Twitter is aflame once again with fiery accusations of antisemitism. As if we hadn’t all enjoyed the thoroughly edifying earlier instalments of this particular three, five, ten-act play? Forgive my cynicism but my initial reaction to this and previous variations on this theme is that many involved don’t give a damn about antisemitism. Nor can anyone seem to agree on what it is.
The spark for the latest conflagration has been, as now seems depressingly inevitable for any debate involving “the left” in British politics, something said or done by someone related to Corbynism. What then follows the viral reaction is a process of mediation through mainstream platforms before everyone decides whether or not to condemn or support it and/or the person. The person in question is Jackie Walker, a member of Labour and Momentum. Not knowing anything about her nor being a supporter of either the party or the campaign group means I have no particular interest in defending Walker. I think her comments questioning security at Jewish schools i.e. whether Jewish people are more at risk of violence or oppression in British society are entirely valid – Islamophobia and anti-blackness structure contemporary politics, state violence and discourse a hundred times more. I have rarely if ever suffered much discrimination on the basis that my mother is Jewish. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t antisemitic attacks or that those more identifiable as Jewish don’t suffer far more than me. Not to mention that everywhere is different, and a Jewish person living in, for instance, present-day Hungary would undoubtedly be at greater risk of oppression and violence. But the point stands that the level of antisemitism in British society shouldn’t be exaggerated for political effect, especially as other forms of racism are seeing a marked upsurge in violence.
I also think discussing definitions of antisemitism, as Walker attempted to do, should not be off limits. Indeed, for Jews (of which she is one), it’s a necessity. Such debate (itself a bulwark of Jewish culture) is crucial because, contrary to what many are saying, how antisemitism is defined remains a much-disputed terrain of historical struggle & intellectual enquiry both inside and outside of the Jewish community.
Jackie Walker seemed to question the need for marking, or at least centring, the Holocaust with Holocaust Memorial Day. The way she did this was clumsy because she made it sound like she was minimising the scale of horror wrought by the Nazis, rather than merely draw attention to other groups of people exterminated by the Nazi state or other genocides of recent and less recent history. I remember my grandma and grandpa, a Jewish American POW held in solitary confinement and tortured by the Nazis, always emphasised to me growing up that “never again” meant anywhere, to any group of people. Walker mentions that only post-1945 genocides are marked on Holocaust Memorial Day and asks why the mass enslavement and murder of the Atlantic Slave Trade should not similarly “count”? Perhaps the marking of a day is of less importance here but this is a good question and one which Alana Lentin answers here. Lentin explains that a dehistoricised and “frozen” conception of “race” and racism is promoted in society today,
“the longer history of race as a political project, beginning with the invasion of the Americas through the spread of European colonialism, the expropriation of lands and resources and the genocides of indigenous peoples, the institution of slavery and later indentured servitude, became severed from the telling of the story of race, leaving just the specific moment of Nazism.”
Other comments I’ve seen linked to Walker about Jews being responsible for the slave trade are, however, wrong and dangerous. This is not only inaccurate and helps to reproduce common antisemitic tropes, it is also shows a bad understanding of how capital works – here seen as a conspiracy orchestrated by small groups of people rather than a set of particular social relations that spread and come to dominate society.
But I can’t help but find it more than distasteful to watch an army of pompous, reactionary MPs and journalists, many of whom have supported and constructed Britain’s institutionally racist immigration detention and border regime – living evidence that racism remains a salient arbiter of life and death, not just a matter of name-calling – pile onto a black woman as they suddenly decide to show off their anti-racist credentials.
When people are reacting to what Jackie Walker said, their reactions simply cannot be disentangled from their interest in the overarching matter at hand – a furious power struggle over the future of the Labour Party. People are playing position – whether it’s to take a swipe at Corbyn, to protect the image of Momentum or simply to make themselves look good. Interventions here cannot escape this situation’s own particular genesis, which means that while a discussion about the nature of antisemitism is to be welcomed the conditions out of which this discussion has developed appear unlikely to lead to an enlightened exploration of it.
The right of the Labour Party, bolstered and dragged along by the right of the country at large and the structural tendencies of mediating institutions, have tried everything in the last year to defame, delegitimise and depose Corbyn and cut off the head of a demographic and organisational challenge to their prevailing technocratic rule of the Labour Party. The weaponisation of antisemitism – through the deployment of a narrow definition of it and the false claim of its particularity to “the left” – has, without question, been part of this. But this is not the same thing as claiming that there is no antisemitism in the Labour Party, among Corbyn supporters or across wider socialist, Marxist and anarchist traditions. Because there is and I’ve seen it in all these places.
Corbyn’s reaction to accusations of antisemitism amongst his supporters in the past has been “there is unity in the party in opposing any form of anti-Semitism, any form of racism,” and other statements similar to this. This mythologising about the anti-racism of the Labour Party and the workers’ movement is part of the problem. Apart from it patently being untrue – Labour are a party that seeks to rule through the capitalist state, the wellspring of racism in society, and the role played by trade unions at Grunwick were no anomaly – this mythologising serves to homogenise the historical production of racisms and calcify them into a moralistic framework whereby “racism” is produced by contextless “ignorance” and “hatred”. Antisemitism isn’t “racism like any other”, it has its own particular history and mode of operation and needs to be analysed as such. Indeed, it now seems clear that the cynical deployment of antisemitism accusations by MPs and commentators exemplifies this particularity – these people wouldn’t dream of making anti-blackness their favoured campaigning tool of parliamentary political point-scoring because it wouldn’t and couldn’t work in the same way.
My intention in writing this piece is not to perpetuate the trend for squeezing all writing through the funnel of the Corbyn Labour saga and it certainly isn’t to either condemn or exonerate a particular individual. Rather, I want us to come to a clearer understanding of what antisemitism is, how it operates and its relation to capitalism, broader racism and class.
Let’s first define our terms. Antisemitism has wildly different definitions depending on who you ask – I remember at school that kids used to look at me when they made a Jewish joke to see if I “approved” – but subjective definitions can’t really cut the mustard here. Not when definitions of Jewishness itself are also in dispute. There is a country of nearly eight and a half million people, with a large diaspora of extra-national supporters, many of whom will believe Jewishness to be a biological religious ethnos, now consecrated as a modern nation-state on the land of its ancient peoples. To people who believe this to be true, the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism makes total sense, and indeed the two do sometimes overlap. But to oppose the actions of a nation-state, or even its existence, is not the same as wanting to attack or get rid of a particular group of people. When it comes to Israel and people’s position on it, including most on “the left”, my question is always: “yes I oppose the state of Israel, I oppose all states. Why don’t you?”
I think Moishe Postone’s bifurcation of historic and modern antisemitism is a useful one. Postone distinguishes between the centuries-long oppression of Jews since ascendant Christianity and the variant of antisemitism that emerges out of late 19th century European capitalist industrialisation. The kind of power attributed to the figure of the Jew is unique among other racial taxonomies. In traditional antisemitism this includes the power to “kill God, unleash the Bubonic plague and, more recently, to introduce capitalism and socialism.” Quite the C.V. Furthermore, the historical enforcement of Jews as moneylenders under the rule of medieval Christendom gives birth to the long association of Jewishness with money and greed.
Postone’s formulation of modern antisemitism has it that with the rapid development of industrialisation in the 19th century, the attribution of power to Jews becomes that much more abstracted, intangible and totalising – especially amidst a wave of 19th century nationalism spreading across Europe with Jews becoming that much more the people with no nation. The Jew is no longer the moneylender, instead the Jews control the money system. Antisemitism becomes a central pillar for explaining a complicated and confusing world. The huge technological and social change wrought by capitalist development was transforming the environment and upending certainties and ways of life and this became associated with Jewish control.
Of course Jews were also seen as being behind the emergence of socialism and social democracy at this time which might suggest that this surge of a reformulated antisemitism constituted a revolt against modernity itself. Postone here argues that Nazism is constructed out of these elements. The massive explosion of capitalist development followed by war, social catastrophe and capitalist crisis paves the way for a restructuring of accumulation and a redirection of nationalist ideology in Germany based on the ‘volk’ (or German race) which highlighted the virtue of concrete, industrial labour in the service of family and nation whilst abstract financial capital from the beste goksites groups, under the control of the nationless, untrustworthy Jew, must be expunged entirely to restore health to the nation.
It is up for debate whether Moishe Postone’s explanation of the Holocaust and his formulation of modern antisemitism through the use of Marxian value theory is entirely adequate to explain such momentous historical events. However, his exposition of the so-called “anticapitalism” of Nazism is extremely important. The desire to be rid of the “Rothschilds” or whatever other names are used to describe the supposed shady puppeteers controlling global finance (and governance) remains extremely prevalent today among people who identify as conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists and anarchists. Perhaps such a diversity lends credibility to the suggestion made by Theodor Adorno, as well as other thinkers, that this form of antisemitism is even immanent to modern capitalism.
