Pots and Pans 12

Frantz Fanon writes in the Wretched of the Earth that laziness is one of the greatest weapons that the colonized have against their colonizers. The object of colonization is to extract as much as possible, as quickly as possible from the place you are exploiting. If the people you are using as labour refuse to move at the speed you want--and why would they?--then your profits suffer.

A lot of the rage leveled against these protests seems to come from the perception that the protesters are refusing to act as economic bodies, consuming and spending at the proscribed levels that the economy wants. The rage is connected to the occupation of space that has been designated as commercial: roads, shopping areas, etc.; these are the conduits to seamless consumption that are being gummed up.

It must be jarring to see one of these marches of thousands, all clanking and banging on their pots, winding its way carelessly headfirst through downtown traffic, past all the outdoor patios and the shoppers and the people out for a night on the town.  After all, there’s basically nothing to do in the downtown core anymore that isn’t an economic transaction—you even get a ticket if you hang out in the park after a certain hour.  If you don’t have a fresh plastic bag, a beer mug, or a movie ticket in your hand then you lack legitimacy as far as Montreal is concerned (and it’s the same in every city in the world).

The marchers shatter the careful illusion the Montreal cultivates during its crucial tourist season of a city that is fun and artsy and safe, but at the same time cheerfully exotic.  The problem is only made worse by the refusal of the media outside Quebec to report on the issues here.  This makes it seems like boisterous mobs of thousands are suddenly appearing out of nowhere and for no comprehensible purpose.  It makes it seem almost random that police cars are whizzing about trying to figure out which streets to block and which lines of traffic to hold up for twenty or thirty or forty minutes as the marchers pass.

The financial hit the city is going to take if this continues is going to be tremendous.  The hit the city’s reputation will take might even be worse.  At a certain point, as the tourists start to pour in, it will become impossible to ignore what’s happening here and—whether the press is bad or good—people are going to be talking and a lot of questions are going to be asked.  Law 78, already condemned by Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the Quebec Bar Association, is going to be judged on the world stage.  There will be no shortage of vitriol against the so-called entitled Quebeckers but, at the same time, I think a lot of other groups will be inspired to organize and resist the bullshit in their own regions.

The biggest difficulty ahead—and I think this might be how the situation differs from in Fanon’s day—is that capitalist societies are constructed in such a way that everyone is completely dependant on the function of the economic engine for their survival, and if any one part ceases to participate properly, the result is always widespread suffering—at least for the people at the bottom; the rich ones always know when to grab their funds and run.  All the people who are employed in low wage jobs, all the people whose survivals are tied to the tourist industry, etc; all these people are the ones who are going to be the most hurt by this protest.  Because their livelihoods are at stake, they are all the more likely to react badly to all of this and refuse to support the cause.  The government and the medial will happily play on this fear and, in the end, it’s going to be very very difficult to accomplish anything here.

I’ll try to expand more on this latter point sometime when I have a few minutes.