The Antisocial Socialist

 As always, if you're interested in context and sensible thoughts you can check out ioplokon 's post. 

I am inclined to think that no one should go to prison, but of course that's not exactly true. Certain things that are illegal, say, sex work or drug use or trying to save the world, are unfairly criminalized. Other things that are illegal, such as rape or murder, are fairly so, though one could debate whether prison is necessarily the most effective way of dealing with them. And some things that are legal, such as building a pipeline on stolen land, or cutting down the Amazon rainforest, or jerking around the global economy so that your buddies can make a quick buck, ought to be punishable with Forever Jail at the least, if not execution by space trebuchet into the fucking sun. If you're a 13-year-old kid torrenting an album, that's illegal, but if you are a huge corporation stealing the work of every creative person alive, it's not illegal, even though it is, like, illegal under current laws. So I'm not 100% a prison abolitionist. Smarter people about me have written about this; let's instead talk about civil disobedience, which is another free association my brain makes with this prompt.

I have a dear friend who, for years, was involved in Extinction Rebellion in [redacted country]. The strategy there was mass nonviolent civil disobedience; they would often deliberately try to get as many peaceful demonstrators arrested as possible to draw attention to the cause. Or to grind up the gears of the legal system. This is in contrast to many of the movements I've been involved in here, where they do not deliberately get as many peaceful demonstrators as possible arrested, but it happens anyway because we keep letting ourselves get kettled for some reason.

This technique has worked well in the past. Most famously, during the Spokane Free Speech Fights in 1909, the Wobblies would stand on a soap box (legal for the Salvation Army but not for anarcho-syndicalists) and give a speech, and the cops would arrest them. Eventually, the jail would get so full that they had to let everyone go. This strategy was effective because neither the prison-industrial complex nor digitized information and surveillance systems were advanced like they are today. These days, this would be a great opportunity for a private-public partnership to build a larger, supermax jail and profit massively per prisoner.

The other day, the Indigo 11, anti-genocide protestors who were violently arrested for the crime of putting paint on the wall of the worst bookstore in the country, were acquitted of all charges. Which is great news! But I wonder how many wasted hours, legal fees, disrupted careers, emotional trauma were suffered, and whether there might be a better way. At least here, and I assume in most alleged Western democracies, the state's strategy to deal with political expression that it doesn't like is to arrest people for charges that everyone knows won't stick. They then spend years grinding down the accused through the courts and disrupting the movement through house arrest and non-association conditions. By the time the person is inevitably free, their name has been dragged through the mud, they've been separated from friends and comrades, they've lost their job or education, and they're broke. You beat the rap but not the ride.

Add to this the context of the US, which could easily be exported here, even if the Tories lose. As the cases of Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil and Abrego Garcia show, in America you can be thrown in a secret prison for any reason, whether or not you violate the law. It's very clear that we will have to devote a lot of time to prisoner support and legal costs to free innocent people. Movement lawyers are going to be incredibly busy and GoFundMe's are going to be incredibly empty. We cannot fuck around with pretending the state has a conscience anymore.

Therefore I propose: No going to jail for justice if you can avoid it. Run, don't go limp. If you're going to get arrested, make sure you do so for a reason that justifies taking you out of the game for potentially years at a time. Do not make mass arrests at demos part of your strategy.

 Consuming media is not the same as activism. That said.

Yesterday, I went to see a screening of Where Olive Trees Weep. If you haven't seen it or there's not a screening near you, you can PWYC on the internet. It's about Palestinians, trauma, and resistance, focusing primarily on journalist, activist, and therapist Ashira Darwish, with appearances from Dr. Gabor Maté, Amira Hass, and Ahed Tamimi. It's beautifully shot and compassionately written and edited.

The hardest thing about the film is that it was shot in 2022. You know. Before things got as bad as they are now. And yet it's still unbearable to see.

Then today I saw Omar El Akkad speak on his new book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Which I haven't read yet, but I've read a bunch of his articles and American War, all of which I loved. I go to a lot of readings and this one was probably the best. He's quiet and self-effacing, like he is rather surprised to find himself in front of a microphone speaking at the first of two sold-out events. And every word out of his mouth is just the most insightful, thoughtful thing you've heard anyone say. I can't wait to read this book and I already know that I'll weep big ugly tears.

Anyway. There's two things to check out, but then you (and I) have to go do something.

I remember Chandler mainly from the Jewish Women's Committee Against the Occupation vigils in front of the Israeli consulate. It's a tough cause to take up—people spit on you and scream at you, and there's not tons that a person can do from here. But he was there faithfully, holding the banner—like he was at every street protest I can remember, for decades. And always with a certain measure of optimism and wit and levity, which I never knew how he managed after so many years of being on the losing side.

I remember how when my friends and I were at a demo, we'd see his unmistakable tall figure approaching and say, "oh, Chandler is here, now the protest can start." Because it was true. If there was an injustice, he was out there fighting it, for nearly a century.

Like so many of our movement elders—like Manuel, Naomi, Miriam, Judith—all the friends and comrades I looked up to and lost in the past few years, I never conceived of him dying. He was too smart, too stubborn, to give in to something like death. He had too much to do.

He lived an incredible 96 years, only a fraction of which I was privileged to know about. You can read more here if you're interested (and trust me, he was absolutely fascinating).

Chandler was brilliant and empathetic and I will very much miss him.

I'm speechless.

