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The Mixed Media gallery

Words and photos by Sarah Mann
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2010

Two downtown neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario - James St. North and Landsdale - have recently been the site of several skirmishes in a gentrification war waged in the media, art galleries and on the streets themselves.

James St. North is the vibrant hub of a burgeoning arts community. Busy cafés and bars owned by Portuguese and Italian immigrants who have called the neighbourhood home for decades sit next to swanky new art galleries showcasing the work of local artists. Just east lies the Landsdale neighbourhood, home to some of Hamilton’s poorest residents, including sex workers and other people living or working on the streets. These two neighbourhoods have become focal points of a fiery debate on surveillance, gentrification and the division of public space within Hamilton’s downtown core.

James Street North

Exemplified by two art exhibits and the media coverage that surrounds them, the debate over the right to space in Hamilton reflects similar gentrification struggles being waged in cities across the country in pursuit of sanitized downtown cores pandering to a “creative class” of young urban professionals (for more info on the “creative class, click here).

In May 2008, creative class theorist Richard Florida was the keynote speaker at Hamilton’s day-long economic summit. The Hamilton Spectator reported his proclamation that “you can’t help but be part of a boom, you can’t really miss,” given Hamilton’s location in the cross-border “mega-region” that Florida described as stretching from Waterloo, through Montreal and Toronto, and into New York state. It was the city’s first economic summit, with more than 125 of “Hamilton’s most powerful voices in business, the arts, government, social services, health and education” in attendance, who called for a reinvention of Hamilton’s image within three to five years, according to the Spectator. The city of Hamilton began full-force promotion of the Hamilton Creative City Initiative to support the creative economy in 2009.

Gore Park.

Gentrification in Hamilton’s core

To support the business of art, Hamilton’s downtown core has been subject to various efforts to “clean up” the streets, including the introduction of 24-hour video surveillance, increased police foot patrols, and legal and illegal evictions from heritage buildings to make way for businesses serving young, hip consumers. As developers work to re-create space for the incoming creative class, people living in poverty, who have long resided in the downtown core, are being forced out. The neighbourhoods of James St. North and Gore Park, the heart of downtown Hamilton, have borne the brunt of these changes - both neighbourhoods feature a special police foot patrol, 24-7 video surveillance and more assigned police presence than any other area of the city.

Acclamation Bar and Grill, James Street North

Public discussion around the cleansing of the downtown core has been especially disdainful towards sex workers. Articles in the Hamilton Spectator have cited sex workers, along with other perceived evils like high crime rates, panhandling, unsightly businesses and loiterers, as barriers to a thriving downtown economy. One Spectator article, describing the eviction of tenants from the historic Hotel Hamilton to make room for creative entrepreneurs and a trendy coffee shop, noted that the building “had ended up as a rundown boarding house that spawned numerous complaints from nearby merchants and residents about prostitution and hardcore drugs.” Similar articles, notable for the consistent exclusion of the voices of the people implicated, have suggested more policing, a ban on social services and the creation of a pedestrian mall as possible solutions.

In nearby Landsdale, prostitution and drugs have been cited as problems of “epidemic” proportion, and blame for everything from low property values to building abandonment and demolition has been attributed to the “decay” of the downtown core. In an article for H Mag in May 2010, landlord Julie Gordon expressed her sense of urgency in pursuing efforts to cleanse the downtown: “the status quo in Hamilton is unacceptable. . . if we do nothing the social climate in Hamilton will not stay the same. It will deteriorate.” Gordon went on to express her desire for “a safe home, good neighbours and pleasant surroundings” in the inner city. Like many of downtown’s wealthier and more powerful citizens, she cited the threats to this ideal as “prostitutes, drug-users and the homeless.”

Amber Dean, a post-doctoral fellow at McMaster University and resident of the Landsdale neighbourhood, described her experiences with the neighbourhood association as alienating. “It felt like to voice an opinion that differed from the majority there was just too risky, and that my input wouldn’t be valued,” Dean said. She recalls her impression that their goal was “to clean up the neighbourhood, and that this meant getting rid of anyone the association deemed ‘undesirable.’ There seemed to be little understanding of the effects of poverty or injustice, and little willingness to consider the bigger issues that were at stake.” After a few meetings, Dean stopped attending. “Their law-and-order agenda seemed unshakable,” she explained.

It’s an all-too-common case of gentrification, where class divisions determine the division and use of public space. Gentrification displaces poor and marginalized populations from physical and cultural spaces, and transforms them into spaces used exclusively by the more affluent. In a city where class divisions between white and racialized groups, men and women, able and disabled persons and cisgendered and transgendered persons are magnified, the wealthier class that moves into a gentrified space is inevitably predominantly white, male, able and cisgendered. While it is difficult to count the number of people displaced by gentrification - they are necessarily not around to be counted - it can be helpful to examine the ways that space and the discourses around space have been transformed to meet the needs of the wealthy.

Young men pose beneath the video surveillance warning sign on James St. N. They spoke about resistance to, and white privilege within, surveillance culture, acknowledging the systems of classism and racism that criminalize their assembly in this space.

The creative crass: Moral outrage as art

The transformation of space by and for a wealthier class in Hamilton is exemplified by the recent work of local “poverty porn” artists, most notably Gary Santucci, whose surveillance and slide show project “The Hood, The Bad and The Ugly” was exhibited at You Me Gallery in September 2009, and Larry Strung, whose April 2010 exhibition at a nearby gallery was called “A Child of God.” Both exhibits consisted largely of photos of women presumed to be doing sex work. Both were collections of images of women in the Landsdale neighbourhood, exhibited in the James St. North neighbourhood. And both shed light on the invasive, forceful and colonizing nature of gentrification in the city.

Santucci’s exhibit was a slide show presented on several TV screens which displayed photos of several different women - some whose faces could be identified - who were photographed standing alone on the corner near his Landsdale gallery and performance space, The Pearl Company. One photo showed a partially nude woman seeking privacy to urinate behind a building. The photos were taken from surveillance cameras mounted on the walls and roof of the gallery and from Santucci’s personal camera, shot from the third-story window of the gallery. “Something must be done,” exclaimed a caption on one screen.

The Pearl Company

Strung’s exhibit included a series of framed portrait-style photographs of a woman whom he met on the same corner outside The Pearl Company, using drugs in her apartment. The accompanying narrative described the woman as a prostitute and addict who could be saved from her destructive lifestyle by faith and prayer. It included her home address and described Strung’s disappointment in her reluctance to model for him after he offered her $20. The narrative accompanying the photos struck a familiar chord with one local sex worker I spoke to, who likened Strung’s description of the photo shoot - watching the woman so she wouldn’t “run off,” and being unwilling to leave after an hour because he didn’t get the photo he wanted - to the disrespectful ways clients talk about street workers on Internet message boards.

It was a stunning juxtaposition of the experiences of women who do sex work and the experience of a privileged male artist who saw a sex worker as a blank slate for his artistic and ideological expression. What for sex workers is an issue of labour and human rights - negotiating with clients, maintaining privacy, adequate pay for their work, the right to refuse service - was transformed by the exhibit into an attitude of ownership and occupation. Given the dynamics of a white man photographing a black woman in the context of gentrification and the criminalization of sex work, the colonization of sex workers’ cultural space is palpable in these images and the spectacle of their display.

