M-L-M Mayhem!

Canadian Airport Anti-trans Laws

2012-01-31T01:10:00.001-05:00

If Sweden's recent anti-person legislation is yet more proof that Sweden is not, regardless of what some self-proclaimed US "socialist" commentators imagine, a socialist paradise, then similar (but clearly less bio-fascist) legislation in Canada should be more than enough proof that this country is also far from socialist. Not that any Canadian leftist worth hir salt has ever imagined that "our home and 'native' land" is anywhere close to socialism––our own experience with the brutal truth of Canadian colonial-capitalism has taught us otherwise––and we have always been rather bemused when US activists have tried to claim otherwise. Yes, we have a better welfare capitalism, and only better for some, but the Canadian left's basis of organization, and whatever theory it has produced, begins by accepting that it lives within a context that is colonial, imperialist, and ultimately capitalist.

(Side point: Please, please, please… Can all of you yankee socialists stop referring to Canadian capitalism as "socialist"? While I agree that it is better to live under a capitalism with free medicare and better welfare reforms than the armageddon capitalism you have, we're still capitalism [and colonial and imperialist capitalism at that] up here! It's also something of an insult to Canadian leftists, many of whom have spent their lives struggling against this nation's capitalist nightmare, to act as if we are living in some sort of socialist utopia. It's like telling all of us that we're stupid, should stop struggling, and that you know our social context better than we know it––you don't, stop pretending as if we're a model of your utopian fantasies.)

Indeed, there is so much legislation that proves that Canada is nothing more than a repressive state: colonial laws, "anti-terrorist" measures, the control of crime that often happens on a racist terrain, legislation that makes the most exploitative migrant labour fundamental to Canadian surplus-value, and really the entire continuing division between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat… All reasons for an organized revolutionary movement. But the legislation I'm specifically complaining about in this entry––that is really nothing more than a logical super-structural product of a racist and patriarchal capitalism, that is co-extensive with all "cultural" and "lifestyle" laws intended to maintain the culture of this specific arrangement of capitalism––is the most recent anti-trans legislation. (Legislation that I heard about a few days ago, but then was reminded of by a blog-comrade––hearing about it from several sources necessitates, in my mind, a blog entry!)

Okay, so we aren't demanding that transpersons should be sterilized: we're much more "polite" in Canada, and our ruling class understands the fact that acting like historical fascism might (an emphasis, here, on might) raise a few eyebrows. Sterilization is so yesterday! Better to create other laws that produce the same effect but without appearing to be as offensive… Such as the law to prevent any trans-identified individual from getting on an airplane. Put in place by a conservative official, in defiance of the Charter, these laws have just recently become public. And though there has been a public outcry against their existence, and they will probably be repealed because they're technically against Canadian "bourgeois" law, we must remember that the Conservatives have been trying to pass similar laws, at multiple levels, even going so far as to argue for an exclusion of trans-identified subjects from the Charter. Hell, on a city level local reactionaries have been doing the same… And this is symptomatic of a rightward drift that has effected every bourgeois party––a symptom of a capitalism the left in Canada has failed to challenge for a very long time, especially since it continues to endorse a protracted parliamentary struggle rather than revolutionary politics.

the fascists watching you on airplanes

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that this airport anti-trans law exists. One of the pro-trans political demands has always been the transformation of gender categories in bureaucratic forms, and passport gender categories are particularly problematic. This anti-trans law is, in many ways, simply the logical conclusion of two premises: a) the need to police bodies moving across borders; b) the desire to police gender categories. Combine the "anti-terrorism" measures with patriarchal gender-binary measures and this piece of anti-trans legislation makes sense, following a brutal logic.

Sure, this legislation can be explained away as not being "anti-trans" because, hey, "if you're really a trans-person then you should have already transitioned and look like your picture"… But, then, a very similar logic is being used for the Swedish sterilization legislation: "if you've transitioned then you don't want to be like the male or female that you used to be." Both instances rely on strict gender categories. (And here we must remember that the only nation that has tried to break from this categorical gender binary in a bureaucratic sense is Nepal, at the height of the now declining revolution––this is a very important fact.)

What is most important about recognizing this anti-trans travel law, however, is the fact that Canadian capitalism has often justified its existence according to liberal notions of permissiveness. Capitalism isn't bad, we are told, because it allows for queer and trans rights whereas the "barbarian nations"––the nations of terrorists, of "backwards people" who are opposed to "civilization"––would never permit these things. Imperialist interventions, the persistence of colonial states such as Israel, are justified according to feminism, pro-queer, and pro-trans ideology. Liberal capitalism is supposed to permit these "lifestyle choices" because we are meant to believe it is not a form of totalitarianism. And yes, capitalism can and has permitted these transformations (though always because of struggle), and we must accept that the extraction of surplus-value can continue even if queer and trans rights are endorsed.

The fact of the matter, however, is that the current capitalist ruling class of Canada is still challenging these rights, and that any right under capitalism is never permanent. Abortion rights are also still under attack, immigration laws are always becoming stricter, welfare reforms and unions rights are constantly shifting, and even Canadian "socialized" medicine is always being challenged (both by the Conservatives and the Liberals)… None of our supposed rights under capitalism are certain.

Clarifications, Just Because

2012-01-25T20:47:00.002-05:00

After my most recent post on the lifestyle politics surrounding the sex industry, and probably because of the back-links, I have noticed that my older posts on prostitution and the polyamory/monogamy binary have again become popular. (In my "year in review" entry I joked about making this blog partly about SEX!, due to the popularity of these posts, and it seems that I was not entirely off-base.) Moreover, I've been forwarded some of the comments made outside of this blog––and have read some dodgy "left" idiot blog posts––about my supposed position on these matters which has caused me to be simultaneously amused and annoyed.

Sometime ago, I complained about the inability of people to read and understand the arguments I was actually making. I have become convinced that blog frequenters, redditors, and internet self-proclaimed "experts" are generally incapable of properly assessing arguments, especially nuanced arguments, defending a position that might defy their ideological commitments. This is not surprising: before and outside of the internet this is paradigmatic of political debate––it's the reason why, to paraphrase Fanon, a well-reason argument solves nothing. People who think their support for commonly held views is courageous really don't like to be told that their views aren't as unique as they imagine; ideological commitment is not solved by sophisticated arguments to the contrary.

In any case, because I have been made aware about the [predictable] complaints about my "sex" posts, and because I find that all of these complaints (some of which recently appeared in the comments string of the old poly/mono post) rely on a failure to read what I actually wrote, I'm going to briefly clarify things so that I don't have to keep writing the same bloody counter-comments. Well, honestly, this probably won't matter if the internet world continues to crank out the same self-appointed experts and the same one-dimensional thinking that can't account for nuance… But might as well try, no?

First of all, I am not anti-sex. (And, really, name-calling in an attempt to find my inner puritanism that doesn't exist is not an argument; it's simply red-herring repetition.) I like sex, I'm not in a relationship that has a puritanical and conservative notion of sex, and I think that anyone who imagines sex in some sort of pure and platonic manner––or who pushes some Aquinas-Aristotelian notion of the-telos-of-sex-is-babies [i.e. the creepy Duggar Family]––is extremely fucked. Simply because I question the commodification of sex, or the fact that it is popular in some circles to conflate who we fuck with politics in general, does not mean that I think the conservative monogamous family is the way to go. I just don't think, as I argued in a post that a few idiots have misunderstood, that pushing polyamory as a political practice is by itself a revolutionary strategy. This is because I'm a materialist and, as a materialist, I think that both polygamy and monogamy are equally fucked under capitalism in different ways. (And as a historical materialist I know that polyamory-as-revolutionary-strategy was a historical dead-end.) That is, as much as I think the monogamous nuclear family is problematic, I also don't think that fucking a whole bunch of different people is going to bring about the revolution. That's all. Rhetorical question: is the queering of sexual normativity, as important as it is, producing the end of oppression or can it be incorporated into mainstream avenues of oppression? Sex movementism is still movementism, and a very limited form of movementism at that.

Secondly, and connected to the first point, I am not pro-monogamy. Read what I actually wrote in that post––hell, even read the title––and maybe you'll understand that I'm opposed to both polyamory and monogamy as political strategies. Hell, I already accept that the latter is a building block of actually existing capitalism; I just don't think that trying to inoculate ourselves with poly relationships as a dominant primary political strategy solves the problem. Indeed, my argument was that it simply reinforces the taboo through the binary of fetish––hence the reason I ended that post with a very specific quotation from Foucault. Is capitalism currently happy with monogamous relationships? Hell yes! But can capitalism easily adjust to polyamorous relationships? Also, hell yes! Being a marxist I believe in the mode of production, not the mode of sexing. The former is scientific; the latter is idealist.

Finally, it is not anti-sex to be against: a) the commodification of sex; b) sex that still happens within the taboo/fetish binary; and, most importantly, c) coerced sex. The fact that I think both point (a) and (b) may also promote point (c) means that I think rape is still a problem, is prevalent in this patriarchal society, and [shudder] may infect most normative expressions of sex. Nor do I think (to connect to the above paragraph) that non-monogamous relationships will somehow obliterate, simply because they're against nuclear family stupidity, patriarchy. Sexual coercion can easily continue within these spaces, and sexual coercion is a lever in the sex industry. And if anyone wants to equivocate an opposition to sexual coercion, to rape, with being anti-sex then they should be reeducated with baseball bats immediately: I believe that any progressive view of the world must begin by associating pro-sex with anti-rape. And anyone who thinks otherwise is, in my opinion, actually anti-sex because coerced sex is not pro-sex. Really, my argument here is that sex beyond coercion––which ultimately means sex beyond patriarchy––should be our aspiration.

The Mass-Line and McLeftism

2012-01-24T00:09:00.001-05:00

After the joint rally in support of the Peoples War in India, which I attended this weekend in Ottawa, my comrades and I encountered two demonstrations in the same city that were arguably better attended than ours. The first was a reactionary anti-abortion rally; the second was a confused march that was demanding NATO intervention in Syria. And though it was somewhat disheartening to realize that politically backwards demonstrations were bette attended than one with a revolutionary message, it made me think again about how to make sense of a mass-line in contexts where large sectors of the masses are more willing to support retrograde rather than revolutionary politics.

There is, after all, a very crude and dangerous way to understand the concept of the mass-line. From the masses to the masses, when taken as a slogan blasted out of its theoretical context, can easily become synonymous with uncritical populism. The masses don't want to support India, and would much rather support the closure of abortion clinics, could easily be mistaken for a "mass-line"––here it devolves into the crude empiricism of counting the numbers and assuming that mass support of a dubious cause represents an authentic expression of rebellion. And though I'm pretty sure that most leftists would never apply this populism to an anti-abortion rally, I'm surprised at how often this uncritical number counting is applied to other causes––the Syrian pro-NATO rally being a case-in-point.

The Syrian people want NATO to intervene to stop the bloodshed, they are showing their will, and we need to react to this "mass-line" (or, if we're leftists who don't use this jargon, we can replace "mass-line" with "democratic will", "authentic rebellious sentiment", etc.)… I am already hearing these arguments amongst sectors of the mainstream left, but am less shocked than I was around half-a-year ago when the same arguments were being made about Libya.

In November, at the closing party of the Historical Materialist conference, I happened to be sitting at a table where a young and arrogant undergrad was screaming at other lefties about the "authentic will" of the Libyan people and how she supported the NATO intervention because it was "the will of the people." There were anecdotes a plenty, all based on people she knew and a certain media perspective on Libya, that she used to argue that: a) the majority of the Libyan people wanted NATO to intervene; b) it was their revolution so we had to accept that this was a revolutionary demand. (As a side-point, I have to say that the woman from the SWP who was arguing against the pro-interventionist, regardless of my feelings for the SWP, was doing an excellent job in the debate.) And this young and arrogant pro-interventionist's position is not entirely strange because the way was paved by the Gilbert Achcars of the world who, from the very beginning, tried to sell a pro-interventionist strategy as "anti-imperialist".

Well, as it turns out, the so-called "popular rebellion" in Libya wasn't that popular. Despite the death of Qaddafi, the "popular rebels" haven't been able to establish the minimum requirements for political hegemony––which means, because they are better funded and armed than the supposed "pro-Qaddafi" forces that we are meant to believe are the only thing standing in their way, that the people don't like them. So much for a popular insurgency: now the US is planning on sending 12,000 troops unto Libyan soil to make sure their "popular" rebels are properly installed. All of which could be predicted from the very beginning of the pro-NATO Libyan rebellion that the US was pushing in order to take advantage of the spirit of rebellion spreading across the Arab world––but all of which people such as Achcar and the pro-interventionist in November refused to recognize, caught as they were in a mindset that conflated apparent populism with revolutionary sentiment.

All of this is to say that what appears popular amongst the masses does not constitute a political mass-line. As leftists with any sense we also have to recognize: a) empirical assessments of popular sentiment are not always trustworthy––these resort in appearances, in positivist number counting that is not entirely scientific in the larger sense of scientific; b) how ideology, the ruling ideas of the ruling class, produces popular sentiment and hegemonic consent.

Practicing the mass-line does not mean practicing McLeftism where we assume that the ideological pressure pushed upon disempowered people is somehow revolutionary. If this was the case, as I have argued elsewhere, then illiteracy would be revolutionary––the majority of people in the world can't read, and a lot of these people claim they are proud that they haven't gone to school––but we know that some of the most radical campaigns have begun by encouraging literacy (i.e. Paulo Freire's political educational programs). The bourgeois state wants to keep people stupid, to keep them politically illiterate and to cultivate tastes that support capitalism.

From the masses, to the masses means that leftists need to go to the masses to understand the general nature of their demands, the areas where they are expressing their rejection of the status quo, organize these demands into a theoretically concise programme, and return to the masses to test this programme out in order to: a) support the previously unorganized rebellious sentiment; b) reflect this sentiment back to the people originally expressing it; c) raise the consciousness of everyone (including ourselves) involved. It is not about saying: "hey, it seems like a lot of people in this poor neighbourhood believe in the Rapture so we should support the Rapture as part of our politics." Belief in armageddon, however, does represent, in a mystified and often problematic way, a rejection of business as usual: obviously people are unsatisfied with this world, but feel too disempowered (and for obvious reasons) to feel that there is any hope in this life––so they imagine this hope elsewhere, just as they imagine that their enemies are the convenient enemies provided to them by the bourgeoisie.

This is why I am not a Draperite, a spontaneist, an autonomist, a movementist, or anyone else who doesn't believe in the necessity of a revolutionary party. [Edit: Due to an insightful comment, and just rereading the previous sentence now, I realize that this was hastily written. Draperism does believe in the necessity of the revolutionary party, it just has a strategy of building this party that, for reasons discussed in other posts, I find to be proven false by history and so results, in my opinion, in movementism for some future party that never emerges. This is what comes of publishing posts late at night without editing.] The theory of the mass-line, as it was actually conceptualized, requires the existence of a party that is unified in theory and practice. Granted, this party needs to practice a mass-line, and practice it without condescension, but it is still required because there is no way to organize the movement from the masses, to the masses otherwise. Without a revolutionary party, without that which can give form and eventual direction to the desire of the most oppressed to live in a better world, we're left with a simply from the masses, one half of the dialectical unity of opposites, where there is no motion and transformation.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but those who preach the most populist interpretation of mass-line politics (or, as aforementioned, whatever synonym they might use for "mass-line"), are quite often the same people who are divorced from the masses. This is because they never go to the masses, and the most oppressed masses don't even know they exist, while they continue to repeat "from the masses, from the masses, from the masses" and adopt innumerable "popular" causes, or tail supposedly spontaneous uprisings, without even interacting––let alone trying to find a way to empower the most oppressed––with those people they claim to support.

Nor is this populist approach even consistent: the Gilbert Achcars of the world might support NATO interventions when they're under the impression that this is "the will of the people", but they aren't out their supporting the politics of the Tea Party. So why support one example of the peoples' "will" and not another? Clearly because they still have enough sense to realize that revolutionary struggle has made some values part of an historical understanding of leftism. But if this is the case, they need to ask why these radical truths have been established in one case and not in the other (at least in their minds because, really, they should know about imperialism by now), and if they are honest they will realize it is because these values have been won through struggle, and a struggle pushed by those amongst the masses with the most revolutionary consciousness.

Here again we're confronted with the notion of a revolutionary avant garde, the catalyst of mass-line politics, which is expressed at every moment of positive political change. The only reason there is access to abortion, for example, is because those with an advanced consciousness about women's needs (the feminist struggle) at a certain period of time organized the mass sentiments of female disempowerment that sprang from pregnancy. They did not simply accept the empirical studies produced by the patriarchy that "proved" most women were opposed to abortion; they did not wait until there was a random spontaneous uprising amongst their sisters.

And amongst the most disempowered sectors of the masses, amongst the proletariat, where we will be taught as much as we provide political meaning, there are also those who do possess a revolutionary consciousness, the proletariat for-itself and not just in-itself, that we need to meet in order to grow, to benefit from their perspective and experience, and to give us direction. But you don't find these people simply by waiting for them to reveal themselves and assuming they are evident in every popular movement.

In Memoriam

2012-01-20T16:11:00.001-05:00

In the past five or six months some of my more controversial and better read posts have been about people who died. Namely about people whose deaths produced undeserved hagiographies amongst a leftwing population that should have known better. In engaging with the events of these deaths I was more than a little shocked by the fact that their fame, far more than anything they actually did, and the illusion produced and fostered by this fame produced bizarre rites of mourning amongst those who: a) had never personally known these people; b) whose politics in theory were supposedly opposed to the politics represented by the objects of their grief. I began one of these posts by talking about the Mao Zedong quote that claimed that the deaths of those who died in the service of oppression were worth less than the weight of a feather, where the deaths of those who placed themselves in the camp of the oppressed carried more weight than a mountain.

And it is here that I want to mention, in an obituary post unlike the ones I have given in the past, the passing of a comrade whose death weighed far more than the deaths of those targeted in the aforementioned posts who, simply because of their fame and the illusions they represented, died in the service of the capitalist camp. Everyone in Canada was aware of the passing of Jack Layton, most everyone in North America and Europe was aware of the passing of Vaclav Havel, and because of this forced awareness there was a frenzy of hypocritical mourning on the part of those who had never known these people personally and who were trying to pretend they were not the ruling class apparatchiks that they were. But no one will ever pay attention to the passing of those still anonymous comrades; those who mourn someone like Layton won't mourn an unknown communist whose commitment to revolution should mean far more than the man we want to falsely label as "socialist". But the anonymous comrade's death, just like every anonymous comrades' death, should be considered far more significant than the death of famous imperialist stooge.

So it is with all of this in mind that I bid farewell to Ben Moseley who passed away last Tuesday at only twenty-two. I knew him primarily as bmose, which was the name he used online, and I must say that is strange to get to know someone, to consider them a friend and a comrade, without having met them in person. Even stranger to be informed that this comradely voice in a different country, with you are sharing so much dialogue, is suddenly silenced because there was a real body behind it (that you always knew but still could only associate with typed words). And it is sad when I look at my blog's "followers" and his is the first name on the list.

The folks at Angry Marxists, who I met him through, and at The Fivefold Path, who were close to him, have already posted on his passing. His death came as a shock (I was talking with him just on the weekend), and he will be missed. And I'm tired of feeling the false shock produced by dead opportunists and reactionaries––a shock you only feel because they were fucking famous––rather than the shock that deserves mourning. That is, the shock of someone in the camp of comrades.

Bye, bmose.

Out to Ottawa on Saturday!

2012-01-19T21:36:00.001-05:00

The end of the Campaign to support the Peoples War of India approaches and soon it will be time for those of us who are participating in those demos and events organized in our areas. For those of us who live in eastern Canada, there is the demonstration on Saturday in Ottawa that will be supported by contingents from various cities.

Again I want to emphasize, as I did in my previous post, the importance of making this protracted and historical struggle more visible in the centres of capitalism. So often we focus on those struggles that seem "fresh" and "new", manic rebellions that explode without warning only to disappear just as quickly, fetishizing each manifestation if it's the newest thing. But for those of us who are communists––although it is our job, to paraphrase Fanon, to sanction every rebellion no matter how desperate––we need to pay more attention to those struggles that are organized and unified with the intention of establishing communism.

As the above map demonstrates, the Peoples War in India has sliced its way through the country: here is the so-called "red corridor" used in comprador Indian propaganda to fear monger amongst the ruling classes. Whereas so many euro-communists were able to ignore the peoples war in Nepal (only to suddenly become "experts" when the rightist political line gain dominance, pretending that they had predicted this failure from the beginning even though they had never bothered to act as decent internationalists in the first place), sometimes joking in an unprincipled manner that Nepal's size and significance in global politics meant that they should pay less attention, the revolutionary movement in India cannot be ignored for the same deplorable reasons.

I am also tired of those amongst the mainstream left who make jokes about the maoist obsession with South Asia as if we are simply fetishizing India and Nepal. This has nothing to do with the region in particular but with our commitment to support the kind of communism that has learned from the past and is carrying forward an advanced revolutionary struggle. We also support the revolution in the Philippines, we support the memory of the PPW in Peru and what it was able to accomplish before degenerating, we look forward to supporting the future PPW in Afghanistan, as well as the foundation of a new RIM, and every struggle theoretically unified under the banner of revolutionary communism. This is simply a basic requirement of internationalism, and we are also internationalists in our support of all struggles, even if they fail to move to the level of the aforementioned struggles, against imperialism and capitalism.

(For those interested, it is worth reading the greetings the CPI(Maoist) has sent to those willing to be internationalists.)

In my last post I also asked my readers and blog comrades to respond by advertising the campaign. Thanks to Angry Marxists and Fivefold Path for providing their support. And special regards to The Speed of Dreams that posted on the week before I finished my last post, and that has been supporting the PPW in India for a long time, as well as posting pretty much every day of the campaign with information and details on the campaign and the struggle in India. Furthermore, Signalfire, which is usually a great source for news on revolutionary movements around the world, put out a serious amount of information on the revolution in India this week.

Hopefully I'll see some of my Canadian blogosphere comrades in a couple days.

Swedish Anti-Person Legislation

2012-01-18T14:28:00.000-05:00

While it is rather common for some self-proclaimed "socialists" living in North America to perpetuate the delusion that Sweden is a "socialist" country (I'm looking at you, /r/socialism), and though the Swedish left would tell us otherwise, it turns out the socialist utopia of Sweden should be throwing the moniker "nationalist" in front of its supposed "socialism".

The Angry Marxists blog alerted me to the fact that Sweden is now planning a forced sterilization campaign aimed at transpersons. If you are Swedish and trans then you will be sterilized if you transition. All to satisfy the religious right in Sweden, of course, who also aren't under the impression that they are living in a socialist country. Nor is this entirely shocking, as the Sweden-is-socialist camp would hilariously have us think, since Sweden's capitalist class has, for a very long time, flirted with fascism. Indeed, this is why the broadest left coalitions in Sweden are anti-fascist orientated.

Anti-fascists in Sweden are also aware they aren't living under socialism.

None of this is to claim, of course, that Sweden doesn't possess numerous social and economic reforms that make life under capitalism more liveable than it is in the US (or Canada, which is also not "socialist", for that matter), or that Sweden's liberal reformism isn't heterogeneous and filled with contradictions… But these contradictions are only an in-house squabble amongst the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that is more than happy to live with welfare reforms (possible under capitalism only because of imperialism) while: they are not significant contradictions because, as this new anti-person Swedish legislation proves, the reactionaries can have their sterilization campaign, the liberals can have some social services, and all parts of the ruling class are content.

While there are still so-called "leftists" who think it is fine to throw transpeople under the proverbial bus––and have often done so simply by setting the needs of this oppressed group irrationally against the needs of other oppressed groups (i.e. ciswomen needs trump transpeople needs, therefore transpeople needs don't count)––it would blow my mind if someone claiming to be progressive in any way-shape-or-form tried to justify these laws… But then again, I once had to purge my blogroll because someone tried to argue that a ciswoman stabbing a transwoman to death in a fast food restaurant bathroom was not a hate crime but a bloody "revolutionary" act––so I suppose, once the inevitable justifications for this law are given (like the one a supposed LGBT spokesperson in Sweden gave) by people who are left in form but right in essence, I might not be as shocked as any rational person who likes people should otherwise be.

I first learned about this law after reading a post by Ms. Marx about the anti-trans measures of a YWCA in her city, and found it interesting that a commenter (to which Ms. Marx responded eloquently) tried to partially justify these measures by coming up with an anecdote where an abused religious ciswoman was offended to learn that another abused woman giving her a massage was trans. The meaning given to this story was that the offended woman was only offended because, due to abuse, she rightfully has problems being touched by men and, because of a purported religious conservatism, she could only recognize the other woman as male. The conclusion, a wild logical leap but a normative part of what passes as "common sense" these days, was that the needs of the abused ciswoman trumped the needs of the abused transwoman and, because of this assumed trumping, the latter should be given another space. Well, Ms. Marx's article already talked about the supposed "other space" that her local YWCA claimed the deported transwoman could access: turns out it was the park.

Furthermore, there actually has been a lot of LGBT agitation around creating safe-spaces for queer and transpeople in my social context because, and these anecdotes aren't the ones that get told, queer and especially trans victims of abuse are often treated to more abuse and chauvinism in the "normal" shelters. Not because they are given massages by other women, but because of actual bigotry. Thing is, conservative cut-backs in numerous cities [and here I'm talking about Canada, where I live], these queer and trans sensitive spaces are being eliminated as "superfluous" and reactionary mayors like Rob Ford justify these cuts by saying: "we already have womens shelters that these 'other' people can go to." Except apparently, the ciswomen and the workers of these shelters aren't always happy with a transwoman walking through their doors. But hey, there's always the park.

Returning to the issue at hand, however, the point is that pseudo-leftist justification for Sweden's fascist legislation is not hard to imagine; nor is it as unthinkable as I would like to believe. If we try very hard, and in every case, we can always find progressive-sounding arguments for our unquestioned chauvinisms. But if you can at least grasp the very logical fact that this Swedish legislation is wrong then, at the very least, support the campaign to stop it from being instituted.

International Week of Support for Peoples War

2012-01-14T12:47:00.000-05:00

This week, January 14 - 22, has been designated the International Campaign to Support the Peoples War in India. The call for such a campaign is particularly important due to the recent capture, torture, and eventual execution of Comrade Kishenji. Clearly the Indian state is frightened by the growing peoples war, the so-called "red corridor", and the surrounding context of revolutionary instability caused by the Kashmiri independence movement, the potential problems still posed by the UPCN(Maoist), and an emergent peoples war in Bhutan.

While it is quite common for anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists in North America and Europe to gather en masse for demonstrations supporting Palestinian self-determination, against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or in solidarity with the unexpected uprisings of the so-called Arab Spring, there is a general and disquieting absence of agitation around the recent and significant revolutionary movements in South Asia. We have no problem pouring into the streets at the drop of a hat because of seemingly "spontaneous" intifadas in Egypt, but we tend to remain [willfully] ignorant of these long-standing armed struggles, even though they possess a political depth, unity, and breadth that the causes we usually endorse (and in thousands in every city) lack.

None of this is to say that we should not continue to supporting the rebellions that have become popular amongst the mainstream left, but only to argue that we need to work harder to become more aware of those other rebellions that, regardless of their size and energy, are not fetishized by both the media and the dominant left imagination. The peoples war in India is a particularly salient example: unlike Nepal or Bhutan, India is a major player in the world capitalist system (some might argue it is more important to global capitalism and the imperialist camp than Egypt) which faces what Samir Amin, probably the most important anti-imperialist political economist in the last five or six decades, has recently referred to, along with the previous peoples war in Nepal, as the most significant revolutionary movement in the past twenty or thirty years:

The endemic revolt of the Indian Naxalites could, by getting inspiration from the lessons of the victories [and I would also add "setbacks"] in Nepal, seriously affect the stability of the modes of exploitation in the Indian subcontinent. […] The hostility of India should not be underestimated. It is one of the reasons for the military cooperation between India and the United States. (Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism or Ending Capitalism?, 98)

The fact that Amin notes "the military cooperation between India and the United States" as yet another reason to protest in the centres of capitalism, just as we protest every imperialist intervention. And US imperialist interests India are echoed by Canadian and British interests. And it was our military and our nations' wealth that helped arm and train the Indian counter-insurgency campaign (with torture training provided by hired out Mossad experts), and so we are culpable if we pretend that we have nothing to do with the suppression of revolution.

And yet, whenever I mention these facts to otherwise well-meaning leftist associates, I am often met with bemused expressions, rolled eyes, and the strangest declamations. We don't know enough about India, that mainstream "marxist" group calls the peasant revolutionaries "terrorists" (but haven't we heard this before and thought it was garbage?), and we don't like them because we're maoists. All of these are excuses, an abdication of responsibility.

Since when was ignorant an excuse for not getting involved? It sure as hell hasn't stopped people who knew very little about Egypt and Tunisia to appear en masse to support those brief uprisings. And years ago, when people used to use the same excuse about Palestine, those of us who were building the seeds of what is now an "acceptable" leftwing movement told these people to educate themselves and scorned the willful ignorance. Since when have those of us who take anti-imperialism seriously listened to the claims of those who are left in form but right in essence? Thankfully we excommunicated Christopher Hitchens and his ilk. And why should the ideological commitments of a revolutionary group prevent us from supporting a rebellion against imperialism? Obviously I agree with maoism, so my support for the peoples war in India will be a support in more areas than one, but one does not need to support the specific ideology of a rebellion in order to be against imperialist intervention: I supported Hezbollah's fight against the Israeli invasion of Lebanon even though I do not support Hezbollah's political line.

But the situation in India remains needlessly obtuse, this massive and important peoples war ignored, even though a Booker Prize winning author and internationally renowned journalist has been supporting it for around half a decade. So despite the fact that Arundhati Roy's public support of the Indian maoists has caused her to be threatened with incarceration and garnered her numerous death threats, despite that this movement is being supported by a decidedly non-obscure member of the international intelligentsia, we remain silent. Her award-winning novel God of Small Things is generally known, but how many of us have read her journalism surrounding the maoist rebellion? And Roy isn't even committed to the maoist political line, and she has said as much, but she understands the importance of the rebellion in India and supports the right to rebel. We can do at least this much.

So I'm calling on every comrade who blogs and twitters to demonstrate some form of support for this international campaign during the week of January 14 to January 22. Write something in support, even if you have to do a little reading, in whatever way you think you can show support. If you're involved in activism and political organization outside of the internet, find a way to agitate and organize, in whatever way you can, around this campaign. Hell, even if it comes down to just reblogging some other article supporting the rebellion, even a youtube video of Arundhati Roy speaking on India's CNN in support of the maoist insurgency, that would be awesome.

And if you live somewhere in my region, and possess the means to travel, it would be great if you would consider coming out to the demonstration in Ottawa, on January 21st, to support the peoples war in India.

Against Capitalist "Rehabilitation": reading David Gilbert's Love & Struggle in the context of Judith Clark's renunciation

2012-01-13T17:27:00.001-05:00

According to a recent New York Times article by Tom Robbins, Judith Clark, former Weather Underground member who was arrested in 1981 for the attempted robbery of a Brinks truck, has renounced her radicalism and is now politically "rehabilitated". Robbins describes pre-rehabilitated Clark as if she was a member of a religious cult: she was a "militant zealot", a member of "a wild tribe of radicals", a "dogmatist"––in essence, the victim of leftist brainwashing. For Robbins and his ilk, the actions of Clark and other 1960s-1970s US militants were an insane response to a sane society that just needed the help of a few enlightened liberals rather than a sane response to the insane reality of capitalism. Now Clark has recovered her sanity, now she has healed from the madness of revolutionary ideology, and so now, Robbins argues, she should be let out of prison and allowed to become part of productive liberal society––after all, seventy-five years of incarceration for simply driving a getaway car is only permissible if she still believed that robbing an armoured truck to fund a revolution was morally okay. Before now, before her "rehabilitation", she was simply a brainwashed stooge.

But as the friend and comrade who introduced me to this article [thanks Jude W!] pointed out, the fact that Clark's radical politics are treated as an instance of cult-like brainwashing is extremely ironic in the context of state brainwashing described unintentionally by Robbins. Clark's "rehabilitation" comes after two years in solitary confinement where a sociologist makes her feel guilt about the child she was forced to leave behind when she was imprisoned. Anyone who knows anything about the treatment of revolutionaries in the prison-industrial complex, and the mechanisms that are levelled upon people who resist status quo ideology (for more repressive, by all accounts, than what is suffered by the general prison population), also knows that solitary confinement and the interrogations connected to solitary confinement are designed to politically condition and "rehabilitate" prisoners. That is, Clark's reconversion to liberal ideology is not some honest recovery of "sanity" but an instance of ideological control and psychological torture––an instance of brain-washing.

What is interesting about this recent news of Judith Clark's "rehabilitation", though, is that it has happened around the same time that one of her former imprisoned comrades, David Gilbert, had finally written and published his memoir, Love & Struggle: my life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond. Unlike Clark, however, Gilbert refuses to be politically rehabilitated, has resisted decades of attempted brainwashing and psychological torture in concentration camps of the American prison system, and is generally known as one of the "poster-boys" of US political prisoners.

Available at Kersplebedeb

Although Gilbert has written other books, Love & Struggle is his first attempt at a thorough and systematic autobiography. Indeed, Gilbert claims in the introduction that he has long resisted writing an autobiography because the idea "always felt too self-involved." Thankfully, for those of us who have wanted to read these memoirs, the son Gilbert has only known through conjugal visits convinced him otherwise.