Apart from being an inadequate understanding of what it is that dominates our lives – does the continuation of industrial production and wage labour ad infinitum somehow minus financing institutions (without even mention of ongoing imperialism) sound like utopia to you? – this also remains the source of much antisemitism on “the left”. It is important that while everyone is slinging the mud of antisemitism around people stop to think about what antisemitism is and how it figures in our understanding of how capitalist society works. The idea that behind the hostile coverage of Corbynism is an elite “conspiracy”, or that “the banksters” being “greedy” and “evil” is the cause of all the world’s problems is a framework for misunderstanding the world that works best with “the Jews” at the top of it. One need only search a few choice words on Google or Youtube to see that apparently “they” still are.
by Michael Richmond | @Sisyphusa
The last week has certainly changed the political landscape in Britain for at least the next generation. My aim here is not to discuss the referendum or to try to summarise the many implications of the result. Instead, like many other discussions and pieces of writing right now, this piece will, at least initially, revolve around the figure of one man who happens to have been my Member of Parliament since the day I was born.
The reason so much revolves around Jeremy Corbyn right now is not because he is a particularly remarkable individual or leader. His election to the leadership of the Labour Party is an expression of the exhaustion of post-2008 social movements and the collapse of their participants back into electoral politics, as well as the final disillusionment of enough party members with a New Labour playbook that can no longer lay claim to “realism” and “electability”. I agree with others that the Corbyn phenomenon internalises within one party what is the only feasible first-past-the-post equivalent of what has happened elsewhere with newer parties such as Syriza, and brand new ones like Podemos.
Looking at the experience of these other parties, though their contexts are very different, should nonetheless act as a reminder of the limits of “leftist” parties once they assume control of the capitalist state and are confronted by a world of states, international organisations and a world market ready to put them in their place. This is not to say that there are “no differences” between parties or that such small differences aren’t meaningful to people’s lives but it is to maintain that parties within nation-states are wholly inadequate vehicles to truly change social relations and a world built on imperialism. Even if Corbyn’s Labour won an election, the migrant detention centres set up by his party would stay, migrants would still drown and be killed in the pursuit of better lives and the intertwined pumping of surplus value out of proletarians and pumping of carbon into the atmosphere would continue to lead to worse and worse conditions for a majority of the people on this planet.
Critiques of the Labour Party and parliamentary socialism are as old as the party itself and theoretically they still stand. Indeed, in many ways, they grow even more compelling. There is no need to recapitulate them at any length but suffice to say that the very design and structure of liberal democracy is to present a separation between political and economic spheres of capitalist society. Such a separation mystifies the indivisible nature of these categories and locks into place a Sisyphean task for those economically exploited under such a system as they are meant to negotiate, through “representatives”, an end to their exploitation via a political system that does not recognise its existence. Labour, under a slowly decaying two party system, also acts as a Bermuda Triangle for social movements and working class struggle, sucking up their energy into a vortex of staid union workerism that long ago made its bed not just with the old Keynesian consensus but has also shown a total willingness to gradually negotiate the ebbing away of any remaining worker protections that only still exist as remnants of the previous compact between capital and labour.
As communists, those who want to overthrow an organisation of society built upon our own exploitation, we know that patriarchy, racism and exploitation are internal to the structural logic and historical development of capitalism and the state that undergirds and superintends the ‘moving contradiction’ of its social relations. In seeking the socialism of Parliament, the socialism of the state, what the Corbyns of this world seek is ultimately to save this system of relations from its own crises and restore some stability to the capital-labour relation.
So far, so “sneering” anarchist/ultra-leftist. However, with this said, we are where we are and it is important to address and adapt to “the political”, in ways that keep more distant goals in mind but don’t remain locked in ‘ideal-type’ scenarios and theories divorced from what is happening. In this spirit, it seems necessary to advocate qualified and precise defences of Corbyn in the current situation within Labour but, more importantly, on how that plays out in wider society. People are right to be encouraged by the fact that Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn consistently act as some of the only politicians who aren’t being negative about immigration and insist on prioritising anti-racism at a time when Islamophobia is widespread and structural racism of all kinds persists. There are also clear differences from mainstream politics in terms of their pronouncements and voting records on welfare and foreign policy. Our desire to cling to these are, however, reflective more of how awful all politicians are and, for example, Corbyn’s Labour remains trapped in the language of talking up migrants in a dehumanising fashion by pointing towards their economic benefit for existing residents and citizens – though more significantly for the needs of state and capital.
The attack on Corbyn and the dwindling numbers still loyal to him in the PLP is not just about him, of course, it’s about destroying the basis for any kind of remotely “left” ideas in the Labour party, in mainstream politics and in society. The recently under-practiced yet clearly unabated anti-communist zeal of liberals – against a pretty bog standard social democrat – shows, as ever, their willingness to ruthlessly round on the left on the side of property and order. When wizarding idiot JK Rowling casts horseshoe spells about the “fascists on left and right” this has far more implications for anarchists, communists and antifascists who take on actual fascists on the streets than it does for casual Corbyn supporters many of whom probably don’t. Perhaps, also, the stellar reporting of the events of the past week by, among others, the spectacularly mendacious George Eaton, has now moved many more people into the camp of those who believe that the Guardian and New Statesman, collection tins in hand, can’t die soon enough.
The current weakness of the left is largely down to the near-total defeat of the workers’ movement over the last century and the failure of programmatic struggles to build socialist societies through the seizure and transformation of states into “workers’ states”. Proletarians are separated and thoroughly decomposed within and across national borders, and any basis for struggle and organisation is severely hampered by constraints on time, energy and resources, as well as material conditions that evoke feelings of anxiety, depression and insecurity. There is no credible argument to say that the crushing of Corbyn would automatically usher in some instant boost for extra parliamentary struggle because what’s holding that back is not simply the existence of the Labour Party.
So what does this mean in practice? I don’t want to do a whole “this is what ‘the left’ needs to do” spiel so instead I’d like to make two comradely suggestions to those in and/or joining Momentum and getting actively involved in the Labour Party.
Firstly, if you don’t like what the PLP have done and plan on moving towards a process of deselecting MPs you should also be targeting local Labour council administrations being tirelessly fought by the likes of Housing Action Southwark & Lambeth, Haringey Housing Action Group and Focus E15 in Newham. This organising that is focused on material needs and confronts the state locally and directly has gained significant wins and represents a far better way to bring people together than ‘activism’. Links of solidarity and genuine support should be made to exert pressure on Labour councils (and all councils) using and abusing homelessness laws, and heinous bureaucratic violence and abuse to evict people from their homes and communities, socially cleansing London in the process. This organising is actually more crucial than ever because the danger becomes greater that in people’s desire to support Corbyn’s Labour people will then be more likely to at best only pay lip service to what the Party’s councils are doing or at worst ignore or dismiss them as an inconvenient truth. Whether or not Corbyn survives, this work remains just as important.
Secondly, the primary way to combat racialised violence – something that is a constant in society and most comprehensively administered by the state – is not through electoral means but through strong communities of solidarity and mutual aid. Even the most common form of antifascist mobilising (confronting organised fascist groups in the streets) is, whilst necessary, still inadequate. The spike in abuse and violence against migrants (or those perceived to be so) following the referendum result is taking place on public transport and in public places which means it requires strangers to intervene on the side of those being abused so that they are not alone or outnumbered. If migrants or people of colour defend themselves using “violence” or likewise others do so on their behalf, such actions should be rhetorically and institutionally defended across this “new New Left” converging around support for Corbyn. Likewise solidarity should be extended towards those who block, prevent and defend against the state’s immigration raids, legally or not.
I think that such solidarity is unlikely but I think it’s absolutely necessary and I’d be glad to be proven wrong. When I interviewed Joshua Bloom, a historian of the Black Panther Party, he spoke of how crucial it was to the growth and strength of the Party that there was a measure of cooperation between the Panthers – who believed in armed self-defence and were willing to fight back against the white supremacist state – and more moderate black groups and leaders. Bloom said of these alliances: “if you think about moderate black political leaders […] think about the kinds of people that supported the Panthers in San Francisco like Willie Brown, who was an assemblyman in California, or Cecil Williams who had a big black church, or think about people like…even Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League – I mean you don’t get much more moderate than that, in terms of black politics at that time – these were the people who led the charge against the most vicious repression of the Party […] these were the same people who, when push came to shove, felt like the Party was representing at least whatever effort there was on the part of young black people.”
I feel no sense of judgement seeing comrades joining Labour to vote for and support Corbyn – these are strange and desperate times and people are acting as they see fit – but I maintain the right to remain skeptical about investing time and energy into this. I do strongly believe that, generally speaking, the answer is not for everyone to stop what they’re doing, join Labour and become active in their CLP. Though as people are doing this, it seems clear that relationships between those trying to change the Labour party and those working outside of it could be very important over the next few years. And I can only hope that grassroots party members will extend solidarity to those proletarians contesting the power of the state more directly.
by Michael Richmond | @Sisyphusa
Didn’t they learn anything from the attempted eviction of Can Vies two years ago, and the popular response that ensued? Have they not yet understood that when you attack the autonomous fabric of a neighbourhood in a city like Barcelona, it will cause the underlying the social, political and economic contradictions to erupt?
