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.

How Can We Teach What Folks Have to Learn? Jamming, 02/02/2018

It's been a few kind of rough days, and that’s okay. But I wanted to take a break from the more hardcore philosophy I’ve been on for the last few days and apply some of these concepts to some of our contemporary situations.

This is a conversation about the labour movement. What there is of it today, anyway. Let me start with my own material position on this issue – I’ll lay my cards on the table.

I’m a district association vice-president in the New Democratic Party here in Canada. I chair our policy committee, which makes me a kind of central coordinating philosopher, if I can be pretentious about it.

When I was watching the Ontario college instructors' strike last Fall,
I saw dedicated activists wasting their time when the government
understood that defeating them was a matter of waiting them out.
When enough students became frustrated with the strike, they
blamed the unions for choosing to strike instead of the government
for refusing to compromise. It seemed no one in OPSEU
understood that this was a possibility, when it's exactly what's
been happening at York University for decades now.

If you know the history of the New Democratic Party, you know that the NDP is, in many essential aspects of its development, the party of the labour movement. Now, the NDP is much more than the party of the labour movement alone these days, but those organizational tensions are for another day.

I'm an ally and a friend of the labour movement – but the movement has to adjust to two new realities if it’s going to thrive as it did a century ago. 1) The working class is too diverse for any necessary solidarity to develop. 2) Anti-union interests know exactly how to defeat the old union methods of bargaining and strikes.

See, while I’m not a marxist, I work in the political party and write Utopias embedded in a tradition of thought where Karl Marx’s works are important and influential. The theorists most influential on my own political thinking were Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Antonio Negri. Their works are positioned clearly in the marxist tradition.

That said, none of them are what you’d call orthodox marxists. If you want a summary of the fundamental premises of orthodox marxism, read the last two posts from earlier this week.

The key lesson you can take from there is that the world is fundamentally contingent – so the processes that were driving your social movement aren’t necessary. New technologies that never existed in Marx’s time and were barely imaginable transformed every aspect of human civilization.

One of those changes that computer, internet, and robotics technology did was fragment the nature of labour. Many different categories of worker exist now – factory floors and mine shafts, the home offices and Slack forums, the smartphone notifications delivering $8 shawarma.

Have you ever tried to get any of these people to talk to each other? Yes, they can all agree that their jobs stink. But they have nothing in common in their personalities.

We in the New Democrats have a beautiful attitude toward Tommy
Douglas, the founder of our party in bringing together the
farmers' socialist movement with the Canadian Labour Congress
and their supporters. But we can't let ourselves be limited by what
we've inherited when the world has changed so radically.

Here’s an example of the working person’s solidarity. When I was on strike in 2009 as a teaching assistant at McMaster, I spoke to a contract electrician who was driving through one of our picket lines. He said he had a son, so I told him one thing we were on strike to secure was more coverage in our benefits plan for parents of small children.

And he told me to go fuck myself because he never had a benefits plan in his life, already a decade longer than mine.

On top of that, look at the example of the big college instructors’ strike in Ontario last year. It was a failure on so many fronts, and I can’t help but blame the instructors’ union itself. Not in the sense most people mean by this, that their claims were unreasonable. No, the instructors’ concerns were valid, important, and vital.

I blame the instructors’ union in the sense that I’m incredulous that they walked into such an obvious trap! It was amateurish.

The union made their first offer to the provincial government months before the Fall semester started. The government didn’t respond until classes were well underway. They made such unreasonable proposals to the union that refusal was the only rational response.

At this point, a union official in Toronto – where the union-administration battles of York University have become legendary over the century – should see that he’s being set up. Yet OPSEU walked right into this trap, filling their public relations messaging that expected solidarity from everyone – especially the students.

We’re working people on strike! Of course the people will support us!

Nonsense. The strike was broken by the first student union coming out to say that instructors should back down and take what management will give them.

The people are too fragmented for solidarity to come through the old-fashioned vectors. Singing “Solidarity forever” only reminds people outside the local that your solidarity is not for them.

Now let’s look this problem in the face and deal with it.

Hope Springs and Freedom Sings, Advocate, 04/11/2016

The more philosophical stuff will continue after this weekend. Today, I’m just writing a short post to add a little promotion to the Syria Film Festival – which opens tonight at the Isabel Bader Theatre at University of Toronto.

SYFF is an organization that’s grown very close to my heart since I became involved last summer. For one thing, it was my first (if still unpaying) gig in the communications field – an internship that I started a couple of months after graduating from my college program.

Though the internship’s term itself finished after the premiere film festival last November, I stayed attached to the organization. And I’m a core part of the organizing committee, though I admit that I haven’t been able to contribute quite as much as I’d like to.

