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		<title>Head Hits Concrete</title>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Mike Gouldhawke on capitalism, colonialism, and how we can use Marx’s concept of value as a tool for understanding and changing our current social conditions.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/head-hits-concrete/">Head Hits Concrete</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">10. 08. 2021</h3><h1 style="text-align: left;">Head Hits Concrete</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><b><br /></b><strong><span style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: #000000;" href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/mike-gouldhawke/">Mike Gouldhawke</a></span><br /></strong></h3><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong>(Métis &amp; Cree, Treaty 6)</strong></h3><hr /><p><br />Abstractions? In this ecology?</p><p>With fires and floods destroying communities, with governments designating certain social groups as expendable during pandemics and crises, can we afford lofty concepts in times like these?</p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In particular, which is to say in concrete terms, what use can we make of Marx’s theory of value, as a tool for understanding and changing our current social conditions?</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Métis marxist scholar and organizer Howard Adams </span><a href="http://www.metismuseum.ca/resource.php/12301"><span style="font-weight: 400;">once said</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that “as Métis people, it is important that we sit down and do some abstract thinking and theorizing about our position in this system&#8230;and how we’re going to get out of it.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nowadays, if we&#8217;re feeling generous, we can say this recommendation applies to all of our relations, not just those of us lucky enough to be Métis.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>What’s value?</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For economist and sociologist Diane Elson, the key political implication of Marx&#8217;s value theory is that it can help us understand and overcome capitalist exploitation.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But what did Marx mean by value in the first place, and how does it fit into an anti-capitalist analysis?</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Toward the end of his life, Marx </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">was adamant</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that in his book </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Capital </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">he hadn’t started out from “concepts” or the “concept of value,” but instead from the “simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society…the commodity.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In capitalist societies, almost everything is exchanged through the medium of money for almost everything else. Qualitatively different things are exchanged constantly, in various proportions, which shows that they objectively have something in common. This common social factor of commodities is what Marx described as value.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marx used the analogy of weight to illustrate his point. Two very different kinds of objects, sugar and iron are both subject to gravity and can be equated with each other on that basis, in terms of an abstract quantity: how much they weigh.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gravity isn&#8217;t a kind of object, but a relation between objects (and energy) that affects objects to a particular degree, which is represented as quantities of weight.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Where value diverges from this analogy is that it’s “purely social,” as Marx put it. Value isn’t an element of the physical mass or of any other material characteristic of commodities, but derives from a particular system of production.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The social determinants of value are human labour in general (in the abstract) and how long it takes on average for workers to produce a given good or service.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The only quantitative measure we actually end up seeing of value is money, expressed in terms of price. Money and commodities are different forms of value, which are exchangeable with each other. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Price can and does diverge from value due to constant market irregularities, said Marx, but nonetheless value and the socially necessary labour time of production remain the centre of gravity around which price orbits.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to Marx, capital is the circular movement and transformation of value: from the form of money, into the form of a commodity, into more money.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Grundrisse</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, he depicted the circulation of capital as “a spiral, an expanding curve, not just a circle.&#8221;</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Competition between privately-owned businesses is a motor force of development. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Propelled by this force, among others, capital doesn’t just circulate but accumulates exponentially, leading eventually to the global social and ecological catastrophe of today.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>What’s the use?</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In her 1979 article “The Value Theory of Labour,” Diane Elson argues that Marx’s theory “enables us to analyse capitalist exploitation in a way that overcomes the fragmentation of the experience of that exploitation.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">People can already understand something is wrong, she suggests, but in their struggles they don&#8217;t necessarily make all the connections they could. Struggles tend to be split between what&#8217;s considered unfair money relations in terms of cost of living and unfair conditions in the workplace. But the process of exploitation is actually a unity, says Elson.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Communist thinker Bruno Astarian contends that workers experience value primarily in the form of capital. Workers are constrained by capital not just in terms of standardization and competition in the workplace, but also on the commute to and from work, and when looking for housing and necessities. These limitations stem, he says, from “the separation of workers from the means of production.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">For earlier marxist writers like Raya Dunayevskaya and C.L.R. James, it was important to distinguish Marx’s analysis as being not a labour theory of value, but instead a value theory of labour.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This is a way of saying that, as Dunayevskaya pointed out, Marx wasn’t concerned only with the superficial fact of the purchase and sale of labour power on the market, but also with the compositional fact that under capitalism, the capacity for work takes the form of a commodity. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">According to Marx, acts of labour preserve and transfer existing value at the same time as they add new value. Most importantly, workers are hired because their labour adds more value to commodities than it costs the capitalist to employ their labour power.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wages are paid for the time a worker spends at work, or by the piece, or per delivery. The commodities (including services) that are produced, like the means of production (including control of app platforms), belong to the capitalists, not the workers. The property relations of the capitalist system facilitate the specific way that exploitation is carried out, and these relations are reproduced by the system.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Workers are paid for their ability to work, not the value of what they produce or the services they provide, because those don’t ultimately belong to them. The capitalist pockets the value added by workers as surplus and tries to pay them as little as possible. Just enough to keep them coming back to work. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Beneath the superficial appearance of equality on the market, of workers freely selling their labour power, lies unequal property relations. Products and services are only commodities, said Marx, if they are produced privately, for sale to others – meaning through private property relations and the market. Most workers have nothing to sell but their own labour power, their ability to work for others.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Actual labour isn&#8217;t measured with a clock but with a surveillance camera, a motion tracker, and the eyes of the supervisor. What money measures, however imprecisely via price, is the value of commodities – the objectification of average labour time – not the characteristics of each act of labour.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the capitalist workplace, we function as abstract workers more than as specific persons. The present danger isn’t so much that we will be replaced with robots as that we’ve already been reduced to sentient automatons, free to compete for miserable survival, and free to be cast aside and forgotten when we’ve outlived our usefulness for capital. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>Social materialism</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the final chapter of Volume 1 of </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Capital,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> which touched on settler-colonial property relations, Marx wrote that “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, which is mediated through things.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Today, we can continue to develop our analysis of social and material relations in areas that Marx, in his time, only briefly examined, such as settler colonialism and service work.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Capital</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Marx indeed analysed, however incompletely, the commodity as a social form, not just as a physical object. He stressed that the value of commodities is a “purely social” relation, not containing “an atom of matter.”</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Accordingly, he understood labour power and certain services as commodities.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Industrial development scholar Fiona Tregenna </span><a href="https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/229390"><span style="font-weight: 400;">points out</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that Marx mentioned service jobs in transport, education, and entertainment as examples of value-producing labour. Today, services employ many more workers than they did in Marx’s era.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As scholars Annie McClanahan and Jon-David Settell </span><a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article/120/3/493/174120/Service-Work-Sex-Work-and-the-Prostitute-Imaginary?guestAccessKey=db6be6be-a468-4db6-9da6-2990b433441a"><span style="font-weight: 400;">suggest in a recent article</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on the importance of service work and sex work, we would do well to dispense entirely with “the productivist metaphysic that would attach a moral value not just to work in general but to goods-producing work in particular.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Along this line of analysis, going beyond the dominant revolutionary subject of Marx’s time – the industrial worker – our expanded and updated view can also take into account social struggles against industrial development by Indigenous peoples.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">As Frantz Fanon suggested in his 1961 writings on the relation between racism and class in the colonies, we should stretch Marx’s analysis slightly “every time we have to do with the colonial problem.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Indigenous thinkers and organizers before myself had already </span><a href="https://rabble.ca/columnists/2015/01/land-relationship-conversation-glen-coulthard-on-indigenous-nationhood"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pointed out</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that land can also be </span><a href="https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/land-as-a-social-relationship"><span style="font-weight: 400;">understood as a social relation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> between all living and nonliving things.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">While the social and material are distinct, they are also related. In fact, relationality itself implies distinction and diversity, as we are dealing not just with a thing&#8217;s relation to itself or other identical things. In turn, distinction implies relationality, since </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devotions_upon_Emergent_Occasions"><span style="font-weight: 400;">no one is an island</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Relationality implies the possibility of change, of the social and material interacting with each other, to generate something new, for better or worse.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Industrial Workers of the World slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all&#8221; </span><a href="https://ecology.iww.org/texts/SteveOngerth/RedwoodUprising"><span style="font-weight: 400;">can be understood</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as applying not just to human beings, but also to the land and all the living and nonliving relations that sustain life.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The colonially constructed abstract rights-bearing individual, entitled to roam, shop, sell their labour power, and own property (if only their own labour power), contrasts with the concrete-particular social group, whose members are exploited, excluded, policed, imprisoned, stopped at the border and deported, but despite all this, still resistant.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Value in its form as capital (value valorizing itself) is driven to accumulation, but also annihilation of non-capitalist social forms of relationality with the land. The abstraction of value (as capital) takes a concrete form in each particular industrial development project. When Indigenous people stand in the way, the state and its police step in to make sure capitalist accumulation continues.