Chapter2 Direct Action as Political Activist Ethnography Activist Research in the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty

Introduction to the Research Problematic

In this chapter, I explore direct action as an important form of activist research and how direct action as research enriches political activist ethnography (PAE).1 I do this by reflecting on my organizing with the Sudbury Coalition Against Poverty (S-CAP) from 2001 to early 2014. S-CAP was a direct action–based anti-poverty activist organization located in the Canadian province of Ontario.2 Direct action moves beyond state-sanctioned forms of protest, such as writing letters and lobbying, to take up ways of organizing that break with the rules those with social power have set up to contain us. Instead, direct action activists refuse to recognize the legitimacy of unjust laws. They use their bodies to disrupt ruling relations to get results for oppressed people—in this case, for people living in poverty. Exploring how direct action is activist research, I draw on my own memory work; discussions and a workshop with S-CAP activists in May 2014; publications, websites, and texts produced by S-CAP and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP); and critical textual analysis of state regulations.3

I begin by reviewing the theoretical and methodological contributions for investigating direct action as activist research, identifying areas in need of further development. This includes how direct action in confronting ruling regimes interrogates institutional relations, how this activism and research are reflexively related, and how this approach makes visible class relations. Second, I provide an overview of the historical context in which Ontario anti-poverty organizing has taken place, outlining the contexts in which struggles played out through S-CAP organizing. Third, I illustrate what S-CAP activists learned from engaging in direct action support work for people living in poverty generally and those enrolled in the Special Diet Campaign, the Community Start Up struggle, and the struggle over the Community Homelessness Prevention Initiative (CHPI) that replaced the Community Start Up. Each of these involved a major struggle over the amount of funding people on social assistance received. I conclude by reflecting on the learning process involved in doing direct action as activist research, pointing to areas for further investigation.

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March 22, 2006. Sudbury. It was one day before the provincial budget was to be presented and over a decade since the Mike Harris Conservative government began coordinated attacks against people in poverty. I was among sixty rowdy people chanting “Stop the War on the Poor” as we marched through the 7^thfloor office of Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament and Minister of Northern Development, Rick Bartolucci, to demand an immediate 40% increase in social assistance rates to raise them back to the level they were at over a decade earlier.

Given that we had publicly announced our visit to Rick Bartolucci’s office, how did we manage to get in? During our last visit to his constituency office, a wall of police met us. This time we discovered that Bartolucci also had a Ministry office, and we went there instead. With the help of another Ontario anti-poverty group, we poured into the building and secured the elevators to send people to the 7^thfloor. They did not expect us. On the way out, we held a noisy rally in the building lobby vowing we would be back if there was no major increase in social assistance rates. (Activist Reflections, Gary Kinsman)

In my life as an activist, the most inspiring activism has been direct actions such as those described above. Direct action has engaged my imagination and body far more than other forms of activism. Direct action is not only a form of activism; it is a form of research, a point echoed by Chris Bowes (2003) and Andrew K. Thompson (2006). Direct action as research makes an important contribution to political activist ethnographic knowledge production. In disrupting ruling relations, a great deal can be learned about how institutional relations are socially organized. For example, the planning of the occupation of a government office involves research activities such as doing reconnaissance to establish where the entrances and exits are located and how the office is organized, finding out what possible legal charges could be laid if the police are alerted, holding discussions about what demands to prioritize and what tactics can be deployed if people are arrested, and notifying mass media without inadvertently informing the office or police.

Another important form of activist research in S-CAP was direct action support work. Activist support work is the practice of taking on board the grievances of individuals living in poverty as group grievances (Corbeil and House 2016; Withers 2021). Doing this involves research and knowledge production through the following: active listening to and understanding the layered accounts of people’s experiences with bureaucratic relations, accompanying people to appointments with social assistance workers to put on pressure, mapping out how social assistance agencies are organized, and actively supporting people by writing letters, setting deadlines, and applying pressure through mobilizing people to go to offices to disrupt their everyday operations to get a response.

