Red Pepper

Azerbaijan: The pipeline that would fuel a dictator

admin — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 10:00:06 +0000

A billboard of Heydar Aliyev, ‘Father of the Nation’, by the Heydar Aliyev Park. Photo: Emma Hughes
The government’s dash for gas has not only resulted in a raft of new gas-fired power stations in the UK; it is also supporting the drilling of 26 new gas wells in the BP-operated Shah Deniz gas field off the coast of Azerbaijan. Companies and decision-makers in London and Brussels are eagerly eyeing these wells and are currently assembling the agreements and finance for a mega‑pipeline from the Caspian to central Europe.
The proposed pipeline looks something like this: from the BP terminal at Sangachal the gas would be forced westwards through the South Caucasus Pipeline Expansion across Azerbaijan and Georgia. From there the Trans-Anatolian pipeline would pump the gas across the entire length of Turkey, to the border with Greece. Here a further final part of the pipeline: the Trans Adriatic Pipeline, will run across Greece, Albania and finally end in Italy. While each segment has a different name, in reality they are all part of one mega-pipeline. And the plans don’t end there. Pressure is building to extend it to Turkmenistan, Iraq and Iran, creating a significant resource grab as central Asian and Middle Eastern gas fields would be locked directly into the European grid.
Such a pipeline could be devastating for the environment, putting an extra 1,100 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere by 2048 – the equivalent of 2.5 years of total emissions from five of the countries it will run through: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Greece and Albania. And in the country of extraction, Azerbaijan, its construction would directly undermine the struggle to overthrow the country’s oil dictator Ilham Aliyev.
A fossil fuel dictator
[pullquote]‘BP is where the president got his power from. Where is his wealth, where are his police, without BP’s money?’[/pullquote]
The ruling family, the Aliyevs, have held onto power in Azerbaijan for the past two decades through a combination of fraudulent elections, arresting opposition candidates, beating protesters and curtailing media freedom. Ilham’s father, Heydar Aliyev, became president in 1993, following a military coup; he had previously been the head of Soviet Azerbaijan from 1969 to 1982. In 2003 he was forced to withdraw from the presidential elections due to ill health and his son stood and won instead. The elections were widely recognised as fraudulent.
The Aliyevs’ rule has been facilitated by the signing of the ‘contract of the century’ in 1994, which brought 11 corporations, including BP, Amoco, Lukoil of Russia and the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, into a consortium to extract oil from the Caspian Sea. The money from that oil not only made these corporations huge profits, but also gave the Aliyev family vast wealth and important allies overseas. The oil revenue means the regime is not dependent on taxes, so there is little incentive to pay attention to citizens’ voices or interests.
Mirvari Gahramanli works at the Oil Workers Rights Protection Organisation union. She blames BP for the country’s autocratic president: ‘BP is where the president got his power from. What is he without the money? Where is his wealth, where are his police, without BP’s money? They [the Aliyevs] have grown rich from BP and now as a result they have much more power.’
The money from the oil industry was supposed to be controlled by the State Oil Fund for Azerbaijan (SOFAZ), which was intended to finance the transition of the Azeri economy away from oil and to ensure the wealth was kept for future generations. Instead much of it has been pumped into construction.
Permanently under construction
Arrive in Azerbaijan’s capital city, Baku, at night and it seems like one of the most opulent places on earth. The drive from the Heydar Aliyev international airport whizzes past in a blur of lights and colour. A daylight walk reveals a different side to the city. The opulence is still evident in the pristine shopping streets, filled with bright plazas and innumerable designer shops – most of which are empty. But walking down a side street is like stepping backstage on a film set. Dust and debris are everywhere; whole buildings are torn apart, spewing their dusty interiors onto the street. Baku is a city permanently under construction.Baku’s highest skyscrapers, the Flame Towers. They were built at a cost of $350 million but appear mostly unused. Photo: Emma Hughes
Just who is benefiting from Baku’s continuous state of demolition has been made clear by the work of Azeri journalists. Khadija Ismayilova has linked many of the construction projects with the president and his family. These include the building of Crystal Hall, which staged the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012, and the nearby State Flag Square, which cost $38 million and briefly held the Guinness world record for the tallest flagpole in the world until its 162-metre height was overshadowed a few months later by a rival pole in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Two-thirds of the cost of the square in Baku came from the reserve fund of the head of state and the other third from the 2011 state budget, yet it was companies connected with Aliyev that profited.
The list of enterprises the Aliyevs are linked to is extensive. It includes phone companies, gold mining and an energy infrastructure company. It is common for big infrastructure projects, financed by public money from oil revenues, to be distributed to companies that belong to high-ranking officials, including the president himself. New laws mean that ownership remains secret, and they are often registered offshore anyway, so that public accountability is impossible.
Khadija Ismayilova’s part in exposing the personal profits made by the Aliyev family has led to her being blackmailed. In the middle of her investigation into the companies profiting from the flagpole square she was sent a tape of her and her boyfriend having sex that had been filmed from a camera hidden in her flat. The accompanying letter threatened to publish the tape if she didn’t stop her investigation. She continued and the tape was published on the internet. It was followed by a smear campaign and harassment by government officials at public events.
While the authorities attempted to label her a ‘loose woman’ for having sex outside of marriage, she says the plan backfired. ‘Society turned out to be more liberal than the government and I got support messages not just from the liberal parts of society but also from the Islamic parties because they are also in a struggle against the government, so they urged me to keep going,’ she says.
In Azerbaijan there are almost no independent media; most newspapers and nearly all TV channels are controlled by the government. Khadija Ismayilova’s experience is unusual only in that she didn’t find herself in prison or hospital – or the morgue. In 2005 the founder and editor of the critical opposition weekly news magazine Monitor, Elmar Huseynov, was gunned down in his apartment building. He had received threats because of his writing and many in Azerbaijan believe he was murdered because of it.
Expectant protesters
Azerbaijanis are furious at how their money has been squandered. Despite the opulence in the centre of Baku, citizens have to pay large sums to use basic services, including healthcare. Much of the county’s infrastructure is in need of repair.
Housing near Tibilisi Avenue in Baku. Photo: Emma Hughes
A new generation is finding new ways to organise through Facebook, blogs and flashmobs. The mood in Baku is expectant; people are talking about when Aliyev will go rather than if. With Baku hosting the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012, the rising protest movements had an opportunity to generate international attention, although it didn’t stop the government responding with continued repression. In October, 200 Muslim activists protesting against a ban on hijabs in secondary schools clashed with the police outside the education ministry. Seventy-two were arrested – the majority of whom were still being detained six months later.
In January, in the town of Ismayilli, west of Baku, the drunk son of the labour minister crashed his SUV into a taxi and then beat up the driver. In response, local residents set fire to his truck, as well as other vehicles and hotels belonging to the same family. Volleys of tear gas filled the streets as a militarised police force marched in. A state of emergency was declared in the town and neighbouring regions, cafes were closed down and the internet censored. The troops stayed for over a month in a show of force. With the regime afraid of change, it is resorting to ever-greater violence and repression. In the run up to presidential elections set for October there are increasing numbers of arrests.
Democracy will not be won easily. Pushing the Aliyev family out of power will be a difficult process. It is made even harder by the actions of the government’s allies in the west. On a recent trip to Brussels, Aliyev promised two trillion cubic metres of Azerbaijani gas for Europe. At the same meeting European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso spoke about the ‘very good exchange’ he had with Aliyev and praised the country for the progress it had made on democracy and human rights.
It was recently announced that the formal signing of the final part of the mega-pipeline agreement between the Shah Deniz consortium and the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) looks likely to happen in mid-October. This means it will coincide with the Azerbaijan presidential elections and will effectively silence those in the EU Commission who wish to speak out about Azerbaijan’s political prisoners and fraudulent elections. Azerbaijani democracy activists accuse the country’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, of manipulating the timing to ensure the EU is not critical of his regime’s appalling record on human rights and democracy.
Khadija Ismayilova is familiar with Aliyev’s tactics. ‘The TAP signing is perfect timing for Aliyev,’ she says. ‘We will hear hardly anything from the EU about human rights and election rigging until after that moment.’
Emma Hughes is a Red Pepper co-editor and a campaigner with Platform. She spent April in Baku meeting democracy activists. More on the planned mega-pipeline: www.platformlondon.org

