Canadian Dimension | Blog

Time for big ideas: Imagine Canada after Harper

Murray Dobbin — 2012-05-21T21:08:27+00:00

Stephen Harper, too, shall pass into history, recorded as one of the most destructive, personally malignant personalities ever to have soiled the Canadian political landscape.

But in the meantime, Canadians are so distracted by his political blitzkrieg through the agencies, policies, programs and institutions that make Canada what it became over five decades, that we are in danger of losing our imagination regarding what is truly possible in this country. While it may seem counter-intuitive, now is the time for Canadians who actually believe in government and nation-building to be contemplating big ideas - the ones that will take us the next step to equality, economic stability and environmental sustainability. Why? Because if we don’t try to get what we want we won’t even get what we need.

Is this just pie in the sky - are Canadians actually open to big ideas? Absolutely. Here are just a few of the signs.

Five signs Canadians aren’t afraid of big ideas

First: CARP, the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (with a membership 330,000), has just witnessed a sea change in its members’ voting intentions. For most of the past year just over 50 per cent of them chose the Conservatives. But suddenly, two issues reversed that, giving the NDP (which had consistently run a distant third) first place with 39 per cent and the Harperites 31 per cent. The first issue was the changes to the OAS. But the “political game changer,” according to Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy for CARP, was the omnibus bill. Eighty-five percent opposed bundling so many legislative changes into a single bill. Seniors, a key part of Harper’s broader base, apparently care about democracy even more than their own safety net.

Sign number two: perhaps we should call it free market fatigue, as increasing numbers of Canadians are questioning the Conservative ideology of minimalist government and a free hand for corporations. As I detailed in my last column, large majorities of Canadians are calling for higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations and are willing to pay more themselves to preserve what we have. And they see the tax issue tied directly to that of inequality - the new top-of-mind issue.

Number three: The Alberta election which seemed for weeks to be heading towards the election of a Harper clone reversed course as Albertans suddenly paid real attention. This wasn’t just a vote against bigotry - though it was that, too - but a vote for good government, something the iconic Tory Peter Lougheed reminded voters of just in the nick of time.

Four: The re-election of Liberal and NDP governments in Ontario (where the NDP did well, too) and Manitoba respectively was not just a vote for incumbency - it was a vote for rational governance and against libertarian recklessness. So will be the almost certain election of the NDP in BC next year.

Five: The Quebec student rebellion. Deep rooted rebellions are always messy and imperfect but while many are uncomfortable with the scenes of violence the students are absolutely right to be protesting tuition fee increases. And now the demonstrations are as much about human rights and the reactionary government of Jean Charest as they are about tuition fees. They are sustained by tens of thousands of our fellow citizens prepared to make real sacrifices for what the rest of us pay lip service to: equality.

But this is also a good example of the role of big ideas. Why wouldn’t we be demanding zero tuition fees - so that all education is free and paid for collectively? We are now, as a nation, well over twice as wealthy per capita (in real, inflation adjusted dollars) as we were when Medicare was established in 1967. The money is there - and in a democracy the people get to decide how those resources are used. We owe the Quebec students (and their hundreds of thousands of supporters in civil society groups) a huge debt of gratitude for shaking us out of our ideology-induced political torpor.

Their message: a better world is possible, but only if we fight for it.

Thinking about a sustainable economy

Our preoccupation with Harper’s outrages, though totally justified, is distracting us from imagining the kind of world we really want to build. Ironically, the projection of extremely low economic growth for the foreseeable future actually provides an imposed opportunity to examine what we desperately need to do anyway - begin to put together plans for a sustainable economy, a redefined prosperity that is not based on unfettered growth in the private sector - the economy of stuff.

If ever there was a time to move in this direction it is now - with corporations sitting on over $700 billion in cash which they refuse to invest because their own policy preferences and reckless behaviour has destroyed demand for private goods and services. Perhaps a tax on idle capital would make sense - a declaration by government that if the private sector can no longer allocate capital investment in the interests of the country and its citizens, then we will take some of it back and allocate it ourselves as public investment. It’s not that we don’t need investment. A no-growth economy is actually a misnomer, for what its advocates are really talking about is a different kind of growth - the kind that only governments can create: mass transit, green energy, a national food strategy, child care, pharma care, home care, culture and anti-poverty programs including affordable housing.

Capitalism will be around for a while yet, but its current incarnation, the savage capitalism of Wall Street and deregulation, needs to be put to rest. The Canadian corporate sector has proven over and over again that it is utterly inept at improving its performance, its investment in research and development and its willingness to take risks and thus improve its productivity. The experiment with government “getting out of the way” of business has been an abject failure.

That should bring back the big idea of a much more planned economy - a robust, imaginative industrial strategy that directs the allocation of private capital to where it is most productive, produces the most and best jobs and provides stability and balance to the economy (NDP leader Thomas Mulcair is on the right track with his Dutch disease analysis). It is the other half of the capital allocation equation. The CAW has taken the lead amongst private sector unions with a 10-point plan to promote the long-term growth of the auto industry. First on the agenda is a national auto policy.

Continuing with the theme of public investment it is long past time that we use the powers of the Bank of Canada to lend to governments (including provincial and municipal governments) at virtually zero interest rates (just enough to cover administrative costs). The insane practice of accumulating a massive public debt by borrowing from private banks ranks as perhaps the most perversely destructive practice of the past forty years.

Democracy and reclaiming the commons

Policies and programs administered by government bureaucracies will not give us what we want - especially given that these bureaucracies are now populated more and more by people dedicated to dismantling government itself. The big idea that will make the difference is a radical, deeply rooted democracy that includes the obvious reforms needed to the electoral system but involves far more than that. Participatory budgeting, institutionalizing citizen participation in the design and delivery of social programs, government subsidies for citizen study circles (as they have in Sweden where some 300,000 such circles are reported each year) which promote education, political literacy and discussion about the kinds of programs and policies people actually want should all be on the agenda.

That’s just a start - add to them yourself by simply using your imagination about what kind of world you would like to wake up to. How will these things ever come to pass? I have no idea - except that unless we think about them, imagine them, and talk about them amongst ourselves it is an absolute certainty that we will never achieve any of them. It is a question of choosing between despair over the historical accident of Stephen Harper and hope rooted in what we know in our hearts to be possible.

In the end it is all about reclaiming the commons - robbed from us by the one per cent and the perverse ideology of neo-liberalism. Maybe we could begin with a small step in that direction - by reinstating Sunday closing. I know, there are lots of objections (its initial roots in Christianity being one) but imagine there actually being a day when you couldn’t buy more stuff. We could bring back an ancient commons tradition: talking to each other.

Review: Imagined Communities

Scott Neigh — 2012-05-19T16:47:32+00:00

[Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. London: Verso, 2006. (Original edition published in 1983.)]

A quirky book that takes as one of its starting points the historically lousy job that the liberal and marxist traditions had done of theorizing nationalism, Imagined Communities became a widely-read classic with the revival of scholarly and popular attention to the topic that occurred in the 1990s. Anderson’s tendency to make shorthand references to people and events that assume a familiarity with European history that most of us in North America lack, and his tendency to include quotations in languages other than English without providing translations, are occasional irritants, but the combination of lively writing and a grounded, innovative approach makes this book still worth reading three decades after its original publication.

To say that nations are “imagined communities” gets at the idea that we will never meet the vast majority of people with whom we share that identification, and there are huge differences amongst us along any number of axes, yet we still manage to imagine ourselves as shared members of the same collective entity: the nation. And nationalism is best approached not by treating it as a political ideology like certain other ‘-isms’ such as liberalism or marxism, but as deeply intertwined with the nation as a social form — it’s an attachment to that form and to that way of imagining human collectivity.

Previously dominant forms of collective imagining included the religious community — Christendom, the Umma, etc. — and the old dynastic realm, which was both socially organized and imagined much differently from the contemporary nation-state. The nation and corresponding attachments emerged, Anderson argues, through the conjunction of shifts in how we see time and the social world, the emergence of print technology, the increased importance of vernacular languages, and the imperatives of capitalism. He writes, “What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communication (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity” (42-3).

Though many scholars before and since this book treat Europe as the home of nationalism, Anderson points out that it first emerged in the Americas in the rebellions of creole elites in Latin America and the future United States against the empires from which they sprang. While, in the Latin examples, the tightening grip of Madrid and the emergence of liberal ideas played a role in creating the conditions for rebellion against the empire, they were not themselves sufficient. Creole elites in each Spanish jurisdiction shared common experiences, common journeys through space and through social contexts and institutions, and common limitations of their roles within the empire, which created shared consciousness and a shared commonsense about a ‘naturally’ existing “we” clearly distinct from the imperial core despite shared language and culture. As well, the emergent newspapers created a widely-shared social ritual that also organized people’s consciousness and sense of belonging in ways that not only built a “we” that corresponded to the existing imperial administrative units but also helped to cement a new notion of the social world as discrete social units moving through linear, ‘empty’ time.

The next form of nationalism to emerge was popular nationalism in Europe, starting from about 1820. Certain shifts making this possible hard already largely occurred. For instance, a sense of ongoing social transition over time — that is, a sense of history — emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment. During the same era, the encounters of European explorers and traders with peoples on other continents normalized the idea of humanity as plural. These helped to make it plausible that at a later moment it would become conceivable to see the natural form of global social organization as being different national units moving forward in parallel. Additionally, language had become an object of study, particularly of historical study, and the languages that had held together the previous religious imaginaries — Latin, in the Western European case — came to be seen as just one more language among many and their sacred place was eroded. For purely practical reasons, empires came to take up vernacular languages for their administration rather than Latin.

In this context, both the model of nationalism from the Americas plus the example of the French Revolution could be taken up and adapted in popular ways in Europe. In the Americas, nationalism did not emphasize shared and distinct language in defining a nation, as both the empire and the colonies which rebelled shared the same tongue. In Europe, much popular nationalism was organized around vernacular languages and deliberate efforts to create national print-languages as part of forging linguistic minorities in the continent’s polyglot imperial territories into nations. Capital-driven print technology played a major role in this, as did the efforts of language-oriented scholars. This helped forge reading publics, which at the time were some mix (depending on the area) of nobility, landholders, professional, bureaucrats, and capitalists. In the Americas, at least at first, there was no particular effort to use nationalism to inspire lower-class investment in the national projects, whereas this was true from the start in Europe.

Partly in reaction to the rise of popular nationalisms, and the corresponding emergence of a sense that linguistic national communities should exist autonomously in a collection of equals, the imperial entities of Europe countered with official nationalisms of their own as deliberate policy. From the start, as a “willed merger of nation and dynastic empire” (86), these official nationalisms always contained a tension between the particular emerging (but often concealed) nation at the heart of the empire and the larger imperial project, but they still often had a major impact in shaping the practices and consciousness of those subject to them.

The final form of nationalism that Anderson identifies was that in the emerging, postcolonial states in the 20th century. Postcolonial nationalisms, he says, were generally a mix of populist enthusiasm and careful calculation by the newly sovereign states. The postcolonial states inherited a great deal from the colonial states they succeeded, not just geographic scope but also the journies of education and administration in which elite consciousness was formed and the various categories and practices instilled under empires which formed consciousnesses that continued into the post-imperial period. He traces the colonial emergence of technologies like the census, the map, and the museum for developing totalizing observation and classification in the colonies and the connection of an abstracted narrative claiming continuity with the distant past, all of which carried over in various ways into postcolonial state practices.

Anderson also points out that even revolutionary seizure of the state, as in the Soviet Union or China or Vietnam, tends to result in those who seize it having their choices and their path to a large degree conditioned by the already-existing state form. One of the many ways this is true is with respect to nation and nationalism. He uses this to explain what at the time of the original writing was the emerging phenomenon of war between actually-existing socialist states that looked much like any other inter-state wars.

There’s lots to like, here. Lots of the arguments Anderson makes are plausible. The emergence of a new social form and related imaginative identification through the accidental conjunction of certain changes sounds plausible. The emergence of shared consciousness and shared imagination through shared practices also sounds realistic. The modularization and adaptation of the social form once it exists in the world also sounds very life-like. In addition, one theme that emerged in my recently-completed class in postcolonial theory is that many postcolonial theorists posit a role for the novel in the shaping of consciousness without saying much about how that might happen, whereas Anderson generally connects texts to changes in consciousness through particular kinds of practices. All of that said, though, he stops short of doing the work necessary to demonstrate that this is what did happen. Certainly the correspondence between elite journeys in the Spanish colonies in the Americas, and later in different ways in European colonies in Africa and Asia, and the actual national attachments that emerged (with no other real correspondence to pre-colonial social organization or imagination) is a strong enough correlation that we should take it seriously. But there must be ways to document this emergence more thoroughly in terms of the shifts of consciousness observable among the people involved.

I have a few other quibbles as well. For instance, he has a short chapter presenting a theory of racism, and basically arguing that it isn’t as inherent to nationalism as many left and liberal European intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s would have argued. He points out that the organization of racial oppression bears more resemblance to the organization of class oppression than it does to the organization of nation and of national sentiment, and argues that instances of racism and nationalism being integrated are an imperial imposition and not inherent to the national form. I think there are some reasonable points here — the relationship between racism and class oppression, for instance — but I think it drastically underestimates the persistence of race as a feature of national identification in former imperial centres and in former settler colonies like Canada.

Related to that, I think much more needs to be said about the interplay of capacity to imagine self as part of a nation and one’s place within the social relations that constitute that nation. How are subordination within and exclusion from nations socially organized, and how does that relate to how they are imagined?

It is intriguing to think about how these ideas might relate to Canada, something he does not mention at all but the sort of thing I’m going to be thinking about rather a lot in the next few months. It seems like the emergence of an English-dominated Canadian nation and nationalism is in some ways quite distinct from any other in the Americas in that it involved a gradual, mutual separation from the imperial core rather than a more contentious break. My sense is that many of the Canadian founding elites were not creole, unlike in the U.S. and Latin America, but were born in the metropole. The Canadian state was also to a certain extent created as a distinct and no-longer-purely-colonial entity for imperial administrative and political convenience rather than any kind of overwhelming local pressure that it be so. I think these things might help explain the odd juxtaposition of pseudo-national consciousness that was clearly integrated into and subordinate to, at least in its dominant strand, an unapologetic imperial consciousness for almost a century. That was not displaced by a more clearly national consciousness until the 1960s.

In any case, this is an important book for me to have read — well, re-read, actually — as I move into what is going to be a fairly heavy reading course organized around thinking critically about English Canadian nationalism. I was initially a bit resistant to the idea of reading something I’ve already read, but am now convinced it was a good idea, and would certainly recommend engagement with Anderson’s work to anyone trying to think about such questions.

[Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. This post originally appeared on his personal blog, as have many other book reviews. Scott has two books of Canadian history entered through the words of activists coming out in late 2012.]

The Hunger Games

Scott Neigh — 2012-05-07T01:45:34+00:00

We are in a strange moment. It is a moment that calls out for resistance — the global retrenchment of class power through austerity; the increasingly bold political attacks on women in North America; the still-changing mix of attack on queers and accommodation with queers who are already privileged in other ways, combined with appropriation and re-organization; the quite different mix of re-organization, silencing, and attack on racialized people; the ongoing erasure of disabled people; so much more. And people resist. They live when they are told they should die, they help and love and co-operate when they are told they should consume and compete, they defy when they are told they should comply…at least sometimes. Collective expressions of that impulse are important to nurture where they happen but are unpredictable, scattered. So many spaces churn with isolated efforts to survive, leftover imagery from past struggles, and a kind of emptiness that cover real anger and real contemporary struggles of ones and twos and tens getting by, and sometimes managing to blunt the local manifestations of the knife. Those swirling images matter, I think — they are one of the few hooks that we have for this desire for things to be other than they are, this sense that they can be, when so many of us are not only detached from participatory, democratic spaces that can give collective form to the struggles that fill our everydays but, after decades of neoliberalism, even from the sense that it is possible to create such spaces in ways that could mean anything for our lives. We sense the swirling anger, the swirling images, but we have trouble making the leap to seeing them as genuine possibilities of radical imagination that we can struggle to make real, and instead relate to them more often as ghosts. Yet the desire persists, the need persists, for a world that is more just and free, as well as the echoes, at least, of past efforts to make it so. Hollywood can stir them up, remix them, sell them back to us. We know this because of how much work is done by the social organization of the news and entertainment media to convince us that these things don’t matter, that they are fun but without any real meaning or possibility.

