Tag Archives: Guy Debord

Dangerous Citizens Save Democracy: My interview with Documento

Documento, a newspaper in Athens, Greece, published Anna Papadimitriou’s interview with me on October 22, 2017. Over the course of the interview we covered a variety of topics including the state of democracy in the world today, the ways in which democracy submits to capitalism and the role of schools in the creation of democratic citizens.

We discussed, in particular, the concept of dangerous citizenship, a notion I developed along with Kevin D. Vinson.

The interview was published in Greek. Below I have posted the unedited version of the interview in English.

Interview with Anna Papadimitriou for Documento (Athens, Greece)

October 2017

Your research interests focus on the role of teaching in building a democratic society in the face of antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance. Nowadays, many countries define themselves as democracies, but one can find one or more of the antidemocratic impulses you mention. How would you define a modern democratic society? Is there any country on the planet that corresponds to your description?

Our default for understanding the world is typically to use fixed terms and ideas that we believe correspond to some unchanging reality. The problem is that our language of democracy is static, but the real world is constantly changing. Our thoughts, ideas and terminology about democracy are merely representations of what we think it is and in many ways these ideas no longer correspond to reality, indeed the reality is nearly the opposite.

Here are some examples of what I mean. This past summer Poland’s parliament passed a law undermining the independence of courts, even though separation of powers is a key idea defining liberal democracy. Earlier this month the Spanish government sent police to attack voters and confiscate ballot boxes in the Catalan independence referendum. Poland and Spain are considered democratic governments, but they are not acting in accordance with the typical ideas we hold about how a democracy works. I could add many examples from the United States, Turkey and other so-called democracies.

We generally accept the idea that the more people participate in a democratic society the more democratic it becomes, but some political scientists now question whether citizen participation is actually good for democracy, arguing that political participation and deliberation makes things worse. There are now political scientists advocating epistocracy, the rule of the knowledgeable, as better than democracy.

This is not a new idea. In 1975, the Trilateral Commission published a report, The Crisis of Democracy, which described the problems faced by governments in Europe, U.S. and Japan as stemming from “an excess of democracy” and advocated restoring the power of centralized institutions.

U.S. political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page produced a major empirical study in 2014 that illustrates that the United States is a functioning oligarchy (which they described as “economic elite domination”). The study concluded that the public has almost no influence over policies the US government adopts, but the central features of democratic governance persist, outwardly.

In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley described our current circumstances:

“by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial … Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

What counts as democracy today, that is state-capitalist electoral politics, is a spectacle, which Chris Hedges calls “meaningless theatre” and Paul Street describes as “fake-democratic ‘marionette theater’ for a corporate and military deep state” that grinds down democracy, if such a thing ever really existed.

In your various works, you address the idea of dangerous citizenship. How would you define it?

If we, here I’m speaking of educators, are truly committed to building a more equitable world we have to re-imagine our roles and find ways to create opportunities for students to construct personally meaningful understandings of the world. What we understand about the world is determined by what the world is, who we are, and how we conduct our inquiries. Education is not about showing life to people, but bringing them to life. The aim is not getting students to listen to convincing lectures by experts, but getting them to speak for themselves in order to achieve, or at least strive for an equal degree of participation and a more democratic, equitable, and just future. This requires a new mindset, something I call dangerous citizenship.

Schools are the primary source of citizenship education and a key site where the state attempts to shape young peoples’ understanding of the world. It is the place where myths of democracy are propagated. Dangerous citizenship is, firstly, a radical critique of schooling as social control. It is also a collection of strategies that might be used to disrupt and resist the conforming, anti-democratic, anti-collective and oppressive potentialities of schools and society.

Dangerous citizenship requires people take on actions and behaviours that bring with them certain necessary dangers; it transcends traditional manoeuvres such as voting and signing petitions, etc. Citizenship from this perspective, is a praxis-inspired mindset of opposition and resistance, an acceptance of a certain strategic and tactical stance. Of course, the implication here is that dangerous citizenship is dangerous to an oppressive and socially unjust status quo, to existing hierarchical structures of power.

