Radical Parenting Resources

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

Knowing and the Problem of Scale

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

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

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

Variations in Our Knowing

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

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

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

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

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

The Process of Knowing

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

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

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

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

Accuracy

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

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

Making Decisions in the World

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

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

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

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

More Housekeeping: Getting Back to Normal

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

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

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

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

Feminism and the Newest Social Movements

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

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

Her concluding paragraphs:

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

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

Concluding Thoughts

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

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

Read the whole article!

(Found via this post.)

Infrequent Posts

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

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

Social Collapse and Projecting the Future

Check this out:

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

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

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

Pessimism

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

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

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

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

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

Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

Quietism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Petition to Oppose Provincial Support for Plunder of Indigenous Land

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

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

Here is the text of the petition:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please sign it!

Review: Resisting Discrimination

[Vijay Agnew. Resisting Discrimination: Women from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean and the Women's Movement in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.]

One metaphor used by certain marxists to capture some of the important features of the capitalist world system is the idea that it has a "centre" and a "periphery". I don't know the history of this particular terminology, I'm afraid, and my appreciation of it as metaphor might not perfectly reflect its technical use or the historical conflicts over its content, but as far as I understand it this way of talking about the world is useful to get across both the idea that geographically disparate regions of the globe are in fact tied together by the relations that are part of capital rather than being completely discrete, as well as the idea that those relations tend to empower and benefit some regions (the centre) and disempower and impovrish others (the periphery) in ways that are interconnected.

I don't read or think or write much about what happens at that rarified level. However, once upon a time when I was struggling to find a way to write about how power and privilege can shape social movements, it occurred to me that the metaphor of centre and periphery is a very apt one in many cases. I welcome counter-examples, but it is applicable to every instance of North American social movements that I can think of. Movements coalesce in response to some sort of pattern of grievances or exploitation or oppression. Often what begins as a vibrant but self-contradicting jumble becomes more internally consistent and coordinated as the movement grows in breadth and power and challenges the oppression in question. In that process of becoming consistent and coordinated, almost invariably the specific experiences of a subset of the people who experience the grievance, oppression, or exploitation in question become the guiding standpoint for much of the movement. Almost invariably, the subset at the centre is more privileged in some or several ways than the subset whose specific experiences of that grievance, oppression, or exploitation are relegated to the periphery of the movement or, in some cases, cast out entirely.

As I said, it is much more difficult to find examples where this has not been true than where it has. For example, the inspirational moment for queer liberation in North America at the Stonewall riots was initiated mostly by working-class gender non-conforming, women, and trans people, including many who were racialized, yet the form of the queer movement in North America today centres politics based on the experiences of relatively privileged gay white men (and to a lesser extent relatively privileged lesbian women) and those whose ways of doing queerness are somewhat less in conflict with the dominant norms. Or look at the labour movement, which has a long history in North America of excluding completely or including but subordinating -- that is, making into the periphery -- white women and racialized women and men, and people who work but not for a wage, and basing its politics on various versions of the white working-class man who receives a wage or a subset thereof. There have been lots of efforts to change that in the last few decades, including a powerful trade union feminist movement that first emerged in Canada in the 1970s and movements against racism within unions that first became visible in their modern form in the 1980s, and certainly pockets exist where significant transformation has occurred or is in progress. However, there are many more union spaces that have changed little, or at least far from enough, and the overall struggle is far from won.

One of the most interesting-to-me examples of this phenomenon is the women's movement and its relationship to racism and to indigenous women and women of colour -- whiteness, of course, has historically been at the centre of the movement in North America, just as with the labour, queer, peace, and plenty of other movements. I think the particular historical and ongoing struggle in the context of the feminist movement is one that all of us need to learn from whether it is a space in which we have been active or not precisely because it is probably the movement that has worked the hardest to meet the challenges from its own perihpery, and those of us in other movements need to learn about how that hard work has happened. And we also need to pay attention to it because despite those many years of hard work, many racialized women continue to point out the ways that there remain many spaces and places across North America (and online) rooted in the white-dominated women's movement that still fail to adequately deal with racism and to de-centre whiteness from their politics.

