The First “LEAPing Beyond” II: The First Answers, Advocate, 13/07/2016

Continued from last post . . . And you can have a look at the post leading up to the first workshop this weekend to see a little more context if you want. 

It was just a small group in this workshop, which is what I like because it means the conversation can plumb the depths of our topic while everyone has the opportunity to be involved. 

As well as Dynamic and Bauhaus, a couple of NDP activists joined us from up in North Etobicoke. And they were impressed enough that they invited me to do a workshop later on in their region. I just need to get a ride up there because transit from the north to south end of this borough is garbage.

Toronto's drivers are not known for taking friendly
suggestions well.

And transit was a major issue in our discussion. We didn’t even really discuss it that much, because we were all on the same page – improved transit infrastructure would cut down on emissions, pollution, and improve quality of life for many working-class people across the city.

The most enlightening conversation when it came to practical activism was our discussion about affordable, energy-efficient housing. This is an important part of LEAP Manifesto’s anti-poverty ideas, since building homes – apartments, townhouses, and detached houses – that are use energy more wisely also makes them cheaper. 

But the current behaviour and interests of many institutions and actors that govern and influence housing developments in Toronto mitigate this. It’s an effect of short-term greed, the usual reason for destructive human activities.

A property developer can make more money more quickly by building plots of enormously expensive mini-mansion housing as extensions of already-existing suburbs. Investment capital can’t reach the types of projects that we need to build to make our cities ecologically sustainable.

Mini-mansion suburban housing developments strain already-underfunded public transit systems. When public transit can’t reach a new, far-flung neighbourhood, it encourages the residents to drive single-occupant cars everywhere for work, chores, and leisure.

Our workshop walking through Sam Smith Park in
southern Etobicoke.

Urban development has to make a city’s population denser, so that we leave more wild space outside the city or threaded through the city. We have to make more income-accessible housing energy-efficient, while mixing those accessible homes with places pitched to wealthier owners. That way, we build smarter, more vibrant homes, communities, and cities for everyone.

New Lesson #1: Fair and open development of urban real estate, so that energy-efficiency contributes to overall affordability of homes in diverse neighbourhoods. Combining with physical accessibility through public transit and solar panels to contribute to the energy pool instead of only drawing from it, community spirit augments ecological wealth.

One of the biggest rhetorical weapons against any progressive proposal like energy efficiency, public transit, or affordable good-quality housing comes as a dichotomy. If you don’t let self-interested developers have their way, they’ll all walk away; mass poverty will be the only result.

In other words, we face a choice between development and decay. I call shenanigans. In the context of housing, all the reasons I’ve described above constitute the foundation of greater wealth than could ever line the pocket of a housing developer, no matter how many isolated miniature estates he might finance on the outskirts of Oakville and Waterdown.

And this choice occurs in many different contexts, all of which have a common theme running through them. If I can evoke the New Democratic Party’s friendly ghost,* it’s how someone tells you that it can’t be done.

Or maybe Smiling Jack.

* Let’s not call him Christ-like. There was no sacrifice here, only the most cynical gesture of idealism and inspiration. Jack is no redeemer. More like a guardian spirit. Herne the Hunter. Jack-i-the-green.

Affordable energy-efficient housing in financially and culturally diverse communities? Either do exactly what the greediest developer wants or collapse into inescapable poverty. You can either protect the environment or you can grow the economy. Choose one or the other. How often did we hear this during the Harper years?

Even in the rebuilding year of the NDP, we keep hearing the same idea, even from our own quarters. Do we want to hold fast to our principles, or do we want the power of state control? 

All of these are false disjuncts. Making you think there’s a stark choice of one or another, when you can have both if you do things right. 

New Lesson #2: Well, not quite false. But the choice isn't stark, and it isn’t absolute. If you’ll let me riff on Deleuze a little bit, it’s about creating a disjunctive synthesis. Developing a practical logic that brings two sides of an either/or together, and their interaction is more productive than their existence alone ever would have been.

You can hold even the greediest developer’s feet to the fire until they finance a mixed community that continues to create capital and community wealth, like Bernie Sanders did as mayor of Burlington Vermont. You can build an ecologically sustainable and creative economy, as the vision of the LEAP Manifesto sets out.

You can hold on to your principles and still gain power when the people come to share your principles. This is the real victory of any of us who still hold optimistic visions for the future of humanity.

