Last night we took to Vancouver’s streets to greet the arrival of the Enbridge Pipeline Joint Review Panel in our city. We numbered more than a thousand, and we were loud, boisterous, and energized. We marched and we surrounded the hotel where the review was underway, and we most definitely made our voices heard. Indigenous elders spoke passionately about their opposition to the on-going robbery of their lands and the destruction of the earth with which, they reminded us, we are all directly connected—despite what hundreds of years of colonization and boundless resource extraction suggests.

Today, with tired feet and back, a slight ringing in my ears (we really were LOUD), and a persisting good feeling in my heart, I’m working through some thoughts about environmental activism, indigenous struggles, and, well, the fact that I’m a settler engaging with these things. This might be a bit rambling, and a bit long, so my apologies in advance.

1

As I continue to think through the complexities of being a white settler on Turtle Island—complexities brought to the fore by the recent Idle No More movement, and the recourse of the Harper government to an old-school strategy of colonization and appropriation—I find myself needing to come to terms with my own racist and colonial habits, brought on by a lifetime of settler privilege. It’s easy enough, intellectually, to talk about “complicity.” But what do such things mean at an emotional and lived level, and what do we do about them? I am also drawn into this contemplation by the fact that the common settler response—even to simply being referred to as a settler—is one of denial (don’t blame me for what my ancestors did) and wilful blindness (we’re all equal before the law now—why should one group of people receive special treatment?).

My ancestors were for the most part poor coal miners from Northern England and Scotland who came to the west coast of this country to work in the coalfields of Nanaimo and Cumberland on Vancouver Island. The practices of the coal barons—employing Chinese and Japanese labourers, whose wages were around half of that paid to European workers, to undercut union organizing and strikes—added to the built-in racism that comes with colonization and nineteenth century European ideas about non-Europeans. I grew up hearing such unconscious, largely xenophobic comments from my maternal grandmother’s mouth (her father was the last coal miner in our family), as well as other family members.

In junior high school in Victoria there was only one native kid that I can remember, and he and I once got into a shouting and shoving match after a lunchtime floor hockey game. He was giving me a hard time about the easy goal he’d scored when I was in net, I shot back a racial epithet, and he more or less threw me across the room. Simple as that, and no doubt far from being an extraordinary or uncommon experience. And yes, we were “normal” teenage boys willing to thoughtlessly say or do pretty much anything. But in retrospect I am  fairly stunned and appalled by the fact that, while this is the only time in my life I can recall saying anything overtly racist like this, it came so quickly, easily, and without any forethought. It was the first “weapon” I reached for when faced with this minor conflict.

Skip ahead a few years and I am nineteen and working on a fishing boat in Tofino (my girlfriend was back in Victoria, pregnant at 18, and I was either escaping for a few months or trying to make money to support my about-to-be family). Every morning we set out from the dock at Tofino and crossed to the Nuu-chah-nulth village of Opitsaht on Mears Island to pick up an indigenous kid about my age who was also working on the boat. It fell to me to walk along the beach from the dock (I remember there were often some shaggy looking cows grazing on seaweed) to the kid’s house (the houses were all in a line, facing the beach, on top of a midden heap that an archaeologist working there one day told me was probably 5000 years old).

The kid was often sound asleep when I got there and I had to wake him up. Sometimes there were other young people asleep in the almost bare room the front door opened onto, lying about on a bare floor littered with empty beer cans and busted couches. At least this is what I remember, after more than 25 years. My co-worker always seemed to simply pop up off the floor, fully clothed and ready to go. We’d then spend the next 12 or 13 hours on the sea, bobbing up and down in the rain, and that kid was always smiling, never feeling sick, always working hard. The next day I’d find him again amidst a heap of empty beer cans.

I wonder about the colonial history that links these two experiences of indigenous peoples. How could you grow up on their land, and only know them through racialized conflict and the immiseration of their communities? The answer of course is that that is pretty much the extent of many settler’s experiences of indigenous peoples (if they have any contact at all)—and that this is indeed what our colonization of their land has resulted in.

Of course I have had other experiences of indigenous people. My father, an avid canoeist, knew native paddlers (I remember the Charlie brothers, from Cowichan, whose speed and power my father marvelled at). Working in Tofino in the mid-80s I met the artist Roy Henry Vickers, and helped him move into his new gallery, The Eagle Aerie. I have, especially in recent years, met many indigenous writers and artists, activists and powerful community leaders and elders, with whom I have worked on various projects, and from whom I am constantly learning. But the point here isn’t simply to list “natives I have known.” It’s to get at the burnt connections between what happened yesterday, what’s happening now, and what we need to do tomorrow.

2

The Occupy movement, in which I was involved, has often rightly been criticized for its failure to properly position itself in relation to (or else its blatant ignorance of) indigenous struggles. Harsha Walia recently wrote (on Facebook):

“Idle No More ain’t Occupy. It’s all those voices rising up that many in the Occupy movement resisted when they/we called on Occupy to decolonize, learn anti-oppression, and understand the systemic differences of inequality amongst the ’99%’. Idle No More is what Occupy perhaps aspired to be, but couldn’t fully be (in many, though not all places) because of it’s lack of grounding in the lived experiences of those communities most marginalized.”

Perhaps, for some, Occupy was necessarily an experience of white settlers meeting the ugly fact of their ignorance and privilege. I certainly hope so—because that needs to happen, to actually approach the “aspirations” Walia notes here—aspirations to actually change the systemic and racialized exploitation of this earth and its peoples. Certainly my own experience of organizing with Occupy Vancouver Environmental Justice, in the months after the occupation, was one of increasing focus on indigenous principles, protocols and leadership. Which is to say, for all the parallels the media wants to draw between Occupy and Idle No More, the key connection for me would be that Occupy, for many, was the needed wake-up call that enabled a number of settlers (my self included) to begin to see what indigenous struggles are at the core, and to see that such struggles are the core of all our efforts to change the course of our self-destructive social and economic systems.

Chris Hedges, in a recent truthdig article, offers a good snapshot of the big historical picture.

“The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism.”

I’m not quite as pessimistic as Hedges—but at times I come close. But the current movement against pipelines and tar sands expansion gives me hope. Because, whether or not we stop a particular pipeline (and I think it’s crucial we do, and I do think we will, stop Enbridge and Kinder Morgan), what feels even more important right now, for our long-term survival, is the active exhibition in the public sphere of an alternative vision to the paltry and exploitive model proffered by the likes of Harper; the emergence in settler consciousness of the stakes of indigenous struggles and the painful continuance of colonization; and the awareness of the interconnection of capitalism, colonialism, and climate change as a single historical process whose inheritors we all in diverse ways are.

3

But getting back to those ancestors of mine. They weren’t all poor coal miners from England’s own margins (despite the fact I’ve always thought of them that way). Family lore suggested that my paternal grandfather was born “near London,” but that the family had only recently moved into the area before relocating to Canada. Some recent research reveals that both my great grandfather and great great grandfather were also residents of London suburbs, the latter, a Thomas Hamilton Collis, born in 1833 and listed in the 1881 census as a “warehouseman” living in Croydon. A warehouseman wasn’t just someone who worked in a warehouse (although that is possible); it also referred to someone who owned or managed a warehouse, which is what I think Thomas Hamilton Collis did.

So what? In the capitalist system, reasonably few people are by definition “capitalists” (the owners and investors of surplus capital). But a host of people work on the periphery of this system, buying and trading and benefitting from the single goal and purpose of this system: the expansion of markets and the ever-increasing accumulation of wealth. Colonization (the forceful expansion of new markets and the expropriation of land and resources) is one of the foundation stones of this capitalist system. Not all my ancestors came to the west coast of North American as hapless coal miners; some of them came as opportunistic shopkeepers. All were directly or indirectly cogs in the wheel of colonization and accumulation.

