Miscellaneous Articles

My career as a political essayist began thirteen years ago when I was asked by Rabble.ca to expand on my views about the prorogation crisis and why public opinion had turned so sharply in Stephen Harper’s favour, even among supporters of the parties trying to topple his government.

My thesis, then, bears repeating today:

In our voting system, the most successful party is one best at reducing the number of choices its potential voters feel that they have. A look at Liberal messaging shows that Jean Chretien became increasingly reliant on his ability to convince potential NDP and Green Party supporters to vote for his party. And despite his antipathy for Chretien, Paul Martin intensified this approach. What we missed during that time was how this change in Liberal tactics helped to change Canadian ideas of what made a legitimate government. As the Liberals lost their capacity to intimidate left-of-centre voters, they lost power. And Canadians learned a lesson: a government’s legitimacy comes not from its ability to appeal to the majority but instead from its ability to control and discipline its own supporters and potential supporters.

In the ensuing thirteen years, this idea has become increasingly entrenched in mainstream Canadian values. If a candidate for office or legislator expresses any view contradicting their party’s leadership in any way, it becomes a scandal, even if their view is broadly supported by the public and the head office view is unpopular.

It is covered in the media as a threat to a party’s ability to govern because the leadership’s control over its legislators and prospective legislators is less than absolute. It reveals not that a party is diverse, complex and pluralistic (all things once deemed core Canadian values) but rather that the party is weak and unsafe because it permits diversity, complexity or pluralism. The country that invented the Westminster parliamentary system still routinely tolerates dozens of MPs voting against a party’s leadership and yet not just remaining in the fold but eligible for future promotion. Indeed, the Westminster system was designed to handle major splits within the factions it represents.

Caucus rebels, back in the twentieth century, were understood to be legislators who could be expected to vote against and/or publicly contradict their leaders during every term they served. Today, the definition of a caucus rebel is a legislator who votes in lock step with their party, never makes a public pronouncement not approved-of by the party but grumbles about having to do this in private with their core supporters. MPs and MLAs, right now, are being punished by chiefs of staff and party whips simply for privately grumbling—that is all that dissent has become.

As I predicted back in 2008, the people who now hold this belief that anything less than total control and absolute discipline is a sign of weakness and illegitimacy are now what pollsters politely call “the centre-left.”

Sadly, as with all broadly held cultural assumptions, these values concerning control, submission and dissent eventually escape their original context and run rampant through society. If people become convinced of a new moral order for how the world above them should run, it ultimately shakes down to the world below.

And we see this here with centre-left reaction to the national truckers’ protest in Ottawa. No permanent organization is running this protest, which appears to be built around social media, a GoFundMe page and a loose affiliation of local leadership groups developed in provincial protests by truckers over the past few years.

And of course, it does not represent all or even most truckers in the industry. The crew who are in Ottawa are whiter, more rural and more right-leaning than the industry as a whole, which is, in turn, whiter, more rural and more right-leaning than Canadian society as a whole. The folks in Ottawa are also more likely to be “owner-operators,” who have financed their heavy equipment through financial institutions. Those driving trucks owned by extended families or by trucking companies directly are much less likely to be part of the protest.

There is no doubt that a small fraction of these individuals are members of Canada’s tiny fascist militias, the Sons of Odin, the Proud Boys and other far-right political groups and that a disproportionate number voted for the People’s Party. In addition, the spirit of the protest and the issue it is taking up, vaccine passports, have attracted members of right-wing groups that are not themselves truckers but wish to express solidarity or see the protest as an organizing and recruitment opportunity.

Those of us who cut our teeth in the 1980s peace movement know this story well. The Vancouver Peace March used to attract 10% of the city’s population (50,000 protesters at its peak) for its annual walk across Burrard Bridge to support global nuclear disarmament. And, consequently, the vanguard of the march comprised the Trotskyites, Maoists and other communist sectarians and foreign dictator fan clubs who saw this as their big annual opportunity to radicalize and recruit ordinary anti-nuclear activists.

Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or the most radical protesters and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed and was mocked by the mainstream press, who depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of its support.

But today, that approach is working because our society’s mainstream values have changed and because the target audience is a different one.

Because Canadians, as a whole, but especially centre-left voters have now come to believe that the legitimacy of a movement inheres not in its size or the diversity of people and views it represents but rather in its ability to discipline and control its supporters, this protest looks both illegitimate and frightening. Not only is this protest not controlling the speech and signage of its members; it is celebrating its refusal to control these things and instead sticking to the basics of making sure protesters are nonviolent and law-abiding.

And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being. Let me rehearse the kinds of sloppy reporting we are seeing here:

• The most bigoted and ignorant Tweets and Facebook comments by individuals supporting the truckers are being cherrypicked and reported as news about the protesters’ shared beliefs, usually without even checking to see if the person is even in Ottawa as part of the protest. The views are not those of the organizers, just its most offensive and deranged supporters. This move, akin to writing a peace march article primarily covering the views of pro-North Korea and nudist activists at the walk, is going over shockingly well with Canada’s urban centre-left because it signifies to them one or both of two things (a) the truckers are all homophobic Klansmen or (b) the organizers are unable/unwilling to control the speech and signage of every participant in the protests.
• Mainstream politicians like Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus are able to credit any hate mail or abusive communication “the convoy crew” and have the protesters and organizers collectively blamed for the communication. Again, this rhetoric is only effective because we have made the belief that the organizers of a protest can or should control the private correspondence of every single participant and supporter a reasonable one.
• Despite a recent passing interest in toppling pro-Confederate and pro-war statues in the United States, Canadian progressives have suddenly become very concerned about nationalist statuary. While I would never try to politicize a Terry Fox statue, myself, the level of offense centre-left urbanites are taking at people placing entirely removable and undamaging objects and signs on Ottawa’s Fox memorial is deeply worrying. No one has toppled the statue; nobody has even got paint on it. Similarly, the fact that there is urine of unknown provenance in the snow near the memorial to the unknown soldier is now being redescribed as protesters, as a whole, urinating on and thereby desecrating the war memorial. Who knew that the mere possibility of a half a dozen or fewer individuals disrespecting a war memorial by urinating near it could de-legitimate a gathering of thousands in the minds of Canada’s mainstream centre-left!?
• Many protesters are making false and unreasonable comparisons between present-day Canada and the early days of Nazi Germany. Like most Canadians, I find these comparisons deeply offensive. But that is what they are: deeply offensive comparisons, born largely of ignorance and a persecution complex. The prevalence of such comparisons among the truckers would, in my view, be a reasonable issue for news media to cover. But, instead, what we see is rhetorical overreach into falsehood. News media are depicting the hand-drawn swastikas and upside-down maple leaves used in the posters making those comparisons as endorsements of Naziism and opposition to the existence of Canada. While I am sure there are some genuine Nazi sympathizers among the thousands of truckers in Ottawa, the protest art I have seen using the swastika is the basis of an inaccurate and offensive comparison and not an endorsement of Hitler. Fortunately, because Canadians’ willful embrace of ignorance and stupidity, urban progressives who can, themselves, barely hold onto the idea that one can compare one thing to another thing, are unable to imagine that the truckers may be using symbols to make a comparison—no, they must all be Nazis, traitors.

While it is true that I agree with the truckers on the main issue they are raising, that of vaccine passports, they are not my political community. I agree with them on few if any other issues. Many do hold views I find not just disagreeable but repugnant. I am sure many are climate denialists, for instance.

I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence.

We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry?

They will wonder if those folks also came to be known as these things the way they did. As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims.

There is a high price to pay when you decide to cry “wolf” over fascism in a political situation like our own, where the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide.

More importantly still, I am trying to sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, disciple and control as Canadians’ primary political values. The fact is that those values are authoritarian. In a nation wherein rapid, dramatic change is not just a moral necessity but an ecological one, we need to retain the capacity for mass mobilization and our capacity to resist an authoritarian regime, irrespective of whether it calls itself progressive or conservative.

