Praxis and Politics: Knowledge Production in Social Movements 0415976596, 9780415976596, 2005022783, 0415882451, 9780415882453, 9780203959817

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NEW APPROACHES IN SOCIOLOGY STUDIES IN SOCIAL INEQUALITY, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Edited by

Nancy A. Naples University of Connecticut

A ROUTLEDGE SERIES

NEW APPROACHES IN SOCIOLOGY STUDIES IN SOCIAL INEQUALITY, SOCIAL CHANGE, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

NANCY A. NAPLES, General Editor THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF POLICY An Institutional Ethnography of UN Forest Deliberations Lauren E. Eastwood THE STRUGGLE OVER GAY, LESBIAN, AND BISEXUAL RIGHTS Facing Off in Cincinnati Kimberly B. Dugan PARENTING FOR THE STATE An Ethnographic Analysis of Non-Profit Foster Care Teresa Toguchi Swartz TALKING BACK TO PSYCHIATRY The Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/ Ex-Patient Movement Linda J. Morrison CONTEXTUALIZING HOMELESSNESS Critical Theory, Homelessness, and Federal Policy Addressing the Homeless Ken Kyle LINKING ACTIVISM Ecology, Social Justice, and Education for Social Change Morgan Gardner THE EVERYDAY LIVES OF SEX WORKERS IN THE NETHERLANDS Katherine Gregory STRIVING AND SURVIVING A Daily Life Analysis of Honduran Transnational Families Leah Schmalzbauer UNEQUAL PARTNERSHIPS Beyond the Rhetoric of Philanthropic Collaboration Ira Silver

DOMESTIC DEMOCRACY At Home in South Africa Jennifer Natalie Fish PRAXIS AND POLITICS Knowledge Production in Social Movements Janet M. Conway

PRAXIS AND POLITICS Knowledge Production in Social Movements

Janet M. Conway

Routledge New York & London

Published in 2006 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

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Transferred to Digital Printing 2010 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97659-6 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97659-6 (Hardcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2005022783 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conway, Janet M., 1963Praxis and politics : knowledge production in social movements / Janet M. Conway. p. cm. -- (New approaches in sociology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-97659-6 1. Metro Network for Social Justice. 2. Social movements. 3. Knowledge, Sociology of. 4. Social justice. 5. Social movements--Ontario--Toronto--Case studies. I. Title. II. Series. HM881.C66 2005 306.4'2'09713541--dc22

2005022783

ISBN10: 0-415-97659-6 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-88245-1 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-97659-6 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-88245-3 (pbk)

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For Lee and Jane, without whom this book simply would not have happened

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Contents

Preface

ix

Chapter One Approaching Social Movements and Their Knowledges: Culture, Identity, Ethnography

1

Chapter Two Social Movements and Their Knowledges: Feminist and Freirean Perspectives on Knowledge from Below

21

Chapter Three The Activist City in an Era of Free Trade

39

Chapter Four Knowledge and Capacity Building: Popular Education in the MNSJ

69

Chapter Five Contesting the Neoliberal City: Campaign Praxis in the MNSJ

95

Chapter Six Knowledge and the Impasse in Left Politics: Towards a New Democratic Imaginary?

121

Notes

141

References

161

Index

181 vii

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Preface

I began writing this book as a doctoral student in the Political Science program at York University in Toronto. I returned to graduate school in the late 1990s in exhaustion and desperation after a decade of full-time activism. This book is a fruit of my experience in the Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) and the encouragement I received at York to write about what I and others had learned in organizing grassroots resistance to neoliberalism in the decade following the signing of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. Despite what felt like endless rounds of struggle and defeat through the 1990s, I was struck by what activists knew in and through their activism. Through our activist attempts to further our knowledge about the world we sought to change and in the course of my own subsequent studies, I began to think that knowledges—rich, distinct and important to emancipatory politics—were being produced through activist practices. Furthermore, I realized that activist practice was essential to this kind of knowing and that activist knowledge was an essential and largely unvalued source for any scholarship claiming to be progressive. In this writing about the MNSJ, I have sought to document and valorize activist knowledge and explore its importance. I was therefore concerned to produce an account that respected and reflected the perceptions of the people whose history it is. Too often, activists do not recognize themselves in accounts that purport to describe and analyze the social movements in which they were key agents. Two rounds of interviews with MNSJ activists (June 1998 and Winter 2001) and their reactions to drafts were indispensable in refining the historical account, elucidating its meaning, and sharpening the central issues and arguments. Thanks to Rick Egan, Beth Jones, Pramila Aggarwal, Marnie Hayes, Bill Howes, Brent Patterson, Stefan Kipfer, Stacey Papernick, Elisse Zack, Peter Clutterbuck, Bernadette ix

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Beaupre, P.Rajagopal, Andy Ranachan, Karen Wirsig, Mike Antoniades, Lee Cormie, Judy Tsao and Ann Curry and to members of the “Alternatives” Study Group in fall and winter 1997–98. Any account is, of course, a partial and specific one, but I hope they recognize their MNSJ here. The MNSJ continued to exist until spring 2005. This study of the MNSJ is confined to the period 1992–97, from before its founding through its first generation to a crisis and turning point in its history. For most of that period, I was heavily involved as a member of the elected steering committee and active in numerous working groups in my capacity as a social justice worker at Church of the Holy Trinity and later as program director at the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto. I will always be grateful to these organizations for their support of the MNSJ and of my involvements in the Network on their behalf, and for numerous other progressive efforts in the city before and since the MNSJ that they have helped create. At York University, I am grateful especially to Leo Panitch who first proposed I write about my activist experience and whose support was pivotal to my being awarded the International Lelio Basso Prize for Economic and Political Alternatives in 1998 for an early paper on knowledge production in the MNSJ. Thanks also to Greg Albo, for his support as Grad Director and his encouragement for my work then and now. Finally and especially, my deep appreciation and affection go to John Saul for his sharp mind, quick humor, and endless patience as my dissertation director. I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the doctoral fellowhip that supported my full-time work on the dissertation in 2000–01. In the preparation of this manuscript, Vivian Harrower has been a wonderful editor. My thanks also to Kim Guinta and Ben Holtzman at Routledge for their interest in this work and to Nancy A. Naples, the series editor, for her constructive comments. I am honored to be included in this series. Thanks to Fernwood Publishing for permission to republish parts of my 2004 book Identity, Place, Knowledge: Social Movements Contesting Globalization. Last, but by no means least, my love and gratitude to my partner, Lee Cormie, and my sister, Jane Walsh, without whom this book simply would not have happened. This one’s for you. Janet Conway Toronto

Chapter One

Approaching Social Movements and Their Knowledges: Culture, Identity, Ethnography

Knowledge arising from social movements is largely tacit, practical and unsystematized. Grounded in activist practice, it is partial and situated, arising from concrete engagement in social struggle and embedded in specific times and places. This book is based on an ethnographic study of the Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) in Toronto, Canada, over a five-year period from 1992–7. It explores the knowledge arising from activist practice and its significance for understanding social movements, for generating post-neoliberal alternatives and for re-imagining democratic politics. Through their everyday practices of survival, resistance and solidarity, progressive social movements like the MNSJ are producing new and distinct knowledges about the world as it is, as it might or should be, and how to change it. Social movement coalitions are particularly fertile locations for the production of knowledge. Sustained encounter across constituencies and issues produces new cultural, political and organizational practices. Coalitions are spaces of experimentation, a fact that is especially important in a period of flux and uncertainty in both practice and theory. Because coalitions are constituted by a fundamental recognition of diversity and respect for pluralism, the knowledges that arise in and through coalition politics are particularly prescient for the building of a world with the space for many worlds within it. The knowledges produced in coalitions demonstrate the possibility of action premised on partial and provisional knowing—on politics that is simultaneously committed and open to what it does not yet know. Social movement knowledges are central to the renewal of emancipatory politics. They are privileged knowledges for building a world characterized by 1

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the visions and values of progressive social movements. But the role and place of knowledge and knowledge production are contentious within social movements and the broader left, because democratic knowledge production implies a commitment to capacity building of people and organizations in civil society in a “long revolution” for social change via cultural transformation, in which the outcomes cannot be known in advance. Such a perspective implies that oppositional movements do not claim absolute knowledge about the world and how it should be, much less how to manage it. This perspective involves a break with older imaginaries of science, emancipation, revolution and utopia. The Metro Network for Social Justice was a cross-sectoral, multi-issue, long-term social justice coalition. It was founded in 1992 as part of a wave of coalition-formation following a major struggle and defeat of progressive social movements over the signing of the Canada—US Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Through the 1990s, the MNSJ was one of the largest and best-functioning examples of this new political form and among the most innovative social movement organizations in Canada. Since its founding, the MNSJ successfully held together a range of constituencies and political orientations in what came to be seen as a common struggle against neoliberalism. On the social movement landscape in Canada, the MNSJ was a coalition with an extremely diverse social base of over 200 member groups including labor unions, churches, anti-poverty and social service organizations, Third-World solidarity and international development groups, and equityseeking groups representing women, people with disabilities, ethno-specific groups, and sexual minorities from across the Toronto metropolitan area. Throughout the period under consideration (1992–7), the coalition sustained commitments to grassroots capacity building, democratic organizational development, participatory knowledge creation and broad-based campaigning. This multi-faceted praxis gave rise to new practices and emergent theories of knowledge production and its role in a reconstructed democratic politics. The MNSJ emerged as a metropolitan-wide coalition, all of whose member organizations had some concrete presence in the city, many anchored in specific city neighborhoods and receiving funding from municipal and/or metropolitan governments. The MNSJ was grafted onto the infrastructure of the local welfare state. Its origins and subsequent practice were strongly shaped by its interactions with the metropolitan government and Metro Council’s attempts to cut back the local welfare state in the 1990s. The MNSJ was a ‘labor—community coalition’ centrally concerned with questions of social welfare and economic justice and, in many respects, a classic urban movement. The praxis of the MNSJ, its knowledges and their significance, can only be understood in the context of Toronto as a globalized urban space in

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the 1990s. The political context of the MNSJ was constituted powerfully, although never wholly, by the advancing neoliberal revolution in the city and beyond. In part, the ethnography can be read as a charting of crises and transformations in activist politics as the contours of the revolution from above became more clear. Neoliberalism, although arguably underway in Canada since 1984 and unmistakably since the Free Trade Agreement in 1988, was experienced most viscerally in the cuts to public services and social programs that were becoming increasingly visible at every level of government by the mid-1990s. The historic struggle and defeat over free trade with the United States in the late 1980s provided organizational and political legacies to the MNSJ as well as its earliest critical discourses about globalization and the neoliberal agenda. A deep and enduring recession through the early 1990s, arguably created by the monetarist policies accompanying the FTA, accelerated neoliberal economic and political restructuring and functioned to discipline the population through persistent high rates of unemployment. The historic election of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Ontario in 1990 was followed by a crushing betrayal of popular hopes in its embrace of austerity, unilateral opening of public-sector contracts as part of its so-called ‘social contract,’ and regressive welfare reform. After a decade of Tory (Progressive Conservative party) rule, the 1993 federal election delivered a Liberal majority. The Liberal government immediately signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), declared the deficit its priority and announced a major overhaul of the country’s social programs. By June 1994, “Federal Social Security Reform” had catapulted to the top of the MNSJ’s agenda and with it a deepening awareness among activists of the corporate or neoliberal agenda, its global ascendancy and its expressions in Canadian politics in parties of every stripe. Finance Minister Paul Martin’s federal budget in February 1995 effectively dismantled the post-war national welfare state and established a new and historic non-involvement of the federal government in key aspects of Canadian development. The losses were mounting with no end in sight when the Progressive Conservatives, led by Mike Harris, were elected in Ontario in June 1995, promising a “common sense revolution” premised on deep tax cuts, reduction of the size, role and capacity of government, workfare, and rollbacks in labor rights and employment equity. In the meantime, in the city of Toronto, the MNSJ’s primary field of action, the downloading of federal and provincial austerity programs resulted in deep cuts to community services, escalating rates of poverty and homelessness and growing polarization of wealth and incomes.

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The MNSJ was founded in 1992 as a collective response to what at the time was called, the ‘neoconservative agenda,’ in a climate of economic crisis and out of a shared sense of need for political and economic alternatives to the reigning orthodoxy. Developments in the MNSJ proceeded through intense interaction with the larger political processes, events and debates underway in the 1990s. On one hand, the MNSJ’s politics and knowledges were highly reactive to those of elites. On the other, its politics and knowledges were dynamic and creative because they were so embedded in and defined by opposition to this larger political context. The politics and knowledges of the MNSJ were also genuinely creative. They were never simply ‘no.’ Contesting hegemonic discourses required not just understanding the discourses, but getting beyond and outside them, seeking and developing other bases and terms for powerful oppositional and emancipatory discourses and practices. Progressive or ‘critical’ social movements are a global phenomenon, even as the vast majority of them are ‘local’ in scope and scale. A growing number of these local social movements, North and South, including the MNSJ, are self-consciously responding to and contesting the terms of neoliberal globalization and, in so doing, are agents in determining the character of globalization in their locality. All social movements and their knowledges are embedded in historically- and geographically specific social contexts in which power and resistance are operating at multiple scales. Oppositional social movements are not solely determining nor delimiting the terms of globalization in their localities, nor are they usually the most powerful actors in any localized struggle. But their ongoing presence and practices and the proliferation of local movements and local struggles on a global scale have to be taken into consideration in any adequate account of what is underway in the world. This ethnography examines a localized social movement, the praxis of which was situated within and critically engaged with larger processes of globalization and was enacting a politics of multiple scales. The MNSJ can be seen as a localized node of global resistance in the context of political transformations on a world scale. In his discussion of the “militant particularism” of localized social movements and the need to construct a politics of global ambition, David Harvey (1996) argues that while distinct space—time contexts produce distinct and situated perspectives, they are also interrelated. He suggests that discovering connections and learning to ‘translate politically’ between them (i.e., to make the meaning of local struggles intelligible beyond the local context and to other local struggles) is a problem of detailed, place-based research (1996, 290). In response to that need, this book undertakes a detailed empirical study of a contextualized, localized social movement, situated in a reading of the global conjuncture and in conversation with histories

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and theories of social movements arising from other contexts. It is a distinctly Canadian and Toronto-based contribution to theorizing a politics of global ambition. This book also explores coalition politics, its potentialities and limits in Canada in the 1990s and its intersection with urban politics, particularly the politics inhering to Toronto as a world city. The ethnography of the MNSJ is situated within research on recent social movement developments in Toronto and English Canada, in particular within the historical emergence of permanent cross-sectoral social justice coalitions. These are a distinctly Canadian political innovation and a fruit of the popular struggle against free trade in the 1980s. They are a concrete example of democratic know-how emerging from the practical experiences of diverse movements experiencing the need to collaborate at all scales (local, provincial, national and transnational) in the face of the growing global consolidation of the neoliberal agenda. The Canadian experience has inspired similar innovations elsewhere in the Americas (Clarke, T. 1992a; Aroyo and Monroy 1996). Although there has been some work on national-scale social movement coalitions, notably the Action Canada Network (Bleyer 1997; Ayres 1998), little research has been done on the ‘local’ level, and even less on the urban dimensions of coalition politics. This ethnography of the MNSJ will help fill these gaps in the literature on social movements in Canada. Although coalitions are an increasingly common phenomenon in popular politics worldwide, beyond Canada they have received scant empirical or theoretical attention in either social movement literatures or in democratic theory more generally (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Brown 1995; Fraser 1997). In addition, despite a long history of rich political practice, Canadian social movements have not been theorized as themselves globally significant, or much in conversation with histories and theories of social movements arising elsewhere. Where this has occurred, it has been limited to comparisons to the US or Europe and been sector-specific, focusing either on the labor or the women’s movement. In a period of growing global convergence among social movements, the know-how arising from specific histories of cross-sectoral coalition politics is of wider significance.

SOCIAL MOVEMENT THEORIES AND LITERATURES Scholarly discussions of social movements are increasingly dispersed over many fields and problematics, reflecting a growing recognition of the centrality of social movements to understanding the dynamics of contemporary social transformations. That which is often referred to as “the social movement literature” or as “social movement theory” is a narrow cross-section

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of the work being done on social movements, occurring mostly in American political science and European sociology. The two primary streams are Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT) and New Social Movement Theory (NSMT), each with a number of variants. Developments in NSMT reflect the wider context of social theoretical debates on the European left in the post-1968 period, which propelled it in post-Marxist and post-structuralist directions focused on questions of identity and culture. In the US, on the other hand, in the absence of strong Marxist political or theoretical traditions, RMT developed in an intellectual milieu dominated by philosophies of possessive individualism, theories of structural functionalism and approaches based on behaviorism. Responding to the limits of these orientations for comprehending the ‘new social movements,’ RMT stressed the rational character of mass mobilization and focused on questions of organization, leadership and resources. As intellectual responses to the reality of the ‘new social movements’ of the 1960s and 1970s, both RMT and NSMT broke in significant ways with prevailing approaches in their respective contexts. Much has been written about the respective strengths and limitations of these two approaches.1 By the 1990s, developments in both streams were converging in acknowledging the importance of the cultural and symbolic “meaning-making” activities of social movements to understanding their significance, including the character and effects of their contests with hegemonic power concentrated in states, corporations and elsewhere.2 In addition to the ‘social movement literature’ proper, research and debates about social movements appear in virtually all disciplines concerned with the study of society, each marked by particular disciplinary approaches, assumptions and questions about how to study the social reality. Within disciplines, works come out of a range of political, theoretical and epistemological traditions. Social movements are an important referent in most expressions of ‘critical theory,’ within and across disciplines. Diverse literature also abounds about particular kinds of movements, much of it organized around the substantive issue(s) with which the social movement is engaged or the particular constituency or ‘identity’ mobilized by a particular movement. So, for example, discussions of feminist movements occur within larger debates about the status of women and feminist theory and politics without many disciplinary referents and still fewer references to “social movement theory” or “the social movement literature.” Likewise, the feminist work on women’s movements reflects the range of feminist politics (liberal, Marxist, radical, socialist, Third World, postmodern, post-structuralist, etc.), epistemological positions (empiricist, standpoint, postmodern, etc.), and the North—South

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divide, so that discussions of women’s movements in the Third World have, until recently, been categorized under ‘development’ or ‘regional studies.’ As the movements proliferate and become more complex and their complexities become discernible to theorists, various new dimensions or problematics are also singled out for study. In short, the large and growing literature on the study of social movements is highly fragmented and diverse, marked as it is by numerous pockets of isolated debates. Increasingly, this fragmentation demands an approach defined by problematics rather than by disciplinary boundaries. My interest in knowledge and knowledge production in social movements has led me in several directions. Methodologically, it has suggested the importance of close study over time of embedded discourses and practices in particular social movement contexts and hence, ethnography. Attention to the everyday processes of production of discourses and practices in social movements has demanded engagement with scholarly debates about cultural production and identity formation in understanding the making and meaning of social movements in our time.

THEORETICAL ORIENTATIONS: SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS ‘COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES’ One way of naming what was ‘new’ about the ‘new social movements’ of the second half of the twentieth century, especially with respect to feminism, anti-racism and sexuality struggles, was to attribute to them an “identity politics.” In attempting to name how these movements escaped the Marxist paradigm of oppression, struggle and change, theorists differentiated between ‘identity’ and ‘class’ as the basis for social mobilization (Darnovsky, Epstein, and Flacks 1995b). In many early discourses of identity politics, struggles to rescue and rehabilitate oppressed identities from the distortions imposed by the dominant culture were often founded upon essentialist conceptions of identity. By the 1980s, social constructivist perspectives, influenced by structuralist, post-structuralist and postmodern sensibilities, were displacing essentialist approaches to identity politics in theory and practice. Social constructivist approaches sought to discern and analyze the social and cultural processes through which meanings and identities are produced. In recent years, the cultural turn in both movement practice and academia has unsettled dominant interpretations of social movements, Marxist, post-, neo- and nonMarxist (Darnovsky, et al. 1995b: xiii). In this genealogy of movement practice and movement theory, it is important to note that the meaning of ‘identity’ transmuted historically

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from being a ‘thing’ (‘gender,’ ‘race’) distinct from ‘class’ (another thing) to being a process. A focus on identity in this sense implies critical attention to identity formation as a contradictory and conflictual social process that forms the basis for any politics, including the politics of any social movement. Identity formation is conceived here as a cultural process having to do with the everyday practices that construct people’s lived experience— practices that produce meanings, that make sense of the world, that create knowledges, and in the process, construct identities. People are not subject to/participating in any one identity-formation process at any one time. Such processes are multiple, overlapping and discontinuous. The post-structuralists remind us that these processes are always effects of power, especially the hegemonic power of states/governments, advertising industries and markets; but identities, to varying degrees and in varying ways and always in relation to the dynamics of hegemonic power, are also being produced from below as people and communities organize for life, survival, solidarity and resistance to forces they experience as oppressive. I am following Mouffe (1988) here in suggesting that every agent occupies multiple subject positions. Many possible constructions of these “multiple subjectivities” are possible, but they must be “articulated,” that is, constructed politically through discourse (by which Mouffe means the full range of speech acts and other practices). No subject position or identity is pre-existing, or analytically or politically privileged. Mouffe, therefore, is opposed to any form of class reductionism or the notion of a paradigmatic expression of “class position.” Significantly, Mouffe does not claim that “class” does not exist, nor that it cannot become the basis for counter-hegemonic struggle, only that it is one of an array of available subject positions that must be politically articulated in order to become the locus of social struggle. At the same time, the range of possible emergent identities is finite. In the contemporary period, race, class, gender and sexuality have become visible and politicized as particularly powerful axes of social experience, knowledge and politics, i.e., of identity.3 In terms of the study of social movements, Arturo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez argue, “to refer to social movements in terms of ‘collective identities’ represents a new trend and a new way of thinking. Social action is understood as the product of complex social processes in which structure and agency interact in manifold ways and in which actors produce meanings, negotiate and make decisions” (Alvarez and Escobar 1992b: 4). In this perspective, emergent collective identities become the structural preconditions for movement mobilization. Collective identities shape movement strategies (and capacities) and are, in turn, reconstituted at various points in the

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course of struggle. Collective identities are actively constructed while constantly interacting with and being shaped by multiple social forces (Alvarez and Escobar 1992a: 321). All forms of collective action (perhaps all social processes) need therefore to be understood, at least partly, in terms of identity formation. In their 1992 collection on social movements in Latin America, Escobar and Alvarez were among the first to fruitfully combine the questions of RMT about political organization, leadership, strategy and resources with those of NSMT about identity formation and cultural politics. In their subsequent collection, with Evelina Dagnino, they more explicitly advocate a post-structuralist cultural studies approach grounded in ethnographic attention to the meaning-making practices of social movements (Alvarez and Escobar 1992b; Alvarez, Dagnino, and Escobar 1998). My approach in this book to the study of the MNSJ and my choice of the problematic of knowledge and knowledge production are situated within these theoretical developments. One of the most influential theorists of collective identity formation in social movements is Alberto Melucci. Melucci wants to explore how social actors form a collectivity and recognize themselves as being part of it. He advocates problematizing where the ‘collective actor’ came from rather than treating it as a given empirical fact. He argues for a focus on collective identity as essential to breaking down the apparent empirical unity of social movements (Melucci 1996: 68ff). For Melucci, “the concept of collective identity . . . cannot be separated from the production of meaning in collective action” (69). Identity formation in social movements is anchored in collective action, the practices that constitute it, and the common sense that participants make of it. He argues for a ‘processual approach’ in which collective identity is understood as ongoing and interactive. “Collective identity as a process refers thus to a network of active relationships, between actors who interact, communicate, influence each other, negotiate and make decisions” (71). Collective identity enables social actors to act, to recognize the effects of their actions and to attribute these effects to themselves as a collective entity. In Melucci’s view, collective identity involves a self-reflective capacity. Concretely and importantly in terms of studying any particular movement, Melucci sees forms of organization, models of leadership and modes of communication as the concrete practices that constitute processes of identity formation in social movements. Interestingly, Melucci also suggests that, historically speaking, collective identity is “becoming ever more conspicuously the product of conscious action and the outcome of self-reflection . . . Collective identity tends to coincide with conscious processes of ‘organization’ and it is experienced

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not so much as a situation as it is an action” (76–7). As a process, it is increasingly self-reflexive and constructed, and Melucci claims that this represents “a qualitative leap in present forms of collective action” (76–7). This argument intersects in provocative ways with my focus here on knowledge production in social movements and how self-conscious practices of organizational development, campaign organizing and pedagogical activity were constitutive of identity formation in the MNSJ.

THE CULTURAL TURN IN SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES Identities are produced through cultural practices. The growing acknowledgement of the centrality of identity formation in understanding social movements also prompted new epistemological and methodological questions. One expression of this has been a growing and parallel attention to cultural theory and approaches. The work of Escobar, Dagnino and Alvarez provides an excellent example of how developments in cultural studies are informing contemporary studies and theorizations of social movements. In introducing their anthology, Cultures of politics, politics of cultures, these authors set out to explore the relation between ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ (i.e., power and its sedimentation in the state and elsewhere) via an examination of the concrete practices that constitute the ‘cultural politics’ of social movements (Alvarez et al. 1998: 2–9). They survey the changing meanings of culture in the social sciences and draw on the post-structuralist understanding of culture in anthropology, which they find useful in “its insistence on the analysis of production and signification, of meanings and practices, as simultaneous and inextricably bound aspects of social reality.”4 Culture in this sense “involves a collective and incessant process of producing meanings that shapes social experience and configures social relations . . .” (3), a usage compatible with Raymond Williams’ earlier characterization of culture as “the signifying system through which necessarily (though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored” (Williams 1981: 13). Escobar, Dagnino and Alvarez also draw on Jordan and Weedon, who write, “Culture, in this sense, is not a sphere, but a dimension of all institutions—economic, social and political. Culture is a set of material practices which constitute meanings, values and subjectivities” (Jordon and Weedon 1995: 8). This understanding of culture reconceives ‘the cultural’ and ‘the material’ and the relations between them as mutually constituting, and it asserts the inseparability of meanings and practices. Nevertheless there remains an ambiguity in much cultural theory arising from the character of the relation between representation and its grounding. For Seidman and Nicholson, this

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is the major problem with postmodernism more generally and derives from its overlap with post-structuralism, notably the latter’s tendencies to collapse the social into the textual. These aspects of postmodernism and poststructuralism have been accompanied by a neglect of social issues of central concern to activists and politically engaged theorists (Nicholson, et al. 1995: 8–9). Escobar, Alvarez and Dagnino are well aware of the pitfalls of cultural approaches that are too often preoccupied with disembodied struggles over meanings and representations, the political or strategic relevance of which are not obvious. Cultural studies approaches too often assume links between the ‘politics of representation’ and the exercise of power, and correspondingly, with resistance to power. They propose that the links can be made explicit. “[T]hese links are evident in the practices, the concrete actions of Latin American social movements, and we thereby wish to extend the concept of cultural politics in analyzing their political interventions” (6). Their focus on the concrete practices of social movements, whose raison d’être is to change their societies, grounds cultural studies in concrete political struggles for transformation. In addition to the micro-processes that constitute movements, movements enact cultural politics in their public political interventions. Escobar, Alvarez, and Dagnino argue “that cultural politics are . . . enacted when movements intervene in policy debates, attempt to resignify dominant cultural interpretation of politics, or challenge prevailing political practices” (8). They contend that, in Latin America today, all social movements enact a cultural politics. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that this is not narrowly with respect to those social movements that are more clearly ‘cultural,’ that is, the “new” versus “old” social movements; those making “culture-based claims” grounded in ethno-racial identity, claims to land, or status as a ‘people’; or those that “deploy culture” as a means to mobilize or engage participants, as through music, media, drama—more narrowly, ‘cultural production.’ Cultural politics includes efforts to “resignify prevailing notions of citizenship, development and democracy” (7) and, in these ways, the political interventions of the MNSJ and most other modes of activism in the North can also be understood as ‘cultural.’ The MNSJ instantiated a ‘cultural politics’ in at least three overlapping ways. In their everyday political practices of capacity-, base-, organization- and coalition-building, MNSJ activists were actively engaged in identity formation with a broad social base. These are the everyday cultural practices, discursive and extra-discursive, that constitute social movements. In actively and self-consciously engaging in movement building, MNSJ activists were enacting a cultural politics.

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Conceptualizing these practices as ‘cultural’ is useful because their efficacy is premised on their persuasiveness, legitimacy, intelligibility and attractiveness to movement participants. Movement participants, by their presence and participation, actively produce and transform subsequent practices and hence, the movement itself. A movement cannot just be willed or planned into being, nor can people be instrumentally manipulated to create one. By definition, a movement is a constantly emergent social process that escapes the best-laid plans of those who would manage it. But politically committed people do act intentionally and seek to broaden the base and power of their actions. In so doing, if they are smart and (one hopes) democratic, they are open to remaking their politics in response to their base, to what the cultural theorists call processes of “reception.” I am using the notion of ‘cultural practices’ to examine how the MNSJ was actively constituted through ongoing activist practices, including those which were explicitly about the construction of meaning and value and which are central to identity formation. These include the ongoing production of interpretations about what the MNSJ was, what it was about, and about the world it sought to change. Secondly, when MNSJ activists produced movement-based interpretations of the issues and contexts they were confronting and deployed them in opposition to hegemonic interpretations in a political struggle for public support, they were enacting a cultural politics. As activists produced alternative interpretations of the Metro budget, cuts to social programs, the federal debt and NAFTA, they were contesting hegemonic messages about these issues that were central to consolidating popular consent and securing hegemony by the elite. Here I am following Escobar, Alvarez and Dagnino in their conceptualization of cultural politics. Thirdly, the MNSJ instantiated a cultural politics in its pedagogical activities. In ways suggested by Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire and discussed in the next chapter, when people engage purposefully in the shaping of knowledges and identities for a political project and as constitutive of a permanent ongoing process of cultural transformation, they are practicing a form of cultural politics. The post-Marxist turn to culture and identity are discourses rooted historically in the new social movements and address the formation of their subjectivities. Cultural and identity-oriented approaches to the social provide ways to perceive, narrate and interpret the processes and practices that constitute social movements in our time, including those of the MNSJ. A focus on the concrete practices of emancipatory social movements can materially root cultural approaches that otherwise risk collapsing the social into the textual. Because of their force in discerning the myriad

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and contradictory processes that constitute any form of collective agency, cultural approaches also open up new ways of thinking about power as more diffuse but also omnipresent. They suggest ways of thinking about the ‘long revolution’ and multiple revolutions for social change. My approach is a ‘cultural’ one in that, in the ethnography, I seek to represent the MNSJ as a site for political, organizational and intellectual innovation through narrating the practices of everyday activism that produced the movement and its interpretations/meanings. The ethnographic chapters examine in detail how MNSJ activists generated new practices and the processes by which knowledge arising from these practices was articulated, systematized and mobilized for politics. Throughout, I strive to avoid reifying the MNSJ, treating it as if it were a pre-existing, unitary entity or a “collective actor.” Rather, I represent the MNSJ as a complex and contradictory ensemble of practices, discourses and identities that were constantly emergent, always in process, always in the making.

WRITING GLOBAL ETHNOGRAPHY: GROUNDING GLOBALIZATION Developments in cultural studies across all the disciplines in which social movements are a referent increasingly point to the value of ethnographic approaches to the study of social movements. Such approaches privilege close observation over time and thick description of the concrete social practices which constitute social movements, coupled with interviewing and archival analyses in order to “get at the inner life and consciousness of a particular group” (Jackson 1985 cited by Dowler 1999: 81). The limits of ethnography historically have been associated with its often ahistorical and atheoretical character in which the ‘culture’ being studied is frozen historically in the observed practices. Furthermore, the authority granted by ethnographers to direct observation has been undergirded by a positivist epistemology and has reinforced an atheoretical empiricism. These legacies have made it difficult to re-think ethnography in ways that admit both the validity of multiple, partial and situated accounts and the constitution of any place or ‘field’ by social and historical forces beyond the space—time of direct experience. Furthermore, it is no longer tenable in ethnography or in any other research to treat researchers as neutral and uninterested observers. Their presence makes a difference in the very practices they observe. Ethnographers bring interpretive frameworks to their act of observing, and their representations are no less theory- and power laden for being grounded in their direct experiences.

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Over the past 20 years, ethnographers and other social researchers who value attention to concrete, lived experience in understanding social realities from local to global, have been exploring these dilemmas in light of theoretical developments in post-structuralism. In urban studies, M.P. Smith has incorporated these debates about ‘postmodern ethnography.’ In asking how one begins to make sense of the “crisscrossing of scales of social practice” in any particular local place and in search of research methods “capable of capturing the socially constructed character of the urban political life under conditions of contemporary transnationalism” (122), Smith writes: The “local” itself has become transnationalized as transnational modes of communication, streams of migration, and forms of economic and social intercourse continuously displace and relocate the spaces of cultural production. The social imaginary necessary to discern the significance of these social relations requires a kind of recombinant and historicized political economy and transnational ethnography (Smith, M. P., 2000:110).

And later: [T]he very concept of the urban thus requires reconceptualization as a social space that is crossroads or meeting ground for the interplay of diverse localizing practices of national, transnational, and even globalscale actors, as these wider networks of meaning and power come into contact with more locally configured networks, practices and identities. This way of envisioning contemporary transnationalism “locates” globalization and situates the global—local interplay in historically specific milieux . . . Closer study of this interplay will, in my view, enable urban researchers to explain the formation of new “subject positions,” grasp emergent counterlogics to prevailing modes of domination, and give due attention to the multiple patterns of accommodations and resistance to dominant power relations, particularly the patterns of dominance entailed in the current discourse on globalization itself (127).

For Smith, without assuming it is unproblematic or totally adequate, ethnography is indispensable because “it is a method designed to grasp processes of meaning-making and yield knowledge of the ways in which consciousness is actually formed, social networks forged, and individual and collective agency connected” (128). He advocates the production of contextually situated, including globally situated, ethnographic narratives in aiming to capture the emergent character of transnational social practices (138).

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In their book, Global Ethnography (2000), Michael Burawoy et al. explore in detail how to produce such ethnographies. They advocate an “extended case method,” in which the ethnographer is pushing beyond conventional ethnographic practice in at least four ways. The first involves recognition of the ethnographer as a participant in the processes observed and as a knower in dialogue with other knowing subjects, cognizant of the power invested in the researcher’s position. Second and third, global ethnography involves extending observations over time and across space to situate the here and now of the concrete practices both as reflective of ongoing social processes and as conditioned by forces at larger scales. Finally, theoretical choices and frameworks are operative throughout the research process, constituting the field and the subject in powerful ways. All of these moves are complex, involve choices and invoke power relations. Burawoy et al. see ethnography as a “reflexive science,” in which ever-present dangers are best addressed, although never completely resolved, through “entering into dialogue with those we study, by encouraging different voices to challenge our emergent accounts of process, by recognizing there can be no one-way determination between processes and forces, and by developing theory through a process of dialogue with other theorists as well as with the world we encounter as ethnographers” (Burawoy 2000b:28). These sociologists set out “to construct perspectives on globalization from below, what we call grounded globalizations. Thus, we set out from real experiences, spatial and temporal . . . [of other agents and victims of globalization] in order to explore their global contexts” (Burawoy 2000a: 341). They argue that global ethnography is a way to make important contributions to our understandings of globalization, how it is “upheld and reproduced, or is challenged and transformed,” that simply cannot be captured by grand theories of global processes (344). 5

CONSIDERING TORONTO AS A ‘GLOBAL CITY’ In an effort to consider the character of the transnational urban space of Toronto as the place of the MNSJ in light of the above discussion, there are several interrelated challenges. One is the question of how to represent or narrate the place, Toronto, as the ‘context’ of the MNSJ without treating Toronto as fixed, static or incidental. Another is how to explore the MNSJ and Toronto as constituted mutually, if not solely, by each other. Yet another is how to appreciate both Toronto and the MNSJ as constituted by processes operating at multiple scales. I have found theoretical resources in urban studies helpful in considering the MNSJ as an urban movement in

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the transnational urban space of Toronto and, more generally, in considering relations between local and global scales of power and agency and between localized social movements and processes of ‘globalization.’ In the historical practice of the MNSJ, the ‘world city’ perspective provided activists with a political-economic discourse on globalization that recognized the significance and uniqueness of ‘place.’ For MNSJ activists, it provided leverage for constructing ‘globalization’ in a way that was concretely and specifically anchored in the place, Toronto, where they found themselves. It therefore also gave them a way to take account of their own activism theoretically—allowing their own agency to be visible and meaningful, in general, but also at scales beyond the local. It provided a discourse on the relation of the local to the global that remained able to talk critically about capitalism on a global scale but also recognized the significance of local resistances and the differences they make. For these reasons especially, ‘the world city theory’ is worth exploring. John Friedmann was among the first to elaborate a theory of the world city, of urbanization as a process of capitalist globalization, drawing explicitly on world systems theory (Friedmann 1995b; Friedmann 1986; Friedmann and Wolff 1982). In brief, the world city hypothesis proposes that major urban centers have become central nodes of global economic activity and capital accumulation and function as command and control centers for the world economy. They are sites in which centers of finance, corporate headquarters, centers of transport and communications, and high-level business services— accounting, legal, and advertising firms, among others—have concentrated. Global cities are also central to the spatialization of the new international division of labor, which is itself highly polarized. World cities are sites for dramatically segmented and often racialized work forces. Global cities are also major targets for intra-national and international migration flows, and so are sites of intense socio-cultural diversity and the politics that connotes. The world city discourse, in many of its iterations, is first and foremost a political-economic discourse with many of its attendant problems for the theorization of local and popular agency. It is a functionalist theory, perceiving cities and their development primarily as functional for global capitalism. Although world city theorists pride themselves on being ‘critical’ theorists, they at times slip into a managerial or policy-oriented discourse concerned about (and implicitly fostering) incorporation into the world system as it is currently constituted. World city researchers have been preoccupied with hierarchically ranking cities in terms of their functions for the workings of global capitalism (e.g., Knox 1995; Friedmann 1995a.). Typical of many political economy discourses, little attention is given to political institutions and processes and dynamics of political struggle (Ward

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1995; Kirby and Marston 1995; Keil 1995; Keil 1996; Keil 1998a) or to cultural (re)production in world cities (Simon 1995:133). World city researchers tend to a preoccupation with corporate and political elites and their agencies (e.g., Todd 1995). Even where world city theorists explore issues of immigration and the restructuring of urban labor markets, many do not foreground ‘agency from below’ in the making of world cities (e.g., Sassen 1991). Finally, world city theory remains predominantly a theory of the First World, or, as Knox puts it, the “fast world” (Knox 1995:14–15). Despite these problems, world city theory offers considerable strengths in terms of this project. The world city paradigm has allowed for: (1) the re-localization of processes of economic globalization, the re-emergence of ‘the local’ as politically significant, and with it, re-theorizations of the relations between local and global and of multiple scales; (2) the emergence of multiple approaches within the paradigm emphasizing the agency of local states, civil societies, and social movements in producing the world city and shaping the terms of globalization as it takes place there; and (3) the incorporation of new developments in social and cultural theory that have broadened the purview of world city researchers to perceive the significance of social and cultural dynamics within cities and to more adequately apprehend socio-cultural phenomena like social movements. The insight that global capitalism is produced (and can therefore be contested) in specific places provides tremendous political leverage, contrasting powerfully with the impotence produced by more de-territorialized theories of global capitalism and global power. Sassen writes: In order to think politically, in order to think about how the micropolitics of many activist groups are or are not connecting to that engagement with global capital, my premise is that we can detect aspects of the system that are in a necessary connection to places and hence to the people in those places. If we keep thinking about global capital as this enormous thing that is out there, that operates in-between national territories, that is forever hyper-mobile—the struggle is going to be a very different kind of struggle, one where local struggles don’t matter. This [localization of globalization] is a schema that in my reading creates room for understanding how the particular kinds of activity that many activist groups are engaged in, that may have very particular and local focuses, that may have a temporality that is very short, a particular action, how can these be seen as also being part of a much broader movement. This is a new kind of politics, not broad front politics as we used to think about it, where we have a common front, but a fragmented politics if you want. But in fact, it is a politics rather than just fragmented localized actions.

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Praxis and Politics This is a global politics centered on local actions that resonate with each other across the globe—each fighting specific local materialization of a global power system (Sassen 1998:192–3).

This re-theorization of ‘the global’ and the centrality of the spatial dimensions of capitalist restructuring have allowed for the re-emergence of ‘the local’ as politically significant in its own right, not just derivative of the global. It has prompted re-thinking of the relation of ‘the local’ to ‘the global,’ the emergence of a theorization/politics of multiple scales, a notion that the global and local are mutually constituted and even suggestions that the local constitutes the global (Beauregard 1995: 242ff). Although reorienting its politics on a local—global axis would prove to be a very important and fruitful development for the MNSJ, replacing the national as the “exclusive container for politics” (Magnusson and Walker 1988) with a local—global binary is also problematic. The ‘local’ and the ‘global’ are mutually constituted and they and other spatial scales are constantly being produced and are constituting social relations as well. Swyngedouw writes: [S]cale is neither an ontologically given and a priori definable geographical territory nor a politically neutral discursive strategy in the construction of narratives. Scale, both in its metaphorical use and material construction, is highly fluid and dynamic, and both processes and effects can easily move from scale to scale and affect different people in different ways, depending on the scale at which the process operates. Similarly, different scalar narratives indicate different causal moments and highlight different power geometries in explaining such events. Scale is, consequently, not socially or politically neutral, but embodies and expresses power relationships. . . . . The crux is not, therefore, whether the local or the global has theoretical and empirical priority in shaping the conditions of daily life, but rather how the local, the global, and other relevant (although perpetually shifting) geographical scale levels are the result, the product of processes of socio-spatial change (Cox and Mair 1991; Smith, N., 1984). In other words, spatial scale is what needs to be understood as something that is produced; a process that is always deeply heterogeneous, conflictual, and contested. Scale becomes the arena and moment, both discursively and materially, where sociospatial power relations are contested and compromises are negotiated and regulated. Scale, therefore, is both the result and the outcome of social struggle for power and control (Swyngedouw 1997:140).