Homes of our own: the growing student co-operative movement

admin — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 17:04:17 +0000

Students in the UK are coughing up an average of £69 per week to live in what are often tiny rooms in rented properties. This cost has been steadily increasing over the past few decades and most cities now have a student area in which houses kitted out with as many bedrooms as possible are hawked out to students often unaware of the rules and regulations that lettings agents are supposed to abide by.
Students such as Michaela Christofi, one of our colleagues and a Birmingham University graduate, have found their houses neglected regardless of the extortionate rents they hand over to their landlords. ‘When our cellar was flooded with more than a foot of water in autumn, we asked our landlord to sort it out,’ Michaela told me. ‘After his visit, he reassured us: “It’s all sorted out now.” We found out after returning from Christmas that “sorted” meant locking the door down and pretending there wasn’t a festering lake underneath the house. No attempt was made at resolving the problem at all.’ Stories like this can be heard in most universities across the country, and the problem has gone largely unchallenged.
Problems with rented properties and private landlords are not restricted to students; they extend throughout the rented property sector. Shelter reports that more than one in five families are now living in rented properties after a 72 per cent expansion in the number of privately-rented properties since 2001. Around 30 per cent of those families have experienced problems with their property or letting agents, while 72 per cent struggle with rents.
It’s clear a solution to renting property is needed by many people across the UK, not just students. We believe the problem lies not just with unscrupulous landlords or letting agents, but rather with the idea of private property rental in the first place. Landlords are in the business of owning land and property, and making their money by renting it to those who can’t afford to buy their own.
Our co-op will mean that the landlord’s profit can instead go towards improving our housing and reducing our rent. We will still pay a company, BCHS, for maintenance, repairs and help to manage our tenancies, but because of our status as members of the business that owns the property we will value our housing more and be directly in control of the rent, what gets mended and by whom.
We plan to purchase two terraced properties with five beds each. These will be co-owned by students, who will be both members directly in control of the business, Birmingham Students Housing Cooperative, and tenants of the properties. Essentially we are attempting to make housing more affordable by removing landlords from the equation – eliminating what Marx dubbed the ‘parasitic class’.
The residents will change regularly, with people moving out when their degrees are finished. Priority will be given to those who have an interest in promoting the co-operative model and are most in need of affordable housing. This will allow a large number of people to experience living in the houses and build a community over the years until eventually the mortgage is paid off. A future set of residents will then be able to make a decision to either expand the co-op or lower rents further. If the co-op were to fail, no student would be held liable for more than £1 as the business is incorporated as a company limited by guarantee.
Our plans are just a small part of a growing student co-operative movement. Discussions have been held in Edinburgh, Warwick, Sussex and Leeds, with more groups and interested students getting together across the country with the intention of creating co-ops. June 2013 saw the initial gathering of a national network, Students for Co‑operation, with the intention to set up a support mechanism for emerging co-op groups and help them get their businesses off the ground. There is a real chance that adopting the co-operative model is something that could support students at a time when rising debt and high costs are discouraging increasing numbers of students from pursuing qualifications in higher education.

Into the Fire: a different picture of Greece

admin — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 15:14:02 +0000

Photo: Guy Smallman
Into the Fire is an important film. As the UK media and government teach the population to hate and mistrust immigrants and asylum seekers, this film takes a look at the situation in Greece and tells a story that is not inconceivable here. The initial backlash against the Woolwich murder in June should serve as a bleak reminder of the possibility of a sudden surge in racism.
Austerity holds Greece in a gruesome stranglehold. Predictably, at a time of crisis, a polarisation takes place. Readers of this magazine will be familiar with the basic story of the rise of the left coalition Syriza and that of the fascist party Golden Dawn, the two sides of this huge rise in political stakes. Rather than focus on the characters involved in the different sides of politics, Into the Fire looks at the plight of those on the receiving end.
As the EU’s south-eastern corner, Greece is an obvious destination for many fleeing from conflict, economic hardship and human rights abuses outside its borders. Yet these refugees often find themselves in a similar, or sometimes even worse, predicament. Thanks to the EU’s restriction on asylum seekers moving country within the Union, many find themselves trapped in Greece. This restriction, the Dublin II Regulation, was drawn up in February 2003 with the declared intention of stopping EU countries ‘offloading’ asylum seekers onto one another.
It is a classic example of legislation intended to achieve one thing but actually hitting the most vulnerable in society. It means anyone seeking asylum in the EU must do so in the first country they arrive in. Yet the situation is so bad in Greece that the UK is no longer returning asylum seekers who arrive here via that country. As one refugee says to the camera in the film, ‘let us leave Greece’ is the simple wish of many of these people.
Although Into the Fire makes for uncomfortable viewing at times, it is not just full of despair. The fledgling anti-Golden Dawn movement is getting itself organised and onto the streets. Dimitris Katsaris, a lawyer representing anti-fascists, puts things succinctly. He issues a call to arms and declares ‘Fear is not an option’ – a necessary maxim for anti-fascists the world over. There are familiar traits on show in Greece: sympathy, if not pre-meditated collusion, between police and Golden Dawn; an asylum process that is intentionally intransigent and hostile to the people it is meant to serve; and inflammatory language used to scapegoat migrants for the economic woes of society.
The film is not highly polished or slickly edited; obliquely that’s a strength. This is a film made by video activists, and makes up for technical rough edges with a passion that shines through in every scene. That same passion has featured throughout the making and distribution of the film. Funded by donations, shot on a shoestring and edited on home computers, it is a testament to determination and dedication.
The distribution of the film is also notable. There have been a number of public screenings that have attracted good audiences. The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has organised three such screenings in the UK – in a café, a university and a barristers’ chambers – all with excellent discussions afterwards. Many other groups across Europe are putting on similar screenings and most are being well received.
But the remarkable thing about Into the Fire is the online reception it has received. The film-makers organised a synchronised launch on a number of different websites, through YouTube and Vimeo. In the first two months, the film had just under 100,000 views – an extraordinary figure for a 40-minute documentary made with no budget for filming, let alone promotion.
This is a film made for the movement by a small part of that movement. It is shocking, it is unsettling, but it is essential viewing.
Into the Fire has been released under a Creative Commons licence and is free to show in any non-commerical setting. Watch it online or find out more about organising a showing at www.intothefire.org

