Showing posts with label working class. Show all posts
Showing posts with label working class. Show all posts

Sunday, June 03, 2012

On Mass Struggles in the Metropole: Thoughts Inspired by Quebec


because mass struggles include all kinds of folks

By Way of Introduction
In many neighbourhoods and cities and towns across Quebec, there is a new phenomenon of people going into the streets every night and banging pots and pans together to signal their opposition to the government’s new repressive legislation, Law 78. This is in the context of an upsurge of mass struggle and rapidly escalating tactics within a student strike that has been going on here for months. It is an unprecedented situation, and the struggle here seems to be transforming itself at what seems like breakneck speed.

On one of the first of these “pots and pans” nights, i went wandering around Cote-des-Neiges, a mixed class immigrant neighbourhood, my little pot and my little spoon in hand, both curious to see where (indeed, whether) i would find some noise, and hoping to maybe join in.

i was not surprised that all of the clanging seemed to be between Isabella and Queen Mary, i.e. where the area is at its most Quebecois, and its least working-class. At 8pm i saw people opening their doors and starting to bang. Wandering around looking for people actually on the street, i could find none. Regardless: as a tactic, especially as a new tactic, it was dramatic. You can hear someone clanging on a pot for blocks, so even though there was less than 1 person per block doing this, the effect in the area was that you could hear noises all around you. This was really effective.

As i wandered up Fulton, an older man was sitting on his stoop. He looked at me and motioned around in the air, asking if i could hear what was happening. i nodded. "Terrorism," he said in a thick European accent, "That's terrorism." Amused, and curious, i asked him if he was scared. He nodded. i asked what of, and he just repeated "They are terrorizing the city." After a brief disagreement, i left with him saying "God bless you", and then, under his breath but quite audibly, "you stupid terrorist." For what it's worth.

(Turns out i was lucky: speaking to a friend the next day, who recently moved to Cote-des-Neiges, he told me how he went out with his little pot and pan and ... got punched in the face! Luckily, the way he put it, the puncher was an old guy who couldn’t pack much force, so his main worry was that his assailant would have a heart attack. But still.)

To be clear, i believe how this is playing out in this neighbourhood - and i would guess in Montreal North, Park Ex, St-Michel, all heavily immigrant - is different than in most neighborhoods affected by the casseroles. In Quebecois working-class neighborhoods i have no trouble believing this is happening in a more organic and broad way. Similarly, in Quebecois mixed-class neighborhoods and even in neighborhoods with sizeable student populations i don't presume that participation will correlate to more middle-class streets. As such, however, this does underscore the national dimension to this surge, and hints at how this may relate to class.


"It's time to awaken; Quebecois, on your feet!"


The Labor Aristocracy
There is an argument, unpopular within the white left, that in North America and other settler societies, “the colonized peoples have been the proletariat, while the white working class has been a labor aristocracy.” [1]

While this view is by no means marginal or beyond the pale amongst people living in oppressed nations, within the white left it is extremely rare; it finds its primary expression in a current of tiny groups known as Maoist-Third-Worldist, and is most familiar to white activists thanks to J. Sakai’s book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (available online at http://www.readsettlers.org). There are variations on this position, mainly regarding the degree to which workers in oppressed internal colonies (the Black Nation/New Afrika, Aztlan, Puerto Rico, Indigenous Nations, etc.) are also labor aristocratic, with the “maximal” version of this argument holding that there is in fact no proletariat within the First World, period. [2]

While some might dismiss these as esoteric debates, occurring largely between internet activists with too much time on their hands, this would be deceptive. Within oppressed communities, in prisons, in immigrant neighbourhoods, and indeed throughout the Third World, these questions are accepted by many people as completely legitimate. Furthermore, while not necessarily expressed as such, the question of how class relates to nation is being addressed (albeit often in confused and confusing ways) every time someone asks “where was the color at [fill in the blank]”, during every discussion about whether some person was killed by police because they weren’t white or because they weren’t middle-class, every time people note how “white” a protest or group or campaign is. Or, conversely, whenever “identity politics” dovetails with middle-class politics, defying some people’s expectations.

This current surge in Quebec provides a nice field to discuss this, and different interpretations, conclusions, and political consequences of these positions. So i'm going to go somewhat out on a limb here and share some rough thoughts on what is happening, informed by my sympathy to the idea that the political behavior of the metropolitan (or First World) working class is determined by its position in the global division of labor, so that it will not act as if it "has nothing to lose but its chains", but that its dominant sections (both in terms of numbers of political influence) will adhere more closely to the forms of activity and politics normally associated with the petit bourgeoisie.


"It's a student strike; it's a popular struggle"

The Student Strike
The situation in Quebec is inspiring. Very inspiring, in fact. For those of you unfamiliar with what is happening here, it will be impossible for me to do it justice in just a few sentences, so i would suggest reading this Report on Quebec’s Student Strike. But in an inadequate nutshell: students have been on strike for over 100 days against a tuition hike – a preeminently reformist casus belli. Yet faced with at-first-routine police harassment and court orders against their pickets, the students fought back - literally - and police were sent running from angry mobs - repeatedly. The street tactics have been escalating steadily, and the State has been relying primarily on police violence and repression in the form of new legislation - Law 78 - outlawing many traditionally accepted forms of protest here (demonstrations without a permit, pickets in front of schools, strikes by education workers, wearing masks, etc.).

Rather than isolate the movement, government repression led to an explosion of public support, the most obvious current example being the aforementioned “pots and pans demonstrations” where people go out in their neighbourhoods banging their kitchenware together every night at 8pm. There are hundreds of these nightly protests, involving tens of thousands of people every night. These supplement larger nightly downtown demonstrations which have turned into riots several times over the past month. Neighbourhood assemblies have also been organized, potentially creating an opening for the struggle to extend to new fronts.

Adding to this promising situation, current plans are to disrupt the various summertime festivals on which Montreal’s tourism industry depends – starting with the Grand Prix, set for early June. Meanwhile, the police and the right-wing Liberal government continue to make all of the best of mistakes, and indeed a few days ago for the third time the government simply broke off negotiations with the student representatives.

It is the most enjoyable thing i have seen in decades, if ever.


white students in blackface,
pulling puppet which implies Charest is "really" english


The Oppressor Nation
The movement, however, is not only First World/metropolitan, it is overwhelmingly white, and while class politics play an important part in how things are framed, this is very much from a perspective that sees whitelife - in this case, Quebecois whitelife - as the norm. Putting aside the ubiquitous complaints about people being pushed out of the middle class, and the various racist incidents that will often occur when masses of white people congregate, this also plays itself out also in terms of how the government's counteroffensive is being framed. One person hit the nail on the head when they jokingly suggested as a slogan, "We're Already Racially Profiled in Small Groups, We Don't Need Law 78!"

