Hi,
Ok, I get it! No one is going to read this thing, let alone enjoy reading it. I'm working on re-writing everything to be more accessible. That won't change that I'm not a very good writer to begin with, but I'll do my best to make the next version at least shorter and faster to read.
For now, please forgive me for any typos or poor writing you come across, if you decide to read through any of this!
Tim (Union Kid)
Many years ago, I used this space on the great expanse of the internet to explain why I was a staunch supporter of the idea of alleviating homelessness in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. (You can skip to the penultimate section at the bottom for a preserved copy of what was originally written here for many years.)
I never mentioned this in specific terms, but I once wholly and unquestionably supported things such as homeless shelters, food banks, and even social welfare programs that assist people who are homeless.
But as suggested by the nature of this document, things changed. Somewhere along the way, I became disillusioned with non-profits and the broader welfare system these institutions are situated within. This was a very difficult realisation for me because I have spent most of my life believing that all non-profits - and by extension, charities - are inherently good. But reality is often disappointing, and maybe there's a reference to Matrix-esque simulation pop-philosophy somewhere in there (see instead: Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard). In today's world, we have created a convenient, politically-correct worldview that often blindly celebrates philanthropy and charity alike.
I want to express this clearly: I am not against the existence of any particular charity or non-profit, or either of those as institutions. These things are, at their core, fuelled by morally good, humanist motivations. Non-profit, like many things, is fundamentally amoral at worst. After all, it is better to do something than nothing at all. Occam's razor, right? But nothing is ever so simple. I can write with some confidence that at some point in everyone's lives, particularly those working directly in lower level social service or non-profit capacities, they've asked themselves the very same question and become vexed by why things continue being the way they are, despite all the time, effort, and money to change them. We're talking about values in the billions of dollars and millions of full-time workers, many unpaid, in the non-profit sector at play here. It's big in Canada, accounting for 8.7% of our country's GDP (data from 2021) and it's an even bigger industry in the United States (data from 2017). Industry is a particularly important word, because not all non-profits are equal. A multi-national organisation is patently not equivalent to a non-profit started by a group of 2-3 friends, from funding to the demographics they work with. But by nature of being a non-profit, particularly the largest ones in the world, they comprise the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC), which also includes Non-Government Organisations (NGOs). The short, if somewhat impersonal explanation is available throughout the internet, but Wikipedia is a great place to start exploring these concepts. I will try to explain it further below following a quick side note.
Side note: I began writing about homelessness but quickly transitioned into something else entirely. It is important to understand that homelessness is a symptom and not a problem per se, but it would be unethical to hyper-fixate on homelessness and not discuss its greater context. This is not to say that we should not address homelessness at all, but again, I will elaborate later.
Consider the following example, representative of many welfare programs in society: in a community-based non-profit, “clients” must almost always meet certain criteria to receive charitable goods or services. Sometimes these are harmless: clients must obviously be children to participate in programs designed for children. But things become more complex when people must fit certain criteria such as being sober, drug-free, or so-on, to acess services like staying in a shelter. Many government programs operate in a similar manner, in a situation known as welfare conditionality (Wright, Fletcher, & Stewart, 2020). Government programs often end up being incredibly bureaucratic, where a simple and perhaps urgent request for living necessities suddenly transforms into a nightmare of paperwork and phone calls (consenting to terms and conditions loaded with jargon, providing mostly irrelevant personal information), surveillance (continued obedience to said terms and conditions, invasive monitoring of reasonably private life matters), and potentially exploitation (punitive conditions such as membership in a religion or simply having to keep returning for additional services because the initial service was unsuccessful or insufficient).
Put another way, think of the legal/corrections system, which ironically fails to “correct” most things, evidenced by abysmal recidivism rates in Canada and Manitoba. And even though I cite recidivism, it is important to note that recidivism is not incarceration: for example, our recidivism rates are similar to those of more successful corrections programs, such as those in Scandinavia, but they differ in that Canada has higher incarceration rates per capita. And I must also concede that recidivism itself is a terrible measure of penal system outcomes because it elides a number of independent factors beyond “re-arrest”. For example, the legalisation of marijuana has certainly decreased legal system contact, but that is the direct result of a change in law, not the success of corrections.
These are things that precipitate from closed-door, bloated hierarchical bureaucracies comprising highly-paid, almost always profit-driven elites. In non-profits, there is little to no democratic power among the lowest-paid or unpaid workers. Starting to sound familiar yet? Such organisations share many similarities with for-profit businesses, where this phenomenon festers, manifesting in remuneration practices, market competitiveness, complete with CEO and board member hiearchies. It is important to make a distinction here: non-profits are inherently better than for-profits, but that does not make either form of organisation above reproach. Regardless of the profit motive, the current administrative bloat, specifically in non-profits, greatly benefits the already-wealthy, the highly-credentialed (correlated with preexisting wealth, rarely actual performance or capacity to perform, which collectively is a mechanism of meritocratic hegemony), and the opportunists with decision-making powers that determine not only how people are “helped”, but “why” they are helped.
It should not surprise many people that society's problems are not actually being fixed, if not becoming worse, given the fundamental malfeasance of current social welfare institutions. People continue to suffer so charities and philanthropists can keep “helping people”.
Wouldn't you rather your money go toward helping someone who actually needs it, maybe even to do something different for once, instead of padding the salary of wealthy executive directors and managers while they operate agencies of social control through the form of internships and volunteerism? (Scary thought: unpaid internships is indebted servitude, which is essentially slavery 2.0. Worse when you realise that post-secondary programmes often require the intern to pay their institution to perform labour!)
