Solidarity with City Workers

In my inbox today:

OCAP STANDS IN SOLIDARITY WITH TORONTO CITY WORKERS

The members of CUPE 416 and 79 who work for the City of Toronto
are now on strike. The business media has begun its inevitable campaign of
misinformation to produce the greatest possible backlash against these
workers. We are encouraged to focus on uncollected garbage and suspended
services but not, of course, to give any regard to the rights of public
sector workers or to think as working people about what is at stake in
this strike.

OCAP, as a matter of basic principle, stands in solidarity with
workers' struggles. We don't hate or blame workers who have been able to
win a living wage or support calls for them to be driven into poverty.
Rather, we want to see the poor provided with wages and incomes that raise
them out of poverty.

This strike occurs in a context that makes it especially important
for all of us that it end in victory and that the concessionary demands of
the 'progressive' Miller Administration be defeated. The Mayor defended
his shameful efforts to gut the collective agreements of City workers by
pointing to rising welfare caseloads brought on by the economic downturn.
What a disgusting statement. To pit City workers against those who are
being forced to turn to the wretched sub poverty pittance that welfare
provides is an outrage. This comes from a man who boasts that there are
more cops on the streets under his regime than every before and who is
taking us towards an obscene billion dollar a year police budget, while he
has frittered away the welfare reserve fund
to a fraction of where it was when he took office.

The Mayor points to the state of the economy to justify his attack
on City workers. In doing this, he makes clear what side he is on when it
comes to who should pay for this economic crisis. As unemployment shoots
up, we face the situation with an empty shell of an unemployment insurance
system that shuts out most of the unemployed and with a post Mike Harris
welfare system that fails to provide the necessities of life. None of the
'solutions' to the crisis involve meeting the basic needs of the
unemployed and poor. For those who still have jobs and unions, the
bankrupt corporations they work for will be bailed out at vast public
expense while their rights as workers are destroyed and they are presented
with massive concessionary demands.

The process of attacking workers started in the auto industry and
other parts of the private sector. The drive for austerity is now
spreading, inevitably, to the public sector. Beginning with militant
fights by postal workers in the 1960s, public sector workers have spent
decades struggling for decent wages and conditions.

The present crisis of capitalism will mean an all out confrontation to
take back those gains. Moreover, an attack on the workers who deliver
public services can't be separated from the attack on the services
themselves and the rights of those who receive them. That is the context
of this strike and we in OCAP know what side we're on. We call for full
support for the City workers. Send messages of solidarity. Be there with
them on their picket lines. Stand with them in their fight because they
are fighting for all of us.

Finally, some common sense. I am shocked (although I guess I shouldn't be, after the reaction to the TTC strike - though even that wasn't nearly so bad) at the mean-spirited selfishness of local citizens.(Just read the comments on any news story about the strike). I can't believe how many people think that city workers shouldn't have x,y,z (benefits and perks, job security, decent wage, etc) because private sector employees don't have these things. It's like the child who breaks a toy someone else is playing with. If I can't have it, nobody can. Of course my metaphor breaks down because lots of the people complaining are not exactly in dire straights. We're talking lawyers and middle management here.

Not that the media is helping any. Zeroing in on the bankable sick days as if that is what this fight is really about. If you didn't live here, you'd think the streets were flowing with garbage.

Cognitive dissonance abounds. Garbage collectors shouldn't be given the same increases as police officers got because garbage collectors aren't as important. But me oh my, it's been TWO days without garbage collection and already they are screaming to have someone take away their refuse. Somehow forgotten is that fact that it is not just a garbage strike. Inside and outside workers include paramedics, parks and rec staff, workers at swimming pools and community centres, health inspectors, office workers, social workers, child care workers, and even the people who clean the nasty (and desperately important especially for the homeless) public washrooms. They supply incredibly important services.

What I think we should realize is just how many services we receive from the city and how invaluable they are. If we were to try to buy all these services, few could afford them. They make all of our lives better, and they happen so routinely we rarely even notice them. Using the recession as an excuse to claw back hard-won benefits from public-sector employees is just wrong. Pretty much the entire world (even the IMF) understands that a recession is the time to spend on public works, not cut them. And if you are cutting, why not start at the top (police chief? city manager?) and work your way down instead of starting at the bottom (non-unionized workers have already been screwed with wage freezes earlier this year)?

If this were France, we'd probably have a general strike just to support them. Everyone would take the day off work (parents wouldn't have to worry about child care at least) and we'd all sit in the streets drinking wine.

Perhaps we could also use this as an opportunity to meditate on the excess of waste we produce as a society. Two days without collection and all hell breaks loose? Honestly. What is wrong with us?

Sharing Work and Food - Imagine That

Here's an article by Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council, quoted in full because I don't know how to link to it on Facebook.

SHARING WORK AND FOOD CREATES AN UPSIDE TO THE ECONOMIC DOWN

BY Wayne Roberts

Unlike most people, Thomas Homer-Dixon doesn't think today's world economic crisis is very complicated. He thinks it's very complex, which makes for a world of difference in understanding which government anti-recession programs will fail (most of them) and deciding which ones can help.

Homer-Dixon, who chairs a centre for global systems analysis at the University of Waterloo, is one of the world’s leading thinkers in the field of “complexity theory,” and the author of several international bestsellers, including The Ingenuity Gap and The Upside of Down. He brings a missing dimension to thinking about remedies to the looming economic collapse that that’s so far been excluded from public and media debate. “If ever there was a case of experts not knowing what’s happening, it’s this economic crisis,” he says.

Hang in for the introductory lecture on Chaos Theory 101, and you’ll be able to follow and lead the economics debate in fresh ways.

Homer-Dixon is the first to admit he has no straight-ahead answers to a downturn that’s much more challenging that the Great Depression of the 1930s, to which it’s often unthinkingly compared. “We’ve never seen a collapse on this scale before in an environment of such enormous complexity and such a huge number of unk-unks,” he says, in a reference to the term used during his days working with Pentagon analysts who referred to unknown unknowns.

The way in which a relatively small proportion of mortgage defaults in one country during the fall of 2008 precipitated the collapse of a global economic house of cards expresses a telltale, if seemingly illogical, sign of complex systems in crisis – a very small cause leading to a very huge result, like the final grain of snow or shift of wind that produce a mountain avalanche.

