Water being brought ashore from barges for the parched island of Tokelau in the South Pacific

According to this news report, new research published at the World Water Congress in Brazil has shown that there’s more than enough freshwater in the world to meet the needs of the massively expanding human population of 21st century Earth.

This has been treated as good news, as a sign that the challenge of surviving the current ecological crisis is going to be a bit easier. It’s easy to see why you would think that when confronted with the prospect of a war in Libya that is at least partly about control of water resources; reports that show that not only developing world megacities face water crises in the near future, but that shortages could affect cities as close to the heart of global wealth and power as New York and Los Angeles; and the news that South Pacific nations have declared a state of emergency due to the fouling of their supply by the saltwater of rising sea levels.

The research would seem to fly in the face of masses of scientific studies that all show that the majority of the world’s population is going to have difficulty in accessing fresh water in the coming decades. But in fact, this report seems to be just yet another example of how mainstream scientific opinion by experts in all kinds of fields, when assessing the problems faced by humanity, and followed through to their logical conclusions, are profoundly at odds with the dominant social and economic organisation of global society. Alain Vidal of the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF), argues.

“Yes, there is scarcity in certain areas, but our findings show that the problem overall is a failure to make efficient and fair use of the water available in these river basins. This is ultimately a political challenge, not a resource concern.”

There’s no denial here of the real water crisis affecting the world; just a simple acknowledgment of its roots causes. Like most of the different strands of the intertwined global economic/ecological crisis, water scarcity is a result of the way we organise our society on this planet, through capitalism and militarised imperialism. With global co-operation and a commitment to fair and equitable sharing of resources, there’s enough water on Earth to sustain many more humans than are now alive; just like we could feed that many people too under different socio-economic conditions. Researcher Dr. Simon Cook argues:

“[There's] complete fragmentation of how river basins are managed amongst different actors and even countries where the water needs of different sectors — agriculture, industry, environment and mining — are considered separately rather than as interrelated and interdependent…In many cases, we need a complete rethink of how government ministries take advantage of the range of benefits coming from river basins, rather than focusing on one sector such as hydropower, irrigation or industry.”

Add to that the fact that competing powers view water resources as strategic assets to be controlled and denied their enemies, and you begin to see the need for major changes to the structure of planetary civilisation in order to survive.

One of the key issues for any movement to save human civilisation from collapse is not allowing the global elite, the rich minority of the human race, to set the terms of understanding the crisis. Water shortages are an issue of inequality on a global scale, not overall supply – don’t let those eating most of the pie tell you there’s not enough to go around.

More generally, in the last 10 years the market price of uranium (the required fuel of nuclear reactors) has increased dramatically, as more and more countries submit to the nuclear industry’s attempt to position itself as the saviour from climate change and fossil fuels (an idea which I am highly sceptical of, but that’s a post for another time.) There are pessimistic and optimistic scenarios about when the world will reach peak uranium, but, just the same as oil, uranium is a finite resource. That means there will come a point where we have reached the maximum possible global production of it, and after that production will decline to the point where we’re expending more energy to get it out of the ground than we’re gaining in nuclear energy.

Some of the more pessimistic scenarios argue that the peak was already reached in the early 1980s and that production has declined ever since. It’s certainly the case that there are far fewer new uranium mining projects waiting to be opened up, meaning that it’s harder for the market to respond to higher prices by increasing production. This inelastic price structure helped contribute to a price bubble for uranium in 2007, and although the price has gone down since then it hasn’t returned to the levels seen in the 90s, remaining at an elevated level.

Uranium mining is already unable to supply the 65,000 tonnes needed by the world’s nuclear reactors every year, meeting only about 70% of that demand. The shortfall is made up by re-using supplies from other sources, including decommissioned nuclear warheads. This is obviously a solution with a limited shelf life. Pessimistic estimates argue that there will be a serious problem for uranium supply by the 2040s.

Now, an interesting but little known fact is that Col. Gadaffi’s Libya has for decades been interested in the suspected large uranium deposits on the fringes of its territory, in sparsely inhabited desert regions whose control has been disputed between Libya and its neighbour Chad.

Gadaffi had a long-standing interest in nuclear technology. Obviously he wished to see Libya taken seriously as an important power, and the ultimate way to do that is to develop nuclear weapons. Numerous attempts were made by the Libyan government to pursue this, including a mission to China to try and buy them off the shelf, and even contact with the Austrian engineer who led the team that developed modern nuclear centrifuges. Libya as also had a long standing interest in nuclear power plants, and has had several different agreements with foreign powers to try and develop its capacity. Recently it was reported (although of course we should take any reports coming out of Libya in the mainstream media with a pinch of salt) that the pro-NATO rebels in Libya had discovered large stores of uranium yellow cake.

Chad, Libya and the Aozou Strip

Libya may not have much in the way of uranium resources on its own territory as is now internationally recognised. But from 1978 until 1987 it was actively involved in trying to conquer territory from Chad that is believed to have significant uranium reserves. The Chadian-Libya conflict involved Libya backing political factions in the north of Chad, who provided infantry that was matched by Libyan air support and armour. At its highpoint, this strategy allowed Gadaffi to cut Chad in half, and deny control of the north to the government in N’Djamena.

Libya was eventually driven out of Chad after a last intense phase of fighting known as the ‘Toyota war’ , so-called because of the use of pickup trucks with mounted machines guns and missiles by highly mobiles Chadian forces. (Many news sources noted the strategy of just buying pickup trucks en masse and using them as military vehicles by the Libyan government in their conflict with the rebels, and remarked on it as an innovative idea, ignorant of the fact that it had already been used to inflict a defeat on Gadaffi.)

Prior to this French special forces had provided vital support to expel Libya from the Tibesti mountains in Chad, also believed to have significant uranium reserves. The final victory, which evicted Libya from Chadian territory altogether, and crucially the desert border region between them known as the Aozou strip, would not have been possible without significant military support from France and the US. The Reagan provided Chad with much more effective weaponry, including the same Stinger anti-air missiles they gave to their future enemies in Afghanistan. The US had more far reaching ambitions in the conflict, seeing Chad as a weapon that could be used to unseat Gadaffi altogether.

Since the late 80s the conflict has been ostensibly resolved, with Libya defeated and Chadian control over the disputed territories internationally recognised. However, Libyan interest in Chadian politics has not waned, with Gadaffi repeatedly attempting to court Chadian leaders as part of his greater efforts to bring about African unity with himself in a leading position.

The Tibesti mountains seen from the international space station

As I noted in a previous post, France retains a huge interest in controlling its former colonies in Africa, including Chad. Chadian uranium is a major strategic concern for an imperialist power so dependent on nuclear energy. The fact that France, the guiding hand behind Chadian forces, was involved in a proxy conflict with Libya for decades is not well known. The whole episode was a war which I had never heard of before I began looking into the causes of the current conflict. Given the fact that Libya renounced many of its nuclear ambitions as part of its deal to regain the support of the west a few years ago, and that it was defeated in Chad, uranium is not a plausible single cause for the conflict between Libya and the Euro-American powers. However, if we look at the constellation of factors and strategic interests that came to make Libya the next target for their war machine, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the existence of a state that’s strong financially and militarily, and is not controlled by the western powers, on the border of Chad is something that wasn’t long-term tolerable for the imperial masters of Paris.

If you’re like me (a little bit allergic to maths), the idea of watching a video about algorithms might not grab you, but this is well worth watching. It’s a great and thought provoking talk about the role that complex computer based maths has taken in shaping our society, most prominently the financial markets, but also all kinds of aspects of our lives, from the physical shape of cities to which movies get made, based on mathematical attempts to predict mass taste.

The most important part of what Kevin Slavin talks about in this video is the role of such complex algorithms in facilitating the financialisation of the economy. In a world with completely subjected to globalised capitalism, there’s very few places left to squeeze profit from, and in recent decades that has meant that the finance sector has been used to develop increasingly arcane methods of moving capital around in lieu of more productive economic activity (you know, like making stuff.) This has in part been possible because there are now these incredibly complicated pieces of machine maths to try and calculate risks precisely, allowing banks to lend to people they wouldn’t have considered a safe bet before (when humans made the decisions.) Of course they are not all-knowing full proof systems, and the consequences of this are ultimately felt in the continuing financial crisis and recession.

There’s one part of the talk where I think Slavin distills an essential truth about the anti-human nature of capitalism. He talks about how, in order for these algorithms to maximise the profits they can generate, these algorithms need to be as few micro-seconds as possible away from communication with the rest of the world via the internet. So in New York, skyscrapers that happen to be near the exchange are being hollowed out of anything needed by humans, and replaced with infrastructure for servers running financial algorithms. . .

“. . .because you, inch for inch and pound for pound and dollar for dollar, none of you could squeeze revenue out of that space like the Boston Shuffler could.”

