by Veronique Raingeval Food for thought was aplenty on the 2011 edition of the Leeds Summat. Great speakers (Maurice Glasman, Peter Tatchell, Hilary Benn MP, Maryam Mir, and Rommi Smith were amongst those I was able to listen to) and great workshops. It was really hard to make a choice between the huge amount of excellent sessions. For some people, the generous and buzzing atmosphere at the Student Union Building of Leeds University was almost enough! I attended the 10am Big Questions Panel hosted by Harry Gration of BBC Look North fame, a session entitled ‘What is moving and awakening around the world’ at 11am, and a session called ‘ Economic Democracy: Remaking a broken system’ at 4pm. The session at 11am in the Common Room gave us a rare access to wounded but resolute activists from Greece, Egypt and Syria. Tales of collective and individual humiliation, torture, secret police kidnaps, closed court trials, displaced and exiled neighborhoods brought the room to a sober realization of how still comparatively easy our lives are. Mahmood, the Egyptian activist and co-founder of ‘One Humanity Network’ said to us :’ We are busy dying for our freedom. We haven’t got the space to reinvent a world system that is badly in need of overhaul. You have. Do it!’ In the Riley Smith Hall, politicians pointed to fragmented good news stories, from which no one could see clear patterns of change emerging. Businessmen acknowledged interdependence from their communities, and pleaded for more understanding and collaboration. Poets and activists challenged the room to dare thinking and behaving differently, Rallying around the Leeds Credit Union and setting an example from Leeds of a new banking behavior was mentioned by several contributors. The crowd was at time angry, confused and unsure. A speaker acknowledged the difficulty for alternative ideas to gain critical mass, outside of a mainstream media, which wouldn’t consider publishing much left-field thinking. A woman said she felt frightened to speak up for her beliefs. She talked about group-think and still being shamed for thinking differently. Someone mentioned feeling powerless against multinationals interfering with our national destinies. Maria from Greece summarized the Western confusion: ‘How on earth from a respected civilization the Greeks can be branded lazy and corrupted tax evaders to the rest of Europe?’ She cried:’ We haven’t seen these €380bn, our supposed debt! Where has the money gone? What was it used for?’ Indeed, a collective headache seemed to grip the audiences throughout the day trying to comprehend the long-term consequences of the current economic crisis and what they could do about it. We are at such different places. The violence of Arab governments is clear, present and unbearable. It attacks so many human emotional, physical and intellectual needs at the same time, that it is pushing its population into a simple and unequivocal collective effort to say ‘no and no more’. What happens after is anybody ‘s guess. The energy needed to throw out the old regime is so great that there isn’t much space to think of afterwards. The growing complexity of our western world on the other hand is imprisoning us in a sticky spider web of dependency, ambiguity and fear. Peter Tatchell - in the last 4pm session – bemoaned the lack of collective rallying around to challenge the shadow side of capitalism. He mentioned the suffragette movement: 100 years on, the complexity of our western societies doesn’t offer an obvious weak underbelly where we could strike. The problem is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. The enemy – like the money that oils our system - is largely invisible. And yet, at the Summat there was also evidence of much going on, from Transition Towns to new social entreprises cropping up everywhere, traditional businesses beginning to take seriously their corporate responsibilities, people recycling, reusing and deserting the consumerist society, a revival of crafts, allotments, green energy trials all over the place. Tip to observers: those who ‘are the change they want to see’ look calmer and much less frustrated than those watching from the side. Yet at a collective level we are missing a sense of urgency here - unlike in the East, where the clock is counting down. It seems to me, we still have too much to lose…It may have to get still worse, before we can really meaningfully respond to the prayer of our Arab brothers and sisters. Food for thought… Indeed, Feast for Thought, at the Leeds Summat 2011! By Dave King of Luddites200 (one of the many workshop hosts at the Leeds Summat 2011) By Alan, the paused propagandist I’m hosting a skill-share at the Summat about different ways to get one’s voice heard by people who are not already involved. This could include graffiti, free newspapers, subvertising, reverse graffiti, stenciling, zines, and physical &creative interventions. I’ll bring a few examples along to the workshop (at 11am), but it will only be any good if other people bring along your ideas and experience on the day. Or comment on this blog would be good! So here are some excellent examples to fire your imagination – can you do any better?! Spoof Newspapers These look similar to the original newspaper format, but with very different content! They poke fun at the paper themselves, but aim to provide an alternative narrative. And they are more likely to get picked up than a boring leaflet. In Leeds, we had the excellent “Evening Pest” in 2009 (pdf copy here). Elsewhere there have been “The Spun”, “Evading Standards”, “Financial Crimes”, and “Hate Mail”. Corporate Watch has got an excellent review of most of the best from the last decade. Reverse Graffiti We all know graffiti is about spraying paint ON to a surface. Reverse graffiti involves washing dirt OFF a surface. Who can complain about you cleaning – partially – a building or pavement? What can owners or police stop you for? Whilst you can use bleach, more common is to use a pressure washer, like what some people clean their drives and cars with. With canvases that stretch for several hundred metres there is potential to create some awe-inspiring creative pictures. There’s loads of pictures on Flickr and YouTube – see this short from Latvia. Over on Instructables.com is good advice about how to go about it. Subvertising Every day we are exposed to the