It is because of this general political interest as well as its relevance to the next couple of chapters of my work that I read Resisting Discrimination. It is measured in pace and tone but quite readable for a text that comes out of academia. It begins with some useful history/herstory that I was not expecting, of issues of race in the context of the first wave of feminist movement in Canada. Then it goes on to explore race and gender in mainstream feminist practice in the '70s, including a critique of consciousness raising groups, and in the '80s, with a focus on efforts at coalition politics like the National Action Committee on the Status of Women and the Toronto International Women's Day committee. It moves on to considering how these issues have played out at the level of discourse in a variety of ways, and the way that systemic racism has always been a part of Canadian immigration policy. The latter in particular, though the basics were not new to me, presented the material in a more rigorously gendered way than I had seen it before.

Much of the original research in the book was based on interviews with women of colour active in women's organizations grounded in African, Asian, and Caribbean communities in Ontario, as well as attendance by the author at events and meetings of those groups over a few years. She talks about the form that those organizations have taken and their relationship to the state, with attention both to the troubling impact of the tentacles of state control exerted through funding and efforts by women of colour and white women to challenge policies around things like language training and domestic workers. The final chapter looks at how women's organizations in these communities had begun, by the period of the research, to address issues of violence against women.

The book presents some important pieces of the past and records some important information about how women of colour have organized themselves in Canada, as well as the obstacles they have faced from the state, from their own communities, and from the mainstream of the women's movement -- as well as the opportunities and resources that each of those three have also at times provided. While as a former employee of a mainstream non-state but state-funded organization I appreciated Agnew's open appraisal of the ways in which control flows with dollars, I was disappointed that the academic research orientation of the text prevented a more creative exploration of how women of colour and, by extension, other organizations might struggle against or even escape that. I also quite liked the way Agnew presented her reflections on her methodology because it was done in a more thorough and nuanced discussion than you usually see even in feminist texts. It included a recognition that many of the women of colour in many of the groups that she studied were dismissive of the value of academic research; I wish she'd taken that as an opening to talk at more length about various issues connected to knowledge production and social movements.

Overall this is an unexciting but useful book that traces some of the important aspects of the experiences of African, Caribbean, and Asian women in Canada up to the early 1990s. It does not attempt to tackled the full question of social movements, their centres, and their peripheries, but it is one important input when considering such questions in the context of the crucial example of the women's movement in Canada.

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

Review: Obsession, With Intent

[Lee Lakeman. Obsession, With Intent: Violence Against Women. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2005.]

My recent reading has included a lot of material about the ongoing epidemic of violence experienced by women at the hands of men and the state, because the next two chapters of my project, which brings to light aspects of Canadian history through the stories of long-time activists, will focus on the subject. This book is perhaps one of the most directly relevant to my purposes that I have yet read because its author is herself one of my interview participants and her words will feature heavily in one of the upcoming chapters.

This book has a rather unusual but fascinating genesis. It began with a five year research project by the Canadian Association of Sexual Assault Centres, or CASAC, which defines itself as

a Pan Canadian group of sexual assault centres who have come together to implement the legal, social and attitudinal changes necessary to prevent, and ultimately eradicate, rape and sexual assault. As feminists we recognize that violence against women is one of the strongest indicators of prevailing societal attitudes towards women. The intent of the Canadian Association is to act as a force for social change regarding violence against women at the individual, the institutional and the political level.

From my understanding based on reading the book, the goals of this project were two-fold: it was intended to increase understanding of the ways in which the criminal justice system functions in ways that prevent the conviction of men who have committed sexual assault, and it was intended to make use of the very few resources that are available for women's equality-seeking groups in the current era to help build not only knowledge but functional political relationships among feminist women active in anti-rape and anti-woman abuse activities across the country. It seems to have been quite successful in both of these aims.

