The pivot to co-optation

[sabotabby]

 Pull up, kids, for another one of Aunt Sabotabby's predictions.

The good news is that the overt state repression of this round of demonstrations is almost over. The bad news is, hoo-boy. We're in for an interesting ride.

Here's what went on in Toronto last weekend: Black Lives Matter TO organized a march. Everyone knows who they are and who their main organizers are. They've been around for a long time. They have ties to various Black communities and can be trusted; if they put something out, we all know it's legit. The march was peaceful and orderly.

Here's what's happening in Toronto this weekend: Someone organized two marches. Who? We don't really know. It wasn't Black Lives Matter TO, because we all know who they are and they put out a statement saying it wasn't them. It wasn't any of the other established Black-led community or activist groups in the city. The name of yesterday's, March for Change, sounded a hell of a lot to me like that Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial. Meanwhile, the medias, state-corporate and corporate-social, went ballistic. Shops boarded up their windows and doors in fear of Black Bloc protesters. BlogTO published a very funny "who are the Black Bloc?" article that I won't link to here because BlogTO sucks and I don't want to give them the hits, but basically it was like listening to your dad explain TikTok. Meanwhile, BLMTO and other trusted organizations suggested that activists, and in particular BIPOC activists, should probably not go wandering into this particular honeytrap.

So then what happened yesterday? There was some kind of a protest, I guess? Lots of people showed up thanks to the involvement of some Instagram kids I've never hear of because I'm old. One of my young comrades suggested that for all the confusion, the cops had organized themselves a pretty good protest! I don't know what's going to happen today but I'd be gobsmacked if there was any actual violence unless the cops decided to instigate it. And they have one glaringly good reason not to.

See, the other thing that happened yesterday is that at various demos, both Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders and PM Prince Justin took a knee. This made for a great photo op. See! Our neoliberal politicians are on our side against this dastardly Trump! You're seeing it all over the US too, and the NFL apologized for being a shit to poor Colin Kaepernick and isn't it cool how we're somehow all on the same side now?

The coercion phase of the repression is over. It is failing and will continue to fail, because people are rightly pissed, even liberals, even some hard right types like Pat Robertson, who I didn't even know was still alive. As bad as things have gotten, you probably still can't convince large numbers of soldiers to shoot their own people in what are, if not their own neighbourhoods, then neighbourhoods that look like theirs. It's one thing to let suburban cops loose on urban communities, but the US has a poverty draft and there are a lot of reasons for joining the army that are not actually "being a complete dick." And the upper levels of the military probably look at Iraq and go, "nope, maybe we don't want something like that here."

Welcome to the co-optation phase.

There are two ways for an authoritarian government to retain power: Coercion and consent. Guess which one always, always works better? Look at surveillance—when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, we had to read 1984 as a cautionary tale so that we didn't become Communists or whatever.* A modern adolescent, I can tell you, does not understand 1984. It literally makes no sense to them, because they've been under a far greater degree of surveillance their entire lives and they enthusiastically participate in it; in fact, they compete to be the best at it. The GDR would have spontaneous orgasms at the ease of finding out every detail of everyone's lives. It's just one of many ways that the Soviet Bloc won the Cold War.**

Coercion works to a point and then people get tired of it and hang their leaders from lampposts and such. Consent works much better. Co-optation is key to consent.

I've seen this happen throughout my lifetime. Nike sweatshops are bad! Young people do not want shoes made with child labour. So, protests! Boycotts! Oh no! This is threatening Nike's bottom line. Time for some intervention—say, the Kielburgers, bright-faced young white kids who collected the anti-sweatshop movement and turned it into the franchises Free the Children and Me to We, and set up a branch in every school. Now kids could earn volunteer hours and scholarships for holding bake sales against sweatshops. Everyone was Making Change and Being the Change, even our corporate partners. Then Nike puts Colin Kaepernick on its ads and suddenly it's a progressive thing to buy their shoes.†

True story: I went to the first BLMTO rally in Toronto. The main chant, I shit you not, was "Black lives matter! All lives matter!" A few days later "All lives matter" was a racist meme, as it still is. Co-option can happen very, very quickly.

The significance of Saunders and Trudeau taking a knee is now all of Kaepernick's trials and tribulations are robbed of their potency. If you have the guy in charge of racially profiling young Black men and the guy who sends the RCMP in with automatic weapons to shoot Indigenous land defenders standing in the way of his pipelines mimicking an anti-racist gesture, that gesture is no longer anti-racist. The far right has honed this strategy to perfection, having ruined, among others, Pepe the Frog, the OK symbol, milk, and now Hawaiian shirts. Now the message is confused, watered-down, and muddled to incoherency.