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This more complex conceptualization of relations between local and global, or more accurately among multiple scales, has deeply informed my account of the MNSJ and its political significance as a localized movement contesting the terms of neoliberal globalization in Toronto. The ethnographic discussion that follows is close to the ground, in MNSJ spaces in Toronto in the 1990s, but I also contextualize and interpret the MNSJ with reference to larger scales and institutionalized expressions of power. The world city scholarship has provided a critical political-economic discourse attentive to the global scale but with significant flexibility and sensitivity to specificities of local places and localized agencies. This ethnography of the MNSJ is about big social struggles over global futures, imbricated with the state and capitalist restructuring/power. Thus, the account is neither innocent of nor agnostic about critical political economy even as it relies on an ethnographic approach. A focus on the micro-processes of grassroots politics is critical to understanding the making of social movements, that is, to the intertwined processes of identity formation and knowledge creation. Further, these practices make a difference in the present and for the future, locally and globally. In perceiving and studying the microprocesses of social movements, cultural studies and ethnographic approaches are more helpful, and I privilege them in that regard. I draw on political economy perspectives in constructing the macrohistorical context in which the MNSJ emerged and acted. Chapter Two surveys feminist and Freirean traditions that have been key in my conceptualizing ‘knowledge from below’ and my theorizing its relation to identity formation and collective political agency in social movements. Chapter Three begins with an account of the origins of the MNSJ in the 1992 FightBack Metro! campaign. It situates the MNSJ in Toronto in the midst of deep processes of economic and political restructuring and considers the political and organizational legacies available to the MNSJ arising from preceding decades of urban activism and, more recently, from the nationally articulated anti-free trade movement of the late 1980s. Chapter Four documents the emergence of a culture and practice of ‘capacity building’ in the MNSJ, particularly through its ‘economic and political literacy’ work. It was through this multi-layered popular and activist education project that knowledge production was first explicitly identified, rationalized and operationalized as a political priority for social movements and for the broader left. Chapter Five documents the orchestration of broad-based pressure campaigns as a key arena for the production of praxis-based knowledges in the MNSJ. This chapter tracks the emergence of an explicitly ‘urban politics’ in the MNSJ and the centrality of activist knowledge production to that endeavor. Chapter Six concludes the

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ethnography with an account of rising conflict in the MNSJ over the role and status of knowledge production. The political impasse is symptomatic of larger dilemmas in contemporary movement politics. Even so, the contours of the praxis of the MNSJ and the epistemology undergirding its practices of knowledge production suggest a new democratic imaginary emergent in social movement spaces.

Chapter Two

Social Movements and Their Knowledges: Feminist and Freirean Perspectives on Knowledge from Below

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND THEIR KNOWLEDGES Knowledge production is central to both the making and meaning of social movements. Ongoing processes of communication and interpretation among movement participants and with movement publics are essential to the ongoing, always incomplete, somewhat contradictory and always contingent processes of identity formation that constitute movements. Beyond consolidating movement identities, social movement knowledges are central to defining and waging wider social struggles and to the forging of any genuinely democratic future. From my participation and observation of the MNSJ, I propose that there are at least three distinct modes of knowing anchored in activist practice: tacit knowledge produced through everyday practice; knowledge arising from praxis, in which practices are systematically reflected on, informed and transformed by other knowledges and theories about the world in an ongoing dialogue; and knowledge production, in which the generation of movement-based interpretation of the world becomes central to the movement’s self-understanding and development and to the capacity of social movement publics to enter into political struggles in which contestations over knowledge are central. Activists demonstrate, draw on and produce tacit knowledges. These are the insights and know-how that activists employ constantly to do what they do as activists. These are generated and transmitted informally through 21

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everyday cultural practices in social movements—organizing meetings, planning campaigns, doing outreach for events, and so on. They are practical and unsystematized and rarely perceived as specific knowledges essential to activism. Tacit knowledges are constantly being revised and created, lost and rediscovered, as social movements innovate—culturally, politically, and organizationally—in response to changing contexts of struggle. In all processes of social learning, such tacit and practical knowledges are essential to what people can produce together, politically and culturally. In the MNSJ, the effect of such tacit knowledges was multiplied through critical reflexive processes that, by ongoing evaluative reflection on practice, sought to name and distill those knowledges and self-consciously advance their development, dissemination and concrete application. This dynamic was central to the development of the MNSJ and remains central to the development of any self-conscious movement organization. Secondly, social movements produce knowledges through praxis. By praxis, I mean activist practices that elucidate the ongoing dialectical relationship between action and reflection in their forging a social movement politics. These praxis-based knowledges are produced when social movement activists consciously and critically reflect on their political practice for what they have learned about themselves and about the world they are trying to change. Praxis-based knowledge is produced through practices of reflexivity. I will argue that praxis is central to the development of self-conscious and effective social movement organizations. Thirdly, social movement activists occasionally engage self-consciously and systematically in knowledge production, in which they recognize the need and the value of engaging with, disseminating and advancing formal knowledges as a constitutive dimension of social change work. The third recognizes, relies on and extends the first two modes of knowing, but also involves recognition that contestations over knowledge are increasingly central to political struggle in the contemporary period (Melucci 1988; Melucci 1996; Melucci 1998). It also implies a pedagogical project. In speaking of pedagogy in the MNSJ, I am considering active intentional knowledge production processes in which the intellectual development of self and others is a central dimension of capacity building for political struggle. Pedagogy in this sense is a form of cultural politics, as a purposeful intervention in the shaping of knowledges and identities for a political project and as constitutive of a permanent process of ongoing cultural transformation. Pedagogy, of course, can be and often is a strategy for

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hegemony by elites consolidating their wealth and power, but pedagogy is also central to any democratic and emancipatory process (Hernandez 1997). These categories are not self-contained. Each has multiple dimensions and is constituted by multiple processes. In what follows, I use terms like ‘producing knowledge’ or ‘knowledge production’ to refer generally to this ensemble of knowledges and the processes that constitute them, to suggest that knowledge is always ‘knowing’ (a transitive verb), always in process, active, changing, unfixed and incomplete. As Himani Bannerji writes, “If knowledge is to be ‘active,’ that is, oriented to radical social change, then it must be a critical practice of direct producers, whose lives and experiences must be the basis for their own knowledge-making endeavor” (Bannerji 1995:65). The problem of knowledge for social movements is not simply or primarily about appropriating or disseminating received knowledges, but also about producing the knowledges and identities that are constitutive of emancipatory agency. Social movements must build their collective capacity to enter into contemporary political struggle in which contestations over knowledge are central (Melucci 1998). This exploration of knowledge and knowledge production in social movements draws on three major sources: Hilary Wainwright’s work on the social movement knowledges of the new left, feminist debates about epistemology and the production of knowledge for feminism, and Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ and debates in critical pedagogy about popular education in and for emancipatory social movements.

THE ‘PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE’ OF THE NEW LEFT In her book, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right, British socialist feminist Hilary Wainwright argues that the social movements of the 1960s’ new left were rebelling against the all-knowing authorities of the state and corporations, especially against their arbitrary and unaccountable forms of authority and claims to know. The effects of these hegemonic knowledge claims were concretely experienced through Taylorist forms of scientific management in factories and universities and were undergirded by unswerving confidence in the power of human rationality and in science as progress. Following Foucault, Wainwright suggests that the generation and mobilization of knowledge had become central to modern governance and the exercise of disciplinary power more generally (1994:73–74; 264ff). Many activists of the new left movements were among the first beneficiaries of mass university education in a period when the organization of

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information, utilization of knowledge, and development of skill had become central economic issues. Wainwright contends that the activists of the new social movements had confidence in themselves as subjects of history and in their own knowledge and capacities. In particular, they trusted and valued “practical knowledge” grounded in their life experience and in their political practice, and they were skeptical of “theoretical knowledge” and claims about its superiority.1 In opposition to the dominant Taylorist institutions, the movements were holding out for their own ways of organizing and thinking, the value of socializing everyday understanding, and combining and testing their insights with those of (established traditions of) theoretical knowledge. The premium on activism and the skepticism toward all forms of authority and received knowledge produced a dialectic . . . between action and knowledge: collective action revealing things not previously known that in turn help to focus further action. . . . Out of critique grew innovation and the practical assertion of alternatives . . . the validity of experiential knowledge . . . as clues, signposts, and stimuli to deeper understanding and theoretical innovation. Combined with this was an attempt to demystify theoretical knowledge and to advocate a pluralistic approach to its development (Wainwright 1994:75, 67).

In addition to their valuing of practical, experiential and activist knowledges and their skepticism of hegemonic knowledges, Wainwright suggests that the new movements were also characterized by a critical consciousness of the partial character of their own knowledges. “The activities of new movements, by contrast, illustrate the scope for consciously sharing and socially building upon practical knowledge as a means of bringing about social change without presuming to be all-knowing” (7). The acknowledgement (or recognition) of the limits of their knowledge led new movements to consciously construct processes for their own learning that would stimulate “new forms of power necessary to achieve purposeful social change” (8). Wainwright argues that the movements were concerned with social conditions that favor the development and transformation of knowledge in a way that previously dominant Leninist and social democratic traditions were not (82). “This assumes a view of knowledge as a social product . . . [and] implies that the possibilities of radical and democratic social change depend to a considerable extent on democratizing and socializing the organization of knowledge” (8). In their organizational, political, and intellectual practices, the movements were concerned with autonomy, diversity and “an experimental pluralism,” and in prefiguring their ends in the process of achieving them.

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Wainwright suggests that this concern illustrates a novel political recognition of the ways in which people reproduce, and therefore could potentially transform, social structures. It also led the movements to advance more complex notions of democracy and to embrace and practice a “radical gradualism” (76, 82–4). This eclectic, egalitarian, praxis-based approach to knowledge that validates practical, experiential, experimental, tacit and social dimensions and is marked by a sober assessment of the limits of human reason has radical implications for the character of democracy. Wainwright suggests that these impulses and their development through concrete practices of the movements foster practical democratic alternatives to neoliberalism and to both Leninist and social democratic traditions on the left (6). Further, she argues for the possibility of a new kind of state inspired by the best practices of democratic and emancipatory social movements (Wainwright 1993:118–19).

FEMINIST EPISTEMOLOGIES FOR COALITION POLITICS Although all the critical social movements have in various ways challenged hegemonic knowledges and generated alternative perspectives, the second wave of feminism has produced the most sustained, reflexive and theoretically elaborated debates on the character of knowledge. Within the movement, women’s experience, activities, and emotions were recognized early on as sources of knowledge for feminism and for a different social order. The women’s movement valorized and built on the uncodified and tacit knowledges of women through widespread and collective consciousnessraising processes. This became an important basis for mounting challenges to hegemonic (“patriarchal”) knowledge claims as biased, incomplete, not neutral, not objective, and not true (Adamson, Briskin, and McPhail 1988:44–45, 204–6). The generation of knowledge on a wide range of fronts was both a political necessity and a high priority as feminists organized to pressure for policy changes. They needed to produce social data of a new kind as well as critically interpret existing information. They had to generate new arguments informed by emergent feminist perspectives in order to produce briefs, speak to the media and persuade the public. Early feminists were also hungry to critically understand women’s oppression, historically and cross-culturally. To accomplish that, they had to do their own archaeological searches for suppressed women’s voices and perspectives and begin to reconstruct histories. As the movement generated new questions about the nature of women’s inequality, “organic intellectuals” drew eclectically on

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available theories including the neo-Marxisms of the new left and revisions of Freud. Sheridan writes, “They were expanding their capacity to intervene in the cultural and political processes of a society in which they were assigned the place of second-class citizens, the place they now challenged at all levels” (Sheridan 1990: 39). Feminists also produced new critical perspectives on and practices of democratic process and organization. This is one of the most widely recognized, widely disseminated and enduring innovations of the women’s movement. Feminists sought to foster collective sharing of skills, knowledge and responsibilities, consensus decision-making, and the elimination of hierarchies of skills and status in groups and organizations. Sheridan claims, “any account of feminist knowledge must include an awareness of how group processes and structures shape what we know by shaping how we come to know it” (Sheridan 1990: 39–40).2 Regard for experience and activism as a ground of knowledge led feminists to argue that women and, by extension, all oppressed people should define and organize around their own priorities. Awareness of their own historic silence and of the power of self-representation encouraged feminists to engage in and value the importance of feminist cultural production—work by women about women—that confronts and interrupts women’s silence and absence (Sheridan 1990:40–42). Central to the eruption of the second wave of the women’s movement was an explicit critique of hegemonic knowledge as patriarchal. Existing authoritative knowledges were seen as distorted due to gender bias and misogyny, limited due to the systematic exclusion of women as knowers and of their experiences and perspectives as irrelevant, and oppressive due to their ongoing complicity in social practices that marginalized women. Feminists problematized the absence and silence of women’s voices/perspective and the invisibility and/or denigration/ undervaluing of women’s lives, their experience and the knowledges arising from these other sources: the everyday, the body and the emotions. This insight led to the generation of alternative theories of knowledge and knowledge production that sought to justify women as knowers and that would guide choices for theory, research and politics in the service of women’s equality (Harding 1990:87–90). Moreover, feminists problematized hegemonic knowledges not just because they were produced by men and not by women, but because of the extraordinary claims of patriarchal knowledge systems to universal, rational and value-free truth. Questioning these claims was, in effect, to challenge the epistemological foundations of Western thought (Harding 1990; Harding 1998). Because feminism, by definition, testified to the disjuncture between women’s critical consciousness and experience on the one hand and

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the claims about women and their lives advanced by hegemonic science on the other, the feminist critique and assertion of alternative sources, processes and theories of knowing unsettled hegemonic knowledge claims—especially in terms of their claims to authority based on ‘objectivity.’ Several feminist epistemologies emerged in response to this reality and the political needs of the women’s movement.3 For my purposes, the development of the ‘feminist standpoint’ in response to the challenges posed by postmodernism is most relevant. The intellectual origins of the feminist standpoint can be traced to the 1970s, as feminist theorists began to reflect on work done in the Marxian tradition on the epistemic privilege of the proletariat. Marx theorized that capitalist relations could be more accurately perceived from the point of view of the working class, who were functionally essential to capitalist development yet marginal in terms of power and influence. For Marx, the social marginality of the proletariat is a function of its economic centrality (Bar On 1993:85–86). Feminist epistemologies began by arguing for women’s experience of the everyday conditions of their lives as the starting point for feminist inquiry and proposed that such a standpoint would provide a more complete, less distorted and therefore truer picture of patriarchal social relations. Both drawing on and departing from Marx, early versions of the feminist standpoint argued that the social marginality of women conferred a similar epistemic privilege to that awarded the proletariat by Marx. Standpoint epistemologies have developed in ‘post-Marxist’ directions in response to both the recognition of difference among women and theoretical developments in post-structuralism, anti-racism and post-colonialism (Harding 1998:149).4 Knowledge from the perspectives of the marginal reveals the knowledge claims of the powerful as specific, permeated by political interests and informed by particular social locations, rather than universal, neutral and objective. Harding argues that these standpoint epistemological strategies have marked the politics of all the new social movements as historically marginalized populations claim a public voice (Harding 1998:149). To the extent that knowledges from the margins are conscious both of the distortions of hegemonic knowledges arising from the disjuncture between their lived experience and hegemonic worldviews and of the partiality of their own knowledge claims, these knowledges are more likely to generate credible accounts. Many versions of standpoint epistemology theorize a connection between ‘doing’ and ‘knowing.’ Harding suggests that the managerial and administrative activities of those at the top inhibit their capacity to see or understand lives grounded in (and enriched or constrained by) other kinds of everyday life activities. For practitioners of feminist standpoint epistemology,

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the lives of marginalized people provide the problematics for research, that is, new and different critical questions arising from needs that differ from the managerial needs of rulers. Feminist standpoint epistemology promises new knowledge about the lives of marginal people and the social order that marginalizes them. It does not provide the answers, but it helps shape a problematic based on posing ‘everyday life’ against the management of the social order. It promises “to produce knowledge that can be for [and by] marginalized people rather than for the use only of dominant groups in their projects of administering and managing the lives of marginalized people” (Harding 1993:56). Standpoint epistemology places the relations between knowledge and politics at the center—to explain the effects of different kinds of political arrangements on the production of knowledge (Harding 1993:55–56; Harding 1998:153). Advocates of feminist standpoint epistemology argue forcefully that all knowledges are socially situated and that some social locations are better than others for generating fuller, more credible accounts of the world and how to change it for the better. This epistemological perspective challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions of the scientific worldview and of Western thought that take science as their model for producing knowledge (Harding 1998:154). Feminist standpoint epistemology emerged out of the women’s movement and its concrete need for an alternative theory of knowledge with which to challenge the authority of patriarchal knowledge systems. Early feminist knowledges informed by standpoint epistemology reflected the specific experience of marginality of those in the movement at the time, predominantly white, middle-class women. Among others, women of color have gone on to embrace and further develop standpoint epistemologies. In speaking of Black life in America across the railroad tracks from the mainstream, bell hooks writes: [T]o be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body . . . Living as we did—on the edge—we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both . . . Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us with an oppositional worldview— a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us,

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aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity (hooks 1984: ix).

Reflecting on hooks, Bar On suggests that such stories from the margins are stories of survival, not just of victimization. They involve the construction of a self (in community) based on the creation of a memory of a past that is not just about oppression, but also about resistance, creativity and agency (Bar On 1993:88). In a similar vein, Harding writes, “members of marginalized groups must struggle to name their own experience for themselves in order to claim the subjectivity, the possibility of historical agency that is given to members of dominant groups at birth . . . [F]or women and other marginalized groups, subjectivity and its possibility of ‘experience’ must be achieved; they are made, not born” (Harding 1992:186). This same struggle for subjectivity confronts oppositional social movements. Commenting on her passage (quoted above) in a later work, hooks goes further in suggesting that the margin is not only a place of deprivation (or survival), but also a space of radical openness, possibility and resistance. For her, the margin offers a central location for the production of counterhegemonic discourse, not just in words but in “habits of being and the way one lives” (hooks 1990:150). Even after she has physically moved from her old neighborhood, hooks insists that hers is “not a marginality to get rid of, but a site to cling to because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (hooks 1990:150). hooks is carving out an epistemic position starting from her lived experience and ongoing fidelity to the memory of it and to the ways of knowing that spring from it. In a similar way, Patricia Hill Collins (2000) elaborates the basis for “Black feminist thought,” a standpoint social theory reflecting women’s efforts to come to terms with lived experience within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation and religion. This explicit commitment to the intersectionality of oppressions has come to characterize many more recent works informed by standpoint epistemology (Hill Collins 2000:24–26). While I do not read these versions of standpoint epistemologies as premised on fixed identities, they are often critiqued for this. Bannerji, who is also identified with the feminist standpoint, offers a corrective. Departing from both postmodern and essentialist formulations, she draws on historical materialism: This historical materialist understanding of experience, which treats it as an interpretive relation rather than valorizing any person or group’s

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In addition to the postmodern critiques of essentialism, feminist theorists and philosophers of science who advocate standpoint epistemology have had to address accusations from the academic establishment of their apparent embrace of relativism and abandonment of objectivity. Donna Haraway writes: [F]eminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges . . . only partial perspective promises objective vision . . . feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge . . . in this way we might become answerable for what we learn how to see. . . . Many currents in feminism attempt to theorize grounds for trusting especially the vantage points of the subjugated; there is good reason to believe vision is better from below . . . But here lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if ‘we’ ‘naturally’ inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges. The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical re-examination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of critical enquiry. The standpoints of the subjugated are not ‘innocent’ positions. On the contrary, they are preferred because in principle they are least likely to allow denial of the critical and interpretive core of all knowledge. They are savvy to modes of denial . . . (Haraway 1991:188, 190, 191).

Haraway is alert to the dangers of both essentialism and relativism. She is not arguing that any standpoint arising from any marginalized social location is as good as any other. Judgments grounded in ethical politics are unavoidable, but a standpoint epistemology holds open the possibility that self-consciously partially knowing selves can enter into conversations and politics with other partially knowing selves based on a shared desire for a world “less organized by axes of domination.” The alternative to relativism, according to Haraway,

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is partial, situated, critical knowledges “sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology” (Haraway 1991:191). Haraway is pointing to the possibility for coalition politics among people and groups with their own distinct standpoints. Encounter across differences within coalitions, including different knowledges, and the experience of producing politics (not as unanimity, but as a capacity for solidarity and collective action) through dialogue and negotiation is neither relativist nor liberal pluralist. It is exactly this epistemological stance that is central to the current dynamism apparent in the convergence of movements against neoliberal globalization and to the creativity of the Metro Network for Social Justice in the period under consideration. Both are premised on an embrace of pluralism and diversity and a shared struggle against neoliberalism. This theory of knowledge suggests that in coalition, through dialogue, negotiation, practical acts of solidarity and ongoing political collaboration, subjectivities can be transformed—not toward uniformity, but toward greater capability of producing fuller, more adequate knowledges with which to change the world in ways responsive to the diverse needs and desires of the many rather than an elite few. As one of Harding’s titles suggests, this is an epistemology for a ‘rainbow coalition politics’ (Harding 1992). New political discourses and practices that are neither relativist nor liberal pluralist, but which are grounded implicitly or explicitly in philosophies of knowledge that break with the notion of universal, objective and value-free truth claims, are generating a new post-liberal and post-socialist democratic imaginary. As yet, its features are barely perceptible. It is emergent and fragile, not yet fully formed. In retrospect, signs of it are discernible in little-known movement spaces like the MNSJ. The exploration of feminist debates about knowledge and epistemology helps situate struggles over hegemonic knowledges and the production of critical, oppositional knowledges as central to the politics of emancipatory social movements. Feminist debates about knowledge and epistemology provide formulations for the dialectical and transformative connections between knowledge and experience, knowledge and identity and the generation of emancipatory agency. Critical social movements, because they are oppositional, are by definition politically marginal. Such movements are often populated by people who, by virtue of their social locations, are marginal in a variety of other ways as well. As a critical social movement, the MNSJ occupies this kind of marginal space. From its origins in the anti-poverty and antifree trade movements, the MNSJ made a ‘class option’ in favor of the poor and marginalized even as it sought to build broad bridges with a range of progressive social forces. It situated itself against the status quo.5

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The majority of activists in the MNSJ were not poor, although some were on welfare or unemployed. Most were university educated, although, by the 1990s, for people under 30, a university education was no guarantee of secure employment, housing or income. They came from a variety of family backgrounds, from working class to upper middle-class professional. Most were white, although there was significant participation by people of color in the leadership. Most MNSJ activists were working in or affiliated with progressive labor, church or community organizations that comprised the Network’s base. In my treatment of the MNSJ, I am building on the insights and claims of the feminist standpoint. The MNSJ as an oppositional political space and as a site for activist praxis provided a standpoint for critically knowing the world and what kinds of changes were needed. A certain epistemic privilege arose from its political positioning, its political practices (doing/knowing) and the oppositional politics and social locations of the people and organizations that comprised the MNSJ, and to whose experience the Network sought to be faithful. The knowledge of MNSJ activists was a partial and situated knowledge and an important one to take into account in thinking about Toronto in the 1990s, about the making of social movements, and about prospects for democratic transformation more generally. The MNSJ is also a coalition and, as such, a privileged place for critical subjectivities in democratic dialogue, for processes of transformation of those subjectivities through contact and collaboration with others and for the production of new practices and knowledges relevant for emancipatory political struggle. In the everyday practical politics of the MNSJ, activists embodied an epistemology premised on partial, positional and situated knowledges as they negotiated common political positions and ways of acting. This epistemological position was eventually articulated explicitly and assumed selfconsciously in the course of the MNSJ’s ‘pedagogical’ work.6 Also in the course of the pedagogical work, the notion of lifting up the subjugated knowledges of the emancipatory movements that had gone before became a central feature of economic and political literacy work and led eventually to self-awareness among these activists of the importance of producing their own knowledges as constitutive of social movement politics.

FREIREAN PEDAGOGIES AND MOVEMENT-BASED KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION The revolutionary philosophy and practice of education developed by Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire,7 is a third major reference point in my

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thinking about knowledge and knowledge production in social movements. This discussion involves a shift from consideration of epistemology to pedagogy, although each is implicated in the other. In speaking of pedagogy, I am considering active intentional knowledge production processes, in and beyond movements for social change, in which the intellectual development of self and others is a central dimension of capacity building for political struggle. Pedagogy in this sense is a form of cultural politics—as a purposeful intervention in the shaping of knowledges and identities for a political project and as constitutive of a permanent process of ongoing cultural transformation. Pedagogy, of course, can be and often is a strategy for securing hegemony by elites consolidating their own wealth and power. But pedagogy is also central to any democratic and emancipatory process (Hernandez 1997:3). Paulo Freire was the founding spirit of what has come to be called ‘critical pedagogy’ and one of its foremost practitioners and theorists.8 I first encountered Freire’s work in an exposure trip to Peru in 1988. His work had grown up alongside the pastoral practices of the liberation church in Latin America, deeply influencing them. Other activists in the MNSJ had encountered his work through their involvements in Central America solidarity movements or through work with progressive international development organizations. Freire’s writing became available in English in the 1970s, and by the 1990s had had an enormous impact worldwide among progressive activists and educators. In Toronto, Freire’s work was prominent at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and in popular education networks like the Doris Marshall Institute and the Moment Project of the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice, both members of the MNSJ. Freire’s philosophy of education, which is also a political philosophy, was grounded in his two decades of pedagogical—political experience of literacy education with poor peasants in the Brazilian Northeast.9 In 1964, after a coup d’etat, Freire was arrested, jailed and then exiled from the country. He began to systematize his thinking during the years of exile and published Education: The practice of freedom and Pedagogy of the oppressed, the latter appearing in English in 1971. Freire had developed a revolutionary method of teaching literacy to impoverished adults by using words from their immediate context and building vocabulary through critical discussion of their social reality, a reality marked by deep inequality, exploitation and oppression. Freire’s teaching method was founded on a recognition that students, including poor illiterate peasants, brought experiences and knowledges to the learning process. He advocated a dialogical process between teacher and students that engaged and respected the knowledges of the students and was grounded in a critical reading of an

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unjust social reality. To read the word was to read the world, according to Freire. To actively and critically learn any body of knowledge was to critically interrogate the social relations that produced such knowledge. Freire called this process of education, which is also and always a political process, ‘conscientization.’ Freire’s method was a radical departure from conventional approaches to education that treated the student as an empty receptacle for a neutral body of content. In contrast to this ‘banking’ mode of education, Freire advocated a ‘problem-posing’ methodology that recognized and drew out the students’ knowledge of the world and developed it through critical dialogue. In the process, students educated one another and their teachers. For Freire, liberating education was founded on recognizing and nurturing the subjectivity of oppressed people. In an intellectual process that affirmed them as thinking, knowing, developing human beings, oppressed people came to recognize themselves as subjects of their own history, as human beings who could participate in the transformation of their societies. Freire conceived of this process as ‘cultural action for freedom’ or a ‘cultural politics’ in which oppressed people recognize and reclaim their rights and advance their capacities for transformative social action. Any pedagogical process involves the renegotiation of knowledges and identities. A critical, democratic pedagogy, which is also a critical cultural politics, is fundamental to any liberatory political project. For Freire, no politics could be genuinely liberatory unless it fostered such processes for listening deeply and in an ongoing way to the masses of oppressed people. This was so not only in the course of pitched political struggle with elites, but also should be conceived of and committed to as a permanent and irreducible feature of democratic social life. He conceived it as a permanent, ongoing cultural revolution, in which human beings were constantly developing their capacities to think critically about the world, were being encouraged in their belief that they could change the world for the better and were moving concretely to organize themselves collectively to do that. Central to Freire’s thinking was a philosophy of praxis founded on hope of the possibility of human agency transforming the world. Conscientization of illiterate people in the context of a “culture of silence” involved suggesting to them the previously unthinkable possibility of their own transformative agency (Freire 1985:50). But Freire is at pains to repeatedly emphasize praxis, the dialectical (dynamic, mutually constitutive) relation between action and reflection that continuously transforms both, as the grounds for both knowing and transforming the world. He writes: [T]he accomplishment of this untested feasibility [the constructible future] which demands going beyond the point blocked by living without

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reference to our consciousness, is only verified in praxis. This means, and let us emphasize it, that human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation, the condition in which they find themselves, only by their consciousness or their intentions, however good those intentions may be (Freire 1985:154).

In other words, “Freire tells us that education as transformative praxis is constructed at grassroots level by ordinary men and women who, in their everyday practices, elaborate their own possibilities by engaging in a collective political-social project” (Gaudiano et al. 1994:132–33). The pedagogy of the oppressed (Freire’s book and the historical process) is both a theory of knowledge (as in the feminist epistemologies discussed above) and a praxis of knowledge production. It is a self-conscious political intervention by the educator that is simultaneously a process of the student coming actively and critically into their own subjectivity, because the praxis recognizes the student as a subject with knowledge and experience, with whom the educator can enter into dialogue. It is a process of identity formation fundamentally oriented and committed to the notion of self-emancipation and to the student/poor/oppressed as subjects of their own history. Freire’s writings display both development over time and an enduring ambiguity in the notion of education itself as a praxis and of education giving rise to a broader political praxis. Freire constantly moves back and forth between considering formal educational moments and settings and their relation to a larger socio-political struggle underway in Latin America at the time. He clearly considers the larger movements as themselves sites of praxis (including pedagogical praxis), which were producing new knowledges, consciousness and identities, which in turn yielded new forms of action and new practices. But in Freire’s view, the (formal, identifiable) more narrowly ‘educational’ moment is not one that can be dispensed with or collapsed into more generic and diffused movement-based organizing processes. In my account of the MNSJ, I demonstrate and describe the presence and interplay of these same tensions and ambiguities. Like Freire, I want to acknowledge and affirm that knowledge arises from social movement praxis, that is, from concrete engagement in protest, campaign and a myriad of other activities. However, MNSJ activists also created specific moments for thinking and learning that were not immediately instrumental in political or organizational terms. Community workshops, training sessions and courses occupied their own distinct space and proceeded according to a logic not reducible to campaign outcomes, although they were often articulated with campaigns. In the MNSJ, ‘economic and political literacy’ (EPL)

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work was itself a form of praxis even as it also served a praxis beyond itself. It helps us understand Freire’s references to pedagogy as a praxis situated within and serving the larger and more multi-faceted praxis of a liberation movement. The clearest and most powerful treatment of these ambiguities emerges in Freire’s conversations with Myles Horton. Although Freire and Horton eventually came to know and love one another and their political philosophies and educational practices were very compatible, their praxes developed independently of one another. Accounts by Myles Horton and Septima Clark, both rooted in the Highlander Center and its development of Citizenship Schools in the context of the Southern Black civil rights movement, testify to the development of pedagogical practices within social movements and so are rife with the omnipresent tensions between ‘educating’ and ‘organizing’ (Horton, et al. 1990; Clark 1986). In a conversation with Freire, Horton recalls a similar debate between Saul Alinsky and himself: Saul says that organizing educates. I said that education make possible organization . . . if you were working with an organization and there’s a choice between the goal of that organization, or the particular program they’re working on, and educating people, developing people, helping them grow, helping them become able to analyze—if there’s choice, we’d sacrifice the goal of the organization for helping people grow, because we think in the long run it’s a bigger contribution (Horton, et al. 1990:115–16).

Freire responds by insisting that education is an indispensable dimension of organizing. More implicitly, I think he is also saying that organizing, as a self-consciously purposeful activity, itself implies an intellectual process. He argues that activists’ pausing to reflect on their organizing experience, which is constitutive of an organizing praxis, creates moments of genuine education and learning. “Education is before, is during and is after. It’s a process, a permanent process. It has to do with human existence and curiosity” (Horton, et al. 1990:117–19). Horton fires back, describing organizations and organizers as being oriented to limited, specific goals in which the education of people is a means to the organizer’s end. It seems clear that Horton is describing specific modes of organizing that he has encountered in the US context, likely Alinsky-style. His experience has led him to argue for a clear separation between the instrumental needs of political organizations and the capacity building of people central to his educational praxis. In another context, Freire argues similarly against the people being “activist pawns” in the

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hands of a revolutionary leadership that assumes that the people have no need or desire to think, and much less that they, the leaders, have anything to learn (Freire 1985:87). Freire’s praxis and his philosophy of education for liberation developed in the context of the post-World War Two eruption of the poor as political subjects in Latin America. Movements for decolonization and a more just and equitable world order were vibrant in many parts of the Third World. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed worldwide eruptions of critical social movements of hitherto largely silenced peoples and groups: women, indigenous peoples, youth, Black people in the US and elsewhere, gays and lesbians. The movements changed their societies profoundly, even as some expressions of movements were crushed and defeated. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the context of an aggressive neoliberal resurgence, the 1990s presented a dramatically different context in which radicals had to reformulate their hopes for wholesale social transformation. Even in this quite different historical moment, Freire’s writings continued to provoke astonishing resonance all over the world. Henry Giroux suggests that one of the reasons for this is that Freire’s work combines, in all too rare a way, “the dynamics of critique and collective struggle with a philosophy of hope, [and] has created a language of possibility that is rooted in what he calls a permanent prophetic vision” (Giroux 1985: xvii). Freire’s philosophy was grounded in his enormous faith in people, in their capacities for love and solidarity, and in the links between knowledge or critical consciousness and agency. His writings are grounded in and advance an alternative approach wherein individuals assume material agency as social subjects in the task of transforming the future, recognizing that a utopian approach calls for deconstructing present discourses and practices in order to enable a creative and committed rebuilding of the future. This ‘utopia’ is characterized by struggle, hope and possibility. Freire is a major figure in the attempt to establish this utopian response to current conditions (Gaudiano, et al. 1994:135).

Freire’s theorization of emancipatory knowledge and a democratic praxis of knowledge production is enormously helpful in illuminating the politics and culture of the MNSJ in general and, in particular, the role and character of knowledge and knowledge production as it developed in the Network in the period under consideration. In the MNSJ, from its origins, activists were engaged in democratic pedagogical practices along the lines advocated by Freire. Activists experienced similar tensions between educating for organizing and educating for capacity building as debated by Horton and Freire.

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Although the tensions were omnipresent, the MNSJ was a movement space in which many activists placed a primacy on ‘capacity building’—for themselves as activists and for the base they were seeking to nurture and organize. At the heart of this commitment to capacity building was an assumption about knowledge and the role of knowledge in any transformative political project. It was that masses of ordinary people are hungry to understand the world, that they (we) have the capacity to understand it, and that they (we) need to understand it in order to act to change it. Furthermore, it involved the assumption that while activists can function as catalysts and animators in the learning (politicization, identity-formation) process, they are also learners. Only over time did activists in the MNSJ explicitly articulate a dialogical relationship with their base, although this sensibility was present in practice from the beginning. Freire’s philosophy of knowledge grounded in a democratic and emancipatory praxis of knowledge production provides an interpretive key to much of the politics and culture of the MNSJ and to the role and character of knowledge and knowledge production within the MNSJ. It also provides a language to talk about some of the most significant practices of the MNSJ and a measure by which to critically assess them, even as the context of Toronto in the 1990s was vastly different from revolutionary Latin America in the 1960s and ’70s.

Chapter Three

The Activist City in an Era of Free Trade

Making sense of Toronto as a field of activist politics is central to understanding the emergence and development of the MNSJ. Every time—place is composed of countless swirling and contradictory historical currents and contemporary dynamics. In representing any context, no single unproblematic rendering exists. In what follows, I have drawn on world-city perspectives and urban movements literatures to construct a place-based reading of Toronto, the city which MNSJ activists came to see as their primary field of action. I begin with an ethnographic description of the origins of the MNSJ in the FightBack Metro! campaign of winter 1992. FightBack Metro! was the most immediate and dramatic precursor of the MNSJ, but activists were drawing on other legacies as well: decades of urban reform politics in Toronto, multiple and diverse activist practices and knowledges grounded in the ‘new social movements’ of the 1970s and 1980s, and a decade of coalition work among social movements in Toronto and English Canada. In this chapter, I explore these older and wider legacies in order to contextualize activist Toronto in the 1990s and to embed the MNSJ in the activist histories that preceded it. In the founding of the MNSJ, at least two quite distinct activist imaginations encountered each other. Orientations to ‘the urban’ and to ‘the national’ co-existed, as activists sought new levels and forms of collaboration in response to a transformed political context ushered in by the Canada—US Free Trade Agreement.

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FREE TRADE AND THE NEW POLITICS OF ‘FIGHTBACK’ On a gloomy afternoon in December 1991, I was working alone in my office at Church of the Holy Trinity. Although in Toronto’s urban core and often the site of much foot traffic, the offices were quiet. It was a few days before Christmas and regular work rhythms were beginning to slow in anticipation of the holidays. I was grateful for the relative peace. I was recovering from an intense half year working on People’s Plan ’91, a popular campaign organized around the November 1991 municipal elections. As the church’s social justice worker, I was an itinerant anti-poverty activist who, in the absence of any compelling political project, was moving from one political moment/event/group/cause to another as they emerged. I was tired, lying low, catching up on my filing and trying to avoid any new work. Late in the day, I answered the phone to find an intense young woman, a community development worker from Dixon Hall, a community center in a low-income area called Regent Park, relaying alarming news about dramatic cuts to municipal social services just passed by the newly elected Metropolitan Council. New Democratic Party Councillor Roger Hollander was organizing an emergency meeting. Would I, could I, come? Yes, it was short notice. No, it couldn’t possibly wait until the new year. Council1 had decided to implement the cuts immediately, cuts that would impose immediate hardship, especially for people on welfare. Subsidized childcare spaces would be eliminated by the hundreds. Special assistance to welfare recipients was being eliminated—monies to deal with needs like moving expenses, housing start-up, winter clothing, cribs for newborns, Christmas expenses, and emergency dental care. Supplementary aid for people with disabilities on welfare—assistance for walkers, wheelchair repair and orthotic aids—was being eliminated. Hundreds of positions were being cut in Metro’s Homes for the Aged. What would be the impact on care for the poor, frail and high-needs seniors who lived there? What about the loss of hundreds more decent jobs in a workforce reeling from a post-free trade recession? Grants to social agencies were being frozen, affecting those community-based, often neighborhood-level organizations like Dixon Hall that delivered day-to-day services in poor communities and, significantly, employed community organizers to advocate for poor people and support their self-organization, like the woman on the phone twisting my arm to go to a meeting on December 23. The emergency meeting attracted over 60 people: a mix of social agency staff, housing and anti-poverty activists, people on welfare, church people and others. Over the next four extraordinary months, the ad hoc

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coalition known as FightBack Metro! that emerged from the meeting orchestrated mass public action such as had never been seen at Metro Council. Hundreds of people made deputations before Council about the impact of the cuts on their lives, on their capacity to work and/or participate in the life of the community. Agency staff testified about their work, about the impacts of cutting jobs and services and about the direct effects on the people they served of cuts to special assistance, supplementary aid and childcare subsidies. The Church of the Holy Trinity, the Labour Council of Metro Toronto, OXFAM, St. Michael’s Hospital and other credible institutions without a direct stake in the outcome declared their solidarity and concern over Metro Council’s disproportionate assault on community services. Mass deputations and unruly public presence at Metro Council were shocking new developments that opened up and slowed down Council’s decision-making process and exposed it to the glare of media attention. In addition to continual pressure through mass presence at Council, the FightBack Metro! Coalition focused heavily on researching budget alternatives and educating its members. Many members of the coalition had been involved in protests and activist campaigns of the 1980s and were veterans of the struggle over free trade. There was a strong conviction that activists and the public needed to understand the dynamics of public finance in order both to propose credible alternatives and to educate their own constituencies about what was happening. In part, this explains the depth of activist response to the cuts. After seven years of neoconservative politics in Ottawa, many activists recognized these cuts as among the first concrete expressions of the politics of free trade, economic globalization, and deficit wars downloaded to the municipal level. Although there had been earlier contractions in the welfare state, this was the first outright elimination of programs, and many knew that it would not be the last. Activists with previous experience in municipal-level politics saw the cuts as expressive of a right-wing Council made more daring in the new political climate of downsizing. For these activists, it was critical to mount some form of grassroots political opposition focused on Metro Council. Council had control of a largely invisible and unaccountable level of government with great administrative and spending powers over critical urban services. Although it had been in existence since 1953, Metro Council had only been directly elected since 1988. It was a nearly invisible level of government, with a high proportion of the councillors being acclaimed to office in the elections of 1991. Most residents of Metro Toronto were not aware of its existence, its powers or responsibilities. Most municipally focused activism had been oriented around the local city councils. Progressive activism in municipal elections had tended to target municipal mayoral

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races and had been heavily concentrated in the old City of Toronto. Social policy activists had concentrated on provincial and federal levels where policy decisions were made and most spending power lay (Andrew 1992, 115; Sancton 1983, 296). Most activists in the coalition understood Metro Council’s fiscal crisis as originating beyond the city. Since the signing of the Canada—US Free Trade Agreement in 1989, the imposition of a zero-inflation policy by the Bank of Canada in 1989 and the crash of the local real estate market, the economy of the Metro Toronto region was in a deep recession. Free trade had been a major factor in the steady exodus of manufacturing jobs out of the region,2 high interest rates were slowing the economy across the country and the real estate depression meant no construction work or jobs in related services. Laid-off workers had gone on to Unemployment Insurance (UI) in droves in 1989–90. By late 1991, they had exhausted their UI and were moving on to General Welfare Assistance (GWA). 3 Faced with a deep fiscal crisis and mounting welfare costs, Metro Council responded by “flatlining”4 the 1992 budgets of all its departments. After decades of steadily increasing spending at or above the rate of inflation, Metro imposed a de facto cut of four to five per cent. In the Community Services Department, the bulk of Metro’s spending was on welfare payments, which were required by law. Finding four to five per cent in the Community Services budget translated into a cut of $28 million, 265 jobs, or 25–30 per cent in “non-mandatory” community services.5 The coalition’s priority on developing and articulating an understanding of the larger political and economic context marked something of a transition from many earlier activist efforts that had mobilized particular constituencies to articulate ‘demands’ premised on equality rights in the welfare state. The widespread assumption underlying this earlier approach was that the economic pie was growing and that particular constituencies simply had to get themselves organized to lobby for their fair share.6 This strategy was pursued through much of the 1970s and 1980s. It was marked by singleissue and program-specific organizing, often mobilizing people around particular ‘identities’ to press equality demands: seniors, women, immigrants, people on welfare, people with disabilities. In Ontario, in an expanding economy and an ongoing social consensus in favor of the welfare state, social movements made many concrete, if incremental, gains this way. By the early 1990s, however, many activists had concluded that such an approach was no longer credible and, in any event, was no longer working.7 The agencies involved in the coalition, prominent among them the Metro Social Planning Council, had long-standing traditions of independent social research oriented to demonstrating social need and social impacts

