Red Pepper

Radical cities: A guide to Nablus, Palestine

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:47:52 +0000

Serving kanafe in Nablus Photo: Sarah Irving
What does it mean to be a ‘radical city’ in Palestine? And for the visitor, what is radical travel? Not so long ago, foreign visitors to the West Bank tended to be activists, journalists, NGO workers or perhaps pilgrims. But the comparative quiet of recent years has seen the New York Times exploring Ramallah’s lively nightlife and the Daily Telegraph’s travel section covering Christmas in Bethlehem (albeit in an article that termed the vicious, land-grabbing Jordan Valley settlements ‘villages’).
Leaving behind Ramallah and Bethlehem, with their expat communities and religious tour groups, what of the West Bank’s other cities? Sleepy desert Jericho? Hebron, struggling to maintain its culture and economy under the weight of soldiers and fanatical settlers? Jenin, with its pioneering fair trade organisations, understated and beautiful old city and the defiant Freedom Theatre in the heart of its refugee camp? Invited to pick a ‘radical city’, I chose Nablus.
Nablus, in the northern West Bank, is one of Palestine’s largest cities. It was once an important stopping-point on trade routes between Jaffa or Jerusalem and Damascus. It was especially famous for its soap, made using olive oil from the surrounding villages. In the 18th and 19th centuries major local families such as the Abdul-Hadis, Tuqans, Arafats and Shaka’as (whose names will still be familiar to any student of Palestinian politics or culture) built ornate palaces, partly on the profits of the soap trade. Nowadays, two factories open sporadically, and are most likely to welcome visitors in the morning. Inside, the liquid soap is poured onto wide floors to solidify, before being cut, stamped and stacked into high, intricate towers to dry.
Nablus’s historical roads through the Levantine hills have been cut by international borders, the separation wall and a series of Israeli checkpoints. This sense of isolation was reinforced in 2002, when a massive Israeli invasion of the West Bank cut off Nablus from outside contact. The old city was besieged and placed under curfew, while Palestinian fighters were chased through its crowded homes by the simple tactic of blasting holes in wall after wall. Next to the site of the Al-Shu’bi
home , a plaque on the wall commemorates the nine members of the family who were crushed to death by Israeli military bulldozers. The old city’s walls are still plastered with martyr posters – some of young fighters brandishing their weapons, others showing the children and old people who just as easily become victims of the Israeli military.
Nablus’s history isn’t just that of the Israeli occupation, although the two are closely meshed. Locals may point out the
old city window from which Yasser Arafat is said to have leapt sometime in the late 1960s, fleeing Israeli soldiers. At the magnificent Orthodox church of Bir Yaqub (Jacob’s
Well) , Father Justinus happily shows visitors the architectural glories of the building he has painstakingly renovated over the last 30 years – but also indicates the charred spot where his predecessor was hacked to death and burned by settlers in 1979. At Tel Balata , massive Canaanite walls and temple foundations attest to Nablus’s antiquity; just beyond the archaeological site is the huge, overcrowded Balata refugee camp.
But Nabulsis are also keen to emphasise the less political attractions of their city. Beautifully-preserved Roman coffins are on display at two sites on the edges of the city, and the Roman theatre is set into the side of the hill next to the Ottoman souq. The churches and mosques of Nablus are a mix of Byzantine, Mamluk and Ottoman architecture, and the old city’s bustling
Market (where you can buy everything from fake designer trainers to herbal remedies, precisely prescribed by a man who studied his craft in Southampton) is peppered with intriguing little shrines and tombs of half-forgotten local Islamic saints and teachers. The famous Al-Aqsa bakery serves hot, fresh kanafe (the opulent sweet for which Nablus is famous) to an unseemly scrum of customers. And for the true pleasure-seeker, Nablus is home to two traditional Turkish baths.
The 17th-century Hammam Ash-Shefa occasionally hosts music nights and even Palfest literary events in its luxurious lounge. The rest of the time male or female customers (depending on the day of the week) can enjoy shisha, Arabic coffee and pastries, before or after steaming themselves and being pummelled by an over-enthusiastic masseur. Nablus is even home to Palestine’s first slow food convivium, the Bait Al-Karama (‘House of Dignity’) cookery school run by a local women’s NGO in a beautifully-restored building in the old city.
Golda Meir told the Sunday Times in 1969 that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian people’, and in December 2011 Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich repeated the line, calling the Palestinians an ‘invented’ people. Perhaps, then, to visit Palestine is in itself a radical act. To recognise Palestinian culture for what it is – a rich, vibrant, living indigenous tradition in this land – is to defy the project of the settlers and of the military occupation, with their aims of wiping Palestine and its people off the map, or of appropriating convenient pieces of Palestinian culture for their own ends.

Practicalities
Nablus can easily be reached by bus or shared or private taxi from Ramallah (or, via Ramallah, Jerusalem). A range of accommodation is now available in the city, from medium/upper range hotels such as the Yasmeen (www.alyasmeen.com), in the heart of the old city, or the Al-Qasr in Rafidia (www.alqaserhotel.com/firstie), to budget hotels like the Crystal (Hotel Crystal Motel on Facebook), or youth hostel-style options such as Damascus House and the International Friends Guesthouse (www.guesthouse.ps).
Nablus has little public nightlife, although Nablus The Culture (www.nablusculture.ps) runs occasional concerts and literary events and the park near the city centre sometimes hosts family concerts. Eating out ranges from high-end choices such as the Qasr Al-Jabi, Saleem Afandi or Saraya restaurants to street stalls serving kebabs or felafel. The Rafidia area and streets around An-Najah University are also home to plenty of cafes.
Dream Tours (www.dreamtours.ps) and West Bank Tours (www.westbanktours.com) are local companies that can organise day trips, longer visits and accommodation and have fluent speakers of English on their staff.