In both cases, the demeaning portrayal of women doing sex work in the Landsdale neighbourhood was presented for viewing by people frequenting the James St. North neighbourhood, where the ownership of public and private space by the affluent has been more or less secured. The surveillance style of the art in both exhibits juxtaposes the privileged position of the artists as entitled to the space with the sex worker subjects as persons whose right to privacy in public space and even their own living quarters has been usurped. This invasion was coupled with a lack of consent. In the case of Santucci’s exhibit, the sex workers he photographed were unaware of his surveillance. Those who found out were very distressed, whether they were featured in the exhibit, or just familiar with the corner as one of their workplaces. The woman in Strung’s exhibit consented to be photographed after what his own narrative described as months of pressure: he asked her to model for him every time he saw her, and eventually she agreed to do so for a paltry $20 payment. Activists contested the ethics of displaying Santucci’s images without the models’ consent, and in the case of the “Child of God” exhibit, were successful in convincing the artist and the gallery to remove the photos.

The controversy surrounding these two exhibits brings to light the politics of space, location and displacement at play in the surrounding communities. Keeping in mind that “space” is often as cultural and emotional as it is physical, we see gentrification at work in these images. From the streets where sex workers and other unvalued or criminalized labourers work to the cultural dialogue about the display of images of sex workers’ bodies, space is made over to attract wealthier and more powerful classes.

Safer Communities and Neighbourhoods Act

“The Hood, the Bad and the Ugly” remained in the gallery for its full run of about a month. As it was an exhibit intended to open dialogue about crime in the Landsdale neighbourhood, it generated discussion - and publicity - in the media. There was also reaction within the community. While sex workers were horrified by their representation in art, the Landsdale Area Neighbourhood Association was teaming up with nearby neighbourhoods for a community meeting at Wentworth Baptist Church.

The meeting followed hot on the heels of Santucci’s September exhibit, and provided a forum for the scapegoating of sex workers and drug users as the causes of the community’s perceived crime problems. Posters and a petition were circulated to advertise the meeting. “Drug dealers and Prostitution,” read the bold lettering. “Working together to get them off our streets and out of our neighbourhood!” Community members at the meeting were visibly hostile, describing sex workers as predators of children, dangerous and violent criminals, and insane drug users who, if you talk to one, will “stab you with an AIDS needle.”

In many communities, propaganda campaigns against sex workers and other “illegitimate” users of public space culminate in legislative solutions to the perceived threat of urban decay. These can take the form of anti-loitering bylaws, building code crackdowns, police sweeps against sex workers and panhandlers, or a piece of legislation that has recently become popular called a “SCAN” Act. Safer Communities And Neighbourhoods Acts have been enacted in Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Northwest Territories and Yukon, and a SCAN was recently proposed and defeated in Ontario. The legislation allows “problem” properties to be emptied via municipal and provincial court authorities. Targets are crack houses and common bawdy houses, many of which are rental properties used as living and working spaces, and evictions can be completed in as little as two weeks.

SCANs take different forms in different provinces, but the system for identifying “problem” properties is usually complaints-driven, and community members are encouraged to observe and report their neighbours. The acts of surveillance and social control become a cycle: surveillance makes some people more visible than others, amplifies perceptions of danger and threat, and the method of eliminating that threat incorporates more surveillance. The spaces occupied by outsiders in the community are continually squeezed by scrutiny and displacement efforts.

Sex workers are people in your neighbourhood

Recognizing sex workers as legitimate members of communities with the right to earn a living in public spaces may expand their opportunities for support and self-protection. In New Zealand, where sex work is decriminalized - prostitution is not a violation of the criminal code and is subject to the same labour and business laws as other forms of employment - a five-year review of sex work’s new legal status revealed that the number of people doing sex work stayed about the same, while opportunities for coercion and exploitation were reduced and most sex workers reported being better off.

According to Crystal, a former outdoor sex worker in Hamilton’s Landsdale neighbourhood, sex workers are “safer when we’re together [on the streets].” When sex workers are displaced through imprisonment or rehabilitation programs, they are often scattered across the city, which breaks down their system of mutual support. Decriminalization is an important goal, but defence of basic rights cannot wait until “after the revolution.” The needs of street labourers can be met now within the existing political, economic and social frameworks that protect other workers’ human, civil and labour rights. The work of activists and concerned community members should be first and foremost to promote the rights of sex workers and other street labourers to the spaces they occupy, and then to tear down the walls that prevent illegitimate labourers from accessing that right.

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Nandita Sharma is an activist, scholar, and the author of Home Economics: Nationalism and the Making of ‘Migrant Workers’ in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2006), and “Anti-Trafficking Rhetoric and the Making of a Global Apartheid” (NWSA #17, 2005). In this interview, she addresses the effects of anti-trafficking on migrant women doing sex work. She critiques the notion of “trafficking” in the context of the increasing necessity of global migration and the tightening of borders in the global North. According to Sharma, border restrictions, rather than “trafficking,” are the biggest impediment to the self-determination of (im)migrant women in Canada.

Jessica Yee is the director of the Native Youth Sexual Health Network. In this interview, she describes the conditions of ongoing and under-reported exploitation of Indigenous women in Canada, critiques the conflation of “trafficking” and sex work, and explains the oppressive effects of the anti-trafficking movement on Indigenous women’s self-determination.

Robyn Maynard interviewed Sharma and Yee in February 2010 for No One Is Illegal Radio’s edition “Sex Work, Migration, and Anti-Trafficking.” Edited excerpts of that interview were published in Upping the Anti #10, and are reprinted here with permission.

Nandita Sharma

"If we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all our exploitation. . . We don't give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation."

How do the government and media use the idea of “sex slavery” to create moral panic? What are the consequences for migrant women doing sex work?

Without a doubt, the moral panic against sex work is fuelling the push for anti-trafficking legislation. Most people who are pushing the anti-trafficking legislation also want to eliminate the option for women to enter into sex work. And they want to do that by further criminalizing sex work activity, especially by criminalizing the entry of migrant women into the sex industry.

For example, in Canada the migration of women into sex work is increasingly scrutinized by the state. Not only are there police who continuously raid sex work establishments like strip clubs and massage parlours under the guise of “protecting public morality” or public health; we also have immigration police who are raiding sex work establishments looking for so-called “victims of trafficking.”

Of course, the vast majority of women who migrate do not enter into sex work. But for those women who do, one of the greatest vulnerabilities they face is their status in the country. The lack of legal or permanent status makes migrant women involved in sex work more vulnerable. Many women who are migrants in the sex industry are employed on temporary work visas in the entertainment industry - the visas given to sex workers were recently squashed by the government - or they are forced to work illegally. It is impossible to legally get into Canada as a sex worker and enter as a permanent resident. You don’t get “points” for being in the sex industry, even though there is high demand. The anti-trafficking legislation is another way to attack women’s ability to work in the sex industry, and it does so in a way that further legitimizes (and relies on) the idea that no woman should ever be engaged in sex work. Ultimately, the moral panic against sex work makes migrant women more vulnerable in the sex industry.

What does anti-trafficking legislation fail to address in terms of women’s rights and agency? What are the root causes of what gets called “trafficking”?

The key issue is to understand why, over the last decade, national governments around the world have been pushed to pass anti-trafficking legislation. There is increased migration in the world today, largely resulting from practices of dispossession and displacement through political and economic crises and war. And yet, alongside increased migration, most states - especially in the so-called “First World” - have implemented restrictive policies that prevent more and more people from entering these states legally. The result is that most people who enter these states are considered to have “illegal” status.

