standpoints and approaches to knowledge production between them and ordinary people in movements and communities. (Which I don't say to excuse them, but rather in the hopes that it might lead us to more productive strategies for countering them.)

All of this raises another issue about how you write history about this kind of elite attack on movements and dissent. In the case of the Canadian Red Scare, there really was no immanent threat to the dominant liberal order in Canada. As much as both militants and reactionaries saw signs of revolution around the corner, each for their own reasons, cool evaluation from a distance shows that this just wasn't the case. In practice, I think the book is quite right in its not-quite-explicit position that for all the fiery rhetoric from some radicals, the bulk of the action on the ground was, in practice, needs-based in a way that could have been satisfied by reforms within the context of the dominant liberal order (and was, in later decades) rather than requiring repression for the preservation of that order. This neglects the unpredictable ways that movements can grow and radicalize, but even so I think it is a reasonable assessment of where things were at as the repression hit.

But one outcome of emphasizing such an analysis is that it ends up downplaying the challenge to the liberal order that did exist and that could indeed have become a to-the-root challenge if it had been able to grow. I don't think the author meant to do that. I'm not even sure how to avoid doing it without either rhetorically playing into the hands of latter-day reactionaries who would applaud the anti-labour repression from nine decades on or producing an account that comes across as rigidly ideological and alienating to the bulk of readers who, for better or worse, understand the world in terms sympathetic to the liberal order and other elements of the status quo. The trick is to find ways that are accessible and not alienating in which to communicate that, even if revolution was not exactly looming, the post First World War movements were a threat to the dominant order. They were just not quite the kind of threat elites claimed to fear, a threat five minutes from guillotines, at least not at that point. Moreover, it was a good thing that they were a threat. We want to threaten existing social relations, given how they organize violence and suffering into so many lives. We want elites to fear us. We want them to recognize that even if their heads are safe (because, really, who cares about their heads), their power is not. We want to recognize the good work of our predecessors in making elites fear that real change might be coming, even if our vision for that threat and for the better world to which it might lead is much different than the leading militants of that era. We must do this even as we make the basic point that this book makes so successfully with its somewhat different framing -- that elites behaved in rash, unjust ways in the face of justified discontent, that they were more concerned with maintaining the status quo than with the everyday needs and desires of ordinary people, and they went to a lot of ridiculous, repressive lengths to act on their selfish concerns. And that they'll do keep doing similar things under similar circumstances today if we don't stop them.

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

Sudbury Event in Campaign to Raise Welfare Rates

A section of the Canadian Union of Public Employees -- Ontario is holding a conference in Sudbury at the end of February. CUPE-O has decided to support the "Raise the Rates" campaign, a struggle to reverse the provincial cutting of the Special Diet Allowance (a provision whereby some people living in poverty in Ontario were able to obtain a little more money to meet their dietary needs, at least before the McGuinty Liberals abolished it) and to win a significant increase in the criminally low social assistance rates in the province. Because of this, when they hold their conference here, they are also holding an event to promote the campaign. There will be two speakers from Toronto, including OCAP's John Clarke and the "Raise the Rates" organizer from CUPE-O, and two local speakers with experience in anti-poverty issues.

Raise the Rates Event in Sudbury
Saturday, February 26, 2011.
6pm-8pm
Holiday Inn Sudbury, Main Floor (Room Geo A and B)
1696 Regent St., Sudbury, Ontario

Come and discuss how to continue to build the Raise the Rates campaign in Ontario:

Speakers:

John Clarke, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) organizer.
Ilian Burbano, CUPE Ontario Raise the Rates Campaign Organizer.
Julie Vaillancourt, author of Ontario Works - Works for Whom? An Investigation of Workfare in Ontario.
Gary Kinsman, former member of the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty.

*snacks/refreshments will be provided*

In its March 2010 budget, the McGuinty government introduced a wage freeze for public sector workers while at the same time approving a $4.6 billion corporate tax break over the next 3 years! As part of these same 'austerity' measures, the province announced a cancellation of the Special Diet Allowance (SDA), a benefit which provided up to $250 per month to persons on welfare and O.D.S.P. (Ontario Disability Support Program). This has been a devastating blow for countless people struggling to survive on substandard social assistance rates.