Red Pepper website redesign – five highlights

admin — Sun, 15 Sep 2013 14:40:06 +0000

Here are some of the changes:

1. Improved readability. We have changed the fonts, spacing and column widths so articles should be easier to read on-screen, especially our longer articles.

2. Better phone compatibility. The website layout now resizes automatically to the size of your phone or tablet. You’re not seeing an annoying ‘special’ mobile version”, but the site itself adapting into one column. Why not try it on your phone now?

3. Clutter-free printouts. Printing now automatically produces a page with just the text and pictures you want, with no sidebar or other menus making a mess of the page.

4. Bigger pictures. As more new articles come online, you will see that we are now able to use Red Pepper’s great photography and illustration across a greater width, so you get the full impact.

5. Social media integration. The new left-hand ‘toolbar’ lets you easily share an article with your friends on Facebook or Twitter, without having to copy-and-paste or hunt for the button.

If you appreciate these new features, why not make a donation to our fundraising appeal so we can keep making it even better?

All thoughts and feedback are welcome in the comments below.

World’s longest running industrial dispute sets example for us all

admin — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:09:00 +0000

Their banner reads:

“Ex-Midrand Council Workers in Dispute Since 1994!
Dismissed for fighting corruption in 1994 and still fighting today!
20 years of Sacrifice! 20 Years of Poverty! 20 Years of Solidarity!”

South Africa’s ex-Midrand Council workers are engaged in what is surely the world’s longest running industrial dispute, a Burston for our times. It started back in 1994, in the midst of the birth pains of South African democracy, when more than 500 workers employed by Midrand Council took industrial action against corrupt employment practices. At that time, local government structures had not yet been subject to democratic ‘transformation’; they were still the creations of the apartheid era. Midrand was run by remnants of the old regime with no interest in reaching a settlement. Under pressure, some strikers returned to work, but the great majority remained in dispute.

In 1996, Midrand Council disappeared into the new local government structures, its responsibilities passed to Johannesburg City Council. There were hopes that the dispute would now be resolved, with the strikers re-integrated into the council workforce, but these came to nothing, thanks to endless buck-passing and bureaucratic inertia (i.e. lack of political will).

The now ex-Midrand workers were left in limbo, on strike against an authority that no longer existed, pressing their demands on an authority that refused to recognise them as employees.

Through all this time, to the present day, the strikers have continued to meet, to agitate and to organise. Many of the original group have passed away (though some of their descendants are active in the campaign). Some have reached pension age (but receive no pension). Others have become too sick and weak to work, and others have moved out of the vicinity, often seeking refuge with family in far-away communities. As a recent statement from the South African Municipal Workers Union (SAMWU) says, “Despite these hardships and sometimes with virtually no external support, the Midrand workers have remained resolute and committed to settling their dispute with dignity and with fairness.”

Every Sunday

For 19 years, they have met every Sunday in Ivory Park/Tembisa “in significant numbers, and often in excess of 120, to hear progress in their dispute, and to share whatever meagre resources they have.”

For many years, they did so with no help from outside, relying entirely on their own resources, which were meagre but treated collectively. In 2009, SAMWU assumed a more active role. With the full support of the 283 remaining ex-Midrand strikers, the union resolved to launch a “political intervention” to secure a just resolution.

Negotiations with Johannesburg authorities commenced but were dogged by what SAMWU describes as “delays and roadblocks.” The election of a new mayor in 2012 led to further postponements. A recent public letter from SAMWU notes:

“Two months ago, we learned that a report [on the Midrand dispute] had in fact been submitted to the Mayoral Committee, but we were not allowed to see it, or were able to contribute to it. Indeed we have not even been informed of the outcomes of the Mayoral Committee’s deliberations. In our view this contradicts both the consultation process we had agreed, and national and local government policy of open and transparent government.

“We can only assume that there are forces within the council who are determined to derail the cause of the Midrand workers, and who perhaps for reasons only known to themselves do not want the Midrand case resolved.”

Nonetheless, support for the Midrand workers is growing. Their campaign has been endorsed by COSATU and many of its affiliates. Media interest has also risen in recent months, in South Africa and beyond.

It’s a small scale struggle with a very big resonance. The context includes the debate about the relation of labour unions to the ANC government, the widespread feeling that the post-apartheid regime has failed to deliver on the promises of liberation, and the hot issue of corruption. The ANC’s right-wing opponents exploit the latter for their own ends, but it is nonetheless a reality, a corrosive force running counter to democratic aspirations. Through SAMWU and other unions, public sector workers have shown that they want to tackle corruption and need support from their employers to do so. Obviously there are others with different interests.

In any case, the ex-Midrand workers deserve support and solidarity from trades unionists everywhere, especially public sector trades unionists. Their tenacity is an example to us all.

Contact SAMWU for more information.

