Author: Justin Podur

Author of Siegebreakers. Ecology. Environmental Science. Political Science. Anti-imperialism. Political fiction.

The Tuition Trap, as discussed by Christopher Newfield

I’ve been thinking about Chris Newfield’s 2008 book Unmaking the Public University a lot lately, and I wanted to reproduce one great quote from page 182, about what he calls “the tuition trap”: how by raising tuition fees, public universities undermine the case for public funding for universities, which shortfall they make up by raising tuition, undermining the case for public funding…:

“The tuition trap goes like this: The public is worried about college affordability, but its public university raises its fees. The university thus implies it does not actually depend on public funding, since it has the private resource of higher tuition at its fingertips. The university may also deepen this impression – that it can do without more public funding – by saying how good it is in spite of public funding cuts. Even worse, it may declare strong public funding a thing of the past in order to justify tuition increases or expanded fund-raising. Taxpayers then reasonably ask, if the university does not need more money, why does it keep raising fees? And since it keeps raising fees, why should we give it more public money?”

He goes on:

“If the university is just another cog in an economic system that is about getting ahead, charging as much as you can, maximizing your returns, and buying your way to the top, why should the general public pay for it?”

Both quotes from pg. 182.

Universities could be very valuable, making huge contributions to the general development of society and accessible to all. For that to happen, public universities have to get out of the tuition trap.

York strikers show the way — now let’s build a truly public university

Protracted labour dispute raises questions of post-secondary governance and funding

The strikes at York University, the University of Toronto, and elsewhere have opened a long overdue debate about student debt, precarious labour in the academy, rising tuition, and, to a lesser extent, university governance. The York University strike offers an opportunity to argue for the continuing relevance of universities as public institutions. The importance of the public in the public university is especially true for York, which, if it embraced its role as such, could tackle a new list of issues and lead the way for other educational institutions.
Precarity, debt, and defensive struggle

York’s contract faculty are the precarious academic labourers whose difficulties have been brought into some public light by the York strike and other labour actions in North America. The contract faculty settled earlier in March. The teaching assistants and graduate assistants had to battle on until the end of the month to win their objectives.

Although the strike ended in a victory, the struggle was mainly defensive. In previous contracts, the union on strike at York, CUPE 3903, won a funding package that includes work as a TA (or, for work outside the classroom, as a GA). The total package offered to a student is usually in the range of $12,000 to $18,000 for the year. Out of this, a domestic student has to pay around $6,500 tuition. International students might get the same package, but their tuition is much higher — somewhere around the size of their whole funding package.

Students are eligible for such funding only if they have full-time status. If they work more than 10 hours per week outside of their studies and on-campus jobs as TAs or GAs, they are ineligible. So, when the administration presented the claim that TAs were getting paid $52/hour, they neglected to add that this was up to a hard limit of about $9,000 for a year. In order to get this $52/hour, students had to figure out how to live on about $30/day (or, for international students, $0/day). Of course, students could take on additional debt, the implicit solution that university administrations continuously try to impose on students.

The union did not go on strike trying to get its members out of this low-wage situation. The union went on strike because management was trying to assert its right to raise tuition while maintaining the funding package at the same rate.

This is the indexation issue that management avoided discussion of for a month, the gain won by the union in previous strikes that management tried and failed to roll back. Indexation means that if the university wants to take more from TAs and GAs in tuition, it also has to pay TAs and GAs more money so that they can pay the university. Losing indexation would have meant that, rather than helping TAs and GAs subsist, their work on campus would merely give them the slightest reduction in the massive debt they would incur while studying.

The U.S. and U.K. systems, in which students at all levels incur ever more massive debt while receiving less and less, and with fewer and worse prospects after graduation, seems to be the model. The striking workers successfully held the line against that erosion.

The academic and the administrative

The York strike also highlighted the problem of a university no longer under academic control. This issue is of more public importance than it may seem on the surface.

Unlike most workplaces that are under the uncontested control of managers, at universities the struggle for academic freedom has been linked to another struggle, that for collegial governance, the idea that academic matters should be under the control of academics (faculty and also students) and not under the control of managers.

Defending collegial governance involves constant battles over policies and procedures, careful readings and debates, and can seem arcane and obscure to the non-university public. But collegial governance, like academic freedom, is an important thing for society to have, and it deserves some public attention — and protection. Let us look at it in the context of York’s strike.

The first way that the administration has strengthened itself has been by moving money. The erosion of the university’s teaching budget has been accompanied by an expansion in the administrative share of the budget. Budgets are contentious and political, and university administrations contest the notion that they are bloated at the expense of the university’s core activities. The analyses are worth looking at: Benjamin Ginsburg describes the growth of university administration at U.S. universities in his book The Fall of the Faculty, and scientist Bjorn Brembs tackles the issue in Germany in a blog post.

York’s faculty union, YUFA, did some interesting analysis of York’s financial statements. While not discussing academic and administrative budgets in detail, it does deal with how to think about the financial statements of a public institution. YUFA also produced a report that described the growth of managerialism.

The growth of the university’s administration at the expense of its academic mission is not solely a matter of money, as Ginsburg’s Fall of the Faculty documents. The growth of “student life” programs under the control of the administrative apparatus has seen students offered more programs in things like time management and study skills, while academic programs in languages, literature, or history are starved of resources. York University has a Senate that is the ultimate authority on academic matters, but the Senate does not have the power to decide what is and is not an academic matter — that is the prerogative of the administration.

Before the current strike, the York community was presented with apocalyptic budget projections (which have since been challenged by YUFA and CUPE) as well as warnings about low enrolments.

York’s administration imposed a process called the Academic and Administrative Prioritization and Review, or AAPR — another management tool that was imposed on other Canadian universities, such as Guelph and the University of Saskatchewan, to destructive effect. Several faculty councils at York repudiated the AAPR and rejected its use in academic planning. Like the strike, the AAPR ended up opening an overdue debate on administrative attacks on the academic mission of the university (see Michael Ornstein’s presentation for a fine example of applying academic criteria to a managerial exercise and Craig Heron’s essay on the consultant Robert Dickeson, whose methodology is used in AAPRs across North America).

Amazingly, in a context of enrolment and budget fears, the York administration walked into negotiations with CUPE 3903 seeking concessions that the union could not accept, and took over a month to make any movement towards an acceptable offer.

As an alternative to bargaining, the administration used a reading of the university’s policy on remediation — intended to provide guidance on how to restart the university after a disruption is over — to start remediating during the strike. The “remediation” ended up making students more uncertain, increasing physical pressure and fear of violence on the picket lines as thousands of drivers tried to cross daily to attend classes that may or may not have been proceeding.

For an administration worried about enrolment, it is difficult to imagine how this could have been anything other than a nightmare scenario — unless low enrolments themselves might provide another tool that administrators could use to discipline the academics?

York, a public university

Like every public institution, universities are changing. They are becoming more hierarchical, more corporate, less accessible, and less free. Defending their role, even expanding it, may not be possible from within their walls alone. But should the non-university-going public care?

Universities cost society massive amounts of resources, and everyone within them, from the administration to the student body, has some relative privilege compared to the many people who never get the chance to go. Scholars’ reputations for obscurity and detachment from the real world doesn’t make it easy for these same scholars to ask the public for resources or for help defending the institution. But public indifference to what is happening at universities only serves the administrators who are eroding them.

And truly public universities could be extremely socially beneficial. Take York again, and consider some 2006 figures that will not have changed much in the decade since. Located in North Toronto, York’s students come from families with a median household income of $55,881, compared to an average of $74,093 for all Ontario university families. The median household income for York students in 2006 was actually lower than the median household income for Ontario in 2005, which, at $72,734, was only slightly lower than the average for Ontario university-going families. Ryerson students came from slightly more affluent families ($56,733) and University of Toronto from slightly more affluent than that ($58,895). The contrast with universities such as Western and Queen’s, with median family incomes above $100,000, is striking.

More than 50 per cent of York’s students commute for more than 40 minutes, and 57 per cent of York’s first-year students rely on public transit to get to school, compared to 32 per cent of Ontario students. Of first-year York students, 60 per cent are female, compared to 55 per cent for Ontario. Of senior-year York students, 72 per cent work for pay off campus, compared to 46 per cent for Ontario; 43 per cent are from a visible minority compared to 29 per cent for Ontario. Where 70 per cent of Ontario students had a parent with post-secondary education, 65 per cent of York students could say the same.

For many decades in North America, universities were designed to train and prepare the ruling class and the professionals who serviced them. But starting after WWII, public universities started to open up and transform into places that potentially everyone could go. York’s demographics present a picture of that kind of public university, a place whose student body looks like the population and not like the rulers.