In response, at its May 2010 Convention, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario passed an emergency resolution endorsing the campaign to raise social assistance rates and to pressure the Liberals not to cut and to fully restore the Special Diet Allowance. This campaign, which is being organized jointly with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and other allies, aims to build a broad-based resistance to the McGuinty’s poverty measures negatively impacting workers and poor communities.

Organized by: CUPE Ontario’s University Workers Coordinating Committee Conference (OUWCC).

Co-sponsored by: CUPE Ontario, the Centre for Research in Social Justice and Policy at Laurentian University & the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.

More information: raisetherates@gmail.com/ 416-299-9739 ext 255

http://www.cupe.on.ca/doc.php?subject_id=236&lang=en

http://www.ocap.ca/

If you are in Sudbury at the end of February, please check it out!

Review: Persistent Poverty

[Jamie Swift, Brice Balmer, and Mira Dineen. Persistent Poverty: Voices From the Margins. Toronto: Between the Lines, 2010.]

This book is a simple one -- well done within its particular bounds, the product of a lot of hard work by many people, and as a text quite straightforward. Yet I found it quite emotionally complicated to read, and was ultimately left frustrated and sad by what it isn't and what it doesn't try to do.

The Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (ISARC) is a grouping of people and institutions in Ontario that are committed to social justice and that are grounded in a variety of faiths. The group first formed during the vicious assault on people living in poverty by the Conservative government of Premier Mike Harris in the late 1990s. At that point and since then they have worked hard to rouse the conscience of the people of Ontario to the conditions of people living in poverty, which Harris worsened significantly and which Dalton McGuinty's Liberals have done little to improve in the years since -- a few small technical tweaks and token dollar amounts, but a just a few grains of sand compared to the scale of the problem.

Periodically, ISARC has done what they call a "social audit," and this book comes out of the latest such process, done in 2010. They held hearings with people living in poverty in 26 different communities across Ontario in 2010, including both urban and rural communities in the province though few or no Aboriginal and Northern communities. The focus is on providing a space where the harsh realities of poverty in Ontario are spoken by the people who live them. As such, the input provided in the hearings is used in combination with policy and sociological data in 18 short chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the problem -- social assistance, low-wage employment, the experiences of immigrants, employment standards, food security, poverty and health, housing, and many others.

I have never lived in poverty myself -- at least, not beyond the very shallow and transient poverty into which some middle-class lives briefly dip at certain stages. But many of the things I have done since I graduated from university have helped me clear away at least some of the resilient ignorance that a middle-class upbringing creates in so many of us when it comes to poverty, including doing grassroots anti-poverty activism in both Hamilton and Sudbury, working for a couple of years doing funded community-based research related to poverty issues, and through all of this having friends, family, allies, and comrades living exactly the sort of realities discussed in this book.

Part of my emotional response to the book, then, is a kind of bubbling mixture of anger, paralysis, and despair -- an echo of things I have felt in so many moments as people I know have been buffeted back and forth and had their realities tightly hemmed in by stupid, arbitrary welfare and disability rules; by heartless, exploitative employers; by the power of welfare officials to indiscriminately get the rules wrong when they can't be bothered to be sure and to act abusively towards their 'clients' when they're having a bad day, all with relative impunity; and by the willful, callous obliviousness of so many middle-class Ontarians to the realities of living in poverty and their frequent refusal to understand those realities even when they are presented clearly and directly. It was so clear that so many of the changes brought in by the Harris Tories were enacted with full knowledge of the pain they would bring to people's lives. Many people predicted this. Then many people pointed to it as it was happening. Yet the majority of middle-class people in Ontario found ways not to care, not to be outraged, not even to know, as their tax cuts were bought with other people's pain. (An iconic example for me: I remember many years ago when I was walking in downtown Hamilton with a few friends, including a very warm and loving and compassionate but not terribly political young middle-class white woman. Someone approached us asking for spare change. This companion's short but intense diatribe immediately after the person moved on managed to pack in so much ignorance, so much poor-bashing, so much venom, from someone so interpersonally kind, that I was left flabbergasted.)