What we, settlers, finally have to learn is that we are at the ragged edge of a long arcing development that has subjugated, displaced, and exploited indigenous peoples and brought the earth to the edge of destruction. And that this is not simply a question of “what happened yesterday”: it’s a matter of what we continue to do today, and what the consequences will be tomorrow. As the saying goes, “activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.” Much of that “rent” needs to be paid in indigenous solidarity, decolonization, and settler awareness. It needs to be paid in transgenerational thought and planning, which has the future consequences of what we do today in the forefront of our consciousness. This was what Tsleil-Waututh Chief Rueben George reminded us of so powerfully outside the Enbridge hearings last night.

The importance of indigenous leadership in this fight—the centrality of indigenous issues to any struggle against contemporary capitalism and its attendant environmental destructions—is that this gives voice to the world 500 years of capitalist-colonial exploitation has attempted to swallow up, rearing its head, letting us know that the struggle isn’t over yet, and that another world is possible—in fact, its an absolute necessity. And its possibility lies in the fact that it has always been right here, resisting its colonization and marginalization. Idle No More is its current expression. We should be heartened by settler participation in Idle No More, but we should also be wary of how much ignorance, privilege, and hate still streams from the mouths of many settles. There is still much work to do.

We cannot change the past. But we can’t ignore or deny it either. We need to know it. We need to know exactly what the system that we are a part of, and from which we benefit, does to peoples and places. And we need to find a way through this knowledge to a new relation to each other and to the lands on which we live and work.

I’m trying to get there, this morning after an invigorating protest, my back aching as I type, my ancestors everywhere I look watching I think hopefully as we try to dig our way out of the hole they unwittingly dug.

In September this year, addressing the United Nations, Morales offered an interpretation of the “Mayan Apocalypse” that resonates with what has been building around the world in recent years—the vision that we need to keep building if we are truly going to imagine not the end of the world, but the end of the world capitalism has built. Morales said, in part:

I would like to say that according to the Mayan calendar the 21 of December is the end of the non-time and the beginning of time. It is the end of the Macha and the beginning of the Pacha, the end of selfishness and the beginning of brotherhood, it is the end of individualism and the beginning of collectivism – 21 of December this year. The scientists know very well that this marks the end of an anthropocentric life and the beginning of a bio-centric life. It is the end of hatred and the beginning of love, the end of lies and beginning of truth. It is the end of sadness and the beginning of happiness, it is the end of division and the beginning of unity, and this is a theme to be developed.

I hope Morales is right. Because what he announces here is not only the end of capitalism, but the birth of the common.

★

1.

Looking back over the past year and a half, what I see (amongst occupations and the indignant especially) is an attempted response to the combined global ecological and economic crisis convulsing the entire world—born of a dawning awareness of how these two aspects of the crisis, the ecological and the economic, drive each other forward in a sort of diabolical feedback loop, though the real motor of destruction behind both crises is the idea that constant growth is both necessary and desirable—the means and ends of social production—to which everything—air water labour life—can and must be sacrificed.

This response took the form, primarily, of a recognition that system change (or revolution, as we used to call it!) is the only “realistic” starting point for solving the global crisis: the current socio-economic system only really serves profit accumulation and the minority of people who are controlling the system in order to ensure their continuing unequal accumulation of profit. This leads to and is in fact predicated upon exploitation, oppression, and environmental destruction: it is always creating crises, depleting, exhausting, and destroying human and natural “resources.” And the situation is becoming starker, and thus clearer, all the time—in part because of certain ecological thresholds that we are now crossing.

To effect system change, the Occupy and Indignado movements made one simple (and, in and of itself, totally insufficient) ambit: if democracy means the direct participation in public affairs of all of society—not just the powerful, wealthy, and influential 1%—in today’s social movements, the public sphere itself must be occupied, and the public encouraged to go “on strike” against the current unsustainable and unequal system. It was a demand for real democracy now (democracia real ya!), made manifest by the near-continuous presence of people in the streets.

2.

But the meaning and shape of democracy is a site of struggle once again—and maybe this is one of the real gains of the past 18 months. Democracy is a socially evolved means of managing constant change, because human life is always undergoing social transformation. Other historical modes of governance—monarchy, oligarchy—are premised upon maintaining stasis, not managing and enabling change.

Democracy’s main method of managing change has been supposed to be the “free and open” election. The problem lies here: free and open elections are as rare as hens’ teeth. What we actually have today is an inept democratic system behind which—working the controls of their power, wealth, and influence—lies a corporate oligarchy, actively resisting and frustrating change. This obviously happens through ideological controls (the media, education, etc.), but hegemony is also enforced structurally through there only ever being one of the oligarchs or their dependents to vote for. The “people’s candidate,” if such a person exists, never even makes it into the race. Money, and the institutional politics it drives, makes sure of that.

Representative democracy, with once-every-four-years elections, has, over time, proven itself an inadequate tool for managing social change, to say the least. So the Indigando and Occupy movements went back to the drawing board—back to ideas of direct participatory democracy, back to the agora and the town square—to find out if there still is a “public sphere” to be resuscitated.

3.

This could only be a first step, a gesture, a cry born of a terrible lack, an open demand for “something else,” for an alternative to be possible and thinkable. For too long this has been the exact problem: there’s not only no alternative to capitalism, the very possibility or thought of alternatives has been forbidden and foreclosed, written off and ridiculed. The very starting point. This is where democracy continues to be part of the problem: in the west at least, its definition has been fused with the definition of capitalism, and the only real freedom democracies stand for, and act in the name of, is the freedom of the market. Thus we find ourselves in a situation where democracy, and much of the discussion about democracy, is nothing more than a false front to the status quo—a “wag the dog” sort of diversion while the money keeps accumulating inequality keeps growing and the wars and pollution keep spreading.

For now, calls for a return to a purified or re-defined democracy are acting as a sort of placeholder for the “something else” the Occupy and Indignado movements were demanding. But the letter of this law—the etymology of “democracy” as “the people rule”—could indeed lead to a real alternative to the capitalist system—a separation of “democracy” from “capitalism,” of “freedom” from “the market.”

That “real alternative” resides in the way “democracy,” in the recent social movements, has been redefined as “the common.” This is where the “we are the 99%” rhetoric leads, what it brings, conceptually, along with it. A democracy, we are being reminded, ought to be governance of the commons, by the commons, for the commons. Not, as we seem to be witnessing now (and throughout history, in various forms) governance (for purposes of containment and exploitation) of the commons by and for the elite 1%.

A focus on the commons reminds us that capitalism is based upon the expropriation, enclosure, and privatization of the common—on the few stealing from everyone else, and the unsustainable (because without limit) exhaustion of the commons formed by the “natural resources” we all collectively, all life in fact, depend upon and materially comprise.

4.

A focus on the commons also inevitably brings another cognate word to our attention: communism. What I’d like to suggest is that if one possibility the Occupy movement opened is the separation of democracy from capitalism (of “the state” and “the corporation”), it could also lead to the separation of two terms that have similarly been conflated (by the same forces which would have us link democracy and capitalism), those terms being communism and totalitarianism.

Another way of saying this is that the Occupy and Indignado movements may be participating in the process of redefining democracy as the common (the foundation upon which any true communism would have to be built): the horizontal sharing of both human and natural “resources” and the decision making process governing those resources; the equitable distribution of the shared, mutual aid, and the preservation of the shared for purposes of future sharing. I reference communism here in the terms Jodi Dean uses in her essay, “The Communist Horizon”:

Communism names that in opposition to which our current setting is configured, the setting within which contemporary capitalism unfolds. Why is communism that name? Because it designates the sovereignty of the people, the rule of the people, and not the people as a whole or a unity but the people as the rest of us, those of us whose work, lives, and futures are expropriated, monetized, and speculated on for the financial enjoyment of the few.

“Communism” as a concept or term may be a hard sell, and I certainly prefer to refer to “the common,” the “commons,” and “commoning” (for various reasons). However that may be—and there’s a lot more to say about this, obviously, and I’m just gesturing at it here—the key questions, now, moving ahead, for me are: 1) how do we develop, or re-instill, a true sense of, feeling for, and valuation of the common, how do we develop a commitment to the stewardship of a shared life and world, and 2) how do we return a sense of futurity to people—how do we give us our futures back? Because this is exactly what capitalism’s current war on democracy and the common does: it robs us of our future, it encloses the future before it even arrives.

