Talks or lectures about food on Vancouver Island tend to begin with the mantra that only a tiny fraction (2%-5%) of the food consumed on the Island is produced here.  Of this, another small fraction is grown without chemical pesticides and fertilizers.  Local, organic food is extremely expensive.  It’s obvious that more food should be grown locally and organically, but the major barrier is that potential farmers can’t get access to land.  It’s too expensive.  Skyrocketing land values are at the root of the crisis of both housing and farming.

Land has been commodified on Vancouver Island since the mid-19^th century when it was surveyed, divided, and sold through colonialism.  Over the 150 years since then, colonialism hasn’t gone away; it has changed and intensified: Victoria and the surrounding region are now increasingly marketed as a destination for tourism and retirement for rich people around the world.  Land on Vancouver Island is now an international commodity, and it has attracted speculators, landlords, developers, and others who profit from the property market.

The speculative real estate market has driven up the cost of housing, and most people who live in Victoria will probably never be able to afford a house here.  For most of us, that means renting.  There has been almost no new rental housing built in Victoria, because developers make more money building condos.  As a result, rental rates in Victoria are also incredibly expensive.

Farmers are in the same boat: they may never be able to afford even a small farm, especially if farming is their only source of income.  A lot of land on Vancouver Island is in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR), a piece of provincial legislation designed to tax people who owns arable land that they aren’t farming.  If you own land within the ALR, the idea is that you’ll farm it, or pay big taxes.  But as an international commodity, a lot of ALR land is currently owned by wealthy people who’ve built huge country estates.  They often lease a portion of their land to be farmed, so that they meet ALR minimums for farming, and get their tax break.  Farmers who lease this land find themselves in precarious lease agreements, with land they can’t live on, and with no long-term stability.  A lot of would-be young farmers have picked up and moved off the Island, or they’ve abandoned farming altogether.

The crucial problem here is that land has become privatized and commodified, and now circulates as an international commodity.  This means huge profits for landlords, speculators and house-flippers.  It also makes it increasingly difficult for poor people to afford to live here, and for farmers to access to land.

Community Land Trusts have been an important response to these problems in other places.  CLTs will not solve these problems, and they do nothing to address the general enclosure of land that continues to underpin colonialism, but they could mitigate the most extreme consequences of private property and real estate speculation.

CLTs remove property from the market and hold it in perpetuity.  A CLT is a non-profit organization that acquires land and then leases it on a long-term basis (often a 99-year lease).  Through the lease model, the CLT continues to own the property, and they lease the land (in the case of farmland) or the dwellings (in the case of housing).  These leases can be sold or transferred, so in effect they become a new commodity.  The crucial difference is that the terms of the lease regulate its resale value, which means that lessees can’t make a big profit from selling their lease.  Because CLTs are non-profits rather than government initiatives, they’re insulated from election cycles and can’t be dismembered by a right-wing majority.  There are a few CLTs in BC, and there’s a Farmlands Trust on Vancouver Island, but the really successful CLTs are in the U.S.

Here’s an example: I live in a collective house, and we pay about $1600 in rent.  The other side of the duplex pays about the same amount.  That’s roughly $3200/month into our landlord’s pockets.  On the other hand, a CLT could buy this duplex and lease it to us.  Our lease fees would help pay off the CLT’s mortgage, and eventually the CLT could own the property without debt.  As lessees, we could sell our lease and get some of our lease fees back, but we wouldn’t make much money.  That’s a good thing: CLT-owned properties become totally worthless to speculators, investors, house-flippers, and others who profit from buying and selling property.  The lease model (often called mutual home ownership) is only attractive to regular people who actually want to live in the home or farm the land.  CLTs often also lease dwellings to non-profit organizations that provide affordable rental housing, or to housing co-operatives.

Now imagine if a significant portion of property was held by CLTs, rather than owned privately.  The properties couldn’t be sold, and lease prices would be regulated, so that they’d be insulated from the skyrocketing cost of houses and farmland in the region.  All the people making big profits off the housing market would be out of the picture, making housing and farmland more affordable and accessible.  CLTs could help make farming more viable, too: farmers could have access to land through stable, long-term leases which would allow them to invest time, energy, and resources in improving the soil, building infrastructure, and other long-term projects.  If they sold their lease, they’d get back what they paid for plus a little to account for inflation and improvements, but they wouldn’t make big profits.

So why aren’t there more CLTs?  There are lots of answers to this question, but a major barrier is money.  CLTs need money in order to buy the properties in the first place.  But the major difference between CLTs and other non-profit housing providers is that CLTs hold the land in trust and then don’t need ongoing subsidies.  So where could the money come from?  Some CLTs have relied on private funding and donations, but to work on a big scale, CLTs need money from governments.  If municipal or regional governments taxed landlords, real estate speculators, and others profiting from the property market, they could generate revenue which CLTs could use to buy properties and remove them from the market.  CLTs would also benefit from access to low-interest mortgages, so they wouldn’t have to buy property up-front.  These possibilities will likely be on the table over the next few years in Victoria and at the Capital Regional District (CRD).  If the CRD approves a region-wide levy to support CLTs, it would have a big impact on farming and housing on Vancouver Island.

CLTs will not solve the crises of housing and farming, but they would definitely help make farming more viable and housing more affordable.  Furthermore, CLTs don’t challenge the way in which land on Vancouver Island has been enclosed, divided, and sold.  The crucial possibility they open is an alternative to private property, where land is insulated from the pressures of the real estate market, making it easier to grow food locally and live here without being rich.

