Feeding Off Its Own Destruction, Research Time, 19/03/2018

I live in Toronto. It’s a vibrant economy and culture, but there’s plenty of simmering conflict here. The tech, finance, and film/tv industry are the major drivers of the city’s economy, but there are plenty of people left behind.

Rent control and housing affordability is a crushing pressure on people all over the city. There’s pressure on the middle classes. People now able to afford a condo’s mortgage are locked out of a townhouse market with not enough supply, and a detached home market whose value has ballooned ridiculously.

I have plenty of bias – my New Democrat affiliation is in my Twitter
bio. What amazed me was, when my part association posted this
image, how quickly we got our first racist comment about Muslims.
Far from our last, too. The real irony is that, the more shit-posters
we get on this image – and the comment thread is ridiculously long
without my having to do a thing – the more visible Facebook's
algorithm will make it in news feeds all over the networks of the
commenters.

There’s pressure on the lower classes. High demand entices building owners and property managers to raise rents beyond what many in already run-down buildings can afford. Elected political leaders in city and provincial offices are no longer interested in subsidizing low-income housing directly, which pushes more disadvantaged people out of housing and into cars or parking garages with few security cameras.

Both Ford brothers – alive and dead – have given lip service to affordable housing. Former mayor Rob would visit the city’s public housing to highlight its unsavoury character.

For the most part, the Ford brother who has a good chance of becoming Ontario’s next premier has taken a Not-In-My-Neighbourhood attitude toward disadvantaged people.
• • •
Toronto’s housing pressure is a function of a very basic process of capitalism, one Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explored in Anti-Œdipus. It’s a social / economic system that’s remarkably durable, which is strange.

There have been plenty of economic crises in capitalism – 47 major recessions in the history of the United States alone. The system was unstable enough that a union activist turned social scientist could write an analysis of capitalist economics describing it as a system heading inevitably for self-destruction.

The contemporary left doesn’t take Marx’s ideas at face value anymore. At least the intelligent ones don’t. Anti-Œdipus was another generation’s updating the basic idea of Capital to unexpected, contingent, new conditions.

Parkdale has been a source of artistic creativity in Toronto for a while,
and a big part of that was how many affordable – if kind of scuzzy –
homes were available in the region. It's been a poor neighbourhood
for a while, which means artists and new Canadians often end up
living here. The Tibean and Roma communities have made serious
impacts here for a while. But they're also squeezed by condo
developers putting pressure on property owners to seek bigger
profits. All those poor and weird people who made the place
interesting and drew people to the area will have to leave so the
boring people with fat wallets can live in this interesting place.

Capitalism’s promise is prosperity and freedom – growth of the whole economy is good for everyone.* But capitalist economic systems drive these cycles of expansion and collapse. Usually, a key commodity’s value is inflated beyond sustainable price ranges by wider economic conditions, and there’s a lot of direct and collateral financial damage in the crash.

* As long as the size of some people’s shares of the pie grows at a greater rate than the size of the pie. That’s how an oligarch’s class is created.
• • •
Toronto’s high-pressure real estate market is one of those systems squeezed by affordability crunches. Profiteering people and organizations – property owners, investors in new condo developments – build these massive structures for middle class and professional class renters and homeowners.

Protests of these developments happen when people worry that they’ll be squeezed out of their homes – squeezed out of any homes at all – by the pressure of ubiquitous development that leaves them behind. That’s the injustice of property development – growing supply of middle class housing can stabilize the pressurized prices, but force those of more modest means away.

Gentrification’s irony. We all know it. A neighbourhood is filled with people of modest means who are all somehow marginalized from the mainstream. Working class. Artists. New immigrants. Marginalized people, whether by ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or some other racial or caste marker. Home of the minorities of a society.

Even the far-right nutters who think Trudeau and Bill Morneau are
communists just help drive our messaging to more people. Don't
tell them that. Hell, even if you do, they'll probably just keep trying
to start flame wars to own us socialists and libtards. Resentment and
cruelty seem to be the only things keeping North America's
conservative coalitions together these days.

Minorities in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception. People whose existence, identity, way of life separates them from the mainstream, others them. Their central example was Franz Kafka – a Czech man working and writing in German; an intellectual, curious, deeply spiritual Jew living in a Christian, rather anti-Semitic culture. It often puts them at a disadvantage.

Contemporary Toronto has its equivalents. Refugees from all over the world live in the Toronto area, as well as immigrants who come to Canada having to rebuild their entire lives. They’re the disadvantaged of our economic system, where we most value people who are already rich.

