Alternatives International Journal

On ‘reasonability' in activism and demanding the impossible

Stefan Christoff — 2014-07-02T02:07:23Z

Over recent days in Montréal, after joining multiple activist discussions (including those at the Montréal Student Movement Convention), revolving around possible frameworks for asserting political demands in opposition to austerity economics and neoliberalism, my mind is racing with critical reflections.

One key problematic point that rests in my thoughts, is rooted in addressing the limiting reality that most activist-driven campaigns today in Québec and Canada assert goals or campaigns within pre-established conservative frameworks for political possibility. Even if the consensus vision at heart of the organizing, that is driving people emotionally and collectively, is anti-capitalist and revolutionary, our collective demands most often don't reflect broader transformative visions.

Clearly campaigning on real and tangible issues, rooted in popular realities is at the heart of any meaningful organizing work (as seen during the Québec student strike), but why limit our political dimensions to a reality that is deeply destructive and oppressive? Can our political campaigns speak both to real issues and also express our broader dreams for true liberation?

How can our campaigning both address concrete realities, while also expressing an inspiring ideas and questions that travel way beyond the constricting discourse of spiritually dead politicians that cynically preach ‘reasonable' frameworks, that in reality are shaped by colonial, capitalist violence. Let's stop being ‘reasonable' to systems that literally refuses to acknowledge our full humanity, or respect the sanctity of Mother Earth.

These questions are visited further, asserted beautifully within an essay included in What Would It Mean To Win? a collection of texts via the Turbulence collective, published by PM Press.

The text by Stephen Duncombe, entitled Politics in an Age of Fantasy, touches on the horrific violence of the Iraq war and reflects critically on progressive activists attempting to make demands, or build campaigns, against the war within political frameworks fixed by the very powers involved in orchestrating the war.

below is an excerpt from the excellent essay from What Would It Mean To Win? thanks for reading, take care, Stefan.

"In the autumn of 2004, shortly before the U.S. presidential election and in the middle of a typically bloody month in Iraq, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature article on the casualty of truth in the Bush administration. Like most Times articles, it was well written, well researched, and thoroughly predictable. That George W. Bush is ill informed, doesn't listen to dissenting opinion, and acts upon whatever nonsense he happens to believe is hardly news. (Even the fact that he once insisted that Sweden did not have an army and none of his cabinet dared contradict him was not all that surprising.) There was, however, one valuable insight. In a soon-to-be-infamous passage, the writer, Ron Suskind, recounted a conversation between himself and an unnamed senior adviser to the president:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That's not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

It was clear how the Times felt about this peek into the political mind of the presidency. The editors of the Gray Lady pulled out the passage and floated it over the article in oversized, multi-colored type. This was ideological gold: the Bush administration openly and arrogantly admitting that they didn't care about reality. One could almost feel the palpable excitement generated among the Times' liberal readership, an enthusiasm mirrored and amplified all down the left side of the political spectrum on computer listservs, call-in radio shows, and print editorials over the next few weeks. This proud assertion of naked disregard for reality and unbounded faith in fantasy was the most damning evidence of Bush insanity yet. He must surely lose the election now.

What worried me then, and still worries me today, is that my reaction was radically different. My politics have long been diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration, and I've had a long career as a left-leaning academic and a progressive political activist. Yet I read the same words that generated so much animosity among liberals and the left and felt something else: excited, inspired … and jealous. Whereas the common sense view held that Bush's candid disregard for reality was evidence of the madness of his administration, I perceived it as a much more disturbing sign of its brilliance. I knew then that Bush, in spite of making a mess of nearly everything he had undertaken in his first presidential term, would be reelected.

How could my reaction be so different from that of so many of my colleagues and comrades? Maybe I was becoming a neocon, another addition to the long list of defectors whose progressive God had failed. Would I follow the path of Christopher Hitchens? A truly depressing thought. But what if, just maybe, the problem was not with me but with the main currents of progressive thinking in this country? More precisely, maybe there was something about progressive politics that had become increasingly problematic. The problem, as I see it, comes down to reality. Progressives believe in it, Bush's people believe in creating it. The left and right have switched roles – the right taking on the mantle of radicalism and progressives waving the flag of conservatism. The political progeny of the protestors who proclaimed, “Take your desires for reality” in May of 1968, were now counseling the reversal: take reality for your desires. Republicans were the ones proclaiming, “I have a dream.”

