Counterinsurgency Urbanism with Ted Rutland

Josh: Welcome to Minnesotan Capitalism. This is Josh. In this episode recorded in mid-2024, we speak with Ted Rutland about the evolution of policing from the mid-20th century's professional model to the counterinsurgency urbanism that emerged in the 1970s and 80s in Canada. Rutland discusses how community policing initially intended to bring police closer to communities through multicultural training, and social services, but became a strategy to win over parts of the community while waging a larger war against the rest. We delve into some of the historical shifts in policing, largely as a response to the radical movement and urban rebellions. We also examine the role of progressive urban governance and maintaining counterinsurgency policing, the impact of neoliberal policies and an influence of white nationalism in shaping urban governance. Ted and I further explore the concept of the counterinsurgency urbanism, showing how it has become central to not just policing, but city-making processes in its entirety, where supportive communities with measures are blended in in order to maintain control over urban populations. Ted Rutland is an associate professor of geography and urban studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His research explores how capitalism and white supremacy intersect in contemporary urban politics, planning, and policing. He's the author of Displacing Blackness, Planning, Power, and Race in a 20th Century Halifax, and the co-author of How to Defend Ourselves, A History of Montreal's First Haitian Street Game.

Jay: Hey listeners, this is Jay. I just wanted to add a few comments to this excellent conversation you're about to hear between Josh and Ted Rutland. I loved listening to this. It's really an awesome addition to the work we've covered with a lot of brilliant folks around counterinsurgency. And I think it really helps people see the way it functions on a city level and gives us a lot of really interesting history about Montreal as well. Along those lines, I just wanted to shout out a couple conversations we had last week on YouTube that I think pair really well with this conversation if you're up for more discussion of counterinsurgency. There's a two-part conversation with Oris Omni Burton and I on the work of the counterrevolutionary and counterinsurgent goon Frank Kitson. and also a conversation with Mark Neocliss on his new book, Pacification. Neocliss's work is very influential to a lot of folks who have done critical work on policing and counterinsurgency. And that conversation really gives a sense, I think, of how deeply embedded a lot of these counterinsurgent logics are within the Western tradition, especially around things like the city and state and policing. So first check out this awesome discussion, and then if you like this, check out those others as well, which we'll link in the show notes. And as always, if you appreciate the work that we do, please become a patron of the show. We would do this work no matter what, but we can only do it at the rate that we do because of the support of our listeners and viewers. Now here is Ted Rutland's conversation with Josh about counterinsurgency urbanism.

Josh: Ted, welcome to Millions in Capitalism. I would just like for you to start by discussing your piece, Counterinsurgency Urbanism, where you started by highlighting how policing shifted from the so-called professional model of the mid-20th century to the community policing model that emerged and became hegemonic in the 1970s and 80s in response to urban rebellions in the late 60s. I think it's an interesting formulation because today we can see how the term community policing is mobilized from certain sectors of the left as a means of designating a political program where the community controls the police. But community policing has been utilized in other ways historically. As you write, and I'm quoting here, Central to community policing are a series of programs that aim to bring police closer to communities. These programs include multicultural training, hiring more cops of color, being more present in community life through foot patrols, attending community events, providing social services. These community policing programs, of course, did not replace the traditional repressive folks of the police, but came to operate alongside it. End quote. This turned community policing, as demonstrated by scholars like Stuart, administrator and Arasami Burton, one of my favorite scholars, and someone we've had on the pod quite a few times, was part of a new counterinsurgency strategy. And you note that, and I'm quoting here again, the aim is to win over parts of the community in order to wage a better war against the rest of it, end quote. So maybe if you can talk a bit about what counterinsurgency urbanism is, and also this counterinsurgency shift that you know historically speaking that has happened.

Ted Rutland: That's great. So many scholars and activists have looked at the way that policing begins to change in the 1960s and 70s as a result of a whole series of crises. And so the first is all these radical movements of the 1960s, Black Liberation Movement, Red Power movements, peace movements, anti-war movements, student movements, etc., many of whom are coming into confrontation with the police. And these movements are developing radical critiques of the police as an institution. There's also this series of urban rebellions, often called riots. And I'm comfortable with the term riot as a positive term in U.S. cities, which are all sparked by incidents of police racism or violence and lead to you know, great rebellion against white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, etc. So you have all these pressures on the police in the 1960s. There's also a different kind of crisis that is emerging in kind of police-affiliated think tanks and criminology departments that are beginning to see the limits of what was called the professional model of policing in the middle of the 20th century, which is the idea that police could be professional crime fighters. They're going to have cars. They're going to have CB radios. They're going to do intelligence gathering. And through this kind of professionalism, they are going to be able to be better at fighting crime. And all these police-affiliated think tanks and criminologists are starting to see that that model actually doesn't work. To be able to arrest people for crimes, you often need information from community members. And so the distance from communities created by the professional model creates a limit to the ability of police to do what they consider to be their work. So all of this comes to a head with the Kerner Commission in 1968, where the government looks into what they called urban disorders, but we could call urban rebellions or urban riots. And what they find is there's this whole series of rebellions that are sparked by incidents of police violence. And they conclude that the professional model of policing leads to these kinds of uprisings, both because it can promote kind of police racism and violence because the police don't know the community. And also when a rebellion begins, the police have no one in the community that they can work with to try to put it down. So there are pressures on the professional police model that are coming from both pro-police people seeking just more police effectiveness, and there's pressure on the police coming from radical social movements that are opposed to the violence and racism of the police. So that promotes a shift towards community policing in the United States that begins to be implemented in the 1960s and 70s. In Canada, it's a slightly different history, but it ends up in the same place. In the 1960s, there were a series of radical movements as well, including smaller Black liberation movements, as well as the Quebec independence movement in the province of Quebec, where I live, that was seeking to remove Quebec from Canada on the basis of often left-wing arguments, but certainly cultural and ethnic arguments as well about the need to create a nation state for the Québécois nation, so French Canadians. And then all of this creates a little bit of a crisis for the state, which it responds to with a turn to multiculturalism. And so multiculturalism becomes official Canadian policy in the late 60s and early 70s. And it does what multiculturalism does. It provides measures of cultural recognition, some forms of representation for non-white or non-Anglophone cultures, sometimes some minimal efforts to diminish racial inequalities, Russian inequalities, but not much. In the 1980s, this leads to community policing, both because there are increasing protests against police racism and violence in the late 70s in Toronto, Montreal, but also because community policing fits with this multicultural model where we are going to hire more cops of colour, we are going to have the police working with communities of colour, getting to know them, developing relationships with them, etc. And there's two ways we can understand this turn to community policing. The first comes from Tony Platt and his co-authors who wrote a book called The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, which is really, really helpful in helping us to recognize that community policing is really just a velvet glove that goes over top of the enduring repressive and violent iron fist of policing. And so it's not a total change in the philosophy or operation of the police. Community policing is usually actually the role of specific cops, where the community liaison officers will be officer friendly, go and meet youth, go and coach a basketball team, do various nice things, sometimes actually be kind of helpful, but basically to win the support of the community for the police. But those community liaison officers aren't going to be the people during the drug busts, shaking people down on the street, etc. So the enduring violence and racism the police continues just with this kind of veneer of community policing. And I find this super helpful just in showing that community policing doesn't really transform the police. It just adds a different component to a basically unreformed, continuously violent and racist institution. I find it a little bit more helpful, though, to think about community policing in terms of counterinsurgency. People like Stuart Schrader or Stanley Burton, Dylan Rodriguez and Rick Wilson Gilmore have all developed this kind of analysis. And it's similar, but it moves in a slightly different direction. So it's building on an analysis of counterinsurgency in military operations, where militaries are figuring out how to battle insurgencies, so non-state actors in places like Vietnam or Kenya. And they come to sort of understand that both the military and the insurgency are essentially fighting over the population. They're both fighting for the support of the population, and that's where the war is actually won. And so a military can go and kill a lot of people, but they also need to figure out how to get some of the people in this country that they're occupying to see their interests being aligned with the occupying military, the occupying power. And so what that does with policing, and there's a direct transfer between the military and police departments, as Stuart Trader's work shows, is it brings about a form of policing where It's an operation upon the population. It's an attempt to think about, well, who's already loyal to the police? Who's deeply disloyal to the police? And who's maybe neutral? Who are the people we can win over? And so the role of community policing is to try to win over the neutral elements to the side of the police in order to wage a better war against the people involved. that you can't win over or that you don't want to win over, the disloyal. And in most cases, that would mean like really radical folks and it would mean people who are criminalized. And so it helps us to see the ways that these two things go hand in hand and that the community outreach, these sort of community ops functions actually make the terror and violence of the police more effective. And then the broader thing that I'm trying to do with this piece and with this book is to show how this became the dominant logic of the police, but also a series of other urban institutions, such that we can see the way that this initial sort of military and police logic becomes a dominant logic of making cities, of the urban process in general. I'm sure we'll get into that a little bit later.

