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Struggling to Be a Socialist Internationalist on Unceded Territory

In this day of rampant Identitarianism, contradictory laws and escalating brutal colonialism in BC, there is a lot of confusion about the relationship between white settler activists like me and the Wet’suwet’en people and allied First Nations with whom we are working to oppose the pipeline being built for Royal Dutch Shell’s export terminal in Kitimat.

In thinking through my own relationship, I found my commitment to socialist internationalism helpful in puzzling out where I stand and what my relationship is to my allies. Socialist internationalists work for socialism in the political jurisdiction in which they are residents through a variety of means like unionizing fellow workers, building socialist political parties to contest elections and engaging in acts of protest and witnessing against capitalist exploitation.

As a socialist internationalist and Canadian citizen residing in BC, I need to work against the capitalist policies of my government at work, at election time and in the streets.

My governments, both provincial and federal, are doing a bunch of very bad things right now, one of which is giving billions of dollars in subsidies to transnational oil companies to frack gas in the Peace Region of BC and Alberta, pipe it to export terminals in Kitimat and Squamish and then send it overseas to be added to the other fossil fuels burned in East Asia.

That project is a monstrous project, an evil project, an omnicidal project and I am duty bound, as a socialist in BC, to oppose it, to fight it, otherwise there will be the blood of millions on my hands. It is my government’s plan and so it is, first and foremost, the responsibility of those governed by it to stop it.

Socialist internationalists also have an obligation to support anti-capitalist movements in other political jurisdictions around the world. Unlike Stalinists and Maoists, our internationalism is not about supporting governments we like in other countries but forming alliances with parties and movements who share our values and priorities in those other places. Sometimes those parties and movements are part of governing coalitions but most are opposition movements like us.

We also have an obligation to form alliances with such movements in what we call the Fourth World, places that colonists are still in the process of conquering, occupied territories like Palestine, Highland Guatemala, Chiapas, Bolivia, the Central Kalahari where indigenous governments and people’s movements are contesting colonial governments for control.

Most of British Columbia is part of the Fourth World, a place where Indigenous governments are contesting the power of the colonial state. The territory of the Wet’suwet’en people is part of the Fourth World.

My allies are the movements within the Wet’suwet’en who share my belief in climate justice, land reform and a host of other issues. An exciting thing happened in this part of the Fourth World in 2019: the movement for climate justice and land reform took clear control of the most powerful Wet’suwet’en institution, the Hereditary Chiefs. By a narrow vote, three pro-development chiefs were deposed for betraying their duty to protect their traditional territory.

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But let us consider what would have happened if that crucial vote had gone a different way in 2019. What if, by a one-vote margin, the pro-development hereditary chiefs had removed those supporting climate justice and land reform?

In that case, the minority who lost the vote would need international solidarity all the more; it would have become even more important to stand in solidarity with those individuals and give them the support they need if their traditional government had turned against them and joined with the band councils bought off by Royal Dutch Shell’s consortium.

Recognizing the inherent jurisdiction of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs is not the same as declaring that government to be infallible. That government is correct right now and has, for more than a century, consistently been on the right side of history. But that does not mean we should substitute its judgement for our own.

Ever since the modern alliance between environmentalists and traditional Indigenous governments emerged in BC in the late 1970s, an unhelpful romanticism has crept into the environmental movement, one that casts Indigenous people in the role of oracle or messiah, in an anthropological trope that has been with us for 2500 years, ever since Herodotus first wrote of “the blameless Ethiopians who still dine with the gods.”

And that means we need to be honest in portraying ourselves as the allies not the surrogates of the Wet’suwet’en. Indigenous people in Canada consistently demand nation-to-nation relationships so let us take that seriously. Indigenous people are not the “true owners” of British Columbia.

BC is a tool designed by the British Empire to destroy and replace Indigenous nations; it sits on top of them and its claims to their bodies and fates is to be contested. It is our job to dismantle and repurpose that monster and do our best to bridle it until that work is done. When we have done that, maybe we can make it begin negotiating in good faith with the First Nations that preceded it.

Until then, let us continue making alliances with our friends and comrades throughout the world, and especially in the parts of the Fourth World with which BC overlaps. Let us keep besieging the legislature arm-in-arm with First Nations as we are today.

But let us not mistake our allies for our own leaders, leaders it is our responsibility to produce. We are responsible for this mess and we must take action to clean it up; we are humbled and forever grateful for the help we are receiving from our Indigenous allies pitching in on cleaning up our mess. But we must never make carrying out our responsibilities contingent on the help of people from whom we have already taken too much.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Time to Tear off the Masks in the Media’s Framing of the Horgan Pipeline Debacle

Names are important. Terms are important. We need to use them more carefully and precisely than ever in this current era of spin, obfuscation, fake news and outright lies that comprise a larger and larger proportion of both our social and mainstream media.

Since having policy analyst Adam Finch on my show two weeks ago to talk about some of this, I have noticed bigger and bigger dangers ahead of those of us opposing the construction of a new pipeline from the Peace Region to Kitimat. If we are not careful, the justice, popularity and relevance of our cause could be compromised through a carefully crafted agenda of de-politicization and obfuscation that Big Oil and its servant governments are engaged in already.

In the grand tradition of rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke, I will try to show how our language is being crafted to achieve the political objectives of our enemies. Let us begin by looking at whom media coverage identifies as the protagonists and antagonists in this pipeline battle.

Coastal Gas Link: The primary antagonist, from the perspective of our side, is portrayed as a company nobody has ever heard of, Coastal Gas Link (CGL). CGL also has the benefit of having no consumer-level customers; not only does it have a negligible media profile but, because of its remoteness from the consumer, it cannot be subject to boycott campaigns; it has no storefronts so no sales can be disrupted by picketing; the only people on whose good opinion CGL depends for its profits are oil companies. So, rather than portraying the villain in our story as the companies whose gas will go through the pipe or the companies building the LNG terminal in Kitimat for whose use the pipe is being built, we keep hearing about a smaller company whom nobody can boycott or picket. And there is a reason for that.

The RCMP: The secondary antagonist in this narrative is the main police force in BC. Many of our cities do not have municipal police forces, including our second-largest city, Surrey. This means that more than a million British Columbians identify the RCMP as the police force that polices their streets, guards their homes and answers 911 calls. But, of course, the RCMP did not just decide out of the blue to head up to Unist’ot’en and start cracking heads. That is because a sacrosanct element of our social contract is the civilian oversight of the police. Since 2001, BC’s system of government has placed those oversight duties in the hands of a provincial cabinet minister called the Solicitor-General.

You may remember that our last Solicitor-General, Rich Coleman, is facing a probe by a special prosecutor because he used his power as the commander of the RCMP in our province to shut down criminal investigations of money laundering. Many NDP politicians have noted that Coleman’s direct oversight of the RCMP makes him the person primarily responsible for the law enforcement decisions by the RCMP about whom and what to investigate. So, the decisions about what to enforce and how to enforce it are made by a real person, democratically elected and accountable, John Horgan’s Solicitor General, Mike Farnworth.

It is worth noting that Mike Farnworth is the only member of the BC legislature who was also an elected government MLA during the last NDP government’s intentional escalation of the Gustafsen Lake siege, which involved the deployment of land mines and the firing of over 14,000 rounds of ammunition at indigenous land protectors, decisions that court documents later exposed as intentional, political decisions made by NDP cabinet ministers.

