Red Pepper » Sarah-Jayne Clifton

Fighting back against finance

admin — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 10:00:11 +0000

It’s less than 18 months since the Occupy protests spread worldwide and already the spotlight they shone on the global financial crisis and the reckless and unaccountable behaviour of the private banks and other powerful global financial actors has begun to dim.
Concrete responses to the underlying causes and drivers of the financial crisis have been feeble and half-hearted at best. Here in the UK the government is still dithering over whether to implement the weak Vickers commission proposal on ringfencing retail banking. Nowhere is there any sign of interest in the kind of co-operative global political action that is needed to gain public control over the financial speculation that is destroying people’s livelihoods. On the contrary, private and shadow finance is increasing its grip over public life and the modes by which it is able to extract wealth from ordinary people, both directly through debt provision and indirectly through our taxes.
Governments around the world are encouraging the growth of public private partnerships (PPPs), known in the UK as private finance initiative (PFI) projects. They feed the growth of a parasitic private finance sector comprised of banks, investment funds and shadow finance actors such as private equity funds, which attach themselves to the state as a new source of secure, low‑risk profits.
PFI increases corporate ownership and control over public services and increases the net outflow of taxpayers’ money into the pockets of private finance – money that could otherwise be invested in improving and extending public services and infrastructure. The government promotion of PFI is contributing directly to increasing inequality and the concentration of wealth, while at the same time reducing democratic control over public services.
On page 20 Nick Hildyard exposes how this is not just happening here in the UK or the rich world. PPPs are now increasingly relied upon to deliver and extend basic services and public infrastructure in much of the global South. In environmental policy too, there is a growing reliance on private finance.
This growing power of private finance is part of the bigger process of financialisation to which we have borne witness over the past few decades. The Marxist geographer David Harvey describes the rapid growth, globalisation and deregulation of the finance sector since the 1970s as leading to the ‘financialisation of everything’, meaning the growing control by finance of all areas of the economy and public life. The global capitalist class is increasingly making its money from finance rather than by investing in production. And the expansion of control and ownership of private finance over public infrastructure, services and resources is part of this process of financialisation. It is essentially a form of primitive accumulation: a new wave of enclosures of the commons.
Tackling this is clearly a long-term project for the left. We are still trying to understand what exactly is happening, to cut through the opaque and complex processes of global finance and divine the real games at play and their wider impacts. Many complications lie in the way of our search for solutions, including the fact that many of the core actors driving these processes operate under the radar, holding unpublicised meetings in anonymous offices and listing their companies in offshore tax havens. Another is that many of the investment funds at the core of this process are using capital from the pension funds of those who are lucky enough to still have pensions to provide the initial equity investments in PFI.
Yet financialisation provides us with an enormous opportunity. It is the common ground for a multiplicity of struggles, a unifying point unlike any that we have seen since the international mobilisations against the Iraq war. Financialisation links the struggles of activists in the UK campaigning to protect the NHS with activists in Brazil campaigning to retain democratic public ownership and control over the forests and the rights of the people who depend on them.
Turning the tide on the power of global finance requires us to remake the case for public ownership and control of the commons in a way that learns from the past weaknesses in bureaucratic and sclerotic state control. It requires us to stop the haemorrhaging of money from public finances into the hands of the private sector parasites by resisting PFI projects and ending the whole PFI agenda. And most importantly, it requires a renewed focus on the redistribution of wealth.
To start with, we must tackle the supposed lack of finance that is pushing governments towards reliance on private investment by demanding a crackdown on the tax evasion by global financial elites and transnational corporations – as articulated so effectively by UK Uncut – and by challenging the low tax regimes of the neoliberal era that let corporations and the super-rich off the hook.

George Lakey: ‘This is about solidarity. Let’s go!’