The proliferation of objectified, sexualized women is often called ‘the male gaze,’ but this is not just something that men do to women.  Aren’t we all trained to see female bodies this way?  And isn’t this gaze—this way of seeing—something that comes to be embodied by women and men, albeit in different ways?  How do the ideals of feminine beauty mark female bodies, and who (or what) does the marking, the disciplining, the cutting?

b o r d e r l a n d s raises these questions not by telling us about contemporary patriarchy and objectification but by performing objectification and division.  What makes this female body methodically divide itself?  What is she preparing herself for?  What are we—the audience—watching?  Or rather: what are we doing, and how are we participating in this process of division, objectification, and consumption?

Rather than presenting viewers with an object to interpret, b o r d e r l a n d s presents a puzzle that the audience is immersed in.  The audience doesn’t watch a performance ‘about’ the objectification of female bodies: the audience does the objectifying.  In this way, it invites us to grapple with patriarchy not by telling us what to do, but by confronting us with perspectives and practices that we are trained to ‘do’ all the time.

Here is the full video of the performance, followed by the artist’s statement.

a seminar for dissection

b o r d e r l a n d s

began in a tent somewhere between here and san francisco.

fully clothed in a sleeping bag  wasting precious phone batteries listening to music, scribbling.  wisely left alone by megan, who had let me be to make out with jacob.  i came across an almost forgotten recording.

serene machines.

once recorded for a lover.  probably sobbed a little. imagined a vengeful performance. knives.  and thus b o r d e r la n d s was born in the cliché beginnings of a long since broken heart.

my work comes to me in a short vision, an image.  these early ideas are fluid. they change through the process of their realisation.  they become an entirely new thing as I work with my materials, and discuss the concept.  it becomes a different thing in its actual performance.  a different thing for each person who experiences the performance.  a different thing in our documentation.

through hours of cycling highway 101 this idea developed.

these are not staged events.  i am doing the thing.  and it is representation.

a noise composition.  a voice, a representation of inner dialogue. a response to the violence enveloping my body.  created by the absurdly talented soma, kay and kris spent hours upon hours composing , though much is left to spontaneity.

although the original audio inspiration was by a musician named sunheart, the white ribs are a major inspiration for the audio aesthetics.

i met a man at the ministry of casual living.  we sat on the curb.  this man had wrapped himself in saran wrap and blown fire in the middle of haultain.  we were fast friends. he made the perfect faceless suit to sharpen knives.

the video is suffused with thirty plus hours of editing.  five minutes and twelve seconds of video to be looped.

i don’t want to say anything in particular with my work or tell anyone what to think. just disrupt some of the normative things.  for me this piece is about bodies and complicity.  it is about systems and violence.  it is about the question of resistance.

this piece is also a nod to some of the matrons of performance, Carolee Schneeman, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper, Marina Abromovic, Diamanda Galas, Rebbeca Belmore.

thank you soma, kay, kris for your collaboration and genius, joel for embodying the headless suit, kirk for hours of technical help, medianet for equipment, wendy and visa for location, tegan for support, simon for building stuff, nick for listening, talking and writing, michael for the painting come poster, katie for projector whispering, andy for camera work, gerald for photographs and sunheart for the inspiration.

–serina

The video, with his speech relayed through the human microphone, is almost unwatchable (for me at least).  However, his speech is worth reading, especially now that almost all of the #OCCUPY encampments have been criminalized and dismantled by police: what now?  The full speech is pasted below.  Zizek suggests that #OWS has provided us with the red ink: the capacity to articulate our unfreedom.  It created a political space for people to formulate problems for themselves, rather than starting from electoral politics or a single-issue protest.  I think he puts his finger on one of the central questions for #OWS and other radical movements to work through:

“There is a danger: Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then?

#OWS, like all political struggles that don’t operate through political channels, faces the blackmail of protest.  Either you are a ‘protest movement’ (in which case you should probably have a platform, some demands, and a few leaders) or you are a leaderless, directionless, and without a clear idea of what you want.  Radical movements are always both and neither: there are always attempts to create a coherent “we” and a direction for “us,” coupled with the recognition that any single direction or identity is far too limiting for the messy, complex, open-ended politics that are emerging.  A participant in Occupy Albany sums it up nicely:

Alright you caught us. We don’t have a list of demands. We don’t have a single message. We do not even have a single tactic that we can agree on. None of us know exactly what we are doing, we don’t even know what the best end result would look like. That is what true change looks like. It looks so different, so totally unimaginable, that you do not even know exactly what it looks like or how to get there.

Maybe the most promising thing about #OWS is that it made this something that could be articulated and understood: refusing to articulate a position, platform, or demand is not simply directionlessness; it’s a way of warding off a single direction, and evading the blackmail of protest politics.  This is the real red ink of the Occupy movements: #OWS didn’t ‘lack’ coherence; coherence was refused for something more complex and open-ended.

Here is Zizek:

“[They are saying] we are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is already socialism — for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property. But in the 2008 financial crash-down more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers; the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers; we are the awakening from the dream that is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything; we are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons. The cartoon cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath its ground. Only when it looks down and notices it he falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, ‘Hey! Look down!’

