Corruption rules in "a time for solidarity" in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"
For the occasion of International Indigenous Peoples Day, August 9, 2020:
Arkilaus Kladit, a member of the Knasaimos-Tehit people in South Sorong Regency in West Papua Province, Indonesia, writes about the importance of his tribe’s customary forests on the Mongabay website.
Arkilaus, who is a member of the Knasaimos Indigenous Peoples Council, describes his tribe’s long struggle to secure recognition of his tribe’s customary lands by the Indonesian government.
Arkilaus explains how the Knasaimos-Tehit people are dependent on forests for food, community resilience, and cultural significance.
On the surface, it’s a story about an Algerian coastal town beset by a mysterious plague. But the allegory works on several levels. “It is at the same time a tale about an epidemic, a symbol of Nazi occupation, and, thirdly, the concrete illustration of a metaphysical problem,” Camus wrote.
It’s that last point that’s so relevant now. The “metaphysical problem” is the brute fact of suffering. It’s a problem because there’s no real reason for it. Like the plague, it’s just a thing that happens in the world whether we want it to or not. Camus’s novel asks if we can conceive of suffering not as an individual burden but as a shared experience — and maybe turn it into something affirmative.
The key is to recognize the universality of suffering. A plague is an extraordinary event, and the horror it unleashes is extraordinary, too. But suffering is anything but extraordinary. Every single day you leave the house, something terrible could happen. At any moment, you could get mortally sick. The same is true for everyone you know. All of us are hostages to forces over which we have no control.
A pandemic simply foregrounds what’s already true of our condition. And it forces us to think about our responsibilities to the people around us. One of the reasons I love The Plague is that it draws out the conflict between individual happiness and moral obligation in such vivid fashion. The hero of The Plague is a committed doctor named Rieux. From the very beginning, Rieux devotes himself to resisting the plague and achieving solidarity with its victims. His sense of purpose is wrapped up in struggle and sacrifice demanded by the sickness.
Each character in the story is defined by what they do when the scourge comes. No one escapes it, but those who revolt against it, who reduce the suffering of others, are the most fulfilled. The only villains in The Plague are those who cannot see beyond themselves. The plague, for these people, is either an excuse to flee or an opportunity to exploit. What makes them so awful isn’t their self-interest; it’s what their self-interest undermines. Because they can’t see that their condition is shared, an ethos of solidarity is completely foreign to them. And that blindness makes community — real community — impossible.
A recurring theme of The Plague is that crises have a way of upending the social order. It throws almost everything we take for granted into chaos. And it forces us to attend to the present moment. Nothing else really matters when your day-to-day survival is at stake. There’s just here and now and, as Rieux says, “We’re all involved in it.”
The coronavirus isn’t “The Big One.” It won’t be the end of us. But it will demand the kind of solidarity our individualist ethos denies.
At the very end of The Plague, Camus distills his philosophy in a final passage:
And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.
That last line is critical. The struggle against suffering is never over. The plague will return, and so will everything else that torments human beings. But the point of the book is that a shared struggle is what makes community possible in the first place.
The lesson of The Plague is that we should see ourselves as members of a community, not as atomized actors. And that means when we think of “preparedness,” we’re thinking not just of ourselves but of how our actions will affect other people. It means thinking of risk as more than an individual calculation.
A pandemic, terrible though it is, highlights our mutual interdependence in a way that only tragedy can. The beauty of The Plague is that it asks the reader to map the lessons of the pandemic onto everyday life. The principles that drive the hero, Rieux, are the same principles that make every society worthwhile — empathy, love, and solidarity.
If we learn these lessons now, in a moment of crisis, we’ll all be better off on the other side of it.
For Re:LODE Radio this post chooses, necessarily, to confront the witting and unwitting villains in this plague scenario. To quote again from Sean Illing's piece for Vox:
The
only villains in The Plague are those who cannot see beyond themselves.
The plague, for these people, is either an excuse to flee or an
opportunity to exploit. What makes them so awful isn’t their
self-interest; it’s what their self-interest undermines. Because they
can’t see that their condition is shared, an ethos of solidarity is
completely foreign to them. And that blindness makes community — real
community — impossible.
The Opinion piece by Michael Marmot published in the print version of the Guardian Journal, Tuesday 11 August 2020, runs with the headline:
The Journal page in the print edition gives equal weight to both the headline and the opening two sentences, that begins with a literary reference to Albert Camus' The Plague:
“The pestilence is at once blight and revelation,” wrote Albert Camus in The Plague, “it brings the hidden truth of a corrupt world to the surface.” If that is true of Covid-19, as it was of the plague of Camus’ novel, then the UK’s dismal record is telling us something important about our society.
We are doing badly: dramatic social inequalities in Covid-19 deaths; high rates in black, Asian and minority ethnic groups; and, now, the highest excess mortality in Europe.
The statistician David Spiegelhalter, in his wise and clear way, has been counselling us against drawing too much on international comparisons because of differences in the way Covid-19 deaths are assigned. Excess mortality is much more reliable. It is a measure of how many more deaths, from all causes, there were in each week of 2020 compared with how many would have been expected based on the average of the last five years.
The Office for National Statistics reported on 30 July that for the period 21 February to 12 June, the excess mortality was higher in England than in any other European country, including the other countries of the UK. Commenting on this report in the Guardian, Spiegelhalter says it will be years before we can properly assess the measures taken against the epidemic. I am sure that’s right but, if we stand back, we can see where to look.
My starting place is the report my colleagues and I published on 25 February, Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On. More than a decade after I was asked by the then secretary of state for health to chair an independent review of health inequalities, we looked again at the lie of the land. England was doing badly in two key respects (remember that this was before the pandemic reached our shores).
The first was overall health. In the decade from 2010, the rate of increase in life expectancy had slowed, dramatically so. For more than 100 years, life expectancy had been improving at a rate of about one year every four years. The increase in life expectancy that had begun to slow in 2010 had, by 2018, more or less ground to a halt. Compared with other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (which is to say, rich) countries, the improvement in life expectancy in the UK from 2010 on was the slowest of all, except for the US and Iceland.
Second, health inequalities continued to increase. The clear picture is that of a social gradient: the more deprived the place you live, the higher the mortality rate and the shorter the life expectancy. During the 2000s the gap in life expectancy between the poorest 20% of areas and the rest narrowed. During the decade from 2010 on, it increased. And if health stopped improving and health inequalities got bigger, it implies that society stopped improving and inequality in general got worse.
My speculation is that the same set of influences that led to England and the UK looking unhealthy in the decade after 2010 led to us having the worst excess mortality figures in Europe because of Covid-19. Such speculation can be given substance if we look at the coronavirus inequalities. Here we find that there is once again a social gradient in mortality rates from Covid-19 – the more deprived the area, the higher the number of deaths. This social gradient is almost exactly paralleled by the social gradient for all causes of death. It suggests that the causes of unequal Covid-19 outcomes are rather similar to the causes of inequalities in health more generally.
The political mood of the decade from 2010 was one of the rolling back of the state, and a continuation of an apparent consensus that things were best left to the market. At times, this aversion to government action was made worse by a suspicion of expertise.
This rolling back of the state was seen clearly in a reduction in public spending from 42% of GDP in 2009-10 to 35% in 2018-19. The fiscal retrenchment was done in a regressive way. If we look at spending per person by local authority, we find that the poorer the area concerned, the bigger the reduction. In the least deprived 20% of areas, local government spending went down by 16%; in the most deprived it went down by 32%. This is remarkable – the greater the need was, the more spending was reduced.
Changes made to the tax and benefit system introduced in 2015 went on in a similar vein: the lower the family income, the bigger the loss as a result of the chancellor’s policies. I sat with a former minister in the Conservative government, showed him these figures and said: “Your government’s policy was ‘make the poor poorer’.” He looked uncomfortable and said that perhaps it was not their explicit policy. But there are smart people in the Treasury and they must have known that this would be the effect.
We limped into the pandemic, then, in a parlous state – an unhealthy population marked by growing inequalities and a worsening of the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age; in short, in the social determinants of health.
In addition to the general mistrust of the state by the government, we had the legacy of specific cuts. NHS spending, supposedly ringfenced in an age of austerity, had not kept up with historic trends: an average 3.8% annual increase since 1978-79 had slowed to about a 1% increase in 2010, at a time when the population was growing, and growing older.
The budget of Public Health England had been cut by 40% in real terms from its founding in 2012 up to 2019-20. Public health was moved out of the NHS into local government – not necessarily a bad thing – but its budget allocation was reduced by £700m in real terms between 2014-15 and 2019-20. Spending on adult social care was reduced, too: by 3% in the least deprived 20% of local areas, and by 16% in the most deprived.
Much of what I have laid out above could be applied to the US, too: a mistrust of the state and miserable levels of spending on social infrastructure and social safety nets. In the US, this is compounded by marked inequalities in access to healthcare.
Everyone in the US, except it would seem the president and his core supporters, is aware that the government’s failure to handle the coronavirus pandemic has been catastrophic. Yet, if we trust the figures, US mortality rates from Covid-19 are lower than the UK’s. How badly must we be doing, indeed. It is time to heed Camus’ words, and examine the truth about what has brought us to this point. Having been honest about the causes, perhaps we can begin to address them.
Mark Brown Arts correspondent for the Guardian reports on the playwright David Hare drawing on his experience of Covid-19 subject of a new play (Mon 10 Aug 2020), a monologue starring Ralph Fiennes to be part of Bridge theatre’s reopening schedule. Mark Brown reports that David Hare has been particularly damning of the coronavirus response, calling it worse than the handling of the Suez crisis or Iraq.
“To watch a weasel-worded parade of ministers shirking responsibility for their failures and confecting non-apologies to the dead and dying has seen British public life sink as low as I can remember in my entire lifetime,” he said.
Hare continued that “in return for lockdown, isolation, commercial disaster and social distancing” the British public deserved honesty. “They must own up to their mistakes, stop dodging and waffling and start to trust us with the truth.”
Re:LODE Radio considers this demand somewhat limited in its scope. This plague has revealed the hidden rottenness, a state of putrefaction and decay at the heart of politics. Even though quoted before, it nevertheless requires to be quoted again: From Sean Illing's piece for Vox:
The
only villains in The Plague are those who cannot see beyond themselves.
The plague, for these people, is either an excuse to flee or an
opportunity to exploit.
Simon Murphy and Sarah Marsh report for the Guardian (Tue 11 Aug 2020) on possible shady dealings between government ministers and a prominent private "outsourcing" company. They write:
The government has been urged to demonstrate there was no favouritism at play in awarding Serco a contact-tracing contract worth £108m, as a leaked memo revealed the outsourcing firm was enlisted to help with the Covid-19 response as early as January.
Serco is facing growing calls to be axed from any future involvement in contact-tracing services amid concerns over the performance of private firms contracted to trace people who have mixed with infected individuals.
An email leaked to Justin Madders, the shadow health minister, showed the company was approached by Public Health England in January over preparations to tackle the pandemic, prompting questions over whether it was “cherry picked” by the government and given the inside track.
The £108m contract was directly awarded to Serco by the Crown Commercial Service on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care (DoHSC) in May. It was not put out to open tender but selected via an existing framework of suppliers.
It comes after the government announced on Monday that NHS test and trace was cutting 6,000 contact-tracer jobs and allocating roles to regional teams to work with councils, after criticism that the centrally run system was failing to tackle local outbreaks.
Along with outsourcing firm Sitel, Serco has been contracted by the government to oversee “non-complex” contact-tracing cases in England, where call centre workers contact individuals who have spent time with an infected person. The firm has been forced to defend its performance, however, after figures showed just over half of people from the same household as an infected person were being contacted. Concerns have been raised by contact tracers that they have made just a handful of calls and feel untrained.
With Serco’s £108m three-month contract up for renewal on 23 August, the shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, and the shadow Cabinet Office minister, Rachel Reeves, jointly wrote this week to the health secretary, Matt Hancock, urging him not to hand Serco any more money to run contact tracing. They are calling on the government not to extend the contract, which could be worth up to £410m.
On Tuesday Madders released an email that he said was sent to Serco contact tracers in early June on behalf of the firm’s customer services director, Garry Robinson, which suggested the company had been contacted by health officials in January asking for help.
In the email, Robinson conceded it had been a slow start but stated there would be a “steady increase in the workload” in the coming weeks. In a section titled “journey so far”, he detailed the company’s early involvement in the pandemic response, writing: “I received a call from Public Health England officials on 22 January, explaining there was a virus in China, which was causing them concern, and they asked if I could stand up a small team in case they required urgent support. Since then, I have been responsible for a number of support lines across various government departments offering support to citizens of the UK concerned about their health, the financial impact CV-19 has had on them, their children’s education and the impact on their companies.”
Madders told the Guardian: “That email went out to contact tracers in early June and suggests Serco was cherry picked very early on by the government to get involved in the pandemic response. It looks like they’ve had the inside track from the start. It begs the question, why was Serco asked as early as January to get involved in the government’s response to the pandemic?
“It’s clear that adequate procurement processes were not followed when Serco was later awarded a £108m government contract to oversee contact tracing. Like with some PPE contracts, this seems to be creating a bit of stench. It’s up to the government to demonstrate there was no favouritism at play here.”
Cat Hobbs, director of We Own It, an organisation that campaigns for public ownership of public services, urged the government to give the money it could spend on renewing private contact-tracing contracts to local authorities. “Local teams have the tools and the local knowledge they need to do this vital work before any second wave this winter. Now they need the money,” she said.
A Serco spokesperson said: “Serco was appointed to the test-and-trace programme under the Crown Commercial Service’s contact centre services framework. We gained our place on the framework through fair and open competition. Serco has played an important part in helping to reach hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have passed on the virus. Our team of call handlers has been 93% successful in persuading people to isolate where we are able to have conversations.”
A government spokesperson said: “As a result of public and private sector organisations working together at pace, we were able to protect our NHS and strengthen our response to this unprecedented global pandemic. Contracts have been awarded completely in line with procurement regulations for exceptional circumstances, where being able to procure at speed has been critical in the national response to Covid-19.”
On the 17th July the BBC fact-checked the statement that Boris Johnson had made the previous Friday, accompanied as he was on this occasion by Dido Harding, who is in charge of the NHS test and trace system for England.
Re:LODE Radio suggests a caption to the above image could read "Dido and an arse"!
The picture depicts the meeting of the Trojan prince Aeneas and the Carthaginian queen, Dido, as described in Book I of Virgil's Aeneid. Following the sack of Troy, Aeneas and his followers are shipwrecked on the coast of North Africa, near the city of Carthage. There, Aeneas meets his mother, Venus, disguised as a huntress. She tells him the sad history of Dido, who was forced to flee her home in Tyre and to build a new citadel at Carthage. Venus envelops Aeneas and his compatriot Achates in a shroud of mist to enable them to penetrate Dido's citadel undetected. Upon entering the temple of Juno, Aeneas sees Dido seated upon her throne, welcoming a number of his fellow Trojans whom he had believed drowned in the recent shipwreck, and expressing her desire to see their 'king' Aeneas. At that moment the mist clears and Aeneas reveals his identity to Dido. This is the precise moment portrayed by Dance.
John Harris of the Guardian has been covering this "saga" throughout the pandemic and concludes that:
And, furthermore, that the "move to include local authorities in test and trace could allow politicians to pass blame in a Covid second wave" (Tue 11 Aug 2020).
John Harris makes his analysis and writes:
The saga of the attempts to set up an English test-and-trace system is perhaps the central story of the government’s Covid-19 failure.
At the heart of the tale is a prime minister who promised NHS test and trace would be a “world beating” operation. Next to him sits Matt Hancock, the health secretary whose record is now indelibly associated with the smartphone app that was meant to be integral to controlling the virus, but has yet to materialise. Other key actors include Serco, the multinational outsourcing company that has previously been contracted to run everything from prisons to air traffic control – and, at a cost of £108m, was recently put in charge of recruiting and training thousands of call centre workers to establish contact with infected people and ensure that anyone they had been close to went into self-isolation.
Over the five months since lockdown began, one other set of voices has been central to the drama: local authorities, whose 140-odd directors of public health are expert in disease control and contact tracing, and whose councillors, officials and staff are forensically familiar with the areas they serve, even after a decade of crushing austerity. During the outbreak’s initial phase – roughly, from February to the end of May – many of these people complained of being cut out of decision-making about the pandemic, and deprived of resources and the all-important data that would allow them to get on top of local outbreaks.
According to Sir Chris Ham, a lifelong NHS insider and the former chief executive of the health charity the Kings Fund, the basic insight either ignored or misunderstood by the government was plain. “Contact tracing has to be led locally by people who work in the communities that are affected and understand them,” he says.
“They’re part-detectives, part-anthropologists: they work with leaders in faith groups, in community organisations, and public services, to understand why there are more cases in a particular area, and how to work with everyone to contain and reduce the challenges. You can’t do that sitting in a remote call centre.”
But now, with the reopening of schools in England less than a month away, everything is to change. From 24 August, nationally-recruited call-centre staff will be “ringfenced” into individual teams that will be linked to specific councils, and the national test-and-trace effort will take a new “integrated” and “localised” approach. This shift follows the arrival of local measures aimed at controlling Covid-19 flare-ups in Leicester and Greater Manchester – and the trailblazing creation of dedicated local test-and-trace operations in Blackburn, Lancashire, Calderdale in West Yorkshire, and Liverpool.
Last week, figures were published showing that whereas call-centre or online workers managed to trace 56% of people’s contacts, the figure was 98% among local health protection teams. The imbalance between the two approaches was perhaps most clearly demonstrated by stories of call-centre workers making handfuls of calls per month, while council staff were worked off their feet.
For those of us who have been following this story, disentangling the confounding mess that was hastily built to administer testing and tracing has been an onerous task. If the tale has a single point of origin, it was the abandonment of initial efforts on 12 March, and the outbreak therefore being allowed to slip free of any meaningful monitoring or official control. When the government then resolved to begin mass testing, its network of regional testing centres was outsourced to yet another private company, Deloitte.
Serco was joined at the heart of the national contact-tracing system by the US “customer services” giant Sitel. Local directors of public health, meanwhile, complained that they were unsure of their relationship with these players, and had woefully insufficient access to detailed data which – in theory at least – was being harvested by the government’s testing machine: information showing people’s age, address, and ethnic origin, all vital to local control of the pandemic.
Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said that people on the ground had ended up being “like local detectives being asked to solve crimes without being given the names of any of the victims or suspects.” Even when Leicester became the first area of the UK to impose a local lockdown, the city council initially bemoaned its lack of access to crucial infection data.
Belatedly, however, the basic orientation of the test-and-trace system had begun to change. In mid-May, NHS test and trace had announced the recruitment as a “national lead on tracing” of Tom Riordan, a highly-respected figure in local government, seconded from his job as the chief executive of Leeds City council. Insiders say that as he worked with Dido Harding, the Tory peer and former CEO of the mobile phone company TalkTalk who is now the executive chair of the test-and-trace operation, its workings at least began to tilt in a more localised direction. Insiders now talk about a “reverse takeover”, whereby the very councils that were initially cut out of the national test-and-trace system have been belatedly pushed to its forefront.
Nonetheless, change has taken months to materialise. On 1 July, it was announced that councils were to be offered the postcode-level infection data that they had been frantically requesting for months. Two weeks later, the government said that councils would be granted powers to close sites and premises hit by coronavirus outbreaks – and on 6 August, their access to information about local Covid-19 levels was enhanced to “near real-time data”.
If these things suggest palpable improvement, big questions remain. Concerns continue to be expressed about the numbers of test-and-trace workers councils are able to call on. Even if the national test-and-trace operation is now set to shed 6,000 workers, what will the continuing role of outsourcing companies be, and how much will it cost?
There is also a low rumble of concern about base politics. With signs of a second wave and the looming arrival of autumn, councils’ expertise will be essential for any meaningful control of the virus. But if England’s woeful experience of Covid-19 takes another turn for the worse, putting them at the core of how the disease is dealt with may also allow Boris Johnson and his colleagues to slip free of blame – something that must have at least flitted across the collective mind of this most calculating of governments.
The backstory . . .
In late May (Mon 25 May 20200 John Harris was identifying that:
Councils have been kept in the dark and starved of funds as coronavirus has spread. Power must be dispersed.
