#13 | theoccupiedtimes.com | @OccupiedTimes MAY2012

Jessica Lehrman

Martin Eiermann

Seven months after the beginning of the of , the birthplace of the movement is welcoming the spring season with a new round of gatherings and direct actions. Since mid-March, organisers in New York have been carrying the Occupy spirit into the streets of Manhattan and online in anticipation of May Day and the Global Spring of . The message: We’re here to change the world. And we’re committed to staying. To mark the six-month anniversary of , protesters re- occupied Zuccotti Park on March 17th. Over 70 people were arrested as New York police cleared out the park, and at least one protester was seriously S/U injured after having his head slammed U K into a glass door by a police officer. OCCUPY FOR ALL OF MAY Occupy responded // PAGE 04 >> Editorial Celebration of the international labour movement across the globe has taken on many different moods depending upon the political context of the time, sometimes celebratory, at other times volatile. Today, the stakes are high, and the struggle is of vital importance. May Day originated as a commemoration of the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, which took place in Chicago during a general strike for the eight hour day. As the police marched on the demonstration in order to disperse it, an unknown person threw dynamite at them. The police opened fire in return, killing several demonstrators as well as some police in ‘friendly fire’. Since then, the 1st of May has seen many significant historical events and attempts by right-wing governments to subvert or silence the message of worker solidarity. One such move last year was the current government’s proposal to scrap the bank holiday. This year, May Day takes on a different dimension, with the and groups like UK Uncut joining the workers, students and more traditional bodies. The need for international solidarity is greater than ever. Fiscal cleansing, ruthlessly imposed on the Greek people by leaders with no democratic mandate, has slashed wages by 30 - 45% for government employees. Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal are deep in crisis, while youth unemployment and recession continue to blight the UK. The past month has seen some interesting developments across western Europe. The Dutch coalition government collapsed after the far-right minority party withdrew its support for austerity measures. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy lost the first round of voting to François Hollande, who opposes Germany’s austerity agenda for the Eurozone. Here in the UK, George Galloway pulled off a stunning victory in the Bradford by-election, also running on an anti-austerity, anti-establishment ticket. Could it be that after four years of failure since the crash in 2008, leftist politicians are finally articulating alternatives to austerity? As encouraging as it is to see shifts away from the Ponzi-scheme economics that have dominated Europe for several years, the devil, as ever, is in the detail. The results of the French vote showed a worrying increase for the alexcharnley.com Front National candidate Marine Le Pen - and Hollande’s victory came partly at the expense of the genuine leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who was soundly beaten non-unionised working population. While many occupiers Donate To Keep by Le Pen on an anti-immigration platform, despite are also unionised, the movement offers a vessel for encouraging pre-election polls. Hollande might yet turn out many without representation, which could significantly Us Going to be France’s answer to Nick Clegg. change the state of play if brought into together with Voting trends away from a colourless, technocratic established antagonistic means. In Spain, Greece and the For the past six months, The Occupied centre imply growing disquiet with economic globalisation. If US, occupiers, students and young dissenters have formed Times has provided a high quality properly channeled, this discontent could be directed towards close ties with unions and other activist organisations. If alternative to corporate sponsored CONTENTS building a radically progressive and more equal social contract the Occupy movement is to be sustained, these kinds of mainstream media, featuring articles PAGES/ throughout Europe. The danger, however, today as in the past, alliances will be fundamental. by activists, thinkers and academic 01 NEWS is when people are drawn instead to populist and reactionary That doesn’t mean, however, that we should be experts from the UK and around the EDITORIAL 02 uncritical of union leadership, or exchange revolutionary 03 NEWS voices capitalising on uncertainty, using the politics of world. The OT has published over 250 04 hOUSE SPREAD demonisation, nationalism and militarism. energy for reformist compromise. Since Thatcher not pages of critical analysis, opinion, 06 iNTERNATIONAL Periods of crisis always offer an opportunity to a range only crushed the unions but also set about destroying features, news and poetry, without 08 ECONOMICS of ideologues and demagogues. We’ve already witnessed the environment within which they could operate, union printing a single advert. The paper is 10 iNTERVIEW the scapegoating of students, the disabled and OAPS. leaderships have largely come to resemble the classic out 12 iNTERVIEW totally non-profit and sustained by the 14 ECONOMICS As austerity measures deepen, will British politicians of touch managerial class of neoliberal capitalism. Times voluntary efforts and enthusiasm of 16 SOCIETY increasingly point the finger at immigrants, as they are are changing, and unions must change with them. its writers and editors. 18 ENVIRONMENT doing across the channel in continental Europe? Union leaders should be bold enough to move beyond To continue with our monthly 20 ACTIVISM The global Occupy and Indignados movements defensively protecting their members’ rights within a publication, we need your help. Three 22 FUN STUFF power dynamic where they cannot win. They should seize 24 PLACARD point to a left wing resurgence, often rich in numbers pounds pays for ten copies to be but, according to some, lacking in direction. May Day the opportunity a crumbling status quo presents them to printed at a local print shop. Just £5 CREDITS offers an opportunity to deepen our ties with the worker advocate alternatives to reshape society as a whole, rather pays for 15 copies, and every penny CONTRIBUTORS/ movements, building an alliance between unionised and than just getting the best deals for their members. Solidarity goes into printing our current run of Michael Richmond non-unionised people. Indeed, over the last 30 years, among unions demands that there be no unilateral deals 2000, but we would love to have the Mark Kauri huge increases in service sector jobs (often replacing with governments, selling out other unions and reinforcing funds to print more. Martin Eiermann Hannah Borno public service and manufacturing jobs) have led to a large the defeatist narrative of the left. Unions should open their If you would like to help us spread Ragnhild Freng Dale doors to the fast-growing and increasingly radical sections of the news that needs to be heard, Danny Diskin society, namely, the growing number of unemployed people, please make a donation by paypal to Emma Fordham particularly inner-city youth. Their justified anger could be a [email protected] or visit our Judith Schossboeck powerful catalyst for change. Olivia Mena website at: www.theoccupiedtimes.co.uk Steven Maclean If union leaders prefer to wait for the Labour Party Natalia Sanchez-Bell to become a force for change while workers continue to Flaminia Giambalvo foot the bill, then those who desire radical change must Mike Sabbagh regain control of their unions from the bottom up. For too PHOTOGRAPHY/ Andrea Bakacs long now, the neoliberal paradigm has successfully pitted Wasi Danihu worker against worker and “native” against immigrant, Ben Cavanna whilst hiding a simple reality: the answer to the problems of Jessica Lehrman society lies not in out-competing one’s peers for a piece of Tony J. Lewis the pie, but in confronting the parasitic policies of the 1%, Christin E. Lozano ILLUSTRATION/ and besieging the tower which dominates the economic and Alex Charnley political system. The solution is not the pursuit of special DESIGN/ interests but the politics of the common good. Neoliberalism Tzortzis Rallis is bleeding society dry, feeding upon the worst instincts Lazaros Kakoulidis of human nature and destroying the best - the qualities of PRINT RUN/ 2000 Copies WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO/ solidarity, altruism, interrelationship with nature, meaningful Aldgate Press, E1 7RQ work, and respectful coexistence within our families and CONTACT US/ communities. As austerity further drains the country, and we [email protected] sink into a double-dip recession, the question remains: how much blood does the patient have left? Let’s make sure that © All information in this paper is free for non-profit distribution May provides the first of many transfusions. Emma Fordham Leyton Marsh: Occupy Re-emerges in London While the hype is all for a Global Spring rebels marched on London. On 12 June, residents about neighbourhood concerns. community rights resurgence of Occupy and allied 60,000 rebels camped at Mile End. Two The last thing they want is conflict and movements in May, a few hardy refugees days later the king capitulated and so, less than a week after it arrived, the from the St Paul’s camp have been signed their charter. As one Occupy Occupy camp was gone from Shadwell. vs the Corporate quietly occupying in East London for the Nomad said: “If only we had 60,000 On a positive note, what they found there past month. activists camping now...”. was a strong community busy fighting for State Melanie Strickland Nomadic Occupy broke away from Unfortunately, the subsequent its rights on local issues, who might want the overcrowded and sometimes hostile behaviour of the rebels was used by to link up on something bigger one day. environment of Finsbury Square one the king to have the leaders and many The protectors of KEMP weren’t anti- In recent weeks the local residents’ who was not arrested was added midnight in March. Pulling a hand-built rebels executed. Fortunately, having Occupy, in fact some of them had visited battle to save Leyton Marsh has shifted as a Defendant in separate civil handcart laden with tents, kitchen gear, learned lessons at the St Paul’s camp and the camp at St Paul’s and were natural from trying to stop the development proceedings, having been identified by solar panels and a 12-volt battery, Finsbury Square, the Nomads of Occupy allies; they just didn’t want or need altogether through peaceful resistance, the Evening Standard as a protester. they were stopped by police in the wee require all campers to adhere to a code tents in their park. to defending apparently escalating Her crime was to spend a few minutes hours somewhere along their four mile of behaviour that excludes intoxication At nearby Mile End, Nomadic Occupy actions in the courts under a system of with her young son under a lorry. route. Having inspected the wiring and and aggression. Decisions are made at a recently negotiated a time-limited stay laws which subordinate communities to The ODA is pursuing her for costs rear lights, the police waved them on ‘morning council’, a less formal variation with the local authorities. Relations corporate rights and the state. of £335,000. The ODA’s aim is to put their way and they continued to a little of the General Assemblies held at larger with nearby residents have been good, By way of background, the “Save the people off peaceful dissent. It has patch of grass near Limehouse Station. Occupy camps. A ‘talking stick’ and although not without hiccups. ‘Locals’ are Leyton Marsh” community group has the financial resources to do so, by Here they pitched tents, introduced an ‘answering feather’ are sometimes not, of course, a homogeneous group, and been organising and meeting weekly employing city law firms like Berwin themselves to the locals, engaged employed to ensure discussions happen while one gives permission for dead wood since January, when planning permission Leighton Paisner on taxpayers’ walkers and cyclists on the adjacent in a measured and respectful fashion; the to be taken from a cemetery, another was granted by Waltham Forest Council money, and by threatening people heavily-used footpath and cycleway, and Nomads say they are experimenting with worries that doing so may jeopardise to the Olympic Development Authority with bankruptcy if they continue to built their nomadic community. They traditional Native American practices. biodiversity. Similarly, the old caretaker (ODA) for Leyton Marsh to be turned into speak out about activities harmful stayed at Limehouse for two weeks. Travellers have long been distrusted, of the Mile End park comments that a private three storey basketball training to their community. By contrast, the On their last day at the Limehouse and only time will tell whether Nomadic self-seeded baby sycamores are weeds facility for Olympic athletes. The marsh community group has to rely largely site the Nomads hosted a Teetotal Tea Occupy can carve itself a reputation that should be pulled up; subsequently is Metropolitan Open Land - which has on pro bono legal support and is Party (of the Alice in Wonderland rather for decency and come to be seen as the new manager of the park is aghast to the same status as Green Belt land and constantly on the back-foot by having than American right wing variety). a bonus when the tribe trundles into see the occupiers helpfully uprooting ‘live may only be developed in exceptional to respond to strict timeframes and an Visitors to the camp were impressed, a neighbourhood. Relations between trees’. The old caretaker is happy that the circumstances. Waltham Forest has endlessly complicated legal situation. one commenting that “This community residents and Nomads at Shadwell in nomads have offered to help him fix his designated the Olympics as such an The legal system is not designed to feels like a family. The camp members Wapping were less than satisfactory after windows. Others are suspicious and see exceptional case. give power to the people. It’s structured protect each other.” After the tea party a small group of occupiers set up camp in the presence of an Occupy camp in the There have been various so as to subordinate communities and and overnight, in the hours before they King Edward’s Memorial Park (KEMP) as area as an imposition. ‘irregularities’ in the planning process to be adversarial, pitting communities were due to be evicted, the Nomads a contingency measure, when the main Despite inevitable wariness, the – including the consultation process against the corporate state and against packed up their encampment, loaded site was under threat of imminent eviction trajectory is looking good. Some of taking place over the Christmas holiday each other. The legal process is stressful, up the handcart, and moved to Mile under bylaws. They did not realise that a the Occupy Nomads are themselves period (which gave locals hardly any time saps time, is potentially financially End, a place of considerable historical local campaign to save the park might be underprivileged and homeless, but they to lodge objections), flagrant breaches devastating and fosters ‘you should have significance, and a very appropriate jeopardised by their presence. are self-reliant, dynamic and politically of the planning conditions (including run this argument differently’ in-fighting. location for an Occupy camp. The Nomads are quick on their feet, motivated. One resident of the Mile the removal of soil up to 50cm deep, Fortunately, this has not happened with In 1381 a Peasants’ Revolt was enjoy exploring new environments, and End camp, Obi, explained that “We are according to the ODA, when planning the “Save the Leyton Marsh” group. underway. The uprising was triggered are keen to experiment with alternative becoming a stabilising factor in the area. permission was granted for 15cm only), A better system of governance is by taxes deemed unfair by the peasants. modes of communal living. They are also We have stopped a few fights in the park and the omission of an Environmental possible. Communities need to assert Led by men with names still familiar big on linking up with local communities and are gaining respect from local people. Impact Assessment which would have their rights. A Community Bill of today - Jack Straw and Wat Tyler - the in order to listen to and learn from We have told some younger residents of revealed the extent of the contamination Rights might have given the locality the camp they must behave themselves, of the soil (the area has previously been more power in a situation like this. because we want this respect to grow.” used as a landfill site, contains high Community Bills of Rights have been Nomadic Occupy is about gathering quantities of lead and asbestos, and an adopted in the US and are successful in information as well as disseminating unexploded WW2 bomb was found at preventing unwanted developments and it. It’s about flagging up the big picture the site just a few weeks ago). Matters activities harmful to the community. – the corporatisation of our world, are further complicated by the numerous They elevate communities vis-à-vis the global injustice, the horror of war on public authorities implicated in the case: rights of companies and the state. In the other continents, the accountability Waltham Forest Council as the planning case of Leyton Marsh the community of the super-rich and their tax havens authority, the ODA as lessee of the land could, with a Community Bill of Rights, – and about discovering the details, and Lee Valley Regional Park Authority assert their inherent rights to determine finding out how world events filter which has a responsibility to manage the the future of their neighbourhood and through and affect everyday lives in the land and protect the ecology of the area. could act on behalf of the rights of form of redundancies, child poverty, Several brave nature (including rare bird and insect library closures and lack of community supporters who camped at the site in species) whose habitats are being amenities. Those amazing conversations solidarity with the local Save the Marsh destroyed by this development. that happened all the time around St campaign found themselves prosecuted If our present government was Paul’s, between campers, tourists and in recent weeks under the Public Order genuinely concerned about creating a city workers, are happening on a smaller Act for obstructing the cement-carrying ‘Big Society’ and was committed to the scale around the edges of the Nomad lorries and preventing the development. localism agenda, it would support the camps now. If the occasional passerby This is another example of the concept of a Community Bill of Rights. Ben cavanna shouts “Get a job!”, occupiers use that criminalisation of civil resistance. People Unfortunately, this government is taking as an opportunity to engage. are not free to assert their democratic strides in exactly the opposite direction. rights, and defend the rights of nature The Olympics and ever-present threat of to exist and flourish. Since their arrests, terrorism provide a useful cloak for the lorries have been rolling in to dump vast authorities to clamp down on dissent amounts of concrete into the site that and designate peaceful protesters as Emma was once the marsh, home to various ‘domestic extremists’ or worse. We Fordham rare species and a green haven for local need to continue to build a movement of Walking the Boundaries residents and their children. people willing to step outside of the legal In a further worrying development, framework and to help build a better one. On April 15th, to mark the six month anniversary of the missing the camp. Two shook Tammy’s hand, one hugged a local resident (Rowena Johnson) occupylawuk.wordpress.com beginning of Occupy London, occupiers from Finsbury her and one said something rude. Grittily optimistic as Square and the Nomadic Occupy camps reunited with ever, Tammy pointed out that “That’s a 75% approval those who camped for four long winter months in the rating. We’re more popular than the government!” shadow of St Paul’s. With chalk and tape, as dusk fell, Who knows? Soon people might start preparing and occupiers marked the areas where the Tent City library, sharing food on the pavement beside the cathedral, in university, kitchen and other structures stood until the the very spot where the kitchen tent stood. Perhaps camp was evicted in late February. workshops and lectures will run in the space formerly A return to the churchyard and the walk around the known as Tent City University and people will read books boundaries of the now imaginary encampment was felt by in the library, converse in huddles on the cobbles, make many to be a poignant and emotional journey. So much art and music in the colonnade, sweep the church steps passion and energy went into creating and maintaining the and breathe life back into the sterile swathe of grey camp and much of that still lingers. The wide, open space this area has become since the Occupy shanty town was rustles with ghosts like an old battlefield, a stone circle, a shovelled into a bin lorry. ruined castle. In minds and in hearts, the tents remain. Almost anything could happen. As long as rights of Tammy, who was displaced by the eviction of the way are not seriously impeded, the understanding of most St Paul’s camp, is now spending her days outside the of the ‘defendants unknown’ of Occupy the London Stock cathedral again. She has reclaimed a patch of ground Exchange is that they’d be within their rights to begin where the Information Tent of the camp used to be. With living there again - just without what the judge described children in tow and home-baked cakes to share, she has as ‘sleeping apparatus’. begun connecting with the streams of tourists and city “Roll on summer” said a man in an mask. Ben cavanna workers who pass by every day. Some say they have been He might have been grinning. us. uk. OCCUPY FOR ALL OF MAY.

>> to the police headquarters a few days that, according to New York mayor Michael Zuccotti Park and heading through later, staging a series of “Let Freedom Bloomberg, the sidewalk could be cleaned. Manhattan. On April 14th hundreds Spring” events to highlight the police Since the eviction of the camp descended on Central Park for the brutality that protesters from New York from Zuccotti Park, activists have peaceful celebration of the Occupy spirit to Oakland have experienced over the experimented with new tactics and under the banner of “Spring Awakening past six months. In early April a group spawned campaigns that have addressed 2012” and to exchange ideas and skills in of activists established occupy.com, issues as far-ranging as corporate anticipation of May Day. aiming to provide a central platform for malpractice, tax injustice, evictions In the words of one attendee, the aggregation and dissemination of of poor and maginalised families, and “Spring is a time of renewal and articles, images, videos, and art from and the upcoming US presidential election. re-growth, which is what the Spring about the Occupy movement. On April Instead of maintaining the centralised Awakening is hoping to bring to the 11th, protesters made use of their court- structure of the camp, the movement movement. [...] We also can’t forget granted right to on sidewalks by has decentralised and diversified, often the that has changed the occupying the public space around the New resembling temporary autonomous landscape of the Middle East, and which York Stock Exchange (in 2000, a US court zones from which individual actions and helped inspire OWS in its early days.” had affirmed the right to “public sleeping as campaigns can develop. On April 25th Occupy teamed up with a means of symbolic expression”). As the occupiers have stated, “The ACT UP to celebrate the group’s 25th As one occupier said, “We’re still corporate media claims that Occupy’s anniversary of AIDS activism and direct sick of Wall Street. We can handle it in strength is waning, but they are action. And for May 1st, Occupy Wall small doses, but now we’re back on Wall merely in denial. During the coldest Street is ringing in the American variant of Street. This time we’re not committing months of this year, the United States the “Global Spring” by calling for a general any form of civil disobedience, we’re has already seen more revolutionary strike in support of economic justice and in full compliance with the law, we’re than it has in decades.” true democracy: “No Work, No School, No not disorderly in any way, we’re just Organisers hope that the Housework, No Shopping, No Banking providing silent messages. And it’s a momentum that has been sustained over - and most importantly, TAKE THE really interesting phenomenon. We’ll the cold winter months can blossom STREETS!” The day of protest will feature eventually spread out to all of Wall again as the world celebrates May Day, rallies, concerts and workshops. Similar Street. I kind of think of it like we’re a the International Workers’ Day and a strikes are planned in 115 American cities tumor and we’re going to keep growing remembrance of the 1886 Haymarket and are supported by a broad coalition and growing, in a cancerous sense... Of Massacre in Chicago - where police fired of activists, student groups and unions. course, capitalism’s the real cancer.” live bullets on workers who went on The “Global Spring” demonstrations on Within days, their ranks had swelled strike for the eight-hour workday. May 12th will be the culmination of public to 70 overnight-campers before police Since March 16th protesters have dissent, as protesters around the world Jessica Lehrman forcibly removed the demonstrators so held weekly marches originating at take to the streets once more.