[inaudible] “… In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV, films, and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China; it means people still dream about alternatives, so we have to prohibited this dreaming. Here we don’t think of prohibition because the ruling history has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world — an asteroid destroying all of life, and so on — but we cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.’ This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, ‘war on terror,’ and so on, falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

“There is a danger: Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like, ‘Oh, we were young, it was beautiful…’ Remember that our basic message is, ‘We are allowed to think about alternatives.’ A taboo is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want, but what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want? Remember: The problem is not corruption or greed; the problem is the system which pushes you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process in the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest, a decaffeinated protest. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of the world where to recycle Coke cans to give a couple of dollars to charity, or to buy a Starbucks cappuccino where one percent goes to Third World starving children is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after immense agencies are outsourcing even our love life… MIC CHECK!… We can see that for a long time, we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back.

“We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which collapsed in 1990. Remember that today those Communists are the most efficient, ruthless capitalists. In China today we have a capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy, which means, when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are ‘against democracy.’ The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over. A change is possible.

“Now, what we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality — everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the field of society and economy — there, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for healthcare, they tell you, ‘Impossible! This means a totalitarian state.’ Is there something wrong with the world where you are promised to be immortal but they cannot spend a little more for healthcare? Maybe we have to set our priorities straight. We don’t want higher standards of living; we want better standards of living! The only sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons: the commons of nature, the commons of what is privatized by intellectual property, the commons of biogenetics. For this, and only for this, we should fight. Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here, but the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are ‘really’ Americans have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now, and down there on Wall Street there are bankers who are worshiping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience.

“The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home, and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case. You know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!

As Harvey explains, these crises are part of capitalism itself.  Because it requires perpetual growth and profit, capitalism encounters limits, turns those limits into barriers that it overcomes, produces crises and encounters new limits.  In the 1970s, labour was too expensive.  It overcame organized labour by crushing labour, suppressing wages, and getting access to new labour markets.  But this led to a crisis of demand: people couldn’t buy as much stuff because they were getting paid less.  It overcame this demand problem by giving people credit, so that spending and consumption could be financed by credit card debt and mortgages: households have tripled their debt over the last 30 years.  When the shit hit the fan and the housing market crashed in 2008, states bailed out the banks and corporations.  This created the sovereign debt crisis that the world is in today: states have spent all their moola bailing out banks (and each other) and they’re unable to pay for basic programs and services, let alone pay off their deficits.  The solution, so far, has been austerity: cut social programs, or at least the programs that aren’t necessary for capital accumulation (we definitely still need the prison-and-military-industrial-complex, as well as roads, electricity, communications and other services that businesses need).  Harvey offers no solutions in this video but his analysis leads to an important conclusion: the source of the crisis wasn’t bad accounting, or corrupt politicians, or the greed of Wall Street, or the 1%: the source is capitalism itself.  Capitalism doesn’t solve its problems and crises; it just shifts them around by fucking people over.

Both statements also reveal how the G20 demonstrations go far beyond simple rejection or insurrection, pointing to solidarities, alliance-building, and alternatives that emerge when dominant institutions and practices are contested.  From Lewis’ statement:

…there is one truth that will stay with us forever. The truth that people everywhere are waking up to the glaring injustices that exist in this world and are doing something about it. Everywhere people are recognizing their own power and demanding change in a myriad of ways.

…

The fiction that exists is that there is only one way to act, to think, to hope and to imagine. The fiction that somehow property is more valuable than the health, well being and physical security of human bodies. The fiction that this society is one of equality, justice and respect. I am not interested in keeping this façade alive.

Hopperton’s statement also draws parallels between the G20, the Arab Spring, indigenous land reclamation, and the OWS movements:

Once the streets are controlled by the people, what next? In Cairo, they organized neighbourhood assemblies to protect their communities and feed their residents; they gathered freely to discuss, to make proposals, and ultimately, to offer some compelling alternatives to the system they had previously lived under.

Peter Hopperton’s statement is below, followed by Adam Lewis.  Read more about the G20 arrests and prosecutions on the Conspire to Resist blog.

Peter Hopperton:

I have plead guilty to co-writing a callout entitled, Get off the Fence – a call to go beyond. It was a letter to the many passionate people across the country who share our values of equality, free co-operation, and solidarity with people in struggle, inviting them to participate in a march. In this letter, we posed some questions, and now, a year and a half after the G20, I feel drawn to reflect on them again.

We wrote,

“Will we accept that the elites take away our city and give us back a tiny scrap in which to exercise our freedom? Will we be content to wave a banner, listen to a speech, and go home believing that our voices have been heard?”

This question has been answered in a thousand ways since the day of my arrest, in millions of voices both here and around the world. They have answered No, we will not be content with empty gestures. While I was on house arrest, I spent a lot of time reading the news, watching the way the austerity policies advanced at the Toronto G20 lead to massive resistance in France, then in England, then South Korea and Spain and Italy and Greece.

Like many around the world, I was riveted as the people of Egpyt and Tunisia rose up to overthrow their governments, and I watched them inspire the people of Wisconsin, then people all across the United States to take back space and make for themselves the decisions that affect their communities.