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in the planning of human services.8 Their participation in FightBack Metro! represented a critical politicization of their traditions of advocacy. Social research and policy advocacy were supplemented (and subsequently transformed) by a more critical political-economic reading of the larger context, joining in coalition with more politicized activists and organizations and adopting a more combative stance with Metro Council, which was also a major agency funder. Awareness was emerging among both activists and agencies of new times requiring new approaches, new alliances, new risks and new politics. This awareness was bred by the struggle over free trade, the onset of the deepest, most enduring recession since the Depression and the growing hegemony of neoliberal discourses of globalization and economic restructuring. The development and promotion of credible budget alternatives—that is, concrete, doable and immediate fiscal strategies that would fly politically and save the services—was a high priority, especially among the agencies. Many in the coalition agreed that this was central in bringing Council, Metro staff, the media and the public onside. The Metro Social Planning Council was a critical research support to the coalition in this respect, crunching the numbers and providing critical and publicly credible expertise. For the many activists who worked in downtown agencies with very poor and marginal populations, producing easy-to-read pamphlets on the cuts, holding small group discussions to help people think critically about the larger context, and supporting people most affected by the cuts in appearing before Metro Council to speak for themselves were greater priorities. This activist grouping was composed almost entirely of young feminist women working in community services9 and oriented to ‘community development,’ a political philosophy committed to grassroots participation, popular education and democratic decision-making.10 For them, ‘educating’ people went beyond the content of the cuts to ask where the crisis had come from, linking the closure of daycare centers to the city’s rising welfare costs, cuts in transfer payments, declining government revenues, rising public debts, rising unemployment, and back to economic restructuring represented by the Free Trade Agreement and a zero-inflation policy. Their attempt to frame the cuts in a larger political and economic context reflected a conviction that poor people needed and wanted to understand these things, and that such understanding was central to their capacity to confidently depute at a public meeting or to meet with their local councillor. Broad social analytical content was coupled with concrete information about Metro’s revenue, spending and borrowing options and specific budget alternatives toward the development of credible options for immediate action by Metro Council. At the end of the campaign, these activists instigated a one-day conference on the cuts and the

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campaign targeted to the people most affected by the changes, with the intent of nurturing critical analysis and capacity building for subsequent struggles. This capacity-building orientation, with its emphasis on critical education, was not universally shared in the coalition, however. Some favored organizing large numbers of people to demonstrate or disrupt Council.11 They disagreed about the relative value both of educating people affected by the cuts and of providing technical solutions to Metro Council in favor of mobilizing people to make ‘demands.’ They argued that poor people knew spontaneously where their interests lay; they criticized education as passive and paralyzing, and lobbying as naive. They were less concerned with building knowledge among poor people and offering credible alternatives to the public than with mobilizing an intimidating popular opposition that would make cuts to social programs politically untenable. To some extent and rather uneasily, FightBack Metro! (FBM) combined all these approaches. Mass public presence, including the changing of babies in the aisles and the personal testimony of people who were usually voiceless and invisible, transformed Council meetings into something of a spectacle. But behavior that was judged to be damaging to the public credibility of the effort was quickly collectively assessed and contained. One infamous example was a street youth, complete with six-inch, purple Mohawk haircut, who spat at a councillor. The FightBack Metro! campaign continued at fever pitch for four months. Its tactics included mass deputations, information picketing, leafleting in subways, and media conferences and communiqués. It was orchestrated by a volunteer steering committee that included representatives from key institutional supporters (the Labour Council of Metro Toronto and York Region, the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, the Church of the Holy Trinity), organizations representing significant constituencies (Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, the Canadian Union of Public Employees), a Metro councillor and a number of individuals. The steering committee met weekly and hosted weekly public meetings, which, at the height of the campaign, attracted up to sixty people. Plans were made on a week-to-week basis and, with the exception of the popular education work and the teach-in and march that ended the campaign, were largely reacting to events and decisions at Metro Council and shaped heavily by the advice of Metro Councillor Roger Hollander, who sat on the steering committee. Although the campaign had been sparked by cuts to the Community Services budget, it quickly expanded to include the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) and police budgets. At this point, the limits of the FightBack Metro! coalition began to reveal themselves. Although there was broad agreement

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in the coalition to oppose hikes in TTC fares as an extension of the assault on poor people and limited leafleting of the TTC took place, an organized campaign on transit implied a much broader mobilization and negotiations with the Amalgamated Transit Union. The ATU was the largest local of the Labour Council and had no history of involvement in community organizing for public transit. At the prospect of a serious campaign on transit and its intra-labor politics, the Labour Council declared that it would have to withdraw from the coalition. On the question of the police budget, again there was widespread agreement in principle to opposing increased police spending and favoring redirection of funding to community services. But there were serious differences on the strategic merit of going after the police. Given the propolice politics among many councillors and the police chief’s media machinery, many in the coalition judged that targeting the police would jeopardize any hope of salvaging social services. Again, this reflected the deep tensions in the coalition among (1) the protest politics of some activist factions, notably the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and the International Socialists (IS), who sought to demonstrate the illegitimacy of ruling institutions, (2) the corporatist—welfare state politics of many agencies that saw themselves as partners with government in enhancing social welfare, (3) the corporatist—labor politics of the postwar labor movement that was alternately combative and co-operative, and (4) the popular movement-building politics of many feminist, popular-educator and community-development activists that emphasized democratic participation, base- and capacity building for longer, vaguely defined struggle. At this juncture, the FightBack Metro! Steering Committee made two contentious decisions, which shaped the long-term politics of the permanent coalition that would emerge. On the question of fighting a transit campaign, the steering committee decided it was a higher value to keep the major coalition partners together than to fracture over a particular issue. Losing the Labour Council was too big a cost. They further decided that, in fighting the transit and police budgets, the coalition was getting beyond its member base. The organizing strength of the coalition, such as it was, lay in the cross-section of interests that had come together to defend community services. Despite shared values about transit and policing issues, to address them in any sustained way was to go beyond the limits of any real organizing capacity that the coalition had. These decisions were not unanimous. Key partners on the steering committee agreed, but the source of authority for the coalition’s leaders was the open weekly public assembly. Many individual activists, excited at the level of mobilization to that point,

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were unhappy with the perceived “pulling back” by those with greater institutional weight. This turn of events highlighted both the strengths and weaknesses of the structure of the FightBack Metro! coalition. It was an ad hoc organization with key institutional support and leadership but fluid in membership and open to participation by individuals, including very poor and marginal people. Anyone who showed up had a voice, and key political decisions were debated and action agreed on and organized at the weekly public meetings. There was informal recognition of those who represented significant organizations but no formal limitations on participation by individuals who represented only themselves. The outcome of the struggle over the 1992 Metro budget was a cut of $28 million and 265 jobs from Community Services. Proposals to cut the whole budget by a further five to ten per cent were successfully resisted in favor of a 14-per cent property tax increase. There was also a reduced but significant TTC fare increase. Cuts to Wheel Trans and Supplementary Aid (special aids to people with disabilities) were successfully rolled back because of the public outcry. The police received $19.2 million above the flatline for a wage increase. The final votes on the budget by Metro Council took place in early April 1992. On 11 April, the coalition organized a teach-in and march to demonstrate its conviction that the cutting was not over and that the work of educating and mobilizing would continue. To bring closure to the campaign and make some organizational decisions, the coalition held a community evaluation meeting to which all those who participated in any aspect of the campaign were invited. Organizers created a “timeline” wall chart to review the events at Metro Council and the work of the coalition from December to April. Different aspects of the coalition’s work were charted in different colors in order to make visible and assess particular streams of activity. Work was charted as “action,” “media,” “research and education” and “organizational development.” In assessing the campaign, participants noted that although many of the cuts had proceeded, their organizing had had some significant impact. Metro Council’s budget process had been significantly slowed. Council had been forced to schedule deputations. There had been much more protracted and public debate than had first looked possible. The proceedings of Metro Council were subjected to community pressure, media attention and public visibility unknown in its history. Alliances were discovered with bureaucrats anxious to protect their budgets. The Metro budget, especially the Community Services budget, had become a site of popular political contention. This was new, and it would continue through the 1990s.

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Participants also pointed to the democratic (albeit chaotic) character of the organizing and decision-making as one of the great achievements of the FightBack Metro! campaign. There had been space for meaningful participation by individuals, not just delegates of organizations, and by people directly affected by the cuts, not just advocates. There had also been important institutional support, but that support had been facilitative and empowering and was generally celebrated as such, despite the tensions described above. The role of the NDP councillors was both appreciated and criticized. Many activists recognized that the information and advice they provided was critical, but that their voice in the coalition’s decisions about its activities had been too prominent. Their political judgment was deemed to be too instrumental and geared to winning concrete, short-term budget victories, which obscured longer-term, movement-oriented, capacity-building priorities. Decision-making in the coalition had involved a complex and conflict-ridden balancing act between the voices of individuals and organizations and between large, established, financially stable and politically influential groups and tiny, more marginal groups often accountable to no base beyond themselves. While such practices were celebrated as an achievement, most participants also acknowledged that such a fluid structure was not sustainable or desirable for the long haul. It was also widely agreed that the creation of a permanent, cross-sectoral, Metro Torontowide social justice coalition was important and desirable and should build on the legacy of FightBack Metro! In terms of the central problematic of this book, that of social movement knowledges, the FightBack Metro! experience is a rich one. In a time of political and economic transition, new kinds of knowledges were becoming important to activist politics, particularly engagement with critical political-economic discourses. Within the coalition existed different notions of the kinds of knowledges required for politics and the appropriate processes for producing them, from expert production of technical budget solutions to popular education and capacity building. And there were conflicts about the importance of either of these relative to disruptive political protest. Nevertheless, these diverse tendencies fruitfully co-existed in the coalition. The education work of FightBack Metro! was ‘popular’ in its methods, products and cultural style and engaged audiences of poor people directly affected by the cuts, whose experience was incorporated as an aspect of the analysis. But the work was not yet explicitly or thoroughly dialogical. In the context of an ad hoc campaign, the work was informed by a tacit, shared approach among those activists drawn to this aspect of

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the campaign rather than by any explicit articulation of a philosophy of knowledge or education. Finally, the practice of participatory evaluation of the campaign by all involved evinced a sensibility about praxis and the possibility and importance of activists’ learning from their experience how to be better activists, how to conduct more effective campaigns, how to structure and practice coalition politics and how to function more democratically. The practices, experiences, lessons, and alliances of the FightBack Metro! campaign deeply shaped the culture, politics and structures of the Metro Network for Social Justice. It was widely acknowledged that the era of cuts to social programs was just beginning and that there needed to be a permanent, metropolitan-wide coalition poised to organize in response. For all its internal tensions, limits and contradictions, FightBack Metro! had been a positive and powerful experience of democratic, action-oriented, capacity-building and coalition-based politics. It was a powerful legacy on which to draw for a new kind of grassroots politics for a new political era.

TORONTO OF THE 1990S: HISTORICIZING AND CONTEXTUALIZING THE ACTIVIST CITY In the early 1990s, the Toronto region was in the grip of a deep recession, the most severe since the 1930s. Activists understood this to be an outcome, if not solely, then significantly, of the Canada—US Free Trade Agreement and the tight money policy of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. Unlike the case in earlier downturns, the unemployment of this period was permanent as the economy underwent “restructuring.” Firms closed or relocated to the US with severe loss of manufacturing jobs in the Southern Ontario region. Unemployed people exhausted Unemployment Insurance and went on to collect welfare, resulting in a tripling of the welfare rolls in Metro Toronto between 1989 and 1991. Many of the unemployed were older workers with slim prospects of re-entering the workforce in some other sector at anything like the wage or benefit levels or working conditions that had characterized their pre-recession employment. The common sense among the activists involved in FightBack Metro! and later in the MNSJ was that it was a “made-in Canada” recession, a direct result of the federal government’s economic policy, and a neoconservative disciplining of the labor force to facilitate acceptance of downward harmonization of wages and social programs that critics associated with the signing of the Free Trade Agreement. These activists understood the fiscal crisis at Metro as an effect of the trickle-down legacy of free trade and the dominant politics of Metro Council as a local expression of deepening

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neoconservatism associated with the Mulroney government and with Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in the United Kingdom. This was certainly not the only available discourse among activists about the city in the early 1990s, but it was the prevalent one among FBM and MNSJ leaders. More generally, it reflected the politics of the left in the labor movement and in critical social policy and anti-poverty circles and was a legacy of the anti-free trade movement. This view stressed the political and federal policy-led character of the recession. Little consideration was given to the dynamics of ‘the city’ or ‘the urban’ as anything more than derivative of national policy choices, even among those who employed a critical discourse of ‘deindustrialization’ and ‘economic restructuring,’ which often downplayed policy and politics in favor of (seemingly) impersonal economic forces.12 Unlike the nationally oriented discourses of most progressives—both activist and academic—those theorists and activists who foreground processes of world-city formation emphasize how “the process of ‘going global’ is organized locally” (Todd 1995, 193), that is, by actors and dynamics operating at sub-national scales. While Todd sees the pursuit of globalization as an explicitly political strategy and politicized process in a perspective similar to that of FBM—MNSJ activists, he is concerned to study specifically local dynamics, not as merely derivative, but as constituting globalization on the ground in Toronto.13 Typical of political economists working within the world-city paradigm, Todd sees Toronto as a center for the agglomeration of internationally oriented financial, insurance and real estate firms. Their location in Toronto has concentrated processes of globalization in this city relative to other cities or regions in Canada. Toronto’s dominant place in the Canadian economy both facilitated and was consolidated by corporate decisions to locate here. The relative weight of the financial sector in the Canadian economy has amplified Toronto’s significance as a global node of financial transactions and services (Todd 1995, 197–99). With that have come significant sectoral shifts in the labor market in favor of service employment14 and away from Fordist industrial-era production (Todd 1995, 199–202). More clearly significant to activists was the increasingly apparent segmentation in the labor market between good jobs and bad jobs, the growing proportion of bad jobs and the resulting polarization in incomes. Technology-assisted reorganization of work has meant that production functions are increasingly dispersed over many sites, including across national borders. The increased use of sub-contracting has contributed to the overall trend to smaller workplaces, smaller core workforces and rising numbers of workers not covered by employment standards legislation or rights to

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unionization (Borowy 1996). These trends in the restructuring of employment unfolded in a context of continuing high unemployment, hovering around 10 per cent in the GTA and much higher in other regions of the country through the 1980s and early 1990s (Borowy 1996). Certainly many FBM—MNSJ activists and their allies were critically conscious of deindustrialization, which was linked to increasing capital mobility facilitated by the Free Trade Agreement. Occupation of the Caterpillar plant just outside Metro Toronto in the early 1990s and the wide support it garnered among social justice activists beyond the labor movement was indicative of this consciousness and one expression of the political conflicts and growing labor—community solidarity emerging in this context of (always politically inflected) economic restructuring. Other world-city theorists emphasize the importance of a city’s specific history and politics, including those of the municipal government (e.g., Ward 1995) and of local “insurgent civil societies” in the making of the city, the local state and the character of globalization in that locality (Keil 1998a; Keil 1996; Keil 1998b). This exploration of the activist city is a partial mapping of the insurgent civil society of Toronto out of which the MNSJ, and its precursor, FightBack Metro! emerged and were embedded. As the pro-development mayor of the city of Toronto through the 1980s, Art Eggleton had promoted the notion of Toronto as a ‘world-class city’ marked by intense development of high-rise office towers, high-end condominiums, and world-class sports and entertainment facilities.15 The real estate and construction boom of the late 1980s busted by 1990, resulting in high levels of unemployment in the construction trades, which persisted well into the 1990s. Speculative investment in real estate had failed to add to the supply of affordable housing, which, from the early 1980s, was recognized to be at crisis levels with vacancy rates in rental accommodation consistently below one per cent. Both the housing crisis and Eggleton’s world-class development strategies provoked grassroots political opposition. The deep recession of the early 1980s and resulting unemployment had dramatically increased the numbers of people relying on welfare in Ontario. Throughout the decade, local poor people’s organizations had formed in a number of Ontario towns and cities, advocating for their rights and for major welfare reform and building alliances with local church, labor and community organizations. Growing demands for welfare reform pressured the provincial government and Premier David Peterson to respond with a promise to study the problem.16 The grassroots mobilization mounted and culminated in a March on Poverty in 1989, in which marchers left from Windsor, Sudbury, and Ottawa to march on Queen’s Park (seat of the Ontario government, in

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Toronto), demanding an end to poverty, hunger and homelessness. The march created the momentum for the founding of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (Clarke, J. 1992). In Toronto, activists viewed alleviating the housing crisis as central to any anti-poverty strategy, and sustained advocacy targeted at the provincial government resulted in increased commitments to the building of social housing. As a result, non-profit, community-based housing corporations and co-ops proliferated and were a significant feature of the progressive grassroots and activist landscape that continued into the 1990s.17 BASIC Poverty Action Group, a small network of anti-poverty activists working in and around the downtown drop-ins, hostels, and community centers, orchestrated a low-budget, high-profile mayoral campaign in 1988, running Carol Ann Wright, a young, Black anti-poverty activist and former recipient of Mother’s Allowance, against Eggleton and his version of the city. Bread Not Circuses, another grouping with strong anti-poverty movement connections, emerged to successfully challenge the city’s bid for the 1996 Olympics and, subsequently, the building of a ballet/opera house. Housing and anti-poverty activists dogged Liberal Premier David Peterson during the 1990 election campaign, and many observers attributed to them a significant role in his defeat and the election of the NDP (Clarke, J.1992, 218–19). This constellation of anti-poverty activists went on to initiate the 1991 People’s Plan campaign in the context of the June Rowlands—Jack Layton mayoral contest, which was a forerunner of the FightBack Metro! campaign and my own introduction to municipal politics. In representing Toronto of the 1980s, many urban scholars narrate the history of urban reform movements and politics originating in the late 1960s and 1970s, the presence of which was still felt despite the pro-development mayor.18 The legacy of reform politics was certainly evident in the dense network of community organizations and activists concentrated in the downtown core in the early 1990s, which came to form the nucleus of the MNSJ. Magnusson associates the municipal progressivism of the 1960s and 1970s with the more general insurgency of the new left. Citizen mobilizations erupted in response to the negative effects of post-World War Two growth on city life, demanding the right to participate in decisions that had been left to the purview of municipal technocrats.19 In Toronto, municipal initiatives to clear ‘slums,’ build expressways and construct incinerators provoked residents’ mobilizations to protect their housing and their neighborhoods and to register their dissent in the face of unrepresentative and unresponsive bureaucratic processes (Magnusson 1983b, 113ff; Kidd 1996). Greater participation led to demands for even greater participation

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and by the late 1960s, ‘urban redevelopment projects’ a.k.a. ‘slum clearance’ had been abandoned. These community-organizing efforts were facilitated, in part, by the presence of federally funded organizers, through the Company of Young Canadians, and other city- or church-sponsored community animators whose raison d’être was to amplify the voice and power of poor people at City Hall (Magnusson 1983b, 114). Residents’ or ratepayers’ associations formed in middle-class neighborhoods as non-poor city dwellers also found their neighborhoods subject to developments that they opposed and themselves without public fora to voice their dissent or have any influence. A plan by Metro Council to build an expressway from northwest Metro to the downtown core provoked massive public opposition and resulted in the highway ending abruptly considerably north of the downtown core.20 These assorted expressions of civic opposition to key aspects of postwar urban development coalesced in a new ideology of urban reform that challenged hegemonic notions of whom the city was for and what ends municipal and metropolitan governments should serve. Magnusson suggests that the new urban reform movement was both conservative and radical. It was conservative in its desire to preserve the old city, its histories and its neighborhoods. It was radical in its opposition to the big developers and its assertion that the city councils had been captured by the agenda of the developers. It was also radical in its demands for a repoliticization of municipal decision-making and the wider incorporation of citizen participation (Magnusson 1983b, 116). These sensibilities and demands were carried directly into Toronto City Council deliberations through the election of a number of reform-minded councillors both as independents and across party lines, beginning in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s (118ff.). As the 1970s proceeded, the reformers split increasingly along party lines, with Liberals and Conservatives aligning with Mayor David Crombie’s version of reformism and more radical critics coming to be increasingly identified with the NDP. But tensions also flared and persisted among the NDP, the community organizations who instigated and sustained reform politics and who valued their political independence, and Councillor John Sewell. Although the most powerful critic of Crombie’s reformism, Sewell was determinedly independent (including of the NDP) and more “radical populist” than socialist (Magnusson 1983b, 122–23). He went on to succeed Crombie as Mayor from 1978 to 1981. Eggleton’s defeat of Sewell in 1981 marked the resurgence of pro-development politics, coincided with the Reaganomics-induced recession and signaled a sea change in urban politics in Toronto. This legacy of reform politics in Toronto’s core was certainly significant for the formation and politics of the MNSJ in that activists in the

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1990s were building on the organizational infrastructure of city- and Metro-funded community groups and their traditions of neighborhood mobilization. However, the institutional reality and political history and culture of Metro Council were the more obvious context for the development of the MNSJ. Metropolitan Toronto was legislated into existence by the Province of Ontario in 1953 as a joint authority of the city of Toronto and its twelve suburbs.21 By 1966, the province had consolidated the suburbs into five boroughs: York, East York, Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough, which were envisioned as functioning on par with the center city in a Metropolitan system of governance. Metro representatives were drawn from the constitutive municipal councils with a chair appointed by the Province, who later would be elected from among the Metro Councillors. Metro Council itself was not directly elected until 1988, which contributed to its relative political invisibility to the public. The formation of Metro Toronto as a joint authority was an alternative to annexation of the suburbs by the City of Toronto. According to Magnusson, Metro’s major function was to facilitate the expansion of the suburbs and to service them, financed largely through tax revenue from the central business district of the old city center. The political and territorial compromise would also become the basis of progressive attempts to equalize human service delivery and development across the metropolitan region (Kipfer and Keil 2000, 18, 21; Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto 1979; McGrath, et al. 1998). The figure of the Chair of Metro Council emerged as a powerful one who, with the senior administrators, had great scope for action in the face of the general lack of interest in metropolitan affairs by the locally elected councillors (Magnusson 1983b, 109–11). Metro Council does not itself appear to have been a site of significant activisms, although its arenas of responsibility, notably the police, certainly were the targets of community pressure for reform.22 Stasiulis (1989) documents organizing through the 1970s and 1980s by Toronto’s Black and South Asian communities in response to racist assaults, inadequate police response and evidence of racism in police training, and police attitudes toward and treatment of Black and South Asian people. Outrage and activism exploded in the late 1970s in response to police shootings, within months of each other, of two Black men. In the Black community, resistance to racism was spearheaded by community development organizations and groups organized around various Caribbean national identities, some affiliated with Black nationalist or Caribbean national liberation movements (Stasiulis 1989, 64). Among South Asians, coalitions formed among religious/cultural and more overtly political organizations.23 The efforts of

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these groups coalesced with activism in the gay community against police brutality and elicited strong statements from Mayor John Sewell and the Toronto City Council expressing non-confidence in the police (Stasiulis 1989, 69). The anti-racist campaigns also found allies among organized labor and the women’s movement, which were organizing to “resist incursions by the police on their rights to privacy, freedom from sexual harassment and violence, dissent with conditions of employment and other fundamental civil liberties” (Stasiulis 1989, 73). Anti-racist activism pressuring for police accountability to a multi-racial citizenry, democratization and community control of the police force resulted in an array of ‘race relations’ bodies and initiatives, with mixed results. 24 Stasiulis comments: Though poorly defined as ‘popular,’ the anti-racist struggles by minority groups are aptly characterized as ‘democratic,’ aimed at producing new or enhanced democratic forms of representations in local state institutions as the means of challenging racial inequality. The desire to democratize institutions whose growth and bureaucratization had weakened their responsiveness to local concerns provided a key link between the aims of the anti-racist movement and those of other (feminist, gay, working class) struggles. A growing disquiet among a significant vocal segment of the population with bureaucratic and unresponsive forms of state power endowed the anti-racist struggles of the minority communities with a potential connection to a larger popular-democratic struggle . . . this potential was tapped in the minority campaign against racism in the Metropolitan Toronto police (Stasiulis 1989, 65–66).

Anti-racist efforts to call the Metro Toronto police to account have continued to the present and constitute an important activist current in the city,25 although this is only one expression of a more variegated anti-racist politics and activisms based in communities of color.26 As mentioned above, anti-racist activism against police violence intersected with mobilization in the gay and lesbian community. Police raids and mass arrests at Toronto’s gay baths in February 1981 provoked an intense wave of organizing and protest. Although a watershed event, these raids had been preceded by others in the late 1970s, including a raid on the offices of The Body Politic, the journal of the gay liberation movement (McCaskell 1988). In response to these earlier events, the first ‘gay pride’ events were organized and a campaign was mounted to run the first out, gay candidate for City Council. Mayor John Sewell had spoken out in support of The Body Politic during his brief tenure as mayor (1978–81). At

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least one commentator understood the 1981 raids in the context of Sewell’s defeat and the reassertion of the Tory-dominated provincial government over the urban reform movements in Toronto (McCaskell 1988, 173). The 1981 raids provoked immediate and multiple protests involving thousands of people, including visible and vocal support from women’s, labor and immigrant organizations, and demanding an end to police harassment and democratic control of the police (174, 179ff.). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, there were other significant activisms in the city that were not explicitly articulated to the politics of the “urban reform” movements. In her imaginative piece on “the feminist city,” Caroline Andrew suggests that good public transit, adequate daycare, community economic development, social housing, services preventing violence against women and the planning of urban spaces to integrate these dimensions are among the features that would make cities hospitable to women (Andrew 1992). All these arenas of community and urban life have been zones of activism for feminists in Toronto over the last several decades.27 Wekerle and Peake point to an even wider range of women’s activisms and protests in urban areas and argue that they also should be considered urban movements. In their overview of women’s urban activisms, the authors suggest women have organized around “quality of life” concerns, the creation of alternative services, “identity politics” and municipal government itself (Wekerle, et al. 1996, 270ff.). Although I question their taxonomy,28 Wekerle and Peake identify important activisms around collective food provisioning and preparation and protests against environmental contamination as quality-of-life struggles. They point to community activisms for more and better parks and recreation services, social housing by and for women, and women’s shelters. Under the problematic rubric of “identity politics,” they point to proliferating activisms in Toronto and elsewhere by lesbians, women of color and immigrant women, older women and women with disabilities through the 1980s and into the 1990s.29 Despite the fact that feminist activism has been far more oriented to national and provincial governments, feminist initiatives have also made a significant mark on municipal government, enlarging the zone of ‘urban politics’ to include such concerns as childcare and violence against women, as well as addressing, from feminist perspectives, more conventionally ‘urban’ subjects such as policing, zoning, land use, public health, housing and transportation. In Toronto, the Metro Action Committee on Violence Against Women (METRAC) and the Safe City Committee of Toronto City Council were institutionalized expressions of the feminist movement in municipal and metropolitan governments beginning in the early 1980s (Wekerle, et al. 1996, 275; Wekerle 1996, 141ff.).

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Many other significant women’s activisms emerged in Toronto in the 1980s and 1990s. Women protested cuts to social programs at all levels of government, protested and advocated for more progressive immigration policy, and organized domestic and garment workers for better working conditions and collective political voice (Wekerle, et al. 1996, 263–64). Feminist organizing for reproductive choice has been a consistent presence on the activist landscape in Toronto and in other Canadian cities since the mid-1980s. In Toronto, the Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics has been an important node for pro-choice organizing (Antonyshyn, Lee, and Merrill 1988). The March 8 Coalition, later known as the International Women’s Day Committee, began organizing the annual rally and march and associated cultural events in 1977. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, IWDC was an important political space for the development of coalition politics across the spectrum of women’s movement organizations and beyond, especially among socialist feminists, lesbians, women in the labor movement and later, with immigrant women and women of color and their organizations in Toronto (Egan, et al. 1988). Like many ‘new social movements,’ feminist organizing is “urbanbased,” without being “urban-oriented” (Wekerle, et al. 1996, 267), i.e., grounded in identities less obviously articulated to particular localities or to municipal politics. Nevertheless, this thick presence of activisms in Toronto together with accumulated traditions and cultures of activist practice constitute an important resource for any subsequent movement politics in the city. In analyzing feminist methods of political organizing, Andrew emphasizes the centrality of networks and networking, abiding concern for organizational democracy and innovation, and the generation of collective identities and meanings through inter-organizational links and activities (Andrew 1992, 111). Networking works particularly well in cities, where organizations can be small enough to allow for intense participation by members and multiple enough to cover the whole of the city, yet geographically close enough to allow for face-to-face negotiation and ongoing collaboration. Andrew argues that these modes of organizing pioneered by feminist groups and combining attention to service provision, internal democracy, public education and political advocacy, and both working within the state and being of civil society can and do help constitute progressive and democratic governance in cities (114). Feminist political traditions and modes of organizing were powerful currents shaping practice in the MNSJ. The feminist literature on movements also testifies especially strongly to cross-fertilization and inter-penetration among issues, organizations and movements, and to attention to multiple scales of political power and social

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movement organizing. This latter is implicit and under-developed, but it is present. Writing about the Coalition of Visible Minority Women (CVMW), Hernandez points out: The issues of peace, equality and development are very relevant to visible minority women. We see the relationship of these issues to housing, social services, employment and discrimination. Members of the CVMW are in the core of such alliances as the Alliance for Employment Equity, the Coalition Against Racism, the Coalition for a Just Refugee and Immigration Policy, and Women Against Free Trade. We are working with other groups, including people with disabilities, Native peoples, and visible minority men in seeking mandatory employment equity in Ontario (Hernandez, C. 1988, 164–65).

Writing more generally but making the same point, Wekerle and Peake claim: [W]omen’s urban activism has also had a substantial impact on other new social movements . . . the gay and lesbian movements, AIDS movement, environmental movements, and animal rights movement have all been influenced by trained feminists who through their participation in other new social movements have integrated feminist concerns into those movements. By establishing roots in other social movements, women’s urban activism may be less visible today than in the past as its concerns become subsumed or dispersed. At the same time, feminist issues have become more pervasive and more established, and there are more examples of women working together in coalitions (Wekerle, et al. 1996, 273, citing Taylor and Whittier 1993).

Another major front for social movement organizing in Toronto in the 1980s was in response to environmental concerns. Toronto is the site of numerous large, well-established environmental organizations representing a range of political perspectives, including Pollution Probe and Greenpeace.30 Perhaps dashing conventional images of environmentalists, Hartmann observes, “the Canadian environmental movement is predominantly composed of urban dwellers” (Hartmann 1996a, 312). Hartmann identifies two major types of urban ecological activism: the reclaiming of ‘natural’ habitats threatened by urban development and anti-pollution campaigns (1996a, 312). Magnusson has a slightly different perspective, arguing that struggles like that over Claquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island also express an urban

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(movement) politics. Magnusson writes insightfully and provocatively about this in ways that intersect with points made above: [I]t seems that every stand of old-growth timber now attracts a band of protectors, not only from Victoria and Vancouver, but also from the other cities that generate environmental activism. Perhaps typically, the most publicized leader of the Claquot Sound ‘Peace Camp’ . . . came not from British Columbia but from Toronto (Coull, Dyment, and Kleiman 1993). The Peace Camp was supposedly organized on ecofeminist principles, and so it appealed simultaneously to environmentalists, feminists, and pacifists. Such a working together of major social movements is typical of contemporary progressive politics. Not so much coalitional, as ad hoc and action-oriented, activity of this sort depends on a sharing of sensibilities among people who identify with different, but not mutually exclusive social movements. For the most part, these movements are generated from within a free-floating urban culture, whose space is defined cybernetically (Magnusson 1996b, 330–31).

Closer to home for MNSJ activists, this certainly also exemplified the protests in Temagami (an area of Ontario’s near north known for oldgrowth forests) in the late 1980s. Hartmann provides two illustrative examples of more unambiguously ‘urban’ and Toronto-based environmental activism. Citizens for a Safe Environment was formed in 1983 by residents and community groups in the Riverdale neighborhood to oppose the building of new incinerators in the downtown core and to shut down an existing one. They mobilized pressure against incineration as dangerous to the environment and to human health and argued for alternative, ecological waste management approaches. This campaign among others resulted in Metro Council closing its Commissioner Street incinerator in 1988, citing health concerns. By then, the Ontario government had also responded to pressure and subjected incinerators to the Environmental Assessment Act. By the late 1980s, incineration was no longer a politically viable waste-management strategy in Toronto (Hartmann 1996a, 315–17). The Toronto Environmental Alliance was formed in the late 1980s as a grassroots, urban environmental movement. It was born of a critique of the mainstream environmental movement (also very present in Toronto) and in favor of a focus on ‘the local,’ including local government, on community and neighborhood organizing and ‘the streets’ (Corbet 1996). An example of such organizing was Toxic Challenge ’93, a multi-faceted community development process that included a door-to-door campaign in

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North York inviting 4,000 households to sign a pledge to stop using household toxics (Hartmann 1996a, 313–15).31 Important activisms were being forged in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s between environmental and labor movements. One important example was the Green Work Alliance, which coalesced in 1991 in response to the rising number of plant closures in Southern Ontario following the signing of the Free Trade Agreement. Five locals of the Canadian Auto Workers’ Union joined with anti-poverty and environmental activists to explore developing a sustainable industrial strategy centered on worker involvement in the production decisions, design and manufacture of socially useful products using ecologically sound processes. The group was inspired by stories from elsewhere of worker occupation of plants and successful take-over and transformation of manufacturing processes.32 This effort gained significant momentum when workers occupied a Caterpillar plant just outside Metro Toronto in response to an announcement that the profitable plant was relocating to North Carolina. Significant support for the occupation from among activists beyond the labor movement was indicative of growing labor—community solidarity, especially in the aftermath of the struggle over free trade (DiCarlo 1996; Keil 1994). Woven through many of the stories above are signs of a new kind of labor movement emergent in Canada in the 1980s. Labor unions, labor locals, and/or central labor bodies were significant actors in, or supporters of, wider struggles: against police violence (McCaskell 1988; Stasiulis 1989); for progressive changes in school curriculum (Stasiulis 1989); for abortion rights (Antonyshyn, et al. 1988; Egan, et al. 1988); for accessible, universal, high quality childcare (Prentice 1988; Colley 1983); for lesbian and gay rights (Egan, et al. 1988; McCaskell 1988); in support of liberation movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador and South Africa (Warskett 1992, 119ff.); against Cruise missile testing in the Canadian North (Langille 1988) and for welfare reform (Clarke, J. 1992). While the labor movement certainly has a long history of involvement in social struggles beyond the workplace, for civil and political rights, social welfare and public health and safety, the nature of its involvement from the late 1970s seems to have undergone a shift. In part, this had to do with the proliferation of other social movements and the new arenas of social life that they politicized. But the labor movement was itself changing in significant ways. The world of work and the composition of unions both were changing, with wide-ranging implications for the politics of labor movements in Canada. While this was and remains a multi-faceted process, the entry of unprecedented numbers of women into the workforce and the eruption of union feminism were of particular significance.33

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s in Ontario, women workers in female-dominated workplaces undertook a series of strikes. One of the first and most significant occurred through a UAW local at Fleck Manufacturing in 1978. In their struggle for a first contract, the women picketers daily confronted police in riot gear. The strike drew support from other groups of women workers and from feminists outside the labor movement. It also brought strikers into contact with Organized Working Women, a feminist group within the union movement. Militant strikes by women workers34 and community support by wives for male strikers35 challenged many sexist attitudes and practices within the male-dominated labor movement. Women workers’ militance and participation in their unions created pressure to widen labor’s bargaining agenda to include concerns especially important for women workers like childcare, paid maternity leave and protection from sexual harassment. When the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) struck in 1981 for paid parental leave, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, pushed by the Toronto International Women’s Day Committee, publicly supported the strike. This illustrated to the labor movement both the possibility and strategic value of alliances with progressive groups outside of labor and laid foundations for labor’s subsequent support for and entry into wider social struggles like those for abortion rights and others noted above. Movement transformations were mutual as unionists came to work in the women’s movement and argued successfully that wage controls, the right to organize and the right to strike were feminist issues, central to the struggle for women’s equality (Warskett 1992; Egan, et al.1988; Briskin, et al. 1983).36 The above is a slim survey of a slim literature.37 Many other efforts, organizations and strands of theory and practice exist within the movements mentioned. Completely different areas of activism, each with multiple expressions, also interpenetrated the movements mentioned. Some of the more prominent movements in Toronto through the 1980s included Central America solidarity, anti-Apartheid, anti-nuclear, disability rights and AIDS activisms. These many short vignettes of activisms in, or connected to, efforts in Toronto point to a much bigger, more complex and dynamic reality, historically and presently, of movements proliferating within movements and of transmutations in and across movements, only a small fraction of which are documented in any way. As the 1980s proceeded, activism was increasingly marked by ‘coalition politics.’38 The notion and practice of coalition politics came to inform social movement politics of all kinds, and we will explore this more fully below. Suffice it to say here that the coalition politics emergent in the accounts above unsettle many of the categories of ‘new social movement

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theory,’ including neat dichotomies between ‘old’ and ‘new,’ materialist and ‘post-materialist,’ and class and ‘identity’-based movements.39 When the MNSJ coalesced in 1992 and over the period discussed here, activists were drawing, knowingly and unknowingly, on pre-existing histories, networks, traditions and habits of activism in Toronto and in English Canada. The activist histories and movements mentioned were carried in some way, through people or organizations, into the MNSJ and helped to constitute it. In significant ways, practices in the MNSJ reflect continuity with this rich and diverse tradition. But in some other, also significant, ways, practices in the MNSJ were genuinely innovative and represented new and original contributions to traditions of activism, traditions that are themselves living, dynamic, constantly transmuting, always in movement.

THE FREE TRADE WATERSHED: COALITION-BUILDING INTO THE 1990S As is evident in many of the examples above, many instances of coalition politics existed within and across movements since at least the late 1970s. Many of the coalitions were ad hoc, single issue, short-term, and highly localized. Sometimes collaboration was limited to a joint statement or press conference. In some other cases, full-blown campaigns were embarked upon. Undoubtedly, coalition politics was, in part, a response to a deepening crisis of the post-World War Two order, but it was also reflective of the ongoing presence, development, and dynamism of the movements of the ‘new left,’ their effects on society and on each other.40 There are also important examples of long-standing movement institutions organized on provincial and national scales, founded as cross-sectoral coalitions around a particular demand or focus. The Canadian Peace Alliance, formed in 1985 (Langille 1988, 197–99), and the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, formed in 1980 (Prentice 1988), are examples of such cross-movement collaborations and institutionalizations. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), founded in the late 1960s, is a coalition of hundreds of women’s groups from across the country, and as discussed above, was a site of cross-movement coalition politics. The labor movement and the peace movement were in the women’s movement, for example. Cross-movement and intra-movement coalitions also fostered cross-fertilization of ideas and analyses and of encounters, especially among the ‘lefts’ in the various movements, who were disposed to understanding the diverse movement struggles as ‘linked,’ even as the exact nature of the linkages was rarely specified.41 Movement activists generated complex, multi-faceted

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analyses of the big struggles of the 1980s. Although activism pre-dating the anti-free trade movement is often framed as single issue, identity-oriented (as opposed to ‘class-based’), or based in a single sector, there were many and growing instances of coalition politics marked by integrative critical analyses, including of the capitalist context of struggle.42 Most commentators, myself included, argue that the struggle over free trade that began in the mid-1980s and climaxed in the 1988 federal election was a watershed in transforming the terrain of social struggle in Canada and in transforming the movements themselves. I will explore the anti-free trade struggle as an essential context in understanding the emergence of the MNSJ in terms of its organizational form and its political modes and discourses. But first, I want to consider the nature of the claims about the transformations wrought by the anti-free trade struggle relative to what went before and the ways in which those transformations and the claims about them shaped the founding and development of the MNSJ. In the narratives of coalition politics emerging over and out of the free trade struggle, certain prefigurations are almost invariably mentioned. Socalled “solidarity coalitions” first appeared in the early 1980s in response to the rising tide of neoconservatism. Operation Solidarity, a mass, laborled mobilization against a multi-faceted legislative offensive targeting labor rights, social programs and human rights rocked the Social Credit government in British Columbia in 1983 (Action Canada Network 1992a; Palmer 1988). Solidarité Populaire Québec emerged in 1985 as a broad-based alliance of labor and community groups in defense of social programs and addressing both federal and Quebec governments (Simard 1988; Action Canada Network 1992b; Pourier 1992). In the writing of a number of commentators, these mobilizations, in which labor initiated, took over or otherwise predominated, are distinguished from other coalitional efforts which are characterized as ‘single issue,’ ‘sectorally fragmented’ or as having ‘lowest common-denominator politics.’ The ‘solidarity coalitions,’ on the other hand, are characterized by their ‘class’ or ‘structural analysis’ and their orientation to “more fundamental social transformation,” as opposed to “reformism” (e.g., Howlett 1989). The organizational apex of anti-free trade movement was the Pro-Canada Network, later Action Canada Network (ACN), a broad coalition of ‘national’43 organizations and provincial anti-free trade or ‘social justice’44 coalitions that coalesced in 1987.45 While I agree that the emergence of the Action Canada Network represented a political breakthrough in many respects, these comparative characterizations of what had gone before are crude and problematic. These self-understandings of the “social justice coalitions” that proliferated during and after the free trade struggle were widespread, including in the

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MNSJ. They testify to the persistence of a Marxist imaginary of society and social struggle at the heart of a lot of activist politics, whether narrowly or broadly ‘left,’ within or outside the labor movement in their privileging certain activist modes and discourses as politically superior to others and, in so doing, reproducing problematic binaries of ‘class’ vs. ‘identity’ and ‘radical’ vs. ‘reformist’ politics. This poses particular problems for these movements and coalitions in seriously coming to terms with other critical politics, most notably by the mid-1980s and through the 1990s, the politics of anti-racism (Conway 2004: 131 ff.). Reflecting on the rise of coalitions in the 1980s, Larry Brown, secretary-treasurer of the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), is quoted as saying: For the first time since the era of FDR’s New Deal and the post-war unionizing drives, progressive elements in society came under official attack. The unimaginable began to happen. Ronald Reagan . . . decertified an entire union. Employers negotiated and won rollbacks from their employees. The role of governments as the legitimate provider of services to people was first questioned, then undermined, and finally attacked. All the rules between government and people changed almost overnight. . . . Old strategies didn’t work anymore and new ones had to found (Brown quoted by Layte 1992, 11).