admin — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 10:00:45 +0000

What influenced your political formation as an activist?
I was brought up in a pro-union working class household. That gave me a keen sense of economic oppression and has influenced my activism ever since. I was also part of a religious denomination that believed that children can be called to preach, and at 12 years old I prepared a sermon that racial equality was the will of God. It was a one-day preaching career. This was 1949 and no one wanted to hear a sermon about racial equality. That was hugely impactful for me. I learnt that saying the truth as one understands it is going to get various reactions.
You’ve said the Mississippi ‘freedom summer’ in 1964 was your most important introduction to participatory social change. Tell us a bit more about that.
I had a lot of influence from Ella Baker, who was an awesome civil rights hero. She was influential in the Student Nonviolent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC) and they were the real pioneers in Mississippi. They were the ones going into the hardest of the hardcore states and doing projects with extremely disempowered people. And they were convinced by Ella Baker that the only technique that could really be empowering was one based on discussion and participation and on following the lead of the people who were the most disempowered. That was in stark contrast to the style of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr [Martin Luther] King, which was much more an inspiring kind of leadership. I was intrigued by this alternative approach because it seemed so respectful of the extreme oppression that folks were living under and how much that oppression had been internalised.
What are your thoughts on Occupy and the limits of consensus decision-making?
I think we need to learn more about under what conditions consensus does and doesn’t work. It depends on the context and the people and the degree of trust. The SNCC were working in a kind of container in rural Mississippi – often in the black church, in a rural setting, with people who knew each other very well. That is very different from people who don’t know each other gathering in the city centre, being watched by media and the mayor and everybody else and saying, ‘Okay, now we’re going to make decisions.’ In our Occupy in Philadelphia, the lack of trust was enormous. It’s so hard when people won’t listen and won’t trust to reach any kind of fair decision.
How could Occupy be more effective in achieving tangible gains for the 99 per cent?
One thing that impressed me in Boston is that a subset of the Occupy people joined a campaign against the public transport authorities raising fares and lowering service – an issue of huge importance to working class people in Boston and people of colour. They weren’t just saying, ‘Come over to our turf and join our Occupy thing.’ They were saying, ‘We know a struggle when we see it. We want to be with you. This is about solidarity. Let’s go!’
Campaigns like that are often critiqued as being too reformist. Do you think they can add up to something bigger?
A revolution doesn’t come without a revolutionary situation, and a revolutionary situation is created by history, not by us. So while we’re waiting for the revolutionary situation we can be preparing for it. And the best way to do that is to be side by side with those whose interests in having a revolution are greatest, so that we have been through struggles together and we are trusted. There will never be enough self-identified activists to win a revolution. It’s always people who have other primary identities, like father, mother, grandfather. We have to be with them and campaigns are one way to do that. It’s building that infrastructure of relationships that makes revolution possible, and I don’t see a short cut.
Do you feel that violence is ever justifiable as part of legitimate struggles for justice?
I always say to people who advocate violent struggle, if you really want to be pragmatic, then you will develop at least one nonviolent and one violent struggle strategy, and then compare them and make a choice. I’m not prepared to say that there is a nonviolent way to win in every situation. But I’m also not prepared to say that a violent way would more likely win. There are plenty of situations where neither way would win, where your opponent is just overwhelming at that moment in history.
George Lakey’s Toward a Living Revolution is published by Peace News Press, £15. www.peacenews.info

Editorial: Building a new world

admin — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:00:05 +0000

Following a series of evictions worldwide, including that of the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, the Occupy movement is actively assessing its modes of organising and thinking about how these might be developed in the next phase of the movement.
Here in the UK, the eviction of the St Paul’s camp has revived age-old debates on the left about the strengths and limits of horizontal, non-hierarchical organising. Alongside acknowledgement of Occupy’s massive success in putting a structural critique of the financial system on the public agenda, many sympathisers are repeating the same critical questions: what are the demands? what is the strategy? did it make a difference?
Of course these are important questions, but they are rooted in an understanding of politics focused overwhelmingly on immediate and institutionalised results. Occupy is not a political lobbying organisation trying to formulate policy messages to communicate to elites. Assessing it solely on these terms misses a whole dimension of the change that Occupy and other horizontal spaces are advancing. This involves a lasting social transformation – a slow but sticky building of empowerment, political voice and expectations of political involvement, and skills and methods of collective organising that can be shared with others and transferred to other spaces. This transformation, hidden in cultural forms, is an essential prerequisite to securing lasting political change. But it is hard to measure, or even see happening, and therefore often undervalued.
How, for example, could we measure the potential for change created by the debates and workshops in the ‘Tent City University’? Or the personal transformations experienced by those who engaged in participative decision making for the first time in their lives in the general assemblies? What about those who learnt other new practical and organising skills that they will take to the next occupation, protest or mobilisation and help make that stronger and more effective? Clues to potential answers lie in comparable movements of the recent past. Significant numbers of people trained and empowered through the Climate Camp network play key catalyst roles in UK Uncut, the student movement and Occupy, to name only a few.
It is important to ensure that the lessons emerging from Occupy inform the future of the struggle against corporate power. In this issue, Josh Healey reports on experiences from Occupy Oakland that highlight what he sees as some of the limits of non-hierarchical organising, including how small groups have taken the banner of Occupy Oakland towards more violent tactics, which he argues has served to undermine its popular base.
Elsewhere this issue looks at other attempts to build democratic and participatory counter institutions. One such model is that of co-operatives, which Robin Murray argues can form the basis of an alternative, more equitable, more people-centred economy. As with Occupy, a big part of the transformative potential of co-ops lies in the ongoing process that co-operative members engage in as individuals and collectives. Of course, co-ops also have potential to deliver very concrete economic change: greater worker control over and participation in business decision-making usually goes hand in hand with greater wage equality, more dignified and fulfilling working lives, and greater accountability of businesses to local communities. In summary, co-operatives are one of the key ways by which we can, as John Holloway puts it, ‘stop creating capitalism’.
However, there is no guarantee that individual co-ops will act in broader societal interests and not solely in the interests of their members. The experience of US energy co‑operatives which supported coal and nuclear power and the Conservatives’ drive to use co-ops as a cover for dismantling the public sector are evidence of this. Ensuring that the co-op movement is kept radical and underpinned by solidarity and sustainability across national borders is essential if its full transformatory potential is to be unleashed. This requires that co-ops themselves be in constant and dynamic interaction with broader social movements.
The lasting impact of such collective forms of organising on social relations and political identities is demonstrated in Francesca Fiorentini’s analysis of the legacy of the social movements that arose in Argentina in response to its debt crisis ten years ago. This can be seen specifically through the ‘recovered enterprises’ movement, where workers occupied and took control of businesses that were on the brink of bankruptcy and ran them as self-managed co-operatives.
With the devastating Health and Social Care Act set to unleash a period of unprecedented chaos in our health services, The Lancet editor Richard Horton predicts that people will die as a result of government’s insistence on competition, while GP Jon Tomlinson highlights the need to build ‘Occupy Healthcare’ – a movement to reject the idea that the healthcare needs of society can be commodified and governed by market logic.