It may not be coincidental that at the most public of universities, there is a strong emphasis on humanities and social sciences — 53 per cent of first-year students compared to 38 per cent in Ontario, 51 per cent of senior-year students compared to 42 per cent in Ontario. I love science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and I think this type of education is both vitally important and under attack, especially under the Harper government. But social sciences and humanities — philosophy, literature, history, political science, geography, sociology, linguistics, economics — are fields that help students understand power and understand the world they live in. They are fields that give students a chance of shaping the future.

In his 2008 book Unmaking the Public University, English professor Chris Newfield of the University of California, Santa Barbara, argues that the attack on the social sciences and humanities — the devaluing of cultural knowledge — was a part of the assault on public universities and part of the assault on the North American middle class.

The idea of a public university open to everyone, where the cultural knowledge to shape and change society is taught and developed, is a dangerous idea for those who fear the public.

Who is subsidizing, and who is subsidized?

Newfield’s book is full of insights, many of which are highly relevant to Canadian universities and especially to York. One in particular relates to university budgets. Part of a professor’s job, especially in the natural sciences, is to seek external research funding. The grants that professors win in competitions bring prestige to their universities and make it possible to do research. Many believe that these grants help subsidize other parts of the university, but Newfield points out that the grants never cover the full costs of the research, and the university has to provide some matching funds for every grant.

Where do these matching funds come from? From the teaching budget from where most of the students are: the social sciences and the humanities. So, here again, what most people believe is the reverse of reality: it turns out that teaching in the social sciences and humanities subsidizes research in the natural sciences, not the other way around.

In the background of the York strike is the provincial funding formula, which has continued to erode the public part of university budgets. Universities in Ontario responded by following what was done in the United States: they have sought to squeeze more tuition out of students and more funds from private donors.

York’s administration has also sought to expand its science, technology, engineering and mathematics profile and reduce, in relative terms, its social sciences and humanities profile. The fact that the social sciences and humanities faculty and students are among the most “unruly,” the most likely to insist on collegial governance, and highly active in unions, may not be lost on the administration.
Unfortunately university administrations are all alike, and there are no models for creatively managing public institutions.

But none of these strategies will work to the competitive advantage of York, many of whose students will either receive a public education or no education at all. This puts York in an interesting position, as it makes the public option the most strategic one for the institution to survive and thrive. Unfortunately university administrations are all alike, and there are no models for creatively managing public institutions. There are only corporate models of total top-down control, privilege, and power at the top, and obedience and fear at the bottom.

York’s social sciences and humanities programs, which attract huge numbers of students and probably subsidize the rest of the university, will never be shut down. But an administrative vision would see these programs carefully controlled, delivered by insecure teachers with no union protections or academic freedom, and students who pay huge amounts to shut up and study like their instructors, who gratefully accept a tiny share of the budget for the chance to shut up and teach.

It doesn’t have to be this way, especially at York. We could try, instead, to be who we are, instead of trying to be something we are not.

What if York were to lead other universities in the aggressive pursuit of the public option? Embracing its progressive traditions, embracing its diverse and in many cases oppressed student body, and working on a whole new list of problems. What would it take to achieve free tuition? How could we speed up and open up the peer review process? How could we run the university on free software and free information? How could we ensure that everyone who works at the university has a good job at a living wage and the freedom to contribute creatively to the community and to say what they think? How could we have a totally seamless relationship with the non-university public, in which the university becomes a source of knowledge and not a place where knowledge is locked up to be accessed only by those who pay to be within its walls? These are the more interesting problems that we could work on at places such as York.

The alternative is to become another all-administrative university with cowed, indebted students taught by cowed, temporary faculty. York’s TAs, GAs, and contract faculty have shown the way, but the struggle for a truly public university will be a long one.

First published in Ricochet: https://ricochet.media/en/373/york-strikers-show-the-way-now-lets-build-a-truly-public-university

Cease Fire, Resume Genocide: An Interview with Dr. Jacob Smith*

Dr. Jacob Smith (name changed) is a North American physician who has visited Gaza several times, working at several hospitals there in both clinical and training roles. I spoke with him about the medical system in Gaza and the state of Gaza under the current, post August-2014 intensified siege.

Justin Podur: Describe your work in Gaza’s medical system.

Jacob Smith: I was initially asked several years ago by the Ministry of Health in Gaza to participate in a needs assessment for one of the subspecialties. At the time I knew very little about Gaza, wasn’t involved in politics, and knew very little even about the history of the region. As a physician what I saw was a tremendously poor humanitarian situation that was in large part man-made. Most times humanitarian crises result from earthquakes, tornadoes, natural disasters. This disaster is entirely man-made. The health system is the area I’m exposed to most. But it’s one small nidus of a multifactorial problem. The health system needs work, but so does the water system, so does rebuilding people’s homes, there are huge needs in every area. Politically, the most important thing would be getting the borders open so people can export and import – these are simple things that people in a Western society simply take for granted. The blockade prevents medical supplies, medications, training of doctors. The actualization of an independent, sovereign people requires that they can interact with other people. To be able to be empowered to overcome poverty and other challenges, is really not something that they can do under blockade.

JP: Give us some examples of how the siege plays out in the medical system.

JS: I’ll give you an example of what happened in the last offensive. Some specialized treatments like cancer treatment, kidney dialysis, and blood transfusions are only available in Shifa hospital in Gaza City. These treatments are regular, life-saving, and necessary to prolong people’s lives. In the last offensive, people from Northern Gaza were unable to get to Gaza City for these treatments because the road network was destroyed. Those people simply died. Just like that. Another very simple example: when I was there a few years ago, I met a young man in his early twenties who had been exposed to white phosphorus. As a complication of that, he ended up being in the intensive care unit quite a long time. I saw him several years after his exposure, which was probably during Cast Lead in 2008/9. He has chronic illness, he’s unable to find work. During his time in intensive care, the hospital lost power, so he’s lucky to even be alive, but he is a casualty of white phosphorus. In the most recent Israeli offensive a lot of the equipment just stopped because of power cuts. If you’re on a respirator and the power dies, you die. And during the most recent offensive, people who were the sickest – in the intensive care unit – intermittently, the power went down, and you had to hope the generators kicked in. Otherwise the person died. It was that simple. During the offensive, the one time when critical supplies need to come in, this is the time that none of the supplies were available. People were ingenious, trying to find solutions, but there are limits to that. Many people died from things that were easily preventable.

JP: I think it would be worth our time for you to tell us a bit about Palestinian ingenuity. It’s a part of the story people rarely get to hear about.

JS: Just to give you an example, when I visited the dialysis unit, one thing they have is old equipment that is essentially breaking down, broken down to the point where anywhere else, it would be thrown out. But because of the needs, the major hospital in Gaza has designed a system where there are now five shifts – for perspective, you should know no North American facility runs more than three shifts – they run five shifts and they have modified the regime to assure that every patient’s needs are met. They’ve modified the scheduling system to ensure there are nurses available 24 hours a day. I’ve never heard of that happening anywhere else. Another well-publicized example. When the power runs out, many of the Palestinian people will use cooking oil in their cars, which works effectively. The hospitals do the same when they run out of diesel. They use cooking oil to fuel the generators. There are countless examples of running out of electricity supply in the hospital, and setting up someone’s car battery so that the intensive care unit, OR, and the ER can continue to operate. Now there’s a big push, and one of the most empowering programs now is to empower each of the hospitals with solar power similar to as has been done in a couple of hospitals in Haiti. You’ll find countless examples. The level of knowledge of medical students, in terms of book knowledge, was higher than my North American students. But the Palestinian students don’t have the opportunities to go on exchange, develop experience and training outside of Gaza. They have everything they can get in Gaza – they are brilliant students – but they are stuck under the blockade.

JP: And as inventive as the Palestinians are, the occupation is also endlessly inventive in attacks and deprivations. How do they raise the costs for internationals to try to help in Gaza?

JS: So long as the blockade continues, Gaza is in a situation where they really need international help. So long as they are blocked, they need foreign aid, they need NGOs, they need money, reconstruction of hospitals, homes, UN buildings, everything. And yet at the one time that they need the world more than ever before, the world is grossly absent. And it is not simply that the world doesn’t want to be there. Israel (and, it must be said, Egypt) has made it almost impossible to get in and out of Gaza. If you’re an NGO and you’re trying to determine the most productive use of your time and money, you’ll go to a place that’s easier to get in and out. It is hard to get in, hard to get out, it’s intentional delays to deprive people of the ability to do good work. If you apply to go through Israel, they’ll delay or refuse your COGAT permission. Many have been refused without explanation and aren’t allowed back – for no reason. Mads Gilbert is an example.

I know of doctors who have been rejected multiple times, spent thousands in legal fees, took their case to the Supreme Court of Israel, and were finally granted permission through the Supreme Court of Israel. Even after getting permission from Supreme Court, the border officials make entry and exit especially difficult and humiliating.

