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Civil Disobedience is a Terrorist Threat

Merrick Godhaven — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:45:43 +0000

We’re used to the right wing media lying about activists. But last Sunday the lefty Observer ran an article titled ‘Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists: Fear of deadly attack by lone maverick as officers alert major firms to danger of green extremism’.

Officers from a specialist unit dedicated to tackling domestic terrorism are monitoring an eco-movement called Earth First! which has advocates who state that cutting the Earth’s population by 80 per cent will ease pressure on other species.

Firstly, just to be clear, the unit is not about terrorism. The unit themselves say

NETCU provides the police service of England and Wales and other enforcement agencies with tactical advice and guidance on policing domestic extremism and associated criminality.

And what is ‘extremism’?

The term ‘domestic extremism’ applies to unlawful action that is part of a protest or campaign. It is most often associated with ‘single-issue’ protests, such as animal rights, anti-war, anti-globalisation and anti-GM (genetically modified) crops.

The front page of the NETCU site shows some cops standing around in front of a demonstration of people dressed as clowns.

So it’s not terrorist stuff in any real sense, it’s just protests. Already there’s exaggeration of the threat.

But what about the extremists who say ‘cutting the Earth’s population by 80 per cent will ease pressure on other species’? Given this one allegation is what the Observer hang their whole article on, it’s peculiar that there is not verbatim quote. Surely, if such a statement existed on a blog or in a newsletter somewhere, they’d be quoting it and naming the source.

But whatever, it is not an extremist position. It’s an irrefutable fact. Whether you think there should be such a reduction is another thing, but the statement itself is incontrovertible.

Even if you do think there should be population reduction, it doesn’t mean you believe there should be some sort of random cull, which – by linking it with the word terrorism and all the images that conjures in your mind – is what they’re trying to imply.

STOP THE LARDO-TERRORISTS!

By the same token, when the Conservatives say there are too many obese people it doesn’t mean they’re wanting to cull the 20% or so of Britons who are overweight.

But can we rule out that a ‘lone maverick’ in the Conservative party is not planning to carry out an act of lardo-terrorism? Should NETCU be outside Conservative party meetings taking photos and notes (as they are at Climate Camp ones)? The Conservative party is clearly a lardo-terrorist hotbed, and even though – like Earth First! – there’s no policy or any indication they want to do anything terrorist, they certainly have the ability and might be planning it at this very moment.

We’re told that Earth First!

has links to US environmental extremists which have waged a campaign of violence in America, including the firebombing of a string of 4×4 car dealerships in California in 2003 and alleged arson attacks on other property

and that

green extremists have yet to embark on an orchestrated campaign of violence in the UK

Yet the only ‘violence’ they can list from US environmentalists is damage to property. In the UK, Earth First! has been involved with similar damage to property across the country for nearly 20 years.

But if that were pointed out – a campaign of property damage that hasn’t hurt anyone – it wouldn’t seem like a new and terrorist threat.

This malleability of definitions, fudgy thinking and ignorance of fact run through the whole article. That’s because it’s not there to inform in a real sense but to establish an undefined unease, to sow in the public mind a feeling that there are terrorists in the green movement so that reasonable people who share green concerns are discouraged from joining in. Then when, at some time in future, greens are treated as terrorists nobody will complain.

In the meantime, it serves to defuse this burgeoning movement. If you make the radical end seem scary and liable to imprisonment then the more moderate activists will seek to distance themselves.

STOP THE FOETO-TERRORISTS!

Incidentally, if you want a campaign of genuine violence in the USA, try anti-abortionists. They too do major property damage, but also have a long history of murdering doctors, nurses and receptionists.

There are also anti-abortion groups in the UK, they also intimidate people and blockade places, therefore they also counts as ‘domestic extremists’. They too could harbour a ‘lone maverick’ who wants to kill. So why aren’t they a NETCU target?

Because action on ecological issues, especially climate change, has such huge public support and scientific backing that is rapidly growing and so represents a threat to government policy and corporate profit, whereas anti-abortionists do not. This repression is a measure of the environmental movement’s success and power.

MARK TOWNSEND: STOOGE OR AGENT?

It’s not the first piece of terror-threat tosh Mark Townsend has written. Last week he did a piece which opened by telling us that

suspected terrorists have attempted to infiltrate Britain’s top laboratories in order to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Yet his own second paragraph say that’s not true, only that MI5 and MI6 ‘believe’ their suspects were attempting it.

It turns out that there’s a stringent MI5 vetting scheme for students that has turned away 100 people. People the article describes as ‘potential terrorists posing as postgraduate students’.

You, dear reader, are a potential terrorist. And anything you declare yourself to be is something you are posing as. So, for example, the driver of the train I was on yesterday could be described as a potential terrorist posing as a train driver.

What is all this guff about? Surely nobody would lie about WMD to create false impression of threat and thereby have an excuse to commit extreme acts that the public wouldn’t otherwise allow, would they?

It seems as though Townsend has a hot new contact in the security services who’s taking advantage of his gullibility and feeding him this cack.

Where is he getting it from? Well, the co-author of the eco-terrorist piece is Nick Denning. Flash back a year and, as Ian Bone spotted, Townsend was an embedded reporter in Afghanistan. The British military commander showing him round was a man by the name of Nick Denning.

Two weeks running Townsend’s written vacuous scare stories of threats, plants that are seemingly straight from the spooks, taken at face value, without checking sources. He clearly hasn’t looked into EF!, or even talked to coppers who’ve actually dealt with EF!.

WHAT IS EARTH FIRST!?

Earth First! is not a shady new organisation. In fact, it is none of those three things.

It is, as is said on pretty much every publication and website under the name,

not a cohesive group or campaign, but a convenient banner for people who share similar philosophies to work under.

Earth First! has been going since the early 90s. The anti-roads and anti-GM direct action campaigns were aligned with Earth First!.

Earth First!‘s public presence in the UK is a couple of websites, a newsletter and an annual conference in the summer, open to all and attended by about 200 people. All of this is well known to the police and not news. This year’s summer gathering only got police attention in the form of a perusal to see that it was complying with its events license. Which it was.

The general principles behind Earth First! are non-hierarchical organisation and the use of direct action to confront, stop and eventually reverse the forces that are responsible for the destruction of the Earth and its inhabitants.

At a time when government and corporations have proven themselves utterly incapable of responding as science and nature so urgently demand, when figures as mainstream as Al Gore are calling for civil disobedience (which makes him, by NETCU’s definition, an extremist) such action is not only justified but essential.

Conflating terrorism, extremism and anything criminal would be risible if it didn’t raise the spectre of the state meting out the same treatment to all three activities.

The fight for the NUS

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 18:09:19 +0000

The NUS ‘governance review’ was presented to us as some great piece of social democratic reform by the union’s Labour-affiliated leadership, but in reality they seek to sideline the union’s elected officers and demolish the last remnants of political pluralism within the NUS. The rhetoric says that the union will somehow still be ‘led by students’, but this is patronising at best. The basis and vision for the review was provided not by students, but by non-student union managers. And the main proposal involves the transfer of ultimate power and veto within the union to a ‘trustee board’ made up of ‘external’ individuals such as lawyers and accountants.

What does that mean in practice? When I was elected equality and diversity officer at Leeds University student union, I became a trustee on a new board. I was asked to sign a contract stating that, as a trustee, I would not make any decisions to the union’s financial detriment. In one swift stroke, my right to campaign for the removal of the NUS’s multi-million pound contracts with unethical manufacturers was ripped from my grasp.

The trustees also had the power to overrule any decisions made by students if they were deemed to ‘jeopardise the union’s reputation’ – a phrase interchangeable with ‘having a non-mainstream political opinion’. I was informed that sitting on such a board would require me to take off my ‘student officer hat’ – I would not now be looking after the interests of the ‘minority’ students that you would expect an equality officer to represent, but those of the student body as a whole. Any suggestions that such a structure was a root cause of discrimination were dismissed as the ramblings of a renegade.

One year later, an almost identical review, conceived by a steering group that includes the brains behind the Leeds proposal, has been rolled out for the national union. This time it is suggested that the board will have no officers to represent minorities at all, hat or no hat.

The proposal effectively erodes the already limited democratic structures remaining between ‘ordinary’ students and those at the top. It works to centralise power, reaffirming the view that the union is nothing more than a playground for bureaucrats en-route to a career in Westminster. It is a plan to destroy a mass-membership organisation and create in its place an elitist, monolithic lobbying tool – a kind of student think-tank.

The union’s leaders seem to think that the huge losses students have suffered – the right to free education and the giant leaps made in its marketisation – would not have transpired had we adopted this way of working earlier. That is nonsensical: the reason students lost their right to free education was because the union was begging for scraps inside the minister’s office rather than throwing its energy and resources into mobilising students across the country.

Blaming the shaky governance structures is an easy way out of NUS’s failure to secure the interests of its core members. The union will continue to fail so long as it keeps moving towards becoming nothing more than a consortium of student unions, headed by union managers, that puts profit before students. The union certainly needs to change – but the current proposals have taken a dangerous wrong turn.