Yet a culture of entirely rich people is boring. It’s dull. It’s creatively dead. All this class knows how to do is commodify – invest for a higher return. But if you need sources outside your own class to invest in, you need to find difference-makers – new trends, new businesses, new ideas.

The minorities of our societies are the creative classes – they’re already mixing and realigning cultural codes and traditions in their own identities as they adapt to their new social worlds. Capitalism as a social system needs such people – hustlers, artists, new people – because the elite of a capitalist system don’t have the capacity to think anymore.

The margins of a society bring the energy to the next growth and creative process in a capitalist economy. Yet the very success of those processes force marginalized people out of a society, since the prosperity of an unrestrained capitalist system tends to cluster in oligarchical shapes.

Oligarchs hate those filthy poor people, and they aren’t smart of worldly enough to know how profoundly they depend on them.

Eyes Over the Table, Composing, 15/06/2017

I didn’t mean to go three days without posting, but it happened. Its unfortunate, because this is the first time in a while* that I’m fairly well ahead of my blogging in my reading.

* Don’t fucking jinx it, Riggio.

There’d be times when I’m so busy scrounging work that I’m reaching for a spare paragraph of philosophy or anything at all to read that I’m wondering what to write at the end of the day. Now sometimes, I come home too tired to write, or because I’ve been working on writing projects from clients, and directing a documentary.

Have I not mentioned that yet? I’m not even sure that I have before.

The film is called Around One Table, a story of a very straightforward idea – that dinner brings us together. At first, the idea was to make a short documentary about an organization called Syrian Welcome Dinners.

This film project has a lot of fringe benefits.

They’re a volunteer-run organization that connects newcomer families from different parts of Syria with Canadian families who are interested to get to know people from the region, and are open to helping them build their personal and professional networks in their new city.

They all meet and get to know each other over dinner. Literally, the already-Canadians invite the whole family of the new-Canadians for a meal. Our documentary will film interviews with some of the participating Canadians and the participating Syrians.

We’ll talk with the Canadians as they prepare their meals. What’s your history with this dish? Do you have any good memories associated with this meal? What are your expectations about meeting these folks? What do you want to talk about with them? Why are you taking part in this program in the first place?

Similar conversations with members of the Syrian families in the days before the dinner. What’s your story of coming to Canada? What do you remember about your life before coming here? Do you have other family members in Canada? Elsewhere in the world? In Syria?

What do you like about Canada? What have you learned about this city already? What sticks out to you? What do you expect of the welcome dinner? What do you think of a meeting program like this? Why did you sign up for this?

We’re catching up with Syrians who’ve already gone through the program as they cook an Iftar meal to bring to their former hosts.

Questions like this can tell you plenty about a lot of the joy and tragedy in life. I’m pretty sure we'll have enough for a feature-length.

To Be Incorruptible V: If You’ve No Shelter You’ll Have No Peace, Research Time, 25/04/2017

Continued from previous . . . I find a lot that’s valuable in Machiavelli. But there are limits, of course. Someone like him writing in the 1530s is in a very different historical position than someone like me writing in the 2010s.

I mean, the reasons why are obvious, of course. But I want to call attention to one reason in particular – it’s not as if there weren’t plenty of good ideas in the same tradition of materialist radical democracy in the intervening five centuries.

However much I value Machiavelli’s concept of patriotism as devotion to the public good of your community, other questions related to the nature of the community generate troubling answers. Not a reason for rejecting Machiavelli as a whole, but a reason to be careful with how his thought might influence you.

Here’s a serious problem of the 2010s that Machiavelli’s writings can’t break through – the boundaries of a community. Globally, there’s a near-universal political crisis over the nature of the border.

I draw a sword against conspirators;
When think you that the sword goes up again?
Never, till Caesar's three and thirty wounds
Be well avenged; or till another Caesar
Have added slaughter to the sword of traitors.

For decades, we’ve been troubled over the dangers that come from borders in trade, and investment fall away. The erosion of borders in these cases has encouraged explosive social problems as terrible inequalities entrench themselves.

The most intense iteration of border erosion facing the West is state attempts to control the movement of people. Most in our faces is the refugee crisis – literally millions fleeing horrifying wars and oppression across North Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Many crowd into slums and makeshift camps like the squalid tent cities at Calais.

I go to Machiavelli thinking there might be an answer to this question in his book on the strengths and safety valves of democratic society. I don’t find the answers I want. Machiavelli, living in a time of wars and invasions, sees in the movement of desperate people only more invasion, violence, and war that desperation has driven to extremes.