Sarah Irving is the author of the Bradt Guide to Palestine. Red Pepper reader offer: use the coupon code RP35 at www.bradtguides.com to receive a 35% discount off the retail price of £15.99 (p&p free to UK addresses). Sarah Irving also runs palestineguesthouse.com, which lists small-scale and community tourist accommodation in Palestine

The students’ moment

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:40:53 +0000

Photo: Andrew Moss Photography
The past two years have been a lesson in the necessity and resilience of mass dissent. It is necessary because after 30 years of Thatcherism, and no serious parliamentary opposition, the government is embarking on a programme that will end the public sector as we know it, throwing our increasingly improvised daily lives open to the logic of the market, just as that logic has become morally – and literally – bankrupt.
And it is resilient primarily because it began with a mass movement of young people too young to remember a time when real alternatives existed. Any force capable of mobilising students in 2010 would not have been put off by anything as trivial as a defeat in parliament.
This wave of dissent began after the ‘end of history’, and has continued to grow despite being encumbered by Thatcherite anti-union legislation and repressed in the streets. It has spawned the beginnings of an ideological renewal for the left, given trade unions a kick-start and created thousands of activists and different campaigns.
Transform or bypass
The weaknesses that exist within this movement lie not in a failure of collective will or ideological critique, but in the failure of these things to permeate ‘our’ institutions. Part of this is a failure of the organised left to translate grassroots radicalisation into bureaucratic weight. All eyes are on Occupy, anarchists and the largely unaligned student activist networks (such as the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts, or NCAFC) – not on the paper sellers, for whom a cycle of recruitment and factioneering still often prevails.
Unlabelled grassroots pressure, driven by the sheer scale of the assault on pensions, may bring us a few days of large strike action per year. But in order to bring the government down and pose a credible alternative to further neoliberal retrenchment (the only real goal that serious leftists can now have), a cohesive political project is needed, capable either of transforming the institutions of the left, or bypassing them altogether.
Failure to organise rapidly, properly and imaginatively will mean the end of public education and the welfare state. Veterans of previous great waves of working class and anti-capitalist dissent will be well acquainted with the timid trade union leader and the careerist NUS president. The superficial reappearance of such characters is only half of the story: in reality the state of trade and student unions – let alone the Labour Party – is now far worse than it has ever been.
Supporting, not organising
The outright hostility of the NUS leadership that characterised the student revolt of 2010 has abated in recent months following the election of a more sympathetic president, whose manifesto included a call for a national demonstration. But this pledge has gone unimplemented, putting the NUS in the absurd position of supporting the NCAFC-organised demonstration on November 9 2011, but, as a large organisation with massive resources and hundreds of staff, refusing to actually organise it.
In the end, the demonstration was funded as much by PCS as by NUS, and the whole thing was done on a little under 5 per cent of the cash, and almost none of the staff support, that went into the 10 November demonstration in 2010 prior to the fees vote.
In what seemed to sum up what was wrong with much of the official student movement, a flurry of student unions threatened to pull out of the demonstration just days ahead of it, citing mistimed risk assessments and the failure of the NCAFC – a campaign with barely any money and no staff – to, among other things, take out public liability insurance that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds.
In the midst of the biggest assault on the welfare state ever, with the government’s higher education white paper proposing to privatise, cut and fence off universities, and further cuts to further education colleges coming through, many unions hid behind their trustee board structures, clung to the idea that inaction was preferable to trying without a guarantee of success, and in some cases merely shrugged, as if mobilising for a national demo to defend education and the welfare state was an odd kind of thing for a students’ union to be doing.
Rapidly generalising
Within this context, the ability of the NCAFC to mobilise about 10,000 people – as it did on 9 November – was a significant achievement, testament to the durability and reach of the NCAFC and to the continued, and rapidly generalising, anger among students ahead of the 30 November strike action. If NUS had organised the protest itself, turnout may have been closer to 100,000.
As it was, we put the higher education white paper debate on the agenda, kept some of the student movement alive, and built momentum for N30. The ‘total policing’ of the demonstration itself, unpreventable for the NCAFC as organisers, is something that we must tactically digest in the coming months.
The alternative strategy, pioneered by Labour-aligned NUS leaders while their party was in power, of lobbying for crumbs from the table, is taken seriously by barely anyone under the current government. Unless NUS moves rapidly to mobilise again, the prevailing political culture within it will have twice fallen victim to its own lies: that mass mobilisation and direct action, backed up with serious political demands, are ‘dinosaur tactics’ from decades ago, used only by the hard left to lose valiantly.
Echoes of this rhetoric can be found throughout the Labour Party and its commentariat, and parallel structural and legal shifts can be found in the trade unions. The legacy of Thatcher and Blair has pushed the student movement and the labour movement to the brink of inertial catastrophe.
That is the real issue at stake in 2012: it is not a question of whether ‘the rest’ can keep up with ‘the students’ in their various Uncut or Occupy guises, but whether or not the mass unrest of the past 18 months can organise itself as a movement, and is able to reclaim the political ground that has been lost to Blairism and its heirs.
It is a moment in which student activists must take seriously the fight for bread and butter issues on their campuses as well as the broader battles, and it is a question to which the old organised left may not have a timely answer.
Michael Chessum is a co-founder of NCAFC and a member of the NUS national executive council. Visit www.anticuts.com for more details

Greece: how to avoid a social default

admin — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:50:08 +0000

On Sunday 12 February, the people of Greece, in demonstrations and street fights all over the country, expressed in a massive, collective and heroic way their anger against the terms of the new loan agreement dictated by the ‘troika’ (the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund).

Workers, youth, students filled the streets with rage, defying extreme aggression by the police, setting another example of struggle and solidarity.

Greece is becoming the test site for an extreme case of neoliberal social engineering. The terms of the new bailout package equal a carpet bombing of whatever is left of collective social rights, and represent an extreme attempt to push wage levels and the workplace situation back to the 1960s.

Terms of the bailout

Under the terms of the new agreement, there are going to be drastic changes. The minimum wage is going to be reduced by 22 per cent. For new workers under 25, the reduction will reach 32 per cent.

This reduction is also going to affect all other private sector employees covered by collective contracts and agreements. Most sectors will see wage reductions of up to 50 per cent – on top of drastic pay cuts already made.

