Two Aspects of Power: Consciousness and Physical Force

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Left: A Freedmen's school, a place of learning established by New Afrikans who had escaped the slave-system in the south of the united states. Right: a mob of euro-americans burns a Freedmen's school to the ground.

It is necessary, first, to overcome the opposition between a physicalist vision of the social world that conceives of social relations as relations of physical force and a "cybernetic" or semiological vision which portrays them as relations of symbolic force, as relations of meaning or relations of communication. The most brutal relations of force are always simultaneously symbolic relations. And acts of submission and obedience are cognitive acts which as such involve cognitive structures, forms and categories of perception, principles of vision and division. Social agents construct the social world through cognitive structures that may be applied to all things of the world and in particular to social structures... (Pierre Bourdieu, Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field)

War in its literal meaning is fighting, for fighting alone is the efficient principle in the manifold activity which in a wide sense is called War. But fighting is a trial of strength of the moral and physical forces by means of the latter. That the moral cannot be omitted is evident of itself, for the condition of the mind has always the most decisive influence on the forces employed in War. (Clausewitz, On War)

... colonialism is a comprehensive system, operating on all social levels (economic, political, cultural), and is not a mere expression of military aggression, i.e., “violence” in physical forms.
In most cases, colonial violence in armed/physical forms is preceded by unarmed and nonphysical forms of aggression, in the guise of traders, academics, missionaries—who seek not only to lay hold of the land and labor of the peoples, but also to lay hold of their minds, their customs, and their languages. These violent actions suppress, distort, injure, frustrate, infringe, profane and unduly alter the targeted peoples and their social orders, and cripple the people’s ability to resist and to regain their independence! (James Yaki Sayles, Meditations on Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth: New Afrikan Revolutionary Writings, p. 199)

The above passages are all getting at the dual nature of power and counterpower. Despite the differences between the authors -- a 20th century French Marxist philosopher, a 19th century German military theorist, and a leading member of the Black Liberation Army-Coordinating Committee who passed away in 2008 after spending most of his life in prison -- they are all really touching on the same thing. The fact that liberation and oppression each exist physically and on the level of consciousness.

Ignoring this duality dooms us to failure.

The above passages also parallel the distinction between a "war of position" and a "war of maneuver" made by the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who was persecuted by fascists under Mussolini. The war of position being about winning over people and accumulating forces, the war of maneuver about actually attacking the enemy and seizing power.

Gramsci's ideas are often interpreted in a very conservative way, to argue that the time is not right for physical confrontation - be in in the form of a Black Bloc, a blockade, or armed attacks - because the war of position has not yet been won, i.e. because radicals do not yet enjoy enough popular support. According to this argument, the war for consciousness and social power must precede the latter physical conflict, a proposition that i am not sure is in line with Gramsci's actual thought on the matter.

But even if one holds that the "war of maneuver" should only commence once radicals enjoy popular support, this conservative interpretation ignores the fact that physical activity, including violence, constitutes a necessary part of the "war of position". Just as power exists and can coerce through both physical force and the force of people's consciousness, the process of negating oppression must proceed both on the level of physical force and on the level of consciousness.

Indeed, according to many practitioners of armed struggle, the goal of physical attacks is not to be found in the material damage done, but in the changes in consciousness that they can occasion. For instance, as the Red Army Faction put it:

The propaganda target of anti-imperialist action is the dialectical relationship between being and consciousness, because the masses’ loyalty to the system is based on their accepting its pretty exterior, its promises, and its lies. Their loyalty to the system is based on its capacity to discourage all spontaneity in its quest to completely assimilate the masses into the “the silent bondage of the relationship” (Marx), which it forces the masses to accept as if it were only natural. Anti-imperialist action rips apart the system’s facade and manipulation, along with the loyalty of the masses, and forces it to admit the truth, about which the masses say, as always, “This is not what we wanted.” (RAF, The Black September Action in Munich: Regarding the struggle for Anti-Imperialist Struggle)

Although perhaps overly optimistic, this is clearly a strategy of intervening on the level of consciousness.

The dual material/symbolic nature of power is also one reason why political insurgencies can only ever be defeated politically. A military defeat will constitute a political challenge, and one that the insurgency may not be capable of overcoming, but in and of itself it cannot put an end to an insurgency. Likewise, a successful military operation will constitute a political opportunity, but one that can be bungled - bad political content or lack of follow-up can transform any military victory into a critical defeat.

Keeping in mind the dual nature of power, of oppression and liberation, is essential to our ability to decide what course of action is called for, and how best to respond to the circumstances around us.

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The Gendered Body Public: Egypt, Sexual Violence and Revolution

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Politically, sexual violence constitutes both a form of terrorism against its target, and an act of affirmation for the rapists and those who identify with them. It is not normally a form of "horizontal violence" - that would imply that other than this unfortunate slip-up, perpetrator and target would both share the same class position and interests. The prevalence of sexual violence, and its intractability, speaks against this naive theory.

Rather than depoliticizing this question, sexual violence should be understood as a form of oppressive violence meant to either establish or defend hierarchies between people. Keeping some people - overwhelmingly women, but also queers of various genders, and in some cases cis men - "in their place".

Beyond that, sexual violence can be used to define a broader situation or political moment. Gendering it.

As such, the article reposted below from jadaliyya (an independent ezine produced by the Washington DC-based Arab Studies Institute) is worth reading. While the article does not offer any conclusions, it does underscore the need for analysis that is both anti-capitalist and anti-patriarchal, understanding these as not two separate but worthy struggles, but rather as two dimensions of struggle that we need to integrate.

Original article posted here.


The Gendered Body Public: Egypt, Sexual Violence and Revolution
by Maya Mikdashi

We must acknowledge, sit with, and address the sexual violence that has, is, and will occur in and around Tahrir Square. How do we do this work in a responsible and ethical manner that is in solidarity with Egypt's ongoing (and multiple) revolutions? How do we retain and respect political, economic and social complexity in the face of the horrors of mass and public sexual assault?

How to write when all you want to do is shout?

Friday 25 January 2013 was the second anniversary of the outbreak of the Egyptian revolution. Today the revolution continues, as protestors face down government allies and troops across Egypt. Bodies are bruised, bloodied, and killed. Rocks are thrown, bullets shot, and bottles broken. We are learning, once again, that violence is always plural and weighted differently. Those on the front lines, the frail, and the young are more vulnerable to that gas that burns eyes, those clubs that break bones, and those boots that kick flesh. Female protestors are also more vulnerable to the multiple violences of revolution, of protest, of repression. Women are more vulnerable to violence in times of peace and of stability, and no matter who is in power.

Female protestors have been beaten, dragged through streets, and shot at along with their brethren protestors. They have been imprisoned, disappeared, and repressed just as ruthlessly as their male comrades. They have been pinched, grabbed, and harassed by both regime supporters and their political allies at Tahrir. They have been stripped and they have been raped, in the offices of police and medical examiners, and in the spaces of the public. Their vaginas, anuses, and breasts, the very organs that mark them as women, have been targeted and violated by individuals and groups of men on every side of Egypt's political divide.

Sadly, this fact, that it is precisely the violence and rape of women that transgresses political divides, does not shock us.

The daily possibility of sexual harassment, assault, and repression forms, in large part, the female political subject(s) in the modern state era. Public assaults in Cairo, mass and public rapes in India,and the fact that every two minutes a woman is sexually assaulted in the US are only amplifications and spectacular examples of the sexual violence that women and girls face across the divides of nations, cultures, religions, and economic systems; in peace and in war.

It is sad but not surprising to note the silence on these gendered dynamics in the coverage of the second anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It should be all too clear that Tahrir is a discriminately gendered space. But despite efforts to counter this trend, most analysis is deafeningly silent on the violence of this process.

By de-gendering Tahrir the square, the protestors, and the revolution itself is depoliticized. This is similarly the case across the uprising and upheavals in the Arab world and beyond. We cannot continue to deny that men and women and boys and girls face different assemblages of violence and vulnerability daily in the streets of Homs or in a Jordanian refugee camp. To de-gender the Syrian uprising is to depoliticize its costs, the people waging it and the tactics used by them and by the state. There is no universal, ungendered, unclassed, and anonymous protestor or body of protestors. And yet, writing about rape in Syria, sexual assault in Egypt is somehow a “social issue” and, shunted off to those boxes called “gender studies,” “women's issues,” or “social/cultural dynamics,” comfortably outside politics. We can no longer afford such comfort.

This comfort is unethical. It imposes analytical limitations on the very possibility of understanding the various ongoing struggles for transformative change we are witnessing today. It reinforces a long-standing reality in which agents of power appropriate, control, and limit struggles for gender equality by folding them in the residual categories of “women’s empowerment,” and “women’s participation.” This folding pretends to offer an easy solution to gender violence and inequality—that they will simply dissipate if more women were to exercise their right to vote or serve in parliament, for example.

In Egypt, it is this bifurcation of the “social” from the “political” that has allowed Mubarakists, officers, and Brothers, along with their regional and international allies, to set the terms of struggles for gender equality. Those terms—gender quotas for parliament and cabinet, family laws, and birth control—are silent on the dire need of meaningful social and political change. It is these false dichotomies between gender and politics, between the economic and the cultural that will continue to impede the very possibility of transformative revolution in Egypt and beyond.

It is not possible to write the political without beginning with plurality, without multivalent injuries, without bodies and the organs that mark them with difference by interconnected regimes of power. It is not possible to write the political without writing about the body; the body itself is both a medium and the primary target of modern politics and state intervention. Gender and sex are a product of this intervention and regulation of the body by the intersection of state, economic, historical and cultural practices. One cannot approach politics or revolution without a focus on the body. One cannot approach the body without thinking through sex and gender.

Analysts and journalists who write on the Syrian refugee crisis or Egyptian protestors who use the singular voice are making a choice. They choose to interpolate a universal that does not exist. This choice a political act. Is this singular voice due to ignorance, and if so, can we read ignorance as a political act? Is it even possible to write three dimensionally? And if it isn't, should we stop trying?