When we wrote, “We will take back our city from these exploitative profiteers, and in the streets we will be uncontrollable,” many chose to hear only a call to chaos and destruction. But to hear only this is to miss something important. The larger significance of this feeling is more in line with the question posed by the freedom fighters of Tahrir Square: Once the streets are controlled by the people, what next? In Cairo, they organized neighbourhood assemblies to protect their communities and feed their residents; they gathered freely to discuss, to make proposals, and ultimately, to offer some compelling alternatives to the system they had previously lived under.

It is the same question the occupy movement asked in Oakland and New York City once they were in control of the squares there: once we have taken back this space, how do we go about creating freedom? It is a question powerfully answered by the people of Grassy Narrows and KI, who, in a struggle that is often life-or-death, managed to take back land from exploitive profiteers while nourishing their cultures and communities.

These are just some of the people and communities who, while I was on house arrest, were not content to just go home. They refused to settle for scraps of freedom.

Locally, many people made the same choice. In Toronto, it has looked like challenging the manufactured budget crisis at city hall that is being used to further attack the most marginalized people of this city. In my city of Hamilton, people are organizing together to confront bad bosses and landlords, to monitor the police in our neighbourhoods, and to maintain community education projects. In my life, it looked like the outpouring of support and generosity that came as the exuberant mobilization against the G20 flowed into a longterm commitment to supporting its prisonners.

The prosecution that lead to my conviction was deeply political from the beginning, and so I believe it’s important to emphasize the wider story of movements for social transformation of this past year and a half. My going to jail is just one small part of this overwhelming current. But there is a personal level to this too. Because of this political prosecution and this political conviction, I may never see my Grandfather again. He is an American who lives in Florida, he fought in the second world war and is now ninety-five years old and can’t travel himself. Up until these charges, I visited him at least once a year, but now it is at best uncertain if I will be able to cross the border again.

The pain of being separated from our loved ones by borders is felt by an increasing number of people as the federal government moves to further restrict immigration. In this context, my situation is not extraordinary. But when telling the story of the G20 Main Conspiracy prosecution though, I want to remember the perspective of a 95 year old veteran who is missing his grandson. I want to honour all the walks we won’t be taking, and all stories that I now will not hear.

I am going to jail today. I have plead guilty and do not contest this. But I remember that whatever happens in the court is not the most important story. Even as this prosecution draws to a close, the truly important stories are ongoing, playing out among allies in liberated spaces everywhere, and in the hearts of my family and the people who care about me. It is those stories I will carry with me as I leave the courtroom today.

Adam Lewis’s statement:
(Nov 28) The truth is indeed stranger than fiction in this case. The truth
is that my guilty friends and I, as well as my former co-accused are not
purveyors of “chaos and mayhem” as we have been made out to be by the
crown and the media. The truth is what occurred on the 26th of June 2010
was not just a so called “riot” but it was also a day of massive
repression by various police and security forces. It was a day that showed
us, and continues to show us, that the police are not accountable to
anyone but themselves and the protection of systems of injustice. The
truth is the criminalization of dissent is far too well known in these
times.

There is also another truth. The truth of imagining a better world.
Imagining a society of people who are committed to helping one another, to
building strong and vibrant communities, to creating justice for and by
themselves. A better world where people live with respect, hope and
dignity, not one of fear, uncertainty and shame. The truth is this is the
better world I am committed to creating.

I am committed to creating this better world from a variety of
perspectives and forms of action. I myself have been involved in political
work for many years at this point, from letter writing and meetings with
MPs and other politicians, to street marches, information and educational
nights, bookfairs and beyond. I also tie my academic work as a university
student into this work, thinking about how we might create the world we
wish to see in all facets of my life. Apparently daring to dream is a
dangerous affair…

The truth is that I am proud of the organizing I have done, the
conversations I’ve had, the friendships I’ve made and the commitment to
social and political change and the resistance that so many have made part
of their daily lives. This doesn’t mean that we all haven’t learned a lot
along the way, but there is one truth that will stay with us forever. The
truth that people everywhere are waking up to the glaring injustices that
exist in this world and are doing something about it. Everywhere people
are recognizing their own power and demanding change in a myriad of ways.
I still believe that this is the way to foster change and create a better
world.

I have accepted a guilty plea in this case, but I must affirm that I still
do not believe that organizing to create something better in a world rife
with injustice should be any crime at all. I want to affirm that creating
something better is possible and that we all must take up this work in
every aspect of our lives. We will have different ideas and take different
actions, but there must be space for us all to dream and imagine what we
ourselves might want to see in this world.

The fiction that exists is that there is only one way to act, to think, to
hope and to imagine. The fiction that somehow property is more valuable
than the health, well being and physical security of human bodies. The
fiction that this society is one of equality, justice and respect. I am
not interested in keeping this façade alive. I am unwilling to believe
that society as it stands now is NOT in a chaotic state or that chaos only
exists in the protest actions of those who work for change. I am
interested in something better.

And so I stand before you today, guilty and ready to accept punishment for
the beliefs, actions and dreams that I have I acknowledge that my
experiences have been influenced by the privileges that I have as an
individual with a variety of social positionings and avenues of access
available to myself. My experience is somewhat unique in this regard. But
this also means I have some responsibility to act. To work toward change.
To imagine something better and commit to a life of action.

So yes indeed truth might seem stranger than fiction, but it is something
worth fighting for.