Except Love & Struggle is not simply another collection of remembered politics on the part of a revolutionary who is still a committed revolutionary communist, nor is it just a who's-who inventory of the radical 1960s and 1970s––though it is, in some ways, both of these things. But Love & Struggle is truly worth reading for the following reasons: a) it is a book written by an imprisoned revolution who (unlike his former comrade Judith Clark) continues to resist political rehabilitation; b) parts of it are grouped around revolutionary concepts, leftist in-jargon that is usually obscure to a new radical, that are demystified through Gilbert's autobiography; c) it is an honest and self-critical engagement with a radical period in US history, a bildungsroman of a revolutionary now behind bars who is not afraid to critique the naivete, or the social privilege, of his younger self.

While those of us who believe in a revolutionary break from capitalism cannot endorse Clark's brainwashed renunciation, and should never treat the action taken in 1981 as morally "insane", we also should be critical of the political strategy behind this and similar actions. And Gilbert is not afraid to critique the erroneous line of this strategy (i.e. see the chapter "Foco" as well as the chapters dealing specifically with actions taken by the WU and other organizations with which he associated) while maintaining the politics behind this strategy and the need for revolution.

Nor is Gilbert afraid of self-criticism [and even has a chapter about criticism/self-criticism], of harshly examining his actions and beliefs at different stages of political growth, and so this is not an autobiography written by someone who wants to hide his mistakes, to paint himself as an angel. He is quite critical of moments of internal racism and sexism, of personal errors committed amongst comrades.

The autobiography proper concludes with the author and his comrades being imprisoned three decades before he decided to write this book. Only a small afterword following the last chapter discusses the thirty years Gilbert has spent incarcerated, but it is telling when read in context with the political "rehabilitation" of his former comrade:

As my son approached college age, he became the strongest advocate for my expressing my sorrow and regrets in a direct and forthright manner--and I’ve done so publicly on a number of occasions. The colossal social violence of imperialism does not grant those of us who fight it a free pass to become callous ourselves. Especially in fighting for a just cause, we need to take the greatest care to respect life and to minimize violence as we struggle to end violence. There is no contradiction: I full-heartedly continue my commitment to the oppressed; I deeply regret the loss of lives and the pain for those families caused by our actions on October 20, 1981.

Whereas Judith Clark's child was used as brainwashing method of political rehabilitation, David Gilbert uses the existence of his son to remind himself that a better world is necessary. Whereas the political errors made by the actions in 1981 were used to produce a guilt and shame that would allow Clark to break from her politics, Gilbert accepts responsibility but refuses to reject a commitment to the oppressed. And it is Gilbert's position that liberal hacks like Tom Robbins will continue to treat as insane and fanatical unaware that, every time they celebrate comrades who have lost their way, they are condoning the most insane and violent reality.

(Also: the introduction is by Boots Riley from The Coup which is awesome.)

David Gilbert's Love & Struggle can be purchased online here.

Marxist Missionary Cults

2012-01-12T20:44:00.001-05:00

Ever since I started this blog, I've complained off-and-on––sometimes humorously and sometimes with outright annoyance––about the cultish "marxist" groups that tend to afflict the broad left like an unfashionable sweater. Anyone who has spent time as an activist is very aware of these ultra-sectarian groups, of their dogmatic "holier-than-thou" attitudes, and how they make the lot of us look like backwards weirdos trapped somewhere between 1840 and 1915. And anyone (such as myself) who has spent a lot of years encountering these self-satisfied dogmatic cabals has learned that it is: a) generally unproductive to engage them because it is usually impossible to have an honest debate with close-minded zealots; b) better to ignore them, treating them as quaint and amusing, and hope that they will go away.

Quite often they're the subject of leftist "in-jokes", sort of like how one would laugh at an embarrassing family member. Around ten years ago, I used to have a group of friends who thought it was the height of entertainment to go to Spartacist events where the only other people in attendance would be the members of other Trotskyite sectarian groups (some who had split from the Spartacists) who only showed up to engage in inter-sectarian fights––all great fun for my friends who usually attended slightly inebriated, giggling at the back as they observed a war of theologies.

But after so many years of tolerating these uncritical dogmatists––who have shown up at events put on by other groups and/or coalitions since as far back as I can remember to repeat the same tired slogans, to start arguments, and to try and poach members from other groups––I am getting rather tired of their behaviour. Maybe this is because, after half a decade of choosing to avoid them and successfully avoiding/ignoring them at demonstrations and rallies, I have now had them force their unwanted attention on me in the same way that Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses bug me outside of subways and on street corners. What has stopped bugging me for half-a-decade is bugging me again: no wonder the rest of society thinks communists are nut-jobs, and that the bourgeoisie can sell the lie that "communism is just another religion", with these people still hanging about.

Workers Vanguard is "the Watchtower" of the communist left

Listen: when I say I don't want to buy a copy of Workers Vanguard, don't hover over me repeating yourself, staring at me with glassy-eyed fanaticism, and flipping anxiously through pages of said paper asking me if I've read your stupid and simple-minded analysis of historical events. Stop coming to events you didn't help organize when you only plan to be a nuisance, blocking off hallways and trying to poach activists––learn how to organize something of your own that isn't attended by your own members and isn't an excuse to just talk at people.

Really, a part of me is amazed that these sorts of groups continue to exist, but obviously without growing and retaining pretty much the same numbers (give or take a few) of active members as they had fifty years ago. I'm especially amazed that they are able to take themselves so seriously when the rest of the left see them as a joke. But another part of me is not entirely amazed: I have referred to them as cults, as missionary marxists, and as dogmato-revisionists who think "that there is some sort of pure communism outside of time and space, and that they are the elect capable of reflecting and understanding this perfect theory […] they have abdicated a scientific view of revolutionary theory in favour of religious superstition."

In other words, groups like the Spartacist League are cults, marxists in form but religious fanatics in essence, and should be treated as such. In the rest of this entry I will explain, point by point, why these tiny little trotskyist sectarian groups are the marxist equivalent of cults.

A. Dogmatism #1: mechanical application of doctrine

The inability to understand classical marxist theory as anything other than a collection of "sacred texts" demonstrates, as I have complained before, the religiosity of these cults. Rather than making sense of the historical method, by doing the hard work of interrogating the dialectical interplay between the interplay of the universal and the particular, these marxists assume that what is expressly written by Marx (filtered through Trotsky and whatever "experts" write their newspaper articles) is mechanically correct. A one-to-one relationships between doctrine and the concrete world is assumed; critical thought is abdicated in favour of rote repetition. Abstract categories replace the concrete: this is idealism, not materialism.

Take, for example, the simple-minded and offensive claim that peasant revolutions are "petty bourgeois" because peasants are "petty bourgeois." Blasted out of the original social context, treated as a truth existing above and beyond the material world, this position originates from how Marx and Engels sometimes examined the class consciousness of the peasantry in nineteenth century Europe. But even if Marx and Engels were correct in their assessments of the European peasantry (and how dare anyone argue that the gods of communism might be wrong here and there!), universalizing the class content of the nineteenth century European peasantry to the rest of the world is a dogmatically mechanical, rather than critical, application of thought. A peasantry still existant in a cohering capitalist mode of production is not the same as a peasantry persisting in a capitalist formation on the periphery of world capitalism. One would expect that these dogmatists, with their obsession with doctrine, would have some notion regarding Lenin's analysis of imperialism, but this is assuming that we can even call cultish dogmatism "marxism-leninism."

B. Dogmatism #2: rote repetition rather than critical thinking

Ever deal with a religious fanatic standing at your door and trying to convert you? You probably recall how they tended to pepper their sales pitch for salvation with random quotes from their favoured religious text. Same thing with these marxist cult groups: and they like to repeat these quotes for comfort, as if they have the power to channel Marx from beyond the grave: Praise Trotsky!

(On a side note, it's funny when they get their quotes wrong. Several months back a Spart quipped about humans making history, but not in circumstances they please, and then assigned this quote to Theses On Feuerbach. When I told him it was actually from 18th Brumaire on Louis Bonaparte, he refused to believe me––he was utterly convinced that I was essentially incapable of the same knowledge of Marx.)

If something exists beyond the sacred texts, beyond what is only acceptable as proper "marxist" thought, then it is unworthy of investigation. All critical and academic literature and theory that emerged after the 1950s might as well not exist because revolutionary theory ended with the death of Trotsky. Thus, if you mention concepts outside of this religious canon (i.e. "eurocentrism", "anticolonialism", "patriarchy", etc.) then you are immediately speaking in terms the cultists refuse to investigate.

Although my knee-jerk reaction to this sort of dogmatism is to demand critical thinking––to point out that the mindless repetition of quotes is not only idealism but an argument from authority––I know that our dogmato-revisionist friends will simply reply by dismissing critical thinking as petty-bourgeois. Critical thinking has been done for us by Marx, Engels and Trostky, thus there is no point in learning to think critically. Clearly this defines the mindset of a religious cult: don't think through the principles, don't engage with the material world, the real thinking is complete and simply waiting to be applied.

C. Recruitment strategy

Like a cult, groups like the Spartacist League tend to recruit people who are a particular type of social outsider. No, not oppressed minorities or extremely exploited proletarians, but misanthropes––the kind of people who experience the petty-bourgeois alienation of not being "cool enough" who are excluded from the social circles of their class because of supposed "nerdiness" and other bullshit reasons.

Cults prey on social misanthropes. Being social animals, all of us desperately want to fit in––to find a group or groups that will accept us. Cults have always relied on a recruitment strategy that targets the socially excluded, often converting suburb kids who are unpopular in highschool and brain-washing them with a dubious notion of "friendship".

D. Proselytization rather than organization

These groups generally refuse to organize, preferring to go to events organized by others and using these events as an excuse to preach their specific brand of leftism. So if you have a coalition of leftists gathering around some anti-imperialist cause, most of whom are on the same page, these folks will show up simply to tell everyone why they're "stupid", hoping that their self-declared cleverness will snag them more members. Refusing to organize outside of the student and left movements organized by others, they function only to preach a "pure" marxism and poach people mobilized by others.

The claim is that they are protecting a pure marxism and if they just preach "the good news", the masses will be won over by their gospel and eventually join them. Thus they can always maintain a distance from organic movements (this way they can't make mistakes, and their slogans can remain untainted), but "intervene" in the way that Mormons and Jehovahs Witnesses intervene on your daily life by ringing your doorbell.

Years ago some leftists used to argue that groups like the Spartacist League were most probably police agents: after all, why would someone waste so much time proselytizing in such a way so as to disrupt events that others worked hard to organize? But the truth is that, while the police might need to invent them if they didn't exist, these groups are simply so invested in missionary dogmatism that they actually believe disruptive proselytization is the same as organization.

E. Persecution complex

The anti-capitalist left often has good reason to feel persecuted: the state is trying to maintain its power and does go out of its way to arrest and imprison leftists. And yet these marxist cults aren't the groups being arrested (because they aren't doing anything that really threatens the state), so the fact that they always act as if they are being targeted for their "radicalism" is similar to those religious groups who feel that they are not growing because of some pernicious conspiracy.

The thing is, since the rest of the left finds these groups annoying, then they create the terms for their persecution complex. And since they feel like they are disliked because they are "more clever" and "more revolutionary" than everyone else (nobody can understand how brilliant we are!), they are able to reconfirm their own existence by imagining that this is some form of oppression. By assuming that the reason they are disliked is because they are right and everyone else is wrong, the more they are disliked the more they feel they are correct. This is precisely how adherents to different forms of religious fundamentalism think.

Let's be clear: you're not being "persecuted"––people just think you are annoying and disruptive. The state is not trying to infiltrate and ruin your movement because your movement has done nothing in recent memory to challenge the power of the state.

In any case, as should be evident from the tone of this post, I am tired of interacting with people and groups who are the communist version of Moonies. Being a critical leftist, I enjoy friendships and long-standing intellectual debates with comrades/friends from various left-wing traditions: anarchists, autonomists, draperites, trotskyists and post-trotskyists, other maoists, indigenists, african nationalists, even stalinists. I think it is important to interact with people from various leftwing traditions, to support their initiatives and events, because I think it is important for us to learn from each other. Although I have a theoretical commitment to a specific political line, and am convinced that it is correct in principle, I am also aware that there is always a chance that my commitment might be proved wrong–-indeed, the reason I became committed to a marxist-leninist-maoist position in the first place was because of an open-minded and critical investigation and interaction with various traditions and organizations. In all my years as an activist, however, I cannot recall one conversation with a member of one of these missionary groups, in almost fifteen years of activist experience, that has been fruitful and/or politically relevant. Hell, even when I used to try and end conversations that were going nowhere by saying "let's just agree that, despite our disagreements, we're all communists and allies of some sort" I would usually be told that I was wrong because "we" are not "all communists" because only they are "true" communists.

As much as I don't want to celebrate those moments in marxist history where extremely dogmatic trotskyites in third world contexts were targeted, whenever I walk away from conversations with dogmato-revisionists I can understand why this happened. Ho Chi Minh might have been theoretically inaccurate by claiming that the small cabal of Vietnamese trotskyites were "worse than fascists", but the statement was a long result of having to deal with people who were organizing against the peasant-based anticolonial revolution because it was "not properly communist". And if future revolutions throughout the world are going to be hampered by people with this sort of ideology, who resist revolutionary movements and end up siding with the oppressors in practice if not in theory, then it is clear that these marxist cults are more problematic than a leftist in-joke.

Suggestion to Reddit: please consider renaming your "/r/socialism" subreddit "/r/liberalism" for reasons of conceptual accuracy

2012-01-10T20:09:00.001-05:00

Although I do not like Reddit, or the kind of self-proclaimed "experts" who hang out on reddit, some of my internet comrades are obsessed with the wonderful world of Reddit and, because of this obsession, I am often more informed of the Reddit universe of stupid than I would otherwise prefer. And one subreddit that is generally and unfortunately stupid is /r/socialism which I have complained about at numerous points on this blog.

The reason why the "socialism" subreddit is stupid is because the people making up the majority population of the posters and commenters are not socialists, and usually seem rather unaware of what socialism means. My complaint is not sectarian––it has nothing to do with some maoist nonsense about claiming that a bunch of trotskyists aren't authentic socialists––but conceptual. The hegemonic consensus of /r/socialism has nothing to do with the actual political and historical definition of socialism. If you are a welfare capitalist, a reformist who thinks the US should be like Sweden, a mild anti-imperialist who thinks socialism is about some dream of "the founding fathers", or in the case of my social context (Canada) someone who thinks the NDP is a socialist party and that socialism can happen by voting… you are not socialist. You are a liberal. Maybe you're a left-leaning liberal, but you are not interested in socialism; you are interested in the historical commitments of liberalism.

Maybe the majority population of /r/socialism is convinced by the mindless rhetoric of the right that reduces the political landscape to conservative versus liberal. For the brainless American hard right, socialism and liberalism are synonymous despite the fact that, in actual fact, they are different categories of political meaning. Socialism historically emerged as political category by recognizing the ideological limits of liberalism, by understanding liberalism as the prime ideology of capitalism, and by initiating a politics that rejected the core commitments of liberalism––core commitments, it would seem, that are held by most posters and commenters in the world of /r/socialism.

Look, if the extent of your politics are about arguing whether Obama is the candidate more deserving of your "socialist" support than Ron Paul (or, as is now being argued on /r/socialism, vice versa), then you are not a socialist. Again: you are a liberal. Socialism begins by rejecting the Obamas and the Pauls as having nothing to do with its politics. Sometimes there might be a gap between theory and practice when it comes to this rejection (i.e. "I know it is not socialist to support Obama, but I feel the need to vote for the 'lesser evil'), but in the world of /r/socialism there is a gap between theory and theory.

It's okay, you can admit it––there are a lot of liberals in the world, and liberalism has as many different factions as socialism. Just as we socialists have our various traditions, you can have yours. In fact you might be happier realizing that you are a Rawlsian or a Millsian rather than pretending you're a Trotskyist or an anarchist. So please, for the sake of philosophical clarity, consider changing the name of your subreddit.

New Look for 2012!!

2012-01-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

Really, I should have done this in 2011. For the longest time I wasn't entirely happy with the look of my blog, and some of my faithful readers have complained about its ugliness (although I still like white on black, damnit, even if it does burn your retinae!), but I just didn't have the energy or time to waste switching things around. Too many bloody choices of templates equals confused inaction. That and the fact that I can finally admit that blogspot was crap compared to wordpress. Truthfully, considering how much I hate shite design when it comes to magazines, posters, book covers, etc., it's amazing that I endured the shitty appearance of my blog for so long.

But now blogspot is offering these new "dynamic" blog templates and so I finally caved, spent about an hour converting the links from my blogroll into a separate page, and another hour torturing myself over the fact that it was all changing… And here is an attempt at making MLM Mayhem look different. It's an occasion for a party:

You all know what kind of "party" I really mean.

If you click on the left hand drop down menu where it is currently default-set to "magazine" you should be able to see other viewing options. Some of them are far too cluttered and more deserving of the name "dynamic", but right now I am going back and forth between "magazine" and "sidebar".

Updated for the impending apocalypse New Age gurus and other mystificatory conspiracy-theorists claim will happen in 2012 (based on a eurocentric-appropriated false reading of the Mayan calendar), this blog will now hopefully appear cleaner and easier to read. This raises the question: was the bourgeois theorist Marshall McLuhan correct in assuming that the "medium is the message" (or, as he would later say, "the massage")? Will the transformation of the blog medium result in a better overall message? After experimenting with this transformed blog for over twenty-four hours, I was shocked to discover that my blog traffic swelled to over 1,000 hits on a single day: so either blogspot is lying about my traffic in order to trick me into keeping this "dynamic" setting, or the transformed medium worked. (Or I'm committing one of two possible fallacies noted in the previous post.)

Since I noticed the too-cool-for-school couple at the table behind me staring hypnotically at my computer screen, I'm assuming I have their approval of coolness. Or maybe not: I also feel I should leave this new neighbourhood bar, which turned out to be a hipster bar, because I feel like a total leftist nerd. Apparently my "Serve the People" Mao Zedong bag isn't cool enough––go figure!

How to Become a Feisty Leftist Political Blogger

2012-01-07T13:00:00.002-05:00

Friends and comrades have often asked how I am able to produce so much crap on a regular basis on this blog. Clearly my life is not primarily devoted to blogging––I have a job, I do political organizing work, and I have a social life––but it is pretty easy to be on the computer during and between the main aspects of my job, and nothing is usually happening between the hours of 11pm to 3am during the week, so there is always time to write. Plus, since I spend a lot of time writing, I can crank out blog posts in very short spans because, trained to write academic papers throughout my time spent as an undergraduate to a PhD student, it's pretty much my only marketable skill. But it's actually not as hard to produce the amount of writing that is on MLM Mayhem in an average month, so I figured I would spend this post, keeping with the semi-serious tone of the last post, providing pointers on how to become a feisty leftist political blogger.

1. Read

This should be obvious, or at least you would think it would be obvious. I mean, if you're going to be a bloody left-wing political blogger you should educate yourself on radical theory and history. And no: wikipedia, cliffs notes on Chomsky, and whatever the bourgeois authorities are touting as truth do not count. Unfortunately, if you go to Reddit and look at the "socialism"subreddit as an example of left-wing thinking on the interwebs, you'll immediately be inundated by petty-bourgeois champagne socialist ignorance, usually on the part of people who have barely educated themselves on what it means to be an anti-capitalist and who resist such education because their individual theories are so fucking awesome. Other "leftist" blogs are equally suspect, and it is amazing what people imagine counts as an anti-capitalist and/or socialist position these days.

So maybe begin by reading Capital, at the very least the first volume, if you want to pass yourself off as a leftist political blogger. Hunt down the classics, and contemporary classics, that are theoretically and historically insightful. Do not rely on pundits, do not rely on wikipedia (except as a place to mine for potential sources, just remember knowledge is always classed), and definitely do not imagine that mainstream historiographies, the kind that make the bestseller list and are often written by reactionaries, count as "truth." And please stop imagining that liberal bourgeois economic theory is anti-capitalist: welfare capitalism is not the same as anti-capitalism.

According to the socialism reddit, Keynes is a "socialist"

There once was a time when the left placed a great emphasis on political education––on mass education, on literacy campaigns that would also produce political literacy––but it seems as if it is now trendy for the left in North America to adopt some sort of anti-intellectualism because, hey, that's so working class man. Ignorance is not proletarian, it's what the bourgeoisie wants for the proletariat.

But don't let the need to read paralyze you: write as you read, don't seek theoretical perfection in your articles: be open to new ideas, using blog posts and commenting as a process of self-education. You're blogging, not writing the next great work of theory.

2. Polemicize about things that you find politically offensive

Whether it's some reactionary television show, some pro-capitalist policy, the local plutocrat closing down hir factory, a liberal columnist who is a fucking moron, or that self-righteous Trotskyite missionary who shows up at rallies s/he didn't help organize only to piss on the masses… There is so much in everyday life that is worthy of scornful posts. The most read blog entries aren't the thoughtful ones, unfortunately, but the ranty ones. It's about bombastic gong-showing and rhetoric and trashing your enemies or enemy ideologies.

One of the obnoxious social democrat capitalists trashed posthumously on this blog

These are also the more fun blog entries to write, especially when you allow yourself to be deluded that your polemic is more important than it actually is: "no one will take this person seriously ever again after they read my skillful assault on hir bourgeois stupidity!" Unfortunately, however well reasoned and well read your rants might be, good arguments and devastating rhetorical assaults do not change the minds of people committed to a set politics.

3. Forget about serious editing

I edit each post spuriously as I go and then hit "publish" before rereading: this way I prevent the paralysis of constant revising. Also, this would explain the numerous typos and structural problems of my posts. But blog posts are not books or academic essays, and aren't going to be peer-reviewed anytime soon, so why bother to make them perfect? Nothing is going to be perfect, whatever you write is going to contain mistakes, and your readership will either love or hate what you produce no matter how "perfect" you make it.

As should be obvious to anyone who has read this blog for an extended period of time, the majority of my posts are quickly put together, sometimes start talking about one thing and then end up talking about another, and are prone to tangents. Sometimes the posts are utterly random! Eclecticism is a problem for theory and praxis, but not for blogging! This is because blogging is not really theory and definitely not praxis… though some imagine that WEBSITE = ORGANIZING, but this is not the case though it is important for organizers to have a web presence.

4. Become a master of quirky political rhetoric

Cultivate a word zoo of jargon and jingo culled from the jungle of the great left polemicists and polemics. Dialectical is always a good one to use, and never forget the "r-words": revolutionary, rebellion, radical, revisionist, retrograde, reactionary… You can't go wrong with these!

Just remember to use the jargon/jingo properly. For example, there are many marxist bloggers who feel that, since they are marxists, they should use the word "dialectical" a lot. Everything becomes "dialectical" in their entries: it just becomes a catch-all phrase to explain relationships that makes such relationships sound cooler than they actually are. Except if you ask how the thing that is being explained is, precisely, dialectical, you get hums and haws. If you can't explain, except with a massive amount of sophistry, how the logic of some relationship is the unity of opposites, then don't use the word dialectical as your own personal stamp of approval. One of my pet peeves about the mainstream and dominant left is its inability to think dialectically; part of this pet peeve is how it proves its lack of understanding of dialectics by using the term for everything under the sun.

The sun is also "dialectical"

In any case, don't throw in conceptual terms unless you know what they mean just because they sound cool––it's not as if it it is especially hard to do the research on a term (see point #1), and don't simply imagine you understand what a term means. Here's a hint: if you can't explain the concept and its employment to yourself, don't use it. This way you avoid some asshole troll, who imagines himself more clever than the rest of the world, making asinine comments on your blog.

5. Informal logic is your hammer!

While arguing a point, or responding to comments, you can up your blogging cred with the knowledge of logical fallacies that: a) might be in your own work; b) is most probably in the comments of your detractors. Chances are you'll have a few fallacies in your own work if you followed my advice in point #3 [but hey, it's "dialectical" man!], but a lot of detracting commenters and/or trolls will be much more fallacious.

It doesn't help, however, if you use your knowledge of fallacies spuriously. The problem with most internet "expert" debaters is that they like to imagine they understand argumentation fallacies, and have learned a few names to make them sound learned, but they really don't know what the hell they're talking about and usually employ these fallacies innacurately and/or fallaciously. So don't fall into this trap, even if you're tempted to appear clever by accusing someone of "straw-personing" your position–-chance are, they might not have been straw-personing your position, and are actually providing a counter-argument you didn't consider. Hold any fallacy knowledge in reserve, use it precisely.

Since everyone throws up the "straw-person" charge, most often inaccurately, and since I had to study this sort of thing as part of my degree and sometimes even teach it, here are a few useful fallacies of a different sort that you can use that will produce a feisty blog: the fallacy of bifurcation [where someone tries to force an either/or principle out of something that is more nuanced, i.e., "you are either with us or against us"], the red-herring fallacy [where someone, instead of arguing about the actual terms of the debate tries to derail the argument by making it about something that only seems related but actually has nothing to do with the main argument], the category mistake [where an argument conflates ontological categories, making distinct categories of meaning seem as if they are the same and often trying to draw an analogical comparison that is actually logically false], the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy [where people decide to conclude, simply because one thing followed another, that the first thing caused the second]. Try to avoid making up your own fallacy categories: if you do this, chances are you aren't talking about something that is logically fallacious.

Of course, if you prefer to use formal logic rather than informal logic as your hammer of choice, more power to you. While the interwebs argumentative experts like to imagine they are masters of informal logic, very few of them have even the glimmer of a clue about formal logic––the last time I checked, there weren't many logicians roaming the political blogosphere. The only problem with relying on formal logic, though, is that no one except another logician is going to know what the fuck you're on about. Which might be a good thing, because there will be less people available to check your argumentation proofs, but don't expect entries and comments that are reduced to formal logic algorithms to be popular.

Here is my most exciting blog post that will crush my enemies!

Then again, Badiou is currently enjoying a level of popularity despite his reliance on formal logic and mathematics. And since a lot of people who are crushing on Badiou as the new most awesome theorist generally have no background in formal logic (or even ontology), and sometimes can't even say what the hell he's doing, there is a good chance your retreat into formal logic might provide you with some level of strange popularity. It seems that the more obtuse and difficult a thinker is, the more profound and brilliant people are willing to imagine s/he is… This principle could work for you!

6. Just write the bloody thing

As noted in the third point, blogging is not about producing the most brilliant theoretical/analytical entry ever. The more output, the more readers; the less output, the less chance you're going to find an audience, grow your audience, or keep your original audience. So if you refuse to write out of fear that you're not going to have the BEST ARTICLE EVER, no one will read you. Blogging is an act of metaphorical vomiting: just spew it out, hit "publish", and then manically obsess over your traffic.

M-L-M Mayhem! 2011 in Review

2012-01-06T01:11:00.001-05:00

In an earlier post I joked that, based on the traffic of certain articles, if I turned this blog into an exercise of pissing on the graves of the recently dead I would probably increase my average traffic. And due to then high traffic generated by my last article, maybe it would also be clever to transform this blog into one about dead people and sexual politics. It could be called DEATH! SEX! and would be sure to offend a lot of self-proclaimed lefties along with reactionaries. Although I am not planning on making such a drastic shift in this blog's content focus, thinking about how some topics have generated far more traffic than others, I have decided to release an M-L-M Mayhem 2011 in Review and list what posts were the most viewed and exchanged across the interwebs from last January to December.

10. Entries regarding the PCR-RCP initiated elections boycott:

These articles generated a lot of traffic, and a lot of parliamentary ire on the part of sectors of the left who should have known better. The boycott itself raised eyebrows in my city, resulted in some rather asinine counter-arguments that intentionally straw-personed its politics, and whenever the articles on this blog were posted they often caused a shit-show and revealed the left's fascination with and addiction to social democracy. The most popular articles concerning the election, though, were Wendy Glauser's guest post regarding the actual capitalist/imperialist politics of the NDP (which is still reblogged now and then because, hopefully, the left in Canada is beginning to dispense with its mindless commitment to a party that has no concrete connection to the proletariat), and my post-election assessment of the fall of the Bloc Quebecois which caused one irate commenter to create a sock-puppet.

9. Entries on the "occupy" movement:

My initial assessment of the occupy movement, was probably the most reblogged, but the others (found in the months of September and October 2011) also generated a lot of discussion. Now that the occupy movement is sputtering out, unable to go beyond its own ideological boundaries [that were presented as a lack of boundaries], the initial assessment and the ones that followed were proved to be pretty much correct. More reason to pursue they type of political organization that has already been proved in practice––but hey, I'm sure that this year (because the objective conditions of the recession continue to be ripe) we'll find other similar manifestations of mass anger that, yet again, leftists who want to reinvent the organizational wheel will tout about as the new brand of margarine.

8. My attempt at an eNovel:

Yes! People are reading my fiction! Well, at the very least they're downloading it––who knows how much it is actually being read. If only someone in the lefty political blogosphere was connected with a publishing company that wanted to publish my modest fictional offerings. I'm still waiting for an offer! Those who did read it, however, seemed to enjoy it and that made me feel appreciated.

7. Trotsky and Stalin!

For some reason, my post about the mimetic similarities of Trotsky and Stalin, though not heavily trafficked on its initial release suddenly became uber-popular and heavily facebooked in December. I have no idea why there was this explosion of interest around the possible similarities between the dead-ends of Trotskyism and Stalinism, and I am still waiting for some irate Trotskyist to comment with a screed about the theoretical perfection of the "prophet".

6. Entries on why I support the PCR-RCP:

All of which can be found on this page. There weren't a lot of comments on these articles, but they were heavily trafficked. I always find it interesting how some of the articles that sustain heavy comments are actually not the same articles that have the most traffic. Take some of my articles on imperialism and false consciousness that, while popular enough to generate 31 comments [which are mostly, to be fair, arguments amongst a small group of people], never generated the kind of traffic that the barely commented upon entries regarding my support of the PCR-RCP generated. Maybe confessional style entries, being less controversial but still interesting, produce a context that is more amiable to reading than arguing.

5. Entries surrounding the intifadas in Tunisia and Egypt:

Before the occupy movement, a repetition as farce, displaced the mass uprisings in the middle east, I wrote about the limits of spontaneity in the context of what would eventually be dubbed "the Arab Spring." Some people immediately took exception to my assessment, one commenter even calling my approach "undialectical" (a typical slur often used by people who don't understand the meaning of dialectics), and yet my analysis has been proved correct. Although it would have been amazing if these uprisings had succeeded in providing a significant challenge to imperial capitalism, and it is extremely sad that they did not, the fact is that, as I argued, the military coup was not progressive, the movement failed to produce a significant political counter-hegemony (because of its structure, as we should historically know, it could not). And yet, as the emergence of the occupy movement proved, so many leftists leap on the bandwagon of the next supposed semi-Draperite phenomenon and imagine that they are witnessing a world historical revolution.

[Side-point: where are you long time commenter but now silent RRH whose interventions were always educational and interesting? I think this might have been one of the last posts you commented on...]

4. Articles around class reductionism:

My initial article on this issue still keeps showing up as well-trafficked, but so too do the articles connected to the PRAC event "This Ain't Your Grandpa's Communism": the first of these a guest post by Baolinh Dang, the second my sequel––both of which were part of a larger presentation that, despite its problems, was well intended. Too bad the central presentation by Rachel Gorman, since it was presented from notes rather than a pre-written paper, was not available to guest post. The continued interest in these posts demonstrate, in my opinion, the hunger amongst leftists for a historical materialist analysis that takes into account identity politics without lapsing into identity politics. The maoist and maoist-influenced tradition is still, in my opinion, the only tradition that can provide this historical materialist analysis in a systematic manner, which is one of the reasons I was drawn to it in the first place.

3. An entry about a proper anti-capitalist approach to social reformism:

My article "Understanding Social Reform in a Non-Reformist Manner" generated a high level of traffic when it was first posted and still continues to be reblogged and facebooked every now and then, showing up on my statistics page as a highly clicked-on entry. (And my thanks to the excellent and super supportive comrades at Mouvement Étudiant Révolutionnaire for translating it into french and reblogging it on their site the same month it was released.) This issue is one that I return to often, and I don't think I really said all I wanted to say in this article, especially since I feel that dominant currents of the left in my social context: a) misunderstands its role vis-a-vis social reformism; b) attacks groups and people who try to be critical, but not dismissive, of this approach. And this strongly connects to my complaints about the NDP-ism (in both the boycott articles and one of my most highly trafficked articles that will be discussed below) that tends to plague our movement.

2. Sex!

Already my most recent entry on the sex industry has started 2012 off with bang, but my initial 2011 article regarding this topic was, and continues to be, heavily trafficked––more heavily trafficked than its 2010 semi-precursor. What I have started to find interesting about my left-wing engagements with sexual politics––whether they be about the institution of prostitution or the fetishization of certain sexual "liberatory" behaviours––is that other leftists, especially male leftists, really take offense to any criticism of the unquestioned male right to have 24-7 access to female bodies. I have always felt that it was necessary for the committed left to critically engage with many of the points made by radical feminists such as the Cell 16 collective and Andrea Dworkin [who, as I have often noted, is terribly misread and misunderstood], and I am nearly as shocked by the unwillingness amongst the left to perform such an engagement as I am with the willingness of male-power-loving reactionaries to call Dworkin, whenever she is mentioned, names like "fat dyke". [This despicable insult appears, every now and then, in troll comments I receive in my moderated folder––all aimed at an article written back in Fall 2010.]