Lakeman emphasizes that her organization does not see the criminal justice system as the only or even the main avenue by which violence against women will be ended -- at the very least, the increasingly disproportionate poverty experienced by women and the retreat of the neoliberalized Canadian state from redistributive goals are also central to allowing that violence to continue. However, CASAC also believes that as long as so much of our lives are shaped by the state, women have the right to demand that the state fulfill its commitments as expressed in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the United Nations Conventional on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Womenm (which the Canadian state has accepted and ratified) to create substantive equality for women by using its powers to address the scourge of male violence against women. To that end, given that there was a rare opportunity to obtain federal resources to do useful work in the service of women's equality, CASAC jumped at the opportunity. The research combined a thorough review of documents from the criminal justice system in jurisdictions around the country with interviews with 100 women who had been raped and chose to pursue the matter via state intervention, as well as the reported experiences of many frontline workers in anti-rape organizations. Most women never report the violence they experience to the authorities, and for reasons explained in the book the women interviewed in this project tend to represent greater persistence in their attempts to overcome the barriers thrown in their way by the state than is generally true even of women who report, according to the everyday experience of sexual assault centre staff. Nonetheless, this allows for a powerful and depressing picture of the way the criminal justice system betrays the equality rights of women who have been assaulted by men.

The book began life as the final report of this project. Photocopies of the report were widely circulated and used by activists within Canada and even internationally, and the decision was made to turn it into a book.

Now, the fact that it began life as a report for a funder has an impact on the form of the document -- I've written such documents myself, and I know it is its own kind of writing with its own kind of rules. This means, for example, that in the book there are sometimes references to events, legal precedents, and bits of history that I experienced while reading as not being explained as thoroughly as they might be. While this was occasionally distracting, the political ideas in the book are communicated strongly and clearly, and its overall message should still be very accessible whether you have been part of the movement in question or not.

What is more significant about the path that this document took from initial discussions among feminist women to book form is that it is a rare and powerful Canadian example of knowledge generated by and for a social movement. This is not academic research that can be partially appropriated for the benefit of movements and it is not government research that can be read into activist frames; rather, it is knowledge production that responds directly to immediate needs of a collective of collectives of feminist women who are trying to change the world. They are not interested in proving to supposedly disinterested peer reviewers that X or Y is "true" according to some sort of abstract standard that really just hides gender, class, and racial bias. Instead, their standard for validity is how well this knowledge supports their efforts to push for reforms and ultimately for transformations necessary to end violence against women.

Pursuing knowledge creation of this sort is a powerful, powerful tool that is not understood even by many activists. Part of that is that such work is quite resource intensive, so even though activists and oppressed people more genreally do it in uncoordinated ways every day, even when activists are aware of the power to be found in greater coordination and deliberate collective effort, often we just don't have the resource to do it. This book is an inspiring example of a movement finding ways to do it anyway, despite lean and hostile times.

The biggest political learning for someone not in the movement is the detailed illustration of how profoundly the criminal justice system fails women. At every step of the process, women who have experienced violence and who call upon the state in their search for justice and freedom from male violence face barriers in the attitudes of professionals and the polices and material realities of institutions that shape their environment.

Also of interest was reading this so soon after reading Andrea Smith's book and other material that has come out of the movement of which Smith is a part (exemplified by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence and related groupings, I think mostly in the United States). Both books and the movements from which they spring share a radical commitment to ending the violence that brings misery and terror to so many women's lives, and both are highly critical of the state. However, the two take those things in somewhat different directions, both in terms of how they elaborate their analysis of gendered violence and how they orient their social change work with respect to the state. It would be interesting to witness or read some sort of substantive engagement between these two perspectives. As well, though I wouldn't expect it from this particular book because it is outside its purpose, there are a number of other areas where it left me feeling that I (and probably others) would benefit from engagement across different feminist analyses in ways in which all parties are committed to giving the views of their opponents as sympathetic a reading as they can in critiquing them as a way to explore the roots of such differences, as well as a more thorough discussion of the ways in which power and privilege inevitably threaten to shape the centre, boundaries, and internal functioning of any movement.

