APRIL 2007
ACTIVISM AND RISK - LIFE BEYOND ALTRUISM
At this rate, soon, on this planet, we will all have to be either activists or victims.[1]
Denis G. Rancourt
February 2007
University courses do not prompt students to consider their role in shaping the world. That is why I facilitate a course about activism at the University of Ottawa.
Registered students span the spectrum of engagement in society, from experienced campus activists to environmentally conscious community members to mainstream-misinformed clients picking up a free elective. The material presented by guest speakers is compelling enough that all students question their place in society and the nature of their agency.
There is relatively little polarization between the right and the left in the class. Representatives of both political tendencies are genuinely interested in hearing the other side and in re-considering their positions in the light of the challenges presented, or are happy to reaffirm their positions having heard the other side. Instead, the main axis of polarization tends to be between liberals and radicals. Here I consider the origin of this tension.
I argue that the heart of the tension lies in opposite fundamental beliefs about societal structures and corresponding opposite allegiances with power: The liberals are elitists who believe that the system works (because it works for them) and that one does best to preserve and enhance the system, whereas the radical activists are egalitarians who believe that societal structures need to be transformed through action and direct democracy. This brings me to elaborate on the definitions of both activism and radicalism. Militant activists are not necessarily radicals and radicals are not necessarily activists, in fact most are not. There emerges the notion that risk is a necessary component of activism, without which one can be certain that one is not changing anything. Regarding the false dichotomy of working from within versus working from without, I point out that activists from within can be effective agents for change through organizing as well as through sabotage and overt or covert mutiny.
Seeking to define activism, right and left
Many students in my class first strive to define activism. One dominant tendency is to want to be all inclusive and to suggest that activism is acting out of personal initiative to “contribute positively” to society – being personally motivated to do good. Here, volunteers who help out at the local soup kitchen and students helping others with their homework, for example, are activists, as are people who recycle and who are vegetarians, according to their beliefs of what is good.
The latter definition is not the one in common usage and is not specific enough to be useful. The latter behaviours by themselves should instead be referred to as: volunteering, altruism, responsible behaviour, community service, ethical consumerism, and so on. These behaviours are the result of natural individual impulses to cooperate and to contribute to community.
There are also natural impulses to compete and to be socially territorial. Each individual chooses to adopt either an altruistic or a defensive stance depending on her perception of the circumstances, depending on whether the human environment is perceived to be either safe or threatening, respectively. We all draw boundaries between what we do to contribute and what we do for ourselves. Few commit suicide to avoid consuming or to avoid emitting CO2 by breathing.
Activism is something else. Activism is political. In activism one acts directly to change circumstances, change power balances, or change hierarchical structures. One does this either to achieve greater justice by moving society toward equally distributed power (left-wing activism) or to advantage or protect oneself or one’s group (right-wing activism).
The left assumes a safe environment where all people can be trusted to share in power, whereas the right assumes an unsafe human environment where one must protect oneself. Both environments exist, but the left has a tendency to believe that a safe environment in which cooperation thrives does or could easily dominate whereas the right believes that there is an inescapable tendency towards aggression, oppression, and competition, and that, therefore, the best strategy is to fight others and win.
Too often the cooperation versus competition debate ignores the facts that humans respond in kind and that shared decision-making power is the greatest known catalyst for learning and personal development. This has been shown, for example, in the participatory democracy movement that has transformed Brazil.[2] The “masses” are ignorant only to the extent that they have no power.
Altruism is not activism
An animal rights activist may treat her pets humanely or may be a vegetarian but she is an activist only because she directly confronts the system that abuses animals. She may do so via intense discussions, petitions, lawsuits, lobbying, outreach events, demonstrations, challenging authority, denunciation, direct action, civil disobedience, or some such direct means. In activism one confronts in order to change the norm.
A vegetarian may practice vegetarianism in political silence and simply adapt to all eating circumstances by abstaining from eating meat, whereas another vegetarian may defend her choices and engage in every occasion to communicate her reasons and to advance her justice-based political motives. The first is a vegetarian while the latter is a vegetarian and an activist – someone whose discourse is more than a personal style.
