The G20 Riots Are a Calculated Political Theatre Piece

Blogging takes a backseat to thesis writing, research, and manuscript editing, so I haven’t followed through on my promise to tell a bunch of funny and insightful stories about my conference trip to Montreal. Taco Tuesdays at NL Girl House, Rue Sherbrooke will have to be immortalized somewhere else for now. There are more pressing issues at hand.

This time last week, I was considering going to Toronto today to join the G20 protests. I’ve talked a fair game about my more radical political views before, and now I had a chance to put some of my philosophy into action, at least in terms of political theatre. Watching events unfold in that city, I’m glad I stayed home, from the perspective of my physical safety. From the perspective of my political beliefs, I’m a little regretful.

Admirable, if smug, leftist activist leaders deride militant protesters as accomplishing nothing but property destruction, violence against people, and the counter-productive public relations that depicts all leftists as thugs, morons, and arsonists. Anti-capitalist groups worthy of praise deem the Ontario and Canadian governments as needlessly provocative, the extent and secrecy of their emergency police powers showing that establishment forces were spoiling for a fight, and are glad to have struck a genuine blow against those struggling for a more fair society in which all people can prosper and live freely.

I can’t disagree with ideas like that, especially when I see video like this.



I examine this situation and perceive a clear narrative. Everyone knew that this G20 meeting would be focussed on global austerity plans for many of the world’s richest nations. These rich nations, Canada included, have long been manipulated by a piratical investment banking establishment into running their governments at massive deficits, funding enormous national debts from which global financial institutions make the most profit. There are even ways in which an investment bank can profit from the complete collapse of a well-off country’s economy: buying insurance against the collapse of a country’s economy. And those economic collapses happened because of over-reliance on financial strategies invented by investment industry chicanery anyway.

Austerity economies in the world’s richest countries would only lead to increased suffering for poor human populations inside and outside those countries. The investment industry also profits from the deregulation of capital investment that comes with austerity economies. So naturally, advoactes for the poor would protest these plans at the most visible moments to communicate their message that there must be other ways of organizing an economy. Such a moment is a G20 summit where these international arrangements are taking shape. However, there is always a militant fringe to the leftist advocacy movement (just as there is for any political movement: observe, for example, the rural militias of the United States). This militant fringe usually causes property destruction, but has lately been overwhelmed in public relations by the sane organizations. I think one of the main reasons few militant anarchists have appeared at recent summits is that these summits have been held at isolated locations, and travelling there is very expensive. Most people who don’t believe money should exist have very little money for travel, so the militant left fringe can only arrive in small numbers.

However, the downtown core of Canada’s largest city is extremely accessible, and it’s cheap to get there. Everyone in Ontario comes to Toronto. Even a hitchhiker would find it easy to get a ride to a city as central to a country’s life as Toronto. Ask a driver if she’s going to Kananaskis and she’ll ask you for directions, and whether that’s the real name of a town. Knowing that huge numbers of people will be able to assemble for protests, the government then creates an enormous security apparatus, effectively shutting down an entire city for a long weekend. Every government spokesperson justifies the expense and enormity through talking points about the ineviably violent nature of leftist protestors.

A climate of mutual provocation is created. A brutalizing government can justify its large-scale security apparatus in an absurdly conspicuous location, while using the spectacle to discredit leftists and their sympathizers as violent criminals. Meanwhile, brutalized leftist protesters can decry the inevitable government crackdown and win sympathizers for their own causes who deplore government and police overkill. Watch the video again, and you can see both narratives unfolding. The police act in a manner that’s inherently threatening, standing in a street with full riot gear. And the protesters are singing the Canadian national anthem, an act of patriotism aimed at the police, who they hope to depict as having betrayed the democratic ideals of Canada. They sing the words to ‘O Canada,’ but what they communicate is, ‘Charge! I dare you!’ And the police gladly oblige. Both government and police, peaceful and militant leftists, have set a trap for each other, and each oblige the other by walking into their enemy’s traps.

