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Review: The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance

Scott Neigh — 2013-04-18T00:07:38+00:00

[Robin Tudge. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Surveillance. Toronto: Between the Lines and London: New Internationalist, 2011.]

This will be a little review of a little book. It is a useful resource — part of a series of small, focused No-Nonsense Guides put out by Toronto publisher Between the Lines — but it is also one that has limits and should be read with a certain amount of caution.

There are two main strengths to the book. The first is its sense of urgency. Despite the problems with the book I note below, the ever-increasing amounts of data that are collected about each of us by states and by for-profit corporations, and the ever-increasing sophistication with which disparate pools of data are connected both to each other and to various mechanisms to regulate and discipline us, are not understood as broadly as they need to be nor treated with sufficient urgency even by some of those who have a sense of the scope of the problem. On that level, a bracing call to wake up already and pay attention to the issue is certainly welcome.

The other main strength of the book, and perhaps the one that matters more to me, is its usefulness as a piece of reporting and a collation of a great many sources. I did notice a few problems with referencing, but by and large it seems to make good use of reports (both establishment and dissident), scholarly research, and pieces published over the years in the mass media, as well as the words of whistle-blowers from within organizations that do various pieces of the work that the book describes. Moreover, bringing it all together into one volume helps give a sense of the scale of the problem and the sweep of its trajectory in a way that is easy to miss when all you see is an out-of-context article here and an isolated news story there. I think anyone looking to investigate further will find this book a good first stop in terms of tracking down important resources.

That said, there is lots that makes me more hesitant about the book too. For one thing, even before getting into the substance of its politics, despite being co-published by a Canadian publisher, the book has very little to say about how all of this has been implemented here. That would be nice to know about.

But there’s a lot more than that. The book is fairly narrowly focused on questions of surveillance, and is obviously written to appeal to people with a broad range of politics on other issues. While understandable from the perspectives of winning converts to a narrow cause and of selling books, I think that approach almost always leads to shoddy politics. In this case, the fairly singular focus on surveillance and the consequent state and corporate regulation and discipline leads to a fairly flat understanding of power. Thankfully it is robust enough that it recognizes private tyrannies (capitalist corporations) as well as public tyrannies (states), but it still is almost entirely organized around “freedom from” rather than a richer understanding of “freedom to” or of “thriving”, and that leads it towards … well, in some places, the flavour is almost right-libertarian, whereas in others it is a particular kind of U.S. American liberalism. And I think as urgent as surveillance is, as part of broader questions of power, oppression, and resistance, thinking of them only in terms of “freedom from” is dangerous and will likely create that freedom for people who are already privileged while merely reshaping the cage slightly for most of the rest of the people on earth.

In a related problem, it presents enforcing a “right to privacy” as the answer to surveillance, and “privacy” as an unambiguous good. While there are plenty of examples historically of strategically-deployed struggles for privacy winning gains for ordinary people, and I’m certainly not taking any absolute position against doing so now, it’s a lot more complicated than that. “Privacy” and how it is put together socially can be a component in a lot of gender and sexual oppression, for example. A more liberatory response to the issues raised by this book may struggle not for “privacy” but for a way of organizing our lives that does not depend on an axis between “public” and “private” as currently constituted.

There are points where the shallow, Cold War liberal or even libertarian rhetoric is thick enough to make you cough and splutter. For instance, in its potted history of surveillance — some of which is useful, mind you — it frames the world in terms of “communist” and “fascist” and “democratic”, which is itself a sign of simplistic liberalism to follow, and then it frames the surveillance/regulation problems of the first two earlier in the twentieth century as systemic while the excesses of the latter are blamed on the power hungry machinations of one man, J. Edgar Hoover, and it proceeds to pine for a time when the true principles of democratic freedom were more freely adhered to in the U.S. of A. While Hoover is someone who belongs in the ‘evil’ category in any just accounting of history, this framing ignores the reams and reams of work showing that liberal-democracy has also been systemically violent, nasty, and oppressive, from the get-go — it just organizes and distributes it all a bit differently.

I could do some more detailed dissection of the book’s limitations, but I promised a short(ish) review and I really have other work that I should be doing, so I’ll just note general themes. A particularly egregious one, given how surveillance and the disciplinary practices attached to it have played out in the last decade and more, is the seriously underplaying of the centrality of racialization and white supremacy in how surveillance is organized and experienced. Then there is the book’s tendency to not always be careful in distinguishing among what happens now, what theoretically could happen and probably will at some point, what technically could happen but probably won’t, what various political actors wish to happen and that may or may not actually happen, and what state/corporate/surveillance industry insider rhetoric claims in denial of the complexity and unevenness of how huge bureaucratic and technological systems inevitably function. The little hypothetical scenario with which the author opens the book is perhaps the most egregious example, but far from the only one. And while that kind of approach might help to produce a sense of short-term urgency, it can lead to misidentifying the problem. And, in fact, it can be one part of another larger problem with the book, that it consistently gives too much power to that which we struggle against and underemphasizes our capacity to make change through struggle. This can lead to a circumstance where dissatisfaction with the status quo is urgently felt but leads to little or no activity, and that is not a good thing.

This has not been as little a review as I intended. Sorry! In any case, the book’s urgency is important and the resources that it collects are useful, but read it with caution: Its political and rhetorical limitations nudge the reader towards a politics that will be woefully insufficient to truly address, in a just and liberatory, practices of surveillance and the oppressive and exploitative social relations in which they are embedded.

[Scott Neigh is a writer, parent, and activist based in Sudbury, Ontario. He is the author of two books looking at Canadian history through the stories of activists, which you can learn about here and buy here. He is also the host/producer of Talking Radical Radio. This review originally appeared on his personal blog.]

Talking Radical Radio Has Launched!

Scott Neigh — 2013-02-27T18:30:37+00:00

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new broadcasting/podcasting project, Talking Radical Radio. This weekly, half-hour show brings you grassroots voices from across Canada. It uses in-depth interviews that will concentrate not on current events or the crisis of the moment, but on giving people involved in a broad range of social change work a chance to take a longer view as they talk about what they do, how they do it, and why they do it.

If you happen to live in Sudbury, Ontario, you’ll be able to listen every Wednesday morning at 8 am on 96.7 FM CKLU. For most people, though, the best way to tune in is through the show’s page on the Rabble Podcast Network, part of Rabble.ca. The debut episode can be found here — it features an interview with Alex Diceanu of Steel City Solidarity in Hamilton, Ontario about that group’s experiments in using direct action tactics and a new sort of organizational form to challenge instances of wage theft by employers.

Upcoming coming episodes include Robin Folvik of Vancouver’s Graphic History Collective on March 6 and Gerald Wehatley of Calgary’s Arusha Centre on March 13. In the following weeks, look for Sheetal Rawal and Dilani Mohan of The Miss G Project based in Toronto, Ontario, talking about their eight-year struggle to get women and gender studies curriculum in Ontario high schools; Pastor Rhonda Britton of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church talking about organizing efforts in Halifax, Nova Scotia to keep a closed school building as a resource for the community; and an organizer with Winnipeg Cop Watch from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

If you think this is an interesting project, along with listening, there are other ways you might want to support it:

Suggest topics for future shows! Check out these criteria for participants and tell me about grassroots organizations, groups, projects, or initiatives doing interesting social change work in the Canadian context by emailing me at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.
Get the show picked up on your local community or campus radio station! In the coming months, I will be working hard to get the show picked up by community and campus stations in different parts of the country, and if you are a volunteer, staff, board member, or avid listener of such a station, you can help me out. Again, be in touch at scottneigh(at)talkingradical.ca.

Stories from the front line of the victorious abortion struggle in Canada

Judy Rebick — 2013-01-25T19:23:37+00:00

Monday, January 28 is the anniversary of the deepest and most important victory the women’s movement in Canada has ever had. After almost 20 years of struggle, beginning with the Abortion Caravan in 1970, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the abortion law in a landmark decision citing women’s right to privacy — in effect women’s rights to control their own bodies.

When the judgment came down, I was standing with about 50 other supporters outside the Morgentaler Clinic on Harbord Street in downtown Toronto. Along with Dr. Henry Morgentaler, we had been battling Conservative governments at two levels, the cops and the anti-choice forces, including the Catholic Church, for eight years.

We had arranged for Carolyn Egan, who as a birth control worker had been one of the key people to initiate the fight in Toronto, to call us from Ottawa as soon as the judgment came down. There were a huge number of TV cameras and reporters waiting with us. And it was freezing.

A reporter whispered to me that the decision had come and that they had struck down the abortion law, based on a women’s right to control her own body. I didn’t believe her. We thought we might win on a technicality of equal access to a medical procedure but never on a fundamental rights issue. So I didn’t pass it along. Five minutes later we got the call. The scrum moved in, “How do you feel , Judy? Tell us how you feel.”

“I feel great!” I replied jumping about a foot off the ground. I don’t think I’d ever felt so much joy. After eight years of organizing, demonstrating, direct action, lobbying, fundraising and sometimes facing threats and violence, we had won. We had won in the highest court in the land and at that moment I felt no-one would ever be able to take it away.

By some serendipity, this historic anniversary falls on the international day of action called by Idle No More, another mass popular social movement that is making what the pundits think are impossible demands. We didn’t have twitter in those days so media couldn’t track day to day our support like they are doing now with Idle No More so they never knew that our support would ebb and flow depending on what was happening When we were under attack we could count on thousands to come out. Day to day it was about a hundred activists who kept things going. Even though we got tremendous coverage, and the media was supportive, they were just as skeptical as they are today about Idle No More.

I am reminded of the day in 1986 when I ran into an old friend Elly Alboim, who was Executive Producer of the National, in an airport. It was soon after the Court of Appeals in Ontario had rejected the jury’s verdict of not guilty and ordered a new trial. “You’ll never win this, Judy,” he informed me. “I’ve talked to the lawyers. There is no possible way you are going to win.” But we did win, thanks to the courage of Dr. Morgentaler and Dr. Scott and the mobilization of tens of thousands of women and men from every community, every social class and every walk of life taking to the streets, protecting the clinic with their bodies, writing a cheque, lobbying their representatives, attending a meeting, passing a resolution or just talking to their neighbours.

I got involved in the fall of 1981, when Carolyn and her co-workers called a community meeting with the idea of opening an illegal abortion clinic to challenge the law, along the model of Dr. Morgentaler’s in Montreal.

After a long struggle in Quebec, the PQ government had basically legalized abortion, refusing to prosecute any doctor who was performing abortions in safe conditions after two Catholic juries had acquitted Dr. Morgentaler.

The birth control workers realized that while white middle class women with connections had access to abortion under the 1969 law, poor women, immigrant women, rural women, young women, couldn’t get access. Even in Toronto, appointments for the limited hospital abortions were the luck of the draw. A lottery, we used to call it. You had to get on the phone and start calling at 8 am and keep calling, hoping to get through. Imagine the stress of a woman with an unwanted pregnancy not knowing if she would get through at all or in time for a first trimester abortion. CARAL, the Canadian Association for the Repeal of the Abortion Law, founded in 1974 had been lobbying to change the law, educating the public and raising money for Dr. Morgentaler’s court cases in Quebec but more was needed.

The birth control workers wanted to open a clinic like Dr. Morgentaler’s abortion clinic and build a movement to support it. At first Dr. Morgentaler, who had suffered a heart attack in jail in Quebec, didn’t want to open a clinic in Toronto. But eventually he relented. Even before the clinic opened we started organizing. The Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinic (OCAC) was at first a coalition of pro-choice groups and others. We set out to build public support even before the clinic opened. A rally of 1,000 people at OISE with Dr. Morgentaler, June Callwood and others kicked off the campaign.

In the fall of 1982 we introduced a resolution supporting the legalization of free-standing abortion clinics (our basic demand) at the Ontario Federation of Labour convention . It was controversial and even some of the feminist activists in the OFL didn’t want it to reach the floor in case it undermined their resolution for special women’s seats on the OFL executive. We compromised by agreeing the pro-choice resolution would be introduced after the other one passed.

I’ll never forget that day. Every woman at the convention was up at the microphones. Even women who didn’t want to speak wanted to show their support. Some labour leaders argued against on the basis that it wasn’t a union issue and it would divide the labour movement. We had been working the convention all week, building support. The women at the mics showed by our presence that it was indeed a union issue.

Then Lois Bedard, whom everyone knew as a hard-bitten lefty who was usually railing against the leadership, talked about her son, also a union activist, who had recently died. He was hemophiliac. “I got pregnant again,” she explained to a hushed auditorium of 1,500 delegates. “I didn’t want my next child to suffer like he did. There was no legal abortions then, no effective birth control either. I went through three illegal back street abortions. Horrible experiences, so that no other child of mine would have to suffer.” Suddenly the morality of the issue came clear. Then the OFL President Cliff Pilkey gave up the chair of the meeting to come to the microphone and argue for the resolution. His mother had had thirteen children, ruining her life and her health. “Women must have the right to choose,” thundered Pilkey. “Women are part of this labour movement, so this is a labour issue.” That was the first turning point. The resolution passed by a large majority vote.