1. Death!

Like I said, blog entries where I piss on the graves of the recently dead are, for some bizarre reason, my most heavily trafficked. First there were the entries where I complained about the idiotic tendency amongst the self-proclaimed "anti-capitalist left" to sing the praises of NDP superstar Jack Layton upon his death. Then there was my entry on the deaths of Kim Jong-Il and Vaclav Havel. The latter scored over 1000 hits on its first day alone, and continues to generate more, scooping both Lenin's Tomb and Louis Proyect in pissing on the reactionary legacy of Havel. I am curious, however, as to why negative obituaries produce the most attention. When it came to the Layton entry, I was flabbergasted by the amount of leftists who chastised me on "speaking ill of the dead" (really, are we that superstitious, and why the fuck should I care about a dead capitalist?)… But I am more flabbergasted by the fact that the same people who are angry others are "speaking ill" of the dead are probably the same people who make these entries so highly trafficked. Those who want to protect the legacy of even the enemy dead are the same who are fascinated with obituaries that trash this legacy: people are morbidly fascinated with the dead.

So those were the top entries of 2011, and 2011 proved to be a rather exciting year. Here's hoping that 2012 is more exciting, more rebellious, and that its exciting rebellions are more organized and theoretically unified.

Capitalist Propaganda in Random Television Shows

2012-01-04T23:58:00.000-05:00

Tonight my partner and I made the mistake of turning on the television to pass an hour while we were eating a late dinner. We don't usually watch television when we eat, or even casually watch television, preferring to choose what shows and movies to watch on our own time rather than playing the lottery of channel flipping. Considering we only get five or six channels on a good day (yes, those of us who don't have the money to spare on cable or satellite or whatever when we are already paying for the internet and the telephone still use aerials), there's really not much to watch. And since we don't often flip through prime time television, when we do we usually discover new shows.

This time we discovered a show called Harry's Law starring Kathy Bates, some guy who I'm pretty sure was in a bunch of shitty Adam Sandler films, and the actor who played "Norm" in Cheers. One of the reasons we don't like watching random shows is because, as a general rule, so many of these random shows are the worst sort of mindless Yankee propaganda. And rather than turning off the television when the show becomes ideologically offensive, we receive a rather sick pleasure watching the episode until the end, complaining aloud as we watch, experiencing jolts of pathetic self-righteousness. Tonight's episode of Harry's Law––yet another idiot lawyer show that is mostly about how great it is to be a wealthy lawyer––provided us with just this sort of experience.

I'm less interested in analyzing the show itself (which isn't really worthy of any cultural assessment) than its ideological function. I really know nothing about Harry's Law, after all, and don't care about knowing anything further, but this specific episode was a rather poisonous example of the current state of USAmerican propaganda. We are living in a time where, due to the economic recession, people at the centres of imperialism are losing their faith in capitalism: although the subjective conditions may not be ripe (due to the failure of anti-capitalists to produce an organized and theoretically unified counter-hegemony), events such as the occupy movement are clearly demonstrating that the masses are waking up to the global nightmare they've been dream-walking through for the past several decades.

This particular episode of Harry's Law, then, was interesting because it demonstrated the pernicious ruling class ideology response, that masquerades as innocuous, to the widespread disillusionment with the American Dream. And though I don't spend time (or have the necessary channels) to watch a lot of mainstream American television, I think I can safely assume that the ideology purveyed in this specific episode is anachronistic: not only is it telling that a random television watching escapade just happened (as it so often does) to force us to encounter yet another annoying example of pro-capitalist propaganda, the ideology inherent in this episode is extremely familiar––I have watched and heard it before, in multiple forms in the supposed heterogeneity of the culture industry that is mostly, with a few honourable exceptions, unified in its superstructural support of capitalist business as usual.

The episode in question focused on two plot lines. One concerned a custody battle over a Chinese child who was "kidnapped" from China when she was two and sold into the US orphan system. The second concerned a legal battle surrounding labour protectionist laws that were forcing a citizen (who also happened to be the titular "Harry", played by Kathy Bates) to pay a supposedly egregious fine.

The first plot line was significant in that it was yet another example of the current American mindset––a mindset that has been cultivated from the early days of orientalist imperialism, through the cold war hatred of communism, to the spite regarding non-white competing capitalism––towards China. It is interesting how much China is mentioned in the culture industry. Take the last Batman movie where a criminal is outed in court for using a Chinese-made [which also meets terribly made because it is not made in America and non-whites cannot produce anything worthwhile] gun, and where Batman flies into China to grab a criminal––all side points to the main plot. Or take all the strange stories we hear about China––some half-true, others false, still others no more strange or horrendous than the stories we hear about the global actions of America or Canada or the EU––on a daily basis. While it is true that China has been a state capitalist country since Deng and the capitalist roaders seized power at the end of the failed GPCR, and while it is true that it has aspirations to be an imperialist power on the same level of the US, the actions of China are no better or worse than the actions of its capitalist counterparts; prevalent expressions of sinophobia are intended to make us think that China is more barbaric, more violent, more alien, and more repressive than the regimes that we are supposed to celebrate.

In any case, in tonight's episode of Harry's Law we are presented with the story of a child from China who was stolen from her parents when she was two and raised until she was six by an American family. China, after all, is a nation of child traffickers. And though the Chinese parents have searched for this child all their lives, they lose her to the American family in the custody battle because: a) they didn't raise her; b) her life is better in America. Since I care little for biological notions of the family, I don't care very much about point (a) aside from the point that it is contingent on the supposition that China is den of child-stealing criminals (who apparently do not exist elsewhere). The point is that the conclusion of the custody battle seemed intended to demonstrate that America had the right to decide the destiny of a child. America, after all, has the right to make decisions for the world's population!

The second plot line, however, was a much more relevant piece of propaganda. Due to the recession a mayor (played by "Norm") decides to implement a protectionist policy for auto-workers by making it illegal for people in his city to drive foreign-made cars so as to protect the jobs of his fellow citizens. Harry was driving a mercedes and so she was fined. A rather stupid story-line in general, but terribly informative when it comes to the function of the ruling ideas of the ruling class: Harry's argument is that the mayor's protectionism (which is little more than mildly left populism) is a form of "marxism" and that America is not "the Soviet Union"; she claims that being American is synonymous with "freedom" and that "freedom" is synonymous with the right of any individual to buy whatever she wants (as long as it doesn't violate the liberal harm principle); she argues fiercely that outsourcing is an essential part of the capitalist market and will ultimately create more jobs and well-being for Americans (in a word, she argues for the export of capital, for imperialism); she thinks that her right to drive expensive cars trumps the possible starvation of workers; she equivocates (falsely, fallaciously) an attempt to protect the domestic market (however limited this attempt would be) with xenophobia ("you don't like German cars, you don't want German cars to compete, the best commodity wins"), even going so far as to offensively compare her experience of being fined for being rich to the experience of anti-semitism.

Essentially, the arguments made on the part of the show's hero are part of the arguments that are being assembled to produce the propaganda necessary for combatting the complaints of these mass movements that are feebly attempting to challenge capitalism. Following the emergence of the occupy movement, television shows are arguing that the ideology of these types of movements, however limited and confused, is contrary to "freedom", that targeting the wealthy is akin to being a xenophobe [here we must remember how the late Vaclav Havel, when he was a politician, passed a law that claimed it was "hate speech" to criticize corporations], and that it is better to live in a world where market choice is equivalent to freedom.

The judge eventually decides in favour of Kathy Bates and argues that, yes, the right to useless individual liberty, the right for the capitalist market to persist, trumps the needs of the jobless in his city. Because, hey, this is what America is all about! Get out of the streets #occupiers, go hide in universities anti-capitalists, starve on the streets or play along with your collaborating union workers! Stay in the ghettoes, in the projects, on the street, in the kitchens. Joblessness and starvation and oppression are small prices to pay for the individual freedom protected by the Founding Fathers and the Constitution: this is what makes America and capitalism great.

In an old and somewhat asinine post (which was intended to be blithe and humorous and that succeeded in pissing off at least one local Randroid) I complained about how "liberty" was often confused with "freedom" and this was a core dogma of capitalist ideology. Even worse is the fact that the language of "freedom" that is espoused by libertarians, conservatives, and the ideologues responsible for tonight's episode of Harry's Law is now a pale shade of even the liberal equivocation of liberty with freedom. While the liberal shell still remains, the conceptual kernel is almost absent. The concept of freedom, bandied about by pundits of every type of capitalist, is coming to mean nothing more than "capitalism" in general and (in the case of Harry's Law) the USAmerica in particular. Capitalism is the greatest system because it promotes the most individual liberty and it promotes the most individual liberty because that is what capitalism does. America is great because it is the land of freedom and it is the land of freedom because it is America.

What we're looking at, then, is degeneration of even the concept of liberty––a degeneration that might shock J.S. Mill, though he should have realized it was the historical and logical upshot of his way of seeing the world––where an already falsely defined "freedom" is now defined by the logic of market efficiency. Milton Friedman, uncritical marionette of capitalist ideology, was honest enough to recognize that capitalism was, indeed, about efficiency: hence his argument that the foster system and orphanages should be replaced by slave auctions where the richest members of society would bid for abandoned children. The efficiency of pure self-interest is now somehow suddenly the definition of freedom. With such a definition presupposed, it is easy to argue that any politics that rejects pure self-interest and market efficiency is a politics of unfreedom. In a word, and a flattening word that critical thinkers have come to despise: totalitarianism.

Hell, this vague and secretly nihilistic definition of freedom can even explain the concept of "equality" (a concept that is often used by critical theorists to define freedom as a counter-balance to liberty). Everyone individual is equal under capitalist law, after all. As Anatole France wrote in The Red Lily: "The law, in its majestic quality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread." A meaningless equality, as meaningless as the larger definition of freedom.

In the end, the propaganda of a show like Harry's Law is just a tiny part of the larger system of propaganda that is rearing its head in a time when an economic crisis at the centres of capitalism is finally laying bare the contradictions that were always known and felt in the peripheries. Unfortunately, since there is no real unified counter-movement, this propaganda will probably be more successful than it might have been otherwise.

On Privileged Engagements with the Sex Industry

2012-01-02T15:00:00.000-05:00

Recently I learned of yet another "leftist" in my region who, convinced that prostitution is an essentially liberating vocation, has decided to dabble in being a call girl in order to demonstrate her politics in practice. Perhaps she feels that this experience will give her the necessary clout––the anecdotes, the street cred––to argue her prostitution-equals-feminism position in future arguments with those feminists who maintain that prostitution is an essential pillar of patriarchy.

Since I have already written a long post about the stupidity of the "feminist" position that conflates sex work with feminist agency, I won't bother rehashing in my arguments in significant detail. Rather, I am interested in the class position that produces not only the prostitution-equals-feminist-agency political commitment––the position that leads certain privileged individuals (like the one mentioned above) to dabble in prostitution in order to declare the practice liberating.

By-and-large, those who argue for the essential liberating aspects of sex work––and thus that sex work is not part of patriarchy––are either people who have never experienced sex work, or people who possess the class agency to dabble in sex work without any of the repercussions experienced by the vast majority of global sex workers. This is the equivalent of suburb kids roughing it on the streets, anarcho-punks from privileged families who think that dumpster diving is a political practice: unlike the people who did not choose to live in poverty, and thus who are actually impoverished, "slumming it" is a crude simulacrum of the actual experience of homelessness. People whose class positions are such that they can go home, can afford to properly feed themselves, cannot experience what it actually means to be poor––this is a life that was not chosen by the great majority of the world's masses and a life that they do not want.

Thus, someone who owns property and has a secure job cannot actually experience what it means to be a sex-worker because hir prime vocation is not one where s/he is forced to sell her body as an economic necessity. Sex labour in a context of class privilege is an activity, a game, where one's material reality produces a different set of options: you can always stop, you have a far greater margin of choice (your clientelle are more like dating options on Craigslist but with reimbursement attached), and by-and-large you are not a sex-worker because this is simply compensated dating––it is not the material institution of prostitution defined by labourers who have no other choice but to sell their labour in this institution. You are not part of this institution's army of labour; you are not part of its reserve army of labour when you aren't working.

Really, I have no moral problem with people who demand monetary reimbursement for casual dating and casual sex. I do have a political problem, however, with these people assuming: a) they are engaged in the real world of sex-work; b) they are practicing radical, anti-oppressive politics when they are simply slumming and, in this slumming, endorsing extremely alienated wage-slavery. I never considered the story of Pretty Woman to be "feminist", so I'm not going to consider call-girl slumming an act of radical politics.

And yet, whenever feminist arguments against the prostitution-is-liberating political line are made, those who are committed to sex-work as feminist agency get very angry and self-righteous. When my above cited post was reblogged and reposted on various sites, for example, there were numerous dismissive comments about how I was "straw-personing" the pro-prostitution feminist line. Except I wasn't straw-personing anything, and this was proved by the fact that all of those who made this claim could not explain where, how, or why the straw-person fallacy existed and functioned. (I have complained before about how internet commenters like to name fallacies but are unable to actually understand the meaning of these fallacies and, in naming them, actually produce fallacious arguments [i.e. the red herring fallacy].) My initial arguments regarding the "sex labour is inherently radical feminism" political line often employed reductio ad absurdem arguments, or reductions to the political essence and logical conclusions of the line I was critiquing––clarifying often politically confused positions to reveal inherent contradictions is not "straw-personing", it is how philosophically sound arguments function. In any case, there is generally an irony in this employment of the straw-person charge because the people who make it are the same people who actually straw-person those who are committed to the abolition of prostitution as part of the abolition of patriarchy.

Take, for example, the fact that whenever those of us who argue that the global sex trade is an essential part of patriarchy, the response is that we are "anti-sex" and "anti-prostitute." While it is true that there are puritan moralists whose conservative notions of sex and prostitution is worthy of such a charge, the people who are attacked by this straw-person argument are most often people who are: a) invested in the unionization of sex-workers as necessary (but who want johns and pimps targeted); b) who don't think that prostitution is not essentially defined by the act of sex [this is its formal quality] but by the commodification and control of womens' bodies. This accusation of "anti-sex" and "anti-prostitute" is akin to accusing all anti-capitalists of being feudalists. Clearly there are some "anti-capitalists" who are raving reactionaries––who want to go back to the "good old days" where morals were morals (Christian fundamentalists, for example)––and who feel that the market is bad for morality, industrialism terrible for the soul (Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is precisely this sort of "anti-capitalism"), but it would be ludicrous to argue that the progressive commitment to an anti-capitalist politics is marred by the same conservative dogma. And yet this straw-person conceptualization of the "abolitionist" position lingers and, with this fallacy, the fallacy of bifurcation: either you are for the institution of prostitution or you are against sex and prostitutes.

Those of us who feel that the global sex trade industry is oppressive begin by asking structural questions: who controls the means of production, who by-and-large consumes the commodity, and who profits from the surplus value generated. These are the same questions that we must ask about any labour institution under capitalism and they are not questions that should lead critical leftists into idiotic dismissals of workers rights or condemnations of people who are forced to sell their labour. Rejecting the labour process under capitalism does not mean rejecting fights for unions or labour reforms, but a revolutionary position has always been one that judges reforms as ultimately limited. A unionized factory under capitalism is still a factory under capitalism: it is not a site of liberated labour.

But those who imagine that the practice of alienated labour can somehow be liberating are those whose politics lurk at the level of individuality and the level of the formal appearance of this labour. When they attempt to make arguments about structure they are reduced to making silly comparisons between sex-work and academic work, arguing that we live in a society where the latter is privileged at expense of the former. They never question the structural meaning behind the division of labour between mental and manual, nor do they question the fact that their entire analysis emerges from a position of academic privilege. In the end, their politics is a politics of privilege, of the autonomy that comes from petty bourgeois privilege, radical in form and anti-radical in essence.

And when they cannot develop arguments that actually engage with the arguments of abolitionists, these "feminists" lapse into unprincipled behaviour by targeting feminists involved in on-the-ground work with prostitutes and against the sex industry. There was an open letter circulated by abolitionist feminists, for example, discussing their treatment at the hands of these pro-prostitution ideologues. The fact that many of these abolitionists were former sex-workers (and not the type who possessed the privilege to play at sex work like a game), some experienced with the global third world aspect of the sex industry, apparently didn't matter: and so the pro-prostitution feminists ended up targeting a population who had real experience in the industry, just not the experience they wanted to hear. Really, if this political line didn't exist, it would be necessary for the pimps and pornographers––indeed for the patriarchy itself––to invent it.

Yet Again: Shameless [partially] Self Promotion [but of new joint blog]

2011-12-30T02:01:00.000-05:00

Over the past year and a half this blog, which has always pretty eclectic, has developed an audience that is less interested in my posts about movies and books and art. Interestingly enough, in the first year of my blog the only posts that garnered any traffic beyond my friend and comrade circles were those posts about movies and books. Indeed, the first post that was ever reblogged was my long analysis of Pascal Laugier's Martyrs. Now my reviews and analyses of art and literature and film generate far less traffic than other posts, so I stopped blogging about the cultural sphere of the superstructure about a year ago.

(This is not to say that I am interested in only blogging about those subjects that garner the most traffic. If that was the case, I would blog only about obituaries of people I disliked. After all, my posts about the late Jack Layton and the late Vaclav Havel are so far my most popular. [The latter received over 1000 hits on the first day of its posting! People really do like reading complaints about dead people!] I'm not lying when I say I was tempted to turn this blog into nothing more than exercise on pissing on the graves of personages I dislike…)

Since I still like blogging about books and films and music and such, but am now aware that this site is not necessarily the appropriate place to blog about these things (as eclectic and weird as I sometimes get), I've decided to diversify and move said "cultural" blogging to another site devoted only to rantings and ravings of the sphere of the so-called "arts." (Except for reviews and analyses of academic books which shall remain on this site.) This decision was also prompted by my partner who is a cultural worker and who has been bugging me for some time to start a joint blog with her where we can write about these sorts of things separately and together. A blog with a theme! A better name! A better URL! How could I resist? (Answer to hanging question: I could not.)

During the holidays, ending with today, we slowly cobbled together a blog over at wordpress which is called Achilles, Powder & Lead (if you don't get the reference, it's in the "About" section of that blog). Aside from general reviews and analyses we even have some ideas about running series' [one which is tentatively entitled "Soundtracks of Our Adolescent Lives" where we blog about relistening to music that used to mean something to us when we were teenagers], and about doing joint blogs about books/movies/installations we experienced together.

Hopefully those readers who still like my often crude analysis of cultural products will visit Achilles, Powder & Lead in the future. And if you don't like my analysis, then maybe you'll like my partner's analysis––she is more qualified, after all, to speak about these things… hell, most of my taste and analysis in this area was influenced by her to begin with.

I shall be putting this new blog on my blogroll post-haste––I even have a review to start it off. But since I don't write about cultural things that much these days, and my academic training makes me more inclined to philosophize/theorize/rant/blather about politics, MLM Mayhem will still be my blog priority. Also, don't expect the posts to be too frequent: my partner is responsible for the next one and, since she currently has more employed-job responsibilities than me, will probably be slower in blogging.

Now... If only some of you readers would start submitting your brilliant essays to my call-out at 100 Flowers Press…

Xmas Annoyances

2011-12-24T16:09:00.000-05:00

Like many communists who come from a certain religious background that is hegemonic in the Americas and Europe, this season (and specifically tomorrow) produces familial social obligations that can be simultaneously nostalgiac and onerous. Generally speaking, of course, this is a problem with most family obligations: we cannot forget that communism should mean the death of the family––or, at the very least, the death of the current and dominant expression of the family. But the traditional social obligations connected with this season are obligations that I find the most stressful. If my partner and I didn't care about our families we would avoid participating in any way, shape or form in this Yuletide hub-bub; the only reason we leave our city to visit our families elsewhere, and participate (granted, as minimally as possible) in Christmas social conventions, is because it matters to them.

The most obviously annoying thing about this season is its religious specificity. I would say eurocentric––because the specific form of Christmas that is shoved down our throats at the expense of every other religious and non-religious group is clearly the EuroAmerican White Jesus form––and this is true, but at least fifty per cent of our experience is a non-eurocentric form of Christmas (my partner is Palestinian and comes from a Palestinian Christian family), so the social obligations we are made to feel are not all eurocentric. And yet the eurocentrism is everywhere and so influences how even that side of the family understands the holiday. Even if this wasn't a problem, the fact that Christmas is pushed on everyone in this country regardless of the fact that everyone is not Christian––and though Christians make up the majority religious population, all other religious and non-religious populations clearly outnumber Christians––is bloody annoying.

Of course, this is a Christmas that is more of a capitalist holiday than properly christian holiday, the end result of Puritan colonization of the Americas stripped of most of its religious trappings and turned into the worship of the almighty dollar. And though this was perhaps the holiday's inevitable destiny, I am greatly annoyed by all this "Christmas is under attack" bullshit from the usual conservative sources. Why the hell should they care about the "consumerism" of Christmas when they are all different shades of capitalist? What other Christmas spirit is there? The one that was instituted by Constantine when the holiday was first founded to appropriate pagan festivals? That was about the expansion of the Roman Empire, Christianity suddenly its main ideology, and though those lamenting the death of "true" Christmas spirit are often great lovers of imperialism, I doubt they're invested in the spread of the Roman Empire. Who the hell cares about some "real" Christmas spirit that never existed. Really, the main reason the holiday is still hegemonic is because it is promoted by corporations and shopping malls. If it wasn't for capitalism, Christians would be free to celebrate whatever each of them think is the "true meaning of Christmas" in the privacy of their own homes––but then they'd all probably be complaining about how they can't go into their malls and hear their favourite yuletide songs.

Greatly annoying is the fact that we are socially obligated to buy gifts that has now degenerated into an irrational process. We've hit this point where family members will tell us what they want, and we're expected to tell them what we want, so really all we're doing is just exchanging money because we are socially obligated to exchange money on this holiday. It has nothing to do with gift-giving or even gift-receiving; it's just exchange. Adorno had something to say about this in Minima Moralia where, in his twenty-first meditation, he discusses how we live in a culture where people have forgotten how to give gifts. Really, aside from the logic of commodity consumption, what's the point?

Well I suppose the point is to return to the religious specificity (and most often eurocentric notion) of Christmas that I already complained about above. Really, I don't give a shit about some true meaning of the season because, aside from banal pronouncements about love and faith (which now mean "have faith in Santa Clause, that is believe in something you know is a lie and then lie to your children), this season really has no true meaning because it began as a state-sanctioned holiday and is now a capitalist-sanctioned holiday.

Some comrades recently reminded me of Alexandra Kollontai's Soon, a Christmas story without Christmas. If there is any "true meaning" I would want to get out of Christmas, it would be the message of this story which, ultimately, is the story of a world that has transcended Christmas.

Counter-revolutionary and Revisionist Die on the Same Day

2011-12-19T02:32:00.001-05:00

While people were still spilling too much ink writing peonages to a petty bourgeois essayist who, regardless of whatever skill he possessed as a stylist, will eventually be forgotten, two historically important figures died. Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-Il are now dead; the closeness of their respective deaths is simultaneously marked by a vast political distance. Whereas Vaclav Havel represented the aspirations of the global bourgeois class, the frenzied excitement at the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the elevation of capitalism as "the end of history", Kim Jong-Il represented the continuation of the kind of "communism" that served as a straw-person justification for victorious capitalism. And the demonization of the latter figure, that will doubtless continue after his passing, will also serve to justify the hagiography of the former.

Indeed, expect the hagiography of Vaclav Havel to reach frenzied heights in upcoming weeks. Although the cultural industry that thrust him into the position of "velvet revolution" hero was no longer necessary in the decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, we will all be reminded of his importance, his bravery and self-sacrifice, in innumerable obituaries. Doubtless, Bono will speak at his funeral and U2 will produce a chart-topping hit about Havel's accomplishments. The historical amnesia regarding Havel's very existence (for we so often forget the heroes force-fed to us by the bourgeois media industry) will be replaced by that previous historical amnesia, the one that made us believe he was a saint in the first place. Although we must agree that the state capitalism of Czechoslovakia needed to be criticized by the left, the fact that we were told to celebrate Havel and his "velvet revolution" rather than the Czechoslovakian Communists and their Prague Spring (an authentic communist rebellion against Soviet chauvinism where "Lenin wake up, Brezhnev is speaking bullshit!" was the rallying cry) is the most cynical expression of historical memory.

The official obituaries of Vaclav Havel, all of which will be devoted to elevating the man to the status of St. Francis of Assisi, will never mention that Havel was a dedicated counter-revolutionary, not the humanist that the Bonos of the world like to claim, whose presidency in Czechoslovakia demonstrated, as Michael Parenti pointed out years ago in Blackshirts & Reds, "his reactionary religious obscurantism, his undemocratic suppression of leftist [even anti-communist liberal leftist] opponents, and his profound dedication to economic inequality and an unrestrained free-market capitalism." And if we were told anything honest about Havel's social background we would know the following:

"Raised by governesses and chauffeurs in a wealthy anti-communist family, Havel denounced democracy's 'cult of objectivity and statistical average' and the idea that rational, collective social efforts should be applied to solving the environmental crisis." (Parenti, 97)

Havel also whole-heartedly supported the original Gulf War, suspended his own parliament when he was in power so that he could rule without worrying about constitutional niceties (and to speed up free-market reforms), sold weapons to the repressive regimes in the Philippines and Thailand, signed a law that made the advocation of socialism in Czechoslovakia a felony, advocated that any self-proclaimed "communist" be barred from employment, and passed a law that made criticisms of corporations a "hate crime." He regained his family fortune, becoming extremely wealthy, while pushing through privatization laws that ensured massive poverty.

And yet we will celebrate him as a hero, a great statesman, a pacifist standing against "totalitarianism." Especially since he died almost simultaneously to Kim Jong-Il, the perfect spectre of the very totalitarianism we are told communism means. So while Havel's praises are sung with utter historical amnesia, Kim Jong-Il's crimes will be perfectly remembered (along with a bunch that will be added without any historical evidence). A saint and a demon, we will be told, died on the same day: a tragedy and celebration at the same time.

Obviously I am not one of those uncritical leftists who imagines the DPRK was the communist wonderland proclaimed by "juche thought". And though I celebrate the Korean revolutionary resistance led by Kim Il-Sung against the forces of reaction led by US imperialism, the extremely problematic feudalized communism that would eventually be promoted by Kim Jong-Il was history repeating first as tragedy and then as farce. At the same time, however, we cannot ignore the brutal sanctions that were applied to North Korea following the imperialists' failure to win the Korean War, sanctions that grew more brutal when China became state capitalist in the 1970s and stopped supporting the DPRK. We know that similar sanctions levelled upon Cuba were a serious problem for the revolutionary government, and North Korea was far more isolated than Cuba. Always the target of imperialist intervention, even though it lacked the power to do anything aside from trying to feed its people and throw parades for a communist leadership distorted into an imperial dynasty, one has to admire the tenacity of the DPRK's people (though not, admittedly, the politics of their leader).

Although we will be told that Vaclav Havel was the hero and Kim Jong-Il the villain on this shared obituary date, we should ask why this is the case. What makes Havel more of a "hero" than Kim? Really, only the fact that he served the interests of empire. A plutocrat, an autocrat, a man who used political power to take away democratic rights and who now uses his economic power to ensure that poverty flourishes in his country… How is this man more of a hero than his counterpart in death? Only because Kim Jong-Il more obviously fits the role of villain.

Vaclav Havel is a statesman, a staunch opponent of "totalitarianism", a cultural icon who wrote literature and was thus loved by a small but vocal group of the western literati. Kim Jong-Il is a "buffoon", a totalitarian despot, the kind of dictator who fancied himself a cultural icon but whose literary and artistic worth was the product of a self-inflated ego. But Havel was a statesman because he was a manufactured to be a statesman by the imperialist forces behind his "velvet revolution"; his opposition to "totalitarianism" was matched by the anti-democratic laws he pushed through his post-communist parliament; and he's only a cultural icon because he was promoted as such by the imperialist industry. (I mean, really, have you actually tried to read The Memorandum? When I was a confused quasi-anarchist who believed the lies told about Havel I actually tried… Try it for yourself: it's derivative of Beckett, a pantomime of absurdism barely hiding the woefully typical "Animal Farm" anti-communism, the sort of thing no one would care about if Havel had been anyone other than who he was.)

Havel cuts a mean figure, sauve and smooth and proto-individualist… and, we must not forget, absurdly rich. The shorter Kim, an easy outlet for orientalism, is the perfect archetype of the "asian despot" which is part of the imperialist collective unconscious… is it any wonder that every so-called "satire" of the man has primarily involved, despite the fact that there is so much that could actually be satired, the most racist "chinaman" depictions?

So here is what we will encounter in the piles of obituaries produced in the following weeks: Vaclav Havel the friend of humanity died, a great loss for the world; Kim Jong-Il, totalitarian enemy of existence, is finally gone and this is cause for celebration. But I would suggest that, while not mourning the passing of the latter, those of us who proclaim that we are anti-capitalists, that we are leftists, should celebrate the passing of the former whose death was, like the deaths of so many imperialists and capitalists who promoted the starvation and death of the masses, worth less than the weight of a feather.

"People of the Shining Path": Old Dispatches Television Documentary (1992)

2011-12-17T17:41:00.002-05:00

A month ago, I wrote a post about class morality that mentioned, in passing, certain assessments of the Communist Party of Peru (PCP-SL, also known as the Sendero Luminoso or "Shining Path") as an example of how revolutions are morally conceived by bourgeois ideology. Although the post was not intended to defend the Sendero Luminoso (and in fact noted that, in my opinion, the organization theoretically and practically degenerated on certain points), someone in the comments string took issue with my use of the Shining Path as an example and failed to understand my overall points about bourgeois ideology.

The comments condemning the Sendero Luminoso demonstrated a typical over-reliance on the very dubious Truth and Reconciliation Committee of Peru––an organization staffed by conservatives and state officials and thus far from "independent"––which blamed many of the brutal policies of Alberto Fujimori's Grupo Colina death squad on the PCP-SL. Moreover, these comments made unfounded pronouncements about the lack of popular support for the Shining Path. While I agree that the Sendero had significant problems, and that we cannot ignore how and where it degenerated in theory and practice, I have always maintained it is better to critique these organizations from the left rather than from the right.

In any case, I recently encountered an old Dispatches television documentary from 1992 entitled "People of the Shining Path". (Although Abimael Guzman ("Gonzalo") was captured along with most of the PCP-SL leadership in 1992, this documentary was made in the months preceding the capture.) This documentary is not made by pro-communists but by liberal journalists who are interested only in encountering SL guerrillas. (For those who don't know, Dispatches is an award-winning BBC investigative journalist program––kind of like the British 60 Minutes––and not even close to being a communist/anti-capitalist institution.) Existing before the emergence of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee's narrative gained hegemony, however, it is important to note that the Dispatches journalists are not yet a priori conditioned by a counter-revolutionary discourse:

Whether or not we agree with the ideology behind this documentary (Dispatches has always been, at best, a liberal humanitarian) or the ideology of the Sendero Luminoso, there are some important things to note:

a) The policies of Fujimori are clearly understood as fascist and even, at one point, deemed "genocidal" by the journalists––this is something most bourgeois critics of the PPW now, following the emergence of the counter-revolutionary discourse, have disappeared.

b) The PCP-SL is clearly depicted as having massive public support in 1992, very close to the moment it was beheaded, despite the Truth and Reconciliation Committee's arguments that its violent activities had already led to its alienation. The Dispatches journalists even indicate that Peru is on the brink of a revolutionary seizure of state power and that the Shining Path is the largest leftwing movement in Latin America.

c) The party cadres interviewed are not raving maniacs. Although they do occasionally demonstrate a cultish devotion to Gonzalo, they are clearly guided by a principled desire to end the poverty produced by the ruling class government. They understand that the duty of the movement is to end this poverty and provide the people with a better world––they even make these arguments. Moreover, there is a significant female guerrilla population: these are not masculinist guerrillas obsessed with how macho they are. At around the 23 minute mark, there is coverage of the hundreds of Sendero Luminoso guerrillas in prison: they are depicted as principled, intelligent, and disciplined––so much so that the other prisoners hold them in high regard––and there is even a depiction of the execution of these prisoners of war.

d) The Dispatches journalists make it clear that the discourse that portrays the PCP-SL as "a bunch of vicious terrorists" is state propaganda. This is significant because it demonstrates that the discourse of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission [which again, I emphasize, was comprised of ruling class officials and intellectuals––including former military officials] was already in existence. If anything the Truth and Reconciliation began on the ad hoc principle that the PCP-SL were "vicious terrorists" and, as those of us who are familiar with ad hoc fallacies know, simply chose to assemble its data according to a presupposed conclusion.

e) The guerrillas are consistently depicted as a peoples army, not some band of murderous thugs but a popular organization that has grown significantly due to state repression. Indeed, Dispatches depicts the tactics used against the SL in a way that can possibly explain the later "findings" of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee: peasant counter-insurgents trained by the state (a popular tactic learned from USAmerica's many counter-insurgency campaigns in Latin America), though a minority compared to the PCP-SL's Peoples Army, appear very similar to the SL. After the Truth and Reconciliation Committee published its report, after all, Shining Path sympathizers in Peru were known to argue that many atrocities blamed upon the PCP-SL were actually atrocities carried out by state-sponsored death squads "posing" as SL cadres as part of a strategy to alienate the guerrillas from the masses. While this may sound conspiratorial, this has always been a counter-insurgency tactic and is in every CIA handbook about counter-insurgency tactics––we must remember that the Peruvian military was being trained by the US during this period. (This CIA endorsed practice of posing as other organizations while carrying out violent activities is in fact part of a proud American settler tradition. The Boston Teaparty, after all, was a massacre where secessionists dressed up as indigenous people when they massacred the British, thus causing the British to focus their return violence on native populations.)

f) The atrocities are blamed primarily on the Peruvian state, not the Shining Path. Even peasants who are not guerrillas blame the violence on the army. The violence attributed to the PCP-SL, though condemned by Dispatches, is violence that is directed at specific state and military targets, not civilian populations… Again it is interesting to note how, in around a decade, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee was able to produce a discourse that altered what was depicted in this documentary. "The Shining Path has been blamed for a campaign of terror against Peruvians," the narrator says at one point, "But most deaths have been the work of the military."

g) The mass-scale demonstrations shaking the country are against the government, not the Shining Path, so if the Shining Path had "zero popular support" or was responsible for most of the violence, then why are there no mass-scale demonstrations against the PCP-SL? Thus, if the Truth and Reconciliation Committee was correct, and the Sendero Luminoso was responsible for slaughtering civilians, then why are the majority of those peasants who lived through this violence not protesting the Shining Path? Is it because they're ignorant indian peasants who are incapable of understanding their true enemies? The discourse that blames all the atrocities on the guerrillas depends on a rejection of peasant agency and historical amnesia. In fact, you can see a lot of PCP-SL flags in these massive demonstrations.

h) The US discourse that the Shining Path received its support from "the narco-trafficker", used as a pretext for its intervention during the Emergency, is said to be without evidence. In fact, the documentary points out that the Shining Path declared drug traffickers "enemies of the people." And yet, the argument that the Sendero Luminoso was an organization of cocaine smugglers is still part of a counter-revolutionary discourse.

i) The PCP-SL is at the stage of "strategic equilibrium" and has the power to overthrow the state. So why did it eventually fail? When Guzman was captured, and then appeared to deliver a statement that the PPW was over and had failed, it is most probably the case that the Sendero Luminoso's devotion to the Cult of Gonzalo allowed them to behead themselves.

