Printemps Érable: More than just a clever pun

Willy Blomme
Johns Hopkins University

Some are calling the massive demonstration in Montreal on May 22nd the biggest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Whether or not this is true – and I suspect that it is – the march was certainly impressive. Upwards of 250 000 (some estimate as many as 400 000) people took to the streets and collectively disobeyed a new “special” (read repressive and draconian) law pushed through the National Assembly by Quebec's Liberal government. The march was organized to mark the 100th day of a student strike undertaken to oppose the government's plan to hike tuition fees. But what started as a conflict over education has become something much bigger. In the wake of Bill 78 the conflict has become a stand-off between two ideological visions for Quebec.

Technically the protests are about a tuition hike. The students voted to strike in response to the government's plan to increase tuition by 82% over seven years. Since February 13th 170 000 university and CEGEP students (the number has fluctuated somewhat) have refused to go to classes to protest the proposed hikes. The choice of a strike as the protest tactic cleverly exposes the ideological differences between the two sides. The students understand that by educating themselves they are engaged in important social work. The government, by contrast, follows the typical neoliberal individualistic and job-training-focused interpretation of education. It insists that the students are boycotting classes and predictably dismisses and infantalizes them by referring to them as “enfants roi” (spoiled brats). 

Since the beginning these protests have been about more than just tuition. They come after years of “belt-tightening” in Quebec and have attracted many nonstudents angry and worried about the direction the Charest government is taking the province. Nonstudents have swelled the ranks at three major demonstrations (the 22nd of March, April and May respectively). Red squares – the symbol of the movement – have become ubiquitous. On a recent trip to Montreal I was amazed not only to see these felt squares pinned to the shirts and bags of nearly everyone I passed on the street, but also painted on buildings and even used in stores' window displays. Students and their supporters have consciously linked the fight over tuition fees to a broader struggle over economic and social justice.

Events took a turn for the sinister mid-May with the government's adoption of emergency legislation to deal with the protests. At the end of a messy couple of weeks that saw violent stand-offs between police and protesters, the rejection by students of a negotiated deal (a bizarre arrangement that would have maintained the tuition hikes but neutralized them through equivalent reductions in fees imposed by universities), the release of smoke bombs into the Montreal metro at rush hour, and the resignation of the embattled education minister, Line Beauchamp, the Charest government introduced Bill 78 with the purported intention of “restoring peace and order.” Instead it does such violence to civil liberties and the right to protest that it was guaranteed to inflame tensions. The most controversial provisions of the law (adopted 24 hours after it was presented) are:

• a requirement that police are informed eight hours ahead of the route and duration of any demonstration of 50 or more people (originally set at 10 or more);
• a requirement that organizers – or student associations simply participating in a march – ensure that the event meets the specified parametres; and
• a requirement that student associations employ appropriate means to induce their members not to directly or indirectly disrupt classes.

The law also imposes fines of up to $125,000 against groups that contravene these provisions. Constitutional lawyers, the Quebec Bar Association and human rights groups have all condemned the legislation as a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms. The government clearly recognized the inevitable legal challenges and built a self-destruct date into the legislation (July 1, 2013) ensuring that the law would expire before it had to be defended in court. In effect, the government has just given itself a weapon to use against protesters that even it recognizes as illegitimate.

Worryingly, this move to trample civil rights and grant the police extraordinary powers in the name of order is a growing trend in Canada. In one of those illuminating moments of political coincidence the Charest government tabled its “special” law the day after a report came out in Toronto condemning that city's police force for excessive force, illegal detention, and ignoring or breaching constitutional rights during the June 2010 G20 summit – an event that culminated in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history (over 1,100). The federal government is getting in on the game too. Not only is it pushing a maniacally carceral agenda (insisting on building more prisons despite persistent decreases in crime rates) it has recently proposed legislation that would ban the wearing of masks at protests (mirroring a by-law just adopted by the city of Montreal). These legislative moves make it harder and harder to simply blame “rogue” police officers for the abuses increasingly committed against Canadian protesters. At every level of government the police are being given more tools – literal and legal – for repression while the space for protest is steadily constrained.

Back on the streets of Montreal – and to a lesser extent elsewhere in Quebec – the response from citizens to the new law has been inspiring. The most dramatic moment of resistance was of course the massive May 22nd demonstration. Two of the student associations had complied with the law by providing the police with the protest route, but led by a third association, la CLASSE (Coalition large de l’association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante), hundreds of thousands of people disobeyed by walking in the opposite direction. There have been a myriad of other responses: a deluge of letters and phonecalls to the police informing them of the date and location of innocuous gatherings (from children's birthday parties to a Chamber of Commerce meeting), a bonfire at a major downtown intersection, hundreds of citizens pledging to disobey the law on arretezmoiquelquun.com (somebody arrest me), a movement mascot dressed in a plush panda suit known as Anarchopanda who hands out hugs to protesters and police officers alike, and most recently the “marche de casserole” (march of pots and pans) in which hundreds of residents come out of their houses at 8pm every night to bang on pots and pans for 20 minutes.  