A glasnost moment?

admin — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 00:02:47 +0000

Could this be a glasnost moment for the British media and the politics it has corrupted? That is the question on the lips of many on the left in the wake of the phone hacking scandal and its domino effect across the establishment.To answer it, we have to ask another question – why did it take acts as extreme as hacking the phones of a murder victim and bereaved relatives of soldiers and terror victims by the UK’s largest media corporation before mainstream progressive political actors felt the need to seriously tackle issues of ethics, accountability and monopoly power in the British media?
More important than what triggered this upheaval, or ‘firestorm’ as David Cameron has called it, is what didn’t trigger it and why – how standards of ethics, accountability and basic humanity across large parts of the media were allowed, over decades, to sink to such depths.
The media exerts a constant influence on cultural norms and the moral and ethical landscape in which it operates. It shapes as well as reflects public values and opinion, and right-wing dominance breeds fear, prejudice, hatred, warmongering, sexism and xenophobia.
So where has the left been? To be fair, there has been a lot of brave, persistent campaigning. The NUJ has been taking on Murdoch since he purged the unions in Wapping, working with the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom. Together with academics and backbench MPs such as Tom Watson, it has plugged away with research, analysis and proposals and kept issues of media ethics, ownership and accountability on the political radar. More recently, campaigning organisations such as 38 Degrees and Avaaz have taken up the issue – and of course it would still be lingering in political backwaters without determined pursuit by the Guardian.
It is striking, though, that many mainstream progressive figures and organisations have been slow to put their heads above the parapet. Ed Miliband appeared to face a choice between challenging News International or abandoning future hopes for his leadership before he was prepared to speak out. Elsewhere, myriad campaigning groups have by and large acted like media ethics and accountability is none of their business, even though a diverse and democratic, free and accountable media is fundamental to creating the bedrock of public understanding needed for action on progressive issues.
This reflects the enormous imbalance of power between politicians and civil society on one side, and Murdoch, the rest of the right-wing press, and the economic and commercial interests they represent on the other. Many a left-wing politician – from Tony Benn onwards – has learnt the hard way about the risks of going in alone against Murdoch and the right-wing media.
Anthony Barnett, in his analysis of the recent events, points to ‘a collusion of party power with Murdoch’s influence’ resulting from the cohabitation of politicians, journalists and media owners in the same close-knit, incestuous political class. Add to this the police collusion in protecting corporate media interests, and we start to see how Murdoch and other media moguls have been able to suppress criticism of the so-called ‘normal’ operation of a free press.
Of even greater concern is the growing dependence of interest groups on the media as a source of power. Putting out a press release and securing a story is, in the short-term, far easier than the long, hard slog of reaching out to people and communities and getting them on board with your campaign – or the even harder slog of running participative, democratic and deliberative processes that engage and empower people in a way that gives them a voice in and power over organisational strategies and priorities.
The widespread silence of the progressive ecosystem can therefore be seen as evidence of a wider failing on the part of our civil society to value empowerment and support the building of a real counter-power to prevailing economic and political forces.
Hopefully, if our interviews with Len McCluskey and Mark Serwotka (page 16) are anything to go by, this could be starting to change. In these and other articles in this issue, we see evidence of the growth of a more involving, participative and movement-based politics, and a willingness to act outside narrow interest areas in solidarity with others, on issues across the whole spectrum of progressive concerns.
The discussion on media reform is already producing new proposals on ownership and plurality, on journalistic ethics and freedoms, and how to fund a diverse, plural and independent media. There is great potential for this to trigger real transformation in the British media and politics, rather than a return to business as usual as we have seen with the banks. But this can only be realised if civil society urgently comes together around a common agenda for media reform – and in active support of its vocal advocates.