The same is true of volunteer work, charity, and so on. These behaviours are not activism by themselves. On the contrary, they often help maintain an unjust status quo. It has been shown, for example, that the non-profit and NGO sectors taken as a whole do more harm than good.[3] Similarly, activists can be effective and dedicated agents without adopting any particular lifestyle practices that are advanced by others. An environmental activist can drive a car if she judges this to make her activism more effective overall or for whatever personal reasons. A public school activist can choose to send her children to a private school, given the family circumstances or for whatever personal reason. What matters is dedication to activism, not personal survival, convenience, and lifestyle choices.
Obedient workers contribute to maintaining existing structures whereas, for example, whistle-blowers and employee justice organizers make a difference.[4] In this world of continental-scale exploitation, it is superficially satisfying to have a job where one does seemingly useful work, but being a dedicated employee in any such job does not directly change power structures to maximize social justice. At work, you only make a difference if you work for change by going outside of what is expected and imposed.[4] This is necessarily in opposition to the established order and therefore involves personal risk.[5, 6]
Essence of activism
Two essential components, method and goal, define activism. The method involves confronting authority directly or through defiant or non-subordinate assertion. The goal is to redistribute power in the workplace and society. Left-wing activists want to democratize power whereas right-wing activists want to secure power. Risk is a hallmark of activism because activism seeks to redefine power structures.
At the heart of activism is a belief that things are wrong, a belief that injustices are institutionalized or socialized and are maintained by those who benefit from the established structures. The justice of left-wing activism is social justice, in which one shares rather than steals opportunity and resources; it is social justice in its broadest sense including animal justice and environmental justice.
Justice is synonymous with democracy: distributed power and horizontal structures rather than concentrated capital and lap dog elites. Anything that moves us towards more democracy and the associated greater individual responsibilities is a step in the right direction. Employees taking power from bosses, students and professors taking power from the university administration, students taking power from professors, board members taking power from the chair, community members taking power from the board of directors … by whatever effective means … all move us toward more democracy.
Democratic influence derived from activism is both empowering and educational. It may be the most powerful form of education ever practiced. How better to learn what the system is really like and your place in it? How better to increase your knowledge and your influence? All progress of civil society has been catalyzed by and based in activism. Only strong popular movements have ever wrestled concessions from the ruling class.[7, 8, 9] Service intellectuals by comparison to activists are spineless and serve only to placate and deceive in order to strengthen the power structure and erode past gains.[5]
Resolving methods and motives
With the above definition of activism, we must make the important distinction between methods and motives. Both activists and hippies want a just society. The latter actors look for it by attempting to create ideal but somewhat isolated communities. They are morally supportive of activists, may show up at rallies, and often contribute to a community that activists need, but they are not activists except when they act to transform the broader society in order to defend their ideals.
Likewise, the extreme right wing and fascists use direct action to transform power structures toward aims that are the opposite of egalitarian. They are right-wing activists. But they are at least often honest and transparent in their goals.
Liberals are elitists. They believe that the system should be moulded by an enlightened elite, is primarily just, and needs only to be adjusted by following the guidelines for change that have already been established. They believe that the best method to obtain positive change is to negotiate and cooperate with power. They are allergic to direct action. The more the direct action is likely to be effective, the more allergic they are to it. They are a major force for maintaining present power structures and they go into overdrive when activists appear to be making gains.[5]
What emerges is a two-dimensional map. On one axis, from left to right, we have the justice and equality variable, going from distributed power and complete democracy (that is, the anarchist ideal [9, 10]) to plutocracy, fascism, and hierarchy. On the vertical axis, from bottom to top, we have the methods variable, going from direct action by whatever effective means to non-confrontation and cooperation. Activists are in the bottom left, hippies in the top left, fascists in the bottom right, and liberals in the top right. True conservatives are in the middle.
Too many observers confuse method and motives: There are four poles and a middle in the action-justice plane. What liberals offer amounts to cooptation, not genuine negotiation, which can occur only between power equals.
Too many observers confuse choice of methods (collaboration versus confrontation) with choice of focus (working from within versus working from without). One can be an activist either from within or from without or both; but one can only be a true liberal from within and only be a true hippie from without.