When I was leaving Israel via Ben Gurion, the authorities insisted I write my facebook, home address, work address, phone numbers. I had my luggage dumped on the floor, every item in my bag was swabbed, I had to go through the X-ray twice, I was strip searched, and had my private parts patted down. This is routine for anyone entering and exiting Gaza for medical relief work. You are intentionally made to feel like a criminal, like you’re doing something wrong by going to Gaza, that the mere act of being present there makes you a criminal. As you go through it, even if you know that’s happening, human nature dictates that you’ll start to think, well, there are a lot of places that need humanitarian work, you’ll be inclined to go somewhere else next time, which means you’ll have done exactly what the Israelis wanted you to do. As a physican, most physicians will feel they have better things to do with their time. And that’s a part of why development has happened at a snail’s pace.

And consider me, as a white North American physician, I’m not used to this treatment, but part of the sadness is, if I was Palestinian, this would happen all the time, I wouldn’t be telling this story, and much worse would happen to me – I’d be detained, or jailed, or tortured, and no one would know.

JP: You mentioned Egypt. It’s not just Israel making it difficult for people to get in. It’s also the Sisi dictatorship in Egypt.

JS: I visited Gaza when Morsi was president of Egypt. At that time, the Rafah border crossing was mostly open. There was also a tunnel system that served as a lifeline of medical supplies into Gaza. It was easier for people to go in and out via Rafah for specialized medical care. That said, it was still not accessible to everyone. It was accessible to people who had the means – in a territory where there is more than 50% unemployment, that was still a major barrier. But now, in the Sisi era, it’s simply impossible to get out. Several years ago, during one of my visits, you could see NGO people everywhere: UN, MSF, Red Crescent from Turkey. They were everywhere, there were projects, there were people. Now they are almost invisible.

Much of the money that was pledged, the overwhelming majority, has never got in. Reconstruction efforts are essentially nonexistent. The hospitals that were most visible from the international perspective – in Gaza City – were rebuilt first. Not because they were strategic for human health, but because they were the most likely to please Israel, to help Israel’s international reputation. The pediatric hospital, which was bombed in August 2014, was rebuilt first.

So far, the reconstruction effort is going at a rate that will take 100 years to repair the damage just from the most recent conflict, never mind the conflicts before that. The most basic necessities are in short supply. The majority of the water is undrinkable because of damage to water treatment plants and lack of sewage treatment. Electricity outages range anywhere from 12 to 20 hours a day. Because of the displacement of over 100,000 people, many of these people are living in congested housing. We’re seeing a very high rate of people living in close proximity. People are literally dying of diarrhea, children have died of hypothermia because they can’t get heat in their homes.

Each of the things that I’m describing, we’re talking about an area where the average person in Gaza lives on less than $1500 per year. If you move less than a mile away in Israel, that figure is over $35,000 per year. The reason this exists is entirely man-made. The people within Gaza are motivated, determined to be independent and have their own health care system that they develop and that they optimize. The reason this is not happening is solely because of the occupation and a blockade that forbids supplies, and rather than the very rapid genocidal campaign of the war, after the ceasefire none of the conditions have been respected.

My dream is that Gaza would have an independent health care system that would be run by Gaza that wouldn’t be dependent on foreign aid, not dependent allowing supplies in through the occupier. That’s completely possible. The desire, the expertise, the determination, are all there on the Palestinian side. But on the Israeli and Egyptian sides, there is opposition. And internationally, those who want to help haven’t been strong enough to overcome this opposition. One of the most frustrating things for me, is, to see the potential. I have to perceive things as, what’s the potential if we overcome those barriers. That has to be the way that we think. What’s the ideal situation? A health system designed by, for, and managed by physicians and leaders in Gaza. They are more than capable of doing it if the world allowed them.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Cease-Fire-Resume-Genocide-An-interview-with-Dr.-Jacob-Smith-20150311-0031.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

Online Privacy Is Worth The Extra Work

This past week, Laura Poitras’s documentary, Citizen Four, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary. When he provided the documents that revealed the details of universal spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the subject of the documentary, Edward Snowden, wrote an accompanying manifesto. His “sole motive”, he wrote, was “to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them. The U.S. government, in conspiracy with client states, chiefest among them the Five Eyes – the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – have inflicted upon the world a system of secret, pervasive surveillance from which there is no refuge.” (1)

Snowden, who made careful plans to try to avoid capture before he could get the materials out, nonetheless assumed that he was going to be spending the rest of his life in prison. Even though his greatest wish was for the public to know about the surveillance programs, he was pessimistic about the possibility that the programs would be reformed through the existing political system. His manifesto concluded with the repurposing of a quote from Thomas Jefferson about the U.S. Constitution: “Let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.”

In other words, maybe if the public found out, they would find the idea of being surveilled by unaccountable powers unappealing, or maybe they would not. If they rejected universal surveillance, they might demand that the program end. But maybe the political system was in fact so closed, undemocratic, and unresponsive that it could not change in response to such a demand. But even then, the public had options: the public could change their behaviour in order to make universal surveillance more difficult. How? What are these “chains of cryptography” to which Snowden referred?

In a lecture at the 31c3 conference late last year (2), Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum and Laura Poitras showed the systems that the NSA have so far been unable to crack. Taken together, and used carefully, these systems offer the continued possibility of privacy, a fundamental right, a right which enables people to form their personalities, their philosophies, and their politics, a right which has been taken away by spy agencies for their own grandiose plans.

What are these systems? They include public key (GPG) encryption for email, onion routing (Tor) for web browsing, and Off-The-Record (OTR) protocols for online chatting. Importantly, all of these tools are free software/software libre (3), which means that their source code is published and can be studied, so that bugs and problems can be identified and fixed by the community of users and developers. Security experts like Bruce Schneier (4) have long emphasized that no user should trust any product that promises online privacy or security that is not free software. Unless the source code is published, there could easily be “backdoors” built in – and, as Snowden’s documents have shown, they often are. Richard Stallman of the GNU free software project made the argument connecting free software to online privacy and security at his own lecture at 31c3 (5).

The above tools – GPG, Tor, and OTR – may be cracked one day by the NSA, or declared illegal by oppressive governments (including that of the US). The important point is that they are tools that were created by the free software community and offered to the public as ways to try to achieve the right to privacy. Unlike corporations, the writers of free software don’t try to control users in order to profit from them. But nor do they have the resources to create vast call centres to do customer service, and indeed all free software comes with a warning that it has no warranty or guarantee. Although the difficulties are often exaggerated, the free software versions of many programs can be difficult to use. What this means is that the price of freedom, or of privacy, online, is not measured in dollars or even in suffering, but in convenience and patience.

Greenwald recounts in his book, No Place to Hide, that Snowden tried to contact him many times before finally reaching him through Laura Poitras. Greenwald didn’t want to go through the inconvenience of learning GPG, and Snowden wouldn’t write him any specifics without it. Even now, most people, including journalists and activists, don’t take the extra time to learn these tools, or to learn about the free software movement. Until Snowden, this included even Greenwald, the very reporter who ended up breaking the story. The ‘crypto party’ movement has arisen to make it possible for people to get together and help each other learn the tools (6). If only a tiny group of people attempt to exercise their rights to online privacy, it will be easier for governments to isolate them. On the other hand, if people assume they have the right to privacy and join the free software movement, it is better for everyone. By exercising your right to freedom, you are making it easier for others to exercise theirs. If you are already using a computer anyway, isn’t it worth some inconvenience?

NOTE: If you are having difficulty getting to a crypto party, but are willing to put in some time and effort to learning the tools for online anonymity that we do have, some of the principles of online privacy and security, and some of the principles of free software, please consider joining the Z School course (7) on the topic, which will begin in April 2015.

First published at TeleSUR English March 2/15: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Online-Privacy-Is-Worth-The-Extra-Work-20150302-0021.html

Notes:

(1) The manifesto is quoted in its entirety in Greenwald’s book No Place to Hide.

(2) See the talk, “Reconstructing Narratives”, here: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6258_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412282030_-_reconstructing_narratives_-_jacob_-_laura_poitras.html

(3) Free software, or software libre, is software that gives its users the freedoms to view, share, modify, and use the code as they wish, and it is regulated by very carefully constructed licenses, especially the GNU Public License or GPL.

(4) See Scheneir’s blog: https://www.schneier.com/

(5) See the talk, “Freedom in your computer and in the net”: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6123_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412291130_-_freedom_in_your_computer_and_in_the_net_-_richard_stallman.html#video

(6) In my city, for example, there’s Toronto Crypto: http://torontocrypto.org/. Find out if there’s one in your city.

(7) The course opens in April 2015. Details will be posted on: https://zcomm.org/znet/

My Radical Teacher article – A summer in Islamabad, and a student view

Radical Teacher’s 101st issue is about Teaching Across Borders. In it, you can find my article about my experience teaching in Pakistan in 2008, which I’ve also written about in this blog.