But of course this book is not about me or my needs, and that's a big part of its value -- as a source of important recent herstory of parts of the Canadian women's movement and of radical feminist social analysis in the Canadian context, its power comes precisely from the fact that it is grounded explicitly in the needs of women who have experienced violence at the hands of a man, women who have been failed by the Canadian state, and women who have committed themselves to collectively challenging both of those things and forcing the state to meet its commitments to women's equality.

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

"Support Our Troops"? (Complete)

Sooner or later, everyone who opposes Western imperial adventures in western Asia will be forced to declare their orientation towards those people who are making it a reality on the ground. It might be a supporter of the war demanding rhetorically "Do you support the troops or not?" to score political points. Or scattershot hostility might spring all of a sudden from someone you try to hand a leaflet -- someone who has a child or partner bearing arms right at that very moment in Afghanistan or Iraq for whom the understandable emotional intensity of the desire that their loved one return safely leaves little space for any other consideration.

How should we, as people opposed to war and empire, approach this issue?

By far the most common answer to this question among anti-war activists is the slogan, "Support our troops, bring them home!"

On the surface, this slogan has a lot to recommend it. The rhetorical power to delegitimize that flows from the accusation that someone is not supporting the troops is a result of a double barrelled shot: The person so accused is seen thereby as attacking the imagined nation to which accuser, accusee, and troops all belong, and which the state of the same name spends massive resources trying to foster as the primary attachment in its subjects so they can more easily be mobilized in the direction that the power politics of the moment dictate. And they are also seen as attacking ordinary people -- little Johnnie Appleby from down the block (don't you remember when he was knee high to a smurf?) and poor Mrs. Macdonald who has got both her boys away to war, bless her.

"Support our troops, bring them home!" allows war opponents not only to advance a version of support that might be compelling to loved ones of soldiers because it is predicated not on the possibility of their death but on the assurance of their safety and life via their removal from the arena of combat, but it also allows you to introduce the evidence that the other side really doesn't support them at all. In Canada, that evidence might consist of showing how the state is putting Canadian youth in harm's way (and in a situation where they will inevitably be complicit in violence against innocents) to advance the interests of owning-class and other elite Canadians by sucking up to the fool emperor who lives next door, and the complete dishonesty about the nature of the mission to get the rest of us to go along. Or, in that emperor's more direct territory, by the even more massive catalogue of lies told in his name to get the whole affair going to begin with, the sheer incompetence of inadequately equipping the troops, and cutting health and other benefits that are supposed to support them once they are discharged.

And, to take a slightly different tack, it also gives the appearance of being more reasonable and less ideological -- in the sense of obscuring what's actually going on by deploying abstractions -- because it admits Mrs. Macdonald's boys as human beings rather than as faceless instances of an ideal type, i.e. "troops". This refusal to overlook the humanity even of people who are doing things we don't particularly like has a certain moral appeal as well -- one that some might dismiss, but that I think has value even if I would interpret it in my own idiosyncratic way.

"Support our troops, bring them home" is a slogan that is seldom subjected to much scrutiny, however. A little more reflection reveals it to be politically iffy and even nonsensical.

This may appear to be a minor example, but it has larger implications, I think: this stance by the anti-war movement, such as it is, set up a recent tactical defeat for anti-war organizers in Toronto. Since October, emergency response vehicles in the city have been sporting "Support Our Troops" bumper stickers. Once this was actually noticed it touched off something of a political firestorm, especially since it had been done without approval of city council. Because the vast majority of people who identify as anti-war are wrapped up in being perceived as supporting the troops even as they oppose the mission in Afghanistan, there is no already-built critique of the notion of supporting the troops that is easiliy accessible in public discourse. And that means that even though everyone concerned knows this is a piece of pro-war messaging, those people who enacted it and who support it could pass it off as politically neutral without looking like idiots because, "Hey, you people say you support 'em too, right? Heh-heh, heh-heh." They take advantage of all the hard work that anti-war activists have done to show that they support the troops too. (And to any readers who point out that "Support our troops" is technically a neutral statement, even without any deeper analysis of the content I feel very confident in saying -- based on the fact that I spend a great deal of my time thinking about how people will take up, understand, and respond to language -- that it will function in pro-war rather than neutral ways for the vast majority of readers.)