These are the questions that immediately came to mind on Monday when messages began appearing that the Banc Expropiat, a squatted social centre in the city’s Gràcia neighbourhood, was being evicted in a massive police operation. Gràcia is a district towards the north of the city with strong traditions of social organising and association. An old town with a proud identity popularly known as “Vila de Gràcia”: The Town of Gràcia.
And so, we are again witnessing another popular revolt in Barcelona. At the time of writing, we are entering the fourth consecutive day of protests, demonstrations and confrontations with the Catalan riot police force (the infamous BRIMO units of the Mossos d’Esquadra) and their accompanying violence – which has so far caused injuries to at least 67 people.
The Banc Expropiat is a stone’s throw from the main market, in the old premises of the bank Catalunya Caixa, one of the major recipients of a bailout during the current crisis, hence its name: The Expropriated Bank. The premises were squatted in 2011 at the end of a demonstration against the eviction of another local social centre, when an assembly of around 40 people decided that there was enough energy and commitment to collectively manage the newly opened space. With a clear anti-capitalist and anti-gentrification ethos, the project bases its presence in the neighbourhood within the framework and the practice of autonomy, self-management and mutual support. Having been part of the community in Gràcia for the last 5 years, it now stands evicted and boarded up with metal panels.
Banc Expropriat is a space which encourages inclusivity, openness and participation, clearly departing from some other political/autonomous spaces and scenes, ‘bunkerised’ from their surroundings. The physical layout itself favours this approach, as the Banc Expropiat mainly consists of a ground floor with open access to the street and external walls that are made of large glass panels. In a video put together for their campaign against eviction, one of the centre’s assembly members states that “inside the bank we have always tried to keep it as free of symbology as possible, to make sure people feel welcome. But this doesn’t mean that, right from the moment you walk in, you don’t realise that there’s a very clear type of political practice in here. And that the main axis running through all the struggles and projects that take place in here is anti-capitalism.”
Banc Expropriat continues a local tradition of building power from below, what in Barcelona many people would refer to as ‘Poder Popular’, manifested through solidarity networks that are able to respond and find collective solutions to the problems many local people face. The rampant gentrification of the area, restricting access to secure housing for many people, is one of the main issues that people involved in the social centre understand as a collective problem that demands collective action.
This solidarity also extends to collectivised food provision. The ‘Xarxa d’Aliments’ (Food Network) that provides free access to food by recycling leftovers and donations from shops and market stall holders that participate in the network, is another of the core projects of the Banc Expropiat. Other events in the regular calendar include lessons in a variety of subjects, meeting space for local grassroots groups and campaigns and a wide range of cultural activities. Though the social centre focuses its activities in finding collective solutions to problems faced by nearby people, those involved in the space make it clear that they don’t want to be seen as a “radical NGO”, seeking to reproduce solidarity relations rather than the logics of the state or charity.
The Banc Expropiat has had an eviction order looming over it for some time. The original owners of the building, Catalunya Caixa, withdrew from eviction proceedings. Many believe this was because of an awareness of the strength of resistance to any attempted eviction. But, in 2014, Catalunya Caixa sold the property to developers represented by Manuel Bravo Solano, a well-known property speculator whose first action was to offer €12,000 to the occupiers in exchange for them vacating the building. The response was clear: the Banc Expropiat does not negotiate with the agents of gentrification.
Following failed attempts to evict another prominent social centre (Can Vies) two years ago, the then Mayor of the city made a secret deal with the current owner of the building in the run up to the local elections, offering to pay rent with public money in order to buy ‘social peace’. When this secret €65,000 deal was discovered in June 2015, the social centre made it public, restating that Banc Expropiat could not be bought.
In January 2016, Banc Expropiat once again came under a permanent threat of eviction. The council of the newly elected mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, a well-known activist and ex-spokesperson of the anti-home repossessions movement PAH, cancelled the deal with the owners of the building and stopped paying the rent. From that moment, the social centre has engaged in building an inclusive campaign to resist any eviction. The social centre has argued that everyone has a role to play in its defence. Right from the start, the main slogan of the eviction resistance campaign has been “Amb caputxa o sense, el Banc es defensa”, meaning something like “with or without masking up, the Banc will be defended”.
The neighbourhood awoke to the sounds of the eviction taking place. A call was immediately sent out to resist it. #ElBancReisteix began trending and people started gathering in front of the police lines almost immediately. Meanwhile, two people locked themselves inside the old bank’s safe. It took up to 8 hours for police to break into the safe and take over the building.
Crowds gathered in the streets surrounding the social centre throughout the day. Later, a march of 1,800 people proceeded through the main streets of the neighbourhood. When protestors carrying an electric radial saw tried to remove the metal boards covering the evicted social centre, police charged with batons and shot foam bullets into the crowd. The crowd, now dispersed, were met with further police violence across the neighbourhood until past midnight. By the end of Monday around 50 people had been injured – including four hit by foam bullets to the head – and one arrested.
Reactions to the violence of the police on Monday were varied, with mainstream media platforms led attempts to divide protestors between “peaceful” and “violent” so as to excuse the violence of police. Social media overflowed with imagery captured the night before in an attempt to counter this, much of it filmed from the balconies of Gràcias’s neighbours outraged at the police violence they had seen the night before, as well as alternative media platforms. The Banc Expropiat published a communiqué entitled ‘Tornarem al Banc’ (“We’re going back to the Banc”). The communiqué expressed gratitude at the solidarity expressed in the streets of Gràcia the night before, restating the determination to re-take the social centre and pointing out that the popular rage seen the night before was a direct consequence of police brutality and impunity.
#TornemAlBanc called for a series of solidarity demonstrations that evening in several districts of the city. People from the Sants and Raval districts marched together towards Gràcia, and at around 9pm several hundred people started marching again towards the Banc Expropiat.
When the demonstration reached the social centre, a group of people managed to force open a metal gate creating a loud cheer from the crowd. At that point, riot police moved in with a brutal charge causing injuries to many protestors. The police re-took the building as the crowd dispersed to different parts of the neighbourhood and smaller groups of people kept gathering and confronting police till around midnight.
Protests spread to several other districts of Barcelona, followed by calls to ‘surround the banc’. Columns from Clot, Sants, Vallcarca and Poble Sec made their way to Gràcia in the evening and at approximately 9pm, around 2,400 people gathered in a square near the Banc Expropiat. This is the biggest demonstration seen so far.
Lines of riot police blocked all streets leading to the social centre, so people marched around the police lines. At around 11.30pm police charge the crowd once more, prompting groups of people to break away again. Several bank offices were attacked and by midnight, people dispersed. A call was also put out for neighbours to record images of police violence from their homes and to publish them on social media in an attempt to counteract more apologetic reactions in the media. Alternative media projects Contrainfos and La Directa publish daily video summaries.
The struggle to re-take the Banc Expropiat is ongoing. A new communiqué entitled ‘Tornarem a Intentar Entrar” (We are going to try to break in again) says “we have nothing to negotiate … the Banc is ours because we have built it minute-by-minute between all the people that have come in during all these years and have been contributing with hundreds of different experiences; the Banc is ours and we will defend it till the end.”
A #TornemAlBanc (“We’re going back to the Banc”) day of action was launched again on Sunday 29 May, with a call to gather in Gràcia from midday. Meanwhile a variety of street activities and events have been organised in an attempt to continue with the social centre’s regular activities.
How all this will unfold, and what the future of the Banc Expropiat will be is yet to be seen. On the one hand we are witnessing in Gràcia an undiminished collective determination to regain a five year old, well established project. It seems that negotiation with institutions, political parties or representatives is not considered an option for those defending the Banc Expropiat.
On the other hand, there is the new ‘Council of Change’ of Barcelona recognising the ‘social value’ of the social centre’s activities, and stating that they are doing all in their powers to negotiate a settlement that is acceptable to all parties.
The actions of the police against those defending their spaces this week has been brutal and violent. The social cleansing of the city is one mediated via multiple processes of state violence and dispossession, though it has been some time since such a naked display of state violence has been witnessed in Barcelona.
In an article published this week in ‘Critic’ called “Making the Invisible, Visible”, the journalist Sergi Picazo argues that what we are seeing this week in the streets of Gràcia “is not only the result of the eviction of a squatted social centre,” but rather, “the result of such a dire, deteriorated, unequal and conflictive situation” in today’s Barcelona.
by Jordi Blanchar | @maqui_tuits
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Click Image for High-Resolution PDF
Resisting an eviction is a last resort, not a long term solution, giveing you time to organise alternative accommodation. If facing eviction, other pressure needs to be applied to keep people in their homes or find new ones, including entering homeless applications with your local council
Once a possession order has been granted by a court, the owner has 3 months to get a writ/warrant. They are valid for 1 year
Evictions by High court enforcement officer are very rare. They are more likely if you’ve resisted a previous eviction attempt or the landlord expects resistance.