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coordination and solidarity across social lines remains a weapon against these concrete manifestations of capital, while theory helps integrate an analysis of particular conflicts within a broader understanding of the overall system. The question is how to extend and consolidate links of communication and support.</span></p><p> </p><h2>Theory of relativity</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 1947, the marxist writer and organizer Grace Lee Boggs wrote that capitalist society’s “wealth in productive machinery” is matched by “its poverty in social relations.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Never have the means of production been so highly developed,” </span><a href="https://libcom.org/history/american-worker-paul-romano-ria-stone"><span style="font-weight: 400;">she wrote</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, “yet never have they seemed so inadequate to the task of elementary economic reconstruction.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That same year, Boggs and fellow marxists C.L.R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya together </span><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1947/invading/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">made the bold claim</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> that the proletariat’s revolt was no longer against politics and the distribution of surplus-value, but “against value production itself.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Decades later, in her 2011 book <em>The Next American Revolution</em>, Boggs would emphasize social and ecological reconstruction, writing that in the United States the struggle is not for economic growth, which has already taken place at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and other non-white people, but to correct the “injustices and backwardness of our relationships with one another, with other countries, and with the Earth.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">She explained that she felt “kinship” with the Indigenous resistance and community organizing of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, saying they had “demonstrated the need for a paradigm shift in our thinking.”</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Like theorists and organizers before us, we don’t have to engage with abstractions just for the sake of abstractions, or stay strictly bound to the orthodoxy of past theory, but can develop theory as a tool for use in our current struggles against capitalism and settler colonialism, as they actually develop and play out in our lives.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><h2>A better life?</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Capital</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">, Marx presented the accumulation of capital as taking place “on a progressively increasing scale.”</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The full social and material consequences of this exponential development have become clear only in our time.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marx wrote that the quantitative determination of value by socially necessary labour-time asserts itself like a “regulative law of Nature,” like when the law of gravity asserts itself by collapsing a person’s house on top of them. Now we can see that the house isn’t just one person’s home but the entire planet.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our ecological outlook is dire. Our chances for success seem slim. Now more than ever, we’ve </span><a href="https://youtu.be/PclhNB8BiwI"><span style="font-weight: 400;">gotta get out of this place</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> if it’s the last thing we ever do.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">“This place” not in the sense of a location, like the billionaires blasting off for space imagine. Instead we’ve gotta overturn their system that’s arrayed against us.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Today, the states most responsible for climate change aren’t willing to really put the brakes on reckless capitalist development, even when communities within their borders have already been devastated by it. Not only that, but they continue to actively facilitate the expansionist logic of capital, almost as if this has entered the logic of the state itself.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Value is a crucial piece of the puzzle to be solved. It&#8217;s important not just in itself, but also because of its place within the overall structure of capitalism and colonialism. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have to figure out how to feed that structure through the shredder of history. Or in lieu of that, how to launch the system into the sun. Worth a shot, anyway, whatever the outcome.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Better living, not so much through </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistry"><span style="font-weight: 400;">chemistry</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> as through communism and anarchy, and by no means, under no circumstances, without Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span class="il">Mike</span> Gouldhawke is a Métis and Cree writer whose family is from kistahpinanihk (City of Prince Albert) and nêwo-nâkîwin (Mont Nebo) in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan. He is based out of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territories (Vancouver, British Columbia) and has been part of Indigenous and anti-capitalist movements in the city.</p>						</div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/head-hits-concrete/">Head Hits Concrete</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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		<title>Building Blocks</title>
		<link>https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/building-blocks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=building-blocks</link>
		
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Midnight Sun]]></dc:creator>
		<pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2021 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
				<category><![CDATA[Features]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Blockades]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Direct action]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Indigenous sovereignty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Land defence]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mike Gouldhawke]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Solidarity]]></category>
		<guid isPermaLink="false">https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/?p=1138</guid>

					<description><![CDATA[<p>Mike Gouldhawke on Indigenous land defence and the care that builds the solidarity that strengthens the blockade.</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/building-blocks/">Building Blocks</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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			<h2 class="elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default"><a href="https://unsplash.com/@frostroomhead" target="_blank">(Photo: Rodion Kutsaev)</a></h2>		</div>
