Revolution Right Now: The Ends are the Means

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There’s been a lot of talk about revolution here at SQUABBLER – lots of wild ideas about total systemic overhaul – and you might be wondering: what the hell can I do? Maybe Thatcher was right, you might be thinking, maybe there really is no alternative.

But there is. The revolution isn’t a distant idea. It is already happening.

War All the Time

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The important thing to understand is that revolution is not utopianism. It is not about imagining some perfect society and then striving towards that. Revolution is a constant process of change, of adaptation. The old anarchist motto says it all: “live as though you were already free.” The means are the ends. Revolution is a daily activity.

It begins by knowing your enemy. Who is it that is preventing you from living the life you want to live? Is it a cruel landlord? A petty manager? Or is it the government which has failed to provide its citizens affordable housing and the economic system that drives us into jobs we’d rather not have simply to make money? Is it mediated images of white supremacist hetero-normative patriarchy through Hollywood films and television or is it the performative resistance to this and a false alliance to progressive ideals by companies who profit off of systems of inequality? Is it the cops? Is it the supermarkets? Is it the entire state which exists only through the assertion of force, the theft of land and the sustaining rewards of racism?

It is all of these.

Revolution is not simply fought in the streets. It is not necessarily destructive, though destruction may help. As Mikhail Bakunin says, “the destructive act is also a creative passion.” This may have worked in an industrial society, against a state apparatus of discipline and punish. But today, in our interconnected surveillance society, beneath the eyes of money-powered Control, revolution is best fought with your wallet.

I’m not talking about “shopping locally,” or “buying organic.” These are middle-class responses. Most people can’t afford to do this. I’m talking about food-security education: learning how to grow your own food, access community gardens, how to take over otherwise disused green spaces in your neighborhood and begin to understand how to manage your own food supply.

More importantly, I’m talking of how not to buy. If we have learned the many names of our enemy and seen how they all answer to the supreme name of Capitalism, then we must agree that the replication of capital through buying and selling is an action in service to the adversary.

Simply put, the most revolutionary act you can do is to stop spending money on absolutely anything you don’t need to. Steal music, go to a library, shoplift if you feel like it and accept the risk. These are truly revolutionary acts that present a direct challenge to the concepts of exchange and property that underpin capitalism.

Challenge yourself.

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Mainstream media reinforces the status quo which legitimizes capitalist hegemony. Mainstream narratives either are encoded with bigoted thought or perform our resistance for us by paying lip service to anti-capitalist ideas whilst tightening the grip of very regime they decry. Films, television, and popular music are all equally guilty of this. Better to seek out the bizarre, the formally experimental, the challenging. Especially difficult works produced by people marginalized by the current system. Read from small presses, discover music on Bandcamp or Soundcloud. Better yet, make something yourself.

Creation is Resistance.

Stasis is the enemy. Comfort is complacency. Capitalism would have us stalled in every motion that is not directly related to production and consumption. That’s a nice hobby, says Aunt Thea, but what do you do? Creation is not necessarily production. L’art pour l’art is a direct challenge to the capitalist notions of entertainment and economic service that artists have long been shackled to. Make something and give it away. Write a book to pull the pillars down. Make a beat, write a song. Never sit still and always be exactly who you want to be. This is revolution.

The political is personal. We are holding ourselves back and others less fortunate than us every time we participate in the economy. The market is responsible for global warming, the market is responsible for wide-spread inequality. The market means you are not free. Revolution exists wherever capitalism is resisted. Capitalism exists wherever capital is self-replicated.

Ask yourself: do I want a better world or a better phone?

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Universal Basic Income: A Weight Lifted

When the shadow of COVID-19 fell across Canada, as with much of the world, it immediately revealed the many fault lines running through our current mode of social organization. With some qualifying for the now-rescinded Canadian Emergency Relief Benefit (CERB) and others not, some being declared essential and thrust to the front-lines while others were able to shelter at home, the chasm between privilege and disadvantage was thrown into terrible relief.

Economic stimulus cheques sent a muddy message to the public: if $2000 a month is considered the minimum amount a person needs to remain alive during a pandemic, why, for so long, have so many been forced to live on so much less?

Governments are like parents – the majority of the people they rule over didn’t ask for their custody, they were merely born into it. Like parents, a government has a responsibility to provide care for the people they are in charge. Ostensibly, this is the whole point of government.

If we are born into living in a world where everything has a price, then it should be the government’s duty to ensure that every citizen has money to spend. If our human rights – our access to water, shelter, and food – are slapped with a price tag, it is a human rights violation to make these things inaccessible.

Utopia Now

“No penalty on earth will stop people from stealing, if it is their only way of getting food. It would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood so that nobody is under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief, then a corpse.”

