Ai am a fan of go. Ai play it a lot online, and occasionally in meatspace too. Ai can’t say ai’m a particularly good player by any means, but it’s fun, and also fun to talk about.

When people who don’t know about the game hear me talk about it, though, they are rather likely to get confused, at least if ai’m speaking in English, which is what ai’m probably doing. That, of course, is because, rather than only referring to this game of ancient Chinese origin which is played on a 19×19 grid, the monosyllabic word “go” also happens to be one of the common words in the English language.

It did not need to be this way.

In the Japanese language, this game is either called 囲碁 (romaji: «igo») or just 碁 (romaji: «go»). The shorter form is apparently more common, but one has to wonder why, in English, we didn’t adopt the longer form if only to make the term more distinguishable. Then there’s the matter of there being at least two other East Asian languages whose names for this game are significantly different from anything that already exists in English, which cannot be said for either Japanese name. In Mandarin, the game is called 圍棋 (pinyin: «wéiqí»), and in Korean, it is called 바둑 (romaja: «baduk»). Ai haven’t been able to find the names for this game in any other East Asian language, unfortunately, but working with what we’ve got, it’s clear that we have two terms that would be less confusing than the term that is currently the standard: “weiqi” (dropping the pinyin diacritics) and “baduk”.

If ai was going to make an argument for one or the other, ai would have to say that we should use “baduk”, if only for the reason that it is going to be a lot easier for your average anglophone to pronounce correctly. The rules of pinyin are non-intuitive to anglos who haven’t learned them, so instead of pronouncing the word way-CHEE, as they should, you’d probably get a lot of people embarrassing themselves by saying wee-KAI or weh-KEE or whatever. This problem would be easily resolved by changing the orthography to something more intuitive, i.e. “waychee” instead of “weiqi”, buuuuut ai don’t like that, it looks weird.

Incidentally, it would seem that the reason that the Japanese-derived name came to predominate in English (and in other European languages) is due to greater contact between European and Japanese academics, politicians, rich people, etc. from the nineteenth century on. Japan, of course, has arguably been the most problematic among the trio of itself, Korea, and China, at least in terms of emulating (quite successfully, at least for a little bit) the model of the nineteenth-century European imperial power, and then (again quite successfully, for a little bit) the model of the post-World War II capitalist powerhouse. So to the extent that using a particular word can be, in itself, imperialist, using “go” rather “baduk” or “weiqi” may be that. Take these words as seriously as you care to.

Also neat: rather than speaking of “go players”, we could use the fancy word “badukists” to refer to people who play this game. Ai am all about it.

First, a small point on style: ai think that, in English, we should speak of “Plan Nord”, not “the Plan Nord”; the omission of the definite article follows the style that has been established thus far in propaganda. Besides, in this case, two syllables craquent mieux que three, n’est-ce pas?

Anyways, ai don’t think it’s useful to organize against Plan Nord. Instead, we should organize against ecocide, against colonialism, against carbon-emitting industry, and so on and so forth. Even against “civilization”, if that’s your jam – but that word, of course, deserves its own post one of these days!

“But isn’t Plan Nord,” you might protest, “a very important local manifestation of all that bad shit you just mentioned in the last paragraph? Isn’t organizing against Plan Nord strategic and useful, as opposed to some weird abstraction that takes a long time to explain?”

Okay, yes, “Plan Nord” is definitely a manifestation of all this bad shit, and as folks living in territory that is administered by the Québécois provincial government, it definitely makes sense to target it. The thing is, though, that “Plan Nord”, the way we talk about it, doesn’t actually correspond with what Plan Nord really is.

We talk about Plan Nord as something material. Plan Nord is the damming of the Romaine River, Plan Nord is uranium mining, Plan Nord is a highway to a deepwater port in Ungava. None of this is Plan Nord, though. Plan Nord is a plan – or a proposal, or a blueprint, or a strategy, or all of these things. It is something virtual, not material, except to the extent that we might say that certain promotional materials and policy documents are material manifestations of it, as well as the occasional job fair at Montréal’s Palais des congrès.

A small amount of history is in order. In the latter years of his administration, Jean Charest was trying to establish a legacy project – the kind of thing that might award him veneration as a forward-thinking premier in the Québec of tomorrow’s civics textbooks and pro-capitalist histories. So he came up with an idea, which, from a capitalist perspective, made a fair amount of sense: attract as much investment as possible for an acceleration of resource extraction in the Labrador Peninsula, a huge landmass of Turtle Island that remains relatively unexploited by capitalist industry, despite great natural wealth. But, of course, to attract investors, you need to convince them that the investment is worth it, and for this reason, you need a promotional campaign. That’s basically what Plan Nord was when it was announced in spring 2011. Yes, there was a promise that the government in Québec City would provide financial incentives to investors, which could be considered policy as opposed to marketing, but it needs to be considered that this kind of incentivization is standard policy in this province for all relations between government and major industries. Like, literally all of them, with a great example being Montréal’s video game industry, almost entirely attracted here, and kept here, thanks to favourable deals negotiated with both Liberal and PQ governments.

We should, then, see Plan Nord as mostly comprising advertisements, websites, and Charest’s own speeches, which he delivered on multiple occasions in Europe, in Brazil, in the United States, and occasionally here too.

Now, this is the important part: for all the bluster and spectacle, the announcement of Plan Nord was not some great historical event. It did not mark any particular acceleration of the capitalist development of the northern four fifths of Québec City-administered territory. There was already a lot of development taking place up there before spring 2011 – and to name but one example, the damming of the Romaine River had begun in earnest in 2009. The announcement of the Québécois government that it would be supportive of any corporation that wanted to invest in the area did not necessarily speed up the development, either, to a particularly great degree. Certainly that was the intention, but it doesn’t seem to have panned out that way. Ecocidal development is happening, yes, and needs to be stopped, of course, but it more or less seems to be going on at a normal, sometimes faster sometimes slower pace. This is something that is obscured when all of our slogans are directed against Plan Nord.

If we consider the fact that there is also a lot of ecocidal development still taking place in the “south of Québec” (which, really, is just Québec), an area that is more heavily industrialized than the Labrador Peninsula but still pretty far away from the fucked-up ideal of total exploitation, then organizing against Plan Nord makes even less sense, at least for us down here.

Now, to be clear, when one of those job fairs comes to the Palais des congrès, ai think chanting PLAN NORD, PLAN MORT on the streets of downtown Montréal is perfectly appropriate. But if we are trying to develop some kind of green movement in this city, opposed to ecocide in general and active at other times than any reprise of April 20, 2012, then we should speak of ecocide generally.

If we want an anti-colonial movement in this city, our slogans should probably not mention Plan Nord, and rather than speaking about an unqualified “colonialism”, it would be good to go a bit NI QUÉBEC, NI CANADA, by which ai mean mentioning Québec and/or Canada by name in some way. We need the average pedestrian to get the message loud and clear, after all.

And finally, for an anti-civ movement, the banner should probably be something more creative/communicative than DÉTRUISONS LA CIVILISATION – but then again, such mystical banality has a certain forcefulness to it, no doubt. Ai guess ai’m of two minds on the matter.

Ai have had some conflicts with people before about spelling conventions. Basically, for me, English, as bad as it is (and ai will be writing a post, at some point, about the particular shittiness of the English language), is also my first language and obviously a language which sometimes expresses itself in beautiful sound forms, beautiful calligraphy, and even just beautiful character arrangements.

This post is about the last of these: character arrangements.

A difference between the United States and the majority of other officially or unofficially anglophone countries is in the exact arrangement and/or number of characters in the suffixes of words. So, in England, there is a word for work spelled out “labour”, and in New England, that same word with that same exact meaning is spelled “labor”.

Ai like “labour” more than ai like “labor”. Ai also like “theatre” (Britannic) more than “theater” (Yankee). But there are, of course, plenty of words that ai prefer in their Yankee formulation. For instance, how can you replace that excellent letter-zed [z, Z] with a letter-ess [s, S] in a name like “Demilitarize McGill”?

“Demilitarise McGill”? It would be awful! By which ai mean to say, it would actually be completely fine (because these things don’t matter), but it would still strike me as looking somehow wrong. Ai don’t think this is just because ai am a particularly weird person. Ai think it is just that ai am a Canadian resident who reads and who is used to seeing the suffix -ize instead of -ise, and since the word sounds like it has an -ize in it, ai think it’s dumb that to spell it in a way that seems counterintuitive. And let’s be real: it looks French to me, and that kind of makes me want to pronounce it in the French way, i.e. de-mil-ih-tar-EEZE, not de-MIL-i-tar-ize.

An American person who reads, though, could justifiably say the exact same thing about things that, here in the Canadas, we mostly justify/defend. And when ai say we, ai mean me. Ai have totally argued with people endlessly about the fact that, indeed, ai really think “labour” is superior to “labor”.

Ai am not ashamed of this, because ai still think from the bottom of my heart that “labour” is the better way to spell the word, but my aesthetic opinion really doesn’t matter very much in the bigger picture. Ai read a lot of books. Ai’ve been literate from an early age. This has informed my aesthetic opinions, but what is beautiful to my mind isn’t necessarily beautiful others, and ultimately, there are  more important things in the world than beauty anyway – but that’s a different topic.

