Scottish politics was never meant to be this exciting. Safe Labour seats falling like skittles. Legal threats over referendums. The first vote in 300 years over our future in the Union. Devolution was designed by it’s architects to stabilise and maintain the Union after the onslaught Thatcherism had on Scotland throughout the 80s. However 30 years later, the Union faces the greatest challenge in its history.

Of course theoretically such protection exists, the private rented sector is supposed to be regulated via numerous systems such as compulsory landlord registration. Somewhat predictably however Scottish councils have opted for “light-touch” regulation, generally translating as no regulation at all.

The benefits of this “light-touch” can be seen in Edinburgh, where no Landlord has ever been deregisted, in spite of some carrying criminal convictions for offences against tenants. Letting agents are also taking advantage of the system, many are charging illegal fees to tenants, a practice that has become so widespread that most don’t even question them.

So what can we do about it? Whilst activists in Glasgow have taken direct action against illegal fees, tenants in Edinburgh are also getting organised. Edinburgh Private Tenants Action Group (EPTAG) is preparing to launch a campaign to pressure the council into deregistering criminal landlords, sending a signal out to the rest of the industry that they need to raise their game.

The situation for young tenants today is bad, but if we stand together and fight for better, we can change this.

Come along to EPTAG’s campaign launch meeting on March 8th at 7 PM at Old Saint Paul’s Church, Jeffrey St, near Waverley.

Etc. Etc., you know the script.

Cait’s refusal was not out of a snobbery for Poundland, the retail sector, or those who work in retail. It was out of disdain for a system that thinks young people’s labour is worth less than other people’s, and which has now deemed it worthless. The government’s compulsory ‘work experience’ schemes, in which young people on unemployment benefit are ordered to give their labour to large corporations for free, are becoming the status-quo and have massive swathes of public support behind them. The more well-meaning of these misguided supporters think the government are doing us a favour, making us more employable. These tend to be the same people who believe that if you want a job, you will get one, and if you don;t have one, it must be due to laziness and unwillingness to work. Today’s news tells us that of the 231,000 people currently unemployed in Scotland, over 88,000 are aged 18 to 24. So 38% of Scots on the dole are youth (and these figures don’t even take the 16-17 group into consideration).

It is simply untrue that young people do not want to work. In Scotland, many young people have part-time jobs while still in high school, and rely on part-time work to see them through university. Tuition fees might remain free for Scots studying in their home countries, but rent and food are not. The student who does nothing but party is an archaic stereotype, and a myth. The student who must fit in classes around part time jobs – in many cases students have more than one of these – is an increasing commonality, especially in the case of lower-paid working-class families who simply cannot afford to support their children while they are away at university. Graduates who are unable to find jobs in their sector due to ‘lack of experience’ or a simple lack of jobs are being turned away from lower-paid jobs on the grounds that they are ‘over-qualified’, creating a widing graduate employment gulf. And young people who do not go to university, preferring to leave education in order to make a wage sooner, are increasingly finding that there are no jobs for them. Where even minimum-wage jobs demand extensive ‘experience’, school-leavers increasingly find themselves at a loose end in a system that refuses to accomodate them. Clearly the factors leading to youth unemployment are much more multifarious than unwillingness to work or idealist attitudes.

So is this huge number, this 38% of Scotland’s unemployed being youth, a crazy coincidence? Or is it symptomatic of a system that consistently works against the interests of young people?

Either way, free labour presents no solution, and it works against everyone’s interests, not just those of the youth. Why would a company employ someone to do labour for them when they could have a young person do it for free? The Tories are notorious for acting in the interests of big business and ‘the city’ rather in the interests of the people, and no more so than here. In a Britain where young people’s labour is worthless, unemployment increases for every age category, since the workforce is increasingly made up of unpaid people on unemployment benefit. This scheme does not make young people more employable, it makes them work for dole – and even if we are to see unemployment benefit as a substitute for the wages they would otherwise earn from this labour (which it categorically isn’t, but humour me for a second) – we are still expecting young people to work for a fraction of the minimum wage – a fraction of what an employee would be paid to do the same job. And this fraction of the minimum wage is paid for by the taxpayer, rather than by the company that gets the benefit of this virtually free labour.