"How Good 'We' Have It"

2011-12-13T18:35:00.001-05:00

At various points in the blog I have discussed the tension surrounding using bourgeois rights in a non-bourgeois manner. Moreover, I have argued that what are often misunderstood as "bourgeois rights"––that is, rights that capitalism gives its subjects out of the goodness of its heart––are actually not essential to capitalism and primarily exist under capitalism because of struggles against capitalism. To paraphrase from memory a comment made by Jeff Noonan at Rethinking Marxism 2009: capitalism's essential logic is antithetical to life and the only things that have made capitalism liveable exist because of anti-capitalist struggle.

If capitalism is a system based on the logic of surplus-value (which includes accumulation, expansion, the subordination of use to exchange, economic alienation, militarism, and anything that means in a very simple and very crude sense profit over people), then the only individual "human" rights that matter are those rights required to allow exchange to persist. The only reason that there are such things––and in a limited sense only at some points in the capitalist-dominated world––as labour rights, freedom of expression, social welfare is because, faced with the possibility of revolt, the capitalist ruling class at different points in society and history were forced to realize it was more feasible to grant concessions in order to neutralize revolution. This is the reason welfare capitalism exists, or that Keynes argued for what amounted to social capitalism. Of course, there are always other ways for capitalism to deal with revolts, especially during times of crisis, which is why the possibility of fascism always lurks as a possible response to anti-capitalist revolt. At this historical conjuncture this threat is perhaps more imminent.

In any case, the rights we are supposedly provided by capitalism at the centres of imperialism, besides the fact of having emerged from the crucible of rebellion, generally work to sustain capitalism by muting its contradictions in those areas where these rights exist. Better yet, they provide capitalist ideologues with arguments against anti-capitalism. When people in the centres of global capitalism take positions against capitalism they are generally told by the most cynical and common-sensical individuals who can neither think globally nor beyond the boundaries of a limited bourgeois imagination that rebellion is hypocritical: "you have it so good, the only reason you can protest is because this system gives you the right to protest."

Well, we should know what this means. One of the key liberal thinkers who, unlike his predecessors, understood the need for capitalism to provide a certain level of individual rights in order to sustain itself was J.S. Mill. And yet Mill's argument for freedom of expression is an argument for a marketplace of ideas: the freedom to express anti-capitalist opinions should be allowed as long as it remains in the realm of expression and opinion; the moment it harms others–-especially capitalists and thus the market––this freedom should be disallowed. So in essence: you have the right to protest, to complain about what you shouldn't bother complaining about, as long as your protests do not transform into concrete rebellion.

Even now, when the liberal capitalism of the centres is eroding, a century of "equal rights" liberalism has successfully worked its way into the consciousness of not only the defenders of capitalism but also the consciousness of those who are supposedly anti-capitalist. And thanks to imperialism, where the surplus lost at the centres can be regained through capital expansion into the peripheries, these supposed anti-capitalists are also affected by a labour aristocrat consciousness: social reforms in the capitalist modes of production, though partly a response to rebellion, are also connected to the logic of increased exploitation in the peripheries.

So here we have a strata of anti-capitalists who want to argue for the end of capitalism but who are still so often invested in the persistence of liberal capitalism. Those of us who are "marxist academics", or whatever flavour of anti-capitalist "intellectual", are especially prone to being affected by liberal capitalist ideology. Really, all we need to be happy anti-capitalists are tenured positions, publishing contracts, and the right to express our "anti-capitalism" in the marketplace of ideas. We might believe in revolution in theory, but in practice we are acting as if good arguments and a shit-load of papers and books will bring about the end of capitalism.

The irony, then, is that while we get annoyed by those capitalist ideologues who argue that we shouldn't protest because "we have it so good" (as if there is no other we besides the we at the is both at the centres of capitalism and are moderately privileged), so many of us act according to this argument. For if we truly wanted to reject the argument that we're so privileged to have bourgeois rights, our practice would not merely be about saving these rights: the majority of anti-capitalist organizations and groups at the centres of capitalism, regardless of what they argue, do little more than produce ideological debates and reformist movements. And leftist academics are especially notorious for doing nothing beyond (if even this) defending protests and actions that are primarily reformist. Hell, some of them don't even do this very well: for example, when my labour union was on strike (and strikes, though important, are generally reformist), there were "marxist" professors who refused to support us… These are professors who are proud to sit on "worker" organizations but, despite all their talk of labour rights, have actively undermined my union's collective agreement.

Thus, although it is easy to understand why smug liberal arguments about "how good we have it" are essentially idiotic, some of us continue to act as if this is the case… And this is because some of us are those who do have it pretty good under capitalism because we are petty bourgeois intellectuals, a privileged strata of the labour aristocracy that have far more to lose than our chains if a revolutionary movement, and the resultant counter-revolutionary actions of the state, began to make a privileged life under liberal capitalism uncomfortable.

On Attempts to Massify Philosophy

2011-12-09T12:38:00.000-05:00

Around two years ago I picked up a small book, published at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, entitled Selected Essays on the Study of Philosophy by Workers, Peasants and Soldiers. The essays in this book are the product of various study groups based in different sites of production during the GPCR––ship yards, glass factories, motor plants, village communes, etc.––and at first read appear like a rather strange and perhaps humorous attempt to "philosophize". Take, for example, the essay entitled "Dialectics of Building a 10,000-Ton Freighter" where the authors (a workers' philosophy study group in Tientsin Hsin-kang Shipyard) write:

Standard practice in building a ship is to use a berth corresponding in size to the ship under construction. Our shipyard has only a 5,000-ton berth. Was it possible to build a 10,000-ton freighter there? […] Some shook their heads and said: "it would be sheer adventure." […] Others ridiculed the idea as "reckless". […] The bourgeois "experts" and "authorities" who could not get along without the crutch of foreign literature considered it out of the question to build a freighter of such size on this berth. […] But the broad masses of revolutionary shipbuilders said firmly: "With the invincible Mao Zedong Thought we can certainly build a 10,000-ton freighter on a 5,000-ton berth!"

Then the essay goes on to explain why 10,000-ton freighters are philosophically important, and why producing them rather than purchasing them is a philosophical necessity, with an excitement for the details of ship-building––juxtaposed perhaps awkwardly with philosophical statements such as "matter can be transformed into consciousness and consciousness into matter"––that could only be expressed by people who are really into ship-building.

As someone who possesses a doctorate in "philosophy", and is thus supposed to be interested in what it means to be a philosopher, there is that snobbish university bred part of me––that liberalism that continuously needs to be kicked in the teeth––that wants to dismiss the sort of philosophizing found in this book as crude, ludicrous, absurd, and embarrassing. After all, if my students ever philosophized in their papers in the manner of some of these essays (i.e. in "Dialectics Applied in Driving Safely", a member of a PLA transport argues that there is a revolutionary and counter-revolutionary way to drive a truck) I would be extremely disappointed. Since first year students are often under the impression that "philosophy" is just their "opinions about life", first year philosophy essays are generally filled with whacky speculations about the students' "own personal philosophy", which is never as unique as they might imagine.

I know of other marxist academics who have encountered these essays and have used them as examples of "bad marxist philosophy". Since the workers at the shipyard clearly do not possess the requisite background to perform "proper" and "rigorous" philosophy, these "curious" essays are worthy of little more than derision and scorn. One quite famous, and now retired, marxist academic at the university where I work apparently even mocked this book in a lecture––look at how stupid these workers and peasants are compared to those of us who are the "real" marxist philosophers! As academics we want our marxism to be taken seriously as an intellectual system; we get defensive whenever we encounter representations that appear to resemble the papers of first year students and seem to make our chosen system of thought into something less rigorous than we think it should be.

And yet there is something completely different between spurious first year philosophy papers and the essays found in this book. First year philosophy students are usually "philosophizing" ruling class opinions they imagine are unique (often cribbed without reflection from crude understandings of Nietzsche) because they imagine that they are unique philosophy individuals. The writers of the essays in this book, however, emerge from work teams that are trying to make sense of their labour, to bring meaning to their practical activity. In this context, dialectics are not an abstract philosophical problem but a concrete engagement with the concrete world.

Returning to the example of the 10,000-ton freighter we discover an attempt to comprehend dialectical logic in the real world, in practical activity: "we must base ourselves on existing objective conditions, and shipbuilding is no exception. But material is a dead factor, while men are living [this is the unity of opposites]. Once we grasp… materialist dialectics and give full play to man's dynamic role, we can create the conditions. […] Those who thought it impossible to build a large freighter on a small berth actually saw only things, not people; they saw only the prevailing conditions and not the developing ones. This view is contrary to materialist dialectics." Whether or not we agree with this assessment of dialectics is not the point: these essays are not concerned with making academic arguments, they are attempts on the part of workers and peasants to interpret the meaning of their labour and, after this act of interpretation (which is the moment of philosophy), attempting to apply what they have examined to their objective experience in order to change their circumstances.

Whatever their problems, the fact that these essays exist should actually be cause for excitement, rather than scorn, amongst those of us who claim to be marxists. These essays are the result of a period where there was a great attempt, however short-lived and ultimately failed, to bridge the gap between intellectual and manual labour. The mental division of labour, marxists should know, is one of the problems with which all socialist revolutions must engage: we cannot simply believe that some people are destined to be the intellectuals and others are destined to be the menial workers, the former predestination valued more than the latter. And the GPCR, whatever its mistakes and ultimate failure, was a moment in time where there were massive attempts to eliminate this division: intellectuals [often kicking and screaming] were sent to work in village or factory communes; mass art projects and exhibitions, artistic and literary production from below, were launched; worker and peasant universities were built in massive numbers with a curriculum aimed at embedding learning within concrete circumstances and making knowledge accessible [as depicted in Breaking With Old Ideas]; and workers were expected to study marxist philosophy rather than simply allow the party officials to the thinking for them.

Unfortunately, we know these attempts to bridge the gap between mental and manual labour eventually failed. Perhaps one of the seeds of this failure can be observed in Selected Essays on the Study of Philosophy by Workers, Peasants and Soldiers: the over-reliance on "immortal Mao Zedong Thought", which was then the codification of marxist theory aimed at people who, probably for the first time in their life, were just encountering philosophy. And as much as the codification might have been a good entry point into dialectical thinking, the fact that it was wed to the figure of Mao Zedong could lead to the confusion between a person and a philosophical system––we are generally wary these days, and for good reason, of cults of personality.

Still, the fact that workers and peasants were studying philosophy in the context of their own concrete circumstances should be treated by those of us who claim to be marxists as tremendously exciting. Even more exciting is the fact that these essays were published. We need to imagine what it would be like for a worker or peasant who, previous to the revolution, was treated as "stupid" and less important than those who were privileged to attend university. Suddenly these people are encouraged to study philosophy, are told that their labour is just as important (if not more so) than the contemplative labour of those who spend all their time in the ivory tower, and get to see their essays printed in magazines and books. The idea was to try and transform every worker into an intellectual, and every intellectual into a worker.

A similar approach happened with art during the GPCR: suddenly everyone from every point in life was producing literature and posters. As Mobo Gao pointed out in Battle For China's Past, regardless of the often didactic and perhaps crude artistic nature of these attempts, we should be impressed by the fact that there was a pursuit of mass art––the rise of cultural sites of production was unprecedented. Peasant and worker artists were showing their work at galleries alongside the more "respectable" artists; even if we might take issue with the aesthetic quality of most of what was produced, we cannot deny that this situation, because it was casting the net wide in an attempt to turn the masses into artists or art critics, also led to the production of some very significant art installations such as Rent Collection Courtyard.

In any case, just as there was an attempt to massify art, there was an attempt to massify philosophy. To pour scorn on these attempts is to pour scorn on those who, for the first time in their lives, were participating in privileged sites of production. So what if much of their art or philosophy was not as "aesthetically worthy" or "intellectually rigorous" as those who scorn their attempts complain? Derision here is anti-marxist: it is anti-worker and anti-peasant––this is the intellectual elitism that is contingent on the contradiction between mental and manual labour. Academic marxists, regardless of their political commitment, are just as prone to experiencing this elitism as other academics.

Moreover, what is important about these attempts is the fact that, regardless of what we might think of some of the productions, they in some sense are an argument for the importance of art and philosophy. For example, we philosophers are usually very aware of the joke, that is commonplace in this society, that our degrees are worthless because philosophy is worthless––we should have become medical doctors, lawyers, or engineers. The attempt to massify philosophy demonstrated by Selected Essays on the Study of Philosophy by Workers, Peasants and Soldiers, however, is also an argument for the importance of philosophy. For if it wasn't deemed important, why encourage workers and peasants to launch philosophical study groups?

As for the story of the 10,000-ton freighter, the workers actually did succeed in building it on a 5,000-ton berth. I would like to imagine that their philosophizing about the concrete situation contributed to this process.

Random Cultural Interlude

2011-12-05T15:32:00.000-05:00

After so many "serious" blog posts (most of which degenerate, as usual, into rants) I figure that it is time to write something not-so-serious––or, at the very least, less contentious [maybe]. Since I have not blogged about films and books for awhile (and since I used to have the odd film or book review peppered throughout this blog), I'm going to spend this post gibbering on about what I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week. This will perhaps give people an insight into the strange landscape of my interior life: no I do not only read Marxist/Leninist/Maoist literature, or only watch "political" movies, dismissing everything else as "bourgeois" and hardly worth my notice. So, in no particular order, I will describe the cultural products (some of them crap some of them not crap) that are not specifically marxist that I have been shoving into my brain over the past seven or eight days.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (novel): I'm halfway through this massive novel and am somewhat disappointed. Seven years ago I picked up Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and like so many others fell in love with the author. Considering the size of 1Q84, I was under the impression that, unlike his previous novel (After Dark), I would encounter something just as good (if not better than) Wind-Up Bird. I mean, Kafka On The Shore was almost as good as Wind-Up Bird, but since it was half the size it couldn't cover as much territory.

Unfortunately 1Q84 meanders a lot, doesn't have the same resonance and depth, and in so many ways feels derivative of Wind-Up Bird. To be clear, I am enjoying the novel, and I think the concept is interesting enough to keep me hooked, but I feel that it isn't as good as it could be––a strange feeling to have but, if you've read Wind-Up Bird (or even Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World or Kafka On The Shore) then you'll know what I mean.

Granted, I'm only halfway through: perhaps it will get better. So far, and aside from the meandering plot, there are annoying aspects to 1Q84 that continue to frustrate my reading enjoyment. I mean, what the hell is with the fixation on womens' breasts? Despite the supposed "feminist" moments in the novel (the character Aomame is an assassin who murders misogynist and abusive men), every chapter forces you into the male gaze where Murakami is describing the female anatomy, specifically "breasts". Now I get that the character Tengo has some Oedipal fixation on that part of his mother's anatomy, and that maybe if Tengo is secretly the author of 1Q84's narrative then we're simply being treated to his fixation, but it is just bloody annoying. Male gaze aside, it feels entirely juvenile: Murakami's breast fixation in this book is like that of a teenaged boy who has just hit puberty––you expect more from one of Japan's leading writers.

Sennentuntschi by Michael Steiner (film): A very disturbing and cunningly executed movie from Switzerland that plays on an old Swiss folktale, revealing its inherent misogyny. The time framing is very well done, but if I say anything further on this it will ruin the movie.

My partner's short analysis of the film goes something like this: "moral and social codes allow men to make their sins invisible. The mystery of the film is whether these sins reappear as ghosts in the shape of women or as women's hysteria. Either way there is punishment Watch at your own risk." She twittered something shorter and similar.

Sennentuntschi is the type of horror film that is made only once in a while these days––the kind that pushes for a sense of sinister dread and ominous atmosphere rather than wallow in blood and body horror. Not that there isn't blood or body horror. And the film's depiction of sexual violence, though treated the way that sexual violence should be treated on screen––as disturbing rather than sensationalized a la the Watchmen movie or, in another way, Irreversible (the former's depiction appeared to glorify rape; the latter used rape simply as a shock tactic rather than to make any point about violence towards women)––is still something neither myself nor my partner could watch. We love horror movies, though, and especially those horror movies that take the time to really deal with the violence underneath society.

Sennentuntschi felt like Sauna (though set in a different time period), and like Sauna it fell flat on the ending: the pay-off is a little too hurried and overly obscure, and the moments before the ending should have been where it stopped. I think that some screen-writers and filmmakers don't know where to end their films.

Episodes of The Walking Dead (television): Did I mention that both myself and my partner like horror? And we both have a soft-spot for zombie horror, especially since the original Night of the Living Dead uses the zombie genre to examine race in 1960s America (the black protagonist survives the zombies only to be murdered by white rednecks at the end of the film). And yet most zombie horror since Romero has been just a rehashing of the same zombie tropes. 28 Days Later, which was not exactly a zombie film, is probably the only exception. Otherwise most zombie films (whether with slow or fast zombies) are rather derivative.

The Walking Dead is definitely derivative. The comic series, which I started reading years ago and never finished because I found it rather unremarkable, was the basis for the series (though the series departed pretty early on, and maybe for good reasons, from the comic's narrative) and every time I watch episodes in this series I keep asking myself why they chose The Walking Dead as the source material. Hell, even the beginning of The Walking Dead is bloody derivative (man wakes up in hospital from coma to find the world has gone to zombie apocalypse – clearly the author ripped this off of 28 Days Later). Plus, the story of the father searching for his family in zombie land was already done in the cult novel The Rising, and done better (but with shitty prose, unfortunately) because it was in a context that was also a new take on the zombie.

And why is the main character a pig? I'm tired of white cops who are dude's dudes saving the ladies and the people of colour. I want to see an adaptation of Alden Bell's novel The Reapers Are The Angels which is the only original zombie story since Romero I have ever encountered. Not because the zombie apocalypse is different (there is no faster zombies! super zombies! zombies from outer space!) but because the approach to the zombie apocalypse transcends the genre and is not merely a repetition of the same Hobbesian narrative. None of this is to say that The Walking Dead isn't enjoyable, and isn't filled with dramatic tension, but just that, like the majority of zombie movies and books and comics out there right now, it does nothing new or interesting with the genre. If you want zombies in a context that goes beyond zombies, read The Reapers Are The Angels (Faulkner and O'Connor in zombie world is what critics are saying); if you want the same old zombie apocalypse, then watch something like The Walking Dead.

Second Manifesto For Philosophy by Alain Badiou (philosophy book): Yes I try to keep up, somewhat, with Badiou since I am supposed to be a "philosopher" (well that's what my PhD says, though sometimes I feel a little alienated from this discipline), and even though I disagree in so many ways, philosophically, with Badiou… Even though I feel that his philosophical concerns are a dead end for thought.

At the same time, though, I've always been impressed that someone is doing ontology in the way that ontology was done before logical positivism and post-structuralism––that is, in a way that ontology was done before the so-called analytic-continental divide. Of course, sometimes I also think that ontology is a bloody waste of time. Nor do I think that Badiou, even if he is an ontological "genius", can call himself a materialist when he is obsessed with reconstituting Plato for his ontological inspiration. Call it what you want Badiou, but it does smack of sophistry when you try to say Platonism is not idealism (it is): there is a reason we trace the division between idealism and materialism to the division between Plato and Aristotle; anyone who calls themselves a Platonist, neo-Platonist, Platonic Realist, is an idealist unless they aren't doing Plato.

In any case, and as I have complained before, I do find it odd that Badiou is becoming the theorist flavour of the year outside of Philosophy (or those who study, outside of philosophy as a hard discipline, the history of this sort of philosophy). Ontology is something that is one of the concerns of philosophy and there is no possible way that a book like Being and Event can be understood by people who do not have the requisite ontological background. After all, there are things in math and physics that we would not be able to understand without being mathematicians and physicists: Badiou's philosophical work is a work that exists at that point of philosophical investigation that no one has really been doing since the early twentieth century and is what could properly be called philosophy––not theory, not the theoretical flavour of the week that can be dropped into some random literary theory course beside excerpts from other "hot" theorists. Which perhaps demonstrates the problems with this sort of theorizing. Outside of a philosophy context Badiou reads as bullshit, as another charlatan (or terroriste obscurantist as Foucault once called Derrida), which is probably why so many academics, who like to yammer on about what sounds brilliant and profound [brilliant and profound understood as something rendered opaque by jargon and thus understandable only by the "enlightened" few, if understood at all], are into Badiou.

Apokalypsis by Chelsea Wolfe (music): I have been listening to this quite a bit over the past month, thanks to a comrade blogger who sent me the album, and am really into Wolfe's creative channelling of PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, black metal ambience, to make music wholly her own. (There is also the fact that she covered Burzum's "Black Spell of Destruction"––say what you want about Burzum [fascist scum that needs to be purged whenever the revolution happens], Wolfe's cover is weirdly cool and, um.... disturbing?) In any case, check out her live performance of "Pale on Pale" and the video of "Mer", both different sounding but still the same, and you'll probably be hooked.

Settler Ideology and Attawapiskat

2011-12-03T18:51:00.002-05:00

There is a "common sense" settlerist discourse in this country that holds, empirical evidence to the contrary, that the colonized are privileged to be colonized––indeed, sometimes even more privileged than the colonizers. Perhaps a sublimated articulation of the "civilizing mission" ideology that could be openly proclaimed decades ago, the claim that the colonized "have it good" under colonialism is usually, specifically in Canada and the US, based on spurious claims about supposed tax exemptions, idyllic myths about North American bantustans (Canadian reserves, we need to remember, were the basis for the South African apartheid bantustan system), or some other garbage that passes for wisdom amongst those who want their racism justified as rational fact. Now with the media furor surrounding Attawapiskat, where once again the Canadian public is being inundated with the reality of colonized life (this happens every once in a while only to be quickly forgotten), the colonized-have-it-better-than-the-colonizer ideology cannot be asserted so easily. And yet, as anyone who understands that a colonial context necessarily requires colonial ideologies to function as colonialism, with a little bit of tinkering, the ideology persists in a more insulting form regardless of the reality of Attawapiskat.

Now we have the Conservative government claiming that it has provided Attawapiskat with around ninety million dollars in tax money since 2007 and that the reason for the abhorrent conditions (which, we need to point out, are just the conditions produced, to greater and lesser degrees, by colonialism) in this indigenous community are not the fault of the colonial government but the fault of indigenous mis-management. Here we have the perfect justification for both colonial misery and the ideology that the life of the colonized under colonialism, aside from the odd aberration produced by deviant individuals (i.e. residential schools are the fault of Catholic priests, not the logical result of Canadian colonialism), is a wonderful thing and all criticism is nothing more than ungrateful complaining. Actually, this ideological unity happens quite often, especially at those moments when the effects of colonialism are revealed or the colonized decide they're going to actively resist; the whole "Attawapiskat brought its misery upon itself" bullshit is actually quite predictable.

Thankfully, I don't have to spend much time demystifying this statement, the concrete meaning of the ninety million that has seized the imagination of every racist who wants to hold on to the colonized-have-it-better myth, because it has already been thoroughly demystified, statistically and historically with the colloquial fine-toothed comb, on âpihtawikosisân. [I urge everyone who plans to waste time commenting along the same lines as the ideology I have already heaped scorn upon to read the aforementioned article before replicating the same arguments that have been demonstrated as erroneous.] What I am concerned about in this post, however, is the ur-logic behind the ideology of the supposed "ninety million"––a figure that is being mindlessly repeated by every settlerist drone who wants to justify hir unexamined racism, and that was initially offered by the Harper government in such a way as to make those who had no intention of actually examine the figure believe that ninety million of "our tax dollars" were dolled out, in one generous and altruistic lump sum, to Attawapiskat on some ideal day of the week where the government decided to be kind to one of its internal colonies. (Indeed, even the fact that this supposed "donation" was provided to Attawapiskat since 2007, despite being part of the Conservative government's actual report, is conveniently dropped from the discourse.)

First of all, as the aforementioned article points out, the amount of money provided to Attawapiskat since 2007 is rather miniscule when compared to the federal tax funds provided to other municipalities. As a rule, the federal government provides tax money to cities and communities because tax money is meant to be earmarked for infrastructure––this is the point of taxes. Now a libertarian might make a point of complaining that these taxes are in themselves theft (the typical objectivist garbage), but to argue that communities such as Attawapiskat are benefiting more from "public tax theft" than your average settler communities is utter nonsense. So the question becomes: if Attawapiskat was even receiving federal taxes at the same level as your average settler community, why was it so badly "mis-managed"? There are two logical responses to this question: a) the community, unlike those "fiscally responsible" settler communities, is responsible for its own mis-management; b) there were structural reasons for this "mis-management."

Point (a) is the point wherein hegemonic settler ideology operates. Rather than even examining the possibility of structural inequalities produced by the colonial past and present, it tends to locate the problem at the level of the individual. That is, individuals in these supposedly privileged communities continue to screw up and, by screwing up, are more responsible for screwing over their people than the colonial government. Or, to put it in a way that these supposedly "non-racist" ideologues often and callously put it, native communities just take from the government and, since they don't know how to "work" and are just "takers", they can be nothing but fiscally irresponsible. After all, the odd liberal commentator on the aformentioned article likes to argue, those of us who live in "Canadian" cities and towns don't mis-manage our money! And yet point (a) pre-supposes biodeterminist racism. For if we are not going to consider the structural problems of colonialism as the progenitor of these problems, and are going to place the blame on individuals within indigenous community, then what makes these individuals any different from those individuals who live within the average settler community? The fact that they are "native", other, and thus genetically incapable of "fiscal responsibility." Thus, despite all the hooplah liberals kick up about how they "are not racist", their arguments really do rest upon an unquestioned and despicable assumption about racial biology––arguments made without liberal dishonesty by nazi fanatics.

Point (b), however, is something your average liberal settler does not want to even consider. Never mind the fact that every indigenous bantustan possesses, either now or recently or in the future, a similar experience to Attawapiskat––the living conditions and economic statistics of these communities place the average colonized population far below the standard of living of the average settler population––because if we do not consider the structural implications of colonialism then we might as well just derive our explanations from biological destiny. After all, what fundamental cause outside of political and economic structure can explain the living conditions of a specific group of people? To be sure, arguments about individual fiscal responsibility and native leaders' mis-management may appear, at first glance, to be structural arguments… But in order to explain why the structural facts of a reserve differ from the structural facts of a settler community, these arguments all rest on a racist logic that supposes an ontological difference between native and non-native peoples.

Returning to the question of the supposed ninety million, the aforementioned article has demonstrated, painstakingly and thoroughly, that the money was poured into colonial structures that predetermined how the money would be used. The general Canadian public is largely ignorant of the fact that, just as there are federal/provincial/municipal bodies that determine how the tax money for settler communities is to be used, there are also governmental bodies that determine ahead of time how tax money for indigenous communities is to be used. And the majority of bodies that preside over indigenous communities are intensely colonial: in the case of Attawapiskat the money first went through Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) which is an organization devoted primarily to maintaining the reserve system and actively preventing indigenous national self-determination––and from this body the money is doled out, every colonial bureaucrat taking a cut along the way, to various groups and officials that are also interested in maintaining the colonial system––from the "Indian Affairs" security groups to their comprador puppets. Just as tax money allocated for non-native communities is also used to maintain the class composition of Canadian capitalism (money for the army, the police, etc.), tax money allocated to native communities is used for: a) maintenance of capitalism; b) maintenance of colonialism.

Whereas Canada's overall waning social democracy is able to manifest a somewhat significant portion (at least for now) of tax dollars in beneficial public institutions (i.e. health care, education, welfare, etc.), communities such as Attawapiskat are lucky if they get as much tax money for their hospitals, roads, education, and so many other things we take for granted. Indeed, these institutions in the settler communities are not generally better because of some superior non-native essence, and the stolid hard work of rugged settler individualists who "take nothing from nobody", but because of the tax funds they receive. And the decisions of where our taxes go are not decisions based on community consensus; these are always decisions made over our heads according to the logic, with varying degrees of complexity, of the entire system.

At the end of the aforementioned article, however, the author concludes with appeals to educating the Canadian settler public. Unfortunately, in the context of colonial ideology, these appeals are ultimately meaningless. If a good argument about oppression solved anything––if appeals to facts and a demystification of lies that justify oppression worked to change minds––then colonialism would have fallen under the weight of systemic logic long ago. There was a reason that Fanon began his great work on the dialectic of colonialism-anticolonialism with a tragic but necessary appeal to revolutionary violence: well reasoned arguments, he told us, solve nothing, and colonialism only loosens its grip when the knife is held to its throat. A terrible fact to consider, but a fact that explains why the colonial ideology that attempts to place the sins of colonialism on the shoulders of the colonized continues to thrive despite facts, figures, appeals to history, and the mountains of anticolonial arguments made since the advent of modern settler-colonialism.

History is a Weapon: eJournal call-out for submissions.

2011-11-30T20:46:00.000-05:00

100 Flowers Press is producing a "semi-academic" e-Journal called "History is a Weapon." The first issue will be entitled "it is right to rebel, but better to make revolution" and will hopefully concern, loosely and creatively, questions concerning organization, organizing, the differences between a revolutionary and merely rebellious movement, and a host of other questions that may or may not have been raised by the OWS movement.

The call-out and guidelines for submissions can be found here.

Submissions are tentatively due February, 2012.

All comrade bloggers and comrade blog readers who come from historical materialist perspectives should consider submitting, especially since so many of you (judging from your blogs and/or comments) have good ideas.

Questions raised by the [possible] end of Occupy Toronto

2011-11-28T18:29:00.000-05:00

Now that Occupy Toronto has collapsed, at least temporarily, under the weight of its contradictions, I cannot help but be reminded of a post I wrote months before the #occupy movement was even proposed regarding the politics of affirmation. In that post I argued that it is often easier to understand what we are against than what we are for and that the latter understanding, though harder to grasp, was the only thing that could lead to a revolutionary movement. For while it is one thing to reject capitalism, or even worse symptoms of capitalism, it is quite another to grasp and organize a movement directed by a post-capitalist politics. Clearly this entire occupy movement, while being in some ways an expression of anger against what many of us want to reject, is hampered by its inability to propose a productive politics. In fact, those most dedicated to "occupy" as a movement have gone to great lengths to assert a politics of pure negativity: "we don't like the 1% and that's the only position we need to uphold."

But with Occupy Toronto no longer occupying its chosen site, evicted peacefully after trying to fight for its existence in court, I cannot help but wonder whether it can or should continue to exist as a movement in this city. If the movement was all about demonstrating its rejection of "the politics of the 1%" by camping out in a park, then what can it express without having a site to occupy? I am reminded of how Nick Dyer-Witheford recently argued that occupy could only fail as a movement as long as it remained within its occupying sites rather than moving to sites and circuits of production. For at the sites of occupation it can be nothing more than a movement about camping out, expressing anger together, and thus doing nothing entirely productive when it comes to the existence of the 1% at which its anger is aimed. What can it be without the praxis it has possibly fetishized? Without a place to camp, to hang out with others who have also been drawn to the movement, it is nothing. The marches that originated and terminated from this camp site, after all, did not possess agendas and aims any different from the agendas and aims of other organizations who have and will continue to organize these types of demonstrations, without any need for a camp site, in the future. Indeed, many of these marches were partially organized by these other groups! So if "occupy" is to survive in Toronto as a movement that is more than just a fetishized name it will have to find another camp site.

And yet Occupy Toronto left its site, the only concrete thing that provides it with an identity, without significant fuss. Peaceful protests, legal battles, and ordered marches aside, the Toronto "occupiers" did not respond to their eviction in the manner of Oakland: their exit was so peaceful that both Toronto's right-wing mayor and the chief of pigs congratulated them on their behaviour. Having complained about the [non-]organizers' understanding of the police before, I think it is worth questioning the potentiality of a movement if it can be congratulated by the police and a reactionary civic leader. A movement generally unable to even recognize the structure behind the symptoms it rejects might not be a movement that we want to survive––at least not in its current form.