Resisting an eviction can give you time to organise alternative accommodation, and possibly demonstrate/galvanise collective strength and community solidarity. But an eviction resistance is a last resort, not a long-term solution nor the basis for an entire strategy – See advice on making a homeless application here.
Give people as much notice as possible. Many resistances involve an early start!
Establish the easiest way to block access to the property. Find a good place for spotters who confirm arrival/departure of bailiffs/police.
Resisting Evictions can take a few hours. Bring refreshments to share if you can.
Resisting evictions can be joyful. Chants and banners help neighbours see what’s happening (and get involved!)
When bailiffs arrive, don’t rush towards them – Continue to block access as a group.
Deny bailiffs access to the property as a group. Point out you won’t be moving.
The bailiffs should walk away – they often have another appointment lined up.
As long as no-one assaults bailiffs/police it’s very unlikely you’ll be arrested. There have been many successful eviction resistances without arrests. Here are some threats police might make. An awareness of these beforehand lets you know your rights and possibly diffuse situations with police.
“Resisting an evictionis contempt of court” – The specific person or people being evicted could be threatened with contempt of court. It is not contempt of court to resist your own eviction unless you have been served with a court order with an attached penal notice – this is very rare and it will be clear in the paper work!
“This is a breach of the peace” – Police can make arrests or use reasonable force to prevent crime or a ‘breach of the peace’ (where violence is used or threatened towards a person or their property in their presence). A crowd of people outside a home facing eviction does not itself constitute a breach of the peace. However, police have used this excuse to break up eviction resistances in the past. As ‘breach of the peace’ is not a criminal offence people detained should be released a small distance from the location of the eviction.
“You’re obstructing court officers” – When resisting tenant evictions, ‘obstructing court officers’ (s10 of 1977 Criminal Law Act) doesn’t apply as tenants aren’t trespassers. With squat evictions this offence does apply but is rarely used.
Advisory Service for Squatters | squatter.org.uk
Legal Defence and Monitoring Group | ldmg.org.uk
Housing Action Southwark & Lambeth | HousingActionSL.org
We did not want to frame people as victims, avoiding the prism of humanitarian paternalism which is often the
basis of art projects, but as courageous people who, by the very fact that they had decided to set out on such
a journey, made a radical change in their life – fleeing war, conflicts and poverty. We were interested when,
how and where they had been travelling before we met them. We asked why they had embarked on such a
journey, what troubles they had survived, how they had crossed borders, what their experiences were
with police and people in the countries they had passed through.
Together we sketched maps, piecing together their routes, which in some cases had taken up to 7 years.
Sometimes the maps lack detail or are unclear, and sometimes they would skip parts of the journey.
We wanted to show their routes factually, and thus draw attention to Europe’s inhumane
asylum policy | Djordje Balmazovic, Škart
“The rush to make profits out of carbon-fixing engenders another kind of colonialism.”
Introduction
We’re all familiar with the ongoing planetary biocrisis. Global temperatures are predicted to rise by 4°C by 2100, with recent research warning of a 6°C rise by 2100, a far cry from the 2°C target deemed safe. The integrity of our energy systems and agriculture are threatened, the world’s oceans slowly acidify, our forests ecosystems are collapsing, and amidst the ecocide the world’s fossil fuel companies continue to increase their fuel reserves, edging dangerously close to safe emissions limits.
One proposed solution to prevent dangerous climate change is the carbon market, “a market created from the trading of carbon emission allowances”. Can the trading of emission permits help pave the way to a low-carbon future? Could the pricing of carbon aid a global transition to renewables? Or is the concept of a carbon market another example of neoliberal hegemony, a capitalist attempt to profit from disaster?
The Origins of Carbon Markets
One of the first markets in emissions trading was the Acid Rain Program in the USA in the 1990s. This was introduced in a market-friendly attempt to reduce the emissions from coal-fired power stations and prevent occurrences of acid rain after previous government legislation had failed to address the problem. The successful 10% reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions between 1995 and 2003 seemed to vindicate the idea of market environmentalism, and encouraged the insistence of market mechanisms in climate negotiations.
The US delegation and the 1,500 lobbyists from the International Emissions Trading Association helped cement the use of market instruments in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. US Vice President Al Gore advised that the US would only agree to the Protocol if the trading of pollution rights was implemented. Even though the US refused to adopt the Protocol it strengthened the concept of market environmentalism. Since then the design and development of carbon markets has predominantly fallen into the hands of financial market architects, with emissions trading becoming “almost unstoppable”.
Through the prism of capitalist accumulation we can see carbon markets as a case of state enclosure of the commons (the atmosphere) in order to forcefully create a new market, attempting to reduce something complex (climate) into something quantifiable (carbon price). “Creating markets where there have been none before is one of the ways in which, historically, capital has expanded”.
Today, emissions trading is a key part of capitalist logic. Scientists frequently endorse the idea of putting a price on carbon to help tackle global warming. Corporations experiment with internal carbon pricing in attempts to reduce emissions. The World Bank estimates that 12% of annual greenhouse gas emissions are now covered under carbon pricing systems. Carbon markets now form an integral part of an “emerging global policy framework” to tackle climate change.
Contemporary Developments
Despite Nicholas Stern’s assertion that climate change “is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen” carbon markets have quickly propagated across the world. From California to South Africa to Japan, emissions trading is popular globally, with new markets constantly emerging. Emanuele Leonardi references this proliferation as the “carbon trading dogma”, the ideological assumption that only pollution markets can effectively solve climate change.
Carbon markets come in many forms. The largest scheme in existence is the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), established in 2005, and is a prime example of a cap and trade system. There are also project-based carbon offsets, where instead of cutting local emissions entities can finance “carbon-saving” projects elsewhere. Under the Kyoto Protocol there are also “flexibility mechanisms” such as the Clean Development Mechanism and Joint Implementation.
In 2009 Richard Sandor of the Chicago Climate Exchange, stated “We’re going to see a worldwide market, and carbon will unambiguously will be the largest non-financial commodity in the world”. As predicted, the global carbon market has doubled in size every year since 2005 and is expected to have a market value of US$3.1 trillion in 2020. In 2009 carbon markets traded over US$100 billion a year and were worth €64 billion in 2014. The EU ETS alone had a turnover of €90 billion in 2010.
Carbon markets enjoy widespread support. The City of London has become the focal point for carbon trading, with institutions opening carbon market trading desks or acquiring “carbon companies”. Recent efforts have focused on attempts to link up existing markets, with the EU and California looking to connect their regional markets, and California assisting China with carbon market design. Canadian provinces are preparing to link cap and trade systems, and carbon markets are predicted to expand across North America. Carbon markets are not advancing homogeneously however – efforts to fix the flaws in the EU ETS continue, and Australia is the first country to repeal a carbon price.
The Failure of Atmospheric Commodification
The logic is that a carbon price, controlled by supply and demand, will provide an incentive for market actors to invest in cleaner methods of energy generation in order to save money. “In generating a price for carbon an incentive is created to reduce emissions as efficiently as possible”.
A recent economic study found that, factoring in climatic tipping points, the cost of carbon should be 200% higher than it is today. The EU ETS is plagued by oversupply problems. Countries still have no economic incentive to switch to cleaner energy supplies, and other studies prove that carbon pricing mechanisms are not enough to avert climate change.
Due to the inequalities of purchasing power and wealth transfer, the idea of markets ushering us into a low carbon future seems impossible. The control of our atmospheric commons will remain out of our hands, and the state will step in if resistance emerges. Neoliberalism has always used violence via the state to secure property rights, enforce stability, and quash dissent – carbon markets are no different. An immaterial commodity like carbon requires state intervention for a market to be enforced and regulated.
Carbon markets have also been wracked with crime. A reliance on corporate self-regulation has encouraged “climate fraud”. INTERPOL in 2013 released the “Guide to Carbon Trading Crime”, detailing carbon market-associated money laundering, insider trading, and cybercrime, and explaining how the capacity to falsify information or receive bribes has been found in regulatory institutions of all kinds.
Carbon markets have even failed to reduce emissions. The trading processes do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions and offsetting can increase emissions. An economic structure has emerged that relies on maintaining emissions to make money. There have been regional emissions reductions but only as a result of short-term fuel switching. Global emissions can be seen increasing through the online measurements of the Mauna Loa Observatory.
These failures would suggest that regardless of design carbon markets cannot reduce emissions. As Mike Childs describes:
“The global carbon budget to avoid dangerous climate change is too small to allow trading. If a temperature target of 1.5 degrees is chosen with a reasonable to high chance of avoiding it, then the global carbon budget will be tiny. Carbon trading relies on countries having ‘spare’ carbon emissions … Under a tiny carbon budget it is almost certain that no country will have any spare emissions to sell.”
Carbon trading also ignores fossil fuel consumers that cannot be subsumed under markets – the US military for example, potentially the world’s largest consumer of petroleum, would hardly accept a carbon price as it released almost 60 million metric tons of CO2 in 2011.