“I pledge allegiance to the world, nothing more, nothing less than my
humanity. Until the last lock breaks none of us are free…”– Strike
Anywhere

This year, I’m trying to learn more about municipal politics (and urban politics more generally).  I don’t have a lot of knowledge or answers; I just think it’s an important place to experiment.  What follows is some ideas and questions about what it might mean for radicals to engage in municipal politics.

I’m going to vote in the upcoming election on Nov 19th.  And you should too (gasp!)  Not because you are a good citizen and it’s your duty or some crap like that, but because you understand that municipal politics matters whether you like it or not, and (I’m assuming) if you’re reading this, you have some radical political views and you’re not OK with the status quo.  More on that later–I’ll tell you who I’m voting for too, and why.  But this isn’t a simple call to vote–it’s a call to think about municipal politics more generally, and the multiple ways radicals can engage these processes.

For instance, the recent Juan de Fuca controversy (where a developer wanted to pave over acres of forest in order to build a bunch of vacation cabins) would never have happened in the first place without the approval of the municipality and the CRD.  And it would never have been stopped without the work of activists (and councillors) fighting against it in, through, against, and outside city councils, the Capital Regional District, and the Band Council system.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying radical activists should stop the awesome grassroots, non-hierarchical stuff they’re doing (like the Peoples Assembly of Victoria) and get involved in municipal politics instead.  That would be a disaster.  What I am saying is that the more we know and understand municipal politics, the more options and tactics become available.  What I’m asking is this: how can radicals engage with municipal politics in multiple, overlapping, and maybe even contradictory ways?  Is it possible to be flexible enough to work within bureaucracies at some times, and challenge their legitimacy and get in their way at others?

Participating in municipal politics is not going to lead to some revolution or massive transformative change–not in Victoria, anyway.  It’s not a vehicle for creating horizontal relationships or unlearning oppressive behaviours.  Victoria–and increasingly all municipalities in North America–remains caught in a neoliberal race to the bottom with other municipalities: fighting to encourage more crappy tourism, more horrible development, more of the same.  A municipal election is not going to change this.  But it could create way more breathing space for alternatives to corporate capitalism.  It could help alleviate some of the worst excesses of surveillance, policing, sprawl, and corporatization.  And I don’t think we’ll get co-opted just by showing up to vote, or by campaigning in elections, or by participating in institutionalized, bureaucratic politics in other ways.  The more we understand municipal politics (and the severe limitations of them), the more we can start to engage with them pragmatically.

So what does this ‘pragmatic engagement’ look like?  Well, I dunno exactly, and that’s for you to decide, but to start with, I’d suggest that you consider voting in the upcoming municipal election on Nov 19th.  I have never urged people to vote before, and it still feels icky.  But there are good reasons!  You can vote for up to 8; I’m only voting for 4: Ben Isitt, Lisa Helps, Rose Henry, and Philippe Lucas.  There are probably other decent candidates too; I’m just pretty confident that these folks in particular would be useful allies to a lot of ongoing struggles in Victoria.

• Philippe Lucas (an incumbent) has been a constant voice against the gentrification of Pandora Green and the need for a fixed-site needle exchange.  He’s also been working lots on encouraging local food and farmers’ markets.
• Lisa Helps started a micro-credit lending scheme that provides loans to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get one from the banks.  This creates possibilities for incomes that aren’t reliant on corporations and big business.
• Ben Isitt has done tons of work on affordable housing in Victoria.  He’s also an academic with a wicked analysis that he makes accessible, rather than dumbing it down.
• Rose Henry has done loads of grassroots work on homelessness and she’s the only candidate I’ve ever heard talk about (and work on) colonialism and decolonization for more than a few seconds.

Don’t live in Victoria?  Well, other municipalities like Saanich, Central Saanich, Langford, etc are arguably just as important–sometimes more so.  There are lots of politicos, I’m sure, who can tell you the ins and outs of Victoria municipal elections: strategic voting, political influence, who has the best chance of being elected, blah blah blah.  My main reason for voting at all is that these elections are often decided by a margin of 100 votes, so voting actually means something.  Plus there aren’t hundreds of seats like the federal election, so it actually matters who gets elected where you live (sorry Elizabeth May).  It matters because crappy stripmalls, condos, and tourist traps all depend on the support of City council, and if the municipality had different priorities, things would be a little less destructive and messed up.

There are also ways to affect municipal politics beyond the election cycle. 

Here’s one example to consider: a new ‘Consensus Statement on Victoria’s Economic Development Strategy‘ has just been released by a loose network of policymakers, activists, politicians and other people in Victoria.  It talks about the need to support local businesses (rather than large corporations) and focus on projects that nurture community resilience and sustainability.

Many radicals will be ambivalent or outright hostile to this consensus statement: it leaves out any analysis or mention of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, or private property, and the way those processes reinforce economic inequality, big business, and unsustainable ways of life.  But there’s a difference between dismissal and engaging this effort strategically or critically.  The statement is interesting because it’s tuned to municipal politics in Victoria.  Based on who votes right now, no candidate is going to get elected on an anti-capitalist platform.  The City also depends on businesses and property owners for its revenue.  But an anti-corporate, community economics platform could help drive a wedge into municipal debates, where politicians actually have to start making choices between supporting corporations or supporting small businesses and local, community-based economic policy.  It could generate conversations and get people thinking critically about jobs, development, and investment.  Most of the time, municipal politicians just insist they like all business, big and small, and they pretend that corporations aren’t actively destroying alternatives.

