Hosted by Justin Podur
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.
For those in Toronto, please come to the Media Democracy Day conference and my workshop. Callout below.
MEDIA DEMOCRACY DAY WORKSHOP
33 ST GEORGE ST
TORONTO, ON
2:30-3:30
Organized by OPIRG U of T
Left punditry: doing and presenting political analysis.
This workshop is for the rogue opinionated radical, or (better), the activist with an organization working on some aspect of communication.
Continue reading “Media Democracy Day Thurs Oct 23, Toronto”
Bolivia’s popular movements are attempting to use democracy and a legitimate government to advance an agenda of sovereignty, greater equality, and development. Their opponents, led by several governors of the wealthier provinces in a part of the country called the “media luna”, are trying to use violence and sabotage to stop that agenda by provoking a civil war and chaos. The challenge to Bolivia’s government and its president Evo Morales is to stop the violence without allowing the provocation to succeed. In meeting that challenge, Morales has the support of most of the Latin American governments. His opponents have the support of the United States government.
Both sides are using tested models. Bolivia’s path has similarities with that of Venezuela. After long debates about whether the electoral path to change was the right one, an electoral strategy was mapped out with some of the social movements supportive, others skeptical. Having won elections, the new government faced difficulties because much of the state apparatus, including regional governments, remained in the hands of the old elite and status quo, while the economy remained controlled by foreign powers and local elites. Trying to re-structure the government while keeping the country running, dealing with foreign interference, and then use legislation and a constitutional process to attempt deeper reforms, is a major challenge. But the government’s attempts at reform were strengthened and propelled by popular support and, more importantly, popular organization. Meanwhile the fact that Washington’s attention was focused on the Middle East provided some breathing space.
The opposition is also using tested models. In Venezuela in 2002 and in Haiti in 2004, US-backed elite movements developed methods for enacting a coup against an elected regime. Western media would support the elite and present a distorted picture of the elected government and its leader as a “strongman” or “dictator”. These media reports could be translated and re-broadcast locally to present a popular government as if it were internationally isolated. The US Embassy and other personnel could contribute to both the media campaign and to the financial, political, and military organization of the opposition. In the final stages, military or paramilitary forces would be necessary. They would create some spectacular instances of violence: perhaps by attacking unarmed opposition protestors whose deaths could be blamed on the government; alternatively, they could attack government supporters who confront the opposition in counter-demonstrations.
The latter might lead to armed action by government supporters in self-defense or in reprisal, or to repression by military forces still loyal to the government. In either case, further pretexts are provided for the government’s claimed perfidy and violence, which could then lead to calls from the US that the government step down in a predictable press conference at the US Embassy.
At this point in Bolivia, the international media campaign against the government is on in full force, the US has helped to organize the opposition, and since September 10 the requisite massacres have been produced, by the opposition itself, its victims the government’s supporters. If the regional governments support the Bolivian government and the armed forces remain loyal, as they are likely to, the Bolivian government will survive this crisis. But lives have been lost senselessly in this attempt to stop Bolivians from claiming their rights.
Although the path to the current crisis has been longer than a few weeks (for some background see our previous “Bolivia on the Brink”, ZNet March/08), the trigger for the current violence was the announcement on August 28, 2008 by Evo Morales of a date for a referendum on the new constitution. It is to be held on December 7, 2008, and it will mean a re-founding of the country: land reform, nationalization of natural resources, and institutional changes that will make it much more difficult for the elite to block popular measures.
The elite´s main strategic goal is to avoid the constitutional referendum by pressuring the government to postpone the constitutional referendum. This would cost Evo his popular support and destroy any capacity or momentum for popular reform. The Morales government is extremely popular, and the elite knows it. Their strategy has been, rather than to claim that they are representative of the country as a whole, that they are seeking autonomy for their own regions, which are controlled through old networks of patronage (and, more recently, violence as well). In May 2008 they held their own autonomy plebiscites, organized by the five provincial governments under their control, with no international oversight and no legal basis. Morales’s government dismissed these as illegitimate and when a recall referendum was held on August 16, 2008 (this time with international observers and a legal basis), Morales won with 67% of the vote.