While I read this book, I also felt encouraged. This work happened, it happened well, and the layer of people doing it demonstrated a commitment to continue to amplify the voices of marginalized people in this province and to prod the public conscience with these harsh realities. The kind of community-based research that I did for a living for a couple of years partially involved producing exactly this kind of material, so I know that it is a lot of work, and it isn't easy. It is easy for the voices of the people whose experiences are nominally at the centre to be lost from focus, and that did not generally (again, with certain limitations in mind) happen here. So both the skill exhibited in preparing this document and the relentless persistence of the ISARC folks and their allies in witnessing and acting for social justice, despite the general decomposition of movements in Ontario since the Harris era, are encouraging.

However, this was tightly twined with a melancholy that not only is exactly the same work necessary as was ten or fifteen years ago, but the essential details of the experiences of people living in poverty are pretty much the same as when I first did grassroots anti-poverty work in the late '90s or when I was doing community-based research in an agency between 2001 and 2003. Yes, the details of a few programs have changed, but the shape of people's lives have not. At all. Which is enraging.

Perhaps the most complicated focus of my complicated emotions, though, is the specific kind of document that this book is. Though prodding the public conscience is one goal of this work, it is clearly intended to be done in the form of a document that can be taken up by the processes that organize state practices around poverty issues. Documents of this sort have a history and throughout that history have been forced by the very desire of their creators to inform state practices in capitalist, liberal-democratic contexts to follow certain norms. There is a spectrum -- those produced within governments have somewhat different requirements than those produced by academics which are different in turn from those produced in the voluntary sector, and there is variation within each as well. This specific book is towards the better end of that range in that it places a lot of emphasis on the words and experiences of people who experience poverty (though at least a small proportion of such documents, such as some produced in funded anti-racism contexts, manage to include a more robust politics and to escape some of the erasures described below). Yet the overarching constraint imposed by the desire to be seen as legitimate to those making decisions in policy-making contexts remains.

This means that documents in this range of traditions can talk, for example, about impacts and costs, and even about the experiences of particular individuals and groups. Attention paid to specificities in experience is usually in a classificatory rather than an analytical way -- poverty means X in rural areas, Y for immigrants, Z in terms of health, for instance, but little that goes beyond subdivided description. It may have its limits, but it is still useful. (The omission of any mention of queer people in this book is notable, given certain vital intersections between queerness and poverty, such as in youth homelessness. This is perhaps related to the fact that many faith-based contexts are still subject to internal struggles to find what the Protestant social gospel tradition calls the 'prophetic voice' on the issue -- a disappointing silence nonetheless.)

Such documents also have room to propose technocratic fixes. They can suggest increases in dollar amounts here, changes in policy there, new programs over there. Again, bounded but still useful. The ground for all of this is rarely spelled out explicitly, but underlying it all is an assumed social democracy. It may be a thoroughgoing social democracy or a social democratic tweak to an overall neoliberalism, depending on the origins of the document, but the consistent idea is that state action that addresses symptoms and not root causes is the best response to social problems.

And despite all the criticisms of the limitations of social democracy you could find by reading the last five years worth of writing on this blog, I still think it is important to see the value in this kind of document. The foregrounding of experience is important. The emphasis on technocratic fixes may be very limited in some ways, but in order to have a chance of success on its own terms it must be grounded in an understanding of people's lives that is likely to be more nuanced than those produced by many leftist politicos with grander visions but less immediate pressure to attend to details. Meeting immediate needs in a practical, achievable way (ideally in the course of broader struggle) matters a lot, whatever else is happening. Attending to everyday experience and to practicalities is also important to inform political action, and documents like this provide a tool to do that to people approaching it with a wide range of analyses, and that matters too. And for all that some radicals sometimes pooh-pooh it, appealing to conscience can be one important element in a broader range of ways to try and leverage change, and this book provides a tool to do that too.

Yet the pressures to which people preparing research documents on social issues must respond if they wish their work to have a chance of being taken seriously in processes that produce social policy have very serious implications. For instance, given this starting point of wanting to be useful to the institutions that rule us, it is quite natural that such documents are easily pulled into the standpoint of those institutions in how they talk about issues. Indeed, many such documents only and always reflect that standpoint. This book, with its consistent attention to everyday experiences of people living in poverty, is less captured by the standpoint of ruling relations than many, but it still can't escape.