The clinic opened in June 1983 on Harbord Street in downtown Toronto. Dr. Morgentaler arrived in the afternoon. It was my job to escort him across the street. There was a huge bank of cameras and reporters who had been there all day waiting for something to happen. And then it did. Half way across the street, a man ran from the corner and grabbed Dr. Morgentaler. I pulled his hand off and Cheryl, another OCAC activist walking with us, ushered Henry into the clinic and safety. I pushed the man away as he raised his arm with a garden shear that I assume he intended to use on Dr. Morgentaler. I blocked him but he thought better of stabbing me and started to run down the street. It was the first time in my life that I understood the meaning of losing your temper. It was ridiculous to chase him but I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. Fortunately Cheryl, a psychiatric nurse, realized I was in a state of shock and once she had Henry safe she came outside, ran to catch up and yelled my name into my ear to stop me. Not a single reporter moved to help me. Not just the camera operators, I know they had to get the shot, but the print reporters. Our supporters couldn’t see what was happening over the media hordes. That was the day we were able to show that the anti-choice were fanatics and I think public opinion moved more to our side.

The clinic was open for about three weeks. It was an exciting time. Despite the dangers, women came in droves for their appointments. The police started following the women home to get “evidence” against the doctors. In the creative space that happens in a dynamic social movement, someone got the idea of having escorts and safe houses. The escort would drive each patient to a safe house first, inform her of her rights, perhaps share a cup of tea and then drive her home. That meant the cops couldn’t harass women when they were most vulnerable. An unexpected consequence was that the escorts became a solid front guard of the movement, always prepared to mobilize when needed. They had as much invested in the clinic as we did. At this point, the anti-choice was holding back waiting for the Ontario government and the police to act and arrest the doctors. Three weeks later they did.

Doctors Morgentaler, Smoling and Scott were arrested for performing illegal abortions. Dr. Morgentaler closed the clinic until the trial. Once again, like in Quebec, he was acquitted by a jury. In a bold summary, his lawyer Morris Manning said to the jury, “you can ignore the law, if you think it is unjust” and that is exactly what they did unanimously. Throughout the court case, Carolyn, Norma Scarborough from CARAL and I met with Henry and Morris to try and co-ordinate the legal case with the struggle in the streets. After the acquittal, Henry opened the clinic again. That’s when we had to deal with the anti-choice. As the Crown prepared their appeal, the anti-choice started regular demonstrations in front of the clinic harassing the women who were seeking a procedure. We had people out there every day too helping the women through the lines and keeping the anti-choice off the property. Direct action, we might call it today. Labour activists who knew how to hold a picket line helped us a lot.

Another turning point came when a CFRB reporter showed up at the door of the clinic. I wasn’t often there but I was that day. He was running two tape recorders. On one a tape played of a woman with an accent saying that Dr. Morgentaler had forced her to have an abortion when she didn’t want it. The other tape was running to record my response. I said I didn’t know about the incident but what I did know is that Dr. Morgentaler had an impeccable record and that there had never been a complaint against him. I was sure that there was another explanation. What happened later that day convinced me that we were going to win.

After he left, I met with the clinic staff and Henry. What had happened was that the woman had freaked out on the table while the doctor had already started the abortion. It was not possible to stop without great danger. The nurses tried to calm her and then finally at the end of the procedure she was fine, hugging the nurses and thanking them.

So what had happened?

Within an hour after the news hit, we got a call at the clinic. It was the cab driver who had picked her up. He explained that she was fine, talking to an escort who was traveling with her. It wasn’t until he was dropping her at her home when the police approached the cab that she got upset. We decided to see if a reporter would find him and Sheila Mannese from CBC reviewing the tapes (there were always TV cameras outside the clinic) found him herself. Within an hour, someone called from the police station telling us she was being pressured; then someone else from emergency at the hospital and then from immigration informing us that she was an illegal immigrant. It was that moment that I knew we would win. They couldn’t get away with lying.

All day we dealt with media. Our word against the Chief of Police. We said they had harassed her and forced her to make the complaint on pain of deportation. He denied it and said she had come on her own. On the evening news, there was the taxi driver, an unemployed actor as it turned out, telling the story. “She was fine, “ he said, “talking to the escort who invited her for a cup of soup the next day. They embraced, laughing. Then I dropped off the escort and took her home. The police showed up just as she was getting out of my cab and then she looked scared.”

The last turning point came when the Catholic Church decided to call out their troops. One Sunday, the priests were asked to give their sermon on the evil of abortion and call on all their constituents to demonstrate in front of the clinic in two week’s time. Every day of that week, Monday to Thursday, 2,000 people, including children from Catholic schools were bused in demonstrate in front of the clinic. There was media coverage night after night.

By this point, we had had many rallies but none of them had been bigger than 2,000. We didn’t think we could out mobilize them. CARAL was against having a counter demonstration. It would make us look weak they felt. OCAC discussed it and decided whatever numbers, we had to fight back. Otherwise our people would get demoralized. We called a counter demonstration on Friday. CARAL was furious but they pulled out all the stops trying to make to make the demonstration a success. It was at that moment that I learned something key about building a movement. Whatever differences we might have had, CARAL was committed to building the movement. Even though they were sure it was a mistake, they knew once we called it, they had to put everything into building it, even if it proved they were wrong.

Another unforgettable day. I was standing on the steps of Queen’s Park (they didn’t construct barricades in those days) watching wave after wave of people pour out of the subways. After every report of the Catholic protest, the media announced the time and date of our protest as balance. So all the people who had been quietly cheering Dr. Morgentaler in the privacy of their own homes decided now was the time to show their colours. Queen’s Park was full, people spilling out into the street, more than 15,000 people rallied and then marched to the clinic. Up until that march, the anti-choice thought they were a majority and I guess the government might have as well. That night it was clear, as Henry had always said, “the people are with us.”

The pro-choice movement was the broadest and most successful social movement I have ever seen in Canada. And while access to abortion is still not universal and back bench Conservatives have tried over and over again to re-criminalize abortion, that victory has stood the test of time. Today Canada is one of the few countries in the world to have no legal restrictions on abortion and women have the right to reproductive freedom, a foundational right for women’s equality.

Review: Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada

Scott Neigh — 2013-01-13T22:29:35+00:00

[Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, editors. Rethinking the Politics of Labour in Canada. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2012.]

This book is, I think, tailored for use in labour studies courses. The selection of essays on various aspects of political action by Canadian unions and workers would serve very effectively as an introduction and as an overview. The writers approach the topic from a pro-labour perspective that is nonetheless quite capable of being critical of the movement but is never polemical, and the criticism is mostly tempered by a sober appreciation of practical constraints.

The first section sets some of the context and it is where the collection does some modest but useful work to introduce new ideas for thinking most generally about labour politics. I quite appreciated Donald Swartz and Rosemary Warskett’s conceptualization of the labour movement’s history and the challenges it faces today through the frame of evolving forms of solidarity and the capacity of those forms to meet (or not) certain practical challenges. I also think that Stephanie Ross’ materialist complication of the ideal-types of “business unionism” and “social unionism” is an important piece of groundwork for effective discussions about labour’s future directions.

The second section is about labour and electoral politics — the NDP, the different trajectory between labour and parties in Quebec, strategic voting, and electoral reform. All four of these pieces combine history and contemporary analysis. I think that the essay on the NDP will be useful to me as a resource to inform discussions on the left about what we can and cannot expect from future NDP governments, particularly the author’s patient cataloguing of recent NDP regimes at the provincial level and his illustration that not a single one has been even marginally non-neoliberal since 1988. I also got a lot out of the piece on Quebec, about which I previously knew relatively little in this area. The final section is on extra-parliamentary activism, with chapters on gender equity, indigenous people, the environment, community unionism, anti-poverty organizing, migrant workers, and the prospect of progress through the courts. In each case, the included essays present useful mixtures of history, current activity, possibilities, and limitations, none of which should be taken as the final word on any of the topics but all of which provide a good basis for further discussion.

The two main limitations I see with the book are both connected to its form. The first is its (presumed) classroom orientation. While careful scholarly criticism is certainly more useful than, say, tired Trot or anarchist polemics that read current events into eighty year-old debates in ways that make it harder to respond dynamically and radically to contemporary circumstances, I think scholarly criticism has limits as well. In particular, I think one important way to learn about labour politics is to read things produced in the midst of struggle which are less concerned with obedience to the demands of academic civility and careful-speaking: For instance, instead of just hearing about the trajectory of conventional unions interacting or not with community-based direct action anti-poverty work, let’s include a pull-no-punches account from someone involved in the latter about the pros and cons of working with conventional unions. The same for immigrant workers of colour, and for indigenous workers, and so on. I wouldn’t want that material to displace what’s already there, but I think it could be a useful and powerful supplement.

The other limitation that I see in the collection has to do with the ways in which the survey form can make it very easy for us to ignore the interlocking and intersecting character of apparently disparate issues in how he read, write, think, and act. When you produce a collection that divides one broad topic into a number of specific elements, you inevitably produce a certain kind of organization for the knowledge that you present. Often, the fact that this is going on is not obvious because such division tends to reproduce already-existing dominant assumptions about the centre and periphery of the overall topic, and to naturalize the divisions between the components. Of course pieces need to have a focus, and no piece can do everything. But when you have one piece that is designated as your piece about indigenous workers, and one piece that is very clearly your piece about the NDP, and one piece that is about the environment, and one that is about migrant workers, you are setting up a situation in which intersections among these can easily be ignored. You make it more likely, for instance, that the analysis of the NDP will centre the category “worker,” which in North America tends to centre whiteness when that is not explicitly disturbed, and so you get an essay that does not necessarily have much to say about how workers of colour have experienced the NDP. Or, say, the one on the environment doesn’t do anything with indigenous/settler dynamics, presuming that to be a topic for a different piece, and the mainstream assumptions of what “labour movement” and “environmental movement” mean displace any possibility of approaching the question with an anti-colonial environmental justice lens. In other words, the survey form makes it look like we are covering all of the bases in terms of voices and critical orientations, but in fact it allows us to isolate them in individual chapters rather than taking them into the core of what we are doing. (In noting this, I don’t at all mean to detract from the good things that the collection does, and I certainly recognize that the choice to use this particular form is a practical and common one, and that the choice to do things in a different way would inevitably face push-back. Still, I think critical attention to interconnection and to challenging the received social organization of knowledge is absolutely crucial for building the movements that we so desperately need.)

Despite these limitations of form, I think this book is a very useful one, and one that I hope is widely read. I’m happy to have it on my bookshelves as a good first-line reference for future reading, thinking, and writing I might do on these many and varied topics related to the politics of labour in Canada.

[Scott Neigh is a writer, parent, and an activist based in Sudbury, Ontario. Fernwood Publishing recently published his two books looking at Canadian history through the stories of activists, which you can learn about here and buy here. This review originally appeared on his personal blog, as have many other book reviews.]

Idle No More: A profound social movement that is already succeeding

Judy Rebick — 2013-01-12T15:44:40+00:00

I haven’t written about Idle No More yet because I am inspired by the plethora of Indigenous voices that we are finally hearing across the country, including of late in the mainstream media. If I learned anything from the women’s movement it is that we have to speak for ourselves, not be represented by others, however well meaning and supportive. Instead I have devoted my support for the movement to sharing the many brilliant and informative articles, the announcements and reports of events and the beautiful graphics and photos from Idle No More to my rather large social media network. The spurious attacks against Chief Theresa Spence over the last couple of days have made me decide to speak out.

I don’t know if Theresa Spence is a good chief. It seems to be that is up to the members of Attawapiskat to decide. Others, more informed than I, including most eloquently Chelsea Vowel who writes the blog âpihtawikosisân, have countered the attacks against her by pointing out, among other things, that most of the problems reported in the audit happened before she was elected chief in 2010. A fact that most media is ignoring.

What I do know is that Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike has inspired a generation of Indigenous youth to stand up, organize and speak out. “She is prepared to die for us,” one young man explained. Whether or not she is a good chief to her reserve is irrelevant to the fact that she is a courageous and inspired symbol for her people. What’s more, she has accomplished what no one else has been able to do, including the premiers. She has forced Stephen Harper to do something he didn’t want to do.

The other thing that is driving me crazy is this constant questioning of whether Idle No More is a movement, whether it is the new Occupy, what it can possibly accomplish. Yes, Idle No More is a movement. I’ve been part of and studied social movements all my life and it fits the description of a movement perfectly. Of course, it looks different than the movements people of my generation, like journalist and environmentalist Terry Glavin, are used to. It is a 21st-century movement decentralized and deeply democratic in the sense that much of the initiative belongs to the grassroots. In that way, it looks like Occupy but as Pam Palmater, now a spokesperson for Idle No More, has explained, it is a movement of a group of people with a common identity and despite the different history and cultures of their nations, a common history in relation to Canada. In this way, the Idle No More movement is better compared to the civil rights movement and women’s movement.

As to whether they will effective, my answer is they have already been effective. First and foremost, they have mobilized Indigenous people, the most oppressed group in our country, by showing them that they can organize and make change; that many non-native people will join them; and that their culture is beautiful and worth celebrating.