Interestingly enough, however, something of a productive politics emerged during the process of eviction. Instead of arguing that they were involved in a significant protest, when they went to court to fight the injunction the representatives of Occupy Toronto's defense was that they were building a new community. This was clearly a political rather than legal argument: no sane judge in this bourgeois system, regardless of how left-leaning s/he might be, is able to endorse an argument about building a new community on "public" property. There is no possible way to even legally argue for this position: under the rules of capitalism, communities are not claimed but owned, and without permits and contracts and capital you have no right to build anything, let alone a community.

But this glimmer of a productive politics should cause us to wonder about the supposedly "new" community Occupy Toronto was trying to build. This was not a squat action organized by an anti-poverty organization where the most destitute organize to claim an abandoned building: the primary occupiers' class position was of the type that allowed for camping out for the sake of camping out––a hippy tent city, not a squat designed to attack private property. Nor was this community sustainable on its own terms; it was heavily subsidized by sympathetic organizations, including unions, that made sure that, for example, there were porta-potties to manage the occupiers' waste. A community that did not know what its meaning as a community rejecting capitalism was, a community that was unable to exist by its own terms as a community because it was in some ways reliant on public union funding: this was the only politics that Toronto's #occupy managed to affirm. These were the politics of a movement that some have been declaring, without any proper philosophical understanding of the terms, world historical and revolutionary. In many ways I feel this frenzied rush to uncritically embrace the the political expression of this movement represents, yet again, the myopia of the left at the centres of capitalism.

Thus, as Occupy Toronto collapses I am reminded again of all the overly excited and unsober declarations that the entire movement's staunchest defenders have been making since its inception. When I was in Europe for a conference, I had to sit through a plenary where a member of the USAmerican ISO yelled at the audience about the importance of the #occupy movement. And when I write yelled I mean this literally: he was even interrupted by an audience member and asked to "stop yelling at us"––a request that, despite an applause of agreement, he chose to ignore. According to this man, the "occupy" movement was the most revolutionary movement in the world. In fact, he went so far as to argue (while yelling) that, just like in the 1960s, America is showing the world how to do revolution. So many of our suspicions about the American exceptionalism behind this movement was partially confirmed in that statement. How precisely was America even close to having the most revolutionary movements in the 1960s? Vietnam's revolutionary war against the US, the Cultural Revolution, May 1968, guerrilla movements in South America, urban guerrilla movements in Germany and Italy and Japan, decolonizations struggles following the Algerian Revolution at the end of the 1950s––judged against these revolutionary processes, America was far from "leading the world" in revolutionary struggle. And the most revolutionary struggles in 1960s USAmerica––Black Nationalism, indigenous self-determination––happened despite America: these were movements aimed against the very existence of America as America; these were also movements that were inspired by the above non-American struggles. But according to Mr. ISO, the US led world revolution in the 1960s and is now leading it again in these occupy movements. Some people in the crowd, representing a far more international audience, were clearly disappointed by this analysis; some wanted to hear about struggles outside of the US and were utterly bored by the obsession with #occupy that had nothing to do with the revolutionary imaginations of their contexts.

None of this is to say that I agree with the evictions, or think the #occupy movement should just die, but to argue for more clarity and perspective in how it's approached. As much as we like to believe that demonstrations at the centres of capitalism matter more than armed struggle in the peripheries, we need to have a far more global perspective: yes I know that a nascent Trotskyism that is very popular at the centres of capitalism might have us believe that revolutionaries at the centres must lead revolutionaries at the peripheries, but maybe it is time to have the sort of global perspective that causes us to realize that this position is quite literally eurocentric.

Maybe we also need to ask whether the #occupy movement in Toronto could do anything productive within its own boundaries: if it is nothing but a camp-out that is only barely a squat, and has demonstrated its inability to articulate a politics beyond speaking of building a [subsidized] community, then should it survive according to its own logic? And maybe it is time to ask the very marxist and very materialist question: what goals has the #occupy movement as a whole accomplished, aside from prolonging its existence as a massive protest camp-out––the cliched proof in the pudding which should matter according to those of us who call ourselves historical materialists. These aren't questions, again, that argue for ignoring the movement but simply, as I have been doing since it began, understanding the movement according to its own terms. And often I feel that those of us who are leftists tend to fail when it comes to understanding movements according to their own internal logic.

Theological Applications of Marxist Theory

2011-11-23T17:23:00.003-05:00

In 1918 Anatoly Lunacharsky, in his assessment of Russian revolutionaries, wrote that Trotsky, despite being a great revolutionary leader, was "incomparably more orthodox than Lenin… he takes revolutionary Marxism and draws from it the conclusions applicable to a given situation. He is as bold as can be in opposing liberalism and semi-socialism, but he is no innovator." The lack of a creative application of revolutionary theory––taking universal concepts and applying them, dialectically, to a concrete and particular situation––was something, according to Lunacharsky, that escaped Trotsky whose theoretical offerings, unlike those of Lenin, were destined to remain rote and perhaps dogmatic formulations of the science of revolution begun by Marx and Engels. Thus it is perhaps not entirely surprising that, if Lunacharsky was correct about Trotsky, the most loyal Trotskyist grouplets––those who never tire of repeating the words of their prophet and assessing Lenin through Trotsky's rigid patterns of thought––possess the same simplistic orthodoxy and inability to understanding theoretical innovation. As I noted in a previous post, these "marxist missionaries" tend to imagine "that there is some sort of pure communism outside of time and space, and that they are the elect capable of reflecting and understanding this perfect theory."

Generally, because interacting with people who have a religious mindset is extremely frustrating, I try to avoid interactions with members of these dogmatic cabals. Since they have not grown in decades, and are acting in the same way they acted fifty years ago, and have failed to do any significant practical work aside from coming up with "correct" slogans, I really don't see the point of wasting my time in their company. Although I have friends and comrades with whom I have ongoing debates over differences of revolutionary theory––and who I still count as comrades because ultra-sectarianism leads to close-minded dogmatism––I feel there is nothing worthwhile in arguing with cultish marxists who use the words of Marx and Lenin, through the filter of their great prophet Trotsky, in the way that priests use words from the Bible. This betrayal of the historical and dialectical materialist method, this inability to grasp the dialectical union between the universal and the particular, is extremely frustrating. When you argue with dogmatists, rational and historical arguments mean nothing: they have already dismissed your points ahead of time, sometimes before they even know what they are, because they have no intention of considering critical intervention.

Take, for example, the dogmatic Trotskyite assessment of the revolution in Nepal. Due to the current and extremely disappointing degeneration of the UCPN(Maoist), where Prachanda has seemingly capitulated to the party's opportunistic, certain Trotskyite cabals are gleefully castigating those communists who have been supporting the Nepal Revolution. And now when those same communists, who once published supportive articles and assessments, are beginning to express their disappointment, the Trotskyites see this as some sort of massive contradiction. "If only you could have had our theoretical understanding of the revolution in Nepal," they argue self-righteously, "then you would have known from the get-go that this failure was pre-ordained."

What this demonstrates, of course, is a dogmatic ignorance of history and revolution––a purist and nineteenth century way of seeing the world. For one thing, these groups argue that every revolution that does not resemble precisely the Bolshevik party under Lenin is destined to fail. Before they even engage with the concrete circumstances of Nepal, for example, they will make ahistorical pronouncements that are no more than a crude attempt to fit history into orthodox patterns of thought––and they will make it fit by hammering as hard as they can, distorting the original object of their thought. So while I agree that is necessary to grasp the universal developments of revolutionary theory, these developments must always be grasped within concrete social and historical insights. Just as Lenin understood that the Russia of his time was not the France of the Paris Commune (and yet at the same time knew how to make sense of the universal insights gleaned from the Commune's successes and failures), we have to understand that other revolutionary situations are not Russia in 1917.

While Trotskyite dogmatists dismissed the Nepal Revolution from the very beginning because it was not identical to Lenin's Russia in 1917, there were those of us who had the principled position that the revolutionary process was not immediately flawed. And why should we ascribe some telos on a revolutionary process, imagining for whatever vague reason, that it would be destined to fail? Why should we not endorse the maxim "dare to struggle, dare to win"? There was no good reason to reject the Nepalese Revolution, despite all its failures and setbacks, until it was clear that it was moving towards the point of degeneration. Nor can revolutionary degenerations be grasped so easily: all revolutions are fragile, and it is always harder to succeed because of the difficulties of winning, but according to the very puritanical worldview of religious communists, there is no point in even trying. Nor do these groups like the idea of revolutionary movements that try to think creatively and heterodoxically––applying the universal insights of revolutionary theory to their reality in order to produce a concrete analysis of a concrete situation.

Let us be clear: all revolutions that have succeeded, especially those world historical communist revolutions, have not succeeded by religious and formulaic repetition. All attempts to produce a revolution by dogmatically applying the method of the Bolsheviks in 1917 have failed. Of course those who attempt to preserve this tradition through the rigid and unscientific categories of the Great Prophet Trotsky will never fail because, due to a theory that results in the paralysis of praxis, they will never come close to trying. Failures happen because people try to make revolution, after all, and success is always extremely difficult to achieve; those who never try, who do not "dare to struggle, dare to win", will never have to fail. Better yet, because they will never be close to testing their theories in practice, they can always imagine they stand upon the revolutionary high ground. The fact that no ortho-Trotskyist group has ever led a revolution, despite all the crowing about a perfect theory, is apparently not treated as a failure in and of itself.

And speaking of failure, what about the Russian Revolution that is used dogmatically by these missionaries? Why should a revolution elsewhere in the world look precisely like the Bolshevik Revolution if, and this is an historical fact, the Bolshevik Revolution failed. These trot cabals would never (and nor should they) accept the autonomist argument that the Russian Revolution failed because its failure was predetermined from its origins (i.e. because of a vanguard that seized state power), and clearly they believe in upholding the initial success of this revolution despite its failure. The problem, however, is that they are giving the wrong questions to the right answers: the revolution failed but not, as they simplistically declare, because Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky. We maoists have our own assessment of this situation, after all, that comes through the theoretical insights gained through the world-historical revolution of China: the revolution fell because of an inability to grasp the line struggle that takes place within the Communist Party itself.

(Maybe we're wrong, but at least this leads to a more nuanced and non-mindless attempt to critically assess failures and successes. And if a scientific theory is defined by its ability to make sense of reality, in its universal applicability, then the theory of line struggle does far more to explain failure than "well it only failed because of a bad person and the people who surrounded this person" which is more spurious than scientific––and rather bourgeois, for that matter, because it reduces historical procession to the acts of individuals rather than class struggle. After all, it makes far more rational sense to understand failure, even the failure of the Chinese Revolution, through the concept of line struggle rather than turning the figure of Stalin into a universal principle of "Stalinism" and then trying to argue, very simplistically and embarrassingly, that this or that person is like Stalin. Again: this is nothing more than transforming people into universal and historical principles, a thoroughly bourgeois way of assessing reality.)

Due to an inability to understand the concept of line struggle, these Trotskyite groups cannot grasp why so many of us could support the revolution in Nepal for a long period of time until, once a certain conjuncture was reached, we could no longer make the same supportive claims. For we understood, from the beginning, that this revolution's victory was not preordained but we supported it, as any principled revolutionary should, because we grasped the circumstances of its success or failure. To no longer support the revolution is not to change our position, and is far from a contradiction, but simply an assessment based on what was happening with the Nepal Revolution: a revolutionary process can change at any given moment; it is important to grasp the reasons behind this change rather than thoughtlessly apply categories.

And due to this thoughtlessness, this lack of understanding of even the debates and exchanges of polemics that were happening amongst parties throughout the world who were international comrades with the Nepalese, those Trotskyite cabals who predicted failure from the beginning, and who imagine that those of us who are now less supportive of the Nepalese situation are suddenly "changing our tune", cannot help but be puzzlingly ignorant. One would think that, before throwing accusations around, they would investigate the critiques delivered to the Nepalese––back when these Trotskyist grouplets had no idea that a Peoples War was happening in Nepal––by the sister parties in the Revolutionary International Movement. Indeed, when the Nepalese originally decided to use the parliamentary method as a tactic, a lot of groups, who also continued to support them with qualification, delivered very pointed critiques and warnings. If these Trotskyist self-righteous groups in my city had even bothered, several years ago, to come out to an event where Hisila Yami [Comrade Parvati] was speaking, they would have witnessed many of us, those they now see as having been blinded by poor understandings of history, delivering similar warnings about the possible revisionism that this tactic might produce.

The reason we continued to support the revolution for as long as we did, however, was because we initially grasped the point that the Nepalese were arguing that the use of the elections process (far from being a "Menshevik" strategy) was simply a tactic to buy them the time necessary to get into the cities. So originally, when sister groups still supported the UCPN(Maoist), it was because we accepted (which was only principled) that they were speaking truthfully about elections as a tactic, a temporary moment in a larger chain of the PPW. Indeed, at that time the political line that was dominant in the UCPN(Maoist) held that the elections process was nothing more than a tactical necessity––and there were actually good reasons for this that had nothing to do with some "Menshevik" notion of uniting with bourgeois liberals. For example, the PLA was in danger of being crushed, the Indians were backing the Royal Army, and the inability to break into the cities was vastly becoming a weak-point in the PPW. The elections process, at its outset in fact, allowed for the UCPN(Maoist) to break into the cities and found some significant and revolutionary organizations.

Unfortunately, as those of us who understood the danger of the process grasped, there was also the possibility that the opportunist line in the party would gain the upperhand and reject the initial reasons for tactically using the parliamentary process. So throughout this process, sister parties continued to issue warnings to the Nepalese about the possible revisionism if what was once understood as a tactic was turned into an overall strategy. Even still, because these parties and all of us who supported the revolution in Nepal, we knew that as long as the line struggle continued there was always a chance that the party's revisionism was not preordained. We understood how it become revisionist, which is why we are now losing our hope, but it would be unprincipled to ascribe failure to something that still had so much revolutionary potential. We knew the ingredients that would lead to revisionism, however, which is why we have supposedly "changed our tune" in our assessment of the revolution. But, as I argued earlier, if this is a contradiction in thought then it is also a contradiction for Trotskyites to uphold the Bolshevik Revolution despite its eventual failures.

Of course, one never expects people whose understanding of revolutionary theory and history is so dogmatically simplistic, to grasp a nuanced and principled assessment of a revolutionary process. If they cannot find passages in their sacred texts that speak specifically about realities that the authors of these texts were unable to assess, then these realities do not exist. And if arguing with these pitiful assessments are reduced to searching for passages, and throwing quotes back and forth, then all in which we are engaging is theology. I am one of those, however, who does not believe that revolutionary theory should be reduced to a mindless appreciation of doctrine.

Cults of Personality

2011-11-20T23:11:00.000-05:00

A couple days ago a friend sent me the link to the infamous, and unintentionally hilarious, Bob Avakian Burning Man article that the RCP-USA published, without any irony, over a year ago. Apparently people are still encountering this article and wondering whether it was intended as a joke: members of the RCP-USA "popularize" revolution by going to the neo-hippy festival, Burning Man, and postering the highway with pictures of Avakian. Because, the argument goes, Avakian's face somehow equals revolution; it is the platonic essence of revolution and, I suppose, one just needs to contemplate its existence in order to understand the necessity for communism. Rereading this article, and again being struck by the dogmatic mindlessness of its writers, I could not help but be reminded of the numerous times I've encountered certain RCP-USA members and been flabbergasted by their glassy-eyed and uncritical cultishness. (I say "certain" members because, occasionally, I'll meet older members of the organization, who were around before the rise of the Cult of Bob, who seem to be able to think for themselves and have read more than writings by or about Bob Avakian.)

Encountering this sadly hilarious article for the third or fourth time caused me to again wonder how an organization that claims to be revolutionary ended up devolving into a quasi-religious organization centred around an embarrassing cult of personality. Although I think the RCP-USA, even at its height, has always had serious ideological problems (i.e. its shameful lapses on both indigenous and queer self-determination), there was a time when it had some right to the label "revolutionary communist". So how the hell did it degenerate into a cult devoted to a second-order thinker who, at no point in time in USAmerican radical history, was leading the masses in revolution? More importantly: why have so many revolutionary organizations throughout the world ruined themselves by constructing (and sometimes with more legitimate reasons than the one given by the RCP-USA) cults of personality?

Whenever I've asked Avakian-worshipping members of the RCP-USA about this problem, however, I've always been met by defensive hostility. Their first knee-jerk response is to argue that questioning the cult of personality is "bourgeois". Of course, their only justification for this response is that the bourgeois media complains about cults of personalities as part of its overall anti-communist struggle and so therefore, since I'm also complaining about the same thing, I must be "bourgeois". And when I argue back that maybe, on the contrary, it is the height of bourgeois individualism to endorse a "great man" theory of history, they tend to lapse into a monologue about how, if it was 1910 and I encountered Lenin, then I wouldn't realize how great he was. This of course hinges on whether or not Avakian is the same as Lenin.

Moreover, and this is the most important fact, Lenin would not be Lenin if there was no world historical revolution in Russia: there would be no such thing as Leninism (as a universal development of revolutionary science) because there could only be Leninism-as-Leninism through the crucible of revolution. If the Bolsheviks had not seized power then we would have to say that Lenin's theory, though perhaps interesting, was a dead end. Even more importantly: what we call Leninism is a theory for which Lenin, as an individual, is nothing more than a cipher––a world historical revolution is more than one person, theory does not just emerge from the brain of a single individual but emerges as the end result of a collective process, and we know that Lenin did not make revolution all by himself, alone with maybe a gun, but was rather part of a larger world historical process.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that the theories that push revolutionary science further often require someone to write them down, to engage in polemics, and concretize an ideology, we often do tend to get caught up in erroneous and bourgeois ideas about individual brilliance. But the Lenins and Maos of the world are just living end-results of a longer process, the last links in an unrecognized revolutionary chain, able to finally provide a concrete analysis of concrete circumstances because they happen to be in the right social position at the right time. To imagine otherwise is to pretend that individual humans are outside of history, that there are such things as "philosopher-kings" or ubermenschen that stand above the herd.

Still, whenever we are faced with those individuals who possess the privilege to unify theoretical concepts and rise to positions of leadership (sometimes for good reasons, other times for not-so-good reasons), because we are conditioned to think that individuals and not collective people, make history, we often capitulate to greater or lesser degrees of individual worship. The RCP-USA's Cult of Avakian is just history repeated as farce; there are earlier and more tragic examples. The cult of personality around Stalin, the cult of personality around Mao… The codification of the cult of personality, by Enver Hoxha, where it was actually argued that cults of personality were revolutionary and politically necessary. (And as much as the RCP-USA has a history of ideologically struggling against Hoxhaite theory one cannot help but notice how it has adopted similar arguments regarding the personality cult.)

Even if we could argue that the adoption of these cults of personalities made sense (i.e. Mao Zedong was the leader of the Chinese Revolution, and other revolutionary leaders who have been accorded cultish devotion were also "heroes" for the masses), that does not mean they possessed any lasting benefit for the revolution. The Cult of Mao, after all, was used during the Cultural Revolution by even the enemies of Mao's political line; the fact it came to stand over and above revolutionary politics was useful for counter-revolution. Or the intentional fostering of the Cult of Gonzalo by the Sendero Luminoso meant that, once Abimael Guzman denounced the Peoples War, the revolution collapsed: the great leader cannot be wrong because he stands outside of history––his possible betrayal can never be grasped because, if he is the revolution itself, how can he betray himself?

And yet, when it comes to groups like the RCP-USA one must ask why, if these groups have not led any revolutionary process let alone seized power, the theoretical output and the groups' practical activities, are concentrated around a single personality. The Cult of Avakian is not alone in this phenomena; Avakianism is not the only ism that imagines, without a revolutionary process or revolutionary consummation, that the ideas of its great leader constitute a new avenue of revolutionary theory far in advance of any proof. There was no Leninism before the Russian Revolution; there was no Maoism before the Chinese Revolution. Pretending otherwise is to ascribe the present to the pre-revolutionary past and assume that the individuals behind these molar isms were destined, simply because of the power of their mind, by heaven to succeed.

Furthermore, it is also far too easy simply to point the finger at those groups that actively foster cults of personality and imagine that the rest of us, because our elevation of individual organizers and intellectuals is not so crudely obvious, are beyond criticism. The cult of the individual often takes a more pernicious and sublimated form, pushed under appeals to collectivity and consensus; even in those groups that self-righteously lambast others for capitulation to a daddy figure there might still be a single individual whose word is doctrine, whose opinion matters more than others, and who treats collective organizing as nothing more than a reflection of his own ego. (The he is intentional because such individuals are usually male.) For at this conjuncture, drenched as we are in the filth of bourgeois individuality, it is always easier to subordinate our collective interests to the desires of whoever appears to be the hardest working and/or most intelligent comrade rather than, as we need to do if we have any hope of overthrowing this nightmare, building a structure that will transform everyone into leaders.

Rereading Althusser

2011-11-20T02:07:00.000-05:00

Recently, due to some philosophical issues in the realm of marxism I'm interested in interrogating in my academic work (yes, I know I need to be "sent down to the countryside"), I have been rereading Louis Althusser. For the past several years I have had a sustained, though not entirely serious, debate with a close comrade/friend who is something of an Althusserian about the necessity for communists to endorse a theory of the human subject: he has argued (following Althusser) that there is no such thing, and that such an argument is nothing more than bourgeois humanism, whereas I have argued that (while rejecting bourgeois humanism), such a theory is philosophically important. And since I am interested in further arguing for this necessity, but without lapsing into humanistic stupidity, I figured it was probably appropriate to reengage with Althusser's philosophical rejection of the concept of a universal conceptualization of human being.

I have not read Althusser since the final year of my MA and, I must admit, I have changed a lot both politically and ideologically since that time. Although his rejection of the human subject, conflated as it is with a rejection of "humanism", still remains, in my opinion, a rather philosophically confused argument––and though there are still other points he makes that I still find uncompelling––I have to say that reengaging with Althusser now, after so many years of distance, is somewhat refreshing. There was so much I had either forgotten or failed to understand; my previous reading took place in the context of autonomist marxism, right before reading Harry Cleaver's Reading Capital Politically, and so was highly influenced by that way of seeing the world. Furthermore, I was also reading Althusser between reading the Frankfurt School thinkers which only muddled my ability to appreciate him fully.

So although I still disagree with his assessment of the concept of the human subject––and feel that he fails to appreciate the philosophical consequences that result from his rejection––I also have to say that Althusser is one of the only proper marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. Unlike the Adornos and Marcuses of the world, he understood the role of marxist philosophy: it was not a stand-in for science, but a result of the new science first established by Marx and Engels, and marxist philosophers should never confuse the two. In some ways (to re-invert the claim he made about the students of May 1968) I feel he was giving the wrong answers to the right questions… and yet, since philosophy is all about asking the right questions, this still made him superior to those other marxist philosophers who imagined that were producing new concepts, re-investigating the world in order to produce the concepts necessary for revolutionary change, many of whom disappeared in the labyrinth of psychoanalysis and subject/object quandaries––red herrings for any radical philosophical engagement with concrete reality.

Now that I am rereading Althusser, and appreciating him as a proper philosopher of marxism (a role that other marxist philosophers have always had trouble understanding), I cannot help but wonder about the terrible misapprehension that, in my academic context, has been fostered about his work. The majority of people who reject Althusser as a "proper marxist" generally make arguments that, now that I am rereading him, amount to nothing more than straw-person assessments. Political economists who imagine that they are philosophers mistake his project, misunderstand the object of his study, and cannot explain his arguments aside from vague pronouncements how they dislike his notion of "the epistemic break", or how they think "structuralism is wrong." But Althusser was a philosopher of marxism who never imagined that he was a political economist, though he took political economy as his object (as philosophers of science take the sciences as their object), and so the judgments of political economists, which he already assessed ahead of time, often misapprehend their target.

There is a failure amongst marxists to apprehend the meaning and significance of "marxist philosophy" (or what I prefer to call, for semantic clarity so as to not make philosophy more important than it actually is, "the philosophy of marxism"), and this failure isn't helped by those academics who study political economy and fancy that they are doing "philosophy"––or by those philosophers who imagine that contemplation is synonymous with performing politics. Althusser, however, did not mistake philosophy as theory or the science of history; he understood that the role of philosophy was not only to work out concepts through investigation and interpretation of the set marxist universe, but that to do philosophy as a marxist was also a class struggle in the realm of thought. For if marxism as a science (historical and dialectical materialism) was the science of history, and history was conceived as class struggle, and if it developed through revolutionary praxis, then new and universal developments of the theory could only come through practice and not through thought.

Philosophy is about thinking, about interpreting the world and not changing the world (as Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach made clear) and thus, if it possesses any worth for marxists, it cannot be treated as more important than it actually is. To do philosophy as a marxist, to be a philosopher of marxism, is not to establish new fundamental categories of thought; the philosopher of science, after all, does not pretend to establish new categories and concepts of physics. And so the theory that unifies revolutionary movements does not come, and can never come, from philosophy––this is what Althusser understood when he interrogated (with philosophical rigour) Marx's "epistemic break" from the Young Hegelian way of seeing the world.

The Philosophical non-Issue of Organization

2011-11-16T16:04:00.000-05:00

Academic marxists in North America, and sometimes in Europe, have wasted too much time and energy focusing on the so-called philosophical problem of organization. In social contexts where there does not appear to be a viable revolutionary organization capable of posing a significant challenge to capitalism, at the centres of imperialism where it is often difficult to mobilize the masses in a lasting manner against the bourgeoisie, many marxists often assume that we require a new theory of organization. Although I agree that there are numerous and significant philosophical problems surrounding the practice of organizing, I also believe that most academic marxist attempts to re-theorize the concept of the revolutionary organization is a philosophical dead-end that does little more than attempt to (forgive the cliche) reinvent the wheel.

Due to the failure of the world historical socialist revolutions in Russia and China there is a tendency amongst academic marxists to reject Lenin's insight of the party formation and the dictatorship of the proletariat. New methods of militant organizing are demanded, the theory of the party of the advanced guard is often straw-personed, and so much ink is wasted on imagining alternatives––none of which have ever worked and all of which continue to fail to do anything more than lead to mass spectacles and/or academic conferences where only the "converted" argue about their competing brands of communism. Movementist solutions, assembly structures (nothing more than politically diluted council communist attempts), and the fetishism of spontaneity and vague "horizontalist" theories, are suggested and debated. At least the anarchists know they reject organizational and theoretical "authoritarianism"; communists at the centres of world capitalism, often adrift in the void between theory and practice, want to be communists in essence and anarchists in form. Perhaps this is because anarchists, and anarchist styles of practice, have actually been fighting in the North American and European streets since the anti-globalization movement in the late 1990s whereas the majority of communists, when they weren't hiding in universities, have simply tailed the anarchist movements. Or perhaps this is simply because marxist academics, being academics, enjoy turning philosophical non-issues into papers and debates.

If we begin by assuming that the theoretical method of organizing a revolutionary movement and overthrowing the capitalist state is a philosophical problem, then obviously we are forced to accept the conclusion that a new organizational method is required. But if we find the starting proposition dubious, then the argument becomes little more than a false syllogism. And I want to suggest that the starting position that results in the over-fetishization of "new" methods of communist organizing is philosophically dubious that is often assumed, a priori, and generally without any reflection other than: "well Lenin's idea of the party vanguard and the dictatorship of the proletariat is stupid." Sometimes the Leninist development of revolutionary communist theory is straw-personed ("vanguards are BAD because they are AUTHORITARIAN") with very little understanding of what Lenin actually meant, or how the concept has been developed historically in contradiction to what some imagine it means. This straw-personing allows for suspect historical claims, such as those made by some autonomists, where the failure of Leninist-style revolutions is attributed to the theories of the vanguard party and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

To be fair, I agree that the universality of these Leninist concepts should also communicate with the particular concrete circumstances that emerge from specific social contexts. The revolutionary party does not have to always perfectly resemble the party of the Bolsheviks––only dogmatists and purists would argue otherwise––and, in fact, in those places where the revolutionary party has succeeded in either leading revolutions or seizing power, they have not been identical (much to the hatred of the dogmatists) to the party under Lenin. The Chinese Communist Party under Mao, for example, while accepting the universal insight of the vanguard and the necessity to seize state power and build the dictatorship of the proletariat, was also different in its composition and internal structure––going so far as to eventually produce new universal insights that would also need to be adapted to other concrete particularities. In a previous entry I discussed this dialectic between universality and particularity; I won't waste time rephrasing the argument here.

While I would agree that there are some philosophical issues surrounding the theory of revolutionary organization, this does not mean I think it is philosophically useful or historically rational to reject Lenin's concept. Whether or not the party should combine a certain level of horizontalist organization with a verticality, for example, that is always held to account, but unified with an overall revolutionary theory, is something worth discussing; this could be a way to apply Mao's theory of the mass-line––another universal insight––but has nothing to do with abandoning the theory of the vanguard. Nor does figuring out how to organize a revolutionary party at the culture industry dominated centres of imperialism mean that we reject Lenin's insights; it only means we have to figure out how to build an organization in the first place––and even here it is still worthwhile to look at past historical experiences. So sticking with the cliche, the wheel might require updating––no reason in keeping a wagon wheel in the era of cars, and maybe the wheel could do with some hubcaps––but it still possesses universal validity. Similarly, we do not scrap mathematical concepts simply because we don't like them or because we misunderstand their applicability.

The rejection of Lenin's theory of organization, the search for "new" methods, is often a result of, as aforementioned, the realization that the world historical revolutions of Russia and China collapsed. And yet the rejection that emerges from this realization is barely more than a badly theorized category mistake where the moments before and after the revolutionary seizure of power are conflated. A very simplistic teleology is ascribed to the revolutionary party, resulting in the argument that all militantly organized revolutionary parties that seize state power contain, from the moment they organize and despite the significant differences in parties throughout the world, the seeds of counter-revolution simply because they are parties that seize power. None of this is to say that there aren't elements internal to the party preceding revolution (i.e. an unrecognized two-line struggle, a lack of mass-line) that will affect the same party post-revolution, but it is a fallacy of composition to infer that negative elements internal to the whole are identical to a negativity of the whole.

The point is that Lenin's theory of organizing a revolution has been proved both by its successes and the failures of every non-revolution based on alternate theories. If Lenin's theory is about seizing state power and founding a socialist process––a process that includes placing the bourgeoisie under the command of the proletariat––then it is the only theory that has succeeded in doing so. The collapse of socialism has nothing to do with this theory since it is a theory that is, simply put, only about establishing socialism and creating the very basic and very crude context to defend socialism. The problem of organization is not this theory, which accomplished its primary aims, which is about organizing to establish revolution; the problem is about organizing socialism and pursuing the withering away of the state post-revolution. This is the problem, as I have noted at so many points on this blog, that Mao theorized, thus creating the universal demand to pursue class struggle under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but also failed to solve––despite so many attempts, sometimes confused and sometimes temporarily successful.

Rejecting Lenin's theory means rejecting the type of revolution in which communists believe. Anarchists reject this theory because they usually have a theory of history and human nature that gives them good reason for doing so. But communists, who believe in theoretical unity and the universality of class struggle, really have no good philosophical reason to wander an imaginary philosophical wasteland in search of a new organizational oasis that doesn't exist.

End of Week Hiatus (hopefully)

2011-11-13T20:41:00.002-05:00

Due to my hiatus between posts, and the fact that I lose traffic whenever I fail to write regularly, I feel that I should post something regarding the great and not-so-great engagements and interactions at the Historical Materialism Conference in London. But since I am brained-out from the exhausting conference and trip back to Toronto, I lack the mental ability to write something substantial. So instead, here's another half-assed and semi-humorous (if that) entry about my top likes and dislikes of the conference and everything surrounding the conference.

Dislike #1: I forgot that North American, and especially USAmerican, airport security/customs are more asshole-ian than the rest of the world.

Seriously, this is more of a grumpy complaint outside of the bounds of political commentary. After all, we all know that the securitization of borders following 9/11 is fascistic, and is more fascistic towards people of colour (especially Arabs), but the US (and to a lesser extent Canada) are, as usual, are better assholes in this regard than the rest of the imperialist world––with the honourable exception, maybe, of Germany. They substitute assholeness for even rational fascism: you think it would make more sense to let your imperialist allies do the work for you, rather than waste time and money by performing redundant operations that if you think about it are useless. You get searched leaving Heathrow, for example, and you've gone nowhere but the secured airport and the plane in that entire time, and you have to get triple searched––not to mention go through customs and have your back rechecked when you don't even want to fucking visit America and have no intention of leaving said secure airport––when you're making a connection in the United States. All this means is line-ups: I thought American conservatives hated line-ups… oh yeah, that's right, they only hate the bread line-ups of the old Soviet Union. Guess lines are bad when you're waiting for something like free food but good when it's about being searched by fascists.

Like #1: meeting Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

As some of my regular readers might know, I'm a big fan of Dunbar-Ortiz who is often an under-appreciated thinker and revolutionary despite the fact that she was a founding member of Cell 16, one of the very first militant feminist groups in the US, and an original core member of the American Indian Movement––and that's just naming two of the groups of which she was an intrinsic part. (In fact, as far as I can tell, she was the only person speaking at the Historical Materialism conference who had an actual revolutionary history.) In person she's actually really nice––she even gave me her card and made appreciative comments about a question I asked at one of the sessions she also attended. Whether or not I will work up the courage to email her, however, remains to be seen… Although, since she did comment on this blog once, perhaps she will see this shameless hero worship and respond!

Dislike #2: airport idiocy based on petty-bourgeois individuality.