To preface this section, identity politics is not the cause of the problem, but it elucidates many layers between the problem of homelessness and the root causes that are seemingly taboo in most of society. In the same vein as the previous section, let's begin with something that is easily observed in today's society. Identity politics, or “idpol”, as it is colloquially referred to on the internet, is a term that fuels culture wars and is the most visible obfuscation of social issues. Identity, simply put, is race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Idpol is not inherently bad because it is simply a categorical system - it really is just language used to categorise something. (Whether or not that ascribes some meaning akin to a self-fulfilling prophecy is for another discussion.) But the usage and often policing of language unnecessarily abstracts the problem beyond its original scope. Referring to homeless people as “people experiencing homelessness” or measuring “racial diversity among the homeless” is an incredible waste of time and effort. Imagine you were, say, a white male, and someone comes up to you and tells you about how much more advantaged you are than that homeless immigrant woman down the street. I can guarantee that neither you nor that woman care about your sex or gender or race beyond the fact that neither of you have a home to live in (and presumably want to live in one). Imagine being denied a benefits check because you “aren't the eligible race”. I think you get the point. But you can see how this easily becomes a convenient way to unnecessarily divide people by creating identity-targeted, often theory-informed welfare solutions: this homeless person suddenly becomes an Indigenous homeless person, who eventually becomes an Indigenous homeless man, or an Indigenous homeless man with drug abuse problems, and so on. (There is another possible discussion here regarding when holistic and medical approaches are appropriate in problem-solving, but again, it would be too tangential.)
Idpol proliferates within corporations and charities alike, espousing appropriated “socially just” views in support of various marginalised groups, meanwhile using this as a facade to hide the fecklessness of social welfare provision as a function of society, which also happens to be the fundamental role that charities and non-profits perform for society. Society as a whole enjoys dealing with the problem of racism as a social problem. It is simple to think about. You know what racism is, I know what racism is, you can ask the next person you see on the street and they, too, will know what racism is. The framing of race issues today is jejune, and so is its juvenile solution: to “solve racism” is simply to respect other races, a very simple task (that we have obviously failed to fully achieve, but that's beside the point).
This, too, is a middle layer among many in the problem of homelessness, however significant the layer may be. The prevelance of crowdfunding for health, death, and many other things that people around the world would consider to be basic human rights is evidence of that. Idpol drives the issue and its discussions away from what can benefit everyone: the fairer allocation of material resources - homes, food, and money to buy both of these things - paramount to bringing people out of poverty (a socioeconomic stratum to which homeless people tend to fit in). “Solving racism” is far easier than solving poverty, because poor people do not need or want your respect (skip to 8:50 and watch for a few minutes, but honestly I'd recommend watching all of it).
How did identity politics become so rampant in society? Why is it seemingly everywhere across the political spectrum? Throughout history, a common imperialist strategy is to divide and conquer. Identity politics is a manifestation of this strategy in a globalised, Western-dominated milieu (which is changing, but I will explain why that doesn't affect neoliberalism). The divisions created by this political phenomenon is part of the same neoclassical economic rhetoric in which people are seen as entirely alienable from the labour they perform, and therefore some will always be unable to afford a (reasonable) home because “that's just the way it is”. It is the type of argument you can expect to receive after confronting someone about sweatshop or child labour in foreign nations: they will blame either the foreign nation itself for allowing such practices, or worse, arguing that slavery is a better alternative to no income whatsoever and consequent starvation. Reject this reactionary drivel! This is abstraction which divides or even pacifies what ought to be righteous indignation of the masses against exploitation of labour and resources! Don't be fooled by the silver tongue, which often intimidates us with warnings about having to pay more for goods or that small businesses will suffer. (Small businesses in western contexts are almost always as predatory and sharkish as big business - they just have less people working in them.) This is, in essence, the nature of neoliberal thought, a bastardisation of neoclassical economics with bleeding heart liberalism. It took me years to reach a point where I could finally see that most mainstream news outlets across the world promote similar rhetoric. Of course, reflecting the silver linings I described earlier, the “news” or the “media” is not inherently bad, and we should not suddenly stop reading the news. But understand that something simple, for example an article about job market growth in the second-quarter of 2022, is an article mostly relevant to the benefactors of such news: an incredibly small but wealthy group of people who benefit immensely from having you believe that you are about to receive some sort of newfound prosperity as a result of “job market growth” in a disgustingly financialised economy comprising mostly speculative value. Reuters is one of the worst offenders because of its ubiquity - often cited by other news outlets in Canada, which include CBC, CTV, and Global News.
Side note: I should acknowledge that abstraction (neoliberal or not) is not an inherently bad phenomenon. However prosaic, this is the case for most things in life. There are pragmatic reasons why abstractions in the form of disciplines and subdisciplines have developed, mainly that they elucidate more complex (root) phenomena for most humans. Less pretentiously, abstractions dumb things down, and that's not a bad thing! The problem is that things which are dumbed down tend to remain dumbed down: race studies, women and gender studies, and so on, are not “dumb” in any sense, but they were not meant to be ends per se. They are children of sociology, which itself is often known as the daughter of philosophy. The point of this is to address any potential contradiction in my argument against abstractions. I will also admit that I learned this from three heterodox economists (Mitchell, Wray, & Watts, p. 23), and a cursory look at macroeconomics will reveal endless jargon and a fundamentally abstracted field, which reiterates the importance of context!
