SOLIDARITY Vol. 1

SOLIDARITY 


Vol. 1 June 2016 North Devon Solidarity Network




Make Zines Not War Senar Togok

On why I’m a Feminist Emily Abbott

Feminism didn't apply to my life. I had a career, liked wearing lipstick and enjoyed making the man in my life a cooked breakfast. Feminism was part of the past. Feminism was what my mum and her friends did when they held hands at Greenham Common, it was Germaine Greer, getting angry, and not wearing heels. It made sense in an era where women spent a lot more time in aprons but Feminism wasn't relevant to me. What was the point? There was nothing wrong.

Then I became pregnant. As my pregnancy progressed, so did the quite sense that there was in fact, something very wrong.

My pregnancy was almost full term at the end of the 2013 academic year. It wasn’t the stressed, sharp elbowed students barging through doors that made the University Library feel less safe than a packed tram or a bar on a Friday night, but a change in atmosphere.

I had a feeling that while I was losing my ability to laugh without leaking a little bit of wee, my academic work was also losing its validity. It was subtle, but it was there hanging in the air when I went to the Short Loans desk or stood in the queue for the printer. I got a sense I didn't belong there anymore, I was taking up space.

Becoming a mother was a huge transition, suddenly I became part of a tribe who were in varying degrees of shock and awe at our new roles. There was a pervasive sense of vulnerability among most of the women I met at this time, and we clung together to share stories and tried to work out what on earth we were supposed to be doing.

Then there was breastfeeding. There were women with partners who didn't like it, women who set up support groups, women who found it hard, women who found it easy, women who hid and women who didn't hide and then got kicked out of shops. Then there were women who did sit-in protest and spoke on the telly. I was one of those women and I liked it. I liked it that at this awesome and incredibly vulnerable time women got together and stuck up for each other.

At that time I still hadn't worked out what was wrong, I knew that pregnant women and academia didn’t sit well together. I knew that breastfeeding a baby was contentious and political and I knew television production people could interview a group of articulate women and edit them to make them look insane. I just but I didn’t know why.

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Fast forward a few years and I make a horrible discovery. The man that I

hoped I would spend the rest of my life with, had been going to prostitutes.

Not just occasionally, a lads holiday thing, he was going a lot, he had a subscription, he was supporting an industry. The world as I thought I knew it starting to fall to bits.

Before I could work out how I was going to deal with this, I needed to establish my views properly. In my former pre-motherhood life I worked at a project in Nottingham's Red Light District. Where we had our cigarette breaks was also a spot for sex workers to wait for Johns. It was fairly regular occurrence to see women getting in and out of cars and I was liberal and my view was that these women should be able to work legally and without fear of arrest. That is still my view but now for entirely different reasons.

I did lots or reading. First hand accounts about prostitution like Rachel Moran’s, read the arguments for and against amnesty internationals proposals, the Nordic Model and scoured the web where I found the chilling 'Invisible Man Project' on Tumblr.

Then I felt sickened, and angry, really angry, for myself and for all the women who my partner had been having sex with, who probably didn’t enjoy it.

Suddenly every man that looked at me or called me 'love' or 'darling' offensive. Panel shows only seemed to have one or two women on them, a hoover advert only showed women actually using the hoover, billboards and adverts were full of sexually explicit images of women and the senior management where I was working were all men and this wasn’t just a bit of a shame, it was a worry. It (whatever 'it' is) was apparently going on everywhere and I hadn’t even noticed!

The support I sought out at this time also turned on me, instead of being able to get help, I had to prove myself. I had to prove myself as a mother, as an employee and as a woman. The things that had defined me, my mothering, my relationships my vocation had been put in the hands of men who were deciding my worth. It was horrible.

What kept me going at this time was a quote, 'The dawning of feminist consciousness requires an act of separation. All feminists, have had the courage to separate themselves from malestream culture will have found that they received punitive sanctions. (Abridged) Sheila Jeffreys* 2

I was waking up and I felt stupid. I'd studied Discriminatory Discourse, how

had I not seen this before? How on earth had I failed to apply theory to women in my training sessions when I'd applied it to every other oppressed group?