These are related questions in my mind: the common is a vision of the future, an alternative to the status quo, and, I argue, the very possibility of a future at all is dependent upon our ability to work with and for the commons.

If, as I’m suggesting, the “common” is the key idea the Occupy (and Indignado) movement was trying to express (it’s “one demand,” if you will), what we need to keep in mind is that this idea has only just tentatively been put on the table to this point. Viewed this way, the movement wasn’t so much a failure as it was the mere glimpse of an idea, the beginnings of a compelling story, which we now have to find ways to flesh out, expand, and express fully. To give up now would be to refuse to hear the rest of the story.

★

Commoning is synonymous with decolonizing—because you will never build a new commons if you continue to build on foundations of theft, enclosure, and genocide. This is why indigenous leadership and solidarity is so crucial. This is why the Idle No More movement is capturing our collective energies and imaginations—just like Occupy did, like the Indignados did, like the Quebec students did.

We are looking for and riding the waves of collectivity and mutual aid wherever the rise against an exploitive and self-destructive economic system still shuddering and careening through crisis, against governments which have no better idea than austerity, which is merely a program of adding insult to injury, and making the commons pay for the excesses of the elite.

The picture is as clear as ever. We either continue to try to win the individual contest of exploitation and accumulation (which we participate in even by our consenting silence), or we truly begin to build a common future of shared responsibilities, environmental stewardship, and justice for all. Really, no one wins the former contest (everyone loses in that game)—but we might all share in the world opened by the latter.

Evo Morales, your words are echoing in my ears today. I want to feel them in my very bones: that one world has indeed come to an end today. And another world is being born. In 2013, we will show this to be true by keeping the struggle going. We will show this in our actions and in our words. We will show this in the increasingly interconnected movements we build. The non-time of capitalism is over. The time of our shared future begins.

“Topical” poetry, movement poetry, is not always easy to write or to like. I tried to keep close to the sound and textures of language, the particularities of region and the issue at hand. The question of what we “know,” and the consequences of what we “do,” became driving themes. Every fifth section became a list of “reasons” for going to the rally in Victoria. Other poems came into conversation with what I was writing – Whitman’s “This Compost,” Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache.” Readers also began to post poems in response.

I’m posting the entire poem here in case it can be of interest or use, beyond the moment of the Vitoria action. Here’s a PDF that can be downloaded/printed (take it away if you like):

Defender of our coast

The original blog version can be found here.

And in case you just want to start reading it right now, here’s the whole thing.

DEFENDERS OF OUR COAST: A POEM
(September 23-October 21 2012)

Stephen Collis

1

Defenders of our coast—
Indigenous elders
Environmentalists
(radical or otherwise)
Grannies (raging
or otherwise)—
let’s surround government
until it hears the people
at its heart—
let’s show a world
we’re a world too—
rivers and mountains
talking down to the sea

I think we know
what to say yes
and say no to—
our land in the hands
of the future
whose grandchildren
will listen to it
in a clean and curling shell
all of us hoping
no Kalamazoos near
our kaleidoscope coasts
and the precious that washes
clear waters and smooth sands

2

Who knew a canoe?
Who found a forest?
Came around a cape
with a tanker full of regret
and spilt it on paper
where we’d written
“over my dead body”
promises we keep
along coasts we defend

We wont refuse
what we see and know
because we see and know
what it is that we refuse—
the money from trees
and the money from soil
no one can exchange
for the flesh of salmon
the flesh of songs too

And this little window
I found in your boat—
lighthouse computer screen or eye—
it’s watching from promontories
and running for river mouths too
though you don’t need a weather man
to know which way the oil flows
or a pilot to show you
the long teeth of jagged inlets

3

World,
macaroni and glue
or fibrous web of cells—
I test the edge of sincerity
the clarity of words
on a page ideology prepared—
can we go on like this?
I like you
and the sun comes up
one side of you
before sinking down the other
and we dance in small streams
just beyond our suburbs
or cast small stones
at the shores of you—
is this alright?

Do you see what we’re doing
for money and out of fear?
Come close to the place
where we made you up, OK?
And then push us through
to the other side of the page—
we’re ready to stand with you
and against money and power
and all this pretending
the gluing of shapes onto
surfaces of our kindergarten lives
though the kids are alright
and the world’s still
sometimes a defensible idea

4

Defenders of our coast
voices calling out indignation
bodies claiming streets
minds conceiving this vision
of a more giving world—
show me no solitary discontents
show me no pathetic policies
of a meandering middle road
show me no compromise
with chemical economics—
every barrel that doesn’t spill
into our rivers and seas
spills into the air we breathe

Defenders—is it true
there’s never quite enough
of us to encircle power
or bridge the gap of privilege
where CEOs lisp dear heart
as they pump liquid assets?
Don’t fall into that trap
that the public is over there
waiting to be addressed—
no—we are the public
exploding back into existence
a whale rising to breach
off the bow of a rusting tanker

5

Capital, we are coming—

because Paleozoic flora and fauna
did not die so condensate
could liquefy their remains
in rupturing pipelines

because these rivers have
directions of their own to follow
as they wander towards the
seas they began in

because a spirit bear once stopped
on the highway somewhere
between Terrace and Prince Rupert
and casually watched my car pass
as though I were the ghost
in the machine of its forest

because the Haida have paddled
these waters so long their island
is a shell of first peoples
and ravens are not made of bitumen

because the oil companies
don’t get to purchase the future
of every living thing yet to be born
yet to breathe in the atmosphere
yet to tumble into a stream

because governments were built
to be surrounded by the people
who came up with the idea
of governments in the first place
knocking them down
where they once put them up

6

Can you imagine
what if we did—
if we left the oil
in the ground?

Think of everything
we don’t do
waiting and pressing
against no ideas

It’s said the human
is unique in picturing
what it will build in
the mind before building

Picture then what
you won’t build
broken pipe rivers
and carbon machines

Or some other structure
you might—wind and sun
gleaned from givenness
the need not to travel

Great distances to bring
some spice to the lips
of a hunger no longer
redirecting the clouds

7

It is the habit of plants
to drink at nearest sources
it is a wet land—a wetland
slung along valleys or
spread at the ends of rivers
where we live
filled with mystery and
broken wings—Cuyahoga
on fire—Kalamazoo sinking
into a bitumen bog
condensate burning
the eyes of surface

All life hinges
upon air and water
where hinge is the way
our thinking or unthinking
swings into actions into
a world of environments
we gently or aggressively
compose—now—let’s be
hinges giving onto a world
we’ll enter carefully
the doors of other
possibilities swinging free

8

Bird—it’s very sordid
stocks and derivatives
desire to drag every
last drop of profit
out of any source
so you’ll agree about
weathermen and which
way the wind blows
when the spills come
because the spills will come
and the delicate vanes
of your feathers which
when soaked in oil
will mat and separate so
your skin is exposed and
Bird—you suffer hypothermia
or unable to resist instinct
preen your bitumen body
and so ingest our chemical
will to transform you
like we thought you were
just a symbol of our more
ethereal flight through image
and coin to roost amidst
golden light in a tree singing
as we approach in mechanism
to uproot and rip the dark soil

9

If only it were
this small matter
of one line on a map
one narrow channel
one pipeline to one
tanker port—but
it’s the tangle of all
this carbon carving
a wide corridor torn
stripped fracked and drilled
out of the land we love and
engulfed by money as it flows
through pipes to tankers
trains and trucks and then
into rivers seas and atmosphere
all this web of energy to get
energy to get home—see it all
flowing everywhere round
as in a carbon mist—but start
somewhere—start from home
in the resistance you bring
to this system of asphyxiation