Most often, in his era and in the time of Republican Rome, Machiavelli encounters refugees as literal invading armies. If some natural disaster rendered a city-state unliveable, its leaders and people would invade another country’s territory and set themselves up.

War was the only response to what we’d today call a humanitarian crisis. Yet he does describe a material root of the erosion of human capacities for kindness as well as our state borders.

Returning to his golden age of Republican Rome, Machiavelli sees the root of the fear of refugees in what – during that ancient era – were the most common causes of whole cities uprooting themselves.

Resource wars. A drought would ruin a harvest, or a flood would wreck too much farmland, and a city wouldn’t have the material to support itself. All they could do was invade their neighbours and hope to plunder enough loot to sustain themselves.

A battle over scarce resources, made more scarce by massive disasters, would bring ordinarily peaceful cities into deadly conflict. Their means of survival itself was at stake. Life was inescapably fragile. Risk was great, and likely perceived to be greater in the moment.

If there isn’t enough to keep everyone alive, our peaceful ideals can all too easily be pinched into nothing. A flame between two calloused fingers.

It was a catastrophic drought in the late 2000s that drove Syria into upheaval. A time when, in a state with tight borders, there was no longer enough to keep everyone alive and prosperous.

Inescapable Obsolete States, Research Time, 09/01/2017

So after reading through Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Cosmopolitanism, I started looking around for other books that would examine perspectives like his. Conceptions of global citizenship and multinational civic engagement and identity building.

My own country Canada's policy of welcome to all immigrant groups
is part of a program of multiculturalism that's integrated our major
cities and helped build one of the first post-national countries.

I’ve had some limited success so far. I’ve snagged a couple of things by Pheng Cheah which are on my list to get to pretty soon. And I also found an interesting little book by a philosophically inclined journalist named Atossa Araxia Abrahamian.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen is a title dripping in irony. When I read Appiah’s abstract arguments in favour of embracing cosmopolitan, multicultural, multinational aspects of our identities, I found an optimistic, hopeful vision of humanity’s potential for coexistence and friendship.

Appiah’s philosophy and his life are conceptual and living arguments for embracing our multiplicity. We too often today use strictly defined terms – ex. Muslim, English-speaker, Quebecer, Burmese, Russian – to stake borders around our identities. We make a single or very few of these definitions primary to our identities, and see the world as a collision of these strictly-defined identities and allegiances.

But if we embrace the differences within our own identities and societies, we’ll make ourselves more open to building relationships with people whose cultures have very different thematic concepts and traditions.

It sounds like a paradox, but focussing on our own differences makes it easier to build kinship across cultural and national lines. We explore our many different vectors of cultural creation.

Philosophical journalist Atossa Abrahamian

Sounds fantastic. But Abrahamian’s empirical, journalistic perspective brings a dark angle to the embrace of cosmopolitan identities.

Reading The Cosmopolites, Abrahamian identifies a core source of cosmopolitanism’s corruption – economies and cultural connections have become profoundly global, but massive material power still rests with national, territorially-defined states.

For one, it’s largely the very rich who actually embrace global citizenship in practical terms. Small countries with limited economic possibilities have taken up selling their citizenships.

Several Caribbean island states like St Kitts and Antigua are the major players in this market. If you can afford to invest a few hundred thousand dollars in property or other support to these countries, they’ll offer you citizenship.

And it’s not just the Caribbean. Abrahamian informed me that, for example, former Thai PM and semi-evil billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra regularly travels on his Montenegro* passport.

* And Montenegro itself has been wrapped up in some freaky old-school imperialist shenanigans from its recent creation as a state until today.

But the weirdest kind of citizenship shenanigans is a practice I didn’t know much about until now. I had known already that many Arab countries have large populations of long-resident non-citizens. That many who were born in Persian Gulf monarchies and emirates had no path to citizenship because their families were foreign-descended.

Activist and writer Iyad el-Baghdadi

This was the situation of my old friend A from university. He and his family were of Indian descent, coming from Chennai. When he was born, they lived in Kuwait. Because they weren’t descended from old stock Kuwaitis, he was disallowed citizenship in the country where he was born.

But I didn’t know that many of these non-citizens were genuinely stateless. They had no citizenship at all. The reporting of Iyad el-Baghdadi – a human rights activist and reporter from the United Arab Emirates – first alerted me to the problem. From him, I learned that the UAE is on a path to a population of 96% non-citizens.