Especially after getting a monstrous cold just a few days ago that knocked me out during the frenzied final preparations and promotions.

But I’ve made quite a few good friends here, and gotten involved in an organization that fits the utopian character of my political, social, and moral values. After all, SYFF is based on the notion that art, cinema, and images can help change the world. It’s a wildly unbelievable truth.

Consider the macabre image that launched the wave of Canadian support, grief, and love for Syrian people – Aylan Kurdi’s dead body washed up on a beach. I remember one committee member at the time remarking that the image would pass away within a news cycle or two.

I could tell it was different, that it had a singular and great power. I knew its power was potentially transformative for a lot of people in Canada. I was one of only two Canadian-born members of the core crew in SYFF’s first year, so maybe I had a better sense of how that image would drive people in my society.

But I’m also a film writer, and a lover of cinema. I understand the power of images. That image brought thousands of people out of refugee camps to my country where they can live in peace. That image brought a huge wave of publicity to our film festival.

In our first year, most of our films were pretty depressing. They were all documentaries – some short a couple feature-length – that followed the uprising and the war. A woman who defied her parents to join the revolution against Assad. An animated homage to the White Helmet rescue squads. Shorts about the unending limbo of life in Za’atari Refugee Camp.

I think my favourite film from SYFF 2015 was 50 Feet From Syria, a documentary about Hisham Bismar, a Syrian-American orthopaedic surgeon who travelled to a Turkish hospital just over the border. He treated refugees and performed emergency surgery on freshly wounded soldiers, revolutionaries, and civilians rushed over the border. It was unflinching in depicting the real, gory brutality of shrapnel and bombing injuries. It’s one of the greatest documentaries I’ll never watch again.

Jay Abdo – leaving Damascus, the Hollywood of Arabia, for the
Hollywood of Hollywood.

We have a few war stories in SYFF 2016, it’s true. Our Friday night feature documentary is After Spring, a powerful look at the brutal results of the 2011 democratic uprisings across the Arab world.

But we also have stories of hope. We have a film about the Syrian actor Jay Abdo, tracing his journey from being one of the most famous and respected character actors of Arab television and film, fleeing to America as a dissident, and restarting his career in American cinema.

Jay was a special guest at last year’s festival, and is returning this year to introduce and discuss his film. A few days ago, I did a detailed interview with him, which I hope to turn into several longer articles about SYFF, Jay’s journey, and a look into the world of Arab television.

I think the film I’m most proud of so far in SYFF 2016 is Syrian Eagles. It’s opening the festival tonight, and it’s the first film SYFF itself has produced. Our programming committee head – and well-experienced documentarian – Aisha Jamal directed it.

Syrian Eagles is the story of a local Toronto soccer team composed entirely of Syrian newcomers, telling their stories and their hopes in their new country. At its forefront is hope in the face of terror and war, and a new community of welcome and peace.

Art will change the world.

And We Will Transform Our Values – Ourselves Alongside, Composing, 08/07/2016

This weekend, I’m holding the first of what I aim to be several workshops on ecological policy and philosophy. It’s a part of my work with the New Democratic Party in Toronto, the first initiative entirely of my own design.

This is a rebuilding year for the NDP,* and that includes some fundamental discussions about where we’ll go as a political party. But in a broader sense, I think it’s also about what role the NDP will play in the wider progressive social movement to build a society free of racism and oppression of all kinds. 

* Which I hope turns out more like the Blue Jays and less like the Leafs.

That's bigger than any one political party, and a state institution like a political party can only be a powerful ally of such a movement. A means for that movement of universal liberation to achieve its goals of prosperity and freedom. I think the political party in Canada most amenable to that path is the New Democrats. 

One reason for that is how we treated the LEAP Manifesto. Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis’ program is a vague set of imperatives specifically focussed on the environmental, social, and economic impacts of climate change and how to fight it through radical emissions reduction and a rapid changeover to a renewable energy economy.

Toronto is a beautiful blend of green spaces and thick
urbanity. We have a lot of work to do yet if we want to
build a genuinely ecologically thriving city.

My workshops go beyond that because ecological issues in Canada encompass much more than emissions and climate shifts. And the real weight of our global ecological crisis require thinking about more than simply understanding issues and solving problems.

We need a significant transformation of how we think of ourselves, and our place in the world. Humanity has to become ecological in our self-conception, at every aspect of how we understand our lives. 

At a local level in Toronto, that means understanding how our actions constitute our environment, and how our environment structures the possibilities for our actions. Toronto is inescapably urban, though we do a much better job of including non-human spaces than many other comparable cities around the world.