All pensions are going to be reduced by more than 15 per cent – a reduction again coming on top of other reductions imposed earlier. Moreover, the terms of the agreement demand a new overhaul of the pension system, paving the way for more reductions and the raising of the pension age.

All forms of social spending are going to be drastically cut, including funds for hospitals and health coverage and social benefits. Hospitals are already in a critical condition thanks to earlier cuts, so this new wave of cuts is expected to lead to a dramatic deterioration.

A new wave of privatisations is demanded, including the sale of crucial infrastructure such as ports and airports, and full privatisation of public utilities. And a new wave of lay-offs of public sector employees is going to be implemented, helped by a wave of closures of schools and other public institutions.

Race to the bottom

The social cost of this transformation is going to be immense. For the first time since the second world war, large parts of Greek society are facing the danger of extreme pauperisation.

The first signs are already here: increased homelessness, soup kitchens, and a wave of people emigrating from Greece in search for employment. And things are only going to get worse as traditional forms of solidarity, mainly through family relations, can no longer cope with the situation.

It is obvious that most of these measures have little or nothing to do with dealing with Greece’s debt. Indeed, private sector wage reductions are reducing pension contributions, leading to more deficits. What is at stake is an attempt from the part of the EU-IMF-ECB troika and leading factions of the Greek bourgeoisie to violently impose social ‘regime change’ in Greece.

According to the dominant narrative, the problem with Greece is a chronic lack of export competitiveness, which demands a new approach based on cheap labour and doing away with any environmental restrictions, urban planning regulations and archeological protections that could discourage potential investors. The aim is to turn Greece into one big Special Economic Zone for investors.

What is not mentioned in this narrative, however, is not only that the social cost is going to be tremendous, but that it would lead to a hopeless ‘race to the bottom’, since there are always going to be countries, even in the close vicinity such as Bulgaria, with lower wages.

Competitiveness does not rely only on labour cost but also on productivity, and this has to do with infrastructure, knowledge, collective experience and ability – exactly what is being dramatically eroded by the current economic and social situation in Greece.

What is missing from this narrative is the crisis of the eurozone and of the whole European integration project. It is becoming obvious that the problem is the euro, a common currency in a region marked by great divergences.

The euro in a previous period functioned as a lever for capitalist restructuring through competitive pressure. At the same time it created increased imbalances, mainly to the benefit of European core countries such as Germany.

In a period of capitalist crisis, the euro only makes things worse, increasing imbalances and deteriorating the sovereign debt crisis. That is why the crisis of the eurozone is a crucial aspect of the current global capitalist crisis, and one of the main failures of neoliberalism.

Authoritarian mutation

At the same time, the European Union is going through a reactionary and authoritarian mutation. This is the new logic of European economic governance, as inscribed in the proposed new fiscal euro-treaty.

According to this, member states are going to include austerity measures such as balanced budgets in their national constitutions. European Union mechanisms will have the power to intervene and impose huge fines and funding cuts whenever they think that a member state is not prudent enough with its finances.

To this end the ‘expertise’ of the IMF in imposing austerity and privatisation is also used. The prevailing logic is one of limited sovereignty. Greece is a testing ground for this.

Under the terms of the troika bailout packages, there are already supervision mechanisms in place in all Greek government ministries, dictating policies in an almost neocolonial way. This is going to be the norm if the logic of this European economic governance is imposed.

Talking about a ‘democratic deficit’ is not enough. What we are dealing with is an aggressive attempt toward a post-democratic condition, with limited sovereignty and accountability and little or no room for political debate regarding economic policy, since these are to be dictated by markets through the mechanisms of EU supervision. Seeing ex-ECB central bankers such as Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos becoming prime ministers is more than symbolic.

But putting the blame only on the current configuration of the EU is also not enough. The most aggressive sectors of Greek capital (banks, construction, tourism, shipping industry, energy) are openly supporting its strategy.

Although sectors of capital have suffered from the prolonged recession, and despite the fact that the crisis has curtailed plans for a leading role in the Balkans, the dominant fractions are backing austerity and workplace despotism, doing away with all forms of workers’ rights as a means to regain profitability.

However, an increase in exports cannot possibly compensate for the shrinking of domestic demand, which can affect even dominant sectors of capital.

The Papademos government has been trying to pass the terms of this devastating austerity package by ideologically blackmailing Greek society through the threat of default and exit from the eurozone. But the question is not if Greece is going to default, but how.

The measures imposed are simply leading to some form of creditor-led default. They have already taken the steps of debt restructuring and a ‘haircut’ of the previous debt – with society taking the full cost.

Radical alternatives

That is why Greece defaulting on its own sovereign terms – that is, choosing the immediate stoppage of debt payments and of annulment of debt – is the only viable way to avoid social default. It is also necessary to immediately exit the eurozone.

Stopping debt payments and reclaiming monetary sovereignty will help public spending on immediate social needs and will help stop the erosion of the productive base by imports. This is not a nationalist choice, as some tendencies of the Greek and European left have argued, but the only way to fight the systemic violence of the current policies of the EU.

In fact it is truly internationalist, in the sense of being the first step toward dismantling the aggressive neoliberal monetary and political configuration of the EU – something which is obviously in the interest of the subaltern classes all over Europe.

Stopping debt payments and exiting the Euro are not simple technical solutions. They must be part of a broader set of necessary radical measures, which must include nationalisation of banks and critical infrastructure, capital controls and income redistribution.

But even these measures are not enough. What is needed is a radical alternative economic paradigm in a non-capitalist direction. It must be based on public ownership, new forms of democratic planning and workers’ control, alternative non-commercial distribution networks, and a collective effort toward regaining control of social productive capabilities.

Rethinking the possibility of such radical alternatives is not a simple intellectual exercise. It is also an urgent political need.

Against the current ideological blackmail and the attempt by the government, the ruling classes and the EU to present extreme austerity as the only solution, what is needed is not just to say no to austerity but to bring back confidence to the possibility of alternatives.

