Under the Paving Stones I: Sadly High Probability, A History Boy, 12/03/2018

I’m Canadian, not French. So Utopias isn’t going to wade into all the different interpretations, causes, conditions, effects, and affects of the Paris revolutionary riots of May 1968. But I have to bring in a little history.

Because my own political thinking uses a lot of the concepts that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari developed in the 1970s, May ’68 is a touchstone, a material condition. Anti-Œdipus was a product of the Paris popular uprising, so the social dynamics that brought it about conditioned the creation of the book and its concepts.

Paris’ May uprising was a unique event. Its uniqueness was in how remarkably unlikely the movement’s coalition was – not only the radical communist activists, but also business management students and all the factory workers in the city.

Growing up in Canada, the American narrative of 1960s protests
dominated cultural discussion of that era. The cultures of Europe
were so different that they didn't get much airtime.

That massive improbability was a product of unique and complex conditions that are practically unrepeatable in their exact form. Activists – a primer in two parts on how to learn from history.
• • •
I first learned about May ’68 in an undergraduate political science course – specifically about political behaviour, an introduction to how political scientists investigate how people vote, protest, and get involved with government. It was introduced to me entirely in its dimension as a student movement.

At the time, I worked for a campus newspaper. So part of my job was to report on the activities of the university student union. I found the whole institution* a mess of hypocrisy and self-delusion.

* Yes, that is seriously still their website. It's really sad.

I couldn’t take seriously the idea that a student movement could organize anything sanely, let alone offer up a genuinely inspirational new form of politics. Here was the environment where I was building my first fully self-conscious political conscience, at least regarding student movements.

It’s 2003, 2004. The Iraq War has mobilized a lot of people to fight the myopic imperialism of the W Bush Administration. Among my student union is a sizeable plurality of folks who are dedicated social activists, for whom the campus activists of the 1960s – Abbie Hoffmann, Angela Davis, Daniel Cohn-Bendit – were role models.

Unfortunately, the sudden end of the oil boom three years ago returned
austerity politics to the governance of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Tuition rose again, as rural Newfoundland returned to mass
unemployment, making those CFS messages about increasingly
inaccessible education or unsustainable student debt levels
finally relevant to people's real concerns there. Not exactly how
I would have liked to see the CFS and Newfoundland harmonize.

They worked to put the student union on the progressive side of a revolution against empire and militarism. They did organize some quality anti-war activism. But most of their economic activism was hamstrung by having to stick to a strict script provided by the Canadian Federation of Students – “Students are hurting from high tuition rates! Grants, not loans! Lower tuition!”

Fine for Ontario, reeling from public service cuts after a decade of Mike Harris’ austerity policies. Ridiculous in Newfoundland.

Newfoundland was kicking into an oil-driven economic boom, and Roger Grimes’ governing Liberal Party was reversing its own austerity policies from the Brian Tobin years. My tuition rates went down 25% in the first three years of the century and stayed frozen for a decade.

Social conditions like this couldn’t even unify a students’ union. The dedicated revolutionaries were a vocal minority in a union dominated by residence hall party planners, and middle-of-the-road nerds who wanted to make sure the food court and convenience store kept running smoothly. Plus a couple of man-children and one or two hyper-conservative extremists.

This taught me that there was nothing special about the student movement. So I thought that the paradigm Student Movements™ – France’s May ’68 and the USA’s protests against the Vietnam War – were similar chaotic messes and failures.

The idea of “the student movement” in popular culture is that universities are inherently subversive spaces originates from the Paris Uprising and Antiwar Movement’s model example in Western culture today.

But in real life, the circumstances that made those remarkable movements possible were unique and improbable processes.

The Paris Uprisings of 1968, for example, were made possible by the Algerian War. Ian Buchanan taught me that.

Case Studies in Open and Closed Minds, Advocate, 20/11/2017

I was originally going to talk some more about Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual engineering today. But a fairly viral article in my social network of Newfoundlanders inspired a few new insights about the culture of my home province and the mess it faces.

The wreck of the Charcot in Conception Harbour, Newfoundland.
Certainly not a metaphor for the island's current economic position.
I swear.

James McLeod – who for the last eight years has been a stalwart reporter for The Telegram, the major newspaper for St John’s – probably doesn’t remember meeting me. We shared a few beers in Toronto when I first moved to Ontario, and I was visiting an old friend.

McLeod was just about to move to Newfoundland, a Torontonian going to work in St John’s. He did fantastic work at The Telegram and loved living in St John’s, but he couldn’t stay in the city following its economic downturn.

Newfoundland’s entire economy depended on high oil prices – government revenues depended on stupidly low offshore petroleum well royalty rates, and much of the rural workforce commuted to the Alberta tar sands. As the island has traditionally done, its leaders put all their economic eggs in one volatile, risky basket.

Right now, Newfoundland and Labrador is on the threshold of an even bigger economic crisis than the cod moratorium and the end of much of the inshore fishing industry. And those crises – the oil crash, the massive government debt burden of Muskrat Falls, the massively aging population – will drive a huge migration from NL to the rest of Canada.

What I find most illuminating were the different reactions to McLeod’s article in my social networks. It’s anecdotal evidence of wide social trends, but it displays a depressingly common cross-section of the attitudes about the future of my birthplace.

Solid headshot. The bow tie is pretty cool too.

One friend, when he posted the article, agreed with McLeod that the province was heading for an economic disaster – he was depressed that there seemed to be no way out, but resigned to another outflux of population. He has plenty of experience working around Canada and the rest of the globe, an open, progressive point of view.

Another friend was resigned to the disaster as well, but also expressed an incredible bitterness that any of Newfoundland’s leaders could ever handle it. This friend is a very perceptive man – I remember through the Williams years of the mid-2000s, he was very skeptical of his leadership.

He showed very little of the sad worship of Danny that swept Newfoundland’s culture in those years. There’s a kind of disgust at the province’s leadership – a combination of bitterness, resentfulness, and hopelessness. A loss of faith in any hope or optimism at all. I worry about that.