Theoretical and Methodological Issues

Activists in social movements are constantly producing knowledge and doing research, even when not named as such, in their confrontations with ruling regimes. Making this knowledge visible and critical is an important task in building movement-based research and theorizing capacities (Dixon 2014). Direct action can be seen in a sociological context as an activist extension of an ethnomethodological breaching experiment (Garfinkel 1967) where “social order” is intentionally disrupted to reveal what can be learned about its social organization.4 Direct action as research resonates with Dorothy Smith’s (2005) work on institutional ethnography, which turns the powers of ethnography against ruling institutions to produce knowledge for those oppressed within these relations. George Smith’s (2006) work on PAE pushes institutional ethnographic inquiry further by taking up the social standpoints of activists to produce knowledge that is useful for activists in movements. My contribution to PAE has been to stress the importance of mapping social relations of struggle so that activists can locate themselves within the web of relations they are engaged in and strategize how best to move forward in meeting people’s needs (Kinsman 2006).

Mapping relations of struggle involves not only investigating the ruling relations movements are organizing against, including how these relations can contain activists’ resistance, but also inquiring into the composition or power of struggle (Kinsman 2005; Thorburn and Kinsman 2020) that movements can mobilize in transforming these relations.5 Mapping relations of struggle is not neutral but rather a politically engaged process of capturing the relational contestations and connections between ruling relations and social movement struggles. Mapping relations of struggle also involves explicating movement capacities, including possible allies and strategies and tactics, and identifying weak points where activists can best disrupt ruling relations. In this chapter, I show how mapping social relations of struggle clarified and recorded the knowledge produced through S-CAP activism and how this method assisted in orienting people’s organizing.

I also address an underdeveloped aspect of PAE. George Smith largely writes about doing PAE as an individual activist/scholar. But he also writes, “Research studies of this sort are designed to be written up, published and made available to members in grassroots organizations for their political consideration. They are not in some sense special or unique. Rather, they are intended to provide, on a day-to-day basis, the scientific ground for political action” (2006, 68). How this is to be done, however, is not clarified, and neither is how this can become collective activist knowledge production. I suggest that one way this weakness in PAE can be addressed is through direct action as activist research, which opens possibilities for collectivizing/democratizing research and theorizing.

Direct action research is a unique form of investigation because it both illustrates and demonstrates how consciousness has an active relation to the social world. The practice of investigation is inseparable from that of activist intervention, and the researcher/activist is always in (and of) the world they investigate. As George Smith, my political activist ethnographer mentor, expresses, “My research was given direction by the on-going confrontation with the authorities. It was this that determined what piece of the puzzle I should study next” (2006, 57). Because research is driven by the needs of the struggle, direct action is a form of research that can exceed constraints placed upon more traditional forms of research. The defining criterion for successful activist research is whether it allows for organizing based on an analysis of how ruling relations are organized so that they can be transformed. This is a much higher test than in regular academic research, since the direction of people’s struggles depends on it.

A Brief Sketch of Direct Action Anti-poverty Organizing in Ontario and in Sudbury

In the mid-1990s, the Ontario provincial government led by Conservative Premier Mike Harris launched a major neoliberal war on the poor in general and women living in poverty in particular (Little 2003; Vaillancourt 2011) by reducing basic social assistance funding by more than 21 percent.6 Social assistance was also redesigned and divided between Ontario Works (OW), which provides basic levels of social assistance and on which “workfare” was imposed (Vaillancourt 2011), and the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP), which provides a higher level of support but is far more difficult to access due to required medical documentation and the long waiting period for approval.

This attack provoked important resistance from anti-poverty organizers, especially OCAP (Clarke 2006; Withers 2020, 2021). OCAP and other allied groups developed connections with several unions, most notably the Ontario section of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, to form the Raise the Rates campaign. Along with calling for major increases in social assistance rates and in the minimum wage for low-income workers, the Raise the Rates campaign worked to expand the use of existing programs—such as the Special Diet Supplement (which provides funding for a more nutritious diet if a medical professional approves this) and the Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit (referred to in this chapter as the Community Start Up, which provided funding for people on social assistance for moving and to establish a home for themselves)—to increase the amount of support that people on social assistance receive.