Of course it’s tempting to see in this humanity being totally eclipsed by some kind of financial SkyNet. There are definitely real concerns to be aired about the leaving of so much decision making to machines. However, it’s important to see the big picture. These algorithms behave unpredictably, and maybe you could even say they evolve, but they are not self-aware. They are ultimately the product of design by humans, in the service of a human designed system, capitalism. The algorithms are in fact advanced forms of programming, and the author of the programme is globalised, financialised capitalism.

The problem is that capitalism is a system that doesn’t value human life, or things that you or I might find to be important priorities in life. The only things that have value in our existing system, a system that is violently collapsing in front of our eyes under the weight of its own contradictions, are those that can be expressed in terms of their exchange value. In the last days of capitalist Earth, it’s fitting to see that human beings are now transforming the face of the planet itself to better to allow non-human mathematical systems work their occult money squeezing procedures just a little bit faster, and that this has been prioritised as a human activity against the innumerable more important things we could be doing with ourselves, and with our complex machines. To do that we need to re-programme the underlying system, and re-value human beings and the world they live in.

Bonus: This is the website for Epagogix, one of the companies referred to briefly in the talk. They use algorithms to try and analyse stories, and predict which films are going to be financially successful. Platinum Blue is a company that does the same thing with music. They attempt to analyse mathematically all the elements that can be measured in a narrative or a song, and then try and reduce works of art to what will be maximally profitable. Seemingly, their systems work fairly robustly – the computers correctly predicted that Norah Jones would make hit records, and she was pushed by her corporate record company accordingly. However, does this mean that we get better works of art? Or do we get ones that are computer designed to be most profitable, rather than something that is subjecticely beautiful to human appreciation? Maybe have a look at how many even tolerable big Hollywood movies in recent years for your answer.

The powers of the Atlantic world, both European and North American launched yet another assault against a state that was not sufficiently under their control back in March. The official reason for the war, accepted with little voice of opposition in the attacking countries, is that its necessary to protect Libyans from a crazy government bent on wiping them out. Of course, the fantasy that the governments of the Euro-American powers as humanitarian crusaders is hard to believe when you take a look at the real ways these wars are carried out.

So why, at a time when the financial and social collapse of European countries is painfully obvious, are their governments spending millions of dollars every day to try and kick Col. Gadaffi out of power? As is usually the case, there isn’t a single overriding cause for the war. For example, despite the truth of saying that Iraq was a war for oil, in many ways it was as much about what money would be used to trade Iraq’s oil.

The natural reaction of many may have been that maybe Libya is about oil as well. Libya produces only 2% of the world’s oil. That’s not unimportant, especially considering that oil supplies anywhere are only going to get more difficult to find and expensive in the next few decades, and the world’s powers are already jostling for who controls the supply to the others. But it’s not as decisive a factor as it would be in a country like Iraq, where there’s much more vast reserves to be exploited. Below are five factors you might not have considered about why we’re at war in Libya:

5) Satellites and telecommunications. Until relatively recently, the African continent was dependent on its former rulers in Europe for access to satellite communications. Western companies like Intelsat used their monopoly position in space technology to fleece Africa for basic communications, collecting $500 million a year by making the most expensive place on Earth to make a phone call.

From 1992 onwards, African governments decided to actively try and extract themselves from such a blatant scam by putting up their own communications satellite. But western banks and the IMF failed to provide loans to make it possible. The project needed $400 million as a one off payment to save African countries more than that every year, meaning they would easily be able to pay it back. But with international lenders protecting the profits of European satellite companies, the project was stuck.

The logo of Regional African Satellite Communication

That is until Gadaffi stepped in with the cash, putting $300 million up to launch Africa’s first ever communications satellite in 2007. Although it was built and delivered by a European company, it’s not under their control. What’s more is that it has opened the door to African use of space, with established space powers such as Russia and China sharing technology and providing launch facilities for African countries. Algeria is now aiming to have the first satellite built and launched from African soil by 2020.

African countries have historically been divided from each other by state borders, infrastructure systems and communications networks that had been designed with the needs of colonial powers to extract resources in mind, rather than the needs of Africans themselves. Access to cheaper telecommunications is helping for the first time to connect people all over the continent by phone, broadcasting and internet. Even in rural areas people have access to distance learning, and practical information on sustainable technology and agriculture. The growth of African communications can have a transformative aspect that’s unimaginable for someone living in a post-industrial advanced capitalist country.

The west probably would have funded the project in the end, but only through extortionate loans that would have stuck African countries for interest for decades afterwards, effectively wiping out the savings they were making and continuing dependence on former colonial powers. So by putting up the cost, Gadaffi was not only depriving European satellite companies of $500 million per year, but also in the long term meant western banks missed out on potentially billions in debt repayments that would have kept coming for a long time.

4) Immigration and racism. For years Libya and the European powers were engaged in a pretty sick and inhuman diplomatic game with human lives as the chess pieces. Huge numbers of people from throughout Africa head north every year to try and escape the effects of centuries of European exploitation by getting into Europe itself. Many of them travel across the sea from Libya. The Libyan government controlled the flow of people making it across, and made deals with Italy to accept migrants they expelled (as you can imagine, they don’t have the greatest conditions when they get to Libya). In return, they used this leverage to get economic concessions out of the European powers. Just last year, Gadaffi notoriously traveled to Italy to declare Europe should give him 5 billion Euros to prevent Africans from reaching Europe.

The reason why this is important is racism plain and simple, the anti-immigrant politics that is powerful throughout the EU that fears being “swamped” by Africans. Gadaffi exploited these fears expertly, claiming that if Libya didn’t intervene

“Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black, as there are millions who want to come in . . . We don’t know what will happen, what will be the reaction of the white and Christian Europeans faced with this influx of starving and ignorant Africans. We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”

Gadaffi with the equally awful Italian leader Silvio Berlusconi last year

His attitude has never been anything but cynical, seeing African people willing to risk their lives to escape poverty as a bargaining chip with the European powers. In seeking a more compliant and easily controlled Libyan government, one of the objectives is to get a regime in place that will regard rounding up poor Africans and keeping them out of Europe as the duty of a responsible western ally, and not something they are willing to trade for concessions.

3) Water. Part of the multi-faceted crisis facing global capitalist society is due to the collapse in supply of many vital natural resources. Pretty much the most fundamental of all is fresh water. Human beings everywhere cannot survive without freshwater, but we are increasingly depleting its availability throughout the world through pollution of the supply, growing urbanisation and irrigation intensive capitalist agriculture. Just like they want to get their hands on oil fields and pipelines, any world power that doesn’t want to be dominated by others in the 21st century is gearing up to grab water sources as well. This is the reason Israel has no intention of giving Syria back any of the territory it grabbed in the 60s in the Golan Heights; and why nothing short of a global nuclear war is ever going to convince China to give up Tibet.

The UN Environmental programme warns that within the next 50 years around 3 billion people are going to be chronically short of water. This is particularly a problem in the Middle East, which has 5% of the world’s population but just 1% of its water supply. If you ever doubted that global society has pushed itself to the brink of collapse through ecological stupidity, consider that we already live in a world where wars are taking place for control of water sources; and Libya is one of them.

Epic scale: pipes being laid in the Sahara

Col. Gadaffi is the type of leader who sees himself as one of history’s greats, a “look on my works ye mighty and despair” type guy. He wants there to be a legacy of his rule that will be remembered for centuries. And in the Great Man Made River project, he may just have found one.

Underneath the Libyan desert is the world’s largest aquifer of fossil water – that is, water that built up underground and has been sealed there since the last ice age. The Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System was discovered in the 50s during oil exploration. When Gadaffi came to power he started preparing for a mega-project to exploit this resource, which began construction in 1984. The Great Man Made River Project is the largest network of underground pipes and aqueducts in the world, with 1,300 wells that are mostly more than 500 metres deep. It delivers six and a half million cubic metres of water to thirsty Libyan cities every day, and there’s enough water there to keep doing so for the next 1000 years. But it wouldn’t have been accessible without the massive infrastructure investment of the Libyan government.

The ultimate aim of the project is to allow Libya to become agriculturally self-sufficient (currently 20% of its imports are food) by mass irrigation and reclaiming areas from the desert. Such a huge supply of water is important not just for Libya, but even more so for neighbouring countries, and many of their leaders attended its opening ceremonies. Libya has a population of just 4 million, whereas Egypt has 55 million crowded into a narrow strip around the Nile, which is becoming increasingly taxed by its overuse for water and agriculture. Gadaffi has previously talked of allowing Egyptians to migrate to Libya and being opening up areas of the desert to farming with water from the project.

The powers attacking Libya today are extremely worried about the outcome of the revolutions taking place througout the Arab world. There is no guarantee that countries such as Egypt and Tunisia will end up with governments that are easily controlled enough for the liking of Europe and the US. But if millions of Egyptians were dependent on a water infrastructure that the west could control following the conquest of Libya, then there’s a serious limit to the amount of opposition a future Egyptian government could mount to western control.