Since then, I saw a new article by Aamna Shafqat, a student at IIU-I, and found the student perspective fascinating. If you want to read a bit about teaching and learning in Pakistan, I’d recommend both!

The Rojava Revolution and the Liberation of Kobani

Since September of 2014, the city of Kobani has been in the news as the site of a battle between Kurdish forces from the Rojava region and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). At the end of January, the Kurdish forces (YPG and YPJ) announced that Kobani had successfully repelled the attack. But ISIS is still in control of villages surrounding Kobani and maintaining its threat to other parts of Rojava.

Sardar Saadi is the coordinator of the Rojava Media Project, a media production and training project for young people in Rojava, the Kurdish region of Syria, and a doctoral student in anthropology based in Toronto. I interviewed him on February 7, 2015.

Justin Podur: Can you describe your visit to the Rojava region, and tell us a bit of the geography so we can orient ourselves.

Sardar Saadi: The Rojava region is the Syrian part of Kurdistan, in northern Syria, estimates are of a population of 3 million. It has borders with Turkey and with Iraqi Kurdistan, which is governed by Masoud Barzani. It has three enclaves or cantons: Jazeera, Kobani, and Afrin. I went to the Jazeera canton and Qamishli, which is the biggest Kurdish city in Syria, for three weeks in August 2014. I was there as part of a team to establish a training center for a media project, rojavamediaproject.com.

There is not a lot of info on our website right now, but you can find some basic information on what our goals from this project are. I was also very curious to see what’s going on on the ground in Rojava, and basically to talk to the people there and do some preliminary fieldwork for a possible future study.

JP: You have written an article describing what is happening in Rojava as a revolution. Anarchist writer David Graeber has described it in similar terms, as did an academic delegation that he was a part of, and numerous writers have compared the Rojava Revolution’s program and methods to those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Can you talk a bit about why you are calling it a revolution?

SS: I can go a bit into historical background of how the revolution started. The Kurdish movement in Syria is highly connected to the movement in Turkey led by the PKK (Kurdistan workers party). Because of the PKK’s relationship with Hafiz Assad, there wasn’t actually a strong presence of any kind of revolutionary/ insurgent/ militant movement in Syria against the regime. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t any persecution of Kurds – many Kurdish activists were in Assad’s jails. In 2004 the Qamishli uprising happened – about 30 people died in that uprising. That uprising was the first step for a reckoning in Rojava, for the Kurdish movement, and it influenced the PKK in a way that they could not compromise the potential of a revolution in that region.

In 2011 after the beginning of the revolution in Syria, which ended up in the Syrian civil war, the main Kurdish party, the PYD (Democratic Union Party) (which is known to be connected to the PKK) and based on Abdullah Ocalan’s (the PKK’s imprisoned leader) ideas of democratic confederalism, started political mobilization in the Kurdish cities in Syria.

The PYD’s military forces, YPG and YPJ (people’s and women’s protection units) started to take control of those cities and villages that were part of Kurdistan. In 2012, the Syrian regime’s forces started to withdraw from the Kurdish region and the PYD took control and started to form people’s assemblies, communes, and councils in the cities and other areas to create a political entity for Rojava.

The people in Rojava formed a founding council to write a kind of constitution for Rojava. By the end of 2013, the constitution was written and prepared and agreed upon: it’s called the Charter of Social Contract. By the beginning of 2014, they started forming their cantons, their political systems. One by one they declared their democratic autonomous self-administration. They are trying to avoid the language of “state” and “government” so they call themselves the “administration”.

All the daily affairs of these cantons are managed in councils at different levels. Each canton has its own council, and an executive body is in charge of the canton’s administrative and governmental work. The ethnic and religious representation is carefully chosen and the quota of 40% women is preserved at all levels. All of those communes have this quota and most of the time it’s exceeded – I personally saw some of the neighborhood communes and councils with over 70% of their active members being women, and not just young, but probably mostly middle-aged women. Those women that we think of in that region as housewives and mothers are actively involved in the neighborhood councils. There are also justice councils that have the same kind of system of organization – starting bottom-up from neighborhood communes to the canton.

JP: Which spokespeople should we search for their public statements?

SS: Both PYD’s co-chairs, Asya Abdullah and Salih Muslim, can be reached for this matter. Polat Can, who is very active on twitter, is a spokesperson for YPG who can also help with media inquiries, as well as Redur Xelil. There are representatives in Europe, namely Zuhat Kobane, who can also talk on behalf of the PYD.

JP: In many new revolutionary situations, there are some regions or communities that are, for historical reasons, better organized than others. Is there any unevenness in the organization?

SS: Historically, there was a kind of neighborhood organization based on a clandestine political party. Most of those neighborhood councils, communes, most of what we saw, are because of the organizing power of the PYD’s political body. There are two main bodies in terms of popular organizing that are called Democratic Society’s Movement (known by its Kurdish acronym TEV-DEM) and Democratic Culture’s Movement (known by its Kurdish acronym TEV-CAND). These two are doing most of the work.

People are calling it a social revolution as they are incredibly involved in every level of the social, political and economic life there. Most of the people involved are those who have never been active, and now they are actively engaged and organizing around their communities. And it is not necessarily for the PYD, it is for the sake of their own communities, neighborhoods, for themselves. For example, they decide how public resources such as a piece of public-owned land in their neighborhood to be used. They decide on the public use of these spaces, and then, they propose their plan to the municipality.

JP: What are the economic activities there?

SS: The Jazeera region is very rich in oil and wheat. In one of the interviews with Salih Muslim, he says that they are producing more wheat than they need in that canton. Jazeera is known to be Syria’s breadbasket. They produce over 70 percent of the wheat and other grains, so in terms of agriculture, it’s very rich.

Most of Syria’s oil also comes from there. While I was there, I heard that there are over 2300 oil wells in that region, but right now Jazeera canton’s administration has decided to have only 300 of them running.

Because of the economic embargo by the Turkish government and the Iraqi Kurdish regional government (Barzani’s administration) they can’t export any of what they produce – not oil, not wheat – nothing. And they can’t get anything from outside.

They have to smuggle anything they need. They run a small refinery for their own needs. Electricity is produced from small neighborhood generators that depend on this refinery. Transportation also depends on this refinery. In terms of people’s livelihoods, as much as I saw, they are working mainly for subsistence. I have heard the PYD have a committee working on developing a new paradigm for how to do self-government or autonomy in the economic area (see this article on the economic aspirations). Many cooperatives are starting up, if slowly. I think it’s the most difficult task of the revolution to convince people used to their mode of production, either traditional or modern capitalist one, to leave behind the idea of private property and produce cooperatively. However, if it succeeds, it could develop something fundamentally new and transformative in the whole region and even in the world. It could claim that hey, there is an alternative to the capitalist system, and it is working.

JP: Who controlled the economy traditionally? Are there big landlords? Merchants?

SS: I met one rich guy while I was there. I was told that he was the only one who stayed. Most of the landlords or those known to be wealthy, they have left – they sold everything and went to Turkey or Iraqi Kurdistan, or Europe or somewhere else. And also there’s a kind of ethnic side to this class relationship, in Qamichlu. Many of the merchant class are from the Assyrian minority. The financial and banking systems are ethnically based. The Assyrian minority has a good relationship with the Kurdish community, but unfortunately, they are all trying to leave. They are all scared of what’s happening in the Syrian civil war. Whoever you speak to, they don’t want to stay in that situation.

JP: The Rojava revolution is surrounded by enemies, the Syrian government and ISIS, the Turkish government, even Iraqi Kurdistan, no one wants the revolution to succeed.

SS: I would relate this to the PKK and Ocalan’s idea of democratic confederalism. The PKK is the only revolutionary force that you can encounter in Kurdistan and maybe in the whole region. The PKK has shifted its politics from seeking an independent Kurdistan to a democratic Middle East in the last decade or so.

Unfortunately many analysts who follow what’s happening in Kurdistan, they think of the PKK as a nationalist movement. That’s not true. They are really trying to convince people that what they are trying to do is about the whole Middle East. I think it’s a smart move, and it is working. The PKK and Kurdish movement has long tried to establish a kind of geographic unit for the Kurds throughout the 20th century. In the end, there is only a little part of Iraqi Kurdistan that has been freed, which I believe is not truly free. After Rojava everyone saw that the politics of the Kurdish movement matters more than how much territory they control. That’s how the PKK is winning. In terms of social and political activism, the PKK has become a Jacobinian force in Kurdistan, trying to push people to organize around peoples’ assemblies, communes, and councils. What we currently see in this region is that the people have no option rather than being subjected to the state’s politics (Iraq, Iran, Syria) and imperialist rule or to Islamic organizations. The PKK is the only Left option.