It is clear that there is a need for drastic reforms to the economy, to government, and maybe even to religious institutions as well, all of which are agencies of social control or dictate other institutions to follow suit. These involve grander ideas that I am nowhere near knowledgeable enough to articulate clearly. But it should be some consolation to all of us that many of modern society's ills have already been explained, dissected, and “solved” from decades to centuries ago by numerous sociologists, philosophers, and academics in disciplines spanning across the humanities. Our responsibility, if we believe in the betterment of humanity, is to simultaneously learn what history can teach us and what we can do differently. Unfortunately, grifters people very easily fixate on derivative social problems when corrupted by a paycheque, from the controversial academics who place the onus on individual agency as a solution to social problems, to the sea of lesser known academics, new and old, who have lost sight of their peripheries and become contextually empty paper pushers, or worse, the leaders of new industrial complexes.
Poverty or harm reduction initiatives, such as minimum income, safe injection sites, improved funding for rehabilitation services, and affordable housing initiatives (semi-related article about the nature of renting housing which is interesting enough to mention here), are things I will not elaborate upon here. It is not because they are unimportant or ineffective - these reduction strategies can benefit the majority of any population and are a small step in the right direction, but they must be billed to the richest people and said people must pay for it directly with their own monetary wealth (rather than through loans from banks, which is ultimately money derived from the government, and subsequently, the people - but the nature of these transactions will never be discussed in mainstream media and I'm digressing). My point is that none of these are truly effective solutions and only maintain some continuation of the status quo which created these problems in the first place. This is, in essence, the result of neoliberalism. The ritualistic, cult-like celebration of solutions to problems, chanting mantras of “not enough is being done” or “not enough funding”, all the while actively ignoring the greater context and doing very little to actually prevent the problems from happening in the first place.
Consider the issue of mental health and mental illnesses, which, while very much a result of declining social stigma surrounding the subject (a good thing), may not be an entirely independent problem which we view as something to be treated with therapy, counselling, medication, or a combination of several or all “appropriate” solutions. Unsurprisingly, counselling and pharmaceuticals are extremely profitable “helping” industries experiencing immense market growth as mental health becomes destigmatised. But this growth mostly benefits high income earners, those who can afford “first world” boutique counselling services such as “marriage and family therapy”. Meanwhile, social media bombards us with hyperindividualistic ideologies of leisure and work, culminating in today's Neo-Darwinist hustle culture, which is simply an evolution of the dystopian “positivity movement” from only a few years ago, itself a result of the secularisation of society and subsequent decline of the protestant work ethic (disclaimer: all of these ideologies are harmful to society in that they place virtually every social issue as a moral or ethical failing of individual agency, rather than systemic failures). And while the unsuspecting public (and the youth of TikTok) are deluded into modern neoliberalism, Canada ranked 2nd in 2015 for most deaths due to the Opioid Crisis (Dyer, 2015), with an 89% increase in 2020 from the year before (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2021, page 5). Strangely, society and interpersonal relationships are more atomised than ever despite the ubiquity of media which supposedly exists to help us socialise (or dare I suggest, better communicate) with one another, though I would not venture so far as to establish causation between these factors because not everyone uses social media in the same way (though everyone is victim to the same forces it imposes on its users, no matter how discerning the subject). But one cannot deny that these are relevant realities in a massive push in mental health-related funding, an example being Bell's marketing campaign having less to do with mental health than promoting its brand, meanwhile ignoring the privatisation of what should be publicly funded, owned, and accessible services and industry. None of this is to say that mental health is unimportant or that mental illness does not exist, whether entirely or to the degree that it does. I will address this last point in the next section, “doing things differently”.
Solving any single, abstracted problem is just that - it solves one single, abstracted problem. But what about the others? Again, they are symptoms and not the root of the problem. This mentality is ubiquitous in our society, no thanks an education system which does well to teach generation after generation about social ills while offering few solutions beyond already-present, often private or non-profit institutions, which have historically and consistently failed to solve whatever problems they were created to solve. Sterile needles has reduced disease - you're still homeless and poor. You now have a roof to live under - you're still struggling with drug addiction and poverty, and the examples continue et cetera, multiplying as more factors are applied. Instead of funding a new private psychotherapy or non-police emergency response service, perhaps it would be better to lobby for expanding the healthcare system to include more comprehensive healthcare.
As an aside, I attended a City of Toronto panel discussion in the summer of 2021, which featured representatives of North America's most prominent non-police crisis response programs (New York, San Francisco, Portland, etc). Toronto is Canada's first city to actually offer some semblance of a realistic solution to the anti-poor “defund” movement, so the panel was expectedly dominated by Americans. It was also expected because Toronto is simply copying Eugene, Oregon's CAHOOTS approach to crisis response. The week before, I attended a panel discussion by End Homelessness Winnipeg, which featured groups such as the Main Street Project, Ma Mawi, and Velma's House. Unsurprisingly, after filtering out idpol nonsense in both of these panels, the most common issue faced by people accessing these services was material in nature (usually as a result of a third party “calling the service on them”). Slightly over half of all calls in at least two major American cities were resolved with responding to a material need, such as someone needing a bottle of water, some food, or some clothing (especially during winter). Funny enough, the idpol nonsense was rebuked several times by audience members via Zoom chat (e.g. “Why does it matter if this worker is LGBT or not?” only to be met with a woo-woo, emperor's new clothes response of “Well they have experiences unique to LGBTTQ+ people”). The audience would proceed to add salt on the proverbial wound by claiming that Toronto's proposed pilot programs were undemocratic, a waste of taxpayer funds, and simply an extension of police services.
This is only one example of many in modern society that demonstrates how virtually all policy proposals, however vital they may seem, would take years to come to fruition thanks to the layers of neoliberal structure that I described earlier, a system where everyone in the business “non-profit organisations” must collect years of salaries and grants and bonuses, sit on the boards of excessively bureaucratic and credentialed agencies who offer limitless sinecures, and hold out-of-touch webinars and panel discussions to “engage the public” (more on this chicanery later) before any meaningful change is allowed to happen, something akin to relegating the helped to being a collective meal ticket for the helpers, where government-provided money meant for a community is distilled by a middleman who has already collected their self-awarded toll.