Sudbury is a city of 170,000 people in northeastern Ontario on the territories of the Atikameksheng Anishnawbek Nation and other Anishnawbek people. Historically, it was first a rail centre and then a mining town where major union struggles were waged. Now it is an important regional centre (Leadbeater 2008; Beck et al. 2005) that is Anglophone dominated, with a large Francophone minority and a sizeable Indigenous population facing racism, social exclusion, and poverty. It was in Sudbury that Kimberly Rogers was accused of “welfare fraud” for receiving both social assistance and student assistance at the same time, which the Conservative provincial government had outlawed. Rogers was placed under house arrest and died during a heat wave in August 2001, which led to the formation of the important Justice with Dignity campaign for social assistance reform.7 S-CAP first came together in 2001 and was composed of activists who were inspired by OCAP and the global justice movement and who wanted to organize locally along activist lines. First, “we” campaigned for raising social assistance rates and against homelessness and, in 2002, added direct action support work to our organizing (Bowes 2003).8

Ideology Critique and What S-CAP Learned from Direct Action Support Work

Creating a basis for more effective organizing requires a critique of ideological accounts that exist within both traditional forms of research and movement organizing (G. Smith 2006; Hussey 2012). Concepts and abstract ideas mobilized as “explanations” in social movements can misinform activism because they fall short of uncovering the social organization of oppression and power. Examples George Smith (2006) identifies are how concepts of “homophobia” or “AIDSphobia” failed to produce useful analysis about the social organization of police repression or the denial of access to AIDS treatments and therefore misdirected social struggles.

In anti-poverty organizing, ideological approaches include the views that people living in poverty are separate from the broader working class (Cruikshank 1994) and are “apathetic” and require “help.” The Raise the Rates campaign cut across attempts to pose the needs of waged and unwaged people living in poverty against each other. By viewing the problem not as that of the individual living in poverty but because of the social relations of capitalism that continually produce poverty in people’s lives, anti-poverty activist approaches reject the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor, along with divisions between people in poverty who receive wages and those who do not. Instead, all people living in poverty are viewed as part of the working class whether they are waged, engage in unpaid domestic and reproductive labour, or engage in the everyday unpaid “hooking up” work imposed on people on social assistance to qualify for and to maintain this assistance (Mykhalovskiy and G. Smith 1994).9

Through doing direct action support work in Sudbury, we discovered that people in state and social agencies, and even people living in poverty, would often make sense of the world through an ideological lens. We noticed, for example, that some people on social assistance described their struggles as resulting from having a “bad worker” who offered little information, provided minimal support, and often obstructed their claims. While this analysis has important insights, it can also produce an individualizing, ideological account of the social and institutional organization of social assistance by locating the problem within a specific individual worker rather than the organizational constraints that pressure workers to carry out institutional rules discouraging applications for benefits and excluding people from receiving social assistance entirely.

Broader ethnographic perspectives open possibilities not only for struggles with social assistance workers who enforce regulations that hurt people but also for building alliances with unions and workers and for tensions to be exacerbated between workers and the management of OW and of ODSP. One illustration of this potential is how, in opposing the possible merger of ODSP and OW, which would significantly hurt people living with disabilities, the opposition of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union provided one of the reasons behind the Liberal provincial government’s decision to officially abandon this merger proposal in 2014 while continuing to restructure the program against people on ODSP.

The creation of spaces where critical discussion, mapping, and decision-making skills could be developed was crucial in moving the struggle forward both within S-CAP and with our allies. Direct action support work was organized as a central aspect of the daily work of S-CAP. It was discussed at every meeting, and sometimes, there were meetings of those most directly involved in this work. In these discussions, there was a collective pooling of ideas and suggestions of what to do as well as reflections on what we learned from doing this work. These discussions made the mapping of social relations of struggle possible in learning from each other’s experiences—both those doing activist support work and the people we were working with and for. This led to more generalized analysis and remembering within the group of how to do this work most effectively. There were also direct action support work training workshops to get more people prepared for doing this activity.

