Syria: The Sovereignty of the Revolution Lives in the Bodies of the People in Struggle

Syria. Uttered in Arabic, we hear Sou-ree-ah. What is the meaning of this word today? Its utterance produces shivers, sighs, perhaps sparks of hope along with the horror. And of course fights. There is alive in the 2.0 world of print/blog media a war of words concerning Syria – is it a revolution? is it still a revolution? what about the islamists? what about Assad’s nominal anti-imperialist stances? What about resistance against American hegemony? What about American funding of the rebellion? It might be said that it does not matter so much what is said on blogs in the West about Syria, that the revolution or rebellion continues regardless of what we think about it. But there is a universal human obligation to try to understand those things to which one is connected. And a still more universal obligation to pay witness to suffering, and to those who stand up against oppression. There is something to be learned from every rebellion, every revolution, because there is a truth in the physical manifestation of standing up against injustice. Not because this standing necessarily leads to justice, but because it opens a door, a way towards justice. Because without sacrifice, there is no justice.

Why I won’t fill out any more “doodles”

Doodle is an “easy scheduling” web tool that fits the needs of modern, busy, internet-connected types who don’t share schedules but need to find times to meet up for a work or social activity. Any person can create a poll that gives a group options as to when an event can take place in the future.  Then, by disclosing their availability, it becomes clear what times the most people are available, so the event can be scheduled.

Doodle achieves a certain ideal in the world of today – it fits perfectly with our busy yet flexible schedules, it gathers exactly the information we need and nothing more, it’s a kind of parato-optimal market solution for your time.

However, doodle has a pernicious effect on the meaning of the events that it helps schedule. By making it on-the-fly, which means non-repetitive scheduling, so easy, we no longer need to commit to weekly repetitive patterns. Instead of a weekly group meeting, say on Wednesday at 8pm, the meeting can be planned weekly to fit at the ideal time for everyone in the group, even if such a meeting happens every week. This is the casualization of events which otherwise would have gained a weight, a gravity that comes from repeating a practice in a cycle of time. Monday choir practice, thursday PTA meeting, can you imagine the way the meanings of such events would change if they were re-scheduled every week?

Our weeks, our cycles of time take on significance by, among other things, the things we do in them repetitively. This is why a Thursday afternoon has a certain feeling to it, why we might feel obligated to socialize or “have fun” on a Friday or Saturday night, and why Monday is the unofficial start to the week – despite the fact calendars tend to imply that the week starts on Sunday. By hunting for those empty spaces, and being so good at it, doodle moves us towards a world where our schedules have less and less repetition, where we can less so count on the familiarity of our own lives.

If we need to schedule important events that occur most every week by a Doodle poll, because we can’t find time in our schedules to give the event a repetitive, weekly time, we might ask ourselves if we are too busy? Which means, are we committed to too many projects, are we involved in too many involvements? Our involvements take time, but they should also give us time, in the sense of give us meaningful time, time activity which satisfies us, which grounds us, and which gives the time around it an aura of meaning too. If our involvements are becoming schizophrenic, if we are mere task-oriented, focussed on the completion of imagined goals and therefore lose track of time as not merely a resource but also the time of our lives, who has time become? Or rather, who have we become, such that time governs us, rather than we give meaning to time.

So, when I say I won’t fill out a doodle poll, I don’t literally mean that I won’t fill out a single doodle poll for the rest of my life. But what I do mean is that I will resist the causalization of events, the last-minute-ification of what ought to be planned carefully out in advance. It may be the case that this resistance will result in losing-track of some otherwise completable tasks, but this is better than losing track of ourselves, of not taking care of our own time, of being attentive to the meaning of our time. And when we take care of our time, we take care of ourselves.

Remembering Rachel Corrie

Today is the 10th anniversary of the murder of Rachel Corrie by the Israeli occupation forces in southern Gaza. Last night I attended a screening of the 2009 film “Rachel” at Beit Zatoun, which also served as a commemoration, and as an opportunity to reflect on her life, her dreams and aspirations, her sacrifice, and her legacy.

Food is a Drug

Articles appearing over the past few days in the New York Times and the Globe and Mail have confirmed in the popular press what I’ve suspected for a long time – that today, food is literally being designed to make us addicts. Instilling cravings, motivating us to buy and consume more calories than we need, the food industry profits from our obesity. In fact, eating more than we should is the only thing the manufacturer’s needn’t compete over – increasing the size of our appetites means there is a bigger pie for them to share.