After the liberation of Kobani, Turkey’s PM Erdogan just said they don’t accept any entity from “North Syria” comparing it to “North Iraq”. The Turkish state’s politics has been a politics of denial, of not accepting any kind of political formation, especially by the PKK.

There is a lot of talk about ISIS, but the person with aspirations to be Caliph is Erdogan, not Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. On the other hand, Barzani’s politics are similar to Erdogan’s and aligned with the West to develop the neoliberal market in the region. Internally, in Kurdish politics there’s a huge division between political parties and movements and personalities: those aligned and close to the PKK, in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey, where it is dominant, and those close to Barzani who are mainly traditional statists and Kurdish nationalists who believe that the PKK is not serving the people’s ambitions in Kurdistan and who think the whole idea of a democratic Middle East is not serving the Kurds.

JP: Is the battle for Kobani over?

SS: In the centre of Kobani it’s over. The YPG is spreading and gaining control of the surrounding areas. However, the fight against ISIS is far from over. There’s a possibility that ISIS could come back, but right now, they on the defensive. They are going to change direction toward other cantons of Rojava. Afrin is in danger: it’s small, it’s close to Aleppo, and the political development in Aleppo between FSA, the Syrian regime, ISIS, and Al-Nusra front is very crucial for the fate of Afrin. But on the other hand, it’s more mountainous and defensible compared to Kobani.

Right now the fighting is happening on the eastern front toward Gire Spi or Tal Abyad. The YPG’s strategy is to liberate there next. There were some news reports that they want to contact Arab tribes of that area to collaboratively liberate the city from ISIS. If they do that, Jazeera and Kobani will be connected. They are about 120km apart, and the area in between is under ISIS control. It would be a strategic move, but very difficult to accomplish. The Sunni Arab tribes and the Kurds of Rojava do not have a good relationship. The Arabs think of the Kurds as Assad’s agents, and the Kurds think of the Arabs as occupiers who moved to those areas in the 1950s-60s because of Assad’s “Arabization” policies. Nonetheless, the PYD’s politics is based on co-existence with each other on a shared homeland. It will be a test of the idea of the democratic Middle East.

JP: How important were the western airstrikes? They are advertised as if they were the only factor.

SS: That’s how they want to portray the liberation of Kobani in the mainstream media, as if it was solely because of the airstrikes. CNN did a shitty piece that says the Peshmerga (Iraqi Kurdish forces) liberated Kobani. There were only 200 peshmerga in Kobani. About 410 YPG and YPJ fighters died fighting ISIS, and, as far as I know, only one peshmerga fighter was killed. No one can deny their help for the liberation of Kobani and the YPG in many occasions thanked them. However, they were only logistical forces and not on the front line. But according to CNN, it was the Peshmerga, and airstrikes by coalition forces, that did the whole job.

The YPG’s position from the beginning has been: ISIS is not the Kurds and YPG’s problem. ISIS comes out of NATO’s politics against the Syrian regime. Now the YPG and YPJ is fighting ISIS on behalf of everyone in the region. Kobani is liberated but it is in ruins. No building is undamaged by coalition’s airstrikes and ISIS’ shelling the city.

Back in summer 2014 when ISIS attacked Kobani canton, it was 2-3 weeks that the YPG called for help. It was the time that the airstrikes could have stopped ISIS outside of the city. In one interview with YPG in Kobani, a spokesperson pointed out that it was NATO’s mistakes that saw all their heavy weaponry end up in ISIS’s hands, and all we asked was for coalition forces to destroy those tanks and artillery that they had indirectly supplied ISIS, could they at least destroy their own stuff. The coalition forces didn’t help the YPG and YPJ forces until the media paid attention to the resistance in Kobani. The Western mainstream media just found out that there’s something happening there even though what they did was to show this resistance through sexualized depictions of Kurdish women fighters against Islamic extremists. The depictions were awful, but the media attention did help. Turkey was pushing really hard against the airstrikes, arguing why not just let this one city fall. So to answer your question, yes the airstrikes did help, but the brave men and women of YPG and YPJ liberated the city.

First published on TeleSUR English

Taylor Swift’s Millions Aren’t Worth a Single Prison Term

At an awards show at the end of 2014, musician Taylor Swift accepted her award saying that 2014 was an important year because it was the year she stood up for herself as an artist. In July 2014, she wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about the future of the music industry. (1) Swift makes economic arguments about the value of an artist’s work: “the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace.” She reasons as follows: “Music is art, and art is important and rare. Important, rare things are valuable. Valuable things should be paid for. It’s my opinion that music should not be free, and my prediction is that individual artists and their labels will someday decide what an album’s price point is.”

What does Swift blame for society’s failure to recognize this value? “Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically,” she writes. By blaming piracy, file sharing, and streaming, Swift has adopted what author Rob Reid called in 2012 “Copyright Math”, in which the movie industry claims that the “economic loss” from file sharing of movies amounts to US$58 billion dollars – more than most of the value of US agriculture (2).

Unfortunately, as outrageous as it is, copyright math is no joke. In the same year the millionaire Taylor Swift stood up for herself as an artist, one of the best known, and most defiant, file sharing sites, The Pirate Bay, saw its founders arrested in an international manhunt. The three file-sharers, Fredrek Neij, Gottfrid Warg, and Peter Sunde, were handed prison sentences by a Swedish court in 2009 (3). They went into hiding. Sunde was arrested in June in Sweden and is serving an 8-month jail term. Warg was arrested in Cambodia and is serving three and a half years. Neij was arrested in November 2014 in Thailand. The investigation into the Pirate Bay was extensive, the seizures of equipment massive, and the attempt to shut the site down has been thorough and vindictive (4). The Pirate Bay is being made an example of.

Taylor Swift isn’t responsible for the Pirate Bay’s founders being in jail. But when artists make claims about file-sharing reducing their “value” as artists, these claims are political, and they are part of the political climate that makes the persecution of file-sharing politically acceptable.

But take Taylor Swift’s question seriously for a moment. What is the value of an artist? Taylor Swift has a net worth of US$200 million because tens of millions of people listen to her music. Most of these people first heard Taylor Swift’s music for free, maybe on the radio or online, and much later, decided to pay some money to buy recordings of her songs or albums, or to see her in concert. Almost no one buys an album without hearing some of the songs first. Without the free distribution channels, no one would know who Taylor Swift was, no one would have bought her album, no one would have gone to her concerts, no one would have known her value as an artist, and she would have none of her millions.

Or take a step back from that, and ask, did Taylor Swift develop her musical style on a deserted island and come to her American audiences, completed albums in hand? Or did she develop her songs based on influences by hundreds of other artists whose music she heard constantly, for free, throughout her childhood and adolescence? When I heard the wind instruments in her song, “Shake it Off”, for example, I thought of the bridge from Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”. For a more direct connection, artists have been telling their listeners to “Shake It” since at least the 1970s (5). Swift would never claim that the phrases “players gonna play” and “haters gonna hate” were original to her or to her song. And so on, and on. Musicians, indeed all artists, borrow from one another, are influenced by one another, learn, and add their own little original pieces to the culture. Some artists are more graceful than others in acknowledging influences or samples. I only knew that 2Pac had done a song called Me & My Girlfriend (6), which is pretty much the same song as Jay Z and Beyonce’s song, “03 Bonnie and Clyde” (7), when a friend played 2Pac’s (relatively obscure) version for me years after ’03 Bonnie and Clyde.

Without the chance to borrow and incorporate other people’s music into theirs, would Jay Z and Beyonce be able to refer to themselves as “a billion dollars in an elevator” (8)? Probably not. Without the ability to freely listen and share, there would be no Taylor Swift, no Jay Z, no Beyonce, none of the massive fortunes that these industry players are now trying to use, along with the legal system and their cultural influence, to stop file sharing.

No one can deny that these artists are talented. But talent is not so rare as Taylor Swift’s op-ed would suggest. There are millions of people, just as talented, that are toiling away in obscurity, putting their music out on the web, hoping one day to find audiences. Even for those who manage to put together a livelihood from their work, they might make thousands of dollars per year. Does Taylor Swift really believe she is ten thousand times more talented than one of these artists? Does she really believe that she has ten thousand times more heart and soul to pour into her work? Such beliefs are not to be celebrated. Like Beyonce’s talk of a “billion dollars in an elevator”, they are a celebration of an inequality that has become so pervasive that we forget how vulgar it is.

Biologist Stephen Jay Gould, wrote in his book “The Panda’s Thumb” that he was “somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Taylor Swift’s millions are of a lot less interest than the millions of Taylor Swifts whose talent will never be known.

