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the european union vote: borarse delivers more myth-information
Panela (unrefined sugarcane), 1918, cotton label from a series commissioned for the South American market. The labels, each measuring around 6 inches in height resemble minature posters, strongly influenced by the ‘Munich realist school’ designer Ludwig Hohlwein. Artwork: E. McKnight Kauffer
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The
CONTENTS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Opening 03 Edit & Design: Alan Rutherford
Damn & Borderation
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Hillsborough 13
Published online by www.handoverfistpress.com
Illusions 17
Cover: re-worked comic. Photographs, words and artwork sourced from ‘found in the scrapbook of life’, no intentional copyright infringement intended, credited whenever possible, so, for treading on any toes ... apologies all round!
Abahlali Basemjondolo
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Rags to Riches
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Letter to Socialist Worker
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There is no deadline for submitting articles to be included in the next issue, it will appear whenever, or in your dreams!
Tewkesbury 22
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Exhibition 58 Letters
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Articles and all correspondence to: alanrutherford1@mac.com
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some sort of cock-a-doodledo!
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Tweaked by: Alan Rutherford
looks more like the formalisation of an eggs-a-stentialist impressionism to me?
OPENING Blah-blahblah-blahblah––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Hello,
Welcome to magazine number 11. A magazine produced freely to be read freely. All articles and artwork supplied, or found in newspapers lining the bottom of the canary cage, were gratefully received and developed with love, enthusiasm and sympathy here at Hand Over Fist Press. Nobody got paid. Perhaps that is the problem? Anyway, ‘Sheep in the Road’ will now appear sporadically and occasionally rather than monthly.
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a luta continua!
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Sykes & Picot border mischief!
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DAMN & BORDERATION! How Isis thrives in a borderless world as it erases lines in the sand drawn by the west 100 years ago by France and Britain (Sykes-Picot) ROBERT FISK 12 MAY 2016: The Independent The peoples of the Middle East have suffered this past century from the theatre of dictatorships and cardboard institutions created by the west
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Early in 2014, Isis released one of its first videos. Largely unseen in Europe, it had neither the slick, cutting-edge professionalism of its later execution tapes nor the haunting “nasheed” music that accompanies most of its propaganda. Instead, a hand-held camera showed a bulldozer pushing down a rampart of sand that had marked the border between Iraq and Syria. As the machine destroyed the dirt revetment, the camera panned down to a handwritten poster lying in the sand. “End of Sykes-Picot”, it said. Like many hundreds of thousands of Arabs in the Middle East, for whom Sykes-Picot was an almost cancerous expression, I watched this early Isis video in Beirut. The bloody repercussions of the borders that the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, drew in secret during the First World War – originally giving Syria, Mount Lebanon and northern Iraq to the French, and Palestine, Transjordan and the rest
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of Iraq to the British – are known to every Arab, Christian and Muslim and, indeed, every Jew in the region. They eviscerated the governorates of the old dying Ottoman empire and created artificial nations in which borders, watchtowers and hills of sand separated tribes, families and peoples. They were an Anglo-French colonial production.
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The same night that I saw the early Isis video, I happened to be visiting the Lebanese Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt. “The end of Sykes-Picot!” he roared at me. “Rubbish,” I snorted. But of course, I was wrong and Jumblatt was right. He had spotted at once how Isis captured symbolically – but with almost breathtaking speed – what so many Arabs had sought for almost exactly 100 years: the unravelling of the fake borders with which the victors of the First World War – largely the British and the French – had divided the Arab people. It was our colonial construction – not just the frontiers we imposed upon them, but the administrations and the false democracies that we fraudulently thrust upon them, the mandates and trusteeships which allowed us to rule them – that poisoned their lives. Colin Powell claimed just such a trusteeship for Iraq’s oil prior to the illegal AngloAmerican invasion of 2003.
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We foisted kings upon the Arabs – we engineered a 96 per cent referendum in favour of the Hashemite King Faisal in Iraq in 1922 – and then provided them with generals and dictators. The people of Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt – which had been invaded by the British in the 19th century – were subsequently blessed with mendacious governments, brutal policemen, lying newspapers and fake elections. Mubarak even scored Faisal’s epic 96 per cent election victory all over again. For the Arabs, “democracy” did not mean freedom of speech and freedom to elect their own leaders; it referred to the “democratic” Western nations that continued to support the cruel dictators who oppressed them. Thus the Arab revolutions that consumed the Middle East in 2011 – forget the “Arab Spring”, a creature of Hollywood origin – did not demand democracy. The posters on the streets of Cairo and Tunis and Damascus and Yemen called for dignity and justice, two commodities that we had definitely not sought for the Arabs. Justice for the Palestinians – or for the Kurds, or for that matter for the destroyed Armenians of 1915, or for all the suffering Arab peoples – was not something that commended itself to us. But I think we should have gone much further in our investigation of the titanic changes of 2011.