When I was a kid I remember hearing the term 'Glass Ceiling’. I thought it meant that when a man works downstairs and women work upstairs men could look up their skirts. I'm quite disturbed at how my 12 year old self came up with this interpretation! As an adult I understand what it is. It is the invisible barrier that women are unable to pass through to be equal to men.

Men are in-fact upstairs... and probably finding other ways to look up women’s skirt. When a woman hits the glass ceiling there are two choices, to put the breaks on or hit it head on. Hit it head on and it will hurt, and any woman who does this will find herself dazed and picking out shards of glass; and there will be scars. There will also be men out there who will help, not just because they are gentleman and want to shag you, but because they are good men. I found it important to keep a mental list of these people as a reminder #notallmen. One of them is certainly reading this now.

So my answer to why I became a feminist is this, I’m a reluctant feminist, I had no choice. I will wear lipstick and hopefully might cook someone breakfast in bed again and will occasionally wear heels. Feminism isn’t a stereotype, it’s a level of awareness of the oppressions against women and a commitment to counter it. t doesn’t matter what a persons age, sexuality or politics are, they can be feminist.

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The Rise of Liberal Racism

Very recently an acquaintance of mine accused me of 'denying my culture', by not identifying with the country that one of my Grandparents called their home. According to most 'ethnicity' forms, I am categorised as: 'Any other Mixed / Multiple ethnic background', but I do not categorise myself in this way. It seems, as though the first thing everyone around me notices is that I am ‘black’. Due to living in a rural area my darker skin and “natural” hair makes me an anomaly; being mixed race makes me even more of a faux pas.

For me, the person that befriends and includes me because I am (the token) 'black' causes far greater pain. The irony is that those who act like they want me as a friend, while actually only seeing my colour, would argue that they are militantly anti-racist. Yet they are, by definition, being racist themselves by discriminating and having prejudice views. By definition for someone to be racist they must believe their own race is superior. The confused liberal’s actions portray this mode of thinking; keeping someone around you simply to show your diverse acceptance or fetishising ethnic groups is the same mentality of a racist , they are just displaying their superiority in a different way; you don’t want me as an individual, unique being you just want me as a (insert term here e.g. slave/black friend).

Of course, I understand that there have, and always will be, people that loathe my very existence because of the amount of melanin in my skin but the neocolonial liberal causes me far more pain than the blatant racist. I often have people look genuinely perplexed by the way I apparently 'deny of my heritage’; they tell me I have been 'white-washed' when they find out I cannot speak Yoruba or because I shorten my name for convenience. It is when they give me that look and passive-aggressively tell me I am 'denying my culture' that I realise they only see me and want me as a colour and an exhibit to be flaunted when in need of none-white opinions and company.

I ask now, what is my 'culture'? Like everyone else; I had four grandparents, and one of mine was a Yoruba man, born and raised in Nigeria (with a Spanish family name). As is the Yoruba custom, I was given a traditional Yoruba name by this grandparent; but I met him only three times in my entire life and have never set foot in continental Africa. I also had three other grandparents - what of them? The Russian-Jewish-Londoner; the Trinidadian-New Yorker; the Welsh French-Canadian? Do we dismiss them as part of my heritage due to the presence of the “African” trump card? Are 4

you actually interested in my 'culture' or are you really just seeing my skin colour after all?

The “white-saviour complex” of the 21st century liberal only helps to magnify this passive aggressive, modern form of racism. A typical form of this can be found in the “new colonialists”; the white middle-class women and men (mostly between the ages of 18 and 30) pose with the “poor black children” of “Africa” in an attempt to subtly tell their social circle that they are not materialistic and “do not see colour”. Yet this obsession with famished children from other “less developed” countries is simply being used by them in order to expand their own sense of enlightenment. This post-education ritual acts as justification for their exclusion from being held accountable for the general racism of the West. Another common detrimental fashion statement is the adoption of the victims of colonialisms’ physical attributes and cultural customs. This is slightly more mainstream and I have found that liberal middle-class people are not the only perpetrators. People that love volunteerism when it comes to nonwhite individuals or communities (abroad or at home) that post repeatedly about their generous excursions on Facebook or other social media often have succumbed to the white-saviour trope. As Guy Debora perfectly puts it in his iconic work The Society of the Spectacle; “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. We have moved into an era where people do not feel real, heart wrenching sympathy for refugees; rather they enjoy posting about how kind they were for donating old baby clothes that their child outgrew 10 years ago. They do not really want to help starving children, they just want an enlightening experience to put on their CV and to talk about occasionally at their left-wing gatherings.