Living in a predominantly francophone context, it’s a little weird. To make some generalizations amongst francophone anarchists ai know, there are a few who give no fucks about English spelling conventions at all, and there are a few who want to do it the “right way”. Most, however, are interested in spelling well enough to seem intelligent (because the reality is that many people in this society will judge your intelligence based on your mastery of arbitrary orthography rules), but they are not so interested in spelling that they are going to care about the subtle differences between Yankee and Britannic standards (and even less in learning the specifically Canadian rules of when to use a Britannic style instead of a Yankee style). This strikes me as mostly fine. The only problem is that, in terms of good writing, it is less a problem to use one standard more than another than it is to be inconsistent in your usage.

This is both a problem for individuals, in terms of presenting themselves well (which, y’know, is a thing one has to contend within both this larger society and in anarchist communities), as well as for a movement, in terms of getting its idea across to society. Ai don’t think this is the most important problem staring down Montréal’s anarchists right now, but whatever. If we’re gonna do things, we ought to do them as well as we can.

So, yeah. There is a Canadian standard wherein the proper way to write things is, in many cases, the Yankee standard, and in many other cases, the Britannic standard. Some rules are more contentious/practiced in both ways depending on a number of factors, and there is of course a continuous leaking of Yankee conventions into the Canadian variety of the language, but if you’re a very language-based person and you read a lot of English-language Canadian news media in particular, you have probably internalized the rules. Just like ai have. Ai am a good copywriter because ai know what you want and what you don’t. Lots of anglophone Canadians do not give as much of a fuck though, obviously.

Living in Montréal, ai just wonder how relevant this Canadian standard is to the majority of the population here? And is it useful for francophone anarchists to care about? The answers are, of course, pretty much not at all, and no. This thought isn’t radical enough, though. What is true for francophones is true for everyone. It is certainly true for people who don’t have much interest in either French or English, and it is true even for all those anglophone kids who really would have rather been playing with their friends on the playground instead of sitting in a classroom and learning to spell.

Ai think, though, that orthography has a place. Like, it makes things to easier to understand, and ai think that where there are inconsistencies, exceptions, and unnecessary silent flourishes, they should probably be removed. It’s undeniable that “labour” looks like it should be pronounced rather differently than it actually is in most, if not at all, anglo-Canadian accents. Ai think that, if we consider that a language’s form shouldn’t necessarily be determined wholly by the traditions of people who invented the language or people who have been speaking it for a long time, it should also be determined by the people who use it, who had it imposed upon them, who might prefer to speak a different language if they were capable, etc. Whether to these people’s needs or simply to their tastes, it doesn’t matter, because the mother tongue speakers don’t own it.

To the extent that you understand this blog post, you use English, and therefore you own English.

Ai don’t, for the record, think that this is the case for all languages. Ai’d probably be rather critical of any white dude taking this sort of attitude to Mi’kmaq or Arabic. But for English, the language of the currently existing capitalist economy, and also a language of the colonizer from Ireland to India and Turtle Island to Tasmania? Fuuuuuuuck no.

Almost everyone (except for certain aristocrats, perhaps) speaks English because, at one point in history – more recently for some than others – they had ancestors who were conquered, enslaved, or assimilated by anglophone invaders to their lands. Even people who are no longer directly oppressed by anglophones anymore may have to interact with bossy anglophones much more than often than anyone can consider desirable.

So fuck English. But we still need to use it to communicate. For better or worse, it is the global language, and rather than trying to get everyone to speak Esperanto or something, we ought to accommodate ourselves to this fact.

But we don’t have to accommodate to all of its rules, especially the ones that are so unnecessary and so totally stupid.

Also, it seems to me that anglophones, when writing in English, should at least try to keep in mind that some of the people who are reading what they are writing will not necessarily be fluent. Said readers may even end up mispronouncing words that they read and understood – and, reasonably or not, they may find themselves embarrassed as a result. Ai am not just talking about non-mother tongue speakers, but even anglos who didn’t learn English as well as this society demands of a person, for any number of possible reasons. (Let’s keep in mind, too, that some of the people who ream out people who spell words in the wrong way frame their critique in some kind of nationalist way, wherein they proclaim “we’re not Americans, so put a letter-yu in that word, degenerate!” or something silly like that.)

The implication of all this is probably that Québécois English ought to develop to be more Yankee in style, because, even though it is so stupidly ugly to me (and yeah, it really is), the Yankee style generally always corresponds better with the ways that these words are actually pronounced in the variety of English that is spoken on this continent.

There’s also something to be said that, yeah, given that we’re on the continent we’re on, there really is no particular utility in Canadians emulating the style that is common in the British Isles. In Québec, there is often a lot of critique of the Académie française as well as elements in Québec that denigrate local colloquial varieties of French and impose the very rigid officialdom produced in that institution. In the anglophone parts of the Canadas, though, it’s weird when certain people appeal to “proper English” or whatever in reference to the place from whence the political drive to colonize Turtle Island emerged.

There is, of course, the phenomenon of U.S. cultural imperialism, too. Ai don’t think it’s entirely a fiction, even if we’re talking about white anglo-American culture overtaking white anglo-Canadian culture. It’s just that, y’know, while it is a thing, it’s really not a thing that it matters to care about. Not for anarchists who want to smash the border, anyway.

This post is mostly a self-critique. Ai have, in the past, held to the idea that certain arrangements of characters, certain spelling conventions, are classier than others, when the only thing that might have made them classier is that they correspond to the elements of the Britannic orthographic style that are still considered appropriate by educated people in the Canadas. Basically, my notion of classiness was itself elitist, and that’s not cool.

Ai still think “labour” looks better and ai will use that instead – at least for this blog, where ai do all sorts of things that are kind of ridiculous by most people’s standards. Ai am, in any case, just an opinionated anglo who, in terms of most anglos on Turtle Island, actually has the minority opinion on the questions of “labour”/”labor”, “theatre”/”theater”, etc. Pay only so much attention, and don’t think that your publication needs to adhere by my rules just because you’re in the Canadas.

The copyeditor in me only has this last thing to say: whether you use the Yankee or the Britannic convention for any particular set of words, be consistent or you’ll look dumb!

During the anti-G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, cars with Québécois license plates were pulled over by police and people with francophone accents were targeted too. There were, of course, a fuckton of Québecers in town, and the police services knew that; they also probably believed that “francophone radicals” might be particularly rowdy, and not without some reason.

Thanks to the organizing of CLAC (the Convergence des luttes anti-capitalistes) and RAGE (the Régroupement anti-G20 étudiante), busloads of Québecers showed up in town, meaning that Montréal and other Québécois locales made up a disproportionate number of the demonstrators in town, especially when you consider their distance from Toronto in comparison to other cities.

Ai happened to spend a good chunk of hours in the Eastern Detention Centre that weekend, and one of the people ai shared a cell with was a Québécois dude. He was nice, and we talked about stuff. At one point, though, we got to talking about the targeting of Québecers, and he said (in English), “If this isn’t racism, ai don’t know what is.”

Ai didn’t say anything at the time, though ai definitely should have. It’s not like ai had anything else to do other than to talk politics with this stranger, and preferably about things that would be too esoteric for any listening cops to learn anything from.

So this is what ai should have said:

The thing is, dude, that fucking with Québecers isn’t racism. Even hating Québecers isn’t racism. The reason? Because Québecers aren’t a race!

«Mais», you say, «vous anglos disez que la race, bien que c’est une construit sociale, est aussi réelle autant que la société la rend réelle.» Well yeah, bro, that’s true, but Québecers still aren’t even socially constructed as a race.

«Pourquoi?» Because Québecers aren’t racialized – except, sometimes, by Québecers themselves, and as far as ai know, only by white Québecers. Nègres blancs d’Amérique by Pierre Vallières is a good example of this.

Although Vallières deserves some credit for identifying with revolutionary anti-colonial struggles around the world in this book, and for later distancing himself from more problematic parts of its analysis (like the one implicit in the title itself, which posits the Québecer as «nègre»), we should probably see it as an effort to gain sympathy for the liberation struggle of Québecers from non-white people by presenting an unacceptably essentialist notion of a Québécois nation as somehow non-white itself. This is unfortunate, because, while Québecers – and Acadians, Brayons, and other Canadian francophone peoples – were genuinely oppressed peoples in need of liberation at the time of this book’s writing in 1968, they weren’t, on the whole, a people whose oppression had a foundation in race.

Note: the reason ai say “on the whole” in that last sentence is because there were, even at that time, a minority of Canadian francophones who were non-white or not entirely white, by which ai mean Métis people, black Québecers, and others. Vallières, in Nègres blancs, didn’t take these folks into account at all – and that’s another major lacuna in his analysis.

The discourse of race

Before the 1960s, of course, things were different, but after the Holocaust, race and racism changed in Europe and the white-settler countries as a result of a very rapid recalibration of social mechanisms of racialization. A quick and dirty history of racial discourse is in order.

This discourse, in one form or another, goes all the way back to the ancient world, but it wasn’t until much more recently in history that it lost a great deal of its purely rhetorical character and started to become a coherent concept. Thus we can speak of an emergence of modern racism on the plantations of England’s mainland Turtle Island colonies, different from all the colloquial and inconsistently applied uses of the term “race” that had existed before then. With the advent of modern racism, race was a pretty straightforward concept, based on easily visible characteristics, primarily skin colour, but also facial structure and hair type; this collection of characteristics can be called “racial phenotype” (and ai’m basically just following Ward Churchill’s example here).

