At Marxism 2013 - Contributions

I attended workshops on women's and queer liberation at Marxism 2013. Both workshops were given in-depth presentations on Marxist understandings of gender and liberation, followed by a thorough, ranging and generally comradely discussion afterwards. These are notes from two contributions I drafted on my phone before I spoke (the latter I got to give in the session), which I have slightly polished.

From Gender Construction and Capitalism

A comrade raised concerns about the attitudes towards trans* people and one particular contribution which got quite crudely biological about it. I agree, and I think that this was an issue I felt wasn't addressed enough; several comrades also repeatedly used the phrase of "same sex marriage". This is the kind of demand the Tories, Clover Moore & Alex Greenwhich can support; what we should remember we are fighting for is equal marriage, inclusive of all gender identities.

Recently we've seen footballer Robbie Rogers publicly come out shortly after retiring from Leeds - something that the progressive sporting world certainly should take note of, given the role sport plays as a bastion of reinforcing gender identities. The last footballer to do so committed suicide shortly after, alienated from the football community. Robbie has stated that he needed to step away from the sport to do so, but the fact that he felt he could now do so and seems to be recieving much more positive support for it, to me, reflects that something has changed since the turn of the millenium - and the most obvious answer is the equal marriage movement, which has totally shifted public opinion in Australia and overseas.

This is why independent movements of both lgbti people & women is so crucial to ensure we begin to challenge oppression now; the effect that victories, or even just higher levels of struggle, has on popular consciousness is significant, even if it feels as activists we're shouting into the wind.

Most people in the room seem to have different ways of putting it when it comes to feminism, current tasks or demands to emphasise, and I have an opinion on those things, but I think there is common enough opinions amongst socialist that could forms a basis for united work - against the oppression of women today, seeking to win demands like equal pay, reproductive rights or others, in the same way that we have worked together in the equal marriage movement.

From Festivals of the Oppressed - Women in Revolutions from Russia to Egypt.

I think it's a very pertinent topic to consider and thank Julia for the talk. I think we can all agree that so long as we live in a society based on class oppression then we cannot talk about full liberation for anyone.

To build on what Julia raised about how struggle inspires women to find a greater courage and dedication even than many leading male revolutionaries - Michael Lebowitz said in Socialism for the 21st century:

Rather, we change only through real practice, by changing circumstances ourselves. Marx’s concept of “revolutionary practice”, that concept of “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change’, is the red thread that runs throughout his work.

This is very true for the process of struggle, particularly at revolutionary peaks, undermining sexist ideas, and other ideologies underpinning oppression. Julia identified women's oppression is a barrier to women getting involved in the class struggle already. I think this means if we want all people to be involved in our movement we should struggle against women's oppression and to challenge sexist ideas and behaviours today - the muck of the ages.

This us a big challenge for the revolutionary movements in the Arab world. Julia mentioned that women have played a key role in protests in Tahrir, leading the chants in the square - this was certainly my experience, even in November still the case!

Tahrir Square, 27/11/11

But women and men have also had to challenge sexual assault in Tahrir; there have been many documented cases of assault against women since January 25, by both by forces of the state and others in the street, and that's an ongoing struggle which has come to the fore again today. But the overall success of revolutionary struggle has meant that independent feminist struggle has grown massively since the downfall of Ben Ali and Mubarak.

A key example is the struggle over the constitution in Tunisia - feminist activists led struggle against a constitutional reform being proposed by Nahda which would define women as "complimentary" to men.. That particular struggle has been a key component, along with union struggle in both cities and interior regions, of rebuilding class struggle to the point where it is now - arguably at a higher level than when Ben Ali was overgrown. The lesson is that independent womens struggle is key, not only for the class struggle as a whole but also building a movement to challenge oppression today and lead to a society where we can be rid of it.

Tunisia: Ennahda fails to deliver promises of work and freedom

Originally published in Green Left Weekly, Saturday September 1

Almost a year since Tunisia's Constituent Assembly (CA) elections, Islamist party Ennahda, leader of the coalition government, continues to lose the confidence of those who rose up against dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in late 2010.

Anger was prompted by Constitutional Article 27, which was passed by the Committee on Rights and Freedoms on August 1, defining women's rights as "complementary" to those of men, placing women "at the heart of the family and as man's associate".

This enraged feminists democracy activists, who saw the article as trying to undermine the principle of equality for all citizens, enshrined in Article 22. Formal equality for women has been a strong principle in Tunisian society since the days of post-independence ruler Habib Bourguiba.

Activist Wafa Ben Hassine wrote in independent collective blog Nawaat on August 3 that "the gains that women have acquired in Tunisia are admittedly unmatched in the Arab world, and Tunisians are proud of that".

Thousands of people took to the streets of downtown Tunis to protest against the definition of women in Article 27 on August 13. Reuters said protesters chanted "Rise up women for your rights to be enshrined in the constitution".

The question of women's rights, and the relationship between religion and the state in Tunisia, has come into focus since the January 14 downfall of Ben Ali. The dictator used Tunisia's legacy of equality to justify suppression of political Islam movements such as Ennahda, as well as taking part in the “war on terror”.