In the same branch of modern liberal are those who feel they are eligible and knowledgeable enough to talk on behalf of the problems and customs of people that they have absolutely no connection and, in some cases, empathy with. The white liberals congregate and argue relentlessly about cultural appropriation and racism, while not giving those who experience these things a chance to speak. Instead of hijacking the platforms of the oppressed, those who are privileged or who are not affected by it should simply give way and allow those who suffer to have an opportunity to let their opinion, on what they are or what they are experiencing, be expressed.

Their unwillingness to stop talking and allow the oppressed to take the stage is a sign of their semi-unconscious feeling of superiority towards nonwhite ethnic groups, their actions indicate that they do not see us as able to speak, able to write and able to be persuasive. This in itself is racism; the 5

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white-saviour racism. This feeling of wanting to protect the “weaker”, “less-abled” minorities is what causes a negative reaction in said people; they are horrified when someone they perceive to be an exhibit of “culture” and an opportunity to slander the right turns out to not be as “ethnic” as they want them to be. Personally, I find this most obvious when someone asks me why I am denying my culture; they are only enquiring because I have already broken their expectations and they have realised that I am not what they want.

Again, I ask what is my 'culture'? If culture, in terms of what I am writing about, is literally 'the ideas, customs, and social behaviour of a particular people or society' (which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, it is) then why do they expect me to possess the ideas, customs and social behaviours of a group of people that live on a continent I have never visited? By the liberal’s definition, one is obliged to be loyal to and partake in their 'black' Yoruba grandfather’s culture rather than my 'white' Russian-Jewish-British Naval officer grandfather’s. Perhaps it is my cynicism but the only conclusion I can come to is that I am worth more to you as a victim of colonialism, a descendant of a slave and a 'black' girl. People advocate 'diversity', but the truth is that they hate the unique. If they wanted true diversity they would accept me no matter what culture I seemingly identify with and you would not try and peer pressure people into accepting one (or more) of their ancestor’s customs. Every one of us has four grandparents, eight greatgrandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. Every one of them a sentient, living breathing human being with a story to tell. Everyone brings their own unique heritage and their own culture to the table. Why then the fixation on 'culture' only when there is an increase in melanin? This idea that there are some 'cultures' that are inherently more interesting and exotic than others stems from colonialism and racism.

I do not see myself through your eyes, and I don't define myself by your stereotypes. We are all unique and equal.

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Black Friday Penny MacBeth Shuttling in our more than comfortable car Down streaming roads running red With the rusty overflow Of many buried mines Their excavated heaps of spoil Picked over by hungry fingers now abandoned to the rain We realise en route to the crematorium That this is Black Friday With our long faces And our long sobre overcoats We listen to ironic music Play out the fast retreating coffin We reflect on the view Not black but greener than you could possibly conjure in a dream In this strange suburban final house on a Cornish hill With its picture windows and its sympathetic lady vicar We reflect on grass washed brighter than acid And sky the colour of thunder Reflect on the other cars We have narrowly avoided Down the crowded country lanes On their drivers going somewhere for a bargain Before it’s all too late rushing around to no particular purpose Gathering the stuff you can’t take with you in the end 7

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The Rights of Nature Ben In 2008 Ecuador became the first country to have a constitution that recognised the rights of ecosystems. That’s nearly 800 years after the Magna Carta asserted the rights of some human individuals in Britain. It is close to 4000 years after the first known law was written in Babylon. The biggest denouncement to civilisation is not the amount of time that it has taken for some civilised humans to recognise the rights of nature. It is that fact that these laws have to be explicitly stated and written down at all.