Now, the clichéd stereotype about those of us who see the First World working class as largely compromised is that we would do nothing but shit on the student strike, that we would argue that revs should not be involved, period. Perhaps some folks might point to a certain reading of Settlers or a certain analysis of imperialism, arguing that this is mainly an uprising of white people in the metropole (i.e. the labor aristocracy), and as such that there is nothing to be gained by participating.

To be clear: i reject such a dismissive approach. It treats the privileged character of First World life as near-homogenous, with nobody experiencing privation or oppression outside of those actually producing the super-profits at the center of world capitalism. This flies in the face of lived experience, conflates the concepts of “working class” and “proletariat”, and reduces oppression (which is often determined by immediate context, and lived subjectively) to exploitation. Perhaps worst of all, it involves being closed to the possibility of the unexpected, as if we were guaranteed to have a theoretical grasp on any and all existing social contradictions.

There are divisions and differences in life-experience and suffering within the metropolitan working classes, privileged as many of them may be; if the dominant sections enjoy the profits and benefits of Canadian or Quebecois whitelife, with even many racialized sections enjoying First World privilege, there are numerous pockets whose situation is far more complicated. The problem is that to the degree that they identify with the oppressor nation, the political consciousness of these pockets remains tied to the labor aristocracy that holds sway over the class.

A dismissive approach grossly underestimates this question of consciousness, and the fact that even when we are literally fighting and challenging State power, we are still engaged in what Gramsci referred to as a "war of position", i.e. a war to open up cultural and political space. Or as some German comrades argued, as they grappled with this very question some forty years ago, “to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.” [3]

My view, and my reading of Settlers, is quite different from this cliché, even though i do consider that the global division of labor determines both what is possible and what is probable in our various struggles. What needs to be grasped is that what is happening in Quebec is a breakthrough, but it’s not the rev. While we have every reason to be overjoyed, identifying its limits will be key, not only to our ability to overcome them, but also to our survival as conditions change.


no comment

The Dangers
Thanks to the numbers involved, and the political crisis this has engendered for the State, the student strike of 2012 will likely go down in history as the defining event for a generation of Quebecois youth, the moment when, as Fanon put it, they found their mission. This is a major upheaval, not business-as-usual in the metropole. If it breaks out of its immediate limits, it will alter the very terrain upon which we will be struggling for years to come. If it is neutralized, it will represent a defeat that may weigh against us just as heavily.

True to metropolitan form, at the mobilization’s more swollen moments, radical sections become easy to miss in what becomes a humungous cross-class mass. Even while the pots-and-pans demonstrations represent a creative and promising turn, take note that the Liberal Finance Minister has also applauded the way in which this fits with the image of Montreal that he wants to project, and how they decrease the scope for property attacks during the big nightly marches. In fact, in some areas this "peaceful" mobilization has been spearheaded by the same forces that previously opposed the strike. Similarly, at the biggest demos (hundreds of thousands of people in the streets), some of the slogans may be proletarian but the foot-troops, and the money behind the buses, are middle-class or else labor-aristocratic.

In terms of neutralization, as already mentioned, the government has passed legislation (Law 78) which criminalizes various protest activities, with potential fines for organizations running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the municipal level, Montreal has changed its bylaws so that wearing a mask at demonstrations or participating in an “illegal assembly” will make one liable to heavy fines (up to $3000 for repeat offenders). Federally, the Conservative government is passing legislation to make wearing masks at demonstrations illegal, with maximum prison sentences of 5 or 10 years, depending on the circumstances.

While many protesters see this as unprecedented, and words like “dictatorship”, “police state”, and “fascism” are being bandied about, none of this surpasses the level of repression that has been directed against certain individuals and groups (most notably certain Muslim and foreign-based organizations) over the past years, the difference being one of scale not intensity. More important still, this does not come close to the level of repression that can be enacted by a State while still retaining its bourgeois democratic form, as the European experience in the 1970s and 80s bears out. Finally, we must bear in mind that non-State repression – i.e. the mobilization of “law abiding citizens” and far right forces to attack the students and the left – has so far remained relatively (though not completely) undeveloped.

People freaking out about repression does not necessarily serve us well, and may in fact prevent us/them from grasping the full scope of what can occur.

At the same time, for revolutionaries, repression will only ever be one part of how we get neutralized; isolation and demobilization through a process of integrating the bulk of protesters will be at least as important to the government’s strategy. The traditional means of doing this in metropolitan states is through social democracy, often tinged with nationalism. Indeed, in the context of Quebec, the only province where Canada’s francophone minority forms a clear majority, nationalism is likely to be more than just a “tinge”.

As such, one likely outcome is that the State channels this surge into a social-democratic project with a Quebecois nationalist dimension. Quebec Solidaire is clearly positioned to try and take advantage of this, though its small size and meager infrastructure will mean that this will be an uphill battle for it. (The New Democratic Party, Canada’s main social democratic political party, seems to have been fucked by the same national contradiction that prevented it from winning a foothold in Quebec prior to 2011: even though it is now the main federal party here it is unable to act like a social democratic party should for fear of now undercutting its potential for growth in english canada.) And of course, the PQ is feinting to the left, pretending to support the students, as there’s nothing to gain by any other position at the moment.

Any viable social democratic consolidation, regardless of the parliamentary form it takes, or even whether it manages to form a government, will sow confusion about Quebec’s actual status in the world (as an imperialist nation-without-a-state) and the actual nature of class and national oppression within Quebec. It will reduce any proletarian class consciousness and combativity. It might even unleash energies that will be instrumentalized against the most radical or the most oppressed, either within this society, or else oppressed Indigenous nations which survive within Quebec’s claimed territory. At the very least, these risk being marginalized as footnotes to the main drama at hand. All bad things, to be sure.


the current priority is to break through all patriarchal-colonialist-capitalist limitations

Engagement
While recognizing these as serious limitations on the current arc of struggle, in no way do i mean to suggest that revs should sit this one out. Rather, we who live in this oppressor-nation should be involved, albeit without illusions. This does NOT mean being involved with hesitation - tactically, we should be in with both feet, no holds barred - but it does mean that we should be careful about how we think and talk about what is going on, and wary of what strategic alliances or perspectives we get integrated into. It also means that as we adapt to the new conditions we should make sure to not abandon areas of work where we have already developed a base.

While we should be all-in tactically, strategically we should keep our eye on the limited prize of winning as big a minority as possible for our politics, which go far beyond a tuition freeze or even free education for all. We should not be disappointed or feel betrayed when the movement reveals its social democratic complexion, any more than we should when the social democrats turn on us – and we should be preparing our allies (our real ones), so that they don’t feel disappointed or betrayed either.

Our aims and our methods should therefore be minoritiarian, in preparation for a reversal-of-fortune down the line. Doing so will help our comrades, as well as those new folks we are reaching out to, to experience this reversal-of-fortune as something unfortunate but to be expected, rather than as a defeat. It will also help prepare people to navigate the forms of long-term repression that are to come, i.e. not mass arrests, but political ostracism; not having an organization banned, but having it funded and promoted with a leadership inching to the right while verbally posturing to the left; or else targeted attacks on tiny groups of "troublemakers" or “terrorists” who will be easy to spot by their not cheering whatever the new "consensus" status quo will be.