We need new pedagogical imaginaries for teaching because traditional conceptions of “democratic” citizenship are bankrupt, perverted by capitalism’s triumph over the interests of the people.

Dangerous citizenship embodies three fundamental, conjoined, and crucial generalities: political participation, critical awareness, and intentional action. Its underlying aims rest upon imperatives of resistance, disruption, and disorder.

Dangerous citizenship embraces political participation, but not necessarily traditional means. For example, if state-capitalist electoral politics is meaningless theatre, then voting is perhaps not a meaningful or useful way to be politically engaged. Voting can even be seen as non-democratic, particularly when is suppresses minority viewpoints and enhances the beneficiaries in what is essentially an oligarchy or plutocracy.

Secondly, dangerous citizenship is informed by Paulo Freire’s idea of conscientization, that is a consciousness-raising that facilitates the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Dangerous citizenship asks how can we achieve that kind of critical awareness and understanding?

Thirdly, dangerous citizenship promotes intentional, critical action, behaviours designed to instigate human connection, true engagement with everyday life, meaningful experience, communication and change.

Democracy, in this context, is not about electoral politics, but a force that breaks down the barriers that separate people – class, race, national territory – and creates community. The more porous the boundaries of social groups, the more they welcome participation from all individuals, and as the varied groupings enjoy multiple and flexible relations, society moves closer to fulfilling the democratic ideal.

Do dangerous citizens have a place in a democratic society or are they needed when democracies are fading?

Democracy, as I see it, is something that is yet to be achieved.

The first premise of dangerous citizenship is that democracy does not dominate capital. Capital always trumps democracy – pun intended.

As an unfinished, or never finished project democracy cannot exist in a space where critical social analysis is discouraged. This is a key point for educators to understand. We cannot achieve democracy when curriculum is standardized and regulated. Teachers and curriculum have been subject to ever intensifying policy regimes that attack academic freedom and discourage critical thought. This is happening world-wide and has been taken to extremes, for example, by the Erdoğan government in Turkey.

The primary role of capitalist schooling is social control, most evident in the aims to win children of poor and working classes to be obedient, dutiful and useful to the ruling class under a variety of myths, such as “we are all in this together.” Governments would have us believe that civil disobedience is our problem. But has historian Howard Zinn observed our problem is civil obedience in the face of extreme inequalities that produce poverty and starvation, war and cruelty.

The majority of countries in the world describe themselves as some kind of democracy, a republic or constitutional monarchy. But these are shallow and hollow examples of democracy at best and perversions of the idea of democracy at worst.

Democracy as an associated way of living – where citizens are concerned with the development of shared interests that lead to sensitivity about repercussions of their actions on others and a critical examination of existing social, economic, and political inequalities are at the centre of the endeavour should be our goal. Achieving democracy in this sense is a struggle.

Being a dangerous citizen means living in ways that challenge – are dangerous to the existence of – the status quo and the many inequities that define our world today and that brings with it inherent dangers because enemies of equity and justice can be ruthless.

You were born, raised and educated in the US, but you also have a Canadian citizenship after having spent years in Canada. Can you provide some examples of dangerous citizens in these two countries? How are they confronted by the political authorities?

My goal has been to challenge teachers to examine examples of creative disruption of everyday as potential sources for new critical pedagogies of resistance to be employed in schools. This is an effort to subvert the traditional aims and methods employed in state-capitalist sponsored schools.

The idea of dangerous citizenship is inspired by my interest in post-left, insurrectionist anarchism (such as Guy Debord and the Situationist International) and politically inspired performance artists who aim to creatively disrupt everyday life. These are models for creative pedagogies of resistance.

For example, the “brandalism” – Situationist inspired détournement of corporate advertising – at the 2015 Paris Climate Talks is a good example of dangerous citizenship. As are the “ethical spectacles” practiced by Greenpeace, Yes Men, and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Posse.

Occupy Wall Street, the indigenous Canadian Idle No More movement are, I think, excellent examples of dangerous citizenship, challenging the status quo, refusing to work within a system that perpetuates social and economic inequalities and generally using direct action tactics to achieve change. But I believe the larger civil society movement, where people are organized to express the will of the “third sector” (non-governmental, non-capitalist), also fits in mould, particularly the anti-austerity movement in Greece and Spain (e.g., the Indignant Citizens Movement), which illustrates the double-edged dangers of dangerous citizenship in practice.