This is always the most important feature of a social movement. This was what the black liberation movement, including both the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, did for African Americans. They did not achieve full equality but who amongst us would claim they didn’t achieve anything. Similarly with the women’s movement of my generation. The most important change we made was not the rights we won or the laws we changed, however important they are, but the change in women. When I was young, women didn’t think they could be politicians, journalists, musicians, artists, carpenters, lawyers, doctors, professors. We were supposed to support men to do all those things. It was when the women’s movement started organizing and demanding equal rights, that our consciousness was changed. The consciousness-raising groups of the late ’60s and early ’70s, much ridiculed in the media at the time, showed us that what we thought were personal problems were really political and social problems and that women were capable of solving those problems collectively.

Oppression only works when the oppressed internalize the idea that they are inferior to the dominant group. Breaking out of that paralyzing internalized oppression is central to any movement. Idle No More is breaking out of internal oppression, both through celebrating Indigenous culture and through providing hope of change.

For the first time I can remember we are hearing and seeing multiple Indigenous voices in the media. Last night TVO’s the Agenda had a panel of four speakers, three of whom were Indigenous. They had many agreements and some differences but it was a great discussion and I learned a lot. On the same night, the National had a panel with two Indigenous people, promising the first in a series in the “countdown to Friday.” I have seen individual Indigenous leaders in the media, usually the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, but I never remember hearing from this many Indigenous people. That’s another accomplishment of Idle No More.

Idle No More is being led by women, which is amazing and wonderful. Perhaps they are also providing a direction of change for the women’s movement. It may be time for women to move much more into the lead of bringing change to our communities, our countries and our planet. I think the mostly female leadership has provided a very different approach than men often do. The unity they have achieved, the non-violent nature of the actions and the focus on relationships all reflect this difference.

What Idle No More wants is as significant, if not more significant, a change to our culture and our country as the black liberation or the women’s movement. And just as white people and men have to recognize their privilege and how they benefit from the oppression and discrimination of black people and women to be true allies, so we settlers have to recognize the great privilege each of us has, as a result of the colonial exploitation of First Nations historically and today. The problem of the relationship between First Nations and Canada is not just a government problem, not just a problem of a right-wing philosophy, it is all of our problem. This means trashing the stereotypes, learning the history and the real economics of the relationship between Canada and First Nations. This too Idle No More is accomplishing by inspiring through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, articles and teach-in as well as alternative and mainstream media coverage. I have provided some links at the end of this article.

Idle No More builds on a proud history of Indigenous struggle for self-determination at a national and international level. The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal, Section 35 in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms are all the result of those struggles upon which Idle No More is building. The American Indian Movement, the struggle led by George Manuel for Section 35 to be included in the constitution, the successful battle to defeat Meech Lake, inspired by Elijah Harper and Oka as well as numerous local and regional battles. But so far, the achievements of these movements and struggles and the laws and reports produced have not fundamentally changed the conditions of First Nations or their relationship with Canada. Idle No More is saying ‘enough’. The time has come to end the broken promises and recognize the rights of the first people of this land. I must say that Idle No More is much more generous to us settlers than we in the women’s movement were to men. As a result, the support from progressive Canadians has been extraordinary and hopefully will grow.

The other reason there is so much support from non-native Canadians is because Idle No More is posing the struggle as in our interests as well. As Pam Palmater has said so eloquently, “Canadians need to realize that we are their last best hope at saving the lands, waters, plants, animals and resources for future generations because our Aboriginal and treaty rights are constitutionally protected.”

It is Jeffrey Simpson and others who support the current neoliberal economic system that are living in a dream palace (whatever that is). They believe that we can continue exploiting the planet in the interest of profit, putting economics before survival. If that isn’t living in a dream world, I don’t know what is. We have to make a sharp turn away from the politics of Stephen Harper and his like not only by electing someone else the next time but by changing our relationships to each other and to the planet. From what I’ve seen, Indigenous people whether in Bolivia or in Canada seem to have a better idea of how to do that than anyone else. If that makes me a romantic, so be it.

Review: Paved With Good Intentions

Scott Neigh — 2013-01-03T15:09:08+00:00

[Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay. Paved With Good Intentions: Canada’s Development NGOs From Idealism to Imperialism. Halifax & Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing, 2012.]

This is a thorough and highly critical look at development NGOs in the Canadian context. It focuses on building an understanding of how such organizations are not meaningfully “NG” at all, but rather are tightly integrated into Canadian state relations and into capitalist social relations more broadly.

The book presents both history and social analysis. Along with looking at how development NGOs are part of state relations, it also pays quite a bit of attention to the relationship between NGOs and social movements. It covers a lot of ground so there is probably more to say about each individual element, but from the origins of development NGOs in the desire of Canadian elites to cultivate particular kinds of domestic public attitudes in the 1950s on through the integration of such organizations (which they usually heatedly deny) into the overall strategy for the ongoing colonial occupation of Afghanistan, the case that it presents for transcending liberal enthusiasm for development NGOs is relentless and impossible to dismiss.

The book pays particular attention to the connection between capitalism’s neoliberal turn over the last few decades and the boom in the number of development NGOs over the same period. Development NGOs, the authors argue, are not just a response to the increase in human need that accompanies neoliberalism but are also an important part of how neoliberal policies are implemented — to defuse political resistance, money is invested in NGO projects that are touted as not only useful substitutes to redistributive measures by states but improvements on such measures. While there is no doubt that some cool local projects do occasionally result, there is little evidence from decades of work in all corners of the world that NGO interventions are capable of making any sort of broad or lasting impact on experiences of poverty. The edge is dulled somewhat, and educated sectors that might otherwise be part of resistance movements are co-opted, but the neoliberal project as a whole presses relentlessly forward. In playing this role, development NGOs articulate and depend on an understanding of poverty as being primarily quantitative rather than an expression of social relations.

I think this book is very useful. It resonated with a lot of my own impressions, analyses, and concerns from working in the para-state sector (aka the agency sector, or the domestic NGO sector) in the past, and I would be keen to have this kind of analysis extended in that direction in the Canadian context. My experience involved doing community-based research mostly related to homelessness from 2001 to 2003, when Canadian cities were still in the initial stages of reeling from the neoliberal cuts of the mid- to late-1990s and the corresponding upsurge in poverty and homelessness. A chunk of the work done by the agency that employed me was paid for by a limited-time funding stream which allowed for the creation of short-term projects and the shoring up of emergency infrastructure. It had the effect, much like analogous arrangements implemented via development NGOs in other countries, of giving the appearance of action in the face of need, of allowing sympathetic people to make a living while doing things that appeared (and, on a certain limited level, were) useful, of being completely inadequate to the scale of the problem created by the withdrawal of state redistributive activity, and of helping to ease everyone into a new phase of deliberate and conscious state refusal to engage in the kinds of activities that would actually be on the same scale as the poverty and homelessness that they claimed to address.

There are a few things that I wish the book did differently. For one thing, while I think linking the activities of development NGOs to the dynamics of global capitalism is very important, I think there would be much to be gained by doing more to foreground a colonial/racial analysis of the sort that Sherene Razack uses in Dark Threats and White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism. This book is very much about a different part of the same terrain that Razack examines in that book, and I think orienting an analysis of development NGOs as she does her analysis of peacekeeping would be a path to a much richer understanding of global social relations and of the complicated nexus of shifting relations and practices that usually get oversimplified by the term “neoliberalism.”

I also found the book quite disheartening. And I say that as someone who had no particular emotional investment in seeing development NGOs as good, and as someone who is quite used to reading and writing pretty bleak analyses of the world. As well, I should add that I don’t mean that in the sense that I have sometimes seen it used, as a kind of sleight of hand to avoid thinking about things which might shake the hearer/reader’s liberalism. Rather, I’m thinking about it in terms of making decisions as a writer and an activist about presenting politically depressing material — how do we do it such that we invigorate struggle rather than dampening it? There’s no magic answer, particularly given that things are really bleak, but part of it has to be grounding our work in ways that centre resistance rather than centering oppression. Talk about both, don’t pull any punches, but centre the former. This book does talk about resistance, whether that was the important inroads that radicals made in Canadian development NGOs in the 1970s or whether it is other forms of solidarity activism that provide different conceptions of how we in the wealthy and white-dominated North should relate to those impoverished and oppressed by the social relations which benefit us, but it is not grounded in that material.

The final thing that I would have liked the book to at least gesture towards is a conversation about the implications of its analysis for our own projects of social transformation. That is, the book makes it quite clear that even well-funded, local, non-state interventions by development NGOs have marginal impact on things like poverty and power beyond a very micro level. What does that mean for those of us who are critical not only of capital but also of the state form? I’d imagine there is lots to be said about the form and the goals of development NGO interventions, and how that is much different from anti-authoritarian left interventions — integrating radical oppositional work with non-state prefigurative work is an important difference. But given that this argument is one that some marxists deploy against comrades who are critical of the state form and of political visions that seek to prioritize finding other social forms to replace it, I think it would’ve been useful to include at least an acknowledgement of it, and perhaps a few pages of discussion in the conclusion.

Anyway, I definitely recommend this book. It fills an important gap in developing a critical analysis of Canadian state relations and of the Canadian contribution to the defence and advancement of global capitalist predation.

[Scott Neigh is a writer, parent, and an activist based in Sudbury, Ontario. He recently published two books looking at Canadian history through the stories of activists, which you can learn about here and buy here. This review originally appeared on his personal blog, as have many other book reviews.]

2012: A Year of Activism from Maple Spring to Idle No More

Judy Rebick — 2013-01-01T07:45:26+00:00

I think we will look back at 2012 as the year that everything changed. The year began with what became a powerful strike of Quebec students against an intransigent government and ended with an historic movement of Indigenous peoples across the country declaring they will be Idle No More.

It was a year of activism. The Quebec student strike, and related Casseroles demonstrations in neighborhoods and towns across Quebec, brought down the tone-deaf government of Jean Charest. I called this movement Occupy 2.0 because like Occupy democratic assemblies were at the centre of their success and mobilization but they also used more traditional community organizing techniques to build support among students and had a visible, sophisticated and accountable leadership.

Thanks to rabble.ca and Translating the Maple Spring, a volunteer social media effort, activists in English Canada were able to receive information from the inspiring struggle over the gap of language, mainstream politics and corporate media that have kept us ignorant of each other across the Quebec/Canada divide for so long. For the first time in my lifetime, people in the rest of Canada mobilized support for a struggle in Quebec. And the student movement in Quebec noticed. They are now in the lead of building a pan-Canadian, cross-sectoral movement to oppose Harper and his neo-liberal agenda.

In B.C., a coalition of First Nations and environmental justice groups joined by activists from Occupy Vancouver built a broad movement called Defend Our Coasts. In response the Harper government backed away from supporting the Enbridge pipeline and while Enbridge continues to fight for the pipeline, a clear majority of British Columbians now oppose the mega-project. There were other victories in B.C. along the same lines. In Ontario local property owners joined with environmentalists and city foodies to stop a Mega Quarry on their lands just north of Toronto.

In Ontario, teachers stood up against the betrayal of the Liberal government and the passage of Bill 115. They helped to ensure the Liberals lost several by-elections leading to the resignation of Premier Dalton McGuinty and then took militant action against the government through one-day strikes and work to rule.

Most importantly, the year ended with the brave and inspiring hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, the spark that lit the prairie fire of the Idle No More movement.

It’s not just the rise of activism that leads me to the conclusion that 2012 will change everything. After all it was Occupy that made protest cool again and broke through the neo-liberal hegemony of mainstream discourse by exposing the gap between the rich and the rest of us in 2011. It is the lead of First Nations and Quebec that will change everything.

The central weakness of the Left in Canada in my view has been its failure to understand in practice the fact that Canada is a nation of nations. While there have been moments where that understanding was expressed, it was never central to our politics. During the early 70’s the Waffle, a left inside the NDP, declared the right of Quebec to self-determination and supported Indigenous self-determination. Again in the early 1990’s the National Action Committee on the Status of Women argued that the way to amend the constitution was to recognize that Canada is composed of three nations each of which is multi-national and multi-cultural and has the right to self-determination and that we should negotiate our relationship nation to nation. It was complicated because First Nations are many nations but a committee of First Nations, Quebec and Canadian women developed the framework after two years of discussions.

There were demonstrations in solidarity with the people of Kahnestake during the Oka crisis in the summer of 1990 and sporadic solidarity with other struggles since then. But this is the first time I can remember such a united effort on the part of Indigenous peoples with strong, broad solidarity from a wide range of social movements, unions and political parties.

Perhaps it’s because the issues raised are not only Indigenous rights, although that should always have been enough but also the key issues of democracy and survival of the planet. As Pam Palmater, one of the spokespeople for Idle No More has pointed out,“First Nations are the last best hope that Canadians have of protecting lands for food and clean water for the future-not just for our people but for Canadians as well.”

What has changed in 2012 is that it is the youth of Quebec and the Indigenous peoples who are leading the battle against neo-liberalism and against Harper. Both groups welcome with open hearts support from others as long as it is offered with respect for our differences as well as for our common issues.

Chief Theresa Spence has shown the courage, integrity and eloquence of a great leader. When the CBC asked her if she had ever been so angry, she responded,“Anger, no. It’s pain not anger. I can’t take the pain anymore.”

On Christmas Eve she sent a message of love to all the people who had supported her but also to Stephen Harper. A lot of us have been wondering what would finally expose Harper’s heartless, Machiavellian style of authoritarianism. I think Chief Theresa has shown us the way. She is Harper’s kryptonite. A humble leader acting from love of her people. She has inspired people all over the country and all over the globe. As Naomi Klein points out she has shown us that it is time for action. Too many people are getting hurt. It cannot continue.