In my own reporting of the uprisings, I attributed them to increased education and travel by the Arab communities throughout the Middle East. While acknowledging the power of social media and the internet, something deeper was at work. The Arabs had woken from a deep sleep. They had refused any longer to be the “children” of the patriarchal father figure – the Nassers and the Sadats and the Mubaraks and the Assads and the Gaddafis and, in earlier years, the Saddams. They awoke to find that it was their own governments that were composed of children, one of whom – Mubarak – was 83 years old. The Arabs wanted to own their towns and cities. They wanted to own the place in which they lived, which comprised much of the Middle East. But I think now that I was wrong. In retrospect, I woefully misunderstood what these revolutions represented. One clue, perhaps, lay in the importance of trade union movements. Where trade unions, with their transnational socialism and anti-colonial credentials, were strong – in Egypt and Tunisia – the revolutionary bloodshed was far less than in the nations that had either banned trade unionism altogether – Libya, for example – or concretised the trade union movement into the regime, which had long ago happened in Syria and Yemen. Socialism crossed borders. Yet even this does not account for the events of 2011.
What really manifested itself that year, I now believe, was a much more deeply held Arab conviction; that the very institutions that we in the West had built for these people 100 years ago were worthless, that the statehood which we had later awarded to artificial nations within equally artificial borders was meaningless. They were rejecting the whole construct that we had foisted upon them. That Egypt regressed back into military patriarchy – and the subsequent and utterly predictable Western acqiescence in this – after a brief period of elected Muslim Brotherhood government, does not change this equation. While the revolutions largely stayed within national boundaries – at least at the start – the borders began to lose their meaning.
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Hamas in Gaza and the Brotherhood became one, the Sinai-Gaza frontier began to crumble. Then the collapse of Libya rendered Gaddafi’s former borders open – and thus non-existent. His weapons – including chemical shells – were sold to rebels in Egypt and Syria. Tunisia, which is now supposed to be the darling of our Western hearts for its adhesion to “democracy”, is now in danger of implosion because its own borders with Libya and Algeria are open to arms transhipments to Islamist groups. Isis’s grasp of these frontierless entities means that its own
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transnational existence is assured, from Fallujah in Iraq to the edge of Syrian Aleppo, from Nigeria to Niger and Chad. It can thus degrade the economy of each country it moves through, blowing up a Russian airliner leaving Sharm el-Sheikh, attacking the Bardo museum in Tunis or the beaches of Sousse. There was a time – when Islamists attacked the Jewish synagogue on Djerba island in Tunisia in 2002, for example, killing 19 people – when tourism could continue. But that was when Libya still existed. In those days, Ben Ali’s security police were able to control the internal security of Tunisia; the army was left weak so that it could not stage a coup. So today, of course, the near-impotent army of Tunisia cannot defend its frontiers. Isis’s understanding of this new phenomenon preceded our own. But Isis’s realisation that frontiers were essentially defenceless in the modern age coincided with the popular Arab disillusion with their own invented nations. Most of the millions of Syrian and Afghan refugees who have flooded into Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan and then north into Europe do not intend to return – ever – to states that have failed them as surely as they no longer – in the minds of the refugees – exist. These are not “failed states” so much as imaginary nations that no longer have any purpose.
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I only began to understand this when, back in July, covering the Greek economic crisis, I travelled to the Greek-Macedonian border with Médecins Sans Frontières. This was long before the story of Arab refugees entering Europe had seized the attention of the EU or the media, although the Mediterranean drownings had long been a regular tragedy on television screens. Aylan Kurdi, the little boy who would be washed up on a Turkish beach, still had another two months to live. But in the fields along the Macedonian border were thousands of Syrians and Afghans. They were coming in their hundreds through the cornfields, an army of tramping paupers who might have been fleeing the Hundred Years War, women with their feet burned by exploded gas cookers, men with bruises over their bodies from the blows of frontier guards. Two of them I even knew, brothers from Aleppo whom I had met two years earlier in Syria. And when they spoke, I suddenly realised they were talking of Syria in the past tense. They talked about “back there” and “what was home”. They didn’t believe in Syria any more. They didn’t believe in frontiers. Our support for an Israel that has not told us the location of its eastern border runs logically alongside our own refusal to recognise – unless it suits us – the frontiers
of the Arab world. It is, after all, we who are allowed to draw “lines in the sand” or “red lines”. It is we Europeans who decide where civilisations begin and end. It is the Prime Minister of Hungary who decides exactly where he will draw up his forces to defend “Christian civilisation”. It is we Westerners who have the moral probity to decide whether national sovereignty in the Middle East should be obeyed or abused. But when the Arabs themselves decide to dispense with the whole fandango and seek their future in “our” lands rather than “their” lands, this policy breaks down. Indeed, it is extraordinary how easily we forget that the greatest frontier-breaker of modern times was himself a European, who wanted to destroy the Jews of Europe but who might well – given his racist remark about Muslims in Mein Kampf – have continued his holocaust to include the Arabs. We even have the nerve to call the murderers of Paris “fascislamists”, as the great French pseudophilosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has just written in the press. Nazis Isis undoubtedly are – but the moment we utilise the word “Islam” in this context, we are painting the swastika across the Middle East. Levy demands more assistance to “our Kurdish allies” because the alternative is that “no boots on their ground means more blood on ours”.