Of course, any mega-project of engineering is prone to unforeseen consequences, and the fossil water under Libya is a non-renewable resource that won’t last forever. Extracting the world’s largest aquifer of its kind could have serious geological consequences. But it’s impossible to ignore that the Great Man Made River is one of the greatest feats of engineering humans have ever completed, and cost more than the Three Gorges Dam or the large Hadron Collider (a cost that was met entirely by the Libyan state, see below). Control of it may be something the European powers think worth fighting for.

2) Banks. Finance and international aid has been the means by which the former colonial powers in Europe and the new one in the US have controlled African countries since they became independent. Western banks loan them money which must be paid back at insane interest, and which comes with conditions attached – that governments must give up control over their own economies, privatising and outsourcing the running of their economies, which in practice means handing them over to foreign companies.

Libya is an African country that has managed to maintain a higher level of independence from the west because it has kept its Central Bank under state control, and retains the power to issue its own money. This stands in stark contrast to, for example, the many former French colonies that use a currency that was created during colonial times and continue to be guaranteed by the French Treasury.

Irrigated land in the Libyan desert, visible from space

Coupled with the profits of the oil industry, this has allowed Libya to economically independent, guarantee a fairly high standard of living for its citizens, with people guaranteed basic subsistence, subsidised food, free education and free healthcare, leading to the highest lifespan in Africa. The Libyan state has substantial cash reserves, as opposed to the massively indebted governments that are attacking it. The level of economic independence that Libya enjoys from international finance is not something the global capitalist order was likely to tolerate for long.

The Libyan government’s wealth has not only benefited Libyans, and on top of the already mentioned support for the satellite project there’s the hugely economically important support for financial integration of African countries. They were providing significant funds towards the establishment of an African Monetary Fund and an African Central Bank, leading towards an African single currency.

These organisations are planned to replace the role of the international financial institutions controlled by the US and Europe, and have barred non-African countries from becoming members. By doing so, Africa would perhaps begin to finally get some measure of independence from the foreign powers that have dominated and exploited their economies for centuries. That would be intolerable for the western financial system and European powers.

Indeed, as an article in Asia Times notes, one of the first things the Libyan rebel forces did back in March was to create a central bank, not usually something that is top of the list of things you need to get done in a revolution. Robert Wenzel wrote in the Economic Policy Journal:

I have never before heard of a central bank being created in just a matter of weeks out of a popular uprising. This suggests we have a bit more than a rag tag bunch of rebels running around and that there are some pretty sophisticated influences.

And CNBC senior editor John Carney, asked,

“Is this the first time a revolutionary group has created a central bank while it is still in the midst of fighting the entrenched political power? It certainly seems to indicate how extraordinarily powerful central bankers have become in our era.” (Both quotes from Asia Times).

The rebels declared that their central bank was the only one with legitimacy over monetary affairs in Libya, and they are clearing preparing the way for surrendering Libya’s financial independence to the conquering Euro-American forces and their banks if they manage to take power.

1) Geopolitics. What these different strands add up to is that the west is unhappy with the degree of independence Libya under Gadaffi has been able to exercise from their control. Without his government being indebted to him they can’t use economic levers to control his politics. That financial independence has allowed Libya to become something of a power in Africa, driving forward processes of integration that could start removing the continent from colonial control. The model to emulate is the integration of Latin America pioneered by Venezuela, meaning that many countries there are escaping from foreign dominance. The structures of a united African continent that Libya backs are opposed to many smaller regional groupings such as ECOWAS in the west or the SADC in the south that are funded and controlled by the European Union. He’s also forged economic alliance with the emerging economic world powers of BRICS, particularly China.

One of the reasons that the US has left most of the actual war fighting in Libya to Britain and France (apart from the obvious ones that they’re skint and already busy in a bunch of other places) is that North Africa is somewhere that is accorded greater geo-strategic importance in Europe than the US. France in particular, has never ceased seeking to dominate its former colonies through undermining governments and economic dependency. Both Britain and France have a long history of interest in the region that Libya is in, a fact that that became vividly clear to me when I realised that British forces are now fighting over places where my Grandfather fought in the Second World War.

The European powers regard North Africa, and the African continent generally, as their legitimate sphere of influence, and their continued domination of the continent was threatened by the projects underwritten by the Libyan government may fatally undermine that. Their model for this war, as they explicitly say themselves, is Kosovo. A war for “humanitarian reasons” in fact is an all-out assault on a non-compliant government, aimed at replacing it with one that will give over control of the economy to western banks and allowing its territory to become a massive western military base. Such an easily controlled regime would be particularly useful given the uncertainty over what will happen in neighbouring countries such as Egypt and Tunisia.

None of this is meant to imply that I think the Libyan government is fantastic or that I’m cheering for the continued rule of Col. Gadaffi. His crazy pronouncements make him one of the most hilarious leaders of a state (easy to say when I don’t live there I know) in the world, with his bizarre sci fi visions of the future, his development of the world’s safest car, and his declaring himself “the king of kings of Africa.” The point about Gadaffi is that he’s the type of leader that the world’s global Euro-American powers don’t tolerate any more if they can possibly avoid it – a strong man great leader who retains a state apparatus with independence from the global market and able to allow Pharaohnic feats that demonstrates its power, such as the Great Man Made River.

Any war takes place for a complex web of reasons, and while this list might not be exhaustive, if we want to have any understanding of this latest military adventure by our bankrupt governments, it’s time to look at what Libya has actually done to attract the wrong kind of attention.

There’s been yet another paucity of posts on here since the start of the month. This time I have a decent excuse though – I’ve been taking part in the unbelievably awesome occupation at Glasgow University that has given rise to the Free Hetherington Research Club.

Down the bottom I’ve put a little piece I wrote earlier in the occupation about my feelings about this unique liberated space we’ve collectively created here. It remains something I’m incredibly proud to be part of. This post however is not about that.

This post is how I am disgusted by the actions of a minority of students. A vocal but unrepresentative group who claim to speak on behalf of others, and in doing so harm the interests of their fellow students. I’m talking about these haters.

On Saturday, a group of students in Glasgow were the latest to express their disgust at the conduct of National Union of Students President Aaron Porter. Porter is an odious Labour careerist of the highest order. His only interest is in using his position as a springboard for a future sinecure as a Labour MP, following in the footsteps as other such NUS luminaries as the noted racists Phil Woolas and Jack Straw.

This is what a real kettle looks like Aaron

The fact of the matter is that nobody would have every heard of Aaron Porter if it weren’t for the fact that students took direct action against the headquarters of the Tories last November. His name was made by his own unforgivable betrayal of those students, when he called for them to be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” This of course was badly out of step with the reaction of working class people and ordinary students around the UK, who were delighted to see someone finally taking some radical action after the initial months of the ConDem assault on the welfare state.

In a Guardian piece the day after Millbank, Porter claimed that he would “make no apology for condeming the mindless violence of a few that tried to undermine the cause of a great many.” Except that, soon enough, he would. As November wore on he began to realise just how badly out of step he was with the mood among students. In another interview with the Guardian, he apologised for his own “spineless dithering”, and pledged to give material support to student occupations. A promise which, of course, he reneged on.

Following the initial demonstration that led to Millbank, the NUS under Porter’s leadership completely failed to organise any kind of coherent opposition to the raising of tuition fees for English students. While bodies like the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts were regularly putting tens of thousands of people on to the street, and here in Glasgow we were outrunning police in our hundreds to show our opposition, the NUS was organising a “candlelit vigil” against the government, and refusing to endorse the mass collective action of anti-cuts students.

More importantly, while these same students were being beaten in the streets by the cops, while children were being illegally held in the freezing cold for hours in kettles, the so-called leader of the student movement was not only silent, but was boasting of how proud he was to have “worked closely with the police.” Lest we forget, these are the same cops that hit Alfie Meadows over the head, requiring emergency brain surgery, and hauled Jody McIntyre, who has cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair and dragged him across the road. To remain silent in the face of such state sanctioned abuse goes beyond “spineless dithering” and becomes a knife in the back of students from our supposed leader. This man has forfeited any claim to speak on our behalf. And yet he continues to do so, shamelessly appearing in the media frequently as if he represented our views. He does not, he is an out of touch sell out.

Having shot to notoriety through such ridiculous behaviour, Porter now finds himself to be a not entirely popular figure among student activists. In Manchester he was chased through the streets by hundreds of angry students, and was escorted away by his good pals, the cops. This was the same incident were he and his people disgracefully tried to falsely accuse protesters of racism. When greeted with the chant “Aaron Porter, shame on you, you’re a fucking Tory too,” he tried to claim that in fact the last line had been “Tory Jew”. This claim was dutifully picked up and reported by the right wing press, principally the Telegraph.

"We've got your back just like you've got ours."

At the time he announced over Twitter that he would “not bow to racist abuse.” Another claim that he would later row back on, recently claiming that he had never said he’d heard anti-Semitic chants (a flat out lie.) The greatest problem with this incident wasn’t the appalling smear that he made against fellow students (although this was of course reprehensible), but the fact that it devalues the ability of real anti-racists to call out anti-Semitism when it really happens. It was a cynical exploitation of the very real problem of racism and anti-Semitism for personal political gain. Not unlike the Queen Margaret Union magazine’s ridiculous comparison of our occupation to Vichy France, it is frankly offensive to anyone who takes these issues seriously.