But in Homer-Dixon’s view, that small cause, and even slightly bigger versions of that small cause – the breakdown of integrity in the global financial system, or the inequality that put home purchases beyond the reach of typical families, for example – is only a small part of an overall mix of “cascading failures.” His list of factors converging into a catastrophic perfect storm include intensified inequality, increased global warming, rising resource prices, and the “sheer productivity of capitalism – in many ways the deepest of all causes,” he says, since it produces chronic gluts in desperate search for markets. Together, they overloaded a rigid and “tightly coupled” global financial system that spread uncontrollable wildfires.
“Multiple stresses that reinforced each other” led to “a collapse of assets greater and faster” than anything witnessed during the simpler days of the Great Depression, he says. That’s why simplistic and one-dimensional rhetoric from politicians and pundits about fixing the problem, putting the pieces back together, and managing the crisis betrays a failure to understand what’s going down, he says. “Complex problems require complex solutions. It’s the law of requisite variety. We need a repertoire of responses as complex as the environment. “We must move from management to complex adaptation.”

Just as bodies under stress require core strength in the lower abdomen, economies and societies under shock require sources of core strength, what hip policy experts increasingly refer to as “robustness” and “resilience.” Government policy makers need to focus their view on the prize of supporting resilience in the population. Failure of governments to be on constant alert for the pitfalls of economic giantism or to be on guard for stresses in social resilience “is like not requiring cities to be earthquake-proof,” he says.

“Resilience means helping people to take care of themselves better in tough times,” rather than relying on specialization and expertise, he says, a guideline that puts a community’s ability to feed itself and care for each other at the top of his to-do list.

Here’s how I simplify Homer-Dixon’s analysis, in ways that he may or may not agree with.

When public money is used to keep enterprises afloat, the public has a right to demand that public benefits be spread among the general public. In my opinion, a longstanding (if best-kept secret) of Canadian employment insurance policy should be extended to all public enterprises and bailed-out private enterprises, including car companies and banks. Canada’s federal government allows workers at a company facing lay-offs to opt for everyone sharing the layoff by working a four day week, and everyone sharing the employment insurance by being covered on their one day a week of unemployment. This measure does not cost the employment insurance system a dime, since five people taking a payout for a day is the same as one person taking a payout for a week. It allows a workforce to stay intact for better times, maintains morale among workers and within a community, and protects younger workers with families, a group unlikely to enjoy high seniority.

This simple measure would abolish unemployment overnight, maintain purchasing power in the community, and buy people the time to become more resilient and self-reliant in their own lives, by gardening, cooking from scratch or insulating their walls, for example. It would even give people some time to sleep, the least acknowledged of the crucial determinants of health and well-being.

Only the epidemics of workaholism and every-man-for-himselfishism have kept this obvious low-pain remedy off the agenda for so long.

Having bolstered purchasing power in the community-at-large, the multiplier effect of that purchasing power needs to be captured for public benefit by requiring all government and publicly-bailed-out institutions to purchase local and local-sustainable food, recognizing that the food industry already produces almost as many jobs as the auto industry and can directly employ local people. Since one job for a local farmer commonly leads to five jobs producing farm inputs or off-farm processing, this doable measure is an employment bonanza that also yields major health and environmental benefits. This also fulfils Homer-Dixon’s call for self-reliant and unplugged systems that remove essentials of life from the vagaries of uncontrollable forces.

This depression does not have to hurt. Get beyond the complications into the complexity, and discover what Homer-Dixon calls “the upside to down.”

(adapted from NOW Magazine, February 26-March 4, 2009. Wayne Roberts is the author of The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food.)

Visual Hybridity

Apparently not everyone gets or agrees with the social construction of race. There are still people who are shocked when they find out that there's no biological basis for our racial categories whatsoever. These interesting photographs illustrate how we construct the race of people of blended heritage. All via Sociological Images.

First, the image on the right is of little Barack Obama with his grandfather (Stanley Dunham) who looks remarkably like the picture on the left of the adult Obama (although the picture looks slightly stretched to me).

Obama, to my eye, is the spitting image of his grandfather. Yet, we see Obama and Dunham as separate races, members of two categories we see as diametrically opposed, even biologically distinct. <rest>

Then this photo project makes us question how we assign racial or ethnic categories by providing faces that are difficult to categorize.

This project consists of a series of 16 color portraits of people of mixed ethnic origin in front of primary color backgrounds. The images challenge the concept of race by highlighting the disparity between the stark natural boundaries between the primary colors, and the ambiguous and artificial, yet commonly accepted boundaries between the different races. This project asks the viewer to question the existence of race in nature.

The aim of the portraits is to strip our idea of race down to its elements. It is in this nakedness that the viewer watches the races literally dissolve in front of their face like so many moth-eaten clothes. The tone is neither confrontational nor ironic, but rather unassuming in its directness

Finally, this story of fraternal twins - one "white" and one "black". Well, actually both are of mixed race, as are their parents. Over at SI, she uses this example "to illustrate how skin color (which is real) is translated into categorical racial categories (which are not)."

Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

This is a very interesting piece:

Conserving Racism: The Greening of Hate at Home and Abroad

By Betsy Hartmann

The greening of hate - blaming environmental degradation on poor populations of color - is once again on the rise, both in the U.S. and overseas. In the U.S., its illogic runs like this: immigrants are the main cause of overpopulation, and overpopulation in turn causes urban sprawl, the destruction of wilderness, pollution, and so forth.

Internationally, it draws on narratives that blame expanding populations of peasants and herders for encroaching on pristine nature.

This is part of what is at play whenever people in the rich countries bemoan the high birth rates of many poor countries. Once again, those with the least power (poor women of colour from the global south, in particular) make a convenient scapegoat for all manner of problems that we do not want to take responsibility for. There's also a certain paternalistic bourgeois white supremacy when we see Them as the problem and Us as the solution to all the world's problems. We just have to figure out what to do about Them before They wreck our Nature.

For example, the rush to blame China and India for the high cost of gas, food prices, and global warming. See, China is closing in on the USA as the biggest fossil fuel consumer and greenhouse gas producer. Still, the average Chinese person has around 19% of the impact of the average American. Not to mention the emissions in China have little to do with people's individual lifestyles and much to do with industrial manufacturing... mostly of crap to be consumed by Americans, Canadians and members of other wealthy nations. Not that China is a saint, but I find it interesting how we love to blame them.