Can Tunisia’s labour union ride to the rescue?

admin — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 15:39:47 +0000

Tunisia is gripped by its most serious political crisis since 2011, caused by a breakdown of trust between the government and its opponents and compounded by growing terrorism and a collapsing economy. Last weekend saw a rise in tension, with protestors filling the capital demanding the immediate resignation of the Islamist government.
Yet one local trade union may save the day, and not for the first time. The Tunisian General Union of Labour (UGTT) has affected the character of Tunisia as a whole since the late 1940s. It impacted significantly the 2011 revolution and the transition period and is likely to impact the future. Its current role as mediator between the government and opposition must be seen in historical perspective, as, arguably, the role of Tunisia’s labour movement is what sets it apart from the rest of the Arab World.
Child of protest, midwife of revolution
Trade unionism in Tunisia goes back to 1924 when Mohamed Ali al Hammi (1890-1928), the forefather of the movement, founded the General Federation of Tunisian Workers. But it was under the guidance of the charismatic and visionary Farhat Hached (1914-1952) that a strong home-grown organization would emerge. Hached learned union activism and organisation within the French colonial union, the CGT, for 15 years before splitting from it to start UGTT in 1946. The new union quickly gained support, clout and international ties, which it used to pressure the French for more social and political rights for Tunisia and to consolidate its position as a key component in the national liberation movement. The union’s inception in the midst of an independence struggle cemented its political character, a line it has kept and vigorously defended ever since.
Since then, UGTT has been a continuous presence in the country. During the one-party rule of Presidents Habib Bourgiba and Ben Ali, it constituted a credible alternative to the party’s power and a locus of resistance to it, so much so that being a unionist became a euphemism for being a member of the opposition.
Given UGTT’s power and popularity, successive governments have tried to compromise with, co-opt, repress or change the union, depending on political sympathies and the balance of power at hand. In 1978, the Bourguiba government attempted to change a union leadership judged to be too oppositional and powerful. The entire leadership of the union was put on trial and replaced by regime loyalists. Ensuing popular riots were repressed by the army, resulting in dozens of deaths. The cost was the worst setback to the union’s history since the assassination of its founder in 1952.
UGTT has been the outcome of Tunisian resistance and its incubator at the same time. In December 2010, UGTT – particularly its teachers’ unions and local offices – became the headquarters of revolt against the President. Many of the demands of the rising masses – jobs, national dignity, freedom – had long been on the agenda of the union, which includes 24 regional unions, 19 sector-based unions and 21 grass roots unions and has over 500,000 members. Furthermore, the union holds a strong support-base in the rural areas where the revolution started.
But after the revolution was complete, UGTT again became a target. On 4 December 2012, as the union was gearing up to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of Hached’s assassination, its iconic headquarters were attacked, allegedly by groups known as Leagues for the Protection of the Revolution. The incident was ugly, public and of immediate impact. The leagues had originated in community organisations set up in the aftermath of the January 14 revolution to keep the peace in the security vacuum left which had reportedly become dominated by Islamists. UGTT responded by boycotting plenary sessions of parliament, organising regional strikes and marches, and eventually calling for a general strike on 13 December, the first such action since 1978.
Threats have also come from those on the inside. On August 26, 2013, a group of trade unionists founded the Tunisian Labour Organization, aiming, according to its leaders, at correcting the direction of UGTT. Sami Tahri, the UGTT spokesperson responded dismissively to this move, arguing that this was no more than the reaction of losers who failed to win elected offices in UGTT and were unable to drag the union into the “house of obedience”, referring to the new organisation’s ties to the ruling Al-Nahda party. This lack of concern may be justified, given UGTT’s history of warding off a number of attempts at takeover, division or weakening over the past sixty years or so.
Qualified mediator
Despite antagonistic relations with governments before and after the revolution, UGTT remains perhaps the only body in the country qualified to resolve disputes peacefully. After January 2011, it emerged as the key mediator and power broker at the initial phase of the revolution, winning trust from political players across the spectrum. It was within the union that the committee which regulated the transition to the elections of 23 October 2011 was formed.
At the same time, UGTT has used its leverage to secure historic victories for its members and for workers in general, including permanent contracts for over 350,000 temporary workers and pay rises for several sectors, including teachers.
As Tunisia moved from a period of revolutionary harmony to one characterised by a multiplicity of parties and a polarisation of public opinion, the challenge for UGTT was to keep its engagement in politics without falling under the control of a particular party or indeed turning into one. But, due to historical reasons which saw leftists channel their energy into trade unionism when their political activities were curtailed, UGTT has remained on the left of the political spectrum. This has continued in the face of rising Islamist power, with the union keeping or even strengthening ties with the numerous newly-formed parties of the left. For these reasons, UGTT has remained decidedly outside the control of the Islamist government, which has had to come to terms with the union’s role and status.
UGTT has a significant role to play in the current political crisis, acting as a mediator between government and opposition in an attempt to end the current political stalemate. Many of the protestors’ demands line up with those of UGTT: the resignation of the current government, its replacement by a non-political government, curtailing the work of the Tunisian Parliament, the ANC, and reviewing top government appointments. It also asks for the immediate dissolution of the Leagues for the Defence of the Revolution.
Cracks in the armour
UGTT is not without blemish. A key paradox has been the relative absence of women in positions of leadership, despite the organisation’s support of women’s rights. UGTT compares unfavourably in this respect to other civil society organisations, with women leading the Business Association, the Journalists Association and the Council of Judges. Although some have suggested that the nature of trade union work, including canvassing opinion in the male-dominated cafes of Tunisia, has put women off positions, UGTT’s failure to promote women in leadership is a serious lacuna.
The union has also been accused of over-bureaucratisation and corruption at the top level, which has triggered several attempts at internal reform and even rebellion over the years. The power and money that come as perks of the job for top union officials can be dangerous in a climate of rife corruption. In 2000, former Secretary General Ismail Sahbbani resigned over allegations of embezzlement and financial misconduct.
UGTT also faces future challenges if it is to remain the strongest union at a time when three other split unions are in place and to maintain a political role now that politics has been largely turned over to political parties.
But despite these challenges, a combination of symbolic capital accumulated over decades, a good record of getting results for its members and well-oiled organisational apparatus across the country and in every sector of the economy has made UGTT an unavoidable, and perhaps unassailable, feature of Tunisian politics. For these reasons, UGTT figures are still capable of credible mediation despite setbacks, with their demonstrable expertise and experience placing them above most accusations of bias. UGTT is a defining element of what may be called the Tunisian exception in the MENA region and, if the trade union is successful this time in resolving the political crisis, it would become even more exceptional.
This article was first published at Think Africa Press

Balcombe latest: 50 days on

admin — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 13:28:38 +0000

The Balcombe resistance continues with twists, turns and bizarre developments. Since Reclaim the Power ended, a callout for a 28-day rolling blockade dubbed ‘28 Days Later’ has been answered with a diversity of actions from a tripod in the road, to a local resident locked on to the roof of a tanker, a local environmental scientist handcuffed to the gate, a mass ‘balls to fracking’ football game at the gates and a man locked on to the tow bar of a caravan across the road – all stalling delivery lorries for up to five hours. Over 100 people have been arrested since the drilling began, with police increasingly carrying out snatch arrests and using obscure powers to quell protest.