My old friend Sheena is a journalist in Toronto who’s been reporting formally and informally on the protests / riots / crackdowns. She tweeted something earlier today that I found quite insightful. She was incredulous at protesters marching down the streets of Toronto chanting ‘These are our streets!’ when most of them had travelled in from other cities around the country. Again, it’s easy to travel to Toronto.

You could hear a statement of solidarity with the people of what they consider a besieged city, as when people around the world declared themselves New Yorkers after September 11, or how sympathizers with the revolutionaries of May 1968 would delcare themselves Parisians. Or one could hear the insincerity of a group of protesters callously manipulating their audience into sympathy by means of a charismatic image.

Yes, Toronto has become a war zone, with hundreds of people imprisoned by a police force with authoritarian levels of special powers. But a leftist today is savvy, knowing that police brutalization will play directly into their larger goals of discrediting a police force and a conservative government. In order to win, sincerity must be embraced and denied. A protester who travelled from other provinces, other countries, must genuinely believe that Toronto is their city, the site of this confrontation that is a defining moment of a political movement. And that protester must provoke the security apparatus that has been built to brutalize them, must manipulate their audience into believing in their cause, that their opposition to capitalism and the police institution is genuine. That’s why a protester sings the national anthem at a line of riot police: they know the cameras are there, and they know what an amazing image that is.

The advocates for global capitalism and heavy industry have long known how to manipulate the undecided masses into believing that advocates for social justice and environmental responsibility are enemies, terrorists, evil. Nixon created the blueprint for that when his administration destroyed the liberatory movements of the United States in the 1960s. They manipulated ordinary people’s fear of change, fear of the end of the old, comfortable order (comfortable because it’s old).

But advocates of social justice and environmental responsibility have learned these techniques of manipulation as well. We manipulate ordinary people’s fear of repression by state power, fear of democracy being hijacked by corporate interests, fear of surveillance, fear of death. I say this not to discredit social justice and environmentalism. The word manipulation carries nasty connotations, but it’s the very tool of politics and society itself. Read this again and substitute persuasion for manipulation.

Tools for achieving a political end are ethically neutral: they can be employed by any advocate of any cause. The ethical worthiness of a movement should be judged on its goals, not its methods. The cause of the protestors of global capitalism is the betterment of life on Earth.

Strikes and Music Leads to Thoughts on My Political Art

The expectation after my post last week was that this would be about some of the rest of my University of Edinburgh trip, but I’ve found myself in the middle of a labour action by the McMaster teaching assistants this week. I’m doing my twenty hours per week on the picket lines, though despite the university administration’s stonewalling, I don’t think the strike will last very long. This is more of a tangent about my art and the ideas that motivate it than the strike itself, which is being covered to death.

When I talk to people in cars giving them news about the negotiations and what our demands are, one piece of information that I’ve found especially compels them is the amount of money that TAs with families of their own have to pay for their family-rate health insurance. It’s too high, and TAs’ pay scales are mediocre enough without having these expenses on top of it. I can afford it, but I have no dependents, cheap rent, and no real expenses other than basic life.

So even though I’m on the picket lines to help the TAs who need help more than I do, I can’t help but feel disingenuous precisely because I’m fine. Who am I to speak for people in genuine financial trouble? Who am I to speak for people who go to sleep every night wondering if they’ll be able to feed their kids the next day, or next week? It’s condescending for a comfortable person to speak for someone in that situation.

Tonight, I’ve been listening to a free mixtape K’Naan (in my view probably the best rapper in Canada) and J.Period made, The Messengers. It’s a series of remixes of songs by Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan, interspersed with K’Naan discussing the role these artists played in his life, and in the political, social, and personal movements they sparked at the height of their careers. I downloaded it a while before I left for Edinburgh, and its music has stuck with me for weeks. K’Naan has crafted these remixes into duets, linking the African democracy movements, global anti-poverty activism, and the civil rights movements of the twentieth century to the political conflicts of the current time.