Anti-trafficking legislation is used to target so-called “illegal migration.” Instead of placing the blame for migrants’ vulnerability on the restrictive immigration policies of national states that force people into a condition of illegality, it blames those who are actually facilitating their movement across borders. In today’s world, where it is increasingly difficult to enter First World states legally, it is also next to impossible to enter without someone’s help. It’s impossible to simply get on a plane, get on a boat, get into a car, or walk across the border, without some kind of official identity papers. It’s very difficult to get forged visas or forged passports, and to cross without someone helping you across that border. For many of the world’s migrants, the urgent need is assistance with their movement. Anti-trafficking legislation criminalizes people who facilitate migrants’ entry into national states. I think this is the underlying agenda behind anti-trafficking legislation. It offers ideological cover to target both the migrants themselves and the people who facilitate their movement. In this way, anti-trafficking legislation strengthens border policing.

How can we fight the exploitation of women that takes place in sex work without resorting to anti-feminist hysteria and characterizing women engaged in sex work as victims of trafficking?

I think that we need to take our cue from sex workers themselves. Sex worker organizations are very clear on the steps needed to ensure safe, dignified, decent working conditions for women in the sex industry. At the top of the list is decriminalization. The anti-trafficking agenda moves in exactly the opposite direction. It actually further criminalizes sex work by targeting those people, especially in the case of migrants, who are facilitating women’s entry into sex work. Basically, there is a fundamental disagreement between those who want to end sex work and those who want to make sex work safer for women. The fundamental disagreement is whether or not women have the right to engage in sex work. Most people in the anti-trafficking camp believe that there is no way that women can ever engage in sex work without being fundamentally exploited. I disagree with that, as do most sex workers’ organizations. Most of them point out that sex work can be made safer, can be made more dignified - and the way to do that is to stop demonizing those who are engaged in it. Along with decriminalizing sex work, we can support union organizing within the sex industry. This is exactly what some sex workers’ organizations in India, Bangladesh, San Francisco, and elsewhere have attempted. We need to understand sex work as one of the options available to women in a capitalist economy. We need to work, and sex work is a viable option for many women.

Ultimately, if we want to end the exploitation of women, we need to challenge capitalism, which is the basis for all of our exploitation. Whether we’re working in the sex industry, a restaurant, or in a university, we’re being exploited by those who are benefitting from our labour. So, if we want to end exploitation, we don’t give more power to the state to criminalize workers, we give more power to workers to end their exploitation. Of course, being a university professor is not demonized like sex work is. So we also need a major attitude adjustment. Feminists have long been demanding freedom for women, including control over their own bodies and sexuality. Supporting women in the sex industry and recognizing them as part of the broader collective of workers is part of this struggle.

Those of us who are critical of anti-trafficking rhetoric and legislation are often accused of not caring about women. We’re accused of not caring about women who are kidnapped, women who are beaten up, women who are enslaved or not paid wages, women who have their passports and other documents withheld from them so that they’re rendered immobile. In response to these accusations, the important thing to remember is that all of those crimes are already addressed in the Criminal Code of Canada. It is illegal to kidnap people, to beat them up, to rape them, to not pay them wages, to withhold their documents without their permission, etc. Why do people think new anti-trafficking legislation will make women safer when the police seem completely disinterested in enforcing Criminal Code measures that already exist to protect women? Instead of anti-trafficking legislation, we should be demanding that workers in the sex industry are protected under occupational health and safety regulations, as all workers should be. We should demand that illegalized workers have access to the same rights and entitlements as any other worker in the country, which would of course require that we eliminate the distinction between illegal and legal workers. There are many things we can do that do not rely upon further criminalizing people’s movement across borders. This is the challenge we must pose to people who tell us that the only way to protect women - especially in the sex industry - is to criminalize the people who facilitate their entry into it.

Restrictive immigration policies are causing much of the exploitation of “trafficked women.” How do we fight for migrant women’s safety?

Ultimately, the only way that migration is going to be safe for anyone is to decriminalize it. We need to ensure that people have the autonomous right to move whenever they decide it is in their own best interest. If women today could be assured that when they needed to move they could do so freely - without being criminalized, without needing forged papers, without having to get smuggled into the back of a boat or the underbelly of a car - then they would be much safer.

Let me give you two examples of how anti-trafficking legislation actually increases the vulnerability and exploitation that many women migrants face. First, anti-trafficking legislation targets people who are helping women cross borders. This raises the cost of moving across borders and, as a result, women have to go further into debt in order to do so. Second, by imposing these enormous penalties - which, in Canada, can include a life-sentence and in the United States can include a death sentence - those facilitating movement make migrants use routes that are less safe. People are being forced to cross borders in very vulnerable places like deserts and mountains, places where hundreds of migrant bodies are found dead every year. Anti-trafficking legislation is thus making migration less safe for women.

Jessica Yee

"The government and the media are using the ideas of the left – ideas of human rights and labour rights – to advance right-wing projects."

Please speak about the situation faced by Indigenous women in Canada in terms of forced labour and exploitation. What do you think about the use of the term “trafficking” given that “Canada” is actually Indigenous territory?

Indigenous women have faced forced labour and exploitation for 500 years. What is interesting is that this seems to be a revelation for the media right now; all of a sudden, people are aware of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, and aware that young Aboriginal girls under the age of 18 are eight times more likely to experience sexual assault than other women in Canada. I find it interesting that suddenly this seems to be a priority for both mainstream and alternative media. If you were to ask any Indigenous person if it is new that women are being displaced from communities and beaten out of positions of power and political significance, they would tell you it’s not.

I think that the term “trafficking,” and the way that it’s used in Canada, doesn’t speak to the reality that Aboriginal women face in our own communities. I see a lot of ongoing internal oppression and lateral violence as an Aboriginal woman. Forced labour and exploitation is a reality for many Aboriginal women. It’s not new and it happens in many different forms. As an Aboriginal woman, I don’t think I’m less likely to be sexually assaulted working in an office than working on the street - I feel like there’s an equal chance that I’m going to be assaulted, maligned, and subjected to violence, and that there’s an equal chance that the government, the police, will not help me.

It is important to consider how women are valued on the basis of race in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal society. Violence committed against Aboriginal women is normalized. Aboriginal women are deemed less important than non-Aboriginal women. This is something that we’ve internalized, and that is mirrored in society.

Women around the world, especially racialized women, shoulder the burden of labour that doesn’t get acknowledged or reported. Forced labour and exploitation are reported even less. When we’re talking about “trafficking,” people assume we’re talking only about sex work, and only about cross-border trafficking. We need to remind ourselves that sexual slavery and the forcing of sexual acts are not the only kinds of exploitation, even though they seem particularly salacious compared to other forms of forced labour. We also need to understand that “trafficking” takes place within nation states, and against Indigenous people.

Many people uncritically accept the conflation of trafficking and sex work. The same people who think it is taboo to talk about sex are the first to suggest that this is the number one issue of forced labour, but it’s not. And people who are actually being trafficked and moved against their will receive no attention because the state is so focused on raiding massage parlours and arresting women who are sex workers. This neglect occurs in the name of righteousness and “saving” women, yet it is merely the further colonization of women’s bodies, women’s spaces, and women’s choices.

Can you talk about how the anti-trafficking movement affects Indigenous women who do engage in sex work? What is your analysis of the government’s efforts to present anti-trafficking as support for “women’s rights”?

Recently, Saskatoon Conservative MP Brad Trost attempted to de-fund the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health and the international Planned Parenthood Fund because they perform abortions and support sex workers. In defence of de-funding, it was suggested that he really cares about women and is concerned with how men are attacking women, forcing them to use sex work as a means of employment, and thus have abortions. I think that this is important because it seems like the government and the media are using the ideas of the left - ideas of human rights and labour rights - to advance right-wing projects.