Hind Hassan is one of 12 part-time officers on the National Union of Students executive. She is a member of Student Respect, but writes here in a personal capacity

____

The battle for the union: a timeline

April 2007 A motion is passed at the NUS annual conference in Blackpool, calling for reform of the union’s governance structures

Summer 2007 The NUS pays a management consultant £100,000 to write a ‘white paper’; a ‘consultation’ then opens. The union is criticised for holding the consultation over the summer, when most students will not be at their universities and so cannot be involved. Left groups realise that the reforms will remove their positions within the union, and set up a campaign against them

December 2007 An ‘extraordinary’ (emergency) conference to pass the reforms is called by the national leadership – at such short notice that delegates from most universities are simply appointed by their unions, not elected by students. Controversially, the chair refuses to count the vote, declaring that it is obviously more than the required two-thirds majority

April 2008 The reforms passed in November go to a ratification vote at the union’s annual conference, but the left mobilises in the form of the Save NUS Democracy campaign and narrowly wins the third of delegates’ votes needed to block the new constitution. NUS president Gemma Tumelty breaks down in tears as the result is announced

Summer 2008 The ‘consultation’ is restarted. New NUS president Wes Streeting says that despite the ‘setbacks’ there will be ‘no turning back’ on reform

November 2008 There are plans for another emergency conference to try to pass the reforms again

Fifth Columnist

JamieSW — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:43:09 +0000

AS THE OBSERVER TROTS OUT POLICE LINE OVER ECO-TERRORISM

“Of course I don’t have a f*cking agenda. I’m a national newspaper journalist – why would I have an agenda?” – Mark Townsend, Observer journalist.

The Observer launched a broadside this week against the environmental movement. Headlined “Police warn of growing threat from eco-terrorists”- handily sub-headed, “Fear of deadly attack by lone maverick as officers alert major firms to danger of green extremism” – the article goes on to allege that “Officers are concerned that a ‘lone maverick’ eco-extremist may attempt a terrorist attack aimed at killing large numbers of Britons.” Of course not one shred of evidence is referred to in the thinly disguised puff-piece for the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU).The words of an unnamed police source are all it takes to generate the spectre of carbon-neutral suicide bombings coming to a city-centre near you.

Apparently,

“The unit is currently monitoring blogs and internet traffic connected to a network of UK climate camps and radical environmental movements under the umbrella of Earth First! ... A senior source at the unit said it had growing evidence of a threat from eco-activists. ‘We have found statements that four-fifths of the human population has to die for other species in the world to survive. There are a number of very dedicated individuals out there and they could be dangerous to other people.’”

The piece was written by one Mark Townsend (environmental journalist of the year and co-incidentally author of a mildy-amusing tome entitled “Fifty ways to fuck the planet”) and the mysterious Nick Denning, who doesn’t even work at the Observer.

When SchNEWS contacted Mark at his desk, at first he seemed defensive and grew increasingly aggressive as the interview went on. When asked if he’d just regurgitated a police press release he said, “You don’t know anything about NETCU mate – they don’t just stick out press releases”. Which is strange given that the unit comment very publicly on the work they do – just check out their website SchNEWS 503). More recently of course we had the much publicised discovery of a ‘weapons cache’ near this year’s Climate Camp. As far as the political police are concerned the media are just another weapon in the fight against domestic unrest – and for their journalist-dupes truth balance and fact-checking just don’t come into it. When we asked Mark where the claim that Earth First! advocates the disappearance of 80% of the population had come from he said, “I don’t know – they [NETCU] said they had seen them in blogs” – How’s that for speaking truth to power?

So why the sudden appearance of the article? It contains little that could be described as news, just a load of cobbled together wild-eyed speculation. One answer is that concern for NETCU jobs in the face of the credit crunch has triggered a search for a new enemy and a broader remit. How convenient that now the animal rights (AR) movement is in ‘disarray’, a new target hovers into view.

OFF WITH HIS SUBHEAD

Another possible explanation is that the growing movement against climate change has got the state more worried than we realise, and the idea is to spread fear amongst activists that they are being heavily watched. At the moment campaigners are generally regarded in a positive light and public support is absolutely crucial for successful defiance of the state. Just look at how lightly anti-GM activists and peace protestors are treated by the authorities compared to their animal rights counterparts. Perhaps the time has come to drive a wedge between environmental activists and the general public, and of course the best way to do this is with the emotive issue of ‘violence’. Are we observing the beginning of a smear campaign?

So far it’s AR that has felt the full weight of state-orchestrated demonisation. Despite the fact that the movement has never been responsible for a single death they are routinely described as ‘terrorists’ or ‘extremists’. A political climate has been created which enables the state to crack down hard. New criminal offences are drafted targeting the movement and people are imprisoned simply for organising demos (Sean Kirtley – see SchNEWS 634). The SOCPA legislation (sec 145) banning demos aimed at disrupting ‘contractual obligations’ currently only protects ‘animal research’ organisations. A who’s who of UK media organisations have lined up to take a pop at the AR movement – Dispatches, Panorama and all the main papers have parroted the police line that AR is full of dangerous violent fanatics with an irrational belief system. High profile waves of arrests make the front page, so do the convictions, but news of acquittals languish in the back pages. The actual cause that the AR movement is fighting for receives virtually no media examination. The industrial-scale use of animals for food and vivisection is one of the great hidden evils of our lifestyle – rather than confront that, it’s obviously best to throw those that confront it into prison.

The opening of the new Oxford animal lab, albeit two years late and millions over budget, is now being hailed as a victory by vivisectionists. Of course the very fact that they were able to achieve this much is because of a huge mobilisation on the part of the state. Back in SchNEWS 590 we described how Thames Valley Police accidentally taped themselves saying that they were ‘going to wage a dirty war’ against SPEAK, with one commander adding that, “We’re going to prosecute the shit out of them.” Publicity surrounding the tape didn’t prevent the arrest and prosecution of Mel Broughton, a prominent spokesperson for the campaign (see SchNEWS 616). Last week he was acquitted of possessing an explosive substance – packets of sparklers – with intent. Two other charges led to hung jury.

Despite this, the prosecution demanded a re-trial and Mel was remanded in prison with a trial date to be fixed ‘some time next year’. NETCUs attempts to take ‘ringleaders’ of the AR off the streets by fair means or foul continues.

We don’t know what agenda Townsend’s actually working to but it’s been clear for a while that the police want an increased ability to deal with all forms of dissent. Public demonisation is a key plank in the strategy. We’ll leave the last words to John Curtin, long term AR campaigner: “We used to be regarded as Robin Hood figures for what we did – rescuing animals from a life of torture in laboratories – and now we’re terrorists – the same people doing the same things.”

Original article is at www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/nov/09/eco-terrorism-earth-first-elf

NETCU Watch www.netcu.wordpress.com

Labour History Resurgent?

JamieSW — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:14:00 +0000

‘Live Working or Die Fighting : how the working class went global’ (Vintage paperback, London, 2008)
Paul Mason

A paperback edition of Paul Mason’s ‘Live Working or Die Fighting: how the working class went global‘ is most welcome. More accessibly than anything else I know, it offers a way forward for labour historians still largely locked in an agenda established in the 1960s – when E. P. Thompson inspired a generation with his ‘The Making of the English Working Class‘ and his call for “History from Below”. When Mason’s book was first published in 2007, The Guardian plugged it narrowly as, “required reading for the Seattle brigade”. It is that, but the book also deserves serious attention from those who think they already know all that matters about labour history. By a journalist rather than by a professional historian, it is both readable and timely. The fact that the author was, and is, a BBC Newsnight economics commentator perhaps limits his ability to draw the theoretical and political conclusions his work points to. But that needn’t stop others from doing so.

When the book first appeared, Mason was interviewed by former sociology professor, Laurie Taylor, for Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme. A cacophony of recorded noise introduced the show: the sound of protesting textile workers in Bangladesh, explained Taylor – the sort of sound we can expect to hear more frequently as workers in newly industrialising areas of the world organise to fight for their rights. Could it be, Taylor asked, that Asia, Latin America and Africa in the 21st century might become like 19th century Europe, with workers developing a similar trade union movement? This question, a critical one, was prompted by the form of Mason’s book.

It has eleven main chapters, all of which begin with one of the authors early 21st century journalistic encounters with workers in different corners of the world. Each of these accounts is juxtaposed with a well-researched retelling of an episode from the history of the European or American workers movement. The situation of Chinese sweatshop workers in 2003 leads into an account of the 1819 Peterloo massacre (at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, four years after the battle of Waterloo). Then Indian textile workers in 2005 introduce the story of the 1831 Lyon silk workers revolt. The third chapter time-travels from Nigerian slum-dwellers in 2005 back to the Paris Commune; and the fourth translates the reader from the struggle of Iraqi oil workers in 2006 to episodes in the US labour-movement history of the 1870s and 1880s. Interviews with Canary Wharf immigrant cleaners, organising for trade-union recognition in 2004, head up an account of the heyday of international syndicalism; and Indian car workers Mason encountered a year later are paired with the emergent Chinese workers’ movement of the 1920s. The author then turns to Latin America, which he visited at various times between 2003 and 2006, giving an account of the Bolivian neighbourhood risings and comparing them to the events in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Finally, the experiences of the Argentine working class prompt an account of movements for workers control in Italy, France and the USA in the interwar years.