Side note: One can often find a slew of economic apologists throughout the world of the wealthy, who defend this structure by arguing that wealth, thereupon wealth distribution, is somehow not zero-sum (the axiomatic myth of infinite wealth generation implies infinite resources within an infinite timeline). Remove or change one assumption, say, distribution within a set point in time, and the paradigm crumbles upon itself. In a non-profit sense, it would be the argument that the wealth obtained by welfare workers is entirely independent from the fact that those receiving the welfare are not given access to that wealth (oftentimes denied entirely from this material resource). But this is also an abstraction, because it reinforces the myth that an institution is above reproach, making no efforts to improve how an agency is operated and how its funds are allocated.
Most of these ideas and structures are either natural products of current economic models, or ideologies generated first in academia, dominated by the PMC (essentially the neoliberal bastard child of the upper-middle class and yesterday's yuppie), which then sometimes culminates in policy that governs a population (such as ourselves). There could be an entire page dedicated to a critique of how academia benefits itself and its participants by obfuscating systemic issues and reinforcing neoliberal views. But it goes unsaid that such ideas are forbidden in academic or professional spaces! After all, some would claim, how could anyone “doing good” actually be “doing wrong”? The answer, according to neoliberalism, is to just work a little harder, keep worshipping the literati, and pray to the gods of meritocracy! The NPIC must continue, the PMC and their friends must maintain their dominance over the “unwashed” masses, and the churn is to be untouched! The most concerning issue of neoliberalism is that, unlike many ideologies before it, it evolves, like a virus or bacteria. It is not just resilient, it is anti-fragile. Incidentally, “resilience” is also now a meaningless buzzword, part of jargon that has been overused, corporatised, and void of value within non-profits and social services, in the same vein as terms like “civic engagement”, “mental wellness”, and “positivity”.) What makes all of this worse is that there is a false sense of social justice, termed by Adolph Reed Jr. as disparitarianism, which has abstracted the exigence of wealth inequality, poverty, and fair resource distribution. In our increasingly dystopian reality, Buddhist meditation was packaged into “mindfulness” in the late 2000s, culminating in the hilariously dystopian meme! oh wait, it's actually real “AmaZen Booth”.
There are solutions that have either been popular or are currently gaining ground. Of the latter kind exists mutual aid, a relatively newer social welfare model that returns economic agency to a community, rather than relying on bureaucratic institutions. Put another way, material goods by a mutual aid group among the community they live in, according to need, essentially extricating the binding nature of capital from the goods or service exchange process. In practice, no for-profit buying-selling/paperwork/bureaucracy would translate to someone getting food or a piece of furniture from a mutual aid group, should they need it. It is decentralised, meaning that there is no governing body overseeing the operation of a mutual aid program and it is “staffed” by non-professionals or those not typically viewed as having sufficient credentials. Conversely, mutual aid is not a perfect paradigm. A cynic like myself would really just call this Charity 2.0 and we could spend several hours discussing the materialist dynamics and societal regressions surrounding the implementation and perpetuation of the mutual aid model. But no matter the name, an abolishment of current hierarchies within social welfare institutions, bypassing the agents required to both create and navigate the red tape they create for themselves and others, naturally creates avenues for people to access the support they need, especially if they don't fit certain criteria. In an ideal mutual aid operation, decision-making is performed through consensus from the communities in a grassroots manner: generally, those receiving the benefits choose how they are assisted, rather than the donors in non-profits/institutions. All of these are marked improvements from current NPIC models.
Another example is through labour rights, which ties into other ideas such as the widely-popular living wage or the less popular universal basic income. Indeed, this sort of goes back to my original criticisms of abstracting beyond the scope of the problem (lived poverty and the inequality which creates it, to which a living wage is only a band-aid solution which itself is still a poverty wage) and I will admit that the current nature of labour is still very much bound to a broken system. Capitalism is not simply the exchange of goods and services for money - labour is a fundamental aspect of its functioning. However, labour is both exploited and undermined. This is why improved labour rights, namely in wages, conditions, and benefits, has immediate ramifications for everyone, especially those at the bottom of society. Consider that something as simple as healthcare for your teeth (abstracted as “dental care”) in Canada is often only covered by employer benefits, because for some reason, they are considered “luxury bones” that we ought to pay for to maintain - despite comprehensive coverage for most other health-related issues. Even options considered reputable and “affordable” for dental care in Manitoba, such as the College of Dentistry, will still end up costing you a punitive amount, though not as absurd as private insurance fees. This might change as a result of the recent Liberal-NDP deal in 2022, but it was not promised to be a universal service and will likely remain that way if it comes to fruition. I digress. My point is that better benefits and wages improve people's lives instantly, and it is more reasonable to achieve immediate gains from reform than a drawn-out process which risks a higher chance of failure due to inevitable dissent from those who would stand to no longer be as absurdly wealthy as they once were. More importantly, achieving ground in labour are the first steps toward getting working people re-engaged in both their communities and politics, let alone being able to afford to provide for themselves and their families.