Yes, another airport complaint––but this is only because I just got back from a long trip filled with annoyances. Really, I'm just using this as an excuse to complain about something that has bugged me for years, but that I always forget after about a month of travel only to remember it, the next time I use an airport, and become pissed off all over again. Why is it that, when they start the boarding call, that everyone stands up and mobs the surrounding area of the exit even though the announcer is calling only specific seats? The mobbing only makes boarding go slower, but everybody wants to be near the front when their section is called: yet another example of short-term individual needs being put over the needs of the collective without realizing, as usual, that this selfishness even fucks the individual. Just sit down; the plane is not leaving without you and your seat is already booked.

Like #2: visiting comrades now living in Europe.

Obviously this was the best part of the trip and the reason I went for a week. I am not entirely into touring, or doing tourist things, but I do like visiting with "comrades in exile" who are doing interesting projects around the world and meeting some of their new friends and comrades. Now I'm at that age where I have comrades living on every continent and in hundreds of countries; I need to start taking advantage of this… if only affording regular plane tickets (and the fact I fucking hate airports, have I mentioned that?) wasn't a problem.

Dislike #3: hearing a paper about the connection between race and class in the history of USAmerica by a supposed expert which doesn't even take into account Sakai's "Settlers" thesis.

A white marxist male (I am aware of the irony here) who cites only white marxist males, such as Noel Ignatiev and David Roediger, along with dubious "anti-racists" like Tim Wise, and is writing a book on critical race theory that, despite redundantly echoing (and by echo I mean faint echo) the work of J. Sakai, has no awareness of this subterranean and yet influential tradition. And when a question about Sakai was asked, and he admitted he hadn't read Sakai, the presenter also went so far as to off-handedly say that he didn't think the concept of the labour aristocracy was useful for his reasearch––even after admitting that he hadn't read Sakai's work in this area. If you are going to do work on racism and racialization in the US, and especially work around the emergence of class composition in this regard, you should probably draw primarily on the tradition of work by people who were racialized and experienced this racism. Just saying.

Like #3: seeing the paper "What the Fuck is Up with French Feminism" by Stella Magliani-Belkacem and Felix Boggio.

Not only was this paper brilliant in content, it was brilliant in form. Tracing the history of french feminism and its collusion with colonialism up to its present collusion with Islamophobia, and read to a packed room, the authors received overwhelming applause. Plus, I spent a good portion of the night afterwords hanging out with the authors (one of whom I had met earlier on the eurorail) who are really cool French marxists despite their [unorthodox] Trotskyism. Really, due to their interests and the people they often cited, they seemed more like maoists in essence and trotskyists in form, which I hope to convince them of in the future. But oh well, I'm not some crazed sectarian.

Dislike #4: the "Marxist Humanist" dude who ranted about Mao being a mass murderer at a plenary.

In response to one of the speakers, Peter Hallward, citing Mao, this moron thought it was "uncontroversial" that Mao was the Mao of reactionary historiographies––and this in the middle of a critical marxist conference. I expect this sort of thing from the odd liberal and social democrat, but it's unforgivable when it comes from a so-called "marxist".

Like #4: the response to the "Marxist Humanist" dude by Hallward.

Thankfully Peter Hallward attacked this moron's use of "reactionary history", generating some applause. And even Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who was also on that panel, made a snide comment about this man's use of reactionary history, much to his annoyance. I hope it ruined his week.

Possible Brief Blog Hiatus

2011-11-06T12:55:00.001-05:00

Tonight I'm off to the Eastern Hemisphere, specifically the origin continent of so-called "western" history: Europe. More specifically to Paris and then London, all within the jet-lagged span of a single week. Since I have never travelled anywhere in Europe, nor really had much interest in travelling to Europe aside from the fact that it is a place to travel and see things "with history" (because apparently there is no "history" in Canada and the United States because these are "young nations" and… oh wait, that's right, there's "no history" because it was actively annihilated in the act of founding Canada and the US!), this trip is job-related in the "professional development" kind of way. Thankfully, because it is job-related, I will eventually get reimbursed and thus the fact that I don't really have the money to travel will be solved when my receipts and boarding passes are presented. Plus it was just as cheap to fly into Paris to visit friends, and then travel by eurorail with one of these friends to the conference in London.

In any case, unless I'm able to find the time to blog, this site might be quiet for the following week––which is probably a good thing since it will prevent me from the ill-advised posting of random thoughts and brain hiccups. I will also be drinking Parisian wine and becoming snobbish towards what passes for wine in North America, within a few days adopting petty bourgeois continental airs as academics who find themselves in Europe are wont to do.

(This is actually a real wine company in Australia. Apparently they didn't see the name as a problem, or an academic slur, but something to boldly advertise their wares.)

Yes, that will be me: eurocentric wine-sipper, continental petty bourgeois academic. Thank god the conference in which I'll be participating, Historical Materialism, will be worth this potential political degeneration. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, whose work on anti-colonialism I have used (and who also founded the first North American radical feminist group, Cell 16), will be in attendance. I can only hope that, since she once commented on this blog, we will meet in person. [If you still read this blog now and then, Professor Dunbar-Ortiz, I will be presenting on Friday at 11:45!]

Anyhow: onwards to Europe!

"We have not yet passed beyond class morality…"

2011-11-04T14:41:00.005-04:00

Recently I have been reflecting on an anecdote at the beginning of Mobo Gao's The Battle For China's Past regarding a presentation on the Cultural Revolution at a conference in South Korea. After one presenter attacked the Cultural Revolution because of her parents' negative experience, an audience member stood up and asked the presenter about her family's background. When the presenter admitted that her parents were members of a privileged intellectual class––a class whose privilege was targeted during this confusing period––the audience member replied, "So no wonder. My father used to be head of the production team leader in my village. He still recalls the Cultural Revolution with fond memories because that was his most brilliant years. Those were years when the farmers felt proud and elated." Gao's overall point was that our understanding of the past, and how we assess significant historical moments, is always filtered through our social position and the consciousness this position produces.

Furthermore, our ability to make moral judgments about the past and present––to call something like the Cultural Revolution, despite its clear failures, the high point of revolution, or to dismiss it as either a lamentable tragedy or heinous "abuse of human rights"––is never objectively separate from our class position or consciousness. If we morally side with mass movements on behalf of the oppressed than we have to side with those great revolutions that empowered the oppressed masses and disempowered the exploiters and oppressors; if we morally side with business as usual, and accept that the liberal capitalist state of affairs is not synonymous with terrible violence and oppression but is in fact "liberating", then we will always be drawn to those liberal and conservative historical accounts that morally condemn this century's world historical revolutions. As Engels argued in Anti-Duhring:

"[A]ll moral theories have been hitherto the product, in the last analysis, of the economic conditions of society obtaining at the time. And as society has hitherto moved in class antagonism, morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. […] But we have not yet passed beyond class morality. A really human morality which stands above class antagonisms and above any recollection of them becomes possible only at a stage of society which has not only overcome class antagonisms but has even forgotten them in practical life." (Engels, Collected Works of Marx and Engels vol. 25, p. 88)

So when we make moral assessments and judgments we are always making them according to a class position and to believe otherwise is to imagine that there is a morality outside of history, Platonic notions of the good and the just, rather than to understand that ethics is eminently historical. If we can speak of ethical universality, and I think we can, then it has to be based on a socio-historical understanding of the material nature of the human species, and since humans are currently not outside of class conflict, or free from historical structures of oppression, then we have to accept that such a universal understanding of ethics is an ethics in development, a morality that only become "really human" once humanity has been freed from the oppressive structures it itself has produced.

And yet there is a common sense understanding of morality that, often naturalizing liberal moralism, imagines there can be objective ethical judgements. Amnesty International, regardless of what it sometimes is able to accomplish, functions according to the dogma of "human rights", a liberal understanding of morality based on the notion of individual rights bearers, calculating death statistics, and relying on dubious sources that they imagine to be objective. The fact that Amnesty representatives in Nepal during the height of the Peoples War were seen as collaborators, supported the Royal Army, is something ignored when people assessed the statistical reports Amnesty produced during that period: believers in liberal morality did not ask questions about the sources, about whether or not an organization like Amnesty could really exist outside of the imperialist world system, or critically engage with the possibility that NGOs work, to greater or lesser degrees, in propping up global capitalism. The organization can pass as "neutral", as if there can be neutrality in class war, and its statistics as "scientific", as if they were produced in a laboratory, under a microscope, by an observer who was not embedded in the larger class-divided ethical terrain.

I was again reminded of this failure to understand morality as a class-contested terrain when, a couple nights ago, I was talking to a comrade about the Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) and she was rightly complaining about a classmate who was presenting the normative North American mainstream media understanding of this organization. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru produced a thorough report human rights report about abuses in Peru during the Peoples War and, representing itself as an "independent" body, concluded that the Sendero Luminoso was responsibility for the majority of the violence. And yet, a cursory investigation of this Commission should indicate, to anyone who is critical enough to examine the source they repeat without reflection, that it was far from "independent"––in fact, it was even less independent than other class-embedded Human Rights groups. The Commission's chairman, for example, was Salomón Lerner Ghitis, a Peruvian businessman and politician who would eventually become Peru's Prime Minister. And the rest of the Commission was stacked with former Peruvian military representatives (including an Airforce General), conservative Catholics, and Evangelical Missionaries. There is no representation of the Peruvian peasantry in this commission; they were a priori barred since the majority of them (who make up the majority of Peruvian society) supported the Senderistas. So trusting such a group to honestly assess a revolutionary war, when the majority of its members were anti-communist, is like filling an "independent commission" with members of the IDF and Kahanist settlers and then asking them to give us an accurate assessment of the Palestinian Intifida.

I am not arguing that the Sendero Luminoso was beyond reproach. I think the organization degenerated in various areas due to an erroneous political line on the national question, and the cult of personality around Abimael Guzman ("Gonzalo Thought") that actually served to prevent the Sendero Luminoso from winning the Peoples War. Nor am I arguing that they were not responsible for excesses. What I am arguing, however, is that to use the supposedly "independent" Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a rational measurement of the activities of the Shining Path is in itself an ethical judgment made from a position of class. Moving away from the Sendero Luminoso example, I would argue that so many leftists make this type of ethical judgment without even realizing they are ethically deciding to side with the morality of the ruling class which will *always* present every failed revolution as a crime against human rights––human rights understood, in this context, as a violation of the rights of the oppressor by those masses who don't want to be oppressed.

Even worse, so many people rely on these ruling class sources without even understanding what sources they are using. Whenever I argue with irate liberals about Mao and the Chinese Revolution, I am shocked by how many of them do not understand that they are relying on the anti-communist, and extremely dubious, arguments originally made by John Foster Dulles (and later repeated, without any other sourcing, by Chang and Halliday), one of the pre-eminent USAmerican Cold Warriors (known for his "domino theory" of East Asia and for engineering the Shah's coup in Iran). The source is forgotten, the argument normative because it is an argument that defends the state of the world as is––it is part of the common sense that treats capitalism as the end of history. I have always argued that without investigation there should be no right to speak: if you're going to uncritically accept the ethical position of the ruling class, at least know your sources. Simply arguing something is "common sense" only means that it is common sense for the moral sensibilities you have uncritically adopted––it is not common sense for those of us who support class revolution, it is not common sense for the majority of the world's oppressed populations who still believe that your villains are their heroes.

None of this is to say that the left should not be critical about its mistakes, failures, and excesses, let alone to simply accept every act of revolutionary violence as "moral". But if the point is to critique from the left rather than the right, then we also have to critically engage with the necessity of revolutionary violence from the standpoint of the oppressed's morality. This engagement, however, not only teaches us that the greatest violence is what is made normative by global capitalism––and that all revolutionary violence is primarily a tragic response to a context of ongoing terror––but forces us to ask difficult questions that are not always easily solved, are not clear-cut in the way that liberal ethicists would want them to be, and do not rely on the uncritical acceptance of bourgeois morality. So when we understand that the oppressor at every stage of history has charged hir rebellious slaves with being "oppressive" and "violent" and "immoral", and that this charge is an insult for the slaves who make history, we will begin to understand ethics.

Two New Statements from the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan

2011-11-03T21:17:00.001-04:00

The Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan has been, for a very long time, an important revolutionary force in Afghanistan. Unlike the Islamists, its war against the occupation has pushed a secular progressive agenda; unlike the secular liberal (or those secular organizations that claim they are "progressive") organizations, it has refused to collaborate with the imperialist occupation or any of its NGO institutions. As some readers may be aware, the organization's history of resistance goes back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan where the party was almost completely liquidated––the Soviets actually targeted more Maoists than Islamists––and yet it managed to survive, eventually rebuilding itself to emerge as a significant organizational force in the now defunct Revolutionary International Movement (RIM). Recently they have released two important documents, both of which I want to discuss below.

1. Rebuilding the Revolutionary International Movement

The document, A Decisive Struggle Must Be Waged for the Formation of a New International Communist (M-L-M) Organization, was originally an internal document, intended for the previous members of RIM, but which has now been made public in order to ferment international debate amongst revolutionary communist groups worldwide. This document is significant for two reasons: a) it demonstrates that the Afghanistans have been taking the lead in trying to reestablish a new RIM; b) it provides an important critique of the failure of the last RIM.

What is particularly interesting is that this document, while not precisely naming the Revolutionary Communist Party USA (RCP-USA), more than hints that one of the main reasons for the previous RIM's collapse was due to the "hegemony" and "chauvinism" of this particular organization. (The ironic asides about the "new synthesis", after all, is a pretty clear indication that they're talking about the RCP-USA and its cultish devotion to Bob Avakian.) The failure of this group to abide by the collective decisions of RIM, to push its own line without abiding by the organization's structural process, seems typical of the American Exceptionalism promoted by US "revolutionary" organizations like the RCP-USA.

In any case, it is exciting to read of the possibility of a new Revolutionary International Movement and learn, through this document, that the revolutionaries in Afghanistan seem to be pushing for the establishment of such a movement.

2. The Changing Situation in Occupied Afghanistan

In some ways more exciting that the aforementioned document, The Necessity for a Serious, Decisive, and Unavoidable Struggle to Determine the Principled Tactics of Struggle Conducive to the Current Situation is a communique that is invaluable for an understanding the ongoing occupation. The proposed American "withdrawal", according to this document is only a withdrawal from the battlefield: the puppet government will become the main military actor (Afghani soldiers are cheaper than American soldiers, after all) to be managed from US bases.

Even more interesting––and ultimately damning to the US "war on terror" justification for the occupation––is the American plan to normalize relations with the Taliban by offering them amnesty and positions in the Karzai government. Since Karzai's brand of Islamism differs only from the Taliban's because he and his supporters are willing to be American running dogs, there is no reason that, if the Taliban was to accept American hegemony as it has in the past, they couldn't all get along as Yankee stooges. And there is reason to believe, from the pattern of former Taliban leaders already conceding to the Karzai government, that the normalization will proceed, with a few hiccups here and there, in a manner desired by the imperialists. Which should force critical minded people everywhere to ask the question: if the "terrorists" are now American friends, or if the Yankee soldiers aren't in Afghanistan to "protect women" from "raving misogynist Taliban thugs", then just why the hell are they there? (The question, at least on this blog, is rhetorical.)

By the end of 2014 the US hopes to accomplish this shift in neocolonial management, transforming itself into a contemporary version of the British Raj, which means that this will leave the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan only three years to prepare itself for its inevitable movement from the periphery of anti-occupation struggle to the centre. If the Taliban is bought off, thus withdrawing from insurgency, only the Maoists will remain as a revolutionary organization. Crisis and opportunity: the latter because they will no longer be able to count on the parallel struggle of the Taliban forces and, as the only real insurgents left, will become the prime target of the US puppet regime; opportunity because, with the reactionaries all in one comprador camp, the anti-occupation struggle will be led by a secular and progressive force.

Furthermore, this document should tell leftists that anyone who cozies up to the Karzai government, which will soon be a unified camp of comprador reactionaries, is an enemy of the people. I have long been distressed by the North American left's fetishization of groups like the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) which is neither revolutionary nor, despite the groundless claims of some people here, has done anything, at least in the past decade, for women in Afghanistan. Aside from working with imperialist NGOs, and lacking any grassroots connections with Afghani women, RAWA has long been preoccupied with the "revolutionary" goal of placing its members in Karzai's government––it is hard to even call this "reformist" when Karzai's corrupt government pushes a reactionary theocratic politics (that are very anti-feminist) and is nothing more than an instrument of the American imperialists. Which means that groups like RAWA, who speak out of both sides of their mouth in order to enjoy the indulgence of the North American and the American imperialists at the same time, should be seen, especially if they remain in the Afghanistan Parliament after 2014, as part of the comprador class in Afghanistan.

For too long the North American left has ignored the existence of the secular left revolutionaries in Afghanistan, focusing either on the Taliban or secular liberal groups claiming to be revolutionary, and hopefully the situation indicated by this document will force the often myopic left at the centres of world imperialism to ideologically support the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan as they prepare for the next stage of anti-colonial struggle.

Should the uOMSA and the PCR-RCP Ottawa have Withdrawn from Occupy Ottawa?

2011-10-29T19:55:00.000-04:00

This post is inspired by a comment from Morgan Finch on my previous post regarding the University of Ottawa Marxist Student Association (uOMSA) and the Revolutionary Party of Canada's Ottawa branch (PCR-RCP Ottawa) decision to currently withdraw from Occupy Ottawa. In my response to Morgan Finch I indicated that I would probably edit and revise my thoughts for a future post which I think is important for three reasons: a) my responding comment was messy and disorganized; b) my blog readers don't always comb the comment strings; c) I was already thinking about the points this comment raised. So I must thank Morgan Finch whose well-intentioned and considerate thoughts inspired this post.

Upon reading the uOMSA and PCR-RCP's joint statement regarding their current withdrawal from Ottawa's #occupy site, and spending a short period of time writing a post about red-baiting, I found myself considering the political efficacy of their withdrawal. Since I still feel that the spaces opened by the "occupy" movement are possibly spaces that are filled with organizational potential, there was a part of me that wondered whether the abdication on the part of these comrades was correct. As Morgan Finch rightly indicated, "in Toronto we've managed to defeat red-baiting by having lots of commies in the camp." Thus perhaps, as Finch argues from what logically follows from this Toronto context, the Ottawa comrades behaved in an "excessively pacifist" and non-militant way to the red-baiting by choosing withdrawal over confrontation. I think Finch's comments (which must also be noted were extremely respectful because they not only reject the red-baiting but end with the qualification that s/he respects the Ottawa communists' decision to withdraw from a context where they are clearly not wanted) might be correct when judged in accordance to the Toronto situation; at the same time, however, I feel they open up questions regarding: a) the concrete context of Ottawa; b) the general concrete context of the Occupy Everything movement.

Some of the criticisms levelled at the Ottawa comrades, after all, have treated their decision as irresponsible, possibly even "uncommunist", because it is the job of communists to be militant in these contexts, to whether criticism, and to be prepared to organize against great odds. But such an assessment, in my opinion, only makes sense if one is to grant, a priori, that the Occupy Everything movement is a world historical pre-revolutionary space; it also depends on the fallacy of composition where, if something is true for some of its parts it must be true for the whole.

First of all, the claim that the Occupy Everything movement is a world historical revolutionary space, the only space where we can and should organize at this period of time, is a false syllogism. The argument proceeds as follows: the "occupy" movement is the most important organizational opportunity that has happened in the past few decades (p1); this movement is essentially revolutionary (p2); to remain in spaces that are both [p1] and [p2] is the responsibility of communists (p3); therefore, withdrawing from the occupy movement is against the spirit of communism. But this conclusion only follows if we buy the first two premises.

Secondly, due to the heterogeneous nature of the movement, it is clearly the fallacy of composition to assume that the political possibilities of one site can be generalized as the de facto axiomatic rule for the entire movement. The possibilities of Occupy Ottawa are different from the possibilities of Occupy Toronto––perhaps even the possibilities of Canada's version of the #occupy movement are utterly different from the possibilities discovered in the United States.

So, the question still remains, should the Ottawa comrades have withdrawn? Were they acting in an uncommunist manner, were they demonstrating a failure to be militant, was it their duty to persist in struggling against the red-baiting? Should they have spent their time trying to become a strong voice in the General Assembly, thus rising in the ranks of the [non]leadership, in order to avoid what led to their withdrawal? I will attempt to answer all of these interconnected points below.

1. the concrete context of Ottawa's #occupy, not homogenized in accordance to other occupy sites; the total concrete situation not defined by the best or worst examples of its constituent parts.

According to the statement of withdrawal, t seems clear that the Ottawa comrades were beginning to realize that the class composition of the occupy movement there (and this seems rather clear by now) lacked any organizational potential and so their resources were better spent elsewhere. From what they've described it seems like a degenerated NDP-esque space and thus a space where there would no longer be any fruitful organizational engagements––a space far from anything that possessed revolutionary potential. These are not spaces you should fight to control because they will do nothing but co-opt your energies.

Furthermore, I think the statement of the uOMSA and PCR-RCP Ottawa was put forward more for the intention of unity-struggle-unity within the concrete circumstances of Ottawa #occupy, though I doubt it is even possible to unite with the mouth-pieces of the class forces, and their consciousness, described above. So I feel that it was written in an attempt at reconciliation or, at the very least, in an attempt to make the Occupy Ottawa folks soberly examine their practice. While I highly doubt that the #occupy [non]leaders in Ottawa are capable of self-criticism (and based on the current responses from these people it is clear that they won't), I think that it is more principled to approach the situation in this way than prove the bullshit claim that you, simply by being a communist, are (as the Ottawa anti-communists were arguing) "divisive."

Regardless of the supposed abdication on the part of the Ottawa comrades, I think there is a larger and more frightening abdication of responsibility amongst communists involved in the total circumstances of the #occupy movement. That is, as I have argued in other posts, there is a rather despicable blanquism. The amount of communist individuals and groups involved in this movement is significant, but what is more significant is that people coming into this movement are generally unaware of this involvement. Moreover, by placing all their revolutionary eggs in the #occupy movements petty bourgeois basket, these communists are abdicating from their historical responsibility. Agog with the spectacle of people who are on the street (and rightly justified for being so), critical thinking and historical awareness amongst so many anti-capitalists has been reduced to unscientific comments about the supposed "world historical" and "revolutionary" movement they are now part of––there is talk of building "new revolutionary structures", as if the old ones are suddenly useless or as if these "new" ideas of structure are even new.

But communists in the context, rather than getting drunk on the peoples' justified anger, should be doing what has historically worked to build socialism and which has been proven through struggle: building an organized party (which does not have to look identically like the parties in the past, just so we're clear, because all vanguard parties in time and space have been different), and accumulating the revolutionary forces necessary to do so amongst the proletarians who possess a revolutionary consciousness. The mistakes of past revolutions were mistakes that happened after socialism for reasons that are very well theorized, not mistakes (at least in my opinion, since I disagree strongly with what I take to be a very ahistorical anarchist counter-argument) in the theory of making revolution. And it is clear that reinventing this wheel has never worked: just look at all the same proclamations surrounding "Arab Spring" on the part of people in North America and compare them with what the socialists/communists are saying, for example, in Tunisia: they know that it led only to another comprador-capitalism but that the importance was that they were able to find other possible members of the "advanced guard" and, because of this, begin to build a revolutionary party. They did not do this by imagining the movement was revolutionary in and of itself, and they definitely did not begin this process by being blanquist and tailist.

Thus, for communists to waste their time becoming part of the [non]leadership of a petty bourgeois movement when they should instead be building a revolutionary party is something I cannot support; this is a larger abdication within the larger context of the #occupy movement than the Ottawa comrades' withdrawal. In spaces such as the #occupy movement it is better to serve the people, reach out to similar minded people, have real political encounters within a context of service and humility instead of becoming, as so many communist groups (i.e. the International Socialists) aspire to become, the mouthpiece of a movement that was never yours. Which leads me to the next point.

2. should the Ottawa comrades have tried to become a significant force in the #occupy General Assembly; should communists everywhere become significant forces in the #occupy General Assembly?

Since this movement began, and after listening to friends/comrades' stories south of the border and throughout Canada, I am not entirely certain about whether or not we should involve ourselves in the leadership of this occupy movement. As a maoist, however, I am becoming more convinced that, if we become involved, we should actually involve ourselves at those points where we actually serve the people rather than try to become a mouthpiece for a movement that, according to its own logic, is in many ways at odds with our politics.

In the Ottawa situation, for example, it was clear that there was the asinine belief that communists are "divisive" and want to take over movements. So in this context, placing yourself in a position of leadership would result in two unappealing options: properly representing your politics and thus confirming that you are "trying to take over the movement"; being blanquist (yet again, it always keeps happening!) and, out of a spirit of "cooperation", doing nothing more than representing the limits of the occupy discourse. From what I've observed and heard so far throughout the movement, it seems as if the latter practice amongst communists in #occupy [non]leadership has become normative, and I was vaguely talking about that in my previous post. Why are there so many "rank-and-file" occupiers throughout the movement bemused that communism is even a viable ideology when it is clear that there are a lot of communists involved in [non]leadership and various important committee positions. There is a disjunct here between what communists should be doing (for the only important thing about this occupy movement is its organizational potential but you can't organize when you muzzle your politics and keep people ignorant of what you represent) and what they are doing.

The Ottawa comrades made a decision based on a critical assessment of their concrete circumstances that the #occupy movement was not necessarily their prime sphere of organization. They did not assume it was the "only game in town", nor did they make the facile and ahistorical argument that it was a priori revolutionary, the only way to organize revolutionary forces, and thus a space that they should intervene as a part of the #occupy [non]leadership. Clearly those communists involved in [non]leadership positions are not representing their principles but the #occupy movement: they have most often become mouth-pieces for a limited 99% discourse, attempting to slyly push people towards a communist understanding––which seems more like dishonesty than principled politics. And when you do not accept that the #occupy movement is the primary and only organizational space in your concrete circumstances (which any class investigation should tell you), and thus do not buy the false syllogism mentioned at the outset of this post, the decision to withdraw isn't abdication.

You aren't betraying the revolution when you abandon a non-revolutionary space. You are not being uncommunist by realizing, against the fevered hopes of every jaded communist who is today misled by commodified rebellion, that there are still other spaces that, though perhaps initially unspectacular, might prove extremely fruitful in the days and years that will follow the certain collapse of the Occupy Everything movement. And if you do not commit yourself fully to this moment, and accept its petty bourgeois boundaries as a revolutionary duty, then you aren't overly invested in what only seems to be the greatest radical thing in the world because, since we are always more impressed by the manifestation of the peoples' anger than the hard work of building a sustainable revolutionary organization, you will also be invested at those deeper and wider points from which future revolutionaries, the wretched of the earth left out of this movement, might possibly emerge.

3. the question of militancy

So if these spaces are not essentially revolutionary, and the Ottawa space seems rather diametrically opposed to radicalism, why should the Ottawa comrades have responded to the harassment with the spirit of militancy that has given the PCR-RCP the reputation they currently possess? Was their decision to withdraw an act of non-militant pacifism; should they instead of stayed and fought the people responsible for assaulting their tent and materials? In order to answer these questions we need to examine the nature of the PCR-RCP's militancy: this is not a militancy aimed at other activists, however confused these activists might be, nor is it a militancy that wastes time fighting for spaces that lack any organizational potential. This is because the militancy of the PCR-RCP, judging from their public emergence and public growth, has always been: aimed at the violent forces of the bourgeois state; designed to be political, to grow the organization, to introduce the masses to the limits of the state, to protect even confused activists, and to have concrete political goals. So just where would the militancy of the Ottawa comrades have been aimed in the context of Occupy Ottawa; what political goals would it achieve?

We must pick our battles wisely, asking ourselves what sort of politics they will concretely produce. Starting a fight with a buddhist pacifist who manipulated a mentally ill woman into throwing a shit/urine/blood-soaked blanket on your tent will produce nothing politically admirable. For one thing it will waste your time arguing with people who are probably your class enemies (the "pacifist" and his friends) and who it is not your job to organize because they are already organized around a politics contrary to yours. For another thing, it might end up targeting a proletarian individual (the mentally ill person) who was clearly manipulated. Militant posturing in this space will likely only end up scapegoating someone who was mentally ill, perhaps even exposing her to the cops at which your militancy needs to be aimed. Acting with this sort of arrogance, as so many of us are wont to do, will never draw anyone to your politics––especially if you are supposed to represent social relations that are outside the bounds of capitalism.

Nor do I think it is particularly fruitful to respond to violence in a space that claims (however limited this claim) that it is progressive: perhaps the overall left will be harmed if the situation devolves into fights between groups, even if one of these groups was clearly assaulted. Decades ago in Canada the CPC(ML) used to physically attack other communist/anarchist/activist groups for real or perceived slights and this (regardless of the CPC(ML)'s pre-parliamentary politics that were excellent in confronting neo-nazis for example) produced a very negative situation amongst the left. Is our energy best spent as communists fighting with other groups for a space that is predominantly petty bourgeoisie or is it better spent in organizing in those spaces that are being ignored and where the proletariat live and work? Militancy in the context the Ottawa comrades experienced is nothing more than macho posturing.

So back to Ottawa, where the comrades have withdrawn from the occupy space, and where I would argue that this withdrawal was probably wise and principled. Part of the maoist practice, at least theoretically (and I will be the first to admit that I know many maoists and post-maoists whose actions don't fit this theory), is to serve with humility, discipline and principle. They did this because they understood that this was a space where, regardless of the [non]leadership's failings, they were not going to try to "take over" or become militant against petty bourgeois activists. We can only judge these things based on their circumstances. Maybe some are correct in arguing that the Ottawa comrades should not have withdrawn––maybe they should have found another way to respond to the activities of the GA––but I prefer to accept their analysis and autonomy in this situation. Since they are familiar with the Ottawa context, and the circumstances of its occupy movement, I'm guessing that their decision was based on critical discussion and considerations of the concrete context.

The point is that, depending on your first principles, you can either judge the decision of the Ottawa comrades as irresponsible or responsible. If you begin from the position that the Occupy Movement is a great revolutionary whirlwind that will bring freedom to the masses, then the withdrawal of the Ottawa comrades can only be uncommunist abdication. But if you grasp that this movement is far from revolutionary, is not a stand-in for the hard work of organizing, and is ultimately limited by the petty bourgeois principles that so many of us, possibly tailing and blanquist, unintentionally endorse, then you can only see their withdrawal, and the manner in which they withdrew, as principled.

Red Baiting at Occupy Ottawa

2011-10-28T12:48:00.000-04:00

A recent statement from the University Ottawa Marxist Students Association (uOMSA) and the Revolutionary Party of Canada's Ottawa branch (PCR-RCP Ottawa) has revealed that the #occupy site in Ottawa represents, perhaps, the political nadir of the "Occupy Everything" movement. Here we have a group that involved itself, concretely and thoroughly, in the occupy movement of their city and tried to use this involvement to not only serve the people but to push for a more revolutionary agenda. In the past I have spoken of the need to openly organize as communists in these spaces and the possible potential these spaces permit when it comes to radical organizing. Although I think this statement holds as a general axiom, I believe it is also true that, due to the very nature of this occupy movement, there will be sites and spaces in various cities that, due to class composition and a willful liberal mindset amongst those involved, are politically bankrupt.

And yet the situation in Occupy Ottawa, though not identical to the situation in Toronto for example, perhaps demonstrates the logical limits of the movement as a whole. That is, while the occupy sites may in fact be (judged on a city to city basis) spaces where radical organizing is possible, this movement by itself cannot be revolutionary and may in fact, as judged by the report from Ottawa, become rather counter-revolutionary. From all appearances it seems as if the [non]organizers of Occupy Ottawa are quite pleased with their red-baiting, imagining that this is some sort of badge of honour in the occupy movement, and some of them have even, on the facebook string, pointed out that they wanted to push the communists out because they do not want communism associated, in any way, shape or form, with "their" movement.

Red-baiting has always been a counter-revolutionary tactic, divisive and ultimately pro-capitalist. It isolates activists, smothers attempts at radicality, silences debate, and reifies capitalist business as usual. Reactionaries consciously use red-baiting and it is rather telling, if not extremely disheartening, that the Ottawa #occupy representatives used the same tactic.

What this demonstrates, though, is that the movement's extremely nebulous character may often permit the default common-sense liberal thinking to become an a priori organizing principle, just as the supposed "leaderless" [non]structure allows people who come from positions of privilege (and whose consciousness is thoroughly petty bourgeois and/or liberal) to become informal organizers. Furthermore, the fact that it is now becoming extremely evident in the US movement that communist groups––even those who control information and organizational committees––are being utterly blanquist in their organizational approach, perhaps imagining that the movement will create revolutionary structures and consciousness out of thin air, anti-communism and red-baiting will always be a possibility. In Ottawa organizational efforts were short-circuited by the movement's anti-communist [non]leaders; elsewhere, communists are refusing to organize beyond organizing a banal "occupy" consciousness––even those communists who are the [non]leaders.

My problem with some of the over-excited thinking regarding this movement is that those of us who are anti-capitalists tend to leave our brains behind when we enter these spaces. This movement that apparently lacks demands does have a demand, presupposed and sublimated, and that demand––due to the ideology expressed, the movement's main slogans, the actions of the [non]leaders––is simply a demand for a kinder capitalism. The comrades in Ottawa understood that it was important to be involved but, because they didn't want to represent the politics actually expressed (in even the act of supposed "non-expression") by the movement, chose to involve themselves in committees that would serve the people rather than become leaders––they were interested in organizing for something beyond the occupy movement rather than "taking it over." Ironically, they were accused of the latter… So in their space it was impossible to organize, even if it was done honestly and without any attempt to "control" or "divide" the movement, and the movement's invisible committee went out of their way to be anti-communist. Even more ironic is that the nebulous pseudo-anarchism of this movement usually professes to despise communism because of authoritarianism, social planning, and ideological divisiveness and yet, judged by the report (which has not been denied by the Ottawa organizers but actually defended) cited above, the pseudo-anarchists acted as divisive authoritarians who went so far as to social plan where the "maoists" should be able to have their tent.