Taylor began by asking Mason which of his recent encounters he most vividly remembered. Mason replied:

“[In 2004] I was sitting in … a hotel room in China for an unauthorised meeting with some factory workers who were represented by a labour lawyer. That’s as near as you get to being represented by anybody. When they walked in … every single one of them was missing a limb … One of them, out of the six, had a prosthesis – everybody else couldnt afford one – and they told me the story of how theyd been injured by really crazy, avoidable accidents. And then [they were] immediately sacked because the practice in the sweatshop sector of the Shenzhen industrial sector … is not to take out insurance for the workers… [Yet] it struck me that these guys were part of probably the most decisive social force in the 21st century – thats the Chinese, and latterly the Indian, workforces – a billion strong and making history in many senses, economically, culturally even, but not yet politically.”

But what of more positive experiences of organisation rather than of impotence in the face of maltreatment? Mason responded:

“The developing world is awash with examples of workers organising both in the slums they live in and in the factories they work in… [But] very few of the struggles among the newly formed workforces of China, India, Latin America and Africa has reached the level yet of some of the historical symbolic acts that I write about [in ‘

Taylor’s second guest on the programme was a research fellow from Sussex University’s Institute of Development Studies (an academic field less popular today than it was in the 1960s when ‘development’ – then based on the idea that the miscalled Third World would follow the ‘model’ of the already-industrialised world – was all the rage). Was there perhaps a ‘top-down’ answer, which would offset the need for the disruptive ‘bottom-up’ struggles Mason seems to be predicting? And could the independent study which the developmentalist had been involved in (a study which produced the 2006 Ethical Trading Initiative’s ‘Ethical Trading Report’) point the way? Already one could hear – knocking metaphorically at the studio door – those figures so beloved of troubleshooting liberal academics, ‘progressive’ employers (versed in the jargon of partnership) who see commercial advantage in their workers feeling content and properly represented. Sure enough these shining knights soon entered the discussion, with Mason joining in by recounting a debate he had chaired in which one such multinational employer called for trade unions to become global so that he would have a representative ‘interlocutor’ to mediate his relations with an international workforce.

The BBC discussion was a sign of new times, in which the fashion for a sociology that declared the “end of class”, and sustained the nonsense that “there is no alternative” to neo-liberal, global capitalism, is fading, or certainly losing credibility; and it is a tribute to Mason’s book that it has brought this into the open. But there is also an echo of a more radical discourse in his work. In 1892, when Frederick Engels agreed to a reissue of his ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844‘, he wrote a new preface recognising that times had hugely changed over the intervening 50 years, but defending the relevance of his book on the grounds of his approach to what was often called ‘The Social Question’. And he observed that the response of the middle classes to the threat of social upheaval had changed too; that one-time ‘abomination of abominations’, socialism, “has not only become respectable, but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causeuses [French ‘love seats’ or mini-sofas]. This shows the incurable fickleness of that terrible despot of ‘society’, middle-class public opinion, and once more justifies the contempt in which we socialists of a past generation always held public opinion.”

As a symptom of something real beneath the surface of ‘public opinion’, Engels wrote, serious socialists should pay attention to these changes, but, he argued:

“What I consider far more important than this momentary fashion among bourgeois circles of affecting a mild dilution of Socialism, and even more than the actual progress Socialism has made in England generally …is the revival of the East End of London. The immense haunt of misery is no longer the stagnant pool it was six years ago. It has shaken off its torpor of despair, has returned to life, and it has become the home of what is called the New Unionism…”

One of Mason’s chapters deals with the ‘New Unionism’, the organisation of the unemployed in trade unions in Britain in the 1890s, which led to major class struggles and, early in the 20th century, the foundation of the Labour Party, a radical step in its day and one that was to ensure that a form of class politics – albeit a pale reflection of the reality of the class struggle – was to prevail in Britain’s parliamentary politics until the 1970s or 1980s. Mason brings out – as Engels who died in 1895 could not have done – the way in which the new phase of capitalism emerging at the end of the 19th century found its opposite in the internationalisation of the labour movement. For Mason, the London dock strike of 1889 – introduced with his account of how, in 2004, the immigrant Canary Wharf cleaners knew nothing of the Wapping printers’ strike of 1986, far less the history of Tom Mann and “the dockers’ tanner”, and how powerful they found even a smattering of that knowledge – is only part of a much wider story.

The chapter moves on to France: Victor Griffuelhes and the radical Paris shoemakers, Aristide Briand and Fernand Pelloutier’s ‘Revolution Through General Strike’ and the formation of the ‘Confédération Général des Ouvriers’. It visits the ‘Red City’ of porcelain-producing Limoges, where the violent events of 1905 were triggered by workers in an American-owned factory standing up against managers who thought they had inherited the droit de cuissage (the right to get between the legs) from feudal times. It covers the syndicalist movement in pre-World War I France, before moving to contemporaneous actions in Latin America, and on to Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World in the USA. Thence to Tom Mann’s career in Australia and the strike, and battles, at the Broken Hill mines in 1908-09; to the Europe-wide unrest that began in Barcelona in 1909 and lasted until the eve of World War I; and to the Wobblies (IWW) ‘Bread and Roses’ strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912.

If it was the onset of this great movement in Britain that made talk of ‘socialism’ fashionable amongst the late-19th century middle classes (a ‘socialism’ that would act as a means of social control rather than ‘bottom-up’ universal liberation), in the Britain of the 1990s it was recognition that rampant neo-liberalism was endangering social stability that gave rise to another middle-class fad, this time echoed vociferously in key sections of the tabloid press. ‘New Labour’ thinking created the conversational buzz that contextualised a politics designed to rescue red-in-tooth-and-claw Thatcherism from its own implosion. ‘Public opinion’ found its latest fad to keep the dinner parties alive and consumerist luxury on the go. The term ‘Socialism’, emptied of its theoretical content by decades of bureaucratic welfarism, was now discounted; but the oxymoronic idea of a socially responsible capitalism (in which ‘ethical business’ has a central prominence) took its place.

But the link between Mason’s book and Engel’s preface goes beyond mere comparison. Theoretically speaking, Mason is no Engels, nor would he claim to be. But, in the socially explosive 1840s, when writing about the condition of the working class from his base in Manchester, Engels personally got to know the conditions at work and at home of the class he was writing about. Mason – taking advantage of his international journalistic remit – has visited, spoken to, and in a limited way perhaps, got to know workers all over the world in their homes and workplaces. By pursuing this method, he points the way to the sort of deeper empirical work that is needed as the basis for theorising the agency that can make “another world possible”. This may be of little interest to those concerned only with the excitement of simply asserting (often, to be sure, in courageous and creative ways) that ‘possibility’, far less to others locked into the rhetoric and forms of organisation of the 1960s and 1970s that centred on that long-tried and universally unproductive concept of “building the (revolutionary) party”. But Mason’s work – and once again perhaps that of Engels – will be read more carefully by everyone who understands that there is empirical groundwork to be done to establish the nature of the (global) working class as it is now.

It was Engels who played a key part in assisting Marx to show how the working class is the creation and victim of capital, but is also capital’s structural antagonist – an antagonist that can only assert and defend its own humanity by struggling against and ultimately overthrowing its oppressor. Further, they showed, for the first time in the history of class struggle, the interests of the oppressed class coincided with the needs of humanity as a whole to transcend the exploitation of class by class and create the conditions for the co-operative commonwealth (or ‘communism’ as properly understood). But simply to state that today is to reduce theory to dogma, a barrier to real human progress rather than an enabler of it. What does it mean in practice in the early 21st century, after all the defeats, false starts and disillusionments of the decades since this theorisation of agency was first understood in the 1840s? ‘Live Working or Die Fighting‘ is the work of an individual (one constrained by the codes of the BBC, by whom he presumably wants to remain employed), Mason could hardly be expected to answer that question alone. To do so, must be both a collective task, and a political task, not one merely confined to journalistic description and commentary. ‘Live Working or Die Fighting‘ gives an inkling of at least one aspect of what has to be done.

Mason’s particular declared objective is to address the loss of historical knowledge that is taking place because of the sense (the illusion) that, in the very exceptional period from the 1940s to the 1980s, the Western labour movement had accomplished the goals it was fighting for in the 19th and early 20th centuries: the Canary Wharf workers need to know about Wapping and about the ‘New Unionism’, but they dont. Now that the storms are gathering over globalised capitalism – and it becomes clearer than ever that, if there really is “no alternative”, then there is no human future in view at all – it is surely for those who recognise that we have entered a quite new period to find ways to accomplish in a 21st century way the task Engels set out on in the 1840s, and Mason hints at over a century and a half later.

