Roll over northern rock: we can build a new movement on twopence a week

Among all the gloom and doom of the credit crisis, my friend Jen claims there is something to celebrate. Not all banks have gone to the wall: the Cooperative and other mutual or friendly societies are thriving up here in the north of England.

This weekend we went to see the last performance of Mikron’s Fair Trade. Reaping the Dividends, which tells the story of the Cooperative Movement from its beginnings in Toad Lane in Rochdale in 1844 when the first Co-op shop was opened. The show was written and produced before the current financial crisis really took hold – so it was interesting to hear that, during hard times in the 19th century, the reason for the success of the Cooperative, in comparison to other schemes, was their decision not to give credit. “Only deal with cash.” Members contributed twopence a week to get the Cooperative Wholesale Society off the ground, to provide affordable basic food and goods to poor families. And, of course, the movement was also built on that fundamental principle that, for some of us, still holds good today: that any surplus should be divided evenly between members, not hived off by managers.

After being away from Yorkshire for a long time, I’m proud to be back, and back to being a Co-op member. In fact, my mum claims that the first Co-op shop was opened in Meltham (in Yorkshire) - where I was born and bred – and not Rochdale (in Lancashire). We recall how, in the 1950s and 60s, Meltham Co-op ran its own farm, alongside a grocery store, a hardware store, a clothes store, a pharmacy and the village cinema. It built affordable housing. It offered interest-free loans and modest overdraft facilities to its members before payday. It also, importantly, acted as a savings bank, encouraging thrift and forward planning through the scheme to put away a small sum every week towards Christmas, family holidays - and funerals. Truly it provided ‘cradle to the grave’ security.

In contrast, today’s high street banks have made, and continue to make, their unique contribution to heightened insecurity. I’ve had personal experience of this over the past few months. (Mortgage, madame? Of course, but for not less than £25,000. Costing £2,000 in ‘administrative costs’. On condition that you employ a solicitor. Yes, we acknowledge that you are legally entitled to do your own conveyancing, but if you intend to do so you can’t have a NatWest mortgage. Oh and look, our statistics show that fewer people are taking out mortgages. This is clearly a client driven crisis!) And on the backs of these fleas are smaller fleas to bite us – viz the increase in modern day loan shark cold calling, with an insistence on speaking to the owner of the house: “we’d like to offer you debt advice” aka “let us get you deeper into debt.”


See Cristina’s blog on globalisation and cooperativism in Brazil

Fair Trade highlights the growth of the co-operative movement beyond Britain. There are more than 750 million co-operative members in over 100 countries today. One notable example: the 900 rural electricity co-operatives providing energy for 40 million people across the United States. Another: there is a Co-op for employees in the Emperor’s palace in Japan. Strangely enough, the day I picked up Mikron’s leaflet in Holmfirth, I was with my friend Mary, who comes from Warrington but for many years has been living in Mali. “Oh yes,” she tells me, “the French version of cooperativisme used to be very big in West Africa.” And apparently everyone in Mali knows about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

Across countries in the south, on a small scale, farmers are benefiting from Fair Trade agreements, workers’ cooperatives and credit unions - all of which initiatives are seen as providing more autonomy and better security to the poor than World Bank loans with its crippling conditions attached. Cooperativism is increasingly seen as an alternative world order . Also see an earlier post on women and 'the gift economy'.

I’ve picked up a related idea recently from south Wales: that of ‘time banking’. This is a mechanism promoting volunteerism in community development, which enables people to feel valued and to value each other for their contribution ‘outside paid work.’ The impact assessment report on this system, from the Wales Institute for Community Currencies, emphasises that “it is important to treat people as assets.” A concept western society largely seems to have forgotten.

The Mikron Theatre Company, itself a co-operative, provides a good example of operating on a human scale. Now 37 years old, supported by the Co-operative Membership and working out of the Mechanics Institute in Marsden, the company performs across the north of England in local venues – pubs, village halls, community theatres and even sometimes on their own barge – bringing culture, politics and solidarity to ordinary people.

