Red Pepper » James O’Nions

Editorial: All power to the community

admin — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 12:00:40 +0000

Stand on the banks of the Mahakam river in Kalimantan, Indonesia, and you can watch an unending procession of coal barges go by. Opencast mines pockmark this island, which is twice the size of Britain. Each year more than 200 million tonnes of coal passes through Samarinda, the region’s coal hub, on its way to coal-fired power stations around the world. It leaves behind a wrecked environment and few benefits for the local population. According to the Indonesian anti-mining network JATAM, in one area, East Kutai, only 37 out of 135 villages have electricity.
This visceral energy inequality is repeated time and again around the world. From the opencast coal mining near Merthyr Tydfil to the autocrat propped up by oil and gas extraction in Azerbaijan, it seems there’s an urgent need to keep fossil fuels in the ground even before we consider the climate change impact of burning them. But consider it we must. Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide exceeded 400 parts per million for the first time in human history this spring. The earth is probably already committed to a surface temperature rise of between 3 and 5°C on pre-industrial levels. And though some of the extreme weather events could affect any one of us, in general those without power and resources will be hit much harder by the changing climate.
Our current energy system is an exercise not just in destroying our common environment, but in entrenching existing inequality. Understanding this, we can begin to see why, despite scientific evidence over decades, despite public opinion being mobilised on a huge scale and despite numerous high-profile global conferences, carbon dioxide levels have continued their inexorable rise.
In the UK, our energy system is a private oligopoly, dominated by the ‘Big Six’ energy companies. This has simultaneously retarded the development of renewables while inflating bills (and profits) to the extent that 7,000 people died from being unable to heat their homes adequately in the winter of 2011/12. As Aneaka Kellay argues George Osborne’s ‘dash for gas’, which will result in a whole new generation of gas-fired power stations, may be sold as a way of reducing the carbon intensity of our energy production – in fact it will not allow us to meet our carbon dioxide reduction targets and maintains an energy infrastructure built around corporate profits that is at the root of the problem.
So do we have to just cross our fingers and hope for a revolution before the planet fries? Not exactly. The Zero Carbon Britain report from the Centre for Alternative Technology details how exactly how we could reduce the UK’s net carbon emissions to zero by as soon as 2030. The just-published third iteration of the report deals with a common objection to a renewables-based energy system – that peak electricity demand and variable supply don’t match. Their solution involves smart appliances, energy conservation and energy storage using relatively small amounts of biogas and carbon neutral synthetic gas. Crucially, the overall scenario uses only technologies that are already proven and viable.
So it is possible for a large-scale, complex and modern society to be carbon neutral. But important questions remain. Given the corporate interest in maintaining the status quo, how might we bring about such a transition? Zero Carbon Britain references the Green New Deal concept of public investment in low-carbon infrastructure, which would simultaneously create jobs and rapidly decarbonise the economy. But it also matters what kinds of technologies we invest in and who owns them.
The ability to start small with renewable technologies such as solar PV, wind and micro-hydro means they lend themselves to a community ownership model. As Kim Bryan explores in this issue, the confluence of open source technology development, including hardware as well as software, and energy co-operatives could open up exciting possibilities for what we might call ‘energy democracy’. Mobilising around this ‘positive’ vision of reclaiming our ability, as communities, to produce our own energy is a real possibility – especially as some energy co-operatives already exist, covering places as large as Brighton and Bristol. Public investment could bolster energy democratisation, not just provide jobs.
August’s Reclaim the Power camp was conceived in opposition to the government’s ‘energy austerity’ – the phenomenon of making ordinary people pay while upholding big business interests in the energy sector. The initiative was clearly organised on the model of Climate Camp but in the context of the cuts it had a sharper focus on inequality, capitalism and the need to assert popular sovereignty over energy. We need both these noisy challenges to our current energy economy and practical democratic alternatives like energy co-ops in the process of rebuilding our energy economy from below and to the left.

Upholding a coup: Haiti’s New Dictatorship

admin — Thu, 30 May 2013 12:00:30 +0000

In 2004, the elected president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was kidnapped by US marines and flown to the Central African Republic. It was a coup of the kind tried unsuccessfully in Venezuela two years earlier and successfully in Honduras in 2009. The institutional structures put in place by the coup regime, including the UN troops occupying the country, still remain despite several elections.
Why did all this happen with relatively little international fuss? Podur’s book explains in forensic detail the role of international media, NGOs, the UN and other actors in misrepresenting Aristide’s government and upholding the coup and subsequent dictatorship. It’s an important book not just for Haiti itself, but also because it illustrates how modern imperialism works. Parts of the narrative find echoes all over the world, from the coup in Guatemala in 1954 to Iraq post-2003.
Aristide is a Catholic priest and exponent of liberation theology. From his parish in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince he became a focal point for the democracy movement under the Duvalier dictatorship. He later founded Lavalas, a progressive political organisation that gained widespread support in Haiti’s poor neighbourhoods. His disinclination to follow the neoliberal dictats emanating from Washington was all the excuse the US needed to support his removal.
By 2004, Haiti was experiencing a low-level war between Aristide’s government and paramilitary groups made up of former members of the Haitian army (which Aristide abolished) and Duvalier’s informal death squads, tacitly backed by Haiti’s business elite. Allegations of human rights abuses and corruption against Aristide, spread but never substantiated by the international media, helped muddy the water when the US actually removed him. Human rights organisations funded by USAID also played their part in creating a climate where few Latin American countries challenged the coup and a UN mission, MINUSTAH, was quickly brought in with a mandate to use lethal force.
By 2007 MINUSTAH was still taking part in attacks on Cité Soleil, the poor neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince alongside a Haitian police force now with paramilitaries incorporated. Ostensibly the assaults, complete with tanks and indiscriminate killings, were to control gangs, but it was no coincidence that this was a Lavalas stronghold. Lavalas activists are arrested and imprisoned indefinitely on trumped up charges (such as the pacifist priest accused of gun-running). Lavalas was excluded from elections.
Then the earthquake of 2010 hit. The usual assertions that the death toll was more about poverty than geology, while true, are less interesting here than the impact of the ‘new dictatorship’ on disaster response. With the Haitian government left without the capacity to respond, help had to come from the US. The US military took over Port-au-Prince airport and gave priority to its own operations over, for instance, medical supplies. Shortly after the initial rescue effort the US took the opportunity to negotiate control of Haiti’s ports, airports and roads. Of every $100 of US reconstruction contracts awarded, only $1.60 went to Haitian firms.
In the immediate aftermath, reported one horrified French physician, US doctors made excessive use of careless amputations, sometimes for problems as treatable as fractures. Compare their response to the careful work of Cuban doctors at the same time and the racism that permeates western responses to Haiti becomes clear.
Many leftists who have been engaged in a sustained way in Haiti are highly critical of NGOs. This can seem baffling to people in the UK who are conditioned to understand NGOs generally as an expression of the selflessness that often motivates people to donate to them. Yet Podur’s narrative makes clear how the actions of some NGOs have both justified the coup (or at least muted and confused opposition), as well as failing to deliver effective disaster relief. While some NGOs have done excellent work, Podur doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to the likes of the Red Cross leaving vast sums of donated money sitting in bank accounts and operating with zero accountability to Haitian people.
The carefully documented detail is an undoubted strength of this book, and it is animated throughout by a clear anger at the injustice perpetrated against Haitians. But I couldn’t help but feel the subject matter deserved an even more popular format. The section on why Latin America’s left-leaning governments didn’t oppose the coup also felt a little thin, with Brazil’s angling for a permanent place on the UN security council mentioned only in passing. Similarly, more on the economic aspects of imperial domination would have been welcome, including western aspirations to make Haiti a sweatshop economy (backed by ‘friend of Haiti’ Bill Clinton) and the role of debt in curtailing Haiti’s independence.
However, Podur has done us a real service in documenting Haiti’s past decade. It’s a more complex story than can be summarised here, but the kind of ‘complexity’ that is actually constructed to obscure the realities of empire is neatly sliced away in Podur’s account, leaving bare the contours of a deep and ongoing injustice.

