To reassure the few people who care that I haven’t given up on this blog, and for a few other reasons, I thought I would write a few notes.

Keithie said the word “silly” a couple of days ago. It is as yet unclear how much she understands the concept. If she does start to use the word to refer to things which are in some way ’silly’, I think that this will be in some sense the most ‘abstract’ word she has added to her vocab - which is mostly made up of nouns used in one-word sentences, if they count as .sentences rather than simply exclamations: “doggie!”, “car!”, “hat!”. Oddly, she claps, points, laughs and often says “Yay!” almost every time she sees a train go by - we live next to the railway line - but doesn’t say “train!”, even though we do, and the same general procedures, it seems, have taught her other nouns, often with significantly less repetition and less obvious interest on her part. (However, the whole issue may be non-existent except insofar as it reflects the inaccuracy of my observation or memory, since Sarah disagrees, claiming that Keithie does say “train!” as the train goes by much more often than I suggest.)

Her first grammatically correct sentence, last Tuesday, 3 June: “You’re my mummy.” And literally thirty seconds ago she said her second, in response to my reading out the preceding to Sarah: “You’re my mum.”

Other than that no-longer-singular event, the most substantial sentences she manages are two words long: “my mummy”. Her most common word: “me”. By itself, repeated over and over, and somewhere between a command and a question - “me?” - abbreviating something like “is that for me?” or “will you give that to me?”, and usually accompanied by her holding out her hand. She learnt this directly from us, since we all used the expression “for me?” when we held our hands out to her, wanting her to give us something which she was holding.

Similarly, Keithie’s first grammatically-correct sentence was certainly not merely a statement of fact, though for her certain facts can be simply stated with pleasure. In this case, however, Keithie saying “You’re my mummy”, as she grabbed Sarah by the hand and did her best to drag Sarah along (something she also did in the sequel mentioned above i.e. just a minute ago), was connected to a general development of language as an attempt to direct, to act in the world and on the world, to take hold of what she wants and declare that it is hers, implicitly forming some relationship between ownership and command, possession and responsibility, statement and action, statement as action.

And she is working her way up to starring in her pre-school version of Oliver, since a minute ago she said the word “more” as a request for additional food.

anger mis-management
Over the last few weeks I had been quietly amassing notes for a blogpost provisionally entitled ‘empire, inland’. By last night I had two and a half thousand-odd words, some entire paragraphs but many of them just sketchy outlines of arguments or even just fragments, individual sentences, even phrases or subtitles I thought clever. But, while the argument wasn’t fully worked out and, as Sarah pointed out, some of it was not exactly running along unfamiliar lines, the point was that I was writing again and that this felt good.

Half an hour ago I tried to open the draft to continue this process. Somehow, it is gone.

I’ve lost drafts before, of course, sometimes much more substantial texts than this. But I haven’t been happy with much that I have written in the last five months or so and I was getting happy with this. Also, with my memory rapidly reaching a point I will home-diagnose as acquired brain injury, I need notes like never before. The idea of trying to reproduce something - even something only a few thousand words long (dense text though) - is not one I can contemplate as part of some abstract, unemotional exercise in reflection. It makes me wish I’d gone on that killing spree last year and saved myself the hassle of dealing with my having apparently accidentally erased something which admittedly probably feels better in what passes for memory as unrecoverable achievement than it would as a draft of something I need to decide whether to post or not. (Plus I just re-watched They Live, - which someone I know described in their Honours thesis as the story of someone who accidentally puts on a pair of Chomsky’s glasses - and the whole angry-blue-collar justified-paranoia justified-mass-murder narrative is now retrospectively interpolating me like a cop on a loudspeaker.)

I still don’t really know how it happened. It doesn’t feel like Freud made me do it i.e. like some parapractical expression of unconscious desire, and it isn’t an easy mistake to make, technically - and I haven’t been taking Stillnox or any other drug which makes me lose time. Or not that I remember. Rather, I’ve had too much time, insomnia lengthening yesterday to over twenty waking hours for example. Which is when it must have happened.

