Sam Popowich Discovery and Web Services Librarian, University of Alberta http://spopowich.ca/ Mon, 25 May 2020 17:15:08 +0000 Mon, 25 May 2020 17:15:08 +0000 Jekyll v3.8.5 Social Assumptions in Intellectual Freedom <p>In critical theory circles, one of the ways “critique” functions is by exposing the assumptions made by proponents of a particular theory or worldview. Sometimes these assumptions are unconscious, but whether they are consciously-held or not, they are always withheld or not made explicit by the discourse in question. This is one of the things Kant tried to do in his Critiques, it is what Hegel tried to do in his critique of Kant, and it is Marx’s focus in his critique of Political Economy. What has become apparent in the discourse of intellectual freedom is that there a set of social and political assumptions being made which, whether or not they are consciously or unconsiously held, are never made explicit. Because they are not made explicit, their political commitments do not become part of the discussion or debate around IF, and they end up either setting the terms of the discussion (when critics might think the terms themselves need to be different), or they force adherents and critics to have completely separate discussions cut off from each other.</p> <p>In a <a href="https://cfe.ryerson.ca/blog/2020/04/should-public-library-boards-embrace-intellectual-freedom-their-institutional-soul">CFE blog post from April 27</a> Alvin Schrader reiterates the absolutist view of intellectual freedom in libraries. Despite the title of the blog post being in the form of a question “should public library boards embrace intellectual freedom as their institutional soul”, Schrader is not interested in answering that question. His answer appears in the first sentence of the blog post: “I want first to address the fundamental role and value of the public library in Canadian communities - its ‘value proposition’, grounded in intellectual freedom - and then make a case for intellectual freedom as the institutional soul of the public library”. This is setting up a circular argument: libraries’ value proposition “grounded in intellectual freedom” is used to support the idea of intellectual freedom at the centre of librarianship. Schrader’s conception of intellectual freedom is assumed to be the right one, and is then used to answer the question of intellectual freedom itself.</p> <p>There is much to critique in Schrader’s piece. It is clear that, despite mentioning some of the critical positions, Schrader has not seriously engaged with critics of intellectual freedom absolutism. Schrader unironically and without nuance repeats the democratic discourse of librarianship without indicating that the very fact of democracy is subject to debate and contestation.</p> <p>But there is a <em>particular</em> set of assumptions that I want to challenge here. I have talked a lot about the democratic discourse, so there’s no point rehashing that argument. Rather, what I want to focus on is the self-determining individualistic social ontology that Schrader - and most liberal defenders of IF - take for granted. Schrader writes that the Supreme Court of Canada “provides insights into three key principles that shed light on why intellectual freedom is so fundamental to the Canadian body politic”, but he takes for granted the idea that the Supreme Court somehow transcends the social and political struggles in which all institutions are embedded. This is unsurprising, the Supreme Court - like libraries and the conception of intellectual freedom - have to be described in objective, politically neutral terms in order for the socio-political and economic system to maintain and reproduce itself. Distrust of institutions challenges the capitalist order. Schrader here simply applies to the Supreme Court the assumption of neutrality that has been so roundly criticized within librarianship itself. A commitment to the neutrality of libraries, IF, and the Supreme Court are all part of the same process of legitimation the upholds a “neutral” view of the Canadian state itself. What on the surface appears to be a fairly uncontroversial statement of fact becomes ends up supporting very particular political commitments.</p> <p>One of the principles the Supreme Court has upheld is that “freedom of expression is instrumental to democratic governance and citizen partipation in social and political decision-making”. What I have argued in <em>Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship</em> is that “democratic governance” and “citizen participation” are ideological presumptions made about the state of Canadian society and politics, again for particular political purposes. My own perspective - which I try always to make explicit - is that there is no democratic governance in Canada, and there is no meaningful citizen participation in decision-making. Just prior to the coronavirus pandemic we were dealing with Indigenous blockades against pipeline development, the latest instance in a long tradition of Indigenous resistance in the face of social and political (“democratic”) exclusion. Similarly, Canadian citizens find themselves the “owners” of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project, a decision approved by Cabinet and subject to no democratic oversight or citizen participation at all. I could go on.</p> <p>But the heart of the assumptions Schrader is making, the one that I want to single out as the most unassuming of social assumptions made by liberal defenders of IF like Schrader and Turk, is the following:</p> <blockquote> <p>[U]nfettered discourse fosters individual self-fulfillment and self-actualization, and thus directly engages individual human dignity… the open exchange of ideas encourses the search for knowledge and truth; intellectual freedom is the only pathway to individual and collective truth-seeking.</p> </blockquote> <p>Unfettered discourse, individual self-fulfillment and self-actualization: these are all presented as uncontroversial <em>facts</em> about our society. And yet, there are many, many thinkers, scholars, and activists out there who deny these very facts. Simply to repeat them as facts, as Schrader and Turk do, is not to make an argument or convince us that they are the case. In that sense, they do indeed become <em>ideological</em> (less of a bad word for me than for Schrader, for obvious reasons). Schrader subscribes to a view of individual identity and social relationships (including discourse) that is of long standing in liberal philosophy: the idea that (somehow) individuals are not subject to social relationships that pre-exist them, that they are not born into social relationships (including language), cultures (including values and ideas), and dynamics of power. This idea has been disproved by sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and political theorists. And yet it is one of the mose deeply embedded ideological constructs of our so-called liberal democracies. Marx dealt with its presence in 18th century political economy by dismissing it as a “Robinsonade”, the myth of a self-sufficient bourgeois gentleman (erasing Friday). It reappears in Thoreau, and we all know how reliant he was upon the support and labour of his own (female) social relations. It is present in Kant (the categories of space, time, and causality are inexplicable to Kant except as innate ideas; he does not understand that we learn these categories when we are babies). It is present in the social contract theorists, for whom individuals living their best lives <em>decide</em> to <em>come together</em> after the fact to form a society. None of these social and political conceptions are tenable, and yet they form part of the unspoken social and political assumption Schrader relies upon in his defense of IF.</p> <p>This ideology is not accidental. It is the ideology <em>required</em> by cis-gendered, heterosexual, white, patriarchal property owners in order to maintain their power in the world. They see themselves as “self-made men” with no social bonds to anyone else (especially not to the women and servants who perform the necessary labour). They come together in coffeehouses, the stock exchange, and parliament as independent, autonomous equals. They are ignorant of the ways their ideas, values, and discourse have all been produced by generations of social power and perspectives. There is <em>no such thing</em> as unfettered discourse: discourse arises out of previous discourse, out of the social world itself, it is <em>inherited</em> by people. In a famous formulation in the <em>Eighteenth Brumaire</em>, Marx writes that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. How can there be such a thing as absolute “intellectual freedom”, freedom of <em>any unqualified</em> kind, in a world of such social and intellectual necessity?</p> <p>The ideology of individualism informs the debate, and it is difficult to frame things any other way, precisely because absolutist IF defenders are not explicit about their own social and political commitments. Because of this, they can only understand phrases like “intellectual freedom seems a threat to social justice and must be supplanted by censorship in the name of equity and inclusion”. This sentence only makes sense from the perspective of individualist bourgeois ideology. If we reject the corrosive individualist presumption, we can understand that intellectual freedom can only arise out of collective social justice, and in that context the term “censorship” disappears. Censorship and intellectual freedom can only be considered binary opposites if one presumes individual agency and independent intellectual self-determination.</p> <p>The unspoken political commitments in Schrader’s piece come closest to the surface in his discussion of capitalism. Like many contemporary observers, such as Shoshana Zuboff and Nick Srnicek, Schrader insists on adding adjectives to capitalism “wild west capitalism, uncontrolled capitalism, late-stage capitalism, predatory capitalism, disaster capitalism” in order to salvage capitalism from its various critiques. For Schrader, there are no problems with capitalism itself, it is merely “this current form of capitalist democracy” which has “metastasized into an uncontrollable malignancy”. For Schrader (as for John Buschman), there was a period of “good capitalism” when minority rights were protected and censors knew their place. Such a period, it should go without saying, is a complete fabrication, one which does nothing but prop up the exploitative, violent, oppressive system of capitalism itself. This is the political project absolutist IF serves.</p> <p>The remainder of the blogpost relies on the ideological strawperson Schrader has set up. That critics of absolutist IF are censors who want less intellectual freedom, rather than scholars and practitioners who are explicit about their political commitments, who deny the corrosive individualism of hegemonic liberalism, and who deny that what we are calling for is censorship. In the absence of any real engagement with our work, critics of absolutist IF continue to be painted as misguided censors, extremists. It is not lost on me that this is how Schrader feels defenders of IF are painted. The difference is that we engage with Samek’s work, Turk’s work, Buschman’s work, Schrader’s work. It is hard to think that Schrader could to countenance the idea that absolutism in IF is never defined, if he had read any of the blog posts I and others have written on the subject. (OTOH, the earliest reference I’ve seen to “absolutist” IF is in Michael Gorman).</p> <p>Anyway, this post is long enough. Needless to say Schrader concludes by simply repeating the same liberal canards that come up again and again, like the elision of offense and harm, the distrust and misunderstanding of intersectionality and overdetermination, of what Hegel thinks of as “historical subjectivity”, vocational awe, and first and foremost, the democratic discourse of librarianship. I will end, however, with one more example of the unquestioned and unchallenged assumptions which run through Schrader’s piece:</p> <blockquote> <p>In early November 2019, in the midst of the public library meeting room controversies, a close librarian colleague wrote me: “What is most disturbing is so many people seem to have forgotten that we cannot pick and choose when to support free speech, a concept so fundamental to our democratic values and freedoms. As I pinned the poppy on my lapel this morning, I thought about this and all the work there is to do.