World Social Forum: A new turn in Tunis

admin — Tue, 28 May 2013 18:41:04 +0000

The women’s assembly reflected a new impetus to organise for women’s liberation in North Africa Photo: Isabelle Merminod
The thousands of international activists, politicos and social movement organisers who descended on Tunis for the World Social Forum (WSF) at the end of March could hardly fail to notice that there had been a revolution there two years earlier. For one thing, the organisers had festooned the city centre with banners reading ‘The revolution of dignity welcomes the World Social Forum’. For another, Avenue Bourguiba in the centre of Tunis was adorned with rather less welcoming rolls of barbed wire, which shifted in their extent throughout the week.
The contrast perhaps sums up the attitude of the ruling Islamist Enhadda party to the event – keen to demonstrate its moderate credentials to the world by accommodating the forum (and the thousands of extra tourists wouldn’t hurt either), but aware that the forces of the secular left most involved in its organisation are also among the Islamists’ main opponents.
Nevertheless, the moniker ‘revolution of dignity’, widely used in the country but largely unknown outside of it, has some real resonance as to how the overthrow of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali is now popularly seen. Those events returned Tunisians’ dignity to them, even if the problems two years later include many of those that existed before and more besides. Unemployment stands at around 17 per cent (an economy heavily dependent on European tourism has been badly hit by the upheaval of the revolution) and in April the government agreed an IMF loan of £1.13 billion, which came with the usual rider of neoliberal policies.
These include a ‘prudent monetary policy’ to control inflation and ‘structural reforms to improve the competitiveness of the economy’, for which read spending cuts and privatisation. Indeed, as the Financial Times has reported, the government had already ‘raised fuel prices by nearly 7 per cent, increased taxes on alcohol and trimmed subsidies on state-produced milk’. Given that it was ‘structural adjustment’ programmes under IMF poster child Ben Ali that helped trigger the revolution, the new loan perhaps serves to underline the way the revolution has ended up being limited to questions of political democracy.
For the left, the recent formation of the Popular Front, a promising left electoral alliance, was followed by the assassination of its popular leader, Chokri Belaïd, just a month before the WSF took place. Though his killers are still unidentified, the murder is widely seen as further evidence of the growing power of the Salafists in the country. Like in Egypt, the backing of Saudi Arabia is a significant factor behind the rising influence of these extreme social reactionaries. Nevertheless, the fact that a million people reportedly took part in his funeral procession, in a country of only 10 million, suggests the left isn’t done for just yet.
Twofold rationale
This is the context in which the World Social Forum arrived in Tunisia. The rationale had been twofold. On the one hand the WSF would bolster the Tunisian left with a public demonstration of international support and the fostering of ongoing links, together with the opportunity to involve wider layers of Tunisians in a vibrant progressive movement. On the other hand, the WSF itself, now 12 years old and with an uncertain future, would be invigorated by the ‘Arab spring’.
On the first count, the outcome seemed fairly successful. Thousands of young Tunisians in particular took an interest, and lively debates took place on the role of Islam in public life, the Syrian civil war and the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara. (Although the WSF has a strong tradition of support for the Sahrawi liberation struggle, the official Moroccan government delegation took exception to this, though the latter had little business being at the WSF anyway.) The forum made headline news across Tunisia and had a big impact on the capital.
One Tunisian student, Sossi Mohamed Sadek, told US peace activist Medea Benjamin: ‘This was like a dream come true, to see our university overflowing with over 50,000 people from Africa, Europe, Latin America, the United States, the Middle East—it was extraordinary. I came away with new ideas and new friends that will surely have a great impact on my life.’
It was particularly unfortunate, then, that many of the sessions organised by international campaign organisations were almost segregated away in one part of the university campus where the WSF was held, with the sessions organised by North Africans (and conducted largely in Arabic) in another space entirely. And without wanting to underestimate the difficulties of organising translation in such a heterodox and underfunded space as the WSF, the possibility of exchange wasn’t exactly enabled by language barriers. However, participants spoke highly of the Women’s Assembly, for instance, perhaps reflecting the growth of international feminist organising through groups such as the World March of Women and the Rural Women’s Assembly in southern Africa, as well as the new impetus towards women’s organising in Egypt and the Maghreb since the Arab spring.
So the WSF still has various kinds of utility for the global movement against neoliberalism at least. The opportunity to meet and discuss with people from around the world remains vital for global co-ordination, whether it be around climate change or tax justice. And for every session comprised of a panel overloaded with long-winded speakers leaving no room for discussion, there is another imparting valuable lessons of particular struggles or resolving to create international networks, such as the one opposing drones, which came out of a session at this year’s forum.
Whose forum?
But there are also problems. Graffiti on some of the banners condemned the event as a ‘forum of capital’. Ultra-left perhaps, but it does point up an ongoing problem with corporate sponsorship of the WSF. Part-public part-private Brazilian oil company Petrobras has long played a role here, along with national airlines and the like in host countries. USAID, the imperialist development arm of the US government, felt happy enough to set up stall at this year’s forum, at least until a protest removed it. Fortunately, the fact that the WSF is a space, not a movement, means sponsorship has little direct impact on the politics being discussed.