In the mid-twentieth century philosopher Paul Taylor argued “we must decide what ought to be the case. We cannot discover what ought to be the case by investigating what is the case.” We—educators and citizens—must decide what kind of world we want to live in. That means asking, in particular, in what sense of democracy do we want this to be a democratic society? We must engage these questions not as merely abstract or rhetorical, but in relation to our lived experiences.

The Awakening in America (Analysis of the OWS movement)

THE AWAKENING IN AMERICA

(Analysis of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement)

http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/awakening.htm

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THE AWAKENING IN AMERICA

“A radical situation is a collective awakening. . . . In such situations people become much more open to new perspectives, readier to question previous assumptions, quicker to see through the usual cons. . . . People learn more about society in a week than in years of academic ‘social studies’ or leftist ‘consciousness raising.’ . . . Everything seems possible — and much more IS possible. People can hardly believe what they used to put up with in ‘the old days.’ . . . Passive consumption is replaced by active communication. Strangers strike up lively discussions on street corners. Debates continue round the clock, new arrivals constantly replacing those who depart for other activities or to try to catch a few hours of sleep, though they are usually too excited to sleep very long. While some people succumb to demagogues, others start making their own proposals and taking their own initiatives. Bystanders get drawn into the vortex, and go through astonishingly rapid changes. . . . Radical situations are the rare moments when qualitative change really becomes possible. Far from being abnormal, they reveal how abnormally repressed we usually are; they make our ‘normal’ life seem like sleepwalking.”

–Ken Knabb, THE JOY OF REVOLUTION

http://www.bopsecrets.org/PS/joyrev3.htm#situation

* * *

The “Occupy” movement that has swept across the country over the last four weeks is already the most significant radical breakthrough in America since the 1960s. And it is just beginning.

It started on September 17, when some 2000 people came together in New York City to “Occupy Wall Street” in protest against the increasingly glaring domination of a tiny economic elite over the “other 99%.” The participants began an ongoing tent-city type occupation of a park near Wall Street (redubbed Liberty Plaza in a salute to the Tahrir Square occupation in Egypt) and formed a general assembly that has continued to meet every day.

Though at first almost totally ignored by the mainstream media, this action rapidly began to inspire similar occupations in hundreds of cities across the country and many others around the world.

The ruling elite don’t know what’s hit them and have suddenly been thrown on the defensive, while the clueless media pundits try to dismiss the movement for failing to articulate a coherent program or list of demands. The participants have of course expressed numerous grievances, grievances that are obvious enough to anyone who has been paying attention to what’s been going on in the world. But they have wisely avoided limiting themselves to a single demand, or even just a few demands, because it has become increasingly clear that every aspect of the system is problematic and that all the problems are interrelated. Instead, recognizing that POPULAR PARTICIPATION IS ITSELF AN ESSENTIAL PART OF ANY REAL SOLUTION, the New York assembly came up with a disarmingly simple yet eminently subversive proposal, urging the people of the world to “Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone. . . . Join us and make your voices heard!”

Almost as clueless are those doctrinaire radicals who remain on the sidelines glumly predicting that the movement will be coopted or complaining that it hasn’t instantly adopted the most radical positions. They of all people should know that the DYNAMIC of social movements is far more important than their ostensible ideological positions. Revolutions arise out of complex processes of social debate and interaction that happen to reach a critical mass and trigger a chain reaction — processes very much like what we are seeing at this moment. The “99%” slogan may not be a very precise “class analysis,” but it’s a close enough approximation for starters, an excellent meme to cut through a lot of traditional sociological jargon and make the point that the vast majority of people are subordinate to a system run by and for a tiny ruling elite. And it rightly puts the focus on theeconomic institutions rather than on the politicians who are merely their lackeys. The countless grievances may not constitute a coherent program, but taken as a whole they already imply a fundamental transformation of the system. The nature of that transformation will become clearer as the struggle develops. If the movement ends up forcing the system to come up with some sort of significant, New Deal-type reforms, so much the better — that will temporarily ease conditions so we can more easily push further. If the system proves incapable of implementing any significant reforms, that will force people to look into more radical alternatives.

