Radical cooperatism can deliver fairer capitalism

April 25, 2012 by Leave a comment

Mike Morgan-Giles

Image © Uli Harder

2012 has been officially named by the United Nations as the International Year of Cooperatives. They are widely recognised as being a force for good – with the impact of cooperatives extending from housing to community shops to football clubs.

Yet it appears this is an opportunity that the Government plans to let slip. By the end of this Parliament, their only commitment to a cooperative agenda will likely have been the conversion of public services from being state run to being cooperative led.

While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it is an indication that the Coalition views cooperatives and mutuals as mechanisms to disengage the state from the provision of public services, rather than because they genuinely believe in the development of a cooperative economy and society.

On the other hand, Labour has held a historic connection to the cooperative movement, with the Co-operative Party having been a sister organisation since 1927. In fact, there are 29 Co-operative Party MPs, with further representation in the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and in local government.

The MPs range from senior figures like Ed Balls and Stephen Twigg, to fast up and comers such as Stella Creasy and Luciana Berger. This is a Parliamentary coalition that should be utilised to promote a new consensus on the companies where people work, the shops and services that people use and the places where people live.

Earlier this year, the Government said that they intend to introduce a Cooperatives Bill in the upcoming Queens Speech on 9th May. This is to be cautiously welcomed, but undoubtedly the devil is in the detail.

Creating a genuinely cooperative society requires more than just a bill – it requires direction, policies and an end target. There are around 13 million cooperative members within the UK, all of varying degree, but the ambition should be to involve almost every person across the country in one way or another.

The left therefore need to start laying out what is required in law to make this a reality. A good start would undoubtedly be simplifying the rules around starting a cooperative or mutual and providing advice to do so. But there is a need to go a great deal further.

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It wasn’t supposed to be like this

April 24, 2012 by Leave a comment

Daniel Crump 

Image © Que Comunismo

Initially, South America’s near continent-wide economic expansion meant great advantages for the rest of the Western world. In the opening decade of the century, with Argentina largely at the mercy of the IMF, South America was led mostly by governments that the West could do business with. For better or worse for the people of South America, this meant that the West had stronger trading partners, a decline in drug related violence and yet another example of liberal, free-market economics becoming the default setting for any nation that wished to exist within the international community.

This was also a time when we knew how to differentiate the good guys from the bad. Across the border from Colombia, and 90 miles off the coast of Florida, lay Latin America’s answer to the Axis of Evil. With the menacing prospect of further international terrorism following September 11th, US President George W Bush was able to maintain a healthy distance between Pro and Anti US Latin America. Nowhere was this more evident than between neighbours Colombia and Venezuela. The Bush administration was able to manipulate this relationship by placing US military bases on Colombian soil which were, in the US’s own words, designed as a launch pad for military operations against Anti US Latin American Governments.  South American politics seemed to fit so neatly into the US world-view.

Fast forward to the present day and something rather unexpected seems to have taken place; South American governments are increasingly beginning to think for themselves. Last month’s Organisation of American States (OAS) Summit was the biggest indication yet of the diverging paths taken by South and North America. At the discussion table were measures such as the legalisation of the drugs trade, British claims over ‘Las Malvinas’ and Cuba’s absence from the summit talks. With better relations between Colombia and Venezuela and an increasing desire to settle internal matters through UNASUR rather than the OAS, South America is speaking with its own voice and making its own decisions. The most significant development of South American integration is surely the growing contribution of the Continent’s left-wing bloc.

South American Integration

During the Bush Administration it was clear that the OAS took the majority of decisions affecting the American region. The Organisation was largely designed to satisfy North American goals such as the fights against terrorism and the illegal drugs trade. Cuba was suspended from talks between 1962-2009 and there appears to be no pressing need to reinstate them.

Since then, both the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) have gained a more influential voice. ALBA stands for a rejection of trade liberalization and free trade agreements, preferring to project a vision of mutual economic aid transfers, bartering and social welfare. UNASUR is becoming ever more effective at curbing the influence of the US in South America by resolving the Colombian Venezuelan conflict and agreeing to prohibit US military bases in Colombia being used for military purposes outside of Colombian soil. Read more of this post

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Clowns to the Left of me, jokers to the Right

April 21, 2012 by Leave a comment

Craig Berry

Image © The Prime Minister's Office

In 2010 David Cameron reaffirmed his commitment to measuring levels of happiness. There’s more to life than money, he argued. Accordingly, the Office for National Statistics included four questions on ‘subjective well-being’ in the Annual Population survey for the first time in April 2011.