The hoped-for renewable transition is also an abject failure. Larry Lohmann provides evidence that in the EU ETS renewable energy “gains no demonstrable benefits.” Indeed, the ETS has been criticised for being in direct competition with renewable energy, and has had “a very limited impact” on boosting renewable technologies. Max Koch comes to a similar conclusion, with carbon prices never being high enough to trigger technological change. Carbon markets are thus able to trigger short-term changes for immediate profit but are incapable of long-term planning.
A Mistaken Enemy: Capitalism, not Carbon
There is a need to address the heart of the capitalist system, the “grow or die” imperative that has created carbon markets. Through “Accumulation by Decarbonization” capitalism has created a smokescreen of environmental protection and progressivism whilst furthering inequitable wealth redistribution. There is “no equitable technological solution to climate change” and a green capitalism would still be “characterized…by the unequal distribution of economic, social and environmental risks”. The anti-ecological character of capitalism should be accepted. Existing wealth inequalities are only exacerbated within emissions trading, and carbon markets offer “wealth creating opportunities” to polluters.
Carbon markets also preserve the divisions of North and South. As Howard Zinn said, “globalization is in fact imperialism”. Areas of the earth that can absorb excess carbon are becoming commodified as part of carbon offset schemes, enclosing the commons further. The South is effectively becoming a carbon dump for the industrialised nations, seizing land from indigenous communities to be “managed” per climate agreements. It is no surprise that developing countries see the “ecological concern of industrialized countries [as] merely the latest chapter in a long history of imperialism”.
It is clear then that carbon markets are another weapon in capitalism’s toolkit of domination and assimilation. They present the image that climate change does not contradict capitalism and helps stifle resistance, absorbing and commodifying environmental concerns. Following Naomi Klein’s concept of disaster capitalism “the energy and desire to act on climate change” has been redirected into a “marketing opportunity”. Capitalism has proven how quickly it can shift after sensing “a business opportunity” in disaster.
“Ultimately carbon markets are designed to continue capitalist development and expansion.” Environmental protection is secondary to the profit motive. Carbon trading is a form of “proxy commodification”, turning environmental degradation into a tradable commodity. Even if the global economy were to be “decarbonised” it would still be capitalist in nature, merely “increasingly authoritarian”. Capitalism will maintain the status quo at all costs, and carbon markets allow business as usual as we purchase “green credentials” and personal offsets.
As Murray Bookchin said, capitalism “will not decay”. It is constantly expanding, and attempts to “green” capitalism are destined to fail. “One might more easily persuade a green plant to desist from photosynthesis than to ask the bourgeois economy to desist from capital accumulation”. Even the World Bank, despite its rhetoric of sustainability, “continues to subsidise and support fossil fuel extraction on a scale 17 times larger than it supports clean energy initiatives”.
We have seen that market mechanisms cannot prevent climate change. Faith in their power is dangerous. A new approach is required.
Are Markets Necessary?
Capitalism is a dead end. It can not solve the biocrisis it created, but there are glimmers of hope. The global economy now produces renewable energy at an “industrial scale” and our global energy infrastructure can be replaced with renewables in the coming decades. These developments leapfrog any need for carbon markets and it is only political will that is required to realise them, something we must spearhead. “The historical record shows very clearly that…changes in energy industries require the mobilization of mass social movements. We cannot wait for visionary politicians to forge the way.”
But a solution cannot be a simple product of technics. Our society and its view of the environment has to change. “Renewable energy is a necessity for a sustainable and equitable society, but not a guarantee of one”. We must remember that “every society extends its own perception of itself into nature”. A renewably powered capitalist economy would still view the natural world as a resource to be managed and plundered. The future is anti-capitalist.
As the bourgeoisie ruin our world in the name of profit we have to steel ourselves for the struggles ahead and ask ourselves – who’s afraid of ruins?
This essay is a shortened version. The original essay and accompanying references can be found at Fighting the Biocrisis.
All expressions of gender non-conformity are antagonistic, especially trans femininity.
Gender antagonisms aren’t always brash. It’s defiant to take up physical space as a woman or a femme; it’s confrontational to wear nail polish as a man or a masc.
Daily antagonisms are both empowering and tend to increase vulnerability. There is a cost-benefit analysis about expressing your gender without apology and feeling safe on the streets, which almost always results in a compromise. Your safety is conditional.
Being trans in London is to exist as both invisible and hyper-visible. If your genderqueerness is evident, passersby will stop, point, and loudly exclaim, “Is that a boy or a girl?!” They are always groups of men. Other people will stare, trying to figure out if they should be more uncomfortable with your androgyny or your potentially homo-affection in holding someone’s hand. None of them know you’re trans, none of them know your name or pronouns, none of them witness your gender identity; you are invisible and yet exposed.
Masculinity is perceived as “neutral” or “androgynous” while femininity is objectified and severely scrutinised.
Smash the expectation that marginalised people are responsible for ending their oppressions, that they are required to educate their oppressors, or that they must loudly politicise their marginalised identity. There is value in assimilation for survival – without survival there is no liberation. Worse still is the idea that we are deserving of their oppression for daring to be visible, that we are obligated to assimilate.
I am staunchly against “against apolitical” marginalised identities. Gender non-conformity is inherently political – stop putting it on marginalised people to be explicitly political (that’s the work of allies who are less vulnerable to violences and less exhausted through constantly combating transphobia). Trans people might perform normative gender expressions because it helps them pass, and passing can be extremely empowering (never mind safer). Trans people don’t need to be explicitly political in their gender expression because simply existing as trans is revolutionary. Being trans in a society so invested in a static gender binary is inherently antagonistic and radical.
Fuck respectability politics. Trans people don’t need to conform to cisnormative standards of beauty to be worthy, to be sexy, to be human. This only serves to create a hierarchy of “acceptable” gender expressions and modes of transness – ones which fit the gender binary.
Make-up is both patriarchal shackles and liberation. Embrace the complexity, and get used to it. Trans can contain contradiction.
Two people walk down the street wearing the same dress: both are non-binary demi-boys. One is a dfab (designated female at birth) sex worker, pressured to be femme his whole life; he resents the street harassment when people perceive him as a woman; he is thrilled when he gets stares as they clock him as “a man in a dress” because that’s closer than street harassers have ever gotten to being right about him, and it’s perversely validating. The other boy is dmab (designated male at birth) and was never allowed to express femininity; the empowerment he felt at home when he got dressed dissipates as lads shout at him. They witness his gender nonconformity and undermine his feminine expression. The experience of wearing the same dress, having the same gender identity, and being perceived as the same gender is extremely different for these two people.
Last week I went to a feminist punk show wearing black jeans, a polo t-shirt, and black lipstick; I looked like a boy, sort of. A cute girl started a conversation with me: “It’s great to see so many girls at a punk gig!” “I think so too! But, I’m not a girl. Er, I’m trans.” “That’s so brave, I’ve never met a trans person before. Are you going from female to male?” “Um… sort of. No. I’m like a boy, but not just a boy.” This is the most forward I’ve ever been about my non-binary identity with a stranger.
Gender is dynamic. Sometimes “queer” is the only word which makes sense because it allows for ambiguity and flux.
“Transition”. Transition is constant, like coming out. Gender is not binary for most of us. We don’t wake up suddenly eschewing yesterday’s gender and confidently claim its “opposite”. Gender is a non-linear process; there is no clear “before” and “after”.
Privilege is not only produced, it is reproduced.
The fragility of masculinity is incredible. Men feel so entitled to physical and conversational space, and media representation, that as soon as anyone else speaks they feel silenced. Men are apparently terrified at being excluded from dialogue; it would be laughable if not demonstrated by violently invading femme and non-binary spaces. There is a common fallacy that men need to “get in touch with their feelings” – men need to become sensitive to the feelings of everyone else and stop throwing tantrums whenever their collective masculinity is called out for being oppressive (“Not all men!” Bro, enough men). It would be so cool to have a conversation about gender which doesn’t constantly reference men and masculinity as the focal point.
You develop a hyper-awareness of how other people perceive your gender. As someone who gets gendered differently on different occasions, it’s impossible not to note the differences: when I’m gendered as a man, I’m allowed more physical and figurative space, people take me more seriously, and I’m allowed anonymity; when I’m gendered as a woman, passersby consume my outfit/body, and men mansplain basic shit. The worst is when I’m trying to convey a certain gender expression—a normative one, even—and people misgender me. Sometimes it’s obvious (street harassment as I’m mistaken for a woman), but a lot of the time it’s subtle and it takes all of my focus to concentrate on the interaction instead of wondering how I’m being gendered.
Assimilation is not liberation. Trans queers don’t want marriage (monogamous state-sanctioned intimacy and consolidated wealth) nor to serve openly in the military (“your feminism will be anti-imperialist or it will be bullshit”). We want systemic power imbalances levelled. We want housing and healthcare and jobs (at least until capitalism crumbles). We want our identities to stop being pathologised, and we want to change our names and gender markers without a diagnosis. We want an end to the implicit idea that cis and heteronormative white masculinity is default.