Nonetheless, the Brazilian trade union centre, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), was concerned enough to put out a leaflet rejecting sponsorship and calling for a reaffirmation of anti-capitalist principles. It also declared: ‘In our vision, the WSF will be open to everyone: to networks, to spontaneous movements, to organised social movements, to the NGOs, etc.’ While formally this is already the case, taking this idea seriously means some reform of the current WSF set up.
There is a growing disjuncture between the modus operandi of the WSF and WSF-like events, and the forms of movement-based resistance to post-financial crisis capitalism. In Tunisia, the younger generation who made the revolution were alienated from the WSF organising process by the communist organising style of the traditional left.
At the event itself, activists from Occupy in the US and UK and the M15 (indignados) movement in Spain, organised under the banner of the Global Squares movement, created a horizontal, participative space inside the forum. Though the number of people sat around for workshops on their plastic chairs under a tree was initially small, they made a real effort to involve Tunisians and involvement grew over the days of the forum. On the Saturday, when the forum had finished, save for the closing demonstration, they moved their space to Avenue Bourguiba and involved many dozens more passersby in a discussion of the world they wanted to see that took place largely in Arabic.
It was one of the most interesting interventions of the forum. Of course, its overall success in no way minimises the importance of trade unions or NGOs in the wider movement. Nor would I want to gloss over its shortcomings – consensus is a difficult process when people are constantly coming and going, for instance. But it does add to the sense that the WSF must adapt or see its significance fade.
A new movement
In fact, there are calls from inside the WSF ‘establishment’ to do just that. Chico Whittaker, a Brazilian activist and Catholic radical involved in setting up the WSF in 2001, has called for the dissolution of the international committee, the self-appointed and self-perpetuating governing council of the WSF. In its place he essentially proposes direct co-ordination by an organised movement.
Whittaker says: ‘I call this a new movement because it would have to be necessarily of a new type, in coherence with the new political culture built on social forums: structured as a network, horizontally, as the new movements that arise everywhere, but with a global reach; making decisions by consensus, in the organisational bodies created for specific initiatives; with militants but without the appointment of leaders or spokespersons; in dialogue with parties and governments but maintaining its autonomy in relation to them.’
In Whittaker’s proposal, the movement would have a general assembly both before and after the WSF, dealing with its own business and deciding where the next WSF would be held. The WSF itself would remain, as now, a space open to participants regardless of whether they sign up to the politics of the movement. It’s a bold idea, which attempts to resolve both the question of relating to indignado-style politics and a longer-running question of whether the WSF should try to become a movement itself, with some agreed politics and global initiatives.
The difficulties associated with organising a horizontally-based movement on a global scale are many, however, and the proposal is unlikely to be agreed even with significant modification and elaboration. Nonetheless, the fact that La Via Campesina, a global movement involving millions of people in decision-making at some level, does already exist suggests we perhaps shouldn’t write off the ambition too easily.
Arguments about the usefulness of the WSF, and how much we should expect from it, have surrounded it from the start. Nevertheless, Immanuel Wallerstein’s suggestion that the WSF is ‘alive and well’ and fulfilling its function seems unnecessarily complacent. With growing calls for the WSF to better facilitate the creation of ‘horizontal solidarity among people and organisations’, in Tomaso Ferando’s phrase, the WSF international committee has the opportunity to give a clear lead towards a more participatory politics. But that also implicates everyone who comes to the WSF in thinking about our political practice and stepping outside our comfort zone.
For more reflections on this year’s WSF, see Nick Dearden’s report

Women’s Library occupation: fighting the cuts on International Women’s Day

admin — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 20:42:30 +0000

Inside the occupation. Photo: Reclaim It

Down a quiet street in East London, close to the capital’s financial district, sits the Women’s Library, a historical archive of the struggle for women’s liberation. Previously run by the troubled London Metropolitan University, which is currently being softened up for privatisation, the library was recently transferred to the LSE. The latter plans to incorporate the archives into its own library, shutting down public access and eroding the library’s independence.

So when a group of feminists decided to reclaim the radical history of International Women’s Day from the corporate-sponsored PR projects that have sprung up around it of late, the Women’s Library was an obvious target for action.

‘We’re protesting the closure of the Women’s Library, but also opposing the cuts, which have a disproportionate affect on women, children and disabled people,’ said Kelly Bornshlegel, who has been here since the beginning at 1pm this afternoon. ‘As feminists we oppose all intersecting forms of oppression, and stand in solidarity with people marginalised by the violence of the austerity agenda.’

‘Despite the seriousness of the issues, it’s a great atmosphere and everyone’s in good spirits,’ she added.

Far from barricading the door, the occupiers have left it openly accessible, and the occupation has seen lots of supporters dropping by throughout the day. A substantial core of people (both women and men) are ensuring the occupation is going strong into the night.

Workshops were being organised on everything from self-defence to ‘theatre of the oppressed’, with a feminist sea shanty band due to provide some entertainment later.

‘We’ve got a programme of events lined up for Saturday and Sunday, including a kids’ space,’ said Kelly. We’re open for anyone who’s interested, so come on down.’