Brown’s remarks situate labor’s strategic choices to initiate and support the emergence of (a new kind of) cross-sectoral coalitions against the decline of the Keynesian welfare state, with its disintegrating labor—capital accord and fraying social safety net, and the growing ascendancy of neoconservatism.46 Bleyer’s work on the Action Canada Network is more open to the possibility of continuity rather than rupture with earlier forms of crossmovement collaboration. He traces the origins of the ACN to the participation of dozens of social movement groups in the public hearings of the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (also know as the MacDonald Commission) and collaborative work on the Working Committee for Social Solidarity. He also attributes central importance to a resurgent nationalist movement that coalesced in the founding of the Council of Canadians in 1985. In addition, Bleyer notes an important and controversial statement by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1983 outlining a political strategy centered on coalition building (Bleyer 1997, 136–38).47 No doubt the popular mobilizing and coalition building in opposition to the Free Trade Agreement, of which the ACN was both an expression and a

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leading agent, broke new ground. The ACN was coalition building on a new scale, in terms of the numbers, range and significance of the groups involved and claiming national (later bi- and tri-national)48 relevance, scope and legitimacy. The scale of participation and support by the Canadian Labour Congress was itself new and noteworthy (Howes 2001). The nature of ‘free trade’ as an issue, in the context of the late 1980s after a decade of neoconservative politics and ‘economic restructuring,’ lent itself to a broader analysis of ‘class’ and ‘structures’ (Howlett 1989). In theory, however, the kind of class and structural analysis and the linkages across movements in opposition to the ‘corporate agenda’ that the anti-free trade movement produced could also have emerged in the context of the peace, environmental or some other major movement of the 1980s. Who would have thought ‘free trade’ would have mobilized the kind of broad-based, oppositional and coalitional politics that it did, and that the ‘anti-globalization’ movement continues to do? Was it a matter of ‘the moment’? Was it labor’s emerging clarity about what was at stake, for unions, working people and the whole society? Was it the left in the various sectors and movements who recognized and seized upon a new way to talk about class and capitalism? Was it a serendipitous confluence of: (1) a decade of coalition practices across movements, (2) the resurgence of a liberalleft nationalist movement, (3) an issue (‘free trade’) that concentrated an entire regressive agenda, and (4) a powerful flowering of organizational and political creativity? It was not clear. What we did know was that something new had happened. The Pro-Canada Network (PCN) formed in April 1987 at the Maple Leaf Summit. The Summit had been convened by the Council of Canadians as a popular-sector rejoinder to the Mulroney—Reagan Shamrock Summit.49 At the time of its founding, significant networks against free trade were already coalescing or established in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Quebec. The PCN continued to foster coalition formation on a regional basis and expanded to include dozens of national organizations from a wide range of sectors. The overwhelming majority of member organizations came from the labor movement: public and private-sector unions and central labor bodies. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Federation of Students, the National Anti-Poverty Organization, the National Pensioners and Senior Citizens’ Federation, the National Farmers’ Union, Rural Dignity, and several national church bodies were later joined by several international development/solidarity organizations and represented movements and constituencies other than labor. In many cases, local ad hoc groups and coalitions were already in place working on free trade. The PCN brought them together under one national umbrella.

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Coalition building was premised on the notion of increased legitimacy conferred by a wide range of groups speaking together. All were combating being labeled as ‘special interests.’ Many saw the value of pooling scarce resources and of redistributing resources within the “popular sector” (Drache and Cameron 1985, ix). Many groups prioritized the production of shared perspectives in order to counter attempts to isolate and divide them from one another and to demonstrate their understanding of their various struggles as connected (Swanson 1992, 5; Durning 1992). The common wisdom of the anti-free trade movement that was articulated most consistently and powerfully by the PCN before, during, and after the free trade election in 1988 was that the public interest could best be protected and enhanced by the continued existence of a strong federal state with vital citizens’ movements pushing for the expansion of democracy and social and economic equity. The astonishing surrender of national sovereignty under the FTA became the flashpoint that united labor and social groups across regions and sectors. The Pro-Canada Network coalesced around the threat to governments’ power to modify the ill effects of the market economy, more than around a shared and comprehensive alternative vision for a Canadian economy with long-standing structural weaknesses and subject to growing international, particularly American, pressures (Drache, et al. 1985; Conway 1994). The Pro-Canada Network was also far from a political strategy to implement any such alternative vision. The strategy, such as it was, was straightforward and simple. Up to the 1988 election, it was to defeat the FTA by defeating the Conservative government. Central to the strategy was massive education and politicization of the Canadian public about the agenda behind “free trade” and countering the propaganda from the government and the business lobby (a.k.a. the Business Council on National Issues) that claimed there was no rational economic alternative. Although the 1988 election was lost to Mulroney’s Conservatives, many in the PCN considered it a significant moral victory. In 1985, free trade with the US enjoyed about 75 per cent popular support among Canadians. By the 1988 election, a solid majority of Canadians were opposed to free trade. This massive turnaround in popular opinion can be attributed in significant part to the work of the PCN and its member groups. By providing comprehensive and critical analysis of the deal, the PCN supported analytical work in countless local groups across the country. Groups that had never before considered trade issues significant were, by 1988, literate and articulate about free trade and its impacts on local communities and workplaces and on a range of social causes (Cohen 1992, 33–34). Howlett and others argue that the PCN’s production of knowledge, including critical analyses of the deal, interpretations of its meaning, and a

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common perspective on how and why to oppose free trade, represents one of its most important and distinguishing features (Howlett 1989, 43). This knowledge was coalitional. It was produced by leaders and thinkers embedded in a variety of critical social movements, driven by a sense that their various struggles were linked and their values and priorities compatible.50 Howlett suggests that such “integrative analysis” can propel movements toward more transformative politics. Engaging in collective, cross-sectoral intellectual and political processes can lead to “greater commitment and a more radical position [and] also challenge(s) each of the member organizations to re-define and re-articulate their own individual and sectoral policies” (44). In general I agree, but Marjorie Cohen offers an important addition and corrective to Howlett’s perspective. She argues for the importance of recognizing multiple other sources and origins for critical, movement-based knowledge about free trade. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, for example, passed its first resolution against free trade at its 1984 AGM—long before the Pro-Canada Network was formed and generating its own analysis. She also argues that groups did not simply swallow critical analysis whole, but debated and advanced it. In a conference presentation, she went on to say: Contrary to the subsequent reports which have been written about the anti-free trade movement, it was not primarily a movement where a few key people at the top understood the issue and merely dragged their groups along. Certainly much information was distributed from the central organization, but it would be a mistake to underestimate how this was used in local groups to generate discussion, further analysis, and organize political opposition. This occurred right across the country (Cohen 1992, 33).

By the time the dust had settled after the 1988 election, the terrain of social movement politics and organizing had been transformed. Cross-sectoral coalition building had itself become a movement, a political process and approach to counter a surging and comprehensive agenda from above, variously labeled neoconservatism, the corporate agenda, or néoliberalisme. The post-free trade agenda of the movement was to build coalitions locally in towns and cities that would be networked with and through provincial umbrella coalitions (Pourier 1992). The new movement politics against free trade had also foregrounded the problem of knowledge, the need for new analyses and perspectives in response to a new political and economic context, and the possibility of creating it. This was articulated most commonly and forcefully as a search for “alternatives.”

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When the MNSJ coalesced in 1992 and throughout the period discussed here, activists were drawing, knowingly and unknowingly, on preexisting histories, networks, traditions and habits of activism in Toronto and in English Canada. These cultural legacies are examples of the largely tacit knowledges that activists carried into the MNSJ and which informed the limits and possibilities of movement politics through the 1990s. In the founding and development of the MNSJ, activists were drawing on local, urban, and municipal activisms, and on national political traditions, discourses and practices, particularly those of the nationally articulated antifree trade movement. The MNSJ was founded in a new era marked by the defeat and the breakthroughs of the free trade struggle. MNSJ activists drew on its legacies, building on and extending its innovations, especially in areas of coalition building and knowledge production, and reproducing some its problematic assumptions and limits. But the MNSJ was also located in the unique, complex and dense political space of Toronto, and other activist knowledges, habits, traditions, and networks were also at play in the coming together and development of the MNSJ.

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Chapter Four

Knowledge and Capacity Building: Popular Education in the MNSJ

Knowledge was produced in the MNSJ through three overlapping and mutually constituted arenas of praxis: organizational development and coalition-building, broad-based campaign organizing and “economic and political literacy” or EPL work. The focus of this chapter will be on this third arena of praxis, as it was here that knowledge as a political problem was first identified and debates about the character, status and role of knowledge production in social movements emerged. An early and ongoing commitment to broad-based capacity building through participatory political education, what later came to be called “economic and political literacy” work, was a constitutive dimension of the emergent democratic culture of the coalition. Likewise, democratic, participatory and reflexive organizational practices were central to fostering a generalized culture of capacity building. Developing within and as a constitutive dimension of the MNSJ, its EPL praxis was embedded in the multiple and ongoing political campaigns of the coalition, both serving and enriching them. Likewise, the MNSJ’s EPL praxis served and was supported by its organizational infrastructure and ongoing organizational praxis.

ORGANIZATIONAL PRAXIS AND THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE MNSJ The MNSJ was officially launched in October 1992 and, in five years, grew from 30 to almost 250 member organizations, with an activist base fluctuating between 50 and 100 persons. The Network was funded through modest annual membership fees, in-kind donations including some staff time, and event fees, all later augmented by a three-year Trillium Foundation grant. 69

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(The Trillium Foundation was established by the provincial NDP government in the early 1990s as an arms-length funder of community capacitybuilding projects in Ontario.) Each year, an annual general meeting (AGM) decided on organizational and political priorities and elected a steering committee. The steering committee was comprised of people formally nominated by their organizations and structured to ensure 50 per cent representation by women and at least one-third representation by people of color. After 1993, working groups were convened by the steering committee and open to participation by anyone interested. Working groups became sites of campaign, program and project development, within broad goals and guidelines established or ratified by the steering committee and reflecting the AGM’s priorities. A high level of autonomy existed in the groups, but also ongoing tensions over appropriate forms and degrees of accountability.1 The program of the founding AGM centered on an “Ah-hah” workshop.2 This group activity involved creating a complex cartoon of the present political—economic context based on the varied knowledge and experience of those present. The process aimed to generate linkages among the different political perspectives and struggles represented at the AGM and to engage participants in producing a shared reading of the context in which the coalition was being born. It was instrumental in helping participants transcend lobbying for their own ‘issues’ and, instead, decide together that the MNSJ should address budget cuts and neoliberal free trade policies and focus on alternatives to the reigning economic and political order. The holding of an annual general meeting was central to the democratic experience of the MNSJ. Planning for the fall event began in the spring. Outreach and information packages were mailed in late summer, followed by intensive outreach work over the phone to the more than 1,000 organizations on the MNSJ contact list. Beginning with the founding conference, MNSJ AGMs were characterized by hospitality, networking, and celebrating the year’s accomplishments. A similar meeting process was used each year. Brief oral reports on each major area of work included the political rationale, a description of what had been done, the steering committee or working group’s evaluative, political and analytical comments, and in later years, recommendations for the coming year. Until 1996, steering committees assumed that the AGM’s annual decision-making should begin with a blank slate and that continuation of any existing body of work should not simply be assumed. For example, annual campaigns on the Metro budget became a hallmark of the MNSJ. But because activists were anxious both to keep the political agenda open to the will of the AGM and to constantly evaluate rather than unconsciously reproduce their practice, it took five years of annual

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campaigns before they proposed making a longer-term commitment to the Metro budget as an ongoing priority. Small group discussion encouraged AGM participants to be evaluative and analytical both about the content and processes of the MNSJ’s work. Small groups reported to the plenary, after which proposals for priorities for the coming year were distilled and, in plenary, refined for voting. From 1994 to 1998, the AGM employed a ‘dotmocracy’ process in which member groups each received a tab of stick-on dots of different colors. Groups used dots to vote by placing them on prepared charts, one dedicated to each of the proposed priorities. Dots were weighted according to color. Those voting distributed each colored dot in a way that indicated their preferred ranking of the priorities they chose. Results were tabulated, reviewed and ratified by the plenary. Through these and other participatory planning practices, the MNSJ became an activist space promoting thoughtful, respectful and pluralistic political discussion and democratic decision-making. The democratic culture and organizational praxis of the MNSJ were central to the promotion of collective learning. Activist know-how about democratic governance was informed by shared commitments to ‘participation’ and ‘capacity building’ and was expressed and advanced through organizational praxis. Organizational praxis was itself a zone of politics and of social learning. As a practice, the MNSJ’s annual general meeting was an example of broad-based, participatory planning in which large numbers of people were regularly engaged in reviewing, assessing, and renovating the political and organizational practices of the coalition. In the process, they were collectively producing knowledge about democratic and participatory governance.

KNOWLEDGE AND CAPACITY BUILDING IN THE MNSJ Knowledge is produced in social movements primarily through praxis. Knowledge production is embedded in the everyday practices that constitute social movements as activists organize events, mount protests, orchestrate campaigns, frame issues, formulate demands, produce materials, facilitate educational processes, and deliberate together about their work and its relation to what is underway in the world. All of these activities rely on and produce tacit knowledges. Tacit knowledges are omnipresent and indispensable but remain largely inchoate. When activists reflect critically and self-consciously on their practice and draw insights that inform the next round of practice, they are engaging in praxis. They produce knowledges that are articulated, systematized, repeated, shared, remembered and further actualized, developed, and revised through subsequent practice.

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Knowledge production in the MNSJ was closely related to the notion of “capacity building.” Capacity building in the MNSJ was understood broadly as the development of all kinds of skills and know-how as well as critical political perspectives in people and organizations. Use of the term was not confined to ‘intellectual’ development, narrowly understood. The term ‘knowledge production’ foregrounds the specifically intellectual dimensions of capacity building. Knowledge production in this sense was not confined to the MNSJ’s economic and political literacy work, but it was under this rubric that, as a praxis, it was most fully developed and theorized. In interviews, many activists reported being drawn to the MNSJ in this period because it was an activist organization in which there was space and encouragement to think critically about the world and their own political practice; advancing their own knowledge, they claimed, was key to their becoming better activists. These activists were committed to the MNSJ because it was a movement space that placed a primacy on capacity building, including the nurturing of intellectual capacity for activists and for the base the MNSJ was seeking to nurture and organize. This sensibility deeply shaped the work and culture of the MNSJ in its first era. Commitment to capacity building was manifested in activities ranging from deputations and lobby days on the Metro budget to neighborhood mobilization for the Metro Days of Action. The arena in which capacity building was most sustained and self-conscious and linked explicitly to the development of knowledges was the MNSJ’s economic and political literacy (EPL) work. This capacity building form of activism (and attitude toward knowledge and power) is characterized by an intellectual openness and a commitment to democratic and participatory process as central to the project of movement building. It places a premium on thinking, talking and acting together as the source of new forms of agency from which activists hope will emerge alternatives to the reigning order. Capacity building activism exists in some tension with more familiar forms of ‘protest activism’ that inform much events-oriented and campaign-oriented organizing. Protest activism is marked by an ever-present sense of urgency—the need to respond to outrages, to resist injustice and to create pressure on political and corporate elites from below. This dominant form of activism is often driven by a confidence that activists know enough to know what they want and that bigger and better forms of public protest or pressure campaigns will eventually deliver results. Embedded in this approach is a view of power as a fixed and identifiable entity, resident somewhere specific, which can be located and confronted. The origins of these debates and of EPL work in the MNSJ go back to the FightBack Metro! campaign and the tensions between those activists

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who favored knowledge, knowledge production and grassroots capacity building and those who favored disruptive protest. The MNSJ was established in the months following FightBack Metro! without any explicit ideological commitment to either approach. However, the culture that came to characterize the MNSJ in its early years reflected many of the sensibilities of the more process-oriented, feminist popular educators and community development activists, in part because many of the protest-oriented activists withdrew or had little appetite for organizational debates. In describing these tendencies between ‘protest’ and ‘capacity building’ in the MNSJ, I want to avoid reifying them as static, uni-dimensional or mutually exclusive. As discussed in the next chapter, the MNSJ’s campaign praxis prominently included capacitybuilding goals and practices. Capacity-building elements were fruitfully combined with protest and pressure. However, there were also enduring tensions between these priorities, and debates intensified through the 1990s as the losses mounted and the larger political context polarized. Many thoughtful activists were internally conflicted about how best to work for change. The MNSJ was a unique activist space because, for a significant period, it successfully held together these tensions between the short-term, urgent and immediate and longer-term orientations to community development, base-building and cultural transformation. In practice and theory, a pluralism of approaches and perspectives co-existed within broadly understood and shared commitments to movement building as central to the struggle for greater social justice and equality.

ACTIVISTS AND EXPERTS: WHO KNOWS WHAT ABOUT CREATING A JUST ECONOMY?3 Shortly after MNSJ’s founding AGM in Fall 1992, in the context of an upcoming federal election, the Metro Labour Council and the MNSJ agreed to jointly organize a local cross-sectoral conference in order to stimulate coalition building and to promote discussion of economic policy alternatives to NAFTA. The MNSJ Steering Committee saw the conference as an opportunity to build and broaden the network and to develop ways of collaborating that promoted the development of a genuinely cross-sectoral, multi-issue agenda. Organizing the conference also occasioned the first of many debates in the MNSJ about the use of ‘experts’ and the relationship between formal, academic and professional expert knowledge on the one hand, and the practice-based, action-oriented, and largely unsystematized knowledge of activists on the other.4 In the course of its initial discussions, the working group that organized the conference identified a huge intellectual/ educational agenda for

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activists about ‘the economy.’5 The goals of the conference were “to increase ‘literacy’ among activists about the functioning of the Canadian political economy . . . to instill confidence that there are alternatives to the neoliberal agenda . . . (and) to think about how to organize toward such alternatives . . .” (MNSJ 1993d). The conference planning occasioned the first use of the term “economic literacy” by MNSJ activists to describe their own activities.6 For the purposes of the conference, it was described as including knowledge of the sectors of the Canadian economy, what they have been historically, what they are currently, and how they are being restructured; knowledge of Canadian institutions: political, financial and corporate; an awareness of “globalism” and international economic institutions as context; awareness of the particularities of our local context (Metro) within federal and provincial political and economic frameworks; some knowledge of political and economic alternatives tried elsewhere; (and) appreciation of the links between the struggle for democratization and economic justice (MNSJ 1993d).

The conference was targeted to “social change activists, organizers and community leaders.” This formulation would repeatedly capture the target audience for MNSJ’s large-scale public educational events and was meant to clarify that, in content and format, they were not geared, in the first instance, to the (so-called) “grassroots,” i.e., the extremely poor and marginalized. For many whose roots were in the anti-poverty movement and in the FightBack Metro! campaign, this was a contentious decision. In my view, their discomfort expressed a certain basismo.7 While this discomfort is grounded in an important critique of intellectual elitism, including on the left, it also reflects deep-seated ambivalence among many activists about any use of expert knowledge or any investment in the advancement of knowledge in social movements more generally. Furthermore, it limits many debates about ‘accessibility’ in educational and organizing processes in its assumptions that all social movement processes must be designed to include the lowest-functioning, least experienced and least educated. Among key organizers and in the MNSJ in general, however, there existed a strong appreciation of the possible contribution of experts disciplined by an agenda and process defined by activists. Because of the conference focus on ‘the economy’ and the MNSJ’s orientation to economic justice, activists gravitated to the labor and anti-free trade movements in their search for expertise. This approach yielded experts in the field of Canadian political economy, who were all white and mostly male, reflecting the make-up of

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university political science and economics departments and those labor organizations wealthy enough to support in-house research. An immediate outcry arose about whose voices and what forms and traditions of expertise were being valued by the MNSJ, in the context of more generalized and heated debates in a number of organizations in Toronto, including the MNSJ, about effective anti-racism practice. In the context of the conference organizing, debates about anti-racism were part of a larger debate about inclusion—whom the conference was for—and accessibility—financial, logistical and cultural. It was also about whose and what kinds of knowledge and expertise were being acknowledged. The debate on inclusion problematized the content of the program, the social locations and identities of the resource people and the relationships between people’s identities and their knowledges, and made apparent the limits of an all-white line-up of experts and the exclusive reliance on political economy as a discourse. Without using the term, critics were employing ‘standpoint epistemologies’ to question how expertise was being constructed in and through the conference planning. In response to these concerns, which they shared, organizers did not abandon the use of experts. Rather, they identified activist speakers who came from a much wider range of cultures and communities. They confined the use of experts to workshops focused on specific policy topics where they were paired with movement-based facilitators and respondents. This diversified the conference line-up, incorporating representation from among people of color, people with disabilities, seniors and women, and structured collaboration and exchange between activists and experts into the conference program. Workshops were defined by the questions of activists in the areas of trade, investment, taxation and government spending and, in an election year, were focused on federal public policy alternatives. The workshops were framed by substantive plenary sessions featuring prominent movement-based thinkers and leaders who were invited to provide critical perspectives on the context, agenda and strategic approaches for social movements. A second and related worry about relying so exclusively on political economists was the tendency in their discourse to privilege class (and with it, concerns for full employment within the national economy) and to marginalize or exclude other concerns viewed by many activists as equally important: ecological sustainability, social equity in terms of gender, race and sexuality, and international solidarity.8 Participants’ evaluations criticized the experts for their emphases on critique over alternatives and organizing strategies, and their preference for structuralist and global approaches that demonstrated little appreciation of

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questions about agency and provided little purchase for local action. Their comments reflected enduring suspicion among activists of expertise as alienating, inaccessible and not informed by activist concerns. The evaluations also reflected a characteristic impatience among activists with analysis that did not produce an immediate action plan. Not surprisingly, the audience was extremely uneven in knowledge and experience and had conflicting expectations about the nature of the event—for whom it was intended and appropriate formats and educational methods. The program and the debates it produced reflected widespread, although not universal, dissatisfaction with the substance of left politics, its substitution of policy change for social change, and its increasingly evident inadequacy in the face of ascendant neoconservatism. Among conference organizers, there emerged a new and critical awareness of the extreme degree of fragmentation and the lack of political space or cultural climate for substantive debate in activist circles. However, the turnout for the conference and the ratio of participation by people of color had been outstanding. The gathering represented a ringing endorsement of MNSJ’s continuing critical intellectual/education work on the economy, even as the need remained to incorporate ‘identity’ issues, especially racism, into discussions about the economy, and confusion and disagreement about how to do that continued. In retrospect, the new terrain marked by the conference was not so much in the policy content as in the debates it provoked about the need for critical dialogue between expert and activist knowledges; the complex relationships among factors like social identity, life experience and political engagement in the production of knowledge; and the tensions between expert and activist knowledges and expert-led and participatory forms of learning. Problematic epistemological assumptions undergirded the whole project. At the outset, organizers had assumed that viable progressive alternatives existed, that they simply had to be revised to incorporate neglected perspectives, and that the primary intellectual tasks for activists were strategic and organizational ones. Over the course of the organizing process, conference planners were compelled to acknowledge the need for new thinking about ‘the economy,’ without being confident it existed, much less how to produce it. Finally, with respect to the urban character of the MNSJ, it is important to note the priority given to the national scale both in planning the conference and in economic literacy work in general. This reflected the MNSJ’s political and analytical continuity with the antifree trade left and co-existed with an emergent urban discourse and politics in the MNSJ.

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Over the next year, with a growing body of experience, came a growing (although never univocal) recognition among MNSJ organizers of the legitimacy of and need for academic expertise, the existence and distinctiveness of activist knowledges and the tensions between the two. MNSJ activists remained strongly committed to participatory processes characterized by an open and hospitable climate for discussion and learning and defined pre-eminently by activists’ questions. MNSJ activists also became more confident and clear in rejecting certain orthodoxies prominent among activists at the time, such as that the discourse of all events had to be “accessible” to everyone or that so-called “popular education,” some forms of which biased technique over content, was politically superior at all times for all purposes and with all audiences.9 In Toronto, the dynamics of the organizing and of the conference itself signaled the beginning of a sea change in social movement politics and culture. Explicit debate about knowledge or knowledge production in the MNSJ or for the broader movement had not yet taken place, but the event was evidence of a collective groping among activists for new modes of resistance. Activists were beginning to perceive a comprehensive hegemonic agenda at work. Although the rhetoric of “neoconservative” or “corporate agenda” had been in use since the mid-1980s to interpret cutbacks, evidence of awareness of the extent of its implications for left movements and left strategies was scant.

THE MONETARIST RIGHT, THE NEO-KEYNESIAN LEFT AND THE SEARCH FOR INTELLIGENT ACTIVISM In post-conference organizing, in response to escalating public debate, the public debt rapidly replaced NAFTA as the MNSJ’s campaign focus toward the fall 1993 federal election. In the spring of 1993, Kim Campbell replaced long-serving Progressive Conservative leader Brian Mulroney as leader of the PCs and as Prime Minister. The C.D. Howe Institute had just published a report that got major media coverage at home and abroad about Canada hitting the “debt wall.” The Wall Street Journal published an editorial likening Canada’s financial situation to that of a Third World country. Many activists perceived a well-orchestrated campaign underway by elites within and beyond Canada to create a climate of hysteria about the debt and to identify profligate public spending as the problem. At the same time, the Ontario NDP government initiated its social contract negotiations with public sector unions, seeking major cuts in public spending in the name of debt reduction. Progressives had been largely unanimous through the 1980s that the debt hysteria was an ideological weapon in the right-wing assault on the post-war role of government, levels of government spending in the economy

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and social spending in particular. While this was widely acknowledged, a number of activists in the MNSJ were beginning to think that the debt had become an objective problem, that public nervousness about it was understandable and well founded, and that the progressive line on the debt was no longer credible. Public anxiety could not and should not be dismissed as false consciousness. Over the summer and fall of 1993, a working group developed a pamphlet entitled “the debt is a problem . . . but it isn’t the problem they say it is” (Conway 1993a). The pamphlet articulated a new perspective in that it acknowledged the debt as a problem of the hemorrhaging of public wealth to private financial institutions in the form of interest payments. It offered a critical alternative reading of the causes and solutions to the public debt problem, based on the best critical political economy perspectives in Canada. Debt accumulation was argued to have originated in the 1970s with a series of deficits created by corporate tax loopholes. The accumulated debt had mushroomed into a mountain in the 1980s as a result of high interest rate policies even with a decade of operating surpluses. An alternative debt management strategy was premised on stimulating economic growth through direct employment creation, closing tax loopholes and refinancing the debt at much lower rates of interest through the Bank of Canada. The MNSJ activists did not do independent research. Rather, they assembled all they could find published by progressive organizations, identified and debated responses to the main arguments of the right found in the business pages and editorials and in the publications of the Fraser Institute and the C.D.Howe Institute, and listened carefully to their own reactions and those of “ordinary people” to the media debate. They synthesized their position in the brief, easy-to-read pamphlet and circulated it among their growing circle of allied political economists for critical feedback. The pamphlet was aimed at the general public and sought to address widespread anxieties in a thoughtful, credible way respectful of public concern. This approach reflected an emergent populist politics that took seriously the need to communicate with the public, sought to build bridges of critical understanding with the majority, and assumed that most people are intelligent, thoughtful and responsive to the values informing progressive social movements. In a six-week period, with little money and a skeletal distribution network, 30,000 pamphlets were circulated, half of which went outside Metro Toronto to all parts of the country. The publication of a pamphlet, especially on this scale, was hardly significant in itself. The Tories lost the 1993 federal election without any measurable help from the MNSJ’s work on the debt. Debates in many activist circles at the time were urgent, intense, even frantic about the

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advance of the neoconservative agenda. Activist campaigns (more accurately, event-planning) were often grandiose in their aims and naive in their belief in the power of rhetoric supported by “mass action.” Although individual activists were undoubtedly troubled, there was little evidence in the Toronto public debate, events or activist organizing of the need for a serious rethinking of the political context, the state of progressive politics or the (so-called) movement in general. The MNSJ was embedded in this political context and reflected its shortcomings, although its organizational and campaign praxis created spaces for critical reflection. As the activist leader in the EPL group, I went to the MNSJ AGM in fall 1994 dispirited about any prospect of translating good ideas into alternative policies. Reporting on the group’s work, I was candid about my feelings, fully expecting that support for any intellectual work by the MNSJ on big economic questions would die, and that perhaps it should. No amount of repetition by grassroots groups about an alternative role for the Bank of Canada or the stimulative effect of government spending was going to change what governments did. The premises about growth that underlay such strategies were also cause for concern among a growing number of MNSJ activists. In all, we now knew enough to realize we did not know what to do and to likewise realize that this was the kiss of death in an activist organization. It seemed clearer and easier to stick with protesting cuts, if only because we knew the political rituals associated with such a strategy and because the MNSJ would be seen to be “taking action.” In spite of huge and persistent challenges about how to make issues like the debt relevant and accessible to ordinary people in local communities in Metro Toronto, the problem of creating opportunities for popular agency, and the absence of an effective strategy, the 1994 AGM voted overwhelmingly in support of continuing economic literacy work. Feedback on the pamphlet had been almost universally enthusiastic. The election of the federal Liberals and their immediate passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement was confronting more and more activists with the need for a new, different, longerterm and multi-faceted agenda for enduring social change. For many in the MNSJ, the need for serious investment in critical public educational processes about the economy was becoming more self-evident, even as there was no clarity about strategies to effectively confront governments. At the time of the 1994 AGM, an innovative campaign on the municipal elections was also underway. MNSJ activists had developed a two-hour facilitated workshop or “traveling road show,” that went into community centers, ESL classes, churches, seniors groups, and to any other group who asked. The political objective was to increase people’s capacity in local neighborhoods across Metro Toronto to understand municipal politics and

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debates about the budget. The workshop ‘process,’ meaning both content (from basic civics to economic restructuring, debt downloading and the neoconservative agenda) and method (a knowledgeable facilitator engaging in a simple question-answer dialogue that connected and built on the fragments of people’s existing knowledge, and from local to global and back) was oriented to nurturing people’s abilities to think and act analytically, strategically, and organizationally. Many activists and member groups were very enthusiastic about this strategy, and it positively disposed them to considering the potential in the MNSJ for critical educational processes oriented to grassroots capacity building more generally. Among MNSJ’s economic literacy activists, the community workshop model was an appealing educational strategy. It effectively addressed many of the dilemmas that had been experienced in the conference organizing. Conducting community workshops represented an activist-led educational process, which critically utilized professional expertise at the development stage but which was embedded in and infused with knowledges produced through the MNSJ’s campaign organizing and with a perspective on broadbased movement building that characterized the MNSJ as a whole. Workshops solved multiple problems of accessibility by sending facilitators out to diverse settings rather than expecting a wide public to come in to a centrally organized, one-time-only event. Going into existing groups increased the possibility of concrete, collective and doable follow-up action. Because the audiences were more internally homogeneous, workshops could be pitched more appropriately, the scope and sophistication of content adjusted to the experience of each group, and the use of examples made specific to different populations. Local workshops also more easily allowed for language translation. Workshops done in local community settings, utilizing MNSJ-trained facilitators and MNSJ-generated perspectives became a regular hallmark of almost every campaign after 1994. From this campaign to the decline of economic and political literacy work in 1997, the MNSJ averaged more than 100 community workshops annually, bringing the Metro Network into direct contact with thousands of new people including newcomers to Canada, many of them poor, and most non-activist.

THE NEOLIBERAL REVOLUTION AND THE CRISIS OF HOPE After a decade of Progressive Conservative rule, the 1993 federal election delivered a Liberal majority to Parliament. The Liberal government promptly signed the NAFTA, declared the deficit its priority, and announced a major overhaul of the country’s social programs. By June 1994, the Federal Social Security Reform (FSSR) had shot to the top of activist agendas.

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The Social Policy Reform Action Group (SPRAG) was established in spring 1994 as a working group of the MNSJ. The group’s first undertaking was to organize a “community briefing and strategy session” to inform members and allies of the announced terms and prospective politics of the FSSR, to generate a critical, movement-based political interpretation, and to consult broadly about any role the MNSJ should assume in organizing around it. The event yielded a fast and ready consensus, subsequently endorsed by the steering committee, that the MNSJ should focus on critical public education and protest rather than in organizing participation in the government’s public hearings. The hearings were widely regarded as a legitimating mechanism for neoliberal restructuring of the labor market and the welfare state in favor of greater “competitiveness.” Activists did not perceive them as openings to press for more or better employment, poverty alleviation or the promotion of greater equality. The hearings were too important to ignore, but it was agreed that participation in the formal process could be handled by agencies and the larger social movement lobby groups. The MNSJ should concentrate on grassroots mobilization, which would aim to (1) place the debate in the context of globalization and challenge the argument that a radically reduced social wage is inevitable; (2) argue for a different economic policy in order to finance good social policy. The question of jobs is central; (3) communicate what is at stake, who is benefiting and who will be negatively affected; (4) educate about the history of our social programs and their erosion over the past decade; (5) offer a credible alternative vision and a strategy for resistance to the corporate/ OECD/ Liberal . . . one; (6) resist strategies to divide us and articulate why the struggle is a common one in which we have to work together; (7) engage people’s hearts and minds (MNSJ 1994bb).

Following the lead of SPRAG activists, the MNSJ Steering Committee endorsed a campaign centered on the community workshop strategy.10 The Federal Social Security Reform (FSSR) and the subsequent federal budget of 1995 marked a watershed in the development of the MNSJ. This was especially true for the praxis of knowledge production. The SPRAG campaign significantly advanced activist knowledges about the contours and dynamics of the neoliberal revolution in Canada and, perhaps more significantly, it transformed MNSJ activists’ theories of knowledge and the praxis of knowledge production in economic literacy work. The SPRAG Working Group designed a workshop that critically unpacked the content of the federal reforms. MNSJ activists did not assume

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that the FSSR would be immediately perceived negatively by workshop participants, so the process began by outlining the substance of the reforms and asking participants what might be good and/or bad about the government’s plan and its possible implications. For instance, the emphasis on employment training sounded good to many people, but without adequate supports (income support, childcare, transportation, etc.) and without guarantees for a job at the end, training-centered reform became more ambiguous. Facilitators then invited groups to consider why the government was embarking on this reform, especially if one could see obvious problems with it. Participants were invited to distinguish between “spoken” and “unspoken” reasons. This discussion provided an opportunity to untangle and consider the distinct but mutually reinforcing threads of the dominant rhetoric, which ranged from the inexorable demands of globalization (“progressive competitiveness” requiring “smarter” social spending) to the putative inefficiencies of the current system—its outdatedness, excessive costs and bloated bureaucracies that created a drag on economic growth, particularly on job creation. The “unspoken” reasons allowed people to consider the possible connections with the free trade regime, trends to privatization, the pressure to lower corporate taxes, and the push for smaller government, and how all these combined to discipline the population to accept lower wages, poorer working conditions and a radically reduced social safety net. Moreover, the discussion provided a moment to point to evidence of a corporate or “neoliberal” agenda, its global ascendancy, and its expressions in Canadian politics in parties of every stripe. Through a problem-posing pedagogy, MNSJ activist—facilitators drew on the knowledge and thinking of participants in order to locate the FSSR in a context of neoliberal globalization, expose the FSSR as an elite strategy to reduce the social wage, and suggest the possibility of an alternative economic policy, making the question of jobs central (MNSJ 1994bb). The workshop then zeroed in on the problem of the public debt, the issue that trumped all others and that most intimidated ordinary people. MNSJ activists drew heavily on the work of a newly formed ad hoc coalition called “Paying for Canada (PFCC).”11 PFCC produced a significant report in fall 1994 called Paying for Canada: Perspectives on Public Finance and National Programs (Yalnizyan 1994). The report contested the position of the C.D. Howe Institute that the welfare state was in ruins and no longer affordable. It offered an alternative view of the origins and history of the fiscal crisis, situating it within a broader economic crisis and an ideological assault on the role of government, and posing an alternative debt management approach within a more comprehensive strategy for economic growth. In the rough-and-tumble of grassroots debate in workshops, MNSJ facilitators were quickly confronted with the limits of their alternatives as

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they were presently imagined. Many workshop participants were often quick to detect that the ‘progressive alternatives’ were premised on economic growth, on the legitimacy of current financial institutions and practices, on debt repayment and, more or less, on capitalism as usual.12 The critical, historical and dialogical educational process underway in the workshops incubated new thinking. It exposed the grave limits of available left perspectives,13 forcing activists to re-evaluate their positions, and pushing intellectual frontiers by constantly throwing up new questions, insights and possibilities. In some cases, workshops were radicalizing audiences; in other cases, they simply provided legitimacy for people to articulate and advance their own deeply rooted or emergent radicalism. The SPRAG workshops were also the occasion for the adoption of ‘neoliberalism’ as a key frame, as activists sought to expose the character and scope of the ideological and political forces driving the FSSR without reducing recent history to one giant conspiracy theory. This larger interpretive frame provided a way to link many seemingly disparate issues and moments in a coherent discourse. Politically, in the MNSJ, it helped make possible a continual process of incremental and dialogical knowledge creation from campaign to campaign, across seemingly disparate issues and across the working groups of the network. The SPRAG campaign also marked an expanding awareness among economic and political literacy activists of the dialogical character of the knowledge-production process. It needed to be not only a continual and mutually informative conversation between experts and activists, but also between activists and ‘the base.’ Finally, the SPRAG campaign introduced the question of hope as a political and intellectual problem. Some MNSJ activists were beginning to acknowledge the centrality of this challenge and, in a tentative way, built it into the agenda of the workshops. However, not until confronted with the neoliberal conversion of every political party at every level of government, confirmed by the debacle of the 1995 federal budget and clinched by the June 1995 election of the Harris Conservatives in Ontario, did this question force its way to the front.

THE RE-MAKING OF ECONOMIC LITERACY: GRASSROOTS POLITICS AFTER THE WELFARE STATE In a story that is well known in Canada, the FSSR was trumped by the 1995 federal budget and the inexorable power of the debt discourse. Commentators from across the political spectrum called it the most significant budget in 50 years. The budget cut seven billion dollars from social programs, eliminated the Canada Assistance Plan, and created the Canada Health and

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Social Transfer (CHST). In transforming federal social spending dollars into ‘block funding,’ the CHST effectively removed the federal government from any direct management, regulation or provision of health, education or social services. Critics argued that, in steadily reducing federal transfers in favor of ‘tax points’ to the provinces, the federal government was abdicating its historic role in guaranteeing and equalizing social citizenship across the country. The door was opened to provincial workfare schemes, creeping privatization and deregulation and, in the regulatory environment crafted by NAFTA, to US-led corporatization and downward harmonization of social standards. The 1995 federal budget was a watershed in Canadian post-war political history. It signaled and sealed the end of the welfare state regime that had set the terms of political struggle in Canada for the previous five decades. In its aftermath, many activist settings were deeply and quietly polarized. Some people and groups proceeded with politics as usual: frenetic levels of ever more strident protest. Others were immobilized by grief, defeat and crisis. In the MNSJ’s Economic Literacy Working Group, with intensely engaged activists who recognized the scale of the defeat and who worked in organizations and with populations who were directly affected by the cuts and the restructuring of social programs, there was personal and political devastation. Activists continued to organize and go to demonstrations and remained true to their personal commitments to one another and to the work, but there was a new and pressing need to step back and think—a stance often met with suspicion and hostility in activist circles. Activist discussions of spring 1995 recast the terms of EPL work explicitly as a long-term strategy for a long-term struggle. In the minds of activists developing the work, EPL itself became a strategy for movement building rather than simply or primarily a component of campaign organizing. Goals of economic literacy became: to build the movement by increasing the power of people’s voice 14 and its influence over all levels of government; to increase the “interpretive capacity” of the participants and their organizations with regard to the neo-liberal agenda, its global character and its face in Canada; to provide a jargon-free perspective on the economic dimensions of this agenda; to analyze current events; to “expose, oppose, and propose” (MNSJ 1995p).

Many of these goals had been present prior, but there was a new and shared clarity that economic literacy was not simply about providing a one-way conduit between the “best of the left” and the grassroots, nor about injecting people with the right answer so they could call their Member of Parliament,

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nor about persuading them to turn up at the right demonstration. Connecting people to campaigns was clearly important—key to political formation and hope. But there was an emergent awareness that the larger and longerterm processes of social solidarity and movement building were profoundly dialogical. They had to happen at other levels and in other ways as well, beyond the instrumental needs of campaigns. For the MNSJ as a whole, EPL activists raised hard questions about the social base for social change. They suggested that Metro Network had to move beyond its traditional constituencies to connect with the “insecure middle” or the “political middle” of the population. They suggested that the top priority for activists should be political education that targeted the population as important agents of change rather than protest aimed at government as the sole or primary source of change. This suggested a shift away from campaignoriented organizing to something else, as yet unspecified. EPL activists argued for a politics that was simultaneously micro and macro, linking immediate impacts with global dynamics, and engaged at multiple levels: the local, national, and global. They raised questions of vision and hope as central political issues (MNSJ 1995g) (MNSJ 1995e) (MNSJ 1995h). This political ferment in EPL circles, which spilled over into the MNSJ as a whole, was provoked by a conviction that, with the 1995 budget, the ground had shifted radically and activists needed to critically assess and reformulate their assumptions and practices for a different kind of struggle. The questions were debated at the MNSJ Steering Committee where there was openness to them but great unevenness among MNSJ activists as to a sense of crisis requiring profound rethinking and practical experimentation. 15 In the following year, the EPL Working Group largely withdrew from campaigning to re-think the work in light of this new perspective (MNSJ 1995g). Activists shared a new sense of the importance of history, especially the history of the welfare state, the struggle by labor and social movements for social programs, and the intersections with the histories of immigration policy and anti-racist struggles. Discussion of alternatives included two new dimensions arising directly from experiences in the workshops. One was an explicit acknowledgment of the partial character of their own (and the progressive movement’s) knowledge and strategy and the need for constant critical openness and revision. The second was a dawning realization of how policy-oriented and government-centered their vision of “the alternative” was. In an era when governments had been so clearly captured by neoliberal elites, this was a perspective guaranteed to produce helplessness, hopelessness and apathy. Although a strong commitment remained to keeping the possibility of policy alternatives alive, there was an emergent priority among activists

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of finding ways to talk about alternatives predicated on popular rather than governmental agency, informed by different frameworks and time horizons. The painful post-budget debates had identified an additional political task, that of discerning true hope from false hope. True hope had to be grounded in a candid and courageous assessment of reality, including the magnitude of the mounting losses and the present limitations of the movement. It was also politically imperative to identify concrete signs of hope and to address the challenge of sustaining spirits and commitment for the long term. Activists saw engagement in concrete action as the ground of hope. But as important was the creation of space for people to think without necessarily knowing what to do. Finally, there was a new and explicit desire to search for stories of struggle and hope from other places, particularly from the South, where neoliberalism was far more advanced (MNSJ 1995p). Through the spring and summer of 1995, activists researched and wrote a series of “modules,” which were then collectively debated, critiqued, revised and compiled into a ‘primer.’ 16 The group decided to experiment with developing a two-day “train-the-trainer” program. 17 This would require developing approaches and methods to “workshop” the primer’s content, as well as content and techniques to educate and train people in theory and practice of critical and democratic adult education.