As for cooption, there will indeed be many attempts to take over or manipulate the movement. But I don’t think they’ll have a very easy time of it. From the beginning the occupation movement has been resolutely antihierarchical and participatory. General assembly decisions are scrupulously democratic and most decisions are taken by consensus — a process which can sometimes be unwieldy, but which has the merit of making any manipulation practically impossible. In fact, THE REAL THREAT IS THE OTHER WAY AROUND: The example of participatory democracy ultimately threatens all hierarchies and social divisions, including those between rank-and-file workers and their union bureaucracies, and between political parties and their constituents. Which is why so many politicians and union bureaucrats are trying to jump on the bandwagon. That is a reflection of our strength, not of our weakness. (Cooption happens when we are tricked into riding in THEIR wagons.) The assemblies may of course agree to collaborate with some political group for a demonstration or with some labor union for a strike, but most of them are taking care that the distinctions remain clear, and practically all of them have sharply distanced themselves from both of the major political parties.

While the movement is eclectic and open to everyone, it is safe to say that its underlying spirit is strongly antiauthoritarian, drawing inspiration not only from recent popular movements in Argentina, Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain and other countries, but from anarchist and situationist theories and tactics. As the editor of Adbusters (one of the groups that helped initiate the movement) noted:

“We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE. The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.”

The May 1968 revolt in France was in fact also an “occupation movement” — one of its most notable features was the occupation of the Sorbonne and other public buildings, which then inspired the occupation of factories all over the country by more than 10 million workers. (Needless to say, we are still very far from something like that, which can hardly happen until American workers bypass their union bureaucracies and take collective action on their own, as they did in France.)

As the movement spreads to hundreds of cities, it is important to note that each of the new occupations and assemblies remains TOTALLY AUTONOMOUS. Though inspired by the original Wall Street occupation, they have all been created by the people in their own communities. No outside person or group has the slightest control over any of these assemblies. Which is just as it should be. When the local assemblies see a practical need for coordination, they will coordinate; in the mean time, the proliferation of autonomous groups and actions is safer and more fruitful than the top-down “unity” for which bureaucrats are always appealing. Safer, because it counteracts repression: if the occupation in one city is crushed (or coopted), the movement will still be alive and well in a hundred others. More fruitful, because this diversity enables people to share and compare among a wider range of tactics and ideas.

Each assembly is working out its own procedures. Some are operating by strict consensus, others by majority vote, others with various combinations of the two (e.g. a “modified consensus” policy of requiring only 90% agreement). Some are remaining strictly within the law, others are engaging in various kinds of civil disobedience. They are establishing diverse types of committees or “working groups” to deal with particular issues, and diverse methods of ensuring the accountability of delegates or spokespeople.

They are making diverse decisions as to how to deal with media, with police and with provocateurs, and adopting diverse ways of collaborating with other groups or causes. Many types of organization are possible; what is essential is that things remain transparent, democratic and participatory, that any tendency toward hierarchy or manipulation is immediately exposed and rejected.

Another new feature of this movement is that, in contrast to previous radical movements that tended to come together around a particular issue on a particular day and then disperse, the current occupations are settling in their locations with no end date. They’re there for the long haul, with time to grow roots and experiment with all sorts of new possibilities.

YOU HAVE TO PARTICIPATE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON. Not everyone will be up for joining in the overnight occupations, but practically anyone can take part in the general assemblies. At http://occupytogether.org you can find out about occupations (or planned occupations) in more than a thousand cities in the United States as well as several hundred others around the world.

The occupations are bringing together all sorts of people coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. This can be a new and perhaps unsettling experience for some people, but it’s amazing how quickly the barriers break down when you’re working together on an exciting collective project. The consensus method may at first seem tedious, especially if an assembly is using the “people’s mic” system (in which the assembly echoes each phrase of the speaker so that everybody can hear). But it has the advantage of encouraging people to speak to the point, and after a little while you get into the rhythm and begin to appreciate the effect of everyone focusing on each phrase together, and of everyone getting a chance to have their say and see their concerns get a respectful hearing from everyone else.