Two weeks later on August 28, Morales issued a presidential decree setting the December 7 date for the constitutional referendum. On September 2, the electoral court announced its opposition to the referendum on technical grounds (the court claimed the referendum couldn’t be announced by decree but had to be passed by Congress, including by the opposition-controlled Senate). The opposition governors of the five provinces demanded the referendum be called off. Opposition demonstrators began to block roads. They seized an airport in Cobija on September 5 and blocked the highway between Santa Cruz (an elite stronghold) and the capital, La Paz, followed by roads linking Bolivia to Brazil. They attempted to take over government offices and clashed with Bolivian armed forces – who had been ordered, and followed orders, to not respond to provocation.
In the first week, these opposition protests failed. They generated neither the desired reprisals nor hoped-for of popular support against the government, though they had caused economic damage. Opposition leaders, like wealthy governor Ruben Costas who met with US ambassador Philip Goldberg, must have been concerned about their lack of success. So in the second week of protests, the opposition escalated and moved down the path of sabotage and murder. The road blocks had resulted in energy shortages in the opposition-controlled areas, but the seizure of a gas plant in Villamontes on September 8 and an attack on a pipeline to Brazil on September 10 made problems worse. On September 11, “clashes” in Cobija, Pando, killed about 11 people. The government began to use tear gas and pellets against protestors. Morales called for continued restraint, but warned that “patience has limits”.
On September 12, a paramilitary attack on a pro-government demonstration, just outside Cobija, killed 30 people, in what Bolivian government officials called a massacre. One of the survivors, Antonio Moreno, told the Associated Press that the peasant demonstrators were unarmed. Armed men fired on them from trucks with machine guns. Moreno’s account: “They insulted us, they shot at us, they were armed, others had sticks. We retreated 800 meters but someone said we had to face them. There was a fight, we disarmed some of them but we couldn’t take their weapons away.” The government blamed the governor of Pando, opposition leader Leopoldo Fernandez, for the violence and claimed paramilitary assassins hired by the opposition pulled the triggers. The opposition replied by claiming the peasants attacked first.
The victims of these killings were popular and indigenous movements and organizations, supporters of the government, in the opposition-controlled areas. These organizations helped bring out the popular vote for Evo in the recall referendum and have been targeted for revenge by the elite. Among the attacks in Pando province were the land reform institute, human rights NGOs supporting peasants, and the local indigenous confederation. Among the victims of the Pando massacre was Bernadino Racua, a well-known indigenous leader.
On September 13 and 14 Evo’s government declared a state of emergency in Pando. It used the military to take back the airport and the government offices that had been taken by the opposition. Orders for the arrest of Fernandez and others were issued. Patience had reached its limits, both with opposition violence and with US interference: the US ambassador was declared persona non grata and told to leave, denying the Embassy the chance to hold the usual press conference demanding negotiations, concessions, or a resignation. Chavez followed by expelling the US ambassador to Venezuela, claiming another coup plot against him had been exposed, and Honduras refused to credential their incoming US Ambassador.
The US responded in kind, expelling the Venezuelan and Bolivian ambassadors, threatening “grave consequences”, and announcing sanctions against Venezuelan ministers on the usual drug war grounds (dispelling these drug war accusations requires another article and can’t be done here). Economic and political consequences will run in both directions if the economic relationships between the US and Latin America are harmed. Evo had just visited the Middle East, including Iran, contrary to US attempts at diplomatically isolating that country, and Venezuela just announced joint military exercises with Russia in November. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa announced concerns of separatist movements in the Bolivian mold taking action in Ecuador’s Guayaquil province.