Nature, ecosystems, Gaia, the Earth; whatever, it is called, it is not an abstract idea, of which we can exist independently. If we are to survive, it cannot be treated as property. If we are to flourish, it cannot be abused. It is an indictment of our culture that the rights of nature are not the foundations on which it was built. If this were the case, we would not be facing the cataclysmic environmental problems of climate change, species extinction and the poisoning of the earth, water and air that we need to live.

Every ecosystem is in decline. The fact that human populations still continue to rise is only because we are existing on borrowed time. Fossil fuels have allowed us to continue wreaking damage long past the point when other civilised groups collapsed. We have run off the cliff and are experiencing the “air time” of a cartoon character whose legs pump frantically before the inevitable plummet.

There are other ways of organising human society. Indigenous cultures have diverse and unique ways of relating to their ecosystem. This relationship is reciprocal because it has to be. Parasites which destroy the host do not last long. Indigenous cultures do not need to write down the rights of the land and communities they exist with. These rights are an embedded part of their culture. If they were not, they would destroy themselves very quickly, just as we are doing. Today, we are seeing some indigenous nations begin to enact the rights of nature into their written structures of law. They have had to do this to protect the land they live with from our civilised culture's desire to turn living beings into dead commodities.Civilised cultures are characterised by cities. Cities detach people from nature. The resources they require are extracted elsewhere, often from another country. The poisons are taken out of sight. All damage happens far away. We can just as easily and just as blindly turn on a light without seeing the smoke of the coal burning or the nuclear waste being buried. All these things harm us, because they harm the living communities that are necessary for our continued existence.

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"From increasing extinction rates, to coral reef die-offs, to global warming, today species and ecosystems around the world are collapsing.

Yet conventional environmental activism has not yet recognised that the barriers to change are systemic.

Decades of activism have demonstrated that to stop fracking and other inherently unsustainable (but legal) practices, our organising requires a different path – one which recognises that the problem isn’t simply fracking (or mining, factory farming, etc.)– but rather structures of law based on protecting and expanding commerce, while protecting fracking and oil and gas corporations (mining and coal corporations, factory farming and agribusiness corporations, etc.) over communities and nature.

We need a fundamental change in the relationship between humankind and the natural world. This means placing the highest societal value, and thus the highest protection, on nature through the recognition of legal rights."Mari Margil-Associate Director-Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth. However, our laws continue to recognise land as property. Just as it used to be considered property damage to kill a slave or rape a woman, damage and abuse of ecosystems is treated in the same way. The movement to change the structure of law so that it recognises the rights of nature follows the abolitionists and suffragists, who successfully campaigned to change the law, so that humans were recognised as rights bearing entities and not just property. Since 2005 communities in America have been fighting to create laws which, establish that ecosystems have the right to flourish independently. It was these communities that inspired Ecuador to enshrine these rights into their constitution.

We can start this in the UK to. In fact, if we are to have any chance of saving life on earth, we must recognise the rights of nature globally.

“If police are the servants of governments, and if governments protect corporations better than they do human beings (and far better than they do the planet), then clearly it falls to us to protect our communities and the land-bases on which we in our communities personally and collectively depend. What would it look like if we created our own community groups and systems of justice to stop the murder of our land-bases and the total toxification of our environment? It would look a little bit like precisely the sort of revolution we need if we are to survive. It would look like our only hope.” - Derek Jenson rightsofnature.uk

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Digital Enclosure Software freedom and the fight for the digital commons

Everyday computing and mobile devices are sites of active political struggle.

While superficially innocuous, to a small but dedicated community of journalists, activists and hobbyists, any given app is entangled with a much larger conflict, in which what is at stake is no less than the continuation of bourgeois property relations and the authority which sustains them.

To clarify, I must emphasise that I am not talking about the material hardware that constitutes a phone or a laptop, although this is equally important when considered as commodity and as a product of labour: but the immaterial *software* for which the hardware is used.

Being immaterial, individual applications are not materially scarce. But two megacorporations in particular, Microsoft and Apple, are built entirely on the conception of software as a scarce, tradable commodity: this *proprietary software* is private property. Applications are tied to licenses which restrict access and reproduction: these licenses may be traded in a marketplace, and leased to end users whose role is that of a passive consumer.