In this regard, a not improbable worst-case-scenario would involve Law 78 staying on the books after the mass mobilization subsides, at which point police will not hold back from enforcing it each and every time we take to the streets.

This minoritarian approach is complicated by the fact that we may not be at the tail end of the surge, we may only be at the beginning. Things are likely to get a lot better before they get worse. This may end this summer, or this may simply be the beginning of the first year. (Obviously there is always the hope that global changes or political breakthroughs will occur that will permit this surge to break out of the limited model i am placing it in – comrades have pointed out that world capitalism is already in a crisis, and therefore has less room to maneuver than it did in the sixties – though to those who think that spells “rev”, i would suggest they read up on 77 as well as 68, taking special note of Italy and France.)

The surest way to fuck up in terms of winning more people to our positions would be to act as if this were not a breakthrough, or to act as if things were calming down when really they are heating up. So the (subjective) challenge is in maintaining a cheery disposition but reminding oneself of a long-term gloomy forecast, keeping an umbrella in your backpack despite the sunshine outside. Or to be more prosaic and precise: to fight to break out of this cycle (of metropolitan militancy being re-integrated by patriarchal colonialist capitalism) will leave us in a better position even if we do not succeed.

But we have to fight like we mean it – as hard as we can.



Rearguard Objectives and Avenues of Advance
At the same time, we should work to encourage elements in the mass struggle which highlight deeper problems, which will break people off from their patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist nations. Or, barring that, which will serve as obstacles to reactionary tendencies within their (our) communities. Rather than abandon the terrain and capacities we have developed prior to this upsurge, this is where we can build on them, making connections that will both aid the more radical and oppressed sections of the present mobilization, while also establishing some political barricades against our opponents. (That this is already being done, in at times brilliant form, can be seen from before March 15 to after May 1, with examples ranging from CLASSE reps’ statements about Indigenous sovereignty to the upcoming trans night-time demo…)

In his book The Defeat of Solidarity,[4] author David Ost describes the rightward turn of labor in Poland in the 1990s, making the point that anger at neoliberalism was unavoidable, but that because the left and liberals opted not to organize it, it took on a right-wing, racist, and sexist complexion: “In the end, workers turned to the right because only the right appealed to them as workers, because no one else offered a clear narrative validating the class experiences they were having.”  This is similar to Sakai’s observation that to many leftists, “the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer - which they aren't unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors - or they're like ignorant scum you wouldn't waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the left.” [5]

With this worst-case-scenario in mind, we should never shy away from reaching out to people, hoping to win them over or at least create some space in which they can think outside of the patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist box. This is one way we can work to prevent the social energies that have been unleashed from being captured by the far right. We all have contradictions and doubts, and if we can sow doubts or hesitations in the minds of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people about the worst aspects of capitalism or national oppression or patriarchy, this might make it more difficult for our opponents to recruit them. It might also make it possible for us to win a few of them over to our side in the battles to come, even if they currently remain beyond our reach. As such, although at present we may only win a tiny minority over to clearly anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal positions, that doesn't mean we cannot influence much greater numbers in some more partial and long-term way.

In practical terms, there are a number of ways to do this, the most obvious being to properly contexualize repression: remembering and talking about the dozens of people killed by police in Montreal over the past decades when we discuss police violence at the ongoing protests, and placing the sexual harassment women are facing at the hands of police during these protests in the context of gendered violence being carried out by police – and other men – every day. In both these examples, our ultimate aim should be to frame these interventions in the context of opposing reactionary tendencies within the current mobilization itself, i.e. the fact that women and racialized people have been dealing with sexist and racist shit from both the State and also at times within the student-movement throughout the strike.

Theorizing and acting around this are two obvious ways of making connections, of extending the offensive both within the mobilization and in new ways outside of it. This is the liberatory potential that exists within the dialectic of oppression and revolt.

Of course, other possibilities abound: resisting the ongoing deportations, most glaringly perhaps the case of Dany Villanueva; solidarity with resistance elsewhere, for instance the ongoing prison hunger strikes and rebellions in the u.s., which can be related to prison-expansion plans here; protests and attacks around the anti-abortion bill that is about to be voted on federally in parliament; support for Indigenous resistance everywhere, including of course in regards to Plan Nord; what people do the next time tragedy strikes and police kill someone in this city (you have a plan, right?); mobilization around the new Employment Insurance changes … the list goes on and on …

One nice example of something comrades have been doing: there have been noise demonstrations held outside of area prisons where people arrested in the context of the current movement have been held, making connections between targeted political repression and the broader prison system, and building on previous more limited initiatives of this sort over the past years. This kind of action makes all the right things easier to see.

In the current situation, where militant tactics have provided so much of the fuel that has fired this surge forward, any disruptive resistance to any of these attacks will be seen as relating to the broader upheaval. Though this may not last long, for the moment the tactics themselves have become the symbol of the general politics at play. While tactics must always be tailored to what one’s base will support, with a minoritarian strategy it is important to remember that the base in question is not the general public at large or even your average protester. (By the same token, with a strategy of sowing doubts amongst our opponents in the long-term, actions that negate our politics will of course lead to defeats.)

The trick remains to engage in these more specific, sharper, conflicts in a way that does not instrumentalize them to buttress the “broader” mobilization, but which rather uses them to splinter people off or at least tug on people from the cross-class mass now in the streets.

map showing where the "pots and pans" protests were occurring as of May 25

Solidarity from the Oppressed?
As to our comrades who are not from this oppressor-nation and who do not focus their political activity within it, this article is not directed at them, as their decision on how or even whether to relate to this mobilization will have to be made with different criteria in mind. Group autonomy and self-determination do not mean that members of oppressed communities and nations should not join in this mobilization, they simply mean that this decision should be made without illusions, and with specific goals and factors in mind. Goals and factors different from what needs to be considered by those of us within the oppressor-nation.

Calls to “find the color” in any oppressor-nation mobilization, or to make everything “inclusive”, come from multiple, even hostile, class and political stands. Sometimes the oppressed are better off not lending their energies to mobilizations that do not serve their interests. We need to get used to the idea that if people from oppressed communities are not joining in some allegedly “broad” mobilization, maybe that’s because they have better things to do. Not necessarily a problem to be solved. Simply a choice that has to be made by people in (and not merely from) those communities, and it goes without saying that it needs to be made autonomously, not as the result of some call or demand or request from the settler left.

In terms of internationalism, the worst thing that the settler radical left can do is provide an excessively rosy picture of what the situation is. The second worst thing would be to provide an excessively gloomy one.