mental pollution that is billboards. Subvertising is about détourning, or destroying this propaganda of endless consumerism. The 20 year-old guide to “The Art & Science of Billboard Improvement” does what is says, from our comrades in the “Billboard Liberation Front” All of the above are easy to categorise, but there is loads more creative interventions that communicated widely. Here are a few pictures, but there is also Liberate Tate, Reverend Billy, The Yes Men, The Space Hijackers, and others that you can leave in the comments box below. The Canadian-based Adbusters coined the term “Culture Jamming” for a lot of this. (Disclaimer: you may want to ask permission from the appropriate legal owners before doing some of the above.) By Sarah Rowe from Christian Aid (who’ll be hosting a workshop on tax at the Summat) Really?! Honestly. I know you might not feel it’s a wonderful thing when you open your pay slip at the end of the month, but tax has the power to be truly transformational. Christian Aid research estimates that around $160 billion dollars a year are lost from developing countries by some less than scrupulous multinational corporations dodging tax. One hundred and sixty billion dollars. Not in total, but each and every year. That’s four times as much as the amount needed to finance meeting the Millennium Development Goals, and almost twice as much as will be needed annually to support countries adapt to climate change.1 In a nutshell, our campaign is based on the fact that if those unscrupulous companies stopped dodging tax, there’d be resources available to change the world. Fighting for our own public services at home has made many people realise how important a fair tax system is in raising the money that pays for the services we all depend upon – health and education, roads and rubbish collection, justice systems and welfare. Poor people in poor countries currently don’t have access to any such services, because governments can’t raise the revenue to provide them, so this is a global problem that hits poor people hardest. Such a problem will need a global solution, but as all you Summat-ers know, we need to think global, and act local. Our campaign has been running for a little while now, and we are currently focusing on asking four FTSE listed firms to come out in support of our campaign and publicly recognise that tax has the potential to play a huge role in development. We want them to support country by country reporting in order to increase transparency in the global tax system, and therefore make it easy for countries to spot tax dodging companies. To take action right now, click here. To find out more about the campaign and what we can do here in Leeds, join our Summat workshop on the 26th November. 1World Bank estimates, www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/mdgassessment.pdf and http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTCC/Resources/EACC-june2010.pdf By Donal, an anti-globalisation protester and writer (Hiding in the Bushes) A crisis in the Euro will have a direct impact on the people of Leeds as credit gets harder to get from troubled banks, while the economic growth underlying the government’s plan for recovery will fail to materialize in such an outcome. As I write this, the House of Commons is gearing up for a vote on having a referendum over Europe. This has been a long term goal of the Conservative right, traditionally suspicious of anything that causes the UK to give up any of its sovereignty. Yet we have talk of Cameron imposing a ‘three line whip’ to stop his MPs voting in favour of it, despite the motion coming out of his party. Indeed, over the last few days we have heard such telling statements from Tory ministers that while they may not like the Euro, they appreciate that they need it to be healthy. To answer the question what happens to Leeds if the Euro unravels, we need to understand why Cameron, Osborne and Co have been forced to have this change of heart. Firstly, its all about the economic growth that George Osborne desperately needs if his particular plan to get the country out of the doldrums is to work. A unravelling Euro will cause vast economic woe in our largest market, thus hitting our exports. This will in turn hit growth in the UK, and without that, we would be left with an economy faltering even more. That means less jobs and a government needing to make more cuts to balance the books. For all that people complain about EU red tape, successive UK governments have recognised that access to that market is worth more than the political pain it causes. Businesses may not like the EU bureaucracy, but they do like the financial benefits that come with them. The second effect of a collapsing Euro is the shock it would induce in the financial markets – it would be equivalent the global economy having a stroke. Already very jittery, it is a good bet that a failure to rescue the Euro is going to send the global economy back into recession with a credit crunch to match the one of 2008. Indeed, what is happening now is a continuation of a crisis that has not actually gone away. To put this in context of Leeds there are a number of implications. The cuts being proposed by the Con-Dem coalition are now starting to bite, but this is only the start of the larger programme. The more the economy weakens the less room Osborne has to manoeuvre in his plans. More cuts will come, sending ever more people into an overcrowded market place. And the way Osborne and friends are working, cuts are as much from local government as they are central government. Leeds is the main UK financial and business services hub outside of London. For example, the centre of Leeds has 2800 lawyers in it. A collapsing financial situation puts that at risk. While the immediate affect may not be felt among the people of Leeds, there will be ones in the medium term as Leeds Council income, already under squeeze from central government, will fall as revenue declines. This means more job cuts in local government and trimming back of ever more services in an effort to balance the books, at a time when there is ever greater demand. Of course, much of this will be true of any financial situation which causes the global markets longer term uncertainty, but the collapse of the Euro will accelerate this greatly. In the more immediate terms, the most significant