What did S-CAP learn from doing direct action support work? I provide some suggestions here on how to read the following mappings of the social relations of struggle in which S-CAP was involved (figures 2.1–2.4). At the top of the diagrams are the forces we were up against, and below are the forces that could be mobilized for the struggle. In mapping out the social relations of struggle engaged within doing activist support work, we recognized that we were confronting transnational capitalism, state relations, neoliberalism, austerity, and the war on the poor and that these broader dynamics had to contextualize our organizing (see figure 2.1). We also learned how seemingly distant forces in the Ontario provincial government’s cabinet and the Ministry of Community and Social Services directly affected people’s lives through the textually mediated (D. Smith and Turner 2014) regulations and policies of ODSP and of OW. In coming to terms with the textually mediated character of social relations, we developed critical reading skills that enabled us to read state regulations for their social organization rather than as instructions people are required to follow. At the same time, in S-CAP, it was important not to get too caught up in the technical “state-speak” in these texts in doing support work because that could separate us from people living in poverty. We should never fetishize these documents and give power to the texts themselves, since all these texts are written by, mobilized by, and struggled over by people. We have no need to be “experts” on these documents, but instead, we need to use our skills and expertise in reading, using, and resisting these texts for the struggle.

We mapped out the institutional relations of OW and of ODSP as crucial knowledge for doing effective support work. There is an institutional division of labour in the administration of social assistance. ODSP, as previously mentioned, is still under direct provincial jurisdiction, while municipalities more directly administer OW. This means that the course of action is different in supporting a person on OW than a person on ODSP. In approaching OW support work, we learned to contact the person’s worker, the worker’s supervisor, the director of Social Services, and the general manager of Community Development for the city simultaneously. We would hand deliver letters and send emails, and if we did not receive a favourable response by the set deadline, we would send a delegation to the office of the general manager of Community Development and demand action. Oftentimes, they would respond before our deadline, which demonstrated that applying pressure to those higher up in the bureaucratic hierarchy brought results.

Below provincial state relations is Sudbury municipal state organization, including the city council, the mayor, and the Community Services Committee that oversees social assistance and that S-CAP sometimes took matters to through supportive city councillors. The head staff member under this committee is the general manager of Community Development. Below her is the director of Social Services, whose office is now located behind the OW “fortress” in the provincial building. We found the general manager of Community Development to be most vulnerable to direct action delegations given the publicly accessible character of her office in Sudbury city hall.

The line of fault is between ruling relations and the resistance to this. The mass media and social agencies often lie, to some extent, astride this line of fault and can become contested terrains between ruling relations and activist anti-poverty organizing.

On the other side of the line of fault, the relations of struggle S-CAP was able to mobilize included the people doing support work, the broader membership of S-CAP and our supporters, broader community networks of people living in poverty, and at times OCAP and other activist anti-poverty groups and the union movement. Occasionally, we also made it a public issue, especially if the person we were working with was willing to talk to the media about their grievance. This mapping of the relations of struggle we were involved in allowed us to identify weak links and ways to advance in specific support work situations. I now examine what we learned from three of the main direct action campaigns we engaged in.

The Special Diet Struggle: “We Won’t Be Quiet Until We Get Our Special Diet”

In 2005, S-CAP reconstituted itself with a focus on creating more access for people to the Special Diet Supplement and defending this benefit from attack (see figure 2.2). Although people on OW and on ODSP were rarely informed of this benefit, they could receive up to $250 extra per month if a medical professional decided they needed more nutritious or special foods for health reasons. Health Providers Against Poverty and activists in OCAP discovered through research that this provision could be used to get people badly needed funding and began to publicize the existence of these funds. Hunger clinics were organized where medical professionals interviewed and approved people for access to the Special Diet, and provincial alliances were built with progressive medical professionals and with health workers in the Canadian Union of Public Employees.

