Activism

Tunesia

Activism, Africa
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The continuing revolution in Tunesia proves how myopic both western media and blogs can be. We only woke up to what was happening last week, after riots and protests had been going on for a month; only when president Ben Ali was already in his plane on his way to France did we start to pay attention. As Jamie explains over at the New Left Project, this silence from the big media beasts is not surprising, as this was a spontaneous rebellion, not one of the US State Department’s carefully orchestrated phoney balony colour “revolutions”.

So what has been going on in Tunesia? Alternet has a good recap of the events of last month:

How did it all start? On December 19, authorities in the small, central city of Sidi Bouzid seized the produce cart that 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi was using to make a living. So Bouazizi set himself on fire. Young people in the small, central city of Sidi Bouzid rioted, and police moved to seal the city. In early January, Bouazizi died, becoming an early martyr for the cause. Brian Whitaker, the Middle East editor of the Guardian and a Tunisia expert, has agood article explaining how Bouazizi and Sidi Bouzid got the ball rolling on revolution.

For a more streetlevel view of the revolution and riots, Methalif’s blog is a good start. Over at Lenin’s Tomb, Kevin Ovenden has a nice summary of Ben Ali’s career.

Meanwhile in the rest of the North-African dictatorships, the leaders are a bit more uncomfortable today. Yesterday a protester in Egypt set himself on fire, emulating Mohamed Bouazizi and today protesters demonstrated in front of parliament, supporting him.

For the Win

Activism, Fans are slans!, IT is not magic pixie dust
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Over on the Feminist SF blog, labour organisor Ariel Wetzel reviews Cory Doctorow’s For the Win:

Doctorow imagines how workers in a global economy might resist contemporary manifestations of divide and conquer. Many of the characters in For the Win, who have worked in sweatshops and stood up against unjust working conditions both as individuals or collectively, have seen how bosses and owners utilize this tactic in contemporary transnational business models: a worker resist as an individual, and she is fired and replaced by someone desperate for a job. Workers resist collectively, and their factory is shut down and moved to a country with even worse labor laws. The Webblies, our clever heroes, adapt the Wobbly philosophy for “an injury to one is an injury to all” and organize across borders through the virtual worlds in which they work.

In short, Doctorow captures some of the key philosophies of the Wobblies through his fictional Webblies revival: solidarity across race, and gender. This tactic is an especially smart response to the challenges organizers face in the 2010s–and I’m going to recommend this book to activist friends who know little of virtual worlds because their is fertile ground here for organizing. I also hope that this novel will inspire young people, gamers and virtual workers, to form their own Webbly locals in real life; since the nineteenth century utopian novel Looking Backward science fiction has a tradition of informing real world practices, and For the Win is an awesome candidate to continue this tradition.

It’s been interesting to see Cory Doctorow’s slow radicalisation over the past decade or so. His earliest novels sounded like bog standard late nineties techno optimism, libertarianism lite to me, but with a bit more social awareness than usual. But look away for a decade and he was writing young adult novels like Little Brother and now this, a proper socialist young adult science fiction novel. Doctorow is not the first to fictionally revive the Wobblies however; Ken MacLeod had done so as well in one of his Fall Revolution novels if I remember correctly, as the International Internet Workers of the World.

Lenny’s look at what somebody I unfortunately can’t remember called the grownup version of For the Win, Adam Roberts New Model Army might also be of interest.

The kids are alright

Activism, creative direct action, Policing
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I don’t know who this kid is, but I do know he’ll be taken the mick out something fierce if this video goes viral. We don’t like young, earnest kids talking politics, especially leftwing politics, it’s all a bit cringeworthy, naive and definately not cool. But the kid is right. His generation, the children of the children of Thatcher, were supposed to be beyond politics, good little consumers only interested in X-Factor and X-Boxes. Yet like their slightly older brothers and sisters seven years ago when they skipped school to go on the anti-war demos and getting villified for it, their own experiences in trying to participate in one of their fundamental rights, the right to protest, are radicalising them. As he says, the police is no longer that nice voice at the other side of the line helping you after a burglary. Their counterparts in the estates already knew the police and media were not their friends, but for “normal”, middle class people nothing can be as radicalising as that first time you end up at the wrong demo and see yourself and your friends be treated as dangerous criminals by the authorities.