The urge to highlight one factor over another while thinking about sexual violence in a particular context is seductive: it is either culture, history, imperialism, or more generally, patriarchy. It is more difficult, and less conducive to action, to pause on ambiguity, contingency, and the ways these factors and others are woven (often tensely) together in each act of sexual violence—an intractable and constitutive aspect of political violence. Yet to simplify sexual violence—to consider it a woman's or social issue is to depoliticize it. To de-gender the uprisings is to depoliticize. It is to reproduce a unmarked universal - “the citizen” or “the protestor” - a mythical subject position that fails to capture the complexity of political life in an age of governmentality and biopolitics.

But is there a utility for this analysis when you just want to scream while reading about a female protestor stripped, violated and chased through the streets by male protestors, regime allies and onlookers in Tahrir Square, a place that has come to represent revolution, and revolutionary fervor, internationally?

*This article benifitted greatly from conversations with and insights from Hesham Sallam.

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New Interview by David Gilbert

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This interview originally appeared in Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, 5:2, 259-270.  For a PDF of the interview, go here. It is also mirrored on the Kersplebedeb site here.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many activists looked to the prisons for political leadership, while viewing prisons themselves as institutions of repression and social control integral to larger systems of oppression. Around the world, the prisoner emerged as an icon of state repression and a beacon of liberation. If the prison served as the bricks and mortar of oppression, the prisoner became the flesh and blood of movement iconography. Black American prisoners held special sway within this global visibility of confinement, in part because so many prisoners became prolific authors connected to wider social movements of the time. In prison, black activists from Martin Luther King, Jr to George Jackson and Assata Shakur penned tracts that offered trenchant insights into race, class, and American power. Black activists proved the most incisive, the most creative, inheritors of a deep and multiracial tradition of political critique behind bars. These imprisoned author-activists articulate a profound paradox: one of the best places to understand the "land of the free" is the place where freedom was most elusive. It was both a sobering and inspiring message for a generation on the move.

More than 40 years later the world is once again experiencing the tremors of large-scale, global change. And the prison accompanies this new burst of struggle. For a generation that has never known an America without mass incarceration, never known a world without Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, without indefinite detention and pre-emptive war, the prison may seem an even more fitting metaphor for the contradictions of American power – internationally and within the United States – than it was during the 1971 Attica rebellion, the most dramatic of the dozens of riots rocking American prisons during that time. When prisoners at Attica proclaimed their humanity against the brutality of the prison, the United States incarcerated some 300,000 people. Today it imprisons more than 2.3 million, often serving Draconian sentences, with another 5 million under some form of correctional control. The scale of America's carceral state is even more gruesome when one considers the demographics of those incarcerated: almost exclusively poor, majority black or Latino, and with women and gender-nonconforming people being hard hit both by incarceration and its collateral consequences.

Prisoners themselves are crucial participants – if often unacknowledged by the outside world – in the renewed activism most commonly associated with the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. The conditions of confinement have given a life-or-death character to much of this activism. Massive labor strikes shook Georgia prisons in December 2010, coordinated through smuggled cell phones. The next month, five prisoners in Ohio launched a hunger strike to protest their conditions; a year-and-a-half later, other prisoners in Ohio's "supermax" facilities also staged a hunger strike over inhumane conditions. Between July and October 2011, thousands of prisoners throughout the sprawling California prison system staged an unprecedented hunger strike in protest of the long-term solitary confinement that is now a significant part of everyday life in American prisons. The hunger strike seems to be emerging as a tactic of this burgeoning collective discontent with confinement; in May 2012, prisoners in Virginia's supermax prison at Red Onion launched their own hunger strike, issuing 10 demands for better conditions, modeled after the five demands raised by California prisoners a year previously.

Then as now, the prison is a global icon of oppression. The detention facilities at Guantanamo and Bagram Air Base continue to draw international condemnation. More than 2000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons staged a hunger strike for between four and nine weeks in the spring of 2012 to protest the conditions of their detention. Self-described political prisoners in Cuba have likewise engaged in hunger strikes to protest the denial of human rights and basic freedoms. And in much of Latin America, notoriously overcrowded and violent prisons are drawing new, critical attention.

The new prison protest in the United States confronts the particularities of mass incarceration, while calling upon a deeper history of prison resistance. Although it may seem as if each political generation discovers its mission in an historical void, reality is more dialectical. With varying degrees of awareness, movements emerge in contexts established partially by prior movements, enabling conversations with various legacies of struggle.

The following interview with David Gilbert is one attempt at such an intergenerational conversation across prison walls. David Gilbert was a founder of Columbia University's Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter. His campus organizing for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam in the first half of the 1960s helped lay the foundation for the historic student strike at Columbia University in the spring of 1968. Part of the so-called "praxis axis" of SDS, Gilbert developed a reputation as a theorist and writer. He co-authored the first pamphlet within the 1960s student movement to explain the Vietnam War and American foreign policy more broadly in terms of imperialism. In 1970 he joined the Weather Underground, a militant and clandestine offshoot of SDS. The group pledged its solidarity with the black freedom struggle and national liberal movements of its day. It claimed responsibility for two dozen or so bombings of empty government and corporate buildings between 1970 and 1976, done to protest American political-economic violence throughout the world – including inside US prisons. Gilbert was one of several people who returned underground after the group disbanded in 1977. He was arrested in Nyack, New York, in October of 1981 following a botched robbery of a Brinks truck by the Black Liberation Army, itself an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. Two police officers and a security guard were killed in the robbery. An unarmed getaway driver there as a white ally, Gilbert was charged under New York's felony murder law that holds any participant in a robbery fully culpable for all deaths that occur in the course of that robbery. The judge sentenced him to serve between 75 years and life in prison. Under current New York state law, there is no time off for good behavior, no parole possibilities in a sentence such as his.

During his more than 30 years in New York state's toughest prisons, Gilbert has published several pamphlets on race and racism, social movement history, and the AIDS crisis. He helped start, in the 1980s, the first comprehensive peer education program in New York prisons dealing with HIV/AIDS prevention. He appeared in the 2003 academy award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground and corresponds with dozens of activists throughout North America. He has also published two books: a 2004 collection of essays and book reviews entitled No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner, and the 2012 memoir Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond. The memoir offers David's examination of his life as an organizer and the choices that ultimately led him to prison – an assessment of the paths taken and not taken, of the triumphs and mistakes made in a life on the left. Writing for today's generation of activists, Love and Struggle is his attempt to summarize the lessons he learned as an organizer in SDS, in the Weather Underground, and, well, beyond.

This interview is principally concerned with the "beyond." A voracious reader, Gilbert has been paying close attention to the recent uprisings that have dotted the globe. In the discussion below, Gilbert offers his perspective as an activist for more than 50 years, on the challenges for contemporary social movements.

This interview was conducted through the mail between February and July of 2012. I have, where appropriate, added explanatory footnotes or parenthetical notes.



Berger: Since the fall of 2011, the Occupy movement has emerged in the United States, joining many similar movements against austerity worldwide and now creating its own ripples. Its participants are disproportionately white and include many college students or graduates struggling with student debt. You've offered supportive statements to the Occupy movement while also trying to call its attention to other issues and dynamics. What do you see as its existing strengths, its potential, and its limitations of perspective?

Gilbert: The Occupy movement is a breath of fresh air. After 30 years of mainstream politics totally dominated by racially coded scapegoating – you know, directing people's frustrations against welfare mothers, immigrants, and criminals – finally a loud public voice is pointing to the real source of our problems. And I think they were wise, despite the conventional wisdom of many organizers, not to come out immediately with a set list of demands. That would have narrowed the scope of support, and holding back on specifics implies that the issue is the system, capitalism, itself. There are now plenty of opportunities – through demonstrations, teach-ins, occupations, whatever – to show the range of ways this system is oppressive and destructive.

At the same time, such a spontaneous and predominantly white movement will inevitably have giant problems of internalized racism and sexism. I couldn't help but notice that the first public statement that came out of the general assembly of OWS talked eloquently, and quite rightly, about the injustice of animals being kept in cages ... but said nothing about the 2.3 million human beings in cages in the US today, with mass incarceration the front line of the 1%'s war against black and Latino/a people. And then there is the terminology of "occupy," which does invoke a certain militant tradition, but people need to be aware of the colossal injustice that we are living on occupied Native American land. So far there has been little about the 1%'s rule over a global economy, wreaking terrible destruction on the vast majority of humankind. And that's the basis for why the USA is now engaged in pretty much continual warfare, which not only is tremendously damaging to the people who get bombed but also reinforces all the reactionary trends here at home. So it's vitally important that we oppose those wars.

Also I've heard that at many of the assemblies the speakers are almost all males. So the problems of white and male supremacy are endemic and usually prove debilitating. But flowing streams of protest provide a lot healthier basis for growth than the previously stagnant waters; people in motion against the system are a lot more open to learning. And in particular I want to salute the people of color (POC) groupings who, despite how galling some of the backwardness must be, have hung in there and struggled – groups like the POC Working Group at Occupy Wall Street and Decolonize Portland and the very strong POC presence and role in Occupy Oakland. So the 20 February 2012 day of protests in support of prisoners and the 19 April 2012 teach-ins about mass incarceration are important steps forward. There is still a long, long way to go, but overall I feel very heartened, even excited, by this new wave of protests.

Berger: In writings and interviews since your incarceration, you have described the radical potential of the 1960s era as being rooted in a combination of the success of anticolonial revolutions in the Third World and the centrality of the black freedom struggle within the United States. We are now in an era of renewed global struggle, yet the terms have changed. How would you characterize the tenor and impact of this global upsurge? How do you see it in relation to, or even as a commentary upon, the successes and limitations of earlier national liberation movements?

Gilbert: We still live in a world of totally intolerable destruction and demeaning of human life and of the environment. The most oppressed and vast majority of humankind live in the global South, and they tend to be the most conscious and most active against the system. The national liberation struggles that lit the world on fire in the 1960s and 1970s were not able to fully transform the conditions and lives of their peoples. Learning from the setbacks, people are trying to fight in ways that are less top–down, with stronger democratic participation. So it makes sense that new forms of struggle have emerged, like rural communities resisting dams in India, which combine the needs of poor farmers, the leadership of women, and critical environmental issues; or like the taking over of factories in Argentina.

In the past year-and-a-half, the "Arab Spring" has electrified the world. These mass uprisings for democracy in countries hit hard by neoliberalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East have been tremendously exciting and were a big inspiration for the Occupy Wall Street movement in the USA. But it's important to recognize both the pluses and minuses of this kind of spontaneity. The strength is that even in situations where all organized opposition was crushed, people found a powerful way to rise up. The weakness lay in an inadequate analysis and program on the nature of the State, especially the role of the military, for example in Egypt, and its very close ties to the Pentagon. Such mass outpourings, as we also saw with "people's power" in the Philippines in 1986, are not in themselves adequate to liberate people from the stranglehold of imperialism.

And imperialism is never a passive spectator but rather employs its massive resources and wealth of techniques to distort and reshape such movements: from funding pro-western elements with major infusions of cash to the ways the global corporate media defines the issues, from direct trainings of favored groups to covert CIA operations to outright military involvement. Libya is a recent example. Qaddafi was a tyrant, even while more progressive in terms of health, education, and the status of women than the US-imposed and backed dictators of the region. NATO's "humanitarian" intervention killed far more of the civilians they were mandated to "protect" than did the old regime. It seems clear that the massive, destructive NATO military intervention was not wanted nor requested by the overwhelming majority of Libyans, regardless of their stance on the Qaddafi regime. The brutal bombing campaign and the empowering of factions favorable to NATO may well lead to the USA getting its long-coveted military base in Africa.

In Iran and Syria, the repressive regimes are in big part a result of earlier imperialist interventions, while the current international campaigns against them are very much about strengthening the USA and Europe's geopolitical position. Genuine people's opposition forces are undermined and caught in the cross-fire, while imperialist proxy forces proliferate.

In this complicated world, our loyalty is always with the people. We can't glorify tyrants just because they come into conflict with the West but neither can we forget that imperialism is by far the greatest destroyer of human life and potential. We have to be ready to cut through the rationalizations about "weapons of mass destruction" or "terrorism" or "humanitarian emergency" and oppose what is now a pretty much constant state of warfare against countries in the South – which is brutal for the peoples attacked and also serves to reinforce all the reactionary trends here at home. Many current situations are very painful, with no major organized force of "good guys" to root for – from Assad's killing of civilians to the Taliban's misogyny. But to respond in an effectively humanitarian way, we have to study history. It is the West, first with colonialism and then innumerable CIA interventions, that has decimated Left secular forces who could build unity and instead has both fostered religious sectarianism to divide the oppressed and empowered tyrants to contain mass anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist fervor. Then imperialism uses the backward situation it did so much to create to justify even more intervention, which only will serve to deepen those problems. The best way to help progressive forces in the region have some space to re-emerge is for us to do our part to back off US and NATO intervention. And it can be done in the context of popular struggles in the South; it did happen by the end of the Vietnam War. We need to build a strong antiwar movement in the USA.

So no to tyrants, no to wars, no to imperialism; yes to popular demands for political and economic emancipation. Right now there is no clear, visible strategy on how popular movements can win qualitative change. That will only develop as struggles push forward and learn from advances and setbacks. But the uprisings of "Arab Spring" and the people around the world fighting for independence, democracy and economic justice have shown awesome courage and spirit and provide tremendous inspiration. For us in the North, solidarity is an essential cutting edge, both to ally with the most oppressed and to learn from the most advanced. The devastating damage being done to the planet intensifies the great urgency of anti-imperialist struggle.

Berger: In the 1960s, you coauthored the first SDS pamphlet naming the system as imperialism, and you continue to identify as an anti-imperialist. Many people think of imperialism as a system of domination among nation-states, yet political antagonisms today are at once more local and more diffuse than the nation-state. For instance, talk of the "99%" points to the undue influence of corporate power upon American political processes while the Arab Spring mostly targeted the corrupt leaders and dictators of their nation-state, and alter-globalization campaigns have challenged the global reach of transnational corporations. Do you still think imperialism is an adequate way to "name the system?" If so, why? Can an anti-imperialist emphasis help us, for instance, confront global climate change, promote queer liberation, or engage other issues that have historically been outside the purview of "imperialism?"

Gilbert: I noticed that you used the word adequate, because I emphatically believe that "imperialism" is the best summary term, but it isn't adequate. The value of "imperialism" is that it emphasizes that it's a global system whose main axis is an incredible polarization of wealth and power between a few controlling "centers" (in Europe, the USA, and Japan) and the impoverished "periphery" of the global South. And of course within each of those arenas there is the class polarizations with ruling elites in the South who collaborate with imperialism and many who are oppressed in the North. But it is a global economy; the great wealth and power comes by means of the super-exploitation of the peoples of the South, and that's where we can expect the fiercest battles and strongest leadership for change. And the very rapaciousness of such a system is the basis for a reckless and now extremely dangerous destruction of the environment. At the same time, that center/periphery divide helps frame why the struggles of people of color within the USA, a country built on the genocide of the Native Americans and mass imposition of chattel slavery, are so central.

So, "imperialism" is the best summary term, the clearest way to name the dark dungeon currently confining and brutalizing humankind. But that prison was built on the pre-existing foundation of patriarchy and class rule. And there are all the bars on the cells that confine and divide us. So we have to be very explicit about naming and fighting all the major forms of oppression: white supremacy, xenophobia, class rule, male supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, cruelty to animals, environmental destruction.

Berger: You speak about the world using a center/periphery divide. But is such a dichotomy appropriate to today's conditions? Can all countries be categorized as only imperialist (and collaborators with imperialism) versus anti-imperialist? Isn't China an economic super-power? How do you assess the economic growth in India and Brazil or the economic positioning of countries in the former Eastern bloc?

Gilbert: Yes, China's rapid emergence as a world power is very impressive and creates some new dynamics. China has moved effectively to gain access to oil and other strategic resources, especially in Africa, and the USA has been making a lot of geopolitical moves to be in a position to contain China. That's a big part, to take one example, of why the USA has been so intent on getting a major military base in Africa, which they may soon realize behind NATO's massive bombings of Libya. Of course this isn't the first time that imperialism has had to contend with a "state capitalist" rival. From 1945 to 1991 the Soviet Union was formidable military power, and it provided critical aid to many national liberation struggles.

China couldn't have achieved its tremendous economic growth under the neoliberal model that imperialism imposes on most of the South. The very comprehensive role of the State has been essential. At the same time, the development has accompanied an obscene new polarization of wealth, under a very repressive regime. And China's industrialization hasn't removed its working class from super-exploitation by imperialism. When you buy an iPhone, only 4% of the price goes to the wages of the workers who made it in China – meanwhile Apple has a 64% gross profit over manufacturing costs. Also I doubt that China's economy will continue to grow at the current rate. You know, mainstream pundits often make predictions by taking current trends and projecting them forward, like they'll proceed on a straight line. But reality is much more complicated and contradictory than that. It's very possible that China could well be approaching some major limits on its current model of growth; it faces some severe challenges, including the potential for powerful class struggles, and the ways the global economic recession could impinge on its export-driven economy.

India and Brazil's economies are growing rapidly, but still within many of the strictures set by the world capitalist market. That framework, along with the strength of their own reactionary classes, is likely to block a full breakthrough to strong, self-determining economies that can put their peoples' needs first. Remember, imperialism has always had a few intermediary, semi-dependent nations – Lenin even talked about this, I think in terms of Argentina, 100 years ago; several Eastern European countries also seem to be destined for that niche today.

Imperialism has changed dramatically from the terms of the first three-fourths of the twentieth century. The stark divide is no longer around industrialization as a lot of manufacturing has been moved to the South to take advantage of starvation wages. In today's global economy, as Samir Amin has explained, the domination of the center is exercised through five other crucial monopolies: the control of (1) technologies, (2) financial markets, (3) the planet's natural resources, (4) information and communications, and (5) weapons of mass destruction.

So yes, it is a complicated world with various intermediate forms of dependency and development. Also, the emergence of China entails the potential of a rival, especially if it can ally with Russia, with its high level of military technology. Containing China is a major factor in US geo-military maneuvering. But at this point China is nowhere near capable of directly challenging the global dominance of the imperial triad of the USA, Europe, and Japan. The more relevant issue is the USA's economic decline and how that might limit its military might, its ability to intervene and enforce imperial interests in countries throughout the world. The most exploitative aspects of the global economy and all of the USA's plethora of wars over the past 60 years have been around that main axis of imperial domination of the South. That's at the heart of the colossal polarization of wealth, the awesome power of the ruling 1%, the intolerable oppression of the majority of humankind, and the resulting leading forces of resistance.

Berger: Are you optimistic about a new wave of revolutionary advances in the South and a growing radical movement in the North?

Gilbert: I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Right now the world is fraught with peril. It's scary, for humankind. (Although this is not the first time: I grew up in the 1950s, with the threat of cataclysmic nuclear war hanging over our heads.) Global climate change and the collapse of some key ecosystems could destroy the basis for sustaining a human population even a fraction of our current numbers. And even more immediately, we may have entered a period of severe and sustained global recession. We, and the earth, need less production. But under imperialism it won't involve cutting back on the colossal – multi-trillions of dollars worth – of wasteful and destructive goods and services. Instead the worst, deadliest costs will be imposed on the wretched of the earth. Not only would that entail massive deprivation and suffering but also such stresses can be fertile ground for vicious reactionary movements in the North and bitter internecine battles – tribal or ethnic or religious conflicts – in the South. So what Engels said in the nineteenth century can be raised several orders of magnitude in the twenty-first: the choice is between socialism and barbarism.

What we have to hope for – and even more than that, work for with all possible passion and intelligence – is for people to understand that choice, to see that these horrendous problems are generated by a rapacious system and that the only viable alternative is for people to get together and replace a system driven by corporate greed with one in harmony with nature and centered on human needs.

Berger: Within the United States, one of the biggest and most visible signs of mass movement in recent years has been a largely Latino immigrant rights/migrant justice movement: from the mass marches of 2006 to recent struggles against what some are calling a system of Juan Crow in places such as Arizona and Alabama. Clearly these struggles are reflective of the ways the United States is more multiracial and multiethnic than it was when you came to political consciousness. And of course, the United States now has a black president – something that only recently became thinkable. Do these changes alter the significance you've always given to race as a structuring feature of the United States? Do you still think that black social movements will be the strongest catalyst for political action in the United States?