In contrast, there is a competing model of *free software*, which is made, copied, and modified by a community of users and programmers. This software is produced and distributed by volunteers, often in their free time for no monetary return in a miniature gift economy. Though distributed free of charge, it is primarily "free" in the sense that it is free from the enforced restrictions that characterise proprietary software: free as in "freedom", or as in "liberated", leading to the alternative name of "libre" software.

Such free software is widely used, though many don't realise that it is free in this specific sense: Firefox, VLC, and Audacity are all maintained by volunteers or non-profits, as is Apache, the software underlying the vast majority of popular websites.

Free and proprietary software exist at extremes of a continuum of models of ownership, with varying associated restrictions on modification and reproduction, and varying degrees of corporate involvement. Free software is a relative of *open source* software, software which has no restrictions on copies and modifications: but open source software is intentionally open 11

to enclosure, as many open source software projects are driven by forprofit private interests, such as Google, IBM, and Red Hat. Their business models often consist of charging for maintenance and support, or the sale of data rather than software. These interests derive value from treating labour or data as a commodity rather than commodifying software as such: but the existence of this continuum between free and proprietary software already provides an avenue for private appropriation of free software and the loss of freedom this entails.

All this matters because proprietary software has an inherent exploitative and oppressive potential which free/libre software is resistant to.

Exploitative in that freedom is restricted to enable material gain on the part of the software's producer. Software that comes at any obligatory price is materially exploitative, given that there is no value added in reproducing an exact copy: but even software apparently available free of charge can be exploitative, given the many examples of users being forced into dependency via vendor lock-in, and by having their devices rendered unusable.

The cost of Microsoft Windows is usually hidden from the buyer, but is up to ÂŁ140 of the total price of even a cheap new computer. This cost would be absent from an operating system made entirely of free software.

Examples of the latter include iPhones' remote bricking by Apple (the infamous "error 53"), and Microsoft's frequent and large forced updates, the details of which are frequently hidden from the end user. The effect of this is to reduce the useful life of technology, increasing turnover for manufacturers, and dependency on the software providers: it is worth noting that Apple fills both roles simultaneously.

Were it not for this, the hardware of typical laptops and desktops can have ten to twenty years of useful life. There are many community-driven free operating systems designed for old hardware, reducing environmental costs and the material impact on the end user.

We cannot claim to truly own, or at least have freedom to use, something over which we do not have control but must instead ask for permission from an external authority.

The oppressive potential of proprietary software hinges on the inability of end users to see inside, independently verify, and change what the software is doing. Proprietary software is regularly distributed with security holes and back doors which allow the distributor remote access and control to any machine on which the software runs.

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In Solidarity John Pegram Just recently, I was caught off guard by one of those more forlorn moments we all have from time to time I asked myself when it was exactly I started caring again.

A dawning realisation sunk in that I have never stopped caring it was just that life after the age of 15 had taken me through many twists and turns, round a few corners and into a few nightmares I was lucky to come out the other side of.

I finally parted company with the Portsmouth Anti-Nazi League and SWP at the wise old age of around of 16 when college, parties and lots of other stuff both good and bad came along.

I remember the fire back then. I remember the anger at these people who hated me and my dad because we weren͛’t white and hated anyone not like them. Who hated my mum because she had married a black man. Who attacked Asian people, black people... it made my blood boil. These people called themselves Fascists like it was something to be proud of. We called them Nazis.

The dreary sea side town of Gosport and the vibrant contrast that was Portsmouth suffered from a lot of NF and BNP activity in the 90s. We used to campaign as much as we could, stalls every other Saturday full of Socialist Worker papers, handing out ANL leaflets on a busy high street.

At one point we even set up the Gosport branch of the Anti-Nazi league.

There was only about 5 of us. All kids. All vehemently anti-racist. I don͛t ͛ ever stopped caring. think I’ve ͛ dusted off my activist hat and have started to get involved again. Its͛ So I’ve ͛ learning and I’ve ͛ realized the fire is a long road and I feel out the loop but Im still there.