It is the rise of an Indigenous movement led by women and framed both around re-establishing nation to nations relationship with the state and the Crown and around a more generalized struggle for environmental protection and democracy that is having the most profound impact.

Harper is between a rock and a hard place. He doesn’t want to meet the demands of Chief Spence because then he would have to recognize a nation to nation relationship with First Nations which neither he nor any Prime Minister has been willing to do in my lifetime. On the other hand, he and his corporate backers are smart enough to know that if Chief Theresa dies, there will a battle over every inch of pipeline, mine, oil or any other resource extraction all of which must go through native land. I am hoping that the breadth and strength of struggle will prevent him from breaking off a part of the leadership to find a compromise that falls short of movement’s demands.

So far it seems that the Left has responded appropriately to the need for solidarity. Unions, the NDP, churches, environmental groups, artists, academics and others have come out in full solidarity with Chief Theresa and the movement. As events develop and there is inevitably more conflict, that solidarity must hold. Nothing is more important, whatever your issue, than providing every support possible to this struggle.

That is why we are in a historic moment. The Indigenous Peoples of this country have both the moral and economic power that can not only bring down this government but perhaps set a different path to change for all of us. And more than that, no group in society is more worthy of our solidarity and support

Native activist Robert Lovelace wrote: “My hope for Idle No More is that the casualties will be the old guard, those leaders who have thrived within the asymmetry of colonialism. Perhaps this is their one and only chance for redemption. It is time for new leaders who will not accept ‘no’ as a promise or ‘maybe’ once you have surrendered. The earth and our humanity are too precious to be put on the market. New leadership is what Idle-no-more is seeking, and I hope we find it.”

I think the same challenge is there for the non-native Left. We are seeing a new kind of leadership in Quebec and in the environmental justice movement. It’s been developing for a while but now is the moment for a new democratic, accountable and anti-colonial leadership to stand strong and make the alliances based on equality that we need. Those that can’t let go of the patriarchal, top down leadership of the past should step aside or be pushed.

As Pam Palmater pointed out in an article in the Ottawa Citizen, not since 1969 when Jean Chretien as Minister of Aboriginal Affairs brought out the assimilationist White Paper has the native community in Canada been this mobilized and united. The impact of this struggle on the battle for social and environmental justice cannot be overstated.

For this old activist, it’s been an inspiring year. In face of the most terrible right-wing government in our history, new movements are emerging and calling upon us to put aside differences of ego and ideology to unite not only against the injustices of the past but for the possibilities of a better future. I am looking forward to 2013. Happy New Year.

Background on Indigenous solidarity

A beautiful article by Dru Oja Jay: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2185

Conversation with Algonquin land defender Norman Matchewan: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/publications/ourschools-ourselves/our-schoolsour-selves-spring-2012WT

Harsha Walia on decolonizing together: http://rabble.ca/news/2012/12/debunking-blatchford-and-other-anti-native-ideologues-idle-no-more

An excellent interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: http://www.zcommunications.org/the-opposite-of-truth-is-forgetting-by-roxanne-dunbar-ortiz

Another with Andrea Smith: http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/10-building-unlikely-alliances-an-interview-with-andrea-smith/

And a good response from Corvin Russell: http://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/11-tactical-alliances/”

“A roundtable on relationship-building in indigenous solidarity work By Zainab Amadahy”: http://indyclass.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/e2809clisten-take-direction-and-stick-around1.pdf

Review: Feminism For Real

Scott Neigh — 2012-12-08T23:13:38+00:00

[Jessica Yee, editor. Feminism For Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism. Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011.]

I bought this book about a year ago, originally with the intent of reading it during school and then later with the idea of making it a sort of symbolic first book after finishing my grad work and ending my own brief resubmersion in the academic-industrial complex, but neither of those plans quite worked out. It was already near the top of my to-read pile when I heard the editor speak a few weeks ago, earlier on the same day as my own book launch event in Hamilton, Ontario. Her lively, radical patter (even with the jokes you could ever-so-faintly sense she’d used a hundred times before) ensured that nothing more would bump it out of position.

The book is a collection of pieces by mostly-young, mostly-women, a significant proportion of whom would identify as Two Spirit or as queer in some sense. Indigenous women are at the centre of the book but there is plenty from women of colour and white women as well, not to mention a couple of pieces by people identifying their gender in other ways. The pieces range in form from poems to dialogues to personal essays to polemics, and the voice and tone even among pieces of similar form range widely as well. All of them are what Yee (who identifies as a “Two-Spirit multi-racial Indigenous hip hop feminist reproductive justice freedom fighter” (18), and who now goes by Jessica Danforth) describes as “truth-telling” (11). These truths are the truths of struggle told with firm grounding in the living of it, both the pain and the joy. They are also, in many instances, hard truths about the painful friction between the lived realities of those struggles and the constraining, mis-fitting boxes that many of the contributors have felt pushed into by dominant feminist discourse in universities, in the agency sector, and elsewhere, and the oppression they have faced in spaces and from organizations and people they were told were supposed to be liberatory, allies, comrades.

Though its approach and tone are its own, this book certainly feels like a part of the tradition built by many and diverse pieces written mostly by indigenous women and women of colour over the decades which have criticized dominant feminisms and put forth their own visions. The particular sensibility embodied by this volume feels like it may owe something to both indigenous understandings of pedagogy and to the grassroots DIY ethic of the anti-authoritarian strand of radical politics on Turtle Island, but I don’t know enough about the former or about the relationship of the editor and writers to either to say so with any confidence. Regardless of where it comes from, the approach embodied by the book demands a different way of reading, certainly than academic feminist texts but probably also than a lot of popular mainstream feminist writing too.

Academic writing, because of how knowledge is made and circulates through university contexts, presumes that the writer knows and writes in reference to an established field. What is written may agree or it may differ, but it is expected to do so deliberately and knowingly, with existing discourse as reference point and anchor. Failure to know that field is a significant point of criticism. Reading practices pay significant attention to finding points where the field of reference has been misunderstood and tend to be focused on criticism and on a profoundly ungenerous relationship to the words on the page. And, as anyone who has ever spent time at a pub with graduate students knows, this culture of relating to ideas and to the people who hold them tends also to shape less formal spaces and practices that are connected to universities as well. None of this is specific to feminist academia, but neither is feminist academia immune to it. (For another moment in my own ongoing attraction to and profound unease with academic knowledge production, read the last review I wrote, which is of a very different book, but which was written while I was already reading this one. I think, in a way, that earlier review is at least partially an act of putting the two books in a sort of implicit dialogue.)

I’m not sure that the analagous phenomena in spaces outside the academy are exactly caused by how it happens inside, as this book sometimes seems to be implying, but they do happen. From what I have heard, knowledge of a certain field and mastery of a certain discourse, both heavily marked by race and class, remain informal but necessary components of admission to the label “feminist” in many spaces that are not on university campuses as well. (Again, this kind of exclusion is far from unique to feminist spaces or identities, but those are the focus of the book.) And often because the people with the power to manage that kind of gatekeeping have been able to access a university education, the content that is used to mark the insider-outsider distinction in non-academic spaces is often related to the shape of the feminist discursive field within universities. In these contexts, I don’t know that the practices of relating to texts and to people are necessarily identical to those in the academy — there isn’t the same socially organized pressure towards hyper-critical reading, for instance — but there is still often a reflexive application of a sort of list of vocabulary and political checkboxes, with relationship to the text/person in question shaped by how many boxes get checked.

As well, in both kinds of spaces, existing discourse and categories get treated as more important than the messiness of experience that doesn’t fit them, which privileges those who do and hurts or excludes those who don’t.

My sense is that not only does this book criticize that state of affairs but it embodies an approach to knowing the world and to textual intervention in the world that is premised on being read in ways that reject it too. I think that approaching this book with hyper-criticism based in grounding in texts rather than life, or less rigorous checkbox-based gatekeeping, will pretty much guarantee that you will miss the point and fail to learn what this book has to teach. Rather than elevating a grounding in and mastery of existing discourse, this book grounds knowledge production in experience of struggle. This book takes the stand that if a given person’s experience doesn’t fit the boxes, categories, and expectations that predominate even in a supposedly resistant discourse like feminism, then the problem is not the experience but the boxes, categories, and expectations. This is a rejection of — and this is not language that appears at all in the book, but it is how I’ve come to think of it — the reification that is endemic to most academic approaches to knowing the world and to our current social relations more broadly. And it is a rejection of knowing the world in ways that are not centrally about people’s struggles for survival and liberation. As Ashling Ligate observes in one of the later pieces in the book, “There is a lack of urgency in academia to link the anecdotal stories and statistics in our readings to a real need to resist and dismantle patriarchal and [neo]colonial structures of oppression” (156).

This book demands reading practices that are generous and that actively listen. It demands that you understand that what is being written is grounded in the local circumstances of one person’s life, so your mileage may vary and your way of talking about things may not be the same. It also demands an appreciation of the fact that the sharing of those circumstances is a powerful gift to allow you to understand your own life and how your life is connected to the person doing the sharing. You must be active in realizing that gift, though. You must be open to making the link between someone else’s firm statement that X is their reality, and the hard lesson that because Y is your reality, you have been complicit in X. The refusal of hyper-critical reading practices is not so much that you must not disagree but that disagreement must happen not in the form of dismissing texts (and therefore people) but in the form of engaging people (and therefore texts). As both a basis for active, self-reflective, consciously mutual knowledge production, and as a mode of building relationships and alliances based not on sharing a particular category but on work and actively maintained affinity, “Dialogue is radical,” to quote Ligate and Krysta Williams (163).

There’s lots about this book that feels consistent with the political sensibility that has grown in me over the course of a lot of years of thinking and acting and thinking some more — the grounding in experience and in struggle, the valuing of knowledge production and political work organized around dialogue, the emphasis on interconnection, and a variety of other factors. Not that it is all as organically present for me as it seems to be for those whose voices are in this book. As I wrote in a brief bio elsewhere, I started from and can still all too easily revert to a “faux-objective, overly intellectualized, and disembodied place” as I move through the world. The pull of knowing and writing based in discourse disconnected from lived experiences of struggle is strong, as is the pull of creating community- and movement-based spaces that are bounded by radical-sounding shibboleths that centre some and exclude others in all the usual ways. One kind of work done by this book and others like it, when read by me and presumably by others approaching it from similar places, is that it functions as a kind of reminder and call action. I don’t know about other folks, but I need to encounter such reminders pretty much on an ongoing basis, and such calls to action are an incredibly important source of grounding in the never-ending cycles of reflecting and acting and reflecting some more.

So I encourage people who are active in or identify with struggles for social change, feminist or otherwise, to pick up this book and read it. Particularly, I encourage you to read it in ways that refuse to automatically dismiss it. Seek out the connections between what the writers say about their experiences, and what you have experienced yourself — it might be parallels, or it might be that you have been complicit in causing exactly that sort of pain. Think about the political sensibilities that inform the writing, the approaches to knowing the world, and the approaches to acting in the world that are in this book. Think about instances in which your life or someone else’s life doesn’t fit your chosen framework for understanding oppression and resistance, and think about what it means to allow the experience to challenge and change the framework rather than the other way around. Think about what it means to create movements and to create knowledge and language that refuse to be captured by the relations of ruling that organize the vast majority of universities, social service agencies, and other institutions, and about how to do so in a way that is not about ineffectual purity politics or ideological fantasy of some future event but that is about making change and building power here, now, for real.

Review: Orienting Canada

Scott Neigh — 2012-11-28T15:39:45+00:00

[John Price. Orienting Canada: Race, Empire, and the Transpacific. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011.]

I have noted before on this site that when I go for a stretch of time without reading much history — by which I mean academic or lay writing that would be recognized as “history” by someone trained in that discipline, but not necessarily writing that engages with the past in some fundamentally different way — I often experience a sense of pleasant surprise and comfortable remembrance at how much I enjoy it. The experience of reading this book, which was another that entered my to-read and to-use pile during my year in grad school but which I did not end up opening, fits that description well.

However, though this is definitely legible as disciplinary history, and was written by an academic historian, it is of interest not only for the content but also because it is put together in a somewhat innovative way. I’m not sure I know enough to really assess how innovative it is with reference to disciplinary norms, but it does some pretty cool stuff.

The focus of the book is Canada’s early to mid 20th century participation in, impact on, and impact from the sphere of relations that Price defines as “the transpacific,” a term he invents to designate both “the geographic focus of the narrative as well as the notion of continuous movement and transformation. It best reflects the dynamic flow of ideas and people engaged in border-crossings on both sides of the Pacific” (1). In particular, he is interested in relations with China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and to a lesser extent India. The particular way of defining his spatial focus and the attention to “continuous movement and transformation” are, I think, interesting and relatively novel.