And so it is that we reach a watershed point in the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, manifested in a tangle of stories all unified by vivid themes: power concentrated at the centre, a lack of meaningful checks and balances, and the exposure by incompetence and arrogance of the mess beneath. Primary schools are meant to partly reopen next Monday, but many are in no position to do so; a test-and-tracing regime that should have materialised weeks ago is still frantically being assembled. And then along come the revelations of Dominic Cummings’s wanderings – ostensibly a tale of one man’s self-importance, but really the story of an unelected courtier whose influence and reputation speak volumes about how broken our system of government now is.
One recurrent spectacle has defined the last couple of months: ministers, presumably egged on by their advisers, grandly issuing their edicts, only for people to insist that they simply do not match the reality on the ground. The schools story is one example; another was the shambolic and arrogant way that Boris Johnson announced the shift from “stay at home” to “stay alert”, and his call for droves of people to return to work. Watching the leaders of Wales and Scotland insist they had no input into the government’s change of message and then stick to their existing lockdowns was a stark reminder that the UK is continuing to fragment. In England, meanwhile, the council leaders and mayors who were suddenly faced with huge consequences for transport and public health had been caught on the hop. “No one in government thought it important to tell the cities who’d have to cope,” said the Greater Manchester mayor, Andy Burnham. Nick Forbes, the leader of Newcastle city council, told me last week: “The first I knew about it was when I saw it on TV.”
For the opening phase of the crisis, Forbes explained, he had joined a weekly conference call of council leaders and chief executives, addressed by Robert Jenrick, the communities and local government secretary. He is not the only figure from local government who has told me that the calls are now handled by more junior ministers, and are no longer weekly. A few days ago, I spoke to another city leader who said that long-awaited government guidance on arrangements for social care and help for businesses had finally arrived last Friday, ahead of the bank holiday weekend. He also expressed huge frustration about the issue that arguably highlights the shortcomings of our top-down system most glaringly: the supposed arrival of a “world-beating” testing and tracing system by next Monday, and the ongoing saga of how it will work and who will run it.
On testing, rather than following the kind of devolved, pluralistic model that has worked so well in Germany, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, has so far stuck to the usual centralised script, something exemplified by the drive-through testing centres contracted at speed to such private companies as Deloitte, Sodexo and Boots, and often situated in inappropriate locations. On its hobbling progress towards a system of contact tracing, the government at first followed much the same logic, attempting a centralised system of call centres involving such private companies as the outsourcing giant Serco, staffed by new recruits who had apparently been given the most cursory training.
The councils who have the kind of forensic local knowledge and experience any tracing efforts will depend on were at first left in the dark. Then, less than three weeks before the system was meant to be in place, it was announced that the chief executive of Leeds city council had been made “national lead on tracing”, and that councils and their public health directors were to have a role after all. Throughout last week, senior people in city and local government were still telling me that though this sounded positive, they had no clear idea of what they were going to be asked to do. But on Friday afternoon, the government announced that councils would be working with Whitehall “to support test and trace services in their local communities” and “develop tailored outbreak control plans”.
As one city leader told me, the announcement came at “one minute to midnight”. The £300m that was now allocated to English councils for the work was, he said, “completely pitiful”. The thinking at work was plain: seemingly in a fit of panic, the people who run cities, counties and boroughs had been belatedly tacked on to a plan that should have had them at its core all along. Perhaps the most painful thing was that this mistreatment was hardly a surprise: if councils are suddenly being praised by ministers, it hardly makes up for a decade of savage cuts to basic local services, an aspect of the Covid-19 crisis that is still overlooked.
Which brings us to the subject too often obscured by the government’s convulsions: money. Two weeks ago, the Yorkshire Post reported on the prospect of “many of the 22 local authorities in the Yorkshire and the Humber region making a choreographed joint declaration that they have run out of money”. In Newcastle, Forbes told me the city council now faced an in-year financial gap of £45.5m. When ministers and their cheerleaders announce this or that funding boost and insist there will be no return to austerity, it is worth bearing in mind that austerity is still an ongoing reality for large chunks of the country.
Just about every aspect of our current national impasse proves that the old centralised game is up, and that England needs a new constitutional settlement. This does not strike me as a left/right issue, unless you are the kind of Tory who thinks that the neglect and outright destruction of local government ought to be a necessary part of your politics. Power needs to be taken from the centre and dispersed: the future needs to be founded on a huge boost to councils’ share of the tax take, the devolution of everything from health to transport, and fully localised responses to any future emergencies. If we do not begin this revolution soon, we will carry on bumbling from one crisis to the next, as Whitehall and Westminster fall into more scandal and disgrace and the commands barked from on high continue to fade into white noise.
The Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland writes for the Guardian Journal (Fri 7 Aug 2020) under this headline and the subheading:
From Dominic Cummings to dodgy business deals, the prime minister’s circle behave as if the rules simply don’t apply to them
It took the last Tory government the best part of 18 years to become mired in sleaze, but Boris Johnson’s administration is smelling of it already. Whether doling out lucrative contracts, helping billionaire property developers cut costs, or handing out lifetime seats in the House of Lords, the guiding principle seems to be brazen cronyism, coupled with the arrogance of those who believe they are untouchable and that rules are for little people.
This week came word of at least £156m of taxpayers’ money wasted on 50 million face masks deemed unsuitable for the NHS. They were bought from a private equity firm through a company that had no track record of producing personal protective equipment – or indeed anything for that matter – and that had a share capital of just £100. But this company, Prospermill, had a crucial asset. It was co-owned by one Andrew Mills, adviser to the government, staunch Brexiteer and cheerleader for international trade secretary, Liz Truss.
Somehow Prospermill managed to persuade the government to part with £252m, boasting that it had secured exclusive rights over a PPE factory in China. Just one problem. The masks it produced use ear loops, when only masks tied at the head are judged by the government to be suitable for NHS staff. If the government wanted to spend £156m on masks for the nation’s kids to play doctors and nurses, this was a great deal. But in the fight against a pandemic, it was useless.
All this has come to light thanks to the Good Law Project, which is challenging through the courts what it calls “the government’s £15bn supermarket sweep approach to PPE procurement”. As if to remind us of the necessity of judicial review – a process now threatened with “reform” by this government – the group have initiated such proceedings over several deals with suppliers with no conspicuous experience or expertise in PPE, including a pest controller and a confectionery wholesaler. But this latest one is the biggest.
I asked Jolyon Maugham, who runs the project, whether what he had seen amounted to corruption. He doesn’t use that word himself, preferring to note that “mutual back-scratching” tends to be how it works in this country. “You have contracts awarded to the wrong people because of incompetence, and you have contracts awarded to the wrong people because the wrong people knew what ears to whisper into.”
Such whispers are becoming the background noise of this government. This week the housing secretary Robert Jenrick was asked about his encounter with Richard Desmond at a Tory fundraising dinner last November, at which Desmond showed the cabinet minister a video of the housing development he wanted to build. Jenrick said he wished he “hadn’t been sat next to a developer at an event and I regret sharing text messages with him afterwards”, which rather glossed over the key fact: namely, that Jenrick promptly rushed through a decision on the project, the speed of which allowed Desmond’s company to avoid paying roughly £40m in tax to the local council. That move was later designated “unlawful”, and Jenrick was forced to overturn his decision.
It would be nice to think that episode was a one-off, but it’s hard to do so when developers have given £11m in donations to the Conservatives since Johnson arrived in Downing Street just one year ago.
One can hardly blame entrepreneurs and go-getters for wanting to get cosy with Johnson’s ministers. They see how business is done. They’ve noticed the seven government contracts together worth nearly £1m that were awarded in the course of 18 months to a single artificial intelligence startup, an outfit that just so happened to have worked for Dominic Cummings on the Vote Leave campaign.
The company is called Faculty and, handily, the government minister tasked with promoting the use of digital technology, Theodore Agnew, has a £90,000 shareholding in it. Any suggestion of a conflict of interest is breezily brushed aside. More conveniently still, Faculty’s chief executive, Marc Warner, has attended at least one meeting of Sage, the scientists’ group advising the government on coronavirus. Better yet Warner’s brother, Ben, works at Downing Street as a data scientist and has been a regular at Sage where, as one attendee put it to the Guardian, he “behaved as Cummings’ deputy”. Faculty insists all “the proper processes” have been followed in the awarding of their contracts.
Meanwhile, a political consultancy firm with strong ties to both Cummings and Michael Gove managed to win an £840,000 contract without any open tendering process at all. Public First is a small research company, but it is run by James Frayn, an anti-EU comrade of Cummings going back two decades, and his wife Rachel Wolf, the former Gove adviser who co-wrote the Tory manifesto for last year’s election. The government says it could skip the competitive tendering stage because emergency regulations applied, thanks to Covid. Except the government itself recorded some of Public First’s work as related to Brexit (it now says this was an accounting anomaly and that all the work related to the pandemic).
To confirm the new order, you might take a look at the prime minister’s list of nominations to the House of Lords. Besides his brother Jo, you’ll also spot former advisers, donors, Brexiters, and longtime Johnson pal Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian-born billionaire owner of London’s Evening Standard. It’s all terribly cosy. “It’s a pattern of appointing your mates, that’s the common thread,” says Labour’s Rachel Reeves. When fighting a pandemic, you don’t want “contracts for contacts”, she says; you want to look for “the best people, not whether they voted leave or made donations”.
Why is the government behaving this way? An obvious explanation is the 80-seat majority it won in December. The knowledge that parliamentary defeat is a distant prospect, and that you will not face the voters for four long years, can translate into complacency, even a sense of impunity. Johnson’s sparing of Cummings and Jenrick, when a more fragile prime minister would surely have felt compelled to fire them both, has emboldened those individuals and their watching colleagues. They’re not about to start shooting people on Fifth Avenue, as Trump once boasted, but like the US president, they believe they can get away with anything.
That fits with the credo Johnson and Cummings had even before they bagged their majority. Johnson was hardly a stickler for probity to start with; his attitude to the rules, grandly branded a libertarian philosophy by his pals, has long been elastic, at least when it comes to himself and those around him. As for Cummings, his breach of the lockdown during the pandemic’s most grave phase leaves no doubt: he sees the rules as applying to lesser mortals, not him.
This week, research published in the Lancet proved how devastating “the Cummings effect” has been for public faith in the government’s handling of the pandemic. Through their cronyism, their cavalier disregard for basic propriety, Johnson and his circle are draining trust at a time when it is essential to the public health. One day that will matter for the Conservatives’ political fortunes. But it matters for the rest of us right now.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men..."
This quotation is better known these days than the person responsible for making this observation, John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton,13th Marquess of Groppoli,KCVO, DL (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902) who was well known his day as an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer.
Acton took a great interest in the United States, considering its federal structure the perfect guarantor of individual liberties. During the American Civil War, his sympathies lay entirely with the Confederacy, for their defence of States' Rights against a centralised government that he believed would, by what he thought to be all historical precedent, inevitably turn tyrannical. His notes to Gladstone on the subject helped sway many in the British government to sympathise with the South. After the South's surrender, he wrote to Robert E. Lee that "I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo," adding that he "deemed that you were fighting battles for our liberty, our progress, and our civilization." Acton's stance on the Confederacy was shared by most English Catholics at the time, both liberal and Ultramontane. The editors of the Ultramontane Tablet denounced Abraham Lincoln as a dangerous radical, and the recently canonized John Henry Newman, when asked for his opinion on the matter, stated that slavery was not "intrinsically evil" and that the issue had to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
In 1870, along with his mentor Döllinger, Acton opposed the moves to promulgate the doctrine of papal infallibility in the First Vatican Council, travelling to Rome to lobby against it, ultimately unsuccessfully. Unlike DöllingerActon did not become an Old Catholic, and continued attending Mass regularly; he received the last rites on his deathbed. The Catholic Church did not try to force his hand. It was in this context that, in a letter he wrote to scholar and ecclesiastic Mandell Creighton, dated April 1887, Acton made his most famous pronouncement:
But if we might discuss this point until we found that we nearly agreed, and if we do agree thoroughly about the impropriety of Carlylese denunciations and Pharisaism in history, I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III of England ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greatest names coupled with the greatest crimes; you would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science.
Thenceforth he steered clear of theological polemics.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, began his political career in 1859, on his settling in England, at his country house, Aldenham, in Shropshire. He was returned to the House of Commons that same year as member for the Irish Borough of Carlow and became a devoted admirer and adherent of Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.
For the LODE 1992 project one of the LODE pieces of cargo was created and documented near Carlow in Ireland, or as named in the LODE project Ceatharlach.
The original documentation and identification of place-names used the Irish names, but the dominating influence of English and later, British colonialism and imperialism, has left a lasting linguistic impression across the island of Ireland.
The Re:LODEInformation Wrap for Ceatharlach has two articles that survey the histories of migration in Ireland. These histories include settlers gaining land and property in the article on:
Both these articles include inter-locking histories of invasion, dispossession, and exile, in England's first phase of colonial and capitalistic inspired violence in Ireland, that ultimately led to the grandiose notion of a British exceptionalism. First, England, and then with the Scots, Britain, honed the mythology of its mission of Empire that functioned to provide the necessary camouflage and/or "cover up" of violent subjugation, thuggery and the wholesale "looting" of other people's land and property.
In Ireland the colonial mission was cloaked in the contesting ideologies of raw power and the religious differences between European Christians played out in the Reformation and Counter-reformation.
When John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, as English and Catholic aristocrat, stood for a parliamentary constituency in Carlow in the election of 1859, he was voted into stand as a member of the British Westminster Parliament in a political national entity created by the Acts of Union 1800, passed this parliament, and now known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, thereby abolishing all previous vestiges of Irish self-government.
The Protestant Ascendancy
Encyclopaedia Brittanica has this short SPOTLIGHT mapping video of land ownership in Ireland during the so-called Protestant Ascendancy.
The Wikipedia article on the History of Ireland covers this period 1691 - 1801:
The majority of the people of Ireland were Catholic peasants; they were very poor and largely inert politically during the eighteenth century, as many of their leaders converted to Protestantism to avoid severe economic and political penalties. Nevertheless, there was a growing Catholic cultural awakening underway. There were two Protestant groups. The Presbyterians in Ulster in the North lived in much better economic conditions, but had virtually no political power. Power was held by a small group of Anglo-Irish families, who were loyal to the Anglican Church of Ireland. They owned the great bulk of the farmland, where the work was done by the Catholic peasants. Many of these families lived in England and were absentee landlords, whose loyalty was basically to England. The Anglo-Irish who lived in Ireland became increasingly identified as Irish nationalists, and were resentful of the English control of their island. Their spokesmen, such as Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, sought more local control.
Jacobite resistance in Ireland was finally ended after the Battle of Aughrim in July 1691. The Penal Laws that had been relaxed somewhat after the Restoration were reinforced more thoroughly after this war, as the infant Anglo-Irish Ascendancy wanted to ensure that the Irish Roman Catholics would not be in a position to repeat their rebellions. Power was held by the 5% who were Protestants belonging to the Church of Ireland. They controlled all major sectors of the Irish economy, the bulk of the farmland, the legal system, local government and held strong majorities in both houses of the Irish Parliament. They strongly distrusted the Presbyterians in Ulster, and were convinced that the Catholics should have minimal rights.
They did not have full political control because the government in London had superior authority and treated Ireland like a backward colony.
When the American colonies revolted in the 1770s, the Ascendancy wrested multiple concessions to strengthen its power. They did not seek independence because they knew they were heavily outnumbered and ultimately depended upon the British Army to guarantee their security.
Subsequent Irish antagonism toward England was aggravated by the economic situation of Ireland in the 18th century. Some absentee landlords managed their estates inefficiently, and food tended to be produced for export rather than for domestic consumption.
Two very cold winters near the end of the Little Ice Age led directly to a famine between 1740 and 1741, which killed about 400,000 people and caused over 150,000 Irish to leave the island.
In addition, Irish exports were reduced by the Navigation Acts from the 1660s, which placed tariffs on Irish products entering England, but exempted English goods from tariffs on entering Ireland. Despite this most of the 18th century was relatively peaceful in comparison with the preceding two centuries, and the population doubled to over four million.
By the 18th century, the Anglo-Irish ruling class had come to see Ireland, not England, as their native country. A Parliamentary faction led by Henry Grattan agitated for a more favourable trading relationship with Great Britain and for greater legislative independence for the Irish Parliament. However, reform in Ireland stalled over the more radical proposals toward enfranchising Irish Catholics. This was partially enabled in 1793, but Catholics could not yet become members of the Irish Parliament, or become government officials. Some were attracted to the more militant example of the French Revolution of 1789.
Presbyterians and Dissenters too faced persecution on a lesser scale, and in 1791 a group of dissident Protestant individuals, all of whom but two were Presbyterians, held the first meeting of what would become the Society of the United Irishmen. Originally they sought to reform the Irish Parliament which was controlled by those belonging to the state church; seek Catholic Emancipation; and help remove religion from politics. When their ideals seemed unattainable they became more determined to use force to overthrow British rule and found a non-sectarian republic. Their activity culminated in the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which was bloodily suppressed.
Ireland was a separate kingdom ruled by King George III of Britain; he set policy for Ireland through his appointment of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland or viceroy. In practice, the viceroys lived in England and the affairs in the island were largely controlled by an elite group of Irish Protestants known as "undertakers." The system changed in 1767, with the appointment of an English politician who became a very strong Viceroy. George Townshend served 1767-72 and was in residence in The Castle in Dublin. Townsend had the strong support of both the King and the British cabinet in London, and all major decisions were basically made in London. The Ascendancy complained, and obtained a series of new laws in the 1780s that made the Irish Parliament effective and independent of the British Parliament, although still under the supervision of the king and his Privy Council.
Largely in response to the 1798 rebellion, Irish self-government was ended altogether by the provisions of the Acts of Union 1800 (which abolished the Irish Parliament of that era).
In 1800, following the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the Irish and the British parliaments enacted the Acts of Union. The merger created a new political entity called United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with effect from 1 January 1801. Part of the agreement forming the basis of union was that the Test Act would be repealed to remove any remaining discrimination against Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Baptists and other dissenter religions in the newly United Kingdom. However, King George III, invoking the provisions of the Act of Settlement 1701 controversially and adamantly blocked attempts by Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger. Pitt resigned in protest, but his successor Henry Addington and his new cabinet failed to legislate to repeal or change the Test Act. This was followed by the first Irish Reform Act 1832, which allowed Catholic members of parliament but raised the property qualification to £10 effectively removing the poorer Irish freeholders from the franchise.
In 1823 an enterprising Catholic lawyer, Daniel O'Connell, known in Ireland as 'The Liberator' began an ultimately successful Irish campaign to achieve emancipation, and to be seated in the Parliament. This culminated in O'Connell's successful election in the Clare by-election, which revived the parliamentary efforts at reform.
The Catholic Relief Act 1829 was eventually approved by the UK parliament under the leadership of the Dublin-born Prime Minister, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. This indefatigable Anglo-Irish statesman, a former Chief Secretary for Ireland, and hero of the Napoleonic Wars, successfully guided the legislation through both houses of Parliament. By threatening to resign, he persuaded King George IV to sign the bill into law in 1829. The continuing obligation of Roman Catholics to fund the established Church of Ireland, however, led to the sporadic skirmishes of the Tithe War of 1831–38. The Church was disestablished by the Gladstone government in 1867. The continuing enactment of parliamentary reform during the ensuing administrations further extended the initially limited franchise. Daniel O'Connell M.P. later led the Repeal Association in an unsuccessful campaign to undo the Act of Union 1800.
The Great Irish Famine (An Gorta Mór) was the second of Ireland's "Great Famines". It struck the country during 1845–49, with potato blight, exacerbated by the political factors of the time leading to mass starvation and emigration. The impact of emigration in Ireland was severe; the population dropped from over 8 million before the Famine to 4.4 million in 1911. Gaelic or Irish, once the island's spoken language, declined in use sharply in the nineteenth century as a result of the Famine and the creation of the National School education system, as well as hostility to the language from leading Irish politicians of the time; it was largely replaced by English.
Karl Marx on the Celtic migrations
For the LODE project in 1992 the apparently common phenomenon along the LODE Zone Line were social and political conditions encountered that could only be set out with the help of a letter written by Karl Marx to the Editor of THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, and published in that newspaper on 22 March, 1853, just six years beforeJohn Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, as English and Catholic aristocrat, stood for a parliamentary constituency in Carlow in the election of 1859.