At the most general level, this means that so much of the social relations that create poverty remain unnamed, unmarked, unquestioned in this book. This silence is so normal in this kind of document that to suggest it might be otherwise is to risk being taken as a hopeless dreamer or an untrustworthy ideologue. Yet why should we accept unchallenged the socially constructed but natural-seeming divisions in kinds of knowledge that make it a matter of course that certain topics are out of bounds for a document such as this -- it will describe the plight of the poor and perhaps some of the ways in which their experiences are organized in general terms and how the suffering in those experiences might be more effectively mitigated at the level of symptoms, but it will not engage in much analysis of how it was produced in the first place. So the causes over poverty and how to create change get filled in by the assumptions of the reader. Difficult discussions about why things are the way they are, who benefits, what kinds of changes (beyond the social democratic) might be more effective, and how changes can be brought about, are not triggered by reading it. And, yes, proposing final answers to all of those questions in the text would be foolish, but refusing to start the difficult discussions as we try to prod the conscience of the public feels kind of like giving up before we even begin.

There are more specific examples of this book being unable to resist the pull of the standpoint of ruling relations. For example, at different points the text fluctuates in how it orients itself towards the minor changes made by the provincial Liberals in recent years. There is a pressure -- one that I noted repeatedly when I was doing this kind of work in the agency sector -- to make the action by the state or para-state agency the reference point, and show its impacts in terms of people served or beds created or money disbursed. Doing this emphasizes what is being done and downplays reference to how well it actually addresses the problem. The alternative is to make the experiences of people living in poverty the reference point, which in many instances would make it clear how minor, even trivial, various reforms are compared to the need that is out there. In this book, it felt like there was an unsettled tension between showing supposedly proper gratitude for crumbs versus pointing out how utterly inadequate they are, which showed up in different ways in multiple places in this text. That is, even though I'm sure every single contributor would, in private, acknowledge that the Liberal response in their two terms of office has been disappointing (at least to those foolish enough to expect big things from Liberals) and woefully inadequate, the text still could not break entirely, in every instance, with using the actions of the state as the reference point rather than the experiences of people living in poverty.

Another unfortunate and unnecessary but potentially politically telling example of stumbling into ruling perspectives is the approving reference on the final page of the book to the "moral treatment" of the phenomena that are often understood as mental illness. The "moral treatment" was developed by English Quakers in the 19th century and had nominally humanistic intent. It is used in the text as an example of the ways in which people of faith concerned with human wellbeing can produce positive reforms. Critical historians of psychiatry have shown, however, that the "moral treatment" was more of a shift in the character of practices of domination rather than end to them. So perhaps what this example inadvertently illustrates is the danger of good intent grounded in an uncritical sense of 'good conscience' that is unmoored from analysis and from a commitment to following the lead of those most directly affected by the oppression in question.

Other things were just absent. For instance, an excellent history of one aspect of Ontario's social assistance system showed that even before the Harris assault on the poor, welfare in the province was heavily involved in moral regulation of those receiving it, especially of women. This kind of regulation has always been harsh and punitive. Yet this oppressive character of the welfare system even at its highpoint in the province was largely ignored in this book. Actually talking about it would make it clear that the reforms being proposed in this book are important to meeting needs, but that there are much larger questions that will not go away just by restoring parts of the welfare state. Moreover, the tendency to talk about specificities of experience in descriptive but not analytical ways means that the ways in which patriarchy and white supremacy (e.g. 1, 2) have always been integral to the welfare state in Canada are completely absent from the book. And there may have been one or two passing references to the fact that some powerful people and institutions in society benefit from the widespread experience of poverty, but this central obstacle to addressing the issue even by conventional social democratic means was mostly ignored in the book, and its political implications were never raised.

Starting from the experiences of ordinary people and looking at the relations and institutions that rule them can be a powerful way of generating knowledge for change. This book and others like it go part way to doing that because of their commitment to foregrounding the voices of people living in poverty and their focus on recommending policy and program changes. Yet the commitment to producing social policy discourse that will be at least potentially acceptable to the state and moral suasion that will not alienate privileged Ontarians by mixing in politics that seem too radical means that there are serious limits to producing the knowledge that might be of most political use to people living in poverty themselves and their organizations and movements.