— Thomas More

These lines are from More’s classic work of theory fiction published in 1516, Utopia. More’s close friend, the humanist scholar Johannes Ludovicus Vives went further in envisioning a means of delivering subsistence to every citizen, regardless of their economic background. The American revolutionary Thomas Paine saw the need for a basic income given to the people by the state as repayment for the theft of landed property, the brilliant socialist Charles Fourier thought so too. The history of a universal basic income is the history of the struggle for egalitarianism within a stratified capitalist system.

If the government already owns every piece of land, every natural resource and has barred us from the ability to eke out a free living ourselves, a guaranteed wage is only the start of what we are owed.

Dignity for All

If everyone had a guaranteed minimum income, we would be free to realize our potential in whatever way we see fit. People would be less likely to remain in dangerous living situations for economic reasons, would be less likely to take jobs that pose risk to their mental and physical health. As the late, great David Graeber theorizes in his indispensable book Bullshit Jobs, a guaranteed income may expose just how many jobs are being performed in our society for no good reason at all. Automation can help. We are well passed the point where robotics and AI are advanced enough to make redundant every thankless job.

Either blessed or cursed with the gift of reason, we humans are meant for more than drudgery. For too long have we held ourselves back.

The Times They are a-Changing

There have been many UBI pilot projects all over the world, all with startlingly positive results. One of these is in the fight against climate change.

UBI can reduce the emissions caused by the current 50 hour work week, as well as slow the unsustainable cycle of consumption and production in which we have trapped ourselves and the natural world. A guaranteed cash payment to every citizen could ease the transition away from a fossil fuel economy into green energy that would otherwise leave millions jobless. In Indonesia, a guaranteed income project reduced deforestation in the region it was implemented by 30%.

UBI is a weight lifted; not only off our own burdened backs, but from off the planet, too.

Universal basic income can make extreme poverty extinct. It smashes the need for a welfare state and empowers every individual to realize their full potential. It is a way of making capitalism work for everyone, not just the wealthy. It is a way of taking back from the resource monopolists a small share of what is ours.

To learn more and become involved visit ubiworks.ca.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

The F-word: The Soft Face of Fascism

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The F-word is once again haunting the public discourse. For a while it seemed like the word was doomed to be thoughtlessly hurled at stingy parents and customer service representatives, its true relevance long banished from the western world.

But we aren’t seeing a resurgence in fascism – it never really left.

Fascism is less a political ideology than a way of life. It need not be strictly authoritarian – but it is always sadistic. It may not be outwardly racist, but it is often preoccupied with race. It may not be an iron fist it rules with but a green dollar. Fascism is all around us, ever has been - in some form or other it ever will be. We must learn to recognize its many faces.

For the Love of Country

Merriam Webster defines fascism as a philosophy, regime or movement which exalts the nation above the individual. There is the implication of autocratic control though this need not be necessarily a dictatorial rule. It may be rule by a wealthy elite (plutocracy), a corporation (corporatocracy) or, even the market itself (what some ludicrously call “anarcho-capitalism,” but what we’ll call market-fascism). It often romanticizes a mythic past. It rarely looks forward.

Fascism ultimately positions human rights (universal access to food, shelter, and freedom from harm) as subordinate to the glory of the nation in all its racial, geopolitical and economic forms.

In a fascist state, it is a crime to burn the flag but not to doom someone to homelessness through eviction. Racist police do not face legal repercussions for murder in a fascist state, but those who speak out against injustice do. In a fascist state the nation eats before your family does. There is much for sale in a fascist state, but little of it you need. There is much rhetoric and little truth.

Pay-per-rule

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The United States, now firmly in the world’s eye, with the f-word on many lips, has long been a consumer fascist state (and increasingly, so are we). Trump is merely the lump which belies the tumor. His failure to gain a second presidential term does not banish fascism from America, it merely drives its ugliest form back into the shadows.

Consumer fascism, or soft fascism, positions corporations’ ability to make money and monopolize resources in the name of a national economy as paramount to all else. You may not have access to the abilities of producing your own means of survival, but Amazon does. Loblaws does. Corporations lobby the state and private policy initiatives, they trade data with governments. Increasingly, the line between state interest and that of the market becomes irrelevant.

image from pixabay

People struggling to make ends meet continue to pay corporations for access to food, clothing, or diversion (from the fact that we are not free). We willingly relinquish our lives to be ruled, for the glory of the economy. For the good of the nation.

It wasn’t racism that elected Trump, though it helped. It wasn’t misogyny, though it was readily employed. It was by appealing to the concept of nation and attaching to it the corporate brand he carried. His supporters are quick to praise his positive affect on the stock market as, perhaps the only, sign that he has been an effective leader.

Fascism exists in the subservience of the human animal to the nation and it’s here in Canada too.

The Canadian military was recently found to be engaging in propaganda tactics to influence public opinion. These tactics, which included forged letters warning of wolves in Nova Scotia, are publicity stunts clearly inspired by corporate advertising strategies. This is the military trying to go viral.