In their forms of resistance to the government and the “special” law Quebec's protesters are demonstrating some affinities with the Occupy movement to which they are often compared (along with the Arab Spring, from which the name for the movement – le Printemps Érable – is derived as a pun). Many of the actions are not hierarchically organized, are adaptable (e.g. the splitting and rerouting of the night protests), are creative (e.g. the letters to the police), and are spontaneous (e.g. the marche de casserole). Like Occupy they have sought to open a discursive space for debate about ideology and the political and economic system by occupying a physical space. But where Occupy focused its physical presence on one constant space (e.g. Zucotti Park) the Montreal protesters have turned the whole city into their space of protest. By entering multiple spaces at varying times (e.g. silently riding the metro at rush hour clad in red, marching downtown during the day, banging on pots and pans in residential neighbourhoods at night) the protesters are drawing the entire city into the political space. They are doing it by mobilizing presence, creativity and surprise as their political tools.

The government, for its part, has moved to contain the space of politics through heavy handed means and blunt force. It has tried to limit the reach of the protests by demanding pre-determined, ordered routes. It has attempted to quell spontaneity by boxing in (kettling – a term made infamous by the Toronto police at the G20 protests) residents banging on pots and pans near their homes. And it has resorted to the tried and true technique of mass arrest (close to 700 on the night of May 23rd) in an attempt to make the city streets inhospitable to political opposition. Under the guise of restoring peace and order the government is trying to put the genie back in the bottle and return political debate to the restricted spaces of the National Assembly and its backrooms.

Despite these efforts by the government and the police the protests show no signs of abating. To the contrary, we are seeing more and more spaces of resistance open up and more people join the movement. This is no longer just a demonstration of political dissent but truly “une manifestation.”

Hip-hop and the Neoliberal Turn

Lester Spence
  Johns Hopkins University


  The January/February 2012 Boston Review featured a provocative set of essays on the future of black politics. The essays echo yet provide much more heft than a somewhat similar forum the Boston Review held in 1992. They address a number of key issues, from the growing divide between the black poor and middle classes, the seeming unwillingness of government to tackle the issue of income inequality and of racial inequality, the lack of a critical black progressive infrastructure to tackle these issues. Below I unpack one of these ideas—the growing neoliberalization of black politics.

Hip-hop is in many ways a response to the neoliberal turn in cities, to manufacturing and safety-net disinvestment on the one hand, and to punitive and financial capital investment on the other hand. Just as we can loosely categorize old negro spirituals as work songs replete with call and response techniques that enhance and buffer field labor, we can loosely categorize rap as post-industrial work songs.

West’s track above works on a few different levels. One of the reasons I appreciate both Kanye and JayZ’s work is because they really drive home hip-hop’s anthemic elements. By remixing Shirley Bassey’s Diamonds Are Forever (the themesong for the 1971 James Bond film of the same name) the record deftly blends hard beats and basslines with the soft ethereal elements of Bassey’s voice and the ornate instrumentation of the original. It also binds a trenchant black Atlantic critique of the diamond industry, with a fierce love of Roc-A-Fella (Kanye West and Jay-Z’s first record label—symbolized by diamonds). But Jay-Z’s cameo at about the 2:25 mark strikes me. Comparing his ability to sell cocaine to his ability to sell records, JayZ notes “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business man, let me handle my business, damn.”

Neoliberalism—the dismantling of the state, privileging of markets over all other institutions, and relentless catering to corporate interests—has reshaped the economic and political terrain, sharpened class cleavages, and pitted disadvantaged groups against each other, presenting new challenges for any emergent black movement. 

Neoliberalism doesn’t quite represent the dismantling of the state. Indeed the state’s punitive power has grown, not diminished. Neoliberalism requires a powerful state to rollback the social safety net and to rollout neoliberal policies. Furthermore it requires a state with broad ranging surveillance and punitive powers to separate those unable to work within the neoliberal framework from those able to do so. The now 15 year old welfare reform bill signed by Bill Clinton replaced lifelong welfare benefits with temporary ones that required an intensely invasive bureaucracy. 

Case workers under the new bill were tasked to track not only whether the single mothers were looking for jobs and how they looked for them, but in some cases they were tasked with drug testing recipients and forcing them to identify the biological fathers of their children. And one need only travel the streets of Time Square to note a signal growth in both the police presence and in the arms police use to carry out their jobs. Finally we can track the increasing incarceration of American citizens, and African American citizens in particular.