Liberal-radical antagonism
This brings us to an analysis of the liberal-radical polarization introduced in the first paragraphs. Liberals believe that the system is fundamentally sane and needs only to be improved using methods approved by the ruling elites who are needed to protect us from the ignorant masses, whereas anarchists or socialists (radicals for short) believe that the present system and society that hosts it are deeply flawed and must be changed in their structural roots, at the level of their dominant underlying assumptions or myths, and that people are capable of great collective wisdom and growth. Given these opposed perceptions of society’s architecture and fabric, it follows that liberals would insist on cooperation and “gradual change” [5] whereas radicals would insist (at least intellectually) on challenging the structures and rules themselves.
Radicals, by definition, go to the root of phenomena. In a capitalist society, in a plutocracy, anarchists and socialists are radicals. However, radicals are not necessarily activists. Indeed, most radicals are not activists. Many academics, for example, are left intellectuals well versed in alternative power structures, but they are not engaged in activism. They do not risk their privileged positions by taking action, nor are they defiant on campus [11], which is not a niche of participatory democracy.
The liberal-radical antagonism, therefore, is not between passivity and activism or fundamentally between cooperation and actual resistance. Instead, it highlights two opposing world views that include beliefs about the associated methods that follow from these views. One can get rather overheated about protecting one’s world view (and consequently one’s view of oneself in the world) even if one is not about to risk action that would change the world toward one’s ideal. Conversely, those already engaged in activism often don’t loose much time with this debate.[12]
When liberals say “we should work from within,” they mean we should work in such a way as to preserve and ameliorate the present structure rather than question it deeply. They also incorrectly imply that working from within necessarily means working with and in support of the system rather than against it: They do not recognise the legitimacy of sabotage as a method of fighting unjust rule in society, because they do not see present rule as mostly unjust.
Liberals believe that their methods lead to the most and best results, whereas radicals believe that the methods promoted by liberals cannot possibly increase justice overall because they legitimise and strengthen a system that is overwhelmingly unjust. Liberals tend to be insiders who have had many “productive” exchanges with other insiders. Liberals are leaders and enjoy joining the elite agents for “good”… whereas radical activists tend to be outsiders who are compelled to confront and to challenge. Rather than take power, left-wing activists make power via solidarity and creative contribution.
Real mutual threat
This is how I understand the visceral confrontations that I have observed between liberals and radicals (or between different left factions), as arising from the above fundamental differences in beliefs and perceptions, coupled with a correct mutual sense that the other side represents a significant threat to both position and goals.
It’s easy for radicals and egalitarians to understand the fascist position and to find effective ways to combat the fascist drive, but the liberal threat is more insidious. Conversely, radicals are the greatest threat to the ruling liberals of present First World so-called free democracies, because liberals can cooperate with the right to the degree that serves and preserves them, but radicals present a refractory opposition.
Left-wing radical activism is beyond good – risk is life
In conclusion, left-wing activism is what effective anarchists, socialists, progressives, and egalitarians do. These agents are radical in that they go to the root and identify the underlying basis of injustice. They are activists because they understand that standing up in defiance is the only way to exert influence in the direction of greater democracy. Personal risk is necessarily a consequence.
Finally, because defiance and confrontation are characteristics of activism, and because such action is limited by the risk involved, it is often the case that more risk equals more effect. This leads to the conclusion that we should take as much risk as will maximize the effectiveness of our activism. Whereas Third World activists often don’t need to consider how much risk they should be taking, because they often don’t have a choice if they are to survive, First World left-wing activists who want to be worthy of the title probably should consider actions that will involve more risk. Having survived and learned from the backlash, experienced activists live a life of action, anchored in community and solidarity, and instinctively know how far to push it. Proportionate rewards are guaranteed. Risk is life.[6]
References
[1] Jeff Schmidt as cited by the author. The present essay is partially based on a lecture given in the activism course, 2006: http://www.yayacanada.com/rancourt_lecture_11-10-06.html . Course material is posted at http://www.alternativevoices.ca/ .
[2] Rebick, Judy, 2000, Imagine Democracy. Stoddart, Toronto.
[3] del Moral, Andrea, 2002, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featdelmoral_nonprofit_p.htm
[4] Schmidt, Jeff, 2000, Disciplined Minds. Rowman & Littlefield.
http://disciplinedminds.com/
[5] Rancourt, Denis G., 2006, Gradual Change Is Not Progress. http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&
amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;code=RAN20060503&articleId=2377
[6] Murphy, Brian K., 1999, Transforming Ourselves Transforming the World. Fernwood.