THINKING ABOUT THE PAST AS KEY TO THE FUTURE: TOWARDS A MOVEMENT-ORIENTED ACCOUNT OF THE POST-WORLD WAR TWO ERA Several segments that were developed for the train-the-trainer program subsequently became core modules in the MNSJ’s EPL repertoire and are worth analyzing. I will deal with one particularly influential example here, an interactive “timeline” that collectively generated a historical narrative. Using a long wall-chart, a facilitator led the group (of about 50) in a dialogue centered on the struggle for and development of the Canadian welfare state, which reached back 150 years to the appearance of The Communist Manifesto, and occasionally further—to the French Revolution. Participants were prompted by questions probing ‘why’ things happened when they happened, and how events and trends might have influenced each other. The entry point for discussion was Canada’s major social programs. The facilitator charted the discussion, using colored markers to indicate various historical trajectories of developments in the economy and production, booms and busts, dominant economic theories, the role of the state, social welfare provision, demographics and migration, urbanization and industrialization, elite organizations and elite strategies and the persistent

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presence of socialist, communist, labor and other progressive social movements. This was an extremely powerful educational process, woven from the fragments of people’s own knowledge and experience, knit together by a skilled and knowledgeable facilitator but always in a way that was explicit about the provisional character of the interpretation and open to debate about the explanation of relationships among complex phenomena. Activists drew heavily on political economy discourses in developing their own critical perspective on the welfare state. No single source or school of thought adequately addressed their need for analyses that were critical and historical, incorporated a class perspective, understood the history of the welfare state in the context of a larger capitalist political economy, and incorporated the agency of a range of social movements in the making and un-making of the post-war order. EPL activists who developed and facilitated the workshops supplemented political economy narratives of Fordism, the Keynesian Welfare State and their crises 18 with histories of social movements: the first wave of the women’s movement, turn-of-the century urban reform movements, abolitionist and temperance movements, and movements for public education and for the nine-hour day; from the 1930s: the social gospel, history of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (pre-cursor to the NDP), and the movement for industrial unionism; from the 1960s: the second wave of the women’s movement, civil rights, anti-war, student, ecological, lesbian and gay liberation movements; and from the 1980s: the anti-nuclear and environmental movements, AIDS activism, the pro-choice movement, anti-Apartheid and Central America solidarity, and the movement against free trade. The MNSJ’s emergent perspective (always emergent, always oral) proposed a range of interrelated conjunctural factors for the post-war boom: the generalization of Fordist mass production and Taylorist scientific management; mass consumption supported by full employment policies; rising wages, and the expansion of universal social programs, undergirded by Keynesian macroeconomic management in a virtuous circle contained within the political and regulatory framework of the nationstate. A broad and unwritten consensus between labor and capital and mediated by the nation-state created the conditions for post-war growth and the development of the welfare state. The Marshall Plan, the massive military spending of the Cold War and countless little ‘hot wars’ functioned both as international economic stimulation and as containment of the Communist threat. Massive resource extraction and cheap oil, largely from the Third World, fueled a second industrial revolution in the North. More benevolently, the massive post-war expansion in public investment in schools, hospitals, universities, housing and communications and transportation infrastructure was provoked by the still-recent memory of the

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Depression and newly discovered confidence in the capacities of governments, in the aftermath of World War Two, to manage the economy and provide social security as rights of citizenship. Massive immigration flows augmented the industrial workforce and consumer base, and transformed the ethno-cultural makeup of the population even as, until the 1970s, immigration was largely restricted to those of European origin. MNSJ activists concluded that the welfare state had been a historic achievement in which large majorities in First World societies enjoyed greater measures of social security, equality and social citizenship than at any other time in the modern era. Moreover, this achievement had to be seen as the result of a unique historical conjuncture, which was created and sustained in part by the agency of popular organizations and movements. The world-historical significance of socialism was pivotal: as a tradition of understanding and problematizing capitalism, as the basis for oppositional politics in capitalist societies, and as a massive geo-political reality that shaped political struggles and landscapes globally. Although an unparalleled achievement, the so-called ‘golden age’ was not golden for everyone, globally, nor within Keynesian welfare state societies. The seemingly virtuous circle of ever-expanding mass production—mass consumption was not socially desirable, ecologically sustainable, nor globally replicable even as many meanings and practices of social citizenship that expanded under welfare state regimes remained relevant and desirable. The increasingly apparent contradictions of the KWS suggested a profound task for progressive movements in re-imagining a radical politics, even as they were increasingly consumed with defending welfare regimes that up to the 1990s had been the target of critique and pressures for expansion and democratization. Scholars agree that the post-war regime went into worldwide crisis between the mid-1960s and early 1970s, but their explanations vary widely. The range of explanatory factors includes: a crisis in the labor process, in Taylorist modes of production and in Fordism; a crisis in US hegemony in the world economy precipitated by the increasing competitiveness of Germany and Japan, diminishing returns from the generalization of Fordist technologies and declining productivity; the escalating costs of the Cold War and the US loss of the war in Vietnam; the growing antiwar and other protest movements and increasing labor militancy; a crisis of profit; the growing phenomenon of globalization, de-industrialization of the center and corporate tax evasion, stagnation accompanied by persistent inflation and the real/perceived/ created crisis of Keynesianism, the de-linking of the US dollar from the gold standard, ballooning government deficits and a fiscal crisis of the state (Lipietz 1992; McBride and Shields 1993; Cox 1987).

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What disappears in these political-economic accounts of the crisis is the array of mass popular social forces that erupted worldwide in the late 1960s and early 1970s, challenging the legitimacy of the post-war global order and its national and regional variants and demanding radical change. Without claiming that these movements were universally radical or coherent in their perspectives and demands, MNSJ activists were concerned to account for their eruption and impact. The presence of the ‘new social movements’ also suggests that the crisis of the 1970s was not simply or narrowly an economic crisis. It also signaled a profound challenge to the prevailing order that had social, cultural, political and countless other dimensions.19 This reading of the Keynesian welfare state and the crisis of the postwar era provided a way for activists to understand the 1980s and 1990s in Canada as a counter-revolutionary period. Although facilitated by new technologies and rhetoric of the inevitability of globalization, ‘economic restructuring’ was secured by ideological commitments to ‘neoliberalism.’ By the late 1980s, the political terrain in Canada had been transformed. With the struggle over free trade and the defeat of the popular movements, the stage was set for a ‘war of maneuver’ by the neoliberal revolutionaries. This was the context in which the MNSJ emerged. Developing an account of the post-war era and its crisis, undergirded by critical political economy discourses, was enormously powerful for activists in the MNSJ. It enabled a far more complex understanding of the present than had been previously available to them. Although MNSJ activists had previously drawn on political economy analyses of discrete issues, situating the struggles of the 1990s within a larger and longer historical narrative illuminated political struggle in the present in new ways. It provoked new questions and suggested different kinds of politics with different strategies and time horizons. The most adequate facilitations of the timeline process explicitly emphasized and illustrated that processes of historical change are complex, that there are many forces interacting all the time, that there are no simple cause-and-effect equations explaining events, and that there are debates and competing interpretations.20 The timeline did not reflect nor generate a general theory. Rather, it reflected an eclectic approach, drawing insight from a range of competing theoretical frameworks and disciplines and incorporating activist knowledges. The weaving of histories, theories, memories and experiences in the creation of the timeline reflected activists’ desire to incorporate and theorize about the agency of activist forebears and, by extension, to assert the significance of their own agency. However, the make-up of each audience nuanced the discussion in very different ways. The presence of immigrant

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activists pushed the need to more thoroughly ‘globalize’ the narrative, to integrate movements and events in the South as also shaping the context for struggle in Canada. Environmentalists pushed for the incorporation of the ecological story unfolding beneath, above and within the human one. Activists rooted in equity-seeking movements urged the integration of questions of gender, race and sexuality. Their presence in these sessions added innumerable dimensions to the story, pointed to gaps in the collective understanding and the need for more thinking and research. As a process, the timeline embodied an approach and some interpretive keys to the understanding of history (and, by extension, the present context) that MNSJ activists sought to inculcate in the trainees and subsequent audiences. At its best, the timeline was presented as a collective exercise in producing a reading of a history. Participants were cautioned against concluding that this was a final authoritative or comprehensive version of history, indeed that such a version existed. This did not imply that the narrative was fictitious. Rather, activists had produced an account informed by their critical appropriation of history and theory, shaped by their identities and concerns as activists in Canada in the 1990s. It was their ongoing and collective responsibility to interrogate the data and interpretations underpinning the narrative, and to constantly revise and expand it in light of growing experience and attempts to more adequately integrate diverse perspectives from all the critical movements.21 The timeline process became the centerpiece of dozens of community workshops conducted over a three-year period. It was expanded and revised extensively. This kind of repeated, collective and constantly self-correcting exercise is essential to nurturing the processes of collective identity formation that are central to movement building. To the extent that the MNSJ was engaged in these processes, it was engaged in practices of cultural transformation. To the extent that activists were self-conscious in these ways about what they were doing, they were creating through their practices a new, powerful, broad-based democratic politics.

KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN THE MNSJ: SOME CONCLUSIONS From 1992 to 1997, the MNSJ was the site of a rich and multi-faceted praxis of knowledge production that was situated within and helped constitute the praxis of the MNSJ as a whole. Activists regularly evaluated and revised their practices. They experimented with entirely new approaches in light of the changing context, their accumulating experience and their growing sense of the MNSJ as a political project-in-process. New knowledges were

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produced in new ways as a diverse group of activists and organizations sustained a unique political space in which commitments to grassroots capacity building, democratic organizational development, participatory knowledge creation and broad-based campaigning were held in tension. New experiments in knowledge production in the MNSJ reflected the ‘new times’ as a period of profound transformation in which available critical knowledges were increasingly experienced as inadequate. Activists had to actively create new practices and discourses. They did not spin their knowledges from nothing. They drew on pre-existing critical threads, but they drew them together and added to them and produced new perspectives and practices in response to a new political conjuncture. Activists also came to recognize a persistent distance and tension between academic and activist knowledges. In the MNSJ’s knowledge production work, over time and with experience, activists acted out of growing convictions that activist knowledge exists and is an indispensable knowledge for politics. Grounded in practice, it is driven by particular needs and questions often not in the foreground of academic knowledges. Further, taking activists’ questions seriously involves a re-making of formal knowledges, including emancipatory knowledges, and activist preoccupations with agency, hope, vision, strategy and organization provide alternative starting points for knowledge production, in and beyond social movements. In its economic and political literacy work, the MNSJ forged an innovative space and practice of knowledge production in combining, in a sustained and mutually informing way, the following aspects: an activistled and action-driven character; embeddedness in a social movement organization; accountability to a broad, democratic organizational base; a base in a “world city” and integration into an agenda of urban movement building; the dialogical relationships between activists and experts, between educator-activists and other activists, and with a popular base; and the multiple and interconnected levels and processes through which knowledge production occurred—including popular community workshops, facilitator education and training, and advanced seminars for activist leaders. Through their engagement in the processes described above, EPL activists came to recognize the social character of all knowledge. Also embedded in the work was an understanding of the partial and situated character of their own, and all, knowledges. In practice, the MNSJ’s most mature EPL work acknowledged the dialogical processes through which their knowledges, and all knowledges, are produced. The intentional production of democratic knowledges depends on making this insight explicit and central to the development of knowledge production practices.

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Being committed to popular capacity building, participatory process and democratic knowledge production does not mean that MNSJ activists had no substantive analysis or position. In community workshops and elsewhere, activists set out to teach content: critical perspectives on the history of the welfare state, on the debt, about the Metro budget or the FSSR. MNSJ facilitators and conference organizers had well-developed perspectives, which they sought to communicate. Acknowledging the partial and situated nature of one’s own knowledge does not imply an absence or shelving of political commitment or the lack of reliable knowledges for politics. The activists brought strongly held values and commitments and a collective perspective to their EPL work. But they were not the conduits of a fixed analysis or body of knowledge to which they were seeking adherents. That is not to say MNSJ activists were disinterested in people’s response. All were intensely interested in building a political and organizational base, inculcating an alternative common sense and nurturing an alternative culture. Knowledge production in the MNSJ was simultaneously open and committed, substantive and anti-dogmatic. Stuart Hall expresses the tension as one between openness and closure: Although cultural studies as a project is open-ended, it can’t simply be pluralist . . . Yes, it refuses to be a master discourse or a meta-discourse of any kind. Yes, it is a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name. But it does have some will to connect; it does have some stake in the choices it makes . . . That is the tension—the dialogic approach to theory . . . I don’t believe knowledge is closed, but I do believe that politics is impossible without what I have called ‘the arbitrary closure’; without what Homi Bhabha called social agency as an arbitrary closure . . . It is a question of positionalities [that] . . . are never final (Hall 1993:99).

The increasingly unsatisfying encounter between MNSJ activists and critical political economy discourses can be understood, in part, in these terms. Critical political economy provided the ‘master discourse’ for much of the MNSJ’s knowledge production processes. Activists employed it dialogically with their audiences and they amply and eclectically augmented it. Critical political economy narratives provided powerful and compelling interpretations of the history of the twentieth century, and they are indispensable to any intelligent activism in the contemporary period. But there remain enduring frustrations with the terms of political economy as a discourse. Persistent questions about the incorporation of gender, race, and sexuality as categories of analysis, about challenges raised

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by ecological limits and the failure of ‘development,’ and about social movements as sources of knowledge, agency, politics and hope seemingly could not be addressed within this discourse. Political economy remains the master discourse of left politics, and therein lies a problem. Activists need anti-capitalist knowledges. But they also need discourses that are open and flexible enough to engage with the knowledges arising from other social struggles that are proceeding on different terms. If all knowledges are socially produced and emancipatory pedagogies are dialogical, then intentionally organizing knowledge production for social movements has meant that questions of process, power and participation must be central. Who participates and under what conditions, informed by what experiences, concerns and values, directly and powerfully shapes the character of the knowledge produced, with its attendant insights, specificities and inevitable gaps. This philosophy of knowledge and its production intersects directly with concerns about democratic functioning. The democratic culture of the MNSJ was fertile terrain for the development of these theories of knowledge and this praxis of knowledge production. Likewise, deep-seated commitments to broad-based capacity building, which are grounded, implicitly or explicitly, in appreciation of knowledge from below and commitments to democratizing ‘expert’ and hegemonic knowledges, are central to inculcating new, deeper and more genuine forms of democracy. This is relevant for all democratic political communities, however defined. Attention in practice to these dynamics of knowledge/power and democracy was central to the political capacities and creativity that, for a time, were unleashed in, through and by the MNSJ. Conclusions drawn from reflecting on these social movement processes in the MNSJ are instructive for anyone concerned about and engaged in renewing broad-based democratic and emancipatory politics. Hardly anyone in the MNSJ debated knowledge and power in the abstract. The philosophies of knowledge/power that came to characterize the MNSJ’s EPL work in particular emerged organically in and through activist engagements with a rapidly changing political context. Particularly through the struggle over the 1995 budget, many EPL activists began to think that social transformation was not just a matter of power and who had it; it was also a matter of knowledge and how to generate new emancipatory knowledges from below.

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Chapter Five

Contesting the Neoliberal City: Campaign Praxis in the MNSJ

The organizing and orchestrating of broad-based pressure campaigns was one of the most important ways knowledge was produced in the MNSJ. The discourses and practices of the MNSJ’s public politics provide another way to study processes of identity formation and knowledge creation. This chapter focuses on the MNSJ’s urban-oriented campaign praxis—its broadbased efforts to exert pressure for change on the Metro budget, in municipal elections, on property tax reform and on the restructuring of governance in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). This account of the MNSJ’s campaign praxis testifies to the 1990s as a political watershed in Canada and beyond. The intensifying neoliberal revolution and the resulting disorientation, debates and conflicts provoked experimentation and innovation in activist politics. In the midst of mounting struggles and defeats, activists faced governments impervious to popular pressure and a mass media hostile to their perspectives and actions. In response, modes of activism in the MNSJ were increasingly characterized by theater and protest accompanied by growing commitments to cultural transformation through popular education and capacity building. Over the period discussed here, MNSJ activists came to understand themselves as engaged in a politics of ‘urban movement building,’ enlarging their sense of the urban from municipal budgets and government to advancing claims and engaging in practices that contested hegemonic visions of the city and its future. This account highlights the neoliberal revolution as a specifically urban project that evoked the development of an urban politics in the MNSJ. The story of the MNSJ is one thread in larger narratives of world-city formation underway in Toronto in the 1990s. One of the most significant transformations in activist practice through the 95

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1990s was this changing cultural politics of scale, from being contained and defined by the scalar politics of national post-war welfare states to a local—global politics. The MNSJ’s campaign organizing on the Metro budget and municipal elections involved a re-scaling of popular politics in the city in at least two ways. As early as 1991–2 and the FightBack Metro! campaign, activists were confronted with the need to “jump scales,” from the ‘local’ to the ‘metropolitan’ or ‘regional.’ This involved finding prospective partners and building activist and organizational networks across the downtown—suburban divides and practicing, however unevenly or inchoately, a new kind of popular metropolitan politics. The need to do so was presented by the scale of Metro Council, its responsibilities for key social programs, and the crisis created by cutbacks in social services. The other re-scaling aspect involved the recognition that the metropolitan government’s fiscal crisis had been created by dynamics beyond the ‘local,’ invoked by new scalar processes/politics commonly referred to as globalization. This recognition was provoking a profound challenge in practice to the scalar politics of the post-war era, including its movement politics, to which FightBack Metro! and subsequently the Metro Network for Social Justice were heirs. This question of scale persisted and was transformed as the coalition began to grapple with what it was to be a metrowide coalition, based in a major Canadian city, at a time when the post-war welfare state was being restructured at, and by, all levels of government. Among MNSJ activists, the political dilemmas were surfacing not as an abstract debate about scale but, more concretely, about how to mobilize popular democratic power to effect change in the city and beyond in an era of globalization. In the MNSJ’s campaign organizing, base-, organization-, coalitionand capacity building proceeded together. The campaign praxis of the MNSJ was intricately interwoven with the other arenas of praxis, notably those of organization and knowledge production. These arenas of praxis are co-constitutive and jointly defined the MNSJ in the period under consideration. The campaign practices of the MNSJ functioned to attract, consolidate and develop the base, which was central to the constitution of the MNSJ as an organization and to its developing political character and capacities. The base and the political practices were in a constant dialectical relationship in which one (re)produced and transformed the other. Also in dialectical relation with both were the political orientations, interpretations, knowledges arising from both and the relations between them.1

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THE METRO BUDGET AND THE MAKING OF THE MNSJ Campaign work on the Metro budget was central in constituting the Network, its identity and politics, organizational form and processes. The history and memory of FightBack Metro! were deeply influential in decisions to prioritize annual struggles over the Metro budget. The make-up of the MNSJ’s membership base was also decisive. Many organizations in which the MNSJ found a deep purchase were also ones whose organizational survival was tied to the MNSJ’s advocacy work on the Metro budget. For those in the Network concerned with movement- and organization-building, the Metro budget was a bread-and-butter campaign of the MNSJ in servicing its members and broadening its base. It provided a political opportunity to organize a large and significant constituency and outreach to groups that could be assumed to have similar perspectives but were not yet part of the Network. The budget was, by its very nature, multi-issue and multi-sectoral. It required cross-sectoral collaboration. It lent itself to educating toward a broader politics—on public finance, public spending, the character of our society and our city, and on ‘the economy.’ It also provided for skills development and capacity building. So, while the membership base was decisive in constituting the politics and priorities of the Network, specifically on the Metro budget, the Network’s concrete political practices in addressing the Metro budget, in turn, were decisive in constituting, consolidating, and developing the base. Within months of the founding of the MNSJ, the Metro budget was again the focus of a major organizing effort. The provincial New Democratic Party government brought down a historic “expenditure control” minibudget and initiated its so-called “social contract” negotiations. As a result of the announced cuts in provincial transfers, Metro Council reopened its 1993 budget in May, looking to cut $75 million through a 7.5 percent budget cut across the board. On very short notice, the MNSJ organized for Management Committee deputations, with a message protesting the antidemocratic process, including the complete lack of information from Metro Council about proposed cuts (MNSJ 1993h). Summer mobilization, again marked by mass deputations, media work, targeted lobbying and mass presence, preserved the 1993 grants allocations to community agencies, which in this political context was an extraordinary achievement. The eventual outcome of the 1993 budget saw the Community Services and Housing (CSH) budget cut by between $3 million and $4 million, compared to the police cut of $1.5 million (MNSJ 1995r).

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But the signals about the 1994 budget were already grim. On 11 August 1993, anticipating the 1994 budget, Metro Council voted to ask the CSH department to cut a further 11.8 per cent from its 1994 budget. Other departments were asked for 7.5 percent cuts. The depth of the cut was a result both of the cuts in provincial transfers and a shortfall of $35.4 million in property tax revenue for 1993 (MNSJ 1993g). A special MNSJ Steering Committee meeting was convened on 1 September to devise strategy (MNSJ 1993f). By end of September, the “86-cent solution” had been formulated, MNSJ lobby kits were in production and the Social Planning Council had hired a half-time organizer on a six-month contract to support MNSJ’s Metro budget work.2 A working group, separate from the steering committee but accountable to it, incorporated an expanding number of activists drawn from the membership base and beyond. Anticipating the public outcry, the CSH committee committed to hearing public deputations in the City Council chambers. The demands to depute forced the committee to meet until after midnight and to extend hearings for the whole of the following day. Sixty people deputed, at least 55 of whom were connected to the MNSJ (CSH Committee of Metro Council 1993). All the MNSJ deputants argued that the CSH budget had been unfairly targeted again, that there should be no more cuts to CSH and that savings should be found in other departments to offset the burden on seniors and children. The MNSJ’s promotion of a small property tax increase of 86 cents per household per month (“less than the cost of a cup of coffee”), was aimed at avoiding any further cuts (MNSJ 1993i) (Coutts 1993). The CSH committee voted to reduce the cuts to 8.5 per cent in the face of public pressure orchestrated by the MNSJ and recommendations advanced by Metro staff. The centerpiece of the 1994 MNSJ campaign was the organizing of a broad-based, cross-sectoral lobby of all Metro Councillors. This choice reflected a growing sense that deputations from organizations or in the name of the Network, no matter how many or how well argued, did not produce the necessary votes to protect the CSH budget. The right to depute had been too recently won to take for granted, and deputations provided political moments and media opportunities too important to ignore. Pressure generated through mass presence at key votes had had an impact on the outcomes and this approach remained central. However, Councillors had to feel enough heat from their constituents that their re-election was in question. There was, therefore, a shift in lobby strategies from previous campaigns, from the MNSJ mobilizing its member organizations, service providers and people directly affected, to mobilizing “residents” and “voters.” The MNSJ urged its groups to mobilize their volunteer base to lobby and depute (Clutterbuck 1993).

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Activists produced a lobby kit encapsulating the proposed cuts and impacts and presenting the MNSJ’s position. The kit also provided a history of mobilization against the cuts since 1991. Easy-to-read presentation of “critical issues” discussed the ongoing struggle to demonstrate public support for community services, Council’s avoidance of a debate on priorities through across-the-board cuts, the “big picture” beyond Metro of a deep economic recession, high levels of unemployment and cuts in federal and provincial transfers, growing anti-tax sentiment among Metro Councillors and beyond, and the persistence of a complex and anti-democratic process at Metro Council. The kit provided essential organizing information about Metro Council’s timeline and the MNSJ’s campaign plans. It also included practical resources on how to make a deputation, how to identify one’s Councillor, and how to effectively lobby him or her. As an activity of the MNSJ, the lobby campaign promoted networking and capacity building among participants. The kit was an instrumental device designed to produce an effective lobby, but it was also a pedagogical resource for participants engaged in a larger educational process. The kit incorporated a built-in feedback loop from lobby activities to the MNSJ through lobby report forms. It also promoted the MNSJ as a coalition and provided information on how and why to affiliate (MNSJ 1993a). This is one example of how organization-, base-, and capacity building were knit together in and through campaign activities. Within the Network, significant research and discussion continued on budget alternatives, notably the property tax system, on collection and non-payment of taxes, and in debates about tax reform like ‘market value assessment.’ There were also questions about Metro’s reserve funds, what they were for, when it was deemed acceptable to spend them and on what, in terms of generally accepted corporate accounting practices. In light of cuts to Metro’s Homes for the Aged and growing public concern over deteriorating conditions, activists debated the merits of getting more informed about long-standing and complex policy debates on long-term care. The newly elected Liberal government in Ottawa was sending signals about a public infrastructure program. What did the MNSJ think about spending on physical infrastructure when social programs and human service jobs were being cut? What did activists know about Metro’s capital budget! Activists were engaged in a never-ending struggle to decipher the volumes of paper generated by Metro staff, Council and committees and to grasp the technical aspects of the operating budget before they could attempt to interpret it politically or generate any credible budget alternatives. As in other arenas, MNSJ activists sought out critical expertise beyond their immediate circles and beyond Metro staff and friendly politicians.3

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By February, the MNSJ had further elaborated its menu of budget alternatives to advocate use of “capital from current” reserves.4 In the context of the federal-provincial-municipal infrastructure program and a highprofile debate on the merits of a special infrastructure levy, the Network also argued for a dedicated one percent tax increase for social infrastructure and one per cent for physical infrastructure (MNSJ 1994g). By 9 February and its deputation to Council on the infrastructure tax, the Network had elaborated a full-blown Keynesian argument on the stimulative effect of social spending (MNSJ 1994d; Coutts 1994). Activists seized on a political moment created by broad political support for investment in subways in a context otherwise overwhelmed by anti-government, anti-public sector and anti-tax sentiments.5 An effective lobby effort remained central, however. Concerned to inject life into a flagging lobby campaign, MNSJ activists conceived of a centralized lobby day at Metro to take place on Valentine’s Day, with the slogan “Have a heart, Metro!” (MNSJ 1993l). The MNSJ booked a room at Metro Hall and set up a ‘drop-in center’ with food and drinks, balloons and flowers. Member groups were targeted to mobilize their staff, volunteers and/or clients as residents of the city. Having the MNSJ organize a lobby centrally and concentrating efforts on one day meant that organizationally based groups could get mobilized together, even if they did not all share the same councillor. Participants registered and, if they wished, were briefed and accompanied by MNSJ Steering Committee members to visit their councillors. Appointments had been set up in advance by MNSJ organizers, and delegations were finalized as people gathered in the drop-in from different organizations and far-flung parts of Metro Toronto. Large wall charts aided people in identifying their councillors and any others present who were prepared to meet with the councillor. The ‘drop-in’ was filled with small groups buzzing over juice and muffins, planning their meetings, reading the lobby kit, meeting with MNSJ leaders, or reporting back on how their meeting had gone. The event included visits by children from two daycare programs, who presented Valentines at Metro Chairman Alan Tonks’ office. A media conference was organized at the ‘drop-in,’ and good television and print coverage helped both create a sense of momentum and hope for activists and lobby participants and put pressure on Metro Council (MNSJ 1994e) (Brent 1994). The MNSJ campaign climaxed in early March with mass presence and deputations to the final Management Committee meeting before the decisive budget votes at Council. Rather than again organize overwhelming numbers of deputations, MNSJ activists proposed a joint presentation witnessed by a mass turn-out that would capture in a powerful and synthetic

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way the public defense of community services, present a final argument on the existence of credible budget alternatives, and highlight a recent report by CUPE on dramatically deteriorating conditions in Metro’s Homes for the Aged (MNSJ 1994m). Speaking with One Voice is a powerful 20-page document that, among other things, chronicles and measures direct participation in the MNSJ’s 1993–94 campaign, through deputations, lobbying, letter writing and petitions and measures the representativeness of the MNSJ through a survey of groups participating in the campaign. The deputation was an explicit rejoinder to claims by prominent Metro Councillors that there was no public support for community services and that hundreds of deputants could be dismissed as ‘special interests’ (MNSJ 1994cc). With the final budget votes of 9 March, the CSH budget was cut by $15.5 million or 12.5 per cent. The rest of Metro’s departments were cut by 7.5 per cent, except the police, who once again got a bailout.6 There was a zero percent tax increase, which meant participation in the federal infrastructure program proceeded at the expense of other Metro services. A key vote on the CSH budget to restore funding cut from Homes for the Aged and grants to community agencies lost by two votes. Some specific programs, notably emergency dental care for people on welfare, were spared. And Council agreed to the principle of reinvesting CSH budget surpluses in CSH programs, although they would later renege on this. Several critical reflection processes occurred in the MNSJ following the 1994 Metro budget campaign in the working group, by the MNSJ Steering Committee and at an open community evaluation event (MNSJ 1994j; MNSJ 1994k; Kent 1994; MNSJ 1994i; MNSJ 1994h). The multiple facets and increased scale, quality and creativity of the campaign organizing were celebrated, as were the increased level and scope of organizational and individual participation. The campaign was strongly affirmed as an instance of base building for the MNSJ, of cross-sectoral networking and collaboration more broadly, of growing collective political, policy and campaign expertise and of education and skill development for all who participated. Yet, despite the enormous resources (by MNSJ standards) poured into the campaign, the impact in terms of budget outcomes had been negligible. Participants agreed that the MNSJ’s presence had made a significant difference. The razor-thin voting margin of two in the last major budget vote represented a big leap for the MNSJ in terms of visibility and public pressure (MNSJ 1994k). But to get the critical mass of councillors on side in budget decisions, the MNSJ would have to do more sustained, face-to-face work with politicians and key people in the media. Activists also debated the merits of mass protest and other more confrontational expressions of anger and

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whether the MNSJ should consider civil disobedience. While some were willing to consider this, others feared it would jeopardize gains made with councillors through lobbying and the MNSJ’s credibility with the more ‘mainstream’ social agencies (MNSJ 1994h; Kent 1994). The accumulating experience of fighting budget cuts at Metro was also raising questions—beyond those of effective tactics—about the raison d’être of the MNSJ. Campaign organizers asked those present at the community evaluation to consider whether and why the Metro budget should continue to be a priority for the MNSJ (MNSJ 1994k). Many spoke in favor of continuing the Metro budget work because it was a way of mobilizing a wide cross-section of community interests on a broad, multi-issue agenda. It provided openings for larger political and policy debates over taxation and public provision, the public sector and public infrastructure. These issues transcended the Metro budget. They were expressive of contestations arising from globalized processes and neoliberal discourses of economic and political restructuring, and the Metro budget was a place to concretize, localize and resist them. Another important argument for continuing work on the Metro budget was the recognition that it took time to develop expertise, the wisdom of building on this investment, and the danger for the MNSJ of skipping (and being seen to skip) from issue to issue. Expertise and constancy on the budget were linked to building credibility with Metro Councillors, the public and the MNSJ’s base. One participant deadpanned to great laughter and approval: “Determined persistence is a revolutionary virtue.” Generating alternatives remained urgent. At this stage in the MNSJ’s discussions, conceptualizing alternatives was limited to fiscal strategies for governments. This was continuous with developments among the anti-free trade left. However, some in the community evaluation process were beginning to press beyond this in speaking to the need for “long-term solutions” and the dangers inherent in defending an inadequate and shrinking welfare state. The community evaluation evolved into an open-ended discussion about what social justice in the city would look like and how it might be advanced concretely and politically. Would producing an ‘alternative budget’ be a way of developing an alternative vision of the city and mission for the MNSJ? What about possible linkages with social justice forces in other cities? Was it possible to imagine a campaign that would link all social justice forces, in the city and beyond? Where were the Action Canada Network and the Ontario Coalition for Social Justice and what were their roles in connecting forces on the ground (Kent 1994) (MNSJ 1994h)? Although as yet there was no explicit discourse of urban politics, there were many urban dimensions to the MNSJ’s campaign work. In addition to

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the focus on the metropolitan government and its budget, attempts to build a citywide social base and a citywide network of locally rooted organizations expressed a nascent geo-political and movement-building strategy in urban space. The shift in the MNSJ’s political discourse from the mobilizing of stakeholders and allies (program users, workers, service organizations and their supporters) to residents of the city arguing about the character of their city was a strategic response to the dismissal of claims as those of ‘special interest groups.’ Implicitly, it also marked a shift from the discourses of the Keynesian welfare state to, in this case, popular democratic claims to the city. An implicit politics of multiple scales was underway in activists’ recognition of the effects of the provincial government’s social contract and their choice to focus the MNSJ’s resistance to it in terms of its effects on social provision in the city, even as the Network also participated in solidarity actions with public sector labor unions whose activities were concentrated in Toronto but whose campaigns proceeded largely in provincial terms. Likewise, response to the federal government’s infrastructure program was crafted in terms of the city’s politics and the Metro budget. Political interpretations of the budget and politics of Metro Council continued to draw on activists’ critical analysis of the politics of globalization and political-economic restructuring perceived largely in national-international terms. But their political activism enacted a sustained recognition and insistence that Metro Council did not have to simply accept and administer the terms set by provincial and federal governments, nor indeed by ‘globalization.’ Even at this early stage in the MNSJ’s political experience, in reflecting on their work, activists were groping for ways of enacting a politics of social justice beyond reactions to policy announcements or interventions in the Metro budget and their yearnings were expressed in terms of ‘social justice in the city.’

FROM THE METRO BUDGET TO THE MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS Even as the 1994 campaign on the Metro budget was in full swing, the MNSJ Steering Committee turned its attention to the upcoming municipal elections. A working group met early that winter. They quickly agreed that the MNSJ should focus its energy on the Metro level, as opposed to the local cities and school boards, and that the Network should not be involved in running or endorsing candidates (MNSJ 1994n). The latter reflected the firmly non-partisan nature of the Network. Both decisions were an acknowledgement of the strengths and limits of the common knowledge, experience and resource base of the MNSJ. Practically speaking, there were

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28 Metro wards, six mayoralty races, and dozens of city and school board seats. MNSJ activists could not realistically imagine affecting a fraction of those campaigns, nor would focusing on a few wards make sense to a network whose organizational base was scattered all over the metropolitan region.7 By early spring, the major campaign components had been determined. The choice of these components flowed directly from the campaign work on the budget. A ‘broadsheet’ would educate the MNSJ’s base and broader public about the major areas of the community services budget, incorporate a voting record and include basic descriptions of Council’s roles and responsibilities. A media strategy would target key journalists and media outlets to pressure for more and better comment and coverage. ‘Accountability sessions’ with Metro Councillors would be organized by community groups in their wards, which the MNSJ campaign would support through materials and training (MNSJ 1994p). From the outset, the campaign was prominently about building the organizational and activist base of the MNSJ (Clutterbuck 1994b) and oriented to a politics of movement building over electoral outcomes (MNSJ 1994a). Thinking about the proposed accountability sessions was catapulted forward when Delta Childcare Network, a community agency in North York, approached the MNSJ for assistance in developing a workshop focused on civic education in a particular catchment area. They saw a need for basic education about the different levels of government. They were concerned to reach groups of newcomers to Canada and to work with ethno-specific groups in ways that would help people understand the political system, identify what politicians represented them, and how to access their elected representatives to make their voices heard, even if they were not yet Canadian citizens (MNSJ 1994z). This request prompted a shift from accountability sessions to an innovative organizing process anchored in community-based political literacy workshops.8 Workshops facilitated discussion among participants about how they could intervene in the election, provided information about voting while acknowledging that voting alone would have little positive impact, and generated local strategies to maintain pressure on whoever got elected. The workshops also increased the visibility and built the organizing capacity of the MNSJ in different Metro neighborhoods (MNSJ 1994v; MNSJ 1994aa; MNSJ 1994b). Interest in accountability sessions was now focused not on organizing them directly, but on encouraging residents to go to all-candidates’ meetings in their areas. The MNSJ’s contribution would be to prepare people to intervene effectively in those meetings and to suggest a menu of simple,

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doable neighborhood-based interventions that would be politically efficacious and not dependent on citizenship status. These included neighborhood canvases, creating stickers on locally defined issues, or organizing to pressure incumbents (MNSJ 1994o). Organizers voiced concerns about how to measure the success of such an approach, but with the dearth of good candidates across Metro and a huge wave of cynicism about the NDP in the wake of the social contract, MNSJ activists were generally agreed that the most promising approach was to build capacity in poor communities to keep those elected on their toes. The political literacy aspects of the campaign became a central angle in launching the campaign and the broadsheet Metro Votes! in the media that fall (MNSJ 1994f) (MNSJ 1994u). Not all progressive forces in the city supported the MNSJ’s priority on capacity building. Different sectors of the labor movements were engaged in surveying and endorsing candidates at the Metro, city and school board levels. The arts community had convened an ad hoc coalition, ArtsVote, which, although concerned about aligning support for the arts with community services, was also very electorally focused. An ad hoc committee, trying to resurrect Reform Toronto’s newspaper, The Badger, was also frustrated at MNSJ’s reticence to address issues beyond community services at Metro and its determination to avoid endorsing candidates. By election day, the MNSJ had distributed over 15,000 broadsheets, done 32 community workshops over a six-week period, and had virtually no impact on the media, either in terms of positive comment or coverage of the Network’s concerns. Again, the campaign had been extremely resource intensive for the Network for almost a year prior and had relied heavily on scarce, paid time contributed by a few member groups, student placements and the half-time Social Planning Council staff dedicated to the MNSJ. In the public evaluation meeting following the campaign, there was great enthusiasm for the workshops. While functioning as a mobilization strategy and serving a campaign, the workshops also reflected an emergent commitment to a long-term capacity building process. There was also great support for the voting record. Both were regarded as major break-throughs in campaign organizing and know-how (MNSJ 1994x) (MNSJ 1994w). Research for the voting record had been a difficult and tedious process, full of pitfalls.9 Relying on NDP councillors to identify the critical votes left the Network open to charges of political bias in the choice of data for its voting record. Despite the problems, the development of a voting record had proved to be a popular and powerful tool for the MNSJ and became a frequent feature of subsequent campaigns on the Metro budget and municipal elections. But MNSJ organizers had to learn for themselves how to decipher complex decision-making processes at Metro and decide for themselves

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what votes were key and representative of councillors’ positions. Once again, over-reliance on NDP councillors had proven a problem. Although prioritizing capacity building was strongly affirmed, there remained ambivalence about the costs and implications of such a choice. Some participants pressed questions about concrete outcomes and how to track them. In the MNSJ’s Municipal Elections Working Group, among those who had been the key architects of the campaign, there was also disquiet about some of the MNSJ’s political and strategic choices. Some activists voiced regret about not being more able to enter into broader ad hoc campaign coalitions. In the wake of conflicts with ArtsVote and others, activists voiced concerns that the focus on community services at the Metro level had been too narrow. Others in the group defended the choices, arguing that they had flowed from who the MNSJ was, its history, expertise, and where its primary organizing capacity lay for a municipal elections campaign. Entering into broader coalitions siphoned off scarce energy and resources from the MNSJ’s ‘core work’ (MNSJ 1994x), which, at this time, was tied to the development and consolidation of its own base. In my view, the tension here pointed to bigger questions of coalition politics. The desire to be all encompassing in political content, to link every issue and activist group, is admirable and reflects the powerful coalitional tendencies of popular politics in Toronto in the 1990s. It represented progress over the single-issue and turf politics more prevalent in earlier periods. However, the downside was a tendency to grandiosity and to campaigns that relied overly on a politically correct ‘message’ or ‘manifesto’ without a realistic assessment of who constituted the popular and organizational base that gave any campaign its ‘legs,’ whether any such base existed, and the limits of its political perspectives or organizational capacities at any given moment. Too often, the constituent parts of coalitions were groups that recognized the need for a broader politics, but, in their dedication to it, ignored their own primary constituencies. The community evaluation reiterated that one of the strengths of the campaign had been its focus, even as many supported the need for a more comprehensive vision of social justice in the city (MNSJ 1994x) (MNSJ 1994w). The strengths of the MNSJ’s approach in this period were a cleareyed take on its own limits and those of its social base and the choice to put capacity building at the center of its campaign work.

KNOWLEDGE IN AND THROUGH CAMPAIGN PRAXIS FOR THE MAKING OF THE MNSJ By late 1994, after three years of budget fighting and a municipal elections campaign, the MNSJ’s approaches to campaigning had been consolidated.

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Competency among activists in planning and executing broad-based pressure campaigns had increased markedly. Sustained and multi-faceted organizing over time was changing the limits of the possible. The scale and scope of campaigns expanded from year to year. But impressive campaign growth and strength did not readily translate into effective pressure, electoral or otherwise. Metro Council remained largely impervious to technical solutions, rational argument, political principles, moral suasion or sustained popular pressure. MNSJ constituencies continued to be dismissed as ‘special interests,’ and community services incurred deep and repeated losses in struggles over the Metro budget. Although there was constant negotiation between ‘pragmatic’ and more ‘political’ approaches to the budget, evolving campaign practices in the MNSJ demonstrated a deepening and widely shared movement-building orientation. This was expressed through the growing centrality of base building, capacity building, organization building and cross-sectoral solidarity in campaign praxis. The MNSJ’s campaign practices in this period were oriented toward building a powerful, broad-based, Metro-wide organization, while simultaneously generating political pressure in the context of an election or budget debate. The production of knowledge for both activists and the base was also increasingly at the center of campaign praxis. Activists needed to generate knowledge in order to produce more credible and effective political perspectives for whatever struggle they were waging. Political argumentation was central to persuading the media, the politicians and the public. More immediately and importantly, it was indispensable in building cohesion, support, and political capacity among the member groups and the broader social base. Democratic and dialogical processes within the MNSJ like AGM discussions, campaign evaluations, and community briefing and strategy sessions produced knowledges for campaigns. Critical pedagogical processes had become constitutive elements of campaign organizing. As activists built on what they had done and learned through earlier campaigns, they were also constantly accumulating and drawing on tacit knowledges. The campaigns were organically embedded in the living history of practices that had gone before. That history was present in the memories and largely unsystematized reflections of the activists and in the evolving habitus of the MNSJ that was itself constituted by these and other practices and memories. Although the three-year period under consideration here may seem too short to support these claims about the importance of history and memory, three years is a long time in a larger activist milieu characterized more by event-based organizing and the episodic formation of ad hoc, short-term and strictly instrumental coalitions.

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Some vague and sporadic awareness of the unnamed dynamics that contributed to activists’ being able to do what they did existed in the MNSJ at the time. But in the heat of campaign organizing with its intensity and attendant exhaustion, the insight and any capacity to reflect on its importance were elusive. The practical implications of recognizing the nature and importance of tacit knowledge are enormous for understanding how social movements might more purposefully and effectively reproduce themselves, their politics, practices and knowledges beyond their immediate times and places. Recognizing tacit knowledges is also relevant for the nature of praxis within any particular activist context, for how movement-based experience gets reflected on and lessons articulated and passed on, within a division of labor among activists and between generations of leaders. Where there was sustained critical reflection, new practices became possible that could not previously have been imagined. Most activists in the MNSJ came to perceive the importance of consistent planning of open community campaign evaluations. The evaluation events themselves became occasions for building the Network and the capacity of activists to reflect critically and politically on their practice and so became central sites for the production of praxis-based knowledges. For all the depth and strength of reflexivity in the MNSJ’s work that these practices express, they were still very focused on ‘the campaign’ at hand and how to improve different aspects for future practice imagined in similar terms. There was little capacity or appetite to tease out deeper implications or questions arising from campaign experience for the MNSJ overall, beyond any one campaign, or for the emergent political project embodied by the MNSJ. The one important exception to this, that also proves the point, was the persistent question of vision. Early campaign evaluations express activist recognition that much of their campaign work was highly reactive. Many participants yearned for something more, without knowing how to imagine it, much less how to act in a different mode. Some pointed to the consistent attention to the development of alternatives and to capacity- and base building as more proactive aspects present in the campaign work. But the overall sense was that the campaign work was, by itself, limited, and that the MNSJ needed to articulate a vision for itself and for social justice in the city. Whenever this proposal surfaced, people were receptive, but for most, the awareness was fuzzy and fleeting. Activists participated in this and subsequent discussions from quite different, perhaps divergent, premises. For some, the vision question was informed both by a conviction that the new times required a thorough-going reformulation of activist politics coupled with a deep uncertainty about how to go about it. For others, it was more simply a

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question of power. The vision and agenda of those in power in the city was antithetical to MNSJ’s, they reasoned. The Network knew what its values were and had to protest the values of those in power in the city. And bigger, better, more effective campaigns were the best, and perhaps only, way to do it. We will return to this debate.