The article documents the involvement of some environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Conservation International (CI) with some pretty right wing campaigns. For example:

With USAID assistance, CI and the World Wildlife Fund are promoting a conservation campaign in the region focused on identifying illegal settlements -- often Zapatista communities -- which are then forcibly removed by the Mexican army. These efforts are complemented by the government's aggressive female sterilization campaign in the region. CI's close ties to bio-prospecting corporations raise questions of just who the forest is being preserved for.

She puts this in perspective:

Coercive conservation measures, of course, are nothing new. From colonial times onwards, wildlife conservation efforts have often involved the violent exclusion of local people from their land by game rangers drawn from the ranks of the police, military and prison guards. To legitimize this exclusion, government officials, conservation agencies and aid donors have frequently invoked narratives of expanding human populations destroying pristine landscapes, obscuring the role of resource extraction by state and corporate interests.

This is so true. For example, I was recently studying how in South Africa (but not only there!) the creation of national parks caused significant dispossession of indigenous peoples' land. The racialist ideas around pollution were often driving conservation movements.

Hartmann continues by outlining several myths that help to drive this coercive conservation: man versus nature, the wilderness ethic, the degradation narrative, and scarcity. For example, the myth of the romantic and nostalgic wilderness ethic:

The ways in which wilderness is constructed have a number of problematic outcomes. The ahistorical myth of wilderness as "virgin" land obscures the systematic forced migration and genocide of its original Native American inhabitants.

By locating nature in the far-off wild, it allows people to evade responsibility for environmental protection closer to their homes. And it is geographically parochial, blinding many Americans to the complex ways in which people relate to the land in other countries and cultures. Critiquing the wilderness ethic does not mean one is opposed to national parks and nature protection - rather, it calls for equitable and democratic processes to ensure local communities are not pushed off their lands and robbed of their livelihoods.

Also popular is the degradation narrative in which

...population pressure-induced poverty makes Third World peasants degrade their environments by over-farming marginal lands. The ensuing soil depletion and desertification then lead them to migrate elsewhere as "environmental refugees," either to ecologically vulnerable rural areas where the vicious cycle is once again set in motion or to cities where they become a primary source of political instability.
[...]
It blames poverty on population pressure, and not, for example, on lack of land reform or off-farm employment opportunities; it blames peasants for land degradation, obscuring the role of commercial agriculture and extractive industries; and it targets migration both as an environmental and security threat. It is a way of homogenizing all rural people in the Global South into one big destructive force, reinforcing simplistic Us vs. Them, West vs. the Rest dichotomies.

You should probably just go read the whole thing. H/T Lisa, commenting on Feministe

Robert Jensen on Oppression

How do we explain the fact that most people's stated philosophical and theological systems are rooted in concepts of justice, equality, and the inherent dignity of all people, yet we allow violence, exploitation, and oppression to flourish? Only a small percentage of people in any given society are truly sociopaths, engaging in cruel and oppressive behavior openly and with relish. Feminism helped me understand the complex process, which tends to work like this:

--The systems and structures in which we live are hierarchical.
--Hierarchical systems and structures deliver to those in the dominant class certain privileges, pleasures, and material benefits.
--People are typically hesitant to give up such privileges, pleasures, and benefits.
--But, those benefits clearly come at the expense of those in the subordinated class.
--Given the widespread acceptance of basic notions of equality and human rights, the existence of hierarchy has to be justified in some way other than crass self-interest.
--One of the most persuasive arguments for systems of domination and subordination is that they are "natural."

So, oppressive systems work hard to make it appear that the hierarchy -- and the disparity in power and resources that flow from hierarchy -- is natural and, therefore, beyond modification. If men are naturally smarter and stronger than women, then patriarchy is inevitable and justifiable. If white people are naturally smarter and more virtuous than people of color, then white supremacy is inevitable and justifiable. If rich people are naturally smarter and harder working than poor people, then economic injustice is inevitable and justifiable. And, if human beings have special status in the universe, justified either on theological or biological grounds, then humans' right to extract from the rest of Creation whatever they like is inevitable and justifiable.

For unjust hierarchies, and the illegitimate authority that is exercised in them, maintaining their own naturalness is essential. Not surprisingly, people in the dominant class exercising the power gravitate easily to such a view. And because of their power to control key story-telling institutions (especially education and mass communication), those in the dominant class can fashion a story about the world that leads some portion of the people in the subordinate class to internalize the ideology.

For me, feminism gave me a way to see through not only male dominance, but all the systems of illegitimate authority. I saw the fundamental strategy they held in common, and saw that if we could more into a space in which we were true to our stated ideals, we would reject those systems as anti-human. All these systems cause suffering beyond the telling. All of them must be resisted. The connections between them must be understood.

I thought this was a brilliantly succinct summary of how systems of oppression, dominance, and hegemony maintain themselves. He is also very good at connecting different forms of oppression, showing how they are all interrelated... racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and this ecological nightmare. Read the rest of "King of the Hill"

Also, on white privilege, read Jensen's comment on this blog post

Blogging Against Environmental Apartheid

Today is some kind of blogging for the environment blog action day. So in that spirit, here are some excerpts from a speech by Van Jones (I've seen him - he is an amazing speaker): "Spiritually Fulfilling, Ecologically Sustainable AND Socially Just?"

I want to suggest that there's a communication problem and there are two things that are happening. Number one: it's just very, very hard for white people to hear the pain of the subjugated people in this country.
[...]
So we live together in these bubbles that touch, and we call that diversity, but we don't know each other. And when that bubble breaks for just a second and we're face to face with each other, it's very, very hard to hear that reality.

