Adam Riggio: The Immensity of Revolution
Photo Credit: (CTV Toronto / Google Images)
Written by: Adam Riggio
The motion was put forward, waiting for its vote. But we all knew it would never come, even though, caught up in this moment’s energy, justice pushed itself forward inevitably. Hope encountered mathematics, and we threw up our hands.
The motion, proposed for the City of Toronto by Councillors Krysten Wong-Tam and Josh Matlow, was not even adequate for what must be done. I wrote last week about the motion, this fragile moment that calls us to action, and what it means to abolish policing from a society. So I won’t write any more about that.
An Epitaph for an Inevitability
Of course the motion would fail. To reduce the budget of the Toronto Police by 10 per cent, to make a $1.1-billion police force into a mere shell of itself, a $990-million police force; that was the matter before Toronto City Council on Monday 29 June. This never even came up for a vote, as the council split perfectly along its usual ideological lines to support Mayor John Tory’s motion for further studies on policing activity in the city and spending a bunch of cash on body cameras.
The body camera issue illustrates the dangerous ethic among police that we must dismantle for our own safety. Police officers with body cameras have been found, on the whole, to be more violent toward people, as Indigenous author and activist Pam Palmater discussed in a recent Press Progress forum on abolition. She surmised that this is rooted in the officer’s lack of shame for their violent actions: that the policeman berating, beating, tasing, shooting, or suffocating someone earnestly believes themselves to be in the right.
Someone like Derek Chauvin on the Police roster right now earnestly believes that he was unjustly fired and charged. The majority of liberal and conservative Toronto City Councillors do not understand this at all. I suspect that some small number of them would agree with my hypothetical Toronto Police officer.
Ultimately, the dustbin of City Council minutes is where Matlow and Wong-Tam’s still-inadequate motion to reduce the police budget was always bound. The majority of the council itself consists of both men and women, all rather conservative, comfortable, and closed-minded. Such people are very distant from understanding the struggles of more marginalized people in society. Such people find it especially difficult to understand how anyone could not naturally trust the police. When they regard the world, they do not actually see much that is very wrong.
For all but the most caustic in their contempt, we progressives should pity rather than hate them. These unconcerned naifs bumble through lives of comfortable ignorance, at best.
Burning Out Against Immensities
What needs to be done, to build a society without policing? Here are a few steps that you might be thinking of, after reading the sad fate of this motion, mere nudge toward justice that it was.
First, we progressives must organize communities and activists across the city around displacing the ignorant and aggressive conservatives from City Council. This would utterly transform the political dynamics of the entire city, and how those forces express themselves in the makeup of the representative council. Doing so will probably be more likely after restoring the 47-seat City Council makeup that Premier Doug Ford eradicated in his first, most resentful, months of office.
We will then have to overcome resistance from what will still be a conservative minority, but also the most vocal and aggressive conservatives. These are the open racists, nationalists, corrupt, and elite who profit materially and morally from the roiling disaster of mass poverty and disease that is our current global economy.
This includes, of course, the mega-rich of the international finance industry, but also the corrupt class of mafiosi dictators, plutocrats, and nationalists seeking to corrupt democratic electoral systems into one-party states. More than this, we progressives of Canada and the United States are up against the powerful network of think tanks, lobby groups, and activist organizations that began with the activist work of Paul Weyrich to restore a social order of segregation and institutionalize Evangelical Christianity as a state religion.
All these organizations and social movements push back against any little progress toward genuine freedom. As chattel slavery in the United States ends, Reconstruction builds a multi-racial democracy in the South, only for the 1914 Ku Klux Klan revival and their segregationist lawmakers pound Black Americans into an underclass. Today is what we hope is the crest of the white nationalist reaction to the Civil Rights Act. It would be difficult enough to tear down these economic frameworks and racist social ideologies, even without their constant pushback. But the battle against even the comfortable classes, conservatives of their own inertia, is hard enough, as we learned at Toronto City Council 29 June.
Imagining Desolation as the Soil of Justice
The work of building an economic and social order around principles of justice instead of exploitation will be a long and difficult struggle. As much as we progressive must rally around our optimism, we ultimately have to accept that an even greater obstacle exists. Even before that work of construction begins, so much work remains to be done to dismantle the current global order of exploitation, racism, militarism, and so many other forms of ecological and social destruction for the sake of higher and higher dividend returns.
It is why the image of global devastation has also become a symbol of hope.
This year saw the release of Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada, edited by Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, and Syrus Marcus Ware. Its introduction is an image of what liberation will look like in 2055.
The Earth itself is blasted, as climate changes have made southern Ontario too hot and dry for so much of the year that trees will no longer grow more thickly than a few short stalks every kilometre or so. Water can only survive on the surface of our inland continents in flasks we carry up from underground.
Here, communities of people live underground, developing new models of agriculture and industry that can run without the networks of social, economic, and ecological exploitation that produced the global society where we live today. It only became possible because the old order literally fell to dust along with the planet, after there was nothing of the planet left to feed.
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