Urgent challenges

Hegemony, in the last instance, is about who has the ability to articulate a coherent discourse about how a country and a society is going to produce, cater for social needs, be organised and governed. The crisis of neoliberal hegemony is indeed opening up a political and ideological space for the emergence of such a counter-hegemonic alternative – but it is not going to last forever. In the absence of a positive vision the ruling classes are aiming at individualised desperation and sense of defeat as a means to maintain dominance.

Rebuilding people’s confidence in the possibility of alternatives requires the collective work for a radical programme based upon the experiences emerging on the terrain of struggle. This is one of the most urgent challenges the Greek left is facing.

Despite the fact that a coalition government of ‘national unity’ under Papademos was practically imposed in November, the political crisis is far from over. Pasok (the Socialist Party) is facing its biggest crisis ever, while the conservative New Democracy is facing increased pressure from its base not to accept the measures, and the far-right have exited the coalition government.

22 members of parliament from Pasok and 21 from New Democracy voted against the loan agreement. They were subsequently expelled from their respective parties, marking a new phase in an open political crisis.

The extreme pressures from the troika, with functionaries of the IMF such as Poul Thomsen acting as colonial governors, only makes things worse. Even though the agreement was passed through parliament, since Pasok and New Democracy had a combined majority that could compensate for dissenting parliamentarians, the political system is being stressed to its limits.

Attempts to create new political parties are under way, including an attempt toward a ‘Papademos’ party that could gather all those supporting ‘regime change,’ but they are far from gaining any momentum.

In such a conjuncture the left is getting increased support, but at the same time showing the limits of its strategy and programme.

Syriza (Coalition of the Radical Left) is still insisting on the fantasy of a democratic EU and refuses to bring forward demands such as the exit from the euro. The KKE (the Communist Party) despite its radical anti-capitalist and anti-EU positions, has sectarian tactics and underestimates the necessity of an immediate transitory program.

Antarsya, the anti-capitalist left formation, has played an important role in the struggles and in articulating political goals such as the annulment of debt and the exit from the euro – but it does not have the necessary access to large layers of the subaltern classes.

Radical recomposition

What is needed is a radical recomposition of the Greek left, both in the sense of the collective elaboration of a radical alternative that can create the possibility of counter-hegemony, and of a radical Left Front that could represent the emerging new subaltern unity evident in mass demonstrations and strikes, in forms of self-organisation, in networks of solidarity and in collective experiences of struggle.

Currently Greece is entering a new phase of a protracted ‘people’s war’ against the policies of the troika. The 48-hour general strike on 10 and 11 February and the mass demonstrations and street clashes on 12 February have become the new turning points in the struggle.

This people’s war is far from over. Facing the danger of an extreme historical reverse, we refuse to despair. We insist on the ‘windows of opportunity’ for social change the current situation opens. We shall fight to the end.

Panagiotis Sotiris lives on the island of Crete, Greece. This article first appeared in The Bullet, produced by Canada’s Socialist Project.

Defending human rights defenders

James O'Nions — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:04:49 +0000

Human rights lawyers in Britain may face the scorn of the Daily Mail and David Cameron, but we don’t get killed for our activities. Elsewhere in the world the decision to devote one’s professional skills to the defence of human rights means taking real risks – putting life, liberty, family and livelihoods on the line.
The National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) in the Philippines is committed to using legal strategies to stand up for the marginalised and oppressed – rural communities, workers, fishing communities, the urban poor, indigenous communities, political groups and human rights defenders. They are currently representing the families of two ‘disappeared’ students.
Part of that process has involved issuing a warrant for the arrest of retired major general Jovito Palparan, a fugitive who is avoiding prosecution and shielded by the authorities.
They represent the Morong 43, health workers who, while carrying out medical training, were accused of being members of the New People’s Army, arrested and detained in appalling conditions for 10 months without any trial. They are still fighting to clear their names.
An accusation that human rights defenders are really terrorists is just one of the weapons used by repressive states to silence their critics. But the NUPL finds itself defending its own members as well as its clients. Twenty-seven lawyers have been killed extra-judicially since January 2001.
Attorney Juvy Magsino of Mindoro, a vocal advocate against military abuses and mining projects, was riddled with bullets while driving her car. Attorney Tersita Vidamo was handling controversial land and labour disputes at the time she was shot.
Lawyer members of the NUPL were among the dead in the infamous Maguindanao massacre in November 2009 when 58 people including 34 journalists were killed by political opponents. NUPL secretary-general Edre Olalia says: ‘In the Philippines, the security forces pound on the lawyers, especially human rights lawyers.’
Human rights defenders from the Philippines, Dagestan, Belarus, Colombia, Palestine, Swaziland and Syria will be coming together at an event on 24 February, Defending Human Rights Defenders. Organised by the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers in association with Amnesty International and European Lawyers for Democracy and Human Rights and supported by solidarity campaigns, the conference will consider extra-judicial killings, censorship, imprisonment and criminalisation.
The delegates will have an opportunity to share experiences and publicise their struggles. Most importantly, we will discuss how we can provide practical solidarity to all of our comrades who regularly challenge human rights abuses, and have to face the state acting with impunity.
While it is true that in mainland Britain, lawyers, journalists and other activists can stand up for human rights without fear of significant consequences, in Northern Ireland that was not the case. We remember our comrades Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson, who were murdered for the crime of representing their clients, as well as journalists and other activists who lost their lives in defence of human rights. This conference is dedicated to their memories, as well as those we have lost around the world.

For more on the conference, see the website of the Haldane Society. A version of this blog post was originally published in the Morning Star.

Appeal for solidarity with the people of Greece

Michael — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:16:05 +0000

The people of Greece face an unprecedented economic and political crisis. They are being driven to poverty and mass unemployment by the demands of the so-called Troika – the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund which has imposed Lucas Papademos, formerly of Vice-President of the ECB, as Prime Minister.

Hospitals in Greece are running out of basic medicines, nearly half of all young people are unemployed, workers in some sectors have not been paid for months, and many are forced to resort to soup kitchens or scavenge from rubbish dumps.