As well as the Balcombe protesters’ persistence and creativity, fracking firm Cuadrilla has experienced a series of setbacks on the site. Earlier this month it was discovered it had breached its planning permission by exceeding the amount of allowed noise pollution. Balcombe residents complained to local officials of loud drilling noise in the evenings, causing Cuadrilla to temporarily halt its drilling operations to install further sound proofing, but it has continued drilling on the site.

No permission

Earlier this month, Cuadrilla had to withdraw an application to extend its current planning permission. The application was originally filed in July and sought to extend its current planning permission, due to end at the end of September, by six months. However Friends of the Earth pointed out that the company should never have been granted planning permission in the first place, as current regulations require the company to notify landowners if they plan to horizontally drill under their homes. Cuadrilla has also discovered a need to extend its current drill site as it is too small to contain its operations. It further seeks to quell local residents’ fears by removing any reference to potential fracking.

While Cuadrilla plans to submit a new planning application, it will now have to cease operations after 28 September. This means that the fight to stop drilling in Balcombe has been moved back to the local council planning authorities. During a fresh round of consultation, local residents will be able to lodge objections to the proposed planning permission. This is also a major setback for the company as it will further delay its plans by several months.

And in a bizarre twist, it recently emerged that Cuadrilla may not have proper permission to drill the land anyway, as the land ‘owner’ has an agricultural mortgage with Lloyds TSB, who has not given permission for the non-agricultural use of the land. We await updates and confirmation of this situation.

Preparing to evict

Despite Cuadrilla’s drilling permission coming to an end, this week saw West Sussex County Council take the first steps in attempting to evict the Balcombe camp. On Monday, a county official served the camp with an eviction notice. The notice asked that protesters leave by 9am the next morning or the council would be forced to start legal proceedings against them. Earlier today the camp received a legal notice from the High Court for immediate possession, though protestors are contesting the short notice – Monday – of a court appearance that prevents effective preparation of a defence case. In a press release, the council said it was concerned by the increase in the number of blockades on the road and cited road safety as its reason for asking the protestors to leave.

Sussex Police also released a statement that same day, stating that a Section 14 order would be in place from 10am the following morning. A newly formed protest area would be set up across the road from the site to facilitate protests. Anyone found to be protesting outside that area would be subject to arrest. Many felt that this was possibly a backhanded way for the council to attempt to clear the camp. However the camp is still in existence, with the people in the camp defiant that they will stay. The council are now going through the appropriate legal channels to obtain a possession order which will allow the camp to be cleared. Much of the camp’s infrastructure is still in place, people are still camping outside the drilling site on the verges, and they are still standing in the road to slow the delivery lorries.

After 28 September, Cuadrilla plans to leave Balcombe and return to Lancashire to continue its drilling operations there. London-based company iGas is also scheduled to start drilling in Manchester within the coming months. Campaigners have vowed to replicate the Balcombe protest camp in any area of the country that is being threatened with unconventional fossil fuel extraction. It looks like we’ll see a very busy autumn full of anti-fracking action.

Allende’s socialist internet

James O'Nions — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 10:00:35 +0000

The Cybersyn Opsroom
The story of Salvador Allende, president of the first ever democratically elected Marxist administration, who died when General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the young administration in a US-backed coup on 11 September, 1973, is well known amongst progressives. But the human rights horrors and tales of desaparecidos have eclipsed – quite understandably – the pioneering cybernetic planning work of the Chilean leader, his ministers and a British left-wing operations research scientist and management consultant named Stafford Beer. It was an ambitious, economy-wide experiment that has since been described as the ‘socialist internet’, an effort decades ahead of its time.

In 1970, the Allende government found itself the coordinator of a messy jumble of factories, mines and other workplaces that had long been state-run, others that were freshly nationalised, some under worker occupation and others still under the control of their managers or owners. An efficient strategy of coordination was required. The 29-year-old head of the Chilean Production Development Corporation and later finance minister Fernando Flores – responsible for the management and coordination between nationalised companies and the state, and his advisor, Raul Espejo, had been impressed with Beer’s prolific writings on management cybernetics, and, like Allende, wanted to construct a socialist economy that was not centralised as the variations on the Soviet theme had been.

Allende, a doctor by training, was attracted to the idea of rationally directing industry, and upon Flores’ recommendation, Beer was hired to advise the government, and the scheme he plunged himself into was called Project Cybersyn, a ‘nervous system’ for the economy in which workers, community members and the government were to be connected together transmitting the resources they had on offer, their desires and needs via an interactive national communications network. The whole idea would seem, frankly, eccentrically ambitious, even potty, if today the internet were not such a quotidian experience.

Although never completed, by the time of the coup, the advanced prototype of the system, which had been built in four months, involved a series of 500 telex machines distributed to firms connected to two government-operated mainframe computers and stretched the length of the narrow country and covered roughly between a quarter and half of the nationalised economy. Factory output, raw material shipments and transport, high levels of absenteeism and other core economic data pinged about the country and to the capital, Santiago – a daily exchange of information between workers and their government, easily beating the six months on average for economic data to be processed in this way in most advanced countries.

Paul Cockshott, a University of Glasgow computer scientist who has written about the possibility of post-capitalist planning aided by computing, is a big admirer of Cybersyn as a practical example of the general type of regulation mechanism he advocates: ‘The big advance with Stafford Beer’s experiments with Cybersyn was that it was designed to be a real-time system rather than a system which, as the Soviets had tried, was essentially a batch system in which you made decisions every five years.’
Staff tallied the data and seven government surveyors (seven being the largest number of people who can comfortably participate in a discussion) viewed real-time economic processes for immediate decisions from a space-age, Star-Trek-like operations room, complete with Tulip swivel chairs with built-in buttons, but the aim was to maintain decentralised worker and lower-management autonomy rather than to impose a top-down system of control. The intention was to provide an Opsroom overseeing each industry and within each plant. At the factory level, it was planned that workers’ committees would run the Opsroom. Figures were avoided in favour of graphics displays under the belief that people should be able to engage in economic self-government without formal mathematical or financial training. Vast, economy-wide co-ordination is not the same as centralisation.