Trans politics isn’t about conforming to respectability or professionalism or “you wouldn’t dress that way if you didn’t want attention” victim-blaming crap, and it’s not about ending gender or erasing femininity so we can all be “neutral” (read: masculine). It’s about erasing gender policing, it’s about dismantling the binary so everyone can rid themselves of patriarchal prescribed gender roles, it’s about allowing fluidity of identity and expression. There is no trans liberation without black and brown liberation from white supremacy and colonialism, queer liberation from heteronormativity, women’s liberation from patriarchy, crip and mad liberation from ableism, and worker’s liberation from capitalism.
By Morgan Potts | @mrgnptts | morganpotts.com
There was much hype over Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign to lead the Labour Party. What has been largely absent from the debate is an evaluation of Corbyn’s economic ideas and assumptions. In The Economy in 2020, Corbyn set out what his economic policies will be, if he becomes Prime Minister. A lot can be learned from this about how he understands the economy and the State.
At the outset of the piece, Corbyn claims he wants “to have a serious debate about how wealth is created”. He says that “in reality wealth creation is a collective process between workers, public investment and services, and, yes, often innovative and creative individuals”. But Corbyn has a problem with how this system of collective wealth production works out in practice: workers and the State do not receive enough of the wealth they help to create. That is why he wants to “create a balanced economy that ensures workers and government share fairly in [a] wealth creation process […] that is more […] equal”.
There are two problems here. First, Corbyn wanted a debate about how wealth is created. But all he has done is given us a list of the things that are necessary under present social conditions for wealth creation. Yet, knowing the ingredients for a cake is something very different from understanding how a cake is made. Secondly, Corbyn moves from asserting that certain things are necessary for wealth to be created to the proposition that this means each of these necessary elements must receive its fair share. This is moralism, not economics: there isn’t an economic reason why if something is necessary it therefore deserves to be rewarded. The fact that workers or entrepreneurs are necessary for capitalist production does not lead to any conclusion that they therefore deserve a share of what is produced. If workers are necessary, then the question that has to be asked is what wages do they need to receive to ensure that they turn up to work: that is a different matter to what they ‘deserve’.
Let’s look at how the ingredients in Corbyn’s list of necessities actually combine to produce wealth. What sort of “collective process” do workers and companies engage in?
In this society, the workers are the ones who do the work which is needed to make the useful stuff they never get enough of for themselves (a result Corbyn regards as a problem). On the other hand, it is the companies who own the necessary tools and the raw materials. In this sense, it looks like the creation of wealth is indeed a collaboration: both workers and companies have a bit of what is needed for production.
However, the decision to make some new useful stuff is not a question of collaboration in this way. Useful things are only created if a company has decided profits are to be made in doing so. In deciding to produce something, a company calculates that hiring workers, buying materials and setting the workers to work to make stuff, which can then be sold, will make a profit. If successful, then more wealth has been created: whether this has happened is measured by whether the money made from selling the products is more than the total expended to make it. This is the dominant form of wealth in our society: wealth measured in money, especially money that can be spent in order to increase its quantity, i.e. capital. The fact that useful stuff that people need is made at all under this system is subordinated to this purpose of profit-making.
Workers, who Corbyn invites to share his ideas about wealth creation, are in a difficult position when it comes to engaging in this peculiar collective process. Firstly, the purpose for which the process of wealth creation is undertaken is one which does not care about their need for a wage. What that means for workers is that whether there is work for them to do is not something which they can determine. Being dependent on such calculations is a pretty difficult position given that most workers have no other way of earning a living than by agreeing to work for a wage. That leads on to the second difficulty. Profit-making isn’t just indifferent to workers’ need for a wage, but is hostile to the wage as a source of income – and therefore to workers. That is because the magnitude of capitalists’ profits depends on the excess in price of their products over their expenses. The wages of workers are an expense (albeit a necessary expense). Paying less in wages and getting workers to work harder increases profits.
Given that the wage is subject to such calculations, it is no surprise that the size of the wage is so often insufficient to meet the needs of the workers. Being dependent on a wage is therefore a particularly rubbish way of having to survive and not one we might think people are likely to willingly choose. However, companies can usually find as many willing workers in the marketplace as they can profitably make use of. To ensure that the condition of having no alternative but to work is widespread and persistent, it is necessary that the wage is not generally sufficient to enable an individual worker to obtain resources to prevent herself from having to continue in such a miserable state. The permanent poverty of the mass of people, in the sense that there must always exist a class who has no choice but to sell their time, is therefore a necessary feature of the creation of wealth under this system. The problem of poverty, which exists because of the exclusion of workers from access to most of the wealth, and to which Corbyn reacts, is just the flip side of the coin of the type of wealth that he wants to grow.
When Corbyn agitates his supporters on the basis that as workers they are necessary for wealth creation in this society and therefore they should receive a fair share, he does not contribute to a proper critique of the capitalist production process that is needed if overcoming generalised poverty is the aim. Instead, he stands in the way of correctly understanding how this form of wealth creation relies upon and produces poverty. Failing to explain the relationship between work and wealth does not contribute to people’s ability to destroy that relationship. Corbyn’s acceptance that companies are necessary to wealth creation, whilst failing to explain that the purpose of production is for the increase of the wealth they control – capital – and not the satisfaction of everyone’s needs, encourages workers, who as a class have an antagonistic relationship to capital, to seek compromise with it, rather than the abolition of classes through the abolition of capital. That can be seen in the timidity of his policies (maybe a minimum wage of £10 an hour – so long as profits can still be made).
Additionally, Corbyn argues that “public investment and services” also participate in the “collective process” of wealth creation. Public investment and services are not the form of wealth which counts in the society ruled over by the State which provides them. They do not directly lead to an increase in wealth measured in money which increases itself. But Corbyn isn’t completely wrong to think that the State plays a role – it provides a lot of “public services” to enable this form of wealth creation to exist and thrive.
Firstly, it guarantees private property. This is the basic condition for the existence of the wealth creation which leads to the permanent generalised exclusion from wealth described above. These rights are the only reason why companies own the wealth that workers are compelled to create through their own lack of access to property. The State does not therefore simply encounter a world of competing workers and companies which it must then intervene in. Rather it provides the basic and necessary conditions for this world.
The mistake is an easy one to make in a world where it is the employer who does not pay enough without the State imposing a minimum wage, or where employers would force workers to work much longer hours without rules about working time. And indeed, the State must provide sufficient health and safety rules, minimum standards for pay, welfare support, subsidised housing, education and so on, as left untended capitalism destroys the workers on which it depends.
The State goes beyond merely maintaining the system but actually seeks its growth (something Corbyn also wants) – through investments that aim at increasing the opportunities for profit-making.
For the state to be able to invest, it too needs money – it receives that through taxation. For that, the State uses its power and simply dictates the amount by which it share the economic success of its subjects. Corbyn knows this as he promises to wield this power more effectively – however, he is committed to using it for the same purposes: growth of private wealth.
Corbyn paints the State as an equal victim of business alongside the workers. In doing so he denies its role as the enforcer of the conditions which guarantee useful poverty and recasts its role in ensuring workers exist to service capital as a benevolent service to them.
by Critisticuffs | @critisticuffs | critisticuffs.org
On 1 July 2015, a new legal duty was placed on schools and early years and childcare providers to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. The revised statutory guidance stipulates that ‘being drawn into terrorism includes not just violent extremism but also non-violent extremism, which can create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism and can popularise views which terrorists then exploit.’
Schools and early years providers are now assessed by Ofsted to check that they are implementing Prevent. You will also be aware that Prevent has been through different phases since its inception but currently its most important dimension is Channel, a referral, multi-agency assessment and intervention process meant to protect people at risk of ‘radicalisation’. Channel is driven by multi-agency panels in which the police play a leading role.
I want to identify some of the key concerns about the Prevent duty, as well as suggest some positive alternative approaches, and discuss some of the challenges we face in organising against Prevent in partnership with teachers as well as the pupils, parents and communities that Prevent is impacting on.
Firstly, the model that underpins the government’s concept of ‘radicalisation’, and which is central to Prevent, is informed by a notion of ‘psychological vulnerability’; that individuals must have certain vulnerabilities that make them more likely to engage in terrorism.
This means schools should be identifying signs of such vulnerabilities to then be able to halt the process of ‘radicalisation’. It is interesting that leaked guidance provided to the Cabinet’s Home Affairs Committee stated that it was wrong ‘to regard radicalisation as a linear “conveyor belt” moving from grievance, through radicalisation, to violence’.
Secondly, the Prevent strategy and the new duty are fixated on ‘extremist ideology’; the view that people are drawn into terrorism almost exclusively through ideology. Yet research suggests that social, economic and political factors, as well as social exclusion, play a more central role in driving political violence than ideology.
In the UK therefore, but also in the USA and Australia, training for teachers, often delivered by police officers, urges teachers to report signs of radicalisation among their pupils, despite there being simply no empirical evidence at all to support the idea that terrorism can be correlated with factors to do with family, identity and emotional wellbeing.