Last week, I moved back to Vancouver and into a neighbourhood in which I have spent little time since the 1980s. Back then, I spent a lot of time in the area centred on Memorial Park in the swath of then-working class homes between the city’s main cemetery and its second Little India because my friends Oscar and Terence lived here.

In 1987, Oscar had the first of a series of prophetic dreams that my friends and I attempted to use in our nascent political organizing. For many years, I have thought of this effort to integrate these dreams into our political thought as an adolescent practice we grew out of. But today, I am not so sure. In fact, I have come to believe that Oscar’s first oracular dream basically summarizes most of my experience of political organizing over the past thirty-five years.

So, now that I have an up-to-date photo of the Church’s Fried Chicken franchise that has, amazingly, survived the onslaught of gentrification that has destroyed nearly every fun commercial strip in this city, I thought I would share the dream.

The dream begins with Oscar driving a pickup truck up Fraser Street from the south when he begins to hear something moving around in the back of the truck. He pulls into the Church’s parking lot and gets out to take a look and discovers a half-dozen corpses in the back, whereupon, unbidden by his conscious mind, he takes a hypodermic needle out of his pocket. It is already full of Windex, which he injects into one of the corpses.

Immediately, it springs to life as some sort of contagious zombie and animates the other corpses. They run down Fraser Street and spread the contagion to the other pedestrians. Terrified, Oscar retreats across the parking lot to the northeast to survey the ghastly scene.

Suddenly, he realizes he is not alone. A disheveled man in a grey trench coat is standing beside him. He stands on tiptoe and whispers into Oscar’s ear, “The answer’s in THERE!” He raises his almost skeletal hand and points to a ramshackle wooden outhouse in the middle of the parking lot that had not been there before.

Desperate to deal with the worsening zombie situation, he and Oscar rush over to the outhouse and begin pulling up the floorboards with their bare hands. And then Oscar catches himself and stands up. The man in the trench coat is still furiously pulling up the floorboards and angrily muttering.

“Maybe he’s sick too,” Oscar decides and abandons the outhouse. He goes to the bus shelter on 41^st Avenue where the local transit map is conveniently refreshing every few minutes to show the progress of the zombie infestation, which has now taken over pretty much the entire region except for the town of Squamish to the sorth. A woman with a bunch of kids pulls up in her car and offers Oscar a ride.

The dream ends.

And no, I won’t be offering an analysis of the dream here or anywhere else. Now, back to regular blog posts.

Rest in Peace Oscar Bot, 1971-2014, true friend and comrade.

Our Absurd Moment and the Postmodern Critique
When one looks at the QAnon Shaman at the Bumpkin Putsch or Harry Potter book burnings on TikTok, it is only natural to ask “how did we get here?” How did the Age of Reason come crashing down upon us like this? Surprisingly, a common explanation is “the postmodern critique” or, as Jordan Peterson absurdly mislabels it, “cultural Marxism.” (Peterson believes that Karl Marx was the person who invented the idea that some things are good and other things are bad and then mysteriously blames him for ideologies that claim nothing is good or bad.)

The idea is that the really wacky aspects of the culture wars come from a kind of vulgar cultural relativism that resulted from university students in the Midwest misreading French philosophers at university in the 1990s and calling their misreading “postmodernism.”

All sorts of sinister silliness in our present is thrown at the feet of Michel Foucault, Gayatri Spivak, Jean Beaudrillard and their ilk. We are quick to blame pronoun politics, trigger warnings, standpoint epistemology, the moronic redefinition of “cultural appropriation” and the like on the excesses of the Golden Age of Theory.

Far be it from me to suggest that the Golden Age of Theory was lacking in excesses, silliness or nonsensical clumps of words masquerading as ideas but, most of the ideas it is blamed for had nothing to do with it.

Austerity: Crucible of the New Commissar Class
So many of the cultural practices that undermine our ability to think, to debate, to organize and to stand in solidarity with our comrades arose during the 1980s and 90s but not in the sociology, literature and women’s studies departments we so often blame. They arose in much better-maintained, newer and more expensive buildings on university campuses. Because contemporaneous with the vulgar postmodernist wave was a far more sinister and influential development: the explosion of management theory and the rise of what Thomas Piketty calls “the super-manager.”

Contrary to the public rhetoric of neoliberal reformers like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, austerity programs do not attack bureaucracy and bureaucrats. They typically increase the number of people in management roles in both the private and public sectors. Someone has to develop the strategies for designing and implementing cuts to the industrial and government workforces; someone has to create the new private corporations that are spun off from the state as public resources are sold off; someone has to develop new labour discipline routines to force more productivity out of the remaining workers to make up for all the discarded labour.

And so, the Janus face of fewer frontline workers being paid less is more supervisory and managerial workers being paid more. Furthermore, it is dangerous to promote frontline workers into these new roles. While they might be intimately familiar with the operations of their workplace, they might be from the wrong class and, worse still, act in the interest of that class by stymying austerity effort. Much better to hire folks whose knowledge and skills are unrelated to the operations of the workplace but instead are organized around management itself.

And so, while the social sciences and humanities wandered down one rabbit hole or another in the 1990s, a new kind of professional, the cross-sectoral manager came to populate this burgeoning new class and with that new kind of authority came the expansion of a pre-existing credential, the MBA, the Master of Business Administration.

Administration ceased to be a professional attainment within vocation that one achieved by rising through corporate ranks and became a vocation all its own, with hefty tuition fees to keep the riffraff out.

The was contemporaneous with all kinds of new corporations. Blairite/Third Way austerity programs often involved downloading government services to non-profit or charitable enterprises. All these government contracts with entities outside the government required management; and charities that wanted to keep contracts flowing have discovered that they need to stop promoting from within and instead to begin poaching MBAs from the private sector, often folks with family money or a wealthy spouse who could slum it with their prestigious degree.

More importantly, conventional Thatcherite austerity involved taking parts of the state that made money, selling them off cheap. This created all kinds of openings for high level managers and CEOs who needed private sector experience, to stay competitive. Former government departments needed to be reformed to be “lean” and “agile.” This involved the usual: busting unions, cutting wages and new systems of surveillance and punishment to squeeze more work out of the remaining workforce.

Most exciting for this emerging was the rise of a new kind of business that just managed other things. Hedge funds arose from new laws that made financial speculation easier. Health management organizations (HMOs) and their ilk were necessary to ensure that privatized parts of the state were not too taxed by having to actually provide services to anyone and so whole corporations came into being whose sole purpose was to act as gatekeepers to deny people basic services.

As this new management culture took off in the private sector and in the ruins of where the state had once been, it developed a vast abundance of its own nonsensical theories, like the worst excesses of postmodernism, but with fewer syllables behind it and, even less disciplined thinking. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and similar works of non-scholarship formed the zeitgeist of the emerging super-manager class.

Ironically, all this was taking place as the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the only places where the manager class had seized power from the owner class, were collapsing. And so despite having an emerging class consciousness strikingly similar to the commissars of Eastern Europe, the world’s new manager class presented itself not as competitors of the capitalist/owner class but as its handmaidens.

During this period, sectors of the economy like healthcare and postsecondary education experienced huge growth in their administrative sectors, with the number of managers per frontline worker increasing three- or fivefold. To advance in such a system, the post-USSR commissar class, remade in the Harvard School of Business, was charged with the continuous revolutionizing of production. The owner class delegated this work to CEOs and the massive bureaucracies they built outside the state, at the state’s margins and inside the state as governments sought to ape the supposedly more efficient private sector.

The meat of this work entailed increasing productivity while reducing wages. And that involved not only the formal and legal destruction of unions but a frontal assault on the cultural fabric of working folks that made them stick together, whether formally unionized or not.