The driving need to make a difference still exists, and being my own boss these days I want to commit to it both locally and nationally. Ill͛ fight ignorance, bigotry and racism wherever I see it. Ill͛ never subscribe to that Nazi poison!

Bristol is a city of different cultures, people, races and all things diverse.

Having lived here for 4 years now its͛ becoming more like home every day 13

and every part of it reminds me of all the good bits about Pompey, my home from home.

I think that these days theres͛ a sense of apathy that has seeped into society that was never there before, or maybe it was its͛ just that for a while it had hold of me too. Thats͛ the problem with being ͚alright Jack! ͛ you lose sight of the bigger picture.

I think when the racism across the board started getting worse, and the xenophobia became unbearable I think thats͛ when I slowly lifted my head and whispered quietly ͚we are all the same. ͛ The whisper soon became a roar. And the fire I usually reserve for Thai boxing found a second home. ͛ going to make a difference. Locally, regionally, nationally.

So this year Im Even goddamn globally if I can. And its͛ going to be the same the year after ͛ see you on that road. that, and the year after that. I’ll In solidarity, John Pegram

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Article 6 Jonathan Medland On 13th January 2004, we tragically lost our only son. His life came to a terrible and cruel end, and the happy lives of myself, my wife, and our daughter were brutally changed for ever.

Jon was in his 5th and final year as a medical student. He was SO full of enthusiasm for life. He was intelligent, compassionate, caring, and had my outrageous sense of humour. He loved and was loved by everyone. He had a beautiful girlfriend with whom he was very much on love. Indeed, they had spoken of marriage. And he loved every aspect of his medical studies at university.

The only thing in his life that wasn't perfect was that he had mild acne, and a few annoying spots on his back.

He had heard of a prescription medication which was supposed to be good at getting rid of acne. So he started taking it. And three and a half weeks after starting the medication, he had a severe psychotic reaction to it, and took his own life.

I cannot put into words the pain and heartbreak we have endured since. But you either sink or swim, and we have all tried to stay strong for each other, and make the best of what we have left.

But neither can I put into words the anger I feel since this happened, towards the pharmaceutical companies.

We have campaigned in the press, on TV, and been to parliament on numerous occasions with great support from our MP, in an attempt to raise awareness and get this hideous drug banned, on the basis that it has almost certainly caused the suicides of hundreds of people in this country alone, as well as recurring psychological problems in probably thousands of people who have survived it.

In our naivety, we believed that people in power would act with integrity, and that the drug would be banned.

But apparently, there is no integrity or conscience in the corporate world. It is all about profit. Making money at any cost, be it human lives or whatever.

Make no mistake, these companies are some of the biggest in the world.

There is no such thing as justice; even when good evidence comes up to show the harm that this drug does, they simply throw obscene amounts of 15

money at their legal people, who somehow "discredit" everything that has been said against them.

Even our own government is afraid to take on the pharmaceutical companies, as these money making giants have so much money, power, and influence.

I do not know how it will happen, but I look forward to the day when these men or women of power, who are void of integrity and decency and driven by greed, are held accountable for their actions, and made to endure long and meaningful custodial sentences.

Some people in life make me despair of the human race.

But others I have met fill me with joy and hope for mankind.

I thank god for the latter group.

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Local Grassroots Environmental Resistance Jullian Langer Here in North Devon we live in what seems to me to be one of the most purely beautiful parts of the natural world. This is a beauty expressed in the coastline; in the woodlands and habitats; in the wildlife; the rivers and hills; in all the natural beauty that surrounds us. The beauty of this land is something that is so valuable, in that it is not just a way of reconnecting to what is fundamentally real – the living biotic systems that enable life to exist on this planet – but in that they are some of the last of the ever diminishing areas where the natural world can exist autonomously, with some degree of separation from this increasingly “developed” technoculture.

I specifically write “the” rather than “our”because the natural world, despite the myths of this culture, is not the property of man, but rather the entire world is self-owned, where life owns itself and functions as a community of mutual aid, where ecosystems function in a free egalitarian form of symbiotic mutualist economies in which organic competition and consumption facilitates the needs of the community – the food chain being an overly simplified myth of human ideology, with the real natural world being a web of interacting organisms. Humanity doesn’t have any inherent right to claim what is natural, just myths of human entitlement and the ability to enact violence and take what it wishes. The world doesn’t belong to this species; this species belongs to the world and this is something we have forgotten as a culture.

One of the things that saddens me when I look at this culture (and at myself to a large degree), is how disconnected we are from the Real natural world, into a Reality of an artificial technological world, which distances us both physically and mentally from all this beauty. We don’t generally live lives that are in contact with this natural beauty, but rather we generally live lives in TV world; in Facebook world; in Twitter world; in Internet world; in Xbox and Playstation world; in virtual worlds of virtual culture, with virtual people – disconnected. Given this, of course those living within this culture don’t (really) care about or value the living world. When life-experience doesn’t have this connection, why would those living within the lifeexperience value what is on the other side of this connection?

This is a way of life that we know is destroying the planet. We know that our energy intensive way of life is spurring on climate change and runaway global warming and that this is melting the ice caps making the oceans unliveable for fish to survive and causing forest ecosystems to be 18

massively unstable and unliveable. We see this on the news, read it in papers and on news websites, but we’re not spurred to do anything about it, from our disconnection.

I wonder though, given how ecocide is literally killing the planet our lives are dependent upon (which ultimately means it is killing us), how people would react if the situation were (very slightly) reframed. If an alien race came to earth and started deforesting, melting the ice caps, toxifying the oceans, irradiating huge areas of land, built(/developed) upon habitats and subsequently brought about a mass extinction event, or brought about any other of the effects of this culture that now spans the globe and is infecting the entire world, would we not rise up and resist? I’d like to think that when it came down to it, if such a violent force came to the planet from the outside that we would resist. We managed to resist abhorrent violent forces and defeat them within history, the Nazis being an example of this. Though when I talk to people about any of this, defeatism seems to dominate and often people take this to be as something that is “out there” for someone else to deal with.

Some of these issues are more personal than the grand overarching issues I’ve mentioned, which we generally seem to find disempowering. Groups like Surfers Against Sewage, Devon Hunt Sabs, DGR UK, Frack Off and North Devon Solidarity Network (as well as many other groups that support the natural world in this struggle) are fighting against this culture. By trying to protect the beaches, the wildlife, the national parks and resisting this culture, these groups contribute to resisting the destructiveness of this culture. Opposing and resisting developments in areas such as Manning’s Pit and others like it in and around North Devon is just one way we can support the living world.

Not everyone can be an activist, but this isn’t important. This isn’t a distinction between those who go out and campaign, march, engage in direct action, enact ecotage and those who don’t. This is a distinction between those who do something and those who nothing.

While we can join this fight to resist this destruction, what we need also is to rekindle our wild relationship with our natural world. We need to reclaim a love of the living world. Teach children about it. Make it the place where we find our joy and ourselves. As long as we identify as part of this culture, we won’t defend the living world; we must ally ourselves with the living world, if we want a liveable planet for those who come after us. I love seeing plant life manage to break through concrete or tarmac, as it is the living world actively defying this culture and resisting it. We need to embody this same spirit or natural wildness.

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Success at last for Junior Doctors?

Chris Burridge-Barney Junior doctors have scored an important victory in their fight against dangerous working conditions, with health secretary Jeremy Hunt finally admitting defeat in his attempts to impose an unsafe contract. This follows months of strikes in North Devon and across the country, illustrating the vital importance of trade union action.

The contract which Hunt attempted to impose would have removed penalties for employers which forced doctors to work too many hours.

According to the government’s own equality analysis, women, carers and people with disabilities would have been hardest hit by the changes, but this was deemed to be acceptable as a “means of achieving a legitimate aim”.

Katie Pass, a junior doctor at North Devon District Hospital, dispelled the myths that were promulgated in the media. Speaking to the North Devon Journal, she explained that the dispute was not “merely an argument over Saturday pay” but a reflection that doctors were “gravely concerned” the contract would “adversely affect patient and doctor safety”.

The new contract agreed the British Medical Association is a step in the right direction, recognising junior doctors’ invaluable contribution across the week, and providing more rigorous oversight to ensure safe working.