But white supremacy, to use the provocative term, will reinterpret that experience for you; and make it not be about your inability to hear, but be about other people's inability to speak. This is one of the most remarkable things: if you can get this, all doors open. There is the assumption - this is deep, this is deep - there is the assumption that when there’s a breakdown in communication between people of color and white people, that there is an deficiency but that the deficiency is not in white listening, that the deficiency is in black speech. "Why are they so angry?" People start critiquing, and then you find somebody who keeps themselves together just for a little bit and it's, "Oh that one's very eloquent, that one’'s very articulate." Right? Always the assumption is that the deficiency lies with the people of color. "Why don't they care about the environment? What wrong with them, don't they see the big picture? ... What's wrong with them? Maybe they are just too poor or busy, because certainly there is nothing wrong with our speech!"
[...]
If it was just that you could show up and be heroic and save the polar bears that would be a boring ass movie. That's not the movie! You show up to be the hero and you discover just like Luke Skywalker, "Wait a minute, the dark side is in me! Wait a minute; my father is the originator of many of the problems that I am now trying to solve. Wait a minute, I can't just fight now the war monger without, the polluter without, the incarcerator without, the clear cutter without - I've got to fight the war monger within. I've got to fight the polluter within."
[...]
People are always talking about their comfort zones, you ever heard that expression: "this is outside of my comfort zone"? Grow your goddamn comfort zone then, okay? 'Cause we are running out of time.
[...]
I've sat with all these people who we think are in charge, and they don't know what to do. Take that in: they don't know what to do! You think you're scared? You think you're terrified? They have the Pentagon's intelligence, they have every major corporation's input; Shell Oil that has done this survey and study around the peak oil problem. You think we've got to get on the Internet and say, "Peak oil!" because the system doesn't know about it? They know, and they don't know what to do. And they are terrified that if they do anything they'll lose their positions. So they keep juggling chickens and chainsaws and hope it works out just like most of us everyday at work.
[...]
There's a pathway back to community that we have to walk. I have to give up something, I have to give up my right to be mad at white folks, 'cause that's not going to make a difference for my child. But white people have to give up something too, which is their right to stay ignorant about all of this. You have a perfect right to be ignorant about all of this and you'll be great people, honestly. You could lead big environmental organizations, you could lead spirituality retreats, you could do all kinds of stuff and you will get cookies and congratulations and people will cry at your funeral. You have a perfect right to not care about any of this. There just won't be any human family left.

Via Gristmill. More on Van Jones and eco-apartheid. You can also watch him speak, short:

or longer.

My Last Conversation With Aung San Suu Kyi

By John Pilger, on Znet:

As the people of Burma rise up again, we have had a rare sighting of Aung San Suu Kyi. There she stood, at the back gate of her lakeside home in Rangoon, where she is under house arrest. She looked very thin. For years, people would brave the roadblocks just to pass by her house and be reassured by the sound of her playing the piano. She told me she would lie awake listening for voices outside and to the thumping of her heart. "I found it difficult to breathe lying on my back after I became ill, she said."

That was a decade ago. Stealing into her house, as I did then, required all the ingenuity of the Burmese underground. My film-making partner David Munro and I were greeted by her assistant, Win Htein, who had spent six years in prison, five of them in solitary confinement. Yet his face was open and his handshake warm. He led us into the house, a stately pile fallen on hard times. The garden with its ragged palms falls down to Inya Lake and to a trip wire, a reminder that this was the prison of a woman elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by generals in ludicrous uniforms.

It's sort of hard to read or listen to an interview with Aung San Suu Kyi and not fall just a little bit in love. She has distinguished herself as one of the great heroic figures of our time, although she is quick to dismiss it:

"People I've spoken to regard you as something of a saint, a miracle worker."

"I'm not a saint and you'd better tell the world that!" "Where are your sinful qualities, then?"

"Er, I've got a short temper."

"What happened to your piano?"

"You mean when the string broke? In this climate pianos do deteriorate and some of the keys were getting stuck, so I broke a string because I was pumping the pedal too hard."

"You lost it ... you exploded?"

"I did."

"It's a very moving scene. Here you are, all alone, and you get so angry you break the piano."

"I told you, I have a hot temper."

I tend to disagree with hero worship, since it discounts the daily struggles of the people. But a hero provides an entry point, an interviewable spokesperson, and 30-second sound bytes that drive today's media. Put simply, a hero gets on TV. And a hero can more easily be emulated. Aung San Suu Kyi may not be a saint, but she is indeed a hero, and so are the monks, the Karen, and other regular people in Burma. Their people power faces the immense military power of the junta; we in the West could certainly learn from them.

... no matter the regime's physical power, in the end they can't stop the people; they can't stop freedom. We shall have our time.

Read the rest of the article here

Troops refuse to fire in Rangoon - Possible army mutiny?

The best outcome we could hope for in Burma would probably be if the soldiers were won over. That would be in keeping with the peaceful Buddhist ideals. Whether or not this is a real possibility has been debated by many others far more knowledgeable than me, but the reality is nobody knows.

However, if this is true, it looks promising:

Reports from Rangoon suggest soldiers are mutinying. It is unclear the numbers involved. Reports cite heavy shooting in the former Burmese capital.

The organisation Helfen ohne Grenzen (Help without Frontiers) is reporting that "Soldiers from the 66th LID (Light Infantry Divison) have turned their weapons against other government troops and possibly police in North Okkalappa township in Rangoon and are defending the protesters. At present unsure how many soldiers involved."

Soldiers in Mandalay, where unrest has spread to as we reported this morning, are also reported to have refused orders to act against protesters.

Some reports claim that many soldiers remained in their barracks. More recent reports now maintain that soldiers from the 99th LID now being sent there to confront them.

Growing numbers of protestors are gathering in Rangoon, with 10,000 reported at the Traders Hotel and 50,000 at the Thein Gyi market. The police are reported to have turned water cannons against crowds at Sule Pagoda.

Many phone lines into the Burmese state have now been cut, mobile networks have been disabled and the national internet service provider has been taken off-line.

In a related development, an unverified report from cbox says:

Military sources in Rangoon are claiming that the regime's number two, General Maung Aye (right), has staged a coup against Than Shwe, and that his troops are now guarding Aung San Suu Kyi's home. A meeting between him and Suu Kyi is expected. Maung Aye is army commander-in-chief and a renowned pragmatist.

Lots more here or on the facebook group.