Off the top of my head, the draft contained:

(i) discussion of the category of the ‘event’, not in the sense of Badiou or anything/one like that, but in the straightforward sense of the quality given to the crude empirical facts of something like 9-11 which distinguishes it from any other mass murder or similar occurrence (almost wrote ‘event’) which fails to be, I don’t know, eventual? Not about the scale of direct consequences - non-events can have massive such geopolitical consequences without being such an event, without our lives continuing in an ever-lengthening shadow of endless aftermath.;

(ii) discussion of certain non-events I presented as exemplary in some detail - the Highway of Death in the 1991 Gulf War, and the subsequent blockade/sanctions of Iraq and associated mass death, and the blockade/sanctions/military assault on the people of Bougainville by the PNG and Australian governments being another. The latter, being less known, was given some historical detail, mainly to highlight the role of the Australian Labor Party in this deliberate policy of mass murder/generalised terrorism/counter-insurgency - years before the ALP’s role in the 1991 attack in Kuwait/Iraq and subsequent blockade/sanctions/deliberate death of hundreds of thousands.

But beyond the need to point out the ALP’s routine involvement in homicidal policy - what with them now being our leaders and all - the draft was supposed to develop into a reflection on mediation and representation and on everyday existence and the spectral geopolitics of reification. While my damaged brain may have difficulty reproducing much of that draft, if anything the process of rethinking and rewriting such a critique of representation and mediation should be at least as promising as it was last week when I began to think I was actually starting to think again.

As a final note, I’ve long planned a post about Sarah (she is in the last image, and not the baby), a woman I love so much it might seem almost insane to some, unless they know her well enough to realize how impressive she really is, has become, continues to become. (She is sitting next to me right now, using the other computer and wearing a vest which she made yesterday, an object which in itself is more stylish than everything I own or ever have owned - a fact which has no relation at all to anything else I say about her here.) I just don’t really respect many people. A long time ago now I started to recognize how much I respected her, and that respect has only grown since then, so much more than I would have ever imagined possible. Those who know me will, I think, realize that this is more of a compliment than it sounds - even if it sounds arrogant, misanthropic and loving.

Anyway, I still intend to write such a post one day.

I’ve had the strangest headache/migraine for the last twenty or so hours. For much of it I’ve wanted to scream maybe three seconds out of every fifteen, and it hasn’t gone away for more than forty-fove minutes at a time, except, I suppose, after I finally managed to get a few hours of sleep. It was there again when I woke up. The pain is on the outside edge of what I guess is my brain, about an inch forward of my right ear, and each time is very sharp and sudden - the other seconds, no pain at all, no dull ache, everything feels fine. I feel like one of those people at the start of House who display some weird symptom right before the camera drives right into their head and they collapse onto the ground. Next thing they’re somewhere between early Cronenberg and the kind of Oliver Sachs case study people base operas on.

Incidentally, I once had a doctor who was very obviously a junkie - I never saw it, but apparently it reached the point where he would shoot up in his office with an increasing proportion of his patients before his world fell totally apart. He wasn’t any kind of brilliant diagnostician, actually, but he would sell you an excellent script. Once his drug problem reached the point where he had to supplement his income by selling prescriptions and anything else he was empowered to provide or could get his hands on, junkies flocked into his place by the dozen, and soon enough undercovers were waiting outside his practice to snatch ‘patients’ and sweat them the five minutes it takes to get ninety-nine percent of drug addicts to roll, and then junkie-doctor was gone, no longer a free man and de-barred (quasi-inside jokes for anyone who knows what I’m talking about). When it comes to fucked-up doctors, junkies are like sharks, swarming in until there is nothing left to rip off the carcass, then moving on until another doctor miraculously screws their own life up enough to become useful, which means, of course, that desperate drug addicts become financially useful to the doctor as well. A generally quite short high-wire performance. Of course, most people who are doctors have a lot more in the way of nets to catch them than your average junkie likely to make use of such a decline and fall. This has been a community service announcement. I just want everyone to know I’m pro-family and anti-drug.

I have an appointment at the Carlton Clinic at 2:30. Meanwhile my head feels like it might rupture my skull.

Communist Headache was the name of a British ultra-left publication in the nineties, a couple of copies of which John Hutnyk sent me in 1995, and which are now lost along with almost everything else I had back then. I don’t remember much about Communist Headache except that it was a very cheaply made A4 mag and advertised a t-shirt which just had the words “I ♥ surplus value” on the front.