As usual, we can find some guidance here in Marx. The theory of surplus value tells us that profit is created from workers being paid the lowest possible wage for their labour – necessarily this must be less than the products of their labour are worth to a buyer. The lower the wage, the higher the profit margin. Free labour – or, at best, dole-priced labour – results in a widespread acceptance of the assumption that labour isn’t worth wages, thus devaluing everyone’s labour. People are paid less as a result, thus company profiits go up, and the unemployment statistics are worse than ever due to unemployed people being used as virtual slaves. This is a super-capitalist plot devised to increase company profit using the poorest members of our society, relying on the prejudice many have for young people in order to quell any resistance to a scheme that devalues everyone’s labour, and makes the unemployment problem worse. Classic Tory strategy, whereby the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Cait Reilly simply refused to be a dole slave. The system demands she works. She demands it gives her a job. She demands her labour – and by extension everyone’s – be worth at least minimum wage.

Ever since the personal computer has been in mainstream use and since Microsoft bought the DOS operating system, Microsoft has had an iron grip on the computer market. Their vision was that everyone would have a personal computer and they would be the ones to let them use it (for their price and under their control), while IBM envisioned great servers around the world that would be controlled by individuals’ terminals, they would not need Microsoft’s software and so hardware was where the money was. As we know, Microsoft were correct in their analysis and the idea that people could have their own computer that they thought they could control was popular. But some people didn’t like that they had to pay £100 just to use their computer and that if they wanted to do useful tasks such as write letters or store information for an organisation or group they would have to pay yet more. Microsoft have made it harder and harder for anyone to use software other than their own and increased the price accordingly.

Some have turned away from Microsoft’s model of “every extra thing you want to do costs extra” and turned to Apple who will give you most things that you need but you have to buy everything from them. Others have created a community where people make software for themselves. The idea is that if ordinary people all around the world make our own software, it can be as good and even better than its commercial counterpart. This software does not have its code encrypted like Microsoft’s and Apple’s but is open for all to see, this is the world of open source software.

For many years this movement has been small and its products have been pale in comparison to their mainstream version. For years after most people were using a mouse to control their computer through a graphical user interface, these people were still typing out commands. But over that last decade their numbers have grown and their progress accelerated, most open source operating systems now use advanced graphical user interfaces and have more and more advanced programs to match. Linux is the most common type of software within this world and its browser ‘Firefox’ has become quite famous for its ‘Port’ to Microsoft Windows and is accepted by most to be better than Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer, even on its native Windows. This is just an example of the powerful software that is produced by the open source movement and now that the UN has chosen ‘Ubuntu’ (a Linux operating system) for its under $100 computer, to distribute in underdeveloped countries. A lot, if not most, of the movements resources are now focused on Ubuntu’s code.

Compatibility has long been an issue as with all non Microsoft software and OpenOffice has had problems creating Microsoft Office documents due to Microsoft office’s closed source nature (Microsoft obviously made no effort to read any file other than their own). The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) worked with Sun Microsystems to create a standard format for word processing documents and came up with the Open Document Format, which was then accepted as the standard word processing and office suite file format by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Microsoft refused to accept the new standardisation and Microsoft Office was still not even able to open, never mind create OpenDocument Format files. They were inundated with complaints by angry customers who were not able to use any of the standard files they were receiving and so Microsoft relented and Microsoft Office is now able to read and write OpenDocuments from Microsoft Office 2007 (from service pack 2).

People within this moment have mainly been technical in nature and have mostly let companies hold the copyrights to the names of their software, due to there being no individual creator to hold such rights. OpenOffice’s copyright was held by Sun Microsystems but when Sun were purchased by Oracle, a company with a history of commercialising and tampering with open source software, without permission from the community. The leading creators of OpenOffice became worried that the same would happen to OpenOffice so they created the document foundation to hold the copyright of OpenOffice and any other open source software that wishes to use it. Anyone can join the document foundation who agrees with its values and can take part in its democracy (based on a meritocratic, skill based division of labour). After which the developers continued to improve the software although they no longer had rights to the OpenOffice name, then owned by Oracle. The name LibreOffice was chosen for the continuation of the project until such time that the copyright of the OpenOffice name be reacquired. Oracle decided to keep offering OpenOffice and have even posted updates, but have since donated the name to Apache.

It will be interesting to see how many other software projects go down the same route and hold their copyrights in the document foundation or form similar structures. If projects continue to allow commercial entities to own and sway their products, they will likely be pushed and assimilated into commercial software such as Windows and the war will be lost.