The 1990s was the decade of, among other things, the listserv, proto-social media, an e-mail list that distributed your response to a post to the inbox of everyone on the list. This led to the first of a series of internet-leavened eruptions of social conflict as people normally inhibited by the physical presence, tone and body language of one’s interlocutors were able to express their opinions of coworkers and their ideas in a medium (e-mail lists) lacking in those inhibiting features. Combined with the radical social dislocation produced in workplaces by neoliberal reforms and the adjustments associated with the switch from alcohol and tobacco to coffee and anti-depressants as the main workplace drugs, this led to an explosion of the expression of workplace interpersonal grievances.

Consequently, a key area of knowledge and action by this new, increasingly self-conscious and connected managerial class became the workplace psychology of employees. Whereas the first wave of study in employee psychology in the postwar era had been focused on increasing Fordist industrial production and the maintenance of morale and had been centred in psychology departments, this new wave was characterized by non-academic thought and thought nevertheless canonized by Business and Commerce departments at universities.

The New Age and the New HR
Rather than the empirically-driven efficiency models we associate with Robert McNamara’s presidency of the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s, this thinking was surprisingly woo-based, as it reflected the Yippie-Yuppie transition embodied in the Jerry Rubin-Abbie Hoffman debates of the 1980s. The transformation of the New Age EST movement for self-actualization into the Landmark Forum for personal and financial success typified the alchemy 1970s New Age thinking underwent to become Management Theory.

The structure of gurus, retreats and encounter groups underwent a similarly superficial transformation. The retreats became “corporate retreats,” which did not always involve even leaving the office. Instead, they imbibed of the spirit of the elementary and middle school assembly. Regular duties would be canceled for a day and the bosses and managers would introduce an individual or small team to educate the company’s workers in some way that would somehow make them better co-workers. These exercises often repurposed “trust building exercises” from 1970s New Age culture with employees being forced into conscriptive group activities that entailed behaving in undignified ways: confessional testimonials, bad collaborative drawing, incoherent improvisational skits, sack races, etc.

Many of these activities entailed classic cult recruitment strategies designed to break down one’s dignity, one’s ego in front of the group and then have the group conscripted into reforming/repairing that ego as one based on the values of the facilitators of the activity, centred around the group. The idea of the outsider guru did not just form new high level charlatan jobs like “management consultant;” “retreat facilitators,” “anti-bullying consultants,” etc. multiplied in the ever-expanding world of Big HR. For every new manager based in a single firm and workplace, there was also a new contractor, ready to charge big bucks to put on day-long events designed to induce a new camaraderie, a new loyalty as old loyalties and solidarities were chipped away by ever-tightening regimes of austerity and surveillance.

All this unfolded as the wage disparity within corporations grew; more ranks, more material differences came to separate conventional employees from management as the super-manager class emerged, to vie with the owner class for control of capitalism and its institutions.

Anti-Bullying and the New Morals Clause
A curious development arose from all this: when corporations came to the bargaining table with unions, it was often they, not the union that asked new contracts to include anti-discrimination and anti-bullying measures with large, elastic, capacious definitions of discrimination, harassment and bullying. And when there was no union with whom to negotiate, workers found similar measures creeping into their non-union contracts.

Central to these new measures was what we might call victim subjectivity. These policies were typically framed based not on intersubjective or objective standards but by subjective standards. By this, I mean that whether a person was facing discrimination, harassment or bullying was based on the following test: did the person feel as though they had been targeted based on their sexual orientation, gender expression, race, etc.? These grounds for discrimination typically excluded the two main factors in workplace harassment: class and workplace rank/status.

Such policies tended to eschew easily available evidence in favour of an individual’s feelings: had one’s coworkers witnesses some portion of the harassment? That was unimportant evidence. Could one find a pattern of financial discrimination in the awarding of overtime, holiday dates or unsuccessful promotion attempts? Again, not nearly so important as feelings.

In this way, real, material structures of power and real, material standards of evidence were effaced, enabling those most able to narrate their emotions to serve their strategic objectives to dominate this field. And as an increasing number of complaints were encouraged by these policies, complaints also came to be directed downward or horizontally in the workplace. After all, with such a deliberately flimsy evidentiary structure, it was as easy for complaints to fail with evidence as to succeed without it. Consequently, complaints tended to be directed at individuals who could not materially punish the complainant. And they tended to operate in an evidence-free frame, causing them to measure not how wronged a person was but how much power and popularity, how much social capital they could mobilize.

Furthermore, with increasing frequency, these complaints could encompass actions and opinions expressed outside the workplace provided they produced feelings located in the workplace. Unwittingly, union negotiators often tended to embrace these management-driven policies because they appeared congruent with the values associated with political projects and parties with which unions were associated outside the workplace, like anti-racism initiatives.

Such complaint structures also served another purpose for the new managerial class in the age of austerity: more and more of unions’ energies were taken up with complaints by workers about other workers, not about managers and owners. Union grievance structures, originally designed to force management accountability, have become increasingly colonized by complaints by workers about one another, further undermining solidarity and distracting union officials from fights for real economic justice inside and outside the workplace.

The HR-ification of Activism
And we all know where things have gone from here. Social justice activism is taking the cue from Big HR and the super-manager class. One does not need to be a co-worker for an individual who feels wronged or offended by something one has done or said. The moral logic of HR is now the moral logic of the world. An increasing portion of self-styled social justice activists focus all or a portion of their time on finding a person whose speech they find hurtful and seek redress through the person’s workplace.

And given the capacious, incoherent and subjective nature of harassment policies, non-co-worker complainants appear to have real power and real standing whether conferred de facto or de jure. At our present moment, it is as though everyone has had a morals clause inserted into their contract, i.e. everyone’s job is now contingent on non-controversial public speech.

Now, political victory is not a change in public policy or cultural practice nearly as often, these days, as it is the infliction of unemployment, precarity and, ideally, homelessness on any individual who thinks aloud in ways that emotionally trouble people who possess significant social capital, as though being emotionally untroubled is some kind of right we have earned, as though being emotionally troubled or challenged is not the most common path towards personal growth.

What I find most shocking arising from all this is that the huge popularity idea that those who express wrong (i.e. emotionally troubling) thoughts should not have jobs, homes or even friends and loved ones. And that the left’s idea of victory is not the conversion of those it deems opponents to values of tolerance, pluralism, economic equality and ecological sustainability but instead their firing, eviction, shunning and premature deaths.

In my own recent experiences with two abusive employers, I have witnessed this firsthand. Those most interested in striking a pose as radicals, revolutionaries, as social justice warriors, have thrown in with my bosses, amplifying their slanders of me on social media, intensifying their harassment at times I am in high-stakes negotiations. They are labouring for free because being implicated in my humiliation, immiseration and poverty will redound to their glory, making them heroes of today’s Bizarro Left.

Once upon a time, we had a name for such folks. They were called “snitches” and “scabs,” and were subject to the scorn of their fellow workers. Now scabbing and snitching are the very essence of the travesty that passes for too much of contemporary social justice activism: volunteer work for the bosses.

Following my resignation from the BC Ecosocialist Party’s leadership, a few kind folks with podcasts reached out to interview me in greater depth about the larger context of what some are calling my “cancelation” from BC politics. I suggested that this plague of de-platforming and hounding people out of work for straying from left-Identitarian orthodoxy was possible because of a loss of cultural memory of the Cold War and, in particular, McCarthyism and the other Red Scares.

Current practices of policing the discourse by Woke folk are, whatever their ideological and cosmetic differences, in essence, McCarthyism. As in the Red Scare of the 1950s, the idea is that, embedded in organizations throughout society, there are evil people who believe in destroying everything good in society. But these folks are secretive; they conceal these views behind complicated academic language, or by only expressing them in private, or by encoding them in works of art. These people might be anyone: your teacher, your relative, your childhood friend, your co-worker, even your political comrade who appears to be on the same side as you. That is why it is important to be vigilant because members of the International Communist Conspiracy might be anyone anywhere.

While we often think of McCarthyism as a state-driven enterprise, with Senator McCarthy or J Edgar Hoover orchestrating the firings of thousands of Americans exposed as communists, the fact is that the vast majority of people who lost their job, their reputation, their marriage, their children, their political office through McCarthyism were people the US government was not even aware of.

