About

This blog explores the politics of food, land, bureaucracy, property, housing, farming, colonialism, anarchism, authority, judgement, creativity, art, social movements, and other stuff.  Those are just a bunch of words, but hopefully I can use this blog to string some of them together in a meaningful or interesting way.

‘Politics’ is a fuzzy and contested term, but as far as definitions go, I like Warren Magnusson’s (he was my MA supervisor):

Politics: Purposive social action directed at the conditions of social existence.

That’s really broad, and it implies that politics goes on pretty much everywhere.  I like it because it side-steps the mainstream conception of politics as related to governments, voting, elections, and other official institutions.  Politics tends to be understood in relation to the State, or at least in relation to dominant practices and authorities.  Politics is often measured, judged, or evaluated in terms of its effects on these dominant institutions (“maybe you made some ruckus, but what reforms did you achieve?”)  That’s the conception of politics that has become hegemonic: it presents itself as the common-sense definition of politics, at the expense of other possibilities.  So how do hegemonic assumptions get challenged, changed, or dismantled?  And can hegemonic ideas and practices be challenged in a way that doesn’t just replace them with a new form of dominance?  The State and other dominant institutions have confiscated politics, so how can it be taken back, multiplied, and proliferated everywhere?  How to navigate many politics?  These questions aren’t new, and people are taking back politics all over the world: formulating problems and responding to them in ways that can never be predicted in advance.

It’s not clear how to think about politics in a way that avoids some common traps.  If we can’t judge our politics by its effect on policies or institutions, how can we reflect on our own efforts, and how do we figure out what to do next?  What if ‘success’ or ‘failure’ are too simplistic to think about the complexity of radical politics?  And who is this ‘we’ anyway?  I don’t have good answers to any of these questions, but hopefully some of them are good questions.

This will sound like the ramblings of an ivory tower intellectual to some.  This is fair enough: I have sh*tloads of privilege and I have been in the school system (public school, then university) for almost my whole life, so my thinking is a product of that.  I’m also a white, middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied man.  I’m also a product of relationships with lots of amazing people and communities  outside academia, who are continually challenging me to grapple with privilege and oppression in everyday life.  I live and work in “Victoria”: Coast Salish Territory, British Columbia, Canada, and I’m interested in politics happening here and elsewhere.

In my experience, activists and community organizers (especially those influenced by feminist, anarchist, anti-racist, queer, and anti-colonial movements) are really attuned to the problems of politics that are usually glossed over: speaking for others, representation, making things clear (or not), demanding unity or cohesion, and navigating all the other complexities that come with political engagement.  So I am trying to reflect on some of the stuff I’m doing, pay attention to what others are doing, and get at some of that complexity of many politics in this blog.