All of this is to say that we are not dealing with a revolutionary movement and that honest anti-capitalists need to accept that this is a fact. Nor will this movement become revolutionary if we continue to tail, hide our principles, and imagine that everyone involved is "the proletariat" (they're not, do some social investigation) who will magically form a revolutionary party on their own (they won't, just examine historical precedent) without honest agitation. The thing is, if left to follow its own logic, this movement can easily become, wherever it is found, as it became in Ottawa.

So Many Marches, So Little Time

2011-10-22T14:06:00.001-04:00

Today I am skipping out of a giant march from my city's occupy site partially because, after yesterday and the march described in my previous post, I am not entirely interested in going to a march composed primarily of the trade union labour aristocracy, the usual left activist groups, police cooperation––all of the "family friendly" characteristics that have become commonplace in our demonstrations. (Confession: I am also skipping the march because I have a bunch or reading to catch up on, the rest of my group isn't going, and today I am being lazy.) This is not to say that I have a problem with "family friendly" marches, that I boycott them because I'm some sort of super radical who only wants marches where we might possibly fight the police: I am not some macho ultra-leftist who thinks the only people who should be on the street protesting are those who are able-bodied and without children––hell, as much as I hate the limits of these marches, I usually still attend them.

At the same time, however and as noted in my last post, I have grown tired of the stale "let's just walk around this giant block and make sure the police know where we're going" ethos practiced by Toronto's mainstream left. And during this week, after attending other marches connected to the occupy movement, I am less interested in a march of the converted left, or at least semi-converted left, who will only be marching altogether to reinforce to each other that they aren't happy with the system. Of course displays like this are important, but a trade-union led march is the kind of march that is normative in Toronto and this one will be no different from any of the others except that it has tied itself to this #occupy movement. There will be the same groups involved and the same sad string of speakers––some preaching to the choir, others representing the NDP or some bureaucratic echelon of the labour movement.

Yet Again: the context, the concrete circumstances

What I have found compelling about this occupy movement (and those lazy readers who misinterpret what I've written please take note), is that it is a space where you can actually have political conversations that are not forced––where you are able to talk about anti-capitalism with people who might have never encountered a real anti-capitalist position until recently––and thus a space where organization is possible. Yes, I believe in organizing for a revolutionary party but, since I also reject every straw-person conceptualization of vanguardism as pejorative idiocy used merely for rhetorical effect, I think that the possibility of the advanced guard is not necessarily limited to the forces I support and that, if everyone who claims to be an anti-capitalist tries to organize according to hir anti-capitalist commitments, then this is also excellent. What may be the advanced guard now might or might not be the political advanced guard in the future: the question is always tied to the political line, the practice, and how we are growing, unified in theory and practice.

In any case, this is a space brimming with potential: in the everyday political discussions feel forced, maybe because they are not considered "polite" or maybe because we on the left have stopped bringing political discussions into the everyday, but within these occupy spaces they are far more likely to occur. Moreover, people are actually open to talking about the general concepts of communism. But since this is also a space currently determined by the limits of its supposedly absent structures, limitations I have already discussed in a previous post, and continue to be patently obvious from what we have observed, anyone who thinks that it is politically worthwhile to hide their political commitments is, or who imagines without any social investigation and just proclamation that the space is brimming entirely with "the working class" and some Draperite magic, is in my opinion being politically irresponsible.

Moreover, I think we need to critically engage with the very exceptionalist claims regarding the newness of the #occupy movement. Queer agit-prop filmmaker Bruce LaBruce recently wrote a pretty great, and also funny, piece about the Wallstreet occupation that also questions the uniqueness:

"Occupy Wall Street, of course, started not in America in the fall, but in the Middle East with the Arab Spring, followed by the Greek and Spanish summer, where tent cities sprung up in cities such as Barcelona as early as May. (Leave it to New York to take all the credit.) Now the Arab Spring seems to be on permanent summer vacation, with power being shuffled from one neo-liberal entity or entrenched military institution to another, and the spontaneous complaints choirs of southern Europe seem to be languishing a bit too, probably owing to protest fatigue."

And back when Arab Spring happened I remember debating, with more than one irate commentator, the limits of this movement and, though my position was proved correct, I find it rather telling that the same spontaneist or Draperite arguments are being made about this #occupy business, but now with a North American exceptionalism. (As an aside: the title of LaBruce's article could not help but grab by attention considering that an earlier post of mine also uses the "whither thou" title.)

Furthermore, LaBruce's article had evoked the same rejection of political criticism that I complained about in an earlier post––this close-minded idea amongst the [non]organizers that there should be no critiques, well-meaning or otherwise, within the #occupy spaces since this "divides the ninety-nine per cent." And I will say it again: any movement that rejects well-meaning and principled criticism is a movement that cannot grow.

In any case, criticisms aside, it needs to be asserted that this context is brimming with political potential. At the very least it is a space that has recaptured something of the political commons; for that reason, though it should be engaged with critically, it should not be ignored or dismissed––this has always been my point, as well as the point of other organizers, both in the US and Canada, who have decided to critically involve themselves in the movement. The social democratic parties are organizing in this space (the NDP, for example, maintains a constant presence in the Toronto occupation site), as are the libertarians and, in some very depressing cases in the US, neo-nazis––the ninety-nine versus one per cent discourse can be used by all of these political positions. So anti-capitalists, and most definitely communists, should be doing the same (and many of us are); otherwise we are surrendering the terrain to our political enemies.

Within this Context: marches, agitation

So in the context redescribed above, I am less interested in a march that will be the same as other trade-union marches than with the other opportunities and political moments the occupy space can produce. Even if there is an anti-capitalist contingent in this march I am uncertain as to how it will matter considering that these are always the types of marches where anti-capitalist contingents are welcome. And if you're going to have a march pulled off just by anti-capitalists, then it should be more confrontational––it should possess the glimmer of anti-capitalism in how it deals with the state, how it represents itself to the masses on the streets and in their workplaces. Within today's march, an anti-capitalist contingent will just be a group of people who may or may not respect each others' anti-capitalism, who will sell competing papers only to each other, and will generally, with honourable exception, refuse to agitate beyond the same organizational confines it has always agitated within.

Again, I am not arguing that these marches should not exist and that no one should participate. As briefly mentioned above, I usually attend these sorts of marches. Indeed, if this was the only march/action going on this week then I would probably be there. But this week I have been more interested in spending my energy in those alternate spaces that this movement, regardless of its limits, has opened up. Yesterday there was a small but confrontational anti-capitalist march that, by returning to a style of demonstration that has been largely absent in Toronto for around a decade, probably made more of an impression on the everyday life of the people living and working in downtown Toronto who witnessed its confrontational moments.

And then there are those breakaway marches that––regardless of my complaints about national anthem singing, possible police collaboration, and a forced social democratic ideology––are filled with so much exciting potential because many of the people involved are people who have never joined a demonstration, have never marched for a political reason, and whose confusion provide these marches, as critical as we still must be of the politics expressed there, with their fragile and pre-political character. In today's labour march, this newness will be lost and even those possible future radicals who participate will be absorbed and dissolved within its boundaries.

Two Lane Struggle

2011-10-21T21:16:00.003-04:00

For much of this week I have constantly been reminded of an article by the Ignite Collective, The Objectivity of the Streets, whenever I have observed Occupy Toronto's interaction with the police. When you have a [non]official police liaison who is one of the movement's [non]leaders, when there are rumours of other [non]leaders possibly collaborating with the cops by providing them names of the "trouble-makers", when you inform the police of your breakaway marches, and when you persistently try to make people think that the pigs are in the same camp as you––that they are part of your "ninety nine per cent"––then your movement isn't as radical as you would like people to believe. As the Ignite Collective wrote, based on their experience within the #occupy wallstreet movement:

"What struggle for liberation would leave the NYPD intact? Or any other police force? How could we? There are of course particularities to each police force, there may be scattered “well intentioned” individuals in its body (as there are ”well intentioned” individuals amongst financial capital itself, or any other section of the ruling class). NYPD is a mobilized force that is more or less an occupying army in the hood, it is the backbone of finance capital, it is our jailers, it is our violent attackers. If we truly want to face the enemy we must recognize who our enemies our. #OccupyWallSt. has loosely put forward that our enemy is the “1%” in relation to the “99%” – we say essentially that at the very least the formulation be reformulated as the 98% against 2%, finance capital and their running dogs in the NYPD. Liberation means the end of the police!"

Thus, I was quite happy when today, at a march to the occupy site, there were no permits, the police weren't alerted, and the street was occupied without apology or liaison attempts. Nor was I surprised when the tone of this march, in slogans and intentions, was far more anti-capitalist and far less social democrat than the other marches I have so far observed in this movement.

When the police did show up, and demanded that we only take one lane instead of two, one of my comrades started up a joke chant, "two lane struggle", that the rest of the marchers began to chant as well, and the pigs were disobeyed. By simply beginning without permits, without a police presence, by taking the streets without the permission of the guardians of capitalism––and this process discovering that bystanders will join you, that workers will support what your political line––has always been a moment of radicalization. When you march with the police involved, when you liaison with them and try to be "good" demonstrators, you do not begin by confronting the state even on a symbolic level; you are conceding to the state, you are marching according to its rules.

As much as I have complained about the strategy of movementism, I still have a lot of respect for the tactics of the golden days of movementism in my city. The snake marches, the rejection of the International Socialists' attempt to make us march around the same damn block herded by the police, the confrontational occupations… Although the theory and structure for something beyond action itself was lacking, there was still radical action. Those of us who endorsed these tactics understood that the pigs were not our friends; we even had various anti-police chants. Although I cannot accept the ahistorical and always disproven theories of revolution pushed by this theoretical melange (sorry, no matter how many times you try to dress up Draperism with new words it's still the same idealist nonsense), at least it had a radical dimension that has been largely absent from the mainstream spaces of the occupy movement.

The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much we want to believe a movement is radical and unprecedented and filled with revolutionary potential, it will be nothing more than capitulationist unless people realize that the police cannot be part of a movement that would ever threaten the capitalist state. And if this movement does not become something that can threaten capitalism, if there is no two line (or "two lane"?) struggle within it to push it towards an anti-capitalist agenda, then it is far from radical. Again as the Ignite Collective argued:

"We must know in what class relation do [the police] stand to the rest of society – even the wisdom of the ancients, particularly Plato, had long judged their position in relationship to productive labor - that is the “soldier class” produces nothing, there is no actual work. Any section of the people which produces nothing however receives a wage is in fact dependent on the surplus accumulation of the whole people, which in this context takes place in the imperialist capitalist world system. They’re therefore, because of this context, parasitical to the broad working people. One can say their labor is as civil servants, that their labor is reproductive for the means of production. This in fact makes sense, but for ourselves we must point out what kind of “reproductive” work is this? Its reproductive labor which is in fact violent maintenance of the the conditions of production – whereas the sanitation worker clears the snow after the blizzard, whereas the teacher prepares (or perhaps not) the new generation to become the army of the labor, the police breaks strikes, they arrest and house labor, they murder us when commanded. In this respect their actual interests are not the same as the broad working masses and at least at this moment completely divergent from ourselves."

Whither Thou, Communism?

2011-10-18T15:53:00.000-04:00

Although communists continue to comprise a significant portion of the anti-capitalist left's population in Canada and the United States, ever since the fall of the Eastern Bloc and the flurry of anti-communism that triumphed with the capitalist end of history, the existence of communist organizations and individuals has largely been seen as anachronistic by the non-activist mainstream. In the Western Hemisphere's centres of capitalism, these nightmare fortresses of advanced capital, the common discourse of communist failure and supposed atrocity––all the cold war propaganda that has been victorious since the end of the Soviet Union and the free marketization of China––has helped produce the misconception that communism and communists are a thing of the past. And even when the typically myopic western mind is able to admit, with grudging confusion, that communism might be an ongoing reality over there, it generally is unable to comprehend the persistence of communist ideology amongst the populations in its own hemisphere.

If you speak to people outside of the normative activist terrain about communism the response is often one of bemusement. There is a general confusion and curiousity about the very concept, a deep-seeded belief that you might be speaking about something that happened half-a-century ago and might not be relevant to the contemporary era. The fact that there are still a lot of communist groups and individuals, that they form a significant portion of the activist left, really doesn't matter to the majority of the people you encounter on an everyday basis; the majority of the population is not activist and largely unaware of the vicissitudes of activist life.

There is a significant problem, in my opinion, that communist organizers have persisted––that new commie groups are born every five years––but that the general population is most often confused about this persistence. Most disconcerting is the fact that the proletariat, that working-class that is not to be found in the labour aristocratic trade unions, has been largely unaware of communism and communist organizations. If communism is about organizing the masses, specifically the most exploited ranks of these masses, then the fact that it can continue to thrive in activist spaces and yet remain largely unknown in proletarian spaces is extremely telling. If it is only organizing students, academics, and those of us who have grown out of our anarchist phase, then it is not organizing as it should be organizing: this is not the communism that means class struggle, but the communism that means an ideological club of fashion activists and ivory tower academics.

So despite the fact that there are a lot of us communists out there, we have tended to accept the capitalist imaginary regarding the end of history and often chosen to be blanquist about our politics. The argument is that the people aren't ready for communism, that in this uber-capitalist reality people are overly hostile to communism, and that we should never talk openly about our politics––we have to hide what we believe, pretend to be trade-unionists, submerge ourselves in the nebulous realm of movementism, or degenerate into tiny and dogmatic groups who preserve a "pure" communism. When the people one day "wake up", the scales magically dropping from their eyes by the grace of God, they will suddenly say "oh yeah, communism, I think I like that" and go out shopping for whatever communist group, all of which have been hiding more or less in the shadows, best fits their new political desires.

When I look back on my activist life and try to make sense of how I gravitated towards communism, I'm struck by the absence of communist organizers in my pre-political phase. Like many young people who are just becoming interested in anti-capitalism, I defaulted on anarchism because I simply assumed that communism was dead end, due to the failures of actually existing socialism, and I was not aware that anyone thought differently. It wasn't until I started to become involved in activism that I realized, with surprise and confusion, that there were a hell of a lot of communists out there, maybe as many as the anarchists I assumed were the normative activist reality, and at first I could not help but see them as an anachronism. And yet my story is one of student privilege: I was part of that population who, moving through the ranks of the radical student movement, was even able to enter the activist terrain. I was not a worker who did not possess the same access to radical ideology––these days, in this part of the world, anti-capitalist ideology and anti-capitalist agitation tends to be limited to privileged sites of organization.

The point is that, for a long time, communists have chosen to accept the limits imposed by the end of history narrative and, fearing the hostility of their traditional social base, retreat into the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. And because of this retreat, either in limited activist circles or in parliamentary politics, the very people they claim to speak for, the most exploited and underprivileged of this society, started to forget that communism was a viable political commitment.

One of the justifications for this retreatist blanquism is that, because of the failures of communism and the propaganda connected to these failures, communism has become an ugly word and the masses will be hostile to any mention of a communist revolution. And yet, even if this is a universal truth, we must ask how the masses will stop being hostile if the actually existing communist groups continue to hide within privileged spaces. Maybe if we stop calling communism communism, and come up with other names and categories that are just a rebranding of the old names and categories, we can circumvent this supposed hostility… But this is assuming that people are stupid and won't figure out that we're talking about the same thing they supposedly hate.

A more important question to ask, however, is whether or not this hostility is as widespread and normative as we are told it must be. Certainly there are people hostile to communism, but there were always people hostile to communism––even in the days before the Russian Revolution. These days, when I speak about communism with people outside of the traditional activist milieu, I'm struck more by the bemused curiousity than the outright hostility. When we held a teach-in about communism at a public library several months back, for example, the only person present who was hostile was someone who believed that the Illuminati and the Free Masons controlled the world––the type of person who would be hostile to all politics that did not fit his conspiracy theory categories. If hostility is still present, it is the hostility that will always be present against communism: the hostility of those committed, in some shape or form, to capitalism––social democrats, the petty bourgeois, are more hostile to communism than the people communists are supposed to be working to organize. This is the point. So why are we hiding our politics from those we are supposed to organize, yet sharing these very same politics with a class filled with people who often are outrightly hostile to the idea of communism?

This refusal to be principled about our politics has become a normative and ingrained practice for communists. Take, for example, the march a briefly described in the previous post where a bunch of people decided to start singing the Canadian national anthem (amongst other things) as an expression of their politics. As it turns out, there were other communists at the march who did not think it was worth intervening in this expression of pro-imperialism because (I'm assuming) an intervention would be "alienating." Although I was annoyed that the national anthem was sung, and was willing to confront it with my comrades and allies, I understand that in the pre-political space of this #occupy movement there are people who are still caught within the discourse of Canadian nationalism. I am less annoyed, therefore, with the people singing the national anthem than the communists who should know better who thought it would be okay to just accept this expression of colonial-capitalism. By refusing to intervene, by keeping their supposed principles to themselves, no one would even know that they were communists; they might as well have been social democrats also yearning for a return to the "good old days" of Canadian capitalism. They might as well have been saying, in a different context, "boys will be boys"––we know that this is an excuse, an acceptance of anti-people politics.

The people deserve better than a "people will be people" attitude to problematic behaviour. It is condescending and patronizing to fail to intervene in those pre-political spaces, to fail to push the people who want something more towards an actually liberating politics, but when we continue to hide our politics we can be nothing more than patronizing and condescending.

I will end this post by referencing the recent statement of the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada regarding how we as communists should approach spaces such as the #occupy movement:

A revolution does not just happen, nor does it triumph by chance. A revolution is the product of a conscious and long-term struggle led by thousands of proletarian people, people that are as ordinary as they are heroic. People who make the first decisive action to engage in the struggle. Some proposals we can uphold right now are:

1) To discuss and share our collective problems and to convince those around us of the necessity of class struggle in order to radically transform society. We need to combat systems of oppression, such as sexism, racism, and all forms of chauvinism aimed at dividing the camp of the people.

2) To organize in our workplaces, our schools and our neighborhoods by establishing committees for socialist revolution. Such committees could serve as the basis for circulating revolutionary ideas: by distributing newspapers and leaflets, by organizing events and actions, for example denouncing public services cuts, acting in solidarity with strikers, occupying a factory, responding to racial profiling by the police and ‘justice’ system, acting against a polluting industry, etc.

3) To build the revolutionary organization capable of uniting the proletariat and leading the fight for socialism.

Today at "Occupy" Toronto

2011-10-17T22:04:00.000-04:00

Between the discourse that rejects every sudden social movement that is limited and imperfect, and the discourse that fetishizes every new movementist brand with the ahistorical belief that these moments are Unique and Revolutionary, is the reality of the #occupy movement. Neither discourse is capable of providing a concrete analysis of a concrete situation; both project their own delusions, distorting reality, on this explosive but limited event. The amount of "I will never get involved because I'm smarter and more radical" complaints are equaled only by the "I'm going to tail this movement because it is so awesome and liberating" statements. Although those of us who are communists are supposed to be thinking dialectically, and finding the nuanced unity of opposites in our understanding of this moment, we tend to swing to either side in how we make sense of this fragile event. Either position will result in an inability to take advantage of this opportunity: the more-radical-than-thous will not even engage with the possibility of organizing in these spaces (aside from maybe going to complain or to sell their papers); the tailists won't organize because they are generally under the impression that the movement will move magically and spontaneously from the pre-political to the revolutionary––socialism "from below" where the party builds itself out of thin air.

The truth, however, is that this space is full of radical potential while, at the very same time, entirely limited by its own imperfection. This unity of opposites, due to the heterogenous nature of the movement, varies from site to site, both in the same city and elsewhere, so that sometimes the potential is more readily apparent and at other times the limits are clear. From my own experience with the movement in my city, from what I have encountered thus far with the group in which I'm involved, I am alternately hopeful and frustrated. Hopeful because it is clear that the potential for organization is concentrated in an incoherent movement; frustrated because I know that this incoherence, which eventually allows only a coherent petty bourgeois ideology to emerge, results in significant problems.

The first and obvious problem, a significant roadblock to organizing, is the fact that there is an informal leadership that is doing little more than promoting a social democrat we're-all-in-this-together-as-the-99 agenda. The idea that the police are our friends, that some of the [non-]leaders are offering to collaborate with the pigs and CSIS, is only the most obvious manifestation of this social democrat domination. We can also speak of the calls for unity amongst forces that should not be unified in any revolutionary structure, the typical tears shed about the disappearing middle-class, or the invectives to fix the voting system and that writing to your parliamentary representatives is synonymous with social equality. The larger problem, however, is in the process that promotes certain people to leadership allowing for a reification of this opportunist ideology.

Those who are emerging as leaders––aside from those social networkers who caught the zeitgeist, called the movement, and placed themselves in organizational positions "by consensus"––are those who camp out at the occupation site. It makes sense that the people who will have the most command of a movement like this will be those who are involved in a day-to-day basis because they will quickly discover how things work, put processes into motion, and be recognized as the people who are always there. And yet we need to question how and why certain people have the autonomy and agency to camp out indefinitely: the camping activists are not the homeless, are not people who are jobless because they are absurdly poor, but representatives of a class that possess the privilege of time––that is, subsidized jobless students, slumming anarcho-punks from the suburbs, or even people paid by large and suspicious organizations (i.e. the NDP) to always be present. Although there is a current and troubling school of thought that imagines predominantly white and male kids are somehow the new revolutionary class, I am of the opinion (and an opinion that comes from a concrete analysis of history) that the opposite is the case: their class composition does not make them essentially revolutionary; indeed, if the current limits of the #occupy movement are anything to go by, the opposite is the case.

From this problem of the informalized leadership emerges the successive problem of that incoherence that reifies a commitment to a desire for a more humane capitalism. Today I participated in a breakaway march that left the park to temporarily occupy the financial district (where the site of occupation should have been, in my opinion, in the first place). The vast majority of the speeches delivered through the over-fetishized "peoples sound system" demonstrated little more than a desire to return to a stronger welfare capitalism, a demand that the cops join us because they are also part of the ninety-nine, and how if we were really radical we would write letters to our MPs and MPPs as soon as we got home. Some activists who had their faces covered out of fear of being targeted by the pigs (and these were most often people of colour) were told that they shouldn't be covering their faces because "we are all open here." Those unaccustomed to protesting acquiesced to police intimidation pretty quickly, regardless of the warnings of those of us who warned them that they needed to stand their ground, because the "leaders" kept feeding them information about time regulations, and respecting the other members of the 99 whose lives we were disrupting, and oh yeah, we also had a police liaison who was doing a terrific job. (Side point: if you have a police liaison you are automatically not a revolutionary movement.) We were reminded by some of the more leaderly non-leaders that this was a very "historic" moment… and yet everything is historical, but I assume he meant "world historical" (this is a Unique Event) which is something I reject utterly––this is a new formal repetition of older events, and perhaps if we could spend the time to learn from the failures and limits of those older events we wouldn't keep making the same bloody mistakes.

We also decided (I use "we" ironically because of the enforced "consensus" model that does not speak for my politics or the politics of others involved) to form a giant 99% in Dundas Square so the news helicopters could "get our message" and then dance around in a circle. What was the most counter-revolutionary moment of the day, however, was when it was decided, again "by consensus", to sing the national anthem. This was clearly an enforced "consensus" moment because the moment it was suggested a significant number of us, including an indigenous contingent, voiced our dissent and yet the anthem was still performed. After the anthem was sung one of the indigenous representatives was permitted to voice his distaste in a megaphone, but the majority of the people singing the genocidal song just clapped and cheered his speech as if it had nothing to do with their desire to celebrate colonialism.

Inside these limits, however, there was still a strange potentiality. Throughout the march the group I was with was able to speak with people both in the march and on the sidewalks, spread very clear communist propaganda, and thus use the spectacle of the march to communicate with people currently outside of the activist terrain. We also intervened when it was necessary within this space: we began the anti-capitalist and anti-colonial chant against the Canadian anthem (much to the annoyance of the consensus fetishizers) that others noticed, some even participating in; one of our members defended the right for other protestors to cover their faces. In practice we supported the marchers but we tied our practice to a different ideology.

I do not believe, for one moment, that this movement will result in the end of capitalism; it is very clear that its current [non-]leadership, at least in my city, is tied to a social democrat agenda and, lacking any clear organization, unable to be anything more than a collected site of spontaneous anger. I still believe, however, that is important to agitate within these spaces for something more… but in order to do so we must maintain a disciplined, principled, and, above all, sober attitude.

Smarmy Social Democrats on the Anniversary of the Long March

2011-10-16T19:57:00.001-04:00

Yesterday, during the initiation of #occupytoronto, the group with which I was involved brought a banner of Mao's face to our anti-imperialist march and into the occupy site. This was appropriate because, as the person who painted the banner reminded me, today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Long March. Although I'm not always into expressing my politics through floating heads (because I think that sometimes this facialization might obscure political content), what made the banner interesting in this specific context was that it encouraged more attention and interaction than the majority of other banners that were mainly acronyms, abstract designs, and not entirely distinguishable from each other.

For most of yesterday the banner was photographed by pretty much everyone with a camera (sometimes these people asked us to pose, or asked to take a picture with Mao's head), but more importantly we were forced to interact with a constant barrage of people who wanted to know why we were standing with a painted effigy of Mao Zedong. [Although one of my friends joked: "why are you marching with an Andy Warhol banner?"] On multiple occasions this curiousity resulted in fruitful political discussion that ended with an exchange of emails. Once, because I guess the politics represented by Mao in the common imagination was apparent in our head (these folks are crazily anti-capitalist!), we were actually asked by someone else to intervene in a confrontation with the libertarian Ron Paulbots who are using these #occupy demos to push an abhorrent anti-people politics.

Right when we were about to pack up the banner and go to the general assembly, however, we were finally met with hostility. A group of self-satisfied, smarmy protestors, one who was a self-proclaimed and proud "social democrat" banded together to inform us that Mao was a "mass murderer" and that our banner was akin to "hate speech." The social democrat felt he had the right to inform us that we had no right to be at "his" protest. Here was where the facialization predominated and the talk became abstracted from the political content represented by the head; we ended up getting sucked into an argument about the historical facts of the Chinese Revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution. And though a number of us (including a friend who wasn't a Maoist but who was genuinely surprised by the earlier positive reaction we were getting and found this round of critiques idiotic) demanded sources for these typical counter-revolutionary claims, going so far as to demonstrate that we were largely aware of the sources they were using––but sources they themselves could not cite––these social democrat morons were unable to offer any convincing counter-argument.

So what should this tell us about the use of a stylized face as a political banner? We know that there are some cultish groups (such as the RCP-USA) that use the faces of pseudo-revolutionaries to push a cult of personality that lacks any depth. We know the ultimate silliness that results in this method of political practice: posting stenciled photos of Bob Avakian's head around Burning Man. Since Mao Zedong was the foremost revolutionary leader and theorist following Lenin, there should be a clear distinction between the use of his image and that of Bob Avakian's but, still, there is always the possibility that the use of a revolutionary face could conjure the spectre of a cult of personality that ends up replacing revolutionary political content. After all, Mao's image was used even by the enemies of Mao's political line during the Cultural Revolution.

In the context of the #occupy movement, however, I think the use of Mao's image resulted in a very fruitful social investigation. If we are in a moment of accumulating revolutionary forces, then those the most curious about, but not necessarily hostile to, Mao, and who wanted to talk to us about politics, emerge as a population of possible allies or future comrades. The fact that many of the people who spoke with us wanted to exchange contact information was perhaps even more important than ideological exchange. And the fact that we pissed of a small group people revealed that population which will refuse to organize around revolutionary ideas: one of them even said that he rejected the violence of every revolution, of every moment where the oppressed were forced to kill their oppressors. These are people who find the entire notion of revolution abhorrent, a significant sector of the 99% who, as discussed in previous posts, would be quite happy becoming the 1%.

Moreover, it is telling that this counter-revolutionary population claims the #occupy movement as their own. These proud social democrats are clearly under the impression that this movement is their terrain, that activists who have been organizing (however movementist or sectarian) in Toronto for years are "offensive"––chances are they would never show up at any of the older style demonstrations, probably not even at the G20 or previous anti-globalization demos, and exist in a state of historical absence where nothing has proceeded before "their" movement arrived to represent "their" petty bourgeois ideas. Again we are forced to recognize the current petty bourgeois boundaries of the #occupy movement; by recognizing this, however, we should be led to push a politics that rejects the limits beloved by these social democrats who are so offended by the entire notion of revolution.

It is both interesting and important that in this activist context the image of a revolutionary leader can be polarizing. But the point of revolutionary politics is, by these politics' very nature, to be polarizing. Class struggle is necessarily polarizing in that it divides people into revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries; if we pretend otherwise we are engaged in opportunism.

We on the left have always used divisive and polarizing symbols. There was a time when Che's image, before it became a pop-cultural icon was extremely divisive (and it still is for some), and I remember a time, not so long ago, where wearing a Palestinian keffiah was considered extremely "divisive" and "alienating" even amongst the mainstream left. But those of us who were anti-zionists and who, over a decade ago when the Palestinian struggle was not yet a normative feature of mainstream leftwing demos, intentionally wore keffiahs in order to make a polarizing political point. I remember when the keffiah would cause supposed leftists (some of whom today are now all about boycott-divestment-sanctions) to complain that I was supporting "extremism" and that the keffiah, though not a face, was an instance of "hate speech" because it was "anti-semitic." But now that the keffiah has become a staple of the activist dress code (and at one point even a staple of the hipster dress code), only raving zionists would argue that it is "offensive." The reason it was initially worn, however, was to be intentionally political which means intentionally divisive.

Once you take a clear political position you have already articulated who is included and who is not. Even those liberals who pretend they are apolitical––because liberalism is a default position––have decided who and who is not included in their politics; they might imagine everyone is with them, but the truth is that, like those smarmy social dems at yesterday's #occupy kick-off, have decided who is excluded from their set politics. All political commitments are defined by, their very goals and ideology, deciding who are political friends and who are political enemies. Which is why Mao once argued, in his analysis of classes in Chinese society, that we have to begin by answering the question who are our friends and who are our enemies… I suppose that, yesterday, it was appropriate that the image of Mao's face made us think of this question.

Uncritical Zeal

2011-10-14T13:05:00.001-04:00

Since the "occupy" zeitgeist is manifesting in my city this Saturday, and since I'm going to be part of an anti-imperialist contingent that will enter the site of occupation with red flags flying, I have been following the left debates of the movement, and speaking with comrades across the border who are involved in said movement, with critical interest. Indeed, the reason for my earlier post about the petty bourgeois boundaries of #occupy was the result of digesting innumerable interventions and polemical exchanges, as well as discussing the politics and practice of those most enthralled by the "occupy" movement with more sober and critical activists who were still involved.

As much as I still think it's important to get involved, and am excited at the possibilities this critical mass might produce in Toronto, I have been utterly unimpressed by the uncritical zeal evinced by #occupy's strongest supporters and [informal] organizers. In my previous post, cited above, I briefly complained about the reactionary discourse of returning the US or Canada to the "good old days" that was becoming commonplace amongst some of the #occupy ideologues. Even worse is the inability of many of these organizers and most active supporters to accept criticism; for me, one of the important ways to gauge the political worth of any movement is to examine the willingness or unwillingness to be self-critical, open to learning and change, and conscious of one's social position.

Lack of self-awareness, refusal to grow, means a lack in consciousness raising––means a lack in developing the type of revolutionary consciousness that is required to be a truly radical movement that will be able to actually transgress the limits of capital. And if the backbone of the #occupy movement is currently comprised of people unwilling to accept criticism, who seem to be unable to admit that they can learn from those who have suffered the worse exploitation and oppression under capitalism, then it is going to be nothing more than the next movementist street party. People will get arrested––just as they did in the G20 in 2010 and just as they did during the hey-day of the anti-globalization movement––because it's the pigs' job to put down anything that even resembles an uprising, but what are they get arrested for? Again: capitalism is not going to fall (as some of the more rabid #occupiers, along with the most mindless tailist groups, are proclaiming) because of this movement and so the question, that I have been asking in multiple ways and in multiple contexts, is what can the left get out of this movement for future revolutionary goals.

A paradigm example of this refusal to accept criticism can be found on the People of Color Organize! website's critical coverage of the #occupy movement. Since the movement began, POCO has been running critical assessments of the movement from the perspective of racialized people and the predominant whiteness of the movement. The point of these articles were not to dismiss the #occupy movement in a "more-radical-than-thou" kind of way, but to bring a much needed sober analysis to a movement that, at least when these critiques began, only had the most simplistic analysis of what was at stake. Every one of these articles resulted in comments from extremely uncritical #occupiers who wrote what uncritical activists have been saying for decades: "you're being divisive by bringing up these issues." In the case of the POCO articles the issues of critique surrounded racism and colonialism, but so many of us know that in these movementist spaces, where the myth of spontaneity is prized, that all talk of a politics with content is despised. You are being divisive when you speak of the need to address structural oppression amongst a movement and its organizers; you are being sectarian when you talk, even in the most non-sectarian way, about political principles that go beyond movementist spectacle.

Any movement requires criticism if it is to become something more than just a petty bourgeois street party that the pigs find bothersome but not truly threatening. Yes, this criticism has to be well-meaning for the interest of growth, but my issue is that I'm wary of people who cannot even accept well-meaning criticism. Ernesto's article, Seven Occupy Wall Street Racial Justice Roadblocks, for example, is a very well-meaning article that examines what is standing in the way of activist people of color in the US from getting involved with the #occupy movement. If anything it is arguing that the #occupy movement can grow and become stronger if it engages with these issues; it was trying to explain, to the movement's most excited members, why a lot of people of color in the US were skeptical.