TRICKLE-DOWN NEOLIBERALISM MEETS GLOBALIZING URBAN ELITES In fall 1994, the budget picture at Metro once again looked grim, although for shifting reasons. The economic recession continued to grip the city, and welfare spending remained high. There was major budget fall-out from the NDP’s social contract cuts. A mounting property tax revolt was creating pressure at Metro Council for a zero percent tax increase, or even a property tax cut. Losses from uncollectible property tax revenue approached $60 million, creating a shortfall in 1994 and setting the scene for a bruising 1995 budget debate amid an escalating, business-led anti-tax debate and growing evidence of property tax competition and business flight from Metro to the border cities of the Greater Toronto Area. In the meantime, the Toronto Star embarked on a crusade for the creation of a mega-city, arguing for reformed and streamlined governance to foster international competitiveness, plan region-wide infrastructure and rationalize taxation. The provincial NDP government appointed a Task Force on the Future of the Greater Toronto Area chaired by United Way President Anne Golden in April 1995 with similar terms of reference (MNSJ 1995a). In the MNSJ Steering Committee, activists recognized the need to broaden their budget work. The enormous effects of provincial power on the Metro budget, like the NDP’s social contract, propelled thinking about an inter-governmental approach to the campaign. Progressive organizing among tenants for property tax reform was shifting the tax debate from the left and making budget strategies premised on tax increases more problematic than they already were (MNSJ 1994dd). The escalating public debate on the GTA posed new dilemmas about how to work simultaneously on both the immediate budget threats and the bigger, long-term, and arguably more significant debates unfolding about the future of the city, in which the elites were engaging without reference to the concerns or constituencies of the MNSJ and its allies. It was agreed that the MNSJ’s work should proceed on “two tiers”—on the Metro budget and on “globalization and the GTA.” Building on its earlier budget work, MNSJ activists advocated a whole menu of budget alternatives but framed them within a larger call for political courage, leadership and advocacy from Metro Council in the context of

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debates about the future of the city. In its lobby materials, deputations, and media work, MNSJ pressured Metro Council for its ‘vision’ of the city especially with respect to human services and social infrastructure (critical aspects of urban life, economy and governance), the vision of which was completely absent from Golden’s terms of reference and the Toronto Star’s super-city series. The MNSJ argued that Council should seek fair and equitable revenue solutions within the GTA, rather than accepting tax cuts as the only and obvious response to the property tax crisis (MNSJ 1995d) (Clutterbuck 1995) (Patterson 1995). This approach reflected an assessment that Councillors actually could weigh in on the debate on the future of the city, command some media attention and make a positive difference, even as the terms of the debate were being set elsewhere. MNSJ activists judged that the pressure they could bring to bear on Council was the most effective way they could influence either the GTA debate or decisions at other levels of government affecting the city. Emerging from its own praxis but also reflective of this larger context, the discourse of the MNSJ in its Metro-focused work shifted from defense of ‘the poor’ to defense of ‘the city’ (MNSJ 1995f; MNSJ 1995a).10 Organizing activity on the 1995 Metro budget utilized the MNSJ’s full repertoire of campaign tactics, but in more systematic and effective ways. Contact with the NDP caucus, key bureaucrats, and swing councillors was sustained, and pressure put on them. High-profile, expert witnesses were used to a greater extent. Important collaborations happened with recipients of multicultural grants, with the Toronto Environmental Alliance, and with the influential Ontario Dental Association (ODA).11 Intense work with reporters resulted in more and better media attention. The emergence of FaxLeft, a more technologically developed, cheap, efficient, and effective communications network, enabled more frequent and timely mobilizations. Mass deputations, mass presence at key votes, and sustained broad-based lobbying remained central. More visuals (signs and stickers) and paper snapping made the mass turnouts more assertive, effective, and media-worthy. Toward the culmination of the 1995 Metro budget debate in April, but after the landmark federal budget in February (discussed in the previous chapter), a significant debate took place among activists about the nature of one final budget mobilization at Metro Council. Among those deeply affected by the federal budget, there was preference for a symbolic and dramatic event, with a message geared to the general public through the media about the future of the city. The idea was to have a mass procession into Metro Council, using music to disrupt the proceedings, and to present Councillors with bread and roses as emblematic of the city we wanted. Such an event was not aimed at affecting the outcome of the budget

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vote at hand, but at creating a provocative and compelling image that we hoped would find purchase with the public. Without naming it as such, advocates of this approach were arguing for a fuller and more explicit cultural politics. This choice was based on a reading of Council and the larger political landscape, which indicated that losses were mounting that would not be reversed any time soon and that the MNSJ had to experiment with a new kind of politics. The alternative view held that we were in the midst of a campaign for concrete concessions. Any mass action had to demonstrate anger, make specific demands, and maintain pressure on Councillors to vote against any further cuts in the short term. The debate was brought to the MNSJ Steering Committee. They opted for the latter approach but acknowledged the need for a fuller debate about long-term perspectives (MNSJ 1995e). To everyone’s surprise, the 1995 Metro budget campaign resulted in a partial but significant victory, the first sign of such in four years. Against all odds, the 1995 budget included a modest tax increase and protected a number of programs that had looked very vulnerable (MNSJ 1995w) (MNSJ 1995h) (MNSJ 1995n). There had also been cuts, of course, but considering what had been on the table in the context of a ‘watershed budget’ (Armstrong 1995), the outcome was rightly hailed as a victory.

REVOLUTION FROM ABOVE, INNOVATION FROM BELOW In spring 1995, with the Metro budget struggle temporarily in abeyance, the working group turned its attention to the bigger and longer-term questions that had been submerged by the urgency of the campaign work. These included debates on property tax reform and the restructuring of governance in the GTA (MNSJ 1995n) (MNSJ 1995h) (MNSJ 1995i). Other priorities percolating in the MNSJ included the need for a vision for the city and for the MNSJ’s work in the city and for a longer-term perspective and strategy for social change. By fall 1995, however, the political landscape had transformed yet again. The Conservative government of Mike Harris had been elected in Ontario in June. Their platform, the Common Sense Revolution, prominently featured tax cuts, workfare, repeal of the Employment Equity Act and a wholesale transformation in the scale, role and nature of government. Almost immediately, an ad hoc coalition, “Embarrass Harris,” consolidated; its organizing efforts became a focus for protest and activist energy. There was also a flurry of panicky sector-based, post-election strategy discussions and numerous overtures to the MNSJ requesting participation. Discussion in the MNSJ Steering Committee in June affirmed the need to focus on the longer-term while maintaining presence and support wherever possible. It was

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agreed that the MNSJ not take the lead in organizing anti-Harris protest (MNSJ 1995k). By September, however, the Metro Network Steering Committee judged this position to be no longer tenable. In the wake of announced cuts to the MUSH sector12 and their enormous impact on the Metro budget, attention to vision and long-term strategy in the MNSJ evaporated in favor of participation in the swelling fightback (MNSJ 1995l). In the wake of the 1995 federal budget and the onset of the Common Sense Revolution, everyone in the Network by now agreed that we were in a new political moment and that a different kind of campaigning / broad-based politics had to be imagined. Even as the overriding realities of provincial government and corporate power were being acknowledged, most activists in the MNSJ argued that a focus on the Metro budget remained critical. The MNSJ was identified with it and could not abandon it. The Metro budget battle could be used as a platform to aim at the provincial government. But questions remained about who or what should be the primary target of a campaign: Metro Council? the public? the provincial government? the media? ‘corporate power’ (MNSJ 1995u)? Such questions were reflective of a deeper uncertainty about how progressive change might happen in a new political era when it was becoming increasingly clear that tried-and-true activist strategies of previous decades were no longer effective. Building on the campaign message of the previous year, the MNSJ argued that the provincial agenda was an assault on the city and that Metro Council had an obligation to defend the city by publicly opposing the provincial government and mobilizing the city’s populace. Furthermore, the MNSJ argued that, in these new times, Metro Council must think about itself differently and the city’s public should expect different things from its Council. Metro Toronto was the largest city in the country and region. It was a huge factor in national and provincial economies. Metro Council had a lot of leverage if they had the guts to use it. Council could organize a mass lobby or rally at Queen’s Park, sponsor ward meetings to educate and mobilize constituents, or more dramatically, shut down Highway 401 or Pearson International Airport for a day (MNSJ 1996a). Experimenting with new tactics of its own, MNSJ activists organized an archaeological dig for the backbone of Metro Council on the front steps of Metro Hall. This audacious piece of street theater was a dramatic and humorous presentation of why and how Council had to stand up for the city, publicly and politically, rather than trying to micro-manage its budget crisis. The tactic was aimed at Council and the public through the media rather than as a direct intervention in the formal budget process (MNSJ 1996p). MNSJ activists also began to contemplate the possibility of civil disobedience as part of a “civic defense strategy.” In addition to pressuring

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Council, the MNSJ also sought to expose the corporate interests driving and benefiting from provincial initiatives at the expense of the city and/or populations concentrated in the city, e.g., welfare recipients (MNSJ 1995v) (MNSJ 1995s; MNSJ 1995t). Both these elements were combined in a traffic stoppage on Bay Street, the heart of Toronto’s financial district, on Corporate Tax Freedom Day to call attention to the Toronto Dominion Bank’s successful property tax appeal and its cost to the city. This larger political message and more dramatic tactics proceeded alongside more conventional organizing for humane budget priorities within the budget process. In 1996, in the context of mounting federal and provincial cuts that downloaded costs and crises to Metro Council, more numerous sector-specific campaigns took place. The MNSJ’s history of cross-sectoral budget campaigns meant that groups collaborated as a matter of course to ensure coordination and complementarity, but semiautonomous campaigns proceeded to defend grants to community services, childcare per diems, and public management of Metro’s homes for the aged. In this activist context, the MNSJ was freer to engage in more dramatic actions, including civil disobedience, while publicizing and supporting the other, more budget-focused campaigns. Major contributions by the MNSJ included the ongoing production of integrated voting records on the whole range of progressive struggles at Metro Council and organizing a mass ‘budget watch’ during the final budget votes. The MNSJ’s work on the 1996 budget departed from previous years in that its tactics focused attention on the “systemic” as well as “specific” aspects of the Metro budget struggle. The “systemic” is understood here to refer to the actions of the federal and provincial governments and their articulation to a global corporate agenda. But neither Metro Council nor the media had been receptive to either the message or the tactics. The plethora of sector-specific campaigns left some MNSJ activists wondering what constituency with a direct stake in the Metro budget was left for them to organize. The attention to “systemic” concerns left activists feeling the campaign had suffered without a tighter, clearer and more instrumental focus. Recognizing that they did not set the terms or timing of the debate in the media or at Council, some activists wondered whether the MNSJ had the luxury of moving away from the micro politics of the budget as determined by Metro Council. Media attention was commanded by the official process and elected politicians. Only by intersecting with that process and its discourses did they get any substantial media attention. It wasn’t enough but it was realpolitik. To introduce a different discourse was to be ignored by the media and thus the politicians. Activists worried that their attempt to broaden the budget work had in fact marginalized them,

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including in the eyes of the activist community, most of whom were engaged in and defined by fightback campaigns (MNSJ 1996q). In the wake of the 1995 federal budget defeat and subsequent Metrofocused work and in the context of the rising tide of anti-Harris activism, debates intensified in the MNSJ about the character of campaigns and, more fundamentally, about campaign-centered politics. The strongest initial conclusions were that departing from conventional forms of activist politics was costly and had not yielded any obvious gains. Even by the mid1990s, political signals remained deeply contradictory. Fight-back campaigns did continue to make a difference. They provided a clear target and course of action and, for activists, remained powerfully compelling. Most activists could not get beyond the largely unexamined assumption that activist work was campaign work and that the MNSJ existed to facilitate ever bigger and better campaigns. Campaigns were how change happened, that is, how reforms or concessions were forced from governments. Although the MNSJ’s praxis was constituted by concerns and activities beyond campaign work, narrowly defined, campaigns remained the dominant and taken-for-granted units of political planning, activity and analysis. Even within campaign-centered perspectives, however, activists were debating the relative value of capacity building, dramatic symbolic actions, and disruptive protest, what the relationship was or could be between these approaches and more conventional forms of political pressure, and how to choose between competing organizing priorities in campaign work. For ‘protester-activists,’ there was a primacy on the MNSJ’s visible street presence on provincial issues in the context of anti-Harris activism. For ‘campaigner-activists,’ the priority was smart, effective pressure campaigns to force concrete material concessions. For ‘community development/popular educator activists,’ hope for the future lay with building the capacity of people, within or beyond pressure campaigns. All these activists were committed to ‘action,’ ‘organizing,’ and ‘movement building,’ but they did not all mean the same thing when they used these words (MNSJ 1996i). The climate and culture of the MNSJ allowed these different perspectives to be aired and to co-exist over time, both within and beyond campaign organizing. Steering committee discussions were never pushed to an either/or vote. MNSJ activists tended to defer fundamental questions to the AGM while affirming the debate as rich and important.13 In terms of the effects of these questions on the MNSJ’s everyday activist practice, everything depended on how people with differing perspectives operationalized them in collaboration with others in multi-faceted, cross-sectoral campaigns. The resulting practice exceeded any one perspective and the sum of the parts.

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The dynamism and pluralism of shifting discourses and priorities that characterized this debate and the MNSJ more generally are normal in activist politics, perhaps especially in the period of political flux and turbulence in which we live, when progressives everywhere are groping for new political modes. They are especially characteristic of coalition politics where there is foundational recognition of diversity. Coalitions try to more consciously embrace and mediate the pluralism that is everywhere present. The intense dynamism and pluralism may also be indicative of a culture of grassroots politics in English Canada, where there is a premium on pragmatism, of getting on with things and not getting bogged down in protracted debates. People can give nod to questions and priorities that they personally do not share because they are working in coalition, and in practice, their own concerns are heard and respected. But their nod does not imply there is one thing on which they agree or rationally apply to subsequent practice. While not disputing the practical wisdom of such an approach, it is also important to note its limits. The richness and creativity of the resulting range of practice across the MNSJ, including in its Metro-focused work, could not, in itself, compensate for an enduring inability among activists in the MNSJ and especially in the steering committee to address unresolved and pressing questions of vision and strategy. By 1996, these persistent questions were also articulated to a growing organizational crisis. They continued to haunt the debates about campaign approaches (narrowly), about the MNSJ’s ‘urban politics’ (more broadly), and about the MNSJ as itself a political process/project (more broadly still). In the meantime, as the dilemmas remained and debates simmered, the working group continued to produce “We’re Watching” voting records on a variety of concerns that had broadened to include transit, policing and the environment. Ongoing “watchdog” work at Metro continued to be affirmed as a priority for the MNSJ as the MNSJ sought to position itself within the growing fight-back against the Harris government. Metro Council was a local battleground for “all questions at all levels.” The MNSJ had a legacy and a responsibility to its base to continue to be a presence there, even as activist energy in Toronto was focused increasingly exclusively on the provincial government (MNSJ 1996r).

BEYOND THE IMPASSE? TOWARD A POLITICS OF ‘URBAN MOVEMENT BUILDING’ By 1997, MNSJ activists had come to understand the full range of political activity in the Network as being oriented to ‘urban movement building.’ This represented a major advance in that it drew together threads that had

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been inter-woven throughout the MNSJ’s praxis from the beginning but which had not been readily understood as constituting a coherent whole. The occasion for this discursive breakthrough was the report by the provincially appointed commission on the restructuring of governance in the GTA led by Anne Golden. Between the Toronto Star’s campaign for a megacity, the Golden Report’s vision of the city as an engine of growth, and the Harris government’s pro-corporate, anti-government and anti-urban politics, the status and future of Toronto was on the agenda of powerful elites. The public ferment on the future of the city, its economy and governance converged with MNSJ activists’ long-standing sense of need for a broader discourse about the city even as their politics and priorities conflicted with the ones on offer. MNSJ activists used the occasion of the Golden Report to embark on their own process of understanding what was underway in the city and their own place in it. In March 1996, as a first stage, the working group organized a one-day community forum that aimed to develop a critical working knowledge among activists of the Golden Task Force Report and its implications for social justice struggles in the GTA (MNSJ 1996f). Organizers went in search of critical discourses on the ‘capitalist city’ that would help them understand processes of globalization as they were underway in and affecting the city and that would enable them to problematize the claims about the global economy and economic growth undergirding the Golden Report. Activists were also seeking ways of thinking about the city beyond the metropolitan government and its budgets and about the MNSJ’s presence and politics in the city beyond budget fightbacks at Metro Council (MNSJ 1996e). For the community forum, MNSJ activists recruited a roster of progressive experts in critical urban studies, many of whom drew heavily on ‘global city’ discourses to situate the politics and recommendations of the Golden Report both within processes of globalization and as a response to local political pressures. The forum led to a complex collaboration with other activist organizations in the city on an ‘urban movement building conference’ that took place in November 1996.14 What is of particular interest here is the longer, more continuous, and less visible process of knowledge production among the organizers that found public expression in these two events. Like the processes underway in the EPL Working Group, this process is instructive for the way activists took more active control of their own learning and kept their organizing goals prominent throughout. Through spring 1996, organizers read and discussed a series of articles on the world city perspective as they conceptualized a conference that

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would assemble urban movement groups to consider questions of vision and strategy. From their study, MNSJ activists identified three key problematics of world city formation on which to focus: employment, immigration and ecology. These were clearly major arenas of activism in Toronto, which were deemed important for the MNSJ in any articulation of a broader urban politics.15 MNSJ activists then produced short position papers, developing each problematic in terms of what they knew about Toronto and with reference to their own political and organizing questions (Conway 1996; Kipfer 1996; Mwarigha 1996). At the same time, they set out to identify partnering organizations who would be interested in collaborating in the planning of a forum or conference panel on each topic.16 They also began to identify some activistintellectuals on each subject, both in and outside of universities. In developing their thinking about each problematic, MNSJ activists were concerned to address persistent problems of integrating considerations of gender and race. Furthermore, a key goal was to foster cross-fertilization among activist ghettos, so the topics had to be problematized in such a way that linkages and possibilities for collaboration would become more clearly evident. Problematics of employment, immigration and ecology had to be understood with reference to each other without losing the specific focus on each. For instance, the ecology panel successfully integrated issues of employment and immigration into a discussion of urban ecology. York University professor Roger Keil introduced the ‘environmental problematic in world cities.’ He was followed by Lois Corbet, a grassroots environmental activist with the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Nick De Carlo from the Green Work Alliance, and Nita Chaudry, who was involved with an environmental justice initiative at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre. An academic ‘expert’ provided an analytical framework followed by panelists rooted in activist organizations, who spoke about their activist practice. In contrast with the 1993 “Creating a Just Economy” conference,17 the “Between Local and Global” event demonstrated significant development, both intellectually and in organizing know-how, in response to the persistent questions and critiques arising from sustained EPL work. Analytically and politically, this conference decentered the state and state policies in favor of an understanding of the urban as constituted by myriad social processes in the urban region, including but exceeding the activities of states. Analytically and politically, this conference was grounded in activist practice, and questions of strategy and organizing permeated the discussion. Organizers took more initiative in grappling with expert knowledge over a

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period of time and as constitutive of the organizing process. They recognized the importance of producing their own perspectives. They produced them collectively, over time and in writing, and this enabled more genuinely dialogical encounters with experts. Questions of gender and race were integrated substantively into the conference content rather than treated primarily as issues of representation and diversity in the line-up. Although understanding the problematics of employment, immigration and ecology as significantly shaped by processes of capitalist globalization, discussions grounded in specific and localized activist practice began from the reality of popular and emancipatory agency. The entire organizing process had been premised on this simple acknowledgement. Starting the discussion from this point, rather than with the more structuralist and globalist perspectives of political economy discourses abstracted from any particular politics of resistance proved far more fruitful—analytically and politically. This knowledge production process helped consolidate ‘urban movement building’ as a long-term priority of the MNSJ. The notion of ‘urban movement building’ implied not just understanding the city in new ways but perceiving the agency of other movements in the city as significant for urban politics, even if those groups did not employ an explicitly urban discourse. Although this organizing process had been developed outside of EPL proper, activists drew on years of EPL experience in the MNSJ about the use of experts, activist-led learning processes and about critical political adult education. The way seemed clear for fruitful and growing cross-fertilization between these two expanding and dynamic arenas of praxis in the MNSJ.

CONCLUSION From the vantage point of the new century, the 1990s appear as a period of dramatic transition in a ‘long revolution’ wrought from above. Activist strategies in the early ’90s still bore traces of strategies and tactics employed successfully well into the 1980s. Patterns of thinking and acting ingrained in people and organizations die hard. With the rise of the antiglobalization movement and a new wave of youth militancy, more people and organizations are critically aware that putatively democratic institutions and processes have been successfully captured or otherwise contained by political and corporate elites. Because this was not so self-evident in the early 1990s in Canada, conventional lobbying strategies remained central to any credible politics. A decade later, new critical political discourses have

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made new practices possible, comprehensible and acceptable to a broad public. The limits of the possible have changed, due in significant part to the insurgent knowledges and agencies germinating in movement spaces like the MNSJ on the shifting political terrain of the 1990s. As in other arenas of knowledge production in the MNSJ, activists drew on and generated tacit knowledges through everyday campaignorganizing activities. They also generated knowledge through praxis as each campaign was collectively planned and evaluated, the results debated and interpreted, and the insights disseminated. Each organizing process yielded particular insights and lessons, which were carried forward to inform the next campaign and which also diffused, through myriad discourses and practices, to shape the overall culture and politics of the coalition. These processes were uneven and imperfect, but as activist practices go, they were systematized to an extraordinary degree. Activists also produced critical pedagogies, formal analytical knowledges and public political discourses as integral parts of effective campaigning. At various moments, activists sought critical interaction with progressive experts and with critical theories of urban politics as they struggled to chart, situate themselves and move strategically and effectively on a rapidly transforming and increasingly conflictual political terrain. In response to that changing terrain and emerging from their own practice of reflexivity, MNSJ activists experimented with new approaches to the Metro budget and entirely other organizing processes oriented to a politics of urban movement building. These strategies were more ‘cultural,’ oriented to the activist public and the broader public rather than to the state and the media as agents of change. They express a growing cynicism among activists about formal channels of democratic participation and representation, an orientation to their own capacities for critical knowledge and self-organization, and a turn to movement building as an alternative in its own right through which a new grassroots politics/power could be nurtured. These shifts had parallels elsewhere in the Network, notably in the EPL praxis, but were not universally or unequivocally embraced. The pluralistic culture of the MNSJ allowed for ongoing political differences to coexist while activists got on with concrete collaboration. But in the context of deepening social crisis, growing desperation, exhaustion and chronic shortage of resources, the political stakes associated with pursuing one approach over another were rising. And the prospect of serious conflict over strategic choices increased accordingly.

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Chapter Six

Knowledge and the Impasse in Left Politics: Towards a New Democratic Imaginary?

THE EXPLOSION OF POLITICAL POSSIBILITY AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZATION Throughout 1996, the level of MNSJ activity on multiple fronts was dizzying. A major conference convened activists working on employment, ecology, immigration and anti-racism to think about a reformulated urban politics. A base-building project prioritized solidarity with equity-seeking groups and saw the MNSJ organize for and participate in events like the International Women’s Day march, Gay Pride Day, Caribana, and the Toronto leg of the cross-Canada Women’s March for Bread and Roses, Jobs and Justice, a forerunner of the World March of Women. New forms of labor-community solidarity included picket line support in the historic OPSEU1 strike in February 1996. New initiatives in EPL reached out to youth and to the “political middle.” A major media project successfully launched MNSJ activists on talk radio. An “unbanking” campaign aimed at exploring credit unions as an alternative to commercial banks was launched. In October 1996, the Metro Days of Action, co-sponsored by the MNSJ and the Labour Council, were a heady climax to five years of community-labor coalition building in Toronto and the culmination of a series of citywide strikes across Ontario in opposition to the policies of the Harris government and their ‘Common Sense Revolution.’ The strike saw the closure of over 300 workplaces and the effective shutdown of the city followed by a mass demonstration the next day of over 200,000 people. Through 1996, the rising tide of mass action, including strikes, demonstrations and rallies, created a widespread sense of rebellion and possibility. 121

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The Days of Action, in particular, seemed to signal a new kind of politics being forged from the fires of neoliberal restructuring and promised to propel the MNSJ to a new level of political significance.2 The number of new activists and the volume and scale of activity introduced new organizational challenges within the MNSJ. These challenges were especially acute in EPL. By March 1996, interest in economic and political literacy work was exploding. Meetings were regularly attracting fifty people with dozens of additional activists volunteering to facilitate workshops on request. The MNSJ economic and political literacy “program” now included ongoing work at three levels, which were integrated in their overarching goals. Community-based workshops represented the mass-movement and popular capacity building activity, in which there was a premium on accessibility, participation and action. Regular train-the-trainer events were the medium through which content was packaged, educational methods developed, thinking about democratic political education advanced, and facilitators educated and trained. An “Advancing Knowledge” stream included annual graduate-level seminars for activists and was geared to sustained collective intellectual development. The third was the most intense incubator for a new kind of knowledge. A core group of EPL activists participated heavily in all three levels of activity, informally facilitating their integration and cross-fertilization. Several key leaders were also prominent in other areas of MNSJ activity, notably in the work on ‘urban politics,’ which was critical in fostering political coherence, unity and trust across the Network. To manage all this activity democratically—to maintain the levels of communication and accountability essential to democratic functioning within and among working groups, steering committee and MNSJ membership—would have been a challenge for any organization. It was a problem of democratic and management know-how, made infinitely more difficult by the MNSJ’s skeletal infrastructure and lack of staff. In EPL, the expansion of work required a new division of labor and the formalization of different levels of conversation within the working group. New sub-committees were established to develop concrete initiatives. The working group became the entry point for new activists, to orient them to the history, politics and culture of the MNSJ and of EPL work. It was also the central node for EPL planning and evaluation and relations with the MNSJ Steering Committee and AGM. A shaky administrative infrastructure was set up using part-time placement students to respond to workshop requests, book facilitators, link mentors with trainees, do evaluative follow-up and track fee payment. Management and administrative skills, facilitative leadership and its continuity, institutional memory, sustained and nuanced political communication between those mediating among different MNSJ bodies,

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and high levels of formal and informal trust among leaders became ever more critical. At the height of this work, four member organizations were contributing fluctuating amounts of paid staff time.3 There were dozens of volunteer activists and no core staff. The plethora of EPL projects launched in winter 1996 all deserve detailed reflection. Each initiative had its own dynamism and could yield important lessons. Some bloomed quickly and intensely only to wither for lack of sustained leadership, time and energy. Without someone with adequate skill and enough time to support and facilitate the group’s work and the growing complexities and requirements of working within an organization that was exploding with creative energy and political commitment (but without a stable infrastructure), groups began to founder. Even where volunteers could provide significant leadership, their capacity to do this was not indefinite; if one withdrew, for whatever reasons, the work faded unless another had the time and capacity to step in. Although first and most intensely apparent in the EPL work, the organizational crisis was confronting the MNSJ as a whole. While this account focuses on EPL work as the privileged site of knowledge production, it is critical to understand that EPL was developing in the context of a complex and pluralistic network of tendencies, activities, and campaigns that constituted the evolving MNSJ. The MNSJ was becoming more than the sum of its parts and moving beyond the boundaries of coalitions as members had known them and, in so doing, was outgrowing its established structures, processes and forms of leadership. Inevitably, awareness of this was very uneven; there was no systematic discussion of it anywhere in the Network. The questions of growth and change were not problematized in any way that made the issues of co-ordination, communication, staffing and management political questions of vision, strategy and organization. The Annual General Meeting first articulated and pushed these questions as political issues.

VISION, STRATEGY, ORGANIZATION: CRISIS AND CONFLICT In retrospect, it seems clear that an organizational (and political) crisis had been simmering since the pivotal events of 1995, namely, the landmark federal budget and the election of the Harris government in Ontario. Politically, debates were escalating among activists about the merits of campaign-centered politics, about tactics in campaigns and about the relative weight of capacity building as a priority. These debates were overlaid with the unresolved question of vision and the seeming inability to address it. Likewise, unresolved differences on the question of organization and the

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relative priority of organization building lurked behind debates about what to do politically. In the wake of the 1995 budget and the Harris government’s assault on the public sector, many member groups were under intense financial and political pressure. Some were collapsing and others confronting the need to amalgamate to survive. For the MNSJ, the long-term viability of significant sectors of the membership base was in question. Groups had fewer material resources to dedicate to the MNSJ. Yet, in spite of the pressures, the membership base continued to grow. Members were becoming more politically radical, and their expectations of the MNSJ were swelling, even as many were also increasingly cautious about their public political commitments because of fears of being targeted for funding cuts. Related to these developments, the 1995 AGM identified two important priorities: long-term viability of the MNSJ and “vision creation,” the need to articulate a political vision for the organization that would also serve the larger movement. These priorities represented a peculiar departure from the usual menu of campaign foci emanating from AGMs. They reflected major transformations in the larger political context and shifts in activists’ thinking about how to respond. ‘Vision-creation’ and ‘long-term viability’ were new political categories suggesting the need for new kinds of discourses and practices in and about the MNSJ. Many on the MNSJ Steering Committee were ambivalent about these aspects of the mandate and reluctant to dedicate precious time and resources to thinking about what they could mean, despite the obvious resonance such ideas had with the membership. Admittedly, it was difficult to imagine how to move forward concretely on either front, but there were deeper personal and political resistances, rooted in part in attitudes to knowledge, power and organization.4 The need for some serious process of vision creation was profoundly threatening because it suggested that we were on unfamiliar terrain, requiring new maps and destinations, and that, at the moment, we did not know where we were going, much less how to get there. Some who resisted this (actively or passively) feared the abyss they assumed would engulf us if we addressed the question of vision and our seeming lack of it. Others were fierce in their commitment to “fight back” without wanting to consider the magnitude of the 1995 defeats or if and how they transformed the landscape of resistance. Response to the problem of long-term organizational viability was similarly complex. For some, the problem was reduced to one of material resources, which was, in turn, a function of ‘organizing’ and ‘action.’ Bigger, better, more visible and successful campaigns would attract members, money and activists and thereby ensure long-term viability, they reasoned. This stance assumed that, in ‘the coalition,’ we already had the necessary political

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instrument, that the organizational foundations on which it was constructed were secure, and that we only had to use it better. What the coalition was for, in any sense beyond fight-back campaigns, remained unexamined. “Fighting back” itself provided an adequate political identity and strategy. Some others were suspicious of any form of more permanent institutionalization as, by definition, bureaucratic, ‘mainstream’ and politically undesirable. Among another significant group of MNSJ activists, who constituted a minority on the steering committee but a majority in EPL work, there was deep resonance with the AGM priorities but little clarity about how to act on them. For this group, the questions of vision and long-term viability were unavoidable, inextricably connected, and involved thinking about the MNSJ, not simply as a political instrument or some static “space”5 to do activist-type work, but as itself a political project. Those who shared these sensibilities were disproportionately concentrated in EPL work, where that praxis created a collective culture and disposition open to, and even demanding of, larger political debates. Whether for reasons of workload, the weight of greater decision-making responsibilities, the presence of greater political pluralism and/or the unevenness of political experience within and beyond the Network, the steering committee, in contrast, had become increasingly less able to have sustained and substantive political debate about the character and future of the MNSJ. The crisis of management in EPL propelled those activists to address the question of institutionalization even as debates in the steering committee about vision and long-term viability for the MNSJ as a whole kept collapsing. In winter 1996, the EPL Working Group proposed that the MNSJ itself establish a Center for Economic and Political Literacy. Supported by the steering committee, the organizers set out to develop: 1. a political vision for EPL within the MNSJ grounded in historical practice and thinking about future needs and possibilities; 2. the rationale for the development of a “Center,” conceived as space, staffing and financial infrastructure to support EPL and, with it, the whole MNSJ; 3. the relationship between a Center and the MNSJ, particularly structures of governance and accountability; 4. prospects for funding (MNSJ 1996d; MNSJ 1996g).6 In the first instance, the Center would house, stabilize and support existing EPL work but would expand to include a journal, web site, regular conferences and cultural events, independent research and a resource library. It would be a street-front space with a small staff.7 It would rely on a diverse

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funding base to maximize political independence (MNSJ 1996l; MNSJ 1996c). The MNSJ Steering Committee approved a resolution for the 1996 AGM on establishing the Center. But there were signs of deep ambivalence about institutionalization in general and the proposed Center in particular. Some worried about EPL dominating the MNSJ and/or the financial and administrative burden of a project on this scale.8 The proposed management structure was also contentious.9 In the meantime, however, no other group was taking initiative anywhere in the Network to address the question of long-term viability. For some, the continued growth of the membership base and the bank balance blurred the sense of organizational fragility. The persistent refrain from EPL activists of the need for infrastructure reflected the high and ongoing co-ordination and planning needs of that work. EPL was both a major revenue generator10 and the main outreach and base-building engine of the MNSJ, creating the very conditions that provided the illusion of stability. Those struggling to keep EPL going knew that, as it was currently organized, it was not sustainable and feared that this had implications for the well-being of the MNSJ as a whole. The Metro Days of Action (MDA) in October 1996 had a deep impact on the debate as well. As co-sponsors of MDA, many MNSJ activists were consumed for months in the planning and organizing. As the Center proposal developed and wended its way through the working group and steering committee processes, significant MNSJ leaders (especially on the steering committee) were too absent, distracted and/or exhausted to attend to the substantive questions regarding vision, strategy and organization confronting the MNSJ, or the adequacy of the proposal to establish a Center as a response to them. For some time after, the enormous sense of power and hope unleashed by the Days of Action made organizational debates seem anachronistic. The Center proposal went to the AGM on 30 November 1996 with the support of the steering committee. As an initiative implying organizational structural change, it was proposed and voted on as a formal resolution. It passed unanimously, with an additional (and prescient) directive to consult the membership on the political questions related to funding, and, together with “long-term viability,” was voted the top priority for the coming year. However, despite apparent consensus on the EPL Center proposal with its implications as the de facto response to the MNSJ’s general need for independent space, funding and staff, no focused work was done on any aspect of this agenda by the steering committee or any other group in the MNSJ in 1997—except that done by the EPL Center Working Group.11 Throughout the winter of 1997, the EPL Center Working Group sought to clarify the relationship of the proposed Center to the MNSJ and

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to the broader priority of the MNSJ’s long-term viability (MNSJ 1997b). From the working group’s perspective, the expiration of the MNSJ’s threeyear Trillium Foundation grant in mid-1998 and political turmoil at the Social Planning Council,12 which housed the MNSJ, made the issues of organizational stability pressing. In the void created by the absence of any other proposal or overarching approach, the EPL Center came to be conflated in the minds of many with the long-term viability strategy of the MNSJ. For most people involved, this simply represented a pragmatic approach, the details of which could be sorted out later. In retrospect, one sub-group’s developing a project of this nature and scale in a political and strategic vacuum was a disaster waiting to happen. In the spring and summer of 1997, numerous conflicts over vision, strategy, and organization that had been simmering beneath the surface erupted. Conflicting tendencies variously prioritizing protest, campaigns or capacity building had been present in the MNSJ from its roots in the FightBack Metro! campaign and had been generally accepted as within the normal range of politico-cultural differences that marked cross-sectoral coalition work. As long as there was room for a range of political expressions and a climate of respect and tolerance for a range of perspectives, the various priorities were not experienced as a problem for the coalition; in fact, they were more often celebrated as a resource. In attempting to understand why these long-standing differences became a problem at this time, it is important to characterize both the conjunctural and factional dimensions of the conflict and the ways in which different groups named the issues. The immediate occasion for conflict was the fund-raising strategy being developed by the EPL Center Working Group and the subsequent preparation of a funding proposal for submission to the Trillium Foundation.13 The issues are many and tangled, but, for the purposes of this discussion, they can be grouped in two categories. One set may be described as dilemmas and disagreements about institutionalization in general, and its financial aspects, in particular. This set of issues included: (1) ambivalence about needing, seeking, and managing money; (2) reservations about the scale of managing and maintaining a Center and its potential drain on activist energies; (3) conflict over appropriate sources of funding and strategies for fund-raising and their impact on political independence and public credibility;14 and (4) reluctance to pursue funding for EPL without having secured the MNSJ’s overall stability and concern that the Center would compete with the MNSJ as a whole for scarce resources. The conflict over knowledge and knowledge production in social movements in a new political era is more explicit in the second set of issues, which may be described as conflicts over the nature, significance, role and

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requirements of EPL work in the MNSJ. At issue were (1) what some activists detected as an undesirable “shift in direction” in the MNSJ or a “loss of balance” in establishing an EPL Center, which resurrected old polarities of “education” versus “action,” accompanied by resentment about the EPL’s disproportionate capacity to attract activists; (2) concern about the ‘optics’ of establishing a center dedicated to education in terms of credibility in the activist community or perceptions that MNSJ was insufficiently militant; (3) questions about the (lack of) immediate “outcomes” of EPL work; and finally (4), doubts about the personal political credibility of those EPL activists who were not involved in other, more “action-oriented” parts of the MNSJ and/or in street protests.15 Some of these concerns were shared by activists on all sides of the Center debate. Some were plausible with equally plausible counter-arguments. Some were reflective of problems with this specific proposal and process. But others were expressive of an unexamined bias in favor of (often unspecified) forms of ‘organizing’ and ‘action’ understood as distinct from and in a superior relationship to ‘education.’ Four significant features marked the conjuncture. (1) The first was a sense of “new times” requiring new politics. The experience around the 1995 federal budget occasioned the conviction of deep crisis. In a general way, this sense of crisis was widely shared within the Network, but some felt it far more acutely. The EPL group discussed it incessantly and believed it had implications for EPL work, for the MNSJ and for activist practice in general. Within the steering committee, discussion pertaining to the changed context was initiated repeatedly but simply did not have the same purchase. The future of the MNSJ was suspended between those who thought the political and organizational status quo in the Network was basically desirable and tenable and those who perceived major macro transformations underway that demanded the MNSJ be re-imagined and re-created. (2) The second feature, which emerged by 1996, was a sense in EPL and in the MNSJ as a whole of the possibility of something new, bigger and better emerging from the crisis. Because of the felt need for, and successful production of, new political perspectives, many in the EPL group saw spaces like the MNSJ as central sites of creativity and important cultural and political correctives to the labor-dominated politics that had permeated organizing for the Metro Days of Action. They saw the politico-cultural sensibilities of the MNSJ, and of EPL work, as critical to any post-Days of Action transmutations in social movement politics and organizing.16 (3) The third feature was the immediate, objective, organizational crisis in the MNSJ, which was directly related to the expanding capacities and sense of new possibilities. Again, there was a vague general awareness of this, which

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those closest to the day-to-day operations felt acutely, and which was experienced first and most intensely in EPL and problematized early and constantly in the working group. The status quo in the MNSJ, although characterized by immense creativity and success, was not sustainable. The stellar contributions of a few organizations and key leaders could not continue underwriting the whole operation in the hope that impressive levels of activity would themselves resolve the organizational questions. Finally (4), the proposal for a Center for Economic and Political Literacy also attempted to address broader questions of political vision, long-term strategy, and organizational viability. The project was infused with the emergent cultural politics of the EPL Working Group. It reflected the deeper sense of crisis and possibility, and, as it became more concrete, was the flashpoint for conflict over the future development of the MNSJ. The composition of the factions that emerged defies pat analyses. Within the MNSJ, the struggle was widely described as one between the EPL Working Group and the MNSJ Steering Committee. Yet there were powerful personalities representing significant organizations on both sides of the debate within the steering committee as well. The conflict was also variously understood as generational, gendered, sectoral, ideological-political, temperamental, or inter-personal. Varied readings of the conflict were in play throughout and it remains that no one axis neatly explains who ended up on what side. Some members also made ongoing attempts not to be labeled as being in one or another faction. These attempts, however, did not stop factions from forming, or others coming to see the struggle as a factional conflict. What became definitive was a profound loss of trust and a growing inability to talk across differences that had been successfully bridged within the MNSJ from its beginning.17 A series of heated arguments and intemperate words resulted in a steep deterioration in the culture of the coalition. A climate of respect, tolerance, trust, flexibility and openness was replaced by one of suspicion, hostility and rigidity. For the first time, the problematic concentration of power in a few organizations was decisive. The Labour Council threatened to withdraw from the MNSJ if the funding proposal to the Trillium Foundation for the EPL Center proceeded, voicing concerns over the direction the MNSJ would be taking if this went ahead. In the face of this threat, which was seen by others as a threat to the continuation of the MNSJ, enough people on all sides agreed to a rewriting of the funding proposal that would de-center EPL in a more diffuse proposal describing all the Network’s activities. In terms of the politics of funding, this was a grave tactical error, which those familiar with the dilemmas of fund-raising recognized and in which they were subsequently proved right. But in the context

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of the struggle within the MNSJ, no alternative that did not jeopardize the Network as a whole presented itself. In the months following this debacle, despite efforts on all sides to restore good faith, the sense of hope and possibility evaporated among EPL activists, and with it, any capacity to sustain the work. EPL work collapsed over the next six months as people left the MNSJ—disillusioned, angry, depressed and hurt. The MNSJ survived this crisis, but at great cost. The debate that erupted into conflict in 1997 was ‘resolved’ through the defeat of the cultural politics and project advanced by the EPL Working Group. The resultant exodus of activists identified with the proposed Center was a huge loss to the MNSJ of their political perspectives, priorities and skills. The political conflict had far-ranging ripple effects throughout the Network; the long-term political processes set in motion by the urban movement building conference were short-circuited as protest and campaign politics became ascendant and any activity associated with EPL perspectives became marginal. The abeyance of open conflict did not mean that the deeper questions of vision, strategy and organization had been resolved, only that the knowledge-based dimensions and the cultural politics related to them were no longer viable alternatives in the MNSJ.

CONFLICTS OVER KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: SOME CONCLUSIONS The conflict over the EPL Center, its myriad costs to the MNSJ including the short-circuiting of EPL work and the marginalization of practices and discourses of capacity building and knowledge production, is an unsettling note on which to conclude this ethnography of the MNSJ. It marks a significant political transition in the MNSJ, the end of its first era, and the end of a process that had increasingly placed knowledge creation and capacity building at the center of activist politics. The praxis and politics of knowledge production in social movements is the core problematic under discussion, and the conflict over the Center is rich in insights, if discouraging in outcome. The historical defeat of the EPL perspective in the MNSJ does not undermine the significance of knowledge and knowledge production in social movements and for activist politics in the present and for the future. Rather, it suggests how challenging it is to re-orient political imaginaries in unfamiliar directions, even when grounded in a well-developed political praxis. More generally, it testifies to the tenuousness, fragility and ephemerality of movement politics. In this light, the scale, scope, diversity and genuine creativity of the MNSJ’s praxis in the period under consideration becomes something wondrous.