This is the sound of the Conservative Party moving away, albeit very tentatively, from neoliberalism. The economic downturn has not altered but reinforced Cameron’s point of view on this. His support for measuring happiness, alongside GDP, derives instead from his profound commitment to conservative ideology.

As New Labour’s ‘accommodation’ to neoliberalism and the Thatcher legacy became stronger rather than weaker – contrary to early promises – Cameron carved a space for himself in promoting traditional English values in contrast to Labour’s fanatical modernisation.

It would be easy, and not unjustifiable, for the left to be cynical about what the government is doing. But the left’s bêtes noires of recent decades, the neoliberals, are also cynical, and in some cases incensed – see for example Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod’s research for the free market think-tank Institute of Economic Affairs. And take another look at the speech on happiness Cameron gave in November 2010. He contrasts the pursuit of happiness in public policy with three shining examples of a neoliberal agenda in action: immigration, cheap booze, and consumerism.

This does not mean there is not a major flaw in the government’s thinking. In terms of measuring social progress, the effectiveness of happiness measures are undermined by the fact that, as Johns and Ormerod point out, people always say seven. The ONS asked people ‘how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?’, ‘to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?’, and ‘how happy did you feel yesterday?’; across all three questions, three-quarters of people said seven out of ten. (When the question was posed in more negative terms, that is ‘how anxious did you feel yesterday?’, the vast majority said three out of ten.)

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Guest Blog: Forget Rio’s infamous favela: I’ve seen it all in Liverpool

April 15, 2012 by Leave a comment

Vicki Kellaway

Image © Vicki Kellaway

I sat down at my computer today to tell you how I walked around a favela, one of those notoriously impoverished, crime-ridden communities huddled on the hills of Rio de Janeiro. But I’ve changed my mind. Instead I’m going to tell you a story about a land far away – 5,800 miles to be exact.

It was 7.30pm on Good Friday when my news editor wandered past my desk. “You know what darlin’,” she said (she really talks like that) “There’s a 13-year-old girl who’s been missing two days now. She might just have run away but, you know, it’s a quiet night. Why don’t you go and have a chat with her mum and see what happened?”

Forty minutes later, I pulled onto a street in which mine was the only car. I parked, I knocked and the girl’s mother let me in. Her house was bare, save for a few chairs on the carpet-free floor and a sofa that had seen better days. There was a puppy and several kids though, including an eight-year-old who had his nose pressed against the window.

“Is that your car?” he asked me excitedly. “What is it?”

“It’s a Vauxhall Corsa,” I replied, trying not to smile.

Four years have passed since that night but I remember it perfectly. It either altered the way I see the world or it confirmed simmering doubts I didn’t know I had. The girl’s mother was vague. Her kid was a runner – always disappearing somewhere. Maybe she was being bullied at school but, then again, maybe she wasn’t even going to school. Her mother had no idea.

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This Game Really Does Have New Rules

March 11, 2012 by Leave a comment

John Paul Shammas 

Image © Mamamia

In the voice-over introducing his video “Kony 2012,” narrator Jason Russell tells a worldwide audience, “The game has new rules”, and he’s right.

There was a brief lull around campuses and student bars this week when students had momentarily halted from watching a baby monkey ride a pig on Youtube. Instead, their internet activities had moved on to something else, and the conversation had moved towards the infrequently visited topic of African warlords. The Youtube phenomenon Kony 2012 is a short campaign film by Invisible Children that aims to make Joseph Kony famous. Not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent that through social media, we can mobilise our youth to influence our political discourse in order to bring bad guys around the world to justice. Sounds great, right?

The truth is that social media is an incredible mechanism for connecting ideas, including bad ones. Helping people is a complex business, something this viral video doesn’t communicate. Consequently, campaigns such as this one have a distorting impact which encourages the conversation (and the money) in the wrong direction. For example, 69% of the money received by donations and Kony 2012 related purchases aren’t going towards helping anyone. Instead, it is going towards Invisible Children promotion campaigns which ultimately perpetuate a self-promoting cycle for the company to go and make more viral hits without investing the bulk of their profits into local communities and aid. This fact is made even more repulsive when the content of the video is a journey with a self-absorbed narrator who unashamedly indulges in hero-worship of himself, attempting to seem paternalistic, but coming across as simply neo-colonial and deceptively populist.

