Marxist anthropologist David Harvey

Tomorrow SSY members will be among the folk going along to the Right to the City discussion forum on education.

Right to the City is a political group that is based on ideas put forward by the Marxist anthropologist David Harvey (he’s the guy in that cool cartoon about the economic crisis). The idea is that people should have the right to transform the cities they live in to change society and make them more liveable. In Glasgow, Right to the City has organised in depth political discussions over the last year.

Tomorrow, they’ve agreed to provide a space to talk about education. The idea is that we can make some time for the student movement to go beyond just organising protests against cuts, and talk about what we want as well as what we don’t. We’ll be discussing our vision of an alternative education and what role it can play in changing society. There’s going to be lots of different people from different political backgrounds, so it should be interesting. Here’s the info they’ve put out about it:

Right to the City Forum has been running events since last summer creating spaces for discussion, and exploring ideas of community activism and how to define our own lives.

We are hosting an education forum on Saturday 22nd January at Partick Burgh Halls, Burgh Hall Street, Glasgow, from 12.30-4.30 pm. The venue is just off Dumbarton road, Partick, only two mins from Partick rail and subway lines:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=…55.87129974%2C-4.30905008

The Forum will attempt to open up the education debate beyond an immediate defence against the cuts, and make a useful contribution not only to the education movement but to wider activity against the marketisation of cultural and public space. Members of the forum are not aligned to any one party or political position, however, the ‘Really Open University’, in the statement below, express some of our concerns very well: http://reallyopenuniversity.wordpress.com/

“The recent response to the marketisation of higher education has given a voice and a collective identity to a discontent stretching beyond funding constraints. It is now time to respond as well as create, looking for new action and dialogue for the future. We want to open up debate, not close it down.

Issues to consider: What is worth salvaging from the university system? What strategies do we have for attracting those who ought to be sympathetic: passive academics, apathetic students, individuals outside of the University, young people? How to operate within the academy without being corrupted by it? What could The University be? How do we make this happen?”

In short, the Forum will attempt to ‘re-imagine the school and the university’ – fighting for what education should be, not just preserving what it currently is.

We will be looking at wider cuts/resistance in education and not just the university. We also recognise that education is not confined to educational establishments, and that those outside of educational establishments have just as much if not more to teach than those in education. The event is open to all. It is an opportunity to meet other like-minded people to discuss the deep political implications of how the education system manages human potential.

A set of short texts will introduce the main themes the forum will explore. These will be handed out to all participants on the day and used in the initial discussion session to develop more in-depth discussion from people’s responses. Some themes to be explored include: student debt as training for life, the function of education in market relations, transformative potential of education/what education might be, uneven cuts to arts and humanities, academic ‘autonomy’?, disciplinary role of cuts/debt, crisis of aspiration (hope), wider cuts beyond education, and linking of struggles within and beyond education.

Best Wishes,

Right to the City Forum.

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=143062559084259

This event is hosted by Strickland Distribution http://www.strickdistro.org/.
It is supported by ARIKA http://www.arika.org.uk/.

“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire.
The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.” David Harvey

Also, beforehand in the morning there’ll be a Glasgow Against Education Cuts stall to promote the next planned protest in Glasgow, which we’ll be posting details about soon. Meet at the Donald Dewar statue at 11am.

In a move with potentially hilarious consequences, the government is moving ahead with plans to turn the most popular online petitions into parliamentary bills. The most popular petition on the government’s website, or those that reach around 100,000 signatures, will be introduced as private member’s bills to be debated in parliament, and possibly passed into law.

At first this sounds like a good idea – any increase in direct democracy is good, and it could potentially be a useful way to give important issues publicity. However, scratch beneath the surface and you can see that this is just another meaningless “look-honestly-we’re-not-evil” proposal from the tories.