Now the Troika demands a cut of 23 per cent to the minimum wage, the sacking of tens of thousands of public sector workers and the decimation of pensions which have already lost nearly 50 per cent of their value. International capital is asset stripping an entire country and ripping apart its social fabric.

Greece is at the cutting edge of the austerity measures that are being introduced across Europe. All the evidence shows that while these measures may protect the interests of the rich, they just make matters worse for the majority of the population. What happens in Greece today cliwill see in Portugal tomorrow and in Ireland the day after. In Britain, the Coalition government is pursuing similar measures which will see workers earnings cut, working longer for a smaller pension, and the dismantling of the NHS along with other public services.

Mikis Theodorakis, famous Greek composer of Zorba’s Dance, and Manolis Glezos, veteran resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation, have issued a statement calling for a European Front to defend the people of Greece and all those facing austerity.

The Coalition of Resistance and the People’s Charter have decided to support this call and agreed to work with trades unions, campaigns and parties across Europe to establish a European Solidarity Campaign to defend the people of Greece. The campaign aims to organise solidarity and raise practical support for the people of Greece; they cannot be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not responsible.

Signatories so far include Tony Benn, Michelle Stanistreet, Len McCluskey and Mark Serwotka. To add your name click here.

Tonight on TV: “Tweets from Tahrir”

Michael — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 11:14:58 +0000

It’s a documentary inspired by Tweets from Tahrir, called Tweets from Tahrir! It airs on Al Jazeera English at 8pm in the UK, 10pm Cairo time. We saw it at a preview on Monday – it’s a great film, actually moving in places, and funny at times too. It’s well worth watching, especially if you’ve read the book to put faces to Twitter handles.

In the UK Al Jazeera is channel 514 on Sky or 89 on Freeview. It’s also streamed live online here: http://www.aljazeera.com/watch_now/

The film doesn’t just cover the 18 days but the year since (I did some extra research work for Al Jazeera). It has been masterfully put together by Adib Nessim.

Watch!

Could you be our new website editor?

James O'Nions — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:46:46 +0000

Red Pepper’s website is becoming an increasingly important part of the way our magazine works. We’re now looking for a volunteer editor to be the driving force behind making it a real resource for the left. You would join our existing collective of five volunteer editors, but with specific responsibility for the website. If you have a thoughtful approach to left politics, some experience of writing, editing or journalism, a passion for changing the world and experience of organising to bring that about, we want to hear from you.

The position is one of real responsibility, with the opportunity to help shape the future of Red Pepper. We would like to particularly encourage women and those from ethnic minority backgrounds to apply. Closing date Monday 19 March.

To find out more, download the job description and person specification (pdf).

Cycle city Kathmandu

James O'Nions — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 19:51:05 +0000

Commuting in Kathmandu is difficult, at best. Taxis are extortionately priced, buses are overcrowded, and the city is big enough that walking is often impractical. Increasingly, people are turning to bicycles as a remedy. Proponents are now emphasising the positive effects of cycling in terms of ecology, Nepali independence and improving safety on the streets. It is a dangerous, yet remarkably political mode of transport.

Unlike campaign groups that focus on the macrocosm of global climate change, Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 focuses on the city itself. Member Shail Shrestha describes Kathmandu’s air as ‘unimaginably polluted’, but adds that this pollution is caused by those who can afford private transport, while those who can’t are affected most – witness for example the many Nepalis who live in shacks on the ring road, a highway that leaves passers-by coughing from the fumes of cars, buses and motorbikes.

Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 sees its campaign as rallying against social inequality. As another member, Rajan Kathet, says: ‘The “have nots” have always been victimised by the “haves”.’ Shrestha believes that Nepal can set an example for other countries to follow: ‘If a developing country does this [promotes cycling], it could be an example for countries that pollute.’

Nepal is currently in the midst of a fuel shortage. Schools, small businesses and organisations are struggling to get fuel for their vehicles. There are mile-long queues at every petrol station. Nepali independence activists claim that fuel dependency on neighbouring India is inhibiting progress in Nepal. The fuel shortage is caused, they claim, by deficit and corruption within the Nepal Oil Corporation, which is entirely dependent on the Indian Oil Corporation—to which it is in debt. In order to eradicate this debt, the Nepali Oil Corporation last week announced they would add 10 Rupees (approximately 9 pence) to every litre of fuel sold. Even in UK terms, this is no small amount. It would make fuel unaffordable for many Nepalis. Fortunately the decision was reversed following a Kathmandu-wide strike at the end of January, led by 13 of the city’s Students’ Unions.

Many social organisations in Nepal talk about ‘improving the country’ in terms of making it fuel-independent. The strike action only implies a general consensus that greater sovereignty would be beneficial. Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 is instead keen to ‘do action’. It deems cycling to be the best way to move away from fuel dependence. Indeed, in the context of a fuel shortage, cycling is being increasingly recognised as a cheap, accessible and non-polluting way to keep the city operating. Cycling in Kathmandu has become synonymous with freedom.

Yet safety remains a major concern. Just a few months ago, the revered wildlife conservationist, Dr Pralad Yonzon, was killed whilst cycling on the road in Kathmandu. Refusing to be scared off by the number of accidents, Kathmandu Cycle City 2020 held a rally to promote better visibility and to encourage more people to use bicycles instead of motorbikes.

Although bicycles are in fact generally safer than motorbikes in Kathmandu, they are seen as less fashionable among younger Nepalis. Shrestha explains that, ‘there is an idea that people who cycle are those who can’t afford [motor]bikes’. By highlighting the number of deaths on motorbikes compared to those on bicycles, the group are hoping to challenge this belief.

Promoting cycling on such dangerous streets is the first hurdle that the group have to overcome. On January 11, the group gained one of their first wins. Following extensive lobbying by activists, the government announced that they intend to build cycle lanes on all roads over 22 metres wide. Meanwhile the number of cyclists in Kathmandu has risen since the start of the campaign.