The Injunction: Some apologists for Farnworth make an argument similar to one made by NDP supporters during the Clayoquot Sound mass arrests and trials of 1993 in which I was incarcerated. They argue that the RCMP and Solicitor-General’s hands are tied because people are being arrested for violating a court order obtained by the pipeline company from the BC Supreme Court. This is true. But here are some things that are also true:

  • The injunction’s existence is contingent upon a set of permits already awarded by the province for constructing the pipeline; the BC government is free, at any time, to revoke those permits and the injunction would cease to exist.
  • The injunction’s existence is also contingent upon a final unissued permit not being denied; the BC government can, at any time, evaluate this final permit and deny it and the injunction would cease to exist.
  • The Solicitor-General might well be over-reaching if he singled out a lone injunction and told his employees not to enforce it. But he is well within his rights to put forward general policing policies that all members of his police force must abide by. These might include not interrupting traditional indigenous activities on unceded land whose status is before the BC Treaty Commission, or not conducting military-style assaults against racialized populations, or not destroying valuables like vehicles, healing centres, works of art, trap lines, etc. in the course of carrying out their business. He could even go with something really basic, like “don’t beat up journalists and stop them filing stories by detaining them.” But he has not. He could, at any time. But he has not.
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So while the injunction’s existence is not the Mike Farnworth’s doing, its enforcement is. And while its creation is not the doing of George Heyman, the Minister of Environment, its continued existence is.

The Rule of Law: The term “the rule of law” is often deployed to refer to times when governments are constrained by the constitutional order from impinging on the rights of citizens. “We are bound by the rule of law,” has been used in the past by governments to explain why they were no longer entitled to jail women for seeking reproductive healthcare or why they officers were no longer allowed to engage in carding or “stop and frisk” practices. Here, the meaning has been turned on its head to de-politicize political decisions, to distance the decisions to build a pipeline, to force it through unceded, contested territory from the people who made those decisions, the elected BC and Canadian governments.

Now, let us turn this around and think about the words that are not being used, beginning with whom and for what the pipeline is being built. Coastal Gas Link is building the pipeline for:

Royal Dutch Shell: Shell Canada is a subsidiary of a transnational oil company called Royal Dutch Shell. It is Royal Dutch Shell the transnational corporation that is the biggest private sector investor in the Kitimat LNG project for which the pipeline is being built. It is also the biggest recipient of the $6 billion in subsidies by the Horgan government that caused the project to be launched. So, unlike CGL, there are literally hundreds of gas stations, convenience stores and offices all over Canada that people can easily picket. There is a company that that one can boycott.

In fact, Shell has been subject to a number of boycotts because this is not the first time it has made a deal with a government to extract and process oil and gas and then used that government’s police as company goons to intimidate racialized people opposing the project. In the 1980s, Shell was the subject of an international boycott because of its close association with South Africa, a white supremacist pariah state hated the world over for its system of racial segregation, violence and torture called “apartheid.” Shell was the main target of boycott efforts to bring down the white supremacist regime it funded.

Royal Dutch Shell settled out of court for Ken Saro Wiwa’s execution in 2009 for $15 million

In the 1990s, Shell used a combination of its hired goons and Nigeria’s military police to systematically murder the leadership of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta. People like Ken Saro Wiwa were brutalized and eventually killed for standing up to Shell’s pipelines and refineries on their traditional territory.

Also note how when you say “Royal Dutch Shell,” all that Jason Kenney-Rachel Notley bullshit about “foreign money” backing Canadian environmentalists vanishes as a talking point. Shell is jointly incorporated in the Netherlands and UK.

Mike Farnworth, Solicitor-General & commander of BC’s RCMP

Mike Farnworth: While people have been pretty good at keeping the names “Justin Trudeau” and “John Horgan” in circulation, we have struggled to remind people that when they talk about how the RCMP are behaving, how they are doing their job, whom they are targeting for arrest, how many resources they are using, nobody mentions that those decisions are being made by a man with a name, address and phone number.

The BC NDP, the Green Party of BC and the Liberal Party of Canada: Let us remember that these are the parties that form the governments that issued the permits, that doled out the subsidies, whose MPs and MLAs all have to keep voting in favour of the permits, the subsidies and the continuation of the government every few weeks.

While there is real value in holding bad leaders accountable, we also have to remember that these parties’ caucuses could fire their leaders at any time and choose leaders who support climate justice. While there is real value in talking about a Trudeau government or a Horgan government, let us remember that the votes to keep these governments in power are cast by a minimum of 213 parliamentarians in Victoria and Ottawa.

Furthermore, these parties also have members who, in the case of John Horgan, returned him to the leadership of the party just three months ago with a 97% approval vote, ten months after the militarization of Wet’suwet’en territory began. That vote was given by hundreds of delegates to the party’s convention. Thousands of members of the BC Green Party will have a chance to vote for the party’s next leader this spring; if they vote for a leader who votes, once again, for fossil fuel subsidies next week, who refuses to say “pull the permits” or “cancel the pipelines” but instead continues in the party’s disingenuous “both sides” nonsense, they are complicit too. They are part of the machine that is committing this omnicide, this act of climate villainy and brutal, racist oppression.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Identitarian Activist Labour System: Aesthetics, Identity and Conscription

When I was a child, my parents and I lived in a house in Kerrisdale, a former streetcar suburb in Vancouver centred around a set of three-storey walk-up apartment buildings inhabited by the current and former servants of those living in the adjacent neighbourhood, Shaughnessy. Over time, Kerrisdale became a high-income neighbourhood in its own right and my parents were part of that transition. My mom was black and my dad was white; my grandma bought them their house with the money from her late husband who had been a prominent stockbroker.

My kindergarten class over-represented high-caste Indians, Jews, Catholics and other members of the new Kerrisdale bourgeoisie, the newly white and the nearly white. Some marshland was cleared for the Arbutus Club, a fee-paying club to serve this secondary elite, who could not gain admittance to the Vancouver Club, Terminal City Club, Vancouver Lawn Tennis Club, University Women’s Club or Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Nevertheless, when my mom would wheel me up to the high street, Forty-first Avenue, in my stroller, the elderly white women who had retired from domestic service always assumed that I must be the child of a very rich person, from the Shaughnessy side of the train tracks because I appeared to have a black nanny.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, black domestic servants were the most sought-after in Canada. As the Laurentian elite continued to converge with the Yankee elite of the US, an increasingly popular way of displaying one’s wealth in Canada was to have a domestic who resembled an American domestic. Having a dark-coloured servant with distinctively African features was better than an ounce of saffron in the cupboard. Black bodies, especially in Western Canada, were very rare, comprising less than 1% of the population, and they looked all the more exotic, as a result. At the same time, as showing one’s wealth through one’s exotic possessions, having black bodies in one’s house in Canada also showed one to be conforming to the mores of the most powerful elite in America, the Yankees, the nabobs and patricians of the Northeast. One could concurrently show one’s status through both conformity and exoticism, both expressed through the same body.

Most black people who were brought to the Americas were brought here as plantation labour, deployed in lowland, humid regions that had been depopulated of Indigenous people. They were put to work in sectors where they were expected to live long, hard lives. (Because most of the costs of a slave were paid up-front at the time of purchase, slaves were not, mainly, sent into high-mortality tasks like mining for fear of investment loss.)

But a minority of slaves were sent somewhere else: to serve as butlers, guards, nannies, etc. in places where the manual labour of colonialism didn’t come from slaves but from Indigenous people or from low-status white creoles. In Mexico City, Lima, Boston and New York, the greatness of a house was determined not just by its size but by the blackness of its guards, porters and butlers. That is because blackness was an integrated part of an aesthetic display by the wealthy: where black bodies were rare, and consequently expensive and difficult to obtain, they were deployed as part of an elaborate show of power. In the late twentieth century, Japanese night clubs used the same strategy—the most elite ones had African bouncers: just one of the rare and precious things one could enjoy there, of a piece with the endangered abalone brought all the way from the waters off California.

In addition to being about scarcity and preciousness, showing the bodies that pseudoscience said were the most unruly, base and uncontrollable forced to stand at attention, to bow, to curtsey, while wearing impractical, fancy, constraining clothes has always fitted into the politics of the Western Hemisphere’s elite. The Spanish, British and American Empires have always been animated by that neo-Ottoman spirit: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. By putting the most abject, alien and unruly bodies adjacent to those of the most powerful elites, serving them with precision and fealty, the play of American empire and racial hegemony is enacted every day.

In 1988, I was an enthusiastic new member of the Green Party. I was also sixteen years old. And in September of that year, the party held an omnibus nomination meeting at its Vancouver office on Commercial Drive. I was studying for a physics test and could not attend but I begged my mom to go to the meeting in my stead.