Among of the most affecting and powerful songs are a duet on “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” where Dylan’s verses alternate with K’Naan’s raps about global poverty, African gangsterism, and endless cycles of violence; and his remix of Bob Marley’s “Jonny Was a Good Man,” where K’Naan creates new verses between Marley’s chorus, describing a traumatized Iraq veteran who refuses to follow his orders and return to yet another tour, including graphic scenes of children mutilated and killed by the bombing raids of the soldier’s own army.

K’Naan grew up in Somalia through the collapse of the government. He fell in with gangster life in Baltimore, and only survived after the American INS chased his family to Toronto, where he discovered his musical talent. He can tell these stories because these are stories of genuine violence and hardship that he overcame. As a novelist, I want to write about these stories: these are the stories that matter today. Just as Bolaño can write about the crimes of the Latin American dictators because he lived there, and fled from there; just as K’Naan can write about the violence of Somalia because he lived that violent life: these are the stories of our era.

Contrast this to me. I’m a white male from an upper middle class background. The only stories that I can legitimately write about are breakups and love stories, tales of other rich white people who don’t get what they want. This is the situation of a great many artists in the West who want to tell important stories about the violence and injustice of our world. But our affluent lives insulate us from this injustice: we don’t have the rights to tell stories that really matter. The only pain in our lives comes from breakups; we know nothing of violence. I would be condescending to try to tell these stories, and I would probably get it all wrong precisely because I haven’t lived it.

I understood my solution as I wrote my first novel, A Small Man’s Town, my book about Newfoundland. My characters, especially in their youth as leftist student activists, interacted with people from genuinely violent regions like Palestine and Colombia. And I worked out how a person like me, who has never known violence or had to overcome it, can write about that violence. The very quest to avoid condescension itself, striving to escape being part of the problem, straining against the indifference that comes with wealth, is the awakening political consciousness of the wealthy.

It’s a kind of political shame that we have lived for so long without knowledge of our luck, and our unwitting roles in the exploitation of others. The political task of the affluent in this world is to become mindful of the suffering of others, and accept that this cannot be our world. I don’t think I’m articulating this concept well, but I want at least to try, to make one first attempt to understand this political consciousness the longs for redemption for his mindlessness to suffering, yet accepts that it is impossible.

Perhaps a New Concept Has Been Made

I was listening to the BBC’s Start the Week podcast this morning, and their central guest was Amartya Sen, who was promoting his new book, The Idea of Justice. He talks in the show about how he departs from the traditional ways of discussing justice as a guiding ideal. Instead, justice is an understanding of the world as one lives in it. One sees justice and injustice in the order of the world around you, if only you pay attention. You could call it a concept of justice as imminent to the world, instead of a transcendent ideality.

This is especially intriguing to me, as the transcendent character of most approaches to justice is exactly what alienates me from them. Transcendent justice has that flavour of the absolutely perfect to which we mere mortals can never attain. Implicit within it is the devaluation of the world in which we live and the valorization of that which is not human, even though they are our ideas. It separates thought from action, dismissing action as mere empirical imperfection. Transcendent frameworks of ethical ideals I think contradicts the very point of ethics, which is worldly action.

But Sen’s concept of justice as he articulated it on Start the Week was especially intriguing, and could very well revolutionize the way the philosophy of justice and ethics is done, if he achieves in it all that he claims to achieve. Of course, there will be some who don’t understand his concept of imminent justice, because they have become so used to thinking of justice as a transcendent ideal that their minds are closed to any approach that denies a premise so fundamental to them. Of course, that would seem, at this cursory stage, to be the very point of Sen’s concept of justice. You will only understand justice if you pay attention to the world and what the world can offer. If you persist in what you have learned and do not take seriously the novel or the strange which is present around you, then you will know nothing.