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							<h3 style="text-align: right;">5. 6. 2021</h3><h1 style="text-align: left;">Building Blocks</h1><h3 style="text-align: right;"><b><br /></b><span style="color: #000000;"><a style="color: #000000;" href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/tag/mike-gouldhawke/"><strong>Mike Gouldhawke</strong></a></span></h3><h3 style="text-align: right;"><strong>(Métis &amp; Cree, Treaty 6)</strong></h3><hr /><p><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />The past two years have seen a new wave of militant Indigenous resistance across Canada, centred on </span><a href="https://twitter.com/1492LBL" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">1492 Land Back Lane</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Haudenosaunee territory and the </span><a href="https://unistoten.camp/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unist’ot’en</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Camp and Healing Centre in Wet’suwet’en territory. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Since July of 2020, Haudenosaunee people of the Six Nations of the Grand River community have been re-occupying a parcel of land adjacent to the reserve that is slated for a non-Native housing development. This struggle builds upon the community’s similar, and successful, land reclamation launched in 2006, for land known as </span><a href="https://mgouldhawke.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/from-six-nations-of-the-grand-river-to-tyendinaga-2006-2008/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kanonhstaton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Unist’ot’en Camp was set up in 2010 by a Wet’suwet’en clan to stop the proposed development of multiple oil and gas pipelines in so-called British Columbia. A solidarity checkpoint and camp set up by the neighbouring </span><a href="https://www.yintahaccess.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gidimt&#8217;en</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> clan, and subsequent repeated raids by the RCMP in the winters of </span><a href="https://unistoten.camp/media/invasion/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">2019</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgfVO6U5QuA" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">2020</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">,</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> escalated the situation.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Direct actions and other demonstrations of solidarity have taken place in urban and rural locations, carried out by both Native and non-Native people. On the Native side, the direct action aspect of this struggle is not new, but built upon generations of Indigenous resistance. What has been different about recent times is the greater number of non-Native people willing to not only hold solidarity demonstrations, but also take direct action, using the tactic of the blockade. </span></p><p> </p><h2>Blocking dispossession</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This tactic stands to place a limit on repressive action by the Canadian state and its police: to make the costs of repression outweigh the benefits, not just economically, but also socially. Not just in the present, but for the future.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">A </span><a href="https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/policing-indigenous-movements" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">private 2015 risk assessment</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> by the federal Department of Public Safety, for example, labeled the Unist’ot’en Camp as the “ideological and physical focal point of Aboriginal resistance to resource extraction projects.” The state security apparatus is concerned not just with any particular action but also with its potential to spread.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In 1990, cross-country Native solidarity blockades of roads and railways were a prominent feature of the so-called Oka Crisis, which centered on Kanien&#8217;kehá:ka (Mohawk) land defence. Among those who took action in solidarity with the Kanien&#8217;kehá:ka were the Wet’suwet’en, and their neighbours and allies the Gitxsan. </span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the winter of 2020, the solidarity of 1990 was reciprocated, as Kanien&#8217;kehá:ka and other Haudenosaunee set up blockades and camps at the Tyendinaga, </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kahnawá:ke</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and Grand River communities in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, hereditary chiefs of the Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan traveled across the country to Tyendinaga and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kahnawá:ke</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">, to deepen already existing social-political links. These strengthened bonds were activated almost immediately, when Gitxsan chiefs and community members blocked a railway in their territory in response to the Ontario Provincial Police raid of a solidarity camp at Tyendinaga, as they had done just previously in response to the RCMP raid of Wet’suwet’en territory. When the RCMP moved in and arrested the Gitxsan chiefs, more community members rushed down to support, blocked the highway, and were able to force the RCMP to release those they’d arrested earlier that night.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Also during the Wet’suwet’en solidarity movement, in Treaty 1 territory on the Prairies, Native warriors working in small groups did pop-up railway blockades and would strategically move on before police could enforce injunctions, in order to fight again another day. In response to such actions, the provincial governments of </span><a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-highway-blockade-six-nations-anti-blockade-1.5758294" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manitoba</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/alberta-bill-targeting-blockade-protesters-passed-into-law-1.4988429" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Alberta</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> have sought to criminalize Indigenous direct action through new legislation that threatens steep fines and jail terms for anyone found interfering with “critical infrastructure” </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">–</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> a term defined </span><a href="https://ablawg.ca/2020/06/17/bill-1-criminalizing-protests-and-encroaching-on-aboriginal-and-treaty-rights/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">broadly enough to include streets and sidewalks</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">More recently, the methods of the Wet’suwet’en solidarity movement appear to have played some role in inspiring the ongoing use of road and railway blockade <a href="https://www.insauga.com/mississauga-intersection-reopens-after-multi-day-protest-against-police-shooting-of-man-in-crisis" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tactics</a> in Mississauga, Ontario, as part of the movement for <a href="https://www.instagram.com/justice4ejaz/?