In this process we are already getting a taste of a new kind of life, life as it could be if we weren’t stuck in such an absurd and anachronistic social system. So much is happening so quickly that we hardly know how to express it. Feelings like: “I can’t believe it! Finally! This is it! Or at least it COULD be it — what we’ve been waiting for for so long, the sort of human awakening that we’ve dreamed of but didn’t know if it would ever actually happen in our lifetime.” Now it’s here and I know I’m not the only one with tears of joy. A woman speaking at the first Occupy Oakland general assembly said, “I came here today not just to change the world, but to change myself.” I think everyone there knew what she meant. In this brave new world we’re all beginners. We’re all going to be making lots of mistakes. That is only to be expected, and it’s okay. We’re new at this. But under these new conditions we’ll learn fast.

At that same assembly someone else had a sign that said: “There are more reasons to be excited than to be scared.”

BUREAU OF PUBLIC SECRETS

October 15, 2011

[A PDF version of this text can be found at http://www.bopsecrets.org/recent/awakening.htm ]

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“Making petrified conditions dance by singing them their own tune.”

The NFL, idiot fascism, and the future of America

The latest issue of Rolling Stone (RS 1089) is highly recommended (even if Bono is hamming it up on the cover). Skip the fawning piece on U2’s current US tour (it’s mainly about their mega-stage and luxury airliners) and read the bits by Matt Taibbi.

The former sports editor for The Moscow Times (Russia not Idaho) gives us a gonzo take on the opening of the NFL season, which includes a report on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium that merits quoting because it is the best paragraph to appear in on a “sports page” in the 21st Century:

Dallas’ opening home game against the Giants, in which their hideously commercialized mall palace known as the new Cowboys Stadium was unveiled to the world, was a genuinely terrifying broadcast event of a kind not seen since the premiere of Triumph of the Will. This was like a debutante ball for America’s new idiot fascism. Still, there was something weirdly compelling about seeing 100,000 Texans cheering historical footnote George W. Bush as they christened what promises to be about 490 years of municipal sales-tax payments, all so that Jerry Jones can see a 160-foot wide image of his own surgery-tightened face on the world’s biggest HDTV. At the home opener, ticket-holders got to see Tony Romo throw three interceptions against the backdrop of multiple corporate billboards lining the field. Then there was the specter of 100,000 people watching a giant taxpayer-funded TV while sitting at the live event. If this is the future, could America be any more fucked?

Taibbi’s writing sits well along side Guy Debord and Raul Vaneigem.

Taibbi also adds this tidbit on the Detroit Lions, biggest losers in the NFL:

If Lions rookie QB Matt Stafford busts, the city of Detroit will collapse under the Earth’s crust, forever, to be spoken of in the future as a mythical lost place, like an Atlantis full of shuttered Ford plants.

The birthplace of the Rouge Forum deserves better but my advice to Bill Blank and the gang is to get outta there.

Staughton Lynd: “What is to be done?…let’s make every school a freedom school.”

Staughton Lynd, author, attorney, radical historian, and civil rights leader presented one of three keynote addresses at the Rouge Forum’s 2009 Conference at Eastern Michigan University last month.

His speech—which shares its title with Lenin’s famous work on the principles of democratic centralism—draws on his experiences as director of the Mississippi Freedom Schools of the mid-1960s to identify where we can can begin to resist the antidemocratic impulses of greed, individualism, and intolerance in our work as educators.

Lynd’s talk reminds us that people learn by and through experience, not by reading the “right newspapers” or attending lectures. A claim that is somewhat reminiscent of Guy Debord’s assessment of what revolutionary organizations should be about:

“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.” —Guy Debord [“For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art”]

The bottom line in Lynd’s talk is as simple as it is challenging, let’s make every school a freedom school.

Read Lynd’s talk here and in the upcoming issue of The Rouge Forum News.