Josh: Yes, absolutely. For one, before I shift gears a little bit, maybe you can say a word about a professional model of policing, that term you keep using. Let me describe what that means.

Ted Rutland: Well, it's initially a police reform. And so the first urban police departments in North America were very corrupt, as police departments continue to be. But they're allied with different political factions, different factions of organized crime. And so a lot of people who write about early policing in North American cities talk about it as a way of organizing criminality. And so you're going to have a drug economy, you're going to have sex work, you're going to have gambling. but the cops will organize that economy to the interests of their side of organized crime and their political bosses, their political regimes. And so the professional model comes out of a concern with that kind of corruption and also a kind of modernizing belief that science and social science can help a range of social institutions or political institutions to operate better, whether that's social work, urban planning, or the police. And so you begin to see criminology departments, you begin to see police officers like going to college or going to police training. So they're getting sort of a more advanced education in how crime happens. They are specifically going to be distant from the political apparatus. So this is when you begin to see the argument that the state or the government should never interfere with the investigations or the operations of the police. Which seems like maybe a positive idea at the time, but is very weird. You know, 100 years later, where we have all these politicians saying, oh, we can't, we can't talk about the police. That's, that's, that would be corrupt. And then you have all these technologies that enable that. And so you have the spread of patrol cars, CB radios, 911 systems. And it comes with the logic that crime fighting means being able to respond to calls as quickly as possible. And so people become very distant from communities, both to eliminate a particular kind of corruption and also to be able to do what experts thought would reduce crime, which is being able to respond to 911 calls very quickly. And, you know, that produces a different kind of corruption. It comes with you know, an increase in violence because they're also getting advanced weaponry. You get these specialized squads like SWAT teams, et cetera. So it doesn't, you know, it leads to a kind of policing that looks very familiar to the kind we have now. Only now we also have, in addition to all that, an effort to build relationships with communities. Absolutely. I appreciate that breakdown.

Josh: And speaking of community policing, and in that same vein, I'd like to read a quote from you where you take the task to state's usage and mobilization of the phraseology of community policing, where you write, and I'm quoting here, Of course, the word community here is misleading. As the illustrator's important work explains, community policing does not so much engage with communities as it produces them. The community members and groups the police work with are legitimized, they are produced as the community itself. Those the police do not work with, and especially those who are criminalized by the police, are defined as the non-community or anti-community. This is clear from the outset in the assumption that the police and the community will work together to fight crime and therefore fight people viewed as criminals. by the police, which is obviously of larger category than people actually engaged in crime. In this arrangement, it is certainly possible for community members to criticize the police and to propose police reforms, but only so long as these members are not themselves criminalized and only so long as their proposed reforms pertain to the policing of the innocent. To propose something beyond this or to suggest that criminalized people are members of the community is to call into question the legitimacy of policing itself, an impermissible abolitionist move in this arrangement. And so you also co-wrote a book about Haitian street gangs. We won't get too deeply into it today because we are bringing you back on the show in a couple of weeks or so to discuss it more at length. But one of the things you make note of is And I'm quoting here again, street gangs are the result of institutional, social, and cultural processes that echo the dynamics of racism and violence at work in Quebec, society, and elsewhere. End quote. In an interview you published in Spatial Justice, you and your co-author state that, and I'm quoting here again, Haitian gangs were not what the police and press said they were at the time. We show that far from the image of organized crime groups, there were young people from the second generation of Haitian migrants to Montreal who at some point sought to defend themselves and find their place in society. This generation was the first to leave the neighborhoods where their parents were segregated to go and experience the city and make a place for themselves. In doing so, they were confronted with incredible violence from white gangs and white races. In response, some Haitians So to me, these two concepts, right, in two separate pieces that you are a part of, there's a correlation. And I'm sure you see it, obviously, as well. But I would just hope that you can kind of like... elaborate on this a bit, if you get what I'm saying.