Updates will be posted online at reclaimit2013.wordpress.com. A great little exhibition, ‘The Long March to Equality’, is currently, as a result of the occupation, open 24 hours a day!

Editorial: Solidarity against the border

admin — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:00:42 +0000

‘Crossing borders … today is a synonym of death. All the migration paths around the world are marked by graves.’ Thus opens the call for a global day of action against racism and for the rights of migrants, refugees and displaced people on 18 December. Focusing on that most basic right, the right to life, the statement goes on to highlight the 2,000 people who died in the Mediterranean sea in 2011 alone.
As Matthew Carr points out in his essay and in his excellent new book, Fortress Europe: dispatches from a gated continent, these deaths are not an unfortunate consequence of people with choices taking unnecessary risks, but a direct result of the enforcement of the EU’s border regime against people without the luxury of choice. The deaths are flanked by a whole panoply of indignities, brutalities and forms of imprisonment imposed on migrants across Europe.
Carr goes on to argue that Europe needs migration economically, a point backed up by our immigration ‘mythbuster’. A realistic and humane migration policy would start with politicians recognising this. Yet Europe’s demand for migrant workers and its punitive treatment of actual migrants is not necessarily a contradiction. A migrant population cowed by fear of being removed is unlikely to demand better pay and conditions, although there is a better chance of it doing so if it can rely on solidarity from local populations.
While racism in general can act to divide workers against each other, immigration controls specifically function to weaken migrants’ ability to win better conditions. When the state acts against employers who are employing undocumented migrants, it may not be acting in the interest of that one employer, but it is ultimately acting in the interests of the employing class as a whole.
The Labour Party’s record in this matter has been miserable, tailing tabloid prejudice and imposing the kind of neoliberal policies that have gutted communities and made them susceptible to anti-immigrant rhetoric. The process is circular, with Labour politicians then ‘responding’ to concern over immigration that they helped create.
In this context, Ed Miliband’s approach at the Labour conference in September was not as bad as it could have been, concentrating as he did on condemning ‘exploitation’. Nevertheless, to imagine that one can effectively clamp down on the exploitation of precarious migrants while leaving vicious, racist immigration controls in place is akin to thinking the moon is made of cheese.
Where does this leave us in terms of practical politics? As Vittorio Longhi points out, migrants themselves are increasingly leading the way in Italy, France and of course in the US, where mainly Hispanic migrant workers have mobilised in their hundreds of thousands. In the UK there are also a few signs of this approach. The Latin American Workers Association has worked with unions to help cleaners fight highly exploitative conditions in cleaning companies, sometimes through ‘wildcat’ strikes.
But it has also begun to take action against random immigration status checks (producing a ‘bust card’) and against the UK Border Agency’s increasingly frequent dawn raids, organising phone trees among the Latin American community in London. The latter allow a swift response, in some cases managing to block UKBA vans from departing, and at the least preventing neighbours from being disappeared quietly.
We need a popular politics to match this self-organisation. The main refugee charities in the UK concentrate on ‘improving’ the asylum system while helping individual refugees to negotiate their way through a system stacked against them. Other organisations, such as the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants take a ‘human rights-based approach’ to immigration in general, fighting increased restrictions and anti-immigrant propaganda. But to really win migrant rights we need to organise a politics that goes beyond borders.
This might not be as unwinnable as it first seems. A YouGov poll commissioned by the campaign group No One is Illegal this year found that 54 per cent of people surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘People should be free to live and work wherever they wish, and enjoy all the same rights as all other residents.’ Only 16 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed. While framing is important in such surveys, and the ability of large numbers of people to hold contradictory views should not be underestimated, the figures do suggest the possibility of the left advancing onto the front foot for once − even if not easily.
In the context of increasing austerity, the danger of not trying to do so is apparent in the rise of Golden Dawn in Greece. But austerity has also provoked cross-border progressive responses with the first multi-country strike action in European history on 14 November. There is also a strong tradition of anti-racism in the workers’ movement that we can build on. Migrant and non-migrant workers face immiseration at the hands of both the EU and its individual member governments at the moment. Let’s build a militant workers’ movement that sees humanity in every face, European or otherwise, and fights for the freedom of everyone to move and live without fear.