10

because you cannot eat money
because the lung came from a swim bladder
because of the Burgess Shale
because we are aquatic creatures still
because of all the relatives rights
because of more than three billion years
because who the fuck are we to destroy all this?
because I like the idea of my grandchildren
and my grandchildren’s grandchildren too
because once and this is true I worked on
the water and an orca came close by
the side of my boat and I could have
reached out and touched its dorsal fin
but I did not
because in the industrial revolution we
outsources the body and now we are
outsourcing the mind
because of the Exxon Valdez
because of Enron
because of Kalamazoo
because our representatives don’t represent
because of otters
because of shellfish and bivalvular life generally
because I have canoed many rivers and found
them each a unique voice of this earth
because there is love and principle and
responsibility which is the ability
to respond and so I am responding now

11

Defenders—we will not
put our futures in
anyone’s blind trust—
these picture books
we are shown
full of cartoon
pie charts and
graphs where a
red line falls off
to the jagged right—
nothing says we have to
blindly trust them nor
the permanent precarity
they so coldly promise us

People of earth
everyday activists
defenders of this coast
here’s what we know
we can blindly trust—
the air our lungs need
the earth our feet walk
the water our rivers carry
the sun that fires our dreams
and the fact that together
we will stop these pipelines
allowing no corridors
for carbon—no fracked earth
for the accumulation of despair

12

Petrochemical—
we’re all a bit queasy
plastic wrapping round
everything we hold
eat or sleep under or near
and effluent isn’t pretty
and the fumes are noxious
as we cower near
the chemical plants
while catalytic cracking
announces the cancers
of our daily routines
our fracked hearts open
our heads engulfed
in blue flames of progress

Petrostate—
there is a sort of resin
or film on my hands and eyes
I can feel it in my lungs too
like a lozenge melting
slow as polar ice
quick as changing climates
do you want to see every
possible compound
cracked from element?

Petrodisaster—
it’s because of all this
the soup we leech in
the particles we inhale
that we are coming

13

How can it be
that the ground itself
does not sicken?
The tar is locked
in the sand for a reason:
what’s held in the earth
is not always meant
to spring forth to be burnt
not in this balance
of gasses we call air

Knowing is not
tested by the factual
but we go there
unreasonable in our
desires to find out
what transformations
fall from our social metabolism
taking up the material surround
to form our economies
and manufacture consent

But the understanding remains
a footprint in the sand
in which we will no clots
of oil to pool—no blackened
ducks wash up on this
imaginary shore so real
in its diverse life forms
a quick orchestral up-topia
where nothing dies for mechanism
and we wonder at living growths of spring

14

—for Neil Smith (1954-2012)

Defender—say what you feel
and what you can defend
not that which is
dead but still dominant
burning neoliberal mind
throwing all there is
onto fossil fueled fire—
but that which is
alive but still languishing
call it an occupation
a global uprising that
still seeks the singularity
of a unified voice rising from
the four corners of our struggles

we know there must be more
than the homeless the millionaires
and the lonely middle class—sing
a is for alienation
b is for the bosses
c is for capitalism
and learn where the leaks lie
in the catastrophic chain—
that the ecological collapse
is the economic collapse
is the ecological collapse
is the collapse of a dead idea
now sing—as soon as this pub closes
as soon as this pub closes

as soon as this pub closes
the revolutions begins!

15

because of Cohasset
because of Wilmar Saskatchewan
because of Rusk County Wisconsin
because of Glenavon Saskatchewan
because of Fort McMurray
because of Neche North Dakota
because of Virden Manitoba
because of Kalamazoo
because of Romeoville Illinois
because of every place the oil spills
we are coming Enbridge
to defend our coast

because of Suisun Marsh
because of Walnut Creek
because of Oakland Harbor
because of the Mojave Desert
because of Donner Lake
because of Inlet Drive Burnaby
because of Abbotsford BC
because of every place the oil spills
we are coming Kinder Morgan
to defend our coast
and see our seas clean
and our rivers running clear

16

We withdraw from
the still woods we love
the hollow call of ravens
where no fossil fuel
drives their dark wings
through dark cedars

How can this
bitumen dream bring life?
Every continent worked over
for the sour dead
of millennia pressed
into layers of coal and oil

You see we became gluttons
gulping down generations
of possibility as foul liquid—
under this land earth burns
the machinery of thought
grinds and shakes and strains

This is no compost
no death for future birth—
gas pouring out of our shopping
oil spilling from broken commodity—
we throw death after death
and draw dark flowers from our eyes

17

Curious the resurrection
of bud burst and stem
in the round of seasons
I cannot help but watch
the sea water rise
and fall the harbor fill
and empty with the passage
of tankers which seem
to murmur the strange
psalms of capital as they
pass beneath the Lion’s Gate
and the lilacs might still
be blooming in the dooryards
of Delta where long trains of
containers snake to other deaths
less dramatic than pipelines
or tankers three times the
capacity of the Exxon Valdez its
honeysuckle heart the
rusting steel dream of
production’s fraught desire—O
defenders of this long paddled
coast—beware this compost
of mind and matter this liberal
western ghost of soft change
and soft rioting—behold as the
death we sought to thwart
arrives by other means
at the door of our endlessly
unconscious and unquenched homes

18

What chemistry this sea coast
to feed all kinds of terraqueous
forms and resiliencies the
bones of salmon in riverbed
exposed mollusk on storm beach
as we are heightened by sitka
spruce to overlook soup of
mists and spray where nations
many songs came as compounds
formed out of Pacific ethers
and we will have no green-wash
spread about this cedared realm
because we know the winds
are not yet infectious and the
blackberries flavorous still

And that other chemistry
of social transformation
the thought network that
leads us to the edge of change
and pushes us over—Defenders
let’s take that courageous step
from the well-oiled machinery
we know into the ghostlier
realm of air and sunlight
we don’t but which yet beckons
the bubbling store of tomorrows
we may yet create if we still
harbor visions and if we still
see the orca spyhopping and
the village sprawl at forest fringe

19

Listen to this prospect
this view of sounds
harbours bays and bends
that drift spendthrift through
our consumptive debts
and echoing projects to reclaim
social wealths locked in
private speech by public men
lying about their leisure and
the sound of their own voices
as the big banking thermostat
is set to up the oil flow
for the overheated planet to
what—spin a little faster?
make us all terrified of the earth
that calm and patient growth
of sweet light corruption
bent to our engineered ends
fluvial and Devonian we will
distill exquisite winds of
alternative energies and
lessened desires for divine
materials accepting leavings
from the gleanable commons
spread as this compost about
the ecos we house and hold

20

because economies can no longer trump
ecologies for they are the front and back
doors of the same precarious house

because we are always at beginnings
when at our ends and have to be thoughtful
of what comes after our getting there too

because the birds smoking cigarettes on
the wires outside our windows also need
something like healthcare and revolution

because whatever we carry we can and
must be mindful of the ground we cover
like great hollow forms in our passage

because governments and debts and
the privilege of the few will not stop
and listen to us somewhere on the road

because the slippages are many and
pipes burst and tankers tank and the
seepage is without profit for any animal

because we are animals and other
animals remind us of limits and we aspire
never to leave the shards of glass behind us

because the broken is a property of the
made and markets are vague consequences
without promises the next stop in our sequence

21

Defenders—I hear an elder
do you hear her too? These damages
to our mother are plain
though hidden under happy plunder
by imaginary people
drinking oil and eating money

Lost species are
lost forever—they are stories
no one knows anymore
islands lost to rising seas
are one thing—money made out of
the dead ends of days is another

We now confront
terminal crises of a model
based on submission and destruction—
have you seen the cops?
They are oily engine parts too
no mechanism without its kill-switch, eh?