I have also come across a couple of other left writers recently who have challenged the slogan.

The first was Michael Neumann, a Canadian academic at Trent University that I know very little about -- I see his stuff occasionally at CounterPunch, and I often find things in it to disagree with but it also usually challenges me to think about things in new ways. He addressed the slogan in a couple of paragraphs in a larger essay arguing that even if you accept the motives for Western involvement in Afghanistan, you still must oppose the actual actions because the resources committed to achieve them are so inadequate to the task -- at least an order of magnitude too little -- that failure is inevitable and disaster is the predictable result.

He takes on the slogan by subjecting it to a little bit of materialist scrutiny. He points out that it is meaningless to declare abstract support for the troops.

[T]he entire opposition to the Afghan war worships at the altar of Supporting our Troops (Bring Them Home!). This is either hypocrisy or nonsense. If you support the troops, you must support them where they are, not where you might wish them to be. So someone might ask: do you or don’t you wish that the troops who are in fact now in Afghanistan remain safe? If you do wish that they remain safe, you wish them to possess that huge military asset, invulnerability. You want their armor and air support and heavy weapons to protect them. This can only mean that you hope they kill any Afghan who threatens their lives. Push come to shove, you want them to win all their battles. This, as an anti-war stance, is nonsense. “Support our troops, bring them home” is not an anti-war slogan, it is mere evasion. But if you don’t wish them to remain safe, then you don’t really support the troops. You’re a hypocrite: you can’t support them if you don’t hope to keep them from harm. No one I know admits to this attitude.

His materialist disruption of the philosophical idealism in the slogan, in other words, focuses on a physical and immediate situational where.

The other work I encountered that addresses this is a commentary by U.S.-based writer and activist Rahul Mahajan -- permalinks to each post don't seem to be working on his site at the moment, but if you just scroll down the top page to the July 2, 2007 entry you will find what I am referring to.

Mahajan's attack on the slogan is also materialist, but focuses more on what (or, if you like, where in a social and institutional sense).

[P]erhaps it is time for the left to put to rest the nonsensical slogan, “Support the troops, bring them home.” It is true, as crafters of this slogan have been at pains to point out, that the other side makes precious little sense either. Supporting the troops by not anticipating the dangers, waiting years to adapt Pentagon procurement practices so that they’re equipped as well as possible, and having psychologists deny them rights to combat-related disability benefits because of claims that their PTSD actually results from when their parents didn’t take them to the circus is not exactly in accord with the vernacular definition of “support.” I wouldn’t deny this. But I think their version still makes more sense than the antiwar movement’s version.

“Support the troops, bring them home” sounds a lot to me like “Support the policemen, make sure they don’t have to fight crime” or “Support the ballerinas, keep them from performing dangerous dance steps that could lead to serious joint injuries.” If your daughter was a doctor fighting, say, a malaria epidemic, would you be “supporting” her by trying to get her called away?

Of course, it is true that, unlike said doctor, many of the soldiers want to leave. Do you mean “support the soldiers’ wishes?” Do you really think decisions about war and peace should be made by polling the military? I imagine not.

For whatever reason people join the U.S. military, the truth is that it exists to fight wars abroad. If we fought lots of noble wars abroad from disinterested humanitarian motives and nobody was killed (except, of course, for “bad guys”), and the countries we bombed were transformed into Sugar Candy Mountain, then perhaps that would be a noble goal. As it is, the last war we fought in which our participation was unequivocally a good thing (with lots of horrors embedded within it, of course) was World War II and at the start of that war we barely had a standing military.

I think I would challenge his characterization of World War II, but overall I think he is on to something important.