Read more about Mikron at www.Mikron.org.uk

and the Wales Institute for Community Currencies at www.wicc.org


Note on the Tolpuddle Martyrs:
This was the group who, in the 1830s, set up the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, operating as a trade-specific benefit society. But as friendly societies had strong elements of what are now considered to be the role of trade unions, the organisers were jailed and subsequently sentenced to transportation to Australia...

One Love or Roots of violence in Jamaica

Post-election violence continues in Kenya
while fear of further violence mars the run up to Pakistan’s postponed elections. I’ve just returned from six weeks in Jamaica - another former British colony - so here’s a Jamaican perspective on Kenya and other events.

At the beginning of January 2008, countries in the north were taken aback at what was for them the unexpected eruption of tribal violence among the youth of Nairobi’s slums during the abusive election process in Kenya. No surprise to participants at the World Social Forum in Nairobi this time last year, when the People’s Parliament took over the daily press conference to declaim the corporatisation of Kenya and the WSF event itself.

In the Sunday Gleaner, 6th January 2008, Jamaican commentator Don Robotham highlights the fact that the 1960s Mau Mau rebellion led by Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya was a “major source of inspiration for our own anti-colonial struggles.”

Today there are other connections: “Like Jamaica, Kenya is a land of great and growing inequality, which is particularly hard on its large and semi-educated youth population.” Despite the difference in size, Robotham argues that “the two countries face similar problems… grappling with the pressures posed by globalisation on underdeveloped economies.”

Jamaica Observer

In the Sunday Gleaner, 16 December, just arrived in Jamaica, I’m able to read the latest crime figures: 1500 people murdered in 2007, an average of 41 per week. Recently appointed police commissioner, ex Scotland Yard Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin, characterises crime here as a national crisis linked to poverty. In other words, “depressed communities are factories that produce criminals.”

Despite these statistics I never feel afraid in Jamaica and colleagues here tend to agree that the violence is very much localised in particular communities. St Mary parish, where we’re staying, is recognised by the island’s police force to be the safest. If you’re taking a country walk, for example, you’ll be greeted with ‘peace’ ‘love’ or ‘respect’ and villagers will check that you know where you’re going and are ‘on the right track’.

A month later, on 14th January 2008, the front page of the Jamaica Observer carries the headline “Deadly raid on Tivoli”. Five men were shot dead in a joint police/military action against this so-called “garrison community” in west Kingston. 27th January, Kevin O’Brien Chang (Sunday Gleaner) estimates that the homicide rate in garrison communities (1,200 deaths per 500,000 population) is a level seen only in war zones.


The Cuban connection

At the museum at 56 Hope Road in uptown Kingston, we are reminded that reggae, like Fidel Castro, has long been big in Africa. In 1980 Robert Nesta Marley O.D. was invited by newly elected Robert Mugabe to play at an official ceremony in Harare, the newly named capital, to celebrate Zimbabwe’s independence. Unfortunately the ordinary citizens, excited and angry at being excluded from seeing these inspirational musician perform, rioted outside the fence. And the irony doesn’t stop there, given Zimbabwe’s great hopes for the future then and the situation there now.

Two years before Harare (1978) Marley played the One Love concert in Kingston with the aim of promoting social harmony on the island of Jamaica, physically uniting the two political leaders on stage. He was later to be the target of an assassination attempt.

Jamaica’s then Prime Minister, Michael Manley, after six years in office, had developed close links with Cuba and wanted to adopt the Cuban model of socialism as a means of addressing Jamaica’s failing economy and related problems.

On election, Manley had signalled his intention to pursue a 'third path' of 'non-aligned' states, which could steer between the Russian and US superpowers. He hoped that Jamaica could promote some kind of minor trading block, entice foreign investment and grant improvements to the working class through levies on industry. For a couple of years this strategy seemed successful with Manley able to grant the working class rising living standards. But US capitalism proved to have the whip hand. When Manley supported Cuba's involvement in the Angolan civil war the US administration withdrew economic aid and funded a destabilisation campaign.

Manley called for elections in the fall of 1980. The opposition won a landslide victory, and Edward Seaga became prime minister and minister of finance. He announced a conservative economic program that brought an immediate harvest of aid from the United States and the IMF. In October 1981, Jamaica broke off diplomatic relations with Cuba, and two years later it participated in the US-led invasion of Grenada.