Freedom of information goes further than just source code in this war, Wikipedia has become the largest encyclopaedia in the world and is created by specialists and knowledgeable people all around the world. Its accuracy is doubted by many due to the lack of credentials needed to modify or create an article. However Wikipedia and its users routinely remove false, unreferenced material and lock pages that have been continuously changed to the most accountable, previous state. Pages go through a hierarchy or locked states, where only the most certified users can request a change. While vandalism and incorrect posts do occur, it is a very good source of information where cross-referenced properly, as with any other source. Wikipedia recently undertook a ‘Blackout’ on the English portion of its site in protest to bills going through the US Congress. It was not designed to block users from information as they were shown how to bypass the blackout but meant that users read about the bills that implicated any site, with a link rout to illegal copyright material, as liable. Google also showed its support for the campaign by censoring its logo on Google.com.

With Google web search using a version of the Linux kernel, the engine behind Linux operating systems, and Android phones using another version of the Linux kernel, the future looks bright for open source software. It is now very possible to move away from Microsoft’s empire. Ubuntu has a very nice interface and integrates social networking far better than Windows; while those who are less techno savvy might like Linux Mint which is simpler than Ubuntu or Windows. Office files can be created by the powerful LibreOffice and free programs like Gimp can be used instead of Photoshop. Maybe one day, if this revolution is won, taxation will pay for the effort that people put into these projects, but until then, they rely upon donations based on the ability to pay and give time, from its users. The Future is ours, if we just choose to take it.

The referendum date has been announced after months of whining from the Unionist parties, all of which have been in disarray since the SNP’s victory. Labour, the Libdems and the Tories all called for a referendum to be held as soon as possible after the SNP’s victory – ignoring that when the SNP was a minority administration they all refused to support the SNP’s call for an independence referendum in 2011.

They must be kicking themselves now – the poll on Scotland’s future will now take place after 2 years of a vicious Tory austerity package that will disproportionately affect Scotland’s economy, which itself has a higher than average public sector employment due to destruction of Scottish industry in the 80′s by Thatcher. If it comes down to choosing between a Government led by Alex Salmond in Holyrood and many years of continued Tory rule in Westminster even non-nationalist Scots may vote Yes as an “exit strategy” from Tory misrule.

This fear of a referendum being held at the height of Tory cuts is probably what motivated Cameron – along with typical Unionist arrogance – to try to bring the referendum under the control of Westminster. After 300 years of Scotland having no say in whether or not we stayed in the Union Westminster is now very concerned that Scots should have a fair say in it, even going as far as to say a referendum held by the Scottish Parliament would be “illegal” and “unconstitutional”. A bit ironic given that the UK has no written constitution – it has Kings, Queens, Princes, Dukes, but no constitution.

At the end of the day, no referendum carried out is “binding” under UK law – all of them are advisory. And if there’s a majority yes vote for independence, it does not matter whether it’s in 2012 or 2014 – politically, the Union is finished. After years of snidey slagging of Scots as “subsidy junkies”, “dole scum”, too wee to go it alone etc, Conservatives in England are beginning to wake up to the reality of Scottish Independence – the British state would be “Shorn of its permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and relegated to minnow status in Nato”.

Unfortunately for the Tories who have less MP’s in Scotland than there are Panda’s, they’re unlikely to have any impact in stopping the breakup of the UK. Cameron’s intervention into the timing of the referendum shows he has zero tactical knowledge of the Scottish political scene. The Unionist pillar of political strength in Scotland is the Labour Party, who have still not recovered from their defeat of 2007 let alone last year’s humiliating rout.

Despite the disparity in political strength between the SNP and it’s Unionist opponents, by 2014 you can expect the Honeymoon between the Scottish media and the SNP to be over, if not at least on hiatus for the duration of an Independence Referendum campaign. Expect predictions of the apocalypse if Scotland decides to go it alone.

That’s why we need to organise a grassroots Independence campaign to ensure we have our own media to promote the case for Independence – with Socialists adovcating a Republic, public ownership of oil, and taxes on the super-rich, in contradiction to the SNP’s model of Scotland as a Celtic Tiger like, er, Ireland.

Pro-Independence left-wingers don’t just need to organise to win the referendum, but also to shape the future of a post Independence Scotland – to oppose any moves to keep Scotland inside a “Union lite” with British bases kept in Scotland on lease, or where our economy is run along the same Thatcherite lines that condemns a quarter of Scottish children to poverty.

For the first time in decades we have a chance to fundamentally change Scotland and Scottish politics for the better. Lets get organised to build the Socialist Republic.

