Red Pepper » Editorials

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.

Why the future isn’t working

admin — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 14:00:56 +0000

Greece’s ‘troika’ of creditors – the European Commission, European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – has demanded that the Athens government introduce a six-day working week as part of the terms for the country’s second bailout. Those Greek workers who still have full time jobs already work the longest hours in the EU. Yet now the austerity technocrats are ordering them to work even longer and harder to pay off the bankers’ debts.
It is not just in Greece that longer hours are heralded as a solution to capitalism’s crisis. Britannia Unchained, the recent book by five Tory MPs from the 2010 intake, claimed that ‘the British are among the worst idlers in the world’. They bemoaned the country’s low work hours and early retirement age and ended by lamenting ‘the lost virtue of hard graft’. The authors render invisible the vast amount of labour that takes place outside official working hours.
On 20 October the TUC is holding a mass march for ‘a future that works’. There are many problems with work today: unemployment, low wages, precarious and temporary employment. Struggles for ‘more and better jobs’ are important. That is why we begin our ‘beyond work’ section by surveying current trends in industrial planning and look at the limits and omissions of these.
But even jobs with relatively ‘decent’ terms and conditions often monopolise too much of people’s lives. It isn’t just Britannia Unchained that valorises hard work and long hours – the work ethic pervades current thinking. Work, as defined by the labour market, is accepted as an obligation of citizenship – and the main way in which people are offered a role in society.
People’s desire to contribute to the common good, or their dreams of accomplishment, are only offered realisation through waged work – even though its prime purpose is not to produce social wealth but private surplus value: profit. Work has occupied the imaginations of both the political right and the left. When envisaging the future, social movements should not just consider how to make work better but also how to move beyond the wage contract.
The future cannot be postponed; it must be built today. If we want an alternative tomorrow we must find a way to reach it in our current struggles. To borrow Kathi Weeks’ phrase we must make ‘utopian demands’ – ones which offer concrete goals but can also act as a bridge towards transformation.
Such ideas are easy to describe and far harder to put into practice, but demands that point to a world beyond the wage already exist. Calling for shorter working hours without a reduction in wages is just such an idea. A 30-hour working week would help address some of the problems of underemployment and overwork. In addition it also challenges accepted ideas about the role of work in relation to other activities. While a shorter week may seem a moderate demand, it opens up new questions and critiques, and therefore offers a possible way towards more radical aspirations.
In our section looking beyond work Red Pepper also offers some moderate demands with potentially radical ends – demands like food sovereignty which aim to give people control over the material elements of their life and collectively reclaim food from the market. Or a citizen’s income which, like the women’s movement, recognises the labour involved in reproduction and also takes an imaginative step further, to think of a life outside of wage work.
We explore neighbourhood assemblies in Spain, which are beginning to root themselves in the day to day organising of local activities: spawning co-ops and action groups. Such creative new forms of co-operation outside of the workplace open up the possibility of a wider challenge to capital.
And in our essay, Hilary Wainwright highlights examples of trade union activity in the workplace that aren’t just organising for better terms and conditions but challenging the very purpose of work. She explores what it would mean for industrial policies to be devised with the purpose of releasing the social creativity of labour, whether in the workplace or not.
The disparate ideas we point to are connected by a creativity that is neither proprietary nor patented, by a labour that is neither individual nor alienated. The crisis of capital is not abating, and in this moment of post-Occupy strategising an imaginative leap beyond work can link current goals with future hopes.
Subcomandante Marcos said the society for which the Zapatistas struggle would be like a cinema programme in which they could choose to live a different film every day – and that the reason they have risen in revolt is that for the past 500 years they have been forced to live the same film over and over again. We must look beyond the screen of work to other possibilities and horizons. An alternative future is not based on working, but enabling creative and productive activity to occur beyond selling our creativity on the market.