An appetite for change in the food system

admin — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:00:14 +0000

Illustration: Cressida Knapp
Chingford is firmly part of outer London’s Tory belt. Both urban and conservative, it might seem a strange place for the birth of a movement for a radically democratic approach to our food and agriculture system. Yet it was here in July, at the Hawkwood Plant Nursery, that an enthusiastic bunch of food growers, activists and educators gathered for two days to work out how to bring to the UK an idea that is already common currency in parts of Europe, Africa and Latin America: food sovereignty.
Go to Hawkwood and you immediately see not only why the meeting was held here, but why initiatives already underway in the UK mean food sovereignty has a hope of catching on. Originally run as a market garden by Waltham Forest Council, the four-acre site had been unused for years when it was leased in 2009 to Organiclea, a workers’ co-operative that grows and distributes fruit and vegetables. With glasshouses as well as outdoor land on the site, Organiclea also provides educational and volunteering opportunities and runs a vegbox scheme and cafe in nearby Walthamstow.
The gathering itself was inspired by a week-long European encounter in Austria last year, which aimed to bring together a cohesive European movement for food sovereignty. With delegations from every European country and quotas to ensure producers and community groups were properly represented, the event catalysed a number of initiatives and a European action plan.
Yet while the UK sent a delegation and just managed to meet its quotas, its engagement was still dominated by the enthusiasm of NGOs that understand food sovereignty from a global perspective. With Britain’s farming politics long dominated by the high Tory, free‑trade outlook of the National Farmers’ Union, and no equivalent to France’s radical Confederation Paysanne, for instance, the UK lacks organisational structures and a certain militancy when it comes to progressive farming politics. This was one challenge that July’s gathering was trying to resolve.
Host of initiatives
A host of initiatives have sought in recent years to facilitate local and sustainable food production, funded by local councils, central government or lottery funding. Capital Growth has nurtured urban food production in London and similar projects exist elsewhere. Making Local Food Work is a national project that provides advice and support to community shops, farmers markets, buying groups and other initiatives in their hundreds that help people take ownership of where their food comes from.
Yet this has all happened largely in the absence of a radical narrative about transforming our food system. Indeed, it has been accompanied by the onward march of supermarket expansion, with 25 million square feet of supermarket retail space either under construction or with planning permission approved at the end of 2011.
Protests by dairy farmers this July over supermarket attempts to reduce the amount they pay for milk to below the cost of production are indicative of the direction this is leading, but also that a fightback is overdue. The UK now imports £37 billion worth of food, drink and animal feed per year, and exports £18 billion (although £4 billion of this is whisky). On top of the huge environmental impact of this international trade is the race to the bottom it allows in terms of working conditions in production, local environmental impact, land grabs and animal rights.
Alternative solutions
So where do we start if we want an alternative? The Kindling Trust in Manchester has been behind a number of initiatives that have begun to show what can be achieved. Helen Woodcock, one of its founders, explains where it all started: ‘Feeding Manchester is a network of sustainable food practitioners: commercial growers and retailers, community gardens, educators and so on. It meets three times a year and discusses what the barriers are to sustainable food production, and what solutions we can come up with.’
One of the solutions is the Land Army. During harvest times organic farmers can face a shortage of labour. Fruit, for instance, can literally rot on the bushes because hiring extra help at a reasonable wage would push the cost of production above what the fruit can be sold for. The Land Army organises volunteers who want to learn about organic farming to help with picking and other jobs. Helen hopes the initiative can feed into a better apprenticeship scheme.
Manchester Veg People is another project. It is a co-operative bringing together the five organic farms closest to Manchester and a range of buyers, including both small caterers and cafes and bigger buyers such as the University of Manchester. It was established to tackle both the lack of variety of organic food coming into Manchester and the fact that organic growers struggle to sell their produce above the cost of production, which results in rural poverty and people leaving farming.
Organic farmers plan crops each year based on their conversations with buyers and get a more secure market. Particularly central to the project is involving the public sector (schools, universities, prisons, hospitals) in procuring sustainable food. ‘It is about trying to make sure a wider range of people have access to it even if they don’t feel they can afford it in their own personal shopping,’ says Helen Woodcock.
Community supported agriculture
The principle is very close to that of community supported agriculture (CSA), whereby a small community organises to buy the produce of a particular local farmer in return for a say in what is produced. The community takes some of the risks (such as crop failure) with the farmer and gets affordable food with known provenance in return. The model is being promoted by the Soil Association, among others, and a European CSA conference is planned in October in Italy, a country where the Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale model is well established.
Helen Woodcock was most inspired by the model she saw on a recent trip to the Basque Country, however: ‘They have CSAs but with a collective of growers, about seven to ten per group. Farming can be a lonely, hard existence, and in a traditional CSA, the grower is often the poorest paid person in the group. With our projects in Manchester, what we’re not doing is creating another market; it’s political. In the Basque networks they do an induction with new farmers who join where they talk about the political issues and collective solutions.
‘They also have a global outlook, and an idea of having networks of co-ops in the global north and south for getting things they can’t grow. The issue isn’t that we need to be better at growing local food, it’s that we need to stop treating people so badly.’
Challenging the CAP
Whatever the viability of solidarity-based alternatives however, there’s no getting round the fact that government policy firmly supports big business agriculture. Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is a case in point. This year, however, as the eurocrats negotiated the CAP’s regular seven-year cycle of reform, they were met by a popular mobilisation. For the first time, the European parliament also got a say in CAP reform alongside the Commission, and the organisers of the Good Food March, which culminated on 19 September in Brussels, sought to use the opportunity to influence the direction of the CAP on issues ranging from the structure of the subsidy system, to support for ecological agriculture, to supply management in grain markets.
It’s an agenda that resonates with Jyoti Fernandes, a smallholder farmer in Dorset who was planning on joining the march as it reached Brussels. She is particularly interested in pushing for the CAP to support new entrants into ecologically sound farming.
‘The subsidy system pays people to own land, which pushes up the price of land. If you want to get into farming, buying land with a farmhouse is totally unaffordable,’ she says. Fernandes and her family live on a 43-acre farm they share with another family, in a house they built themselves. They practice low input mixed farming, keeping sheep and chickens in their orchard, growing barley and keeping pigs. They make a living on a small farm because they add value themselves, making jam and bacon and brewing cider.
Much of this kind of production needs access to expensive equipment and premises that conform to health and safety regulations. That’s why, in 2006, Fernandes and other local farmers formed the Peasant Evolution Producers Co-operative, an informal way of sharing the costs of production and helping each other to sell their produce, as well as making certain products together, such as cheese. This approach is hardly the norm for British farmers, Fernandes acknowledges: ‘It’s similar to what happens in some parts of France for instance, but UK farmers don’t usually want to work in co-operatives.’
The problems for small-scale agro-ecological farming aren’t just limited to the CAP and British individualism, however. For a start, DEFRA policy seems to encourage farmers to do anything but grow food. ‘You can get funding for a catering business, or to open a bed and breakfast, but no help for the basics of farming,’ says Fernandes.
She’s also concerned about the de-skilling happening in farming, especially when it comes to anything other than chemical agriculture: ‘Agricultural colleges aren’t teaching the basics about ecosystems. You just get a series of certificates in corporate-controlled farming. It becomes an industrial system: buy this grain, spray this pesticide and so on.’
Pushing GM again
Alongside carbon-intensive farming, we’re now seeing a renewed offensive by the GM industry. The climate change crisis has been seen by Monsanto and others as an opportunity to push GM crops again in places where they decisively lost the battle in the 1990s, particularly Europe.
The climate argument for GM is easy to demolish. Not only do polycultures offer the best prospect of resilient farming in a world faced with unpredictable and often extreme weather patterns, but organic agriculture actually sequesters carbon dioxide into the soil – at a rate of up to 900 kilos per acre per year, according to a 10-year study by the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania.
Yet surely there’s no harm in scientific experimentation?
If science was some realm of reason that could be separated out from capitalism, that might be the case. But GM trials take place in a context. The recent trial of GM wheat at Rothamsted may have been publicly funded, but the beneficiaries of any research are likely to be corporate. While the organisers of the ‘Take the Flour Back’ action at Rothamsted highlighted a panoply of objections, from raising doubts over food safety to claiming the science itself is flawed, contemporary anti-GM activism largely situates itself in a narrative about food sovereignty in a global context.
The Rothamsted protest featured as a speaker Gathuru Mburu, co-ordinator of the African Biodiversity Network, who put his finger on the key issue: ‘Beneath the rhetoric that GM is the key to feeding a hungry world, there is a very different story – a story of control and profit. The fact is that we need a diversity of genetic traits in food crops in order to survive worsening climates. Above all, people need to have control over their seeds.’
Against the ever-tightening grip of multinationals, the global food sovereignty movement asserts a democratic food system. Local food is an important aspect of this, not only because it reduces our food’s carbon footprint, but because it renders visible the social relations that feed us. Britain’s incipient food sovereignty movement hopes to both galvanise opposition to corporate control and fertilise the shoots of real alternatives.
A small multitude of community-supported agriculture schemes, non-commercial growing projects and co-operative enterprises have sprung up in the UK in recent years. Whether they are incorporated into the logic of capitalism, fail completely or become the basis of a new solidarity economy around food is dependent on many factors, but the beginnings of a self-conscious movement for food sovereignty is surely one of those factors. It’s a long-term organising effort that could bear much fruit in the struggle for a better world.
For more on the UK food sovereignty movement go to www.foodsovereigntynow.org.uk