The common misconception that “trafficking” refers only to sex work reflects people’s ignorance of the realities of sex work. A lot of anti-trafficking campaigns aren’t organized by sex workers. The campaigns involve re-victimizing.

In Toronto, we’re really lucky. The Native Youth Sexual Health Network has partnered with Maggie’s (The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project) to form the first harm reduction pro-choice project - pro-choice means that we respect women’s choices to engage in sex work - called the Aboriginal Sex Worker Outreach and Education Project. It is the first project in Canada by and for Aboriginal women that isn’t exit-focused; it doesn’t solely tell women to get out of the trade. As someone who has engaged in sex work over the years, I know that exit-based programs are not working.

I think it’s dangerous that the government tries to present “anti-trafficking” campaigns as advocacy for women’s rights. And I think it’s really important for people to not only stand up against it, but also to challenge prevailing misconceptions of sex work. These misconceptions are affecting Indigenous women throughout the world. A crude example of these effects is MTV’s “MTV Exit” campaign, in which they team up with UNAIDS and go to countries where they think there is a lot of “sex trafficking” to try to rescue women. Indigenous women in these countries are then arrested on suspicion of being sex workers. Their human rights are under assault by this western imposition in the name of “anti-trafficking.” So, in addition to the impact on Indigenous women in Canada, we’re also responsible for stuff that’s happening throughout the world to other Indigenous countries and people.

If criminalizing sex work is not a solution, what is a more meaningful way to struggle for justice?

First, a meaningful way to struggle for justice is to actually work with sex workers. Take their lead, just like you would with any other ally-based movement. Second, we have to address people’s great unwillingness to talk about sex and sexuality more generally. Without these conversations people will have a difficult time coming to terms with real trafficking and real exploitation.

We need to have frank discussions about sex work, and about sex and sexuality more generally. These topics are particularly taboo in Indigenous communities. This is because colonization is such a real presence for us. And if you’re going to take away a people’s most powerful abilities, you’re also going to take away their sexuality, which is why I think we have members of our own communities who conflate “trafficking” with sex work and assume it is all “bad for women.” We’re in survival mode and trying to keep our communities together, trying to keep our communities free of violence, and ain’t nobody helpin’ us! And if nobody’s helping us, then we get left to our own terms and our own measures to deal with things.

There is a lot to discuss. I get many questions from people asking about youth and sexual exploitation, for example. Even within the sex worker movement, people do not agree that young people have the right to engage in sex work. I recommend that people check out the Young Women’s Empowerment Project in Chicago, which is the only organization for young women engaged in sex work between the ages of 13 and 24. We work with them quite a bit in the United States. They just produced an amazing research report on your question: what’s a more meaningful way to struggle for justice? Their answer is that we should listen to to the people who are impacted, and shut up a little bit more! Respect the ways we decide to organize. People need to recognize that there are so many spaces that aren’t safe for us, as sex workers, to be real and frank about our lives and our struggle. In the meantime, correct people who are confused about what really constitutes trafficking and exploitation. More importantly, teach people about self-determination - not just over land, but over our own bodies.

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By Todd Gordon
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2010

Canada has been active indeed on the world stage of late, but hardly as the force for good many Canadians imagine their country to be. Since June 2009, Canada has supported a coup in Honduras; three Salvadoran activists who were organizing against Canadian mining company Pacific Rim Mining Corporation have been assassinated; one activist in Mexico has been assassinated for opposing yet another Canadian mining company, Blackfire Exploration; Foreign Affairs and International Trade has refused to advance a law to impose human rights standards on Canadian companies operating abroad; and Canada has taken a lead role in the free-market-oriented reconstruction of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in January, which follows Canada’s participation in the 2004 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the imposition of an aggressive neo-liberal regime on the country. At the same time, of course, the Canadian military has been participating in the ongoing occupation of Afghanistan, propping up a profoundly corrupt regime whose members include warlords with atrocious human rights records.

I could offer many more examples of Canada’s retrograde behaviour around the world. But these cases should suffice in challenging the notion that Canada is a benign force on the international stage or that its bad behaviour is restricted to a few isolated cases. What we see instead is a systemic pattern of self-interested, violent and destructive behaviour that cries out for a deeper analysis.

To make sense of Canada’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy and to comprehend the wreckage that Canada and its business interests are leaving in their wake as they stampede through the Third World, it’s important to grasp the significant transformations Canadian capitalism has undergone over the last 20 years of neo-liberal entrenchment. Canada, we must finally recognize, is an imperialist power; members of its ruling class think and act like imperialists. Support for coups and violent conflicts with local communities aren’t accidents, nor should the Left expect a change in policy without serious popular mobilization.

A mere middle power?

Many Canadians who take for granted that the United States is an imperial power are still reluctant to describe Canada in the same way. The U.S. is indeed the global superpower, and has a long history of invasions and support for reactionary regimes abroad to protect its own interests. Given the prominent role it has played in international affairs since the Second World War, its actions draw a great deal of scrutiny and criticism. But imperialism isn’t the sole domain of superpowers. No one would claim that Britain was the only imperialist nation when it was imposing its empire around the globe a century ago, even if it was the most powerful such force.

Rather, imperialism is about relations of power and domination in which countries (usually) of the Global North systematically drain the wealth and resources of the South via economic, political and military means. It’s driven by the contradictory dynamics of capitalist accumulation – particularly the overaccumulation of capital, in which too many factories, big box stores, mines, etc. are created to be deployed profitably – that underlie the economy’s recessionary tendencies and create constant pressure on companies to expand geographically in search of new markets. Imperial relations, in other words, are embedded in the system of global capitalism. They transcend superpowers, however important the latter are in setting and enforcing the rules of the game.

So how does Canada fit into this picture?

Canada isn’t some mere middle power riding the coattails of our superpower neighbour. That view of Canada was never really accurate, even before the dawn of the neo-liberal age. Canada has always had a self-interest to promote; Canadian capital has always had a controversial presence in the Third World, whether in banking in the Caribbean, manufacturing in apartheid South Africa or mining in General Suharto’s Indonesia. But the neo-liberal era, with heightened competition among multinational corporations and the aggressive market liberalization imposed on the Third World by the North (including Canada) has seen an unprecedented international expansion of Canadian capital.

The best measure for assessing the degree of Canadian capital’s penetration of third world markets is foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment is cross-border investment (usually by multinational corporations) that represents at least 10 per cent of equity in the targeted asset, whether it be a factory, mine or newly privatized utility. It’s an important indicator of foreign penetration of national economies because 10 per cent equity typically gives the investor some degree of managerial control. Often, though, the equity stake is much higher than 10 per cent. Foreign direct investment has been a driving force behind neo-liberal globalization. It has increased significantly in the last 20 years, more rapidly in fact than the world economy as a whole. As many observers point out, foreign direct investment is one of the principal ways by which capital from the North has gained economic power and influence in the South during the neo-liberal period.

Canada is now one of the world’s major foreign direct invest­ors. By 2007, the cumulative stock of Canadian direct investment had reached $514.5 billion, and Canadian investors were active in 150 different countries. Over the last several years Canada has consistently ranked in the top 10 of the world’s biggest foreign investor nations in absolute terms. Among G8 nations, Canada has the fourth highest ratio of outward direct investment stock to gross domestic product. But it’s not just the growth of Canadian direct investment that’s important here: the global distribution of these investments has changed in important ways in the last couple of decades, expressing shifting preoccupations of Canadian capital.