As part of that commitment to understanding interaction, he pays particular attention to the relationship between empire and racism, and works to connect critical race theory and history. This conjunction sometimes feels a little clunky in terms of the writing but it is interesting and important work, from showing how different relationships to empire meant the experiences of racialization by Chinese and Japanese people in Western Canada were at points very different, to showing how racist assumptions about various Others in Asia shaped Canadian and U.S. American policy decisions in those years. I’m pretty sure it is an idea that I’ve encountered before, though I couldn’t tell you where, but I quite appreciated his careful demonstration of the ways in which anti-communism often functioned in the post-Second World War years as a kind of de-raced surrogate for the blatant white supremacy of the pre-war years, in that it framed Western opposition to self-determination among colonized and formerly colonized people of colour but it made it all look a bit more polite and noble to white Western eyes.

I also quite appreciated Price’s efforts to cast the Second World War in a less Eurocentric frame. Despite having read a great deal about the Second World War in my younger years, nothing I had ever encountered before pointed out that not only did the first strand of warfare that resulted in global conflagration begin with the Japanese invasion of China, but it was in fact the Chinese people that shouldered the lion’s share of the effort, the suffering, and the dying in the war that ultimately defeated the Japanese empire — in conventional North American history, the Pacific side of the war is told as a story almost exclusively about the United States.

I tend to agree, too, with Price’s analysis of Canada’s role in the West, in that Canadian elites were (and are) active participants in constructing liberal empire in Asia and elsewhere and not hapless pawns of the United States. He argues not only that “the Canadian government played a supporting role in the emerging global order in which US power would predominate” but also that “it actively encouraged the United States to take on this role, and that it did so due to the values shared by the men in the foreign policy establishment of both countries — values that reflected ideas about race and empire” (304). He shows numerous instance in the post-Second World War years when Canadian officials — including that oft-worshipped saint of smug Canadian liberals, Lester Pearson — had not only the inclination but also the space to take a moderately different position on some question than the U.S., but they chose not too, not because of Amur’can intimidation but because they realized it was in Canadian elite interest to do so.

While I think the scope, the dynamism, and the engagement with critical race theory are exciting aspects of this work, I hope that they are taken up as just a starting point for developing new ways of producing historical knowledge. For all of these interesting things, much of the core of the book remains lodged in what I think would be labelled as “diplomatic history.” That can certainly be one interesting window into what states were doing in a given period, but I wonder if more could be done to escape the smothering grip of the state-centric standpoint of ruling regimes in which such diplomatic and policy discourse is firmly entrenched. What is being assumed and reified in this approach that could be re-read in a more critical light if it were put in dialogue with some other approach, some other archive? I’m not sure, and it is certainly beyond my competency to even speculate. But I hope that others with the right expertise build on the theoretical explorations begun in this book. Also, how could considerations of gender be integrated into such work?

A final note closest to my own interests was the glimpse this book provides of struggle based in Asian-Canadian communities around questions of racism and empire, particularly in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. Other than some of the responses to Japanese-Canadian internment and deportation in the ’40s, I had seen little mention of any of this before, and I want to know more.

Anyway, this is important work, and worth reading.

[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 recently published two books of Canadian history entered through the stories of activists with Fernwood Publishing.]

So sad for the people of Gaza

Judy Rebick — 2012-11-22T14:30:47+00:00

I haven’t written a blog in a long time but the recent attack on Gaza has moved me to write. During the last attack in 2009, I was angry, furious at the slaughter of hundreds of people of Gaza trapped in a tiny slip of land without any protection. So I participated in an occupation of Jewish women of the Israeli consulate. As you will see from the video I was furious and ready for action. This time my feeling is more sadness.

The last few years have filled me with hope that a resolution would come. The Arab Spring, the growing protests in Israel against the economic policies of Netanyahu and above all the growing non-violent protests in the West Bank. Hope that the people’s of the Middle East who have so much in common would find a solution to the violence and hatred. So today I feel sad that we are back to choosing sides in a lopsided so-called war. As you have heard many other places, this is not a war. This is a terror attack by one of the most powerful military forces in the world against an almost defenseless peoples.

Perhaps you can understand the situation better by hearing from some of the people I interviewed while I was there in 2002. It was the time of suicide bombings. The terrible fear of suicide bombings was the excuse Israel gave then for it’s blockade of Gaza and checkpoints soon to be a wall between Israel and the West bank. The suicide bombings declined by 2005. The most stunning interview was with the cousin of a suicide bomber. “We need alternatives,” he said, “but until then we have to fight back.”

The other was the story of friends in Ramallah who try to protect their children from the terror around them so they won’t hate. I called it Ramallah Revelations. We went to Gaza too. I visited with Palestinian feminists there who said they were as afraid of the growing strength of Hamas as they were of Israel. Hamas is growing, they told me because they provide basic social services, which the Israeli blockade had made very difficult. Even then, entering Gaza was like entering a penatentiary. I can’t even imagine how much worse it is now.

Virtual Launch Event for Two Books of Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists!

Scott Neigh — 2012-10-26T14:20:46+00:00

I am excited to announce that my two books of Canadian history through the stories of activists, Resisting the State and Gender and Sexuality were released by Fernwood Publishing in September. With the details of the first few offline launch events finally confirmed, today I am celebrating a sort of virtual launch event for the books. I am reaching out to people online whom I think might be interested and asking them to help spread the word about the books’ release. In this post, I describe the books, link to useful information on the project’s website, provide details about offline launch events, and suggest a number of possible ways that you might choose to show your support.

We usually learn our history from the perspective of our rulers — from the top down. In these books we learn about our history from the perspectives of ordinary people — from the bottom up. Whatever liberty and justice that communities, workplaces and individuals in Canada enjoy are due to the many struggles and social movements in our country’s history. Most of the time, the stories and histories of those movements to overcome racism, sexism, and poverty, for example, remain largely untold, thanks to the single, simplistic national story taught to us in school. In these books, I have combined challenging ideas and historical context with accounts from movement participants themselves, and the result not only brings rich, untold stories of movements to life, but paints a much more critical picture of the country in which we live than the one most of us learned in school. More than that, I hope that the histories in these books serve to both inspire and inform us as we engage in the ongoing struggles that will shape our shared tomorrow.

Gender and Sexuality unearths a diverse spectrum of struggle through the accounts of longstanding social movement participants. From indigenous women working against colonization and Christian women trying to end sexism and homophobia in their churches, to gay men opposing sexual oppression and women fighting against hostile employers and against violence, this book reveals the ways that oppressions based on gender and sexuality — and the struggles against them — have shaped our society.

Resisting the State details the histories of a broad range of social movements and provides readers with a richer understanding of the Canadian state and why so many people — including military draftees, welfare recipients, workers, indigenous people, psychiatric survivors, immigrants and refugees — have struggled, and continue to struggle, for equality and justice for all members of society.

To learn more about what people are saying about these books, you can go here.

POSSIBLE WAYS TO SUPPORT THIS PROJECT

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1) Buy the books!

You can do this by ordering through your local, independent bookseller or by ordering from the publisher — use this link for Gender and Sexuality: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists and this link for Resisting the State: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists.

If you attend a launch event or know me personally, you can buy a copy in person.

While those methods are preferable, it is also possible to order from major retailers online — currently not Amazon, for some reason, but Chapters/Indigo.

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2) Attend (or circulate word about) a launch event!

SUDBURY: Two events are planned in Sudbury, Ontario, on November 6 — here are the details on FB and the details not on FB.

HAMILTON: There will be an event in Hamilton, Ontario, on November 8 — here are the details on FB and the details not on FB.

TORONTO: There will be an event in downtown Toronto, Ontario, on November 13 — here are the details on FB and the details not on FB.

WINDSOR: There will be an event in Windsor, Ontario, on November 14 — the venue is not yet confirmed, so please email me for details if you’re interested.

OTHER LOCATIONS: There will also be launch events in the new year in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, and perhaps Montreal; details are still being arranged, so please email me if you are interested in joining us for one of these events and I’ll make sure you’re notified when the events are confirmed.

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3) Share word of the project or specific sample material via social media!

The project website can be found here. It contains detailed information about the project, the books, and the interview participants, as well as sample written and audio material from the interviews. Here are a few examples of the audio excerpts connected to the material published in the books:

The late Madeleine Parent, a long-time feminist and labour activist, talking about organizing women in Montreal’s textile mills in the 1940s here.

Toronto-based anti-war and social justice activists Isabel and Frank Showler reflecting on their decisions to take a pacifist position during the Second World War here.

Cree elder Doreen Spence talking about her memories of working as a nurse in a hospital in northern Alberta in the ’50s and standing up to the hospital administration against the involuntary sterilization of a young indigenous girl here.

Labour, anti-racist, and community activist Lynn Jones speaking about struggles against racism and racial segregation in Nova Scotia in the ’50s and ’60s here.

Feminist activist Lee Lakeman talking about organizing a women’s movement conference in Ontario in the early ’70s here.

Feminist and community activist Shree Mulay talking about the founding of the South Asian Women’s Community Centre in Montreal in the early ’80s here

The late Charles Roach, a long-time radical lawyer and community organizer in Toronto who passed away earlier this month, talking about his advice for youth who are becoming involved in struggles for social change here.

There’s lots more on the site, so please stop by, check it out, and share your favourite pieces.

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4) Review the books!

An important part of spreading word about new books is people talking about them in print. That means formal locations for reviews, such as relevant magazines and journals. But it also means less formal locations, such as your own blog, social media (from Facebook to Twitter to Goodreads), and the websites of online retailers. If you read these books and have an opinion about them, please consider writing about your opinion in one or many of those locations!

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5) Assign one of the books on a course!

These books are well-suited for use in post-secondary courses related to Canadian social movements and their history, whether those are taught under the banner of labour studies, women’s studies, history, social work, or any of the other institutional locations in which such courses sometimes find a home. If you teach relevant courses, you can go to the links to the publisher’s site under (1) above and find out how to obtain examination copies. If you know people who teach relevant courses, please let them know about these books and encourage them to make use of them in their teaching.

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6) Recommend these books to your library!

Most libraries have a procedure for members to recommend new purchases. Find out how it works in your school or community library, and ask them to add these books to their shelves.

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7) Forward this post to a group of friends who might be interested!

Thank-you so much for your support!

Scott Neigh

talkingradical.ca

facebook.com/TalkingRadical

twitter.com/TalkingRadical

Writing and Alienation

Scott Neigh — 2012-10-04T18:51:38+00:00

Last week, I went to a meeting. It was the founding meeting for a new, Sudbury-based chapter of a national organization for self-employed writers who do paid non-fiction writing, I think with a particular focus on those who do (or want to do) freelance work for magazines and newspapers but also people who do (or want to do) contract writing for governments and businesses. The people were pleasant, the advice seemed sound, and the organization itself is probably pretty useful to anyone who makes their living that way. However, it was only a few minutes into the meeting when I began to feel this intense, visceral discomfort that lasted well past the event’s end. Deep down in my bones, in my gut, to the tips of my toes, I did not want to be there. And I wasn’t sure why.

I have been pondering this feeling ever since. Certainly one possible source of explanation for it might have something to do with the many ways in which writing can at moments be a pretty fraught enterprise for lots of people, me included. Even in its less personal forms, writing is like taking a little piece of your core self, putting it on display, and yelling out, “Judge me! Judge me!” Most of us had experiences as children or in high school in which we were shamed in connection with our writing.

Given that, there might be some value in exploring individualized, psychologizing, life-history explanations for my reaction to the meeting. It did, for instance, stir up faint echoes of the anxiety I felt when I first started to think of myself as a writer but was unable to admit that to anyone — it felt presumptuous to claim the label, and I had little I could point to and say, “See, I’m legit!” But that was fifteen years ago, and I have lots of writing work of lots of different kinds under my belt, and I’ve been pretty comfortable identifying as a writer for a pretty long time. The event also twigged in a small way my sensitivity to the powerful cultural norm in which the only work that is considered “real” work is work that is done for a wage. And I suppose it also stirred up memories of the difficult, earlier moment when I seriously considered exactly the sort of freelancing that this organization is about as the primary focus of my writing life, and ended up rejecting it. (I have, both before that decision and after, earned money in various ways through my writing, including ways that amounted to freelancing of one sort or another, and I would be quite happy to have opportunities to do so again tomorrow, but those are specific instances in the context of a different and broader logic rather than a central, guiding goal in my decision-making around writing.)

All of those things are present, but neither on their own nor summed together do they account for more than a fraction of what I was feeling during the meeting. No, I think the answer lies elsewhere, and it took me several days to pin down exactly where.

I think that I was reacting to a phenomenon that some writers have, following Marx, called “alienation” — where that word is meant not in a general and colloquial sense, but rather in a specific technical sense which links a particular kind of embodied experience to particular forms of social organization.

According to David McNally (in a book I reviewed here), we experience alienation when we are compelled to engage in a significant proportion of the practices that fill our everyday lives under logics that take them beyond our control, squash our creativity, and employ us as do-ers of specific, externally imposed tasks rather than whole people.

What is produced, how it is produced, according to what techniques and under what circumstances is determined by the logic of capitalist accumulation. Rather than an affirmation of our humanity, of our existence as creative beings making our lives together, labour under capitalism becomes drudgery, a detested, mind-numbing loss of life. (115)

He goes on to identify elements of this logic: the control that others have over whatever it is that we produce; our lack of control over the work process; the ways in which the work process estranges and divides us from other people; and the ways in which we “are estranged from [our] human capacity for creative self-development as members of a co-operative community” (ibid). And not only is this a localized feature of labour processes, but the logics of capital shape relations and practices far beyond that, such that many “spheres of life become yet more areas in which we are estranged from others and from ourselves” (117).