Green Party: Left foot forward?

James O'Nions — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 14:56:52 +0000

Green Party leadership candidates at a London hustings. Left to right: Pippa Bartolotti, Natalie Bennett, (returning officer Jon Nott) Romayne Phoenix, Peter Cranie.

Green Party members in England and Wales will soon be receiving their ballot papers in the first serious contest for leader and deputy leader the party has held. Though the posts were first introduced in 2008 (previously the Green Party had ‘principal speakers’), and elections recur every two years, there was never any doubt that Caroline Lucas would be leader, and Norwich councillor Adrian Ramsay deputy.

This time, however, Caroline Lucas has decided not to stand again. She’s cited the need for a wider group of Green politicians to gain public profile as her reason, and there’s little doubt that her own time as leader led directly to her election as the Green’s first MP in Brighton Pavillion. But she and her team are no doubt also keenly aware of the time she needs to put into getting re-elected in Brighton – in a seat where Labour are her main rivals, are bashing the Green-led council for passing a cuts budget (however hypocritically) and in the context of a likely national swing to Labour at the next election, it’s tactically smart for her to concentrate on Brighton for the next couple of years.

Hence the Greens face a leadership race with no obvious winner going into the contest, although of the four candidates, there are frontrunners. The first to declare, Wales Green Party speaker Pippa Bartolotti, is surely not among them. Pippa, whose background is in business ‘sustainability’, is of the ‘neither left nor right but forward’ camp (and uses the phrase on her website). Once a more widely held position, the phrase no longer really chimes with the mood of a party more and more made up of people specifically looking for a left alternative. Plus it sounds rather silly. With turns of phrase like “the government has to stop pimping the planet and it has to stop pimping the people” (at the London hustings) and a grasp of media strategy that led her to proclaim “I annoy journalists all the time” as some kind of virtue, Pippa has something of the Jenny Jones about her.

The other candidate I would rule out is Romayne Phoenix. Romayne is standing on a ‘Green Left’ ticket with deputy leadership candidate Will Duckworth. Green Left is a small and dwindling ecosocialist current in the party. This is no barrier to electoral success: Derek Wall, a better known member of the group, has been elected male principal speaker of the party before. But he’s endorsed Alex Phillips (see below) for deputy so its clear there’s no unity around the ticket in the group. And there are plenty of socialists in the wider party who aren’t connected to Green Left and I would guess won’t be voting for Romayne.

They may well vote for Peter Cranie, who is also (marginally) the bookie’s favourite. Peter ran as the lead candidate in the North West for the European Parliament elections in 2009 on a specifically anti-racist, anti-BNP ticket. Though he just missed beating Nick Griffin to the last MEP place in the region, he is well placed to beat him next time. He says he wants the Greens to be known as much for housing as for the environment, and comes across like he might just be able to carry that off convincingly (he’s a Scot from a working class background who used to be in the Labour Party).

Also in the running is Natalie Bennett, chair of Green Party Women, parliamentary candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, and with a record of competence and getting things done within internal Green Party structures. An Australian who has worked as editor of the Guardian Weekly, she has framed her campaign around speaking up for the marginalised, and around concrete ambition for the party’s electoral growth.

Of the deputy leadership candidates, the most interesting is perhaps Alex Phillips. She’s the youngest of the candidates, but as a Brighton councillor was the only one to vote against the cuts budget (as amended by Labour and the Tories) and was closely involved in Caroline Lucas’ election campaign. She will probably get the Young Green vote (more for her more leftwing politics than for her own relative youth), but is also supported by a good range of people in the party establishment.

Her main rival is probably Caroline Allen since though Richard Mallender is a party stalwart he appears to have run a rather lacklustre campaign so far, with no prominent backers listed on his website. However, that’s to reckon without the party’s election rules, which mean that once the leader is elected, deputy leadership candidates of the same sex are then disqualified so as to ensure gender balance. That means two of the deputy candidates have no chance of winning, but no-one knows which two until the votes are counted.

If I had to guess I would say that Peter Cranie will be the Greens’ next leader. From the evidence of the hustings so far he has the most natural manner, and the strongest chance of broadening the party’s appeal. He’s probably best known among ordinary Green Party members and has the support of enough of the party establishment to win.

An unofficial Green Party elections blog is being run by Matt Sellwood and Jim Jepps, both occasional Red Pepper contributors, and both now running one of the frontrunners’ campaigns each (Peter Cranie and Natalie Bennett respectively). It is nevertheless being scrupulously fair in its presentation of videos of various hustings and other news and opinion. The ballot closes on 31 August, with the result announced before Green Party Autumn conference on 7 September.