When she entered the room, she found herself to be the only non-white person there. It was quickly decided that the party would not field any municipal candidates unless the slate was joined by a woman or a person of colour. As my mother was the only member of either group with any experience in politics (she had run for Parks Board in 1978) and one of only four women in the room, she suddenly found herself in a hostage situation. The Green Party was going to deny every supporter in the city the chance to vote for them unless my mother agreed, then and there, to run.

A short aside to my readers: my mother and I are estranged. That is neither a good or a bad thing. It just is. I ask that you respect our privacy as I have hers these past seven years: I never tell a story about my mom that she herself has not told to a public audience. If you want a narrative of blame for our estrangement, blame the intergenerational legacy of trauma descended from slavery.

Some people might say that this was a great step forward in the broadening of the Green Party’s appeal to new constituencies of voters. I am not saying it was not. But here is what it also was: extortion and conscription.

A group of white people with more leisure time than my mother decided to withhold their labour from the project of saving the planet unless they could make the first black person over whom they could exercise power do an equal or greater amount of work. They did this by, among other things, using the threat of dashing her son’s hopes to do that. That’s extortion.

A black person was coerced to do work for an organization run by white people with no compensation, monetary or otherwise. That’s conscription. And—a little bit—slavery.

Some people might argue, as they have falsely done in other areas of American life, that this is affirmative action. Let us be crystal clear:

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There is no such thing as affirmative action when people are not being paid. The purpose of affirmative action is not to have a workforce that looks diverse, by showing off bodies that have different genders and races inscribed on them. The purpose of affirmative action is to redistribute wealth—to give non-white and female-headed families the ability to save money, to inherit money, to send their kids to college, to participate in activities money had cut them out of.

It is not affirmative action when people are placed in roles that deplete their leisure time, that deplete their funds, that deplete the resources available to their families. That’s counterfeit affirmative action.

Our understanding of this is occluded by the way the civil society and its labour systems were reordered by Third Way austerity in the 1990s. Today, most charitable and activist enterprises function like businesses. Volunteers are unpaid interns. Boards of directors are essentially self-appointing. The funds come from donors who gain no membership rights with their donation or from family trusts or the state.

Because we see active volunteer membership not as part of a democratic culture of a self-governing organization with regular, democratic internal elections, it is easier to falsely apply ideas of affirmative action to what we euphemistically call “the non-profit sector.” Because the people doing the daily work of these organization are conceptualized as a mix of paid organizers and their unpaid interns.

Today, in BC, there is an effort being led by Indigenous people, in particular, the hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en people. The traditionalist faction of the Wet’suwet’en people are making big sacrifices of their labour, their money, their freedom to stop a gigantic carbon bomb being built in Kitimat by cutting off the route the government has chosen for its pipeline.

The Wet’suwet’en traditionalists are doing everyone in the world a gigantic favour by protecting us from the machinations of the BC government, Canadian government, Royal Dutch Shell and Mitsubishi.

And what is our response? Mostly, it has been good. But I have also noticed something else.

In communities all over BC, white settlers like me are saying “well, I’ll come to a rally but it needs to be led by Indigenous youth.” Note how they don’t care what First Nation the youth come from. It’s just that people younger and less white than them, with fewer resources, at greater risk of police brutality are being asked to stand in the vanguard. If they do not, these white settlers might just withhold their labour from the single most important climate battle being waged in our time and place.

Like so much of colonialism and racism, I believe that these efforts and conscription and extortion are unconscious. That’s what makes our settler colonial order so powerful here: it lives inside the unconscious of everyone.

Those parts of the activist world that have not been colonized into the “non-profit sector” that delivers contracted-out government services, lets kids do office work so they can check a box and be allowed to graduate high school, with its set of executive director commissars, are an especially dangerous place. The people standing on logging roads, standing in front of bulldozers, camping on rail lines, these are not people managed carefully by incorporated NGOs with offices and executive directors pulling in six figures; they are mainly young, racialized and poor. Taking on a leadership role in organizations like that doesn’t burnish your resume; it makes you unable to pass a criminal record check, difficult to hire, difficult to house.

How dare we tell the most marginalized people in our society that we will withhold our labour from the struggle unless they bear a disproportionate amount of the risk of violence, unemployment, homelessness, etc.?

All that stated, I believe strongly that when marginalized people seek leadership roles, we must yield those roles to them. And we should support them in those roles by providing them with money, with childcare, with job references and referrals and, most importantly, with our labour. But this should happen only when we have made sure their labour has not been extracted under duress, that they are not our conscripts but, instead, that we are at their service for once.

I cannot help but notice that when white settlers are critical of a group for not “being representative,” they only mount that criticism after looking at a photo of a crowd or a photo array of individual portraits. No one asks if any of those depicted has an invisible disability, a mental illness, an addiction, an autoimmune disease. No one asks if any of those is housed, if they are a member of the underclass, the proletariat, if they are undocumented or do not have literacy skills. And certainly nobody asks if they are descended from people whose skin is not as white as theirs; those of us with Indigenous and African blood and epigenomes ravaged by colonialism are of no use in such a project because our bodies fail to meet the aesthetic demands of the colonizer. (White-looking Indigenous bodies can still be useful if costumed correctly in an exotic way that points towards an imagined past of noble savages with long braids.)

That is because, for far too many people on what we might call “the left,” the politics of representation is not a justice-based project at all. It is an aesthetic project. A key aspect of the display of elite white power is the ability to fashion a mosaic, made out of the most exotic human bodies you can find, that signals to other white people in the same way black domestics servants once did. Such a project is not about transcending colonial racism; it is a re-enactment of that racism.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

Political Geography of Community – Part 5: Dispossession, Disinhabitation and the Invention of Landscape

Yesterday, I listened to a simple but a profound and compelling speech by Wet’suwet’en activist Jennifer Pighin in support of the rights of her people to protect a part of their traditional territory from a natural gas pipeline being forced through it. The pipeline will connect the fracked natural gas from the Peace Region to Kitimat, the town where the BC NDP is paying Royal Dutch Shell over a billion dollars to build a massive carbon bomb called LNG Canada, a megaproject that will ship fossil fuels to East Asia.

But this article is not about my furious and ongoing opposition to that particular crime against humanity. The arguments against Kitimat LNG and against doing business with apartheid shills and murderers of the Ogoni people have been made elsewhere.

What struck me most was what Pighin had to say about the process of connecting with her Indigenous identity. Her mother, like so many Indigenous Canadians (and a surprising number of non-Indigenous ones) was a victim of the “Sixties Scoop,” the mass abduction and institutionalization of the children of Canada’s underclass. Her mom, like so many others, lost her fluency in the Wet’suwet’en language and, through protracted separation, her sense of connection with her people’s traditional territory.

Pighin talked about how, to regain that connection, to make herself fully Wet’suwet’en, she had to return to that territory, to live in it, to walk through it, to swim in it, to physically reconnect with the land. She was talking, in essence, about reinhabitation.

Too often, when we think about colonialism, we think of it as being about importing a new population to seize and build on the lands of indigenous peoples. But the reality is that, in a place like British Columbia, colonialism more often means the opposite. It means finding indigenous people inhabiting the land and expelling them from that space. Beginning with the congregación projects of the Spanish Conquest in the 1550s, when Indigenous villages were amalgamated into a single settlement and the original settlements burned, disinhabitation has been the Janus face of the settler occupation we associate with colonialism.

Whether in the service of logging, mining, industrial agriculture or tourism, the main business of the settler state, when it comes to land in BC, has been to clear that land of human habitation and human activity: the disinhabitation of the land. Today, the Wet’suwet’en people who have been living and working on their trap lines for centuries are being evicted to make way for the pipeline.

They will be replaced, Pighin tells us, by a “man camp,” a particular kind of extractive, temporary community. Men will live there, often in a twenty-day or thirty-day cycle, spending half of their time working long hours at the camp and the other half at their real home hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away. Such communities are designed to be impermanent, not just physically and economically but socially. No families live in them. No children grow up there. Government and business look the other way when it comes to the drug abuse and gender-based violence against nearby indigenous populations that we know they will bring.