(Incidentally, Aaron Porter is not Jewish, but as part of his campaign of lies he was happy to let people think he is.)

Porter now finds himself in the position that, as a result of his disgusting scab sell-out behaviour, he faces oppostion and protest wherever he appears in public. Last Saturday he was at Glasgow University for a young Labour conference. Of course, he wasn’t here to express support for the Free Hetherington, one of the most astonishing and inspirational of all the current wave of student occupations. He made no public statements about the devastating cuts to a swathe of Glasgow’s most successful courses, which are going to impact Scottish culture and society as a whole. No, he was here to act, yet again, as a careerist politician. Fortunately, not without opposition.

A group of us waited outside the lecture theatre where he was to greet him. After lots of dithering by the flummoxed party hacks on the door, they took the decision to offer him up as a sacrificial lamb to avoid any of the other conference goers having to cope with the awful sight of real student activists expressing their opinion.

As he came out of the door, our minds went blank with the shock that we were confronting the sell out himself in the flesh. He made his intentions clear by moving away from us as rapidly as possible – he had no real intention of engaging with us, but intended instead to run away from any kind of debate. As he got outside we caught up with him, and started a piece of symbolic non violent direct action. We joined hands and surrounded him in a circle (not making any physical contact with him), and chanted “Aaron Porter, shame on you, now you’re in a kettle too,” whilst others let him know exactly how we felt about his behaviour over recent months.

The only person that carried out anything that could remotely be compared to an assault during this incident was Porter, who pushed us (as stated, we weren’t touching him), and tried to slap one person’s camera out of their hand, breaking the strap. He eventually ducked under our arms and did a comedy bolt, in a shite Benny Hill style escape up the steps by the QM and away. Any attempts to pursue were made impossible by all protesters being doubled over with laughter at his bizarre antics.

This small action has led to an outburst of faux outrage by the right at Glasgow University that is truly beyond satire. Apparently the two undergraduate unions intend to release a statement condemning those who took part, and allegedly some figures from their boards have in fact called for our immediate removal from the HRC and disciplinary action to be taken. They have also engaged in a personal campaign of abuse and hate mail via Facebook private messages.

Let’s be clear right now about one of the key issues here – the action was not decided on collectively by the whole occupation, but was an autonomous one by some of the folk who are here. The deliberate attempt to conflate the protest with the Free Hetherington occupation belies an agenda, an agenda by those who have been waiting for an excuse to attack the occupation.

I absolutely respect people’s right to disagree with the action that some students took. Indeed, we have offered people the right to come and voice their concerns in person at the occupation, rather than abusing us over the internet. Of course, they haven’t had the courage of their convictions to express themselves to our faces, but instead jumped straight into issuing ignorant statements and setting up Facebook groups.

But using it as a pretext to try and deprive others of their degree is disgusting. When QMunicate has published disgusting misogynist columns that do real harm to women, we haven’t called for the authors to be kicked out of uni. When GUU members smashed up the QM a couple of years back I didn’t go crying to the Principal.

The fact of the matter is that these people, having completely ignored the occupation in the first couple of weeks, have now seized this incident in an attempt to manufacture a moral panic false controversy in order to attack the occupation. As one commenter on Facebook succinctly and accurately put it, “The aspiring political class don’t like it when you attack one of their own.”

The people behind this right wing attack on the protesters are people who aspire to be our future political leaders. They, like Aaron Porter, must play the game. That means keeping the terms of political debate strictly within defined limits, and squashing any dissent outside of these self imposed boundaries. The extent to which they are threatened by the initiative being seized by the Free Hetherington is revealing.

Some of the haters have questioned the use of the chant “You’re a fucking Tory too” at a Labour Party member. But the confinement of political debate within the narrow neoliberal consensus in the UK doesn’t end with student politics. The Labour Party have completely failed to put up any serious opposition to the government, because if they were now in power they would be cutting just as hard. Ed Miliband won’t even march against cuts, let alone support strikes and direct action. Labour is in power at a local level throughout Scotland, where they refuse to defy Tory cuts and use their position to implement them. To be truly anti-cuts, you have to oppose all who implement them, whichever of the four main political parties implement them.

That’s not to mention the much more immediate question of Aaron Porter conducting secret negotiations with the Tories, with the publication of emails in which he encouraged them to cut bursaries and grants as an alternative to raising fees, a new low even for this sell out merchant.

Then there’s the criticism that we are hypocrites for condemning kettling and then using the tactic ourselves. This comment could only be made by people who have no idea what they’re talking about, either with regards to the action at the weekend, or simply from the point of view that they have never themselves been in a kettle. Those of us who have know the reality of being held for hours in the freezing cold with no food or water or toilet access, and what it’s like to be assaulted by police when we try to leave. Aaron Porter doesn’t know anything about this, because he’s failed to take part in the mass protests of the last few months that have been kettled. Our symbolic, theatrical action aimed to make him try and get a glimpse of what it’s like, but it was very far from the reality. We never touched Porter when he tried to push free, as opposed to what the police would have done – battered fuck out of him. He was held for less than 5 minutes while we made our point.

Others have asked what we hoped to achieve by this action, claiming some kind of open debate with Porter would have been more effective. Leaving aside the issue of how much we’d like to debate with someone who wants us “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”, Porter isn’t interested in any kind of real debate, ignoring the messages he’s been sent, and running away from anyone who opposes him.

What we hoped to achieve was to conduct a stunt that would help the world to know that Aaron Porter is completely unrepresentative of the views of ordinary students. Some who condemned us said:

“It is a particularly black day for democracy when people are attacked, harassed and hounded simply for being on our campus and attending political meetings. This behaviour is a direct assault on political freedom and is indefensible. I believe one of the proudest boasts of Glasgow Uni is that it has stood resolutely as a centre of tolerance and debate in a world where these things are all too frequently disdained.”

This is a completely false claim. Aaron Porter of course has the right to express his views. So do those who are truly against the marketisation of education. The difference is that he has the full force of the mass media to express his out of touch opinions, pontificating as if he represented anything. We don’t, which is why we’re forced to take to the streets to get our views expressed in non violent direct action. Aaron Porter wasn’t no platformed at the weekend – we didn’t disrupt the Labour conference. We spent 5 minutes of Porter’s time letting him know we feel. To characterise this as anti-democratic or an assault is a travesty.

The real question for these people is what are their priorities and when are they going to get a grip. Their actions speak volumes about their lack of political understanding. At a time when Glasgow University are destroying the future of arts and humanities education at our university, this is their priority. Where were they when students were being assaulted by cops up and down the UK? Where are their statments of condemnation of the police for undertaking political attacks on their fellow students?

At the mass meeting in the QM last week to discuss the cuts, the QM President, when asked a direct question about whether he would support staff taking strike action, fobbed off the audience with a non-answer that he “didn’t know”, and that he “wasn’t familiar with the issues.” This led to his justifiable heckling by lecturers from Slavonics and Anthropology who’s jobs are on the line, the most pointed shout being “These are student representatives?!”

I would suggest the time spent falsely accusing protesters of assault would have been better spent looking into the issues and wising up. In other words Mr. President, do your job. Having been silent and inactive on the real issues facing students, the Glasgow Uni bureaucrats choose now to make an intervention, over something that is trivial and irrelevant compared to the unconscionable cuts we are facing. They are the ones creating division within the student movement, and their actions will threaten their very own positions as the uni begins cutting the funding of student services.

The one positive thing from the unions’ joint statements is that it calls on people to protest uni management’s actions on Weds 16th. This is a semblance of having some kind of correct political instincts, unfortunately overshadowed by their ridiculous claims and grassing in of fellow students. It’s time they got a grip.

For more background on the Free Hetherington, read more after the jump.

The Free Hetherington Research Club is in my opinion possibly the most important action that has happened in the current wave of student occupations across the UK.

The majority of student occupations at other universities take place in lecture theatres or court buildings. The logic behind these targets is clear – to win demands of university management it’s necessary to be somewhere that’s majorly disruptive and will force them to concede in order to get them out.

Our occupation, however, is a different kind of operation. The space we’ve occupied, a former student union closed down by the cuts, means we aren’t causing much disruption to the day to day operations of the university. (Although, if the reports we’ve received are true, management were about to begin a major programme of construction to transform the building into office space, which would forever have killed off the prospect of the much loved Hetherington re-opening. In that case, we couldn’t have picked a better target – no disruption to students, lots for management.)

But if we’re honest, what we’re trying to do here is different to many other occupations. The Free Hetherington Club isn’t a protest; it’s a living demonstration of how people can come together and build a space that is democratically run, autonomous and non commercial. So far it has been an incredible success beyond what many of us could possibly have hoped for.