George Clooney features in the video briefly, calling for warlords and tyrants to be made as famous as he is. The sentiment here is basically calling for the many atrocities and injustices in the world to get increasing levels of exposure within the public domain, which is something we can all get on board with. The issue however, which is inherent throughout this Kony 2012 debacle is the misdirection of our discourse and the misdirection of our culture. We should be addressing why we value George Clooney as so essential and immediate to our consciousness, not calling on the media to equate his exposure with human rights violations – that’s a consumer choice issue of which the buck firmly stops with us, the consumer. Read more of this post

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Realism and Religion

February 25, 2012 by Leave a comment

Andrew Calderwood

Image © Duke Human Rights Centre

For many people, religion will have a profound effect throughout their lives, often acting as a great healer of the soul. It will provide a positive influence in times of need and a rock of solace throughout times of pain and suffering. Equally, during periods of great plenty and fulfilment, the preaching of key messages, moral wisdom and the search for solidarity can be used as an unmatched medium in the step towards societal advancement.

Whether a fully fledged believer or an ardent atheist, the majority of society are likely to agree, that the cornerstones of religious preaching can set sound foundations when building towards a prosperous future in the pursuit of harmonious global relations. This positive underpinning, however, makes it an ever more bitter pill to swallow when recognising that the various religions that encompass our world appear inherently unable to co-exist side by side and assimilate themselves into a united society. Instead, radical religious leaders and sects appear intent on abusing religious ideology in the pursuit of objectives that are deemed as personally productive. Many demonstrate a lack of willingness to cooperate within the national and international arena and thus fail to contribute to the constructive progression of developments in cordial political dialogue.

Too often we see religious leaders or groups striving for dominance over another, or politicians using religious beliefs as a political vehicle to control the masses. We have also been witness to the oppression of groups and individuals who openly oppose the dogma of ruling political parties, or those who may be deemed undesirable or a danger to the status quo of power politics. Throughout history religion has been used as a tool to nurture the ‘Power Urge’ of groups and individuals, derived from the more basic urges of self-aggrandisement and self-assertion. The power urge can be translated through personal ambition, a quest for prestige or simply from a desire to profit from the work of others.[1)

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Global Justice and the Future of Hope

February 15, 2012 by Leave a comment

Rajesh Makwana

Image © Niklas Sjöblom

Would it be easier to create a sustainable global economy if the world more closely resembled the demographics and geography of Iceland – a volcanic island with a manageably small population and a unique abundance of renewable energy? This was among the many questions raised during a panel discussion at Tipping Point Film Fund’s UK premier of Future of Hope, often referred to as the Iceland documentary.

Since the Nordic country experienced the systemic failure of its entire banking sector in 2008, a number of Iceland’s senior banking executives have been arrested, sacked or sued. Grass roots organisations, including the Ministry of Ideas that was featured in the film, have since hosted a National Assembly of unprecedented scale. The government-backed Assembly was designed to focus specifically on the nation’s next steps; to agree on a set of collective values and to establish a clear vision for how to rebuild their economy from the ashes of the old. While the film did not focus on the Assembly itself, progressives would not be surprised by its outcome: participants emphasised the importance of robust public services, establishing an environmentally responsible and sustainable economy, and ensuring equality and transparency in the country’s future renaissance.

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Marx out of 10 for Page 3’s apologists?

January 31, 2012 by 3 Comments

Sam Fowles

Image © OBJECT

The Page 3 debate shows how the left, as well as the right, must stop clinging to old ideologies and address the problems of today.

“It was a breath of fresh air”, writes Ellie Mae O’Haggen in the New Statesman, “to see four articulate women at the Leveson inquiry spelling out the sexism most feminists knew was there all along… without being ridiculed or interrupted.” How short the sudden silence.