Lastly, many Manitobans are already aware of co-operatives, which are a viable alternative to traditional forms of business (i.e. pyramid-shaped, several layers, few people own the company and its assets while the workers own little to nothing, etc). If market “progressiveness” was measured, mutual aid would be in the same ballpark as co-operatives. I won't get into details about how co-ops operate because they've been present in our society for so long, so people know what they can expect from them. So, I will play the devil's advocate, quoting an idea I learned from one of Paul Prescod's talk show appearances. It is important to see co-operatives as individual participants in a broader market, in which they are forced to compete against non-co-ops and co-ops alike. They are still private businesses with the sole interest of successfully competing in the market, only with a different approach to governance and ownership of said company. I do not know enough about the economy enough to state with certainy on the long-term viability of co-op companies - there are some who say that co-ops are as “fair” as it gets and therefore a fair market consists entirely of co-ops, while others push for complete public ownership (e.g. hospitals in Canada) because current models of competition inherently limit human rights. Regardless of one's views on co-ops, they remain a step in the right direction, with some even arguing that they are more efficient and productive than their non-democratic counterparts. The key of co-ops and mutual aid programs are that they are owned by the people, which is a surprisingly rare form of business management. These democratic-focused models obviously become slightly more challenging to implement in a literal sense when it comes to, say, children and childcare. But again, it would be pedantic to dismiss childcare and child welfare as in any way detached from the broader context that is the inadequate economic model and social welfare system (for adults, ergo, children's parents) when considering that parental leave and associated financial support are limited if not punitive in most jobs, requiring that parents seek out third party care for their children (through state or private business) rather than being able to care for their children themselves without having to risk economic or career insecurity.
As you have read, there is some progress toward a better world. But it is small, and even in Manitoba, we have actually seen little overall progress despite the government's self-congratulatory and short-sighted reports. In essence, the data from the latter linked report shows improvements over the span of only a few years, but the prior linked data reveals that not much has really changed for almost three decades.
To support labour rights is to support unions. (Fun fact: unions were doing mutual aid by and for workers before they became a counter-cultural force against the NPIC!) Sadly, union membership is abysmal in the U.S., while it is on the decline for millennial and younger generations in Canada and is comparably low in industries in which most people work. Nursing, education, and public sectors jobs tend to have high salaries and good benefits, and it's no surprise these skew Canada's unionisation statistics significantly. But not everyone is a nurse, teacher, and civil servant, and if there's anything the recent phenomenon of gig economy workers and the frustrations of essential frontline workers have shown us during the pandemic, they deserve better pay and better benefits. It's no surprise neither of these have happened because their employers underpay their workers while raking in millions.
Labour unions and its supporters are not perfect, much in the same way that mutual aid and co-ops are only minor steps toward an actual overhaul of what is essentially work. Unions, mutual aid groups, and co-ops, as democratic as they are, are economic institutions and vulnerable to the same problems as any organised groups. Unions in particular can become accommodationist and focus exclusively on advocacy, which includes plenty of closed-door, backroom dealings between bureaucrats - yup, like a page right out of the NPIC playbook. This contrasts to what they should be doing: organising, which includes representing workers' interests first and foremost (rather than siding with bosses) (McAlevey 2018). Organising a new union is hard enough as it is, whether getting support through existing trade unions or building support at your workplace, but it is still possible despite millions spent on “union-busting” (preventing unions from being created by workers), such as during the Amazon warehouse unionization victories in the US. It would also be disingenuous to ignore personal accountability especially if the end goal is greater social cohesion and ultimately a better social welfare system. To illustrate, police unions across North America are relatively powerful in contrast to unions of other industries, but recent history has only demonstrated that even unions are not immune to humanity's corruptibility. Police departments in Canada and the U.S. have demonstrably failed to punish their officers for misconduct in various forms. Blame can be shifted toward inadequate training (which is actually a case of inadequate funding or malfeasance, e.g. militarisation), broken windows policing, and so on, but my point is to acknowledge the importance of accountability for one's own actions. Likewise, union bureaucrats sometimes collect massive salaries while the workers they represent earn a fraction of that, and corruption is commonplace in any hierarchical structure (to me, corrupt unions are even worse than corrupt non-profits).
...which begs a better heading, but this will do for now.
When I first started writing this, I once thought the history of trade unions and labour in general was quite young and therefore little progress had been made. I couldn't be more wrong. What progress has been made, though far from universal, is still good, valuable, life-changing progress: most people being able to enjoy a “weekend” or children not having to work (in some countries) are just two of many examples of democratic benefits that labour movements have fought for and won for us today. But persisting problems are prevalent in modern (western) society. We do not yet have a living wage, wage slavery persists, and vital or essential professions are frequently undervalued relative to others. These indicate a fundamentally broken system which everything revolves around and ought to change.
None of these ideas, from labour laws and tax reform, are new. They have been around for decades, if not centuries. It is now mostly a matter of doing things differently as a species, to avoid perpetuating paradigms which are currently extensions of an already failed and corrupt economic system.
In spite of the above invective, we will still need many of the people and many aspects of industries I vehemently attacked earlier. Counsellors, because some mental illnesses are rooted in biochemical reality and are best assuaged by trained professionals (and possibly medication, and by extension, pharmaceuticals); leaders, because neither you or I want to participate in daily plebiscites over how our sewage is treated, who's turning on the electricity, etc(.) - quoting general Žižek discourse here; advocates, because there will still be people who do not share the same ideas in a fairer world and because any true improvements to society will be the result of tug-of-war-type struggles (see: women's suffrage, 19th century worker emancipation, Indigenous Canadian history, etc). To quote the famous Noam Chomsky:
“I don't like the system, you don't like the system, but it exists, and we have to work within it. We can't say, ‘I don't want it, Let's have another system that doesn't exist.' We can only build a new system through pressure from inside and outside.”
Make no mistake: even the white-collared PMC, who often sabotage the efforts of working people, are still victims of an incredibly oppressive economic fabric. People are bound to their corporeal needs, after all. And though material inequality is very obviously not good, ideological friction is vital to meaningful reform. A brief observation of history demonstrates the numerous times unchallenged ideas or movements go too far and end up harming the people it was meant to serve. Put another way, imagine if Copernicus never proposed his dissenting ideas! Someone else would have likely shared an identical idea later but the astronomical damage to human understanding of the world would have changed history and delayed progress.