To recognise the reality of the period – what the Marxist political theorist István Mészáros has defined as the structural, the truly historic, crisis not just of 19th and 20th century industrial capitalism, but of the much longer-lasting capital system itself – is to see that the forms of political organisation apparently appropriate to the 20th century, modelled on an often limited understanding of the 1917 Russian Revolution, are now entirely inappropriate. The protests of the ‘Seattle brigade’ show that the will to fight remains, but perhaps not the theoretical perspectives to take the fight beyond protest. ‘Live Working or Die Fighting’ is not a programmatic statement for new forms of socialist organisation that can meet the needs of the emerging global working-class movement he writes about, but it is certainly relevant to those who want to participate in creating them.
Mason himself contextualises his book, explains how he came to want to write it, in an instructive and moving way; his conclusion is highly personal and the book’s inspirational logic is thereby clarified. His father was a truck driver at a Lancashire electrical engineering factory by day, who played in a dance band by night. He was a trade unionist conscious that some of the separately-organised machine workers made twice the wages he did, and probably voted Tory. By the time he fathered Paul in 1960, he had bought their home – the first in his family to do so – but it had an outside toilet. Paul lived with his parents in this working-class community until he was 18, meeting no one who was not a trade unionist. He was used to Labour winning every election in the area. He lived through many industrial actions, including two miners’ strikes, the second of which brought down a Tory government, but never saw a political demonstration or the waving of a red flag. The demands he was aware of were for decent working conditions, pensions, health care and sports facilities. Recounted memories of the Depression of the 1930s told him more about the meaning of history than any textbook or film, and formed the background to the demand articulated in various ways in the community for “socialism through evolution”.

This labour movement as it existed from 1945 to 1989, Mason argues, was very different from the one his book describes that stretched from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to World War II. The unions, allied with the employers and the nation states in the 1940s war against fascism, were rewarded, more or less effectively, with welfarism and an implicit social contract in which they played a key role. The industrial democracy that had been built as an instrument of class struggle, with national variations, in the interwar years, for the most part continued only as a “parallel lifestyle, separate from but not opposed to that of the upper classes”, and even this eventually withered away, except perhaps in a few areas such as “the Welsh valleys … the Tuscan hill towns [and] the Buenos Aires docks”.

By the time Mason’s father died in 1986, the threat of mass unemployment had returned and governments were responding to shop-floor militancy by abandoning consensus, freeing capital to seek cheap labour transnationally, and – in the symbolic case of the air traffic controllers in Reagans America – chaining trade unionists hand and foot. In Britain the last battle for “progress and evolution” was fought by the miners and lost in 1985. By the 1990s, neo-liberal policies were being pursued in the post-Stalinist states and even by governments that continued to call themselves Communist in China and Vietnam.

In this self-conscious (but modestly presented) ‘life-story’ so much is encapsulated; it is a small-scale, very personal (but also typical) account of the sea-change in social opportunities and political attitudes that reflect, in an ‘advanced’ country, the underlying shifts in the tectonic plates of the capital system that have been at work since (say) the early 1970s. Such stories matter, particularly if they can be told in a way that – as Mason succeeds in doing – relates them to the much wider history of labour from which they have come. And even more do they matter if they can sharpen our minds in developing the theory necessary for us to understand the reality of the point in history that humanity has arrived at, in order to develop the thinking and forms of organisation that will enable the emergent ‘global’ working class to take ‘global’ society (in Mészáros’s words) “beyond capital”.

Mason himself ends on a rather different and more romantic note. In his chapter on the Paris Commune he writes a good deal about Louise Michel, the poor poet-schoolmistress from bohemian Montmartre who, a prosecuting lawyer claimed, “from her lectern in her spare moments … professed doctrines of free thought, and made her young pupils sing poems she had written, among which was a song entitled ‘The Avengers’.” He returns to her in conclusion, recounting a vision he imagined when covering the violently attacked protests at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland. Against riot police got up like robocops were ranged, amongst many others, Latin American musicians, and dancers clad as fairies – symbolising the human rhythms to which the future must move and the touch of utopian magic that movement needs.

What Mason claims he saw in his mind’s eye was “the young Louise Michel dancing to a samba band in a field outside the Gleneagles summit: her face … painted and … wearing pink fairy wings.” “She still”, he concludes, “has a lot to learn.” But the real value of his book is that it tells all of us with ears to hear and minds open to new thinking: “So have we all!” If ‘labour history’, so optimistically embraced by a generation of E. P. Thompson-inspired postgraduate students in the 1960s as a way to fight the class struggle from the archives, is to be rescued from the strangling embrace of the academy and the uncertain insights of postmodernism, it could do worse than to start with this book. And political activists too might take it as a set of signposts, not to all they need to know, but to one important area of essential knowledge.

From Goma to Gaza, Mr Miliband

JamieSW — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:21:08 +0000

David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner were quick to fly to Kinshasa and Kigali this weekend to be seen to be responding to the sudden visibility of the long-running horrible humanitarian crisis of the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Whether they achieve much more than another temporary truce among the assorted warlords whose troops have been living by rape and pillage in the area for more than a decade, is of course another question.

But Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner have another invisible humanitarian crisis on their hands in which some highly publicised flying around could have a dramatic effect on the ground. They should announce visits to Jerusalem to speak to Israel’s leaders, and then arrive by helicopter (the airport is destroyed) in Gaza City, breaking the Israel military’s 17-month siege of Gaza.

They would be able to do it with ease, unlike the handful of people who made the trip recently in two boat trips from Cyprus, bringing medicines, hearing aids for the deaf, and hope that the world could hear the horror of what is happening to them.

The two European leaders could see for themselves in Gaza how Israel’s collective punishment of 1.5 million people has crippled Gaza’s economy, cut fuel and electricity, leaving its desperate people hungry, deprived of medicines, with hundreds barred from travelling for operations or healthcare, or for education. Only last week, camps in Gaza City and Khan Yunis saw waist-high water flood homes and roads after heavy rains because the pumping system was not working.

All this suffering is there to be seen.

And they could hear about the many avoidable deaths, and learn the names of men from 77 to 21 who died at Erez checkpoint when their permits were delayed, and about children, like one-year-old Bayyam Abu Hilu, who died at home when she was denied a permit “for security reasons”.

They would hear how underlying these realities the mental health needs of every family – particularly for children – are overwhelming.

Last weekend I was among about 100 foreigners due to arrive in Gaza for a medical conference on the impact of siege on mental health. The World Health Organisation was a co-sponsor of the conference, Walls versus Bridges and, with other international organisations, had applied to the Israeli military authorities for permission for each individual to enter. Everyone – mainly doctors, psychiatrists, academics from the US, Canada and Europe – was barred, and had to fall back on a blurry video conference from Ramallah.

Among the grim testimonies of psychiatrists from Gaza, such as Dr Eyad Saraj from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, which organised the conference, with WHO, was a video from the former US first lady, Rosalyn Carter. Mrs Carter deplored the fact that “the closure of Gaza is making it impossible for people to lead normal lives,” and said she looked forward to the conference’s recommendations.

Do Miliband and Kouchner really not know what Mrs Carter knows about the devastating impact on people of Israel’s continuing control over the Gaza Strip’s borders, airspace and coastal water? Or about the effect of Israeli military occupation, checkpoints, and the wall, in crushing economic, social and intellectual life for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank?

They should go to Gaza now and see for themselves, as Tony Blair has so shamefully failed to do in his role as Special Envoy for the Quartet. Mr Miliband and Mr Kouchner might then want quietly to tell the Israeli government it will become more and more difficult for them at home to resist the calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions which Palestinian civil society has been asking US and European church and other human rights groups to work for.

Fights, not deals can save workers' jobs

JamieSW — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:30:11 +0000

There’s a right way and a wrong way for unions to confront job losses—and this was highlighted last week by the crisis in the manufacturing industry.

The right way is based on strikes and protests to defend every job. The wrong way gives away pay and conditions in exchange for promises of security from the employers.

The fight at Ford’s Southampton plant is an example of the former.

Some 400 workers there walked out unofficially on Monday of last week in protest at threats to transfer production of the Ford Transit van to Turkey.

They returned to work on the same day but by Friday action had flared again, with 40 walking out on the evening shift.

Tony helped to organise the unofficial protest. He told Socialist Worker that the initiative came from longstanding workers he describes as a “small, determined, crusty group” but who were cheered on by younger workers.

“People here feel cheated, lied to, and kept in the dark about the future of the plant,” he says. “Some also feel that the union is moving too slowly—that’s why we had to act.”

In response to the walk-out, the company has warned all those who took part that they could face disciplinary action, while “ringleaders” have been threatened with the sack.

“It’s now up to our Unite union, at a local and national level, to take the fight forward,” says Tony.

Backing

“They have the union machine to call on. If we had that backing, we could bring more than a thousand workers out.”

Ford Southampton is one of many plants where jobs are threatened. The company has also refused to make any long-term commitment to its Halewood plant in Liverpool.

These attacks are taking place across the industry. Last week Peugeot-Citreon announced massive production cuts.

Chrysler has said it wants to slash a quarter of all its white collar jobs.