Progressive dreams, and the spectacles that give them tangible form, will look different than those conjured up by the Bush administration or the commercial directors of what critic Neil Gabler calls Life, the Movie. Different not only in content – this should be obvious – but in form. Given the progressive ideals of egalitarianism and a politics that values the input of everyone, our dreamscapes will not be created by media-savvy experts of the left and then handed down to the rest of us to watch, consume, and believe. Instead, our spectacles will be participatory: dreams the public can mold and shape themselves. They will be active: spectacles that work only if people help create them. They will be open-ended: setting stages to ask questions and leaving silences to formulate answers. And they will be transparent: dreams that one knows are dreams but which still have power to attract and inspire. And, finally, the spectacles we create will not cover over or replace reality and truth but perform and amplify it. Illusion may be a necessary part of political life, but delusion need not be.

Perhaps the most important reason for progressives to make their peace with the politics of dreaming has little to do with the immediate task of winning consent or creating dissent, but has instead to do with long-term vision. Without dreams we will never be able to imagine the new world we want to build. From the 1930s until the 1980s political conservatives in this country were lost: out of power and out of touch. Recalling those days, Karl Rove, George W. Bush's senior political adviser, says: “We were relegated to the desert.” While many a pragmatic Republican moved to the center, a critical core kept wandering in that desert, hallucinating a political world considered fantastic by postwar standards: a preemptive military, radical tax cuts, eroding the line between church and state, ending welfare, and privatizing Social Security. Look where their dreams are today.

Accompanying art work via Zach Matthes in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, via cutandpaint.org

Source: http://freecityradio.org/post/89532600835/on-reasonability-in-activism-and-demanding-the

Art and Inspiration Meet on Montreal Streets

Stefan Christoff — 2012-01-30T12:45:00Z

In Montreal, art is a key element of the intensely complex collective identity that stretches across this beautiful island city.

Today, as Montreal is being celebrated as a centre for cutting edge art in North America, a heightened critical reflection on artistic production and its representation is necessary. There are contesting visions on the directions forward for cultural movements in this city, visions that often overlap, but just as often clash. Now is the time for us to intensify our collective thinking on the multitude of difficult questions that confront the arts today in Montreal.

Are the corporate sponsorships for indie festivals or efforts to push ‘underground' culture into capitalist-driven art markets the best way forward for the long-term health of the arts community in Montreal?

On the flip side, are artists working hard enough to build bridges with the community organizations and activists who struggle daily to sustain the political and economic space that works to create the room for independent culture to thrive in Montreal?

The complex issues of gentrification in neighbourhoods like the Mile End and the Plateau need to be addressed. Are Montreal artists contributing to sustaining a livable city for all, or is the rapid fire mainstream celebration of local artists contributing to creating economic conditions that exclude people living in poverty?

As corporate box condos are dispatched to artistic hotspots in our beloved city, areas that have fostered and nurtured the arts for so many years, are artists doing enough to confront this process of gentrification that stands as the antithesis to the rugged beauty that has inspired so many living here?

Are we giving attention to and supporting organizations like the Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain (FRAPRU), a grassroots organisation that fights for social housing on a policy level while employing direct action campaigns and street protests to challenge the injustices of gentrification. As artists interested in preserving the vital character of Montreal, lending solidarity and support to activist groups like FRAPRU, and the many others with similarly inspiring mandates, is a clear necessity.

Are the independent cultural institutions working seriously to challenge a Ville de Montréal administration that is diligently working to co-opt the global hype surrounding the city's art? When the Place des arts is no longer a Place des peuples, what are we left with?

As all cultural workers understand in the heart, inspiration for our best work rests in the difficult and beautiful realities of the world around us, not in the monotone words or florescent-lit halls of political power, guided by an economic logic that works to close the social spaces in which creativity flourishes.