Actually, now that I think about it, the magazines and papers which John would send me from Britain back then had a pretty big influence on my politics and (hence) life: most obviously, Aufheben; the frequently excellent and now long gone Here & Now, which put out a nice supplement when Debord died; the now defunct Red Action, the ultra-left zine Proletarian Gob, the now-defunct but still much-despised Revolutionary Communist Party’s very glossy Living Marxism/LM magazine and their other, short-lived magazine focussed on workplace issues; even the Revolutionary Communist Group’s appallingly punctuated title Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! made it into his packages and my reading; the (then) Provisional Central Committee of the (still) Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker, often excellent materials from the unfortunately defunct Colin Roach Centre and from Anti-Fascist Action…and literally many many more.

Given the quality of far Left publications in Australia (almost uniformly awful) and the fact that the net, though existing, was hardly functioning as it is today, this was the only way I could really get access to the British far left, and a sense of a whole array of debates and ideas, and of efforts at engagement and organisation, of struggle and resistance.

What does it mean that so many of these groups and publications are often defunct (Here & Now, the Colin Roach Centre, AFA, Red Action) or have become even less impressive (the dominant tendencies in the RCP/Living Marxism morphing into Spiked! website and the Institute of Ideas, Red Action to the extent some members submerged themselves into the Independent Working Class Association)? Declines in certain forms of radicalisation and notions of the political, in some places amongst some people, are certainly not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly exciting an interesting things have happened this millenium. But it does reinforce the fact that anything truly exciting will probably come from somewhere outside of the familiar and expected, rather than emerge from traditional labour movement organisations or what most might consider the obvious ’social movements’.

Maybe this is more obvious in the broader Left in Britain, starting with the decline of the Labour Left and the ever-duller roles of trade unions and also of the student movements. The splits in and declines of both the Scottish Socialist Party and Respect - Left groups which had managed to achieve parliamentary representation - maybe reflect tendencies to exhaustion and incoherence of certain tendencies to Leftism: contradictions in social democratic nationalism and personality-based electoralism in the first instance, and parallel divergent socio-economic bases and political agendas in the case of Respect, where community leaders and business people, often the same people, seem to have found a political trajectory making even an opportunistic SWP politically too radical, as well as competitors for whatever lame-ass spoils people who play in that kind of politics want to seize their shares of…

for workers control of punctuation!
Today I received the blurb reproduced below, sent out by Daniella Olea, sibling of someone arrested in the pseudo-arbitrary circumstances at, or more properly after, the anti-APEC events in Sydney, specifically the big rally ending at a park. I had already left said park after a couple of hours of peaceful, dull standing around against APEC, on the assumption that there would be no collective action and, more significantly, no cop violence, and thus no reason to stay in case it was necessary to defend other protesters - who were in any case mostly dispersing. I was wrong, not the most serious of the large number of mistakes I made over those few days. The group I was in had wandered off into the city in search of food when we got word by phone that police violence and arrests were taking place. We rushed back to find that the police had dragged people away, under circumstances briefly described below.

In my opinion, a deliberate act of targeted repression against Left political activists, possibly provocation but more likely just nasty harassment of the sort which had occurred with escalating frequency in the lead up to the protests against APEC: police tracking people down to threaten them should they attend the anti-APEC protests, whether or not they were on the proscribed list of people criminalised-in-advance, very obviously following people and keeping them under surveillance, ‘random’ stop-and-searching of soon-to-be protesters just for being in Sydney, etcetera. And then this incident, and these arrests, of people just sitting in a park minding their own business.

If possible I intend to go to this rally, despite my general antipathy to demonstrations and in the face of an excessive use of exclamation marks. This is what Daniella sent out:

POLICE ATTACKED PEACEFUL CROWD!!!!

On September 8th 2007 about 10,000 people joined a vibrant, festive crowd protesting against [the] APEC summit. Police created an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. After the rally was well and truly over Police attacked a quiet group of people. They arrested 2 people and then released them saying…’they had made a mistake’. In arresting these two people many others got arrested including my sister. My sister was part of the independent media on the day. Her charges range from ‘Assault’ [to] ‘Resisting Arrest’. She along with other were denied bail and had to spend a horrific night in jail.