But that’s what George W Bush and Tony Blair told us before marching into the graveyard of Iraq in 2003. We are always declaring ourselves “at war”. We are told to be merciless. We must invade “their” territory to stop them invading ours. But the days are long gone when we can have foreign adventures and expect to be safe at home. New York, Washington, Madrid, London, Paris all tell us that. Perhaps if we spoke more of “justice” – courts, legal process for killers, however morally repugnant they may be, sentences, prisons, redemption for those who may retrieve their lost souls from the Isis midden – we would be a little safer in our sceptered continent. There should be justice not just for ourselves or our enemies, but for the peoples of the Middle East who have suffered this past century from the theatre of dictatorships and cardboard institutions we created for them – and which have helped Isis to thrive.
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reprise ffs! Jez for Prez
shit... looks like tony is going to get away with it ... so much for justice!
Say no to a monarchy Alan Rutherford
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IRAQ 2003
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THAT CHILCOT MOMENT
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ES M I T L ICA IMES P O T THE THESE T L O O P FOR R IVE
L L A B T O O F OF K O O B
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Unused cover Alan Rutherford
T
AN R G N KE
Taken from STUMBLING AND MUMBLING: April 27, 2016
HILLSBOROUGH THE CLASS CONTEXT
The truth about Hillsborough has of course always been known. What happened yesterday was that it finally became incontrovertible. I fear, though, that the context of Hillsborough is in danger of being forgotten – that context being that the 1980s was an era of moral panic about the working class. Back then, football fans were mostly working people. It cost only £2 to get into a first division game in the mid-80s, and the influx of fashionable middle-class men talking about “the footie” was a post-Gazza, post-Hornby phenomenon. Such fans were the object of fear and contempt by the police and Tory party: Thatcher tried to impose ID cards onto them. Here’s how When Saturday Comes described the attitude towards fans then: The police see us as a mass entity, fuelled by drink and a singleminded resolve to wreak havoc by destroying property and attacking one another with murderous intent. Containment and damage limitation is the core of the police strategy. Fans are treated with the utmost disrespect. We are herded, cajoled, pushed and corralled into cramped spaces, and expected to submit passively to every new indignity.
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However, football fans were not the only object of class-based moral panic. Thatcher famously described miners as “the enemy within”: not, note, people with mistaken ideas but an enemy, comparable to warmongering fascists. And there were panics about “new age travellers” and “acid house”.
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Now, there is – sad to say – an ugly truth here. These panics were not wholly unfounded. Crime was high in the 80s, and football hooliganism was a genuine problem; Heysel happened just four years before Hillsborough. However, a pound of fact became a ton of moral panic and class hatred.
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It’s in this context that we should interpret the slanders against the Hillsborough victims by Tories such as Irvine Patnick, Bernard Ingham and Kelvin Mackenzie. Their fear and hatred of working people had reached such feverish heights that they were prepared to believe them capable of robbing the dead. In all these cases, the police were brutal enforcers of this class-based hatred – and unlawfully so. After the battle of Stonehenge in 1985 Wiltshire Police were found guilty of ABH, false imprisonment and wrongful arrest. And after Orgreave South Yorkshire Police – them again – paid £500,000 compensation for assault, unlawful arrest and malicious prosecution. As James Doran says: The British state is not a neutral body which enforces the rule of law - it is a set of social relations which uphold the rule of the capital. Law is a matter of struggle - ordinary people are automatically subject to the discipline of the repressive apparatus of the state.
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All this poses a question. Have things really changed? Of course, the police and Tories have much better PR than they did then. But is it really a coincidence that the police still turn up mob-handed to demos whilst giving a free ride to corporate crime and asset stripping? When the cameras are off and they are behind closed doors, do the police and Tories retain a vestige of their 1980s attitudes? When Alan Duncan spoke of those who aren’t rich as “low achievers”, was that a minority view, or a reminder that the Tories haven’t really abandoned their class hatred? Many younger lefties might have abandoned class in favour of the politics of micro-identities. For those of us shaped by the 80s, however, class matters. And I suspect this is as true for the Tories as it is for me. From the excellent blog: http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad. com/stumbling_and_mumbling/
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ILLUSIONS
of Democracy 23 JUNE
It would seem the UK, still whistling in the dark ages with a debateably unjust ‘first past the post’ election system coupled with an unelected House of Lords with veto powers ... and a current tory government elected using fraudulent expenses – are hardly the standard anyone would use to measure ‘democracy’? I cut a long article planned, not wishing to add to the nonsense, the ridiculous hot air parading as fact, the coleection of myths and blatant scaremongering repeated until we are all blind, in this, the European Union referendum.
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Why has parliament relinquished its right to govern us, its a distraction from real life surely, for since when have our government and their paymasters, big business, ever allowed the citizenry to decide on anything supposedly this important? It can only be that either way they don’t give a shit, they know that whatever ‘we’ decide, they will still be in the saddle!
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From acres of newsprint here is a balanced argument to stay...