The group’s main aim is that Kathmandu becomes a bicycle-friendly city by 2020. Along the way, they are making a real difference to regular people’s lives and to Nepal as a whole. With advocates like Kathet and Shrestha, it won’t be long before more Kathmanduites will, as the group’s motto says, ‘ride with pride’.

Find out more on Kathmandu Cycle City 2020’s website.

An ‘excess of democracy’: what two generations of radicals can learn from each other

admin — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:21:21 +0000

Photo: Sven Loach
The ability of the Occupy movement to create platforms outside our closed political system to force open a debate on inequality, the taboo at the heart of the financial crisis, is impressive. It is a new source of political creativity from which we all have much to learn.

At the same time, no veteran of the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s can help but be struck by similarities. There’s the same strong sense of power from below that comes from the dependence of the powerful on those they dominate or exploit. There’s the creative combination of personal and collective change, and the bringing together of resistance with experiments in creating alternatives here and now. There’s the spurning of hierarchies and the creation of organisations that are today described as ‘horizontal’ or ‘networked’ – and that now with the new techno tools for networking have both more potential and more ambiguity.

And the same hoary problems reappear: informal and unaccountable leaderships, the tensions between inclusion and effectiveness. The Tyranny of Structurelessness, the 1970s pamphlet that tackled these unanticipated pitfalls from the perspective of the women’s liberation movement in particular, may be well read.

But that was 40 years ago – even before the widespread use of faxes, let alone personal computers and mobile phones! How could reflecting on these marginalised earlier movements possibly take forward the debates opened by Occupy and the Indignados?

From social rebellion to capitalist renewal

The fate of the energies and aspirations of that rebellious decade is a long and complex cluster of stories. To consider their relevance today, I want only to point to a historical process that was not generally anticipated at the time and still is not fully understood. This was the capacity of capitalism, as it searched for ways of out of stagnation and crisis, to feed opportunistically on the chaotic creativity and restless experimental culture of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

For example, from the 1980s, at the same time as attacking the trade unions, corporate management was also dismantling the military-style hierarchies characteristic of many leading companies and decentralising the production process. A new generation of managers, especially in the newer industries, was recognising that workers’ tacit knowledge was a rich source of increased productivity and greater profits – so long as workers had little real power over their distribution.

Another example is how, in the endless search for new markets, culturally-savvy marketing managers were able to identify and exploit the commercial opportunities in the expanded horizons and wants of the increasing mass of women with incomes of their own.

The key underlying feature of these and similar trends is that much of the innovative character of capitalism’s renewal in the 1980s and 1990s – underpinned by the expansion of credit – came from sources external to both the corporation and the state. In fact, frequently its origins lay in resistance and the search for alternatives to both.

In other words, capital proved very much more nimble in responding to – and appropriating – the new energies and aspirations stimulated by the critical movements of the 1960s and 1970s than did the parties of the left – for which these movements could have been a force for democratic renewal.

What kind of a counter-movement?

Now, with the credit that underpinned the apparent ebullience of this particular period of capitalism having become toxic, the search for alternatives is back. As I write, the Financial Times, much to its own astonishment, is publishing a week of articles on ‘The Crisis of Capitalism’. The opening article declares that ‘at the heart of the problem is widening inequality’.

Are we seeing in the combination – not necessarily convergence – of unease within at least the cultural elites, the growth of sustained popular resistance and public disgruntlement, the emergence of what Karl Polanyi called a ‘counter-movement’ to the socially destructive consequences of rampant capitalism? And to what extent might the ideas of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s influence the character of that counter-movement?

A fundamental break

To answer this we need, briefly, to remind ourselves of the core nature of the original social critique made by the 1960s/70s movements and in particular the nature of its potential break with the institutions of the post-war order: their paternalism, their exclusions, their narrow definition of democracy and their assumption that production and technology were value neutral.

Central to the character of this critique was its aspiration, more in practice than in theory, to overcome the debilitating dichotomies of the cold war: between the individual and the collective/social; freedom and solidarity/equality; ‘free’ market versus ‘command’ state – dichotomies that were refrozen through neoliberalism and the manner of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The ideas and practices of the women’s movement are particularly illustrative. This movement came about partly from the gender-blind inconsistencies and incompletely fulfilled promises of the radical movements of the time. It deepened and extended their innovations, adding insights arising from women’s specific experiences of breaking out of their subordination.

Especially important here was an insistence on the individual as social and the collective as based on relations between individuals: a social individualism and a relational view of society and social change. After all, the momentum of the women’s liberation movement was animated both by women’s desire to realise themselves as individuals and their determination to end the social relationships that blocked these possibilities. This required social solidarity: an organised movement.

The nature of its organisation was shaped by a constant attempt to create ways of organising that combined freedom and autonomy – what every woman struggles for in her own life – with solidarity, mutuality and values of equality. The result – cutting a complex and tense story short – was ways of relating that both allowed for autonomy and also achieved co-ordination and mutual support, without going through a single centre. In other words, here was what could be called an early, pre-ICT, ‘networked’ form of organisation.

The political economy of networks

This networked form was distinctive because integral to its origin, character and sustainability were values of solidarity and equality and democracy. Awareness of these origins could help us now, when networked organisations are everywhere, to distinguish between the instrumental use of the concept of network in essentially undemocratic organisations (within states and corporations, for example) and, on the other hand, as a way of connecting distributed activities based on shared values of social justice and democratically agreed norms.

The latter possibility is radically enhanced through the new information and communications technology in its non-proprietorial forms. The new possibilities of systems co-ordinating a multiplicity of autonomous organisations with shared values, through democratically agreed norms or protocols, can help upscale economic organisations based on non-capitalist – collaborative, P2P (peer to peer) co-operative or other social and democratic – forms of ownership, production, distribution and finance.

What enables us to make this apparently surprising leap from the forms of organisation shaped by the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement (or indeed other civil society initiatives of the same period, such as the factory shop stewards’ committees combining against multi-plant, multinational corporations and developing alternative plans for socially useful production) is the importance they give to practical, experiential knowledge and the need to share and socialise it.