All this means is that popular issues will be debated in parliament – there’s no requirement for the government to take into account public opinion beyond this. Before the Iraq war, huge demonstrations were held, with millions taking to the streets – far exceeding the government’s e-petiton threshold. They were ignored. Opinion polls show that the majority still oppose the war in Afghanistan – the troops are still there. The new proposals are just another way to hide the fact that our “democratic” system isn’t very democratic at all, and the same elites will continue to run things the way they want to. Even if MPs are forced into debating an issue they don’t like, it won’t take much to vote it down and ignore it.

The plans also don’t take into account the nature of the internet – if this goes ahead we can look forward to debates on the merits of Justin Bieber gigs in North Korea, or on if we should make Top Gear knobhead Jeremy Clarkson prime minister. The government has said that the petitions will be moderated for eligibility to counter jokes like this – but if the government is deciding what petitions get debated or not, isn’t that the exact same thing as not having a petition system at all?

The important thing to remember in all of this is that if e-petitions were really going to let people directly influence government, the government wouldn’t be introducing it. Just like letting the public decide “which cuts they want” on Facebook (How about none?), this is an empty gesture to make it look like the government cares what we think.

Ever had something go missing from the internet? Whether it’s a Facebook event or a photo on Flickr, we usually don’t have any control over our data online. Most of us take this for granted – but when 4000 of Bill Barrol’s tweets mysteriously vanished, he wanted compensation. Working on the premise that he is normally paid around $1 per word, he worked out that his tweets were valued at around $62,000, and demanded that Twitter cough up the money. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t pay out – his tweets were restored a few days later, and I don’t think he would have been getting a penny anyway!

Despite not actually receiving a payout, Bill’s quest for damages over his lost data illustrates bigger issues about control and the internet. In the past, people’s data would almost always be stored on their own computer, meaning they were responsible for keeping it safe and making sure no-one was able to illicitly access it. However, as high-speed internet connections have become more and more common, this has changed dramatically. Most people use webmail, in which email is stored on a web server rather than on the user’s hard drive. Websites such as Google Docs means documents are now frequently stored and edited online. More and more of our information is being stored in the cloud. This means that we leave responsibility for it being accessible, and secure, in the hands of private companies.

The biggest example of how this can be a problem Facebook – millions of people (me included!) will happily tell the website our name, age, job, interests, who our friends are, what events we’re going to be at, and rely on it as one of our main methods of communication. Advertisers love this, and pay facebook millions of pounds to target ads based on all of these details. Ever noticed how the adverts o your page seem to sometimes correspond creepily to your interests? That’s because Facebook has been flogging off what it thinks you like to whatever company wants to pay for it! As useful as services like Facebook can be, we should take into account how much we want these companies, other people or Facebook itself, to know about us, given their less than perfect record on privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg - The face of evil

As political activists, control over the internet poses even bigger issues than personal privacy. More and more, social networks are being used to organise large-scale protests and demonstrations. The UKUncut actions against Vodafone and Topshop, which SSY has taken part in, were originally organised through Twitter, and recent national student days of action have been called using Facebook events. There’s no question that this has been a huge boost in some respects – large events can be called with far less work than was required in the pre-internet era, and it gives a way for people who aren’t normally involved in radical politics to easily find out about, and take part in, political activity. However, there are also serious problems with this. If an event is organised only through Facebook, and Facebook decides to delete the event, what happens then? Just after the election, a Facebook event for a “Party Against The Tories” in George Square in Glasgow, which had hundreds confirmed as attending, mysteriously vanished. Whether you put this down to sheer coincidence (unlikely) or a police intervention (more than possible) it highlights perfectly the problem with these new ways of organising.

So what’s the solution to this? Saying that we aren’t going to use social networks anymore isn’t an answer – they’re far to useful, and have become a huge part of many young people’s lives. We need open networks, in which we are in more control. There’s already been an attempt at building something like this with status.net – an open-source alternative to Twitter. Anyone can set up their own status.net server, and users on any server can subscribe to any user on another. Another project, Diaspora, is aiming to build a similar alternative to Facebook. Although these don’t represent perfect solutions – not everyone has the resources or the know-how to run their own server – it’s a big improvement over the situation in which one company controls everything.