What might have been small and manageable in the past decade proved to be very different in the first major recession of the 21st century. After decades of police brutality, corruption, dictatorship and political repression the call to action struck with popular consciousness not just in Egypt but all around the world. Millions watched glued to their screens, the first major revolution of the 21st century. After decades of rule and with no previously obvious signs of collapse the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was forced from office in the space of two weeks and now faces the death penalty for his crimes against the Egyptian people.
Egypt’s revolution took the rulers of that region completely unaware – Israel today is absolutely terrified they will no longer have a partner to keep Gaza under siege and whose new Parliament may put it’s peace treaty with Israel to a popular referendum, and the US tried hopelessly to maintain Mubarak’s rule in Egypt even as it looked impossible to most observers.
This wave of popular protest wasn’t limited to Egypt either – it has now spread to every Arab country, both pro and anti-US but with the common goal of overthrowing dictatorship and corruption.
This meant the West took very different attitudes to different parts of the Arab Spring. In Bahrain, the USA turned a blind eye as one of it’s most important allies, Saudi Arabia sent hundreds of troops to crush a popular uprising in Bahrain and to preserve the sectarian monarchy that hosts a large US military base on the Island. However when it came to Libya, a bizarre dictatorship which shared many characteristics with other Arab regimes – with the exception that it wasn’t completely in the pockets of the West – a different attitude was taken, with military action conducted by NATO to overthrow the regime.

Not a good year for these guys

This made Libya the third Muslim country in 10 years bombed by the West, after Afghanistan and Iraq. While the campaign in Libya was, from the viewpoint of London, Paris and Washington, a quite easy affair there was one war that finally seems to have drawn to a close – at least for Washington. The 8 year nightmare of Iraq for the USA ended with a formal troop withdrawal from Iraq earlier last year, as Obama redeployed US soldiers from Iraq to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Iraq war, so critical in radicalizing millions of people across the world ended not with a bang but a whimper as the USA has been forced to leave with many of it’s desires – permanent military bases, proxy for strikes on Iran and Syria, dirt cheap oil – unfulfilled. If Iraq has been a disaster, Afghanistan hasn’t turned out much better as it’s Taliban guerillas continue to make the ISAF occupation of the country as pointless, ineffective and bloody as all the previous occupations of Afghanistan have been. The Vice President of the USA, Joe Biden even went as far as to say “The Taliban are not our enemy” – an admission that the USA will negotiate and involve the Taliban in Afghan politics at some point.

The solid decade of occupation and war in Afghanistan and Iraq has proved so costly for the USA that US President Barack Obama has carried out the biggest reform of the US military “since WW2″. Moving it’s forces away from Europe and the Middle East to Asia and the Pacific (hello China) it’s a massive climbdown from the previously almost invincible US military power in the 90′s. But what other choice does Obama have, particularly when in 2011 the US faced a historic first time downgrading of it’s credit rating. When the most powerful nation in human history hasn’t got the best possible record at debt management, it’s a damning indictment of the cost of occupation and war – and may fortunately dissuade the USA from any attack on Iran, at least for the time being.
Many of the historic events we saw in 2011 – such as the resignation of Mubarak – weren’t from our sofas or bedrooms, but with other activists in comrades in the longest running student occupation in UK history. From February to September, Hetherington House a former postgraduate club, was occupied by anti-cuts students at Glasgow University. For 6 months we were able to hold a non-commercial space on Glasgow Uni campus, open to a variety of campaigns – from the protests to stop cuts to nursing, modern languages and adult education at Glasgow University, to the campaign to save the Accord Centre in the East End of Glasgow. This occupation succeeded in acting as a focal point for the anti-cuts movement across the whole of the city, as well as attracting a variety of speakers like Ken O’Keefe and Owen Jones.

While the occupation of the Hetherington House ended, the networks and connections built up between different activists and groups hasn’t disappeared. There’s now a vibrant anti-cuts group for the whole of Glasgow that many of the former occupiers are involved in – the Coalition of Resistance. COR’s been in existence since May and has already become the largest and most active anti-cuts group in Glasgow, organising strike buses for J3O and N30, building the October 1st demonstration, the march to save the accord and providing a space for anyone from any political background who wants to fight the cuts to come to. COR will be an important part of anti-cuts activism in the next year, and a vital space for Socialists to operate in.
Another front that will be opening in the next few years is the Independence campaign in Scotland. After 4 years of SNP minority rule, alongside a Tory Government in Westminster many Labour Party members must have thought they were a shoe in for the Holyrood elections held in May of last year. What they actually faced was the biggest defeat for Labour and Unionism imaginable – central belt seats where the Labour party had majorities you’d normally find in one party states were seized by the SNP for the first time in it’s history, producing a revolutionary result in Scottish politics – a pro-independence majority in Holyrood for the first time ever.