Our occupation has demands of the uni management and the world at large (no cuts or redundancies; the Principal Anton Muscatelli to condemn cuts and take the average wage of a university worker or resign; and an end to all public sector cuts.) However, our single most important demand is something that nobody can give to us – it’s something we walked in and took for ourselves. The Free Hetherington Club.

It’s hard to communicate to people who haven’t been involved the sense of euphoria involved in this place. Something really exciting and unique is happening here. Every day the place is busy with students and members of the community coming in for (free) coffee and a bit to eat, a chance to meet people and get stimulating conversation, and to take in some of the hugely varied programme of events (film showings, guest lectures, skill sharing) that we’ve started to put together. Crucially, the building is being booked and used by ordinary student groups and societies, like the Hispanic Society Language Exchange and GU Applied Visual Arts Society. The more it becomes normalised that this building is open for use in the wider community, the harder it’s going to be for the uni to kick us out day by day. So far they know how well entrenched we are, and haven’t even started.

Something that in my opinion is absolutely crucial to the success of what we’ve done so far is the non-commercial nature of the operation. When you come in the door of the Free Hetherington you realise straight away that this is different from the other student unions and surrounding West End pubs. When you come here, no one is making a profit out of you. One of the clearest illustrations I’ve ever seen of the alienating effects of introducing money into human relationships is what happens when you remove it. Being a non commercial space fosters relationships based on respect and solidarity; people wash up their own plates, ask how they can contribute and offer to organise events. People don’t come here as consumers, but as participants.

Last year I visited the Basque Country, where, like many parts of Europe, there is a strong tradition of self organised young people taking a space and running it as a collective space for non commercial socialising, as well as collective organsing. To see that youth houses, as they call them, are everywhere, even small villages, was incredibly inspirational. When I asked them how they managed to build such a culture of autonomous spaces. Their answer: “We just do it.” Their advice to me was that if we wanted spaces of our own, then we just had to start taking them. That’s what I feel like we’ve started doing in the Free Hetherington Club. However our occupation here ends, my hope is that there’ll be a generation of Glasgow Uni students who will have gained vital experience in taking over a building and turning it into a little microcosm of what it might be like to live in a better world; a world of real human freedom. We all must remember to take that experience out and make many oases of freedom like this. If we do that I believe that in 10 or 20 years towns all over Scotland, just like in the Basque Country, can have a place where young people organise themselves in non hierarchical free spaces to do what they want in a way where no one tells them what to do and they don’t have to spend money. This is the beginning.

Col. Stinkeye: Gadaffi thinks the internet is ripping the piss out of him. And we are.

In amongst the inspiring news of what might be the first ever modern popular revolution in Tunisia, it would be easy to miss the words of the world’s most conspiracy-believing heads of state.

The botox injecting Col. Gadaffi, who has been the de facto leader of Libya for going on 42 years, is a man given to making amusing pronouncements. He’s of the opinion that there’s a coming era in which the world will recognise the Jamahiriyia (the term he invented for the Libyan state) as the ideal form for all other states. This will of course follow the imminent collapse of the US dollar due to its being successfully forged by anarchists, as well as the development of super bioweapons by terrorists. I have eagerly been awaiting these apocalyptic developments ever since I first heard him promise them 10 years ago, but they’ve mysteriously yet to materialise.

As well as inventing his own conspiracy theories, he’s got in other peoples’ as well, such as his claim to the UN that the H1N1 flu virus was created by a foreign military, and that JFK was assassinated by Israel. He also famously claimed to have invented the “world’s safest car.” More recently, he’s teamed up with another guy who you can’t quite believe is in charge of a country, Silvio Berlusconi, as part of a crusade to keep Africans out of Europe.

Now he’s spoken out on the revolution in Tunisia, in which he sees one of the most intricate conspiracies yet – US ambassadors deliberately making stuff up in diplomatic cables which they knew would be leaked, in order to create chaos!

The deposed Tunisian President, Zine al Abidine Bin Ali, was an ally of Gadaffi, as well as being a thug who ran a country for his own personal enrichment. But Gadaffi told TV audiences that he was “pained” by his fall.

He said that Bin Ali was the only man to lead Tunisia, and that Tunisians should have been patient and waited until 2014 when Bin Ali claimed he would stand down. However, he made clear that in his own view Bin Ali should be President “not just until 2014 but for life.”

“Tunisia now lives in fear. Families could be raided and slaughtered in their bedrooms and the citizens in the street killed as if it was the Bolshevik or the American revolution,” he claimed.

But the best part was where he put the blame for all this on WikiLeaks. He said that leaked cables, which revealed US diplomats’ private disgust at the corrupt Tunisian regime which they publicly supported, were “written by lying ambassadors in order to create chaos.”

One aspect of what he had to say was his constant references to WikiLeaks as “Kleenex.” This is the name he uses to refer to the site throughout his speech. I’ve looked quite a bit but I’ve yet to see anyone explain the reference, and I just don’t get the joke. Am I missing something obvious? Could it be a pun in Arabic? Some kind of joke about leaky noses? If you know please enlighten us in the comments.

Anyway, he’s what he had to say about the notorious imperialist internet tissues:

Even you, my Tunisian brothers. You may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet.

This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of “Facebook” and “Kleenex” and “YouTube”! Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods? . . . This world wide web Internet is laughing at us and damaging our countries; it is tearing up our clothes; and killing our children for it.

Of course, it’s actually pretty offensive and arrogant for us to assume that Tunisians, who had lived under the regime of Bin Ali and his 100,000 strong security services since 1987. They knew fine well what their government was like. It is possible to argue that social networking sites and youtube helped spread the news of the incident that did really spark the revolution – the suicide of a young man who was running a fruit and veg stall to survive after it was smashed up by the cops. The background, of course, is massive poverty and youth unemployment. Not what US diplomats have to say.

But that doesn’t make it any less funny to see the Colonel not getting the internet. In a sense he is of course right: I often use the internet while being a drunkard under the influence in order to laugh at others – and Gadaffi gives me plenty of material.

Above is an amazing documentary about ants that really made me think about being a socialist.

The lyric I’ve quoted above originally made me uncomfortable, because my vision of socialism is one in which is the opposite of the stereotypical idea of the individual crushed under the weight of a collective apparatus or overbearing state. To me, socialism means freedom, and that includes the freedom for individuals to develop autonomously in ways that have never been possible before.

It seemed to me that comparing a socialist human society to ants played into the idea that what we want is to convert people into robots, drones on behalf of a hive society. More than that, it’s wrong to project on to animals characteristics of humans and our societies that just aren’t there.

But I now think that looking at the incredible achievements of ants is an argument for socialism in a different way. Of course there’s no way we could, or should want to, use the way ants live as any kind of a model for ourselves. But what the achievements of ants do show profoundly is the power of co-operation and sociality. As Bert Hoelldobler, the ant expert in the documentary, puts it:

“The evolutionary transition from a solitary life to a social life occurred in only 3-5% of all animal species, including our own species, Homo Sapiens. But this minority plays an overwhelmingly dominant role in almost all land habitats.”

Individually ant bodies are incredible in their strength and endurance, as is often demonstrated in the film by the somewhat bizarre tests they endure, such as running on a treadmill or holding on to their surface in a centrifuge. But as they argue in the film:

“Their success lies not in their abilities or strengths as individuals, but in the organisation of their societies.”

Co-operation,the organisation of ants into a society, allows them to achieve incredible things. Their colonies are incredibly complex structures, carefully designed to regulate air flow and temperature. They practice their own form of agriculture, managing fungi and smaller creatures such as aphids. In the film, we see how their combined power allows them to compete with humans and cattle as the dominant form in the South American pampas.

The incredible structure of an ant city

One particularly fascinating part for me was the demonstration, in the lab based artificial nest, of how foraging scout ants communicate the information they’ve found on food sources. As they search, they leave a dotted chemical scent trail behind them for others to follow. Once they find something, they gorge themselves, to fill up their “social stomach”, a part of their bodies where they store food to take back to the colony and share with others to demonstrate what’s out there. On their way back they leave a continuous trail, meaning that the scent is stronger. When they give others a taste of what’s in their social stomach, they will follow the trail themselves, reinforcing it as they go.

The result is what they call in the documentary a “chemical democracy.” No overseer directs the work, there is no management. The ants, by their combined individual efforts, rapidly find the quickest routes to the best food sources. The food sites are chosen collectively by the community on the strength of the chemical trails – like a peer to peer network, it works through co-operation. Ants circulate food through a colony very efficiently – unlike our societies where there are some who eat too much while others go hungry. Their sharing of food allows ants to judge the needs of the colony through how they feel as individuals – if they are hungry it means the whole colony is hungry.

I remember being blown away a couple of years ago to learn (from reading Stephen Jay Gould) that not all social insects had evolved from a common ancestor. In fact sociality in insects has evolved multiple times, and is an example of convergent evolution. When something is an obvious, efficient solution to a problem an organism faces, it can evolve separately several times. Eyes are a great example of this – there are many creatures on Earth that have eyes that evolved them separately, because they are simply the best way to see.