Gilbert: You're right about the importance of immigration and the Latino/a population. And I want to add that, in addition to the so-called "borders" being illegitimate, the whole disruption of families and mass migrations are being driven by the very destruction of the economies of the South by imperialism.

While the modalities of race have changed in significant ways, the fundamentals of a system based on white supremacy haven't. Now, as opposed to the 1960s, there are a lot more Blacks in the middle class, although still not in proportion to their percent in the population, and many more multiracial individuals. We now have a Black president; while it was nice to see that aspect of Jim Crow shattered, it doesn't mean much in practice since politics in the USA, including Obama, are so completely controlled by big money. But the erosion of Jim Crow has been more of a neocolonial strategy than a qualitative change for the majority. Many educated Blacks who would have been vociferous spokespeople for the struggle now live in greater comfort.

Meanwhile conditions in the ghettoes and barrios have in many ways gotten worse, with cascading epidemics: the loss of manufacturing jobs; mass incarceration; broken families; the internal violence that comes with making drugs illegal; then the violent "war on drugs;" the health epidemics of HIV, hepatitis, asthma, and so much more.

So I'm sure that race will remain central, although probably radical struggles will not be as predominantly defined by revolutionary nationalism, as other forms have also become important: immigration, women of color, LGBT and queer movements, and other alliances among various peoples of color. The black community, with its cohesion and stunning culture of resistance, has been under relentless and full-scale attack for decades, with virtually nothing in terms of an anti-racist white movement to provide solidarity. The relentless attacks have taken a toll. But given the centrality of the black struggle to opening up almost every period of protest and advance in US history and given their legacy of humanity and resistance, I believe that black social movements will continue to be the strongest catalyst for radical political action in the USA.

Berger: As the movements of the 1960s receded, something called "identity politics" emerged in their place. At its most caricatured, the debate over identity politics has positioned parochial identity groups (e.g. women, people of color, LGBT communities) against the universalism of emancipating all people, or at least of the entire working class. How do you see this debate?

Gilbert: I don't understand why there is a debate, since both are essential and they're so complementary. Movements or unions that are dominated by straight white males are far from universal. I haven't kept up on all the literature; evidently, there are examples of identity politics that are all about narrow sectors competing to be "the most oppressed." Nonprofit organizations, with their funding power, have fostered and rewarded such a narrow and competitive approach. But the thrust of the Combahee River statement and the women of color movement since the 1970s, 1 as well as more contemporary queer movements, have been about those who are oppressed being the ones who can best articulate their needs and aspirations and also the important ways those oppressions intersect. That enriches rather than detracts from our movements.

What's divisive is racism, elitism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism. We face mammoth barriers to progress in the myriad ways that people oppressed in one way will still have contempt for those who are oppressed in other ways and even partake in keeping them down. The challenge for us as organizers is to achieve unity among all who have an interest in overturning the current, horribly destructive and demeaning order. That can only be done by breaking through the various forms of oppression, from the bottom–up, led by those who understand the issues best, to overturn the entire set of mutually reinforcing structures of domination. In short, the long march to universal human liberation must smash through each of the various specific barriers of oppression.

Berger: Your recent memoir, Love and Struggle, seeks to explain and uphold what you see as the best aspects of 1960s-era activism, while also chronicling the mistakes of the New Left and other movements of the era. You are quite self-critical as well, writing of the need to "struggle against our own weaknesses" in the fight for social justice. What has that struggle been like for you? Is it something that can only be done in retrospect, or how might you encourage young activists today to engage in this kind of struggle now?

Gilbert: While retrospect can afford added perspective, the struggle is always very much current and ongoing. For me personally, well, I look at some of my mistakes and my efforts to learn from them in Love and Struggle. When such issues were [first] raised with me, I'd get defensive; it would feel difficult, almost impossible, to change. But in the long run I've found the process to be very enriching and hopeful. I would absolutely encourage activists not to approach the struggles against our own weaknesses, which are inevitable growing up in this society, as grim or self-flagellating, as a question of guilt. Instead, the more we identify with and learn from other people, the more fully human we become and the better our chances for achieving real change.

Berger: You were imprisoned just as the war on drugs and mass incarceration became structuring tenets of life inside the United States. And since the "war on terror" began in 2001, prisons have become central to American foreign policy as well, epitomized by the prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force Base. Yet there has also been a renewed attention to American prisons domestically and abroad – due to the organizing of prisoners, as well as interest from journalists and scholars. What hope do you see for an end to mass incarceration? Have prisoners, in your experience, drawn connections between the domestic penal system and "war on terror" prisons? How have prisoners responded to the emerging movements in the Arab world and across the United States?

Gilbert: There are some very advanced prisoner struggles in places like California, Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia. 2 But where I'm at right now there has been a major decline in political consciousness since I came in. Prison is very much affected by what's happening in the outside world. I think the combination of the destruction of leading organizations like the [Black] Panthers, AIM [American Indian Movement], and the Young Lords [a Puerto Rican militant organization in the late 1960s and early 1970s]; the loss of manufacturing jobs combined with the massive influx of drugs; and the relentless barraging of people with ads that encourage consumption have all set back consciousness outside and in. Also certain right-wing groups are working to undermine people's ability to understand the system. The prisons have been flooded with conspiracy theories that divert from the analysis of how the imperialists rule. One destructive example is AIDS conspiracy theories that appeal to well-founded distrust of the public health system to then discourage black youth from HIV prevention and treatment. When we traced these back, the source was from the fascistic LaRouchite movement. 3

Despite all those setbacks, the legacy of the Panthers has a strong cachet, and prisoners are more aware than the general population about the dangers of the "war on terror" and how it has promoted torture, preventive detention, and warrantless surveillance. I mean, that's always existed under imperialism, but institutionalizing these human rights abuses makes them more "accepted" and more widespread.

I think that part of the reason prisoners haven't been more active comes from a sense of isolation and vulnerability, so a developing movement on the outside will have an impact in here. For both inside and outside it's important to recognize that mass incarceration isn't simply counterproductive in how it reproduces harm and violence and how it drains resources from positive and more effective programs. The "war on crime," since President Nixon first proclaimed it at the end of the 1960s has been the spearhead for attacking and turning back the black liberation struggle and the related movements for social justice it had inspired. 4 So opposing mass incarceration and the war on crime is central, completely strategic, to rebuilding momentum for fundamental change.

Berger: You've been incarcerated for more than 30 years, much of it spent between New York's most restrictive prisons: Attica, Auburn, Clinton, and Comstock. During that time, you've authored two books, written dozens of articles, started the first peer-education program for prisoners around HIV/AIDS, and mentored many young activists outside of prison. How have you been able to stay politically connected from inside prison? And what keeps you going after all these years?

Gilbert: Well "mentored" isn't exactly the right word. I learn a lot from the young activists who write and/or visit. So I hope that our exchanges are very much a dialogue. And those dialogues, as well as the connections with so many wonderful old friends and comrades, are a major way I've stayed politically connected. Also, thanks to the struggles of a preceding generation of prisoners, I'm allowed to get a lot of, although not all, political literature. So all of that has helped keep me going. And I'm blessed with a tremendous amount of love in my life: my son, my family, old friends, younger-generation activists. So I'm very, very fortunate. Most broadly what keeps me going is a feeling of connection with, love for, and hope in humankind.





Notes on contributors
David Gilbert is a former member of SDS and the Weather Underground, currently serving a life sentence at Auburn Correctional Facility in New York state. He is the author, among other titles, of Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond, published in 2012 by PM Press.

Dan Berger is an assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of Washington at Bothell and a founding member of Decarcerate PA. He is the author, among other titles, of Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.



Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Naomi Jaffe and Jeremy Varon for their many insightful comments and suggestions on this interview.



Notes
1. The Combahee River Collective was a Boston-based black feminist organization that existed between 1974 and 1980. Its political statement remains an influential legacy to the rise of women of color feminism and paved the way for later theories of "intersectionality" that view race, gender, sexuality, and class as mutually constitutive elements of identity and social status. For more on Combahee as part of a black feminist movement, see Springer, Living for the Revolution.

2. Since 2010, prisoners in Georgia, Ohio, California, and Virginia have protested their conditions through coordinated strikes. The biggest of these has been the hunger strike inside California prisons, which began in the "supermax" prison at Pelican Bay. For more on that strike, including a list of the five basic demands prisoners developed, see the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity Coalition website, http://prisonerhungerstrikesolidarity.wordpress.com/. The San Francisco Bay View has printed several statements by prisoners involved in the strike, including messages to Occupy Wall Street activists; see http://sfbayview.com/. The Black Agenda Report has reported on all of these prison struggles; see http://blackagendareport.com/. On 20 February 2012, coalitions of OWS and anti-prison activists held a national day of actions under the banner "Occupy for Prisoners." Statements from prisoners and a listing of actions can be found at http://occupy4prisoners.org/.

3. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr is a former Trotskyist who founded the National Caucus of Labor Committees in the 1960s. Since the early 1970s, however, LaRouche has been a far-right propagator of conspiracy theories rooted in anti-Semitism on a range of issues. LaRouche and his followers have used emotional and physical manipulation to ensure the compliance of members, and they have a history of physical attacks, spying, and dirty tricks against leftist groups while presenting themselves as being on the left. Several LaRouchites and LaRouche himself have run for office on the Democratic Party ticket, and they often try to recruit among leftwing events. For more on LaRouche, see King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism; Berlet and Lyons, Right-Wing Populism and America, 273–6; and the articles about LaRouche on the Political Research Associates website, http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/index.html. (Thanks to Matthew Lyons for alerting me to these sources.) Gilbert wrote an essay in the mid-1990s debunking the conspiratorial thinking around AIDS. See Gilbert, "AIDS Conspiracy Theories."

4. Several emerging studies on the rise of the carceral state confirm Gilbert's view. See, for instance, Thompson, "Why Mass Incarceration Matters;" Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Rodríguez, Forced Passages; Alexander, The New Jim Crow; Parenti, Lockdown America. Historian Michael Flamm points out, however, that the war on crime first began under Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon. Flamm's argument feeds a broader concern with the ways in which liberals and the Democratic Party share similar if not equal blame as Republicans for the rise of mass incarceration. See Flamm, Law and Order.



Bibliography
1. Alexander, Michelle . 2010 . The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness , New York : The New Press .

