Dru Oja Jay breaks down the manifest necessity and moral hazards of political compromise

Dru Oja Jay is a writer, organizer and web developer. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Half Past Capitalism, and serving as both the Executive Director of CUTV, Canada's oldest campus-based TV station, and as publisher of The Breach, an independent media outlet producing critical journalism at a time when it is urgently needed. He’s written a number of stirring articles for The Breach, and he’s also the co-author, with Nikolas Barry-Shaw, of an invaluable book called Paved with Good Intentions: Canada's Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism. There’s no getting around it, though: the state of the journalistic profession is looking bleak. Dru talks about how social media has meant a “shifting of roles” for journalists and widespread “disempowerment in the sector” that runs alongside the public’s lack of confidence in journalism during the neoliberal period. More particularly, he says that social media and what he calls “algorithmic curation” is a kind “race” where “society is coming apart,” and in which a multitude of competing organizations are trying to establish the dominant “pattern of thinking.” What’s necessary, in this context, is for those on the Left to commit to radically deepening democracy, even as we labour under the force of “mega corporations” that constrain the flow of information. There are multiple demobilizing forces converging in the current moment. Jay talks about his research into the effects of NGOs, how they have tended historically, despite their good intentions, to deradicalize movements. In fact, he claims that we are currently seeing “systematic and cynical work to derail” the climate movement through the professionalization of activism in NGOs. What he laments is the loss of “direct accountability” and the constitutive links that movements have with their members as groups become incrementally more accountable to funders over time. A major theme here is the problem of how particular “patterns of thinking” are created, and then become very difficult to dislodge. We discuss the ways that geopolitical patterns of thinking have historically undermined any notion of a rules-based international order. He offers some nuanced analysis of the role of NATO in creating the conditions for the crisis in Ukraine, while necessarily dwelling with the impossible contradictions of that military conflict and the terrifying possibility that it could mean nuclear war, given the brazen ways that major powers are dealing with, and have dealt with, the prospect of nuclear annihilation in the past and present. It’s clear that, for Jay, we also need to unpack and come to terms with the “collective trauma” of settler colonialism and how it lives on in “scars” and “patterns of thought” we inherit. He underscores the ongoing violence of colonial oppression, and how, today, Indigenous peoples are “handcuffed to an objective measure” of climate collapse in ways that reinforce the ties between racism and capitalism. We talk in bluntly critical ways about how, as he puts it, capitalism is always “looking over your shoulder”—creating, commodifying and exploiting our relationships in its image. For this reason, perhaps, he stresses the importance of class as a site of social transformation, especially in relation to established and emerging environmental movements, where we are starting to realize that we share a grim fate under “the brutality of petro-states.” Wars are spreading globally and the climate emergency is accelerating. What are we going to do? Jay makes it clear that the crises we face are going to require mass mobilization to upend them, and that part of the battle involves confronting the class privilege and extreme wealth that makes it too easy for some to just basically refuse to perceive reality as it is.