In 1992 the LODE leaflet contained the following text:
The Colonial and Emigration Office gives the following return of the emigration from England, Scotland, and Ireland, to all parts of the world, from Jan 1, 1847 to June 30, 1852: English 335,330; Scotch 82,610; Irish 1,200,136. "Nine tenths" remarks the Office "of the emigrants from Liverpool are assumed to be Irish. About three-fourths of the emigrants from Scotland are Celts, either from the Highlands, or from Ireland through Glasgow." Nearly four fifths of the whole emigration are, accordingly, to be regarded as belonging to the Celtic population of Ireland and of the Highlands and islands of Scotland. The London ECONOMIST says of this emigration: "It is consequent on the breaking down of the system of a society founded on small holdings and potato cultivation"; and adds "The departure of the redundant part of the population of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement. The revenue in Ireland has not suffered in any degree from the famine of 1846-47, or from the emigration that has since taken place. On the contrary, her net revenue amounted in 1851 to £4,281,999, being about £184,000 greater than in 1843."
Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have grown a burden on the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue! Such is the doctrine laid down by Ricardo in his celebrated work, The Principles of Political Economy. The annual profits of a capitalist amounting to 2000, what does it matter to him whether he employs 100 men or 1,000 men? "Is not," says Ricardo, "the real income of a nation similar?" The net real income of a nation, rents and profits, remaining the same, it is no subject of consideration whether it is derived from ten millions of people or from twelve millions. Sismondi, in his Nouveau Principes d'Economie Politique, answers that, according to his view of the matter, the English nation would not be interested at all in the disappearance of the whole population, the King (at that time it was no Queen, but a King) remaining alone in the midst of the island, supposing only that automatic machinery enabled him to procure the amount of Net Revenue now produced by a population of twenty millions. Indeed, that grammatical entity, "the national wealth", would in this case not be diminished.
In a former letter I have given an instance of the clearing of the estates in the Highlands of Scotland. That emigration continues to be forced upon Ireland by the same process you may see from the following quotation from THE GALWAY MERCURY:
"The people are fast passing away from the land in the West of Ireland. The landlords of Connaught are tacitly combined to weed out all the smaller occupiers, against whom a regular systematic war of extermination is being waged. the most heart-rending cruelties are daily practised in this province, of which the public are not at all aware."
In the ancient States, in Greece and Rome, compulsory emigration, assuming the shape of the periodic establishment of colonies, formed a regular link in the structure of society. The whole system of those States was founded on certain limits to the numbers of the population, which could not be surpassed without endangering the condition of the antique civilisation itself. To remain civilised they were forced to remain few. Otherwise they would have had to submit to the bodily drudgery which transformed the free citizen into a slave. The want of productive power made citizenship dependent on a certain proportion in numbers not to be disturbed. But with modern compulsory emigration the case stands quite the opposite. Here it is not the want of productive power which demands a diminution of population, and drives away the surplus by famine or emigration.
It is not population that presses on productive power; it is productive power that presses on population. Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existence it breaks down than an earthquake regards the house that it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. On the Continent heaven is fulminating, but in England the earth itself is trembling. England is the country where the real revulsion of modern society begins.
Karl Marx, THE NEW YORK DAILY TRIBUNE, 22 March, 1853
What Karl Marx sets out so very clearly is that "migration" happens out of necessity, as much, and if not more than out of a choice, and the impetus for this exists in the impulsive force of economic power that, however rational the economic actions of those in power are presented, the kind of economics that govern here is MADNESS!
The recent publication by David Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason is a devastating indictment of how we live today. This renowned human geographer and critic of capitalism explores a growing awareness that the free market can’t give us what we really want and need.
This article has a precursor in the Re:LODE Methods & Purposes section and found in the article Economism, where the work and ideas of David Harvey are also referenced.
A. For bourgeois capitalist economists, "economism" is reduction of all social facts to economic dimensions. The term is often used to criticize economics as an ideology in which supply and demand are the only important factors in decisions and outstrip or permit ignoring all other factors. It is believed to be a side effect of neoclassical economics and blind faith in an "invisible hand" or laissez-faire means of making decisions, extended far beyond controlled and regulated markets and used to make political and military decisions. Conventional ethics would play no role in decisions under pure economism, except insofar as supply would be withheld, demand curtailed, by moral choices of individuals. Thus, critics of economism insist on political and other cultural dimensions in society.
. . . returning to the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland
Violent rebellion . . .
Outside mainstream nationalism, a series of violent rebellions by Irish republicans took place in 1803, under Robert Emmet; in 1848 a rebellion by the Young Irelanders, most prominent among them, Thomas Francis Meagher; and in 1867, another insurrection by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. All failed, but physical force nationalism remained an undercurrent in the nineteenth century.
Land ownership in Ireland
A central issue throughout the 19th and early 20th century Ireland was land ownership. A small group of about 10,000 English families owned practically all the farmland; Most were permanent residents of England, and were seldom present on their Irish estates, and instead they rented out parcels of land to Irish tenant farmers. For the tenant farmers, falling behind in rent payments meant eviction and loss of livelihood, and accompanied by an enforcement process that often resorted to the use of high levels of violence.
Power that corrupts allows fora global "land grab",gained corruptly through legal "enclosures"!
Consider this. It is 1607. The English have been taking lands in Ireland for several centuries. First written down in the 7th century, Irish customary law is sophisticated and still administered by trained traditional magistrates (Brehons). Now rulings in the English courts on Gavelkind (1605) and Tanistry (1607) finally deny that customary law delivers property rights. Family holdings are made tenancies of by now well established Anglo-Irish elites, and the commons, crucial to grazing and hunting, are made more absolutely the property of the elites and new waves of English and Scottish settlers. Irish communities may use the commons at the will of these new owners.
Now 1823 in America. Chief Justice Marshall rules that while Indian natives were rightfully in possession (“Aboriginal title”) of 43,000 square miles of disputed land – in a case he engineers to be brought before the Supreme Court (and in which he has a private interest) – they illegally sold this tract to developers. He argues that by virtue of conquest, the British Crown became the owner of North America (“the right of discovery”). Therefore only the Crown or its administrations may lawfully sell or grant lands. Possession is no more than lawful occupation and use, and doesn’t count. Forty-year-old opinions of the Privy Council in London aid Marshall’s argument. These opinions established in 1772 and 1774 that English law supersedes local law, and that for the purposes of property, land is “uninhabited” (unowned) when empty of civilized people (McAuslan 2006).
1845 in England.
The villagers of Otmoor, Oxfordshire in England, as described by Linebaugh in this volume, have lost the fight to keep their commons, as have hundreds of other communities across the realm. In fact, feudal land law in England (and the rest of Europe) has dictated for some centuries (since 1285) that only those granted land by the king, i.e. the lords, own the land. Local populations hold no more than use rights. These legal realities have come harshly into focus only with industrialization and with private capital hungry for lands and the financial killings which may be made from selling the commons to railways and factories. Parliament, made up of wealthy landlords, is on their side, passing law after law since 1773 to legalize the dispossession of commoners. The Inclosure Act 1845 [sic] administers the coup de grace, speeding up the process. Of course private gains under these “parliamentary enclosures” are “in the public interest.”
In her memoirs the late Margaret Thatcher wrote that privatisation must be “at the centre of any programme of reclaiming territory for freedom”. Since 1979 British prime ministers have been true to her word. Thatcher used territory in a metaphorical sense, but it was also true literally: the privatisation of land is the biggest, and least well-known, sell-off of the state’s assets. As Brett Christophers, a professor of economic geography, points out in our pages, almost 10% of land has been transferred from public into private ownership since Thatcher came to power. In his book, The New Enclosure, Prof Christophers calculates that approximately 2 million hectares of land – or 10 % of Britain – has disappeared from public hands, the bulk of which has entered corporate, as opposed to charity or community, ownership. This is a privatisation of half of the state’s estate, worth about £400bn, and dwarfs any other transfer of public wealth to private hands.
The scale of the disposals was masked because the process took place largely in silence and by stealth. Often tracking the sales was difficult because of the opacity of transactions. The diversity of public bodies in the UK offering sites – from forests to airbases to hospital grounds – made it hard to piece together. The sales often took place at knockdown prices, with the public sector barely realising a fraction of the current value. This process has been briefly illuminated by tenacious journalism, such as this week’s story exposing how nine years of swingeing central government cuts to English councils have resulted in a vast and irreversible sell-off of public assets. In many cases local authorities have begun offloading their assets – playing fields, community centres, libraries, youth clubs, swimming pools – to fund redundancies made necessary by Whitehall cuts.
The defence of privatisation is that it can increase efficiency and spur investment. Such an argument is difficult to sustain with land. When the Cabinet Office looked into whether public bodies were holding on to vacant space, officials reported that, au contraire, it was the private sector that had a problem – maintaining a vacancy rate three times as high as government. Neither has land use been invigorated by private developers. Last year the New Economics Foundation pointed out that the government’s target of building 160,000 homes by selling off public land was 12 years behind schedule and would take until 2032 to achieve. The Tudor enclosure movement was supposed to have turbo-charged the capitalism of its day. Even if this dubious claim is true, it is unlikely that today’s equivalent is having any positive effect.
Where there appears to be some historical echo is in the appropriation of wealth by a rentier class which has grown up alongside large aristocratic estates. A staggering 23 of the top 100 richest people in the country last year have property listed as a major source of their wealth. That dwarfs the other biggest sources. Then there is the corporate hoarding of land: one study lists 50 private companies that together own about a 40th of Britain. Lastly there is the growing social dislocation: the share of young families privately renting has increased from just 9% in the late 1980s to 34%. Land can bring political influence, power, wealth and pleasure. But these things ought to be widely shared, whether land is built upon or not. It ought to be there for the common good: to be run across or gazed over or protested on.
Ownership of land matters, and it ought not to be solely for the market to decide who is included or excluded from it.
This graphic representation of land ownership in England, based on data from Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England, was included in the cover story for the Observer's The New ReviewForgive Us Our Trespasses, on the right-to-roam campaigner, artist and writer Nick Hayes (Sun 9 Aug 2020) by Rachel Cooke.
Following the presentation of this graph Rachel Cooke writes:
Our green and pleasant land. Except it isn’t – ours, I mean. A third of Britain is still owned by the aristocracy; 24 non-royal dukes alone own almost 4m acres of it (in 2016, 17 of these men together received farm subsidies worth £8.4m). Then there is the new aristocracy, the self-made millionaires who can afford to buy up the land: men like Richard Bannister, the retail tycoon who bought Walshaw Moor in Calderdale in 2002, and whose “management” of this rare habitat brought him into conflict with Natural England – until, that is, the agency dropped its claim, settling out of court (Bannister now owns some 16,000 acres of the valley). Finally, there are the offshore companies, which in 2015 owned 490,000 acres of England and Wales, meaning that an area larger than Greater London can legally avoid stamp duty and inheritance tax (the largest swathe of English land registered to offshore companies is the Gunnerside estate, whose 27,258 acres of North Yorkshire moorland are registered in the British Virgin Islands and which, over the last decade or so, received some €430,000 of taxpayer handouts in the form of agricultural subsidies). According to Hayes, there are “good landowners”: he would single out the Crown Estate and Sir Julian Rose, the owner of Hardwick House, also in Berkshire, whose farm is run on ecological principles and who allows a nonprofit group to run outdoor activities for children with disabilities on his land. But these people are, in his view, in the minority.
Basildon Park
One of the properties featured in the article is the National Trust's Basildon Park. Nick Hayes forthcoming book The Book of Tresspass includes research that contextualises his mission to open up access to England's acres for the benefit of everyone's mental health. Rachel Cooke writes:
England, he would go on to discover, is still owned by a relatively small number of wealthy individuals and institutions: by the law of trespass, we are excluded from 92% of the land and 97% of its waterways. How can this be? The feeling grew in him that change must and can come. When The Book of Trespass is published later this month, he and Guy Shrubsole, the activist author of Who Owns England? (which came out last year), will together launch a new campaign, the primary focus of which will be the fact that the nation’s mental and physical health would be improved immeasurably by increased access to it. “I don’t believe property is theft,” Hayes says. “That’s a ridiculous proposition, one that ignores human nature. This isn’t the politics of envy. All we’re asking is that the lines between us and the land are made more permeable.”
This doesn’t mean, however, that political history is of no interest to him. Quite the contrary. For Hayes, Basildon Park house serves as one symbol among many of the way, down the centuries, land was effectively stolen from the people, its grand estates constructed on the back of their exploitation. Built in 1776 by John Carr of York, it was designed for Francis Sykes, a wealthy member of the East India Company, who returned home with fingers that were, as Hayes puts it, “sticky from the colonial cookie jar” (Sykes himself explained the bleeding dry of India as a basic choice of “whether it [the wealth extracted under British rule] should go into a black man’s pocket or my own”). Hayes doesn’t disapprove of the National Trust; he’s largely supportive of both it and English Heritage. But he wonders why, given the history of Basildon Park, some of its 400 acres could not be given over to, say, local allotment holders. And what about those who cannot afford its ticket prices? “I think the vision of Octavia Hill [the social reformer, and one of the three founders of the National Trust] for the working classes has gone a bit wayward. It does seem very white and middle class. It holds some of our cultural soul, and it could change the narrative if it tried.”
Guy Shrubsole, Nick Hayes fellow activist and campaigner for access to the countryside, contributed to The long read in the Guardian (Fri 19 Apr 2019) under the headline:
Multi-million pound corporations with complex structures have purchased the very ground we walk on – and we are only just beginning to discover the damage it is doing to Britain. By Guy Shrubsole.
This is an edited extract of Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land and How to Take It Back, published on 2 May by HarperCollins.
Despite owning 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of land, managing a property portfolio worth £2.3bn and having control over huge swaths of central Manchester and Liverpool, very few people have heard of a company named Peel Holdings. It owns the Manchester Ship Canal. It built the Trafford Centre shopping complex and, more recently, sold it in the largest single property acquisition in Britain’s history. It was the developer behind the MediaCityUK site in Salford, to which the BBC and ITV have relocated many of their operations in recent years. Airports, fracking, retail – the list of Peel business interests stretches on and on.
Peel Holdings operates behind the scenes, quietly acquiring land and real estate, cutting billion-pound deals and influencing numerous planning decisions. Its investment decisions have had an enormous impact, whether for good or ill, on the places where millions of people live and work.
Peel’s ultimate owner, the billionaire John Whittaker, is notoriously publicity-shy: he lives on the Isle of Man, hardly ever gives interviews and helicopters into his company’s offices for board meetings. He built Peel Holdings in the 1970s and 80s by buying up a series of companies whose fortunes had decayed, but which still controlled valuable land. Foremost among these was the Manchester Ship Canal Company, purchased in 1987. The canal turned out to be valuable not simply as a freight route, but also because of the redevelopment potential of the land that flanked it.
Peel Holdings tends not to show its hand in public. Like many companies, it prefers its forays into public political debate to be conducted via intermediary bodies and corporate coalitions. In 2008, it emerged that Peel was a dominant force behind a business grouping that had formed to lobby against Manchester’s proposed congestion charge. The charge was aimed at cutting traffic and reducing the toxic car fumes choking the city. But Peel, as owners of the out-of-town Trafford Centre shopping mall, feared that a congestion charge would be bad for business, discouraging shoppers from driving through central Manchester to reach the mall. Peel’s lobbying paid off: voters rejected the charge in the local referendum and the proposal was dropped.
Throughout England, cash-strapped councils are being outgunned by corporate developers pressing to get their way. The situation is exacerbated by a system that has allowed companies like Peel to keep their corporate structures obscure and their landholdings hidden. A 2013 report by Liverpool-based thinktankEx Urbe found “well in excess of 300 separately registered UK companies owned or controlled” by Peel. Tracing the conglomerate’s structure is an investigator’s nightmare. Try it yourself on the Companies House website: type in “Peel Land and Property Investments PLC”, and then click through to persons with significant control. This gives you the name of its parent company, Peel Investments Holdings Ltd. So far, so good. But then repeat the steps for the parent company, and yet another holding company emerges; then another, and another. It’s like a series of Russian dolls, one nested inside another.
Until recently, it was even harder to get a handle on the land Peel Holdings owns. Sometimes the company has provided a tantalising glimpse: one map it produced in 2015, as part of some marketing spiel around the “northern powerhouse”, showcases 150 sites it owns across the north-west. It confirms the vast spread of Peel’s landed interests – from Liverpool John Lennon airport, through shale gas well pads, to one of the UK’s largest onshore wind farms. But it’s clearly not everything. A more exhaustive, independent list of the company’s landholdings might allow communities to be forewarned of future developments. As Ex Urbe’s report on Peel concludes: “Peel schemes rarely come to light until they are effectively a fait accompli and the conglomerate is confident they will go ahead, irrespective of public opinion.”
While Peel Holdings is unusual for the sheer amount of land it controls, it is also illustrative of corporate landowners everywhere. Corporations looking to develop land have numerous tricks up their sleeve that they can use to evade scrutiny and get their way, from shell company structures to offshore entities. Companies with big enough budgets can often ride roughshod over the planning system, beating cash-strapped councils and volunteer community groups. And companies have for a long time benefited from having their landholdings kept secret, giving them the element of surprise when it comes to lobbying councils over planning decisions and the use of public space. But now, at long last, that is starting to change. If we want to “take back control” of our country, we need to understand how much of it is currently controlled by corporations.
In 2015, the Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson lodged a freedom of information (FOI) request with the Land Registry, the official record of land ownership in England and Wales. He asked it to release a database detailing the area of land owned by all UK-registered companies and corporate bodies. Eriksson later shared this database with me, and what it revealed was astonishing. Here, laid bare after the dataset had been cleaned up, was a picture of corporate control: companies today own about 2.6m hectares of land, or roughly 18% of England and Wales.
In the unpromising format of an Excel spreadsheet, a compelling picture emerged. Alongside the utilities privatised by Margaret Thatcher and John Major – the water companies, in particular – and the big corporate landowners, were PLCs with multiple shareholders. There were household names, such as Tesco, Tata Steel and the housebuilder Taylor Wimpey, and others more obscure. MRH Minerals, for example, appeared to own 28,000 hectares of land, making it one of the biggest corporate landowners in England and Wales.
Gradually, I pieced together a list of what looked to be the top 50 landowning companies, which together own more than 405,000 hectares of England and Wales. Peel Holdings and many of its subsidiaries, unsurprisingly, feature high on the list. But while the dataset revealed in stark detail the area of land owned by UK-based companies, it did nothing to tell us what they owned, and where.
That would take another two years to emerge. Meanwhile, Eriksson had been busy at work with his Private Eye colleague Richard Brooks and the computer programmer Anna Powell-Smith, delving into another form of corporate landowner – firms based overseas, yet owning land in the UK. Of particular interest were companies based in offshore tax havens, a wholly legal but controversial practice, given the opportunities offshore ownership gives for possible tax avoidance and for concealing the identities of who ultimately controls a company. Further FOI requests to the Land Registry by Eriksson hit the jackpot when he was sent – “accidentally”, the Land Registry would later claim – a huge dataset of overseas and offshore-registered companies that had bought land in England and Wales between 2005 and 2014: some 113,119 hectares of land and property, worth a staggering £170bn.
Private Eye’s work revealed that a large chunk of the country was not only under corporate control, but owned by companies that – in many cases – were almost certainly seeking to avoid paying tax, that most basic contribution to a civilised society. Some potentially had an even darker motive: purchasing property in England or Wales as a means for kleptocratic regimes or corrupt businessmen to launder money, and to get a healthy return on their ill-gotten gains in the process. This was information that clearly ought to be out in the open, with a huge public interest case for doing so. And yet the government had sat on it for years.
The political ramifications of these revelations were profound. They kickstarted a process of opening up information on land ownership that, although far slower and less complete than many would have liked, has nevertheless transformed our understanding of what companies own. In November 2017, the Land Registry released its corporate and commercial dataset, free of charge and open to all. It revealed, for the first time, the 3.5m land titles owned by UK-based corporate bodies – covering both public sector institutions and private firms – with limited companies owning the majority, 2.1m, of these. But there were two important caveats. Although we now had the addresses owned by companies, the dataset omitted to tell us the size of land they owned. Second, the data lacked accurate information on locations, making it hard to map.
Despite this, what can we now say about company-owned land in England and Wales? Quite a lot, it turns out. We know, for example, that the company with the third-highest number of land titles is the mysterious Wallace Estates, a firm with a £200m property portfolio but virtually no public presence, and which is owned ultimately by a secretive Italian count. Wallace Estates makes its money from the controversial ground rents market, whereby it owns thousands of freehold properties and sells on long leases with annual ground rents.