One writer described this as ‘orientalist pseudoscience’. Beneath the jargon on ‘risks’, ‘vulnerabilities’, ‘engagement factors’ and ‘psychological hooks’, is an invitation to limitless racial and religious profiling in which normal teenage behaviours, or a young person’s beliefs, can be seen as indicators of being on the pathway to violent extremism. In fact, again, studies show that there is no direct link at all between religious observance, radical ideas, emotional wellbeing and violent acts.
But this is how Prevent operates in schools: identifying threats before they emerge in the so-called ‘pre-crime space’.
You might remember that a senior British police officer, Scotland Yard commander Mak Chishty, recently called for a move into the ‘private space of Muslims’ and offered specific advice: if a teenager stops shopping at Marks and Spencer, it could be because they had been radicalised. He also suggested watching for subtle unexplained changes such as sudden negative attitudes towards alcohol and Western clothing.
A huge concern, therefore, is the tremendous risk of abuses and mistakes in any approach that tries to predict future criminal activity, including terrorism.
By requiring schools and teachers to put pupils under surveillance, casting particular suspicion on Muslim pupils, and profiling them for behaviours that have no real connection to criminal behaviour, Prevent confuses the different professional roles of teachers and the police, and draws educational practitioners into becoming the eyes and ears of the counter-terrorism system.
An example of this is that there are now several private companies selling “anti-radicalisation” software to schools. If pupils search for words such as ‘caliphate’ or ‘jihad’, or the names of Muslim political activists on classroom computers they risk being flagged as potential supporters of terrorism. A really sinister feature of the software being marketed by a company called Impero, is a ‘confide button’ allowing pupils to report on fellow classmates anonymously.
Expecting teachers and childcare professionals to identify potential extremists undermines trust and positive relationships. We argue that mutual respect and trust between teachers and pupils is essential for learning environments where everyone feels safe and valued. The constant monitoring of Muslim students will destroy trust and encourage discrimination against them.
How much confidence can Muslim communities have in Prevent in schools when many serious abuses are being reported already?
A series of case studies put together by the Muslim Council of Britain on terrorism legislation confirms the worst fears we had about the statutory Prevent duty; we are seeing the duty being implemented naïvely in some schools, but also in crude, damaging and discriminatory ways in others. These are often schools where teachers have attended the ‘official’ Workshop to Raise Awareness of Prevent (WRAP) training.
Here are some examples:
Prevent is clearly leading to negative stereotyping of Muslim children and young people, and racial and religious profiling.
As Muslim pupils are now monitored and scrutinised through a securitised lens there is now little doubt that those who fit the profile set out in the Channel Vulnerability Assessment Framework will increasingly find themselves unfairly targeted.
We argue then that the Prevent duty is institutionalising anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia in schools while also undermining the duties of the schools under the Equality Act 2010 to ensure that direct and indirect unlawful discrimination is taken seriously, and that individuals or groups of students should not be treated unfairly or put at a disadvantage.
Prevent is making discussion of sensitive and controversial issues much more difficult in schools. Pupils with political opinions or who take part in protests are also coming under increasing surveillance.
Children and young people need to be able to speak openly with teachers about the issues they feel strongly about, including sensitive and controversial ones, without the fear that they will be profiled or put under suspicion.
It is perfectly legitimate, for example, for young people to criticise government foreign policy; to oppose the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan; to express support for Palestinian rights or to express either support for or opposition to the Israeli government. One may agree or disagree with such views, however they form part of legitimate discussion and debate.
The Prevent duty presents a number of specific threats to the rights of children and young people. Despite the UK government being a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, a legally binding international agreement, there appears to have been no consideration at all given to the Convention as the Prevent duty was drafted. Apart from the key articles that ensure rights apply to all children without discrimination (Article 2), and the principle that governments must act in children’s best interests (Article 3), I think there are very specific concerns in relation to Article 13 which outlines how every child has the right to freedom of expression and ideas.
As Arun Kundnani recently commented: ‘The great risk is creating an atmosphere of self-censorship – where young people don’t feel free to express themselves in schools, or youth clubs or at the mosque. If they feel angry or have a sense of injustice but nowhere to engage in a democratic process and in a peaceful way, then that’s the worst climate to create for terrorist recruitment.’
Schools are now required to actively promote ‘fundamental British values’, including ‘democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of different faiths and beliefs.’
By positioning opposition to British values as ‘extremist’, the government are engaged in a similar process as can be seen in France: a crude attempt to create a forced consensus, in the same way the French secular principle of laïcité has become a tool to reinforce narrow judgements about French identity and discriminate against minorities.
Some key questions and challenges should be considered:
In a powerful piece earlier this year, Safeguarding little Abdul, Prevent Muslim schoolchildren and the lack of parental consent, Yahya Birt asked his readers to imagine Abdul, a 12-year-old pupil:
‘Abdul deserves a better future. One in which he is treated a citizen rather than as a suspect. Where he can disagree, sometimes even be bold and radical in disagreeing if he chooses to do so, without being labelled an extremist. Where he can be proud rather than be ashamed of being a Muslim. He deserves to be inspired at school, opened up to new possibilities, for his autonomy to be nurtured and respected. This is the kind of schooling and the kind of country that we need to fight for.’
Already, in many schools, Prevent is causing significant nervousness and confusion among teachers. There is increasing evidence that teachers identify it as counter-productive and dangerous.
A teacher, who did not want to be identified, told a Guardian journalist that her Muslim pupils had become more careful about what they talked about for fear of being referred through Prevent. She added that assessment by Ofsted on how schools were protecting children from radicalisation added an extra pressure on teachers.
The National Union of Teachers statement on the Prevent duty was welcome and encouraging:
‘Teachers need opportunities to work together, and with local schools, to develop proportionate and sensible ways for schools to respond to the different risks young people face – one of which, for a comparatively small number of young people, might be exposure to individuals advocating violence.’
The National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) union moved a motion, unanimously passed at September’s TUC Congress in Brighton, arguing that Prevent ‘could destroy relationships between teachers and learners’. Requiring teachers to spy on and report pupils would ‘close down space for open discussion in a safe and secure environment and smother the legitimate expression of political opinion.’
We must work towards repeal of the Prevent duty on schools, but we need more discussion on what we need to do to achieve that. I suggest that this must involve engagement with school leaders, teachers and governing bodies, as well as working with the NUT, NASUWT and other professional associations.
We also need to develop close partnerships with the communities, pupils and families who Prevent is targeting, and ensure that as well as playing a leading role in campaigning, they can also access expert advice, support and advocacy. Research and analysis is also required to explore what is happening locally and nationally. There is a key role here for committed journalists, academics and human rights organisations. In particular, the way that Prevent is being driven into schools as part of ‘safeguarding’ needs to be more thoroughly analysed and critiqued so that teachers, school leaders and others have the confidence, the evidence and the arguments they need.
by Bill Bolloten | Bill is a teacher and independent education consultant who works with schools, school governors and children’s services on equality and diversity.
This article is an edited version of a speech at the joint IRR/CCIF seminar ‘Securitisation, Schools and Preventing Extremism’
]]>PARCOE is a grassroots alliance working in Europe to amplify the voices of Afrikan Communities of Reparations Interest all over the world. For us in PARCOE, there are spatial dimensions to reparatory justice for people of Afrikan heritage. According to political geographer Edward Soja, ‘spatial (in)justice refers to an intentional and focused emphasis on the spatial or geographical aspects of justice and injustice. As a starting point, this involves the fair and equitable distribution in space of socially valued resources and the opportunities to use them.’
It follows that spatial justice has to do with geopolitics and how the European ruling classes have gentrified the world. This has been done by way of imposing enclosures here in Europe and taking land from the commons into private ownership, but also going around the world dispossessing other people and land, space and resources, and expropriating them to become their own private property and impose their rule on other peoples. Hence the domains of European imperialism in the colonies were part of a grand gentrification process by the ruling classes of Europe.
This has impacted on their power in the metropoles as much as in the peripheries. In the colonised periphery, the ruling classes of Europe established a power which created global apartheid. There were enclaves of colonial settlers who wielded power and took resources at will, not hesitating to apply the most violent forms of exploitation, oppression and dispossession to serve their purposes, resulting in genocide and ecocide. Then they came back to Europe with the gains of these crimes in order to covet and expropriate more space in the metropolis, contribute to industrialisation and build all kinds of grand mansions in the process of appropriating more and more common land and space. Ecocide is being caused by gentrification of spaces in the neo-colonies today, such as more land grabs for extractivism. Not to mention the destruction of social housing, and the erecting of luxury apartments and corporate buildings that occurs in parts of the metropolis.
Now you find that the peoples who have been displaced from the neo-colonies, following the stolen wealth back to Europe, end up being removed violently any time the ruling classes find them in the way of expanding neoliberal capital. For example, the attack on social housing – being replaced wholesale by unaffordable private housing – is a continuation of the crimes of chattel colonial and neo-colonial enslavement being brought into the communities of the still colonised peoples now living in the metropolis.