We demand that all charges be dropped. The hysteria of security leading up to APEC was just a way to intimidate people out of voicing their right to protest. These ridiculous measure might be used in other protest so we need to unite and speak out against violent and intimidating police tactics.

JOIN SOLIDARITY PROTEST TO DEFEND THE RIGHT TO PROTEST
THIS THURSDAY 20TH OF DECEMBER
12PM OUTSIDE MELBOURNE MAGISTRATES COURT (CNR WILLIAM & LONSDALE)
PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD AND BRING BANNERS, MEGAPHONES ETC

I know I haven’t been blogging recently, so let’s consider that evidence that this rally must be really significant and those arrested worth supporting.

OK, I’m back. What did I miss?
Odysseus

we’re the same too
We got a leaflet promoting the local Greens candidate in the mailbox.

Much of the current election process has consisted of watching the ALP furiously agree with the Liberals on everything except a a very few carefully chosen issues with which they feel totally safe - everything else they have vigorously supported and so mostly successfully diffused as an issue, while getting as much of their socio-institutional base and apparatus to stay in line. (The lack of union complaint about federal legislation which would severely restrict the legal ability of unions to campaign on any issue, and in particular to call for any kind of boycott, is directly connected to ALP support and ALP pressure for unions not to make a public fuss.)

This leaflet included a quiet example of the Greens doing the same, on an issue on which they feel vulnerable: drugs. While highlighting their difference from the ALP and Liberals on almost everything, the only point which they attempt to make regarding drugs is that they are the same as the ALP and Liberals. Literally the only point, literally the same. Issue diffused. Courageous stuff.

Meanwhile, as I took a tram along Swanston Street I couldn’t help but notice a billboard-sized photo of Adam Bandt’s head smiling at me, promoting him as a candidate for the Greens.

Very soon we will have a victory, it seems, and many people will be irritatingly acting as if such a victory for the ALP is some kind of positive political development - which seems cretinous in relation to (a) what the ALP is saying they will do; (b) what the ALP will actually do; (c) what the ALP did the last time they were in office; (d) what the ALP has always done when in office; and more particularly (e) the forces at play determining the trajectory of policy and social relations more broadly. I’m sure Afghan’s will be pleased if it is an ALP government sending troops to help out, as the Bougainvilleans were when the ALP supplied PNG with the military capacity for starvation blockades and murderous violence, or the Iraqis when the ALP helped out with what is often called Gulf War I and then with the ’sanctions’ which killed over a million people in one of the more neglected near-genocidal mass-murders-as-policy of the very late twentieth century, or the East Timorese were…well, you get the point.

Agriterrorism

The Australian Government, Curtain University of Technology and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research have spent time and money trying to help with the expansion and consolidation of the few corporations and chains which seek to control agricultural distribution in the Philippines. On the one hand this is presented, predictably, as help with ‘development’, specifically with developing ‘linkages’ between small farmers and ‘market intermediaries’. But the nature of such ‘help’ becomes pretty stark in the Philippines, where the relationship between economy and violence isn’t hard to spot.

A great deal of the work done to help this section of capital in its struggles for control and profit and ‘market share’ involves companies such as Dizon Farms. For a 2005-2006 research project in this area, the Centre noted that:

Dizon Farms, as the largest vegetable consolidator in Manila, is interested in establishing better linkages with farmer groups. Issues that need addressing for the chain associated with Dizon Farms include: agronomic support at the farm level poor handling and packing procedures opportunism, inconsistent quantity and quality chemical residues and food safety.

The Centre never got around to discussing the role of the private security forces of the company, the collaboration with the army/security forces in repression and harassment of workers and local communities, the mutually supportive relations with politicians involved with death squads aimed at keeping the population compliant and working, etcetera - in particular involvement with the ‘counter-insurgency’ actions of the 28th Infantry Battalion of the Armed Forces of the Philippines in Monkayo.

