The annual conference of Python software developers does not usually make news beyond the world of computer geekery. This year’s conference, however has has given rise to a snowballing controversy surrounding female tech-professional and conference attendee Adria Richards. Depending on who you read, Richards is either a tenacious advocate of women’s empowerment in a male-dominated industry, unjustifiably fired for having the temerity to expose sexism on the conference floor – or, alternatively, she is an overgrown school prefect, who overreacted to off-colour humour, and cost a man his job. A third position – that has been heard all to audibly in recent days from the legions of demented 4chan types – is that Richards is a woman on the internet who refuses to imitate a doormat, and as such deserves to be subjected to threats of violence and rape.
Anyway the facts are as follows. Richards, who was watching a presentation from the conference , took offence at a conversation taking place behind her – which pertained to the importance of having a “big dongle”. Feeling that this was all too symptomatic of the sexist atmosphere of the industry she took a photograph of the men who were conversing and tweeted it along with a description of her displeasure at the conversation. She further discussed the matter with the conference organisers who then threw the men out.
The upshot was that one of the men involved – having had his picture and company name publicised – lost his job. The, in turn, provoked fairly widespread outrage, amongst the IT/Developer/internet community, much of it directed acted at Adria Richards. Hacker attacks were made against her company SendGrid, who responded by publicly firing her – prompting accusations that they had caved in to the troll army.
On the internet, mysoginy is prominent and institutionalised, and Richards is no doubt suffering its effects. Yet looking at her account of the conversation that provoked her tweet, it is difficult to sympathise with her actions. No doubt the conversation that she reports involves some low grade sexual humour – the importance of having a big dongle. But there’s nothing that appears particularly sexist. They were not, for example. talking about any particular woman – present or otherwise – who they would “like to do”. Merely floating a sex related analogies to each other.
Indeed other female software types have, understandably, taken umbrage at the suggestion that such chatter is peculiarly offensive women’s ears. As one woman put it “I probably would have been giggling myself…It has nothing to do with gender.” Yes there can often be a crossover between sexist humour and juvenile jokes about body party. And yes expressions of sexuality are not made in a social vacuum, but in a society in which sexual relations between men and women are all too often a matter of coercion. Yet the two are not one and the same. And where juvenile toilet humour is not marred by sexism, it ought to be recognised and indeed celebrated by all right thinking people as a fundamental cornerstone of our civilization.
What, however, truly made this situation into something very painful to those involved was the exercise or corporate power against employees, specifically the power to sack. In firing their developer for making a crude joke – a man who supports three kids – Playhaven imposed a fairly brutal punishment for some of the cuff chatter. In doing so they also sent a message to any of their other employees who happen to do any public that amounts to we own your soul – restrict thine smalltalk to company approved phrases. Meanwhile, it was at a point when Adria Richards had already been subject to massive public humiliation that her own company decided to publicly fire her – going as far as too tweet that she had been sacked “effective immediately”. Certainly a good education for anyone whose bought into the idea that Silicon Valley’s open plan offices represent a new kind relaxed, open, and egalitarian corporate culture. Those fighting, respectively, in the corner of Richards or crude-joking men could to worse than turn their fire on the real enemy.
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Since the crisis in the Cypriot banking system became apparent, the position of the German government has been clear: those who have deposited money into the Cypriot banking system – mainly Cypriots and Russians – must be prepared to meet the cost of bailing it out. “Anyone having their money in Cypriot banks must contribute in the Cypriot bailout” argued Angela Merkel. “That way those responsible will contribute in it”. She has been backed up on this by her finance minister Wolfgang Schaueble who has argued that those who, as depositors, lent their money to Cypriot banks, knowingly took a risk and should therefore be prepared to foot the bill.
No doubt, there is some logic to this approach. When a bank is rescued from insolvency, its creditors are the primary beneficiaries of that rescue – and obviously ought to contribute to the cost of saving those institutions that they themselves chose to lend to.
Nonetheless, one cannot help feeling that the German government is afflicted by a mixture of hypocrisy and amnesia. Back in 2008 it was the Irish banking system that was going under. Had the country’s major banks collapsed, the key losers would have been German bondholders who had lent vast amounts of money to these now insolvent institutions.
Unsurprisingly, in this instance Chancellor Merkel was rather less enamoured by the principal that a bank’s creditors ought to pay for the cost of bailing it out. Instead, in a deal that she was instrumental in shaping, the Irish government was compelled to borrow the tens of billions of Euros necessary to save the banks (and their foreign creditors ), and to pass the debt on to current and future generations of Irish citizens – a debt that exceeds ten thousand Euros for every man, woman and child.
The German finance minister has come up with many high-minded reasons why the those who deposited their money in Cyprus have an unusually great responsibility to meet the cost of the bailout. Such depositors, he argued, chose to put their money in a low regulation, low tax jurisdiction, and should therefore be prepared to accept greater risk. But could not exactly the same be said – albeit to a lesser to degree – about those German bondholders who chose to invest their money in Ireland?
Indeed it is becoming increasingly clear that the principles governing the management of Europe’s financial crisis amount to little more than “might is right”. Big bondholders, situated in Europe’s most powerful economies are to be protected. Depositors, and taxpayers, within Europe’s peripheral economies can get stuffed.
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Under the coalition, budget day has become quite a ritual. The precise details of Osborne’s budget are yet to be revealed. Nonetheless, it is already easy to predict what budget day will sound like. The telegraphistas will complain that the Cameroons are not cutting fast enough. The Tory leadership, for their part, will say something about Labour’s toxic debt legacy, and possibly regurgitate some flawed household budget analogy. Meanwhile, we lefties will see our Facebook and twitter feeds fill up with people pointing out the regressive elements of the budget, and asserting once again that austerity isn’t working.
In recent years, the fiscal question – the issue of who gets taxed, and how much gets spent – has come to dominate political and economic debate. This is particularly true on the left. “No cuts” has become the key slogan – and, to an extent, the very identity – of those of us who are opposed to the present economic and political order. In many ways this makes perfect sense. Austerity is not only having a grim affect upon the poorest in society. It is also the lynch pin of what the coalition proclaim to be their economic strategy. By necessity, our starting point must be one of opposition to the cuts.
Yet what’s also becoming increasingly clear is that an alternative fiscal policy, based on progressive taxation and stimulus spending, is nowhere near enough to address the deep seated causes of economic misery in the British economy. In recent years real wages have fallen sharply. This is not simply because some employers are taking the opportunity to profit from unemployment. It also reflects, in part, a near unprecedented decline in productivity – something unlikely to be reversed given the historically low levels of investment – as both banks and firms hoard cash rather than putting it to productive use. The causes of social and economic misery are to be found not simply in sluggish demand, but also on the supply side of the economy.
For the Right, all of this demonstrates that what Britain truly needs is not stimulus spending, but a more “business friendly” environment. Not true. Since the coalition came to power, cuts to corporation tax, combined with attacks on workers’ rights have done nothing to increase levels of investment. Osborne’s low tax, low regulation, Enterprise Zones have created just 6% of the jobs that they were predicted to create.
Rather, the point is this. In the present situation, characterized by a scarcity of profitable investment opportunities, we cannot rely upon markets and upon entrepreneurs to power Britain’s productive economy. Meanwhile, if we are to take a longer view, and look at the more benign economic conditions that preceded the crash, we can see that allowing market forces to structure the economy is conducive neither to sustainable growth, nor to the creation of secure, well-remunerated and meaningful work for the many.
In short our demands for an end to austerity must be coupled with equally prominent proposals for how the economy as a whole can be reorganised. We must look at government not only as a consumer, capable of making up for sluggish private demand, but potentially as a producer and investor, and as a mechanism by which democratic pressure can be brought to bear upon the management of the whole economy. To demand a reversal of spending cuts and no more, risks returning us to the politics of Blairism – a politics that allowed markets to run wild whilst seeking to allocate a bit more cash to the public sector, and which sought to plug the gaps left by deindustrialization by merely shoving low-wage, low-opportunity public sector jobs up north. This is not merely bad economics, it’s also bad politics. As Jim JEPPS has argued, while many consider austerity unfair, fewer people believe that its reversal is actually possible – and the the people who we need to convince know full well that a simple return to the pre-cash economy is not a realistic possibility.
So what would an egalitarian reorganisation of the economy entail? Far more than can be said in what is already, at this point, a somewhat tl;dr blogpost. I believe that protectionism may be crucial in creating opportunities for productive investment, and in broadening the base of the British economy beyond financial services – and thus reversing a trend that has done so much to concentrate wealth , and good work, amongst a relatively narrow elite. There is also a good case for publicly run British investment bank that, in contrast to the market-led disaster of the past 2 decades, could allocate scarce investment funds on the basis of social utility rather than merely short term profits. Meanwhile, Paul Cotterrill’s focus on institutions, and in particular, the potential of co-operatives, offers very serious food for thought (and his proposals, compared with mine, have the advantage of being far less state-centric, and actually delivering power to ordinary people). So too are Chris Dillow’s Eight Ideas for Supply Side Socialism.
Whatever the answers, this is absolutely the territory we need to be fighting on – politically and intellectually.
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The SWP – one of the most successful organising forces on the British left over the last few decades – is close to death, its good work sacrificed on the altar of the cult a flawed model of democratic centralism created.
I will spend no time mourning for there is no time to mourn. The left must not slip further into recriminations, sectarian squabbling, backbiting and bloodletting. Every second that it does is another second the rest of the country doesn’t care.
Do the vast majority of working class people think it’s terribly important what Lenin said to Trotsky in 1917? Or are they more concerned about wages, housing, education, healthcare, cuts and simply surviving the government’s onslaught on their lives? It’s time to put aside the obscure ideological differences of the past and unite on what matters to people.
There are already broad campaigns against the cuts which draw together activists from across the far left, Labour and the Greens.
But when the demonstration is over, when the placards have been put down, do we say to people you have no choice but to vote Labour because it’s the best you’re going to get?
The collapse of the SWP and the failure of RESPECT do not take away from the fact that there is a vacant space to the left of Labour and an urgent need to fill it. Firstly as a campaigning force against Tory austerity. Secondly to represent a class abandoned by the neoliberal husk Blair and Brown turned a gutted Labour Party into. Thirdly to act as a gravitational pull, supporting socialists in Labour to help steer it back to the left.
As Ken Loach told the Evening Standard last week: “We desperately need a new movement … What UKIP has done for the right, we need for the left!”
If this new movement is to emerge, it cannot be a temporary electoral alliance, a patchwork of the tiny Trotskyite groups sewn together in a banner hung out for the General Election and then put in a cupboard again while its constituent elements focus on building their own organisations.
It has to join peoples’ everyday struggles; it has to matter to their everyday lives. It must stand with them, not on top of them; speak with them, not down to them with high theory. Only then will it win the right to ask them for their votes come election time.
Many dedicated socialist activists will have suddenly found themselves homeless in the last few days. But the death of the SWP does not have to spell the death of the left if we put aside the 10% of obscure ideological differences on which we disagree and unite around the 90% of what matters to us and what matters to the most disadvantaged people of this country.
Ken Loach has made an important call and the Left Unity project has opened up the discussion around it. Now it is the task of all socialists to ensure we can do all we can to protect the vulnerable from austerity by coming together to make a difference.
Click here to donate to the Firebox Kickstarter Campaign.
Back in the summer of 2012 I got involved with launching Firebox, a progressive cafe and events space in South Camden. In the months since Tony Benn cut the ribbon at the official launch, Firebox has evolved into something quite significant, as a place in which people struggling against the current order can come together, a place in which a plurality of progressive voices can be heard, and in a place in which politics can really be brought into the community. Last week it hosted a packed meeting, addressed by Owen Jones, on the future of the left. Firebox wants to do even more of what it does. To this end they have started a Kickstarter campaign to raise £5000. As well as helping to pay for some basic things likes mugs, chairs and security shutters, this money allow Firebox to make the investments it needs to start running citizen journalism courses for individuals progressive organisations. So far nearly £3000 has been raised. But to get any money at all the target of £5000 has to be reached within the next 15 days. Please do give what you can. And whether you can donate or not, please do share this around.
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As is the way of these things, a particularly stupid and irritating Facebook meme seems to have resurrected itself recently. The meme in question is this letter to the Guardian from ex-Labour minister Michael Meacher (or Michael “was September 11 an inside job?” Meacher, to give him his full title), which originally appeared in print in May of last year:
You see the problem? The stereotype of the well-meaning but economically illiterate leftwinger is a tired cliché, but with stuff like this around it’s depressingly easy to see where it comes from. You don’t have to become an economics expert before you express an opinion on the subject (I’m sure as hell not one, even if I’ve studied it a bit) but as a rule of thumb it usually helps to at least know the meaning of the words you’re using.
For those who are unaware (and with apologies to those who aren’t), the government’s budget deficit is the difference between what it’s spending and what it’s taking in as revenue each year – it’s not the same thing as the total debt. If over a five year period my annual earnings are £30,000 but my annual expenditure is £32,000, then my annual deficit will be £2,000, while my total debt will come to £10,000 (plus interest).
This being the case, it shouldn’t be too hard to see how Meacher’s suggestions simply don’t make any sense. Capital gains tax on wealth accrued over a period of ten years might be enough to pay off 70% of the deficit this year, but what about next year? If you have a persistent deficit, a one-off lump sum isn’t going to help you. You need to find a way to either increase your revenues or reduce spending, both for this year and for years to come.
None of this makes the inequality of wealth which Meacher describes any less grotesque, or the government’s tax policy any less unjust, but it does have the potential to seriously weaken the political case against them. Every time a prominent leftwing figure comes out with something this stupid, it makes it that bit easier for the right to dismiss us as naïve innumerates, and given the persistence of the “this crisis happened because Labour spent too much” myth, that’s something we could really do without. Repeating stuff that we’ve read or heard because it confirms our preconceptions without really thinking about whether they make sense is a very common human failing (and one I’ve almost certainly been guilty of in the past). But given how politically damaging it has the potential to be, it’s a failing we’d be well-advised to avoid.
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Ever since our imperial possessions broke away from us, we Brits have been coming up with different ideological coping mechanisms to deal with our historic butthurt. The latest delivery of prozac came today, with the unveiling of the commonwealth charter.
In short the queen stood up in her palace to explain how the 53 other countries ought to govern themselves, and we got to pretend that they would listen to her.
In the run up to the Charter being signed there was much handwringing in the Liberal press. Some of the less “with it” members of the commonwealth had managed to prevent any reference to equality for gays and lesbians. Needless to say, this will be a crushing blow to all those gay rights activists in Pakistan who naturally will have vested all of their hopes in Buckingham Palace riding in to the rescue.
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For those who missed it, Nick Cohen was in typically bullish form in last Sunday’s Observer, looking back on (nearly) ten years since the start of the Iraq war:
…I would not restore the Ba’ath if I had the power to rewind history. To do so would be to betray people who wanted something better after 35 years of tyranny. If my interrogators’ protesting cries allow it, I then talk about Saddam’s terror state and the Ba’ath’s slaughter of the “impure” Kurdish minority, accomplished in true Hitlerian fashion with poison gas.
Superficially, Cohen’s article is quite nuanced. Alongside his stout defence of the invasion, he also acknowledges the torture at Abu Ghraib, the sectarian violence of the civil war which followed de-Ba’athification, and that there are many examples of oppressive regimes in dealing with whom non-intervention is the lesser evil.
Yet despite this, he still can’t resist falling back on the now almost retro tactic of suggesting that his opponents were somehow either unaware or uncaring about the evils of Saddam Hussein’s regime:
My questioners invariably look bewildered. The notion that, even if they opposed military intervention, they had obligations to support those who suffered under a regime which can be fairly described as national socialist had never occurred to them. No one can say that time’s passing has lessened their confusion.