The internet is often praised as a great tool of democracy, and this is true – whether it’s governments being held to account over information from wikileaks, mass protests organised over twitter, or even websites like this, it has let us share information in ways which were never possible before, and the world is a better place for it. But we shouldn’t forget the fact that a lot of the internet is controlled by large corporations whose interests lie in money-making before user privacy, and that it doesn’t take much for a government to get a facebook event removed or a blog shut down. In the future we will hopefully see more open networks and ways of sharing information emerge, but until then, we need to be careful about how much we rely on websites that we can’t control.

One possible candidate for the new ACMD

As previously reported by SSY, the government isn’t generally too keen on scientific advice when it comes to formulating drug policy. When the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and independent body advising the government on drugs legislation, recommended against Cannabis being reclassified as a class B drug, the Labour government went ahead and done it anyway. When the same body said that Ecstasy, a class A drug, should be downgraded, they ignored that advice too. The former chair of the ACMD and SSY hero Professor David Nutt was even sacked after a pamphlet he produced said that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than cannabis, LSD and Ecstasy. Now we have a new government, and they’ve finally come up with a solution to the fact that none of their drug policies agree with the scientific evidence – get rid of the scientists all together!

That’s right – if a proposed amendment to the Misuse of Drugs law passes, it will remove the requirement for scientists to be included in the committee. After years of ignoring all the evidence when it comes to drugs anyway, this policy looks like it could be signed into law. It’s a well known fact that policy on drugs is driven by the tabloid newspapers more than what is useful – this year’s mephedrone ban was brought in after a series of deaths reported in the media attributed to the drug. The most famous of these cases, the deaths of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, put huge pressure on the government to ban the drug – it was later discovered that they had not been taking mephedrone at all. By removing the need for scientists on the ACMD, the government is making an admission that they don’t care about science when they make decisions that criminalise thousands of people – only about pandering to the media lies and propaganda about drugs.

As SSY has always argued, legalisation and regulation, based on scientific evidence of harms, is the only sensible drug policy. Drugs would be purer and safer, production would be taken out of the hands of criminal gangs, and people could be given information about each drug’s harm that isn’t based on scare stories. Removing scientists from the ACMD further reduces its importance and relevance, and means the government can carry on doing whatever it likes about drugs without scrutiny from people who actually know what they are talking about. Whilst not all the scientists on the ACMD support legalisation, they support an evidence-based drugs policy – something that it’s obvious the government couldn’t care less about.

Fighting around the world!

Tonight once again you can join SSY for more historic liveblogging!

For the second time, Gordon ‘Tired’ Brown, David ‘The Replicant’ Cameron and Nick ‘Our Sexy Saviour’ Clegg are going head to head over the issues that divide them. Tonight’s theme is international issues, so you can guarantee there’ll be strong disagreements about who supports the war in Afghanistan the most, and who can best follow orders from the White House.

We’re very exciting to hear more about David’s plans for a third world war with China, and not excited to hear Gordon tell us a lot of lies about how much the government has done about climate change. No doubt we’re going to hear a lot of fawning about the wonderfulness of Obama as well.

Overall, let’s not forget that all three parties tonight were in favour of the war in Afghanistan, and want to continue the proud British tradition of foighting round the world, keeping down the huge threats to Britain represented by peasants and children who live on the other side of the planet.

What is exciting is that tonight Leftfield has upgraded our technology, and so will be bringing you all of our opinions, silly jokes and childish observations from each of us individually LIVE. Currently we’ve got me, theworstwitch, LydiaTeapot and Liam the admin, and we may later be joined by Sarah. Each of us will be bringing you our penetrating geopolitical analysis individually, thanks to Liam’s incredible blog cleverness.

So, if you’re quite prepared, stand by for SSY taking down imperialism one knob joke at a time. . .

The Scottish Trade Union Congress’ annual St Andrews Day march against racism in Glasgow is this weekend, and many SSY members will be going along.

The march assembles at 10.30 on Saturday 28th November at St Andrews in the Square (off Saltmarket), and heads off at 11, marching through the city centre, followed by speeches in the GFT.

Hope to see you there!