Neighbourly connections

Price hikes - especially for fuel and basic foods - over the last few months under Golding’s new government, have hit Jamaica hard. Survival problems have been exacerbated by the fact that harvests were destroyed by unseasonal hurricanes in November / December. A lot of new construction for the tourist industry can be seen but this kind of development investment rarely benefits local people in need.

A Caribbean colleague is one of the lucky ones. He has a pretty little villa with a tiny private beach on the north coast, not far from where Noel Coward and Ian Fleming built their winter hideaways. This is somewhat ironically down to Manley’s rejected vision. Carlos recalls that “thirty years ago, the middle classes were leaving Jamaica in droves, crying ‘communism is coming’. They were literally selling off their houses for a song at the airport.”

Now he looks around and asks me: “If you moved here, how would you cope with the politics?”

In a neighbourly offer, Venezuela’s president Chavez has opened up the idea of bartering cheaper oil for a share of Jamaica’s bananas and sugar cane - an idea of great interest to the Jamaican Agricultural Society who would like to include the famous Blue Mountain coffee in the deal.

In addition to this offer to help on the economic front, other support is at hand: Cuba wants to increase their scholarship quota to Jamaicans, according to Ambassador Gisela Garcia Rivera at the Cuban Embassy in Kingston. Currently more than 400 young Jamaicans are studying in Cuba and she hopes to increase the number of places for others, especially those interested in medicine.

Inversely, Cuban teachers and doctors are keen to work in Jamaica and a number are already here in the northern parishes. Matthias Brown, member of the Westmoreland Cuba Friendship Association is enthusiastic about the connection and (a little disingenuously) explains that “over the past three years we have been celebrating the Bay of Pigs (when Cuba successfully repelled US invasion) in Westmoreland.”


The Wales connection

In contrast, earlier this year, Milton Brown, mayor of Clarendon, called on Wales to compensate his country for the legacy of poverty he says has been left here (reported in the Bangor Chronicle). Clarendon is the parish where, at the height of the sugar trade, the Pennant family owned 8,365 acres and 594 slaves totalling £40,667 in 1736. According to Welsh historian Jean Lindsay, “men and women were valued at prices ranging from £10 to £45 with ‘children priced at £5… Mules were priced at £20 each.” The family also had property in Spanish Town, where at that time the wealthy plantation owners had their town houses and which is now one of the deepest pockets of violence in Jamaica.

The huge fortune amassed from their plantations (where the agent wrote ‘nothing can be done without negroes’) enabled the Pennants to establish the world-famous Penrhyn quarry, the largest exporter of slate and still in operation - when I’m at home I can see it from my kitchen window in Bethesda. (And although this is argued to have ‘provided a major stimulus to economic and commercial development locally’, wages and conditions for workers amounted to local slave labour and resulted in the longest running strike in the area at the turn of the 20th century).

The lovely plantation home where we are staying in St Mary parish still serves as a reminder of 18th century injustices. I pick up a racy novel on slavery based in St Kitt’s by novelist Unity Hall (which could in fact be the name of a local community). This helps to emphasise the practice of social separation – of man from woman, parent from child - that was employed by slaveholders to keep black people in their place.

This practice seems to endure, as Chang argues:

“The nine predetermined garrisons still warp our politics. This nightmare scenario of a Jamaican government not freely and fairly elected should horrify anyone who values democracy.

“For despite their evil reputations as dens of iniquity and criminal havens, it’s not clear that the majority of Jamaicans want garrisons abolished… Are garrisons a form of social control? Are dons the bakra massas of our time, keeping the ghetto dwellers / field slaves under control so the rest of society / plantation great house can go on with business as normal?”

In comparison with the downward spiral of development and democracy in Jamaica, our ex-patriot British hosts were impressed with the industry and creativity they observed during a recent vacation in Cuba. While Cuban national elections are conducted peaceably on 20th January, with over 8 million voters at the polls and over 40% female representatives elected, Richard Crawford, UWI lecturer eloquently bemoans the situation in Jamaica:

“We need to clean up the police force, the political parties and those private interests who operate outside of the law, running drugs, laundering money, hiring hit-men, smuggling people or goods and not paying any taxes.”


Divide and rule

But why should we aspire to social harmony when we’re lucky enough to live in a liberal capitalist democracy?