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Here we have the whole package: library neutrality (“we cannot pick and choose”), the democratic discourse, the presumption of already-existing freedom. But perhaps most pernicious of all the reference to the poppy, symbol of the recuperation for capitalism of war for profit, war for geopolitical power, war for the extension of capitalism, war for colonial oppression. The most ironic thing, though the irony is lost on Schrader, is that the reference to pinning on the poppy is a perfect example of how individual “choices” are determined by social, political, and symbolic power. Schrader’s colleague would not have used the poppy in such a symbolic fashion if they could not expect Schrader to understand the symbolism. There was no risk of an individual’s intellectual freedom making such symbolic identification impossible. In what sense, really, were Schrader and his colleague intellectually free to construe the poppy in any another sense?</p> Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/05/25/social-assumptions-in-intellectual-freedom.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/05/25/social-assumptions-in-intellectual-freedom.html featured article Functional Programming and Emergence <p>It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog post on technology or programming, but this week I returned to some legacy code I wrote when I arrived at University of Alberta and inherited a programming project. The details of the project are unimportant; what I found interesting returning to it after all these years was the effect of the intervening years. When I initially wrote the application, I had just gotten the Ruby language firmly in my head - it was, and still is, the language I know best, though these days I’m very rusty. I read Sandi Metz’ now-classic <em>Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby</em>, as well as David West’s <em>Object Thinking</em>, which is language-agnostic, but alongside POODR really helped me think about object-oriented design.</p> <p>When I took computer science back in the mid-90s, learning Pascal and Motorola 64000 assembly, we were taught structured imperative design: break your programs up into functions for ease of reasoning, but basically you’re giving commands to a processor one at a time. When I tried to grok object-oriented programming through C++ and Java, I got a bit lost (later, I ended up doing a fair amount of Java web programming at University of Ottawa, which helped, but I relied so heavily on the IDE that I don’t feel I <em>learned</em> very much). So anyway, increased familiarity with Ruby, plus POODR and <em>Object Thinking</em> made me finally grasp OO-design, so that’s what I built my programs in.</p> <p>The basic idea of OO design is that there are <em>things</em> that exist in your application, and those things interact. It’s a very ontological way of thinking about software, and is often said to rely on <em>nouns</em> rather than <em>verbs</em>. Those things, called objects, are defined as classes, which have properties and behaviours, and can inherit and pass on those properties/behaviours to classes higher and lower in the taxonomy. When your program runs, those classes get instantiated in memory, and are considered <em>objects</em>. Objects have methods which, naively, if you learned structured imperative programming like I did, you would think of as functions operating on the data stored in the object as properties. POODR does a great job explaining why this way of thinking is wrong: those “functions” (really methods) are better off being thought of as mechanisms for sending or receiving <em>messages</em> between objects. They are the public interface of interacting and interrelating objects.</p> <p>One thing OO design does is changes the idea of program flow. In imperative programming, you tend to think of a program as beginning, issuing some commands to the computer or manipulating some data, then ending. OO design allows you to think about an ecosystem of interrelated data objects that don’t necessarily have a teleology, but exist in memory as members of an interconnected whole.</p> <p>After writing my OO programs, I became interested in functional programming (a third paradigm to add to imperative and object-oriented), and so I learned Clojure. Again, FP had been <em>really really hard to grok</em>, but at some point, working with Clojure, I figure it out. Coding in FP is mentally a very different process than designing in OO. With OO, you try to design as much as you can upfront. Using something like the Unified Modeling Language (UML) you might plan out all your objects, their properties and behaviours, in advance, on index cards or something. All the behaviour of the application is, essentially, predetermined. In some sense, OO is deterministic; where indeterminacy comes in (and is often the cause of bugs) is with the mutability of data. With FP, you don’t design in that way. You think of the simplest data manipulations and you start with those. You construct the simplest functions that do a single well-defined thing, and once some of those are built, then you use them to construct more complex functions, etc, etc. The end result is, to my mind, a much simpler and more elegant complete program, but it’s one that relies less on up-front design and more on <em>emergence</em>.</p> <p>I’ve written about emergence on the blog before - the idea that new properties or behaviour emerge in a higher level of organization than exist at a lower level. A static example is water, which has different properties than either hydrogen or oxygen on their own. A more dynamic example would be ant colony behaviour, which emerges from but is not reducible to the behaviour of individual ants. The patterns formed by cellular automata are another example of emergence. Emergence is often a characteristic of “complex systems”.</p> <p>Functional programming design can be considered emergent in the sense that the complexity of the program emerges from but is not reducible to the individual functions. But it’s emergent in another way, in that FP has this idea - which comes, I think, from Smalltalk - that you can and should be able to interact with a running program. Because pure functions in FP have no side effects and data is immutable, modifying a running program is in some senses much safer than it would be in the interconnected ecology of predetermined object behaviour. Changing a function in a running system changes the <em>emergent</em> behaviour of the whole, the way changing the rule for a cell in a cellular automaton would produce a different pattern.</p> <p>Anyway, I returned this week to a program I had written as orthodox OO about a decade ago to redesign a significant chunk of (fragile) functionality. Since learning Clojure, functional programming had so deeply entered my programming mind, that the simplest way to approach the problem (which is essentially a complex data transformation project with lots of insonsistency and edge cases) was the functional approach. Luckily, despite mostly being used in an OO context, Ruby lends itself well to functional style. In the end I wrote a functional-flavoured (not strictly functional, as I used a lot of non-functional elements to save time and energy) Ruby program to cover the redesigned part of the original program, wrapped it in a module, and mixed it into the original, larger code base.</p> <p>I don’t know that this story has any deeper significance, more than just as an example of continued learning, observation, and understanding what you’re doing. Habits of thought and perspectives change, and its good to take some time occasionally to take a look at your work from outside to see how and why that’s happening. In many ways over the years I’ve gone from being comfortable with change to actively craving it. The quarantine lockdown has been difficult in that respect, as I tend to like change. All these days of the same structure and pattern is hard to take. Perhaps that’s why I’ve embraced FP over the determinism of OO; I’m not someone who likes to do a lot of up-front design - I’d rather dive in and let the end result emerge from the work itself.</p> <p>I can see this in the way I write, too, come to think of it. I don’t plan or outline; I might jot down a few notes, but really, I just start writing and see where it takes me. The text emerges from the momentary thoughts I have at any given point. This means I have to rewrite a lot, and I end up going through a lot more drafts than I would, I think, if the text was more predetermined through upfront planning and outlining. There’s something intuitive, performative, improvisatory in this way of working that I enjoy (there’s a connection here, I think, with Gadamer and hermeneutics as well). Not to say that other approaches are wrong. As the motto of the Vulcans goes, there is “infinite diversity in infinite combinations”. Uniformity is death.</p> Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/05/16/emergence-and-functional-programming.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/05/16/emergence-and-functional-programming.html featured article Lives, Time, and the Pandemic <p>“When a seller has no choice about selling, it should be called pillage, not purchase.” Cicero.</p> <p>In <em>Confronting the Democratic Discourse</em>, I argued that two of the main precepts of liberal-democratic thinking librarianship are: that lives are protected, and that there is all the time in the world for debate and deliberation. I pointed to the very real lives being lost (Black lives, trans lives) and the time limits imposed by climate change as fundamental challenges to this hegemonic, liberal way of thinking. If we want to achieve something other than the status quo, we need to take the loss of lives and the lack of time seriously.</p> <p>All that was before the global pandemic put both lives and time squarely at the forefront of political questions: how to reduce the number of lives lost, political debates over length of life and quality of life (typically hijacked by rightwingers who are only to happy to sacrifice other people - old people, disabled people - if only to regain time for profit), how <em>soon</em> can the economy “reopen” and things “return to normal”, by which is meant, of course, the profitable exploitation, the wilful destruction of lives and the planet, that marks capitalism in the current conjuncture.</p> <p>At the beginning of the pandemic, we saw calls to <em>close the libraries</em> quickly, while various municipalities and universities wanted to keep them open longer, prepared to trade lives for time. In this, we saw the dreadful equation of expendable, precarious lives to the kind of turnover or reproduction time Marx discusses in volume 2 of <em>Capital</em>. For those of us able to work from home, time became fraught: how to distinguish between worktime and non-worktime - a problem exposed by autonomist and feminist Marxists long ago, but now returning with a vengeance, along with the the very question of gender-based “productivity” that Federici, for example, showed was a product of capitalist violence (as primitive accumulation) dating back to the end of the Middle Ages. Quality of life became a vexed question as time took on new weight and new shadows. Housework and childcare - the loss of time and the production of life - became once again a nexus of gendered power.</p> <p>For those who had to go to work, marked out as “essential” and recognized with applause and empty compliments but no protection, the question of their lives versus their labour-time was brought once again to the surface. In the municipalities and universities, “unproductive time” led - as it always leads - to painful discipline of the workers, the insistence that their lives have no meaning, their time is worthless, if they are not working for their employer. The euphemistic “temporary layoffs” brought the question of working lives and working time together as the absence of both. The forced layoffs in Alberta and Manitoba served only the purpose of discipline, ensuring that workers understood that their lives are valuable only so long as their time is devoted to labour.</p> <p>Capital, faced with an overabundance of lives (workers) and (unproductive) time, does what it always does: sheds its surplus labour power, making it a problem of the state, while working frantically to regain some of that lost productive time. The ghoulish calls for reopening of the economy while lives in the thousands continue to be lost daily, is nothing new, is no surprise. It is the Standard Operating Procedure of capital in crisis.