The fact that time and again evolution has driven insects to live together in societies to me demonstrates just how revolutionary a development it is, and just what an advantage it gives to the animals who develop it. The fact that ants are able to construct cities that dominate their surrounding regions and practice agriculture is a testament to that.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we should idealise their society – they are capable of engaging in brutal warfare with each other (although, it should be noted, war is also a feat of organisation), and they take the young of their enemies captive to use as slaves (although it’s now been observed that as well slavery ant societies also have slave rebellions.)

One of the most important myrmecologists, E.O. Wilson, who was also one of the founding figures of sociobiology, famously once said: “Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it’s just that he had the wrong species.”

Why doesn’t it work in humans? Because we have repro­ductive independence, and we get maximum Darwinian fitness by looking after our own survival and having our own offspring. The great success of the social insects is that the success of the indivi­dual genes are invested in the success of the colony as a whole, and especially in the reproduction of the queen, and thus through her the reproduction of new colonies.

This was I think one of the main contributions of the idea of kin-selection. We now understand quite well why most species of social insects have sterile workers, and therefore can have communist-like systems. In which the colony is all, the individu­al is only a part of the colony, and the success of the whole community is what counts far above the success of the individual. The behavior of the individual social insect evolved with refe­rence to what it contributes to the community, whereas the genetic fitness of a human being depends on how well it can individually use the society. We have become insect-like only by extreme contrac­tual arrangements.”

But of course, this image of the evolution of human society ignores how we have achieved what we have as a species. All the continents of Earth were colonised by humans living in small, egalitarian bands that could only do what they did (including incredible feats like crossing the Pacific on rafts to make uninhabited islands human homes) through co-operation. Its just false to see humans as most successful when we selfishly use society and others for the advantage of ourselves and our offspring. It’s also contradicted by looking at the real operation of numerous human societies.

A squad of leafcutters working together

Human development has seen more and more of our collective labour power organised collectively. For much of history that’s been under hierarchical systems of control, directed by rulers, managers and bosses. But the more we do socially, the more we are capable of. When I watched the “chemical democracy” collectively decide on its food sources it reminded me of the vision of the emerging socialism of information outlined in the article in my last post. Decentralised co-operation is a model that has worked for life in so many different contexts, and human society is now on the verge of maximising the advantages to be gained from sociality and co-operation.

But to do that, for the collective intelligence and power of billions of humans to become its own superorganism, obviously requires effective, decentralised means of communication, which are in the process of being developed. But fundamentally we must eradicate inequality, and work collectively to ensure that all humans have what they need for survival. It means rejecting the model of society posited by Wilson above. For us to develop freely and fully as individuals means we change our society so that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.“

(I’m reposting this article from Liberty and Solidarity because I think it completely sums up my own views about the fact that capitalism is now completely out of date when it comes to dealing with information and culture. It’s essential reading for socialists imho The corporate culture industry and copyright holders desperately trying to hold back the floodgates are just like feudal lords watching their social base crumble in the face of industrialisation – their time has passed, it’s now about the struggle to finish them off.

Incidentally, I would like to point out that I am not one of the people that thinks simply because Julian Assange has done important work with wikileaks means that he should have immunity for being investigated when serious accusations are made against him. My views on that whole situation are pretty well represented by this post on SSY. Fortunately, this article is about the broader implications of movements like wikileaks, and doesn’t tie their success into the personal qualities of one man.)

Despite blanket media coverage of Wikileaks and Julian Assange, there has been little discussion of the fact that Assange is merely one leader within a large and complicated social movement. The better analyses have found it interesting that the Swedish Pirate Party are aiding Wikileaks; some note links to the German Chaos Computer Club. But only “geeks” and “hackers” (technology workers) are aware that all of these organisations are members of the same movement.

This social movement, which has been termed the “free culture movement”, has a thirty year history. It incorporates elements reminiscent of earlier workers’ movements: elements of class struggle, political agitation, and radical economics. The movement’s cadre, mainly technology workers, have been locked in conflict with the ruling class over the political and economic nature of information itself. As Wikileaks demonstrates, the outcome will have implications for all of us.The free culture movement exists as a consequence of the internet’s political economy. Personal computers have radically transformed the economic nature of information. Before the 1970s, a given piece of information was tied to a physical object – a piece of paper, an LP, a roll of film. Entire industries were built on selling paper, LP’s and rolls of film with particular bits of information on them. Then the personal computer arrived and suddenly information of all kinds could be duplicated infinitely at minimal cost – and distributed by the internet to a global audience. Every human could have a copy of every piece of art ever created for the cost of a broadband connection.

In the terms of capitalist economics, every good has a marginal cost, which is the cost of producing one more item. Computers reduce the marginal cost of information to zero, and the internet makes distribution, legal or otherwise, trivial. Information has become “non-excludable” (copying cannot be prevented) and “non-rivalrous” (if I give you information, I keep my copy of that information). In this situation, it is almost impossible to treat information as a commodity – as capitalist economics would have it, information is a public good, like roads or national defense.

As a result, there is a contradiction within capitalism. The most obvious source of profit, the very reason for a capitalist society to invest in information technology, is to extract value by selling information as a commodity. Meanwhile information technology has steadily undermined the practicality of treating information as property.

As computers have rendered “intellectual property rights” unenforceable, the remaining method of privatising information is secrecy. Information collection and secrecy is the business model of Google and Facebook – collecting and selling information about us to their advertisers. Information collection and secrecy are also the core functions of the modern security state. It is in this context that the immense social significance of Wikileaks’ actions becomes apparent: Wikileaks is a key part of the free culture movement’s assault on the bastions of privatised information.

The present situation was predicted by visionary hackers over thirty years ago, and they set out to ensure the victory of free culture over proprietary culture, open organisation over closed, and privacy over Big Brother.

The word hacker predates the personal computer, originating at the MIT Tech Model Rail Club in the 1950s. Amongst geeks, it is used to mean a technically skilled individual who is driven to learn and experiment, a person who believes in sharing what they’ve learned with the community.

Hacker culture proper originated in the 1970s, in hobbyist clubs dedicated to the first personal computers. Hackers quickly became used to copying software freely – after all, it cost nothing to share, and reading the software’s “source code” was educational. Software became the first modern information good: infinitely replicable, at no cost.

This guy is watching you

However, others were already seeking to change the nature of software, to turn it into a commodity. How else, they asked, could the creators afford to eat? In 1976, Bill Gates famously complained:

As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair? … Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? … The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software …but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft.

This was an early appearance of the new contradiction in capitalism – a conflict between the path of greatest production (infinite copying) and the existing source of profits (artificial scarcity). Karl Marx argued that conflict between new and old modes of production is at the core of social change:

The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. … At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. –Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

As Marx might have predicted, Gates’ plea fell on deaf ears. By the mid 1980s, sharing software had never been easier and Internet Bulletin Boards were widespread. Hackers and others would make a computer-to-computer phone call to join discussions, and to download illegal copies of software. Hacker conferences and organisations emerged, including the left-wing Chaos Computer Club in Germany, and later the apolitical DefCon and “liberal” HOPE in the United States.

From its experiences of the new technology, this anarchic subculture developed a shared political and moral sense, now known as the Hacker Ethic:

• Access to computers – and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works – should be unlimited and total.
• Mistrust authority – promote decentralization.
• You can create art and beauty on a computer.
• Computers can change your life for the better.
• All information should be free.

– Steven Levy

The similarity of the ethic to older conceptions of an egalitarian society has been noted by the discussion group Project Oekonux:

The critique of market exchange and of money, the rejection of hierarchy and borders, the critique of contemporary work and the revindication of passion and freedom as primary motivations, of cooperation and of sharing as the foundations of new relations, all this is found, to a degree more or less elaborated and coherent, in the “hacker ethic.” Now these are elements that form part of the foundation of the communist project.

Some thinkers sought to move beyond an ethic and develop a political programme. The first and most important anti-propertarian theorist and organiser to emerge from the hacker world was Richard M Stallman. Stallman is a controversial figure, a geek’s geek and not always polite to his political opponents. In spite of his apparent interpersonal shortcomings, he is widely respected as the founder of the free culture movement, perhaps the first person to understand the new economic situation, and certainly the first person to do anything concrete about it.

Stallman was driven to action when he saw the nature of software begin to change – increasingly, companies kept secret the details necessary to modify their programs, and sued anyone who distributed copies. The first modern information good was becoming a commodity, against its economic nature and against the Hacker Ethic.

Beardy: Richard Stallman

In response, Stallman created a new ideology, Free Software, declaring software-as-commodity to be a moral evil: Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

(note that “free” here does not refer to the cost, as in “free beer”, but to freedom, as in “free speech” – the word has two meanings in English)

As information workers, Stallman and his peers owned their means of production and had access to the means of distribution – by the 1980s, all they needed to bypass capital entirely was a computer and a phone line. In 1984, Stallman began a public collaborative effort to build a complete set of software that respected the four freedoms, announcing it with the declaration:

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. … So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.