This is the realworld cultural context in which Katniss Everdeen’s story is being told. I think a big part of her resonance in this moment is her passionate commitment to survival in the face of hardship, and her unflinching insistence in respecting human dignity, her own and other people’s, in the face of oppression that denies it. Not only that, but her story allows her to make such choices in moments where their resistant character is clearly visible to us, and where her choices have important material consequences (even if more of those will only become clearer in future instalments in the series). Insistence on survival and dignity in the face of all of the pressures not to survive and all of the pressures that deny our own humanity and push us to deny the humanity of those around us speaks to what we need so very badly in this moment. However, the way these things happen in the movie misdirects us, neutralizes their potential. It builds on what is messed up and awful in what is even as it remixes images of resistance and tunes them to our desires for something more, something better.

Who Katniss Must Be

One important way that The Hunger Games misdirects us is through what it says about who Katniss must be in order for her to win. Some of these elements are present in the story arc in both book and movie, and others are accentuated in the movie — I would argue because the extremely high level of capital investment in a feature film intending to be a “blockbuster” means a different kind of responsiveness to mass audience expectations (or their incorrect perception by studio execs) than the more modest outlay required for a book. In both, her chance at victory requires her to perform a certain kind of femininity as she tries to position herself, in the lead-up to the start of the games, to get sponsors. That is, being a certain kind of woman is shown as necessary to win. This happens in the book as well, but there it shown more clearly as an imposition, and Katniss is shown as more resistant. (Though see also this piece which points out that the way it is shown wavers between opposing imposition and opposing femininity itself — for instance, exaggerated femininity, and perhaps a kind of aesthetic queerness, is a primary way in which the Capitol is Othered for the viewer.) Another element of how this shifted with the change in medium is the way her fiery temper is made much more moderate in the movie. That is, for her to act in resistant ways that refuse to deny human dignity, she has to do it in a way consistent with how many people in the audience (and many studio execs) perceive as proper for a woman — she couldn’t be shown as too angry, or people might not like it.

Moreover, in both texts her victory is shown as depending on her being seen as involved in a heterosexual romance (one which even invokes the epitome of hetero romance, Romeo and Juliet, in a number of ways, including the threatened double suicide in the climactic scene). Again, the fact that this is imposition and the fact that she resists — that is, that heterosexual coupledom is not inherent and natural but is socially imposed as a condition necessary for a woman to be allowed to succeed — is much clearer in the book, though she ultimately complies there too. In the movie, I think it was deliberately portrayed such that those viewers who had read the book would read Katniss as deliberately faking it to survive, while those who hadn’t could just as easily read it as a genuine romance blossoming between her and Peeta. In the movie it seems like an almost invisible instance of the near-universal convention in which the successful conclusion of a movie requires the formation or triumphant preservation of a heterosexual relationship.

Another aspect of what the movie shows that Katniss must be in order for her to win is white. In the early stages of turning the book into a movie, online critics writing from an anti-racist perspective pointed out that Katniss is portrayed as racially ambiguous in the book — as not white and perhaps as mixed-race. There was a great outcry when Jennifer Lawrence was cast in the role. This is not, I should add, any comment on her skills — I think she is very talented and she really impressed me in this movie. The problem is that the producers decided that whiteness was necessary to tell the story they wanted to tell in ways that they thought would resonate with enough (white) people to make the movie financially successful. Another troubling moment related to Katniss’ whiteness and her heroic journey within the movie is the scene in which Rue dies. It is already clear by this point that Katniss’ immediate struggle in the games is meant to be read as connected to a larger, collective struggle of survival and dignity against the oppressive Capitol. In her final moments, Rue tells her “You have to win!” While there is certainly ample justification in the movie in terms of the interpersonal relationship between these two characters to make this a plausible statement for Rue to make, it still reads quite strongly to me as a moment meant to bestow a certain kind of legitimacy on Katniss, a kind of confirmation of the racial universality of the struggle of the white hero through a sympathetic Black character saying to do it for her. This universality, of course, is so often denied to non-white heroes in general, and was specifically denied to a non-white hero in this movie through the casting of Lawrence.

What Struggle Must Be

The movie, again in line with the book in some ways and more than the book in others, also politically misdirects us in what it tells us about what struggle must be.

Before expanding on that, it is important to note that there are ways that it portrays oppression and resistance that are interesting and that do allow us to think usefully about the world in which we actually live. The kind of spatialized mechanisms of control between a centre (the Capitol) and a periphery (the Districts), and the specialized roles in production played by the territories of the periphery, reformulate a very real and active aspect of how our current global social relations work. It even potentially makes this mechanism more visible to readers and viewers because it casts it all within a post-apocalyptic U.S. rather than as the relation between Europe/North America and the rest of the world which is made largely invisible in our realworld culture. The Hunger Games also shows in a number of different ways how horrible violence is ritualized and/or routinized and thus made invisible, particularly to those who are not subject to it. And, certainly, this is an important idea to explore, given the extent to which our lives in North America depend on massive violence that is largely invisible to us, and the extent to which good liberals will immediately reclassify you as someone not worth listening to when you try to point that out. As well, various points made by the “President Snow” character about the political role of the Games, such as giving oppressed people a hint of hope — not none, but not too much — resonate with the real world (see: Horatio Alger). And the division of those who benefit from oppressive social relations between a small number of conscious elite oppressors and so many others who more passively benefit but whose desires, structures of feeling, and interpretive practices are organized such that they can maintain a self-image as good, violence-free people yet react to resistance by the oppressed in ways that fully support the oppressive status quo and tacitly or explicitly support repressive and oppressive violence.

But there is a lot about how struggle is portrayed that is much more troubling. For instance, while there are moments where refusal of an oppressive status quo is shown as being an assertion of dignity, there are other moment where resistance is shown as being about virtue. Assertions of human dignity are an important aspect of struggle because it is core to that act to assert that all of us deserve it, even though we are flawed. An emphasis on virtue, however, reinforces an oppressive and culturally dominant idea that only those who are virtuous have a right to object to their oppression, and that ways of objecting to and resisting oppression must be such that virtue is maintained in order to be seen as legitimate. The bind of having to be passive or (an oppressive version of) perfect is yet one more way that resistance gets undermined.

As the previous section outlined, even Katniss’ instances of insisting on dignity are in part grounded in certain kinds of implicit claims to virtue through who it is shown she must be in order to be the resistant hero. But it becomes even more stark when you look for signs of oppression and resistance beyond Katniss herself. One powerful association of virtue in the dominant, white-supremacist imaginary in our society is with whiteness, and between sin or evil or corruption and non-whiteness, particularly Blackness. Part of how the movie constructs Katniss’ fellow citizens of District 12 as not only oppressed but virtuous in their oppression, therefore, is showing them as largely white and by invoking (sanitized) imagery from our past of hardscrabble, oppressed, poor white folk and white industrial workers. When they show snippets from other districts later in the movie, more multi-racial images of oppressed people are shown, but in the initial establishment of the movie’s framework, white members of the audience are pulled in to identify with those who are oppressed in part through the whiteness and ostensible virtue of the oppressed.

Interestingly, while they do show more breadth of racial backgrounds among the competitors in the Games and in the snippets of other districts, they still show a lot less racial diversity than a post-apocalyptic U.S. would actually have, following today’s trends — the virtual absence of people who are visually identifiable as Latina/o particularly struck me. This, too, is part of trying to generate identification between the movie-going demographic with the most money and the people the story needs the viewer to identify with. And, of course, when they show the beginning of forms of resistance that the movie-going demographic with the most money will find scary or offputting — when the riots start after Rue’s death — it is shown as a Black man that starts it, playing on racist stereotypes that associate violence and criminality with Black masculinity. (This is also in line with the way that Thresh is portrayed as meeting certain dominant, white, racist stereotypes of Black masculinity.)

A final aspect of this appeal to virtue rather than to assertions of dignity, I think, has to do with the relative apportioning of aesthetics and gender expression alluded to in the previous section. The citizens of District 12 are shown as having very conventional gender expression — the one fairly minor exception is Katniss, and she is disciplined to more conventional expression as the movie progresses — and the people of the Capitol are shown as hyperfeminine and queer-ish. Again, dynamics of oppression and resistance are mapped onto imagery that evokes culturally dominant ideas of what is virtuous and what is not.

That is not the only way that the movie misdirects the impulse, so important in our current moment, to see ordinary people standing up for themselves, for survival, for dignity. The social arrangement in the movie makes at least one aspect of oppression in the lives of the characters very stark and visible, both to the characters themselves and to the viewers of the movie — the domination of the Districts by the Capitol. What could be clearer than the lack of food and the sad lined faces in District 12 in the opening scenes? What could be more stark than the theft of children for a spectacle in which they must murder or be murdered? And while making it obvious and visible makes it easier for those of us viewing the movie to talk about, it also implies that for oppression to matter in the real world it must be similarly stark and obvious to viewers. Which, of course, is not going to be true for many viewers, particularly those of us with privilege of various sorts for whom the awful violence of realworld social relations can be very hard to see and very easy to rationalize away. Or another way in which this could be read by many viewers resonates with one particular tendency among a particular layer of newly politicized people — I’m thinking of a subset of those associated with the Occupy movement — which sees only the newly visible (i.e. since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008) problems and not the longstanding ones. Reinforcing the idea that what matters is what you can already see contributes to the way that this tendency often ignores problems dating back before 2008.

This way of portraying oppression and resistance also makes it appear as unidirectional — the only problem shown in the movie is the Capitol. While many movements past and present have also framed the world’s problems as emanating from a single axis of domination, and feature film storytelling is rarely noted for its portrayal of social complexity, there is also decades of evidence from many writers and many movements that the real world is never that simple and it is oppressive to pretend that it is. Even granting that the story being told needs to show the struggle against the domination by the Capitol as central, there is never a hint that Katniss’ experiences are also organized by gender oppression, say, or of the inevitable continuity of racial oppression in a post-apocalyptic North America. This, too, misdirects the identification with struggle generated by the movie.

Perhaps the most fundamental way that The Hunger Games movie misdirects us — and this is implicitly present in a number of the points I’ve already made — is that, through the identification it creates between privileged viewers and oppressed protagonists in a struggle portrayed in a particular monolithic, unidirectional way, it allows us not to see our own place in analagous struggles in the real world. The fact is, even granting the huge imbalances in how wealth and power and privilege are allocated within the continent, most of those of us who live in North America are, on a global scale, citizens of the Capitol, not of the Districts. Nothing about this movie encourages us to wrestle with that. And, of course, many in North America do live lives that are cast into struggle, but even so, the landscape of that struggle is much different and much more complicated than the struggle that is portrayed in the movie. Almost all of us are simultaneously oppressor and oppressed, along different axes. Even when there are moments in which the lines of a particular struggle are clear — the students of Quebec versus the Charest government’s austerity agenda or the Occupy Wall Street folk versus the big banks, for instance — the impulse to see self as wholly constituted by righteous opposition to external nasty is a guarantee that our work will reproduce major political problems and will thereby limit itself. We must start from our own complicity, and The Hunger Games makes it easy to not do that.

All of that said, I think I still enjoyed the movie more than the two people with whom I originally saw it (and whose critiques of it have certainly informed this piece — thanks SR and SC!). And, as always, noting all of these things is not so much a demand for political perfection from mass media pop culture artefacts, but more to point out the work that this particular artefact is doing because of how it is put together and the ways in which that is troubling and disappointing.

[Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. This post originally appeared on his personal blog. His books Gender and Sexuality: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists and Resisting the State: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists will be out in late 2012.]

Youth, austerity, and the changing meaning of opportunity

Matt Austman — 2012-05-04T14:44:40+00:00

In the wake of the Conservatives’ 2012 austerity budget, depressive politics have been elevated to a new level in Canada. The vulnerable and marginalized are once again the subjects of demonization, deemed a societal burden by public and private sector elites who are convinced that balancing a budget in five years is more important than ensuring food on the table for the disenfranchised.

It turns out it doesn’t help to have a finance minister who believes homeless people should be thrown in jail.

The middle class will continue to shrink as a result of the austerity measures, but the budget’s sword is not drawn on them. As John Ibbitson eloquently put it in his latest analysis of Harper’s majority, the Conservatives’ socioeconomic agenda is to foster the development of more middle-class suburban families. It is in this way, by fixating their economic policies on the development of the nuclear family, they hope to shift the meaning of opportunity for Canadians.

In order to achieve their ideal society, they exploit the notion of the ‘Canadian dream’ for everyone. But to achieve this they do not dare touch the rich, who they perceive as demi-gods of our economy. Instead, they seek to create more prosperity by attacking low-income earners – ‘motivating’ them to become more ‘productive’ members of society. This is achieved by attacking the commons via privatization.

As easy as it may be to argue that Harper is simply robotic and evil, hell bent on ruining Canada, he and the Conservatives likely do believe – contrary to all evidence – that pressing austerity onto the backs of low-income people will benefit society at large.

But so short sighted they are.

One of the largest demographics of low-income earners in the industrialized world are young people under age 30. Canada is no exception, although it is fairing better than parts of Western Europe where up to 50% of young people are unemployed. Youth here are still facing an unemployment rate double the national average.

Considering this, it’d be logical to think that the government would see the contradiction in attacking low-income earners. But the government only sees the problem as too much RED TAPE.

Precisely, the issue is of no real concern to the government because they conceive opportunity only in terms of GDP. GDP only measures monetary transactions. It does not measure social and environmental degradation. This is why they believe catering to corporations and expanding the natural resource industry at all costs is so critical to our future.

But their trickle-down economics only end up with a splash on the foreheads of a few.

Austerity is framed by the government and mainstream media in terms of creating more opportunity in the long run. In reality, however, it’s about creating a specific kind of opportunity. We see this in their obsession with expanding natural resource extraction, while trying to downsize public investment in other industries as a means of ‘leaving it to the market.’

Consequently, they are sending a simple message to the legions of unemployed youth: Get a trades or science based education, or don’t complain. There’s no room for ‘hand outs’ if you don’t.

The Conservatives’ attempt to shift the meaning of opportunity for youth is evident through almost every major initiative they’ve taken since gaining power: Massive cuts to Canada’s creative industries; the raising of the OAS from age 65-67; tightening EI benefits; cutting funding to humanities and social science research – all the while obsessing about cutting RED TAPE for corporations. There is to be no safety net, except for Canada’s wealthiest.

Youth will continue be taken to task by the right for the foreseeable future. This is because, plain and simple, politics is calculative. It’s no secret young people don’t vote anywhere near in numbers to middle-aged people and seniors. Democracy is ruthless when you don’t vote. But it’s even more ruthless when propaganda succeeds (how many parents voted Conservative last election based on the idea that eliminating the deficit in five years is critical to their children’s future?).

Youth tend to either not care, or be exclusionary in their arguments when taking the Conservatives to task in turn. But perhaps youth need a simpler message: Austerity is not about this or that program being cut, or tuition being increased somewhere. It’s about what we value as a society. It’s about the very meaning of opportunity.

The Conservatives are betting that their austerity measures will result in more disenfranchisement from the political system, increase worker productivity, and reduce the role of the commons in the economy.

Yet it is here where the greatest hope for youth lies. The neoconservative agenda cannot be sustained. While efficient propaganda campaigns continue to scare the baby boomer generation into believing austerity is necessary for ensuring the prosperity of future generations, it won’t work on today’s youth, as they will not have the material gains to believe it.

As the social and environmental deficit accelerate at a feverish pace, the hope for youth actually increases. If what’s happening in Quebec is any sign of what’s to come, and the youth begin to rally against these gaps in the coming years, it will make them exactly the opposite of the media narrative: A generation of realists.

Review: Science Fiction and Empire

Scott Neigh — 2012-05-04T13:36:57+00:00

[Patricia Kerslake. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007.]

I’m deep in end-of-term mode at the moment, with one big paper and a few smaller things to finish before it’s done, and then book edits to deal with immediately after that. But I’m stealing a few minutes to do a quick review as I haven’t blogged in awhile.

The final paper that I’m writing this semester is looking at science fiction and other utopian and speculative forms through a postcolonial lens, with the intent of seeing if I can say anything about a role for speculative fiction in catalyzing anti- and postcolonial possibility in the cultural imaginations of those of us who are passive beneficiaries of empire. I’m quite cautious about making any but the most modest claims about this, but I’m starting from Edward Said’s observation in Culture and Imperialism that “the enterprise of empire depends on the idea of having an empire … and all kinds of preparations are made for it within a culture” (11, emphasis in original). The idea is that if preparations are made for empire (and Said was quite concerned with literary preparations in particular) then perhaps there is some role for analagous preparations in moving beyond empire. Not sure exactly what I’m going to say about that yet, but I read this book (somewhat selectively but intensively) as part of that work.