Jay-Z quote above signals his willing acceptance of the neoliberal turn, a turn that forces people to take more and more responsibility for their own care and personal development under the guise of entrepreneurialism. The focus on the hustle and the hustler within rap, the focus on the grind, are all fundamental components of the neoliberal turn, as these themes push people to become more and more “productive” with their time even as they are rewarded less and less (and being punished them more and more). Rap magnates like JayZ see themselves as new jack entrepreneurs using their productivity and their entrepreneurial capital to develop black business and black communities. 

Above we see a clip of Creflo Dollar, head pastor of Creflo Dollar Ministries and founder of World Changers Church International. From a church with less than ten members, Pastor Dollar has grown his church to a congregation of over 30,000 members with annual revenues of over $60 million/year. According to the Wikipedia entry Dollar himself has a private jet, two Rolls-Royces, and expensive homes in Atlanta and in New York City. The sermon is a powerful example of the prosperity gospel—the fastest growing gospel in America, the fastest growing gospel in African America. Believing in God, truly believing in God will not only bring spiritual prosperity according to Dollar, but will bring material prosperity. Concomitantly not believing in God will block your blessings and will reduce your ability to prosper materially. Poverty along these lines is the result of a spiritual deficit rather than a material deficit. 

Finally, above we have a clip of Dave Bing, current mayor of the City of Detroit.  Bing makes the claim that fiscal mismanagement has caused Detroit’s economic crisis. Just as labor and automotive executives came together to stave off the collapse of the auto industry (incidentally by eviscerating worker benefits and past labor agreements), citizens have to sacrifice in order to stave off a state takeover. In 2011 the Michigan legislature passed Public Act 4 of 2011. The innocuous sounding act allows the state to appoint a financial emergency manager when a local government unit (a city, a township, a school system) experiences financial crisis. An online faq detailing the content of the Act provides an answer to the most important question—what happens when as the result of crisis a local government unit is placed in receivership?

…beginning then and throughout the receivership, the governing body and chief administrative officer of the unit of local government may not exercise any of the powers of those offices except as may specifically [be] authorized in writing by the Emergency Manager. In addition, the governing body and chief administrative officer are subject to any conditions required by the Emergency Manager. [Italics mine]

We already think of Detroit as a third world country on American soil—the best commercial of the 2011 Superbowl had the tagline “imported from Detroit”. Long before both major political parties urged deficit reduction policies, cities like Detroit were forced by state governments and bond rating agencies to reign in social spending. But in the wake of today’s crisis they are now being asked to do more than that—as a result of the financial crisis Detroit has been forced to make are cuts in both the police and fire department.

The black political imagination has been shaped by black popular culture, and by calls to faith by progressive black church leaders. And as blacks have increasingly become majority populations in American cities, it has been shaped by black elected officials (particularly by black mayors). This political imagination has for all intents and purposes been neoliberalized. Black populations internally divide themselves into two populations—black populations that have the potential to be responsible for themselves and for the race, and black populations that are irresponsible at best and are dangers to the race at worst. In dealing with this new increasingly multicultural political era, the first thing black activists need to take account of are the forces within black communities that make it increasingly difficult to articulate much less fight for progressive political visions. 

Lester Spence's book, Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-hop and Black Politics is available from the University of Minnesota Press. Lester Blogs @ http://www.lesterspence.com/blog/ and you can follow him twitter@lesterspence

Great White Hope: The National Martin Luther King Memorial

Char Roone Miller
George Mason University


The U.S. census recently reported that the income gap between the richest and the poorest in the United States has doubled since 1968 (from a ratio of 7.69 to 1 to 14.5-to-1 in 2010), the United States is currently active in not one but three major wars, and there are more black men in American prisons today than there were slaves in 1850.  You don’t need a crystal ball, or a giant granite one, to know Martin Luther King’s response to this condition.

In spite of the justifiable and touching power the new Martin Luther King Memorial on the National Mall in D.C. takes from our nostalgia for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it fails to move us any closer to understanding or realizing how a living monument to King's dream requires our resistance to militaristic and economic forms of oppression.  The Memorial whitewashes any sense of King as activist, disrupter of power structures, and critic of economic systems.  It hides the struggle demanded by King.

A figural 30 ft-tall sculpture of MLK emerges partially formed from a block of granite, called The Stone of Hope, which appears to be the middle third of a giant boulder, sliced out and pushed from between the other two slabs of rock—The Mountain of Despair—towards the tidal basin on the National Mall.  The colossal white granite memorial, located at the cartoonish address of 1964 Independence Ave., SW DC, sternly faces the Jefferson Memorial, with its back towards the Lincoln.