He founded a political group, the Free Software Foundation, and in collaboration with the lawyer and free software leader Eben Moglen popularised another new concept – copyleft. A “copyleft” license is a special copyright license that brings legal enforcement to the four freedoms. It grants anyone the right to modify and share an information good, provided that any modifications are shared according to the same license. In other words, you may treat the work as communal property, as long as your own modifications also become communal property.

To hackers, avid readers of science fiction, it seemed obvious that in the near future all of humanity’s information would be stored on a global computer network. Stallman realised that if state or private interests controlled the software running the network, they could monitor or censor any information they wished – and decided that humanity as a whole must have the ability to share and modify all software. This idea was most fully developed by the lawyer Lawrence Lessig when he coined the phrase code is law.

In real space, we recognize how laws regulate – through constitutions, statutes, and other legal codes. In cyberspace we must understand how a different “code” regulates – how the software and hardware (i.e., the “code” of cyberspace) that make cyberspace what it is also regulate cyberspace as it is. As William Mitchell puts it, this code is cyberspace’s “law.” “Lex Informatica,” as Joel Reidenberg first put it, or better, “code is law.”

Cyberspace is regulated by software, much as the real world is regulated by law. It follows that if there is to be a free culture, then software must be free – otherwise, corporate and state interests have an unacceptable ability to collect and censor information.

These trends – the end of information scarcity, the distribution of the means of production into the hands of information workers, the development of a broader hacker community and ethic, the emergence of ideological leaders and organisations, and the creation of a legal theory – combined in the 1990s to produce an extremely rare economic event: the arrival of an entirely new mode of production. The first example of the new mode was the Linux project.

By the early 1990s, the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Project had assembled all the free software necessary to run a computer apart from one, known as the “kernel”. Finnish hacker Linus Torvalds created the free kernel “Linux” as a hobby project, licensing it under the FSF’s copyleft license. Linus’ hobby soon became the first large engineering project to be conducted entirely online, and it developed faster than anyone envisaged. Twenty years later, it has benefited from millions of contributions from many thousands of workers around the world.

Free software – built on GNU and Linux – is now ubiquitous on internet servers, and recently began leading the market in smartphones (thanks to Google’s Android). The GNU/Linux ecosystem is a completely unique phenomenon – an engineering and artistic project of immense scope conducted across thirty years using a global workforce, with most of the work coming from volunteers simply because they enjoyed contributing.

Eric S Raymond, in his seminal essay the Cathedral and the Bazaar, made an early attempt to explain what was going on:

Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool was made. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the gestation period of Linux coincided with the birth of the World Wide Web, and that Linux left its infancy during the same period in 1993 – 1994 that saw the takeoff of the ISP industry and the explosion of mainstream interest in the Internet. Linus was the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible. While cheap Internet was a necessary condition for the Linux model to evolve, I think it was not by itself a sufficient condition. Another vital factor was the development of a leadership style and set of cooperative customs that could allow developers to attract co-developers and get maximum leverage out of the medium. But what is this leadership style and what are these customs? They cannot be based on power relationships – and even if they could be, leadership by coercion would not produce the results we see.

Information workers were cooperating globally and without coercion to produce property that was to be communally owned. Non-coercive productive relations were inevitable given the underlying economic truth – a computer, internet access, and communally-owned free software are all the productive capital a computer programmer needs. The cooperative, ad-hoc and voluntary nature of GNU/Linux development is exactly the behaviour Marx predicted would emerge from free access to productive capital:

Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase “proceeds of labor”, objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. … labor [will] become not only a means of life but life’s prime want — Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

Also beardy: Karl Marx

Always confining themselves to information property alone, because of its non-scarce nature, the philosophers of the free software movement started to sound like libertarian communists – even though many in the community would not subscribe to leftist politics. FSF Lawyer Eben Moglen made the case forcefully in his essay Anarchism Triumphant:

At the center of the digital revolution, with the executable bitstreams that make everything else possible, propertarian regimes not only do not make things better, they can make things radically worse. Property concepts, whatever else may be wrong with them, do not enable and have in fact retarded progress. In the network society, anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable political philosophy … because defection is impossible, free riders are welcome, which resolves one of the central puzzles of collective action in a propertarian social system.

Some hackers were unhappy with these ideological developments. On the grounds that business was perturbed by the FSF’s rhetoric, Eric S Raymond formed the breakaway Open Source Initiative to focus discussion on the technical superiority of open development models, avoiding troublesome talk about “freedom” and the nature of property.

Raymond had been invited out by Netscape to help them plan their browser source-code release … we might finally be able to get the corporate world to listen to what the hacker community had to teach about the superiority of an open development process. The conferees decided it was time to dump the moralizing and confrontational attitude that had been associated with “free software” in the past and sell the idea strictly on the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that had motivated Netscape. They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. “Open source”, contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.

The Open Source Initiative helped to make business comfortable in the free software world, but the internet continued to have a troubled relationship with capitalism.

From the 1990s hackers and artists found themselves caught in an intensifying class conflict, as intellectual property owners manipulated the political process to strengthen laws protecting information’s status as property, even as that status became increasingly unenforceable in practise. To hackers, this could only be seen as an attempt to extract needless rent from a naturally abundant resource.

“Content owners”, alarmed by the emergence of file-sharing websites, began building digital locks, called Digital Rights Management (DRM), into DVDs, mp3s and even e-books. The hacker community was deeply offended by the idea of books that could not be resold or lent, and set about breaking the locks as fast as they could be designed. A class struggle was being fought simultaneously at the points of information production and consumption, because in the world of computers the point of production is the point of consumption.

Under intense music industry lobbying, several countries including the United States implemented laws banning any technology capable of bypassing DRM to allow copying. A series of high-profile prosecutions followed, most famously that of Russian programmer Dmitri Skylarov, who was arrested after giving a conference speech in the United States explaining how to break Adobe’s e-book DRM.

Under increasing attack, the wider geek and hacker communities began to radicalise to defend free speech and free information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formed to offer legal support. Various hacker groups adopted political aims, most often aimed at guaranteeing free speech and defending the free internet.

The hackers were fighting the struggle, but during the 2000s the means of production and distribution for every kind of artist became available to anyone with a computer – free software began to allow the creation of a truly free culture.

Lawrence Lessig, who had predicted this as part of his “Code is Law” theory, founded Creative Commons, an organisation dedicated to giving individual writers, musicians and artists easy-to-understand ways of allowing others to share and modify their work, with the stated aim of bringing the freedoms of free software to all art:

It is no accident that those who understand this are those closest to technology. Our challenge will be to find ways to explain it so other creators get it as well …. Our single, overarching aim: build the public domain, by building projects that expand the range of creative work available for others to build upon.

Perhaps most importantly, they created a copyleft license for non-software works. Creative Commons provided the legal framework for the current flowering of free culture – Wikipedia, for example, may be copied and modified by anyone under a Creative Commons copyleft license. Artists began to join the free culture movement, dissatisfied with capital’s notion of them as interchangeable “content creators” and enticed by the possibilities of distribution free from industry control.

In 2003 now-infamous filesharing website the Pirate Bay, which has pioneered partnerships with Creative Commons artists, was spun off from Swedish group Piratbyrån. Piratbyrån was a think-tank on the nature of intellectual property created by hackers, artists and left activists to counter the Swedish Antipiratbyrån (Anti-Piracy Bureau). In 2006, they founded the Pirate Party, winning two seats in the European Parliament. and there are now Pirate Parties in countries across the globe campaigning for weaker intellectual property laws and free speech on the internet.

At least some members of Piratbyrån are radically anti-intellectual property, and their vision is consciously opposed to information as a commodity:

The copyright industry today likes to present the problem as if internet were just a way for so-called “consumers” to get so-called ”content”, and that we now just got to have ”a reasonable distribution” of money between ISP’s and content industry … It is totally wrong to regard our role as to represent “consumer interests”. On the contrary, it’s all about leaving the artificial division of humanity into the two groups ”producers” and ”consumers” behind. … We are now pounding the old mass medial aura and we are in a state of transgressing the hierarchical consumer-producer society. — Rasmus Fleischer of Piratbyrån speaking at the 2005 Chaos Communication Congress

The Pirate Bay were not merely pirates – they saw themselves as taking deliberate political actions to undermine the existing economic structure in favour of a new mode of production.

Piratbyrån itself disbanded in June 2010 and the Pirate Bay was sold, however the high level of support for Wikileaks provided by Scandinavian activists and the Pirate Party suggests that the wider milieu is alive and well.

Wikileaks also has roots in an influential 1990s discussion group, the Cypherpunk mailing list. “Cypherpunk”, formed from the words “cipher”, or code, and “cyberpunk”, a science fiction genre full of rogue hackers fighting corporate tyrants, indicates the members’ loose ideology – that the anonymity and security provided by computerised cryptography (“crypto”) could create a new society free from coercion, a system know as crypto-anarchy.