And another friend – a Facebook connection from having shared some friends and some conferences in the New Democratic Party back in the early 2010s – who expressed what I find to be a very sad and all-too-common attitude.

Go on back to the mainland. No matter all the time you spent here, no matter how much you came to love Newfoundland, no matter how much the island shaped you – if you’re leaving, then good riddance. You were never our friend.

It’s an inward turning. When resentment boils into contempt. When it’s in triumph, it’s the attitude of the Williams partisan – “How does it feel now, mainlander?” When it’s under a weight, it’s the spite of disgust – “Fuck off back to the mainland!”

The rocks will outlast the people.

Turning away, no matter what’s on offer. Whether it’s multiculturalism, true economic diversity, business and trade links, or even just inter-community friendship. Turn away. They’re not one of us. They don’t count – and they never did.

No matter how much McLeod contributed to my home province over the last decade, it’s the feeling that the province owes him nothing. No mainlander is worth respect.

I’m not a mainlander. I live in Toronto, and my spouse is Torontonian. I grew up in Newfoundland. But being Italian, I never really fit in – my name and the fact that I had a large extended family in Quebec made me a foreigner. Even though I was born at the old Grace Hospital in St John’s and lived there until I was 25.

The irony is that I’ve actually written for Cleary’s paper about the political and cultural insularity of Newfoundland’s culture. It wasn't the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador that drove me to build a life elsewhere. It was the insularity of so many popular attitudes that made my more open perspective feel unwelcome.

There was also the feeling that, despite having been born and grown up in St John's, that I never truly belonged, that my Italian heritage and my connections to Quebec kept me from being a real Newfoundlander. Well, if you don't want me, I won't come . . . .

Never Forget That Freedom Is Fragile, Jamming, 24/08/2016

There was one incident at Lunaza that sticks in my mind. There were a lot of wonderful events. Basking in the joy of a new arts and music community’s rebellious and joyful spirit. Talking for an hour or so with my old friend EP at our campsite. 

It is a bit of a strange thing to pop up in the middle of a
field in The Goulds. The local locals didn't much like it.
Photo by the GF.

But there was one incident that expresses not only a perennial problem with being a progressive artist in Newfoundland. It’s also a very local expression of a broader issue that’s dominating contemporary politics in the West. 

Here's a story that’s unique to a very particular place. About an hour or so before their security staff arrived, the field where Lunaza Festival took place was visited by nine teenagers on ATVs and a pickup truck. They knocked over one of the decorative obelisks and almost did the same to their port-a-potties.

Razziki the organizer and I both understood what these creatures were. Skeets. Newfoundlanders know what I mean. Every society has these purposely ignorant, small-minded, perpetually immature, racist, homophobic, bullying dicks. 

But it seems – at least from my perspective – that Newfoundland has a peculiar version of these creatures. The Newfoundland Skeet shares with all its compatriots around the world the same resentment and hostility toward weird and artistic people. Where the Skeet differs, is that he doesn’t seem content to leave them alone.

It doesn’t even seem to matter when an artistic community can make money for the city and the province. No, “Techno music’s all weird and faggoty!” and “What’s all this gay shit propped up on wooden sticks?” These are people who laugh when they break something that belongs to someone else.

Those fuckers on their ATVs don't have nearly the
class that Ricky and Julian have in their little fingers
as they stir the ice in their drinks.

Their attitude is an aggressive hatred of the strange, unusual, and creative, precisely because it’s strange and unusual when their own lives are dulling repetitions. Out on the quad, ride around the dirt roads, eat, sleep, drink, fuck, repeat. Building anything noticeably unique is a demonstration of the futility of their thoughtless lifestyles. 

They hate it, and lash out.

This is a struggle that I think plays out throughout human society in a lot of different contexts. Thinking back on my personal experience over the last few years, I feel as though this attitude has contributed to some of the weirdnesses I’ve noticed in the Toronto startup scene.

I’ve come across a lot of job descriptions that, frankly, seem to chase trends – always just a little too late to really capitalize on them. And when I talk with business leaders, asking them about their ideas, I see bandwagon attitudes fairly often. “Everyone’s really starting to do X, so we’ve got our own spin on it.”

The city’s startup culture has plenty of enthusiasm, but on the whole, seems more intent on following what’s already peaked in Silicon Valley rather than developing fresh ideas and business approaches that grow more organically in Toronto’s and Canada’s cultural contexts.*

* I’m satirizing this attitude with a character in the current film version of You Were My Friend. Madison’s boss at a crashing sharing economy business gives us a lot of laughs with his enthusiasm. Thanks to a timely Patreon donation, that ridiculous man now has the name of my first Patron. I’m glad he has a good sense of humour.

A fear of the strange, of the unusual, of what’s never been seen before.

I’m speaking in very broad strokes when I say this – No, maybe I should say, instead, that I’m focussing on only one aspect to think in very vague, speculative terms, about a disturbing common feature to a lot of events that seem quite different.

Border patrol agents in Arizona, charged with keeping
the foreign out of the country. Did I make a suggestion
there? When does such a suggestion stop being a drunken
speculation and become a philosophical insight?

What does a band of ATV-riding halfwits have to do with the entrepreneurial (self-styled) elite of Canada? They react very differently – one bullies, the other blinds themselves. But there’s a common feature in their aversion to real difference, the genuinely unfamiliar and unusual. 

One group bluntly knocks the weird stuff over. One group just turns away from the weird stuff and pursues familiarity even when the familiar starts to fail.

Consider one application of this idea – aversion to the new and strange as a foundation of many diverse human habits. Over the next few days, I’m going to dig into Etienne Balibar’s thoughts on nationalism and state institutions. 

I’m already seeing aversion to the new and strange as the ground of a lot of the most violent nationalisms of our time. Balibar’s analyses trace how the institutions we live in can encourage those dangerous feelings. 

Call this one a prologue.

Sites of Actualizing Freedom Out to the Goulds, Jamming, 23/08/2016

This break turned out to be longer than I thought. While I was in St John’s, I ended up getting virtually no time to write. I squeezed out some remarks for the Syria Film Festival Coordinator AtoZ’s speech at a TIFF event. But it was literally a list of lines and jokes barely a page long that I burned off before going to my cousin’s wedding.