I would walk one thousand miles
to get out of oil—the other option
is we’re all fossils to fuel no fires—
so our decisions are made “under the influence”
as the saying goes—but there are other
influences too—elder mother home—listen

22

If we are like I am
which is temporary
which is often confused
which is folded
which is an array
which is hoping
which is under weathers
which is branching
which is self-inflicting
which is beholden
which is overflowing
which is a sad consumer

And if I am like we are
which is pointillist
which is echolocating
which is non-unionized but organizing
which is near spent fuel rods
which watches ducks and orcas
which puts the pedal to the metal
which is complex and contradictory
which in non-violent but gets angry
which sports various gadgetry
which is bullshit as we all know
which is our only hope

Then open every door and window
storm streets and seats of bad government
and lead by following in the defence
of the laws of mother earth
 

23

Time—do not be
a devourer—
we will set aside
our lucent skins
take off hair and
lung—carpal and
sinew—set aside
heart and—skeletal—
dance along the sides
of the tar sands
along the length
of the pipelines
and in the hollow holds
of the tankers waiting
to be filled

Mother—is there another
dance we might perform?
Working in a circle
healing ourselves our
relationships and our world—
space is what we’ve
laid waste to
inside and out
accumulating the capital of
the crazed glaze of commodity
now—working in a circle
replace cell phone with bird call
jet ski with water fall
refinery with otter dive
pesticide with bee hive

24

Folks they were always
here before erasures
no one should have to
face came ashore and
what is a pipeline? What
is an inlet where oil
fills fishing grounds
and rivers wash down
globs of bitumen to spawn
in synthetic seas
but the continuation
of centuries of colonization?

Defenders—elders—others
gathered from all around
see this parliament’s a shell
washed up on a beach with
nothing in it not even sound—
see this oil company it’s
only money burning money
to make money for no ends—
and see this massive crowd
forming—it’s called the people
and the people are coming to
decolonize and to defend

25

because we have damaged it so badly
because of accumulation
because of plastic
because of our cars and motorcycles and trucks
and RVs and speed boats and
because of mining metals and smart phones
because we see it but keep doing it
because we find it too easy
because of the sleep called entertainment
because of airplanes and the beauty of the world
and hotels and beaches in pictures
because of the distance between home and work
because of fruit in winter and a lack of canning
because of highways and innovations in paving
because we are longing
because of the creation of scarcity and want
because of the movie
because of the song
because we weren’t told to think we were told
to go shopping
because our leaders get paid
because there are those who can pay for
anything and everything and they will
because of the media they own
because of our leaders they own
because of us
because we can change but don’t or haven’t
because of the frog and the pot
 

26

Defenders—consider
Bull Kelp and Splitleaf Rockweed
consider Common Coralline Seaweed
and Staghorn Bryozoan consider
Sea Pan and Encrusting Bryozoan
consider Red Jelly Fish
and Crimson Anemone consider
Aggregating and Plumrose Anemone
consider White-plumed Buried
and Swimming Anemone consider
Fish-eating and Tube Anemone and
consider Tube Worms the Giant
Nudibank and Hudson’s Doris
and Yellowmargined Cadlina

See the waters ebbing and flooding
clear for centuries to come see
the play of light on and beneath
waves and the shape of shadow
and light on rock and sand beneath
surface—see Pacific Giant Octopus
and Swimming Scallop see Wrinkled
Dove Shell and Leafy Hommouth
Frilled Dog-winkle and Blue Top
Snail—Northern Abalone and
Speckled Limpet—Red-flecked
Chiton and Giant Sunflower Star—
see all of this and nowhere the stain
of bitumen in the endless days to come

27

Defenders we travel inland
along rivers and in and out
of streams knowing lotic
systems and unidirectional
flow—riffles glides and pools
the angle at which light strikes
leading to light lost to reflection

Knowing biofilm and water column
algae—moss and liverwort
knowing duckweed and water
hyacinth invasive hydrilla and
cattail tops emerging from
slow water and bladderwort
feeding on small captured organism

Knowing sinuosity and substrate
crayfish with their feather-like gills
salamander and trout and
oolichan and the riparian zone
with otter and beaver and mink and
wolf and bear midst salmon spawning
then alevin then parr then smolt

Knowing especially the salmon and
bear and cedar and salmon cycling
nitrogen back from seas knowing
magnetoception and the names of
rivers salmon return to and this
circle is love and nowhere does it
include oil spilling from burst pipes

28

Defenders—rise up
lift this feeling
for Cormorant and Gull
Sandpiper and Dipper
Petrel Shearwater Grebe
and Bittern and Egret
Great Blue Heron
Kestrel and Killdeer
lift this feeling
for Wood Duck and
American Wigeon the
Scaup Elder Harlequin
and Hooded Merganser
Stellar’s Jay and Hutton’s
Vireo lift this feeling
for Spruce and
Sage Grouse Rock
Ptarmigan and Yellow
Warbler for the living
web lift Bald Eagle Raven
Barn Owl—rise up
Flicker Harrier Towhee
and Thrush—lift this
feeling for the freshets
for the forms loving flight

29

Defenders—Tsleil-Waututh and
Squamish—Yinka Dene and
Wet’suwet’en—Sto:lo and
Gitxzan and Lubicon Cree
and so many more in this
unbroken line—and day and
night labourers nurses teachers
fishermen and foresters—bakers
baristas clerks and caterers—
grandmothers uncles nieces
and friends and acquaintances
who love and console us and
children gamers activists and
students and immigrants of all kinds—

Rise up—we are the people
come upon each other in
streets and on paths through
woods—in parks and alleyways
along piers on rocks overlooking
the sea and amongst the mottled
sides of rivers and streams and
in suburban back yards or the
middle of farms of modest size—
finding we compose a world
outside states corporate profits
or trade agreements and we rise
up together and we rise up
to defend our coast together

30

because our coast is our future
a space we share with the many
now working loving and playing
and the many who will come after
working and loving and playing

because this is where we walked
this is where we swam
and the pictures taken here
beneath the riverbed
are lines to our anchor souls

because the ecos in our economies
is the same ecos as in our ecologies
and our not dwelling on this fact
lays waste to all homes of all things
that may be dwelling here

because this is where we walked
this is where we swam
and the pictures taken here
beneath the river bed
run right through our lotic souls

because our coast is our future
a space we will share with the many
now working loving and playing
and the many who will come after
working and loving and playing

Capital—we are coming
and we will defend our coast
link arms and defend our coast
sing this song to defend our coast
walk forward to defend our coast

Almost 3,000 people have pledged to take action in the Defend Our Coast sit-in on the front lawn of the B.C. legislature and take a stand against Enbridge’s and Kinder Morgan’s tar sands pipeline plans. First Nation communities from the north to the south have pledged support and over 132 have signed the Save the Fraser declaration to protect the Fraser River from the threat of tar sands tankers. Seven major unions, including the Canadian Energy and Paperworkers Union, and the BC Federation of Teachers have publicly supported the sit in and denounced all tar sands export pipelines through BC.

In one week, on Oct. 22nd hundreds of people will converge in Victoria at the BC legislature to defend the coast against tar sands pipelines and tankers. In Victoria they will participate in or support one of the largest acts of peaceful civil disobedience to stop tar sands pipelines and tankers that Canada has ever seen. Together they will show that the west coast, Indigenous rights, and our environment are not for sale.

We are hoping that you will join them. We need you to come to Victoria and act alongside First Nation, union, social justice, health, education and environmental allies to say no to tar sands tankers and pipelines. The more numbers we have the louder our voice will become and the stronger our message will be.

Be a part of defending the beautiful west coast, respecting First Nation rights, and steering the Canadian economy away from the toxic greenhouse-gas-polluting tar sands industry.

If a record number of us participate in this historic act of peaceful civil disobedience we can make a difference.

The Defend our Coast pledge can be signed here.

Recent news about the FIPPA trade agreement between Canada and China adds urgency to this action. A recent vancouver Observer article cites Gus Van Harten on the deal, which was made, and will be administered, under “unprecedented secrecy”:

“The Canada-China deal undermines basic Canadian principles of public accountability and open courts. It raises dramatically the stakes of Chinese takeovers in the resource sector. If ratified, it will tie the hands of future elected governments for at least 31 years.”

“This treaty, in effect, will pre-empt important elements of the debate of the Northern Gateway pipeline and may frustrate in a very significant way the ability of the current BC government or any future government—if the NDP were to win in spring—from stopping that pipeline or bargaining a better deal for BC.”