With the emergence of racial phenotype as something that people cared about and created systems and customs around, you suddenly had, in the parts of Turtle Island sending taxes to London, an awareness that there were white people, there were black people, and there were “Indians” whose skin colour would usually be characterized as red. There must surely have been people who, for one reason or another, defied easy categorization, but they must not have been numerous enough to matter to the larger racial narrative that was emergent on the Atlantic coast of this continent in the 1600s.

In the nineteenth century, though, a more apparently scientific language started to predominate in racial discourse – and in other areas of discourse, too, of course. Less obvious characteristics of designated groups of people, or simply invisible characteristics (which were, to be clear, usually completely fictitious), were investigated and posited as hallmarks of racial difference. Generally speaking, among white Europeans, groups who were already colloquially racialized proceeded to be pseudoscientifically racialized. Jews got the worst of this, it would seem, but Protestant pseudoscientists were quick to ascribe inferior characteristics to all manner of “papists” as well, like the Irish.

After 1945 (and the collapse of the short-lived Nazi empire), this “scientific racism” – never entirely hegemonic, increasingly difficult to argue in the context of certain geopolitical alliances, and not necessarily conducive to social peace in Europe or white-settler countries – was widely rejected. This didn’t end racism, of course, even though there have been many efforts to that end since 1945, and from many different political standpoints. What it did, though, is purge race of its esoteric element. Notwithstanding the minority who still adhere to such ideas, race mostly became a matter of visible and obvious difference once again, which really means that it mostly became a matter of visible phenotype. White people were simply white people, black people simply black people, and so on. Today, when Toronto-raised children of Italians realize that their grandparents consider Italians to be non-white, or when people in the Canadas are told that the Hutu génocidaires considered the Tutsis to be racially distinct because of their height and their somewhat lighter skin tone, the reaction is generally one of confusion.

“The Québecois race”

In the 1960s, white Québecers didn’t look particularly different from other white people in Turtle Island. While people in the anglophone upper class had certainly circulated some racial narratives about them in the past – about how, for example, Québecers and other Canadian francophones had been descended from peasants, not from the aristocrat seigneurs of Nouvelle-France who left after Conquest, and thus were of inferior stock – this kind of shit was a bit passé by the time Duplessis finally hit the bucket. This doesn’t mean they didn’t suffer discrimination. It just means, again, that this discrimination had no roots in racial conceptions.

One thing that gets cited a lot is that francophones were often told by anglophone to “speak white”. This was definitely a thing, but is it racism? And was it a thing that francophones faced in particular, as opposed to italophones, lusophones, or grecophones? Ai think that English’s dominant status in the northern two thirds of occupied Turtle Island meant that it was considered, in effect, the language of white people, so an admonishment to speak white was perhaps an admonishment to behave like a proper white person. The same admonishment, though articulated differently, could be directed at any white person engaged in an emotionally and/or sexually intimate relationship with a non-white person, or any white person who supported something as basic as voting rights for black people in the American South. Admonishments like these were not, however, an assertion that the targeted white person was somehow not white, only that the person was improperly white.

Now ai’m a little forgiving of people for having some weird ideas about stuff a few decades ago, especially in the context of what, again, was a genuinely shitty situation for most white francophone Québecers, and where knowledge of worlds beyond their own was not as accessible as it is today. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, though, not so much. Describing Québecers as a race kind of sidesteps the fact that Québecers themselves are stratified into different racial categories. This was true in the 1960s, too, as ai’ve already said, but one could make the argument that it was a much more racially homogenous society at the time, and that argument could sorta fly maybe. Today, it doesn’t work at all. Unless you define a Québecer as being de souche – in other words: unless you’re an unambiguous racist, or you want to invisibilize or dismiss a part of the chosen identity and/or self-conception of a significant number of people of colour, or both – then Québecers, as a whole, constitute a multiracial population.

Ai believe that the Québécois dude in that Eastern Detention Centre cell with me probably would not define being a Québecer as being de souche. So, then, why would he use the word “racism” to describe the targeting of Québecers that weekend? Well, other than using the word in a lazy and/or imprecise way in a place where the word “prejudice” might be more appropriate. (An aside.)

So, if Québecers constitute a multiracial population, to posit that Québecers constitute a distinct racial group (which can be done indirectly, as when Québecers are posited as possible targets of racism by Toronto police services during the G20 summit) and still be coherent is to select some characteristic other than a phenotypical one and use that as a basis of identifying racial difference.

Coming into contact with the writings of anti-colonial theorists elsewhere, many Québecers identified language as such a nucleation site; the French language was often posited as “the blackness” (in French, «le négritude») of the Québécois people. This term came from Martinican writer Aimé Césaire, who later commented that, while perhaps being skeptical of Québecers’ use of the term with regards to themselves, he thought that Québecers had at least understood the concept – something that couldn’t be said for many other people. As a person who is himself somewhat confused by what concept (or concepts?) may exist behind Césaire’s word «négritude», ai don’t know if speaking French in the context of northern Turtle Island can count or not – but ai do think that, even if it is a kind of négritude, that does not mean that white Québecers can claim themselves to be «nègres», i.e. racially distinct from other white populations near them, and therefore possible targets of racism.

They might be targets of linguicism, though? Why not.

Alternate racialization schemas?

Ai do believe that things other than phenotype can be nucleation sites for racialization. For example, it seems that, in our society, the quality of being Muslim – in one sense or another – constitutes such a nucleation site. This is a topic for another post, but unless we want to concede that acts like Jyllands-Posten publishing its pictures of Muhammad in 2005, or Florida pastor Terry Jones burning qurans in 2011, are somehow not racist in and of themselves, and instead only neutral acts being framed racially. Ai don’t want to make that concession, personally, especially because ai don’t think it’s necessary.

Instead, ai would point to the fact that people who would probably be identified as white based on phenotype may, as a result of their Muslim or apparently Muslim names, be subject to a form of discrimination that is generalized to others who are Muslim. It’s not just white people, either. In the United States, black Muslims, as well as black people who simply appear Muslim in some way, may be the recipients of hatred and discrimination from black Christians. This, for me, is an indication that a “kernel of Islam” (as absurd a concept as the “one drop of black blood” that determined blackness in the United States for so long, and yet no less socially real) has become the esoteric nucleation site around which a somewhat non-standard form of racialization can form – although ai would certainly be open to a semantic discussion about whether this should be called “racialization” or not. The whole thing is similar, though, to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, a form of racism that also hinges on the capacity to identify a given body on the basis of its defining “religious” characteristic (which, of course, has little to do with “how religious” the body is).

Without even getting into a discussion of whether such an alt-racialization constitutes a kind of racialization at all, though, ai really just don’t think that the characteristic of speaking French is a similar kind of nucleation site. It’s not something upon which a racial construct can be built. Even if it could be, though, it hasn’t been – except by Québecers themselves, some of whom seem to think that others (non-Québecers) think of them (Québecers) in racial terms, rather than in cultural terms.

To be clear, ai am not saying that Québécois nationalists identify Québecers in racial terms. They don’t, or at least not as a general rule. They, instead, identify the Québécois people in terms of identity, cultural values, and other stuff. This makes sense. Considering that Québecers are, in terms of “blood”, much more obviously an amalgam of different “nations” than other populations of white people (like, compared even to places where white racist nationalism has been very popular before, like 1930s Germany, or today, like Hungary), “purity” is less a thing to mobilize around. Hell, instead, you might incorporate “mixity” into your population-fusing, nation-state-building program, like certain South American admirers of the Nazis did, coming up with their counteridea of a racially diverse “cosmic race” that is still as absurd as the Nazis’ idea of a “master race” of somehow “Aryan” character.

So we have a situation where, despite the fact that white people in other parts of Turtle Island alt-racialize certain populations (like Muslims), they don’t alt-racialize Québecers – and yet Québecers, except for the most organized fascists amongst them (like Mussolini-admiring Troisième Voie types), actually do conceive of themselves racially! Or at least some of them do, casually and perhaps unintentionally, when discussing a situation where something bad happened to someone because that unfortunate someone was a francophone.

A complicated situation

There’s always a lot to say when delving into the subject of how human populations are stratified by a wide variety of different identification mechanisms, the ways that social power is unevenly distributed between people in a way that corresponds to the ways that they can be identified, the political implications of this reality, the strategies that make sense for dealing with it, and so on and so forth. It can be confusing to talk about. It can be hard to follow the arguments of others, especially when the substance of what they are saying hinges on very small details. Therefore, the language we use to discuss these things needs to be very precise. This is as true in the specific situation of Canadian francophones as in any other.

In the specific situation of the targeting of Québecers at the G20 summit, ai am very skeptical that we should even analyze the events as a situation of systemic discrimination. At the very least, it shouldn’t be our primary mode of looking at what happened. State security agencies had spies in CLAC. They knew that people in Montréal were, at the very least, planning to come. Without any other details of the conspiracy, too, they understood that Montréal is, for better or worse, the principle producer of urban radical culture in the Canadas. In such circumstances, it was simply intelligent police work to direct lower-rung Toronto cops to target Québecers.