We also now know that Peel Holdings and its numerous subsidiaries owns at least 1,000 parcels of land across England – not just shopping centres and ports in the north-west, but also a hill in Suffolk, farmland along the Medway and an industrial estate in the Cotswolds. Councils, MPs and residents wanting to keep an eye on what developers and property companies are up to in their area now have a powerful new tool at their disposal.
The data is full of odd quirks and details. Who would have guessed, for instance, that the arms manufacturer BAE owns a nightclub in Cardiff, a pub on Blackpool’s promenade and a service station in Pease Pottage, Sussex? It turns out that they are all investments made by BAE’s pension fund; if selling missiles to Saudi Arabia doesn’t prove profitable enough, it appears the company’s strategy is to make a few quid out of tired drivers stopping for a coffee break off the M23.
The data also lets us peer into the property acquisitions of the big supermarkets, which back in the 1990s and early 2000s involved building up huge land banks to construct ever more out-of-town retail parks. Tesco, via a welter of subsidiaries, owns more than 4,500 hectares of land – and although much of this comprises existing stores, a good chunk also appears to be empty plots, apparently earmarked for future development. One analysis by the Guardian in 2014 estimated that the supermarket was hoarding enough land to accommodate 15,000 homes. More recently, however, Tesco’s financial travails have prompted it to sell off some of its sites. Internet shopping and pricier petrol have made giant hypermarkets built miles from where people live look less and less like smart investments. In 2016, Tesco’s beleaguered CEO announced the company was looking to make better use of the land it owned by selling it for housing, and even by building flats on top of its superstores. As for the supermarkets’ internet shopping rival Amazon, whose gigantic “fulfilment centres” resemble the vast US government warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark – well, Amazon currently has 16 of those across the UK. And it has grown very quickly: all but one of its property leases have been bought in the past decade.
Companies are increasingly taking over previously public space in cities, too. Recent years have seen a proliferation of Pops – privately owned public spaces – as London, Manchester and other places redevelop and gentrify. You know the sort of thing: expensively landscaped swaths of “public realm”. Aesthetically, they are all very nice, but try to use Pops for some peaceful protest, and you are in for trouble. They are invariably governed by special bylaws and policed by private security, itching to get in your face. I once found this to my cost when staging a tiny, two-person anti-fracking demo outside shale-gas financiers Barclays bank in Canary Wharf. Canary Wharf is partly owned by the Qatari Investment Authority, and – bizarrely – photography is banned. Within a minute of us taking the first selfie on our innocuous protest, security guards had descended en masse, and we spent the next hour running around Canary Wharf trying to evade them.
The Land Registry’s corporate ownership dataset contains millions of entries, and much remains to be uncovered. Some of the information appears trivial at first glance – a company owns a factory here, an office there: so what? But as more people pore over the data, more stories will likely emerge. Future researchers might find intriguing correlations between the locations of England’s thousands of fast-food stores and the health of nearby populations, be able to track gentrification through the displacement of KFCoutlets by Nando’s restaurants, and so on.
But to really get under the skin of how companies treat the land they own, and the wider repercussions, we need to zoom in on the housing sector, where debates about companies involved in land banking and profiteering from land sales are crucial to our understanding of the housing crisis.
One particularly controversial aspect of the housing debate that has generated much heat, and little light, in recent years is the debacle over land banking, the practice of hoarding land and holding it back from development until its price increases.
In 2016, the then housing secretary, Sajid Javid, furiously accused large housing developers of land banking and demanded they “release their stranglehold” on land supply. Housebuilders, not used to such impertinence from a Conservative minister, hit back. “As has been proved by various investigations in the past, housebuilders do not land bank,” a spokesperson for the Home Builders Federation told the Telegraph. “In the current market where demand is high, there is absolutely no reason to do so.”
So who is right? This is a complex area, but one that is important to investigate. Can the Land Registry’s corporate ownership data help us get to the bottom of it?
It is common for UK pension funds and insurance companies to buy up land as a long-term strategic investment. Legal & General, for example, owns 1,500 hectares of land that it openly calls a “strategic land portfolio … stretching from Luton to Cardiff”. Its rationale for buying land is simple: “Strategic land holdings are underpinned by their existing use value [such as farming] and give us the opportunity to create further value through planning promotion and infrastructure works over the medium to long term.”
When I looked into where Legal & General’s land was located, I noticed something odd. Nearly all of it lay within green belt areas, where development is restricted. The company appears to have bought it with the aim of lobbying councils to ultimately rip up such restrictions and redesignate the site for development in future.
In the case of pension funds lobbying to rip up the green belt, it’s the planning system that is (rightly) constraining development, not land banking itself. And none of this implicates the usual bogeymen of the housing crisis, the big housebuilding companies. By examining what these major developers own, is it possible to say whether they’re actively engaged in land banking?
There is no doubt that many of the major housebuilding companies own a lot of land. What’s more, housing developers themselves talk about their “current land banks” and publish figures in annual reports listing the number of homes they think they can build using land where they have planning permission. As the housing charity Shelter has found, the top 10 housing developers have land banks with space for more than 400,000 homes – about six years’ supply at current building rates.
Prompted by such statistics, the government ordered a review into build-out rates in 2017, led by Sir Oliver Letwin. Yet when Letwin delivered his draft report, he once again exonerated housebuilders from the charge of land banking. “I cannot find any evidence that the major housebuilders are financial investors of this kind,” he stated, pointing the finger of blame instead at the rate at which new homes could be absorbed into the marketplace.
Part of the problem is that the data on what companies own still isn’t good enough to prove whether or not land banking is occurring. The aforementioned Anna Powell-Smith has tried to map the land owned by housing developers, but has been thwarted by the lack in the Land Registry’s corporate dataset of the necessary information to link data on who owns a site with digital maps of that area. That makes it very hard to assess, for example, whether a piece of land owned by a housebuilder for decades is a prime site accruing in value or a leftover fragment of ground from a past development.
Second, the scope of Letwin’s review was drawn too narrowly to examine the wider problem of land banking by landowners beyond the major housebuilders. As the housing market analyst Neal Hudson said when it was published, the “review remit ignored the most important and unknown bit of the market: sites and land ownership pre-planning.”
In fact, if Letwin had raised his sights a little higher, he would have seen there is a whole industry of land promoters working with landowners to promote sites, have them earmarked for development in the council’s local plan, and increase their asking price. As investigations by Isabelle Fraser of the Telegraph have revealed: “A group of private companies, largely unknown to the public, have carved out a lucrative niche locating and snapping up land across the UK.”
One such company, Gladman Land, boasts on its website of a 90% success rate at getting sites developed. Few of these firms appear to own much land themselves; rather, they work with other landowners, perhaps signing options agreements or other such deals. Consultants Molior have estimated that between 25% and 45% of sites with planning permission in London are owned by companies that have never built a home.
This gets us to the heart of the housing crisis. Sure, we need housing developers to build more homes. But most of all we need them to build affordable homes. And developers that are forced to pay through the nose to persuade landowners to part with their land end up with less money left over for good-quality, affordable housing. By all means, let’s continue to pressure housebuilders whenever they try to renege on their planning agreements. But at root, we have to find ways to encourage landowners of all kinds – corporate or otherwise – to part with their land at cheaper prices.
Since the first appearance of modern corporations in the Victorian period, companies have expanded to become the owners of nearly a fifth of all land in England and Wales. Much of this land acquisition is uncontested: space for a factory here, an office block there. But some of it has proven highly controversial. Huge retailers and property groups like Tesco and Peel Holdings have eroded town centres and high streets by amassing land for out-of-town superstores, and lobbied to maintain a culture of car dependency. Multinational agribusinesses have exacerbated the industrialisation of our food supply and accelerated the decline of small-scale farmers.
Property firms have made tidy profits from the privatisation of formerly public land – which might otherwise have gone into the public purse, had previous governments treated their assets more wisely.
Though the veil of secrecy around company structures and what corporations own is at last lifting, thanks to recent data disclosures by government, there’s still much that needs to be done to make sense of this new information. The Land Registry needs to disclose proper maps of what companies own if we are to get to the bottom of suspect practices like land banking, and give communities a fighting chance in local planning battles.
Legally obliged to maximise profits for their shareholders, and biased towards short-term returns, companies make for poor custodians of land. Nor are corporate landowners capable of solving the housing crisis. Hoarded, developed, polluted, dug up, landfilled: the corporate control of England’s acres has gone far enough.
"Enclosures" in Ireland and England from the period of the Tudors are only instances of the historical global colonial and capitalist phenomenon - "Accumulation by dispossession".
Accumulation by dispossession is a concept presented by the Marxist geographer David Harvey. It defines neoliberal capitalist policies that result in a centralization of wealth and power in the hands of a few by dispossessing the public and private entities of their wealth or land. Such policies are visible in many western nations from the 1970s and to the present day. Harvey argues these policies are guided mainly by four practices: privatization, financialization, management and manipulation of crises, and state redistributions.
Privatization and commodification of public assets have been among the most criticized and disputed aspects of neoliberalism. Summed up, they could be characterized by the process of transferring property from public ownership to private ownership. According to Marxist theory, this serves the interests of the capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, as it moves power from the nation's governments to private parties. At the same time, privatization generates a means for profit for the capitalist class; after a transaction they can then sell or rent to the public what used to be commonly owned, or use it as capital through the capitalist mode of production to generate more capital.
The wave of financialization that set in the 1980s is facilitated by governmental deregulation which has made the financial system one of the main centers of redistributive activity. Stock promotions, Ponzi schemes, structured asset destruction through inflation, asset stripping through mergers and acquisitions, dispossession of assets (raiding of pension funds and their decimation by stock and corporate collapses) by credit and stock manipulations, are, according to Harvey, central features of the post-1970s capitalist financial system. That aspect relies entirely on the fact that the quantity of money in circulation and therefore demand levels and price levels are controlled by the boards of directors of privately owned banks.
Those boards of directors are also on boards of corporations and any number of other legal vehicles who are also profiting from asset price swings. At the heart of accumulation by dispossession is the private control of the quantity of money supply that can be manipulated for private gain, which includes creating unemployment or restive conditions in the population. This process is well documented in English history as far back as prior to the founding of the Bank of England and before that in the Netherlands. The process works well with or without a central bank and with or without gold backing. The details are also manipulated from time to time as needed to satisfy popular rage or apathy.
By creating and manipulating crises, such as by suddenly raising interest rates, poorer nations can be forced into bankruptcy, and agreeing to such deals like that of the structural adjustment programs can yield more damages to those nations. Harvey reasoned that this is authorized by parties such as the U.S. Treasury, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The neoliberal nation-state is one of the most important agents of redistributive policies. Even when privatization or commodification appear to be profitable to the lower class, in the long run it can affect the economy negatively. The state seeks redistributions through a variety of things, like changing the tax code to profit returns on investment rather than incomes and wages of those who are struggling to survive in paid employment.
A Fascinating World video animation of global wealth, and including the vast scale of capital transfer from the poorer nations to the richest, uses graphs that echo the visual information updates on the spread of Covid-19 across the world.
Is capitalism and accumulation by dispossession analogous to the conditions of "The Plague" as set out in literature by Camus?
Whilst the LODE project of 1992 found a common thread running through the web of life along the LODE Zone Line that foregrounded "economism". This included the how and the why, in a "modern" world dominated by the economic system of global capitalism, that there is NO sharing, and there will be NO sharing, of the fruits of increasing productive power. Instead "people" become a "surplus population", as far as the "economy" is concerned, because the rich man who owns the means of production wants to keep more and more of the surplus value as profit.
For the Re:LODE project 2017-18 the concept of accumulation by dispossession becomes more an more important to understand. This is especially the case in the light of how the mining of natural resources, the destruction of primary forest habitat, has end results including the violent suppression of communities and the wholesale emission of billions of tons of carbon emissions into the world's atmosphere. The recent Re:LODE Radiopost Paying the price in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH" highlights the concerted attacks on communities protecting their way of life and the environment from international corporate and industrial interests that use the techniques of both gangsterism and the state apparatus.
The
only villains in "The Plague" are those who cannot see beyond themselves.
The plague, for these people, is either an excuse to flee or an
opportunity to exploit.
There are two articles to be found in the Information Wrap for the LODE cargo created at Dhauli in the Indian state of Odisha, formerly known as Orissa, that orbit the pandemic of global capitalism. The features foregrounded in both cases are mired in corruption and violence.
In the second of these articles an excoriating critique of the politics of violence conducted in India by a majority upon minorities, is set out by Arundhati Roy. She argues passionately that India must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil war. This text, published in the Guardian (Sat 13 Dec 2008) is quoted in full.
Arundhati Roy was prompted to analyse the current situation in Kashmir following the Indian PM Narendra Modi's visit to the Indian town of Ayodhya where he was welcomed to a ceremony marking the start of construction of a temple on the site where a mosque was razed to the ground by a Hindu mob 28 years ago.
The BJP has succeeded in turning the controversial issue of whether the temple should be built into a touchstone of Hindu identity, a marker of the Hindu nationalism that forms part of its core ideology known as Hindutva.
“It is an undoubted victory for Modi. He fancies himself to be a greater icon of Hindutva than the actual temple,” said Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr, a political analyst.
Prominent Muslims have said the community was resigned to the decision but fear it could embolden Hindu nationalists to target two other mosques in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
“The Modi government should assure Muslims that Hindu outfits will not ask for the construction of temples in Varanasi and Mathura after demolishing existing mosques there,” said Iqbal Ansari, the main Muslim litigant in the supreme court case, who now supports building the temple in Ayodhya.
Zafaryab Jilani, the general secretary of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, a lawyer who was also involved in the legal dispute, said that while Muslims had to accept the law of the land, it was wrong of Modi to attend the ground-breaking ceremony.
“It is against the letter and spirit of India’s secular constitution for the prime minister in his official capacity to attend such a religious event. It shows a woeful and total disregard for the principles of the constitution,” said Jilani.
For Modi’s political opponents, the start of the temple construction has presented them with a quandary. They dare not challenge the celebrations and festivities for fear of alienating many of their fellow Hindus and appearing out of step with majority sentiment. Yet they remain nervous at the BJP’s success in conflating religious conviction with political ambition.
“When politicians hail the building of the Ram temple, they choose to ignore that it is being built on the debris of mutual accommodation and represents an unprecedented homogenisation of Hinduness,” wrote Suhas Palshikar, a political scientist, in the Indian Express.
“In this sense, the past one year and more has been the period of ‘no contest’ in India’s politics. If the BJP is guilty of dismantling the republic, all other parties are silent approvers.”
Under this banner headline Arundhati Roy sets out her critique of the tactics of rightwing Hindu nationalist prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, observing that:
A year after a ferocious crackdown, I see the region facing nothing less than cultural erasure
Arundhati Roy, novelist, writer and political activist writes for the Guardian Journal in an Opinion and ideas piece(Wed 5 Aug 2020):
At midnight on 4 August 2019, phones in Kashmir went dead and internet connections were cut. On 5 August 2019, a year ago today, 7 million people were locked into their homes under a strict military curfew. Up to 10,000 people, from young children and teenage stone pelters to former chief ministers and major pro-India politicians, were arrested and put into preventive detention, where many of them still remain. On 6 August, a bill was passed in parliament stripping the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and special status enshrined in the Indian constitution. It was stripped of statehood, downgraded into two union territories, Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir. Ladakh would have no legislature and would be governed directly by New Delhi.
The problem of Kashmir, we were told, had been finally solved once and for all. In other words, Kashmir’s decades-long struggle for self-determination, which has cost tens of thousands of lives of soldiers, militants and civilians, thousands of enforced “disappearances” and cruelly tortured bodies – was over.
In India’s parliament, home minister Amit Shah went further. He said he was prepared to lay down his life to take over the territories of what India calls Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and what Kashmiris call Azad Kashmir, as well as the frontier provinces of Gilgit-Baltistan. He also threw in Aksai Chin, once part of the erstwhile kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, now a part of China. He was wading into dangerous territory, literally as well as figuratively. The borders he was talking about lie between three nuclear powers. Amid the unseemly celebrations on India’s streets, the extra wattage generated by Kashmir’s humiliation intensified the glow of prime minister Narendra Modi’s already god-like halo. Provocatively, the Indian meteorological department began to include Gilgit-Baltistan in its weather reports. Few of us in India paid attention to the Chinese government when it urged India to “be cautious in its words and deeds on the border issue”.
In the year that has gone by, the struggle in Kashmir has by no means ended. In just the past few months media reports say that 34 soldiers, 154 militants and 17 civilians have been killed. A world traumatised by coronavirus has understandably paid no attention to what the Indian government has done to the people of Kashmir. The curfew and communication siege, and everything else that such a siege entails (no access to doctors, hospitals, work, no business, no school, no contact with loved ones), lasted for months. Even the US didn’t do this during its war against Iraq.
Just a few months of Covid lockdown, without a military curfew or communications siege, has brought the world to its knees and hundreds of millions to the limits of their endurance and sanity. Think of Kashmir under the densest military deployment in the world. On top of the suffering coronavirus has laid on you, add a maze of barbed wire on your streets, soldiers breaking into your homes, beating the men and abusing the women, destroying your food stocks, amplifying the cries of humans being tortured on public address systems.
Add to this a judicial system – including the supreme court of India – that has for a whole year allowed the internet siege to continue and ignored the 600 habeas corpus petitions by distraught people seeking the whereabouts of their family members. Add further a new domicile law that opens the floodgates by allowing Indians a right of residence in Kashmir. The precious state subject certificates of Kashmiris are now legally void except as backup evidence to bolster their applications to the Indian government for domicile status in their own homeland. Those whose applications are rejected can be denied residency and shipped out. What Kashmir faces is nothing less than cultural erasure.
Kashmir’s new domicile law is a relative of India’s new blatantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that is supposed to detect “Bangladeshi infiltrators” (Muslim of course) whom the home minister has called “termites”. In the state of Assam, the NRC has already wreaked havoc. Millions have been struck off the citizens register. While many countries are dealing with a refugee crisis, the Indian government is turning citizens into refugees, fuelling a crisis of statelessness on an unimaginable scale.
The CAA, NRC and Kashmir’s new domicile law require even bona fide citizens to produce a set of documents approved by the state in order to be granted citizenship. (The Nuremberg laws passed by the Nazi party in 1935 decreed that only those citizens who could provide legacy papers approved by the Third Reich were eligible for German citizenship.)
What should all this be called? A war crime? Or a crime against humanity?
And what should the collusion of institutions and the celebrations on the streets of India be called? Democracy?
A year down the line, these celebrations over Kashmir are distinctly muted. For good reason. We have a dragon on our doorstep and it isn’t happy. On 17 June 2020, we awoke to the horrifying news that 20 Indian soldiers including a colonel had been brutally killed by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the icy reaches of the remote Galwan Valley on the Ladakh border. Over the next few days reports in sections of the Indian press suggested that there had been several points of ingress. Army veterans and respected defence correspondents have said that the PLA has occupied hundreds of square kilometres of what India considers to be its territory. Was it just naked aggression as portrayed by the Indian media? Or have the Chinese moved to protect what they see as their vital interests – a road through the high mountains of Aksai Chin and a trade route through Pakistan Occupied/Azad Kashmir? Both are under threat, if the belligerent statements made by India’s home minister were to be taken seriously, and how can they not be?
For a ferociously nationalist government such as ours to concede what it thinks of as sovereign territory has to be its worst nightmare. It cannot be countenanced. But what can be done? A simple solution was found. Just days after the Galwan Valley tragedy, Modi addressed the nation. “Not an inch of land has been occupied by anyone,” he said, “no one has entered our borders” and “none of our posts have been occupied by anyone”. Modi’s critics fell about laughing. The Chinese government was quick to welcome his statement, because that’s what they were saying, too. But Modi’s statement isn’t as stupid as it sounds. While army commanders of both countries are discussing withdrawal and the “disengagement” of troops and the social media is full of jokes about the art of exiting without entering, and while the Chinese continue to hold territory they claim to be their own, to the vast, uninformed majority of India’s population, Modi has won. It was on TV. And who’s to say which is more important? TV or territory?
Whichever way you slice it, in the long-term, India now requires a battle-ready army on two fronts – the western frontier with Pakistan and the eastern frontier with China. In addition, the government’s hubris has alienated its neighbours Nepal and Bangladesh. We have been reduced to boasting that in the event of war, the US – reeling from its own crises – will come to India’s rescue. Really? Like it rescued the Kurds in Syria and Iraq? Like it rescued the Afghans from the Soviets? Or the South Vietnamese from the North Vietnamese?