Unlike some of their European cousins, its been a couple of decades since the Greens in the UK have had any kind of right wing. Nevertheless, there are probably two main strands of thinking in the party. One is a kind of ecoliberalism, concerned with climate change and more bike facilities. The other is a left social democracy, concerned with inequality and defending the NHS. To a certain extent they co-exist, even in the same people, but recent years have seen the latter gain ground. Whatever the outcome, this leadership contest seems to confirm that.

Nevertheless, finding someone combining genuinely leftwing politics with credibility as a mainstream politician is difficult in any party. Too often the Greens manage only one or even neither. Getting somewhere near both in the Greens’ second ever leadership team could open up the possibility of a real advance for the party.

In for the long haul

admin — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 10:00:48 +0000

Could Europe have reached a turning point? Syriza, the coalition of the radical left, may not have won the second round of elections in Greece, but they got an even bigger vote this time around. Across Europe the anti-austerity movement is posing an increasing challenge to the parties of austerity. The new president of France was elected on a platform pushed to the left by the Front de Gauche’s Jean-Luc Mélenchon. In the Netherlands, the left-wing Socialist Party is running ahead of the centre-left Labour Party in the polls.
Outside the electoral arena, the Spanish 15M movement proved it has not gone away, with impressive reoccupations of a number of Spanish plazas. April saw a major protest in the Czech Republic against austerity and corruption, while Romania has seen mass popular protest against an increase in sales tax and the slashing of public sector pay.
The Blockupy Frankfurt protests are also important for a number of reasons. They represent an unprecedented attempt at pan-European protest against austerity; they are targeting in particular the European Central Bank, one of the pillars of European anti-democracy; and they are taking place in Germany, a country so far absent from the revolt.
Yet for all this, we still have some way to go. The advances for the left have been patchy, and importantly have lacked pan-European co-ordination, including commonly-produced alternatives and converging actions. From 2002 until it dwindled, the European Social Forum was an important, vibrant and well-attended space for this kind of internationalist organising, building relationships and sweeping away much parochial dust, even if it also suffered from an excess of rhetoric and political infighting.
We need to learn some lessons from that process, both positive and negative, while recognising that, ironically, the ESF never developed a strong enough focus on Europe itself in order to challenge its closed, technocratic institutions and its powerful elites.
A modest but useful ‘EU in Crisis’ anti-austerity conference in Brussels at the beginning of May proved that useful legacies of the ESF remain. This was evident from the presence of pan-European campaigning networks, for instance around the movement against water privatisation and for ‘remunicipalisation’. There was a determination to work together to better co-ordinate the movement across Europe. Now this initiative urgently needs to establish itself and incorporate significant social forces and grassroots activists, not just movement grandees and bureaucrats. Only then will it be able to call widely supported cross-border actions and raise the kind of solidarity that Greece will undoubtedly need in the coming months.
The need for common alternatives must also be worked on, even if it is no easy task. On the one hand some basic demands will have wide resonance and support: defence of public services and the social wage; taxing the rich and the financial sector; opposition to any racist backlash. On the other hand, significant areas of controversy remain. Stimulating economic growth through industrial policy is a key demand for many, but others have fingered growth as the culprit for the climate crisis and demand another solution.
The European radical left remains split over whether staying in or leaving the euro is the least-worst option. And at a more fundamental level, even those social democrats not chained to the neoliberal yoke propose merely to reformulate the class compromise that formed the original European welfare states. In doing so they ignore the fact that this post-war settlement was made possible only by the super-exploitation of the global South and the unwaged work of most of the female population. It was also a settlement which, though moderately redistributive, did not base its reform programmes on a challenge to the dominant organisation of production.
It is surely possible to overcome these differences to formulate some kind of united demands. But all the evidence suggests that this crisis of capitalism will not be short-lived. Opening up new areas for capital accumulation remains a vital goal for the 1 per cent, both through the privatisation of European public services and through the commodification of natural resources previously held in common, dispossessing the many people who depend on them.
We’re in this for the long haul, and to go beyond the current crisis, we need more than a hodgepodge of basic democratic demands and Keynesian economic management. Our movements need to start extending the experiments in assembly democracy that are taking root in neighbourhoods of Spanish cities. We must also spread the practice of creating alternatives as we resist – occupying and then transforming in all the areas of society we need to reproduce our lives, from food to free software. In this way, at least part of our common agenda can be that which emerges from our common resistance.
There is no crisis in the capacities and creativity of humanity. Thanks to the growth of movements including Occupy and the indignados, the last year has seen the limits of the possible expanded beyond the depressing confines of market fundamentalism. Now it’s time to blow those limits wide open.

Riots: The left must respond

James O'Nions — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 14:07:30 +0000

‘If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.’ – Malcolm X
A depressing YouGov poll today (pdf) shows that 90 per cent of Britons believe police should be able to use water cannons to quell rioting, while a third believe they should have the use of live ammunition – in other words that they should be able to shoot indiscriminately at people with little accountability, as that’s what such a power would amount to. While we should be wary of polls of this kind as a real arbiter of public opinion, it is nevertheless clear that demands for a virtual police state in response to the riots are reaching fever pitch.

There is lots to be said from the left about the reasons the riots are happening, and commentators from Nina Power to Zoe Williams are starting to do so. We can talk about the impact of spending cuts to youth services, EMAs and the rest on cities where unemployment is high and inequality continues to grow. In London in particular, poor inner city neighbourhoods where young people can (very reasonably) see no decent future for themselves, nestle up against much wealthier areas which seem unaffected by the recession and are still living the high life of iPads, regular weekend breaks in Europe and fine dining.

We can also talk about the psychological impact of 30 years of neoliberalism and the rampant consumerism that goes with it. Hence the phenomenon of ‘consumer rioting’, with high street chains targeted not just for destruction, but for the latest accessories. This could be described as a kind of confused redistribution of wealth – unfair, based on individual smash and grab, and not really redistributing wealth much at all – but nevertheless motivated by keenly felt social injustice. Of course, some of the looting was for what could reasonably be described as necessities too, but any basic collective sentiment, beyond a shared sense of being a generation without hope, was lacking. This was not Athens.