But there are particular issues that Torontonians need to confront if we’re to work through how a Torontonian can conceive of herself as an ecological creature. I want to talk with people about their ideas of how to make urban infrastructure and architecture more green, how to incorporate the buildings, roads, and transit links of a city with the complex ecosystems of our rivers, lakes, and the parks that grow around them.

We have to figure out how we can fund this urban transformation into ecological urbanity. Or rather, how that transformation can fund itself. Because an economically viable program for anything has to generate wealth – no matter what form that wealth may take. 

The most conceptually difficult (and promising) idea in the LEAP Manifesto that I want to work through in these workshops is Klein’s concept of energy democracy. She calls this common ownership of energy resources and infrastructure. 

Now, this is different than public ownership, which is just another word for state ownership. State ownership of energy resources is a government institution that holds and operates our energy infrastructure in trust for the people. But it’s ultimately not accountable to the people. It serves the government, which betrays the people often enough that it can’t be trusted univocally.

Common ownership is the actual ownership of energy resources and infrastructure by the people who use it. How to coordinate that kind of radical energy democracy – the return of the commons in some of the most investment-heavy projects in human history – is one of the major problems that we face.

Antonio Negri, in Commonwealth, developed a detailed theory of this commons, but philosophy as usual falls a little short in figuring out how it would work in practice. Understanding that common ownership, its implications, and its mechanics will take a lot of work. A lot of discussion, probing and exploring all these ideas and their applications. Piece by abstract, difficult piece.

I love a challenge.

• • •

The first LEAPing Beyond workshop will take place this Saturday 9 July, from 12.30 to 2.30 at Colonel Sam Smith Park, by the corner of Kipling and Lakeshore in southeast Etobicoke.

How to End Racism (No, Really), Research Time, 15/02/2016

Something you notice after you live in Toronto, or any city like it, for a while is that you see a lot of interracial couples. And because there are so many ethnic groups around this city, you see pairings from all these different combinations. 

These pairings have been happening for more than a generation already. Enough time has passed that there are already a significant number of people of a mixed-race or mixed-ethnicity background walking around continuing to mix traditionally separate ethnic lineages.

For all the mass racism that's sprung up throughout
America in response to his presidency, the very
existence of Barack Obama and people like him of
mixed ethnic heritage is a sign of humanity's
utopian possibilities.

This is utterly fantastic. Not just in that general warm fuzzy sense of everyone leaving racism behind in a funky spirit of gettin’ it on. But it’s that too. There’s a much more profound social and cultural transformation going on in this generation of ethnic blending and blurring. And it’s awesome.

In the last chapters of Empire, Antonio Negri gets a little utopian about the shape of the more anarchist alternatives to our current global economic order threaded with injustice.* You might think that these kinds of utopias are inconceivable. That we’ll always have a global economy based on exploitation and injustice.

* Though he goes into the real detail in the next two books in his trilogy, Multitude and Commonwealth. That’s coming soon.

Well, I call shenanigans. Because the best way to argue that we can achieve the unimaginable is to remind you of how we very recently achieved something that was culturally unimaginable to the same degree.

Now, I’m not saying racism is over. We no more ended racism with an increased frequency of inter-ethnic marriage and dating than we did when the United States elected a black President.

But people in a society where a significant number of folks come from mixed racial heritages is going to have a very hard time believing in any essentialisms about race. And anyone who knows them is going to have a similarly hard time believing in race essentialism.

Anything beyond amusing stereotypes and cultural jokes will be more easily seen for the divisive, hateful bullshit that it’s always been. Racism has only ever been believed because we’ve chosen to believe it. Throughout most of our modern history, we’ve let our drives to tribalism and division overcome our drive to love and oneness.

That desire for unity in the massive diversity of humanity is more important now than ever. The worst decision we can make in fighting the destructiveness of globalization is embrace localism, national unity, and the purity of social isolation as an antidote. 

Globalization became so powerful because those processes developed the ability to break down nationalisms and state-territorial boundaries. Any attempt to revive nationalism won’t be an antidote to globalization because globalizing forces already have the ability to break national autarkies down incredibly easily.

No, if you want to succeed against globalization, you have to globalize yourself. The utopian movement that works to heal the injustices of global capitalism – the slave labour, exploitation, oligarchical domination, massive ecological destruction – can only work if it exists on the same global plane of activity.

So we have to be individuals living our globalized lives, building relationships and friendships around the world. And procreating. Procreating people whose identities necessarily have to break with the old boundaries of the past. Love itself creates people whose very existence is a slap in the face to racist beliefs. 

Toronto – to take the example physically closest to me at the moment – is becoming a city where ethnicity is no more or less important in drawing one person to another than hair colour or tone of voice. Love now grows between people who, only a few generations ago, would have been considered different species in mainstream popular belief.