And Abrahamian has produced a report on the strangest solution to this citizenship problem. Kuwait and the UAE, in separate deals, negotiated with the Comoros Islands to buy hundreds of thousands of Comoro citizenships for its stateless citizens.

We’ve come a long way from the philosophies of the founding period of the nation-state. The modern state as a public ideology – a philosophy become dogma – the state is the expression of the nation. It’s an agent of social unity – the state unifies a diverse people, but is also the institutionalization of the universal national essence. It’s the voice of a people and simultaneously creates that voice.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the founding
philosophers of the modern concept of nation
as reaching its highest and most proper form as
a state government of free citizens.

Yet today, we see states and governments who treat citizenship as a commodity to be bartered for. Just another thing to be bought and sold.

Should we mourn for the ideal of the nation-state? Its commitment to forging a people in unity together. Or do we admit that it was always kind of a sham?

That a few sophisticated, idealistic, and maybe a little naive thinkers made an inspiration out of an institution that was always about control of populations. That the lofty philosophies of Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel only ended up giving institutions of exclusion and racialization multifaceted dimensions and a bunch more propaganda material?

That all the talk about the unity of a state and its nation meant nothing when those very nations were building colonial empires, folding wildly different cultures inside their states.

Reality’s hypocrisy doesn’t mean we can simply write off the philosophies of nationhood and the nation-state. The philosophies provided the foundational concepts for how we as people understand our political institutions – their purposes and ideals.

Building a genuinely post-national world means building an institutional, activist, and conceptual toolbox for a model of politics that globalizes democracy. Building the concepts of the new means understanding the concepts of what you want to overcome.

Cosmopolitanism (the philosophy and the book) is a start. But as Abrahamian’s research shows, it isn’t nearly enough.

Anarchist India, Research Time, 30/09/2016

We in the West have a lot to learn from others. I mean, everyone has a lot to learn from everyone else – that’s just the nature of singularity. All of our experiences and life narratives are different, and we can all learn from each other. 

But speaking more specifically (and without empty hippie platitudes), I think Western progressive activists have a lot to learn from community organizing in India. At least, from my first tentative investigation into the curious new kinds of political associations that modern Indian society produces, we have a lot to learn.

We Westerners (as far as I can speak for a whole society spread over
four continents) tend to think of slums as sad, pathetic places. And
their people lead difficult lives. But revolutionary political creativity
can emerge from these places.

Yesterday, I wrote about how Western political thinking is stuck in a bind. In our political tradition, states first developed as civil organizations. Their purpose was to unify disparate people across wide territories behind a common mission and a common identity. 

The Western state was the material articulation of the spirit of the nation – such was the philosophy. And the institutions of the state were designed to build that communal spirit of nationhood in the first place. It was supposed to take real associations and societies of plurality and unify them, homogenize them. 

We’ve run into quite a problem with this, which is that national identity never matches borders exactly. People who identify with one nation live outside it, and we feel a strange legitimacy when a national state tries to protect nationals (even non-citizen nationals) outside its borders. Even when it results in aggressive expansion or subversive invasion.

The nation-state has been obviously obsolete since, as far as I’m concerned, 1945. So what kind of political institutions can be alternatives?

Chatterjee identifies – without using the phrase itself – the welfare state as a vibrant, functional alternative to nationalism and the nation-state. When the state and the government is a service provider, it focusses on identifying differences, not smoothing them into unity.

There are populations with different needs, different situations, and different histories. The state has obligations to help all these populations in its territory develop better lives for themselves. That results in a much more empowered citizenry.

Here’s an example from Kolkata: Rail Colony Gate Number One. This is a shantytown of about 1500 people in a Kolkata suburb on the side of railroad tracks. Everyone knows their settlement is completely illegal. They’re squatters on private land – political and ecological refugees, as well as economic migrants, from Bangladesh and East Bengal.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has become the face of Hindu
nationalism, a label he's embraced. And while he's managed to
control the public image in the West of what India has embraced,
his power over a dynamic population of more than a billion is not
quite as considerable as the propaganda suggests.

Everyone – squatters included – acknowledges that they’re squatters, and so their community is legally precarious. It’s subject to forced removal at any time. But these very poor people literally have nowhere else to go. 

And that’s why the railway and municipal authorities let them stay – because they have nowhere else to go. Also, they’ve formed their own relationships with the surrounding neighbourhoods as care workers and day labourers. They’ve become economically integrated over the decades the Colony has existed.