Then the man camp will be gone and all that will remain will be the pipeline. A pipe buried under an emptied land.

It is no coincidence that the beginnings of modern capitalism coincide in time and space with the start of this process of disinhabitation. The project began on the other side of the Atlantic in the first two Calvinist nation-states, Tudor England and the Dutch Republic. The new economy of Northern Europe that we associate with the Protestant Reformation and the domination of the countryside by central governments was fueled by what we call the “Wool Boom.”

In the 1400s, specialized winter clothing became a major item of trade throughout Europe and this clothing was made almost exclusively of wool. Finally the long-term north-south trade deficit vanished. And soon, more value in wool was flowing south than wine flowing north. The countries that made the most money during that boom were those that were most effective in converting land into sheep pasturage.

And it was in this that the English and Dutch excelled. As I wrote in the last post in this series, a decade ago, this meant the mass dislocation of rural peasants. The common lands they farmed were seized and sold. As Thomas More then observed, men no longer eat sheep; “now sheep eat men.” In my last piece, I focused on what happened to the people, the women and men whose lives and homes were eaten by sheep. They became the world’s first “neighbours.”

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But what became of the land? The sheep pastures that Enclosure produced had a distinctive look. Their look was “pastoral.” A common trope of the pastoral aesthetic, the focus of the Romantic movement in the nineteenth century, had become “the Ruined Cottage,” as the William Wordsworth poem attests.

We refer to these vistas as landscapes. The corollary of the neighbour is the landscape.

The story of how the term entered the English language might surprise you: it is a loan word from the Dutch Landschap. Its original meaning was: a vista resembling a Dutch landscape painting. Long before the French and English Romantics, it was the Dutch who first aestheticized the disinhabitation of the capitalist project. There was a strange, haunted beauty to lands from which human beings had been evicted, leaving minute traces or none at all. The first landscapes aestheticized the eviction and pauperization of the European peasant, and everywhere they have appeared since has arisen from a capitalist project of disinhabitation, forced eviction and human suffering.

Landscapes are not “natural” in the sense that the term sometimes means (when it is able to mean anything at all) “non-anthropogenic” because the absence of humans is not caused by human absence but rather by the creation of a state powerful enough to evict humans from huge swaths of territory to make way for some larger economic objective.

When the environmental movement first appeared in the United States, it arose from an intersection of the romantic movement, the spiritualist movement, the growth of the power of the central government and its massive subsidies to railway companies. The first modern park, Yosemite, we must remember, was created through the genocide of the people for whom it is named—a genocide motivated by the commodification of an aesthetic.

When transcontinental railway companies reached the places we today call Yellowstone, Jasper, and Banff, they were faced with places that lacked high-value timber, easily accessible subsoil minerals and no real estate development potential. They were turned into landscapes, so that they could enter capitalism, as an experience purchased by the guests of the four-star hotels the rail companies were permitted to build inside the parks whose boundaries they chose. By that, I mean that the indigenous people living inside their boundaries were all evicted like the Nez Pierce of Yellowstone or murdered like the Ahwahnee of Yosemite. The only way the companies could make money was by turning beautiful places into landscapes, by disinhabiting them. That required guns. That required money.

Stanley Park in Vancouver, Central Park in New York: these places were also rendered landscapes, their boundaries chosen because they were the places the poorest people with the fewest property rights were living. Today, they are landscapes—places which the state uses all of its power to keep uninhabited. That’s the thing about disinhabitation; it is continuous, relentless.

Landscape painting, as an aesthetic project, is, among many other things, the documentation of the loss, grief and alienation that capitalism inflicts. It is, in a way, the corollary of the aestheticization of post-industrial sites as in Vancouver’s Granville Island Market or Providence’s India Point Park. But instead of showing the vanished and failing power of the mythologized industrial workplace with its union halls and family-supporting jobs, they show not only the resilience and beauty of ecosystems; they also show the power of capitalism regnant, triumphant, still able to empty a land, not just of its resources but of its human inhabitants. It is this paradox that causes vistas that should be haunting and foreboding to be misinterpreted as reassuring and nostalgic in the capitalist imaginary.

It is the task, not just of Indigenous people, to reverse this, to reinhabit and restore our lands.

Los Altos Institute will soon be accepting registrations to its spring landscape intensive course co-taught by my partner, Corey Hardeman, one of Canada’s premier landscape painters, and me. To join the Wet’suwet’en defense of their land or learn more about it, go here.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies | fusangite |

What We Can Learn From Jeremy Corbyn’s Loss: We Must Be Fearlessly and Completely Honest With Our Base

The fate of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party was wrought early in his mandate, on April 14th, 2016. Every day of the next forty-four months he remained leader until December 12th, 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.

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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.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Extinction Will Be Stopped by Conversion, Not By Raising Awareness

Back in June, I promised that I would write about the alternative to raising awareness, as a paradigm for understanding shifts in political allegiance, conversion. To get more fully into this piece, it is probably useful to review the one it follows.

Green Politics, Paradigm Shifts and Raising Awareness

A few years after I joined the Green Party, the second great upwelling of environmental concern in post-war North American society began. From 1988-92, there was a period of tremendous environmental concern and activism in Anglo American society, reaching its crescendo in the 1990 Earth Day celebrations and TV specials. During this time, Angus Reid conducted a poll asking Canadians if they would vote for a Green Party, if only one existed. We, in the Green Party of Canada, were confused and surprised. But 14% of Canadians appeared to tell Reid that they would be voting for us the first chance they got.

During that time, many new people joined the Greens and membership in environmental groups shot up higher and faster. But our election results did not reflect this. We got 1.4% in a 1988 byelection in BC, 2% in 1989 and our best result in any BC riding in the 1991 election was 4.4%. The federal party did even worse.

This did not dishearten the party’s base. And what I began to hear, with increasing frequency, was that there would be a massive, quantum, ten- or twenty-fold increase in our vote once the “paradigm shift” happened. While this was, to some degree, an appeal to the strong eschatological I have describe in Green politics on more than one occasion, I want, in this piece, to look seriously at the precise meaning of this term and how it presaged a catastrophically bad theory of social change that hobbles Green and green politics up to the present day.

The term “paradigm shift” was developed by historian of science Thomas Kuhn in his book the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. His argument was that science takes sudden and massive leaps forward when a “paradigm shift” takes place. An example of this is the massive shift when the theory of a universe of planets encased in crystalline spheres, making circular orbits, governed by the will of God was replaced by free-floating planets, moving in elliptical orbits, governed by the invisible forces of gravitation. Kuhn argued that science makes these major leaps forward when the model that is being used to interpret and store information becomes weighed-down with too many exceptions, too many aberrations and it is easier to come up with a new system that explains these things than it is to continue modifying a system that has had to create too many special cases and exceptions to explain away observable data.

The universe of Ptolemy and Copernicus gave way to the universe of Kepler, Galileo and Newton not because its model was conclusively disproved but because the new model was so much less cumbersome in its explanations and contained fewer special cases and exceptions, that the sheer weight of all the eccentrics and epicycles brought it down in favour of a system simpler to explain, that modeled far more – but not all – of the available data.

Greens believed that as more and more information about the harms of climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. became available, human consciousness would undergo a “paradigm shift” that rejected liberal capitalist politics and economics in favour of a new, green model of politics and economics. The way forward, to political success, then, was clear: raise awareness. Circulate more and more information about the health impacts, ecological impacts, social impacts of the current social order and, upon reaching a certain threshold of information, society would undergo that paradigm shift.

This, of course, fitted well with the kinds of people most Greens were: people eager to be seen as the smartest, most informed person in the room, and eager to spread the information that made them so, to educate others.