The Politics of Solidarity: Six Nations, Leadership, and the Settler Left

The European settlers who colonized most of North America, were themselves uprooted from the land through capitalist enclosure and the commodification of land and labour – a process later exported to the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the rest of the world. By becoming small farmers and independent commodity producers in the early stages of Canadian development, poor and working class settlers in North America clearly benefited from the theft of indigenous lands. However, over the past 100 years, capitalism has extended and intensified its reach. Non-native people have become increasingly concentrated in large cities (Canada has the most urbanized population per capita in the world) and have been integrated into the capitalist system as workers. Because of the inherently exploitative dynamics of capitalism, workers in North America have faced a decline in living standards since the neo-liberal offensive of the late 1970s.

As William Robinson has argued, the contemporary resurgence of indigenous struggle in the Americas is happening as the few remaining autonomous indigenous communities are being forced into compliance with the demands of capitalist world market. This market seeks to commodify their labour and their land. At the same time, it seeks to drive down living standards and commodify the lives of non-native people as well. These pressures are just as evident on the Haldimand tract as they are in Canada's far north, in the mountains of Chiapas, or in the jungles of the Amazon. Traditional indigenous resistance to enclosure and commodification is increasingly assuming a directly anti-capitalist character. When this resistance takes place in large urban areas where a relatively small proportion of settlers directly occupy the land in question, new opportunities for joint struggles arise. Doing this kind of work will not be easy. Building radical organizations and combating white racism within predominantly white communities, workplaces, and political organization will be particularly hard. But it remains necessary task as a pre-condition to building meaningful solidarity with indigenous struggles.

Read this article by Tom Keefer via Whenua, Fenua, Enua, Vanua (originally published here), discussing how non-native activists can support indigenous struggles, like that of the Six Nations reclamation in Caledonia, breaking away from the "leadership" model, and turning towards work within our own comminities as well as alliances with indigenous communities. It is a long article, but worth the read.

Guilt, Privilege and the Pain of Living in a World of Domination

Someone close to me is in pain because he feels marginalized for who he is: a white male.

He's basically a "gender-blind", "colour-blind" regular Nice Guy^TM who believes in equality for all. He sees people as human first and wants the same from others. The common definitions of sexist and/or racist (seen as individual attitudes or prejudices) do not apply to him.

But there's a deeper, structural understanding of racism & sexism as a system of power that goes far beyond any individual beliefs or discrimination. In other words, we are all racist and sexist because we participate (i.e. live) in a racist, patriarchal system of dominance. That doesn't mean we're all Ann Coulter. It also doesn't remove our responsibility to try to do something about the system.

As a feminist, anti-racist activist, this interests me, of course. This is a situation in which all the theories I read are pretty irrelevant - here there is pain; there is real anger and hurt.

This young man hurts because he is labeled privileged, simply because he's a white male, something he did not choose and cannot change. But as a youth who grew up poor, in a household with violence, in an unhelpful school system with bullies, believe me, he had no silver spoon. He looks at his life and asks a very fair question: how can this be what privilege looks like?

If it wasn't someone I care about I could perhaps blithely respond: yes there is privilege, if you don't see it it's because you don't have to (your denial proves your privilege and dominance, which is maintained precisely because of its invisibility to those who possess it), there's nothing more to discuss. Of course, that is me talking to the figurative, metaphorical, representation which is "White Man", not to every real individual white man. This is is the real world, and individuals have real feelings and experiences that cannot be adequately captured in such simple statements. As progressives I believe we don't want to alienate those who are trying to make the world a better place, especially by hurting them. That simply drives them into the arms of the right-wingers: Might as well get a shotgun and a gas guzzler and become a real racist sexist prick, since that is what I'm assumed to be anyways.

When we are able and have the energy to do so, I think there is a point to helping those with privilege learn how to accept and understand it, so they can become our allies, even as we continue to learn about our own privilege, and how we ourselves perpetuate oppressions.

The truth is, privilege and oppression are extremely complex. White people and men of different backgrounds have different levels of access to social resources, power and status. Economic class, language, sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, even the neighbourhood a person lives in makes a difference. Aside from the intersection of many forms of oppression exist other contradictory examples. Here's one for ya: Patriarchy harms men. Patriarchy privileges men. I believe those two statements are not mutually exclusive.

From Pain and Progress (on the awesome XY site):

Because sexism hurts all men as well as women the ending of sexism is entirely in the interests of all men and all women. The "privileges" of patriarchy are paltry compared to the enormous cost we pay to maintain them. We give up so much of our humanness to become sexist patriarchs and no man who could clearly see what he has lost and is still losing by maintaining patriarchy would hesitate to give it all up. For example the power accorded to us by patriarchy is as nothing compared to the joy of real human connections to other people, men, women and children, based on equality and true relationship. We can't exercise this power and have truly equal relationships with women.

Interestingly, marginalization is at issue here too. Now we know that it is the white male perspective that is the "invisible" perspective: the universal position of imagined objectivity. Those on the margins have historically been silenced. Recognizing viewpoints that come from different experiences is an important part of our work. This does not necessarily mean that an individual white male is given a forum or platform (which are of course not identical to the dominant mainstream white supremacist viewpoint), meaning our theories do not resonate within him. They don't jive with his experience, so he may turn away from feminism and anti-racist activism completely.

I think growing our movements and building coalitions means trying to understand the pain we all experience as both oppressors and oppressed.

From Trauma and Oppression, Chapter 4 of Power-Under: Trauma and Nonviolent Social Change, from which I've quoted before:

One of the distinctive features of our social/economic/political system is the way in which it parcels out privilege and power-over. While there are enormous concentrations of wealth, status and power at the top, there are also infinite gradations of economic, social and political standing throughout the rest of the society. The result is that while virtually everyone is oppressed in some significant way, almost everyone also has access to some type of privilege and to one or more oppressor roles. This is an aspect of what Aurora Levins Morales calls the "interpenetration of institutional systems of power."
[...]
Most white people and most heterosexuals and most able-bodied people and most people who hold wealth beyond their needs simply think of themselves as normal, and think of their privileges as something that they have earned or that they deserve or that give them some modicum of social value and self-respect. People from oppressed constituencies who aspire to privilege and dominance surely do not think in terms of aspiring to become oppressors, but in terms of achieving statuses and positions from which they have been categorically excluded.

At the other end of the spectrum, when people identify as victims of oppression, it can all too easily block their willingness or ability to recognize the ways in which they also hold privilege and dominant roles.
[...]
As victims we are understandably preoccupied with our own experience of being acted upon in utter disregard for our worth as human beings. Our suffering unavoidably fills up our entire psychological landscape and – to the extent that we are politically conscious of oppression – our political landscape. The overwhelming impact of trauma can make it difficult or impossible to believe that the suffering of other oppressed groups could be as serious or as profound as our own.