</p> <p>Now that we are on the brink of reopening, as libraries want to be the first to “serve their customers”, the question of the lives of library workers and the time “lost” to closure becomes once more the target of the pragmatic, practical thinking of library leadership. The pragmatic calculus is based on once again equating lifetime with working time, but with a third term now becoming more and more insistent: the time of the user. Users clamouring for their own time to pass more quickly or more productively through access to library resources, books, games, newspapers, databases, research material. Ranganathan’s fourth law - save the time of the reader - takes on a tense and eerie complexion as we rush (time) to put library workers (lives) back in jeopardy in order to improve the time of our users, at the same time potentially contributing - in a cycle no less vicious for being obvious - to a second outbreak and the loss of more lives and the waste of more time.</p> <p>And of course, this depends on users’ evaluation of their own lives and lives of the other members of their community. Abled users who underestimate the risk are prepared to risk the lives of disabled users, immunocompromised users. Should we take our users’ clamouring at their word? Faced with such a choice, libraries often fall back on “give ‘em what they want”, but in times like these such a conception of choice and service is unethical.</p> <p>Reopening libraries means understanding psychologies of our various constituencies, their over- or underestimation of risk to themselves and to the community, the quarantine time of returned books, it means understanding the choices people are making about their lives. Libraries hate to <em>judge</em>, to <em>decide</em>, to <em>choose</em>. But judgement, decision, and choice is what is called for here. Not the usual abdication of responsibility to the law or to our parent institutions. We have to be able to challenge “give ‘em what they want” if that is the responsible and prudent move.</p> <p>By moving too fast (saving time) by being practical and pragmatic as always, by falling for the old canard that “the customer is always right”, I worry that we are going to lose more of both lives and time. At the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, there was talk of things slowing down, but slowness is antithetical to the turnover requirements of capital, and as institutions of social and cultural reproduction, libraries must also subscribe to the privileging of speed, the feeling that one is alive simply because one is moving so fast.</p> Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/05/15/lives-time-pandemic.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/05/15/lives-time-pandemic.html featured article Intersectionality and Class Politics <p>(NOTE: I have gone into the question of intersectionality and identity in more detail in chapter 2 of <em>Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship</em> on “Vectors of Oppression”).</p> <p>I don’t pay much attention to OLA’s <em>OpenShelf</em>, but when <a href="https://open-shelf.ca/2004-06-open-for-all-intersectionality/">John Pateman’s post on identity politics and intersectionality was sent to me, I felt I had to respond</a>. I am automatically suspicious of any “political” statement, especially one that claims a radical or progressive political position, that supports the dominant line of the profession and of public library management (Pateman is CEO of Thunder Bay Public Library).</p> <p>Pateman’s post fits squarely into recent debates around deplatforming and intellectual freedom which I’ve argued before has exposed a division within the profession that is in at least some senses generational. These “generations” are not merely categories of age - we’ve seen examples of generational divide between feminist waves, and there are definitely “generations of Marxism” which disagree not only on details but sometimes on the fundamental approach to politics. I’ve critiqued Pateman’s <em>OpenShelf</em> posts before, and I’ve come to the conclusion that much of our disagreement stems precisely from our generations of Marxism. While there are definitely synchronic disagreements within Marxist tendencies (Marxist-Leninists see a lot of things very differently from, say, anarcho-communists), the diachronic or generational differences can be just as striking. Previous generations of Marxists, like previous waves of feminism, can find it hard to deal with certain questions around identity, especially when intersectionality is brought into play.</p> <p>However, I came away from Pateman’s post with the distinct impression that he doesn’t understand what intersectionality <em>is</em>. At one point, he refers to it as a “form of politics”, and he seems to equate it with what he understands as “identity politics” <sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. For Pateman identity politics seems to equal intersectionality, and both these things are isolated from and independent of something else called class politics. While Pateman allows that “there is also a class dimension to intersectionality”, in fact he holds these categories as separate things, related, if at all, only externally. This, to my mind, indicates a static, formal understanding of the network of concepts, rather than a properly dialectical one. For Marx, such external opposition of concepts was the mark of vulgar or dogmatic criticism rather than true critique, and I think that, unfortunately, is what Pateman is engaged in here. True critique must look beneath the surface categories to understand how they came to be, what political issues they were summoned to confront.</p> <p>If identity politics and intersectionality are <em>not</em> the same, what is their relationship? Luckily, the <del>concept of</del> term<sup id="fnref:2"><a href="#fn:2" class="footnote">2</a></sup> intersectionality is traceable back to its origins: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 article “Demarginalizaing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics”. Crenshaw argues that any category of identity when taken in isolation serves to bury the differences that categorize Black women’s experiences. For a Marxist, the burying of differences must be recognized not only as mystification but as deeply political, and should not be ignored. Crenshaw writes that “neither Black liberationist politics nor feminist theory can ignore the intersectional experiences of those whom the movements claim as their respective constituents. In order to include Black women, both movements must distance themselves from earlier approaches in which experiences are relevant only when they are related to certain clearly identifiable causes (for example, the oppression of Blacks is significant when based on race, of women when based on gender)”. I think Pateman is falling into the same trap, seeing class oppression as only relevant when it is based on class position, rather than recognizing the intersectionality of class itself. More importantly, Crenshaw suggests that identity politics is <em>not</em> the same as intersectionality, a suggestion she makes explicit in a later paper, 1991s “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. “The embrace of identity politics,” she writes, “has been in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice. Race, gender, and other identity categories are most often treated in mainstream liberal discourse as vestiges of bias or domination - that is, as intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalize those who are different. According to this understanding, our liberatory objective should be to empty such categories of any social significance. Yet implicit in certain strands of feminist and racial liberation movements, for example, is the view that the social power in delineating difference need not be the power of domination; it can instead be the source of social empowerment and reconstruction”.</p> <p>By my reading, Pateman is attempting precisely to “empty [identity] categories of any social significance”, for example when he writes that “activist communities need to work harder to make it possible for people of different classes, genders, ethnic origins, sexual identities, etc. to be together in respectful and beneficial ways.” It is hard, for example, to understand how a Marxist can propose the idea that “people of different classes” should “be together in respectful and beneficial ways” without emptying the concept of class of all its social and political significance. What is class-struggle besides the <em>rejection</em> of such tolerance.</p> <p>But for Pateman, as for many Marxists of previous generations, class is not an identity. It is, rather, an objective economic category, a position within a relationship of objective, scientifically readable process (production). But, as Marx famously said, “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”. Class is an economic category, to be sure, but it is <em>also</em> an identity - how else can we explain ideology and class-consciousness. Workers would not need to develop class-consciousness if their class position was immediately transparent to them; workers would always identify as workers, rather than adopting the ideology that allows them to identify with the bourgeoisie. Put another way, class as economic category is available to us <em>as an identity</em>. It is hard to understand how a Marxist could make this claim about identities other than class without seeing that working-class politics does this all the time: “Call-outs, shaming, and other forms of “weaponized” communication shut down conversation and political debate, and more importantly, limit the number of social spaces where differing points of view can be heard and respected”. We would not include capitalists or management in a union meeting, precisely because we <em>already know</em> what they are going to say based on their class-identity, and respect for another’s position, in this case, is detrimental to class politics and gives up class struggle without a fight. Pateman seems to imagine the possibility of a progressive politics without struggle, an odd position for a Marxist to take.</p> <p>Besides the privileging of class as objective over identity as subjective, I suspect that Pateman is also making one of the foundational mistakes in the Marxist playbook, one Marx identifies and analyzes at the very beginning of <em>Capital</em>. Marx calls the process of mistaking social relations for things (social relations of production for commodities, for example) as <em>fetishism</em>. Georg Lukacs, in a nuanced exploration of this idea, refers to it as <em>reification</em>, making <em>things</em> out of social relations. Pateman has made the same mistake here, thinking of “identity politics” and “intersectionality” as things (“identity politics selects…”, “intersectionality is here to stay…”) rather than as social relations. It suggests that, in fact, Pateman doesn’t really understand what identity politics or intersectionality are. That identity politics, like all progressive politics, is recuperable and actively coopted by capital is no surprise: class politics is not immune to this, why should identity politics or the concept of intersectionality? What is more important than looking at the surface (reified) manifestations such as call-outs or deplatforming, is to understand the roots of identity politics in oppression and intersectionality as differentiated oppression.</p> <p>Indeed, I suspect that what is going on here is a bracketing of class oppression from other kinds of oppression (of race, gender, sexuality, disability, etc). However, this is the kind of privileging of the class experience of one particular kind of person - the white, male, industrial worker - that feminist Marxists in particular have challenged. Silvia Federici, for example, in her classic <em>Caliban and the Witch</em> makes the historical case that, while Marx focused on the experience of the male industrial worker in England, the truth of capitalist development is that both colonial exploitation (and the construction of race) and what Federici calls a genocide against women were fundamentally necessary for the development of capitalism. Any contemporary Marxism must then take the <em>intersection</em> of race, gender, and class seriously. Intersectionality and identity politics do not come out of nowhere, are not unconnected with real lived experiences and structures of oppression, but reflect real social and power relationships present within racialized and patriarchal capitalism<sup id="fnref:4"><a href="#fn:4" class="footnote">3</a></sup>.