The daily scare tactics beggar belief – they’re not working
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troublemakers on the right of his party, has instead managed to add massive fuel to their fire. And, in doing so, he has simply cleared the way for one of their own to seize the moment. So a leave vote could give you the prospect of a brand new prime minister and a remain vote gives you the same old, same old, and off we go, back to square one.
Delia Smith in The Guardian Meanwhile we, the long-suffering British Friday 27 May 2016 voters, are subjected to what Jon Snow on Channel 4 News rightly described as a “positively poisonous” campaign. The much-maligned European Union, which in One of the best expressions of sheer essence is a group of democratic countries frustration that’s stuck with me over the attempting to work alongside each other, years came from the comedian Tony has now become a fierce battleground Hancock, who in moments of extreme in the direct line of fire of some vicious disquiet repeated the words oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Now the mere mention of the rhetoric. The most abhorrent and offensive of all was the EU being compared to, dreaded referendum and those words are of all things, Hitler and nazism. Hang what spring to mind. Oh dear indeed. The Guardian view on the Leave campaign: on a minute, isn’t there a crossed wire here somewhere? Was it not within that show some respect for truth horrendous regime that the very idea of First, why is the entire nation being put egotistical, xenophobic and isolationist under this unnecessary pressure? We already get to vote for a democratic system, sovereignty was originally conceived? where all the big decisions are meant to be made on our behalf. Instead, faced with this very grave decision which has such serious implications, we find ourselves pawns in a game of dubious political manoeuvring. The prime minister, seeking to outwit the
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The now daily dose of scare tactics simply beggars belief, and do you know what? It so isn’t working. Because at this stage, I’m sure you agree, we voters are just reduced to having a laugh. What else can you do
when you are told there are 70 million Turks lining up, like the Zulus in the Stanley Baker film, coming over the hill, set on seizing our jobs, our homes, our lives. But hats off to the TV coverage that accompanied the story, showing us what that ancient and wondrous Turkish civilisation was all about. They found shots of the most amazing kebabs, laden with spices and dripping with juices over flaming charcoal, just so we could understand what the Turkish threat might mean. What it achieved in our house was a resounding: “Bring it on” Frankly, the current state of politics is pants in this debate. Politics are there to serve the people and not the other way round. So, why don’t we simply short-circuit the daily threats and angry squabbles, and from now on engage in some proper grownup, joined-up thinking, about the real issues? What each of us is being asked to do is cast a vote that will affect not just our lives, but the future of generations to come. Each of us must reflect quietly and independently about this vote. What shapes my own vision of things is this: almost imperceptibly (but then again, perhaps also staring us in the face) is that the world, whether we like it or not, is slowly beginning to become a global community. And this, while it may or may
not take centuries to achieve, simply has to be the future. With the advent of high-speed travel, communications technology, satellites and the rest, we are already living in much closer proximity to one another than we could previously have imagined. Young people hop from country to country exploring, experiencing other cultures, forming friendships across the globe, and this gives them a far greater sense than previous generations of being comfortable belonging to the much wider human family, a completely diverse but nonetheless enriching collection of democratic nations.
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The results are plain as day for all to see. Why have we now achieved so much in science or in say, space exploration? Because scientists from groups of nations work closely together. The same with advances in medicine and practically any other field of invention and progress. The global village is not some romantic dream, it’s a reality. No, I’m not a naive optimist and yes, I know only too well about the bureaucratic challenges of different nations attempting to work alongside each other. I may well be mocked for my views but again, bring it on! I believe passionately in the human
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adventure, and that individual people as well as individual nations will in time, in spite of how long it might take, embrace -solidarity and the global society. It is our responsibility to help to prepare the way to a united humanity in the belief that it can make the world a better place. Evolution, as history has shown, will not be knocked off course by a small group of islands claiming they want “sovereignty”.
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So there it is. As you may well have guessed by now. I am quite definitely in. And I want to do everything in my power to encourage you to add your support to our membership in a group of nations who, for all their imperfections, are learning how to coexist in a converging world.
‘I still don't understand why panamapapers isn’t in the news still. This was a picture of some russianoligarch who had moleslikeslugs from my sketchbook on taxdodgingdouchebags' NYE WRIGHT author of ‘Things to do in a Retirement Home Trailer Park’
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Artwork from Nye Wright’s sketchbook
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Photographs: Alan Rutherford
TEWKESBURY MAY 2016 June 2016
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teatime in tewkesbury SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER ELEVEN
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ET 38
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TC ETC ETC ETC
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INTENDED AS A BLOW TO THE SYSTEM ... SHAKE & STIR! June 2016
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Abahlali baseMjondolo
is a movement largely based in shantytowns built on land occupations in and around the South African city of Durban. Since 2005 it has sought to build popular counter-power through the construction of self-managed and democratically organized communities engaged in a collective struggle. While the movement has not used the term “commune”, it has, on occasion, been described by left theorists as seeking to constitute itself as a set of linked communes. This assessment has been based on the movement’s organizational form. But this struggle, while often strikingly similar to Raúl Zibechi’s account of territories in resistance in Latin America, is very different from how Marx and Bakunin imagined the struggles of the future in their reflections on the Paris Commune. It is primarily framed in terms of dignity, fundamentally grounded in the bonds within families and between neighbors, and often largely waged by women from and for bits of land in the interstices of the city. If Abahlali baseMjondolo (the term means “residents of the shacks”) is to be productively connected to the idea of the commune in terms of a set of political commitments, it would require – as George
Ciccariello-Maher has argued with regard to Venezuela – a detachment of the concept from “a narrow sectarianism” with the intention to “craft a communism on local conditions that looks critically, in parallax, back at the European tradition.” THE LAND OCCUPATION In Durban, as in much of the world, one starting point for this work is that the passage from the rural to the urban seldom takes the form of passage, via expropriation, from the commons to the factory, from the life of a peasant to the life of a proletarian. And for many people born into working-class families long resident in the city, work – as their parents and grandparents knew it – is no longer available.