US Patriotism as Viewed from a (Short) Distance

Last November in Houston, TX, I participated in symposium titled “The Future of Patriotism”, which was cosponsored by the College and University Faculty Assembly and the International Assembly of the National Council for the Social Studies.

The session included a wide variety of perspectives on patriotism, with talks by Suzanne A. Gulledge (U of North Carolina), Rodney Reeves (Florida State U), Masato Ogawa (Indiana U), Joel Westheimer (U of Ottawa), James Leming (Saginaw State U) and me. The discussion that followed the panel was quite rich and illuminating. I’m pretty sure Leming’s provocative comments were generating the most light, as well as a bit of heat (which is good).

My comments on the panel follow.

US Patriotism as Viewed from a (Short) Distance
E. Wayne Ross

“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.” —Guy Debord [“For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art”]

For the last five years I’ve lived in Vancouver, British Columbia. I don’t have any intention of moving back to the United States, but even though my spouse and son have always been Canadian citizens (my son is a dual citizen), I have yet to apply for permanent residency. I’m up there working away thanks to NAFTA, an example of free trade in human capital.

When I’m asked about my status in Canada it is always by Americans. Canadians never inquire about such things. “Have you become a Canadian citizen yet?” my compatriots ask. And my answer is usually along the lines of “I’m already a citizen of one country and I’m not so sure about how that’s working out, so why would I want to join up with another one?”

Indeed, the worst thing about living in Canada, besides the wild fluctuations in the Loonie, is that I ordinarily have to endure two national anthems at Vancouver Canuck hockey games.

“Are you proud to be an American?” I’d have to respond to that question pretty much the same way the late, great social critic and comedian Bill Hicks did: “Uh, I don’t know, I didn’t have a lot to do with it. My parents fucked there, that’s about all.” Okay, that’s a vulgar and flip response, but it does make point that being a patriot is, for most people, an allegiance based upon an accident of birth.

Patriotism can be parsed in different ways, but in the US it basically comes down to love of country and often a willingness to sacrifice for it. Ritualized performances—such as pledging allegiance to the US flag, singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” voting in elections, jingoistic holidays, buying Chevrolet Trucks, symbols like the yellow ribbon and linguistic tropes like “Support Our Troops,”—are aimed at promoting “love of country.” Indeed, American patriotism results from a hegemonic branding campaign aimed creating a population who see their interests as one and the same as the state. And I’m reminded of this every time I watch the overwrought patriotic displays presented prior to every NASCAR race (and I watch these races weekly as I am from Charlotte, North Carolina).

When asked, “do you love your country?” The first response needs to be another question: “What do you mean by country?” Here I’ll cast my lot with the Noam Chomsky who in response to this question said:

“Now if you mean by ‘the country’ the government, I don’t think you can be proud of it. And I don’t think you could ever be proud of it. You couldn’t be proud of any government. It’s not our government…States are violent institutions. States are violent to the extent that they are powerful, that’s roughly accurate.” [1]

Marx and Engles were also deeply critical of the state describing it as “nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another—no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy.”[2] In the US, government policies that are driven by the interests of the capitalist class have created staggering levels of inequality in education, the economy, health care, and pursuit of justice.[3] Recent events have clearly illustrated the stranglehold Wall Street has on the federal government, and this most certainly did not change on November 4. Indeed, the US government is for all intents and purposes an “executive committee of the rich.”[4]

Alternatives to Patriotism American-style—Examples from North of the Border
Patriotism can be conceived as simply a commitment to a community—as opposed to one’s narrow individual interests, which opens the door for us to express affinity with communities other than country/government/state. George Orwell limits his definition of patriotism to acts that are defensive. Patriotism, he wrote is “…devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”

I believe Orwell’s definition works in reference to Canada. Canadians generally have much greater faith in government than Americans. The Canadian state is much kinder and gentler than the American state. But it has engaged in its share violent acts as part of the British Empire and in its own name. Racist, discriminatory laws targeted Chinese and South Asian immigrants; the indigenous peoples of Canada have been subjected to literal and cultural genocide; and there is the current war in Afghanistan to name a few examples. But patriotism in Canada is not the issue that it is in the US. What is at issue north of the border is the question of what it means to be Canadian. What it means to be American is not a question that is often considered because the dominant strain of “American patriotism” fixes that idea.