2. Berlet, Chip and Lyons, Matthew N. 2000 . Right-Wing Populism and America: Too Close for Comfort , New York : Guilford Press .

3. Flamm, Michael . 2005 . Law and Order: Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s , New York : Columbia University Press .

4. Gilbert, David. "AIDS Conspiracy Theories: Tracking the Real Genocide". In No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner, 129–50. Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press and Arm the Spirit, 2004.

5. ———. No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner. Montreal: Abraham Guillen Press/Kersplebedeb, 2004.

6. ———. Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground and Beyond. PM Press, 2012.

7. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

8. King, Dennis . 1989 . Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism , New York : Doubleday .

9. Parenti, Christian . 1999 . Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in an Age of Crisis , New York : Verso .

10. Rodríguez, Dylan. Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

11. Springer, Kimberly. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980, 1977. Reproduced under its original title, "A Black Feminist Statement". In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, 210–18. New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983.

12. Thompson, Heather Ann. "Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History". Journal of American History 97 (2010): 703–34.

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Anti-Capitalism and Violence: Gord Hill Interviewed by Kersplebedeb

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The opening graphic in The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book is striking, showing a Black Bloc member squaring off against a cop, each as representatives of the clash between Empire and free peoples from centuries past. To what degree do you feel that the clashes at today's summits represent a continuity with the history of anti-colonial resistance?

To start with, I wouldn't limit the concept of anti-colonial resistance simply to counter summit mobilizations. But in general, I do think there's a connection in that free, autonomous societies have always resisted the rule of civilization and its empires, which the graphic you refer to was meant to depict. Looking at just the summit protests, however, they are in some ways the equivalent to battles fought against empire by tribal peoples, including forms of self-organization, autonomy, even tactics. For example, tribal peoples in Western Europe fought in a somewhat chaotic autonomous manner, while Roman legions were in massed units, lines of heavily armoured troops, etc. You can see similar forms of struggle among social movements opposing state security forces today, the Black Bloc being somewhat similar to the "barbarian" tribes fighting Roman soldiers (who look very similar to modern day riot cops).

In the section of your comic book where you talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, you show how assimilated tribal chiefs took advantage of the power vacuum to establish their own kingdoms. Some comrades argue that we're now in a period of the decline of imperialism, but is there anything we can do to prevent history from repeating itself, and today's "assimilated tribal chiefs" in the neo-colonies from similarly filling the power vacuum as warlords to set up their own fiefdoms?

The "assimilated tribal chiefs" are already circulating and jockeying for position within our social movements, if we consider the collaborative role of union bureaucrats, political party members, pacifist ideologues, etc. Internally, we make efforts to keep our autonomy and decentralized manner of organizing while defeating those that would control and contain us. In the event of a systemic collapse, what would prevent warlords as such from rising? Organized resistance capable of defeating such forces, the seeds of which must be planted now so that when the crisis matures so does the resistance. it should also be noted that even among the European tribes collaborator chiefs were targeted with death and there was significant internal struggles among tribes in responding to both the advance of the Roman empire and its collapse.

k: The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book focuses almost exclusively on clashes at protests that have occurred in the media spotlight. Do you consider these protests, which some people have criticized as "summit hopping", to be particularly strategic? Is there a particular importance in telling these stories?

gh: The summits depicted in the comic are historical events that involved tens of thousands of people directly in the streets, and which affected many more (via corporate and alternative media, etc.). They inspired many and showed the power of the people when mobilized, despite the vast deployment of state security forces. This is a strategic gain that is absolutely necessary for resistance movements. In regards to telling these stories, it is up to us to maintain our history of resistance, no one else will do it for us. It is in fact in the interests of the ruling class that such histories be erased because they are such "bad examples." I personally don't like the term "summit hopping" as it belittles the efforts of organizers attempting to mobilize against such events in their areas. It also arises from the false belief that we either organize "locally" or "summit hop," a division that doesn't exist in reality.

k: I think what you're saying there is really borne out by what we're seeing at the moment in Quebec, where some of the same people who were involved in the militant actions at the G20 or even at Montebello before that, have been participating in the present mobilization.


gh: Ya, I've heard the same thing about the #Spanish Revolution, which Occupy Wall Street was modeled after.  Many of the organizers were 'veterans' of the so-called anti-globalization movement.

k: In your comic book, you show the Mohawk uprising and the Zapatistas in 1990, but then skip ahead to APEC in 1997 and then J18 in 1999. In many cities, the 90s were a decade where militant antifascist politics became an important area of action. Do you see any connection between the antifa activism of the 90s and then much broader antiglobalization movement that followed?

gh: Yes, certainly, in that many of the Anti-fa militants were key organizers in some of these mobilizations and also promoted militant tactics such as Black Blocs over those years. But I had limits on how much of the story could be told, and the anti-APEC and Zapatista rebellion more directly influenced the so-called anti-globalization movement with the focus on neo-liberalism, which I think really made people aware of the global restructuring then underway.

k: In Toronto there was Anti-Racist Action, and in Montreal we had the somewhat pathetic example of the "World Anti-Fascist League" and then (much better) RASH and SHARP; what kinds of groups were active on the West coast at the time?


gh: In Vancouver there was less of a fascist threat during this period.  There were smaller numbers of neo-nazis organized around Aryan Nations, and there was an Aryan Resistance Movement, as well as Tony McAleer's "Canadian Liberty Net," mostly a telephone line that had racist messages and info.  As a result there wasn't an active ARA chapter.  We did set up a group called Anti-Fascist Info, which was mostly an informational group that organized film screenings, forums, etc.  There were numerous autonomous anti-fascists who would show up at anti-racist rallies, for example in 1993 I think the Canadian Liberty Net attempted to organize a forum with Tom Metzger from the White Aryan REsistance (WAR).  This meeting was shut down after militants learned of the meeting place.  There was also a liberal reformist group called the BC Organization to Fight Racism (BCOFR) which had formed in the early 1980s when the KKK was more active here.

k: Your work over the years, both as an activist and a movement artist-intellectual, has focussed on Indigenous resistance struggles, which have been going on uninterrupted for over five hundred years. Yet you also obviously have an affinity for some of the traditions of resistance that emerged much more recently in Europe, especially the German Autonomen. There seem to be glaring differences between the circumstances that have given rise to these resistance struggles - to what degree do you see them as being compatible, or perhaps more to the point, what how do you see them as being relevant to one another?

gh: Yes, my main focus is anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. As capitalism arose from Europe's colonization of the Americas, I see the two as intertwined. The imposition of capitalist relations among Indigenous peoples has resulted in class hierarchies, today manifested in the Aboriginal business elite and their collaborator political organizations. I think decolonization must include an anti-capitalist analysis or it risks simply being another form of assimilation (neo-colonialism). And since we have to develop anti-capitalist resistance it makes sense to study and understand such movements both historically and current. The Autonomen, as an autonomous and decentralized political force/social movement, share some qualities with Indigenous tribal society and also serve as a model for radical anti-capitalist resistance in a modern industrialized nation-state.

k: In the 1970s, at the time when the Autonomen were first developing in West Germany, and during the second wave of Autonomia in Italy, there was the related phenomenon of the "Urban Indians" - was this just a racist rip-off, or do you see there as something positive in this kind of identification, especially as the people who identifies this way may have been anti-imperialist, but really had no connection or contact with the anti-colonial Indigenous struggles here?

gh: The "Urban Indians" were probably sincere in their efforts to "decolonize" from Western Civilization, but ya it is a kind of racist appropriation of culture which would not go over very well here in North America.  The ironic thing is they could have reached back to the tribal history of Europe itself--the Vandals, the Goths, Celts, etc. all resisted their colonization by the Romans and had numerous military victories, including the sacking of Rome itself on a few occasions, which seems like a great historical legacy of their own ancestors engaging in anti-colonial resistance.

k: At the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, one of the best moments for me is when a guy came over to my table and was excited because he recognized himself in your comic - he had been arrested at the G20 and his story and\ made it into your pages. Other people i know also get a grin when they see someone who might be them. Leaving aside the question of how autobiographical your book may be, what is the significance of using art to keep alive the stories and anecdotes from these events?

gh: Tribal peoples have always used to art to maintain their histories and culture, as have social movements. In regards to the historical events depicted in the comic, I hadn't seen too much artwork attempting to maintain this history, for example with comics, which I find to be a great form of communication.

k: I imagine your art will continue to serve this function for the movement in the years to come. Do you have any future projects along similar lines that you'd like to tell us about?


gh: Not at the moment, perhaps you have some ideas?

k: Ha! Well, you could always come to Montreal, lots of interesting things happening here these days...

k: Violence is central to your stories, and the idea seems to be that the more of it, the better. Why is violence so important, and what do you have against peaceful protest?

gh: I would say violence is central to the stories I depict because they are a critical moment in the social conflict out of which they arise. It isn't every day that the state mobilizes thousands of cops and soldiers, or when thousands of militants converge on a specific battlefield as it were. In regards to levels of violence I think this is a tactical question that is very much dependent on conditions and context. In Seattle 1999 there was a fairly low level of violence engaged in by protesters, certainly in the downtown core where it was much more of a classic "police riot." In the Capitol Hill area there was more sustained street fighting, but of course the most spectacular impact arose from the small Black Bloc action in the downtown which saw a fairly low level of violence (there were no confrontations with riot police with a good amount of property destruction carried out). I have nothing against "peaceful protest" and have participated in many more such protests than "violent" ones. It's a question of tactics and strategy. I would say, however, that I am opposed to pacifist ideologues attempting to impose their beliefs on others while undermining militants.

k: Various writers have argued that violence against the oppressor can actually be psychologically liberating for people, a way of dealing with and healing from the violence of everyday day life under patriarchal colonial capitalism...


gh: Ya that was the message of Franz Fanon.  I would say it can be psychologically liberating, and an important part of that is showing that the oppressor is not omnipotent, that they can be fought and even defeated.  Without this people feel powerless, which contributes to apathy.  People need a fighting spirit and the will to resist, and I don't think pacifism is very inspiring to a lot of people.

k: In the context of the antiglobalization movement, which you literally illustrate in your comic book, there were debates about nationalism, about cooperating with the right (i.e. Pat Buchanan, Ralph Nader, etc.), about conspiracy theories - but the only debate that appears in your comic book is the debate over violence. Did you purposefully decide to highlight this one question?