And, to be clear, the cops didn’t just target Québecers. Normal English-speaking folk who don’t think of themselves as Québecers and don’t want to think of themselves as Québecers (so, y’know, a lot of anglo anarchists in Montréal) also got their cars pulled over if their cars happened to have Québécois licence plates. But, of course, the police probably expected the people pulled over to have French accents, so there’s that.

Just because what happened at the G20 summit doesn’t strike me as particularly good evidence of discrimination against Québecers, ai do think that anglo chauvinism is still a thing, and white Québecers may sometimes face unfair sorts of discrimination and difficulty as a result of that. Ai think that, in many places, francophones who can’t speak English (or at least can’t speak it fluently) face a certain kind of material difficulty that is worth talking about – at least once in a while, in the appropriate venue. And even if ai didn’t think all that, ai still think it would make sense to sometimes speak of the no longer existent Canadian social order where francophones got a much smaller share of imperial and colonial superprofits (if only to analyze “the white nation” all Sakai-style).

Ai just don’t think that any of these conversations can benefit from using the word “racism” in a non-intuitive, imprecise way.

And seriously, “linguicism” is a pretty decent word!

A few years ago, in 2011, ai was working on one on of the computers at QPIRG Concordia when a friend came by and asked what me ai’d been up to recently. Ai responded by saying that ai was helping to organize a demo against gentrification and police presence in the Village.

“Oh,” they said, “like the queers versus the gays?”

No, that’s not what the demo was about, ai tried to explain. Of the people who were, at that time, doing their best to put political pressure on the city government to bring more cops into the Village – and who were complaining very loudly in the media about drug users, dealers, “prostitutes”, and so on – ai was quite certain that at least a few of them had a tendency to use a postmodernish “queer discourse” rather than an essentialist “gay discourse” in their description of their own identities, their conversations about sexuality, and so on. It seemed to me that, to the extent that one could designate some people as “queers” and some other people as “gays”, we would find both queers and gays on both sides of the Village’s own little class struggle.

Ai tried to explain, too, that a person’s analysis of sexuality and gender had very little bearing on either their class position (which wasn’t an entirely accurate statement, as ai will explain in a bit) or on what action they would take to defend and entrench that position. You could, for instance, understand the gender binary as a social construction and simultaneously advocate social Darwinism, the essential goodness of cops, and les criminaux hors de mon Village!

All of this seemed to be a little bit lost on my friend, which was frustrating.

At this point, ai should probably define “queer discourse”, but this is, of course, a rather difficult task. The meaning of the word “queer” is rather difficult to pinpoint – and really, it’s much better to talk about the word’s meanings (plural) rather than even entertain the pretense that it only refers to one thing. This issue is well-illustrated on page 28 of the generally excellent text Terror Incognita by CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective. Of the four main categories of meaning provided (each of which contains a variable number of more precise meanings), the one ai would like to highlight the most is the third of these: “queer” as a subcultural label. To the extent that queers constitute a subculture, it is evident enough that both myself and my aforementioned friend (call em Friend A) are part of the Montréal iteration of that subculture.

Consider another conversation ai had with another friend (friend B), this one more recently, in 2014. This second friend had recently found a new apartment, and ai asked where it was. Ey named a certain street, and on hearing the name of this street, ai was able to name one of eir roommates; ai had been to the house before. After saying “oh, wow!” or something, ey commented in the following way, as a means to make sense of how ai could identify eir new house perfectly: “Ai guess there aren’t that many queers on that street, eh?” This statement struck me as odd when ai heard it because, by my reckoning, there were probably many queers on that street – it is, for the record, a rather long north-south stretch. But this friend of mine was clearly making reference only to a smaller population of queers, one that is defined by far more than particular forms of sexuality or the condition of relating to prevailing gender norms as an outsider, and which is comprised of people far more likely to self-identify as “queer”. Indeed, there probably aren’t very many people on this street who belong to this (anglophone) queer subculture that is, in part, defined by both its fluency in, and comfortableness with, the vocabulary of queerness, and which can also be defined in relation to its generally anti-capitalist politics.

Going back to the original conversation a few years ago, in QPIRG Concordia, one could take this subcultural definition and then argue that, indeed, the demo ai was helping to organize was a matter of queers versus gays. Me and my fellow organizers were indeed queers. The people that we could most effectively mobilize were, for the most part, also queers. The people on the other side were, one could reasonably deduce, older, and thus less likely to be familiar with the strange ways of our new queer subculture. They were also mostly francophone, whereas ourselves and the others in our subculture were, and are, principally anglo.

(To be clear, there are francophone queers, too, but in my experience, being both francophone and self-identified as queer at the one and the same time tends to equate with perfect fluency in English, as well as a tendency to plaster English – not just anglicisms, but actual English – all over any political organizing that you might choose to do.)

As an organizer of that 2011 anti-police demo, though, ai didn’t want the demo to be a matter of queers versus gays. Ai wanted it to be a matter of those opposed to social cleansing versus those advocating for social cleansing or carrying it out. It’s certainly true that queers, in the subcultural sense, would be among those opposed to social cleansing, and ai definitely wanted them out in the streets – but ai also wanted to make space for those who were more affected by social cleansing, a group that included many people significantly less fluent, or comfortable with, the vocabulary of queerness than your average McGill undergraduate. In fact, ai would prefer to have more of the latter than the former, even if (horror of horrors) the majority of demo participants had ended up being straight. A lot of the propaganda put out by me and fellow demo organizers emphasized that social cleansing in the Village was a matter of rich queers versus poor queers, and ai think this is worth mentioning, because, y’know, it’s true. But since we don’t know shit about shit, the majority of the Village’s most affected population could very well have been heterosexual people with annoyingly heterosexual attitudes, and yet they would still be the most affected population, i.e. those most justified in participating in a demonstration against the Village’s gentrification!

At this point, ai want to talk about queer supremacy.

There is a prevailing attitude in the previously described queer subculture that it is better to be queer than being any of the alternatives to queer. A third friend of mine (friend C, and very much a queer herself, both in the sense of being part of the Montréal iteration of a broader anglo queer subculture, and also just being queer) made a critique of this attitude in 2009 or 2010, and she described it as “queer supremacy”. Ai thought that was funny, so that’s the term ai’ll use for it.

Just to avoid possible confusion: “queer supremacy” is the name for an attitude that is only found in a recognizable way within a particular subculture; it is not the name for a materially existent system of domination that reproduces itself over time. Compare and contrast to “white supremacy”: whereas an individual person may or may not possess an attitude that can be characterized as white supremacist, that same person, if white and living in a white supremacist society, simply will experience the accorded benefits. Ai guess you could say the same thing about a person who is queer in a queer supremacist society, but such a society has never existed!

In any case, queer supremacy tends to manifest itself in a number of ways. It’s possible that a queer person only wants to hang out with other queers, for example, and that may be because of a quality of feeling more comfortable when around other queers, potentially, or based on the verifiable fact that other queers are likely to understand a great deal of one’s experience in a way that non-queers are unlikely to. There can come a point, however, when “straights” or “breeders” are denigrated as actually being less capable of understanding things that, to be clear, they certainly should understand, and also as necessarily (or, at least, very much more frequently) possessing attitudes that are both obviously not held by all heterosexuals and which are also obviously held by plenty of non-heterosexuals.

Straight people, in this society, ought to know about what it’s like to be queer, and cis people ought to know what it’s like to be trans. This is, of course, not completely knowable, because they are not capable of experiencing others’ subjectivities, obviously. But it is, ai would argue, understandable – at least to a point!

In any case, in queer supremacist circles that also value an anti-capitalist politic, and which have analyses about how capitalism and heteronormativity and cis patriarchy are mutually reinforcing, there is often an idea that being queer is, at the very least, some kind of anti-capitalist act. Ai am just gonna say that this is silly, and also self-congratulating if you happen to be queer. It is worse, though, when those non-heterosexuals who are not anti-capitalist (because, for example, they believe in the good of free markets) or not anti-state (because, for example, they are police officers) are somehow seen as less than queer, or improperly queer, or most interestingly of all, traitors to queer people.

For me, the cop who self-identifies as queer and maybe does some sexy stuff with a person of the same assigned gender once in a while is both a queer and a cop. It seems weird to take away that cop’s queer label. Not because ai particularly care about the cop’s feelings, but because ai reject the idea that ai’m can’t hate a person who is queer. Ai mean, if there is anything deserving of the label “tribal mentality”, this is it. Ai am gonna hate who ai want to hate, queer or not.

(Aside: ai actually don’t hate cops; they are beneath any kind of emotional consideration, really, and hatred is generally self-destructive in any circumstance.)

For me, it is clear that most queer people are proletarian or working-class, and that queer people are still oppressed in you-can-get-gay-married Québec on the basis of the fact that they are queer. So the project of queer liberation needs to be an important part of the anarchist project, here and everywhere – though ai would argue that the project of liberating queer desires of all people generally is more important than seeking to expand the power of specific queer individuals, especially if we’re talking about individuals already already possess all kinds of power as a result of white privilege, male privilege, cisness, high-quality citizenship, available funds, or whatever else.