The welfare state owes these people resources to live and improve their lives. Now, they way we think about the government coming to help in the West, we’d expect disasters to unfold. It’s become obvious in our culture that the government is a disconnected, distant, barely competent service provider. But that’s not what happened in Kolkata.

Community leaders in Rail Colony Gate #1 formed Jana Kalyan Samiti – The People’s Welfare Association. It’s an organization of community organizers in the shantytown itself, which coordinates with the government and other stakeholders in the neighbourhood for service provision and diplomacy.

As far as principles go, it’s an anarchist organization. Again, this has a very different meaning than mainstream Western ideas. We tend to think of anarchism as Black Bloc crust-punks who live in squats, beg or wash dishes for a living, and reject education or social advancement.

That’s a false picture of how anarchism as a philosophy works. In the Western academic world, anarchism tends mostly to be a negative argument about the oppressive powers of national governments and authoritarian institutions. 

But anarchism, in a positive sense, is network politics. Organizations arising from communities themselves, as people build networks that grow to become huge associations with core and periphery members. 

The leaders of the Rail Colony’s People’s Welfare Association are relationship brokers between the people of the shantytown, neighbourhood organizations, the rail company, and all levels of the Indian government. This Indian organization – to take it as one example – has shown us how to do anarchism right.

Politics as relationship brokerage for the betterment of everyone in the community.

Freedom Speaks With Light From a Screen, Jamming, 16/09/2016

Tonight, I’ll be busy with a fundraising event I’m organizing with the Syria Film Festival. For lack of a better name, it’s the SYFF Cultural Party, and it’s actually going to be a pretty fun night. 

When we were planning the fundraiser, we had our eye on a comprehensive menu of entertainment. We’ve arranged an art auction, and our Festival Director AtoZ’s band is playing a set of traditional and contemporary Syrian music. 

But the centrepiece of the Cultural Party is the screening of a film that one of our partners produced, My Dream My Right. Faisal Attrache is a documentary director who's made several shorts following the lives of people at the Za’atari Refugee Camp just over Syria’s border with Jordan.

Over 80,000 people live in Za’atari, making it Jordan’s fourth-largest city. It’s a city made of United Nations tents in the middle of the bloody desert. It’s existed for four years. And it’s a pretty typical refugee camp in that it’s an enormous limbo for its residents, trapped by the international laws of citizenship that keep them from seeking a better life elsewhere.

The Europeans certainly don’t want any more Syrian people coming to their country, so everyone is just sort of stuck there. That’s what refugee camps are – places where people are stuck. 80,000 people.

Some of those people are youth who’ve taken part in a set of filmmaking workshops that Attrache – and his organization, Voices of the Children – have set up. My Dream My Right is a collection of several short films that these young people made themselves. Each is only a few minutes long, and expresses an aesthetic style unique to each of these young directors.

One of the founding activists and officials in the UNHCR, Thomas Jamieson, had a saying that I discovered a while ago. “If you can close a camp, do it.” A refugee camp is a living purgatory, stuck in a place where your citizenship and your humanity isn’t even fully recognized. 

It reminds me of one core truth behind my own political ideas – We can’t rely on our states to protect us and bestow us rights. We deserve full rights and legal recognition as people, regardless of citizenship and the laws of whatever government issued us our papers. You're always in some minimal danger of a government that cares nothing for you leaving you out to dry.

Well, Za’atari doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. But these young people are sick of the limbo of life in a refugee camp.

The Cultural Party will also now be the first stage in fulfilling a promise I made to the documentary’s producers at the Voices of the Children non-profit. Figuring out how to get these people out of the god damn refugee camp. 

Because if you've been stuck in a refugee camp in the middle of the Jordanian desert overlooking the Syrian border for four years,* you’ll want to get the hell out. It’s not a nice place to be for a month, let alone for four years.

* Four fucking years. I mean, seriously.

Four fucking years. I’d have had it. I’m not surprised that these guys have too. So I plan on introducing (virtually) some of SYFF’s donors and immigration activist partners to the young artists behind My Dream My Right. 

If they can produce such remarkable cinematic beauty in the generally shitty conditions of Za’atari, they’ll be able to weather pretty much anything in the name of art. Especially if they can get the resources of a country and society like Canada working for them.

Some of the heirs to Werner Herzog’s pragmatic existential cinematic process could be in Za’atari right now. We owe it to the world, humanity, God, to get them to make as many films as physically possible.

God would owe them. God should owe them.

Once again, here’s the Facebook event for the Cultural Party tonight. Never stop pushing and nudging the world toward freedom. Even if it’s just a $20 cover charge.