The book contains some quite useful ideas and engages with a range of texts that in some senses is quite broad — it includes many classics of the genre from the U.S. and the U.K. — but in other senses is somewhat narrow — it pays no attention whatsoever to the emergence of explicitly postcolonial science fiction or science fiction from formerly (or currently) colonized peoples. This tendency to focus on cultural production from the heart of the empire is not exactly unknown in postcolonial studies — just look at Said, for instance — but it is still a little disappointing. In any case, the book begins by looking at the role of the Other in science fiction, goes into some of the mechanisms through which empire is used in the genre, and then goes quasi-chronologically through several key moments, starting with sf from the classic imperial age and on through some very contemporary writers with different ways of relating to empire. There is definitely material in here that I’ll use — maybe some of the stuff on the Other, definitely the sense of sf being complicated and ambivalent in relation to empire but its potential as a tool for working through ideas and legacies of empire, probably some of the details of how that has worked at different moments.

I was unsurprised but disappointed that there was not a more materially grounded exploration of how exactly ideas in literature might have an impact upon a culture. Based on the readings in the course that I’m writing this paper for, it seems quite common for postcolonial literary scholars to be sure that their texts of interest are not only shaped by societies steeped in empire but go on to shape those societies in turn, but nobody quite spells out how that works in a convincing way.

Also, as useful as this book’s literary insights are, and as keen as its grasp of some aspects of historical empire, there were also a few politically dubious things that only showed up later in the book. I suppose an earlier clue was the complete absence of any recognition that colonial histories do not just include the formerly colonized (or neo-colonized) so-called Third World but also still actively colonized indigenous peoples in settler societies. But the last chapter of the book said some pretty awful things about empire as social phenomenon (as opposed to literary phenomenon) that boiled down to erasing the contemporary realities of empire and colonization, completely for indigenous peoples and almost completely around Iraq and Afghanistan and other contemporary Western exertions of imperial power outside the borders claimed by settler states. As well, she presents some half-baked and largely unsupported ideas about empire as a transhistorical and psychological essence of humanity — I may be exaggerating slightly, but it frames it in a way that downplays the role of social organization and implicitly reassures those of us who are complicit in it that, well, it’s just what humans do, and whatchagonnado.

Those problems aside, for the issues that are the actual focus of the book’s scholarship, it seems quite good. I’m sure I will make considerable use of it. On a more frustrating note, it also made me want to just set all of this school stuff aside and read some novels, and that’s not going to happen for awhile. (How can I have never read any Kim Stanley Robinson? That’s just not right!)

Expect more from your government

Murray Dobbin — 2012-04-26T01:48:01+00:00

Something is happening in Canada that seems, in the context of a majority Harper government, counter-intuitive. Harper continues implementing his right-wing revolution by fiat, and Preston Manning’s “democracy” institute says Canadians actually want “less” government and more individual responsibility. Yet a flurry of polls in the past few weeks and months suggest two dramatic counterpoints to this self-serving narrative.

First, in a development that is virtually unprecedented, inequality has become, by far, Canadians’ top concern displacing the perennial front-runner, Medicare. And closely related are a number of polls showing that Canadians in large majorities think wealthy people and corporations should pay more taxes. They are even willing to pay more themselves.

How these attitudes will play out over the longer term is hard to predict. Other trends are not so encouraging.

The trouble with normal, Bruce Cockburn told us, is it always gets worse. And that’s the danger in times like this when we sit and the ratcheting back of democratic government and the things that it has provided. The longer term threat to democracy is that we become inured to the systematic assaults on it. It is easy to get demoralized with what one US writer called “surplus powerlessness.” Without an obvious short-term solution to the quasi-dictatorship of the Harper government the easiest response is to deny it is happening – and then get used to it.

No opposition party has so far said that they are committed to reversing all the reactionary and destructive actions of this government. Yet this is what we should be demanding of them.

The myriad assaults on the nation being implemented by Harper are really just the latest chapter in what has been a revolution of lowered expectations: a deliberate and systematic culture war on ordinary Canadians deeply held values about the role of government. Starting in the late 1980s with the FTA campaign corporations and their propaganda agencies like the Fraser Institute, set out to reverse the so-called welfare state, and the belief system it rested on. The slogan for the free-traders was simple and repeated endlessly: there is no alternative. Of course there were alternatives, just none that the corporate state was going to allow.

Neo-liberals and the Christian right have been engaged in a thirty year process of trying to change the political culture into something more akin to the individualism of the US. To do that they had to demonize government – the institution of collective action which distinguished us from our southern neighbours.

The free trade battle was followed by the deficit hysteria campaign promoting the spectre of hitting the (non-existent) debt wall, softening Canadians up for huge cuts to social spending (courtesy Paul Martin). Demonizing government and government workers (lazy, privileged, self-interested, overpaid) also prepared the ground for the laying off of 50,000 federal employees. And, of course, as programs were diminished so too was the average citizen’s trust in government.

Lastly was the whole question of taxes and tax cuts – the litmus test of a new political culture of smaller govt and individual responsibility. Framing taxes as a burden, and telling people they knew how to spend their money better than government, the Liberal and Conservative regimes handed out billions upon billions of tax cuts in their efforts to downsize democracy.

Yet the whole project is turning out to be a failure. Canadians’ values have changed very little since the 1960s and ‘70s. What has changed are people’s expectations of what is possible from government. We cling stubbornly to our values but no longer expect to see them reflected in government policies. Until now. Thanks in large part to the wonderful activists in the occupy movement, suddenly Canadians are emerging from this war on democracy with the beginnings of what it will take to turn things around.

There is growing evidence that for a majority of Canadians personal experience is beginning to trump propaganda. As they see services decline, inequality rise, infrastructure crumble and democracy erode, what they have always known comes to the fore – that a civilized society is fair and that you have to pay for it.

For 31% of Canadians to say (as they did in this Ekos poll) that inequality is their number one concern, placing fiscal issues at 9% means this sentiment has been growing for sometime. It just took the catalyst of the occupy rebellion to bring it forward.

And the many polls revealing we are prepared to pay more taxes is an obvious extension of that moral imperative. The Ekos poll showed 59% chose investing in social programs as the highest government priority, compared to 16% who wanted to keep taxes as low as possible.

The Broadbent Institute’s recent polling was even more encouraging. Seventy-seven percent identified inequality as a major problem undermining Canadian values, were willing to do their part to address it and believed it should be a government priority to deal with it. While a large percentage supported fairer taxes (with the wealthy and corporations paying more) a significant majority, 64%, were willing to pay more themselves to save social programs – 72% of Liberal and NDP supporters and even 58% of Conservative supporters agreed. The majority support held across regions, gender, age, education level, and family income.

When the provincial NDP in Ontario recently called for a modest 2% tax hike for those earning half a million dollars or more the public response was overwhelmingly in favour – by a margin of 78% in favour to 17% opposed. The Liberal government read the polls – and agreed to the tax increase to get the NDP’s support for its budget.

Even in Calgary – in the heart of anti-tax country – 55% supported increasing municipal taxes while only 10% called for a decrease.

The media seems completely caught off guard by these and other polls. The Globe and Mail did an interactive poll the day before federal budget and declared: “What stood out was the across the board call for higher taxes.” People were willing to see the GST restored to 7%. A columnist for the National Post worried that the arguments against taxing the wealthy were not very convincing – especially when the mainstream is supportive.

When it comes to tax cuts the message is clear: enough is enough. At the same time as the polling is showing these remarkable results, there are now several organizations calling for fairer taxes: Doctors for Fair Taxation, Lawyers for Fair Taxation and Faith Leaders for Fair Taxation. There is also a national group, Canadians for Tax Fairness (which I am associated with) and groups beginning to form at the provincial level – such as Nova Scotians for Tax Fairness. There is the Canadian section of the international Uncut anti-austerity movement, with fourteen local chapters across the country. NUPGE, the federation of provincial government employee unions has been running an amazing tax campaign called All Together Now for a couple of years.

The movement for equality and tax fairness is barely off the ground and it already has majority support across the country. Now the opposition parties have to show that they have the courage and the principles to respond to this progressive sentiment. If the Liberals and the NDP ever manage to form a coalition government the first item on which they should agree is the need tax fairness and sufficient revenue to restore the Canada we once had and go beyond it. The Ekos poll revealed that 60% of Canadians say they would be more likely to vote for a party that pledged to raise taxes on the rich.

For Canadians and opposition parties the time for lowered expectations is over. Expect more.

Review: Bodies and Pleasures

Scott Neigh — 2012-03-30T03:43:16+00:00

[Ladelle McWhorter. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1999.]

Those of us on the left are often not very good at talking about the living of life at the individual level. There are a number of different ways that it is done badly among us, by different people or at different times. From some, you see a refusal to think about it at all, and a focus that is entirely on change at the social level, as if the collectives that can create such change are not made up of people and our practices or as if our politics should have no bearing on our lives outside of meetings and actions. From others, there is a focus on lifestyle choices that ends up patrolling in-group/out-group boundaries (often in quite racist ways) and/or that imports a very asocial, individualistic moralism into our groups and communities and movements in ways that are divisive and that form the basis of usually-silent but highly destructive hierarchical purity politics. And of course there is lots that is loving and communicative and accepting and supportive in how we live our lives and relate to each other as well, but even that is often similarly detached from really thinking through how we act beyond the level of “be kind to each other.”

Bodies and Pleasures is an account of Ladelle McWhorter’s reading of the work of Michel Foucault in the context of both her own experiences of sexual regulation and the evolution of her understanding of the social world. As such, I experienced it as important in two overlapping but distinct areas. One relates to her account of her struggles against sexual normalization. Our lives are very, very different in a lot of ways, but there were moments in reading those parts of the book when I felt that jolt of recognition you feel when you read something you’ve experienced but never put into words before. The other area of importance of this book is that it offers some conceptual tools that might — might — be useful for those of us involved in movements and committed to social change as we think about everyday practices of living, particularly if we want a critical approach that is not already three-quarters of the way down the path to lifestylism, moralism, or privilege-based exclusion.

In volume 1 of his History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that the commonsense idea that we live in a sexually repressive culture is only true in a very narrow and specific sense, and that in fact in the last 150 years there has been a great proliferation of spaces and ways and compulsions to talk about sexuality. This proliferation of talk has been part of the emergence of selves that are in large part defined by sexuality, of sexual subjects, in a way that did not exist before, and also part of the emergence of a complex of relations and practices through which such selves are administered. A distinct sphere of life labelled “sexuality” has emerged out of previously disparate and unconnected sensations, practices, impulses, and ideas. It is one instance among a number in which norms have been created, and individuals are assessed relative to those norms and disciplined to better fit those norms, as part of producing and controlling populations. A central aspect of this has been the production over that period of “the homosexual” as a defined and subjugated type of human being — that is not the only axis along which such sexual regulation operates, but it is an important one.

McWhorter first read that particular work of Foucault’s in her early 20s, in the early 1980s, and it spoke profoundly to her. Throughout her early life, in many different ways, in many different spaces, she had faced individuals in positions of power and broader social arrangements that pressured her to confess to being a particular type of sexual entity — the type labelled “homosexual” — and thereby to become knowable and known as a particular kind of not-quite-human being, as someone who in so many moments would have their complexity and ethical fullness and even basic freedom denied because of that status. She knew keenly before she had the language to express it what it meant to be pinned to that category, so she resisted as best she could being sorted, being labelled, being subjected to the particular forms of oppressive social regulation. This was never about doubt or hesitation about her sexual and romantic relationships with women, but rather a keen and deeply felt objection to the ways in which that forced her production as a certain kind of subject.

She charts the course of her resistance over different phases of her life, as well as the growing depth and sophistication of her understanding of Foucault. She discusses what it means to try and understand the world genealogically, in Foucault’s sense — to constantly call into question and seek the historical and social roots of every category, and so have no solid, simple, humanist place for the knowing subject. She engages with some of the key criticisms that have been levelled at Foucault’s work over the years, in particular the assertions that his analysis leaves us with no ground for making moral judgements, no way to exert agency, and no way to ground political collectivity. I don’t think she settles all of those questions once and for all, but she successfully shows that his work cannot just be dismissed on those grounds. She addresses modes of resistance, again with reference to her own journey. She talks about the body — one of the key elements in her title, and one of the key elements in her understanding of Foucault’s thoughts about resistance. She also talks about the other element of each, pleasure, and about some specific practices of what she describes as “self-overcoming” grounded in bodies and pleasures.

The useful stuff in her account of her struggles against sexual normalization takes a couple of different forms. I’ve mentioned before that one way to periodize my life would be to distinguish between the time before counter-normative sexual and relationship practices were even imaginable for me, versus after they became imaginable and gradually became more a part of my lived practices along a couple of distinct axes. The moments of recognition that I experienced in reading this book apply more directly to the later period, but I don’t feel particularly inclined to elaborate on that at this point. The perhaps more distant but interesting relevance is to the earlier period, where my practices, desires, and imagination were thoroughly normative along every axis. Even so, I felt the pressure to become known in sexual terms as oppressive. Partly, given my intense shame around sexuality, this was around being pinned to being a sexual subject at all, never mind that it was a thoroughly privileged sexual subject at that point. More interestingly, I now recognized, it was resistance to being pinned to a particular version of masculinity that I desperately, urgently wanted no part of. It’s not that I’ve ever had even any inkling of myself as doing gender in any way other than masculinity, but at that point in my life, based on my observation of the media and the people around me, I understood (even if I would have been unable to articulate) masculine desire for women as having a necessary connection to ways of doing masculinity that were about treating women and subordinate men badly. I felt that being known as a (thoroughly normative and privileged) sexual subject would have pinned me to gender in a way that repelled me. (Though I’m sure it worked the other way too — part of why I wanted no part of that particular way of doing gender was because it was, by definition to me at that point, the only way of doing gender I had ever encountered which experienced and acted on desire, given that my understanding at the time was that no women and only bad men felt/acted on sexual desire, and that was shameful.)

The more general utility of this book for making choices about everyday practices of living has to do with the way she builds towards talking about the two elements in her title, bodies and pleasures. For her, the significant thing about bodies is understanding them as Foucault does, not as the Cartesian correspondent of “mind” but as a united whole that is capable of developing new capacities over time in response to disciplinary pressures. This capacity of bodies is the basis for the various social technologies through which disciplinary power, often in conjunction with judicious applications of pain, has been applied over the last 200 years develop capacities that are in some sense “useful” to various institutions, and that ensure the docility of those of us who are thus disciplined — it has made us good workers, good soldiers, good consumers, and so on. However, she argues that this same capacity in bodies can be turned in more liberatory directions. That is, through how we live our own lives, we can cultivate new capacities in our bodies through deliberate, disciplinary choices that are based not in cultivating pain but in cultivating capacity for pleasures, and that are directed not towards some external end but are purely directed towards expanding our range of possibilities. Pleasures may or may not have content that we currently understand as sexual, but they are deliberately oriented differently from dominant ways of pursuing sexual desire. She gives, as examples of disciplines of pleasure, gardening and dancing from her own life, and of sadomasochistic sexual practices, hallucinogenic drugs, and the writing of philosophy from Foucault’s life, and illustrates the ways in which each of these have functioned as practices of self-overcoming, of change that changes self while the relations and practices around self remain the same but that change self in ways that will (or at least might) lead that self to be an origin point of challenge and changes in those surrounding relations and practices. The examples she gives are meant not to be taken up directly but as illustrations, and she encourages those who wish to experiment with such ways of being to find their own disciplines of pleasure.

This sounds like it could easily become very self-involved and even narcissistic, and I’m not at all convinced that it is guaranteed to avoid those pitfalls. Nonetheless, it is based on the idea that deliberate cultivation of self in this manner can be a path towards us being other than we have been socially produced to be; towards us overcoming those limits into which we have been trained but which are not (or are no longer) about avoiding direct, tragic consequences; towards us challenging those relations and practices which oppressively discipline us. The idea, I think, is that the non-utilitarian grounding in pleasure will provide both the energy to motivate us and the source for logics of acting that differ from the discplinary (and capitalist) logics which permeate our lives today. To me, this resonates strongly with John Holloway’s idea of creating cracks in capitalism, as it provides an answer as to where the non-capitalist logics that are to shape those cracks are to come from. McWhorter admits that there is nothing sure about what will come from following ethical disciplines of pleasure, though I think she’s right that there is at least a reasonable chance that following such disciplines will, sooner or later, bring you up against normalizing disciplines and therefore carry you into struggles to create change. I think what for me makes her analysis worth taking seriously is the fact that it applies to areas of life that we make decisions about, that we enact practices in, regardless of whether we do so with political intent, so it is at least worth seeing if there are ways that we can take up her ideas that are consonant with our other political commitments. In retrospect, certain ways that I have related to writing and certain ways that I have related to sexuality could, in complicated and contradictory ways, be understood as disciplines of pleasure that have contributed to change in self.