Last night a Kashmiri friend messaged me: “Will India, Pakistan and China fight over our skies without seeing us?” It’s not an unlikely scenario. None of these countries is morally superior or more humane than the other. None of them is in this for the greater good of humanity.
But even without an official war, for India to keep a standing army on the Ladakh border, supplied and equipped for high-altitude warfare, for it to even remotely match China’s arsenal, India’s defence budget would probably have to double or triple in size. Even that won’t be enough. It will come as a huge blow to an economy that was already in steep decline (with unemployment at a 45-year high) before the Covid-19 lockdown, and is now predicted to shrink between 3.2 and 9.5%. Modi is not doing too well in the early rounds of this game of Chinese chequers.
The first week of August comes with some other milestones, too. Despite the ill-planned, draconian, back-breaking lockdown, despite woefully few tests compared with other countries, confirmed cases of coronavirus in India are now growing at perhaps the fastest rate in the world. Among its victims is our sabre-rattling home minister, who is spending the anniversary in a hospital bed. Not for him the cures being peddled by the quacks, godmen and members of parliament in his party – drinking cow urine, a magic potion called Coronil, blowing conch shells and banging pots and pans, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa, chanting “Go, Corona, Go!” in the flat intonations of a Sanskrit sloka. Oh no. For him the most expensive private hospital and the best (allopathic) government doctors on call.
And where will India’s prime minister be?
If Kashmir had really been “solved” once and for all, he would be there to be feted by adoring socially distanced crowds. But Kashmir isn’t solved. It’s shut down again. And Ladakh is almost a battlefront. So, Modi has wisely decided to retreat from those troubled borders to a very safe place to make good another long-standing election promise. By the time you read this, he will, accompanied by prayers from priests and people across the country, as well as the blessings of India’s supreme court, have laid a silver slab that weighs 40kg as the foundation for the Ram Mandir, a temple that will rise from the ruins of the Babri Masjid, a mosque that was hammered into the dust by Hindu vigilantes led by members of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party in 1992. It’s been a long journey. Let’s call it a Triumph of the Will.
Lockdown or no lockdown, as I write, I can sense the very air trembling in anticipation of the historic moment. Only the naive or the hopelessly indoctrinated can still believe that hunger and joblessness will lead to revolution – that temples and monuments cannot feed people. They can. The Ram Mandir is food for millions of starved Hindu souls. The further humiliation of the already humiliated Muslims and other minorities only sharpens the taste of victory on the tongue. How can bread compete?
It would be easy to look at the 365 days between last August and now – the final “integration” of Kashmir into India, the passing of the CAA and NRC, and the inauguration of the Ram Mandir – as the defining period in which India under Modi has formally declared itself a Hindu nation, the dawning of a new era. But declarations can contain unacknowledged defeats. And showy beginnings can contain unforeseen ends. It’s worth remembering that despite Modi’s larger-than-life presence and the BJP’s massive majority in parliament, only 17.2% of India’s population voted for them.
Perhaps, as the Chinese suggest, in this matter we should proceed with caution. Think a little. Why did Modi decide to inaugurate the Ram Mandir now? After all it’s not the festivals of Dussehra or Diwali, and the date has no particular relevance in the Ramayana or the Hindu calendar. And there’s a partial lockdown in most parts of India – many of the priests and policemen preparing and securing the site have already tested positive for Covid. So why now? Is it to rub salt into Kashmir’s wounds, or is it to put balm on India’s? Because, whatever they tell us on TV, there’s been a tectonic shift on the borders. Big plates are moving. The world order is changing. You can’t bully people and act like the top dog in the neighbourhood when you’re not top dog. That’s not a Chinese saying. It’s just common sense.
Could it be that this August anniversary is not actually what it’s being cracked up to be? Could it be instead the little limpet of shame clamped to the soaring cliff of glory?
When and if India, China and Pakistan fight over Kashmir’s skies, the least the rest of us can do is to keep our eyes on its people.
In Belarus . . .
The victory of Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, in the recent presidential election, was quickly endorsed by Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia.
The official Chinese government public relations line, as announced in Belt and Road News, is that:
The Chinese side is willing to make joint efforts with the Belarusian side to earnestly implement the consensus reached by the two heads of state, intensify bilateral exchanges at all levels in the context of routine COVID-19 response arrangements, deepen cooperation under the Belt & Road Initiative, and step up coordination on international affairs to push China-Belarus comprehensive strategic partnership for substantial development and open new prospects for bilateral mutually beneficial cooperation.
Andrei Dapkiunas noted, the Belarusian side speaks highly of the great achievements the Chinese government and people have made in COVID-19 containment, and sincerely thanks the Chinese side for providing selfless assistance to the Belarusian side’s fight against the virus.
Attaching great importance to its relations with China, the Belarusian side supports China’s stances on issues concerning the Chinese side’s core interests and major concerns, and is prepared to carry out cooperation under the Belt & Road Initiative in an in-depth manner and further strengthen friendly exchanges in various fields to push Belarus-China relations for new achievements.
Eleanor Albert of The Diplomat asks the question (October 02 2019):
The idea of a centralized source of information on BRI would be a welcome development as it has become harder and harder to differentiate what qualifies a project as BRI-worthy in contrast to China’s general foreign economic cooperation. However, the more likely scenario is a blurred line between reported data and highly controlled, curated party-state talking points.
The LODE Zone Line traverses Belarus in lands between the borders of Poland and the borders of Ukraine.
. . . the election was "rigged"!
Katsiaryna Shmatsina writes an Opinion piece for the Guardian Journal (Mon 10 Aug 2020) under the headline and subheading:
The implausible results of Sunday’s presidential elections have triggered a pushback like never before
Katsiaryna Shmatsina writes:
From the residential area of Minsk where I’m writing, I can hear the incessant honking of car horns. The sound marks the expression of popular protest in the Belarusian capital against Alexander Lukashenko, and his desire to stay in power and add one more presidential term to his already 26-year rule.
On Sunday, when the preliminary results announced by the central electoral commission indicated an “elegant victory” for Lukashenko, with nearly 80% of support, people took to the streets to defend the votes they cast for the opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who officially got only around 10%.
While the official figures indicate a clear victory for Lukashenko, independent exit polls showed strikingly different results: with almost 80% for Tikhanovskaya and less than 10% for the incumbent. The discrepancy in the vote count – coupled with the way independent observers were prevented from staying at polling stations – boiled over in an unprecedented way.
Tens of thousands gathered on the streets of Minsk, united by a simple slogan: “Leave!” In response, the siloviki – the special state security forces – violently dispersed the crowds, resulting in around 3,000 people being detained and hundreds injured. What is particularly remarkable is that protests took place all over the country. This is not the uprising of some narrow or unrepresentative liberal group.
The internet has also been blocked for the second day in a row; even with workarounds, like VPNs, it barely works. (This happened before in 2010 on election night and sporadically during the 2020 electoral campaign.) As of Monday afternoon, the protesters, many of whom rely on information from the encrypted Telegram app, were still intending to take to the streets again. Moments of connectivity brought Telegram reports that additional military trucks and equipment are being brought to the city.
Lukashenko’s plan to stay in power is crumbling. In a recent address to the nation, he proclaimed that he “won’t give the country away”. With multiple violations of democratic standards and human rights committed during his reign – such as the unconstitutional referendum that allowed Lukashenko to run for president for an unlimited number of terms, the disappearance of opponents in the 1990s, the imprisonment of those who dared to question his authority – he and his government understand that if he leaves now, the prosecution of past deeds might follow. People would be free to pore over the past 26 years. The regime is in survival mode: they are determined to suppress discontent, even at the cost of spilling blood on the streets.
Although Lukashenko has a strong hold on the repressive apparatus of the state – as the spectacle of siloviki bundling unarmed protesters into the backs of vans in broad daylight signals – and maintains leverage over the employees in the state sector who work on the electoral commissions, there are signs of cracks inside the system.
A number of polling stations both in Belarus and abroad were reported to have noted a victory for Tikhanovskaya over Lukashenko. Tsikhanouskaya herself told the Associated Press that her campaign had evidence that there were many polling stations “where the number of votes in [her] favour [were] many more times than for another candidate”.
There were reports indicating that police showed up last night at some of the polling stations, forcing the commissions to report the “correct” results. In addition, although many of the siloviki present on the streets yesterday did attack protesters, some refused to take part. Such developments are unprecedented.
Another source of inspiration for the protesters and those people who oppose the regime from inside the system (electoral commissions and the police), is the growing consolidation of the civil society. Belarusians – those inside the country and the Belarusian diaspora all over the world – have already reached into their pockets to crowdfund money to assist those who have been repressed and detained.
We are at a turning point. Lukashenko has little option other than to cling to power, which makes the possibility of more state violence against his own people likely. At the same time, this level of popular protest against the intolerability of life under Lukashenko has never happened before. Even if he manages to suppress the protests in the coming days, Belarusian society has awoken to a freedom struggle that will not go away any time soon.
Katsiaryna Shmatsina is a research fellow at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies.
Shaun Walker Central and eastern Europe correspondent for the Guardian offers his analysis (Mon 10 Aug 2020) under the headline:
For a man who has spent a quarter of a century building a political brand based on stability, there is no doubt that the events unfolding in Minsk will change politics in Belarus and the standing of its veteran leader Alexander Lukashenko for ever.
What is not yet clear is whether the new political era that will follow the protests will be one of dynamic change and a new government, or one of a sustained and bloody crackdown.
“This is a country pretty much unified from border to border in outrage,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He compared the situation to the 1989 revolutions that brought down communist regimes across Europe.
Over the years, Lukashenko has offered his people a sort of Soviet-lite system that prizes tractor production and grain harvests over innovation and political freedoms, and the key part of his political offer has always been political and economic stability.
Lukashenko tried to push this line again into the run-up to Sunday’s presidential vote, painting Belarus as an island of stability in a world buffeted by economic crises, political unrest and coronavirus.
The scale of discontent over the past days shows that for many Belarusians, this messaging will no longer work. In order to secure his supposedly crushing victory, Lukashenko required what appears to be some of the most brazen vote-rigging in recent European history.
Belarusian authorities thought they could safely leave Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the wife of one of the opposition candidates arrested in recent months, on the ballot to provide a window dressing of democratic competition. Instead, Tikhanovskaya emerged as a formidable opponent, describing herself not as a leader, but a symbol, and promising swift new elections if she attained power.
“This sort of ‘accident’ can happen in ageing autocracies. They try to eliminate possible competitors but they look to the elites and figures that resemble themselves,” said Ekaterina Schulmann, a Russian political scientist and Chatham House associate fellow.
The contrast between the two visions of Belarus was visible in the pre-election speeches. An angry Lukashenko berating a room of grim-faced suited functionaries stood in stark contrast to the lively rallies of Tikhanovskaya. She drew crowds of thousands even in small cities, where people sang along to Changes, the 1987 song by the Soviet rock band Kino that became the soundtrack of a previous generation of people demanding a new kind of politics.
“The basic political demand is not for a woman instead of a man, or a young person instead of an old person, but for a different type of political communication and a different sort of conversation between the people and the authorities. And you can see and hear that difference very well if you listen to the speeches of the president and the oppositional leader,” said Schulmann.
The brazenness of the falsification in Sunday’s vote may prove to be counterproductive. If the official result had been Lukashenko winning with 55%, combined with a statement that he had listened to the people and would embark on a new and conciliatory era, he might have restricted anger to the usual politically active demographic.
Now, it seems to have broadened to encompass many people who have never protested before. Lukashenko’s comments that those behind the protests were “sheep who had been manipulated from abroad” will also not have helped.
“There’s a genie out of the bottle and it won’t go back in,” said Gould-Davies.
The role of Russia in what follows could be pivotal. Russia and Belarus in theory are part of a “union state”, though none of the state’s institutions ever materialised, with Lukashenko wary of his country being gobbled up by its larger neighbour.
The relationship with Moscow has frayed further this year, culminating in the bizarre arrest of 33 Russian mercenaries late last month who were accused of plotting a revolution in the country. A number of correspondents for Russian state media were among many journalists arrested and beaten by police on Sunday night.
In the event that a weakened Lukashenko survives, Russia may see an opportunity to increase control over its smaller neighbour. President Vladimir Putin will not want to see another neighbouring leader toppled by street protests, or another partial ally turn decisively toward Europe.
Inside the country, the coming days will test both the resolve of protesters and the loyalty of the repressive structures Lukashenko has built. Given the spread of protest to all corners of the country, does he have enough riot police? Will the isolated reports of some police putting down their shields in small towns become a broader phenomenon? And to what extent can Lukashenko count on the military, which has not previously been used for internal repression, to carry out his orders?
“He is dependent on his own armed bureaucracy. They are now faced with the dilemma of whether they need to heavily invest into keeping the old leader in power or whether he has become a liability and so they had better, for their own interests, get rid of him,” said Schulmann.
Hanging in the balance?
The prospect of revolution or repression in Belarus hangs in the balance. Up until this moment he regime in Belarus has offered China everything it requires to further the interests it seeks to consolidate with the Belt and Road Initiative.
So says Sergey Shcherbakov reporting for euro news 21/06/2019:
The Great Stone Industrial Park is a joint project with China. Surprisingly Belarus, a small country in Eastern Europe, is one of the key areas of China’s Belt and Road initiative - the so-called Silk Road of the 21st century.
China is counting on Belarus to become a major transit hub delivering Chinese goods to Europe. And Belarus wants to be a part of this process. It sees it as an opportunity to give a significant boost to the local economy. Sergei Vaitekhovsky, deputy general director of the Great Stone Industrial Park Development Company, said Great Stone will be a platform for new projects and industries.
He told Euronews: "We all understand that the Belarusian economy needs to develop. We need new technologies, new skills that come with foreign investors. In the long run, the Great Stone Park will be able to contribute about 3-5 per cent of Belarus' GDP. And I think these are quite good figures."
More than 60 companies have already been registered, and not just from China and Belarus. They also come from Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The main goal of attracting European companies in Belarus seems to be attainable, even though it is still early days. And it’s a win-win situation for the Chinese investors, who are very keen to gain a foothold in Eastern Europe.
Great Stone's chief executive, Hu Zheng, said: "We see that China and Europe have closer and closer relations today. Many resident companies of this park are focused on Europe. And the Great Stone Industrial Park will allow them to enter the European market on more comfortable terms."
So far more than 400 million Euros have been invested in the development of the Great Stone Industrial Park. In the next few years, this amount is expected to triple.
Business as usual . . .
. . . or changes?
ПЕРЕМЕН! Changes,the 1987 song by the Soviet rock band KINObeing sung now on the streets of Minsk, and that became the soundtrack of a previous generation of people demanding a new kind of politics, has turned out to be a complex social cultural and political phenomenon.
“I Want Changes!”(Khochu peremen!) is one of the most famous songs by the band Kino. During Perestroika, the tune took on a distinct political message, and ever since it’s been associated with protests, ringing out at rallies and demonstrations by groups of every stripe. Even diametrically opposed political movements use the song. But the politicization of the lyrics took place against the wishes of Viktor Tsoi, Kino’s lead member, who insisted that the song isn’t about protests. In honor of Tsoi, who would have turned 55 this Wednesday, were it not for a tragic road collision in 1990, Lev Gankine revisits how the band’s hit song became an anthem for activists in the post-Soviet world.
In 2011, Tsoi’s song also witnessed a popularity surge in Belarus: at “silent protests”, passing cars blasted “Peremen!” and protesters played the song in synchronization from their mobile phones. Though activists never uttered a word throughout the demonstrations, police detained them, and Kino’s song, along with a few tracks by Lyapis Trubetskoy, were temporarily banned from the radio. In 2014, the song was heard often in Kiev during the Euromaidan protests — both the original Russian version and a Ukrainian version performed by the Ternopil-based rock group S.K.A.I.ture
Business as usual when the need is for change?
The abiding theme of the Re:LODE Radio posts has been documenting and questioning how the current global economic system represents an impediment, a stumbling block to implementing the radical reduction in carbon emissions necessary to mitigate the worst effects of global heating upon our shared planetary atmosphere.
How can this impediment be overcome? Is a fundamental reform of energy production and use possible? Or is a revolution the only way out of the impasse?
(01 01 2015) In their section on CRISIS/THEORY/BOOKS Jacobin magazine invited David Harvey and Leo Panitch to discuss the contradictions of capitalism and how to build movements that go beyond localism.
David Harvey and Leo Panitch are two of the world’s most respected Marxist thinkers. Here, in a spirited conversation for Jacobin, they discuss Harvey’s new book, 17 Contradictions and the End of Capitalism; capital’s relationship to nature; and how to build visionary movements that go beyond just localism. And clash over a few things along the way.
David Harvey is professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Leo Panitch is Canada research chair in comparative political economy at York University.
A Marxist heresy?
David Harvey's position is vigorously challenged by Jorge Martin 25 June 2020 In Defence of Marxism in an article headlined:
While those who are arguing for and against a Revolution, the crisis remains to be acted upon. Perhaps, and it is only a perhaps, the pandemic crisis has, in its apocalyptic scale, also been a "revelation", as politics and everyday survival become the order of the day. The prospect of a wholesale re-thinking concerning the how and the why of the global network of supply chains is on the cards. It is clearly understood by many that maximising profit is not the only way of doing things. Big profits will be trumped by actual access for communities worldwide to the necessary resources for survival. The notion of local industrial capacity to provide the materials necessary to address a health crisis is translatable into a strategy to address the climate emergency, but ONLY if there is the political will, OR the peoples of the world collectively demand it.
In this book, Paul Mason discusses the existential threat posed to capitalism by the digital revolution. He argues that the digital revolution has the potential to reshape utterly our familiar notions of work, production and value; and to destroy an economy based on markets and private ownership. In fact, he contends, this is already happening. He points to parallel currencies, co-operatives, self-managed online spaces, even Wikipedia as examples of what the postcapitalist future might look like. Mason argues that from the ashes of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy.
Five years ago (Fri 17 Jul 2015) Paul Mason set out his case in this Guardian article on Economics under the headline and subheading:
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian
The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The force would be applied by the working class, either at the ballot box or on the barricades. The lever would be the state. The opportunity would come through frequent episodes of economic collapse.
Instead over the past 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed the plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.
If you lived through all this, and disliked capitalism, it was traumatic. But in the process technology has created a new route out, which the remnants of the old left – and all other forces influenced by it – have either to embrace or die. Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.
As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started. Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all. Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely. Third, we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.
The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue. Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis. You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III. New forms of ownership, new forms of lending, new legal contracts: a whole business subculture has emerged over the past 10 years, which the media has dubbed the “sharing economy”. Buzzwords such as the “commons” and “peer-production” are thrown around, but few have bothered to ask what this development means for capitalism itself. I believe it offers an escape route – but only if these micro-level projects are nurtured, promoted and protected by a fundamental change in what governments do. And this must be driven by a change in our thinking – about technology, ownership and work. So that, when we create the elements of the new system, we can say to ourselves, and to others: “This is no longer simply my survival mechanism, my bolt hole from the neoliberal world; this is a new way of living in the process of formation.”
*
The 2008 crash wiped 13% off global production and 20% off global trade. Global growth became negative – on a scale where anything below +3% is counted as a recession. It produced, in the west, a depression phase longer than in 1929-33, and even now, amid a pallid recovery, has left mainstream economists terrified about the prospect of long-term stagnation. The aftershocks in Europe are tearing the continent apart.