gh: Yes, I think it's a much more critical debate than those over larger strategic ones at this time, such as nationalism or conspiracy theories. I think within more radical social movements there is already an understanding around nationalism and the right-wing, a consensus of sorts that generally rejects these concepts. But within this there is a division over the question of violence and militant actions that must be resolved to some degree before greater unity of effort can be achieved. As for conspiracy theories, they certainly had an impact on the Toronto G20 due to the involvement of some conspiracists promoting the idea that the Black Bloc was a police operation, and maybe some debate on this should've been included, but by the end of the G20 comic I was seriously pressed for space...

k: This spring in Quebec there has been a student strike which has developed with strong anticapitalist politics and a rapid escalation on the streets. A lot of the protest tactics which were pioneered by small, even tiny, groups over the past fifteen years are now in the headlines every day, and being taken up by much larger numbers of people. How much potential do you see for this kind of urban militant resistance to spread in North America? Do you see any potential pitfalls?

gh: I think it can spread very far and wide in a very short period of time. I began to realize the potential for this after reading a report from Greece on the 2008/09 rebellion there, where a similar phenomenon of thousands of youths adopted the tactics and methods that had been used by smaller numbers of anarchists for years. This wasn't simply natural intuition--these kids and many others in Greek society have watched the anarchists in action for over two decades now. It's like "monkey see, monkey do" and that's the importance of showing examples of militant resistance and serving as a model of how it can be carried out. The Canucks Riot of 2011 here in Vancouver was similar--during the 1994 hockey riot there were no cars arsoned. In 2011, over 16 or 17 cars were torched, including 4 police cars. I'm sure many of these youth rioting had seen some coverage of the Toronto G20 and the four burning cop cars that resulted. The Occupy movement, whatever its shortcomings, shows that a large segment of the population believes that some form of social change is necessary. They weren't willing to join the Occupiers, but they're sitting there and observing all this social mobilization and conflict going on in the world. It might only take one incident or issue to instigate social revolt, and as conditions continue to deteriorate this potential grows. The potential pitfalls are greater repression of social movements and an increase in police controls over the population, but that's part of the process of resistance.

k: If or when things do fall apart, isn't there a risk that the racism, patriarchy, and capitalist values that people have internalized might lead significant sections of the oppressor nations, especially its middle classes, to veer to the far right?


gh: I'd say it's a very real possibility and one that we can see occurring even now, with the right-wing Christian patriot militia movement in the US.  This movement expanded during the 1990s but then declined after 9/11 when the so-called "War on Terror" began.  In 2008 however, when Obama was elected amidst an economic crisis, the patriot militia movement expanded rapidly with part of it mainstreaming as survivalism (itself a sign of the times).  As of yet this right-wing has not coalesced into a unified movement, although all the ingredients are there for fascist style paramilitary organizing on a large scale.  But the thing about the declining economic conditions is that significant segments of the middle-class may become working class, as occurred in Argentina during the 2001-02 economic crisis there.

k: Still thinking of Quebec, after a few weeks of demonstrations in which police were repeatedly sent running, both the federal government and the city of Montreal began drafting legislation and changing bylaws to criminalize wearing masks and increase penalties for even being present during a militant demonstration. With potential consequences of up to ten years in prison and thousands of dollars in fines, the movement is now going to face significantly heavier repression in the courtrooms, and perhaps in the prisons too. On top of that, the provincial government has passed Law 78 which criminlizes a broad range of protest activities, and is clearly meant to break the back of the movement. What will be necessary for radicals to break through this escalation on the part of the State, and what effect will this have on our struggles?

gh: People join resistance movements for a variety of reasons--some ideological, some for friendship, some for financial reasons or personal security. But an important factor is the potential for victory--only those committed ideologically will join a group doomed to failure or defeat. If movements surrender or abandon a struggle after the first act of repression many will see it as weak and impotent. If a movement overcomes this repression and continues to advance, it will more likely gain new members and inspire others. But it also depends on the context--what is the struggle and how much emotion is invested in it by the participants? Is it a matter of life or death, is it a significant part of the core beliefs of the participants, an important matter of principle? In regards to the Quebec student strike, it seems that many participate or sympathize because it is a matter of principle (the right to education, or the right to assembly and protest). They seem to be able to mobilize the numbers necessary to defy the ban on protests and masks for the moment, but the real question will be how social movements without such a large base will fair. To answer the question more directly, I would speculate that mass disobedience of the new law would be crucial to show that the movement cannot be intimidated and controlled so easily. The disruptions resulting from the protests can create political pressure to repeal the legislation, just as they did to create it. But the movement might have to raise the level of struggle to one that it cannot maintain, given that its base, even though large by our standards, is ultimately limited. The law itself will undoubtedly contribute to the radicalization of even more people, just as the student strike itself has.

k: What do you think of the North American left today?

gh: It has great potential considering the worsening socio-economic conditions, the convergence of ecological and economic crises, etc. In general, at the moment it seems weak and fixated on intellectual efforts rather than physical activities, dominated by middle-class social democrats and their suffocating pacifist doctrine, and likely to turn tail and run at the first sign of aggression by our class enemy. The only hope lies in the radicalizing influence of militants, which is why the state sees the bogey-man Black Bloc as the greatest threat, and not those sectors of the left which can be easily co-opted. Furthermore, I think many people don't join "leftist" struggles because they see little potential for victory, and little that actually inspires them. 

The N. American left today largely inspires middle-class liberals and reformists, and the last thing they want is radical social change. The left or social movements in general will become far more effective when working class people actually join and participate in significant numbers, which I think will happen as the economic conditions decline further. I believe this is one of the reasons we must promote a diversity of tactics within out movements, because many working class people intuitively understand that radical social change requires some level of conflict, as opposed to middle-class reformists who seek to avoid both.

k: Violence aside, can you think of any other strategies or tactics that people are using presently that might challenge middle-class control of the left?


gh: I'm not sure, but I think some examples may be found in Occupy Oakland, where more people of colour and working class people were involved and radicalized what was a predominantly white middle-class movement.  Another example might be the Wet'suwet'en in central 'BC' who are resisting the Enbridge pipeline as well as the Pacific Trails Pipeline, a couple of years ago they severed their connection to mainstream environmental NGO's and began working with grassroots resistance groups.  But overall I think middle-class control will be undermined as social conditions continue to decline and more working class elements become mobilized in the resistance.

k: In the time that you have been involved in resistance movements, we have experienced numerous battles on multiple fronts, with both surges forward as well as defeats. What do you think we need to prepare ourselves for over the next ten years?

gh: Preparation must be based on our analysis of what may occur over the next ten years. Worsening economic conditions, ecological crisis, increased state repression... and potential systemic collapse in localized areas. Typically under such conditions there arises the need for greater solidarity and mutual aid to be practised, greater efforts at self-sufficiency (including food production, shelter, etc.), physical self-defense, survival skills, and better education on security culture. Given the growing cynicism with the current system, anti-capitalist resistance should find fertile ground for mobilizing. Anti-fascist or anti-racist efforts may become more important in some areas as well, as the state and ruling class typically resort to fostering fascist movements and racist sentiment among the population in times of crisis.

************************************************

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On Mass Struggles in the Metropole: Thoughts Inspired by Quebec

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because mass struggles include all kinds of folks

By Way of Introduction
In many neighbourhoods and cities and towns across Quebec, there is a new phenomenon of people going into the streets every night and banging pots and pans together to signal their opposition to the government’s new repressive legislation, Law 78. This is in the context of an upsurge of mass struggle and rapidly escalating tactics within a student strike that has been going on here for months. It is an unprecedented situation, and the struggle here seems to be transforming itself at what seems like breakneck speed.

On one of the first of these “pots and pans” nights, i went wandering around Cote-des-Neiges, a mixed class immigrant neighbourhood, my little pot and my little spoon in hand, both curious to see where (indeed, whether) i would find some noise, and hoping to maybe join in.

i was not surprised that all of the clanging seemed to be between Isabella and Queen Mary, i.e. where the area is at its most Quebecois, and its least working-class. At 8pm i saw people opening their doors and starting to bang. Wandering around looking for people actually on the street, i could find none. Regardless: as a tactic, especially as a new tactic, it was dramatic. You can hear someone clanging on a pot for blocks, so even though there was less than 1 person per block doing this, the effect in the area was that you could hear noises all around you. This was really effective.

As i wandered up Fulton, an older man was sitting on his stoop. He looked at me and motioned around in the air, asking if i could hear what was happening. i nodded. "Terrorism," he said in a thick European accent, "That's terrorism." Amused, and curious, i asked him if he was scared. He nodded. i asked what of, and he just repeated "They are terrorizing the city." After a brief disagreement, i left with him saying "God bless you", and then, under his breath but quite audibly, "you stupid terrorist." For what it's worth.

(Turns out i was lucky: speaking to a friend the next day, who recently moved to Cote-des-Neiges, he told me how he went out with his little pot and pan and ... got punched in the face! Luckily, the way he put it, the puncher was an old guy who couldn’t pack much force, so his main worry was that his assailant would have a heart attack. But still.)

To be clear, i believe how this is playing out in this neighbourhood - and i would guess in Montreal North, Park Ex, St-Michel, all heavily immigrant - is different than in most neighborhoods affected by the casseroles. In Quebecois working-class neighborhoods i have no trouble believing this is happening in a more organic and broad way. Similarly, in Quebecois mixed-class neighborhoods and even in neighborhoods with sizeable student populations i don't presume that participation will correlate to more middle-class streets. As such, however, this does underscore the national dimension to this surge, and hints at how this may relate to class.

"It's time to awaken; Quebecois, on your feet!"