</p> <p>Unfortunately, I think Pateman’s critique of intersectionality is not only based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept, but that it is based not on a commitment to a politics of the disenfranchised, but on tone-policing. When Pateman writes that “It’s hard to see how people in deprived communities can get excited about a form of politics that regards much of what they think, say and do as a form of abuse”, it indicates not only the misundertanding of identity politics, but also that the crux of the matter is the question of tone. It is also a straw-person, identity politics is no more marked by regarding what people think, say, and do as abusive than any other form of politics. Indeed, we just have to look at the treatment of April Hathcock at <a href="https://aprilhathcock.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/alamw-what-happened-and-what-should-happen-next/">ALA Midwinter in 2019</a> and the ALA’s subsequent response to understand how important an intersectional approach is, and how tone policing often spills over into abuse in and of itself.</p> <p>Pateman’s undialectical reification of the concept of intersectionality leads to another straw-person argument: that intersectionality and class politics must be “reconciled” so they “work in tandem”. “Both theories must have equal billing going forward, or they will become exclusionary.” Much of the best work in Critical Race Theory, feminism, and contemporary Marxism already do this work of “reconciliation”, but reconciliation is in fact the wrong word<sup id="fnref:3"><a href="#fn:3" class="footnote">4</a></sup>, as it implies the smoothing out of contradictions, tensions, and differences. In fact these differences, while they may be painful, are immensely productive, and so what is needed - and indeed, what is being done - is not a <em>reconciliation</em> of differences but a properly intersectional reckoning with them. The work of W.E.B. Du Bois and Frantz Fanon, among many others, shows how race and class interlock; the work of Federici and Nancy Fraser, among many others, shows how gender and class interlock; the work of Crenshaw, among many others, shows how gender and race interlock. There is no shortage of “identity politics” work that displays precisely the kind of nuance Pateman accuses it of lacking. And this is not only true of academic work: intersectionality is present in the best radical antiracist anticapitalist egalitarian movements. Pateman’s worry about co-option is not unjustified, but his fear that poor and marginalized populations and communities will be put off by identity politics or intersectionality is unfounded.</p> <p>More worrying, though, is how Pateman’s fundamental argument falls in line with the dominant conception of intellectual freedom and neutrality in libraries. I’ve come to realize, in my reading of recognition politics, that the reason libraries absolve themselves of responsibility for what gets said in them is that they see their role as purely one of platform: they bring together differing points of view and ensure that the rules of civility and respect obtain. Pateman’s post supports this perspective and does not recognize the structural role libraries play, the enormous power imbalance at work, and the harm done by libraries in legitimating harmful perspectives. This too is a problem with generations and identity: to identify as a librarian is to uphold the core values without question; previous generations of “critical librarians” see critique as properly directed <em>outside</em> the profession. As a result, they are at a loss when the critique is directed at the profession itself.</p> <p>There is no fundamental dichotomy between “identity politics” and “class politics”, they are already related: any contemporary Marxism must (and indeed, does) take intersectionality seriously. The category of identity is not distinct from the category of class. As a result, there is no need to “bring them together” unless, for some reason, you have already split them apart, reifying them, and falling for the mystification inherent in reification. What Pateman is afraid of is not, I think, identity politics and intersectionality properly understood, but the same tired “lack of civility” backed by an unconscious dimissal of race or gender, sexuality or disability as structures of real oppression and harm that marks liberal centrist politics in the current conjuncture. As I have <a href="https://redlibrarian.github.io/introduction/2016/05/10/public-libraries-history-state.html">mentioned before with respect to “community-led libraries”</a>, Pateman’s own view of the politics of libraries is easily recuperable to a politics of austerity and neoliberal dismantling. I suspect this is because he continues to believe in the democratic discourse of librarianship, and sees the proper target of critique outside the profession. However, it is becoming more and more clear that the work being done in the current generation of critical librarianship - critiquing the profession itself - is a turn whose time has come not a moment too soon.</p> <p><em>References.</em></p> <p>Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” <em>University of Chicago Legal Forum</em> 1. <a href="https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/">https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8/</a></p> <p>Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. <em>Stanford Law Review</em> 46(6): 1241-1299. doi:10.2307/1229039</p> <p>Fanon, Frantz. 2007. <em>The Wretched of the Earth</em>. New York: Grove Press.</p> <p>Fanon, Frantz. 2008. <em>Black Skin, White Masks</em>. New York: Grove Press.</p> <p>Federici, Silvia. 2004. <em>Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation</em>. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.</p> <p>Honneth, Axel and Nancy Fraser. 2004. <em>Redistribution or Recognition: A Political-Philosophical Exchange</em>. New York: Verso.</p> <p><em>Notes.</em></p> <div class="footnotes"> <ol> <li id="fn:1"> <p>I’m tempted to think of identity politics as a “boundary object”, i.e. in this case a concept which is sufficiently flexible to mean particular, sometimes incompatible things, in different contexts, but which is well-enough defined at a larger scale to be recognizable. <a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:2"> <p>Thanks to David James Hudson for pointing out that while Crenshaw may have coined the term, the concept of intersectionality had been around in Black feminist circles like the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combahee_River_Collective">Combahee River Collective</a> in the 1970s. <a href="#fnref:2" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:4"> <p>Just as wrong in this context as it is increasingly exposed as inadequate to settler-Indigenous relations in Canada. <a href="#fnref:4" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p> </li> <li id="fn:3"> <p>Indeed, Marxism already has a concept that comes close to intersectionality: <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/overdetermination.htm">overdetermination</a> <a href="#fnref:3" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p> </li> </ol> </div> Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/04/23/intersectionality-and-class-politics.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/04/23/intersectionality-and-class-politics.html featured article Consultation and the Politics of Recognition <p>As my PhD research on Intellectual Freedom in Canadian libraries evolves, it is moving away from ethical and political-economic questions towards what should more properly be described as political theory. One thing I am trying to do is to situate the IF transphobia incidents at VPL and TPL within larger social and political issues in Canada, especially as they relate to the question of minority rights. Minority rights, in the classical-liberal, absolutist IF perspective, are that free speech/free expression protects, against the tyranny of the majority. This is straight out of John Stuart Mill. But as I have written before, Mill’s theory, like Locke’s, was developed in a relatively homogeneous society of white, property-owning men (with white women and all people of colour by definition excluded from political and philosophical consideration).</p> <p>Over time, imperialism/colonialism and globalization changed the face of the societies in which these theories arose. In imperial centres like the UK, immigration from the colonies exposed the racism at home early on: think of Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, and more recently - drunk on Brexit - the British government’s attempts to deport members of the “Windrush generation” who had come from the colonies to the UK between 1948 and 1970. In settler-colonial states like Canada, similar processes have taken place with respect to demands for Indigenous sovereignty. What were formally seen - at least in their own self-image - as relatively homogeneous states (and formal policies of assimilation were meant to maintain some sense of homogeneity) have now had to face up to the fact that they are not just multicultural but multiethnic and (more importantly, in Canada’s case), <em>multinational</em> polities in their own right. Additionally, globalization has (or had - things are changing rapidly) bound sovereign nation-states into international or global organizations like NAFTA, the EU, the World Bank, or the United Nations. The important role played by the WHO in the current pandemic and its defunding by Donald Trump (while the US was already millions of dollars behind in its WHO funding commitments) is an indication of the current tensions between national sovereignty and international order.</p> <p>All this to say that the classical liberal philosophy of Locke and Mill has not been adequate to imperial or settler-colonial states for a long time, and yet it is most often with reference to Mill (or others of the same ilk, like Jefferson and Madison) that IF absolutists deal with questions of minority rights. One has only to glance into any edition of the ALA’s <em>Intellectual Freedom Handbook</em> to see this in action.</p> <p>To deal with the changing complexion both domestically and internationally of the question of minority rights, cultural diversity, and multinational politics, various political theorists and philosophers in the 1990s developed the theory of a politics of recognition. Axel Honneth, James Tully, Nancy Fraser, and perhaps most influentially, Charles Taylor, all addressed the politics of recognition from various minority rights angles. The theory began as a way to understand and recuperate the project of multiculturalism, but it rapidly gained prominence not only in feminist theory (for example in Fraser’s work, though she is also critical of the concept), but in queer and trans rights work as well. Basically, the politics of recognition draws on Hegel (and sometimes on Frantz Fanon) to argue that since self-consciousness (and some would say individuality itself) comes about through mutual recognition with an Other <em>who is an equal</em>, misrecognition or nonrecognition can have a harmful effect on people’s self-image, leading to various psychological and social problems. These problems, the theory goes, could be mitigated by a properly egalitarian politics of recognition. Accordingly, various “recognitions” took place within settler-colonial states, recognition of land rights and cultural practices (towards Indigenous people), recognition of a distinct society (for Quebec), recognition of gender equality (for women) and, in 2016 with Bill C-16, recognition of gender and sexual identity as protected grounds in the Canadian Human Rights Act.</p> <p>I would argue that the values statements of public libraries attempt to participate in this politics of recogition, through values of community engagement, but also through much of the discourse around safe spaces, respect for all identities, and allyship. What critics of libraries - especially in the transphobia, room-rental debates - point out is that these values and commitments are discarded when they challenge Intellectual Freedom - IF becomes the only value that matters. Recognition, then, only goes so far, remains limited to only particular spheres (cultural or identity spheres) rather than actually making libraries change their policies.