As I have stated previously, the problems with this are obvious: one is that it assumes that people share the moral and ethical views of those raising the awareness, that society is united in a belief in utilitarian liberalism. It assumes that people prioritize future generations living as well or better than us, that they think extinction of species is bad, that they think poor people dying in extreme weather events is bad, that they wish to minimize human suffering. It also assumes that people will remain within the Enlightenment episteme and not choose an alternative theory of physical causation like sodomy causing hurricanes and gay marriage causing fire tornadoes.

But most importantly, it suggests that people have not already bought into the idea of enjoying their lives at the expense of others, be they one’s children, people in the Global South or other species. The SUV-driving World Bank economist who spent half the year in Sierra Leone implementing austerity programs and starving people to death with social program and food subsidy cuts was sure that the paradigm shift was coming any second, that he was a classic utilitarian, someone happily foregoing immediate gratification in the service of a greater good.

The idea of social change by paradigm shift is absurdly premised; first, it argues that moral, ethical and political choices function, for a society, the same way science does; second, it is premised on the idea that there is only one ideology in the world, utilitarianism and that everyone in the world is a utilitarian, someone who will maximize pleasure and minimize pain, personally, socially and ecologically. Paradigm shifters suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, first, in failing to imagine that not all people think the way they claim to think and, second, in failing to realize that they themselves do not think as they claim to. But rather than confronting this, they go forth and raise awareness.

The term “raising awareness” has problems beyond those identified by Doug Stanhope. The term, itself, appears to have arisen in the 1990s to replace the term “raising consciousness.” Whereas “raising awareness” refers simply to the idea of increasing the amount of information one’s interlocutor possesses, “raising consciousness” is about much more. Popularized by the Second Wave of the feminist movement, it was not just about giving women new information about their status in society; it was about offering an alternative theory of what it meant to be a person of worth as a woman, independent of patriarchy’s or an individual man’s evaluation of you.

Unlike raising awareness, raising consciousness was about providing women two things: new information about their status in the world and a new moral order within which to situate this information. Information about the gap between men’s and women’s wages is only significant if one decides that men’s and women’s work is equally valuable. Information about rates of unprosecuted domestic assault is only significant if one decides that it is wrong for men to beat their wives.

“Raising consciousness,” in turn, came out of a Marxist vocabulary. A key purpose of a communist party, according to canonical Marxism is to challenge “false consciousness” among the working class, beliefs like the idea that bosses are people more deserving of money than their workers, even if they work fewer hours and less hard, or the idea that people deserve family money they inherit from a rich relative. The problem has never been that people don’t know there is a massive wealth gap between rich and poor and that family wealth determines more of one’s economic fate than one’s own actions and choices; the problem has been a false consciousness that sees these things as fair.

The Nature of Conversion

When we look at the adversaries of progressives, we see social movements that are growing more powerful by the day. Neo-fascist movements, the Christian Right, Islamic fundamentalists, Hindu nationalists, etc. do not raise awareness, nor, indeed, do movements on the left that are not progressive i.e., movements that have abandoned coalitions with liberals and scorned accommodations with neoliberalism. Momentum and the movement behind Jeremy Corbyn, Our Revolution and the other movement groups behind Bernie Sanders, the student strikers for climate who stand behind Greta Thunberg, these groups are not raising awareness. These groups are seeking converts.

A conversion superficially resembles a paradigm shift in that it is a sudden realignment of one’s affiliations and consciousness but is, in more ways, opposite. When a person experiences conversion, the information they have does not change; what changes is the moral order in which they place that information. People do not join the Sanders movement because they have just received a new piece of information about the lack of healthcare for low-income Americans; they join because a fire has been kindled within them that suddenly makes poor people dying because they don’t have health insurance an evil they can no longer abide. People do not join Extinction Rebellion because they have just become aware that climate science is true after previously deeming it false; no, they join because they can no longer abide the scale of death, suffering and extinction our civilization is causing.

When we look at the Christian Bible and examine conversion stories, none of them are based on information. They are based on an encounter with another person or persons who have realigned their lives based on a new morality they have adopted.

We must remember that conversion is something far more natural to human beings than a paradigm shift. Many kids bully other kids in school. They do so because they enjoy the suffering of the kids they are bullying, until they don’t. Then, suddenly, they feel remorse, shame and realign their lives to behave in less hurtful ways. This is conversion. The information doesn’t change; morality changes.

Our adversaries understand this perfectly. They understand that people feel powerless, insignificant, dirty, That’s why; the patients are suggested to take this cialis sale find for more info now drug in the amount advised by the doctor. This has grown into increasing concern by in Athletic Physical Therapy researchers and endurance sports participants. levitra 20 mg It is highly suggested to avoid having intoxicants and over consumption of food while using this medicine. buy vardenafil levitra http://www.wouroud.com/blog.php Erectile dysfunction develops when there is less or no blood provision to the male viagra without prescription canada organ under the influence of this health problem from their male partner. morally compromised. They understand that the world is full of people who want to be good guys, heroes, people who want to turn their lives around with a new sense of purpose. And so, instead hurling information at them, information they usually already have, they sell moral realignment. They offer people a sense of renewal, purification and purpose.

Amazing Grace

At the beginning of the Enlightenment, we still understood the power of conversion. One of the most important and uplifting hymns of that era is Amazing Grace. The semi-apocryphal story of the hymn is that it was the story of a slaver, John Newton, delivering African slaves to the Americas, a slaver who had grown wealthy and powerful running his slave ships, delivering their human cargo. Then, one day, in the midst of a storm, on board his slave ship, God spoke to him and he realized the evil of what he had been doing:

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now am found

T’was blind but now I see

T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear

And Grace, my fears relieved

How precious did that grace appear

The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares

We have already come.

T’was grace that brought us safe thus far

And grace will lead us home

Newton knew the same things about slavery after that moment as he did before. He had been “blind,” not to the conditions under which he captured his slaves or the conditions under which he kept them. He had been blind to the evil of these acts. The scales fell from his eyes and he had a new purpose, a new story of what his life meant.

Stories of conversion are tremendously compelling to people from all walks of life, a chance to press the reset button, annihilate one’s past mistakes and re-describe oneself as an agent for good.

So, why, then do progressives recoil from the idea of conversion as their mission, their political strategy? Some, as I said above, comes from a failure of imagination, an inability to understand that different people have different theories of good and bad or good and evil, other than utilitarianism. Such blindness is inculcated through concepts like “social justice,” the idea taught in the caring professions, like nursing and social work, that those who disagree with us simply do not believe in social justice i.e. utilitarianism, rather than recognizing that those who disagree with us have a different theory of what justice is and that everyone believes in a social justice.

But the other problem is this: shame. Progressives believe that shame is unnatural and unhealthy. It is not enough to be a good person now; one must always have been a good person. The idea that one’s life’s work is one of moral elevation of the self is an alien one. To have been a bad person in the past admits a kind of fallibility and saddles one with a guilt that progressives imagine to be unendurable. That is because, by and large, while being very well-intentioned, they exist in a culture that engenders a lack of character. I fall back on the brilliant words of the film the Big Kahuna to explain what I mean:

PHIL: The question is do you have any character at all? And if you want my honest opinion, Bob, you do not, for the simple reason that you don’t regret anything yet.

BOB: You’re saying I won’t have any character unless I do something I regret?

PHIL: No, Bob. I’m saying you’ve already done plenty of things to regret. You just don’t know what they are. It’s when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you’ve done and you wish that you had it to do over, but you know you can’t ’cause it’s too late. So you pick that thing up and you carry it with you to remind you that life goes on. The world will spin without you. You really don’t matter in the end. Then you will attain character. Because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself all across your face.

Unacknowledged Shame Is Paralyzing Shame

I noticed this after the 2009 electoral reform referendum in BC. I was on a board of directors who made bad hiring decisions and bad strategy decisions that ensured the victory of the status quo. Had we made better decisions, individually and collectively, we would have offered British Columbians a campaign that made sense and deserved their vote. So, I issued a public apology for letting the movement down. No one else did. Everyone else blamed our adversaries for beating us, like that wasn’t their job. I recall after the 2015 election Ken Georgetti, former head of the BC Federation of Labour, write an Op/Ed piece stating that the NDP’s drop from first place to third was not the party’s fault or labour’s fault; their strategy was sound; it was the voters who were to blame for not finding it appealing.