The political economy of knowledge

The reason why this is important for the development of a political economy beyond capitalism is that behind the imposed choice between capitalist market and the state is the polarisation between scientific, social and economic knowledge on the one hand and practical knowledge on the other. While the former was regarded as the basis of economic planning and centralised through the state, defenders of the free market held up the latter as being held individually by the entrepreneur and capable of coordination only through the haphazard workings of the market, based on private ownership. The relevant breakthrough of the women’s and other movements of the 1960s/70s was to make the sharing and socialising of experiential knowledge – in combination with scientific forms – fundamental to their purposeful, but always experimental, organisations. And to do so through consciously co-ordinated/networked and self-reflexive relations between autonomous/distributed initiatives.

Translating this into economics in the age of information and communications technology – a project requiring much further work – points to the possibility of forms of co-ordination that can include and help to regulate a non-capitalist market. A regulated, socialised market, that is, in which the drive to accumulate and make money out of money is effectively suppressed. It also provides a basis for democratising and, where appropriate, decentralising the state, within the framework of democratically agreed social goals (such as concerning equality and ecology).

It is over these issues concerning the sharing of knowledge and information and the implications for the relationship between autonomy and social co-ordination that the ideas coming from the Occupy movement can creatively converge with those of earlier movements. It is interesting in this context to read the economics working group of Occupy London describing in the Financial Times how Frederick von Hayek, the Austrian economist and theorist of free-market capitalism, with his ideas on the significance of distributed knowledge, is ‘the talk of Occupy London’. No doubt this was partly a rhetorical device for the FT audience. But the challenge of answering Hayek and his justification of the free market on the basis of a theory of distributed practical and/or experiential knowledge does provide a useful way of clarifying for ourselves the importance of the networked social justice initiatives of today and the anti-authoritarian social movements of the past for an alternative political economy.

There is a point at which Hayek’s critique of the ‘all knowing state’ at first glance converges with the critique of the social democratic state made by the libertarian/social movement left in the 1960s/70s. Both challenge the notion of scientific knowledge as the only basis for economic organisation and both emphasise the importance of practical/experiential knowledge and its ‘distributed’ character. But when it comes to understanding the nature of this practical knowledge and hence its relation to forms of economic organisation, these perspectives diverge radically.

Whereas Hayek theorises this practical knowledge as inherently individual and hence points to the haphazard , unplanned and unplannable workings of the market and the price mechanism, the radicals of the 1960s/70s took, as we have just explained, a very different view. For them, the sharing of knowledge embedded in experience and collaboration to create a common understanding and self-consciousness of their subordination and of how to resist, was fundamental to the process of becoming a movement. In contrast to the individualism of Hayek, their ways of organising assumed that practical knowledge could be socialised and shared. This led to ways of organising that emphasised communication and shared values as a basis for co-ordination and a common direction. It provided the basis for purposeful and therefore more or less plannable action – action that was always experimental, never all-knowing; the product of distributed intelligence that could be consciously shared.

At the risk of being somewhat schematic, it could be argued that the movements of the 1960s/70s applied these ideas especially to develop an – unfinished – vision of democratising the state. This took place both through attempts to create democratic, participatory ways of administering public institutions (universities and schools, for example) and through the development of non-state sources of democratic power (women’s centres, police monitoring projects and so on). It involved working ‘with/in and against’ the state, such as when the Greater London Council was led by Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s.

Today’s movements are effectively focusing their energies especially on challenging the oligarchic market, and the injustice of corporate, financial power. Here the development of networked forms are increasingly linked to distributed economic initiatives – co-ops, credit unions, open software networks, collaborative cultural projects and so on. In this way, today’s movements are beginning to develop in practice a vision of socialising production and finance and creating an alternative kind of market, complementary to the earlier unfinished vision of democratic public power.

What they have in common, more in practice than in theory, is an assertion of organised democratic civil society as an economic actor, both in the provision of public goods and in the sphere of market exchange.

Cultural equality

This emphasis on the development of strategies for political and economic change that empower democratic civil society, rather than an exclusive reliance on the state, marks a distinct development beyond the politics of the social democratic reformers of the past. The architects of the welfare state and the post-war order, with all its achievements and limits, believed in economic and political reform. But they did so generally on the basis of assumptions of cultural superiority: they, the professionals, knew what was best for the masses. By contrast, the rebellions of the 1960s/70s were asserting cultural equality. Their goals concerned economic and social needs but in a context of challenging dominant understandings of knowledge, emphasising the public importance of practical, tacit and experiential knowledge. This underpinned commitment to developing the organisations in the workplace and wider society that could share this knowledge and turn it into a source of transformative power.

The broadly anti-capitalist movements since the late 1990s are remaking that struggle, in radically changed political and economic circumstances. The context is framed by a new form of cultural domination. It is in effect the imposition of a financial accounting mentality. Thus, pensioners are defined as a ‘burden’; workers are defined as ‘costs’. Higher education is defined as a personal investment, as if everyone determined their future in terms of a personal rate of return rather than a contribution to society. The aim is a culture of acquiescence to the cuts and privatisation in the interests of an unproblematised goal of ‘growth’.

How can we challenge these new forms of cultural subordination, turning citizens, by the dictat of an imposed accounting system, into mere ‘hands’ or ‘dependants’ in the language of 19th-century capitalism?

Alternative values in material practice

Part of the answer is surely to be found by illustrating in practice the alternative values that could found a political economy based on a framework of equality, mutuality and respect for nature. Many such illustrations are up and spreading: credit unions that organise finance as a commons; public sector workers countering privatisation with proposals for improving and democratising services for and with fellow citizens; ‘free culture’ networks insisting on the use of ICT as a means of extending and enriching the public sphere rather than a digital oilfield for profit; a revival of co-operatives and collective consumer action around energy, food and other spheres in which the logic of capital is particularly destructive to society and the environment. The strategic question we have to work on is how to generalise from, interconnect and extend these scattered developments.