I know this has been a long and rambling post. I'd be interested to hear other thoughts on this.

Rumour has it the natives will be restless tomorrow (Friday, June 29). Nobody really knows what's going to happen – there could be roads blocked, train routes compromised, taxes hiked way up on native cigarettes, anything at all.
[...]
Come the Day of Action, expect a plethora of grievances and calls for redress. Here are a few of the lesser-known ones:

WE DEMAND that something be done about the belief that Aboriginal people get everything for free. This might seem to be true if you count the bad water in Kashechewan, illness from black mould in inadequate housing, linguistical genocide, diabetes and rampant sexual abuse. But trust me, we've paid for all this.

WE DEMAND that the feds actually appoint a native person as the minister of Indian Affairs. We humbly ask: isn't the attorney general usually a lawyer? Isn't the minister for the Status of Women usually a woman? Doesn't the minister of Transportation have a driver's licence? Isn't the minister of Defence usually defensive?
[...]
WE DEMAND that white people (more politically correctly known as people of pallor) stop angrily saying, "They shouldn't do that!" in regard to protests and blockades, and instead exchange it for the more understanding "They shouldn't have to do that." It's technically more correct.
[...]
WE DEMAND that all commercials for Lakota medicine be pulled. Immediately.

WE DEMAND the Assembly of First Nations explain what it is it actually does – other than call for days of protest.

WE DEMAND that the police of this country stop shooting, assaulting and otherwise abusing the civil rights of native people. It's for law enforcers' own benefit. There are substantially more native people in this country than police, and we have more guns.

You know what, I think all people of pallor better go read the whole thing. There's something here for everyone.
Seeing red: This Indian’s plan to clean up the mess left by 500 years of illegal immigration by Drew Hayden Taylor.

Did I mention I heart Drew Hayden Taylor? HT to Stageleft

Fighting Amongst Ourselves for the Scraps

One of my favourite Canadian blogs has a very interesting conversation going on in the comments of this post, as explained here. To sum up, there's a Nice White Guy who feels Indiginous peoples have unfair advantages, and Scott has some very compassionate and well-argued points. I urge everyone to go and read.

I've been hearing and reading versions of this conversation everywhere lately. The well-meaning, hard-working white guy has a tougher and tougher time making it these days. He looks back, feeling nostalgic for a time that seems simpler; the time before the women's movement, before civil rights, before various other liberation struggles. There's a tendency among many regular working class people to blame those who are below them in the heirarchy but catching up, rather than those at the top who are keeping everyone down. Thus you have increasing fear, and a huge backlash against so many of the progressive reforms hard fought and won. Vicious anti-feminism, anti-immigration, and that sort of soft reactionary racism that is common these days (such as the belief in reverse discrimination).

See, on the left, we usually see the rise of neoliberalism as one of the main causes of the increasing difficulties for the white middle class. We blame those at the very top, and their cheerleaders and supporters in the market fundamentalist government, corporate media, and think tanks. Most (though not all) of these people are white, wealthy, Christian, hetero men. That doesn't mean we blame white people, the wealthy, Christians, heteros, or men.

The nostalgic past in which life was simple and good for a hardworking everyman was experienced by a minority of white Westerners. The 50s look very different to a black woman in the US, or an aboriginal person in Canada, an Algerian in Algeria, or a Palestinian in a refugee camp.

The last few decades have seen amazing struggles, many successes, and many setbacks. I certainly don't want to bedgrudge any group the rights they fought so hard for. I want them to have more. I want us to have more. That's what social justice is about. If I may use a dog-and-meat-metaphor: we should not be fighting amongst ourselves for the scraps, but going after those who are eating the prime rib. (Well, more precisely those structures that dole out prime rib to some and scraps to the rest.)

RACE: Are We So Different? - Interactive

A look at race through three different lenses: History, Human Variation, Lived Experience. With videos, quizzes, an interactive timeline, and more cool features. It's anti-essentialist, but does show that which side of the privilege fence you're born on provides for very different experiences. In other words, in this culture and society, race does still matter. Be sure to check out the blog while you're there, too. (especially this post, commented on by Robert Jensen)

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the mothers of the earth!

Probably one of the most powerful statements I've ever read.

Letter from the Landless Mothers

We speak to the sons and daughters of the land from all nations. To those who were not invited to the banquet. To those who have been waiting in the queue of history for centuries. We will not be spectators at a film waiting for the light to go out. It's time to believe in the possibility of defeating sorrow.

We are rising up with the mothers who are losing their sons and daughters in wars, in urban massacres, from the barrel of a rifle, in concentration camps, in acts of femicide and genocide, in domestic violence, in political persecutions, in armed sieges. We are rising up with the mothers who are losing their children because they don’t have milk, bread, land, or access to the knowledge accumulated by humanity. We are rising up with the mothers who are wandering with their sons and daughters, seeking a better world, We are rising up to call for social justice and dignity.

We raise our hands, our hoes, our scythes, and our consciences to call on all working women of the world to unite against those who exploit the land, life, the strength of our work and of our body.

We are directing ourselves to those who are said to be lords of the world. We don't want and we aren't asking for your permission to cut fences and to sow flowers and dreams. We will not hesitate to speak to you. We are struggling for land, for water, in defense of seeds and of biodiversity for the right to decide about our lives and our food, for the right to work, for our future and for solidarity among peoples.

"Development and modernity" advance over the world and open wounds. In your name, laws are passed that put humanity at risk. Against the green desert and despair we break the silence and we denounce the dust that is thrown over dreams and the prison of flowers. Your modernity is darkness and hunger and for this reason, is not in our interest. Don't you dare move ahead one step with your project of death!

The criminal manipulation of biogenetics, monoculture, agro-fuels, and agribusiness is an attempt to kill food sovereignty and the possibility of a ecologically correct and socially just world. We will not allow humanity to be destroyed. You should know that we will not accept that you kill our children through violence or for lack of food.