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When urban life is wageless, or when access to the wage occurs outside of the official rules governing the wage relation, the land occupation can enable popular access to land outside of the state and capital. And land, even a sliver of land on a steep hill, between two roads, along a river bank, or adjacent to a dump, can – along with the mud, fire and men with guns that come with shack life – enable spatial proximity to possibilities for livelihood, education, health care, recreation and so on.
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Across South Africa, urban land has become a key site of popular contestation with the state and the liberal property regime. In Durban the steep terrain also enables opportunities for new occupations within the zones of privilege, nodes of spatially concentrated, racialized power. But, again as in much of the world, dissident elites have often been skeptical about the political capacities of the urban poor. The worker or peasant has often been imagined as the subject of a “proper” politics, a politics to come in which industrial production or rural land would be the key site of struggle. Abahlali baseMjondolo has, affirming what it has called “a politics of the poor”, disobeyed the various custodians of a “proper politics”, affirmed the value of an “out of order” politics and taken the situation, the strivings and the struggles of its members seriously. It has affirmed the city as a site of struggle and impoverished people seeking to occupy, hold and develop land in the city as subjects of struggle. It has constructed a political imagination in which the neighborhood is seen as the primary site for both organization, through direct face-to-face deliberation and democratic decision-making, and the broader practices that sustain resilience.
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A conception of political identity rooted in residence in a land occupation, whether established or new, has enabled the affirmation of a form of politics that exceeds the central categories through which impoverished people are more usually divided. This includes an ethnic conception of belonging that, in Durban, has increasingly been asserted by the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), as well as a national conception of belonging, undergirded by a paranoid and vicious xenophobia, asserted by the ruling party, the state and much of wider society. The movement has been able to successfully resist these forms of division and has consistently taken a multi-ethnic form. People more ordinarily described as foreigners rather than comrades have often held important leadership positions, while the movement has been able to occupy and hold land and to sustain impressive popular support. But there are significant limits to its reach, it has been subject to serious repression, and it has not been able to sustain the political autonomy of its larger occupations over the long-term.
A HOMEMADE POLITICS Abahlali baseMjondolo was formed in 2005 in a group of nearby shack settlements, all on well-established land occupations, some reaching back to the 1980s or even the late 1970s. The people who formed the movement drew on a rich repertoire of political experience that included participation in the ANC, trade unions and the popular struggles of the 1980s. There were also familial connections reaching back to key moments in the history of popular struggle like the Durban strikes in 1973, the Mpondo Revolt in 1961, resistance to evictions in Durban in 1959 and the Bambatha Rebellion in 1906. The movement was also shaped by practices and ideas developed in African-initiated churches and adapted from rural life. From the beginning ideas about a pre-colonial world in which personhood was respected and understood to be attained in relation to others were significant. But elements of the new liberal order, like rights-based conceptions of gender equality, as well as political traditions that claim descent from Marx, were also present. These were largely derived from trade unions and the alliance between the South African Communist Party and the ANC. This new politics was often described as a “homemade politics” and as a “living
politics”. The idea of a “homemade politics” carried some sense of bricolage, a general feature of life in a shack settlement, and both of these phrases marked a commitment to a mode of politics that emerges from everyday life, is fully within reach of the oppressed, and is fully owned by the oppressed. The settlements where the movement was formed had all been dominated by the ANC. At the time the ANC, as Idea, was still entwined with the nation and the struggle that had bought it into being. As a result the break from the authority of the party, which resulted in autonomous elected structures being set up in each affiliated settlement, was often understood as a challenge to local party structures, rather than a rejection of the party altogether.