That is because McCarthyism functioned like a contagious disease. Because if someone in one’s circle were exposed as a communist, a person might be asked about their friend, relative or co-worker. There was only one correct response: to condemn the person in question, ostracize them and take umbrage at being fooled by that wily communist. If one responded, “but what’s wrong with being a communist?” this would expose one as a fellow communist sympathizer. But responding, “I’m sure he’s not a communist; he seems a good guy” would have the same effect but worse: one was now aiding and abetting the conspiracy through lies. Most dangerous was saying “this person is a good and trustworthy person; I vouch for his patriotism”—everyone knew what that meant: “I too am a member of the International Communist Conspiracy hell-bent on the destruction of civilization.”

Today, we have a much wider variety of names to call folks on the left: one can be exposed as a “SWERF”, a “TERF,” a “Karen” (note that these epithets tend overwhelmingly to be misogynistic ones) but the epithets all mean the same thing: a malefactor walking secretly among us, colluding with other malefactors and seeking to lead good folk astray.

While I have experienced minor, minor consequences compared to most folks Woke activists have decided to try and cancel, I want to note that my controversial writing about identity-formation in late capitalism was not the text used to falsely indict me as a transphobe. The smoking gun was my declaration that Vancouver housing activist Judy Graves was not a transphobe. Friends of mine are now understood to be transphobes because they have said that I am not a transphobe. Declaring that a known TERF is not a TERF is the clearest evidence that someone is a TERF. And so it spreads, like a disease.

In this way, what some call “cancel culture” is simply neo-McCarthyism. We would realize there was nothing new or special about it if we were not so historically unmoored, if we remembered that rather than leading, Joe McCarthy and the US federal government lagged behind neighbourhood scolds, personnel managers, church deacons and ambitious union vice-presidents in identifying and rooting out the putative communist threats. While senator McCarthy’s inflammatory statements about communist infiltration fueled the 1950s Red Scare, they first produced a volunteer-led, grassroots McCarthyism from below. As in the present day, lawmakers sought to enact their own persecution campaign not as a project of their own making but as a means of placating or jockeying for the support of the grassroots activists who prosecuted most of McCarthyism.

And that is what so many people miss about Cold War authoritarian movements and governments: their popularity, their grassroots support, their ethic of volunteerism.

Of course, McCarthyism was hardly the greatest scourge on human liberty of the Cold War; it killed very few people and existed for a fairly short period of time in a single country. Far more significant were the “bureaucratic authoritarian” regimes that flourished in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The USSR, its European client states and America’s Western Hemisphere vassals lived far longer under far more brutal oppression.

While some were led by charismatic strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, most were led by uncharismatic bureaucrats; there were lots of examples of rotating leadership, collective leadership and leadership from behind the throne. Consequently, allegiance to these states tended to be a defensive, fear-based allegiance. The official rhetoric was that one’s country was an embattled bastion of something precious that must be defended at all costs. In Chile, that thing was the free market; in Argentina, it was Roman Catholicism; in Czechoslovakia it was socialism; in Yugoslavia, it was pluralism.

While most bureaucratic authoritarian regimes were installed from above, often at gunpoint, almost all nevertheless began with real popular support. And it would be a mistake to assume that this support declined. Like Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, elections were not rigged or canceled because the government feared losing or had to abide by the results but because the rulers were ideologically opposed to democratic elections.  It is a mistake to assume that canceling or rigging an election is an indication of a lack of power or popularity; just as often it functions to demonstrate those things.

Yet despite the apparently sweeping and total power of these regimes over every aspect of their citizens’ lives, they, like McCarthyism, relied on the mobilization and support of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.

Even today, with cameras and satellites everywhere, with facial and voice recognition software, with increasingly invasive surveillance legislation, the state lacks the labour to utilize a hundredth of the information gathered by its own agencies, never mind its private sector partners.

What made it possible for the Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean regimes to “disappear” tens of thousands of their citizens was the work of volunteers. In these states, the role of the neighbourhood scold was elevated, empowered and trusted by the state to feed it the information it needed to know which tapped phone to listen to, what time of day to search a home, whose workplace supervisor to call.

Ultimately, these dictatorships became unstable or failed when they lost too many volunteers, when too many people stopped reporting on their neighbours, coworkers, friends and relatives. Because no authoritarian succeeds without mobilizing a sense of volunteerism and civicmindedness in its citizens. That is why internal propaganda is important; it is ineffective at changing the views of dissidents; its purpose is to mobilize and inspire the government’s essential volunteer labour force.

Today, many decent folks, myself included, admire and lionize Jane Jacobs’ idea of “eyes on the street” as the most effective public safety and crime prevention measure, a benign vision of elders on stoops shouting at young ruffians and making sure someone is watching when young women walk home at night. That vision is not a false one and I am not renouncing my support for the “eyes” principle of public safety any time soon.

But we must remember that there is a dark side, a Janus face of the eyes on the street in Jacobs’ Greenwich Village in 1965; it is the eyes on the street in Rio de Janeiro that same year, eyes watching for socialists, atheists and anarchists for the Brazilian junta.

Just as our cultural amnesia prevents us from remembering that residential schools were created by do-gooders and social reformers, who believed they were improving the lives of Indigenous people, our historical amnesia also immunizes us from seeing how little daylight there is between the impulses and practices behind Cold War social control and the forces that enforce the orthodoxies of the moment, be they the orthodoxies of the Fox News and the Trump movement or those of the Woke.

No campaign of repression from above succeeds without mass support from below, not just in the form acquiescence but in the form of labour, through surveillance and denunciations of the putative enemies of the people.

While much of this is powered by fear, fear that the volunteer army will turn on oneself, one cannot discount just how many people in 1955 looked at a long-time comrade, friend, colleague or relative and said to themselves “Wow! He’s a member of the International Communist Conspiracy too!? Who knew? I would never have guessed how many of my associates have actually been working to destroy everything I hold dear, all along! This betrayal cannot stand! How can I help getting his kids apprehended by the state?”

I am 100% certain that the primary architect of my attempted cancelation thought something very like that about me, that somehow I had been turned, changed by the forces of evil and now had to be torn out, root and branch, from the political left in British Columbia for fear that the contagion might spread, ensuring, of course, that it does.

Unlike Jordan Peterson and the other sad sack idiots who rail against the alleged totalitarianism of the present day, I do not believe that we have lost our freedom of speech or that there is some kind of authoritarian control of the discourse. Noam Chomsky’s consent factory is bigger and more powerful than ever, aided by Silicon Valley, the billionaire class, and their control of social media, their ability to shape the language and thought of both their allies and adversaries.

But I am suggesting that, as we guard against the authoritarianism coming our way, we refocus our optic, that we focus not on the small amount of monetized and automated labour needed to create a surveillance society and instead cast our eyes horizontally, that we pay attention to the lion’s share of the labour needed for such a society, the sincere, altruistic work of volunteers.

These days, it is at least satisfying to see that, even if the world has not become a better place in the past decade, it has become a place I can predict better. Since my time living in the US during the 2010 midterm elections, I have spent a good amount of time warning people about the rise in anti-scientific belief and conspiracy theories in the US and their slow seizure of the public square.

Unfortunately, many on the political left seem to see identifying conspiracy theory and its wrongness as an end in itself, politically, a tactic for more comprehensively dismissing political movements that are gaining on us every day. As with other phenomena allied with Trumpism, progressive folks see empirical wrongness as some kind of Achilles Heel or sign of inevitable defeat, and therefore reassuring. An increasingly elitist, siloed and out-of-touch left rarely thinks to ask itself: “why are these movements succeeding?” or, more importantly, “what are people getting out of these movements?”

Fundamentally, people do not take on new beliefs or join new social movements if these movements do not meet needs that are not being met elsewhere. If we do not ask ourselves what false beliefs are being used for, we have little hope of competing against those beliefs and the movements that peddle them.