The solutions have been austerity plus monetary excess. But they are not working. In the worst-hit countries, the pension system has been destroyed, the retirement age is being hiked to 70, and education is being privatised so that graduates now face a lifetime of high debt. Services are being dismantled and infrastructure projects put on hold. Even now many people fail to grasp the true meaning of the word “austerity”. Austerity is not eight years of spending cuts, as in the UK, or even the social catastrophe inflicted on Greece. It means driving the wages, social wages and living standards in the west down for decades until they meet those of the middle class in China and India on the way up. Meanwhile in the absence of any alternative model, the conditions for another crisis are being assembled. Real wages have fallen or remained stagnant in Japan, the southern Eurozone, the US and UK. The shadow banking system has been reassembled, and is now bigger than it was in 2008. New rules demanding banks hold more reserves have been watered down or delayed. Meanwhile, flushed with free money, the 1% has got richer. Neoliberalism, then, has morphed into a system programmed to inflict recurrent catastrophic failures. Worse than that, it has broken the 200-year pattern of industrial capitalism wherein an economic crisis spurs new forms of technological innovation that benefit everybody. That is because neoliberalism was the first economic model in 200 years the upswing of which was premised on the suppression of wages and smashing the social power and resilience of the working class. If we review the take-off periods studied by long-cycle theorists – the 1850s in Europe, the 1900s and 1950s across the globe – it was the strength of organised labour that forced entrepreneurs and corporations to stop trying to revive outdated business models through wage cuts, and to innovate their way to a new form of capitalism. The result is that, in each upswing, we find a synthesis of automation, higher wages and higher-value consumption. Today there is no pressure from the workforce, and the technology at the centre of this innovation wave does not demand the creation of higher-consumer spending, or the re‑employment of the old workforce in new jobs. Information is a machine for grinding the price of things lower and slashing the work time needed to support life on the planet. As a result, large parts of the business class have become neo-luddites. Faced with the possibility of creating gene-sequencing labs, they instead start coffee shops, nail bars and contract cleaning firms: the banking system, the planning system and late neoliberal culture reward above all the creator of low-value, long-hours jobs. Innovation is happening but it has not, so far, triggered the fifth long upswing for capitalism that long-cycle theory would expect. The reasons lie in the specific nature of information technology. * We’re surrounded not just by intelligent machines but by a new layer of reality centred on information. Consider an airliner: a computer flies it; it has been designed, stress-tested and “virtually manufactured” millions of times; it is firing back real-time information to its manufacturers. On board are people squinting at screens connected, in some lucky countries, to the internet. Seen from the ground it is the same white metal bird as in the James Bond era. But it is now both an intelligent machine and a node on a network. It has an information content and is adding “information value” as well as physical value to the world. On a packed business flight, when everyone’s peering at Excel or Powerpoint, the passenger cabin is best understood as an information factory. But what is all this information worth? You won’t find an answer in the accounts: intellectual property is valued in modern accounting standards by guesswork. A study for the SAS Institute in 2013 found that, in order to put a value on data, neither the cost of gathering it, nor the market value or the future income from it could be adequately calculated. Only through a form of accounting that included non-economic benefits, and risks, could companies actually explain to their shareholders what their data was really worth. Something is broken in the logic we use to value the most important thing in the modern world. The great technological advance of the early 21st century consists not only of new objects and processes, but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical things that are used to produce them. But it is a value measured as usefulness, not exchange or asset value. In the 1990s economists and technologists began to have the same thought at once: that this new role for information was creating a new, “third” kind of capitalism – as different from industrial capitalism as industrial capitalism was to the merchant and slave capitalism of the 17th and 18th centuries. But they have struggled to describe the dynamics of the new “cognitive”capitalism. And for a reason. Its dynamics are profoundly non-capitalist. During and right after the second world war, economists viewed information simply as a “public good”. The US government even decreed that no profit should be made out of patents, only from the production process itself. Then we began to understand intellectual property. In 1962, Kenneth Arrow, the guru of mainstream economics, said that in a free market economy the purpose of inventing things is to create intellectual property rights. He noted: “precisely to the extent that it is successful there is an underutilisation of information.” You can observe the truth of this in every e-business model ever constructed: monopolise and protect data, capture the free social data generated by user interaction, push commercial forces into areas of data production that were non-commercial before, mine the existing data for predictive value – always and everywhere ensuring nobody but the corporation can utilise the results. If we restate Arrow’s principle in reverse, its revolutionary implications are obvious: if a free market economy plus intellectual property leads to the “underutilisation of information”, then an economy based on the full utilisation of information cannot tolerate the free market or absolute intellectual property rights. The business models of all our modern digital giants are designed to prevent the abundance of information. Yet information is abundant. Information goods are freely replicable. Once a thing is made, it can be copied/pasted infinitely. A music track or the giant database you use to build an airliner has a production cost; but its cost of reproduction falls towards zero. Therefore, if the normal price mechanism of capitalism prevails over time, its price will fall towards zero, too. For the past 25 years economics has been wrestling with this problem: all mainstream economics proceeds from a condition of scarcity, yet the most dynamic force in our modern world is abundant and, as hippy genius Stewart Brand once put it, “wants to be free”. There is, alongside the world of monopolised information and surveillance created by corporations and governments, a different dynamic growing up around information: information as a social good, free at the point of use, incapable of being owned or exploited or priced. I’ve surveyed the attempts by economists and business gurus to build a framework to understand the dynamics of an economy based on abundant, socially-held information. But it was actually imagined by one 19th-century economist in the era of the telegraph and the steam engine. His name? Karl Marx. * The scene is Kentish Town, London, February 1858, sometime around 4am. Marx is a wanted man in Germany and is hard at work scribbling thought-experiments and notes-to-self. When they finally get to see what Marx is writing on this night, the left intellectuals of the 1960s will admit that it “challenges every serious interpretation of Marx yet conceived”. It is called “The Fragment on Machines”. In the “Fragment”Marx imagines an economy in which the main role of machines is to produce, and the main role of people is to supervise them. He was clear that, in such an economy, the main productive force would be information. The productive power of such machines as the automated cotton-spinning machine, the telegraph and the steam locomotive did not depend on the amount of labour it took to produce them but on the state of social knowledge. Organisation and knowledge, in other words, made a bigger contribution to productive power than the work of making and running the machines. Given what Marxism was to become – a theory of exploitation based on the theft of labour time – this is a revolutionary statement. It suggests that, once knowledge becomes a productive force in its own right, outweighing the actual labour spent creating a machine, the big question becomes not one of “wages versus profits” but who controls what Marx called the “power of knowledge”. In an economy where machines do most of the work, the nature of the knowledge locked inside the machines must, he writes, be “social”. In a final late-night thought experiment Marx imagined the end point of this trajectory: the creation of an “ideal machine”, which lasts forever and costs nothing. A machine that could be built for nothing would, he said, add no value at all to the production process and rapidly, over several accounting periods, reduce the price, profit and labour costs of everything else it touched. Once you understand that information is physical, and that software is a machine, and that storage, bandwidth and processing power are collapsing in price at exponential rates, the value of Marx’s thinking becomes clear. We are surrounded by machines that cost nothing and could, if we wanted them to, last forever. In these musings, not published until the mid-20th century, Marx imagined information coming to be stored and shared in something called a “general intellect” – which was the mind of everybody on Earth connected by social knowledge, in which every upgrade benefits everybody. In short, he had imagined something close to the information economy in which we live. And, he wrote, its existence would “blow capitalism sky high”. * With the terrain changed, the old path beyond capitalism imagined by the left of the 20th century is lost. But a different path has opened up. Collaborative production, using network technology to produce goods and services that only work when they are free, or shared, defines the route beyond the market system. It will need the state to create the framework – just as it created the framework for factory labour, sound currencies and free trade in the early 19th century. The postcapitalist sector is likely to coexist with the market sector for decades, but major change is happening. Networks restore “granularity” to the postcapitalist project. That is, they can be the basis of a non-market system that replicates itself, which does not need to be created afresh every morning on the computer screen of a commissar. The transition will involve the state, the market and collaborative production beyond the market. But to make it happen, the entire project of the left, from protest groups to the mainstream social democratic and liberal parties, will have to be reconfigured. In fact, once people understand the logic of the postcapitalist transition, such ideas will no longer be the property of the left – but of a much wider movement, for which we will need new labels. Who can make this happen? In the old left project it was the industrial working class. More than 200 years ago, the radical journalist John Thelwall warned the men who built the English factories that they had created a new and dangerous form of democracy: “Every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.” Today the whole of society is a factory. We all participate in the creation and recreation of the brands, norms and institutions that surround us. At the same time the communication grids vital for everyday work and profit are buzzing with shared knowledge and discontent. Today it is the network – like the workshop 200 years ago – that they “cannot silence or disperse”. True, states can shut down Facebook, Twitter, even the entire internet and mobile network in times of crisis, paralysing the economy in the process. And they can store and monitor every kilobyte of information we produce. But they cannot reimpose the hierarchical, propaganda-driven and ignorant society of 50 years ago, except – as in China, North Korea or Iran – by opting out of key parts of modern life. It would be, as sociologist Manuel Castells put it, like trying to de-electrify a country. By creating millions of networked people, financially exploited but with the whole of human intelligence one thumb-swipe away, info-capitalism has created a new agent of change in history: the educated and connected human being. * This will be more than just an economic transition. There are, of course, the parallel and urgent tasks of decarbonising the world and dealing with demographic and fiscal timebombs. But I’m concentrating on the economic transition triggered by information because, up to now, it has been sidelined. Peer-to-peer has become pigeonholed as a niche obsession for visionaries, while the “big boys” of leftwing economics get on with critiquing austerity. In fact, on the ground in places such as Greece, resistance to austerity and the creation of “networks you can’t default on” – as one activist put it to me – go hand in hand. Above all, postcapitalism as a concept is about new forms of human behaviour that conventional economics would hardly recognise as relevant. So how do we visualise the transition ahead? The only coherent parallel we have is the replacement of feudalism by capitalism – and thanks to the work of epidemiologists, geneticists and data analysts, we know a lot more about that transition than we did 50 years ago when it was “owned” by social science. The first thing we have to recognise is: different modes of production are structured around different things. Feudalism was an economic system structured by customs and laws about “obligation”. Capitalism was structured by something purely economic: the market. We can predict, from this, that postcapitalism – whose precondition is abundance – will not simply be a modified form of a complex market society. But we can only begin to grasp at a positive vision of what it will be like. I don’t mean this as a way to avoid the question: the general economic parameters of a postcapitalist society by, for example, the year 2075, can be outlined. But if such a society is structured around human liberation, not economics, unpredictable things will begin to shape it. For example, the most obvious thing to Shakespeare, writing in 1600, was that the market had called forth new kinds of behaviour and morality. By analogy, the most obvious “economic” thing to the Shakespeare of 2075 will be the total upheaval in gender relationships, or sexuality, or health. Perhaps there will not even be any playwrights: perhaps the very nature of the media we use to tell stories will change – just as it changed in Elizabethan London when the first public theatres were built. Think of the difference between, say, Horatio in Hamlet and a character such as Daniel Doyce in Dickens’sLittle Dorrit. Both carry around with them a characteristic obsession of their age – Horatio is obsessed with humanist philosophy; Doyce is obsessed with patenting his invention. There can be no character like Doyce in Shakespeare; he would, at best, get a bit part as a working-class comic figure. Yet, by the time Dickens described Doyce, most of his readers knew somebody like him. Just as Shakespeare could not have imagined Doyce, so we too cannot imagine the kind of human beings society will produce once economics is no longer central to life. But we can see their prefigurative forms in the lives of young people all over the world breaking down 20th-century barriers around sexuality, work, creativity and the self. The feudal model of agriculture collided, first, with environmental limits and then with a massive external shock – the Black Death. After that, there was a demographic shock: too few workers for the land, which raised their wages and made the old feudal obligation system impossible to enforce. The labour shortage also forced technological innovation. The new technologies that underpinned the rise of merchant capitalism were the ones that stimulated commerce (printing and accountancy), the creation of tradeable wealth (mining, the compass and fast ships) and productivity (mathematics and the scientific method). Present throughout the whole process was something that looks incidental to the old system – money and credit – but which was actually destined to become the basis of the new system. In feudalism, many laws and customs were actually shaped around ignoring money; credit was, in high feudalism, seen as sinful. So when money and credit burst through the boundaries to create a market system, it felt like a revolution.
Then, what gave the new system its energy was the discovery of a virtually unlimited source of free wealth in the Americas. A combination of all these factors took a set of people who had been marginalised under feudalism – humanists, scientists, craftsmen, lawyers, radical preachers and bohemian playwrights such as Shakespeare – and put them at the head of a social transformation. At key moments, though tentatively at first, the state switched from hindering the change to promoting it. Today, the thing that is corroding capitalism, barely rationalised by mainstream economics, is information. Most laws concerning information define the right of corporations to hoard it and the right of states to access it, irrespective of the human rights of citizens. The equivalent of the printing press and the scientific method is information technology and its spillover into all other technologies, from genetics to healthcare to agriculture to the movies, where it is quickly reducing costs. The modern equivalent of the long stagnation of late feudalism is the stalled take-off of the third industrial revolution, where instead of rapidly automating work out of existence, we are reduced to creating what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” on low pay. And many economies are stagnating. The equivalent of the new source of free wealth? It’s not exactly wealth: it’s the “externalities” – the free stuff and wellbeing generated by networked interaction. It is the rise of non-market production, of unownable information, of peer networks and unmanaged enterprises. The internet, French economist Yann Moulier-Boutang says, is “both the ship and the ocean” when it comes to the modern equivalent of the discovery of the new world. In fact, it is the ship, the compass, the ocean and the gold. The modern day external shocks are clear: energy depletion, climate change, ageing populations and migration. They are altering the dynamics of capitalism and making it unworkable in the long term.
They have not yet had the same impact as the Black Death – but as we saw in New Orleans in 2005, it does not take the bubonic plague to destroy social order and functional infrastructure in a financially complex and impoverished society. Once you understand the transition in this way, the need is not for a supercomputed Five Year Plan – but a project, the aim of which should be to expand those technologies, business models and behaviours that dissolve market forces, socialise knowledge, eradicate the need for work and push the economy towards abundance. I call it Project Zero – because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system; the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of necessary work time as close as possible to zero. Most 20th-century leftists believed that they did not have the luxury of a managed transition: it was an article of faith for them that nothing of the coming system could exist within the old one – though the working class always attempted to create an alternative life within and “despite”capitalism. As a result, once the possibility of a Soviet-style transition disappeared, the modern left became preoccupied simply with opposing things: the privatisation of healthcare, anti-union laws, fracking – the list goes on. If I am right, the logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important, and that sometimes they do not coincide. * The power of imagination will become critical. In an information society, no thought, debate or dream is wasted – whether conceived in a tent camp, prison cell or the table football space of a startup company. As with virtual manufacturing, in the transition to postcapitalism the work done at the design stage can reduce mistakes in the implementation stage. And the design of the postcapitalist world, as with software, can be modular. Different people can work on it in different places, at different speeds, with relative autonomy from each other. If I could summon one thing into existence for free it would be a global institution that modelled capitalism correctly: an open source model of the whole economy; official, grey and black. Every experiment run through it would enrich it; it would be open source and with as many datapoints as the most complex climate models. The main contradiction today is between the possibility of free, abundant goods and information; and a system of monopolies, banks and governments trying to keep things private, scarce and commercial. Everything comes down to the struggle between thenetwork and the hierarchy: between old forms of society moulded around capitalism and new forms of society that prefigure what comes next. * Is it utopian to believe we’re on the verge of an evolution beyond capitalism? We live in a world in which gay men and women can marry, and in which contraception has, within the space of 50 years, made the average working-class woman freer than the craziest libertine of the Bloomsbury era. Why do we, then, find it so hard to imagine economic freedom? It is the elites – cut off in their dark-limo world – whose project looks as forlorn as that of the millennial sects of the 19th century. The democracy of riot squads, corrupt politicians, magnate-controlled newspapers and the surveillance state looks as phoney and fragile as East Germany did 30 years ago. All readings of human history have to allow for the possibility of a negative outcome. It haunts us in the zombie movie, the disaster movie, in the post-apocalytic wasteland of films such as The Road or Elysium. But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages? Millions of people are beginning to realise they have been sold a dream at odds with what reality can deliver. Their response is anger – and retreat towards national forms of capitalism that can only tear the world apart.
Watching these emerge, from the pro-Grexit left factions in Syriza to the Front National and the isolationism of the American right has been like watching the nightmares we had during the Lehman Brothers crisis come true. We need more than just a bunch of utopian dreams and small-scale horizontal projects. We need a project based on reason, evidence and testable designs, that cuts with the grain of history and is sustainable by the planet. And we need to get on with it.
What "The Plague" teaches us! Solidarity! Above all - value a sharing society!
The Wikipedia article on Paul Masons's PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future has a resume of how in the last section of the book Paul Mason sketches out a road-map to a utopian post-capitalist global society, harnessing zero-marginal-cost production, and seeking to avoid the failings of twentieth-century Communism and capitalism. A key reference point is Alexander Bogdanov's 1908 novel Red Star.
This last section of the book articulates 'five principles of transition', all envisaged operating through non-hierarchical social networks:
To use massive amounts of real data to understand, model, and test ideas for social change so that they fit observable trends in human behaviour.
Ecological sustainability.
Ensuring that a transition to post-capitalism is not conceptualised simply in economic terms, but in wider human terms.
To address problems with diverse approaches, rather than attempting monolithic solutions.
Maximise the power of information.
And the Key goals are:
Rapidly reduce carbon emissions to stay below 2 °C warming by 2050.
Stabilise and socialise the global finance system.
Prioritise information-rich technologies to deliver material prosperity and solve social challenges such as ill health and welfare dependency.
Gear technology towards minimising necessary work, until work becomes voluntary and economic management can focus on energy and resources rather than capital and labour.
Paul Mason's suggested means to achieve this include:
Model policies thoroughly using abundant data before implementing them.
Tackle public debt, not through neoliberal privatisation and austerity, but partly by closing down offshore banking and by holding interest rates below inflation rates.
Promote (partly through state support/regulations) collaborative/co-operative/non-profit forms of work and creative commons production, rather than highly unequal, autocratic and/or rent-seeking business models.
Break up monopolies or, where this is impractical, socialise them.
Socialise the finance system (via a transitional phase of re-regulating the finance sector).
And last, but NOT least:
Pay everyone a basic income!
So, 5 years on, what "The Plague" can teach us is solidarity, plus . . .
'Our generation's NHS': support grows for universal basic income
Insecurity caused by coronavirus has prompted more people to join UK groups calling for change
Jessica Murray reporting for the Guardian (Mon 10 Aug 2020) writes:
It was when he set up a pro bono advice clinic for people facing homelessness that Jonathan Williams, a trainee solicitor, really became committed to the idea of trialling universal basic income (UBI). “There was someone who had been on the street for over 12 months and he was exhausted. I just thought it would be a great foundation for him to get himself back on his feet,” he said.
“So many people fall through the cracks and there’s a lot of people now that don’t even apply for universal credit because they’ve just given up on it.”
Soon afterwards, and faced with an economic crisis triggered by coronavirus, he co-founded the Cardiff UBI Lab in May, one of a growing number of grassroots groups set up to examine the idea’s potential impact within a certain area and explore the launching of pilot schemes.
Since the pandemic struck Britain, the number of UBI Labs has more than doubled, to 24 within the UBI Lab Network. More local authorities are voting in favour of testing the scheme in their area: Norwich became the latest to join the list last month, following Liverpool, Sheffield and Hull.
Campaigners are pulling together an all-party parliamentary group on the subject, with Conservative MPs onboard. The government holds the power to create a pilot scheme.
UBI proposes that every citizen, regardless of their means, receives a sum of money – £1,000, for example – regularly and for life to cover the basic cost of living. Its proponents argue it will alleviate poverty and give people time to retrain and adapt to changing workplaces, be more creative and become more active and engaged.
“It’s a 21st-century solution to 21st-century problems – it could be our generation’s NHS,” said Williams. “Our generation need a policy that is going to help people and I think this could really invigorate entrepreneurialism and help local economies.”
Scotland established a steering group – including councils in Fife, North Ayrshire, Edinburgh and Glasgow – which published a detailed feasibility report in June endorsing a three-year pilot. In May the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said the economic consequences of the pandemic made her think the “time has come” to consider UBI.
Jonny Douglas, a co-founder of the original UBI Lab in Sheffield, said about 15 new labs had joined the network since lockdown. “None of us would have wished the circumstances we’re in, but I reckon we have come forward four or five years’ worth of campaigning in the past four months,” he said.
The UBI Lab Network wrote an open letter to Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, at the start of the lockdown asking him to consider an emergency UBI. Now the network is looking at a recovery UBI of £1,000 per adult and £500 per child for two months to help revitalise the economy.
“The pandemic has shown the vast majority of people in this country are just two pay cheques away from not being able to pay the bills, and all of a sudden everybody’s job is insecure,” said Douglas.
As more people join the campaign, he notes, everyone brings their own experiences and personal reasons for advocating UBI.
Tchiyiwe Chihana co-founded UBI Lab Women, one of the first non-geographical groups dedicated to representing specific voices in the conversation around UBI; there are also plans for disability and refugee labs.