As third world economies were being pried open by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the 1980s and ’90s, Canadian investors began to exploit the cheap labour, natural resources and sale of public assets in the region at an unprecedented rate. In the early 1950s, the Third World received approximately 10 per cent of total Canadian direct investment stock, but this has increased sharply since the early 1990s; by 2007 it received over 27 per cent. Canadian investment in the U.S. similarly reflects the overall shift in investment destination: from 1990 to 2007, the share of Canadian direct investment in the U.S. fell from 60 per cent of total Canadian direct investment worldwide to 44 per cent, even though Canadian assets in the U.S. tripled in absolute terms. In 2007, among G8 countries Canada had the second highest level of direct investment in third world countries as a proportion of gross domestic product. At the same time, income from direct investment in the Third World as a proportion of total investment income earned abroad has risen significantly, from just under 25 per cent for the years 1973-79 to over 45 per cent for 2000-07. In 2007, total after-tax income from Canadian direct investment in the South reached $18 billion.

Canadian investment is particularly strong in banking and mining, and Canada’s mining industry is the largest in the world. But Canadian companies are also prominent in sweatshop manufacturing, hydroelectric development and telecommunications, among other industries.

This dramatic growth of Canadian investment in the Third World has had serious repercussions for the communities where the investment is undertaken. Across industries and across regions, Canadian companies, often with the diplomatic and financial support of the Canadian state, are actively displacing indigenous and subsistence communities, undermining unions and engaging in ecological destruction. As a result, they face stiff resistance wherever they go. Conflict with local communities is a common feature of Canadian investment in the Global South, and has become increasingly well documented.

The necessary violence of imperialism

Canadian foreign and military policy developments over the past 20 years have been shaped by the rapid growth of Canadian capital’s presence in the Global South and the ensuing conflicts with local communities and anti-neo-liberal governments. Canada’s ruling elites have a clear stake in ensuring that the Third World remains a safe place to do business. Their aim is to ensure – to use the language of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) – “stability,” “predictability” and “transparency” for Canadian investors. Not surprisingly, imposing liberalized market relations (which constitute “stability,” “predictability” and “transparency”) and exploiting the South have become a central goal of Canadian foreign policy, as evidenced in policy documents coming out of DFAIT and CIDA. This in turn entails a more aggressive attitude towards any country or organization deemed to be threatening Canada’s financial interests or the sanctity of liberalized free markets more generally.

The aggressive pursuit of one-sided trade and investment agreements that lock in corporate rights over and above the human and environmental rights of local communities is a good example. This has been most advanced in Latin America and the Caribbean, where Canadian direct investment in the South is the strongest. Canada has 10 bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements with six countries in the region.

Another weapon in the Canadian foreign policy tool kit is aid financing. Canadian aid policy has little to do with altruism towards the world’s poorest. Canada still imposes structural adjustment measures as a condition of receiving its aid. In line with Canada’s investment patterns, furthermore, Stephen Harper’s Conservative government has shifted Canadian aid priorities away from Africa towards Latin America, where Canada has been funding such things as the neo-liberal reorganization of mining sectors (as in Peru) or the rewriting of mining codes to strengthen foreign investor rights (as in Colombia).

A supposed commitment to human rights and democracy promotion has also served as a useful cover for advancing Canada’s financial interests abroad. American writer William Robinson has discussed the move towards “democracy promotion” in American foreign policy in Latin America since the 1980s, coinciding with the emergence of liberal democracy in countries previously ruled by U.S.-backed dictatorships. American aid funding, typically channelled through the National Endowment for Democracy (and implemented by the International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute) goes to parties and organizations sympathetic to U.S. interests. For Canada, democracy promotion has in practice meant funding right-wing “civil society” organizations like those that participated in the coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004.

The Harper Tories, following suit, have plans for a new democracy promotion centre to better focus its activities in this regard. This comes, furthermore, as the Tories push the state-funded and supposedly non-partisan Rights & Democracy (aka the International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development) further to the right with their recent appointments to its board of directors. Rights & Democracy was not a progressive organization to begin with, having supported the right-wing opposition to Aristide in Haiti. Now it will be even more staunchly in the pro‑imperialist camp, following the Tories’ appointment of Gérard Latulippe, the current resident director in Haiti for the National Democratic Institute, as its new president.

Security for capital

Like any good imperialist the Canadian state has put a premium on building up its war-fighting capacity in recent years. The Liberal government under Paul Martin (with its junior coalition partner the NDP) and the Harper Tories both committed billions of dollars of increased military spending in order to hire more soldiers and create a more efficient war machine with the capacity to deploy rapidly around the world. While the occupation of Afghanistan was used as the pretext for these spending increases, the reality is that the majority of new purchases won’t be obtained until after the military’s presence in Afghanistan has been scaled down considerably, suggesting the Canadian ruling class is thinking well beyond Afghanistan with respect to its military planning.

Since the end of the Cold War, military and political leaders have consistently stated that the world is more insecure and unstable than it was previously, while most of the potential threats to Canadian security, they suggest implicitly or explicitly, emanate from the Third World. It would be very short-sighted to think that the central place the South has taken in military thinking is merely coincidental to Canada’s economic interests. These interests are the main reason Canada is engaged in the Global South in the first place. There is zero risk of Canada being invaded by a southern country, and other supposed threats military planners sometimes refer to – terrorism, disease and an influx of refugees – are overblown and little more than racist tropes designed to promote fear of the areas and people we exploit.

The military interventions in Haiti and Afghanistan have demonstrated Canada’s willingness to employ dramatic levels of violence in order to be taken seriously by friend and foe alike, and, particularly in the case of Haiti, to promote the interests of Canadian capital. The Canada-as-peacekeeper myth – which was always a problematic narrative on a number of counts – can’t be sustained in the face of such violent military occupations, a fact which Canada’s ruling elite is happy to stress to both Canadians and the rest of the world.

The responsibility of the Canadian Left

Ecological destruction, violent conflict with local communities, support for unsavoury regimes such as the Lobo government in Honduras or Álvaro Uribe in Colombia, opposition to progressive governments such as Chávez’s in Venezuela, and military engagements – none of these things are accidental or the result of a misinformed policy. They’re the product of strategic decision-making by Canadian business and political leaders about how to best protect their interests abroad. And there’s no reason to think Canadian leaders will change their behaviour of their own accord. It’s simply not in their class interest. Our task on the Left, then, is to build a deeper anti-Canadian-imperialist consciousness, while fostering stronger bonds of solidarity with movements in the South struggling against imperialism in general and Canadian imperialism in particular. Only with these steps will it be possible to sustain the kind of movement that can challenge the destructive power of Canadian capital and the state abroad.

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By Simon Enoch
Briarpatch Magazine
November/December 2009

With the Financial Times lamenting the “end of the era of liberalization” and the “death of global free-market capitalism” and Newsweek declaring “we are all Socialists now,” one could be forgiven for believing that the worst excesses of neoliberalism have been relegated to the dustbin of history. But for all the talk of resurgent Keynesianism, reports of the death of neoliberalism - the pathological fear of all things public and the idolatrous worship of the market - are greatly exaggerated. While the advocates of free-market orthodoxy have remained uncharacteristically quiet during the current economic crisis, neoliberalism has merely gone underground, biding its time until it can resurface with renewed ferocity.