There are a few other things to be wary of in McWhorter’s analysis. For instance, she doesn’t really deal with the ways in which some of what Foucault has to say in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 is quite Orientalist. And she doesn’t really deal with the fact that experiencing the moment of confession and consequent sexual identificaiton and classificaiton as the originary moment one’s oppression is premised, more or less, on being white — which isn’t to say that racialized people don’t experience that moment in all sorts of horrible ways, but because of the unchosen visibility that is inherent to most forms of racial oppression it is highly unlikely that it will be experienced as the first moment of oppression in the same way. And I think the examples she gives of how disciplines of pleasure lead her towards more collective political involvement — she uses the Foucauldian term “governmentality” — deserve more attention. She is quite right in arguing that we shouldn’t just dismiss her conventional-seeming participation in legislatively oriented efforts to oppose attacks on queer lives in the Southern state in which she lives and works, given that they are very much relevant to the space that ordinary people have to survive and thrive there, but I think attaching her sophisticated understanding of power to an equally sophisticated understanding of movements and what they are and what they can do would be very useful.

In any case, I think this book is worth reading and it contains ideas that are worth taking up, given that it deals with levels of practice that those of us who identify with movements normally don’t do a good job of thinking about, and given that the critical but open-ended character of her answers seem at least potentially resistant to the risks of lifestyleism, moralism, and exclusion. Is any of what she says certain? Definitely not. But it feels worth experimenting with to me.

Mourning Mulcair’s Win

Murray Dobbin — 2012-03-29T16:39:13+00:00

There will be lots of soul searching and head scratching going on this week about what happened with the NDP leadership race. The mechanics of the convention, the interesting lack of deal-making, and how the balloting progressed are all fodder for those who enjoy going through the entrails of leadership conventions. Others will be analyzing the various campaigns of the frontrunners, looking for weaknesses to explain how they could collectively have let Thomas Mulcair, the right-wing Liberal, pro-Israel, political bully become head of their party.

Two things shocked me about this race and its final two days. The first is that so many NDPers, part of a tightly-knit, hyper-loyal political culture steeped in progressive values could so casually elect a man who contradicts so many of their principles. Besides the disastrous result for the party and all progressives in the country, the election of Mulcair raises profound questions about the health of the party. There are two possibilities, neither attractive. One is that NDPers, like increasing numbers of Canadians in general, simply don’t read as much and that information about Mulcair did not get through to them. To what extent did NDPers devote time and energy to finding out about the candidates? In general, what is the state of member education and engagement in the party?

More worrisome is the possibility that many thousands of NDP members had indeed heard the negative aspects of Mulcair’s politics and voted for him anyway. That’s a very different problem. It reflects what I have observed about the NDP for decades now: its decreasing emphasis on policy and philosophy and the increased — political machine driven — preoccupation with winning seats in elections, often out of context of the political moment and oblivious to unintended consequences. One prominent NDPer I spoke to responded to my shock that he was supporting Mulcair with a sort of football game enthusiasm. “I think he can take on the bastard [Harper].”

Facing a ruthless tough guy? Get your own ruthless tough guy. And possibly create a monster you can’t control. It is as if policy, philosophy, and vision for the country have simply been devalued to the point where they are an afterthought or some vaguely interesting historical relic. There seems to have been a kind of “We’ll worry about policies later, let’s pick someone who can win first.”

The second shocker was the low turn-out. Around 50 per cent of the members, who have been inundated with campaign efforts for months now, bothered to vote. What happened? It was incredibly easy to vote and the conventional wisdom about the NDP is that it has the most enthusiastic and committed members of any party. Maybe not.

How will Mulcair’s “negatives” play out now that he is leader? These are significant negatives: his vicious, public attack on Libby Davies in 2010 showed unforgivably bad judgment. His failed negotiations with the Harper Conservatives for a cabinet position should by itself be a deal breaker for what it reveals about Mulcair’s ethics. When finance critic, he barely said a word about Harper’s destructive economic policies, and so one has to suspect he was in basic agreement. He boasted in 2007 about having slashed the work force of the Quebec environment department by 15 per cent, referring to himself as first and foremost a manager. That fits with his history of union-bashing — and support for NAFTA — while in Quebec’s Liberal cabinet.

It is impossible to predict what Mulcair will do on the whole range of issues that have people extremely worried. It could come down with serial games of chicken. How hard will the caucus fight, for example, on the Palestinian question? Will the caucus be willing to allow a fight to get out into the public? Mulcair has demonstrated that he is more than willing to do so, the consequences be damned. Do you protect the party from bad publicity or do you protect it from having its policies gutted?

Mulcair’s rigid fiscal conservatism may be another problem that comes up very quickly. Mulcair’s economic views are closer to Harper’s than they are to Jack Layton’s or any other recent NDP leader. How convincing will he be in attacking deficit slashing if he actually believes in it?

On the fair taxes front we will get nothing from Mulcair unless, again, the caucus uses all its power and authority to forces the issue. The strongest progressive voices in such a conflict may just find themselves in the shadow cabinet, making it tricky to criticize the party leader — and your “cabinet” boss.

On the critically important issue of Quebec, NDPers hoping that Mulcair is the man to retain what Jack built may quickly be disappointed. You would be hard-pressed to find a social activist in Quebec who thinks Mulcair is a progressive. He is widely disliked. With the Bloc resurgent, open rejection of Mulcair’s leadership by NGOs and movement groups could be disastrous. The scores of Quebec MPs have no social base of their own, and the vast majority have no riding associations. The party needs to build that base to keep its seats and Mulcair could be a barrier.

It all seems to be starting off well enough and we can hope that now that he has the position he wants, Mulcair will work hard to ensure unity — which one would assume is in his interest, too. He has kept Libby Davies as deputy leader and has said there will be no house cleaning of the party staff, most of whom opposed his candidacy.

Whatever happens, it will likely happen sooner than later.

Mulcair’s victory: A new direction for the NDP?

Richard Fidler — 2012-03-29T15:06:45+00:00

There is a lot of speculation going the rounds about whether or to what degree Thomas Mulcair will change the direction of the federal New Democratic Party. Mulcair, as everyone who pays attention to Canadian politics knows by now, emerged the winner in the NDP’s contest to replace deceased leader Jack Layton. In the fourth and final vote at the March 24 convention in Toronto, Mulcair scored 57% against runner-up Brian Topp’s 43 percent. The election of the party’s most prominent Quebec MP was no big surprise, especially in Quebec where it was widely considered the logical outcome to the NDP’s upset gains in last year’s federal election when the party won 59 of the province’s 75 MPs — 60% of the NDP’s parliamentary caucus, making the party the Official Opposition and thus a credible contender for government for the first time in its history. But what does the election of this former Liberal mean for the future of the NDP? The answer is not entirely clear, although clues abound.

Modernization?

Mulcair himself revealed little of his particular agenda during the leadership contest, nor was he strongly challenged to do so by the competing candidates, all of whom were promising to pursue “Layton’s legacy.” Mulcair spoke vaguely of “modernizing” the party, of ditching old rhetoric about “working people,” and of the need to demonstrate the NDP’s competence in “managing the economy.” But there was enough evidence on the record to arouse concerns about his commitment to social justice issues long championed by the NDP. Columnist Murray Dobbin, an NDP sympathizer, noted some of these during the campaign, describing him as a “big ‘L’ Liberal at heart, who is barely out of synch with the one per cent the occupiers have targeted.”

Dobbin pointed to Mulcair’s support of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, anathema to the labour movement and environmentalists. “The NAFTA,” Mulcair said in a recent interview, “is the first international agreement that had provisions dealing with the environment. You can’t throw out the baby with the bath water.” Dobbin commented:

“The FTA and NAFTA were the single most damaging political acts the country has ever had to endure — unleashing two decades of suppression of wages, the rapid depletion of natural resources, falling productivity, the loss of several hundred thousand of the best jobs in the country, and despite Mulcair’s naïve declaration, the virtual end to any new environmental legislation by the federal government (after it lost two NAFTA challenges).”

But the NDP long ago abandoned any pretence of opposing NAFTA. Nor has it campaigned against the pending free-trade agreement with the European Union, currently being negotiated in secret. As for Mulcair’s concern for environmental issues

“In 2007, Kady O’Malley interviewed Mulcair and asked him to describe himself as a politician. He replied: ‘Above and beyond anything else, I’m a public administrator and a manager. I chaired Quebec’s largest regulatory agency [the Office des Professions] and reduced staff there and brought in management schemes to make things more effective…. When I was minister of the environment, I reduced by 15 per cent the budget of the ministry.’…”

Palestinian solidarity activists are understandably alarmed at Mulcair’s unconditional support for Israel. His campaign co-chair was former MP Lorne Nystrom, now a director of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Israel lobby’s main pressure group. While co-deputy leader of the federal NDP, Mulcair publicly humiliated the other deputy leader, Vancouver MP Libby Davies, forcing her (with Layton’s complicity) to recant in Parliament her historically accurate statement that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land since 1948.

Although he may not have solicited their support, Mulcair appeared to be favoured for leader by some elements not known for their NDP sympathies.

Journalist and activist Derrick O’Keefe, examining the lists of donors to the NDP leadership campaign on the Elections Canada website, found that among those contributing to Mulcair’s candidacy were billionaire financier Gerald Schwartz, the CEO of Onex Corporation and a co-founder of CanWest Global Communications. Schwartz and his wife, book chain magnate Heather Reisman, founded the Heseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides money to cover tuition and living expenses for non-Israelis who serve in the Israeli army. “In 2006,” O’Keefe noted, “the couple made headlines by abandoning their traditional support for the Liberals in favour of the Conservatives after Stephen Harper had given full-throated support to Israel’s operation against Lebanon.”

Contributing to Mulcair’s leadership campaign as well was another Onex director, Anthony Munk, who is also a director of Barrick Gold Corporation, the Canadian mining giant founded by his father Peter Munk. Barrick is a prime target of environmentalists and indigenous struggling in many countries against its pillage of local communities and natural resources.

Also noteworthy was the especially sympathetic coverage given to Mulcair’s campaign in the journals of Canada’s major newspaper chains, Postmedia (successor to CanWest) and Groupe Gesca, a subsidiary of the Desmarais family’s Power Corporation.

What about the Liberals?

However, there was no indication of major policy differences among the candidates during the five public debates the party held. In fact, the one question that attracted the most media attention was whether the NDP would or should now orient toward formal alliance or even merger with the federal Liberals. This speculation has increased now that Liberal interim leader Bob Rae, the former NDP premier of Ontario, shares the Opposition front benches with ex-Liberal Mulcair in the federal parliament.

Although Mulcair may, as alleged by many, be keen to remake the NDP into some version of Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” and thus an appropriate candidate to replace or merge with the Liberals, the NDP is determined at this point to firm up its position as a “government in waiting,” hoping to replace Stephen Harper’s Tory majority government in the next election three years from now. And the Liberals are still struggling to recover their historic position as Canada’s “natural governing party.” But there is no secret about NDP readiness to ally with Liberals if that will help ease their way into government.

In 2008, Layton signed a formal coalition agreement with the Liberals and the Bloc Québécois in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to defeat the Tory minority government. Such an arrangement has no traction at present, when there is no prospect of defeating the Tory majority in a parliamentary vote. However, among the membership of the NDP there is no substantial opposition in principle to closer ties with the Liberals. This was revealed in the leadership vote, in which every member of the party was entitled to cast a ballot, listing the candidates in their order of preference. About half the party membership of 131,000 voted on the first ballot, the only one with all the candidates listed. Thus it was a fair indication of the sentiments of the party activists.

On this first ballot, the top three candidates, accounting for two-thirds of the total vote (Mulcair 30%, Topp 21% and Nathan Cullen 16%), were those most closely associated with collaboration with the Liberals. Brian Topp, for instance, was a primary architect of the 2008 coalition agreement and has even written a book about it. Cullen’s most notable contribution to the debates was his proposal that the NDP hold joint nomination meetings with the Liberals in future to try to come up with common candidates. Mulcair’s Liberal connections are well documented. No wonder MP Pat Martin did not have to carry out his promise (threat?) to run himself if no candidate promoted eventual merger with the Liberals!

And Quebec?

And then there is the Quebec question, historically the NDP’s Achilles heel. On this, too, there was no real discussion during the leadership candidates’ debates because none of them differ with the party’s firm defense of the federal regime. And least of all Thomas Mulcair. Although he was a long-time Liberal, and reportedly once considered joining the Conservatives, there is one constant in his political career: hostility to “separatism,” the movement for Quebec independence that is supported by the vast majority of progressive opinion in Quebec. Mulcair is a former director of legal affairs at Alliance Quebec, the federally-funded Anglophone lobby that has fought repeated court battles against Quebec’s Charter of the French Language (Law 101).

No one in Quebec expects the NDP to support Quebec independence. In 2011, however, the party managed to win the support of most of those voters in Quebec who were looking for some alternative to the Harper Tories in Ottawa, and it did this simply by indicating greater openness than other federalist parties to Québécois language concerns and tipping its hat to the right of self-determination — promising to recognize a majority vote for sovereignty in a Quebec referendum. Mulcair was not the author of these positions, which are set out in a document now known as the Sherbrooke Declaration, adopted prior to his transition to the NDP. However, he was one of the architects of the 2008 coalition agreement with the Liberals. That agreement was contingent on a promise by the Bloc Québécois not to vote with the Tories to defeat a Liberal-NDP minority government for at least six months. The NDP’s success in bringing the pro-independence Bloc onside at that time — even behind a coalition agreement that would have made Liberal leader Stéphane Dion, author of the hated Clarity Bill, the prime minister — may have fostered the image in Quebec of Layton’s NDP as a federalist party that was relatively sympathetic to Quebec. In fact, the Tories reinforced this perception by attacking the accord primarily on these grounds.

Will these positions be sufficient to consolidate and build the NDP’s shaky Quebec structure? During the leadership contest, the party managed to increase its membership in the province to just over 12,000, less than 10% of the total party membership in Canada, and a far cry from Mulcair’s hope of recruiting at least 20,000 new members. Since its electoral rout in 2011 the Bloc Québécois has regained support, and in a recent poll was neck-and-neck with the NDP. The Bloc boasts three times the membership of the NDP, and enjoys the collaboration of the formidable Parti québécois election machine.

The BQ’s new leader Daniel Paillé acknowledges that an NDP with Mulcair as leader will be a major challenge for his party, but argues, with justice, that the NDP will soon reveal its true colours by defending “Canadian” interests against those of Quebec. Le Devoir columnist Michel David perceptively notes, however, that Mulcair has “an argument that the Bloc Québécois cannot use: he is a position to replace the Harper government.” How this plays out in the next period will depend very much on whether the Quebec nationalist movement manages to overcome its current crisis of perspectives and resume its forward march — in which case the NDP, focused as it now is on winning parliamentary seats in English Canada, will be faced with some major political dilemmas.

There was a foretaste of these tensions in one of the leadership debates. When candidate Peggy Nash suggested that federal enforcement of the Canada Health Act (an umbrella law imposing medicare funding conditions on the provinces, which have jurisdiction over health care) might have to be adjusted to accommodate Quebec concerns, the other candidates quickly dissociated themselves from her comment. That was the closest the debates came to addressing “the Quebec difference.” Nash, a former official in the Canadian Auto Workers union, probably had in mind the readiness of the Canadian unions to accommodate their Quebec affiliates, according them a large degree of autonomy. The NDP has never displayed similar flexibility to its Quebec membership.

Marginalization of labour

This leadership convention registered the further marginalization of labour in the NDP. In the last leadership convention, which elected Layton in 2003, the affiliated trade unions were allocated 25% of the votes; this was consistent with a series of provisions in the party constitution and practices historically that had given the unions a weighted presence in party leadership bodies. Following that convention, however, the party removed this provision and moved toward a full one-member-one-vote (OMOV) system for choosing a leader. The move was motivated in part by changes in federal party financing laws in 2003 and 2006 (with NDP support) which banned union donations to federal parties. In return the NDP, like the other parties, gained access to new state subsidies. In addition, individual donors are allowed tax deductions of up to 75% of the amount of their contributions to party finances, a “tax expenditure” that constitutes in effect another form of state funding. The NDP is now dependent on such funding for the bulk of its activities.

As Murray Cooke has noted, these changes in funding, and the adoption of OMOV, resulted in “a relative marginalization of the federal [parliamentary] caucus, the powerful provincial wings, unions and local party activists.” And he adds:

“Firmly in control of the party, Layton was able to moderate, simplify and carefully package the NDP message. He simply ditched many controversial policies. During the 2004 election, he single-handedly dismissed the NDP’s longstanding support for pulling Canada out of NATO. With each campaign, Layton would focus on a small number of modest reforms. Increasingly, the NDP would speak for “middle-class” Canadians. By the 2011 election, the NDP was proposing to reduce the small business tax to reward “job creators.” Certainly, the 2011 platform was a more moderate program than anything ever offered under any previous federal NDP leader….”