As we check into the Terra Nova hotel on 28th December I’m shocked to read the newspaper headline that Benazir Bhutto has come to a violent end in Rawalpindi. That’s going to further destabilise the country, I can’t help but feel intentionally, in what R. Iriyan Ilango of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in New Delhi describes as the “bitter and abusive election process” up to January 8th 2008. And Wasim Akram, former cricket captain, fears the incident may affect the planned Australian tour to Pakistan.

After we drop my daughter off at Norman Manley airport, Ludlow the taxi driver tells me that Cuba has been excluded from Stanford 20/20 the new Caribbean cricket initiative. This is sponsored by US billionaire entrepreneur Sir Allen Stanford but unfortunately is subject to political pressure from his own capital. Due to the United States embargo against Cuba, organisations and citizens have to make application to, and receive special permission from the US Government to conduct any type of activity with Cuba. Stanford's application was denied.

The news comes as a huge disappointment not only to the Cuba team which has been training intensely for what was to be their first official tournament outside Cuba but also to the legends, cricket fans and Sir Allen who were looking forward to seeing what the heavily baseball-influenced nation could do with a cricket bat. The sport has taken of in recent years thanks to the Commission of Rescue and Development of Cricket in Cuba which has attracted some support from the UK government.

Jamaica, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, the partition of the Indian sub-continent… the preferred game has always been to divide and rule. The strategy still prevails as far as US foreign policy is concerned, in respect to now independent states with natural geographical, ethnic and economic links in Latin America and the Caribbean.

It’s a pity: the sound of leather on willow has surely been one of the few relatively benign legacies of British colonial history. Unfortunately even this can be used as a divider. In other words (at the risk of repeating myself ) whatever the future holds, we can be sure it’s not cricket.

Alternative ending: From the sugar trade to Ceylon tea plantations: someone else is reaping what we have sown.

NB. The Jamaican motto is “out of many one people”

Read more

The Jamaica Observer

The Gleaner

Spotlight on the Cuban experience

Sometimes I have good news to report. On 20th October – which is Cuba’s national day - I attended a prestigious event at Clwyd Theatre in Flintshire celebrating 25 years of solidarity between Cuba and Wales (Cymru Cuba).

“We’re proud that the Welsh Assembly has official government links with Cuba,” emphasised MP Elfyn Llwyd, highlighting the memorandum of understanding for cooperation in higher education, which has been developed by Welsh Minister for Education Jane Davidson in collaboration with Silvia Nogales, First Secretary of the Cuban embassy.

In contrast, explained Rob Miller, Director of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, our UK central government still does not have normalised relations with Cuba. Trade amounts to less than £4 million a year, despite assurances of “supporting open communications with Cuba rather than using an isolationist approach to influencing change” (Angela Smith). The impact on the Cuban people of the 40-year old US economic blockade continues to be officially ignored. In addition, international banks and other companies operating in Britain have been forced by the US to stop trading with Cuba – an act which both contravenes UK law and compromises our own sovereignty.

In spite of negative images of Cuba in the media, over 100,000 British tourists visit the island annually - not counting exchange visits, study tours and delegations of parliamentarians, trade unionists, academics and others. What do they find there? “People like us,” says Tyrone O’Sullivan, ex-miner chair of the worker-owned Tower Colliery in south Wales, “hard-working, good-natured, good at fixing things. Cuba still remains the example of what can be achieved by putting people first, of how ordinary people can change their own destiny.”

In summer of 2006 I got a little frustrated with the press coverage about Castro and wrote an article, archived on the Cynefin Y Werin (Wales Common Ground) website, called Cuba Sí: Let’s dream the impossible which began:

‘Cuba seems to be easy target practice for journalists these days: Fidel is dying, the revolutionary ideal is dead, communism is rotten and the vultures are circling. Soon the US will overrun the island, capitalism will be reinstated and the paradox which is Cuba will finally be resolved.’

Well, according to the speakers at Theatr Clwyd - and as I predicted - none of that has happened yet.



But what do the rest of us have to learn from the Cuban experience?