When the government faced a CIA-backed strike from conservative small businessmen and a boycott by private lorry companies in 1972, food and fuel supplies ran dangerously low. The government faced its gravest existential threat ahead of the coup. It was then that Cybersyn came into its own, when Allende’s government realised that the experimental system could be used to circumvent the opposition’s efforts. The network allowed its operators to secure immediate information on where scarcities were at their most extreme and where drivers not participating in the boycott were located and to mobilise or redirect its own transport assets in order to keep goods moving and take the edge of the worst of the shortages. As a result, the truck-owners’ boycott was defeated.

After that other September 11 almost forty years ago, when the bombs fell on La Moneda, the presidential palace where Allende took his own life rather than surrender to Pinochet’s fascists, the fires that destroyed democracy in Chile also took the world’s first non-Stalinist experiment in economy-wide planning with them, replaced by another economic experiment of an altogether opposite character: the monetarist structural adjustment of Milton Friedman, infamously replicated by Margaret Thatcher and her dozens of imitators.

Today, 40 years later, systemic change is on the table again. After decades of defeats, there is a burgeoning – if still fragile – sense that far-reaching transformation going beyond a tinkering with the system might be necessary and, crucially, achievable.

So you would think that the period would be ripe for discussion of a post-capitalist economics, for a blossoming of competing concrete proposals of what a thoroughly different economic system might look like. Yet very few have engaged in the hard thinking about what could happen ‘the morning after’ a presumed victory. We are undergoing the biggest economic disaster since the 1930s, an unprecedented global slump that may turn out to be worse than the Great Depression, and no one wants to theorise about the day after tomorrow, fearful that we may be ‘building castles in the air’.

This is the utility of Allende’s Cybersyn for us in 2013. Cybersyn is not some quirky historical curiosity. Nor was it a utopian dream. Rather, Allende’s experiment was a real-world example of post-capitalist planning that needs to be scrutinised in great depth and then appraised to see what bits of it, if any, can be redeployed were ordinary people once again to win power.

Chile: The first dictatorship of globalisation

James O'Nions — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 20:52:39 +0000

I arrived in Chile at almost exactly the half-way point of the Popular Unity government. Salvador Allende had been elected President on 4 September 1970, at his fourth attempt at the presidency, heading a coalition of his own Socialist Party, the Radical Party (like Britain’s Labour Party, an affiliate of the Socialist International), the Communist Party and several smaller parties, one of them a splinter from the Christian Democrats.

The mood in the country in March 1972 was still quite euphoric, following substantial and hugely popular achievements such as the nationalisation of Chile’s copper mines and the pursuit of a more radical land reform. People still felt that now, at last, they had a government which belonged to them and would bring real and irreversible improvements for the poor and the dispossessed. In the words of the Inti-Illimani song: ‘Porque esta vez no se trata de cambiar un presidente, será el pueblo quien construya un Chile bien diferente’ —This time it’s not just a change of President. This time it will be the people who will build a really different Chile.

Radicalised culture

Chile was an intensely exciting place to be. Everyone was ‘comprometido’ —committed, involved. There was no room for being in the words of the Victor Jara song, ‘ni chicha, ni limonada’ —a fence-sitter, neither beer nor lemonade. Political debate was constant and ubiquitous among all ages and classes of people of the left, centre and right. Newspapers (most of the principal ones still controlled by the right), magazines, radio and TV discussed every action of the government, every promise made by Allende and his ministers and every move of the opposition with a depth, sophistication and venom almost unimaginable in Britain today.

The changes were not only political, they were profound changes in the national culture. Most of the popular singers, many actors, artists, poets and authors identified closely with Popular Unity and considered themselves engaged in a battle against the imported, implanted values of Hollywood, Disney, Braniff Airlines, the ‘cold-blooded dealers in dreams, magazine magnates grown fat at the expense of youth’ in the excoriating words of Victor Jara’s song ¿Quien mató a Carmencita? There was a vogue for playing chess and in cafés and squares you would see people earnestly bent over chess-boards while conducting vehement political debates.

The national publisher Quimantu (the old ZigZag company, bought by the government in 1971) was printing a vast range of books, produced and sold at low prices, to enable all but the poorest to own books, enjoy reading and have access to literature. In the two years of its existence it produced almost 12 million books, distributing them not only in bookshops, but street news-kiosks, buses, through the trade unions and in some factories.

Dark clouds

But dark clouds were beginning to gather. The CIA had already attempted a coup in 1970, with a botched kidnap attempt ending in the murder of General Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army. ITT and other US corporations were busily urging more decisive intervention on the State Department. There was a vast increase in funding to opposition groups in Chile and the price of copper, Chile’s crucial export, was being manipulated on the world market. The economy was beginning to falter, and inflation to climb.

In October 1972 the owners of road transport staged a massive lockout (still, mistakenly, called ‘the lorry-drivers strike’), paralysing road transport, attacking or sabotaging the vehicles of any who continued to work and paying a daily wage well in excess of normal earnings to owner-drivers who brought their lorries to the road-side encampments of the strike. The atmosphere of these was similar to those of the refinery blockades in Britain in 2000, but far more serious and violent. Food, oil, petrol and other necessities ran short.

I spent some of my free hours unloading trains in Santiago’s Estación Yungay, alongside teams of volunteers organised by the Chilean Young Communists and other groups.

The lockout subsided, and all attention was turned for the next few months on the mid-term congressional elections due in March 1973. Despite a concerted opposition media campaign to denounce growing food shortages and economic difficulties which were affecting the living standards of many workers, Popular Unity increased its share of the vote to 43.2 per cent.

By now, however, the Christian Democrat party had turned decisively to the right and began to identify more and more closely with the parties of the traditional right. Virulently anti-communist and sometimes anti-semitic messages became more frequent in their newspaper, La Prensa. Together, this right-dominated block held the majority in both Senate and Chamber of Deputies and could block any legislation. Their messages were that Popular Unity meant ‘the way to communism via your stomach’, in other words by hunger; and that socialism meant promoting envy and hatred (of the rich).

Violence of the wealthy

The now united opposition decided that if democratic votes would not provide the results it required, it would resort to violence and call on the military to intervene. Government buildings and institutions were targeted by arsonists, and sabotage of the electricity network brought frequent black-outs. I watched gangs of young middle-class men in Providencia, one of the wealthier avenues of Santiago, halting trolley-buses and setting fire to them.