At the same time, when comrades criticize racist and sexist behavior and chauvinism, remedying this should be a priority. Not so that we can do a better job at recruiting more “color” to our events or because we are embarrassed by a lack of “diversity” or to hush up news that might damage our image - all reactions that have more to do with neocolonialism than antiracism. The main reason should not be to seduce allies (who might not benefit from such an alliance, after all), but simply because these forms of oppression are inimical to our politics and our principles, period. To the degree that this is a strategic priority, it is because racism, sexism, and national chauvinism are three of the strongest chains tying people to the labor aristocratic and middle-class elements that will try to drag this movement into the social democratic camp, and thereby instrumentalize it against the most oppressed. This is the ominous alternative to the aforementioned ways to extend the struggle; we can refer to it as the reactionary potential that exists within the dialectic of oppression and revolt.

In the here and now, the worst example of this kind of approach is summed up in the slogan "students and immigrants, same struggle" - a banner i saw at the monster demo on May 22. The conflation of interests implied by such "unite and fight" catchphrases is simply dishonest, and this despite the fact that the folks who say such things often mean well, and may even be comrades. These slogans cover up what we should be trying to expose. Indeed, the political content of such slogans is just as racist as the white students who wore blackface to a protest a few weeks back – if you think about it, they’re actually saying the same thing.


"After 2012, the chasm has become an abyss"

By Way of Conclusion
To get back to my little life in my little neighbourhood: a few of us got together last week, and by the end of the evening we were at times as many as fifteen walking through the streets, getting lots of smiles and occasionally having people lean out from their windows to chime in with their own kitchenware. Not everyone knew why we were banging pots and pans. Some people did not even know what we were talking about when we said “the student strike.” Personally, i hope if this continues in our neighbourhood, perhaps the focus can be something local folks can relate to more - i.e. against racism and/or against the police…

But i digress: it was a nice night - the most important thing is to be there, in the streets, alongside people - and better to try and fail than not to try at all.

For that reason, as well as all of the others outlined above, i don’t take the position that we should boycott these surges. Nor do i agree with the superficial antiracist approach that we should join them in order to add issues to some laundry list. However, i also reject the view that we should have a unitary response to them, or that we should blur the lines between the specific and the universal. Such an approach generally leads to privileged elements gaining political hegemony and leaves the radical – and, where they exist, proletarian – elements at their mercy.

for what it's worth...




Foonotes
[1] As stated by J. Sakai in When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited.

[2] While the question of Quebec’s status is an interesting and important one, for the purposes of this discussion it is unambiguously NOT an internal colony, as regardless of its irregular State form, it is fully integrated into the First World/metropolitan core.

[3] Red Army Faction, “The Black September Action in Munich:Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle”

[4] David Ost The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell University Press, 2005), 96-7.

[5] J. Sakai When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited. 



Tuesday, May 04, 2010

I’ve Learned to Dissimulate: Michael Ryan's Introduction to Clenched Fists, Empty Pockets

Clenched Fists Empty PocketsClenched Fists, Empty Pockets is a pamphlet recently published by Kersplebedeb, comprised of texts by Swedish working-class activists detailing their experiences in their country's middle-class left. This edition also includes an introduction by Michael Ryan, presenting his own experiences in the North American left.



I’ve Learned to Dissimulate
Introduction to the North American Edition of Clenched Fists, Empty Pockets, by Michael Ryan

What interest could a pamphlet cataloguing the personal experiences of a series of Swedish working-class activists with the middle-class left of their country have for a North American public? In his introduction to the German-language edition, Gabriel Kuhn describes Sweden’s working-class movement as the “most institutionally successful in Europe,” pointing out that the Swedish Social Democratic Party has only lost four elections since 1920, that the CP (and its successor, the Left Party) has held seats in parliament almost without interruption since 1917 and that the anarcho-syndicalist-oriented Swedish Workers Central Organization has been active since 1910.

Certainly, these are conditions that are not even superficially similar to those that reign in North America. In the U.S., there is no institutional workers’ party – people call the Democratic Party the left for fuck’s sake – the CP plays no noticeable role and anarcho-syndicalism exists, to the degree that it does at all, in a mist of nostalgic romanticism.

In Canada, the situation isn’t much better. The social democratic New Democratic Party has never broken out of opposition at a federal level and is widely discredited at the provincial level, and there is little organized working-class left to speak of beyond that.

However, the significance of this pamphlet does not lie in comparing European and North American societies. Rather, what is important here is the skill with which the authors in this pamphlet elucidate the complexities of what they call a “class journey.” By “class journey” the authors mean more than simply clawing one’s way up the economic food chain. In his essay included here, co-editor Fredric Carlsson-Andersson addresses this issue directly: “It isn’t only your job that determines your class, nor is it the amount of money you’re paid. Among other things, it’s a question of values and cultural preferences.” It is from these aspects that the concept of “class journey” derives its poignancy. As Atilla Pişkin points out in his piece, when people from the working class choose to act on middle-class terrain – and the alternative left is certainly such a terrain – “They land on unfamiliar territory. Once there, they have to establish themselves anew.”

When Carlsson-Andersson recounts once attending a Marxist-Leninist reading group, but not returning because he “didn’t understand the language they were speaking” or when Kakan Hermansson speaks of middle-class activists “steamrolling over workers with Marx quotes,” it’s immediately familiar. Many years ago, I (like Carlsson-Andersson, only once) attended a Maoist study group. I was shocked to hear people praising Stalin. When I asked for clarification, I was instructed to prepare a self-criticism and handed a reading list to help me do so – paternalism and a sense of superiority meant to make me feel small.

I was done with Maoism, but I was far from done with the left. I may never have done that “self-criticism,” but I had learned an important lesson: the cornerstone of middle-class leftism is the manipulation of words, the use of words as weapons – not so much against the class enemy as in an endless competition for ideological hegemony on their own terrain. I could not possibly estimate the number of hours I spent in smoky bars and trendy cafés discussing the working class, oppression, exploitation, alienation, sexism, racism, and so on and so forth. I mastered the basics of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao. I dabbled in Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara. I lapped up the European intellectuals: the Frankfurt School, Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci … I got my requisite Fanon, Nkrumah, Lumumba. I encountered intellectual feminism in the form of Kate Millet, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone … Thusly armed, I entered the game that Carlsson-Andersson succinctly portrays in the following way: “I watched how others made their moves: first this side, then the other side – just like a board game.”

Indeed, I could counter your Marx quote with my Luxemburg quote, trump your Engels with my Adorno, silence you with a snippet of Fanon, blast you with a bit of de Beauvoir. What did any of that have to do with the liberation of the working class (or anyone else)? Nothing, actually. The real objective is quite accurately characterized by Atilla Pişkin: “Shining brightly in conversations has no goal beyond shining brightly in conversations. It is part of ensuring one’s status.”

