The Source of Our Values Are Around Us, Research Time, 13/06/2014

I love watching a horse race. And by horse race, I mean election. For one thing, I’m very impressed with Kathleen Wynne’s victory,* happy that Tim Hudak is leaving the leadership position of the Ontario Conservatives, and pleased that Andrea Horwath got her comeuppance for losing some very good MPPs, gaining some other very good MPPs, and forcing an election that cost the New Democrats their voice in the provincial budget process. 

* I refuse to make THAT pun. Everyone, intentionally and unintentionally, makes THAT pun.

I’m an NDP member, and I have been for seven years now. I was proud to have supported Nathan Cullen and Tom Mulcair in the 2012 federal leadership convention. I was proud to have marched on strike in 2009 with CUPE local 3906 alongside David Christopherson (federal MP, Hamilton Centre) and Paul Miller (provincial MPP, Hamilton East). I’ll proudly support the federal NDP in next year’s federal election. I live in Horwath’s own district, but I voted Green as a protest against the blatantly triangulated campaign she ran this month, which reminded me of the abandonment of principle that brought the duplicitous fanatical Catholic Tony Blair to power in Britain in 1997.

Andrea Horwath thought she understood the lessons of
Jack Layton's political legacy. But she missed its most
profound aspects.

I got into a couple of arguments on twitter about my distaste for Horwath’s campaign because it struck me as engineered solely to take seats from otherwise Conservative-leaning supporters, presenting a purely electoral ideology. After all, that was the complaint of the NDP old guard against Mulcair and Cullen, who I supported in 2012. I even saw an interview with the re-elected MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh, Percy Hatfield, in which he gave the traditional definition of his party as the conscience of Canada. Horwath positioned herself as an heir to Jack Layton’s legacy, someone who understood that the NDP were capable of winning elections. Surely, the backfiring of this perspective is a sign that the New Democrat traditionalists were correct?

I actually think that Horwath has badly misunderstood Layton’s legacy, which Cullen and Mulcair have carried on. Layton carried himself as if he was running for Prime Minister, which any self-respecting leader of a political party must do. Horwath understood this much, as do Mulcair and Cullen. 

But there was another, even more important element to Jack Layton’s subtle revolution in the NDP. Layton’s last electoral breakthrough from fourth party to official opposition in 2011 did not come from a baldly ambitious focus on electoral victory. It came from understanding a new movement in Quebec society that was rising against the obstructionist sovereigntist ideology of the federal Bloc Quebecois. Layton offered Quebec a vision of a political party that would represent leftist ideas and policies they could support which would engage in the Canadian project as a partner, no longer as an opponent. Not enough people realized, when Layton won so much of Quebec, that this was a new social force among that province’s people saying that Quebec would no longer sit outside the Canadian conversation and wanted to rejoin the federal system on its own terms. Basically, Quebec wants in.

Layton won an election by tapping into a political force that emerged immanently from the people of Quebec. What impressed me most about Mulcair as a person was that he quit the provincial Liberal party of Quebec over an environmental issue, the destruction of a park and nature reserve in the name of a construction project.** He took a very risky move for his career in the name of his values, the source of which was the continuing environmentalist movement. These are not only values I share, but they are the values of a social movement, a force that emerges from people acting in their daily lives. 

** And we all know how transparently and ethically construction projects are undertaken in urban Quebec.

What impressed me most about Cullen’s 2012 leadership campaign was how much he foregrounded reconciliation and reparation with the First Nations of Canada. He tapped into the same power that would manifest over the next two years as Idle No More, a political movement that emerged from people themselves whose goal, difficult though it might be, is to forge a contract of the many First Nations of the Canadian land on equal terms for the first time with the Canadian state, provinces, cities, and settler or immigrant peoples. Social movements can give life to electoral politics such that they genuinely transform the status quo. Engaging the ideas of new social movements is how electoral politics avoid growing too bureaucratized.

As I explore more of Gramsci, I realize that,
no matter your political affiliation, you can
benefit greatly from reading his work.

As part of my research for the Utopias project, regular readers will have noticed that I have lately been reading Antonio Gramsci. One section of The Prison Notebooks discusses the nature of ideology. Quite often, even today, we refer to ideologies in terms of their being true or false. A false ideology is a lie, usually conceived as a conspiracy or a creation of the ruling class, a framework of political thinking that deceives the oppressed into believing that a social order that oppresses them is somehow good. A true ideology, in contrast, is the political thought process that awakens people to recognize the use of false ideologies to oppress them. For a modern statement of this way of thinking about ideology, read Noam Chomsky’s political works.

Gramsci considers this way of thinking inadequate, because frameworks of thought are not designed specifically for purposes. They are complex cultural, cognitive, and philosophical creations that develop from the aggregate historical interaction of millions of people over the histories of nations and civilizations. 

The best way of thinking about ideology does not distinguish the true from the false, which is a poor question to ask. Instead, distinguish what he calls the organic from the arbitrary. An organic ideology is, precisely, a framework of thinking that develops in a community or nation over time, through the daily interactions of people dealing with their political, economic, social, and environmental problems. 

An arbitrary ideology is developed abstractly, entirely conceptually, without necessarily any input from ordinary people dealing with problems. It does not grow from people, but is imposed on them from positions of authority. People chafe against arbitrary ideologies because these frameworks are not necessarily adequate to their practical concerns. Unlike organic political ideologies, the arbitrary did not emerge from the practical engagements of life, but from, perhaps, the speculations of an ivory tower, the insular machinations of a cabal of extremists, the shining walls of a think tank, sometimes the sweat and tension of an electoral war room or the harsh fluorescents of a focus group.

Andrea Horwath did have a vision in this campaign, but it wasn’t a vision crafted to deal with people’s problems and concerns. It did not connect with any political desire of people in Ontario, not even a small or especially vibrant sector. Horwath campaigned on a political framework designed in isolation for the sole purpose of ideological triangulation to incorporate progressive state politics and far-right, small-state ideology to capture votes from fiscal conservatives and right-leaning Liberal sympathizers. 

Horwath’s ideology was arbitrary. Even the most subtle revolutions must emerge organically from the movement of people.

Where Is the Fire in Our Politics? Research Time, 04/06/2014

I watched some of the leaders’ debate for Ontario’s provincial election last night, though I couldn’t bear to watch it all. The thorough disappointment looking at Kathleen Wynne and Andrea Horwath combined with my disgust at the condescension of Tim Hudak’s folksy non-answers such that I eventually had to turn away for my own health. As I’ve said before here and on Twitter, I live in Andrea Horwath’s district, so my vote will probably count as a protest. 

Peter Ormond is the Green Party candidate in my district,
running on the electoral suicide mission against NDP
leader Andrea Horwath. Here is his platform, and you can
follow the links on that page to general Green Party policy.

I’ll probably vote Green, despite my broad philosophical problem with linking environmentalism to a single political party, because many of their social policies and plans to protect Ontario's watersheds and agricultural land are very good ideas. As well, I support their plan to destroy Ontario’s Catholic school board and merge its resources with the secular state system. This is a personal issue for me, as my home province of Newfoundland was badly wounded by Catholic dogma and abuse — our orphanage system was the home of horrifying sexual abuse by priests for decades, and our Catholic school system was culturally complicit in instilling such blind, dogmatic trust in the church that there are still people, even after the spectacle of a public trial featuring horrifying victim testimony, who believe that no priest, pious man of God that he is, could ever molest a child. I was shocked that Ontarians accept the presence of a Catholic school board in their province when I first moved here, and I still am.

But this post is about more than just my thoughts about the provincial election and my ramblings about social policy in general. Otherwise, I would have labelled it another Jamming. Because I regularly looked down from the cheap talking points (everybody), empty populism (Wynne), faux-leftism (Horwath), and idiotic folksiness (Hudak) to my iPad, where my book of essays by Antonio Gramsci lay open. And it made me wish the fire I could see in the early essays of this Italian activist from a century ago could appear in the politics of my own country and time.

Of course, one of the major reasons for that political fire was that these essays came from the socialist left of Italy during the First World War, when the economy was collapsing, much of the Italian countryside was impoverished and illiterate, and the rise of Mussolini and Fascism was just around the corner. Tumultuous times like those make for exciting philosophy.

But Gramsci offers a voice that is sorely missing in this election, as Ontario’s major politicians all play to a standard set of talking points, setting the election's agenda by following trends in buzzwords more than any substantive engagements with issues that would make a real difference to the lives of people in this province. Horwath arguing over who will balance the budget better and faster, Wynne making public transit (one of the most important issues for southern Ontario, especially inter-city) sound boring, and Hudak explaining education policy by talking about how his dad used to give him math lessons are not real politics.

Here’s an example of real politics. Midway through the First World War, Gramsci wrote a series of essays on education policies for his radical magazine, Avanti!, that hit at a heavily class-segregated system. The prestigious university programs received the lion’s share of government funding, but only went to the overproduction of lawyers and other white-collar jobs. Vocational schools received a pittance because of their association with labourers. As a result, the upper class found themselves underemployed, and the working class found themselves out of work because Italian factories had to import better-skilled labour from other countries. 

Gramsci imagined a vocational system that combined humanistic political, philosophical, and literary educational grounding with the vocational skills training needed to manufacture physical goods, the basis of genuine wealth production. “Technical schools should not be allowed to become incubators of little monsters aridly trained for a job, with no general ideas, no general culture, no intellectual stimulation, but only an infallible eye and a firm hand.” Philosophical education was necessary for all people, since “Philosophy finds people opposed to it especially when it states truths that strike at vested interests.”

Those university administrators who think nothing of treating the tuition payments of their students as collateral for corporate partnerships should understand that “A school which does not mortgage the child’s future, a school . . . of freedom and free initiative, not a school of slavery and mechanical precision” is a place where “the sacrifices which everyone in society willingly makes in order to foster improvements and nourish the best and most perfect men who will improve it still more — these sacrifices must bring benefits to the whole of society, not just to one category of people or one class.”

That’s real politics: imagining a better way of life for your fellow citizens and working to create it.

And to boost my readership, I’ll end with the hashtag #ONpoli, with the hope of encouraging a little actual politics in ON.

So If I’m an Anarchist, Why Do I Still Vote? Jamming, 11/05/2014

If you remember my posts a couple of months back about some of Robert Paul Wolff’s old books on anarchism, you remember my basic conclusion. There is no way that an apparatus of the size and complexity of a modern state can truly represent your individuality as a person without making that individuality disappear. In that sense, there is no way that a state can be a politically legitimate form of governance.

However, I also believe institutions like the state are pragmatically necessary. The human economy — our technological processes of production and flow of capital and materials around the world at a terrifyingly fast pace and enormous scale — dwarfs, crushes, and grinds into a fine paste any anarchistic community that could sustain genuine democratic legitimacy in governance. To protect ourselves from enormous industry, we need huge bulwarks. States are generally awful for all sorts of reasons, but they’re the closest things to actual protection we get from these overwhelming capital forces. 

Of course, this perspective only means that I become even more irritated with the fantastically shitty job they’ve done of protecting us from unfettered capital and material flows. In Hamilton, I live in the shadow of a dying steel and manufacturing industry, and one of my country Canada’s most successful companies is Dollarama, the mega-discount store where virtually nothing costs more than $4, a huge percentage of the goods are made in Asia under sweatshop conditions, and the staff are paid so poorly that they can only just afford to shop there. However well-off Canada’s population may be compared to the rest of the world, life here isn’t exactly free from the problems of economic inequality.

Thomas Piketty's book has exploded in the mainstream
press since it's launch this month, and he's become so
prominent a spokesperson for modern left perspectives
that reporters have found old allegations of domestic abuse
against him.

One of latest books of economics to catch popular fire this year is Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a vastly detailed and comprehensive study of how the inheritance of fortunes in capitalist contexts results in major increases in inequality over time. The rich get richer and the poor either get poorer or stay about where they are while the rich’s trust fund brats get continually richer off capital gains of their parents’ estates. Wolff’s blog also gives a detailed examination of the book, which you can read in these links, as they’re quite illuminating. Piketty himself has engendered vitriol from the right saying he's a communist, and from the left saying he's a bourgeois propagandist. If the popularity of this book, and the controversy it engenders, means anything, it’s that economic justice has become a central issue of our time.

Now that it’s election season in Ontario at the provincial level, I hoped that we would at least see some gripping political discussion of the economic and social issues that face our society. No such luck, as the three major parties of Ontario (and the Greens) sputter the usual platitudes. Knowing the vibrant discussions and debates of the millennial political left, the strength of the Idle No More protest movement in southern Ontario being a particularly powerful source for new ecological ideas, I at least hoped the New Democrats would channel some of this energy and these ideas into policy proposals, especially since they were the ones who prompted the election through their refusal to support even an amended version of the Liberal budget under Kathleen Wynne. They've had no problem negotiating and amending Liberal party budgets for the last two years, and achieved the incremental progress that can be expected from most political organizing and negotiations anyway. According to the CBC’s Political Compass survey, at least, the NDP is the only provincial party that overlaps with any of my general political principles at all, even if the Horwath NDP is at the far right border of my political smear on their map.* After all, I'm still a member of the NDP, so I'd hope that I could at least justify voting for them.

* If the CBC’s survey had included any more foundational matters of political philosophy instead of directly relating each question to a specific policy point, I would probably have no overlap with the major parties at all on this map. I also seem to have a curious sympathy with the Hudak Conservatives on nuclear power policy — Thorium plants for all!

I can understand Andrea Horwath’s ambition. The 2011 election saw Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals win a government with one seat shy of a majority, and their first task, instead of tactfully and constructively coalition building with his most likely partner (the NDP), he began bribing members of the other parties with high-paying bureaucratic appointments so he could take their seats in by-elections. The following three years of by-elections saw the Liberal plurality slip from 53 to 48, entirely to the benefit of the NDP’s seat count. Given that, I can see why Horwath would think momentum is behind her. 

Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath on the campaign trail.
I don't know what she's thinking.

But her campaign policies include the kind of ridiculous populism that Rob Ford rode to the mayoralty of Toronto four years ago. I've read some very strong critiques of the New Democrats as no longer compatible with truly progressive politics because they've become too deeply entwined in institutional and establishment thinking. Yet Horwath seems to have embarked on a new kind of crazy. Her plan for a universal Hydro credit is utterly unaffordable (we’d all be much better off with Thorium plants), and she’s even using memes like stopping the gravy train and supporting job creators. That is a notion straight from the far-right conservative media think tanks of American politics. 

Anyone with a decent knowledge of economics — especially one who would call herself a social democrat — knows that business owners, although they sign the paychecks and give you your tax slips every winter, aren’t actually job creators. The force that creates jobs is the buying power of middle and lower class citizens who purchase the goods and services of their community’s businesses. The motive force of capital flow are consumers — the people! — not owners. Yet the leader of Ontario’s New Democratic Party is talking about supporting job creators as if Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz were writing her speeches. Even the Toronto Star is shaking its head in dismay. I have no idea what the Horwath campaign is thinking.

So yes, I believe that the state is inherently illegitimate, but because I think the state is pragmatically necessary as the best weapon we have to protect ourselves from being steamrolled by planet-sized capital and material flows, I still vote. As well, I get excited about watching elections the way some more sane people get excited about sports seasons. The mechanics of a campaign, the relationship between the sloganeering, the speeches, the underlying ideas, and the over-caffeinated drudgery of getting the vote out door by door is a beautiful sight. But for the first time in quite a large number of years, I don’t think I’ll be voting NDP. I live in Horwath’s district, so I’ll essentially have a protest vote. It’ll probably go to a fringe candidate. I haven’t decided which one yet.