Dark Matters Mark Kauri ravity, they In the early days and dialogue what many easily grasped as poetic say, is a natural of occupation, the articulations dissonance between the City’s major consequence of of Occupy London were outward- financial hub and its merry band of the presence of looking; towards what mattered in would-be occupiers. matter. What the first. The initial statement of Perhaps it was inevitable mattered, at first, Occupy London called for structural that amid the oft-negative, was occupying change, a shift toward authentic politicianeering and profit-oriented the London Stock global equality and democratic statements about ‘Occupy London’, Exchange;G and gravitate towards it alternatives to the current the currents of the camps’ own we did. With society cast adrift on the system. Subsequent demands for dialogue would become caught rising tides of austerity, a dialogue transparency of the activities of the in the wake, turning inward. The born of civil disobedience would Corporation would add commentary that initially circled counter the current. What began further depth to the outward-looking the injustices encapsulated by as a protest of expression against nature of the movement and refine the symbol of the stock exchange economic injustice soon took physical its definition in tune with causes and transformed over time into something manifestation in the camps and in the aims. In so doing, these statements multi-faceted, with distinct streams spaces we occupied, with an emerging shed light on the inattentive ‘blind and currents focusing solely on point of definitional reference, spot’ of mainstream media in its the movement itself (not merely of both from within and outside of the failure to articulate a purpose, camp-management, process and Tony J Lewis movement, as ‘Occupy London’. mainstay, or suitable description of best practice, but expressions of internal definition and structure). To extend the metaphor of our physics what has become a predominance more in the way of definition than lesson, we could say that with the of inward-looking dialogue. the amassed treasure-trove of our camp outside the gates of the stock This ever-burrowing semantic established kernel. In short: to exchange showing no signs of retreat life-form has gone so far as to throw disperse these dark matters to find in the face of winter, the gravity of up suggestions for a prolonged our defining unity in what mattered the situation was with us; we had period of collective contemplation in the first - and what matters still: become the thing that mattered. (complete with weekend seminars our common causes. With the roots of the movement and supplemented motivational The prospects for such a re- tied down by guy ropes, an internal audio-tapes, perhaps) and further imagining of definitional treatment domain to ‘Occupy London’ was articulation to solve this so-called would seem to hinge not upon established that would play a role ‘problem of definition’ of the a reshuffle of the established in forming the continuing, wider movement itself, from within the structures of our whirring, internal dialogue - its currents now shaped streams of its own internal dialogue commentary, or upon efforts from within as much as from without. and structural paradigms. to establish the articulation of In recent weeks, since the But perhaps herein lies the “Big a structured internal domain, eviction of the camp at St. Paul’s, Whoop” misnomer of a non-problem! but upon renewed efforts for all those with an ear to the ground Perhaps a solution to this aspects of our dialogue to realign will have noticed the emerging apparent ‘problem of definition’ to the gravity of the causes of the murmur of surplus discussion will not emerge through the movement, above and beyond the gravitating towards internal issues proposed articulation of the, as gravity of internal dynamics. All including: profiling of occupiers; yet unseen, ‘dark matter’ at the matters of unity and definition the definition and scope of the heart of the movement. Perhaps, regarding the efforts emerging movement; brand management; instead, the problem itself will from Occupy London to challenge financial affairs; the nature and dissipate if we make efforts to social, economic and environmental remit of autonomous participation, vacate this internal domain and injustices - whether purely in etc. While these are undoubtedly the ripples of centralised and discussion or actively expressive - important matters, the stuck-in- structured elements which there could, in this sense, be perceived the-mud impasse within which reside as our ‘matters’. In so and measured in terms of their their seemingly unattainable doing, we may look once more harmony (or disharmony) with the resolve resides - with consensus beyond ourselves, to the elements, causes of the movement and our and forward-progression proving causes and tokens of the wider shared sense of gravity, process, so elusive - perhaps relates to global movement. These offer far best practice and the commons. That Thine Alms May be

The Irreverent in Secret... Reverend Nemu

Making another charitable assumption, that this was not economic warfare but good-intentions gone bad, it illustrates the complexities of

humanitarian intervention, even in Tony J Lewis noble causes. In 1955 the World Health Organisation began its Global Malaria Eradication Programme, using the farms towards export crops, and free Now as in the days of Sir. Frances recently developed chloroquine and grain programmes were dismantled. Drake, the real pirates are backed by DDT, nearly wiping out malaria in Sri Currencies were devalued and grain imperial powers. Aid is a bargaining chip in Lanka, but not quite. As any GCSE stocks sold off to service debt, leading a game of political favours, and this is only science student could have predicted, a to serious food shortages. Farming the tip of the iceberg – who knows what generation grew up without developing subsidies were cut (except for export politicians get up to when they gather in immunity, and the resulting resurgence crops) whilst the US, Europe and Japan their covens and raise their demons. claims 10,000 victims per year today. continue to spend seven times the total Virtues are fraught in the New The programme has, however, helped global aid budget on farm subsidies, Testament, but commandments are wipe out half of the Nepalese jungle and meaning that their produce outcompetes simple, and boil down to two. The 20% of the Amazon, along with various locally grown food. Not surprisingly, the second is: “Love thy neighbour as creatures great and small. Previous statistics reveal that “when a Sub-Saharan thyself.” (Mark 12:31) attempts to develop the rainforests had African nation is under a World Bank In today’s multicultural Benetton been doomed to feverish failure, but structural adjustment loan, then it tends ad of a world, you might be forgiven “charity” rendered this defense impotent. to have higher levels of child mortality.” for thinking that your neighbour lives Whilst admitting that eradication Somalia’s nomadic herdsmen were in Kathmandu, but hark ye: Your is impossible, WHOrocrats launched self-sufficient in the 1970s, but the neighbour lives in your neighbourhood, another $2bn per year campaign in 2008. privatisation of both the veterinary and the and that is where you should raise a Until they abandon it, your taxes will water service meant that medicine became stink! If your government robs local fund the spraying of toxic insecticides expensive and uncompetitive boreholes fell pensioners and closes your local library throughout the tropics, killing all manner into disrepair. Cheap grain imports and a whilst funding war, ecocide and land- of insects along with mosquitoes, and 15-fold increase in food aid shifted farming grabs on other continents, it is neither starving and poisoning the animals and eating habits. Currency devaluation charity, nor alms, nor love. It is nothing above them in the food chain. was imposed in 1981, fuel prices rose more noble than greed. As well as disastrously stupid do- and infrastructure collapsed. Today it is More wrath and righteousness from goodery amongst aid organisations, considered a failed state and pirate haven. Rev. Nemu at www.nemusend.co.uk there is also Machiavellian scheming: “When thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth” (Matthew 6:3) Before the invention of the toilet roll, ancient cultures differentiated between

alexcharnley.com a private and a public hand, a right hand for giving and a left hand for taking. While the dexterous right hand gives aid, “For now we see through a glass, sister’s parachute jump, but respecting what does the sinister left hand take? darkly; but then face to face… And now the opinions of those around you. On 70% of US aid is tied to US goods abideth faith, hope, charity… but the the international scale, it might mean and services. Most of the $3bn given greatest of these is charity.” respecting the right of other countries to Israel is military credits, and African (I Corinthians 13:12-13) to decide their fiscal policies. AIDS relief funds stipulate that the Through the dark glass of The distribution of alms (not arms, drugs be US-made, rather than generic international politics, witness a curious brother Cameron, alms) is a more alternatives. Then there is the diplomatic spectacle. Indian politicians are calling delicate affair:“Therefore when thou game. In 2003 various UN member for India to refuse British aid, whilst doest thine alms, do not sound a states including Guinea and Angola Britain is pleading with them to continue trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites were threatened with losing aid if they accepting it. Dissenting voices were do in the synagogues and in the streets, opposed the Iraq War. Pacific nations also heard in the UK in February, when that they may have glory of men.” receiving aid from China do not recognise India chose 126 French fighter jets (Matthew 6:2) Taiwan; those funded by Taiwan do. over British, despite our International Hark the herald bureaucrats sing, Aid often ends up with the rich, Development Secretary making it and how the UN trumpet blasted out beyond that simply stolen by corrupt clear during a diplomatic visit that this to the tune of $10 billion from member politicians. Half of EU aid to Latin was just not cricket. Referring to the states in the wake of the Haitian America goes to the biggest 17% of £1.2-billion project, he said “The focus is earthquake. After six months, however, farms. A quarter of the £3mn British also [sic] about seeking to sell Typhoon.” only 2% had been spent on relief, and package to Malawi in 2005 went on hotel Of course, anyone visiting the not a penny of the $1.5bn from the US bills and meals for US operatives. More world’s 13th fastest growing economy arrived before the anniversary of the seriously uncharitable, in the biblical must be prepared to haggle, but whilst disaster. Until today, less than 1% has sense, is using aid to force neoliberal this looks for all the world like the been channelled through the Haitian policies upon developing nations. cynical machinations of arms dealers government, and only 23 out of 1,490 “And if thy brother be waxen poor, and and morally bankrupt politicians, let us reconstruction contracts have gone to fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt consider a more charitable explanation. Haitian companies. relieve him… Take thou no usury of him, The whole problem, brothers and Compare this tardiness with the or increase: but fear thy God; that thy sisters in revolt and rapture, arises from 13 months it took for the US Agency brother may live with thee.” a mistranslation of scripture. for International Development to (Leviticus 25:35-36) Charity is the “bond of perfectness” completely exterminate the Haitian When poor countries were unable to (Colossians 3:14), the “end of the creole pig when African swine fever service their debts, the IMF directors, not commandment” (I Timothy 1:5) and the hit the Dominican Republic (not Haiti). being suitably God-fearing, negotiated final saintly virtue (II Peter 1:5-7), but Charitable pig-killers even went onto debt relief and aid agreements in return the Greek word agape does not refer isolated islands, not to test, but to kill for structural adjustment programs to coins in a can. It means selfless these hardy and humble little pigs, (SAPs). Traditional lands went on the love, and more specifically tolerance which were the basis of the barter market in Zambia and Sierra Leone; for other perspectives. In English also, economy. The fat, frail American pigs communities and ecosystems were ‘uncharitable’ can mean narrow-minded sent in their stead died, unsuited to bought up by investors and replaced by rather than stingy, and ‘charity begins life outside of agro-business, and monoculture farmlands. Land, water and andrea bakacs at home’ is not about sponsoring your Haiti has never recovered. labour were diverted away from small The Europe-wide Assault on Universal Healthcare David Ferreira

It wasn’t more than a few years ago that proponents significant NHS staff cuts, users will rightfully complain of healthcare reform would point out that the United about its reduced quality. To this, the free-market States was the only developed nation without a universal fundamentalists in British government will provide a false healthcare system. Right-wing electoral victories and cure in the form of privatisations. several IMF interventions later, a number of European The sad irony is that in this age of austerity and nations have joined the United States on the list of proverbial belt-tightening, Europe is in the process of developed nations that healthcare access on ability shedding the relatively inexpensive public healthcare to pay rather than need. model for the overpriced American model. The US spends The most unforgiving attack on universal healthcare nearly 40% more on health care than its GDP would has been felt in Greece, where democratic norms predict, with 85% of this linked to the private insurance have been suspended to accommodate the demands of system the country employs. This figure should be no international creditors. Current healthcare spending in surprise. Private insurance companies post profits in the Greece is down 25% from what it was in 2009. As the billions, while civil servants in Europe merely demand a austerity program shuts public hospital wards and clinics, living wage and a respectable pension. Greek citizens in need of medical assistance only have But this profit extracted from America’s failing the private healthcare system to turn to. With pensions healthcare system is the very motivation to slowly advance slashed and a staggering unemployment rate of 21%, this the U.S. model in Europe. With functional public healthcare simply isn’t an option, and families are left seeking out systems in Europe, these crucial social services are closed charity health services that would otherwise be assisting to market exploitation. Dismantle them and suddenly a those in need in the developing world. public good is a commodity ripe for market speculation. This story of decimated healthcare services is being But it’s difficult for right-wing politicians in Europe to repeated with varying degrees of severity across Europe. dismantle healthcare systems that have serviced the public In Portugal, the IMF and European Union have demanded for decades. These systems must first be attacked at their increased fees for public healthcare, which has priced an foundation, reducing quality of service before the whole increasing number of Portuguese out of those services, edifice can be brought down in favour of a for-profit model. especially considering the widespread wage cuts. In Those who cherish their public healthcare systems Spain and the UK, right-wing governments have taken in Europe must not be reduced to inaction by claims upon themselves the task of gutting their healthcare that the reforms are modest. True reform would entail systems. The Spanish People’s Party is initiating a the improvement of service, a feat hardly achieved nationwide program to cut healthcare spending and with fewer nurses, doctors and facilities. Instead, the subsidies for the elderly while here in Britain the Tories drive in Europe is to leave public healthcare mutilated are slashing NHS staff numbers. and deformed. At this moment, public healthcare is in This assault on public healthcare places Europe on the emergency room. It has already suffered repeated a trajectory toward the model currently maintained by wounds from austerity-wielding politicians; left any the United States. Whether it’s the UK, Portugal, Greece longer in their hands, there is little chance universal or Spain, weakening public healthcare sets the stage healthcare can avoid the morgue. Christin e Lozano for such services to be filled by the private sector. With igualitarista.wordpress.com

Spain’s General Strike & the Bleak Prospects for Spanish Workers Chus Rivas Bote

The numbers are known. In January frustration and rage these measures against it, and the role of the media, 2012 unemployment figures in Spain provoke in workers and throughout which is mostly pro-government, and passed the five million mark, which society. The measures being taken to discouraged potential strikers. Many points to an incredibly high and growing mitigate the effects of the economic workers were threatened with the number of families without any source crisis will be disproportionately directed sack if they participated. Equally, the of income. Civil servants’ salaries were towards reducing all kinds of benefits, response from trade unions lacked the frozen, and have now been cut. Such including those services considered force necessary to mobilise effectively measures are being sold to many active essential for the protection of the most and en masse, with the urgency this workers as a solution to keep their jobs. disadvantaged. These measures have untenable situation calls for. Wages, already below the European already had a direct impact on public Although participation in the strike average, continue to drop. The education and healthcare, as well as was less robust than had been hoped “mileurismo” - salaries of a thousand other services that could be considered for, this was compensated for by a euros - long ago fell to 800 euros for of strategic importance, such as great number of demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of workers, research. Meanwhile, the budget for workers (strikers and non-strikers), especially the young. If they want keep culture has been cut so severely that it the unemployed (who can’t effectively their jobs, people are expected to accept is now almost non-existent. strike), parents and carers, young longer hours in poor conditions, without Nothing beyond rhetoric has been people, students and indignados overtime compensation. forthcoming, no effective measures have of all kinds, whose participation It is against this backdrop, and been implemented to curb extremely exceeded all forecasts. The shock Christin e Lozano as a “long term solution” to the crisis high rates of tax fraud in the country reached government officials, whose hitting all Western economies, that (there is a verified shadow economy of parliamentary majority does not grant Royal Decree-Law 3/2012 for Labour around 20%). A reform of the Spanish rule without consent. Many different Reform (Spain) was approved. This taxation system is well overdue, as it social sectors and their representatives move will satisfy only the aspirations is intolerable that average employees, are now calling the politicians to account. of employers, by further liberalising including the self employed, are taxed at Despite this, there is no working conditions, scuppering a rate almost twice that of businesses. interest from the government, collective negotiation in favour of The national budget proposes which acts predominantly in favour redundancy, and making everything further cuts which will add 630,000 of employers, to modify what has cheaper for the bosses. In some of the to the current unemployed figures, already been approved. It is thus very new contracts, employee dismissal according to experts. This reveals likely that conflict will increase and will come at no cost to the employer. that there is indeed a link between the demonstrations will grow. The greater Another postulate beyond belief is that proposed plans and labour reform: the injustice, the more radical the nine days of sick leave in two months it was necessary to facilitate the workers’ responses will be. can justify a dismissal, if the employer dismissals of even more workers to Profound reflection is needed; wishes to enforce it. It is not difficult to meet the planned budget. an acknowledgement of the see that none of these measures have The general strike on the 29th of inadequacy of the latest measures, the anything to do with improvement in March did not have the widespread reestablishment of balance between economic activity, nor will they lead to impact that organisers had hoped for, workers and employers, and an any growth in employment. although it did affect whole sections agreement to face the crisis with fair Thus the Labour Reform Decree of the chain of production. Key to and proportionate measures. Right now, has turned into the main focus of a understanding the success or failure of exactly the opposite is being proposed. Christin e Lozano General Strike contextualised by the the strike is how employers strategised (translated by Clara Rivas) Go Global Mary (An d Beware Of War) Kaldor

oney is an productivity growth slowed down, oil were also decades associated with the expression of became more expensive, the US started spread of ideas about freedom, human power relations. running trade deficits, and so on. At the rights, and greater tolerance towards The current time, neoliberalism was seen as the minorities. A new set of movements financial crisis answer to sluggish economic growth. began to develop in the late 1990s reflects a Liberalisation and deregulation did free renewing ideas about social justice, much deeper up capital to invest in a future model of the anti-globalisation movement, the crisis, which largely IT based development. The so- movement for climate change action, Mhas to do with the exhaustion of called new economy spawned huge new and protests against the ‘War on Terror’. the late twentieth century model of companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google These were the precursors to the development. By model of development and , but the full diffusion of current wave of mobilisation, of which I mean a combination of technology, the new technologies was blocked by Occupy is such an important part. patterns of production, consumption, the political institutions and patterns of So can the new social movements communication, infrastructure, and consumption typical of Fordism. Because offer a way out of the crisis? What is a specific set of political institutions. of the difficulty in continuing to make needed is a shift away from finance and a The twentieth century model of profits in the productive sector, finance move towards massive public investment development, often known as Fordism, switched to investment in assets and in green technologies and in a range was based on the intensive use of oil. developed new speculative tools – hence of public goods like education, health, It is characterised by mass production, the rise in private debt and asset inflation or poverty reduction. Under Fordism high levels of consumption and military that was bound to collapse at some productivity gains were labour-saving. spending, the spread of the automobile point. It is important to understand, The IT revolution offers the possibility and the aeroplane, as well as radio therefore, that this is an economic, for resource-saving innovations. In other and television, the growth of suburbs social, environmental and political crisis, words, we need a new green economic and a consensus on state intervention. not just a financial crisis. paradigm not only because of the risk of This period also crucially saw the In moments of transition from one climate change and resource depletion, emergence of American hegemony, model of development to another, the but also to solve current economic which has underpinned the role of the role of social movements is critical. problems. To achieve this, I believe we will

dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The labour movement was crucial in need a greater role for local (municipal andrea bakacs Capitalism has evolved through several creating the conditions for the Fordist or sub-regional), regional (European) models of development; starting with the model of development by pushing for and global governance because of the introduction of the factory system and a greater role for the state in welfare institutional blockage at national levels. like the period before World War I when of communication may make us less the production of textiles led by Britain, provision and pressing for higher We will need a shift away from American syndicalists, suffragettes and others vulnerable to violence on the scale of then the increasing role of coal, iron and wages, so that workers could then dominance to a more cooperative world were campaigning for more democracy, the twentieth century, everyone who is railways, followed by the introduction buy consumer goods. By the 1960s system. Above all, we need to reinvent more rights and more social justice. They currently politically active both at the top of steel, electricity, colonialism, and the disaffection with the paternalistic male democracy on a multi-scalar basis. were sidelined by the wars and their and at the bottom has a big responsibility rise of Germany and America. dominated ‘old left’ as well as the The big concern is the risk of war. In demands were only finally and partially to find ways to steer a peaceful and At some point, the model of inflexibility of the state led to the rise of previous transitions, war played a crucial fulfilled after the most terrible slaughter democratic transition to a green, socially development is institutionalised and it new movements both on the right (the role (for example, the Napoleonic wars, the world has ever witnessed. I worry just global economy. becomes increasingly difficult to innovate neoliberals) and of a more emancipatory or the wars of the mid-nineteenth and about growing conflict in the Middle Mary Kaldor is a former peace and also to increase productivity and kind (peace, green, human rights, mid-twentieth centuries). War was both East and about the rise of populist and activist and professor at LSE, where she therefore profits. This began to happen feminist). The 1980s and the 1990s were a response to crisis situations and a way xenophobic movements. While increased directs the research group on global civil with the Fordist model in the 1970s; the highpoint of neoliberalism, but these of crushing protest. This period is much awareness as a result of the new forms society and human security.

