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gathering around the fire this christmas

this is mostly a compilation of some things i’ve been reading during advent 2021 or other things i’ve encountered this year appropriate for reflecting upon during this season. the image below is entitled‘Christmas night’ by the Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour.

Advent is a season of both arrival and coming. It is about end and beginning. The dissolution of an old order, and the advent of a new one. Most sense the world is not right. A single person burning $5.5 billion to privately visit space with his family for 4 minutes while 2.37 billion people go hungry during a global pandemic and a quarter of the globe’s urban population still live in slums is emblematic of this world’s persistent unsoundness. Yet, another world is not only possible, but it is necessary and it is coming. As Arundhati Roy remarked:“On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

In New York Burning, Jill Lepore recounts the slave insurrection in New York that unfolded over the winter of 1741, led by Caesar John Hughson. Lepore summarizes the events in this way:

“New York was a slave city. Its most infamous episode is hardly known today: over a few short weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across the city. Nearly two hundred slaves were suspected of conspiring to burn every building and murder every white. Tried and convicted before the colony’s Supreme Court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake. Seventeen more were hanged… Another eighty-four men and women were sold into yet more miserable, bone-crushing slavery in the Caribbean.”

How could so many slaves, under bondage to so many different masters, organize together to implement such a coordinated burning of ruling-class property? On an island ridden with brackish groundwater like Manhattan, a pristine well was an oasis that tea drunk slaveowners could not help but send their slaves to fetch from. It was Comfort’s Pump therefore that became a congregating point for slaves to assemble and air their grievances with each other. And if Comfort’s Pump became the spatial congregating point, Christmas became the temporal one, with additional layers of rowdy festivities to boot. Lepore writes:

“In their confessions, dozens of New York slaves described their “Christmas Hollidays” as a feast and revel, a world turned upside down” where they sat “around a fine table—with a tablecloth— listening to music, as if they were gentlemen; pledging themselves to a secret society, in imitation of Masons; plotting to overthrow the government, like politicians.”

Lepore goes on to describe this Christmas celebration in the context of a practice known as wassailing:

“…topsy-turvy was exactly the point. Christmastime had long been celebrated in New York as a pagan carnival of turning the world upside down, of men dressing like women, and of wassailing, in which the rich gave gifts of money to the poor who wandered the streets and knocked at their doors. By the turn of the century, New Yorkers’ wassailing Christmases would become so notoriously riotous and, finally, so threatening to public order and to the sensibilities of an emerging white middle class that the whole holiday would be domesticated and moved indoors, along with the evergreen. New Yorkers like Clement Moore, who wrote “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” in 1823, invented a fireside tradition of family gift-gifting, under the grandfatherly eye of Santa Claus, to put an end to the street carnival of poor and working-class whites and blacks.”

The uproarious festivities intermingling with traditions of Black Saturnalia drifting in from the British West Indies, was the backdrop to one startling statistic, which is that a good 35% of insurrections in British colonies of the Caribbean were concentrated around Christmas:

“The black men who met at Hughson’s tavern called on Dutch and English holiday traditions; even more, they called on the tradition of Caribbean Christmas, or black saturnalia. In the British West Indies, the source of 65 percent of New York’s slave population, the holiday between Christmas and New Year’s when slaves were spared hard labor—the time of Hughson’s “Great Feast”—was celebrated by revels in which slaves were allowed into white men’s houses for feasts and entertainment and gifts. The carousing easily turned violent. And easily slipped into rebellion. Thirty-five percent of all slave rebellions in the British Caribbean took place at Christmastime.”

Among the most famous of these Christmas insurrections was the Christmas Uprising or Baptist War of 1831 in Jamaica led by Samuel Sharpe, a Baptist preacher who led a massive general strike in the days following Christmas where thousands of slaves took an oath refusing a return to work in the sugarcane fields. The strike eventually escalated into plantation burnings and then the largest slave insurrection in the history of the British West Indies. Tom Zoellner in his book Island on Fire describes the mood in Jamaica during the Christmas of 1831:

“Nobody who saw them ever forgot the plantation fires. They would burn and reignite across northwestern Jamaica for the better part of two weeks and rain a curtain of ash down on the trees… More than two hundred blazes were reported in the opening days of the revolt, and in the daytime, they magnified the glare of the tropics and tinted the sun with menace as an organized army of enslaved people held their masters hostage and fought off attacks from the volunteer militia… The entire plantation society of Jamaica came under attack in the largest revolt it had ever faced. One of the richest sugar growers in Jamaica, Richard Barrett, watched the fires with mounting fear from a house in Montego Bay. A fierce defender of slavery, he was the cousin of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and well connected in British society. Barrett scratched out a note to the colonial governor on the fourth night of the insurrection… ‘It is supposed that a hundred plantations and settlements are already in ashes,’ Barrett wrote. ‘If the rebellion spreads, our force is quite insufficient to put it down—all depends on the moral effect of the employment of the King’s troops. Five rebels have been tried by court martial and shot. A woman also condemned was spared—I think she should be hanged.’”

This was not the first of insurrections planned around Christmas. Zoellner describes an earlier Coromantee uprising planned in the wake of Tacky’s 1760 revolt:

“Coromantee met in secret in St. Mary’s Parish to swear an oath of loyalty to each other... They aimed to take Tacky’s revolt further and establish an independent black nation in Jamaica. And they would do it under the cover of the Christmas holiday.”

But Sharpe’s uprising was different in its large-scale mobilization and its apt deployment of Baptist liberation theology that brought in more than thirty thousand (some estimates place it closer to 60,000) enslaved people into the plot, catalyzing an acceleration towards the abolition of slavery throughout the British empire. Sharpe’s homiletics gravitated towards biblical declarations of liberation, as Zoellner writes:

“In his private teachings to his fellow enslaved people, Sharpe emphasized those passages of the Bible explicitly dealing with freedom. Four passages in particular drew his attention: “No man can serve two masters” (Matt. 6:24); “If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:36); “Ye are bought with a price: be ye not servants of men” (1 Cor. 7:23); “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is nether male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ” (Gal. 3:28). He appears to have neglected all those that seemed to justify slavery or harped upon obedience—the favorite localized theology of the established church.”

Zoellner also points out that in the months leading up to the Christmas Uprising, another enslaved Baptist preacher named Nat Turner was guiding a slave uprising in Virginia. As Du Bois notes in his biography of the Calvinist revolutionary John Brown, the Nat Turner uprising was carefully studied by Brown, who drew lessons from it to formulate a plan for launching a wide-scale slave guerrilla war in the US. While Brown’s plan faltered into his much more modest Harpers Ferry Raid, the raid was still an important event leading up to the Civil War and the eventual abolition of American slavery. That theology might not only be an opiate of the masses, but also contradictorily a liberating force, was what figures like Nat Turner underscored.As Lepore emphasized regarding the 1741 New York insurrection:

“...New Yorkers understood very well, Scripture can counsel obedience, and it can counsel rebellion. In 1730, the New York Gazette reported news of “an Insurrection of the Negroes” in Virginia, occasioned by a report that the new governor “had Direction from his Majesty to free all baptized Negroes.” This inspired baptized slaves to claim their freedom, which, since their owners denied it, meant staging a rebellion.”

While Christmas was about the arrival of a figure of liberation that would bring an end to imperial domination, such sentiments were of course not unique to Christianity but part of a long Jewish tradition of anti-imperial resistance. As Daniel Boyarin writes in The Jewish Gospels:

“The Jews were expecting a Redeemer in the time of Jesus. Their own sufferings under Roman domination seemed so great, and this Redeemer had been predicted for them. Reading the Book of Daniel closely, at least some Jews—those behind the first-century Similitudes of Enoch and those with Jesus—had concluded that the Redeemer would be a divine figure named the Son of Man who would come to earth as a human, save the Jews from oppression, and rule the world as its sovereign. Jesus seemed to many to fit that bill. His life and death were claimed to be precisely a fulfillment of what had been predicted of the Messiah, Son of Man, by the old books and traditions. What happened as that expectation of redemption was delayed and as more Gentiles joined this community is the story of the Church, of Christianity.”

The purpose Jesus saw for himself in Luke 4:18, that is the purpose of Advent, of being sent and arriving, came directly from Isaiah 61:1.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.”

If this context of Advent, and Christianity more broadly, is clarified, then it should be relatively unsurprising that so many slave revolts occurred during Christmas time. The arrival of Christ signified the arrival of a new political order, and the Gospel (the good news) advanced by such a messiah was that the wretched of the earth were invited into inaugurating this new world into existence. The good news was for the poor and the earth was for the meek to inherit. The rich would be sent away empty and the proud scattered. As Jesus said: “Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:24).

As Advent and Christmas is a time for remembering the hope that such an arrival occasioned, it is also a good opportunity to reflect on those who have continued to spread that hope of liberation through the way they have lived their lives collectively with others. Zoellner describes the story of Samuel Sharpe becoming recognized as one of Jamaica’s seven national heroes:

“The committee invited the poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite, then teaching at the University of the West Indies in the Kingston suburb of Mona, to prepare the first modern apologia of Samuel Sharpe, a short book titled Wars of Respect that frames him as an uncompromising social revolutionary, a proto-Marxist fighting a system of capitalist oppression who “had made the discovery—long before his time—of the impact of industrial strike action upon the industrial system.” …“Marxism was the language of the day,” recalled Arnold Bertram, a PNP official who served on the committee. “The wider context was resistance to plantation slavery.”

Though the 1970s rediscovery of Samuel Sharpe came at the time of Jamaica’s relations with Castro and the US attempts to tamper with national elections, there were also other powerful cultural forces at work… The government declared Samuel Sharpe a National Hero on October 1, 1975, an honor that unleashed a number of others. Sharpe’s story was inserted into the public school curriculum all over the island. His face went on the paper currency.”

Little is known about how the general strike organized by Sharpe escalated into the widespread inferno that engulfed so many West Indian sugar plantations, but one interesting oral tradition that Zoellner mentions is:

“an unnamed female slave who touched a lighted torch to the cane leaves with a defiant statement: “I know I shall die for it, but my children shall be free.” Though there is no contemporary documentation… [the slave mother’s story] is recounted on a historical marker in the mountain crossroads of Kensington. About a mile down the hill from this marker, the Jamaican government has built a small amphitheater—painted in the national colors of green, gold, and black—several yards away from the undisputed spot where the first blaze of the insurrection had been set.”

The scholar Verene Shepherd has researched a number of the women involved in the 1831 Christmas “war of liberation” (as she calls it), including women like Catherine Brown, Catherine Clarke, Nancy Wright, and Eliza Lawrence. Shepherd delivered a lecture on these women revolutionaries who are often neglected in other scholarly accounts of the Baptist War (including Zoellner’s).

As those who observe Christmas gather around fires this Christmas, it might be worth reflecting on the fires of history that have welled up in response to unconscionable violence and oppression, and the fires still yet to be kindled. I recently learned from a UJPO/Winchevsky Centre post that some Jewish people irreverently call Christmas in Yiddish krats mikh meaning ‘scratch me’.I love that! If only people who observed Christmas were really itching for another world and lived as if that were so. If only they earned and fostered a reputation for turning the world upside down like those in Acts 17:6 hador the slaves Lepore described in 18th century New York. I would like to conclude with a beautiful passage Sara Miles wrote in Jesus Freak that I think pairs well with cozy Christmas fires that many might gather around this season:

“Back in the early 1970s, when I was Gabriel’s age, the country had been on fire: the cities were burning; the streets were full of marchers and National Guardsmen; the country was convulsed by assassins, drugs, and riots. Everything was turning over: women left their husbands, young men defied the law and the elders, inmates took control of prisons, poor people refused to obey the cops, parents and children were at each other’s throats. I was young and fiercely antiauthoritarian and had no sense at all. My favorite chant at the demonstrations—not today’s stage-managed events, but the ones that wound up with tear gas and running with your heart in your mouth—was Two, four, six, eight; smash the family, church, and state.I had absolutely no idea, back then, that this was Jesus’ chant. That it would turn out to be such a fundamentally Christian thing to say. Smash the family—smash the relations of power between men and women, young and old. Smash the church—break the relations of power between an official priesthood and the people of God, between manipulators of mystery and its helpless objects. Smash the state—break the relations of power that owe their existence to official violence, destroy the armies of the empire, break the iron bars of the prison house.I could just hear Jesus chanting this. Or, to quote another saying I grew up with: ‘‘Burn, baby, burn.’’ And how I wish, says Jesus, that the fire were already kindled.”

How beautifully this passage by Miles resonates with the way Verene Shepherd described the unnamed woman rumoured to have started the first plantation fire in the 1831 Christmas Uprising:

“Yes, it led to her death, but it gave birth to abolition within the British Empire. I’m going to rename her tonight. Guess what I’m going to name her? ‘Fire.’ Tonight we christen ‘Fire.’ This time we want to have the flames of passion in our hearts. As I look across the hills, I can almost see the fires lit in 1831. I believe the hills were joyful that night as they witnessed our ancestors stand against oppression and torture.”

music round-up 2020

bunkering down during the pandemic offered an opportunity for me to better familiarize myself with my public library’s online resources and the joys of Kropotkinist library socialism. and i discovered that the Mississauga Public Library provides access to Freegal, which I have been using a lot to stream music at home. i just wanted to take a moment to note down some of my favourite albums from this past year.

i’ve also been dipping my toes a lot more into Tudor Church Music this year having encountered Sylvia Townsend Warner (a writer I’m very fascinated by) who was very interested in and knowledgeable about Tudor Church Music having studied under the Westminster organist Richard Terry. There’s a great paper on Warner’s engagement with Tudor Church Music that you can read online. Some of the recordings I’ve included of pieces (by Orlando Gibbons and Robert White e.g.) are mentioned in the paper on Warner, especially the Magnificat pieces which I’m sure she was very interested in, not only musically but also politically, as she was a communist for a good portion of her life.

i also discovered quite a bit of music from an event hosted by Independent Jewish Voices on anti-fascist klezmer music which was hosted by Aaron Lakoff who hosts a show called The Rebel Beat, which a lot of this year’s music came from. there was also a recent episode on Red Life Podcast with some interesting music. i’ve embedded a playlist of some of the more politically inclined music i’ve been listening to this year.

“Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes” by Leyla McCalla

“Reliever” and“Gospel First Nation” by William Prince

“The Sharecropper's Daughter” by Sa-Roc

“Un esta Navidad” by Carlos Mejia Godoy y Los de Palacaguina

“Pantayo” by Pantayo

“Gore” by Lous and the Yakuza

“Test Their Logik” by Test Their Logik

“Multiply” by Rebel Diaz x Tef Poe

“Mariah Carey’s Magical Christmas Special” by Mariah Carey

Music not from 2020:

“The Ballad of the Runaway Girl” by Elisapie

“Not a Public Assembly” by Subhas

“A Little Letter” by Brivele

“Buena Vista Social Club Presents”Omara Portuondo

“Nara Leao 1978 (Ao Vivo)″ by Nara Leao

“It’s Dark Outside- Indroysn iz Finster” by Tsibele

“Classic Christmas” by Brynn Stanley

“Complete Jazz Series 1935-1936” by Billie Holiday with Teddy Wilson

“Byrd, Mathias, Taverner, Sheppard, Poulenc, Palestrina & Esteves | Choral Christmas Music” by Christ Church Cathedral Choir

“Händel: Messiah, HWV 56” by Leonard Bernstein

“Robert White Tudor Church Music” by The Tallis Scholars

“Orlando Gibbons Tudor Church Music” by The Choir of King’s College Cambridge

“Magnificat (Settings of the Magnificat Plainsong for Solo Organ)” by Stephen Farr (ends with Bach’s Magnificat)

“Arvo Part Beautus” byTonu Kaljuste and the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir

“A Consort of Musicke Bye William Byrde and Orlando Gibbons ((Gould Remastered))” by Glenn Gould

“Urban Zulu” byBusi Mhlongo

“Global Citizen” by Jike Junyi

“I Ain’t Marching Anymore” by Phil Ochs

“La Época Dorada del Flamenco Angelillo” by Angelillo

“Hakollak Hagah” by Warda

“Works (1960-1970)” by Cornelius Cardew

“Alan Bush” Royal Scottish National Orchestra

“The Power and the Glory” by Paul Robeson

“Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus” by Charles Mingus

“Return of the Boom Bap” by KRS-ONE

“RBG: revolutionary but gangsta” by dead prez

advent reflection #4: advent and apocalypse

the fourth and final reflection for Advent 2020. in this reflection, i’m exploring the apocalyptic nature of the climate catastrophe that we face ahead of us, in light of the current global pandemic and past 19th century famines that devastated colonized populations of the Third World. with these apocalyptic shadows, i’m also thinking about authority, power, and an ‘eschatological’ future in which all are humanized and live lives of dignity. these are links to previous first, second, and third reflections i made this Advent.

Photo byFraser Miller of Jesus and the moneychangers atTingstäde kyrka, a medieval ‘asylum’ church on the Swedish island of Gotland where those awaiting trial could find sanctuary. You can find more of Fraser’s photography here.

What the coronavirus pandemic has fore-fronted this past year for me is that the human species in no way exists outside the realm of ‘nature’ despite all that humans do to sustain such an illusion. The laws of nature continue to function despite the degree to which humanity has deluded itself into believing otherwise. And while human exceptionalism has proven somewhat hazardous during this past year, I sometimes suspect the coming climate catastrophe will be far more protracted and painful, especially for the poorest of the world – the ‘wretched of the earth’ as opening lines of The Internationale put it.

History has shown the mass scale of death that occurs when ‘natural disasters’ intersect with a destructive political order. Mike Davis in his book “Late Victorian Holocausts” explores how the climate phenomenon known as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) coalesced with European colonialism to create some of the largest human catastrophes in recorded history – famines of enormous scale that brought about incalculable human suffering and preventable premature death.

Strangely and sometimes unexpectedly, these types of apocalyptic tragedies are what the Advent season compels its observers to think through: death and judgement. Mike Davis in “Late Victorian Holocausts” points out the etymological connection between Advent and this phenomenon that is now known as the El Nino:

“The “El Niño” aspect of ENSO results from the subsequent warming of the Pacific off Ecuador and Peru due to the cessation of trade-wind-driven upwelling. Usually observed by fishermen near Christmas, hence El Niño or “Christ child.” The central tropical Indian Ocean also catches a fever, which affects the strength and path of the monsoons. In big events, the normal geography of aridity and rainfall in the equatorial Pacific is reversed as thunderstorms flood the hyper-arid deserts of coastal Peru, while drought parches the usually humid jungles of Kalimantan and Papua. The monsoons fail to nourish agriculture in western India and southern Africa, while further afield drought holds northern China and northeast Brazil in its grip.”

This December we are witnessing a flip to the La Nina end of this climate phenomenon. La Nina is the colder counterpart to the El Nino, where the heat moves back to the west end of the Pacific Ocean and coastal Peru returns to its normal arid state. For western Canada, it typically means colder weather. In the areas around Toronto, it will often mean more snow, which is maybe why we’ve woken up to a beautifully white Christmas. Yet the ENSO phenomenon and the colonial policy of the 19th century worked together to produce some of recorded history’s most terrible suffering. Davis’s book cites something the climatologist John Hidore wrote about one of these El Nino induced famines that wreaked havoc throughout British colonies:

“The failure of the monsoons through the years from 1876 to 1879 resulted in an unusually severe drought over much of Asia. The impact of the drought on the agricultural society of the time was immense. So far as is known, the famine that ravished the region is the worst ever to afflict the human species.”

Mike Davis goes on to comment on a series of famines that would ravage the planet and the way certain imperial forces used such crises to their advantage:

“But the great drought of 1876–79 was only the first of three global subsistence crises in the second half of Victoria’s reign. In 1889–91 dry years again brought famine to India, Korea, Brazil and Russia, although the worst suffering was in Ethiopia and the Sudan, where perhaps one-third of the population died. Then in 1896–1902, the monsoons again repeatedly failed across the tropics and in northern China. Hugely destructive epidemics of malaria, bubonic plague, dysentery, smallpox and cholera culled millions of victims from the ranks of the famine-weakened. The European empires, together with Japan and the United States, rapaciously exploited the opportunity to wrest new colonies, expropriate communal lands, and tap novel sources of plantation and mine labor… The total human toll of these three waves of drought, famine and disease could not have been less than 30 million victims. Fifty million dead might not be unrealistic…

…the Radical journalist William Digby, principal chronicler of the 1876 Madras famine, prophesized on the eve of Queen Victoria’s death that when “the part played by the British Empire in the nineteenth century is regarded by the historian fifty years hence, the unnecessary deaths of millions of Indians would be its principal and most notorious monument.” A most eminent Victorian, the famed naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, passionately agreed. Like Digby, he viewed mass starvation as avoidable political tragedy, not “natural” disaster. In a famous balance-sheet of the Victorian era, published in 1898, he characterized the famines in India and China, together with the slum poverty of the industrial cities, as “the most terrible failures of the century.””

I think of how exploitative socio-political orders can mingle with the great tragedies of the ‘natural world’ to create these moments of terrible grief and suffering. I think today, during this global pandemic, of economic systems all over the world that have evicted poor people from their homes when they need such shelters more than ever. I think of the rapid spread of COVID throughout migrant worker dormitories and within prison complexes, largely filled with racialized communities who have been most exploited in this world. I think of an economy that cannot provide safe working conditions and wages during such a time, leaving countless people to survive on non-existent savings that have been decimated from decades of wage suppression and the corrosion of labour rights. Economies that cannot create jobs facilitating adequate contact tracing while so many are left jobless and looking for work. Societies that cannot provide paid sick leave to ensure desperate people who are exhibiting symptoms of an extremely contagious virus cannot afford to stay home. Wealthy societies where levels of testing and testing capacity have remained far below an adequate level to properly contain the spread of this virus.

And to think of many developing countries that were coerced into the global capitalist economy by institutions like the IMF, becoming overly dependent on producing for the over-consumptive habits of the more affluent stratum of our planet. These poorer countries now being thrown under the bus. Take for example the enormous suffering in a place like Bangladesh, that was taught according to the theology of ‘competitive advantage’ to focus on their specialty: garment production. But who helps all the workers when the garment industry shutters because it is no longer thought of as essential? How much labour during these past decades have been coercively directed into ‘non-essential’ activity by neoliberal policy to cater to the whims of the richest strata of the global population who can afford to throw away perfectly good clothes each year because they are no longer in fashion? Some within affluent societies can console themselves by believing they are donating clothes to poorer people when in reality the large majority of used clothing donations end up in landfills.

And suddenly, when garment demand collapses, who bears the brunt of all that economic risk? The poorest of the world, who are always the people who must bear the risks taken in such a capitalist economy, where the greatest mathematical minds of our time are used for the purposes not of better ensuring the well-being of the people in the world that most need relief and help, but preoccupied with shifting risk away from investors with deep pockets and externalize it onto the poorest of the world. Such is the crisis of the coming climate catastrophe. It is places like Bangladesh where enormous climate displacement will also occur and who will pay for all these millions of people to move from flooded regions? I get the feeling they will be left to fend for themselves, or else they will be simply another investment opportunity to turn more profit.

Foreign creditors of the 19th century took advantage of similar moments of extreme desperation, and it is within such similar moments in which millenarian movements sprung up during the devastating famines of the 19th century. Mike Davis’s book “Late Victorian Holocausts” also delves into a number of these:

“Drought and famine gave foreign creditors, allied with indigenous moneylenders and compradores, new opportunities to tighten control over local rural economies through debt or outright expropriation. Pauperized countrysides likewise provided rich harvests of cheap plantation labor as well as missionary converts and orphans to be raised in the faith. And where native states retained their independence, the widespread subsistence crises in Asia and Africa invited a new wave of colonial expansion that was resisted in many cases by indigenous millenarianism. El Niño was thus followed by gunboats and messiahs as well as by famine and disease.”

Davis emphasizes the religious millenarianism of many anticolonialist movements throughout the globe:

“Throughout monsoon Asia, drought and crop failure interacted with increasing disease mortality, especially malaria in its most virulent strain. Rinderpest, as in Africa, ruined tens of thousands of small cultivators in southeast Asia whose major capital was their bullock or ox. Where small peasants and sharecroppers were conscripted into export commodity circuits, the world depression of 1893 had left a legacy of crushing debt, aggravated by the implacable revenue demands of the state. Everywhere, anticolonialism arrived as a watershed between religious millenarianism and modern nationalism. In some cases, like Korea and the Philippines, local messianism and revolutionary nationalism became complexly intertwined. So were environmental crisis and colonial exploitation.”

I think it’s important to note how often Davis raises the issue of debt, which was a very important mechanism of control used by colonizers throughout the Third World. One can see how this plays out in North American cities like my own, where working-class families barely able to live paycheck to paycheck, who lost their jobs, are now being served rent arrears demanding for the full repayment of all rent during this pandemic time, or else being evicted from their homes.

Jodi Magness, in her book “Masada”, highlights how debt was also a central issue during the revolutionary events unfolding during the time of Jesus. It is fascinating to read in her text about one of the events of the revolt being the burning down of Agrippa II’s palace mainly because it housed tax and loan records. David Graeber in his history of debt mentioned that this is a common starting point for revolts, writing:

“By the same token, for the last five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of the debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers, whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. (After that, rebels usually go after the records of landholding and tax assessments.) As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: ‘Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.’”

Unsurprisingly then, Advent is inevitably about that mission proclamation Jesus claimed for himself from Isaiah 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Messiah means ‘anointed’ which was the ritual done to royalty at the time. Yet the mission of Jesus was that his cadre would rule with him. There are numerous points in the so-called New Testament where figures belonging to the movement of Jesus claiming that all their masses would receive a crown and reign together with him. There is no more master and slave at the foot of the cross – we rule together. This is ironically the fear at the heart of conservative evangelical critiques of ‘critical race theory’ levelled by people like John Piper – an anxiety that people can think of themselves as ‘gods’ in an age where ‘God’ has been ‘displaced’. Yet does Piper fail to see that is precisely the emancipatory direction of the movement Jesus undertook where he quotes Pslam 82 in John’s gospel:

“It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.” Jesus answered, “Is it not written in your law,[d] ‘I said, you are gods’? If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be annulled— can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?”

The mandate of Jesus was that found in the old prophetic tradition: liberation. The year of the Lord’s favour – Jubilee – the cancellation of all debts. Those landlord corporations with hard hearts and tight fists know nothing of the spirit of Advent. They are serving rent arrear notices even on Christmas Eve demanding repayment. They do not understand the radical levelling of Advent, where it is not merely about pulling rulers (or landlords) from their thrones, but raising everyone to the level of the throne so that all may exercise power and not simply a handful of people.

Davis also gives a fascinating account of Brazilian millenarianism that took on many different forms:

“Brazil’s nineteenth century ended in a bloody sunset of drought, famine and genocidal state violence. Across widening regional and racial divides, the positivist Republic, established by coup in 1889 and dominated by Paulista elites, conducted a ruthless crusade against poor, drought-stricken but pious sertanejos in the Nordeste. The 1897 War of Canudos, which culminated in the destruction of the holy city of Canudos in the Bahian sertão and the massacre of tens of thousands of humble followers of Antonio Conselheiro, is one of the defining events in Brazil’s modern history – the subject of Euclydes da Cunha’s epic Os Sertões [1902]. Another famous backlands utopia led by a religious folk hero, Father Cícero Romão’s city of Joãseiro in Ceará’s Carirí Valley, narrowly escaped the fate of Canudos: it survived into the twentieth century only through shrewd compromises with local elites. If eschatological imminence (with the oligarchic Republic as the Anti-Christ) suffused both communities, each was also a pragmatic and successful adaptation to continuing environmental crisis and economic decline in the Nordeste. The roots of both movements, moreover, go back to the Grande Seca of 1876–78.

The sertão had long been a religious volcano. “Sebastianism,” based on mystical belief in the return of the Portuguese monarch who had vanished fighting the Moors in 1578, was particularly widespread. The first massacre of millenarists occurred at Serra do Rodeador in the sertão of Pernambuco in 1819–20. “A prophet gathered together a group of followers to await King Sebastian, who was expected back at any moment to lead them on a crusade for the liberation of Jerusalem.” Their roughshod utopia was instead destroyed by a nervous government who viewed the utopian-apocalyptic strand in folk Catholicism with the deepest suspicion.41 The great droughts of the late nineteenth century, however, only further entrenched Sebastianist eschatology in popular culture. From the ranks of barefoot beatos and beatas, the famines of 1877 and 1889 mobilized fierce new visions of cataclysm followed by Christ’s thousand-year kingdom.

Yet millenarianism in the sertão was also a practical social framework for coping with environmental instability. When foreign priests and missionaries fled the scorched sertão in the spring of 1877, the former-schoolteacher-turned-beato Conselheiro and the ordained priest Cícero stayed behind with their flocks, sermonizing apocalypse but practicing energetic self-help. The first acquired his reputation for holiness by repairing local churches and graveyards, while the second became locally famous for resettling starving drought refugees in the undeveloped but fertile lands of the Araripe Mountains.”

Davis spends quite a bit of time referring to the Taiping insurrection throughout his book also where a failed Chinese bureaucrat became convinced he was the brother of Jesus and led an insurrection against the Qing government that resulted in what is considered to be the bloodiest civil war in recorded human history. He also discusses Southeast Asian millenarians like Estrella Bangotbanwa, Clara Tarrosa, and Dios Buhawi:

“By the late 1880s, thousands of peasants and aborigines in both Panay and Negros (in a movement strikingly analogous to the millenarian refuges of Joãseiro and Canudos in contemporary northeast Brazil) had withdrawn into autonomous armed communities in the mountains led by prominent babaylans like Panay’s Clara Tarrosa, “an eighty-year-old woman … who claimed to be the ‘Virgin Mary,’ ” or Negros’s Ponciano Elopre, a transvestite [sic] miracle-worker known as Dios Buhawi (the Waterspout God) for his/her skill in rainmaking. Despite brutal retaliations, including massacres and summary executions, Spanish power essentially collapsed in the island interiors, leaving the babaylons and their followers to confront the more ruthless, usurper colonialism of the Americans a decade later.”

“In Vietnam the coincidence of drought-famine and cholera was a bellows that fanned the embers of peasant anti-colonial resistance into millenarian revolt. With the killing in 1872 of Tran van Thanh, the leader of the populist Dao Lanh sect, the French believed they had pacified their new colony. “Unfortunately,” as Reynaldo Ileto points out, “they had not reckoned on the popular belief in reincarnation.” As the threat of famine spread panic through the countryside in 1877, another Dao Lanh apostle, Nam Thiep, announced that he was Tran’s incarnation and “that the time had come to expel the French” (widely believed to be responsible for this conjugation of disasters). “Nam Thiep was able to unify the Dao Lanh groups and mount a rebellion in 1878. He announced that the Low Era was ending, and that the reign of the Emperor of Light … was being established. Peasants armed with bamboo spears and amulets attacked French garrisons, only to be driven back decisively by rifle fire. But this did not faze Nam Thiep, who in 1879 proclaimed himself a living Buddha and built a new community on Elephant Mountain, in the region of the Seven Mountains.”

It’s important to remember that Advent is also rooted in a millenarian movement. Jesus was claimed by his followers as a Messiah that would overthrow the yoke of the Roman Empire. The millenarian revolts that Mike Davis describes throughout Third World anticolonial movements were also present throughout Europe, and like some anticolonial movements the European ones were often inspired by the Christian tradition. One can think of the great German Peasant Revolt that unfolded in Germany, which attracted great attention from revolutionary writers like Engels.

Much of Reformation history focuses on Magisterial Protestant reformers like Luther. These figures of the reformation accepted that secular rulers had a right to authority within the church, just as the church should be able to rely on secular rulers to “enforce discipline, suppress heresy, or maintain order” (as Alister McGrath put it in his text “Historical Theology”). Beyond such Magisterial Protestant reformers like Luther were those of the Radical Reformation who rejected the authority of secular rulers over the church. Among the most recognizable of these Radical reformers was Thomas Muntzer who led the 1525 Peasant Uprising in Germany. While Muntzer early on fought alongside Luther against papal power, they became radical opponents when it came to the demands of Germany’s impoverished peasants. Luther, with unflinching brutality, called for secular rulers to crush the Peasant Revolt by any means necessary.

This splinter between Magisterial and Radical Protestant reformers serves as an interesting way in to Advent reflections for 2020. Firstly, there is an old problem that Christmas poses as a state-sanctioned holiday within the Anglosphere, and to what degree the separation of church and state actually exists in practice. People of what faith ultimately have decided these issues here on Turtle Island? There is the hegemony of the so-called ‘holiday season’ that can never fully or satisfactorily manage to shed its religious connotations for many. And for others, it has shed far too much in its accommodation to some imagined ‘war on Christmas’.

Then there is a novel issue as we enter into Advent this year: the global pandemic and the stay-at-home orders that governments have mandated at the recommendation of public health scientists. Something curious has happened at many churches, especially in the U.S., but also in Canada. It is Christian defiance at government orders to curtail public gatherings at church buildings. For example, the prominent evangelical John MacArthur and his elders at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles issued a statement asserting “Christ, not Caesar, Is Head of the Church.” Even the church my parents attend (now virtually) are very unhappy about the lockdown measures in Ontario and explicitly said defying the state is not off the table in the future. While John MacArthur has on prior occasions denounced the notion of a “war on Christmas” as a waste of time, many of his fellow evangelicals have seen no irony in their fight for keeping Christmas decorations in government buildings. Now that state power has followed the advice of public health epidemiologists, it pays no respect to such state authorities despite on other occasions feeling no difficulty citing Romans 13 when politically convenient:

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”

Yet it is always important to underscore how this bible verse has been weaponized throughout history by the most reactionary of governments, including the Nazi regime. It is not an easy passage to deal with. Yet what many evangelicals have shown is that they are willing to defy the state, but over what issues? Many Christians did not defy the Nazi regime but used Romans 13 to persuade their congregants to obey the state of that time. It is a sad mark among many that has stained Christian history.

The issue I believe is not whether we should obey authorities or not. In my view, people who flout norms of COVID precautions are not wrong because they disobey the political authorities but because they disregard basic natural laws that have been revealed by empirical study and basic consideration regarding the risks particular actions impose on vulnerable communities. Bakunin, in his text “What is Authority?” asks:

“What is authority? Is it the inevitable power of the natural laws which manifest themselves in the necessary linking and succession of phenomena in the physical and social worlds? Indeed, against these laws revolt is not only forbidden - it is even impossible. We may misunderstand them or not know them at all, but we cannot disobey them; because they constitute the basis and the fundamental conditions of our existence; they envelop us, penetrate us, regulate all our movements. thoughts and acts; even when we believe that we disobey them, we only show their omnipotence. Yes, we are absolutely the slaves of these laws. But in such slavery there is no humiliation, or, rather, it is not slavery at all. For slavery supposes an external master, a legislator outside of him whom he commands, while these laws are not outside of us; they are inherent in us; they constitute our being, our whole being, physically, intellectually, and morally; we live, we breathe, we act, we think, we wish only through these laws. Without them we are nothing, we are not. Whence, then, could we derive the power and the wish to rebel against them?”

Bakunin was not against all forms of authority, but conceded to authority that justified itself. He recognized the finitude of the individual and that collective human knowledge was distributed across collective humanity:

“Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure…

I bow before the authority of special men because it is imposed on me by my own reason. I am conscious of my own inability to grasp, in all its detail, and positive development, any very large portion of human knowledge. The greatest intelligence would not be equal to a comprehension of the whole. Thence results, for science as well as for industry, the necessity of the division and association of labour. I receive and I give - such is human life. Each directs and is directed in his turn. Therefore there is no fixed and constant authority, but a continual exchange of mutual, temporary, and, above all, voluntary authority and subordination.”

Yet what Bakunin’s comments do not adequately address in our present circumstance is when there is a discrepancy between conceptions of risk and certain individuals do not voluntarily ‘subordinate’ themselves to justified knowledge and in doing so subject others to unjustifiable risks. He does not account for the fact that knowledge exists in a field of endless contestation, and human beings do not come to conclusions in a purely rational manner. A properly functioning society does require a certain level of coherence and coordination. This is the point that Engels mentions in his brief text “On Authority” when speaking about the demands of modern production:

“Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception… If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.”

Returning to the spinning wheel is precisely what some like Ghandi and E.F. Schumacher proposed. However, I think if one is to be politically consistent, such a position requires a retreat from the modern world. If one really believes a world without modern industry is better, one is required in some sense to live without all that it produces. While that is admirable and is lived out to some degree by certain Anabaptists that were birthed forth from the Radical Reformation that Muntzer was involved in, I do think the degree to which modern industry has the capacity to improve lives for those not blessed with the same access to land as Anabaptists and the same historical latitude to preserve their culture, do yearn for access to the same benefits of modern industry that more affluent sectors of society have enjoyed. The issues involve what it would take to carry out modern industry in an ecologically sustainable way, in a way that distributes the burden of labour and responsibility evenly across the population, in a way that distributes benefits evenly across society, and in a way that minimizes the need for hierarchy and coercion. Yet what Engels and Bakunin both agreed upon was the ideal of a future stateless society, but Engels makes an important point about what it would take to reach such a possibility:

“All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed.”

Engels makes the point that certain social conditions must be destroyed before the state could be abolished. What I think COVID has done is made this insight tremendously obvious. One could not simply abolish authority overnight. It seems the type of values that have been fostered under the past decades of neoliberal capitalism are not conducive to the type of unified action of mutual concern, care, and consideration that would be necessary for a stateless society to function. The reckless behaviour that has occurred during the ongoing public health emergency makes Engel’s point obvious. One cannot rely on voluntary action in a society in which selfishness has been made the primary driver and virtue for decades. It is naïve to believe the immediate abolition of authority would render such a state possible. A type of radical consciousness-raising would be required. This is the troubling humanist dimension of Marxism that is at issue. Marxism like Christianity was very preoccupied with the idea of creating a ‘new man’, yet it’s sometimes difficult to determine how the causality is supposed to work. Oscar Wilde referred to this as ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’. One would assume the idea is that a certain transitional phase, often referred to as ‘socialism’ in Marxian theory, would be required where a state would help formulate the type of society that would produce this ‘new human’. Afterwards, this ‘new human’ would be required for a future communist society to properly function. Yet would a state be required to create a ‘new human’ or could it be done from below?

This type of Marxist-humanist tendency is similar to Christian notions of sanctification and glorification. Both Christianity and communism recognize some sort of notion of ‘original sin’. Although a Marxist anthropology believes such ‘original sin’ is not so much intrinsic to humanity as much as it is an imprint of a capitalist society that fosters particularly destructive habits and qualities within human behaviour. Societies and communities shape people, as people also shape societies and communities.

This is also the case for ecosystems and our planet. We have discovered that humans do shape the functioning of our planet to a horrifying degree. That we as such a small species could radically alter the temperature of our planet is rather astonishing, maybe terrifying when one gets into all the details of what that would mean in the future. In her book “The Mushroom at the End of the World” Anna Tsing explores some of these ways in which humans along with all other species transform the world and impact each other:

“Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making. Fire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn the landscape, encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that attracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans; pines and fungi work together to take advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils. Humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds.”

“Pines have made alliances with animals as well as fungi. Some pines are completely dependent on birds to spread their seeds—just as some birds are completely dependent on pine seeds for their food.”

Yet this interdependency is not isolated from ‘destructive’ human practices. Tsing points out that human deforestation also benefits pine trees in certain circumstances:

“Humans spread pines in two different ways: by planting them, and by creating the kinds of disturbances in which they take hold. The latter generally occurs without any conscious intent; pines like some of the kinds of messes humans make without trying. Pines colonize abandoned fields and eroded hillsides. When humans cut down the other trees, pines move in. Sometimes planting and disturbance go together. People plant pines to remediate the disturbances they have created. Alternatively, they may keep things radically disturbed to advantage pine. This last alternative has been the strategy of industrial growers, whether they plant or merely manage self-seeded pine: clear-cutting and soil breaking are justified as strategies to promote pine.”

The reason Tsing is fascinated by species like pine that can persist in the wastelands of human destructiveness is because she believes the task before us is not averting catastrophe but how to live within the ruins that capitalism will inevitably produce. It is a sobering almost defeatist attitude, but maybe a realistic one.

Some leftist critiques of the term ‘anthropocene’ come from the fact that humans are not all equally responsible for the climate catastrophe. It is far more so the responsibility of capitalism and its ruling class that has generated such planet-altering conditions. And so for these leftists the clumsy term ‘capitalocene’ is more appropriate. Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway sometimes use the term ‘plantationocene’ because they locate such destructive practices to the colonial slave plantations that created the scale of production on which not only modern industrial agriculture rests, but modern industry more broadly. Think of how cotton slave plantations in the United States generated the need for enormous textile mills in Manchester, of which Engels so memorably described in The Conditions of The Working Class in England.

Anna Tsing opens her book Mushroom with a quote that she attributes to a ‘radical pamphlet’. I had to read it a few times before I understood it to be a very critical and nihilistic angle on radical soteriology. This is the quote in its fuller context from Desert:

“The spectre that many try not to see is a simple realization — the world will not be ‘saved’. Global anarchist revolution is not going to happen. Global climate change is now unstoppable. We are not going to see the worldwide end to civilisation/captalism/patriarchy/authority. It’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s unlikely to happen ever. The world will not be ‘saved’. Not by activists, not by mass movements, not by charities and not by an insurgent global proletariat. The world will not be ‘saved’. This realization hurts people. They don’t want it to be true! But it probably is… if we don’t believe in a global revolutionary future, we must live (as we in fact always had to) in the present. Shelves overflow with histories of past struggles and hallucinations of the post-revolutionary future whilst surprisingly little has been written about anarchist life under, not after, capitalism.”

The pamphlet’s writer goes onto quote Gustav Landeur:

“The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”

I had first come across ‘green nihilism’ (and this pamphlet I believe) in a link to Toronto’s Anarchist Reading Group shared on a Harvest Noon social media page, back when that little spot was still serving affordable vegan fare on the U of T campus. ‘Green nihilism’ did not sound very appealing to me then. I am a person of faith. I believe another world is possible. Yet this radical disbelief, this infinite resignation is precisely the prerequisite required for a Kierkegaardian double movement of faith — the dirty existentialist task of living in the ‘now’. As the unattributed Fredric Jameson cliche goes: it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And I think this text takes a very realistic and painfully honest take on the deep unlikelihood of global revolution, the end of capitalism, and the cessation of climate catastrophe. It claims that this brutal reality should not alter the radical fostering of community that anarchists and communists perform every day. But these things should be done because they make life better now, regardless of the outcome. The memorable line from the text goes:

“As Raoul Vaneigem said, for many, ‘the greatest kept state secret is the misery of everyday life.’ Our lives can be better, freer, and wilder than this and as anarchists we do our utmost to make them so, not in the ever-after of post-revolutionary heaven, but now.”

And near the end of the text, the author(s) of Desert admit(s):

“I can already hear the accusations from my own camp; accusations of deserting the cause of Revolution, deserting the struggle for Another World. Such accusations are correct. I would rejoin that such millenarian and progressive myths are at the very core of the expansion of power. We can be more anarchic than that.”

As I have mentioned before, I do not share the same view as the anonymous writer(s) of the Desert pamphlet, but I do think they set the stage for what real faith entails. They mark the total impossibility of the task before us. That is why ‘another world is possible’ is a theological statement. It requires faith of unimaginable magnitude. Yet occasionally one does see glimmers of such a future lived out in the present. The word ‘apocalypse’ means ‘revelation’. It connotes a gesture of revealing something previously hidden. That is part of the task we face today. Revealing a world of radical love and mutual care.

I think about the book of Revelation, often called the Apocalypse of John. It speaks of nations accommodating a hegemon that I cannot help but understand in the light of American imperialism. Take some of these excerpts from Revelation 18:

“For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown rich from the power of her luxury.”

“And the kings of the earth, who committed fornication and lived in luxury with her, will weep and wail over her when they see the smoke of her burning; they will stand far off, in fear of her torment, and say, “Alas, alas, the great city, Babylon, the mighty city! For in one hour your judgment has come.” And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, slaves—and human lives.”

The commodities especially the commodification of human life will be brought to an end.

“The merchants of these wares, who gained wealth from her, will stand far off, in fear of her torment, weeping and mourning aloud:

“Alas, alas, the great city, clothed in fine linen, in purple and scarlet, adorned with gold, with jewels, and with pearls! For in one hour all this wealth has been laid waste!”

Rejoice over her, O heaven, you saints and apostles and prophets! For God has given judgment for you against her. Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, “With such violence Babylon the great city will be thrown down, and will be found no more;

...for your merchants were the magnates of the earth, and all nations were deceived by your sorcery. And in you was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.”

These passages of judgement are what I have in mind this Advent. It is this very chapter in Revelation that Bertolt Brecht alludes to when he writes:

“So it is: The burghers have been bound to the millstones. Those who never saw the day have gone out into the light. So it is: The ebony poor boxes are being broken up; the noble sesban wood is cut up into beds. Behold, the capital city has collapsed in an hour. Behold, the poor of the land have become rich.”

Sometimes love and judgement are often conceived of in binary ways, but I really think what loving your enemy (especially when your enemy is the oppressor) means exposing their actions to them and demanding that they stop.

I want to conclude with some things Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that summarizes so much of what I’ve been contemplating this Advent, about eschatology, liberation, and the spiritual transformation that is required for ‘another world’ to be made possible.

“Dehumanization, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human. This distortion occurs within history; but it is not an historical vocation. Indeed, to admit of dehumanization as an historical vocation would lead either to cynicism or total despair. The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.”

“Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both. Any attempt to "soften" the power of the oppressor in deference to the weakness of the oppressed almost always manifests itself in the form of false generosity; indeed, the attempt never goes beyond this. In order to have the continued opportunity to express their "generosity," the oppressors must perpetuate injustice as well. An unjust social order is the permanent fount of this "generosity," which is nourished by death, despair, and poverty. That is why the dispensers of false generosity become desperate at the slightest threat to its source. True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.”

False charity and generosity is often so much a part of this season. Loving oppressors involves not demanding that they be more generous but demanding that they cease their oppression. If Christians believe Jesus exemplified a life of love then is not his flipping of tables in the temple and chasing the moneychangers out with a whip of cords an act of love and judgement simultaneously?

This is the task of humanizing all: oppressor and oppressed such that their mutually constitutive roles wither away. When James 1 speaks of the rich withering away I believe he is speaking about this relationship of domination that Freire talks about. The rich withering away is the process of them becoming human. This has implications from the inequality that has filled our prisons to the debt that oppresses the working masses of our planet. Yet Jesus came to set the captives free and declare Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favour. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

One can recognize the impossibility of such a world. How naïve and utopic it really is, and in that recognition confess that holding onto such a hope is an act of immense faith. That, I am convicted, is the task of Advent. Thy kindom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

advent reflection #3: advent and alienation

in this essay, i’m thinking through some of the continuity that exists between old religious conceptions of eschatology (and yearning for a better world) to more recent and modern conceptions (including overlaps that i am critical of in both, like narratives of ‘redemptive suffering’). since Advent is traditionally about the coming of some sort of‘kindom of God’ as a means of overcoming God’s alienation from humanity, i’m thinking about what overcoming alienation means today with respect to issues like prisons or the value workers produce through their labour. this is my third reflection this year. my first advent reflection can be readhere. my secondhere.

“It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.”

- Walter Benjamin (On the Concept of History)

“New Planet, 1921″ by Konstantin Yuon

It was Martin Luther King Jr. who brought me up close to the theology of Paul Tillich. King had written his doctoral dissertation on Tillich, and it was King’s exploration of Tillich’s theology that brought the theological gravity of Tillich’s notion of ‘estrangement’ into focus for me. For Tillich, ‘estrangement’ is of principal concern for the Christian faith. Reading Genesis through such a lens forefronts how ‘sin’ becomes a problem because it estranges us from God and from each other.

What is interesting is our carceral institutions believe separation and estrangement to be the antidote to ‘sin’, failing to see that in many ways this is a reversal of causality. The prison-industrial complex is premised on the idea that separating ‘troubled’ people (who may have caused harm) away from their communities of support and people who care about them the most (and putting them together with other ‘troubled’ people in prison) is the most effective way of ‘reforming’ such persons. Dr King like the apostle Paul spent time in such carceral institutions because he too was troubled. Troubled at the horrifying racism around him, and consequently King disobeyed the unjust authorities of his time and found himself in prison.

This old practice of civil disobedience continues all around the world, including in the very city where I live. In Mississauga,a protestor involved with Malton People’s Movement was arrested at a protest yesterday that involved the absolution of an officer responsible for murdering D’Andre Campbell. Malton People’s Movement made the following statement after the arrest:

“We know that we have every right to protest peacefully. The fake blood on Peel Police’s marble stones have been washed off with water; the blood of D’Andre, Jamal, Ejaz, and Chantelle cannot.”

Since then protestors (largely racialized working-class folks) present at the event have been tailed by police and intimidated by large fines and threats of charges. Policing and the institutions of incarceration are not unrelated to Dr. King, as has been made evident in books like Michelle Alexander’s“The New Jim Crow” which shows how prisons and criminal records effectively perpetuate old dynamics of racial segregation. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, King drew connections between Tillich’s ‘estrangement’ with Jim Crow segregation:

“So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness. So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.”

Tillich was very much within the orbit of the Frankfurt School, friends with Horkheimer and helped bring Adorno into its fold. His political sympathies with that strand of leftist politics is not particularly a secret, even if not often emphasized within a lot of the theological discourse I’ve encountered. In Tillich’s “Systematic Theology”, you get the sense that estrangement is not just a purely existentialist notion, but one denoting something eschatological and worth contemplation during seasons like Advent:

“Christianity asserts that Jesus is the Christ. The term "the Christ" points by marked contrast to man's existential situation. For the Christ, the Messiah, is he who is supposed to bring the "new eon," the universal regeneration, the new reality. New reality presupposes an old reality; and this old reality, according to prophetic and apocalyptic descriptions, is the state of the estrangement of man and his world from God. This estranged world is ruled by structures of evil, symbolized as demonic powers. They rule individual souls, nations, and even nature. They produce anxiety in all its forms. It is the task of the Messiah to conquer them and to establish a new reality from which the demonic powers or the structures of destruction are excluded.”

Advent then for Tillich is the yearning anticipation for the eventual overcoming of estrangement. Traditional Christianity conceived of the ‘Fall’ as sin separating humanity from God. Such a separation is denoted as ‘estrangement’ in Tillich’s theology. The ‘demonic powers’ or ‘structures of destruction’ that have marked the contemporary social order (colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, gender violence, oppression, et cetera) have removed us from a good and just society. We are estranged from such a ‘just society’, or what old prophetic voices called the ‘kindom of God’. And such a reality means we are also estranged from each other. ‘Sin’ then is an alienating force, where we are estranged from the justice (of God), estranged from each other, and even estranged from our very selves.

It is here worth noting that what is often translated as ‘estrangement’ in the work of Tillich is the German word “Entfremdung”. It is the same word that is translated as ‘alienation’ in the corpus of Marx. Tillich’s Advent musings of the ‘new eon’ replacing the old reality is that ancient small and ugly dwarf Walter Benjamin describes as hiding under the puppet of ‘historical materialism’ – theology. Guy Debord elaborates on this insight by Benjamin, writing in “The Society of the Spectacle”:

““Philosophy — the power of separate thought and the thought of separate power — was never by itself able to supersede theology. The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion. Spectacular technology has not dispersed the religious mists into which human beings had projected their own alienated powers, it has merely brought those mists down to earth, to the point that even the most mundane aspects of life have become impenetrable and unbreathable. The illusory paradise that represented a total denial of earthly life is no longer projected into the heavens, it is embedded in earthly life itself. The spectacle is the technological version of the exiling of human powers into a “world beyond”; the culmination of humanity’s internal separation.”

The lineage that Cornel West makes from Christianity to Romanticism to Marxism explains part of this issue. West writes:

"Marxism is a child of nineteenth-century Romanticism to the extent that it subscribes to a steadfast hope in an earthly paradise and invests in politics a passion previously monopolized by Christianity. Since Romanticism was, as M. H. Abrams demonstrated, a naturalization of the Christian world view, a secularization of the Christian gospel, it is no accident that Marxism and Christianity share a similar moral impulse.”