The marginalization of the party’s labour base did not start with Layton, of course. In the neoliberal phase of capitalism of recent decades, many unions have loosened their ties with the NDP, and not just at the NDP’s behest. A notable example has been the flirtation with the Liberals of leaders of the Canadian Auto Workers, a union that in past years was respected by militants as a foremost fighter against bosses’ pressure for concessions in union contracts. These trends reflected a more general shift to the right in Canadian politics under the neoliberal onslaught on wages, working conditions and social programs.

Of the nine candidates who ran for NDP leader this year (two dropped out during the campaign), only one — Peggy Nash, a former CAW leader, and one of only two women candidates — came from the union milieu. It is worth noting, however, that she was the first ever candidate for the party leadership from trade union ranks. Notwithstanding, Nash lacked support from some major union leaders in the party, and in the end finished in fourth place with 12% support on the first ballot.

An alternative approach?

Perhaps most ominously, while union ties to the NDP have slackened they have not been replaced by closer collaboration between the party and grassroots organizations in the front lines of the fight against the capitalist offensive. Among the leadership candidates, only Niki Ashton (5.7% on the first ballot) alluded (indirectly) to the Quebec students’ inspiring upsurge for greater access to education.

The NDP can at times be a useful asset for militants in the extra-parliamentary arena. Last June the party’s newly-elected MPs mounted a parliamentary filibuster in opposition to the Harper government’s suppression of the postal workers’ right to strike; some MPs participated in public solidarity rallies. These actions helped to publicize the workers’ cause and the party’s standing rose still further in the polls.

Governments in Ottawa and across the country are now targeting public sector unions and services, as well as the poorest and most vulnerable in society — from welfare moms to pensioners — in pursuit of a shared agenda of tightening austerity and cutbacks. The NDP faces mounting challenges in the period ahead — on the economic, social, constitutional and international fronts — but with Mulcair at the helm the signs point to a continuing shift of the party to the right.

Overall, the NDP emerges from this leadership convention poorly armed to confront the crisis. Its leaders are clearly hoping to ride into government in three years on a program that differs only modestly from the right-wing Tory agenda. True, it might prove sufficient in electoral terms. But it will not do much to build the mass movements that are needed to oppose and overcome the neoliberal assault.

Understanding the Victory of Thomas Mulcair

Judy Rebick — 2012-03-26T04:54:37+00:00

Most of the mainstream media, with the help of the Mulcair and Topp campaigns, constructed the leadership battle at the NDP convention as a battle between those who wanted to move to the centre to win government and those who wanted to win maintaining the “traditional” social democratic values of the NDP.

Brian Topp’s bold sounding declaration that he was a proud social democrat made those of us who have spent decades on the left of the party cringe. Isn’t the NDP a social democratic party? Hasn’t the history of the party been the struggle between a democratic socialist left, best represented by the Waffle but succeeded by a series of progressive groups ending with the New Politics Initiative, with the social democratic establishment. Is that establishment now in the position of opposition pushing the party to the left? If it is true, it is depressing on the one hand and deliciously ironic on the other.

What is left out of this narrative is that there is a new force in party that I would consider the new left and it was best represented in this campaign by Nathan Cullen. Cullen’s language was very close to the politics of the New Politics Initiative. He speaks of social struggles and the alliance between the party and First Nations and environment groups. He speaks from the heart without the spin has infected almost everyone else. He is at heart a democrat. This left is less sectarian. Many of them supported strategic voting in past elections and this time the more strategic electoral alliance with the Liberals. I don’t agree with them on that but there is no question that they are the most progressive force in the party right now and the one closest to the social movements who are flooding into the streets and the parks across North America.

The strength of Cullen’s campaign came from the power of this youthful movement represented by Lead Now’s support for his proposal on an electoral alliance as much as from his winning personality and charisma. No-one mentioned that Lead Now got 9,000 people to join to the NDP to support what they call “co-operation.” There were days when the women’s movement had this kind of power in the party reflected especially in Audrey MacLaughlin’s victory as leader. Peggy Nash’s unjust defeat early in the balloting showed that this movement is much less a force today.

It is too bad that Peggy Nash or Paul Dewar didn’t seize the chance of an alliance with this group or that Brian Topp, seeing that he couldn’t win, didn’t throw his support to Cullen who could have won. But then I think the party establishment represented by Topp, with a couple of important exceptions like Libby Davies, are more worried about Cullen’s politics than Mulcair.

The other narrative promoted by the Mulcair campaign, Chantal Hebert and Gerry Kaplan is that a defeat of Mulcair would have been seen as a slap in the face to Quebec. After all polls showed that Quebecois massively supported Mulcair as the leader of the NDP and he had majority support from the Quebec caucus of the party and a lot of endorsements and financial contributions from outside the party.

This is more complicated. It may be true that the initial reaction to the vote will be positive and that most media in Quebec supported Mulcair but there is also intense criticism of him here. What people in the NDP don’t seem to understand is that the massive move from the PQ to the NDP in the last election was less a move to federalism and more a move to the progressive party most Quebecois thought could defeat Harper. If the NDP moves to the right of BQ under Mulcair, it risks losing a lot of that support. Since no one, including Chantal Hebert, has any idea what the Quebec electorate will do in the next federal election, supporting Mulcair or opposing him for this reason makes no sense. It is positive that the NDP membership showed that they understood the importance of the gains in Quebec by giving their support only to the candidates who are fluent in French.

The third narrative is what has been called a whisper campaign against Mulcair. It was a pretty loud whisper turned into a shout by Ed Broadbent. No one can get along with this guy. He is a bully who doesn’t brook opposition. Kind of like a certain Prime Minister we know. It was also suggested that Mulcair had nothing to do with the victory in Quebec. Quieter but just as widespread was the knowledge that not a single woman who has worked with him for more than a few months was supporting him. Some of these whispers are true from what I can tell. On Quebec, he did establish a foothold in the province but he was not a major player in recruiting candidates or organizing the last election campaign. He is however, the only one of the leadership candidates who is known in Quebec.

NDPers don’t like whisper campaigns, which is to their credit. They may also have figured that we need a bully to face a bully or that Brian Topp’s lack of charisma or ability to connect with a crowd was as big a problem as Mulcair’s authoritarian streak.

My view is that the NDP has elected an old-style patriarchal politician who has the same politics vis-à-vis Quebec as the pre-Jack NDP, seeing sovereigntists as bitter enemies instead of potential allies, is more of a liberal than a social democrat and who will move the party to the right especially on international issues, including free trade and Israel, two issues at the centre of Harper’s agenda.

I didn’t participate in this campaign because I see the hope for change in the new movements that are emerging around the globe rather than in electoral politics. That is where I am putting my energy these days but it always helps if the social movements can see their reflection in the social democratic political party. This hasn’t been true in Europe for a long time which is why we see just a dramatic contradiction between what is happening in the Parliament there and what is happening in the streets.

In Canada, whatever the weaknesses of the NDP, we have always managed to have a strong alliance between them and the social movements. That alliance strengthened the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, the labour movement and others. I fear under the leadership of Thomas Mulcair, that alliance will be lost and it will be a loss for all of us.

Tom Mulcair: For Sure

James Laxer — 2012-03-22T14:23:47+00:00

First, with all due respect to party elders, the NDP has been moving to the centre for decades, most rapidly over the last six or seven years. The idea that we must come together to protect threatened NDP values from Tom Mulcair is a bit rich. I’ve looked at the platforms of all of the candidates, and while I will concede that there are differences, all candidates share what I would call a centre-left perspective.

If ideology isn’t a major factor, then leadership and the break through in Quebec become the overriding considerations. It is clear from polls that Mulcair has a much better shot at hanging onto the seats in Quebec than anyone else. Brian Topp doesn’t have a seat and who knows how long it will take for him to get one, let alone whether Quebecois will accept him as one of their own.

Broadbent’s foray into the campaign has been a disaster that inclines me even more to support Mulcair. His line, that Mulcair had nothing to do with last year’s breakthrough and that it was all planned on Laurier Avenue, leave me speechless…. He gives no credit to Quebecois and their long-established progressive tradition. It boggles the mind. As for the idea that only people born with a picture of J.S. Woodsworth in their crib should be eligible to run for the leadership, get real. In Quebec, the most interesting political leaders have been in more than one party. And now they’re coming to the NDP. Broadbent’s line means that no one in the Quebec caucus has been around long enough to qualify to run for the leadership.

Quebec will change the NDP as well as the NDP changing Quebec, something devoutly to be desired.

I believe that with Mulcair the party moves ahead. He has enormous political talent, and his progressive credentials are impeccable. I’m sick and tired of the whisper campaign against him for being bad tempered. With all due respect, the distemper has been coming from those who oppose him—-and I don’t mean the candidates. With any of the other candidates, we open the door to the Bloc and Bob Rae.

As a socialist and long time critic of the NDP, you can count on me to continue to critique the party from the left as I have been doing for decades.

But this weekend, the challenge is clear. The NDP needs to embrace Quebec as Quebec has embraced the NDP by choosing Tom Mulcair.

Nathan Cullen would get my vote

Murray Dobbin — 2012-03-21T14:06:21+00:00

There are so many factors that NDP members have to look at when choosing who to vote for in their leadership race that I don’t envy them (I am not a member). How do you weigh the various elements: policies, philosophy, engaging personality, ability to take on Stephen Harper in the House, co-operation with the Liberals, and support for proportional representation? Are they likely to bring people together or cause divisions within the caucus and party? Are they their own person – do they have enough depth and self-confidence to stand on their own or are they too dependent on staff for their persona?

All of these factors are critical ones and all the potential winners – Peggy Nash, Brian Topp, Thomas Mulcair, Nathan Cullen, and Paul Dewar – have their strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, one of the reasons it is so difficult to predict a winner is that there many good candidates in this race. Most have a good set of policies all are committed to bringing in proportional representation. They are all smart.

But there are two other factors created by the current political moment which is dominated by a radical, right-wing libertarian with a majority in Parliament. The unprecedented threat to the country represented by Stephen Harper puts these two leadership traits at the top of the list to consider when NDPers mark their preferential ballots.

In my assessment only Nathan Cullen makes the grade and if I had a vote he would get it.

One of those traits is whether or not the candidate is stuck firmly in the old mold of the traditional politician. You know what I mean – calculating every word, dividing the audience into sectors to be massaged, being careful not to attract too much attention – or too little – by anything they say, saying the right things even if you know they aren’t committed to them, word-smithing to the point where they never say anything bold. And not saying things you know from other evidence that they believe. In short, all the things that contribute to Canadians’ cynicism about politics.

These traditional traits of politicians and those running for leadership arise primarily out of the culture of the party in question. Thousands of hours spent in hundreds of meetings with people equally dedicated to the party create these politicians. It is the source of excessive partisanship and it is reinforced by political staffers. In ordinary times these characteristics were not so problematic. Today, they could be fatal.

If the NDP is going to win on a political landscape characterized by Stephen Harper’s misanthropic politics at one end and the liberationist politics of the Occupy movement at the other, whoever wins the leadership had better be doing politics differently right out of the gate after March 24th . If they don’t – and I would bet money on this – the NDP will fail to maintain its current status in the House of Commons and certainly will not move beyond it. The next NDP leader absolutely must be able rebuild ordinary Canadians’ trust in politics and government. If they can’t do that, it won’t matter a whit if they can “take on” Stephen Harper in question period or have great policies.

Canadians have developed an unerring instinct for flim-flam in politics. One whiff of phoniness or calculation and you’re off the bus. There is not a phony bone in Cullen’s body – he breaks the mold.

The second, and closely related trait whose absence should be a deal-breaker, is whether or not the candidate is willing to put the country first and the party second. Of course they all claim to do this but the proof is in the pudding and only Cullen is clearly and genuinely committed to this principle. The reason this is important should be obvious to anyone who paid attention to the last three elections and the rise of Stephen Harper. Hyper-partisan politics put Harper where he is today – a calculating, narrow politics that decided on when to pull the plug Harper minority governments based almost exclusively on how many additional seats the NDP could win.

Watching the NDP make these calculations it was almost as if the possibility of Harper winning a majority never even entered into the calculation. The euphoria at NDP headquarters on election night last May when there should have been tears over a Harper majority demonstrated the price we pay for this kind of simplistic, almost cultish partisanship. We are losing our country as a result of it.

I happened to catch Nathan Cullen at his brief appearance in Powell River where I live. He talked about doing politics differently – building his campaign support at and among the grass roots, rejecting the traditional game of quickly getting MPs and other party luminaries lined up, being more NDP than the next candidate. It is apparently working – he has had the momentum in terms of member donations since mid-February. It took Jack Layton many years to develop the rapport with people that made him so popular. Cullen has it in spades without having to learn it – he is almost the anti-candidate.

It’s not just that he is instantly likable but when he speaks it is clear he has the country in mind and is acutely aware of the threat that Harper poses to the nation. He simply states: “We cannot have eight years of this man …who is not a conservative but a radical libertarian.” It took amazing courage to promote the idea of co-operating with the Liberals and Greens, pre-election, in a party that values loyalty almost more than anything else. It isn’t likely to happen – but the message was crystal clear: this time’s its different because the very existence of the country is at stake.

I was impressed by Cullen’s grasp of economic policy, the impact of trade deals and the change in corporate culture with the advent of globalization. But mostly I was just taken by how easy it seemed for him to be honest without having to try. On the partisan question he argued, I think correctly, that especially when it comes to young people, party loyalty just doesn’t matter the way it used to. Listening to him, with that perpetual optimistic grin, the thought came to me that this is perhaps the only candidate who could successfully engage with an Occupy crowd. When he speaks he is addressing all progressive Canadians, not just party members – and that’s contrary to convention, too.

Cullen – quick, witty and passionate – emphasizes the need to engage Canadians in a positive vision, saying he doesn’t want to just sit in a corner constantly going after the latest Harper outrage. And here, perhaps, he has the key to reviving Canadian democracy and politics. Harper has been nailed hard on several issues in recent weeks, from the email-snooping fiasco to robo-calls scandal and his poll numbers have not budged an inch. People’s expectations of politicians are a new and dangerous low. Politics as usual will get us the usual results. Doing it differently at least gives us a chance.

If that’s what you want, a chance to save the country and rebuild it, vote for Nathan Cullen.

An extraordinary day in the life of Occupy Toronto

Judy Rebick — 2012-03-13T13:02:49+00:00

It’s hard to create a community based on love and compassion in the middle of a society based on greed and fear. The hippies tried it without much success even in the backwoods. We tried it in the women’s movement but even in all-women groups, the training we received in a patriarchal society restricted our ability to achieve it. The Occupy camps are the closest I’ve seen to that beloved community that has so escaped our grasp.

It was never clearer to me than when Occupy Toronto was taken down by the city, the courts and the police for the terrible crime of camping in a city park. Oh excuse me, it was for violating a city by-law that they mobilized 100 city staff and uncounted number of police. This we were told was to restore the park to its original beauty so that citizens could use it unimpeded, at the end of November. When one reporter asked me about what a mess the park was, I responded, well if authorities are so worried about that, why do they support the tar sands and mining exploration which destroy trees and water. The only thing destroyed in this park was some of the grass. As one tweeter put it: “Occupy 2.0 will include the right to walk your dog.”

In some ways Occupy Toronto was the poster child of the Occupy movement. They negotiated consistently with city officials, fire department and the police, never receiving a single citation for health and safety or fire hazards. As with other Occupy sites, there was a growing number of homeless people, some of with serious mental health issues, who arrived because Occupy created such a welcoming environment in which they could be fully part of the community. It wasn’t easy and there were incidents but from what I could see they were handled with compassion and intelligence. They built alliances with like-minded groups around the city from the labour movement to the disability rights movement. St. James Park became the centre of activism in an increasingly activist city.

There was not a shred of an excuse to shut down the camp except for the complaints of a few of the neighbours. As we know, the threat of the Occupy camps was political; the emergence of a movement that not only challenged the greed and lack of democracy of neo-liberal capitalism but also demonstrated on a micro level that it was possible to build a community based on different values and a deep democracy. That’s why they shut down the camps.

The occupiers had every right to be angry. And they were angry but they behaved with amazing discipline, militancy and calm. I got a text at 5:15 a.m. from a friend on the site asking me to come down. I’m not much good at midnight but I wake up early so I told him to feel free to text me as soon as the cops were coming. I got there about 5:45 just before the police moved in. There were not a lot of people spread out on the very large site. Despite requests on twitter and texting for people to come down, at first there were not very many who came.

There were people barricaded in three locations around the fire, in the gazebo and of course in the famous library yurt. When I arrived, I asked what the plan was and people just shrugged. There wasn’t so much of a plan as an attitude. The people barricaded were prepared to get arrested. Everyone else was there for support probably hoping to avoid arrest.