Some queer people are not proletarian or working-class, though. Some queer people do not do anything useful towards destroying this nightmare of a society (including, y’know, not just capitalists, but some people in the anti-capitalist-by-conviction queer subculture that ai am a part of). When organizing to get cops out of the Village, ai want to make it clear that ai don’t care about these people. For me, if there’s any abstract group of people ai’m doing this organizing for (as opposed to, y’know, a non-abstract group of people like me and my peeps), it’s the proletariat!

So ai think this post is a little too harsh, but ai’m gonna publish it anyway. On a final note, though, let me just say that ai hope people don’t think ai’m knocking queerness in some boring, “anti-eccentric”, the-real-oppressed-have-better-things-to-do way. In my opinion, the Village needs to be way more queer, and way more accommodating to way more forms of queerness. Like, what the fuck is the deal that ai can’t even be naked in public in any part of the Village, even on a nice summer day? And as for people who have very specific fetishes, or desires to fuck in public, or whatever, it seems to me that a neighbourhood like the Village is supposed to be the place where they can do all that. Except they can’t, whether or not they have money, i.e. regardless of their class.

There’s more than class oppression going on, in other words!

So, to conclude, things would have to be different in a properly awesome proletarian Village. Like, ai would have to be able to hang out on a patio naked if ai wanted to (in a place where it’s been designated that non-sexual nudism is cool), someone could be guzzling some scally lads’ piss a few alleys away (in, of course, the designated Alley of Piss), some people could be acting like puppies (in a parc de caninisme humain?), and so on and so forth. Also, for the more vanilla folks, you could still go to a club and find someone to take home to your normal bed – but it wouldn’t cost you so much bloody cash, if any at all.

Anarchists generally don’t give a fuck about proper orthography, which makes a person like me part of a minority. There’s at least one exception to this generalized disinterest, though, and that’s the case of the term “black bloc”.

Should any of those letters be capitalized? Well, there are different opinions, but most anglophone anarchists seem to recognize that there shouldn’t be capital letters because we’re not talking about an organization or a movement, but a tactic. Organizations, and sometimes movements, qualify for the status of “proper noun”, which generally require capitalization (though there can be exceptions, see: k.d. lang, bell hooks). Tactics, on the other hand, do not qualify for this status. This opinion is not universal amongst anarchists, though.

Is it acceptable to spell out this term using a letter-kay [k, K], i.e. “black block”? Absolutely not! This is pretty much an anarchist shibboleth, or at least it is for anglo anoks – a determinant of whether or not you are part of the in-group or the out-group. Besides, “black block” looks ugly, and there’s a meaningful difference between a bloc and a block, to be elaborated upon shortly.

In discussing the tactic in the abstract, should “black bloc” be introduced with an article or not? In other words, should we speak of “black bloc” or “the black bloc”? Here, even though anarchists generally fall into the habit of speaking of “the black bloc” all the time anyway, there is a general understanding that it’s bad to reify the widespread myth of the Black Bloc organization/movement, and thus some people speak of “black bloc” while others try to say “the black bloc tactic” each time, all five syllables of it. This last question doesn’t only concern orthography, but also what the place of this word is in the complex of English grammar, both written and spoken.

So, in an effort to answer these questions, ai am just going to get right to the point with my answer.

None of the words in “black bloc” should ever be capitalized, unless, of course, the word “black” has found itself at the beginning of a sentence. Let’s maintain that “block” with a letter-kay simply can’t be used. Finally, the tactic, in the abstract, is simply “the black bloc tactic“, and if we want to be using a shorter term, the one we should use is “black bloc’ing“.

This last pronouncement is going to be controversial, for sure, but the term “black bloc’ing” is actually used all the time when anarchists speak about black blocs. That’s obviously a rather strange spelling, but also one that ai think to be necessary. The two most obvious alternatives are to use either “blocking” or “blocing”, but the first of these seems to identify “black block” as a possibly acceptable spelling for this term, and second looks like it shouldn’t be pronounced with a hard letter-cee [c, C] sound, and it also looks like it shouldn’t exist in the English language. You can probably say the same of “bloc’ing”, with its apostrophe, but you can at least make the argument that the apostrophe signals that the letter before it should be pronounced as a voiceless velar plosive, and that it is therefore better than “blocing”, which looks like it might be pronounced in any number of weird ways.

Besides, once we accept the legitimacy of “black bloc’ing”, we get so many other words that look so elegant with this apostrophe, and which we are likely to use more often.

For example, the verb “to bloc up” – meaning, in effect, to change into black bloc attire – can now be rendered in text easily. Ai bloc up, my ruedawg blocs up, dudeguy bloc’ed up earlier, the Sugar Sammy affinity group is bloc’ing up under the weird anti-civ banner over there, it’s nice to see so many bloc’ed-up people in a demo, but is there an actual black bloc anywhere?

We also get the term “black bloc’er” from an acceptance of “black bloc’ing”, which looks so much nicer than the term “black blocker” that occasionally shows up in places. Even if you disagree, it’s confusing to include the letter-kay in this form while maintaining that it doesn’t belong in “black bloc”, and yet is also clear that the word “blocer” looks a bit strange itself.

Blocks and blocs

Why am ai so opposed to the letter-kay? Well, that’s because a black block would better refer to a black Lego block than to a collection of people grouped together and covering as much of their body as possible in black clothing. The word “bloc” was chosen for a reason when this term was originally translated into English from the German term «Schwarzer Block». Whereas, in English, the word “block” refers to something discrete, whether a Lego block or a city block or a prison cell block, the word “bloc” refers to something that is perceived, composed of multiple things that are certainly different from one another in many ways, but which are beheld as the same indistinguishable mass.

Thus the “Communist bloc” that occupied the Eurasian landmass during the Cold War. It included the massive territories of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, as well as many smaller states like Yugoslavia, Albania, and later Cambodia and Vietnam, many of whom had conflictual relationships with one another – and yet they appeared as a uniform threat to the capitalist powers, something that needed to be contained. So much so, in fact, that it took nearly a decade for most capitalist states’ foreign policy makers to perceive the Sino-Soviet split, by which time, in the late 1960s, the Soviet Union and China were at the point of armed clash.

And thus too black blocs, whose defining feature as a discrete tactic is that the individual people comprising the bloc become difficult to identify and track as individuals, something that renders a potential advantage to the black bloc’ers. An enemy that isn’t fully understood is an enemy that is more difficult to engage.

The proper noun

It is worth mentioning the fact that, in making the point that there is no singular Black Bloc organization present in every single demo, it is worth noting that there have, in fact, been some entities that have chosen to name themselves “Black Bloc”. For example, there was the movement that emerged in early 2013 that used the name “Black Bloc” to describe itself: Black Bloc Egypt. This was apparently a rather heterogenous movement, and it apparently drew its inspiration from anarchists who had used the black bloc tactic in other parts of the world (and perhaps in Egypt itself, since yeah, there were black blocs in the Cairo of 2011 too), but this movement definitely espoused a certain baseline political ideology, and the things that it did went far beyond simply using the black bloc tactic.

This is something we should be able to acknowledge if we ever find ourselves trying to discuss what the tactic is. Yet it should require no more elaboration than it does to explain that occupation is a tactic that exists independently of, say, the Occupy movement.

In the case of Black Bloc Egypt, it’s interesting, and probably not all that surprising, that the black bloc tactic – and the movements that have employed that tactic in the past – would serve as the main inspiration for a movement of anti-capitalist, anti-theocratic youth seeking to create a kind of collective political identity. That’s because, for many reasons, the term “black bloc” has been imbued with an anarchist character. This isn’t an entirely good thing.

The political coding of the tactic

The term “black bloc” comes from the term that German news anchors used to describe crowds of black-clad, masked-up squatters who formed to defend their homes from attacks by the state; the news anchors may have gotten the name from the German police first, but it’s a bit unclear. In any case, squat defense was a thing that happened a lot in Germany, and other West European countries, throughout the 1980s. When things really picked up in terms of efforts to defend Hamburg’s Hafenstraße squats, starting perhaps in 1986, «Schwarzer Block» became really widely known in German-speaking parts of Western Europe.

The squatters were mostly not anarchists, and the news anchors, for their part, did not refer to them as such either. Anarchists in Turtle Island were inspired by the squatters’ movement, though, and the other political tendencies associated with the German autonomes.

Whenever there are disturbances around the world, anarchists are quick to learn the particular terms that are used, in whatever context, for what we might call in English “hooligans”. In French, one term is «casseur»; in Greek, one term is «koukoulofori»; in Turkish, one term is «çapul». Ai can name all of these off the top of my head, without looking them up – and ai bet many anarchists have similar knowledge. All of these are words that are used by news media against uncontrollable or rebellious people in the streets, and they then get appropriated and turned into a positive identity. They become words of celebration, not just among those çapuling every day in Istanbul, but in places where there are people inspired by those happy çapulers. This same thing played out a few decades ago with the term «Schwarzer Block», translated to “black bloc” in English. The German hooligans embraced the label that had been applied to them, and the celebration of this label spread along subcultural and political channels to other parts of the world.