What is interesting is the way some contemporary theorists of ‘really existing socialism’ find this lineage as something that needs to be more thoroughly shed. For example, Jian Shigong, a self-described ‘conservative socialist’ often associated with the ‘Chinese New Left’ and legal commentator on the newest iteration of China’s state-sanctioned ideology ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ writes that:

“Both utopianism and communism are ideas that trace their origins to the Western civilizational tradition… Western scholars believe that Christian salvationist theology and views of historical progress in modern theory are part of the same genealogy, and some attribute the rise of communism to Christian Gnosticism. This is why Marxism can be read as a secular version of determinism. But Marx consistently emphasized that ‘communism’ must be transformed from utopianism into a scientific socialism, which meant that communism had to be realized in real life, becoming a concrete state of life subject to testing, in which ‘communism’ would become a ‘communist society’ in a truly scientific sense.”

After sketching out that oft-repeated lineage of Marxism from utopian Christianity towards ‘Scientific Socialism’, Jiang Shigong then writes:

“It was precisely the inner tension between communism as a philosophical concept and the construction of a communist society in a genuinely scientific manner that led Mao Zedong to begin to wonder about basic philosophical questions such as whether communist society was a contradiction in terms. It is like the ‘pursuit of the millennium’ in Christianity, in which God’s return to earth can only be repeatedly pushed forward. If we really were to experience God’s judgement here on earth, Christianity might also lose some of its lustre.”

This is a curious position for Jiang Shigong to take, and reflects how drastically ‘Marxism’ has shifted within Chinese socialist discourse. Jiang Shigong specifically articulates the strategy that has been taken to elevate Chinese communism into a sort of spirituality:

“Communism is not only a concrete society to be realized in the distant future but is also the highest ideal that will be absorbed into current political practice, a vibrant spiritual state. Communism is not only a beautiful future life, but is also, and more importantly, the spiritual state of Communist Party members in their practice of political life. In this way, communism merges with specific historical process and daily life as ideals and struggles. Precisely within the context of traditional Chinese culture, the understanding of this highest ideal is no longer that of Marx, who thought within the Western theoretical tradition; it is no longer in humanity’s Garden of Eden, ‘unalienated’ by the division of labor within society. Instead it is intimately linked to the ideal of ‘great unity under Heaven’ 天下大同 from the Chinese cultural tradition. The last section of the report to the Nineteenth Party Congress begins with the phrase ‘when the Way prevails, the world is shared by all’ 大道之行，天下为公”

There is an interesting tension here that Jiang Shigong identifies. The tension between the future society promised by communism on the one hand, and what Jiang Shigong says is more important, “the highest ideal” and “spiritual state” of communism as “current political practice” on the other hand. The tension exists in this way. One is alienated from that future society that communism promises. (What the Christian tradition calls the ‘kindom of God’.) To deal with that alienation, the move is to live out that “highest ideal” within everyday “practice of political life”. Yet Jiang Shigong in making this move asserts:

“this highest ideal is no longer that of Marx, who thought within the Western theoretical tradition; it is no longer in humanity’s Garden of Eden, ‘unalienated’ by the division of labor within society.”

Jiang Shigong’s critique of Marx is that he is still too much within the ‘linear’, ‘progressive’ structures of the Western theoretical tradition, within a narrative of ‘the end of history’. Marx for Jiang is too utopian still. Therefore a central ‘ideal’ of Marxism is abandoned – that of ‘unalienated’ labour. This is precisely the accommodating aspect of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ that can come across as troubling, because Marx’s theory of alienation is that generating profits or accumulating wealth under capitalism is a process of alienation. One of my favourite quotes by Marx is about the ideological austerity that capitalism imposes on people is composed of an allusion to Matthew’s gospel:

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save-the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour-your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life-the greater is the store of your estranged being.”

Certain aspects of Christian theology were unacceptably alienating for Marx, especially those concerned with the idea of the long suffering poor on earth receiving some future reward in heaven. Yet Jiang Shigong, precisely in dealing with the alienated eschatology of communism by bringing it into the present everyday, abandons Marx’s yearnings for a world in which workers are not alienated from the fruits of their own labour, for that is too ‘utopic’, and alienated from the present. But by trying to bring such ideals into present praxis, they must alter the ideal from overcoming alienation (including in the realm of labour), towards a new ideal of ‘great unity under Heaven’. Therefore, Jiang falls into a different sort of utopianism – that of the Maoist emphasis on the collective at the expense of the individual. It’s worth noting the pre-eminent communist historian, Eric Hobsbawm’s comments on Mao’s theoretical leanings:

“Unlike Russian communism, Chinese communism had virtually no direct relations with Marx and Marxism… Mao's own knowledge of Marxist theory seems to have been almost entirely derived from the Stalinist History of the CPSU: Short Course of 1939. And yet below the Marxist-Leninist top-dressing, there was - and this is very evident in the case of Mao, who never travelled outside China until he became head of state, and whose intellectual formation was entirely home-grown - a very Chinese utopianism. This naturally had points of contact with Marxism: all social-revolutionary utopias have something in common… Yet his view of an ideal society united by a total consensus, and in which, it has been said, 'the individual's total self-abnegation and total immersion in the collectivity (are) ultimate goods . . . a kind of collectivist mysticism', is the opposite of classical Marxism which, at least in theory and as the ultimate object, envisaged the complete liberation and self-fulfillment of the individual,”

Cornel West also notes that “the historical roots of the notion of individuality are found in the Christian gospel and the Romantic world view, a moral core which Marxism has also appropriated.”

This Maoist tendency that Hobsbawm identifies has certain resonances with Erich Fromm’s descriptions of fascism. I do not subscribe to the idea that fascism and communism are two manifestations of the same underlying essence of totalitarianism, but there are certain strains of communism that share certain semblance to Fromm’s descriptions of fascism. I have not had a chance to track down English translations of Jiang Shigong’s work on the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, but have only noted that Jiang is among the most enthusiastic translators and promoters of Schmitt’s work in China. From what people have written of his work, it seems that engagement with Schmitt is more admiring than other theorists who have worked through Schmitt’s theories, like Arendt or Agamben (or even theologians like Catherine Keller for that matter). Jiang, at least according to certain interpreters, believes in the necessity of state power that subscribes to the Schmittian assertion: “If I say you're wrong, you're wrong, even if you're right.” And so I am reminded of some things written in Fromm’s“Escape from Freedom”:

“This masochistic side of the Nazi ideology and practice is most obvious with respect to the masses. They are told again and again: the individual is nothing and does not count. The individual should accept this personal insignificance, dissolve himself in a higher power, and then feel proud in participating in the strength and glory of this higher power… Goebbels gives a similar definition of what he calls Socialism: “To be a socialist,” he writes, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole… Sacrificing the individual and reducing it to a bit of dust, to an atom, implies, according to Hitler, the renunciation of the right to assert one’s individual opinion, interests, and happiness.”

Fromm traces this through certain tendencies that Luther had:

“Luther’s relationship to God was one of complete submission. In psychological terms his concept of faith means: if you completely submit, if you accept your individual insignificance, then the all-powerful God may be willing to love you and save you. If you get rid of your individual self with all its shortcomings and doubts by utmost self-effacement, you free yourself from the feeling of your own nothingness and can participate in God’s glory. Thus, while Luther freed people from the authority of the Church, he made them submit to a much more tyrannical authority, that of a God who insisted on complete submission of man and annihilation of the individual self as the essential condition to his salvation.”

Emma Goldman spoke similarly of this religious tendency, writing: “Religion! How it dominates man’s mind, how it humiliates and degrades his soul. God is everything, man is nothing, says religion.” Yet Goldman recognized that there was a radical strain within certain faith traditions, when she spoke of “resistance to tyranny [being] obedience to God” or spoke of figures like the radical priest John Ball or Tolstoy who she described as “the real, true Christian… the greatest enemy of organized Christianity.”

Now returning to Jiang Shigong it is worth asking why in his commentary on ‘Xi Jinping Thought’ he has identified a shift from Marx’s ideal of ‘unalienated’ division of labour (which he pejoratively associates with the utopian connotations of the Garden of Eden) and the ideal derived from Chinese tradition: ‘great unity under heaven’. Again, Hobsbawm identified this Maoist tendency as an abnegation of the individual to the collective – a collective sanctioned by the Party (‘heaven’). The issue I believe has to do with the fact that China has lost its reputation as a country that is following a path that is truly ‘Marxist’ in nature. For example, hawkish personnel within the American national security apparatus, people like John Bolton, do not consider China to be communist any more. China admits that it is not currently a fully socialist society, but it claims it is striving to become a socialist society by 2049.

Basic Marxist theory subscribes to the idea that capitalism is a prerequisite stage that must be travelled through before a society can become socialist, and then eventually communist. Vijay Prashad has succinctly put it this way: you cannot socialize poverty. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms (theoretically) were about harnessing the forces of capitalism to improve China’s ‘productive forces’. To use technology transfer and foreign direct investment to first deal with the problem of scarcity, before trying to deal with the problem of uneven distribution (or ‘uneven development’). This is a paradox that lies uncomfortably within the theory of Marx. It is the criticism that Edward Said levelled at Marx, which Said locates within the Romanticist tradition of Goethe that Marx never could bring himself to abandon. Said first points Goethe’s “West–Eastern Diwan”, which Marx cites as a means of asserting a necessary narrative of redemptive suffering:

“Should this torture then torment us

Since it brings us greater pleasure?

Were not through the rule of Timur

Souls devoured without measure?”

Said than comments:

“The quotation, which supports Marx’s argument about torment producing pleasure, comes from the Westöstlicher Diwan and identifies the sources of Marx’s conceptions about the Orient. These are Romantic and even messianic: as human material the Orient is less important than as an element in a Romantic redemptive project. Marx’s economic analyses are perfectly fitted thus to a standard Orientalist undertaking, even though Marx’s humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged. Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out, as Marx’s theoretical socio-economic views become submerged in this classically standard image:

England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.

The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism, of course, but coming from the same writer who could not easily forget the human suffering involved, the statement is puzzling. It requires us first to ask how Marx’s moral equation of Asiatic loss with the British colonial rule he condemned gets skewed back towards the old inequality between East and West we have so far remarked. Second, it requires us to ask where the human sympathy has gone, into what realm of thought it has disappeared while the Orientalist vision takes its place… That Marx was still able to sense some fellow feeling, to identify even a little with poor Asia, suggests that something happened before the labels took over, before he was dispatched to Goethe as a source of wisdom on the Orient.”

We can see within certain Marxist conceptions of history a narrative of redemptive suffering. That some oppressed group must suffer through the indignities and violence of colonialism or capitalist development before socialism can be a viable possibility. It is not unlike similar narratives of redemptive suffering that have laced the history of Christian practice. I’m reminded of Hobsbawm, during an interview with Ignatieff, admitting:

“...in a period in which, as you might say, mass murder and mass suffering are absolutely universal, the chance of a new world being born in great suffering would still have been worth backing… had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15-20 million people might have been justified. Yes this is exactly what people said about WW1 and WW2.”

And one can see how this conception fundamentally accepts a certain alienation out of pragmatism. One is alienated from certain values of dignity, basic humanity, justice, value for human life in order to potentially achieve some future goal. By any means necessary, as the slogan goes. In China, the sacrifices today do not seem as extreme as they did during the height of Stalinist purges, but Jiang Shigong recognizes that the capitalist development ushered in by Deng Xiaoping have pushed China’s socialist goals out by many decades into the future. And his means of overcoming such alienation is a type of utopian ‘unity’ in the present, ‘communism’ as political practice today, and a rejection of upholding Marx’s ‘unalienated’ division of labour as a viable ideal to hold onto.

There are interesting parallels that Christianity faces also within this same realm of eschatology. Jesus (who was thought of as Messiah) did not establish a perfectly just society during his lifetime. His execution as a revolutionary on ‘Easter’ made a ‘second coming’ necessary for followers that refused defeat. It is the reason Christians still observe Advent. Because they are waiting for the Advent of the fully realized ‘kindom of God’. Yet Christians must somehow manage this gap between the “already” and “not yet” within the heart of inaugurated eschatology. In part, the Holy Spirit was the presence of God that arrived to animate the body of Christ on earth. But this was a divine presence that left space for a certain type of divine absence also. An absence, an alienatioin that could only be extinguished on some last Advent. But as Kafka put it though:

“The messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.”

Or as Judith Butler rather unsatisfyingly put it with respect to the messianism of Levinas (though Butler’s focus in this respect is Zionism, which does remind us that utopias in practice often have painful consequences that violate the ideals of their initial conjurers):

“If messianism is engaged with a form of waiting, a waiting for the Messiah and, indeed, a waiting for justice, it also is precisely a kind of waiting that connot be fulfilled in historical time. Messianism is distinguished from eschatology."

I am reminded of a great Advent/Nativity organ piece by the French composer Olivier Messiaen called La Nativité du Seigneur (The Birth of the Lord). One of Messiaen’s quintessential techniques that features in the piece is the appoggiatura. This is a musical ornament in which a non-chord note is added on a strong beat such that the arrival of the expected principal chord note is delayed, therefore delaying the expected melodic resolution. One might imagine Christmas as that non-chord note, arriving unexpectedly. Where the Messiah was thought to resolve all oppression and injustice, such a social order did not come to pass. Therefore within the Christian imaginary, all of history between Christmas and some ‘final’ Advent is that space between the starting non-chord note of the appoggiatura and its final resolving note.

Messiaen’s ‘Nativité’ also uses what he calls “modes of limited transposition” that he compiles especially from the music of Debussy and Rimsky-Korsakov. These modes can only be transposed to higher pitches a small number of times before they start repeating the exact same notes of previous transpositions. Messiaen does something similar with what he calls “non-retrogradable rhythms” (which are symmetrical in the sense that they are the same whether read left to right or vice versa) but this occurs within the domain of time. Messiaen writes in his text “The Technique of My Musical Language”:

“…these modes cannot be transposed beyond a certain number of transpositions without falling again into the same notes, enharmonically speaking; likewise, these rhythms cannot be read in a retrograde sense without one’s finding again exactly the same order of values in the right sense. These modes cannot be transposed because they are – without polytonality – in the modal atmosphere of several keys at once and contain in themselves small transpositions… Finally, the last note of each group of these modes is always common with the first of the following group; and the groups of these rhythms frame a central value common to each group.

…the hearer… inspite of himself… will submit to the strange charm of impossibilities: a certain effect of tonal ubiquity in the non-transpositions, a certain unity of movement (where beginning and end are confused because identical) in the nonretrogradation, all things which will lead him progressively to that sort of theological rainbow which the musical language, of which we seek edification and theory, attempts to be.”

What is interesting about these modes of limited transposition is that they never resolve because they are always in multiple keys at once. Like Benjamin’s ‘messianic time’ one can see particular events of oppression and revolution repeating, stacking up, forever trapped in Kierkegaardian repetition. I am reminded of something David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules:

“For much of the last century, the great revolutionary question has thus been: how does one affect fundamental change in society without setting in train a process that will end with the creation of some new, violent bureaucracy? Is utopianism the problem—the very idea of imagining a better world and then trying to bring it into being? Or is it something in the very nature of social theory? Should we thus abandon social theory? Or is the notion of revolution itself fundamentally flawed?

Since the sixties, one common solution has been to start by lowering one’s sights. In the years leading up to May ’68, the Situationists famously argued that it was possible to do this through creative acts of subversion that undermined the logic of what they called “the Spectacle,” which rendered us passive consumers. Through these acts, we could, at least momentarily, recapture our imaginative powers. At the same time, they also felt that all such acts were small-scale dress rehearsals for the great insurrectionary moment to which they would necessarily lead—“the” revolution, properly speaking. This is what’s largely gone today. If the events of May ’68 showed anything, it was that if one does not aim to seize state power, there can be no fundamental, onetime break. As a result, among most contemporary revolutionaries, that millenarian element has almost completely fallen away. No one thinks the skies are about to open any time soon. There is a consolation, though: that as a result, insofar as one actually can come to experiencing genuine revolutionary freedom, one can begin to experience it immediately.

...the logic of direct action: the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free? The obvious question is how this approach can contribute to an overall strategy—one that should lead, perhaps not to a single moment of revolutionary redemption, but to a cumulative movement towards a world without states and capitalism. On this point, no one is completely sure. Most assume the process could only be one of endless improvisation. Insurrectionary moments there will surely be. Likely as not, quite a few of them. But they will most likely be one element in a far more complex and multifaceted revolutionary process whose outlines could hardly, at this point, be fully anticipated.

In retrospect, what seems strikingly naïve is the old assumption that a single uprising or successful civil war could, as it were, neutralize the entire apparatus of structural violence, at least within a particular national territory—that within that territory, right-wing realities could be simply swept away, to leave the field open for an untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity.

And this is really the paradox of Advent. Faith in another world being possible. Yet how to experience genuine revolutionary freedom immediately through some type of prefigurative politics that does not abandon its core values. For many insurrectionists, estrangement and alienation are what is at issue in a multiplicity of ways. Take something the Invisible Committee wrote in their text “To Our Friends”:

“In reality, the end of civilization has been clinically established for a century, and countersigned by events. Expatiating on the matter is now nothing but a means of distraction. But it’s a distraction from the catastrophe there in front of us, and that has been there for a long time, from the catastrophe that we are, the catastrophe that the West is. That catastrophe is existential, affective, and metaphysical first of all. It resides in Western man’s incredible estrangement from the world, an estrangement that demands, for example, that he become the master and possessor of nature—one only seeks to possess what one fears. It’s not for nothing that he has placed so many screens between himself and the world. By cutting himself off from what exists, Western man has made it into this desolate expanse, this dreary, hostile, mechanical, absurd nothingness which he must ceaselessly devastate, through his labor, his cancerous activism, his shallow hysterical agitation. Relentlessly driven from euphoria to stupor and from stupor to euphoria, he tries to remedy his absence from the world through a whole accumulation of expertise, prostheses, and relations, a whole technological hardware store that is ultimately disappointing. He’s more and more visibly that overequipped existentialist who can’t stop engineering everything, recreating everything, unable as he is to bear a reality that is completely beyond him.”

While there is something excessively dramatic about this type of literature, I do think this period of isolation during COVID has brought to the forefront a certain alienation that exists in life being mediated by screens. In many ways it is a positive thing in this crisis, but even still, it has been painful and unbearable for many. It reminds me of when Debord writes:

“Separation is the alpha and omega of the spectacle. The institutionalization of the social division of labor in the form of class divisions had given rise to an earlier, religious form of contemplation: the mythical order with which every power has always camouflaged itself. Religion justified the cosmic and ontological order that corresponded to the interests of the masters, expounding and embellishing everything their societies could not deliver... he spectacle keeps people in a state of unconsciousness as they pass through practical changes in their conditions of existence. Like a factitious god, it engenders itself and makes its own rules. It reveals itself for what it is: an autonomously developing separate power, based on the increasing productivity resulting from an increasingly refined division of labor into parcelized gestures dictated by the independent movement of machines, and working for an ever-expanding market. In the course of this development, all community and all critical awareness have disintegrated; and the forces that were able to grow by separating from each other have not yet been reunited."

One sees that despite some early hopes that COVID might prove the power of a general strike or offer a radically fundamental shift in society to ‘build back better’ we have seen Capital seize on every conceivable opportunity to take advantage of crisis and alienation at every turn to do what is able to do best, turn profits. One sees how ruthlessly Amazon and other tech firms have taken advantage of this crisis to line already crowded pockets. The Invisible Committee wrote:

“Marx wrote in the aftermath of 1848: “A new revolution is possible only as a result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself.” And indeed he spent the rest of his days prophetizing, with every spasm of the world economy, the great final crisis of capital which he would wait for in vain. There are still Marxists who try to sell us the current crisis as “The Big One,” and would have us wait a bit longer for their curious version of the Last Judgement.

“If you want to force a change,” Milton Friedman advised his Chicago Boys, “set off a crisis.” Far from fearing crises, capital now tries its hand at producing them experimentally. The way avalanches are intentionally triggered in order to control their timing and size…

The crisis discourse of the neoliberals is a variety of doublespeak. Among themselves they prefer to speak of a “double truth.” On one hand, crisis is the invigorating moment of “creative destruction,” creating opportunities, innovation, and entrepreneurs of whom only the best, most highly motivated, and most competitive will survive.

… Nothing is older than the end of the world. The apocalyptic passion has always been favored by the powerless since earliest antiquity. What is new in our epoch is that the apocalyptic has been totally absorbed by capital, and placed in its service.”

This is a dour note to finish on, but I’m still a person of faith. One can soberly recognize and expose the way Capital leverages the pain and suffering of others during such crises. One can recognize the alienating forces pervasive throughout our societies. The estrangement that pits suffering workers against each other using the lies of racism, religious discord, political sectarianism and disunity. We can see how the fruits of workers’ labour are alienated from them. The value they create in the world expropriated from their hands into the pockets of those above them. The perfect example being Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program that pays workers piecemeal to sort through difficult to categorize items on its site. The program’s name is an allusion to the very phenomenon Walter Benjamin was describing in the quote about chess I opened this essay with. Amazon’s dwarf is not playing under the banner of historical materialism though but capitalism, because it is the theology of neoliberal capitalism that obscures the contributions of workers underneath a veneer. It is like the scene in Parasite, where each time the house-owner climbs a step the lights appear to automatically turn on, but it is the entrapped labourer in the subterranean world below, banging his head on switches, in a jarringly worshipful way that allows this spectacle of ‘technology’ to function. And so we have people arguing today that people who use smartphones or laptops cannot possibly criticize capitalism because they are using the very products generated by capitalism. Yet it is a categorical mistake to assert that it was capitalism that built these things rather than the labour of human workers exploited by capitalism. Hence enters the‘redemptive suffering’: if the exploitation and domination is a necessary ingredient in ensuring the rapidity of‘innovation’ and‘progress’, is it worth it?

In this present reality of profits over people, we can see how alienated we are from some future society that places people over profits. But we can also have faith that another world is possible. That we can work tirelessly together to place the value of humans above the profits of ‘fictitious gods’ of capital. We can emphasize unity without disparaging the individual and without abandoning ideals regarding the overcoming of alienation. The prophets of old had similar yearnings within their hearts. Through the Middle Ages these yearnings persisted, as Silvia Federici describes in“Caliban and the Witch”:

“It was the growing landless proletariat which emerged in the wake of commutation that was the protagonist (in the 12th and 13th centuries) of the millenarian movements, in which we find, beside impoverished peasants, all the wretched of feudal society: prostitutes, defrocked priests, urban and rural day laborers (N.Cohn 1970). The traces of the millenarians' brief apparition on the historical scene are scanty, and they tell us a story of short-lived revolts, and of a peasantry brutalized by poverty and by the clergy's inflammatory preach-that accompanied the launching of the Crusades. The significance of their rebellion, however, is that it inaugurated a new type of struggle, already projected beyond the confines of the manor and stimulated by aspirations to total change. Not surprisingly, the rise of millenarianism accompanied by the spread of prophecies and apocalyptic visions announcing the end of the world and the imminence of the Last Judgment, "not as visions of a more or less distant future to be awaited, but as impending events in which many now living could take active part" (Hilton 1973: 223).”

Here again is that tension: that we remain alienated from some imagined future of justice, but that we have the opportunity to participate in its ultimate demise. As James 1:10-11 reads: “Let the believer who is lowly boast in being raised up, and the rich in being brought low, because the rich will disappear like a flower in the field. For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the field; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. It is the same way with the rich; in the midst of a busy life, they will wither away.”

The believer dreams of a time that will come where justice will reign across the lands, the rich will wither away, and the infliction of suffering will cease. Peace on earth, goodwill between all. Where our swords will be turned to ploughshares, and we will work together, each individual producing and creating as they are able, and each receiving according to their need (as the Acts of the Apostles puts it). I still dream of such impossibilities rendered possible. The reconciliation of the infinite with the finite. A kindom come on earth as it is in heaven. I still have faith in Advent.

advent reflection #2: hypostatic movement

this is the second of my advent reflections for 2020. the first can be read here.

Image: Songe de Nabuchodonosor from Saint-Sever Beatus

This is a glimpse of the story told in Chapter 5 of Acts of the Apostles, before Paul and his comrades are rounded up by the police following their escape from prison:

“Then someone arrived and announced, ‘Look, the men whom you put in prison are standing in the temple and teaching the people!’ Then the captain went with the temple police and brought them, but without violence, for they were afraid of being stoned by the people. When they had brought them, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, “We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood on us.” But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than any human authority.’”

Consciousness raising among the masses, defying the carceral state surrounded by militant crowds antagonistic to the police, and openly sharing a somewhat seditious theology that had little patience for unjustified ‘human authority’ – these should all be tell-tale signs that Paul and his comrades were very much troublemakers in the eyes of the ruling class. Unsurprisingly then, Gamaliel, in a speech following the recapture of Paul and his comrades (in Acts 5:34-39), compares his former student Paul to two earlier Jewish revolutionaries: Theudas and Judas the Galilean.

Theudas according to Josephus led a revolt (of 400 men according to Acts, if it is the same Theudas) in 46 CE. Judas the Galilean led a revolt in 6 CE against the imperial tax census, though the author of Acts curiously places Theudas chronologically before the revolt of Judas (again possibly a different Theudas). Either way, one might say we are in the domain of Walter Benjamin’s ‘messianic time’ where “a chain of events” is but “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” at the feet of the angel of history. In the “Foundations of Christianity”, Karl Kautsky writes of Theudas:

“Every fanatic who proclaimed himself a Messiah and promised to free the people by his miracles found supporters. One such was the prophet Theudas under the procurator Fadus (from 44 A.D. on), who led a throng of people to the River Jordan, where they were dispersed by the cavalry of Fadus.”

Roman procurator Cuspius Fadus suppressed Theudas’ open rebellion against Rome by decapitating Theudas and parading his head into Jerusalem.

As for Judas of Galilee, he previously surfaced in my first Advent reflection, as his revolt against the census was the unmentioned backdrop of the Nativity story in Luke. This Advent was the first time Judas of Galilee was brought to my attention. I was reading a book on Advent called “Light of the World” by Amy-Jill Levine (a Vanderbilt professor in New Testament and Jewish Studies, as well as a practicing Orthodox Jew). Levine writes:

“In the year 6 CE, after the death of Herod the Great and when Jesus would have been a child, Rome proclaimed a local census. At this time, a Galilean known as “Judas the Galilean” (here, as with all the Marys, we have a combined problem of lack of last names coupled with too many people named Judas) began a revolt. We know that Luke knows about Judas because Judas appears in Gamaliel’s speech in Acts 5:37: ‘At the time of the census, Judas the Galilean appeared and got some people to follow him in a revolt. He was killed too, and all his followers scattered far and wide.’”

While Levine interprets the census mentioned in Luke 2 as a narrative device to emphasize Mary’s and Joseph’s obedience to the Roman colonial authorities, which would distinguish Jesus’ movement from the violent insurrectionary movement of Judas of Galilee, I would tend to think the census is mentioned to emphasize the context of Roman imperial domination and oppression under which Jesus was born and against which he was resisting. Reza Aslan, in Zealot, mentions that the census came at a time just after the official Roman conquest of Judea:

“Then, in the year 6 C.E., when Judea officially became a Roman province and the Syrian governor, Quirinius, called for a census to tally, register, and properly tax the people and property in the newly acquired region, the members of the Fourth Philosophy seized their opportunity. They used the census to make a final appeal to the Jews to stand with them against Rome and fight for their freedom. The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It was an admission that the Jews were not the chosen tribe of God but the personal property of the emperor.

It was not the census itself that so enraged Judas and his followers; it was the very notion of paying any tax or tribute to Rome. What more obvious sign was needed of the subservience of the Jews? The tribute was particularly offensive as it implied that the land belonged to Rome, not God.”

In “The Foundations of Christianity”, Kautsky also takes some interest in Judas of Galilee writing:

“At the same time the insurrection spread to the country. The brigands of Galilee now got strong detachments of recruits, and made up whole armies. Their leaders had themselves called Kings of the Jews, that is Messiah. Especially prominent among them was Judas, whose father Hezekiah had been a famous bandit and executed as such (47 B.C.). In Peraea Simon, a former slave of Herod, got together a band; a third force was commanded by the shepherd Athronges. The Romans suppressed the revolt with great difficulty… There was an unspeakable slaughter and pillage; two thousand of the prisoners were crucified and many others sold into slavery. This was about the time in which the birth of Christ is set. There was quiet for several years, but not for long. In the year 6 A.D. Judea came under direct Roman rule. The first measure taken by the Romans was a census for tax-collecting purposes. In answer, there was a new attempt at insurrection by Judas the Galilean, the same who had been so prominent in the uprising ten years earlier. He got together with the Pharisee Sadduk, who was to incite the people of Jerusalem. The attempt failed, but it led to the break between masses of the common people and the rebellious Galileans on the one hand, and the Pharisees on the other. They had been together in the rebellion of 4 B.C. Now the Pharisees had had enough, and the party of the Zealots arose in opposition to them. From that time to the destruction of Jerusalem, the fires of insurrection were never completely extinguished in Galilee and Judea.”

Now to return to Gamaliel’s speech in Acts 5. After Gamaliel mentions the failed revolts of Theudas and Judas of Galilee, he says something very interesting about Paul and his comrades:

“So in the present case, I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone; because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them—in that case you may even be found fighting against God!”

This is fascinating for a number of reasons. Firstly, Jesus had already died. In many ways he would have already been thought of as a ‘failed Messiah’ like Theudas and Judas of Galilee, yet the fervour of Paul and his rabble-rousing friends preaching resurrection and the immanent apocalyptic return of Christ meant their movement’s success was still an open question (at least in the narrative of Acts). However, the crucifixion at Easter implies Advent to be a season of waiting, anticipation, and yearning for justice that had been displaced into the future, because the birth and life of Jesus did not bring about the dismantling of Empire and oppression nor an egalitarian reign of justice and peace for all. However, that hope is not gone, and all the Abrahamic faiths still await such a future together. Amy-Jill Levine in her Advent book mentions how:

“In terms of messianic ideas, the opposition from many Jews to the claims of Jesus’ status should not be a surprise. The dominant Jewish idea at the time (and subsequently) is that the Messiah brings about the messianic age, a time when death no longer has dominion, when there is a general resurrection of the dead, a final judgment, the return of exiles to their homeland, peace on earth. Because Jesus did not bring about this type of salvation, most Jews concluded that he could not be the Messiah. What Christians sometimes describe as the “Second Coming” looks, to a great extent, like traditional Jewish messianic hopes. The only difference is the identity of the Messiah, who in Jewish tradition is not a divine being to be worshiped, but a representative of the one God.

Rather than having us engage in endless (or, at least until the end of the world) speculation about messianic job descriptions, it makes more sense to me to work together for justice and peace, and let God take care of the end-of-the-world details.”

Levine’s last statement raises interesting questions about eschatology as well as the tension between human and divine agency, because working for justice and peace is a type of eschatological activity oriented to a liberated future. This question of agency is precisely the one Gamaliel makes in his speech wondering whether the movement started by Jesus and continued by Paul was of human or divine origin. This tension is present in the radical Hanukkah hymn “Mi Y’malel”:

“Who can describe the heroic deeds of Israel, who can count them?

For in every age a hero will arise to save the people.

Hark! In ancient days at this season, the Maccabees redeemed and delivered us.

Therefore, in our day, Israel must unite, arise, to redeem ourselves!””

The hymn alludes to Psalm 106:2: “Mi y’maleyl g’vurot Adonai!” – “Who can describe the heroic deeds of the LORD?” But the hymn modifies the Psalm, and goes “Mi y’malel g’vurot yisrael” – “Who can describe the heroic deeds of Israel?”

N. T. Wright has pointed out that many writers of the Christian testament interpret passages from the Hebrew Bible that are about Israel (e.g. the suffering servant songs of Isaiah) as about Jesus or more generally a Messiah. One has interesting shifts between the individual and collective. From Jacob to Israel (children of Abraham) to Messiah to faith community to God/Spirit within historical discussions of liberation. One can imagine that is partly where this tension is coming from between attribution to human and Divine initiative. Guy Debord in the book “The Society of the Spectacle” touches on this important tension within past millenarian movements:

“The great European peasant revolts were also an attempt to respond to history — a history that was violently wresting the peasants from the patriarchal slumber that had been imposed by their feudal guardians. The millenarians’ utopian aspiration of creating heaven on earth revived a dream that had been at the origin of the semihistorical religions, when the early Christian communities, like the Judaic messianism from which they sprung, responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their time by envisioning the imminent realization of the Kingdom of God, thereby adding an element of unrest and subversion to ancient society… millenarianism developed in a historical world, not on the terrain of myth. Modern revolutionary hopes are not irrational continuations of the religious passion of millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium. On the contrary, millenarianism, revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, a tendency that lacked only the consciousness that it was a purely historical movement. The millenarians were doomed to defeat because they were unable to recognize their revolution as their own undertaking. The fact that they hesitated to act until they had received some external sign of God’s will was an ideological corollary to the insurgent peasants’ practice of following leaders from outside their own ranks.”

With Debord here, we have a view dialectically opposite to Gamaliel’s. For Gamaliel, any failure of revolt would be because the revolt’s origin was found in ‘man’ and not God. For Debord any failure of revolt would be because the revolt’s origin was imagined to be found in God and not human initiative. Yet this tension is in fact not a strictly modern one, but is laced throughout the canonical texts.

It is not entirely unrelated to questions raised in the discourse of Christology, ideas of hypostatic union, and even the authorship of scriptures. Peter Enns for example was an evangelical professor that got booted from Westminster Theological Seminary because in his book “Incarnation and Inspiration” he emphasized that scripture had both divine and human aspects, which undermined fundamentalist notions of inerrancy. I think collective movements in history are better understood in such a dialectical fashion. One might think about old debates among the left between base and superstructure: whether technology and the means of production was the driver or culture and ideology. One cannot lose sight of either, especially if one believes another world is possible.

In an introduction to Muntzer’s “Sermon to the Princes”, Alberto Toscano elaborates on the wonderful way Ernst Bloch engages in such a dialectical mode with respect to Muntzer:

“it was perhaps only Ernst Bloch - in his 1921 Thomas Muntzer: Theologian Of the Revolution - who tried to do justice to the interweaving of apocalyptic theology, mystical spirituality and revolutionary politics in Muntzer. Bloch does not see the theological impetus of the 'revolution of the common man' of 1525 as the mere index of socio-economic immaturity. On the contrary, he views it as one of those situations that bears witness to the fact that 'the superstructure is often in advance of an ... economy that will only later attain its maturity'. In other words, unlike his great critic on this point, Georg Lukacs, Bloch wants to stress the anticipatory character of Muntzer's anachronism, without immediately relegating it to the scrapheap of necessary failures…

Rather than accepting the disjunction between (premature) political content and (sterile) religious form, Bloch finds in Miintzer the paradoxical union of theology and revolution, without the one serving as an instrument for the other.”

The Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom has written extensively on Leviticus and how old priestly ideas and notions of ritual exist about how human agency affects the coming and going of the ‘presence of God’. With respect to eschatology one could think of that famous text from Isaiah 40 that is sung in the opening to Handel’s Messiah:

“The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness; prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry moutain and hill made low; the crooked straight and the rough places plain.”

The movement that Jesus began became known as “the Way” and its adherents “people of the Way” – workers building this “Way”. Preparing for the coming of another world, on earth as it is in heaven. Working to eventually bring down the exalted, make low the rulers, exalt the lowly of the valleys. Preparation for a new world. Advent is not a passive waiting but a very active waiting for another world. Building towards another world. Levelling in anticipation of a final levelling.

The ‘Way’ through the wilderness, out of Egypt’s slavery, out of Babylonian exile, to Jerusalem is an arduous one. It involves resisting Empire at every turn. This is exactly what we find in the Maccabean Revolt against the Hellenizing forces that came to desecrate the Jerusalem temple to set the context for the festival of Hanukkah now being celebrated. Jodi Magness in her book “Masada” gives a good summary of the issues at play during this period of the Maccabees:

“Local elites eagerly embraced the Greek lifestyle in emulation of the ruling class. The Jerusalem elite—primarily wealthy priestly families—were not immune to these influences, despite the fact that the Greek way of life often contradicted biblical law or Jewish customs. For example, a Greek education was key to upward mobility under Alexander’s successors.”

This reminds me of Sartre’s relevant introduction to Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”, in reference to Third World decolonization, which reads:

“The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words ‘Parthenon! Brotherhood!’ and somewhere in Africa or Asia lips would open ... thenon! ... therhood!’ It was the golden age. …the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end…”

Anyway, Magness goes on to describe the decree of Antoiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 BCE where the:

“Jerusalem temple was re-dedicated to Olympian Zeus (the chief deity of the Greek pantheon) and the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim (where the God of Israel was also worshipped) was re-dedicated to Zeus Hellenios. Shrines and altars to Greek gods were established elsewhere around Jerusalem and the countryside. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing in the late first–early second century CE, attributed Antiochus’s decree to a desire to eradicate the Jewish religion (Hist. 5.8:2).”

This image of the ‘desolating sacrilege’ or the ‘abomination of desolation’ that desecrated the Temple makes itself present within so-called ‘New Testament’ apocalyptic writing including the Gospels and by allusion in Revelation. So Hanukkah in many ways hovers within the imagery of the Christian testament. At stake was always the manipulative and co-optive manoeuvring of Empire to quell the radical nature of indigenous movements. Jesus, being Jewish celebrated the Festival of Dedication which has come to be called Hanukkah. Amy-Jill Levine in her Advent book writes how:

“Hanukkah is the Hebrew word for “dedication,” and it is mentioned in the Gospel of John, where Jesus visits the Temple: “The time came for the Festival of Dedication in Jerusalem. It was winter” (John 10:22).”

Daniel’s apocalyptic literature was immensely influential to writers of the Christian testament, and was likely written under the Seleucid regime of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The issues of Hanukkah and the Maccabean revolt colour the book of Daniel in central ways. Daniel is of enormous interest to me, because it’s the primary text on which Thomas Muntzer is preaching on in his seminal “Sermon to the Princes”. Muntzer’s sermon is a radical revolutionary text that preceded the great German Peasant Uprising that ultimately got Muntzer executed. Like the Maccabees who saw the imperial influences of Hellenization and its attendant class stratification, so to did Muntzer see this in his time as he participated in the radical Reformation as he saw how the feudal ambitions corrupted the clergy:

“One sees now how prettily the eels and snakes copulate together in a heap. The priests and all the evil clergy are the snakes, as John the Baptist calls them, Matthew 3[:7], and the temporal lords and rulers are the eels, as is symbolized by the fish in Leviticus 11[:10-12]. For the devil's empire has painted its face with clay. Oh, you beloved lords, how well the Lord will smash down the old pots of clay [ecclesiastical authorities] with his rod of iron, Psalm 2[:9]. Therefore, you most true and beloved regents, learn your knowledge directly from the mouth of God and do not let yourselves be seduced by your flattering priests and restrained by false patience and indulgence. For the stone [Christ's spirit] torn from the mountain without human touch has become great. The poor laity and the peasants see it much more clearly than you do. Yes, God be praised, the stone has become so great that, already, if other lords or neighbours wanted to persecute you on account of the gospel, they would be overthrown by their own subjects. This I know to be true. Indeed the stone is great! The foolish world has long feared it. The stone fell upon the world when it was still small. What then should we do now, after it has grown so great and powerful? And after it has struck the great statue so powerfully and irresistibly that it has smashed down the old pots of clay?”

This is a fascinating homily on Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream in Daniel 2. One might imagine the statue of this dream as the detritus piling at the feet of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history.

“The head of that statue was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. As you looked on, a stone was cut out, not by human hands, and it struck the statue on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, were all broken in pieces and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the statue became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”

This statue of degrading qualities of metals, descending down to clay, was oneiric signpost to the various empires that Judea had been subjected to. The mistaken prophetic prediction in the Book of Daniel regarding the death of Antiochus is actually what allows scholars to date these portions of the book. But it also allows one to interpret Antiochus as every other oppressive ruler sanctioned by Empire, one catastrophe piled upon another.

This is the great monolith of Empire that oppressed slaves in Egypt, that dispossessed people and took them as captives to Babylon, that desecrated a holy temple during the time of the Maccabees, slaughtered peasants in Germany during Muntzer’s time, and in our time, evicts poor people across Canada during a global pandemic and refuses debt relief to the poorest developing countries completely collapsing under the untenable economic pressures that this pandemic has brought us. Muntzer imagines that stone cut out in Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream in Daniel 2 falling upon the world and striking down that great statue of Empire. I think back to an old song I sung in Sunday school that goes: “Lift your voice, it's the year of jubilee, And out of Zion's hill salvation comes.”

One can imagine the old apocalyptic yearning, a large stone cut out of Mount Zion, that would smash the oppression of all empires, and establish a reign of peace and justice for all. But one can also hear the cries of Isaiah this Advent, anticipatory but also participatory:

“Prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, and ev'ry moutain and hill made low.”

advent reflection #1: nowhere to lay his head

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have dens, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58)

The old Nativity tableau vivant of a Jewish peasant family shacked up next to a manger among assorted livestock is a familiar one this time of year. My neighbour has a beautiful inflatable nativity scene (complete with cute little sheep) that distends and glows every evening. Among the sparkling holiday lights though, I find that it’s sometimes easy to forget this Nativity scene is a scene of homelessness, and something as jarring as homelessness and destitution sits unsettlingly at the heart of Advent. Incarnation is the arrival of a Messiah to a people oppressed by an Empire, who arrives as a homeless person to join the unhoused in their homelessness. In so many ways homelessness is a type of dispossession. But this Messiah did not come so that the unhoused remain homeless, but rather that they find a home in the future radically egalitarian ‘kindom of God’. But as we live within this present reality of injustice, the manger outside the inn is where the Divine is made manifest in this narrative. This site of indignity and unjustifiable poverty is what demands our spiritual attention.

There’s ‘no place’ in the inn for this young Jewish family, just like there’s ‘no place’ for those who cannot afford to pay their rent here in our cities today. Daily all across Canadian cities, faceless landlord corporations are deploying police officers to evict poor families who cannot afford to make rent, through no fault of their own, but because they are treated as the flotsam of a capitalist economy functioning as intended under a global pandemic. These evicted tenants are like the ‘illegitimate’ and ‘dishonourable’ holy family who one might imagine could not afford to shell out the expenses for a clean dry place to lay their head down for the night.

Under the decree of a census, Mary and Joseph must travel where the imperial bureaucracy demands, but expenses are externalized onto poor working people. And such censuses were acts of imperial domination for extracting wealth from the colonized of Judea. We see the radical tax resistance led by Judas of Galilee in 6 CE at this time urging Jews not to participate in the imperial Roman census. The movement of Jesus would become associated with such a spirit of revolt by people like Gamaliel, who explicitly compares Paul and his rabble-rousing comrades with the likes of Judas of Galilee in Acts 5.

Yet this old dynamic of the powerful extracting wealth from common people still persists with us today. In this time of Advent, courageous organizers like Sarah Jama and Desmond Cole are being arrested and fined for occupying space on public property, demanding a public meeting with the Herodian municipal powers over evictions and the housing crisis. I say Herodian, because an eviction can effectively be a death sentence for some, especially this winter, and that is why anti-eviction protestors say municipal leaders have blood on their hands, as do landlord corporations and REITs (real-estate investment trusts). Anti-war activists of old used to say nuclear weapons not only killed when they were detonated, but extinguished life by way of all the food they removed from the hands and mouths of poor children where enormous government resources were diverted into creating weapons of mass destruction rather than meeting the basic needs of its citizens. It is not unreasonable for young people today to ask similar questions about how collectively pooled money is being spent on the police compared to goals like guaranteeing housing for all. The number of officers municipalities send for each eviction have a daily wage that could pay someone’s rent for multiple months.

The anti-fascist theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in an Advent sermon he gave on December 2, 1928, said that:

“The celebration of Advent is only possible to those who are troubled in soul... the curse of homelessness... hangs heavily over the world... we see in many lands people dying of cold in wintry conditions. The plight of such people disturbs us within and amidst our enjoyment; a thousand eyes look at us and the evil haunts us. Poverty and distress throughout the world worries us, but it cannot be brushed away...”

Bonhoeffer goes on to emphasize how Matthew 25 is central to the way any Christian is to observe Advent:

“…we face the shocking reality. Jesus stands at the door and knocks. He asks for help in the form of a beggar, a down-and-out, a man in ragged clothes, someone who is sick, even a criminal in need of our love. He meets you in every person you encounter in need. So long as there are people around, Christ walks the earth as your neighbour, as the one through whom God calls to you, demands of you, makes claims upon you. That is the great seriousness of the Advent message and its great blessing. Christ stands at the door. He lives in the form of people around us. Will you therefore leave the door safely locked for your protection, or will you open the door for him? It may seem odd to us that we can see Jesus in so familiar a face. But that is what he said. Whoever refuses to take seriously this clear Advent message cannot talk of the coming of Christ into his heart. Whoever has not learned from the coming of Christ that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, has not understood the meaning of his coming.”

Christians cannot forget that at the heart of their faith tradition is a homeless Messiah. If Christians are to take Matthew 25 seriously as central to observing Advent, and living out a life of faith daily, the mass evictions unfolding since August of this year should be of unwavering importance. While affordable housing has been a severe issue over the past many years around the GTA, it is especially salient under the cloud of COVID-19. There are thousands of online eviction hearings scheduled in the coming few months, pumping out rulings like a factory with a cold brutality that is chilling. Just last week alone 2000 eviction hearings were held.

Alykhan Pabani has pointed out that the large majority of rental units in cities like Toronto are not owned by so-called mom and pop landlords, but are owned by real-estate investment trusts (REITs), which are faceless corporations that hire management companies as a barrier between them and their tenants, to make the extraction of wealth as painless as possible for them. There is a reason they want to keep at such a remove from their tenants who are faced with high and steeply climbing rents, and perpetually degrading building conditions with more wildlife roaming about hallways and through building crevices than a Christmas nativity scene. Just speak with tenants anywhere in Parkdale, or read reviews or forums for rental units online. There’s a reason tenant protestors call their landlords ‘slumlords’.

Alykhan Pabani and Aliza Kassam were interviewed on the Red Life Podcast, and it was an extremely informative glimpse into the housing crisis that began well before this ongoing global pandemic. They speak of how city workers and police are deployed to tear down the homes of encampment dwellers on public land and how management companies and landlords like MetCap are conducting mass evictions during this pandemic. Before COVID, some 135,000 people faced homelessness every year in Canada. Some 47% of Torontonians are renters, making a significant portion of the population vulnerable to evictions. Before the pandemic around 10,000 people on any given night in Toronto could be found sleeping rough, without a roof over their head. All these figures are only getting worse as the full gravity of this pandemic under capitalism is being felt. Tents, which are people’s homes, are being destroyed by the City, and despite officials claiming there are shelter spaces available to hold people overnight, there have been documented cases showing otherwise. One can see echoes of the alienating Roman imperial bureaucracy of Jesus’ time controlling where poor people’s bodies must be at any given time, and letting them deal with the consequences of being unhoused.

As long as basic clean sanitary housing remains a commodity, and is not ensured as a human right, this tragedy will persist. We have the resources in this country to provide housing for everyone. There are extremely wealthy families that live within our borders, but it is their interests that ultimately get the final say in government. People need jobs. Labour can be directed towards building and maintaining affordable homes for everyone, but instead labour in our economy is directed wherever wealthy people decide it should be directed, often towards that which is most profitable, which frequently happens to misalign with that which is most useful for meeting basic human needs that cannot be justifiably ignored.

And so when the knocking on the door of Advent arrives, it is the knock of a homeless Christ figure at our doorstep. It is not a matter of performing individual acts of generosity though. Simply letting someone into one’s house is radically generous, but it is not changing the fundamental structure of property relations, and who controls what, and who has what type of access to what. Everyone needs housing – a safe place that they can call their own. The knock of Advent is the cry of the tenant with nothing butlint in her pockets, demanding they not be evicted from their home. It is the painful groans of the Holy Spirit praying for a day of justice to come (in Romans 8). Part of Advent is, as Bonhoeffer said, “taking seriously, not [only] our own sufferings, but those of God in the world.” And doing so requires a commitment to faith – faith that another world is possible. Or as Arundhati Roy says, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

In a sermon Bonhoeffer gave on December 17, 1933, he speaks of this revolutionary spirit that found its way into the Magnificat:

“This song of Mary's is the oldest Advent hymn. It is the most passionate, most vehement, one might almost say, most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. It is not the gentle, sweet, dreamy Mary that we so often see portrayed in pictures, but the passionate, powerful, proud, enthusiastic Mary, who speaks here. None of the sweet, sugary, or childish tones that we find so often in our Christmas hymns, but a hard, strong, uncompromising song of bringing down rulers from their thrones and humbling the lords of this world…”

And so more than petty housing reforms, and stop-gap government measures to quiet the rowdy demands of tenants and encampment dwellers trying to survive the brutal winter cold, what we need more than any of that is a total restructuring of the political order. What Alykhan Pabani and Aliza Kassam are doing with Encampment Support Network and various tenant organizing projects (People’s Defense Toronto, Malton People’s Movement) is not only meeting the immediate material needs of their neighbours (providing food, sleeping bags, tents, protection from evictions, affordable rents, etc.) they are also spreading good news that another world is possible. And that it should be made a reality. That this kindom of justice and dignity for all should be on earth as it is in heaven. That it shouldn’t be the job of volunteers to be doing all these things while so many are jobless and desperate for work. The state should be guaranteeing jobs to anyone who wants one and meeting the sea of needs that exist out there. We need a radically different economy. That is what Mary so rightfully recognized in her Advent hymn. She sang all those centuries ago:

“He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51-53)

If we are to fill the hungry with good things, and to adequately house everyone, we have no choice, but to send the rich away empty, and that is what is knocking on our door this Advent. Another world. “On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

a history of radical ideas behind hancock’s meadowvale and ‘new towns’ like it

this started as a reflection on a short Chomsky book, but it provoked a long excursion into the town planning ideas that informed the design of Meadowvale, a suburb i have spent almost my entire life in. i hilariously had to rewrite this entire essay from memory after having accidentally deleted it upon pasting in my last cited passage into my Notes app, which promptly proceeded to crash after i tried to undo the paste. i have permanently pledged to do all future writing in a proper word processor. requiem for a Notes app nightmare.

Requiem for the American Dream is largely composed of fragments of interviews with Chomsky conducted for a documentary of the same name. Consequently its tone is very conversational and it’s pretty conducive to the audiobook format. (Someone’s uploaded it onto YouTube if you’re in the mood for such listening.)

The book opens with Chomsky comparing the present situation to the Great Depression as he recalls it. He talks about how even though things were bad then – much worse than now – there was still a sense that things would get better. Chomsky says that sense of hope has vanished. People no longer have a sense of upward mobility being possible. The bubble has burst and the American Dream has collapsed.

The American Dream commonly elicits images of white-picket fences and other stock imagery of the American suburbs. I grew up in the suburbs, and though this was in Canada, my parents as immigrants bought into this ‘dream’. As I reflect on our experiences, I see Chomsky’s words ringing true. My dad’s income has not only failed to increase for over the past decade but has in fact fallen. My mom has worked longer and longer hours over the years, even working through vacation days, because work has to be done and she feels terrified of not being able to meet the unreasonable expectations of her bosses.

Chomsky makes a very fascinating point citing something Alan Greenspan said about why his tenure as chair of the Federal Reserve was so successful. Greenspan said in his testimony before the US Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs in 1997:

“[A] typical restraint on compensation increases has been evident for a few years now and appears to be mainly the consequence of greater worker insecurity. In 1991, at the bottom of the recession, a survey of workers at large firms by International Survey Research Corporation indicated that 25 percent feared being laid off. In 1996 . . . the same survey organization found that 46 percent were fearful of a job layoff. The reluctance of workers to leave their jobs to seek other employment as the labor market tightened has provided further evidence of such concern, as has the tendency toward longer labor union contracts. …The low level of work stoppages of recent years also attests to concern about job security. Thus, the willingness of workers in recent years to trade off smaller increases in wages for greater job security seems to be reasonably well documented.”

Marx refers to this as the reserve army of labour – the unemployed and underemployed, more destitute than you, willing to take your job for less compensation and worse working conditions. That’s the sort of circumstance very conducive to capitalist production. The highly productive economy relies on the fear of losing one’s job. I see that daily as my mom works enormous amounts of unpaid overtime because she is absolutely terrified of losing her job.