John Holloway (in a book I reviewed here) puts it like this:

Labour (alienated labour) is what we reject: it is an activity that we do not control, an activity that produces the master, that produces capital. (Alienated) labour is the enemy: we do not want to labour. But in the background there is another possibility (potential, dream?): to engage in free, conscious activity, conscious life-activity. (89)

My reaction to the meeting, then, was a reaction to a particular way of organizing a writing life. I have, through a combination of luck, privilege, and work, built myself a writing life that is relatively (though far from completely) unalienated. I have developed particular practices of relating self, world, and words, which feel affirming, which flow from and reflect me, which simultaneously enact and grow my “human capacity for creative self-development.” These are not totally practices that I control, that refuse to produce the master, that refuse to produce capital — we live in the world in which we live and there is no escape that is not collective — but that allow me some control and some scope to work within-and-against the production of the master, the production of capital. I can, to a significant degree though with particular costs and consequences, write things that I want to write in ways that I want to write them. All of which may sound very abstract and even quite peculiar, but it was the spectre of going down a path that would mean losing that space and being swept back into writing under much more alienated conditions that created that intense negative feeling inside of me at that meeting. (I think a reaction to alienated writing labour, though in that case through the imposed logic of the classroom rather than the logic of the market, was also a big part of my sense of needing to ‘detox’ after my recently completed year in graduate school.)

Now, some caveats: This is not saying that people who engage in the kind of freelance writing practices that this organization facilitates are somehow “doing it wrong” or are “bad.” Far from it — it is more evidence that their success in navigating such conditions are worthy of respect and worth learning from. There are many strategies for writers to navigate and resist alienation, and while some may be better suited to specific circumstances than others, I’m not sure that any are “better” in an absolute sense. There are always tradeoffs, and we all must navigate the particular circumstances in which we exist. I recognize that the particular strategies that I have developed and trade-offs that I have made are highly dependent on a significant degree of material privilege. And I recognize that my path is not some expression of purity, but simply one approach to non-stop struggle, negotiation, and compromise. My recently released books are a good example of such negotiation and compromise in my writing life: I wrote them as a single book, but split that one into the two that have been published in response to the publisher asserting quite convincingly that market logic required it. It meant giving up some things about the project, but it seemed a more than reasonable trade-off. And part of my current activities involve promoting the books, which is another layer of obedience to market logics — in the tongue-in-cheek, self-directed words of an English author of lefty books in a recent blog post, “See, this is what happens when you become a member of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia - non-stop hawking of your own wares, all relations subordinated to the cash nexus, all sentimental bonds drowned in the icy waters of egoistic calculation. No, but seriously.”

And of course there are other people who are quite successful at creating and defending space to engage in (relatively) unalienated writing in other ways. Some deliberately engage in both alienated and less-alienated writing and keep firm boundaries between them, for instance by writing articles about things they don’t care about for money while also working on a novel. Others might just do for-pay non-fiction freelancing, but have a dynamic relationship to alienation, such that they are clear that some pieces are just for money but others include much more self. I’ve always admired the ability of screenwriter and director Joss Whedon to combine in his career writing that I would identify from the outside as being relatively alienated with writing that is relatively unalienated even while carving out a highly successful career at the heart of entertainment capitalism — Hollywood — through both doing smaller and independent projects as well as having a (relatively) sound instinct for when to bow down to the demands of capital in the form of network execs and when to push and put pieces of self in even the biggest budget productions he has worked on (i.e. The Avengers). (Though I agree that his approach requires not just cunning and effort but also significant privilege in order for it to succeed.) And another approach — one I have used plenty in the past — is to work waged jobs that have nothing to do with writing to reduce the power of market compulsion over my writing choices, and then write what I want in the rest of my time.

The point I want to make here is not that a particular strategy of resisting alienation when it comes to writing work is better or worse, or even that the decision not to resist it at an individual level is necessarily a problem. But I think the experience of alienation as part of writing work is one we all need to think about, however we relate to it. And my reason for saying that goes back to a point I made earlier: most of us have most of our early writing experience in the context of elementary and high school. That may not be writing done directly under the logic of the market, but much of the time — there are always exceptions with great teachers — it is similarly alienated in that the goals of the writing are imposed, as are many of the processes and practices, and the product is primarily used as part of evaluating the one who produced it. I think that such early experiences sediment into us very deeply. They are traumas, damages, hurts that we continue to struggle against as adults, that are continually woken in us during our present-day struggles with alienation in the context of our writing. We all want to find new and better ways to deal with those kinds of material and emotional barriers to doing the writing we want to be doing, and I think viewing both those early experiences and our current struggles through the lens of “alienation,” as one among others, gives us a powerful conceptual tool in figuring out how to move forward.

[Scott Neigh is a parent, activist, and writer based in Sudbury, Ontario. This post originally appeared on his personal blog. He has written two books as part of a larger project examining Canadian history through the stories of activists, one focused on gender and sexuality struggles and the other on resisting the state.]

Student movement victory? The Québec Strike

Matthew Brett — 2012-09-25T12:40:29+00:00

governing Liberals to call an election, which resulted in a Liberal defeat and the repeal of tuition fee hikes and anti-protest legislation. The movement in itself is something worth celebrating. Students mobilized themselves to enforce a student strike that lasted for 8 months and, in the process, fostered a broad social movement in communities across Québec and internationally. People and families were inspired to take the streets on a nightly basis.

Students built their own democratic structures on a sweeping scale, fostering general assemblies across the province that directly engaged hundreds of thousands of students. In terms of the level of passion, engagement and creativity, there is nothing comparable in electoral politics or union organizing in recent North American history.

And students did this in the face of relentless cynicism and distortion from corporate media. A careful analysis of media coverage of the movement would reveal an anti-strike bias so severe as to truly merit the term propaganda. This was corporate propaganda, plain and simple. It carried an ideological fervor and contempt for the students.

Not surprisingly, students bore the brunt of these insults and degradations. I am of the firm belief that this media coverage fostered a culture of dehumanization. And when youth are painted as violent and extreme, it becomes far easier for authorities to impose a level of oppression that would otherwise not be tolerated.

I do blame the media for some of the serious, even critical, injuries that were inflicted upon students by an overwhelming police and state apparatus.

This was coupled with a troubling piece of legislation called Bill 78 (or Law 12), which undermined basic rights and freedoms, including the right to free speech and assembly.

Students endured all of this and, in doing so, achieved their principal goal: a repeal of the tuition hike. For CLASSE, this was always done with a long-term perspective of introducing free education for all.

Students deserve to celebrate this victory—one step along the way toward free and emancipatory education.

The decision to celebrate the repeal of the tuition hike was also invariably a strategic choice. It seems clear to me that many students were on the brink of emotional and psychological defeat leading up to the election.

Celebrating this victory simply makes sense and keeps people in good spirits. It is absolutely worthwhile to celebrate something that students fought for with incredible determination and resilience.

But this moment does also merit critical reflection. The election result and the Parti Québecois’ ensuing decision to repeal the tuition hike and Bill 78 have far-reaching consequences.

In my mind, student movements are not simply militant lobby groups with the goal of policy reform. They exist to offer an alternative vision of society based on active participation, real equality, climate justice and the common good. The elections effectively muffled this alternative perspective for the foreseeable future, precisely when it is most needed.

But there contines to be a desire within the movement for fundamental change which cannot be created through existing institutions. Hegemonic ideas of democracy are not deemed legitimate to many student organizers. Camille Robert and Jeanne Reynolds, co-spokespersons of CLASSE, describe this alternative vision with beautiful clarity in theirpost-election Toronto Star column, drawing from the pre-electoral CLASSE manifesto:

They write that we have a “broken system of democracy that comes up for air once every four years, in which politicians prefer the murmurs of business lobbyists to the voices of those they supposedly represent. Our faith is in direct, participatory democracy, which we practise in assemblies of thousands where every student can give input into the decisions that impact them.

“Our commitment to genuine democracy is a reflection of the type of society we seek to build: one that is more equal, not less, and revolves around the needs of people, not corporations.”

The strike was an attempt to foster a widespread social movement autonomously from electoral politics. Students raised issues of ecological degradation and crisis, sexism and racism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism – topics that cannot be easily filtered into the election outcome or the tuition hike repeal, which appears as a flash in a pan when compared with these deep-rooted challenges.

If the repeal of the tuition hike is a victory, and I think it was, the PQ decision can also be regarded as a partial closing of a window on these more transformative social goals.

Many students in Québec continue in their struggle as the dull rhythm of complacency and “business as usual” creeps back into daily life, precisely at a time when ecological and social crises are most pressing.

Camille and Jeanne said it beautifully in closing their Toronto Star column: “the social movement of the past year has taught us that police batons and corrupt politicians will not always prevail over the power of ideas. Ours is an age of cynicism, but we are learning that our dreams can be made real.” For many, the repeal of the tuition hike was simply one more step toward free education and a free society.

Matthew Brett: writer and activist based in London, England. Member of the Canadian Dimension editorial collective. Student in economics, School of Oriental and African Studies. Follow on Twitter @mattbrett_1984.

What’s Different About Ontario? Thinking About Specificity in Student Organizing

Scott Neigh — 2012-09-16T01:59:12+00:00

Last Friday, the Toronto Star published a piece by columnist Carol Goar that combined useful (if depressing) information about postsecondary education in Ontario and important questions about “the quiet death of society’s commitment to ensure that each generation does better than the last,” with some quite pessimistic observations about the state of the student movement in Ontario.

Goar writes of Ontario’s students, for instance,

They know they’re paying more and getting less. They know society benefits as much they do from their education. They just don’t see any realistic hope of bucking the political/public consensus. And unlike their Quebec counterparts, they aren’t prepared to stage mass protests, cancel classes and clash with police.

While there is some value in this observation, its presentation as observation makes it harder to see that it also contains a hefty dose of presumption. It’s worth separating the two, I think. I would guess, based on what she says and what I know about how journalistic knowledge production generally works, that she’s probably basing her remarks purely on what has happened on the streets in the last eight months. So, yes, there have been hundreds of thousands of students and allies in the streets of Quebec cities this year with nothing on anything approaching the same scale in Ontario. This is without a doubt an important indicator about significant differences between the two provinces, and any thinking about education-focused struggle has to deal with whatever these differences are and whatever they might mean.

In contrast with Goar’s article, though, I think it is important not to jump too hastily to conclusions about the nature of those differences. In particular, I think the basis that she assumes to explain this difference smacks of a particular logical fallacy that often crops up, even on the left, when looking at past instances of significant struggle: Things that have happened often get treated as if they had to happen, and things that haven’t happened (yet) often get treated as if they can’t. A given movement wins the right kinds of victories and makes the right kind of impact, and the hard work and difficult choices of the ordinary people who made it happen get erased and replaced in most accounts with a seemingly agentless and inevitable sweep of history (perhaps with some great charismatic leader for human interest). While another movement doesn’t quite manage to influence events in a lasting way, or it does so in ways that are harder to see or less likely to be remembered, and it is treated when it is remembered at all as Quixotic, something silly to have tried, something that could never have been, a failure, just a footnote. (And, of course, there are many movements which do win and which are forgotten completely, but the erasure of huge aspects of struggle from how we learn history is a story for another day.) It can be hard to avoid that kind of thinking, but working against it is important because in refusing to appreciate how contingent choices and actions by the people who constituted movements in the past actually mattered to the outcomes of their struggles, we make it harder to appreciate how our own choices and actions matter.

So the fact that nothing on that scale has happened in Ontario so far this year is hardly an indication of essential and unalterable dominance for the kind of quiet resignation that Goar sees among Ontario students. This year’s uprising in Quebec was not spontaneous, but rather was the product of years of hard work. And there are signs of students in Ontario engaging in exactly the kinds of hard work that produced it. There was a significant training camp in Toronto this summer bringing lessons from Quebec to Ontario students activists. I wrote a journalistic piece just last week that reported on nascent organizing happening in Sudbury, and you can be sure that if it is happening here then similar things are happening in lots of other Ontario cities as well — in fact, I’ve seen fragmentary evidence over social media of exactly that.

Where all of that will go is still very unclear, of course. It may not produce results that become visible to those who are at the pinnacles of the dominant media, who will then be able to ignore whatever has been accomplished and smugly claim that their predictions of student quiescence in Ontario have been confirmed. Or the organizing may go quite a different way, and pundits will declare themselves shocked, as so many do any time that organizing they could learn about if they wanted to but have studiously ignored results in some outcome they can ignore no longer. The point is, taking existing presence in the streets as your only indicator of what is possible or even what is likely is not sound reasoning, and the equation of “Quebec = something” and “Ontario = nothing” is false. Columnists for major mainstream dailies largely ignored what was happening in Quebec when the organizing was at this stage, too.