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Intensifying political debate in the MNSJ after the 1995 budget was a sign of political vitality and organizational maturity. The debates were a fruit of the shifting terrain and intensifying political struggle of the 1990s; they ranged from debates about campaign-centered politics to the priority given to capacity building and to short-term versus long-term horizons of struggle. The debates could only have emerged in the context of a permanent organization in which sustained and reflexive political practice produced the questions. Activists with a shared history and organizational context could debate the questions while remaining grounded in praxis. The MNSJ was big and multi-faceted enough, with sufficient stability and longevity, to allow activists the space to generate the questions, to debate them over time, to continue to live and work with differences, and to experiment with different approaches. Meanwhile, more conventional forms of campaign and protest politics, which were essential for visibility and relevance in the eyes of the media, the politicians and other activists, could continue. Organizational permanence was a structural precondition for the political force and creativity of the MNSJ’s praxis, which was, in turn, a fruit of reflexivity. The power inherent in reflexivity is multiplied and qualitatively transformed in the context of a community of actors with a shared history before and after le cause du jour. Permanence allows for a sense of change over time, including a historical perspective on one’s own praxis, instead of the endless present that characterizes so much activist politics. It allows for the accumulation of shared memory and know-how, the collective generation and transfer of knowledge, and the production of questions, insights and practices that could not otherwise have been imagined. Activists in the MNSJ developed a rich, multi-faceted and enormously promising praxis of knowledge production in a period of political crisis and historic transition. The coalition attracted a growing number of people and created the context for an explosion of fresh ideas and projects. The MNSJ as a political organization ‘grew’ this praxis, but the praxis outgrew the organizational and political visions, processes and structures that had given birth to it. The praxis of knowledge production in the MNSJ eventually presented bigger and qualitatively different organizational (and political) questions and requirements than did protest- or campaign-oriented politics. Knowledge production required different amounts and kinds of time and space for thinking, planning, learning and coordinating than campaign work, although campaign work clearly benefited from the investment in knowledge production. Knowledge production requires long-term investment of hopes and resources, greater continuity in personnel, sustained attention to some particular issues and questions, and the time and space

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for the accumulation of specialized knowledges and skills. It implied its own organizational logic. Organizational permanence, sustained practices of reflexivity and historical memory helped foster a growing and effective campaign praxis in the MNSJ. These conditions are basic to the articulation, accumulation and mobilization of tacit knowledges and to the existence of any genuine praxis. However, these conditions and the organizational stability on which they are premised were, if anything, more immediately and obviously essential to any praxis of knowledge production. The limits of what could be achieved without any one of these conditions became visible more quickly in EPL work and propelled EPL activists to address the questions of vision and long-term viability in the MNSJ by exploring the risks and possibilities inherent in institutionalizing their work. The maturing praxis of knowledge production in the MNSJ demanded investment of precious activist resources for future and uncertain outcomes. The outcomes of EPL work were not (and could not be) articulated nor understood strictly in the usual terms of activist politics, that is, in terms of outcomes arising from campaigns or protests. A wellexecuted demonstration is generally unproblematically understood by activists as ‘good,’ ‘useful,’ or ‘successful’ in and of itself. A well-executed workshop is less readily understood in such terms. Campaigns and protests can be produced by ad hoc groupings of activists, as can the most rudimentary forms of knowledge production. But to the extent to which concerns about democratization, capacity building and reflexivity inform any activist practice, questions of organizational democracy, capacity and functioning become immediate and unavoidable. In the MNSJ, the explosion of knowledge production with its attendant possibilities required that the MNSJ re-create itself organizationally and politically. Organizational innovation and attention to questions of democratic process and structure had marked the founding and early years of the MNSJ and were central to the MNSJ’s political vitality and creativity. Why then was the challenge of the EPL Center so seemingly insurmountable? Was it simply an exhaustion of organizational energy and creativity after five years of intense activity under difficult circumstances? Was it a lack of clarity, agreement, and/or trust among the activists about how to proceed? Did the EPL Center represent an organizational challenge of a different scale or character, beyond the organizational imagination or skill of the leading activists? The feminist community development activists who had been so instrumental in the founding and early development of the MNSJ were still present, although now more concentrated in the EPL Working Group than on the Steering Committee with its decision-making

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power. Questions of vision, strategy and long-term viability had also become more pressing and hung over the debate about the Center. No such questions had so troubled earlier processes. In a way, there was much more at stake and much more to lose in 1997 than at any point prior, a fact that may have inhibited risk and experimentation on the bigger scale represented by the Center. The project of an EPL Center blossomed from the success of the MNSJ, a sign of the flowering of enormous political energy, creativity, and know-how. But it was also an enormous organizational and political challenge and risk. Its emergence reflected the growth in scale and complexity of the MNSJ, politically and organizationally. It could not have emerged earlier or otherwise. But in order to embrace what the Center represented, the MNSJ would have been required to transform itself. The Center provoked a clash of imaginaries in a period of historic transition and political uncertainty at the same time that a generational transfer was underway in the MNSJ. Either condition would have been difficult to negotiate productively. The combination proved to be the undoing of a rich and important political praxis and the possible futures it suggested for the MNSJ and beyond. Concluding the ethnography with the conflict over the Center poses a final and provocative question about the organizational and political implications of placing capacity building at the center of social movement politics. The presence, role and prominence of knowledge production in social movement politics are contentious on the left. The praxis of knowledge production emerging in the EPL work after the 1995 budget embodied a cultural politics premised on building people’s critical capacities through dialogical and democratic processes—a long-term strategy for a long-term struggle. It placed a premium on sustained thinking, talking and acting together as foundational for the formation of insurgent political identities and the emergence of new forms of agency grounded in civil society. This re-orientation away from exclusive or primary preoccupation with the state as the source of power and (progressive) change was a conclusion drawn from hard political experience. In the wake of the 1995 budget, in the face of set-backs and defeats on multiple fronts despite growing campaign, lobby, and protest efforts, EPL activists began to consider the merits of a different kind of struggle premised on a different kind of agency. A long-term orientation to cultural transformation and the nurturing of critical popular agency was one response to a historic shift in the political landscape. Such a politics does not exclude many and escalating forms of protest, non-violent direct action and civil disobedience. It does not discount the power and democratic possibility concentrated in states.

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But it does imply different understandings of power and change than animates most activist politics. To privilege knowledge production, and with it, capacity building and cultural politics, is in considerable tension with conventional notions of struggle, revolution and utopia on the left. It implies an orientation to long and multiple revolutions conducted primarily in civil society. It moves away from the notion that domination is organized through a single system or according to a single logic that can be decisively overcome through a single revolution. To promote a culture of capacity building and dialogical knowledge production as constitutive of democratization is to conceive of utopia as an open-ended social process that is always in the making and whose exact contours cannot be known in advance. The differences among MNSJ activists that became more evident as EPL work grew in scale and influence had to do, in part, with largely unexamined attitudes toward knowledge and power—between largely unspoken but nonetheless conflicting perceptions of the magnitude of change provoked by the neoliberal triumph and conflicting convictions about how progressive change might happen. In periods of great historical transition, flux and uncertainty, when emancipatory politics and theories are in disarray, new forms of agency hold the hope for an alternative future. Implicit in this is an alternative perception of power—a kind of countervailing power that is diffuse, democratic, rooted in people’s collective agency and emerging from the bottom up. For progressive social movements, I suggest that space must be made for experimentation and institutionalization along the lines suggested by the MNSJ’s EPL praxis. I am not implying that other dimensions of activist praxis should be abandoned or treated as secondary. Rather, different forms of praxis need to proceed together and be mutually informative, as in the MNSJ case. The tensions between short-term, immediate and urgent needs to mount protest and demonstrate resistance and long-term orientations to capacity building and cultural transformation need to be maintained. Divisions of labor are inevitable as movement agendas grow in scale and complexity, and differences among activists in terms of their personal political priorities within a pluralistic and multi-faceted political project-in-process need to be respected and nurtured rather than suspected and suppressed. The terms of the MNSJ’s political praxis as one of movement building, oriented to base-, organization-, coalition- and capacity building, and combining broad-based campaigning, democratic organizational development and participatory knowledge creation, suggest the contours of a political process/project that still needs doing, in Toronto, in other cities, and at other scales.

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TOWARDS A NEW DEMOCRATIC IMAGINARY? In the wake of the global neoliberal revolution, politics as progressives conceived it in the twentieth century has to be reimagined. Reformulating assumptions about knowledge and power is constitutive of any new, radical and democratic politics. In the introduction to this book, I argued that social movements produce knowledge and that those knowledges are privileged and essential ones in imagining any genuinely alternative and democratic futures. In new kinds of social movement spaces like the MNSJ, we can see the features of a new democratic politics emerging in and through activist praxis. This new movement politics is profoundly coalitional. It is premised on a foundational recognition of the sheer variety of progressive activisms, the need to mediate among them, and the possibility of concrete collaboration across irreducible difference. The new politics is pluralist in synchronously affirming multiple projects, priorities, approaches and perspectives. The new politics is popular. The coalitional politics of the MNSJ sought to build the broadest possible base for collaborative action. Activists recognized the legitimacy and stability conferred by an organizational membership base and actively built it. But they constantly sought to address a broader social base in the population as a whole. The new politics is profoundly participatory. Activists created open fora and processes for participatory consultation and decision-making. Although an organizationally based coalition, the MNSJ invited anyone who was interested into meaningful and creative political activity and decision-making. MNSJ activists also recognized structural barriers to participation. In the MNSJ, feminist leaders were central in constructing democratic practice, and equity criteria promoted the leadership of women and people of color. Problematizing organizational structures and processes and permanently experimenting with, reflecting on and renovating them, was central to enacting participatory democracy in the MNSJ. The building of a permanent, broad-based, democratic and reflexive organization was a critically important aspect of movement building. The new politics attends to creating conditions for equal participation, especially for poor, disabled and otherwise marginalized people. Although many new movements are grounded in their common opposition to neoliberal globalization and their widely shared commitment to popular democracy, other struggles for equality arising from other axes of difference/identity, including gender, race, sexuality and culture, remain salient within and beyond the movements themselves. The praxis of the MNSJ testifies to the 1990s as a watershed decade, an interregnum between the fall of the Berlin Wall and defeat of socialism

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as a world-historic alternative and the new world order of unrestrained American imperialism. In Canada, the 1990s saw the abrogation of the post-war social contract and a rising tide of mass action in response. MNSJ’s praxis also points to cities as key sites for the new movement activism, especially in the North, and the possibility of locally rooted, multi-scale politics in the globalized spaces of the world city. It speaks to the ongoing significance of geo-politics in social movements, of mobilizing people in a specific space. This remains central to mounting democratic claims on place-based political institutions. MNSJ activists articulated a specifically urban and place-based politics of movement building. Like those involved in so many other localized movements in an era of globalization, MNSJ activists ‘localized the global’ and ‘globalized the local.’ They recognized how neoliberal globalization is being advanced as much through putatively ‘domestic’ policies and ‘local’ actors as through the institutions of global governance, and how it can and must be contested in specific places. The praxis of the MNSJ points to the increasing importance and potentialities of horizontal linkages among localized movements in conceiving a movement politics of global ambition. This politics displaces the national as the a priori privileged scale of progressive politics and challenges any claim to a global hierarchy of movement organizations. The MNSJ’s praxis also attests to the continued importance and changing character of campaign organizing. Campaigns remain an essential and constitutive element of the new politics even as growing numbers of activists regard the institutions they target as profoundly illegitimate. While issue-focused campaigns engage in pressure politics as usual, they also increasingly incorporate popular and public education, participatory campaigning, skills- and capacity building in a popular base, mass mobilization and direct action. The MNSJ’s campaign praxis was similarly multi-faceted and oriented beyond immediate instrumental gains to a broader politics of movement building. In the new politics, movement building has become an alternative politics in its own right, grounded in recognition of the critical knowledge and self-activity at the base as generative in itself. The new movement politics has de-centered the state and its institutions. Increasingly, activists in the MNSJ turned to the cultural politics of theater, protest and popular education even as they sought to protect and stretch institutionalized democratic spaces where these continue to exist. Struggle over concrete gains and losses continue to be waged on the terrain of the state, but the state is no longer the uniquely privileged space of progressive politics. The MNSJ’s praxis points to the ongoing tension in movement politics at all scales between constant mobilization for frontal confrontation

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and the need to create free spaces outside the logic of protest and resistance in order to generate alternative theories and practices. Alternatives to neoliberal globalization are being and need to be created; they do not exist to be discovered, nor do they exist apart from the agency of popular oppositional movements. This insight and the epistemology that undergirds it is one of the most important legacies to a new politics of movements like the MNSJ. The Network’s deep-seated and widely shared commitment to broad-based capacity building was premised on an appreciation of knowledge from below and the importance of developing it. Knowledge production in the MNSJ was based on intellectual openness and dialogue with critical expertise and with the knowledges arising from other movements and their histories. Building popular intellectual and political capacities was articulated to participatory and dialogical pedagogical processes. Social learning in the MNSJ was a democratic and democratizing activity essential to generating alternatives to neoliberalism. Constitutive of this attitude toward knowledge was the recognition of the limits of one’s own knowledge (and the knowledge of any particular movement, organization, politics or program), alongside the necessity and possibility of acting while remaining open to what one does not yet know. Feminists have theorized the new epistemology most systematically as one of partial, positional and situated knowledges. Drawing on experiences in coalition politics, they have argued for the possibility of dialogue among partial knowledges, mutual learning, expanded solidarity and concrete collaboration that does not require either perfect knowledge or perfect agreement. In fact, this epistemology for “rainbow coalition politics” is premised on difference, on the recognition of diversity, on irreducible pluralism. Commitment to dialogue and a foundational recognition of pluralism does not imply the absence of firmly held values or political commitment, but it does require an epistemology embracing partial, situated, positional knowing as the basis for open, provisional, but ‘reliable-enough’ knowledge for politics. The need for movements to act and the diverse discourses and practices constantly emergent will always outstrip the best available theories. The belief in and demonstrated capacity to act on provisional knowing, and to act together with others who think, live and dream differently, rely on a culture and politics of social learning and capacity building. They suggest notions of democracy, revolution and utopia as open-ended projects-in-process, worked out in practice, open to question and to new ‘others,’ and always needing renovation. The new democratic imaginary places a premium on practice. It is through practice that the movements are producing the knowledges they

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need in the making of another world with the space for many worlds within it. Through countless concrete initiatives, experiments and projects, and reflection on their successes and limits, the movements learn, teach, change, try again. A pluralism of visions, projects, organizations, emphases—including among those whom we readily recognize as being progressive—will always exist. In the MNSJ, tensions endured between those who prioritized mobilization, protest, and frontal confrontation with power institutionalized in states and corporations, those who sought space to imagine and construct alternatives that would seize and stretch the currently existing spaces, and those who waged struggles in completely other terms. In the MNSJ, the tension came to a head in the conflict over the Center for Economic and Political Literacy. This exceedingly important chapter in the story suggests how deeply ambivalent left movements are about activist practices that break with their conventional notions of social struggle and social change. The conflict raised the political and organizational implications of placing capacity building and knowledge production at the center of our notions of social movement politics. It provoked a clash of political imaginaries and epistemologies in the MNSJ and is illustrative of larger unresolved disputes in the movements about the (changing) nature of hegemonic power and about how best to build countervailing power in the contemporary period, and whether this formulation is even the proper one. Within and among the new social movements, those more identified with Marxian traditions remain a powerful current, politically and intellectually. Although many are struggling with (and open to or even actively constructing) the new democratic imaginary, long-standing visions of revolution and utopia persist, premised on all-or-nothing struggles for socialism centered on control of nation states for the global overthrow of capitalism These currents have great trouble coming to terms with the pluralism of visions, values, theories, practices and projects present in the movement The new democratic imaginary poses deep challenges to the lefts in the movements, in part because it implies a politics of self-limitation. It is skeptical about ‘projects’ for whole societies, especially those advanced through state power. It is even more cautious about putatively global counter-projects. The new democratic imaginary implies long, multiple and ongoing revolutions conducted primarily in civil society. It displaces those military images of pitched battles for the decisive victory in the struggle against capitalism that have so shaped left imaginaries of social transformation. It clearly does not preclude intense and focused struggles here and now, direct action, frontal contestations with hegemonic power and unequivocal critiques of capitalism. But the new imaginary’s understandings of power, struggle and change are

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more multiple and complex, more plural and provisional, and the new imaginary is more open to what it does not yet know. At the turn of the century, the eruption of worldwide anti-globalization movements captured activists’ imaginations and energies, the attention of governments and major media, and the sympathies of a broad public. The astonishing political scale, capacities and creativity of these new movements did not spring forth whole from nothing. The proliferation all over the world of movement spaces and activist knowledges like those produced in, by and through Toronto’s Metro Network for Social Justice, and which proceed under the radar of most social theory most of the time, constitute the capillary system that has, in this moment, instantiated a massive, visible, highly de-centered yet global expression of countervailing power that has already changed the terms and course of global politics.

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Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. See Carroll, W. 1997. 2. For a highly original and insightful discussion of these developments using the work of Melucci, Laclau and Mouffe, and the development of ‘frames’ in RMT, see Masson 1997. 3. There is a major debate in post-positivist/postmodern social theory about ‘identity’ in the wake of postmodern critiques of essentialism and the resulting loss of any ‘subject’ of emancipatory politics. For post-positivist contributions to a ‘realist’ theory of identity, see Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000. 4. Alvarez et al. note that the notion of culture has undergone numerous transformations and has been actively debated in anthropology. Classical anthropology was characterized by a positivist epistemology and fixed understanding of culture as embodied in institutions, practices, rituals, symbols, as belonging to identifiable groups and as bounded in time and space. Structuralist, political economy-oriented, and interpretive anthropology challenged these assumptions of classical anthropology and moved in post-positivist directions. A ground-breaking collection of essays in the mid-1980s developed new conceptions of culture as interactive and historical. See Clifford and Marcus 1986. Growing awareness of globalization of cultural and economic production has further unsettled spatial notions of culture and neat dichotomies between homogenous “us” and discrete “others.” See Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Fox 1991. For the full discussion, see Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar 1998: 3–4. 5. Although I depart somewhat from these authors in their defense of a realist ontology and their representation of globalization as a single process, I concur with their arguments about the value of ethnography for studies of globality (i.e., the character of the global).

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NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. In presenting Wainwright’s argument, I am employing her categories of “practical knowledge” and “theoretical knowledge.” But I find her usage problematic because it implies that “practical” or “experiential” knowledge is available in some raw way unmediated by “theory.” In my view, no knowledge is atheoretical. Even tacit knowledges are informed by ideas about how the world works, arising from previous experience. As soon as such knowledges are articulated, they are mediated in conceptually saturated ways. Her usage also often suggests that activist knowledge is only ever practical and experiential and that theoretical knowledge is produced somewhere else by someone else. She is inconsistent in this, but her categories orient her argument in this direction. 2. For an extended discussion of the history of debate and range of practice in the women’s movement in Canada on questions of organization and process, see Nancy Adamson, Linda Briskin, and Margaret McPhail, eds, Feminists organizing for change: the contemporary women’s movement in Canada. 1988: 229–55. 3. Harding identifies three: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint, and feminist postmodernism. Harding 1990. 4. The feminist critique of patriarchal knowledge and feminist generation of emancipatory (feminist) knowledge was itself subject to critique as class-, race- and culture-specific. This has resulted in, among other things, the loss of ‘women’ as a unitary subject of feminist emancipation and has required the reconstruction of feminist knowledge on post-foundationalist terms. See Fraser and Nicholson 1990 for discussion of “postmodern feminism.” 5. To the extent that one aligns oneself with the aspirations of oppressed people (in the MNSJ’s case, poor people and people on welfare, who are dependent on municipal social programs), their perspectives also take on a privileged position. This is not to essentialize ‘the poor,’ their experiences or knowledges—only to propose that one starts there, listens hard, and commits oneself to practical solidarity. It does not eliminate the need for negotiation or judgment. 6. I am using the term ‘pedagogical’ here in the spirit of Paulo Freire, whose work I explore below. In the MNSJ, this work proceeded in large part under the rubric of ‘economic and political literacy.’ 7. This discussion of Freire is based on my reading of a selection of his works including Pedagogy of the oppressed,1972; The politics of education: culture, power and Liberation,1985; and with Myles Horton, We make the road by walking: conversations on education and social change,1990. There is also a large secondary literature on Freire, some of which I draw on explicitly below. 8. In the US, a school of ‘critical pedagogy’ has emerged dedicated to advancing Freire’s work in the North American context. This highly visible and intellectually acclaimed stream of critical pedagogy is an academic movement, pioneered by Henry Giroux, which addresses itself to educational

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contexts “into which a radical practice has to be carved.” See Mostern 1994: 256. As a discourse, critical pedagogy has been preoccupied largely with the struggle for reform of teaching methods and curriculum within formal educational institutions. Mostern 1994 rightly critiques critical pedagogy for its lack of concrete connection to specific movements. He argues that it is not enough to “teach from a position;” it is essential to join with and develop communities of activist practice (256). But insofar as this discourse has an explicit politics of liberation and incorporates critical social movements as an explicit referent, it is instructive. The more political and theoretical works include the following: Mohanty 1994; Mostern 1994; Giroux 1985; McLaren 1997; Gaudiano and de Alba 1994; Giroux, Lankshear, McLaren, et al. 1996; McLaren and Lankshear 1994; Giroux and McLaren 1994; Luke and Gore 1992; Steiner, Krank, McLaren, et al. 2000; Lankshear and McLaren 1993; McLaren and Leonard 1993; Giroux and McLaren 1989; Hernandez 1997. Here I have privileged a second stream of critical pedagogy, that which is embedded in popular movements. This includes many expressions of Freirean-inspired popular education in Latin America and the work of the Tennessee-based Highlander Center. I would also include the economic and political literacy work of the MNSJ in this stream. Because these are activist pedagogies, they are rarely described in writing and even less systematically reflected upon or theorized. This was Freire’s great contribution—one I hope to extend here through my study of the knowledge production practices of the MNSJ. 9. For a very perceptive treatment of Freire in the context of a larger and longer-standing tradition of Latin American pedagogical-political thought, see Edgar Gonzalez Gaudiano and Alicia de Alba, 1994, “Freire—present and future possibilities,” in Peter L. McLaren and Colin Lankshear, eds. Politics of liberation: paths from Freire, 1994.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. At the outset, it is important to clarify my use of terms. Until municipal amalgamation in 1997, Metro Council was the metropolitan authority for the political region, Metropolitan Toronto. Metro Toronto extended from Steeles Avenue in the north to Lake Ontario in the South and encompassed six ‘local’ municipalities each with their own Councils: the cities of Toronto,York, East York, North York, Etobicoke and Scarborough. Since 1988, Metro Council was directly elected although the Mayors from each of the local cities also automatically became Metro Councillors. In this account, when I refer to Metro Council or ‘Council,’ I am referring to a specific political body and level of government with its own bureaucratic apparatus. When I refer to Metro Toronto, I am referring to the urban geographical area corresponding to this political jurisdiction. When I refer to Toronto or ‘city of Toronto,’ I mean the ‘old’ or ‘inner’ city. The ‘Greater Toronto Area’ is a term that has come to refer to a larger urban

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2.

3.

4. 5.

economic region much beyond the boundaries of Metro Toronto and encompassing many more municipalities. Although there have been ministries, boards and commissions carrying this moniker, it remains a weak although emergent political jurisdiction. Municipal amalgamation in 1997 resulted in the elimination of the six constituent municipalities and the creation of a single ‘megacity’ Council for the area previously known as Metro Toronto and now simply the ‘new’ City of Toronto. Between 1989 and 1992, the GTA shed over 180,000 jobs, about onetenth of its employment base and more than one half of all jobs lost in Canada in that period (Donald 1999: 111). By 1992, the unemployment rate was 12 per cent, having more than tripled since 1989 (Clarkson 2001). According to The Toronto Star, 78,000 jobs were lost in 1991 alone (MNSJ 1993a; MNSJ 1995a). UI was a program funded by a trio of contributors: workers, employers, and the federal government. It was an insurance program, paid into during good times in order to support unemployed workers in times of recession. Unlike earlier (post-war) downturns, the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s did not give way to recovery of employment levels. Unemployed workers were forced onto the social program of last resort. General Welfare was an income support program that, historically, was cost-shared among federal, provincial and municipal governments. Up to 1989 and before the “cap” on the Canada Assistance Plan, Ottawa was paying 50 per cent, Ontario 30 per cent and Metro 20 percent of GWA costs. At the same time that levels of unemployment were soaring, the federal government capped any increase in its contributions to welfare for the three richest provinces— Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta—at five per cent. The newly elected NDP government of Ontario was left to bear the brunt of exploding welfare costs. This meant that the cost-sharing ratio between Ottawa and Ontario/Metro shifted from 50:50 (1988) to 29:61 (1992) (Graham and Lightman 1992). Although costs to Metro remained at 20 per cent, the numbers of people in Metro Toronto on welfare tripled between 1989 and 1991, from about 40,000 to over 120,000. Metro’s 20 per cent share of the total welfare bill tripled from $63 million in 1990 to $200 million in 1992 (MNSJ 1993g). “Flatlining” refers to imposing a zero per cent increase. Factoring in inflation, the result was a de facto cut of between four and five per cent. These included: Special assistance and supplementary aid, programs that provided for special needs and extraordinary expenses of people on GWA or Family Benefits Assistance, including moving allowance, housing setup, beds and bedding, Christmas allowance, dental care, orthotic aids, eyeglasses, and other assistive devices for people with disabilities. Childcare: With costs of infant care approaching $1000 per month, many working families could not afford the full fees. Metro and the provincial government have shared the costs of subsidizing a number of childcare spaces. The 1992 cuts resulted in the loss of 600 subsidized spaces, the closure of six daycare centers, and an increase in user fees of 200 per cent.

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

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Homes for the Aged: Metro operates a number of Homes for the Aged, which tend to house poor and very frail seniors. In the Metro Homes for the Aged, 156 jobs were eliminated. Community grants: Metro had an innovative program funding community-based, neighborhood services. Grants were frozen at 1991 levels. This was the tacit common sense that informed the feminist and antipoverty activism that I encountered in Toronto beginning in the late 1980s. There were small nodes of Marxist-inspired (Marxist-Leninist; Trotskyist; Maoist; socialist feminist) activism and leftists within all the movements, who had critical analyses of capitalism and a perspective on the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s as symptomatic of capitalist crises and who understood particular activist struggles within this larger context, though this did not characterize activists or activism in general. For an insightful discussion of these political differences and how they played out concretely in the childcare movement through the 1970s and 1980s, see Prentice 1988. These tensions are also evident in the exchanges between author and commentators in discussing the gay movement of the 1980s in McCaskell 1988. As discussed in Chapter Two, especially with reference to the women’s movement, earlier modes of activism also involved and required movement-based knowledge production. However, generally speaking, activist discourses of this period did not interact with political-economic discourses about ‘the economy’ until the advent of the struggle over free trade. For accounts of the history and politics of social planning and of the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, see McGrath and Clutterbuck 1998; McGrath 1998; Lemon 1993. A significant number of the leading activists in FightBack Metro! were young women social workers employed by community and neighborhood centers, settlement houses, and downtown drop-in centers and emergency shelters. Through the 1980s, there was increasing emphasis in these agencies on “community development”: the development of the capacities of poor people to speak for themselves, to take leadership in community organizing processes and to participate in the governing of the agencies whose mandate it was to serve their communities. When the FightBack Metro! campaign coalesced in 1992, there were established, albeit uneven, practices of engaging poor people in meaningful discussion and decisionmaking about their lives and a network of committed and experienced “community development workers” drawing on traditions of radical social work. I want to distinguish the usage of “community developmetn” common among Toronto social agencies and community groups from the more conservative American tradition associated with increased community self-reliance and a reduced role for the state in social welfare provision. The emphasis here is on self-advocacy and self-organizing, often to more effectively make a claim on public resources or for better treatment by public bureaucracies. It is

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12.

13.

14.

15.

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17.

Notes to Chapter Three also distinct from “community economic development” (CED). Although there are many versions, CED differs from community development in its emphases on local employment creation and capital formation. The key organizations representing this position were the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) and the International Socialists (IS). To the extent that OCAP is informed by a political philosophy, it is that of Piven and Cloward 1979 and their argument that the most powerful political resource available to poor people’s movements is their capacity to create disruption and conditions of ungovernability. In both personal conversation and in his writing, OCAP’s long-standing leader, John Clarke, has been explicit about this. See Clarke 1992. For activists, linking the budget crisis at Metro with the politics of free trade was an analytical advance in itself. The struggle over free trade put the economy back at the center of activist understandings across a variety of movements. This is not to deny the ongoing importance of national-scale dynamics in Toronto (Kipfer 1997) but to draw attention to the local—global dynamic producing globalization in world cities which, in my view, is an important corrective to the national bias of most critical political discourses. I find this category problematic in that Todd does not specify what ‘services’ are included, nor does he consider the implications of significant differences between high-end employment of marketing, accounting, legal and financial advisors versus the low-end, highly exploited employment of cleaners, chambermaids, and food service workers. Also not mentioned is employment in human services in the public and para-public sectors. Sassen was among the first world-city theorists to note the labor-market segmentation and polarization in world cities (Sassen 1991; Sassen 1994). Although the MNSJ emerged in response to developments at the Metro level of government, the sense that many of the activists had of ‘the city’ was inexorably shaped by their concentration in the downtown, in the center city of Toronto. One of the significant features of the MNSJ’s politics was its intent to build a Metro Toronto-wide network when there had been no previous activist politics developed at that scale. This swelling province-wide, anti-poverty movement pushed both the Peterson and Rae governments into serious and high profile plans to restructure the welfare system. These initiatives were undermined by the Mulroney government’s “cap on CAP” in 1989, which capped transfer payments for welfare to Ontario, Alberta and B.C. See note 3 above. This was followed by the repeal of the Canada Assistance Plan by the Liberal government in the notorious 1995 Martin budget. In Ontario, any hope of progressive welfare reform died when the Harris government was elected in 1995 on a platform that included workfare as a major plank. This is a complex and important history, which I cannot explore here. See, for example, the following for discussion of women’s housing and women’s activism for social housing: Wekerle 1988; Wekerle and Muirhead 1991; Wekerle 1993.

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18. According to most accounts, it seems that these reform politics of the 1970s were heavily concentrated in the center city of Toronto. By the time the MNSJ was organizing in the 1990s, local pockets of progressive activism and community organizing certainly existed in all the cities that comprised Metro Toronto. There are important histories of radical grassroots politics in the suburbs that also need to be recovered and knit into the story of the (new) City of Toronto’s political history. One example is the history of community activism in the Jane-Finch community that dates from the early 1970s. For one woman’s testimonial about her life in this neighborhood and her emergence as a community leader, see MacNevin 1999 and the Forward by Marvyn Novick. There is a much fuller and largely undocumented history than I can deal with here. 19. In another context, Magnusson traces the history of local government in Canada and describes the post-war era as a period in which ‘good’ local government was thought to be professional, bureaucratic, and rational, and by definition, remote from political influence of both elites and citizens’ groups. Most commentators view these developments as progress over the clientalistic relations that had marked so much local government up to that period. However, the practices of local government in the period of rational planning continued to be organized around creating and maintaining a favorable climate for investment (Magnusson 1983b; Magnusson 1983a). 20. For a discussion of the history of these developments, their articulation to the development of the ‘neighborhood movement’ and its organizational expressions in neighborhood associations from the 1960s to the early 1990s, see McConkey 1992. 21. Also see note 1 above. 22. In this period, the Metropolitan Toronto Police were accountable to a Police Commission comprised completely of provincial government appointees (McCaskell 1988, 179). 23. Stasiulis does not specify the nature of the “political.” 24. Anti-racist struggles also had significant and more unambiguously positive impact on the Toronto Board of Education. Stasiulis documents these efforts also and then compares the achievements at the School Board with the relative incalcitrance of the police (Stasiulis 1989, 74ff.). 25. In 1999, there were at least three community activist networks working on policing issues like public accountability, ever-expanding police budgets and police targeting of vulnerable populations. The networks included: the June 13 Committee based in the gay community; the Coalition Against Target Policing comprised of groups supporting homeless people, and the Coalition for Better Policing, which was supported by the Law Union and other law reform organizations (Wirsig and Khosla 1999–2000). 26. See Calliste 1996. See also Brand 1986, Robertson 1999, and sources in note 29 below. 27. On women’s housing activism, see Wekerle 1988; Wekerle 1993; Wekerle, et al. 1991. On“safe city” initiatives, see Wekerle and Whitzman 1995.

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29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes to Chapter Three Important collections on feminist organizing in Canada through the 1980s and 1990s include the following: Wine and Ristock1991; Carty 1993; Backhouse and Flaherty; Adamson, et al. 1988; Briskin and Yanz 1983; Dua and Robertson 1999. I find their categories problematic in several ways: (1) Why are all these struggles not “quality-of-life concerns”? (2) Why are the activisms they identify as “identity politics” deemed so? This seems to leave other women’s activisms as ‘without identity.’ In the process, this taxonomy implies that the activisms of white, straight, and able-bodied women are somehow normative. While this follows conventional usage among many activists and academics in the 1980s, it remains problematic. (3) A similar problem arises from categorizing activisms (and women) as lesbians, women of color, immigrant women, disabled women, and so on. While people did and do organize around specific axes of oppression, it is important to represent these issues and activisms as interactive and cross-cutting. There are disabled women who are lesbians, lesbians who are women of color, etc. Presenting a list of seemingly fixed categories, while making visible some important specificities of women’s activism, also contributes to the notion that these are self-contained and static issues, identities and groupings. These conceptual problems are reproduced in the academic study of social movements, which often represents the ‘peace’ movement separately from the environmental movement, from the women’s movement, from the labor movement, and so on. While there are specific movement histories, cultures and politics, and many examples of movement chauvinism, there are more examples of the movements informing and penetrating each other. A women’s movement exists in the labor movement and vice versa, for example. On organizing by immigrant women and/or women of color, see Hernandez 1988; Brand and Carty, 1993; Dua and Robertson 1999; Dua 1999; Das Gupta 1999; Ng, R. 1988; Ng, R. 1991; Agnew 1996; Ng, W. 1982; Women Working With Immigrant Women 1982. On organizing by women with disabilities, see Doucette 1991; Driedger 1993; Stone and Doucette 1988. On organizing by lesbians, see Decter 1993; Egan, Gardner and Persad 1988; Stone 1991; Stone 1997. For an insightful discussion of the range of discourses in the environmental movement in Canada, see Adkin 1992a. For other helpful accounts of environmental activisms in Canada, including Toronto-based examples, see Adkin 1992a; Sandilands 1992. Examples included Lucas aircraft in the U.K. and a Toshiba plant in Japan. Murray (1992) identifies a number of major features of the current context having transformative effects on labor movements. The globalization of production has ushered in a period of intensified international competitiveness, increased capital mobility, and trade and investment liberalization. This is a new context for labor as owners and investors can increasingly escape national modes of regulation—or argue for ever-greater concessions from governments and/or workers as the price for remaining in any given

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location. Governments are being constrained by these developments, even as many are actively promoting them through international agreements and through deregulation and privatization of public assets and services. Deregulation has included rolling back social protections and organizing rights of workers. Neoliberal modes of governance have also transformed the terrain of public sector employment, bargaining and organizing. The shift from Fordist to post-Fordist modes of production is marked by flexible specialization in production, a shift from the production of goods to services, and employer demands for increased flexibility of the workforce. This has led to a growing proportion of the work force in part-time, casual, and contractual work, often dispersed over far-flung workplaces or working from home, a situation that has radically transformed conditions for union organizing. The growing bifurcation of the workforce between high-paying, secure jobs and low-wage insecure jobs is a dynamic within unions as well as characterizing social conditions more generally. The entry of women and people of color into the workforce has dramatically increased, producing new conflicts and struggles within unions as well as pressures and possibilities to connect with social forces organizing outside of unions. Finally, Murray suggests that the growing marketization of social life itself, characterized by rampant consumerism and consumer debt, is raising profound questions for unions and workers about productivism and growth. Murray 1992, 42ff. Notably at Radio Shack, Puretex, Sandra Coffee, Irwin Toys, and by the 1980, the Public Service Alliance of Canada federal clerks’ strike (76 per cent women). As in the 1978–79 steelworkers’ strike at Inco in Sudbury, Ontario. There is a much bigger history of feminism in the labor movement and much more to say about its significance for social movement politics in Canada. For an excellent, if dated resource, see Briskin, et al. 1983. A brief comment on the literature drawn on above and its (tenuous) relationship to the lived reality of those activisms and movements seems important. What is surely self-evident but is rarely admitted by those writing about movements is the paucity of written accounts relative to the activisms, large and small, that are everywhere present. Most activisms are never documented and are quickly forgotten. Sometimes, some fragment of a complex, often chaotic process, is preserved in a newspaper account. More often, activisms are present in their absence: between the lines of accounts of some policy discussion or some legal case. Of those very few activisms that get described at any length, there is often only one account available. Very few writers, activist or academic, are self-conscious about the partial character of their own knowledge of and perspective on what are always multivalent and conflictual, often opaque processes. Further, some movements generate far more self-reflection and political theorization than others. In the Canadian context, feminist and labor movements come to mind, and within them, the more self-consciously socialist strands are particularly self-expressive and academically and theoretically oriented.

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Notes to Chapter Three There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is the important Marxian tradition of ‘history from below.’ The feminist movement also has a strong tradition of the recovery and writing of women’s history and respect for the significance of the micro-processes of everyday life. These traditions are centrally important and I place myself within them. But it is also important to be aware of the sociology and politics of knowledge production, of how powerfully they shape what will be written about and in what terms, and of how ‘knowledge about activism in Toronto’ comes to be constituted, even within a body of critical scholarship on progressive social movements. The institutionalization of labor studies and women’s studies in universities both reflects and amplifies these trends. My central point is that it is essential both not to confuse a(ny) limited body of literature with a complex, diverse and dynamic reality and to critically examine the sociological and political conditions for the production of any body of knowledge, including its exclusions and silences. Coalition politics is an important term pointing to real breakthroughs in social movement practice. But it does not get at movements’ ongoing and mutually transformative effects on each other, preceding and beyond that which we call ‘coalition politics.’ See, for example Carroll and Ratner 1995, on the presence of ‘new social movements’ within ‘old unions.’ This was true not only in Toronto, of course. See Boyd 1992, 22–23, for example, for an account of the history of coalition building around a variety of struggles in Prince Edward Island starting in 1973 until the formation of the PEI Pro-Canada Network in 1987. While I don’t want to over-state the coalitional impulses of the movements of the 1980s, I do want to assert that they were present and significant, both in theory and practice. But it is probably fair to say that the ‘mainstream’ of all the movements was oriented to working within the boundaries of their own movements (which were themselves marked by internal diversity and organizational coalitions). The ‘left’ within each movement would have had a sense of the importance and possibility of collaborating with labor. And the ‘new social movements’ within the labor movement, especially feminists, were pushing labor outward toward the other movements. Again, I don’t want to overstate the presence of this kind of thinking and practice in the movements. But it was there. By the late 1980s, for example, socialist feminists were the dominant group in the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. The literature produced on Canadian movements in this period also reflects this, although it is crucial to note that the literature of the 1980s is, almost without exception, Marxistinflected, which the movements as a whole were not. As stated above, the literature on movements in Canada is very slim. There are very few accounts of histories of debate within movements. There are fewer still that reflect the unevenness, pluralism, and development of political perspectives over time. And of the few accounts that do exist, many are over-determined by the Marxist frameworks of their authors. As a result, the presence and

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perspectives of Marxist-informed activists are over-represented in the literature relative to both their political influence and their numbers on the ground. I am marking the moniker ‘national’ to flag its ambiguous meaning. For many organizations, ‘national’ implies an office in Ottawa oriented to monitoring and/ or lobbying the federal government and interacting with the ‘national’ media. While many of these organizations may be articulated to wider networks dispersed across some or all the major cities, provinces or regions of Canada, most have little or no capacity or authority to mobilize people or resources concretely on any scale beyond their Ottawa offices. I discuss the problematic assumptions about scale embedded in the unqualified use of ‘national,’ ‘provincial’ and ‘local’ to describe ‘levels’ of political organization elsewhere. See Conway 2004:141, n.2; 165–66. In any event, in even the most vertically integrated ‘national’ organizations, notably the unions and the Canadian Labour Congress, representation and decision-making is more fragmented and decentralized than it might appear. These organizations are not unitary entities and they don’t function on command, although the premises of coalition politics as practiced at the ACN seemed to imply otherwise. I deal more fully with these and other problematic assumptions informing coalition practice in Canada elsewhere. Conway 2004: 115ff. I am flagging ‘social justice’ to note what I detect as a narrowing of its meaning to refer to a particular kind of coalition politics oriented to economic policy and social welfare programs and notably (implicitly) de-centering equity struggles around race, gender and sexuality, including their narrowly economic aspects and certainly their broader socio-cultural and human rights dimensions. On the origins, history and some initial theorizations of the Action Canada Network, see Bleyer 1997, Robinson 1993, Clarke, T.1992a, and Conway 1994. For extensive scholarly treatment, see Ayres 1998. I don’t know of any account of the history of debate in the 1980s within various tendencies in the labor movement about the merits of coalition politics or lack thereof. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the defeat over free trade and growing disillusionment with the NDP had made coalitions with other movements a higher priority after 1988. When Bob White became President of the CLC in the early 1990s, there was relatively greater and more widespread support for labor participation in and support of crosssectoral coalitions, but concrete implementation of this orientation was highly uneven and contingent on the enthusiasm of local labor councils. See Howes 2001. This last is not a small point in that individuals central to the founding, organizational stability and political success of the ACN came from the Christian left—specifically Tony Clarke, who became chair of the ACN and who was the staff at the Social Affairs Commission of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference and probably wrote their 1983 statement entitled “Ethical Reflections on the Economic Crisis,” and Dennis Howlett, who was on staff at GATT-fly, later

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the Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, which performed a significant proportion of the ACN’s research and publication work. 48. This formulation refers to developments involving recognition of Quebec and the First Nations as ‘nations’ in pan-Canadian social movement coalitions. Explicit political articulation was most developed in the National Action Committee on the Status of Women in the context of the struggle over the Charlottetown (Constitutional) Accord, and NAC representatives carried these perspectives into broader coalitions like the ACN. 49. Accounts vary as to who should be credited with the founding of the Pro Canada Network. In an article, Tony Clarke 1992b cites the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) and the Council of Canadians. For a dissenting opinion, see Cohen 1992. She challenges the perception that the CLC spearheaded the coalition against free trade. 50. This is not to say that there were and are not significant tensions, but the desire to be together and work together overrides these in coalition politics. Sometimes this produces ‘lowest common denominator’ politics, as Howlett suggests. But sometimes, it produces something else, as he goes on to argue about the PCN and I will argue about the MNSJ. Bleyer (1997, 140), however, also notes that the PCN was not immune to ‘lowest common denominator’ politics.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. On paper, lines of accountability were clear: the elected steering committee was the authoritative body between AGMs. In practice, however, as the work of working groups became larger scale and more complex, it exceeded the oversight capacity of the steering committee. Effective accountability also relied heavily on the capacities of individual steering committee members active in working groups to competently and continually report on and problematize the work of the working groups to the steering committee and vice versa. For fuller elaboration,see Conway 2001: 222ff. 2. This is a popular education methodology developed by GATT-fly (later the Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice) in the late 1970s and 1980s. A number of FightBack Metro! activists had been using it in their work and brought it to the campaign. See GATT-fly 1983. 3. Sources for this section were conference organizing files and steering committee meeting minutes, as well as my experience and recollections as the full-time program co-coordinator for the conference and member of the MNSJ Steering Committee. “Creating A Just Economy: A Metro-area Conference for Social Change Activists, Organizers and Community Leaders” took place 2–3 April 1993 in the Northrop Frye Building, University of Toronto. 4. In describing this tension, I want to avoid reproducing a false dualism between ‘activist’ and ‘expert.’ Many activist leaders in the MNSJ and elsewhere are university educated. There has nevertheless been a wide gap between those whose thinking is embedded in ongoing social movement

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practice and those whose lives and thinking have been remote from concrete political engagement. More precisely, it was about government policy in areas identified as central to economic restructuring. Economic literacy was a term being used by grassroots organizations in Africa involved in popular education and organizing in the context of “structural adjustment.” It embodied a commitment to the importance of ordinary people developing a critical understanding of economic restructuring, and it captured what the working group wanted to achieve in the conference. Basismo is a critical term used to describe a political tendency within Latin American popular movements, which argues that the critical knowledges necessary for emancipatory action are spontaneously present in the ‘base’ (among the poor, the oppressed), arising from their experience of oppression. This tendency eschews the need for engagement with other bodies of critical knowledge, especially more ‘expert,’ abstract and systematized knowledge associated with ‘theory.’ See Mainwaring 1986. While these concerns may seem self-evident, different movements inevitably stressed one to the detriment of the others. Even where the essential character of all of them was acknowledged, there were few, if any, movement spaces where they were (are) truly integrated. This recalls Freire’s oft-repeated injunction that the pedagogy of the oppressed as a cultural and political process could and should not be reduced to a set of tools or techniques. The SPRAG campaign also featured shadow hearings, street protests, a 48hour vigil outside the federal Liberal caucus meeting in Toronto, 1–3 February 1995, and a subsequent “Vigil Tour” to Ottawa that featured public events in 18 Ontario towns and cities. All these events were in collaboration with other organizations. The MNSJ also conducted about 30 community workshops in Metro in the period leading up to the federal budget of 28 February 1995. See Conway 2004: 171–74. Paying for Canada was initially a collaborative effort among the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, the Child Poverty Action Group and Citizens for Public Justice and included some people who were also active in the MNSJ. Although Paying for Canada was very influential in MNSJ discussions, activists were regularly reading, debating and integrating data and perspectives from the following organizations: Canadian Labour Congress, Canadian Auto Workers, National Union of Public and General Employees, CUPE, Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, National Action Committee on the Status of Women, National AntiPoverty Organization, Action Canada Network, Ecumenical Coalition for Economic Justice, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform, Council of Canadians, and the work of journalist-author Linda McQuaig. See Conway 1995a. Workshop audiences were highly varied and critical discussion was uneven. Church groups full of seniors remembered the Depression and were often

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17. 18.