Within Bolivia Evo has acted to try to deny the opposition a strategic victory and prevent the conflict from derailing the popular agenda. On September 9, in the middle of the crisis, he shuffled out some of the ministers he’d been forced to accept out of compromise with the elite and replaced them with people who were ready to move popular economic policies. He opened a dialogue with the opposition but insisted that the referendum would go forward on December 7. The opposition offered to lift the roadblocks on September 14. The government approved this step but said it was completely inadequate to restore order. After orchestrating the deaths of dozens of people, the opposition ought not to be allowed to simply order a temporary tactical retreat. They have the right to due process in criminal prosecutions. They do not, after orchestrating murder and massacre, have the right to demand concessions from a legitimate government.
Latin American leaders, including those of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and others, are meeting on September 15 to seek a resolution to Bolivia’s conflict. Virtually all, including even US ally Colombia, have announced support for Morales’s government and its popular mandate, and that they will refuse to accept separatism.
The movements that brought Evo to power will not go quietly, as the opposition should know. Without the capacity for a national coup, the opposition lacks the popular support to even sow “ungovernability” in their own provinces for very long. Their desperate need is to use the media to amplify their limited actions as larger than they are, to generate external political pressure to force Evo to make concessions and defeat the popular movement for them. As a result, the success of Bolivia’s popular processes depends in part on whether the false stories about the government, the past few weeks, and the days to come, are believed.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. His blog is www.killingtrain.com.
So at the request of an anonymous commenter (thanks again!) in this blog, I went and read Bruce Levine’s “Commonsense Rebellion”. I saw, next to it on the shelf a book I’d picked up in 2000 but not really read, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s “Against Therapy”. It is good to discuss them together.
Continue reading “Against psychiatry, psychotherapy, and for a commonsense rebellion…”
It’s odd that I’m in the middle of a psychology reading binge, given my professional interest in climate and the current horrific climate chaos that has millions of people displaced in Asia, people dying from record high temperatures in Europe, and your run-of-the-mill 38 degree celsius here in Toronto. But I won’t spare you my random thoughts on this reading on that account.
So, rather than getting into Alice Miller right away I decided to deal with Alfie Kohn today. I started with his book, “Punished by Rewards”, which discusses why rewards (grades, gold stars, salary bonuses or any other kind of bribes) are not good things – not in workplaces, not in families, and not in schools. Why? Five reasons, Alfie says:
1. Rewards are the flip side of punishment – we agree that we don’t like punishment, but rewards are just as controlling.
I’ve been reading a fair bit that isn’t directly relevant to current events or the kind of politics that I am usually involved in – namely, psychology and alternative education stuff. One important author I want to talk about a bit here is Alice Miller. Another is Alfie Kohn. I’ve done a few waves of this sort of reading. I find it really depends on the timing, how insightful or useful I find the stuff. Anyway I think Miller and Kohn both deserve more in-depth reviews. Today though I want to say a few quick words about Barbara Coloroso, who is an author on bullying. I was given her book, “Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide”. She discusses mostly the Nazi holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, some of the Armenian genocide, and analyzes it in terms of bully, bullied, and bystander. These categories have some explanatory power – bullying is based on contempt and lack of empathy, she says, and taken to its extreme, it is genocide. It’s a reasonable set of categories she applies, but I think Miller’s work on the psychology of genocidal leaders and societies goes much deeper and is much more insightful (again, more later).
What upset me about Coloroso’s book, though, is what you might guess from an American author writing about genocide. She talks about bullying, contempt, racism, bystanders, apathy, sexual violence, and how all these lead to genocide. She presents a list of genocides in the first few pages of her book. To her credit, the number one and two genocides are those of the Americas – North and South America. But not to her credit, America’s Vietnam and Iraq massacres of millions of people do not appear. No Congo. No East Timor. No Guatemala. And, even though the body counts are large enough to meet her criteria (she has genocides of 10,000 and 30,000 – by Australia and South Africa, both of which are responsible for much larger numbers of deaths than this), no Palestine. The problem with this is, of course, that in Coloroso’s own scheme, it makes her a bystander to the kind of genocidal bullying she critiques, and a bystander in the very conflicts where her voice, her profile, and her analysis could make such a very huge difference. What if someone did weave a story about genocides like Barbara does, and seamlessly include those that the US and its allies (Israel, for example, or even Canada with its only-recently-closed residential schools and ongoing dispossession) are responsible for? Would it not help people see these things more clearly? Or would Barbara simply be shut out, like everyone who tries to actually be consistent about matters of bullying or genocide? And yet, Barbara herself would teach us that not wanting to be shut out is not enough to excuse a bystander. Stephen Lewis, who I also respect a lot, but who also chooses his battles carefully, says about Coloroso that “Nothing escapes the unsparing force of her intellect, the gentle generosity of her soul, and her passion to shape a better world.”