Unfortunately, Ernesto's sober critique produced some of the most asinine and uncritical comments from the #occupy zealots. The usual refrain is that the basic discourse of the 99% versus the 1% is a discourse of unity, and that any division or critical discussion amongst the 99% empowers the 1% even further. Gone is any understanding that the ninety-nine is further divided, both globally and locally, and that those currently claiming to speak for the ninety-nine do not actually have a real revolutionary class understanding since they refuse to examine the hard core of this ninety-nine––the proletariat. And the proletariat, as I have been arguing since I began this blog, is strongly determined by racialization, gender, and other sites of oppression. As Dustin from The Hong Se Sun has excellently put it:

"The top twenty percent of the population in the US owns around 83% of all the wealth. Leaving the bottom 80% of the population with only 17% of the nation's wealth. I must reiterate the lack of class analysis. The next 19% are no better than the top 1%. I'm sure most of those 19% would love to be the 1%."

Which of course led Dustin to make the very accurate and political deduction that this was not necessarily a movement of class warfare but a movement of populism. That is, this is a movement currently led by the more left-inclined members of the petty bourgeoisie that, in some ways, is rejecting a proper class analysis in favour of the kind of populism that sees no difference between the petty bourgeois and proletariat of the ninety-nine. I already complained about this, but it bears repeating: the majority of the petty bourgeois, once they get what they want, will sell out the lower classes. So when uncritical defenders of #occupy respond to every well-meaning critique with invectives to "cooperate", and that any critique is a lack of cooperation, they ignore the fact that the idea of radical cooperation that their critics actually represent must also take into account the barriers standing in the way of this cooperation. And there are barriers: simply imagining they don't exist doesn't make them go away.

A movement that can be truly radical must have revolutionary political content and a revolutionary structure. We know this from history; we have seen the successes and the failures. Critique and discussion provides political content and if people are scared of critique, no matter how well-meaning this critique might be, then the politics they represent will be worthless. Political critique was deemed essential to this century's most revolutionary movements––both in the moment of revolution and later, when the revolution failed, to understand what went wrong. Revolutionary ideology did not appear magically because the utopic 99% are going to invent them out of thin air; it has been won through historical struggle.

Moreover, when critiques about an informal [usually white male] leadership are raised, simply denying that an informal leadership exists, perhaps with statements like "everyone is a leader", is not an argument. Those of us who have spent years wandering the "consensus" and "affinity group" labyrinth know that the whole "everyone is a leader" claim is bullshit. Structural oppression and individual privilege results in certain people emerging as recognized leaders amongst the people involved in the movement (though maybe not the cops), and since we all like to pretend that there is no leadership, the people who have the most influence are not held to any formal structures of accountability. These spaces are frustrating for people who are unaware of the consensus and affinity games that promote informal leadership cliques; they often wonder why all their ideas are being rejected, unaware that it might be because they are seen as a threat by the informal leader clique or that their ideas run counter to the set politics of said clique. And usually the people who are frustrated are people who come from a site of heavy exploitation and oppression, just as the people in the informal clique are generally privileged and petty bourgeois––if not white men, then people with a lot of economic autonomy.

In light of this context, and the politics being promoted by the "no leaders" of the #occupy movement, criticism is necessary. If the end of capitalism is our goal––and we know that this movement is not in itself going to end capitalism––then it is necessary to engage with well-meaning critique and learn. Moreover, it is necessary to enter these spaces with a desire to help and engage in the movement but not as mindless tailist robots who do not talk about the required revolutionary ideology and structure or kow-tow to an invisible college of organizers.

Some of critiques (such as the one by Ernesto, cited above) have argued for the need for people who are wary of the political boundaries of the #occupy movement to enter these sites with their own community organizations. And though Ernesto's critique concerned people of color, I think his point is relevant in a broader sense. I plan to enter the #occupy site as a member of an organization that will work diligently in a coalition but will not, because of its political content and ideology, mindlessly accept the strictures of whatever informal leadership emerges: we have our own structures, or own responsibilities to each other, and it is better to be involved in unity as a group than to be involved in alienation as a single individual.

Anti-Imperialist Contingent March to #occupytoronto

2011-10-12T16:34:00.001-04:00

In my previous post I discussed the ideological boundaries, the general petty bourgeois consciousness, that currently delimit the politics of the #occupy movement. Now that it is about to arrive in Toronto, the facts I described are becoming more evident––especially when the excited organizers (or non-organizers considering the reality of the we-have-no-leaders informal leadership approach) and soon-to-be participants are making absurd exclamations like "it's time to take Canada back." But Canada was always a colonial-capitalist nation, an imperial settlement since its inception, and these demands to return to a rosier and friendlier settler-colonial capitalist reality runs dangerously close to reactionary nostalgia. [Tangental point for Jude and Sarah: a nod to our discussion of the politics of nostalgia!] A desire to return to something that did not exist, a desire to make capitalism more humane like it was in "the good old days" (was it really, and for what class?), can easily turn reactionary: it not only obliterates the memory of the past's victims, but it runs parallel to the ultra-conservative desire to return to the days when white male supremacy was largely unchallenged.

So how do we challenge the default reformist politics that currently has hegemony in the #occupy space. The political group(s) that I'm involved with have decided to enter the #occupytoronto site as an anti-imperialist contingent, rather than separately and disparately, so that our politics are obvious from the beginning. Since the day that #occupytoronto begins (October 15th) is also the same day as the 10 year anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, it is perfect to mark our participation in this "occupy" movement as a participation qualified by our anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics. You cannot talk about justice for the 99% unless you realize that the 1% also accumulates wealth through the export of capital (which means imperialist plunder and militarism), or that the entire 100% is composed of colonizers and colonized and that "Canada" as it currently exists cannot be "taken back." Unless, of course, we mean taking back land in the anticolonial sense… but the use of the national term Canada already forecloses on this possibility.

There can be no talk of the greed of the 1% without also talk of the structural reality of capitalism which, here in Canada, also means colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and ableism. There can be no talk of how we are the 99% unless we understand that we exist in an imperialist nation that participates in, and profits from, the mass slaughter of the global 99%. There can be no talk of the 99% versus the 1% without understanding that when we speak of these percentages we are also speaking of class struggle.

I still think, as I argued in the post cited at the outset of this entry, that there is a lot of potential in the #occupytoronto space. The problem, though, is how to utilize that potential: do we hide our politics and tail the politics of the [informal] organizers, do we ignore the movement altogether because we cannot help but shudder when people talk of "taking back Canada", or do we involve ourselves in a way that demonstrates a clear and principled political line? Clearly I side with the third option because, as I have argued before, the other two options are politically paralyzing and do nothing to accumulate the revolutionary forces necessary to build the structure that can challenge capitalism.

Moreover, not only do I think that our politics should be evident; our politics need to be expressed in our actions. We should not get involved simply to proselytize because we should not be missionary dogmatists who, instead of doing any on-the-ground work, waste their time selling papers and fighting over the proper slogans. Our politics should be recognizable in our words and discussions, in the manner in which we enter spaces, but it's more important that these politics are seen as inseparable from our actions. Being a good communist not only means being recognized as a communist because you're carrying a bloody hammer-and-sickle flag (or some other variant), but being known for actually serving the people.

So if there are any Toronto readers who are interested in joining the Anti-Imperialist Contingent of the Canada Out of Afghanistan March––readers who are interested in marching into the #occupytoronto site under an anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist banner––check out the details posted here and join us at 1pm this Saturday.

[The Anti-Imperialist Contingent of the March consists of the following groups: the May 1st Movement, Women United Against Imperialism, Basics, the Canada South Asia Solidarity Association, Barrio Nuevo, International League of Peoples Struggle Canada, and the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee.]

Contesting Petty Bourgeois Spaces

2011-10-11T12:17:00.000-04:00

The growth of the "occupy" movement that started on Wallstreet (and will soon arrive, for better or worse, in Toronto) has produced a discourse about the exploited 99% and the exploiting 1% that, although accurate, is being preached by a sector of people who might otherwise resist the use of such terminology. Since this movement is currently dominated by a class of people who make up, perhaps, the top 20% of the ninety-nine in the US and Canada––and probably only four or five per cent of the global ninety-nine––the fact that it is speaking, in very broad brushstrokes, in language vaguely akin to the language of communists is extremely interesting.

At the same time, though, due to the class that is currently in command of this movement (the supposed lack of leaders does not mean, as it never does, the absence of an informal leadership – meaning, a leadership dominated by the most privileged) the discourse of the 99%, though clearly important as a starting point, is locked within boundaries of reform, a return to Keynesianism––a possibly healthy capitalism with a welfare "socialism" that is contingent upon greater exploitation in the peripheries. That is because the class dominating this new activist zeitgeist is the petty bourgeoisie and its demands (or, more accurately, semi-intentional lack of demands) are still primarily the demands of its class. Even the fact that the movement has been resisting the need to place key demands on its agenda, falling back into some sort of "strength in directionless" ideology promoted by AdBusters (one of the key magazines for the activist, "culture-jamming" petty bourgeoisie), demonstrates the consciousness of a petty bourgeoisie in crisis––directionlessness, confusion, the realization that its class position is, and has always been, unstable.

So many of the activists interviewed around the "occupy" movement have demonstrated that this movement began as a manifestation of the petty bourgeoisie in crisis: some have spoken about a future where they can't get the same jobs they could get in the past, revealing the widespread belief that this class deserves certain jobs; those calling for the "occupy" movement on facebook and twitter and countless "social networking" sites and tools (all of which are instruments that the majority of the global ninety-nine cannot access) focus primarily on the greed of the top one per cent––a psychological problem rather than the structural reality of capitalism.

But the fact that the petty bourgeoisie is in crisis is not something that we should overlook. If anything, the space that was opened up by the "occupy" movement––despite the limitations of its initial discourse and use of language––is a space that needs to be further radicalized, a space that needs to be taken over by the majority of the 99%, a space where a revolutionary ideology that truly represents the 99% should be fostered. We don't do this by kow-towing to the informal leadership, by allowing the people who were taken by the original "occupy" discourse to continue dominating the ideological terrain, or by tailing a petty bourgeois agenda and hoping it magically radicalizes just because those of us who reject its limitations are hanging around. Already it is clear that there are organizers involved in some of the "occupy" sites (I'm looking at you, Boston!) who are working hard to reject the current boundaries of the movement's discourse, bring in groups and people who represent the majority of the ninety-nine, and push a more revolutionary agenda.

If the petty bourgeoisie currently dominating this movement represents a class in crisis, then we have to understand that what we are witnessing is a moment of proletarianization where the more privileged upper classes, though also dominated by the top one per cent, are being pushed further down the ladder of exploitation. Although today many of them might still cling to a petty bourgeois ideology, though their consciousness might represent this class's way of seeing the world, tomorrow, in this climate of austerity, they will most probably discover a consciousness that better fits the class position they are being forced into.

Furthermore, we can't ignore the fact that some of the criticisms levelled at the "occupy" movement come from activists and organizers who themselves are petty bourgeois in their consciousness––from people who speak the proper radical language but whose entire approach to activism is still squarely within the boundaries of social reform. (I should point out, however, that the critiques of the "occupy" movement promoted by the Ignite Collective and People of Color Organize! have been extremely thoughtful and useful for debate. None of these critiques were simplistically dismissive but, rather, were sober engagements with the limitations of the "occupy" movement from insightful critics who still thought it was necessary to be involved.) The problem is that the traditional leftwing activist scene at the centres of capitalism is dominated by a petty bourgeois consciousness and ideology, a default opportunism, and it seems rather hypocritical (and perhaps sadly amusing) when the more radically educated petty bourgeois feel the need to self-righteously school a more confused but angry sector of their class––especially since the former's activities haven't produced a properly revolutionary movement regardless of their better terminology and analysis.

The fact is that the obstacle of the organized left in Canada and the US is its own petty bourgeois consciousness that has been produced by decades of welfare reforms and culture industry pacification, both of which are contingent on imperialist exploitation in the peripheries. The established trade unions have long been part of the labour aristocracy, as petty bourgeois as the initial forces of the "occupy" movement. So this class as a whole comprises the dominant forces of the traditional left in upper North America because this left, its own consciousness affected by the spaces in which it continues to organize, refuses to recognize the actual class composition of itself and its organizational terrain. And, as Engels reminds us in The German Revolutions, "this class [as a whole] is entirely unreliable except when a victory has been won. Then its noise in the beer saloons is without limit."

So if the left on the whole has wasted so much time organizing amongst the petty bourgeoisie, taking on the unreliable limitations of this consciousness, then there is no point in ignoring another petty bourgeois space simply because it is a space that is not as acceptable as the average docile demonstration or a trade union march. Moreover, the spaces opened up by the "occupy" movement are spaces connected to the fear of proletarianization––maybe a prophetic fear since the workers in trade unions and the students at demonstrations are also facing this reality though still, in so many ways, acting as if they should just fight tax cuts and plead with bourgeois politicians to keep welfare reforms––and thus might possess more potential for radicalization than typical demonstrations and marches.

The danger for the petty bourgeoisie as a class––a danger possibly immanent to this "occupy" movement––is that, as Engels also reminds us, members of this class generally hope "to climb up to the big bourgeoisie, and they are fearful lest they be pushed down to the ranks of the proletariat. Between fear and hope they will in times of struggle seek to save their precious skin and to join the victors when the fight is over." Obviously, only the most deluded will believe that capitalism will be toppled by these "occupy" movements that lack revolutionary ideology and structure, structured only by a general discourse surrounding the 99% delimited by petty bourgeois ideology. The so-called "Arab Spring" did not, as some were loudly proclaiming, result in the end of comprador capitalism in the middle east and it was far more radical than this "occupy" movement.

When this movement peters out, as it surely will, and the majority of its most vocal supporters decide they want "to join the victors when the fight is over," then we must ask ourselves what victories could be claimed by the left in the aftermath? If the immediate overthrow of capitalism is already highly unlikely due to a lack of a unified revolutionary movement, then what do we want to see emerge from these uprisings? Something for the future, an accumulation of revolutionary forces, possibly a minority of the original "occupy" population, that will be committed to continuing the struggle and participating in a sustainable and structured revolutionary movement. None of this can emerge if: a) we ignore these spaces because they aren't perfect (and what space is perfect?); b) if we simply tail the struggles in these spaces because we superstitiously believe in the myth of spontaneity. The point, then, is to radicalize these spaces so that the properly anti-capitalist left will be seen as the victor in future struggles.

Onward Parliamentarian Spectacle

2011-10-05T21:39:00.000-04:00

The Ontario provincial elections are almost here and if anyone thinks that they are going to prevent the austerity response to the crisis then s/he is delusional. Due to Jack Layton's death and hagiography––the fact that an anti-socialist has suddenly been transformed into a socialist martyr––there is a chance, however slight, that the NDP will again become a provincial government. But I remember the days of Bob Rae's NDP government in Ontario, and the back to work legislation mobilized against the working classes he claimed to support, and that did not happen in the context of this crisis. Anyone who imagines that a possible NDP government in today's climate will somehow be more progressive than Rae's anti-worker regime is living in a dream world: at least Rae eventually accepted that he was liberal––here's hoping that the NDP would stop pretending it is anything more than a classic liberal party, far from even Tommy Douglas's social democracy, and voters stop imagining that an NDP in a hostile rightist climate, where the bourgeoisie is fighting to keep its profits, is going to save us from poverty and welfare cuts.

During the federal elections boycott campaign that I endorsed, and in which I participated, we discovered that the people implicitly boycotting the elections (the silent 40% who never vote, the people on the street in beleaguered neighbourhoods) could care less whether the government was Liberal, Conservative, or NDP because, according to many of them, it made no difference in their day to day reality: every government protected landlords and private property, thus participating in evictions and explicitly or implicitly endorsing police brutality. The provincial elections will probably produce the same implicit boycott––a rejection of voting that, as we argued then and I will argue again here, speaks more to a rejection of the state than some vague notion of apathy. Those who cling to the notion that parliamentarianism is identical to freedom, and who believe voting is some sort of utopian privilege, generally, and without any investigation, claim that people who refuse to participate are guilty of apathy––as if voting means caring, and an "x" on a ballot implies democratic responsibility.

It is all too easy, once you accept that participation in bourgeois democracy is synonymous with caring about politics, to misrepresent those who refuse to participate as simply apathetic. Granted, some non-voting citizens may well indeed be apathetic, but simply because we know some apathetic people exist does not make their attitude normative amongst the non-voters. And even if some of the non-voters are apathetic, shouldn't we ask why some people respond to this system with apathy? After all, it seems absurd to care for a system that cares mainly (and sometimes only) for the upper classes.

Those of us involved in the boycott campaign for the federal elections spent part of our time dealing with this nascent parliamentarian ideology (as this older grumpity post should demonstrate), so I won't bother spending much time rehashing old territory. And since the boycott campaign, because it was meant to unify an organizational moment in different provinces, was devoted to the federal elections, there doesn't seem to be much point in reigniting the flame wars. This is not to say that I am endorsing voting for the NDP or any such nonsense in the provincial arena, just that I'm not spending my political activist time in a provincial boycott campaign.

(Oddly enough, because the movementist way of thinking programs us to think that every group should be a single issue or single concept group––that this group does that pet issue, and that group does that pet issue––there were people in the Toronto left who thought that some of us were involved with a group that only did elections boycotts.)

The Revolutionary Student Movement of Toronto argued, in a recent post, that "the NDP, a prime example of a party that is left in word and right in form, is dangerous because it works hard to deceive the masses by projecting a so-called working class agenda. It says it will raise people's standard of living, but it shamefacedly represses people's knowledge of the sources of the wealth that fills its coffers. Like the Conservatives and the Liberals… [its] ultimate interest is the maintenance and growth of the capitalist system." Unfortunately, after Layton's hagiographical death, we'll probably have well-intentioned people at the provincial level placing all their hopes on the NDP because people in the self-proclaimed "left" have worked very hard to argue that Layton was a socialist and that is party possessed a "working class agenda."

And yet in Toronto we had an NDP hack as a mayor before the conservative cut-fanatic Rob Ford. And though that mayor didn't cut obviously essential services, he poured more money into the police (strangely enough, Ford is cutting police funding as well because, hell, he's a millionaire who wants to cut everything), actively prevented affordable housing, and supported the suppression of proletarian and reserve proletarian dissent. And, as aforementioned, our last provincial NDP government was also anti-worker: it broke strikes and engaged in political repression with the same avid glee as the Liberal McGuinty government. But I doubt that today's potential NDP government, in this austere climate, will be even as left as the Rae regime––and again, seeing as how Rae admits he's a liberal, that's saying something. Anyone who imagines, however, that a bourgeois parliamentarian party, no matter how "left" it pretends to be, will be more left now than it was in the days of Bob Rae is ignoring the climate of austerity that is causing every member of the bourgeois family to move to the right. It's time to protect the profits and power of the tiny ruling minority; Keynesianism (which was never socialist no matter how many US left liberals and their moronic rightwing opposites would like to pretend otherwise) was the bandaid solution of another crisis and the ruling class doesn't need it anymore. Even the NDP doesn't need it anymore, though they'll probably work hard to plug a few holes in the sinking welfare capitalist ship.

More Straw-Person Anti-Maoist Stupidity

2011-10-03T20:54:00.003-04:00

In a recent post I complained about the intentional misconceptions some petty bourgeois academic leftists promote when it comes to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. So it was hilarious to accidentally encounter, after a fundraiser on Friday, a Frankfurt School hipster marxist blog that promotes the same idiot and intentionally ignorant garbage regarding Maoism in general, and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada (PCR-RCP) in particular, with a confidence spawned from reading too much Adorno and not much critical history of actually existing communist movements. The main point of my aforementioned post was that without investigation of what Marxism-Leninism-Maoism actually means, then there should be no right to speak.

The anti-Maoist post on the hilariously entitled "Frankfurt Fist" blog (do Frankfurt School politics ever lead to the confrontation that the word "fist" implies or do they mean the exact opposite?) is paradigmatic of analysis without any concrete investigation. Considering that it sounds as if it was written by a privileged student hipster marxist (who likes calling everyone else bourgeois students), the only reason I am going to spend any time dealing with its claims is because I feel that it is important to counter misconceptions spread about a group like the PCR-RCP that is doing extremely vital work in the Canadian context. And now that the state clearly feels that the PCR-RCP, unlike this random blogger, is a threat and has initiated a wave of repression against them, it is utterly insulting to encounter these sorts of snide dismissals. As I have always argued: at least get your facts right––I'm tired of straw-person analyses.

What makes Frankfurt Fist's (FF) confused polemic difficult to deal with systematically is that it is so utterly confused, it is filled with so many wild assertions by an undergraduate or MA student who has spent most of his time reading Adorno, that it is difficult to know where to begin. I suppose I could go through the article following the Minima Moralia style paragraph numbering, but many of these paragraphs are rendered meaningless if the arguments in previous paragraphs are dismissed.

So let's begin with the article's claims about the PCR-RCP's composition from which other bold assertions flow. Frankfurt Fist (FF) claims that the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada is a student group alienated from the masses it claims to represent. This is nonsense, and anyone who has had any contact with the PCR-RCP in Quebec would immediately know this is garbage. They do have a student front, but they also have a workers mass organization, among other fronts, and they do most of their work in proletarian neighbourhoods. In fact, from what I've been able to tell, university students represent a very small minority of the party; moreover, the student fronts of the PCR-RCP are concerned primarily with highschool students, not university students. So the hilarious point FF makes about how "establishing a sense of class consciousness among alienated upper-class students is like synthesizing wet flame" is a red herring: the party agreed with this point ahead of time, which is why it encouraged the Revolutionary Student Movement in Toronto to focus on highschools instead of the university campus. In any case, the point about the organization being a student group is an utter falsehood, but from this falsehood the author is able to build successive claims that seem reasonable, but only if you grant the false premise. Otherwise they have nothing to do the PCR-RCP. Maybe they have to do with the Proletarian Revolutionary Action Committee (which emerged from a conference called by the PCR-RCP), but even then the author is clearly confused.

From here let's deal with some of the more asinine assertions about FF's straw-person Maoism. "Maoists claim that Stalinist Russia was a model of functional socialism." Not really: the CPC under Mao argued that Stalin's Russia was still socialist (in contrast to Kruschev's Russia), but far from functional. The argument was in fact the opposite: that the Soviet Union under Stalin's policies was dysfunctional, that Stalin's metaphysical approach to communist theory and his inability to handle contradictions, was a serious problem. This is the point in the "Great Debate", the exchange of polemics between the Soviet Union and the CPC, and is pretty much the understanding of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory. It's why Stalin's name isn't between Lenin and Mao.

The author also thinks that the concept of revisionism is a ruthless term that Marxism needs to maintain itself. Of course, he doesn't explain what he means by this, nor does he seem to have any idea what revisionism means. In an earlier blog post where FF attacks the PRAC's film fundraising night, Rosa Luxemburg is blithely cited as an authority against the activities of the PRAC (again based on a possibly hypocritical misconception about the group's composition and focus), and yet Luxemburg had no problem being ruthless when it came to the use of the concept of revisionism. In fact, one of Luxemburg's great contributions to revolutionary theory is the ideological struggle she waged against Bernstein's revisionism. By the way, FF, read your history: revisionism is a serious deal; it's the reason why the SDP in Germany capitulated to fascism and Luxemburg was executed. Then again, considering that the point FF makes about revisionism seems utterly random, it's hard to know if it means anything significant.

Then there is FF's sixth numbered paragraph claiming that Maoism is all about the Three Worlds Theory. Another red herring: the three worlds theory, pushed by Lin Biao and not Mao, is actually part of what is known as Maoism-Third Worldism, not the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism of the PCR-RCP, or of many other Maoist organizations around the world. Tiny groups like the Leading Light Communist Organization are Maoist Third Worldist, not the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada. [Caveat: commentator "yarp" below has corrected this mistake, and provided a link, demonstrating that even Maoist Third Worldist groups like the LLCO don't accept the Three Worlds Theory – apologies for the haste of this post and the failure to fact-check. And though there is probably still some tiny Third Worldist group out there that pushes this line, the fact that the LLCO rejects this position further proves how antiquated FF's analysis is.] If the PCR-RCP was this type of Maoism then it wouldn't bother organizing in Canada but, rather, would wait for the miracle of the global peripheries.

But FF also goes on to say, after mis-ascribing the three worlds theory to maoism, that globalization has reduced the world to an ideological singularity. This is just privileged eurocentric nonsense written by someone who has never studied political economy and is still fascinated with Negri and Hart's theory in Empire. The ideology of the culture industry that FF might understand (since it is talked about in the Frankfurt School) is not the same ideology that is dominant in the global peripheries. There is not a sameness of ideology across the globe, though there is definitely a hegemony of capitalist ideology. Still semi-feudal and semi-colonial formations linger. The majority of the critical left, and not just Maoists FF, did away with this Empire nonsense after the anti-globalization movement at the beginning of the 21st Century collapsed and the offensive against Afghanistan began. Do any cursory study on imperialism, figure out the global contradiction between centres and peripheries, and you'll realize that the deterritorialization concepts you seem to be supporting lack any connection to reality.

Then there is the dismissal of the claim that revolutionary theory is a science without any understanding of what Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Mao, and other theorists meant when they used the term science. Of course we know that communism is not a science in the sense that physics and math are sciences, there is something that this understanding of revolutionary theory shares with physics and science: that is the logic that there is a dialectic between the universal and particular, that there can be universal developments in revolutionary theory that are applicable in particular contexts, and that like any scientific paradigm there are world historical movements that force new understandings. Political economist Samir Amin often uses the term "living science" in order to explain why revolutionary theory needs to be open to the future, just like a science, but that it follows the theoretical pattern of rupture-continuity. Since I have explained this at numerous points in this blog, I will not bore my usual readership by repeating it here. In any case, just saying that it is not a science is not an argument but an assertion. Nor is it an assertion that applies only to Maoism: other species of marxism make the same claims, so how is this specifically an attack on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism?

At numerous points FF attacks the Maoist concept of the mass line without, again, having any understanding of the concept. A "mutilated direct democracy"––how so? What is wrong with the idea of working with people where they're at, trying to give unity to these demands, but also using these demands to hold ourselves to account? I have been involved in non-Maoist organizations that have tried to apply similar ideas, albeit in non-structured ways, and this was always considered grass-roots and liberating. The mass-line's main point, to paraphraise Mao, "is that the people and the people alone make history while we [meaning the communist party] are often foolish." The idea that the party should be held to account by the people, that the people should even bombard the headquarters of what ever party claims to lead them (something I'll discuss in a later point), is something FF does not appear to understand.

Furthermore, FF thinks that maoists use the term "masses" because we think people are animals in need of salvation––how does that conclusion does not follow from the word "masses"? We use that concept because we understand that society is composed of multiple classes, not just "the proletariat" and "the bourgeoisie" (though these are the prime contradictory classes), and we also place ourselves within these masses. If the word is a problem, another can be chosen, but a quibble over terminology and then a forced interpretation is another terrible argument. Apparently maoists exist to force-feed the badly named "masses" socialism, or so FF claims, because apparently talking about socialism and holding social investigations with people in their neighbourhoods is an act of force-feeding, or herding them towards socialism. That's a category mistake, FF: talking to people about communism is not force-feeding, nor do the most revolutionary-inclined people amongst "the masses" need to be led like animals towards socialism. The mass-line is about agency from below, and any cursory read on the concept would reveal that.

And then there is the typical straw-person of the theory of Protracted Peoples War. Even worse is the fact that FF confuses it, in paragraph 10, with the theory of insurrection. Actually, the theory of PPW is considered the alternative to the theory of urban insurrection, insurrection being only one possible tactic in a larger chain of strategy. So the author misdefines PPW as the following: "an urban insurrection against the most apolitical proletariat, identified as the enemy or the system, and acting to further the cause of statist repression and negating their cause while decimating whatever miniscule faith anyone had in their mission." This is all very confused because it also seems as if FF is also confusing PPW with Gueverism (or focoism), the tactic that was disasterously applied by groups like the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Japanese Red Army, etc., and that is definitely not PPW. In fact, adherents of Protracted Peoples War were criticizing those groups engaged in armed propaganda in the 1960s and 1970s for a similar reason to the one FF uses to dismiss Peoples War. That is, PPW is about slowly building up a Peoples Army at multiple levels where the proletariat is actually politicized (but not just in factories), and where a larger strategy of encircling the state, rather than just going on mad bombing campaigns or hoping for the miracle of a general strike, slowly and thoroughly. Mao always argued that the Peoples Army had to be the people and could not become alienated from the people––so yet again, FF has made up his own imaginary Maoism just so he can trash it… straw-person argument strikes again!

Next comes the usual denunciations of the Cultural Revolution, but again from an utter misunderstanding of the theory of the Cultural Revolution. FF seems to think the theory of Cultural Revolution is about cultural reform and, falling back on a simplistic understanding of the Frankfurt School's concept of the culture industry, he seems to think that culture (but never explains what he means by culture) asserts its autonomy and that the theory of Cultural Revolution is about trying to change this culture from above. Actually, the point of the Cultural Revolution is simply that class struggle continues under socialism but that the bourgeoisie and their ideas end up in the communist party itself. The point of the GPCR was to unleash the masses on the party (to bombard the headquarters so to speak), not to impose reforms: hence the large-scale chaos of the Cultural Revolution in China. Maoists now understand that Mao was correctly able to pose the problem with this theory of the Cultural Revolution, but was actually unable to solve this problem with the GPCR, though it went further than previous revolutions. So the point now is to figure out how to solve the problem that Mao understood: how do we prevent the capitalist roaders from restoring capitalism as they did in the Soviet Union and China? That is the key insight of actually existing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism now, not some idiot doctrine of reforms from above. We also think it's important to note that large populations of workers and peasants in China are demanding a return to the Cultural Revolution because, contrary to FF's beliefs, it actually meant something real and liberating for them.

Of course, FF is under the impression that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is a rigid ideology. Well it's not a completely loose ideology that accepts an anything goes liberal movementism, that is true enough… But it has always been about social investigation and trying to develop an understanding from a social context's concrete circumstances, and the most successful Maoist attempts around the world have often resisted dogmatism in their attempt to creatively apply the key universal insights of MLM theory. Not that FF has any concrete understanding of the context of Canada, let alone a concrete understanding of the global contradictions or the theory he is straw-personing. Rigidly applying the Frankfurt School as an alternative isn't very creative, nor is the nascent liberalism behind FF's criticisms.

In point fourteen, FF has a throwaway sentence about agrarian socialism for an industrial capitalist environment. The most famous straw-person of Maoism: it's only about peasants and the agrarian countryside! The PCR-RCP hasn't once argued for an agrarian socialist revolution, or sought to align itself with an imaginary Canadian peasantry, and I already mocked this utterly ignorant misunderstanding of maoism in my post about proper investigation, cited at the beginning of this polemic. How many more false theoretical concepts must be applied to an organization that has gone to great lengths to perform a concrete analysis of a concrete situation? Answer: not many that are worth addressing, considering the ravings about New Democracy and the vanguard are even less coherent than FF's entire jumble of fallacies and poorly investigated assertions.

Only the author's insulting comment about how the PCR-RCP will never be popular, and will never be included in the left that "we" might rebuild. Well where is this left that is supposedly being rebuilt, and how will it be rebuilt? The point of the PCR-RCP's analysis has always been that the left in Canada needs to be rebuilt and unified and, surprise surprise, it's been actively pursuing this rebuilding in Quebec for years. It also takes the "we" seriously because when it uses the term "we" it doesn't mean a few academic champagne marxists obsessed with the Frankfurt School but people who the in-crowd and privileged left are refusing to address in a revolutionary manner. Furthermore, as the current wave of repression levelled at the PCR-RCP proves, the organization is clearly doing something more relevant than an oh-so-clever blogger with his straw-person arguments. Nor has the PCR-RCP, or any of its allies, refused to work with other left and progressive organizations in accumulating anti-capitalist forces: it is a member of CLAC, after all, and has refused to engage in poaching or asinine turf wars in organizational spaces. It is unclear what "we" FF represents, or why FF even imagines that s/he has the right to speak on behalf of this "we": I have spent long years of my life involved in Toronto activism, in various sectors and avenues, and I do not imagine that I could speak of myself as the "we" that will rebuild the left––I cannot imagine some arrogant undergraduate feeling that s/he has the right to make the same claim to collective identity.

Moreover, behind all of these terrible arguments, FF demonstrates a Nietzschean libertarianism cloaked in new left lingo. The fear of Maoism seems driven by a fear of the people (the people s/he claims maoism disdains), and mediated by a sublimated notion of Mill's harm principle. Pragmatism, individualism, scorn for the collectivism that will suppress bourgeois individuality. Is it any wonder that, emerging from this position, the author cannot help but straw-person a politics s/he refuses to understand?

Still inspired by Adorno's Minima Moralia, FF concludes his ramblings with the following statement: "immanent critique cannot be applied when there is no surface to penetrate. If penetrated, all that's revealed is how deep their nothingness goes." It is all too easy to point out that patriarchal rape language behind FF's use of penetration; it is easier to point out that if s/he truly understood immanent critique s/he would realize that the nothingness s/he ascribes to maoism is correct in that the critique had said nothing substantial and demonstrates an utter lack of knowledge of its object of critique. Where FF speaks of its imaginary maoism, FF speaks of nothing that actually exists in the Maoist movement.