So, I thought I might use today’s post to think a little more creatively and compassionately about one of the movements out there whose teachings are not merely wrong but cause unnecessary deaths of children with some frequency. Unlike many movements that are astroturfed by corporate wealth, the “Anti-Vaxx” movement is the very opposite. Its adherents persist in their anti-childhood vaccination campaigns despite facing the opposition of Big Pharma, one of the most ruthless and powerful industry groups in the world today, bigger, scarier and more popular than Big Tobacco.

So, why is the Anti-Vaxx movement so popular and why are its adherents so willing to donate volunteer time?

The core of the Anti-Vaxx movement are parents of autistic children who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism. Their activism is focused on convincing other parents not to vaccinate their children, thereby preventing them from developing this often-crippling neurological disability. Why would a group of cash-strapped parents, many already run ragged caring for disabled kids with negligible help from the state or their community, throw themselves into this work?

Exactly. What if this is not an obstacle to Anti-Vaxx activism but a reason for said activism?

One of the dominant feelings for the parents and guardians of autistic kids is one of powerlessness. No matter how hard they work, how much love they show, how many new or controversial treatments they try out, etc. they feel powerless over the child’s disability, in an endless process of triage in which, not just their child but their whole family suffers day in-day out.

They can attend support groups and talk about that feeling of powerlessness but it never goes away. They can commiserate with the other parents of autistic kids but such experiences of social solidarity and companionship, as often as not, serve to entrench those feelings of powerlessness as one meets parents who have been struggling with non-verbal or non-responsive kids into young adulthood, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.

But let us imagine how different the experience would be if one could join a support group and, instead of sharing experiences of frustration and loss, the focus of the support group was to stop autism? Going to the support group would suddenly take on a very different character. Even if one’s own child could not be cured, the hope of an end to autism could be real, and one’s own loss could be balanced against achieving a greater social goal that would spare other parents from ever having to join such a group. That is what the Anti-Vaxx movement offers.

In many communities, seeing oneself as a victim or a member of a marginalized group requiring pity or accommodation is something shameful and plays to only certain kinds of personalities. Imagine an autism support group full of people whose primary self-image is not as victims but as heroes. Again, that is what the Anti-Vaxx movement can offer: a chance to create community with the parents in other families afflicted with autism based not on a shared victimhood but shared heroism.

In many smaller communities, there might not be a local autism support group but there might be a handful of Anti-Vaxxers. Furthermore, those who join the movement despite not having autistic kids but because they believe they have been screwed-over by Big Pharma in some other way, like survivors of benzodiazepine or opioid addiction are not just a source of camaraderie but people who can help lighten one’s burden as a caregiver in small, material ways.

So, let us be clear on some of the values that underpin the Anti-Vaxx movement: compassion, solidarity, camaraderie, heroism, altruism. In a neoliberal, individualistic society in which family support and help is becoming scarcer, people are coming together and offering each other not just material support and camaraderie but a psychological lifeline in the form a narrative of heroism for people struggling to put one foot in front of the other.

Another feature of communities brutalized by the pharmaceutical industry and of parents with negligible respite care and a school system that rations education assistants in school to the point where parents are routinely called to take their kid home when the SEA’s shift is over is the experience of being talked down-to by experts and authority figures.

Unlike the twentieth century, when we believed in Thomas Paine’s theory of common sense and people were allowed to explain science on the news, the twenty-first century is a time when the cult of expertise means that “it’s science; you wouldn’t understand,” is the stock response of the commissar class and the caring professions when questioned by lay people.

The Anti-Vaxx movement reverses this too. It believes, for better or worse, that anyone can read and figure out fairly advanced neuroscience; it has faith that if people “do their research,” they will come to the same conclusion, the very opposite of the movement responding to the climate crisis, which emphasizes expert authority and is deeply distrustful of any public debate of science. Furthermore, the movement gives its members the confidence to talk back to experts and authority figures, to stand their ground, to act like heroes and to proclaim a hope for a better world in the future.

If these folks weren’t killing all those kids, I might well join up!

For my earlier writing on autism, there is this post.

The fate of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was wrought early in his mandate, on April 14^th, 2016. Every day of the next forty-four months he remained leader until December 12^th, 2019 was a day of delayed reckoning. That he could delay that reckoning for so long is a testament to his political skills, his cadre’s and the links they forged with Momentum and other movement groups. But every day of that delay was a day that fed into a belief stoked by the mainstream media and tabloid press: that Corbyn was hiding something and something important, that unlike the transparently and cartoonishly duplicitous Boris Johnson, Corbyn was successfully concealing something about himself and something important.

The reason the absurd allegations of anti-Semitism, Stalinism, Trotskyism stuck to Corbyn was because they were shaped like something that was true, that underneath the unassuming and avuncular exterior, there was something inscrutable, some part of his nature that did not trust the British people and was keeping a vital piece of information back.

Following the defeat of Remain, the press and Corbyn’s centrist critics came closest to describing the reality when they attacked an anemic and perfunctory campaign to remain in the European Union as a secret desire to Leave. Because that was true. I am firmly convinced that Corbyn voted Leave because I believe, ironically, that he was too honest a man to betray himself by doing otherwise.

So, why did Corbyn campaign for Remain instead of Leave if he were actually a Leaver?

The answer is fairly obvious: he believed he would not be able to retain the majority of his caucus or his own job as party leader if he joined Leave. The false accusations of anti-Semitism would have been validated because he would have campaigned alongside actual anti-Semites Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. These would have been accompanied by accusations of racism and Islamophobia for largely the same season.

Centrists would have had a credible narrative for creating a pro-EU party led by Blairites, perhaps in some kind of coalition with the Liberals, finally realizing the dream of the 1980s SDP and this party would have competed for the votes of the very young people who had worked with Corbyn to throw off the Blairite yoke.

But I do not believe that this was the reason for Corbyn’s duplicity either: I think there was a more human, more tragic reason:

Although this photo depicts a moment the spring of 2017, it captures what created the contradiction at the centre of the Corbyn phenomenon. Young people loved Corbyn because someone was finally speaking from a perspective of morality rather than calculation. People loved Corbyn because someone was finally speaking truth to power, about austerity, about privatization, about contracting-out, about war, about the media. But all of that truth sat on an unstable foundation, because so much of it was perched on Corbyn’s own pragmatic lie.

While Milennials and those younger are coming to question capitalism more and more as a moral order, they, also paradoxically, have a political consciousness shaped by capitalism and, in the Anglosphere, one shaped by Blairite capitalism, the specially English accommodation between social democratic parties and neoliberalism epitomized in characters like Mike Harcourt, Roy Romanow and Bob Rae. This, in more recent years, has taken on a cultural dimension with American liberals like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver offering a public morality that conflates liberalism and socialism.

So, although young people today are more likely to question capitalism as a system and oppose it at the ballot box, the false consciousness produced by Jon Stewart articulating the values of Tony Blair as though they are oppositional to capitalism, is also uniquely associated with those most likely to be mobilized by the political movements of Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn or Jean Swanson.

Many young people who identify as socialist today believe that investor rights are part of socialism, that the free movement of capital across borders is just part and parcel with no one being illegal. Many who identify as socialist see “free trade” as a positive good and associated with the freedom of persons. Many struggle to understand the moral order behind uncompensated expropriation or 100% inheritance taxes; for them inherited wealth and the protection of private property rights are not so much things they believe in but simply the ideological air they breathe because their correctness has been uncontested for so long.

For this generation of young, socialist Britons, leaving the EU was an unthinkable and irrational act of bigotry and xenophobia. And, given a choice between being beloved by basically good people and being universally reviled, Corbyn chose the path most of us would have and chose the love of Britain’s youth.