None of the fourteen quotations carved into the wide marble wall that arcs around and behind the statue of King refers directly to King's work against economic injustice.  One quotation, from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, does suggest the audacity of his desire that all people receive three meals a day.  Unfortunately, this phrase becomes a touching platitude when removed from demands for state action or public policy.  The architect carved two additional quotations onto the sides of the statue of King, including one that has provoked significant criticism in which King appears to be describing himself as a “drum major for justice.” 

King’s original quotation suggested that he didn’t mind being deprecated in the service of the cause even if critics wanted to call him a “drum major for justice.”  Exactly the meaning suggested by the redaction; Maya Angelou said that edit made King look like an "arrogant twit."  The Foundation missed the point, but, worse, they missed an opportunity and wasted valuable space with a clichéd phrase, when King authored so many pithy statements of purpose.  King's remarks, for example, concerning the seat of the national government are remarkably appropriate for display in Washington DC:  “We will place the problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind.”  The statements displayed on the memorial fail to provide much meaning to King’s vision, even as they strategically lack any reference to his economic demands.

This shouldn’t be too surprising.  In spite of their repeated attempts to destroy organized labor, suppress wages, and general success at shifting wealth to the very rich, major corporations paid for this memorial.  Coke, Ford, Target, ExxonMobil, BP, FannieMae, JPMorgan Chase @ Co., NFL, McDonalds, and Lehman Brothers all donated to the Memorial and are listed on the major contributors page.  General Motors donated $10 million.   Wall-Mart gave $1 million. The Foundation proudly proclaims the faith these major donors have in King’s dream.  “By their generous support,” the website proclaims, “they’ve demonstrated something truly remarkable.  They’ve shown the breadth of support that exists for Dr. King’s vision, from the man on the street to boardrooms on the fiftieth floor.”

Those boardrooms, high above the people occupying the street, did not offer large donations in order to memorialize the fact that King was assassinated in 1968 while in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers; that just days after her husband’s murder Coretta Scott King and 42,000 people peacefully marched through Memphis to demand that the Mayor of Memphis recognize the sanitation worker’s union; that at the time of his assassination King was hard at work on the Poor People’s Campaign.   Neither Walmart nor Target, companies that have dedicated massive financial resources to fighting labor unions, could be expected to memorialize King’s vision for the power of organized labor.  Certainly not Coke, with its history of fighting unions in Guatemala and accusations that the company has used prison labor in China, and its probable complicity in the death of union organizers in Columbia.  These donors, I claim, paid for a Memorial that would help us forget that the revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron sang, "does not go better with Coke."  They got what they paid for; the Memorial does not offer any sense of the stern criticism King would certainly direct toward the labor practices of many of these companies.  The problem is not that they gave money for the Memorial, it’s that the Memorial fails to display the conflict those donations have with King’s labor advocacy. “We call our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income,” King wrote, “because we feel that the economic question is the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, are confronting.” (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., Pages 67-69) Simply allowing the Memorial to deliver King’s message concerning the importance of organized labor on a monument paid for by labor busters would offer a better representation of the struggle that King advocated.

Corporations were not the only donors, nor were they the only donors with labor policies in serious conflict with King's struggle.  The Memorial, as many have remarked, was created in China.   The Chinese government, probably the largest single donor to the memorial, gave the foundation $25 million--the U.S. government only gave $10 million in matching funds.  The Foundation naively denies that the Chinese donation influenced their decision to create the memorial in China.  Union representatives in the United States protested the contract with China and eventually received a promise from Johnson that union labor would be used to assemble the monument in the United States.  Then in September of last year, the union discovered that the Foundation had reneged on this written promise and that unpaid workers from China were working on the Memorial.  Harry S. Johnson, president and CEO of the Memorial Foundation, evoked a hypocritical claim to racial harmony to hide the issue of economic exploitation. On September 8, the Foundation asserted:  “While 95% of the work is being done by American workers, we strongly believe that we should not exclude anyone from working on this project simply because of their religious beliefs, social background or country of origin.”

The Foundation consistently gestured toward pluralism and artistic integrity to make the exploitative dimension of their economic choices disappear.  According to Ed Jackson Jr., the Executive Architect on the project: “The granite for King's statue was chosen because when lit at night, it lends a brownish tone to King's likeness. The stone, however, only exists in China.” though, he added, “some wanted it to come from the United States.”  All the white marble on the National Mall, whether from China, Italy or New Hampshire, gets darker when the sun goes down.  Jackson’s ridiculous claim about the color of the statue raises another, more obvious, question:  why not use black granite? Martin Luther King was Black. 