Another example beyond election cycles: Neighbourhood Associations often have a lot of sway in determining Official Community Plans, rezoning, and bylaws, which has huge impacts for construction, policing, surveillance, taxation, social programs, and community events.  Neighbourhood Associations (and city councillors) claim to represent their whole neighbourhood, so you’re being spoken for, whether you like it or not.  For example, Neighbourhood Associations were key players in the gentrification of Pandora Green.  They have a lot of authority, and radicals can engage with this authority in multiple ways.

Anyways, municipal politics is not going to stop being bureaucratic, hierarchical, or business-friendly anytime soon in Victoria.  It tends to be dominated by older, white, policy-minded people.  There are lots of paradoxes and traps around co-optation, assimilation, and deradicalization.  But refusing to participate on principle is also a trap, I think.  It’s a conservative reaction to a messed-up system, rather than a creative engagement with it.  What that creative engagement means is an open-ended puzzle, and it will depend on who you are, what struggles you’re involved in, and what your objectives are.  But that puzzle is complex.  I think it’s worth thinking about and messing around with.

For as long as I have been an intellectual and activist I have been involved in conversations with many kinds of people – activists, piece workers, hippies, politicians, punks, farmers, educators, academics, etc, etc, about the problems of society. We have talked about a myriad of systemic problems – from authoritarian political systems to economic injustice to colonization to patriarchy to global warming to dis-embedded and technologically mediated life experiences and thousands of local manifestations of these and other systemic problems.

We who are sensitized to our society know that serious problems exist. However, while holding this discontent, we also know that most people seem to be fine with the systems of social, economic and ecological oppression that are the trademarks of our society: most people watch TV, drive to Wal-Mart, eat factory meat, buy sweatshop clothes, etc.

Now, as we watch and take part in the spread of the Occupy movement across the globe, it seems that we are encountering an amazing opportunity. The exorbitant greed of the wealthy 1% have led to a surge in popular discontent as many people are becoming enraged about the unjust and oppressive characteristics of our societies. The wide purchase of slogans like “We Are the 99%” is unprecedented in the 20 years that I have been politically conscious.

In Victoria a march of over 1,000 people sprang up on October 15^th up with minimal local publicity and the Times Colonist shockingly actually reported that there were 1,000 people in the march. The Victoria Police Department bowed to local conviction and the global movement and has so far allowed campers to stay in Centennial without being harassed. People from diverse sections of society are pissed about corporate financial extortion and are rising up.

However, for many of us, the emergence of the Occupy movement and our own personal interactions with it has been a cause of frustration. Many of us have observed people involved in the movement perpetuating colonial mentalities, as the Occupy name itself flagrantly demonstrates (why are we trying to occupy unceeded Indigenous territory for a second time?). Likewise we have witnessed people engaging in poor-bashing and enacting patriarchal behavior. As was pointed out by Indigenous activist Rose Henry during a speech at the British Columbia legislature on October 15^th, this behavior within a progressive movement is shameful and will result in the perpetuation of the very values that progressives are working to oppose in society.

Many frustrations arise from the practical difficulties of engaging with people who have a diverse multitude of beliefs. It is uncomfortable to stand next to someone arguing that the problems of society are reducible to a lack of individual freedom. The same can be said of standing next to the people who claim that our behavior is manipulated by chem trails. In addition, it is immensely frustrating to participate in the democratic processes of the General Assemblies. Assemblies in Victoria have been marred by people taking up far too much personal space, speaking out of turn and going on rants rather than addressing specific proposals under discussion.

My own involvement as a member of the Finance Committee the People’s Assembly of Victoria (Occupy Victoria) has been exemplary of these frustrations. We have had a difficult time having any proposals approved by the general assembly. This means that after 5 days we do not yet have a bank account set up, let alone having had any general discussion on concrete proposals for what to do with the $1100 dollars that has been collected so far in largely unsolicited donations. As a Committee we have been queried on many things including our relation to the Federal government, accused of valuing money over love, told to give the money away to other organizations and in general mistrusted by many members of the General Assembly. When the Finance Committee has been able to create and put forward a proposal to the General Assembly, we have been presented with new concerns that require us to re-think our proposals from new perspectives.

However difficult this process of attempting to set up a rigorous and transparent finance structure has been, it has been an important co-operative learning experience. And it has been a cardinal demonstration that re-learning communal democratic process is an uncomfortable, frustrating process of engaging with people who are different from us and have different, often conflictual values from us.

Despite this pain and difficulty, it is imperative for us who have been critical of society to engage with people in the contested space of the Occupy movement rather than retreat to a moral or intellectual high ground of non-participation supported by the knowledge that once again the masses are wrong. Such high grounds are available to educated and culture-rich people but they are not intensively democratic spaces. Instead they are spaces in relation to which those who already occupy them educate those who do not speak these discourses or do not embody certain practices.

As activists and intellectuals, we need to step into the space of the Occupy movement and engage politically to sway others to hold our beliefs and follow democratic practices that we find valuable, uncomfortable as this process is. The movement presents one of the rare social spaces in which people are open to new solutions, new ways of thinking. As such, it is a democratic space, although one that is prefigured in important ways, as activists from anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives have pointed out forcefully.

If we do not have the courage or resolve to speak in this emerging space of discontent that is the Occupy movement then others will step into this space and speak for us. As movement elder Grace Lee Boggs has said, “The coming struggle is a political struggle to take political power out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to get this power into the hands of the many, it will be necessary for the many not only to fight the powerful few but to fight and clash among themselves as well.”