Nothing, that is, except the US or Israel’s bullying and genocidal programs. Still, it is worthwhile material for those who can take it to its logical conclusions and apply it more consistently than Barbara does.
Remind me also to discuss James Ron’s “Frontiers and Ghettos”, recommended to me by Rahul.
http://www.zcommunications.org/after-socialism-by-justin-podur
Review of Gabriel Kolko?s ?After Socialism: Reconstructing critical social thought?. Routledge, UK. 2006.
What follows is a paper for presentation at the Z Sessions on Vision and Strategy, to be held in June 2006. It is fairly schematic. I have fleshed out the ideas with examples in other online work (see this essay and this interview). The aim here was to present the main ideas to a leftist, activist audience, advance the ideas somewhat, and seek feedback. I’m hoping for feedback from those who attend the sesions. But I hope to get more feedback in the ZNet wiki, in the discussion pages…
My presentation is motivated by what I believe is a weakness across the political spectrum: handling the interaction of different cultures and identities in accordance with principles of equality, solidarity, and liberty. My optimistic belief is that if we – leftists – can get this right, in our own communities and organizations such as they are, then we can solve some of the debilitating problems within our organizations and communities. If we can do that, we will be more attractive, bigger, stronger, and better able to face the battles we will need to fight in future.
I am obliged to start with some definitions. I am going to define a few very commonly used terms. In my definitions I am going to stick fairly closely to what I think people mean when they use these terms, but I am going to select meanings in order to make it easier for me to make my points.
I define a community as a group of people who share something in common. Who is in or out of the community is determined by the community and by those outside it. The Black community, for example, is not one based solely on self-identification. Who is Black has been defined, historically, by whites, not blacks. The journalistic or scientific ‘community’, a very different kind of community, is not defined from the outside – or is defined from the outside to a much lesser extent.
Identity is most simply membership in a community or group. Like the boundaries of community, identification happens in two ways. One’s own consciousness is important. But so too is that of the group – in many cases, membership in a group is contingent upon the group’s acceptance. And also, identity can be imposed from the outside – by states who confer ‘status’ or ‘non-status’ identity on their subjects.
I am going to define culture differently from anthropologists. To anthropologists culture is everything that is not defined by biology. But I will define culture as the shared language – not only language, but nonverbal cues, assumptions, norms, customs – that enable members of a group to communicate internally and to strengthen the identification of individuals with the community. But the capacity to communicate is moderated through cultural institutions – media, educational, religious… indeed every institution has a cultural element, which is the reason for phrases like ‘working class culture’.
Race is just a particular kind of group identity, correlated with continent of origin and physical features like skin colour. In North America ‘racial’ identifications are basically: Asian (sometimes divided into East, West, South), Indigenous, Latin@, Black, and white. Ethnicity is a more nuanced understanding of the concept, relying on country or language of origin.
Next is racism. Leftists used to have some control over the definition of this word, but I believe we have lost it, and this has led to some of our problems. Common usage of the word racism is that racism is bigotry, prejudice, resort to stereotypes. In this common usage, Blacks can be just as ‘racist’ as whites. Another idea is that racism is simply the irrational hatred of Black people. In this usage, ‘racism’ is reserved for anti-Black prejudice, and differentiated from anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and hatred against other groups. This usage leads to the idea of ‘reverse racism’, which in common usage is discrimination against whites and is usually suggested as an argument against affirmative action programs.