Oddly, it was from writers on the left that one heard the loudest rebuttal of the submission from Object and “Turn Your Back on Page 3”.  Roy Greenslade was quick to question the veracity of their evidence in the Evening Standard, while Brendan O’Neill launched a telling broadside against the “bevy of feminists” and their “shrill chorus” on this website.

This issue presents a problem for many on the left. For once we’re facing a major societal issue that wasn’t caused by faceless bankers or privileged Tories. The 99% are just as culpable. We have, by the implicit consent of the consumer, created the gutter press. Tabloids print what sells and we’re all buying.

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The political discourse of America in recent history has been driven by a narrative – a durable myth

January 30, 2012 by 2 Comments

 John Shammas

Image © Michael Noirot

Reagan’s voice commanded a receptive audience during a period of economic stagnation with his talk of values, responsibilities and duty prevailing over a worn and laboured liberal rhetoric which lost itself in almost-exclusively discussing rights and entitlement schemes. Even today, Reagan’s critics fall so easily into playing the role of an apologist for the out-of-touch, tax-and-spend stereotype – a stereotype of which the conservative media sell to their demographic at a rate similar to that with which Apple shift iPhones. Meanwhile, the key contemporary GOP field today – the Bachmans, the Palins and the Gingrichs of this world do not have to function as stand-alone politicians: instead their key occupation is to merely serve as apparatus to the echo-chamber of the Reagan myth.

Reaganism constitutes a politics of post-modern structuralism which has such obvious and explicit endurance today. It is driven by a mythology that highlights the fact that the key battleground issues of the 1960’s have never been fully resolved. The disputes, shifts and changes of the era cannot be solely defined and dictated by political or partisan preference. Crucially, the durability of the Reagan myth feasts of the evanescence of a counterculture informed by individual choices, moral standing and personal identity which has dissipated into consumerism, materialism and ideological separation.

And the emphasis here must ultimately arrive at that last point: ideological separation. So often, in his election campaign in 2008 and even in last week’s State of the Union address, Obama idealistically speaks of bi-partisanship, cooperation and ideological synthesis. However, he has been wholesomely defeated in his campaign. The essential legacy that Reaganism has engrained upon our politics is displayed in how viscerally and unapologetically we define ourselves in ideological terms. Partisanship is not an issue. Partisanship is the issue.  Read more of this post

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Bellow’s History

January 30, 2012 by Leave a comment

Nik Williams

Bosnian widows grieving at a mass funeral in 2010

‘To forget a Holocaust is to kill twice’, uttered by Elie Wiesel. This phrase haunts the legacy of the Holocaust, it leaks into every remembered tale, every history book, every elderly relative drawing at the twines of their memories, every town square and every memorial. To kill twice, to condemn not the already condemned body nor the mind, but the memory is a crime we can all become culpable in, as we let the shape of the Holocaust and its horrors dissolve into nothingness. When something is hidden from view, withdrawn from circulation, its outline becomes hazy and indefinite. Soon you redraw the image in your mind, but it is never the same. Lengths have shortened, curves emerged and proportions are tinkered with and soon you have in your mind, the last navigatory tool, a caricature of what was. But is the Holocaust trapped under the weight of our collective history, bound up in twine shunted against the wall in the room coddled with cobwebs, to be missed, to be obstructed from view by the miscellany and knickknacks of modern life?

You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them, feel for them? You can nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love as soft men think.

Saul Bellow wrote this in Herzog and when thinking about the Holocaust, genocide and crimes against humanity, how can history be anything but cruel? To think of Bellow’s cruel history is to think of a long and continuous thread tying us to the camps at Dachau, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Majdanek, Belzec, Stutthof; the brutal war of independence in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan); Khmer Rouge’s utopic view of a ‘purer’ sense of communism that saw around 2 million people killed; the widespread murder and cannibalism of pygmy tribes in the DRC; inter-tribal violence in Rwanda that pitted Hutu and Tutsi against each other, severing villages and families; the annexation of East Timor by Indonesia and the list goes on. Reciting the list, part of me wants to call out to Wiesel: ‘how can we forget, it still happens, it is occurring around the world to remind us!’ But to remember a face, an individual instance, in such a sizable crowd, a mass of people where the edges of the crowd cannot be seen, is impossible. But how have we let such a crowd of the dead amass threatening to make the voices of each case inaudible above the din of the screams, yelps and sobs? Read more of this post

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