As Fredric Carlsson-Andersson and Atilla Pişkin explain in their introduction, “one can come from the working class and learn the rules of the middle class. … Even if you manage that … you will never feel like you completely belong.” And that’s the rub: the so-called “class journey” is not a smooth transition from one class to another – at least that hasn’t been my experience – it is to some degree a betrayal. When reading Carlsson-Andersson’s account of Ronny Ambjörnsson giving “childhood friends a phony address when he met them for the first time in ten years, to prevent them from visiting him,” I had to cringe, recalling an occasion on which I pretended to be unavailable when a childhood friend was passing through town – I was afraid he would embarrass me in front of my middle-class leftist friends with his lack of sophistication.

When Atilla Pişkin writes, “I’ve been moving in your circles for such a long time that hardly any of you would guess that I come from the working class. I’ve learned to dissimulate,” he is describing an important part of my experience. What, however, is the cost of this sort of “passing”? One may “land on unfamiliar territory” in the process, but this territory is not unfamiliar simply because it is new: it is in fact a sort of no man’s land between two territories, between two classes, if you will. Should you succeed in mastering the rules of the middle class, learning the language(s), absorbing the appraisal of the arts, learning, as Fredric Carlsson-Andersson puts it, “to drink tea out of expensive Moomin cups” – you will find yourself alienated from your own class roots, from your own community.

But there is more than that to this dissimulation. If you eventually learn to move smoothly among the middle class, if you read their books, watch their films, discuss issues using their language, you will only reinforce their myth of a world where the middle class is the norm – a myth so powerful in North America as to have become a truism of sorts. They may confide in you about their university “salad years” when they were “very poor.” They may tell you about the job they had for a while waiting tables or pumping gas – the genuine working-class experience that gives them the insight that allows them to opine about the solution to the “problems” faced by the working class. You may be exposed to the galling romanticization of the working class that marks so much of left middle-class rhetoric: the purity of spirit that arises from an honest day’s work with one’s hands – they know because they did it one summer. There is no malevolence intended. They aren’t intentionally trivializing the lives of others. Theirs is simply the blindness bred by the certainty that arises from a sense of entitlement that is to all intents and purposes a reflex.

For a working-class individual, a person who must live in the world beyond the abstractions of the left debate, the choices available – remaining in the working class or engaging in the sort of “class journey” this pamphlet explores – are both grim in their own way. I was young, only in my early teens, when I began to gravitate to the alternative left. It was the early 70s and both the student revolt and the socio-cultural youth revolt offered a poignant counterpoint to the life that otherwise lay ahead of me – a life that I explored off and on for the better part of a decade in my late teens and early twenties, when I worked first in an outboard motor factory and subsequently for the railroad. Anyone who romanticizes factory work is an idiot – at least that’s how it appears to me. Factory work is dirty, dangerous and – when non-unionized, as was the case for me – poorly paid. It cost me some of my hearing and damaged my lungs.

The railroad was, however, a much more sobering experience. It was a “good job.” The union was more than a bit yellow, but the pay was generous, the conditions were acceptable, the work was secure and the pension at the end was reasonable – the trade off: long hours and an erratic work schedule. It offered access to the trappings of a middle-class life – a home in the suburbs, a couple of cars, a few weeks a year vacationing in some interchangeable “sun spot,” maybe a small country home with a barbecue in the back yard. I knew it was a “good deal,” and I knew I had an important decision to make: I quit, and my “class journey” began in earnest.

It soon became obvious it would be a one-way journey. The further I drifted into alternative left intellectualism, the further I drifted from the stable Irish Catholic working-class community in which I had grown up. The more I came to see myself as part of the revolutionary working-class left, the more middle-class my milieu became, until, in the end, I was gazing across an unimaginable abyss at the “land” I had come from. When I visited the family I had largely left behind, I felt like a tourist. We no longer shared an experience – in truth, we no longer shared even a language.

Although I had become estranged from my roots, from the very experiences that had first formed my worldview, I had not in the process become a comfortable member of the left to which I had gravitated. I joined that left looking for solutions to the many layers of oppression that make up the fabric of our society. What I found was a milieu where books replaced human exchange, where clever quotes replaced dialogue, where issues were most smoothly dealt with when they were at a significant geographical distance. I found a world where every imaginable oppression was sifted, graded and slotted into a curious and subjective hierarchy – women’s oppression; the oppression of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgendered people; of indigenous peoples; of whites in the First World; of Third World peoples; of animals; of the planet itself – but sometime in the 90s, the idea that the working class no longer existed in the First World began to gain currency.

Kakan Hermansson addresses this issue in her essay included in this pamphlet. She writes, “When I was at secondary school, young conservatives explained to me that there was no longer a working class, because most of the factories and mines had been closed. Today, I hear the same argument from the left.” How is one to understand this glaringly sweeping blind spot, given that it is quite literally impossible to leave one’s home without everywhere seeing the working-class people who maintain the infrastructure of our society? It seems to me that such a distortion could only arise in a situation in which ideology trumps reason and the myth of the middle-class society has been uncritically embraced – in a situation in which the pedantic sifting of the relationship to the means of production becomes more important than experienced oppression. It is a delusion that someone from the working class, regardless of how far she or he may have proceeded on a “class journey,” could only countenance at the cost of self-negation. And it is just that sort of self-negation that makes up the many contours of the journey from the working class to the middle class – and nowhere more so than on the left.

This is not a problem that will be easily addressed and resolved, but it is a problem that must be resolved if the left hopes to constitute something more than a parlour game played with big words and obtuse concepts. I’ve read your books. There’s a lot that’s of value in them. However, something critical is missing – the genuine voices of working-class people. No longer should working-class people be faced with a choice between continued oppression and embracing alienation. It’s time for you to listen. This pamphlet is a good starting point.



Clenched Fists, Empty Pockets: true life experiences of working-class activists in the middle class left

Clenched Fists Empty PocketsHot off the copy machine, Clenched Fists Empty Pockets is a pamphlet just released by Kersplebedeb, examining the true life experiences of working-class activists in the middle class left.

In Clenched Fists Empty Pockets six working-class activists from Sweden discuss their experiences with class and middle-class hegemony in a variety of left-wing scenes and organizations. In doing so they flesh out the complexities and limits of what in Sweden is referred to as a “class journey.” Dealing with more than economic realities, the authors grapple with the full gamut of cultural and social class hierarchies that are embedded in the society and the left.

As Fredric Carlsson-Andersson and Atilla Pişkin explain in their introductory essay:

The texts gathered here deal with the left as well, but in a different way: they address an alternative movement that regularly talks about the working class, but often in circles that lack even a single working-class member. In particular, though, the texts are about us: comrades from the working class who find themselves on the left, and who find themselves feeling lost and out of place – obviously, not always, but often enough. It’s easy to imagine the left as unconditionally welcoming. However, that’s not the case. As in all other scenes, the left has strict standards of right and wrong. It can take years to learn all of the rules.

This selection of essays was originally published in a German pamphlet, itself a selection of texts from the Swedish book En knuten näve i fickan, published by Yelah in 2008. The German pamphlet was published under the title Mit geballter Faust in der Tasche: Klassenkonflikte in der Linken–Debatten aus Schweden by Syndikat-A in March 2009.