On June 29 the No.2 Tank Regiment headed by Colonel Souper and backed by the leadership of the fascist group Patria y Libertad, staged an attempted coup. Tanks surrounded La Moneda, the presidential palace in the centre of Santiago. But the rest of the armed forces failed to move in support and the coup failed. I spent that day with my friend Wolfgang, a film-maker at the State Technical University, peering round street corners and trying to film the action as it developed.

We could not tell at the time if this was a dress rehearsal or a false start by a group of hot-heads. Our relief at its failure was short-lived: it was immediately clear that worse lay ahead. At my work-place, the Forestry Institute, we began to take turns to mount guard at night to protect the buildings against sabotage. The institute’s distinctive Aro jeeps had been ambushed on roads in the conservative south of Chile and the drivers beaten up.

In the poor neighbourhood where I lived, close to the centre of Santiago, we had set up a JAP, a food supply committee, which aimed to suppress the black market, discourage hoarding and ensure that basic necessities such as rice, sugar, cooking oil and some meat, were distributed to local residents at official prices. We had enrolled 1,200 families in an 8-block area, and the weekly general meetings were attended by 400 or more. We worked with the owners of the small corner grocery stores common in that area. But they had no love for us.

Military rebellion

The country was slipping into a de facto state of civil war. Allende attempted to stabilise the situation by including military officers in his cabinet, but his loyal army chief, General Prats, was forced to resign when a group of wives of other senior generals staged a demonstration outside his house, accusing him of cowardice. His replacement was General Augusto Pinochet, at that time still believed to be loyal to the constitution.

By early September 1973, we fully expected a crescendo of right-wing violence, a military rebellion, further coup attempts. Popular Unity supporters marched in a vast demonstration on 4 September, taking hours to pass in front of the Moneda Palace, where a desperately tired and grim-faced Allende stood to salute his supporters.

But nothing had prepared us for the swiftness, the precision and the totality of the coup that began in Valparaiso on the night of 10 September and had gained complete control of the government, all major cities, airports, radio stations, phones, transmitters and communications by 3pm on the 11 September.

In the Instituto Forestal, we met in the canteen. Most people left to go home, collect children from school, ensure the safety of their families. Some perhaps had orders from their parties to go to particular points of the city, to defend, to await orders, possibly to take up arms. A group of us stayed on to guard the buildings until the military curfew made it impossible for us to leave. The radio broadcast only military music and bandos, military communiqués, read in a clipped, cruel, mechanical voice, declaring an indefinite 24-hour curfew, reading a list of names of those who must hand themselves in immediately to the Ministry of Defence, and justifying the ‘military pronouncement’.

Torture and killings

At first we believed that there would be resistance, that the armed forces would divide, even that General Prats was marching from the south at the head of regiments loyal to the constitution. But none of this occurred. Pockets of resistance in industrial areas of the cities were swiftly and brutally eliminated. Some military officers were arrested, others fled the country, but there was no significant rebellion. The parties of Popular Unity and the MIR hunkered down for underground resistance but, having worked publicly and openly for so long, most of their existing leaders were instantly identifiable and were soon arrested or killed.

Together with other non-Chileans, I hid that night in the outhouse of a colleague who lived near the Instituto. Returning next morning we found the institute empty, with signs of doors having been forced and some bullet marks. A military patrol had come during the night and arrested the director and those who had remained on guard. We went through the buildings, office by office, removing all lists of names, trade union membership, party posters and badges, everything that we supposed might incriminate our colleagues. It was hard: everything that had been normal, routine, legal, was now illegal, dangerous, potentially lethal.

Later, some of the cleaners arrived and warned us to leave immediately: it was likely that the military would return and arrest us. They took us across the fields to the shanty-town where they lived and, at considerable risk to themselves and their families, hid and fed us in their houses until the curfew ended.

The next days were spent living in limbo, moving from one friend’s house to another. Of my two Chilean flatmates, one had been arrested on the 12 September in the State Technical University, along with hundreds of students and academics and taken to the Chile Stadium, where Victor Jara was tortured and shot. Wolfgang managed to escape and later would come as a refugee to Britain. The other, Juan, had sought asylum in the Swedish Embassy.

Complete purge

The scale and totality of the coup is hard to grasp. From the first, the military sought to replace every single public official from ministers, through provincial governors, university rectors, right down to small town mayors and secondary school heads. The new appointees were mostly serving or retired military officers or those in their direct confidence.

University departments (especially sociology, politics, journalism) were purged or closed and whole degree courses abolished. Libraries and bookshops were ransacked and books burned. Blocks of flats in central Santiago were searched and all suspect books (including mine) thrown by soldiers from the windows and burned in the street below. All political parties were declared ‘in recess’ and all those of Popular Unity and the left were banned, with their offices and property seized. The entire national electoral register was destroyed.

Our flat had already been raided twice by police, after right-wing neighbours claimed we had an arsenal of weapons stored there. Unwisely I returned, ten days after the coup, to collect clothes and was just leaving when the police blocked off the street and an armed patrol arrested me.

At the comisaría, the local police station, there was an atmosphere of hysteria. The carabineros there had divided and fought a battle on the day of the coup, between those loyal to the constitution and supporters of the coup. The survivors had been on duty almost continuously and been fed with rumours that ‘foreigners had come to Chile to murder their families’. Improbably, they accused me, despite my fair hair and blue eyes, of being a Cuban extremist. A pile of books, perhaps including mine, was burning in the courtyard and the smoke blew in through the bars of the cell where I was held.

In the National Stadium

Later that day they took me to the National Stadium, the vast national football and sports arena. The entrance was thronged with groups of prisoners being brought in from the four points of the capital. There was a large group in white coats, doctors and nurses from one of the main hospitals, arrested because they had refused to join right-wing colleagues the previous month in a strike against the government.

We were herded into changing rooms and offices. Soldiers manned machine-gun positions along the corridor which ran the full circuit of the stadium below the stands. We were 130 in our camarín, a team changing room, only able to lie down to sleep at night by lining up in rows and dovetailing heads and feet. Next to us was a cell with women prisoners, some of whom had been horribly abused and tortured, but whose morale and singing would sustain us in the coming days.

Photographs of the period tend to show prisoners sitting in the stands. But these were only a fraction of the total number, while many more remained in the cells below and those selected for interrogation, torture and elimination were taken to the adjacent velodrome.

I was lucky. My family and friends had informed the British Embassy that I was missing, and on my seventh day in the Stadium the British Consul arrived to obtain my release. I hoped to stay in Chile but with no documents and no job (all foreigners at the Institute had been indefinitely suspended by the new military-appointed director) I had little choice but to leave. Most others were much less fortunate. The Brazilian engineer next to me in the camarín was taken out for interrogation, hooded, beaten around the ears with a wooden bat until he could scarcely hear and questioned by both Chilean and Brazilian intelligence. I told Amnesty International about him, but we could never discover what became of him.