In this sense the insistence on ‘being the change we want to see’ and creating alternatives here and now has a macro significance as well as a micro one. The exhaustion of the existing system is in some ways far deeper than in the 1960s and 1970s but we should never underestimate the ability of capital to adapt and appropriate – which is why we must think ambitiously, though remaining grounded, about our collective organisational innovations.

Finally, what about relations with the state?

One of the distinctive features of the recent movements and the steady development across the world of forms of social or, more radically, solidarity economics is an ambition to be part of a process of systemic change. This inevitably raises the question of the relation of these usually autonomous initiatives to the state and to electoral politics.

Most activists in these experiments, rightly, have no faith in the ability of the political class to lead ways out of the crisis. But there has been an overly-generalised theorisation of engagement with political institutions as necessarily counterposed to the building of non-capitalist economic relations in whatever spaces can be struggled for now. Experience, however, points to the possibility of a pragmatic and cautious engagement with political institutions from a consciously and determinedly autonomous base.

An example of this can be found in Argentina, where networks of workers’ co-ops have struggled for legislation favourable to their interests [PDF link]. For example, starting with support at a municipal and provincial level in Buenos Aires, they have won the legal right to maintain ownership and control of occupied factories. The logic of their approach has been to develop autonomous sources of power rooted in actual alternatives, rather than merely forms of pressure and protest that leave the creative initiative (or rather lack of it) with the political class.

This experience effectively illustrates an alternative, progressive recognition of the creative, productive power of civil society to the one described earlier in capitalism’s ability to absorb and subordinate the creativity of the critical culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In conclusion

This brings us back to my opening question of what use there might be in revisiting these earlier movements. In sum, my arguments point to the importance of the unfinished foundations in democratic civil society of an alternative political economy – including a different kind of state. You could say we were rudely interrupted in our work. But maybe, as we join with new generations with capacities and visions way beyond our own, we will be collectively stronger if we recover what was potentially powerful and what the elites feared and tried to destroy.

It’s not easy to sum up succinctly what the managers of the ruling order felt so threatened by in the 1960s/70s, so let’s use the words they employed themselves. It was ‘an excess of democracy’ that lay behind ‘the reduction of authority’, concluded the Trilateral Commission when it investigated the causes of the political and economic crises of the early 1970s on behalf of governments of the dominant western powers. The elite alarm at that time was thus more than just the regular ruling class fear of the mob. The notion of ‘an excess of democracy’ implied a fear of intelligent and organised opposition, which was hence less easy to counter.

It was the autonomous and yet purposeful, organised and capable nature of the movements – including, perhaps especially, in the workplace that they feared most. Here was the emergence of a new generation with allies throughout society that no longer accepted the place allotted to them by the elite democracy handed down to them after the war. And yet that generation comprised the children of the post-war democratic order, gaining legitimacy through appealing to its claims and its unfulfilled promises. At that moment, the elites lost their authority. Simple repression would no longer work – not that they didn’t try it.

Related to this and later on, as the ideas of the radical movements began to shape political debate in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the threat, at least in the UK, became that a form of socialism (or at least a viable political vision threatening to the elites) might emerge that could no longer be dismissed by reference to the failure of the Soviet model. Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand hatchet man, put it neatly in reference to the radically democratic Greater London Council of the early 1980s: ‘This is the modern socialism and we must destroy it.’

The grounds for these fears lay in the distinctive features of those movements and projects described in this article. In their ways of organising (combining autonomy and co-operation, creating the participatory conditions for the genuine sharing of knowledge), the alliances they built (across the traditional divides of economics, culture, labour and community) and their vision (beyond state versus market, individual versus social), they held out in practice the possibility of an alternative, participatory and co-operative political economy.

For a time, the new political culture seemed unstoppable. Now, in the presence of Occupy and the multiplicity of movements that share in new ways the same hopeful characteristics, it feels as if, like a mountain stream that disappeared from sight, the same ‘excess of democracy’, with its springs in the 1960s and 1970s, is bubbling up again.

Many thanks to Marco Berlinguer, Roy Bhaskar, Robin Murray, Doreen Massey and Jane Shallice

When the opposition does not oppose…

Michael — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:34:49 +0000

What does it mean when a Shadow Chancellor admits that he won’t reverse the spending cuts he claims to oppose? Does it show that there are no alternatives? Does it legitimise the social destruction of government’s policies? No. As the cover of the latest Red Pepper suggests, the cross-party consensus of our political elite is exacerbating something ultimately far more dangerous than the fiscal deficit we so often hear warnings about: the ‘democratic deficit’.

The gap between what the public demands and what the political class act on is growing.Constitutional commentator Nevil Johnson describes the role of opposition to ‘oppose the government, to criticise it and to seek to replace it’. If Labour and the Conservatives are becoming increasingly indistinguishable on economic policy, it raises an important question: how can the opposition outside parliament find effective expression?

We might begin by asking who has the real ‘credibility’ on how the coalition’s plans are impacting on our public services? Surely it’s those who have direct experience of working day in and day out on the frontline of service delivery – those who care for our families, teach our children, drive our buses, and all the rest of the public sector workforce? Far from out of touch, trade unions are the organised expression of these workers who possess the knowledge, skills and commitment to improving the fabric of our lives. From this bedrock we can build a movement with the capacity to move our economy towards the more equitable, democratic and ecological road.

The first radical step would be the hardest: union disaffiliation from Labour and union backing of a party better able to put forward an alternative vision of the economy – an alternative for which thousands of disenfranchised activists currently ache. Whether this party already exists (in the form of the Greens perhaps) or still needs to be built, we need to provoke a rethink about the whole nature of parliamentary representation and opposition.

But we can’t just wait around for people to speak on our behalf. We need to keep talking, debating, educating and innovating about ways we can articulate the arguments. The mantra that ‘There is no alternative’ (Tina) is not an objective economic truth, but part of a rigid ideology that serves the interests of finance, big business and wealthy individuals.

In other words, if the opposition do not oppose, the responsibility to get an airing for the alternative falls to us.