In fact, progressives are awash in shame for their failure to avert the extinction event we are now facing. The shame they think they are avoiding has actually paralyzed them. And it is only by acknowledging that shame, by acknowledging one’s culpability, one’s past failures that one can begin anew and fight with the moral clarity necessary to challenge the global death cult that welcomes the extinction event. And that can only be accomplished through conversion, by acknowledging our shame, our loss, our failure and reorienting our morality through an act of contrition and humility and then calling upon others to do the same.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Hispanic Baroque II: What the Casta Paintings Can Tell Us About Modern Gender Politics

The Enlightenment, the process that began the Age of Reason, was a global event. Throughout what we might term the “civilized world,” the Baroque episteme, early modernity, the Age of Beauty collapsed under its own weight and gave rise to the episteme, the social order at whose end we are located. Not just in Europe but throughout the world, early modern societies confronted true modernity in the work of the likes of Adam Smith, Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This produced a series of crises of social and political order around the world.

The Age of Beauty, which preceded the Age of Reason, like John Keats, conflated beauty, truth and power. Political legitimacy stemmed from a sumptuous and elaborate aesthetic performance in cuisine, music, art and philosophy. Copernicus had not supplanted Ptolemy because a heliocentric universe was more reasonable than a geocentric one but because it was more beautiful to have a universe with a sun at its centre.

A philosophy based on luxurious, sumptuous aesthetics made additional contributions beyond a heliocentric universe. The Great Chain of Being was featured in the British imaginary and elsewhere, an elaborate effort to situate every known thing in the universe in a single hierarchy with God at the top, encompassing all things that existed, both natural and supernatural. The great empire of the early modern world, the Spanish, French, British, Chinese, Mughal, Ottoman, British, Portuguese and Dutch saw themselves as agents of a divine order in which there was a place of everything and everything was in its place.

 

Enlightenment thinkers challenged this hierarchical divine order by suggesting that human beings were equal, that there was no reason one set of laws should govern a peasant and another govern lord, no reason that different laws should apply to you depending on whether you were Indigenous, African or European, no reason women should not enjoy the political and financial rights enjoyed by men, no reason to afford one set of rights to Christians and inferior rights to Jews, Deists or Muslims.

In the Baroque episteme, one did not need to show that this hierarchy of kinds of people was entirely consistent with lived experience, physical evidence or logic. For the Great Chain of Being to be true, it simply had to be shown to be the most beautiful way of depicting the human family. In this way, the Baroque order proved itself right by the logic of… the Baroque order.

But Enlightenment thinkers practiced a different epistemology than Baroque thinkers; to be true, a theory or model had to be both internally consistent and consistent with all evidence gleaned by observing the world. Fundamentally, it had to be descriptive. And there were simply too many free, proud, rich people with African blood in their veins; there were too many politically powerful, independent women, too many theologically sophisticated Indigenous people, too many honest, proud, forthright Jews, too many rich men of low birth and poor men of aristocratic blood, etc.

While the existence of thousands upon thousands of exceptions to the map of the human family did not challenge the Baroque order on its own terms, it did challenge it by the increasingly popular Enlightenment epistemology, that more and more people and, especially wealthy, powerful urban people turned to to understand the world. And so many Enlightenment thinkers called for the old hierarchical order to be torn down.

But not all.

What many people forget is the form that the forces of reaction took during the eighteenth century. In 1714, the Hapsburg monarchy was overthrown in Western Europe during the War of Spanish Succession. The outcome was that the Spanish Empire now came under the control of the Bourbon monarchy of France. Following the brutal war, the Bourbons in both France and Spain began to adopt Enlightenment ideas as a means not of dismantling but of shoring-up the old order. The central problem that they faced was the incongruence between the way they described the world, to give their laws legitimacy, and the way the world appeared to observers. In essence, their problem was a fundamental incongruence, metaphorically, between map and territory.

The question that faced not just Spain but many of the world’s empires was how to make map and territory converge. When it came to race, the economic lifeblood of the Spanish Empire was at stake. The existence of the casta (caste) negro (black) made racial slavery both justified and permissible because it described African people as naturally servile and in need of guidance; and this provided almost all of the labour for the empire’s sugar, tobacco and indigo plantations. The existence of the indio (Indian) casta allowed the Spanish to tie indigenous people to the land like medieval peasants, refuse to educate them in the Spanish language and extract annual tributes of maize from them to fuel their imperial machine.

The problem, Bourbon reformers realized, was that the caste system was insufficiently descriptive. It had to be made accurate, map had to converge with territory. So, they began with a crackdown on the illegal sale of limpieza de sangre certificates that attested to the whiteness of a person who was not entirely white. By eliminating corruption and revoking whiteness in the colonies, territory and map began, once again, to converge. Now, at least people who did not look white were not recognized as white.

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The Bourbon Reforms, the package of laws that were designed to bring the Spanish Empire into the Enlightenment did not do away with race; instead they made it more descriptive. People who had felt that their prior caste designation did not really describe them were given a more precise, narrower, more specific racial designation. And because genetic testing was not on the table, it was relatively easy to look at people’s appearance and station in life and “correct” their race so that it became more descriptive. By multiplying and intensifying the number of racial categories, the Bourbon Reforms did not just produce new laws; they produced new ways for people to narrate their desires, their inclinations and their identity.

In the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the vast political entity encompassing the Philippines, Guam, Mexico, Central America and what is the southwestern US today, this had an aesthetic expression, the Casta Paintings, a whole artistic movement that used increasingly photo-realistic “objective” artistic styles to depict a typical member of each of the now-double-digit number of castes of which one might be a member. These paintings were not simply a state-commissioned propaganda project; they were a popular enterprise that people used to comprehend and navigate their experience. Distinctions were made between criollos (whites born under the less favourable celestial and humoral influences of the Americas) and peninsulares (European-born Spanish whites) too. Differences of dress, culture, custom, language, appearance and class could now be explained by a more precise and refined set of castes; map and territory could again converge.

Casta Painting from Mexico
Casta Painting from Mexico

 

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see what this all was in aid of: Indigenous servitude, African slavery and the disruption of solidarity through the multiplication and elaboration of difference. And, with that same benefit, we can see where all that ended up: in scientific racism, eugenics and the other pseudo-sciences premised on the fallacy of race.

Today, we face an increasingly stratified, oppressive, hierarchical order in our society. Social mobility is freezing. Human trafficking is increasing. More of us are imprisoned. More of us are in the underclass. These things were happening in the eighteenth century too. An unequal and unjust social order was reaching a crescendo of oppression.

It should not surprise us, then, that those defending the dying social order of neoliberal capitalism are offering us illusory forms of liberty and identity. Instead of recognizing gender as an inherently and materially oppressive category, we are told that the problem with gender is that it is not descriptive enough, that with more categories of gender, more categories of sexuality, more sexual orientations, each carefully labeled and described, that the brutality of the wage gap, gender-based violence, workplace harassment and violence, sexual exploitation of the precariously housed, human trafficking, denial of childcare to all but the richest among us, will somehow become justifiable. Once again, there will be a place for everyone, and everyone in their place.

Today, progressives use the term “radical feminist” as an epithet meaning “bigot.” This should tell us something very important: that the people who have borne the brunt of providing transition housing to victims of violence, who have marched against men’s violence against women, who have called-out gender as an oppressive category that keeps people down are now being portrayed as barbarians and villains.

The same accusations were hurled back in the early nineteenth century, at the cross-racial alliances of former slaves, current slaves, Indigenous peoples and the racialized underclass who marched together and took up arms to demand an end to caste system, an end not just to the laws but to the culture that sowed division and justified hierarchy. Vincente Guerrero, a leader of African, Spanish and Indigenous descent led a multi-racial army that called not for the recognition of their castes as equal to whites but for the abolition of race as a category, a frontal attack on the very idea of racial difference. And his army succeeded in tearing down laws mandating servitude, slavery and caste in New Spain.