We are all becoming increasingly aware of the dangers of oil spills, from both pipelines crossing rivers and watersheds, and super tankers navigating our coastal waters. We are waking to the reality of global warming and the massive contribution to atmospheric carbon that the tar sands development threatens. And we are becoming aware of the dangerous presence, here in Vancouver, of increasing tar sands oil tanker traffic, in Burrard Inlet, as Kinder Morgan plans to increase its capacity.

We are standing right where the oil is getting out, today, and where even more of it could get out – spilling into our rivers and oceans and atmosphere – tomorrow. But what the FIPPA fiasco reminds is that this is about the future too – about our children’s and grandchildren’s future. Decisions like FIPPA may hamstring us for the next 31 years. But decisions like fully developing the tar sands will hamstring us for generations, even eons. What we are talking about here are transgenerational consequences. And what we need to develop is transgenerational thought and actions. This is where the human evolutionary project has led: what we do today effects the entire globe, for generations to come. Let’s take a stand, on October 22 in Victoria, on October 24 around the country, and in the months and years ahead – for all our many tomorrows.

Join Leadnow’s campaign to tell the Harper Government that Canada is not for sale.

If you can’t make it to Victoria, join actions in your community of October 24.

How can we move forward, and what do we do next? Capitalism is crisis—economic and ecological crisis—plain and simple. As Morris Berman writes, “our job is to dismantle capitalism before it dismantles us.” I think that’s where the contemporary moment leads us—from whatever positions we started from—now, the only real option is the whole ball of wax. So, building off Part One of this essay (and offering really just an addenda or summary here), here is a rough list of how and where we might begin this “dismantling”—a set of conceptual nodes for what a movement of movements might set out to do, what we might work on together in the coming years. The details still need to be worked out. I hope that that is something we will do collectively.

1. Decolonize, decommodify, and build the commons

Protect the socially, environmentally, economically shared—that upon which we all collectively depend—and resist the privatization, exploitation and monetization of the same—whether this is university education, housing, the land we live on, the air we breathe or the water we drink, the forests and plants around and amongst us. No one should own what we all require. It is a commons which we need to exercise collective stewardship over.

2. Continue to build a “dual power movement” that is both against and for something

We need to 1) as Immanuel Wallerstein puts it, “minimize the pain” caused by a system in crisis, and 2) to build a movement directed towards evolving what Naomi Klein has called a “new civilizational paradigm.” The first point means opposing unjust legislation and systemic inequalities and defending those being exploited or marginalized under the present system. The second point means envisioning and beginning to build alternative systems of mutual aid and the commons.

3. As the saying goes…think globally, act locally

While the economic and ecological crisis is global, we must address its local manifestations wherever it is that we live. Here in Vancouver there are some obvious pivots around which we need to continue to organize: tar sands oil piped to and tankered through our harbor; the excessive costs of housing and consequent precarity and homelessness; the financial inaccessibility and long-term indebtedness of a university education—amongst other related struggles.

4. Take indirect action

We need direct action—but we also need the indirect actions of an active cultural sphere fighting the information war. Poet Drew Dellinger says that ”the world belongs to the most compelling story.” We have barely begun to produce an effective “alternative” media or story. We need our story—the story of the common, the story of a world of shared and sustainable responsibilities and prosperity—to continue to be articulated far and wide. We need films and videos and songs and poems and novels and essays and journalism ad infinitum, telling our side of the story. There is an alternative to capitalism, and it simply begins when we realize that we can take care of each other and the planet we inhabit, sustainably and collectively.

*

Occupy Vancouver Voice is being renamed Occupy & Decolonize Vancouver. It will ideally reflect the above objectives—and function more as a “united activist network,” sharing activist news, campaigns and actions, as well as providing more in-depth analysis.

Happy Birthday Occupy Vancouver. Here’s a song—probably the best song to come out of the movement—to celebrate, and to remind us to keep moving forward:

1. Eat Cake but Get Back to Work

The Occupy movement is a year old, and it has been an amazing year, a year that has changed many of us forever. But now is not the time for congratulations or nostalgia—not the time to fall in love with ourselves, as Zizek warned last fall at Zuccotti Park. Now is the time to take the appropriate steps to build the foundations of a truly sustainable grassroots movement that will continue to oppose this corrupt, bankrupt, and decaying system through the long and sometimes dark years ahead.

I know that’s a bit of a downer. But I’m serious about this movement, serious about the dangers and opportunities of this historical moment, and serious about us getting past, through, and beyond the death throws of capitalism.

We are in the midst of a combined economic and ecological crisis. The former is harder for most people to discern here in Vancouver, as we, and Canada generally, continue to enjoy something of an economic bubble—at least so far as the noisy ruling and middle classes are concerned. But we need only look south to the United States, or east to Europe (or east along Hastings Street), to get a sense of the general drift of the global economy, and to be reminded that full austerity will reach our shores soon enough. And as far as the ecological crisis goes, there is more science than even an oil-blind government like Harper’s can ignore much longer (though try he will). Capitalism is crisis—economic and ecological crisis—and this crisis is only getting worse as this 500 year-old system (taking the long view) grinds to its jagged and nasty conclusion.

What this tells us is that we have a brief window (other parts of the world aren’t so lucky) within which to organize before we feel the full brunt of austerity, economic crisis, and ecological disaster. As Morris Berman writes, “our job is to dismantle capitalism before it dismantles us.” So have your cake, Occupy Vancouver, but then find your feet on the ground again, and get back to work.

I want here to outline (roughly) just a few points about where this movement is now, and what we might want to start working on in order to keep this movement evolving. Because it is only over time that a substantial movement can evolve and unfold (no room for flash-in-the pan insurrections here)—and time is exactly the issue: we have a little, but not a lot.

2. On Occupying and Decolonizing

“Occupy” continues to be a less than appropriate shorthand for this moment when our struggles have aligned against the capitalist machinery, and the possibility of building a movement of movements hovers before our eyes. It’s hard to shake the Occupy moniker (though I’ve tried, referring to it as “the movement formerly known as occupy—MFKO). For now, I will follow the dialectical approach of calling it Occupy & Decolonize, hoping thereby to take some of the colonial stain off the word, and because decolonization remains the shadowy specter that haunts the capitalist colonization of global space and peoples. To defeat capitalism—to occupy its centers and pathways—we have to decolonize all aspects of our lives, from the land we stand upon and the resources we destructively extract from it on up.

Decolonization is, I’d suggest, directly linked to what Immanuel Wallerstein calls “decommodification.” Both can be linked to projects related to the commons: to “common” resources, sharing knowledge, food, water, land, community etc., is to work against capitalism’s colonial and commodifying impulses. The common is what capitalism must shut down or exclusively contain, in order to ensure accumulation: it has struggled to do this through the long centuries of its birth, through the decades of its violent colonial expansion, and through its present privatizing, deregulating, and resource-mad neoliberal phase. But the common keeps re-asserting itself, against colonization and commodification. We don’t only want to see things as “saleable,” and we don’t only want to see each other as “customers.” We want shared projects that stretch into the future. We want to work and play together in meaningful ways.

If we’re going to continue “occupying” in some sense, let’s do it by decolonizing, and identify, support, and nurture the nascent and ever present commons upon which we continue to depend. Protect the (socially, environmentally, economically) shared, and resist the privatization and monetization of the same (university fees, housing, our land, air, and water).

3. On some Tactical and Strategic Questions

Occupy has been a space in which people with more reformist aims—people not necessarily “opposed” to capitalism—have rubbed shoulders and interacted with those more radically and directly opposed to the capitalist system as such. This has been a “good thing,” I think, and I’ve argued, in Dispatches from the Occupation, that this dialectic has been part of the strength and potentiality of the movement. Extending this, I’ve suggested that fault lines that have fractured the “left” in the past—between social democratic reformers and those seeking to overthrow the system in its entirety—have been less divisive, generally, in the Occupy movement, and a kind of “left-pragmatism” (if that’s really what it is) has kept some of the internal strife at bay, as people have been willing to oppose particular pieces of legislation, or electoral corruption, while at the same time seeking to confront the capitalist system in its entirety (a system within which “democracy” functions as little more than a convenient lackey).