Which gives a little context for the recent actions of the local company of the New People’s Army (NPA), outlined in their subsequent statement thus:

The people’s army disarmed the security forces of the despotic agribusiness giants, Compostela Plantation Inc. and Dizon Farms […]. Sixteen firearms, including two baby armalites, various ammunitions and military equipment were seized during the offensives done in broad daylight.

Red fighters from the 5th Pulang Bagani Company of the New People’s Army-Southern Mindanao disarmed the security forces of the two big companies in sitio Pilar, Barangay Babag, Monkayo in Compostela Valley Province. No one was hurt during the disarming operations. The twin disarming operations were a punitive action against the two despotic agribusiness companies for their active collaboration with the fascist 28th Infantry Battalion of the Armed Forces of the Philippines deployed in the province. Using their armed goons and security forces, these agribusiness giants had been harassing and threatening plantation communities, including the workers and its growers.

with thanks to Liam

SBS was right: the world is an amazing place
On July last year, former ‘Independents’ faction NUS office-bearer and now journalist Misha Shubert had an article in The Age entitled : Hotel jobs plan for Aborigines in ’showcase’ of first Australians. This is it:

INDIGENOUS Affairs Minister Mal Brough has backed a plan to “showcase” Aborigines to tourists at five-star hotels across Australia.
Tourism training experts yesterday launched a campaign to entice indigenous people from remote communities to jobs in swank establishments such as the Sydney Hilton.
The new recruits would be trained as receptionists, concierges and waiters in a bid to give foreign tourists the chance to meet indigenous people.
Speaking at an indigenous business conference in Sydney yesterday, Mr Brough praised the plan as an opportunity for indigenous Australians to acquire skills and qualifications in tourism and hospitality.
“But it also provides an opportunity for Australia to showcase our first Australians, and that is exactly what tourists come here to see,” he said.
Mr Brough said the recruits would be given prominent roles in major hotels.
Tourism Training Australia chief executive Bill Galvin said the plan would deliver benefits to all involved.
He rejected suggestions the plan was treating indigenous people like museum exhibits.
“Exactly the opposite,” he said. “What will happen is that once these people have introductory skills, they will undertake further training elsewhere around the country at TAFE colleges.”
But former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairwoman Lowitja O’Donoghue rejected the plan as “patronising”.
Labor’s national president, Warren Mundine, who is indigenous, described the push as bizarre.
“If they want to recruit Aboriginal people, there are plenty of them already living in Sydney and Melbourne and Brisbane,” he said.
Indigenous Business Australia chairman Joseph Elu said the proposal was a way forward.
“We have to educate kids and get them to have the passion to go and seek employment in the wider world,” Mr Elu said.

I’ve previously discussed the IBA role in the current NT intervention.

who will survive, and what will be left of them?
In the same post I discussed the censorship introduced as part of the NT intervention, which has not been subject to much public criticism or attention. On the 14th of this month The Age ran an article entitled ‘SBS is porn problem in NT: Brough’:

Aboriginal women have singled out SBS television as one of the main distributors of pornography in the Northern Territory, says Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough.

As of today, anyone caught in an Aboriginal community in the territory with pornographic DVDs or magazines faces fines of up to $11,000.

People in possession of five or more prohibited items will be automatically deemed traffickers and face up to two years imprisonment.

The bans form part of the second phase of the federal government’s intervention in the NT but critics claim they don’t target problem areas and will be easily undermined.

“Foxtel R rated channel is still by far the major source of porn going into communities and unfortunately the federal government hasn’t turned that stream off yet,” said Robbie Swan from the Eros Foundation, an adult entertainment industry lobby group.

“The minister is aware of it but he’s finding it difficult to deal with it because big business owns that.”

Mr Swan said only 15 to 25 per cent of pornographic material viewed in remote Aboriginal communities came in the form of a DVD or magazine, while the rest was sourced through pay or commercial television.

He said there as “plenty of evidence” to suggest that Foxtel representatives were promoting the channel in Aboriginal communities, despite the government’s intervention.

Mr Brough today said the Attorney-General’s department was looking at ways to restrict cable salesman from selling their products, but he said the concerns of Aboriginal women lay elsewhere.

During a visit to Alice Springs a few weeks ago, Mr Brough said he was surprised to learn that SBS was considered to be a problem.