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It was frequently assumed that the fundamental problem was that impoverished people living in shack settlements had somehow been forgotten in the new order. It was often thought that if they, like the industrial working class, could develop an organizational form to successfully assert themselves as a particular category of people, with a particular set of interests – as the poor – the sympathetic attention of leading figures in the party, and elsewhere in society, could be won, and that
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recognition and inclusion could be attained. But there was, from the beginning, also an evident commitment to attain inclusion in a manner that altered the nature of the system in various respects. One was with regard to how decisions are made. Reflecting on that moment, S’bu Zikode, a participant in the early discussions, recalls: “There was a realization, at the onset, that it was a mistake to give away our power.” There was a clear resolve that the right of people to fully participate in all decisionmaking relating to themselves and their communities, a right understood to have been expropriated by colonialism, needed to be restored. The implication of this is that there was a commitment to dispersing power and to changing the nature of the relationship between the state and society. Another commitment that was present at the outset was a rejection of the commodification of land. Again this was often framed in terms of restoration. AN AUTONOMOUS POLITICS The political form of the movement was constituted around elected structures in each settlement affiliated to an elected central structure. Meetings were required to be open to all and held in the settlements at set times. They took the form of inclusive and
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slow deliberative processes that continued until consensus was attained. It was a politics consistently constituted around an open and face-to-face democracy. The role of elected leaders was understood to be to facilitate this kind of decision-making and to adhere to it. There were also frequent assemblies, often attended by hundreds of people, and the smaller meetings would refer important decisions to these assemblies. The slow politics that results from the need to attain consensus before acting sometimes meant that political opportunities were missed. But because people – wary of the frequently crass instrumentalization of impoverished people by parties, the state and later NGOs too – knew that they fully owned this movement, popular support was sustained. The early decision to refuse any participation in party politics or elections was vital to sustaining unity, and deflecting constant allegations of external conspiracy. For some people it was purely a tactical measure while for others it was a point of principle. But a clear distinction was drawn between “party politics” and “people’s politics”. For Zikode, “we realized that to be in a political party was to be confined, as in a coffin.” Despite extraordinary inducements and pressures the movement
sustained its autonomy from political parties and, later on, NGOs. In both cases the response from constituted authority was to resort to colonial tropes and present the movement as criminals under the control of malicious external white authority. While the movement always understood that its original and fundamental power lay in self-organized communities, the capacity to occupy and hold land and the use of disruption via road blockades, it was never solely concerned with this sphere of action. Alliances were also sought with actors outside the settlements, like journalists, lawyers, academics and religious leaders. There were regular interventions in the wider public sphere, via lawful forms of mass protest as well as the media, and an often very effective use of the courts to, in particular, take contestation over land off the terrain of violence. Autonomy was taken seriously within the movement, but it wasn’t imagined as an exodus from sites of constituted power. It was imagined more like Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the neighborhood council as a political commitment that would enable effective collective engagement on other terrains. People spoke, by way of analogy, of occupying space in sites of constituted power, like the media or the university.
THE LONG SHADOW OF THE STATE The organizational form developed by Abahlali baseMjondolo enabled a political space in which the oppressed, albeit it in this case self-identified as the poor rather than the working class, could, as Marx said of the Paris Commune, work out their own emancipation. Although this process has, at points, had to grapple with internal difficulties and frustrations – such as new entrants bringing in contradictory projects, families seeking to turn the risk and commitment of a child or sibling into a reward, or distortions consequent to repression – it has often been undertaken with a strong sense of collective excitement.
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But any affirmation of the commune as a political strategy rather than a description of an organizational form has to take careful account of the fact that, since 1871 and continuing with more recent experiences in, say, Oaxaca and Oakland, the declaration of a commune has seldom resulted in a sustainable political project. States rarely tolerate the emergence of even modest instances of dual power. In Durban the intersection of the ruling party, which employs technocratic, Stalinist and ethnic language to legitimate the centralization of authority, has used two primary strategies
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to regain control over territories in which a degree of political autonomy has been asserted. One of these strategies is the simple exercise of violence – whether carried out by the police, private security, local party structures or assassins. Violence has been a constant presence during a decade of struggle. But there have been two periods of particularly intense repression that have both, in different ways, had a profound impact on the movement.