Atos sponsors the Paralympics? It’s enough to make you scream

admin — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 19:42:05 +0000

The US humourist Tom Lehrer famously greeted the news that Henry Kissinger had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 by declaring that satire was dead. The sponsorship of the 2012 Paralympic Games by Atos provokes a similar sentiment. For this is the very corporation that has been responsible for throwing hundreds of thousands of people with physical and mental impairments into the trauma of a compulsory ‘work capability assessment’ with the clearly political objective of slashing the benefits bill.
Terminally ill? What kind of excuse is that? Get to work. Tragically, the callous and frequently incompetent assessments have resulted in a spate of suicides. Welcome to the Paralympics, in association with the people who are making the lives of disabled people a living hell.
No doubt the Games will see a chorus of fatuous right-wing commentators saying that it shows what the disabled are capable of doing when they put their minds to something (with the pig-ignorant implication that most disabled people are just too lazy to work or live independently). Competitors from across the world will be coming to a country where disabled people are facing a media-fuelled climate of hostility that has seen disability hate crime reach record levels and an unprecedented series of government attacks, the latest of which include the plan to scrap the disability living allowance and the closure of at least half the Remploy factories, throwing thousands of disabled people out of work.
While the rich reward themselves with tax cuts and the banks carry on as normal, the people most in need of assistance from the state are punished for a crisis they had nothing to do with creating. It really is enough to make you scream. (Ironically, a version of Munch’s iconic painting parodied on our cover has just been sold for $119.9 million to a billionaire New York financier.)
But the scream is only the beginning. Because although they might be in a vulnerable position, the role played by disabled groups, far from being one of passive victims, is exemplary for the forceful and innovative forms of activism – both online and offline – and for the ability to lead collective resistance and direct action against the cuts. As we go to press, plans are in preparation to make the experience of disabled people in Britain visible to the international media coming over to cover the Paralympics. So, too, disabled activists will be an important constituency in mobilising for the TUC‑organised demonstration in October. This will be a key opportunity to demonstrate the breadth of popular opposition to the policies of a government that is failing so manifestly, even on its own terms.
David Cameron and George Osborne will be praying that a ‘good’ Olympics distracts everyone’s attention from the incompetence and divisions of the coalition government, which, following the defeat of the Lib Dems’ timetable for Lords reform, appears to be fracturing. Another satirist, Juvenal, mocked the politics of his day for consisting of little more than ‘bread and circuses’. Well, we’ve certainly had our share of circuses in 2012, starting with the queen’s diamond jubilee.
With the likes of Boris Johnson centre stage, all the world can see that Britain is a gold medallist at putting posh buffoons into positions of power. But beneath the fake union-jack-and-beefeaters image of Britishness beloved of the tourist industry (and how much ownership will Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even the English regions feel towards the Olympics?), the reality of life in many parts of 21st-century Britain is grim. How many tourists will make it to those parts of the capital that saw an eruption of rioting, arson and looting this time last year? And how many people from the estates that border on the Olympic Park will have been able to afford a ticket to get inside? This corporate circus clearly isn’t meant for the likes of them.
This is the London the world isn’t meant to see. Families on housing benefit in the capital are being forced out of their homes, some of them out of the city entirely, to places where they have no connections whatsoever. Others are dependent on food parcels to feed themselves. Unemployed young people are forced to work without pay for corporations with turnovers running into billions just to retain their benefits. Cheek-by-jowl with child poverty, unemployment and homelessness sits the extreme affluence of city traders and mega-rich Russian oligarchs. And let’s not forget the Square Mile, international home of corrupt banking and the ‘wild west’ of deregulated financial services.
Of course, Britain is far from alone in experiencing the brutal effects of austerity. If things are bad here, how much worse is it for the Greek people, many of whom can’t even get vital medicines on prescription, while fascists openly threaten violence to immigrant communities? Despite the election of the conservative New Democracy party, the rise of Syriza shows that it is possible to build popular support for an alternative to austerity through active community organising and practical solidarity initiatives. It means challenging assumptions and self-consciously seeking to empower and involve groups who lie beyond the reach of traditional structures of workplace representation, just as the Unite union is tentatively attempting in the UK. As the example of disability activism shows, what at first sight might seem like barriers to effective action can in fact provide the stimuli for creative and innovative forms of resistance.