Dave works at Nissan’s Sunderland plant where the company is halting production of its Micra and Note cars for two weeks because of lack of demand.

“I work on the Qashqai car line, which is not directly affected, but even here the mood is bleak,” he told Socialist Worker.

“Temporary workers and those on short term contracts are being sacked in December, and those of us who are permanent are worried about the future.

“People with five or more years experience are being offered redundancy. And we’ve already been forced to agree to pay cuts of £200 a month for new starters.”

Nissan made profits of £4.9 billion last year, up on the previous year.

Many other firms that have for years made startling profits from their workers’ efforts are now seeking to slash their pay bill in order to keep costs down and their shareholders happy.

They say that unless workers accept this logic factories will close.

Unfortunately, some in the leadership of the trade union movement appear to have fallen for the trick.

Last week workers at JCB were blackmailed into a deal which will see a reduction in their hours from 39 to 34 a week in order to cut back production—with a pay cut of around £50 a week.

Laid off

The company, which has already laid off 379 workers in Britain this year, said that unless workers accepted their offer, a further 350 jobs would go before the end of the year.

Tragically, the GMB union allowed a ballot on the loaded question and greeted the result of the four to one vote in favour of the proposals as a show of “social solidarity of union members in action”.

Yet JCB is not a company in trouble—it is one of the top three construction equipment firms in the world.

In 2006 its profits jumped by 35 percent to £149 million, and 2007 was better still.

With profits of £187 million, JCB announced that “sales, profits and market share reached record levels”, and that it had been “the most successful year in our 62-year history”.

By helping JCB cut its costs, the GMB will encourage a downward spiral in which jobs and wages will be traded for ever smaller guarantees of protection for workers that remain.

This makes the example of struggle at Ford’s Southampton plant even more important.

Tony says that there is now talk of Unite organising a national fight that combines this year’s pay round with the demand to keep the Transit at Southampton.

This could see Ford workers from around the country rallying around the threatened plants.

Under difficult circumstances, Southampton Ford workers have shown that they can put up a determined fight.

Many trade unionists, including the local trades council, are hoping that Unite will call a national demonstration against any possible closure as part of building a wider fight.

It is only this kind of action—not the selling of pay and conditions through backroom deals—that can prevent a jobs massacre.

That’s a lesson that some of our trade union leaders badly need reminding of.

Nuclear-free footsteps...

Arash Sedighi — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:45:33 +0000

This summer, I was one of nine walkers to complete a gruelling 84-day, 1000+ mile International Walk towards a Nuclear-Free Future from London to Geneva, through France.

The other eight walkers were: co-organisers Kerrie-Ann Garlick and Marcus Atkinson, and June, from Australia; Jill Saunderson from Fife; Steve Gwynne from Birmingham; Lena Bladh from Sweden; and Albert Monti and Aristide from France.

The walk was jointly organized by the Australian-American group “Footprints for Peace” and the French anti-nuclear network “Sortir du Nucléaire”. We were joined along the way by many more French walkers, other Brits, another Australian and representatives from Austria, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Niger, Switzerland and the USA, all keen to build a strong global movement against the worldwide expansion of the nuclear industry.

This was my second outing with Footprints for Peace, following last year’s amble from Dublin to London which also took 12 weeks, covering a paltry 900 miles.

Some of us, myself included, got arrested then – more than once in some cases – engaging in civil disobedience against Trident nuclear weapons at Faslane and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

Battersea and beyond

This year’s walk departed on 26 April, the 22nd anniversary of the world’s worst ever civil nuclear disaster, Chernobyl. At a well-attended opening ceremony at Battersea Park Peace Pagoda, we heard from Bruce Kent, CND vice-president; Siân Berry, then the Green London mayoral candidate; and Shuji Imamoto, chair of the Japanese Greens.

We arrived in Portsmouth after five days, took a ferry across to Cherbourg and began our arduous trek across France.

If the last walk was tough, I found this one even more challenging. We often covered 15-18 miles a day in oppressive heat. Inevitable tensions arose through tiredness and spending so much time in a group of strong-minded individuals.

Sometimes we were put up in relative comfort and fed very well, but often we made do with basic conditions, camping in farms and playing fields and cooking out-doors.

Walkers of all ages joined us, from young children and teenagers to pensioners. Travelling through France, the cultural and language barriers presented extra challenges, although my GCSE French helped.

The walk’s strict no-alcohol rule created problems in a country where (moderate) consumption of alcohol is deeply ingrained in the culture. However, the group accepted this rule, standing in solidarity with indigenous people in Australia and North America whose communities have been devastated by alcohol donated by uranium mining corporations.

Nuclear France

The British government, committed to a nuclear power renaissance, is looking to the French to provide the technology, avoiding any debate about the health and environmental implications, safety concerns or the true financial costs of nuclear power and the management of waste that remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

There is no discussion of the links between nuclear power and the proliferation of nuclear weapons; of the risk of rising sea levels flooding nuclear sites in low-lying coastal areas; of the legacy of Chernobyl, Windscale and Three Mile Island; and of the constant leaks, discharges and dumping of radioactive materials into the air, land and water.

There is little talk about the displacement of indigenous populations due to uranium mining in Australia, North America, Niger and elsewhere, or the radioactive contamination of their sacred lands and World Heritage sites.

What is more, our government conveniently ignores the astronomical rise in the incidence of birth defects, leukaemias and lymphomas seen in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Lebanon as the West bombards them with its nuclear waste in the form of so-called “depleted” uranium (DU) munitions. We called at various civil nuclear sites on the Normandy coast and along the banks of the rivers Loire and Seine, some nuclear waste dumps and a couple of military bases. The 80%-state- owned company Electricité de France (EDF) operates every nuclear power station in France and wants to extend its nuclear empire to the UK. Prime minister Gordon Brown’s brother, Andrew is currently EDF’s head spin doctor in the UK.

Actions en route

At each site, we staged a “die-in” or other peaceful action, displayed banners, distributed flyers and, on occasion, engaged workers, bosses, the gendarmes and the public in discussion about the wide-spread death, disease, human rights abuses and environmental devastation caused by the nuclear industry.

We visited Flamanville in Normandy, where the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) is under construction. It has been plagued by safety problems and spiralling costs, like the only other EPR in the world, being built at Olkiluo-to in Finland. This is the technology French company AREVA and German firm Siemens want to bring to the UK.

At various public meetings along the way, we exchanged information and ideas with local activists, politicians and journalists. We spoke about local resistance to the nuclear industry and sustainable alternatives to nuclear power.

Arriving in Geneva in mid-July, we met with our national ambassadors to the UN on disarmament, as well as a high-level representative from the UN Conference on Disarmament who we presented with a thousand origami peace cranes we’d folded along the way. We shared with these diplomats our concerns about nuclear and uranium weapons and nuclear expansion.

Next year, Footprints for Peace plan to walk from Geneva to the European Parliament in Brussels, via Germany, starting again on Chernobyl Day, 26 April. In 2010, they will walk from the Y-12 plant in Tennessee to the United Nations in New York for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference.

————————————————————————————————————————
Footprints for Peace: http://footprintsforpeace.net
Walk diary: http://tinyurl.com/peacenews016

A colourful revolution

JamieSW — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:15:03 +0000

In Stokes Croft, once dubbed ‘Bristol’s forgotten half mile’, a quiet but colourful revolution is taking place. A loose coalition, the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft (PRSC), is using public art to transform an area that used to be emblematic of urban decline.

For Chris Chalkley, the one-man dynamo behind the scheme, art has the power to give the district a greater sense of community, and turn it into Bristol’s ‘cultural quarter’. ‘It’s possible that groups of people could come together to form an alternative vision for the area,’ Chris enthuses, as he takes us on a whistle-stop tour of a few of the ‘street galleries’ that have sprung up across Stokes Croft.

Shop fronts, walls and even an electricity sub-station have been adorned with striking images by local artists. Almost anything can be turned into a feature of the area, Chris says. Even mundane objects like drainpipes and litter bins can impart a feeling of identity, safety and vibrancy when they have been decorated with eye-catching, unique designs.

The PSRC is funded and organised almost entirely by Chris himself. Having run a china shop for 25 years, he does not think of himself as either an activist or artist, and relies on local artists to donate their time. In April, around 20-30 volunteers painted the inside of a railway tunnel just outside Stokes Croft. In a single weekend, it became a canvas for myriad different designs. There is no doubting the potential of Bristol’s artists, which is only beginning to be harnessed.

Dissatisfaction and blight

The PRSC has grown out of a need to change the face of the area, and dissatisfaction with the council’s response to its problems. Connecting the shopping centre of the city with more affluent areas to the north, Stokes Croft is a mixture of residential buildings and shops that line the main road. While a number of its buildings are listed, about 30 are derelict, such as a three-storey carriage works from the area’s Victorian heyday, which has stood empty since 1979. A further blight on the district’s image in many people’s eyes is the large number of homeless people, many of them suffering from drug problems, who congregate in what is known locally as the ‘bear pit’: a largely tarmac-covered, sunken roundabout at the end of Stokes Croft, connected to the surrounding streets by forbidding, grimy underpasses. The main road also boasts two less-than-subtle brothels.