“The woman actually said to me their greatest concern of television type programs was SBS, believe it or not,” he told ABC Radio today.

“That is just what they have said is a real concern with some of the women, obviously some of the programming on free-to-air programs as well, we just need to be aware of it.”

Mr Swan said the government could legislate against pornographic pay TV in remote communities but “it is about the political will to go that extra step”.

In addition, he said rogue traders were still operating from Darwin post office boxes, selling unclassified and pirated x-rated films.

To stop this, Mr Swan called for a licensing scheme for all adult movie traders in the Northern Territory, similar to the scheme currently operating the ACT.

“This can’t come about soon enough because if we have a licensing scheme in place of course these people can’t open up,” he said.

Asked if he thought the films were making their way to Aboriginal communities, he replied: “At $12 a DVD, yes I think they could, I mean it’s extremely cheap.”

Mr Brough said he was surprised to learn of the problem.

“I was disturbed to learn that you can sell anywhere in the territory, from your home if you register as a business, x-rated material,” he said.

“I just presumed it was like the ACT.”

See also here and here. The Little Children are Sacred report had already talked about SBS as a source of pornography. The report quotes “Service Providers at a Central Australian community” as declaring that: “Porn is available in the community - SBS and Austar are probably the main sources.” In the same section, on ‘pornography’, those cited more often complain of music videos, and of ‘violent movies’ by which they seem to mean mainstream Hollywood films. A ‘Men’s meeting’ in the Katherine Region is quoted as worried that “the kids in the community were constantly using the term, “mother fucker”".

This is the report which fretted that, because of severely overcrowded living conditions, “it is more than likely that children would be exposed to adults, and others, engaging in sexual activities within the household”.

The legal porn industry, like the legal brothel industry, tries to shift the focus to illegal or informal forms of distribution, partly as a defense but mostly, I’d suggest, as a way to attack the competition. Everyone agrees that these black people can’t be trusted with the kind of material other adults in Australia can legally possess, can in fact buy at newsagencies and convenience stores. The legal porn industry, like their brothel-owning equivalents, try to use the state to shut down their competitors, hence the Eros Foundation has been complaining that “80% of the banned (ie Refused Classification) pornography coming onto the communities has been coming from four pirate operators in Darwin who do not sell X rated material but sell illegal material for ridiculously low like $5 per DVD”, and urging the government to put a stop to these bargains. Indeed, they even claim to be outraged that the Federal Government has “ignored the effect of the big commercial R rated film companies who sold Texas Chainsaw Massacre films”. I will fight to the death for people’s ability to see the Hooper/Henkel original, and even the remake had it’s good points. (I haven’t seen the sequel to the remake yet.)

I have a question: does anyone know of good any writing about the last few years of Redfern’s history, of planning and policy, of struggles in relation to development, land speculation, yuppification and efforts at deliberate deconcentration/dispersal of people deemed to be a problem? I’m looking for accounts which might combine economic with political analyses i.e. the capitalist logic of urban ‘development’ and the state’s intent to ‘deal with’ the people of Redfern? (Not that I want to divide the forces involved into private capital and state respectively, as if this simply mirrored some crude version of an economic/political divide…but I think you probably get what I mean.)

I have just started, again, to look at the Northern Territory ‘intervention’, in part because I am writing an article which attempts a more coherent articulation of the project and its context than I have otherwise managed. The notes I intend to put in this blog, then, are not sections of this article-to-be, but fragments of my notes and efforts at clarification in its general direction. Fragments toward an understanding of the bio-economics of intervention.

At the moment I am trying in particular to think about the ways in which Centrelink, and related welfare bodies, will be required to manage people, and, necessarily, to define them. Which leads me to this note.

preliminary note on an aspect of method, if such a thing makes any sense
Though I make exceptions, I generally avoid using the word ‘community’. I don’t like the homogenising communitarianism, the covert racialisation or attempt to ‘positively’ spin an overt racialisation, or the very notion of this already-constituted sociality, the purposes of which usually seem to me intertwined with a certain political economy of representation, and of self-evidence, and as such often implicated in the border policing of a geopolitics of reification.