Beyond the Soundbite But With Necessary Soundbites, Jamming, 28/04/2016

One of the core issues that came out of this month’s national convention of the New Democratic Party was the embrace of the LEAP Manifesto. Well, it was a qualified embrace. 

Actually, let me qualify that one more time. To my colleagues in the party more accustomed to talking about specific policies, action plans, and legislation, the NDP’s embrace of the LEAP Manifesto was a significant compromise. 

My own book is a little tripper and
complex than LEAP, but that's the idea.
LEAP was intended for the most popular
audience imaginable. I'm writing for a
more niche market of intelligent,
environmentally-minded people whose
pot-smoking habits open them to
conceptual trips.

None of its content was adopted as official policy. The party only agreed to discuss it at the local level – our riding associations and local membership organizations – and use those discussions to inform specific environmental and green economy development policies shaped to our local situations.

But as someone who has a fair bit of experience dealing with political philosophy, this was exactly the point of the LEAP Manifesto. This is a work of philosophy, an essay of a few hundred words. It’s a discussion of ideas, produced by committee. 

Granted, it’s a committee with a noteworthy, intellectually powerful figure. Not a leader, as its communal composition must not be the vision of any one person. But the single most powerful force among its creators as a group.

And no, I’m not talking about Avi Lewis. Frankly, I’m a little peeved that the discussion of LEAP in internal NDP circles has talked so much about the leadership of Avi Lewis in this regard. Chatter has even included the idea that Lewis (with the help of his still-living legend father Stephen) is promoting the LEAP Manifesto as a sneaky route to the NDP leadership.

It strikes me as a little sexist, to be honest, as if so many members of my own party are dazzled enough by the Lewis family legacy that they forget that Naomi Klein is the real philosophical innovator in this relationship. 

She’s the one who wrote the central books of North America’s anti-globalization movement No Logo, one of the most concise analyses of how the security and surveillance justifies and legitimates itself, The Shock Doctrine. 

And she wrote the philosophical underpinning of the LEAP Manifesto itself, This Changes Everything, which traces the interdependence of new liberal economics and politics with mass-destructive industry. 

You know, it kind of pisses me off that Klein’s own profile kind of disappeared from a lot of the public discourse surrounding the LEAP and the NDP convention. Because she is manifestly the one in charge here. 

The end product of all this is my own personal endorsement of all the philosophies in LEAP. It’s basically the set of moral principles that an ecologically-defined subjectivity would naturally find intuitive and ordinary. 

Communities need to have control and reap any benefits that come from the natural resources of their territory. Indigenous people especially, because their longer cultural relationship with the territory gives them, on average, a deeper knowledge. And as a kind of reparation for colonial mistreatment and cultural genocide.

Naomi Klein's style blends journalistic accessibility
with conceptual analysis more clear than many
professional academic philosophers. She's a
forerunner of the kind of popular outreach where
I think the future of the tradition lies.

Economic structures, principles, and trade deals that curtail this local control or encourage doubling down on destructive industry need to end. States should organize the building of new energy and transit infrastructure housing, but only acting as servants of people, not their masters giving orders from a bureaucratic power centre. 

Just the sort of principles that I avoid describing in my own book, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity because I concentrate my argument on a different place. I’m more concerned with the back end of things, because people who think of themselves in a new liberal (or traditionally liberal) framework will never be real environmentalists.

Their individualism makes them think of themselves as absolutely separate from the rest of the world, where an ecological person understands their intimate and intricate connections and interdependence with everything else. That kind of person finds political principles like the LEAP Manifesto much more intuitive and sensible.

So I’ll be spending my summer (if all goes smoothly) leading workshops with our membership and the wider communities of Toronto about ecological politics. Ostensibly, we’ll be debating the ideas being LEAP, but what’s really going on is conversations to change people’s minds, make them think more ecologically about the world and themselves. 

That’s how progress happens.

Hard Truths for the Canadian Left, Advocate, 12/04/2016

I think this week is going to consist pretty much entirely of blogs about the future of Canada’s New Democratic Party. It’s pretty easy for a guy with a blog to talk about issues of national politics. In most cases, bloggers just kind of blow smoke out their asses about it.

Unless we’re published on fairly well-trafficked forums like HuffPo, VICE, Brietbart, the Atlantic, or something of that ilk. Then at least we’re pressured to have done some research before blowing smoke out of our asses.

But when it comes to the future of Canada’s official social democratic political party, I actually have some skin in the game and a little minor influence. I am the Vice-President of a district association, after all. Not exactly a major leadership position – but I have a little institutional grease along my wheels.*

* That sounds really dirty for some reason.