And so I am conflicted. Though I am not a religious person myself, I have great respect for political allies who ground their social justice work in faith. I think this book is important and necessary and well done, and it is heartening that there is this collection of people who are refusing to be still and silent in the face of the intransigence of Ontario's elites and the disinterest of the middle class. Calls on conscience are important and radicals shouldn't dismiss social democratic reforms that would alleviate suffering when we have nothing that is obviously and practically better to offer at this moment. (Though, of course, we shouldn't restrict ourselves to such reforms either.) So I think the choice to place this research within particular moral and state-centric discourse is entirely understandable, given the situation we face. Yet I also remain convinced that we need so much more -- so much more when it comes to knowledge production in the service of social change, and so much more when it comes to actions that might lead us down a path that would have a chance of ending those gut-wrenching, painful, infuriating moments that are part of living in poverty in 21st century Canada.


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

Review: The First World War

[John Keegan. The First World War. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1998.]

I have written before about my fairly intense political and aesthetic distaste for military history. Nonetheless, a possible project I have in mind intersects some with military history, so I have read a little of it recently, including this book. Thankfully, Keegan is a good writer -- that isn't nearly enough to make all of my objections to military history disappear, but at least he is able to keep the narrative flowing in a mostly-engaging way and he includes at least some context beyond what you might find in more narrow and technical military history, even if it isn't the kind or amount of context I would choose. I also really appreciate and respect that he begins the book from a strong emphasis on how the First World War was tragic and unnecessary. Again, his reasoning is narrower and different than mine would be, but I'm still glad he gave the point such attention.

The book is a comprehensive overview of the First World War, from its causes, through its campaigns, down to its outcomes and consequences. If you have reason to seek out such a book, this one isn't a bad choice. It still has plenty of hard-to-follow, boring discussion of troop movements and battles, but also pays some attention to personalities of colourful figures, broader social conditions, and non-technical questions. For instance, while I don't necessarily agree entirely, I think it was useful for him to revisit the question of the military leaders in the war, who have been awarded rather horrific reputations even in mainstream histories for presiding over such slaughter, and to explore to a certain extent how the particularly brutal character of the fighting between 1914 and 1918 was at least in part due to questions of technology and social organization of the military and can't just be attributed to heartless leaders. That said, Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Empire's war effort on the Western Front for much of the war, seems to have lacked anything resembling a soul, and I think it is quite appropriate for us to hold in contempt leaders who could preside so calmly over a situation in which a hundred thousand deaths in a week was routine. I also appreciated Keegan's scorn for what he describes as a more recent generation of military historians who have an obsession with refighting in painstaking detail every battle to occur in France and Belgium in the First World War. I was less thrilled about the subtle pro-British partisanship that seeped into the work -- he was largely fair and even-handed, but you could still sometimes tell where his loyalties, as a former teacher at the British military academy at Sandhurst, lie.

My biggest problem with the work and with Keegan's politics are the inevitable hypocrisies of the liberal historian. For instance, when discussing the pointlessness of the war, he makes some important observations about the social organization of warfare, the importance of the technology of the railroad timetable, the relevance of the limited state of communication technology, the sheer chance that lead to 'level heads' not being in the right place at the right time to stop things, and so on. However, as is so often the case in histories grounded in liberal-democratic assumptions about the world, larger scale questioning of social relations and their role in socially producing such suffering and death were simply not admissable, perhaps not even conceivable to the author.

More enraging was his extremely Eurocentric discussion of the impacts of the war, which cropped up in at least two or three separate parts of the book. His laments for the death and destruction were genuine and welcome, of course. But he also mourned the impact on European civilization. I don't have the book handy so I can't quote directly, but he expressed things like sorrow over Europe losing its optimism and its moral authority to lead. There was one passing acknowledgment that colonialism and imperialism weren't necessarily great things, but their existence was treated as peripheral to his description of the wonders of the West that were dealt such a blow by the coming of violence after a century of peace. There was no apparent recognition of the repgunance of a stance that treats white folks brutalizing each other as the moment of tragedy, when white people brutalizing the non-white inhabitants of the rest of the globe had been so routine for centuries.

A related version of this hypocrisy also extended to some of the discussion of the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia later on in the war. I have no problems with him naming brutality and political awfulness exhibited by the Bolsheviks, but the standard liberal hypocrisy of doing that while downplaying or ommitting the centuries of visciousness of capitalism and the integrated imperial projects of its core Western states is tiresome and gross.

I also was not impressed by the book's tendency to talk in very simplistic ways about the national character of soldiers in different armies -- the "British soldier" had these characteristics, the "Italian soldier" these other ones, and so on. I can appreciate that the combination of shared culture, training, equipment, conditions of battle, and leadership do create circumstances that enforce a certain limited similarity on the troops of a particular nation, but is it really necessary to reify that into some supposedly essential national character when we talk about it?

In any case, if you need a general overview of the First World War and aren't terribly concerned about ingesting critical analysis while you do it, this is quite a useful book. Just be wary that it embodies many of the larger failings of military history specifically and conventional history more generally.

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

Review: Queer Attachments

[Sally R. Munt. Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2007.]

In the reading and thinking about shame I've begun in the last little while, this book is the first I've encountered that primarily approaches the topic via cultural studies rather than psychoanalytic theory. I like this rather a lot. As even quite individualistic analyses of shame generally have to admit, it is extremely social in character -- there is this sense of being seen to be deficient, disgusting, lacking, evil, whether by an actual observer or an imagined one that has been created within us by years of social training. Along with my dubiousness about some of the epistemological bases of psychoanalysis, its inability to really deal with the social character of shame means its use to me will likely remain limited. Even better, though this book does still occasionally lapse into the over-the-topness I sometimes associate with cultural studies -- self-satisfied academic cleverness that makes too much of too little -- it is committed to a relatively grounded, materialist version of cultural studies, and one that is quite attentive to class. I like it because it talks about shame as experiences in and between bodies, as things that actually happen and can be observed and felt and reported.

Shame can, of course, be a very individual experience in response to very immediate, local circumstances. It isn't even entirely negative -- if I were to do something deliberately harmful to someone else, it would be entirely appropriate and socially useful for me to feel shame afterwards. And a general impulse to avoid shame is likely one factor among a larger constellation that ensures that most of us, most of the time, are very unlikely to engage in behaviour that is patently harmful or anti-social. Yet shame is much more than this. It is a social phenomenon that marks people into groups, often in ways that are the product of histories of violent domination. Queers, people living in poverty, people who are racialized, are targeted for shaming in all kinds of ways, both everyday and spectacular, and strategically mobilized shame is a powerful mechanism through which relations of gender oppression have their nasty impact. Yet even this painful, oppressive shame can be the basis among those it targets for a shift of its energy in more positive, socially productive directions. Shame's travels and functioning can be hard to discern, however, both in ourselves and socially. Munt describes shame as a "sticky emotion," one that adheres easily to other negative emotions which can sometimes mask its presence as the driving energy in a given situation. She also emphasizes the capacity of shame to circulate, move, and transfer; the one who is shamed often lets it leak out in unpredictable ways, imposing it on others, and further transmitting it.

She sees in shame, both in the individual experience in the moment and in the larger social phenomenon, a turning away. You feel yourself socially marked as deficient, disgusting, unworthy, and you turn your eyes away and blush. In that moment, there is a disattachment in the micro-level social relation with the one who shamed you. As well, shame is not just acute and painful in individual experience, but it lingers. The impact of past shames, the need to avoid future shames, can run strong and deep through the self, organizing and driving it, sometimes in ways that are recognized but not necessarily so, and this too can promote disattachment from those around you in order to avoid future shames. This drive to disattachment, to turn away from human connection and from the attachments that have shaped you up to that point, can lead to abjection, even to death. It can be among the most painful of emotions. Yet in that moment of turning away, of disattachment, there is also potential. Even as it disciplines you, the social regulation that evokes shame disconnects you, at least partially, at least momentarily, from the relation through which the shaming social regulation has been transmitted. In that disconnection, there is some space for agency and for something new to emerge. If you survive, it is sometimes possible to transform self, to reorient one's self with respect to the acts from others that cause shame, and to develop new attachments, horizontal attachments, attachments of solidarity and support and pride. Munt sees this as an important part of many of the liberation movements that arose as part of the New Left wave of struggle.