And I’m a vulgar-enough marxist to note the occlusion or ‘normalisation’ of what used to be called ‘class relations’ - and more specifically, ‘class struggle’ - in most versions of this concept, though these differences are never forgotten, always operative, in the functioning of the state . (Notions of a ‘working class community’ have their own problems, including quite often their own forms of covert racialisation.) More generally, borders are erected not merely in relation to those defined as outside, but in relation to those whose inclusion is subject to policing routinely and simultaneously effaced and enacted within representations of community. And, for the purposes of this initial note, one word will have to stand in as a faint reminder of an enormous and defining problematic: gender. There is no less deliberate intent in the title of the famous pamphlet of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community”, than there is irony in the title of Foucault’s lecture series, “Society must be defended”. (For the former see also this; for the latter, see below.)

In the case of the Federal ‘intervention’ into the Northern Territory, I have sometimes used the word ‘population’ or the term ‘Indigenous population’ - or ‘populations’, depending upon context - which avoids some of these connotations but reproduces many of the same problems.

The issue is more than terminological, and the stakes are especially stark in instances such as this, where the proponents of a new racialisation try to deploy the rhetoric of ‘positive discrimination’ and of concern for ‘communities’ as code-words to mobilise support for new forms of surveillance and control, for experiments in domination. And I say this even though most visible (to me) criticism and resistance has been equally centred on almost identical notions of ‘community’.

This is not a call to stop talking about/with/as Indigenous people, obviously, but rather reflects a desire to attend to this political economy of representation, both of visibility and of the possibility of the representative. Certainly to attend to the socio-institutional conditions of possibility of identity politicians, so that criticism and resistance does not itself act to unreflectively subsume resistance into the representative capacity and agendas of existing or competing ‘leaderships’, or of caring professions, or of professional mediators between ‘communities’, states and capitals, or even of ‘elders’ just for having acquired the position of ‘elders’. And, just as an axiomatic reminder, I don’t want to assume, ever, that I can actually see more than a fragment of mediation of what is happening, of how people are struggling and resisting - in addition because many forms of resistance and survival rely as much on forms of invisibility as on an insistence on appearance, on refusal of the presumed right of inspection as much as organisation of a claim to representation. The question of visibility should always entail the question, visible to whom? (Famously, the ’secret bombing’ of Cambodia wasn’t such a big secret to the very large part of the Cambodian population who suffered its effects.)

And there is the only-apparently other issue, that the impetus for new ways of defining or framing ‘communities’, or ‘populations’ for that matter, is not merely about claims to representation, or about making possible visibility, but about forming the object of discourse and action - creating and recreating, refining, the categories to be acted upon. Just as practicing urban containment at APEC makes possible new experiments in control and pacification in the future, so creating the socio-institutional apparatus of this ‘intervention’, appalling enough by itself, makes possible new experiments in racialised social control in the future. Or, of course, of ‘populations’ defined in at least nominally non-racial terms. And doing so requires the capacity to classify, to determine, and to prepare people for experiments in inescapable classification.

In his 1978 lectures on Security, Territory, Population, Foucault writes of the emergence of the idea of ‘population’ as an object to be acted upon, managed. In particular, he discusses the development of ‘political economy’ as it moved beyond a state-centred discourse concerned with finance and its control (pp. 76-7):

[…] when it became possible not only to introduce population into the field of economic theory, but also into economic practice, when it became possible to introduce into the analysis of wealth this new subject, this new subject-object, with its demographic aspects, but also with the aspect of the specific role of producers and consumers, owners and non-owners, those who create profit and those who take it, when the entry of this subject-object, of population, became possible within the analysis of wealth, with all its disruptive effects in the field of economic reflection and practice, then I think the result was that one ceased analyzing wealth and a new domain of knowledge, political economy, opened up.

Foucault goes on to discuss the “well-known opposition” between Malthus and Marx on ‘population’:

For Malthus, the problem of population basically has to be thought as a bio-economic problem, whereas Marx tried to circumvent the problem and to get rid of the very notion of population, but only to rediscover it in the no longer bio-economic form, but in the specifically historical-political form of class, of class confrontation and class struggle. That is the source of their disagreement: either population or classes, that is where the split occurs, on the basis of an economic thought, a political economic thought, that was only possible as such with the introduction of the subject-population.