Co-optation is much, much harder to fight than coercion. You need to be skilled in media criticism, diversity of tactics, and organizing. It's a much less violent game long-term, but it's a thornier knot to untangle. And the everyday, systemic patterns don't change, obviously, so it's not not violent, but that violence becomes more distributed, less visible. Like it always is, but this time the people committing the violence are listening to you, and on your side.

Watch for it. 

* Hahaha no one ever learns about Orwell's actual politics.
** See also: Putin's control over the US and other countries' political systems, the validation of a command economy.
† No fault of Kaepernick, by the way. He needs to earn a living and get his message out any way possible. Co-optation is much more complicated than coercion.

Comments

[dewline]

Now, to keep the pressure on to make sure their deeds more closely match their performance. Co-opting can be made to work the other way, after all. It needs diligence, vigilance, and luck, yes...

[gingicat]

No disagreement.

Also, I've always been taught 1984 as an anti-totalitarian warning.

[sara]

Yeah, having lived in Niketown, USA, you'll notice I don't buy fuck all of theirs, no matter who shills for them. I know what those people will do to your town, given the opportunity.

Kaepernick has to make a living but he picked a damn strange bedfellow there.

The disinformation is extraordinarily heavy right now.

[robin_iamar]

It's even happening inside Corporate (public or private sector 'corporate') now - the pivots to "diversity and inclusion" training (after just... silence) which... I mean. I'm my workplace's 'mental health-diversity person" and as soon as I saw the 'should we Diversity And Inclusion?' start, I knew I'd be called on to get my group some form of it. It's... gawd, it's so performative and there's this push to go back to performing things and having that be good enough, and it's exhausting.

[smhwpf]

Everyone taking a knee, it's such a classic, does anyone even remember what taking a knee has to do with BLM? That you are saying you can only give qualified support to your national anthem so long as police brutality and systemic racism continue? So is Trudeau going to take a knee when they sing O Canada?

But more importantly of course is he going to stop trying to force a pipeline through unceded First Nations territory. Clearly not.

I think the positive is that many, many more people recognize that systemic racism, specifically in the police, is a problem. The polls in the US show that the percentage who think that has gone up massively since Ferguson, I think from 49% to 74%. Which is a big step up from what was won in the '60s, most people agreeing that "racism is bad" and that "skin colour shouldn't matter", but then congratulating themselves on not being racist and pretending the problem had gone away.

Now that first change was associated with genuine gains, so the big question is how can the current sea change in perceptions be translated into genuine gains? Some positive signs in terms of police reform and the fact that it's possible to talk about more radical ideas like abolition, It's probably going to need both active street protests and a cogent political strategy for identifying what specific demands can be pushed at a Congressional/Parliamentary/State/Provincial level that have a chance of getting enough of a coalition around them to get through.

My recollection of Orwell (I went through a big teen fanboy phase, when I read most of his essays and papers, and most novels, though I bounced off Coming Up For Air), is that he described himself as a Socialist rather than a Communist. A pretty darned radical one, and of course he was with the Poum militia who were Trotskyite, but I don't think he ever described himself as a Trot. I think he was ambivalent about the idea of Revolution; certainly supporting it when seeing it in action in Spain, but I'm not sure he saw it as the way to go in Britain. Of course, he died at a time when it might still have been possible to hope that the Post-War Labour government might lead to the sort of radical change he would have liked to see.

[minoanmiss]

*reads and takes notes*
May I link to this?

[kore]

Sadly OT (sorry!) but I saw this sign and thought of you, I loved it:

https://twitter.com/ngelvsworld/status/1269394728602136577

Big crowd marching up thru our neighbourhood now -- maybe 1K? -- NO cops that I can see, also NO FUCKING CHOPPER ready to buzz people. Hopefully no fucking Nat Guard or prison guards flown in from fucking Texas or AZ either.

[kore]

Also omfg talk about the shifting Overton window: Jacob Frey, who looks like Prince Justin's more whitebread twin, showed up at a Minneapolis protest. This is where Al Sharpton JUST gave what Maddow said was "a eulogy for the ages" for George Floyd. Frey was filmed at that service sobbing like a baby. He shows up at the protest and gets asked about defunding police and starts going fumfuh-fumfuh union blah blah reform blee blee. The woman with the mike says YES OR NO ANSWER and reminds everyone he is up for re-election and asks him again. Fucker says no and gets booed off so loudly he literally looks like a little kid running home to mommy. He has to walk off through this huge throng of people all chanting "SHAME, SHAME, SHAME" at him. DAMN.

(And as one person rightfully said, bro, you showed up at a Defund the Police protest and said no, you would not do that, what the fuck did you think would happen)

https://twitter.com/BethLynch2020/status/1269426371740217350

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1269460338329739264

[metawidget]

*comes up from Orwell Wikipedia article rabbit hole*

Wow, yeah: complicated fellow.

[lapinlunaire]

*takes notes*