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The first was the expulsion of the movement’s leading members from the Kennedy Road settlement in 2009, via the destruction of their homes by armed men acting under the direction of local party structures, and with the support of the police. This was a process that continued for some months. The second was two assassinations, and a police murder, in the Marikana Land Occupation, in 2013, followed by another assassination in KwaNdengezi in 2014. Both periods of intense repression placed some people under severe stress resulting in anxiety and paranoia, as well as familial pressure, and resulted in real strains in the movement. In 2014, in an act of desperation when it seemed that murder
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was being carried out with impunity, a collective decision was taken to make a tactical vote against the ANC, with a view to raising the costs of repression for the ruling party, while remaining independent from any party political affiliation. The second primary strategy of containment, frequently related to the exercise of violence, is the often very effective attempt to make independent development on occupied land very difficult while mediating access to state development through local party structures. For as long as the state has the capacity to demolish homes, an investment in building a brick and mortar house is not rational. Shacks, particularly in acutely contested land occupations, are often designed to be cheap, perhaps built from pallets salvaged from a warehouse. They are sometimes designed to be able to be collapsed when the demolition squad comes and rebuilt when they have departed. When the state concedes the legitimacy of a land occupation and offers a housing development there will be significant opportunities for accumulation via local party structures, often enmeshed with local criminal networks, and access to the housing will be allocated through party structures. These two factors combine
to make it almost impossible to benefit from development while being outside the party. In a context in which the party machinery offers the only viable route out of impoverishment for many people, responsibilities to family can begin to conflict with responsibilities to neighbors and comrades. This can result in a situation where some members of the movement go over to these structures. It can also result in a situation in which party structures return, from outside, at gunpoint. For these reasons it is very difficult to sustain the political autonomy of a territory once the state has conceded its legitimacy and brought it into the ambit of its development program. Material success – winning land and housing – becomes political defeat. This has meant that while Abahlali baseMjondolo has endured, and grown, during a decade of struggle in which the movement has always remained vibrant, the sites where the struggle is waged with most intensity have been dynamic. A MOMENT OF POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY If the political form of the commune is understood as the self-management of a spatially delimited community under popular democratic authority, then – although the term commune has not
been used within the movement – it could certainly be argued that Abahlali baseMjondolo has been and, despite the trauma of serious repression, remains committed to the construction of a set of linked communes. However, if the commune is understood as a form of politics with explicit commitments to the radical traditions developed in 19th century Europe, then things are more complex. Although the movement’s politics has evolved over the years it has always been committed to some principles that had a productive resonance with standard European conceptions of socialism and communism. This is true with regard to what, using Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s terms, can be described as both its interior emancipatory horizon and the practical scope of its day-to-day actions. But dignity has consistently been a far more central concept than socialism. The practical scope of the movement’s work has overwhelmingly focused on the sphere of social reproduction rather than the sphere of industrial production. SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER In 2005 many people had thought that, via a powerful movement, they would secure land and housing, on their own terms, in a couple of years. Now there is a strong sense of the ANC as an outrightly oppressive
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force that is understood to have betrayed the national struggle by entering into a self-serving set of alliances to sustain the enduringly colonial structure of society. The horizon of struggle is much longer, and often more modest. Progress is understood to be a matter of resilience and resolve over the long haul, with most gains taking an incremental form.
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But with a widening split within the ANC, and trade unions and organized students breaking from the ANC, there are new prospects for building alliances and solidarities outside of the ANC – alliances that could potentially enable a greater political reach on the part of what Abahlali baseMjondolo have termed, with reference to the self-organization of the oppressed, “the strong poor”. The splits in the ruling party have already offered some respite to the movement and, in one neighborhood, a tactical local alliance with Communist Party structures has helped to secure the – previously unimaginable – arrest of two ANC councilors for the assassination of an Abahlali baseMjondolo leader. If the idea of the commune has a future here it will have to be appropriated by the oppressed and rethought from within their actually existing strivings and struggles. This would have to include the work of making
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sense of a moment of political opportunity as the collapse of the moral authority of the ANC spreads from the shantytowns, to the mines, factories, parliament and university campuses.
Richard Pithouse
Richard Pithouse teaches politics at the university currently known as Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. His new book is Writing the Decline: On the Struggle for South Africa’s Democracy (Jacana).
From 2003, about Durban’s Cato Manor township ColdType Modern Classics present, ‘White Man Walking’ by Denis Beckett Free to download at www.coldtype.net
DENIS BECKETT
WHITE MAN WALKING
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RAGS TO RICHES BY FEEDING THE KILLING MACHINE adapted from Martin MITCHELL https://martinmitchellsmicrophones.wordpress.com
T45 Noise-Cancelling Microphone (1944) In 1942 after America entered World War 2, the US military estimated that only 20% of radio communications in combat were successful. Failure in the other 80% was mainly due to the voice of the radio operator being drowned out by the surrounding cacophony of war. Like no other conflict before, success on the battlefield relied on communications. Spotting a gap in the market Al Khan and Ed Burrows, the owners of Electro-Voice, came up with a brilliantly simple, ingenious and cost effective solution to this problem.
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Even in 1942 the single button carbon microphone was a piece of old fashioned tried and tested technology, having been in use in telephones since the tail end of the previous century. Although the audio quality of the T45 is little better than it’s telephonic predecessors it is extremely reliable and very robust. It also has a high output making it ideal for long distance communication. Even if the microphone gets wet you can simply dry it out (as per the instructions above) and it will carry on working! However, the really clever part of this design utilises 2 small holes of equal size on the front and back of the mic. These allow the surrounding
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noise to enter the microphone on both sides of the diaphragm. The sound striking the back of the diaphragm is 180 degrees out of phase with the sound at the front. This causes a very impressive cancellation of the unwanted noise whilst the speaker’s voice, which is less than a 1/4 of an inch from the front opening, dominates the transmission. In terms of manufacturing costs it would be hard to produce a cheaper microphone. A carbon button is a very small tin of glorified coal dust (carbon granules) with a simple diaphragm attached. A bit of wire and some lightweight plastic fittings and that is it! Pure genius!
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After some initial military skepticism the product was thoroughly tested and a first order came through to Khan and Burrows for 100,000 units! The T45 was soon taken up by all branches of America’s armed forces and the success rate of combat communications rose to 90%.