He never had the heart to tell them that there was almost nothing in his 2017 or 2019 manifesto that could be achieved without leaving the EU. Corbyn was not naïve or foolish; when he rose in the House in 1993 to speak against the Maastricht Treaty, he did so because its EU investor rights provisions effectively bar the British state from ever buying back its railways, because these same provisions prevent any part of the NHS currently contracted-out being brought back inside the state. And because Maastricht would never permit legislating a fair wage foreign EU workers living in Britain. Because they were not part of and never learned about the Zapatistas and the other anti-globalization movements and heroes of the 1990s.

In this way, his 2017 and 2019 manifestos really were flights of fancy, as the media claimed, just not in the way they claimed. While I knew that at an abstract level, I believe that many of Corbyn’s supporters came to sense it at a visceral one. And I think that is why they lost.

I still think Jeremy Corbyn is the best leader Labour has had since Michael Foot and would have made the best Prime Minister since Clement Atlee. I thank him and honour him for taking the global anti-austerity and climate justice movements so far and enduring the cruel, baseless falsehoods hurled at him not just by the tabloid press but by the centrists, saboteurs and turncoats within Labour.

But let us hope that the next leader finishes what Corbyn started: coming clean about the global capitalist order and telling people the whole truth this time, not just 80% of the truth but the whole truth about the monstrosity and scope of the global capitalist order, including the European Union.

The work of coming clean is not just a speech, interview or observation. Groups like Momentum need to reorient their direction and focus on building new educational infrastructure for working people, outside the postsecondary system. As the English working class as far back as the Diggers realized, it is not enough to mobilize; it is not enough to educate; we must build an alternative world of institutions and culture to hold the values and morality of an anti-capitalist working class.

From left and right, those of us wishing to build solidarity face challenges of claims of knowledge. On the left, people routinely use standpoint epistemology and punching-down discourse to suggest that no person who is not a member of a specific identity group can have true knowledge. No non-indigenous person can know indigenous history. No man can have insights about feminism. The only people who can know about gender are those with minority gender identities. Knowledge of race flows in the blood and is embedded in genes, not in a critical understanding of race. And so it goes.

From right-wing troll culture, we learn the refrain “you don’t know me,” whereby people who have been spouting racism announce that if we truly knew them, we would understand that they were not bigots. Disbelieve what Donald Trump does and says; ignore the actions you witness him taking; if you truly knew him, you would know he cares about the environment/women/LatinX people more than anyone else.

“You cannot know things about me without being me” is a master discourse of our present age. And it runs completely contrary to the idea of solidarity. That’s why the privatization of reputation is not a curiosity; it is an existential threat. While it is true that no person can know another’s experience, oppressive or otherwise, completely, it is also true that no solidarity can be built solely from pity. It must be built from mutual recognition and imaginative empathy.

As we face the extinction event our plight converges with more and more kinds of people, not just with people in uncontacted societies in New Guinea, Brazil or India, whose fate is now one with ours as planetary life support systems go into crisis, but with thousands of plant and animal species whose fate converges with ours as our planet burns.

This piece is the first in a series of four that makes its argument using material from my formal education as a doctoral and postdoctoral student, drawing from the early modern Spanish Empire under the Hapsburg and Bourbon dynasties. This is the empire whose decline and fall directly preceded and gave rise to capitalist modernity. It is my view that, at the end of the Age of Reason, it is useful to look back on the Age of Beauty for hints about how to navigate our present times.

In 1598, the Spanish Empire conquered New Mexico, that arid part of the Great Basin north of the fertile and densely populated region that has been dominated by the Aztec Alliance. This was among the first territories the Spanish tried to rule on the American mainland that had not already been consolidated into a territorial unit by the empires that preceded the Spanish, the Mexica and Inca.

Almost immediately upon conquering the region, the Spanish began to repent of their conquest. There was no pre-existing network of easy-to-traverse canals and roads linking the region to itself or anywhere else. Not only was there precious little irrigation in most of the region, this absence arose from there being little surplus water to irrigate with. The Seven Cities of Cibola and their gold had turned out to be a series of what the Spanish called “pueblos,” villages in which the dwellings, temples, common areas, etc. were integrated into a single large adobe brick structure, adjacent to irrigated fields of maize.

The only wealth in New Mexico came from the pueblos and their inhabitants’ ability to produce a surplus of maize through careful and sophisticated agricultural practices. These surpluses attracted Apache raiders, who both competed with the Spanish in extracting maize from the pueblos, and raided the Spanish themselves. The small and beleaguered population of Santa Fé made its living by heavily taxing the pueblos and using the surplus maize both for food and to supplement the diets of the sheep, goats, horses and beef cattle they raised. Illegal indigenous slaves and salted beef were all the region exported, at a cost in military spending greater than the paltry resources New Mexico delivered.

New Mexico was a backwater, but the Spanish held onto it out of pride. If they left, they would be seen as having been defeated by either the people of the pueblos, the Zuni, the Hopi, etc. or by the Apache raiders. Over time, the Spanish and Apache, the raiders of the pueblos, came to resemble one another increasingly. Raiding and slave capture became the centre of these cultures and the Spanish had to innovate as royal decrees prohibiting indigenous slavery destabilized slave markets to the South.

So, an increasing number of the slaves became genízaros, a Spanish transliteration of a specialized kind of slave taken by the Ottoman Empire. Unlike Ottoman janissaries, genízaros were child slaves who were raised not as soldiers but as herders, a cross between a domestic slave and a field slave, who bunked with the family but spent the day out on the plains herding the domestic animals, the bread and butter of New Mexico.

With an increasing number of their children being stolen, their temples being vandalized, crippling maize tribute and European disease epidemics, the people of the pueblos faced intolerable pressure. When all this combined with a drought in the 1670s, Popé appeared.

Popé was the first of many American Indigenous neo-traditionalist prophets. Just as Europeans borrowed Indigenous ideas and foods, so too did Indigenous peoples. One of the most useful European imports was the idea of an eschaton, a moment at the end of history, when things seem darkest, that God re-enters our cosmos and joins the side of the righteous, meting out justice and cleansing the world. This originally Judean idea fused with various Indigenous ideas of justice, purity and pollution to produce not just Popé’s movement but the cosmology of Wovoka, Paiute creator of the Ghost Dance, Neolin, the prophet who preached for Pontiac’s rebellion and Tenskwatawa, the brother of Tecumseh.
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But these subsequent movements did not just replicate the theological manoeuvre that Popé made to galvanize the people of the pueblos and the genízaros to rise up together and drive out the Spanish conquerors. Their rebellion gave those subsequent movements not their ideology (as far as we know, each time Indigenous neo-traditionalists adopt eschatology, it is based on the Christianity of their day, not the ideas of previous movements) but something far more important: the horse, the single-most powerful material tool Indigenous North Americans have used to challenge European invaders.

As far as we can tell, Popé, like many of his successors, taught that all things the Europeans had brought had polluted the world and that the maize-sustaining rains would only return when they had been utterly destroyed. This meant that the colonists who failed to flee were not captured but killed. European dwellings, clothes, even useful tools like swords were destroyed, buried, discarded.

And this seems to be the case with the invasive species, not just goats, beef cattle and sheep but wheat, grapes and barley. Except the horses. The horses were not killed. They were freed. The later interactions of the Apache and genízaros with those horses would cause one of the major events of ethnogenesis in the Western Hemisphere and produce a whole new people, the Comanche, for whom one’s full humanity could only be achieved on horseback, a people who could ride, train and shoot from a horse better than any European. And like their cousins the Métis, the Plains Cree, the Kickapoo and the Sioux, they would be the ones who would make the last courageous stand against the industrial might of the American and British Empires two centuries later.

In this sense, Popé was a prophet. He and his Puebloan armies released a force into the Americas that would be Indigenous peoples’ best hope of resistance for centuries. This was possible because of those things upon which solidarity rests: mutual recognition and imaginative empathy.

Puebloans had a distinctive social contract, not just unlike the Spanish but unlike the Apaches and genízaros. Except for the temple, all space inside a pueblo was women’s space. Each dwelling was the dwelling of a woman and her children. Men might pass through common space to reach the temple, but over 90% of a pueblo was women’s property; and 100% of private space in a pueblo was this kind of space. Marriage took place not in the temple, where men led rituals to contact the Rain Gods, but by a woman inviting a man into her dwelling, at which time he became her husband. Divorce took place when a man found his shoes had been moved by his wife from inside the dwelling to the common passage outside.