However, there is another side to thinking about the specificities of the student movements in Ontario and Quebec. I have a feeling that it would be all too easy, particularly for student activists in Ontario who are sinking blood, sweat, and tears into creating something here, to respond to reasoning like Goar’s — which I’m sure they hear from some of their peers as well — with a far too simplistic “They did it there, we can do it here!” Of course on a certain level that sentence is entirely valid. However, if taken up without enough reflection it can lead to a stance that denies any relevance at all to the differences between the two provinces and the two movements — or that claims to acknowledge their respective specificities without much actual analysis of what that has to mean in practice. Assuming it can’t happen here because it hasn’t yet happened here is a mistake; basing actions on the assumption that it can happen here the same as it happened there is also a risky thing to do.

The fact is, things are different in Ontario. And I don’t feel like I have a very grounded sense of what those differences are. Even the best English-language media reports about the struggle in Quebec — which is all I have to go on, not having been there — do not convey an adequate sense of the mechanics and feel of the organizing to develop a really good sense of how it all went. And even though I I spent the past year doing a one-year degree as an Ontario postsecondary student, I don’t necessarily feel that I have a good handle on the range of moods and mobilizing capacities on (and within) different Ontario campuses. That said, there is no denying that conditions for student organizing in the two provinces are very different, with a much more recent and vibrant history of successful militancy by Quebec students, a fairly continuous tradition of assembly-style organizing stretching back to the late 1930s in Quebec in comparison to much more stifling and bureaucratic and ritualized forms of organizing in Ontario since at least the ’70s, and the cultural resources of the Quiet Revolution that the former can draw on. Those things matter.

What exactly that means in practice, however, I have no idea. That is a matter for investigation and experimentation by those who are working to grow the movement. I’m just saying we all need to be clear that it isn’t necessarily going to unfold like it did in Quebec — in fact, it probably won’t. And that’s okay. Feeling like failures if students haven’t shut down Toronto by January is probably not very productive, and we should work against ways of thinking and talking about things that might lead to such unnuanced, all-or-nothing thinking. The vision of province-wide fundamental changes to education and beyond is important, but such things don’t happen easily or overnight, and winnable intermediate goals that reflect our capacities, our opportunities, and the barriers we face in any given moment are crucially important too. Building new networks and new ways of doing things that will persist to fight another day are important as well.

Happily, my understanding of the assembly model is that, at its best, it is well suited to accommodating exactly these kinds of concerns — to being responsive to what’s actually happening to people locally, to having lots of conversations, to building new networks, to encouraging tactical innovation and creativity to reflect local circumstances.

So I think there is great potential in students in Ontario learning from what has been going on in Quebec and taking up new approaches to student struggle that involve that combination of grounding in local realities, commitment to a kind of expansiveness of vision and openness of process, and a recognition of the need to get beyond the purely rituatlized forms of protest that have been the staple of much street-focused student organizing in English Canada. Even if initial victories around things like tuition are more limited than students might like, I think it is exciting and encouraging if the strongest features of this approach begin to take root in the organizing practices and political sensibilities of a new layer of politicized students in Ontario — that will not only be good for the student movement, but I think good for the other movements and communities in struggle as well. I just hope that the many conversations that are part of the organizing include not only what we can learn from Quebec but also, right from the beginning, attention to what might be specific about Ontario, what Ontario students might want to do differently.

In the meantime, I suspect there will be more than a few student activists across the province whose reaction to Goar’s article will be much like the activist whose social media posting brought it to my attention.

Her response?

“Sounds like a dare to me…”

Responding to “Why Are Men and Women So Different?”

Scott Neigh — 2012-09-08T01:20:11+00:00

I have, lately, been doing a series of posts on my personal blog responding to pieces on the site The Good Men Project. For various reasons, I’m doing these posts quickly — in an hour or so — which means that they aren’t as polished as some other things that I write, but I think they are still useful. For a rationale as to why I’m doing this, see the first few paragraphs of this post. Mostly, I have not shared this particular series on the Canadian Dimension blog, but this one I decided was worth publishing here, too.

The piece that I am responding to today is “Why Are Men and Women So Different?” by someone called Bill Cloke. It is an unsurprising but nonetheless very troubling and just plain inaccurate article. In addressing the general question of its title, it cites a number of different kind of specific examples — from the author’s early observations as a teacher, from his later work as a relationship counsellor, and from the media. Early on, it gives a nod to “culture, parental involvement and other factors” but then opposes that to what it then exclusively deals with, “physical and psychological differences between the boys and the girls.” Even without much further analysis, this early sentence seems sloppy in that it is hardly a radical idea in psychology that things like “parental involvement” can shape “psychological” factors, whereas this sentence implicitly poses them as different and in fact opposed. In any case, the real thrust of this sentence seems to be that social factors aren’t irrelevant, but that biological factors are what this article is going to treat as explanatory. For instance, he later explains gendered behaviours in relationship contexts through reference to differences in brain physiology, which he then links to gross generalizations in gendered approaches to dealing with tasks. The article closes by explaining that these differences do not need to be seen as a problem, and can be a source of complementarity and harmony in relationships. There is more than a whiff of heterosexism in sentences like, “Because men and women have complementary skills, the balance between the two makes for healthy and productive partnership.”

Gendered differences exist, of course. You see them in the classroom, in the school yard, in the workplace, in the family. They exist, and asking what they are and why they exist and what they mean is certainly worth doing. But as so often happens in pieces that take the line that this piece takes — and as so often happens in lots of casual conversation, in my experience — even at the level of observations of and statements about gendered difference, things are not nearly this simple. Often in conversation and writing, gendered differences are presented as much starker and more stable and more absolute than they actually are on close examination. Partly, I think, this is a product of the language that is easily accessible to talk about these things — it pushes us towards statements that are too absolute, too general, too unnuanced. But it is also a product of how we learn to observe gendered differences. I have often countered this tendency in casual conversation by citing the example of my son, L, and my nieces, E and Y, each of whom enacts an idiosyncratic mix of characteristics that are typical for their gender and those which are atypical. And they are pretty normal in that regard. Yet almost invariably this complexity is superficially acknowledged and then substantially dismissed, usually by the next sentence and certainly by the next day. And, like most people, I myself am a mix of the typical and the atypical when it comes to gender enactment.

Acknowledging this complexity is important. When you say “Boys do X” without further qualification, you are erasing the boys who do Y. You are also shaping all boys in the direction of X, and implicitly sanctioning the policing and punishment that is meted out to boys who do not do X — boys who wear pink, boys who don’t like sports, boys who like boys. And making sure that our observations of gendered differences reflect the actual variability and complexity of how they occur lets us ask better questions about where they come from. It is not a coincidence, I think, that articles which give superficial attention to the social and then default to biological determinism tend to pose the differences they claim to want to explain in simplistic ways.

In saying this, though, I’m not saying we should ignore the fact that we are physical, embodied entities, and that that matters. What I’m saying is that we need to treat claims to reduce complex human behaviours to elementary biological or biochemical observations — to reduce gender to sex, in one usage of those terms — with appropriate scientific skepticism and with critical epistemological analysis. There are resources out there (and I don’t have them at hand, and since this is a timed one-hour writing I’m not going to try to dig them up) which address that question in considerable detail. But in general it is the case, notwithstanding the fact that smart professionals like Cloke do it all the time, that you usually can’t draw a clear, causal link between a given biological readout and particular gendered differences in complex human behaviours if you are being suitably critical and rigorous. You may be able to show correlation, and you may be able to present a story that feels compelling if you don’t separate out what has actually been demonstrated from what feels plausible based on certain disciplinary assumptions and based on ideological assumptions about gender. But claims of simple cause/effect is almost always poorly produced and inaccurate knowledge. As I say, there are authors who have explored these questions in detail.

So the relationship between quantifiable biology to complex human behaviour cannot generally be drawn as a straight line. We are never just bodies. We are never outside of the social relations that produce us. Yet — in another feature common to this article, to lots of other work that takes this position, and to lots of everyday conversation — even when there is passing acknowledgement that, well, yes, of course the social is not irrelevant, there is absolutely no effort put into producing an account that integrates the biological body into the social world. And I think that’s what we need to do. Often this debate is framed as a choice between the binary opposites of “nature” and “nurture” or “biology” and “environment,” but I don’t think that is a very helpful approach. What we need to do is to come up with an account that both deals adequately with what is known about biology, physiology, biochemisty, and so on — applying the appropriate skepticism when drawing links upwards several scales to how human being behave — and that give adequate weight to the ways in which we are shaped by the social world. It is easy to come up with proof-of-principle evidence showing some role for the social production of complex human behaviour — in fact, it’s not hard to come up with pretty overwhelming evidence — so that, it seems to me, implies that even accounts that are more focused on the biological elements must thoroughly incorporate the social. They are not separable, and any account which treats them as separable will be inadequate.

An important element of that is that the causal arrows do not just point in one direction. I know some of the path breaking work was by Anne Fausto-Sterling, but I think she’s far from the only one to demonstrate this sort of thing and I’m not up on all the details. However, it has been credibly shown that social experience shapes the body in ways that are biologically and biochemically measurable. My sense is that lots more work needs to be done in this area to discover what and how in all of the myriad of specific instances, but the principle has been clearly shown. So any account of gendered differences must include the ways in which biological readouts are shaped by the ways in which different bodies have consistently different experiences related to the social organization of gender, racialization, sexuality, ability, and so on.

So, yes, gendered differences exist, and it is worth asking questions about how and why. But they are much less stark and stable than articles like this one claim. The clear causal line between biological markers and complex human behaviours does not exist in the way that this article claims, though our accounts of gendered differences can’t neglect the facts that we are physical and embodied — we have to be able to talk about biological readouts and what they mean, but we have to do so with a suitably critical epistemology. Moreover, because it is clear that the social shapes us very powerfully in gendered ways, talking about gendered differences and ignoring the social (or acknowledging it in passing and then effectively ignoring it) is just irresponsible and inaccurate.

We need better ways to talk about gender and about gendered difference, ways that transcend the nature/nurture binary, that bring in what we know about our embodied selves but that also never lose sight of the social relations that shape our experiences into privilege and oppression.

Guns & Politics in Canada

Dave McLaren — 2012-09-07T14:52:24+00:00

The gun is now a part of Canadian politics. Richard Henry Bain killed one person and injured another at the PQ rally last Wed night. He was ill, it seems, and a recluse, like many of those who suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically erupt into violence.

It’s tempting to leave it there, at the feet of a mad man. But, like so many other, similar mad men, Mr Bain has tapped into something deeper and darker in our national psyche. Some old business we’ve left unfinished.

He’s English, and when he yelled “the English are waking up” he tainted the next four years of politics in Québec. We must be careful that the blood he spilled does not stain us in ‘the rest of Canada’.

I remember, now, my last visit to Québec. I chatted with two students from the Université de Québec about the federal election. The conversation was polite—not the sycophantic politeness that makes you cringe. It was a respectful courtesy—discourse without rancour or rhetoric. It was pure Canadian curtesie, to use the old English word, politesse to use the French…tough stands argued bravely, with honour and a smile. Their wit and their charm were disarming, and typically Canadian.

Is it still true? It’s only been a year. Have the hate-filled politics of our neighbour to the south finally infected us?

Among us there are some, both mad and bad, who pick up the threads of political discord and act in ways that unravel the social fabric and test our national character.

But whenever rage overwhelms reason we are all of us bereft and bloodied. Let us ignore all calls to arms. And heed our national impulse to disarm.

David McLaren is an award-winning writer living at Neyaashiinigmiing on Georgian Bay. He can be reached at http://jdavidmclaren.wordpress.com/.

Movement History Update

Scott Neigh — 2012-08-31T18:15:42+00:00

As regular readers of my blog know, a long-term project of mine that is about to bear fruit is one based on doing oral history interviews with long-time Canadian activists — you can learn more about it here. As part of that work, I have for many years periodically sent out email updates to a list of interested parties. That hasn’t happened as regularly as I had intended, but it has happened. And I sent out an update recently, which I reproduce here:

Hello!

This email is one of a series of irregular emails updating progress on the oral history project attached to talkingradical.ca (formerly www.movement-history.ca). If you wish to have your name removed from the list, please email me and let me know.

I talked in my last update about the two books based in this project to be released from Fernwood Publishing in the fall: Gender and Sexuality: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists and Resisting the State: Canadian History Through the Stories of Activists. While my school commitments meant I have not been as able to send out regular email updates as I had hoped in the last few months, their release is still on schedule. I saw on the Fernwood site yesterday that they just received the copies of the books and I will be doing a sort of online launch for them in a few weeks time…keep your eyes on your inbox!

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out the ample material that I have been adding to the talkingradical.ca site:

You can listen to radical lawyer Charles Roach talk a bit about his experiences of defending Black Panthers and other radical Black liberation activists who fled to Canada in the 1970s.

You can listen to Vancouver feminist Lee Lakeman talk about a women’s movement conference that brought together a hundred grassroots women from south-central Ontario in the early ’70s.

You might want to listen to Isabel Showler talk about her experiences as a left-wing pacifist in the late ’30s and early ’40s.
There is lots more material to read and listen to on the site, so I encourage you to explore. As well, I will be updating it every day or two for the next few weeks, and very regularly for a good period of time thereafter, so be sure to check back. Please feel free to circulate this email and word of the project to other people you think might be interested. They can email me at scottneigh@talkingradical.ca to join the mailing list, or they can follow it on Facebook. I have also just created a Twitter account for the project, so you can go there to follow updates on the project as well as reTweets related to Canadian social movements.
Peace and solidarity,

Scott Neigh

Review: Teaching Critical Thinking

Scott Neigh — 2012-08-23T15:48:57+00:00

[bell hooks. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. New York: Routledge, 2010.]