That utopian achievement turned out to be perfectly possible. No reason the power of human love and our creativity in building communities together can’t achieve a further utopia.

• • •

I once met somebody who told me that he felt sorry for all the ethnically blurred people in the world, because there was always going to be racism and they could never avoid being the victims of racism. 

People from their mother’s race would hate them, and people from their father’s race would hate them. So it was best to build families only with those who had the same skin colour as you.

Man, fuck that guy.

The Soul of Toronto Is a Dead Raccoon (or; The Pan Am Games Are Boring), Jamming, 13/07/2015

All the millions in marketing and outreach couldn't bring the people of Toronto together
like a little dead raccoon.

Lots of things to talk about, but I had another idea that my friends in the communications field would find interesting. Really, everyone I know in Toronto would probably find this interesting. It’s about the Pan Am Games falling flat on their faces.

At least in terms of attendance. My uncle won some tickets to a soccer game that he sent us, but the game is in Hamilton on a weekday afternoon and we can't go because we'll be at work. I am planning to get some tickets for the track events, because girlfriend Gillian is a big fan of track, and I'm a big fan of hers.

But attendance has been lacklustre at the Games overall, and a lot of Torontonians have left the city on vacation. And I think its failure lies in communications. 

It’s a simple matter. Living in Toronto since this January and being generally attentive to the physical world around me has exposed me to the games in several ways: advertisements on the streets and on transit, and notices of road closures and detours.

The ads, I'm sure, are perfectly constructed by the Games' marketing department. Even the July TTC monthly metropass is a pocket-sized ad for the games. There are images of intense and triumphant athletes on every subway. I see posters everywhere as I walk around the city. 

This is just my experience, of course, but it’s an example that illustrates how ubiquitous the Games are as an event. These images exist to keep the Pan Am Games in the forefront of your consciousness and excite you about the event itself, the clash of international athletes on a global stage.

Yet the road closures, detours, and extra physical inconveniences getting around the city during Pan Am time probably doesn't have anything to do with the marketing department. Those notices would likely be the responsibility of officials with Toronto’s communications department, though I’m honestly not sure how the organizations handling Pan Am related matters are structured internally.

Those notices are necessary to tell people how to plan their days, given the changes to the city’s streets that the Pan Am Games events will cause. But they were probably the biggest poison pill of the Games with the people of Toronto. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the culture of Toronto, it's that everyone here works damned hard, and commuting is necessary for everyone, even if it's just a 30 minute subway ride. Many residents of the GTA, Toronto and its far-flung suburbs and satellite towns, pray daily only that they escape traffic jams and might possibly be able to see their families before having to go to sleep so they can be up before sunrise for the next day's commute. 

Do you think any of these people will be going to work during the Pan Am road closures? Those who can will flee. That goes for everybody whose commute might be lengthened unnecessarily. Far from being an event for the whole family, the Pan Am Games’ primary affect on Toronto's people is the fear that they'll see less of their families for being stuck on a road home from work. So you go on vacation.

The New York Times article I linked above makes a bigger point of the public’s disgust at the Games’ cost overruns, but I while that may have initially soured opinions, the public could still be won back through excitement about the event itself, the global clash of world-class athletes on an international stage. But the logistical messes and high costs of hosting international sporting events are getting so large that only dictatorships can quiet their population sufficiently to win bids.

I know a lot of high-level officials in Toronto’s government and governing class want the city to grow in prestige, and they believe that prestige comes with things like hosting international sporting events. The city certainly doesn’t build its reputation with hosting international political summits, like the infamous G20 meetings five years ago. World Pride last year, while generally fantastic, was packed too full of people to sustain the atmosphere of relaxed, liberated fun that makes Toronto Pride so fantastic.

And it’s because of geography. Too much has to close down. There isn't enough space to put the events and the population at the same time. Hell, Toronto can’t even host a macaroni festival without a disaster of urban ecology.

The real spirit of Toronto doesn’t emerge on the orders or suggestions of a government marketing department. It emerges spontaneously, as a population turns an act of protest into a beautiful piece of collaborative street art.

A raccoon died in downtown Toronto last week, and an office worker tweeted it to a municipal Twitter account to send animal control units to get the corpse. But it didn't come, and the worker continued bugging the city. People working in neighbouring buildings saw the tweets and decided to mock the city’s slow speed by building a heartfelt memorial to the poor little raccoon. 

This was #DeadRaccoonTO. A spontaneous movement to critique their city government through a sarcastic act that was simultaneously a tender tribute to this and the other urban wildlife that shares our city streets. The residents of the city itself taking a few minutes from their busy workdays to send a kind-hearted message of frustration at the slow movement of their government and the frustrating drudgery of their working lives. It was anarchism through humour, protest with a smile and a little tear falling from your eye.