And to make it worse, how much of this labour is focused on bettering humanity as a whole, and how much of it is focused on meeting the desires and interests of the wealthy few? I’m glad Chomsky offers a term to describe this sort of economy. He actually references a term used by Citi Group: “plutonomy” – an economy that is driven by the demand of the wealthy few. Basically labour structured around the whims of the rich – a type of neo-feudalism. This is also visible in the suburbs, but only certain parts of it. The wealthier suburbs. You see an army of gig workers mowing people’s lawns, landscaping gardens, cleaning people’s houses, delivering food and Amazon orders, making people’s food, caring for people’s aging parents, raising people’s kids. There are long commodity chains around the material inputs for each of these jobs too. But it is bourgeois consumption that drives the economy. Canada is categorized as a plutonomy by Citi Group. This is only amplified by orders of magnitude for the extremely wealthy.

What if the economy was structured very differently, where instead of wealthy people directing where labour should be focused according to their interests, we came to decisions more democratically for the wider interest of the public at large. Chomsky mentions a very interesting case regarding transportation and the way alienation has eroded our ability to collectively organize:

“After the housing bubble and the financial crash, as you remember, the government pretty much took over the auto industry. It was virtually nationalized and in government hands. That means popular hands. That meant there were choices that the public could’ve made. If there had been an organized, active public, there would have been choices that people like us could’ve made about what to do with the auto industry. Well, unfortunately, there wasn’t that active mobilization and organization, so what was done was the natural thing that benefits the powerful. The industry was pretty much a taxpayer expense, and returned to essentially the same owners—some different faces, but the same banks, the same institutions, and so on—and it went on producing what it had been producing: automobiles.

There was another possibility. The industry could have been handed over to the workforce and the communities, and they could have made a democratic decision about what to do. And maybe their decision—I would at least hope that their decision—would have been to produce what the country desperately needs, which is not more cars on the street, but efficient mass transportation for our own benefit, and for the benefit of our grandchildren. If they’re gonna have a world to survive in, it’s not gonna be through automobiles—it’s gonna be through efficient forms of transportation. Retooling it wouldn’t have been that expensive, and it would be beneficial to them, beneficial to us, beneficial to the future. That was a possibility. And things like that are happening all the time, constantly.

This is one of the few countries, certainly one of the few developed societies, that doesn’t have high-speed transportation. You can take a high-speed train from Beijing to Kazakhstan, but not from New York to Boston. In Boston, where I live, many people literally spend three or four hours a day just commuting. That’s crazy wasted time. All of this could be overcome by a rational mass transportation system, which would also contribute significantly to solving the major problem we face—namely, environmental destruction. So that’s one kind of thing that could be done, but there are many others, large and small.

So, there’s no reason why production in the United States can’t be for the benefit of people, of the workforce in the United States, the consumers in the United States, and the future of the world. It can be done.”

When I look at Meadowvale, the suburban neighbourhood I live in, I ponder these early proposals for its development where mass transit was the central focus. One fascinating nugget of local Meadowvale history is that Moshe Safdie’s McGill thesis, conducted under Daniel van Ginkel, was a proposal for the development of the Meadowvale ‘new town’, and while this proposal remained ultimately unrealized, it became the basis of his landmark work Habitat 67.

The Carleton professor Inderbir Singh Riar, in his doctoral dissertation at Columbia, describes this van Ginkel project that Safdie worked on as drawing from the Marxist-inflected Metabolist movement of the architects Kenzo Tange and Fumihiko Maki:

“The van Ginkels elsewhere admitted admiring Tange’s 1960 Tokyo Bay proposal and their work had absorbed aspects of its heroic planning: an unrealised 1961 master plan for the new town of Meadowvale, Ontario, found massive pyramidal “clusters” of civic buildings, industrial sectors, and housing complexes attached to a transport spine facilitating “as complete as possible a separation between automobile and pedestrian” (fig. 3.6).78 Partially in the spirit of Man in the City, Meadowvale at its most heroic reflected concerns being concurrently advanced by the Japanese Metabolists for whom Tange served as éminence grise. Drawing on biological connotations of “growth”, Fumihiko Maki’s influential concept of “collective form”, which acknowledged debts to Team 10 ideas, aimed to represent “groups of buildings and quasi-buildings… not a collection of unrelated, separate buildings, but of buildings that have reasons to be together” by systems of “linkage”.”

More sketches of Safdie’s Meadowvale plan.

Rair also explored this fascinating development from Safdie’s Meadowvale ‘new town’ proposal into the great Montreal landmark of Habitat 67, and one can see in this description that these ‘linkages’ were not solely thematic, as to make the development more aesthetically cohesive, but also about establishing a system of mass transit. He writes about Safdie’s formative project in this way:

“The suggestion came from Moshe Safdie, who, upon graduating from McGill University in 1961, had worked for the van Ginkels on the Meadowvale new town and was, by early September 1963, among their young Expo 67 staff architects. Safdie had contributed some of the more heroic elaborations of Meadowvale in massive pyramidal housing, commercial, and industrial sectors set along a transportation system: each “productive unit depends on others just as they depend on it”; “Rapid transit unites the centre city”; the “key point is TRANSPORTATION”.”

It’s fascinating to see here that early hopes for Meadowvale actually matched the sort of sensible focus on mass transit that Chomsky mentions would be more possible under a more democratic economy. The issue is how these visions are often radically watered down under the dictates of capital. While Safdie’s vision did not come to fruition, the town planner that did come to shape Meadowvale was Macklin Hancock, a graduate of Harvard, greatly influenced there by the principles of Bauhaus, the ‘new town’ movement and its ‘garden city’ precedent. While many of these architectural and planning movements were infused with the radical politics of socialists, their design principles under capitalist development all but shed their radical roots. Hancock, unlike his more radical professors at Harvard, did not see these design principles as requiring the socialist politics behind them, but rather saw them as design projects that could be profitable under a ‘free-enterprise’ economy. Hancock writes:

“What is essential is to develop principles and techniques, within our free enterprise socio-economic framework, to link effectively the handling of traffic with the design of communities.”

While Hancock did enact some very important principles from the ‘new town’ movement – e.g. focusing on making the community more walkable, by segregating car traffic and pedestrian walkways and ensuring the connectivity of these walkways through tunnels and bridges avoiding traffic intersections, and granted I have benefited often from these ideas during bike-rides to the Meadowvale library and community centre. I cannot emphasize how valuable a tunnel or bridge crossing a road is, rather than traffic light crosswalks. Especially crosswalks across wide vehicle roads which remain fairly dangerous in my experience as people try to negotiate tightly timed turns at red lights, or try rushing through amber lights, or for that matter, when crosswalk buttons stop functioning, and one has to cross while that red hand remains illuminated.

All this being said, I still find the mass transit available in Meadowvale less than satisfying. Hancock was often styled as a type of conservationist and environmentalist and recognized early on the severe consequences of an underfunded or non-existent mass transit system, both environmentally and from the perspective of economic productivity. He writes in a 1963 article for Traffic Quarterly:

“Those nations with cities built around a compact principle employing mass transit as the basic element of transportation have an opportunity to provide production at less cost than we, with a corresponding benefit to the economy and amenity of the family unit.”

Hancock in a more recent interview with Streeter recognized the awful state of mass transit in the GTA, caused by the chronic underfunding of the TTC:

"They don’t seem to understand how to create and maintain a transportation system… These are the communication systems of a city, the Romans knew this. Know why there is so much gridlock coming into the city? Because they’ve ignored the TTC for the past 20 years and there are more and more people coming into the city to work every day."

Hancock goes on to suggest that they should have TTC extensions out to places outside the city like Meadowvale. And I agree with Hancock. While the GO train into downtown from Meadowvale is likely the most successful aspect of public transit available in the neighbourhood, Meadowvale still deserves better, and every trip for me to anywhere downtown requires a stop through Union Station before I can proceed to any other destination in the city.

Meadowvale GO Station

Additionally anywhere else in the GTA takes a prohibitively long duration to reach, as most of it is based on public buses that travel on the same congested highways as all the other private cars, though this is beginning to change for more central regions in Mississauga, where there is now a corridor for public buses alone (and potentially a path for future LRT development). What I do know is that I’m one of those people who Chomsky describes, commuting for four hours a day (in fact often it’s closer to 4.5 to 5 hours).

My main point is that however visionary the architects and planners we bring to the table may be, they can only go so far as capitalist development dictates, and often times that severely limits the radical vision on offer. What I want to do here is trace through some of these radical thinkers that influenced Macklin Hancock as a way of seeing the radical history of certain suburban plans before they were co-opted by the needs of capital over ordinary residents. Before I go into that though, I think it’s worth looking at Moshe Safdie himself, who had offered a fascinating proposal for Meadowvale that eventually took shape in Montreal instead.

Inderbir Singh Riar wrote of this blurring of ‘town and country’ (which is a theme at the centre of the ‘new town’ movement I will get into later):

“Still early in his career, Safdie – who had, under Daniel van Ginkel, designed a modular housing system as his McGill thesis project that would become the basis of Habitat 67 – saw the future city in terms of regional planning. His Meadowvale scheme, which brooked little distinction between town and country, recalled the linear city originating in the Spanish planner Arturo Soria y Mata’s ciudad lineal of 1882, with its sections of infrastructure – water, gas, electricity, and sewage – extending an optimal line to which components of the city would simply attach.”

This notion of the “linear city” became successfully realized in various Frankfurt developments by the Ernst May, and exported into Soviet planning schemes. In fact Soviet planners subscribing to “linear city” principles became the primary faction allied with “garden city” planners in the Soviet Union forming the ‘disurbanist’ camp against the ‘urbanist’ camp, which I will also get into later. What’s fascinating is that all these schemes were of great interest to leftist intellectuals. Rair traces Safdie’s ideas for Meadowvale and eventually Montreal’s Habitat 67 to the utopian socialist, Charles Fourier’s Phalanstère and the New Babylon proposed by the Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys:

“Constant believed as much and thought New Babylon heir to the nineteenth-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier’s phalanstère, a building based on a desire for “architecture unitaire” – the Situationists called for a “unitary urbanism” – and designed for a self-contained community governed by “passional attractions”. (Debord sought “lived ambiances and their transformation into a superior passionnal quality”.) Walter Benjamin had described the phalanstère – in the context of related ferro-vitreous enviroments of the nineteenth century that he took from Giedion – in terms of the capacity of advanced building systems to change radically the processes of everyday life:

‘Its highly complicated organisation is like a piece of machinery. The meshing of passions, the intricate interaction of the passions mécanistes with the passion cabaliste, are primitive analogies to machinery in the material of psychology. This human machinery produces the land of milk of honey, the primeval wish symbol that Fourier’s utopia filled with new life.’”

What’s fascinating I think is that Safdie in the past has identified with socialism and contends that it still informs his work:

“Absolutely I feel the ideological base I grew up with is still the foundation of my beliefs. The socialism of early Israel has an enormous influence on my practice… It’s very basic and constant in my ideas. I’m more focused on society as a whole.”

Like Chomsky his young experiences on a kibbutz became deeply formative to Safdie’s anarcho-socialist impulses, and in his book “Beyond Habitat” Safdie elaborated more on his relationship to leftist politics:

"This is not bureaucratic socialism; it's a much more humane interpretation of Marxism. I think the kibbutz is an open-ended, civilized interpretation, respectful of man in contrast with the Russian misinterpretation. The kibbutz members actually live by the rule, "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." There is no private property, only communal property. Everything is owned by the community, not the state, and that is a big difference."

It is fascinating that “communal property” was actually a central concept to early ‘garden city’ and ‘new town’ proposals, which would eventually take a far less radical form in the work of Macklin Hancock’s new town projects of Don Mills, Meadowvale, and Erin Mills.

If you’ve ever seen the cover of the 1992 documentary “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media”, it is Chomsky’s face plastered across a large screen. A snapshot from one of the documentary’s opening scenes. I actually spent many moments of my childhood under that screen playing mini-golf, eating cake and other sugary goods, and taking unbearable photographs with Santa Claus.

Erin Mills today

This is the four-way screen that used to sit under the postmodern ‘town tower’ of Erin Mills Town Centre, also developed by Macklin Hancock. That tower is gone now, replaced by a strange glass globe, but the screen under that tower is forever emblazoned within that Chomsky documentary, and this piece of trivia is sometimes even featured in real-estate postings for the Erin Mills area.

The glass globe of Erin Mills today.

Following a quote by John Milton, the Chomsky documentary actually opens with overhead snapshots of Erin Mills Town Centre, before focusing in on the multimedia screen.

Opening screenshots from the documentary “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media”

Instead of collectively owned approaches to development, Macklin Hancock’s first ‘new town’ project (Don MIlls) was executed under the finance of a subsidiary owned by the arch-capitalist E. P. Taylor who also had his finger in every other industry of vice: alcohol, gambling, tar & chemicals, mining, gated communities, off-shore tax havens, and sugary soda drinks for children. Curiously, his brother Fred Taylor was an artist and a communist, constantly criticizing his brother, and who E. P. Taylor was perpetually embarrassed by.

A painting of Chabolley Square, Montreal (1955) by the communist Fred Taylor (brother of arch-capitalist E. P. Taylor).

Hancock’s first job as a town planner came while he was still a graduate student at Harvard. His father-in-law worked for a company owned by E. P. Taylor and got Hancock to design a plan for what would become Don Mills. Hancock actually tried to convince his professors to allow him to undertake the project as extra credit towards his degree, but they declined, thinking he had bitten off more than he could chew. While on the project, he tried to convince one of his Harvard professors, Walter Gropius, to design the commercial heart of Don Mills ‘new town’, but Gropius “gently refused” as Dave LeBlanc put it in The Globe & Mail. Instead Gropius suggested another recent graduate of Harvard, John Parkin, who accepted the offer. Parkin would leave behind traces of Bauhaus design all over Toronto, and especially in the Don Mills area with buildings like Don Mills Collegiate and the Janssen Building.

Parkin was also involved in designing the Simpson’s building at Yorkdale Shopping Centre (now The Bay) together with Victor Gruen – the committed socialist often considered the ‘inventor’ of the shopping mall. Certainly shopping centres did not turn out to be the centres of civic community that Gruen initially envisioned. The young architect most responsible for the Simpson’s section of Yorkdale was actually John Andrews, who designed the CN Tower along with great brutalist landmarks like the University of Toronto Scarborough campus and the University of Guelph South Residence buildings. Andrews’ first job after graduating from Harvard was in the Parkin firm working on Don Mills. Afterwards, while working on the Simpson’s building at Yorkdale, he experimented in the vernacular of New Formalism, and I admittedly have a soft spot for those types of minimalist lines and the white vaulted ceilings that still adorn the exterior of The Bay. It’s probably my favourite decorative feature to Yorkdale. Andrews was actually drawing on the work of Minoru Yamasaki who was also working with the New Formalist vernacular at the time. Yamasaki is maybe most famous for designing the World Trade Towers, but he is also the architect behind the Pruitt-Igoe social housing complex. Catherine Liu, in a video interview with Jacobin, commented on how the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe and its condemnation by postmodernists (as a failure of top-down modernist ambition and idealistic design out of tune with the reality of the ‘gang violence’ that it would breed), was ultimately a mischaracterization of what amounted to a racist project by the white business class of defunding social housing primarily used by racialized communities.

Social housing was actually a central idea in the ‘new towns’ movement, but by the time it was taken up by Macklin Hancock around Toronto this was no longer a central focus. In fact one of the criticisms of Don Mills was its lack of non-profit housing. Anyway, after executing Don Mills rather ‘successfully’, to a fair degree of acclaim, he went back to Harvard to finish his degree. He would later go on to take these ‘new town’ ideas westward into Mississauga to develop both Meadowvale and Erin Mills along ‘new town’ principles. In fact, E. P. Taylor was one of the early speculators buying up land around the Missinihe (Credit River), which would eventually constitute part of the neighbourhood of Erin Mills.

The name Erin Mills itself was a sort of franchised extension of the success at Don Mills. The name was simply taken from nearby Erindale – ‘Erin’ being a mythic name for Ireland (since many of the early European settlers in the area hailed from Ireland), and dale was just another poetic name for valley (in this case, carved out by the Missinihe). There never was a historic mill site called ‘Erin Mills’ along the Missinihe as I had initially assumed. It’s actually quite interesting to see how settler colonialism is infused within the names developers gave to these ‘new suburban utopias’. It really begs the question ‘utopia’ for whom?

Thirteen years after purchasing all that land around the Missinihe, E. P. Taylor’s subsidiary Don Mills Development Corp announced a plan to build a New Town in four phases, and Macklin Hancock would be called back to the drawing table. Jan Dean tells the story along with the developer Larry Robbins in the Mississauga News:

“As Robbins tells it, the whole Erin Mills development – all four phases with all those thousands of homes and commercial and industrial buildings – started as a gleam in the eye of iconic Canadian entrepreneur E.P. Taylor. After the huge success of his Don Mills project Taylor dreamed of a similar project in the Credit River watershed. He started buying up parcels of land in the area, getting friends and colleagues to purchase it in their names to keep the prices down. And by 1954 Taylor’s company, Canadian Equity and Development Ltd. (CEDL) which also owned Don Mills Development Ltd. (DMD), owned 10,000 pristine acres of the watershed. It was a plot of land that Robbins describes as “a developer's dream where five creeks all flow into the Credit River in a south-easterly direction.” One third of the land was in Oakville, the other two-thirds in Toronto Township – what would become the City of Mississauga. “The land sold for $1,000 an acre,” says Robbins. “Now it would be worth more than $1-million an acre for raw land.””

The four quadrants of Don Mills and the same quadrant structure of Erin Mills Town Centre, to me, has certain thematic resonances with four rivers of the biblical Eden, and so the utopian allusion is certainly there, as I see it. But as I mentioned before, whose utopia was it? It is interesting that the nostalgic utopia this late capitalist development alludes to, that of ‘bucolic’ mills along the pastoral fields by the Credit River, was at the same time signifying a process that dispossessed the Anishinaabe who lived along the Missinihe. I did an audio piece on how the deforestation projects and decimation of salmon populations these mills perpetrated led to the exodus of the Anishinaabe as their livelihoods became endangered from the collapse of their resource base.

Lake Wabukayne

One interesting little body of water that I sometimes access along the network of walkways that Macklin Hancock designed in Meadowvale is known as Lake Wabukayne. It used to be a cattle pond on the Cook Farm, and became a flood control reservoir developed and financed by Cadillac Fairview for preventing surges of water, which could affect Erin Mills downstream of Wabukayne Creek.

An image of Wabukayne Creek (above) flowing nearby Erin Mills Town Centre, behindQuenippenon Meadows Community Park, named after another Anishinaabeg chief. His name is often renderedKineubenae,Quinipeno, or Quenebenaw. He witnessed first hand British colonial deceit in the wake of signing Treaty 13A.

Concrete storm water management structure at Lake Wabukayne farther upstream in Meadowvale.

A note about the name of the creek and the reservoir: Chief Wabukayne was an Anishinaabeg leader murdered by a white man in Toronto who was trying to solicit sex from Wabuayne’s sister. And after this white man (a murderer of an Anishinaabeg Chief) was acquitted by the court, there was almost a full-scale indigenous insurrection resulting from the unjust ruling.

Erin Mills Town Centre today is owned by the Ontario Pension Board, but was previously owned and operated by Cadillac Fairview, which is in turn owned by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund. David Harvey has pointed out the strange entanglements of capitalism, such that its less about which individual is a capitalist and who is proletariat, and more about the different roles people now play in different circumstances. Pensioners are capitalists, but I think there is some nuance here worth flushing out here.

The management consultant and business professor Peter Drucker in his 1972 book “The Unseen Revolution: How Pension Fund Socialism Came to America” opens his book by writing:

“If "socialism" is defined as "ownership of the means of production by the workers"—and this is both the orthodox and the only rigorous definition—then the United States is the first truly "Socialist" country.

Through their pension funds, employees of American business today own at least 25 percent of its equity capital, which is more than enough for control. The pension funds of the self-employed, of the public employees, and of school and college teachers own at least another 10 per- cent, giving the workers of America ownership of more than one-third of the equity capital of American business. Within another ten years the pension funds will inevitably increase their holdings, and by 1985 (probably sooner), they will own at least 50—if not 60—percent of equity capital. Ten years later, or well before the turn of the century, their holding should exceed around two-thirds of the equity capital (that is, the common shares) plus a major portion—perhaps 40 percent—of the debt capital (bonds, debentures, and notes) of the American economy. Inflation can only speed up this process.

Even more important especially for Socialist theory, the largest employee pension funds, those of the 1,000-1,300 biggest companies plus the 35 industry-wide funds (those of the college teachers and the teamsters for instance) already own control* of practically every single one of the

1,000 largest industrial corporations in America. This includes control of companies with sales well below $100 million, by today's standards at best fair-sized companies, if not actually small; the pension funds also control the fifty largest companies in each of the "non-industrial" groups, that is, in banking, insurance, retail, communications, and transportation.t These are what Socialist theory calls the "command positions" of the economy; whoever controls them is in command of the rest.

Indeed, aside from farming, a larger sector of the American economy is owned today by the American worker through his investment agent, the pension fund, than Allende in Chile had brought under government ownership to make Chile a "Socialist country," than Castro's Cuba has actually nationalized, or than had been nationalized in Hungary or Poland at the height of Stalinism.”

While this was in 1972, business elites still accept Drucker’s premise. For example, Roger L. Martin (former dean of Rotman School of Management) in a 2014 Harvard Business Review article agreed with Drucker:

“Workers, he predicted, would own the means of production — but not through the violent overthrow of capitalism in the way Marx had suggested. Rather they the ownership would come through the stocks held by their pension funds. Drucker was right, especially if you lump traditional pension funds along with their sovereign wealth fund cousins. The top 350 pension and sovereign wealth funds control just under $20 trillion of assets. They are the largest holders of securities in for-profit organizations competing in democratic capitalist environments.”

However, it’s worth considering how the ownership of these assets is not the same as democratic control over them. While this ‘pension fund socialism’ is hardly a threat to capitalism, and Drucker saw it as a saving grace of capitalism, Martin laments that these giant pension funds are monopolistic in nature and undermine capitalist competition. I am less interested in its undermining of capitalist competition (which I don’t perceive as a necessarily good thing), and more interested in how these monopolistic tendencies concentrate power. The Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin writes:

“The logic of accumulation lies in the growing concentration and centralization of control over capital. Formal ownership can be spread out (as in the “owners” of shares in pension plans), whereas the management of this property is controlled by financial capital.”

I think this is an important point, because I often ponder the difficult struggle over divesting university pension funds and similar types of investments out of fossil fuels. What degree of democratic control exists in the allocation of capital? Samir Amin believes that ultimately a de-financialisation of economic management is required, and elaborates on how abolishing pension funds is a necessary step towards this goal:

“The de-financialisation of economic management would also require two sets of legislation. The first concerns the authority of a sovereign state to ban speculative fund (hedge funds) operations in its territory. The second concerns pension funds, which are now major operators in the financialisation of the economic system. These funds were designed - first in the US of course - to transfer to employees the risks normally incurred by capital, and which are the reasons invoked to justify capital‟s remuneration! So this is a scandalous arrangement, in clear contradiction even with the ideological defense of capitalism! But this “invention” is an ideal instrument for the strategies of accumulation dominated by monopolies. The abolition of pension funds is necessary for the benefit of distributive pension systems, which, by their very nature, require and allow democratic debate to determine the amounts and periods of assessment and the relationship between the amounts of pensions and remuneration paid. In a democracy that respects social rights, these pension systems are universally available to all workers. However, at a pinch, and so as not to prohibit what a group of individuals might desire to put in place, supplementary pensions funds could be allowed. All measures of de-financialisation suggested here lead to an obvious conclusion: A world without Wall Street, to borrow the title of the book by François Morin, is possible and desirable.”

I think Peter Frase also provides a really interesting critique of this sort of ‘market socialism’ framing, even mentioning Peter Drucker explicitly. Frase first cites something Matt Yglesias writes in reference to the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund:

“[T]he right thing to do is to just directly think about the issue of how best to ensure that everyone obtains the financial benefits of equity investments. And the answer, I think, is sovereign wealth funds. That’s how they do it in Singapore and conceptually it’s the right way to do it. An American version of Singapore’s Central Provident Fund would be much too large for any market to absorb, but the US share of world GDP should shrink over time and it’s conceivable that there would be some way to work this out on the state level to create smaller units. A fund like that would render the public listing issue irrelevant, since it would clearly have the scale to get in on the private equity game. This would, needless to say, entail injecting a hefty element of socialism into American public policy but I’m always hearing from smart conservatives how much they admire Singapore.”

After citing this remark by Yglesias, Frase lists out all the problems that still remain with this sort of ‘market socialism’:

“you would still have profit-seeking companies competing with each other, and they would still be subject to the same kind of discipline they are now--the shareholders, which is to say the sovereign wealth funds, would demand the highest possible return on their investment… the important point about capitalism without capitalists is that in many ways it isn't any better than capitalism with capitalists. You still have to sell your labor power and submit to a boss in order to survive, so alienation persists. Since firms are still competing to deliver the highest returns to their shareholders, there will still be pressure to exploit employees more intensely and to prevent them from organizing for their rights. Exploitation goes on as before, and it will be all the more robust insofar as it is now a kind of collective self-exploitation. And on top of all of this, the system will still be prone to the booms and busts and problems of overaccumulation that occur in today's capitalism. It was, after all, public and union pension funds that bought many of the toxic mortgage-backed securities during the housing bubble.

…now each person is simultaneously a capitalist and a worker, in some degree or for some part of their life. Thinking through the inadequacy of such an arrangement is, for me, a more accessible way of thinking through the arguments of people like André Gorz and Moishe Postone. They argued that the point isn't to get rid of the capitalist class and have the workers take over: the point is to get rid of capital and wage labor.”

I started this long tangent on pension funds remarking that it was Cadillac Fairview that owned and operated Erin Mills Town Centre and even a lot of the surrounding infrastructure (like the flood-control reservoir of Lake Wabukayne in Meadowvale). I found it a very curious thing that it was the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan who owned Cadillac Fairview. My mom works in finance, and many of the people in the corporation she works for come from OTPP, because they are totally woven into the fabric of Canadian high finance just as any other capitalist financial corporation. It’s remarkable that Cadillac Fairview actually owns the entire TD Centre out of which the Toronto Dominion bank operates out from. This is maybe the most significant Bauhaus architectural landmark in the downtown core of Toronto designed none other than Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe.

I swear there is a better photo I took of this building, but this is the only one I could find for now. The Mies TD Centre building is the black one on the far right.

This is a shot of it I snagged from google maps.

Mies Van der Rohe is possibly one of the most well known of the Bauhaus architects, and the last director of the Bauhaus school, an institution with a stormy connection with the left. In 1926, Mies Van der Rohe had designed a memorial to the communist ‘martyrs’ of the German revolution, Spartacist League leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, commissioned by the then president of the German Communist Party, Eduard Fuchs. This memorial, with its hammer and sickle and all, had been later destroyed by the Nazis, whom Mies Van der Rohe had capitulated to in strides and bounds, trying to keep the doors of the Bauhaus school open, but eventually failed. Mies had gone so far as to make submissions for Third Reich buildings like their Reichsbank competition and their pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair, complete with sketches of swastika flags and a stone eagle. By 1937, the Bauhaus school had shuttered and Mies left for the US. This trajectory was what led Mies to design some of the most famous modernist skyscrapers plastered with the names of large corporations and banks – exactly as one sees with the TD Centre at the heart of the Toronto financial district. The architectural critic Tom Dykhoff writes:

“…his future patron would be no government, no political system, but the economic system that was emerging triumphant in the US. Modernism…would succeed as the landscape not of communism, bolshevism or nazism, but of international capitalism.”

The Bauhaus school before Mies Van der Rohe had a reputation, especially among the Nazis for being infiltrated by all sorts of leftist elements, particularly communists. It might be worth taking a moment here to describe what was the Bauhaus movement in fact was and a bit about its founder – Walter Gropius, the Harvard professor who had greatly influenced Macklin Hancock during his time in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Irish communist Jenny Farrell wrote a great introduction to Bauhaus for People’s World:

“The Bauhaus began in Weimar in 1919 as a state school for art and architecture. The guiding principles in the Bauhaus Manifesto were community, unity of art, practical education, cooperation between craft and industry, and a sense of belonging to the people. All artistic disciplines were to be reunited under the leadership of a new architectural art.

The name Bauhaus plays on the German word Bauhütte (construction/building hut)—the workshop where the builders of the great medieval cathedrals worked together: quarrymen, plasterers, mortar-makers, stone-cutters, masons, and others. Here there were no strict dividing lines between artists and craftsmen, and the builders were both in one. This was an important concept for the Bauhaus school. As the word Hütte means hut, the term was modernized to Haus (house). In this way, the term Bauhaus refers to a workshop, the sense of community and the equality of art and craft under the guidance of architecture, as cultivated in medieval cathedral workshops.”

The medievalist impulses of Morris’s Arts & Crafts movement deeply informed the early Bauhaus before its direction towards more futurist and urban aesthetics. J. Dakota Brown in a Jacobin article writes:

“The cover of the Bauhaus’s founding manifesto carried Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a cathedral rising into a turbulent sky, beset by shafts of light. In the writings of Arts and Crafts theorists like John Ruskin and William Morris, the Gothic cathedral had represented the integration of art, labor, and life in the pre-capitalist world. Bauhaus pedagogy reimagined the structure of the medieval guilds: “apprentices” worked under a “master of form” (normally a painter) and a “master of craft” (a skilled artisan). Students who passed the initial coursework became “journeymen” eligible for waged work in the workshops. Many later became “young masters” — junior teachers — themselves. The Bauhaus Manifesto promised to “raze the arrogant wall between artist and artisan” through a dual education that would form a new type of producer.”

An Arts & Crafts Movement display at the Royal Ontario Museum.

This medievalism of the Bauhaus school in fact did find its way into the work of Macklin Hancock in Don Mills, although Hancock’s other influence of ‘new towns’ were also deeply informed by the work of William Morris. The president of Don Mills Residents Inc., Tony West, explains:

"Most European towns start with a castle and then outside you had people with dwellings and the fields where people work.”

In the case of Don Mills it is the shopping centre that serves the role of the medieval castle, which ironically seems a fitting way to frame the feudalistic nature of capitalist consumerism. Around this castle are the four quadrants of Don Mills, each with a school, church and housing – all of which connected by a network of walkways (as I see in Meadowvale also). The Donway then is often framed as the ‘medieval wall’ wrapping around the Don Mills ‘new town’.

However, Bauhaus’s coalescence of building and architectural design was ultimately rejected by many of the architects and planners around Macklin Hancock, as they saw the architect as an importantly neutral mediator between the developer and the builder – again willing to forsake core design principles for the sake of maintaining the terms of capital. I am not sure about Hancock’s take on Gropius, but it is interesting some of the remarks made in an issue of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (Serial No 341, Vol. 31, No. 1) that featured an article by Macklin Hancock and his colleague Douglas Lee called “Don Mills New Town”. It opens with an editorial by the President saying:

“The very fact that imagination has been freed and traditional restraints removed is making us more soberly thoughtful, more critical of new forms of expression, less apt to mistake novelty for beauty, less willing to accept the philosophies of contemporary prophets without fully understanding them… It is suggested sometimes that the architect should abandon his professional status and take part commercially in the building operation. This we must not do. The professional function of the architect is vital to the orderly operation of the business of building.”

Later in the issue, from Alberta, the architect Maxwell Bates writes:

“In the United States, Dr Gropius recently said that the architect will have to become part builder to survive… At first glance, the combination may seem healthy and natural, but I think consideration shows it to be extremely dangerous. Although the position of the architect, internationally speaking, has suffered some modification in our century, it has gradually evolved, without great basic changes, for hundreds of years. His position has depended on a relative independence as between owner and builder on the one hand, and a general acknowledgement of architecture as an art, even as the mother of the arts, on the other hand. The architect is the only side of the owner, architect, builder triangle able to make impartial judgments. On this impartiality, which corresponds in a way with the independence of the judiciary from party politics, depends the respect with which he has been generally regarded by the building trades. Much of his authority on the job is traditional. To become party to a building contract is to lose all eminence due to his professional, impartial standing. So the English architect foresees the architect becoming less of an artist; and the famous architect, Dr Gropius, foresees the necessity of relinquishing his other traditional support, his independence as mediator between contracting parties.”

I wonder what Hancock thought of this, and I wonder if these remarks were specifically targeted at Hancock, and consequently published together with his Don Mills article. Certainly, whatever their concerns, Hancock still fit very well into the capitalist arrangement (’mediating between contracting parties’) as he wrote with Lee in his article on Don Mills New Town:

“It is the aim of the Development Company to create, under the free enterprise system, an integrated new town which will satisfy the requirements of private investment, and which will also be in accordance with the best principles of town planning.”

It’s clear Hancock thought he could pull off both. I think it’s interesting now to take a closer look at Walter Gropius who so influenced Hancock, and the sort of leftist currents that he was moved by. I think this is why Hancock is always being found to emphasize terms like “free enterprise” and “private investment” as people like Gropius were often seen as socialists, and for good reason. Jenny Farrell talks about the ‘Cathedral of Socialism’ that was featured on the front page of the Bauhaus founding manifesto:

“With this commonality of craft and art in medieval cathedral construction in mind, the “Cathedral of Socialism” was understood as a utopian building and embodiment of a future social structure, intended to overcome the consequences of alienation, the causes of which were seen more in the division of labor than in wage labor.

Walter Gropius added this woodcut by Lyonel Feininger to the founding manifesto of the Bauhaus in 1919 as the title page. A triad surrounds the cathedral spire: the three arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture, their rays flowing into each other. The choice of cathedral references the Bauhütte and underlines the centrality of architecture. The old-fashioned woodcutting technique combines with a futuristic cubist design.”

Lyonel Feininger‘s“Cathedral of Socialism”

It’s actually worth seeing the way Tom Wolfe, the arch-reactionary journalist, talks about Gropius and the Bauhaus movement in general. I actually bought one of his books “From Bauhaus to Our House” from a used bookstore during my first year in Kingston. I did not really know who Tom Wolfe was at the time, but I was somewhat interested in the Bauhaus movement. Little did I know the book would be a weird anti-socialist tirade. It’s fascinating the way Wolfe yearns with nostalgia for a time when rich aristocratic families with taste commissioned classical re-renderings all over the city, but now, corporate bodies have to accept modernist architecture as a slap across the mouth:

“…after 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners, and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.”

Wolfe then quotes a manifesto of the Novembergruppe, of which Gropius was chairman, which states:

“Painters, Architects, Sculptors, you whom the bourgeoisie pays with high rewards for your work—out of vanity, snobbery, and boredom—Hear! To this money there clings the sweat and blood and nervous energy of thousands of poor hounded human beings—Hear! It is an unclean profit …we must be true socialists—we must kindle the highest socialist virtue: the brotherhood of man.”

Wolfe next quotes Gropius speaking on the class commitments of the Novermbergruppe’s Workers’ Council for Art (i.e. ‘Soviet’ for Art):

“The intellectual bourgeois … has proved himself unfit to be the bearer of a German culture… New, intellectually undeveloped levels of our people are rising from the depths. They are our chief hope.”

Jenny Farrell includes this Gropius quote in her People’s World article for the centenary of the Bauhaus school’s founding:

“In Gropius’s words: ‘the more their class pride grows, the more the people will despise imitating the rich and independently invent their own style of living. This understanding by the people is the fertile ground for the art to come.’”

Yet Gropius would actually turn out to be a moderating force in the Bauhaus school who would curtail the more radical communist direction that Hannes Meyer brought the Bauhaus school towards after he was appointed director of the school after Gropius. J. Dakota Brown gives a fascinating account of this story:

“Years of political wrangling had delayed many of Gropius’s plans, but the institution seemed to be on secure footing when he abruptly announced his departure in 1928. Gropius offered the directorship to Hannes Meyer, hired the previous year to head the architecture department… The Bauhaus would now be oriented toward “necessities” rather than “luxuries,” centering the needs of the proletariat. Design problems would take their cues less from formal exercises directed by painters, and more from current research in the natural and social sciences.

Departing from the official position that the Bauhaus was engaged in “objective, entirely non-political cultural work,” Meyer was open in his communist sympathies. He rearranged the class schedule to more closely approximate an industrial workday and happily reported that increased cohesion and cooperation during his directorship signaled “an undeniable degree of proletarianization.” Under Meyer, a growing body of communist students came to understand the Marxist worldview as the only consistent outcome of a Bauhaus education.

Trade union facilities and workers’ housing completed under Meyer, after all, had clear precedents in projects initiated by Gropius — who once defended his own generous master’s quarters by saying, “what we today consider luxury will tomorrow be the norm!” In the background, however, Gropius, Kandinsky, and Josef Albers were already plotting Meyer’s dismissal.

Meyer’s political sympathies naturally attracted controversy. Bauhaus students were overheard singing communist songs at a 1930 party, which produced a feeding frenzy in the right-wing press. Later, it came to light that Meyer and a Bauhaus student group had each donated money to a Communist-led miner’s strike.

Attempting to stem the formation of a fully-fledged “communist cell” at the Bauhaus, the masters dismissed twenty students in a move that made Meyer himself a target of student anger. Nonetheless, the liberal mayor of Dessau — encouraged by Gropius and the old masters (with the exception of Klee) — demanded his resignation.

A few months later, Meyer boarded a train to Moscow with several of his closest students. Stalinist policy on design and architecture, however, would prove hostile to Meyer, who rounded out the rest of his career as a city planner in Mexico. Over the next decades, Gropius and the remaining masters would construct a canonical version of the Bauhaus that erased Meyer’s contributions altogether.”

After Meyer was removed from the Bauhaus directorship, Mies van der Rohe took leadership, and there was a significant political shift that accommodated the fascist pressure of the Nazis.

It’s remarkable to see how entangled leftist politics was in both the work of Gropius and the Bauhaus school in general, and to think it was a major influence on Macklin Hancock’s plan for Meadowvale, the sleepy Mississauga suburb where I live that exists on the very fringes of the city, only minutes from farm land that still covers many land plots in Milton.

Yet even more than Gropius and the Bauhaus movement, the other professor at Harvard that had a great influence on Macklin Hancock was William Holford, who spent much of his career spreading the ideas of the ‘new town’ movement. Macklin Hancock ultimately called Don Mills, Erin Mills, and Meadowvale ‘new towns’ because those were the design principles he was principally informed by. There is less information on Holford out there than Gropius, but I actually find Holford even more interesting. However, before going into Holford, it might be worth tracing out what the ‘new town’ movement was.

Charley cartoon commissioned by post-war Labour government to promote their New Town plan. The film was created at the behest of Stafford Cripps (UK’s ambassador to the Soviet Union and once leading spokesman for the Popular Front with the Communist Party which got him expelled from the Labour Party).

Professor Georgia Wrighton, on a Monocle episode on ‘new towns’ provides an excellent introduction sketching out the post-war history of this movement in the UK, locating its origin in the ‘garden city’ movement which tried to combine ‘town’ and ‘country’, in a way that brought the imagined healthiness of the ‘countryside’ into the town’ for an elevated quality of life. Wrighton specifically mentions the “radical new Labour government under Atlee” planning ten satellite towns around London to deal with the housing crises after WW2 and house “bombed out Londoners” in such a way that dealt with the earlier problems of development under the industrial revolution – namely disorganized and unplanned development, overcrowding, and pollution. The early policies of these ‘new towns’ involved affordable rentals for the working class, as well as mixed-class housing to prevent class stratification and segregation. One of the most important features was that the increased value of the land from the ongoing building of the new towns was to go back into the ‘new town’ for maintenance and renewal. Wrighton describes an early feeling of a “socialist utopia being built in the brave new world of the 1945-era”, but by the late fifties, the invisible hand of the private market began creeping into these developments, such that the early model of land value uplift going into ‘new town’ refurbishment was abandoned as the privatization model of the late fifties involved selling off the land into private hands. All that remained was the council housing which had to find alternative revenue streams.

This model that Wrighton discusses is explicitly spelled out in the ‘garden city’ principles of Ebenezer Howard, who often rubbed shoulders with other anarchists and socialists. This model though was actually a Georgist one. Henry George had formulated a similar idea where the rising value of land would be reabsorbed by the public through a land value tax, that prevented people from profiting of the mere possession of land and recapture the collective’s common inheritance. Though Howard had drawn on people even more radical than George. In 1889, Edward Bellamy the socialist novelist had his book “Looking Backward” first published (serially) in the journal Brotherhood edited by J. Bruce Wallace. There’s a fascinating connection between Wallace and the Bolsheviks that I will get into soon. But Bellamy’s novel would make a significant impression on Howard after his first reading of it, although he became more sceptical about it in later readings. Like William Morris, he was mainly concerned with the idea of the state becoming one large capitalist corporation that replaced all other capitalists and all the centralized bureaucracy that would entail (although this is not actually that far from the process Engels describes in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” and which is more recently explored in books like “The People’s Republic of Walmart”, and this gets back to Drucker’s ‘pension fund socialism’ I was discussing earlier). However, other aspects of Bellamy’s novel would persist in its influence on Howard.

In addition to the obvious influence of William Morris, another interesting figure that left traces in Howard’s work was Kropotkin. Howard briefly cites Kropotkin’s book “Fields, Factories and Workshops” in the second edition of his seminal work “To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform” – though what Howard was interested in was not the revolutionary aspects of Kropotkin, but those of local initiative and self-government.

The first planner to put Howard’s principles into practice was Raymond Unwin who planned Letchworth, often called the first garden city. Unwin was both an engineer and a town planner who spent much of his life trying to improve working class housing. He was friends with the socialist Edward Carpenter, interested in John Ruskin, and deeply committed to the Marxism of William Morris – even moving to Manchester to become secretary of Morris’s Socialist League and editing its newspaper. He was also very involved in the Labour Church, which was one of the primary forces of Christian socialism at the time.

Letchworth became the site of Britain’s first roundabout. The Yale professor James C. Scott, interprets “traffic circles” as a sort of anarchist assemblage that replaces the centralized control of traffic lights, with a self-managed traffic junction that has proven to actually be more efficient and safer in a number of contexts. In his book “Two Cheers for Anarchism”, Scott briefly discusses various “red light removal” campaigns in Europe and some impressive results of their implementation .

Letchworth, and ‘garden cities’ more broadly, would become a deeply influential in the town planning of both Cold War super powers. I personally find the influence of ‘garden cities’ on Soviet planning to be particularly interesting. Rosemary Wakefield, in her fascinating book on ‘new towns’ called “Practicing Utopia” writes:

“The garden city concept was introduced into Russia by 1908, and social reformers in Saint Petersburg published a Russian translation of Howard’s text in 1911. A small party of Russians made the pilgrimage to Letchworth in 1909 with German garden city enthusiasts, and again in 1911 with a Danish and German delegation. The infl uential Russian architectural journal Gorodskoe Delo eagerly promoted garden city ventures, while architect Vladimir Semionov worked with architect and urban reformer Raymond Unwin in England and wrote extensively on garden city ideals. Based on Semionov’s design, the Moscow- Kazan Railway Company began construction of Russia’s first model garden city at the Prozorovskaia Station, forty kilometers east of Moscow. It was such a success that the Russian Ministry of Transport began building similar settlements for railway employees. Garden city– style projects popped up in Siberia, where an All- Russian Garden Cities Society was founded.”

The Soviet planner Semionov that Wakefield mentions actually ended up planning major Soviet cities like Kharkov and Stalingrad, drawing on Howard’s ‘garden city’ principles. Wakefield describes a fascinating debate that unfolded within Soviet planning circles between urbanists and disurbanists (which included enthusiasts of ‘garden city’ principles that influenced Macklin Hancock, as well as ‘linear city’ principles which influenced Moshe Safdie’s unrealized Meadowvale proposal). Wakefield on the debate:

“A passionate debate ensued on the nature of the sotsgorod, or socialist city, as the Soviet Union hurtled into urban and industrial transformation. The battle was initially drawn between two camps: the disurbanists, who argued for decentralization mostly following the garden city ideal, and urbanists, who demanded an increased scale of urbanization and industrialization.

Linear industrial towns were proposed by El Lissitzky and by Nikolai Miliutin, especially the latter as outlined in his seminal publication The Problem of Building Socialist Cities (1930).19 The linear city had political appeal, because it seemed to abolish the division between city and country according to the principles outlined by Karl Marx. Miliutin produced such plans for the new industrial towns of Magnitogorsk in the Urals, Stalingrad on the Volga River, and Avtozavod, where an automobile plant was taking shape under the direction of Ford Motor Company. Parallel industrial and residential strips were separated by greenbelts and highways. The towns would be nodes along transportation routes in one continuous band of development. Miliutin’s groundbreaking concepts were published in Ernst May’s Das Neue Frankfurt and were featured in the Proletarian Building Display in Berlin in 1931.20 The linear city ideal survived as one of the most viable alternatives to the concentric pattern of garden and satellite cities.”

Another fascinating Soviet connection involves a rumour (an urban myth, or rather a ‘garden city’ myth) that Lenin actually visited Letchworth during his time in London in 1907 for the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, attended also by other Russian revolutionaries like Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, and Maxim Gorky. The congress was hosted in Hackney at a Tolstoyan socialist church called the Brotherhood Church, founded by J. Bruce Wallace, a resident of Unwin’s Letchworth garden city. Wallace was actually the first to publish Bellamy’s novel in serialized form in his journal of the same name – Brotherhood. Gorky described the Brotherhood Church thus:

“I can still see vividly before me those bare wooden walls unadorned to the point of absurdity, the lancet windows looking down on a small, narrow hall which might have been a classroom in a poor school.”

Part of the Lenin in Letchworth rumour involves Wallace possibly hosting Lenin for a night in Letchworth, where Lenin also allegedly gave a talk. There is a fascinating BBC Radio 4 episode on this idea of Lenin visiting Letchworth. In Robert Beevers' book "The Garden City Utopia", there is an interesting endnote that he includes:

“[the] Letchworth branch of the Social Democratic Federation was in touch with the R.S.D.L.P. Congress, as is indicated by the fact that it passed a resolution protesting at the harassment of its delegates by the police, vide The Citizen, 20 July 1907.”

Russian revolutionaries garbed in funny-looking disguises and set on overthrowing the tyrannical Czar, gathered in Wallace’s Brotherhood Church, for three weeks, and were subject to jeering protestors as well as curious onlookers. The BBC programme on Lenin in Letchworth has a fascinating excerpt written by Kruspskaya (Lenin’s wife) from an earlier visit to London with Lenin in 1902-1903 describing their visits to various socialist churches. She writes of Lenin:

“He visited eating houses and churches. In English churches the service is usually followed by a short lecture and a debate. Ilyich was particularly fond of those debates, because ordinary workers took part in them. He scanned the newspapers for notices of working-class meetings in some out-of-the-way district, where there were only rank-and-file workers from the bench – as we say now – without any pomp and leaders. These meetings were usually devoted to the discussion of some question or project, such as a garden-city scheme. Ilyich would listen attentively, and afterwards say joyfully: "They are just bursting with socialism! If a speaker starts talking rot a worker gets up right away and takes the bull by the horns, shows up the very essence of capitalism." It was the rank and-file British worker who had preserved his class instinct in face of everything, that Ilyich always relied upon. Visitors to Britain usually saw only the labour aristocracy, corrupted by the bourgeoisie and itself bourgeoisified. Naturally Ilyich studied that upper stratum, too, and the concrete forms which this bourgeois influence took, without for a moment forgetting the significance of that fact. But he also tried to discover the motive forces of the future revolution in England.

There was hardly a meeting anywhere we did not go to. Once we wandered into a socialist church. There are such churches in England. The socialist in charge was droning through the Bible, and then delivered a sermon to the effect that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt symbolized the exodus of the workers from the kingdom of capitalism into the kingdom of socialism. Everyone stood up and sang from a socialist hymn-book: "Lead us, O Lord, from the Kingdom of Capitalism into the Kingdom of Socialism." We went to that church again afterwards – it was the Seven Sisters Church – to hear a talk for young people. A young man spoke about municipal socialism and tried to prove that no revolution was needed, while the socialist who had officiated as clergyman during our first visit declared that he had been a member of the party for twelve years and for twelve years he had been fighting opportunism – and that was what municipal socialism was – opportunism pure and simple.”

The BBC programme also shares an excerpt from Orwell’s classic “The Road to Wigan Pier” (a book I’ve even seen Marxist-Leninists approve of), that offers up a brutally derisive account of Letchworth:

“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured ‘Socialists’, as who should say, ‘Red Indians’. He was probably right—the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person but of touch with common humanity.”

Orwell can truly be so insufferable sometimes. As Orwell famously spent much of his youth as a colonial police officer in Burma, I think it’s rather rich to hear him criticize other people in the fashion he does. While on the topic of Southeast Asia, it’s worth making a small detour regarding the influence of ‘garden city’ principles in one ‘non-aligned’ country before proceeding onto its influence in America.

As most of my extended family lives in Singapore, and I have visited them a handful of times, I’m quite aware of the way Singapore often refers to itself as The Garden City – a branding inaugurated under the young Lee Kuan Yew, at that time a Fabian socialist from his time in Cambridge throughout the early decades of his political career. Architectural critics have made much of Le Corbusier’s influence on early Singapore development and planning. Le Corbusier was of course rather taken with Howard’s “garden city” ideas and many of his design plans show that greening influence.

WOHA building behind Hong Lim Park (where expressions of dissent are contained) in Singapore.

I’m less interested in Le Corbusier, a notorious anti-Semite and as far as I’m concerned – a fascist. However, I am interested in the rationale behind Lee Kuan Yew’s insistence on making Singapore into a ‘garden city’. Part of it was making life more pleasant for the people who lived on this tiny Southeast Asian island, but it seems the central focus was attracting foreign investment and tourists. So the ‘magnet’ Ebenezer Howard wrote of, was maybe less about attracting people (unless they were tourists) and more about making the island more conducive to capital, which is not wholly distant from the sort of ideas prevalent throughout a lot of Fabian reformist socialism. I have not been able to locate any explicit references to Ebenezer Howard in early Singaporean state planning policy, but would be fascinated if anything on that were to come up in the future.

It is worth commenting that Moshe Safdie (who worked on the proposal for Meadowvale as his thesis project) was the architect behind Singapore’s iconic Marina Bay Sands building, the second most expensive building at the time of its completion. The irony that a socialist would not only build such an extravagant building but that it was also a casino resort has not been lost on me. Utopian socialist design can almost never succeed in progressing its core political principles under capitalism.

As for the influence of ‘garden cities’ in the US, the beating heart of capital, I will turn to Rosemary Wakefield to explain how Unwin and Howard worked together with Clarence Stein, a progressive planner that would become influential on American suburban design, and greatly influence Macklin Hancock:

“The American interpretation of garden cities is equally illustrative of the fusion of influences comprising both the new town birthright and the regional vision that framed it. In 1923, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright sailed for England to meet with Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin and make the pilgrimage to Letchworth, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the newly established Welwyn Garden City. The experience was clearly the inspiration for the “city planning atelier” that Stein organized to discuss how the garden city could fi t the needs of America. He and Wright persuaded Unwin to help shape the group’s theoretical framework, with the result that Unwin became actively involved in the American planning scene.”

Stein’s Radburn was an explicit influence for Hancock. While Stein offered some interesting ideas that kept with the ‘garden city’ tradition – like reducing the size of private yards to produce greater public spaces, facing house fronts onto these green public spaces and placing garages at the back of hosues where they would lead directly into house kitchens, as well as important greenbelting measures – despite all this, Stein did not retain the same socialist impulses as Howard or Unwin, and never did claim the label of socialist as such. Even still, he was very critical of capitalism believing:

“(a) the revolution was at hand, and (b) capitalism could not and perhaps should not survive. He expressed his political views quite openly in these letters.” (in the words of Tridib Banerjee)

Prudence Anne Phillimore described Stein’s relationship to capitalism in this way:

“He also appealed to people to reject the waste and extravagance that had become an integral part of life in a capitalist society. Although Stein did not venture as far into socialism, he was vitally concerned to find a means of eliminating the unnecessary waste which comes from our system of competitive production and distribution, " and to remove 22 staples, like housing, from the competitive market. Both the economical use of land and the control of unearned increment on land (through single ownership) and the aesthetics of city planning became focal points In Stein’s work.”