It was a fantastic wedding too. Not only do I think my cousin Cornbread has finally found someone able to tolerate his artistic ego and comically savant-like inability to do basic practical household chores, the Jammer is a generally cool, extremely chill, well-accomplished artist in her own right. 

It’s taken him a while to find a good balance in his life this way. The west coast has been good to him. I just hope Victoria isn’t destroyed by a massive tectonic displacement in the next few decades. 

My only regret is that I was an idiot and forgot to sign his guestbook. But I promise I was there – there is photographic evidence of it. And you can screencap the last few paragraphs, print the image, and paste it in your guestbook. The fact that this is essentially a public apology has taken care of enough public shaming.

Lunaza's DJs largely had a good sense of variety. St John's
is, frankly, too detached from the continent's major techno
culture hubs to get caught up in fresh trends. So the scene
seems to be a collection of young music historians who
plug decades of different styles into the same sets. They
don't chase trends, they absorb them.

Philosophically, though, I was most excited by the techno party I attended with GF earlier that weekend. Lunaza has yet to gain a large-scale profile beyond the St John’s electronica scene, which is good in some ways, but dangerous in others.

Being a latecomer to Ontario and Quebec’s festival rave circuit, I think what I see has a lot of potential. There are political limitations, of course. Hippie culture on the whole has been thoroughly corrupted, healthy rebellions becoming self-destructive paranoias.

Mistrust of pharmaceutical companies’ motives has become a dedication to Falun Dafa and anti-vaxx activism – opposition to global violence has become conspiracist anti-Americanism easily manipulated by Putinist propaganda. A liberating drug regimen of pot and occasional acid has become the self-destructive addiction of nitrous and way too fucking much acid.

But at its heart, the techno festival is a free space of a temporary respite from the hustle and madness of contemporary life. Precarious existence in an unstable economy gives way to a communion with a more natural ecosystem, as well as a community of like-minded cultural rebels. 

Our socio-economic guarantees may have collapsed, but these parties can create a space where a low-consumption lifestyle at least feels plausible. It's a space of social and intellectual freedom.

Lunaza offers one such space that hasn’t yet grown to such a size that its financial investment turns it into an elite zone. You have to pay for a ticket, and there are logistics to subsidize with that admission fee. Port-a-potties, deco, the stage and sound system. Paying the musicians, organizers, and workers. But the atmosphere was sociable, relaxing. 

Most importantly, Newfoundland hasn’t been a serious victim of global climate change – it’s still cool enough there to avoid heatstroke during a day of camping, which wasn’t something I could say for rural Quebec. Or Toronto.

Ideally, these parties should be music and arts festivals where people from all over the world can meet and learn from each other. They’re places where you can discover new identities, personalities, and styles of life. You can conceive of greater possibilities for humanity than you have before.

These are the summits that can really build peace, because ordinary people from all walks of life can meet – our social and moral minds expand. Combine this with aesthetic stimulation from being surrounded by music and art for days, as well as mental relaxation from an intense country experience. It can literally strengthen and expand the mind.

I don’t need drugs to have fun.

A Basic Failure of Imagination, A History Boy, 29/04/2016

I finished the film script for You Were My Friend yesterday, I still have a lot of work to do for a bunch of creative projects. Building the profile of Sunnyvale Psychochronography, preparing my presentation material for the book panel on Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity in Calgary in a month’s time and some related articles for the Reply Collective, and building a more robust Patreon page.

On the day I wrote this post (yesterday), I also had an interview for a job that could actually end my last four years of underemployment and low income. It could finally be the start of my second career. So I was a little nervous about that.

But, if I’m going to say one event really hit me this week as part of the narrative of my life, it was when the Newfoundland and Labrador budget came down, and the resulting protest movement kicked into gear.

Newfoundland doesn't have a strong history of effective
protest, like these organizers in Britain, aside from some
oppressed union organizing in the 1950s. But I think
the current generation is finally, at long last, different.

Atlantic Austerity

You might find this weird, because I haven’t lived in Newfoundland since 2008. But I think of the Ball budget as the culmination of the whole reason why I’m glad that I left Newfoundland when I did.

Their provincial Liberal government has produced an austerity budget that essentially turns Newfoundland and Labrador into Canada’s equivalent of Greece. It’s set to become an economic basket case with no real public services of any kind, offloading the fiscal mistakes of Danny Williams’ leadership entirely to its population, who will suffer in widespread poverty for generations. 

The province’s new tax burden is disproportionately hitting the poor and working class. Services are being cut to such levels that they will not exist – including health care and education. The government is making no attempt to generate demand to stimulate economic activity. They are simply cutting people off from what they need to live decently and saying that it’s all in the need of keeping a good fiscal house in order.

The economic crisis has a cause. The provincial government did not have enough cash reserve or investment holdings to see the province through any tough times that might be caused by any drop in the price of oil. 

I could tell from his first political victories that Danny
Williams substituted superficial patriotic imagery and
rabble-rousing for real political engagement with the
people of Newfoundland and Labrador. It had all the
hallmarks of demagoguery to distract from autocracy
and corruption.
And no one listened to me when I'd say so.

The Most Foolish Hero Worship

In the late 2000s, no one believed the price of oil would ever drop. The universal love of Danny Williams prevented any criticism of his governments’ actions from being taken seriously. He had sincere approval ratings across the province at a level that some dictators feel insecure about faking. 

Williams’ problem was not his high levels of government spending. They were his insistence on also cutting taxes and corporate levies for the resource sector at the same time, and his creation of a state-run energy monopoly in Nalcor. 

He built a government and inspired a culture across the province that revelled in the prosperity of the moment without a single thought to contingency planning or a shred of criticism or accountability. I could tell, as Williams gained a reputation more like a Messiah than a man, that this would not end well. So I left.

And everyone in the old country thought this was wonderful because they were all getting rich from oil money. No one ever thought that spending without saving or economic diversification was a good idea. No one ever thought that a leader whose popularity put him beyond critique could be dangerous in the long run. 