In defense of science and the advancement of human understanding of the world, there's something to be said about the odd neoliberal fiscal austerity that people across the political spectrum so easily fall victim to, at one point baiting even Bernie Sanders into its fallacies. For some reason, people, often reactionaries, promote the idea that improving social welfare means dismantling most things irrelevant to it, from space exploration to arts and music and entertainment. This coincides well with my prior argument that wealth in any immediate point or partitions in time is zero-sum. But the level of wealth, and by extension all resource, is in surplus of a scale never seen before in human history. The only problem is distribution and allocation (and of course, the environment, but it is not reasonable to get into that in this context even though I believe it to be entirely relevant to the existential fate of humanity). It is economically beneficial to provide everyone with homes, food, and reasonably well-paying and safe work by nature of them existing, when one considers how much is spent on simply monitoring people in workplaces and reinforcing the coercive relationship of capital flight/unemployment or even broader political behaviour in which the world's largest space programs receive less funding than the soldiers, guns, and missiles aimed at other countries, whether commodified for sale or used as weapons. A fairer society does not require or result in a regression to societal asceticism, so long as the resource allocations are modified appropriately to prevent capital concentration.
We need scientists, mechanics, engineers, general labourers, but more importantly, the currently grossly undervalued and underpaid domestic and care workers. These people are either good at what they do and provide tangible contributions to society's development or functioning, or they are simply invaluable to society. Again, particular emphasis should be placed on care workers (the linked article gets very idpol, but the economic problem is evident and applicable enough to Canada). Put bluntly, you and I likely suck at most of the things in those prior mentioned professions, and it would be a real shame if someone expected either of us to fix a car or practice clinical pathology.
Side note: this doesn't mean that every job is equally valuable to society or humanity. As the late David Graeber wrote in Bullshit Jobs, if (tele)marketing and [most] law-related jobs simply disappeared overnight, the world might be a better place, or at worst change very little.
Of course, anyone can do anything they want because our fellow humans are of no more or less worth than you and I, but most of us would underperform exceptionally with neither adequate training nor some predilection for a particular type of work. Regardless of what we do, so long as we are doing something, we all ought to enjoy some basic standard of life and leisure and rest. This is not only because we perform labour (and the ever-looming obsolence of many professions), but because we exist in human civilisation, complete with cognition and awareness of self - cogito ergo sum, I say, in spite of meandering philosophical disagreement. And we ought to continue disagreeing with one another, because apparatchiks and group think only works toward the demise of any healthy civilisation. McCarthyism in the 40s and 50s, which resembled religious fundamentalism throughout history, has only held humanity back through the various ways they control society, ultimately reinforcing the power of those who have too much of it and else. But this anti-elite rhetoric needs to be used to motivate, to establish a new modus vivendi, rather than point fingers at people in society (real life, social media, in the press), worst of all done without addressing and having conversations about economics and material inequality.
No revolution was ever successful by being iconoclastic and alienating entire populations of people, to quote a fraction of Michael Brooks and Ben Burgis' type of cosmopolitan politics (which I learned much earlier from someone who I will write about later below). Rather than expurgating entire wings of politics, perhaps we ought to work together in solidarity, to abrogate the very system creating unnecessary conflict between humans, too often over basic needs. We are not so different from one another! This is not to say we should adopt some form of red-brown alliance and shy away from all conflict. Catherine Liu interpreted Hegelian philosophy through a modern lens and wrote that class (and discussion of material inequality) cannot exist without class antagonism, which is to say, an “us against them” perspective is vital for meaningful change. However, these theoretical musings remain intangible if we fail to frame political action around the personal material needs of people. If we are truly interested in engaging today's atomised society, it is inevitable that we encounter people with political alignments even opposite to ours. But this is no indicator of what specific policies they support, which are often more similar than portrayed by reactionaries or mainstream news. Take Berlin's recent vote to socialise some 240,000 apartments, supported by Germans across the political spectrum, as an example of how the average person can hold views which are more “radical” than those of mainstream politicians (Schwerdtner, 2021). The lesson here is probably that praxis is never so simple. I have met people, often students, who are fully aware of the nature (hegemony) of the world we live in, but they are profoundly defeated - more often than not, harried by financial constraints and political apathy - and there is no connection between problem and solution. Much of what I have written about so far has been mentioned to be excessively theoretical, perhaps even a bit axiomatic, so I realise that I am not really going to change many people's views. Though I would like this content to be relevant to everyone, it is particularly pertinent to those who have so far agreed with me, because we (as a collective people who share such views) are often guilty of policing people's lifestyles and cultures, sometimes overtly and directly. But this is a subconscious social othering that builds the roots of phenomena such as gentrification and corporate hierarchy climbing - the selfish and needless assertion of a moral superiority in what is a battle of culture, rather than one of class.
And I ought to remind you that class is not culture! The point, rather, is to encourage as many people as possible to become cognisant of their material suffering (or the material suffering of others) in the current system, why they should change it, and how they can change it. Do not abstract the problem beyond this with the vapid nonsense of philanthropy or charity or identity or non-profits! Whether or not people choose to take action is their prerogative, but it is better to give people knowledge than try to “empower” them in a fashion which fetishises them as mere objects to justify one's helping.