Notes to Chapter Four schooled in the critical perspectives of the Social Gospel. Latin American immigrants were steeped in critical understandings of the international political economy of debt; many had years of experience in the Latin American left. Both groups had lots to teach MNSJ facilitators. By this I mean the neo-Keynesian, welfare state-based and policy-oriented politics, which represented the best of left thinking in Canada and in which the MNSJ was steeped, even as its limits were becoming apparent. It is noteworthy that the reformulated goals emphasized amplifying “people’s voice” (sic!) without reference to their organizations. A major effect of the cuts in Ontario has been to subdue or silence the voices of advocacy organizations, which are a large proportion of the MNSJ’s membership. This inattention to defending their constituent institutions suggests one of the blind spots of coalition practice in Canada. To my knowledge (in Toronto and Ontario), there has been little discussion of the neoliberal’s strategic assault on the infrastructure of popular opposition or of its political ramifications for coalitions (or resistance more generally). Member groups have also been very unevenly impacted, affecting the (im)balance of power between labor and community organizations. There is a pressing need for material analysis of who supports coalitions, when, why and how, and what happens when the configuration of material resources changes. This is key to any long-term planning, yet there remains a strange and enduring silence on the subject. Thanks to Rick Egan, Interview, 4 June 1998. Discussions about the meaning of the 1995 federal budget were pursued most energetically by those activists who had been in the leadership of the SPRAG campaign. In the months following the budget, in winter 1995, these discussions proceeded in the MNSJ’s Economic and Political Literacy (EPL) Working Group and were disseminated through the Network through those activists present in multiple working groups and through reports and discussions at the steering committee. These discussions, their effects on EPL work and their long-range political and organizational implications for the MNSJ are dealt with more fully in the concluding chapter. In the next chapter, I discuss their reverberations through and effects on the Metro-focused work in 1995–96 and the Network-wide transformations that pressed toward a broader politics of urban movement building which, by 1997, had become central to the MNSJ’s self-understanding. This process in the working group produced a publication entitled Hope in Hard Times (Economic and Political Literacy Working Group 1996) designed for use independently of facilitator trainings or workshops. Between January and April 1996, three trainings were held with 120 trainees. The political writings of French regulation theorist, Alain Lipietz, were especially influential in shaping the narrative of the post-war order and its crisis. See especially Lipietz 1992. The seminar conducted for MNSJ activists by Greg Albo in fall 1995, also informed by regulation theory, helped consolidate this thinking. In anchoring this international narrative

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in the Canadian context, two books were particularly helpful: McBride and Shields 1993, and Teeple 1995. 19. There is a large literature on the new left and the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their historic legacy for subsequent movement development. On US movements in this period, see Boggs 1986; Epstein 1991; Darnovsky, Epstein, and Flacks 1995a; Boggs 1991; Breines 1982; Gitlin 1987; Freeman 1983. 20. As is true of any educational process, especially one that works with the experiences and knowledges of participants, the quality is contingent on the degree of skill, knowledge and theoretical sophistication of the facilitator. Although significant attention was paid to the problem of facilitator education, training and support in the MNSJ, the quality of content and process in workshops was inevitably uneven. 21. Significant work to further develop the timeline continued through 1996 and 1997, notably to incorporate critical narratives of immigration, the self-organization of immigrant communities and their role in expansions and transformations in the welfare state in Canada, and the activist histories in communities of color. There was also significant work initiated on incorporating a fuller ecological perspective. These attempts reflected a growing self-critique among the EPL activists of their too-exclusive reliance on political economy-based narratives.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE 1. My use of ‘dialectical’ is meant to invoke a thoroughly historical and multi-dimensional and multi-directional ensemble of processes in transformative relation with each other and in which none can be reduced to another. I have found David Harvey’s treatment of dialectics very rich, resonant and provocative, although I don’t embrace his perspective tout court. See Harvey 1996. 2. I was hired in this position. I remained on staff at Church of the Holy Trinity part-time and continued to represent the church on the MNSJ Steering Committee. 3. In winter 1994, activists organized a roundtable with invited experts, including some present and former Metro Councillors, former executive political staff, people teaching urban studies, urban planning consultants and movement-based activist-intellectuals. This was an informal and onetime-only discussion that clarified for MNSJ organizers how NOT to consult experts! Experts on urban politics would not be consulted again until winter 1996 in the face of the wholesale restructuring of governance in the GTA. Although activists were open to seeking formal expertise, there were myriad problems in doing it effectively. 4. The “capital from current” account was approximately $60 million that Metro collected annually through property tax and then dedicated to a capital fund which financed up to 50 percent of Metro’s capital spending

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5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

per year. Anything in excess of this went into a reserve fund. In 1992 alone, $10.3 million went into this reserve (MNSJ 1994g). This deputation and the trends in activists’ thinking about fiscal policy alternatives reflected a growing knowledge base and developing perspective in the Network following work on the “Creating a Just Economy” conference in April 1993, the publication of a pamphlet on the federal debt in the context of the 1993 federal election (see Conway 1993a), and ongoing work in economic literacy. See Chapter Four. By the budget vote, the police budget was $15 million over the target set by Council. Instead of cutting them, Council extended a $7 million loan and more time to find the rest . See Clutterbuck 1994a. In the MNSJ’s campaign literature, three reasons were given for the decision not to endorse candidates: “ (1) we are a coalition of groups and we anticipated much internal conflict . . . (2) there are too few good candidates . . . (3) we did not want to focus so exclusively on the outcome of the vote.” MNSJ 1994c. The workshops and their significance are discussed in the preceding chapter. Metro Votes! had to be recalled immediately after its release because of an error in the voting record. The MNSJ issued public apologies and retractions, then reprinted and distributed a corrected version. It was a costly mistake in terms of public and media credibility and delayed distribution of the broadsheet by two weeks at the onset of the election period. In my view, this discursive shift signaled an urbanizing of the MNSJ’s politics that was in part a response to the effects of neoliberalism on the city and in part a recognition of the defeat and/or exhaustion of the claimsmaking discourses of the post-war era. In an interview, Stefan Kipfer cautioned that this formulation can imply a conservative communitarian and fortress-like politics that functions to erase the ongoing presence and effect of class (and other kinds of) conflict within and over the city. On one hand, I agree. On the other, I do not agree that communitarian discourses are, by definition, reactionary. I think they are too powerful to be rejected out of hand by progressive movements. It is important to clarify that the MNSJ’s use of this discourse was embedded in a popular democratic politics that was acutely aware of class inequalities and concretely engaged in struggles over redistribution. See Kipfer 2001. (Kipfer is an urban theorist, who was also an activist in the MNSJ during and after the period under consideration and a significant voice in shaping the MNSJ’s emergent urban politics.) The ODA publicly defended Metro Council’s emergency dental plan for welfare recipients, which converged with the MNSJ’s concerns. More generally, however, the politics of the ODA was characterized by a defense of the incomes and rights of dentists in private practice. This would involve them in later years in lobbying the city to eliminate salaried dentists from community health clinics. Their defense of the emergency dental program should be viewed, partially at least, in this context. Kipfer 2001. The MUSH sector refers to municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals as recipients of provincial transfers.

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13. The reasons for and effects of this strategy and its contribution to a growing political and organizational impasse and crisis in the MNSJ are discussed in the next chapter. Suffice it to say here that the praxes of the working groups were producing fundamental political questions of a new kind, with which the steering committee did not have the wherewithal to deal. The dynamics were further complicated by the fact that there was disagreement within working groups about the nature and importance of the questions, and the fact that they were presenting the steering committee with open-ended questions, not fully-formed answers or positions with which people could agree or disagree. 14. The MNSJ “Community Forum on Restructuring in the GTA” was held on Monday, 11 March 1996 at the 519 Church Street Community Centre with about 40 people in attendance. The conference, “Between Global and Local: Building a New Urban Movement—A coming together of activists in the Greater Toronto Area” was held on Friday, 15 November and Saturday, 16 November 1996 at the United Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street with over 100 people attending. I have drawn on the organizing files, detailed program proposals, and in the case of the conference, audiotapes of the event, in addition to my direct knowledge of these processes. 15. The package of reading included Friedmann 1995b; Todd 1995; Keil 1995; Sassen 1994; Jessop 1994. 16. The conference was co-organized with the Chinese Canadian National Council, Green Work Alliance, INTERCEDE, Labour Council of Metro Toronto and York Region, Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto, Toronto Environmental Alliance, WEED Foundation, and the Workers’Information and Action Centre of Toronto. MNSJ 1996o. 17. The ‘Creating a Just Economy’ conference is discussed in the preceding chapter.

NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX 1. Ontario Public Service Employees Union. 2. For discussions of the Metro Days of Action, both academic and journalistic, see Kipfer 1997; Kipfer 1998; Munro 1997; Cole-Arnal and Kelly 1996; Kuitenbrouwer 1997; Bickerton 1996; Beck, M., 1996; Rebick 1996; Toronto Star 1996a,b. 3. These were the Social Planning Council, the Labour Council, the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice and Neighbourhood Legal Services. 4. Although shaped by organizational involvements and loyalties, the political analyses, motivations and responses of individuals are complex, often contradictory and changing, and defy conclusive description. However, they also determine the limits of the possible and so demand critical, if cautious, reflection. The following is based on my first-hand experience in the MNSJ at the time, innumerable meetings and conversations, official minutes and my own notes. This is an attempt to describe and group a range of responses rather than delineate factions.

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5. I am aware of the arguments of radical geographers that no space is static; the problem is that it continues to be conceived as such. See Doreen Massey, “Politics and Space/Time,” New Left Review 196 (1992) 65–84. 6. The committee also engaged in extensive consultations with other local and national groups perceived to be doing some aspect of EPL work, to garner their support and feedback, and to ensure that they were not duplicating work. 7. The staff would support the ongoing activities of the working group, which would continue to be volunteer activist-based and would drive the work. 8. A draft budget was not developed until March 1997. The five-year budget that was eventually approved in August 1997 for fund-raising purposes was for $155,000 in Year 1 rising to $209,250 by Year 5 (gross figures). MNSJ file: “Centre for EPL, April 1996-September 1997. 9. Because running the center would involve major financial and employer responsibilities, the EPL organizers supported the idea of a reference group nominated and/or elected by the working group and appointed/ratified by the steering committee to provide continuity and to take on legal and day-to-day management responsibilities. Half would represent member organizations, several of whom would also be steering committee members. The other half would be individuals active in the EPL work. Although not the only issue, the proposed role of individuals was controversial in an organizationally based coalition. For an account of this debate see MNSJ 1996k. 10. EPL workshops, courses and conferences generated revenues through fees and donations. 11. The Center sub-committee was upgraded to the status of working group reporting directly to the steering committee after the 1996 AGM. 12. The Social Planning Council was experiencing intense political pressure in the aftermath of the Days of Action and was having its own financial and organizational crises. The MNSJ was housed at the SPC virtually rent-free and was heavily dependent on its infrastructure. 13. The problem was not the Trillium Foundation itself as a source for money, but that it was perceived by some as the only or the best source of money for the MNSJ; they feared that the EPL proposal would effectively squeeze out funding for other MNSJ activities, specifically campaign work. 14. This erupted in the context of a debate over fund-raising guidelines. The Center Working Group wanted to ensure diversified funding and, with the proper safeguards, was open to money from foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals. Some on the steering committee were unequivocally opposed to accepting money from some or all of these sources. The debate reflects a number of factors: people in church and labor organizations with independent funding bases were not experiencing the funding crises of community organizations and had no occasion for familiarity with the contradictory world of fund-raising; people attracted to a politics and aesthetics of marginality were ambivalent about money and organization and

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resisted going “mainstream;” some people did not perceive exclusive dependence on labor money as also constituting a problem of political (and intellectual) independence. 15. This unfortunate development cannot be separated from two related developments: in February 1997, due to personal reasons, the MNSJ lost two leading EPL activists who had also been longstanding and widely trusted members of the steering committee and who had deep roots in other areas of the MNSJ’s work; and the Center Working Group had attracted a number of activists primarily interested in EPL and/or the concept of a popular center but with little knowledge of the MNSJ and its politics and structures as a whole, and without sufficient political maturity and history to effectively and constructively engage in the debates that were underway. 16. The cultural (political, strategic) conflict that I am describing in the MNSJ was also evident in the Metro Days of Action coalition. Were the Days of Action about “bringing down the Harris government” or transforming the political culture? Both these tendencies were at work and informed the planning and assessment of the MDA. See Conway 2004: 185–88 for more extended discussion. 17. Again it is important to mention the loss at a critical time of several leading and long-standing activists, respected by all sides, who had played important consensus-building roles. These departures from the MNSJ represented a generational transition in leadership that had a profound impact on the MNSJ’s capacities to deal with the challenges being discussed here. A long-standing inability to deal seriously with questions of leadership development and succession planning was another aspect of the resistance to addressing long-term viability in the steering committee.

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Index

A Abortion, 56, 59–60 Accessibility, 74–75, 77, 80 Action Canada Network (ACN), 5, 62, 102, 151n47; see also Pro-Canada Network Activism, 51–52, 147n18; see also activist practice; social movements Activist base, 72; see also base-building; social base Activist practice capacity building form of, 72 conflicts within, 128, 138 modes of knowing in, 21–23, 72 in movement building, 11–12 new strategies of, 42–43, 112–114, 119, 121–122 old strategies, 42, 145n6–7 participatory politics, 135 political project of MNSJ, 125 undocumented, 149n37 “Ah-hah” workshop, 70, 152n2 AIDS activism, 57, 60, 87 Alinsky, Saul, 36 Alliance for Employment Equity, 57 Alternative policy production, 92, 137 debt management, 79, 82–83 as government centered, 85–86 for Metro budgets, 99–100, 109–110 ‘social justice in the city,’ 102–103 Alvarez, Sonia, 8–12 Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), 45 American imperialism, 136 Andrew, Caroline, 55

Anti-free trade movement, 19, 48–49, 74, 102; see also Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA); North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) MNSJ as part of, 31 nationalization of local concerns, 76 as transforming social movements, 2–5, 57, 62–67, 146n12 Anti-poverty movement, 31–32, 49, 142n5, 146n16; see also Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) Anti-racism, 53–55, 63, 75–76, 121, 147n24; see also race Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right, 23 ArtsVote, 105–106 Assembly of First Nations, 64

B Badger, The, 105 Ballet/opera house, 51 Banking, 121 Bank of Canada, 42 Bannerji, Himani, 23, 29–30 Bar On, Bat-Ami, 29 Base, social, see social base Base-building, 83, 126, 134–136 FightBack Metro!, 45 identity formation, 11, 121 as a priority, 92, 96, 99, 101–102, 106–108 tensions associated with, 73

181

182 BASIC Poverty Action Group, 51 Basismo, 74, 153n7 Berlin Wall, 37, 135 “Between Global and Local ,” 116–118, 157n14 Binaries, 63 Black communities activism, 29, 51, 53–54, 147n24 in US, 28, 36–37 Bleyer, Peter, 63 Body Politic, The, 54–55 Bread Not Circuses, 51 Brown, Larry, 63 Budgets; see also cuts to public service and social programs; police (Toronto); tax annual campaigns about, 70–71, 97–103, 123–124 budget watch (1996), 113 flatlining 1992 Council, 42–43, 46, 144n4 NDP 1990 election, 3 outcome of 1992, 46 significance of 1995 federal, 83–84, 128, 154n15 Burawoy, Michael, 15

C Campbell, Kim, 77 Canada Assistance Plan, 83, 144n3, 146n16 Canada Health and Social Transfer (CHST), 83–84 Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), 2–3, 5, 41–42, 59, 65; see also anti-free trade movement Canadian Auto Workers Union, 59 Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, 63 Canadian Federation of Students, 64 Canadian Labour Congress, 64 Canadian Peace Alliance, 61 Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), 60 Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), 44, 100 Capacity building; see also knowledge production broadly understood, 105–107, 123, 127 controversial, 44, 105–106, 114, 130–134

Index as long-term commitment, 2, 45, 47–48 as pedagogical, 22, 33, 36–38, 44, 80 role in social movements, 69, 71, 95–99, 114, 122 Capitalism, see global capitalism Caribana, 121 Caterpillar plant, 50, 59 C.D. Howe Institute, 77–78, 82 Center for Economic and Political Literacy, 125–127, 129, 132–133, 138, 158n6–15; see also economic and political literacy (EPL) Chaudry, Nita, 117 Childcare, 113 Child Poverty Action Group, 153n11 Church of the Holy Trinity, x, 40–41, 44 Citizens for a Safe Environment, 58 Citizens for Public Justice, 153n11 Citizenship, 51, 84, 88, 105 Citizenship Schools, 36 Civic opposition to urban development, 51–52 Civil disobedience, 102, 112–113, 133 Claquot Sound, 57–58 Clark, Septima, 36 Clarke, Tony, 151n47 Class, 7–8, 31–32, 64, 135 Coalition Against Racism, 57 Coalition for a Just Refugee and Immigration Policy, 57 Coalition of Visible Minority Women (CVMW), 57 Coalitions; see also social movements community and labor, 121, 154n14 distinctly Canadian, 5 feminist standpoint epistemologies, 31, 75, 137 formations of, 2 knowledges arising from, 1 labor movement, 49, 63–64, 151n46; see also labor national, 62–64, 151n43, 152n48, 154n14 in new politics, 135 politics of, 60–62, 106, 149n38–42 politics of anti-racism, 63 Cohen, Marjorie, 66 Collaboration, 117 Collective identity, see identity Collins, Patricia Hill, 29 Common Sense Revolution, 3, 111–112, 121

Index Community development, 43, 145n9–10 “Community Forum on Restructuring in the GTA” (1996), 116–118, 130, 157n14 Community Services and Housing Department (Toronto), 42, 46, 97–98, 101; see also cuts to public service and social programs Company of Young Canadians, 52 Consensus, 26, 42, 81, 87, 126, 159n17 Consumer base, 88 Conway, Janet, ix–x, 79, 155n2 Corbet, Lois, 117 Corporate accounting practices, 99 agenda, 3, 64, 66, 77, 82 coalitions, 45 elites, 72, 118 interests, 78, 82, 89, 113 knowledge, 74 locations, 16, 49 power, 112–113 Corporate Tax Freedom Day, 113 Corporations funding from, 158n14 new left and, 23 resistance to, 17, 81, 138 Corporatization, 84 Council of Canadians, 63–64 Counter-revolutionary period (1980s and 1990s), 89 “Creating a Just Economy” conference (1993), 117, 156n5 Credit unions, 121 Crombie, David, 52 Cultural studies, 92 Culture, 8–13, 141n4; see also under politics Cultures of politics, politics of cultures, 10 Cuts to public service and social programs; see also budgets activist response to, 12, 56, 79, 84, 102 alternatives to, 40–44, 109–113 free trade, 3, 7 statistics, 97–99, 144n5 trend to, 46–48, 77

D Dagnino, Evelina, 9–12 Daycare centers, 43, 144n5 Debt consumer, 149n33

183 information about, 92 public, 12, 43, 77–80, 82–83 De Carlo, Nick, 117 Decision-making citizen participation in, 52 democratic, 43, 47, 71 feminist, 26 at MNSJ, 70, 125, 132, 135 in new politics, 135 Delta Childcare Network, 104 Democracy anti-racist campaigns, 54 contained by elites, 118 feminism, 26 knowledge production, 2, 21, 23, 91–93, 133–135 in movement building, 12 popular claims of, 103 priority in social movements, 25, 47, 70–71, 123, 138 Demonstrations, 84–85, 121–122 Dental care, 101, 110, 144n5, 156n11 Deputations as capacity building activity, 72 on cuts to social services, 41, 44, 47, 94, 97–101 on vision of city, 110 Deregulation, 84 Dialectical, 96, 155n1 Disabilities, people with activism by, 55, 57, 60 as experts, 75 MNSJ membership, 2 in new politics, 135 social service cuts, 40–42, 46, 144n5 Dixon Hall of Regents Park, 40 Doris Marshall Institute, 33 Dotmocracy, 71

E Ecology, 117–118, 121 Economic and political literacy (EPL); see also Center for Economic and Political Literacy; workshop process basis of, 19, 35–36 as capacity building, 72, 119 collapse of, 130 epistemological position, 32 federal budget (1995), 154n15 fund-raising strategy, 126–129, 158n6, 158n14

184 goals of, 84–85 interactive timeline workshop, 86–90 lobbying kits, 99 long-term strategy of, 84, 124–130, 154n14 on municipal politics, 79–80 organizational challenges, 122–123 origin of terminology, 74, 153n5–6 outcomes of, 132–133 practice of knowledge production, 91, 93, 117 on public debt, 77–80 on social security reform, 81–83 support for, 79–80 workshop development, 86, 154n16–17 Economics activists’ understanding of, 49, 74–76, 92–93, 145n7, 146n12 of education, 23–24 of free trade, 42, 50 public debt, 77–80, 82 restructuring, 81, 89 social movements understanding of, 42, 62, 150n42 Education; see also economic and political literacy (EPL); pedagogy; workshop process of the base, 104 employment and, 32 importance of formal, 35–36 in social activism, 43–44, 65–66, 77, 128, 153n9 tensions with organizing, 36–37, 72–73, 128, 159n15–16 in universities of the new left, 23–24 Education: The practice of freedom, 33 Egalitarianism, 24–25 Eggleton, Art, 50–52 Elections, 40, 77–78, 80, 83, 103–106; see also budgets Elitism, 74, 82 Emancipatory politics, 1–2 Embarrass Harris, 111; see also Harris, Mike Employment, 32, 50, 99, 117–118, 121; see also Unemployment Insurance (UI) Environmental Assessment Act, 58 Environmental movement, 57–59, 110, 117 Escobar, Arturo, 8–12 Essentialism, 30–31

Index Ethical politics, 30–31 Ethnography, 13–15, 19, 141n5 Experts activists’ relationship with, 80, 99, 117–119 debates about use of, 73–77, 152n4, 153n7, 155n3

F FaxLeft, 110 Federal and provincial transfers, 84, 99 Federal Social Security Reform (FSSR), 80–83 Feminism; see also Wainwright, Hilary character of knowledge, 25–27 in community services, 43 democratic practice, 135 feminist standpoint, 27–31, 142n3 influence on activism, 56–57, 132 labor activism, 59–60, 149n36, 150n41 recovery of history, 149n37 in social movement theories, 6–7, 19, 137 Fight-back campaigns, 115, 125 FightBack Metro! campaign activist strategy, 42–45, 96, 146n11 coalitions within, 44–46, 72–73 community development workers, 43, 145n9–10 contentious decisions, 45–47 origins of, 40–41 origins of MNSJ, 19, 97 recession (1990), 49 First Nations, 64, 152n48 Flatlining, 42, 46, 144n4 Fleck Manufacturing, 60 Fordism, 87 Fordist industrial era, 49 Foucault, Michel, 23 Fraser Institute, 78 Free trade, see anti-free trade movement; Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA); North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Freire, Paulo, 12, 19, 23, 32–38, 142n6–8, 153n9 Freud, Sigmund, 26 Friedmann, John, 16 FTA, see Canada–US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) Funding, 125–127, 158n14; see also Trillium Foundation

Index G Gay and lesbian communities, 54–55, 57 Gay pride, 54, 121 Gender, 118 General Welfare Assistance (GWA), 42, 50, 144n3 Giroux, Henry, 37, 142n8 Global capitalism, 17–18, 118 Global Ethnography, 15 Globalization; see also world city theory economic, 17 as local, 14–15, 49, 96, 139, 146n13 movement against, 116–118 post-war regime, 88–89 social programs in context of, 81–82 urban politics, 136 Golden, Anne, 109–110, 116 Golden Task Force Report, 109–111, 116–118, 155n3 Gold standard, 88 Governance of EPL Center, 125 global, 136 knowledge and, 23 local, 53, 95, 109 neoliberal, 149n33; see also neoliberalism progressive and democratic, 56, 71 in vision for GTA, 110–111, 116, 155n3 Grants allocations, 97, 113 Grassroots; see also capacity building capacity building, 2, 48, 73, 80–82, 91 community development, 43 culture of, 115 environmental movement, 58, 117 in making social movements, 19, 85–86, 119, 147n18, 153n6 mobilizing of, 41, 50–51, 74, 79 in praxis, 35 Greater Toronto Area (GTA), 95, 109–111, 116, 144n2; see also Toronto Greenpeace, 57 Green Work Alliance, 59, 117

H Hall, Stuart, 92 Haraway, Donna, 30–31 Harding, Sandra, 27–29, 31, 142n3 Harris, Mike, 111–114, 116, 121, 123, 146n16; see also Progressive Conservative Party

185 Hartmann, Franz, 57–59 Harvey, David, 4 Hernandez, Adriana, 57 Highlander Center, 36 Historical materialism, 29–30 History in cultural studies, 14–15, 19 importance of, 85 interactive timeline workshop, 86–90 new left as subjects of, 24 undocumented, 149n37 Hollander, Roger, 40, 44 hooks, bell, 28–29 Hope, 83, 86 Hope in Hard Times, 154n16 Horton, Myles, 36 Housing crisis, 50–51 Howlett, Dennis, 66, 152n50

I Identity class politics, 7 incorporated into political activism, 76 politicization of, 7–10, 141n3 in social movement theory, 6 Immigrant activists, 89–90, 104 Immigration, 117–118, 121 Inclusion, 75, 135 Institutionalization, 125, 127, 134; see also permanence International Socialists (IS), 45 International Women’s Day Committee (IWDC), 56, 60 International Women’s Day march, 121

J Jackson, Peter, 13 Jordan, Glenn, 10

K Keil, Roger, 117 Keynesian Welfare State, 63, 87–89, 100, 103, 154n13 Kipfer, Stefan, 156n10 Knowledge; see also knowledge production; knowledges debates about types of, 73, 142n1 democratization of, 24–25 expert, 73–77, 80, 117–119 feminist epistemologies, 25–32 from the margins, 27–29

186 and patriarchy, 26–28 from social movements, 1–2, 145n7 Knowledge production; see also knowledge activists’ control of, 116–117 capacity building, 72–73, 107 contentious in social movements, 2, 20, 127–128, 130–134, 138 democracy, 21, 23, 91–93, 137 pedagogy, 22–23, 33–38 as a praxis, 71–72, 91, 93, 117, 119 search for alternatives, 66 in social movements, 47–48, 66, 152n50 theories of, 9 Knowledges, 1; see also knowledge activist, 91 in activist practice, 21–23 practical, 23–25 praxis-based, 22 tacit, 21–25, 67, 71, 107–108, 119, 132

L Labor anti-racist campaigns, 54 coalitions, 49, 121, 150n41, 151n46, 154n14 dominating political left, 128 environmental movements, 59 in globalization, 16, 82 in 1994 municipal election, 105 new kind of activism, 59–64 plant takeovers, 59, 148n32 restructuring of market, 49–50, 59, 81, 146n14, 148n33 strikes by women workers, 149n34–36 union feminism, 59–60, 150n41 Labour Council of Metro Toronto, 41, 44–45, 129 Language translation, 80 Latin America, 11, 37 Layton, Jack, 51 Left Christian, 151n47 criticism of politics of, 76, 138 European, 6 labor and, 128, 150n41 limits of, 83, 154n13 new left, 23–26, 51–52, 61 recession (1990), 49 Leninism, 24 Liberals, 3, 52, 79, 99, 146; see also budgets

Index Literacy, 104; see also economic and political literacy (EPL) Lobbying kit, 99 Local, 14–19, 53, 95–96, 109, 136; see also globalization

M Magnusson, Warren, 51–53, 57–58, 147n19 Maple Leaf Summit, 64 March 8 Coalition, 56 March on Poverty (1989), 50–51 Marginalized people, 28–29, 31–32, 142n5 Marshall Plan, 87 Martin, Paul, 3, 146; see also budgets Marxism feminism and, 6, 27, 145n6, 149n37, 150n42 neo, 26 new democracy and, 63, 138 roots of post, 12 in social movement theory, 6–7 Mass production–mass consumption, 88 Media, 41, 110, 121, 131 Mega-city campaign, 109–110, 116 Melucci, Alberto, 9–10 Membership base, 32, 45, 69, 97–98, 124–126 Metro Action Committee in Violence Against Women (METRAC), 55 Metro Council (Toronto); see also under budgets; Greater Toronto Area (GTA); Toronto budget, 97–98 cuts to social programs, 40–42 history of, 41–42 influence of FightBack Metro! on, 46–47 MNSJ’s effectiveness on, 104, 106–107 origins of, 53 terminology, 143n1 Metro Days of Action (1996), 121–122, 126, 128, 159n16 Metro Labour Council, 73 Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ); see also under budgets; economic and political literacy (EPL); workshop process AGM, 70–73, 107, 114, 122–130, 152n1–2 bank balance, 126 campaign-centered politics, 101–102, 108, 114

Index charges of political bias, 105–106 collaborative activist practice, 114–115, 138–139 community forum (Golden report), 116–118 cross sectoral conference (1992), 73–77 cultural politics of, 11–13 decision-making practice of, 115, 135 from defense of poor to defense of city, 103, 110, 156n10 diversity of, 2, 130 effect of funding cuts on, 124 ethnographic study of, 1, 4–5 factionalization of and challenges to, 122–130, 133–134, 155n4, 157n7 feminism’s influence, 56–57, 132, 135 funding of, 127; see also Trillium Foundation identity formation in, 10 long-term strategies, 111, 124–130, 154n14, 159n17 membership, 84, 125–126, 154n14 Metro budget work, 98–99, 102, 155n2 Metro-wide, 146n15 as non-partisan, 103, 106, 156n7 origins of, 2–4, 19, 47–48, 51–53, 60–61, 73, 97 publications, 78–79, 104–105 recession (1990), 49 research by, 78 staff, 98, 123, 155n2, 157n3 statistical information, 69–70 tension between educating and organizing, 37–38, 72–73, 128, 158n15 theoretical underpinnings of, 31–32 urban movement building, 115–118 working groups, 70, 77, 106, 152n1 Metro’s Homes for the Aged, 98–100, 113, 144n5, 153n12; see also seniors Metro’s reserve funds, 99–100, 155n4 Metro Votes!, 105, 156n9 Militancy, 118 MNSJ, see Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) Moment Project of the Jesuit Centre for Social Faith and Justice, 33 Mouffe, Chantal, 8 Mulroney government, 49, 65, 146n16 Mulroney–Reagan Shamrock Summit, 64

187 Municipal government, 51, 147n19; see also budgets MUSH sector, 112, 156n12

N National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), 60–61, 64, 66, 150n42 National Anti-Poverty Organization, 64 National Farmers’ Union, 64 National Pensioners and Senior Citizens’ Federation, 64 National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), 63 Neighborhoods, 51–52, 147n18 Neoconservatism, 64, 66, 76–77 Neoliberalism, 2–4, 31, 83, 134, 137 Néoliberalisme, 66 New Deal (FDR’s), 63 New Democratic Party (NDP) city politics, 52, 109–110 election of (1990), 3, 51, 146n16 FightBack Metro!, 47 labor coalitions, 151n46 municipal election (1994), 105 Ontario social contract, 77 reliance by MNSJ on, 105–106 social contract, 97, 109 Trillium Foundation, 70 New Social Movement Theory (NSMT), 6, 9 Nicholson, Linda, 10–11 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 3, 73, 79–80; see also anti-free trade movement

O Objectivity, 26–27 Olympics (1996), 51 Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), 44–45, 51, 146n11 Ontario Coalition for Abortion Clinics, 56 Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, 61 Ontario Coalition for Social Justice, 102 Ontario Dental Association (ODA), 110, 156n11 Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), 33 Operation Solidarity, 62 Oppositional movements, 2 OPSEU strike (1996), 121 Organizing Working Women, 60

188 OXFAM, 41

P Patriarchy, 26–28, 142n4 Paying for Canada: Perspectives on Public Finance and National Programs, 82 Paying for Canada (PFCC), 82, 153n11 Peace Camp (Claquot Sound), 58 Peake, Linda, 55, 57, 148n28 Pedagogical work of MNSJ, see economic and political literacy (EPL) Pedagogy; see also education capacity building as, 22–23, 33, 36–38, 44, 80 terminology, 142n6–8 Pedagogy of the oppressed, 33–34 People of color, 135; see also race People’s Plan campaign (1991), 40, 51 Permanence, 131–132; see also institutionalization Peterson, David, 50–51, 146n16 Pluralism, 24–25, 115, 119, 137–139; see also coalitions Police (Toronto) budget results, 44–46, 97, 101, 156n6 community activism against, 53–55, 147n22–24 Political economy discourses, 92–93 Politics anti-racist, 54 campaign-centered, 114–115, 123–124, 131, 136 coalition, 60–62, 106, 150n38–42 commitment to, 92 cultural, 110–111, 129, 134 in cultural studies, 11–13, 19–20 ethical, 30–31 knowledge production, 28 of labor, 45, 59, 148n33 of movement, 104 municipal, 79–80 as popular, 135 pro-development, 52 reimagined, 135–139 role of state in, 136 Pollution Probe, 57 Postmodernism, 11, 27–31 Post-structuralism, 8, 10–11 Post-war regime crisis, 88–89 Power (hegemonic)

Index changing nature of, 138 countering messages of, 6, 12 in identity formation, 8 new left against, 23–24 Praxis campaign (of MNSJ), 2–4, 32, 96 defined, 34–35 knowledge production as a, 21–22, 71–72, 91, 93, 119 of a liberation movement, 36–38 organizational permanence, 131, 134 Privatization, 84 Pro-Canada Network, 62, 64–66, 152n49; see Also Action Canada Network (ACN) Production of knowledge, see knowledge production Progressive Conservative Party, 3, 52, 77, 80–83; see also Harris, Mike; Mulroney government Property tax, see under tax Provincial government, 51, 109, 112, 115 Public hearings, 81

Q Quebec, 62, 64, 152n48

R Race; see also anti-racism activism against police, 53–54 in activism politics, 76, 118 feminist standpoint epistemologies, 28–29 MNSJ membership, 32 Radical gradualism, 25 Radical populist, 52 Radio, 121; see also media Rainbow coalition politics, 31, 137 Reaganism, 49, 52, 63 Realpolitik, 113–114 Recession (1990s), 48, 99, 109 Reflexivity, 22, 108, 119, 131–132 Reform Toronto, 105 Relativism, 30–31 Reserves (capital from current), 99–100, 155n4 Resource Mobilization Theory (RMT), 6, 9 Revolution conventional sense of, 2, 134, 137–138 counter, 89 cultural, 34

Index knowledge, 30 neoliberal, 3, 81, 89, 95, 135 for social change, 2, 13, 102, 119 Rowlands, June, 51 Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada (MacDonald Commission), 63 Rural Dignity, 64

S Safe City Committee (Toronto), 55 Sassen, Saskia, 17–18 Seidman, Steven, 10–11 Seniors, 40, 42, 64, 75, 79; see also Metro’s Homes for the Aged Sewell, John, 52, 54 Sheridan, Susan, 26 Slum clearance, 51–52 Smith, M.P., 14 Social base, 2, 11, 85, 91, 103 Social Credit government (1983), 62 Social infrastructure, 109–110 Socialism, 88, 135–136, 138 Social movements; see also capacity building; coalitions; Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ) as collective identities, 7–10, 58 early coalitions of, 61–62 global phenomenon of, 4, 60–61, 89–90, 139 importance of knowledge production to, 20–23, 47–48, 66, 93, 145n7, 152n50 in Latin America, 37 of the 1960’s new left, 23–25 social/cultural process of, 11–13 tension between educating and organizing, 36–37, 72–73, 127–128, 159n15–16 tensions of old and new politics, 42, 138–139, 145n6 theories and literature about, 17–19, 31–32, 149n37; see also feminism as urban based, 58, 136–137 Social Planning Council (Toronto), x, 42–44, 105, 127, 153n11, 158n12 Social Policy Reform Action Group (SPRAG), 81–83, 153n10, 154n15

189 Solidaité Populaire Québec, 62 South Asian community, 53–54 Southern Black civil rights movement, 36 South (global), 4, 6, 86, 90 South Riverdale Community Health Centre, 117 Space, 125, 158n5 Speaking with One Voice, 100 Special interests, 100, 103, 107 St. Michael’s Hospital, 41 Standpoint epistemologies, see under feminism Stasiulis, Daiva K., 53–54, 147n24 Street theater, 112–113 Strikes, 60, 121–122, 149n34–36 Subject position, see identity Supplementary Aid (TTC), 46 Swyngedouw, Erik, 18

T Task Force on the Future of the Greater Toronto Area, 109–110 Tax, 46, 98, 100–101, 109–110, 113 Taylorist scientific management, 23–24, 87 Technology, 110 Temagami, 58 Thatcherism, 49 “The debt is a problem . . but it isn’t the problem they say it is,” 77 Theories; see also feminism about social movements, 5–7, 17–19, 31–32, 149n37 discussion based on, 118–119 world city theory, 16–18, 116–117 Todd, Graham, 49, 146n14 Tonks, Alan, 100 Toronto; see also Greater Toronto Area (GTA); Metro Council (Toronto); Metro Network for Social Justice (MNSJ); police (Toronto) in Canadian economy, 49 economics of 1990s, 48–50 environmental movement, 57–59 as globalized urban space, 2–3, 15–16 housing crisis of, 51 labor movements, 59–60 political history background, 50–53 terminology, 143n1 women’s activism, 55–56 Toronto Dominion Bank, 113

190 Toronto Environmental Alliance, 58–59, 110, 117 Toronto Star, 109–110, 116 Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), 44–46 Tory, see Progressive Conservative Party Toxic Challenge ’93, 58–59 Transnationalism, 14 Traveling road show, 79 Trillium Foundation, 69–70, 127, 129, 158n13

U Unemployment, 50, 99 Unemployment Insurance (UI), 42, 144n3 United Auto Workers (UAW), 60 Urban movement building conference (1996), 116, 130, 157n14 Urban politics, 122; see also world city theory emergence in MNSJ of, 19, 102–103, 154n15, 156n10 locally rooted and global, 136 MNSJ’s debate about, 115 in neoliberal revolution, 95–96 Urban redevelopment, see slum clearance Utopias, 2, 37, 134, 137–138

V Valentine’s Day “Have a heart, Metro!” campaign, 100 Vietnam war, 88 Vision for EPL, 125–127 Golden report, 109–111, 116–118, 155n3 outgrown, 131 pluralism of, 138 as a priority, 124 unresolved question of, 123, 130 Voting records, 105, 113, 115, 156n9

Index W Wainwright, Hilary, 23–25, 142n1 Wall Street Journal, 77 Weedon, Chris, 10 Wekerle, Gerda, 55, 57, 148n28 Welfare state dismantling of, 3, 63, 84, 136 elimination of programs, 41, 80–83 history of, 87–88 interactive timeline workshop, 86–90 internal conflicts of agencies of, 45 recession (1980s), 50–51 “We’re Watching,” see voting records Western thought, 28 Wheel Trans (TTC), 46 White, Bob, 151n46 Williams, Raymond, 10 Women Against Free Trade, 57 Women’s March for Bread and Roses, Jobs and Justice, 121 Women’s movement, 54–56; see also feminism Workfare, 3, 84, 111, 146n16 Working Committee for Social Solidarity, 63 Workshop process; see also economic and political literacy (EPL) community-based political literacy, 104 development, 86 founding AGM (MNSJ), 70, 152n2 interactive timeline, 86–90, 155n20–21 train-the-trainer, 86–87, 122 variety of, 80–83, 153n12 World city theory, 16–18, 116–117 World March for Women, 121 Wright, Carol Ann, 51

Y Youth, 37, 44, 118, 121