Leftist usage of the word racism is different from common usage. In leftist usage, racism is either a system of power that one group (whites) holds over others, or any individual or institutional behaviour or pattern that reinforces this system of power. I believe this is a useful definition – indeed the most useful – but because of its limitations, it has been mostly rejected in favor of the common usage. I will discuss these limitations in a minute – first I will dispense with the definitions.
Multiculturalism is a proposed solution to racism. In a multicultural framework, all cultures are respected and indeed, all cultures are equal. Groups are free to express their cultural preferences and dominant groups are to have special respect for minority groups. Tolerance and diversity are the order of the day. Cross-cultural understandings are sought. Multiculturalism posed as the counter to the common-usage form of racism.
Multiculturalism is not, however, a solution to racism as leftists refer to it. Indeed, if a system of power is still in place, multicultural ideals of respect, tolerance, and diversity can then be used as arguments against mobilization aimed at identifying or redressing power imbalances (as divisive or intolerant). Ideas of fairness and equality developed as an antidote to bigotry become arguments against affirmative action. It is official policy in Canada, and it plays out in perverse ways: it is a table built on dispossession at which the gatekeepers of the different communities compete for resources based on their ability to convince the others that they ‘represent’ their communities. The result is that the dominant group, presumed to have no ‘culture’ (having to settle for wealth and power instead) gets to wield strict fairness and equality arguments against these ‘cultures’, who sound like they want ‘special rights’.
At the same time, leftists helped develop multicultural analysis and the multicultural ideal. That it has become mainstream speaks to its basis in good values (fairness, equality, diversity). That it is used as a weapon against oppressed constituencies speaks to its limitations.
The limitations of the leftist definition of racism are related to the limitations of multiculturalism. Both are highlighted by the proposed solutions to the problem. If we are against power differentials between groups, do we eliminate the differentials but preserve the groups? Or do we eliminate the groups?
If we want to preserve the groups neatly and separately, we have a separatist solution.
If we want to eliminate the groups, we are after assimilation.
But both such solutions – and in its crudest form multiculturalism is a separatist solution, albeit with an injunction to ‘tolerance’ between the separate groups – are solutions based on cultural homogeneity. They are based on a flawed idea that people live their lives as members of a single group or a single identity.
The flaw and its application in multiculturalism is described by Vijay Prashad in his book ‘Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting’:
“Are cultures discrete and bounded? Do cultures have a history or are they static? Who defines the boundaries of culture or allows for change? Do cultures leak into each other? … To respect the fetish of culture assumes that one wants to enshrine it in the museum of humankind rather than find within it the potential for liberation or for change. We’d have to accept homophobia and sexism, class cruelty and racism, all in the service of being respectful to someone’s perverse definition of culture.”
Adding to Vijay’s list of rhetorical questions are two posed by Michael Rabinder James’s book ‘Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity’: Do individuals choose their cultural identities, do they inherit them, or are they imposed from without? A group’s claim on resources or restitution may depend on this question. When we are talking about resources, we are talking about the economy, and class, and perhaps of conflict between classes. Why should a group based on self-definition have any special claim on resources? The truth is, Rabinder James argues, that in fact, choice and inheritance, internal group acceptance and external imposition, all play a role in identity formation, in virtually all cases.
Most of our views about culture and multiculturalism underestimate diversity within groups. They overlook how group boundaries can shift over time.
Amartya Sen’s recent book, Identity and Violence, also makes this argument. He makes two main points. First, that individuals have multiple identities that overlap and can change. Second, that there is always some role for choice in how identity plays out in any given situation.
This is not a matter that requires great imagination. It merely requires recognition of daily reality. It is in front of all of us. But it has some important consequences.
Robin Kelley, 1999 ColorLines, describes this recognition as ‘polyculturalism’, which he counterposes with ‘multiculturalism’.