Birmingham, Alabama King Memorial

The Foundation’s decision to represent Dr. King in white granite treats the color of his skin as a peripheral issue, when in fact it made King who he was.  King certainly looked to a time when people no longer made judgments of value based on the color of skin but in the United States white has never been the neutral absence of color. That the Foundation chose white as an abstracted representation of King continues, regrettably, the social positioning of whiteness as neutral, which requires the production of other colors as derivative or deviant.

The assertion, given broad currency in the 1960s, that “black is beautiful”highlights a politics of aesthetic taste. The color and shape of the statue of King appears as a visual and sensual event. The body with its attractions (of color, shape, size, strength, weakness, etc.) functions as a political trigger for desire and emulation.  Plenty of our responses to the appearance of the human body are beyond and before our understanding of actions, arguments, and behaviors. Such responses are an important part of our political life.  Monuments operate in this field.  King’s physical appearance moves us; King deserved a monument that would move us. 

Binghamton, New York King Memorial

To build a colossal statue to King on the Mall is to represent him in many of the terms that have solidified white male privilege (with its connections to national and imperial forms of domination). The representation of emperors, kings, and presidents in sculptural form often presented the leader as transcending the limits of the body.  It is undoubtedly an important moment when the body of the son of a Black preacher, himself the son of a sharecropper, appears as a giant white god. 

It is inescapably necessary to represent King in earlier categories of power and value but the valuable struggle comes in using that positioning to undercut the borrowed hierarchy. Borrow the trappings of power but only to transform the terms of success. Take some money from Coke but spend that money to support the Columbian food workers union, SINALTRAINAL.  This Memorial fails because it never displays the struggle necessary for political life.  King’s life was a life of this struggle.

King's arrest for 'loitering,' 1958

It’s exciting to see Martin Luther King Jr. occupying such select space on the National Mall but we can’t afford to loose his critiques of the forms of value and prestige that the Mall and its Memorials represent.  Lehman Brothers and Coke may have paid for this Memorial but the real monument to King are the activists occupying Wall Street and DC in an attempt to transform notions of privilege and power through conflict and struggle.

Looking Beyond Spring for the Season: An African Perspective on the World Order after the Arab Revolt

Siba Grovogui

Johns Hopkins University

There is much misunderstanding today about the decision of African Union (AU) to not endorse the military intervention in Libya undertaken by France, Great Britain, and the United States in conjunction with a few Arab States. Speculations abound as to whether the uniform decision coming out of Africa indicates that the African Union is out of step with the spirit of freedom sweeping across North Africa and the Arab World, or whether the absence of Africa in the battlefield of Libya suggests military ineptitude and political bankruptcy. In fact, the African Union has not been indifferent to the conflict in Libya. The AU opted for mediation and negotiated constitutional compact, with the aim of fostering a different kind of politics. The uniform refusal of the AU to endorse Western intervention has two main explanations. The first is the practice of consensus in decision-making which has a long history within Africa. The other is profound unease on the continent about the form and foundation of the intervention itself.

I suggest that there is continent-wide skepticism in Africa about Western leadership in the eras of global governance, the rule of (international) law, the status of international morality, and the future of global democracy. This development is the result of continental experiences with the modes of enactment and execution interventions in Africa. The African position arises therefore from doubt that the coalition of Western powers leading the military effort in Libya today can be trusted to not abuse legitimate anti-Gaddafi sentiments, to not instrumentalize international law and morality, and to not subvert UN procedures and the mechanisms of global governance in order to advance hegemonic agendas and parochial ‘strategic’ interests. In short, underlying the African objection to military intervention is a longstanding tension between international organizations that represent Africa and the self-identified West around the representations of the will of the international community, the resulting global democratic deficit in times of intervention, and their effects on international morality, including the principles of humanitarianism.

In relating this conflict, I do not speak for a uniformly-defined ‘Africa’ and/or for all African entities. Nor do I wish to conflate the official West with the sentiments and traditions of all constituencies of what might be called The West. I reflect on a widely held sentiment currently expressed in Africa that specific actions by Western powers with respect to Libya paradoxically undermine the spirit and practice of participative global governance. They also subvert what should have been a moment of transformation of politics at the local, national, and global levels. In short, this is a story of how the global democratic gap or what I call the global democratic deficit has widened precisely at the moment when the national democratic deficit has erupted into violent conflict. The paradox is that humanitarian concerns come once again to serve as pretext for widening the global democratic deficit and, in the case of the Middle East, re-inscribing the term of past imperial relations under new guises.

Today’s democratic deficit may be located in many registers, two of which are of interest here: the national and the international. The domestic democratic deficit is what has prompted street uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. The global democratic deficit resides in the structures of international organizations where states, regional organizations, and other entities necessarily occupy different positions commensurate with their powers, endowments, traditions and the like. However, structures do not necessarily produce deficit, they create the conditions for it. In the present case, one can trace the deficit to the processes of decision-making regarding Libya and the institutions and traditions to which they may be traced.