</p> <p>In many ways, this problem lies at the heart of one of the most convincing critiques of the politics of recognition, Glen Sean Coulthard’s <em>Red Skin White Masks</em> (2014). Coulthard argues that because the politics of recognition is predicated on <em>equality</em>, it allows recognition to be limited to spheres of cultural practice (where we can all be considered equal) but not to fundamentally <em>unequal</em> relationships (colonizer/colonized, for example, or labour/capital) (Coulthard draws on Fraser’s distinction between “affirmative” rather than “transformative” redistribution, that is, a surface adjustment of minority/majority relationships, rather than a fundamental transformation). The liberal regime of (formally) equal rights and an exploitative political economy remains untouched. As a result, recognition becomes “cultural recognition” only, and the project of multiculturalism is saved without having to deal with the underlying capitalist social and economic system.</p> <p>The height of hypocrisy when it comes to recognition is “consultation”. As we have seen with respect to UNDRIP, and most recently with pipeline approvals, Indigenous consultation has become a key part of the federal government’s process. But consultation merely involves <em>recognition</em> of Indigenous views, it does not go so far is to listen to them, take them seriously, or act on them. Coulthard’s argument is that the presumption of equality in a politics of recognition is completely fictitious in a society based on colonial oppression and exploitation: the Hegelian theory of recogntion does not hold in a situation of such vastly unequal power relationships. The power of the Canadian state means that it can deign to offer “recognition” without having to actually change.</p> <p>We saw the same thing play out at the scandalous Toronto Public Library board meeting in late 2019, when many trans people stood up to tell their stories to the board. They were, in the sense we have been discussing, <em>recognized</em> by the board, and much of the discourse coming from board members has been around <em>recognition</em> of the rights, needs, and harms facing trans communities. But the aftermath of the board meeting - and the documents received under FOIA show that this outcome was determined in advance - have shown that, as with settler-Indigenous relationships, the politics of recognition only went as far as the board wanted and no further, that is, only as far as possible to demonstrate recognition/consultation, without actually having to change library policy.</p> <p>The politics of recognition is not the only way to understand these dynamics, but it does offer a particularly clear-cut way to understand the VPL and TPL reactions to criticism of their IF position in the last couple of years.</p> <p>More to come…</p> Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/04/19/consultation-and-politics-of-recognition.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/04/19/consultation-and-politics-of-recognition.html featured article Theory and Commitment <p>Yesterday, I was reading Baylis, Smith, and Owens’ <em>The Globalization of World Politics</em>, an introductory textbook in International Relations. One of the first things the authors do (in the “Introduction” no less) is to layout the various theoretical approaches to IR, three “mainstream” approaches (Realism, Liberalism, Social Constructivism) and four that I would call “critical” (Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonialism). International Relations, then, takes not just for granted, but as its starting point, a set of worked out theoretical approaches that have currency within the field. While LIS is marked - especially lately - by a multiplicity of theoretical approaches, the field lacks the kind of self-awareness that would be able to put together an introductory chapter similar to this one.</p> <p>I think this lack of self-awareness comes from a few places, which I’ll get to in a moment, but first I want to talk about what I see as two main consequences of this lack of theoretical self-awareness. On the one hand, it means that the underlying liberalism that dominates LIS is still able to present itself as a common-sense empiricism. The liberalism of LIS claims to have a corner on “the facts”, and most often assumes its own foundational epistemology (= provable truth claims) as already given. This is why, on the one hand, it is so difficult to argue against defenders of IF absolutism who implicitly rely on liberalism; they don’t admit that their liberalism is one ideology out of many, rather, they claim for it the status of unmediated knowledge. This is also why panels on Intellectual Freedom and mainstream articles (I’m thinking now of recent articles by Wiegand and Buschman) can completely ignore the entire body of critical librarianship that has appeared, say, in the last five years. Their unaware liberalism precludes them from taking seriously anything “ideological” (i.e. political), in other words anything that takes the relationship of truth and power seriously and which therefore involves us in real political commitments. Of course, there are also very real power relations involved here too: the liberal mainstream has a lock on dominant positions in the profession, have the loudest voices, have the most platforms, etc, and they aim to keep it that way.</p> <p>The other consequence of this lack of self-awareness, as I see it, is the eclectic treatment of theoretical approaches as a grab-bag or toolkit, from which a researchers may take whatever they need to fit their current research program. So, while one might take a poststructuralist approach relying on Foucault when looking at surveillance in libraries, one might take a Marxist approach when looking at labour, ignoring the fact that poststructuralist commitments tend to be very different from Marxist ones (though the relationship of Foucault to Marxism is a complicated one). The IR textbook makes it very clear that theoretical approaches are not simply <em>methodological</em> requirements, but are directly and inextricably related to the way one understands the world (i.e. there is no “objective” research position). Someone who understands the world through a Marxist lens cannot simply turn around and adopt a liberal perspective simply because a given methodology demands it. This is the problem, as I see it, with the recuperation of Gramsci to a particularly liberal perspective on intellectual freedom: it erases his radically Marxist worldview, keeping only those aspects of his thought palatable to liberalism.</p> <p>Now, this doesn’t mean that certain combinations of theoretical orientation aren’t possible: my own Marxism is flavoured by certain poststructuralist ways of thinking about knowledge and power, for example, and Marxism informs (sometimes antagonistically) many of the theoretical commitments of feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism (I would add Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory to the list of perspectives currently dominant within critical librarianship). But we need to be clear on how those tendencies interrelate and how they change the political commitments they impose on us. For example, the poststructuralist flavoured Marxism I adopt means I care more about a kind of anarchic democracy-from-below than about the dictatorship of the proletariat, or at least that my understanding of that dictatorship is swayed by poststructuralism’s m’s suspicion of authority…</p> <p>There are two main reasons, I think, why mainstream LIS lacks the self-awareness of its own liberalism, its own theoretical and political commitments, and why the theoretical richness of, say, critical librarianship is so threatening. On the one hand, there is the longstanding and everpresent ambiguity between LIS as an academic discipline and LIS as training for librarians. I suspect there has always been a reluctance within LIS to really hash out these theoretical and politicl differences because a) we’re too polite and conflict-averse and b) because there are many within the library schools who feel this kind of theoretical debate is an irrelevant distraction from the job of training (or being trained as) librarians. This is obviously related to the tension between librarianship as (some kind of) profession and librarianship as a job, and runs immediately up against the practicality and pragmatism of the profession itself. These antagonisms, too, have a long history, marked by the gender divisions of 19th century librarianship between a philosophical, gentlemanly, idealized, scholarly profession for men, and the practical, hand’s-on work reserved for what Dee Garrison has called “the tender technicians”.</p> <p>On the other hand, after the wholesale adoption of naturalistic positivism in the 20s and 30s, many social sciences drew back from an extreme positivism in the 1960s, but LIS has not. We are still very much bound by positivist thinking (for example, in evidence-based LIS and the “objective” value of systematic reviews), and it is this positivism that raises an unacknowledged liberalism to the status of empirical knowledge and reduces all other theories to the status of non-rigorous, non-scientific ideology. Such ideologies might be suitable for particular research projects which require more theoretical insight than an unconscious, hegemonic liberalism can provide, but those approaches should be seen as aberrations rather than as entailing particular commitments which cannot simply be cast aside when another methodology dictates.</p> <p>When I was at the CARL Research Institute a couple of years ago, a health sciences librarian with a background in the natural sciences asked why any discussion of theory was relevant to a course on research. She didn’t need or use any theory, she claimed, she simply worked from “the facts”. My favourite counter-example to this kind of claim from natural scientists are tools such as the microscope. Does the microscope present an unmediated view of a slide to the eye? What are the theoretical concepts (optics, lens theory, etc) that go into the design and construction of the microscope, and how are those theories erased in order to allow the use of the microscope appear unmediated? What about an electron microscope, is that still unmediated sense-perception? And so on.</p> <p>Baylis, Smith, and Owens warn the student that they</p> <blockquote> <p>do not think that theory is an option. It is not as if you can say you do not want to bother with a theory; all you want to do is look at the ‘facts’. We believe that this is impossible, since the only way you can decide which of the millions of possible facts is by adhering to some simplifying device that tells you which ones matter the most. Theory is such a simplifying device. Note also that you may well not be aware of your theory. It may just be the view of or even the ideology about the world that you inherited from family, social class, peer groups, or the media. It may just seem common sense to you and not at all complicated like a theory. But we fervently believe that in such a case your theoretical assumptions are implicit rather than explicit. We prefer to try to be as explicit as possible when it comes to thinking about world politics.</p> </blockquote> <p>This explicitness is one of the things missing from library schools and mainstream LIS scholarship. I’m thinking back to my own “Information in Society” class, when the professor claimed that untrue knowledge was not knowledge and therefore had no causal effects, to which I pointed out that the Americans had just invaded Iraq based on untrue knowledge. But I’m also thinking of the ways in which writers from a critical perspective <em>have</em> to engage with mainstream LIS scholarship (Wiegand, Buschman are two clear examples), but the reverse is not true: mainstream LIS, with its unacknowledged, common-sense, hegemonic liberalism, can afford to ignore critical approaches because they are <em>obviously</em> and <em>objectively</em> true while the rest of us toil away on our ineffective and pointless ideological fantasies. The subaltern position of critical librarianship is connected to a whole host of historical political problems and dynamics within the field, but it is interesting to see these problems and dynamics play out in real time when yet another paper on libraries and society is published by a mainstream LIS scholar that cites no work done within critical librarianship.</p> Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/04/04/theory-and-commitment.