In 2005, after more people started to access the Special Diet and more funds had to be allocated to it, the Liberal provincial government excluded several health conditions from the list of coverage, making it very difficult to access the full $250 monthly supplement.10 In 2009, the Liberal provincial government announced they were abolishing the Special Diet entirely, but following a storm of protests, it was continued in a restricted form with benefits for fewer conditions and higher demands for confidential medical information, including from people with AIDS and HIV infection, among other intrusive measures designed to prevent access to the benefit.11 The provincial government was able to restrict access to this supplement by altering the textually mediated regulations through which it was organized. The Special Diet is now so restricted it is not always a very useful way to access more funding for people on social assistance.

The struggle we were able to mobilize in Sudbury for the Special Diet was limited by the lack of support we received from the local medical profession. While there were some medical professionals who would fill out the form for their patients, few would take referrals from us, and none were willing to participate in a Special Diet clinic. This posed a problem for people in Sudbury because large numbers of people in poverty do not have primary care physicians. Many previously supportive medical professionals were also scared away by measures taken against doctors who regularly supported people’s requests for the Special Diet. One of these doctors, Dr. Roland Wong in Toronto, was taken to the College of Physicians and Surgeons following a complaint by then city councillor Rob Ford (who later became Toronto’s mayor). Wong had his medical license suspended for six months in 2014.12

At the same time, S-CAP made many more people in Sudbury aware of the Special Diet when we held a media conference with people speaking out about the need for the Special Diet inside the constituency office of our local Liberal Member of Provincial Parliament Rick Bartolucci in 2005. We also brought several people to the mass hunger clinic in the fall of 2005 organized on the lawn at Queen’s Park in Toronto, which is the seat of government in Ontario. All the people from Sudbury who participated were signed up for a $250 supplement, which made a real difference in their lives.

The Community Start Up Struggle

As part of a broader neoliberal downloading of social assistance provision responsibilities to municipalities, the Liberal provincial government in 2012 announced its plan to abolish the vital Community Start Up and place only 50 percent of its funding into a new program called the Community Homelessness Prevention Initiative (CHPI; Wellesley Institute 2012). Originally, the Community Start Up was a vital benefit that people on social assistance relied on to move, prevent themselves from becoming homeless, acquire furniture and appliances, set up a home, flee violence and abuse, and/or set themselves up after leaving an institution. The new CHPI program would focus more directly on rent and prevention of homelessness and much less on community start-up and maintenance needs. This smaller amount of funding was to be spread across a broader group of people, including low-income people not on social assistance (see figure 2.3).

S-CAP, OCAP, and the Raise the Rates campaign recognized that this was a major attack on people on social assistance that followed the earlier cuts to the Special Diet. We organized a campaign and backed it up with popular education, support work, and organized clinics to sign people up for the Community Start Up. Building on what we learned from the Special Diet struggle, S-CAP’s first action was to target the government cabinet minister in our city. On April 19, 2012, we held a speak-out and media event in the waiting area of Bartolucci’s constituency office that brought together more than thirty people and received major local media coverage. After about an hour, we left, but only after the staff had faxed our package of information to Bartolucci with a request for him to get back to us on this as soon as possible. He never did.

The composition of struggle we mobilized in Sudbury was strengthened by the alliance we built with the North Shore Tribal Council, Mamaweswen (https://mamaweswen.com), which represents First Nation reserves from Sudbury to Sault Ste. Marie, who were also organizing against cuts in the budget that affected their communities, including the cut to the Community Start Up. S-CAP supported their march in Sudbury in June 2012 and a jointly organized march in November, both of which brought hundreds of people into the streets. A month later, during the province-wide week of action, S-CAP and the Tribal Council co-organized an action in Sault Ste. Marie that involved closing the Trans-Canada Highway for close to thirty minutes. This alliance enabled S-CAP to deepen its support for Indigenous struggles and allowed many of us to develop a deeper anti-racist and anti-colonial analysis that also led to our support for Idle No More, an Indigenous activist movement, when it emerged.