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.

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.

Every crisis is an opportunity

admin — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:24:51 +0000

Goodbye, 2011 – we will miss you. An upsurge of popular protest against our dysfunctional economic system finally arrived, Western-backed dictatorships in the Arab world were toppled, and social movements began to take on innovative, unfamiliar forms.
One person who will be trying to banish the memories of 2011, though, is Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls. Less than a year after he joined the TUC’s March for the Alternative to say ‘there is an alternative to these cuts’, his first major intervention of 2012 was to announce that ‘we are going to have keep all these cuts’.
The nuances of Balls’ speech, delivered to the Fabian Society on January 14, suggest this is not quite the 180-degree reversal in approach that delighted commentators on the right suggest. What it certainly does represent, however, is a continuation of the slide into a post-political consensus in the UK’s parliamentary politics. In the ever‑shrinking centre-ground that the three major parties inhabit, differences of opinion over fundamental issues are sidelined for an image-based popularity contest in which winning power is an end in itself. And in pursuit of victory in this contest, as evidenced by its refusal to support the pension strike, Labour is willing to trample upon its support base in pursuit of the elusive centre-right floating voter. Miliband’s Labour turns out not so different from New Labour after all.
Labour’s vacillations over the cuts are an exemplar of the deeper crisis of social democratic parties across Europe. If there was any doubt over the matter before, it seems certain now that significant progressive change will continue to be driven by movements outside the formal political process. This issue of Red Pepper contains several critical reflections on the successes, failures, challenges and opportunities in this arena. These range from a discussion of the historical lessons for the Occupy movement and an analysis of the relation between leaderships and grassroots members in trade union mobilisations for N30, to a look at the student movement’s ability to bypass conventional union structures altogether.
Paul Mason outlines the extent to which horizontal forms of political organisation combined with new communication technologies have created protests that repressive regimes find hard to contain, and that also, as he puts it, have a ‘congruence with the human values of the generation’ in a way that increasingly tired traditional left organisations do not. In the surreal contest between Ed Miliband and David Cameron to offer condemnation of ‘predatory’ or ‘crony’ capitalism, or the Economist’s plea to ‘Save the City’ as ‘even the bankers’ supposed allies are putting the boot in’, one can read the far-reaching impacts that the likes of UK Uncut and Occupy are now beginning to have.
There are grounds for caution as well as optimism though. As our essay by Adam Leaver outlines, the past three years have seen the entrenchment of a coalition of big banks, leading politicians and civil servants within the most powerful organs of the British state, which has successfully blocked financial reform. The democratic disconnects hereby created will be hard to overcome. Additionally, as Nina Power’s sobering analysis of the legal system’s crackdown on student protests and Mika Minio-Paluello’s report from Cairo remind us, successful movements usually encounter repression.
The EU’s lurch towards technocracy exemplifies the regressive direction in which official politics may be heading as political elites seek to contain the discontent caused by imposed austerity. There is an urgent need for new ideas that challenge the technocrats’ neoliberal programme, which threatens to undo the social gains of the past half century and erode the basis of mass democracy itself.
This issue seeks to provide a space for discussion of some of the alternative proposals for a route out of the EU’s current crisis, in the hope that we might ‘keep good ideas alive until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable’.
The quote is borrowed from Milton Friedman, who endured decades in the political wilderness during the Bretton Woods era of state capitalism. The coalition of interests that the likes of Friedman provided the intellectual foundations for, later subsumed under the label ‘neoliberalism’, was well placed to take advantage of the collapse of the post-war economic order in the 1970s.
At the time of writing, the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s has, ironically, issued a stark warning over the shortcomings of Europe’s austerity obsession via a rating downgrade of France and Austria. Ernst & Young economists have announced that Britain is back in a double-dip recession and that unemployment will rise to three million in 2012.
As Friedman was fond of saying, every crisis is an opportunity. And as the failures of neoliberal doctrine proffered by both the EU technocrats and the UK’s coalition become more apparent, the space for alternatives is opening further.