Many of us see strong crypto as the key enabling technology for a new economic and social system, a system which will develop as cyberspace becomes more important. A system which dispenses with national boundaries, which is based on voluntary (even if anonymous) free trade. At issue is the end of governments as we know them today. … Strong crypto permits unbreakable encryption, unforgeable signatures, untraceable electronic messages, and unlinkable pseudonymous identities. This ensures that some transactions and communications can be entered into only voluntarily. External force, law, and regulation cannot be applied. This is “anarchy,” in the sense of no outside rulers and laws.

The cypherpunks were ahead of their time, clearly anticipating Wikileaks’s use of anonymous, encrypted internet drop-boxes by 15 years or more – but then Julian Assange was a regular poster to the list. The hacker community has created the future it used to speculate about.

In one notorious incident, cypherpunk Jim Bell published an essay entitled “Assassination Politics”, which discussed the creation of a completely anonymous site where users could sponsor the assassination of corrupt politicians. Bell was later jailed for spying on federal agents, themselves sent to spy on him for writing the essay.

Assange laid the philosophical groundwork for Wikileaks when he replied to Assassination Politics in his State and Terrorist Conspiracies:

How can we reduce the ability of a conspiracy to act? … We can split the conspiracy, reduce or eliminating important communication between a few high weight links or many low weight links. Traditional attacks on conspiratorial power groupings, such as assassination, have cut high weight links by killing, kidnapping, blackmailing or otherwise marginalizing or isolating some of the conspirators they were connected to. … The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption. Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

With a single mechanism, Assange demonstrates the political implications of the new economics of information. If all information is can be copied freely, then organisations may be faced with no choice but to conduct the majority of their dealings openly. He has simply carried Eric S Raymond’s conclusion about Linux – that its open organisational model would always be more efficient than Microsoft’s closed model – into the political realm.

Wikileaks is the first concrete realisation of the crypto-anarchist dream: completely anonymous leaking, dealing blows to tyranny. However it has also highlighted the weak points in the free internet, surviving dangers to freedom of speech and the new mode of production.

Perhaps the most obvious is that large corporations control the physical infrastructure of the internet – the big servers and all the actual wires from place to place. Another danger is the monopolisation of some services – social networking by Facebook, search by Google. And with the recent cutting-off of Wikileaks funds by PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, the danger of state-corporate action to deny funds has become starkly apparent.

As is typical, the hacker community has been working on solutions for some time. There are projects to create wireless “mesh” networks, and projects to create distributed, open alternatives to Facebook and Google. There is even the Bitcoin project, which has the ambitious goal of creating a distributed virtual currency.

Marx described, in broad strokes, the ways in which political economy shapes society and history, but left the detail up to those alive at the time. The activism, organisation and ideology we see in the hacker community today are the material consequence of a new mode of production, a fundamental shift in the political economy of information. The free culture movement has (so far) defeated all attempts, both legal and technological, to reimpose information scarcity. If Marx was right then this is simply because the winds of history are behind us.

There is no way to predict where this will end – some hackers theorise that in the future, manufacturing will decentralise in the same way as information production, a miniature factory in every home if you will. The processes favouring decentralisation and organisational openness will continue to gain strength, as will the reaction against those processes. The only certainty is that the economic nature of information has changed forever. That fact will still be transforming our society a century from now.

Above is some amusing archive footage of the days when it was still possible for scientists to basically give people a bunch of acid and see what happens. It’s from a TV documentary about mental health from 1956.

The scientist doing the experiment, Dr. Sidney Cohen, was trying to ascertain the possibility of using LSD as a mental health treatment, and also worked on it as a way of dealing with alcoholism. He was part of a group of people who believed in the potential of LSD to help people, which also included the philosopher Gerald Heard who’s interviewed at the end of the video.

Directly inspired by the book ‘The Doors of Perception‘, and his contact with the author Aldous Huxley, Heard had begun experimenting with LSD in the 50s. His 1960s writings perhaps can be said to show a sign of its influence (from Wikipedia):

“In 1963, what some consider to be Heard’s magnum opus, a book titled The Five Ages of Man, was published. According to Heard, the prevalent developmental stage among humans in today’s well-industrialized societies (especially in the West) should be regarded as the fourth: the “humanic stage” of the “total individual,” who is mentally dominated, feeling him- or herself to be autonomous, separate from other persons. Heard writes (p. 226) this stage is characterized by “the basic humanic concept of a mankind that is completely self-seeking because it is completely individualized into separate physiques that can have direct knowledge of only their own private pain and pleasure, inferring but faintly the feelings of others. Such a race of ingenious animals, each able to see and to seek his own advantage, must be kept in combination with each other by appealing to their separate interests.”

In modern industrial societies, a person, especially if educated, has the opportunity to begin entering the “first maturity” of the humanic “total individual” in his or her mid teens. However, according to Heard — based on his decades of studies, his intuition, and his many years of reflection — a fifth stage is in the process of emerging: a post-individual psychological phase of persons and therefore of culture. According to Heard, the second maturity can be one that lies beyond “personal success, economic mastery, and the psychophysical capacity to enjoy life” (p. 240)

Heard termed this phase ‘Leptoid Man’ (from the Greek word lepsis: “to leap”) because humans increasingly face the opportunity to ‘take a leap’ into a considerably expanded consciousness, in which the various aspects of the psyche will be integrated, without any aspects being repressed or seeming foreign. A society that recognizes this stage of development will honor and support individuals in a “second maturity” who wish to resolve their inner conflicts and dissolve their inner blockages and become the sages of the modern world. Further, instead of simply enjoying biological and psychological health, as Freud and other important psychiatric or psychological philosophers of the “total-individual” phase conceived, Leptoid man will not only have entered a meaningful “second maturity” recognized by his or her society, but can then become a human of developed spirituality, similar to the mystics of the past; and a person of wisdom.

But collectively and culturally we are still in the transitional phase, not really recognizing an identity beyond the super-individualistic fourth, “humanic” phase. Heard’s views were cautionary about developments in society that were not balanced, about inappropriate aims of our use of technological power. He wrote: “we are aware of our precarious imbalance: of our persistent and ever-increasing production of power and our inadequacy of purpose; of our critical analytic ability and our creative paucity; of our triumphantly efficient technical education and our ineffective, irrelevant education for values, for meaning, for the training of the will, the lifting of the heart, and the illumination of the mind.”"

Official Gerald Heard website.

This site was my first attempt at blogging. I abandoned it when I re-entered higher education and stopped having a meaningless desk job with internet access and employer’s time to burn. Since then, I set up a more music oriented blog, which I also abandoned. I found it difficult to be consistent, and to find the motivation to maintain the things I’d started.

After being a two time blog failure, I was a bit reticent about having my own site again, and you’d have every right as a reader to be sceptical as well. But in the intervening time between these projects I became a regular poster on the Scottish Socialist Youth blog, a site which I’m immensely proud to be part of. It’s essential reading nearly every day. Being part of the collective that wrote it taught me a hell of a lot about blogging, and just being a more interesting writer. When I finally got too old to keep participating in SSY last November, I made my last post an outline of the reasons why I think SSY and its blog is a vital contribution to the future of Scotland.

So for the past couple of months I’ve found myself without a venue to foist my opinions and interesting things I’ve found on others, and I’ve given a lot of thought to my blogging future.

Besides my own personal blogging inconsistency, another reason I was hesitant to start a personal blog again was because I really appreciated being part of a writing collective. It takes the pressure off one individual (me) to make sure there’s a regularly updated site that people think is worth checking back on. It meant that there was a real diversity of voices, of which I was just a part. But more than that, there was a point to my writing beyond just sharing my opinions – it served a purpose of trying to attract people into action. Maybe through some of the stuff I wrote people would feel encouraged to become active in the struggle to save civilisation from extinction. If I’m going to keep writing like this, then that surely is one of my aims.

To keep up politicised blogging, a project I’m hoping to help with over the next few months is a newly revitalised website for the Scottish Socialist Voice, the Scottish Socialist Party’s print newspaper. There’s a hugely talented pool of writers around the SSP, and I think if the Voice (which is currently the only regular socialist paper produced in Scotland) took the big step into blogging it could have a major impact with a powerful collective of contributors.

However, the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to realise I’d like an outlet to talk about things that wouldn’t fit in on something that was primarily focused on real world politics and practicalities. The reason I’ve taken the decision to relaunch this blog is so that I have somewhere to be a bit more idiosyncratic and eccentric with the things I post. As I say, I’ve learned a lot about being disciplined and organised in my blogging in the last couple of years. I’ve also learned that not everything requires a somewhat lengthy article explaining it. The world is full of interesting things that I can simply take from elsewhere and present to you as is. Which doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be pieces of analysis from me, but there’ll also be a lot more short stuff than there used to be.

And there’s going to be a lot more of the odd things I’m into to go along with the politics. Keep checking back over the coming weeks and you’ll see what I mean.