It would seem that the neoliberal resurgence is already upon us, as governments around the world begin to deploy the all-too-familiar rhetoric of deficit and debt crises to prepare their citizens for the inevitable attack on what remains of the public sector. In the morbidly ironic words of Queensland Premier Anna Bligh - who has initiated a sweeping public-sector wage freeze and benefit clawback, coupled with the sale of over $15 billion in state assets - “public services have to come first in the dire global economic crisis.”

Canadians have seen this before. During the supposed “debt crisis” of the 1990s, the common refrain was that Canada would face outright bankruptcy and International-Monetary-Fund-imposed austerity unless it pursued a vigorous gutting of all things public. Paul Martin’s infamous 1995 budget did just that, sacrificing 45,000 civil service jobs, privatizing CN Rail and Petro-Canada, slashing federal transfers to the provinces and transforming unemployment insurance into the woefully inadequate program it is today.

Progressive economist Jim Stanford argues that much of this belt-tightening was not only unneces­sary, but ultimately damaging to the Canadian economy. As Stanford documents, Canada could have reached its deficit reduction targets through economic growth alone, without having to endure the draconian cuts to our social programs. Stanford concludes that the $50 billion in public programs and assets that were sacrificed to the deficit gods would have “made an incredible difference to the concrete quality of Canadians’ lives” had they remained invested in public services and assets.

What Stanford and others emphasize is that the gutting of our public services was not an economic necessity, but rather an ideologically driven political gambit. We would be wise to remember this when the inevitable calls for belt-tightening and self-sacrifice in the name of fiscal responsibility once again rear their heads. Though the current deficit is smaller (relative to GDP) than what we faced in the 1990s, we are already hearing the early warning signs of the coming austerity from the Harper Conservatives.

Despite Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s past insistence that the deficit can be resolved without cuts to programs or tax increases - a position from which he appears to be retreating day by day - the Tories have already shown their preference for the public sector to bear the brunt of fiscal austerity through their attempts at eliminating pay equity and the right-to-strike in the public service. Couple this with the Tories’ Crown asset review, wherein any public asset not deemed self-sustaining could face the auction block, and the writing is on the wall. Due to their minority status, the Tories have had to move carefully on these fronts, but rest assured that when it comes to a choice between reversing their ill-conceived and ill-timed tax cuts or cutting public sector jobs and social programs, the public sector will lose.

Those who would use the deficit to resurrect neoliberalism will deploy the same shopworn rhetoric of the past. We will be exhorted to “do it for the children,” lest we leave them our bills to pay, while simultaneously being praised for our courage as we are asked to sacrifice for the good of the nation. The gutting of the public sector is one choice among many; there is always an alternative.

In many ways, the deficit crisis of the 1990s locked Canada into the straitjacket of neoliberal policy, destroying what was left of the fragile post-war social contract that had held sway for close to 50 years. The 1995 deficit-busting budget inaugurated Canada’s wholesale embrace of neoliberalism; the current deficit must not be used to revive that same failed ideology.

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Photo by Leroy Schulz

By Anna Reitman
Briarpatch Magazine
May/June 2009

Everybody’s looking for a lifeline to pull themselves out of the global downturn. But with giant bailout packages failing to provide stability in the U.S. and grim predictions for the remainder of 2009, what are the emerging opportunities for secure and lucrative investment?

Financial experts the world over are surveying the wreckage of the global economy to devise a comprehensive investment strategy. They seek a strategy capable of turning high unemployment rates, huge pension losses, surging consumer bankruptcies and home foreclosures to their advantage.

One need look no further, though, than the human dramas playing out on the evening news. The arms trade is one industry virtually guaranteed to continue delivering higher than average returns during the global economic retrenchment.

The global trend towards increased military expenditures is evident in such recent opportunity zones as Israel/Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Ossetia and the ongoing skirmishes in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Military expenditures worldwide have ballooned to more than $1 trillion a year and continue to rise. With no end in sight for the nine major and 17 smaller-scale armed conflicts in the world, brisk sales of arms and military equipment can be anticipated at least through 2012.

Free-market enthusiasts will be pleased to note, however, that these growth opportunities extend beyond the state-controlled defence industries of the world’s leading military powers. They also reach into the efficiently unregulated global market in small arms.

Mexico, for instance, is an emerging market that should not go overlooked. A strong narco-state transit hub, it is also the number one importer of small arms worldwide. As a fellow signatory to the North American Free Trade Agreement, Canada is in the enviable position of being one of Mexico’s top suppliers. With gang wars breaking out over lucrative drug routes that criss-cross the entire globe, demand for small arms to facilitate these conflicts will remain strong. Canada is well positioned to capitalize on this booming industry because of its leadership role in global hot spots like Afghanistan and Haiti.

Some investors may feel uncomfortable counting on criminal enterprise to deliver the returns they have come to expect. For those “ethical” investors, there is an alternative. Privatized prisons in the United States have reliably delivered high returns, particularly during downturns in the business cycle. As unemployment, evictions and foreclosures increase, the prison population can also be expected to enjoy healthy growth. In the current “tough on crime” political climate, cost savings from the reduction of non-essential services like medical care, food and correctional guard training could increase these profits considerably.

For those seeking to invest closer to home, the recent surge in public support for tougher approaches to crime in Canada may also lead to new markets for human incarceration service delivery. More privatized prisons in more countries should result in higher dividends for the ethical shareholder.

The average shareholder, though, is perhaps more adventurous in seeking out the next lucrative bubble - for them, arms are the new real estate.

The Japanese symbol for “disaster capitalism” is composed of the symbols for “danger” and “opportunity.” Investors navigating the global financial crisis should remember that robust turnover in weapons inventory will, sadly, result in some collateral damage. The shrewd investor will seek out opportunities to turn collateral damage into collateral advantage. Construction companies, for instance, can vault over the housing slump and go directly to reconstruction contracts on territory that has been cleared of hostile occupants by warfare or natural disasters.

Similarly, local contracts can be gifted to Canada’s battered auto sector by retooling it to produce military vehicles. Other spinoff sectors sure to enjoy a collateral advantage are the energy, technology, pharmaceutical and security industries. This abundant economic activity will keep the discerning money manager sleeping soundly, investments tucked away safe.

Two-thousand-and-nine could yet be a comeback year. There is no need to worry about the future of the economy; the rules are operating just as they should.

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Subscribe to Briarpatch. ]]> http://briarpatchmagazine.com/how-to-profit-from-the-global-recession/feed/ http://briarpatchmagazine.com/disaster-populism-the-left-in-crisis/ http://briarpatchmagazine.com/disaster-populism-the-left-in-crisis/#comments Mon, 01 Dec 2008 15:59:20 +0000 Andrew Angus http://briarpatchmagazine.com/?p=754 An interview with Naomi Klein

By Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2008

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and the author of two international bestsellers, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (2000) and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007).

Klein is a firm believer in the notion that, if you can get a powerful idea into the hands of those with the capacity and motivation to act on it, you can change the world. Indeed, in The Shock Doctrine, she documents how the radical free market ideas of Milton Friedman have changed the world - not through their persuasive power or popular appeal, but through the creative exploitation by Friedman’s disciples of whatever shock might happen to present itself, be it a coup, a tsunami, a stock market crash, or a massive military bombardment.

The Shock Doctrine details how time and again, governments of all stripes have used almost any crisis that presents itself as an opportunity to advance radical economic restructuring: gutting social programs, privatizing and deregulating large sectors of economies, and leaving a global trail of devastation in their wake. Committed to nothing less than the exposure of the dominant economic theory of our time as a blood-soaked fraud, Klein shows that unfettered capitalism is an inherently violent ideology that is fundamentally incompatible with political freedom and true democracy.