This means after 300 years of unionist misrule, the Scottish population will finally have a choice over our constitutional future. And for Unionism, it couldn’t come at a worse time, where a Tory party that has less MP’s in Scotland than Pandas is trying to force through a brutal package of austerity. This is Scotland’s gain from the revolutionary year that was 2011 – the chance to take our nation out of the world’s oldest empire, and a possibility for the Radical Left to shape that debate and the Scotland that emerges. 2011 will be remembered as the year that saw arrogant, embedded and reactionary power crumble fall – from Cairo to Tunis to Pollok – lets organise to make sure 2012 continues in the same vein.

The Dear Bieber: JBiebz hangin at some crazy procession thing in downtown Pyongyang

Earlier this year, users of cult online messageboard 4Chan struck a strategic alliance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il. In return for a supply of tactical nuclear weapons, the internet memesters rigged a competition on the website of teen popstar Justin Bieber. The competition invited fans to vote for the country that they wanted Bieber to tour nexact, and in proof of the glorious success of the Democratic People’s Republic, North Korea won out top! Here, Leftfield brings you an exclusive look at Justin’s tour diary in the land of the Dear Leader:

“Yo, what up, this is JB, live from my tour of the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. I arrived in through a place called the DMZ, don’t know what it stands for but it sounds street. Probably NK is doing what I do and just calling things names or saying stuff for their credibility, so it’s cool with me. I know how hard it is to convince people that you really are straight street, when you come from somewhere like Ontario or NK.

The border guards were all tense and straight, they could do with a lesson or two from my swagger coach, and maybe Usher telling them how to act.

We went to meet the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, and I was like woah, cos the North Korean shorties be going wild for him, just like they do for me back home. I explained to KJI that I believe if I stay humble and keep following the right path, I will achieve my goals and keep reaching success. He said that he believes the same thing, and calls it the Juche ideology, which apparently a whole philosophy that he came up with by himself with a little help from his Dad!

Then we went to see some Korean mass games, which made me think that KJI must have caught Bieber-fever, the way they straight took my love of hot choreography to the next level. KJI asked if I’d perform with his 10,000 personal dance crew, and I was like “Whatever you want, JBiebz will give it to you.”

KJI was so happy he told me that alongside his Dad (the Great Leader) and himself (the Dear Leader), I was going to get the honorary title of the Dear Bieber of the DPRK.

So now, after 6 months of intense rehearsals at gunpoint, I think I’m bout ready to represent for the people’s homeland. I think the true North Korean Beliebers are going to have a Biebergasm when they see what we’ve put together.

Hopefully KJI will be satisfied, I been trying to get him to say when we can actually end the tour, but he never really answers the question and starts talking about rice harvests instead. I love the paradise on Earth that is North Korea, but I can’t wait to touchdown for all my sweet fans on the next stops of the tour, Afghanistan and Somalia. Plus I’ve been wondering what’s happened to Usher, I haven’t seen him since KJI told me he’d gone to a holiday camp for a relaxing vacation breaking rocks and making rifles.

Until then, I’m going to leave you, live here in North Korea. Peace! (But never with the American Imperialist Pig Dog Aggressors Who Will Be Crushed by the United Efforts of the Heroic Korean People, Juche is Invincible!)”

(JBiebz was speaking to Jack)

Where the internet and protests collide

Political activism has been in the news more in the last year than in all the years since the 2003 Iraq war. Revolutions in the Arab world, occupations in America and beyond, and student protests and social unrest in the UK have all been hailed as ‘social networking revolutions’. To understand the importance of information and communication technologies to these examples of political activism, we must examine the extent to which these events were actively driven by new technologies.  By discussing these cases, we can see that increased use of social networking software and other technological advances is not necessarily a root cause of these events, but rather simply an aspect of them.