[7] Zinn, Howard, 2001, A People’s History of the United States. Perennial Classics.
[8] Mitchell, Peter R. and Schoeffel, John, 2002, Understanding Power, the Indispensable Chomsky. The New Press, NY.
[9] Noble, David F., 2005, Beyond the Promised Land, The Movement and the Myth. Between the Lines, Toronto.
[10] Malatesta, Errico, 1891, Anarchy. New translation from the Italian by Vernon Richards, Freedom Press, 1974, 1994.
[11] Said, Edward W., 1994, Representations of the Intellectual. Vintage Books, NY.
[12] Rancourt, Denis G., 2006, Malalai Joya Breaks the Fear Barrier in Ottawa.
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2006/09/15/660/
The Library is on Fire
Wood as Cultural Signifier
============================
~M.W. Blackburn~
"The Library is on
Fire." These were the code words [during the German
occupation of France] for a parachute drop to the Cereste
maquis of the French Resistance -- words that acquired a
mysterious life when one of the containers exploded and
set fire to the forest, alerting the Gestapo to the
position of Rene Char's group. The Frenchmen barely
escaped with their lives.
And the poet thought the fire was proof of the power
of language to shape the world. "I believe in
the magic and in the authority of words," he told
his superiors in London, insisting the code be
changed.
-- Christopher Merrill.[1]
The way in which wood and fire and books and words
swap places in this singular event -- a supply drop
in the middle of World War II -- indicates the
strange [yet everyday] way one thing can become
another -- passing from object (wood) into language
(code) into substance (fire) again. And there are
infinite permutations. Here is another: woods to
paper to books to library -- the woods are a library.
But conversely, can the library return to its source
-- the forest? Can
it imitate and become once again the properties
from which it came? Under the trees' dense canopy,
the living occupants of nests, hives, and holes are
not a stable text -- their bodies join in sex,
the cells deviate, and bodies collapse into one
another, and once again, when an animal kills
another; the archived text,[2] beginning and ending
in paper, has no means to replicate these behaviors.
Hence the library, unlike the forest, only makes
record of mutation, copulation, and compost; it
cannot also exist as that which it is made of.[3]
[4]
Char's evaluation of this event gives primacy to
the authority of words: he believes that the object
(forest/library) is subject to and responds
accordingly to a word, in this case, the verb
(burning).[5]
(When the verb substituted forest for library, it
was as if it had sought a related noun when its
original subject could not be located.) But what if
this event is read otherwise -- that it is the
word that lacks primacy here; that this word
primarily serves as temporary shelter for the object
at hand. What if we claim that made objects will
always tend towards that which they originate --
shucking off their linguistic designation and
returning to the material source. And so, the
library fuses with the forest.
Perhaps America's dramatic decline in readers of
literature or poetry -- or any book for that matter
-- signals a more universal impatience with the
manner in which language seemingly gets in the way of
the authority and magic of the object.[6] Perhaps
literacy -- which includes the act of embedding an
object in a word and abstracting that substance
until it is no longer visually recognizable
-- was/will be just a brief bad dream; and so we are
eager to eschew words and begin and end with the
primacy of the object -- in this case the object is
wood.
According to _The American Woods_ (first printed in
1888 with delicate slats of wood inserted within and
last printed in 2002, with photographs instead of
those sanded splinters) wood starts out as
the substance 'from which trees are made' and is not
only turned into books but into buckets, lathes,
window shutters, matches, baskets, hammer-handles,
railroad sleepers, fence posts, fishing
rods, threshing-flails, walking sticks, ship's
masts, ribs and yards, cricket bats, barrels,
sledges, snow shoes, canoes, drinking vessels, salad
bowls, fishing net floats, cupboards, levers, mallets,
carts, rifle-stocks, ramrods, coffins, and plows, as
well as the thresholds of door ways, the hubs of
wheels, floorboards, pumps, gunpowder, wooden
cylinders, ropes, utensils, pencils, roof shingles,
telephone poles, planks, ship's spars, shoe lasts,
firewood, threshing machines, guitars, wharf piles,
charcoal, joinery, gymnastic apparatus, clogs, broom
handles, divining rods.