Ted Rutland: So there's a few things that we need to understand in that passage. And the first is that I'm talking about a series of community policing reforms that were implemented in the 1980s. And those included, you know, hiring more diverse cops, doing multicultural training, putting the police in situations in the community that are essentially outside of arrest situations or stop and frisk situations with the aim of, you know, showing the human side of the police, winning some confidence of the community, etc. And also building relationships with a whole series of community organizations in Montreal, including Black organizations that were fighting the police in the 1980s. And what's important about these reforms is that They're not good reforms. You know, I'm not in favor of these reforms. They're reformist reforms. They don't address the problems that we would raise about the police, including its racism, its violence, its role in feeding people into the carceral system. But they're reforms that were put in place for particular reasons. So they were often demanded by community organizations and activists in the 1980s. They were also implemented as part of a broader effort of the Canadian state to kind of reorganize itself after the 1960s through logics of multiculturalism. And so what's important there is just that These reforms weren't meant necessarily to extend the power and violence of the police. They were mostly meant to maintain it. And they mainly took the form of kind of public relations. You know, they're trying to improve the image of the police. And some people thought that these would be positive reforms, having more Black cops would somehow help, which, especially in hindsight, we know it doesn't do. And so the fine point that I'm trying to make is that in 1989, with the beginning of the war on gangs, which is a war on the Black community, All these community policing practices, which were implemented for particular reasons, come to serve an entirely different function. They come to serve the function of really extending the power and violence of the police. And they do that in two ways that are highlighted in the passage that you quoted, Josh. So first is we have a set of community policing projects that enable better surveillance and intelligence gathering. And so the 1980s saw an expansion of police officers in Montreal high schools. And they were introduced to build better relationships with the youth, etc. To do educational activities with the youth that are all propaganda. They're trying to build support for the police, particularly in communities that are targeted by the police. But in 1989, the police force explicitly says that these police officers in schools are are going to use their presence there to do surveillance and to map out drug dealing and gang networks in high schools. And of course, they're doing that in racialized high schools. They're doing that in working-class high schools. They're not doing that in sort of white middle-class schools because this is serving the warring gangs, which is an anti-Black operation. There's also, you know, these community policing practices are putting... police officers in community organizations and in community events. And so one example is there was an organization created in 1989 in a sort of Black area of a neighborhood called Little Burgundy. The organization was called Youth in Motion, and the organization was created specifically to provide a kind of safe space for mostly Black teenagers and young adults And safe from the police, and then safe also from the interpersonal violence that was happening at a time where there was a lot of violence in the drug market. And they, I don't think they were necessarily radicals, but their mission meant that they weren't going to allow the police into the space. And they had rules about what you could do in that space, like you're not allowed to use or sell drugs, but they didn't care whether the youth outside of that space were using or selling drugs. And so a pretty open-minded kind of space, non-criminalizing, non-repressive kind of space. They did, however, let one cop into the space, which was a specific kind of community cop, who was tasked in that neighborhood with building relationships with community organizations. And so he was a nice guy. He, you know, wasn't arresting people. His job was not to arrest people. He wasn't beating people up. And so he won the confidence of this organization, Youth in Motion, because he really seemed like a different cop. And in some ways he was. He wasn't going to be out in the street, stopping and frisking people, beating people up, arresting people. And so they trusted him. And I interviewed this police officer a couple years ago and asked him many questions. But one of them was, were you doing intelligence gathering or surveillance when you were in Youth in Motion? He said, well, yes, of course. And I was able to get information there that my colleagues were unable to get. And so I think what's important here when we're talking about these community policing practices is that it really was an extension of police power and repression because these community cops are able to do things and access spaces that your usual cop that does do arrests and does do racial profiling, et cetera, would not have been able to do. So it's absolutely an extension of the power and repression and surveillance of the police. The second role that these community policing practices come to serve, beginning in 1989, is to create divisions in communities, and particularly in the Black community, because this is a war. The war on street gangs is a war on the Black community. The police also killed more Black people than between 1989 and 1994 than in any other period in the history of Montreal. And so there's a lot of resistance. There's a lot of criticism of the police. And so the police are going to use some of their community policing programs in order to divide those communities and build support within some parts of those communities. And so one example is in 1991, after the police killed a Black young man named Marcellus François, the police sent a Black teenager, whom they'd given a summer job as part of a community policing program, to go and speak to the media about the police. And of course, he says in the media that, you know, my friends and other people in my community think the police are racist and violent. But I've seen a different story. They're actually quite nice. They're actually very nice to me, you know. And of course, the police are nice to him. I mean, the whole purpose of that project is kind of public relations. So I have no doubt that the police officers that he encountered in the police station treated him very well. And it's really... Abusing, you know, this teenager, you know, abusing people who are at an age where it's kind of difficult to understand how individuals can be quite kind sometimes, but the institution is a problem. I mean, a lot of adults have trouble understanding this too, but they're really, you know, abusing this kid who, you know, doesn't have the ability, I guess, at this point. to understand how cops can be actually very nice. And also the institution is really terrible. And also maybe the night cops who are being nice to you are not the ones who are operating in the neighborhood. They're not the ones who are killing Marcellus Francois. The police take this tactic of dividing the community to a next level in 1992. And so think about 1992, the context is, you know, the LA rebellion following the acquittal of the cops who brutalized Rodney King. So huge rebellion in LA, but obviously protests across North America as well. In May 1992, there was a huge protest in Toronto. So five hours down the road from Montreal, it was called a riot. And a lot of people who were involved called it a riot in a positive sense. It was a moment of rage and protest. Two weeks after the so-called riot in Toronto, a group in Montreal was organizing a protest. The group is also known as X, or CACs. They're younger, quite radical Black activists. You know, a ton of respect for this group. They were organizing the protest to commemorate that one year had passed since the killing of Marcellus Francois. But they also saw it as an opportunity to kind of build on the Black-led resistance to police racism and violence across North America. And so they call it a protest. The police wanted to crush this protest. And so they did that in various kinds of ways. They had plants within various organizing spaces. They also arranged for the metro system, Montreal subway, to not stop in the neighborhood where the protest was being held on the day of the protest. But the most important thing they did is they got their head of community relations to contact a few of the Black organizations that were supposed to be mobilizing for that protest and attending that protest, and they told them not to go. They told them to boycott the protest. They also told these organizations to call any friends they had in other cities in Canada or in the United States who might be coming to the protest and tell them not to come. And indeed, these two busloads of Black activists from Toronto were scheduled to come to Montreal and participate in the protest. And one of the organizations agrees. They agree to boycott the protest, and they agree to call their friends in Toronto and have them boycott the protest. And so those two busloads of Black activists never arrive. And so here, you know, we're talking about the state deliberately creating divisions in the community. And I think this is different than just the kind of public relations function that community policing was playing prior to this. It's about strategically thinking about who is the population? Who are the people who are already loyal to the police? Who are the people who are disloyal? And so we're not going to try to work with them. Also known as X, that group would be one of those. And who are the neutral people? Who are the people we can potentially bring onto our side? And so we see an explicit effort to try to bring people Those sort of neutral elements, obviously people with potentially a more social democratic or liberal analysis, maybe more trusting of the path of police reform in this time, they bring them on board. And so that marked, you know, that protest in 1992. And of course, it created a lasting division within the resistance movement because the group that organized the protest very understandably felt betrayed by this other group. And so one of the things that I think an analysis of counterinsurgency forces us to consider is that if we're organizing and trying to build a mass movement, trying to build a revolutionary movement or trying to build a movement that's going to transform society significantly, We're kind of doing the same thing as the state through counterinsurgency. I mean, we're doing it differently. We're doing it better. We're doing it with like laudable objectives. But if, you know, if we're organizing to build a mass movement, we're trying to build support in the population. And presumably there are groups that we consider loyal. We consider them natural allies. We're either working with them already or it's just a no brainer to work with them in the future. There are disloyal groups, including the police and various aspects of the state and capital where we're not working with these people. Our role is to defeat these people. And then there's a range of groups, presumably, that we don't share natural affinities, but we think that maybe we could work with them either because we help them to develop a different analysis or because we're just talking about a specific campaign or project where it doesn't necessarily matter that the group doesn't fully share our politics. There are people that we could work with. Well, the state is doing exactly the same thing. In some ways, if we take the literature on counter-resurgency seriously, we can see that the mass movement, leftist movements, abolitionist movements are competing for the support of the population in a similar way to the way that the state and the police are doing it. And so I think that forces us to consider a couple of things. One is that, you know, in any movement moment, and we can think of 2020, we can think of 1992, we might be organizing with people and we might be in the streets with people that we consider, you know, allies in that moment that the state or the police see as potential allies for them. And so I think it's worth considering, in those movement moments, is there anything we can do to prevent some of these folks from getting bought off by the state? Is there a way of inoculating a movement in those movement moments from being drawn into a state project through counterinsurgency? I'm not sure, but I think it's something that we need to consider. The second question, and it's a more uncomfortable question, is that if we're talking about the United States after the 1960s, if we're talking about Canada after the 1980s, we're talking about a context in which counterinsurgency is already operating in a really significant way. It's being put into practice constantly by the state, by the police, presumably by other state institutions. And so we're organizing a terrain that has already been shaped by counterinsurgency. And I think that what that means is, you know, there are groups that are presently allied with the state in some way that actually could have been some kind of allies in our movement. You know, it's an Is it useful to think about how there are groups presently that are siding with the state in some kind of way, presumably because they think some kind of reform is going to fix things that maybe could be brought back towards the movement? Some people that, you know, could become loyal to a mass movement, a leftist struggle, you know, a revolutionary struggle. And, you know, it's an awkward question because it's not palatable. It's not a palatable task. to take it upon yourself to go and talk to groups that are allied with the state and try to convince them to do something different. It's not fun. It's not enjoyable. But I think it's a question worth asking. And to take this very abstract question down to the ground, if you're a kind of radical organizer in 1992 in Montreal, and the police just bought off some groups that you'd been organizing with in the previous years, What do you do at that point? And I know that I would feel like I don't want to work with these people anymore because that's a massive betrayal. But I wonder whether it's possible to actually build a mass transformative movement if we don't think about how to bring some of those people back. And again, if we're talking about the present, if we're talking about a context in which counter-resurgency has been operating for decades, that could mean figuring out how to work with groups that are presently allied with the state in some kind of reformist effort. I don't know. I would love to hear what other people think about that question. So my thought is that the question is worth raising, and I don't really know what the answer is.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And I would like for you to discuss the community being used as kind of a buffer for the police in the state more broadly, if you can. And I want to quote something from you really quickly, where you write, the Warren Street gangs expanded and systematized the police repression of Black communities, which could now be described as repression of the Black gangs, rather than an simply Black people, instead of all the community policing reforms introduced in the 1980s were placed in service of the war on gangs. Before launching the war, the police met with various Black organizations they had worked with in preceding years to inform them about the war and win their support. Community police officers working in schools ostensibly introduced to build a better relationship with youth began to use their presence there to gather intelligence about youth gangs and drug dealers and to restructure their after-school programs so that anyone who broke the law or was suspended from school would be removed from the program. In 1999, when the war on gangs resulted in the killing of a Black teenager, Marcellus Francois, the police sent Black youth working for them as part of a diversity-oriented internship program to speak to the media about their positive impressions of the force. Finally, when the protest of the Francois killing was called by Black organizations, the police called their Black community partners and asked them to boycott the protest and ensure their friends from other cities did not attend. In order, some organizations followed. Policing from 1989 onward then was more punitive, but also more supportive. It was a counterinsurgency operation in and against Black communities. End quote. So if you can, just talk about this a little bit.

