the trampled must be polite

By now you have probably heard that Israel has resumed direct strikes on the Occupied Territories of the Gaza strip, with the alleged goal of taking “action against the terrorist infrastructures operating from the Gaza Strip against the civilian population in Israel”. Having successfully assassinated Hamas military commander Ahmed al-Jabari, the Israeli Defence Forces (according to their newly established twitter feed) now claim that “All options are on the table. If necessary, the IDF is ready to initiate a ground operation in Gaza.”

Sorry, can we just go back to that for a second? The IDF has a twitter feed. A twitter feed. Someone is live-tweeting the bombardment of Gaza, giving play-by-play updates to followers around the world. While both the US military and the Canadian Forces have built rather robust social media presences, generally tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been used for recruitment…not for creating new micro-content that is easier to read as fact than propaganda. Twitter’s 140-character limit actually facilitates this, making demands for clarification difficult and nuanced objections to questionable evidence near impossible.

The entry of the IDF into the ‘twittersphere’ is just one more instance of the colonization of discursive space by those who already hold enormous material, military, and political power. For proof of this, we need not look further than the always-dependable U.S. Department of State. Here is this evening’s release on the situation in Israel and OT:

“We strongly condemn the barrage of rocket fire from Gaza into southern Israel, and we regret the death and injury of innocent Israeli and Palestinian civilians caused by the ensuing violence. There is no justification for the violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel. We call on those responsible to stop these cowardly acts immediately. We support Israel’s right to defend itself, and we encourage Israel to continue to take every effort to avoid civilian casualties.

Hamas claims to have the best interests of the Palestinian people at heart, yet it continues to engage in violence that is counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Attacking Israel on a near daily basis does nothing to help Palestinians in Gaza or to move the Palestinian people any closer to achieving self determination.”

There are a few things that should jump out at you as you read this. First, the intentional act of violence was perpetrated by Hamas. The violence perpetrated by Israel, a state that receives millions of dollars in military aid from the United States every year, is framed as secondary, reactionary; the casualties resulting from the actions “regrettable”. There is “no justification” for Palestinian violence towards Israel, but Israel is justified in whatever “defense” (read: bombardment, embargo, blockade, assassination, murder) it chooses to deploy in order to enforce an illegal occupation for an indefinite amount of time.

As a friend pointed out to me this evening, this rhetoric bears an uncanny resemblance to the relationship between an abuser and their victim. Refusing to cease abusive behaviour until the victim relents and gives up their resistance is a classic example of how oppressive relationships work. What do we make of the similarities between these two relationships? Clearly, not much thought has been given to it by the State Department. The kind of rhetoric used in their statement only serves to inflame existing wounds in the Middle East, jeopardizing the possibility for accord in the region. By obscuring the power dynamic operating in the Israel-Palestine conflict and completely ignoring the historical context of the situation, we fail the people of the region.  No justice, no peace.

just for the record…this is what happened last time:

Israeli casualties: 13. 10 military (incl. 4 friendly fire), 3 civilian.
Palestinian casualties: 1417. 491 military and police, 926 civilian.

on harm reduction, homelessness, and how bourgeois morality stops one from mitigating the other

This morning, a friend of mine directed me to a story that by now is a few months old, but in need of fresh attention. As the summer winds down and we begin to prepare for autumn, we should keep in mind that when the temperatures start to drop, not all of us will be warm and cozy in heated dwellings. In Canadian and American cities north of the Mason-Dixon line, death by hypothermia in the streets of our larger cities is not an unheard of phenomenon. Folks without shelter sometimes die of exposure to the cold, a barbaric fate considering the resources available. While the question of homelessness is  complex and has been addressed by countless others, what I think is important to talk about today is why it is that 212 people died of exposure or hypothermia in Poland last year.

‘Don’t they have homeless shelters?’ you ask? Well yes, they do. However, some significant barriers prevent those who need the help the most from taking advantage of what services do exist. More and more, shelters in Europe and across North America require those who wish to stay to pass a breathalyzer test before being welcomed out of the cold. This clip from a small city in Connecticut is just one example of an approach to homelessness that is less about actually helping people in need and more about enforcing and maintaining a morality that keeps the poor in a state of permanent vulnerability. Rather than acting within the harm reduction paradigm (adopted by most regional health authorities in Canada and proven to reduce the negative effects of drug and alcohol abuse and dependency), these shelters will turn away those who have been drinking or taking drugs, turning them back onto the streets where some will succumb to hypothermia.

So what is going on here? Don’t shelters exist to help people in need, not to judge their state of sobriety and subsequently give or deny benefits? Perhaps there is something else going on here.  Although there are arguments to be made in favour of limiting entry to homeless shelters to those who can pass a breathalyzer test, they don’t pan out when it comes to the clinical evidence, which supports harm reduction almost across the board. Though the breathalyzer may be a relatively new piece of technology, its use in homeless shelters across the continent is simply a modern re-iteration of an age-old judgement of the deserving poor versus the undeserving poor. This division made it possible for some of the working poor to considered for social assistance and charity, while the others were made to “work or starve”. That same morality is at work in this situation, and with the same goal in mind.

The decision to limit access to shelters to those who have not been drinking has more to do with bourgeois morality and economic necessity than it does with health or wellness. If those considered “undeserving” had equal access to facilities and programs designed to help them overcome their addictions, find meaningful work, and some stability in life, the underclass upon which capital depends would disappear. Without a “reserve army of the unemployed”, capital would lose much of its ability to press wages down: if no workers were unemployed, demand for labour power would be high, driving up the price of labour time. However, as more and more workers join the reserve army of labour, the supply of labour goes up and the cost of labour goes down. Pushing the cost of labour down by cutting wages and benefits is capital’s primary technique as it strives to extract ever more surplus value from the working class.

The treatment of the lumpenproletariat (Marx’s term for those who had been unemployed for a long period of time or who were unable to work) by society at large makes life as a wage slave look pretty good. Those of us with a paycheque and a roof over our heads don’t have to worry about freezing in the streets, Little Match Girl-style. The threat of “falling out” of the proletariat is enough to keep most of us in line. However, the threat of “falling out” only works if there is something worse that we could fall into. The earnest application of harm reduction principles to the problem of homelessness and the associated issues of drug and alcohol abuse would be one significant strike against the continued abuse of the lumpenproletariat – the first step to lifting its members out of hardship, thereby eroding the very existence of the class that capital depends on.

It is in this sense that I argue that harm reduction specifically, and public health in general, are both practically and philosophically at odds with capitalism. People who are honestly interested in the health of individuals and the health of populations must come to terms with the fact that health cannot be isolated from class politics. In fact, class politics ought to be our starting point if we are to make any significant difference in the health of the most vulnerable in our society – those who lack even a roof over their heads.

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