Rags to RICHES
Prior to World War 2 Electro-Voice was a small struggling company, with 20 employees, manufacturing a handful of dynamic and velocity microphones per week. By the latter part of the war Electro-Voice had 500 employees working in 3 shifts producing more than 2,000 T45 microphones a day! After WW2 it was also adopted by commercial aviation and remained in service for several decades. The T45 was also used on the Mercury, Gemini and Skylab space missions. Over the entire production run more than a million were produced placing the T45 among the highest selling microphones ever made. During the war many small firms went out of business due to a shortage of manpower and materials, but for those involved in the war effort fortunes were to be made. In 1946 Electro-Voice moved into an impressive new factory at Buchanan Michigan where they continued to manufacture innovative and exciting audio products for the next 60 years.
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The Electro Voice T45 Noise-cancelling Microphone 1944 June 2016
capitalism just does not work, i’ve just spent all my wages and i’m not pissed ...
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Socialist Worker Letters Page Dear comrade editor As a once active member and now long time supporter I note with some dismay Socialist Worker trotting out the same old ‘EU is a bosses club and cannot be reformed’ with mention of unelected bureaucrats to ram home your partisan LEAVE message and ... to all intents and purposes for everyone to see … share that flatulent argument and a putrid-smelling platform with UKIP and other assorted bigots. The EU is a bosses club, this we know, I have no illusions about the EU, but also have absolutely no illusions in the uk parliament, its voting system, or its unelected second chamber - the exclusive, up-your-arse house of lords (no capitals required!). This referendum is a distraction, since when have our government, and their paymasters (big business) allowed the citizenry to decide on anything supposedly this important? Either way the vote goes - they don’t give a shit - they believe ‘they’ will still be in the saddle!
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As internationalists we should be promoting joint cross-border worker action to break down big companies ability to play worker against worker by shifting work and money about the EU (and the world) for their profit-margins, arguing for active support of French strikers … this we can do better within the EU. To break the stranglehold the EU rightwing have on the rights and movement of migrants/refugees/immigrants, and deliver on Socialist Workers’ ‘They are all welcome’ message, we should be appealing to cross-border action, not proposing we side with those who want to skulk in an off-shore walled-up island patrolled by peak-capped border guards. We need to be in Europe arguing for no borders. We should be (and are) for the overthrow of ALL ‘bosses clubs’! Alan Rutherford ex-Cheltenham SWP
June 2016
EXHIBITION A NEW CHILDHOOD PICTURE BOOKS FROM SOVIET RUSSIA
House of Illustration London N1C 4BH Until 11 September houseofillustration.org Avant garde design, childrens books from 1920s and 1930s.
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The exhibiton takes us from Tsarist Russia through the revolution and then wallows in Stalin’s counter-revolution. Those interested in this period of illustration can follow it up by visiting a free archive at pudl.princeton.edu/collections/ pudl0127
Poster by Galina and Olga Chichagova
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Writing worth reading Photos worth seeing http://www.coldtype.net
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Jailed in las vegas | Brian terrell when nuclear power came of age | Brian Parkin gimme shelter (from the tax man) | nomi Prins
ColdT ype W r i t i n g Wo r t h r e a d i n g | p h oto s Wo r t h s e e i n g
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DonalD Trump
Breaking the bottom of the barrel June 2016
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WAFFLE LETTERS
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Dear Editor ... Absolutely damaged but still awake, I say again, well yes, again, because the letters page is so much of a hopeless failure ... Words fail me, what is the use of words when the person you are saying them to is unable to grasp your, and their, meaning? Worryingly, we are still heading down that irrational road, the one where stupidity reigns, and where basic facts and knowledge acquired over time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, hearsay and superstition. The probability that this shit-faced fudge of complacency and mad spouters will be defended to the death before reason can be accepted again (if ever) is utterly terrifying. For evidence of this I direct your (giggling still) attention to Donald Trump and his campaign to become US President. As Britain’s government is a happy satellite of US mischief in the world ... and a blindly loyal follower of US foreign policy, what will our Cameron/Osborne/Johnson government do if Trump suceeds and begins his Term of Ignorance?
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Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am absolute in my scepticism about whether the Euro (pro and sceptic)-business-arses and their sycophantic political stooges – or the US presidential circus and their flunkies – will come up with anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than the rampantly corrupt ruling class wankers intent on fucking us all.
June 2016
HAND OVER FIST PRESS
BOOKS • DESIGN at www.handoverfistpress.com
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 2 Alan Rutherford 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 1 Alan Rutherford 2014
IRISH GRAFFITI some murals in the North, 1986 Alan Rutherford 2014
NICETO DE LARRINAGA a voyage, 1966 Alan Rutherford 2014
To read/view a book, please go to BOOK page on website and click on their cover and follow the links ...
KAPUTALA The Diary of Arthur Beagle & The East Africa Campaign, 1916-1918 Alan Rutherford Updated 2nd edn: 2014
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Available to view/read at www.handoverfistpress.com
MAGAZINE
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD Issue 10
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Issue 9
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May 2016
April 2016
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February: 2016 March 2016
February:
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January: 2016
Xmas: 2015
December: 2015
October: 2015
Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core. Contributors included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, Martin Taylor, Martin Mitchell ... A pleasure to produce ... thank you
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