This is the third book about teaching and pedagogy by African-American feminist (and prolific writer on diverse topics) bell hooks. Her earlier two books on this topic made significant contributions to critical, anti-racist, feminist pedagogy. This is a somewhat different book — it has been awhile since I last looked at the earlier two, so I may be misrepresenting the difference a bit, but I’m pretty sure it’s fair to say that rather than an effort to open up significant new territory and propose innovative ideas like Teaching Community and Teaching to Transgress, this one is more a tool for stimulating the inevitable cycle of reflection and action that is part of making any critical understanding material rather than abstract.

The book is organized into 32 short divisions that hooks labels not “chapters” but “teachings.” I think it would also be fair to describe them as “meditations.” Each one responds to a question she has been asked about teaching over the years, but they are written to be of general relevance, and also to provide diverse entry points into hooks’ overall project of cultivating, in self and others, a critical, self-determining practice of engaging the world in the service of challenging what she often calls ‘dominator culture.’ The topics of the teachings range from the legacy of feminist challenge in the academy to the particular difficulties faced by Black women in classrooms to the joy of reading to sexuality to collaboration to emotion the classroom.

Reading hooks is always a delight and a challenge, though a welcome one. Her prose is very clear and she deploys it in a way that constructs an inviting vision of what could be that calls all to take part and build that vision. It’s easy for me as someone with white and masculine privilege who at the level of explicit propositions identifies with that vision to momentarily lose sight of what I’m sure she never does: our respective places in relation to why that vision isn’t and to how it might be differs profoundly. Her statements and challenges based on race, class, and gender are similarly straightforward and matter-of-fact, and make clear the difficult, agonizing, unavoidable work that progress toward the vision requires.

As someone whose participation in pedagogical moments on the seeking-to-cultivate-learning-with/of-others side has been more often in informal, community-based contexts than in classrooms, including many contexts that might not be immediately obvious as pedagogical in character if you don’t already have a pretty expansive idea of what pedagogy is and can be, I still find hooks’ classroom-focused meditations to be useful. Every workshop, every public education event, every movement-based meeting, even every direct action is at least partially pedagogical in what is intended and what will result. The ways they combine varies a lot in different situations, but the same questions arise in all of them, and hooks’ ways of talking about the questions and her answers makes the underlying principles very present, which makes it easier to imagine them into non-classroom settings than might be the case with other writers.

The book itself embodies an important insight into how we learn. It would certainly be a reasonable reaction to this book to point out that there isn’t a lot in it that is both substantive and new. A reasonable response to that, however, is that seeing worthwhile intellectual work as only being about linear progression in the direction of the never-said-before, never-heard-before favours a relationship to knowledge that evaluates it primarily in relation to other texts rather than in relation to lives, and misunderstands how we actually relate in practice to hard critical insights about the world. A good example for me is books about writing. Once you’ve read a couple of good ones, the amount of truly new insight you’ll find is subsequent good ones that you read will be incremental rather than exponential. Yet in writing, as in practices of critical pedagogy, reading a piece of wisdom once does not mean that immediately and automatically informs our embodied practices forever after. Instead, there’s a continual cycle, a continual relearning, reapplying, remaking in new situations, as well as frequent forgetting and going back to first principles. That’s how writing works. That’s how pedagogical practices work. That’s how enacting critical politics at the level of the everyday works. And with writing, I quite enjoy periodically reading a new, good book about it, and using that as a way to push myself to think about things again but with a fresh mind, with a new slant, a new twist. And that, I think, is the value of this book — its meditations both illustrate hooks’ own experience of that cycle of reengagement and reflection and, with both their inviting vision and their staunch challenges, are inspiration and guidance for readers to do the same.

[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 Fall 2012 from Fernwood Publishing.]

Review: Demography and Democracy

Scott Neigh — 2012-07-21T22:16:58+00:00

[Himani Bannerji. Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press, 2011.]

Himani Bannerji’s latest collection, Demography and Democracy: Essays on Nationalism, Gender and Ideology, builds a rich picture of the themes listed in the subtitle by passing through a broad range of other topics – early 20th century Indian novels, individual and social development, religion, and the discipline of sociology, just to name a few. (For reviews of earlier books by her, see here and here.) Bannerji, until recently a Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, writes with a passionate commitment to marxism, anti-racism, and feminism, and applies a distinctive social ontology and epistemology derived from the work of feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith and from Bannerji’s own adaptation of Marx’s ideas. For me, it is this open, grounded, and expansive epistemology that means that even when particular passages edge towards the polemic or the schematic, the core ideas remain solid, relevant, and useful, often far beyond the presenting situations for which she develops them.

One central message of the book is that the meaning, shape, and impact of nationalism depends on the social relations which constitute the nation in question. Along with the important distinction between colonial and anti-colonial nationalisms, she also divides the latter among bourgeois liberal, bourgeois illiberal, and national liberation forms. She is clear that, contrary to Western stereotypes, the liberal/illiberal division does not map onto some kind of West/East divide but rather both kinds of regimes are found in both areas of the world. Nor does it correspond to a modern-and-colonial versus anti-modern-and-anti-colonial divide, as both sorts of postcolonial states are entirely modern and are integrated into the world system. She argues, moreover, that all colonial nationalisms (that is, imperialisms) and all anti-colonial nationalisms that refuse to break with capitalist relations of property depend on and indeed are organized in important ways around the domination of women – which is not to say that there are no important political differences among them, just that none can ever be sufficient to meet the needs of women.

The first essay of the collection explores the rise to power of the hindu right in India in light of Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony and cultural struggle. This essay feels like a good instance of what seems to be a deliberate choice to centre non-Western contexts in producing ideas meant to be much more broadly applicable, in an inversion of the usual practice of North American and European intellectuals. In this instance, her analysis of the rise of right-wing religious and cultural politics in South Asia are very relevant to cultural struggle ongoing, in different ways, in both the United States and Canada. Similarly, her exploration of struggle in India and Israel/Palestine over demographics and reproduction as a central element of cultural nationalism, including the corresponding violence against women, offers powerful tools for thinking about aspects of racialized demographic struggle in Canadian history – Bonita Lawrence’s analysis in ‘Real’ Indians and Others of systematic demographic attacks on indigenous nations and people through the Indian Act and other measures springs to mind.

It is her challenges to other feminists and to the non-marxist postcolonial scholars of the Subaltern Studies school that are the most polemic parts of the book. In the former instance, her focus is feminist authors and activists engaged in international work who have settled for or always been committed to coalitional politics across difference (and borders) that are focused on mutually agreeable remedial projects but not fundamental social transformation. While she emphatically agrees that “women of both the first and third world have not achieved their full citizenships,” she goes on to conclude, “If they are to be fully entitled social and political beings their struggles against proprieties of patriarchy must rest on struggles against all relations of property, relations that extend from ownership of women – their reproductive and labouring bodies – to all the social relations that form class, capital, and imperialism” (126). With the Subaltern Studies group, it is the polarization between marxist and non-marxist (often Foucauldian) postcolonial scholars into which her work fits. She traces the intellectual evolution of that school and focuses particularly on the work of Partha Chatterjee to demonstrate that “by separating culture from economy and society and constructing and entrenching a unifying cultural essence, and postulating a national community upon that, it erases existing social relations and ideologies of difference, most importantly those of class-caste and patriarchy” (171). While I find Bannerji’s arguments convincing in both cases, my impression – perhaps misinformed – is that particularly for the latter there might be more room for exchange and mutual insight between Foucauldian and marxist postcolonial scholars than either side sometimes allows, in ways that would be in no danger of compromising feminist and revolutionary commitments such as Bannerji’s. It would be particularly interesting to see a marxist with the analysis of knowledge production that Bannerji holds engaging in some of that finer-grained sifting.

The most important, and very uncharacteristic, moment of lack of nuance in the book is around the ways in which Bannerji develops her typology of anti-colonial nationalisms. Her arguments regarding the liberal and illiberal bourgeois variants are keen and insightful, and they both inform and emerge from her analyses of South Asia, Israel/Palestine, and elsewhere. Yet she presents no instances of grounded analysis of her favoured option, the national liberation flavour of anti-colonial nationalism. While I am inclined to agree with her that neither women’s liberation nor liberation from capital can come about without the other, the lack of grounded analysis of examples makes her insistence that this path contains the answer less convincing than it could be for people not already inclined towards anti-capiatlism, particularly given the limitations in overcoming both capital and gender oppression in all examples of national liberation struggles that the world has yet seen. It also avoids the need to address very sticky questions about whether the state form, however revolutionary its seizure, can ever be meaningfully repurposed from its current integral role in organizing oppressive social relations. To be fair, it feels like the two essays towards the end of the book which make use of her analysis of the novels and political writing of Rabindranath Tagore (a Bengali novelist, poet, and intellectual active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) begin to edge towards such questions, with her exploration of his simultaneous opposition to both colonialism and nationalism. Though his analysis is clearly liberal, she just as clearly wants to find ways to add its best elements to the more grounded marxist approach that she sees as necessary for liberation.

Those who are studying questions of gender and nationalism, or who are engaged in working against right-wing cultural nationalisms wherever they occur, will benefit from the ideas that Bannerji presents in this book.

Corporate Propaganda and the Student Strike

Matthew Brett — 2012-07-20T21:00:27+00:00

Montreal Gazette columnist Henry Aubin makes some interesting claims in his latest tirade against the student strike. The movement is composed predominantly of an “Internet generation” who read “only that which comforts – rather than challenges – their opinions.”

Immersion in social media fosters radicalism as protestors feed off their shared, narrow perspectives. He concludes that “we need to guard ourselves against the ideological extremism and polarization that the Internet has the potential to excite.”

Given its vastly superior access to power and financial resources, it is worth asking whether corporate media is also capable of exciting “ideological extremism and polarization.”

CORPORATE OWNERSHIP AND PROPAGANDA

A cursory look at the ownership, structure and motivations of the corporate media is revealing in this respect. Compared with social media, Aubin writes that corporate newspapers “traditionally present relatively objective news coverage and a wide range of commentary.”

A rigorous analysis of Gazette coverage of the student strike and protest movement would be worthwhile, and I am confident that coverage of the strike tests the outer limits of “relatively objective news coverage.” The conservative bias of the Gazette runs deeper than ideology of its editorial board or ownership, however.

The primary function of corporate media is to generate profit. The best means of increasing revenue is carefully defining a target audience and catering to that audience.

Rather than presenting “relatively objective” news coverage, corporate media are in the business of selling products to consumers. John Paton, a strategic advisor to the PostMedia, made this very clear when PostMedia purchased CanWest and its holdings in 2010.

Paton stressed that “if Postmedia Network is going to fulfil its core mission of journalism, it’s going to have to give people the information they want on the platforms they want and when they want it.”

A promotional article about the purchase is interesting to read in this light. The article states that “the new ownership group plans to transform a collection of newspaper and online assets that have weathered the recession but, like others, still face an uphill battle to improve profitability in a challenging environment where the fight for reader and advertiser attention is more fierce than ever.”

The article also notes that “executive team plans to pursue an ambitious ‘digital first’ business model that harnesses strong brands in dominant market positions.”

The newspaper itself is an “asset” and its management have a primary responsibility of improving profits. A large corporation like PostMedia is basically a hierarchical and authoritarian institution, and executives must “fight for reader and advertiser attention” by fostering “strong brands in dominant market positions.” These are hardly conditions that foster “relatively objective” news coverage.

HARDENING OPINION

Looking more carefully at the Gazette, its daily “market penetration” is centered around an audience of 283,800 adults (less than the number of students on strike at the height of the movement).

Readers are 53 years old, on average, with a household income of $76,600. Roughly 75 per cent of readers own a home, while 62 per cent are married. Readers are geographically based in the increasingly sprawling suburban periphery of the Montreal Census Metropolitan Area.

The subsequent bias of content and issue framing is self-evident. There is a notable shift in content toward aging and senior-care issues along with family-oriented content for the young families in the off-island periphery. Coverage of the strike is more likely to focus on the delays that automobilists suffered than any principled notion of equality or education.

Suppose that the Gazette maintained this audience but “branded” itself for a slightly different target market—say, single 18 to 24 year olds with an income of no more than $30,000, renting apartments in the downtown core.

The news coverage would stir such visceral reaction from the settled 53-year-old subscribers as to draw immediate reprisal and sanction from the PostMedia head office. Heads would roll on the Gazette floor as subscription numbers dwindled.

In other words, the selection of what is “newsworthy,” the subsequent framing of these stories and the avenues by which these stories are distributed are anything but objective, as Aubin suggests.

The Gazette, like all corporate media, is providing a product for a target audience as a means of generating profit. This is a tailored message geared toward pleasing and maintaining the consumption habits of an affluent market. This is not objective news. It is propaganda.

And it is just as likely to foster “ideological extremism and polarization” as any form of social media. The dangers are more real, in fact, given the significant access to power and financial resources that PostMedia retain.

Corporate media bare a strong degree of responsibility for any physical or verbal violence inflicted upon participants in the movement, precisely because the media have helped foster a climate of “ideological extremism and polarization.”