On October 10th London Metropolitan University saw the successful launch of the new International Institute for the Study of Cuba (IISC). At a time when Cuba is certainly facing a period of change, the IISC aims to provide an in-depth objective appraisal of the ‘social experience’ and to examine its holistic approach to development, particularly in the fields of education and health. IISC executive director, Professor Patrick Pietroni, former Dean of General Practice, who started mobilising resources for the institute just over a year ago, describes to me how ‘academics, managers and scientists in Cuba all seem to have an understanding of the social dimension of their work; an ability to link the macro to the micro and vice versa.’



The online, open-access International Journal of Cuban Studies - first issue due out in spring 2008 - will publish scholarly work on Cuba (and related topics) in all disciplines including science and medicine. So here’s the opportunity to develop some interesting ideas, for example: If the Cuban approach to development had been used in Africa rather than the World Bank model, would the continent be in much better shape? How is a caring holistic approach to housekeeping feasible when prevailing wisdom tells us that only market-oriented policies can bring prosperity? And how to explain the apparent contradiction that women are highly educated, economically independent and equally involved in community decision-making in Cuba, but not in so-called democracies like Mali?

His Excellency René Mujica Cantelar, Cuban ambassador to Britain, concluded his speech at Theatr Clwyd:

'We all need to address the issues of war, poverty, ecological disaster facing the world today, but it is not through weapons or market forces that we will overcome these challenges: it is through cooperation and solidarity.'

Read Cuba Sí. Let’s dream the impossible

Also read about the Caring Economy in Venezuela



human rights

Women, socialism and language

“ Taking part is not enough, you have to express your opinion.”

I found this quote on a card from Puntos de Encuentros
the leading women’s advocacy organisation in Nicaragua. What they say is true, but I know it’s not easy because it took me a long time to find my own voice as a writer. And like many other women I have found blogging a creative and empowering means of expressing my opinions and at the same time helping to raise other women’s voices.

I blogged live from the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January, and from the G8 alternative summit in Rostock in June. Now I’m grounded for a while in north Wales experiencing withdrawal symptoms. But fortunately the world keeps on spinning and the social movement keeps on moving. So in August musicians and political activists from the Americas and Europe descended on the tiny Welsh town of Machynlleth, home to the Centre for Alternative Technology for a Latino-Welsh extravaganza. They came to celebrate the living inspiration of the Chilean musician Victor Jara and discuss common environmental concerns – thus proving yet again that the sweet old-fashioned dream of socialism succeeds in eluding eradication and can be found bringing people together happily in what may seem the most unlikely of locations.

In fact, for me, the event is not surprising because there is a tradition of connection between Wales and Latin America which goes back to the first Welsh settlers to Patagonia in Argentina in 1865. More recently, solidarity groups in Wales have regularly exchanged visitors with Nicaragua and organised bilateral conferences on Cuba . This is the second Victor Jara festival in Machynlleth, and now links are being developed with Venezuela, since Cesar Aponte from the ministry for the environment was at the festival to talk about oil, equity and biosphere.



The reason for today’s connections, of course, is the common experience of oppression: Wales by the English kings, landlords, law, church and language; Latin American countries by dictators at home supported by successive greedy US regimes equally violating human rights including the right of free expression. The connection means that both Welsh civil society and politicians are active in LA solidarity: Jane Davidson, minister for education in the Wales Assembly, has visited Cuba on official business and Eluned Morgan (now Labour MEP) worked on the Nicaraguan coffee harvest. LA links are particularly strong among members of the Welsh Language Society : poets, musicians, writers like Angharad Tomos or educationalists like Branwen Niclas who have in their time been held in English prisons over Welsh language rights.

Mother tongue

Language was one of several themes of commonality in a cross-cultural initiative between women in Wales and women in Nicaragua last century (1995-6). This was a particular link with the multilingual Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, where, as in Wales, it is women who have been instrumental in maintaining indigenous language in the face of oppression by conquistadores, government, society or husbands. They have kept the mother tongue alive at home, in community life (especially Sunday school) in bringing up their own children, through stories, oral history, shared childcare and the development of a bilingual education programme.