A few decades ago, when I was a kid, I used to sit next to a stereo system that had a radio and a cassette tape recorder attached, waiting for one of my favorite songs to come on, so that I could press “record” at exactly the right time and get a recording that I could listen to over and over again. Worse, I would use these recordings to make mix-tapes that I would share with friends from my school. In the world of Swift and of copyright math, I was stealing, contributing to an early version of the multi-billion dollar economic losses that file-sharing represents today.

There are much better ways that society could support artists, giving all artists a good living and the chance to find audiences. There are better frameworks, like the Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/), to facilitate artists being able to share and also get recognition for their work.

Taylor Swift cannot get what she thinks she’s worth without a whole framework of laws that control how we listen, watch, and read, without surveillance on all of us to ensure we comply with these laws, without the police to hunt down and arrest people who seek to share the products of the culture we live in, without jail terms and demonstrative punishments for those who defy these rules. It isn’t worth it.

First published at TeleSUR English.

ADDENDUM:

Some have asked, “who pays artists?” I have no problem with audiences paying artists – for concerts, for merchandise, even for music, if they choose to. The problem is the monitoring and persecution of file-sharing, which is enabled by the defining of sharing music (or other information or cultural products) as a form of “theft”. It is a strange kind of theft where the person stolen from still has the item after the theft. We all know that sharing is a good thing, and that sharing is very different from “theft”. The vast majority of artists have no fortunes to protect by persecuting people who share their work. It is the millionaire artists who are trying to kick away the ladder of free music they climbed up on that this essay argues against.

Notes

Taylor Swift,July 7, 2014. “For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music is a Love Story.” Wall Street Journal. http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-taylor-swift-the-future-of-music-is-a-love-story-1404763219
Rob Reid, the $8 billion iPod. TED talks,February 2012.http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod?language=en
Jon Russell, “Police Finally Arrest the Third and Final Founder of the Pirate Bay” TechCrunchNovember 4, 2014.http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/04/police-finally-arrest-the-third-and-final-founder-of-the-pirate-bay/
Andy, “Police seized 50 servers in Pirate Bay raid”,January 23, 2015.Torrentfreak.com.http://torrentfreak.com/police-seized-50-servers-in-pirate-bay-raid-150123/
Billboard.com, “10 Biggest ‘Shake’ Singles in Billboard Hot 100 History”. http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/6229455/biggest-shake-singles-billboard-hot-100-history
2Pac, “Me & My Girlfriend” – for now, listen at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdu9qt6XuPA
Jay Z and Beyonce, “’03 Bonnie and Clyde”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=copiznIfV3E&list=RDcopiznIfV3E– part of what Beyonce sings in this song is also taken from TLC’s song, “If I was your girlfriend” -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoV_-gex-bY
TMZ “Beyonce raps about elevator fight”.August 3, 2014.http://www.tmz.com/2014/08/03/beyonce-elevator-fight-money-jay-z-solange-flawless-remix-marriage/

#IStandWithPanzi

In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in the city of Bukavu, in South Kivu, on the Rwandan border, Panzi Hospital has been a refuge for survivors of sexual violence. So why is the Congolese government using the tax system to try to shut it down?

The director of the hospital, Denis Mukwege (1), has argued that the pattern of violence that he and his medical staff have encountered there constitutes a new pathology, a kind of weapon of mass destruction (2), deployed by armed actors to destroy the social fabric of the eastern DRC and control the region and its resources. Dr. Mukwege has won numerous humanitarian awards for his work. As a regional hub for survivors of sexual violence, Panzi has attracted international attention and support. Beyond his medical work, Dr. Mukwege has been a strong voice in international forums reminding the world that, as long as weaponized sexual violence continues, the Congo cannot be said to be in a “post-conflict” situation.

The Kivus are still overrun with armed actors. The Congolese Army is a major human rights violator. Militias sponsored by the DRC’s neighbours, Uganda and Rwanda, as well as armed groups of exiles from these countries, operate in the countryside and victimize the civilian population. The Ugandan and Rwandan armies periodically enter Congolese territory to conduct operations of their own. And a multinational United Nations force, one of the UN’s largest missions, has been in the east for about 15 years. Against this backdrop, Panzi has been a haven for civilians, a place where women could heal, and a place from where a lot of the energy and organization to help the region recover has come.

A major driver of this chaotic armed violence is the region’s mineral resources, which have been plundered for more than a century, by Belgian colonialists, Western corporations, local dictators like Mobutu, and neighbouring powers like Rwanda and Uganda. In recent years, there have been numerous efforts to move the mining trade out of the illegal realm and into legal, corporate hands, through legislation like the Dodd-Frank Act. Perhaps the most visible face of corporate mining in South Kivu is the Canadian gold mining company, Banro Corporation, which inherited rights to two big gold mines from the state-run mining company and which, in 2013, had a gross revenue of $111 million USD from its mining operations. A look at Banro’s 2013 Annual Report describes the company’s tax arrangements with the Congolese government – arrangements that are always sought after by mining companies, even if they are not always obtained:

“In the Congo, the Company is subject to a mining convention signed with the Congolese government that provides the Company with a 10-year tax holiday from the date of commercial production. The tax holiday enables the Company to earn income in the Congo that is exempt from corporate income tax during this period of the tax holiday. ” (3)

Unfortunately for Panzi hospital, the Congolese government shows more generosity with its tax holidays towards mining companies than it does to public hospitals. At a press conference at the end of 2014, Dr. Mukwege described the persecution of the hospital by the state (4). The Congo’s tax office seized the hospital’s bank accounts last October. Panzi sued, and the tax office released the accounts on December 29 – then, re-seized them again the next day. In their press release, Panzi emphasized that none of the other 500 officially recognized public hospitals in the DRC pay taxes, but Panzi has been hit with taxes of $47,000 (already seized) and $650,000 additional dollars for 2013. “If we owe $600,000 in taxes,” Dr. Mukwege asked at the press conference, “how much are we supposed to have earned?”

The hospital, which serves an area of 400,000 people, is in danger of closing, and cannot pay its 500 employees. The Belgian government (5) called for the tax to be scrapped, stating that the tax “threatens the care provided to rape victims.” If others follow, there is no reason why the tax couldn’t simply be scrapped and the hospital return to its important work.

This is not the first attack on Panzi or on Mukwege, who survived an assassination attempt in 2012. The current persecution of the hospital is likely pre-electoral in nature. President Joseph Kabila was elected in 2006 by a population that hoped he would help to restore the country’s sovereignty after a decade (then) of proxy war and occupation. His re-election in 2011 was won only with recourse to massive fraud. In order to stay in power after 2016, he will have to change the constitution (it was changed for him once already, because he did not reach the age requirement of 35 when he was first elected). The “post-conflict” continues to be deadly to the people of the east (6). Instead of addressing the violence, Kabila’s government is attacking those who are trying to stop the violence and raising criticisms of it. The government would do better to study Panzi carefully, increase its resources, and try to emulate its work in other conflict zones.

Notes

(1) I profiled Dr. Mukwege for The Progressive Magazine in November 2009: “Healing in the Congo: A Profile of Dr. Denis Mukwege” -http://www.killingtrain.com/sites/killingtrain.com/files/podur_progressivenov2009healinginthecongo.pdf

(2) Mukwege and Nangini 2009, “Rape With Extreme Violence: The New Pathology in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo” PLOS Medicine 6 (12): e1000204 doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000204. URL:http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000204

(3) Banro Corporation, 2013 Annual Report, pg. 47 URL:http://www.banro.com/i/pdf/2013AnnualReport.pdf

(4) Panzi Hospital’s press release: http://www.panzihospital.org/archives/2847. Transcription of the press conference: http://www.panzihospital.org/archives/2858

(5) “DR Congo tax on rape victim hospital sparks fury” France 24, January 3, 2015:http://www.france24.com/en/20150103-belgium-urges-dr-congo-scrap-tax-hospital-rape-victims/. Reuters story Jan 2/15: http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/01/02/congodemocratic-health-politics-idINL6N0UH15020150102

(6) See the Congo Siasa blog for updates by academic Jason Stearns and guests like Rachel Sweet, who posted on Jan 6. on the ongoing violence in North Kivu, which has claimed 200 lives in the past three months: http://congosiasa.blogspot.ca/2015/01/guest-blog-politics-and-business.html

First published on TeleSUR English

Hacktivism

A review of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the Many Faces of Anonymous, by Gabriella Coleman. First published at TeleSUR English.

On December 17, independent journalist Barrett Brown, who has been in jail for two years without trial, had his first sentencing hearing (see the report by The Intercept). Barrett Brown was threatened with one hundred years in prison for analyzing documents that were hacked from private security companies HBGary and Stratfor. Brown never hacked anything – he received the documents and was reporting on them.