On this Mother's Day we reaffirm our determination to transform the countryside into a space for hope, happiness, and above all, for struggle. In our project, everyone has the right to a dignified life, a decent standard of living, and the sweet smell of flowers. We want to transform the world so that it may be more just and more egalitarian, and that all who live in it may be respected.

We will continue sowing revolutionary unrest on behalf of agrarian reform, social justice, and sovereignty of food and peoples. This is our mission and thus it must be for all peasant mothers persecuted by the violence of agribusiness and water-business.

What's left for the mothers of the world is to organize and struggle. We will struggle tirelessly against the neoliberal system that transforms food, water, land, people’s knowledge, and the bodies of women into commodities.

It's time to demand justice and punishment for those responsible for exploitation, violence, genocide, and massacres.

It's time to open up new passages, new men and new women.

It's time to set our sights on the new horizon.

We are standing up, spending night and day sculpting the fertility and the rebellion that are being born in the womb of mother earth.

Long live Mother Earth! Long live the mothers of the earth!

May 2007

MST – Agrarian Reform: for Social Justice and Peoples’ Sovereignty

The MST makes me so happy. Background here, here, and here,

The camouflaged native as blockader is Canada's fave new stereotype

From a piece by Drew Hayden Taylor (First Nations comedian and author of several books including Me Funny):

Blockades were not part of our traditional culture. Historically, Canada had too many wide-open spaces for native people to successfully blockade anything. But we are an adaptable people. After a while, we learned to blockade roads and railways, just as we learned to hunt with guns, cook with flour and lard and ride in cars. It seems like a natural progression.

Sadly, this image of the camouflaged native as blockader is replacing the drunken Indian as Canada's favourite new stereotype.

Children are in danger of becoming more familiar with the Indian wearing a bandana to hide his face than with the mighty warrior on a horse hunting buffalo. In the U.S., the dominant stereotype is the casino Indian.

Here in Canada, I know many people who've been involved in blockades and other acts of civil disobedience. They do not make these choices lightly. Most of them know things will get worse before they get better.

Everybody remembers the tragic images in Alanis Obomsawin's brilliant documentary Rocks At Whiskey Trench of local whites stoning Mohawks who were being evacuated from Kahnawake during the Oka crisis, resulting in one man dying of a heart attack.

Most people have come to understand that natives' actions at Oka, Ipperwash and other standoffs were justified. All involved years of trying to settle land claims with little response from the federal government. The ante needed to be upped.

On the news, I heard an annoyed VIA passenger bitterly condemn the native blockade: "I didn't think they were allowed to do that, but I guess they can do whatever they want." Our elders used to say the same thing about white people.
[...]
At the very least, irate VIA passengers will have an amusing tale to tell their grandkids. "I was part of the great Tyendinaga Railway Blockade of 07." I'm sure insurance will cover those companies or individuals who may have lost money because of the inconvenience. There must be some sort of "Act of Indian" clause somewhere.

Printed in this week's Now Magazine (It's been a particularly good issue). Read the Whole Thing Here

Happy May Day 2.0

Capitalism Divides. Mayday Unites


I would argue our most important challenge as progressives is to build bridges between movements. Labour and Environmentalists. Feminists and indigenous peoples. Anti-war and anti-poverty activists. So, in that spirit this post is dedicated to the people, united (we'll never be divided).

Don't miss this article from Common Ground.

If springtime is all about rebirth and resurrection, perhaps it's time we dusted off a much-maligned holiday and upgraded it to May Day 2.0. The bounty from labour and capital is ultimately drawn from the harvest, so why not merge the worker and nature angles? They're a natural fit. We'd still keep Earth Day, but it would be a preliminary event leading up to the planetary celebration on May 1st, when we'd celebrate not just the Earth, but all beings that struggle on it – from the threatened creatures of the coral reefs to the disappearing tigers of Southeast Asia to the sweatshop workers of "free trade zones" to the native survivors of Canadian residential schools to endangered white collar workers.

Also, check out "our history of protest", today's series of amazing posts at Women of Color Blog.

A Selection of May Day 2007 News from around the world:

Canadian Unions need to re-energize:

Issues that were previously championed by labour: poor relief, affordable housing and job-creation initiatives -- tend to be spearheaded by community groups or other advocacy organizations that run outside and without the influence of the labour movement.

US: Wal-Mart Skirting Labour Protections:

The retail giant Wal-Mart exploits weak U.S. labour laws to prevent union formation and violates the fundamental human rights of its U.S. workers, says a report released Monday on the eve of the May Day labour holiday.

IRAQ: The Iraqi labour movement salutes May Day:

May Day is an opportunity for Iraqi working people to sharpen their resolve as they continue struggle for a better Iraq of Human rights, social justices and federal democracy, free from terrorism and sectarianism.

Also GFIW proclaims: "Strong Unions Need Women" and Iraqi communists again call for an end to the occupation.


Palestinian Teachers on Strike

Palestinian teachers have held a one-day strike over unpaid wages prompting the deputy prime minister to suggest that the unity government be disbanded if the Western embargo is not lifted in three months. It is the first time a leader of the six-week-old unity government has made such a suggestion.

PERU: Striking Miners to March on Lima

Peru’s miners began an indefinite strike Monday demanding respect for labour rights. Their main complaint is against the outsourcing of jobs, as 80 percent of the 100,000 workers in the mining industry -- the backbone of the economy – are affected by the phenomenon of subcontracting and outsourcing.

SOUTH AFRICA: "You Have to Work Nine to Ten Times Harder Than a Male Farmer"

As activists focus on the challenges facing workers this May Day (May 1), Martha Moside is calling for attention to be paid to the situation of female subsistence farmers in South Africa.

RUSSIA: Of All, Russian Unions Begin to Lose Members

Squeezed between political change and budgetary difficulties, federal and regional trade unions are beginning to lose large numbers of active members. At many workplaces unions simply do not exist.

Venezuela to hike minimum wage 20% for May Day:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez raised the country's minimum wage by 20 percent, setting Latin America's highest pay scale.

More labour news from IPS News, and LabourStart.



Posters from labourhistory.org.za.

Inventing Whiteness

Who is white? What are the criteria? Is it the paleness of one's skin? If that were the case then Takao Ozawa (1922) would have been granted naturalization, since his skin was white. But he was Japanese, so the Supreme Court determined that white meant Caucasian.