Women ruled the pueblos in the name of the Corn Mothers, and what took place inside was society. Men ruled in two places: priests ruled in the temple and chiefs could lead war parties and hunting parties. Unmarried men had an important role in society. While women and their children worked the fields and made food and clothing from what they raised, young men took on high-risk hunting expeditions to obtain meat, which provided the fat that the Puebloan diet was chronically short of. In this way, a tiny handful of old, powerful men presided in the Temple, but the other men in the pueblo were guests. Most men orbited around the pueblo, sometimes getting to come inside, but often ranging away from civilization for weeks or months on high-risk expeditions.

Just like horses. That’s not how seventeenth-century Spanish people lived, at all. But it was how their horses lived. When the Puebloans looked at the invaders, they, like the invaders, did not experience mutual recognition, but confusion. But when they began being taken as slaves by the invaders, they did experience a mutual recognition, made possible by imaginative empathy and an understanding of their shared plight: they recognized the horses, the invaders’ most valuable slaves, as people like themselves.

Because they were.

You see, equine society comprised mares, their foals and a stallion or two. Younger stallions range in a wide, irregular orbit around horse society as bachelor bands who, from time to time, return seeking mares or to challenge the primary stallion.

Ultimately, the Spanish returned and reconquered New Mexico as a matter of imperial pride. But it was too late. The horses were loose and they changed the world.

The descendants of those horses freed lots of people, some of whom were human, some of whom were not. Hunting down and recapturing or slaughtering those liberators became the job of the British, American, Spanish, French and Mexican armies for the next two hundred years.

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society speaks of a moment in the 1970s as giving his life purpose: an undeniable sense of mutual recognition with a whale, of shared plight, shared purpose and, most importantly, shared personhood. I know many people experienced this feeling  last year, when an orca mother carried her dead child for seventeen days in an act public mourning in the Salish Sea. That recognition is the beginning of the solidarity we must build together.

Today, as we debate whether to actively accelerate and magnify the extinction event in which we find ourselves, whether merely to watch the feedback effects of our activity as forests burn and permafrost melts or whether to make the Herculean effort to slow or even stop it at some point in the future, our entire debate is framed in terms of knowledge.

The bad guys in the climate debate are “deniers,” people who fail to believe that the climate is destabilizing and entering into a crisis. They push “debunked” “junk science” that tells people falsehoods about whether our planet is warming and what the causes of this might be. The good guys “raise awareness” about climate change. We “debunk” bad science and tell people what the correct science is. The “deniers” love this because they get to play dumb, to pretend they have not noticed the climate changing, that they believe the threadbare, unbelievable lies put forward by industry-funded think tanks or claim they buy into Donald Trump’s or Alex Jones’ absurd conspiracy theories about all the scientists being in some sort of Chinese conspiracy to ruin America.

What sits at the core of this belief is the idea, one much beloved by those who identify as “progressives” that we human beings are rational choice-makers whose behaviour changes based on new, more accurate, up-to-date information. Liberals and progressives narrate their own lives this way, claiming that they learned a new piece of information and that this changed their outlook or behaviour in some important way. This is often tied to their sense of self-worth. Progressives often think of themselves as smarter and better-informed than average; they understand themselves to be smarter than those around them and, consequently, more able to avail themselves of the best and most correct information and to digest that information faster and more comprehensively.

That is why progressives will often conceptualize their efforts to achieve political change as “raising awareness.” “People do not presently agree with me,” they reason, “This must be because they have less information than I do. When they have the same information I have, they will agree with me. Therefore I must work to give them the information that I have so that they will think the thoughts I think and then do what I know needs to be done.”

When a progressive looks at the global climate debate, they see a mass of misinformation being pushed by mainstream and conservative media and they see this being repeated by people who disagree with them. So, they conclude that they have to do a better job of discrediting misinformation and replacing it with correct information. And, because this is such a colossal tactical blunder, that has produced abject failure for two generations, their adversaries encourage them to keep making that tactical choice.

The reality is that progressives are being trolled. They are being made fools of. Their adversaries are playing dumb. Nobody actually believes the nonsense peddled by climate deniers; it’s an excuse, a fig leaf. The modern conservative playbook is increasingly indistinguishable from the shitty husband playbook. Protracted fighting in long-term marriages is largely composed of feigned ignorance: “I didn’t know that bothered you. I didn’t know I was doing that. I didn’t know the oven was still on. I didn’t know you couldn’t put bleach on that. I didn’t see the ‘dry clean only’ label.” And modern conservatives, the gleeful family annihilators that now run the movement love how the joke is on the progressives, how they, by playing dumb, have revealed that the progressives, with their stupid awareness-raising, are the actual idiots.

The reason that this is so is that whatever imaginative empathy progressives may once have had, they have now lost. Progressives cannot imagine that people are not like them, that someone could have the same information they do but want to do something else about it, because they have a different set of values, a different morality, a different theory of the good. Because progressives have completely imbibed the liberal theory of the self, they imagine that everyone is a utilitarian, a person who wishes to both maximize pleasure and minimize pain individually and to see that, at a population level, the greatest number experience the most good.

When they see poor evangelical Christians voting for policies that further impoverish them, they smugly think “those people are not acting rationally in their own interest. I guess they need to be made more aware.” The idea that people might conceive of their good in non-material terms is not considered, nor is the idea of sacrifice, collective or individual, that people may be choosing suffering in order to achieve something important, some change in the moral order or some deserved punishment being visited on others.

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This progressive failure of imagination is being intensified by certain kinds of liberal identity politics. While cultural appropriation, i.e. the appropriation of non-monetized material and immaterial cultural production by the forces of capital, is wrong, the original idea of cultural appropriation has been vulgarized into something worse than useless. It has become the idea that to represent a person or group from a culture into which one was not born in literature, drama or anywhere, really, in one’s own creative work, is an injury, a theft, that engaging in acts of imaginative empathy, that placing oneself in the shoes of another is an act of imperialism rather than solidarity.

A phenomenon we call “standpoint epistemology” has further intensified this problem, arguing that the identity group into which one is born determines what is true about the shared, discoverable physical world, that if one is indigenous, the earth can be a different age than if one is English or Yoruba. Similarly, standpoint epistemology is often mobilized to bar people from outside an identity group from teaching, studying or publishing about that group’s experiences. I recall being angrily lectured in a bar just last year that it was an act of imperialism and violence against indigenous people that I once taught a First Nations history course.

Because it has become increasingly transgressive to engage in acts of imaginative empathy, not only do we see the larger leftist community increasingly fragmented; we also see it becoming increasingly strategically stupid. That is because the most important use of imaginative empathy is not to build solidarity and understanding with one’s allies. It is to guess what our enemies will do next. Because we cannot place ourselves in their (or anyone else’s) shoes, we cannot anticipate or counter their moves against us or guess what motivates them.

The climate denialists are not people who are benefit-seeking utilitarians and proud individual choice-makers and optimizers. They are members of a global death cult, one that they entered not by gaining new information but either by being born into it or, through something far more powerful than awareness: conversion.

In the progressive theory of personal and political transformation, change is caused when a person gains a bunch of new information that makes them realize that the best way to obtain what they want for themselves and others is different than they previously thought. In this way, their objective stays the same but their strategy for achieving that objective shifts. This is the “awareness” model of social change.

In a realistic theory of personal transformation, be it socialist, communist or conservative, change is caused when a person has a dramatic, realigning experience and they realize that what they wanted was the wrong thing to want and that they now want something else. They now understand themselves to be a different, better person who now wants something different and better. It is their objective, not their strategy that has shifted. This is the “conversion” model of social change.

And this is what those of us wishing to save the life on this planet must adopt. More on that soon.