Chihana’s work in the refugee sector opened her eyes to the struggles women face and how a UBI could help alleviate them. “Women take on the bulk of work that is unpaid in this country, and with Covid, things have just gotten worse for women,” she said.
“Women are disproportionately likely to work in the sectors that were hit the hardest by the lockdown measures, and with domestic violence [reports of which have risen during the lockdown] a UBI would allow a woman being abused in a relationship to step away from that because they have that basic financial security.”
The groups have gathered hundreds of statements from people on what UBI means to them. One from the north-east lab reads: “I live in a former mining community. The work available before the pandemic was low-paid and precarious, much of it will now have gone. Folk are already depressed and without self-respect. Basic income would enable them to move on from feeling left behind, believe in their own worth and be more willing to train for new work.”
While the labs attract people from all walks of life, one thing new members always leave at the door is party politics. “We engage in politics, but it’s not all about that,” said Douglas. “I came up with the idea of calling them labs because it’s about testing. So whether you’re for it or against it, the only way to be right is to test it and prove it. It enables us to engage with people who are unsure or against basic income.”
With labs now springing up all over Wales, Williams is hoping to get a debate on UBI in the Welsh parliament by the end of the year. “We’re well aware we don’t control social security in Wales, it’s not devolved, but I personally think that we’re the best place for [a pilot] and I’m really confident, I have this feeling in my bones that something is happening here,” he said.
The campaign has come a long way from when UBI was considered a “crackpot, fringe idea”, said Williams, but people still have plenty of reservations – it needs to be funded somehow, and many critics fear it could discourage job-seeking and encourage laziness.
“The idea is not necessarily to 100% convince people. You just have to get them to a point of going: ‘OK, well let’s try it’, and go from there,” said Douglas. “This is about more than UBI, this is about democracy, this is about how people engage with society to actually influence things.”
Participatory economy In the Wikipedia article on Post-capitalism, a separate Wikipedia article to the one on Paul Mason's book PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, there is a section on what is identified as Participatory economy that references the book Of the People, By the People: The Case for a Participatory Economy, by Robin Hahnel. This book describes a post-capitalist and ends with the proposal of the Green New Deal, a package of policies that address climate change and financial crises. Hahnel argues that a participatory economy will return empathy to our purchasing choices. Capitalism removes the knowledge of how and by whom a product was made: "When we eat a salad the market systematically deletes information about the migrant workers who picked it". By removing the human element from goods, consumers only consider their own satisfaction and need when consuming products. Introducing worker and consumer councils would reintroduce the knowledge of where, how and by whom products were manufactured. A participatory economy is expected to also introduce more socially oriented goods, such as parks, clean air, and public health care, through the interaction of the two councils.
Being utopian? Turning the argument? For those that call the participatory economy utopian, Albert and Hahnel counter: Are we being utopian? It is utopian to expect more from a system than it can possibly deliver. To expect equality and justice—or even rationality—from capitalism is utopian. To expect social solidarity from markets, or self-management from central planning, is equally utopian. To argue that competition can yield empathy or that authoritarianism can promote initiative or that keeping most people from decision making can employ human potential most fully: these are utopian fantasies without question. But to recognize human potentials and to seek to embody their development into a set of economic institutions and then to expect those institutions to encourage desirable outcomes is no more than reasonable theorizing.What is utopian is not planting new seeds but expecting flowers from dying weeds.
QAnon - the opposite of "solidarity" and the epitome of the corruption at the heart of a profit hungry digital monopoly!
Julia Carrie Wong has been investigating for the Guardian (Thu 25 Jun 2020):
In early May, QAnon braced for a purge. Facebook had removed a small subset – five pages, six groups and 20 profiles – of the community on the social network, and as word of the bans spread, followers of Q began preparing for a broader sweep.
Some groups changed their names, substituting “17” for “Q” (the 17th letter of the alphabet); others shared links to back-up accounts on alternative social media platforms with looser rules.
More than just another internet conspiracy theory, QAnon is a movement of people who interpret as a kind of gospel the online messages of an anonymous figure – “Q” – who claims knowledge of a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles and sex traffickers. Within the constructed reality of QAnon, Donald Trump is secretly waging a patriotic crusade against these “deep state” child abusers, and a “Great Awakening” that will reveal the truth is on the horizon.
QAnon evolved out of the baseless Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which posited that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza restaurant, and has come to incorporate numerous strands of rightwing conspiracy mongering. Dedicated followers interpret Q’s cryptic messages in a kind of digital scavenger hunt. Despite the fact that Q’s prognostications have reliably failed to come true, followers rationalize the inaccuracies as part of a larger plan.
Q’s initial commentary on the Facebook bans was concise: “Information Warfare,” Q posted on the website 8kun. Two days later, in a post that included a collage of dozens of news headlines about the takedowns, Q went further, speculating that there had been a “coordinated media roll-out designed to instill ‘fear’” in believers and dissuade them from discussing QAnon on social media. “When do you expend ammunition?” Q wrote. “For what purpose?”
The anticipated purge never came. Instead, QAnon groups on Facebook have continued to grow at a considerable pace in the weeks following the takedown, with several adding more than 10,000 members over 30 days.
A Guardian investigation has documented:
More than 100 Facebook pages, profiles, groups, and Instagram accounts with at least 1,000 followers or members each dedicated to QAnon.
The largest of these have more than 150,000 followers or members.
In total, the documented pages, groups and accounts count more than 3m aggregate followers and members, though there is likely significant overlap among these groups and accounts.
These groups and pages play a critical role in disseminating Q’s messages to a broader audience and in recruiting more believers to the cult-like belief system, researchers say.
“Facebook is a unique platform for recruitment and amplification,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who has been studying QAnon for years. “I really do not think that QAnon as we know it today would have been able to happen without the affordances of Facebook.”
Moreover, Facebook is not merely providing a platform to QAnon groups. Its powerful algorithms are actively recommending them to users who may not otherwise have been exposed to them.
The Guardian did not initially go looking for QAnon content on Facebook. Instead, Facebook’s algorithms recommended a QAnon group to a Guardian reporter’s account after it had joined pro-Trump, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown Facebook groups. The list of more than 100 QAnon groups and accounts was then generated by following Facebook’s recommendation algorithms and using simple keyword searches. The Instagram accounts were discovered by searching for “QAnon” in the app’s discovery page and then following Instagram’s algorithmic recommendations.
Receiving QAnon recommendations from Facebook does not appear to be that uncommon. “Once I started liking those pages and joining those groups, Facebook just started recommending more and more and more and more, to the point where I was afraid to like them all in case Facebook would flag me as a bot,” said Friedberg. Erin Gallagher, a researcher who studies social media extremism, said she was also encouraged to join a QAnon group by Facebook, soon after joining an anti-lockdown group.
Facebook’s own internal research in 2016 found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”, the Wall Street Journal reported, primarily through the same “Groups you should join” and “Discover” algorithms that promoted QAnon content to the Guardian. “Our recommendation systems grow the problem,” the internal research said.
Facebook did not directly respond to questions from the Guardian about its policy considerations around QAnon content. “Last month, we took down accounts, Groups, and Pages tied to this conspiracy theorist movement for violating our policies,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “We also remove Groups and Pages that violate other policies from recommendations and demote in search results. We’re closely monitoring this activity and how our policies apply.”
The company also claimed that “all of the Pages” and “the vast majority of Groups” documented by the Guardian had been removed from recommendation algorithms prior to the Guardian’s query. The company did not provide evidence for this claim, which is contradicted by screenshots of pages and groups appearing in recommendations that were taken in May. The Guardian also continued to receive recommendations to join additional QAnon groups after its initial query to Facebook.
Asked about this discrepancy, Facebook said that the pages and groups in question had been marked as “non-recommendable” as of 8 April 2020 for violations of policies against clickbait, viral misinformation and hate speech, but that a page or group can be restored to eligibility for recommendations if its behavior improves for several months.
Over the course of reporting this article – about one month – the aggregate membership of the documented groups and pages grew from 2.75m to more than 3m, or approximately 8.5%. Groups and pages that the Guardian had documented to have been promoted through Facebook’s recommendation algorithms grew 19.9%. One page that appeared in recommendations – “We are ‘Q’” – saw its following grow nearly 60%, from about 24,000 to about 38,000 over the month – despite the page not having posted any new content since February.
To Friedberg, the window for Facebook to act on QAnon may have already passed. “I’m starting to wonder if we’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop – another act of violence,” he said. “That seems to be what the platforms wait for, and that in and of itself is terrifying.”
A ban that stuck
While QAnon thrives on Facebook, another social media site took timely and decisive action against it. Nearly two years ago, Reddit, the link-sharing network of interest-based message boards, carried out a site-wide purge of QAnon – and made it stick.
Reddit had been central to the development of the QAnon movement, which began in October 2017 with the emergence of “Q” on 4chan, the anarchic image board that has served as a launching pad for memes and internet culture but also racist extremism and harassment campaigns. Q, whose cryptic messages and predictions claimed to be based on a high-level government security clearance, quickly decamped from 4chan to the even more extreme 8chan, where believers could read Q’s latest “crumbs” directly from the source.
Q went briefly silent in 2019 when 8chan was forced offline in the wake of the El Paso massacre, but re-emerged on the new site founded by 8chan’s owners, 8kun.
Anonymous internet posters claiming to be high-level government officials are not entirely uncommon; in recent years, other so-called “anons” have emerged with claims that they were revealing secrets from inside the FBI or CIA. But Q is the first such figure to have achieved such a broad audience and real-world political influence. This is largely due to the activism of three dedicated conspiracy theorists who latched on to Q’s posts in the early days, according to an investigation by NBC News. These activists worked to develop a mythology and culture around QAnon and cultivated an audience for it on mainstream social media platforms.
Reddit was significantly easier to use for the kind of crowd-sourced research and interpretation that forms the core of participation in QAnon, and the site was host to a large pool of potential recruits, such as the 1.2m members of the subreddit r/conspiracy. It had also long enjoyed and at times even earned a reputation as one of the danker cesspools of the social web, for years tolerating communities known as “subreddits” dedicated to sharing non-consensual sexualized images of women or advocating rape.
But the violent anger of adherents to QAnon crossed the line for Reddit in less than a year. On 12 September 2018, citing its ban on content that “incites violence, disseminates personal information, or harasses”, the company banned 18 QAnon subreddits, the largest of which had more than 70,000 members.
Social media bans are often difficult to maintain, but Reddit’s move was uncommonly effective. Today, QAnon remains unwelcome on Reddit, with the few subreddits that address it dedicated to either debunking the theory or providing support to people who have lost friends and family members to QAnon.
‘Taking the red pill’
QAnon did not disappear after Reddit pulled the plug, however. Instead, its believers moved on to other platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Discord and – crucially – Facebook. At the time of the Reddit ban, one of the largest closed Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon, “Qanon Follow the White Rabbit” had 51,000 members, according to NBC News. Today that group has grown to more than 90,000 members.
And while YouTube and Twitter have played an important role in providing a broadcast platform for QAnon content, the specific structures provided by Facebook are uniquely suited to the participatory “work” of engaging with QAnon. Facebook also provides QAnon with an even larger pool of potential recruits than Reddit could, especially for the somewhat older, Evangelical crowd that has proven susceptible to QAnon’s messaging.
Will Partin, a research analyst with Data & Society, and Alice Marwick, a professor of communication at the University of North Carolina, describe QAnon as a “dark participatory culture”, which is to say that it is a community that takes advantage of the infrastructure of social networking sites to bring disparate people together and foster discussion, collaboration, research and community, but directs those energies toward anti-democratic, regressive and even violent ends.
“Everything about our research suggests that these people are not irrational; they’re hyper-literate, even if they’ve come to beliefs that are empirically inaccurate ,”Partin said. “That’s partly because they have a fundamentally different epistemology to judge what is true and false.”
The digital architecture of Facebook groups is also particularly well-suited to QAnon’s collaborative construction of an alternative body of knowledge, Friedberg said. The platform has created a ready-made digital pathway from public pages to public groups to private groups and finally secret groups that mirrors the process of “falling down the rabbit hole or taking the red pill”.
“You can mechanically take those steps,” he said. “Very few of the contemporary Q-following base actually need to engage with 8chan at all.”
To ban or not to ban
While Facebook has policies banning hate speech, incitement to violence and other types of content that it considers undesirable on a family- and advertiser-friendly platform, QAnon does not fit neatly into any single category.
Much of what is shared in QAnon groups on Facebook is a mix of pro-Trump political speech and pro-Trump political misinformation. Memes, videos and posts are often bigoted and disconnected from reality, but not all that different from the content that is shared in non-QAnon, pro-Trump Facebook groups.
The pages and groups that were removed in early May violated the company’s ban on “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – ie the kind of digital astroturf tactics that Russian operatives used to support Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. Those rules are aimed at operations in which actors make false representations about their identities in order to mislead people – a description that could encompass Q – but Facebook only applies its policy to deceptive behavior that occurs on its platform, not on 8kun.
To enact a blanket ban akin to Reddit’s under its current rubric of rules, Facebook would likely have to designate QAnon as a “dangerous organization” – the category it uses to ban both terrorist and hate groups and any content published in support or praise of them. QAnon is hardly an organization, though as a movement it has certainly caused harm and could be considered dangerous.
There are innate societal and individual harms to convincing people of a version of reality that is simply false, as QAnon does, said Data & Society research analyst Will Partin. “When a common sense of what is real and what is correct breaks apart, it becomes nearly impossible to reach a democratic consensus.”
And QAnon followers’ enthusiasm for misinformation is not confined to politics; as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, the groups became a hotbed for medical misinformation – something Facebook has claimed to be working hard to combat. Analyses by Gallagher, the social media researcher, and the New York Times demonstrated how QAnon groups fueled the viral spread of “Plandemic”, a 26-minute video chock full of dangerously false information about Covid-19 and vaccines.
Facebook’s algorithms appear to have detected this synergy between the QAnon and anti-vaccine communities. Several QAnon groups are flagged with an automated warning label from Facebook that reads, “This group discusses vaccines” and encourages users to go to the website of the Centers for Disease Control for reliable information on health.
It appears that anti-vaccine propagandists are also taking notice, and attempting to capitalize. Larry Cook, the administrator of Stop Mandatory Vaccination, one of the largest anti-vaxx Facebook groups, has begun incorporating QAnon rhetoric into the medical misinformation he peddles, as well as making explicit invitations to QAnon believers to join his group.
Cook has begun referencing the “deep state” and stoking fear of forced vaccination and “FEMA camps”.
“I have discussed the concept many, many, many times that vaccines destroy our connection to God and that we are in a spiritual war with Principalities of Darkness that have a death wish for our children, and humanity at large,” he wrote in one QAnon-inflected post. (Cook also uses the site to aggressively promote his various products and a subscription-only platform for “medical freedom patriots”.)
But the potential for damage from QAnon goes well beyond. For those individuals who truly believe in the QAnon narrative, the crimes of the “cabal” are so grievous as to make fighting them a moral imperative. “They’re talking about a group of people who are operating our government against our wishes and they’re molesting and torturing children and destroying our society,” said Joseph Uscinski, a professor of political science who studies conspiracy theories. “It’s an incitement to violence.”
Indeed, there have been numerous incidents of real-world violence linked to QAnon, and in May 2019, the FBI identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat in an intelligence bulletin. While anti-government conspiracy theories were not new, the bulletin stated, social media was allowing them to reach a larger audience, and the online narratives were determining the targets of harassment and violence for the small subset of individuals who crossed over into real-world action.
Despite this, Uscinski is skeptical of the idea that kicking QAnon off Facebook would help anyone. He regularly polls conspiracy theories and consistently finds that QAnon is “one of the least believed things” out there, well below belief in theories about Jeffrey Epstein’s death, anti-vaccine hoaxes, and Holocaust denialism. Uscinski also cautions against overly exoticizing the QAnon narrative, noting that “most of the component parts of QAnon have been around forever”, with parallels in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s or the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK. And he’s concerned about the free speech implications of censorship by tech platforms.
“It’s a potentially dangerous belief; it’s very disconnected from reality; I don’t really think we want more people getting into it,” he said of QAnon. “Do the internet companies bear some responsibility? Yes. Would it be better if they took it down? Probably. Does that take care of it? No.”
Partin said that he generally favored Facebook taking a “more aggressive approach to moderation”, including addressing the recommendation algorithms and trying to reduce the spread of misinformation out of dedicated conspiracy communities and into the mainstream.
“If Facebook flipped a switch and every Q post disappeared tomorrow, that probably would be harmful for QAnon,” he said. “But there is resiliency built in. Getting deplatformed is harmful, but the idea that it would somehow make this disappear is fanciful.”
Friedberg worried that it may already be too late. “Facebook should have taken action on this a long, long time ago, and the longer that they wait, the more deeply entrenched in mainstream politics this becomes,” he said. Facebook has been reluctant to appear in any way biased against Republicans, and if (or when) QAnon reaches Congress, it will be even more politically difficult for Facebook to take a stand.
In May, Republican voters in Oregon nominated a QAnon believer to run for the US Senate in November. Another QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is likely to be elected to the House of Representatives after she came first in a Republican primary in a conservative Georgia district on 11 June.
“In some ways, the second that Trump officially acknowledges QAnon is the second it becomes a partisan political issue that Facebook may not be able to take action against,” said Friedberg. “We’re watching a normalization process of these conspiracies, and I think the beast that is Facebook was really the answer to this all along.”
Indeed, Trump himself has repeatedly retweeted QAnon accounts on Twitter, which believers take as confirmation of their alternate reality. And on 20 June, just before Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump’s adult son Eric posted a QAnon meme on his Instagram account. Eric Trump deleted the image relatively quickly, but not before screenshots spread across the Facebook Q-sphere.
“So Eric Trump posted a pic with a ‘Q’ in the imagery,” an administrator of one of the larger QAnon groups wrote. “The pic has been taken down but the message was received!”
The only villains in "The Plague" are those who cannot see beyond themselves. The plague, for these people, is either an excuse to flee or an opportunity to exploit . . .
. . . meanwhile Facebook algorithm monetises and encourages QAnon fake news and paranoia!
Guardian investigation finds the Facebook communities are gaining followers as Twitter cracks down on QAnon content
New and established QAnon groups on Facebook are growing at a rapid pace and helping to spread the baseless and dangerous conspiracy theory to new countries around the world, a Guardian investigation has found.
The Guardian has documented more than 170 QAnon groups, pages and accounts across Facebook and Instagram with more than 4.5 million aggregate followers. The Guardian has also documented dedicated communities for QAnon followers in at least 15 countries on Facebook.
The growth in the QAnon Facebook communities has come as rival social media platform Twitter undertook a broad crackdown on content and accounts dedicated to the conspiracy theory, citing the movement’s “clear and well-documented informational, physical, societal and psychological offline harm”.
At the time of Twitter’s crackdown, anonymous sources told the New York Times that Facebook was planning to take “similar steps” at some point this month. In the meantime, Facebook’s recommendation algorithm has continued to promote QAnon groups to users and some groups have experienced explosive growth.
QAnon is a baseless internet conspiracy theory whose followers believe that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a “deep state” cabal of Democrats and Hollywood celebrities engaging in pedophilia and sex trafficking. The theory evolved from the 2016 “pizzagate” conspiracy theory and has grown to have real-world political impact. Numerous QAnon adherents are running for elected office as Republicans; the FBI has identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorism threat.
In late June, the Guardian reported that the QAnon community on Facebook included more than 100 Facebook pages, profiles, groups and Instagram accounts with at least 1,000 followers or members each. The largest of those groups had more than 150,000 followers or members, and overall the accounts, groups and pages counted more than 3 million aggregate followers or members.
As of Sunday 9 August, the aggregate following of those previously documented groups, pages and accounts had grown by 34% to over 4m. The largest groups have grown to include more than 200,000 members.
The Guardian also documented an additional 73 groups and pages dedicated to QAnon with at least 1,000 followers or members each. Many of those 73 groups are brand new – founded in May 2020 or later – and they have already amassed an aggregate following of more than 560,000 people.
These newer groups and pages also demonstrate the spread of QAnon around the world. They include groups dedicated to QAnon followers in the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, Serbia and Slovenia. The largest international QAnon groups documented by the Guardian were German, Italian, Polish, Dutch, Australian and British.
“Enforcing against QAnon on Facebook is not new: we consistently take action against accounts, Groups, and Pages tied to QAnon that break our rules,” a Facebook spokesperson who asked not to be identified by name due to safety concerns said in a statement. “Just last week, we removed a large Group with QAnon affiliations for violating our content policies, and removed a network of accounts for violating our policies against coordinated inauthentic behavior. We have teams assessing our policies against QAnon and are currently exploring additional actions we can take.”
The removed group had nearly 200,000 members and was banned for repeated violations of Facebook’s rules against bullying, harassment, hate speech and harmful misinformation. A spokesperson at the time confirmed that the removal was a “one-off” enforcement action and not part of any broader policy shift. The network removed for coordinated inauthentic behavior was relatively tiny, with just 1,600 followers on Facebook and 7,200 on Instagram.
An internal investigation by Facebook found thousands of QAnon groups and pages with more than 3 million aggregate followers, NBC News reported on Monday. Those figures were part of the preliminary results of an investigation into QAnon by Facebook employees obtained by NBC News. Facebook has been looking into QAnon“since at least June”, according to the report.
“The response from all social platforms to the harm and threat of QAnon has been slow and anemic,” said Travis View, a researcher and co-host of QAnonAnonymous, a podcast that documents and debunks QAnon. “But Facebook stands alone in how much it has enabled this conspiracy theory-driven extremist community.”
“Not content with merely hosting QAnon propaganda, Facebook continues to recommend QAnon groups to users, essentially providing free marketing for a movement that has already inspired people to commit terrorism, murder and conspiracy to commit kidnapping,” View added.
Facebook is considering an approach to QAnon similar to its policies on anti-vaccine propaganda, according to NBC News. Such an approach would probably involve removing groups from search results and Facebook’s recommendation algorithms rather than banning them outright.
Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project, warned that Facebook needs to be incredibly careful about how it manages any crackdown on QAnon, especially with the election approaching. Since QAnon adherents already believe that the truth of secret pedophile cabals is being suppressed by the liberal media, a crackdown could serve to reinforce unfounded beliefs.
“We want to stop QAnon because it’s degrading trust in our institutions, spreading medical misinformation and potentially fostering violent extremism,”Friedberg said. “Without an explanation as to why QAnon content is being banned, this is not going to do anything to deter the beliefs of the communities.”
Friedberg said that effectively combating QAnon will probably require “factual interventions” from conservative media outlets and leaders who are trusted by those most likely to believe in QAnon – older, white, conservative evangelical Christians.
“As QAnon seems to be largely centered around support for Trumpian politics, there needs to be intervention from the conservative members of their trusted partners,” he said. “What if PragerU decided to do a two-week-long series debunking QAnon?
“The goal isn’t the suppression of speech,” he added. “The goal is rebuilding trust in our institutions and electoral politics.”
This post discusses the social, economic and political impact of the Black Death upon the late medieval world and the early Renaissance in Europe, and contextualizing the emergence of what we now experience as global capitalism.
The Wikipedia article on QAnon references this possible origin of this contemporary 'Q' substitute.
There has been much speculation about the motive and the identity of the poster, with theories ranging from a military intelligence officer, to Trump himself, to an alternate reality game by Cicada 3301. Because 4chan is anonymous and does not allow registration by users, any number of people originally may have posted using the same handle. The poster came to use a frequently changing tripcode to authenticate on 8chan after migrating there as they feared 4chan had been "infiltrated".
The Italian leftist Wu Ming foundation has speculated that QAnon is inspired by the Luther Blissett persona, which leftists and anarchists used to organize pranks, media stunts, and hoaxes in the 1990s. And it was "Blissett" that published the novel Q in 1999.
As Q relies on a tripcode to verify themself, and the tripcode is verified by 8chan's server and not reproducible on other imageboards, Q was not able to post when the website went down following the 2019 El Paso shooting. This apparent conflict of interest, combined with statements by 8chan's founder Fredrick Brennan, the use of a "Q" collar pin by 8chan owner Jim Watkins, and Watkins's financial interest in a QAnon super PAC that advertises on 8chan, have led to widespread speculation that either Watkins or his son, 8chan's administrator Ron Watkins, knows Q's identity, although both of them deny knowing Q's identity.
Apocalypticism and the paranoid style of American politics
QAnon may best be understood as an example of what historian Richard Hofstadter called in 1964 "The Paranoid Style in American Politics", related to religious millenarianism and apocalypticism. The vocabulary of QAnon echoes Christian tropes—"The Storm" (the Genesis flood narrative or Judgement Day) and "The Great Awakening", which evokes the historical religious Great Awakenings from the early 18th century to the late 20th century. According to one QAnon video, the battle between Trump and "the cabal" is of "biblical proportions", a "fight for earth, of good versus evil." The forthcoming reckoning is said by some QAnon supporters to be a "reverse rapture" which means not only the end of the world as it is now known, but a new beginning as well, with salvation and a utopia on earth for the survivors.
Classic historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories
The conspiracy theory's targeting of George Soros and the Rothschilds has led The Washington Post and Jewish-American magazine The Forward to accuse it of containing "striking anti-Semitic elements" and "garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones". An August 2018 Jewish Telegraphic Agency article said, "although not specifically, some of QAnon's archetypical elements—including secret elites and kidnapped children, among others—are reflective of historical and ongoing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories".
The Anti-Defamation League reported that while "the vast majority of QAnon-inspired conspiracy theories have nothing to do with anti-Semitism", "an impressionistic review" of QAnon tweets about Israel, Jews, Zionists, the Rothschilds, and Soros "revealed some troubling examples" of antisemitism.
The long read by Anna Merlan published by the Guardian (Thu 2 May 2019):
Outsiders and the disenfranchised have always embraced the existence of wild plots and cover-ups. But now the biggest conspiracy-mongers are in charge.
Is QAnon an example of a digital and social media "cult" going "viral"?
Some studies have classified QAnon's appeal as similar to that of religious cults. According to an expert in online conspiracy, Renee DiResta, QAnon's pattern of enticement is similar to that into cults in the pre-Internet era where, as the targeted person was led deeper and deeper into the group's secrets, they become more and more isolated from friends and family outside of the cult.
In the Internet age, QAnon virtual communities have little "real world" connection with each other, but online they can number in the tens of thousands.
Rachel Bernstein, an expert on cults who specializes in recovery therapy, has said, "What a movement such as QAnon has going for it, and why it will catch on like wildfire, is that it makes people feel connected to something important that other people don't yet know about. ... All cults will provide this feeling of being special." There is no self-correction process within the group, since the self-reinforcing true believers are immune to correction, fact-checking, or counter-speech, which is drowned out by the cult's groupthink.
QAnon's cultish quality has led some to characterize it as a possible emerging religious movement. Part of its appeal is its gamelike quality, in which followers attempt to solve riddles presented in Qdrops by connecting them to Trump speeches and tweets and other sources. Some followers use a "Q clock" consisting of a wheel of concentric dials to decode clues based on the timing of Qdrops and Trump tweets.
Travis View, a researcher who studies QAnon, says that it is as addictive as a video game, and offers the "player" the appealing possibility of being involved in something of world-historical importance. According to View, "You can sit at your computer and search for information and then post about what you find, and Q basically promises that through this process, you are going to radically change the country, institute this incredible, almost bloodless revolution, and then be part of this historical movement that will be written about for generations."
View compares this to mundane political involvement in which one's efforts might help to get a state legislator elected. QAnon, says View, competes not in the marketplace of ideas, but in the marketplace of realities.
Nonetheless, some QAnon believers have eventually started to realize that they have been isolated from family and loved ones, and suffer loneliness because of it. For some, this is a pathway to beginning the process of divesting themselves of their cultish beliefs, while for others, the isolation reinforces the benefits they get from belonging to the cult. View says,
People in the QAnon community often talk about alienation from family and friends. ... Though they typically talk about how Q frayed their relationships on private Facebook groups. But they think these issues are temporary and primarily the fault of others. They often comfort themselves by imagining that there will be a moment of vindication sometime in the near future which will prove their beliefs right. They imagine that after this happens, not only will their relationships be restored, but people will turn to them as leaders who understand what's going on better than the rest of us.
Some Q followers break away when they recognize the content of the theories is not self-consistent, or they see that some of the content is directly aimed at getting donations from a specific audience, such as evangelical or conservative Christians. This then "breaks the spell" the conspiracies had over them. Others start watching Q-debunking videos; one former believer says that the videos "saved" her.
Disillusionment can also come from the failure of the theories' predictions. Q predicted Republican success in the 2018 US midterm elections and claimed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions was involved in secret work for Trump, with apparent tensions between them a cover. When Democrats made significant gains and Trump fired Sessions, there was disillusionment among many in the Q community.
Further disillusionment came when a predicted December 5 mass arrest and imprisonment in Guantanamo Bay detention camp of Trump's enemies did not occur, nor did the dismissal of charges against Trump's former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. For some, these failures began the process of separation from the QAnon cult, while others urged direct action in the form of an insurrection against the government. Such a response to a failed prophecy is not unusual: apocalyptic cults such as Heaven's Gate, the People's Temple, the Manson Family, and Aum Shinrikyo resorted to mass suicide or mass murder when their expectations for revelations or the fulfilment of their prophecies did not materialise.
Psychologist Robert Lifton calls it "forcing the end". This phenomenon is being seen among some QAnon believers. View echoes the concern that disillusioned QAnon believers might take matters into their own hands as Pizzagate believer Edgar Maddison Welch did in 2016, Matthew Phillip Wright did at Hoover Dam in 2018, and Anthony Comello did in 2019, when he murdered Mafia boss Frank Cali, believing himself to be under Trump's protection.
Prominent QAnon follower Liz Crokin, who in 2018 asserted that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death and is now Q, stated in February 2019 that she was losing patience in Trump to arrest the supposed members of the child sex ring, suggesting that the time was approaching for "vigilante justice."
Other QAnon followers have adopted the Kennedy theory, asserting that a Pittsburgh man named Vincent Fusca is Kennedy in disguise and would be Trump's 2020 running mate. Some attended 2019 Independence Day celebrations in Washington expecting Kennedy to appear.
You could not make it up!
This report by Carl Hulse for The New York Times (June 30, 2020) provides evidence of the growing influence of QAnon conspiracy theories on Republican Trump supporting voters. He writes:
Lauren Boebert, a political novice and gun-rights activist who has spoken approvingly of the pro-Trump conspiracy theory QAnon, claimed an upset primary victory on Tuesday night against Representative Scott Tipton of Colorado, unseating a five-term incumbent endorsed by President Trump.
Ms. Boebert, 33, is the owner of Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colo., and has gained attention in recent days for defying pandemic restrictions by keeping her restaurant open. She previously grabbed headlines for confronting a former Democratic presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, over his pledge during an appearance in the state to seize assault rifles.
“I am here to say: Hell, no, you’re not,”Ms. Boebert, who encourages employees in her restaurant to openly carry guns, told him during a town-hall meeting in Aurora. Gun rights have been at the center of the state’s political clashes for years after new restrictions imposed after mass shootings.
More recently, Ms. Boebert defied state orders against opening her restaurant until the Garfield County sheriff obtained a cease-and-desist order against her.
Her unexpected victory will probably lead Democrats to put more emphasis on the race to try to snatch a Republican seat. The winner of the Democratic primary was Diane Mitsch Bush, a former State House member who lost to Mr. Tipton in 2018.
Democrats immediately went on the attack against Ms. Boebert on Tuesday night for her refusal to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory movement, which holds that “deep state” traitors are plotting against Mr. Trump.
Appearing on a radio program last month, she said of QAnon: “I hope that this is real because it only means America is getting stronger and better, and people are returning to conservative values, and that’s what I am for.”
“If this is real,” she added, “then it could be really great for our country.”
This month, Republican leaders condemned offensive statements about Black people, Jews and Muslims made on social media by another Republican candidate who had promoted QAnon, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who finished first in a primary for a Georgia congressional seat.
“Washington Republicans should immediately disavow Lauren Boebert and her extremist, dangerous conspiracy theories,” Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in a statement on Tuesday night. She said Democrats were “well positioned to compete and win this seat.”
Conservative values? Hidden within, all corruption?
David Smith in Washington reports for the Guardian (Fri 7 Aug 2020):
The NRA has been the most powerful gun lobby in the world since another former president of the group, Hollywood actor Charlton Heston, promised to resist efforts to prise firearms “from my cold, dead hands”. It has fought to suppress research on the danger of guns in society, keep open loopholes for background checks on gun sales and even for firearms to be present in schools.
The NRA also has been an electoral ally of Donald Trump, spending $30m to help him beat Hillary Clinton in 2016. Democrats, gun control activists and others have fought long and hard to curb its influence. But in the end, the NRA’s worst enemy was the NRA. Victim of its own success and hubris, it strayed from its core purpose and shot itself in the foot.
27 Woe unto you . . . hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.
28 Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity.
The Gospel of Matthew Ch 23 Verses 27 and 28.
Progressive values?
Jessica Murray and Aamna Mohdin report for the Guardian on the common purpose of activism on racial inequality and the climate emergency (Tue 11 Aug 2020) under the subheading:
For 14-year-old Eleanor Woolstencroft, it was last year’s school climate strikes that empowered her to throw herself into the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in recent weeks.
“[Without the climate strikes], I would have been a lot less confident, I wouldn’t have known how protests worked,” she said, adding that the strikes helped open her eyes to societal inequality. “There have been so many speakers at the climate strikes talking about racial injustice and how the climate emergency is going to affect immigrants and people in refugee camps first.”
Woolstencroft is one of many BLM protesters who said they were first introduced to activism through environmental movements like the Extinction Rebellion (XR) protests and school climate strikes, which swelled to enormous size in 2019.
Natanya Popoola, 17, from London, said the first protests she went to were the climate strikes, which she described as “exhilarating” because it “was being led by someone young for the first time”. She added: “The fact that we were striking school was empowering, because it was in your hands rather than asking your parents to go on a Saturday. It redefined the idea of what a protest meant. It really made me feel: I can handle this as long as I’m with a good group of people.”
While Popoola said her race has meant she has had her political awakening at a young age, she believes climate strikes have got her generation thinking about politics more deeply.
Another 17-year-old protester, who didn’t wish to be named, described the climate strike protests and the BLM movement as core tenets of young people’s identity. “It’s almost essential to know now. A lot more value is placed on politics and knowing what’s happening, whether it’s racial justice or the student climate march.”
Although the BLM protests are making fewer headlines in the UK now, many are still happening. Woolstencroft has been going along to as many protests in her home town of Newcastle as she can. “As a person of colour, when we make the change that we need to make, I want to say I was a part of that, and I helped to bring about that change,” she said.
Young environmental activists have long made the link between racial injustice and the climate crisis, and have therefore been keen to offer solidarity with BLM in practical ways.
XR organised a “know your rights” training session in June for BLM protesters, outlining what to do if you are arrested or stopped and searched at a protest.
The session covered common police tactics, the right to no comment, the arrest process, and what support is available afterwards, as well as what protesters should carry with them, such as a “bust card”: with legal advice and solicitor contact details.
“We’re aware of the kind of institutionalised racism within the police force, so we were quite concerned knowing there would be a far higher proportion of black people and people of colour in attendance at the Black Lives Matter protests,” said Eva, part of the XR legal support team.
“We just thought, ‘We do this training all the time, so it would be really great if as many people as possible went to the protests knowing their basic legal rights.’”
Much of this experience and knowledge has been built up among XR members as a result of its tactic of mass arrests during its rebellion in October, which was criticised for excluding minority groups.
In the wake of the BLM protests, XR released a statement acknowledging this and outlining how it would prioritise anti-racism going forward: “We recognise now that our tactic of arrest has made it easier for people of privilege to participate and that our behaviours and attitudes fed into the system of white supremacy. We’re sorry this recognition comes so late.”
The news was welcome to XR Youth, which has long been vocal about the need for greater inclusivity in the organisation, and hopes this is the start of wider change. “There has been talk for a while now about a fourth demand, about climate justice and racial justice, being added to the current XR demands,” said Rianka Gill from XR Youth. “It’s already being incorporated into more local XR groups, so my hope is that it reaches the masses.”
Lola Fayokun, an 18-year-old student who helped organise the UK school climate strikes, spoke at a BLM digital rally about climate justice, a term that frames the climate crisis as an ethical and political issue, not just an environmental one.
“If you’re tackling climate change while ignoring the fact that it will disproportionately impact all the most marginalised people in our society, and they already are bearing the brunt of this crisis, then you’re doing them a grave injustice,” she explained.
But this is also a critical moment for environmental groups to tackle racism within the movement itself, she said, and more needs to be done.
“It needs to come into everything. There’s no point in releasing a Black Lives Matter statement if the majority of strikers are white, the majority of organisers are white, if the vision that we’re actually promoting is not one which defends black lives,” she said. “The [environmental] movement is typically seen as like a lot of white, middle class people doing the work behind the scenes, so we have to do the work to change that.”
For many of the climate activists, the BLM protests also offered a moment to reflect on how their movement is perceived, and therefore policed, differently.
“As climate strikers, we get policed less than a Black Lives Matter march,” said Fayokun. “That’s obviously really important for our understanding of the relationship between policing and the maintenance of certain power structures.”
Documentary filmmaker Mark Johnson, who also created the Playing for Change project based on his idea made in late 1990s and established the eponymous Foundation, witnessed a street performer Roger Ridley (died November 16, 2005) performing the song in Santa Monica, California in March 2005, inspiring Johnson to film Ridley's re-performance and another thirty-six musicians' individual performances of the song "around the world" and then mix the clips into one music video.
The music video was featured in an October 2008 episode of Bill Moyers Journal, where Johnson was promoting the documentary film Playing for Change: Peace Through Music, which includes the music video and was shown as part of the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
The music video was uploaded via the Playing for Change YouTube channel in November 2008, garnering more than 10 million views as of May 2009. The total amount of views of the YouTube video increased to more than 24 million as of December 2010, 30 million as of March 2011, 40 million as of March 2012, 50 million in somewhere between 2012 and 2014, 60 million as of 2014, 74 million as of May 2015, 100 million as of 2017, and 140 (or 142) million as of March 2020.
My name is Arkilaus Kladit. I’m from the Knasaimos-Tehit tribe in South Sorong Regency, West Papua Province, Indonesia. For decades my tribe has been fighting to protect our forests from outsiders who want to log it or clear it for palm oil. For my people, the forest is our mother and our best friend. Everything we need to survive comes from the forest: food, medicines, building materials, and there are many sacred sites in the forest.
We have been taught for generations about how to maintain a good relationship with the forest. If it is cut down, it will be the same as cutting down our lives.
This has been critical for us during this Covid pandemic because, with the shortage of rice, we have been relying on our traditional staple food, sago, that comes from the forest.
And we have gone further by harvesting it to provide food for the surrounding area.
The first threat to our forest was in 1988-89 when I was young. The government wanted to make a transmigration scheme settlement in our area but our elders rejected it because we were worried a lot of new people would harm the forest. Then in the early 2000s companies came wanting to log the valuable trees in our forest. After some years of struggle, we saw them off in 2005 but only after they did some damage to our forest.
The most recent threat is from oil palm. We heard news reports in 2012 there was an oil palm company going into a neighboring village. The news was quite alarming. Our tribe was sad. We had heard about thousands of hectares being cleared for oil palm plantations in Merauke and Sorong Districts. We thought that if oil palm is planted in a neighboring village, it is certain that the forests around our villages, Sira and Manggroholo, could also be under threat. But we stood firm on protecting our forest for our children and grandchildren. Our people consistently oppose oil palm, because we realize that our economic, customary and cultural lives depend heavily on the forest.
After our earlier fight with the illegal loggers, we decided in 2006 that we wanted to gain recognition for our customary forests. What has interested me most was getting the rights of the people to manage their forest. We worked with our Non-Government Organisation friends, including Bentara and Greenpeace, to do participatory mapping of our own village lands and mark the boundary of all 81,446 hectares of our tribal lands. It is our custom to pass down from generation to generation where the boundaries of our forests are.
Everything is collective, or is inherited collectively through the clans; it comes from our ancestors.
On the 12th August 2020 the CEE Alliance launches the campaign for the Climate and Ecological Emergency (CEE) bill.
This is a Private Members’ Bill, and taking it through the UK parliament will be a hard-fought process but it has been done before with major climate legislation. This is an alliance bill that has been written by scientists, lawyers and activists; it is gathering support from a broad range of campaign groups, businesses, charities and individuals. The bill has the potential to become the most significant move forward since the Climate Change Act 2008.
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