Neoliberalism starts here

Returning to Britain, I became involved with the Chile Solidarity Campaign, just being formed with backing from Liberation, the main trade unions, the Labour and Communist Parties, IMG, IS and many others from the churches, academics, artists, musicians and theatre people. At the time, we believed that the dictatorship would be brief, and I personally hoped and expected to return to Chile and resume my life there.

What none of us sufficiently understood was that the Pinochet regime was much more than the sum of its troops, its armaments and repression. It was an entire economic project, perhaps the first full-on attempt to implement a neoliberal revolution by means of the extreme shock of military coup and dictatorship. But the power that underpinned it lay not in Santiago’s Ministry of Defence, but in Washington and Chicago, in corporate headquarters, banks and think-tanks, in the City of London, Delaware and the budding off-shore empires. As so brilliantly documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, these would come to dominate not just Chile, but the states and economies of most of the developed world, and the recent recession notwithstanding, they dominate them still.

The fight against this globalised economic dictatorship has barely begun. Even in Chile, more than 20 years after the end of the Pinochet regime, the thousands of students who have taken to the streets in the past few years are clear in their demands: for an end to the neoliberal model in education and other public services and for the resumption of universal provision as a human right.

Mike Gatehouse is a campaigner and journalist. He lived in Chile in 1972-3 and after he left worked for the Chile Solidarity Campaign and the El Salvador Committee for Human Rights. He is now a member of the editorial team of Latin America Bureau.

A workers’ ‘green ban’ on fracking?

jenny — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 08:25:05 +0000

A workshop on ‘work and transition’ at the Reclaim The Power protest camp in Balcombe, Sussex, was part of an ongoing conversation between the labour and climate movements. It is a conversation which, in Britain, has involved the historic links between the Reclaim the Streets movement and striking dock workers in the 1990s. Lucas Aerospace workers’ transition plan in the 1970s, which proposed to repurpose their socially and ecologically unsustainable factories to produce socially necessary goods.

With the climate movement reviving in the context of the government’s newfound mania for expanding fossil fuel energy generation and ‘extreme energy’ solutions like fracking, it is a conversation which must be had again with a new generation of activists.

The workshop aimed to give activists who might not have engaged with the labour movement before to learn about trade unions and workers’ organisations, and to discuss questions around workers’ agency in fighting climate change and the potential for worker-led models of transition.

Manuel Cortes, general secretary of transport union TSSA, spoke about the links between the fight for a top-quality, publicly-owned transport system and the fight against climate change. Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) assistant general secretary Chris Baugh introduced the Campaign Against Climate Change’s ‘One Million Climate Jobs’ pamphlet, a campaigning publication which argues for investment in and expansion of ‘green collar’ jobs in sustainable, socially-necessary industries like transport, social housing construction, and renewable energy.

PCS officer Clara Paillard recounted her experiences as a workplace environmental rep fighting for sustainability in the workplace, making links with local environmental campaigners to fight the construction of a privately-operated, for-profit waste incinerator in their local area. Green Party activist Derek Wall discussed models from economic theory, including Karl Marx and Elinor Ostrom, which could help develop a vision for democratic collectivism and a sustainable future.

I spoke to tell the story of Workers’ Climate Action (WCA), a direct-action solidarity network active between 2006 and 2010 which aimed to bring a working-class political approach to the climate movement and radical ecological politics to the labour movement. WCA sought to make links with workers in high-emissions industries like energy and aviation, because we knew that a conversation about transition was only possible from within a framework of basic solidarity with workers’ day-to-day struggles.

Small-group discussion in the workshop covered a range of topics. It would be disingenuous to deny the difficulty of discussing the potential power of aviation, construction, and energy workers in a workshop made up of participants who had little or no experience of working in such industries. However, with participants working as teachers, journalists, and in local government – all sectors and industries with high levels of trade union organisation – there was plenty of opportunity to discuss applying workplace and union-focused models of environmental activism to participants’ own workplaces and experiences, rather than seeing them solely as something we can engage some alien worker ‘other’ with.

The green bans movement

An episode that came up repeatedly in the discussions was Australian construction workers’ ‘green bans’ movement in the 1970s (in fact the movement that originated the use of the term ‘green’ in politics). The New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation union put ‘green bans’ on a number of socially and environmentally unsustainable construction sites, insisting that their skills would not be used to damage the environment and the interests of working-class communities. The confidence and power of the BLF to launch such a movement was built up over years of struggle, including within their own union, over issues as fundamental as the right to have access to toilets on construction sites.

The lesson is that by organising and fighting over issues of day-to-day exploitation, workers can develop sufficient confidence in our own power to fight for the transformation of our industries and for control over what our labour is used for.

The workshop discussion generated one particularly exciting aspiration: a workers’ ‘green ban’ on fracking sites. That aspiration is not going to be realised overnight. Work is hard to come by for everyone, union organisation in the construction industry is weak, and with many construction worker activists still suffering from the long-term effects of blacklisting, it’s a big task to try and persuade workers to refuse jobs. But if the climate movement can develop a solidaristic, rather than antagonistic, relationship with construction workers on fracking sites or on new fossil-fuel power plant construction projects, we can amplify that conversation and put that aspiration at its centre.

In the workshop, we discussed some small-scale recent precedents for this, including WCA’s work engaging with workers at Kingsnorth and Ratcliffe-on-Soar power stations (the targets of the 2007 Climate Camp and the 2009 Climate ‘Swoop’ respectively).

The workshop, and the ongoing conversation of which it was a part, speak to the very core of the climate movement’s politics. A systemic understanding of where climate change comes from necessarily implies an integral role for organised labour in fighting it. The exploitative relationship between workers and bosses that is at the essential core of capitalism causes ecological damage because it subordinates labour, the process which mediates humanity’s relationship to our environment, to the chaos of markets and the profit motive.

A working-class political economy for the environment sees organised labour as a privileged agent in fighting not only against the immediate effects of climate chaos but for a democratic-collectivist society based on democratic planning in the interests of human need. That society should be the common aim of both the environmental and labour movements. If it is, we can begin to dissolve the distinction between ‘environmental activist’ and ‘trade union activist’ and aspire to a common identity as class-struggle activists fighting for a democratic and sustainable society – in other words, for socialism.

This conversation is set to continue at a TUC fringe meeting this week: Unions and communities together against fracking and for one million climate jobs, Monday 9th September, Bournemouth