Speaking of which, this twelve year old math geek was deemed dangerous enough to be threatened by anti-terrorist police:

Nicky Wishart, a pupil at Bartholomew School, Eynsham, Oxfordshire, organised the event on Facebook to highlight the plight of his youth centre, which is due to close in March next year due to budget cuts.

The protest, which was due to take place today, has attracted over 130 people on Facebook, most of whom are children who use youth centres in Cameron’s constituency, Whitney.

Wishart said that after the school was contacted by anti-terrorist officers, he was taken out of his English class on Tuesday afternoon and interviewed by a Thames Valley officer at the school in the presence of his head of year. During the interview, Wishart says that the officer told him that if any public disorder took place at the event he would be held responsible and arrested.

Speaking to the Guardian, Nicky Wishart said: “In my lesson, [a school secretary] came and said my head of year wanted to talk to me. She was in her office with a police officer who wanted to talk to me about the protest. He said, ‘if a riot breaks out we will arrest people and if anything happens you will get arrested because you are the organiser’.

“He said even if I didn’t turn up I would be arrested and he also said that if David Cameron was in, his armed officers will be there ‘so if anything out of line happens …’ and then he stopped.”

Wishart, who describes himself as a “maths geek” said he was frightened by the encounter. “I was really scared. Normally I’m a confident speaker but I lost all my confidence. My mum was worried, and I was worried and I didn’t know what to do.”

Armed police threatening twelve year olds. Does it not make you proud of Britain?

Confirmed: Americans are still humourless gits

Activism, Climate change, Funny, Video
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So the British 10:10 campaign (aiming at cutting carbon emissions ten percent in 2010) put out the satirical video above which, to be fair is a bit heavy handedly ironic and of course the usual numbnuts who still think a wet summer refutes climate change take it seriously and scream about intended genocide. They have to, it’s in their job description (I refuse to believe anybody believes this nonsense without a paycheck being involved somewhere). As everybody who does have a brain should understand by now, these people should be mocked, not argued with.

Unfortunately, climate change deniers are not the onlyones whose sense of humour has been surgically been removed; the same goes for most American environmentalists, who have had their panties in a bunch about this video as well. Case in point:

There were emails from people all saying the same thing: Have you seen this? This was a gross video making its way around Youtube, purporting to show people being blown up for not believing in climate change. It’s been “pulled” from Youtube by its creators, the British climate group 10:10, but of course nothing is ever really “pulled” from Youtube. If you want to watch it bad enough, I’m pretty sure you can find it. Or you can look at the stories by climate deniers assailing it as the latest example of eco-fascism.
The climate skeptics can crow. It’s the kind of stupidity that hurts our side, reinforcing in people’s minds a series of preconceived notions, not the least of which is that we’re out-of-control and out of touch — not to mention off the wall, and also with completely misplaced sense of humor.

[…]

JR: The video is beyond tasteless and should be widely condemned. […]

Dear oh dear.

Worrying how the deniers will spin anything is useless. No matter how inoffensive a campaign they will object: that’s what they’re paid for. In fact, all this worrying about how this video sends the wrong message about how authoritarian environmentalists are (percieved to be) is actually reinforcing the deniers’ message. Anybody who thinks this video shows the reality behind the environmental movement or whatever is a loon. Anybody with a functional brain knows that. Complaining about it only validates the loons.

Unite wins court battle against BA

Activism, Unions
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British Airways strike ban is overturned by appeal court:

The appeal court overturned a high court injunction against the strikes won by BA on Monday, hours before the first five-day strike was due to take place. The appeal was allowed by the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, and Lady Justice Smith, who rejected the original ruling that Unite had breached the 1992 Trade Union Act by taking inadequate steps to inform members of the result of a strike ballot in February. It was rejected by the master of the rolls, Lord Neuberger.

It’s good news for the Unite union, as this ruling means employers locked in battle with the union cannot get a ballot to strike declared invalid just because the members weren’t told about eleven spoiled ballots. The news confirms Palau’s hunch the original judge kicked this upstairs, making his decision on purely procedural grounds but leaving the intepretation of the law to a more senior court.

Meanwhile, does it surprise anybody that BA was trying to fix up union organisers as long ago as 2007?