In the summer of 2012, we engaged in mass leafleting about the proposed cut to the Community Start Up, and in the fall, we organized a large Raise the Rates town hall meeting. We also held a clinic to sign people up for the Community Start Up and organized a specific direct action to focus pressure on this issue. We held planning meetings, did the necessary research, and returned to Bartolucci’s office to turn his waiting room into an emergency homeless shelter to dramatize the effects of this cut. On November 9, 2012, more than twenty people moved into Bartolucci’s office shortly before 2 p.m. with the intention of staying there until the office closed at 4 p.m. After about ten or fifteen minutes, we heard reports from people outside that up to five police cruisers had pulled up outside and then later police arrest vehicles. We were there for about one hour and fifteen minutes before those of us who stayed were arrested.

When the police said we would be arrested if we stayed, support people left, and the remaining eleven of us were arrested by the police, handcuffed, taken downstairs, placed in the arrest vehicles, and taken to police headquarters for processing, where we were charged with trespassing and released. These major police operations created quite a spectacle in downtown Sudbury, with many people gathering to watch, and it became a major media story.13For those of us arrested, it was an important learning experience about the social relations of arrest.14 In very concrete ways, we learned how the police are used to stifle political dissent and about the operations of the legal system.

This action in Bartolucci’s office turned out to be tactically brilliant, although when we planned it, we had no idea that he would be there and no way of anticipating the scale of the police response. After the arrests and the media coverage, far more people knew about the Community Start Up, and the action we held later that November with the North Shore Tribal Council had far more people from Sudbury at it than any other action we organized in defence of this benefit.

Direct action led to more people participating in street marches. During the province-wide week of action, we were also able to secure the city’s official support in calling for the maintenance of the Community Start Up. It was only at the end of December—when the provincial government announced that it was going to put an extra $42 million into the CHPI funding for a year to address Community Start Up and homelessness prevention needs—that we realized the full impact of all the province-wide protests, including those we organized. While we were ultimately unsuccessful in preventing the abolition of the Community Start Up, we learned that direct action and mobilization win gains.

The CHPI Struggle: Community Start Up Rates and Policies for CHPI

In mapping out what the new set of relations surrounding CHPI looked like (see figure 2.4), we demanded clarification from the general manager of Community Development and the director of Social Services, who, in January 2013, assured us that the new municipal “application process [was] the same and the amounts [were] consistent” with the previous Community Start Up rates and policies. We soon found out that this was not the case and that funding for furniture and appliances was no longer mandatory due to the administrative funding split between CHPI funding proper (directly related to housing and rent) and the City Discretionary Benefits funding for beds, furniture, and appliances. This marked a shift in the terrain of struggle whereby responsibilities for Community Start Up funding were downloaded onto municipalities, which dispersed struggles that were once unified with the province-wide program (Withers 2020, 2021). Struggles would now have to be waged each year regarding city budgets.

We soon discovered that people on ODSP were having major difficulties with their start-up needs being met because their requests were now sent to the OW office, where decision-makers had no real understanding of the needs of people with disabilities. We knew there were important tensions between the administration of ODSP and that of OW in Sudbury, and we wrote a letter to OW and the city demanding the situation be rectified. Our position was that the previous provincial Community Start Up rates and policies had to be matched by municipal CHPI and associated funding, since this provided more access and funding for people on social assistance. While doing support work to ensure that people on ODSP could get as much as possible to meet their needs, we also discovered problems with exceptional circumstances funding. Under the Community Start Up, people who had already received this funding in the last two years were eligible for up to the full amount again ($799 for individuals and $1,500 for families with children) if they encountered exceptional circumstances rendering them homeless, had bedbug infestations, or had to flee a violent relationship.