This has been in part motivated by a desire to, as Wallerstein puts it, “minimize the pain” of a system in crisis. There is an argument to be made that we no longer need to “help” the capitalist system achieve a decisive crisis (a position that sometimes had formations within the historical left attacking the welfare state as “helping” capitalism stay afloat). Indeed, the system is in a full-blown crisis that—largely because of a threshold where economic expansion has crossed ecological limits at a planetary scale—we can do little now to “help” it along to its end point (nor resist that end point, for that matter): it’s going there, regardless of our views on the question. Capitalism is in palliative care.

I don’t mean this as a sort of triumphalism: the decline of the capitalist system, and the degree to which its masters will fight to keep it accumulating profit to the bitter end, will not be pretty, to say the least. And “what comes next” is very much an open and potentially frightening question. This is speculative of course, but I’m willing to suggest that the right strategy now is indeed to 1) “minimize the pain,” and 2) build a movement directed towards evolving what Naomi Klein has called a “new civilizational paradigm,” preparing the way both for the moment full-blown austerity is rammed down our throats here in Canada, and for the moment when we can step onto the ground of the full-blown crisis and begin implementing a new paradigm—social relations based not on colonization and commodification, but on the common, on the commons.

4. A Return to the Local

While the economic and ecological crisis is global, we must address its local manifestations wherever it is that we live. It’s a simple spatial fact—regardless of the global communicativeness of social media networks—we still live our lives somewhere. And we need to be in the streets of that somewhere, en masse, opposing the local conditions of this system forcefully—but until we have built sufficient local capacity to do so, we must build our networks, build our activist communities, build strength and solidarity where we live. This is simply to say that while the global revolution is inspiring, the same conditions do not exactly hold here in Vancouver as they do in New York City or Madrid. The thousands are not ready to swarm into Vancouver’s streets, filled with indignation. We need to prepare ourselves for the time when they will be ready to do so.

You build a sustainable, long-term movement on the two foundations of 1) local campaigns/projects (Tristan Markle and Sean Antrim of The Mainlander have suggested a “100 mile” activism diet), and 2) principles that reflect a new idea of the social totality, a new ethic of social relations and the basis upon which we cooperate. Within Occupy Vancouver (especially its Environmental Justice working group), we have been working towards the latter, adopting certain First Nations protocols and the Four Worlds International’s 16 guiding principles as a basis for moving forward together in this colonized space we call Canada.

I would like nothing better than to see the energies of Occupy Vancouver activists focused on our very real and particular local manifestations of disastrous capitalism. These would include: an out of control housing market, driven by speculation, that contributes to poverty, homelessness, and renters subsistence struggles; the dizzying costs of post secondary education in BC, and especially in an expensive city like Vancouver; and the risk of ecological disaster, and the fact of a disastrous contribution to global climate change, via our status as a key oil and coal port. I could go on, but the point is that while it may have been “the banks” and OWS’s occupation of Wall Street that inspired many Occupiers here in Vancouver and around the world, we can only truly manifest and sustain a social movement if we address the local formations of capitalism, which here in Vancouver have at their base property speculation, a grinding cost of living (and concomitant personal debt), especially for students and those on limited or fixed incomes, and the wide-open carbon tap that our city has become. These are all parts of the global capitalist network, in their local particularities, and we can decolonize and decommodify them if we organize properly, locally, around them.

Take this as a first foray into this topic—I will return to many of these points in this series of posts over the coming weeks and months, adding detail and argument where I can. The point, as Marx once suggested, is to change it. The challenge, as this world system goes through its own self-inflicted transformations, continues to be how to change it, and into what. We’ve been saying for a year now, “the beginning is near.” It’s getting nearer all the time. Are we any more ready for it than we were a year ago?

Then they
split up camp
went for
lexicography
of cardboard signs
run banks
not bulls
so our orthography
is livestreamed
a pop song over
tear gas streets
and cops their
chaperone eyes
seeing only a
percent etched
into paycheque
and all the
drills of uneven
development

 
Leitmotif is
human microphone
all shouts will
be repeated
just don’t yell
fire yell bailout
the bucket will
list the ship
run aground the
tankers yawl in
our harbours of
discontent and
wall street won’t
bubble it’ll
drown a rat
that got off
at the last port

 
Not just liberal
like hedges the
field-to-fold ratio
or barricades
taken back from
Spartan cops
who appropriated
radical form their
plastic shields
reflecting the
communist horizon
of forgotten futures
we’re remembering
now as the force
of the commons
throws tents all
over our consciousness

 
So stumping
out of tempest
to clamber each
storied street
we demand
futures not just
things of the past
but real rents
in the fabric
of the real
we demand
possibility
Lefebvrean
explosions
and not just
Zizek spitting
in the park
but the future’s
ruins lying all
about us waiting
to be picked up

 
Tired old
proletariat now
Googled into being
Marx would have
Luxemburg Che
Durruti Marcos
or any other
thrown red ink
at this crisis so
we demand difference
we demand alter
and anew
the cobblestones
and the fields
we demand
this continue
some shape or form
until we are all free
of money and mechanism
on a common
looking to share
all that’s grasped
and ungraspable
between

- Stephen Collis

There is a realization, at least to some extent, that we are the ones responsible for the global ills; the reification of individualism and the exporting of capitalism and ‘democracy’, yet the vast majority of people are too ‘comfortable’ to do anything more than nod their head when presented with the evidence. Why is this? In short, most people don’t feel enough pain on a personal level to motivate them to take risks… If this is so, do we need revolution?

Yes, because we are living within a lie, and this cannot be healthy…

‘Democracy’ provides us with the illusion of power. This is the lie that we have been sold.

The undercurrent of discontent that is surfacing is due to this dawning realization; that we are pawns in someone else’s game; that there are others that are laughing.

Those in power do a masterful job of hiding their true motivations. The triumvirate which includes those with the money, the politicians they are able to purchase, and the media which they own, have managed to figure out how to manufacture complacency.

What makes things all the more complicated is that the target is invisible because there is no point at which to direct an offensive. Businessmen, per se, are not the problem. The problem lies below the surface with the institutions within which we are situated; the models we deem sacrosanct within the structure of capitalism and democracy and the relation between the two. This was both what Occupy revealed; as well as one of its challenges.

The Possibility of Revolution
The traditional sense in which we conceive of revolution is as a mechanism to replace the existing power structure. We overthrow the current regime and replace it with something else. In order for us to realistically shift the balance of power in that sense these conditions need to be met:
The existing power structure needs to be sufficiently unstable
There needs to be sufficient numbers of people will to engage in some way… via action
At this point we are nowhere close to satisfying either condition… so what should we do?

Revolution 2.0: peaceful occupation
Occupy was both a militant political movement and a community. Those that occupied did so for different reasons and if there is one thing that we have learned over the past ten months it is that we all hunger for the community we created.

Furthermore, the support that we received from the public was, in large part, for the community we created that housed, fed, clothed and treated a large number of people at no charge. This represents the essence of community; mutual support and care. This has been lost in western culture… a culture where everything has a price.

This support was offered because people, at some deeper level, realize that this is the essence of community; that these sorts of actions as well as the context that makes them possible, is what is really important. Of course, it is one thing to know this and something completely different to participate since most people are trapped by nine to five jobs, house payments and car pavements. Enslavement can take many forms… and in some cases can be palatable.

The thing about Occupy that was most revolutionary… most on target, was the occupations themselves… the reclaiming of physical space. That it was so essential to the identity of Occupy is revealed by its loss. We, in Vancouver, have not been able to reclaim the sense of hope and possibility that was present during the occupation. I suspect this holds true in other cities as well.

We need to re-occupy…but with the support of the community.

Occupation 2.0: what would re-occupation look like?
Revolution 2.0 will be a slow process; one that focuses on engaging, educating, and capacity building. What we need to do is to build a bridge to the anaesthetized… to create points of interaction where we can educate people and cultivate personal relationships… This needs to happen in physical space.