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/04/04/theory-and-commitment.html featured article Lives, Time, and Minority Views <p>Two of the main tenets of liberal intellectual freedom are that IF-protections are in place so that minority views are able to be expressed, and that the only way to challenge incorrect views is to subject them to debate and argument in order for the truth to emerge. These two views are clearly interrelated: in order for an incorrect view to be challenged and refuted, it has to be publicly expressible.. In Mill’s <em>On Liberty</em> (1859), which provides the blueprint for all this, he argues that the reason we need to protect the ability of minority views is because we can never be 100% sure of the truth - for Mill, this isn’t a question of protecting whatever theory someone has come up with, but that their perspective may end up being true, and repressing the truth is by definition wrong. Mill’s <em>System of Logic</em> (1843) was extremely influential on much of the scientific thinking that ended up dominating the social sciences in the 20th century, and Mill is here thinking purely of empirical, scientific truth. However, There is another kind of truth which we might call political truth - which I think Gadamer gets at in his <em>Truth and Method</em> - which is very different from empirical truth. The truth status of, say, Nazism is beside the point, indeed it is for many people beyond the pale even to look into its truth status; we reject Nazism not because it is <em>false</em> but because it is <em>heinous</em>.</p> <p>In <em>Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship</em> I argued that liberalism leads to two assumptions which, especially in times of crisis, are not tenable: the first is that because the right kind of people may not be dying, no-one is dying (this is the issue of <em>lives</em>) and the second is that there is no limit on the time we should take (deliberation, argument) to arrive at the truth. Especially in times of crisis, however, the adherence to this view ends up costing more lives and wasting more time. While this was a question of the lives of trans people and the time limit imposed by climate change, liberal defenders of IF-absolutism did not need to think very much about this problem. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed all that. Now, in a very real sense, the people who are dying are not only the people bourgeois society thinks it is OK to sacrifice; the virus draws no such distinctions. And as we know from experts in epidemiology and emergency response, the <em>speed</em> with which a society reacts to an epidemic is critical; time, quite literally, is of the essence.</p> <p>Enter Richard Epstein, a legal scholar who objected to an epidemiological model used in a New York Times Study because he had a <em>sense</em> it was wrong. This sense, it will surprise no-one to learn, is in fact Epstein’s libertarian ideology. The New Yorker <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-contrarian-coronavirus-theory-that-informed-the-trump-administration">challenged Epstein</a> on his views, because his own epidemiological model (remember, he is a legal scholar and law professor) conformed with the ideological preferences of the White House and has gained some currency there. The New Yorker had two actual epidemiologists fact-check Epstein’s claim - doctors whose time could have been better spent doing almost anything else.</p> <p>What is important for the discussion of intellectual freedom is that in the New Yorker interview, Epstein clearly makes the “lives and time” case, both in terms of “minority views” and in terms of “time to argue”:</p> <blockquote> <p>Q: Are the stakes too high to publish articles with basic errors? A: This is not a mistake. It’s an open challenge. I’ve spent my entire life as a lawyer taking on established wisdom. My view about it is what you’re asking me to do is, when I think everybody is wrong, to remain silent, and the stakes are too high.</p> </blockquote> <blockquote> <p>after you start declaring emergencies you have time for reflection and adaptation and modification, which you don’t have in a fire case. So the political point is one which essentially says, when you see governors of three major states putting out statements that their experts have said this, that, and the other thing is a result, and you don’t see the studies and you can’t question the assumption, I regard that as a serious breakdown in the political process.</p> </blockquote> <p>Now, Epstein doesn’t necessarily believe that the <em>wrong</em> people are going to be dying while his minority views get aired, but he does think that - according to his minority view - fewer people are going to die in any event, and those people dying is no reason not to go through the rules of “political process” by which claims are deliberated in due time, rebuttals formulated, and challenges addressed. Epstein holds to Mill’s view that what we are all looking for here is the <em>truth</em>. However, the truth is <em>not</em> at issue, <em>saving lives</em> is at issue. Dr Michael J. Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization, said much the same thing in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqRHH6e-y6I">video clip</a> that recently went viral: “Speed trumps perfection… If you need to be right before you move, you will never win.”</p> <p>This appears to put the abstract and deliberative foundations of liberal intellectual freedom in jeopardy. James Turk asks, “Why would any marginalized minority trust representatives of the majority to determine whose expression is to be allowed and whose is to be censored?” In this case, I would argue that marginalized minorities like disabled people and immunocompromised people would need - perhaps “trust” is too strong a word - would need to expect the majority (epidemiologists and emergency response doctors) to determine that spurious theories which are going to get more people killed should be suppressed. Reading through Epstein’s article, and this is a point the New Yorker journalist makes, it is clear even to those of us who know very little about medicine that Epstein is talking complete nonsense, hiding behind a defense of minority views and the “political process” of argument and debate. Intellectual freedom <em>cannot</em> be absolute, unless we are prepared to accept an unconscionable death rate. What this points out, of course, is that there is <em>no</em> position which does not <em>determine</em> suppression, which liberal IF consistently maintains: there is suppression of opinion and there is real harm up to and including death.</p> <p>The liberal idealism of Epstein and Turk cannot make the connection between opinion and real harm. In many ways this is because liberal philosophy inherited the mind-body dualism of the “bourgeois ideologue” Descartes. This mind-body dualism, in which neither can affect the other, lies perhaps right at the heart of the lives and time problem: if questions of the mind, of intellectual freedom and free speech, can <em>never</em> have a material effect on the world, if climate change does not worsen and people do not die due to the expression of some “minority views”, then there is nothing to worry about. One only hopes that IF-absolutists see the error of their ways before many more people have to die.</p> <p>Now, there are very real political concerns around the coronavirus response. On the right, these have to do with government spending and the social Darwinism that argues that the weakest deserve to die. On the left, these concerns have to do with social isolation and state-authoritarianism simply furthering the alienation and totalitarianism of capitalism. I agree completely with the left-wing concerns expressed here. However, and here is where <a href="http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/2020/03/thoughts-on-pandemic-and-biopolitics.html">recent criticism of Giorgio Agamben’s “COVID trutherism”</a> comes into play, the issue is saving lives. Process and procedure that may be justifiable in “normal” times are unconscionable in times of crisis. Will social-distancing and isolation exacerbate the problem of alienation and impede the left’s ability to organize? Almost certainly. Will this set left-organization back? Again, almost certainly. But we cannot sacrifice potentially thousands or millions of people on that basis. In Canada, the government recently implemented an employee support fund in response to the crisis, but the bureaucratic channels are slow and inefficient (process!). Critics of this method have argued that rather than going through proper channels and following the usual procedure, the government should simply mail cheques to every Canadian, and at income tax time next year, tax the money back from anyone who didn’t need it. An analogy, of this, I think, is the correct political response to the crisis: let the government and experts do what they need to do to save lives now; the left will “tax it back” in the future when the current crisis has passed.</p> <p>Of course, we will continue to have to use our political judgement to determine how much is too much. This, for example, out of Hungary, looks less like coronavirus response than the implementation of dictatorship:</p> <blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-partner="tweetdeck"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Hungarian Parliament passes bill that gives PM Orbán unlimited power &amp; proclaims:<br /><br />- State of emergency w/o time limit<br />- Rule by decree<br />- Parliament suspended<br />- No elections<br />- Spreading fake news + rumors: up to 5 yrs in prison<br />- Leaving quarantine: up to 8 yrs in prison<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/COVID19?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#COVID19</a> <a href="https://t.co/5ScZCbF4yv">pic.twitter.com/5ScZCbF4yv</a></p>&mdash; Balazs Csekö (@balazscseko) <a href="https://twitter.com/balazscseko/status/1244612142831198209?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 30, 2020</a></blockquote> Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/30/lives-time-minority-views.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/30/lives-time-minority-views.html featured article Knowledge and Decision <blockquote> <p>The writers of the Enlightenment looked on human nature through the prism of particular social needs and relations. But they did not suspect that history had put some prism before their eyes. – Plekhanov</p> </blockquote> <p>We live, whether we like it or not, in postmodern times. For many people, the postmodern distrust of “grand narratives”, the postmodern understanding that facts and knowledge are never pure, but always intertwined with material power, is a mistake attributable to the corrupting influence of “French theorists” and the anti-semitic conspiracy theory of “cultural Marxism”. Those same people want to return to an unmediated conception of facts (biological facts, economic facts) and the confidence inspired by experts who understand complex facts that we cannot, and who are able to communicate those facts free of the taint of ideology. But the genie cannot be put back in the bottle: the understanding of the relationships between knowledge and power cannot be forgotten. Right-wing populism is one expression of this understanding, performed in the service of power inequality itself, but it is not the only one. In postmodern times suspicion of facts, knowledge, and expertise is a problem to be faced, not wished away.</p> <p>Those who would wish it away do so from the perspective of pure knowledge, of better arguments: it is a matter of thinking differently, of recognizing the expertise of experts. Zeynep Tufekci argued yesterday that the reason nations have been laggard in dealing with coronavirus is an inability to understand complex systems, as if better understanding were the way to overcome generations of knowledge and facts in the service of power. Similarly, narratives of choosing to “be kind” cannot overcome generations of increased alienation and isolation, narratives of “the spread of enlightenment” cannot overcome the material social relations that require ignorance, anomie, and distrust. To take the opposite view is pure idealism, and idealism is too easily recuperated by the power of capital and the state. Jameson and Harvey showed us how postmodernism is the cultural manifestation of particular (neoliberal) changes in the organization of capitalism. We are currently going through another such transformation, though what the outcome will look like is still unclear. We have exited neoliberalism and, likewise, the cultural expression of what comes next will differ from postmodernism. Until then, we are still living in postmodern times.