The truth about Newfoundland is that it’s a culture where very few people actually ever think. I hope that will finally change soon. But I cannot be part of any attempt to try.

The politics of empty demagoguery, populism, and Little
Big Man autocracy go back to the beginnings of
Newfoundland and Labrador's story in the Canadian
federal state.

The World’s Only Example of Dependency Theory

Newfoundland is one of the oldest settler cultures of North America. They’re proud of their self-reliance. But that self-reliance has never been political, only a brazen toughness against physical adversity. Newfoundland’s population has never bothered to take control of their own political existence. 

Now, I’m not talking about political independence as a nation-state, which is a centuries-out-of-date romanticism in Newfoundland culture that had a popular revival in the Williams era. I mean that Newfoundland’s political culture has never been capable of finding the resources for prosperity and progress among its own people. 

From the moment of settling, Newfoundland’s population has been entirely dependent on oligarchies for anything beyond basic subsistence. For centuries, the colonizing fishers (after exterminating the indigenous population) let themselves be dependent on whatever food and cash aid they could receive from British fish merchant associations.

As an independent country, the bulk of the population was still economically dependent on trades and handouts from a business class based in St. John’s and Britain. The mythologized 1947-8 referendums never had true independence on the table: only a choice between a return to the pre-Depression status quo of a nation-state economically dependent on a British-linked oligarchy or becoming an autonomous province of what was, at the time, a Canada still dominated by Anglo-Ontarian social conservatives.

When the cod fishery collapsed in the 1990s,
Newfoundlanders never tried to find new ways to make a
living. They just moved away, went on government
assistance, or eventually joined the Nova Scotia
crab fishery. It's a wonderful soil for hardy vegetable
agriculture, but no one has ever thought to grow food
on an industrial scale except for an ill-conceived
government-supported cucumber greenhouse.

As a province, Newfoundland’s political culture shifted from open oligarchy to a kind of hair-brained populism. Smallwood: “Confederation will bring us riches!” Peckford: “Oil revenue and a poorly-organized greenhouse business will bring us riches!” Williams: “Oil revenue actually is bringing us riches!” All this peppered with a little empty nationalism to distract from the emptiness of their claims.

Postcolonial theory developed a concept called dependency. It said, in very short form, that a colonized country remained shackled after nominal independence because its economy and culture would be forever linked to the dictatorship of their colonizing powers. 

This hasn’t quite been true for colonized people in Africa and Asia because they still have strong cultural memories of self-sufficiency. When they’re able to overcome local dictators who use nationalist rhetoric to justify taking over the old oppression machinery of the colonial state, they do just fine.

Newfoundland’s white culture has never not been dependent. They have no real tradition of self-governance. They have never not been controlled by an elite. Newfoundland has never had the cultural cognitive resources for actual democracy: people banding together to build and direct their own lives and communities.

With Bernie Sanders winding down his Presidential
campaign, some moronic pundits will say that his
movement is over. But this was never his movement.
Like Jeremy Corbyn, the movement chose him as an
electoral standard bearer, an established politician with
compatible ideals. But they're both relics from the times
in the 20th century when social democracy was a
reasonable proposition.

Until Now, Maybe

One generational shift that’s been taking place lately is a revival of ideas in the West that were once – and are often today – dismissed and abused as communist: social democracy where local communities work together across the world to build a just and fair society throughout Earth.

Most communist governments around the world didn’t actually do that, of course. The Bolsheviks, Mao Zedong, and the Castro Brothers – the 20th century’s leading communist revolutions – did what I just described those tinpot postcolonial dictators as doing. 

They took over an oppressive state apparatus and exponentially amped up that oppression. They ran their governments on principles of totalitarian collectivization, which eventually scaled back their intensity from mass suicide to state-controlled bureaucratic socialism.

But the communist movement is more complicated than this, despite what the descendants of Friedrich Hayek would have you believe. For example, the first communist activists in the 19th century organized in the popular movement to end the slave trade. And America’s first organized resistance to communism was a society of conservative slave-holders, outraged at this movement that would force them to relinquish their ownership of black people.

We see around the world today social movements that have seen through the lies of new liberal politics and philosophy. We now, popularly, understand that regressive tax systems, deregulation of finance and environmental protections, and the expansion of a global labour pool without expanding workers’ rights results in total economic disaster.

The demonstrations against austerity in Newfoundland
have begun, led by a globally plugged-in generation.
They've learned in solidarity with activists in the US and
Europe. I have hopes that real democracy can finally take
root in Newfoundland, when people realize that they
can control their own lives. Democracy is the politics
of the human desire for freedom. #WeWillWin

In North America, the social movement that began with Occupy is the driving force of this changing popular attitude. We aren’t yet sure what balance we’ll eventually have to strike between the legitimacy of absurdly extreme wealth, progressive tax enforcement, ecologically harmonious infrastructure, poverty alleviation, and demand-driven economic policies. 

It won't be anything like the socialism of the 20th century, with its over-reliance on government bureaucracy and authority. It should be driven by the same network politics that create the social movement in the first place, with a focus not on the state, but on people.

And if the people of my birth province join this movement and fully understand it, they might finally end up ready for real freedom.

It’s Only Newfoundland III: A Lion’s Roar, Jamming, 12/08/2015

Originally, I had planned to be finished with my reflections on Newfoundland and its political culture on Monday. I even started a new series of posts talking about the importance of science-fictional thinking and composition to understand utopias.

Overlooking a beach at Cape Bonavista, I also read a
tourism info stand describing the history of the cod fishery
in Newfoundland, an industry controlled by outside
authorities.

But my friend from the old country, The Good W, wrote me a comment on a Facebook link to the post that made me rethink whether I wanted to end my thoughts where I did. On Monday’s post, I was happy to describe the history of Newfoundland’s intense politics of resentment at the height of the Danny Williams era, and how uncomfortable that omnipresent political culture made me.

But The Good W went beyond the frame of my own experience, to frame Newfoundland’s cultural resentfulness in more sympathetic terms. In essence, Newfoundland (especially rural Newfoundland) has always been an exploited economy. 

