For the Win

Activism, Fans are slans!, IT is not magic pixie dust
Published on

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.

Stamp collecting

Blinded by Science, Natural World
Published on

Proper science is hard work:

A Wasp Opus 30 Years in the Making
Future entomologists working on the Australian wasp genus Sericophorus will have a much easier time identifying species, thanks to a 234-page paper by curator Wojciech Pulawski. A Danish scientist named Ole Lomholdt actually initiated this massive study in the early 1980s. However, following his untimely death in 1999, Pulawski picked up the mantle and finished this 30-year labor of love. Pulawski conducted additional field work in Australia, studied more than 1,000 specimens, described 30 species unknown to Lomholdt, generated photographs, added distribution maps, and analyzed the wasps’ evolutionary relationships. The result is the most comprehensive overview of Sericophorus ever published, including a key to 100 species.

Wikileaks confirms: removal of Hondurian president was a coup

Honduras
Published on

From a cable sent by the US ambassador to Honduras on 24th July, 2009 we learn that the removal of the then president Zelaya from power by the military and his subsequent deportation was illegal and hence a coup:

— the military had no authority to remove Zelaya from the country;

— Congress has no constitutional authority to remove a Honduran president;

— Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process;

— the purported “resignation” letter was a fabrication and was not even the basis for Congress’s action of June 28; and

— Zelaya’s arrest and forced removal from the country violated multiple constitutional guarantees, including the prohibition on expatriation, presumption of innocence and right to due process.

The official US response to the coup back then was ambivalent. While the Hondurian military’s actions were condemned, the US government accepted the outcome of the coup. It hesitated to put pressure on the coupists and sought to mediate between them and Zelaya and his supporters. This was sold as a properly neutral, unbiased position, but the end result was that the coupists won: Zelaya remains in exile while they remain in power. Had the US made this analysis coming from its own embassy public, it would’ve been much harder if not impossible for the coup to succeed.

The kids are alright

Activism, creative direct action, Policing
Published on



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?