(Source: http://subashini.tumblr.com/post/6490630348/hidingincanada-spatiotemporalcookies)

Few are aware for instance that the Western coalition on Libya decided to declare Libya Arab and not African and thus designated the League of Arab States as the primary address ‘in matters relating to the maintenance of international peace and security in the region’ encompassing that country. The purpose it has become apparent was to remove any hindrance to an agenda that did not conform to UN mandates. The UN resolution currently implemented (Res. 1973) (PDF) has a number of stipulations that can be summarized thus: 1) ‘immediate establishment of a cease-fire and a complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians’; 2) ‘the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis which responds to the legitimate demands of the Libyan people,’ aided by a Special Envoy to Libya and the Peace and Security Council of the African Union; 3) compliance by ‘Libyan authorities comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law, human rights and refugee law’; 4) ‘to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.’

The AU understood the point of the resolution to favor a peaceful resolution but it has become apparent today the coalition had a different agenda from that stipulated in it. It has also become apparent that, on account of its position in the relevant international organizations and political and military endowments, the Western coalition was reverting to the imperial tradition of claiming the universal will for itself – and thus to exclude others from its expression. Having sidelined Africans and imputed all hindrances to the resolution of the conflict to Gaddafi, the Western coalition determined to change the regime in Tripoli which one issued from the ranks of the opposition in Benghazi: the Transitional National Council, or TNC. Since then, all measures recommended by Res.1973 have been exceeded. Specifically, NATO airstrikes have gone from forestalling Gaddafi’s aggression to destroying the nation’s infrastructure. In the process, the Western alliance has embraced assassination as a policy; Britain has sent special agents to the ground; and France had delivered weapons to the so-called resistance, despite the putative ban on weapons. The irony, as Gaddafi is finding out, is that to defy Western will is to expose one to a fate not unlike Gaddafi’s answers to those who rebelled against him.

Like the domestic democratic deficit against which Libyans rightly rose up, the global democratic deficit is both behavioral and structural. The connection between the non-democratic behavior of global hegemonic powers and the possibility of democratic politics at the domestic level is often direct. Take for instance the role of the West in the political culture currently brewing in the Libyan opposition. Since endorsing the TNC as the sole legitimate representative of the Libyan people, the Western coalition backing has remained silent as the organization grows intolerant by the day not only toward Gaddafi, his family, and allies but also toward Sub-Saharan African migrants accused of sympathy with the regime. Accordingly, the TNC has not only excluded negotiation with Gaddafi or his allies; it has snubbed all efforts by the African Union to mediate a political settlement. To either the West or the TNC, there could be only one solution: total and unconditional surrender of political opponents.

Africans are accustomed to a certain instrumentalization of reform by Western powers. One recalls for instance the policy of Constructive Engagement. During the Apartheid years, this official US policy was build on the assumption that effective politically mediation and settlement in South Africa rested in the capacity of mediators (honest brokers?) like the US to engage all parties even, in this case, a regime that was ideologically and politically bent on the total subordination of its local black population and the destruction of neighboring states. Africans are also accustomed to another certainty in Western interventions: this is that unsympathetic entities like the then Marxist regimes of Angola and Mozambique and the African National Congress of South Africa were directed by Western powers to necessarily accommodate opposing Western-friendly entities, whether states, corporations, or political organizations as a requirement for lasting peace. By contrast, it is also a certainty of political life in Africa that, upon Western interventions, reigning or ascendant Western-friendly entities need not accommodate unsympathetic opposing figures or entities. In other words, friends of the West need not bother with democratic niceties as the price for peace. Enemies or adversaries do the same or they are eliminated from the scene.

In the case of Libya one may even wonder why the TNC would want to negotiate, compromise, or reconcile when the largest armies in the world are committed to the destruction of the one obstacle to their own path to power? President Ahmadou Toumani Touré of Mali, an engaged democrat himself whose own behavior in power contrasts drastically with that of Gaddafi, gave an indication of his own sentiment about the situation in an interview granted to Radio France Internationale. Asked by the reporter why he would not join the West (again dubbed during the interview as the International Community), Touré gave the following answer, which I paraphrase: ‘We are asked to promote democracy in Libya against a man who holds power at the barrel of the gun and you want me to unseat him at the barrel of the gun and seat another group in his place. If Gaddafi’s unwillingness to negotiate and compromise is the problem today why is the other side relying on forced removal?’