A ruling class controls and accumulates most of the profits from an economy that revolves practically entirely around natural resource extraction. That ruling class is usually separate, geographically and culturally, from the people who eke out a living from the extraction work. 

In the colonial and independent days, that ruling class was in Britain and St. John’s. In the Canadian era, that ruling class is in Ottawa controlling the federal government, or are other interests who fall under the catch-all term, “mainlanders.” The need for charismatic national leaders arises naturally from the exploited position: such a leader refuses the politics of colonial-style conciliation of the exploited with their exploiters.

Resentment is a natural reaction to this kind of economy. Although Newfoundland is a white, European-descended population* that currently exists as part of a federalized democratic state, much of the population remains economically colonized. They’re dependent on a resource industry that they don’t control, and is usually managed without their interests in mind. 

* Whose own settlement has its history of ethnic cleansing and genocide against the indigenous population with the destruction of the Beothuk. Newfoundland and Hispaniola share the distinction of being the only settlements in the European colonization waves of whom none of the indigenous population or culture survived.

Danny Williams, Newfoundland's roaring lion. But
was he growling at the real enemy?

I understand where the politics of resentment come from, but they’re a model of politics that’s only successful when they’re overcome, not embraced. But overcoming resentment politics isn’t about reconciling with economic exploiters while maintaining the exploitive regime. Turnabout, when the exploited can lord his power over his former exploiter, is no end in itself.

Frantz Fanon’s words come back to me when I think about this problem of political culture. He’s most famous for being an inaugural theorist of what’s now called post-colonial philosophy. And his most famous argument was for the legitimacy of violent – sometimes horrifyingly violent – resistance to colonial occupation. He was a leader in Algeria’s independence movement, after all, which innovated many of the techniques of modern terrorism today, and used them against France and French people.

But what most caught my eye in The Wretched of the Earth was a critique of violent revolution as an end in itself. Put simply, once the immediate exploiter class was defeated, the cultural attitude that galvanized the population against the colonizers had to be overcome. 

It was a reactive mode, constantly fostering resentment at those who attacked and cut away your political and economic independence. If the battle is won, but the resentment remains a dominant force in the culture, people’s collective anger continues searching for more enemies. People turn on possible allies and each other. It’s a social-psychological account of why so many revolutionary societies turn to civil war.

The way out is a cultural overcoming in thought. Recognizing when the material political and economic conditions of your own world have changed so that violent overthrow of an oppressor class is no longer necessary. 

That unifying, one-dimensional cultural drive is replaced with a creative spirit. In freedom, you start again, building a culture more diverse than the forced unity of a battle against exploitation fuelled by resentment.

Fanon's greatest lesson was in the danger of letting the
spirit of revolution take a people just a touch too far.

There’s a nationalist song in the old country with a repeated line, “We’ll rant and we’ll roar like true Newfoundlanders!” Nietzsche also developed a metaphor of the roar. It was the lion in Zarathustra whose anger and rage shattered his chains and threw off his burdens. 

Yet even though the lion was free of his burdens, he wasn’t really free. Because he had yet to free himself from his anger at the forces that burdened him. He was consumed by a need for revenge, to go beyond simply freeing himself, and make his former exploiters suffer in return. Punishment feels great when you’re carrying it out, especially when you do so in a spirit of retribution. But it’s still violence, and an unnecessary violence because you’re already free.

Many people in Newfoundland and Labrador aren’t economically free. They’re still dominated by corporate interests in natural resource extraction, dependent for their own prosperity on the mere salaries many receive from natural resources. Williams simply made sure that the oil companies were now firmly in charge of the economy, and used the rhetoric of emancipation from mainland Canadian domination to hide a new yoke.

The politics of resentment in Newfoundland are a distraction, a spirit that fights an exploiter class that’s already been usurped, instead of seeking the people’s control over corporate foreign interests. The lion roars at the ones who’ve already let go of the chains.

It’s Only Newfoundland II: You’ll Always Be a Come-From-Away! A History Boy, 10/08/2015

Continued from last post . . . And the one before it, though I never really numbered them that way. From the start, I always found Danny Williams’ style of politics distasteful. He effortlessly enacted the tough populism that has always gone over just a little too well in Newfoundland. He was the biggest of the province’s Little Big Men, and an embodiment of why the island could no longer stand such people. Even though few realize it yet.

Newfoundlanders loved to watch Danny Williams' defy
the over-sensitive norms of mainland Canada with his
seal-fur coats. But his gestures weren't about ecological
politics or indigenous rights. They were about energizing
the population to follow him and him alone.

Williams became leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Tory party when they were in opposition to a flailing Liberal regime that had dominated the province’s politics for ten years. The Liberals had their own charismatic rabble-rouser in Brian Tobin, a man who personally boarded a Coast Guard ship and chased down a Spanish turbot trawler to prove that he was tough on illegal foreign fishing in protected regions. 

But by the time Williams became premier in 2003, the Liberals had been in power for over a decade and were well out of steam, energy, or ideas. It was reasonable enough that someone with a different approach to the political would take over the premiership, and although my politics had always leaned left, it’s not as though there was much difference between Liberals and Tories on economic details.

Then Williams achieved his greatest success as premier in 2005. I mentioned in the last post that Brian Peckford’s greatest success was negotiating the Atlantic Accord, the exemption from Canada’s National Energy Program that gave Newfoundland control over the pace and nature of development in offshore oil. Williams negotiated a new version of the Accord that let Newfoundland keep the lion’s share of oil revenue as well.

He did it by playing such a hardball negotiating tactic that I really admired it in itself. But its social effects made me feel deeply unwelcome in the province where I grew up and had lived my entire life until then. Williams ordered every Canadian flag removed from all government buildings throughout the province. 

The Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin was humiliated, and couldn’t do anything from his own office that would achieve a comparable insult to Newfoundland as Williams had just delivered to the federal government. He similarly bolstered his patriotic credibility by humiliating a deservedly under-informed Paul McCartney and his then-wife Heather Mills, exposing their ignorance about the ecology of Newfoundland and Labrador’s seal populations on Larry King Live. 