It was agreed that there would be no effort to stop city workers from taking down the tents. And the workers were very respectful, folding and tagging clothing and other items found in the tents and carefully taking them down. These are workers from CUPE 43, a union under threat of privatization and imminent lock out. No doubt many of them hated what they were doing but they were told they would be terminated if they refused to do the work and there was one supervisor for every three workers. They were also working very, very slowly.

At first it was just regular police around watching the workers and occasionally chatting with some of occupiers. People watched them work and from time to time began chanting but no-one screamed at them as was reported in some media. To my eyes, the occupiers didn’t seem very organized. But they moved to where they were needed and when spirits were failing someone showed up to sing or lead a chant or do a mic check. The live stream guy with his laptop hanging from a string around this neck and an assistant walking beside him was filming everything including doing interviews, excited that more than 1,000 people were watching his broadcast.

The people in the gazebo and around the fire seemed in good spirits most of the time. The people defending the library yurt were firm and determined, some of them outside the yurt shivering in the cold. I was pretty sure the police were clearing the tents before they were going to approach taking down the barricaded structures so I suggested they take a walk. “No,” one young woman replied, “We are resisting.” But you are shivering I replied, your body temperature is getting too low. “I don’t resist with my body,” she replied pointing to her head and smiling. And I remembered what it was to be 20 years old and went to look for blankets or sleeping bags that might keep them warmer. That they accepted.

Around 10 a.m., a young woman sat in front of a city truck barring its way and she was arrested. The entire park moved towards the vehicle chanting, “Let her go, let her go.” In an incredible scene they surrounded the in charge police officer and began talking to him as a group using the human mic method of repeating what people were saying, including him. This group of people without any visible leader negotiated that she would be released. When he said, she will just be given a $75 fine for trespass, someone asked, “How can you be ticketed for trespassing in a public park during the day.” And the crowd repeated it. I couldn’t believe that the police officer allowed himself to be surrounded like that or that the crowd would be so bold as to do that. But both he and they understood that there would be no violence here. There was no threat.

Around 11 a.m., most of the tents were down and we noticed that riot police were massing on the east side of the park. They weren’t wearing helmets or shields but you could tell by their uniforms and their stance that they were riot cops. Some of the union people on site had been asking Sid Ryan to adjourn the Ontario Federation of Labour convention and march over to the site. Now those efforts became more intense. There had been a wonderful rally the night before with about 1,000 union brothers and sisters. Great speeches from labour leaders acknowledged the inspiration that the Occupy movement is to their movement. But this was the moment that solidarity was needed. Most of the people in the park had been there all night and a reinforcement of energy was needed before the tough part came. Then at 11:30 a.m. we got word that the OFL had voted to adjourn the convention and march over to the park. A huge cheer went up.

A few minutes later the police formed a perimeter around the first structure with the fire. It had been a sacred fire but the elders had put it out a day or two before but still people wanted to protect the fire. Tensions were rising because the perimeter kept people well away from the hut. The riot police came in quietly and stayed in the background. It was clear by now that the police were not going to provoke violence.

At 11:45 someone saw the flag leading the OFL convention and they poured into the camp. I am not sure how many people came but it felt like a thousand. Of course they started chanting and the energy was amazing. OFL President Sid Ryan spoke and said they would be leaving soon but they were there to show their solidarity. “We are not here for a confrontation with the police,” he said. “Your movement has been an inspiration to millions of Canadians because you have been non-violent. So let’s keep this non-violent.” I would have felt better if he had included the police in those remarks but no-one seemed to mind. The injection of energy and real gesture of solidarity was what was important and that is what occupiers responded too. And once again I was reminded of how often my mind and others of my generation to go to the negative, the critical. Sid left with about 50 people but the rest stayed. Then we heard that the police were negotiating with those inside the hut and the union brothers and sisters were asked to stay about 20 minutes until the negotiations were concluded and they did.

I don’t know if the negotiations would have happened anyway but there is no question that the union presence just when they were needed gave the occupiers a lot more leverage than they perhaps otherwise would have had. One woman was arrested fairly roughly. She was yelling but we couldn’t hear her so people chanted again, “Let her go, let her go.” She resisted arrest a little but she wasn’t charged either.

After that more and more people kept coming into the park, some on their lunch, some perhaps because they realized that no-one would be arrested. The next amazing moment came when we heard that the occupiers barricaded in the library yurt had negotiated with the police to take out the books and carefully take down the Yurt. One of those chained to the Yurt had a joint press conference with the police officer in charge and astonishingly they praised each other for their co-operation.

I’ve been around a long time and I’ve never see anything like this. The occupiers didn’t save their camp, that wasn’t possible but they delayed their eviction by a week through an injunction. They created an atmosphere that meant that neither the tents nor their content were damaged. They created enough resistance that it took an entire day to dismantle the camp, all of it broadcast on local TV and through live stream. And through their action no-one faced criminal charges despite around ten arrests. It was brilliant.

Perhaps it is true that the police were trying to recover their reputation post G20 but I also think they had a lot of respect for what the occupiers were doing. I heard that a lot cops were referring homeless people who won’t go to shelters to Occupy Toronto where they would be well treated. The police negotiated every situation with considerable skill. When three young men refused to leave the yurt and were arrested, the crowd once again surrounded the police van. The officer in charge offered to have the Occupy chaplain come with them to ensure they would be well treated and promised they would only be ticketed for trespassing to get the crowd to let the vehicle drive away.

I like to think that it was really because of the atmosphere created in the camp, an atmosphere of love and compassion, an atmosphere of commitment and determination, an atmosphere of a loving accepting community. I think maybe the police were affected by it too. I know that I have been.

Canada supports the dark side of international finance

Murray Dobbin — 2012-02-28T14:36:32+00:00

You can say one thing for the powers that be in the banking industry. They’ve got a lot of nerve.

This past week our own finance minister Jim Flaherty, along with Mark Carney, the Governor of the Bank of Canada, came out strongly in opposition to a modest proposal to regulate the US banking system. Their interventions followed a concerted effort by American bank lobbyists to spark international opposition to US regulatory reforms.

What a shameful spectacle. Less than four years ago the world was holding its breath for fear the crisis in the hyper-deregulated US financial system would cause a second Great Depression. Now Canada and other foreign governments, cheered on by US banking interests, are doing their best to block US legislation that would curb the industry’s worst excesses. The initiative Flaherty and Carney attacked is a proposal by Paul Volcker, the former chair of the US Federal Reserve. Simply put, the “Volcker rule” would prevent financial institutions – US or subsidiaries of foreign banks – that are backstopped by US taxpayers from behaving like hedge funds and trading for their own account.

Flaherty and Carney are trying to cast their opposition as standing for Canadian regulatory sovereignty. But since all five of Canada’s largest banks drew on emergency loans from the US Federal Reserve during the crisis, the US certainly has a moral argument in favour of being able to regulate the behaviour of Canadian bank subsidiaries operating within its territory. After the financial industry’s speculative bets on the US housing market went sour, US and foreign banks got $1.2 trillion of the American public’s money in emergency loans and $700 billion through the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The banks’ weak defence is that they have paid all the money back – an argument that can be challenged because the US government is still holding the bag for bad deals the banks made with companies like AIG.

But why banks get to have first call on this extreme level of government resources when they get themselves into trouble speaks loudly about their influence over the political system. Analysts of the secret loans given to Wall Street during the crisis point out that $1.2 trillion they got is enough to cover all the 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages in the US. Secure in the notion that their companies were too critical to the global economy for the US government to let them fail, CEO’s of the big US banks had continually ratcheted up the level of risk they tolerated in their trading divisions. It was a kind of “heads I win, and tails, I still win” ultimatum to taxpayers that the Volcker rule would help put an end to.

So did Wall Street learn anything from its near-death experience in 2008? In the immediate aftermath of the financial meltdown, the heads of US banks were called before Congressional inquiries to explain what went wrong. Some of their statements suggested they were genuinely shaken by the scale of the catastrophe and understood the need for government regulation. John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley, admitted that government support had prevented “a collapse of the financial system”. Mack stated that “the financial crisis has also made it clear that regulators simply didn’t have the visibility, tools or authority to protect the stability of the financial system as a whole.”

But that was then. Like a heart attack survivor who immediately goes back to eating fries and gravy, Wall Street’s biggest firms have quickly returned to lobbying against regulatory reform. Even though during the financial crisis Morgan Stanley topped the list in the size of loans it drew from the Federal Reserve, now the bank is organizing international opposition to the Volcker rule.

Lobbyists from the US banking industry are visiting foreign embassies like Canada’s and issuing anti-Volcker rule position papers. According to one analyst, “The criticism of foreign governments on behalf of their banks is helping U.S. banks fight the rule.” Mark Carney, for example, is claiming that somehow the Volcker rule will do irreparable harm to the Canadian government’s ability to sell its bonds and will “undermine the resilience of the Canadian financial system.”

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist with the IMF, called Carney’s criticism absurd. He wrote in the New York Times that he could understand why the big banks would oppose the Volcker rule because they want to continue to engage in high risk/high return activities with the implicit backing of the US taxpayer. Johnson questions, though, why the Bank of Canada would be siding with Wall Street given that the Bank “would ordinarily be expected to take a broader perspective, at least aligned with the social interests of the Canadian population.”

Johnson notes that Carney worked for Goldman Sachs for thirteen years, but charitably says that he does not think this background explains Carney’s position on the Volcker rule. I’m not so sure. Bankers make up the world’s most powerful boys club and Carney is clearly still a member in good standing. What better way to maintain that standing than by helping out your Wall Street buddies. In his own clearly exasperated response to Carney’s argument, Paul Volcker has written a Financial Times editorial explaining that nothing in his proposal would prevent American commercial banks from finding buyers for foreign government’s debt – they just would be prevented from speculating on this debt themselves. He also points out that foreign governments seemed to be able to raise money in international markets before the US market was deregulated in the 1990’s to allow their banks to trade in this debt. Volcker said we should “not be swayed by the smokescreen of lobbyists dedicated to protecting the interests of some highly compensated traders and their risk-prone banks.”

There are two significant initiatives to try to advert another financial catastrophe. In Europe, governments are proposing a financial transaction tax to curtail the turbo-charged speculation going on in securities markets. In the US, there is the Volcker rule, a key component of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. Canada is on record as opposing them both. To use a Lord of the Ring’s analogy, Flaherty and Carney are playing the supportive roles of Orcs to the Dark Lords of international finance.

On the environment Canada is a rogue state

Murray Dobbin — 2012-02-21T16:14:19+00:00

There are so many areas of conventional democratic governance being challenged or eliminated by the Harper wrecking crew it is hard to keep up. Those searching for a line in the sand that even this government won’t cross still haven’t found it. So far, it seems, there is nothing in the broad field of democratic governance (save the military and prisons) that is sacrosanct.

Minimally, all governments take seriously the protection of their citizens; otherwise there is scarcely any point in having one. Yet a recent CBC report reveals that that the Harper government has virtually eliminated monitoring of the ozone layer over Canada. The government has shut down four of five very sophisticated monitoring stations leaving only a single station—at UBC in Vancouver—still gathering information about this critical aspect of our environment.

In doing so, Canada is once again demonstrating that it is becoming a rogue state. The monitoring of the ozone layer—which protects the earth from harmful radiation—is an international task requiring the co-operation of many countries. Canada, because of it enormous territory and its large share of the Arctic where the ozone layer is most threatened – is absolutely key to global monitoring. Last week, according to CBC TV’s Environmental Unit, “…five scientists from high-profile U.S. universities and NASA released a scathing critique of Canada’s cuts to its ozone monitoring, saying it is jeopardizing the world’s ability to watch for holes in the ozone layer and pollutants high in the atmosphere.”

But beyond the contempt shown for the international community, the deliberate sabotage of ozone monitoring again demonstrates two of the most prominent features of the Harper government: its disdain and even hostility towards science (and it own scientists) and its determination to promote the oil industry and protect it from any possible criticism.

It is not just ozone monitoring that has been gutted. In a response to the revelation Environment Canada acknowledged that other pollutant monitoring was also being downgraded: “The number of staff in measurement activities for the monitoring of ozone, tropospheric pollution and atmospheric transport of toxic chemicals has remained constant but their work now includes other departmental priorities.”

Tropospheric pollution is essentially pollution particles caused by combustion—industrial, automobile, forest fires, etc.—the kind of pollution that is the most dangerous to human health.

The same day that the revelations about the Conservatives’ cuts to pollution monitoring were published, an article in the New York Times reported on several new studies that revealed living in polluted air is even more hazardous to your health than previously thought. One study found that air breathed by most Americans (it’s hardly any different in Canadian cities) “…greatly accelerates declines in measures of memory and attention span.” A study in Boston concluded that the odds of having a stroke increased by 30% even on days when pollution was classified as moderate—a category that is supposed to suggest minimal danger to health. It went up to 60% for bad pollution days and the effects were almost immediate—within 12–14 hours.

A study published in the American Journal of Medicine revealed a strong link between common pollutants—carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide – “…raised a person’s immediate risk of suffering a heart attack…” increasing heart rates and thickening the blood, accelerating the development of atherosclerosis.

Why would any government deliberately take steps that they know will make it more difficult to protect the health of its citizens? A Health Canada report published in 2005 concluded that nearly 6,000 people a year in Canada died as a direct result of air pollution and that the health costs of that pollution were a billion dollars a year. So clearly the Harper government isn’t concerned about Canadians dying or the strain on the Medicare budget.

The Harper government’s priority is not the health of Canadians or the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Its single-minded purpose seems to be to promote the oil industry and protect it from any criticism. Demonizing critics of the Tar Sands as enemies of the country is just one small part of that goal. Eliminating scientific data that could link the oil industry to negative health effects is another. Why else would the government stop monitoring for pollution?

If the message is giving you trouble, shoot the messengers. That’s exactly what Harper has done and will continue to do in his March budget. Last fall Environment Canada announced that some 700 scientists and researchers would be losing their jobs. Sixty were fired in January.

The Myth of American resilience

James Laxer — 2012-02-21T15:51:14+00:00

Bankers, financiers, capital markets lawyers, investors and economists—people supposedly in the know—routinely make the argument that the United States is more resilient, flexible and adaptable than any other major country in the world. America is down they say, but not out. The Americans, according to this line of thinking, will bounce back to reclaim their global economic dominance. As Clint Eastwood proclaimed in his commercial for the Super Bowl, it’s half-time and America will come roaring back in the second half.

The myth of American resilience—this is not about minor ups and downs in the U.S. economy—skews the vision of many observers of the global economy. Like other myths, this one is based on a combination of dated thinking and romanticism, not unlike the faith of fans that the members of an aging sports team still have the stuff to re-live their glory days and win the title.

The truth about America is that it is anything but flexible and resilient and faces a range of obstacles that portend decline (not collapse) rather than a creative re-birth that will re-establish its supremacy.

Where the United States was once on the cutting edge of Modernity, benefitting from its conquest of a continent, its steady supply of immigrant labour, and its military victories over formidable foes, the country is now hobbled by rigidities, of which the following five are of critical importance:

1. The widening income and wealth gaps.

Among the principal western countries, the US is the most extreme case in terms of the income gap between the rich and the rest of the population. The gap meant that a tiny proportion of the U.S. population gained the lion’s share of the economic benefits of the past three decades, leaving the large majority of the population with few or no real gains. Indeed, on the eve of the great crash of 2008, the gap between the very rich and the rest was the same as it was in 1928 on the eve of the Great Depression. While Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s did ameliorate the severity of the Depression, it did not end it. The American economic crisis was only resolved by the entry of the United States into the Second World War following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The war generated an immense wave of job creation and industrialization in the United States; and the war left America’s chief rivals, the enemies Germany and Japan, and the allies, Britain and the Soviet Union, in a state of economic ruin.

The war did more. It opened the way for the United States to reorganize the global economy placing itself at the centre with the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency of the world, the latter a fact of great importance because it allowed the United States to go into debt on a scale that would have been impossible for any other country. In addition, winning the war strengthened American labour and the American trade union movement. The full employment economics of the post-war decades and the muscle of organized labour meant that the real income of American wage and salary earners (adjusted for inflation) doubled between 1950 and 1970. The earnings gap between the rich and rest shrank appreciably during these decades.

Following the oil price shocks of the 1970s and the miserable effects of stagflation, the door opened to the age of neo-liberalism, globalization, de-regulation, and the loss of bargaining power for organized labour. The consequence was the onset of the new earnings gap that peaked at the onset of the crash of 2008.