The tasks of wood seem endless, and as the
substance takes form after form, its cumulative
force engenders a collective hallucination:
it begins to seem that we, as a species, are the
embodiment of
industriousness, a people of action who make and
make and make, rather than a sentient life force
that values stillness and solitude (which is what
the library requires and what the woods permit). "A
dictionary begins when it no longer gives the
meaning of words, but their tasks," states
Georges Bataille in his one paragraph essay/entry
"Formless" from _Visions of Excess_. But the
various
tasks performed by the wood eclipse not so much the
meaning of the object, as its source. Wood, in its
raw and singular state, does not conjure wilderness
(remember the lumberyard, envision Home
Depot's plank and plywood section). When embodied in
a veneer, or say a tool handle, it does not even
muster the image of a greenhouse-raised sapling in
the mall parking lot section divider. Wood has
been transformed from object to task to color, a
decorative pattern rendered in plastic or pixels:
the wood paneled station wagon, the dark wood
(plastic) cafeteria trays, wood-colored hotmail
e-mail stationary (circa 1996), and the wood(s)
screensaver. What task is
this, what definition does it create? And what is
to come -- wood cell phone cases, wood eye shadow,
wood-colored tights, wood silicone dildo? So, it is
not long after a coppice is reduced to timber
that its wood is reduced to decorative pattern as
well, and our definition, our understanding of wood
and woods is reduced as well. The borrowed pattern
does not relay the metronome sway of a
branch released from a squirrel's weight as it
shifts from one branch to another. Nor does it
reveal the odor of a lightning struck tree -- sure,
there is evidence of its burn but no smell of sweet,
dark smolder.
Each striation in a tree's trunk represents one
lived year in the life of a tree. Unlike the
palm-reader's pseudo-reading of a man's past,
drought or flood, blight or fire can be accurately read
by analyzing the lines revealed in the stump. But
some of these wood lines are also a fiction; hand
painted on the surface of a banquet room bar or a
manufactured particleboard panel. Which trees
are these objects approximating? Sweet Locust,
Sassafras, Swamp Hickory, Pigeon Cherry, Old-field
Birch, Catalpa, Loblolly Bay, Red Titi, Sour Tupelo,
Swamp Privet, Cotton Fan Palm, Screw-Pod
Mesquite, Naked Stopper, Green Wattle, Pinon, Digger
Pine, Shad-blow, Common
Fig, Pig-Nut Hickory, Scarlet Oak, Dwarf Sumac,
Witch-Hazel, Double Spruce, Arbor-Vitae, Quaking
Asp, Necklace Poplar, Prince-wood, Alligator
Juniper, Fetid Buckeye, Gumbo Limbo, Mastic,
Bustic, Strongback or some nameless hybrid? These
are only 33 of the 350 trees described in _The
American Woods_. By asking which trees these objects
are approximating, I'm casting aside Bataille's call for
a definition that favors task over meaning. I know
what tasks these
trees perform for themselves and humans, but what
are they? What is a Swamp Privet? How do I recognize
the Digger Pine? A woman who grew up in the
California foothills told me I would be able to identify
a Digger Pine because it appears
"boneless." When I drove there I
saw swooping, slumped pines on grassy yellow hills.
But the Digger Pine remains there because housing
developments have not subsumed it and it isn't
considered good for much more than a roost for animals
to nest and eat. It would be to its detriment -- to
be good for anything other than growing in the soil
it's rooted in. Its wood pattern is not
approximated, delicately painted on any object. The
lines remain buried in the trunk until the digger
breaks into two, felled by its own age.