Despite holding onto this Georgist idea from the ‘garden city’ movement Stein was disturbingly accommodating to segregationist policies. Andreas Panagidis in a case study on Radburn writes:

“as the planners were trying to comprehensively design the neighbourhood, they were also posing segregationist questions such as “what should be the policy in relation to the admission of negroes and other people of other races than white?” (Stein cited in Birch, 1980), and by the eventual racial discrimination by the realtors of both Jews and African-Americans (Schafer, 1983). The residents' educational and religious backgrounds would end up being “more or less the same” (Stein, 1949).”

Another influence of Hancock, this time concerning the placement of a shopping mall as the ‘town centre’ of a ‘new town’, was the planner and mortgage banker James Rouse, another ‘new town’ planner, but one far less anxious about capitalism. He was a philanthropist and advocate for ‘free enterprise’ economies. Freedom for whom? People with money, to do what they want with their money. While Rouse spoke the rhetoric of racial equality saying:

"The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind," he wrote. "There really can be no other end purpose of planning except to develop better people….An inspired, concerned and loving society will dignify man; will find the ways to develop his talent; will put the fruits of his labor and intellect to effective use; will achieve brotherhood; eliminate bigotry and intolerance; will care for the indigent, the delinquent, the sick, the aged; seek the truth and communicate it; respect differences among man."

Paige Glotzer in her book “How the Suburbs Were Segregated” gives a more sobering account of Rouse’s involvement in networks of segregationist developers:

“In Baltimore, one of the most prominent developers to gain power in the 1960s was James Rouse. Rouse was a self-described liberal whose politics and development priorities seemed, on the surface at least, to constitute a considerable break with predominant exclusionary patterns. However, Rouse’s rise is precisely why a longer history of suburban power is necessary to understand the persistence of housing segregation. Indeed, Rouse was a part of the Roland Park Company network. Before he became famous as a developer in the 1960s, Rouse began his career in the Baltimore office of the FHA and worked closely with Roland Park Company officials in business endeavors and government consulting. By the 1950s, Rouse and Mowbray together were in charge of spearheading federal urban renewal policy based on their work in Baltimore. This policy ultimately wreaked devastation on communities throughout the country. In Baltimore alone, urban renewal displaced over ten thousand households. As was the case around the country, the majority of those who lost their homes were African American.

Often lauded both for his malls and for the racially integrated planned suburb of Columbia, Maryland, well outside Baltimore, Rouse’s early and midcareer work consisted of fortifying the very socioeconomic and racial borders that the Roland Park Company had created. Nowhere was this clearer than in Cross Keys in the early 1960s, where Rouse developed a gated planned community next to Roland Park called the Village of Cross Keys after urban renewal destroyed the long-standing African American community of the same name.”

Glotzer’s work on redlining is important for underscoring how planning communities under a capitalist economy, despite the radical ideas you bring to the table will inevitably devolve to accommodate the dictates of capital – if developers consider the uplift of property value a paramount consideration, than segregation becomes a justifiable means of achieving it. While suburbs in the US have become symbols where white families escape to from inner cities to live lives segregated from other racialized families – suburbs around Toronto have become havens for immigrant communities. Peel Region, where both Meadowvale and Erin Mills are located in, has the highest percentage of ‘visible minorities’ in the GTA (at 62.3%). In fact, 50.8% of Peel’s population is of South Asian ancestry, making the term ‘visible minority’ a clumsy one at best. Yet racial diversity is not a barometer for a just economy. In fact, in many ways, more affluent white millennials are able to afford living in the downtown core of Toronto, where the suburbs outside the city became unfashionable or less desirable places to live, at best merely signifiers for adventurous eaters who read the Globe & Mail and visit ‘ethnic’ hole-in-the-wall eateries run by immigrants.

Some papers I’ve read saw ‘new town’ developments of Hancock as opportunities for corporate consolidation. Stephen Bocking writes about this process in the case of Don Mills:

“Most significant, however, was the extent to which Don Mills reflected the shared influence of the planning profession and corporate interests. Professional ideas about neighborhoods, ample green spaces, and lower density had ample opportunity for expression: Don Mills was described by Architectural Forum as “a planner’s dream coming true.” This dream came true largely because it was consistent with private interests and with the capacity of a single large developer, E. P. Taylor, to assemble a large land area; to install water, sewer, and other services (the cost of these was then transferred to the buyers); and to manage and market the entire project. Carver had argued in Houses for Canadians that effective professional planning of neighborhoods required close contact between planners and developers: “If urban development is to take the form of planned neighbourhoods it will be necessary to achieve a much closer coordination between the technical staffs of planning boards and the actual developers of suburban property.” As Don Mills demonstrated, such coordination, and hence the practical expression of planning ideas, would be easier with fewer and larger developers that would have the resources to hire professional planners and that could impose a single vision on an entire community. Thus, the application of planning expertise to new communities was inseparable from the consolidation of the home-building industry. Both planners and developers benefited from their association: the former, through new professional opportunities; and the latter, through the opportunity to present their planned communities as distinct from the older areas of the city and as ideal sites for families pursuing the suburban ideal.

After beginning Don Mills, Taylor bought 6,000 acres on the western out- skirts of Toronto, where he eventually built during the 1970s and 1980s another huge development, Erin Mills, which would house about 170,000 people. As an integrated community with a variety of housing types and forms of employment, it also represented a combination of professional planning expertise and corporate agendas.”

For me, the concern is less about a single planner’s imposition of will on an entire community (which I think is a false way of framing what planners do) nor is my issue with the large scale of community building – I think scale provides many advantages to ensuring a well-functioning and cohesive community. My issue is when something of this scale is done under a capitalist economy, and it is the wealthy capitalist investors like E. P. Taylor who benefit and reap the unfair profits off such an enterprise, yet externalize the future costs of renewal. Even in the case of a private developer like Cadillac Fairview doing the development, while being owned by a public workers’ pension fund, the issue remains of profit and rate of return being the ultimate goal of the endeavour. And in such a case you see issues of chronically underfunded mass transit and the increasing unaffordability of housing creeping up on ‘new towns’ like Erin Mills and Meadowvale. Owen Hatherley, the historian of communist architecture saw this problem of ‘new towns’ running back to their earliest days, even in their most radical iterations:

“…Morris’ age of rest arrives, as the first part of the book describes, after a violent proletarian revolution. Many years after it, London has depopulated, the Houses of Parliament are used to store dung, iron bridges have been rebuilt in stone, and most of the population lives long, quiet, fulfilled lives in cottages among greenery, something which curiously does not seem to have produced a suburban mentality. No phalanxes, collectives, or communes feature in this vision of communism.

Morris, then a member of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and a correspondent of Engels, was conspicuous both for the radicalism of his vision of class struggle and the conservatism of his vision of the city. His disciples would lose the first trait, but cling to the second.

The architect and planner Raymond Unwin, a fellow SDF member, would return to the idea, ridiculed by Marx and Engels, of building the socialist society in fragments under capitalism, drawing on the self-organized but otherwise deeply Fabian “common-sense socialism” of Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City of To-morrow.” Between 1903 and 1913, Unwin designed the garden city of Letchworth just outside of London, the Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the massive suburb of Wythenshawe to the south of Manchester.

The first two were funded by philanthropists, and aimed to mix, to the point where it would no longer be obvious which was which, cottages for workers and cottages for the middle class. It was the latter that soon dominated.”

Marx and Engels were right that the “building the socialist society in fragments under capitalism” would never produce the utopia envisioned at the outset, because capitalism has a logic of its own.

I sometimes wonder what Macklin Hancock thought of it all, as his father, Leslie Hancock, was actually a socialist politician of Tommy Douglas’s CCF party (forerunner to the NDP) who represented Wellington South in Ontario’s Legislative Assembly.

Curiously Macklin Hancock was born in China, where his father was a horticulturalist at Nanking University, but their family left amidst the Nationalist revolutionary turmoil erupting in 1927. I presume this exodus was precipitated during the ‘Nanking incident’ in March, where both Nationalists and Communists raided foreign consulates – seizing millions of dollars worth of British concessions. At that time the Kuomintang (KMT) government was backed by the Soviet Union, and led by Chiang Kai-shek, who blamed the incident on instigation by the Communist Party of China and Soviet advisors. I believe this event was somewhat of a turning point where the KMT broke their alliance with the Communists and dismissed Soviet advisors. Many communists were arrested and executed in what has become known as the Shanghai Massacre. By July of 1927, Mikhail Borodin, the once Soviet advisor to Sun Yat-sen, was ordered out of the country, accompanied by Soong Ching-ling (Sun Yat-sen’s widow) on the train ride out of Wuhan. Macklin Hancock’s father-in-law William Macklin (whom Hancock was named after) was also in China at the time with Leslie Hancock and left around the same time. Macklin had established a hospital in Nanjing, and was known to the locals there as Ma Lin. He even counted the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen among friends according to a Globe & Mail article by Tenille Bonoguore.

An exhibit display of Sun Yat Sen’s revolutionary comrades throughout British Malaya, at theSun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall in Singapore. Tan Kah Kee can be seen in the top left, a supporter of the revolutionary overthrow of the Qing government as well as a supporter of the communists in China, which got him expelled from Singapore by the British colonial government. He remained in China serving in various positions in the Chinese Communist Party.

One of the great though vastly underappreciated ‘new town’ planners of the left – Macklin Hancock’s Harvard professor William Holford – shortly after these revolutionary events in China, took a trip to the Soviet Union. The Chinese architect Chen Zhanxiang’s memories of Holford are recounted in a book by Jun Wang called “Beijing Record: A Physical and Political History of Planning Modern Beijing”:

“Holford visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and back home, he published a book entitled God’s Plan, describing the socialist country as a “planners’ paradise.” Chen Zhanxiang never read that book but heard about it from his teacher on many occasions. For him, the most unforgettable thing about the Soviet Union was that under socialism, the state ownership of land and the overriding power of the state ensured implementation of all plans. For this reason, Chen Zhanxiang, like many other students, had good opinions of socialism.”

I would love to read this book, but have been completely unsuccessful in tracking it down. What an incredible name for a book on Soviet planning, haha: God’s Plan. These religious allusions are part of what makes me so fascinated by Holford. There’s a fascinating thing he wrote about his experience in the Soviet Union that alludes to these Edenic utopian resonances that I think colour Holford’s own planning work. Gordon E. Cherry and Leith Penny in their book on Holford write:

“The appeal of the Soviet Union, however, was of a different order. For Holford, as for so many of his generation, a romantic notion of Soviet society provided a focus for a whole range of personal and social idealisms, a new Jerusalem in which it could be supposed the individual was liberated from the constraining hypocracies and injustices of life in England.”

They then quote something Holford wrote about the anxious excitement he felt about the Soviet Union, though totally conscious of the fact it could all end as a total and disturbing failure:

“It seems to me now that there could be illusions which one ought not only to let alone, but even to defend against disillusionment. We go merrily pricking the bubbles in the course of what we call education. Things and people I believed in years ago I only have sympathy for now-which is a poor thing. There remain the big illusions–love, friends, work, the big ideal of the socialist state. They go further than I can see, and because they are bigger than myself, there is something in me that makes me follow. But my ever-curious intelligence soon uncovers a danger, like a hole in a tooth. If I go on probing for proofs and experiences will I end up by pricking another bubble? Will it be the old myth of the Garden of Eden over again? I don’t know. The old serpent intellect replies, ‘you will never know unless you find out for yourself. And the outcome of it all is that I refuse to try and answer riddles, and so I say ‘Let it all come! I’ll hang on to what I have until I can’t hang on any longer’.”

And then maybe the most fascinating remark I’ve found of his on communism in general is his excitement at reading Lenin but his hilarious exercise in self-criticism – some old Christian self-flagellation – regarding his unworthiness to consider himself a worker, but rather a bourgeois intellectual. This is a letter Holford wrote to Gordon Stephenson in 1933 (Stephenson being another architect in the habit of mingling with English socialists and communists, and who would also visit the Soviet Union, twice):

“I get all worked up reading Lenin, or about Lenin or publications by the friends of the Soviet, URSS publications etc., kidding myself I’m a WORKER. Conversely, when I read ultra capitalist stuff, newspapers that make me vomit, platitudes of Dictators, or luxury nonsense, then I want to bust things up, start a clean fresh order of life, do something. The thing that worries me is that it is all in the head—not in the bones. I was bred as bourgeois as anybody and when my head and my sympathies move very far along the communistic line I become nothing more than a ‘bourgeois intellectual’. And that may mean a lot or it may mean nothing. The change to a real live communist cannot come about only through the head, and there people like Bernard Shaw utterly fail. I don’t mean he isn’t useful. He gingers people up, particularly the jolly old bourgeoisie, but his great mission never gets beyond the itching powder stage. He is Britain’s Great Irritant—useful but uninspiring.

...Conviction! that’s all it is. The old Christians used to pray for conviction, and now I suppose the only thing to do is to work for it. Just occasionally I feel holes in the armour.”

I think Holford’s dig at Shaw is hilarious, although curiously Lenin was rather sympathetic to Shaw calling him “a good man fallen among Fabians.” Gorky said he was “one of the bravest thinkers of Europe”. There’s a fairly fascinating letter Lenin wrote Gorky on December of 1921 after the Russian Civil War while the country was descending into famine:

“I am very sorry to write in haste. I am terribly tired. I’ve got insomnia. I am going away for treatment. I have been requested to write to you: would you write to Bernard Shaw asking him to go to America, and to Wells who is said to be in America now, to get them both to help us in collecting aid to the starving? It would be a good thing if you wrote them. The starving will then get a bit more. The famine is very bad. Make sure to have a good rest and better treatment.”

Lenin would end up begging the wealthier Western countries for aid, asking for “bread and medicine”, in light of the crop failure, and ended up negotiating with President Hoover, who sent aid asking they depart with some of their gold holdings to defray the costs. Some estimates have the famine’s death toll at 1-2 million. A Soviet estimate was at 5 million. Gorky ended up writing to H. G. Wells, the other Fabian they were in contact with, who quoted parts of Gorky’s letter in an article.

Shaw was actually very sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and in 1931, years after Lenin’s death had this to say about him:

“We should not think that the importance of Lenin is a matter of the past, because Lenin died. We should think of the future, of the importance of Lenin for the future, and his importance for the future is such that, should the experiment Lenin undertook — the experiment of socialism — fail, then modern civilization will perish, like many civilizations have already perished in the past.”

Shaw remained an ardent supporter of the Soviet Union for the rest of his life, even having a framed portrait of Stalin displayed on his mantel. This was not uncommon for socialists of the time though. Even Frida Kahlo, secret lover of Trotsky, had Stalin’s portrait pinned to her headboard above her bed, among other revolutionaries including Mao.

As for Shaw, his sympathies extended in other weird and disturbing directions, expressing disturbingly affirmative comments towards Hitler and Mussolini. It really does make you worry about the ‘fascist creep’ of red-brown alliances sometimes. Shaw was also a eugenicist, though this was common among socialists of his sort at the time. Even Tommy Douglas was a eugenicist, and certainly Lee Kuan Yew’s Fabian years were also formative to the eugenicist impulses that coloured his views for the rest of his life, long after he had abandoned a commitment to socialism.

A statue of Shaw at Niagara-on-the-Lake (home of the Shaw Festival).

As for Shaw’s relationship to ‘garden cities’, he regularly gave talks at places like Letchworth, as he was in the same Fabian orbit as Unwin and Howard. In fact Shaw was one of Ebenezer Howard’s investors calling him:

“... one of those heroic simpletons who do big things whilst our prominent worldings are explaining why they are Utopian and impossible. And of course it is they who will make money out of his work.”

But what of this legacy of Letchworth. What utopia did it birth or whom did it make a lot of money for? Owen Hatherley sees Letchworth as not particularly radical, especially in what it turned out to be:

“In all of these, you can get the sense that the hope and the reality never quite met, as Letchworth became just another affluent Hertfordshire commuter town. As the planner and writer Adrian Jones puts it, "Letchworth is a comfortable place in an increasingly uncomfortable country, and that is why people like it". That isn't to be sniffed at, but it would have disappointed the radicals of the 1910s…

With little state support, the original garden city became reliant on an uneasy mix of private finance and local enthusiasm; the main employer in a town where women who didn't want to wear corsets could feel comfortable became the Spirella Corset Factory.

The British government likes to talk about building new garden cities, but never about building new new towns, which are still associated with unfashionable concepts like modernity, public ownership, and equality. It's this, rather than a love for alternative lifestyles or Arts and Crafts architecture, that has inflated the reputation of the garden cities.

At the railway station is an advertisement for Le Jardin, Luxury Retirement Living, a "stunning collection" of one- and two-bedroom retirement apartments. Its architecture is a debased version of Parker and Unwin's asymmetrical, pitched-roof style, with none of the space or grace. That's where utopia ends, here.”

Yet is there anything radical to reclaim from the surprisingly radical roots of many of these ‘new towns’ and ‘garden cities’? The suburbs are often scoffed at, yet what radical potentials lie in their midst? Hatherley doesn’t believe these ‘new towns’ are anything to scorn, and in a London Review of Books piece, defends them from the types of attacks Jane Jacobs once subjected them to throughout her career:

“There’s a problem, too, with the way her scorn for new towns and suburbs extended to those who chose to live in them. It seemed to baffle her that anyone could ever choose Levittown over the West Village, or Harlow over Stepney. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities – which would become official policy in Britain, with the building of new towns after the Second World War – were ‘really very nice ... if you were docile and had no plans of your own’. This is nothing but a reflex on her part. Raphael Samuel recalls in The Lost World of British Communism that Wythenshawe, an interwar council suburb in Manchester, a project and a Radiant Garden City Beautiful if ever there were one, was a prime recruiting ground for radical politics, because it was inhabited by workers who had the self-sacrifice and drive to move out of the slums, even if it meant paying more rent. The postwar new towns attracted people who had plans; they wanted to get out of what they considered hopeless, dead-end places and bring up their children somewhere fresh and modern. Many early suburbs and new towns weren’t places for the passive, for ‘children’, yet this is just how Jacobs saw them.”

Raymond Unwin was involved with the development of Wythenshawe, and it became a hotbed of radical politics as Hatherley points out. I think about Meadowvale and what, if any, radical potential lies within its network of pedestrian pathways and the library and community centre at the heart of its town centre, and if there is any future possibility of a more socialized model of housing. There are new plans beginning to be proposed for Meadowvale’s renewal, and I think one of the most important abandoned ideas from the “garden city” and “new town” movements was some type of mechanism for collective ownership.

Lake Aquitaine a‘constructed reservoir’ designed by Macklin Hancock.

We have public spaces like Lake Aquitaine, some green-belted areas, greened pedestrian networks, the community centre, and library – but the increasing unaffordability of housing is the elephant in the room.

I’ve often attended a book club at Eden United Church, which sits directly across the road from Meadowvale Town Centre. One of the members also serves at the food bank that’s operated out of the church building, and she describes this gentleman she knows, an immigrant who has spent the past three or so years of his life sleeping on a couch, sharing a small space with a few other people. The large majority of his income, often unstable, goes to rent – sometimes, after paying rent and other basic necessities (but mostly rent), he has as little as $10 to stretch out for the entire month to support himself, and comes to the food bank to be able to make ends meet. He finally was able to secure a subsidized unit and came to tell her because he was so incredibly happy. She mentioned to us that listening to his story broke her heart and she wanted to cry, because there are people in immense desperation. Another person I met, who often attends the church is disabled, surviving on ODSP, and mentions that there are very long wait-lists for subsidized housing units in the Meadowvale area, and has been trying to get politicians in the area to do something about it. I think it is time we start revisiting some of the collectivized mechanisms of the early ‘garden city’ plans, whether it be old Georgist mechanisms, or new proposals put forward by people like Hatherley, who often emphasizes this aspect of ‘garden cities’:

“A key concept of the original garden cities was collective ownership, with them owned and managed by some sort of community trust for the benefit of residents, rather than in the hands – and for the benefit of – developers such as Persimmon and Barratt. This was mostly honoured in the breach in the first generation such as Letchworth or Welwyn. But today, a garden city could be run as a Community Land Trust, a form of ownership that contains clauses against speculation, stopping cities becoming middle-class commuter towns and ensuring their original intention – places without hierarchies, slums, “luxury living” colonies or class distinctions.

However, co-operative or community ownership is usually elective, favouring enthusiasts and those with time on their hands. The new city should aim for the universality that council housing once provided, through a system of housing allocation that would make housing accessible to anyone that wants it. The best model for this is still renting through the local authority.”

Holly Firmin in the New Socialist puts forward some interesting ideas for new new towns that I think would be worth considering for Meadowvale’s renewal:

“New New Towns would also provide the opportunity to enact emerging ideas around community wealth building. What better way to develop strong anchor institutions and create a locally rooted economy, based on new forms of worker ownership, than to design a New Town on these principles from the ground-up? Rather than exploiting the workers that build New Towns, they could instead belong to unionised, local co-operative construction companies. Original New Towns were themselves committed to a kind of proto-community wealth building policy of ‘self-containment’, which encouraged residents to work, rest and play within the boundary of the town.”

Can you imagine if Meadowvale’s renewal project provided jobs to local residents for maintenance, repair, and new building projects, and secured housing for everyone who needed it? Current plans for Mississauga are trying to reach a target 35% of units as ‘affordable’ housing (I guess they want the majority of its housing then to be unaffordable), but they intend these units to be acquired by way of market rental or ‘affordable’ ownership schemes. Under these schemes housing remains a commodity, subject to the market, which even Clarence Stein (not a socialist) believed should not be so.

2018 list of Mississauga neighbourhoods by affordability, Meadowvale Village listed at third highest cost, Meadowvale (new town) at twelfth (out of nineteen)

Hatherley provides some interesting examples in Seoul that focus rather on de-commodification and ‘regeneration without gentrification’, and I think these need to be options kept on the table:

“A more radical model still is in schemes that both renovate and de-commodify. Recent examples include the renovation of the Seewon Sangga development in Seoul, which in its mix of housing, industry, markets and self-proclaimed ‘regeneration without gentrification’’, presents a model of redevelopment far more intelligent than anything we have dared in the UK. Similarly unusual is the renovation of the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in Paris by the architects Lacaton and Vassal, which took a 1960s tower, slated to be demolished, and renovated it for the existing residents, giving them new winter gardens and adding wings of new social housing to the existing structure with no evictions and no changes in ownership. Notably, both of these were proven to be far cheaper than demolition and building anew, and neither has been precious about making major changes to the existing building fabric.”

I get a little nervous reading about re-development and renewal plans for Meadowvale. How much will focus on making the neighbourhood more inclusive, and how much will result in it displacing the vibrant immigrant and working-class communities that have made Meadowvale what it is today. I’m able to chat with public transit bus drivers and artists at my neighbourhood church, but the strain of housing is hard on many people. It is sad that one of the only non-profit housing options available in Meadowvale is an elderly residence that was built and operated by the United Church. We cannot rely on the private charity and generosity to make housing affordable for everyone. It has to be central and systemic to the entire fabric of our neighbourhood.

I think about Gordon Stephenson, whom Holford often wrote letters to. Stephenson was considered a man of the left in many ways like Holford. He designed Stevenage, the first of Labour’s post-war British ‘new towns’ – located between Letchworth Garden City to the north and Welwyn Garden City to the south. The pedestrian spaces and design were referred to as “Festival Style”, and Clarence Stein was consulted, with many parts of Radburn becoming features in Stevenage. Monica Felton, feminist, town planner, peace activist and Labour Party member was chair of the Stevenage Development Corporation in 1949 but was dismissed from her job, unofficially because of her status as a fellow traveller, going on Soviet-organized trips to North Korea and participating in Soviet propaganda broadcasts – even winning the Stalin Prize in 1952.

Concerning questions of the ‘renewal’ of Meadowvale, Macklin Hancock’s ‘new town’: the question will always persist: whose utopia are we creating, uncreating, recreating when we engage in these processes of ‘renewal’? Stephenson, though considered a progressive, was also responsible for his 1957 plan to redevelop the entire downtown core of Halifax, which involved the forceful eviction of Africville (which he described as a “little-frequented part of the City… an encampment, or a shack town”). This ultimately led to the forced removal of a poor but vibrant Black community in Nova Scotia.

The story of Africville has its origins in the Underground Railroad. Some slave escapees settled in the area around the 1830s or 1840s – though the Black community in Nova Scotia existed since at least the 18th century, particularly after the American Revolution, when Black ‘Loyalists’ came to settle around Halifax. (As J. Sakai explains in Settlers, liberating slaves for participating in imperial military operations is hardly liberatory, both on the side of the British and the United States, and consequently the same oppressive structures from slavery will persist since they have not been properly addressed through real liberation.) Africville were a largely self-sufficient community, though one that had to resist perpetual attempts of removal and environmental racism.

Since the Halifax explosion of December 1917, when four residents of Africville died, the city had been trying to find a way to rid itself of the settlement. 1917 was the same year Trotsky was detained at the Halifax harbor on British MI5 intelligence. In March of 1917, Trotsky was making his way from New York back to Russia to join the revolution that was breaking out there. On April 3, he was detained by British officers and sent to the Amherst concentration camp, all of which he described in in a chapter of his book “My Life”.

By April 29th, Trotsky was told to pack his bags and he and his family were released – but not without stirring up some trouble in the concentration camp during his stay, where he spent time organizing the prisoners, setting up translation teams, political discussion groups, and proselytizing on behalf of the revolution. Captain F. C. Whiteman, second-in-command at the camp commented that if Trotsky had stayed in the camp any longer, he’d have turned all the German prisoners into communists. By the time of the Halifax explosion on December 6, Trotsky was already back in Russia, the Winter Palace had been seized by the Bolsheviks, and a Constituent Assembly had been elected – only to be closed down by Lenin in January.

Back in Halifax, the targeting of Africville was intensified by the city. Despite paying taxes, Africville did not receive most services from the city – no sewage or water, no roads, no health services, no electricity. A open-pit dump site was built in Africville in the 1950s, leading up to its classification as a ‘slum’ and its ultimate demise.

Stephenson had accepted a position at the University of Toronto in 1955, after initially planning to accept a position at MIT, but being denied permanent residency in the US. While in Toronto he worked on an ‘urban renewal’ project for Regent Park, while also helping with the design of the Kingston waterfront and the Eaton’s Centre. While Stephenson saw the poor conditions of Africville and said that it “stands as an indictment of society and not of its inhabitants”, many of the justifications for the ‘slum clearance’ efforts and forced relocation at Africville involved business interests, such that commercial development could expand into the area. Despite Stephenson’s socialist leanings, his most remembered legacy in Canada was the razing of Africville – roundly condemned now not only by all manner leftist political parties throughout Turtle Island, but even by liberals.This is the way Stephenson described Africville in his 1957 Halifax redevelopment report:

“There is a little frequented part of the City, overlooking Bedford Basin, which presents an unusual problem for any community to face. In what may be described as an encampment, or shack town, there live about seventy negro families. They are descendants of early settlers, and it is probable that Africville originated with a few shacks well over a century ago. Title to some of the land will be difficult to ascertain. Some of the hutted homes are on railway land, some on City land, some on private land. There will be families with squatters rights, and others with clear title to land which is now appreciating considerably in value. The Citizens of Africville live a life apart. On a sunny, summer day, the small children roam at will in a spacious area and swim in what amounts to their private lagoon. In winter, life is far from idyllic. In terms of the physical condition of buildings and sanitation, the story is deplorable. Shallow wells and cesspools, in close proximity, are scattered about the slopes between the shacks. There are no accurate records of conditions in Africville. There are only two things to be said. The families will have to be rehoused in the near future. The land which they now occupy will be required for the further development of the City. A solution which is satisfactory, socially as well as economically, will be difficult to achieve. Africville stands as an indictment of society and not of its inhabitants. They are old Canadians who have never had the opportunities enjoyed by their more fortunate fellows.”

While Stephenson’s plan was framed as a progressive way to provide public housing to improve the material livelihoods of the residents of Africville, it was more fundamentally about clearing the land to make it more attractive to capital. Stephenson commented that after clearance, “It may now redevelop the land for highest potential its use.” And while his plan was initially accepted as a viable liberal welfare reform, radical Black activism in Halifax began raising more awareness about the actual nature of the relocation process. Visits to Halifax by the Black Panthers and Kwame Ture (born Stokely Carmichael) helped establish a Black Panther Halifax chapter in 1969 and the Black United Front, lead by organizers such as Rocky Jones, Joan Jones, and Yvonne Atwell. The displacement of Africville, and the role of capitalist investors as well as ongoing racism came into clearer view and the true nature of Halifax’s ‘urban renewal’ process came into larger provincial and national discourses on racism.

However, these visits by radical Black Power activists put the local Black community on the radar of the RCMP who conducted surveillance projects on them for years to come. Rocky Jones would be tracked by the RCMP for over a decade. Jenifer Nelson’s book “Razing Africville” details some of the measures the RCMP took including tapping phones, intercepting mail, stakeouts outside homes, undercover incursions and informant operations into Black community meetings and nightclubs.

This is part of Stephenson’s legacy in Canada. While it is useful to see the radical roots of certain ‘garden city’ principles had on the ‘new town’ movement, advocated by progressives like Stephenson and Holford, and their eventual affect in Macklin Hancock’s Meadowvale, it is maybe more important to look to radical racialized groups like the Black United Front in Halifax to more closely examine the real effects these ‘new town’ planners had in practice. Whose utopia were they creating? Whose utopia were they renewing under racial capitalism?

William Holford called Hancock’s Don Mills ‘new town’ “probably the most attractive natural town site that I have ever seen.” High praise from a very distinguished planner of the left, yet for whom was Don Mills attractive under the‘free-enterprise’ economy Hancock always made accommodation for. Whose freedom was prioritized in this‘free market’? Attractive to capital or to ordinary working people? And now decades later, with GTA house prices unimaginably high, who can afford to be attracted to a place with scanty non-profit offerings.

Macklin Hancock grew up many of his years on his family plot in Cooksville, Mississauga, where he lived next to the nursery run by his father Leslie Hancock. The nursery was said to have hired a number of Japanese Canadians during WW2, so as to help them avoid the internment camps setup by the Canadian government. This plot is also very close to the home Duchess Olga lived in at the end of her life – she was a Romanov, youngest child of the Czar Alexander III, who fled the Russian Revolution of 1917.

The Hancock plot of land has recently been acquired by the City of Mississauga as parkland, and the woodlot on this plot has some of the oldest white pine trees in the area. Much of Mississauga used to be covered in these tall white pines, before they were processed in 19th century sawmills on the Credit River, like those around Meadowvale Village, and sold to the Royal British Navy for their imperial projects abroad and to construct roads that would become the backbone of Canadian settler capitalism. The attendant deforestation and destruction of the Credit River and its salmon populations would displace the Anishinaabe. Meadowvale ‘new town’ was in many ways named after this ‘bucolic’ old utopian village on the Credit River, a good distance east of what would become the New Town’s core. These nostalgic allusions to some utopia of White settlers was at the same time an indirect allusion to the destruction of indigenous communities who had treasured and lived off this land for centuries. This is the complicated history that Meadowvale will have to come to terms with as it looks for new ways forward.

capital and the plantationocene: faith or defeat

a review of Anna Tsing’s “The Mushroom at the End of the World”

Since my late undergraduate years, Donna Haraway has been a continuous figure of fascination for me. I always found her to be a very fashionable writer, maybe because I had a very unfashionable taste for 90’s postmodernism during my politically formative years. Around the time I started toying around with vegetable gardening in my backyard I began getting fairly interested in Haraway’s work on companion species and how species are mutually constituted by each other. Species (including humans) of course do not exist in a vacuum, but exist in relation to other species, and have been formed by the history of these other species with whom they have been interacting over vast periods of time, genetically and behaviourally adapting to what Haraway calls ‘kin’ — family. (Also Haraway references in Orphan Black only added fuel to this smouldering interest.)

More recently, Haraway’s Marxism has been more often foregrounded in discussions. I suppose this is simply a result of the political mood that has been surfacing over the past few years. But I listened to a podcast interview Haraway did with Jacobin on why using the term ‘anthropocene’ was inadequate for trying to understand the nature of the anthropogenic climate catastrophe currently underway. Many leftists use the (rather clumsy) term ‘capitalocene’ to signal that it is the specific political economy of capitalism and specifically the actions of the capitalist class — the wealthy few — that are driving this climate catastrophe. Haraway mentions she finds that term useful but more often refers to a term that her colleague Anna Tsing uses which is ‘plantationocene’, which signals the type of socio-ecological and political-economic organization that came to exist under colonialism that became the basis of capitalist production today — and how that was the driving force behind the ongoing climate catastrophe. This is how I first encountered Anna Tsing.

It is interesting how certain liberal science writers like Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction go out of their way to try and frame ecological destruction as an intrinsically human thing. Almost as if it is inevitable that humans as a species would cause mass extinctions either way — with or without capitalism. Ironically, this is a rather fascist idea behind a lot of eco-fascist calls for genocide. Haraway sometimes gets accused of this because she emphasizes population control as an important ecological tactic (with slogans like “Make kin, not babies”), even though she has been extremely critical of these sorts of fascist impulses in movements like deep ecology. Haraway’s emphasis on population control is inverted from the typical liberal one that carries deep anxieties over ballooning third world populations. Haraway claims that having a child in the highly consumptive environment of a Western ‘middle-class’ life is far more worrying than having a child as a third world family. I ultimately don’t really agree with Haraway’s emphasis on population as a primary mechanism of dealing with this climate catastrophe, but certainly I think it’s worth admitting that our planet can only sustain a certain number of human beings.

I want to point out though how radically different indigenous anthropologies are from the sort of picture Kolbert paints in The Sixth Extinction. For example, Leanne Simpson talks about how human abandonment is not the solution to environmental destruction but human care and responsibility:

“So when I think of the land as my mother or if I think of it as a familial relationship, I don’t hate my mother because she’s sick, or because she’s been abused. I don’t stop visiting her because she’s been in an abusive relationship and she has scars and bruises. If anything, you need to intensify that relationship because it’s a relationship of nurturing and caring.”

The botanist Robin Wall-Kimmerer also talks about finding this common notion among her ecology students that humans are not beneficial to ecosystems:

“One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students in my General Ecology class a survey. Among other things, they were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment. Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix. These were third-year students who had selected a career in environmental protection, so the response was, in a way, not very surprising. They were well schooled in the mechanics of climate change, toxins in the land and water, and the crisis of habitat loss. Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was “none.”

I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? …When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman.”

I think what people like Haraway and Tsing offer is a framing beyond nature as something radically distinct from humans, as if humans are not part of nature or ecosystems. Their critique of rendering nature as something static or pure is also at the same time a critique of anthropocentrism. To recognize humans as a species formed in parallel together with all other species on this planet, and that we as a species affect other species just as other species affect us, and affect each other also. What we cannot lose sight of is the hegemonic influence the humans species (more specifically an elite subset of the human species) has had on all other species on this planet. We cannot divorce anthropocentrism and certain destructive humanisms from a proper class analysis.

Tsing actually works through a number of Marxist concepts throughout the book. She explores labour (wage labour and precarious gig labour), capital, privatization, alienation, and commodification. I think many on the left are quite impatient of postmodern sermonizing (maybe rightly so), yet Tsing is working in the tradition of Marx and has many worthwhile things to say. Some of Marx’s earliest articles as a journalist and editor of the German paper Rheinische Zitung was on the wooded commons. He wrote a series of articles on the ‘theft’ of firewood from German forests in the autumn of 1842, which many consider formative to his further politicization.

One of Tsing’s observations I found most useful was her exploration of capitalist co-optation which she terms the ‘salvage economy’ writing:

“In this “salvage” capitalism, supply chains organize the translation process in which wildly diverse forms of work and nature are made commensurate—for capital.”

Tsing elaborates:

“In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. Many capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. ”

Tsing then turns to two very interesting literary examples of capitalist co-optation of indigenous knowledge by colonizers to generate capitalist wealth:

“Consider the nineteenth-century ivory supply chain connecting central Africa and Europe as told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. The story turns around the narrator’s discovery that the European trader he much admired has turned to savagery to procure his ivory. The savagery is a surprise because everyone expects the European presence in Africa to be a force for civilization and progress. Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage.

For a brighter view of supply-chain translation, consider Herman Melville’s account of the nineteenth-century procurement of whale oil for Yankee investors. Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated indigenous people from Asia, Africa, America, and the Pacific. The ship is unable to kill a single whale without the expertise of people who are completely untrained in U.S. industrial discipline. But the products of this work must eventually be translated into capitalist value forms; the ship sails only because of capitalist financing. The conversion of indigenous knowledge into capitalist returns is salvage accumulation. So too is the conversion of whale life into investments.”

I cannot help but recall Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest crying out:

“...I loved thee

And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle,

The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:

Cursed be I that did so! All the charms

Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!

For I am all the subjects that you have,

Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me

In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me

The rest o' the island.”

After the extraction of indigenous knowledge for capitalist gain comes the inevitable violent process of enclosure and privatization that dispossesses the colonized from their land.

Tsing is a Southeast Asianist and I think her writings on Southeast Asia are some of the strongest aspects of the book. The influence of Japanese capital for example in Indonesia was fascinating, and how the reinvigoration of Japanese capital after WW2 was largely a function of anti-communist foreign policy.

“American occupiers arranged for the rehabilitation of once-disgraced nationalists and rebuilt the Japanese economy as a bulwark against communism. It was in this climate that associations of banks, industrial enterprises, and specialists in trade formed again, although less formally, as keiretsu “enterprise groups.” At the heart of most enterprise groups was a general trading company in partnership with a bank. The bank transferred money to the trading company, which, in turn, made smaller loans to its associated enterprises… Trading companies advanced loans—or equipment, technical advice, or special marketing agreements—to their supply chain partners overseas. The trading company’s job was to translate goods procured in varied cultural and economic arrangements into inventory. It is hard not to see in this arrangement the roots of the current hegemony of global supply chains, with their associated form of salvage accumulation.”

Tsing also tells the story of Nike which started as a U.S. outpost distributing Japanese sneakers, and eventually moved to this model of heavily subcontracting every stage of production to the extent that one of its Vice Presidents remarked: “We don’t know the first thing about manufacturing. We are marketers and designers,”

It is then interesting to see Tsing write about her first encounter with commodity chains as a Southeast Asianist was to observe how Japanese capital functioned in Indonesia by way of subcontracting not unlike the way Nike did:

“I first learned about supply chains in studying logging in Indonesia, and this is a place to see how the Japanese supply-chain model works. During Japan’s building boom in the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese imported Indonesian trees to make plywood construction molds. But no Japanese cut down Indonesian trees. Japanese general trading companies offered loans, technical assistance, and trade agreements to firms from other countries, which cut logs to Japanese specifications. This arrangement had many advantages for Japanese traders. First, it avoided political risk. Japanese businessmen were aware of the political difficulties of Chinese Indonesians who, resented for their wealth and willingness to cooperate with the more ruthless policies of the Indonesian government, were targets in periodic riots. Japanese businessmen evaded such difficulties for themselves by advancing money to Chinese Indonesians, who made the deals with Indonesian generals and took the risks. Second, the arrangement facilitated transnational mobility. Japanese traders had already deforested the Philippines and much of Malaysian Borneo by the time they got to Indonesia. Rather than adapting to a new country, the traders could merely bring in agents willing to work with them in each location. Indeed, Filipino and Malaysian loggers, financed by Japanese traders, were ready and able to go to work in cutting down Indonesian trees.

Third, supply-chain arrangements facilitated Japanese trade standards while ignoring environmental consequences. Environmentalists looking for targets could find only a grab bag of varied companies, many Indonesian; no Japanese were in the forests. Fourth, supply-chain arrangements accommodated illegal logging as a layer of subcontracting, which harvested trees protected by environmental regulations. Illegal loggers sold their logs to the larger contractors, who passed them on to Japan. No one need be responsible. And—even after Indonesia started its own plywood businesses, in a supply-chain hierarchy modeled on Japanese trade—the wood was so cheap! The cost could be calculated without regard to the lives and livelihoods of loggers, trees, or forest residents. Japanese trading companies made the logging of Southeast Asia possible. They were equally busy with other commodities and in other parts of the world.”

This habit of disarticulating production is the common experience of capitalist alienation. Ching Kwan Lee, who has done some remarkably important studies on Chinese investment in Africa made some very interesting remarks on subcontracting:

“The worldwide trend has been to use subcontractors who in turn offer minimal training to short-term contract workers. The use of casual and contract workers was equally prevalent in construction.”

She observed many mining companies backed by global private capital (e.g. traded on the London stock exchange) were far more likely than Chinese state-owned mining companies to engage in widespread subcontracting in their mining projects:

“CM was particularly notorious and ruthless in using competition among subcontractors to drive down costs, to the extent that there was an internal discourse among its own managers about the “tyranny of finance.””

Lee argues in one of her lectures on her book “The Specter of Global China” that subcontracting and the casualization of labour often significantly reduces the chance that workers will engage in strikes together, and consequently their bargaining power. She says:

“The more subcontracts you have, they fight more over things like equipment — it’s harder to manage. But on the books, you’re cutting costs by subcontracting… Why do I mention this as a very important feature? Because it has extremely important consequences for labour power — the capacity for labour to force the hand of management. Because if you only have one subcontractor, your workers are unified, because they just have one employer. But if you have many many subcontractors, your workforce is totally divided, and that’s why more strikes happen in the Chinese state mine, and they have to make more concessions to their workers because they care so much about.. smooth production.”

Lee’s point is that Chinese mining is less concerned about maximizing profits by selling minerals on a global market, than actually directly using those minerals for state infrastructure projects. This is the classical distinction between ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’ (mentioned in both Adam Smith and Marx). But Lee emphasizes that this is only in the case of mining. Subcontracting is still very common in Chinese construction and the bargaining power of labour power in Chinese construction in Africa is sometimes even worse than construction undertaken by global private capital. So it cuts both ways.

I work at a small firm engaged in distributing and‘integrating’ power engineering products and am intimately confronted by the bizarre world of a subcontracting and sub-subcontracting that happens in almost every dimension of the field. It’s remarkable how many middle people are involved in small value-adding steps and plastering their‘brand names’ on goods simply manufactured in third world countries where labour is much cheaper.

Anyway, with these issues of mining and landscapes ravaged by capitalism, I think Tsing raises an obvious but important point that humans are not the only species that radically transform landscapes. She writes:

“Making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers reshape streams as they make dams, canals, and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world. Bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multispecies world making. Fire was a tool for early humans not just to cook but also to burn the landscape, encouraging edible bulbs and grasses that attracted animals for hunting. Humans shape multispecies worlds when our living arrangements make room for other species. This is not just a matter of crops, livestock, and pets. Pines, with their associated fungal partners, often flourish in landscapes burned by humans; pines and fungi work together to take advantage of bright open spaces and exposed mineral soils. Humans, pines, and fungi make living arrangements simultaneously for themselves and for others: multispecies worlds.”

Tsing also mentions how

“Pines have made alliances with animals as well as fungi. Some pines are completely dependent on birds to spread their seeds—just as some birds are completely dependent on pine seeds for their food.”

Yet this interdependency is not isolated from ‘destructive’ human practices. Tsing points out that human deforestation also benefits pine trees in certain circumstances:

“Humans spread pines in two different ways: by planting them, and by creating the kinds of disturbances in which they take hold. The latter generally occurs without any conscious intent; pines like some of the kinds of messes humans make without trying. Pines colonize abandoned fields and eroded hillsides. When humans cut down the other trees, pines move in. Sometimes planting and disturbance go together. People plant pines to remediate the disturbances they have created. Alternatively, they may keep things radically disturbed to advantage pine. This last alternative has been the strategy of industrial growers, whether they plant or merely manage self-seeded pine: clear-cutting and soil breaking are justified as strategies to promote pine.”

I have mixed feelings about the emphasizing of this framing by postmodernists like Tsing and Haraway. On the one hand there is something dialectical to this sort of analysis. Yet also this reiteration of slippage and blurring of boundaries can obscure the real dominant power dynamics at play, and the clarity of the task before us.

Catherine Liu did a really interesting interview with Jacobin criticizing postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. She mentions that most textbooks locate the pivotal turn to postmodernism as the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe (a social housing project in St Louis that ‘devolved’ into a hotbed of ‘gang violence’). This narrative framing was also the case of for me in a first year international development course, where this landmark moment in architectural history had resounding consequences in art more generally and philosophical and political currents. Liu claims that the postmodernist disdain for large-scale ‘alienating’ and ‘dehumanizing’ mass-produced social-housing projects and efficiently designed rooms like the Frankfurt Kitchen designed by the communist architect Margarete Schutte-Lihotzky dovetailed well with reactionary initiatives to dismantle social housing, which were largely used by poor working-class people of colour. Liu sees this as a defeatist impulse in postmodernist ideology. That grand projects to provide housing for all and not leaving poor racialized communities behind is seen as an impossibly utopic vision bound for failure. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe housing projects is not properly located within the active efforts of the rich white business class to stop public funding of social housing and providing adequate maintenance for it, but as the fault of modernism’s large ambitions and excessively managed ‘imposition’ of egalitarian ideas on normal people that cannot relate to these idealistic elites, and are too violent and ‘uneducated’ to take care of and maintain these unworkable projects of modernist monstrosity.

Each of these critiques Liu puts forward, I can see within the texture of Tsing’s book here. When I first picked up this book, roaming about a big box store book retailer (one I recently learned from a member of the United Jewish People’s Order is often subject to BDS boycotts because of its funding of the HESEG Foundation), I encountered Tsing’s mention of the anarchist pamphlet Desert, which basically asserts that stopping a climate catastrophe is impossible as is any effort to put an end to the global capitalist order, and that radicals should simply focus on how to better live in radical communities of mutual aid under the ruins of capitalist power.

In many ways Tsing’s book is about how life has thrived despite the circumstances of capitalist destruction, and found ways to survive outside the orbit of typical capitalist modes of production. I tend to agree with Liu more that such defeatism is dangerous. Yet it should not be ignored wholesale. Questions of how to survive under capitalism are important. But being a person of faith, I do believe another world is possible and worth fighting for. Tsing talks about how ‘scalable’ operations of colonial plantations (e.g. those involved in the production of sugar cane) became templates of capitalist production today, yet also recognizes that scalability is not intrinsically good or bad, it just has certain consequences that one must properly consider.

I think I’ve have spent many years believing in a vision that E.F. Schumacher put forward in Small is Beautiful, along with these critiques of technology and industry put forward by Ivan Illich (a Catholic anarchist of sorts) embraced by certain Latin American leftists. The Marxist historian of Southeast Asia, Michael Vickery in his 1999 introduction to his seminal text on Cambodia, fascinatingly mentioned a connection one of his acquaintances made between the ideology of the ‘Pol Pot regime’ and Ivan Illich, though Vickery thought Illich did not intend to be taken so literally or seriously. But this utopic agrarian idea of collectivization without the imposition of Western technology on peasants (as modernization is often framed as) is something that Vickery sees as part of the tragic ideology infused within Cambodian revolutionary society, even if they likely did not read Illich at all, but shared certain ideological impulses with him.

As migrants and refugees from Laos and Cambodia, as well as some Hmong immigrants constitute many of the matsutake pickers that Tsing spends time with and interviews, I found Vickery’s insights on Cambodian revolutionary ideology (which he does not really characterize as communist or Marxist) rather relevant to these issues of scale, modernization and progress that Tsing so strongly criticizes. I too had a certain disdain for notions of‘progress’, but am coming to think I have been mistaken about them. The eschewing of‘progress’ in many ways is defeatist as Liu suggests.

I think these are all very complex issues. What Tsing’s book did provide and one of my favourite parts of it involved these fascinating elaborations on pine and oak trees that for some reason provide a sense of hope. Some sense that out of destruction, life can still persist. In that sense it is not sheer defeatism. Tsing puts forward fascinating facts like “felled oaks (unlike pines) tend not to die; they sprout back from roots and stumps to form new trees.” The Asian history Tsing tells about pine forests is also fascinating:

“Long before they came to central Japan, Dr. Ogawa related, Koreans had cut down their forests to build temples and fuel iron forging. They had developed in their homeland the human-disturbed open pine forests in which matsutake grow long before such forests emerged in Japan. When Koreans expanded to Japan in the eighth century, they cut down forests. Pine forests sprung up from such deforestation, and with them matsutake.”

I think about the enormous white pine forests that covered the landscape of Mississauga once, and were wiped out in what Anishinaabeg ethnobotanist and Dalhousie professor Jonathan Ferrier referred to as a “genocide by sawmills”. Yet I recall Leanne Simpson speaking of Mother Earth recovering, and I think about the resilience of pine to thrive in the wake of human or more specifically capitalist destruction. Despite all the ruins of capitalism, beautiful things can still persist. That does not mean we should be resigned to the terms of capital. We must fight with everything inside us, and draw strength from the pockets of resilience that survive the destruction such an economy has sown. We need not feel embarrassed about the lines we draw in the sand, while still recognizing that ultimately we do things out of solidarity and love. We love our oppressors by speaking truth to them about their oppressive ways and moving them towards helping in the abolition of such relations of domination. Ecosystems are inevitably full of suffering and pain, certain species gaining from the downfall of another. Yet they are also full of examples of immense interdependence, mutuality, and cooperation. As Arundhati Roy has said:

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.“

The question is how she will look like when she arrives.

hybrid warfare and leftist alliances

this was originally written as a goodreads reflection on Masha Gessen’s book “The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia”, but turned into a sprawling mess.

I breezed through all six seasons of The Americans not long ago — another product of my podcast listening habits involving the Magnificast, hosted by two Christian communists. The Americans certainly stoked a smouldering interest in Soviet history for me. I only recently found out that Gessen did the Russian translations for many of the seasons.

This book was recommended to me by a pen pal who did her Master’s thesis on Soviet hockey propaganda, and will soon be starting a PhD on Russian democratic activism (and lesbians). So she certainly knows her stuff, and am glad I took the time to read this.

As a qualifier, before I begin this review, I have seen Gessen use she/her pronouns and other places that say Gessen uses they/them. I will use she/her because that is the most recent source I have found. And also the pronouns Gessen uses in reference to herself in the book. I will correct this review if I find my use of pronouns incorrect. With that out of the way, I’ll proceed onto the book.

I thought it was an absorbing read, well-structured, entertaining, and full of stuff I was completely ignorant of. There was a fascinating section on the practice of sociology under the Soviet Union, a really interesting section on Freudo-Marxism and its interaction with the Soviet state, and this later comes up in Gessen’s use of Erich Fromm for her stuff on totalitarianism. I think Fromm has helped me a lot better understand the dynamics of fascism. Gessen’s meeting with Putin was very fun to read. The difficulties I had (at times) keeping up with the history, dates, names, etc were some indication that I likely need to brush up on my Russian history. Once in a while I would recognize something, like when Gessen mentions Gorky in her typically humorous style:

“The city was named Gorky, after the Russian writer Alexei Peshkov, who, as was the Revolutionary fashion, had taken a tearjerker pen name: it meant “bitter.” When Zhanna was first becoming aware of her surroundings, she had no idea that a writer named Gorky had ever existed: she thought the name was a literal description of her town. The Soviet government seemed to agree: four years before Zhanna’s birth, it had chosen Gorky as the place of exile for the physicist Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the country’s best-known dissident.”

I encountered Gorky a couple years ago by way of the Indonesian anti-colonial writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer (a political prisoner in Indonesia for decades, wasting away in various penal colonies, perpetually accused of being a communist, though always denying that label) who was an enthusiastic translator of Gorky’s writing. Translating Gorky’s novel “Mother” into Indonesian was one of Pram’s first sources of income after his wedding, as I read in his memoir “The Mute’s Soliloquy”. He did the Indonesian translation working off from an English translation, and later found out sections were missing after going through a Dutch translation. He humorously wrote that he had to put up with pointed and critical queries about his translation when visiting the University of Leningrad.