By providing a counter-narrative that can help people to make sense of these trends, Klein seeks to make us less susceptible to shock and better prepared to defend and rebuild the public sphere in its wake.

Briarpatch editor Dave Oswald Mitchell spoke with Naomi Klein in Regina in September, following her address to a capacity crowd of 800 people.

Briarpatch: You came to prominence as a leading theorist of the antiglobalization movement. Can you talk about what happened to that movement after 9/11?

Naomi Klein: You know, it never really was a ‘movement.’ I always called it a ‘movement of movements.’ Or even more, a ‘moment’ - a moment of convergence, a moment when a lot of different movements saw themselves in one another’s struggles, and, together, built large coalitions in opposition to these really ambitious trade policies. Those policies really built our coalitions for us because they affected so many different sectors and reached into so many different countries simultaneously.

We were as global as the forces we were up against. Those forces are now in crisis - the World Trade Organization negotiations are stalled and the Free Trade Area of the Americas is dead - so I think it makes a certain amount of sense that popular movements are re-regionalizing, too.

So it really depends on where we’re talking about. The movement against neo-liberalism is certainly alive and well in Latin America. I mean, think about how far to the left Latin America has moved since 9/11. At the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, all 34 heads of state signed on the dotted line.

And it’s not just about who is in office; it’s that those people have company. They’re building trading blocs and developing an alternative economic model. And that model itself is being challenged from the left by grassroots indigenous movements that say developmentalism is too heavily based on extraction and fossil fuels, that the whole mentality of extraction and developmentalism also needs to be challenged. That’s what President Rafael Correa is facing in Ecuador right now. So things have moved radically forward in Latin America.

What about in Canada?

Here in Canada, what happened after 9/11 was really dramatic. We had just had this big protest at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in April 2001. And I remember really clearly what happened: the big NGOs, many of which rely on foundations to get their funding, got spooked, and the trade unions suddenly didn’t want to have anything to do with confrontational street demonstrations. There was a full-on media onslaught trying to equate “those scary anarchists” in Quebec City with terrorists. As a result, people went back to their corners. There was a retreat into single-issue politics. It wasn’t that people stopped believing what they believed, it’s that the willingness to work together and build these innovative coalitions was lost.

The other thing that happened, though, was that an anti-war movement quickly emerged out of the infrastructure of the so-called antiglobalization movement. The network of Indymedia sites was really the backbone of those massive, global anti-war demonstrations before the Iraq war.

And meanwhile, people who were more inclined to street activism were just focusing on stopping the war. We were in a state of emergency. But, also, there was a sense in some of the anti-war groups that you had to have a really simple message like “Stop the war” that everyone could agree on - that you couldn’t really talk about the economics of war because not everyone agreed on that. So there was a kind of dumbing down of the analysis we had of the way the world actually worked from what we saw in the streets in Seattle, Quebec City, Genoa.

The epigraph of The Shock Doctrine reads, “Any change is a change in the topic.” Was that part of what happened to the antiglobalization movement - that the topic was changed on us?

Well, “any change is a change in the topic” cuts both ways. I mean, we changed the topic in 1999. They wanted to talk about globalization, which was treated as an inevitable force of nature. But in Seattle, we changed the topic to capitalism, deregulation, and their impact on workers, the environment and human rights.

But then in 2001, the topic was changed on us - from economics to security. Two weeks after 9/11, the National Post ran a story under the headline, “Anti-globalization is so yesterday.” They could not wait to change the subject. I personally think we were on to something, and the fact that we were debating global capitalism in the streets as opposed to, say, arguing about one political party or another was actually a very threatening moment for capitalism. And so we saw that rush to change the subject.

That quote comes from Argentinian novelist César Aira. But I first heard it in a conversation with Claudia Acuña, an Argentinian investigative journalist. I quote her in The Shock Doctrine talking about how, in Argentina, the violence was so extreme that it was impossible to see the economic project behind the violence. That was the most important thing I learned in Argentina: the blinding effects of violence. When Claudia said that to me, she also quoted César Aira: “Any change is a change in the topic.” Cualquier cambio es un cambio de tema.

“Everyone is talking about terrorism,” she said. “You have to talk about something else.” Hence that epigraph, because that’s what I’m trying to do with the book - I’m trying to change the topic back.

You’ve recently begun using the term disaster populism in your lectures. Can you talk about what you mean by that?

I guess I’m trying to invoke the 1930s and ’40s and the context of an economic shock that put the free-market ideology on trial.

As I write in The Shock Doctrine, Milton Friedman very clearly understood his movement as a crusade to undo the New Deal. The right realized that when the 1929 market crash happened, the left was ready. The populists were ready with their ideas. And the right at that time, the corporate forces, didn’t take ideas seriously, didn’t think ideas mattered, because they had all the money and power.

Lewis H. Lapham has written really well about this, about how Corporate America suddenly realized in the 1960s that they needed to get into the ideas business. Lapham talks about just how uninterested the elites had been in ideas and intellectual life, and the systematic funding of the think tanks that followed this realization. You saw this wave of new think tanks being launched between 1970 and 1977.

So this is part of progressive history, that actually, progressives organically respond to crisis with the ideas that were lying around. And now we’re up against this crisis-response machine, this army of think tanks. Their whole purpose is to keep the ideas of neo-liberalism ready until, in Friedman’s words, “the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” That’s why they get the big bucks.

The other phrase I use is disaster collectivism, which is a phrase I got from Saket Soni, an organizer in New Orleans who works with immigrant workers. I actually launched the book in New Orleans, and we had this exchange between New Orleans community organizers and Indian community organizers from the tsunami-affected region. And at that meeting, Saket stood up and said, “Look, they have disaster capitalism; we need disaster collectivism.”

But the real reason to talk about disaster populism or disaster collectivism - I actually like both terms - is to be as clear as possible that I’m not saying you shouldn’t respond to disasters, or that responding to disasters is inherently anti-democratic. The question is, how? You can respond in a highly democratic way, or you can respond in an authoritarian way.

This is the way Latin Americans understand what happened there in the 1970s. You know, The Shock Doctrine is not an original analysis in Latin America. What’s original about the book is applying a Latin American analysis to other places than Latin America. What inspired the book was actually being in Argentina, a country that had just experienced a profound shock in the form of an economic crisis.

Because they knew their history, they did not give in to their fear. When we arrived in Argentina, everyone was saying, “There’s going to be another coup, there’s going to be another coup,” but they repelled it through street protests. When the government declared a state of siege, people took to the streets. And then we witnessed this incredible thing, which was, effectively, disaster collectivism: meetings on every street corner, barter centres, and workers turning shut-down factories into democratic co-operatives, which was the subject of our film The Take - just spontaneous organizing everywhere to meet this disaster.

So, for me, it’s not just a theory. I really feel like I got to live it, I got to see it. And I think we need to know that history a lot better in our own countries. I don’t know it well enough in Canada.

What would it take for progressives in North America to actually seize back the initiative and start setting the agenda, the way we’re seeing in Latin America?

You know, we don’t have a bloody-minded enough impulse on the left sometimes. It’s like Yeats said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” We miss opportunities, for example, to point out the profound intellectual crisis on the right. I mean, the National Post just published an op-ed by Conrad Black about the credit crisis. How absurd is it that the National Post goes to him for advice on how to deal with the crisis on Wall Street? I mean, how crazy is that?