I see two issues that are going to cause some major splits and problems for the NDP and for Canadian progressive social movements more broadly. I’ll talk about the most obvious one first, the one that the two actually important speeches at last weekend’s convention threw into sharp relief.

Rachel Notley threw down the gauntlet regarding the LEAP
Manifesto, dismissing its calls for a petroleum-free
economy and industry an utter disaster of naïveté. The
NDP won't literally split as an organization over this,
because it will never literally adopt LEAP, only use it
as a launching point to build a more ambitious
environmentalism platform. But we're already in
danger from some problematic optics simply for
talking about it.

Workers vs The World

For quite a few years, I had a feeling this fight would appear among Canadian progressives for a while. It’s a tension that exists in all alliances generally called left-wing. The NDP is now in open conflict between its commitments to workers’ rights and the environment.

Everyone is talking about how Rachel Notley slammed the LEAP Manifesto as nonsense that’s purposely designed – at least in part – to destroy the entire economy of Alberta. As Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis would say, they’re worried about Earth, which is both bigger than and includes Alberta.

But the best quote of the whole affair so far goes to Alberta labour activist Gil McGowan, who the CBC is so glad to have caught on air. “These downtown Toronto political dilettantes come to Alberta and track their garbage across our front lawn.”

Other sources have spent more time analyzing this split already, and I’m sure it’ll be a major part of the philosophical debates that will energize the NDP over the next two years. 

It even has the angle of each side’s leading spokespeople including members of New Democrat political dynasties: Rachel Notley, daughter of Grant, who carries the prestige of having won government in Alberta; and Avi Lewis, son of Stephen and grandson of David.** Starting their dustup at a convention moderated by Rebecca Blaikie, daughter of Bill.

** And great-grandson of Moishe, who pre-dated the NDP’s existence. I mean, holy shit, this family of activism goes back a ways.

Avi Lewis, youngest heir of a four-generation dynasty
of political activism from Russia to Canada, with his
wife Naomi Klein, who is a much better writer and
philosopher than he is.

Icelandic sagas aside, this fight expresses a tension that has always existed in the Western left since its modern social movement started. Environmentalism is fundamentally about the radical transformation of industry so that it doesn’t produce pollution or irreversible planetary damage anymore. And a lot of workers’ jobs and livelihoods depend on industry staying just the way it is.

Now this tension has exploded all over the Edmonton convention, and we can finally get it all sorted out in the open. Providing we’re actually creative enough.

We Need to Talk About Quebec

As I said yesterday, Tom Mulcair’s central role in organizing the NDP’s massive victory in Quebec in 2011 gave him the political capital to lead and win the race for the federal party’s leadership. Well, it was the loss of two-thirds of those Quebecois NDP seats that helped send him packing out of the leadership last weekend.

And we should be clear about why. There was one central issue that crippled the NDP’s and Mulcair’s support in Quebec last year: whether women can wear a niqab in their citizenship ceremonies. 

There were only two places where this really had traction: the Conservative party’s own base of hardcore nationalist supporters, as expected, and among the general population of Quebec, especially outside Montreal, as was terrifying. 

If you thought racist nationalism in Quebec was on the way out just because the Bloc Quebecois and Parti Quebecois were humiliatingly defeated over the last few years, you were dead wrong. 

Racist incidents against Muslims and Jews has risen in Quebec recently. This is a dangerous social problem that Canadians have to face as an important aspect of preserving and improving our institutional and social unity and ethics. 

Blatantly anti-Semitic graffiti discovered earlier this
month in the Montreal suburb of Laval.

We cannot let racism remain part of mainstream culture in any part of Canada. Quebec must be a central vector for anti-racist activism from the NDP and all other related movements in the future.

Let’s be clear about the main causes of the 2011 NDP Quebec victory: Tom Mulcair’s ground game organizing throughout the province, and the public love of Jack Layton after his appearance on Tout le Monde en Parle. 

We can now add one important condition: nobody talked about the NDP’s commitment to multiculturalism, diversity, and cultural-ethnic integration to the point of miscegenation. Indeed, its embrace of miscegenation, with inter-ethnic marriages and relationships being utterly normal and a point of pride in modern Canada. 

Inter-ethnic marriages like Jack Layton’s with Chinese-Canadian Olivia Chow and Tom Mulcair’s with Sephardic Jew Catherine Pinhas. 