This english-language edition contains a new preface by translator Gabriel Kuhn, and an introduction by former Montreal activist Michael Ryan.
Regular price $4.50, available directly from leftwingbooks.net for $3.00 - click here to order.

Product Details
edited by Fredric Carlsson-Andersson and Atilla Pişkin
translated by Gabriel Kuhn and André Moncourt
saddle-stitched pamphlet
36 pages
published by Kersplebedeb in 2010
ISBN 978-1-894946-34-6



Friday, October 30, 2009

Class, Nation, and Health: with some thoughts about H1N1, and building movement capacity


What follows is a rough version of a talk i gave at Montreal's Native Friendship Center, at the Anti-Colonial Thanksgiving organized by Frigo Vert last night. Many of the articles and documents referenced here are also referenced on the new Kersplebedeb H1N1 page.


I’m here to say just a few words about health inequalities, with particular attention to this new flu, the H1N1 or swine flu, and some concerns around it.

The flu is something I became interested in earlier this year, when my husband caught it and became very sick. He spent two months in the hospital, most of that time on a ventilator in a medically-induced coma, and he probably would have died if not for the fact that he received excellent medical care.

People say that you have to already have a serious health condition to be at risk from H1N1, but my husband’s only relevant health problems were very mild asthma and the fact that he gets migraines. In fact, they’re saying now that a quarter of the people who have died of H1N1 were in perfect health beforehand.

Now luckily my husband didn’t die, though his seven weeks in the ICU did make me realize some things. For one, it gave me an appreciation of the fact that even though not many people were dying of the flu, an unknown number of people were getting very very sick, and it was only the fact that there were enough ventilators and ICU beds that allowed them to survive. (The clearest figure i could find about this was that for every H1N1 death, there were four people critically ill with the virus who had to be kept alive in an ICU.)

And that got me thinking about health inequalities, and how they might play out with the flu.

By “health inequality”, I don’t mean the fact that some of us are more healthy than others, or that some of us see the doctor more often. I don’t even mean just the fact that some of us have more ready access to medical care, though that's getting closer. What I’m talking about is not an individual thing, but a collective phenomenon. The fact that different groups of people face different obstacles and challenges to being healthy. That the family you were raised in, the neighbourhood you grew up in, the job you end up doing and the place where you end up living as an adult, these factors all affect your chances of getting particular illnesses, they affect how readily you’ll have access to treatment if you do get sick, and as a bottom line, these things all affect how long you’re likely to live.

That’s what I mean by health inequality.

Health inequality is normally the result of some other kind of inequality. It’s not just caused by bad luck or genetics. More often than not, it is a result of financial inequality, unequal power relations, your position in society.

There are many useful ways of looking at this, but two that i find particularly helpful are class and nation.



Class and Life Expectancy: Some Examples from Montreal

If you go out this door, walk down to St-Catherine street and then take a left and walk for an hour, you’ll end up in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, Montreal’s working-class east end. Folks there have a life expectancy in their low to mid-seventies. In fact, bucking the general trend in most countries, the life expectancy for older residents of the neighbourhood actually went down between 1998 and 2008. (By life expectancy we don't mean how old most people are dying now - that's referred to as the "average age of death" and is usually significantly younger. Life expectancy is capitalism's forecast as to how old people born today are likely to live - indeed, the fact that there continue to be such discrepancies in life expectancy is a stark indicator that the 21st century is not intended to be any more egalitarian than the last one was.)

If on the other hand, you were to go out this door, walk down to St Catherine street and take a right, and walk for about an hour, you’d be in Westmount, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in all of Canada. The folks there, just to use the same measure, have a life expectancy in their eighties.

Now what makes a life expectancy? Lots of things, for instance: how common violence is in your community, what kind of food people eat (and what kind is sold at your local supermarket), what opportunities you have for physical exercise, how stressful or dangerous your job is likely to be, and of course how likely you are to get sick with various diseases due to poor sanitation or overcrowding or pollution.

The thing about these various factors, is they all follow the same contours of wealth and political power. When I was doing a bit of research for this talk, I came across a page hidden like a needle in a haystack on the Quebec government website, in which Montreal was divided up into different neighbourhoods and each neighbourhood was listed along with the prevalence of various diseases, various "quality of life" indicators, and also average annual income. These statistics are not completely honest, engaging in a bit of demographic gerrymandering, by including a few blocks where people are poor into the wealthier neighbourhoods, and including a few middle class blocks in with the working-class neighbourhoods, to dilute the impact of the numbers - but even so, a predictable pattern emerges. The same neighbourhoods – places like Hochelaga Maisonneuve, St-Henri, Montreal North –
suffer from higher rates of various health problems, and the same places enjoy better than average health, and those are the wealthier and safer areas. (Although lacking the health information, similar socio-economic statistics can be found on this City of Montreal web page.)

It makes sense, after all, this is one of the big reasons people want to be middle class, or upper class, the fact that they can then afford a healthier and longer and safer and more pleasant life, not only for themselves but for their children, too.

This all is one way of thinking about heath inequality.



National Disparities Within Canada

If class is one useful way to look at injustice, another important concept is nation. The two aren’t the same, but they’re closely related.

Different nations, different peoples, live inside what is called Canada, experiencing very different living conditions, and obviously this leads to differences in health. We may live just down the block from each other, but for all that many of us effectively live in different countries.

Again, to use life expectancy as a bottom line, folks in Westmount might be expected to live into their eighties, folks in Hochelaga Maisonneuve into their mid- seventies, well Indigenous people in Canada, on average, have a life expectancy in their low seventies (high sixties for men, mid-seventies for women). That's all the Indigenous folks counted as such by Statistics Canada, including those who have "made it", including those in communities with more resources: a national average just slightly below that of the poorest of Montreal's neighbourhoods.

Canadian colonialism and genocide create this discrepancy - the Indigenous life expectancy results from different health issues and trends than what is found in the settler community. We're not just talking a little more of this disease or slightly less of that vitamin, but tragically high death rates amongst young people, often due to violence and various forms of substance abuse (See pages S54-S55 of the Revue Canadienne de Santé Publique Vol. 96, Supplément 2). That’s a direct result of genocide, Canada's long term assault on the ability of subject nations to reproduce and maintain themselves in a healthy way.



Looking at Communities

Now these statistics are just that, statistics. They’re all about averages and generalities, they deal with large numbers of people, millions in fact. For that reason, while they're useful as an initial tool, they can also trick you into missing some important details. Just as it's misleading to talk in broad generalities about “Canada” without specifying the different classes and nations here, it’s also misleading to talk in generalities about neighbourhoods or broad national categories like “Quebecois” or “settler” or “Indigenous” without keeping in mind that not everyone in these categories is dealing with the same situation. Definitely not all settler communities are the same, definitely not all immigrant communities are the same, definitely not all Indigenous communities are the same. Ignoring this has real political consequences that can screw us up.