Chris is adamant that image problems cannot be fixed simply by moving homeless people on or shutting down the massage parlours. You have to ‘work with what you’ve got’, he says. In their effort to discourage rough sleeping and graffiti by providing only single person seats and covering surfaces in anti-graffiti paint, the council has inadvertently made the area unwelcoming for everyone, says Chris. ‘If the policy is to make public space inhospitable to the homeless, then it will become scary to the public.’

While the PRSC has no formal links with any political organisations, it explicitly challenges what it believes has been the council’s approach to urban development. The focus, the group claims, has been exclusively on attracting private investment and big brands, exemplified by the ongoing £500-million Cabot Circus project to rejuvenate Bristol’s retail heart just a few hundred metres away from Stokes Croft. Instead, the PRSC argues, the aim of regeneration should be to create welcoming public spaces and to promote creativity in the face of creeping corporate homogenisation, with public art a cheap way of doing so that can involve the local community.

‘This is the front line of the battle against the encroachment of Cabot Circus,’ Chris warns, ‘so it needs to have a strong identity.’ However, others think that the new shopping hub, currently festooned with cranes, might be beneficial. ‘Cabot Circus has had a good impact,’ says Lisa Blackwood, who works at the nearby Kuumba Arts and Community Centre. ‘Stokes Croft is too close to Cabot Circus not to be developed.’ Yet commercial enterprise is welcomed by the PRSC, so long as it fits with the area’s independent and eclectic feel. ‘If we change the perception of the area, then businesses will come,’ Chris says. Indeed, cafes, grocers, bookshops and t-shirt printers have sprung up, attracted by relatively low rents.

Character appraisal

Bristol council says that it is working with residents and groups such as the PRSC to improve Stokes Croft. In October 2007 it published a detailed ‘character appraisal’ of the area, assessing its aesthetic and social problems, and also acknowledging that the murals that now dot the area are part of its distinctive character.

They have recently undertaken a £1-million renovation of a hostel for homeless people, and a street-drinking ban in 2003 was largely successful in moving on drinkers from a central grassy patch known as ‘Turbo Island’ on the main road (though critics claim that this has done little more than displace them a few hundred metres down the street). But private investment is still central to renewing urban areas, the council argues: ‘The improvements to the image of the area effected by the work of PRSC are one part of the process, but not sustainable on their own – there needs to be commercial investment to back it up.’

One of the council’s biggest problems is getting private owners to preserve the historic character of their buildings and shop fronts. Some property holders simply hang on to derelict buildings, hoping that a lucrative development offer will come along. The council is currently battling to reclaim the towering Westmoreland House building from the developers Comer Homes, who have left it derelict for more than two decades. Seven people have died since the building was damaged by fire and abandoned in 1969.

As our tour of the Republic comes to an end, Chris is keen to stress that he doesn’t think he has all the answers to Stokes Croft’s problems. Most of the works done so far are temporary. ‘The project is constantly evolving. A year ago I was thinking differently, and next year it will have changed again.’

There may be a risk that street art, while visually exciting, will turn the area into an artistic ghetto, and be exclusive of those who are not a part of the graffiti community. Or, if businesses and affluent residents are drawn in, the resulting rent hikes may push out the very artists who are attempting to accelerate urban renewal. The next step planned for the PRSC is to set up as a social business, where donations are exchanged for a say in the future of the project. Whatever direction the PRSC takes next, there can be no doubt that public art created and funded by local artists can be a cost effective way of putting colour and life back into the inner city.

A place for the left

eddie — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:33:59 +0000

Turn on the news in the past few weeks and it’s like reading Trotsky: capitalism in profound crisis; Labour leaders and their ‘epigones’ (a favourite Trotsky word) locked in internal battle. But where are we, the left? In its party forms the English left is divided both inside parliament (with some, disastrously, voting through 42-day detention) and outside (the Respect debacle). In its movement form, it is fragmented and, apart from the occasional creative initiative such as the climate camp, barely visible.

We have, no doubt, contributed to the loss of legitimacy neoliberalism has suffered over the past decade or so. But as Walden Bello, a radical intellectual from the Philippines, has put it: ‘Neoliberalism is like the train conductor who gets shot in an old western and dies with his hand on the accelerator. He’s dead but speeding the passengers inexorably towards total disaster.’ It’s as if we know the alternative direction in which the train should go, but are powerless to take action. Powerless because the millions of people who feel estranged from ‘mainstream’ politics do not consider the left to be any different.

Where the left is having an impact is where it is part of – and has helped to create – initiatives that reach beyond itself, to challenge the political class with a vision of a radical and egalitarian democracy. This is invariably a vision that is not explicitly socialist. Look at the Convention for Scottish Independence, Plaid Cymru’s coalition-building work in Wales or the broad-based coalition to save democracy in the NUS. Look too at the movements in support of Barack Obama in the US.

In the UK, Europe’s most centralised and executive-dominated of political systems, the loyalties and sense of rights associated with place are an important base of this democratic challenge. This is obvious in the nations of the UK but it applies also to English cities. Here are two modest examples. The first is an eight-year-long experience in Newcastle of a successful trade union-led struggle against privatisation leading to a collaboration between unions and public managers completely to transform the management of the council’s IT-related services – back office and frontline. It might sound mundane and a speck in the ocean of privatisation, but what these public service workers, unions and managers have done is to give a practical and convincing answer to the pervasive notion that only the competitive pressures of the market can produce innovation and change. Here in Newcastle is a demonstration of the innovative dynamics of the public sector itself. Crucial to its success has been the activation of a powerful ethic of public service rooted in a strong city identity, an ethic that had been dormant, stifled by the old hierarchies of local government and the constant attacks from Whitehall.

Another example of a completely different kind, too new to be sure of its success, is an experiment in the left pooling its resources to create the Convention of the Left, a locally-rooted challenge to New Labour’s annual rally in Manchester. At the time of writing it has certainly achieved a creative cross-party, cross-movements collaboration impossible at a national level. The pull of these national and local identities away from Westminster is a vital clue to understanding and preparing for the unravelling of New Labour. Although the Labour Party can trace an important component of its origins back to a convergence of local labour alliances, the party’s structural alliance between the trade unions and the parliamentary leadership tied it to the British state before anything else. New Labour has taken this to extremes and ended up as a caricature of a party: no roots, no means of feedback, no loyalty, no trust. When this implodes there will be few local parties left with any life, but what there are will be an important part of any attempt to recreate a left that is based on a recognition of national and regional autonomy and creativity.

As national political structures crack and lose their authority, initiatives from Scotland, Wales and the English cities and regions will have the chance to break through, setting a new kind of example, stimulating a new direction for debate and developing their own international links.

The importance of place is not as a romantic retreat for the left. On the contrary, it offers a base for creating a left that is sufficiently rooted to be effective and a source of autonomy from the Westminster/Whitehall rootless elite. More immediately it provides the basis for the cross-party kind of left politics that must surely be the way to avoid the Tory dystopia that hovers ominously on the horizon (see Patrick Dunleavy and Alex Nunns in the October/November issue of Red Pepper).

Pepperazzi

Ellie Keen — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 18:14:45 +0000

Cops attack as Smash EDO demo paints the town red again…

Over 400 people gathered in Brighton on a very wet Wednesday in the latest protest called by Smash EDO against local bomb factory EDO MBM/ITT. The last demo, in June (See SchNEWS 634), saw protesters invading the factory grounds and smashing windows. This time the cops were determined to have an overwhelming presence. At noon Sussex University campus was occupied by large gangs of cops as people arrived at the demo’s start point at the uni entrance.

Police tactics soon became obvious. As the crowd gathered they issued a Section 60 notice, giving them the power to remove masks. Trying to stamp their authority, they quickly set about the gathering crowd demanding people remove any kind of face covering, photographing everyone and generally using any tactics to intimidate, attempting to seize banners and alienate as many onlookers as possible.

Initially shocked – the mob soon found the resources to fight back and just after midday the march burst into life. The red and black-clad crowd sprang into action to the rallying call “Get behind the banner”. Behind the sturdy, massive SHUT ITT! banner – reinforced with a wooden frame – and waving flags, the noisy bloc moved at pace through Stanmer Park and out onto the Lewes Road, filling both lanes.

At least ten pairs of police evidence gatherers with long lenses, video cameras and spotter cards, including the Met’s Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) were in evidence from the start but spent most of the march foiled by FIT Watchers (See SchNEWS 639). Hundreds of copies of FIT Watch’s spotter cards were distributed complete with photos, names, numbers and descriptions of FIT police likely to be in attendance. Whenever FIT teams appear, shouts of ‘Block That Shot’ is becoming a call to arms for activists sick of only being able to protest whilst constantly under surveillance.