The Quebec Spring Mark Bergfeld

Striking students in the Canadian But student protesters are severely weakened government which province of Quebec are vowing to highlighting the fact that Finance had been scarred by two years of escalate their fight against an increase Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial continuous opposition by trade unions. in tuition fees after police used tear budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and Although 110,000 out of a total gas, shock grenades and arrested accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity of 185,000 striking students rejected dozens of protesters this Friday. and education. Ironically, Bachand the agreement in their general For more than ten weeks now, labelled these ‘sacred cows of assemblies, the strike was put to 170,000 students from approximately Quebecoise society’. an end. But with full privatisation 180 local unions have been on an Over the last nine years in power looming, students do not want to see open-ended student strike which the Liberals have pursued to restructure a repeat of 2005, which saw them go has shut down the Port of Montreal, society in the interest of the rich. Tax back to class empty-handed. ministerial meetings and nearly all cuts for corporations have gone hand in Students have learnt some classes in post-secondary education hand with increasing the retirement age important lessons. They are organising across the province. to 67. After trade unions suffered a blow on a departmental basis, which has Quebec students who pay the lowest in 2005 it was announced that student strengthened the overall organisation of tuition fees across Canada are faced with fees were to increase. the strike. This has also helped them to a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the Over the course of five weeks, hold the centralised unions to account. average annual cost to attend a Quebec students have engaged in a ‘general The high point of the ‘Quebec university is $2,519. Even if the planned strike’, causing significant economic Spring’ has been the 200,000-strong increase were to go ahead, Quebec damage to the provincial government. demonstration in Montreal on March students still would pay less than in any Yet the majority of the student unions 22. On the day, students successfully other Canadian province. and associations cut a deal with a blocked the Port of Montreal for several Navneet Pall hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November. back down”. This has only strengthened Immigration minister Jason Kenney, More importantly, the two largest the determination of student strikers, best known for his anti-gay and anti- public sector unions called their and led them to forge new alliances. immigration stances. membership on to the streets for the Students are organising solidarity with While the display of resistance mobilisation. Following the biggest locked-out Rio Tinto Alcan workers and has inspired activists far beyond the student demonstration ever, students with hundreds of Aveos employees who provincial borders of Quebec, the called for a week of economic disruptions, recently lost their jobs. movement is confronted with difficult bringing inner cities’ traffic to a standstill Friday’s protests saw questions. The strike’s success has while also mobilising 30,000 parents in environmentalists and students come meant that the return to courses will support of the students’ demands. out together. They stormed the top be at least delayed until mid-June, at While the mainstream media floor of a conference centre in which which point professors will be taking claims that the liberal government Charest was to unveil further details time off from regular teaching. Despite has “extended a hand” by offering of his ‘Plan Nord’, a mining plan which the fact that this means that students students an “increased bursary and will see a 1.2-million-square kilometre will have to retake the academic year loan programs”, the government is stretch of indigenous land be sold off and might not be able to graduate, intent on breaking the movement once to big business. students are clear about one thing: again. Premier Jean Charest said: “The At the same time, other students “If the strike continues, students are decision has been made and we will not stormed a meeting of the federal certain to win the fight.” In Search of a New

Jayati economic Model Ghosh t a discussion is based on the idea that society and media, are not simply distracting from on “the future of economy should be so constructed as more important goals, but can even capitalism” at the to give everyone equal opportunities; be counterproductive. For example, Guardian Open that each person should be granted a chaotic, polluting and unpleasant Weekend on 24 freedom, dignity, a political voice and system of privatised urban transport March, a case the minimum material conditions for involving many private vehicles and was made by one a decent life; that plurality should be over-congested roads actually generates of the panelists - respected without encroaching on more GDP than a safe, efficient and AWill Hutton - for what he called “good fundamental human rights. affordable system of public transport capitalism”. This is one that encourages It is immediately evident that this that reduces vehicular congestion and private entrepreneurship but requires a move beyond tired ideas of provides a pleasant living and working subordinates the market to the broader all kinds, not just those prevalent in environment. So it is not enough to talk needs of society. It is focussed on more the mainstream. Thus, the traditional about “cleaner, greener technologies” to equality of opportunity, and enables socialist paradigm, with its emphasis on produce goods that are based on current and facilitates small businesses. It centralised government control over an (increasingly discredited) patterns of also recognises and addresses the undifferentiated mass of workers, cannot consumption. Instead, we must think constraints posed by the environment, still be the desirable ideal. Rather, the creatively about consumption itself, and reduces ecological waste and new vision of socialism must incorporate work out which goods and services damage. It was pointed out by another more explicit emphasis on the rights and are more necessary and desirable for panelist (myself, as it happens) that concerns of women, ethnic minorities, our societies, and think of how best to what he was describing could as easily indigenous and local communities and create the material incentives that will be called socialism. other marginalised groups, as well as encourage such activity. The problem is, of course, that recognition of ecological constraints and The good news is that this is not when the world “socialism” is used, the social necessity to respect nature. just an idealistic hope for an impossible too many people immediately think of The distributive element of this utopia. In fact people across the world the centralised planning, authoritarian is clearly important. The Occupy are thinking along these lines and tendencies and bureaucratic control of Movement has made the huge developing alternative paradigms for the former Soviet state, and reject the contribution of putting the issue of constructing very different relationships notion immediately. Unfortunately, we inequality at centre stage. Yet the between society and economy. For have over-used and distorted too many system cannot be changed only by example, in Ecuador and Bolivia, new words, especially the “isms”. Therefore restraining the one percent, or seeking constitutions emphasise the rights of all it is harder and harder to describe in to reduce their obscenely inordinate citizens to work with dignity and decent shorthand the alternative that must be share of assets and incomes, although conditions, to have access to food, promoted, without getting stuck with this is obviously essential. In addition water and health care. Simultaneously, all the baggage of the past. Yet thinking to this, we need to think of new the state is required to respect the about and formulating the alternative and genuinely progressive ways of rights of nature, and so environmental is not only essential but increasingly organising the economy that recognize conservation, biodiversity, the inevitable. The current model of profit- the varied needs of all citizens. prevention of environmental damage andrea bakacs led deregulated capitalism has failed This requires, to start with, moving and recovery of degraded natural on so many fronts and created so much beyond GDP as the basic index of well- spaces are declared matters of public dysfunctional inequality that it obviously being, and developing new means of interest. The economic structures activities, but within regulations and and pessimism that are so actively must be transcended. measuring genuine progress, well- built around these broad aims do not fiscal and other economic policies that instigated by the mainstream media. So, for want of a better word (maybe being and quality of life. Quantitative involve the complete negation of the create incentives for generating more Of course the path will not be easy, and someone will think of one soon?) let GDP growth targets, that still dominate market; rather, the necessity is seen decent work opportunities, as well as opposition will be fierce. But if we do me call this alternative socialism. It the thinking of policy makers and the for encouraging and developing market more time for leisure and what is seen not open our minds to a more positive as “relational time” to engage in fulfilling approach that seeks to transcend the social relations. In Ecuador, the five- current system, we will continue to year economic plan of the government be helpless pawns in an increasingly is explicitly focussed on “El buen vivir” cynical game in which financial elites or “good living”, though the literal and large capital are destructive of both translation of the original Quechua term human and natural life. is perhaps more apt: “life to the fullest”. The slogan of the World Social This is just one example – but Forum, which for a brief time had in many countries more and more become one form of articulation of people are not just thinking about global people’s resistance to the current but also attempting to put into place oppressive system, is “another world new institutions, rules and practices is possible”. The writing on the wall is that do not just challenge the existing now clear: another world is not just power structures but also suggest possible but inevitable, as this system creative new ways of dealing with the cannot survive in its current form. economy. We need to know much more Shaping it in more desirable directions, about these experiments, and to have towards socialism in its original sense, more confidence in ourselves and in is therefore the task. our capacity not just to imagine but to Jayati Ghosh is Professor of implement alternatives. For that, we Economics at the Jawaharlal Nehru have to shed the fears, insecurities University in New Delhi.

Tony J Lewis tz Shadow Banking 101 John Aziz

Everything you wanted to know DEREGULATION paper, tender option bonds, variable rate about the terrifying shadow banking The banking system has blown up demand obligations, re-hypothecation, system but were afraid to ask. By multiple times in history, when depositors and hundreds more exotic variants. John Aziz, an independent financial have panicked and withdrawn funds en (Hypothecation is where the borrower writer from England. masse in what is known as a bank run. So pledges collateral to secure a debt – i.e. traditional banks have become party to a mortgage, and re-hypothecation is MEET JAMES... a lot of regulations. For example, banks where that collateral is passed on and James bought a house. It cost him must keep on hand 10% of deposits as a someone else borrows against it, even £150,000, of which £30,000 had come reserve. This reserve is a buffer, so that though it remains in the original debtors from his own savings, leaving him with if depositors choose to withdraw their hands). The function of these assets a £120,000 30-year fixed-rate mortgage money they can do so without the bank are essentially the same; securitisation from the WTF Bank, with a final cost having to call in loans. Of course, banks is a way of creating products with an (after 30 years of interest) of £200,000. can still suffer from a liquidity panic if exchange value, and bringing money Now, up until the ‘80s, a mortgage was a large proportion of their depositors into the shadow banking system; so just a mortgage. Banks would lend the choose to withdraw their money. Under much money that the shadow banking funds and profit from interest as the those circumstances, traditional banks system in 2008 was much larger than the mortgage is paid back. have access to central bank liquidity — traditional banking system: Not so today. James’s £200,000 short term loans from the central bank to mortgage was packaged up with 1,000 guarantee that they can pay depositors. PLUMMETING JUNK other mortgages into a £180 million Shadow banking arose out of So securitisation — as well as its siblings MBS, (mortgage backed security), and bankers’ desire to not be bound by these hypothecation and re-hypothecation, sold for an immediate gain by WTF restrictions, and so to create more allowed for pre-existing securities to be Bank to Privet Asset Management, a and more and more financial products, re-posted again and again as collateral, hedge fund. Privet then placed this MBS and debt, without the interference or sucking more and more money into the with Sacks of Gold, an investment bank, oversight of regulators. Of course, this system — became a pretty significant in return for a £18 billion short-term meant that they did not have access to way of funding lending. The problem in collateralised (“hypothecated”) loan. central bank liquidity, either. the financial crisis beginning in 2007 was Two days later Sacks of Gold faced a Essentially, shadow banking is still that a lot of the assets securitised to bring margin call, and so re-hypothecated banking. It is a funnel through which money into the shadow banking system this collateral for another short-term money travels, from those who have an turned out to be junk. collateralised £18 billion loan with J.P. excess of it and wish to deposit it and Think back to the MBS bundle Morecocaine, another investment bank. receive interest payments, to those who containing James’s mortgage: if 90% andrea bakacs Three weeks later, a huge stock market want to borrow money. Shadow banking of the mortgages in the MBS were crash resulted in a liquidity panic, institutions are intermediaries between defaulted upon, that MBS would yield resulting in more margin calls, more investors and borrowers. They can have a huge loss for whoever was currently shadow banking system, fell precipitously things trying to turn a profit. All kinds forced selling, which left Privet Asset many names: hedge funds, special holding it. If that MBS had been posted simply because there was less money of weird and wonderful systems will Management — who had already lost a investment vehicles, money market as collateral against further lending, floating around in the system. emerge. Some systems work better lot of money betting stocks would go up funds, pension funds. Sometimes those debts would be called in. For Friedrich Hayek wrote about this than others. And — as might be sensibly — completely insolvent. investment banks, retail banks and even shadow banking institutions that were problem long before anyone coined the expected — the shadow banking highly leveraged this turned out to be term shadow banking: system’s wacky idea of financing banking a huge problem. To raise capital, they There can be no doubt that besides operations through the securitisation started selling just about anything that the regular types of the circulating of debt failed. But because of the wider wasn’t bolted down. This meant that medium, such as coin, notes and bank implications for the financial system, prices — even of securities that weren’t deposits, which are generally recognised central banks began throwing money fundamentally weak — plummeted. to be money or currency, and the around in order to save these broken And because of the problems with a quantity of which is regulated by some institutions and systems. lot of existing securities, the funding central authority or can at least be The Federal Reserve’s first source for a huge part of global lending imagined to be so regulated, there exist quantitative easing program bought completely dried up, worsening the still other forms of media of exchange up tranches of defunct MBS. This economic contraction. which occasionally or permanently stabilised markets to the extent that The risk — that debtors would do the service of money. Now while while securitisation virtually ground default upon their loans — rather for certain practical purposes we are to a halt in 2009, by 2011 the shadow than being confined to a single bank, accustomed to distinguish these forms banking system was growing again. But came to be spread about the entire of media of exchange from money proper this is surely just a temporary measure. economy, with bad debts that had as being mere substitutes for money, Simply, there is no reason whatever been securitised, hypothecated and it is clear that, other things equal, any to doubt that the same problem — of re-hypothecated coming to sit on the increase or decrease of these money bad debt coming to be spread around balance sheets of tens or even hundreds substitutes will have exactly the same the entire financial system through of financial institutions. effects as an increase or decrease of the securitisation and re-hypothecation quantity of money proper, and should — will take root once again, causing PSEUDO-MONEY therefore, for the purposes of theoretical similar turmoil in the future. This entire system creates another analysis, be counted as money. The status quo is that we have a problem. Securities came to be a kind Thus, as the shadow banking broken and dangerous system that of pseudo-money. In other words, they system expanded, it caused inflation, doesn’t really work, surviving on became a unit of exchange and a means and as it imploded it caused deflation. It government subsidies. Sure, a full for payment between banking institutions. was a big toxic bubble waiting to burst. collapse of shadow banking in 2008 With the 2008 shadow banking implosion, would have been painful. But we may this meant that many prices, including THE FUTURE have created a bigger and more painful prices of products like equities that Ultimately, markets are a little crazy. collapse further down the road. were superficially disconnected from the People will do all manner of wacky www.azizonomics.com CONFUSED? central banks. The difference is that You should be. This is of course a in the new galaxy of shadow banking, $ fictitious story. But the really freaky these chains of intermediation are often thing is that this kind of scenario — the extremely complex, the shadow bank packaging up of fairly ordinary debt into does not have to keep reserves on hand, $20.000.00 Shadow Banking Liabilities VS Traditional Bank Liabilities ($MM) exotic financial products, which are then and shadow banking institutions raise Shadow Banking System traded by hundreds or even thousands money through securitisation, rather Commercial Banks of different parties, has occurred than through accepting deposits. millions and millions of times. And it is extremely dangerous. When everybody SECURITISATION $15.000.00 is in debt to everybody else through a With securitisation, the financial industry complex web of debt one small shock creates the products which populate could break the entire system. The the shadow banking ecosystem, and £18 billion debt that Privet owed to act as collateral. Rather than accepting Sacks of Gold could be the difference deposits (and thus accepting regulation between Sacks of Gold having enough as traditional banks) shadow banking $10.000.00 money to survive, or not survive. And if gets access to money through borrowing they didn’t survive, then all the money against assets. These assets could be that they owed to other parties, like anything — mortgages, credit card debt, J.P. Morecocaine, would go unpaid, commodities, car loans. These kinds of

thus threatening those parties with products are packaged up into shares, $5.000.00 insolvency, and so on. This is called sold and traded. There are various systemic risk, and shadow banking has forms: collateralised debt obligations, done for systemic risk what did the collateralised fund obligations, asset- Beatles did for rock & roll: blow it up, backed securities, mortgage-backed source: zero hedge and spread it everywhere. securities, asset back commercial 196004 197003 198002 199001 199904 200804 P reoccupying: P aul Mason “ The old world is on life support” Paul Mason is Economics Editor of BBC Newsnight and the author of several books including Meltdown and Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere. The OT caught up with Paul to get his views on the trajectory of the financial crisis and the unrest it has helped spawn, the Occupy movement’s successes and failures - and the role of the media in society.