We can and should also talk about the regular, humiliating stop and searches which many of those who have been rioting (and many of their peers who haven’t) undergo. Its no wonder that that the shooting of Mark Duggan set some of this off – these kids know just what brutal thugs the police often are. They know this wasn’t a one-off, but part of a continuum of police repression and impunity that will probably see them getting away with it again. And yes, many of them know exactly how useless and toothless the IPCC is. Of 333 deaths in police custody since 1998, none have resulted in a conviction.

But important though all this is, we need to do more than talk. The right is making the running, and the facts on the ground need changing. While some left commentators (and no, I don’t include Sunny Hundall in that category) have been saying the right things, left-leaning politicians rarely have. Diane Abbott was among the first to talk up the idea of a curfew. Ken Livingstone bashed the government for their cuts, but was most concerned to talk about cuts to the police in London leading to an inadequate response to the riots. He certainly won’t be talking about police violence, given the robust support he’s given to the Met in cases ranging from Jean Charles de Menezes to Ian Tomlinson.

What we need right now are channels for giving voice to the issues which lie behind the riots. This is starting to happen. Last night in Tottenham, 60-70 activists from Hackney and Haringey, called together by the Day Mer Kurdish association and Hackney Alliance to Defend Public Services, met to come up with a response. As a result there will be a demonstration on Saturday from Dalston to Tottenham under the slogan Give Our Kids a Future. Whatever your exact attitude to the rioting itself, its vital to build this demo, and others like it around the country, if we’re to turn the tide of reaction and have a hope of making demands for real social justice. (There is also a similar demo from Deptford High Street at 6.30pm to Lewisham Town Hall today, 10 August.)

All over the world, the rise of neoliberalism has been accompanied by the rise of the security state. This is no accident. The victory for the capitalist class that neoliberalism represents produces howls of protest from the oppressed. Sometimes they have political direction, and sometimes they don’t. The response of the Conservatives, and of elites the world over, is to deny any real grievances and unleash further state-led violence. If we want to build an alternative based on economic justice and freedom, our first job is to ensure that ordinary people aren’t cheering them on.

Our right to the city

admin — Mon, 30 May 2011 04:28:55 +0000

A tussle is taking place in Westminster politics over the word ‘progressive’. Conservatives are divided over whether to claim the word from the left as part of the detoxification of the Tory brand or denounce it as an anodyne cover for dubiously pinko sentiments. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg casts around for coalition policies to promote as progressive to try to deflect the flak from the decidedly anti-progressive spending cuts.
Internships, Clegg thus weakly proposes, should be subject to open interviews, not awarded to family friends. The grammar school boy should have the opportunity to enhance his CV too. The issue of payment is not broached. Yet this intervention is part of a wider agenda to recast ‘meritocracy’ as the acme of progressive ambition. No need for the redistribution of wealth here. In fact, no problem that the cuts are redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich, so long as a few of the poor themselves can be redistributed that way too.
The Labour Party is not immune to pouring meritocratic wine into ‘progressive’ bottles. The contradiction inherent in Labour’s need to re-engage its working class support, while still appealing to ‘the squeezed middle’ (best expressed in Andy Burnham’s leadership campaign oxymoron ‘aspirational socialism’), dovetails with the dominant culture of commodification. Even those genuinely seeking redistribution express little vision beyond enabling more people to privately buy their way out of material deprivation.
In choosing to focus on radical visions for our cities in this issue of Red Pepper, we are hoping to show that something more attractive, and more challenging to capitalism, is possible. In his important 2008 essay for New Left Review, ‘The Right to the City’, David Harvey wrote: ‘The right to the city is … a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation.’
This sense of collectivity in the way we live in the city is something we need desperately to reassert. Yet this is not just an ideological problem. The physical city has often been constructed in a way that reinforces an outlook framed by atomistic individualism. We peer out of our windows at the noise, pollution and physical danger of traffic. Our fear of crime has soared in a cityscape that is increasingly privatised and subject to surveillance (see Anna Minton, page 26). Individual home ownership guts our common interest in solving the housing crisis as homeowners hope for ever‑increasing property prices.
Yet alternatives exist. As Chiara Tornaghi shows (page 22), various embryonic urban agriculture projects can be starting points for reclaiming the commons while cutting down the environmental impact of our food and multiplying the public green space in our cities. The post-war period of building new social housing may not have been universally successful, but as Owen Hatherley points out (page 28) the architects and planners in those years often had a vision of building design as serving a higher social purpose. Not everyone will agree with the modernist result, but it’s clear that community, democracy and solidarity can all be built into the city, and with them quality of life.
Given where we start from however, building a new radical urbanism will not be easy. We are helped in some ways by the aftermath of the financial crisis. The neoliberal juggernaut has been slowed and with it the building frenzy throwing up private apartments, shopping complexes and the infrastructure of boutique lifestyles for the wealthy.
At the same time, the perennial crisis in housing has been exacerbated, leading to rising repossessions and homelessness. Any movement to claim the right to the city needs to tackle the housing question centrally. As Stuart Hodkinson argues (page 20), such a movement must start with the immediate issues around providing affordable housing but seek always to decommodify housing and move towards collective ownership and control. In doing so, it will inevitably encounter a whole range of other issues, from the redistribution of wealth to the power of multinationals to the problem of gentrification.
Recent events in Bristol, with the so-called ‘anti-Tesco riot’ in the Stokes Croft area, are illustrative of this wider battle over the character of city life. The issue is not limited to a single, if symbolic, supermarket branch, but encompasses a struggle over gentrification and the entry of major retailers into an area currently characterised by local shops – many catering to ethnic minority communities – squatted buildings and some inspiring non‑profit community and arts spaces (see RP Aug/Sep 2008).
This concentration of radical urbanism is relatively unusual, but it need not be so. Combined with a movement to fight urban inequality, and a strategy of reclaiming the commons in housing, public space and elsewhere, such spaces can provide both a better way to live and a thorough-going challenge to the priorities of the capitalist city.