“…we were and are `polycultural.’ By `we,’ I’m not simply talking about my own family or even my `hood, but all peoples in the Western world. It is not our skin or hair or walk or talk that renders black people so incredibly diverse. Rather, it is the fact that most black people in the Americas are products of a variety of different `cultures’ — living cultures, not dead ones. These cultures live in and through us everyday, with almost no self-consciousness about hierarchy or meaning. In this respect, I think the term `polycultural’ works a lot better than `multicultural,’ since the latter often implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side — a kind of zoological approach to culture. Such a view of multiculturalism not only obscures power relations, but often reifies race and gender differences..
“…While this may seem obvious, for some people it’s a dangerous concept. Too many Europeans don’t want to acknowledge that Africans helped create so-called Western Civilization, that they are both indebted to and descendants of the very folk they enslaved. They don’t want to see the world as One — a tiny little globe where people and cultures are always on the move, where nothing stays still no matter how many times we name it. To acknowledge our polycultural heritage and cultural dynamism is not to give up our black identity or our love and concern for black people. It does mean expanding our definition of blackness, taking our history more seriously, and looking at the rich diversity within us with new eyes.” (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=3865)
First of all, I still do want to eliminate power and class differentials between groups. So restitution – programs that pay attention to history with a view to eliminating equality and fairness in the present – is important, for example in North America for Blacks and Indigenous peoples in particular. I cannot see justifying inequalities on the basis of tolerating diversity, nor do I see any reason to view a reparations programme that decreases inequality as ‘special treatment’. But there is a flip side. First, the programs have to be carefully designed so that they actually do decrease inequality. And second, wanting to eliminate inequalities between groups does not mean tolerating inequalities within groups.
This is where a possible tension emerges between cultural autonomy and solidarity. This is not a plea for cross-cultural tolerance, because we do not live in a single identity. We can have solidarity with others on the basis of shared identity, even if we have only our shared humanity as a basis for solidarity. But if we don’t want to use cultural relativism as an excuse to tolerate injustice within groups, we also don’t want to allow powerful groups to violate the autonomy of weaker or smaller groups based on their own values or norms.
But what does it mean in the real world of institutions and groups and populations to say we cannot ‘allow powerful groups’ to do something? What kind of protection is there for a minority within a country, or for a small independent national community in the family of nations? There are legal, political, and media protections that could help a society deal with this problem.
Formal, legal protections in constitutions and international law, protections that require consensus or huge majorities to change. But these can be violated by powerful groups.
Voting systems can be arranged to provide incentives to politicians and campaigners to reach out across obvious community divisions. But these, too, could be ridden with conflict.
Major media institutions could be encouraged to operate based on fairness criteria. These criteria include:
Smaller, community media institutions might have a more specialist role. These might not be held up to the same standards of fairness. Nor would they have the same levels of public support or access to public space. They would just be independent media, available to anyone and protected by free speech laws.
What I’m sketching out here, for media institutions, is an important principle for a polycultural framework. The wider society has a responsibility to make its institutions representative of the diversity of the communities within it. But it should also encourage and help the creation of autonomous institutions for those communities: institutions that are not held to the same strict criteria of fairness, because, unlike society-at-large, people are free to exit them.
Michael Rabinder James, in his “Deliberative Democracy and the Plural Polity”, suggests fairness criteria for judging democratic processes: aggregative equality (each person has roughly the same voting power), deliberative equality (each different position is represented regardless of its popularity), aggregative autonomy (choice between different candidates and positions), deliberative autonomy (a chance to develop positions free of coercion and with full information), aggregative reciprocity (equal coalition-building opportunities), and deliberative reciprocity (a tendency to view others as partners and understand their positions). He also suggests voting systems that would encourage people to seek votes across identity groups.
Legal, political, and media protections can all facilitate a polycultural framework. But in spite of them, powerful groups could wield control over resources to shut out or misrepresent alternative views or consign them to the margins.
