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    Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism
    Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism
    Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism

    By Craig Fortier

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    Drawing on interviews with 51 anti-authoritarian organizers to investigates what it means to struggle for “the commons” within a settler colonial context, Unsettling the Commons (ARP Books) interrogates a very important debate that took place within Occupy camps and is taking place in a multitude of movements in North America around what it means to claim “the commons” on stolen land. Travelling back in history to show the ways in which radical left movements have often either erased or come into clear conflict with Indigenous practices of sovereignty and self-determination—all in the name of the “struggle for the commons”, the book argues that there are multiple commons or conceptualizations of how land, relationships, and resources are shared, produced, consumed, and distributed in any given society. As opposed to the liberal politics of recognition, a political practice of unsettling and a recognition of the incommensurability of political goals that claim access to space/territory on stolen land is put forward as a more desirable way forward.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArbeiter Ring Publishing
    Release dateNov 15, 2017
    ISBN9781927886038
    Unsettling the Commons: Social Movements Within, Against, and Beyond Settler Colonialism
    Author

    Craig Fortier

    Craig Fortier is an Assistant Professor in Social Development Studies at Renison University College, an affiliated college of the University of Waterloo. He holds a PhD in Sociology from York University. Craig has participated in migrant justice and anti-capitalist movements and in support of Indigenous sovereignty for over a decade in Toronto (Three Fires Confederacy, Haudenosaunee, and Huron-Wyandot territories). He is also the centre-fielder for the radical recreational softball team the Uncertainty and the author of the cat blog Diaries of a Cat Named Virtute.

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      Book preview

      Unsettling the Commons - Craig Fortier

      Acknowledgements

      PROLOGUE

      Commoning in a Time of Dispossession

      Glitter-speckled sweat falls from my face and splashes on the woodgrain floor of Decadent Squalor, a DIY venue in Montréal’s Saint-Henri neighbourhood. ¹ It’s an unseasonably hot evening for mid-May and about a hundred of us are crammed tightly into the venue to listen to a trio of radical punk bands: Fail Better, Force Quit and Frankie Fricative & the Facials. The crowd is a mix of white anarchist punks and queer/gender fucking femmes of colour, the latter of whom have come from the Glamour Kiss Look Fair, the naughty sibling of Montréal’s annual Anarchist Book Fair.

      The show ends and as we stumble into the cool breeze of night, we are immediately swept up in one of the dozens of nighttime marches, part of the 2012 Québec student strike. In our shimmering tight clothes and slightly running makeup, we are an odd though welcome sight for the other protesters. We snake through the city streets with a motley crew of radicalized students, veteran anarchist organizers, older Québecois leftists, and those masked up in black bloc formation. These activists have marched in record numbers for a half-dozen consecutive nights in defiance of Loi 78, an emergency measure intended to limit the right to assemble to picket and protest, recently passed in the Assemblée nationale du Québec by Québec’s Liberal Party provincial government.

      We evade riot police by snaking from street to street, improvising the route. I see a dumpster being turned over and lit on fire to block the police from disrupting our march. Spirits are high, and without much talking we cooperate and collaborate with each other with hand signals and chants. In a moment of reflection I think about how the evening’s two very different events—the punk show and the night march—were both building towards something similar: the reclamation of space and the formation of commons.

      The punk show at Decadent Squalor and the ad hoc and brief reclamation of the Montréal streets that night could both be understood as different but related expressions of co-creating space through the practice of commoning. This long-term building of community is rife with conflict, contradictions, and disagreements, yet it entails what historian Peter Linebaugh calls complex kin patterns, forms of mutuality, and customs held in common.² A reformulation and reinterpretation of long-standing practices of commoning underlies many leftist projects that respond to the forces of dispossession and proletarianization that are central to capitalism.