So, what happened is that, at some point, some Turtle Island anarchists started to do a similar thing where they would show up to larger demos with a mind to sticking together and wearing as much black as they could over as much of their body as possible. At the very least, this was what people were doing by the first time that ai was involved in a black bloc, in 2007. (There are various ideas about when and where the first black bloc on this continent was, but the answer seems a bit unknowable to me; let’s just say “around 1990”.) Speaking of that specific black bloc ai participated in, which was during deliberations on the Atlantica Free Trade Agreement in Halifax, it was rather different in form than those demos that had happened in Germany so many years ago. In the German demos, the entire demo would typically be comprised of black-clad people (almost all of them squatters or at least heavily involved in the squatting scene), and those people were almost certainly not wearing specific black bloc attire in order to make them more difficult to identify individually. Yes, the German squatters generally wore masks, but so have lots of other militants. Those Germans did not function as a bloc within a demo. Very interestingly, they seem to have worn the clothes that they apparently wore most of the time anyway (i.e. what was fashionable in their particular subculture and/or practical in their particular circumstances).

All of this means that the German squatters did not actually operate as a black bloc. The modern concept behind this term, anarchists’ tactical conception of what a black bloc is, was actually created by anglophone anarchists after the height of the German squatting struggle in the 1980s was over. It had very little to do, in fact, with that particular movement – and it had a lot more to do with the political situation in which anarchists on Turtle Island and in Western Europe found themselves over the course of the 1990s and the 2000s. Later on, the term “black bloc” was brought into German as an anglicism, and without many people necessarily even being aware that the term’s origin was in German (although plenty of people must have been). It also entered other languages, like French and Arabic, as an anglicism. It carried with it a very specific meaning by this point, but also one that was routinely ignored or confused.

Today, anarchists in the English-speaking world (and in may other places) usually participate in violent physical confrontation with the state by participating in demos, and these usually take place in cities that, increasingly, are fraught with surveillance devices and other means of gathering visual evidence on riots. Black blocs are useful for anarchists, insofar as we want to break windows and get away with it. There are other good things to say about black blocs, but this should be sufficient for this post. Our appreciation of this tactic has led many of us to elevate this tactic to something more than it is. It has become, in a way, a specifically anarchist tactic, if not the anarchist tactic.

In other words, it isn’t just corporate newscasters that discuss black blocs as being something more than what they are. Anarchists do it too. A good example is when the magazine 325, in its ninth issue, spoke of the Black Bloc (with capital letters) as an example of informal organization in the same paragraph as it mentioned the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), examples of the same. 325‘s claim might be true to a point, but it’s pretty obvious that, whereas the ALF and the ELF are banners under which anyone can claim an action (so long as, in the case of the ALF at least, they adhere to the organization’s guidelines), the same cannot be said of “the Black Bloc” – unless, of course, you set up something like Black Bloc Egypt, which does end up serving as a sort of banner under which certain things cannot be declared.

Ai don’t think this kind of thing is particularly useful for anarchists, though. First, the aesthetic is easily appropriated – and, in fact, it has been appropriated – by racist nationalists. This is the whole “autonomous nationalist” phenomenon in parts of Europe, and along with black bloc attire (which, for the record, can be as useful for the purpose of terrorizing an immigrant neighbourhood as it can be for attacking police after they shoot a teenager), they have also taken up certain “causes” that anarchists are usually at the forefront of promoting in a militant fashion, most notably defense of the Earth. If we argue that the black bloc tactic is an anarchist tactic, but we are also unable to stop scumbags from employing that tactic to scumbag ends, then people who don’t know the details may assume, rightly or wrongly, that the black bloc that did something scumbaggy in their neighbourhood was comprised of anarchists.

When we talk about black blocs as anarchists (like this blog post is doing, since ai’m an anarchist), or when black blocs comprised of anarchists and fellow travelers talk about themselves (like when black bloc’ers go for a stroll together and hand out flyers to passers-by), we should avoid talking about it as something that is ours. Instead, in theory directed towards other movement participants, we should talk about wearing masks, street fighting, uniformity of dress, and the combination of all three as tactics that have a place in a broader strategy for liberation (which counters the arguments of pacifists and managerial types, for example). When we hand out flyers to proles in Hochelag’ about “what a black bloc is”, we should emphasize that it is a thing that anyone can do, to whatever end they like, so long as they have some black clothes and some friends.

We should really stop moaning about Nazis stealing our good ideas, too. Yes, it sucks, but was it really our good idea, anyway? The topic is debatable. Like, having done some reading about the West German squatting scene in the late ’80s, ai am not entirely sympathetic to everything that was going on. Ai don’t think that movement is mine any more than ai think the 2012 strike movement in Québec was mine; instead, ai understand that movement as a place that was inhabited by people that ai have sympathy with, but also by a lot of others, including a lot of shitty people. So if the Nazis stole it from anyone, it was not just anarchists or people who anarchists like, but also, say, Marxists who believed that talking about gender issues is a useless activity, and yet who were also part of that historical West German scene, also fought the cops, etc.

In any case, a big part of Nazis’ whole deal is that they steal ideas from others and use them towards their own shitty ends, and while plenty of anarchists may have not heard about the autonomist nationalist phenomenon yet (which is fine, since not all of us spend hours reading obscure blogs about what racists in Bulgaria are up to), the reality is that anarchists in Turtle Island, on the whole, have known about black bloc’ing Nazis in Europe for a while now. We shouldn’t be shocked or upset about it every time we hear mention of them. Instead, we should think about what this means for our anarchist scenes which, rightly or wrongly, often spend a lot of time talking about black blocs.

A few criteria for identifying black blocs

#1. Three people in black bloc attire do not make up a black bloc. The whole point of a bloc is that it is difficult to distinguish individual parts or grasp the full size of it. So, at the very least, there need to be enough people in a bloc so that you can’t just tell how many people comprise it just by looking at it. It needs to be enough people that you need to take a second to count them.

#2. An area of a demo where there are lots of people in black bloc attire, but also a lot more who are not wearing black bloc attire – but who may be wearing “dark clothing”, masks, goggles, helmets, and so on and so forth – is not a black bloc. It is, perhaps, an area where a black bloc is likely to form, but it could also just be described as “the rowdy section”. Within this section, there may be a black bloc, of course, which may or may not comprise all of the black bloc’ers, but which probably doesn’t.

#3. Just because people are wearing masks and hoodies, that doesn’t mean they are a black bloc. The proper attire is really important, and even though it is sometimes difficult for people in a bloc to achieve total monochrome uniformity, it’s usually easy to tell when they are trying and when they are not.

Errata

Did you know that there was a Sudanese political party called “Black Bloc” during British rule? Pretty weird!

“A new Cold War?” This headline has appeared so often this year, and in so many different news media outlets. There is plenty of reason for this, of course. The proxy conflict in the Ukraine is a pretty big deal, without doubt, and it bears much more than a passing resemblance to the roughly 1945-1989 conflict that was dubbed “the Cold War”.

It’s important to note, though, that even before 2014, the headline “A new Cold War?” would appear fairly frequently in those same news media outlets. That’s because hostility between the Russian Federation and the NATO alliance, as well as general awareness of such hostility in the English-speaking world, have been growing for a while now – since at least the 2008 invasion of Georgia, ai would say. Thus whenever Russia would conduct naval exercises off the west coast of France, or make a fuss about missile defense systems in eastern Europe, commentators would speak of either “a new Cold War” or rhetorically ask whether the Cold War had ever really ended.

To be perfectly explicit about it: the Cold War between Moscow and Washington D.C. did not end. The collapse of Realsozialismus from 1989 to, at the latest, 1992 simply marked a new phase in the Cold War. Although Russian state power was diminished in almost every respect and could no longer be considered a superpower, it remained powerful enough to hold onto its sovereignty, and it also held onto enough of its nuclear arsenal to destroy the biosphere more than once – a capacity that, even today, it shares only with the United States. To the extent that elements remained in political power in Russia that wanted to maintain Russia as a great power, there were still seeds of the kind of geopolitical conflict for a slice of the globe’s resources that had characterized the Cold War.

Thus the Cold War entered a new phase after the Berlin Wall fell – and sometime between then and now, it entered at least one new phase again. Ai am not really sure if ai’m qualified to taxonomize the periods of the Cold War in full, but ai know that some people would argue that the prosecution of the Second Chechen War and the rise of Vladimir Putin would constitute a new phase, and ai know a lot of people would argue that the last year’s events in Ukraine would constitute a new phase too. Ai lean towards the invasion of Kartvelia as being rather important, myself.

Now, to be clear, this post has been talking about the Cold War, with a definite article and capital letters. The Cold War is not necessarily the same thing as a cold war. First of all, the Cold War had many moments where it turned hot, so it wasn’t a perfect example of what a cold war is, even if it is pretty “cold” most of the time. A better example of a cold war might be the low-scale conflict that exists on the Persian Gulf between the Gulf monarchies and the United States, on the one hand, and the Islamic Republic of Iran on the other.

Generally, though, the concept of a cold war is pretty vacuous. Like, what is the difference between a cold war and simple hostility between states?

For some reason, using a quote mark after a numeral makes this blog platform freak out and use a strange character that ai would prefer wasn’t here at all. Oh well!