This means that the Occupy movement is a challenge that calls us on the left to share our anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian views and communicate our knowledge that resistance to financial exploitation and the other evils facing society must focus on inter-locking systems of oppression. This is a time that these views will be heard more than any other time in recent memory. Those of us who have knowledge of consensus process, media relations, facilitation, outreach strategies, developing semi-permanent rain-proof structures and all the hundreds of other minute skills that will help build a popular movement based around people’s assemblies, resistance to the financial exploitation by elites and the occupation of public space need to share these skills or they will not be passed on and the movement that emerges will suffer because of it.

This sharing, and the shaping of the movement will be a painful process, especially for people who have already experienced oppression. Yet, if we really want to air our discontent and to change society in a positive way, we have to come down to these emerging public political spaces and think, act and organize in these spaces.

UVic Announces Non-Academic Food Growing Initiative!

UVic has announced plans to start growing food extensively on campus.  The University has unveiled plans to develop food-producing gardens on campus and on all 30 acres of the CJVI lands.  UVic says the new initiative is part of a broader commitment to reviving, creating, and sustaining diverse ecosystems, and its transition to a car-free campus.  Some areas will be used for sustainable agriculture, whereas others will be rewilded or converted into permaculture forests.  Bilpatrick promised that the quad will remain a field of grass.  “We want to get rid of as much lawn as possible, but everybody loves playing frisbee on the grass, so we’ll leave the quad as-is,” Bilpatrick said.

UVic plans to complement these non-academic food growing initiatives with an academic component, as part of a new inter-disciplinary research and experiential learning program, and through the creation of a Permaculture, Ethnoecology, Agroecology and Sustainability (PEAS) Research Centre.  The new Centre will be located on UVic’s CJVI lands, which will become a university farm.  Numerous students, faculty, staff and community members have been advocating these changes for some time, but up until now, they had been largely ignored by the University.  “We had convinced ourselves that these projects weren’t economically viable, but we’ve finally escaped that mindset,” said Bilpatrick.  UVic is scrapping its Cedar Hill Corner Property management plan in favour of including students, faculty, and staff members in decision-making about how to convert the land to a farm.

UVic has been heavily criticized for its wasteful maintenance of lawns and ornamental plants, and for its authoritarian response to students who planted gardens on campus.  “It took some time, but we finally realized that we should be using our resources to grow food instead of wasting time, money, and water on lawns and bushes, and greenwashing our activities,” Bilpatrick said.  He credits Food Not Lawns for the change of heart, citing their zine on guerrilla gardening as an inspiration.

Earlier plans to move forward with the student non-academic discipline policy have been cancelled.  The former plan would have created new processes for UVic to punish students, but university officials say the plan was scrapped because they realized it was a waste of time.  “We initially wanted to create and legitimize a process for punishing students that haven’t broken any academic regulations,” said UVic spokesperson Kruce Bilpatrick.  “However, we quickly realized that in terms of non-academic matters, we should be finding ways to involve students in growing their own food, rather than finding new ways to punish them,” Bilpatrick said.

Bilpatrick said that part of this initiative was made possible by a generous donation from the Jeeter V Pustavson School of Business.  “Jeeter called us up and said he wanted his $10 million to be used for farming instead,” explained Alix Bastmalchian, Dean of Business.  “Mr. Pustavson decided that he wanted to contribute to a new program that would promote sustainability and community, rather than individualistic, capitalist values,” Bastmalcian said.  Bastmalchian said he hopes this is part of a broader trend at UVic, towards community-building, reciprocity, sustainability, and away from centralization and corporatization. In the meantime, Bastmalchian and Bilpatrick are urging students to rip up lawns and plant gardens wherever possible.  “Anything is better than lawns,” they agreed.

March 22, 2011  - Coast Salish Territories, Victoria –Victoria’s celebrated Other Urban Repair Squad (O.U.R.S) has painted more “sharrows” along a busy commuter route in Victoria. The markings run along Lansdowne Road, which links downtown with the Camosun and University of Victoria campuses. “Now that it’s spring more folks will be riding their bikes to work and school,” says Yukon Duit, spokesperson for the group. “We do our nighttime urban repair work because of a simple wish to get more people out of their cars and onto their bikes. We’d like to kick off the cycling season on a safe note, and let cyclists know that even though the City has forgotten about their infrastructure needs, we haven’t.”

Sharrows – short for “Shared Use Arrow” – are bicycle-and-chevron markings indicating a shared use lane. The markings are used in cities across North America and Europe on roadways that are too narrow to incorporate a full bike lane.  It’s been nearly a year since guerrilla sharrows were painted on different sections of Hillside and Lansdowne – an area of town which many cyclists agree should have more bike lanes connecting to the downtown core. Yet, neither the CRD nor the Cities of Saanich and Victoria have responded with any further developments.

Another set of guerrilla sharrows running along Lansdowne in front of Camosun College were left untouched by the City of the Saanich – a progressive move that was applauded by the cycling community. “We know from our experience that painting bike lanes is cheap. You can buy a lot of paint with $2-million, so we thought we’d show the Region and City how it’s done. Again,” says Duit.  “For its part, the City is making decisions in the dark, without the input of the cycling community, and at a snail’s pace” claims Duit, pointing to the shutting down of the City of Victoria Cycling Advisory Committee nearly three years ago.
Each year there are 1,300 crashes involving cyclists in British Columbia, and on average, 10 people are killed. When car and bicycle collide, the cyclist invariably loses.