Yes, Canadians are proud of the symbols such as the Maple Leaf (and/or the Fleur de Lis). And Remembrance Day is still, more than anything else, a commemoration of the Armistice. While America patriotism is prepackaged and given the hard sell, Canadians seem to always be engaging the question of what it means to be Canadian.

Here are some examples.

Canadian identity is closely tied to the state institutions such as official bilingualism, the Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1985) and the Canada Health Act.

Canadians jealously guard their health care system and are proud of its basis in a utilitarian ethic where the metric of the system’s success its contribution to the care of all persons. Initiatives aimed at enhancing private health insurance and for-profit health care delivery systems are considered by many as “un-Canadian.” In health care debates, the conflict between corporate profits and the literal well-being of the populous is clearly established. Indeed, Tommy Douglas—who as Premier of Saskatchewan (1944-1961) led the first socialist government in North America and introduced universal public healthcare to Canada—was voted “The Greatest Canadian” of all time in a nationally televised contest organized by the CBC.[5]

A second example is Canadian Multiculturalism Act, which recognizes and promotes the understanding that multiculturalism is a fundamental characteristic of the Canadian identity and that it provides an invaluable resource in the shaping of what Canada is and will be. Canadian multiculturalism is most certainly contested terrain, but that is the point. The cultural pluralism of Canada is not merely about allowing groups to maintain their cultural identities within a dominant culture. But, the cultural diversity itself defines, in part, what it means to be Canadian.

And thirdly there is phenomenon in Canadian politics that is completely unfathomable in the US context: Bloc Québécois. The BQ is a left-wing, ideologically driven, regionally based political party whose primary aim in the creation of a sovereign nation of Quebec. The party is, of course, orientated towards Quebec and it’s not surprising that there is little or no support for the party outside the province. While its impossible to imagine a party with these characteristics having legitimacy on the national scene in the US, the Bloc Québécois was Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in the Canadian Parliament from 1993-1997.

I believe these are examples of what Joel Westheimer has called democratic patriotism and they contrast sharply with the shallow and authoritarian patriotisms that fix what it means to be an American and define absolutely what it means to be “A Patriotic American.”[6]

While folks like Westheimer and others are making valiant efforts to reclaim American patriotism as democratic. I don’t believe that patriotism is a salvageable concept, particularly in the US context. The mainstream of American patriotism today—the product of that hegemonic branding campaign aimed creating a population who see their interests as one and the same as the state—is a betrayal of the revolutionary ideals that birthed United States: the emancipation of the common person; the creation of participatory democracy; a voluntary federation of local communal institutions, perpetually re-created from below.[7] I think Guy Debord’s thoughts on revolution are relevant here:

“Revolution is not ‘showing’ life to people, but making them live. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its objective is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation.” [8]

Promoting a commitment to a community—as opposed to one’s narrow individual interests—is crucial project, but I believe that the nature of that community and the actions taken to express one’s commitment to a community are choices that individuals must make for themselves with no expectation that an accident of birth defines what your community or commitments are.

Notes
[1] Chomksy, N. (1992). Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media [DVD].

[2] Engles, F. (1891). Postscript to Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.

[3] Ross, E. W. (2006). Introduction: Racism and antiracism in schools. In E. W. Ross (Ed.), Race, Ethnicity, and Education (Volume 4, pp. xiii-xxvi). Westport, CT: Praeger.

[4] Gibson, R. (2005). The search for what should be, within what is, by critical educators. Journal of Critical Educational Policy Studies, 3(1).

[5] http://www.cbc.ca/greatest/

[6] Westheimer, J. (Ed.) (2007). Pledging allegiance: The politics of patriotism in American schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

[7] Lynd, S. (1968). Intellectual origins of American radicalism. New York: Pantheon.

[8] Debord, G. (1981). For a revolutionary judgement of art. In K. Knabb (Ed.), The situationist anthology (pp. 310-314). Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets.