Fringe Thoughts

Lots of inspiration and food for thought when thinking about the Irish situation - from Cairo and Barcelona, but also from anti-water privatisation struggles in New Zealand and student politics in Poland among others…

Interface: a journal for and about social movements http://interfacejournal.net

Volume four, issue one (May 2012): The season of revolution: the Arab Spring and European mobilizations

Issue editors: Magid Shihade, Cristina Flesher Fominaya, Laurence Cox. Guest editor (European special section): Mayo Fuster Morell
http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/

Volume four, issue one of Interface, a peer-reviewed e-journal produced and refereed by social movement practitioners and engaged movement researchers, is now out, on the special theme “The season of revolution: the Arab Spring” with a special section “A new wave of European mobilizations?”

Interface is open-access (free), global and multilingual. Our overall aim is to “learn from each other’s struggles”: to develop a dialogue between practitioners and researchers, but also between different social movements, intellectual traditions and national or regional contexts. Like all issues of Interface, this issue is free and open-access.

This issue of Interface includes 403 pages and 31 pieces in English, Catalan and Spanish, by authors writing from / about Australia, Canada, Catalunya, Dubai, Egypt, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Palestine, Poland, Senegal, South Africa, Spain, Swaziland, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, the UAE, the UK and the US among other countries.

Articles in this issue include:

• Magid Shihade, Cristina Flesher Fominaya and Laurence Cox, The season of revolution: the Arab Spring and European mobilizations

The Arab Spring:

• Austin Mackell, Weaving revolution: harassment by the Egyptian regime (action note) and Weaving revolution: speaking with Kamal El-Fayoumi (interview)
• Samir Amin, The Arab revolutions: a year after
• Vijay Prashad, Dream history of the global South
• Jeremy Salt, Containing the “Arab Spring”
• Azadeh Shahshahani and Corinna Mullin, The legacy of US intervention and the Tunisian revolution: promises and challenges one year on
• Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio, After Mubarak, before transition: the challenges for Egypt’s democratic opposition (interview and event analysis)
• Bassam Haddad, Syria, the Arab uprisings, and the political economy of authoritarian resilience           
• Steven Salaita, Corporate American media coverage of Arab revolutions: the contradictory messages of modernity
• Ahmed Kanna, A politics of non-recognition? Biopolitics of Arab Gulf worker protests in the year of uprisings
• Aditya Nigam, The Arab upsurge and the “viral” revolutions of our times
• Cassie Findlay,Witness and trace: January 25 graffiti and public art as archive (practice note)

Special section: a new wave of European mobilizations?

• Eduardo Romanos Fraile,“Esta revolución es muy copyleft”. Entrevista a Stéphane M. Grueso a propósito del 15M
• Marianne Maeckelbergh, Horizontal democracy now: from alterglobalization to occupation
• Fabià Díaz-Cortés i Gemma Ubasart-Gonzàlez, 15M: Trajectòries mobilitzadores i especificitats territorials. El cas català
• Puneet Dhaliwal, Public squares and resistance: the politics of space in the Indignados movement
• Donatella della Porta, Mobilizing against the crisis, mobilizing for “another democracy”: comparing two global waves of protest (event analysis)
• Joan Subirats, Algunas ideas sobre política y políticas en el cambio de época: Retos asociados a la nueva sociedad y a los movimientos sociales emergentes (event analysis)

Other articles:

• Marina Adler, Collective identity formation and collective action framing in a Mexican “movement of movements”
• Nancy Baez and Andreas Hernandez, Participatory budgeting in the city: challenging NYC’s development paradigm from the grassroots (practice note)
• Magdalena Prusinowska, Piotr Kowzan, Małgorzata Zielińska, Struggling to unite: the rise and fall of one university movement in Poland 
• Jim Gladwin and Rose Hollins, The Water Pressure Group: lessons learned (action note)

This issue’s reviews include the following titles:

• Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent action. Reviewed by Brian Martin
• Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine (eds), Africa awakening: the emerging revolutions. Reviewed by Karen Ferreira-Meyers
• Amory Starr, Luis Fernandez and Christian Scholl, Shutting down the streets: political violence and social control in the global era. Reviewed by Deborah Eade
• Rebecca Kolins Givan, Kenneth Roberts and Sarah Soule (eds). The diffusion of social movements: actors, mechanisms, and political effects. Reviewed by Cecelia Walsh-Russo
• Florian Heβdörfer, Andrea Pabst and Peter Ullrich (eds), Prevent and tame: protest under (self) control. Reviewed by Lucinda Thompson
• Observatorio Metropolitano, Crisis y revolución en Europa: people of Europe rise up! Reviewed by Michael Byrne
• Arthur Lemonik and Mariel Mikaila , Student activism and curricular change in higher education. Reviewed by Christine Neejer
• Rebecca MacKinnon, Consent of the networked: the worldwide struggle for internet freedom. Reviewed by Piotr Konieczny

A call for papers for volume 5 issue 1 of Interface is now open, on the theme of “Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements ” (submissions deadline November 1 2012). We can review and publish articles in Afrikaans, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Zulu. The website has the full CFP and details on how to submit articles for this issue at http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Interface-4-1-CFP-vol-5-no-1.pdf

The next issue of Interface (November 2012) will be under the title “For the global emancipation of labour: new movements and struggles around work, workers and precarity”.     

Interface is always open to new collaborators. More details can be found on our website: http://interfacejournal.net.

Please forward this to anyone you think may be interested.

A great post here by the new Combat Liberalism blog - hilarious for anyone who has ever thrown the Irish Times into the bin in disgust at how it talks about ordinary people’s views on politics.

A strange phenomenon is developing on the Irish left blogosphere. Suddenly, all sorts of otherwise sane individuals are delighted to see a ceremonial President use words like socialism and criticise neo-liberalism. I’ve been ruminating a bit on this and similar  responses.

Because of course the point is that the President isn’t actually practicing socialism or doing anything to prevent the onward march of neo-liberalism. As President, he can’t - but even before that, as president of the Labour Party (including during the start of its period in government with Fine Gael) and in a “long and illustrious career” before that again, Michael D - whatever his real merits - has been a key figure in a party which has consistently been available for coalitions that have been the opposite of socialist. The current one is a particularly blatant example, and his role within the party leaves no space for claiming that he secretly disapproved of the programme for government or whatever; but the pattern is a long one.

So why get excited? Because, O best beloved, for those who get excited when they hear the word “socialism” used where it has no actual implications in practice, what matters is precisely words, and the ability to use them or not. If The President - with as many capital letters as possible - says these kinds of things it suddenly becomes possible to use them in certain circles once again. Those circles are not the circles of popular movements - the movements which put socialism on the agenda and come to that brought the phrase neo-liberalism to Irish ears - but the circles of commercial and state media, academia and similar places.

In other words, it is now possible to remain respectable, part of the in-group, in these little worlds and make radical noises.  Because it is, after all, upsetting not to be able to say what you feel - not so upsetting of course that you would say it anyway and damn the consequences if they were to lead to losing respectability, not getting invitations, getting a reputation as a trouble-maker - but upsetting enough for people who feel, at the end of the day, that they want to have their cake and eat it: be part and parcel of the various elites that run the country but also make nice, “radical” noises.

I remember the first time I came across this concept, expressed by someone who is now a leading academic but was then young and a bit insecure, struggling to express the question: “Don’t you think it is possible to be radical and … be part of the system?” Well, no. It is possible to be radical and have a job (if there is one to be had); it is possible to be radical and organise within and against powerful institutions; it is possible to be radical and take part in all sorts of structures as part of a movement aiming to overthrow exploitation, oppression and injustice. Absolutely. Is it possible to be radical and do your damndest to be accepted by the powers that be, become part of the in-group, to cringe at the thought that someone superior to you might raise an eyebrow at your naive expression of outrage and the institution’s behaviour? No.

Of course in Ireland in particular there are rewards for people once from social movements who turn gamekeeper rather than poacher, not only the ones who make a career out of denying their past (which is lucrative enough) but even more those who serve to demonstrate that the system itself incarnates the ideals of the movements who struggle for a better world. That’s what happens when popular movements make their own state: you get a conveyor belt from angry shop steward to the board of directors of a semi-state agency, from member of a paramilitary organisation to cheerleader for local investment, and all the rest of it. In India, governments which call themselves communist send paramilitary thugs into kill and rape villagers resisting multinational investment. In Ireland, governments whose members call themselves socialist turn a blind eye while thugs beat up opponents of multinational investment and sink their boats. (At least the killing, if not the sexual harassment, has been absent so far in Rossport.)

But like Bertie Ahern, there is an attraction to calling yourself a socialist while handing over oil and gas to multinationals. Like many a member of Catholic religious orders, it sounds nice to call yourself an activist for social justice while turning a blind eye to what your own organisations are responsible for, particularly if it is happening somewhere nice and quiet, away from cameras.

You can even - and this is the kicker - make a career (as journalist, academic, NGO professional) out of being outraged at poverty, gender inequality, economic crisis, and all the rest of it while remaining an active member of a government party which is making people poorer. There will be an audience, and a space, for your hard-hitting analyses and tear-jerking accounts of how the crisis is hitting the poor. What there will not be is any attempt to join the dots - any ability to see that giving away natural resources to multinationals, bailing out the bondholders of a private bank, maintaining European fiscal loyalty at any cost, choosing privatisation as a strategy and a dozen other aspects of government policy are in some, apparently subtle and hard-to-grasp way … responsible for a situation in which the costs of the crisis are visited on the poorest and most vulnerable and the crisis itself is used to further entrench the power of the same, em, neoliberal elites which created it.

Because in this wonderful world you can run with the hare and hunt with the hounds - make a career out of commiserating with the victims while being part of the institutions which are perpetrating the damage, celebrate socialism and condemn neo-liberalism while practicing neo-liberalism and attacking any movement which has even a shred of socialist reality. Is it because there is no sense of having any ethical or practical responsibility for what your own party chooses to do? Is it because it is just too complicated to make the links between macro-economic choices (or to understand that they are choices) and their effects in cuts to real people’s ability to survive? Or is it because it’s nice to feel good and it’s also nice to feel appreciated by The People Who Count? Answers on a postcard please.

So let’s come back to what is actually involved in being socialist or opposing neo-liberalism. It is standing up, in practical ways, to support the people of Rossport, and now the people opposing fracking in Leitrim or drilling in Dublin Bay - not just making polite noises when your party is out of power but actually having a policy that is about popular control of natural resources for the good of all (whether that means exploiting them or leaving them in the ground). It is standing alongside women when police forces joke about rape. It is refusing to accept a situation where the government is paying airport fees to enable the USA to fight its proxy wars in the rest of the world. It is actually opposing institutions, like the EU, whose fundamental structures are organised to enshrine neo-liberalism (and more so with each new treaty and referendum). It is supporting migrants against deportation and institutional racism. It is opposing the poll tax and making people pay for basic services. And it is supporting the fight for actual democracy when it counts.

Of course there is a cost. But it is not that hard a cost in Ireland, in the 21st century. It is not the cost paid by the people who created socialism, who put women’s rights on the agenda, who fought for democracy in the first place. It is the cost of … not being liked by people one step above you, not getting that appointment you were hoping for, not being asked back by the media; the cost of dirty tricks by the cops, a bit of abuse on the street, not having everyone agree with you all the time.

It is one thing to think that the real wealthy and powerful are screwing the rest of us over for the sake of their investment portfolios, their second and third homes, private jets or whatever it might be. It is another thing altogether to think that their useful idiots are doing it for the sake of a slightly quieter life and a few scraps from the master’s table. Maybe when they are done emoting about how awful things are for everyone they might take a good look at what they are actually, in practice, supporting and what they are actually getting out of it - and grow up.

It’s that time of year when people start to think about plans and we put publicity for next year’s masters course together. Good comrade Liz Humphrys has rescued us from the embarrassment of relying on my non-existent design skills and turned out two excellent posters for the course, which I’m taking the liberty of posting here (as Blogger won’t let you post PDFs and it gives me an excuse to talk about the course here…)

Here’s one of the posters: MA CEESA poster 2

And here’s t’other:  MA CEESA poster 1

More details about the course at this page.

The furore over Papandreou’s referendum idea is telling - and reminds an Irish audience of the furore over the Irish defeat of the Lisbon Treaty (when we were told to go back and vote again until we got it right). Just to untangle a few of the layers here:

- At the simplest level, we are told that those European populations (most) which are hostile to various elements of neoliberalism and EU institutions are misinformed, nationalist, protectionist and so on - claims which would make more sense were it not that support for these elements can hardly be said to be uniformly well-informed, internationalist and committed to an authentically free market. In parliamentary democracy, them’s the breaks: if you want the legitimacy of “popular mandates” when you can get them, it makes little sense to object when you lose that your opponents are diverse. It is ever thus.

- At a broader level, while popular support for the EU as such represents a fairly solid majority in most member states, support for its neoliberal elements (such as the various ECB / IMF austerity packages and bailout funds) or for increased powers for its various executives does not, and this has been consistent over the last decade whenever we have had a chance to vote on these matters. The horror manifested at the proposition that Greeks might have the right to vote on austerity packages reflects this reality - that the only way such a referendum could have passed would have been by making it a vote at a minimum on Greek membership of the euro and at a maximum on Greek membership of the EU.

- The barely suppressed comment from “the markets”, European elites and the mainstream media is “never mind democracy, we know better”. As generally in neoliberalism, this is supposed to be a technical matter in which popular opinion has no place - as indeed for all decisions of substance. In a sense neoliberalism can be defined as precisely this process of removing what in earlier capitalist regimes were matters of public debate from that democratic realm (however limited) and into the province of technocracy.

- But do “we” know better? The evidence hardly suggest so. Like most previous capitalist regimes (Keynesian / Fordist, for example), neoliberalism started with a crisis, had a boom period and is now facing a bust. This is what such regimes are for, and it is no argument for the particular merits of any given one. (In fact, it is at this level that the argument is usually lost, when sufficient groups defect from a particular arrangement, be it from above or from below - see the neat chronicle of the last time in Lash and Urry’s End of organized capitalism.)

- In fact the dice are seriously loaded when it comes to “argument”: in most of the English-speaking world at least, it is barely possible to get a training, let alone a permanent post, in economics if you are seriously hostile to the axiomatic assumptions which now underpin the discipline (and it has to be remembered how recently these axioms were imposed). Far from the free play of logic and evidence, if you do not subscribe to the relevant articles of faith there is no place for you in economics. The artificial nature of this is shown by how many critics of neoliberalism can be found in less well-policed disciplines (and those which are less likely to be called on to advise governments, have chairs funded by corporate donations or be called on as media experts): in sociology, geography or anthropology, for example, there are heated arguments between defenders and opponents of neo-liberalism. As soon as genuine debate is possible, in other words, it becomes clear that the “self-evident” status of neo-liberal dogma is only self-evident to members of that particular church.

The increasingly difficult balancing act of turning EU economies around within neo-liberal frameworks and without popular consent relies, though, on this assumption that “they” do know better - but it is an assumption which they have done nothing to deserve, and one which is rarely defended. In universities, as in the media or within the political parties which manage the balancing act, the bulk of the argument is achieved by separation: economists here, sociologists there. Commentators on rising poverty here, economic affairs there. Local log-rolling here, voting the way the leadership (or “Europe”) requires, there.

The challenge of popular movements is to hold power to account - and to create new forms of power which respond to a democratic impulse rather than line up with the demands of power. The starting-points have to include breaking that separation. Not just challenging the apathy which assumes that “they” will always win, but also challenging the collusion of self-declared progressives who nonetheless line up behind parties and policies that serve the continuation of neoliberalism; holding them to account for the decisions taken by the leaders they support, and pointing this out as clearly and directly as possible.

Doing this also means dropping the shadow-boxing beloved of the Irish left, involving writing detailed economic critiques aimed at insider circles, and starting to focus on how to talk to people who have an interest in listening, and making clear and straightforward proposals which relate to most people’s sphere of action rather than that of detailed policy. We have little enough strength; we can’t afford to waste it.