Certainly, the struggle to survive with dignity as artists, to sustain ourselves economically, is a challenging reality that needs constant focus. In the context of global financial systems now failing at hyper-speed and rooted in a race to the bottom economics, sparking inspiring street protests globally, let us look to community based economic alternatives.

Failed corporate economic models will not address our collective economic challenges as community-based and independent artists. Quick fixes are never healthy in the long term, and today's economic implosions certainly offer a clear argument in that direction. Urgent economic thinking and exploration outside of capitalist boxes of commodification and corporate sponsorships is needed.

Difficult questions confront all visions of the arts in Montreal for the next years, but in stepping towards the future, we should recognize the incredible accomplishments over recent years; a thriving indie music scene built from the ground up, an internationalist hip-hop scene that speaks to the reality of Montreal as a global city, a cinema culture that inspires globally, and an internationally respected design and publishing culture, all performed in two ‘official' languages. This cultural reality is rooted in the daily work of thousands of artists, cultural workers and activists, a process far removed from the empty words of municipal politicians or corporate types now moving to claim credit and profit from the global attention on Montreal arts.

The celebratory reception of Montreal's current artistic culture in the mainstream press, both locally and globally, does little to address the history of political struggle that worked to construct the spaces for these visionary arts practices to take root.

Montreal's artistic renaissance over the past decade is deeply connected to Québec's turbulent political and economic history. Across Québec, protests confronting social injustice in the late 1960s and early 1970s influenced a generation of artists. Major worker and student strikes from the era continue to shape our reality today, from official government policy to a popular culture rooted in the struggle for independence.

And though the mass social movements in Québec certainly spoke to struggles linked to the economic and linguistic oppression of Québecois, these popular mobilizations also spoke to the international revolutionary spirit of the times that reshaped modern artistic practice across the board. Beyond the common contemporary representation of the Quiet Revolution as being directly focused on Québec nationalist demands, the reality of its political language and dreams were largely visioned as revolutionary, internationalist and rooted in cultural expression.

It was in this era that spaces opened for serious artistic exploration, from the artist run centres showcasing contemporary art practices, to the cafés and bars that acted as venues for popular musicians and storytellers, to a political culture that gained widespread support for significant public funding for the arts. Montreal began to solidify an artistic voice that stood in stark contrast to the commodity culture that would soon sweep across most of North America.

In The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal by historian Sean Mills, the relationship between art and activism is addressed:

“Quebec's political independence had to form part of a comprehensive transformation that would affect all spheres of life, from poetry and literature to cinema and sexuality. [...] Literature, and culture generally, were deeply constitutive of this leftism, and were central to the new world of freedom and creativity that needed to be built.”

Today the Conservative attack on public funding for the arts, alongside an austerity economics that presses for corporate tax cuts as a solution to financial crisis, are a very real affront to Québec's tradition of patronage of the arts, a reality that was only achieved via the struggles of social movements of past generations.

In a globalized world, struggles stretch beyond borders, and questions concerning how the arts will deal with increasingly stringent austerity measures, a growing conservatism both economic and social, are being raised to cultural workers across the world.

However, there is also the specific context of Montreal's history of struggle that is directly responsible for the spaces that exist today to create the unique art that has come to shape our collective identity. As artists operating in a city that stands in discord to Wall Street economics — a city which, for the most part, rejects the destructive capitalist economics of the box store/shopping mall/condo model — we should take inspiration from this history, and honour and learn from past struggles. From the sonic explorations challenging musical genres, to the street art that beautifies our urban environment, to the spoken poetics that reshape contemporary literature, arts in this city must not be isolated from Montreal's political history.

Let us focus on this contested moment in history and move forward in a way that stands in solidarity with the social movements that create independent spaces, who value and love the arts, the same movements for change that have inspired the most incredible artists throughout time.

This text originally published in edition twelve of Four Minutes to Midnight, launched in November at Expozine in Montreal. Ideas expressed in this article largely are linked to and inspire the work of the Howl! arts collective in Montreal.