</p> <p>For many liberal thinkers, the relationship between knowledge and power takes the form of the vexed question, “who decides?” In <a href="https://cfe.ryerson.ca/blog/2019/10/social-justice-requires-intellectual-freedom-why-toronto-public-library-should-refuse">James Turk’s blog post about TPL</a>, he wrote that “if we authorize censorship by the state and public bodies in the name of equality – to protect marginalized minorities – we have a problem involving who decides what expression to suppress.” And yet, as Dax D’Orazio wrote in a recent CFE <a href="https://cfe.ryerson.ca/blog/2020/03/freedom-expression-misinformation-and-anti-vaxxers-right-thing-do-not-obvious">blog post about anti-vaxx activism</a> in the context of free expression, it is <em>precisely</em> this protection of minority views that the liberal conception of intellectual freedom was meant to serve: “Freedom of expression is supposed to be a counter-majoritarian check on power that affords objectionable content constitutional protection”. In the liberal tradition, the only answer to the question of “who decides?” is “the individual” (the smallest possible minority), and any other answer is by definition an infringement of individual rights.</p> <p>In addition to being individualist, liberal intellectual freedom absolutism is idealist, in that tends to ignore the question of real harm because it recognizes only ideas and opinions, speech and expression, as having real effect in the world. There is a long history behind this which I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that it takes a lot to overcome the idealist inertia of liberal thought to get it to recognize real harm. It is significant, I think, that trans rights activism and discourse was not enough to elicit a recognition of harm from IF absolutists, but anti-vaxx activism is. To my mind this plays precisely into the question of expertise, opinions, and “facts”: doctors and public health officials are experts worth listening to, but trans people are not (because their knowledge is somehow “subjective” while medical science is “objective”). Experts grounded in hard facts (like the success rates of vaccinations) are more reliable than experts grounded in subjective experience (note too, how transphobia thrives on an insistence of the “hard facts” of biological essentialism). Power is implicated in all of these contradictions, of course, but the refusal to recognize real harm done to trans people but take seriously real harm done through lack of vaccination (which hurts everyone) is, fundamentally, rooted in dehumanizing transphobia itself.</p> <p>Liberal idealism leads D’Orazio to see anti-vaxx activism as a problem of knowledge, of ignorance of the “facts” of science. It is a question of beliefs and belief systems: “the decision-making process of parents skeptical or hesitant about vaccination is likely affected by a series of cognitive biases that are strategically exploited by anti-vaccination activists in their very carefully crafted messaging”. Decision-making is thereby impaired by manipulation (power), and so the real answer to the question “who [legitimately] decides?” is reason, sovereign even over the individual, amenable to logical argument and the presentation of facts. Liberal idealism attempts to put the genie of power back in the bottle by claiming transcendental absolute priority of reason over the aberrant abuses of power. They refuse to understand how the “facts” themselves have been used to manipulate people into harms way for generations - think of the “fact” of <em>terra nullius</em>, the <em>fact</em> of racial inferiority, the <em>fact</em> of gender roles. It is no wonder that in a society in which all these power imbalances exist, and in which individual decision-making is prioritized, that people should reject the gesture of experts towards the objectivity of facts. Those who live by the sword…</p> <p>And yet, and yet… Plekhanov uses the image of a prism not as a metaphor for ignorance which can easily be cleared away by facts and objective science. Rather, it is a metaphor for ideology (in the Marxist sense) and for the social and historical construction of reason and understanding itself. Reason is not transcendental or ahistorical, but has a history, and is constrained and determined by our social relations and our relations to the natural world, as well as to history which has always-already-happened and cannot be otherwise. In the end D’Orazio’s idealism prevents him from seeing the problem of anti-vaxx activism clearly and so prevents him from coming up with an adequate solution. Changing people’s minds through better arguments and a presentation of the facts doesn’t work, not because people are distrustful of experts (though they may be, and with good reason), not because people are unable to comprehend the facts, but because ideology produced by social, material, power relations are strong; indeed, the social construction of knowledge and understanding is so strong as to be unavoidable. Anti-vaxxers, like all minority opinions, are responding to real contradictions in the social relations of a given society. The response is not to restrict ourselves to the realm of ideas, opinions, and arguments, as IF absolutism insists; the solution is, rather, to <em>change</em> the underlying social and material relationships in order to resolve the contradictions that give rise to anti-social ideas to begin with.</p> <p>We have all experienced the casualness or callousness of overworked doctors, overwhelmed by the assembly-line flow of patients because of the fee-for-service model. The track record of the medical profession with respect to women’s health, for example, is abysmal. The distrust of medical experts is not unfounded in a society of absolute commodification, including the commodification of medicine (yes, even in Canada). The power of the medical profession, the inability of doctors to particularly <em>care</em> (due to the alienation of late capitalism itself) means that parents/patients feel <em>powerless</em> in the face of medical discipline, medical orders, medical professionalism. This powerlessness cannot be overcome by means of knowledge and explanation, but by dismantling structures of power inequality, and hopefully someday the institution of real conditions of human flourishing for all. Perhaps in such a situation expertise might become something respectable as opposed to what it is now, the “objective” prism of a particular regime of power. In this case, then, to be transphobic or an ally, to be for or against vaccination, has less to do with knowledge, facts, and understanding - reason - and more to do with political commitments, choice, and value, which may appear irrational but which, if we dig deeper, are understandable manifestations of deeper, more material irrationalities.</p> <p>ADDENDUM: On Informed Consent.</p> <p>Liberalism’s individualism forces it to see society as something unrrelated to individuals, something that confronts individuals antagonistically, that is external to individuals and makes claims on them from outside. This is clearly seen in J.S. Mill’s <em>On Liberty</em>, the blueprint of liberal intellectual freedom positions, in which he asks, “What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself? Where does the authority of society begin? How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?” This conception of the individual and society as mutually exclusive, autonomous, distinct arises from the same process that leads to mutually exclusive knowledge and power. This process also gives rise to the distinction between <a href="https://redlibrarian.github.io/article/2019/06/20/predicate-and-dialectical-logic.html">predicate and dialectical logic</a>, which I have written about before in an <a href="https://redlibrarian.github.io/article/2019/10/15/dialectics-and-social-responsibility.html">intellectual freedom context</a>.</p> <p>Predicate logic requires that things be considered isolated and distinct, and any relationship they might be brought into is an external relationship: individual vs. society, knowledge vs. power. Predicate logic is unable to comprehend or explain the internal relationships between things. As a result, for Mill, society is <em>brought into a relationship</em> with the individual from outside in order to solve certain problems of individualism. Similarly, I see “informed consent” as a way to bring in a certain amount of agency and power (over one’s own health, over one’s own body) as an attempt to deal with certain problems of medical power (i.e. lack of information and lack of meaningful consent). Informed consent is vitally important, but it has to be understood as a limited response to the lack of real power in the doctor/patient relationship. “Informed consent” would not need to be its own thing if lack of it was not already part of the medical relationship.</p> Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/26/knowledge-and-decision.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/26/knowledge-and-decision.html featured article A Change in Tactics <p>In normal times, under normal circumstances, I prefer to focus on the long-term strategy of full communist democracy, constituent power, the utopian possibilities of a fundamental change in subjectivity, etc. In many ways, this is in order to keep these utopian possibilities in view, to make sure they are not lost or forgotten amid the day-to-day economic and social justice struggles so many of us are engaged with. This fits with the narrative of the German Social Democratic Party and the Russian Social Democratic Worker Party at the turn of the 20th century - the endgoal of communism could not be forgotten or ignored in the various political and economic clashes of the period. In other ways, however, this perspective has been “bending the stick”, attempting to counter the weight and influence of pedestrian bourgeois understanding of economics, politics, culture, and society by focusing precisely on the most seemingly unrealistic and utopian aspects of a future society worth building.</p> <p>But one of the main things we can learn from Lenin is to change our tactics as the concrete situation changes. It remains true that the state is the “committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie as a whole”, it remains true that wage labour and private property must be abolished for the real social and cultural revolution to take place. What we are witnessing today is the effect of 40 years of post-welfare-state austerity, neoliberalism, privatization, consumerism, automation, alienation and isolation. The coronavirus pandemic is showing just how inadequate those projects were in the face of disaster. What we need, in order to prevent the collapse of society, is not utopian programmes or long-term narratives, but concrete socialist measures to rapidly reinstate the social safety net that was put in place during the <em>last</em> fully global crisis, the Second World War.</p> <p>As always with capitalist crisis, the effects are not evenly distributed across the globe or through society: we are waiting for the disease to fully penetrate the Global South, where countries have long been used as resource-extraction playgrounds and landfills for the capitalist centres. Within the capitalist centres, the division between those of us able to work from home and those with no job protection, no rent protection, no benefits (ar at least no benefits not tied to employment and productivity) are exposing the division between the aristocracy of labour and the real proletariat. In the midst of all this, corporations (always on the lookout for a good thing) are clamouring for bailouts while the homeless are just looking for somewhere to stay. Racism, ableism (especially in the form of falsely-promoted cures, pharma-profiteering, and lack of care towards the immuno-compromised), and the gendered quality of the division between the WFH aristocracy of labour and, say, nurses, are all symptoms of the larger neoliberal dismantling of anything resembling a social safety net and the inability of capitalism to respond adequately to a crisis of this magnitude.</p> <p>Small businesses are at risk, though the solution for small businesses is also socialism. The small government favoured by the petty bourgeoisie, the low taxes, and lax regulations, are exposing small businesses to the ravages of the crisis. Small businesses should be on board with any socialist measures.</p> <p>What socialist measures? No bailouts, only nationalization: to create jobs, to keep essential services afloat, to spend our way through the crisis; rent control and a ban on evictions; nationalization of daycare and making daycare free, so that while people are keeping their children at home, they aren’t financially responsible for the daycare’s survival. Universal basic income has been floated for years - under normal circumstances I tend to be against it, as it a) leads to further transactionalization of government services (i.e. Foucault’s governmentality) and b) would be used by employers as an excuse to lower wages. But in the current crisis UBI, along with job protection, is a vitally important measure. There are many other measures that will need to be adopted, but this is a flavour of the kind of thing that will have to happen.