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">justice for Ejaz Choudry</a>, a 62-year-old man who, while experiencing a mental health crisis, was shot and killed in his own home by the Peel Regional Police in the summer of 2020.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Implicit in the tactic of the blockade is a strategy that rejects attempts at moral persuasion or mere dialogue with those who hold power and property, and who use it to exploit, harm, and kill. Implicit in the forceful act of solidarity is the sense that an injury to one is an injury to all, and that one can best defend one&#8217;s own community by forging bonds with others. If a community cannot escape encirclement by the police on its own, supporters elsewhere can try to flank the state from the other side. This requires building or strengthening lines of communication that evade the state’s and the mainstream media’s control or easy access.</span></p><p> </p><h2>A tactic rooted in care</h2><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The strength behind Indigenous resistance flows from our community roots, and our sense of relationality, with each other and with all of our surroundings, living or otherwise. These already structured and long-held relations are what allow us to quickly respond to situations as they arise, with a strategic eye toward the future, toward securing a land and social base for generations to come. Such relations are the building blocks of the blockade, social as much as physical. In this way, the blockade relies on activities of care (or </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uur-pMk7XjY" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">social reproduction</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">) as much as a militant spirit.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the past year, intergenerational relations of care produced direct action once again in </span><a href="http://sqeq-petsin.ca/four-women-arrested-at-tmx-drill-site-bringing-total-arrests-to-nine/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Secwepemc</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> territory and the </span><a href="https://yellowheadinstitute.org/2021/03/10/indigenous-youth-land-defenders-release-human-rights-testimonials-of-police-and-state-violence-re-trans-mountain-pipelines/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">City of Vancouver</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territories), where several (re)occupation actions against the Trans Mountain Pipeline ended in arrests and </span><a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/secwepemc-say-no-to-tmx-trial-support" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">court cases</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. The </span><a href="https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/how-canada-is-targeting-indigenous-resistance-to-tmx-trans-mountain-pipeline" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">sentencing of Anishinaabe elder</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Stacy Gallagher to 90 days in prison led the Indigenous youth group </span><a href="https://www.instagram.com/braidedwarriors/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Braided Warriors</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to </span><a href="https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2021/03/04/indigenous-anti-pipeline-protest-ends-peacefully-in-vancouver/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">block a Port of Vancouver entrance</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, as had been done a year earlier in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Those solidarities extend beyond the blockade itself. For example, Native and non-Native supporters on the </span><a href="https://smaac.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Prairies</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and in Ontario have been working to build support for Indigenous prisoners, and for people (Native and non-Native) </span><a href="https://dropthecharges.ca/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">still facing charges</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> from the Wet’suwet’en solidarity blockade movement of early 2020. These campaigns have been made accessible via websites and fundraisers to help arrestees through the court process, and to support prisoners before and after release.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Non-Native people looking to support Indigenous resistance also have avenues open to them other than just adding their numbers to a blockade or contributing to a fundraiser account. Developing one’s own struggle so as to better link it with others is another step in the right direction. The growing self-organization evident in Toronto-area struggles </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">– like in the struggle for</span> <a href="https://linktr.ee/EjazChoudry" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">justice for Ejaz Choudry</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://keepyourrent.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">tenant organizing</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://linktr.ee/peoplesdefenceto" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">eviction defence</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, and </span><a href="https://www.encampmentsupportnetwork.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><span style="font-weight: 400;">support for encampments</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and all unhoused people </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">is the kind of good work that can also be done elsewhere, at a variety of points of social contention. Through the strengthening of different communities generated through those struggles, the potential for solidarity with the Indigenous resistance movement also grows.</span></p><p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cities are Indigenous land too, and Native people are also workers, renters, and rough sleepers. We’re used to fighting on multiple fronts at once and we’re used to working with others. The networks of solidarity that make the blockade possible can be built in every struggle against the landlord, the boss, and the police </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">–</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> representatives of a </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">system that all oppressed people stand to benefit from tearing down.</span></p>						</div>
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							<p><span class="il">Mike</span> Gouldhawke is a Métis and Cree writer whose family is from kistahpinanihk (City of Prince Albert) and nêwo-nâkîwin (Mont Nebo) in Treaty 6 territory in Saskatchewan. He is based out of Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl̓ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm territories (Vancouver, British Columbia) and has been part of Indigenous and anti-capitalist movements in the city.</p>						</div>
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		<p>The post <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca/building-blocks/">Building Blocks</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.midnightsunmag.ca">Midnight Sun</a>.</p>
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