The NDP achieved something amazing in Quebec, helping break the dominance that nationalist separatist political parties have held on that province’s politics for two decades. 

The good news is that, even though the NDP lost many seats in Quebec last year, no one political party dominated its representation. Many NDP seats remained, and while the BQ won several more, the Liberals and Conservatives also made gains. Quebec’s time of mass-scale political allegiance seems finally over.

The bad news is that virulent, violent racism remains quite popular in Quebec. At least a sizeable minority of Quebecois are disgusted at the prospect of integrating their society with non-white ethnicities and (despite widespread secularism and contempt for the Catholic Church) non-Christian cultures. This hatred must be fought.

The NDP must be on the vanguard of anti-racist activism in Quebec. In purely mercenary terms, NDP support will grow with the end of racism in Quebec. In ethical and moral terms, racism must end. Full stop.

It Is Accomplished VI: What Does This Title Mean? Research Time, 01/10/2015

Continued from last post . . . I didn’t mean to continue this series of posts into a sixth part. But last night, I was thinking about how I've drifted from the main topic of the first post to the more confessional tone of the fifth. 

The book project that so much of my last two years of reading is building toward is about utopias, our dreams of a perfect society. That entails quite a few questions. One of those is, What moral norms and political institutions are perfect? Another is, What does perfection mean anyway?

The world changes. And if we ever achieve a perfect society (whatever the hell that is), the world it exists in will keep changing. So to accomplish a perfect society is never really a finished task. The perfect society for one set of circumstances is going to run into problems as circumstances change. So perfecting humanity is an ongoing process of self-critique and change.

Awesome. But what does this mean for how utopia has traditionally gone? 

I remember some of Frederic Jameson’s insights when I think about this question. Utopia in the Western tradition of thought has roots in Christianity, the world’s first major eschatological religion – the first major religion in the world to conceive of time as having an endpoint that was also a fulfilment. 

At the end of time, goes the Christian Revelations, will be the Kingdom of Heaven. When the self-deceiving incomplete secularism of the Enlightenment* got hold of this idea, then the end of history will be the Kingdom of Eternal Happiness. Marx called it communism, Fukuyama called it liberal democracy.

One of the clearest expressions of our having caught up
to Nietzsche's ideas about the joy of having no God
and no inherent purpose for ourselves and the universe
is Rick and Morty. I'm serious. Its core message is that
"Nobody exists on purpose; Nobody belongs anywhere;
We're all going to die." Then they travel adventuring
around a multiverse of incredible diversity and
excitement.

* I’m simplifying to an absurd degree here, but this is the shorthand for how I interpret a lot of modern secularism, as all the same structures of Christian philosophy, metaphysics, and morality, but with some placeholder where God normally would be. Existentialism tried to get us into pure secularism, but they still lamented the loss of a God figure. Sartre's atheism was pretty dour. Just read Nausea. It took us more than a century to catch up to Nietzsche, who understood that a world without (the Christian sense of) God or perfection is actually pretty amazing.

Jameson showed that whatever you called the Kingdom of Eternal Happiness depended on the social circumstances of your time. Whatever the major problems facing your society were, your utopia was the world in which those problems were solved. 

When a social problem is big and pervasive enough to cover all of society, or all of civilization, the problem feels universal. For most of Western history, utopian visions really have pitched themselves as solving eternal problems. But I think we've moved past that as a society.

Think about the latest statement of utopian political activism: Naomi Klein’s Leap Manifesto. It calls for the kind of radical and all-pervasive transformation of Earth's civilization that you expect from a utopia. But it doesn't pitch itself as the perfect society. 

It’s actually not nearly so ambitious as the Communist Manifesto’s ambition to build the eternally perfect society. Total universality is so 19th century.** Klein’s Leap Manifesto is a document to solve a present problem, digging ourselves out of the current trap we're in, our stumbling accidental mass-suicide called the Holocene Extinction.

** The craving for total universality is so 20th century.

Thankfully, we're all historicists now. Well, not nearly all of us. There's still plenty of absolutism in both religious circles and atheistic ones. But historicism has been around long enough, and is properly understood by enough people, that it’s become ordinary. 

Our knowledge can reach universality in scope and reference, but our quest for knowledge always begins from our position – our priorities and frameworks of thought of our current societies, circumstances, and personalities. Even how we understand our relationship with the divine. A historicist doesn’t even have to be an atheist. She just can’t be an absolutist.

Today’s solutions seed tomorrow's problems, so we can never let ourselves become complacent.