</p> <p>But who will put these measures to government? Our nominally left-of-centre party lacks imagination and has marginalized its most left-wing members; the NDP’s former leader Tom Mulcair eulogized Margaret Thatcher while he was in office, giving an indication of what kind of anti-worker sentiment is acceptable to Canada’s third party. I have long been one who thought there was no hope for parliament and the government, but in times like these we need a party which will push for socialist responses to the crisis. Lacking such a party, direct action, direct pressure will be the watchword. We don’t have to agree with Giorgio Agamben that coronavirus is an invention for the purposes of finally implementing the prison camp towards which modern sovereignty always tends, to recognize that self-isolation and social distancing is going to make it very hard to materially manifest our displeasure. Withdrawal of labour is almost impossible in times like these without job protection, etc (which is why, of course, the German and Russian Social Democrats focused on political freedoms as the “light and air” of the socialist movement). I know here are organizers and agitators currently working on all these problems.</p> <p>Two sets of measures which, while not necessarily socialist, need to be part of the current response concern climate change and Indigenous sovereignty. Any bailout intended for the oil and gas industry should be immediately repurposed to expand nationalized renewable energy infrastructure. Indigenous sovereignty needs to be engaged with in good faith starting now. Besides the justice of it, capitalism’s complete destruction of any kind of relationship to the natural world (what Marx called the “metabolism” of nature) - fossil fuel extraction, industrialized farming, etc - means that it will require some kind of example if we are to get back to any such metabolic, reciprocal relationship. Indigenous sovereignty has to be a core element in that return.</p> <p>Communism will always be there, will always be the horizon of true social change and a fundamental reorientation away from institutionalized economic injustice. But as the social and economic problems mount under the current crisis, it is important to recognize the value and significance of concrete socialist proposals. The response by the bourgeoisie and its governments following the Depression and the Second World War was the post-war compromise and the welfare state: the current crisis indicates that, if we want to have a society <em>able</em> to fight for a communist future, we need to have socialism now. Rosa Luxemburg’s stark choice - socialism or barbarism - was only ever hidden from view by the enormous capitalist culture and mystification machine. It was <em>always</em> there for women, for people of colour, for marginalized populations in the centres and on the periphery, for Indigenous peoples. In this crisis - in any crisis - it returns for the rest of us once more in full force.</p> Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/23/a-change-in-tactics.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/23/a-change-in-tactics.html featured article Contracts, Social and Otherwise <p>Periodically, the accumulation of capital reaches a point where such a vast amount has already been accumulated that every addition of surplus value or profit makes only a minuscule difference to the total. Such economic limits combine with social and political ones to produce crises, like the Depression or the Second World War, which are useful to capitalism <em>in part precisely because they wipe out a certain amount of capital value</em>, allowing capital accumulation to restart at a higher level of technological, social, and political organization. After the Second World War, capital and labour came to a kind of of unspoken compromise, whereby capital would give up a certain amount of the profit it saw as its rightful due in exchange for social peace on the labour front and the creation of society able, for the most part, to afford the consumer goods being produced by industry (the car here is the classic example). This post-war consensus saw capital paying workers more, allowing for more consumption, but also for higher taxes; higher taxes, of course, allowed for the creation of the safety-net institutions of the welfare state.</p> <p>This period, which still looms large in the ideological imagination of the developed liberal-democracies, only lasted thirty years before capital - under pressure from worker and student revolts on the one hand and oil prices on the other - decided to renege on the post-war agreement, recapture the portion of profit it was losing to labour and social programs, and dismantle the welfare state, mainly through privatization, tax cuts, and austerity. This transition, which began in the early 1970s, was to the form of social and economic orthodoxy we know of as neoliberalism. More and more it appears as though neoliberalism itself only lasted until the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. What we are living through is the transition period to a new inflection of capitalism, a new mode of accumulation, similar to the transition to the consumerist welfare state after 1945, or the neoliberal period in the 1970s. Leaving aside the possibility of a socialist or communist revolution right now, the main question to my mind is whether this transition is to a new period of welfare state social protections, or to the final apotheosis of class struggle and the collapse of capitalism. The answer to this question - which will have to be an empirical rather than a theoretical one - will likely determine whether or not a revolution is actually on the table, as it did in the 1930s and 1940s.</p> <p>Now, one of the strongests concepts of the welfare state was that of the social contract (developed in the 18th century by Rousseau), and this idea dies hard. Indeed, I think it forms the current basis of various calls for rent and eviction freezes, nationalization of industry and health care, and universal basic income. One aspect of the social contract that was still prevalent when I joined the workforce in the 1990s was the idea of loyalty to one’s employer. Anyone who thought seriously about the social contract understood that this loyalty had to work both ways, and the insistence on loyalty to one’s employer in the 1990s became more strident as neoliberal organizations increasingly reneged on welfare-state loyalty to their employees throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.</p> <p>The rise of zero-hour contracts and other forms of “gig work” precarity, which were in turn modeled on the almost totally virtualized financial economy, proved to be the indicator that whatever social contract might have existed between employer and worker had been completely destroyed. Nevertheless labour law, which exists to protect the power of capital against labour, bound labour tightly to capital while requiring zero reciprocal commitment of capital to labour. The only way in which capital could be bound to labour, the only way to force capital to take responsibility for its commitment to labour, was through workers’ struggle (e.g. strikes) and collective bargaining.</p> <p>Twelve years into the transition, we can see how even existing collective bargaining power weighs very little against the power of capital. Libraries are being kept open and staff forced to continue to work with the public despite the danger inherent in the global pandemic and in some cases despite states of emergency being declared. Library workers are being summarily laid off - sometimes through reduction of hours on zero-hour contracts, sometimes even with a collective agreement in place. Budget cuts and layoffs are imminent in many libraries, only held at bay right now because of the crisis, but bound to return in full force when the crisis is over. Governments are stepping in to try to protect workers, renters, and those at risk, but governments are also forcing through austerity budgets designed to wreck the last vestiges of social welfare. In both cases, these are governments born in the neoliberal period, whose understanding of the real contract of the welfare state is almost nil, and whose tendency is to cut taxes, reduce government footprint, privatize, and hope that the invisible hand will protect people. (Spoiler: it will not).</p> <p>This isn’t good enough. If this crisis does not lead to socialism, and I’m afraid I don’t think it will, it <em>must</em> lead to a refounding of the social contract along welfare state lines. The unlimited power of capital, the inhuman alienation produced by advanced capital accumulation, the complete instrumentalization and isolation of life, has to be reversed through taking political control back and forcing capital - as we did during the Depression and the Second World War, as we did in the late 1960s - to curb its tendencies towards total destruction of the social and ecological fabric of our lives. Capital will never do this willingly; it will have to be forced. Now is the time to force it. However, this is not merely a question of changing our mind, of thinking differently, it is a question of a fundamental restructuring of the economic relations of our society in the service of a new contract. The contract will be temporary, capital will never be able to control itself or its greed for more profit, but it will at least buy us some time to organize again for when that day comes.</p> <p>Some will think this is reformism, that we ought to be letting the crisis develop so as to sharpen the thirst of the multitude for the revolution. But that kind of accelerationism does no one any good in the long run. What kind of society can we build if we force the economic generators of isolation and alienation, of poverty and dehumanization, to their bitter conclusion.</p> <p>Needless to say, such a fundamental restructuring will have to reexamine the question of nations in a global context, and this will mean taking seriously Indigenous sovereignty and what that means for the social contract of capital not only with human beings but with the planet itself. Again, capital will not do this willingly, it will have to be forced to accede to the demands of humanity.</p> <p>Neoliberals will argue that you can’t force someone to be party to a contract: that contracts are founded, as Friedman insisted, on free participation and engagement - indeed, the neoliberal conception of freedom is based precisely on the model of free contract. And yet, the formally free workers under capitalism have been forced to sign contracts for their labour ever since they were driven from the land into the cities and factories. Coercion has never been an obstacle to signing a contract, except in the ideologies and fever dreams of capital.</p> <p>In addition to Indigenous sovereignty, the “repressive tolerance” of a refounded 21st century social contract will have to apply to those who would dehumanize a section of the population, for dehumanization is the hallmark of instrumentalization, and instrumentalization is the motive force of capitalist social relations. Our conceptions of “free speech” like our conception of “free contract” will have to undergo a massive refoundation on principles other than the primacy of profit and capitalist accumulation. Public servants will no longer get to parade their opinions in white nationalist, phrenological, transphobic rags.</p> <p>Neoliberalism is over, the crisis is upon us, governments have to respond, and we will have to hold them to account. Elections are not the way to hold them to account: worker resistance is. In a world where public libraries can layoff staff without notice in the midst of a global pandemic, we owe our employers nothing. We produce everything, including production itself; let’s produce everything for ourselves and for each other rather than for the profit of a few who don’t care a fig about us anyway, despite all the protestations and statements of principles coming from “our leadership”.</p> Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/18/contracts-social-and-otherwise.html http://spopowich.ca/article/2020/03/18/contracts-social-and-otherwise.html featured article
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