THE OCCUPIED TIMES: The Occupy human expectations combined with our “alternative” culture dominated movement saw protestors initially a rejection of the old economic order by ageing standup comedians and gather, en masse, at significant and the old power elite. millionaire concept artists. financial centres across the globe, but This year is the 200th anniversary I think Lehman was the moment the movement received heavy criticism of Luddism, which prefigured where the fatalism the capitalist - with claims that protestors failed other, more successful organised realism concept describes did die; but to present an alternative to what the labour battles. Somebody inside the I also think you have to admit there later conceded was movement said to me: “Maybe we’re is quite a lot of “the new” actually “capitalism in crisis”. Undaunted by like the Luddites, we’re a prefigurative being born. The iPhone has conquered this criticism, many thousands will be movement for something else”. the world since Lehman; six out of mobilising throughout May to further In America you can already see seven Arab Facebook users joined challenge economic injustice. Do Occupy melding with other more local after the revolution started. There is you believe that movements such as and deep-rooted movements: with the rapid uptake of technological change predicted one or another aspect of the southern USA, looking at poverty and Occupy bear the seeds for a sustained Trayvon Martin protests, with protests going on, and the rapid creation of credit crunch. displacement. It taught me a lot more overthrow of the economic status quo? around abortion and contraception rights. alternative forms of media. Likewise if Increasingly there’s a default about effective demand, and real labour PAUL MASON: No. For the simple Whatever else happens, Occupy is you look at the Rio+20 summit, the UN counter-crisis policy coalescing: you market, than the monthly stats could. reason that Occupy doesn’t yet have now a meme that won’t go away and I has suddenly become obsessed with saw it in Berlin in April at George OT: You write in your new book, Why either the means or the intention to would expect it to influence subsequent “transition” projects. Soros’s INET [Institute for New It’s Kicking Off Everywhere (WIKOE), of “overthrow” the economic order. It’s waves of struggle and resistance. So I would rephrase Gramsci: the Economic Thinking] conference: it’s an “almost mystical determination by striking that while the present system OT: You recently told ’s old world is on life support because basically repress finance, rebalance protestors to occupy a symbolic space – free market unregulated capitalism Comment is Free site that the global too few people want the chaos that an western economies towards production and create within it an experimental, – is facing a crisis of sustainability revolts of 2011 have signaled the end attempt to create a new world might and hi-tech through state intervention, shared community”. You also mention and belief, the so called anti-capitalist of Mark Fisher’s concept of Capitalist bring. Instead of “morbid symptoms” and upskill the western workforce. But that this creation of “instant liberated movement still can’t answer the Realism, whereby it seemed easier you’ve got zombified symptoms. it’s actually very hard to implement: spaces” is the most important theme questions: what do you want, what to imagine the end of the world than OT: There seems to be an inability once the answer to every question is linking the global revolt. Does this would you do if you could decide things? the end of capitalism. These revolts on the part of both those in the not “the market” you need experts, mean that you wouldn’t subscribe to It looks a lot like a new form of could be seen as a global rejection of financial industry and among many strategists, planners; “competitiveness” the meme that is popular with some in utopian socialism, or utopian anarchism. long-standing neoliberal economics. financial journalists to fully understand becomes not about “getting fit” but the Occupy movement that you “can’t I do not belittle that, of course – my So if we are to believe that “the old is the complexities of the economic “winning the race by putting your spikes evict an idea”? Is holding onto a Tahrir, job is to study these movements in real dying and the new cannot be born” are system. It sometimes feels like we’re into the knee of your opponent”. a Zuccotti Park or a St. Paul’s crucial time: but as far as I can see it remains a we now in Gramsci’s “interregnum” speeding along in a driverless car and I’ve said before that the big to the success of the movement? critique of capitalism “within capitalism”, - experiencing “a great variety of when you ask around what’s wrong, unspoken question is protectionism: PM: I was reporting in Zuccotti myself destined to create small islands of morbid symptoms”? everyone shrugs their shoulders. how much of the rebalancing can you two weeks ago and got physically alternative lifestyle or alternative PM: Well that Gramsci quote gets What does this situation mean for the hope to achieve without protecting evicted, despite my BBC press pass. economics, not a systemic overthrow. rolled out a lot. I would see it as potential success of policy responses your domestic market and restricting Then the place got swamped with cops At the same time I do believe having a lot of relevance in Britain: - and can we even seek to comprehend the supply of unorganised cheap and tourists in equal numbers. Then Occupy has created a new zeitgeist, old newspapers and media business what is going wrong before the shit labour. I think it’s coming back – in one slightly deranged guy started to and that it reflects a wider discontent, models dying; the media obsessed really hits the fan? both left and right wing forms. meander through the space shouting and that it’s a product of something with an agenda dreamed up in the PM: I dispute this: there are If you look at the French elections, “Occupy Wall Street”, which echoed that is going on objectively, which is a unreal bubbles we call political parties; many journalists and economists it’s the candidates to the left and right off the office blocks and completely new inter-personal and psychological the voice of the gentleman’s club and who get what’s gone wrong: at least – Le Pen and Melenchon – who’ve defined the situation. revolution, and a revolution in the public school still ubiquitous; 12 significant academic economists been prepared to break these taboos. So I suppose that’s a good The challenge for people around illustration of the idea being Occupy, which tends to shy away from impossible to evict. However, if you “demands”, still less harsh demands look back at the history of opposition that actually inflict pain on one section movements in, say, France, you would of society by wielding political power say ideas, eventually, can get evicted. on behalf of another, is that we might Entire generations of radical French be entering a decade of demand-based workers clung to the idea of the social radical politics. So what are you going republic, despite it being to do if politics and economics enters a world of class vs class, nation vs nation? OT: A look back at the lead-up to the current global economic crisis reveals that a number of marginalised voices were accurately forecasting a crash well ahead of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. What changes can we hope to make to economic reportage in order to accommodate input from the likes of critical commentators such as Steve Keen, Nouriel Roubini, David Harvey and Nicholas Taleb? PM: Each of the figures you mention are big figures who pick and choose their interventions carefully. I’ve hosted most of them on BBC outlets. For me, economics reporting is not about theory anyway: it’s about bringing in the granular and unexpected details of real life into the world of theory. It’s about reporting before it’s about economics – such as when I got andrea bakacs Christin e Lozano in a car and drove across most of the populated by people from white, privileged backgrounds? What advice would you give to young working-class people keen to become journalists? PM: Marry somebody who owns a ski-lodge in Verbier and a 60ft yacht! Seriously you put your finger on a problem. In the media in general wages for the producers, young reporters, internet writers etc are so low they’re impossible to live on unless your dad is rich. I regularly look at adverts for research fellowships in Higher Education, or entry level school teaching, and think, heck, that’s way more than people earn in TV and newspapers. So a lot of working class would-be journalists simply give up, or can’t survive in the “prestige jobs” – so they move to the more lucrative edges of the media – which tend to be less altruistic, or they go into PR. Going back to the advice: I would say start a blog now; start producing video now; start posting your pictures on Tumblr or somewhere now. Start reporting, even if its only for an audience of a few hundred. You may already be out-performing your local newspaper in terms of readership! And get a specialism. I started on a magazine covering “heavy plant” – ie digging machines. But this problem of low wages, and too few entry level jobs that pay, also reflects the rise of social media and the crisis of mainstream business models. OT: A hero of yours, George Orwell, masterfully depicted tyranny and hierarchy in 1984 and the nature of power in Animal Farm but he wasn’t to know how new technology would herald the explosion of networks now connecting people across the globe; networks that you say will invariably defeat hierarchies. We think the important question is: would George have been a keen Tweeter or more of a Jessica Lehrman Facebook fan? PM: Orwell would have closed his Facebook account the moment sporadic strikes and protests to really the day it’s not as important as it Injury] as I methodically delete press “evicted” physically twice, in 1851 they started messing around with transformative mass action. was. If you don’t like it; do your own releases from my email in-box. I cannot and in 1871. Eventually they gave the privacy options. He would have The 1960s do have a resonance: reporting and disseminate it yourself. say it has really changed my reporting. up on it: the character of opposition been tweeting Anglo-Saxon epithets but as I say in the book, back then the What unites activists and bloggers More of a problem is the relentless politics transformed as a result. but getting trolled by a combination revolution in individual lifestyles and on the right and left – in the USA legal guerilla warfare corporations After a while then, an idea gets of right wingers and Stalinists, freedom ran into very powerful forces and increasingly here – is how little engage in with the media; and their ground to pieces by repeated failure. as he was in 1937 when he wrote linked to the Cold War, to the resilience they trust or care about what the endless complaints and lobbying efforts How to avoid failure? Social history Homage to Catalonia. Also, maybe, of the economic system, which could mainstream media says. outsourced to the public affairs industry. tells us it’s numbers and relevance. he would have sold more books by still deliver life improvements to Given that the PR industry But my philosophy is: if you are straight, If you contrast Zuccotti to OT: self-publishing on Kindle than he ordinary people. has grown at an almost directly and play fairly with everybody, most of Tahrir: in Tahrir there are still tens of ever did with Victor Gollancz. Also he The parallel with the pre-1914 proportional rate to which newsrooms it is like water off a duck’s back. thousands of ordinary people prepared would have ripped the **** mercilessly days for me comes from the fact have shrunk in recent decades, how do A lack of representation of to risk life, injury and careers to be OT: out of Occupy. Read his description that you’ve had this revolution in you feel this has changed reporting, working-class people in politics is in Tahrir, even more than a year on, of two ILP [Independent Labour individual lifestyles that is congruent and is it causing serious problems? obviously problematic for democracy, to expand the democratic rights they Party] members getting onto a bus with a technological revolution and, No. The only serious problem it but what is the impact on society of won in February 2011. I think it’s an PM: in Letchworth dressed for a socialist until 2008, growth - but it’s a cultural causes me is RSI [Repetitive Strain a Fourth Estate disproportionately open question whether Occupy in summer camp to see why. the USA and UK will revive as the parallel I am drawing. And I do so weather gets better, or whether it to raise a question I don’t know the dissolves into whatever is coming answer to: if it all gets really ugly, next. Certainly, if you look at Spain economically and socially, could the and Greece, the indignado movements powers that be really roll back all the have now moved on to a more worker personal freedom we’ve gained? We and politics oriented agenda, as have to remember that Berlin went you’ve moved into general strikes and from the gay capital of the election campaigns. world to a Wagnerian cultural desert OT: In WIKOE you’re keen to draw in the space of two or three years. It historical parallels between our times happened then. and the Edwardian Age or “Belle Epoque” OT: We’re interested in the ability at the turn of the 20th century rather of mainstream media outlets to be than the more common comparisons a check on political and corporate most people make with the economic power. Are organisations like the BBC turmoil of the 1930s or the youthful doing their job properly? Or have we protests of the 1960s. Why is this? reached a situation where the real PM: We’re not yet in a 1930s situation speaking of truth to power comes out because the main economies in the of movements like Occupy, UK Uncut world chose to bail out the banks or from independent sources? instead of letting them go bust. PM: I think all the mass and Students are poor; young workers mainstream media knows it’s facing are low paid. But go into any bar or a huge challenge as social media shopping mall where students and empowers ordinary people. And I young workers hang out and you will don’t see the first job of the media see them still spending money: that as “speaking truth to power”: it is money they are spending is some of the much simpler – it is telling the truth. trillions of dollars, euros and pounds Finding it, uncovering it, testing out that’s been created to stave off crisis. claims, creating a coherent picture of By contrast my grandad’s generation what’s going on and then publishing literally spent their last penny and it. What I say to people who get irate then starved. And even then it took the at reporting they don’t like in the Christin e Lozano threat of fascism to rouse them from mainstream media is: in the end of P reoccupying: M ark Fisher “ These are the signs of a system verging on collapse” Mark Fisher is an author, political and cultural theorist and a visiting fellow at Goldsmiths. The OT asked Mark about the concept behind his book ‘Capitalist Realism’, his thoughts on the culture of neoliberalism and his assessment of the global unrest that has sprung up over the last two years.

THE OCCUPIED TIMES: Paul Mason recently commented that the to ignore. The question is, can Occupy provide the basis for a uprisings of 2011-12 have brought the curtain down on capitalist sustainable antagonism? The broad problem we’re facing here is, realism. Can you briefly outline what you mean by the term how can this antagonism be sustained now that the Communist ‘capitalist realism’? And do you believe that the financial crisis and Party has disappeared and trade unions have for the most part the subsequent popular fightback have signaled a new beginning? become quiescent? The party and the union structure provided MARK FISHER: Capitalist realism can be seen as a belief - that sustainability, continuity and institutional memory. Now, it’s not there’s no alternative to capitalism, that, as Fredric Jameson that these are the only institutions that could provide such things, put it, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end or that those older institutions would be fit for purpose, even if of capitalism. Other systems might be preferable to capitalism, they had survived into the 21st century. But a genuinely new force but capitalism is the only one that is realistic. Or it can be that is capable of struggling against 21st century capitalism must seen as an attitude of resignation and fatalism in the face of be able to fulfil those functions. I think we also need to recognise this - a sense that all we can do is accommodate ourselves to the importance of building hegemony - and this means stepping the dominance of capitalism, and limit our hopes to contain outside the activist universe. There’s a danger of the activist’s its worst excesses. Fundamentally, then, it’s a pathology of world become very self-contained. We need to reach beyond those the left, nowhere better exemplified than in the case of New intensely engaged with politics to those who don’t look to politics Labour. Ultimately, what capitalist realism amounts to is at all to explain the misery of their lives. It’s those people who the elimination of left wing politics and the naturalisation of have been most affected by capitalist realism, and who could be neoliberalism. I think it’s too quick to talk about the end of mobilised against it, if they could be reached. capitalist realism, though what we have been seeing for the OT: What was your reading of the riots last August? The epitome past couple of years is a challenge to this naturalisation of of neoliberal materialism or further evidence of a system built on neoliberal concepts. In some ways, the austerity measures greed breaking down? that have been implemented have constituted an intensification MF: I think those involved in the riots were largely exactly the of capitalist realism. Those measures couldn’t have been kind of people I was just talking about - those for whom ‘politics’ introduced unless there was still a widespread sense that there means absolutely nothing. I’m not saying that the riots weren’t is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. The various struggles ‘political’, that they were an inexplicable upsurge of criminality, as that have blown up since the financial crisis show a growing the right did. The riots were political, but in a negative sense - they discontent with the panic neoliberalism that has been put in were a massive symptom of a failure of politics, an expression of Christin e Lozano place since 2008, but they have yet to propose any concrete discontent which lacked political goals or strategy. These are the alternative to the dominant economic model. Capitalist realism signs of a system verging on collapse; people took part because is about a corrosion of social imagination, and in some ways, they felt radically excluded. The invisible wall that prevents people that remains the problem: after thirty years of neoliberal from acting like this had collapsed - there was so little on offer domination, we are only just beginning to be able to imagine that there was almost no incentive not to riot. It’s to be hoped that alternatives to capitalism. But at least now we can imagine the discontent that exploded so powerfully, and, in many cases so imagining such alternatives. tragically, in the riots, can be harnessed. Shortly after the riots, I OT: What have you made of the global Occupy movement’s went to a screening of the Black Audio Film Collective’s 1986 film role as part of the mass mobilisation against the politics and Handsworth Songs, an essay-film about the 1980s riots. The film’s economics of austerity and neoliberalism? From what you’ve director, John Akomfrah, said that, if these rioters can bring the seen can Occupy and other movements mount a sustained British state to its knees for three days, they will also be able to opposition to the ruling status quo, continuing with the global organise themselves. That is my hope. actions planned throughout May? OT: In the sections of the book where you cover the culture MF: The short answer is that this remains to be seen. There’s of work, you describe the combination of marketisation and no doubt the Occupy movement has played a major role in the maddening bureaucracy as “Market Stalinism.” This evokes the shifting of ideological atmosphere that has happened in the excellent US television series The Wire where the police, the last year or so. You’re right that the question of sustainability politicians, the teachers, etc. are all shown to be focused, above all is crucial. In Capitalist Realism, I argued that the anti-capitalist else, on “juking the stats.” Can you describe how Market Stalinism movement had become background noise to capitalist business works and how we can hope to get rid of it? as usual - something that it was by and large easy for capitalism MF: I hadn’t actually seen The Wire at the time I wrote Capitalist Realism, which is why there’s no mention of it in the book. But you’re right, The Wire exemplifies so much of what I wanted to say in Capitalist Realism. In fact, if you want to know what capitalist realism is, watch The Wire! Market Stalinism was my term for the kind of bureaucracy which was typical of Blairism, but which, as The Wire demonstrates, was by no means confined to Blairism, or to Britain. The neoliberal claim was that marketization obviates the need for the state and for bureaucracy. But the result of imposing ‘marketization’ on public services is always a crazed proliferation of bureaucracy, via target setting, league tables, performance reviews etc. Just as under Stalinism, everything becomes geared towards the production of appearance. In these conditions, gaming the system is inevitable. How to get rid of Market Stalinism? We need to expose one of the biggest lies in neoliberalism: the idea that it is an anti-bureaucratic force. This will involve a struggle against managerialism, and towards a workplace based on the collective autonomy of workers. OT: You write in Capitalist Realism “This battery of bureaucratic procedures is by no means confined to universities, nor to education: other public services, such as the NHS and the police, find themselves enmeshed in similar bureaucratic metastases.” Now that the police want to strike, do you think they should be seen as just another public service, or does their role of enforcing the government’s agenda mean we shouldn’t oppose cuts to the police force in the same way we do the NHS, education or welfare? MF: It’s a difficult question, but one that should be answered Jessica Lehrman pragmatically and strategically. If we are involved in fighting the capital, never the reverse. Capitalist realism has never been about direct ideological persuasion - is not that the population of the UK were ever convinced of the merits of neoliberal ideas. But what people have been convinced of is the idea that neoliberalism is the dominant force in the world, and that, consequently, there is little point resisting it. (I’m not suggesting that most people recognise neoliberalism by name, but they do recognise the policies and the ideological narrative which neoliberalism has so successfully disseminated.) This perception has arisen because capital has subdued the forces acting against it - most obviously, it has crushed unions, or forced them into being consumer/ service institutions within capitalism. But you’re right - the situation has changed since the heyday of social democracy, and one of the principal ways in which it has changed is the globalization of capital. Indeed, this is one way that unions were outmanoeuvred: if your members won’t work for these rates, we’ll go to a place where workers will. One of the strengths of Occupy is that it is a transnational movement. But the challenge for Occupy is whether it can constitute a force capable of inducing fear into capital. My suspicion is that it won’t be able to do that on its own, and that it will need other institutions and groups - probably including unions - if it is to succeed in being a counter-force to capital. Capital isn’t actually global, but it is sufficiently global, and therefore any effective opposition to it needs to be sufficiently global also. The concrete question - somewhat obfuscated by many of the andrea bakacs debates about centralization versus networks - concerns co- ordination. How are disparate groups to be co-ordinated? We can police - either literally or at some other level - then the police are it’s easy to forget, for example, that league tables were only we learn lessons from neoliberalism here: its success was based playing their role as ideological enforcers. Which isn’t to say, I must introduced relatively recently. League tables produce the kind of on building a patchwork of heterogeneous groups, often with emphasise, that we should ignore police brutality and corruption. Market Stalinist distortions I was talking about earlier. Teaching different, even conflicting agendas. What happened to Alfie Meadows and others is appalling, and becomes a matter of training students for examinations; anything OT: The book ends very optimistically, saying that there is a sense needs to be exposed. But we have to remember that the police else is a luxury. Contrast this with the much-praised education that anything was possible again. That was two or three years ago aren’t the enemy, they are the servants of the enemy, and if all of system in Finland, which is fully comprehensive, has no league now. Still optimistic? More or less than before? our energy is taken up struggling against them, then they are doing tables or inspectorate, and is based on trust in teachers. MF: Well, I think that the optimism has somewhat been borne their job for their masters very effectively. Ultimately, it must be far OT: A predominant theme of the book is the issue of mental out by what’s happened since I wrote the book. As I said, I think better if the servants are turned against their masters. illness in capitalist societies. You write, “what is needed now is it’s going too far to say that capitalist realism is over, but the fact OT: A lot of what you write in the book comes from your a politicisation of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is that Paul Mason could make such a claim shows how much has experiences of working as a further education teacher. Where do their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression changed over the past couple of years. Just before the student you believe the Coalition, and New Labour before them, are going is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS.” It seems militancy blew up in the UK at the end of 2010, I spoke at a wrong with their education policies? that with mental illness scarring the lives of so many sufferers conference, making the - in retrospect - mild claim that there MF: The broader agenda here is the imposition of what I have and their loved ones in the UK, it should be towards the top of the would be shows of public anger against austerity, and I was called business ontology: the idea that only outcomes recognised political agenda. How can we begin to reduce the stigma, isolation accused of “revolutionary nostalgia”. The point is, that it was my by business count. It’s gradually become accepted that the and shame that our society still attaches to the issue of mental accuser that seemed to have the most (hah!) realistic handle on principal - if not the only - role of education is to turn out the kind illness? How can we convince people that its cause has roots in the things then. But surely there’s not anyone now who thinks that of compliant individuals which ‘business’ wants. As systems from collective, not just the individual? public discontent in the UK is at an end. Things have got better and the private sector are increasingly introduced into education, the MF: This is a crucial question. The way in which social and political worse since 2009: worse, in that panic neoliberalism has further influence of managerialism grows, and the status of the teacher is problems are converted into individual pathologies, to be explained attacked the welfare state, NHS, education etc; better in that downgraded. The pretext for the battery of bureaucratic and self- via chemical imbalances or family history, neatly sums up so opposition is coalescing, and the ideological climate has shifted. surveillance techniques that have been implemented by successive much of what has happened under capitalist realism. It’s what I’ve OT: You’ve written a lot about how popular culture has reinforced governments is that they ‘increase efficiency’, but their effect is to called the privatisation of stress. Depression has been described Capitalist Realism. You show how commercial pop and hip hop spread anxiety and erode the autonomy of the teacher. This isn’t an as a pathology of responsibility: you feel intensely responsible for music and films like Children of Men and Wall-E, even when accident: it’s the real aim of these measures. Education has been the state that you’re in. The excruciating paradox is that, while purporting to critique authority and the system, in fact leave only corralled into naturalising and intensifying capitalist competition; you feel that only you can get yourself out of depression, the a message of its inevitable perpetuation. Do you feel that there is condition consists precisely in your inability to act. There’s more much in the way of popular culture that does successfully subvert than an analogy with the political hopelessness and fatalism that Capitalist Realism? What subversive music, films and books can have characterised capitalist realism. Depression, after all, is a you recommend to OT readers? pathology which centrally involves a sense of realism (indeed, MF: I’m not saying that there are no political potentials at all in the there’s a phenomenon called depressive realism): the depressive popular culture I discuss in Capitalist Realism. What I was pointing thinks that they are being realistic, that they have perceived to, though, was the fact that anti-capitalism at the level of a film’s the real state of things, denuded of illusion. This describes the message does nothing in itself to disrupt the super-hegemony of post-utopian tenor of capitalist realism perfectly: other societies capital. Anti-capitalism - or at least anti-corporatism - is utterly had their illusions, their dreams of something beyond capitalism, standard within Hollywood films: consider something like Avatar, but we have come to terms with the inevitability of competition for instance. This is the objective irony of capital: nothing sells and precariousness. Yet depression shows the extent to which better than anti-capitalism. Or, even more bleakly, late capitalism’s people - even during the boom years - could not come to terms culture is anti-capitalist. There is an asymmetry: we struggle with this. With precarity increasing and welfare programmes against capital, but part of capital’s defeat of us is that it can sell eroding, it’s not surprising that there should be an increase in our books. This isn’t a completely closed circle, though. The issue depression and anxiety. But this increase in distress has been is how culture connects up with struggles, and you can’t second pathologised, neuroticised and commoditised over the past thirty guess that. It’s possible that any of the filmsI talked about could years. Instead of looking to unions when our workload becomes contribute to the development of class consciousness or inspire unbearable, we’re invited to look for a medical solution. Stressed people to engage in struggles. Conversely, it’s possible that even by too many working hours? Take this medication, which will those films or television programs which inventory the features restore the balance of your brain chemistry. Worried about losing of capitalist realism end up reinforcing it. Take something like The your job? Tell me about your mother. This is a major example Wire: yes, it exemplifies practically everything I say about capitalist of the naturalisation process I talked of earlier. What we need realism, but, for that very reason, you could say that it supports, is a denaturalisation (and consequent politicisation) of mental rather than subverts, capitalist realism. You could very easily take illness. I think the formation of a dedicated pressure group could away the message that struggling to change things is pointless; work towards this. We need something like a revival of the Anti- the system wins in the end. But one film I would recommend to Psychiatry movement of the 60s and 70s. Well, not so much a people, if they haven’t seen it, is Mike Judge’s Office Space, which revival as a re-occupation of the terrain that Anti-Psychiatry fought I briefly discuss in Capitalist Realism: I’ve seen no film which on; you could argue that the receding of Anti-Psychiatry correlates better captures the bureaucratic immiseration of late capitalist very closely with the rise of capitalist realism. managerialism labour. OT: With neoliberal economics being so globalised, so strongly enforced by powerful entities on a national, international and supranational level, does this not make it that much harder for any one nation-state to adopt a new economic paradigm? Would there not be credit-rating downgrades from the ‘objective’ agencies who missed the Enron and sub-prime scandals, a hysterical frenzy among the corporate media, veiled threats from the IMF and OECD and, quite possibly, stampeding capital flight? Couldn’t there even, depending on the extent of the country’s departure from the consensus, be hostility from the other neoliberal countries? MF: Of course, that would happen, and this kind of threat plays a large part in the current mode of capitalist realism. In fact, this is pretty much a statement of what capitalist realism is at this time. But it presupposes that capital is the most powerful force on earth, and it’s this presupposition which needs to be undermined. How? By constituting a counter-force capable of disciplining andrea bakacs capital. We’ve become used to a world in which workers fear MONEY TALK$ REAPING THE WHIRLWIND: NIGEL LAWSON AND THE ‘80s ROOTS OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