I am generally opposed to “awareness” as a political idea, consequently, as an activist effort. The belief, for instance, that Canadian mining companies poisoning and murdering Mayans in Guatemala can be, in any way, addressed by awareness is pernicious.

However, Autism Awareness Month is a different sort of thing. That is because autism does not have a “solution” per se and those who claim that it has a “cure” are typically either quacks, psychos or both.

What Autism Awareness Month demands of us is not donations (although some well-directed ones can help), a campaign or solutions as much as it demands an optical care. The point is to see autistic people, consider their experiences and think about the ways our society’s structure pushes not just their plight but their talents into the shadows, into the margins.

The idea, for instance, that every job now involves customer service and sales has increased not just the marginalization but the unemployment rate of autistic people. Adding cashier duty to a shelving job can push autistic people from their workplace into a solitary life of collecting disability. Demanding the practice of an haute bourgeois etiquette politics and the faddish social precision that entails from everyone in a desk job can push autistic people into silence, invisibility and eventually unemployment.

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Often, these are people whom we cannot help through our own efforts but at a remove, by supporting their caregivers, their relatives, those who aid and are present with them. It is important, in our efforts to be aware and supportive this month, to reject the neoliberal politics of disease and disability in which atomized individuals are afflicted. Autism afflicts not persons but families; families experience the emotional stress and grief of autism; families are impoverished by autism; families are stigmatized by autism. Some of those effects are from the disability itself but more often than not, they are from how our society interacts with it, the resources we provide, the resources we deny, the social spaces we create and those we fail to create. So our awareness, and our care must extend not simply to persons managing autism but to families managing autism.

And that includes giving space and support to people who have been pushed to their wits’ end and are mismanaging it. Not every anti-vaxer is a black-hatted villain; some are just people who are taking refuge in a conspiracy theory because they have been overwhelmed by guilt, stigma, powerlessness to help their child and the total exhaustion that comes from carrying more of a burden of emotional and physical care than any individual can. That includes giving space to people whose emotions seem out of control. We must remember that the body autism disables is the family.

Finally, let us remember that we are sliding into the greatest extinction event in four billion years. Every species, every population, including our own, faces the likelihood of extinction. Those that survive such events are those with the most diverse mutations, the widest spectrum of kinds of members. We must remember that just as anorexic people have pulled average people through famines, just as those with restless leg syndrome guarded our primate groups while the rest of us slept, just as schizophrenics stepped forward and helped to lead the resistance to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when neurologically average people were paralyzed, we do not know what role our autistic brothers and sisters may have to play in our survival in the future because only God can see all ends. In this way, we must also reject the idea that autistic people are a population-level illness to be extirpated from the human population. They are not; they are a precious part of the human family to whom we should direct a little more care and attention this month.

On Thursday, November 5^th, 2015, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), colloquially known as the Mormons, announced a new set of policies to reinforce the hard line it has taken against homosexuality. Since becoming the primary sponsor and proponent of Proposition Eight, the 2008 amendment to California’s state constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, the LDS have jockeyed for position among conservative American religions to distinguish themselves as the most intractably opposed to homosexuality.

In those seven years, the LDS have engaged with questions of women’s access to priesthood and other offices in the church hierarchy in the same spirit, offering more vehement, robust and conclusive denunciations of gender equality that competing religious formations, such as the Roman Catholic Church under Benedict XVI.

While each round of anti-gay pronouncements and policies has elicited protest and criticism from more liberally-inclined LDS members, this new set of policies has immediately engendered far deeper and more broad-based opposition, going well beyond the usual chorus of liberal voices at the margins of the Church. Indeed, many opposing these new policies are, themselves, convinced, faithful Mormon opponents of same-sex marriage and female ordination. On social media, many of even the most orthodox Mormons are seeking to explain the policy away as an ephemeral error or mis-statement that will soon be cleared up.

Until this week, Mormons were encouraged to convert youths and adolescents in non-Mormon families. And they still are. Unless those families have two parents of the same sex. Children raised in Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist or even Satanist families are welcome to join the LDS Church but not the children of same-sex unions; they are specifically prohibited from joining until they reach the age of twenty-one and, even then, must swear special vows condemning their parents and voiding their family units. While the LDS declaration that living in a same-sex union is now understood to constitute apostasy, irrespective of its legality, might constitute a problem for liberal Mormons, it is the elements of the policy concerning the children of these couples that is producing a much more far-reaching outcry, rooted in the faith’s unique scriptures and foundational narratives. Thursday’s announcement appears to do considerable violence to fundamental aspects of the Church’s core theology.

Mormons distinguish themselves from other Christians based on scriptures that only their church recognizes (The Book of Moses, Book of Abraham, Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants), scriptures that non-Mormons understand to have been authored by Joseph Smith in response to burning theological questions of the early and mid- nineteenth century. Mormons, on the other hand, understand them to have been translated by Smith but authored by various Hebrew prophets including Abraham and Moses, and, in some cases, by God himself.

There was a lot of controversy over infant baptism in Joseph Smith’s day and Mormon scripture responded with a detailed theology dealing with intersection between the age of majority/consent, free will, parental prerogatives and salvation. Mormon scripture, speaking with the voice of either God or Jesus, explains that children between the ages of eight and eighteen are absolutely free to make adult decisions about their salvation and religious affiliation and those decisions, for good or ill, count in eternity. It also explains that children under eight must not be punished, on earth or in heaven, for the decisions taken by adults, even if those adults are their parents or priests.
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Upon reaching the age of twelve, according to current Church practice, young men are eligible to become priests, holding the “Aaronic priesthood” and receiving an ecclesiastical rank in the church. The “age of accountability,” of eight, from which time forward children may make decisions about their salvation as adults, Mormon scripture sources directly to God himself:

“And, behold, and lo, this is an ensample unto all those who were ordained unto this priesthood… And again, inasmuch as parents have children in Zion, or in any of her stakes which are organized, that teach them not to understand the doctrine of repentance, faith in Christ the Son of the living God, and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost by the laying on of the hands, when eight years old, the sin be upon the heads of the parents… And their children shall be baptized for the remission of their sins when eight years old, and receive the laying on of the hands… Behold, I am Alpha and Omega, and I come quickly. Amen.” – Doctrine and Covenants 68

There is a long tradition of faith-promoting literature in the LDS tradition in which children of non-Mormon parents see the correctness of Mormonism and convert despite familial opposition and even disownment. Such stories have only grown in importance as the LDS missionary program has globalized and its missionaries—often themselves under the age of majority in the US—have reached out to adolescents the world over who are questioning their parents’ faith and familial religious traditions. Indeed, much of the appeal of the LDS missionary program, which seems structured in some ways as a reverse-Rumspringa, has come to inhere in the youth and sincerity, as opposed to seasoned proficiency of the faith’s global missionary army.

Mormon missionaries are typically eighteen- and nineteen-year-old men who have just received the ironic title of “Elder” prior to their missionary vocation are, as of Thursday instructed that they may not convert individuals their own age if they are being raised in a family rooted in a same-sex union. And, if approached by such individuals, unsolicited, must turn them down as unworthy converts.

These doctrinal changes, more than simply confirming a two-decade trajectory of social conservatism, eviscerate a core doctrine of the Mormon faith, that of “free agency,” which Mormon theologians proudly trumpet as distinct from and superior to mainline Christianity’s “free will.” Much of Mormonism’s seductiveness in gaining and retaining young members has come from its recognition of the capacity of children and youth to make real choices for which they are accountable. Today, for many Mormons, it appears that that foundational principle, on which so much Mormon culture and organization—never mind doctrine—depends, is now in retreat.

The impending crisis the Mormon world now faces may have been occasioned by bigotry towards same-sex couples. But the bigotry, itself, is no long the central issue. Rather, it is the over-reach, the hubristic effort to rewrite Mormon theology from the bottom up to serve that bigotry, that has thrown Mormondom into its biggest doctrinal crisis in more than a generation.