It is telling that both the left and right head of the neoliberal hydra are attacking the modern Guerreros, radical feminists who are demanding a cultural revolution that will throw off the yoke of gender. The right head calls these radical feminists a threat to order, to the family and to God himself. The left head, the progressive head, calls them intolerant bigots, ignoramuses, science deniers. No doubt, there are some transphobic people in radical feminist organizations, just as there are anti-Semites in the Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, just as there were Soviet communists in the Screen Actors’ Guild during McCarthyism. The existence of this minority is not a reason to reject radical feminism.

Let us not allow the existence of an intolerant minority in a movement cause us to lose track of its transformative message: the problem with your gender, your sexuality is not that they are not descriptive enough, not precise enough, not uniquely reflective of who you are. The problem is that they are tools of exploitation and oppression; the problem is that they exist at all, that there are gender norms, gender expectations, gendered outfits, gender performances. These are means of creating division and inequality. They are not natural or inevitable responses to differences in biological sex. You are being conned into believing that they are because, for the order oppressing you to succeed in its oppression, map and territory must converge in the modern equivalent of the Casta Painting.

Politics of Identity Race | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 7: Hustle-fuckery, Narcissistic Injury and the Politics of Liberal Etiquette and Emotion

Seven years ago, I suggested that the Age of Authenticity, as an episteme, causes us to fashion different kinds of selves that, at once, are a logical entailment and consequence of the kinds of selves the Age of Reason asked us to make and are a new kind of self, one “larger and more permeable.” Such selves, even as they grow more common, as the liberal order collapses, are nevertheless pathologized today. In the DSM IV, people who have difficulty constructing “other people” as a category, and who struggle to retain the knowledge that the other creatures walking around who look like them are the same sort of creature are referred to as having “Cluster B” personality disorders. This means that the individual’s personality was defectively built, producing sometimes-charming but never empathetic personalities.

Narcissism and Hustle-fuckery

Clinical narcissism is one of these personality disorders. Narcissists live terrifying lives because they are governed by a profound sense of worthlessness. They believe that they are subhuman creatures whose only relevance or value to others is achieved by tricking people into thinking they are, in fact, superhuman. Narcissists live in constant fear of being found out, of being forced to confront what they see as an irreconcilable, impassible gap between the self the loathsome person they actually are and the universally-adored person they must be perceived as.

Narcissists are often regarded as malevolent or ill-intentioned and certainly, they can do a lot of damage. I have the scars to prove it. But they are often experienced as charming, exciting, fun people to know who do you no harm whatsoever, provided you reinforce the belief that the are the self they aspire to be.

The problem comes when one accidentally or intentionally fucks with a narcissist’s hustle. Hustle-fuckery is always dangerous, regardless. But when one fucks with a narcissist’s hustle, by showing that one genuinely sees past the self they present to the world, it can lock one into a Manichean struggle, because the maintenance of the illusory self is viewed by the narcissist as a necessary condition for their survival, because, rather than seeing their inner self as an ordinary damaged human self, they see it as a thing so loathsome that it could never be accepted or loved.

Fucking with a narcissist’s hustle is dangerous, risky. But it is also necessary. So many of the bullies and monsters who stand in our way or cause us pain, not just in politics but in our work lives, friendships and family lives, are people with Cluster B personality architectures, people whose ego boundaries are profoundly malformed.

So, when one provokes a narcissist into showing some aspect of themselves that they seek to conceal or specifically calls out or identifies that behaviour, the narcissist feels wounded. They experience what is termed “narcissistic injury.” It is an injury both in the sense that the narcissist experiences real pain when this happens and because it does inflict damage on the person’s narcissistic personality architecture. After experiencing narcissistic injury, a person often needs to spend time recovering, refashioning their sense of self, re-narrating events to fit this refashioning, seeking comfort, experiencing real debilitating depression and grief, shedding real tears.

The narcissistic injury, then, is paradoxical. It is a real injury caused by a perceived attack on or damage to a fake thing.

Triggering, Then and Now

In progressive i.e. liberal-influenced putatively left-wing circles, this phenomenon has dangerously coincided with the vulgarization of the term “trigger” and the adoption of a liberal politics of affect (i.e. emotion). From the beginning, demonstrating emotional sensitivity has been central to the liberal concept of selfhood; both the ability to shed tears and the ability to stoically refrain from shedding tears while feeling very deeply are central to the liberal ideal of the self. When liberals idealize self-control, that ideal is possible precisely because, for a sensitive person, self-control is a kind of emotional athleticism, demonstrating extraordinary strength.

Whereas, socialist politics has traditionally styled itself in opposition to liberalism and consequently featured unrestrained expressions of emotion, fist pounding and cries to “smash the state,” progressive politics is all about restraint. Everyone is expected to show the big emotions they have; everyone is supposed to talk about how big their emotions are; and then everyone is expected to demonstrate the liberal virtue of self-control by not matching that with shouting, crying, desk-pounding and fist-pumping but instead show how one is an ideal person because one’s sensitivity is exceeded only by one’s self-control. And when a progressive is exposed to unrestrained emotion, they are often “triggered.”

Triggering was once a psychiatric term that applied only to people who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While PTSD sufferers can sometimes recall the event(s) that traumatized them in a dispassionate and accurate way, this entails a level of repression and detachment from the emotions accompanying the traumatic experience. Triggering is when something that is associated with the traumatic event causes the sufferer to re-experience the event and the extreme emotions associated. Often, it is a piece of sensory input peripheral to the experience. For instance, a friend of mine was a military contractor doing firefighting for the US military in Afghanistan. While he can recall, dispassionately, the event that caused his PTSD, simply recalling and re-narrating that event does not trigger him. He is only triggered when he smells a particular combination of spices being cooked with onions that preceded the attack that traumatized him. Triggering, in its original meaning, referred not just to an unmediated experience of emotion but physical manifestations like rapid drops in body temperature, swelling in the lungs, loss of circulation to extremities and temporary blindness.
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Today, “triggered” means very upset.

Etiquette and Orthodoxy

Of course, affect politics are not the only part of liberalism that progressives practice. They also have adopted liberal practices of etiquette. This goes beyond a simple demand that progressive politics be polite and self-controlled. Etiquette is, by definition, faddish, because it is a means by which those at the top of society can impose a set of occult rules on others that will have changed by the time those outside the elite figure them out. Etiquette, then, is not just a set of rules about how to act, speak and dress; it is the process by which these rules are in constant flux, creating new forms of social transgression. Many working class people follow Donald Trump because his politics are an attack on etiquette—Trump really is attacking “the elite” and “draining the swamp” from a certain cultural perspective. His actions render etiquette less powerful in an increasing number of places.

This does not just produce a sense of cultural liberation but of intellectual liberation because this kind of etiquette breach is necessary to challenge orthodoxy. Orthodoxies are enforced through etiquette. If you dispute a mere ideology or worldview, those holding that worldview understand your statement to be wrong. A modern flat-earther can say “you’re lying; the earth is flat,” the response to which is “you’re wrong; here’s why.” But when Galileo challenged the Roman Catholic Church’s orthodoxy with respect to the heavens, by saying “the earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit in space,” the response was not “you’re wrong” but “you are not permitted to have said that. Therefore we shall behave as though you have not and our vision of the universe has never been challenged.”

Putting It All Together

So let’s put all this together and think about its impact on progressive politics.

As I have stated before, a progressive politics of emotion functions as etiquette not ideology. So when someone expresses themselves in a way that triggers someone (as per the contemporary usage), we must not merely silence the offender; we must act as though the idea they have expressed is beyond the pale and cannot be considered, discussed or even acknowledged as an idea. Because inflicting narcissistic injury is triggering (not just by the contemporary definition but sometimes even by the original medical one), one must never inflict narcissistic injury. Progressive etiquette politics conscripts us into denying or eliding any apparent differences between the self a person wishes to present to the world and the self they reveal themselves to be.