This provision did not exist under CHPI, and at first, it was not clear whether OW and the city were going to provide this funding. In response to support work involving a delegation going to the office of the general manager of Community Development, we got a meeting with city staff who clarified that only $200 for an individual and $300 for families with children in exceptional circumstances would be provided. We responded by organizing protests that included speak-outs in the OW office, and we worked with two supportive city councillors to raise the rates to Community Start Up levels at the Community Services Committee and at city council. Just before this motion went to city council, the exceptional circumstances amounts were raised back to the Community Start Up rates pending a “consultation” with social agencies. This was an important victory based on our support work and our organizing outside of but also to some extent within municipal bureaucratic relations.

The strategy city managers adopted in response to our struggle was that of “consultation” with social agencies (Kinsman 1997). These agencies are themselves heavily dependent on municipal and other forms of state funding, and they were “consulted” to develop guidelines for cutting back CHPI funding when the extra $42 million in funding would run out. S-CAP pointed out in our counter-report to that of city staff that this was a “sham ‘consultation’ process since people living in poverty were not involved or consulted. The only people ‘consulted’ were some of the people in social agencies, who were then asked to rank their priorities in a follow-up survey which was to be used to establish priorities for both funding and cutting back on funding” (S-CAP 2013).

The weakest link in their strategy was that people in poverty were never consulted. We were able to use this to undermine the legitimacy of this “consultation.” As part of the research for our counter-report, we organized a “focus group” in the fall of 2013 with people on OW and on ODSP to discuss their needs. At this group, people spoke of a broad range of issues, including the need for Community Start Up rates and policies for CHPI funding (S-CAP 2013). This was the only consultation with people living in poverty that took place during this period.

We adopted a strategy of “documents and demonstrations” outlined by George Smith in the Right to Privacy Committee (which organized against the police repression of gay men) and AIDS ACTION NOW! (organizing for pharmaceutical treatment access). By this, Smith means not only that we need to have comprehensive research and analysis but also that people in positions of power will never consider our proposals without the power of demonstrations threatening to destabilize ruling relations. There was also a relation between what we learned from demonstrations and the analysis developed in our documents.15 When the “consultation” was held on June 17, 2013, we held a protest outside and gave a presentation inside demanding Community Start Up rates and policies for CHPI funding. Most S-CAP members present then walked out, since we did not want to take responsibility for any decisions that would hurt people living in poverty. Later, we learned from one of our observers who remained at the “consultation” that city staff tried to construct a “consensus” by making the opposition raised during the meeting disappear from their reports. We critically analyzed the survey questions that were sent to the agency representatives following the “consultation” meeting and found that the questions directed replies toward de-prioritizing important areas of funding.

Under neoliberalism and austerity, it becomes more difficult for social agencies to support direct action activism because they are tied more directly to state funding and professional relations. What can be referred to in a broad sense as the “anti-poverty industry” includes a range of social agencies, non-governmental organizations, social planning councils, and state-funded homelessness networks. The process of state funding and regulation has transformed community groups into professionalized groups that have become staff- and management-driven and that have corporate forms of organization with executive directors and boards of directors (Ng 1996; Walker 1990). While these groups are often now obstacles to direct action anti-poverty organizing, winning their support, when possible, adds to the composition of struggle we can mobilize.

Some people in and around S-CAP were confused by the stance of people in the social agencies, since they were supposed to “help” people in poverty. What we needed was not a moral critique of them for “betraying us” but instead to understand how their collaboration with and within ruling relations was socially organized. Simultaneously, in our activist support work, we found that we got into some “turf wars” with some of the social agencies in the city on housing issues. Even though our support work resulted in people getting what they needed, managers and staff at some social agencies saw us as disrupting their professional agency/client relations. As a result, these somewhat supportive agencies became more hostile. We were accused of not having any “professional” credentials for doing this work and of believing what people living in poverty told us. On the surface, this was quite disorienting for people doing support work until we examined how this was socially organized both through “professional” relations and through city and other state funding for these agencies. In Sudbury, most of these agencies now stand in an administrative relation to their “clients.” This investigation makes visible a broader class analysis. Staff at the agencies separate people living in poverty from the broader working class they are part of and construct the poor as “victims” requiring “help” from middle-class-oriented agencies. This is an active part of the work of constructing class relations. Political activist ethnographic work makes visible class relations and struggles.