I think my affinity for anti-colonial politics and its attendant resistance and revolutionary movements have created a certain (though limited) sympathy for the Soviet Union at times, although I know that when people like Pram were invited to the Soviet Union or Mao’s PRC — or for that matter when African Americans like W. E. B. DuBois, various members of the Black Panthers (like Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton), or Paul Robeson were also — they were shown a very curated view of those countries (as any diplomatic visitor to the West would be shown also), and these were concerted initiatives to project particular images of Communism into the so-called Third World (and Fourth World as ghettoized areas of the ‘First World’ are sometimes called). These are basic tactics to be expected of modern statecraft. My dad’s friend is Nigerian, and while politically and socially conservative (e.g. homophobic), he has a very high view of the Soviet Union as his father was invited to tour Soviet Russia and was very impressed with the place. This positive view of Russia has extended into the post-Soviet Putin years, and this is a theme in Gessen’s book. I will get into these issues a bit later, but first a word about Arendt.

I think the book’s main thesis and orientation draws substantially on Hannah Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism. Arendt is a figure I have been meaning to read for a while. Her work was very important for leftist philosophers engaged in theology like Giorgio Agamben who elaborated on the notion of ‘bare life’ from Arendt’s writing on Aristotelian distinctions of ‘bios’ and ‘zoe’. I do believe in the value of political life and political engagement, and I think those notions come through in Gessen’s focus on how Soviet repression of political engagement carried on into post-Soviet years. Arendt is not a leftist though (in my view), and while I haven’t read much of her work, I get the sense she would not have identified herself as such (nor would have even accepted the political spectrum birthed forth from the French Revolution). And so I think where I depart from agreement with Gessen’s work is where Arendt’s work on totalitarianism comes into view, and I think part of it also involves disagreements I have with Arendt’s views on Marx and leftist politics more broadly that she elaborates on in “On Revolution”. First I will make some remarks on Arendt’s book “The Origins of Totalitarianism”.

So I think the ‘milieu’ (lol) of literature and essays I spend most of my time thumbing through makes certain distinctions between authoritarian fascism and authoritarian communism. Many anarchists will emphasize similarities, yet I don’t think they would consider Hitler and Stalin as equivalents. Even libertarian communists who are against authoritarian tactics of communist ends, still generally hold similar goals as Marxist-Leninists, e.g. the abolition of class, but differ on how to get there. Now of course there are some Leninists who still use the word ‘liquidation’ and are vague about what they mean — likely some variation ranging from ‘the wall’ to ‘re-education camps’. The problem of realizing a classless society without violent coercion and force is an issue, I’d admit, but there are other mechanisms that disincentive acts of domination without the need for terror. The question of their efficacy is another matter. That being said, even though I think Nazism/fascism did have certain overlaps with Stalinism, I don’t think fascism and communism (even Soviet communism) are inherently two manifestations of the same underlying essence. This is Gessen’s summary of Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism:

“Whatever premise formed the basis of the ideology, be it the superiority of a particular race or of a particular class, was used to derive imagined laws of history: only a certain race or a certain class was destined to survive. The “laws of history” justified the terror ostensibly required for this survival. Arendt wrote about the subjugation of public space—in effect the disappearance of public space, which, by depriving a person of boundaries and agency, rendered him profoundly lonely. ”

In my mind, I don’t see eliminating a race and class as the same thing, although I do agree that many authoritarian communist regimes ended up empowering people who treated ‘ruling classes’ as almost metaphysical entities and one’s ‘class’ could almost be inherited genetically, e.g. if one’s ancestors were landowners, one could some how be held accountable for that (Gessen brings this up). I think many people who identified as communists in those regimes didn’t think that way, but it only takes a portion of people (who do) to cause irreparable trauma and terror, especially when they have power. I of course find that very troubling, but if one treats classes as relationally constituted, which is exactly the whole point of Marx’s body of work, then abolishing class might involve expropriating already expropriated wealth to return it to the people who produced it and need it more, trying to better distribute all the things produced by society such that no one is lacking hygienic housing, proper health care, healthy food, leisure time to enjoy the fruits of one’s labour etc… and fostering a world where people don’t feel superior to other people and have their identity based around having inordinately more than other human beings. I mean that is another way of abolishing class, and I see no problem with ‘eliminating’ class by such means. It’s an ‘elimination’ of a relation not a person. That is, working towards removing relations of domination between people. How that happens in practice is a whole other issue, if it’s at all possible. Authoritarian impulses not only go back to Marx and Engels, but back to utopian socialists, and even show up in Thomas More’s Utopia. So Arendt’s accusations cannot be so easily dismissed.

So this issue of violence is important to Arendt, and she will work though how Marx is connecting it with issues of scarcity and necessity. Arendt accuses Marx of turning issues of scarcity into accusations of exploitation, saying:

“Marx's transformation of the social question into a political force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a 'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence… If Marx helped in liberating the poor, then it was not by telling them that they were the living embodiments of some historical or other necessity, but by persuading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity.”

Arendt said something similar, but more forthcoming, in a footnote contained in her 1972 book “Crises of the Republic”:

"Behind it, however, stands the illusion of Marx's society of free producers, the liberation of the productive forces of society, which in fact has been accomplished not by the revolution but by science and technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not accelerated, but seriously retarded, in all countries that have gone through a revolution. In other words, behind their denunciation of consumption stands the idealization of production, and with it the old idolization of productivity and creativity"

This is an argument that Jordan Peterson perpetually peddles. I actually agree that capitalism is a far more productive and dynamic economic system than communism in most situations. I think Marx saw that too, and that’s why he believed capitalism was the stage that must precede socialism and then communism. Now you can debate the morality of whether we should accept such terms, but it’s merely a practical assertion on Marx’s part. That’s the grounds on which China’s liberalization occurred, and I think Soviet industrialization found similar justifications under Marx. I haven’t read enough Arendt, but from what I’ve read, I think Arendt’s focus on technology (especially in the American development case) as the answer to scarcity fails to recognize how organizations engaged in technological development under capitalism are in fact very political. Chomsky has called corporations some of the most totalitarian institutions on the face of the planet. I can say that engineering firms are even worse than other corporations. They are often very toxic work environments, deeply connected to the military industrial complex and resource extraction industries. The fact that military-fuelled corporations are behind so much of the innovation and increased productivity that exists today raises questions if it’s worth it. With all the technology that exists in 2020, how much more innovation is worth the continued exploitation and highly authoritarian working conditions that such increased productivity demands. The ‘falling rate of profit’ as the Marxian economists call it is some indication that ‘value-adding’ innovation can only increase by so much more. We have garnered enough productive capacity to meet all basic human needs. Is it time for something new?

Of course Arendt recognizes Marx’s typically Hegelian reversal from [violent expropriation causes poverty] to [scarcity and poverty necessarily causes revolutionary violence] which she strongly finds objectionable throughout the European tradition, including in Robespierre and Hegel. But in this Hegelian move, Marx is suggesting that only by assuring abundance and meeting material needs can one avoid violence. I agree with Marx in his assertion that poverty produces violence, because poverty is a form of structural violence which poor people are reacting too. Arendt later jokes even Lenin saw the technical basis of abundance as true, though I don’t think it’s that far off Marxist dogma as she asserts:

“…when asked to state in one sentence the essence and the aims of the October Revolution, [Lenin] gave the curious and long-forgotten formula: 'Electrification plus soviets.' This answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the party, on one side, the building socialism on the other. Intheir stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to be solved through socialization and socialism, but through technical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes any specific form of government.”

Arendt’s characterization of technology as neutral is maybe somewhat similar to the Saint Simonian vision of the neutral‘administration of things’ reiterated by Engels.

I think maybe a few decades ago, the problem of productivity and scarcity were still central issues, or as Deng Xiaoping put it: the ‘principal contradiction’. But the so-called ‘principal contradiction’ today for China under Xi Jinping is ‘uneven development’. Haha, I’m quoting CCP Central Committee brass now, and I’m not even a Marxist, lol. So this issue is most often rendered as ’inequality’, but I think ‘uneven development’ is actually a good way of putting it. It’s an inequality of both (1) consumption: the distribution of all that we produce collectively as a species within a larger ecosystem of species, and (2) production: the focusing of labour onto producing things primarily for the interests of richest 10% of the global population (although the rationale here is that this stuff eventually trickles down — now 60% of the global population have access to the internet and 20% have been able to enjoy a plane ride).

Now to take a few steps back again, the question of how much violence is acceptable and justified to pursue a particular iteration of a ‘just society’ does pose a problem, which might be glossed over by simply stating violence is inevitable. This is what Arendt writes about in her work “On Revolution”, where she thinks ‘pity’, which undergirds revolutionary politics, quickly turns to cruelty and justifies almost any degree of violence or vice. In this sense I can see how Aristotle’s virtue ethics has really laid claim to Arendt’s arguments here. She has a certain disdain for the ‘by any means necessary’ folks. I never take that phrase literally. I think it is meant to be an assertion of political force more than anything. I don’t know any radical who uses the phrase ‘by any means necessary’ to literally mean that. They would never justify racial genocide if it led to a classless society. Their values are informed by their goals, and ultimately do constrain their means, but maybe less so than Aristoteleans like Arendt who writes:

“Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense majority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery to the foundation,of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation through the immediacy of suffering; it. was determined by the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by -the limitless immensity of both the people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The boundlessness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the sentiments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.”

This is why Arendt prefers the American Revolution to the French Revolution, because it was not concerned with ‘compassion’ or ‘pity’ for the poor, but because it was solely about freedom, yet she recognizes the glaring problem of her example, which is American slavery:

“Yet we deal here with men of the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become common in certain strata of European society and precisely among those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revolution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity,'by Jefferson's 'lovely equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of reliable statistical" data we may be sure that the percentage of complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker than the obscurity of poverty;”

Often historians will call the American Civil War America’s real revolution. The French Revolution brought about movements to liberate slaves in the colonies (though slaves themselves of course were the initiators, by way of revolts and uprisings), even if not well sustained. The political impetus behind the American Revolution differed from the French Revolution in that its disregard for liberation by ‘political means’ and its disregard for the suffering of slaves cannot be divorced from this exact ideology enabling slavery. (A particularly scathing critique of the American Revolution is given in J. Sakai’s “Settlers”, which criticizes white communists who lionize the American Revolution.) I think Arendt’s whole view on the matter is succinctly summarized in these couple sentences:

“All rulership has its original and its most legItimate source in man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery, and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible truth that only violence and rule over others could make some men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolete than to attempt to liberate mankind from poverty by political means; nothing could be more futile and more dangerous.”

I have been thoroughly propagandized by theorists of the left (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser) to see things somewhat differently than Arendt, though I still have a lot to think through and I think Arendt’s critiques of the left and revolutionary politics more broadly must be taken seriously. They are carefully thought out and worth sitting with. But I think one should be cautious about how Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism are weaponized by certain centrist interests. This critique Gessen made of Bernie Sanders with respect to Cuba and Chomsky’s discussion with Arendt maybe reflects this divergence of opinion (although I agree with her critique of Castro’s homophobic purges must always be foregrounded). This is an excerpt from an article in Monthly Review by Reuven Kaminer on ‘totalitarianism’:

“The concept serves as the basis for a specific historical narrative built around the struggle of good (liberal democracy) against evil (totalitarian) dictatorship. According to this narrative, we are at the present enjoying the fruits of great victories in the battle against totalitarianism which stem directly from the comparatively recent demise of the Soviet Union. This, of course, makes it all the more easier to promote the concept of totalitarianism.

One of the ‘magical’ aspects of the concept of totalitarianism is that it appears to be “fair,” “even-handed,” and really above day to day politics. It seems completely objective because it warns that the dangers to freedom emanate from both the Right and the Left. Thus, the concept of totalitarianism is (almost) universally accepted and admired at all levels of political and intellectual life. All participants in current prevailing ideological and political discourse are assumed to be opponents of totalitarianism. The hegemonic rules of discourse are such that dissenting views may be disqualified if their proponents exhibit any lack of militancy against totalitarianism in thought and in practice. The final Part Three, on Totalitarianism, is devoted to the presentation of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as a new and unique form of government. The point of the author’s argument is clear and direct. Arendt sees a common basis to the two regimes in that they both are embodiments of radical, absolute evil. The content is clear, and so is the context. Never, for a moment, can the reader escape the clear and insistent message that Arendt is writing on behalf of the “Free World” against the looming evil of Soviet Russia.”

He goes on to do a sort of guilt by association thing with Arendt and various neocons. I will get into this a little later (especially how different leftists do this to each other) when discussing so-called red-brown alliances, which is somewhat similar to Arendt’s totalitarian thesis, and which I think is a threat the left should take very seriously. Anyway, Kaminer writes about a similar dynamic of a Trotskyist to neo-conservative pipeline (though I would argue this is not exclusive to Trotskyists: Bayard Rustin was a democratic socialist, Eugene Genovese an orthodox ML in the CPUSA):

“The fact that former leftists, and especially “graduates” of the revolutionary Marxist anti-Stalinist (Trotskyist) movement during the thirties and the forties, became leading ideologues of US reaction from the fifties onwards is well documented. The path of development among this particular section of US intellectuals would have been impossible without the Trotskyist stage. The “family,” as they were known by many, moved step by step from revolutionary, communist, Marxist anti-Stalinism during the thirties to just plain anti-Stalinism. From there the path was short to fervent, militant anti-Communism (minus Trotsky, minus revolution) and on to passionate support of the United States as the bastion of the Free World during the Cold War. Those who began their political life as convinced revolutionary Marxists moved via their core position of “anti-Stalinism” to condemnation of the Soviet dictatorship and on to identification with official US policies, as the only reliable bulwark against the tide of Bolshevik aggression. Current experience with the neo-conservative movement in the United States will help the reader to understand how a relatively small intellectual group can indeed become a vital factor in the ruling circles. It is not pure chance that one can even trace personal and family connections of the present influential grouping back to the anti-Stalinist Left.

This fascinating collection of intellectuals, which attracted Arendt and Bluecher, has been dubbed the New York intellectuals in a book with the same title. Even a partial list of some of the main representatives of the group is studded with highly influential and even famous names such as, inter alia, Irving Kristol, Sydney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer. In New York, Arendt and her husband became a prestigious social, cultural, and political addition to the New Yorkers. During the war, she had already made a name for herself with articles in various magazines, including Partisan Review and Commentary. She certainly made a strong impression on the local colleagues as someone who spoke on the basis of intimate acquaintance with the broader horizons of European culture. It soon became clear that Arendt knew everything that her new colleagues knew and more.”

I find this very interesting, but it’s worth pointing out that Arendt was very critical of neo-Conservativism. I think Corey Robin, who is in fact a great admirer of Arendt’s work, makes a more compelling case that her writings on totalitarianism, though popular in western discourse, are in fact not the most important parts of her oeuvre. Robin writes, in the London Review of Books:

“This last section [on the Soviet Union as ‘totalitarian’] is the least representative – and, as historians of Nazism and Stalinism have pointed out, least instructive – part of the book. But it has always attracted the most attention. Young-Bruehl claims that the section on imperialism is of ‘equal importance’ to the one on totalitarianism, yet she devotes a mere seven scattered paragraphs to it. Samantha Power uses the last section to examine recent genocides, despite Arendt’s insistence that totalitarianism seeks not the elimination of a people but the liquidation of the person. And when Power tries to explain al-Qaida or Hamas, she also looks to the last section, even though Arendt’s analysis of imperialism would seem more pertinent…

If Arendt matters today, it is because of her writings on imperialism, Zionism and careerism. Composed during the 1940s and early 1960s, they not only challenge facile and fashionable applications of the totalitarianism thesis; they also eerily describe the dangers that the world now faces. By refusing to reckon with these writings, the journalists, intellectuals and academics who make up the Arendt industry betray her on two counts: they ignore an entire area of her work and fail to engage with the unsettling realities of their own time. The latter would not have surprised Arendt: empires tend to have selective memories. The history of ‘imperialist rule’, she wrote at the height of the Vietnam War, ‘seems half-forgotten’, even though ‘its relevance for contemporary events has become rather obvious in recent years.’ America was so transfixed by ‘analogies with Munich’ and the idea of totalitarianism that it did not realise ‘that we are back, on an enormously enlarged scale . . . in the imperialist era.’”

The issue of imperialism is one of the most pressing matters in global politics and I think it’s one of the pivotal factors behind these red-brown alliances that Gessen mentions. Gessen’s elaborations on the National Bolshevik Party and Aleksandr Dugin were likely some of the most important aspects of the book for me. They helped me understand a whole dimension of leftist infighting that I had previously not fully grasped. This is Gessen’s explanation of the red-brown alliances that her grandfather was very taken with:

“He now spent his days reading the emergent ultranationalist press, newly known as the red-brown part of the political spectrum for its combination of Communist and brownshirt fervor. Boris Mikhailovich took to reading antisemitic passages out loud. Tatiana diagnosed this as senility and told her daughter that such was the tragedy of old age: Boris Mikhailovich, who had been an articulate, if generally quiet, opponent of the Communists his entire life, was now aligning himself with people who were not only brown but also red. More to the point, after his brief love affair with politics, Boris Mikhailovich was angry and disillusioned, and the “red-brown” press was the vehicle most immediately available for the expression of his disgust with politics.”

One of Russia’s most prominent figures fusing far-right fascism with certain communist ideas was Aleksander Dugin, one of the pioneers of National Bolshevism which combines Soviet nostalgia with ethno-nationalist and fascist ideas. Gessen actually spends a lot of time sketching out Dugin’s intellectual formation during Soviet years and his emergence into popular Russian attention, and he is mentioned throughout the book. This is one of the places she describes his fascination with fascism:

“Dugin made his own pilgrimages to Western Europe. In 1990 he went to Paris, where he met Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers… He… suggested to Dugin that his ideas might combine into something called National Bolshevism. Within a year, Dugin met a number of other Western European New Right intellectuals, was welcomed to the conferences of the ethno-nationalist think tank Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne in Paris, and was published by an Italian New Right house… If Evgenia and Boris Mikhailovich were merely listening to people who were flirting with ultranationalist and fascist rhetoric, then Dugin was going to the source. He had grown fascinated with Hitler’s philosophy and system of governance.”

The extent to which Dugin has had an influence on Putin has been debated. Gessen seems to think Dugin had Putin’s ear. Whatever is the case people saw strong parallels between Dugin’s ideas and Putin’s geopolitics. This is where the red-brown issues come into focus. Putin is not a communist, and most western communists do not like Putin as far as I know. He is a conservative and reactionary, who has actively stifled celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution and Lenin within Russia, because he is ultimately an anti-revolutionary. Yet he has remained somewhat esteemed among Latin American leftists, especially within the domain of the Pink Tide, like Castro and Chavez, and even to an extent Lula and Morales. In part, this is part of Putin’s geopolitics which favours the weakening of American hegemony for Russian advantage; Latin American countries despise American hegemony for slightly different reasons. But also these countries, especially Venezuela, are often great sources of market demand for Russian military goods, which is good for the Russian economy. And ceaseless American intervention in the region, which Washington continually refers to as America’s ‘backyard’, is the principle driver (in my view) of their demand for military technology.

So I first encountered Max Blumenthal by way of a video on the Palestine-Israel conflict shared with me by a Libyan friend who is very into Palestinian politics. I have followed the work of Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton over the past while, their podcast Moderate Rebels and their website The Grayzone. I find their analysis of Latin American politics and parts of the Middle East the most useful, but I’m a little more skeptical about their coverage on China and Ukraine, and a lot more skeptical about their coverage on Syria.

They are Marxist-Leninists involved with the PSL (Party for Socialism and Liberation) — a communist party in the U.S., whose members are often accused of being ‘tankies’, although interestingly enough PSL has its origins in the American Trotskyist movement lead by Sam Marcy. As commented on libcom.org this Trotskyist connection is often carefully written out of their history. Norton has connections with the Communist Party of Canada (speaking at one of their events for a candidate in the Danforth riding) and PSL (like the CPC) is very supportive of ‘really-existing’ Socialist countries, especially in Latin America, so I can see how that might colour their views on Russia. But Ben Norton has very clearly stated he thinks Putin is a “right-wing nationalist” and “anti-communist”.

Norton’s and Blumenthal’s news platform ‘Grayzone’ is (I believe) a reference to what is called ‘hybrid warfare’ in U.S. military discourse. Francis G. Hoffman offered this definition of the ‘gray zone’ in a paper published in PRISM (a journal of the U.S. National Defense University) called “Examining Complex Forms of Conflict Gray Zone and Hybrid Challenges”:

“A formal definition of gray zone tactics is offered: Those covert or illegal activities of nontraditional statecraft that are below the threshold of armed organized violence; including disruption of order, political subversion of government or non-governmental organizations, psychological operations, abuse of legal processes, and financial corruption as part of an integrated design to achieve strategic advantage. This definition emphasizes the actual activities over intent. Placing this to the far left of the proposed continuum of conflict, short of violent military force or war, represented by the thick red line, positions it clearly along the continuum of challenges that our security policy must address.”

Hoffman later writes:

“Numerous foreign sources describe President Vladimir Putin’s preferred method as “hybrid warfare,” a blend of hard and soft power. A combination of instruments, some military and some non-military, choreographed to surprise, confuse and wear down an opponent, hybrid warfare is ambiguous in both source and intent, making it hard for multinational bodies such as NATO and the EU to craft a response.”

I think titling their platform The Grayzone, Blumenthal, Norton, and company are making a self-conscious admission, or maybe a sarcastic non-concession, that the journalistic work they do is inevitably caught up in the complex web of hybrid warfare between superpowers. They primarily see themselves as anti-imperialists, and Empire for them is American Empire. So anti-American sentiment is their common terrain with Russian nationalists. Numerous PSL members like Brian Becker and Eugene Puryear host podcasts/radio shows on Sputnik Radio, and many leftists internationally have RT shows. This acceptance of support of the Russian state by leftists has often generated accusations of red-brown alliances. Numerous articles on libcom and IWW sites go into this phenomenon, often using guilt-by-association tactics, but I don’t mean to say that pejoratively. One example I recently saw on The Grayzone itself was an interview Anya Parampil did with Mark Sleboda who is a Eurasionist (Gessen discusses this movement) who was one of Dugin’s main translators, though he’s since distanced himself from Dugin. But I wonder why even give Third Positionists like him a platform? This is more so the case with other PSL-affiliated media on Sputnik like Brian Becker’s show “Loud & Clear”.

The Grayzone itself is independently funded (at least it claims to be), but some of its PSL comrades in journalism are not. They have support of Russian state-media. I don’t want to be too judgemental here, but I think it’s fascinating when The Grayzone starts harping on anarchists in Rojava accepting indirect American military aid or Hong Kong protestors accepting funding from US state-funded ‘democracy’ NGOs. The issue is about agency, alliances of convenience, and I think it is a complex matter, yet I think the polemical nature of the Grayzone yields to a double standard they feel no shame about asserting. Even anti-colonial leftists like Wilfred Chan (who founded Lausan) have been continually criticized by Grayzone journalists like Ajit Singh. I read Singh’s work, appreciate it, and I think it’s important, but I really don’t get why he spends so much time criticizing leftists in the Hong Kong protest movement. I am personally critical of many dimensions of the Hong Kong protests, but I think it’s absurd for Singh to smear leftist HK protestors by showing how “Ukrainian neo-Nazis and US white nationalists” support the ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Hong Kong, especially in light of the support PSL receives from Russian state-media. I think it is worth contemplating why so many American conservatives and reactionaries support the Hong Kong protests, but it’s also worth considering why reactionary right-wing forces in Russian state-media support communist journalists in the U.S.. It is part of the “hybrid warfare” that the people at the Grayzone know perfectly well about, as it’s enshrined in their platform’s name. U.S. conservatives don’t care about Hong Kong citizens themselves or the actual socio-economic demands of protestors, as long as it destabilizes China and poses new legitimacy problems to the Communist government there. It’s a geopolitical game for them. “Democracy” has always been cover for US intervention that is primarily about economic market interests. The US is one of the most flawed democracies of the West so of course it’s absurd. In a leaked US Army publication, Field Manual 3-05.130 “Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare”, US interests and its military goals are made perfectly clear:

“If the United States is to ensure that countries are set on a sustainable path toward peace, democracy, and a market economy, it needs new, institutionalized foreign-policy tools—tools that can influence the choices countries and people make about the nature of their economies, their political systems, their security, and in some cases, the very social fabric of a nation. In July 2004, Congress created the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). The mission of the S/CRS is to integrate military expertise and best practices into the civilian world…”

One of the approaches they state is to: “Work with international and multilateral organizations, individual states, and NGOs…”

U.S. Unconventional Warfare (UW) tactics involving the support of ‘resistance movements’ are plainly stated in the document (and this is not actually surprising at all, nor even really controversial, I think):

“Operations conducted by, with, or through irregular forces in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, or conventional military operations.

This definition reflects two essential criteria: UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces. Moreover, this definition is consistent with the historical reasons that the United States has conducted UW. UW has been conducted in support of both an insurgency, such as the Contras in 1980s Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan.”

And again, often times ARSOF (Army Special Operations Forces) is seeking out what it considers as “democratic” elements to achieve these objectives:

“Perseverance in pursuit of U.S. objectives is fundamental to the conduct of ARSOF UW. If the seeking out and support of democratic elements in every nation and culture as outlined in the NSS is “the work of generations” and ARSOF UW is a central tool to achieve this policy, ARSOF UW requires a persistence of USG effort far beyond most other enterprises of government.”

So I understand anti-imperialist critiques of Hong Kong protests in light of all the meddling the U.S. is involved in, but again this is a question of agency. Does communist journalism funded by Russian state-media affect its legitimacy also? Granted Joshua Wong wishing Marco Rubio happy birthday and photo-ops with Tom Cotton are all bad form. I can’t imagine PSL cadre wishing Putin a happy birthday. But leftists Wilfred Chan and Lausan have been actively trying to convince fellow protestors to stop accepting funding from State Department-backed groups like the National Endowment for Democracy because it is delegitimizing their cause. But he is perpetually criticized for giving left cover for Hong Kong protests by MLs. I think the Chinese Communist government has accomplished a number of positive things, but that’s no reason to remain in denial about the terrifying way it’s treating Uyghurs, or the fact that many billionaires are members of the Chinese Communist Party but no one who publicly practices a religious faith can join. I recognize a new cold war with Russia, but especially China is at stake. Biden mentions Uyghar concentration camps in the same breath as moving 60% of American sea power to China. By ‘sea power’ I presume he means naval ships or submarines, some of which I imagine must be armed with nuclear weapons. Can you imagine China doing that to the US over the concentration camps it has for undocumented migrants?

And yes, it is extremely ironic that NATO makes YouTube videos about Russian information warfare, when the US is one of the world’s greatest meddlers. All this being said, I don’t automatically think anything the U.S. supports is wrong. Chomsky always brings up the example of Trotsky’s criticism of Stalin was agreement with fascists but that didn’t automatically make Trotsky wrong about Stalin. This is also the case with the U.S.. Even still, I’m almost certain what the U.S. does is for U.S. interests alone and it would stop as soon as it no longer benefitted U.S. interests enough.

Gessen goes into a section on the severe crackdowns on Russian NGOs receiving foreign funding, legislation requiring labels like “foreign agent” for such organizations, the removal of USAID from Russia, and mentions Kremlin attempts to shift blame on protests to US intervention:

““They are just doing their jobs,” said Putin, meaning that protesters were working for money—state television channels had by this time aired a series of reports claiming that the protests were bankrolled by the U.S. State Department.”

Now of course the U.S. State Department is constantly meddling in Russia and many other countries. In my view the U.S. was also responsible for Putin’s crackdown. They provide easy justification for gangsters like Putin to crush dissent. Yet the anti-semitism and terrifying homophobia that undergirds so many aspects of the Russian state, including many of its media platforms on RT and Sputnik raises deep concerns about leftist alliances with them, especially when it comes to how dissident journalists sometimes cover terrifying Russian intervention in places like Syria.

In a few episodes of Moderate Rebels, Blumenthal and Norton go off on the anarchist writer Alexander Reid Ross, his‘red-brown smears’ of them, and his book Against the Fascist Creep. The book is an exhaustive look at red-brown alliances. I’ve actually listened to a talk he gave on it and found it fairly useful for understanding how individuals can cross into radically diametrically opposed poles of the political spectrum. A few months ago I discovered Mussolini was actually a socialist, before eventually becoming a fascist. Ross remarks that Lenin actually liked Mussolini. I looked it up and what Lenin said was: "What a waste that we lost Mussolini. He is a first-rate man who would have led our party to power in Italy." Yet these red-brown alliances are not restricted to MLs, but actually came to Ross’s attention when he saw reactionary ideology entering the ecological green and anarchist movements he was a part of. I haven’t read Ross’s book and I’m not sure if he mentions this, but that fascism, communism and anarchism have common roots in Romanticism is likely part of why people can cross extremes of the spectrum so easily, or at least find common cause. As Cornel West points out that Romanticism was a secularization of the Christian gospel, it’s unsurprising that, almost all leftists are pretty good at calling other people either fascists (at the other end of the spectrum) or liberals (the common enemy of the center):

One of the most important aspects of Gessen’s book was her elaboration on LGBTQ activism in Russia. Definitely the parts on Pussy Riot were very interesting. But the vigilante violence against gay people in Russia is at an unimaginable level. Many have basically been lynched for lack of a better word. They are frequently beat up. Some murdered. It’s not illegal to be gay in Russia as it is in authoritarian countries like Singapore, but in places like Chechnya the vigilante violence is extreme. I really think it’s at the detriment of the left to ignore this. If one uses Russian state media as a platform, one has a responsibility to denounce violence against LGBTQ communities in Russia. Leftists often shrug off the horrible homophobia that has latently possessed so many of their movements. Clara Sorrenti, a trans-woman who ran for the Communist Party of Canada in London, Ontario left the party over the Central Committee’s refusal to adapt notions of indigenous sovereignty. In her reflections after leaving, she points out that communist refusals to accept the violence revolutionaries like Che Guevara enacted on gay people was especially wounding to her. The left cannot remain in denial about the homophobia of people like Castro and Chavez. Ignatz, the pen name of an orthodox christian, trans lesbian, communist wrote a piece called “Communism, Catholicism, and Sexuality” in response to an article Dean Dettloff wrote in the Jesuit journal America (Dettloff is one of the hosts of the Magnificast, the podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this reflection). In this piece she writes:

“If the relationship between Catholics and communists has sometimes been more positive than some might assume, we should also address those places where this positive relationship is objectively a form of reaction and a failure of compassion that ought to be inimical to communists, Catholics, and any combination thereof. The Argentine theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid tells the story of how when the Argentine Junta cracked down on homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’, a letter was written to a number of major Latin American Catholic liberation theologians asking them to sign a statement of solidarity. All refused, claiming sexual issues were not their concern.

Yet, as Althaus-Reid argues, this is to neglect the role of Christianity in creating the political system of heterosexuality that now dominates the globe. Christians created heterosexuality; it is now Christians’ responsibility to help overthrow it… whilst there are severe problems with homophobia and transphobia in both the Catholic Church and the secular left, there are people in both or either movement who are committed to resisting that and finding new ways of practicing these traditions.”

While I might disagree with some aspects of Gessen’s book, I think she offers very important critiques of the left, especially where they have made common cause with right-wing forces. I believe the left must take seriously these issues of violence, terror, and neglect of social issues, especially where racial, religious and LGBTQ persecution are concerned. I did not even go into the anti-Semitism that Gessen takes time to explore in the book. So much to think about; I think it’s a book worth reading.

god is not dead. god is bread. the bread is rising! bread means revolution.

this is a reflection on Kropotkin’s“Conquest of Bread”, because i couldn’t fit it all in goodreads. the title of this post comes from the New York Young Lords,‘‘Celebration for a People’s Church” (1969).

This was a fascinating book. My interest in Kropotkin came out of reading about Anabaptist radicals. Kropotkin thought that Western anarchism’s roots could be traced back to Anabaptist communities. The affection has, in a sense, run both ways though. Catholic Workers adore Kropotkin, and he had an outsized influence on Dorothy Day, who writes a lot about Kropotkin in her autobiography. I can see the connection. Even as Kropotkin spoke frequently about revolution he also was less enthusiastic about violence than many other anarchists. For example, I came across this in Jacqueline Jones’ biography of Lucy Parsons (with whom Kropotkin was acquainted, meeting in London and Chicago):

“At the same time, Kropotkin disavowed the use of violence, which, he said, is “not characteristic of anarchists or the Anarchist party.” He told his listeners that true anarchists accepted “the principle that no man nor no society has the right to take another man’s life.”

That being said, Kropotkin observed the Bolshevik revolution with interest, though certainly through a critical lens, and returned from England to Russia in 1917, in June following the February Revolution. The Menshevik David Shub quotes Kropotkin’s comments as the October Revolution was unfolding:

“When, in Moscow that November, Kropotkin heard the first cannon volleys of the Bolshevik uprising, he exclaimed: "This is the burial of the Russian Revolution.””

Kropotkin eventually met Lenin, as Lenin was in fact quite fond of Kropotkin, even if they had their disagreements. Lenin’s personal secretary Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, first met with Kropotkin in 1918, and eventually arranged Kropotkin’s meeting with Lenin. Bonch-Bruyevich documented this in 1919, in a very fascinating piece of writing.

A total tangent, but Bonch-Bruyevich (though a Marxist, and eventually a Bolshevik) was also friends with the anarchist Tolstoy with whom he collaborated with in aiding the Doukhobor immigration to Canada. Tolstoy requested that Bonch-Bruyevich escort the Doukhobors to Canada. The Doukhobors were radical pacifist dissenters. I have a book at home called “Folk Furniture of Canada’s Doukhobors, Hutterites, Mennonites, and Ukrainians” by James Fleming and Michael Rowan, and it describes the Doukhobors in this way:

“The Doukhobors adopted the peasant commune system, or mir, that had existed for centuries… One of the persistent bases of the commune was the rejection of land ownership in the usual sense. Work alone gave rightful claim to temporary possession of land in theory at least land was to be redistributed from year to year. In the early years under this system there as no personal property, and each individual, each family, shared in the common wealth and goods of the community, and contributed to them… Koozma J. Tarasoff has described the Doukhobors as “Christian anarchists in search of a practical utopia.”

Bonch-Bruyevich (aka Bruevich), besides his politics, had a deep interest in folk religion, and spent time studying various ones of Russia. The Canadian folklorist Robert B. Klymasz wrote about Bonch-Bruyevich (aka Bruevich) in a paper called “V. D. Bonch-Bruevich and the Lenin Connection in New World Folkloristics”:

“A number of important ideological factors helped bridge the two sides of Bruevich: that is, Bruevich as revolutionary activist on the one hand, and Bruevich as avid folklorist on the other. Lenin in particular had noted how, in the past, religious heresies were the seeds of political revolutionary change, and how there appeared to be a universal connection between political protest Bruevich committed much of his energy to a long-term search for publishable materials that could underline aspects of social protest that simmered among the tensed-up masses of Imperialist Tsarist Russia before the Revolution. Bruevich's search inevitably led him to investigate the folkloric formulations of dissent as couched in the rich oral traditions of the Doukhobors, whose dicta were immune to the ruthless suppression of the printed word by the official censorship in tsarist Russia. By the turn of the century he foresaw the publication of a series of volumes full of materials concerning the history and study of Russian sectarianism and schism.”

Back to Doukhobor immigration to Canada, and the Tolstoy connection: Tolstoy had written to an economics professor at the University of Toronto called James Mavor (he was involved in a Scottish Socialist League, and while in Toronto, deeply involved in the founding of the ROM and AGO, and is the great-great-grandfather of Noah “40” Shebib, Drake’s producer). Tolstoy described them as Russia’s best farmers who would use land and seeds in the best way possible. One other supporter of Doukhobor immigration to Canada was Kropotkin himself, who also wrote to the Toronto economics professor Mavor, requesting they be granted “land in a block; they cannot live in isolated farms. They are Russians, for whom it is more indispensable than for Mennonites.” (The stuff you learn about in books about Canadian folk furniture.) George Woodcock has also written a book about the Doukhobors that I hope to read some day.

For more reading on the Bonch-Bruyevich angle, there is a record written by Vera Mikhailovna Velichkina (Bonch-Bruyevich’s spouse) about travelling with the Doukhobors to Canada. When the Doukhobors were interned at Grosse Isle, Quebec, in the St Lawrence River, Bonch-Bruyevich began writing down their hymns, psalms, prayers, and narratives, many of which are collected in the “Book of Life of Doukhobors: Materials Concerning History and Study of Russian Sectarianism and Schism”.

Alright, returning from the enormous tangential diversion, what I think is fascinating about The Conquest of Bread, is that it highlights the distinction (of emphasis) between the real politik communism of Marxism-Leninism and more libertarian tendencies of anarcho-communism. I will start with some fun examples (anarchists are always so good at these things, I can see that David Graeber really fits this tradition so well). These examples reflect a mode of ‘grace’, theologically speaking, where deed and reward are not so tightly coupled in any precisely quantifiable manner:

“When you go into a public library — not indeed the National Library of Paris, but, say, into the British Museum or the Berlin Library — the librarian does not ask what services you have rendered to society before giving you the book, or the fifty books which you require, and he comes to your assistance if you do not know how to manage the catalogue. By means of uniform credentials — and very often a contribution of work is preferred — the scientific society opens its museums, its gardens, its library, its laboratories, and its annual conversaziones to each of its members, whether he be a Darwin, or a simple amateur.”

“The tramways and railways have already introduced monthly and annual season tickets, without limiting the number of journeys taken; and two nations, Hungary and Russia, have introduced on their railways the zone system, which permits the holder to travel five hundred or a thousand miles for the same price. It is but a short step from that to a uniform charge, such as already prevails in the postal service. In all these innovations, and a thousand others, the tendency is not to measure the individual consumption. One man wants to travel a thousand miles, another five hundred. These are personal requirements. There is no sufficient reason why one should pay twice as much as the other because his need is twice as great. Such are the signs which appear even now in our individualist societies.”

What’s interesting is that I’ve witnessed over my lifetime the eradication of this type of transit fare. My first visit to Singapore, I witnessed with fascination the tapping in and out of subway stations and buses, which charged your accounts to precisely the stops you boarded and alighted from. Years later, Presto arrived in Toronto, and I have witnessed the TTC subway stations one by one, replacing their subway gates to eradicate the use of tokens. The fare is still a level one as of now, but there are plans to move it into the direction of GO Transit policy, where journeys are charged according to precise distances travelled. (Of course there are monthly passes, but if it is not universalized, just like health insurance in Amerika, it becomes unaffordably expensive.) Technology has a way of enabling this sort of erosion of commons and grace, into a calculating self-absorbed individualist mode of existence.

This ethos was what provoked Kropotkin to speak out against anarchists like Proudhon, who advocated for labour-cheques, effectively paid on the basis of labour-time rather than the market-determined value of one’s labour:

“It is the same with the wages system; for after having proclaimed the abolition of private property, and the possession in common of all means of production, how can they uphold the wages system in any form? It is, nevertheless, what collectivists are doing when they recommend labour-cheques. It is easy to understand why the early English socialists came to the system of labour-cheques. They simply tried to make Capital and Labour agree. They repudiated the idea of violently laying hands on capitalist property. It is also easily understood why Proudhon took up the idea later on. In his Mutualist system he tried to make Capital less offensive, notwithstanding the retaining of private property, which he detested from the bottom of his heart, but which he believed to be necessary to guarantee individuals against the State… how can we defend labour-notes, this new form of wagedom, when we admit that houses, fields, and factories will no longer be private property, and that they will belong to the commune or the nation?”

My greatest affinity for Kropotkin comes from his emphasis on human needs before the question of production, because when our most basic needs are not met is when we are most vulnerable to exploitation. He writes in The Conquest of Bread:

“It was poverty that created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating “surplus value,” of which we hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists.”

“Let us limit ourselves at present to opening up the new path that consists in the study of the needs of man, and the means of satisfying them.”

“We study the needs of individuals, and the means by which they satisfy them, before discussing Production, Exchange, Taxation, Government, etc. To begin with, the difference may appear trifling, but in reality it upsets official Political Economy. If you open the works of any economist you will find that he begins with PRODUCTION, the analysis of means employed nowadays for the creation of wealth; division of labour, manufacture, machinery, accumulation of capital. From Adam Smith to Marx, all have proceeded along these lines. Only in the latter parts of their books do they treat of CONSUMPTION, that is to say, of the means necessary to satisfy the needs of individuals…”

Marx the materialist insists on starting with the material conditions and realities, that is the mode of production. The problem is theorists never can get to a consensus as to how production should be organized, who should look after what thing, how best to do so etc. The ultimate materialist base consists of basic human needs. Kropotkin’s claim is that, hey we already have the ability to produce enough for everyone’s basic needs. He spends pages and pages of calculations showing this. Kropotkin encourages us to settle the issue of what must be done to meet everyone’s basic needs, and only when we understand the basic needs can we adjust production to better suit those needs. This is ultimately the issue that is foregrounded in Kropotkin’s 1920 letter to Lenin, where he highlights the food distribution issues in the first few years of Soviet Russia.

I do believe the focus on Universal Basic Income is ultimately a good one. Everyone has the unconditional right an adequate supply of healthy food, clean water, hygienic shelter, and basic healthcare and drugs. Let us secure these things, and focus production around these things. Only when our basic needs are met, are we free enough to think clearly about the details of revolutionary theory and organization. Kropotkin writes:

“That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all — an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.

All the same, we maintain our contention: bread must be found for the people of the Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of all other questions. If it is settled in the interests of the people, the Revolution will be on the right road; for in solving the question of Bread we must accept the principle of equality, which will force itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution.”

Marx is famously known for wanting to abolish ‘wage labour’, but his means of getting there was in fact far more moderate than anarchist theorists like Kropotkin. Marx believed there was to be transitional phases required before we could reach a wageless economic system. Kropotkin in contrast writes:

“Unskilled labour in the eyes of the collectivist is simple labour, while the work of the craftsman, the mechanic, the engineer, the man of science, etc., is what Marx calls complex labour, and is entitled to a higher wage. But labourers and craftsmen, weavers and men of science, are all wage-servants of the State — “all officials,” as was said lately, to gild the pill.

The coming Revolution can render no greater service to humanity than to make the wage system, in all its forms, an impossibility, and to render Communism, which is the negation of wage-slavery, the only possible solution. For even admitting that the Collectivist modification of the present system is possible, if introduced gradually during a period of prosperity and peace — though for my part I question its practicability even under such conditions — it would become impossible in a period of Revolution, when the need of feeding hungry millions springs up with the first call to arms. A political revolution can be accomplished without shaking the foundations of industry, but a revolution where the people lay hands upon property will inevitably paralyse exchange and production. Millions of public money would not suffice for wages to the millions of out-of-works. This point cannot be too much insisted upon; the reorganization of industry on a new basis (and we shall presently show how tremendous this problem is) cannot be accomplished in a few days, nor, on the other hand, will the people submit to be half starved for years in order to oblige the theorists who uphold the wage system. To tide over the period of stress they will demand what they have always demanded in such cases — communization of supplies — the giving of rations. It will be in vain to preach patience. The people will be patient no longer, and if food is not put in common they will plunder the bakeries.”

Of course Marx recognized the problems of wages. His ideas in Capital centre around the problem of how a global market deeply shapes hierarchal relations of domination. As soon as we have a universal signifier of value like money, anything in the world has a relative value to any other thing in the world. There is theoretically an exchange rate between an object and any other object in the world. One shoe is worth x number of carrots. However, it is not merely objects that have been commodified, but our labour. Our labour is sold on the market, and therefore any single person’s hour of labour has an exchange rate with any other person’s hour of labour. There are ratios of value between people’s labour. A doctor’s labour is more valuable in the market than a janitor’s and custodian’s labour. Hence, markets inevitably create classes of people, some of whom are more valuable in the market than others. Hence some people are more disposable than others. One person’s hour of labour, and ultimately life, is more valuable than another person’s life.

Kropotkin writes:

“Most collectivists, true to the distinction laid down by middle-class economists (and by Marx) between qualified work and simple work, tell us, moreover, that qualified or professional work must be paid a certain quantity more than simple work. Thus an hour’s work of a doctor will have to be considered as equivalent to two or three hours’ work of a hospital nurse, or to three hours’ work of a navvy. “Professional, or qualified work, will be a multiple of simple work,” says the collectivist Grönlund, “because this kind of work needs a more or less long apprenticeship.”

Other collectivists, such as the French Marxists, do not make this distinction. They proclaim “Equality of Wages.” The doctor, the schoolmaster, and the professor will be paid (in labour-cheques) at the same rate as the navvy. Eight hours visiting the sick in a hospital will be worth the same as eight hours spent in earth-works or else in mines or factories.”

The solution that Kropotkin writes of here attempts to rectify the issue by equalizing everyone’s hour of labour to an equal value. As long as you work, an hour, you receive the same thing in return. The issue then becomes, what if you are unable to work as much as others, you have more children, you are sick more often, you have a disability, etc. Marx recognized this issue and made a comment, that would be capitalized upon by the authoritarian left for generations. In his “Critique of the Gotha Program” Marx writes:

“In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

While Lenin early on emphasized the need to better equalize wages, he would eventually come to the conclusion that is rendered in the deutero-Pauline epistle 2 Thessalonians (3:10),:

“The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.”

“Not directly relying on enthusiasm, but aided by the enthusiasm engendered by the great revolution, and on the basis of personal interest, personal incentives, and business principles, we must first set to work in this small-peasant country to build solid gangways to socialism by way of state capitalism .••• Personal incentive will step up production; we must increase production first and foremost and at all cost.”

By the time you reach Stalin, this ideology is made extremely explicit:

“What is the cause of the fluidity of manpower? The cause is the wrong structure of wages, the wrong wage scales, the "Leftist" practice of wage equalisation. In a number of factories wage scales are drawn up in such a way as to practically wipe out the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. The consequence of wage equalisation is that the unskilled worker lacks the incentive to become a skilled worker and is thus deprived of the prospect of advancement; …hence, the fluidity of manpower. In order to put an end to this evil we must abolish wage equalisation and discard the old wage scales. In order to put an end to this evil we must draw up wage scales that will take into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, between heavy and light work. …Marx and Lenin said that the difference between skilled and unskilled labour would exist even under socialism, even after classes had been abolished; that only under communism would this difference disappear and that, consequently, even under socialism "wages" must be paid according to work performed and not according to needs. But the equalitarians among our economic executives and trade-union officials do not agree with this and believe that under our Soviet system this difference has already disappeared. Who is right, Marx and Lenin or the equalitarians? It must be assumed that it is Marx and Lenin who are right. But it follows from this that whoever draws up wage scales on the "principle" of wage equalisation, without taking into account the difference between skilled and unskilled labour, breaks with Marxism, breaks with Leninism. And what does promoting them to higher positions and raising their wage level mean, what can it lead to as far as unskilled workers are concerned? It means, apart from everything else, opening up prospects for the unskilled worker and giving him an incentive to rise higher, to rise to the category of a skilled worker. You know yourselves that we now need hundreds of thousands and even millions of skilled workers. But in order to build up cadres of skilled workers, we must provide an incentive for the unskilled workers, provide for them a prospect of advancement, of rising to a higher position.”

By 1972, this quid pro quo ideology is expressed as such (by V.S. Kulikov):

“Under socialism, greater rewards are given to those workers who create more value, whose contribution to the fulfillment of plans and the development of production is larger. This is achieved by paying higher wages to skilled workers, to those requiring longer training. Work undertaken in dangerous or harmful conditions is also better paid. If this were not so, there would be no incentive to acquire eduction, to raise skills, to undertake more complex and responsible work.”

I mean this is the sort of stuff you hear rich capitalist reactionary assholes and ‘white collar professionals’in America saying to minimum wage workers. This is trajectory from which it is best to read this last quote from Kropotkin that I want to conclude with:

“They will speak of “Scientific Socialism”; they will quote bourgeois economists, and Marx too, to prove that a scale of wages has its raison d’être, as “the labour-force” of the engineer will have cost more to society than the “labour-force” of the navvy. In fact, — have not economists tried to prove to us that if an engineer is paid twenty times more than a navvy it is because the “necessary” outlay to make an engineer is greater than that necessary to make a navvy? And has not Marx asserted that the same distinction is equally logical between two branches of manual labour? He could not conclude otherwise, having on his own account taken up Ricardo’s theory of value, and upheld that goods are exchanged in proportion to the quantity of work socially necessary for their production.

But we know what to think of this. We know that if engineers, scientists, or doctors are paid ten or a hundred times more than a labourer, and that a weaver earns three times more than an agricultural labourer, and ten times more than a girl in a match factory, it is not by reason of their “cost of production,” but by reason of a monopoly of education, or a monopoly of industry. Engineers, scientists, and doctors merely exploit their capital — their diplomas — as middle-class employers exploit a factory, or as nobles used to exploit their titles of nobility.”

radical theodicy: another withering is possible

this is a review of Engels’“Socialism: Utopian and Scientific” that i again couldn’t fit in goodreads. i have been wrestling through leftist history the past few months trying to garner a basic sense of the landscape and form some of my own thoughts out of the deluge that is this messy constellation of politics. i have come full circle, in some sense, and am rather convinced that i identify with some sort of libertarian socialist politics, but still believe that the‘sober-minded’ analysis of more traditional tendencies of the left (such as those from‘really existing socialism’) cannot be simply ignored. they are a central part of figuring out the tasks ahead.

This was very short. More a pamphlet than a book, but densely packed with many interesting things, such that I had to re-read sections numerous times. Even still, Engels writes with a clarity that Marx’s writings do not have for me, and so I appreciate that he does have his own body of work, which I seem to have read more of than Marx's.

One of the portions I actually enjoyed most from this text was its 1892 introduction, written by Engels almost precisely a century before I was born. It’s a fascinating glimpse into Engels’ views on religion. Near its beginning there are a number of successive excerpts from “The Holy Family” that Engels takes from Marx’s portions of the book. Marx outlines a fascinating history of materialism, tracing his way through the medieval theologian Duns Scotus (who he calls a ’nominalist’, a philosophical rejection of universals, more associated with Ockham of ‘Occam’s razor’), onto Bacon, then Hobbes. The Holy Family is an interesting book because it is mostly Marx shit-talking his doctoral thesis advisor — the liberal theologian, Bruno Bauer, and his circle. I think this was actually the first book Engels and Marx collaborated on. Engels had left Marx with something like fifteen pages, before he departed from Paris. By the time Marx was finished with his portions, the book totalled almost 300 pages.

Anyway, following these excerpts from The Holy Family, Engels then goes on in this pamphlet to denounce agnosticism as a disguised and embarrassed form of atheism/materialism. This was likely one of the most unconvincing parts of this text, but lots of interesting stuff to chew on still. Its thesis is Goethe’s “in the beginning was the deed”, a materialist inversion of John’s Gospel “In the beginning was the word”. Marx’s materialist thesis, at least if one ignores his unpublished works (e.g. Grundrisse), is that material conditions are the primary causal force — much more so than ideas. In other words, the Base determines the Superstructure. Or the 'productive forces' and 'relations of production' determine the 'dominant ideology'. Engels then moves on to a critique of Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’, an old Aristotelian retort of sorts to Platonic ideals. Aristotle gets his mention in the second chapter. Which leads to 'historical materialism' which Engels defines in fairly clear terms:

"The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange."

Before I do move on from this point, I only want to place here a quote I found from an essay by Czeslaw Milosz, included in NYRB’s publication of Simone Weil’s “On the Abolition of all Political Parties”:

“And the problem is: who can justify the suffering of the innocent? Albert Camus, in The Plague, took up the subject already treated in the Book of Job. Should we return our ticket like Ivan Karamazov because the tear of a child is enough to tip the scale? Should we rebel? Can God exist if he is responsible, if he allows what our values condemn as a monstrosity? Camus said no. We are alone in the universe…

But perhaps if not God, there is a goddess who walks through battlefields and concentration camps, penetrates prisons, gathers every drop of blood, every curse? She knows that those who complain simply do not understand. Everything is counted, everything is an unavoidable part of the pangs of birth and will be recompensed. Man will become a God for man. On the road toward that accomplishment he has to pass through Calvary. The goddess’s name is pronounced with trembling in our age: she is History.

Leszek Kolakowski, a Marxist professor of philosophy in Warsaw, states bluntly that all the structures of modern philosophy, including Marxist philosophy, have been elaborated in the Middle Ages by theologians and that an attentive observer can distinguish old quarrels under new formulations. He points out that History, for instance, is being discussed by Marxists in the terms of theodicy — justification of God.”