The Labor Aristocracy
There is an argument, unpopular within the white left, that in North America and other settler societies, “the colonized peoples have been the proletariat, while the white working class has been a labor aristocracy.” [1]

While this view is by no means marginal or beyond the pale amongst people living in oppressed nations, within the white left it is extremely rare; it finds its primary expression in a current of tiny groups known as Maoist-Third-Worldist, and is most familiar to white activists thanks to J. Sakai’s book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (available online at http://www.readsettlers.org). There are variations on this position, mainly regarding the degree to which workers in oppressed internal colonies (the Black Nation/New Afrika, Aztlan, Puerto Rico, Indigenous Nations, etc.) are also labor aristocratic, with the “maximal” version of this argument holding that there is in fact no proletariat within the First World, period. [2]

While some might dismiss these as esoteric debates, occurring largely between internet activists with too much time on their hands, this would be deceptive. Within oppressed communities, in prisons, in immigrant neighbourhoods, and indeed throughout the Third World, these questions are accepted by many people as completely legitimate. Furthermore, while not necessarily expressed as such, the question of how class relates to nation is being addressed (albeit often in confused and confusing ways) every time someone asks “where was the color at [fill in the blank]”, during every discussion about whether some person was killed by police because they weren’t white or because they weren’t middle-class, every time people note how “white” a protest or group or campaign is. Or, conversely, whenever “identity politics” dovetails with middle-class politics, defying some people’s expectations.

This current surge in Quebec provides a nice field to discuss this, and different interpretations, conclusions, and political consequences of these positions. So i'm going to go somewhat out on a limb here and share some rough thoughts on what is happening, informed by my sympathy to the idea that the political behavior of the metropolitan (or First World) working class is determined by its position in the global division of labor, so that it will not act as if it "has nothing to lose but its chains", but that its dominant sections (both in terms of numbers of political influence) will adhere more closely to the forms of activity and politics normally associated with the petit bourgeoisie.

"It's a student strike; it's a popular struggle"

The Student Strike
The situation in Quebec is inspiring. Very inspiring, in fact. For those of you unfamiliar with what is happening here, it will be impossible for me to do it justice in just a few sentences, so i would suggest reading this Report on Quebec’s Student Strike. But in an inadequate nutshell: students have been on strike for over 100 days against a tuition hike – a preeminently reformist casus belli. Yet faced with at-first-routine police harassment and court orders against their pickets, the students fought back - literally - and police were sent running from angry mobs - repeatedly. The street tactics have been escalating steadily, and the State has been relying primarily on police violence and repression in the form of new legislation - Law 78 - outlawing many traditionally accepted forms of protest here (demonstrations without a permit, pickets in front of schools, strikes by education workers, wearing masks, etc.).

Rather than isolate the movement, government repression led to an explosion of public support, the most obvious current example being the aforementioned “pots and pans demonstrations” where people go out in their neighbourhoods banging their kitchenware together every night at 8pm. There are hundreds of these nightly protests, involving tens of thousands of people every night. These supplement larger nightly downtown demonstrations which have turned into riots several times over the past month. Neighbourhood assemblies have also been organized, potentially creating an opening for the struggle to extend to new fronts.

Adding to this promising situation, current plans are to disrupt the various summertime festivals on which Montreal’s tourism industry depends – starting with the Grand Prix, set for early June. Meanwhile, the police and the right-wing Liberal government continue to make all of the best of mistakes, and indeed a few days ago for the third time the government simply broke off negotiations with the student representatives.

It is the most enjoyable thing i have seen in decades, if ever.

white students in blackface,
pulling puppet which implies Charest is "really" english

The Oppressor Nation
The movement, however, is not only First World/metropolitan, it is overwhelmingly white, and while class politics play an important part in how things are framed, this is very much from a perspective that sees whitelife - in this case, Quebecois whitelife - as the norm. Putting aside the ubiquitous complaints about people being pushed out of the middle class, and the various racist incidents that will often occur when masses of white people congregate, this also plays itself out also in terms of how the government's counteroffensive is being framed. One person hit the nail on the head when they jokingly suggested as a slogan, "We're Already Racially Profiled in Small Groups, We Don't Need Law 78!"

Now, the clichéd stereotype about those of us who see the First World working class as largely compromised is that we would do nothing but shit on the student strike, that we would argue that revs should not be involved, period. Perhaps some folks might point to a certain reading of Settlers or a certain analysis of imperialism, arguing that this is mainly an uprising of white people in the metropole (i.e. the labor aristocracy), and as such that there is nothing to be gained by participating.

To be clear: i reject such a dismissive approach. It treats the privileged character of First World life as near-homogenous, with nobody experiencing privation or oppression outside of those actually producing the super-profits at the center of world capitalism. This flies in the face of lived experience, conflates the concepts of “working class” and “proletariat”, and reduces oppression (which is often determined by immediate context, and lived subjectively) to exploitation. Perhaps worst of all, it involves being closed to the possibility of the unexpected, as if we were guaranteed to have a theoretical grasp on any and all existing social contradictions.

There are divisions and differences in life-experience and suffering within the metropolitan working classes, privileged as many of them may be; if the dominant sections enjoy the profits and benefits of Canadian or Quebecois whitelife, with even many racialized sections enjoying First World privilege, there are numerous pockets whose situation is far more complicated. The problem is that to the degree that they identify with the oppressor nation, the political consciousness of these pockets remains tied to the labor aristocracy that holds sway over the class.

A dismissive approach grossly underestimates this question of consciousness, and the fact that even when we are literally fighting and challenging State power, we are still engaged in what Gramsci referred to as a "war of position", i.e. a war to open up cultural and political space. Or as some German comrades argued, as they grappled with this very question some forty years ago, “to write off entire sections of the population as an impediment to anti-imperialist struggle, simply because they don’t fit into Marx’s analysis of capitalism, is as insane and sectarian as it is un-Marxist.” [3]

My view, and my reading of Settlers, is quite different from this cliché, even though i do consider that the global division of labor determines both what is possible and what is probable in our various struggles. What needs to be grasped is that what is happening in Quebec is a breakthrough, but it’s not the rev. While we have every reason to be overjoyed, identifying its limits will be key, not only to our ability to overcome them, but also to our survival as conditions change.

no comment

The Dangers
Thanks to the numbers involved, and the political crisis this has engendered for the State, the student strike of 2012 will likely go down in history as the defining event for a generation of Quebecois youth, the moment when, as Fanon put it, they found their mission. This is a major upheaval, not business-as-usual in the metropole. If it breaks out of its immediate limits, it will alter the very terrain upon which we will be struggling for years to come. If it is neutralized, it will represent a defeat that may weigh against us just as heavily.

True to metropolitan form, at the mobilization’s more swollen moments, radical sections become easy to miss in what becomes a humungous cross-class mass. Even while the pots-and-pans demonstrations represent a creative and promising turn, take note that the Liberal Finance Minister has also applauded the way in which this fits with the image of Montreal that he wants to project, and how they decrease the scope for property attacks during the big nightly marches. In fact, in some areas this "peaceful" mobilization has been spearheaded by the same forces that previously opposed the strike. Similarly, at the biggest demos (hundreds of thousands of people in the streets), some of the slogans may be proletarian but the foot-troops, and the money behind the buses, are middle-class or else labor-aristocratic.

In terms of neutralization, as already mentioned, the government has passed legislation (Law 78) which criminalizes various protest activities, with potential fines for organizations running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the municipal level, Montreal has changed its bylaws so that wearing a mask at demonstrations or participating in an “illegal assembly” will make one liable to heavy fines (up to $3000 for repeat offenders). Federally, the Conservative government is passing legislation to make wearing masks at demonstrations illegal, with maximum prison sentences of 5 or 10 years, depending on the circumstances.

While many protesters see this as unprecedented, and words like “dictatorship”, “police state”, and “fascism” are being bandied about, none of this surpasses the level of repression that has been directed against certain individuals and groups (most notably certain Muslim and foreign-based organizations) over the past years, the difference being one of scale not intensity. More important still, this does not come close to the level of repression that can be enacted by a State while still retaining its bourgeois democratic form, as the European experience in the 1970s and 80s bears out. Finally, we must bear in mind that non-State repression – i.e. the mobilization of “law abiding citizens” and far right forces to attack the students and the left – has so far remained relatively (though not completely) undeveloped.

People freaking out about repression does not necessarily serve us well, and may in fact prevent us/them from grasping the full scope of what can occur.

At the same time, for revolutionaries, repression will only ever be one part of how we get neutralized; isolation and demobilization through a process of integrating the bulk of protesters will be at least as important to the government’s strategy. The traditional means of doing this in metropolitan states is through social democracy, often tinged with nationalism. Indeed, in the context of Quebec, the only province where Canada’s francophone minority forms a clear majority, nationalism is likely to be more than just a “tinge”.

As such, one likely outcome is that the State channels this surge into a social-democratic project with a Quebecois nationalist dimension. Quebec Solidaire is clearly positioned to try and take advantage of this, though its small size and meager infrastructure will mean that this will be an uphill battle for it. (The New Democratic Party, Canada’s main social democratic political party, seems to have been fucked by the same national contradiction that prevented it from winning a foothold in Quebec prior to 2011: even though it is now the main federal party here it is unable to act like a social democratic party should for fear of now undercutting its potential for growth in english canada.) And of course, the PQ is feinting to the left, pretending to support the students, as there’s nothing to gain by any other position at the moment.

Any viable social democratic consolidation, regardless of the parliamentary form it takes, or even whether it manages to form a government, will sow confusion about Quebec’s actual status in the world (as an imperialist nation-without-a-state) and the actual nature of class and national oppression within Quebec. It will reduce any proletarian class consciousness and combativity. It might even unleash energies that will be instrumentalized against the most radical or the most oppressed, either within this society, or else oppressed Indigenous nations which survive within Quebec’s claimed territory. At the very least, these risk being marginalized as footnotes to the main drama at hand. All bad things, to be sure.

the current priority is to break through all patriarchal-colonialist-capitalist limitations

Engagement
While recognizing these as serious limitations on the current arc of struggle, in no way do i mean to suggest that revs should sit this one out. Rather, we who live in this oppressor-nation should be involved, albeit without illusions. This does NOT mean being involved with hesitation - tactically, we should be in with both feet, no holds barred - but it does mean that we should be careful about how we think and talk about what is going on, and wary of what strategic alliances or perspectives we get integrated into. It also means that as we adapt to the new conditions we should make sure to not abandon areas of work where we have already developed a base.

While we should be all-in tactically, strategically we should keep our eye on the limited prize of winning as big a minority as possible for our politics, which go far beyond a tuition freeze or even free education for all. We should not be disappointed or feel betrayed when the movement reveals its social democratic complexion, any more than we should when the social democrats turn on us – and we should be preparing our allies (our real ones), so that they don’t feel disappointed or betrayed either.