OCCUPIED TIMES: If you were to pick OT: These days, Nigel Lawson has been things tolerated by the powers-that- one event from recent history to help calling for a new Glass-Steagall Act, “a be has shrunk since 1980s, as the make sense of the current crisis, what complete separation between classic money-men established intellectual would it be? commercial banking and investment hegemony. I am thinking of civil ROBIN RAMSAY: One is hard. Here’s banking.” He says the crucial “discipline liberties, basically: the right to protest a couple of starting points. The budget of the marketplace” is being eroded by and the response of the state to of 1980 (the real intellectual author too-big-to-fail institutions... protests. These days, go on a demo of which was Nigel Lawson) set the RR: He’s an old man and has probably and you might get ‘kettled’ by the bankers free to move money and lend (and conveniently) forgotten that he’s police for six hours for your trouble. as much as they wanted to. It tends to the primary creator of the present mess. Even worse if you are trade unionist: be forgotten that this move happened He should stick to writing about dieting. months of notice and ballots before it in the UK before it did in America. In a However, yes, he’s basically right in part is possible to strike. And GCHQ and the very real sense, the present shambles is – in his account of the problem – and NSA are recording and analysing every Maggie’s great legacy. Not that she had wrong in his prescription that the free form of electronic emission from baby any idea of what was going on; but she market can solve the problem itself. As monitors upwards. was in charge, at least formally. soon as someone writes or talks about OT: This is boom time for the A second event would be the decision “the discipline of the market place” you surveillance industry, for the privatized by those around Neil Kinnock in 1988 to are hearing ideology taking the place demolition of privacy. What would you give up on their anti-banker economic of thought. say to someone working in this sector? policy and begin kissing butt in the City; OT: Back in 1999, you wrote: “The City RR: To an ordinary Joe making a living that was the moment when personal of London has had complete control with a mortgage to pay, I would say careers overrode intellect and concern over British economic policy, and most nothing. To managers, tech innovators, about this country. British economic thinking, for over I would paraphrase the bit of the Bill twenty years.” Is the City’s control as Hicks sketch where he asks if there rubbish, and that the City was the enemy RR: The anti-war lobby is always ignored. The OT is given a strong today? is anyone in the audience who works of the British people. More recently, the But, as I say: you have to proceed without RR: Even stronger, if anything. The in advertising. And when he hears Conservative David Davis is an interesting hope. If you need hope to continue, you tour of Britain’s events of 2008/9 demonstrated that a “Yes” from the audience, he says figure and might do something one day. are screwed. If people believed that big politicians of all the British parties, with “Kill yourself. I mean it. Kill yourself.” OT: In 2009, Bryan Gould wrote: marches against the Iraq war were going political ruins the possible exception of Vince Cable, Seriously though, businessmen and “There have been no more enthusiastic to persuade Tony Blair to go against by Robin Ramsay, knew nothing about economics, and women will always take opportunities cheerleaders for the culture of greed American foreign policy, they knew were simply waiting to be told what to offered them by society. Not their fault. and excess than New Labour ministers”, nothing about the British political system editor and do by the money men. The bailout was This stuff comes from the top. in a government which “celebrated the or our post-war history. publisher of theft, enacted by ignorant politicians OT: Who is your political hero? excesses of the City”. Do you agree? OT: The west seems intent on fighting, who were stampeded by the bankers. RR: In Labour Party terms, I supported RR: Absolutely. And I would say: in Larkin’s words, “the savage wars Lobster Magazine OT: Can democracy find its way back the views of Bryan Gould MP, who “no more enthusiastic and ignorant of peace”. and author of The from this? stood against John Smith in 1992 for cheerleaders”. The Parliamentary RR: Giving Obama the Nobel Peace RR: Truthfully, I don’t know. Did we the leadership of the party and lost. Labour Party knew nothing; its leaders Prize was nearly as funny as giving Rise of New Labour. ever have democracy? The range of Gould saw very clearly that the EU was knew nothing. All they saw was big it to Henry Kissinger. (Indeed, I have buildings filled with clever people forgotten why Obama did get it). Obama making money, in the new ‘knowledge was bought-and-paid-for long before economy’. Funny how ‘knowledge his election. Anyone who didn’t know economy’ has disappeared from the this wasn’t paying attention, or didn’t political discourse of today... want to know. OT: You once described the rhetoric of OT: Are we humans are too believing the City as: “Leave everything to us; we for our own good? know what we are doing. We are the RR: Do we really believe? Turnout success story of the British economy.” at elections keeps falling; party Nowadays, in Europe, we are leaving memberships keeps falling. We are it to the technocrats, trusting the stuck: the state is too powerful to bankers to save us... organise against; many of us are too RR: It’s clear that all over Europe (i.e. comfortable to be bothered doing EU Europe), bar the Czech Republic, anything; huge swathes of those under the ideology of pre-WW2 classical thirty are merely consumers who still liberalism is the prevailing view; and think stuff is more important than quite a few ex-members of Goldman anything else. The internet is rewiring Sachs have been parachuted into our brains, diminishing our attention positions at or close to the top of EU spans, addicting many of us. members governments – Belgium, If globalisation has failed, then we Germany, Ireland, Italy, France and return to the nation state. Do you see Greece – to make sure there is no anyone on the left thinking about this? default on Goldman Sachs loans. I don’t. And no wonder: nation segues The really striking thing is that none into nationalism, and this is the territory of Europe’s left-wing terror groups – of the right and far right. So there’s the e.g. those in Spain, Ireland and Greece big necessary project: how to detoxify – have started knocking-off the bankers the notion of the nation state and make and Eurocrats. The cynic in me says that it acceptable to the left. this may suggest that such groups were Robin Ramsay is the editor and being run by their states. publisher of Lobster Magazine (lobster- OT: What does it mean to be a cynic? magazine.co.uk). Is it a mode of constant questioning? RR: Good question and very difficult to answer. I guess it’s something like this: I expect things to go wrong, and I expect it to be revealed that the motives people profess and those they really have are not the same. OT: What’s the biggest lie Britain’s been sold? RR: In my lifetime there have been several. Obviously WMDs in Iraq is on the list. But I would add: (a) public bad, private good; (b) the unions were to blame for the inflation of the 1970s; (c) there is no alternative (TINA) – a phrase often used by Thatcher to justify her economic liberalism. In other words, the entire edifice of Thatcherism / Blairism was built on lies. OT: Do you think the anti-war lobby will ever recover from being so ignored over andrea bakacs andrea bakacs Iraq and the WMDs? Ethical is Optimal Chris Cook

VALUE: THE REALITY Three sources of value exist: 1) Location – i.e. three dimensional space; 2) Energy – in material or static and immaterial or dynamic forms; and 3) Intellect – in subjective form (knowhow) and objective form (knowledge). While the factors of location and non-renewable energy are finite, and subject to enclosure and dominance by elites, the emerging factor of intellectual value is subject to the direct instant connectivity of the Internet. “The Internet” as John Gilmore has said, “interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” and it’s already routing around governments and rent- seekers to prevent them from capturing and enclosing knowledge and knowhow. The great theme of the 21st Century will be the exchange of intellectual value - firstly for the value of infinite renewable energy (MegaWatts); and secondly for the value of non-renewable energy saved (Negawatts and Negabarrels – units of unused energy).

CO-OPERATIVE ADVANTAGE I believe we will see – probably more rapidly than many will believe possible – a transition from a profit-centred dollar economy to a people-centred energy economy. The adoption of a networked collaborative model has a ‘co-operative advantage’ – the freedom from paying something for nothing to rent-seekers. andrea bakacs Networked financial systems spread the risk and are more resilient – from enclosure, for example. value-extracting banks and other NEW ETHICS OF BUSINESS There is a useful tool of credit which middlemen, but possibly alongside These new participatory models share risk I call a ‘nondominium’ agreement: a value-adding individuals with and reward whilst circumventing the current consensual framework agreement professional and banking experience of banking model, in which you pay money for between stakeholders such as asset risk management and project appraisal the use of money. The Limited Company users, managers, and investors which who have a stake in the outcome. structure is often toxic - particularly in brings them together collectively and One example of such a project its public limited company (Plc) form individually in such a way that none was ‘The Art of Flirting’ LLP (Limited - and instead we need cooperatives of has a dominant right over another, but Liability Partnership), a film project in cooperatives and to remove ‘money for Tony J Lewis each has negative rights to protect their which actors became members with nothing rent seekers’ from the equation. interests. In this new economy, absolute percentage shares in the partnership (as We need to understand that deficit- rights of ownership would be replaced by opposed to £1.00 shares in a company), based modern money has come to the end CHRIS COOK EXPLORES HOW VALUE: THE MYTHS rights of ‘stewardship’. and ‘capital partners’ invested cash of the road. Instead of allowing banks to This time, the violent conflict and REALITY BASED ACTION CAN LEAD for a 20% equity share. Although, as issue our credit for us based on nothing, disruption which has historically TO A RESILIENCE ECONOMY with most films, it was not a financial we could base credit on productive assets For thousands of years the resolved such wealth imbalances – at COLLABORATIVE INVESTMENT By finding consensual solutions success, the actors acted in a film; such as Land and energy. A currency toxic combination of the inexorable least since debt jubilees went out of through the formation of community the producer produced a film; I carried unit based upon land rentals could be mathematics of compound interest fashion – will not take place, despite the partnerships we shall see a viral spread out very useful action-based legal and instrumental in resolving unsustainable on debt and private ownership of the gloomy view of many. To understand of networked community projects. So financial research, and even the investors property debt; while energy-based commons (particularly land) have led why not, we have to understand what collaboration to a common purpose had a completely legitimate tax loss. currency units could be instrumental in the to the unsustainable concentration “value” is - because underpinning and the equitable sharing of value will In Edinburgh, waterfront land is the transition to a low carbon economy. of wealth in the hands of the few to every school of economics, implicitly eventually out-compete profit-based subject of a proposed land partnership In doing so perhaps the most the exclusion of the many. This has or explicitly, are certain foundational economics. As a research fellow at the involving the local council, architects essential safeguard against corruption invariably led to booms and busts at assumptions as to the basis of value. Institute for Security and Resilience and others within an LLP framework. and abuse is transparency. For example, best, and revolutions and wars at worst. Almost invariably there is an Studies at UCL, I am engaged in action- Another proposal was prepared for in Norway, Finland and Sweden all tax How can we address the systemic anthropocentric assumption that it is the based research to simplify and localise the Albion Trust, which created Norton returns are accessible to the public. In fact, imbalance in ownership of real wealth individual’s labour which is the source of all the way in which people may interact Park in Edinburgh – a converted under cooperative-based finance, it is in – particularly land – and the financial value, and that the use of other factors of creatively using unconventional legal school which offers affordable offices everyone’s own interest to be transparent: claims by the 1% over the indebted 99%? production – lumped together as ‘capital’ – entities and agreements. This enables for charities and social enterprises. sunshine is the best disinfectant! In other simply makes labour more ‘productive’. So stakeholders to participate in mutual The key lesson here was that the words: Ethical is Optimal. THE END OF THE DOLLAR ECONOMY a nurse in public service is an unproductive agreements to a common purpose of affordability of rents – there were no Chris Cook is a former director of Our current system is unsustainable. burden on the taxpayer, but in the private creating productive assets of all kinds. vacancies in 15 years due to a long the International Petroleum Exchange. There was even a near seizure of money sector she magically becomes ‘productive’. Within such reality-based projects waiting list for tenants - gives certainty He is now a strategic market consultant, transmission services in 2008 when we Or when a factory is automated, the person participants come together without of investment return. entrepreneur and commentator. were a few hours from cash machines who switches it on and off is almost running out. A sequence of defaults and infinitely productive, while the capital breakdowns in trust on a global scale all embedded in the factory is not. but destroyed the banking system, which This is pure ideology - but it is of course has been on life support ever since, being convenient, since it justifies the imposition flooded with money by central banks, of taxes only on individuals, rather than like transfusions of blood being pumped upon the productive assets they may own. into an accident victim. The visible There are two additional myths we wounds of the system, the banks, have need to leave behind us for good: firstly, been stitched up and have largely healed. the banking myth, which is that banks The problem is that the patient continues take in deposits and lend them out to bleed internally, and worse than that, again; and secondly the ‘tax and spend’ quack Austerity-crazed doctors are myth - that Treasuries collect taxes and intent upon applying leeches or even then spend the proceeds. lopping off healthy limbs. The truth is very different: banks and Hundreds of years from now treasuries are simply credit middlemen historians will look back at the meltdown who provide a framework of trust for of Lehman Brothers in October 2008 as the credit they create out of nothing as the moment which marked the onset money. The value which underpins this of the transition. The US economy had credit is in fact only in small part that already reached a point of Peak Credit – of the bank, but is actually based upon the point at which the monetary claims the capacity of productive people to created by banks had become greater meet their obligations, and it is usually than the capacity of the population to backed by the value of productive assets, meet them. And then, the crash. particularly land. ‘P AY UP’ WHY WE NEED to START Daniel TALKING ABOUT POVERTY PAY Garvin

Activists involved with UK Uncut, % Wages as a proportion of GDP,

Occupy, community organisations and 70 1955 to 2008, percentages trade unions are about to launch a nationwide campaign – called PAY UP - against highly profitable UK companies that pay some of their staff only the 65 bare minimum. CEO pay, and the focus on the top 1% gained a lot of traction in 2011, but 2012 needs to focus on 60 the 99%, or rather about the low and The Only Thing stagnating pay for the bottom 10-20%. Here are some reasons why: 55 Getting Bigger in WAGE TRENDS: 1945 - 1979 Let’s take ourselves back to 1978. In the 30-odd years since the end of the Second 50 this Society is World War Britain saw an unprecedented decline in inequality. This didn’t simply Tim Matthews come about because that period saw the At the same time, the UK and the Rowntree Foundation has shown how of UK Uncut Inequality modern day welfare state created; it also majority of other Western economies the number of children living in ‘in work saw the labour movement take home a have seen gross wage stagnation for poverty’ has risen to 2 million. Before George Osborne’s 2012 budget Enabling abuse is another steadily increasing proportion of national those at the bottom end of the pay scale. While wages have been stagnant, address, Nick Clegg informed the country anti-democratic measure by this income. In 1910, the richest 0.1% of the The situation is most acute in the United we’ve seen energy and food prices soar, that it would be a ‘Robin Hood’ budget, government and one which we can add population took home a whopping 10% of States, but as the accompanying graph as well as the decline of social housing whereby the rich would be taxed to help the to a long and growing list. The recent all national income. By 1978, that figure shows, the steady fall in income share that provision, and the rise of market rates poor. If the government were sincere about lobbying scandal highlighted how wealthy had dropped to a more modest 1%. the UK labour force has been handed since in the private sector. this pledge and truly wanted to support Tory donors buy power and influence. Now A year later, in 1979, Margaret 1979. In relative terms, millions of people The past 30 years has seen wage those who are suffering at this time of we see how Britain’s tax rules are being Thatcher rose to power and began in the UK have been getting gradually rises replaced with credit cards, loans austerity, they would have done all they written by tax-dodging big businesses and her radical programme of neoliberal poorer, while those at the top have seen and rising household debt. Some could to reclaim the £25 bn lost annually banks like and , who sit market deregulation that came to their pay packets and profits boom. The economists have analysed how the US through and to make sure on exclusive corporate working groups at define global economic policy for the introduction of the National Minimum housing crash in 2007 rested on the such abuses could not be repeated. This the heart of government, crafting policies next 30 years. The financial markets Wage in 1998 certainly improved pay for issue of low wages which creates the is an example of one obvious and genuine entirely for their own benefit. were freed up, tax rates for the richest the lowest paid, but some figures show need for workers to borrow money to alternative to the cuts. Greg Philo, director of In a pitiable attempt to appease the plummeted, stringent anti-union that over the past 10 years, wages have make ends meet or to maintain living the Glasgow University Media Unit, pointed wave of public anger over tax avoidance laws were put in place, and business decreased in real terms by around 10% for standards. The banks then turned these out another back in 2010 in an article for by mega-rich individuals and opulent was shed of a variety of ‘red tape’ those on the minimum wage, as inflation debt packages into complex “sub- the “Guardian”: a wealth tax to raise £800 corporations, George Osborne announced regulation. Thatcher believed that has outstripped growth in pay. prime” financial debt packages to trade bn from the £4 trillion held by the richest in that the government would take steps Britain’s economic problems were in and make a tidy profit off. In 2007/08 our society, something which had strong to implement a General Anti-Avoidance part down to the increasing strength of THE RISE OF CREDIT, DEBT AND that debt bubble went pop. support amongst the public according to Rule, including a consultation document the labour movement. The fightback by GOVERNMENT WAGE SUBSIDIES A flagship New Labour policy was the a YouGov poll his team commissioned, to be issued this summer. However, this those at the top was on. The real crisis in the UK is at the bottom Working Tax Credit (WTC). This is money showing 74% in favour. amounts to very little given the scale of end of the pay scale. When the Tories given to those in work, on low pay, to Instead, the budget was a case of the problem, which the government only WAGE TRENDS: 1980 - 2012 stand up and say ‘work must pay’ they top-up their wages in order to make ends Robin Hood in reverse, with the Chancellor seems intent on worsening. Now fast forward to 2012. Over the past are criticising a system where some meet. Some figures suggest that £15bn encouraging tax avoidance by big business The government’s much-derided and 30 years, top wages in the UK, as well as households can receive more in benefits a year is currently spent on WTC. WTC and further lowering corporation tax while parodied slogan “we’re all in this together” other major European and North American than in wages. The scandal is not an has provided a vital lifeline to millions of implementing even deeper cuts to public sounds all the more absurd if you consider economies, have rocketed skyward. Last over generous welfare state, it is that people on low pay, but in the cases where spending. The UK was robbed of the income how levels of inequality have grown over year the High Pay Commission detailed work itself does not pay. People are individuals work for a private company, it needs to fund its precious public services recent years. In the UK, the thousand examples of how some FTSE 100 CEOs’ going to work and not even earning WTC mean the government is subsidising while the rich were given more hand outs. richest people have accumulated fortunes pay and bonuses have risen by 4,000%. enough just to feed their children, to the profits of the private sector. Ironically A budget for the poor, jobless and that are collectively worth £250 bn more Even in 2010, the average CEO pay in the pay the rent and the bills, let alone it is actually the failure of the market to dispossessed is now needed more than than a decade ago with giant corporations FTSE100 went up by 49%. having a disposable income. The Joseph provide a living for people that creates the ever in this country. The coalition partners sitting on near-record levels of cash. For need for a strong welfare state. know that one million 16 to 24-year-olds example, in the UK, as Stewart Lansley are out of work - the highest for 10 years, has pointed out, “corporate surpluses PAY UP and higher than the EU average. They know stand at over £60 bn, around 5% of the A lot has been said over the past four that Britain’s female unemployment rate size of the economy”. This is money which years since Northern Rock collapsed has hit a 25-year high. And if they listened could be used to kickstart the economy yet about the unfairness, greed and to the Institute for Fiscal Studies they would is instead mostly standing idle, resulting, inequality of financial capitalism. This know that the biggest losers from the for Lansley, in ‘paralysis’. The regressive anger should not just be reserved for public spending cuts are the poorest 10% of reductions in the top rate of income tax the banks, but extended into the wider families with children. What they don’t seem (to 45%) and in corporation tax (to 24%) economy and back towards a more to know is the plain truth: austerity may be show that this government is extremely fundamental discussion about the working for the bosses and the banks, but it comfortable with the wealthy getting relationship between labour and capital, isn’t working for Britain. wealthier whilst the dole queues grow. workers and bosses. In the budget, Osborne showed All this means we should not be fooled At the end of 2011 a light was shone that his true priority is giving succour to for a moment into thinking that George onto the bumper pay packets of FTSE100 multinationals, helping them reduce their Osborne is Robin Hood when we all know bosses, and the disgust about bankers’ tax bills dramatically by enabling their that he is really the Sheriff of Nottingham. pay and bonuses is well known. However, profits from offshore finance company This country is not broke, and there are an even sharper light now needs to be subsidiaries to be tax exempt. clear alternatives to austerity, alternatives shone onto low, poverty wages. If a CEO According to Felicity Lawrence, “If a which are being purposely ignored by receives a million pounds less this year UK-based multinational sets up a treasury the political elite. We only have to look at this will not actually result in any benefit company in Switzerland and puts equity the profits and bonuses of banks and big for most people. into it from the UK, which is then passed business to know that. Big business in particular can afford on in loans to its other subsidiaries to run Take Amazon.co.uk for example. high wages. Profits are booming, and some its operations, with interest on the loans Last month the Guardian revealed that economists estimate that the cash reserves flowing back in profits to the tax haven. The Amazon’s British operation made £3.3 that have been built up by the private sector tax rates on these profits will be a maximum bn in sales last year but paid not a penny stands at an eye watering £700bn. of just one-quarter of the current UK rate.” in corporation tax on any of the profits Pay rises should be one of the many The Chancellor’s announcement of from that income. The company is now steps towards fighting the inequality of these new policies will make tax avoidance under investigation by the tax authorities, capitalism. We hope to build an effective much easier for multinational companies according to media reports. alliance between social movements and and banks. The Treasury itself has admitted What is broken, and destructive, is workplace organisations that can achieve these measures will lose the public purse a political and economic system which some concrete action on pay. And we want £1 bn each year. Tax expert Richard Murphy claims to promote the ‘big society’ but to popularise wages as an issue, alongside casino banking and tax avoidance in the described these new measures as a where the only things getting bigger are Tony J Lewis “deliberate promotion of tax haven abuse”. unemployment, inequality and anger. post-2008 critique of capitalism. How to Deal with the FIT FITwatch