See, most discussions of "Support our troops", whether or not they dwell on the anti-war addendum of "bring them home!", revolve around the word "support." This whole thing comes out of the right accusing a lack of support and left-liberals and others falling all over themselves to demonstrate that they support, and it's more support, and better support, because it is support based on a more accurate understanding of support, and don't forget about that support. Even Neumann's commentary, decidedly not liberal at all, is based on taking the blinders off about what "support" would really entail.

This is important stuff, no doubt, but it does not exhaust the possibilities for discussion. What Mahajan does is move the focus to the word "troops." This, I think, is a very important move, though the commentary leaves a lot of questions unresolved.

You see, little Johnnie Appleby and the Macdonald boys are those sweet kids who grew up in your home town, and we shouldn't just forget that. But that's not all they are; they are also "troops." "Troops" is not just an abstract category. It is not a badge that can be put on and taken off as simply as a "Support our troops, bring them home!" button. It is not a taste adopted nor a fashion worn. "Troops" is something done to human beings, a deliberate process to prepare them for a role that human beings generally do not wish to fill, as killer or killed. And "troops" is located within a particular web of relationships that shape their actions and define how they function in the world.

As is the case about so many things, more information is easily available about the United States than about our own country, but from what I understand, even allowing for some variation between armies, the phenomenon of "basic training" is a standard feature of turning citizens into the kinds of soldiers needed to wage the kind of war that modern industrial states wage. And basic training is awful. It dehumanizes those who go through it, and forces upon them "an idealized military masculinity based on the denial of attachment and compassion" that ensures they are able to kill when told to. The kinds of experiences that are part of being "troops", including but far from limited to basic training, have a lasting impact. For example, you can read about a U.S. Department of Justice study that found veterans to be twice as likely to be incarcerated for sexual assault as non-veterans. I have seen related numbers about rates of violence by male soldiers against their intimate female parters on U.S. bases. I cannot paint a complete picture of the kinds of impacts that being "troops" has on the individual human beings who are forced into that category, but this should give you a sense. How can we support that?

And as much as the right pushes us to see Johnnie Appleby just as Johnnie Appleby, once he is in that uniform he takes up a very particular place in social relations as well as remaining himself as an individual. He is obliged upon threat of serious legal sanction to obey orders, and it is the path of those orders that ties him in. He cannot see where they flow from, but flow they do, through him and out into consequences in the real world. I once quoted Jane Jacobs on this site as saying, "Imperialism, in whatever form, is a global process -- it occurs across regions and nations -- but even in its most marauding forms it necessarily takes hold in and through the local." And it is through Johnnie that this happens. And, yes, part of that is the mission. But part of that is inherent to being "troops" connected to particular forms of human organization that predictably and reliably turn to violence against ordinary people to protect and enhance the power of the already powerful.

Now, some might counter this with all manner of mythology about Canadian benevolence in general and about the benevolence of the Canadian military in particular. This is, for the most part, hogwash. The fact that the Canadian military has not been as deeply implicated in horrific doings as the U.S. military over the last century is not about virtue, it is about privilege -- the privilege of not mattering in the world system, and therefore not having to play as direct a role in defending it by force. Disaster relief activities are noble, but whatever organization you have to respond to things like the Red River flood and the great ice storm of a few years back does not need to be armed or trained to kill, so some other institution could be created to replace the military in that capacity. At home, since Confederation, the Canadian military has also been used on many occasions to break strikes and to enforce colonial relations on indigenous peoples, and even if the former hasn't really happened since the first half of the twentieth century, the latter has happened much more recently and is envisioned by the hawks in charge as being a prime component of what the "troops" are supposed to do well into the future. At the international level, the resources devoted to peacekeeping were always a very small proportion of the military budget in Canada -- I'm afraid I don't have the number handy, but it was not large -- and in any case peacekeeping has always had colonial overtones, as Sherene Razack's work on the Somalia Affair has illustrated. And as Canada's chief general, Rick Hillier, infamously said a year or two ago, "We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people."