An economy in which productivity gains push up the incomes of those at the very top, while leaving the rest with no appreciable gains, suffers from a dearth of purchasing power. The mass of the population accumulates ever more debt in this bubble-prone economy. For the swollen financial sector, which accounted for 22 per cent of the U.S. GDP on the eve of the crash, speculation to pounce on quick gains, became the name of the game.

2. The Costs of Empire.

As was the case with earlier empires, the Americans bore the costs of imperial overstretch in two ways. The first, the more obvious of the two ways, has been through immense military spending. Today, the U.S. accounts for about half of all the military spending in the world. In addition to regular military outlays to maintain and upgrade the American military establishment, there has been the expenditure of about two trillion dollars to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Steep military outlays at a time when there is immense resistance to paying higher taxes among upper income earners has exacerbated the crisis of state indebtedness in the U.S.

The second cost of imperial overstretch is discussed much less often although it is perhaps even more important than the first.

As was the case with former empires, notably the British and the Roman, American economic dominance allowed the United States to farm out its production of a wide range of goods to countries where the cost of labour was much lower. Crucially, in recent decades, this has allowed the American people to share in the bounty of “cheap stuff” being imported into the country. While China was the primary point of origin for these imports, there were many additional sources in other low wage countries. This was a double-edged sword. It meant that outlets such as Walmart offered cheap imported manufactured products, and that U.S. and other multinational corporations made vast profits producing goods where labour costs were low.

It also meant, however, that American domestic manufacturing which had once been dominant in the world, was hollowed out on a stupendous scale. In 1970, as West German and Japanese imports flowed into the United States, the U.S. ran a deficit in its trade in manufactured products for the first time in the 20th century. Since then, the US manufacturing trade deficit has grown ever larger (it shrank sharply in the aftermath of the crash in 2008 but has begun to expand once again) so that it now amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

In 1980, the share of the US GDP accounted for by manufacturing was close to 20 percent. By 2008, this proportion had shrunk to 12 percent, an alarmingly low proportion for a nation that had once been the world’s industrial powerhouse. One dramatic consequence of the hollowing out of American industry has been the decimation of the jobs and incomes of the American working class, especially working class men, who once could earn an income that could support a family, and no longer can.

Britain, the world’s first industrial power, had also followed the same trajectory. Even in the mid 19th century, when British industry reached its zenith, the nation’s manufacturers were involved in a struggle for primacy with the financial elite, the bankers and financiers of the City of London. By the end of the 19th century, in what has been called the second industrial revolution, that involved science, steel, and chemicals among other industries, British manufacturing lost its dominance to German industry and particularly to American industry.

What dealt a near-fatal blow to what remained of British manufacturing came in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister of the United Kingdom. First elected to power in 1979, the Thatcher government initiated an experiment in monetarism that squeezed inflation out of the British economy but had the effect of hurling the country into a severe recession. During that recession, scores of manufacturing establishments closed in Britain, never to re-open. Under Thatcher, finance won its final victory. The United Kingdom had been reduced to having an economy that was based on finance in the City of London and North Sea oil. For all intents and purposes, industry was dead. As was the case with the Americans, the position of British finance in the global economy allowed the British people to enjoy the fruits of cheap imports, from China and other countries. But the British working class paid the price of lost industrial jobs. And with the crash in 2008, the position of British finance in the global economy was placed in grave jeopardy.

The Romans, as the republic rose to dominance across the Mediterranean, used their new-found power to import low cost products, a leading example being grain from Egypt, that had the effect of driving citizen farmers in Italy out of business. Those farmers had been the backbone of the Roman army. They were the main source of plebian political power in the republic. As cheap Egyptian grain drove farmers off the land, tens of thousands of them flooded into the city of Rome, where they became dependent on food provided for them by the republic. These were the Roman citizens, relocated in the mushrooming metropolis, who were bought off by the “bread and circuses” of the patricians who sought political power for themselves. Rising patrician stars such as Julius Caesar and Pompey spent vast sums to feed and entertain the urban masses to win their votes when they ran for positions such as Consul. This was plutocracy with a flair that the American plutocrats have not yet matched. In the United States, plutocratic politicians such as Mitt Romney stick to purchasing huge swaths of time on the media to drown their opponents in abuse and to advance their own meager talents. In Rome, plebians were treated not only to repeated repasts but also to the pleasure of watching gladiators or animals tear human foes apart. During this last phase of the disintegrating Roman Republic, the army whose legions had once been composed of citizen soldiers, became a professional force. Over the long-term, the Roman Empire, successor to the republic, was forced to bring infusions of Germans and other foreigners into the ranks of the army, first as individuals and later as whole legions. Rome’s inability to feed itself, and its reliance on cheap imports, along with the loss of its citizen farmers, were not reversible processes.

It is one thing for great industrial states such as Britain and the United States to use their prowess when they are peak of their power to flood their own domestic markets with cheap imports. It is quite another thing to re-industrialize once industry has gone. It is theoretically possible, but exceptionally difficult, involving as it inexorably would a steep drop in the average standard of living in the country.

3. Crumbling Education.

One of the great strengths of the rising American republic was the quality of its public education. The mass of white children received an education, paid for by the state that allowed American white youths to enter the labour force ready to learn how to cope with skilled or semi-skilled jobs. Two great changes have occurred. The level of education required to do all but unskilled jobs, of which there are now millions at low levels of pay, is much higher than before in an age of advanced technology. The other enormous change is that millions of affluent families have abandoned the public educational system, which has been allowed to crumble, to one degree or another across the United States. (Since education is a state responsibility, there are important differences in the effectiveness of public education from state to state.) As the affluent have fled from public education, the effectiveness of American education has dropped dramatically in relation to education in other advanced countries. In terms of literacy, numeracy and other measures, American children rank near the bottom in comparison to children in other advanced countries as tests scores reveal.

4. Ideological Blinders.

It is not surprising that the most influential sections of American society are highly resistant to fundamental change. Such behaviour has been the norm among the leading elements of successful empires throughout the ages. Those who have the most to lose from fundamental change are the same people who have gained immensely from the success of their empires. The very success of an empire, whose rise was due to genuine flexibility and innovation, breeds resistance to change when the empire has reached its peak and even more so as it begins its decline.

The process of shutting out the real world and its challenges in favour of the repetition of ideological homilies that once reflected innovative thought, but now are a barrier to it, is far advanced in the United States. Before them the rulers of the Chinese, Roman, Spanish, Russian, French and British empires behaved in the same way. They repeated soothing formulas—incantations from the past—-which speeded them on their way into decline.

Affluent Americans who fear change, from within their own society and from a world in which the US share of global economic output has shrunk from 50 percent in 1945, to 20 percent today, are inclined to seek the truths of the Founding Fathers of the American republic to steer them on the stormy seas of the 21st century.

The emergence of the Tea Party has been the most visible recent case of a populist re-affirmation of the American civic religion that is rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. The verities of individualism, free enterprise and the limited state are at the heart of this explosion on the political right. The idealized capitalism of the Tea Party conjures up an image of American society, not from the era of the American Revolution, but from the 1840s and 1850s. It is housed in a hazy vision of a small town, laissez faire capitalism, before the rise of the great conglomerates such as Standard Oil, U.S. Steel and J.P. Morgan in the decades following the Civil War.

The trouble with the reified thinking of the adherents of the Tea Party, the populist right more generally and the Republican Party is that it denies empire, global enterprise and finance-centred capitalism, the essential realities of our age.

5. Formidable Challengers.

Everyone looks to China as posing the greatest challenge to American global dominance. China is indeed, the principal, but by no means the only challenger to American hegemony. China’s economic rise, its development of a capitalist model in which the state plays major, if chaotic, roles is of immense importance to all of humanity. Not least, this is for reasons of sheer scale. When twenty per cent of the human race, over one billion people, go through unprecedented transformations, the consequences of success or failure, indeed the kinds of success or failure, are colossal.

Several hundred million people in China are living in varying degrees of affluence. Hundreds of millions more still live at a subsistence level. From the vastness of this larger China come about one hundred and thirty million rural workers who move in and out of the country’s wage economy as conditions change.

The rise of enormous new powers always contains the risk of social explosion, wars both civil and against external enemies, and the immense danger of collapse. All of these possibilities are present in China today. The governing Communist Party, once a force for revolution, is now an empty vessel, whose sole purpose is to retain power and privilege for its leading cohorts. It is a party without vision, subject under pressure to a descent into strident nationalism exclusionism and expansionism.

A useful way to look at the US-China economic relationship is to understand it as a single, volatile and quickly evolving single system. The US and China have a symbiotic relationship. The US provides a vast consumer market for Chinese exports. (US imports from China fell from $337.8 billion in 2008 to $296.4 billion in 2009 and the US trade deficit with China declined by just over $40 billion that year. As a consequence of the economic crash, in particular the severe slump in Chinese exports, about 20 million migrant workers lost their jobs by the winter of 2009. In 2010, US imports from China bounced back up to $364.9 billion.) Because of the extent of the US trade deficit with China (it was $273.1 billion in 2010) and the extent of US direct investments in China ($22.2 billion in 2006 compared with $600 million in total Chinese direct investments in the US that year), China has a vast pool of US dollar holdings (in US government and institutional bonds). In 2011, China’s foreign exchange reserves (their size is classified as a state secret in China), the highest exchange reserves in the world, totaled about $3 trillion, about 60 percent of the reserves made up of US holdings.

The huge imbalance in trade between the US and China creates enormous problems for both countries. The gigantic US manufacturing trade deficit with China (and other countries) has resulted in the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs in the United States over the past decade. It needs to be noted in relation to this, that the US-China trade relationship is complex. While about 37 percent of China’s GDP is accounted for by exports, net exports accounted for only about 12 percent of China’s GDP. This is because China’s exports have imbedded within them enormous imports to make them possible. Huge imports of capital equipment and parts and components into China feed into the final manufacture of products in China. Americans import goods from China that have been partially produced elsewhere including the United States itself.

While China has built up huge reserves of dollar holdings, China desperately needs to recycle these dollars through direct investments in the US and by purchasing US bonds. Seen as a single system, the US represents the consuming side and China the savings side. One side cannot exist without the other.

But it is a dynamic system whose motion brings with it potential crises both economic and geopolitical.

How China evolves, bringing an ever larger proportion of its population into affluence and the mainstream of global capitalism will have a huge impact on the future of the world. Internal social upheavals, already visible in labour struggles and protests that often go largely unreported in the rest of the world, are already occurring in China. They are an inevitable consequence of the wrenching changes through which the country is passing.

These changes will generate pressures, which may open the country to wider social and political dialogue and greater degrees of popular decision making or may generate an even harsher dictatorship that seeks legitimacy through nationalism and expansionism.

The United States and other powers will undoubtedly affect the process of Chinese development. If the American political leadership responds fearfully to China’s rise, in part as a way to deal with America’s own social chasms, China will be pressured in one direction. If American leaders conclude that the United States and China have symbiotic economies in which the United States provides a vast market for Chinese products, while China helps stave off insolvency for the United States through the purchase of its financial instruments, China will be pushed in another direction.

Above all, the relationship between the United States and China is highly unstable, subject to constant changes. As China’s internal market grows larger and as the cost of Chinese labour rises, China will have less need for the American market. As China develops, the capacity of the United States to afford Chinese imports on such a flagrant scale will decline. This may force at least the partial re-industrialization of the United States, under conditions that will be far from favourable.

Other potential challengers to U.S. economic hegemony include India, Japan, Brazil and even Europe when it finally succeeds in making the transition to a European state that involves much more than a single currency.

To sum up, the 21st century will not be an American century as the 19th and 20th centuries were. The United States will, of course, remain a substantial power. It will, however, be subjected to the immense pressures that confront a declining empire. The cleavages within American society include the very wide gaps between the very rich and the rest of the population and the realities of a country undergoing vast demographic shifts. By the middle of the 21st century, it is estimated that 90 million of the 360 million Americans, will be of Hispanic origin, the large majority of Hispanics living in the crescent of states that once were part of Mexico. By 2050, 15 percent of the US population is projected to be African American. A further 10 percent is projected to be made up of Asians, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. These changes mean that only one half of the American population will be composed of non-Hispanic whites, the demographic element on which the founding of the American republic was based.

As the role of the United States in the global economy continues to decline, the US will be pushed down the ladder of the global division of labour. This will bring the era of “cheap stuff” from abroad for Americans to an end, with the consequence that for the mass of the American population there will be a falling standard of living at least for a time.

How Americans cope with the pressures that confront them, chaotically or relatively successfully, will have a huge effect on American society and the world. Of one thing we can be certain: those who stubbornly assert that the United States is uniquely capable of flexibility and resilience in the face of challenges are among those who are standing in the way of developing a realistic evaluation of the pressures facing the United States. They are part of the American problem, not the solution.

Local Food and Co-operatives

Scott Neigh — 2012-02-18T16:56:38+00:00

I wrote the following article for the monthly newsletter of a Sudbury organization called reThink Green. I did this as part of my placement at another local organization called Eat Local Sudbury, which is an element of my current detour through graduate school.

Local Food and Co-operatives

By Scott Neigh

It manages to be both obvious and difficult to wrap our minds around: In order to have a greener impact on the planet, we have to think about doing things differently far beyond the kinds of individual choices that are more green or less green but that leave the shape of our lives and communities otherwise unchanged. For instance, choosing to take public transit rather than drive on an individual occasion is certainly a positive thing, but a shift towards sustainable transportation that is sufficient in its reach and equitable in its consequences means going beyond encouraging more people to make that choice under current conditions. It also means thinking about what we need to do socially to make it more possible and more reasonable for more people to choose to take transit more of the time, probably in ways that will end up making our lives and our communities work differently than they do now.

I want to make the case that one kind of difference that can foster greener outcomes is supporting local co-operatives, which means embracing a different kind of relationship to the organizations in our community than those demanded by regular businesses. At the moment, I’m working with an organization called Eat Local Sudbury (ELS), which is organized as a co-op and is currently figuring out how to bring its ways of doing things more in line with the strengths of that particular organizational form. This means that what I have to say is largely focused on talking about the work that ELS does. However, 2012 is also the International Year of the Co-operative (see www.canada2012.coop, so it also seems like a good opportunity for people concerned with the environment to think a little more broadly about how co-ops can be part of building communities that are sustainable.

ELS has a storefront at 176 Larch Street where you can buy food that has been produced locally, in many cases using green methods. Many people who are concerned with their impacts on the earth are already aware of the benefits of eating locally. The closer food is produced to where it gets eaten, the less fossil fuel it requires to get it from farm to table, which is good for the environment. The money paid for local food is more likely to go to support producers who have smaller operations and who are part of our communities, rather than huge businesses. When food is local, it is often possible to have a much better idea of how it was produced in terms of processes, environmental impacts, and the wellbeing of the animals and people involved. More of the money spent on local food stays in the community, as the producers in turn pay workers and buy supplies closer to home.

The benefits of buying local food are many, but those of you who shop at ELS already know that a commitment to eating locally means making some changes in how we relate to buying food. Given how busy our lives are and the ever-increasing pressures to work more and more to make ends meet, it is no wonder that the pull of supermarket buying is so strong – one-stop shopping to get whatever we need, and if the food we buy comes from 3000 km away and we don’t really know what happened to it before it got to us, well, we’re too busy to do too much about it.

An outlet that focuses on local food, in contrast, cannot have everything and cannot be a one-stop solution. ELS is working all the time to expand the range of products that it offers, but there are lots of foods that are simply not produced near Sudbury or even in Ontario, or that are available only at certain times of year. Moreover, dealing with small, local producers rather than massive, transcontinental supply chains means that not everything will be available all of the time. Our local environment has rhythms, people’s work has rhythms, and to buy locally we need to recognize that our buying and eating need to have some rhythms too. Eating local means making changes in our lives beyond picking X over Y.

There are other aspects of ensuring there is local food on your table that are less visible. Any food that you buy not only has to be produced by someone and sold by someone, but it also has to get between the producer and the seller. Industrial agriculture has large-scale distribution systems that span continents already in place. Yet the infrastructure to get food from the farmer down the road to your table is still developing. In fact, it is one of the priorities of a newly-formed provincial network of local food co-ops to figure out how best to support the growth of robust local food distribution systems – how to fill in the “missing middle,” to use one of the buzzwords. Though it is not usually visible to people who want local produce, local meats, or local processed food, doing this means making new connections, building new relationships, and figuring out new ways of doing things. That is, it is another way that having greener impacts requires making changes and doing work that is social.

Eat Local Sudbury

My role at ELS is to contribute to a process of organizational development which, in part, involves shifting how we do things to be more in line with the fact that we are a co-operative. As the work has unfolded, it has become clearer and clearer that the way we need to think about it is “different food in different ways” or even “better food in better ways.” The co-operative form offers advantages that will allow the local food system in Sudbury to grow and thrive in the years to come.

