Andrew Witt

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The Mystification of Crisis | Vancouver’s Green Capital Plan

By Andrew Witt On January 6, 2013 · Add Comment

Pick up any new condo ad and you get the sense that Vancouver is perpetually stuck in summer. Sun-drenched landscapes open up to lush green fields counterposed with calm waterfront scenes. Condo towers reflect on the water like huge unimposing spaceships. The North Shore Mountains complete the frame. In this reflective landscape, nature merges with its setting. At nightfall, the reflective gleam of condo towers shimmer on the Burrard Inlet, always delivering a garish constellation.

In this great real estate fiction, Vancouver comes into being as an Elysian idyll. Leisure is aplenty in this vision of the afterlife: cycling, kayaking, jogging, wine-drinking, yoga -- whatever your heart contents. Weekends extend into the weekday as a waking-dream outside the day-to-day drudgery of the wage-relation. The city is endowed with a sense of grace and visual impunity. The wish-images of the future merge with death mask of its afterlife, perpetuating a present without history. Nature is imparted to the people as an unencumbered fiction.

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There is no commons without a communist movement | Raqs Media Collective

By Andrew Witt On August 26, 2012 · Add Comment

I.) In a time of periodic riots, enthusiastic uprisings and the rejuvenation of mass mobilizations of the oppressed, a new rebellious subjectivity has re-emerged onto the scene. For a moment in recent history no future appeared for this class of the excluded, because a common collective present was held captive by the rule of profit and the logic of disempowerment. Today, however, a new rebellious class is emerging that is recommencing a history of struggle. Simultaneously destructive, dynamic and creative, this project has advanced the capacity to unlock and forward a formerly inexistent possibility: a universally viable project for emancipation outside the regime of dispossession, acculturated lifestyles and callous self-interest. II.) Contemporary emancipatory politics makes room for that which was formerly inexistent. The examples of this form of subjectivity are as numerous as they are brilliant: indigenous councils in Bolivia; the emergence of Syriza, the Coalition of Radical Left in Greece; tenant organizing from Shanghai to Vancouver; weekly student demonstrations in Quebec. In these instances, the new lexicon for political consciousness is immediately produced, formed through occupations, strikes and grassroots organizing. From the perspective of the struggle, the terrain of politics has shifted both at the level of praxis -- in terms of the novel invention of new organizations and movements -- but also with the medium of thinking the political conjuncture and its contradictions through mass mobilization. For those who have made it their priority to side with mass politics, the assumed inevitability of the class relation no longer appears inevitable. The long twilight of left-wing melancholia that has tainted potential militants with cynical nihilism and pious self-righteousness has lost legitimacy, insofar as greater numbers are determined to throw every molecule of their being into the dawn of communism’s rebirth. The historical project of emancipation is no longer held in by the seal of obsolescence, or worse, treated longingly with nostalgia. If there is any sort of critique of the market that has gained relevance, it is a critique sutured to an emancipatory project that is intent on abolishing the class relation and the existing state of things.

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A night in purgatory, and other reveries of the ruling class

By Andrew Witt On August 7, 2012 · Add Comment

Yang Fudong’s highly-stylized, black-and-white film, Fifth Night (2010), best resembles a state of purgatory. Threadbare proletariat, ripped at the collar, drag themselves through a movie set that imitates a Shanghai city-square. Although the setting is dated to the 30s and 40s with vintage cars, plaid suits, and tramways, the temporality of the film is indeterminate. More like a nightmare, the film resists any historical specificity. Wandering nowhere in particular, Yang’s actors appear as they are imprisoned in a world not of their choosing. Not one of them possesses the capacity to speak. Dirtied by soot and grease, their bodies are marked by nights of labour and slowed by fatigue. Commanding an insubstantial weight, their poverty is extreme: they even do not own their own exhaustion. Despite their poverty their stature is monumental and their faces oscillate between the reserved and the searing. Counterposed to the rambling labourers, two elegantly dressed upper-class women are admixed with the setting. Despite their class position, they share the same countenance of the laborers: melancholic, distraught, wistful. Isolated from one another, each character treats their surroundings with a good mix of suspicion, contemplation and disbelief. Ultimately caught in solitude, these characters trawl themselves through the square with hesitation, or at times, stumble backwards in shock.

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Mining Film: From Dispossession to Expropriation

By Andrew Witt On June 25, 2012 · Add Comment

Juan Manuel Sepúlveda’s film, Every Image calls for its Redemption - Matter is not created nor destroyed (it only changes form) (2012) sets off from the Zacatecas community a couple of months after a blockade at Goldcorp’s Peñasquito mine in Mexico. Installed outside the entrance of the SFU Audain Gallery for the MFA exhibition Apparitions (2012), the installation format is peculiar and unconventional. The installation, split in two, begins with an interview with a rural ejidatario (communal land owner) who gestures without sound as he drives his truck through the Mazapil city centre. His body mimes a testimonial address, but the sounds that emit from the installation’s headphones are instead the ambient everyday noises found on any Vancouver side-street: a bus moves along an electric-wire; indiscernible shouts and murmurs ring along the sidewalk; police sirens annoy without end; footsteps advance down a hall with added weight and resonance. Yet from the truck ride, the sequence quickly moves from intimate address to the unending descent down a craggy dirt road towards the Peñasquito mine.