The police snoop on protests and protesters in many ways. Fear of being on a police database definitely shouldn’t They call it ‘intelligence gathering’. Some of this is done stop you from being active and participating in the politics by murky methods, with undercover police and informants, you believe in. But being ‘known’ can present some but a lot of it is open, obvious and in-your-face. challenges. Cops you’ve never met before may call you by The Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and their name. You might find your car gets stopped on the way to methods of intelligence gathering should not be tolerated protests, or that you become the target of more intrusive by anyone who genuinely wants to see any form of social surveillance methods. You may be more likely to be change. FIT’s function is to gather data, and then use this arrested. It’s not as if you are going to be ‘disappeared’ - information to disrupt, intimidate and harass those involved but it is unpleasant, intimidating, and best avoided. in political dissent. It’s also unclear as to what happens to these details There are some key things which everyone should once they are on the database. The police operate a policy of know: for starters, how to recognise the FIT. Don’t make it sharing information with anyone, if it is for ‘policing purposes’. easy for them to take your photograph. Look away, keep Blacklists emanating from the police have been known to find your head down (literally!), block the cameras, wear a their way to employers. It probably won’t happen to you, but mask, do whatever you need to do, but try to keep your there are only two ways to avoid the risk altogether: a) give up picture out of their image database. politics or b) stop the FIT taking your details! Don’t give them your name and address. They can “I’m already on a database, so why should it insist on it if you have committed an offence, caused matter anymore?” harassment, alarm or distress, or are driving a car, but Yes and no. The police do not just compile lists of can’t otherwise. Don’t give it. Say no. activists. They also constantly watch to see who is involved with what, and how networks change and develop. They FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS: then use this information to organise further surveillance “Why should I stop them taking my picture or having my and ‘disruption’, which could be anything from sending in name and address? I have nothing to hide.” undercover cops to making it more difficult for you to get FIT does not just collect details of people who a space to meet in. have done something wrong. If you are an organiser If you are already on a database, it is still very much in of protests, a member of a specific group, or simply your interests - in all our interests - that you don’t give them someone they see about a lot, you have become a person any more information than they already have. They don’t want ‘of interest’. Your description, name and details (if they to just know who you are, they want to know how involved have them), and your photo will be put on a database. you are, how well networked you are, how committed you are. You will have your own police file and may even be If you are ‘of interest’ they will be interested in who you know, designated as a ‘domestic extremist’. who you hang around with, and what protests you’ve been on. Many people think that ‘masking up’ is just for people Resisting the FIT is not an optional extra – it’s an who are intending to commit crime. It should be for all of essential part of building a social movement that can bring us at any time that we are engaged in political protest and about change. Don’t talk to them, don’t let them take photos of you, and keep your name for your friends. WAsi danihu the FIT teams are out. “I’m on a database, should I be afraid to attend protests?” http://www.fitwatch.org.uk/

Faith in a Better World Tim Hardy

The Christian anarchists Dorothy Day neighbourhood - not the government. Christians. Your Christians are so and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic I am comfortable in my atheism. unlike your Christ.” Worker movement in the midst of the I should have no problem with other When you listen to Prime Minister Great Depression in 1933. They rejected people believing whatever they like, David Cameron justifying selling arms war and pledged support for workers but at times I do. Like many ex- to tyrants or former Scotland Yard and the dispossessed, maintaining Catholics, I have a problem with faith. Assistant Commissioner John Yates these views even in the face of growing I am genderqueer and not making excuses for a regime that persecution from a state that wanted exclusively heterosexual. In an ideal tortures and murders dissidents, it is to destroy what it perceived as a red world that should concern nobody worth recalling that, for these men and menace. The Catholic Workers branded but me and those with whom I am for many others, “It is easier to imagine the profit motive immoral. They intimate. Unfortunately I grew up in the end of the world than the end of condemned capitalism because it led the era of the homophobic legislation capitalism.” Men without morals, they to grotesque inequality. They worked Section 28 that had a chilling effect on capitulate to the false necessities of a directly to help those in need, providing discussions of sexuality. Gay-bashing brutal world view that warns if they don’t food and shelter. tabloids and Christian bigots were do it, someone else will and that one can Over 150 of the soup kitchens the unchallenged in their abuse of anyone only get ahead by getting one over on Catholic Workers founded throughout who was not straight or cis-gendered someone else. So we sell weapons that the world are still operational. Each and young queer people were left will be used to kill innocents in order to site is autonomous. There is no central alone, sweating in the dark. stop other nations doing it and profiting authority. Each refuses to accept These days the Conservatives from the same deal. That’s what moral, grants or to pay taxes or to accept pretend they have changed, while responsible capitalism demands. any of the bureaucratic restrictions the tabloids have switched to baiting For religious people, on the other “Religion is like a nail; the harder you hit progress of over a hundred years of imposed by the state, such as the need Muslims and the disabled. The Catholic hand, “That’s how things are” just it, the deeper it goes into the wood.” But struggle and to attempt to bring about to apply for permits or for non-profit Church still stands unrepentant, doesn’t wash. They have a faith at odds it is not just a matter of being pragmatic. an order closer to feudalism than to status. The food they provide to the gladly allying itself with tyrants to with the blind faith of capitalist realism. Those of us who reject a faith in the the ideals of democracy; a world where homeless is donated by people in the block measures in the UN to make For this reason alone, however spiritual realm need to recognise the the elite are given special dispensation discrimination on the grounds of challenging, those of us who wish to value of the human desires and dreams from the law and from responsibilities sexual or gender identity a crime and build a better world should embrace expressed through religious faith. to others and the most vulnerable are condemning hundreds of thousands people of faith in solidarity and resist We commonly describe acts made to pay for the mistakes of their to abuse as a result; abuse that can the divide and conquer tactics of those of cruelty by others as inhumane new masters. escalate to serious violence and murder. who do not want change because they because we find it hard to accept that Those who believe in a better world My support for a woman’s right to profit from the way things are. humanity includes the capacity for such have a potential ally in those of faith. choose to have an abortion is another Since the coalition took power, malevolence. Likewise some ascribe For Day, spirituality and the moral life issue that frequently puts me at odds the bigots have been crawling out of forgiveness and unconditional love to were founded in the constant fight for with some faith groups. the woodwork. The right-wing papers, divine powers because they cannot justice and in compassion for those Sadly there are many religious apologists for the rich and powerful, accept humanity is capable of such in need. Whether or not we believe in bodies that promote intolerance and are lining up articles attacking gay greatness of spirit. the gospels from which she derived harmful attitudes. I am ashamed, rights and women’s rights then under The Catholic Worker movement, her faith, these values and a refusal to however, that my instinctive reaction cover of this artillery barrage of like all progressive movements, is accept a system that condemns some when faced with such religious bigotry complain that Christians are growing weaker in a society that is to suffer so that others may live lives intolerance is to respond in a way that being persecuted in the UK. Such an increasingly atomised and lacks the of luxury are the values we need. Only is not that different to the behaviour invitation to attack is hard to resist. structures of organised labour and this will carry us through the growing of the racist who generalises to make We have to acknowledge that there strong local communities. The right darkness of a world where those in judgements about all members of an are strong anti-clerical and anti-religious is on the ascendant around the world. charge seem unable or unwilling to ethnic group or nation. tendencies on the left, but the desire The reaction to the greatest crisis steer the machine of civilisation away Many Christians, like Day, would to eradicate religion is futile. As the in capitalism since the Depression from its headlong passage down the likely agree with Gandhi’s judgement, Soviet minister of education Anatolii has been for the rich and powerful to path to total self-destruction. Ben cavanna “I like your Christ. I do not like your Lunacharskii realised as early as 1928, systematically roll back the hard-won BeyondClicktivism.com Battle Lines Stephen Collis & Pipelines in Canada fter the (so “’Environment’ has become a There is more or less united far) successful narrow, bitterly focused word turning opposition from indigenous opposition to exclusively on hurts or despoilations communities, many of whom have the Keystone XL [sic] of nature, magnifying the slightest signed the “Save the Fraser” declaration pipeline, attention alteration or disturbance of ‘the natural’ (http://www.savethefraser.ca/). The has shifted to the as an unspeakable sin. Fraser River is the largest river in the proposed Enbridge There is another wider, larger, humane province and is crossed or due to be Northern Gateway dimension to the environment — larger and crossed by all existing and proposed Apipeline, which would carry over more vital than any reference to landscape. pipelines. These “First Nations” never 500,000 barrels of tar sands crude per That is the human and social element…. signed treaties with colonial invaders, day across hundreds of British Columbia In my view, this is the first and deepest so their lands are still in legal limbo. rivers to the pristine coast. Getting less justification for… the oil industry. Jobs are Finally, there is Occupy. Occupy attention is the already operational essential for the human environment” brings a holistic approach to this issue, Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline The title of Murphy’s article says seeing the environmental, economic, and that has been carrying 300,000 barrels it all: “Oil sands are a Triumph for political crises as integral parts of one of tar sands oil per day to Vancouver’s the Human ‘Environment.’” It’s hard total crisis of capitalism. Our demand is harbour for many years now. to believe that anyone, let alone a for “system change not climate change.” The campaign to keep oil flowing respected journalist, could be so stupid Occupy Vancouver Environmental Justice and contain environmentalists is in as to call tar sands development “the Working Group hosted a meeting on full swing, labelling them as fringe slightest alteration.” March 26 (just before an anti-Enbridge “radicals” and “foreign interests” hell- Finally, consider the recent Globe 2012 rally in Vancouver) with more than a bent on ruining Canada’s economy. Conference and Trade Fair in Vancouver. dozen environmental groups, including Consider the following: One has to wonder about a conference Greenpeace and Bill McKibben of 350. First, the federal government which invites Canadian politicians and org. Occupy is working with these groups is presently reviewing the Canadian avowed tar sands supporters including to coordinate resistance to the pipelines, Environmental Assessment Act, the federal Environment Minister, Peter and to tar sands more generally. We are supposedly to “modernise” the Kent, and BC Premier Christy Clark, to also allying ourselves with indigenous assessment process and “speed up help representatives of such corporate communities. approvals of projects,” as reported in environmental luminaries as Dow It is not a question of ‘efficiency’ or The Vancouver Sun. The article goes Chemical (responsible for the Bhopal ‘jobs’. It is not a question to be solved by on to cite Michelle Rempel, a Calgary- disaster), Suncor (a major tar sands so-called “corporate social responsibility.”

based Conservative MP, suggesting developer), and the Canadian Oil Sands It is a question about the future of Navneet Pall that revisions to the process “could Network to discuss “sustainability” and find humanity and all the species on this planet. help the country avoid losing economic “solutions to the world’s environmental Will it be “game over,” as NASA climate opportunities to lengthy reviews that problems.” Irony, anyone? scientist James Hansen has said of tar need to be more ‘efficient’ and ‘effective.’” But this is only one side of the sands development, or game on. It is a Nothing too surprising here for battle. On the “optimism” side of the question Occupy has risen to address. And a government that steadfastly denies ledger, we have, first off, the fact that it is a question we will answer with our global warming and recently pulled out 4,500 British Columbians signed up words and actions in the coming months. of the Kyoto Accord. to address the Environmental Review Here’s what you can do: organize, Second, noted commentator and Commission as it travels around the join or participate in an Earth Day CBC regular Rex Murphy recently Province, some 4000 more than any event and / or the May 5 International suggested in The National Post that prior review process. This is just the tip Stop the Tar Sands Day events (http:// those who criticize tar sands “bite the of the iceberg when it comes to public stoptarsands.yolasite.com/) in your hand that feeds us.” and popular opposition to the pipelines. local community.

Why I Told BP to Come Clean About Their Interplanetary Escape Pod Danny Chivers

Navneet Pall I sat nervously near the end of an aisle, years, and a lot of people in this room will out, “They’re not dead, they’re just somewhere in the middle of the hall. still be around then. So I can only assume demonstrating!”, prompting more It was BP’s Annual General Meeting that there’s some kind of interplanetary laughter. I decided to stay dead and let BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon drilling New York Times to the Financial Times (AGM) in London’s Excel Centre, on 12 escape pod being built in a secret BP security carry me bodily out of the hall, disaster, which has still not been cleaned and even the Sun. April 2012. The room contained several bunker, to carry the board, executives while others in the group were dragged, up. Their statements were followed by a These kinds of actions won’t hundred shareholders, and I was waiting and senior shareholders away as society escorted, or explained that they’d be challenge from Clayton Thomas-Muller of bring down the fossil fuel industry by for my turn to address the board of collapses around us.” happy to move of their own free will the Indigenous Environmental Network, themselves, but they help to chip away directors. As the holder of a (single) BP Laughter began to ripple around the as soon as BP pulled out of tar sands about the dubious legality of BP’s tar sands at the veneer of social responsibility share I had every right to be there, but to room as I continued: “I’d like to know how extraction. I tried cheerfully explaining to leases on First Nations territory in Canada. these companies hide behind to expose avoid undue attention I was wearing an many spaces are available on the ship, shareholders as I passed that numerous In response, the Board just reeled out the brutal profit-driven reality beneath. uncharacteristically sharp suit and had and where the board is planning to escape studies have shown that it would be some prepared statements that completely They’re also an important reminder of just grown a neat little beard for the occasion. to – Mars? The moon? Somewhere deep perfectly possible for everyone on the ignored the questions. how powerful we can be. When “ordinary It seemed to have worked so far – the below the Earth’s surface, or another planet to have a good quality of life This isn’t really surprising. They people” are organised, determined and security guards were all ignoring me. solar system altogether? Also, are tickets without the use of fossil fuels. I’m not don’t have answers to these questions. with right on their side, they can beat the After a range of questions from available to shareholders, and how do we sure if their grins were in response to this All pretence at being a “sustainable” oil corporate PR machines. Plus, I was in the shareholders and campaigners, my turn book our places onboard?” statement, the stunt we’d just pulled, or company and going “Beyond Petroleum” Wall Street Journal asking BP about a came at last, and I stepped up to the The board refused to answer the the fact that one of our group was still has now been dropped, and their entire spaceship, so that’s another personal life microphone. Despite my nervousness, my question, which means that they definitely loudly refusing to move until he got his focus is on short-term profitability. That’s goal achieved. voice sounded calm as I addressed the have an escape pod, and just don’t want ticket to the space pod. why we might as well ask them about The BP AGM action was coordinated board: to share it. On hearing this, I gave a cry We’re so used to having to deal with their interplanetary escape plans – we’re by the UK Tar Sands Network (www.no- “Mr Chairman, we’ve already heard of “BP are leaving us all to die! We’re all corporations as though they’re huge, just as likely to get a sensible answer to tar-sands.org). We’ll be doing it all again that, according to your annual report, you going to be killed by climate change!” formless beasts. The The AGM is one of that as to anything else. for the Shell AGM on May 22nd, which is believe that fossil fuels will still make up and tumbled to the floor, dead. This was the rare opportunities we get to put some The combination of all of this – the happening simultaneously in London and 80% of global energy use in 2030, leading the cue for eight more people around human faces on the corporate monster and questions from frontline communities the Hague. Why not join us? Contact info@ to a 28% rise in CO2 emissions. This will the room to collapse, groaning, into the look them in the eyes. Before our sudden and campaigners, our die-in and dramatic no-tar-sands.org for more information lock us into disastrous runaway climate aisles. attack of climate death, the Board had faced ejection, plus shareholder uproar about and to get involved. change. So my question is: what’s the There was a moment of confusion challenging questions from representatives the CEO’s over-generous multi-million A longer version of this article was escape plan? I mean, the really scary stuff as security guards came running over, of Gulf Coast communities whose health pay bonus – led to blanket press coverage first published with images by New will start to kick in over the next 20 to 30 and then someone helpfully shouted and livelihoods had been wrecked by the next day, from the Guardian to the Internationalist, at www.newint.org GENETICALLY OUR WORLD IS OUR Sarah MODIFIED Profits Emma Fordham & Kate Green BIGGEST CANVAS Cowan