However, whilst this breakthrough is welcome, there is still a great deal to be done.

The government is currently reeling following its U-turn on the force academisation of schools, so we must be sure to strike while the iron’s hot.

In particular, the Trade Union Act threatens to cripple unions’ ability to organise and take strike action and must be repealed. Furthermore, it is clear that, given his co-authorship of book calling for the NHS’ replacement with private insurance, Hunt sees the health of the public as just another commodity to be bought and sold, so he cannot trusted to defend the NHS – he must resign.

For the fightback to be successful, we must build solidarity networks, uniting workers in all fields in recognition of the interconnectedness of their struggles. At the heart of many of these battles is a government working hand-in-glove with capitalists to flog public assets. This is being done using the standard technique of privatisation: defunding services to the extent that they don’t work, so that people get angry and demand a change, 20

We all have a part to play in the fightback, whether it is through joining picket lines, strengthening union links in our places of work or writing articles which challenge the idea that selling off the few remaining public services is the way forward. Make no mistake, the forces against us are strong, but they are defeatable if we are resilient in the face of adversity.

 

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Food Solidarity in Devon Carlus Hudson Food poverty is one of the most urgent and vicious effects of the economic crisis, public service and welfare cuts, and capitalism at large. A myriad of different organisations – businesses, charities, churches and government at every level – exist to alleviate the surface damage of the problem. In trying to treat the symptom, they lose sight of the need to address the underlying cause of food poverty. It’s not enough to simply deal with food poverty on the level of it as a symptom without addressing its underlying cause.

Addressing food poverty can become reduced to an issue of administrating people’s suffering rather than ending it. Means-testing of welfare and the system of referring people to food banks before they can access food mean that people are, in a sense, at the mercy of institutions nominally there to help them. They can perpetuate a division between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, which takes people who are already screwed over by the system and patronises and dehumanises them further.

There is an alternative to this though. Across Devon, and taking inspiration from similar groups elsewhere in the UK and worldwide (e.g. Food Not Bombs), groups are being set up to distribute cooked vegetarian and vegan meals to anyone who needs or wants them free of charge. A group in Exeter, Food Fight, has been running for over a year and has been giving out food and hot drinks every Saturday in the city centre. Running based largely on donated ingredients and on the energy of volunteer cooks and servers, Food Fight has never been short of the means to carry out its work. As it developed, Food Fight became a place for political discussion and for people to meet each other and plan other actions. It has next to no formal structure, and works based on the mutual trust of the people involved. It has done a lot of good work over the past year, and took the initiative of just several people over the space of a week to get most of the organisational work setting it up done. It shows that you don’t need large or necessarily highly-experienced activist cliques to organise things. Rather, you just need a group of friends with a shared commitment to the project. No one takes the ‘leading organiser’ role, it’s just people working together as equals approaching the public as equals.

As well as addressing the human suffering caused by food poverty, Food Fight and the groups it takes inspiration from seek to address that suffering in such a way that is non-hierarchical, imagines a freer society we want to see, and which raises a fundamental critique of capitalism.

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Similar projects are in the works in Plymouth and here in North Devon. The nature of these types of projects means they are fairly straightforward to set up and run, and many people are coming together to do just that – if you want to get involved, get in touch with the North Devon Solidarity Network and we’ll get you in touch with these projects!

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We are the children Tom Stockley

We are the children/we were hurt too... The solution proposed is to cause MORE hurt M O R E v i o le n c e M O R E b r i g h t e y e s extinguished. This is why we're here, to lend our ears to say we will NOT disappear until WE are heard. We are the disillusioned/we are here to PROVE that we care/ that there is no man, no woman and no dead pig romances that can plan acts of war and insanity without us making a stand, so gather your bands and your words, turn your face and join me to say: NOT IN MY NAME

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Notes

SOLIDARITY SOLIDARITY was created by North Devon Solidarity Network. It is a collection of articles and poems on various topics with the common theme of “solidarity�.

North Devon Solidarity Network is an autonomous, democratic affinity group which aims to encourage and facilitate local grassroots activism in North Devon.

/northdevonsolidaritynetwork