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- City and VPD move to arrest PiDGiN picketers, residents bring opposition
  18 Apr 2013
  
  Photo credit: DM GILLIS
  
  After ten steady weeks of nightly protests by anti-poverty activists in front of the PiDGiN restaurant in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, police have stated that they plan to arrest picketers. In a press conference delivered yesterday, Vancouver Police Department spokesperson Brian Montague stated that his department is “anticipating an arrest soon.”
  
  A letter issued yesterday by the VPD states that PiDGiN picketers can now be arrested for “shouting, screaming, or swearing.” The statement cites section 430(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada, which means that the VDP is seeking to label the protest a criminal action. An associated VPD release states that the police are issuing the arrest order to prevent Vancouverites from being “denied the lawful use and enjoyment of property.”
  
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- Vancouverites walk for Welfare Justice
  1 Apr 2013
  On Wednesday, March 27, residents across the city joined together to walk 14.5km across Vancouver for Welfare Justice. The walk was organized by the Raise the Rates coalition to highlight the need for a significant increase in welfare rates as well as a comprehensive anti-poverty plan in the lead-up to the provincial election this May. The walk commenced at Christy Clark’s office on West 4th Ave in Kitsilano and ended almost 8 hours later outside Adrian Dix’s office at the Joyce Street skytrain station.
  
  Homeless Dave joined the walk for Welfare Justice on the sixth day of his hunger strike against displacement and gentrification. Welfare and housing are intimately connected and as Vancouver’s low-income housing stock erodes, people on income assistance are being hit the hardest. In 2012 alone, 426 SRO units in the DTES became unaffordable for people on welfare. A recent article by Seth Klein shows that despite government press releases, the actual increase in the social housing stock in BC has been negligible since 2006.
- Homeless Dave on sixth day of hunger strike against gentrification and displacement
  27 Mar 2013
  
  At noon on Friday March, 22nd, Homeless Dave began a hunger strike in support of housing rights and social justice in the Downtown Eastside. The strike was announced in front of the controversial Sequel 138 development site at Main and Hastings, where a developer is planning to build unaffordable market condos using a financial subsidy from the BC Liberal government.
  
  Homeless Dave, who is now housed and goes by the name “the artist formerly known as Homeless Dave,” has put three demands at the front of the indefinite hunger strike: that the city decline the development permit for Sequel 138; that the former Main Street police station be used for social housing; and that the Downtown Eastside be declared a “social justice zone.” “We’re not about smashing windows,” stated Dave, “we’re about smashing the old broken paradigms and building new paradigms that are more just and equal.”
- Anti-poverty activists call out Adrian Dix, demand a commitment to increase unlivable welfare rates
  31 Jan 2013
  
  This morning, anti-poverty activists protested inside NDP leader Adrian Dix’s office in the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood of Vancouver. They say that the NDP has yet to make a commitment to decreasing poverty in British Columbia. Recent research has shown that British Columbia is among the most unequal provinces in the country.
  
  Today is the one year anniversary of NDP MLA Jagrup Brar’s completion of the “Welfare Challenge.” For the month of January in 2012, Brar lived off the $610, the amount allocated to single welfare recipients in BC. During his challenge, the MLA lost 26 pounds.
  
  His challenge was an emulation of a similar challenge taken by former NDP MLA Emery Barnes in 1986. Since Barnes’ campaign, welfare increases have lagged behind increases in the cost of living.
  
  One of the organizers Bill Hopwood said: “A year ago today, Jagrup Brar finished his welfare challenge. He couldn’t afford to live on $610. He got in debt, had to borrow money, and lost 26 pounds. Nobody can afford to live on that.”
  
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- Protest against government bailout of Pantages condo project
  11 Dec 2012
  
  Tues Dec 11, 2012 — Today at 2pm, the Downtown Eastside not for Developers coalition (DNFD) is holding a demonstration against the government bailout of the Pantages condo project on the 100-block of East Hastings. News was recently leaked to the Province newspaper that BC Housing has bailed-out condo developer Marc Williams/Worthington Properties with $23 million in sub-prime loans. BC Housing said that it has a mandate to fund “revitalization.”
  
  The Province reported: “Dan Maxwell, vice-president, corporate services, and CFO of B.C. Housing, said Williams’ application to the province’s community partnership program was accepted because the development will revitalize the block.”
  
  The organizers of today’s demonstration are “calling on Marc Williams to sell the Pantages parcel to the City at the 2010 assessed value and for the City to buy the site and work with BC Housing to develop it as 100% resident controlled social housing with low-income community space on the ground floor.”
  
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The Mystification of Crisis | Vancouver’s Green Capital Plan

There is no commons without a communist movement | Raqs Media Collective

A night in purgatory, and other reveries of the ruling class

Mining Film: From Dispossession to Expropriation

News

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