Now a community may be geographic, like Hochelaga Maisonneuve or St. Henri or Kanesetake, but it may be more amorphous than that. Not all communities are found on maps, not all communities have a longitude and a latitude. We may not normally think of them as communities, but in terms of health, your job may provide a community, for instance a factory may be a community. A school may be a community. If you're a sex worker, then that may be a community. And if you’re living on the street that’s a particular community, if you’re living at the Y, or staying at a shelter, then that’s a particular community. If you’re in prison, then you'd better believe it: in terms of your health, that's a distinct community.



Locked Up or On the Street

This does not diminish the importance of nations and classes. On the contrary: if you check out these situations, or if you’re forced to live in them, you see that in fact they’re not separate. In fact, it is in specific communities that nations and classes exist in their sharpest, most intense, form. Like on the street: in Hamilton, Ontario, for instance, where Indigenous people represent 2% of the city’s population, but 20% of the homeless population. Or Edmonton, where Indigenous people make up 43% of the homeless population, though only 6% of those who have homes. (Aboriginal Housing Background Paper, Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation November 2004)

Or take a look at Canadian prisons and penitentiaries: Indigenous people are locked up over six times as often as anyone else in Canada. A few years back they did a "snapshot" study of all the prisons, penitentiaries and jails in Canada, to see exactly who was locked up: in Saskatchewan Indigenous people were imprisoned at almost ten times the overall provincial rate; they were 76 per cent of that province’s prisoner population. In Manitoba, 61 per cent of prisoners were Indigenous; in Alberta, it was over 35 per cent. (Racial Profiling in Canada, p. 81, quoted in Sketchy Thoughts)

So when we’re talking about communities, even when we don’t mean actual geographic communities that you can find on a map, even when we’re talking about something like being on the street or in prison, it should be clear that we’re still talking about something that has very clear class and national characteristics. Not everyone has an equal chance of ending up in these situations, not everyone has an equal chance of getting out of them.

In terms of health, in terms of well-being, if you’re in a particularly oppressed community, your reality will be a lot more intense than what you see in the broad reassuring national statistics. To give an example: 1 in 125 people in Canada is thought to have Hepatitis C, a potentially fatal illness. According to a study carried out in 2004, the rate is almost one in four (23.6%) for prisoners in the federal system. To give another example: Canada-wide, just over one in a thousand (0.13%) people were HIV positive in 2004, but almost one in twenty women in prison (4.7%) had the virus. (Moulton, Donalee. "Canadian inmates unhealthy and high risk." CMAJ: Canadian Medical Association Journal. 2004) Similar kinds of discrepancies exist if you’re talking about tuberculosis or many other serious health problems.

Prisoners are one such group, people without good housing are another. A study that just came out this week in the British Medical Journal tells us that in Canada, if you're a woman living in a rooming house at age 25, your life expectancy is less than fifty years of age. If you’re a man living on the street at age 25, your overall life expectancy is less than forty. Less than half the national average. (Hwang, Stephen W., Mortality among residents of shelters, rooming houses, and hotels in Canada: 11 year follow-up study, BMJ 2009;339:b4036)

Understand it: nations and classes find their lived reality in communities. Communities with their own vulnerabilities and peculiarities, their own cultures, their own realities. This is important when thinking about health crises, because when disaster strikes, it will normally strike first in a specific community. Partly because germs and pollutants are distributed that way, and partly because social power and wealth are distributed that way. When there's an outbreak of some disease, most communities will probably be mildly affected, if at all. Oftentimes, there will even be big differences within various oppressed and colonized peoples, as only certain subgroups are made to bear the brunt of whatever capitalism is dishing up this season. (At least at first.)

So we have this obscene situation, that as a society, we’re often moaning about possible disasters that aren’t very likely at all, while people around us are actually living the disaster, or living the crisis, right now before our eyes. But most people choose not to see it.

It’s important to keep this in mind, because if you yourself are in a community struck by disaster, then these big reassuring statistics can make you feel like what's happening to you is exceptional and aberrant, perhaps even your fault or your community's fault. But in reality while it may be exceptional, it is also intrinsic to the system, and more often than not your personal hell has been noted and deemed acceptable by those who claim to be in charge.

On the other hand, if you are lucky enough to not be in the line of fire, then those statistics, by lumping people and communities together in these big categories, can give you a false sense that nothing anywhere is really all that bad. Those cases where people are in a serious crisis, where diseases like tuberculosis and Hepatitis C are not only common but are the norm, those situations end up being hidden, camouflaged by the large numbers of cases where people are managing to hold it all together.



H1N1: Parsing Opinions

This new flu, the "swine flu" or H1N1, it's an easy topic to spin bullshit about, and a lot of people are spinning bullshit about it. It’s easy to spin bullshit because this is a new strain of the flu, and it hasn’t been around during a flu season yet, and so no one can really know how serious it will be. According to some people the flu will wipe everyone out, according to some people it’s harmless but the vaccine will kill you – and all these folks seem to contradict themselves and rely on junk science, but they get a hearing because most of us know we can’t trust the government, and we’re often scientifically illiterate ourselves. If you’re bored, you can make up any old end-of-the-world fantasy story, and someone out there is likely to believe you. (If you don't believe me, just try it.)

But just because we don’t know something, that doesn’t mean that we can’t talk intelligently. Just because any crazy idea will get a hearing, doesn’t mean that it’s pointless to try and be logical and reasonable in seeing what might come.

Within the sane range of opinion, there’s two ways of looking at H1N1, and at what is likely to occur. One way is to point out that most people do not get very sick from it. Only 90 people in Canada have died so far from H1N1, while the regular flu kills thousands every year. This is an important point. According to this view, it's not so much a pandemic as a scamdemic, a fabricated excuse for some big pharmaceutical companies to boost their profits.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the regular flu normally kills hardly anyone in the summertime or spring, and that’s when H1N1’s deaths have occurred so far. To compare the regular flu's winter toll with that of H1N1 over the summer is to make certain assumptions that contradict what years of epidemiology tell us about when flu infections - and serious illnesses, and deaths - will spike.

The bottom line is we just don’t know how serious or how mild the flu will be this winter, and winter is when the vast majority of flu deaths normally occur.

In the meantime though, we do have the experience of the H1N1 this spring. Then the virus played itself out much like other illnesses: people in less wealthy and more oppressed communities were more prone to catching it, and thus formed a larger proportion of those who got very sick. There was a good article in the Globe and Mail a little while back, in the science section, which made exactly this point; its title was “Influenza has a cure: affluence”.

To give one example of how this worked, in June, 14% of people with H1N1 showing up at emergency rooms all across Quebec were showing up at just one hospital, the Montreal Jewish General. This may in part be because it’s just a better hospital and more proficient at diagnosing people, but it may also have something to do with the fact that it’s located in the middle of Cote-des-Neiges, one of the more heavily immigrant neighbourhoods in Montreal. While Cote-des-Neiges is a mixed class neighbourhood, it does contain pockets of real poverty, bad living conditions, and overcrowding. (This statistic, of 14%, was discussed at an information seminar about H1N1 at the Jewish General in June. i am unaware of it having been published to date.)