In this way, the progressive scene has come to be dominated by narcissists and gas-lighters by placing any challenge to their narcissism beyond the pale, because such a challenge is impermissible by the orthodoxy. We have thus produced a system of incentives that encourage people to build more narcissistic, porous, oversized selves that contain all kinds of things they shouldn’t, like other people’s thoughts, other people’s bodies, other people’s desires.

And this leads us back to the central issue as we endeavour to think past the liberal identity politics some people mistakenly call “intersectionalism:” do I own who other people think I am or do they? Progressive identitarianism grows increasingly unequivocal on that point—you own other people’s thoughts about who you are and they do not. And that view is batshit fucking insane, a narcissistic delusion.

A real left politics, a real socialist politics must do the opposite. To engage in real debate, real solidarity, real acts of mutual recognition and empathy, real confrontations with evil, left politics must declare open season on narcissism and the affect and etiquette politics that intimidate us into thinking that inflicting narcissistic injury is a bad act. It is by this sleight of hand that the Third Wayers, the Blairites, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans who cry crocodile tears over pipelines they build, treaties they violate, future generations they condemn to misery and death, are able to hold the power over us that they do.

Because they have taken from us the ability to shout “You are not who you say you are!”

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Hispanic Baroque I: The Pueblo Revolt, Solidarity and Moments of Mutual Recognition

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.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Thanks for Saving Downtown Prince George, Homeless Folks

I host a talk show on community radio in Prince George, BC, an industrial town and regional centre of 74,000 souls. My show is the Monday edition of After Nine, a show that runs on weekdays. Last week, the Thursday host of After Nine had a twenty-five minute interview with and five-minute editorial in support of a new downtown business owners’ group, as yet unnamed, fronted by two downtown commercial property owners, Melanie Desjardins and Jason Luke.

They presented a picture of a downtown overrun by homeless people living on the street, mostly indigenous and mostly opiate addicts, who engage habitually in not just property crime but violent crime. This group of people, they explained, are making downtown unsafe and, consequently, need to be “rounded up” and permanently removed from the downtown. Such an action was possible, they argued, because, by virtue of being opiate addicts, these individuals are habitual offenders and habitual offenders, in their view, “have no human rights.” It is only because “the human rights have gone too far,” they explained, that businesses are not prosperous downtown.

The only solution, they argued, was the forcible mass relocation and indefinite detention of a criminalized and racialized group of people. In other words, a pogrom. And, if the police wouldn’t do this, they might well take matters into their own hands.

Once the podcast of the show came out and more and more Prince George residents who do not listen to community radio normally began listening to the interview, local social media has lit up with expressions of horror, disgust and incredulity. Prominent local opinion leaders are now leading a boycott of the station.

The response of the businesspeople has largely been incoherent and self-contradictory, repeatedly disavowing and then restating the same views over and over again. But there is now one new message: “well, how are you going to solve this problem?” By this, they do not really mean homelessness; besides, we know how to do that, with Finland-style “housing first” government policy at the provincial and federal levels that administer social programs. What they really mean is “how will my business become more prosperous and get more customers?” And, not because I deem their question sincere but because they have accidentally started a community dialogue, I have decided to use this post to answer it.

 

The first thing we must recognize is that one of the groups that contributes most to our downtown’s current functionality is the very group they seek to extirpate. Were it not for the street homeless of Prince George, our downtown would truly be in bad shape. Our downtown has been badly understood and, consequently, badly planned and badly managed. It is only by luck that we have as much commerce there as we do.

Eyes on the Street

That is because study-after-study over the past half-century has validated the theory of street crime put forward by Jane Jacobs in 1961, “eyes on the street.” In other words, the single biggest factor in whether someone commits a crime of opportunity against a stranger on the street is whether they can see other people watching them. And the theory is specific, beyond this, about which eyes have the greatest crime-reducing power. They are eyes with the fewest sheets of glass between them and the potential criminal. Eyes behind a window or windshield are a small fraction of being as effective as eyes on a stoop, a patio or a sidewalk. And eyes that might be watching from a camera are less effective still. And it turns out that it does not matter very much whose eyes are watching, just that there are other human eyes.

Because Prince George has over-prioritized the availability of parking spots downtown, many people who come downtown to shop will get back in their car repeatedly during a single trip, and move it to the next location in downtown. This means that most shoppers are not, during most of their trip “eyes on the street.” They are behind glass in a store or behind glass in their vehicle. In this way, we have shunted almost all of the work of having eyes on the street to the very people we think are making downtown unsafe.

What makes a place unsafe are empty sidewalks, hedges, privacy fences, arcades and indoor malls because they suck eyes off the street and place them behind things that prevent them from observing crime.

Slow Space
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Another contribution that our local underclass makes to our prosperity and the life of our downtown is the way they help to generate the most coveted kind of urban space when it comes not just to commerce but to a vibrant civic life: slow space. To give credit where it is due, our city has helped to generate this kind of space by narrowing streets with angle parking, widened sidewalks and four-way stops in recent years. But this is not enough.

If one visits the most commercially successful, prosperous and friendly streetscapes, we see a mixture of slow-moving cars, bicycles being ridden without helmets and pedestrians paying some, but not too much, attention to traffic signals. People cross against lights, cycle slowly so they don’t get sweaty on the way to their destination, drive in circles, looking for a perfect spot or take ages to pull in and out of their hard-won parking spot. That is what is going on in the strip malls of Scott Road in Surrey, on Granville Island in Vancouver and all over the commercially successful parts of every major, mature European or Asian city.

People moving through slow space make more unplanned purchases, more unplanned library visits and have more unplanned conversations with friends and neighbours. Every time a member of the underclass crosses against a light or jaywalks, they are slowing our downtown space, making it more vibrant and prosperous. Cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create slow space, and here it is in Prince George, welling-up around the dispensary.

Petty Commerce

One of the reasons that my partner and I often go to the malls at Spruceland or Pine Centre to shop, instead of downtown is a lack of opportunities for convenience and petty commerce. There is nowhere downtown for me to buy cheap groceries if I need to make a last-minute purchase of something I have forgotten. There are no convenience stores downtown. There are no grocery stores. There is no liquor store. In other words, downtown is understood by Prince George residents to be a place to make specialty purchases, not a place to do a daily or weekly shop.

Places downtown that are for daily or weekly shopping, like the pharmacies, rely for their walk-in traffic on the minority of residents who do not use cars and find themselves at the bus terminus at 7th and Dominion or are getting around on foot. Again, the underclass of street homeless and marginalized people who hang out downtown are over-represented in this group. Chocolate bars, cups of coffee, energy drinks, pizza slices, deli sandwiches, 13 oz booze, tweezers, nail scissors, menstrual products, shoelaces, gum, mints: these are the lifeblood of any truly vibrant commercial area—convenience stories, groceries and pharmacies transacting small purchases are the places that keep a downtown going.

And again, the people who go to the most trouble to find the only cheap chips at Birch and Boar or actually buy their menstrual products at the Pharmasave or pick up some cheap gum at Third Avenue Pharmacy are the people who are on the street all the time.

Finally, A Shout-Out

I have lived all over and, frankly, I have to say that if you think Prince George has a zesty, rough or greasy downtown, stay here! You may be rugged and tough enough to survive a Prince George winter but I cannot imagine you being able to handle most of downtown Toronto, Providence, Boston or pretty much anywhere else interesting that I have lived or visited. Even Salt Lake City might be too much for you. But at least there, they have a merchant community and government that have the same bad ideas and keep trying to push vital parts of the community out of the city core and then suffering for it.

Anyway, a lot of friends have asked me how I like Prince George and its street life. The story I tell, every time, is how, whenever I buy flowers for my partner, women having tough lives, who don’t know me, that see me on the bus or on the street, take time to commend me for buying payday flowers and bringing them home. Every bouquet of flowers has generated at least one conversation with a stranger; and none have ended with me being hit up for money.

And that is what I really admire most about the people having a tough time on our streets: they don’t hold a grudge against people who look like me, just because of some bad apples among the downtown business community, the way so many people who look like me hold a grudge against them.

Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George | fusangite |