At the conference in Bangor we discussed the paradox that while women are keepers of the language we are not always encouraged to use it ourselves in public. For this reason some researchers suggest that women’s speech is associated with powerlessness and can be characterised by over-politeness, hedging and hyper-correct grammar. Jennifer Coates has argued that these features do not actually correlate with the sex of the speaker but with social status, linked to previous experience and confidence in the context. “Powerless language has been confused with women’s language because in societies like ours women are usually less powerful than men.”

In mixed communication men are observed to interrupt three times as often as women, thus violating the rules of turn-taking. Conversely, women tend to act as facilitators, doing more of the interactive work and respecting others’ turns. Coates points out that “both men and women are disadvantaged by the existence of these two different models of conversation: women because their style leads to their being dominated (by men) in mixed groups and men because they lack competence in co-operative interaction.”

Angelica Brown, then councillor for the southern Atlantic coast region of Nicaragua highlighted: “Problems arise when it is a question of women taking on a public role because we underestimate our abilities of management and communication. For women in bilingual communities there is the additional worry of having to speak in public in your second or even third language.”


I have to keep on fighting

“Pay attention to the way you construct the present. It should look like the future that you dream of” (Alice Walker) is the message on another card from Puntos de Encuentro. Although the socialist experiment hasn’t always been so good for women, it has only been made possible by their active participation. While the reality may not live up to the dream, socialism in different Latin American contexts has opened up a space where women can raise their voice, take part in decision-making and are able to move, influence or inspire others. And, as Amanda Hopkinson says, ‘If you want to make a protest in Central America, you write a poem.’ The following two poems are not new but their writers’ dreams live on.

Firstly, the Creole painter Joan Beer, who died in 1984 not long after writing Love Poem, talks about the reality of personal relationships at a time when the Sandinistas (named after the anti-US-imperialism fighter, Sandino) were working for a greater love - for the sunrise, as the liberation of Nicaragua was called. The poignancy of ‘trying to keep back the night from falling’ is even greater in retrospect, given the World Bank’s dismantling of developments in health, education and equality during the 1990s.

Oscar, yuh surprise me
assin for a love poem

Ah sing a song a love fa meh contry
small contry, big lite
Hope for de po’, big headache fa de rich
Mo’ po’ dan rich in de worl
mo’ people love fah meh contry

Fa meh contry name Nicaragua
Fa meh people ah love dem all
Black, Miskito, Sumo, Rama, Mestizo
So yuh see fa me, love poem complete
‘cause ah love you too.

Dat no mek me erase de moon
an de star fran de firmament.

Only somehow wen ah rememba
how you bussin yo ass
To defend dis sunrise, an keep back
de night fran falling
Ah know dat tomara we will have time
fa walk under de moon an stars
Dignify an free, sovereign
children a Sandino.

In the conclusion of the second poem, the recently deceased Claribel Alegria expresses her choice more starkly:

Because I want peace and not war
I want to keep on fighting.
Because there are liberated territories
Where people learn to read
And the sick are cured
And the fruits of the earth belong to all,
I have to keep on fighting.

Note:
Creole is one of the languages used in Bluefields on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua. As a community they were socialised to believe that Creole is just ‘bad’ English, not a real language, especially by the powerful Moravian church and its schools. Comments from afro-caribbean activists:

“The church teaches us women to be humble – that is, stupid!” Marjorie McKenzie.

‘When my husband is at home, we all speak Spanish. When he’s away, we speak bad Creole.’ Shorlaine Howard.


Further links

OpenDreams live on blog

El sueno existe

History is a weapon, Joan Jara (downloadable)

Lovers and Comrades, Women’s resistance poetry, edited by Amanda Hopkinson, The Women’s Press, 1989
Welsh Writing 1960-1985, Ned Thomas, 1996

We share the same struggle, edited by Patricia Daniel, 1996 (downloadable)

Climate change: sustainability, socialism and music

My latest blog for openDemocracy.net covers El Sueno existe the Victor Jara festival in Machynlleth, mid-Wales, which brought together environmentalists, musicians, academics and political activists from Latin America (Chile, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba..) and Europe (Wales, England, Italy, Finland...)to discuss practical solutions to climate change actually working today, as well as socio-economic scenarios for the future. I interviewed both women and men on a range of issues and came away inspired by seeds of hope, including the example of political and economic empowerment of women in Venezuela.

Please check out the blog here openDreams live on