Occupation Requires Sustained Physical Space: obviously if we are to re-occupy we need a location to do this. The importance of a physical location cannot be overemphasized. Physical space contributes to building the revolution in the following ways:

Evidence of The New Culture: we need a physical space in which to provide evidence of the new culture… We need to show that Gift Economies can work…

Deepen Relationships: It provides a place for people to go to and therefore for people to simply share space and get to know each other.

Bridge Differences: This is especially important in a movement that is resisting the entire system and therefore is the home for people who have different perspectives and are working on different things.

Build Trust: The solution to bridging differences is to cultivate personal relationships… to realize that we are all in this together.

A Place To Organize: Of course, it also provides a place to organize our activity.

Sustained Occupations Cannot Be Confrontational: I think that I speak for most of us when I say that the appetite for sustained occupations that are confrontational has been fully satisfied! This does not mean that occupy cannot continue to participate in front line resistance activity and to show solidarity with others that are standing on the front line.

Space Must Be Utilized To Engage and Interact With the Mainstream: If we are to build the movement we need to educate and activate the average citizen who does care, but has no entry point into the movement. They must feel welcome to share the space with us whenever they want.

Education, Training: We must develop curricula that connects the dots between capitalism, colonialism, marginalization and systemic oppression. These sessions must be offered to the public out of our space.

Media and Messaging: A critical component of the strategy will be to reframe the message. We need to cultivate our media and messaging strategy… We need to take advantage of the technology infrastructure that allows for the wide and rapid dissemination of messages in real time. This is how we can reshape the meme.

Creating and Networking a Federation: Of course, we all need to focus on our local context, but to whatever extent possible, we need to build real time connections with other occupations that have managed to secure physical space. By connecting with them we stand in solidarity and can more easily share best practices.

Transitional Support: A critical element in the success of Occupation 1.0, was the substantial amount of resources that we garnered from the general public, the unions etc. in return for the substantial amount of positive work that we were doing. Our ability to identify supporters who are willing to provide financial support will be essential.

More on all of this as we proceed…

- Suresh Fernando

As video and written reports continue to come in, detailing what actually occurred on the night of Wednesday June 27, we are beginning to see the outlines of a new Vancouver Police Department (VPD) strategy for dealing with the student protest movement, if not street protests more generally.

First, police arrived on the scene at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) in numbers (42 badge numbers were eventually collected by a trained legal observer). And they arrived with the intention of making arrests. They announced as much to the small group of approximately 20 people gathered at the VAG; they were aggressive and confrontational, from their first to their last interaction with the group; and, perhaps most troubling, they targeted women most aggressively of all.

Two arrests occurred at the VAG: both were of men trying to support the woman (the only woman of colour present) who a police officer had physically accosted (on the erroneous pretense that she was contravening an order not to appear in the downtown core—the result of a previous casserole demonstration).

Of the five arrested at the jail solidarity protest which followed, outside the VPD station at Main and Cordova streets, the majority were once again men who had attempted to block VPD attempts to, once again, target and arrest a woman.

The targeted harassment of women—particularly women of colour—by the VPD is, unfortunately, part of the “normal” protocol on the downtown east side of Vancouver. So perhaps this is just an extension of that culture into the realm of protest and crowd control. But there was something else, more specifically premeditated about this.

The detachment assigned to the demonstration Wednesday night was apparently led by Sgt. Ken Athans, a crowd control specialist, who recently returned from a trip to Montreal, where, it has been revealed, he was observing “strategies the Montreal Police are using” in dealing with student protests. Sgt. Athans was seen to direct the police tactics first hand on Wednesday night, and it was Sgt. Athans himself who led the officers in their targeted and intentionally provocative arrests of women that night.

What can we learn from this situation?

Police brutality and aggression is very real, and apparently on the rise, as far as dealing with protestors in Vancouver is concerned—and there is an expanded tactic of targeted, gendered and racialized antagonism, with the VPD working “to provoke, intimidate, and goad activists” (as I wrote a few days ago on rabble.ca).

But more importantly, from a tactical viewpoint at least, we may need to adjust how small groups of protestors act, and react. The police can arrest 20 people, but they can’t very easily arrest a crowd of 200 or 2000 people. Some may not want to hear this, but small (i.e., outnumbered by law enforcement) street marches might not be advisable in the current environment. We need to bring as many people out into the streets as we can.

Which reminds us what we really need to be doing: building solidarity, building a broadly-based movement in which more and more people wish to and can participate. We need to get back to what brought us to activism in the first place: the realization that there is injustice in the world (a lot of it), and that the world can and must be changed—by our direct participation and actions. We can “casserole” all we want—but until we have something to put in the pot, as it were, we may not be able to build a large enough movement—not here in BC, not under these current circumstances.

To do this, to bring numbers together, above all, we need a story, a vision, an idea. We need something for people to gather around, participate in, join and support—not just something to reject, oppose, or protest against.

In other words, what are we for? I think we all have to ask ourselves this question. We have to meet and discuss our ideas and visions together, and find our common ground. And then we have to build that story/vision/idea, and share it far and wide.

One place to begin: if democracy is going to be more than a “kick-me” sign, more than a joke to those in positions of power and authority, what is it?

For me, democracy is the commons—not the “House of Commons,” where, ironically, power and privilege too often does its dirty work—but the commons as that which we all share in the broadest sense: civil society itself, all the “natural resources” life consists of and depends upon, all the cultural ideas and practices that are our shared inheritance as human beings. A democracy ought to be the stewardship of the commons, by the commons, for the commons. If the bullies kick one of us, they kick all of us. We are all implicated in the shared project of being human.

That’s the foundational idea I want to propose. That’s what I’m for. That’s the vision I’d like to enter our shared conversation with—the place I’d like to start building from. What’s yours?

We had a twenty-five foot salmon along for the ride (what’s not to like about that?).

But why were we here—why Ladner? Because the changes that have happened to this community, and the potential changes that may still happen if expansion plans go through, have been devastating (if not always obvious or recognized), and it’s time people took their community back.

The port on Roberts Bank has meant the loss of traditional fishing grounds, it has meant serious ecological harm to both sea life and migratory birds, and it has meant the loss of very limited and precious farmland. If expansion of the port continues, it will mean even more of the same. As is so often the case in the world today, local impacts (expansion of this specific port / loss of this specific wetland and this specific farmland) are tied directly into global pressures and flows (vast global trade profits for the few / climate change and other social and ecological consequences for the many).

Expanding the port at the expense of farmland is a decision to import food from exotic places rather than grow it locally ourselves. This makes no sense to the local economy, and no sense from an ecological perspective. It only makes sense to the corporations that can profit from such practices, and the politicians willing to make the high-stakes deals with them.

Expanding the port at the expense of the local environment is part and parcel of a mentality—that growth, at all and any cost, is the be-all and end-all of economic activity—that has our climate warming, seas rising, and species dying off at mass-extinction rates. Scientists are now warning of an approaching threshold for a ”state shift” in the global ecosystem. But governments and developers appear to be having a hard time listening to scientists these days.

Plans for a “Foreign Trade Zone” around the Delta Port add to the concern, throwing democracy on the fire where the local economy and environment are already being sacrificed. In such FTZs (as they are known), corporations enjoy the benefit of paying almost (and sometimes quite literally) no taxes, are held to no established environmental or labour regulations, and are largely unaccountable to local elected governments. Picture a pirate enclave, maybe the mythical Tortuga, and you’ve got the idea.

What can we do? We—ordinary citizens, suburban workers, families, fishermen, farmers—we who will suffer the degradation of our local natural environment, the loss of land and resources, and our exclusion from having a voice in vast decisions that directly effect our daily lives? We can stand up and fight back. We can do what citizens have always had to do in a democracy—to keep a democracy democratic, even in the lulls in the “election cycle”—we take to the streets. We make our voices heard by whatever means necessary. We spread the information about what is really at stake in these sorts of situations (always, always it is more than the promise of “jobs” and vague “economic growth” promised by politicians and developers). We put our shoulders to the wheel, and push back.

Even in Ladner. Even on a rainy Saturday.