Interesting points emerge from a posting by Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who reacted to the sentencing hearing. Assange pointed out that the charges against Brown were of two kinds: the first, pertaining to his reporting on the Stratfor documents, which should be protected under free expression. The other, pertaining to things he said when the FBI threatened to charge his mother unless he turned over his source material. The worst thing Brown said about the FBI agent was a tweet that read, “illegally shoot the son of a bitch”. Assange pointed out that this tweet was Brown quoting Fox News’s Bob Beckel, who called for Assange’s assassination. (Assange posted this link as proof.) Beckel has faced no FBI investigation, no legal consequences, no arrests. Barrett Brown, who quoted him, has been in jail for two years and is threatened with many more. Brown and his lawyers have gag orders against them – the prosecution told the court that Brown has shown “intent to continue to manipulate the public through press and social media comments,” thus undermining the enormously powerful government’s right to a fair chance of obtaining a harsh conviction against this independent journalist.

The Stratfor emails got into Barrett Brown’s possession by way of Jeremy Hammond, a hacker who is now serving a 10-year sentence for stealing the secrets of the private intelligence company. Stratfor is a part of a $350 billion security industry that seamlessly links government, police, and private intelligence networks. The Stratfor emails provided, in Gabriella Coleman’s words, “solid nuggets of proof that Stratfor profited from morally dubious practices, such as corporate propaganda dressed as public relations and the monitoring of activists.” One of Stratfor’s founders, Ronald Duchin, devised the “Duchin formula” for attacking movements, published by journalist Steve Horn and quoted in Coleman’s book: “isolate the radicals, ‘cultivate’ the idealists and ‘educate’ them into becoming realists. Then co-opt the realists in agreeing with industry.”

Government and corporate intelligence agencies are extraordinarily non-transparent. What the public knows about them is known almost entirely because of hackers like Hammond and Assange, independent journalists like Brown (and Poitras and Greenwald), and whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden. People like Hammond, Snowden, and Manning took tremendous risks to get these materials to the public, and Hammond and Manning and Brown, among others, are suffering greatly for it.

Neither Hammond nor Manning were caught because they made technical mistakes, even though both of them obtained their data through some technically sophisticated means. Manning’s mistake was befriending someone named Adrian Lamo, who informed on her to the FBI. Hammond was a part of Anonymous, and interacted throughout the hacks with Hector Monsegur, aka “Sabu”, who helped entrap Hammond and many other hackers when Sabu became an FBI informant.

But the arrests and jail terms were not the end of Anonymous. Anonymous’s main twitter feed, @YourAnonNews, has 1.36 million followers. Having maintained a media presence for years, Anonymous is now a powerful media organization in its own right. In addition to the Stratfor hacks, Anonymous can claim credit for exposing abusive police during Occupy, for exposing rapists and rape culture in Canada and the US, and for participating in the Arab Spring in operations against Tunisia’s dictatorship. They are currently highly active against murderous police in the US, in Ferguson and NYC. They have an uncanny ability to land on the side of the oppressed, even where many progressives flounder – as in Israel’s recent massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

As the arrests and jail sentences show, Anonymous is just as subject to vengeance by the powerful as any other group of activists in history. And yet, Anonymous’s mystique is hard to resist: the Guy Fawkes masks, the idea of some huge number of people everywhere, with extraordinary technical skills, able to frighten the powerful, avenge wrongs, and get away with it. How could anyone begin to understand such a phenomenon?

The starting point would be to do what Gabriella Coleman did for her book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the Many Faces of Anonymous: spending time in the Anonymous’s IRC chat rooms, getting to know them, studying what they do and how they do it. Coleman’s methods are anthropological, the same methods she used in her previous book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. In Hacker, Hoaxer, Coleman helps her readers make sense of the bewildering array of actions, statements, and reprisals that have occurred in this relatively new field of activism and the unique group that has brought it so much attention.

Coleman shows how Anonymous emerged from what she calls some of the most “abject forms of trolling”, in which people anonymously did bizarre and malicious things on the internet, just for the lulz (a variation of “lols”, or “laughs out loud”). She explains the idea of the lulz the way an anthropologist would: in terms of a universal trickster figure present in most human cultures. The internet trolling done by the precursors of Anonymous, like that done in stories of mythological stories of tricksters, is mischievous, malicious, and not obviously done for any gain by the trickster (or troll). But when the lulz-seeking behaviour was turned against the powerful, what emerged was something very interesting indeed.

It started, as Coleman documents, with a campaign against the church of Scientology – a lulzy campaign that got more serious as Anons learned more about Scientology’s outrages. Anonymous’s Tunisia operations were the next big step, and Coleman immortalizes the IRC chat log of the decision to attack the Tunisian dictatorship’s servers:

: why are we hitting up tunisia?

: Because they’e just passed a law which says the media can’t say what they want and banned them from mentioning wikileaks

: K-rad, thank you! time to own tunisia then

Coleman follows Anonymous through the Tunisia operations, through the formation of specialized hacker groups LulzSec and AntiSec (because not all Anons are hackers), through to the FBI attacks on Anonymous and the arrests of many of its members, much of which was due to entrapment by the FBI informant Sabu.

In addition to the lulzy, trickster aspect of Anonymous, Coleman describes and explains several other fascinating aspects of the Anons. One of the most powerful aspects is the way the Anons eschew celebrity culture and apply severe social pressure to those who try to use Anonymous to become famous or build their own names. This built-in disavowal of celebrity culture, I believe, helps explain Anonymous’s credibility and, despite some of its more “abject trolling”, it also helps explain how a group of tricksters and hackers can somehow become a moral voice on a chaotic, celebrity-obsessed, and increasingly proprietary internet. Exerting effort to be anonymous on the internet is also good privacy and security practice, another issue that Anonymous has brought to light (as have activist collectives like Riseup and non-anonymous people like Lawrence Lessig, Bruce Schneier, and Richard Stallman).

In all of these respects – mischief and trickery directed at the right targets; eschewing celebrity culture; fighting for freedom and for anonymity on the internet – Anonymous shows us all, and especially leftists, things we can learn.

And in this context, Helen Lewis’s review of Hacker, Hoaxer for the New Statesman misses the point. There is much more to Anonymous, and much more to Coleman’s book, than the fact that the Anons don’t know one another, and much more to their exploits than what happened with Sabu and the FBI. Counterposing Anonymous with the “strong ties” cited by Malcolm Gladwell in a New Yorker essay about the civil rights movement, as Lewis does, doesn’t make sense. There have been very strong ties indeed (up to and including marriages, Coleman cites) made in Anonymous. And the FBI has destroyed movements based on personal relationships and strong ties using the same methods they used against the Anons: infiltration, entrapment, suborning people and turning them into informants. Finally, the civil rights movement was a different era. As Lawrence Lessig argued in his lecture about Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide when he faced 35 years for taking journal articles from a university server because he wanted to make scientific research universally accessible (transcript here):

“Compare: Martin Luther King, the civil disobedient, was arrested on scores of misdemeanors. He was only ever charged with two felonies and acquitted by an all-white jury of those two felonies because the basis for the claims were so outrageous. He did jail time, scores of days in jail. Compare him with Aaron, charged with 13 felonies, giving a federal judge the right to sentence him to up to 35 years in jail.”

Given the shocking prosecutorial zealotry in cases against hackers, it is hard to fault Anonymous (or Assange or Snowden) for not wanting to get caught trying to make the world a better place. And, as Coleman points out, even after Sabu and the FBI raids, quite a few Anons never did get caught, and are still out there.

Coleman’s book helps us understand Anonymous by revealing it to be another form of political activism: people coming together to try to fight for a better world, using, in this case, their computers and direct action, sometimes illegally (as people who do civil disobedience do). Their fights – for free expression in a world of suppression, for privacy in a world of universal surveillance, for the non-alienated use of technology in a world of corporate control, against the abuse of power in a world of police and corporate impunity – are not going away. Neither will the system, which depends on people to run it, ever be completely invulnerable against people who develop skills within it and hold on to some semblance of their conscience. There will be a need for Anonymous for the foreseeable future. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, can show you where it came from.

Anti-Authoritarian Current: A Review of Dixon’s Another Politics

First published on TeleSUR 16 December 2014

In Another Politics, Chris Dixon presents a part of the North American left, defining it early on in the book as the “anti-authoritarian current”. A significant part of the book is dedicated to defining this current, its ideology, and its practices. Dixon is explicit about being a part of this current, and while the book raises some of the dilemmas and internal criticisms of the current, it is largely a celebration of the current’s beliefs and methods.