Editorial: Democracia real YA!

admin — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:03:30 +0000

December is the month of plastic baubles and technological must-haves, when politicians look to boost flagging growth figures with consumerist intemperance. It is always a fitting month to host the ‘conference of procrastinators’, as Patrick Bond has dubbed the UN climate talks. On this occasion the tired gaggle of government and business negotiators assembled in Durban, South Africa.
2012, the year when the first phase of the Kyoto agreement ends, is upon us. Instead of replacing it with more ambitious targets, the principle of mandatory emission reductions seems about to be abandoned. Climate change is rapidly falling down the list of political concerns, replaced by the crisis of finance – the integral role of capitalism in the climate disaster is conveniently ignored. As always, the vested corporate interests of northern countries will be a major stumbling block. Increasing consumption is the only logic that will hold any sway in Durban.
Richer countries also have the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ in their sights. The now infamous US state department negotiator Todd Stern, whose bullying tactics at Copenhagen 2009 were revealed in the Wikileaks diplomatic cables, expressed his contempt for any claim that there is historic responsibility for climate change. He stated: ‘The sense of guilt or culpability or reparations – I just categorically reject that.’
The facts are, still, terrifying. In 2010, carbon emissions rose by a record amount. We must start to reduce carbon emissions by 2017 if we are to avoid water shortages and mass migration. Current pledged cuts would put us at a 5 degrees celsius temperature change. This would mean large parts of the planet becoming uninhabitable.
Our political elites are so in thrall to private finance that they will not act to save their own citizens. Nowhere is this democratic deficit clearer than South Africa itself. One in six South Africans live in shacks (see our interview with Bandile Mdlalose this issue). Some 2.5 million homes do not have electricity, and companies predict a 125 per cent price increase in the coming years.
Yet despite its energy-poor majority population, South Africa is the world’s 13th-largest carbon emitter. It is part of a bloc of rapidly industrialising countries that have skilfully, if cynically, set up their economies to make carbon trading work for them. You won’t see South Africa fighting for binding emissions targets.
Of course, most of South Africa’s carbon emissions are created by mining and manufacturing commodities for the global North – only 16 per cent of South Africa’s total energy consumption is used by its residents. Both the products and the profits are syphoned off for northern countries, leaving the nation’s citizens with depleted and polluted resources.
This is a government that is failing its people. The ANC, as Vishwas Satgar argues this issue, have become overseers of Afro-neoliberalism. Accompanying this is a narrowing democratic vision: opposition voices are marginalised, politicians are market servants and participation is limited to voting – a particularly inadequate option in a de-facto one party state.
The campaigns of the African climate justice movement find themselves oddly disjointed from the climate negotiations – their demands on jobs, energy poverty and extraction will not even be discussed at a summit concerned with quantitative targets. The climate discussions have always been framed in terms that suit northern elites, though even within these narrow parameters an adequate solution evades them.
The domination of politics by corporate interests extends far beyond the climate talks, as neoliberalism brings its limited market democracy to every arena. In Europe, the IMF, assisted by Europe’s ‘inner core’, is once again asserting its right to dictate national polices. Some solutions politicians refuse to discuss: taxation on the rich, significant losses to banks or credit easing for the poor.
But there is a rising tide of resistance. The largest UK strike of my lifetime took place on 30 November – one organised by unions that are starting to address the dual crises of economy and environment by demanding the creation of one million climate jobs.
And from Romania to Peru, the Occupy movement has spread to 82 countries. Beginning with the indignados in Spain and Greece, the reclaiming of public space for debate and deliberation has been a crucial aim. The participatory politics practised by protesters is far removed from our tick‑box democracies.
In a political system dominated by corporate finance, creating more participatory forms of democracy, although crucial, will not be enough. We also need economic democracy. The challenge to Occupy activists and trade unionists alike is to begin a move towards a democratic economy by collectively organising our own productive forces and striving for cooperative workplaces. To become a regenerating force that creates real democracy, we must also create real economic change.