Our aims and our methods should therefore be minoritiarian, in preparation for a reversal-of-fortune down the line. Doing so will help our comrades, as well as those new folks we are reaching out to, to experience this reversal-of-fortune as something unfortunate but to be expected, rather than as a defeat. It will also help prepare people to navigate the forms of long-term repression that are to come, i.e. not mass arrests, but political ostracism; not having an organization banned, but having it funded and promoted with a leadership inching to the right while verbally posturing to the left; or else targeted attacks on tiny groups of "troublemakers" or “terrorists” who will be easy to spot by their not cheering whatever the new "consensus" status quo will be.

In this regard, a not improbable worst-case-scenario would involve Law 78 staying on the books after the mass mobilization subsides, at which point police will not hold back from enforcing it each and every time we take to the streets.

This minoritarian approach is complicated by the fact that we may not be at the tail end of the surge, we may only be at the beginning. Things are likely to get a lot better before they get worse. This may end this summer, or this may simply be the beginning of the first year. (Obviously there is always the hope that global changes or political breakthroughs will occur that will permit this surge to break out of the limited model i am placing it in – comrades have pointed out that world capitalism is already in a crisis, and therefore has less room to maneuver than it did in the sixties – though to those who think that spells “rev”, i would suggest they read up on 77 as well as 68, taking special note of Italy and France.)

The surest way to fuck up in terms of winning more people to our positions would be to act as if this were not a breakthrough, or to act as if things were calming down when really they are heating up. So the (subjective) challenge is in maintaining a cheery disposition but reminding oneself of a long-term gloomy forecast, keeping an umbrella in your backpack despite the sunshine outside. Or to be more prosaic and precise: to fight to break out of this cycle (of metropolitan militancy being re-integrated by patriarchal colonialist capitalism) will leave us in a better position even if we do not succeed.

But we have to fight like we mean it – as hard as we can.

Rearguard Objectives and Avenues of Advance
At the same time, we should work to encourage elements in the mass struggle which highlight deeper problems, which will break people off from their patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist nations. Or, barring that, which will serve as obstacles to reactionary tendencies within their (our) communities. Rather than abandon the terrain and capacities we have developed prior to this upsurge, this is where we can build on them, making connections that will both aid the more radical and oppressed sections of the present mobilization, while also establishing some political barricades against our opponents. (That this is already being done, in at times brilliant form, can be seen from before March 15 to after May 1, with examples ranging from CLASSE reps’ statements about Indigenous sovereignty to the upcoming trans night-time demo…)

In his book The Defeat of Solidarity,[4] author David Ost describes the rightward turn of labor in Poland in the 1990s, making the point that anger at neoliberalism was unavoidable, but that because the left and liberals opted not to organize it, it took on a right-wing, racist, and sexist complexion: “In the end, workers turned to the right because only the right appealed to them as workers, because no one else offered a clear narrative validating the class experiences they were having.”  This is similar to Sakai’s observation that to many leftists, “the white workers as a whole are either the revolutionary answer - which they aren't unless your cause is snowmobiles and lawn tractors - or they're like ignorant scum you wouldn't waste your time on. Small wonder rebellious poor whites almost always seek out the Right rather than the left.” [5]

With this worst-case-scenario in mind, we should never shy away from reaching out to people, hoping to win them over or at least create some space in which they can think outside of the patriarchal-capitalist-colonialist box. This is one way we can work to prevent the social energies that have been unleashed from being captured by the far right. We all have contradictions and doubts, and if we can sow doubts or hesitations in the minds of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people about the worst aspects of capitalism or national oppression or patriarchy, this might make it more difficult for our opponents to recruit them. It might also make it possible for us to win a few of them over to our side in the battles to come, even if they currently remain beyond our reach. As such, although at present we may only win a tiny minority over to clearly anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal positions, that doesn't mean we cannot influence much greater numbers in some more partial and long-term way.

In practical terms, there are a number of ways to do this, the most obvious being to properly contexualize repression: remembering and talking about the dozens of people killed by police in Montreal over the past decades when we discuss police violence at the ongoing protests, and placing the sexual harassment women are facing at the hands of police during these protests in the context of gendered violence being carried out by police – and other men – every day. In both these examples, our ultimate aim should be to frame these interventions in the context of opposing reactionary tendencies within the current mobilization itself, i.e. the fact that women and racialized people have been dealing with sexist and racist shit from both the State and also at times within the student-movement throughout the strike.

Theorizing and acting around this are two obvious ways of making connections, of extending the offensive both within the mobilization and in new ways outside of it. This is the liberatory potential that exists within the dialectic of oppression and revolt.

Of course, other possibilities abound: resisting the ongoing deportations, most glaringly perhaps the case of Dany Villanueva; solidarity with resistance elsewhere, for instance the ongoing prison hunger strikes and rebellions in the u.s., which can be related to prison-expansion plans here; protests and attacks around the anti-abortion bill that is about to be voted on federally in parliament; support for Indigenous resistance everywhere, including of course in regards to Plan Nord; what people do the next time tragedy strikes and police kill someone in this city (you have a plan, right?); mobilization around the new Employment Insurance changes … the list goes on and on …

One nice example of something comrades have been doing: there have been noise demonstrations held outside of area prisons where people arrested in the context of the current movement have been held, making connections between targeted political repression and the broader prison system, and building on previous more limited initiatives of this sort over the past years. This kind of action makes all the right things easier to see.

In the current situation, where militant tactics have provided so much of the fuel that has fired this surge forward, any disruptive resistance to any of these attacks will be seen as relating to the broader upheaval. Though this may not last long, for the moment the tactics themselves have become the symbol of the general politics at play. While tactics must always be tailored to what one’s base will support, with a minoritarian strategy it is important to remember that the base in question is not the general public at large or even your average protester. (By the same token, with a strategy of sowing doubts amongst our opponents in the long-term, actions that negate our politics will of course lead to defeats.)

The trick remains to engage in these more specific, sharper, conflicts in a way that does not instrumentalize them to buttress the “broader” mobilization, but which rather uses them to splinter people off or at least tug on people from the cross-class mass now in the streets.

map showing where the "pots and pans" protests were occurring as of May 25

Solidarity from the Oppressed?
As to our comrades who are not from this oppressor-nation and who do not focus their political activity within it, this article is not directed at them, as their decision on how or even whether to relate to this mobilization will have to be made with different criteria in mind. Group autonomy and self-determination do not mean that members of oppressed communities and nations should not join in this mobilization, they simply mean that this decision should be made without illusions, and with specific goals and factors in mind. Goals and factors different from what needs to be considered by those of us within the oppressor-nation.

Calls to “find the color” in any oppressor-nation mobilization, or to make everything “inclusive”, come from multiple, even hostile, class and political stands. Sometimes the oppressed are better off not lending their energies to mobilizations that do not serve their interests. We need to get used to the idea that if people from oppressed communities are not joining in some allegedly “broad” mobilization, maybe that’s because they have better things to do. Not necessarily a problem to be solved. Simply a choice that has to be made by people in (and not merely from) those communities, and it goes without saying that it needs to be made autonomously, not as the result of some call or demand or request from the settler left.

In terms of internationalism, the worst thing that the settler radical left can do is provide an excessively rosy picture of what the situation is. The second worst thing would be to provide an excessively gloomy one.

At the same time, when comrades criticize racist and sexist behavior and chauvinism, remedying this should be a priority. Not so that we can do a better job at recruiting more “color” to our events or because we are embarrassed by a lack of “diversity” or to hush up news that might damage our image - all reactions that have more to do with neocolonialism than antiracism. The main reason should not be to seduce allies (who might not benefit from such an alliance, after all), but simply because these forms of oppression are inimical to our politics and our principles, period. To the degree that this is a strategic priority, it is because racism, sexism, and national chauvinism are three of the strongest chains tying people to the labor aristocratic and middle-class elements that will try to drag this movement into the social democratic camp, and thereby instrumentalize it against the most oppressed. This is the ominous alternative to the aforementioned ways to extend the struggle; we can refer to it as the reactionary potential that exists within the dialectic of oppression and revolt.

In the here and now, the worst example of this kind of approach is summed up in the slogan "students and immigrants, same struggle" - a banner i saw at the monster demo on May 22. The conflation of interests implied by such "unite and fight" catchphrases is simply dishonest, and this despite the fact that the folks who say such things often mean well, and may even be comrades. These slogans cover up what we should be trying to expose. Indeed, the political content of such slogans is just as racist as the white students who wore blackface to a protest a few weeks back – if you think about it, they’re actually saying the same thing.

"After 2012, the chasm has become an abyss"

By Way of Conclusion
To get back to my little life in my little neighbourhood: a few of us got together last week, and by the end of the evening we were at times as many as fifteen walking through the streets, getting lots of smiles and occasionally having people lean out from their windows to chime in with their own kitchenware. Not everyone knew why we were banging pots and pans. Some people did not even know what we were talking about when we said “the student strike.” Personally, i hope if this continues in our neighbourhood, perhaps the focus can be something local folks can relate to more - i.e. against racism and/or against the police…

But i digress: it was a nice night - the most important thing is to be there, in the streets, alongside people - and better to try and fail than not to try at all.

For that reason, as well as all of the others outlined above, i don’t take the position that we should boycott these surges. Nor do i agree with the superficial antiracist approach that we should join them in order to add issues to some laundry list. However, i also reject the view that we should have a unitary response to them, or that we should blur the lines between the specific and the universal. Such an approach generally leads to privileged elements gaining political hegemony and leaves the radical – and, where they exist, proletarian – elements at their mercy.

for what it's worth...

Foonotes
[1] As stated by J. Sakai in When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited.

[2] While the question of Quebec’s status is an interesting and important one, for the purposes of this discussion it is unambiguously NOT an internal colony, as regardless of its irregular State form, it is fully integrated into the First World/metropolitan core.

[3] Red Army Faction, “The Black September Action in Munich:Regarding the Strategy for Anti-Imperialist Struggle”

[4] David Ost The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Cornell University Press, 2005), 96-7.

[5] J. Sakai When Race Burns Class: Settlers Revisited. 

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