What I find fascinating is that Marx’s teleological convictions can only be described as religious in nature from twenty-first century eyes. It’s hard to find anyone who talks about history in such a manner. Because History really is deified in the Marxist conception of the world, and it comes through in Engels here too. This is an example of Marx commenting on British colonialism in India:

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

Marx almost speaks of this horrible situation as a necessary stage that India had to endure to ‘fulfil its destiny’. This is the sort of thing Edward Said critiqued Marx for in Orientalism, and Said quotes this precise passage, commenting on it in this way:

“The quotation, which supports Marx's argument about torment producing pleasure, comes from the Westdstlicher Diwan and identifies the sources of Marx's conceptions about the Orient. These are Romantic and even messianic: as human material the Orient is less important than as an element in a Romantic redemptive project. Marx's economic analyses are perfectly fitted thus to a standard Orientalist undertaking, even though Marx's humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged. Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out…”

Said goes on to quote Marx again:

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.”

Edward Said again:

“The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism, of course, but coming from the same writer who could not easily forget the human suffering involved, the statement is puzzling. It requires us first to ask how Marx's moral equation of Asiatic loss with the British colonial rule he condemned gets skewed back towards the old inequality between East and West we have so far remarked. Second, it requires us to ask where the human sympathy has gone, into what realm of thought it has disappeared while the Orientalist vision takes its place.”

It is this redemptive action of History (as a deity) that Said critiques here in my view. Back to the Engels text at hand, the next portion of the introduction was maybe my favourite part of the whole book. It was a fascinating glimpse into Engels’ take on the Protestant Reformation. I had known Engels had grown up in a Calvinist family, and of course Marx’s family was nominally Lutheran (even if ancestrally Jewish). So this perceptiveness might have been expected, but even still it was surprising for me. I will just leave the excerpts of interest here, because I feel that it is worth reading, even if long:

“every struggle against feudalism, at that time, had to take on a religious disguise, had to be directed against the Church in the first instance… The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great, decisive battles.

The first was what is called the Protestant Reformation in Germany. The war cry raised against the Church, by Luther, was responded to by two insurrections of a political nature; first, that of the lower nobility under Franz von Sickingen (1523), then the great Peasants' War, 1525. Both were defeated, chiefly in consequence of the indecision of the parties most interested, the burghers of the towns — an indecision into the causes of which we cannot here enter.

…The Lutheran Reformation produced a new creed indeed, a religion adapted to absolute monarchy. No sooner were the peasant of North-east Germany converted to Lutheranism than they were from freemen reduced to serfs.

But where Luther failed, Calvin won the day. Calvin's creed was one fit for the boldest of the bourgeoisie of his time. His predestination doctrine was the religious expression of the fact that in the commercial world of competition success or failure does not depend upon a man's activity or cleverness, but upon circumstances uncontrollable by him. It is not of him that willeth or of him that runneth, but of the mercy of unknown superior economic powers; and this was especially true at a period of economic revolution, when all old commercial routes and centres were replaced by new ones, when India and America were opened to the world, and when even the most sacred economic articles of faith — the value of gold and silver — began to totter and to break down. Calvin's church constitution of God was republicanized, could the kingdoms of this world remains subject to monarchs, bishops, and lords? While German Lutheranism became a willing tool in the hands of princes, Calvinism founded a republic in Holland, and active republican parties in England, and, above all, Scotland.”

I just want to interrupt this excerpt by saying that it was this part about Republican revolutions that got me to look into John Knox as a revolutionary. I believe it was Knox who said “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God” which found its way into one of Emma Goldman’s essays, though she attributed it to a founding father of the United States, most often it’s associated with Jefferson. Roland Boer has an entire book about the revolutionary implications of Calvin, which I hope to read one day, having been raised in the Calvinist tradition.

“In Calvinism, the second great bourgeois upheaval found its doctrine ready cut and dried. This upheaval took place in England. The middle-class of the towns brought it on, and the yeomanry of the country districts fought it out. Curiously enough, in all the three great bourgeois risings, the peasantry furnishes the army that has to do the fighting; and the peasantry is just the class that, the victory once gained, is most surely ruined by the economic consequences of that victory. A hundred years after Cromwell, the yeomanry of England had almost disappeared. Anyhow, had it not been for that yeomanry and for the plebian element in the towns, the bourgeoisie alone would never have fought the matter out to the bitter end, and would never have brought Charles I to the scaffold. In order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further — exactly as in 1793 in France and 1848 in Germany. This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.”

I think an important aspect of Engels commentary on religion is the sort of thing you might expect, but it’s really important anyway. It’s the way religion is used to control people. I think this realization came to me when I read Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in an undergraduate literature course. Atwood has actually had quite an interesting influence on my theological education. Anyway, the relevant quotes from Engels on this:

“…he was not long in discovering the opportunities this same religion offered him for working upon the minds of his natural inferiors, and making them submissive to the behests of the masters it had pleased God to place over them. In short, the English bourgeoisie now had to take a part in keeping down the "lower orders", the great producing mass of the nation, and one of the means employed for that purpose was the influence of religion.”

“If the British bourgeois had been convinced before of the necessity of maintaining the common people in a religious mood, how much more must he feel that necessity after all these experiences? Regardless of the sneers of his Continental compeers, he continued to spend thousands and tens of thousands, year after year, upon the evangelization of the lower orders; not content with his own native religious machinery, he appealed to Brother Jonathan 1), the greatest organizer in existence of religion as a trade, and imported from America revivalism, Moody and Sankey, and the like; and, finally, he accepted the dangerous aid of the Salvation Army, which revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element of early Christian class antagonism, which one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do people who now find the ready money for it.”

Fascinating that Moody gets a mention by Engels, haha. He’s still being mentioned in my family’s evangelical church, though certainly not as often as Calvin.

Ok, that was just the introduction. Now onto the first chapter, haha, I’ve already written a book chapter myself. Engels starts by mentioning some folks I’ve been growing deeply fascinated with over the past year or two:

“…in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Munzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.”

I’ve been very interested in Munzer and the early Anabaptists lately (in fact, that is what got me really into the intersection of radical politics and religion in the first place), as well as Winstanley and the Levellers. (Is it a sin to listen to Chumbawamba???)

Then Engels moves on to engage the Utopian socialists:

“Then came the three great Utopians: Saint-Simon, to whom the middle-class movement, side by side with the proletarian, still had a certain significance; Fourier and Owen, who in the country where capitalist production was most developed, and under the influence of the antagonisms begotten of this, worked out his proposals for the removal of class distinction systematically and in direct relation to French materialism.

One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once. Like them, they wish to bring in the kingdom of reason and eternal justice, but this kingdom, as they see it, is as far as Heaven from Earth, from that of the French philosophers.”

I’m not sure if it’s worth noting that Engels does not mention Cabet, who is alluded to indirectly in the Manifesto when “Little Icaria” is mentioned (there are all sorts of these vague and oblique references throughout the Manifesto, that I had no way of understanding when I first read it; I’m always surprised when people find it a simple read). But I have mentioned these utopian socialists many times in various reviews here. I mentioned Fourier when talking about the protagonist of the 1990 film “Metropolitan” who identifies as a Fourier socialist (it’s a funny film, worth your time, I feel). I recently found out Nathaniel Hawthorne spent some time at a Fourierist commune as an agricultural director and received visits from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody. I’ve also mentioned that there was a radical wing of the early Republican party that had Fourier socialists in it like Horace Greeley, the editor at the New York Daily Tribune who published hundreds of articles by Marx. In fact, it is said that Marx was contemplating moving to Texas, and in fact applied to do so. There was a famous Fourierist commune in Dallas called La Reunion, and I wonder if this was the destination Marx had in mind. I’ve mentioned Sant-Simon when talking about George Sand and Franz Liszt, both involved in Sant-Simonian politics at points of their life. And I’ve mentioned Robert Owen in my previous review of Engels, “The Conditions of the Working Class in England” and talked about how Owenite socialism as well as the Chartist movement were some of the animating forces behind William Lyon Mackenzie’s politics here on Turtle Island. I thought the section on Owen was actually the most interesting part of this chapter. Engels describes how even with all the reforms, far ahead of any other industrialist around at his time, Owen still felt his workers lived in miserable conditions and all his philanthropy was not enough, even with all the adulation he received from visiting statesmen and diplomats.

I was particularly interested in Engels comments on Saint-Simon:

“Hence, to Saint-Simon the antagonism between the 3rd Estate and the privileged classes took the form of an antagonism between "workers" and "idlers". The idlers were not merely the old privileged classes, but also all who, without taking any part in production or distribution, lived on their incomes. And the workers were not only the wage-workers, but also the manufacturers, the merchants, the bankers. That the idlers had lost the capacity for intellectual leadership and political supremacy had been proved, and was by the Revolution finally settled. That the non-possessing classes had not this capacity seemed to Saint-Simon proved by the experiences of the Reign of Terror. Then, who was to lead and command? According to Saint-Simon, science and industry, both united by a new religious bond, destined to restore that unity of religious ideas which had been lost since the time of the Reformation — a necessarily mystic and rigidly hierarchic "new Christianity". But science, that was the scholars; and industry, that was, in the first place, the working bourgeois, manufacturers, merchants, bankers. These bourgeois were, certainly, intended by Saint-Simon to transform themselves into a kind of public officials, of social trustees; but they were still to hold, vis-a-vis of the workers, a commanding and economically privileged position. The bankers especially were to be called upon to direct the whole of social production by the regulation of credit.”

The second chapter on Dialectics was actually very fun. It reminds me of post-structuralist philosophers like Manuel de Landa, Deleuze and Guattari. This wide field of STS inquiries into non-linear mathematics and science as well as chaos studies, that pay homage to the work of Prigogine and Stengers, has much in common with the stuff Engels explores here. I think it is worth mentioning that the economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein was greatly influenced by the work of Prigogine. An example of something Engels says in this chapter:

“This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.”

I think it is worth noting that Marx actually did his doctoral dissertation on pre-Socratic philosophers of the Epicurean and Demicritean traditions, and while Heraclitus is only mentioned once, I think there is an interesting line from thinkers like Lucretius to Marx’s materialism. Another relevant excerpt from Engels:

“The perception of the the fundamental contradiction in German idealism led necessarily back to materialism, but — nota bene — not to the simply metaphysical, exclusively mechanical materialism of the 18th century. Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. With the French of the 18th century, and even with Hegel, the conception obtained of Nature as a whole — moving in narrow circles, and forever immutable, with its eternal celestial bodies, as Newton, and unalterable organic species, as Linnaeus, taught. Modern materialism embraces the more recent discoveries of natural science, according to which Nature also has its history in time, the celestial bodies, like the organic species that, under favorable conditions, people them, being born and perishing.”

There were lots of interesting comments on economics and basic analysis of capitalism, but the last comment I want to make is simply Engels comments on the state:

“The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into State property.

But, in doing this, it abolishes itself as proletariat, abolishes all class distinction and class antagonisms, abolishes also the State as State. Society, thus far, based upon class antagonisms, had need of the State. That is, of an organization of the particular class which was, pro tempore, the exploiting class, an organization for the purpose of preventing any interference from without with the existing conditions of production, and, therefore, especially, for the purpose of forcibly keeping the exploited classes in the condition of oppression corresponding with the given mode of production (slavery, serfdom, wage-labor). The State was the official representative of society as a whole; the gathering of it together into a visible embodiment. But, it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole:

in ancient times, the State of slaveowning citizens;in the Middle Ages, the feudal lords;in our own times, the bourgeoisie.

When, at last, it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a State, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the State really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a State. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not "abolished". It dies out. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase: "a free State", both as to its justifiable use at times by agitators, and as to its ultimate scientific inefficiency; and also of the demands of the so-called anarchists for the abolition of the State out of hand.”

What I’ve found fascinating is that both anarchists and communists both share the same ideal, a society where the state no longer exists. The main difference is the path required to reach there. Whether it is a sort of sudden abolition of the state or a ’withering’ away of the state. This is something I understand Lenin talked about in “State and Revolution” one of the few texts by Lenin that Chomsky has some esteem for, though he’s of the opinion that it was a left libertarian text written opportunistically at the time to gain power. I’m not the sort of person to take Chomsky at face value regarding these things. I realize the sectarian discrepancies here can become very intense over these sorts of things.

What I do think leftists should focus on are the shared ideals they have. That state hierarchy is ultimately something we both want gone. I think old ideas about any immediate abolition of the state or some organic withering away of it merely after some proletariat seizure of state power and private property are both reductive and underestimate the enormous task that such an endeavour involves, and ongoing vigilance it would require even if it were to happen any time soon (which it won’t, if I’m honest). It is a task with so many facets. I think most leftists recognize there are no easy answers about how we are to achieve an egalitarian society without class distinctions. And in most cases, communist states have not withered away but only grown closer in resemblance to capitalist states, citing the ongoing presence of global capitalism as the central reason. And like Fredric Jameson once reiterated:“it’s harder to imagine the end of capitalism, than the end of the world.”

I don’t think it’s naive tocontinue asserting that the power of the few over the many, whether by way of state or capital, is not sufficiently justified. That something can be done about this, and that another world is possible. We have to learn carefully from the many failures from those before us trying to realize this other world. We must never allow the same atrocities to be committed again in the name of achieving such ends. While prefigurative politics may not be enough, it is a vital part to realizing this other world. We must examine with unwavering self-criticism, the narratives of redemptive suffering used to explicate the errors made at the expense of other workers in the past. We are in no position to determine who can be sacrificed in the name of this cause. We cannot be Abraham binding Isaac because History demands such a faith of us, in fear and trembling. We must recognize the enormous failure of raising class-consciousness and putting forward a plausible framing of 21st century political economy that most people can understand as true and correct, beyond the current capitalist mode of production.

It’s 1:35 AM and I have no idea why I’m writing this terrible manifesto. I’m going to put an end to this now. Thanks for the provocative thoughts Engels. I have lots to think about. I need some sleep. I’m glad it’s daylight savings time, and I have an extra hour to smooth things out. Cheers.

radical eschatology and 1Q84

i wrote this as a goodreads review, but i couldn’t fit the whole text there so this is the review in its entirety.

“‘lunatic’ means to have your sanity temporarily seized by the luna, which is ‘moon’ in Latin. In nineteenth-century England, if you were a certified lunatic and you committed a crime, the severity of the crime would be reduced a notch. The idea was that the crime was not so much the responsibility of the person himself as that he was led astray by the moonlight. Believe it or not, laws like that actually existed… I learned it in an English literature course at Japan Women’s University, in a lecture on Dickens. We had an odd professor. He’d never talk about the story itself but go off on all sorts of tangents.”

I think a lot of my writing on this site consists of meandering tangents, only obliquely related to the book at hand — though less useful and interesting than this literature professor’s in 1Q84. Either way I will stick to what I’m comfortable with here. I will start with why I read this obscenely large book. My high school friend who was recently married, hosted a birthday party at a new place he moved into in Etobicoke. I arrived half-an-hour late from the time it was supposed to start (according to Facebook), and was the first one there — which is some indication of the sort of company I keep. As I awkwardly sat around after a brief house tour, he poured me a drink, and we chatted about life and my terrible job. He suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, I almost forgot. There’s something I want to lend to you.” He skips up the stairs and comes back down with a large phone book. On its front cover: a face hiding behind the characters “1Q84” — maybe embarrassed by its bloated constitution. This will help you on your daily commutes from hell, he encouraged me.

I’ve heard that your first Murakami book has a good chance of becoming your favourite Murakami book. That was probably the case for me with “Kafka on the Shore”. I think that book put me onto Kafka, before I would later encounter him in the work of Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and his late communist ‘wife’, Dora Diamant. But subsequent Murakami books were not as satisfying for me. After reading Norwegian Wood, I decided to try and take a break from Murakami. I had grown a little weary of the Oedipal themes, and Murakami’s recurring Manic Pixie Dream Girl tropes. Around this time, my fourth-year college roommate discovered Murakami for himself, and his first encounter was through 1Q84. He loved it, but what a book to start with, I had thought at the time. I was impressed that he ploughed right through such an enormous millstone of a novel. (I was very intimidated by its size when my friend handed it to me, but got through it in surprising time. Having now read 1Q84, I realize it was actually a very fun book to read, and often quite difficult to put down, so it now makes sense.) Anyways, I was discussing these things with my roommate and another law student who was camping with us at Sandbanks Provincial Park — she also shared similar thoughts as mine on Murakami. Conversation wandered on to Junot Diaz, who she was much more approving of — this of course was before the #MeToo revelations about Diaz. How quickly tides can turn. (Especially when there are two moons in the sky.)

So something about the structure of 1Q84. I am told the first two books are structured after the two books of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” — each chapter alternating between Aomame (major keys) and Tengo (minor keys). In each book of Clavier, Bach cycles through all twelve tones, a prelude and fugue for each tone’s major and minor keys. So each of Murakami’s chapters in Book 1 and 2 corresponds to a Prelude and Fugue in Bach’s collection of pieces — 48 chapters in all.

I admittedly have a thing for Bach. I have a copy of Gould’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” on compact disc at home. It came in a package of random shit the novelist Tao Lin gathered together from his bedroom and sold online for like $30 on eBay. That is the sort of stupid stuff I wasted my money on as an undergraduate student. Among the zines, postcard sized art prints, manuscript pages from his edits of Taipei, and a copy of “Shoplifting from American Apparel” was a disc of Gould’s “Well-Tempered Clavier”. In one of the preludes and fugues, the disc is scratched, and makes these heavenly wobbling sounds as it skips, and I have grown quite fond of these parts. I also particularly love hearing the infrequent muffled hums of Gould behind his gas mask.

Book 3 of 1Q84 is structured after Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In the past couple years, I’ve listened to this composition likely more than any other, simply because it’s one of the few albums I happened to have downloaded on my phone. It’s Igor Levit’s studio recording of the Goldberg Variations along with his recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Rzewski’s “The People United Will Never Be Defeated”. I thought it was a clever trio to package in an album. I also recommend Lisa Moore’s performance of other Rzewski compositions put out by Cantaloupe.

I am particularly fond of Rzewski’s “People United” because it recalls for me my first May Day march, where I chanted the Chilean song (from which Rzewski’s title is derived and his piece alludes to) with other people on the street marching on the way to Queen’s Park, while students shouted ‘ftp’ at officers lined on the sidewalk. I was supposed to march with a small contingent from Student Christian Movement, but couldn’t find them at Allan Gardens, so I marched near some York OPIRG students, and in front of a communist who was debating random people the entire march, haha. I had never seen so many anarchists and communists in one place at a time. They sure do like their black and red flags, haha.

This brings me to the next comment I wanted to make. I was curious about Murakami’s politics and I had a difficult time finding a decent write-up that focuses on this, because Murakami can come across as fairly apolitical, which I think is what his ‘bourgeois individualism’ (I use that term in jest) requires of him. Anyways, I stumbled across a series of blog posts made by a Trotskyist grad student that discuss how Japanese student movement comes up in almost every single novel by Murakami, and he discusses how the student movement was a significant segment of the political left in Japan during that time.

“Some brief highlights of the student movement’s history in Japan will suffice. After the end of the war, university students oriented to the Japanese Communist Party (JCP) took advantage of the new liberal atmosphere to rally for university autonomy, for the appointment of progressive faculty and administrators, and for a student voice in administration… In 1948, students from all over Japan inaugurated the All-Japan Federation of Student Self-Government Organizations (known by its acronym, Zengakuren) with a leadership largely from the Japanese Young Communist League… However the honeymoon between the students and the JCP was short-lived… The JCP had seen the American occupation as an opportunity to complete the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Japan, which had been the Moscow-ordained task of Communist Parties the world over during the Popular Front (1936-39) and then again after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, when Communists were allied with all “liberal,” “democratic,” and “peace-loving” forces, meaning those of the ruling class.

…Student radicalism reached even greater heights as the movement entered the 1960s… In militant actions organized by Zengakuren, thousands of students broke into the Diet building twice in 1960, forcing the cancellation of a state visit by US President Eisenhower and the resignation of Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi with his cabinet. During this period Zengakuren’s leadership was largely drawn from the “Mainstream Faction,” which had originated the federation’s opposition to the JCP, however during the late 50s the leadership was briefly taken over by students from the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL), a group formed from JCP exiles after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which was influenced by Trotsky’s writings and would affiliate to the Fourth International. By 1964, there were three different organizations taking the name Zengakuren: the JCP supporters, the Revolutionary Marxists (a Tokyo-based split from the RCL) and a unity faction.”

There’s a lot more the Trotskyist grad student blogger (the official title I have designated to this person) goes into, but he essentially concludes that:

“I believe at this point that I have made a solid case for why Murakami, whose early books on the surface are completely apolitical, take their starting point as the destruction of the Japanese student movement, though at no point is the movement itself exactly foregrounded.”

An an earlier conclusion in his first post:

“Based on conjecture from his novels, we can assume he was around the anti-Stalinist left concentrated in the Zenkyoto groups, though he has insisted that he was never a member of any particular faction. “I enjoyed the campus riots as an individual,” he writes. “I’d throw rocks and fight with the cops, but I thought there was something ‘impure’ about erecting barricades and other organized activity, so I didn’t participate… The very thought of holding hands in a demonstration gave me the creeps.”

…Since this is all I have till I learn Japanese, I will have to take his word that he always had a rather superior, hipster attitude toward politics, which is believable enough considering his status as a graduate of one of Japan’s most elite private institutions. And yet, there is something I see in his early novels that undeniably regrets the collapse of the student movement, no matter how much he resented the factions for “impure” organizational work.”

I think Murakami’s disdain for this sort of leftist hypocrisy comes through in a particularly memorable dialogue in Norwegian Wood (which the Trotskyist grad student blogger never mentioned for some reason):

"Have you ever read Das Kapital?"

"Yeah. Not the whole thing, of course, but parts, like most people."

"You know, when I went to university I joined a folk-music club. I just wanted to sing songs. But the members were a load of frauds. I get goose-bumps just thinking about them. The first thing they tell you when you enter the club is you have to read Marx. "Read page so-and-so to such-and-such for next time.' Somebody gave a lecture on how folk songs have to be deeply involved with society and the radical movement. So, what the hell, I went home and tried as hard as I could to read it, but I didn't understand a thing. It was worse than the subjunctive. I gave up after three pages. So I went to the next week's meeting like a good little scout and said I had read it, but I couldn't understand it. From that point on they treated me like an idiot. I had no critical awareness of the class struggle, they said, I was a social cripple. I mean, this was serious. And all because I said I couldn't understand a piece of writing..."

“...And their so-called discussions were terrible, too. Everybody would use big words and pretend they knew what was going on. But I would ask questions whenever I didn't understand something. "What is this imperialist exploitation stuff you're talking about? Is it connected somehow to the East India Company?' "Does smashing the educational-industrial complex mean we're not supposed to work for a company after we graduate?' And stuff like that. But nobody was willing to explain anything to me. Far from it - they got really angry. Can you believe it?"

“...OK, so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions.”

"So that's when it hit me. These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hands up their skirts. And when they graduate, they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh!”

This passage actually reminds me of a Japanese exchange student I met as an undergraduate who was really into Murakami and used to perform folk music in her spare time. Even though she was an atheist or agnostic of some sort and really into gender studies, she used to attend an international students bible study that I used to go to at a friends’ house. She’s now doing a PhD at MIT in neuroscience, but that passage in Norwegian Wood always reminds me of her. Anyways, you can see how Murakami’s purity politics requires of him a rejection of fully embracing any comprehensive political or religious system. The individual is always of most importance to him, and I think that comes through in 1Q84 too.

Part of what gets to Murakami I suppose is the pretence involve with a lot of armchair leftists. It recalls for me a passage I read in a book about country music of all things called “The Nashville Sound” by Joli Jensen:

“Students rarely ventured into the Rose Bowl. When they did it was usually to be rowdy and to make fun of the rednecks. One night, as I was waiting tables, four fellow graduate students came in. They did not see me, and I watched in rising fury as they sneered and whispered and laughed among themselves at the people around them. These were my peers, who defined themselves as Marxists and had disdained me as a politically unsophisticated liberal humanist. They patronized me in class and were now in "my" world making fun of "my" friends. Shaking with rage, I went over to the table to take their drink order. Of course, they were stunned to find me working there, complete with sequined Rose Bowl vest, and they left immediately. I had caught them at an unseemly game. But I have come to wonder about the basis for my rage and about what it tells me about how we understand ourselves in relation to our perceptions of others.

At the time I felt superior to them, friends of the working class, indeed! and virtuous in my admiration of, and affection for, Rose Bowl patrons. Later, I began to wonder, was I really any better, turning the Rose Bowl into a mythical venue of "salt of the earth" authenticity? Is it really better to idealize and sentimentalize difference than to ridicule and disdain it? This is a poignant dilemma for the country music scholar and is becoming a topic of discussion among sociologists, anthropologists, museum curators, and social critics.”

Anyways, to move past this thoughtful navel-gazing, I want to get into a dimension of 1Q84 that I found extremely interesting. Probably my favourite part is Chapter 10 of Book 1 (A Real Revolution with Real Bloodshed), where Tengo talks to Fuka-Eri’s current guardian, a former anthropology professor and friend of Fuka-Eri’s father. Fuka-Eri’s father (Tamotsu Fukada) was an academic and Maoist revolutionary, enthusiastic about the Cultural Revolution, who gathered a number of students to start a commune in the mountains of Takao. There is a fascinating section on the splintering of the commune into a moderate faction and a more radical one:

“Under Fukada’s leadership, the operation of Sakigake farm remained on track, but eventually the commune split into two distinct factions. Such a split was inevitable as long as they kept Fukada’s flexible unit system. On one side was a militant faction, a revolutionary group based on the Red Guard unit that Fukada had originally organized. For them, the farming commune was strictly preparatory for the revolution. Farming was just a cover for them until the time came for them to take up arms. That was their unshakable stance.”

This paragraph reminds me of the case of the Tarnac Nine. It is within the realm of possibility Murakami had heard about this case, because their arrest was in 2008, shortly before 1Q84’s first books were published. There’s a commune in Tarnac that was involved in the operation of a nearby general store (Magasin General, Tarnac). Giorgio Agamben wrote a brief post on this affair describing it this way:

“On the morning of November 11, 150 police officers, most of which belonged to the anti-terrorist brigades, surrounded a village of 350 inhabitants on the Millevaches plateau, before raiding a farm in order to arrest nine young people (who ran the local grocery store and tried to revive the cultural life of the village). Four days later, these nine people were sent before an anti-terrorist judge and “accused of criminal association with terrorist intentions.””

The social theorist Alberto Toscano described the event in similar terms:

“On 11 November 2008, twenty French youths are arrested simultaneously in Paris, Rouen, and in the small village of Tarnac (located in the district of Corrèze, in France’s relatively impoverished Massif Central region). The Tarnac operation involves helicopters, one hundred and fifty balaclava-clad anti-terrorist policemen and studiously prearranged media coverage. The youths are accused of having participated in a number of sabotage attacks against the high-speed TGV train routes, involving the obstruction of the train’s power cables with horseshoe-shaped iron bars, causing material damage and a series of delays affecting some 160 trains. Eleven of the suspects are promptly freed. Those who remain in custody are soon termed the ‘Tarnac Nine’, after the village where a number of them had purchased a small farmhouse, reorganised the local grocery store as a cooperative, and taken up a number of civic activities from the running of a film club to the delivery of food to the elderly. In their parents’ words, ‘they planted carrots without bosses or leaders. They think that life, intelligence and decisions are more joyous when they are collective’.”

The Professor’s farming of Akebono (the radical offshoot of Sakigake) are framed in similar terms to the way anti-terrorist police in France portrayed the activities of the Tarnac co-op farm, as a front for revolutionary activity. Of course, if you read the Invisible Committee’s “Coming Insurrection”, allusions to such notions are elaborated on:

“Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolve the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it is founded. There are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the “right moment” — which never arrives.”

But this excerpt follows a notion of the commune that is not so easily type-casted into the rural commune of Tarnac:

“Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say “we,” and makes that an event. What’s strange isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes, but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t communes proliferate everywhere? In every factory, every street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base committees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes that will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports club, etc. Communes that aren’t afraid, beyond their specifically political activities, to organize themselves for the material and moral survival of each of their members and of all those around them who remain adrift. Communes that would not define themselves — as collectives tend to do — by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by the density of the ties at their core. Not by their membership, but by the spirit that animates them.”

There is a strong eschatological element in the writings of the Invisible Committee, that some radical political theologians have picked up on (e.g. see Ward Blanton’s lecture on the Invisible Committee). Because of Julien Coupat’s arrest as one of the Tarnac Nine, the Invisible Committee has become associated with the journal Tiqqun. In“Theory of Bloom” Tiqqun is defined:

“The French rendering of the Hebrew word Tikkun, meaning to “perfect”, “repair”, “heal”, or “transform”. In rabbanical school, students study mystical texts that view tikkun as the process of restoring a complex divine unity. A tikkun kor’im (readers’ tikkun) is a study guide used when preparing to chant the Torah, or to read from the Torah in a Jewish synagogue. People who chant from the Torah mustdiffers from that written (the Kethib) in the scroll.”

The Wikipedia article for Tiqqun says the word is derived from the “Hebrew term Tikkun olam, a concept issuing from Judaism, often used in the kabbalistic and messianictraditions.”

Murakami certainly alludes to this intersection of eschatology, theology, and politics, firstly in his narrative mechanism which has this Maoist commune turn into a secretive religious cult. He ties the religious and political in this way, but in a manner that I myself find unconvincing. Many of these co-operative farms are anti-hierarchical and I find it difficult to see, even for a commune of the authoritarian left to turn into something resembling Sakigake in the novel. Regardless, I think the intersection of radical religion and politics in 1Q84 to be a fascinating subject to explore, even if I found Murakami’s particular approach unsatisfying. There is of course an eschatological dimension that Murakami gestures towards in various chapters, often in amusing an humorous ways. One of my favourites is in the following chapter (Chapter 11):

As a woman, Aomame had no concrete idea how much it hurt to suffer a hard kick in the balls… “It hurts so much you think the end of the world is coming right now. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s different from ordinary pain,” said a man, after careful consideration, when Aomame asked him to explain it to her.

Aomame gave some thought to his analogy. The end of the world?

“Conversely, then,” she said, “would you say that when the end of the world is coming right now, it feels like a hard kick in the balls?”

Aomame was called in and instructed to rein in the ball-kicking practice. “Realistically speaking, though,” she protested, “it’s impossible for women to protect themselves against men without resorting to a kick in the testicles. Most men are bigger and stronger than women. A swift testicle attack is a woman’s only chance. Mao Zedong said it best. You find your opponent’s weak point and make the first move with a concentrated attack. It’s the only chance a guerrilla force has of defeating a regular army.”

The manager did not take well to her passionate defense. “…I don’t care what Mao Zedong said—or Genghis Khan, for that matter: a spectacle like that is going to make most men feel anxious and annoyed and upset.”

If there’s any guy crazy enough to attack me, I’m going to show him the end of the world—close up. I’m going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes.”

The Witnesses’ rendition of the Lord’s prayer is recurring theme that surfaces throughout the novel, and even if it is presented in a cynical manner by Murakami, I think it still evokes a particular mode of contemplation that I found interesting. The Jehovah’s Witnesses are the obvious allusion Murakami is making and their pacifism is even explicitly mentioned by Ushikawa: “They are well known to be pacifists, following the principle of nonresistance.”

Pacifism, of course, more associated with the radical Christians of the anabaptist tradition, although I have yet to encounter the connection between Jehovah’s Witnesses and Anabaptism, other than certain millenarian impulses they might share. Anyways, I think this an interesting node that Murakami marks, posing the question of violence and justice: revolutionary violence (of Akebono), assassination (Aomame’s side gig), and sexual violence (experienced by the women that the dowager tries to protect). What causes aversion to political and religious radicals, fundamentalists, etc?

Murakami’s answer is coercion and the denigration of the individual. This is epitomized in a dialogue Aomame has with the dowager, where the dowager asks:

“Are you a feminist, or a lesbian?”Aomame blushed slightly and shook her head. “I don’t think so. My thoughts on such matters are strictly my own. I’m not a doctrinaire feminist, and I’m not a lesbian.”

“That’s good,” the dowager said. As if relieved, she elegantly lifted a forkful of broccoli to her mouth, elegantly chewed it, and took one small sip of wine.

This is very similar to the sort of ideology that Jordan Petersen subscribes to. It is a ‘higher than thou’ purity politics that looks down on any sort of collective organization that betrays any sort of hypocrisy.Yet most religious traditions recognize that any sort of collective organizing is bound to live in contradiction with its ideals. Within the Christian tradition, thoughtful adherents recognize the Church as a ‘fallen’ institution composed of ‘sinners’. I think it is important to recognize and confess the short fallings of previous attempts to realize ideals while not abandoning the ideals because people that came before us have severely fucked it up. Another world is possible, and I think if we fall back into our silos of individualism we will not realize this other world. Murakami provides an almost Kierkegaardian framing of what is essentially ritual rape in the novel — and I found that disturbing, though in the realm of magical realism, I’m not qualified to make any meaningful commentary. What I will confess is that my own life betrays a certain sort of ‘bourgeois individualism’ but I have not yet reached a form of cynicism that celebrates it, and I hope I won’t anytime soon.

Anyhow, beyond these critiques, I enjoyed this novel a lot, and I think it brought up interesting questions to contemplate. I found the Proust jokes hilarious, some of the funniest moments in the book. Curiously, I have never finished reading Orwell’s 1984. I was supposed to have finished reading it for a Grade 12 literature class, but I recall that period of the semester as a tremendously busy one for me. I do intend to finish it one day soon, and Orwell’s democratic socialism is a fascinating lens through which to also examine many of the themes that Murakami explores, including those of agency and freedom. There are these strange lines in the book that I don’t quite know what to make of:

“He leaned against the wall, in the shadows of the telephone pole and a sign advertising the Japanese Communist Party, and kept a sharp watch over the front door of Mugiatama.“

There are funnier allusions to this like:

“Have you heard about the final tests given to candidates to become interrogators for Stalin’s secret police?” “No, I haven’t.”

“A candidate would be put in a square room. The only thing in the room is an ordinary small wooden chair. And the interrogator’s boss gives him an order. He says, ‘Get this chair to confess and write up a report on it. Until you do this, you can’t leave this room.’ ”

“Sounds pretty surreal.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s not surreal at all. It’s a real story. Stalin actually did create that kind of paranoia, and some ten million people died on his watch—most of them his fellow countrymen. And we actually live in that kind of world. Don’t ever forget that.”

...“So what kind of confession did the interrogator candidates extract from the chairs?”

“That is a question definitely worth considering,” Tamaru said. “Sort of like a Zen koan.”

“Stalinist Zen,” Aomame said.

I have my own views on Murakami’s crypto-Calvinist sections, which is not unrelated to Murakami’s interwoven narrative technique, and in excerpts such as the one I opened with about the etymology of ‘lunatic’. Also, I actually quite enjoyed the way Murakami alluded to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor passage from the Brothers Karamazov — where Satan frames miracles as a sort of spectacle when trying to tempt Christ in the wilderness. I’ve always thought that there’s certainly some Debordian comment that can be made with respect to that. In fact, the notion of spectacle, and this process of reducing agency such that we become mere spectators, is itself thematic in Murakami’s fiction, especially here. Again, it is this crypto-Calvinist notion of fate, that one’s future is already predetermined and no matter what one might try, it is inevitable. (This must be related to Murakami’s quoting of Carl Jung:“Called or not called, God is there”.) And so one becomes almost a spectator to one’s own life unfolding under the predetermined path of capital. Yet curiously, Tengo and Aomame do escape from Leader’s prophetic claim that was to befall Aomame, out from 1Q84, back up the stairwell back to the path of 1984. If only escaping from “late declining capitalism” (Murakami’s term) was that simple.

Though I had many reservations, 1Q84 was breezy read and I think that’s a testament to how fun Murakami’s writing can be, and this was one of those books where this was very much the case.

to turn the mills day & night? art thou not newton's pantocrator?

i actually wrote this as a goodreads review of Friedrich Engels’“The Conditions of the Working Class in England”. i use that website more as a place to post reflections on books i read, and being as self-indulgent as i am, i wrote too much and it can’t fit within the allotted space goodreads provides, so i’m just posting the thing here. a lot of half-baked thoughts in here, but it is a further elaboration on mills, which i have been thinking a lot about for the past couple years.

At it again with those mills. I'm really into the history of mills. Sorry, but mills are a thing for me. I want to do an STS dissertation on mills so if any of y'all know professors who want grad students to write stuff on mills -- I'm right here, hmu. Ok, Engels (of Communist Manifesto fame, but he didn't really write any of it): he's from a rich and austere Calvinist family, in Germany. They owned a bunch of mills -- one in Manchester. Engels was a naughty boy with radical ideas, so his father sends him out to Manchester to straighten him out. Get him to smarten up about those silly ideas of his. He sees the workers of Manchester living in total squalor. He falls in love with one of them, an Irish working class woman, Mary Burns, who he remains with for the rest of her life. He sees how the industrial mills of Manchester have laid waste to the rivers, the air, and the people.

An Engels mill in Germany is still around and is part of an industrial museum now. By the time Engels was 17, his father had secured water rights along the Agger River to power a water mill for the production of cotton yarn. He was able to do so from capital he had accumulated from his Manchester operations. When Engels was 22, he was sent by his father to their Manchester mill on the River Irwell. It was here that Engels collected his materials that would become this book. Engels writes about these rivers framing the areas of Manchester he explored while there:

“Manchester proper lies on the left bank of the Irwell, between that stream and the two smaller ones, the Irk and the Medlock, which here empty into the Irwell. On the right bank of the Irwell, bounded by a sharp curve of the river, lies Salford, and farther westward Pendleton; northward from the Irwell lie Upper and Lower Broughton; northward of the Irk, Cheetham Hill; south of the Medlock lies Hulme; farther east Chorlton on Medlock”

Early on in this book Engels starts spewing out numbers galore. It’s breathtaking to see the magnitude of these 19th-century statistics, and the horsepower figures are really interesting too:

“In 1834 England exported 556,000,000 yards of woven cotton goods, 76,500,000 pounds of cotton yarn, and cotton hosiery of the value of £1,200,000. In the same year over 8,000,000 mule spindles were at work, 110,000 power and 250,000 hand-looms, throstle spindles not included, in the service of the cotton industry; and, according to MacCulloch’s reckoning, nearly a million and a half human beings were supported by this branch, of whom but 220,000 worked in the mills; the power used in these mills was steam, equivalent to 33,000 horse-power, and water, equivalent to 11,000 horse-power. At present these figures are far from adequate, and it may be safely assumed that, in the year 1845, the power and number of the machines and the number of the workers is greater by one-half than it was in 1834.”

With these large numbers in mind, I think it’s worth noting that when Engels was writing this book, the American Civil War was still two decades off. By 1860, two-thirds of the global cotton supply was from the US, much of it cultivated by slaves. Sven Beckert, Harvard history professor known for his book “Empire of Cotton”, writes in The Atlantic:

“On the eve of the Civil War, raw cotton constituted 61 percent of the value of all U.S. products shipped abroad… Now, in 1861, the flagship of global capitalism, Great Britain, found itself dangerously dependent on the white gold shipped out of New York, New Orleans, Charleston, and other American ports. By the late 1850s, cotton grown in the United States accounted for 77 percent of the 800 million pounds of cotton consumed in Britain. It also accounted for 90 percent of the 192 million pounds used in France, 60 percent of the 115 million pounds spun in the Zollverein, and 92 percent of the 102 million pounds manufactured in Russia.”

Though cotton production was fairly small in Canada at the time, the proportion sourced from the U.S. was of course much higher, due to the obvious reason of proximity. M.N.A. Hinton and T. Barbiero (2012) in a paper write that:

“Canadian cotton mills, of course, were totally dependent on foreign sources of supply to obtain raw cotton. Before Confederation 95 percent of it was imported from the U.S. South; after Confederation 99 percent was imported from the South.”

Marx in “The Poverty of Philosophy” (his denunciation of Proudhon) wrote:

“Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.”

In no small measure because of his acquaintance with Engels, Marx actually mentions cotton right through his first volume of Capital, which was published shortly after the close of the American Civil War. I first realized that Marx and Lincoln were alive at the same time when I read this in Marilynne Robinson’s “Death of Adam”:

“Americans are astonished to realize that Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln were contemporaries, let alone that Lincoln and much of literate America would have read Marx, who published articles on European affairs for years in Horace Greeley's New-York Daily Tribune, and that Marx wrote about Lincoln. They are amazed that Marx also wrote a contemporary account of the Civil War, passionately taking the side of the North. This is only one illustration of the great fact that we have little sense of American history in the context of world history.”

About 600 articles written by Marx were published in the New York Daily Tribune according to Robin Blackburn. While the description of Blackburn’s book “The Unfinished Revolution” inflates the issue somewhat, saying: “Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War,” Marx did write to Lincoln a number of times and Lincoln (or more specifically his ambassador) responded to an address of the International Workingmen’s Association, drafted and signed by Marx, with a brief acknowledgement. What undoubtedly was the case was that the American Civil War was deeply influential in Marx’s writings. This was at a time where a radical wing existed within the Republican Party. Horace Greeley who edited the paper Marx wrote for was one of the founders of the Republican Party and was himself a Fourier socialist — among a number of other Republican Party founders.

Anyways, Engels quotes a number of reports of the environmental conditions and health hazards faced by workers daily in these mill towns. In one of these long excerpts, Engels interrupts to say:

“...it must be added, like all other rivers in the service of manufacture, flows into the city at one end clear and transparent, and flows out at the other end thick, black, and foul, smelling of all possible refuse”

This is not unlike what you find in Toronto later in the century. Based on an interview with Jennifer Bonnell who wrote “Reclaiming the Don” (published by University of Toronto Press), Katie Daubs in a Toronto Star article writes:

“By 1860, there were more than 50 mills in the watershed, supplying paper, flour, wool and wood, and pollution… By the 1880s, the price of Toronto’s growth was told in the river. Industrial runoff, deforestation and sewage had turned the meandering lower Don into a festering flow of pollution.”

Photo: The Wonscotonach flowing under Highway 401 in 2019.

The Wonscotonach took on the name Don River because the imperialist Simcoe thought it reminded him of the River Don in Yorkshire, another industrial hub mentioned a number of times in this book by Engels.

Photos: Evergreen Brick Works (Don Valley Brick Works)

Close by what is now Don Valley Brick Works Park is Todmorden Mills, now a museum and art centre. It was once a paper mill that supplied paper for William Lyon Mackenzie’s sheet “The Colonial Advocate”.Mackenzie was actually integral to the genesis of this mill. He was worried about the cost of paper for the Colonial Advocate and lobbied the government to award anyone who would establish the first paper mill in Upper Canada. A gristmill known as Don Mills was converted into Todmorden Mills, and Mackenzie had a new supply of affordable paper.

Mackenzie came to Canada in the same boat as James Lesslie — a book publisher and Owenite socialist. They would open and run a bookstore for a number of years together across the road from St. James’ Church (now a beautiful cathedral) around the St. Lawrence Market area.

He and Mackenzie were responsible for union organizing and the setting up of Mechanics Institutes — something Engels talks glowingly about in this book, saying:

“Here the children receive a purely proletarian education, free from all the influences of the bourgeoisie; and, in the reading-rooms, proletarian journals and books alone, or almost alone, are to be found. These arrangements are very dangerous for the bourgeoisie, which has succeeded in withdrawing several such institutes,”Mechanics’ Institutes,” from proletarian influences, and making them organs for the dissemination of the sciences useful to the bourgeoisie. Here the natural sciences are now taught, which may draw the working-men away from the opposition to the bourgeoisie, and perhaps place in their hands the means of making inventions which bring in money for the bourgeoisie; while for the working-man the acquaintance with the natural sciences is utterly useless now when it too often happens that he never gets the slightest glimpse of Nature in his large town with his long working-hours.”

A lot of socialists, communists, and Marxists admire William Lyon Mackenzie. Some examples include —an excerpt from a Young Socialist League leaflet

“For we are required, nothing more nor less, than to carry forward the revolutionary struggle that William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau launched in 1837. That revolution exhausted itself so that as Mackenzie, commenting on its fate in the U.S., saw: ‘the power of the community pass from democracy of numbers into the hands of an aristocracy — not of noble ancestry and ancient lineage, but of monied monopolists and jobbers and heartless politicians.’”

The Communist Party of Canada website states:

“We honour those who led many of these struggles — Louis-Joseph Papineau in Quebec, William Lyon MacKenzie in Ontario, Louis Riel on the Prairies, and Amor de Cosmos in British Columbia.”

And in a rather long article by Julien Arseneau, , William Lyon Mackenzie’s importance to Canadian history is exposited on a Marxist website.

Photos: Silverthorn Mill ruins at Meadowvale Village, operated by Gooderham & Worts for a period of time. Sketched by the likes of A.J. Casson.

My interest in the mills of the Greater Toronto Area originates in Meadowvale Village, and there is a William Lyon Mackenzie connection here also. This is the area from which my neighbourhood of Meadowvale got its name. ‘Vale’ is the type of word for valley you might find in the romanticist verse of Shelley, a poet both Karl and Eleanor Marx were very fond of. So there was a certain poetic cachet that developers could draw on by co-opting the name ‘Meadowvale’ for their subdivisions father out west in the 1960s.

Anyways, back in Mackenzie’s time, the area I now live around was known as Switzer’s Corners, named after the Switzer family — Irish settlers who had garnered somewhat of a reputation as being seditious agitators and friends of Mackenzie. They would host him at their home when he was campaigning in the area, and one of the sons of the family, Martin Switzer, once rounded up a bunch of peace-loving Quakers (around Elgin, south of London) to go join the armed insurrection that had been launched from Montgomery’s Tavern. Charles Switzer (related to Martin Switzer) eventually ran what became known as the Gooderham store for some time, and was a fixture within the Meadowvale Village community.

Photo: The Gooderham store no longer exists, but the Gooderham mansion still stands. Now a private school. How fitting.

At the mouth of the Wonscotonach (Don River), as it empties into Lake Ontario, was the main industrial operation of Gooderham & Worts. This site is now a tourist destination known as the Distillery District, and the name Gooderham & Worts is still plastered throughout the Victorian industrial buildings there.

This company owned a number of other mill sites around the area, including a couple along the Credit River. One was a textile mill, although it was spinning flax (linen) and not slave-grown cotton. Gooderham & Worts, however, owned another major mill site in Meadowvale Village, and owned a department store there comparable with the T. Eaton’s store in Toronto (the one Charles Switzer ran for a period), with lavish and fashionable offerings for the wealthier folks of the area.

As with the ecological destruction of the Wonscotonach (Don River), similar results were manifesting in Mississauga’s Missinihe (Credit River). Donald Smith in his book “Mississauga Portraits” writes what Chief Peter Jones would have seen before and after the mills:

“The great trees stood so closely together that they formed a canopy shutting out the sunshine and most of the daylight leaving the ground free of undergrowth. He remembered the salmon-rich streams and rivers that flowed from the forested interior down to the harbour. Now the area was extensively deforested. The building of dams for gristmills and sawmills now prevented Ontario salmon reaching their upper spawning grounds. Released sawdust blanketed the bottoms of streams and rivers. By the mid-1850s, the salmon runs had declined to the point of extinction.”

The Anishinaabe ethnobotanist and Dalhousie professor Jonathan Ferrier referred to the clearcutting of forests around Lake Ontario as a “genocide by sawmills”.

I’ve mentioned in a previous review the child labour Mother Jones experienced in American textile mills. I wasn’t able to find evidence of similar stuff in Toronto at the time of writing that interview, but I have found some stuff since then. Firstly, Jean Barman in the Canadian Encyclopedia writes:

“The first wave of provincial legislation regulating child labour in factories and mines began to pass in the 1870s and 1880s. But the prohibition of child labour did not come until the 20th century.”

Secondly I found in a republished version of Royal Commission on the Relations of Labor and Capital, 1889 where James Brown a Toronto factory inspector is being interviewed about, among other things, child labour:

“Q. Did you notice […] any large percentage of children?

A. Yes; in some of them — in the cotton mills and some woolen mills, in cigar factories and knitting works, and some others.

Q. Were there many of those children below the age designated by the Act?

A. Well, I found about 40 girls under 14. Girls are not allowed under 14 nor boys under 12. I found six boys altogether nine years of age, and some ten or eleven.”

Mother Jones was from a working-class Irish family, and Engels spends quite a long time discussing how the Irish were an underclass in the industrial towns throughout England, and suffered extreme exploitation at the bottom of the industrial hierarchy.

I think it’s important to see a lot of the things happening in this century (the dispossession of land from and genocide of indigenous peoples, the global trade and Naval Operations those colonially sourced commodities went into, and the cotton plantations powered by American slavery) as deeply connected to the horrors of environmental destruction, child labour, and the extremely filthy and diseased living and working conditions of the English proletariat — as all connected together in the matrices of the capitalist economy. Capitalism cannot be blamed for all the ills in the world, but it certainly sustains and shelters many of them for the benefit of a small elite class of people.

It is hilarious that billionaires like Nick Hanauer are growing extremely anxious, feeling as if a revolution is going to break out any day. Rich people are not oblivious to the incomprehensibly enormous inequality that persists in the world. Hanauer has tried to gather other really rich people like him to lobby the government to implement some sort of ‘wealth tax’, which does not exist now. They can only extract wealth from the rich by way of income taxes right now. You might have heard this covered in a recent episode on NPR Planet Money. Starbucks piece of shit Howard Shultz is absolutely disdainful of this proposal put forward by the likes of Elizabeth Warren. It’s hilarious to see some rich people talk about their generosity in a self-congratulatory way when what they are really worried about is that thing Rousseau warned about: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich". This is at the core of Hanauer’s ‘Pitchfork Economics’. He outright said, at the end of the NPR Planet Money Episode that he’s fine with a wealth tax that ‘slows’ the growth of his wealth, which is the moderate proposal made by people like Elizabeth Warren. This is already rare among the extremely rich. Hanauer mentioned that he can’t be on board as soon as this wealth tax ‘stops’ the growth of his wealth or even farther, reduces it. Laughable really. Engels had something to say about people like this:

“The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: “If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!” It is infamous, this charity of a Christian bourgeois!

…What? The wealthy English fail to remember the poor? They who have founded philanthropic institutions, such as no other country can boast of! Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practising your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them! Charity which degrades him who gives more than him who takes; charity which treads the downtrodden still deeper in the dust, which demands that the degraded, the pariah cast out by society, shall first surrender the last that remains to him, his very claim to manhood, shall first beg for mercy before your mercy deigns to press, in the shape of an alms, the brand of degradation upon his brow.”

Nick Hanauer is worried about some pending insurrection of violence on the horizon. What many people do not realize is that this is precisely the concern Engels had, except he obviously didn’t believe a ‘heterodox’ reformation of capitalism was the answer. Often times ‘communism’ has taken on a reputation of encouraging brutal and violent revolution, but Engels saw communism in a very different way — a way to prevent the cruel striking out of the poor in a unproductive way that accomplished little except the carrying out of individual revenge (think Atwood’s “Alias Grace”). Engels writes:

“Besides, it does not occur to any Communist to wish to revenge himself upon individuals, or to believe that, in general, the single bourgeois can act otherwise, under existing circumstances, than he does act. English Socialism, i.e., Communism, rests directly upon the irresponsibility of the individual. Thus the more the English workers absorb communistic ideas, the more superfluous becomes their present bitterness, which, should it continue so violent as at present, could accomplish nothing; and the more their action against the bourgeoisie will lose its savage cruelty. If, indeed, it were possible to make the whole proletariat communistic before the war breaks out, the end would be very peaceful; but that is no longer possible, the time has gone by. Meanwhile, I think that before the outbreak of open, declared war of the poor against the rich, there will be enough intelligent comprehension of the social question among the proletariat, to enable the communistic party, with the help of events, to conquer the brutal element of the revolution and prevent a “Ninth Thermidor”.”

Engels however is not rejecting the ‘ressentiment’ and its related ‘slave morality’ that people like Nietzsche were so disdainful of (a narrative that people like Jordan Peterson have leveraged for very particular ends). Anyways, Engels writes:

“English Socialism arose with Owen, a manufacturer, and proceeds therefore with great consideration toward the bourgeoisie and great injustice toward the proletariat in its methods, although it culminates in demanding the abolition of the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat… They understand, it is true, why the working-man is resentful against the bourgeois, but regard as unfruitful this class hatred, which is, after all, the only moral incentive by which the worker can be brought nearer the goal. They preach instead, a philanthropy and universal love far more unfruitful for the present state of England.”