University failed to teach me many things that I wish I had learned sooner. What would've been a poor investment of time and money was slightly offset by the fortunate opportunity of studying under some exceptionally progressive instructors who were brave (or aware) enough to push the boundaries of neoliberal thought. These professors managed to sow the first proverbial seeds in my mind, but as PMC curricula dictated, they would not be allowed to grow. It wasn't until my final year of school that I met someone who would be the first to give water to those seeds. The seeds grew over the years, sprawling into a worldview that tapped into society, politics, and economics. Not only had I developed a better understanding of the world, but I finally realised how little I knew about the world and everything in it. Some years later, I learned to quell my precariat anomie.
Their ideas were simple in retrospect, framed around the people we once worked with, but they were the first manifestations of much bigger ideas that I am now only beginning to explore. Though they never mentioned this specifically, the following is paraphrased from one of our many ideological discussions, and it would become my first real experience of theory and praxis, enough to guide me toward new thought. One day, they wrote to me that we [as society] have subconsciously ignored or even consciously denied the structural iniquities which precipitate so many of the problems in the world today, stemming from what is a reflexive politics of identity.
I would later discover that society has only further regressed, becoming obsessed over social divisions, lusting after virtues of “woke” and “intersectionality” and “social justice” (much of it pursuing a philosophical phenomenon known as profilicity - not to be confused with prolificity). This collective failure among what I once thought was progressive left-leaning centrism is the result of reactionary approaches to social problems, and the reactionaries pushing them benefit immensely from sublimating class emancipation into increasingly empty rhetoric as much as possible. What better way to prevent meaningful institutional reform than to propagate factionalism from the balkanisation of yesteryear and have its offspring fight for scraps among each other?
For obvious reasons, solving poverty is not going to magically solve racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. These social constructs (rooted in capital - surprise!) are deeply ingrained in human society, which genuinely disadvantage specific demographics in ways unique to them. Likewise, attempts to alleviate these issues provide genuine leverage for those who need it, but it should not be mistaken that race or sex-targeted policy is in the best interests of the target group or even the entire population - it often only serves the policymaker (see: Simpson's paradox, in which a statistical phenomenon disappears or even reverses when a set of data is aggregated). And it sort of goes without saying, but reducing problems to class does not suddenly justify discrimination of others based on whatever other identity they are.
It is also important to acknowledge that some (who agree with my views) would argue that class, a measurement of material wealth (and ownership), is itself an identity, and there is a realm of identity politics termed “class reduction”, which essentially reduces social problems to issues of class. But I counter this with the argument that as a whole, idpol is only a framework. Its existence is tautological, but like any field (life sciences, statistics, and so on), it is frequently abused in its application. Idpol is not a dead end, but a gateway toward realisation of the political and economic mechanisms which perpetuate itself in modern reality. If one digs deep enough into any identity, you will find that many identities are ultimately abstractions of class, whether or not one considers class an identity. Class inequality magnifies every other disadvantage, sometimes exponentially; ergo, would it not make most sense to unite on one front to fight against the lowest common denominator than to participate in meandering political and cultural proxy wars? More importantly, a discussion of class avoids the teleological essentialism that serves as the foundation of idpol (a rather profound concept I learned from Michael Brooks).
One could also suggest that class analysis itself is also an abstraction of philosophy, which many (including myself) would agree is the purest form of knowledge. But a wise man once said: “The philosophers had merely interpreted the world. The point is to change it.”
My exposure to their class consciousness was a key catalyst in the development of my weltschauung, especially during years I spent in social isolation (long before COVID), with nothing but an algorithm-driven internet and all its communities from mainstream to fringe. It was difficult to kick old habits, but I did cut out most of them, though I admit I still rely on bang-searching every now and then, and many newer workplaces seemingly revolve around the G Suite. At least now, I can see the game for what it is, consequently extricating myself from at least some of it. A convenient side effect of all this is that I've finally reached a point where I'm comfortable enough to consolidate my thoughts here. It's been both revelatory and horrifying to experience the world through a new lens, akin to climbing out of Plato's proverbial cave (arguably into a new cave, but that's philosophy for another discussion).
After considerable (read: years' worth of) deliberation, I've decided it would be appropriate to call this nameless individual somewhat of a hero figure to me. But never meet your heroes, so they say. They are only human: imperfect and fallible like any one of us. I like to believe that we both shared virtually identical roots in the PMC and a conflicted resentment toward our Anglo-Saxon religious upbringings. Unfortunately, class divides all. I was downwardly mobile and seditious. They were neither, arguably the opposite. Their social circle comprised people who epitomised the PMC, working against the destitute under a veneer of social justice as they are wont, à la No Evil Foods. When the early makings of a union began to coalesce, my so-called “hero” was one of the system's many apologists, loyal to a world which I had already began to grow disillusioned from and had started to fight back against. After their gradual transition into careerism, I still admired them enough to buy into their strange concoction of respectability politics mixed with hints of union-busting sentiment, but I don't think either of us really knew of the underlying socioeconomic dynamics of our interactions at the time, let alone understand them. I was a neoliberal firebrand, vociferous and polemical as many socially-conscious young adults are, but I was also silently obsessed with choosing sides and drawing social lines, meanwhile hiding behind destructive vanities. It wasn't until years later that I saw the film, Norma Rae, incidentally an enlightening cinematic experience absent in modern entertainment. It instantly became one of my favourite films, featuring a protagonist I only wish I knew about sooner. Admittedly, I was nowhere near being a “Norma Rae” (nor a Crystal Lee Sutton - the real person Norma Rae was based on) because I was too fixated on the righteousness of my indignation, stemming from my own virtue hoarding and failure to break out of false consciousness, rather than representing, in good faith, the workres whose grievances I listened to and formalised.