There can be no denying that, in the West, if your political event is not advertised on the internet, it is probably not going to be considered much of a success in 2011. In terms of promoting activism through the internet, a small number of websites have basically cornered the market, most prominently Facebook and Twitter. Almost every political event, from protests to organising meetings, to even attempted riots, now comes with a promotional Facebook event. Twitter updates followers in real time of what is happening in volatile situations, and provides a new media platform to activists as it becomes journalists’ first stop for ready-made quotes. Twitter has even spawned its own new form of activism, sometimes called the ‘Twittermob‘, where users can come out of seemingly nowhere to force action from previously near untouchable institutions such as the courts or powerful newspaper outlets. This has been seen prominently in the News of the World hacking controversy, the anger at offensive newspaper articles such as Jan Moir’s homophobic Stephen Gately treasure or the Sunday Express’ insensitive Dunblane article, and the Trafigura oil spill/Ryan Giggs being a mad shagger super-injunction cases.

It is important however not to overstate the importance of websites such as Twitter in recent political events. Reading newspapers and watching television news, it would seem like Twitter is incredibly important to modern day political activism, or indeed pretty much any mundane news story about anything ever. However, we shouldn’t mistake media portrayals of social networking software for reality. The traditional media frequently hype social networking in their reports, but in part this is because they are convenient to access, easy to understand, and important for news output in a world where traditional media is fighting to maintain its relevance and readership. Twitter provides user-generated content for traditional media to exploit while simultaneously cutting the number of paid journalists on their staff, and in this sense it can feed a capitalist agenda.

Creepy winking birds will save us all

An example of a somewhat removed-from-the-truth portrayal of Twitter and Facebook’s importance in groundbreaking political events is the way that the media reported their use in the Arab Spring uprisings of early 2011. It was claimed that “connectedness is becoming a relatively mundane part of people’s lives” and that social networking had toppled the Tunisian regime. But the reality is that social networking is still not as common in the Arab world as the Western media would lead us to believe. In Iran, where a ‘Twitter revolution’ was reported in 2010, the number of Twitter users was estimated at between 7,000 and 20,000 – a tiny percentage in a population of 77 million. It seems crass to call the Arab Spring a ‘social networking revolution’ simply because this is one of the ways that information was shared, when in reality it was the result of decades of social unrest and anger at dictatorial regimes.  This Cracked article makes a few good points about the media’s overestimation of social networking in the Arab revolutions.

While social networking’s importance to the Arab revolutions may have been overstated by the media, that is not to say that it cannot be incredibly useful to activists with regular access to its features. The Daily Mail’s online publisher has stated his belief that “Facebook isn’t a threat [to traditional media]… but a gigantic free marketing engine.” This belief is doesn’t need to be confined however to traditional or capitalist modes of information output. If taken on board correctly, the idea of Facebook as a huge resource for marketing your ideas is one that can be utilised to effect by activist groups. The problem for activists seems to come when this is promoted at the expense of other forms of organising. For activist groups, using social networking for organisational purposes can be at best problematic and at worst dangerous. However, what it is undoubtedly useful for is advertising political ideas once they have been organised and put into effect.

Hey Chris Sibbald, I still want my bloody banner back

Local politics in Glasgow provide a stark example of this principle in practise. Two notable recent examples of occupation tactics used by activist groups in the city have yielded quite different results, and much of this can be traced back to the manner in which they were organised. The ‘Free Hetherington’ occupation of a Glasgow University building for 7 months in 2011 was organised largely by a mixture of preliminary broad based student activist meetings, and secret organising meetings to plan the taking of the building without the police or university intervening. Once the occupation was established, the internet was utilised extensively to promote the occupation’s activities. It finished having reached agreements with the university to implement several of its demands, and it played an important role in the establishment of activist links and left wing unity in the Glasgow community.

By contrast, the ‘Occupy Glasgow’ event, which has been ongoing since October 2011, was organised via a small number of activists acting upon the suggestion of a Facebook event, in response to the much larger Occupy Wall Street camp in New York, USA. The Glasgow camp has been plagued with problems of low attendance to the point of the unsustainability of campsites, poor relationships with the rest of the activist community in Glasgow, misogyny amongst the campers in the wake of a gang rape that occurred onsite, and the notable presence of too many off-the-charts batshit conspiracy theorists in the camp.

The difference in support amongst, and usefulness to, the activist community in Glasgow is clear, and it could be said that the way in which these occupations have approached the internet has played a large part in this. If activist groups continue to utilise the most useful aspects of both traditional organising methods and the newer opportunities afforded by modern technology, this can produce better results than treating internet organising through social networking websites as the be all and end all of political organising, or a substitute for coherent, well-supported politics.