Remember “Frankenstein foods”? From time to time the Daily Sitting about three miles apart, on human and animal habitats destroyed Mail veers erratically onto the side of environmentalists and opposite banks of the Thames, Tate and polluted as BP endlessly hippies to rail against Genetically Modified Organisms and their Britain and Tate Modern sprang from endeavours to hollow out the earth. appearance on our dinner plates. humble beginnings as Millbank’s The endearing children ‘pray every Tony Blair tried to woo the bio-tech companies behind Panopticon Prison and Bankside night’ to stop the oil still leaking into GMOs despite widespread distaste for eating tomatoes with fish Power Station respectively. Until the sea today, and are accompanied anti-freeze genes in them. He failed, because the public and the 1890, Tate Britain’s location facilitated by a beautifully melodic anti-BP song, tabloids were against him. Activists destroyed GM crop trials, the movement of those destined for giving a palpable connection to the consumers left GM produce on the supermarket shelves and transportation to Australia, whilst Tate repercussions of deep water drilling. journalists of all persuasions (and one royal) shrieked about the Modern’s imposing structure was an At the Tate Modern, ‘Drilling imprudence of tampering with nature. inefficient power station (60% burnt the Dirt (a temporary difficulty),’ While the Tories were in opposition they were largely anti- was wasted), closed in 1981 and is the most devastating indictment GM, so the Mail’s stance made sense. However, in 2010 Caroline re-opening as Tate Modern almost of BP’s sponsorship. It is the most Spelman became Conservative environment minister. Despite 20 years later in May 2000. Since informative of the three tours, with what some might consider a blatant conflict of interest (recently then more than 40 million people upsetting statistics and revelations worked as a bio-tech lobbyist), she decided to turn the Tories have passed through Tate Modern’s pumped into our ears throughout. around and get into bed with Monsanto. doors, with an annual average of Designed to hammer home the Monsanto is a multinational biotech company; one of the five million. This has proved to be worldwide destruction caused by BP, largest producers of genetically engineered seed and of the a very successful use of derelict the tour tells us about the countries herbicide glyphosate (marketed as “Roundup”). If we believe buildings, providing worthwhile tourist they are draining, such as Iraq and their PR rhetoric, it would seem that GM foods are about to save attractions in the UK. It is also a Azerbaijan. Established authors cite humanity from starvation and the ravages of climate change. By marketing manager’s dream. proof of meetings attended by BP inventing drought-resistant crops, they think they can cheat their In an arts and activism workshop and UK government representatives way out of the mess that profit-driven mega-corporations (like commissioned by Tate itself, in which they planned to exploit Monsanto) have gotten us into. By producing herbicide-resistant One huge problem with GM crops which is consistently participants were told they would be recent wars. There is a heartfelt crops, they will enable entire fields, hectares and hectares of them, underplayed by the bio-tech companies is the risk of cross- censored from making interventions speech by the mother of a young to be sprayed with chemicals that would kill conventional crops, pollination with conventional plants. Accidental spread of GM against Tate sponsors, despite no man killed when the Deepwater but which will in turn increase the efficiency of food production. seed to neighbouring fields and contamination of non-GM plans to do so at the time. Incensed Horizon rig erupted, with a plea The bio-tech companies claim that their GM super-crops will foodstuffs within the food supply chain are all too common. A by the audacity of this censorship, to acknowledge the obvious risks be good for us; they will be better for the environment, better for US trial of GM rice contaminated the global supply chain in 2006, Liberate Tate was formed to protest of oil drilling. Of all the tours, it is our health, better for delivering nutrition to the hungry. There is destroying export markets for years. In 2009, GM flax from in new and inventive ways against the third that moves me the most, little evidence to back these claims and rather a lot of evidence Canada contaminated supplies worldwide. GM crops are genies unethical sponsorship and the leaving me in no doubt that BP’s to suggest the opposite. In which case, why are they spending and the bottle-stoppers are nowhere near tight enough. They ramifications of BP’s contributions. sponsorship needs to be challenged. billions inventing and patenting these things? Could it be an can’t be. And, just maybe, Monsanto and Co don’t care. Once the Their most recent creations are BP is desperate for good publicity attempt to reap even more profits than they are doing already? genie is everywhere, there’ll be no point in us complaining and three audio tours. One for Tate following the oil spill which damaged Drought-resistant crops are still in the trial stages. Trials trying to thwart their plans. Britain, another for the boat businesses, killed wildlife, and left show that they are not very good in variable climates, which is For now, there is reason to complain. GM crops have the crossing, and a third at Tate Modern. many with respiratory problems and likely what we’ll have more of, as global warming and various potential to cause massive social, economic and environmental One Tuesday afternoon, a friend what has now been dubbed ‘The BP associated feedback loops accelerate. Rather than rely on techno- damage worldwide, yet they are poorly tested and regulations and I begin at the Tate Britain Cough,’ after cleaning agents used fixes, researchers not associated with large corporations looked are weak. Loss of biodiversity, soil degradation, health problems with ‘Panaudicon.’ Over somewhat after the explosion caused oil particles into natural methods of combating crop failure due to drought. and poverty traps are just some of the reasons to resist the distracting background music and a to become airborne and stick in the They found that simple measures such as applying organic mulch pressure to switch to GM agriculture. Research suggests that computerised vocal interlude, gentle lungs of nearby residents. If BP is material massively improves water retention in the soil whilst also organic methods are best suited to solving many of the problems voices narrate the story of how oil simply donating to the arts in order improving the quality of the soil and locking in carbon. A triple bonus that bio-tech apparently seeks to address. The research and drilling began, and the origins of to share their wealth, why then does and no expensive contracts with multinationals for the farmers. cash being poured into techno-fixes could be well spent trialling the building in which we stood. The their logo so prominently adorn the Bio-tech companies have tried to woo poorer nations with low-tech agricultural solutions and helping to introduce them information gleaned was relevant, signs of the institutions they support? promises to increase yields and so end hunger and poverty. appropriately to growers worldwide. interesting and in some places A logo which will soon be beamed Some farmers responded positively only to find themselves As yet, GM is not rampant. In Britain, strong consumer poetic, though it was easy for one’s around the world as they play locked into a nightmare. They entered contracts to buy seed distaste combined with well-organised ‘decontamination’ actions mind to wander. The 45 minute tour sustainable partner to the greenest and chemicals from Monsanto and the like, the seeds producing at trial sites have largely kept GM crops out of our fields and GM lacked a physical connection with Olympics ever. Among the other anti- crops that could withstand the chemicals. The idea was to foods off our shelves. The fightback against profiteering agro- the art or the building around us, BP campaigns is Greenwash Gold, blast weeds out of existence, but in fact weeds have developed chemical companies is going on around the world - but they are and was awkward at times. who are conducting a vote for the resistance to herbicides, requiring farmers to use more and persistent. In some kind of back-scratching exercise disguised We were accompanied by ‘This worst Olympic sponsorship 2012 on more of these chemicals. Yields in many cases were far lower as philanthropy, organisations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates is not an Oil Tanker,’ on the boat to their website www.greenwashgold. than farmers had been led to believe and they became caught Foundation have been pouring funding into agriculture projects in Tate Modern. The second audio tour org. It’s important that money does in a spiral of poverty and despair, driving hundreds in India to Africa with one hand while acquiring shares in Monsanto - which focuses on British Columbia and the not continue to drown out the growing suicide. Meanwhile in Argentina, where GM soya was adopted on is aggressively trying to capture the seed market in Africa with desperate attempts of BP to get at number of voices speaking out. a large scale and there has been massive exposure to glyphosate corporate-owned seeds and pesticides – with the other hand. the crude oil in the tar sands, which These tours are downloadable at as a result, instances of health problems and toxicity have been In September 2011, the UK Government ignored ultimately resulted in the devastating tateatate.org and for those further recorded, despite this being a relatively ‘safe’ herbicide. public and scientific objections by approving an application oil spill of 2010. A family narrates an afield, can be enjoyed from the GM crops lend themselves to monoculture and large-scale from Rothamsted Research to conduct a GM wheat trial in informative piece, highlighting the comfort of your own home. farming. Soil is degraded and local communities are no longer Hertfordshire. The GM wheat emits a chemical that it is hoped growing the variety of foods they need to feed themselves. will drive aphids off the crop. Why this should be necessary, Independence is stripped away and multinational corporations reap when encouraging natural aphid parasites and predators - like the profits. As this realisation has dawned, fewer farmers in Asia, ladybirds - already works, is unclear. Research suggests that Africa and South America are prepared to act as pawns for these aphids may become accustomed to the alarm chemical and companies. As early as 1998, all African delegates (excepting South ignore it. Perhaps, by then, the ladybirds will have starved and Africa) at an international Food and Agriculture forum stated that: wheat farmers will have to buy more and more, stronger and “We strongly object to the image of poor and hungry from stronger, chemicals from the bio-tech firms. our countries being used by giant multinational corporations to Saving humanity from food shortages and climate change? push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, Not likely. Profit motive? Certainly. nor economically beneficial to us… it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have developed for millennia, and will thus undermine our capacity to feed ourselves.” In India, massive grass-roots campaigns to keep agriculture GM-free have, through sustained levels of dedication and outrage, had some success at holding back the PR machines of the corporations. Hunger strikes, rallies of up to 50,000 farmers, a 4000-kilometre march through five states and intense petitioning of politicians has stemmed the rapid growth of GM farming in the country for now. Health problems, dismissed by proponents of GM, have already been reported in India and helped to fuel the reaction against the bio-tech companies. Allergic reactions to genetically modified ‘bt’ cotton plants, in those who’d shown no such reactions to conventional cotton, have been documented. No one knows what the long-term effects of eating GM foods will be but research indicates that antibiotic resistant ‘marker’ genes can survive the digestive tract. As antibiotic resistance is already a problem that medical science struggles to keep up with, such Tony J Lewis andrea bakacs indications are cause for concern. PRO/Linda M. Proposal: Whether a movement should use The Great consensus-based decision-making depends on its goals and common Proposing Stories values. Whilst non-hierarchical consensus models work well in BACKGROUND collection of story proposals more coordinating political actions like local If the World is a book, it is written by coherent? assemblies and single direct actions, power. If the political movements of 7. is the proposal published openly? Debate they might be less useful for decisions the poors are so far incoherent, it is Should real democracy movements stick to on a more international level or for more because they are responding to an STORY heterogeneous groups. Having said that, incoherent world. If the world has Method One consensus in decision-making process? consensus definitely works in a setting become incoherent, it is because Create a blank document and add three where people share motivations and the kind of power that rules tends to headings: background, outcome, story. Political movements around the world seem to agree that our current values, as an alternative to top-down, corrupt, and the kind of power that rules Write the background as a situation democratic model is broken. In using alternative modes of decision-making, non-collaborative processes, which still holds sway. Even so, the story of that is objectionable. consensus has become an integral element of process. However, critics have usually enhance group relationship writing a coherent world has already Write down the tests that have led to said seeking full consensus prevents progress, particularly in the second stage dynamics and reduce problems in begun: a coherent world can be written the objectionable situation. of a movement. Do these downsides outweigh the positive aspects and visual decision implementation. A cooperative by proposing stories that others may Write down a more desirable appeal of the model? Should we stick to consensus, use a modified version, or group atmosphere that respects all take up; there is a different kind of outcome with a series of tests. adopt alternative or even more traditional decision-making processes? parties, generating as much agreement power in merely proposing stories. Write down the simplest story that as possible, can also foster connections Still, pages are missing, chapters could possible make the tests pass. CON/ Daniel Schweighöfer between individuals and strengthen are botched. Of course, “We object!” Such Think of a name for the story and solidarity within a movement. If these objections are becoming increasingly use it as the title of the document. When encountering the consensus model stubborn or ambitious people can connections are strong, the model can common. All that is needed for the world Mention other stories which follow for the first time, most participants leave bring up strange arguments to support even work for globally spread out groups. to become coherent is for the poors to or precede or are refined by the story with a very positive impression. Many positions that do not necessarily relate Interestingly, the word has its become increasingly capable of authoring proposal, so that the overall coherence of members of social movements are seeking to the topic of the debate - the so-called origin in the Latin word “consentire”, the world. Fictions narrate virtual worlds the web of story proposals is improved. the maximum degree of freedom and are “chewbacca defense”. The aim of this meaning “feel together”. When people of the past, present, and future. Non- Publish the proposal openly. used to anarchistic ideas and groups, so strategy is to insist for so long that a joined Occupy in October last year, many fictions recount real worlds gone by. Method Two at first glance, the consensus approach “consensus” is finally reached, though were under the impression that the Between fact and fiction, a different kind What concerns you? What is seems to offer an ideal alternative to actually only one person wanted it. consensus practice, in particular how of story can be found: a story of the future objectionable? Vacillate, and notice your traditional forms of decision-making. Processes like this are likely to it was visually expressed at General written by poors; stories for life the poors objections. What might actually work By seeking consensus that works for consume an immense amount of time Assemblies, was intrinsic to what will play out; an endless script whose instead? Vacillate, and think of some everybody, everybody should feel good and energy for all participants. It is not this movement stood for. For many narrative threads include continuing to tests. Ask how could things actually work about the group’s decisions. only necessary to explain a proposal and people, it was their first contact with an write the book of world. instead? Vacillate again, and fashion a I would argue that this point of view is its arguments, proposers are also forced alternative democratic model, their first Too many stories have been declared story. Vacillate again, and name your dangerous, as it ignores important aspects to dissolve every single objection that experience of being actually heard, and with an expectation that others will take concern. Take a break. Take it to others? of decision-making, namely: social power, might evolve during the debate. This not fascinating to watch and participate in. them up as their habits, too many orders Ask them to consider your concerns. tactics and time. I will briefly explain these only discriminates against those who do Nowadays, most people use modified have been given. Rather than pushing Resolve their objections. Try to repeat? points and their role in the consensus not want or are not able to invest into consensus. Most of the time this is not stories on to others, new stories can Take yourself for a walk. Be merely process. Naturally, they are all intertwined. these resources. It also excludes their much of a departure from the initial instead be merely proposed. Some stories objective. Write it all down. Rearrange the Even in groups without defined input from the sphere of accessible ideas concept. As a specific ritual of activist may be familiar because they refresh old words until they make more sense. Call it structures, there will always be people of the movement. Moreover, it empowers culture, the consensus model has always stories, other stories may also appear a diagram? Call it whatever seems best. with a better standing than others. those with good rhetorical skills and/or been a way of spreading practices and strange and apparently from nowhere Call it a script, or call it a story? Run it Some reasons for this can be found strategy, and disempowers others. At the diffusing a directly democratic model of because they arise during acts of pure past somebody, or run others through it. in our socialization, but I’m not an end of the day, decisions are produced organizing. Like within the global justice invention. Stories that work may be retold Does it work, how can you tell? Do it over expert in social hierarchies and power which are propagated by a few key movement, advocating such activities and remembered, stories that fail may again, how does it feel? Does it pull you relationships. Nevertheless, it might be players, a process which is essentially can be a way of mobilizing without be put aside and forgotten. By distillation along, will they remember? Call it a joy, the case that proposals which generate undemocratic (and I hope you, dear actually trying to convert people to a and invention, through trial and error, in or call it a day. Perhaps make it available consent are often proposed or suggested reader, share this point of view with me). specific belief system. This is not a new memory and forgetting, the World can be sometime tomorrow. by very few people. Another problem Another key argument against concept. Thousands of groups, networks filled with stories that work. Publish proposals openly. Others can is that these proposals often lack real consensus-based decision-making is its and organizations, from the Quakers to But without knowing which try them, they can tell you what’s wrong. discussion and ideas about possible conservative outcome. Groups should the US anti-nuclear movement to the outcomes a story was desired to obtain, Play with proposals, keep them in play. alternatives, as this would be too time- judge their results in the same way Climate Camp movement, have been a story cannot easily be replaced with a The name, the background of objections, consuming. A minority could still use their as people have to, but important and successfully employing consensus since better story. And rather than believing in the tests for the outcome, the diagram better standing in contentious debates to progressive choices tend to be divisive around the 1970s. stories without knowing what they are of the story, and the practised habit can strengthen weak arguments, which leads ones. If real democracy movements stick As much as it is important to for, the desired outcomes of a story can be forever in process. Proposals are only us to consensus discussion tactics. to the consensus model, they sacrifice understand why certain groups should instead be made known. Stories that are ever tried out. Proposals can remain From my point of view, the main their agility and speed of movement stick to consensus, it is important to proposed with outcomes that are known open for objections, it’s how we resolve argument against consensus-based for these formal processes. I believe it understand how, and under which can be improved through constructive the objections that counts. decision-making is that the ending is better to try alternative concepts of conditions, it can fail. Consensus does not objection. Desires are transient, habits of a discussion is not clearly defined. direct democracy, like liquid democracy do away with power relations. It seeks can take time to be changed, and when By Various Occupiers Arguments can be repeated over and for example, to enable social movements to provide an alternative to the pressure desired outcomes are recorded as tests, This proposal is being developed with over in various combinations, and come to decisions. of majority-decisions, and very often, today’s desires can put both today’s a view to improving the processes these relations emerge when process is and tomorrow’s habits to the test. Even of both Occupy London’s General slow and exhausting. Sometimes we put the story of proposing a story can be Assembly and the wider world. While so much energy into reinventing internal proposed in this way, so that desirable the processes surrounding the GA processes, just to get a rudimentary idea stories can be put forward in an were originally recorded as a list of of what direct democracy could look like. increasingly desirable way. activities*, this proposal seeks to However, by adopting the model, we (Opinions are quickly negated and rewrite and then continuously improve seek to ensure group cohesion, to create opposing opinions cancel each other out. these activities as a collection of story horizontal networks, and to enhance the Without a context, statements appear as proposals. The GA Planning WG is quality of our work together on the basis opinions. When a statement is made in continuing to develop these ideas at of agreement about our activities. These the context of desires for another world, meetings held each Saturday at 4pm new forms of organization can reinvent it appears as a proposal. Proposals on the steps of St Paul’s. our daily lives, as many full-term activists can also be negated by objection, but have experienced. objections tend to improve proposals. There are many different forms of At any rate, there are always desires modified consensus systems. We need for another world. And so everything to discuss what they actually mean in is a proposal. Opinions are just empty which context, why a particular version proposals. Never mind the people who was chosen, and how we can challenge immediately say the opposite is true!) individualistic behaviour or all too slow process in favour of genuine principles. OUTCOME Although we might disagree more than Proposals for stories can be tested by in the early stages of the movement asking the following questions: (it is sometimes easier to define a 1. Does the proposal have a name, a common enemy than a common background, an outcome, and a story? goal), using modified consensus and 2. Does the name indicate the activity of elements of direct democracy is not the story? impossible, and alternative elements 3. Does the background contain can be integrated. Discussion of objections that the outcomes resolve? these modifications and variations is 4. Do the outcomes contain tests for important, but will – as the consensus the story? model itself – require respect for each 5. Does the story describe how to other, time, and a common goal to obtain the outcomes that are desired? Ben cavanna outweigh the disadvantages. 6. Does the story proposal make the This is Just Tim Gee the Beginning I haven’t seen a lot of my house applicability, it is not without its flaws. of a brutally repressed strike in 2008 recently. For most of the last four For a start, not all movements win. that the April 6 Youth Movement was months I’ve been on the road (or rather But more importantly, it is somewhat formed and engaged in their project the rails) visiting different towns and passive – what about the actions of of training and preparation. The story cities to run workshops and seminars the movement when the power elite of the confrontation stage that began looking at the methods adopted by are ignoring, laughing at, and fighting in earnest on 25 January 2011 has movements for change. I tend to begin against the movement? been told many times, and claimed by asking people to shout out the tactics Yet insert the logical actions of the the scalp of a president once thought they see as central in ousting Mubarak movement between the predictable to be unshakable. The consolidation in Egypt. The differences in responses succession of actions by power elites, stage will be the most difficult, as the have been remarkable. and an order begins to emerge. When movement struggles to keep its gains For a group of students in they ignore you, the movement must and prevent new unaccountable elites Manchester, social media was the work to raise the consciousness of the from taking hold. deciding factor. At a national conference masses. When they laugh at you, the So where are we in our global of community organisers the first movement must coordinate to show movement against the 1%? My view suggestion was that the relationships its strength. When they fight you, the is that the struggle is still at the early between different social groups was movement must confront likewise, stages. Both the financial crisis of most important. A sociologist in Leeds while still coordinating and raising 2008 and the present austerity crisis cited the economic conditions that consciousness. And when you win, the are making people question the status helped determine the shape of the movement must consolidate gains and quo which once lay unquestioned. andrea bakacs struggle, while a group of trade unionists start the cycle again. Mass marches, new organisations and in London named the threat of a general When populations actively withdraw occasional strikes are all in evidence. strike. Every Occupy Camp I visited their consent from oppressive systems In the shape of the Occupy movement quickly named the occupation of Tahrir in sufficient numbers to have an - and the debate it has set off - a new Square before any other tactic. A number effect, it rarely comes from nowhere. process of co-learning and discussion Some Thoughts of activists in Bristol suggested the It represents the third act of a longer has emerged. And so the time has importance of physical resistance to the narrative. It is the stage at which the arrived to move to the second stage – police on the streets, while a Quaker in government is fighting the people, to build the networked infrastructure Dongria Kondh On Activism Hastings pointed to the role of spiritual and the movement is faced with the that a mass movement will need to if it consciousness for a number of activists. decision to make or break, fight or flee. is to reach the third stage of seriously Now that the tents are (mostly) Thirdly, we have a responsibility They are all, of course, right. It is Central to success at this stage is the challenging the interests of the power gone, what do we find? Yet another to act in solidarity with grassroots also only natural for us to identify with recognition that any regime is propped elite. It can be done. But only in the millionaire’s budget, with tax cuts struggles in other parts of the world. people in other contexts with whom up only by the power of ideas, finance most naive reports is it quick or easy. for the rich paid for by the poor. Here in Britain activists may be spied we share something in common. I am and physical force. If these pillars can be But there is reason for hope. As Widening gender inequality. Creeping upon, maligned in the media, lied to no different. As an activist trainer, I seriously challenged, concessions can the responses given to my opening corporatisation of health, education and by the police, kettled, locked up, fined, am fascinated by the preparation that be won, or on occasion, regimes can question show, the ingredients that welfare. Crony donors and lobbyists given community sentences, and tear- preceded the revolt in Egypt that led collapse altogether. fuelled the Egyptian rebellion are not pulling all the strings. gassed, punched or coshed. Elsewhere, to all of those tactics being deployed The story of the struggle in Egypt exclusive to the Middle East. Thanks My activist journey began with however, activists face torture, and are – by some reports, as many as 15,000 fits these stages well. Consciousness- to our globalized economy, they are the Walk for the Earth, travelling routinely “disappeared”. people received mass action training in raising began in the 2000s against present across the world. In Britain the on foot from Manchester to London At this point, I should mention the the three years before the uprising. a backdrop of rising prices and escalation began in 2010 when students in the run-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Dongria Kondh, who are anxiously But what time is right for what protests against Mubarak’s perceived occupied the ruling Conservative Party’s Summit. We were campaigning for awaiting an Indian High Court ruling on support? There are countless stages unaccountability on matters of foreign offices. And the first line of the first government money to be channelled bauxite mining in their tribal land. The models of social movements to give policy. On the blogosphere, in cafes, in text of the first person to reach the into renewable energy and socially tribe has vowed to fight on, whatever guidance, but the one that applies best slums, universities and nascent political roof remains true today: this is just the beneficial projects instead of nuclear the result, and will need international to the cases I have studied isn’t really organisations, dissent began to be felt. beginning. weapons and subsidies to the arms support. I became involved in the a model at all, it is the maxim usually The coordination stage began with Tim Gee is the author of trade. There was optimism in those campaign at the 2010 climate camp, and attributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore new anti-war groups and independent ‘Counterpower: Making Change Happen’, far-off days. People power had brought changed my name as part of an action you, then they laugh at you, then they trade unions being formed. And it was New Internationalist, 2011 [www.newint. down the Berlin Wall, and the Montreal highlighting the role of taxpayer-owned fight you, then you win.” Despite its following the pre-emptive confrontation org/counterpower ] . Protocol had been agreed, limiting Royal Bank of Scotland in investing in Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the Vedanta, the mining company involved. atmosphere. Naively, we thought that Finally, activism may not change faced with the global threat of climate the whole world, but it changes our change, key governments might be whole world. Once we step outside persuaded to cooperate to tackle the the hegemonic control of the so-called planetary crisis. We were wrong. “elite”, we are faced with the everyday So does the above mean that activism challenge of “living the future we is a waste of time? Not a bit of it! want to see”. Close your newspapers To begin with, speaking out is and open your eyes, and you’ll see important in its own right. I wasn’t part things happening all over the place: of Occupy myself* but was delighted transition town initiatives, radical routes to see it happening. I don’t want to housing co-ops, community supported live in some sort of crazy neoliberal agriculture projects, refugee and North Korea, where truth is taboo homelessness support, permaculture and everyone conforms to celebrity- plots, social centres, anti-supermarket obsessed consumer culture. By campaigns and much, much more. articulating non-hierarchical politics Engaging in this work is just as much with the aims of social justice and part of the struggle for the common ecological sustainability at its core, good as mass actions and camps. It may Occupy continues a noble historical be less visible, but it’s still the frontline. tradition of dissent. Whilst working to sum up this article, I Secondly, whilst we have to give spoke to a friend who was at St Paul’s. The up any hope of short-term systemic image she gave me was dandelions; the change, activism can “tip the balance” big bright flower (ie. Occupy at St Paul’s) on specific issues. Tax avoidance would dwindles to grey fluff, so insubstantial that not be on the political agenda without it breaks up and floats away with a gust of Occupy and UK Uncut. Swathes of wind... but a year later, tenacious radicals Britain would now be under tarmac if take root all over the place, with little it wasn’t for the anti-roads movement yellow flowers budding... in the 90s. Sipson village would now * While the Occupy camp stood be bulldozed if it wasn’t for the 2007 outside the , Heathrow Climate Camp (though the Dongria Kondh was busy fundraising third runway is again being pushed for an ecological restoration project at for by lobbyists). And - for what it’s the source of the River Calder in West worth! - women would not have the Yorkshire: see www.treesponsibility.com