The symbol of Newfoundland nationalism, the pink-white-
and-green flag, was everywhere during the Williams era,
and it echoes still today.

Later conflicts with Stephen Harper’s government over oil revenue sharing resulted in Williams leading the Anyone But Conservative movement in the 2008 federal election. Newfoundland’s national patriotism trumped Tory solidarity and sent an NL caucus to Ottawa that was entirely Liberal and New Democrat.

Newfoundland nationalist tricolour flags were flying everywhere in the province, and especially around St. John’s. One of my friends even hiked up a hill overlooking the harbour and downtown to run up a massive nationalist flag on an abandoned flagpole. 

The province’s culture and society was intensely focussed on national pride, and its expression was a boastful sense of superiority over mainland Canada, and particularly Ontario. In 2007, offshore oil revenue made Newfoundland and Labrador a contributor to inter-provincial equalization payments for the first time. As the collapse of Ontario’s manufacturing sector led it to accept equalization payments for the first time, the Newfoundlanders’ reaction was to laugh in Ontario’s face.

“See how it feels to be the poor ones now, fucking mainlanders! Take our money and lick our boots clean while yer at it!”

The politics of national pride had easily spilled into the politics of resentment. It was crass, rude, condescending, and spiteful. It surrounded me in the media, in conversations, and in the unquestioning love of Danny Williams and everything he did. Williams left office in 2010 with approval ratings higher than some totalitarian dictators feel comfortable falsifying. But they were genuine.

Williams had seemingly fulfilled Peckford’s promise that “have-not will be no more.” He was the single great deliverer of Newfoundland to prosperity. The result was that sketchy projects for which Williams laid the groundwork were embraced wholeheartedly by a public that should have been skeptical.

The Muskrat Falls hydroelectricity development will sell power from a new dam in Labrador directly through the Maritimes, thanks to a series of physical links from Labrador to Newfoundland to Nova Scotia. But there’s no transparency from the government on its cost overruns. 

Looking west at my hometown, St. John's, from Cape
Spear last week. Newfoundland is a culture that still
needs to learn that democracy isn't about picking a
leader to follow, but about keeping your leader on a
tight leash, preferably with a yoke around his neck.

Enormous breakdowns at existing power facilities throughout Newfoundland demonstrated that Muskrat Falls construction is diverting money from necessary maintenance. Public outrage over a series of catastrophic power outages in Winter 2014 forced Williams’ successor Kathy Dunderdale from office. But Williams remains untouchable.

The collapse of global oil prices hit Newfoundland’s workers hard, with slowdowns in the offshore industry and huge numbers of layoffs from sites at the Alberta Tar Sands. Despite the popular faith in offshore oil, Alberta remains a major source of income for Newfoundlanders. Or at least it was. 

Still, Williams remains untouchable, and his massive Galway real estate development on St. John’s west end looks to compound his multi-billion-dollar wealth. 

Williams is a hero to Newfoundlanders, the most dangerous kind of person in a democratic country. My cousin Grizzly Man told me when I visited last week, that Newfoundlanders as a culture have yet to get a firm grasp on precisely what democracy is. And this is because they still have heroes. 

There are still heroes in Newfoundland. Men (and they are always men) who will deliver the population from injustice. Visionaries who shine upon the people like a sun and lift us up with their aspirations and schemes. Follow them and they’ll free you from domination by those mainlanders who’d grind you under their boots, and then you can grind some mainlanders under your own. Or a deluded pop star who made a bad second marriage; you can grind him too.

After living 25 years in a culture where people’s politics are driven by resentment and the worship of charismatic prophet-premiers, I was fucking sick of it. I still am.

It’s Only Newfoundland I: Napoleon Complex, A History Boy, 09/08/2015

Friday night, I arrived back in Toronto from my vacation to St. John’s, visiting my mother, family, a few (but not enough) of my friends, my girlfriend’s mother and her own new boyfriend, and seeing some of the beautifully desolate sights of the Avalon and Bonavista peninsulas. I’m home now.

From Cape Bonavista. If you look carefully, you can see
a tiny fishing boat, three people back to their workday
in the terrifying sublimity of the North Atlantic. You
shouldn't complain about your office job.

This can be a very controversial thing to say among a community of Newfoundlanders: that you were born and raised in Newfoundland but don’t consider it home. To some, it’s understandable. A place where you moved and made a new life can feel more like a home than where you grew up, precisely because it’s free of the growing pains and uncomfortable memories of your origins.

But to others, it sounds like a betrayal. Or at least, it’s incomprehensible.

Last week, I discussed my contempt for Newfoundland’s cultural lack of an environmental or ecological consciousness. Today, I want to talk about a vile aspect of Newfoundland’s culture that hits me more viscerally: its political small-mindedness and insularity.

Newfoundland politics has historically been dominated by Little Big Men, charismatic leaders who inspire public support verging on worship. They ride through political office on promises that their leadership alone will bring salvation. 

The legacy of Joey Smallwood dominated my childhood education about the Canadian period of Newfoundland history. In my elementary school classes, he was treated almost as a hero, usually for having begun the Canadian period of Newfoundland history in the first place. 

Smallwood began as a socialist and social democratic political organizer in rural Newfoundland during the island’s years as an independent country, and then its submission to the British crown as a returned colony during the Great Depression. His campaign to join the Canadian confederation was marred by allegations of vote rigging and ballot destruction that persist to this day. 

Joey Smallwood was Newfoundland's most
successful dictator.

He ruled as an autocratic premier for 23 years after confederation in 1949, attempting a variety of state-centric schemes to subsidize the population of Newfoundland into prosperity. There was concrete material progress after confederation, as basic health care services were brought to much of the rural population for the first time. 

However, this required the controversial forced and incentivized resettlement of many of the smallest, most geographically isolated communities. It forced thousands of people out of their careers in the cod fishery because they no longer had access to their generational fishing grounds. Resentment lingers over what was literally the government’s destruction of hundreds of small towns.