So, this is now an old problem (by about two and a half years), but in the context of the current phase of anti-austerity struggle in Québec, it is relevant. Although Hydro-Québec and the Société de transport de Montréal have been increasing their rates for years, and tuition is still going up, there’s a lot of focus right now (somewhat problematically, in my opinion) on a law targeting the pensions of municipal employees across the province, and which will almost certainly be passed by the National Assembly – dominated as it is by the Liberal Party – in the next few months.

In English, this law is currently referred to as Bill 3, as in the following Gazette headline: “Bill 3 protesters storm City Hall“. It’s called a bill because, right now, the law hasn’t been passed – at which point it will actually be a law.

As far as ai know, there have been no English-language callouts for any of the demonstrations against Bill 3 yet. Ai have seen a few French-language callouts, though. While it would seem that French-language newscasters have been pretty good at calling this thing «projet de loi 3», at least two demonstration callouts have referred to it as simply «loi 3».

Yep! While ai have less access to the texts dating to the time of the strike, ai imagine that this is the reason that Jean Charest’s strike-killing law, passed on May 25, 2012, was so often referred to as “Law 78” in English and «loi 78» in French. It’s because francophone anti-capitalists shortened «projet de loi» to just «loi», and then anglophone anti-capitalists simply translated «loi» to “law”, as can be considered reasonable to do.

At the time, this caused a lot of confusion. Law 78, as we knew it, had come into our consciousness on May 23, and then it got rammed through the National Assembly very quickly. It was not a «projet de loi», or bill, for very long at all, but all of the public discourse, all of the flyers and stencils, used the numeral 78. This is how we had come to know the law, and how, to a large degree, we would continue to know it. But, at some point early June – after quite a lot had already taken place, this being one of the strike’s two heights, and certain names having already been burned pretty deep into our minds – there were suddenly some people in our circles talking about how, in fact, it would be better for us to refer to this ordinance by the name “Law 12” instead, since that was its actual name now.

These people were mostly ignored. It’s interesting, though, since this is one of the few occasions where ai can remember other people regularly talking about the importance of terminology other than myself.

But yes, «projet de loi 78» had become «loi 12». This is apparently not always the case, for the record. For example, the Charter of the French Language (almost certainly Québec’s most famous law) was originally «projet de loi 101» and then became «loi 101». Hilariously, though, the most common name for this law in English is “Bill 101”, despite the fact that it has been part of the law in Québec for several decades now.

Anyways, it’s no surprise that it’s difficult to keep a consistent naming style in place for all of this uselessness. Legalese of this sort is alienating! So fuck the law or whatever!

Anglophones, francophones, quechuaphones, arabophones. These are phoncumlinguic words.

The suffix -phone comes from a Greek root word meaning “sound”. The word is φωνή, which Wiktionary romanizes to «phōnḗ» – but none of that means much to me. In any case, there are plenty of other English words that share this Greek root, such as “phonics”, “phoneme”, “megaphone”, and “telephone”. The etymological reason that these words have a variation of «phōnḗ» within them is pretty straightforward. Phonics is the study of sound, a phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound in a word (“phoneme” itself has five), a megaphone is a tool for making a sound louder, and a telephone is a means to transmit sounds produced in one place to another place.

It’s less straightforward, though, with a word like “anglophone”, because an anglophone is not defined so much by sound as by language. Language and sound obviously have a lot to do with one another, but they aren’t the same thing. Some languages, for instance, do not have a spoken component; they are signed. Being fluent in a language, too, doesn’t necessarily mean that a person is capable of speaking that language – in the usual sense of what we think of as “speaking”, anyway. If ai was a person without functional vocal cords, for instance, ai would not be able to produce the sounds of a language, although there’s a good chance that ai’d be able to move my lips in a way that some people could interpret. In this situation, no ability to produce sound (or even necessarily to hear sound) is necessary for me or whatever person ai’m conversing with to be considered proper anglophones, francophones, whatever.

It’s not especially surprising that the -phone in “anglophone” would be so different from the -phone in “telephone”, though. A shorthand way of explaining the words “anglophone” and “francophones” to Americans who’ve never heard these words would be to say “English-speaking” and “French-speaking”. Ai don’t think this is particularly ableist or reductive, either. The straightforward sense of the word “speaking” involves making sounds with your vocal cords and your mouth parts, but it can also mean to perform a speech act, and it is evident enough that speaking in this sense does not require speaking in the other sense.

It’s a bit unclear, to me, what the origins of the phoncumlinguic words are – with “phoncumlinguic” being a word ai just came up to be describe this large group of words that share much in common with each other, and also have less in common with other words, like “microphone” and “xylophone”, then a person might first assume (especially if their first language was, like, Amharic or Lao or anything else equally distant from the Germanic and Romance languages). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, “anglophone” dates to 1895 and “francophone” dates to 1900, but no source is provided for either date. None of the other common phoncumlinguic words, such as “lusophone” or “sinophone”, have any entry at all. Also, with “anglophone” and “francophone”, there is no indication of whether the words were coined in English or in French in their respective years.

It’s my understanding that phoncumlinguic words have been particularly important in the Canadian social context, because of language conflict. This is almost always talked about in terms of anglophones, francophones, and allophones, which comprises everyone who isn’t an anglophone and a francophone – which is pretty fucking simplistic, of course, but that’s a different story. Beyond such specifically Canadian use, though, the use of phoncumlinguic words in English seems to be rather scant. One might show up here or there, but ai get the sense that these words aren’t used nearly as often in the vocabularies of other English-speaking people. It’s hard for me to imagine someone in Melbourne or Fresno describing the Åland Islands as “a swedophone part of Finland” rather than as “a Swedish-speaking part of Finland”.

Since the Online Etymology Dictionary has given me absolutely no information to go on, other than a rough date, ai’m going to make an educated guess and say that English got its phoncumlinguic words from French, specifically Canadian French. Ai would go so far to say that very early use of the words “anglophone” and “francophone” took place in the pages of English-language newspapers in Québec – perhaps in Montréal or Sherbrooke, which still have large anglo populations, but perhaps also in Québec City or (as some knew it at the time) Three Rivers, whose anglo populations are extremely small today. Many of the wealthiest anglophones in Québec (including those controlling printing presses) were not of principally English descent, but instead Scottish, and thus there is reason to think that they would personally chafe a bit at any discussion of Canadian language dynamics in terms of “the English and the French”. In any case, even beyond this primarily Scottish elite of Québec, English-speaking settlers in the Canadas were, on the whole, not principally English either. Even a proletarian writer, then, might have had reason to import the French word «anglophone», so much more elegant than “English-speaker”, into English itself. For «francophone» to follow would only be natural.

My conjecture, then, is that phoncumlinguic words emerge in French, though ai can’t really be certain of this. Ai haven’t been able to find any French-language etymology resource that can actually give me a date for when «anglophone» or “francophone” first started showing up in print. Ai suspect again, though, that within the francophone world, it is probably within a specifically Canadian context – and probably a specifically Québécois context – that phoncumlinguic words were first used widely, if not necessarily coined (though ai bet they were probably coined in Québec too).

A tangent: words like «anglophone», «francophone», «italophone», and others may very well have been coined by academics in France and used for centuries to describe, with some precision, the language dynamics of Europe. Hell, there’s no reason to assume that it’s only France that could have originated phoncumlinguic words; equivalent words might have a long history in Portugal, for instance. Ai suppose ai don’t know. All this seems unlikely to me, though, because such academics would probably be more snooty about using the Greek root “phōnḗ” in an appropriate manner. It’s long past us now, but Károly Mária Kertbeny got a lot of grief from “men of letters” back in the day because he put a Latin root and a Greek root together in his coining of the word «Homosexualisten» (as it was written in the original German); it’s worth remembering that this shit mattered to highly literate people. This was a time of widespread dictionary compilation and grammatical codification in Europe, which itself was born of a strong sense that nationality corresponded more or less perfectly with language. Thus there’s reason to think that phoncumlinguic words would neither be particularly accepted among literati (since they insulted the ancient Greeks or whatever) nor would they be particularly necessary for anyone if the common understanding is that a person who grew up speaking Czech is a Czech and a person who grew up speaking Basque is a Basque.

(Two side notes on this tangent: FIRST, it’s pretty obvious that the word “phoncumlinguic”, coined by me just now, would also piss off nineteenth-century European literati, and ai am okay with that; and SECOND, the United Kingdom is obviously an exceptional circumstance in regards to the dynamic just described, but ai can’t imagine that too many people on the Continent were, back in the day, giving very much thought to overwhelmingly English-speaking places under the sovereignty of a capital city that was located in a country called England.)

The strongest case for a non-Québécois coining is that these words were, instead, coined in one of the Portuguese-speaking countries. It’s a very weak case, but it’s worth discussing.

What ai know, and all ai know, is that the Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, an organization formed in 1996, declared in the year 2005 that, from forever hence, May 5 would be celebrated as «o Dia da Cultura Lusófona», with the lusó- in «lusófona» referring to Portugal, derived from “Lusitania” (the name of an ancient Roman province whose territory roughly corresponded with the present-day territory of the Portuguese state), and the -fona being a Portuguese derivative of the Greek «phōnḗ». To me, this seems like a possible indication that the word «lusófona» has been widely-known and widely-used within Portuguese discourse for quite a long time.