Returning to the paragraph that exhaustively lists
wood products until the sum total of its pervasive
utility is glaringly apparent, I begin to see how
this paragraph doubles as a dictionary entry of
sorts, one that delineates the materiality of human
survival; our dependence on objects; the way in
which we rely on wood.[7] It surprises us, the
hundreds of instances in which we have morphed
wood into things that in no way resemble trees. We
are surprised because the slender grain of the wood
-- the imprint of the objects former incarnation --
is not always visible in the end product and
we forget the relationship. Cardboard, gunpowder,
medicine or black dye -- the grain is dissolved in
the production process and the origin point is
swallowed.[8]
But what do we do with this information-- that the
nature of objects can be as abstract and liquid as
words? When the primacy of objects -- the authority
of things -- is destabilized, what changes in
our daily reality? Is there a renewed sense of
agency -- that we triumph despite a constant flux
-- or is there a deeper dread, that survival is
contingent on an ever-shifting utilization of material
accident? Seventy odd years ago, when the code
became prophetic and the forest burned, was it fear
of the body terrorized that made Char want to claim
the primacy of words, alone? I imagine that objects
-- shrapnel, corpses, shelters, and bodies -- are so
psychologically freighted in battle -- that it feels
necessary to sublimate one's attachment to these
soft vulnerable carapaces -- to deny all objects and
laud the word. This way in which Char -- in a kind of
projected grief -- created a beautiful and false
pillar of abstraction to cling to reminds me of the
obverse -- twin and twisting tree houses built of
driftwood on the coast of California. A father built
the tree houses when his son died at sea. They
towered up fragile -- a careening and rickety wood
helix -- but they did not protect and could not
preserve anything that had been lost, flesh or word.
The world still existed beyond the tree house and
the coast -- furious and charged, shaking.
Notes:
------
[1] Char, Rene. _This Smoke That Carried Us:
Selected Poems of Rene Char_. Trans. Dubroff,
Susanne. Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, USA,
2004.
[2] The archive, unmediated (that is, without
intervention) can begin to mutate/lactate/mutilate
with use -- with an exterior impetus that mines
information, supplements and underlines. Yet the word
archive implies closed; a repository for inactive
materials; ultimately, a mausoleum of sorts.
[3] No matter how much we may yearn for equivocal
relations, a symbiosis of sorts that underscores
connectivity; it doesn't exist here.
[4] It is arguable that the library does propagate
ideas. The reader consumes the library (mentally) --
leaving the physical body of the library intact.
Another reader makes notations- underlining in pen
and pencil. An arguable mutation. Some leave notes
within the book. Some salivate and eat and the pages
decompose. There are those who insert the sharp
corner pages under the fingernail, rooting out
the dirt and the book's edge is now dulled and
grimy. Furthermore, there are those who eat books.
Shelly Jackson, author and artist, raises the bar
when she writes that she has inserted book pages into
her vagina.
[5] A hierarchical power dynamic is suddenly and
subtly instated -- mute forest (untrue) and spoken
word (that, in all reality, we know not to ignite
any substance.) What happens is that nature
is determined to be passive (what's new?) and man (a
man at war) is the active agent.
[6] We crave the unmediated manna (breast, gun,
sugar, fat, car). Yet doesn't the image of the
object both sustain the desire as well as create a
remove? But a different remove... a distillation instead
of diffusion.
[7] And not on words?
[8] The physical utility of these objects --
storing, killing, healing, and coloring -- preempts
the nostalgia for sylvan retreats or ancient
woodland origins that is sometimes triggered by the
appearance of wood grain -- fake or real.
Works Cited:
------------
Bataille. Georges. _Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings 1927-1939_. Trans. Stoekl, Allan.
Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, USA, 1985.
Char, Rene. _This Smoke That Carried Us: Selected
Poems of Rene Char_. Trans. Dubroff, Susanne.
Buffalo, New York: White Pine Press, USA, 2004.
Hough, Romaine Beck. _The American Woods. Exhibited
by Actual Specimens_. Complete 1-14 vols. Lowville,
New York: Pub., and sections prepared by the author,
1893-1928.
--------------------
M.W. Blackburn recently taught "Dropping Out:
The Aesthetics of Disappearance" and
"Visualizing Aggression: Documenting America
at War" at the Art Institute of Chicago.
"This Dream; This Frequency", a work that
consists of four scattered AM radio
transmitters broadcasting a mix of the nocturnal
dreams of American soldiers in Iraq and fragments of
ancient Mesopotamian dreams leaked into car radios
in Chicago. www.bonfirebitumin.com
is an evolving time-based visual work that
investigates notions of self-rescue and
how landscape is oft commandeered for this purpose.
Additional publications: _Aperture_, _Brooklyn
Rail_, _Cabinet Magazine_, _Loudpaper_, and _Women
and Performance_.
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