Explanation not excuses

admin — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:20:35 +0000

After the tidal wave of post-riot pontificating, the media analysis has boiled down in essence to just three words – the acts were ‘mindless’, the actors ‘feral’ and the need is for ‘justice’. True, the words have a certain resonance for some of those who directly experienced, and continue to live with, the riots and their aftermath. It’s hard to see people mugging the injured, looting from charity shops or leaving ordinary families burnt out of their homes without feeling an instinctive revulsion. As Steve Platt comments (Plattitudes, page 8), if sections of the left think that excuses are in order, they are only furthering their isolation.
But excuses aren’t the same as trying to understand the underlying reasons for the summer riots. And if the right sees itself as vindicated by the censorious response, it ought to watch out. Those words of condemnation indict it too. Consider the definitions.
Mindless – 1a) Lacking intelligence or good sense; 1b) Having no intelligent purpose, meaning, or direction. 2) Giving or showing little attention or care; heedless.
If people are treated as though they are mindless, they will live down to expectations. What would a society be like that treated all its young people as bearers of ‘intelligence’ and ‘good sense’, that wanted to invest in giving them ‘purpose, meaning or direction’?
It’s a fair bet that such a society wouldn’t oversee a substantial increase in youth unemployment, scrap education maintenance allowances and treble tuition fees. Surely, if any actions lack ‘intelligence’ or ‘good sense’ and ‘show little attention or care’ to the lives of millions of young people, then they are those of this government.
And it’s not just the government. The neoliberal model of a market-driven society tells people that their worth lies only in their ability to consume more and better. Every day the media flaunts the millionaire lifestyles of footballers and celebrities as the marker of what constitutes ‘success’. Is it any surprise that, in creating aspirations that it is impossible for the vast majority of people to fulfill, a deep well of resentment begins to be stored up that is capable of overflowing onto our streets?
Feral – 1a) Existing in a wild or untamed state. 1b) Having returned to an untamed state from domestication. 2) Of or suggestive of a wild animal; savage.
People are acting like wild animals, as though there were no such thing as society. If the entire policy framework of more than three decades has effectively replaced solidarity, fellow feeling and public-spiritedness with an atomised pattern of isolated individuals in competition with each other, can we really be surprised that a generation of young people who have known nothing else now act without letting a moment’s thought for other people get in the way of getting their hands on what they want?
Ed Miliband should also take note. As Hilary Wainwright argues (page 30), the Labour Party’s founding division between the political (for which read electoral) and the industrial planes continues to hold back the development of a countervailing force based on the unions’ directly political engagement in the community.
And while we’re talking about the ‘wild’ and ‘untamed’ forces in society, let’s not forget the toxic trinity of state, capital and media. The phone-hacking scandal has opened a window of opportunity for thorough-going structural reform. But can our feral elite be tamed?
Justice – 1) Just behaviour or treatment. 2) The quality of being fair and reasonable.
This is perhaps the trickiest to define: what constitutes ‘justice’? Clearly it is a concept that ought to be central to the operation of the law, but something being lawful does not necessarily make it just.
Take the distinction between tax evasion and tax avoidance. The fact that the latter is not technically against the law doesn’t make it any less of an outrage that the richest individuals and wealthiest corporations on the planet – together with black market trading and other corrupt payments – defraud us of well over a trillion dollars globally. Here in the UK, the amount of unrecovered tax is estimated at a staggering £120 billion – money that could go a long way towards avoiding public service cuts.
The government’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. As Richard Murphy points out (page 27), at the same time that we are seeing people given punitive sentences for relatively minor thefts, those who are stealing on a gargantuan scale by squirrelling away money in Swiss banks have effectively been told they can keep most of their ill-gotten gains. How can anyone seriously talk about justice when the very richest in society are pushing for the elimination of the 50p tax rate at the same time as schools, hospitals, and libraries are being starved of cash and millions of children are growing up in poverty?
Justice implies a universal reach – where there is exclusion, there is also injustice. This has a direct bearing on the recent wave of protests about social injustice in Israel (see page 42). Can campaigners really fight effectively for a fairer deal within Israel without also challenging the theft of Palestinian lands and mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people? It’s not just the looters that need to be brought to justice.

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.

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.