Returning to the original subject, the person I once admired so greatly had an uncanny ability to connect with all sorts of people, an ability which I still envy. Their capacity for empathy was something I could spend a lifetime trying to learn and never succeed because I have neither the mind nor patience for it. But during a time when I was a rapacious belligerent, they were the only one who could mollify were the only one who could mollify me during a time when I was a rapacious belligerent. But it sort of goes without saying: as people age, they can change, and so can their views. I couldn't imagine having believed or written any of the above in my youth, especially now that I can confidently say I'm a living testament of the Dunning-Kruger effect. (I don't have much progress along the curve to show for, but it is progress!) Nevertheless, the years have taught me that it is surprisingly rare to encounter people in everyday life who are willing to mention the concept of class in conversation, even indirectly. Whether or not they were genuinely interested in class politics or merely paying lip service to social justice is moot - that the roots of structural problems are discussed at all is fuel for good conversation. The ideological friction that arises between myself and others only proves the success of neoliberal indoctrination over the last few decades - a battle of profilicity and authenticity, the PMC sympathisers against the PMC dissidents. Or perhaps it has only demonstrated my lagged intellectual development…
Despite the ambivalence I've expressed in the above text, I write everything out of a deep respect for this person. I should probably make a disclaimer that this is all obviously very subjective, as no one can be so simply reduced to words, let alone those from a single man. (Citizen Kane, anyone?) This mystery person will forever be one of the most influential figures in my life and I've already expressed my gratitude to them for that reason. I like to imagine that they've gone on to inspire others in the same way, maybe even becoming a great shop steward, but I can only hope that the people they've met have ended up closer to where I am, rather than reinforcing the frontlines of a continuously oppressive status quo. It is precisely because of our differences in ideology that I bothered to explore social issues beyond the limited scope of academia, beyond the world of charity and non-profits, and into political and sociological phenomena. Most importantly, I would've likely long abandoned any meaningful self-reflection or growth if it were not for our brief but colourful camaraderie as workers. It was a well-timed moment, amid the gaucheness of our salad days. Of course, I could write another essay about the socioeconomic circumstances which facilitated my curiosity, but it would not reduce the significance of the ideological revelation I experienced in that particular point in life. Maybe someday I can do the same for others, through my music, art, or writing. Or maybe I should just stick to making music…
There are more homes than people across the world but many are still homeless. Charity and non-profits, i.e. private market-based solutions, will never solve that. But they exist, which means people care about social problems. Certain economic and political systems are to blame for almost all social problems, not problems of the individual. These systems are not immutable, but they have to be targeted with collective effort. You might find more in common (in a basic human rights/humanist sort of way) with people further down the political spectrum than those closer to you because most of us have to work under the same economic system. There are those that benefit most from this economic system. They don't have to work (as much as we do) and they dominate the middle of the political spectrum (compass model, horseshoe, etc).
This is the original blurb I had posted here before I decided to rewrite everything in early 2021. It's mostly outdated, but it makes for a somewhat interesting time capsule of ideas I once held. Disclaimer: where proceeds from my music go now will be decided per month, and declared somewhere in the album's info section. I originally opted to dedicate albums to single causes, but accounting could potentially be a nightmare in the long run. If anyone objects to my funding plans, please message me and I would be happy to consider suggestions.
To me, the spirit of nonprofit is everything. The simplest way to show support for my music is to donate to a local homeless shelter in your own city or in Winnipeg. If my music has encouraged you to donate, please let me know! No amount is too small. Your donation (if you choose to tell me!) goes toward a running counter that will hopefully become obsolete some day.
Donations can be sent to me (send me a message for details), but they are unfortunately not tax deductible because I am not a registered charity in Canada and neither is my “status” as an artist/musician. However, any donations toward me will be directly forwarded to a Winnipeg homelessness charity or nonprofit. I will not claim any of it on my own tax deductions.
Like many indie artists, I run most things myself. All of my pages are run solely by me, I write/compose/produce/master my own music, and I even make the album art that goes with every track (which feels like a second job at times). Unfortunately, doing all of that leaves little time (and money) to create convoluted T&C, so I'll try to keep it simple. If you wish to use any of my music for commercial or other non-personal purposes (i.e. playing it to an audience), please contact me through my Facebook page, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or here on Tumblr. I will never force anyone to donate to charity or pay me for my music (especially if you can't afford to), but I appreciate being properly credited for my work if you really enjoy what I've written. I'm always open to discussing usage/donation and will usually respond within 1 - 2 days.
Thanks for listening to my music, and more importantly, thanks for considering my cause.
On June 9, 2021, Jacobin Magazine recorded a podcast/talk show episode about non-profits, which I highly recommend listening to/watching because it covers almost every point I made. This was unsurprising to me, and my reaction was not out of smugness, but solidarity. The only downside is that it comes from an exclusively American lens, but the nature of non-profits in Canada (and around the world, really) are similar enough that the ideas in the video are mutually intelligible. Here is the specific segment of their talk show that discusses non-profits in the United States: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GUugAitH7E
If there is anything I wrote above that you would like to discuss via email or private message, please reach out to me! There's a lot more that could keep me bloviating (environment! public transportation! sex, gender, and sexuality! - the above was hardly what one could consider a Weltanschauung), but it'd probably be more tangential than what's already above. Because, after all that's been written, I'm just some guy who's trying to make good music. Consequently, my conversational skills are rubbish. Reader, if we do chat someday, there will probably be more I can learn from you than vice versa, even if your views don't align with mine. In the same vein, if you spot any factual errors in my sources, please send me suggestions, critiques, and corrections. I've done a fair amount of self-editing, but I still find half-written sentences and incoherent thoughts. Together, we can create a stronger message about non-profits, homelessness, and poverty, and this is the best way we can build a better world for everyone.