Ayn Rand once called Christianity the best kindergarten of communism possible, and verses like Mark 3:27 always remind me of this ‘slave morality’ that Nietzsche talked about. In the verse Jesus says:

“But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.”

This verse is also mentioned in one form or another in the other two synoptic gospels. Craig Keener supposes it is an allusion to Isaiah 49:24-26 (the context being oppression under Babylonian imperialism), which I think is a good point of resonance:

“Can plunder be taken from warriors, or captives be rescued from the fierce?

But this is what the Lord says:

“Yes, captives will be taken from warriors, and plunder retrieved from the fierce;I will contend with those who contend with you, and your children I will save.

I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh; they will be drunk on their own blood, as with wine.”

Second Isaiah maybe one-upped the revolutionary Rousseau here. That’s some pretty gruesome stuff. This sort of radical rhetoric within faith communities was not unknown in Upper Canada’s more revolutionary moments. In the neighbourhood where I live there was a Methodist church on Switzer’s Corners known as Switzer’s Church. It eventually became known as Eden Methodist Church, and today is Eden United Church (where I visit not infrequently — though it’s no longer a hotbed of revolutionary fervour). It is fascinating to learn how Methodism was caught up with Owenite socialism in Upper Canada at the time. More broadly both Owenite socialism and Chartism were spread under the umbrella of the Reform Movement in Upper Canada. Engels speaks of both Robert Owen and his brand of socialism (critically) and Chartism (more approvingly) in his book on the working class in England. He also quotes a radical Methodist preacher named Rayner Stephens. Engels writes:

“The people were called upon to arm themselves, were frequently urged to revolt; pikes were got ready, as in the French Revolution, and in 1838, one Stephens, a Methodist parson, said to the assembled working- people of Manchester:

‘You have no need to fear the power of Government, the soldiers, bayonets, and cannon that are at the disposal of your oppressors; you have a weapon that is far mightier than all these, a weapon against which bayonets and cannon are powerless, and a child of ten years can wield it. You have only to take a couple of matches and a bundle of straw dipped in pitch, and I will see what the Government and its hundreds of thousands of soldiers will do against this one weapon if it is used boldly.’”

Haha, wow, this is like an episode of Damnation. Mackenzie himself is probably best known as a failed revolutionary, who led the feeble 1837 insurrection from Montgomery’s Tavern that was easily thwarted by Jarvis. (Peter Matthews, one of the two men hanged as a result of this insurrection, was encouraged to join the uprising by a Baptist preacher from Markham Township called George Barclay.) Mackenzie would go on to occupy Navy Island, just upstream from Niagara Falls and declare it to be the Republic of Canada, before eventually escaping to the U.S. — later returning to Canada in 1849 to take back a place in the legislature. The 1837 uprising was also an important theme in Margaret Atwood’s book Alias Grace (my favourite Atwood novel I’ve read so far), and the role of certain sorts of Methodists and Quakers is thematic in the novel as well.

For all the fear-mongering over atheism that Christians have expressed against Marx and Engels, I think Engels was very well-read in religion. And he knew the working classes generally weren’t, though he didn’t necessarily see that as a problem. Engels inserts a very large and humorous excerpt from the “Children’s Employment Commission’s Report” of working class children being asked about their faith:

“One child had ‘attended a Sunday school regularly for five years; does not know who Jesus Christ was, but has heard the name. Never heard of the twelve apostles. Never heard of Samson, nor of Moses, nor Aaron, etc.’ Another ‘attended a Sunday school regularly six years. Knows who Jesus Christ was, he died on the cross to shed his blood, to save our Saviour.’”

Engels however felt that education was focused on very unproductive sectarian theology and no proper moral teaching:

“The consequence is that religion, and precisely the most unprofitable side of religion, polemical discussion, is made the principal subject of instruction, and the memory of the children overburdened with incomprehensible dogmas and theological distinctions; that sectarian hatred and bigotry are awakened as early as possible, and all rational mental and moral training shamefully neglected.”

Engels goes onto elaborate the general indifference to religion felt by much of the working classes as a result of this pedagogical failure:

“All the writers of the bourgeoisie are unanimous on this point, that the workers are not religious, and do not attend church… among the masses there prevails almost universally a total indifference to religion, or at the utmost, some trace of Deism too undeveloped to amount to more than mere words, or a vague dread of the words infidel, atheist, etc. The clergy of all sects is in very bad odour with the working-men…”

Engels likely thought this outcome to have a fairly bright side, considering the theological convictions of the bourgeoisie which he described in this way:

“It is all very pretty and very agreeable to the ear of the bourgeois to hear the “sacredness of property” asserted; but for him who has none, the sacredness of property dies out of itself. Money is the God of this world; the bourgeois takes the proletarian’s money from him and so makes a practical atheist of him. No wonder, then, if the proletarian retains his atheism and no longer respects the sacredness and power of the earthly God…

…The English bourgeoisie is violently scandalised at the extravagant living of the workers when wages are high; yet it is not only very natural but very sensible of them to enjoy life when they can, instead of laying up treasures which are of no lasting use to them, and which in the end moth and rust (i.e., the bourgeoisie) get possession of.

…the humanity of the workers is constantly manifesting itself pleasantly. They have experienced hard times themselves, and can therefore feel for those in trouble, whence they are more approachable, friendlier, and less greedy for money, though they need it far more than the property-holding class. For them money is worth only what it will buy, whereas for the bourgeois it has an especial inherent value, the value of a god, and makes the bourgeois the mean, low money-grubber that he is.

…It is utterly indifferent to the English bourgeois whether his working-men starve or not, if only he makes money. All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical, idealistic bosh.

During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the plain truth in the matter. …many have died of starvation, where long-continued want of proper nourishment has called forth fatal illness, when it has produced such debility that causes which might otherwise have remained inoperative brought on severe illness and death. The English working-men call this “social murder”, and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Are they wrong?”

where is christ in christmas?

There is a mystifying cliche that sometimes circulates this time of year: ‘they’ have taken the Christ out of Christmas. While I think it is very questionable Jesus would want to have anything to do with the capitalist spectacle that is ‘Christmas’ today, I would say (for that very reason) there is certainly some truth to the assertion that Christ has been removed from Christmas. I would also suggest that saying ‘Merry Christmas’ instead of ‘Happy Holidays’ laughably seems to do nothing to remedy this situation.

I have used this quote in past Advent reflections, but I think it should be an idea Christians perennially return to each Advent. The Anglican theologian and physicist John Polkinghorne wrote:

“In Advent, we think about the coming of Christ, particularly that first coming at Bethlehem and the final coming at the end of the age… But the truth of the matter is that Christ comes to us everyday, anonymously in the people in need who cross our path.”

Matthew 25 has Jesus remind his listeners that whatever they do to the least of these they do to him.

Yet this emphasis has often been treated rather dismissively, not only by conservatives, but even an anarchist like Jacques Ellul wrote in “Anarchy and Christianity”:

“In the 1970s we saw the same tendency in the so-called liberation theologies. In an extreme form a strategy has been found to make possible association with (South American) revolutionary movements. A poor person of any kind is supposedly identical with Jesus Christ.”

This is only to say, in my view, that liberation theologians are precisely the ones who show us what is demanded of those who actually want to keep “Christ in Christmas”. Liberation theologians are not abolishing Christ and replacing him with the poor, but finding God in those who suffer in the world, and in my view that is not something worth trying to put down.

Pope Francissaid that it is“always right”to give something to someone in need, saying further that if "a glass of wine is the only happiness he has in life, that's OK. Instead, ask yourself what do you do on the sly? What 'happiness' do you seek in secret?" I think living out grace in such a radical way for the Christian depends on her recognizing Christ in all who are in need, like Pope Francis suggests we do.

The real ‘war on Christmas’ is waged every time a single mother is forced to work extended holiday shopping hours at her minimum wage job away from her children. It is then that Christ has been taken out of Christmas. Every time a migrant worker from Latin America and Caribbean has to work thousands of kilometres away from his family during the holidays under very poorly enforced labour laws, withno ability to switch jobs away from an abusive employer or access affordable health care, Christ has been removed from Christmas. Each poor ‘stranger’ turned away from the border back to a land devastated by structural adjustment and brutal colonial history (a land in which they daily fear for their lives) is another instance Christ vanishes from Christmas.

Saying ‘Happy Holidays’ is not what is taking the Christ out of Christmas. The cause of this tragedy occurs each time we give Christ no food when he’s hungry, give him nothing to drink when he’s thirsty, welcoming him not when he’s a stranger, clothing him not when he needs warmth and cleanliness, not caring for him when he’s sick, and neglecting him when he’s in prison (Matthew 25:42-43). There’s a lot of this sort of inaction this season, and most seasons for that matter. And I say this as someone most implicated in such passivity. If Christians want Christ back in Christmas, we might start acting like it, rather than wishing our Muslim and Jewish neighbours ‘Merry Christmas’.

The Question of Ecclesiology

Now Matthew 25 is a very important text. Conservative scholars love pointing out that when Jesus is talking about the “least of these” he’s talking about other “people of the Way” or “Nazarenes” (as Acts calls them), or what we more commonly know as “Christians” today. Now let us imagine for a moment that this interpretation should be the case, Christians have still so radically failed at even this low bar that we cannot at all escape from our glaring hypocrisy unscathed.

Let me proffer an example: the migrant caravan and the broader issue of Latin American migration across the American border. AWashington Post article, drawing from a poll they conducted with ABC, states that:

“75 percent of white evangelical Christians rated “the federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants” as positive, compared with 46 percent of U.S. adults overall, and 25 percent of nonwhite Christians.”

Almost 90% of the Latin American population identifies as Christian, and it’s safe to say the large majority of the people in the migrant caravan and people arriving at the American border are Christians. Yet it’s really hard to square white evangelical Christianity with even the most conservative interpretation of Matthew 25. When Jesus was a stranger, a child refugee running away from state-sanctioned violence (Herod), we welcome him by detaining him, separating him from his parents, and then throwing him out back into Herod’s reign of terror?

Dorothy Day once wrote that the Catholic Worker movement was

“not a Christian or religious community, we are an inn by the side of a road. We have no common sense. We do not say no.”

Catholic Worker houses, hotbeds for Christian anarchist organizing, are famous for accepting basically anyone who shows up at their front door in need of a place to stay. Rowan Williams points out that Day wrote that text about being “an inn by the side of a road” the day after Christmas in the 1970’s. In that same text Day goes on to quote Saint Teresa of Avila who wrote that “life is a night spent in a disorderly inn”. Williams went on to dismantle any easy romanticization of these Catholic Worker houses, as they were often significant violators of health codes, and were sometimes places of violence in which Day felt extremely unsafe and insecure under the threats some residents made against her. Day and her friend Peter Maurin were exemplars of people who took Matthew 25 very seriously and radically welcomed all in need, for they saw Christ in all these people, even the ones that threatened them with violence. And even beyond individual action, Maurin stated that his overarching goal in life was to make the world an easier place to be good. A political order that does not incentivize selfishness and competition, but encourages solidarity, cooperation, and mutual aid.

Anyways, I think the text of Matthew 25 itself radically problematizes hegemonic conceptions of ecclesiology that buttress easy boundaries that situate people as either clearly belonging or not belonging in ‘the Church’, and hence worthy of Christian care and mutual aid.

In afantastic episode of the Magnificast podcast, Zach Dimiele elaborates on the ecclesiology of Leonardo Boff, a liberation theologian who even a firebrand communist and atheist like Fidel Castro kept on his bookshelf. Dimiele makes a very interesting point that in Matthew 25, at Christ’s return the people ask Christ when they fed (or did not feed) him, clothed (or did not clothe) him, welcomed (or did not welcome) him, et cetera. And in so doing, they show that they are unable to recognize Christ, because Christ’s body has parts that are sometimes not recognized as Christ’s own. Dimiele concludes that “the body of Christ is ultimately a body with porous and expansive borders. Connecting this idea with the thought of Michael Polanyi, I suggest that the church is body with parts that it cannot apprehend.”

There are of course limits to this line of thinking, as Christ’s body cannot be a universalized conception imposed on all peoples to universally characterize them as either belonging or not belonging to some universal liberative project. However, I think Matthew 25 has potential for problematizing easy ecclesiological formulations that are quite pervasive in the Christian tradition. If there are people that are clearly not recognized as part of Christ’s body, it is likelier to be the rich and the uncompassionate, than some doctrinally deviant people, for upon Christ’s return it is the uncompassionate who are not recognized by Christ in Matthew 25.

John Hick locates the modern version of this incarnational theology (which Dimiele draws from) back into the existential theology of Bultmann and its resulting notion of the‘Christ-event’:

“The notion of the Christ-event seems to have appeared first in Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist interpretation of the New Testament according to which Christian faith is a response, not to the largely unknown Jesus of Nazareth, but to the present notion of Jesus as the Christ; so that whenever ‘the Christ’ is preached this is ‘a continuation of the Christ Event’”

This approach is often explained by people like Marcus Borg with a distinction between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of tradition (who continues by way of preaching, along with other Christian practices). I think Bultmann’s views are rendered quite well by a joke I once heard Hauerwas tell, though Hauerwas says it was just a joke that was circulating Yale or Duke when he was there. It goes something like this:

The Pope phones Bultmann who he sees as an important Protestant figure who needs to hear about this big news. Bultman answers the phone, and after minor polite exchanges, the Pope gets down to business: “I have some really big news to share with you. Some of it is good, but some of it is rather bad… I will start with the good news. The archaeological team has gotten back to me with a groundbreaking discovery. They have confirmed to me that they have found Christ’s tomb. That is the good news… The bad news is they also found his body inside.” The Pope hears a long pause on the other line, feeling quite worried how Bultmann is taking this heavy news. Finally after some time, Bultmann replies… “So… he really did exist.”

That was a bit of a tangent, though Bultmann was particularly known for such a project of demythologizing the Christian faith, and the joke associating him with the ‘Christ myth theory’ does give a sense of his reputation as a skeptic. Bultmann’s emphasis then was an existential one rather than a metaphysical or historical one. John Hick then goes onto describe how this “Christ-event” Christology was elaborated in a more communal direction in which ecclesiology and Christology coalesce together:

“in the work of another New Testament scholar, John Knox, the Christ-event has an ecclesiastical (and thus social) rather than an existential (and more individual) meaning. The Christian faith is not centred in the person of Jesus of Nazareth alone but in the church's developing memory - not, however, ordinary literal memory but a metaphorical 'memory' - of him as its divine Lord (Knox 1967, 2f.). For Knox, 'The phrase "Jesus Christ our Lord" designates, not primarily an historical individual in the past, but a present reality actually experienced within the common life' (Knox 1967, 2). Indeed, 'The Church is thedistinctiveChristian reality . . . And it is because the Churchis[Christ's] body and, in history, his only body, that we often use the words "Christ" and "Church" interchangeably, saying "in Christ" when we are wanting to refer to what it really means to be - and really to be - in the Church. It is this embodiment or incarnation (that is, the Church) which is most immediately - indeed alone is immediately -known. . . And so I say again, the Incarnation originally took place, not within the limits of an individual's individual existence, but in the new communal reality, in principle co-extensive with mankind, of which he was the creative centre' (Knox 1967, 66-7).”

This in some sense is the idea behind the famous poem often misattributed to Saint Teresa of Avila, though far more likely by the Methodist minister Mark Guy Pearse (1842-1930), and Quaker medical missionary Sarah Elizabeth Rowntree. This poem goes:

“Christ has no body but yours,No hands, no feet on earth but yours,Yours are the eyes with which he looksCompassion on this world,Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,Yours are the eyes, you are his body.”

Now if this notion of Incarnation by itself seems too similar to some unhelpful forms of Death of God theology or its antecedent Hegelian pneumatology, I will just briefly admit that this may likely be the case. I then want to ask what does it mean to have faith, for that might be the question that has yet to be properly addressed.

What is Faith? To What Telos?

Evangelical Christians claim to be a ‘Bible-believing’ bunch, and some of them can spend hours schooling you in Pauline justification, saying Christianity is not about what you have to ‘do’ but what Jesus has already ‘done’. I think an interesting road into this is Paul’s quotation of Habakkuk in Romans 1:17: “The one who is righteous will live by faith.” Yet what does it mean to live by faith? Maybe we should take a closer look at the eschatological text in Habakkuk 2 which Paul is drawing from:

“For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Look at the proud! Their spirit is not right in them, but the righteous live by their faith. Moreover, wealth is treacherous; the arrogant do not endure. They open their throats wide as Sheol; like Death they never have enough. They gather all nations for themselves, and collect all peoples as their own.

Alas for you who heap up what is not your own!” How long will you load yourselves with goods taken in pledge? Will not your own creditors suddenly rise, and those who make you tremble wake up? Then you will be booty for them. Because you have plundered many nations, all that survive of the peoples shall plunder you— because of human bloodshed, and violence to the earth, to cities and all who live in them. “Alas for you who get evil gain for your house, setting your nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm!” You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples; you have forfeited your life. The very stones will cry out from the wall, and the plaster will respond from the woodwork. “Alas for you who build a town by bloodshed, and found a city on iniquity!” Is it not from the Lord of hosts that peoples labor only to feed the flames, and nations weary themselves for nothing? But the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

The cup in the Lord’s right hand will come around to you, and shame will come upon your glory! For the violence done to Lebanon will overwhelm you; the destruction of the animals will terrify you—because of human bloodshed and violence to the earth, to cities and all who live in them.”

If there ever was a text for Advent 2018, Habakkuk 2 would have to be it. Advent is naturally a messianic season, and as such it recognizes there is something to be saved from. Well for one, a world where there is such thing as‘wealth’, which in our world, is just another word for extreme inequality.

Advent people might already be aware that wealth is treacherous, as Jesus said “Woe to you who are rich” (Luke 6:24) which he learned from his mother who said the powerful would be dethroned and the rich sent away empty (Luke 1:52-53). Jesus already said “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,” (Matthew 19:24). So, in light of all that, how can any Christian valourize Donald Trump of all people, or anyone of the executive class on that shameful Forbes yearly billionaire list: Gates, Musk, Ortega, Arnault, Branson, whoever? James 5:1-3 reads:

“Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you, and it will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days.”

Advent is an anticipation of those last days, and James gives a dramatic suggestion of what we might expect.

We know imperial governments and MNCs continue to open their throats wide as Sheol, just as in the days of explicit colonialism, gathering pools of cheap labour for themselves like Death itself, expropriating from these children of God what does not truly belong to neither Empire nor MNC. They have plundered the lands under colonialism and extracted resources from the periphery into the core. And like Joseph did for Pharaoh, leveraged the poor’s newly formed desperation in the the wake of plunder, and craft them into dependent debtors owned by centralized power.

How much of the US economy depends on the manufacture of arms? How many towns and cities built on bloodshed and iniquity, people labouring only to feed flames?The Guardian reports that in Yemen, “Since 2015, more than 28,000 thousand people have been killed or injured,” under the US-backed Saudi-led coalition. This past August, a school bus was bombed and 44 children were killed by laser-guided bomb manufactured by the US multinational corporation Lockheed Martin. If this is not the sort of human bloodshed that Habakkuk speaks of and all this is not the “violence to cities and all who live in them” he refers to, I’m not sure what is.

A 2016 UNEP report on the water quality situation of the formerly colonized world’s river systems estimates that:

“severe pathogenic pollution affects around one third of all rivers, severe organic pollution around one seventh of all rivers, and severe and moderate salinity pollution around one-tenth of all rivers in these regions.”

Water that humans and animals alike rely on, which have been devastated by capital, which ceaselessly moves into regions with no capacity to hold MNCs accountable for their reckless productive practices. In the past five decades, average animal (mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian) populations have declined by 60%, and in that same time span 20% of the Amazon has vanished. If that is not violence to the earth I’m not sure what is.

How many Christian policymakers in the US claim that migrants from Latin America are violent and dangerous and should be kept out. Not only is that false, as large-scale studies consistently show either a negative correlation of immigration with crime rates or none at all. Yet even if the connection were true, what would it mean for Habakkuk to condemn those who “set [their] nest on high to be safe from the reach of harm!” (Harm which doesn’t even exist.) What does it mean for Habakkuk to claim that in doing such actions:

“You have devised shame for your house by cutting off many peoples; you have forfeited your life. The very stones will cry out from the wall, and the plaster will respond from the woodwork.”

What is Trump’s wall crying out today? The core always builds around itself in such a way to freely allow capital to flow in, but to keep out the very children of God who have been exploited brutally at the periphery.

Sarah Ngu in her podcast Religious Socialism talks about various people of faith gathering for ‘Jericho walks’, where for example they circumambulate around an ICE building calling for Trump’s wall to crumble down as the walls of Jericho fell in the book of Joshua. I find this fascinating because this type of performative protest is taking one of the most genocidal books in the Bible (which has been an endless source of justification for violent colonialism) and making it into something that counters that tendency. This draws from a rich tradition of this type of subversive reclamation of biblical texts which show up for example in Civil Rights protests to tear down the walls of segregation. Paul Robeson’s beautiful rendition of “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” is a beautiful example, which is still used in protest against Israel’s walls constructed on Palestinian territory.

A cluster of anarchists who call themselves the “Friendly Fire Collective” (who have members from various faith backgrounds including Catholicism, Quakerism, Islam and Wicca) also enacted a traditional Catholic exorcism at their local ICE building, casting the demons of White Supremacy out of the building, which I thought was a wonderful idea. They talk a bit about it in anotherMagnificast episode. Friendly Fire’s occupation of the ICE building was eventually raided rather violently by police and people’s heads were bashed and rosary beads torn from their hands and stomped on.

Many of these religious acts of protest are also involved with the New Sanctuary Movement, which is one of the few remaining widespread acts of civil disobedience churches still engage in by illegally harbouring undocumented peoples within their buildings and in the houses of their congregants to protect them from deportation or detainment. I learnt about this fascinating network of people of faith in Mary Jo Leddy’s book “At the Border Called Hope”, and her engagements with the movement while helping to run Romero House in Toronto which helps refugees make a home for themselves in Canada and navigate the monstrosity that is Canadian bureaucracy.

I see these small acts of resistance against state power as prefiguring the end of such unjust orders and the true Advent of God’s kindom. These are the acts of faith that I think are true to Habakkuk’s text that Paul refers to. It is a faith in the end of an unjust order, of Empire. It is the rejection of passive nihilism and the will to start crafting: “our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us,” as the anarchist collective CrimethInc wrote.In this season of Advent we should hold fast to Mary’s Magnificat which encourages us in this anticipation of a kindom already under way:

“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”

It is this radical orientation to resist power that Jesus was fostered within as a child, and to which we inherit as Christians. And it is in fact a part of a long prophetic Jewish tradition. The flattening imagery echoes Isaiah 40:4 which surfaces in Handel’s Messiah.

This is the prefigurative revolutionary task to “prepare the way of the Lord”. It’s Advent now and we have some work to do.

the radish left: almost anarchist roots

i last mentioned i would be writing on Meadowvale Village next, but I’m still working away at it, gathering more details on the Group of Seven painter Casson as well as the Opium War (both related to this sleepy heritage district in Mississauga). anyways, this post will be a slight a detour into the story behind radishes. this post’s title was primarily provoked by the work of James C. Scott, which offers a way of seeing edible plants with an ‘anarchist squint’. i contemplate the history behind how we got the radishes we are left with today as a way into thinking about centralized power and control. along the way i catalogue some of the happenings with my first encounter with vegetable gardening this past summer.

I have found ‘gratitude’ to be such a spiritually important practice in my own life, whenever I do in fact remember to practice it. At the same time I also recognize how ‘gratitude’ can be weaponized in a way that suggests oppressed people should just be thankful for what they have because it could always be much worse. Other times ‘gratitude’ can be used to foster an uncritical loyalty to institutions that are both physically and structurally violent. For example, when we are told to be thankful for those who ‘die’ for our country, or more often, ’kill’ for our country.

This ‘Thanksgiving’ weekend, one of the pastors at my parents’ church mentioned how thankful he is that we live in a place where we are free to gather and worship Jesus without having to ‘look over our shoulder’. Now I am thankful for religious freedom, but I did find it strange that out of all the things to be thankful for, the pastor implied that what he was basically thankful for was the political arrangement in Canada, a governmental institution that historically has actually prevented indigenous peoples from practicing their own traditions and a nation-state that coercively removed indigenous children from their families so that they could be forcefully shoved into a debased and corrupt form of the Christian faith. A lot of that can remain obfuscated in history too often unacknowledged, but something far too obvious to ignore is the destruction we have done to their land. It’s all around us.

The anarcho-pacifist dissident, Emma Goldman, once wrote that:

“All Anarchists agree with Tolstoy in this fundamental truth: if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”

This certainly hasn’t been the sort of standard our high-minded nation-state or capitalist economy has practiced historically. For example, throughout most of the 1960s, the Dryden Chemicals Ltd paper mill owned by the British MNC, Reed International, dumped mercury into the English-Wabigoon River leaving Grassy Narrows First Nation in a wake of destruction confrontinga poison stronger than love. This is the same company that is now RELX after its merger with the academic publisherElsevier, which publishes all those ‘enlightening’ peer-reviewed papers we all love. How many premature deaths precipitated from this careless act of capital?How many more continue in places like Sarnia’s Chemical Valley, where the Aamjiwnaang First Nation community face a life expectancy of 55 years, lower than Liberia’s of 61 years?

I’m glad some people can practice their traditions without having to ‘look over their shoulder’ in fear. Yet Christians must recognize that this is not the case for everyone in this country. To this day, some people can’t wear a simple religious garment without fearing for their life. Others can’t practice their deeply important traditions of fishing or foraging, because their lands have been utterly destroyed. Some people can’t even enjoy basic life necessities like clean water because of the pollution our ‘economic system’ generates. How can anyone who claims to be ‘pro-life’ be thankful for a government and economic system that permits such atrocities to happen?

On a whim this past Saturday morning, I biked to my local library and bumped into Leanne Simpson’s book “The Gift is in the Making: Anishinaabeg Stories”. Reading it in little portions throughout the rest of the day, I encountered Simpson retelling these beautiful Anishinaabeg stories that absolutely exude with gratitude for the beautiful plants, animals, water, rocks, and spirits that surround us. I think this notion of ‘gift’ is so important for a fostering of gratitude. But it’s a fairly different sort of gratitude than the one that pastor implied. It’s a gratitude that helps sustain the ecological communities within which humans are situated, rather than a gratitude towards some destructive power of capital or state.One of Simpson’s retold stories, called“Good Neighbours”, alludes to this environmental destruction of a paper miill, possibly even to Grassy Narrows itself.

I think the direction towards which our gratitude is channeled reflects our values. What does it mean to channel our gratitude towards the Divine or some neighbourly (ecological) community rather than towards the concentrated power of the state or capital? The radical preacher Thomas Muntzer suggested that:

“The fear of God must be pure, unsullied by any fear of men or creaturely things. How desperately we need a fear like this! For just as it is impossible to fear two masters and be saved, so it is impossible to fear both God and created things and be saved."

Muntzer’s ‘fear of God’ was such that it necessarily negated all other social fears, and in a similar way, Christ’s authority was the sort of authority that negated all worldly powers and hierarchies. Therefore a faithful following of Christ for a Christian, I believe, requires a certain resistance towards all other power. Emma Goldman observantly asked:

“Has not some American ancestor said, many years ago, that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God? And he was not an Anarchist even.”

I think Goldman here was referring to Thomas Jefferson, though I think the quote may go at least as far back as John Knox. All this to say that the negating movement of the Christian faith, the call to resistance, cannot be ignored. It was St. Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians who said:

“But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”

So I suggest people who think of themselves as Christians should allow God’s work to be done through them and foster the sort of gratitude that aids in this ‘reduction to nothing’ of all those self-important concentrations of power around us. I now propose a contemplation of the radish as a means of easing into such an exercise.

The Radish as an Object of My Own Bourgeois Aesthetic Pleasure

Admittedly, I like food that looks pretty. There is something mysterious that a vibrant palette of colours can do to a meal. And this is not merely some anomalous subjective quirk on my part that you (wise rational reader) can stand on high and disdain me for. There’s empirical scientific research demonstrating how our other senses are quite profoundly linked to how things taste. The size of your plate can affect how much you eat. The sound of potato chips fragmenting between your teeth can affect their taste. The pitch of background music can change how sweet dark chocolate seems (a fun experiment you can try yourself at home). There is a a flourishing little niche in ‘food studies’ that explores these strange neurological connections silently manifesting themselves when we toss food into our mouths. I think Professor Charles Spence at Oxford is one of the most interesting of these researchers if you’re curious to learn more.

I only mention this to briefly put forward a ‘very scientific’ justification in defence of pretty food. Now that’s out of the way, I can move onto the important stuff. I recently encountered this trend of garnishing the allegedly ‘millennial’ staple that is ‘avocado toast’ with pretty little radish slices. I don’t use Instagram, so I’ve apparently missed out on this. More sophisticated people might not see that as a tremendous problem. That’s just a presumption of mine. But, how would I know? I’m not a sophisticate. I care deeply about trendy food. Conveniently enough, the radishes in my backyard at the time were blooming just in time.

Who am I to turn down that higher eternal calling that descends upon the saintly ever so infrequently: throwing oneself wholeheartedly into a quickly fading food fad.

Admittedly I was somewhat crestfallen at the time when I discovered there were no avocados in the house, so I had to momentarily settle for hummus.

This was of course a temporary concession though, because I’m fairly certain hummus is only like second-order ‘millennial’. It’s not the key ‘millennial’ commodity behind the rising unaffordability of housing. I eventually did find the real deal to blow my carefully saved 20% down payment on.

I was not aware radishes grew so quickly. The seed packaging mentions only 22 days, so the surprise made this epiphany all the more enjoyable. Less time to mess them up too. The rapid growth of the radish is in fact coded into its Latin nomenclature: Raphanus, which derives from the Greek ra (quickly) and phainomai (appear). Like magic. Or an Instagram shot.

I’ve heard radishes are most commonly used as a crisp garnish in salads, so I was certainly obliged to give that a try next. I gathered some baby kale and chard from the backyard, some cashews and pecans hanging about the house (as I learned from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, the word pecan comes from ‘pigan’, meaning ‘nut’ in a variety of indigenous languages), mixed a vinaigrette, and came out with a fine tribute to my salad days of vegetable gardening — still green in judgement, cold in blood. But wow were those raw baby greens bitter.

I toasted my next batch into kale and chard ‘chips’, an old pastime my mom and I enjoy doing together.

My happiest discovery however, was that the leafy greens of the radishes are entirely edible. I took a nibble on them and was ecstatically surprised! They have a peppery pinch to them, like arugula, and for good reason. They are mustard greens, and the whole plant contains glucosinolates present also in plants like mustard and wasabi (which is also known as ‘Japanese horseradish’; in fact what passes for ‘wasabi’ in most ‘Japanese’ restaurants is in fact ‘western horseradish’; whatever the case, both names make the connections to the radish more explicit). I suppose glucosinolates emerged as a form of plant defence against pests and microorganisms, as they can be used as a natural pesticide. Glucosinolates are also toxic to animals (including humans) at high levels, but healthy for us in smaller doses that you can find in for example… radishes. Harold McGee mentions them in his description of the cabbage family (yes radishes are in the cabbage clan):

“When the plant’s cells are damaged, the two stock-piles are mixed, and the enzymes start a chain of reactions that generates bitter, pungent, and strong-smelling compounds. The special cabbage-family system is effective enough to have inspired a notorious man-made version, the mustard gas of World War I. And the cabbage family turns out to have parts of the onion defensive system (p. 310) as well; these contribute some sulfur aromatics to the overall family flavor.

The stockpiled defensive precursors in the cabbage family are called glucosinolates. They differ from the onion precursors in containing not only sulfur, but also nitrogen, so they and their immediate flavor products, mainly the isothiocyanates, have distinctive qualities. Some of the flavor precursors and products are very bitter, and some have significant effects on our metabolism. Particular isothiocyanates interfere with the proper function of the thyroid gland and can cause it to enlarge if the diet is poor in iodine. But others help protect against the development of cancer by fine-tuning our system for disposing of foreign chemicals. This is the case for substances in broccoli and broccoli sprouts”

In this sense glucosinolates are not unlike caffeine, also produced by coffee trees as a defence mechanism, and highly toxic to humans at high concentrations. However, caffeine’s concentration is so low in coffee, it’s apparently very difficult to die of caffeine poisoning by drinking coffee alone (as I amusingly read in the book “Tree: A Life Story” by David Suzuki and Wayne Grady). In the case of most leafy greens, Michael Pollan hints at this sort of paradox in the Omnivore’s Dilemma when he discusses the mysterious nature of bitterness:

“Taste in humans gets complicated, but it starts with two powerful instinctual biases, one positive, the other negative. The first bias predisposes us toward sweetness, a taste that signals a particularly rich source of carbohydrate energy in nature. …A sweet tooth represents an excellent adaptation for an omnivore whose big brain demands a tremendous amount of glucose (the only type of energy the brain can use), or at least it once did, when sources of sugar were few and far between. (The adult human brain accounts for 2 percent of our body weight but consumes 18 percent of our energy, all of which must come from a carbohydrate…)

Our sense of taste's second big bias predisposes us against bitter flavors, which is how many of the defensive toxins produced by plants happen to taste… A bitter flavor on the tongue is a warning to exercise caution lest a poison pass what Brillat-Savarin called the sense of taste's "faithful sentries." Yet helpful as it is, our sense of taste is not a completely adequate guide to what we can and cannot eat. In the case of plants, for instance, it turns out that some of the bitterest ones contain valuable nutrients, even useful medicines… Once humans discovered the curative properties of salicylic acid in willows (the active ingredient in aspirin) and the relief from pain offered by the poppy's opiates, our instinctive aversion to these plants' bitterness gave way to an even more convincing cultural belief that the plants were worth ingesting even so…”

Pollan then goes onto explain how cooking was another way humans have dealt with bitterness, from Native Americans soaking, grinding, and roasting acorns to access protein, to my toasting young kale and chard from my backyard to make them more palatable.

A very long tangent from radish leaves, but anyways, they’re edible and they’re good! I decided to put them in a pesto. I only used fresh lemon, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and it turned out even better than I expected. Plus you can avoid those wildly high sodium levels a lot of store-bought pesto is garnering a reputation for.

Now, I had to hunt down a good pasta shape. This BBC article recommended twists, but I wanted to confirm with something more authoritative. I consulted the pre-eminent Italian food historian Oretta Zanini De Vita’s “Sauces and Shapes” and she says the canonical shapes for pesto are ‘trenette’ or ‘trofie’, but ‘fusilli’ is also on the list of sanctioned shapes. I only had gemelli in my pantry, and to me it seems like a factory hybrid of trofie and fusilli, so gemelli it was. Gemelli is actually mentioned as a factory version of fusilli in De Vita’s ‘Encyclopedia of Pasta’, so I’m not way off base here.

Now this all may come across as extremely bourgeois, but William Woys Weaver points out in “Heirloom Vegetable Gardening” that the great Greek physician Galen recorded radish leaves and stems as poor people’s food. It’s ‘bougie on a budget’ as my friend Andrew would say.

Gemelli is Italian for ‘gemini’ (which I am). The rumours are true. But I actually love the shape of gemelli because it’s like the helical shape of DNA, something I began encountering more and more as my curiosities regarding radishes and their origins became a fairly all-consuming research topic I couldn’t stop picking at, like an old stubborn scab.

Anarchist Biopolitics in Upland Southeast Asia

The story begins with the latest of my reading list obsessions. My reading interests move along in phases and Southeast Asia has been one of the more recent of these, especially as I prepared for my trip to Singapore (the G7 stronghold of the region).

Three pre-eminent Western scholars have come up in my readings of the region. The first is the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who I first encountered through the work of postliberal and narrative theologians. He’s particularly known for his work on Java, including the religious traditions of that part of Indonesia. (As an aside: I also recently read an interesting critique of his work by Edward Said recently in “Covering Islam”.) The second scholar is Benedict Anderson, who’s most well known for his work “Imagined Communities” which I feel constituted a significant portion of Yuval Noah Harari’s thesis in “Sapiens” though was never directly mentioned or cited in Harari’s book. Anderson’s also a tremendously respected scholar among Indonesians themselves, and during his life, championed the work of literary figures like Pramoedya Ananta Toer. He’s probably one of the most important Southeast Asianists from‘the West’ of the twentieth century, and is also well known in particular circles for his work re-named “Under Three Flags” which connected the resistance of Filipino anarchists and revolutionaries with wider anti-colonial resistance movements throughout the globe. I hope to read some of his work soon, and use it as a way into learning more about anti-colonial Filipino theology and folklore, especially regarding Jose Rizal and Isabelo de los Reyes. Finally the third scholar is James Scott, professor at Yale, who has interpreted Malaysian rural communities through the lens of anarchist resistance, and wrote an extremely important book in Southeast Asian studies called, “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.”

I have been picking through some of these books lately, and was especially taken by James Scott’s ideas regarding how it would be a mistake to characterize the people living in remote hills of Southeast Asia as our ‘living ancestors’ or ‘primitive’ people who as Scott sarcastically put it, somehow failed to “[discover] wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism, and civilization.” Rather their ways of living are carefully chosen and deliberate practices that allow them to live as much as possible outside the orbit or influence of governing states. They live in remote areas and difficult terrain that is notoriously difficult to navigate. Their ‘illiteracy’ is in fact a very convenient way to avoid the concentrating of power in a clerical class as well as keeping raiders ignorant of where people live and where valuables are located, unlike societies that contain written records of such information. And one of the things I was most fascinated by was Scott’s idea that the cultivation of root vegetables is particularly suitable for those trying to evade coercive state power, as opposed to crops like grain or rice, which he argues are vital for state-making throughout most of history. Scott frames the dichotomy in this way:

“Virtually everywhere, wet rice, along with the other major grains, is the foundation of early state-making... From a tax collector’s perspective, grains have decisive advantages over, for example, root crops. Grain, after all, grows aboveground, and it typically and predictably all ripens at roughly the same time. The tax collector can survey the crop in the field as it ripens and can calculate in advance the probable yield. Most important of all, if the army and/or the tax collector arrive on the scene when the crop is ripe, they can confiscate as much of the crop as they wish. Grain, then, as compared with root crops, is both legible to the state and relatively appropriable.

...Slave-raiding expeditions, marauding armies, bandits, starving would-be pillagers of foodstuffs will, like states, find “state spaces” more lucrative for raiding than the slim pickings in sparse, mobile, root crop–growing societies with no permanent structure of authority. Such hill societies are, in this sense, not simply state repelling but appropriation resistant in general.”

This theme of avoiding state control by scattering into the hills actually shows up in 1 Kings 22. The prophet Micaiah is described by the King of Israel as another voice he and Jehoshaphat can seek council from, but at the same time the King of Israel admits to Jehosophat that“I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.” When they do seek council, Micaiah sarcastically regurgitates what all the other prophets tell the kings: go into war, it’ll be an easy victory. But when the king presses him to tell the truth Micaiah says what the king was always most anxious about, the de-concentration of power:

“I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the Lord said, These have no master: let them return every man to his house in peace. And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?”

I found that eerily similar to James Scott’s descriptions of upland Southeast Asia, and geography really does have a way of fostering particular political relations. There’s a great essay by Stephen Jay Gould which describes an argument by Daniel Todes which seeks to explain why many intellectuals in the desolate landscapes of Russia (such as Kropotkin) emphasized‘mutual aid’ over other scientists studying ecosystems in the tropics, who emphasized competition a lot more.

Anyways, back from this tangent, I was reading James Scott’s work on upland Southeast Asia around the time I began planting radishes. Not too long after I was reading the Wikipedia article for radishes and encountered an unreferenced claim that one of the primary locations scientists believe the radish originated from was Southeast Asia because that is where we find wild radishes growing today. I was immediately suspicious of this reasoning, but wondered if there was some truth to it. At the same time, I also read that the round, red radishes commonly found in Western countries today was the work of Dutch and Italian breeders of the 1500s/1600s. My fanciful mind wondered if there was a connection between Dutch colonialism of the Indonesian archipelago, and the radishes growing in my backyard? It was far-fetched, and I would soon find out — basically incorrect.

Firstly, radishes are not primarily the root vegetables Scott has in mind. For example, in “The Art of Not Being Governed” Scott writes:

“In general, roots and tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes, potatoes, and cassava/manioc/yucca are nearly appropriation-proof. After they ripen, they can be safely left in the ground for up to two years and dug up piecemeal as needed. There is thus no granary to plunder. If the army or the taxmen wants your potatoes, for example, they will have to dig them up one by one.”

While radishes are anarchist-inclined in the sense that they have to be dug up one by one when appropriated by the state, one cannot store radishes in the ground for such extended periods of time as tubers. That is why I assume Scott never explicitly mentions radishes in his book.

Secondly, radishes had been around in Europe for quite a long time, and thirdly, I have not been able to find a single credible source to support the Wikipedia article’s claim regarding the Southeast Asian origin of radishes. Yet, what I have discovered is that the precise origin of radishes and also radish domestication remains highly contested, and in fact a lot more complicated then I initially thought. And this obsession of mine regarding the ‘origin’ of the radish is reflective of a flawed way of posing such a question.

A Cosmogony of the Radish

Many of the papers I was reading seemed to think radishes originated either in the Mediterranean region or somewhere in Asia, sometimes sources preferring one region over the other. For example, this gardening guide by Cornell sets the radish’s origin in the Mediterranean.

On the other hand, the food historian and master gardener, William Woys Weaver, in his book “Heirloom Vegetable Gardening”, writes that:

“The oldest documentation of the radish takes us back to Asia in the form of literary references and archaeological remains in North China. From Asia the radish gradually moved westward, more or less following large human migrations. Ancient Greek travel writer Herodotus planted the long-held belief that the early Egyptians grew radishes, but Egyptologists have exploded this for several reasons. Herodotus could not read hieroglyphics, and if he could he would have been hard put to find one for the radish, or for radish used in the context of the inscription he claimed to have seen on a pyramid. The word for radish did not exist in Egyptian until the radish was introduced to Egypt by the Greeks. In all likelihood, the Greeks came in contact with the radish via India or with trade across the Black Sea. They were well acquainted with it long before the Egyptians and recognized many distinct varieties.”

I know Herodotus is notorious for getting things wrong, though I couldn’t find that much commentary on his mention of radishes while he visiting Egypt as an esteemed tourist, though I did find the classicist Barry Baldwin confirm that Herodotus

“is always ridiculed for credulity in the matter of the inscription on the Great Pyramids of Cheops, which purported to list the leeks, radishes, &c., provided for the workmen.”

Despite this, the mention of radishes used as payments in the construction of the Great Pyramids of Cheops (also known as the Great Pyramids of Giza) is still commonly mentioned in peer-reviewed papers on the radish, most often by genomic scientists rather than historians. One paper by Yamagishi and Terachi (2003) claims:

“As depicted on the walls of the pyramids built about 4000 years ago (Crisp 1995), cultivation of the radish (Raphanus sativus L.) has a long history.”

Yet despite this historical blunder, the insights of genomics have been particularly interesting regarding the radish’s origins. The same paper opens by saying:

“These results provide evidence that cultivated radishes have multiple origins from various wild plants of Raphanus.”

Closer to the end of the paper it states:

“It is thought that the wild plants with different mtDNA were grown simultaneously in various regions of the world. Some wild plants were selected by humans as a food crop depending on their needs. Possibly this effort was made independently at multiple times in different regions of the world, as this is reflected by the divergence of mtDNA in the cultivated species we have described here.”

Another paper (Kyoko Yamane et al. 2009) specifies a similar idea with some additional details:

“The MSN provides evidence for at least three independent domestication events, including black Spanish radish and two distinct groups of cpSSR haplotypes. One of these two haplotype groups is restricted geographically to Asia. This led Asian cultivated radish haplotypes to higher cpSSR diversity than Mediterranean cultivated radish or wild radish. These data are consistent with the diversity and distribution of agronomic traits in cultivated radish. At the same time, this implies that Asian cultivated radish is not originated from the diffused descendants of European cultivated radish, probably originated from a wild species that is distinct from the wild ancestor of European cultivated radish. Unfortunately we do not know the wild ancestor of Asian cultivated radish.”

In Theoretical and Applied Genetics,Kim et al. (2016) reiterate the idea that contemporary radishes we have today were from

“an ancient domesticated species native to both the Eastern Mediterranean and Eastern Asia (Becker 1962; George and Evans 1981; Kaneko and Matsuzawa 1993). Thus, the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, and Asian regions are considered possible centers of origin (Warwick 2011). Also, studies based on molecular markers have suggested that domestication of wild radish occurred independently in multiple regions (Yamagishi 2004; Yamagishi and Terachi 2003; Yamane et al. 2005, 2009).”

Finally, a website dedicated to radish genomics, hosted by Dr Zhangju Fei’s lab at Cornell, specifies the Mediterranean as the origin site for the genus Raphanus. Yet while the book chapter cited for this claim (by Yukio Kaneko et al. in the book “Genome Mapping and Molecular Breeding in Plants”) plainly says that the genus Raphanus originates between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, it also elaborates a bit on the complexities of how wild species fit into the picture:

“Tsunoda (1979, 1991) assumed that the wild species of radish belonged to only R. raphanistrum and had their origin in the coastal area from the Mediterranean to Black Sea. R. raphanistrum was distributed widely in Russia and the New World, but not in Japan, China or India (Warwick 1993; Hinata 1995). Recently, the genus Raphanus was classified into two species, R. sativus and R. raphanistrum, where the latter comprises other wild species as the subspecies R. raphanistrum (Hi- nata 1995).

The wild radish, the so-called Hama-daikon, R. sativus var. hortensis f. raphanistroides Makino (Kitamura 1958), or R. raphanistrum ssp. maritimus (Hinata 1995), was naturally grown on the sea coast in East Asia. Another wild radish called Nora-daikon or No-daikon was naturally grown at the inland areas far from the coast. These wild radishes were thought to originate from the escape from the cultivated radish (Furusato and Miyazawa 1958; Kitamura 1958; Aoba 1981, 1988) or the migration of a weedy one becoming contaminated with cereals such as wheat and oat. However, the former view is supported by many researchers.

Hama-daikon and Nora-daikon are regarded as the germplasm resources to investigate the origin of cultivated radish and to improve the radish crop. The molecular studies on the DNA and genomics, besides morphology, ecology and cytogenetics might provide valuable insight on origin, differentiation and domestication of radish.”

So, in other words, the origin of the radish is still not so firmly determined. It’s funny because there is something that inclines me to imagine the first radish suddenly popping out of the ground one day, millions of years ago, as if ‘on the third day’ God burped radishes into existence ex nihilo. Yet the latest genomics research suggests that there likely is no one single origin of the radish.

The various domesticated radishes we have today possibly came from weedy escapees of formerly domesticated radishes. What we have then is a species that has woven its way in and out of human cultivation. This is the sort of thing Deleuze and Guattari elaborated on in a “Thousand Plateaus”:

“What we must determine is not an origin but points of intervention or insertion in the framework of the reciprocal presupposition of the two forms.”

This eschewal of single origins that we find here in Deleuze and Guattari has proliferated in a lot of recent cosmological theories of the multiverse, which the Wesleyan professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein comments on so brilliantly throughout in her book “World Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse” tracing this cosmological tension all the way back to Ancient Greek debates, which occurred millennia ago.

Though the radish is a root, Deleuze and Guatarri famously put forward the image of the rhizome as an alternative metaphor to the predominant root metaphor. In contrast to their being a single origin or genesis in a linear chronology, the

“rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.”

Of root imagery, Deleuze and Guattari say:

“The tree and root inspire a sad image of thought that is forever imitating the multiple on the basis of a centered or segmented higher unity... Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of signifiance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ.”

Yet the complex and rich genomic history of the radish resembles the rhizomatic structure Deleuze and Guatarri allude to, and the radish taking form both as a large domesticated taproot and a weedy escapee — its history of meandering in and out of human cultivation is ultimately a history of weaving in and out of human control.

Exodus as Theme

While James Scott never mentions radishes in his anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia, these root vegetables share a lot in common with the people he is describing (escapees from the domination of centralized control):

“At a time when the state seems pervasive and inescapable, it is easy to forget that for much of history, living within or outside the state—or in an intermediate zone—was a choice, one that might be revised as the circumstances warranted. A wealthy and peaceful state center might attract a growing population that found its advantages rewarding. This, of course, is the standard civilizational narrative of rude barbarians mesmerized by the prosperity made possible by the king’s peace and justice—a narrative shared by most of the world’s salvational religions, not to mention Thomas Hobbes.

This narrative ignores two capital facts. First, as we have noted, it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was unfree; they were subjects under duress. The second fact, most inconvenient for the standard narrative of civilization, is that it was very common for state subjects to run away. Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvée labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages. When these burdens became overwhelming, subjects moved with alacrity to the periphery or to another state.”

In another of his books, “Against the Grain”, Scott talks about the implications of the cultivated field and garden, where domesticated species for the most part develop a deep dependency on human control, not unlike people like myself who live within the control of nation-states today:

“The purpose of the cultivated field and of the garden is precisely to eliminate most of the variables that would compete against the cultigen. In this man-made and -defended environment—other flora, exterminated for a time by fire, flood, plough, and hoe, pulled out by their roots; birds, rodents, and browsers scared off or fenced out—we make a nearly ideal world in which our favorites, perhaps carefully watered and fertilized, will flourish. Steadily, by coddling, we create a fully domesticated plant. “Fully domesticated” means simply that it is, in effect, our creation; it can no longer thrive without our attentions. In evolutionary terms a fully domesticated plant has become a superspecialized floral “basket case,” and its future is entirely dependent on our own. If it ceases to please us, it will be banished and almost certainly will perish. Some domestic plants and animals (oats, bananas, daffodils, day lilies, dogs, and pigs) have, as we know, resisted full domestication and are capable, to varying degrees, of surviving and reproducing outside the domus.”

This excerpt carries an endnote that elaborates more on some of the species that have managed to escape human control rather successfully:

“the weedy escapees, rather like pigs, ...do manage to thrive outside the domus: oats, rye, vetch, false flax, carrot, radish, and sunflower.”

In this sense radishes are one of those anarchist inclined species that itself can make the exodus out of human control and make it on its own in the wild.

In other words to become a ‘weed’ a plant grows outside the domain of human sanction or control, and sometimes so successfully that, like humans, they become invasive species. So for example, the wild radish, is considered “Primary Noxious, Class 2 in the Canadian Weed Seeds Order, 2016 under the Seeds Act.” Wild radishes are only one among a number of weedy root vegetable escapees or ancestors including the wild parsnip and the wild carrot.

The wild carrot is also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, named - in part - after a queen from the land of Kierkegaard. It is so pervasive I stumble upon it almost every day around Mississauga and Toronto. There’s a house in my neighbourhood that infrequently has its lawn mowed and wild carrots have colonized the yard. I happen to think it’s quite pretty, though they can allegedly be fined by the municipality, which I think to be ridiculous. There are a number of wild carrots growing along the edge of a wood lot just across the street from where I live (literally a matter of steps from my front door).

The wild carrot likely originated somewhere around Persia or present-day Afghanistan, and was originally domesticated for its leaves as a herb, like other members of its family including cilantro and dill (another plant from the Port Credit Seed Library that I’m growing; my little dill fellas did not do too badly this summer actually).

Dill is often called‘dillweed’ because of its vivacious reproductive habits. Because I’m not the greatest at caring for plants you can see in the picture below the yellow flowers beginning to pop up, meaning it senses its eminent death and is working to go to seed before it dies.

As a quick aside I’ve found that dill pairs beautifully with wildflower honey and olive oil spread about a slice of this lovely marble rye sourdough bread from St. John’s Bakery (which runs Catholic Worker inspired programs in Toronto).

The bakery is operated by St. John the Compassionate Mission, who openly claim Dorothy Day as a significant influencein their mission statement. Dorothy Day, is also often claimed by anarchists like Colin Ward as one of their own. In my view, she has offered one of the most compelling interpretations of‘render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s’ by saying:

“If we rendered unto God all the things that belong to God, there would be nothing left for Caesar.”

Anyways, I know someone once said we do not live by bread alone, but sometimes I think I really don’t need anything else. It’s quite good.