Ahmadou Toumani Touré

The current intransigence of the West and the TNC has unnerved Africans because it reveals a culture of intolerance. A quick survey of the response of the West to the Arab Spring thus far tells a mixed story. There was no protest when, upon the departure of Hosni Mubarak and Ben Ali, the old regimes essentially maintained themselves. Western reactions to Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria contrast starkly with reactions to Libya. Here, the coalition has fomented and condoned intransigence on the part of the rebels against negotiated settlement. Significantly, with NATO support, the TNC is now on its way to Tripoli without any warnings from the coalition on the fate of civilians in that city if the rebels succeeded in overtaking it: the stated motivation of attacks on Gaddafi’s army.

I know of few people who would argue that the situation in Libya was tenable or that it should have been allowed to persist. I also know of few individuals who would pretend that an operation such as the one currently undertaken by the West could be carried out without mistakes or blemish. Yet, these are not arguments against global democracy and the reasonableness that is required in interpreting international law, particularly UN Resolutions. To paraphrase a dissenting opinion by Judge Kotaro Tanaka (PDF) of the International Court of Justice, ‘different treatment under international law should be permitted only when it can be justified by the criterion of justice’; thus, one may replace justice with reasonableness but only that criterion does not logically lead to arbitrariness. In short, even a doctrine of reasonableness required by pragmatism should not be allowed to do away with the questions of democracy and the morality implied in different treatment of similarly situated events and persons.

The idea that one can be excluded from the political compact simply because of one’s position in the global system or association within an undemocratic regime is a nightmarish scenario to generations of activists who have fought for human rights, constitutionalism, and democratic inclusion; as well as humanitarians who have tended to the social calamities caused by endless civil wars and leading to the collapse of peace and the failure of state. To those who are undeterred by the idea that Africans may actually formulate coherent views of international morality, including an aversion to war, consider these facts. In 2003, even after dispatching Colin Powell to Africa to seek support for the war in Iraq, the US failed to move a single one of them. This refusal to join the Iraq war effort came at the heel of great sympathy for the US following the 1998 US Embassy Bombings in East Africa and the attack perpetrated against the US on 9/11/2001. Further, for nearly 4 years, the US has failed to find a single state from fifty three to host AFRICOM (the US military Africa Command) even as all African states have endorsed the aims of US anti-terrorism programs. Today, none of the countries, and all of them African enlisted in the US initiated Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Partnership, all of them poor and dependent on US aid, has endorsed military intervention in Libya.

Where is Labor’s Voice in Our History?

John Buell

Author of Evil Doers: Demonization and the    

End of Civil Debate in American Politics (NYU Press)

Newly minted Republican governors everywhere seem engaged in a new competition: how best to crush the remaining voices of labor and the left in their states. Attacks on wages, pensions, and benefits of public employees have garnered national attention along with efforts to destroy the unions. Maine has now become the leader of the pack, with our new governor, Paul LePage, now seeking not only to curb unions but also to obliterate labor history itself from our public discourse. His decision to order removal of a labor history mural from the Department of Labor has evoked both local and international attention.

In 2007, a good friend of ours, Judy Taylor, won a competitive commission from the Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Department of Labor to present a visual montage of the history of labor in Maine. . Taylor collaborated informally with Maine’s preeminent labor historian, Charles Scontras of the Bureau of Labor Education at the University of Maine. In personal communication with the artist (and which both have generously shared with me) Scontras highlighted what might serve as an overarching theme for the mural: “Maine is a bit more than the stereotypical romantic images that have become commonplace and marketed by our gift and souvenir shops, i.e., Down-East humor, lighthouses, lobster fishermen, general stores with their pot bellied stoves and crackle barrels, its rock-bound seacoast, the rustic retreat for frustrated urbanites, larger than life lumberjacks, etc. While these things do describe Maine, and I am glad that they form part of our heritage, Maine was not Nirvana. The creative role of dissent, protest, conflict, and the demand for social justice in the workplaces of the state, form an integral part of our historical legacy.”

Judy used her family and friends as models in the 11 panels depicting scenes from Maine's labor history. Thus, the young college- aged daughter of friends became "Rosie the Riveter". Women’s tireless work building tanks, torpedoes, trucks and ships was critical to the war effort and to our final victory in World War II. Our daughter is seen in the panel depicting the Lewiston-Auburn Shoe factory strike of 1937. She is shown screaming with her arms raised as the police and National Guard are dragging the striking immigrant Franco-American women to jail.

My wife is Frances Perkins, whose parents were Maine natives. Frances Perkins, President Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, was the first woman cabinet member and the longest serving cabinet member in American history. She helped create Social Security, the first Federal unemployment insurance, Federal laws abolishing child labor, standards for workplace safety, the first federally guaranteed minimum wage, and the 40 hour work week. To this day, our families and workplaces would be very different without the protections and programs that Perkins and her colleagues initiated and implemented.