So a white person is someone who is Caucasian? Well... not exactly. When an immigrant from India, Bhagat Singh Thind (1923), attempted to gain citizenship by arguing that he was Caucasian. He was rejected, using a weird non-definition of white, appealing to the authority of the common man, whoever he is: "the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences" between a South Asian and a white person.

As any sociologist will tell you, race is meaningful only as a social construction. There's no significant difference between "races", except for their shared experiences (i.e. ethnicity or cultural differences of course, but mostly the shared experience of being discriminated against, being designated "other"). Whiteness in America was constructed as a legal system designed to economically benefit a small elite, by entrenching disadvantages for most groups.

It was also designed to "divide & conquer", to prevent the feared solidarity between white indentured servants and black slaves. (see People's History of the United States)

There's no essential "white". Neither is there a monolithic group of "non-whites". The connecting thread among so many diverse groups is that experience of being excluded from certain things that white people take for granted - being marginalized.

For a really interesting discussion about the complexities of marginalization, read Intersectional Identity by Thinking Girl.

Today is International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Check out this research project: Discrimination in the Job Market: Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?

Also read the 10th Erase Racism carnival.

On Privilege and What We Can do About It

Came across this excellent post today: "Check my What? On Privilege and What We Can do About It. Some tips on going from pro-equality in spirit to pro-equality in deed".

A really good explanation of what privilege means, with some concrete suggestions of how to deal with it. Tells us to accept the fact that privilege exists, learn to listen so we can understand what our privilege means, and then gives tips on how to communicate (including some tips on respectful language, and dealing with minority spaces). One of the most important specifics is, I think, is the advice to recognize "it's not about you". Basically anyone who has any sort of privilege oughtta read it: men, white people, heteros, rich people, etc.

It seems to be an opportune time to post about this, considering the conversations that have been raging in this corner of the blogosphere lately. More to come.

Read the whole thing.

Also recommended for a good primer on some of the effects of privilege vs. discrimination: The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide, previously blogged about here.

UPDATE: Check out Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use it for Social Change. You can even download a whole copy here.

Solidarity With All the World's Women

As a fairly privileged woman living in Canada, I think today (March 8th, International Women's Day) I'd like to express my solidarity for all the world's women. There's such a vast range of different experiences; many women are fighting battles I've been fortunate enough not to have to fight. Despite our differences, we still have our shared womanhood in common.

North America
Here in North America, we are defending against the loss of the liberties we fought so hard for. "Feminist" has been rebranded as a dirty word. The right of a woman to choose when and if to have children is constantly under attack. Violence against women, and women's poverty are still urgent issues. In Canada, essential women's programs are being cut. Our aboriginal women face special risks.

Iraq
The current state of women in Iraq is covered in a recent report by MADRE: Promising Democracy, Imposing Theocracy: Gender-Based Violence and the US War on Iraq. (Listen/watch more at Democracy Now):

A groundbreaking report on the incidence, causes, and legalization of gender-based violence in Iraq since the US-led invasion. Amidst the chaos and violence of US-occupied Iraq, women — in particular those who are perceived to pose a challenge to the political project of their attackers — have increasingly been targeted because they are women. Today, they are subjected to unprecedented levels of assault in the public sphere, "honor killings," torture in detention, and other forms of gender-based violence.

Afghanistan
Because my country is one of the current occupiers, Afghanistan has particular importance to me. The women of Afghanistan are in a grave situation, with some of the highest rates of gender-based violence in the world, on top of decades of war and extreme oppression. The courageous feminists at RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) are incredibly inspiring, working for peace, freedom, and democracy. Their projects include womens' literacy, orphanages, education, human rights, health care, and more. (Canadians Support Afghan women)

Africa
The diversity of Africa makes it tough to write anything short, but a few of the issues women there are facing include poverty, violence (also sexual violence), AIDS, and slavery. Let them tell it in their own words: Read some African women's blogs.

Iran
This year, women marking International Women's Day were beaten and arrested. Despite the ongoing oppression of women in Iran, there is a strong and vibrant Iranian women's movement fighting for their rights, on their terms.

The truth is, there's not enough to room to write everything I want to say to express my solidarity with my brave and beautiful sisters all over the world.

So check out Amnesty International, CBC, Labourstart, and InterPress Service for much much more.

(Last Year's Post)

Why We Must Struggle Against All Forms of Oppression

A comment posted by brownfemipower on her own blog entry: Denying people food is a Male Thing.

ONe of the incidences that I had the pleasure (not) of participating in with a white feminist involved her showing me pics of an Afghani woman who had twin children, one boy and one girl, and she feed the boy breast milk and the girl watered down formula. She didn't think that she had enough milk to feed two kids, so she gave the girl formula–and of course, she’s freaking poverty stricken and can't come up with enough water to make the formula–and of course, when you're starving, what do you do, but portion out and restrict the food you do have? So anyway, the girl wound up dying.

The white feminist I was talking to was positive that this horrific thing happened because Afghani culture values men. Well, it's true that in a patriarchal culture, men are valued. But when you are a single afghani mother who can't forage for food on your own and you’re starving to death isn't there also a very real legitimate reason that you value male life? Do we really think that a well off Afghani woman in Canada that has plenty of food is going to starve her daughter to death and lavish breast milk on a son?

Desperation *creates* and/or *reinforces* gender imbalances–many times, those gender imbalances didn’t exist prior to the introduction of "desperation". Look in Iraq, for example–women are now confined to their houses in ways that they weren’t under saddamn. Is a little girl that requires food but can do nothing to help *get* the food really going to be valued?

and then, really, in the case of this woman, it really pissed me off that this white woman was decrying the sexism, but NOT the fact that a mother has to water down formula to make it last longer or deny her child all together because she simply doesn't have water. Those conditions of extreme horrific poverty were created BY US and the USSR. Do we have no responsibility at ALL in that child's death?

I think this anecdote illustrates nicely the connection between patriarchy and economic injustice. All forms of domination and oppression are connected, and ALL have to be struggled against. That is why Condoleeza Rice represents nothing for our struggles: as a black woman she has been invited into the "other side" of the racist, patriarchal, classist divide. That does not eliminate the divide. Frustrating: white wealthy women (who can choose to be stay-at-home moms because of their priviledged social position) and support right-wing parties and say feminism is dead. Grrrr...