Through this period, we developed good working relations with two members of the Community Services Committee and city council. As “city insiders,” they were often helpful in enabling us to understand some of the workings of the committee and of council, including the need to have CHPI funding put on the agenda of the city budget process through the Finance and Administration Committee. We anticipated that there would be major cuts in CHPI funding after March 2014 because the extra $42 million in provincial funding had not been renewed for the 2014 fiscal year. In response, we mobilized throughout the fall of 2013 for Community Start Up rates and policies for CHPI. During the provincial week of anti-poverty action in October 2013, more than fifty people chanting “What do we want? Community Start Up rates for CHPI funding!” broke into the lobby of city hall. We also continued our support work, often finding that people were not getting what they were eligible for even under the existing city policies.

In addition, the S-CAP 11 trial that took place that fall proved very useful in re-raising the issues around the cut to the Community Start Up and the effects it had. We were able to exert some control over the contextualization of the legal case by doing extensive activist media work. Although we had a very good pro bono lawyer, our control over the struggle tended to be lost once it entered the legal realm. We learned that the legal terrain is not our terrain even though we need to fight on it.16

Within the context of our campaign for Community Start Up rates and policies for CHPI funding, the supportive city councillors contacted city financial personnel to try to locate funding to sustain the same level of CHPI funding beyond March 2014. Meanwhile, city staff consistently attempted to shift attention away from our demands over Community Start Up rates and policies for CHPI funding toward the total amount of funds that could be allocated. While the support of these two councillors was crucial, at this point, S-CAP lost any real input into the process as negotiations took place between city staff and financial personnel and a few city councillors within city bureaucratic relations. The more this was taken up within city-state formation, the less control we had and the more disempowered we felt. When we arrived at the Finance and Administration Committee meeting on December 3, 2013, one of the supportive councillors informed us that the funding had been found and everything was resolved. We responded that while that was excellent, we also needed Community Start Up rates and policies for the CHPI funding. Securing this funding was an important victory, but it was a limited victory because the new arrangement did not establish that Community Start Up policies and rates were to be followed for CHPI.

Continuing support work in December made it clear that the City Discretionary Benefits policy provided far lower amounts of funding than was offered under the Community Start Up. In response, we sent a deputation to the Community Services Committee on January 20, 2014, to demand that Community Start Up policies and rates be followed and that, at the very least, the discretionary amounts must be raised. To strengthen our argument, we rewrote the city CHPI policy so that it conformed as much as possible to Community Start Up rates and policies. We were able to get the discretionary funding policy reviewed, which led to the raising of the amounts for furniture and appliances as well as the addition of dryers to the coverage. This story and struggle continued, but this narrative concludes at this point.

Drawing Some Conclusions: Direct Action as Political Activist Ethnography

This investigation of S-CAP activism shows how direct action is both a major form of activism and a profound form of activist knowledge creation, producing grounds for more effective organizing. I have explicated how an activism-research-activism-research dynamic was at the heart of S-CAP, informing its theorizing and practice. Mapping the social relations of struggle is an important way of focusing and developing activist research (Withers 2020, 2021). It records what is learned from struggles, so it does not have to be learned repeatedly. This mapping work also provides a means through which the activist research and theorizing capacities of the group can be developed. I have also described how mapping the social relations of struggle addresses a weakness in PAE through collectivizing research in ways that strengthen the capacities of the group so that everyone can potentially become activist researchers.

Finally, while this has been an ethnographic exploration of one form of organizing located in one city, it brings far more than this into view. While S-CAP organizing shows the potential of direct action as activist research and its relation to political activist ethnographic practice, it also raises questions about how to engage with text-mediated regulations, with city-state formation, and with legal proceedings without getting contained within these social forms. How can we engage with these necessary terrains of struggle while navigating our way through and beyond their strategies of containment? We need more political activist ethnographic work that details knowledge produced from diverse struggles and movements. I hope this analysis provokes further investigation into other sites of activist organizing and research.

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