After two decades of autocratic one-man government in an ostensible democracy, Smallwood was forced out of power in the 1972 election. Newfoundland politics in the 1980s was dominated by another charismatic figure, Brian Peckford. Peckford was a Tory, which in provincial Newfoundland politics is associated with independence and anti-federalism, in contrast with the historically conciliatory Liberals of Smallwood.

Peckford’s biggest achievement was negotiating the Atlantic Accord, Newfoundland and Labrador’s inter-provincial treaty with the federal government exempting it from the National Energy Program’s mandate of federal control over offshore oil. 

Despite his self-adopted handle as the “Great Negotiator,” Peckford was also responsible for a series of failures in trying to wrest provincial control of other resources and build a self-sufficient economy for Newfoundland and Labrador. 

He tried unsuccessfully to re-negotiate the Churchill Falls hydroelectric development, because Smallwood initially locked the province for nearly a century into terms that would essentially pay the Quebec government to sell hydroelectric power generated in Labrador. The Quebec government wouldn’t give up such a wonderful deal for them, and the courts upheld the original agreement.

Peckford also tried to gain provincial control over the cod fishery and the power to grant fishing licences from the Canadian government, which was selling licences to destructive freezer trawler companies in an era of dwindling cod stocks. He also, along with the rest of Newfoundland, ignored any ecological damage from the sinking of the Ocean Ranger oil platform, which only exacerbated the destruction of the cod stocks to the point of extinction.

A reasonable graphic representation of Philip Sprung.

Peckford’s attempts to diversify Newfoundland’s economy beyond fish and oil were laughable. His major project was a heavily subsidized greenhouse agriculture project, whose development partner in the private sector was little more credible than Lyle Lanley. The Sprung Greenhouses went the way of the Springfield Monorail.

Brian Peckford is most fondly remembered for a single poetic phrase that embodies the empty dreaming of a magic bullet cure for all of Newfoundland’s problems, the one mad scheme that would save everyone. “Someday the sun will shine and have-not will be no more.”

His major material legacy was as the first draft of the Danny Williams premiership, the period whose height disgusted me so much that I couldn’t bear to live in Newfoundland anymore. To be continued . . .

I Was Only in Newfoundland, A History Boy, 07/08/2015

It turns out that my days wandering around bits of my home province with girlfriend Gillian were so busy I had no time to blog. Well, I don’t really mind that, because some level of vacationing should be allowable. I suspect that, as more social media jobs require continual monitoring, labour activism will include rights for time off work out of his provider’s wireless range. That way, she won’t be encouraged to respond to tweets or manage comment boards while on vacation.

We also visited Trinity on this trip, a town that has
embraced the tourism industry to such a degree that they've
become a replica of a Newfoundland fishing village.

I’ve been thinking about Newfoundland, and how growing up here affected some of my priorities in writing. Particularly, I’m thinking of my non-fiction, and what may have helped nudge me along to my work about environmentalism. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is about how to think ecologically, how to think about ourselves and what we are that will put environmental connections and causes instinctually at the top of our minds. 

When I was nine years old, the entire Grand Banks cod fishery was shut down. The reason was that cod stocks had fallen to levels that were near extinction. Small coastal communities all over the province who had relied on a robust commercial-level fishery for literally hundreds of years now had no industry or employment at all. 

Twelve per cent of the province’s labour force was out of work. These regions depended on direct government bailouts to corporate fish plant owners and individual fishers simply to give tens of thousands of people enough money to subsist. The economies of entire small towns collapsed as incomes plummeted and huge numbers of people simply didn’t have money to spend anymore.

The teachers, news reporters, and government of the province had to explain to nine-year-olds what was going on. I was taught a lot about the dangers of overfishing, and the disastrous scorched-earth harvesting of factory trawlers. But it was only when I got to university that I heard it described for what it was.

I grew up in the middle of an enormous ecological disaster.

I feel like ecological consciousness only really developed in my own generation in Newfoundland. Local fishers deeply understood their relationships with the fish stocks, how a resource population could shrink radically in relation to harvesting rates. They knew the cod stocks were in trouble long before the government or seafood companies acknowledged or cared.

But it was only in the 1990s that environmental regulations became a main priority of the government. A lot of lakes in Newfoundland near human settlements are polluted. St. John’s Harbour, despite its central location in Newfoundland’s largest city, had an enormous sewer pipe spewing toxic waste sitting in it for decades before cleanup was even suggested. The province’s forestry and paper mills produced a significant amount of pollution before the period of environmental laws began.

When we visited Cape Bonavista this week, they had professionally mounted displays on how lighthouses worked and the history of the fishing industry. Its display urging hikers and bout tour patrons not to litter or pollute the land or ocean was cut-out construction paper on bristol board, laid haphazardly against a wall.

It occurred to me this week that, in all the times throughout my education here that I was told about the tragedy of the Ocean Ranger oil platform sinking – the terrible storm, tidal waves, 84 workers lost – no one mentioned anything about whether or how much oil had spilled from its exploratory wells. 

Environmental failures in our epoch of disastrous climate change are rooted in how we think. Humans have trouble conceiving of aggregation: the large-scale impact of many ongoing small-scale actions. “What’s a little sludge dumping into this huge sea going to do?” can poison many kilometres of ocean and seafloor when enough thousands of people say it. 

Yes, I think it was exactly like this.

Humans are also short-term thinkers in cost-benefit analyses, the inability to understand the impact of long chains of causes. “My factories and coal plants may produce a lot of pollution, but we bring electricity and products to millions of people right now!” ignores that enough smoke billowing into the atmosphere is absorbed in ocean water, and the chemical reactions lower the oceans’ pH, as much of the world’s waters are too acidic for most plankton to survive. These interactions that lead to the collapse of entire marine ecosystems’ food webs and mass extinction are too complicated for us to grasp beyond the clear immediate benefits human industry provides.

My generation of people who grew up in Newfoundland are probably the first to develop a popular understanding of environmentalism, ecology, and humanity’s deep, complex integration with all the processes of Earth. It only took an ecological disaster.

Watching Captain Planet as a kid probably helped too.