You know, when Conrad Black was convicted, I felt that the left didn’t do nearly enough gloating. I know it sounds silly, but I mean, this is the man who has hammered away in this country about how much more we should be like the United States. And there he was on trial in the United States, but they couldn’t even find a jury that hadn’t already convicted him in their minds, because they just had this inherent suspicion of rich CEOs. He found himself a casualty in a class war that he himself had been pivotal in starting!

Likewise, Hurricane Katrina should have been an opening to talk about the intersection between climate change and neglected infrastructure. It’s always amazing to me that when these hurricanes hit, people barely talk about climate change. I think that the left and the environmental movement feel that it’s somehow unseemly, you know?

The right does not have that problem. They are actually using these hurricanes to push for more oil drilling!

But it goes beyond that. I actually think we have a moral responsibility to respond to these crises by making our arguments more forcefully. There’s a deep crisis of confidence on the left that’s evident in these moments, which are tests. My friend Jeremy Scahill calls it being a vegetarian between meals - which just isn’t good enough. It actually matters what you do in a crisis much more than what you say after the dust has settled. When Wall Street is crashing, when cities are being flooded, that’s precisely when it is so important to push for progressive responses. We have to get to the root of that crisis of confidence.

The global food crisis strikes me as particularly fertile ground for these sorts of interventions.

There are definitely openings there. The food crisis has pushed a lot of countries that have become completely reliant on food imports to turn to the idea of food sovereignty simply as a survival mechanism. I was on a panel recently with Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the president of Liberia. She comes out of the World Bank, and is definitely within the neo-liberal model, but her government sees the food crisis as a wake-up call for Liberia. Liberia has become totally dependent on food imports, and she proposed a two-stage process to address that. First, they need aid to get through the emergency, and then they need to shift towards growing their own food. They want to get back to traditional crops and reduce their vulnerability to these price shocks.

In response to the financial meltdown on Wall Street, you recently wrote, “What is really being called into question by the crisis is the unquestioned commitment to growth at all costs. Where this crisis should lead us is to a radically different way for our societies to measure health and progress.” Within a capitalist economy, which is inherently growth-based, is such a shift even possible? And if not, then what?

You know, this is really the debate that’s happening now in Latin America, where you have governments that are talking a really good game about rejecting neo-liberalism, but are fundamentally locked within the capitalist system and fueling their economies through extractive industries. Sure, they’re investing in co-ops, and they have great anti-poverty programs and some agrarian reform, but the money that is financing it is oil and gas and open-pit mining.

The debate that’s going on in Ecuador right now, for instance, is over open-pit mining and extracting oil from the Yasuni National Park. The indigenous federation CONAIE has adopted the slogan, “leave it in the ground,” which is a direct challenge to the developmentalist policies of President Rafael Correa to extract it and redistribute it.

So I really don’t know the answer to the question. All I know is, it’s the right question. The debate that’s going on right now in Ecuador is at the cutting edge of the debate that we all need to have.

The solution that Ecuadoreans are proposing is a concept called “ecological debt,” which is to say that Ecuador should be paid by the countries that created the climate crisis to leave the oil and gas in the ground, so they are not kept in a state of arrested development because they are not extracting more fossil fuels from one of the most biologically diverse places in the world, the Yasuni National Park. We should pay them not to destroy that place. And the oil companies should help finance that.

I actually think that when you have the Bush administration nationalizing things right, left, and centre, there is an opportunity to say, well, if the U.S. government is going to start nationalizing things, why not nationalize Exxon? Why not nationalize health insurance?

Yeah, why not nationalize something that’s actually profitable.

The problem, though, is if the U.S. government had Exxon, it really wouldn’t make any difference. Instead, I think that on the agenda in Copenhagen at the next major climate summit, there should be a discussion of a mechanism for creating a global trust, through the UN, for fossil fuel revenues. I don’t think national governments should administer it. I think that emerging from a post-Kyoto process, there has to be a way of dealing with these obscene profits that the oil companies are posting year after year.

I mean, Exxon had 40 billion dollars in profits last year. That money should be paying for the transition to a green economy, and it should also be paying Ecuador to leave its oil in the ground. The money is there.

I feel a tremendous sense of urgency about this, because there’s a window of easy oil money. And we’re in it and we’re wasting it. It’s just going straight to shareholders, when they should be treated like criminals. They have left us with a massive disaster to clean up.

Last question: As we’re recording this, there are two big elections just around the corner. Who do you think is scarier - John McCain or Stephen Harper?

Stephen Harper.

Why?

He’s got more to undo. There’s barely anything left to privatize in the U.S., right? Stephen Harper can have health care.

And he’s smarter.

Dave Oswald Mitchell is the editor of Briarpatch Magazine. Listen to an excerpt of this interview on Briarpatch’s podcast, “The Dispatch.”

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Read this.

Excerpt: “The entire world is currently spooked by the Argentine ghost. Even if wealthy countries reach out to ailing nations, some governments will not survive the storm. Even this would not be truly dramatic. But if the industrialized nations then decide to leave the threshold countries to their own devices, the ensuing wildfire will burn indefinitely.”

Watch this again. No longer implausible. Still funny?

Reviewed by Nick Bonokoski

The day after I was assigned this book review, I was talking with two friends, Derek and Corbin. Lehman Brothers had just gone bankrupt and Merrill Lynch had been bought out by Bank of America. Derek was somewhat upset by all the coverage he had seen about this. “The Dow is at its lowest in six years,” he complained. Corbin replied, “Since 2002? I don’t remember things in 2002 being all that bad.” The following week I was talking to a co-worker about this and she said, “2002 was awful.” Her husband is a financial adviser. Those conversations amount to a confirmation of one of Jim Stanford’s key points: everyone has a different stake in how capitalism works.

Stanford’s Economics for Everyone does for economics what bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody did for feminism. In her book, hooks makes the point that everyone has an interest in the struggle to end white supremacist capitalist patriarchal oppression. Similarly, Stanford makes the point that everyone has a stake in understanding how capitalism works and working to reform and/or overthrow it.

Stanford’s book allows readers to develop their understanding of economics through concrete examples of how capitalism affects their lives. He asks readers to begin by taking a walk through their neighbourhood and asking some basic questions. What kind of work is happening in your neighbourhood? Who is doing it? Who is benefiting from it?

Focusing the bulk of the book’s introductory section on the concept of work is an effective way of allowing people to develop a concrete understanding of capitalism by connecting it to their everyday experiences. Stanford makes it clear that the sum total of our everyday work (paid and unpaid) makes up what is called the economy. Workers, paid and unpaid, need to understand how our work fits into the capitalist economy to understand the pressures that can worsen their working conditions, as well as what leverage they have for improving their working/economic conditions.

Economics for Everyone is the cornerstone of an ambitious educational project that aims to provide working people with the opportunity to develop a nuanced understanding of capitalism. The book’s website (www.economicsforeveryone.ca) provides extra resources and lesson plans that social justice groups and community activists can adapt to their purposes, thus further democratizing the study of economics by putting the tools of analysis into readers’ hands.

Economists mystify the economy. The study of economics has become so mystified that the fact that there are other viable economic models besides capitalism isn’t even on most people’s radar. To address this deficiency of options, Stanford concludes by outlining some socialist alternatives to capitalism. He points out, importantly, that socialism will only come about through struggle, analysis, experiment, organizing, and lots and lots of hard work.

Economics for Everyone is a great example of just the kind of hard work needed to generate the class consciousness that can challenge capitalism’s grip on our economy and our imaginations.

Nick Bonokoski works for the Saskatchewan Union of Nurses, is a member of CUPE 3761, does social justice work inside the labour movement, wants to do more social justice work outside the labour movement, and is trying to finish his M.A.