Ted Rutland: Yeah, so I think it's really important that in this context, so beginning in 1989, they start talking about street gangs. And the shift is even more palpable in French, which is the majority language in Montreal, where the whole history of gangs in Montreal until 1999, they'd used the French word « bond », which basically means the same as « gang ». It means roughly the same as the English word « band », if we're talking about like a band of friends. But they specifically change the term to street gang, and in French, gang de rue, in 1989, when they're beginning this war on specifically black gangs. And so the first thing is street gang is a term that was used in the United States. So this is a way for the police and the state to signal that this isn't really about us. These are foreign people coming here with their violence that, you know, a Canadian who watches the news is going to be very susceptible to seeing as a phenomenon of the inner city in the United States. So they're going to invent this new term, gang de rue, or essentially street gang. Which provides a way of talking about how these gangs are different than all these other gangs we've seen in the whole history of Montreal. This is a fundamentally new phenomenon. And so it provides a way of drawing on a long history of anti-Blackness slavery and its afterlives to construct these gangs as somehow different from the ones that had come before. And so that is very helpful for this operation. It constructs them as more violent, as irrational, using gratuitous violence instead of violence potentially in the interest of some kind of criminal objective, which would be what they would associate with the mafia or white biker gangs. But it also puts Black communities, racialized communities, working class communities in a difficult position because... Now we're talking about a war that's not against Black people, it's against Black gangs. And so if you believe that the police can be kind of reformed and only go after the violent people or the bad people, this maybe is an acceptable war to you because you imagine that we are going to have these operations against these bad people. while we also have these community policing initiatives to ensure that the police treat the so-called innocent better. So it provides people who live in these communities with a story about how this isn't going to be racist. It's not going to harm everybody. It's just going to harm these people. It provides a story for maybe liberals and progressives who don't live in those communities, who might be against the police killing of Anthony Griffin, Marcel Esponsois, etc., that the police are just going to go after the bad guys, they're going after gangs, not Black people, and we're working on this police racism. And then it puts, again, community members in a really difficult position where they either have to say, no, we don't want a violent police operation against the gangs either, but that puts you in this category, makes you kind of a target of the police. It kind of criminalizes you, even if you're not involved in anything. And what I'm basically saying, you know, is... This operation, this counterinsurgency operation, occurs at a time where an abolitionist analysis was not as well developed in North America, in Montreal, etc. And so many people have looked at the ways that people on the left, people who are against police racism and violence, ended up sort of supporting a program of police reform and community policing. based on the kind of utopian, I would say dystopian idea that the police can just target the bad guys and leave everyone else alone. And the idea that the police are the best response to the so-called bad guys. I mean, it accepts both of those premises. And I think that, you know, the left today, because of the spread of abolitionist thinking, politics, and organizing, I think we'd be better able to recognize that A, a police force that only goes after the bad guys is impossible. And B, the so-called bad guys often aren't bad at all. In this case, they're actually doing something really useful. And if they are doing harmful, violent things, the police are not the solution to that. There's a bunch of other things we could do about the harm and violence that happen in communities. That involves recognizing the people the police target as people that are part of our community and that we want to support to act differently, not people we want to abandon to the most violent arm of the state.

Josh: Yes. So you make a note of how this shift in strategy to a more permanent counseling surgeon function occurred alongside a new focus on public security across the range of public institutions, from schooling to housing, cost of power or governing through crime.

Ted Rutland: became a more central logic of government programs in the 1970s and 80s.

Josh: So it has been widely documented, the role that both traditional conservatives and liberals have played in this process, but not nearly as much focus on the function of progressives within it. So you write that the 1970s and 80s brought about the electing of several progressive mayors and city governments and urban regions and their role in maintaining counterinsurgency policing. has been underexplored. This is the case in Montreal, Canada, where counterinsurgency has become the permanent and the dominant logic of the police and a range of other public institutions. So in this article, you explore how counterinsurgency has become central to not just policing, but the city-making processes more broadly. So something you call counterinsurgency urbanism. So just talk about how this works and the role both progressives and the far right have been able to influence it.

Ted Rutland: Yeah, I think that a lot of scholarship and a lot of activists have noted the ways that people like Nixon or Reagan have brought about this shift to a more carceral, punitive state, or mayors like Rudy Giuliani in New York City. You also have people like Naomi Murakawa and Elizabeth Hinton who have seen how people like Lyndon Johnson and other liberals were central to that shift. And I think that's really helpful to note the ways that this violent form of policing and mass incarceration are brought about by both conservatives and liberals. At the city level, as you noted, there are a bunch of mayors in urban regimes, sort of urban governments, that come to power in the 70s and 80s in North America that I would characterize as progressive. So just... like a little bit to the left of liberals, like the left side of the Democratic Party, basically social Democrats. And so not the anti-capitalist left, but the social Democratic left. And in Montreal, the party that was in power, as this counterinsurgency model is being introduced in the 1980s, is a municipal political party called the Montreal Citizens Movement, which is a left of center party, certainly a progressive party, and a party that actually comes out of quite radical politics. And so a few words on that. The Montreal Citizens Movement emerges in the mid-1970s, and it comes out of radical labor unions who have an anti-capitalist analysis and ways of organizing. It comes out of neighborhood movements that are contesting urban renewal and displacement and fighting for community control of health care, of recreation, etc. It comes out of Maoist groups. It comes out of libertarian socialist groups and social democrats. And a central part of their program, beginning around 1975, is to decentralize political power to the neighborhoods and give people in neighborhoods the power to make the decisions around urban policies that affect their lives. And it's part of a broader program. They think that if you can give people in neighborhoods the power to make decisions over neighborhood issues, that's going to give people a taste for self-management and solidarity that one could eventually extend into the workplace, other aspects of the state, and basically displace the state and capital to create a sort of self-managed libertarian socialist society. So one of the things that I have to think about then is how does this vicious war on gangs emerge under the most left-wing government that Montreal has ever had and that it has ever had since? And again, there are analogs in some US cities where you have like left liberal or progressive mayors and city councils being the architects of a shift towards a more carceral, punitive urban regime. And so I can think about a couple of things here. One is, unfortunately, this party's vision of the police is just going to be this decentralized democratic police department. And so they think that you can kind of invest neighborhoods with the power to determine what the police does in their neighborhoods. And I think a lot of leftists in that context would have made the same argument. It comes out of this vision of community control, which I think is very positive in lots of ways, but they don't notice the difference between community control of education, community control of healthcare, community control of recreation, all of things that can be made more democratic, I think, and community control of the police, which just can't. They basically subscribe to the myth that the police exist to protect and serve. And the problem is just that they're protecting and serving in the interest of capital and bourgeoisie. And if we could just have protecting and serving in the interest of the working class, that that would be way better. But of course, you know, as abolitionists, no. If we want to have a more liberatory kind of world, we need something other than the police. We need... Forms of safety, of solidarity, of prevention of harm, holding people accountable, that look so different from the police that we have to abolish the police and create something else. So there's a limitation there in the way that they think of policing. So they end up having basically a vision of police reform that is identical to what the police themselves were already implementing in order to better build their legitimacy. So that's one limitation. Yeah. The second thing we can see is the ways that this same model of counterinsurgency that became essential to the police becomes embedded in a whole range of urban institutions and policies under the reign of the Montreal Citizens Movement between 1986 and 1994. And so maybe I'll mention two of these examples quickly. One is this housing policy that they put in place called PAL, P-A-L-L, where the city is going to buy up run down apartment buildings, renovate them, and then turn them over to a cooperative or to a nonprofit organization to run as social housing. And to me, this is a great program. I wish cities would do this more. Cities are able to borrow money at a cheaper rate than you or I can. And so the city could raise the capital to buy rundown housing owned by slumlords and do some renovations and turn it over to a cooperative nonprofit. But because they have this vision of the war on gangs, which overlaps with the war on drugs, what they end up doing is targeting buildings that have been identified by the police as hotbeds of crime. And so the moment that the city takes control of these apartment buildings, they evict or have arrested anyone that the police believed was engaged in any kind of criminality in the building. They renovate it. And then they put in place, you know, security cameras, an intercom system at the front door, sometimes security staff. They also arrange for when people move back into those buildings to have the police be omnipresent in the area to ensure that criminality doesn't resurface. And so what you end up with is a form of kind of progressive urbanism where you are getting better housing for working class people, but that is deeply tied with the logic of criminalization. And so you're creating better housing for maybe the neutral parts of the population, but you're also using housing as a means of affecting a war on the disloyal population, on the criminalized, anyone the police believes is engaged in crime. And then later in the early 1990s, they developed a neighborhood planning model where neighborhoods are going to develop their own urban plans, their own master plans for their neighborhoods. And what that results in, in some neighborhoods, is kind of very nice plans for better transportation, better infrastructure, parks, etc. In the neighborhoods that were targeted by the warring gangs, however... It involves efforts to create neighborhood associations who are going to work with the police to identify the crime spots in their neighborhood. And when the community organizations and the police have identified those neighborhoods, the police will come in and raid them. And then the city will come in and buy the building and renovate it into a new securitized form. So you have a form of urban planning that operates in different ways in different neighborhoods, but in neighborhoods that are criminalized. And in this case, we're talking primarily about racialized neighborhoods. You're going to have something that looks like better housing, but that is deeply integrated into a carceral logic. And I want to say that this is as good as counterinsurgency urbanism gets. At least people are getting some good housing. But when the MCM loses power in 1994, then you have more centrist parties that continue into the present. And they are going to keep the sort of repressive aspect of it without the better housing conditions thing. And so the party who is in power in Montreal right now is called Projet Montréal. They're viewed as progressive by people who I don't think really know what they're talking about, but they're really a liberal party. And their motto is securitize et verdir, securitize and green. So their model is we're going to use the police to provide security, and then we're going to provide some investments in kind of green stuff, parks, plants, bike lanes, etc., And parks and bike lanes, I think, are great. But if you don't have any component that's about working class housing, then you've got a model of gentrification and maybe something that looks a lot like eco-fascism.

Josh: Yes, absolutely. So I would love for you to discuss some of your critiques of revanches and post-revanches, schools of thought, or the punitive supportive logic of contemporary citymaking. Whereas, and I'm quoting here, in practice, cities employ techniques that range from supportive, affordable housing, to an ambivalent, allowing the third sector to set the homeless agenda, or to the punitive, or like the anti-homeless ordinances.

Ted Rutland: Yeah, so the term revanchist city or revanchist urbanism comes from the work of the late great Marxist urban geographer, Neil Smith, who did incredible work on developing a Marxist analysis of gentrification from the late 70s through the 1980s. And in the 1990s, when Rudy Giuliani takes power in New York City, he notes that Giuliani and the police department issue what they call police order number five, which is essentially the kind of broken windows policing logic. And so they're going to use the police to create so-called quality of life for city residents. But what that means is incredible crackdown on just people sleeping on benches, people jumping term styles, people doing graffiti. We're going to have stop and frisk. And so you have a model of using the police in an incredibly repressive way to kind of secure the city for capital, for tourists, for the emerging kind of financial capitalist sectors, tech, and the middle class and upper middle class people who want to move back to the city after a period when they'd often been moving to the suburbs out of white flight and out of a sort of suburbanization of the middle class and upper middle class. Anyway, and so to me, this work is essential. I couldn't think about cities without it. I find it interesting that there's been a kind of pushback to this work that's saying, you know, revengeism, it's not just revengeism. I mean, cities are doing all this repressive things, but they're also doing a bunch of helpful things. I mean, cities are... sometimes funding homeless shelters, they're sometimes supporting safe consumption sites, they're sometimes providing recreation programs for working class youth. It's not just revanchism. And so some people have coined the term post-revanchism to talk about a city that isn't only repressive and revanchist, but also has some supportive things too. And I sympathize enormously with Neil Smith's work, but I don't really find any sense in the post-revengeous thing because if we look at this from a counterinsurgency perspective, it's totally normal that a city would be doing all these repressive things and also some supportive things. You can't maintain legitimacy, I think, in a politicized society. relatively well-functioning society if the police are only doing repressive, violent things. And so to me, it's like what Neil Smith is pointing out in terms of revengeism and what the post-revengeism people are pointing out in terms of some supportive policies, that's just two elements of a counterinsurgency strategy. And maybe it might actually be helpful to look at the predecessor to Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins, who was a liberal mayor, maybe even progressive on some things, and And he, very much unlike Giuliani, is implementing broken windows policing in the subway system. He hires William Bratton as the head of policing for the subway system. So there is this beginning of this crackdown on graffiti, loitering, turnstile jumping. But he's also pushing a set of community policing reforms, including a civilian review board. So the idea that more non-police officers would be involved in evaluating cases of police racism or violence, which is a reform that a lot of people were demanding. It doesn't actually do anything in practice, but it is, you know, a community policing thing. It has the idea that it's about holding the police accountable. And it was viciously opposed by the police, quote-unquote, union in New York City, the Patrolman Benevolent Association, and Rudy Giuliani. And Giuliani kind of gets a public platform, partly in his opposition to this. But I think that we can see in David Dinkins a model of counterinsurgency policing where you have an increase in repression, violence, and harassment alongside certain kinds of community engagement, tiny reforms that seem like they might hold the police accountable, but actually don't. And a lot of that continues under Giuliani. So we focus on the new repressive things that he did. But I think policing in New York City, in LA, in Chicago, in Toronto, in Montreal, in other cities continues. is usually a mix of straight up violence, repression, harassment, and some efforts to win over elements of those targeted populations through reforms and even some actually socially beneficial programs, you know, but only for some people. Definitely.

Josh: And I want to read a pretty exhaustive section of the piece as I think it explores counterinsurgency pretty seamlessly for anyone who may not know exactly what it means. And I'm quoting here, as a significant literature has shown, counterinsurgency was originally a military doctrine or style of warfare. While scholars have traced it back centuries, it became more codified during the anti-colonial struggles in the post-World War II period. And the term itself was coined by the Kennedy administration in 1961 in contrast to conventional warfare, which occurs between two states and their militaries. Counter-insurgency applies to asymmetric warfare against irregular or guerrilla forces such as the Mau Mau or the Viet Cong. While the battle between two armed forces is important to counter-insurgency, winning the support of that population is essential to both parties in the war. As Leila Khalil puts it, and I'm quoting here, "...the civilian population is surprised to be won, whether by persuasion and robbery or the force of intimidation and terror." As I suggest, counterinsurgency relies on much more than a military or military expertise. As the 2006 U.S. Army Field Manual explains, counterinsurgency involves military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions taken by the government to defeat an insurgency. Counterinsurgency has been bound up with policing from the beginning. In military counterinsurgency abroad, the practice of policing was considered essential, winning over the civilian population over the long term. In the typical counterinsurgency clear build hold technique the military clears out insurgents small neighborhood bases are built in the occupied territory to allow perpetual policing and thus the prevention of future threats and various agencies come in to hold the territory and hold civilian support by distributing aid building roads and infrastructure etc domestically counterinsurgency doctrine became influential among U.S. police forces in the 1960s. It became a solution for police forces to the various challenges they faced and were unable to address, from new revolutionary movements like the Black Panther Party to long series of uprisings or riots in U.S. cities, which were usually sparked by an incident of racist police violence. Desistent with its military use, counter-insurgency policing in the U.S. paired ongoing state violence with an effort to win the support of the targeted population. This new goal was the task of so-called community policing, and it's focused on one, better understanding targeted cultures through sensitivity training, two, enlisting local partners or proxies, hiring more racialized cops or building partnerships with community organizations, and three, contributing to community development through cleanup campaigns, playing sports with youth, etc. The aim, however, is not and cannot be. End quote. I know this is incredibly long-winded. I just thought it was really expansive and a really seamless quote in definition of counterinsurgency. But yeah, I would just love for you to discuss the crisis Montreal found itself in in the 1970s, which produced these conditions for counterinsurgency.

Ted Rutland: Well, thanks for that quote. I mean, it's my attempt to make sense of and think through the work of many other scholars of counterinsurgency, almost all of whom have been on your show. And so it's my attempt to kind of think through these things with you and Jared and with the piece that you've had on. You're in my ears as I'm trying to think through the Montreal context and what it means. And certainly this piece in the book that I'm trying to develop would be different if it hadn't been for your podcast. I appreciate that. Well, I appreciate you. So the conditions in the 1970s, they're fairly similar in a lot of North American cities. And so we could talk about the tremendous worldwide capital accumulation crisis in 1973-ish. where you have the beginning of what economists would call stagflation, rising unemployment and rising inflation, what a more critical scholar would see as a more intensified war on the working class and organized labor in particular. So you begin to see industry, manufacturing in particular, in cities, either moving to the suburbs, or moving to countries that have lower wages in order to defeat the power of labor in that moment. So what this means for cities is you're seeing the departure of industries that provided working class jobs and that paid taxes. Either they're moving to the suburbs and paying taxes and providing jobs there, or they're moving to another country entirely. And people are also moving to the suburbs. And this began long before the 1970s. But especially after the Second World War, you have the expansion of the suburbs. And the idea is that that's where middle class people live. And so if you had the money to buy a house in the suburbs, you do so. And of course, that's not just a class phenomenon. It's also a race phenomenon. And so we see that partly in response to Black migration from the South into Northern and Western cities and white middle-class people moving out of the city when a process is called white flight. In Canada, cities look very different in the 1960s than they do in the United States, but you end up with a very similar process. So a couple of things on cities in the 1960s in Canada. They're fairly white in comparison to, say, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, New York. But there are reasons for that. So first, Canada is all unceded Indigenous territory. I'm speaking to you from Tjajage, which is Montreal in the language of Viking Igahaga, also known as Mohawk. And Canadian cities are founded not only on stolen territory and not only founded through the genocide of Indigenous people, but they're founded through the expulsion of the Indigenous people who weren't killed from cities onto non-urban reserves. And so through much of the 20th century, Indigenous people are mostly not living in cities, and they come to be imagined by settler Canadians as non-urban people. And so Sarah Hunt, Audrey Simpson, Ellen Gabriel are some of the Indigenous scholars and intellectuals who have helped to understand how this expulsion of Indigenous people from Canadian cities shapes settler colonialism and how it shapes things when Indigenous people start to move back to cities in the 70s and 80s. Canada also has a history of racial slavery. It doesn't look like the U.S. South with plantations or the Caribbean, but it does look a lot like the Northeast of the United States. And so you have people held captive, put to work through violence on farms, not plantations, but farms, and also as domestic servants and also as symbols of status. And so there is a Black population in Canada's large cities everywhere. through the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, but it's fairly small. And here, Delis Mugaba, Charmaine Nelson, Robin Maynard have written brilliantly about both slavery in cities like Montreal. and also the ways that the afterlife of slavery have shaped Canadian cities. So all of it's just to say that if cities look white in the 1960s, it's not because they always were. It's not if they become more diverse. It's not only because of immigration. But through the expulsion of Indigenous people and through an immigration policy through much of the 20th century that was known as the White Canada Policy, they're basically only accepting immigrants from Europe. cities like Montreal and Toronto are upwards of 90% white. So looking a little different than Chicago, New York, Detroit. But then in the 1960s, Canada's immigration policy changes for various reasons, and you start to have a lot more migration from the global south, from the colonized, formerly colonized, and newly neo-colonized countries. And almost all the migrants end up living in cities. And so they're moving to Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, for example, and they're living mostly in the city itself as the middle class has mostly moved to the suburbs. And so you end up with a situation that looks a lot like U.S. cities at the same time, or at least a little later, where you have a mostly white and mostly thriving suburb and a city that is disproportionately poor and much more racialized. And so this certainly creates a bunch of different crises that Montreal is facing. So in the 1970s, you have at least three crises. You have, you know, capital is struggling to resolve a crisis at a global scale, which is doing mostly by moving manufacturing somewhere else. Cities are struggling financially because the city itself has its own government and it still has to fund infrastructure for the whole city, including the central business district, all the transportation, etc. But tax revenues are depleting because industry is moving away and because people who can afford to pay more tax are mostly moving into the suburbs. And then there's a social crisis where... You know, jobs are leaving and there's not much to replace it. The new jobs that are created, kind of professional service sector jobs, are mostly not available to people who are displaced from manufacturing. They require some kind of education. And so you have a very difficult situation in the city of Montreal. And this is, you know, the kinds of conditions that Maxime's gang, Les Belangers, and other Haitian gangs emerged to try to reckon with. And the usual way that urban scholars talk about how cities respond is to talk about a shift to entrepreneurialism. And so David Harvey famously coined that term as an entrepreneurial governance. And so he's arguing, you know, great Marxist geographer, talking about how in response to these kinds of crises, the city government comes to play a larger role promoting the attraction of capital and the promotion of business. And a lot of what that involves in the early days is promoting tourism, which requires certain kinds of spaces, you know, where tourists will come, be entertained, feel comfortable. Cities are also going to try to attract middle-class and professional workers to the cities. So they're going to, you know, essentially do everything that we associate with gentrification. And so promote particular kinds of home renovation, particular kinds of neighborhood revitalization, and they're going to try to create opportunities a kind of suburban experience of space in the city. And so the whole suburban ideal is like, everything's ordered, you don't have to feel uncomfortable, there's no crime. And so if you try to create that in the city, you're going to need a lot of police. And so you definitely see that. I think what's interesting in Montreal is that when the Montreal Citizens Movement comes to power in 1986, They kind of depart a little bit from the previous entrepreneurial policy where they're actually saying that the future of our city doesn't depend on attracting middle class people and capital to the city. We actually think it's possible to create a great city for working class people. But they struggle with that in various ways. One of which, again, is that cities are deprived of tax revenues because all the taxpayers, whether it's industry or residents, are moving to the suburbs. And then also because they subscribe to a vision of the police that becomes very compatible with the gentrification that's occurring anyway. One of the kind of awful things that I found in the research is that The police in 1991 implement a zero tolerance policy, which is associated with people like Giuliani, which is the police are going to go after all drug dealers and all drug users. Incredibly vicious, repressive policy and not at all the way that we would want to deal with the harms that can occur with drug use. And this was implemented not by the police, actually. It was implemented because some of the new gentrifying residents of working class neighborhoods in the city were complaining a lot to their neighborhood city councilors and to the mayor. And the mayor ultimately told the police department, clean this up. And so unfortunately, again, the criminalization, counterinsurgency comes to mess up an otherwise kind of decent vision for a better city.

Josh: Yes, absolutely. I appreciate that expansive breakdown. And you may have touched on this a little bit, but you make note of how Canadian newfound immigration policy produced a crisis in the late 60s, wherein the majority of Miss Montreal's new residents came from the Global South, and they were met with longstanding forms of racial discrimination and unemployment in housing. The unemployment rate for racialized Montrealers was over 30% in the 1980s and over 60% for racialized youth, and very few race-less migrants settle in the suburbs. And so the situation in Montreal then was similar to industrial cities across North America. The metropolitan spaces was becoming increasingly divided between a struggling and mixed-race city and a prospering and white periphery. And so can you discuss this and maybe the emergence of the entrepreneurial governance, which played an active role in shaping the city's economic and urban development in the late 1970s?

Ted Rutland: I think in one way, this points to the real difficulty of left anti-capitalist politics at the urban scale. And so again, people like Neil Smith and David Harvey have really helped us understand how cities function as tools of capital accumulation. So we can see that in a really obvious way. If we're involved in any kind of struggle against gentrification or against, you know, the destruction of some working class housing to build condos or whatever, we can see the ways that there's real estate capital, there are property developers, there are banks behind them. And in many ways, the city facilitates their profit making through the urban terrain. So that's pretty obvious. I think Harvey and Smith also help us understand the ways that it's not just property development. It's like the whole urban development process is bound up with the need to accumulate capital. And so the cities that we live in, including the ports, the transportation system, the creation of public spaces, etc., is tied into the ways that cities need to enable capital accumulation. And in some ways, city-making helps capital to respond to crises that it faces. And so the suburbs, in some ways, were a response to the crisis of the Great Depression. So we are going to manufacturing is not going very well. We have this massive unemployment. Agriculture is not doing well, but we are going to use the state. to channel a bunch of capital into the development of the suburbs, which employs capital, creates opportunities to profit, employs people. And so, to some extent, the suburbs are a way that the city was used as a way to resolve a crisis of capital accumulation at that moment. And gentrification is another one. And so the huge crisis, global crisis of capital in the 1970s that continued into the 80s creates problems for capital. So what does capital do in this context? And part of the solution is we're going to keep building suburbs, but we're also going to invest capital in the gentrification of neighborhoods. We're going to, you know, tear down working class housing and build condos. We're going to build entertainment spaces. We're going to convert all these old warehouses and manufacturing buildings either into lofts or into workspaces for kind of tech capital. And so again, it's resolving a kind of crisis. And what Harvey argues about that, which is really difficult to accept because it's kind of depressing, is that Even if you have a progressive government or even maybe even something like an anti-capitalist government, I just don't know how exactly that would happen. But you need capital in your city that depends on it. And so even if your vision is kind of progressive, maybe even kind of anti-capitalist, you have to somehow merge that. those ideals and those projects with projects that will ensure that capital continues to be invested here because we need that for employment. We need that for tax revenues and capital can go wherever it wants. So if you have one socialist city, Harvey would say that capital is just going to leave that place and go somewhere else. I feel like that's a little bit too nihilistic. We can kind of struggle here where we are and hope that people struggle elsewhere. Maybe that can sort of change things. But when we're talking about entrepreneurialism, it's a response to the particular kinds of crises that capital was enduring, that cities were enduring in the 1970s and 80s. And so... And again, you might have liberal or progressive mayors and city councillors in the 1970s and 80s, but they're going to have to try to advance some of their better social policies alongside policies that are going to ensure that there's enough capital being invested, that people have jobs, and that the city is collecting tax revenues. And so I think that's one of the binds that any kind of left-wing urban politics faces under capitalism.

Josh: Yes, definitely. And kind of shifting gears here a little bit, can you talk a bit about the white and sometimes white ethnic nationalisms that reemerged in Canada and around the world in the 1980s? And how did liberals resuscitate doctrines of ethno-racial incompatibility espoused by white and white ethnic nationalist groups and turn them into, as you quote, political palatable promises and policies, end quote?

Ted Rutland: So this is the third thing that I want to bring into the analysis of this shift to counterinsurgency urbanism. You have the police trying to work out its own problems. You have a progressive urban government that is trying to do something kind of positive, but doesn't really have a good critique of the police. They're not abolitionists in any respect. And so they end up furthering this. But another force of change is is these new white nationalisms, ethnic nationalisms, essentially fascism, neo-fascisms. And so this is an important part of the context in most advanced capitalist countries in the 80s. In the US, you have David Duke, You have Pat Buchanan getting a lot of attention for a particular kind of white supremacist politics. In France, you have the rise of the Front National. In Britain, the National Front. And then outside political parties, you have the resurgence of different kinds of neo-fascist and Nazi groups like the White Aryan Nation, various branches of the KKK, etc., And of course, all these groups have close relationships with the police, as they always have, especially police brotherhoods, so-called police unions, have always had close ties with the far right, with fascist forces. And so we do need to think about how all of this is shaping national politics in the 1980s and early 90s, but also urban politics. What's neo about the fascism is, you know, well described by Paul Gilroy, who calls it a new racism. Ruth Wilson Gilmore also calls it a new nativism. And so it's a racism that is less premised on the idea that there are racial superiorities and inferiorities, that white people are just more logical, more advanced, less violent, more civilized, etc. It's more based on the idea that races are cultures and And that races and cultures are essentially incompatible. And so it leads to sort of obviously a white supremacist politics, white supremacist attempts to control space, a white supremacist immigration policies, like we can't allow immigration because they might be very civilized, but they don't have our culture. And so in many ways, you see the beginning of what now would be called the great replacement theory, where it's like, it's zero sum. If they, with their cultures come here, they are watering down our cultures and they will eventually become the dominant culture. They will replace us because there's no possibility. that people from all over the world might come here and we might all kind of, you know, change the way we live together in different kinds of ways, that there might be cultural hybridity, that there might be some kind of cultural evolution. So you end up with something that will be called later the Great Replacement Theory. And you also get ideas about a race war, that if we continue with this immigration policy that allows people from the Global South to come here, These cultures that cannot mix, that are fundamentally incompatible, are just going to end up at war with one another. And so this is shaping politics in general. It's shaping the politics of police brotherhoods. And it's shaping a range of policies in Montreal and Quebec. We have a very kind of specific history here of nationalisms that are kind of complicated. And so in the 1960s, you begin to see the emergence of Quebec nationalism, which is a new formulation of French Canadian nationalism. So it's saying that French Canadians, people descended from French immigrants, are a distinct society that are living in a country that is controlled largely by British-descended people. that are experiencing oppression and are experiencing a kind of disrespect for their culture. And in the 1960s, that becomes tied to a project of turning the province of Quebec, which is majority French-Canadian descended people, into an independent country. And in the 1960s and 70s, Quebec nationalism can take many, many, many different forms. There is a very conservative strain. There is sometimes a kind of fascist strain. But a lot of the left was also on board with this, including radical labor unions and revolutionary organizations who saw Quebec law people, so French-descended people, as the vast majority of the working class. and saw English-speaking people as the vast majority of the bourgeoisie, which was absolutely true. And so they developed this kind of left-wing politics that takes inspiration from the decolonizing struggles on the global south and articulates that into something that's kind of liberatory, but with the exception that this isn't the Caribbean, this isn't Africa, this isn't Southeast Asia, this is a somewhat subjugated white population trying to claim liberation on land stolen from Indigenous people who are still here and with a history of slavery and Black people who are subjugated still here and other racialized people. So it's a complicated politics in the 60s and 70s. In the 1980s, however, it becomes a lot less complicated because the left kind of disinvests from this politics and is defeated by the ascendancy of a more centrist and ultimately conservative form of Quebec nationalism. Once the left is no longer part of it, Quebecois nationalism becomes what it is today, which is almost entirely a conservative formation and a white ethno-supremacist formulation. And so lots of people in Quebec in the 1980s would have been proponents of something that we would call the Great Replacement Theory. The birth rate of white Francophone families becomes the lowest in the world in the late 1980s. There are not a lot of white babies being produced at the same time that the immigration policy is bringing people from the global South. So there's a sense that we will disappear as a nation. There's a film produced by an ostensibly liberal journalistic intellectual in 1989 called Disappearance, all about how we are going to disappear as a nation. And so you have in the 1980s, everything that goes from ostensibly liberals who are concerned about the great replacement to fascists who are seeking to use more violence to achieve a kind of similar end or to guard against a white replacement. And again, the explicitly fascist organizations in Montreal, a branch of the KKK called Longitude de 74, Aryan Nations, skinhead groups, are closely allied with the Police Brotherhood. When the Police Brotherhood kind of tries to resist The police leadership in 1987, 1988, after they fired that white police officer who killed Anthony Griffin, they're totally talking about the Great Replacement. They're talking about a race war. They're talking about the need to reassert white ethnic dominance over communities of color. Otherwise, you know, we'll be defeated. Otherwise, there'll be a race war. And then outside of the city, you have these fascist groups allying with the provincial police during the siege of Kanesatake in 1990. So there's Kanengahaga people, Mohawk people were pushed onto two reserves just outside of Montreal, Kanesatake and Kahnawake. And in 1990, famously, the people of Ganesh Itake rose up to stop an infrastructure project, a golf course project on their land, blocked a road to try to build a barricade to stop this project. The province sends in the provincial police and it ends up being a months-long sort of standoff between the gang of Gahaga and the police and then eventually the military. And the fascist groups are in the neighboring white communities. mobilizing them to use incredible racism against the Ganga Haga. They're burning effigies of Indigenous people. They are throwing rocks through the windshields of Indigenous grandmothers and children, driving through the community. And so you just have this incredible alliance of this kind of fascist Quebec nationalism and and the police, all of which becomes, you know, less extreme or is viewed as less extreme because liberal Quebec nationalists are espousing a similar perspective on the world. They just want a little bit less violence to carry it out. They're concerned with the same thing of like white disappearance, the great replacement.

Josh: Absolutely. So I really enjoyed your exploration regarding the Montreal citizens movement and their emphasis on decentralization and participation, which by the time they were elected would become watered down by 1986, right, which is when they were elected. So can you say a word about their rise and fall and their fall ending in their shifting to the political center and furthering the neoliberal turn?

Ted Rutland: Yeah, I think it's a lesson for the left in some ways. And so the Montreal Citizens Movement comes out of these radical movements in the 1960s and 70s, becomes a party of radical labor union folks, Maoists, libertarian socialists, and social democrats, and develops a program that is essentially libertarian socialist. And so there are really useful and important critiques from the left of libertarian socialism. Those are really important. But I wanted to develop a sympathetic critique of this to see, you know, what does this do and what is it unable to do? And there's some things that seem very, very useful in it. So first, they view the party as the political expression of movements within government. And so they adopt what the new left would call a dual power strategy, which is different from what Lenin meant. So they're going to, you know, contest elections, try to win power, but they're also going to be heavily devoted to strengthening movements, doing community organizing. So I think that that's a really important thing that they did. Secondly, they push for the decentralization of decision-making to communities. And in many cases, I think that this is one model for how we might think about moving beyond racial capitalism. There are many, and we should probably be pursuing many of them at the same time, but this is one. And so the limitations, like where they kind of encounter real problems that they can't Their vision of participation comes about at a time in the 1960s and 70s where people are really organized. People are part of unions, they're part of neighborhood associations, they're part of activist groups. And so there are spaces where people are coming together, figuring out what they think, developing common analyses, developing common programs. And so if people in that situation are given the power to make some decisions, some really great things can happen. What happens in the 80s is I think a lot of those leftist spaces get destroyed, get weakened. And so you get this kind of opening to public participation without ongoing organizing, popular education and struggle. And so what cities often call public consultation or public participation from the 1980s onward is not left-wing, really. It's a space where people who have the time in their lives to attend a government-organized event and express their opinion. And so it tends towards people who have some class or racial privilege. It also can be just people's complaints rather than ideas that come out of thinking together, developing an analysis. And so one thing that it's very hard for us to think about, but that we need to think about is the ways that if we believe that everyday people should be able to make the decisions that affect their lives. It's really hard to create those conditions. I think we should still be trying to do it, but it's hard. And we should reject the idea that public participation or public consultations are that. They're not that if there is an ongoing organization happening in the background so that people can figure out how to struggle together and think together. The second thing is that you have gentrification happening. And so like many cities, Montreal in the 70s and 80s was this place where the city itself was disproportionately working class and racialized. There were still a couple of very wealthy neighborhoods, of course, but like Atlanta, like Detroit, like Chicago, there's this idea that maybe we could actually do something pretty great by seizing power of the municipal government because working class people and people of color have a disproportionate power or at least disproportionate numbers in a city. And so this vision of Montreal Citizens' Movement comes out of that and is kind of a beautiful vision. And I think it made sense. But when you have gentrification in the 1980s, which is partly just happening because of the way that social life is being reorganized globally under conditions of capitalist crisis, but also partly through the policies of the Montreal Citizens Movement, You have a liquidation of that kind of working class power. And you have people who have not only have class privilege, but are moving to the city with particularly basically suburban ideas of order, safety and comfort. And it's really transformed cities where you have middle class people, upper middle class people, more white people in cities where that's a problem in itself. But it's also a problem because they're seeking to remake the city and the urban experience in the interest of an essentially suburban idea where you should never feel uncomfortable. You should never see anyone struggling on the street, anyone violating a law. And that shapes the policies of the Montreal citizens movement in the late 80s through early 90s. And it's become something that we have to grapple with in urban politics today is that the potential that existed in the 70s doesn't exist at the city level. At the very least, we need to be thinking about organizing at the metropolitan level, especially because a lot of working class and racialized people are ending up in the suburbs now. They're ending up in really rundown suburbs where the housing is bad and there's no public transportation. And so that model doesn't work. And then the third, and it's really important, is just that this movement did not have an abolitionist politics. And it was the sort of last vestige of a kind of liberal and progressive dream that you could subject the police to community control. That you could have a democratically operating police department that only arrested the bad people, didn't harm anyone else, and that arresting the bad people is the best way of providing safety. And so that obviously has to be entirely rejected. And abolition thought and practice and organizing, I think, has transformed the way that the left would think about these things. But the final thing is that counterinsurgency urbanism, which emerges in Montreal, I think emerges in a very similar way in other cities. And it is a form of policing and citymaking that incorporates aspects of fascism, as well as certain kinds of community outreach and reform that come from progressive and liberal movements. So we have a form of citymaking that that operates at least partly as a kind of fascism, but a fascism that's acceptable and even desirable to many liberals and progressives. And that is like fundamentally where abolition is really essential to the left. We cannot have a left politics that is not abolitionist because we can't have a vision of the city or of safety that is just a more palatable version of fascism. Absolutely. I totally appreciate that.

Josh: That makes a lot of sense. So Ted, thank you for coming on the show. This is great. But before I let you go out, I'd like to give you the opportunity to tell folks where they can find you online and maybe keep up with your work and maybe say a bit about any projects that you're currently working on.

Ted Rutland: Thank you very much for having me on the show. It's a real honor. And like I said, your work, Jared's work, and everyone you've had on the show has been really central to my thinking process. And this would be a different project if it weren't for your podcast. So this piece we're talking about today is the core chapter of a book that I'm trying to write that will ideally come out next year, ideally with a title, Counterinsurgency Urbanism, and I'll post this paper to my website so people, if they're interested, can read it. That's just Ted Rutland. And I tweet at Ted Rutland on Twitter. It's a feed of mostly hating on the Montreal police, but also trying to express solidarity with movements against the police, against settler colonialism and imperialism around the world. So you can find me there. Awesome.

Josh: Okay. This is great. Thank you so much again for coming on. It is an honor, honestly, to be in conversation with you and also to have helped, you know what I'm saying, spearhead this kind of thought process that you're working with, with regard to counter-surgency and city planning in particular. So thank you. This was awesome. Thank you so much.

Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you Bye. Bye.