effect of the collapse of theEuro will be what it does to the banks and in turn to lending locally. The events of 2008 are being repeated, only now it is countries, not the great investment institutions, that look like they might fall, despite all the bailouts. Indeed, all that happened in 2008 was the shifting of the problem from the banks to the governments. It did not deal with many of the underlying problems, and all the exposure that the banks had to insolvent governments remained. The banks still have problems, and the indications coming out of the markets is that this is still a big issue. What we are potentially looking at, in the worse case scenario, is a repeat of the credit crunch. Banks aware of how financially unstable they are due to their multi-billion lending to the countries of Euro will try to hold on to as much money as possible to shore themselves up. This is the problem as small to medium businesses suddenly find that the credit they need for day to day life is harder to get, becomes more expensive. We all remember what happened to Woolworths, which was an otherwise viable business. The same problem could easily repeat itself, with businesses shutting down, increasing unemployment. People, as well, will find loans harder to get and prohibitively expensive, hurting those who need the credit to get through the various ups and downs of life. In a global world, nobody has shelter from the ripples that run through the global economy. The more you depend on your exposure to that global world, the more damage can be done. It is too late for questions about whether the Euro is a good thing or not; it is there and what now matters is how relate to it. Worrying about whether to join the Euro or not is missing the bigger picture. The Summat itself is just one day – but it’s part of a wide-reaching social movement, and ongoing conversations and initiatives. So, over the summer, we went to many of the community galas across the city, and got people talking, debating, connecting, and laughing together. Watch our short footage from on of those events – Beeston Festival – here:
And over the next few months, before and after the Summat, we’ll be linking with people and projects (many of whom will be delivering elements of the event; see Workshops, and Activities + stalls) – and featuring interviews with them, blogs they’ve written, and more. Our first is a short interview with members of UK Uncut, from a demo they held in Leeds in late September: see below. Watch this space for more over the coming weeks and months.
The Leeds Summat 2011: feast for thought!
admin : December 1, 2011 1:55 pm
The Luddites: Everything you know is wrong!
admin : November 14, 2011 10:46 am
Unusual places to say something: Alternative communication and propaganda
admin : November 8, 2011 8:15 am
At the Summat gathering I’m going to be talking about tax, and what a wonderful thing it is.
admin : October 31, 2011 8:43 pm
What happens to Leeds if the Euro unravels
admin : October 27, 2011 9:52 am
Though it is often hard to see, the impact that the Euro has on the banks is how it will affect the people of Leeds directly.
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admin : October 5, 2011 10:07 am
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Legendary Yorkshire radical folk band Chumbawamba have a hilarious song satirising conspiracy theories, called ‘Everything you know is wrong’. But if we’re talking about the Luddites – textile workers from Yorkshire, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire, who in 1811-13 smashed machines which were destroying their jobs – it’s probably true.
Nowadays, most people think that the Luddites were ignorant vandals opposed to progress – but this is a myth, invented in the 1950s. It is a history written by the victors: in fact, the Luddites opposed only ‘machines hurtful to Commonality’, ie to the common good. When they went into mills with their massive ‘Enoch hammers’, they smashed only those machines that were destroying their trade, whilst leaving other machines untouched. Unlike this summer’s rioters, they even punished those in their ranks who stole small items during the raids.
Although their uprising was repressed by massive state violence (50 people were hanged and more transported to Australia), the Luddites’ spirit lives on – for example in the highly successful anti-GM food and anti-nuclear campaigns. 200 years later, the industrial-capitalist system that they were resisting has led to global warming, exhaustion of natural resources and biodiversity collapse, and huge oppression and injustice – and their sceptical approach to its mythology of ‘progress through technology’ looks more and more relevant. Can we discard that ideology but still go forward, not ignoring the benefits of some technologies, but creating a world in which technology development is democratically controlled?
There are more parallels. In 1812, Britain was in deep recession, caused by a trade blockade during the Napoleonic Wars. Bad harvests had sent the price of bread through the roof, and unemployment often meant starvation. Trade unions were illegal, but the workers had repeatedly petitioned Parliament to enforce existing laws banning machines that destroyed jobs, with no success. In 2011, as part of the strategy to cut public-sector jobs, librarians like Paul Walker from Bristol are being told that they are no longer needed, due to the introduction of self-service machines. Insanely, even coastguards are being replaced by communications technologies.
Luddites200 is a group of technology politics campaigners, trade unionists, scientists, engineers, artists and others, who have come together to challenge the lies about the Luddites. We want to open a real debate about which technologies are appropriate in a transition to a sustainable and just society. Two days before the Leeds Summat, we’re holding a benefit gig at TJs at which Boff and Phil of Chumbawamba, as well as Seize The Day front man Theo Simon, and Yorkshire folk singer Gary Kaye will be supporting our call to celebrate the Luddites’ 200th anniversary. We’ll also have a bunch of younger Leeds acts like Dan Audio, Raphael Attar, Docterre, and Halifax punks Three Sheets t’ Wind. We hope you can join us, or come to our workshop at the Summat to learn about the real story of the Luddites and their relevance today.