But there’s something important to grasp beyond the general fact that the flu will be more prevalent in less wealthy neighbourhoods. Like I was saying, no matter what the picture painted by broad statistics, when you look at the specifics you’re going to always find certain communities dealing with much worse situations.

That is precisely what we saw this spring, in a number of communities, where H1N1 became something much much worse. When it became so widespread that a tipping point was reached. To speak in dialectics, one could say the quantitative – the numbers of people sick - became qualitative, meaning it changed the nature of the entire situation. Local resources were overwhelmed, and the crisis entered a different phase. In Garden Hill, St. Theresa’s Point, Sandy Lake – all Indigenous communities – the flu pandemic got completely out of control, local nursing stations were unable to support people’s needs, and over a hundred people had to be medi-vacced to intensive care units in Winnipeg hospitals. Several people died.

Tipping points are like dominos, when one occurs it always risks setting off the next. In terms of what happened this summer, this almost did happen, as ICUs in Winnipeg filled up with critically ill H1N1 patients and there was a real fear that there would not be enough ventilators. Had that occurred (thankfully it didn't) many more people would have died.

While Garden Hill, St. Theresa's Point and Sandy Lake were the only places we know of where things escalated to that level, Indigenous people across Canada were suffering disproportionately from the flu. According to the way the government measures these things, Indigenous people make up less than 4% of the Canadian population – but this summer by the same measure Indigenous people made up 25% of those who got critically ill from H1N1. In Manitoba, where Indigenous people make up roughly 10% of the population, this summer at one point they were over 60% of those who found themselves on ventilators, struggling for life in ICUs.

Nor is it only Indigenous people. Compared to most places, Canada is a fairly “white” country, but according to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, less than 50% of those who became critically ill with H1N1 in Canada this summer were white; the majority were people of color. It’s perhaps also worth noting that that same report found that almost 70% of those who got critically ill were women, which shows this disease has a gender profile that hasn’t been given enough attention.

We may not be able to predict the future, but given what we do know, we can make some reasonable guesses about the flu this winter. It is clear that the incidence of disease will not be random, and that not all communities will fare the same. No matter what the broad, general, abstract “Canadian” experience this winter, it is guaranteed that in some specific communities the situation will be much much worst. Those hardest hit will almost certainly be Indigenous communities, immigrant communities, working class communities.



A Suggestion to My Comrades

At the height of the outbreak in Garden Hill this spring, Grand Chief David Harper asked Health Canada to set up a field hospital in the community, an idea that the government rejected.

Since then, the Assembly of First Nations asked the federal government to send flu kits to Indigenous households across the country – Health Canada didn't see the point, so instead the AFN had to raise money on its own from the provinces and the private sector.

Just a couple of weeks ago Grand Chief Harper was quoted in the newspaper again, saying “By now, we would have liked to have field hospitals set up so our people don’t have to wait to be airlifted to Winnipeg for treatment.”

This is a reasonable request: for months now everyone from local healthcare providers to the World Health Organization has been saying that if a major crisis occurs in Canada, if a tipping point is reached, if the quantitative becomes qualitative, it will most likely happen in one of the many remote and impoverished Indigenous communities. But the government isn't worried.

So it begs a question for me – which of our movements have things like this on the radar? Which of our movements is poised to respond to a request for a field hospital, or any kind of useful emergency intervention? It reminds me of the ice storm back in 1998, when the whole city of Montreal was paralyzed, many without electricity for weeks, and the army was sent in. Many people were relieved to see the soldiers, we felt we needed rescuing. Why couldn’t any of our movements have played that role?

And why does this question seem silly to some of us? As if the ability to respond to a crisis, the ability to serve the people when the people really need serving, as if all of that was beyond the scope of our responsibilities.

Some of us have the skills, and i know many of us would love to see these capacities developed, but the question is a collective one, not an individual one. We need to explicitly decide as a movement that that’s where we’re going. We need autonomous structures, separate from (and ideally hidden from) the state, in which those with medical skills can frame their work, even if they may be operating within a hospital or a community health organization. We need to become scientifically literate, so that we don’t fall for the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory. Even if not everyone has the interest or the proclivity to get a grasp on "hard sciences", as a movement we need to value that kind of thinking, to appropriate it, to make it our own.

Most importantly, we need to think in terms of filling the role that the state plays, dealing not only with healthcare, but also with everything from garbage disposal to sewage treatment to conflict resolution. If we claim to be against the state, then that becomes our job. If we fail at it, if we fail to do a better job than what's being done now, then even if we do someday drive out the state, even if we do establish no-go areas, sooner or later it will be the people themselves who will demand the enemy's return.

H1N1 may or may not play itself out as a disaster this winter. I certainly don’t believe it will be some Canada-wide cataclysm, but I think it’s likely that in certain specific areas it will be a serious problem, and some people will suffer. If tipping points are reached, if the surge capacity of particular communities is overwhelmed, it won't be pretty. I can tell you from personal experience that the disease can be horrendous.

We know the Harper government is ideologically predisposed to letting poor people die. We know capitalism and colonialism will only make the situation worst. Knowing this, I would argue that our movements have a responsibility to think beyond zines and blogs and lobbying, that we have a responsibility to start doing what we can to build our capacity to offer real help to people whenever and wherever a crisis does occur.




Sunday, September 14, 2008

Working Class Struggle in Quebec: 1970-

There was an excellent talk yesterday by Richard St-Pierre, about his own personal experience of working class struggles in Quebec since his politicization as a teenager in 1970.

This was probably one of the best talks i have ever heard in Montreal, and it is a real shame that it was not recorded. St-Pierre's itinerary is like many of his generation: a working class teenager, he was initially attracted by the "social gospel" of Roman Catholicism and the idea of armed struggle to win an independent and socialist Quebec. He then quickly became one of the tens of thousands of people who rejected these ideas to plunge into the Maoist movement that was so active in 70s Quebec.

Where St-Pierre differs from most of his comrades is that he has not only remained politically active but after a few twists and turns his commitment to working class revolution led him to left communism, specifically the tiny International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. Despite his current adherence to the IBPR, St-Pierre did us all the service of recounting the groups and struggles he had been involved in as he saw them at the time, while not being shy to point out, and take responsibility for, specific errors.

The talk was organized in a non-sectarian, comradely manner, by the Montreal local of the North East Federation of Anarchist-Communists (NEFAC), and perhaps forty people attended. While he spoke for over two hours, St-Pierre had time to get through less than half of what he had prepared, and particularly frustrating to me, the section he had to skip was the section on "consciuosness", which i'm guessing would have been the most provocative and interesting bit.

If he speaks again, i strongly encourage you all to attend. In the meantime, with a bit of luck and time over the next few days, i'll try and write up a more detailed report from the notes i took.