How is the current defined? Dixon identifies three strands: Antiracist feminism, prison abolitionism, and anarchism. Antiracist feminism is Dixon’s summary for what is sometimes called intersectional analysis or anti-oppression politics: the idea that there are multiple oppressions, along lines of gender, race, and class, and that true liberation requires liberation from all of these oppressions. Moreover, in this current, none of these oppressions can be assigned a place of primacy over the others. Prison abolitionism is “a set of politics aimed at the complete elimination of the institutions of incarceration” (pg. 38). On anarchism, Dixon emphasizes that this current is defined by a “reconfigured anarchism”, a bundle of features fusing “consensus decision-making, affinity groups, and direct action”, “a strongly prefigurative movement culture based on working together collectively, sharing resources equitably, challenging power relations, and supporting one another”, “along with a commitment to egalitarianism, mutual aid, and freedom as well as a far-reaching critique of domination.” The “glue that largely held it all together was a shared counterculture and template of activities” (pg. 42).

After defining these three strands, Dixon goes on to further define the current according to four “antis”: anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialism. The four “antis” help define what the current is against; a chapter on prefigurative politics discusses the positive aspirations of the current as its members try to redefine relations within their groups as they challenge oppressive institutions in society.

Dixon traces the lineage of the anti-authoritarian current to North American left movements and organizations of past decades. For the book, Dixon interviewed dozens of members of the current across North America and studied dozens of existing organizations (listed at the end of the book pg. 239). Organizations whose work and analysis is given special emphasis in the book include: No One Is Illegal, Colours of Resistance, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. As a member of the political current under study, Dixon states that the research borrows from:

“’ethnography’ (analyzing lived culture by experiencing it), ‘participant observation’ (understanding how and why people do what they do by participating it), and ‘oral history’ (gathering history by inviting and listening to people’s stories). However, none of these methods has fully satisfied me, largely because they still rest on inside/outside distinctions between movements and researchers.” (pg. 12)

As the title of Dixon’s blog (http://writingwithmovements.com/) suggests, Dixon’s interest is in “writing not about or even for but with movements”. (pg. 12)

Dixon’s attempt to remove the “inside/outside distinction between movements and researchers” raises some philosophical questions: what is the role of an individual’s thoughts, or contributions, in the anti-authoritarian current? Another Politics has a high proportion of quotes from members of the current. Dixon’s writing practice is to lend weight to other voices. But it is clear that the interview subjects, the organizations, and the quotes were all selected by Dixon, and the presentation of Another Politics is Dixon’s vision of these politics.

Another philosophical question arises: can someone who writes with movements, who refuses inside/outside distinctions, be critical enough to challenge these movements? Can movement weaknesses and failings be seen from that inside position of a writer who writes with movements? On the other side, can criticisms of movements from the outside be ignored based on their outside origins?

Certainly the book is full of self-criticism, by both the author and the interview subjects. Pitfalls to prefigurative politics mentioned include “getting fixated on particular forms of talking rather than how those forms are connected to practical activities”, as “when organizers… master specialized anti-oppression vocabulary without substantially changing how their organizations function,” (pg. 98) or of focusing “narrowly on anti-oppression politics as a fixed set of behaviors and understandings that we can grasp individually, rather than as a dynamic set of politics, practices, and sensibilities” (pg. 100). What results is “absolutism”, involving “scrutinizing one another’s behavior, creating our own status hierarchies, and excluding those who don’t live up to our righteous standards” (pg. 101).

Pitfalls to the current’s strategic thinking include “a tendency to focus on principles over plans”. Based on “a legitimate concern that radicals may sacrifice our core values in order to win”, “focusing exclusively on principles slips into a kind of magical thinking” (pg. 111). Another strategic weakness is “a tendency to fetishize particular tactics”, especially direct action. Since the 1990s, “a narrow understanding of this tactical approach has gained some popularity among radicals. This mainly involves street protests and confrontations and confrontations with police, often including black bloc tactics.” (pg. 113) While “there is nothing wrong, in principle, with any of these tactics,” radicals can get stuck, “focusing most of our attention on debating the validity of certain tactics rather than on considering how those tactics fit into overall plans to achieve something” (pg. 113). Finally, Dixon criticizes “crisis mode organizing”, a tendency to work on urgent problems at the expense of long-term strategy (pg. 114).

Another Politics offers some thoughts towards addressing these pitfalls. The solution to the problems of prefigurative politics, Dixon proposes, is to remember that “prefigurative praxis… is genuinely transformative only as long as it is part of movements that are fighting to win a new world” (pg. 105). As for the strategic pitfalls, Dixon proposes a “movement-building orientation”, including anti-authoritarian notions of leadership that go beyond patriarchal notions of charismatic (usually male) individuals who lead organizations, and organizations that go “beyond subcultures and service providers” (pg. 139).

In a section about “minding the ruts” (pg. 201), Dixon criticizes traditional left organizational forms: the political party, the revolutionary party, the NGO, and the affinity group – all of which are one or another kind of “rut”. Here, Another Politics admits that organizations that don’t fall into these ruts are “something that another politics doesn’t yet fully have – a way to be critical, conscious, creative and constructive in how we approach organizational structures” (pg. 207).

Another Politics is well-organized and well-researched, a comprehensive look at the anti-authoritarian current in North America. As a result, the book’s limitations are really the limitations of the current itself. I, too, see myself as part of this current. But my assessment of the current’s doctrine and practice is less positive, and less optimistic than Dixon’s.

While I agree with most of the self-criticisms posed in Another Politics, I believe that the problems mentioned in the book (self-destructive internal dynamics and deficits of strategy) have been a major brake on political progress within the current and, thinking in terms of missed opportunities, in the society as well. If, as Another Politics reports, the anti-authoritarian current came into its own in the 1990s, this means that the current has been active for some two decades. In that period, established power has become stronger, inequalities have increased, union organization has declined, the political spectrum has shifted to the right, and US intervention has destroyed several countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Haiti, Libya, Syria). It would be terribly unfair to attribute these declines to a set of small groups of radicals in North America’s major cities, of course. But decades ago, when we were becoming politically active, the anti-authoritarian current defined itself against not only the systems of oppression in society, but also against the established left. Now, the anti-authoritarian current is becoming the establishment: in the two bases of the current, nonprofits and the academy, left politics are defined by the anti-authoritarian current more than any other rival left currents (such as old socialists). Another Politics reflects the anti-authoritarian current’s youthful attitude, arguing on the basis of potential and that the best is yet to come. I fear that our record so far does not match this prediction.

Part of the anti-authoritarian current’s limitations have to do with the lack of a base. The organizational forms mentioned as “ruts”, especially political parties, have been disdained by the activists of the anti-authoritarian current. But before that current even came into its own, the left had been largely kicked out of political parties and then kicked out of unions. Today, most Another Politics-type radicals in North America work through nonprofits or on campuses, both of which have severe limitations. The lost history of radicals in elected office is told in books like Eric Leif Davin’s Radicals in Power (2012), and Lipset and Marks’ It Didn’t Happen Here (2013). Some radical victories through unionism are discussed in Pizzigatti’s The Rich Don’t Always Win (2012). Another Politics devotes pages to discussing the pitfalls of sectarianism and the importance of a non-sectarian approach, but the anti-authoritarian current has been as sectarian as any other left current, which has meant that these other histories have not been incorporated into the anti-authoritarian current’s thinking.

In other words, if Another Politics is based on writing with movements, it could have offered a much stronger challenge to those movements. It is clear to me that there is a great deal to be learned before the left in North America is up to the task it is faced with. We learn more to the extent that we are willing to be uncomfortable. To the extent that Another Politics is celebratory, it makes its movement readers comfortable rather than uncomfortable, and it misses opportunities to make criticism and proposals that could strengthen movements.

Another Politics has a tension within it. On the one hand, it is trying to explain the movement – of which Dixon is a part – to outsiders, with all of its features, many of which are an important part of the author’s political identity. In these parts, Dixon writes like someone who is just discovering these remarkable people and organizations, and who is greatly impressed by them. On the other hand, Another Politics is written for the anti-authoritarian current, trying to show its members what kinds of dilemmas and problems its activists are thinking about. In these parts of the book, Dixon writes very gently and emphasizes that the weaknesses and pitfalls that are raised are in the process of being worked out.

The movement audience for the book could benefit from more discussion of our failures and limitations, as well as Dixon’s own thoughts and speculations about how to get beyond them, even if these thoughts go beyond what Dixon’s interviewees say.

In building up a picture of the common points and ideas of the current, Another Politics also left me wondering about areas of difference among members of the current. Such differences are the seeds of future splits and internal conflicts, and they, too, deserve more space.

Despite these criticisms, Another Politics is an invaluable snapshot of the North American left today. In recent years, a number of studies have attempted to measure the state of the left in North America. Alex Khasnabish’s 2008 book, Zapatismo Beyond Borders, followed North American radicals influenced by the Zapatistas of Mexico. The Ear to the Ground Project (http://eartothegroundproject.org/) is another massive initiative that is still yielding results. Dixon’s Another Politics is an important contribution in this literature. To understand the state of the left in North America, in all its aspirations and its limitations, Another Politics is an important book.