Our governor is unimpressed. He ordered removal of this mural and renaming the department’s Perkins conference room on the grounds that these convey a one-sided view of Maine economic development. If the governor feels that all history and all art reflect a point of view, we can agree with him. The situations portrayed in the mural reflect historical facts but these particular facts were chosen to represent events that working men and women experienced as quantum changes in the quality of their lives. History is not a random collection of discrete facts. Nor is history static. The facts as individuals and as a society that we now choose to emphasize reflect and in turn influence our experience, our sense of right and wrong and our imagination. Art plays an essential role in expressing and amplifyng this creative dynamic.

Business already has more than ample resources to get its views across. There are whole networks, Fox and CNBC, devoted to promulgation of business views. In our increasingly pro-business media, counter arguments are shouted down and opponents demeaned and vilified Following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, corporations are now legal persons that can spend unlimited sums on political advertising and image creation.

So, Governor Le Page, if we can’t have a mural like this at the Department of Labor, where will we learn about the benchmarks in Maine’s labor history? Why is “balance” limited to efforts to counter the few labor voices while business perspective go unchallenged?

The governor’s actions also reflect and intensify the dismissive, contemptuous style of the modern media. Not content with merely ordering removal of the mural, the governor had it removed over a weekend in the cover of darkness to obviate any public protest. His actions are painfully reminiscent of authoritarian efforts to shape politics through the control of art.

Progressive critics of the governor should advocate more support—including financing for-- art from a variety of political and religious orientations. Business itself should be encouraged to develop its own art, but in the process it might also become clear that business is not a monolith. The US Chamber of Commerce claims to speak for all, but often articulates only the perspective of the largest and most government pampered multinationals.

We should counter the Fox mindset not merely with different politics but with a more respectful, less hubristic political style. We must of course advocate and defend the effectiveness of some immediate reforms. The world is not utterly chaotic and some domains or markets would still respond to fiscal stimulus and simple reforms in relatively predictable ways. But order and stability often make possible new disequilibrium and even harmonious systems encounter disruptions from other complex systems. None is as self-contained or autonomous as some would like to argue. Earthquakes, climate change, and inordinate and expanding bubbles all threaten major disruptions in “self-regulating” markets. (The case for a world that cannot be confined within static and predictable harmonies is lent plausibility, though no proof is claimed, in William Connolly’s AWorld of Becoming, which provocatively expands on and articulates political and ethical implications of recent developments in complexity theory, neuroscience, and philosophy.)

How do we respond to such a world? Cling to ultimate faith in the eventual triumph of the “free market’ or to a providential and all powerful God? Surely these conventional voices deserve their hearing. Some progressives, however, want to “remove religion from politics.” And hope the facts will speak for themselves.This is neither fair nor effective. Even progressives’ short-term reforms are premised in part of some fundamental moral values and facts absent passions or commitments may not motivate.

Progressives and liberal advocates of a more just and inclusive society of all stripes and backgrounds should articulate the fundamental religious and philosophical ideals that influence and inspire their politics even as they acknowledge the inability to fully demonstrate their truth to the satisfaction of all. In the process collaboration among secular liberals, peace and environmental justice groups, feminist organization, immigrant rights groups, native Americans. Civil rights groups, social justice Catholics, liberal Muslims, and Jews can grow through mutual willingness to debate core values and recognition of shared vulnerabilites. At a minimum, this process can strengthen and be strengthened by a commitment to oppose efforts by any group to close debate or suppress protest. More broadly it may facilitate development of shifting coalitions around positive reconstruction of the political economy. 

Broader and more systemic reconstitution of workplaces, the media, and consumption patterns aimed at redressing the complex social, cultural, and economic origins of serious disequilibrium such as huge wealth disparities, massive hunger, unprecedented climate disruption can be suggested.

In the context of such basic changes, however, we should acknowledge the continuing possibility of unintended consequences, new and unforeseen rights claims, and our limited ability to predict and control the future. My faith is that such openness to differing fundamentals, tentative and experimental policy responses, and sensitivity to new claims is the best way to prevent anarchy or tyranny in a rapidly morphing world. My (perhaps utopian) hope is that it might even evoke reciprocal moves among, at least, the less rigid devotees of Fox and the Tea Party.

Right now, however, we must stand firm against censorship and the effort to crush any pro-labor perspective, endeavors that are occurring in many forms across the nation. Rather than expanding debate, these efforts are intended to prevent any labor perspective from arising from the ashes.

Instead of taking Frances Perkins’ name off of a room, we should be erecting statues to honor her and other Maine labor leaders. My wife was proud to stand in for Frances Perkins in the Department of Labor's History of Maine Labor mural. The mural should be returned to the Department of Labor, where it can serve all Maine citizens.