CAGE FIGHTING

Multiple sound systems and makeshift instruments kept spirits up in the procession towards the factory. Police seemed to have taken a leaf from the anarchist book and handily blockaded the whole of Lewes Road for several hours, with 8 vans bumper to bumper, urging people towards their sanctioned ‘protest pen’ at the bottom of Home Farm road. Unsurprisingly the idea of being herded into a massive steel cage surrounded by a sea of fluorescent baton wielding cops didn’t appeal to anyone. Determined to march on, people surged towards the police lines, pushing the cops back behind their line of vans. Heavy use of pepper spray and batons on those at the front took the sting out of the crowd, who, nursing bruised bodies and the ill effects of an impromptu chemical eye-bath at the hand of Sussex’s finest, split into two groups. Half the crowd stood their ground, eyeballing the cops, whilst others in small groups gradually headed off-piste, up the slope and into the woods towards the back of the factory.

PUT THE KETTLE ON

Marauding bands of masked militants swarmed through the forest, whilst clueless coppers couldn’t see the hoods for the trees. In a hail of irony, laser-guided paint-missiles bombarded the factory’s roof – staining the factory walls blood-red in a spot of unrequested decoration. After scuffles in the woods and open fields where someone narrowly avoided castration via a police dog bollock-biting attack, a group of about 50 managed to reclaim Lewes Road nearer town before being joined soon after by other cross-country cells and marched towards town.

By half two, the crowd on Lewes Road had begun to disperse and the police line had moved across the road, freeing up one lane of traffic. The remaining crowd were able to launch themselves down Lewes Road towards the Level. Fearing that 100 or so anarchists might not cause enough trouble, the cops kindly contributed towards the mayhem by sending some 25 vehicles to create a police traffic jam stretching halfway down the road.

When the converged marchers arrived at the Level (traditional end point of Brighton demos), police backed off, thinking that the crowd had had enough. As it turns out, the up-fer-it protesters saw the police begin to disperse and made a break for it to storm the city centre, with the local Army recruitment centre as a goal. Still singing and chanting, they carried on, pursued by police until they were finally kettled near Queens Road. Seeing their plight, locals started harassing the cops, kettling in the kettle and throwing food and water to the stalwart marchers. Police eventually followed the protesters to the beach for their final push, where they nicked a pebble-thrower.

With a total of around ten arrests, one sore scrotum, plenty of bruised knees, inflamed sinuses, and stinging eyes, the last 100 intrepid protesters completed the 5½ mile anti-arms trade mini marathon to bathe aching feet in the sea. Andrew Beckett, spokesperson said “We didn’t let the police control events. We went where we wanted, when we wanted. All the police from four counties weren’t able to stop us making our stand against EDO/ITT”.

See www.smashedo.org.uk

Interview: Jon McClure of Reverend and the Makers

JamieSW — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:04:41 +0000

Jon McClure, lead singer of Sheffield band, Reverend and The Makers, hosted the recent 4,500-strong Love Music Hate Racism Rotherham Carnival. He speaks to Lee Billingham about his music and politics

How did you get into music?

I got into music by being a kind of poet and writer. I put on parties and performed poetry. I also wrote stuff for the Arctic Monkeys’ website. I used to write it under various pseudonyms, which kind of increased their mythology. It was more politically inclined than their music would be.

It was around the time of the Iraq war, during which time I had an Iraqi girlfriend for six years. She was from a Shia family, so we were increasingly politicised. That led me into being in a band called 1984 for a number of years, which were really political. I always had the nickname “The Reverend”, not for any religious reason but because people were always saying, “Oh, he’s like a preacher man.” After a while I started putting the prose and poetry into a more musical form, which has led me to be where I am now.

How do you feel about the music industry and the extent to which you can express yourself, particularly regarding political ideas and lyrics?

It’s difficult because here there’s no one doing it. There are people like Damon Albarn, Ian Brown and 3D from Massive Attack and people like that, but among new artists there’s only me and MIA who seriously and permanently question British government foreign policy.

That is really dark compared to the counter-culture in the 1960s and the punk movement in the 1970s and Red Wedge in the 1980s. They were a kind of social voice but now there’s none. This is at a time with the current economic situation, being at war in two countries, with the possibility of a war in a third country – or fourth if you include Pakistan – there’s the situation with climate change and there’s the rise of the BNP.

I would argue we need a politicised voice more than ever, but within mainstream music there’s no one, and you have to ask yourself why. I think one of the reasons is that it has been recently a bit of a commercial suicide to entertain politics in your music.

But my heroes were political – Bob Marley, John Lennon, Joe Strummer. It’s become un-cool to care about the world you live in. It’s become cool to take crack. I don’t think that’s a rebellious act. I think it’s far more rebellious to question the country we live in and the government. I never fell out of love with the idea of it being cool to care about the world you live in.

Do you think it’s something that’s actively discouraged in the music industry? Did you, personally have to be more subtle or have you always been overt with your messages?

I’d sooner be more overt, and increasingly the messages are becoming more overt. When I first came out two years ago the climate wasn’t there for me to be saying these things but now people are saying, “Maybe you’re right actually.”

I think there is conservatism in the music industry because of vested interests. But then there are really good people in the music industry too. There are some good journalists at the NME and there are some good people who work in the industry who want change. People are thinking, “We’re bored of guitar bands doing the same old shit,” and looking for something of a little more substance.

Until recently I was very pessimistic. But my optimism’s returning and I think it’s because people don’t want to listen until it affects them and suddenly all these things are starting to affect them. People are starting to think, “Petrol prices are going up. I wonder if that’s got something to do with Iraq.” Damn right it’s got something to do with Iraq! I think people are starting to put two and two together.

If people don’t give a shit about the world, that’s when the BNP comes to power. Suddenly they’ve got all these seats and people are thinking, “How did that happen?” I’m an eternal optimist. I think that’s one of the main differences that separates left from right: the left have an undying optimism in humankind and the human spirit.

What is your Instigate Debate project?

It’s a website I set up to talk about meaningful subjects to people in the public eye. We’re encouraging people to go up to celebrities, and rather than asking for a photograph or an autograph to ask them a question that means something.

We had a bit of a debate with a lad who works for the NME – while he liked the idea he didn’t think we were maximising it. But rather than us just being a closed shop or getting into a slanging match we said to him, “Why don’t you come and help us?” This thing has to be formed. In the same way that punk was unpopular at first, people have to help shape it and mould it, and he’s very kindly agreed to help us with it. What we’re doing is building a bit of a coalition of musicians, and the music press is going to get behind it. In that regard it becomes a real movement. It’s tangible, because there are kids out there who are ready to go and do this. As a way of encouraging people we’ll go and play at their house. It could be the start of something quite big. I’m excited.

The idea was to hold to account some of the journalists from papers like the Sun, and in particular the Daily Mail and people in the right wing press who really hold more power than the people in Westminster. They’re unelected “people-shapers”. If the government had any morality they’d pass some kind of monopolies bill for press freedom, because Rupert Murdoch and the people who own the Daily Mail have a monopoly on people’s minds.

I’ve got a song on my new album called “Hard Times for Dreamers”, and it really is. Unless we fight back and make people aware, and we make these people look like the bigots they actually are, we aren’t going to get anywhere. For example the “Fagin’s Heirs” headlines about the Romanian pickpockets that were supposedly running rampant in London: no one was ever charged but there was no retraction, maybe a one-line thing. The truth becomes completely distorted, which gives rise to the BNP.

What do you think about the rise of the BNP and using the culture of music as a weapon against them?

The rise of the BNP has been fuelled by the right wing media who are putting the blame on immigrants. The blame within society should be over the mismanagement of the economy and foreign policies by successive Tory and Labour governments.

The problem isn’t immigrants. Unfortunately the fuel being thrown onto the fire by the right wing press is making white working class people, who are looking for someone to blame for the things they see to be wrong with society, put their faith in the BNP. But what these people think they are doing is safeguarding Britain. What they’re actually doing is giving power to Nazis, people we fought a war against. I remember talking to an ex-RAF fellah. He said he didn’t understand it: “I fought for six years against them Nazis only for them to get elected where I live.” I thought that pretty much summed it up.

Other musicians taking a stand against them is good, because young people listen to music and also there’s a much funkier and cooler message in it than marching up and down a street with Dr Martens boots on.

It’s sad to say, but looking at the music world people seem to be more into making money than they are into making any sort of statement. I think it’ll be a bit like the speculators in the stock exchange – they’ll be caught out for that. They’ll be caught out for chasing dollars. They’ve got no substance. I’ll laugh at them when that comes. They won’t have any career left. Their own greed will be their downfall.

What did you think about the LMHR event in Rotherham last month and the effect it had on South Yorkshire?

The event was brilliant. I think the effect on South Yorkshire has been massive because everybody knew about it. I’m in favour of grandiose political gestures: you need a gig with thousands. Even people who were just there for the bands got the message loud and clear. I think the BNP will have an increasingly difficult time in Rotherham after that and it gives us the chance to make networks to go back to next election and say, “Remember that gig we did? Well, this is why we did it. In these elections we don’t want you voting for the BNP.”

You and your family have been getting some grief for your work with LMHR.