Armchair psychologising is a dubious pastime, but this does sound an awful lot like someone trying to convince himself as much as anyone else; after all, it’s much easier to be confident that you’re in the right if you believe your opponents are either callous or myopic (or both).
In the second half of the article Cohen goes on, somewhat bizarrely, to suggest that the post-Iraq war popular and political aversion to military intervention is what lies behind Barack Obama’s failure to democratise Russia and Iran (presumably we should invade them too? It’s not really clear) and his expressions of support for the Muslim Brotherhood-led Egyptian government, because apparently in Nick Cohen’s world Western governments supporting unsavoury regimes for reasons of realpolitik is a new phenomenon (something that would doubtless be surprising news to one Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti were he still alive).
Running through the whole of the article there’s an unquestioned assumption that the motives of Western powers are always unquestionably benign, at least when the people in charge have handy ‘liberal’ rationalisations for their actions. Cohen even describes Obama as ‘the supposed leader of the world’s liberal left’, extrajudicial killings without trial on foreign soil being a well-known cornerstone of liberal political philosophy.
Of course, it would be really awkward for Cohen if a news story were to come out within days of his column that suggested the US government and armed forces’ commitment to human rights, the rule of law and, y’know, not torturing people was any less than whole-hearted, wouldn’t it? I mean, that would suggest that we should entertain the possibility that sometimes Western, ‘liberal’ governments fall hugely short of the values they claim to espouse, and even that they might be knowingly complicit in abuses that echo some of the nastiest actions of regimes like Saddam Hussein’s. But what are the odds of that?
Revealed: Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centres
Exclusive: General David Petraeus and ‘dirty wars’ veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse
The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.
Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.
After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.
A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.
[…]
“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”
[…]
Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”
The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”
Oh.
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Since coming second to UKIP in Eastleigh, the Tories have come out with a raft of proposals aimed at demonstrating that they can still be the Nasty Party to immigrants. Today the Home Secretary, Theresa May, has begun to push the idea of an “immigrant cash bond”. Immigrants who are otherwise legally entitled to enter Britain will be forced to stump up thousands of pounds. They will be able to get it back when they leave, but only if they have avoided drawing on a range of social services, including health services.
This will be a boon for anybody making money from the the trafficking, hiring out, and super-exploitation of migrant labour. This is for the simple reason that a great many immigrants will not be able to simply stump up several thousand pounds – nor be confident in their ability to stick to the terms of the bond (after all illness is not a choice). Nor is it plausible to imagine that would be immigrants will be able to draw loans from conventional sources of credit (would you lend several thousand to somebody who is about to head to the other side of the world).
Instead, they will find themselves in hock to those who can stump up their entry fee – a debt that will be redeemable through their labour. Either their prospective employer will stump up the cash, on the unofficial (and unofficially enforced) understanding that the immigrant will work for them for the entirety of their stay in Britain. Or they will be compelled to cut a deal with a middle man who in return will enjoy the right to hire them out at will. In short, the cash bond will effectively lead to the importation of unfree labour.
The letter of the law may say otherwise. But, particularly in the world of migrant labour, law hardly equates to reality. The experience of smuggled immigrants attests to the exploitation that occurs when economic migrants are compelled to run up a large, unofficial debt simply in return for being here. The situation of “cash mond” migrants, will not be quite the same – since being here legally they may in theory have some recourse to the law. Yet the basic fact remains, that the chief asset with which they can service their large immigration debt will be their labour, and the emergence of “indentured labour” style arrangements is likely.
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That the United States and the Venezuelan business class were desperate to bring down Chavez was a consequence of all that was inspiring about his premiership. The Revolution Will Not be Televised contains fantastic footage of the US backed coup against Chavez, and the civil-military uprising that restored him to power 48 hours later. It was also fortuitous: two Irish film makers happened to be making a film about Chavez when the coup broke out. Some amazing footage of Chavez being arrested by military high command, the uprising and his return.
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