There are maybe a handful of people who've had a greater influence on who I am and how I think. Maybe. I can't overemphasize how much her work helped me learn how to be an educator and an activist and a good human in the world.

From all accounts, she was also a lovely and generous person who lived the same principles she expressed in her writing. 

The world will be so much lesser without her. Rest in power.

 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.

Not content with stirring up shit in my own country, I went to a demo here. It was an anti-Brexit thing and Billy Bragg was playing (everything was running late so I had to leave before the end, but apparently it was too crowded to see him anyway). My impression of London demos is that they’re better than ours in terms of scale, but not necessarily in terms of organization or being able to prune the speakers’ list. A lot of the speakers were really good though; much more inspiring and on topic than what usually happens back home.




Also, I learned some Cornish!







Followed by a party. Which will be followed by sleep.

 I know this is Very Much Not the Point, but this vegan is really craving a milkshake.

(Yes, I know where to get a vegan milkshake/how to make one. No, that's not really the kind I'm craving, but it will do, and I think I will get one this weekend at the conclusion of Hell Week.)

Via Entangled Roots.

I don't know if there's a term for the phenomenon where a well-intentioned, even effective, action gets taken up or co-opted by groups or institutions in a way that either waters it down and renders it purely symbolic, or distorts it beyond its original meaning, but for lack of a better term, I'll call it Franchise Activism.

Some examples:

• Occupy in New York was an effective tactic. It was meant to disrupt business as usual, and it reframed class war in a way that could be easily discussed by people without a grounding in Marxism (which I actually think is useful, even though I'm a Marxist). Other cities took up the slogans. By the time it hit Toronto, it became about camping and using the People's Mic, even though the camp was not in a place that caused any disruption, and the People's Mic was unnecessary, since we don't have the sorts of bylaws here against amplified sound, and to be honest the number of people in the camp was so low by that point that you could just talk normally and everyone could hear you.

 

• The Yellow Vests is about...something??? in France, but I guess one of the demands involves fuel access, so it was immediately coopted by astroturf-funded far-right groups to be about supporting the oil pipelines, opposing any sort of environmental regulation, and kicking out immigrants.

 

• Free the Children harnessed the momentum of the anti-sweatshop movement and tamed it to render it completely ineffective. It took activists smuggling hidden cameras into maquiladoras and culture-jamming Nike billboards and created large binders that could be ordered by every school in Ontario, with a list of approved activities (bake sales!) to raise funds to send rich kids to dig wells in developing countries and "be the change." It holds annual slick events at the Air Canada Centre and rakes in a considerable profit, none of which is ever seen by the 14-year-old girl who makes your clothing in Bangladesh.

Today's ironic example of Franchise Activism is this incredible tweet by—who else?—the Ontario Tory government. For those of you who aren't Canuckistanians, Pink Shirt Day came about because a child was being bullied by homophobes for wearing a pink shirt, and other kids came to his aid and wore pink shirts in solidarity. This is the kind of relatively non-threatening activism that schools adore, so Pink Shirt Day was born. Now, do I always wear a pink shirt on Pink Shirt Day? I do. But I make it clear that it's about homophobia and transphobia specifically, not bullying in general. In some schools, the climate is still so bigoted that you can't name homophobia and transphobia out loud, but everyone is anti-bullying, so the meaning becomes diluted.

It goes without saying that our provincial government is composed entirely of bullies, all of them homophobic and transphobic. They created massive disruption and cost taxpayers a ridiculous amount of money to change a recently updated Health and Physical Education curriculum out of fear that young children would discover that it's okay to be queer and/or trans. You will note that the tweet does not mention queer or trans people or name homophobia or transphobia. But they perform the ritual anyway, as it's expected.

The Ontario government—which doesn't want anyone to talk about queer sexualities and gender diversity—tweeting about Pink Shirt Day without mentioning homophobia is exactly what I can't stand about Pink Shirt Day.

 I went to the thing. The thing was fine. Desmond Cole called for a picnic so I showed up because I trust that he knows what he's doing. Lots of us showed up, but not enough. People kind of meandered around. At one point, my friend and I were talking to one of the NDP MPPs and asking her if they had a plan. They do—more on that in a sec—but she, to her credit, turned it back on us, saying that the real effort had to happen outside the legislature, and what did we think should be done?

Which is when I realized that no one has a fucking plan. Not even Desmond Cole.

The left in Toronto is probably the most disorganized anywhere in the Western world, which is saying a lot. Buncha little groups that don't talk to each other, no real tradition of rebellion, and labour would rather sleep in on a Saturday than show up in force, let alone inconvenience capital by interrupting the work day. I'm thinking, do I have to come up with a plan? I'm not really a planner; I show up and am a body and make dank memes on Photoshop.

So then we tried to get into the public gallery. Just as we got in, they adjourned the session. Turns out the NDP pointed out that you're not actually allowed to reintroduce the same piece of legislation, and essentially the new bill to cut city council is the old bill with "Notwithstanding" scrawled on the top in crayon and the number changed. The Tories said that no, it was a totally different bill, and the Speaker said he'd have to think about it, and Horwath made a motion to adjourn, and everyone clapped, even though clapping isn't allowed. I heard later Maggie Helwig and someone else got arrested but I don't know what for. Clapping, probably.

I never actually made it into the legislature.

Now the regime wants to meet at midnight on Sunday night. It's quite a lot of effort to go through for a petty vendetta and I'd be impressed if it wasn't going to screw over my city.