The Occupy Movement provides an interesting example of where the political origins of Facebook and less well-thought out applications of online activism meet. Where pre-internet social movements like the women’s movement and the civil rights movement in America brought social change out of decades of political discussion and action reaching a peak, new movements like the Occupy phenomenon are not prepared with a coherent message. The reason for this is the context in which they have been formed. Occupy protests around the world have sprung out of calls on social networking sites to replicate the actions of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab revolutions, regardless of whether these tactics are in reality applicable to smaller towns and cities with no discernible widely-felt revolutionary atmosphere. It is important to note that the political ideology behind Facebook actively supports the promotion of this kind of unfocused approach to political issues.

Mark Zuckerberg: the friendly hipster face of pure fascist evil

It has been stated by one of the three members of Facebook’s own Board of Directors that Facebook is a ‘social experiment‘. In his essay ‘The Education of a Libertarian‘, Peter Thiel says of his investments:

“By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order.”

While Mark Zuckerberg is the public face of Facebook, venture capitalist Thiel is considered to be the brains of the operation. Described in The Guardian as a “neocon activist” and a member of a right wing internet pressure group called TheVanguard.Org, it must hold true that if his plans for Facebook as a social experiment which can make money out of people’s interpersonal relationships are working, then this internet monopoly is certainly proving that it can successfully foster neo-conservative activism. When the brain behind Facebook openly states that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible”, it is not a great leap to judge that his strong right-wing ideology will have found itself into the design and purpose of his social experiment. There is bound to be consequences for left-wing activism utilising Facebook in this wide scale manipulation of its users. One way in which these consequences have manifested is known as ‘clicktivism‘, where online activism reflects principles of advertising and engages only in short term goals such as acquiring signatures for single issue petitions. Clicktivism is essentially the reduction of activism to throwaway, commodified ideas that require little political engagement, and as someone who regards democracy as undesirable and dislikes women being allowed the vote, it follows that this deconstruction of traditional activism can only be seen as a positive for Thiel’s ideology. This position on Facebook definitely falls into the realm of ‘cyber-scepticism‘, but it is hard to argue that this is not the ideological root of aspects of Facebook’s design when its own investors and directors are openly stating that this is the case. It is important for left-wing activists who seek to fight traditional power models to bear in mind the philosophical roots behind some of the software that dominates the information sharing market on the internet, and to challenge this where possible. When activism allows itself to be reduced to clicktivism, it plays into the hands of the capitalists who seek to deconstruct human interactions for marketing purposes.

One activist group that seems to have worked out how to utilise social networking without falling prey to its more obvious flaws has been UK Uncut, a loosely organised group which protests tax avoidance by large businesses, and opposes cuts to public services. Where clicktivism utilises the internet to reduce people’s political involvement to a minimum, the ethos of UK Uncut is to enable people who may not have been involved in activism before to organise whole protests themselves. By using a basic organisational template – information disseminated by UK Uncut on websites such as Twitter and Indymedia – anyone can engage with UK Uncut and take its ideas from the internet to their local area, combining protest with the internet’s potential to make ideas ‘viral’. The Guardian states that “new technology has facilitated decentralised, non-hierarchical, horizontal networks” as UK Uncut embodies. This clearly has ramifications for the nature of modern day protest, and in this sense information and communication technologies can encourage short bursts of well organised protest anywhere activists decide to facilitate it, instead of protest being largely confined to tightly controlled large demonstrations in population centres such as was seen during the 2003 Iraq war protests.

Jody McIntyre wheeling menacingly towards Ben Brown

Technologies such as the Blackberry Messenger encrypted messaging service have the potential to be useful to activists in the future. The ability of the BBM service to inform a massive number of people, undetectable to the police and government, of fast-moving events has already been seen in the 2011 English riots. If this technology is developed in future in a way specifically designed for activist use, and is utilised by the likes of UK Uncut, it will be harder for the police to track and arrest activists. The correlation between access to plus understanding of social networking for political agitation purposes and the rise of activism that is harder for police and governments to control and monitor is worth noting. Because protests can be organised quickly, at the drop of a hashtag, the police can find it difficult to estimate how many people will turn out and which target they will pick, which gives UK Uncut protestors a strategic advantage. This has also been a positive development for campaigners who wish to highlight police brutality or miscarriages of justice. They now find that when the police behave inappropriately such as in the case of Jody McIntyre, despite the mainstream media continuing to portray this in a way that is favourable to the police, protestors are quickly able to put across an alternative viewpoint to a much wider audience than ever would have been possible previously. If traditionally organised Non-Govermental Organisations like Greenpeace felt in the past that they were receiving rough treatment from the police, it was unlikely that many people would ever hear about it. For these NGOs, the internet can have the advantage of letting them put across their ideals in their own words in a way that is easily accessible to potential recruits, rather than people hearing about their activities solely through a negative media portrayal.