Ai don’t think so, though. First, the people who work for that organization, and decide its policy, can reasonably be assumed to be both language geeks and students of other countries’ language policies, which means that we can further assume that they may have used the word «lusófona» instead of «lusóparlante» (also used in Portuguese, literally meaning “Portuguese-speaking”, and lacking the ugliness of that expression in English) simply because they were familiar with the terminology that is used in the Canadas. Secondly, when ai look up «lusófona» on Google, one of the things that comes up is an institution called the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, which was founded in 1987. The Parti Québécois had won its first election and lost it by then! A lot of results come up, in fact, and ai’m not claiming to have looked through them all, but none of the institutions seem particularly old, and ai haven’t found any Portuguese equivalent of Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples that rocks a phoncumlinguic word in its title.

Let’s be clear: my research doesn’t constitute a sufficient proof that these words aren’t actually quite old, and to be frank, ai don’t even know how ai would do that research. Ai don’t have the means to scan medieval manuscripts for signs of phoncumlinguic words. Ai’d argue, though, that while there is no particularly strong reason to think that phoncumlinguic words emerged anywhere in the lusophone world, there’s a pretty good reason to think that they were produced in the Canadian context, most likely in Québec.

Neither Portugal nor any of its former colonies have a language conflict that resembles anything like the situation in northern Turtle Island. What is that situation? To be more precise, what is that situation in the late nineteenth century, when both “anglophone” and “francophone” probably showed up in print in the English language? (Ai have decided to just trust Online Etymology Dictionary on this.)

Most critically, the situation in northern Turtle Island was nothing like the situation in Europe. Speaking English did not make you English – and while this attitude to things was probably shared in Ireland, it probably wasn’t particularly well-known nor well-understood in Portugal nor anywhere else on the Continent. But northern Turtle Island’s language dynamic also differed in a very key way from that of Brazil’s. Speaking in broad strokes, because Spain and Portugal generally respected each other’s respective spheres of influence in the Americas, the predominating European language in the area of Brazil was, and always has been, Portuguese. This is not the case in northern Turtle Island, where the status of French and English shifted quite a bit during the wars between Britain and France over that territory. Even after 1759, when the British defeated French forces at Québec City, there were still large populations of francophones hanging about, many of whom were so determined to stick around as a “distinct society” that revanche-des-berceaux natalism came to prominence in many places.

In Brazil and in northern Turtle Island, you have the same four broad demographics (constituent populations, they could be called) at the end of the nineteenth century: 1) the descendants of early European settlers; 2) the descendants of people who were present before Europeans started arriving; 3) the descendants of slaves brought from Africa by force; and 4) and new settler populations, many of them coming from more distant parts of Eurasia than the Atlantic seaboard of Europe. In Brazil, all of these populations had different relationships to the Portuguese language that we can generalize about, but in northern Turtle Island, we need to generalize about both English and French – and this complicates the picture.

Ai am not going to make a bunch of generalizations right now, but instead, ai would like to call attention to the fact that people, in this time period, were making generalizations themselves. That’s because language dynamics were something that they discussed, or at least something that some of them discussed some of the time. What terminology did they use, though? Well, it’s likely that many of them used terminology that some people are still using today. When ai was growing up in an anglophone village in south-central New Brunswick, francophones in New Brunswick and elsewhere in the Canadas usually got described as “the French”, whereas some well-meaning Americans ai’ve met seem to use the word “Québécois” to describe the entire francophone population of the Canadas. Both of these terminologies are problematic in their own way, but the problematicness may be something neither evident nor important to the people using the terms. There’s a good chance that an American (from anywhere but Louisiana or Maine) has never even heard of Acadian people, after all, and regarding the place where ai grew up, the normative attitude was anglo chauvinist: all French people suck, so who gives a fuck about distinguishing between them? Most people knew better, but used the word “French” anyway.

Ai think that, in the anarchist scene, we have a very similar attitude about Ku Klux Klan members and self-described Nazis – two groups that are actually quite distinct from one another, and have a sense of being different from one another, but which are all the same shitpile of Nazis to us. And then the Nazis themselves, of course, are rather unlikely to pay heed to the oh-so-important differences between anarchists, Marxists (both Leninist and non-), George Soros, and whoever else. We’re all communist scum in their view.

Getting back to francophones, though, using terms like “French” or “Québécois” to describe all francophone components of all four constituent populations of northern Turtle Island would have been something that francophones generally both knew to be inaccurate and also probably cared about – at least a little bit. This is where phoncumlinguic words come in.

It is my theory that, at some point in the nineteenth century, some literate francophone person on Turtle Island somewhere – perhaps a person like Kertbeny, literate but not an academic – came up with the first phoncumlinguic word, and probably the second as well, in order to have a more accurate, more respectful terminology for a population that people were talking about anyway. Like Kertbeny, ai feel that this person probably gave no fucks about the proper methods of word generation, which were so important to the dictionary compilers and grammaticians of the day. Like «Homosexualisten», «francophone» probably showed up in some pamphlet that was circulated in Montréal and elsewhere, and from there, it spread. Pamphlets were something like zines are today: more accessible and easily produced than fat tomes or bound books, and perhaps more capable of disseminating ideas (and terminologies) in a population than some people think.

In comparison to anglophones, the francophone population was certainly more ethnically homogenous – but it wasn’t absolutely so. There were francotropic immigrants to Montréal, mainly those coming from similarly Catholic societies (Italy in particular), and there were kids adopted into Québéc’s francophone and Catholic society who weren’t of principally French descent, most of whom were Irish or onkwehón:we. (Note: this adoption was not a cool thing; besides the fact that this was, for onkwehón:we peoples, a very significant part of the genocidal process, there’s also the fact that kids of any race should never be left alone in the same building as Catholic priests.) There were the Métis out West, too. People would talk about these populations, and sometimes talk about their common use of the French language. So what words did people use?

Ai think it’s pretty likely that phoncumlinguic words didn’t become particularly important, neither in French- nor in English-language discourse, until much closer to the 1960s, when the language conflict entered its post-Duplessis phase. At this time, and ever after, a lot of discussion about anglophones, francophones, and allophones (because apparently the rest of y’all don’t get to have your own words for yourselves) started to happen – and the discussion is still going on today. Before that, though, people probably spoke in terms that, more or less, were less scientifically clear, but which probably made as much sense as was necessary for the conversations being had.

Phoncumlinguic words, in my estimation, make more sense than the alternatives – at least the alternatives that have been used so far. This is important. While phoncumlinguic words are certainly less ableist than words like “English-speaking” and «lusóparlante» (given that, despite the thing ai said about speech acts earlier, the word “speaking” and the suffix -parlante can still be taken to mean the physical act of producing sounds with your vocal cords and the parts of your mouth), ai don’t think that this word was selected for reasons we’d recognize today as actively anti-ableist. Even if it was, the person who coined the word did a bad job, considering that «phōnḗ» still refers to sound!

Using “anglophone” or “English-speaker” as the starting point, better words might include “an anglolingual (person)”, “an anglolinguic (person)”, or “an anglolingue”, and we could also use some ridiculous constructions like “anglomemetic (person)”, “a memetically anglic (person)”, “an anglomemer”, or whatever else we can come up with. Given that many languages use a derivative of the ancient Greek ἴδιος (romanized as «ídios» by Wiktionary) for “language”, we could also use “anglo-idiotic”, haha. We shouldn’t be limited to Greek and Latin, either, for our word generation – but ai’m not going to offer any examples of possible constructions myself, since ai wouldn’t be sure whether or not the terms used for “language” in these other language make reference to sound, to the physical act of talking, or whatever else. Ai was going to offer “an angloyuyanic (person)” as an example based on a Chinese term, but it seems that 言 (pinyin: «yán») can refer to the physical act of speaking, too.

In any case, all these less ableist alternatives seem a bit complicated, and also unlikely to catch on – in English, French, Portuguese, and related languages, at least. That’s because phoncumlinguic words have already entered the lexicon of such languages and have, it seems, actually established themselves a fair bit.

Let me make an argument, then: the genealogy of words and symbols does not matter; what matters is the meaning they carry today. No one knows, or cares, about the Greek root anymore. Similarly, no one cares about the fact that the swastika was, for centuries, used for completely non-Nazi reasons in the religious practices of all sorts of people everywhere. Today, who gives a fuck? The answer is these people, but they also believe in intelligent design by aliens. Most of us are comfortable with the idea of swastikas being bad and those who like swastikas being made uncomfortable.

Regarding phoncumlinguic words, this is obviously easy for me to say as a person who doesn’t have personal reason by problematic components of these words’ origin (ai am not deaf, ai have functioning vocal cords, etc.), but ai think that an analysis of these words’ genealogy reveals that, in the creation of these words, there was a mutation and a complete break from the Greek, to the point that we should see the -phone suffix in a word like “anglophone” as having nothing to do with the -phone suffix in “saxophone”.

My next post on phoncumlinguic words will deal with some of the problems of these words, with a mind to smoothing them out as many as possible, and also indicating where there are problems that are, to some degree, irresolvable. Yet this exercise will be conducted from a starting point where phoncumlinguic words are, on the whole, deemed valuable already, and worth improving – rather than as words that are irresolvably problematic and which should be jettisoned from our regular lexicon.