I enjoyed the honey dill pairing so much I even tried to marry it with some seltzer. The honey-dill soda was not quite as good as the bread, but still wasn’t bad at all. It gets better if the dill has some time to soak into the seltzer (overnight seems to yield better results).

Anyways, with respect to the wild carrot, agricultural preoccupation eventually narrowed to its often orange root, sometimes purple, sometimes yellow, sometimes something else. And so it is believed the carrot we have now was domesticated from wild carrots. Wild carrot is in fact edible, though its taproot is only edible when the plant is still young and yet to flower. The leaves as mentioned earlier can be used as an herb. The flower and seeds are apparently edible, although its seeds were documented by Hippocrates as a form of birth control, so that may be something to consider I suppose. In fact, the seeds of this plant are still used by women from Appalachia to India’s Rajasthan state as a herbal ‘morning-after’ concoction.

Wild carrot looks a lot like wild parsnip, which is noxious from the stem up and whose sap can cause burns when exposed to sunlight (although the wild parsnip’s root is still edible like the root of its domesticated cousin, the ‘normal’ parsnip).

There are other plants with umbels that resemble the wild carrot’s including giant hogweed (for which I commonly see signs in public parks warning of its ability to cause blindness), as well as water hemlock, which brought about the demise of Socrates.

What I find fascinating about plants like the wild carrot, wild parsnip, and wild radish (if they were in fact weedy escapees, which might be debatable, though they are certainly related) is that they have managed to sustain themselves outside of human control, even after they should have grown completely dependent on human cultivation. I think it is within the common fabric of human hubris to believe the world and nature depend on us to ‘sustain’ them. That ecosystems and all within them need us to have ‘dominion’ over them if they are to survive. One of my favourite poems is Mary Oliver’s “I Go Down To The Shore”:

“I go down to the shore in the morningand depending on the hour the wavesare rolling in or moving out,and I say, oh, I am miserable,what shall—what should I do? And the sea saysin its lovely voice:Excuse me, I have work to do.”

Every time I hear the Missinihe (Credit River) rushing a long at night, in the dark, enveloped in night, I think about Mary Oliver’s poem, and think how the river works its way, for kilometres and kilometres, out of sight, hidden in trees and night cover, with no help from us, it does its work. Every time I return to my plants the next day to water them, and they have enlarged, flowered, gone to seed, grown fruit, I find myself surprised. It feels like a true experience of ‘gift’ or ‘grace’, receiving something that I did nothing to earn. Something I did not work for, yet it simply presents itself, outside of my control or prodding. In fact the entire symphony of deciduous vegetation withers, dies, and comes alive every year, blooming into immense volumes of wildly varied plant forms. And ‘weedy’ escapees like wild radish or wild parsnip, these wild root vegetables are yet one more reminder of resilience, of gift, of grace outside our control.

The Communal Praxis of a Weedy Escapee

I look at all the sorts of hierarchies and systems of centralized control that I find myself within. As a Christian I might call them social systems of ‘idolatry’ for lack of a better term. They seem insurmountable, and not worth trying to resist, but I cannot escape the narrative of Exodus which compels from beyond for me to depart from such hierarchies. Often times it only remains a fantasy or a short-lived endeavour. I am too attached to the conveniences and comforts they provide. What sustains resistance in our exodus out of Pharaoh’s bondage?

James Scott understood upland Southeast Asia as a sort of refuge from state control, like the wilderness would be for the Israelites escaping Pharaoh in the Exodus narrative. In “The Art of Not Being Governed”, Scott writes:

“The main, long-run threat of the ungoverned periphery, however, was that it represented a constant temptation, a constant alternative to life within the state. Founders of a new state often seized arable land from its previous occupants, who might then either be incorporated or choose to move away. Those who fled became, one might say, the first refugees from state power, joining others outside the state’s reach. When and if the state’s reach expanded, still others faced the same dilemma.”

Scott draws a striking parallel between maroon communities and those ‘state refugees’ living in upland Southeast Asia:

“the study of maroon communities—of African slaves who had escaped and established communities outside the easy reach of slavers. These communities ranged in size from Palmares in Brazil, with perhaps twenty thousand inhabitants, and Dutch Guiana (Surinam), with that many or more, to smaller settlements of escapees throughout the Caribbean (Jamaica, Cuba, Mexico, Saint-Domingue), as well as in Florida and on the Virginia–North Carolina border in the Great Dismal Swamp. I shall elaborate a theory of “escape agriculture,” …We shall, in the context of describing upland peoples in Southeast Asia, encounter practices that bear a strong family resemblance to those of the maroons.

Runaway slaves clustered in precisely those out-of-the-way places where they could not easily be found: swamps, rough mountain country, deep forests, trackless wastes. They chose, when possible, defensible locations accessible by only a single pass or trail that could be blocked with thorns and traps and observed easily. Like bandits, they prepared escape routes in case they were found and their defenses failed. Shifting cultivation, supplemented by foraging, trade, and theft, was the commonest maroon practice. They preferred to plant root crops (for example, manioc/cassava, yams, and sweet potatoes), which were unobtrusive and could be left in the ground to be harvested at leisure. Depending on how secure the site was, they might plant more permanent crops, such as bananas, plantains, dry rice, maize, ground-nuts, squash, and vegetables, but such crops could more easily be seized or destroyed. Some of these communities were short-lived, others survived for generations… Occupying a distinctive agro-ecological zone with valued products, many maroon settlements were closely integrated into the larger economy by clandestine and open trade.”

There is a wonderful account of such a maroon community in Isabel Allende’s “Island Beneath the Sea” which is set in revolutionary Haiti. Scott observes deep similarities between this sort of maroon “escape agriculture” and the “shifting agriculture” (including swidden agriculture), a set of practices that helped sustain life outside of state space. The theologian, Walter Brueggemann, frames the Decalogue as a set of practices that some faith communities might draw on to sustain a life outside of coercive state power. In a recent sermon, he says:

“As you know, the Ten Commandments begin with the identification of the God who liberated Israel from Egypt: “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt…” The word "Egypt" refers to Pharaoh, and Pharaoh is the abusive, brutalizing king of Egypt who practiced and exploited a concentration of power and wealth. You will notice that we do not know Pharaoh's name and that is because Pharaoh keeps turning up in our history time after time. So, Pharaoh is the right name for every brutalizing concentration of wealth and power that acts in violence against vulnerable people. The Exodus is the powerful acknowledgement of that brutalizing domain of human history from which we have been emancipated.

The covenant at Sinai is a warning that if you do not keep these commandments, you will be back in the grip of Pharaoh and his insatiable demands… Thus, the Ten Commandments are strategies for staying emancipated once you get away from Pharaoh. This new strategy, first of all, says you have to honor God - that's the first three commandments - to the exclusion of every idol, every "ism" such as racism, or sexism, or nationalism, or the worship of stuff that is rare or precious or attractive or beautiful or empowering. The new strategy means in the Ten Commandments to take the neighbor with utmost seriousness. So, the last five commandments are all about the neighbor and treating neighbors with legitimacy and dignity and viability and especially disadvantaged neighbors - not to violate the neighbor for the sake of greed. And between these two commandments of honoring God and taking the neighbor seriously, at the center of the Ten Commandments, is Sabbath day. Keep Sabbath: take a break from the rat-race of busyness and exhaustion and do not let Pharaoh define your life.”

Walter Brueggemann’s theological trajectory has always aligned itself with the prophetic tradition, which has pitted itself in critical resistance against the royal strain within the biblical canon (he has an‘anarchist squint’ in the words of James Scott) which shares strong affinities withvarious Christian anarchist intellectuals like Paul Virilio, Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ellul (who has commonly highlighted the anti-monarchical sentiments of God in 1 Samuel).

There is a strange entangled history between anarchist ideology and Christian faith. Nietzsche, once pejoratively suggested anarchism to have essentially the same origin as Christianity, and I in many ways agree. Murray Bookchin agrees about modern anarchism’s origins, and even the European anarchist Kropotkin believed that European anarchist thought traced its way back to Anabaptist communities. Anabaptists have a reputation for a strong emphasis on praxis that allows them to function outside the coercive orbit of the state and corporate power. They live in a way that demonstrates the possibility of how‘law’ (of God) can be something liberatory rather than oppressive. The narrative of the‘law’ arriving after the Exodus, in the wilderness of Sinai of all places, fits neatly into James Scott’s characterization of upland‘anarchist’ communities.

N.T. Wright, particularly in his book “Justification”, makes a case for why the common Protestant notion (by way of Luther) that the law is the standard by which Christians must perfectly live up to or else ‘perish’ (i.e. burn in hell) is a mistaken and inverted understanding of how the law fits into the biblical narrative. Wright astutely points out that the Ten Commandments were given to the Israelites after ‘salvation’ from Egypt. The law is not an impossibly cruel ladder we must fail to climb as humans before Jesus sweeps us up (that is, only if our theological convictions are sound). Rather, following redemption out of slavery - following the Exodus - the Ten Commandments are better thought of as practices which allow communities to sustain neighbourliness outside the destructive ways of idolatrous state power. Hauerwas said that:

“It is… never a question whether we will or will not develop habits and virtues, but what kind of habits and virtues we will develop.”

Hauerwas sees these habits as sustained by community that is intrinsically political. His ecclesiology perceives the

“church as a community capable of challenging the imperial pretensions of the modern state.”

If Christians are to find true allies in their endeavours to live faithfully, they should seek other communities who are sustaining practices (often odd practices from the perspective of Enlightenment modernity) in resistance to hegemonic state and corporate power (which as David Graeber argues, are part of the same structural complex, because as Colin Ward suggests “every state protects the privileges of the powerful.” Within a capitalist economy, state tax revenue relies on corporate profit, and therefore has an interest in keeping corporations happy.).

I think an exemplar of such a community are the indigenous ones described by scholars like Taiaiake Alfred and Glen Coulthard. Alfred advocates for a practical decolonization and believes that

“without the foundation provided by a connection to land-based cultural practices and the reestablishment of authentic indigenous community life, individualizing efforts actually work to compound the problems by promoting further alienation from proven sources of strength and healing on the individual level, and the social-cultural atomization of indigenous communities.”

Alfred and Coulthard draw on the work of Fanon to explain how colonization is also an ‘internal’, psychological issue. Alfred writes:

“In Fanon’s analysis, colonized people who mimic the ways of the colonizer – who assimilate to the mainstream – and suppress their natural selves on a conscious and unconscious level begin to suffer from various psychological disorders (Fanon, 1982). There is certainly no evidence that the issues around assimilation and psychopathology are any different for Indigenous people.”

The co-optation of local leaders by colonial powers is an old practice. One might conceive of the local clerical powers in the New Testament narrative involved in the detainment of Jesus as local leaders co-oped by Roman empire. As someone who has ancestral roots in Southeast Asia, I understand a lot of Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian and repressive policy as a continuation of British empire and its colonial rule. In Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”, he writes:

“In the colonies... The European élite undertook to manufacture a native élite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of western culture, they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed.”

This narrative of manufacturing an indigenous elite sounds a lot like the Babylonian captivity of young Israelites like Daniel and his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah who empire renamed: Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. One can see how empire tries to capture the very identity of their captives. They have captured them physically, but now they must capture them psychologically. Yet these boys resist the ways of empire. They do not accept their luxurious meat of empire, but sustain themselves on the wholesome vegetables of their own traditions. They do not bow down to empire, but have instilled a resistance within them. This is the great Jewish narrative which Christians have also sometimes recognized as important for sustaining true communities of resistance.

Ironically, there are these moments in history when the weedy escapee is woven back into the folds of power. The food czar Joseph in Egypt comes to mind when he helps create dynamics of debt then slavery for the sake of the Egyptian Pharaoh’s power. And here we have the Cherry Belle radish growing in my backyard.

It was‘introduced’ in 1948 by the vegetable breedersZWAAN & Sons, and won its popularity after taking home theAll America Selections prize.ZWAAN & Sons ‘gave us’ the pithy-resistant Cherry-Belle radish, which could be shipped long distances without becoming soft and spongey. Bred less for flavour than for how it fit into our highly globalized modernist mode of life. Like iceberg lettuce that could survive a trip soaked in ice, the Cherry-Belle radish could stay crispy longer. Perfect quality for marketing a commodity, rather than nurturing a species with its own agency and creativity.

Mutuality

There is a dominant myth around that renders the environment as something passive, almost inert, which must be shaped by human ingenuity. It perceives the world as a set of ‘laws’, straightforward cause and effect, which must be mastered to bring about the right ‘effect’. For whom? Well obviously ‘us humans’. This narrative imagines our species as ‘holding all things together for good’, as if it were our moral duty to bring about the full realization of ‘progress’ in this universe. To abandon our strange idea of ‘technological progress’ (whatever that means) would be a ‘waste’. Ecological needs other than human ones are merely distractions crafted by conspiring political powers to debilitate their opposition (i.e. global warming is a socialist hoax meant to injure the ‘growth’ of capitalist economies).

I would argue that currently the predominant idea of progress and good is deeply coloured by our making a virtue of being ‘in control’. For example, a homogenous field of grass is better than a diverse one of ‘weeds’. A garden full of wild flowering ‘weeds’ is abominable, flowers are only good when they can be neatly confined to their rightful place, and only exist when we tell them to and only when they’re the right kind that we want. The suburban and even urban yard is more a testament to human control and ingenuity than it is of any creative agency which another species might exhibit. Therefore, a garden full of ‘weeds’ is one not ‘taken care of’, i.e. under the auspices of human sanction.

I think in his book “The Singapore Grip”, F. G. Farrell made this insightful metaphor linking dandelions to the labour uprisings in Southeast Asia during early twentieth-century colonial rule:

“But the miners’ rash action (how naive they must have been to think that they would get away with it!) had been like a sudden gust of wind which fills the air with thistledown and strips the dandelion of its whiskers. In due course, given time for germination, strikes had begun to spring up all around. Next year it had been the turn of the pineapple factories. The year after that they had spread for the first time to the rubber estates. And what could the old man have done to prevent it? Not a thing.”

I thought it was so fascinating that Farrell so astutely linked plants growing outside of human sanction to the labour movements which grew outside colonial sanction. Plants that grow outside of human control (what we call ‘weeds’) are supposed to be inert objects without agency, shaped according to human will and intention. That is the same attitude the colonial administration saw the pool of cheap labour in Southeast Asia, which were treated merely as inputs for extractive capitalist machinery.

The Agency of Plants

This dehumanizing dynamic is an absence of what Martin Buber called an I-Thou relationship, the same notion Martin Luther King Jr. referenced in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” regarding the evils of segregation. I would argue that this is not dissimilar from the sort of thing the Anishinaabe botany professor Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about when she insists on referring to plants as persons with her students:

“I try to be mindful of my language, to be bilingual between the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy. Although they still have to learn scientific roles and Latin names, I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents, to know that, as ecotheologian Thomas Berry has written, ‘we must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.’

One afternoon, I sat with my field ecology students by a wiikwegamaa and shared this idea of animate language. One young man, Andy, splashing his feet in the clear water, asked the big question. ‘Wait a second,’ he said as he wrapped his mind around this linguistic distinction, ‘doesn’t this mean that speaking English, thinking in English, somehow gives us permission to disrespect nature? By denying everyone else the right to be persons? Wouldn’t things be different if nothing was an it?’

Swept away with the idea, he said it felt like an awakening to him. More like a remembering, I think. The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone. Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to. We quickly retrain them and make them forget. When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw. If a maple is a her, we think twice.

Another student countered Andy’s argument. “But we can’t say he or she. That would be anthropomorphism.” They are well-schooled biologists who have been instructed, in no uncertain terms, never to ascribe human characteristics to a study object, to another species. It’s a cardinal sin that leads to a loss of objectivity. Carla pointed out that ‘it’s also disrespectful to the animals. We shouldn’t project our perceptions onto them. They have their own ways—they’re not just people in furry costumes.’ Andy countered, ‘But just because we don’t think of them as humans doesn’t mean they aren’t beings. Isn’t it even more disrespectful to assume that we’re the only species that counts as ‘persons’?’ The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one—with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It’s all in the pronouns.” (Braiding Sweetgrass)

This orientation that Kimmerer exemplifies in her work shows up throughout all of Leanne Simpson’s retold Anishinaabeg stories in“The Gift is in the Making”. The animals and plants each belong to their own nations and have so many things to teach humans. For example, the radish and wild carrot can teach us ways of navigating in and out of the orbit of concentrated power and wealth.

When we deny agency and even personhood to other species, it implies a uni-directional relationship where only we shape the ‘inert’ and ‘inanimate’ world around us. There is no space for mutual transformation. Being the narcissistic species that we are, we often fail to recognize the immense ways the things in our environment shape us, both the plants and animals we ‘domesticate’ and even the machines we create out of the materials around us.

James Scott, in analyzing our institutional machinery in his book “Two Cheers for Anarchism” proposes:

“What if we were to ask a different question of institutions and activities than the narrow neoclassical question of how efficient they are in terms of costs (e.g., resources, labor, capital) per unit of a given, specified product? What if we were to ask what kind of people a given activity or institution fostered? Any activity we can imagine, any institution, no matter what its manifest purpose, is also, willy-nilly, transforming people. What if we were to bracket the manifest purpose of an in­stitution and the efficiency with which it is achieved and ask what the human product was?”

Scott suggests that we often emphasize an ROI-inflected efficiency towards some unquestioned and measurable objective at the expense of understanding how particular institutions transform us and gradually and subtly change how we think and act in the world. This I believe is applicable to all things in our surroundings whether they be machines, advertisements, food, or plants.

Which would we rather be shaped by is, I suppose, a question we may ask, if the shaping and influence is inevitable. If I really do get to writing about the old milling town of Meadowvale Village post next time I hope to explore that question. As Marshall McLuhan says in “Understanding Media: Extensions of Man”:“we become what we behold... we shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.”So I wonder, at what point do we become the “tools of our tools”, as Thoreau once put it.

alas for you who heap up what is not your own! how long will you load yourselves with goods taken in pledge?

Earlier in June the arugula, kale, chives, radishes, and swiss chard were beginning to sprout in the garden behind my home. This is my very first time attempting to grow vegetables, so I suppose I’m like those first-time parents who can’t stop sharing very underwhelming photos of their children, to the annoyance of everyone else.

Above you can see some young aspiring arugula children, and below some tiny chive babies just beginning their new life.

I got a hold of some old plastic containers sitting around in the basement, that were not being used.

Besides the fact that I could not persuade my dad to donate some precious lawn space to me for growing vegetables, I think container gardening is a useful way to ease my way into gardening, as I can still rearrange the positions of plants with respect to their needed sun exposure throughout the day, especially while I get a better feel for what different plants need. I should be better researching what they need, but admittedly, I have only done some of the required homework.

In other words, I basically have no idea what I’m doing. My gardening strategy is inspired by that parable in the Gospels, where the farmer sort of just throws seeds wherever and hopes a few make it out okay.

Around this time in early June, the tomatillos were also beginning to flower. (They are what one might call Mexican green husk tomatoes that grow a sort of papery husk around them, and were actually more commonly eaten than tomatoes throughout Central America before Spanish colonizers arrived.)

In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel wrote that “The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter.”

And that earlier ‘refutation’ of the seed that occurred all those months ago (while they sat in a south-facing window of my home during early spring)brought to mind the Port Credit Seed Library, where I received these tomatillos seeds back in early March.

The seed library works on a type of credit system, where you can borrow seeds, plant them, and recover new seeds. The library trusts enough people will do their best to return seeds for the next season so it can continue to offer seeds outside the dynamics of typical ‘capitalist exchange’. Yet unlike many of our day’s financial credit systems, it does not function on the coercive engine of debt unforgiveness. In other words, I don’t get in trouble if I don’t return seeds next year, I can still borrow more and try again. Because if I’m honest, the likelihood of all my vegetables going to seed seem slim right now. Bad seed credit due to incompetence.

On the very same land where the seed library exists today, French traders of the early eighteenth century met with Mississaugas at the mouth of the Missinihe (Credit River) and exchanged European wares for fur pelts. At the time, what is now called Ontario was considered a part of ‘New France’ among European colonial powers, and even later in the eighteenth century, what is now called Ontario was actually part of the province of Quebec (see the Quebec Act of 1774). It is worth noting (especially as Canada’s relationship with slavery is perpetually framed as one that provided the great haven for the Underground Railroad) that at this time the ‘colony of Canada’ in New France was rife with state-sanctioned slavery. In this episode of CBC Ideas on slavery in Canada, even Paul Martin (the former Prime Minister of Canada!) was unaware of this historical reality. Slaves were sometimes even escaping across the border in the opposite direction, as some Northern states abolished slavery before Canada. The historian Natasha Henry writes:

“Out of approximately 4,200 slaves in New France at the peak of slavery, about 2,700 were Indigenous people who were enslaved until 1783, and at least 1,443 were Black people who were enslaved between the late 1600s and 1831.”

That is the context of the fur trade at the time that was occurring around the Missinihe (Credit River) in present day Mississauga. Missinihe roughly translates as ‘trusting creek’ or ‘trusting water’, allegedly for the same reason it is called the Credit River today. Anishinaabeg peoples in this area traded on credit with the French (around ‘Port Credit’), acquiring supplies each year and faithfully returning with fur pelts the next spring.

Power and the Colonial Fur Trade

Hardly mentioned in accounts of these times are the exploitive terms of trade prevalent throughout the fur trade. By the time French traders were trading at Port Credit, the Hudson Bay Company had emerged as a dominant competitor holding its own trading hubs in Northern Ontario along the coast of the Hudson Bay. Below are listed some of the prices of goods which were given in the currency of beaver pelts (Made Beavers, or MB).

The Hudson Bay Company defined a Made Beaver as “a prime beaver pelt which had already been worn for at least one season and from which most of the long outer hair had worn off.” These second-hand pelts were softer and worn in, which is what the European market preferred. Julia Emberley in "The Cultural Politics of Fur" (endorsed by Valerie Steele!) writes that:

"The fur trade in North America during the early modern period provided a source of mercantile wealth to Western Europe. For the indigenous peoples of North America, the political economy of this trade brought new forms of exchange value which eventually came to dominate indigenous modes of gatherer-hunter production. Fur was the principle object of exchange for guns, kettles, other tools, food staples, and luxury goods... Harold A. Innis, in his seminal account The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930), argues that Canada came into existence as a country not in spite of its geography, as has often been suggested, but because of it, a geography centered on the water ways and trade routes created by the economic exigencies of the fur trade. Innis begins his introduction that the ‘beaver (Castor canadenis Kuhl) was of dominant importance in the beginnings of the Canadian fur trade. It is impossible to understand the characteristic development of the trade or of Canadian history without some knowledge of its life and habits.’ Innis concentrates on the beaver because its fur was the primary economic unit from the mid-sixteenth century to the 1870s in the fur trade. Indeed, it came to occupy a position as a monetary equivalent in the design of the "Made-beaver," a primary-quality beaver skin used to represent a standard currency for a century and a half.”

Like cigarettes in prison, or opium in China during aggressive British piracy trading campaigns trying to reverse the flow of bullion out of Britain, beaver pelts served as the effective currency in much of North America during the fur trade. David Graeber in his seminal history of debt wrote that:

“Throughout most of history, even where we do find elaborate markets, we also find a complex jumble of different sorts of currency. Some of these may have originally emerged from barter between foreigners: the cacao money of Mesoamerica or salt money of Ethiopia are frequently cited examples. Others arose from credit systems, or from arguments over what sort of goods should be acceptable to pay taxes or other debts. Such questions were often matters of endless contestation. One could often learn a lot about the balance of political forces in a given time and place by what sorts of things were acceptable as currency. For instance: in much the same way that colonial Virginia planters managed to pass a law obliging shopkeepers to accept their tobacco as currency, medieval Pomeranian peasants appear to have at certain points convinced their rulers to make taxes, fees, and customs duties, which were registered in Roman currency, actually payable in wine, cheese, peppers, chickens, eggs, and even herring—much to the annoyance of traveling merchants, who therefore had to either carry such things around in order to pay the tolls or buy them locally at prices that would have been more advantageous to their suppliers for that very reason. This was in an area with a free peasantry, rather than serfs. They were in a relatively strong political position. In other times and places, the interests of lords and merchants prevailed instead.”

The fact that beaver pelts were the currency is very reflective of the power dynamics that existed at the time, as Graeber would suggest to be the case. While Port Credit was a predominantly French trading post, the British MB prices I presume would likely be similar to those at Port Credit. I have yet to find out the cost of these goods in London or Paris at the time, but there were apparently markups as high as 2000% for goods First Nations people traded fur for (I’ve come across this number in both Eric Morse’s “Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada” and Willie Dunn’s documentary called “The Other Side of the Ledger: An Indian’s View of the Hudson’s Bay Company”, but have yet to figure out the original source of it).

This dynamic is a common in colonial trading systems where relatively cheap goods would be extracted, and more expensive manufactured goods would be imported, leading to disproportionate “terms of trade”. The Argentinian economist Raul Prebisch would highlight these unfair “terms of trade” as a dependency theorist in his work with the heterodox economist Hans Singer known as the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis. Alannah Mandamin-Shawanda, in Tracy Bear’s MOOC on “Indigenous Canada”, says that:

“Historians identify three or more different phases throughout the fur trade. Over the course of the fur trade, the relationship between indigenous and European participants changes dramatically. The first phase is marked by indigenous peoples having a great deal of agency… The second phase is marked by increasing indigenous dependency on the fur trade. The third phase is when the Europeans gained control of the trade and negative impacts began to overtake the benefits for indigenous peoples. France set up colonies and forts, primarily to engage in fur trade. And the French were able to work with already existing indigenous trade networks.”

Traditional migratory movements of indigenous peoples involved a concentrating or clustering of people during the warmer seasons, of which the Missinihe served as such a site, and a dispersal of bands would occur in the winter seasons for hunting. This mode of existing on the land allowed for low human impact and moderated the hunting of animals in any one given area to sustainable levels. With the incursion of the fur trade and the arrival of European firearms, I presume food chains in the ecosystem would have been radically disrupted, which contributed to the eroding resource base of indigenous communities that would continue with colonial deforestation projects and the destruction of river systems to process the felled trees or new commodity crops, so that they could be exported to colonial homelands, colonies, or colonial trading posts. Beaver furs, though highest in demand, were not the only pelts sold in the fur trade. Otter, squirrel, moose, marten, and other furs were also high in demand. (Source: “First Nations Trade, Specialization, and Market Institutions: A Historical Survey of First Nation Market Culture” by André Le Dressay, Normand Lavallee, and Jason Reeves)

With the overhunting of animals, First Nations migratory patterns would inevitably become disrupted, and more settled modes of life would take over. Tracy Bear’s MOOC suggests that the previous sharing economy was able to thrive in migratory modes of life because the accumulation of material possessions was not feasible while so frequently on the move. But once people settled down on more permanent sites, it made more sense to accumulate, and particular aspirational ideologies could take hold that would erode the older sharing economy. Yet hunting was only one of the many factors that would disintegrate the ecological webs within which such a sharing economy thrived. The Missinihe (Credit River) also holds such a story of destruction.

The Inadequacy of Recognition Politics

Today, the name Missinihe (‘trusting creek’), or its more prevalent name the ‘Credit River’, is an interrogation of settler society, past and present. The Missinihe’s name, more than anything, is a reminder of deeply broken trust — trustworthiness unreciprocated for a people reputed to keep their promises, and a government still governing today, which has been far less than trustworthy to its own promises.

While Hegel’s language of ‘supplanting’ and ‘refuting’ is about the evolution of truth, it has particularly disquieting resonances for the historical events that would unfold at the mouth of the Missinihe (‘Port Credit’)— land which Anishinabeg peoples envisioned living on forever. It does not take special expertise on Foucault to comprehend how language and regimes of truth can function in particular ways for particular power interests. This language of ‘supplanting’ comes from Hegel’s preface to his most widely read work, “The Phenomenology of Spirit”. The Hegel quote in the opening of this post continues in this way:

“when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.”

Fanon would later interrogate Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition and the master-slave dialectic (an unfortunate term that persists in a lot of STEM fields and computer science discourse today), and explain why they were not applicable to colonizer relations. Unsurprising then that the Canadian Government’s policy of First Nations recognition is still principally founded on the principle of supplanting First Nations communities. That is, it is the Canadian Government that now does the‘recognizing’ and not the First Nations anymore. Canada’s government is now taken to be the ones in power, and ‘legitimately’ so. Fanon’s analysis on Hegel would later be taken up by indigenous scholars like Taiaiake Alfred and Glen Coulthard. Coulthard writes on this issue saying:

“Following Richard J.F. Day (2000, 2001), I take “politics of recognition” to refer to the now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to reconcile Indigenous nationhood with Crown sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identities in some form of renewed relationship with the institutions of the Canadian state. Although these models may vary in both theory and practice, most tend to involve the delegation of land, capital and political power from the state to Indigenous communities through land claims and self-government processes. Against this position, I will argue that, instead of ushering in an era of peaceful coexistence grounded on the Hegelian ideal of reciprocity, the politics of recognition in its contemporary form promises to reproduce the very configurations of colonial power that Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition have historically sought to transcend. More specifically, through a sustained engagement with the work of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon I hope to demonstrate that the reproduction of a colonial system of governance like Canada’s rests on its ability to entice Indigenous peoples to come to identify, either implicitly or explicitly, with the profoundly asymmetrical and nonreciprocal forms of recognition either imposed on or granted to them by the colonial-state and society. As we shall see, Fanon first developed this insight in his 1952, Black Skin, White Masks (1967), where he persuasively challenged the applicability of Hegel’s dialectic of recognition (1977) to colonial and racialized settings. Against Hegel’s abstraction, Fanon argued that, in actual contexts of domination (such as colonialism) not only are the terms of recognition usually determined by and in the interests of the master (the colonizer), but also over time slave populations (the colonized) tend to develop what he called “psycho-affective” (2005: 148) attachments to these master-sanctioned forms of recognition, and that this attachment is essential in maintaining the economic and political structure of master/slave (colonizer/colonized) relations themselves.” (Further elaboration in his book “Red Skin, White Masks”)

Hegel’s language of supplanting and refuting has inescapable reverberations when one examines what happened at Port Credit, where the Mississaugas (after losing so much land already to many deceitful moves on the part of British administrators and broken promises) were promised land and believed that this land would be theirs forever, yet would ultimately lose their land and way of life under a similar “politics of recognition” that still persists today. The image below was the Credit Mississaugas’ reserve, which Chief Peter Jones envisioned would be their home indefinitely.

As early as January 1928, the British military officer and Chief Superintendent of the Indian Department, James Givins, claimed that the British owned the land on which the Mississauga’s community lived. Samuel Jarvis (after whom Jarvis Street is named) succeeded Givins in his role as Chief Superintendent of the Indian Department, and would claim the Mississsaugas wanted freehold tenure principally so that they could eventually sell the land for money. However, there are multiple records of Chief Peter Jones and Chief Joseph Sawyer clarifying that they wanted “a Govt. Document securing the lands to our Tribe and their posterity forever.” Yet they were denied a title deed from the British Government, and many of the Mississaugas, feeling insecure of their future, did not feel motivated to keep up their farmland when they could be removed from it at anytime. They felt insecure on their own land, which the colonial powers claimed was not their own land. By 1847, the Credit Mississaugas departed from the mouth of the Missinihe, and no longer were Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg (‘people who live or dwell at the mouth of a large river’). What enabled such a tragedy and injustice to precipitate? In how many ways were they coerced off this land by the very people they had welcomed, given military assistance to, and trusted?

The Missinihe And Pre-Deforestation Tree Cover of Mississauga

The Missinihe (Credit River) has become one of my favourite facets of Mississauga. From its headwaters north of the Niagara Escarpment in Orangeville to its mouth at the Port Credit harbour, the Missinihe meanders some 90 kilometres, draining a watershed area of roughly 1000 square-kilometres. In Mississauga alone, the Missinihe drops a total of 91 meters in elevation, from Meadowvale in the north to Chi’Nbiish (literally ‘big water’, the Anishinaabe name for Lake Ontario) to the south. Leanne Simpson says Chi’Nbiish is also one of her people’s spirits, a spirit whom they have many stories about. The Missinihe was also understood (by the Anishinaabeg who lived on it) to host a spirit upstream from where it flowed into Chi’Nbiish. This was spirit “who lived at the foot of a high hill in a deep hole… singing and beating his drum”, according to Donald Smith.

The spiritually vibrant life that the Anishinaabe people saw in the Missinihe and Chi’Nbiish is so vastly removed from the ‘machine as metaphor’ visions that settlers had of water as a purely utilitarian means of powering their sawmills and extracting market value from the land as quickly as possible. This is a story of destruction.

Leanne Simpson writes: “Our oral tradition tells of a beautiful territory covered with mature stands of white pine with trunks spanning seven feet and towering 200 feet overhead. The land was easy to travel through, with pine needles and a sparse understory as a result of a white pine canopy.” This was very much the case around the Missinihe. Around 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, retreating glaciers a kilometre thick, deposited sediments in the Credit River valley (and various other valleys north of Chi’Nbiish — Lake Ontario) well suited for these enormous white pines to grow. These white pines were part of a well-forested area, as seen in the table below, where the large majority (~90%) of surveyed land in Mississauga was dominated by trees (From “Mississauga: The First 10,000 Years”).

The swiftly moving water of the Missinihe and the towering trees around it were were perceived in radically different ways by First Nations communities and counterpart European settlers, and that worldview had very concrete impacts on the ecosystems in which they both lived. One’s mode of life allowed trees and river to live symbiotically for many centuries, likely more. One saw the kinetic energy of the water as a means to quickly process felled trees, and was part of an industry that wipedout nearly all of Mississauga’s trees within the span of two centuries.

Personal Complicity in the 21st Century: A Brief Detour

For all the Missinihe’s glory, I don’t actually live within its watershed. I’m only few hundred meters outside of its boundary. I sometimes cycle to the library or a nearby United Church, and I can actually feel the struggle up slope and then the easy cruise down slope. The gradient is not as obvious driving in a car. That elevation peak on my bike ride (where I sometimes pause to catch my breath on my way to the library or church) constitutes the Missinihe watershed’s boundary. The church and library I like to visit lie within what is known as Subwatershed 4 (of Mullet Creek, which has a small natural shale waterfall called Wahoosh Falls further south that I have yet to check out, hopefully soon!), and so I live just outside the Missinihe’s western boundary.

As with most sorts of borders, Mississauga’s municipal boundaries are not based on a those of a watershed, but rather the historical vicissitudes of human development and administrative bureaucracy. Admittedly, the land I live on used to fall within Oakville (previously Trafalgar Township) before it was transferred to Mississauga sometime in the 1970s.

My home falls just within the Niizhozaagiwan (literally "having two outlets”, the Anishinaabeg name for the Sixteen Mile Creek) watershed, and a channelized creek running behind my home is a Niizhozaagiwan tributary known as the East-Lisgar Branch.

According to a 2010 report by Conservation Halton, it is among the unhealthiest tributaries in the watershed, with 100% of its extent categorized as ‘Poor’ according to the Index of Biotic Integrity (IBI). The report identifies “substantial residential development” surrounding this tributary as a primary reason for its poor health. In the words of Virginia Woolf, can you spotthe “[willow weeping] in perpetual lamentation”?

“Substantial residential development” is another way of saying me — I’m the problem. I only bring this up to iterate the obvious: that I live on land that implicates me fully in the sort of ecological destruction and dispossession I will explore in this post and others, and a destruction/dispossession that I am still a benefactor of, which I find really heartbreaking.

Traces of Ruins

As I write this, I’m sitting on a ‘Government of Ontario’ bus on my way back home to Mississauga. My eyes, as they wander up from my screen, land on another screen displaying the coming bus stops. “Millcreek Dr. @ Millrace Crt.” is second from the top. These names hint at European settler water mills, which popped up in large numbers in the nineteenth century, particularly along the Missinihe (Credit River). The names of these roads preserve a heritage that might seem quaint and charming to a local resident interested in this land’s history.

Yet, I would suggest, these ‘heritage’ mills are anything but quaint memories to the indigenous people coerced off the land in large measure from the ecological consequences these mills had on the Missinihe. This is a map of the number of mills that had popped up along the Missinihe (Credit River) by 1855, along with the rich forest distribution in 1806 just at the time the colonial state had ‘acquired’ land from the Mississaugas and just before the milling industry and other settler activities stripped the trees from the land (From “Mississauga: The First 10,000 Years”).

Traces of these mills are scattered all about in the naming of districts and neighbourhoods such as Erin Mills, Credit Mills, and Sawmill Valley, to name a few. Even in Toronto, York Mills, Old Mill, and Don Mills reflect the same sort of historical process. Mill St brewery’s name likewise is a trace of such a time, and there is an important connection between Meadowvale and the Distillery District, which I will get to in a later post.

Growing up, I used to play baseball at a park in Erin Mills, adjacent to the residential neighbourhood of Credit Mills. The parents and players used to call the park there “Q2”, because it contained two baseball diamonds, and also because they did not know how to (or bother to find out how to) pronounce the actual name of the park: Quineppenon (also rendered Kineubenae), named after the nineteethcentury Mississauga Chief of a community that lived on the Ashquasing (Twelve Mile Creek or Bronte Creek). Donald Smith explains in the Canadian Encyclopedia how Kineubenae in 1805 complained how White farmers:“when we encamp on the Land . . . drove us off and shoot our dogs and never give us any assistance as was promised to our old Chiefs.” Kineubenae consequently refused to sell any more land to the British, at least initially, saying: “the young Men & Women have found fault with so much having been sold before,: it is true we are poor, & the Women say we will be worse, if we part with any more.”

Leanne Simpson has astutely pointed out how it was the Anishinabeg women who understood that no more of their land should be sold away in treaties, as the Kineubenae record also reflects. They had the foresight to understand that the loss of land was the loss of almost their entire way of being. Yet their voices would ultimately be ignored. Leanne Simpson writes that an important part of restoring the land to its health also involves “a disruption of the capitalist industrial complex and the colonial gender system (and a multitude of other institutions and systems) within settler nations by challenging the very foundation of the nation-state and its relationships to the land and Indigenous nations.” And so for Simpson, centring the voices of women and gender minorities is vital, especially reflecting on how the exclusion of women from final treaty decisions was also a part of this dispossession story and a colonial incursion on indigenous gender relations.

With enough British pressure, Kineubenae eventually relented and signed the treaty on the second day of negotiations, retaining an interior section for his people, as well as securing a promise from the British that his people could keep the river mouths and their fishery rights there. It would only take a year following Kineubenae’s signing of the Toronto Purchase (Treaty 13) before his protests start surfacing in the record — protests about white settler encroachments on the land which the British promised to secure for their community in the treaty. Keneubenae talks for example about a White squatter who burnt down a cornfield of a Mississauga woman trying to support four children. This same settler also discharged so much soap and dirt into the river that it was negatively affecting migratory salmon movement upriver for spawning. This would only be the beginning of a long torturous destruction of this river that would eventually push the Mississaugas onto various reservations.

By 1820, the Canadian state bought up the remaining land. The Mississaugas requested that they could keep just three small reserves at the mouths of the Missinihe (Credit River), Ashquasing (Twelve Mile Creek), and Niizhozaagiwan (Sixteen Mile Creek). Around this time, the nineteeth century Chief Kahkewāquonāby (Peter Jones) was a young man (not yet a Chief) evangelizing to his people into the Christian faith (Methodism in particular) and convincing them to adopt more Europeanized living arrangements and agricultural techniques, which helped bring in the British aid, that would eventually dry up, as the will for the British to keep their promises waned. Donald Smith, in his portrait Chief Kahkewāquonāby (Peter Jones), weaves historical description with an imagining of Jones’ memory of his land before the treaties were signed:

“The great trees stood so closely together that they formed a canopy shutting out the sunshine and most of the daylight leaving the ground free of undergrowth. He remembered the salmon-rich streams and rivers that flowed from the forested interior down to the harbour. Now the area was extensively deforested. The building of dams for gristmills and sawmills now prevented Ontario salmon reaching their upper spawning grounds. Released sawdust blanketed the bottoms of streams and rivers. By the mid-1850s, the salmon runs had declined to the point of extinction.” (Mississauga Portraits)

The resource base they had depended on was depleted, and the pressure of European settlers was pushing in and intruding upon their land which was promised to them and which the British said they would help secure. They received no title deed to secure land tenure from the British government as they had understood would be the case in previous treaties. The aid that was promised them in these previous treaties was drying up and the poverty that did exist was reflective of all these losses that had accumulated during their time on the Credit Reserve.

Donald Smith opens his book Mississauga Portraits with a story about a painting of Chief Joseph Sawyer, who was chief at the time the Mississaugas finally had to leave the Missinihe behind, and the heartbreak involved with that farewell. Smith writes:

“Nearly forty years ago, I first saw the 1846 portrait of Chief Joseph Sawyer in the art collection of the Baldwin room of the Toronto reference Library. In the oil painting, the head chief of the Mississauga of the Credit appears strong and resolute, neither happy nor sad, without any apparent attitude… Since the winter of 1973–74, it had been fully restored. …during the varnish removal process, the conservator had found strongly masked areas of overpainting, particularly on the chief’s face. A touch-up had covered the artist’s original work. The overpainting mistranslated the painter’s interpretation of his subject’s facial expression. Now, the chief ’s look of dejection, deception, and betrayal clearly emerged. This is the accurate image. Despite repeated efforts, the Credit Mississauga failed to obtain security of tenure to their tract of six or so square miles along the Credit river. They needed this land base to build a self-sustaining community. The Mississauga believed that their 1820 treaty with the British had guaranteed them self-government as well as the protection of their remaining lands on the Credit River. It had not. On 14 November 2011, I viewed Joseph Sawyer as painted on the eve of the Credit Mississauga’s 1847 departure from the Toronto area. Chief Sawyer’s disillusionment was total. To see the original representation of head Chief Sawyer was a revelation, indeed.”

This story of the painting I find very reflective of the way this land’s history has so often been portrayed. Articles and interpretation boards of Mississauga’s cultural heritage so often obfuscate the pain underlying the ‘industrious’ and ‘pioneering’ activities of White settlers whose activities are rarely interrogated critically in relation to First Nations communities who so heavily depended on this land and its ecological health. I hope to explore a specific example of this obfuscation in my next post on Meadowvale Village (Ontario’s First Heritage District) and the way it is presented within predominant ‘cultural heritage’ discourse.

On this‘Canada Day’ it might be wise to reflect on the sorts of narratives the Canadian state perpetuates in its own interest, and how we are seduced into accommodating these veneers at the expense of the Indigenous peoples who have lived on this land for many thousands of years. The painting over of Chief Joseph’s face is but one of the many veneers that need to be carefully dismantled and re-examined, as we think critically about broken covenants that state power has dismissively ignored in exchange for‘recognition’ policy that too often has more to do with fashionable modes of self-congratulation than it has to do with restoring justice on this land that has been so rapidly destroyed. Everyday I cross the Missinihe, the Credit River, the‘trusting creek’ and feel the weight of broken promises and lost trust hanging over this land and its history, and am reminded there is so much work left to be done and so much broken that needs to be made right.

for its maker trusts in what has been made, though the product is only an idol that cannot speak

In late April and May, I had some tomatillos from the Port Credit Seed Library growing along side some Chadwick cherry tomato seedlings.

I hope to explore the history of these two plants some time in a post here, because they have a fascinating and somewhat intertwined history, and there’s quite an interesting story of global botanical exchanges behind the tomato itself, something that only arrived in Europe after Spanish colonizers encountered it in Latin America.

Anyways in May, I transplanted these sprouting friends of mine into an existing bed in my family’s backyard.

Not a proper vegetable bed, and not quite adequately spaced or exposed to sunlight, but hopefully a few of them will survive. I did not read extensively on best practices, nor did I follow the little that I did read, because I’m only borrowing space in a backyard that’s not really my own. Yet it’s not really my parents’ own either, in an important sense.

This process of transplanting seedlings into the land last month prompted me to think a little more about the history of this land. I often hear language along the lines of ‘look how far we’ve come’, as people discuss the vanishing of farmland in the areas surrounding my neighbourhood, because there is a very particular idea of progress presumed by most people who live where I live.

Machine as Metaphor

I last discussed on here Terry Eagleton’s suggestion that modernity’s ideology of progress does not know what to do with death, as death does not fit within its linear ‘upward’ narrative. Modernity’s fixation on ‘progress’ however is not only implicated in our collective repression of death, but also in the functioning of power and the way our species (particularly under ideologies like imperialism) asserts power over other species within the ecosystems we inhabit. Modernity is paradoxically emblematic of the sort of perverse romanticism that Haraway brought into doubt when she said the cyborg knows of no Edenic dust to return to. Wendell Berry’s “Unsettling of America” speaks of this attempt of modernity to recover Eden by way of the machine:

“having thus usurped the whole Chain of Being, conceiving itself, in effect, both creature and creator, humanity set itself a goal that in those circumstances was fairly predictable: it would make an Earthly Paradise. This projected Paradise was no longer that of legend: the lost garden… This new Paradise was to be invented and built by human intelligence and industry. And by machines. For the agent of our escape from our place in the order of Creation, and of our godlike ambition to make a Paradise, was the machine-not only as instrument, but even more powerfully as metaphor. Once, the governing human metaphor was pastoral or agricultural, and it clarified, and so preserved in human care, the natural cycles of birth, growth, death, and decay. But modern humanity's governing metaphor is that of the machine. Having placed ourselves in charge of Creation, we began to mechanize both the Creation itself and our conception of it. We began to see the whole Creation merely as raw material, to be transformed by machines into a manufactured Paradise.

And so the machine did away with mystery on the one hand and multiplicity on the other. The Modern World would respect the Creation only insofar as it could be used by humans. Henceforth, by definition, by principle, we would be unable to leave anything as it was. The usable would be used; the useless would be sacrificed in the use of something else. By means of the machine metaphor we have eliminated any fear or awe or reverence or humility or delight or joy that might have restrained us in our use of the world. We have indeed learned to act as if our sovereignty were unlimited and as if our intelligence were equal to the universe.”

Berry’s comments resemble the way Ivan Illich speaks of our addiction to machines and how it harbours within it an old addiction to slavery. Yet I find Berry here most resembling a theme that recurs a lot in various indigenous thought, particularly the intellectual Vine Deloria Jr’s work. Deloria, in a talk on Native American religious freedom said that:

“The vast majority of Indian tribes (and I don’t know off hand of any that would not hold this view), the vast majority knew, saw, felt, and experienced the universe as a living entity.

...And for thousands of years, living in the North American continent, traditional people, medicine people... were able to communicate with other forms of life, whether they were rocks, or trees, or birds, or other kinds of animals. They were able to communicate with areas of the land itself.

…Now our continent was invaded by your ancestors. A lot of them came over here seeking religious freedom, but they also came over here with a European form of the Michelangelo virus. And that was the belief that the universe operated like a machine. And that has proven immensely useful in science, but I’ve seen a great rebellion among the younger generation of scientists, that the analogy of the machine does not adequately describe the physical world. And if you treat the physical world as if it was a machine, from time to time it’s going to break down.”

Deloria, in “The Metaphysics of Modern Existence”, quotes Alvin Toffler in order to explain the prevalence of the machine as metaphor:

“we all learn from our environment, scanning it constantly—though perhaps unconsciously— for models to emulate. These models are... are, increasingly, machines. By their presence, we are subtly conditioned to think along certain lines. It has been observed for example, that the clock came along before the Newtonian image of the world as a great clocklike mechanism, a philosophical notion that has had the utmost impact on man’s intellectual development...Then we used the analogy of a clock to prove the presence of an absolute time within the universe, which was conceived to operate in the absolute manner we had been taught to expect.”

Deloria goes on to discuss Paul Tillich’s critique of the machine metaphor:

“Tillich suggested that the “man who transforms the world into a universal machine serving his purposes has to adapt himself to the laws of the machine. The mechanized world of things draws man into itself and makes him a cog, driven by the mechanical necessities of the whole. The personality that deprives nature of its power in order to elevate itself above it becomes a powerless part of its own creation.”

Or, in the words of Karl Barth (from Vol 3, Part 4 of his Church Dogmatics):

“the power that exceeds our real necessities of life, the power of technology — which basically has its own rationale and purpose, and which, in order to survive and be able to improve itself, must call forth ever new problems to solve — this had to become the monster that it largely is today, and ultimately, absurd though it is, it had to become a technology of disruption and destruction.”

So what is the problem that the institutions of power have constructed here in this land I live on now?

The Problem

Machines stand in for modern ideas of progress, because we have too often defined progress as the ability to increasingly instrumentalize the world around us, to increase its productivity according to the exclusive interest of ‘us’ humans, or more accurately humans with the most power in a ‘free’ market economy (i.e. humans with the most money).

The arrogant ideology of modernization is the same one that the indigenous intellectual Taiaiake Alfred references in his work. He believes Canada’s government policy regarding indigenous issues is perpetually misframed as a solution to a particular ‘problem’, that ‘problem’ being the lack of economic development in indigenous communities – a failure on the part of these communities to adequately ‘keep up’ with modern progress or to accommodate the liberal democratic state. This has historically been called the ‘Indian problem’.

An example: Duncan Campbell Scott was a bureaucrat in the Department of Indian Affairs for two decades (1913 to 1932), while also maintaining a reputable literary stature. Northrop Frye once wrote glowingly of Scott’s ability to write on subjects ranging from “a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh” to “the music of Debussy”. Frye, however, never mentioned how Scott, in many ways, perpetuated the ‘cultural genocide’ of indigenous communities. Scott once wrote:

“I want to get rid of the Indian Problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill.”

This aggressive integrationist model is behind all government policy that locates the problem of indigenous issues as one of ‘development’. This is a way the Canadian nation-state has acted as if it were God, and to make indigenous nations into its own image: ‘modernized’ and ‘developed’.

Taiaiake Alfred instead insists that Rosalee Tizya was right when she said the main issue and root problem is and has always been that indigenous land was stolen. The issue is not economic development nor even access to institutional state power. It was and is dispossession.

People Who Dwell at The Mouth of a Large River

Planting vegetables this summer, I am unavoidably planting vegetables on stolen land. Not only stolen, but also utterly ruined. The destruction of this land and its intricate ecological systems of interdependence was vital to its theft.

The the Anishinaabe academic, artist, and activist Leanne Simpson posed this question: “Why did my ancestors sign treaties after we lost the political power to have agency? They signed them because they were starving and they wanted me at the very least to be alive.”

Poverty in indigenous communities at the time of ‘treaty signing’ was not so much an issue of development, as much as it was about a tapestry of ecological connections that were torn apart, and a bounty of food that consequently disappeared. Survival and hunger (from a land stolen and destroyed) was the context of coercion that those treaties emerged from.

One of the most important food resources that disappeared in the 19th century was the abundance of salmon that once populated the area. In a footnote in “Dancing on our Turtle’s Back”, Leanne Simpson explains Mississauga’s etymology in this way:

“Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg means the Nishnaabeg people who live or dwell at the mouth of a large river. Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Elder Doug Williams explained to me that this is the way his Elders referred to themselves. Peterborough, ON, October 26, 2010. This is similar to Basil Johnston's Mizhi-zaugeek, Anishinaubae Thesaurus, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI, 2006, 14. Michi Saagiig or "Mizhi-zaugeek" people live at the eastern doorway of the Nishnaabeg nation, located in what is now known as eastern Ontario. According to Doug Williams, the word "Mississauga" is an anglicized version of Michi Saagiig or Mizhi-zaugeek.”

Leanne Simpson has also said that her people, the Michi Saagig, were salmon people. That was what they survived on. People have relied on the fish of the Missinihe river long before White settlers arrived. One of the most significant ‘pre-contact’ archaeological sites found in Mississauga (often called the Scott O’Brien site) is located around where the QEW highway intersects with the Missinihe (Credit River). The photo below (from“Mississauga: The First 10,0000 Years”) is a small sample of the 124 notched stone netsinkers found at the site, once used to catch fish in the Missinihe, back when the native species of salmon abundantly populated the river.

These netsinkers were found in two different caches on the site, one of them dating to the Middle Woodland period (~400 BCE to ~900 CE), conservatively over a thousand years old. People have evidently relied on the fish in the Missinihe for a long time, and within a century or two, these fish completely disappeared from the river.

What happened to the salmon? How did ‘the machine as metaphor’ shape the way 19th century White settlers treated the Missinihe river? And for what purposes and to what ends did they do so? Was it ‘worth it’? I hope to examine some of these questions in my next post here.