      On that exhilarating evening in Montréal, where cracks in the shells of the old worlds of capitalism allowed the possibility of new ways of being to shine through, this re-claiming of the commons was reinforced by the repetition of a familiar call and response chant among North American activists: Whose streets? Our streets! We alternated between French and English. It felt good to chant in unison and I joined the chorus, but I was struck with a pang of worry that something was missing. A lyric from a song that Fail Better played earlier that evening started to roll through my mind, we all try to do what we can, while living on stolen land. In that moment I’m reminded of the inherent contradiction of claiming space without acknowledging the context of settlement and occupation in which we live.

      Two years later, I interviewed Fred Burrill, a white settler, an organizer during the Québec student strike and housing activist based in Montréal. I learned the relationship of the student movement to Indigenous peoples’ land-based struggles was hotly debated during the student strike. Burrill explained how in the moments when the Whose streets chant began during the marches and actions, groups of anti-authoritarian organizers, like those associated with No One Is Illegal or the radical left of the student movement, worked to push back against this message by countering with chants that tried to resist the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and existence. He recounts:

      It was a big issue in the strike actually, at some points we were doing those nightly demonstrations and doing them every day and it became a kind of contest between people being "A qui le Québec? A nous le Québec! and us being A qui le Québec? Au Mohawk le Québec ou a les Algonquins le Québec!"—and really trying to push on those issues of decolonization and land.

      This vignette helps draw out a key problem with how the commons is understood among many social movements within the radical left in North America. The prevailing discourse around the commons becomes one that seeks to claim ownership over particular places and territories without acknowledging the settler colonial context in which these struggles take place.

      Rally chants bring into the public realm political debates that are happening within movements. They also signal shifting relationships and politics and, as Burrill suggests, the debates he took part in in 2012 contributed to the modestly successful efforts to link the Québec student strike with Indigenous struggles against the proposed Plan Nord, a large-scale development project. Through these interventions and discussions, the leadership of the Québec student strike were forced to reckon with a growing body of their base who saw the economic imperatives of their government to conduct resource extraction on Indigenous lands in the north of the province—without the consent of the Cree community—as being tied to the same forces pushing for greater neo-liberalization of their post-secondary education. It is through these linkages that the potential to unsettle claims to the commons exists.

      1DIY means do-it-yourself and promotes ethic of self-sufficiency and community reliance that is outside of the logics (in this particular case) of capitalist profit-making. In this case Decadent Squalor is a space offered by the tenants or owner to act as a venue to host events organized by members of the anti-authoritarian punk community in Montréal.

      2Linebaugh 2014

      Introduction

      So, what is the commons? How should commoning be practiced? What does it mean to build social movements to [re] claim the commons on stolen land? And what does a politics and practice of decolonization look like for non-Indigenous peoples seeking to resist the state while also trying to support Indigenous peoples in their struggle for self-determination?

      These questions are central to this book.

      Drawing on interviews conducted with 51 activists in nearly a dozen cities in Canada and the United States, this book explores the shifts in politics, practices and cultures of social movements as they develop social and political relationships with Indigenous peoples striving for sovereignty and self-determination. The activists I interviewed organize in many different radical left struggles in the Canadian and U.S. settler states, but can be described as sharing certain principles and practices in common—what Chris Dixon calls the anti-authoritarian current.³ This current is made up of movements that converge, overlap, contradict, and challenge each other, including anarchist groups, women of colour organizers, radical queer/trans* activists, environmental justice groups, Black liberation movements, disability justice groups, anti-colonialist activists, and other anti-capitalist and anti-oppressive organizations.

      These movements emerge at an important historical moment. Over the last 25 years, at least since the 1994 Zapatista uprising against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), there have been significant interactions between anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-state struggles throughout the world.⁴ These interactions have led to a greater focus on pluralism and decentralization as liberation strategies, strategies that incorporate a widely shared desire for more direct forms of democracy and critiques of the many structures of authoritarianism emanating from state, capitalist, and bureaucratic leftist institutions.⁵ Movements in the West seeking to re-imagine or reclaim other forms of democracy while resisting austerity and neoliberalism have often

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