Activists for whom the value of information and communication technologies cannot be overstated are those who traditionally have been denied access to mainstream political engagement, such as women and disabled people. Websites like Mumsnet have allowed mothers in the UK to not only have a space in which to discuss their own political views in a way that can be adaptable to their schedule as mothers, but also to a limited extent have those views taken in some ways seriously by the media and, at election time, by politicians. Disability campaigners can promote alternatives to the exclusive nature of physical protests, and reclaim some agency over protests surrounding the issues that personally affect them. The internet can provide support networks, that often develop into activist groups, for disenfranchised people – a “virtual civic society”.

While social networking and other communication technologies have certainly made a visible impact on political activism, to claim that they have fundamentally changed them in the way that much media output over the last year has done seems little more than hyperbole, at least at this early stage. It is clear that the way activism is marketed and in some cases approached is changing with the advent of new technologies. But this change has not yet amounted to much of significance, if we consider the vague nature of the Occupy protests and, thus far, the lack of explicitly political mass applications of technologies like encrypted messaging services. What we have seen with the development of these technologies however is the potential that they hold for future political activism all over the world, from local anti-cuts flashmobs to regime-toppling revolutions. If political activists, particularly those on the left who have been embracing the internet and incorporating it into their activities for years, can utilise the best aspects of these technological advances – while managing to avoid the pitfalls of poor applications such as has been seen in the Occupy movement and over-reliance on Facebook – political activism will be strengthened, not hindered, by the internet and other communication technologies.

That’s over twenty different groups of workers who’ve collectively said they’ve had enough of the government’s constant attacks on wages and conditions, and have now balloted for action – with the strikes  in most cases winning big majorities. A strike of this scale is virtually unprecedented: nearly every school in Scotland will be shut, as will large sections of the NHS, council services, universities and colleges, job centres and tax and benefit offices, courts and other public services.

30 November has huge potential to be a big show of strength. It will not, by itself, bring down the government, but an effective day of action can place enormous pressure on them, and hopefully lead to more. This is absolutely crucial – so far the government have offered only token concessions in the dispute over pensions, with new proposals on line to make employees work longer, pay 3 percent more in contributions AND receive a lower pension at the end of it. But the strike is about much more than just pensions – sparked by years of relentless attacks on public sector pay and conditions, compounded by a three year pay freeze.

So what can you do on the day?

Next Wednesday can be a mass day of resistance for everyone in the public sector and beyond. Walkouts, occupations, pickets, demonstrations and marches – all are useful tactics in turning the struggle into Every school, uni and college is likely to be shut on the day, giving students the opportunity to pour onto the streets in support of the strikes. Student feeder marches have been organised in both Glasgow and Edinburgh on the day, ahead of the main trade union organised rallies.

Picket! If you work somewhere going on strike that day, effective picketing can be hugely important in shutting down a workplace and ensuring the day is a success. If you’re not striking, you can still go and show your support – UK Uncut have made a national call out for people to go and show some solidaritea at their local picket lines.

Demonstrate! March, rallies and events are happening across the country. Find a local action here: http://www.n30strike.org/

Walk out! Most schools, colleges and unis will be shut due to staff striking – but in the even of your classes running, organise a walkout and head to the nearest rally or picket line.

Retweet! Share! Propagandise! The Tories and their chums in the media have already gone on the offensive, trying to create a fake division between public sector workers and those in the private sector. Speak to everyone you know and tell them the facts about the strikes.

GLASGOW

]]> http://ssy.org.uk/2011/11/strike/feed/ 0 http://ssy.org.uk/2011/11/the-only-thing-the-1-fear-is-the-99-getting-organised/ http://ssy.org.uk/2011/11/the-only-thing-the-1-fear-is-the-99-getting-organised/#comments Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:33:13 +0000 Liam T http://ssy.org.uk/?p=7010

via Moh Kohn