The situation of our food production systems today of course needs to be looked at from many perspectives – how does access to food relate to class oppression, radicalized communities, how does it relate to the welfare and rights of food animals, and of course capitalism. One of those perspectives needs to be the way desires are produced in us, both by public relations and by the engineering of food to maximize its addictive potential, and recognizing that those desires are neither natural nor healthy for us as individuals or as a class or as a society. We can’t take our diets for granted – we don’t choose them as rational free individuals any more than we believe that rational agency theory is an adequate account of human behaviour. And while we shouldn’t blame the victims, we should blame the aggressors -including big agriculture and meat production, the snack food industry, and fast-food. These industries have colonized our minds and our stomachs, have made us slaves to cravings, and have normalized a meat-heavy diet that would have been impossible for anyone but the ultra rich before 20th century technological improvements in agricultural and food animal production.

Liberalism, Power and Justice and the Israel-Palestine Conflict

The question for liberals and radicals is a fundamentally different one. Liberals ask how can something proximate to justice be achieved, given the restrictions placed upon the situation by powerful interests? In other words, the oppressed are asked to compromise, to peacefully accept a more reasonable version of their dispossession  Those who refuse are called intransigent, impractical, or even “terrorists”, while those who accept are lauded with complements like “pragmatic”, “forward looking” and the like.

Radicals, on the other hand, ask how can the circulation of power be shifted to fit the requirements of justice, or even how can it be shifted by the requirements of justice. Radicals, in other words, take justice itself to be a power, a source of motivation, a cause for sacrifice. Not merely an “ideal”, but a force that aims towards an ideal, thrusting to bring it about.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and different approaches to “solving” it, serve as a paradigmatic examples of this divergence between liberal and radical approaches. I am not, however, going to argue that liberals are those who endorse a two-state settlement, whereas radicals are those who demand a one-state resolution to the conflict. Rather, the distinction can be found in what attitude a person takes towards the Israeli government and electorate, who have since the Palestinian leadership recognized Israel continually refused to accept the principle of partitioning the land according to International Law. Liberals take the feelings of those in power to be part of the game, and demand that a compromise acceptable to both sides be found in the space between the desires and aspirations of the two parties. In such a compromise, justice is never actualized but at best approximated, and the greater compromise is always taken by the weaker party. Radicals take the feelings of those in power to be part of the problem, an obstacle to Justice and something not to be appeased but struggled against. If the oppressor feels offended by the struggle, this is not a problem for a radical, although it becomes part of the tactical landscape. Whereas, for a liberal, it is more important to change the feelings of the parties concerned, so tactics that alienate are to avoided at all costs.

This distinction over tactics, over caring for the feelings of the oppressor, truly divides liberals from radicals. Not because liberals are nicer, or because radicals are mean, but because radicals believe politics to be about the reforming of the structures of power, while liberals believe politics is about changing what those in power do with that power. Liberals don’t want Israelis to have any less power, they just want them to use it for good rather than ill. Radicals, on the other hand, see the imbalance of power as a basic cause for the reproduction fo injustice in the situation, and something to be overturned through struggle.

Part of any radical position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will very likely include support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). This is because the BDS movement has adopted a set of goals that conform to basic requirements of justice and international law, and pursues them by means of a non-violent strategy that can be adopted equally by anarchists, marxists, and pacifists. Liberals will likely reject BDS on the basis that it does not propose a solution based on the mutual compromising of aspirations between Israelis and Palestinians, pretending them to be parties with equal power in a disagreement. However, there are also radicals who might reject BDS and appeal instead to another formulation of the requirements of justice, and try to mobilize a movement on this basis. Two examples of this have been the prominent intellectual and critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein, and the International Socialists.  Finkelstein has expressed concern over BDS not because he is a liberal, but because he is not convinced that its formulation of the requirements of justice can reach and motivate a broad public. The International Socialists reject BDS on the basis that it alienates the Israeli working class, and draws the delineation of the conflict along the colonial, effectively national lines, as opposed to along class lines. The International Socialists are not liberals, but they are radicals who draw the requirements of justice from a class rather than colonial analysis of the situation, and therefore disagree on the question of who is the oppressor, and therefore, whose feelings do we not need to consider when developing a politics.

It is easy to say that there ought to be unity between radicals, but radicals can be separated from each other almost as easily as they separate themselves from those who stand in the way of the requirements for justice. This is why it is so valuable for the prescriptions set by radical groups to not throw justice into conflict with power, but do so in a way that is motivating to a broad base. The BDS movement at this time is by far the largest radical Palestinian solidarity movement existing in the world today, due in no small part to the fact it has broad support from Palestinian civil society and approval from all the Palestinian political factions. There may be alternatives, but none that I know of which don’t alienate a significant portion of the Palestinian population, as well as a large portion of activists.

The question for intellectuals today is: do you want to be part of power’s self-justificatory functioning? Or, do you want justice to enter the field of power as an actor, do you want to be motivated by a social force which can turn against the realities of power, and be another actor in the field of history?