Chris Bruce for Newfoundland NDP Leader, Advocate, 07/01/2015

I had to introduce a new category of post for this one, because I didn’t think the term “Jamming” was really appropriate for a topic that I think has serious, actual, real-world consequences. The current leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s New Democratic Party is stepping down from her post. My old friend Chris Bruce is considering running for the leadership. And if he actually files the papers and signs up, I genuinely think he would make an excellent leader.

Newfoundland and Labrador's next leader of the NDP.

Frankly, the NDP in the province where I was born and grew up needs the kind of shakeup that being led by a quick-witted, intelligent, idealistic activist would deliver. The provincial party is in a shambles, broken for the last two years by the incompetence of its elected parliamentarians. 

Some background 

Lorraine Michael has been leader of Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial NDP since 2006. She has long been an activist for women’s rights and the poor, and stands for the values that continue to animate that political party. In the provincial election of Fall 2011, her party elected five members to Newfoundland’s 48-seat House of Assembly. 

One candidate, Gerry Rogers, defeated a cabinet minister, and the election in one south coast rural district came within less than 50 votes of defeating another. The NDP had more members in the House than in its history, and elected Chris Mitchelmore on the northern peninsula, the party’s first victory outside the capitol city of St. John’s. Michael’s own popularity was eclipsing the Conservative premier and the Liberal opposition leader. The NDP’s fortunes had never looked brighter.

But two years later, everything fell to pieces. Dale Kirby, a member of Michael’s caucus who rose through the provincial NDP from a career in the Canadian Federation of Students,* led the other three MHAs to write a letter calling for a leadership review. Michael responded by airing the entire conflict in the news media. Rogers and George Murphy backed down from the letter’s position (Murphy even cried with remorse in his interview on the subject) after they realized that, according to the rules of the provincial party’s constitution, a leadership review would require Michael to step down.

* Former CFS members are the only people in the NDP that I univocally refuse to trust. The CFS exercises tight top-down control of member unions' messaging, bullies opponents, uses legal action to intimidate local student unions who wish to leave, and has a documented history of corrupt practices to ensure that its loyalists occupy positions of power in member unions. I documented many such instances of CFS bullying and corruption in Newfoundland when I worked for The Muse, and this investigation by University of Toronto’s Varsity revealed current Toronto school board trustee Ausma Malik’s role in rigging a student union election.

I always suspected this letter of being a spectacular failure of a leadership bid from Kirby, that it was his attempt to position himself as the next generation of Newfoundland’s New Democratic leadership, 2013 being Michael’s 70th year. A humiliated Kirby soon left the NDP. He and Mitchelmore sat as independents, then eventually joined the Liberal caucus. 

Newfoundland’s NDP was trounced in a series of by-elections over the following two years, all of which have favoured the Liberal party. The caucus revolt made every elected NDP member look like a fool. Michael was clumsy enough to air her party’s dirty laundry in public. Kirby didn’t even know how to lead a proper caucus uprising, and Mitchelmore acts like his lapdog. Rogers and Murphy looked as if they didn’t even know the rules of their own party. Yesterday, Michael announced her resignation.

The NDP needs a completely new approach and image, and a smart activist dedicated to the ideals of progressive politics can deliver. These ideals have changed considerably over the last generation, and I know Chris Bruce well enough to say that he won’t be the same old fart peddling outdated ideas of statist socialism that have already been thoroughly undermined by the neo-liberal think tank network and the hypocritical corruption of old leftist leaders.

Progressive politics in social movements

Occupy. Growing income inequality on a social scale is the outcome of both Conservative and Liberal policies that, informed by Canada’s neo-liberal intellectual establishment, have cut taxes on the wealthy, assaulted workers’ rights, undermined workers’ abilities to organize themselves, destroyed government powers to gather workable data about our society, and slashed services that help people out of poverty. The shrinking demand of a poorer population is slowly hobbling our economy.

The last four years have seen a movement of people who demand that the government protect its most economically vulnerable citizens. Our leaders must understand that prosperity for all does not come from protecting the interests of wealthy and powerful businessmen in the name of economic freedom. Progressive politics must fashion a new social contract with this principle at the heart of our government’s obligations to its people.

End War and Surveillance. At the same time, the power of the state to control its citizens must be kept on the shortest possible leash. The War on Terror has seen our government’s powers to spy on citizens grow exponentially. Progressive politics must refashion the state as the servant of the people, not their controller.

The surveillance state is just one aspect of a growing set of police and military powers that have grown beyond acceptable limits for a democracy. The Harper government has expanded Canada’s prison system at a pace that outstrips its growth in the United States. That country already imprisons a higher percentage of its citizens than the Soviet Union’s gulags at their height. Progressive politics must work to end this system of incarcerated slave labour.

“I Can’t Breathe.” Related to the growth of institutional police power to control citizens is its disproportionate employment to harass, imprison, and kill people of colour and indigenous people. Police organizations and conservative media depict even the mildest criticism of police institutions and practices as sedition and incitement to violence. Progressive politics must reconcile our law enforcement institutions with all citizens to protect the public peace.

Idle No More. The ongoing uprising of indigenous peoples across Canada has the potential to transform our state and society into a more just form. Genuinely repairing the historical and ongoing harm that the Canadian state and people have done to indigenous people requires more than apologies. It requires the reorientation of Canadian society from levels of constitutional frameworks and governance to our individual attitudes.

The Harper government is right that indigenous women go missing at a similar frequency as white women in Canada. But when a white woman disappears, there is an amber alert and the mass mobilization of police and citizens to find her. When an indigenous woman disappears, she’s just another drunk fucking Native lost in the snow. Progressive politics must not rest until all people are truly treated equally.

Another aspect of Idle No More that often goes unremarked is that it is also an environmentalist movement. Unchecked natural resource development, especially bitumen and minerals, can do massive harm to our ecosystems, the living systems that maintain so many of the processes that we need to survive and thrive. Progressive politics must also be an ecological politics. 

These are how I understand the principles of the modern left, the genuinely progressive edge of social change. And I think my old friend Chris Bruce is the best person to bring these ideas to the forefront of political discourse in Newfoundland and Labrador as leader of that province’s New Democratic Party.