Written for viewpointonline.net (Pakistan)
What it might have looked like inside the fence
Category: Leftist theory
Occasional forays into leftist theory about what a good society might be like, and how leftists can use social theory to help understand the world.
Contested spaces worth defending
Introductory Note:
The Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (SESE) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) Graduate Student Conference this year took place on April 3, 2010. It had the theme “Contested Spaces: The (Re)Organization of Schooling Under Neoliberalism”. From the conference program:
Self-determination of peoples?
[This is my contribution to ZCommunications’s “Reimagining Society” project]
Polyculturalism and Self-determination
http://www.zcommunications.org/polyculturalism-and-self-determination-by-justin-podur
[Contribution to the Reimagining Society Project hosted by ZCommunications]
The present essay reviews in summary form the key ideas for “cultural liberation” and then discusses the consequences of these ideas for the concept of self-determination, specifically national self-determination, in our world and in a good society.
Review of polyculturalism
Two days at the Mondragon Bookstore Cafe
Like any sensible person seeking to escape the Toronto winter, I decided to spend a few days in Winnipeg! Last time I was in Winnipeg was 2002, and the fall, and I told my hosts in the marvelous activist community out there that I wanted to return in the winter and experience the legendary -20 to -30 C or colder. For better or worse, this trip, thanks to global warming or natural variability, it was a positively balmy -5 C, not much colder than Toronto.
The Christmas problem
Happy Holidays, everyone! Some Christmas reflection.
This past summer I had interesting discussions with friends about Christmas gift-giving rituals. My friends being spiritually inclined, there was much critique of the consumer society. My own position was to argue that the underlying impulses of gift-giving and hospitality are positive behaviors. They argued that even these things were more complex, that even gift-giving and hospitality in a consumer society were often tainted by status-seeking and competition. I thought they were being harsh. They thought I was being naive.
I actually really like this time of year in this part of the world. The snow is pretty, there’s this quietness created by it. Everybody has some time off work and tries to get together. We have an excuse to tell each other and show each other that we care.
But – and it’s always hard to tell whether it’s me changing, being more on my own these days, or the world – with each passing year I feel that this time of year is more of a race of its own: to buy stuff for everybody, to pack in appointments with everyone we haven’t seen, to accomplish social tasks as if they were so much more work to be done.
This year I actually pitched to my friends that we could dispense with the gift-giving ritual. I didn’t have it in me to go shopping. I don’t know what to get people. Everything is just so easy to get now! If I want something, I can get it for myself. The same is true of my friends. So I have to rack my brains to try to think of what item 11 on my friend’s wish list might be, because he’s more than capable of, and has long since, acquired items 1 through 10 on his own list. Meanwhile when my friends buy me gifts, I feel a moment of gratitude followed immediately by trying to figure out how I’m going to get rid of this new item, since I don’t want or need it.
It seems to me that this whole ritual of gift-giving arose when stuff was scarce. Stuff is certainly scarce in much of the world. Stuff may be scarce again here at some point in the future, but today, in this part of the world, and in the demographic I find myself in, it is not.
In the past my preference has always been to give friends some kind of information – music, books, movies. But all that stuff can be downloaded quickly for oneself and what is scarce these days is the time and attention to pay to information. By getting somebody a book or an album or a movie all I am really doing is imposing a burden of attention on them – and in an information-soaked environment, people manage that attention burden very carefully indeed, and extra burdens on the attention are no kind of gift at all.
The “gift registry” approach, used in weddings, is another way. People identify what they want you to buy them, and you buy it for them. That’s a bit of a substitute for the slightly more crass gift certificate approach, which is a substitute for the crassest of all, simply giving people cash. But all amount to the same thing: a recognition that in this society, gifts amount to consumption by proxy, and consumption by proxy is a poor substitute for individual consumption.
I have no answers on this one. I think maybe the core of these rituals is a desire to build communities and strengthen relationships. I think maybe we build communities and strengthen relationships when we can find out what actually *is* scarce that we can give, and give *that*.
Moises Naim’s scary world
I picked up Moises Naim’s book “Illicit” (2005), as the book of record on illegal trade (or, what I call, following my friend Manuel Rozental, “illegal capital”). I wanted to read it because I’m trying to figure out how much of the global economy flows into these different niches. You can understand the economy one way by following energy flows, another by following money, another by following technology (like the story of stuff), another by following arms, another by following illicit trade. And each of these has some relationship with the others. And the whole picture is, well, a little beyond me. What I am wondering about is what the relationship between this kind of trade is and the aboveground economy of employment, incomes, the state, investment, and so on. What happens to this economy during a financial meltdown? When is it better for a kind of economic activity to be legal and when illegal? My answer to that, as someone who is against prohibition, is different from most. But I’m all for learning whatever can be learned from whatever sources there are. Including, if it comes to that, the editor of Foreign Affairs, who is also an opponent of the Venezuelan Bolivarian proceso (a process I support).
I did some reading on “cyber crime” (mainly identity theft and credit card theft), for example, before this, and one of the causes of the increase in cyber crime was the huge number of technically skilled people in Russia thrown out of work by the neoliberal restructuring of the 1990s (it was not put in these terms exactly, but that was the upshot). Other things being equal, people would rather work in the licit than in the illicit economy. So under what circumstances does the illicit economy grow, and shrink? To the extent it is bad for people, how to stop it or minimize its harms?
Unfortunately, I didn’t find Naim’s book very useful on these questions. His basic argument is that technology and globalization have made illicit trade blossom. He doesn’t differentiate enough between crimes that shouldn’t be crimes, like software ‘piracy’ (see the views of Richard Stallman, who I follow in this, for an explanation of information freedom), and crimes that should be, such as human trafficking and sexual slavery. Even the latter crimes might be better stopped through legalization of prostitution and giving sex workers the protection of the law from violence rather than forcing them into the underworld. Naim acknowledges the possibility of demand reduction measures, including decriminalization, but having thoroughly frightened his readers with the spectre of massive illicit trade, he suggests a crazy dystopia of technological surveillance and state power as a solution. Starting on page 243, he advocates digital fingerprinting of products, biometrics, detection devices, surveillance (everywhere, including online), GPS tracking of people, and the increased use of biotechnology and DNA!
For people looking to think sensibly about security issues, please try Bruce Schneier instead. His “Beyond Fear” was an excellent book. It might be the thing to read after Naim, if you need to clear your mind a little.
Third World Story
by Badri Raina
first published in The Hindu November 7, 2008
VIJAY PRASHAD’S new book, The Darker Nations, is history enumerated not just by a scholar but by an anguished participant in the destiny of the world’s oppressed who scrutinises the collapse of a promising world-idea in order to understand better how new ways may be found to resurrect a humanist order.
Left wing punditry: Doing and presenting political analysis
Justin Podur
October 23, 2008
Talk given at rabble.ca media democracy day. University of Toronto.
Continue reading “Left wing punditry: Doing and presenting political analysis”
The financial economy and the real economy: Notes on the economic crisis part 1
“This extraordinary capacity to finance not on past wealth but on the present value of future anticipated cash flows is at the core of America’s dynamic approach to wealth creation” – Edelstein, R., and Paul, J.M. Europe needs a new financial paradigm. Wall Street Journal Europe June 12-13, 1998. Quoted in The Fisherman and the Rhinoceros.
Continue reading “The financial economy and the real economy: Notes on the economic crisis part 1”