I believe, however, that beyond institutionalized protections, the ultimate protection is the development of a ‘common culture’ in which people do not ‘vote’, or even think, reliably or consistently as a member of their ‘community’ only as opposed to the larger society. This is the best protection against communalism and, in India, it has been the main brake on communalism. People do not vote, or live, in a single identity. A sound society would not ask them to.
What about across societies? What about if cases of oppression or violence are occurring within a community or a nation? When does the wider society – or the family of nations, or an external agent of any kind – have the right to intervene?
In the most extreme cases, this can be resolved with a simple rule proposed by Arthur Waskow in the 1960s in a small book called ‘Keeping the World Disarmed’. The basic rule is simply this: intervention is allowed, but more force requires more consensus. So any country could send a single unarmed observer or investigator to investigate claims that a country was arming or committing rights violations against its people. To send more would require more consensus, and full armed intervention would require some super majority.
I said earlier that people do not vote, or live, in a single identity. A sound society would not ask them to. I should also add that a sound political movement would not ask them to. I should also add that I believe that leftists do ask people to, and that is a mistake.
There is no such thing as a homogeneous group or movement. The idea of representativeness in common spaces and the creation of autonomous spaces can almost always be applied. Criteria of deliberative and aggregative autonomy, reciprocity, and equality can always be applied. I believe that we can, and should, evaluate our own institutions and processes according to these criteria. I believe that we can improve our work as antiracists by recognizing the multiple, overlapping identities and the element of choice in them. We can also avoid the error of asking people to live or think in a single identity.
This framework has led me to a skepticism about the label ‘people of colour’ used by leftists. ‘People of colour’ is a flimsy identity, externally imposed. It lacks the elements of shared history, language, experience, or territory that make for coherent communities. It obscures power differentals and oppression within its too-wide boundaries. Antiracists do better to rely on stronger bonds of solidarity, whether based in coherent communities or in shared principles and practice. I do not believe that the benefits of excluding whites are so great that they make up for what is lost. For racial identity, I am in favor of more precise labels: Black, Indigenous, East, West, or South Asian, Latin@, and white – these, too, however, are subject to fluid and shifting boundaries and internal (class, power, gender) diversity.
I also believe that leftists analysis of ‘privilege’ is either too often used or too selectively used. Especially in the absence of positive aims and political strategy, it is common leftist practice to attack individuals on grounds of identity and consequent privilege. Without positive aims or objective criteria, critiques on the basis of identity have the potential to destroy any group and any organizing effort that is not completely homogeneous or atomized. While this is not an argument for denial, silence, or complicity in the face of inequalities or hypocrisy, I will say that such attacks need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, on the basis of their strategic value and on the basis of the likelihood that they will advance positive antiracist aims of decreasing power differentials, strengthening solidarity, or expanding freedom. Many are made instead for the sake of self-expression or because they are easy to make. The attackers are too often unreflective of their own privilege. I suspect that this is the experience of many leftists trying to function in activist circles. Indeed, Michael Rabinder James suggests criteria for when a minority group would be justified in political struggle against the majority. As you may have guessed, the idea is that the majority has to have failed the tests of deliberative and aggregative equality, reciprocity, and autonomy. It is worth keeping this in mind, too, when we are deciding whether or not to struggle against one another.
As I mentioned earlier, I interviewed Richard Stallman earlier this month. Just published the interview and set up a forum (linked at the bottom of the interview) where folks can introduce themselves if they’d like to help begin the exploration on possibly converting ZNet to free software.
The whole discussion and Stallman’s work was of great interest to me, with implications that go beyond software that I would like to explore if I get the chance. Meanwhile, take a look at the interview!
http://www.zcommunications.org/free-software-as-a-social-movement-by-richard-stallman
NOTE: ZNet has begun to explore the possibility of converting to free software. If you would like to help in this effort, please go to the Free ZNet Project forums, register, and introduce yourself.
Richard Stallman is one of the founders of the Free Software Movement and lead developer of the GNU Operating System. His book is ‘Free Software, Free Society’. I caught up with him by phone on December 1/05.
JP: Can you first of all explain the “Free Software Movement’.