That is why the 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March, marching from Windrush Square in Brixton to the Houses of Parliament and 10 Downing Street, highlights this process as part of the continuing Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust and continuum of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial forms of enslavement), for which Afrikan people demand reparatory justice. Not only in terms of compensation, but more fundamentally, in terms of systemic change globally to ensure the expropriation and redistribution of wealth worldwide.
The reparations march amplifies the voices of Afrikan heritage communities of resistance and activists advocating these points. The march first took place in 2014 and was significantly improved and internationalised in 2015. Once again on 1st August 2016, thousands of people will be on the streets in Europe’s biggest Afrikan Reparations March ever. However, in this the third year of the march taking place, we aim for there to be numerous simultaneous marches and/or other reparations actions in various countries in Afrika, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
The Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March Committee (AEDRMC) adopted the following aims for the March in 2015:
To draw attention to Afrikan peoples’ global determination not to let the British State and other perpetrators get away with the crimes of the Maangamizi (Afrikan hellacaust of chattel, colonial and neo-colonial enslavement).
To raise consciousness about the fact that all the attacks on us, in both individual and collective instances, amount to genocide/ecocide in Maangamizi continuity necessitating reparations.
To increase awareness of the necessity to ‘Stop the Maangamizi’ and its current manifestations such as austerity, attempts to recolonise Afrika, mentacide and deaths in police, psychiatric and prison custody.
To demonstrate Afrikan peoples’ strength, capacity and determination to speak to and challenge establishment power with our growing grassroots power to effect and secure reparations (reparatory justice) on our own terms.
To showcase Afrikan people’s grassroots initiatives for reparations.
The 1st of August has been chosen as the day of the reparations march because it is the officially recognised “Emancipation Day”, marking the passing of The Slavery Abolition Act in the British Empire, on 1 August 1833. Further, the significance of 1st August 1833 is that it is the date that after all the years of resistance by enslaved Afrikans, torn away from the Motherland, Britain and its fellow European enslavers of Afrikan people were compelled to recognise that they could no longer continue to enslave us without severe consequences. It therefore represents a symbolic day recognising our refusal to accept enslavement, in every manner, including its present day manifestations.
For the 2016 march the AEDRMC will be continuing with the theme ‘Education is Part of Preparation for Reparations’ as part of the mobilisation and consciousness-raising of our people towards playing their part in efforts to enforce the end of the Maangamizi and secure reparatory justice. This year we will be organising blocs as part of the march. There will be the Ubuntu bloc where we invite allies to attend and participate in the march in solidarity with the cause of reparations, Stop the Maangamizi and the aims of the reparations march.
A practical tool that PARCOE reparationists have developed to raise awareness of the current Maangamizi is the Stop the Maangamizi: We Charge Genocide/Ecocide Petition (SMWCGE).
The SMWCGE petition forms a companion project with the 1st August Emancipation Day Afrikan Reparations March and is therefore a positive action step of Afrikan reparatory justice campaigning which seeks to:
raise consciousness, increase awareness and recommend actions to redress the fact that all the attacks on us, in both individual and collective instances, amount to genocide/ecocide in Maangamizi continuity, necessitating reparatory justice;
highlight the need to ‘Stop the Maangamzi’ before we can truly repair the harm;
be a practical and participatory action for enabling the mass adjudication of Afrikan and other oppressed indigenous peoples’ cases for reparations, and eventually put a full stop, by way of holistic and transformative reparations, to all acts of genocide/ecocide against Afrikan and other oppressed indigenous peoples.
The SMWCGE petition calls on the UK government to establish an All-Party Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry for Truth & Reparatory Justice to: acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of the imposition of the Maangamizi (Afrikan Hellacaust of chattel, colonial and neocolonial enslavement) within and beyond the British Empire; examine subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against Afrikans and people of Afrikan descent; examine the impact of these forces on living Afrikans and Afrikan descendant communities, as well as all other peoples; make recommendations to Parliament and similar bodies at local, national and international levels, including the European Parliament, and; determine appropriate methods of dissemination of findings to the public within and beyond Britain for consultation about proposals for redress, repairs and for other purposes. The SMWCGE is also galvanising grassroots work towards establishing glocal sittings of the Ubuntukgotla*, Peoples International Tribunal for Global Justice (PITGJ).
*The Ubuntukgotla is a Pan-Afrikan conceptualisation of a court of peoples humanity interconnectedness.
SMWCGE builds on the historic 1951 We Charge Genocide Petition that was initiated by Afrikan American and Communist lawyer, William L. Patterson, noted Afrikan-American singer and human rights activist, Paul Robeson, and others on behalf of the former Civil Rights Congress of the United States. The petition outlined both the historic and modern oppression of people of Afrikan descent in America, from murders by lynching to police brutality and systematic inequalities in quality of life and health care, arguing that this collective experience of subjugation amounted to genocide according to the 1948 Genocide Convention. We Charge Genocide called on the United Nations to ‘act and to call the Government of the United States to account’. Genocide, it contended, could not be covered up as an internal affair of the United States, but was a problem for the world.
The vanguard of the International Social Movement for Afrikan Reparations (ISMAR) recognises that local issues have global dimensions and that reparatory justice can only be achieved globally before it can be secured for people of Afrikan heritage in the UK. It is essentially a decolonising process which has to first of all muster the people power, strength and capacity to delink the colonies and neo-colonies from the still colonising metropolis of the British State and the European Union. An essential part of that is the role of the decolonising contingents of the ISMAR inside the belly of the beast, the metropolis, Europe.
For us in PARCOE, this means highlighting as we did in participating in the Wretched of the Earth Bloc of the Peoples March for Climate Justice and Jobs, the still colonising essence of the coloniality of power as it is exercised in the UK, Europe and other parts of the west as well as the domains of European imperialism in other parts of the world. For us in PARCOE this is important because it has been our organising experience thus far that very often progressive forces on what is often called the ‘White Left’ refuse to see the nature of the power being exercised by the ruling classes of Europe within and outside the countries of Europe as an expression of the coloniality of power rather than just the bourgeoisie power of working people. It has been our people’s experience that the intersectionality of this coloniality of power is often not recognised, or minimised, particularly its essentially white supremacist and racist character.
That is the reason why Black Power remains a valid aspect of Afrikan people’s reparatory justice goals because we can only effectively counter the violent racist white power with truly revolutionary Black Power in order to compel genuine participatory democratisation towards multicultural pluriversality within and beyond Europe. For many people of Afrikan descent, restoration of the cultures of the colonised is an essential part of our national and social liberation struggles. Accordingly, these calls for justice imply some form of “spatial justice” as they invariably entail claims not only for the return of land in the neo-colonies but also rights to utilise space, land, properties, as well as some forms of political and/or non-territorial autonomy and other possibilities for self-determination within sites of the metropolis where people of Afrikan heritage live and work.
In furtherance of these objectives, PARCOE, as a constituent founder and organisational member of the Global Afrikan People’s Parliament, is involved in building the UK-based Afrikan Heritage Community for National Self-Determination (AHC-NSD). The AHC-NSD is focused on the holistic regeneration of Afrikan communities; mindful of the fact that, at present, such Afrikan communities exist within and beyond the UK as a multiplicity of different and even conflicting nation-state, ethnic, racial, class, gender, age and other socio-cultural configurations brought from all over the world. Therefore, regeneration of Afrikan communities is being done in a radical and intersectional way, for example, through innovative Eco-Justice Village building projects such as SERUJAMAA, which serves as a living prototype of a future MAATUBUNTUMAN which is a Pan-Afrikan Union of communities throughout the continent and diaspora of Afrika.
In this regard, we highlight MAATUBUNTUSITAWI, our Pan-Afrikan Reparatory Justice equivalent of ‘Sumak Kawsay’, an Andean indigenous approach. MAATUBUNTUSITAWI is our Afrikan contribution to the global search to replace Eurocentric models of imperialism. In essence, what we are saying is that part of effecting reparatory justice includes regenerating Afrikan heritage communities so that we can repair the harms of the Maangamizi in self-determined ways. We will need to have our own spaces, buildings, estates, parks, the preservation of places of historical interest to people of Afrikan heritage as well as the visible presence of our heritage in the open.
How you can show solidarity
You can do your bit to compel accountability for genocide against Afrikans and people of Afrikan heritage by sending a signed copy of the wording on this postcard to your MP. #StopTheMaangamizi
http://stopthemaangamizi.com/2016/01/11/stop-the-maangamizi-postcard-campaign/.
If you would like to participate in the Ubuntu Reparations Solidarity Bloc of the 1st August Afrikan Emancipation Day Reparations March please email: themarchuk@hotmail.com.
To keep abreast of developments on reparations see:
www.stopthemaangamizi.com
by Esther Stanford-Xosei // Co-Vice Chair Pan-Afrikan Reparations Coalition in Europe | @xosei