She sees potential pitfalls in politics forged in shame, however. Such politics can take many different paths, of course, but one tendency -- one that tends to be actively supported by ruling relations that seek to fragment and co-opt resistance -- can make it difficult to achieve the broader solidarity that is necessary for fundamental change. The sort of reattachment and pride that can flow from oppression experienced in significant part by shame does not necessarily but can result in an overinvestment in specific experiences of injury and the need for sameness as a basis for struggle, and in deemphasis of building a better world from below in collective ways. That is, oppressions based in shame can fragment solidarity, even when those who have been oppressed and shamed have moved into an active phase of resistance, into pride. I don't think Munt is careful enough about contextualizing this observation, given how easily privileged folks (even on the left) can turn it into an oppressive dismissal of identity-based resistance in general, erasing its importance in the lives of so many people and its essential role in building more general struggles. But it is still a danger that can crop up and that must be worked through by participants in the process of building solidarity across differences in experience and politics. She points out, as well, how the particular kind of struggle that can result from responses to shaming can also produce politics based in claims to rights that are premised on maintaining the dominant and normative as dominant and normative, rather than tearing down those harmful ideas and the practices which support them.

Still, the fact that shame is a common experience across many different but intersecting oppressions is a possible source of hope and strength. Munt uses Raymond Williams' idea of the "structure of feeling" to get at the idea that the social organization and regulation of lives cannot help but (socially) produce related emotional experiences. Shame may be created in different ways in different groups, and is inevitably experienced in vastly different ways even within those treated as homogenously shameful by the dominant gaze, but there are still a number of ways in which solidarity can flow from this. Reciprocal empathy for the shared pain of shame can be one basis. Analagous and actually-the-same aspects of the social organization of shame can be another one, and is perhaps a more practical basis for alliance. And the dominant tendency to blur shames together in dominant systems of meaning, which is not unconnected to the actual, material tendency for shame to circulate and transfer and "stick," can create links where they might otherwise not exist. In this particular book, Munt is interested in exploring class, sexuality, and (white) ethnicity -- in particular, the intertwined shames of poverty, queerness, and Irish Catholicness in the dominant culture, primarily in the U.K. I think unearthing some of these imposed and/or potentially actively embraced connections is essential to building the kind of broader solidarities that shame can fragment.

As one might expect given its cultural studies orientation, this book looks at quite a number of case studies to explore all of these themes. It uses specific cultural artifacts as examples to illustrate tendencies and practices and dynamics in the broader society. These range quite widely. The first is Edmund Burke's plea for clemency in the British Parliament for the Earl of Castlehaven, an 18th century noble convicted of sodomitcal acts, which Munt uses to illustrate how the very act of seeking less harsh punishment for such things served as a step in their rhetorical reorganization from evil acts to be punished into manifestation of selves that deserve to be shamed and, later on, as the basis for essences that express a particular kind of pride. She also talks about struggles by queer Irish-Americans for inclusion in the New York St. Patrick's Day Parade in the '80s and '90s. This was interesting, and something I'd never heard about before, though I did think that there was something off about her characterization of the Irish-American diaspora, perhaps as a result of applying understandings of the social organization of race and ethnicity from the British context that are not quite on the mark when it comes to North America. The book goes on to move through discussions of lesbian classic The Well of Loneliness, the British TV series Queer as Folk and Shameless, the U.S. American series Six Feet Under, interpersonal and political dynamics within academic Lesbian Studies, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, and British artist Tracey Emin. All were interesting, though it was particularly cool to hear her thoughts about the cultural products I'm more familiar with -- QAF, SFU, and HDM.

I'm not sure who exactly I would recommend read this book. It certainly isn't a movement book, it's an academic one. Yet given the way that shame happens, in our movements no less than anywhere else, I think this general line of study -- including this approach, including this book -- can certainly be read in ways that are movement-relevant. I learned about this from an academic review essay that a friend forwarded to me, and I am certainly encouraged to track down some of the other books it discusses.

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