In short, by being so hung up on showing that we support the human beings who are "troops" for Canada, we end up falling in to supporting all the bad things that go along with "troops". We get to oppose the mission, but we do not get to mount a critique of the institutional circumstances that created the mission in a way that is not about a particular bad politician but is about organizations, institutions, social relations. Our admirable instinct for human connection is used to pull us in to support phenomena that are as profoundly anti-human as you can get.

This does not leave us with a simple, easy way to orient ourselves to the troops. I saw somewhere -- I forget where, or I would link to it -- the idea of "Free the troops!" as a slogan. Again, this has a certain appeal, but I still don't think it quite captures what is at stake. Perhaps more importantly, I doubt its meaning would be widely legible, particularly in the absence of involuntary conscription. "Detroopify the troops!" captures more of what matters in the situation, I think, but not only would it not be easily comprehensible to most people, it sounds silly and it would be completely unable to activate most of the advantages that flow from "Support our troops, bring them home!" as outlined above.

So there is no easy slogan. We can do our very, very best at avoiding all of the things that the war mongers still manage to accuse us of whether we actually do them or not; we can listen, we can foreground the humanity of those trapped in the imposed (to a certain extent even if chosen) category "troops", we can be Buddha-like in our compassion; but we still have to face the fact that there are powerful social and psychological forces at work that will mean a great deal of hostility from many military members and their families (even though, as the author of the article linked admits in his newer preface, he has probably undersold the capacity for resistance among vets and families -- sometimes the guards do revolt). This is unavoidable.

I still don't think that means we should give up. Nor does it mean that we should revert to simplistic slogans that make no sense and commit us to lousy politics.

I'm not sure how to do it, but I think one important avenue is beginning from our own complicity. Part of what makes this whole issue so difficult is the disjuncture between the individual and the relations into which they are socially organized. Yes, this disjuncture can be particularly acute with individuals who are part of the military. But it is hardly unique to that context. Who on this planet is more wrapped up in violence, for example, than white middle-class North American men, even if we have never raised our voice in anger, never committed an act of interpersonal violence, never voted for a right-wing politcial party? (Other experiences marked by significant privilege are similar.) Who I am and what I can do has been shaped by all manner of violence, from the epidemic of sexual and other intimate violence experienced by women and other gender oppressed people that gives me privilege as a man, to the superexploitation of workers in the so-called Third World who make possible my significantly less severe exploitation, to the indigenous nations whose colonization gives me a place to live and a resource extraction industry that functions to the benefit of the settler middle-class in my city, and so on. This is not a matter for personal guilt, but recognizing the pointlessness and paralytic potential of guilt on a personal level does not change the fact that it is violence of that sort that creates the boundaries in which the individual agency and potential of my life is experienced.

This means that approaching the question of "our troops" from a pose of innocence, whether that is followed by unrelenting criticism of them or a pledge to support them by bringing them home, is a lie. No, I'm not saying that we should fail to hold individuals accountable for actions and choices -- those individuals who commit atrocities should face consequences, for example, and even more so the powerful people who create the atrocious circumstances to begin with. But what I am saying is that "troops" may be the edge of the imperial sword, so to speak, but that does not give we who carry along happily as part of the imperial body any valid claims to superiority, let alone innocence. We are in it, we are part of it. We are struggling against, striving to get beyond, but we are still very much within. And that's where we have to start. We have to start by foregrounding that shared complicity. It is not an easy place to start, and is perhaps a pointless one on a very immediate level when faced with Mrs. Macdonald's fear about her sons channeled into anger. But it is all we have. We must allow it to cure us of the urge to point unreflective fingers at people, many of whom may have had fewer real choices in their lives than the more privileged among us. And we must engage in radical experiments with using it as a starting point to form connections that can expand our struggles against that which entraps us all.

And yet there's still something missing in all of this. Others have pointed out that focusing too much on "the troops" can itself be a trap, no matter what stance we take in so doing, because it can detract attention from other aspects of war and empire. In particular, it can make us lose sight of the fact that the disproportionate burden of war and empire is always, always borne not by troops but by non-combatant women.