“I was always afraid to bike to school before, but seeing the sharrows on the road has helped me know that cars pay attention to me on my bike” said Eva Moores-Afely when OURS interviewed random cyclists that used the sharrowson their commute to Camosun College last year. “It’s clear that despite touting Victoria as the cycling capital of Canada, the CRD and the City do not see cycling infrastructure as a priority,” states Duit. “None of the City of Victoria’s $189-million 2010 budget was allocated to the Sustainability Department, yet nearly $69-million was spent repairing major vehicular roadways into the city
and $3-million was spent on automobile parkades.”

“The City and the Region needs to put their money where their mouth is, and do more to support commuter cycling,” notes Duit. Bike lanes along the Hillside-Lansdowne corridor would encourage cycling among the University of Victoria and Camosun College communities which see over 34,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff accessing the campuses during the school year. Studies have shown that the biggest barrier to getting more people on bicycles is the perception of danger on the road due to inadequate cycling infrastructure. O.U.R.S Victoria is part of a larger international network of Urban Repair Squads across North America, Europe and South America that encourages people to reclaim ownership and stewardship of urban spaces by constructing urban infrastructure through direct action.

Maybe the best part of this excerpt is that it combines very abstract philosophical debates and concepts with very practical aspects of everyday life, in a way that makes radical philosophy relevant to anti-oppression, activism, and the way we relate to one another.

They discuss what it means to pick things up with different parts of the body (picking up a coffee cup with your mouth, for example) while connecting this to philosophical concepts and questions like “what can a body do?”  This is a very different question than “what is a body?” or “what is the ideal body?” or “what’s the difference between the body and the mind, or body and soul?”

To pose the question of what a body can do helps to decenter the question of the ideal body, and (maybe) enables us to think about the body as a site of connections and interdependencies.  In the context of disability, this means disrupting the dichotomy that constructs disabled people as lacking, or dependent, and able-bodied people as independent and fully-functioning.

This dichotomy is even present in the concept of (dis)ability itself, insofar as it implies that disabled people lack the abilities that ‘normal’ people have.  In contrast to this, thinking about the body as always-already interdependent and connected helps us get rid of the idea that the body is a sovereign, separate ‘thing’ that is closed off from the world.  We all rely on different tools and technologies in everyday life, but some of them seem normal, natural, or optional, whereas others (like the wheelchair) are seen as something that some people are dependent on, because they ‘lack’ the qualities or properties of a ‘normal’ body.

But if we start from the premise that we’re all fundamentally connected and interdependent, and that these connections and interdependencies aren’t something to be eliminated or minimized, then the dichotomy of disability-dependence//ability-independence breaks down.  None of us is autonomous, and those of us who seem ‘normal’ are only so in relation to norms that we’ve established for ourselves.

This alternative way of thinking the body as a site of connection, rather than an autonomous shell, is what David Abram is working through in this clip:

A bit romanticized, perhaps, but Abram is trying to get us to think about the many connections that are unintelligible to us.  Abram blames this on a kind of fear of the booming buzzing mess of life that’s all around us.  From Butler and Taylor’s conversation, we might add that this reluctance isn’t some primordial psychological thing, but something that’s continually inculcated in us, through process of normalization and our continual embodiment or performance of those norms (this is what Butler means by her famous concept of performativity).  Thinking about all these connections opens the possibility of becoming other than what we are–not ‘other’ in relation to a standard–but ‘other’ as a continual process of unfolding change and connection.

What does this mean for disability?  If all of us are always connected and interdependent, does this imply that so-called able-bodied people are no different than so-called disabled people?  No, because we’re always connected in different ways, undergoing different processes.  It means is that all bodies are different, not simply different from one another, but exercising different capacities and connections with the world.

When these capacities and connections deviate from established norms, people face repression, exclusion, and even physical violence.  Butler discusses this in relation to gender and the body.  People whose performance of gender doesn’t conform to norms of masculinity/femininity may face extreme examples, like the man who was thrown off a bridge for the way he walked ‘like a woman’.  In this sense, “it comes down to how people walk, how they use their hips, what they do with their body parts, what they use their mouth for, what they use their anus for…”  Reactionary violence to these deviations from the norm are visceral and emotional, but they also stem from philosophical essentialism: the idea that bodies and body parts have distinctive, natural, or normal functions.  The body, and its parts, are for something, and people face all kinds of oppression when they don’t conform to these norms–when they use their bodies differently.

To ask ‘what can a body do?’ is to begin to think about our bodies in all of their potential connections and capacities, not just the ‘normal ones’ but also the ones at the extreme.  This doesn’t guarantee that any of these uses will be ‘good’ or ‘emancipatory’ (and maybe these modes of judgement are even part of the problem) but this question does open up a potential space for experimentation, and for thinking about difference in a way that isn’t reliant on essences, norms, natures, and the other dichotomies that we’ve inherited.  Then we can start asking practical questions about what it means to make space for difference, not simply by accomodating or including, but by dismantling the processes of normalization in our society, and the philosophical baggage that comes along with them.  What can your body do, and what might be done with it?