Despite the fact that many Canadians are members of co-operatives, whether it is their community credit union or a retail giant like Mountain Equipment Co-op – as well as, of course, ELS – many of us do not really know what they are or how they work. While different co-ops can look and operate very differently, all are enterprises that are owned and democratically controlled by the people whose participation as consumers, producers, or workers, or some combination, make the organization a reality. There are co-ops that engage in almost every kind of activity, not just retail and financial services but also childcare, agriculture, manufacturing, and much more.

Rather than being legally obligated to focus entirely on maximizing profit for shareholders, co-ops are organized around meeting the shared needs of members. Rather than being controlled by whoever has dollars to sink into an organization, co-ops are governed on a one member/one vote basis. The guiding principles of co-operatives mandate attention to social and community needs. Their democratic, member-controlled structure allows for a kind of responsiveness to the needs of the ordinary people who constitute them and the communities that nurture them that massive businesses simply cannot match.

The key to a vibrant co-operative, particularly a smaller one, is a mobilized and engaged membership. Though co-ops have to navigate many of the same pressures as for-profit businesses, their commitments to organizational democracy, to the wellbeing of members, and to strengthening community mean that active participation by members – or member-owners, as they are sometimes called – plays a much more significant role in shaping co-ops and driving them forward than the relationship between a consumer and a business.

Within those broad parameters, different co-operatives can do their work in many different ways. Currently, ELS is organized as a hybrid of a producer co-op and a consumer co-op – a joint, co-operative venture between those who produce food locally and those who wish to buy local food. In the coming months, we want to get people talking about what it might look like to get member-owners more actively involved in making decisions, promoting local food, engaging the broader community, and bringing ELS to life, in a way that fulfills the co-operative goals of democracy, support of members, and strengthening community. We envision an organization that is community controlled, community supported, and not dependent on grant funding for survival. We imagine building a dynamic, responsive local food distribution system that is networked with such systems elsewhere in Ontario, and we imagine turning more and more people on to the advantages – personal, environmental, community – of eating local food.

If you aren’t an ELS member, I encourage you to become one. If you haven’t bought food at our store, or you haven’t done so recently, I encourage you to come in and take a look. And if you are a member, I encourage you to become part of the conversations that will shape ELS’ co-operative future. ELS members are invited to come to the Environmental Resource Centre (176 Larch Street, back entrance) from 1-3pm on Saturday, March 3 or 7-9pm on Thursday, March 8 to learn about co-ops, to offer your input as ELS changes, and to start thinking about how you can be a part of those changes.

[Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. For more of his writing, take a look at his personal blog. As well, Scott has two books of Canadian history entered through the words of activists coming out in late 2012.]

Time to Zip John Baird’s Loose Lips

Murray Dobbin — 2012-02-17T16:05:10+00:00

It is hard to credit the latest statements and actions by Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. On both Iran and Israel Baird seems to almost deliberately seek to humiliate both himself and the country he is supposed to represent on the international stage. Taking an ultra-orthodox rabbi (whose organization opposes any Palestinian state) with him on an official visit to Israel is not just bizarre but dangerous. And suggesting, essentially, that Iran has a first-strike policy against Israel (with non-existent nuclear weapons) while comparing its leader to Hitler, puts Baird firmly in the company of drunks in a bar room exchange of tough talk.

For Stephen Harper to let this crude and ignorant buffoon loose as our principal face to the world may only be understandable if we assume that everything Harper does is for a domestic audience. He simply doesn’t care what the world thinks. There has always been a kind of visceral disdain for things foreign amongst the population which makes up Harper’s core vote. Perhaps willful ignorance and a penchant for bar room tough talk is exactly what qualifies Baird for his job.

It is hardly new that Harper’s ministers and Harper himself operate with little reference to the professional civil service that most governments rely on for policy advice. He doesn’t trust bureaucrats or their traditional role of guiding government policy. For Harper the civil service is at best an impediment to his agenda, at worst a political enemy — the equivalent of another political party. He has now effectively gagged every public employee who might otherwise brief the media — and citizens — on even on the mundane day-to-day operations of government.

By now the Harper government’s Middle East policy is well known — continuous posturing about Arab dictatorships and terrorists and a sycophantic pandering to the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Harper treats all Palestinians, even elected representatives, as if they were terrorists. While Canada’s official position on a two-state solution (based on 1967 borders) hasn’t changed, Harper refuses to utter the phrase. While he pays lip service to the need for diplomacy regarding Iran, his predominant posture is war-mongering at it worst. If he had a sabre, he would be rattling it.

But even in this extremist context Baird’s recent behaviour is outrageous and a national embarrassment. His recent trip to Israel caused cringing by his hosts who, according to the Globe’s Patrick Martin, were extremely uncomfortable with Baird’s companion, Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn, the head of the Chabad organization in Canada — an ultra-orthodox Hasidic movement noted for its aggressive proselytizing. The movement believes its former leader, Menachem Schneerson, was the Messiah.

What nuanced public policy goal was intended by bringing this controversial rabbi on an official trip is impossible to decipher. Indeed, it seems to contradict any public policy objective, certainly any that might have been put together by the professionals at foreign affairs. Baird was so over the top in his praise of Israel — constantly repeating that Canada was Israel’s best friend — that Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz mused: “I think Canada’s an even better friend of Israel than we are.”

Orthodox Jews and their parties have always played an important role in Israeli governments, being part of any governing coalition. But in recent years they have become more aggressive in Israel society, especially in their efforts to restrict the rights of Israeli Arabs. Secular and liberal Jews have become so uncomfortable with this trend that many have left the country.

Just what message Baird thought we was delivering to his hosts and to Israelis in general is anyone’s guess. But it is in the area of the peace process, such as it is, that Baird’s choice of companion is most troublesome. Chabad is a firm believer in Greater Israel — which includes all of the Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war. According to Chabad, Greater Israel “… is the land promised to us by G-d – not the UN. And we may not give away an iota to our enemies, for it is ours by Divine Will.” This stance effectively eliminates any possibility of land for peace and certainly any negotiations based on 1967 borders — the position of virtually every key player in the “peace” process, including the United States.

It is also the basis for Canada’s official policy. Indeed last June it was Baird who made this clear telling the media after the G8 meetings: “We support, obviously, that that solution has to be based on the ’67 border, with mutually agreed upon swaps, as President Obama said.” If it’s so obvious, then why would Baird bring with him as part of his official delegation the head of Chabad in Canada, an organization whose beliefs make such a solution impossible?

It begs the question: who is actually determining Canada’s policy towards Israel and who, or what organization, persuaded Baird that taking Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn along on an official visit was a good idea?

Baird’s statements on Iran are almost as bizarre and troublesome. It is as if Baird simply shoots from the lip without any consultation with his own officials — but with the apparent blessing of his boss in the PMO. Responding to hyperbolic rhetoric from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about excising the Israeli “cancer” from the region, Baird casually compared the religious leader to Adolph Hitler: “Hitler wrote Mein Kampf more than a decade before he became Chancellor of Germany… ” But he was just warming up: “… it’s not just an Israeli question. The fear in the Arab world, in the entire region, the Gulf, and the entire Middle East is palpable on this issue. And it’s increasingly a significant security threat for the West: for Canada, the United States and our allies in Europe.”

This is little more than adolescent running off at the mouth — again, no strategic thought involved, just a reckless analogy and sweeping, unsubstantiated statements about the most politically complex region in the world. In the same CTV Question Period interview Baird stated that “of course” diplomatic efforts must be maximized and given every chance of succeeding. I wonder how Baird would explain his comparison of Iran’s leadership to Hitler were he to play a role in such diplomacy.

At the same time that he was pointlessly demonizing Iran’s leadership, Baird was repeating one of his most preposterous claims — that Iran would actually use nuclear weapons if they had them. On the latter point, Baird and Harper ignore the fact that U.S. intelligence agencies and the Pentagon — despite renewed rhetoric about Iran’s nuclear program — are still not even convinced that Iran is trying to build a bomb. Baird has stated: “We believe Iran constitutes the greatest threat to peace and security in the world.” This is a country that has never invaded any of its neighbours and compared to the Israeli penchant for intervening wherever it pleases, is isolationist. Yet for Baird it is more dangerous than Pakistan and North Korea which actually have nuclear weapons and are extremely unstable.

Baird’s conviction that Iran would use nuclear weapons matches Stephen Harper’s rhetoric: “In my judgment, these are people who have a particular, you know, a fanatically religious worldview, and their statements imply to me no hesitation about using nuclear weapons if they see them achieving their religious or political purposes.” Such a thoughtless analysis is irresponsible. The suggestion that Iran would use a nuclear weapon against Israel (which has 200 of them) for “religious or political purposes” is an opinion unsupported by any other Western leader.

Were this rhetoric emanating from a youth parliament or an all night pub we could treat it with bemusement. But these casual and ill-informed “diplomatic” interventions are focused on one of the most volatile regions in the world where every word from Western leaders is pored over, parsed and parsed again in a search for new trends or positions. If Iranians pay any attention to them (let’s hope they don’t) the effect will be to generate even more public support to the Ayatollahs and political hard-liners — the most likely sources of support for the development of nuclear weapons. All of the Harper government’s statements imply support for military intervention in Iran. And that, according to literally every Middle East expert, would be catastrophic.

A conservative foreign policy is one thing. A reckless one something else again. At the moment Canada’s approach in the Middle East is simply dangerous. We would contribute more by saying nothing.

Fix, don’t scrap, rights panels

Dave McLaren — 2012-02-14T20:54:47+00:00

Bill Whatcott is a man who doesn’t much like gay men and isn’t shy about saying so. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission thought that what he said went beyond dislike, all the way to hate. That ruling went to the Supreme Court, which is now trying to decide whether hate speech should be free speech. In doing so, the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code might have to be re-written.

About time, say all the opinionators. Ezra Levant over at Sun TV is licking his chops: take that you Human Rights commissars, you free speech police. Well, not so fast.

Hate crimes, as determined and reported by police are going up in Canada—by 42% in 2009, on top of a 35% increase in 2008. It is pretty much the only crime that is actually increasing. It is also, the police speculate, one of the most unreported.

“There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder,” George Eliot wrote in 1866—a woman who felt it necessary to write under a man’s name. Fifty points if you know her real name without looking it up.

Hate speech, even if it doesn’t provoke violence, is a cancer. It spreads its malice until conditions become ripe for violence. Hate speech, when it is not stopped or condemned, gives a kind of permission for action.

That is what dug the mass graves in Kosovo, and how hatred for blacks moved from Jim Crow laws to lynchings in the United States. And that is how (according to the Ipperwash Inquiry) we in Canada got from anti-Native rights rhetoric to the death of Dudley George.

As B’nai Brith points out in a 2008 report supporting Human Rights Commissions, “The Holocaust did not begin with censorship. It began with hate speech.”

In its report, B’nai Brith argues that the Criminal Code is not enough—and too much. Section 319 obliges the Crown to show that an expression of hatred would “likely lead to a breach of the peace.” That’s an awfully high bar to meet and a lot of hate can slip under it. But the Criminal Code is a very big and expensive hammer, useful only after hate propaganda has inflamed passions to the point of violence.

Section 13 of the Human Rights Act, is the section that mandates Human Rights Commissions to decide what is or is not hate speech. Properly implemented, it is a scalpel. It allows Commissions to stop the hate before it can spread and do more damage, rather like a surgeon making a pre-emptive excision of a cancerous tumour. In this way, hate speech can be dealt with at a lot less cost to governments, the individuals involved, and to free speech.

Sure it’s a nasty job, deciding what is or isn’t hate. What’s free speech to one is hate speech to another. But we delegate all kinds of nasty jobs to unelected, quasi-judicial bodies: the police, workman’s compensation boards, criminal injuries compensation boards. Why not have qualified people adjudicate what’s hate speech without resorting to the Criminal Code and the expensive and stressful court process that entails?

The B’nai Brith report does a pretty good job of arguing for the scalpel over the sledge hammer and makes some very good suggestions for cleaning up the process by which Human Rights Commissions come to their decisions.

It makes you wonder why the Prime Minister, given the position of B’nai Brith, one of his staunchest allies, would float the idea of getting Human Rights Commissions out of the business of adjudicating hate speech altogether by scrapping section 13.

What is even more curious is news that Mr Harper is looking at banning speech that “glorifies terrorism.” What would come under that scrutiny? The play he disliked (without seeing) at Toronto Fringe in 2011? How about the hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war”? Maybe if someone sang instead, “Onward Islamic soldiers, marching to intifada?” The “glorification of terrorism” is as open to abuse as section 13’s “any matter likely to expose a person or persons to hate.”

When I look at the statistics on hate crimes and read some of the commentary that passes for free speech, it seems that we are becoming a more hateful people. As Limp Bizkit sang just before 9/11, “Now I know why you wanna hate me; ‘Cuz hate is all that the world has even seen lately.”

And that’s why we should keep section 13 in the Canadian Human Rights Act. If Human Rights Commissions need fixing, let’s fix them. Let’s not neuter them.

David McLaren is an award-winning writer. He has worked in government and the private sector, with NGOs and First Nations in Ontario. He is currently writing from Neyaashiinigamiing on the shore of Georgian Bay and can be reached at david.mclaren@utoronto.ca.

Review: Exile and Pride

Scott Neigh — 2012-02-10T01:14:38+00:00

[Eli Clare. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness and Liberation. Ten-year anniversary edition. Cambridge MA: South End Press, 2009.]

I often feel that describing the pieces that I write in response to books as “reviews” is a bit inaccurate because I only occasionally relate to the books in question in the ways that a review is, traditionally, supposed to. What I write tend to be more reactions or reflections or responses, or just meanderings. Nonetheless, I inevitably end up deciding just to sit with that unease — to accept that the label “review” doesn’t always quite fit the way it is normatively intended and to trouble and loosen it by taking it on anyway. In the case of this book, I’m afraid that what I write will be more of a moderately reflective fanboy “squee” than a proper review.

Exile and Pride is a memoir by activist, author, and poet Eli Clare, who moves through the world as a white transguy (formerly lesbian) with cerebral palsy. It is short and accessible, but incredibly politically complex; easy to read, but dense and at times difficult, if that makes any sense at all. It is, in ways that resonate with and take-up longstanding traditions of theorizing used especially powerfully by some radical women of colour, a powerful example of critically theorizing the social world by starting from self.

The book jumps back and forth through time, weaving together Clare’s childhood in rural Oregon, his contemporary life in urban queer left contexts, and the journey in between. Contrary to the advice in the book about writing memoir that I reviewed back in December, Clare’s immense writing talent and thoughtful choices in this book illustrate that you do not have to excise the complexity that is a feature of all of our lives in order to arrive at a telling of and reflections on life that are compelling and readable. The book also exhibits great honesty and, in so doing, takes both personal and political risk — for instance, his refusal to be cowed by the right-wing use of oppressive and just plain wrong queer-because-of-abuse narratives into refusing to probe the ways in which his awful history of sexual abuse as a child does intersect, in much more subtle and complex ways than anti-queer narratives allow, with his queer ways of being as an adult.

More generally, he relates to experience in ways that I would find difficult but that are key to the power of this genre of theorizing. He talks about strength and weakness, transcendence and frailty, other people’s foolishness and his own foolishness, pleasure and pain. He also uses experience as data, as a starting point for narrative, as a starting point for analysis, as metaphor, as source of rhetorical device, and as guide to making judgments that shape knowledge production. Perhaps most importantly, it is treated not as distinct from the social world but as tightly integrated into it. As well, he relates self and social to place much more thoroughly and effectively than many lefty writers.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of how this book is written is the way that it creates a complex analysis for the reader without anything even vaguely resembling the kind of difficult, obscure writing found in the work of so many university-based theorists (ahem, ahem). I think this is because critical memoir allows for the deployment of what you might called “show” complexity (or modelled complexity) rather than “tell” complexity (or abstracted complexity). The latter requires drawing out and naming the complexity of the world — telling it, in the sense of the binary posed in many instructional books about writing between telling and showing. This leads to things like coining new words, and to taking up various complicated and inaccessible rhetorical strategies. While there are times that such approaches are warranted, and things they can do that other approaches cannot, I think there is scope and power in “show” complexity that is left untapped by many, many people interested in writing about the social world. Modelled complexity uses much the same technique as fiction and literary nonfiction writers to represent the immense complexity of the social world not through taking it apart and naming it but through conjuring the whole in ways that channel the reader’s identification to this or that specific aspect. It depends on mobilizing our everyday experience of a complex world as a resource for writing that complexity, and for writing about that complexity. Exile and Pride is a great example of this approach.

I am, as you can no doubt tell, a fan. I recommend this book highly.

[Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. This post originally appeared on his personal blog, as have many other book reviews. Scott has two books of Canadian history entered through the words of activists coming out in late 2012.]