vote without the often extremely direct for details and to register interest for andrea bakacs actions of the Suffragettes. tree-planting events this Autumn. Tales from

the Grind Jeremy Allen “If the Man was sticking it to me, well then I’d stick it to the Man”

ealth is everywhere an attainable holy trinity, and so a I bought Loot and scoured it, right now. With company famed for putting up the but jobs failed to materialise. It was the Olympics on Village People saw fit to get people with some relief then that the health the horizon, for running, jumping and generally people eventually called, and I made good or bad (and palpitating for a fixed-monthly fee. the long trek from Wood Green to let’s face it - that And through the doors they came, Ealing. They liked me. I could tell: sponsorship rollcall lycra-clad and some looking like they phoned me back that day and is a who’s who of Mark Knopfler in the ‘Walk of Life’ told me the job was mine. Whoo! Hrotters), every man, woman, child video. Like I say, not sexy. £11,000 a year! I’d hit paydirt! and dog is being encouraged to shape I’ll be honest here, working as Astonishingly I was paid up or ship out. For those not opting a receptionist in a Christian health handsomely my first month. I thought for (or unable to afford) that cruise club wasn’t my idea of a vocation. I’d hit the big time. Unbeknown to around the South Pacific, chances are I’d not been in London long and me, £11,000 a year isn’t a significant you’ll be forced to endure a London previously worked a reasonably amount of money. It’s a pittance, alexcharnley.com where the infrastructure is stretched exciting job flying around Europe but I wasn’t into square ideas like to full capacity. Sometimes the photocopying VAT receipts for £4 calculating how much I’d actually get vigorous pursuit of fitness can be bad an hour. Flying back at weekends, per annum after tax. It would appear induced thumper. My flatmates were it to the Man. I resigned in protest at for your health. I hoarded a veritable duty free nor were the people in the accounting impressed by my outlandish lie, but the ineptitude of the accountants, but This I discovered to my treasure-trove of the Greek tipple department. Come my second month suggested my bosses might suspect things would get worse. Way behind on cost some years ago. While it’s Ouzo that I grew partial to over the it became clear the first month’s pay something when I turn up without a the rent, I had to move out of my flat. I now commonplace for glossy, space of the six months I worked had been an anomaly. mark on me. You know your job isn’t was homeless. professional, private outfits like there, and the experience of visiting The wage reduction I could just right for you when you have to punch As my landlady gave me the Bupa to cater to all a person’s needs, different parts of the continent about cope with, but the officious yourself in the face. marching orders, the words of the corporate firms taking an interest in had been eye-opening and sodden. manager who told me to take out my When I thought things couldn’t Village People filled my brain: your wellbeing to squeeze every last Young, naive and believing London earring, despite my protestations get any worse, month five arrived, “Young man, there’s a place you drop out of you before you die was, was full of jobs flying to European about sexual discrimination, was and opening the envelope to look can go, I said, young man, when in those days, only a burgeoning destinations to photocopy, I threw getting on my nerves. Then there at my wage-slip was like a kick you’re short on your dough, idea. Health wasn’t as slick or sexy; it all in to spend the next month in were the Sunday 6.30am starts. Was I to the throat. As it turned out, the You can stay there, and I’m sure the gym and spa were for gymnasts my underpants drinking Ouzo and really being paid so little to travel all anomaly had never been addressed, you will find many ways to have a good and Spartans, and the rest of us watching the World Cup. the way from North London to open and so with a jolt, I discovered I’d time... It’s fun to stay at the YMCA” sneered derisively from the comfort England’s elimination in the up the club without a soul around? been paid barely £300 for the entire The irony wasn’t lost on me. of a smoky pub, saying ‘that’ll never second round to Argentina was a One morning I cooked up a story month. That barely covered the Do you have a tale from your ‘Daily be us’. How wrong we were. wake-up call. We weren’t going to that I’d been “attacked by a gang rent. What was I to do? Grind’? Email us at occupiedtimes@ The charity I came to work for win the World Cup, the rent was due who intimated I was a homosexual” Starve. Jump trains. And drink gmail.com with your absurd and was forward-thinking. The upkeep of and the Ouzo was running low. I’d (I used those very words), in order Ouzo during working hours. If the Man hilarious stories from the world of mind, soul and body was its ethos, have to get a new job. to get out of going in with a booze- was sticking it to me, well then I’d stick working life.

On the Soapbox Neil Iberal Wants Occupy to Be Over

I am writing to you from the luxurious was having a “roving general assembly” couch at Starbucks in the courtyard of right on the main concourse. One of St. Paul’s Cathedral. I work just down them even had the nerve to offer me Ludgate Hill at a well known Spanish half of a brownie as I stood looking at financial institution (let’s just say the the display for the status of my train. name sounds like ‘panderer’) as a Do I look like the type of person who personal finance manager and have would accept a half-eaten brownie? I been coming here for years until you would certainly hope not! Truth be told I lot showed up back in October. This actually would have quite liked a brownie was always the nice Starbucks; only at that moment, but that’s besides the mentally deranged went to the one the point. Luckily the train had a fully just 400 metres away in Paternoster stocked snack cart and I got my brownie Square. Well it was the nice one at after all, hand delivered no less, for the least, until the toilets were “temporarily reasonable price of four pounds. closed” the entire six months St. Paul’s Just last week I had some paperwork Ben cavanna was “occupied”, whatever the hell that to drop off at the British Banking Authority means. I looked forward every day (or ‘Mecca’ as we like to say around to strolling unencumbered through the office) and again I suffered from the And for the record, I’m so sick lunch? All this talk of the credit crunch children? And don’t go and get in your Paternoster Square for authentic Asian tyranny of the “roving general assembly”. of all this banker bashing. Nearly all and financial crisis is blown all out of little heads to occupy a Primark, at least food from Itsu during lunch, but that My mate Niall works there and he’d been my mates are bankers and the most proportion. It can’t be that bad, I’ve got not on the last Thursday of the month simple pleasure was taken away from concocting a reason for me to come by for generous people I know. I do my part even richer over the last few years! when I go and restock my sock drawer. me too. Thankfully those dreadful months so he could show me around and and buy Big Issue every week when While we’re at it, if you have a Like I said I’ll be just thrilled when barricades are gone and no longer is hopefully land me a new job. I know the it’s ‘up’. That’s a philosophy I can get problem with shops like Primark or Occupy is over and I can get on with my there an omnipresent yellow-jacketed readers of this crumby paper would never behind: tough love; help you help Tesco, don’t shop there! It’s really that life. You lot sure haven’t helped me one security staff meandering about. appreciate it but have you seen the inside yourself. None of this pissing and simple! That way everyone wins: Primark bit and are a constant pain in my ass. And These are hardly the only reasons of that building? I took an introductory moaning about cuts and handouts. and Tesco can keep making their I know I’m not the only one. I can’t help I’m glad the tents are out of St. Paul’s architecture course at uni and I should Frankly, I can’t see what the issue is. It amazing and affordable products and but think of the poor workers that had and why I can’t wait for Occupy to be know, it’s a real stunner. So there you go, seems like you are all jealous because you can sit there all smug paying double to clean up Zuccotti Park in New York or over. A few months back I was taking another opportunity ruined by Occupy since bankers get paid big bonuses, but elsewhere for the same stuff I just Zynga square in Athens. Unlike all of you a train out of Euston to visit family in I couldn’t get in while they were outside aren’t all jobs the same? If you work bought. Why should I care if the jumper they have real jobs. And I’m sure they get Manchester and lo and behold Occupy waving their hands all about. in a restaurant don’t they give you I’m wearing is made by Vietnamese lunch breaks, just like me. THE OT horoscope DEMO OPPRESSORS PROTESTeRS POLITICIANS CITIZENS DATES COP ANONYMOUS NEOLIBERAL WORKER Recent events could Your mischievous After a long period You may still have a 1st: Worldwide General Strike - all day have you yearning personality is at its of feeling satisfied, job, and after your 1st: Against Workfare - 11am to join those you’ve height this month but things have recently efforts you deserve March by Occupy / Solidarity Federation stood in the way of for an external barrier taken a turn for the it, but that means Assemble at Clerkenwell Green EC1 so long. Rather than hides the true you worse - for the rest of that your taxes are 3rd: The Big Six Energy Bash - 11am denying yourself or feeling guilty, use it within. You are the epitome of contradictions society, that is. Let not the ‘voices of the funding bombs and bailouts. If you Mass actions by Climate Justice Collective as an opportunity to grow. You often feel - private and attention-seeking by turns - 99%’ slow your fine progress towards have any salary left after paying your Undisclosed locations in Central London empowered, but are you really as strong and this can disguise your truly profound the liberation of new markets. There exorbitant rent, fuel and energy bills as TBA online as you think? The summer will see your contours. Try leaving the house to brighten are plenty more ‘moochers’ to catch the well as for food and clothing then treat 5th: Giant Twister Game & Fun Day - services in great demand, but are you your mood, and remember, people in glass blessing of the old-time ‘trickle down’ yourself to a few well-earned beverages 11am. Mass messing about with Occupy serving society, or are you getting served? houses... The letter V brings luck. trick! If romance is your thing, just at a local hostelry. Remember: work is London St Paul’s remember: everyone has a price. the curse of the drinking classes! 6th: The Big Six Energy Bash - 11am BANKER PACIFIST Mass actions by Climate Justice Collective Toward the start of the Violent rhetoric CHAMPAGNE STUDENT The Grange Hotel month past actions in the media is an SOCIALIST The degree to which 9th: Solidarity With South Korea - 2pm might come back to unwelcome melody, Do not shed all of this you let this month’s Protest U.S. Base in Gangjeong haunt you. Luckily, but do not let this month’s tears on the planetary alignment Outside Korean Embassy, SW1 your clout with people recent cacophony gruelling portrayal of affect your studies 10th: Let’s Kettle the Bastards - 10.30am in positions of authority means help will become the soundtrack of May - for this Dickensian poverty in may result in a large Show your love for the boys in blue be at hand. Remember though, don’t take month’s music is your own. As the song the theatre - there are, after all, reasons debt being incurred. Plan on using May’s Follow and see! risks with other people’s livelihood if you goes “there may be trouble ahead,” but to be cheerful too. Are you sure you don’t actions as prime-time study sessions. 12th: Meet the 1% / Global Spring - 2pm wouldn’t do it with your own. The end of look not outward to moonlight for the have to suffer with those truly worse off Kettled at King’s Cross? Better bring Antics by Occupy London the month will see a huge bonus come answers; illumination comes from within. to be their guardian? You have a good Marx’s Das Kapital. Pepper sprayed in Location TBA online your way, but to atone for your past, look This insight will find you in solitude when eye for where others are going wrong, Piccadilly? Plan ahead and load up your 12th: Protest Against Ethnic Cleansing after your futures. *that* song gets stuck in your head. but don’t always hold yourself to the mp3 player with audiobooks. You’ll be in Palestine - 1pm same lofty standards - do that, and you scoring distinctions in no time! Opposite Downing St, SW1 NATIONALIST ANARCHIST will gain respect. 12th – 25th: Caravan for Climate Jobs In times of crisis Misunderstood? PENSIONER Traveling around the country, arrives in you tend to play the Poorly represented? LIBERAL An unexpected letter London on 25th blame game, but Infiltrated? Let not Don’t be surprised informs you that 13th: Protest for Vietnamese you need to look up these paranoid if you do a lot of long-awaited rewards Prisoners of Conscience - 11am to find those really musings dominate soul-searching this aren’t yours after By Amnesty. Vietnamese Embassy, W8 keeping you down. To achieve happiness, the month ahead, for a clear mind is month, but chastising all. You may have 15th: Global Strike - all day learn the value of variety and overcome needed. When the “authorities” attempt yourself for being felt taken advantage of recently, and it’s 15th: Drought of Democracy: Flood your fear of all things different and to quell mid-month rebellion, let this gullible will mean nothing without action. possible you’ve been made the scapegoat the British Bankers’ Association! - new. Despite your hard exterior, you’re clarity guide your response. Be ready Liberty is important to you, so don’t get in someone else’s agenda, but don’t feel 10.30am. Central London then the British a sentimentalist at heart. Were things to testify and poeticise the response, suckered into a deal that promises riches too sorry for yourself. The privileges you Bankers Association really so good back in the day? but should eyes then turn to you for for all involved but delivers for only a took for granted are soon to be resigned 16th: Anti Academies Alliance Protest leadership, remember: anarchy is a few. Remember: having strong principles to history. You may not have much future - 9am. Protest against fat cats in our one-letter word (beginning with “I”). isn’t a fault, and tolerating intolerance left, but at least you once had one. schools. Outside “The Academies Show” only renders you impotent. Conference at Olympia 2, W14 8UX 18th: Get the Shell Out! - 7.30pm Meeting in advance of Shell AGM, by UK Tar Sands Network, Greenpeace and others. Toynbee Hall, Commercial Street, E1 Direct Action 19th: Stop the War Coalition - 1pm Protest coinciding with Chicago protests The OT Outside US Embassy, W1 Crossword 23rd: People’s History of London (ideas & struggle) - 7.30pm Actions Speak Louder Than Herds Talk by Stop the War speakers 1 2 Bishopsgate Institute, EC2 Across 25th: Don’t Attack Iran Cultural Event 3 4. it is conveniently forgotten by people in the present day who - 7.30pm. Actors & Musicians against War reject any effective forms of protest, that some of these women St. James’s Church, W1 4 engaged in window-breaking, hunger strikes and one famously 26th: UK Uncut’s Great British Street Party - 11:00. Celebrate resistance threw herself in front of the King’s horse. (12) 6. Also known 5 as ‘delay and annoy.’ (2,4) 8. The preferred tactic of Anonymous All over London which doesn’t involved masks. (10) 10. Tommie Smith and John Carlos went shoeless to collect their medals at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. When standing on the podium both men 6 performed this form of salute during the American national anthem to protest the historical and continuing oppression of African 7 American people in the US. (5, 5) 13. The single largest waste of 8 9 perfectly good tea in American History. (6,3,5) 15. Bansky isn’t the only one who does this you know? (8) 17. Tactic used by Bobby Sands and other IRA prisoners. Tended to get messy. (5,7) 18. Was having a nice, relaxing swim, minding his own business, 10 11 when two great big boats tried to kill him. (7,8) 20. Longtime enviro-activists, often found ‘offshore.’ (10) 12 21. Sometimes you’ve just got to break stuff. Penury to direct sport. (anagram) (8,11) Down 13 1. refused to give up her seat to a white man, sparking 14 the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. (4,5) 2. 1960s name for ‘occupation.’ (3,2) 3. A rather extreme form of DA. A sin is so 15 16 Satan. (anagram) (11) 5. The Symbionese Liberation Army did this to Patty Hearst and she ended up joining their cause. (5) 7. American philosopher who wrote “Civil Disobedience” and was himself imprisoned for his refusal to pay his taxes. (5,5,7) 17 9. Modern name for a Sit In. (10) 11. Pricey department store which UK Uncut sat down in, in an “intimidating” fashion.

(7,3,5) 12. Shocking form of protest used by Buddhist monks 18 during the Vietnam War and by Mohamed Bouazizi and others during the “Arab Spring.” (4,10) 14. Hit out by withdrawing 19 labour. (6) 16. Sick name still used to describe some people who have murdered doctors in the US who perform abortions. 20 Better known as ‘anti-choice’. (3,4) 19. As Jello Biafria said, “the unbeatable high”. Or as David Cameron described some recent ones, “criminality, pure and simple.” 21 BE REALISTIC / ASK THE IMPOSSIBLE