 

Starbucks and BDS

The issue of starbucks comes up repetitively in BDS discussions, and I think it’s relevant to listen to what Starbucks has to say on the issue.

Here’s the key bit:

Is it true that Starbucks provides financial support to Israel?
No. This is absolutely untrue. Rumors that Starbucks Coffee Company provides financial support to the Israeli government and/or the Israeli Army are unequivocally false. Starbucks is a publicly held company and as such, is required to disclose any corporate giving each year through a proxy statement. In addition, articles in the London Telegraph (U.K.), New Straits Times (Malaysia), and Spiked (online) provide an outside perspective on these false rumors.

Has Starbucks ever sent any of its profits to the Israeli government and/or Israeli army?
No. This is absolutely untrue.

Is it true that Starbucks is teaming with other American corporations to send their last several weeks of profits to the Israeli government and/or the Israeli Army?
No. This is absolutely untrue.

 

The fact Starbucks puts this kind of information on their page should be seen as a victory for BDS. I’m not saying we should all go out and support Starbucks. We might as individuals supporting BDS dislike the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz who in 1998 was awarded an “Israel 50th Anniversary Tribute Award” from the Jerusalem Fund of Aish Ha-Torah for “playing a key role in promoting a close alliance between the United States and Israel”. Also, according to the Arab American News, Shultz “has championed and funded defense of Israel on U.S. university campuses.” In other words, Shultz has been actively involved in countering the work that anti-zionist activists (and even liberal-zionist peace activists) on American university campuses do when they criticize the US-Israeli relationship and ongoing Israeli colonization and crimes against humanity.

But, BDS is not about targeting individual, even if well connected, Zionists. It is not about boycotting people we don’t like, even people who try to work against us – it is about a principled and consistent economic withdrawal from companies, academic institutions, and cultural performers, who support the Israeli apartheid regime and help wash its international image. 

 

Idle No More – between reform and insurgency, the anti/alter-colonial struggle

I have been hesitant to write any commentary on the recent cross Canada first nations mobilization. Hesitant because I feel I don’t understand it terribly well, and that there are others who are better situated to write commentary on what is going on.

But I think that I now have something to say. The thing about Idle No More which is very interesting to me is the way it manages to be both a revolutionary and liberal, both insurgent and reformist movement at the same time. It is both radical and non-radical because it is at the level of principles not a straightforward anti-colonialist movement, but rather an alter-colonialist, which means reformist, paradigm. The goals are not to kick out the colonizer, but to ask the colonizer to abide by the treaties that were signed a long time ago, and which are not obeyed. The tactics are based on law, based on appeal to the legal basis of the Canadian state, based on appeals to the obligations not simply of the Canadian state but of the British crown. This is why the chiefs demand to meet with the Governor General – because, Canadian democracy aside, they argue it is ultimately the responsibility of the crown to force its local ministers to obey by the international treaties that the crown signed with indigenous nations.

The trick is – for the state to comply with these treaties would mean very deep changes to the Canadian economy, and in the end, to Canadian society. Existing capitalism, the resource economy, can’t survive without subsidies it receives from mining resources on first nations territory. So while the prescription “Obey the treaties” is liberal, its political situation is a radical one because it will take force, it will cause a rupture, for the state to comply with treaties that are damaging to its economy.

And indigenous people in Canada have the power to exert force. They know how to run blockades, they know how to occupy territory, and it is not very easy to label them as terrorists because in the Canadian situation racist slurs against indigenous people are no longer acceptable in liberal society. Indigenous people can shut down the border at Windsor, they can control bridges – they likely can’t win a military confrontation against the Canadian Forces, but the mere danger of such a confrontation has a political effect.

Of course, the use of force isn’t a magic bullet in struggle. Peaceful protest must come first, a grassroots movement must be broad-based and strong. Settlers must play a role in the movement – taking responsibility for their position as settlers, and pressuring their government to abide by the law. The most important thing settlers must do is combat the racist tendencies in settler societies to demonize the indigenous every time they demand their rights.

By being both liberal and radical, both reformist and insurgent, INM is an opportunity to mobilize a broad coalition of the political centre and the political left, those who vote NDP and those who boycott the elections. And, it is an opportunity for all these populations to participate in a single solidarity struggle, and to learn the complimentary virtues of pragmatism and hard-line commitment. The maoist left can get over its “workerism”, center-liberals can get over their allergy to community-rights, NDP supporters can deepen their analysis of colonialism, and anti-colonial activists can recognize the distinctness of one struggle against colonialism from another. And we need to; Idle No More is crucial because it is not only indigenous people in Canada who need liberation and dignity – settlers too are imprisoned by capitalism, and by the world-destructive view that short term profit is the thing of most value – even more than the survival of the planet.