There’s some far right websites where I’ve been threatened and someone would phone up my parents to say I’m a psychopath. My parents have had to go ex-directory. It’s upsetting because my parents aren’t me. If you’ve got an issue take it to me. It’s just cowardly.

It also underlines the tactics of fear that the far right and the BNP use. I would never threaten them physically. I’m completely opposed to everything that they stand for politically, but I would never threaten them or any member of their family. It’s disgusting that they stoop that low, but I won’t be deterred.

One of the first things that brought you into politics was the illegal invasion of Iraq. What do you think about the situation in the Middle East now?

I think the occupation of Iraq should end, primarily because the Iraqi people don’t want the US or British troops there. Everything else is an irrelevance. The other problem is people don’t talk about Israel. People are scared to talk about it because of accusations of anti-Semitism. The state of Israel, however, is holding the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people to ransom, and Gaza has become a big concentration camp. Hamas, whether people like it or not, were the democratic choice. If we go around the world espousing the merits of freedom and democracy we have to respect other people’s choices. We can’t have democracy but only when it’s the people we want to get in. You can’t espouse freedom and democracy while we’re allying with Azerbaijan or Saudi Arabia, two of the world’s most brutal dictatorships.

The Israeli government should accept the fact that they have to come to a permanent accommodation with the Palestinian people the same way that the white South Africans and white Rhodesians did, because the three of them were all in alliance in terms of counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism manoeuvres. In actual fact there’s not a lot of difference really. For Barack Obama and US presidents to just blindly profess their support for Israel, no matter what it does, is very dangerous. And we have no cause to be in Iran at all. The US aren’t going to be able to win in a military fashion. It’s just not going to be possible.

As well as the politics of your music you give expression of an experience, particularly a working class experience, and perhaps an experience of the north of England.

There’s a slight bit of humour in it, I think. You hear it in a lot of Sheffield music – a bit of cynicism. We’ve been fucked over for so many years I think people resort to humour. Hearing Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics and Richard Hawley’s and my own, it’s that slightly tongue in cheek, “It’s shit up here, innit? But let’s have a laugh.” My first record was quite regionally specific. It’s located in the working class because that’s where I come from. I could never make that record twice because that’s not where I am anymore, but it’s certainly rooted in that. I don’t want to be a rock star who talks about leaving Sheffield. There’s only me and Richard Hawley who still live in Sheffield of the Sheffield musicians, and I think that keeps you grounded.

The 1980s Sheffield scene seems to run through your music. What’s your attitude to making music?

I’m very open-minded and I owe a lot of debt to Cabaret Voltaire, Human League and Pulp. I think the thing is that in the 1980s everyone was so skint that they couldn’t afford new gear. Everyone ended up with analogue synthesisers and stuff.

Sheffield has always had an artistic community and because all the steel factories shut down the students and the artists could move into them and use them. That’s why electronica took off because people were saying, “We’ve got a synth and an empty room. Shall we do something with that?” That’s literally how it began, and in that regard it’s a really organic thing. I think people assume Sheffield music began and ended four years ago with the Arctic Monkeys, but there’s a lot of things happening – Warp Records and Squarepusher, and everything from Cabaret Voltaire and Human League era. It’s a very vibrant city, I think our music is a fusion of all of the stuff put together.

What plans are there for the Northern Carnival 2009?

The same way the Rotherham gig sent a message across South Yorkshire, I think the Northern Carnival will send a message across the whole of the north of England, saying, “What are you doing? Stop this. We don’t want the BNP round here.” Hopefully people will sit up, take notice and actually listen to what we’re saying.

The message will be a very loud and powerful one, and that’s needed. We had the one in London last year, but a lot of the problems are in the north, a lot of the deprivation, a lot of the racial tension. I think we’ll smack it next year and it should be beautiful, and I think the BNP will be put out of existence.

Websites:

Reverend and the Makers

Jon McClure’s politically charged side project

Revived by Climate Camp

Arash Sedighi — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:55:40 +0000

Before I am tempted to say I am just tired; activist-burn-out would be the technical term. But I feel that there is something more deep-seated at work undermining my ability to bounce back. We have less than a week to go until climate camp, and I had been wondering whether to go at all.

The intensity of stress experienced before Fossil Fools Day and the ongoing grind of the Ffos-y-Frân open-cast coal-mine campaign has made me nervous. The classic frustration of whether I should be channelling my energies into positive change, rather than being “anti”, has been niggling away at me: being the change you want to see in the world is a very enriching thing to do.

Standing up to authority and saying no – staring them in the face as they glare – is hard. I worry about the public perception of our direct action – I worry whether it creates a good image or whether we seem totally at odds with society.

I hate the stress and the pressure and keep feeling that if we could only raise enough awareness of the problem then the weight of public opinion would be sufficient to steer our government towards the right choices for the future of the planet – rather than their bank balances. Unfortunately, this is not the case; unfortunately, we – that is all of us, citizens of this earth – have to stand up and exercise our civil rights to tell John Hutton, Gordon Brown, E-on, Npower and Miller Argent, that coal is not what we want. This is positive change.

Frankly this exhausts me – I am tired of having to abandon the life that everyone else around me seems to be living: blinkers firmly on. I am tired of being terrified and I want to put my head in the sand – to leave on a jet-plane and imagine it is all a bad dream. Is it really real?

It can seem so intangible that the climate is warming, that something so dramatic as the systemic failure of the its life support mechanisms might be in process.

The weight of it seems to be getting heavier and I feel quite sick. It is very hard to play the rational game – to do “reasonable” things, to speak to the politicians about what needs to be done to avoid “catastrophic two degree warming…” And I am angry that I need to keep putting up this façade of sensible engagement when I really just want to cry and feel so squashed by the impossibility of achieving anything in the face of ignorant greed and an entrenched antipathy towards the metabolisms of life.

But the small vestige that keeps me fighting is knowing that I am privileged – knowing that as the water rises I am in the top percentage of those who could be left standing.

Rather than revelling in this good fortune I feel, instead, that privilege means I have to act and can not face the other way. I am not pretending this is easy anymore, and I understand why so many of us hide in the safety of routines, claiming to be too busy to think or do anything about the black cloud on the horizon – but there are hands out there to hold when we act together.

And that is my strength: those who hold my hand – those who are also brave enough not to turn and face the other way. Like the women of Greenham who hoped against hope and demanded the impossible, even if there is no chance of survival I will not live the lie, I will witness this with my eyes wide open.

And After
Two weeks later and I still have my eyes open – and I still see those things that made me feel so vulnerable and bleak before the camp: we still face a daily onslaught of bullshit and impossible decisions that undermine the possibility of any security and confidence in our simple acts of living. And I still feel that to face climate change is to be left free-floating in an ideological void, which is not only depressing but also deeply traumatic.

Yet I feel strangely calm – having helped create the first Wales Climate Camp Neighbourhood; having built, cooked, debated, danced, loved and cried with other people who are brave enough to keep on hoping. I haven’t found a blue-print for the future, I don’t even think I have all the right answers, but I can talk about it in an open and un-oppressive manner; I can listen, learn and respect.

I believe what we do matters and that we must keep trying, because this time last year I had never done anything like this – and now I couldn’t possibly look back, because I am sure there are more people who are about to reach out to hold our hands.

Goodbye to Grosvenor Square

Alex Doherty — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:21:44 +0000

The US embassy is withdrawing from its central London fortress. If only America would quit other parts of the world it occupies.

Grosvenor Square is about to be liberated. Tidings that the US embassy is moving to an unspecified five-acre location in south London may be good news for local residents (some of whom were renting rooms for a proper view of the rioting in 1968), but bad news for the unhealthier sections of the north London left. Till now, we could all meet happily in central London. A long march to south London is far less enticing, unless the San Francisco model of demonstrating on bikes becomes fashionable here as well.

Of course, we could be spared all this if the United States simply decided to stop bombing and occupying different parts of the world. Apart from anything else, they can’t afford it any more, which also appears to be the reason for the move from Grosvenor Square. The city is owed £4m in rates – which might be the sale price of the building in these troubled times.

When it finally happens, Grosvenor Square veterans, particularly of the great demonstrations of 1968 calling for Victory to the NLF, should make sure there is a properly organized wake with proper music, etc. They should be sent off in style. Old memories must not be obliterated. This could happen if the fortress in the Square is sold off as apartments. Much better if the Imperial War Museum borrowed a few million from one of the Gulf states and purchased it as an adjunct devoted exclusively to US wars. The loan could be written off as a bad debt and Peter Mandelson, back in the cabinet, might help out here.

A worry remains. Why south London? Surely, it would make much more sense to ask the British to dissolve the Foreign Office, abolish the post of foreign secretary (each new incumbent worse than the one before) and offer the King Charles Street building to the United States as their Embassy. The advantages to both sides are obvious. It could be on a 50-year basis since, by that time, a party might have emerged in England that needed a Foreign Office.

It would certainly make it easier for some of us to have both the US ambassador and the prime minister within striking distance of protesting crowds that assemble in Trafalgar Square.

Tariq Ali has given many fiery speeches down the years in front of the soon-to-be abandoned US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. His latest book is The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power.