I enjoyed this short film, directed by Frank Capra and written by Doctor Seuss as part of the propaganda produced for an earlier conflict.

Very hastily written notes based on conversations with people in Sydney:

People in Sydney for anti-APEC protest are being hassled by cops, very obviously followed by undercovers all around the city, the whole bit.

So the intimidation is continuing, a significant context for the Stop Bush meeting which took place tonight, attended by approximately one hundred people. This meeting debated how to respond to the police successfully applying to the courts to ban the previously declared demonstration route. The Stop Bush people have until this point publicly emphasized that this route was non-negotiable, that this route would be followed even if the state criminalized this walk down the street, as an act of collective, peaceful civil disobedience if necessary. At this meeting, however, representatives of the DSP, Socialist Alternative and the Greens (in the form of Kerry Nettle’s advisor Damien Lawson) argued that Stop Bush should capitulate totally, and declare publicly that protesters will comply with the ban on the previous protest route and only march from the Town Hall to Hyde Park - maybe a few hundred metres - without ever approaching the heavily policed edge of the walled off “declared area”.

By declaring this capitulation in advance, these ‘organisers’ create the situation where no matter how many turn up, police are under no pressure at all to let people march the previous route - at least if they believe that ‘organisers’ can fulfill this de facto promise to have everyone behave like obedient children.

People from ACDC, Solidarity, the Flare in the Void collective, the firefighters union and others argued that any decision to capitulate should be made at Friday’s meeting, which may be substantially larger, with many more protesters likely to turn up at the meeting immediately prior to the event, and with interstate people having arrived in Sydney by then. However, those pushing public, immediate capitulation insisted that this needed to be declared as a fact to the media now, effectively presenting people with a fait accompli and reversing the very public position taken by these very ’spokespeople’.

An amendment was moved by Firies to the effect that this decision can be revisited on Friday, which was eventually included. But of course by then these same DSP/Socialist Alternative/Greens people will be able to argue that. by having stated in public that protesters will do absolutely everything the state wants, defending our ‘right’ to ‘protest’ by agreeing to only do it in the corner while obeying every repressive law now on the books, organisers have now promised to everyone coming that this will be the case, and to do otherwise, with its increased risk of police violence, would be irresponsible.

Damien Lawson of the Greens also pulled out the one about how tonight’s meeting represented the real organisers of the event and so was the democratic will of ‘the movement’, while Friday’s meeting would also include people who weren’t these real organisers, but who instead were only people who happened to be coming to the protest or who were organising with an unofficial status. Thus, he stated, Friday’s meeting actually shouldn’t be able to overturn anything anyway.

By contrast, members of Solidarity argued particularly strongly that Friday’s meeting should decide if there was to be any capitulation, and when it became clear that a decision was going to be pushed through tonight, argued that Stop Bush should publicly reaffirm its commitment to its already announced route.

The vote to publicly declare the change of route - contradicting, as I’ve mentioned, everything the Stop Bush people had said until that point about their commitment to their ‘right to protest’ - was about sixty-forty in favour of public capitulation.

I suppose that it is imaginable that Friday’s meeting may reverse this decision - it was hardly an overwhelming majority as it is - but even should this occur, these groups and their allies control much of the protest infrastructure: the Stop Bush spokesperson Alex Bainbridge is DSP; the Stop Bush ‘tactical group’, whose membership was determined long ago, is made up of these types and is empowered to make decisions between Stop Bush meetings; and they will probably seek to have as many of the marshals as they can. They are very very likely to act as if this demonstration belongs to them as ‘organisers’, not to the people demonstrating. There are certainly groups and many individuals who are not going to automatically follow the commands of these self-proclaimed representatives/leaders, but they are certainly going to use their control of infrastructure both before and during the event to try to impose their will and present people with a fait accompli.

Those who don’t want to passively comply with these rightward-moving tendencies may have some capacity to contest, but this is something that needs to be thought out - the risks of police violence and state repression are real, the currently hegemonic organisers know exactly what they are doing, and things are moving fast. I’m going to Sydney. Some kind of clear goal would be good, something worthwhile which can be judged possible.