What can we do?

The most direct way is to stop empowering corporations. Stop buying their products. Stop enabling their destruction of communities, their monopolies on natural resources. We all know Amazon is evil, but so is Loblaws, and Apple. There is nothing these corporations provide that a combination of lifestyle reconfiguration and local shopping can’t provide.

We can empower the individual by supporting universal basic income initiatives. With a guaranteed income, we are less vulnerable to corporate exploitation.

Trump may be on his way out of office, but he is not taking fascism with him. It surrounds us, everywhere. Beckons to us behind every waving flag, every corporate overreach, every piece of data mined. So long as there is patriotism without criticism, corporate welfare over social welfare, there is fascism.

Consumerism leads to fascism by elevating the national market above the human being. So as long as we continue to buy, we are all complicit in its rise.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

The Other Side Breaks on Through to Here: Poltergeist Phenomena as Capitalist Resistance

Zhupel of the revolution (1905) by boris kustodiev

“The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself.”

— Walter Benjamin

Get Out of My House

Floorboards creaking while everyone is asleep. Cupboards swing open before your eyes. The iPad levitated for thirteen seconds before slamming to the ground. The poltergeist behaves like a neglected child, upsetting order to grab attention. It moves unseen through the corridors of the newly renovated town house, starting the Vitamix well before you’re ready to make your maca smoothie. When the front door opens and the family pours in, arms filled with shopping bags, the poltergeist is there, petulant, hurtling a Fitbit against the wall.

image from pixabay

And even in moments of silence, when you do not know you have a ghost in your house – it is there. It’s in the simmering uncertainty held down by another Netflix binge. It’s the cold sweat of what have I done? I don’t want to be a policy analyst. It’s in the silence as you drive the family to the water park. It’s the noise beneath the placid surface of the capitalist dream. The incorporeal shade haunting the hallowed homes of a material world.

“The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way.”

— Walter Benjamin

Bring the Noise

Poltergeist, from the German “poltern” (a sonic disturbance) and “geist” (spirit), might be translated as “knocking ghost”, or “noisy spirit”. However one renders it in English, the meaning is plain: it is loud and restless. Indeed, poltergeist phenomena are always associated with sounds. From the spectral Drummer of Tedworth beating out an unseen cacophony in 1682 , through to the disembodied voices and wall pounding of the notorious Enfield poltergeist which tormented a single mother in England in 1977; the hauntings are uniformly a sonic barrage described as a “disturbance.”

image from pixabay

And what, exactly, is being disturbed? What is the purpose of all this noise? Writing of harsh noise in music, Csaba Toth defines noise as that which “disrupts both the performer and listener’s normal relations to the symbolic order by refusing to route musical pleasure through the symbolic order.” Pleasure is easily commodified and the vectors for pleasure (art, alcohol, drugs, sex) are monopolized by both government and corporation as a means of social control.

But noise resists commodification: it does not appeal to the pleasure principle, experience of it is not mediated by any centralized authority. The poltergeist is then not so different from transgressive sound artists like Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle. Noise as a form of social disruption. Discomfort to short circuit the forces of control.

The Ghost in the Gadget

“But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere… Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads.”

— Walter Benjamin

The poltergeist unleashes a sonic assault on everything we have been taught to believe is sacred about a domesticated, capitalist life. It is important to note how, aside from a few spectacular tales, accounts of poltergeist activity involve only damage to property. In fact, much of the violence inherent in these manifestations is directed against physical objects best representing the private domicile: doors, beds, cupboards, and tables.

Like a protest that turns to smashing the windows of a Starbucks, the poltergeist expresses the rage of an anarchic soul confined by capitalism. It may even possess the symbols of capitalism itself: I am become the floating smartphone, destroyer of stability. In the 1960 case of the Baltimore poltergeist, the spirit exploded Coca-Cola bottles from within.

The poltergeist operates spontaneously, it is unpredictable, capricious, and angry – it is ungovernability itself and, by insinuating itself directly into the home and freely using objects therein, it attacks the very concept of private ownership that lies at the heart of capitalism.

A Spectre is Haunting

“No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble – not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it.”

— Walter Benjamin

Skeptics will say that poltergeist phenomena, often emanating from a human “focal point,” usually in the form of a teenage or pre-teen child, is simply either conscious or unconscious mischief. The child, lacking attention, projects a fantasy spirit to achieve power over the household and assault the hierarchy of the family unit, within which they’ve been rendered powerless. To this I say, where does the projection end and the haunting begin?

image from pixabay

The only thing more ungovernable than the poltergeist is the willful child, to whom property is confusing and rules made only to be broken. Like the youth led innovations of punk, hip-hop and industrial noise, which obliterated capitalist notions of class, race, gender with explosions of sound, both child and poltergeist raise the volume to make themselves heard over the willful silence of the status quo.

Silence is violence but noise destroys.

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Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline