“You can always find a millionaire to shovel all the coal,” Clap Hands by Tom Waits
“It’s not a picnic being the pretty girl,” Anonymous
British Columbia faces four interlocking crises: climate change, dispossession, affordability and corruption. Central to these crises unfolding is BC’s position at the junction of the Chinese and US imperial spheres. Late capitalism and the intensified imperial competition that accompanies it are changing the shape of BC’s already distorted economy and society. Fracking, macro-hydro, pipeline construction and the LNG industry are consuming rural jobs, communities and even the land itself as they annihilate traditional forms of employment and accelerate the forces of climate change that are already decimating the forestry and fishing industries. Experiences previously reserved for indigenous people are now being felt by a majority of settlers on BC’s land. Rural communities are shrinking and dying while becoming even less affordable places to live. Urban communities are being broken up with demovictions, renovictions and crippling rent increases.
Rural British Columbians, faced with befouled water, vanished forests and constant reductions in access to transportation and basic amenities are joining already-desperate residents of Greater Vancouver, whose affordable housing is being converted into investment properties for the super-rich, even as the population who cannot afford homes grows ever more quickly. This industry, far from being publicly managed, is a free market free-for-all, run as a casino, by gangsters, in cooperation with gangster-run casinos that are used to launder the money fueling the industry.
Metro Vancouver’s development industry has become the logical conclusion of the BC economy: it was once that BC sold unprocessed timber to the US and East Asia for little local profit; we started doing the same with coal in the 1970s and the added petroleum to the mix in the 1990s. Now, we are selling British Columbia, itself, house-by-house, condo-by-condo to the highest bidder even as nine thousand people sleep on the streets and thousands more couch-surf or trade sex for shelter.
Following last year’s successful summer intensive on dependency theory, showing how a socialist economic analysis can clarify and expose BC’s place in the world economy, LAI is back with an even more ambitious summer institute, one that will examine the ways that dependency, rentierism and empire have shaped and are reshaping our province. We will be reading work on empire, rentierism and the Chinese diaspora in the context of a resurgent empire.
Joining Stuart Parker, who chairs the Institute and teaches History and International Studies at SFU, as co-instructor is SFU’s Gary Liu, a lecturer in accounting, an expert in modern Chinese history and political thought and a co-founder of HALT, a bilingual Vancouver-based housing affordability group focused on money laundering, birth tourism and speculation. Professional chef Dan Jenneson will rejoin us with another topic-appropriate set of dinners.
We will be holding our intensive at Linnea Farm on Cortes Island, an educational institute that practices and teaches permaculture. They are kindly sharing their educational facilities, local produce and catering services and providing a tour of their location.
Registration includes:
- three daily meals, the evening and mid-day meals prepared by our chef, Dan and the morning meal catered by Linnea Farm
- pre-circulated printed reading materials and books (Millionaire Migrant and American Theocracy), arriving by mail or courier three weeks prior to the intensive
- morning seminars in Linnea Farm classrooms conducted by Gary and Stuart
- four nights of evening discussions of the day’s events over dinner with wine and/or cocktails
- a selection of optional programmed afternoon activities including sightseeing, hiking, hanging out with animals and workshops in landscape phenomenology and local Anglo-Creole literature
- four nights of private or shared accommodation at Linnea Farm
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The event runs from 3:30pm on August 28th to 1:30pm on Monday, September 1st, comprising four full days of programming, taking place on five consecutive days.
Registration closes on August 1st, 2019. Registration for the full event is at three rates:
- For students and the un-/under-employed, $425 for the five days. This includes classes, meals, afternoon programming, drinks and shared accommodation. Those paying this rate may also apply for a travel grant to assist in covering transportation costs. The availability of these spaces is contingent upon full-freight registrants; the maximum available is six.
- For employed academics, activists and interested people, $1050 for the five days. This includes classes, meals, afternoon programming, drinks and shared accommodation.
- For employed academics, activists and interested people, $1425 for the five days. This includes classes, meals, afternoon programming, drinks and private accommodation.
If you are interested in attending, please let us know as soon as you can to assist us in setting rates and making other arrangements by e-mail the program here.
Below are photos of how it all went.