Hardline Salafists were locked out of taking part in the CA elections, but have polarised national opinion with a campaign of aggression against alcohol vendors. The first Salafist Party, the Reform Front, was granted official recognition in May, reported Tunisia Live. Ennahda leader Rasheed Ghannouchi attended the party's first conference in July.

In mid-June, suspected Salafists destroyed an art exhibition in Tunis they considered offensive to Islam, resulting in riots that left one dead, while in August actor and comedian Lotfi Abdelli's show in Menzel Bourguiba was obstructed by a Salafist sit-in.

Media freedom

Media freedom is another front where confidence in Ennahda had been shaken.

Two hundred journalists rallied on August 22 against the appointment of Lofti Touati to director general of the Dar Assabah state-run newspaper. Associated Press reported the protests were angry at the government for going back on a promise to consult with civil society leaders before making such appointments.

Touati is a former police commissioner. He has come under fire after ordering a piece in Dar Assabah critical of his appointment and accusing him of being "too close to Ennahda" to be replaced with advertisements.

Minister of foreign affairs, Rafik Abdessalem, was reported by TAP state news agency on August 26 as saying that Ennahda's goal was to "clean up" the media and prevent them from "[transforming] themselves into forums of opposition to government action".

Tunisia's president Moncef Marzouki responded at the congress of the centrist Congress Party for the Republic (CPR), one of the parties of the troika government.

He criticised "the appointments of Ennahda supporters in key positions whether they are competent or not”, Jeune Afrique reported on August 25. “Our brothers in Ennahda are working to control the administrative and political state."

Tunisian cyber activists, at the forefront of the uprising against Ben Ali, have lodged a bid with the Interior Ministry to reveal the identity of the figure responsible for administering Tunisia's regime of internet censorship, nicknamed "Ammar404".

Nawaat reported on August 21 that Sofiane Chourabi, one of the initiators of the idea, said: "It seems that this government is working on wiping out and marginalising this issue, so that those who committed violations would not be held accountable."

Food, work and national dignity

On the economic front, Ennahda and the coalition have done little to differentiate from the old regime. Al-Akhbar English reported on August 17 that the minister for investment, Riadh Bettaib, announced the state would take out a further $1 billion in World Bank loans.

And radical labour struggle has continued to grow. The General Union of Tunisisan Workers (UGTT), under radical left leadership since it's constitution in January, has led a wave of strikes in the south and interior aimed at fulfilling the Jasmine revolution's demands of “work, freedom, national dignity”.

City-wide general strikes have swept through Tataouine, Monastir, Kasserine and Kariouan, as well as Sidi Bouzid, the town where fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself on December 17, 2010, which triggered the Arab uprisings.

Day workers in Sidi Bouzid demonstrated on July 26 over a two month delay in wages, reported Al Akhbar English, attacking the party offices of Ennahda. Ongoing water shortages in the region over the past six months have also raised anger. Sidi Bouzid's governor, Mohamed Najib Masouri, has blamed residents who failed to pay their bills for the shortages.

The December 17 Progressive Forces Front, along with the UGTT and other forces, organised a demonstration on August 9 to take up the demands of securing water supplies and settling workers' wages.

The demonstration also called for the resignation of the governor and the regional commander of the National Guard, and the dissolution of the whole CA for failing to address the issues of Sidi Bouzid and Tunisia's poorer interior regions.

The protest was attacked by police with tear gas and rubber bullets, putting five in hospital. Blogger Lina Ben Mhenni said one young activist of the Tunisian Workers' Party (POT), Saddem Akermi, was hospitalised after he was shot with a rubber bullet.

An Ennahda spokesperson blamed the demonstrations on the party Nidaa Tunis (Call to Tunis), which formed on July 19 and is comprised of ex-regime figures.

He claimed to have "proof that some figures within the region known to be close to Nidaa Tunis sided with criminals, thieves and alcohol vendors to spread anarchy in Sidi Bouzid," reported Leaders.

The December 17 Front and UGTT responded with a general strike on August 14. TAP said thousands marched through the town and rallied outside the local courthouse to demand the release of prisoners from the previous protests.

Crisis of legitimacy

These struggles have shaken the confidence of many Tunisians in the Ennahda-led troika to chart a new path for Tunisia after the ousting of Ben Ali.

An International Crisis Group report published in June dismissed the "spectre of a second insurrection", but identified that continued political turmoil and a failure to address severe economic inequality could "risk snowballing into a legitimacy crisis for the newly elected government".

Nidaa Tunis has been presenting itself as the alternative vision to the troika. The party, led by elder statesman and post-Ben Ali prime minister from February to December last year, Beji Caid Essebsi, has been condemned by troika parties as a renewal of the old regime. CPR secretary general Mohammed Abbou told Tunisian radio that Nidaa Tunis represented "a return to tyranny," reported Tunisie Numerique.

Essebsi responded to the attacks, calling them "free of charge". He publicly supported the demonstrators in Sidi Bouzid, saying "it is inappropriate to describe this way the democrats, activists and human rights components of civil society who took to the streets to protest against repression and to defend their rights."

Given the moves of Ennahda in office, and the emboldened Salafist aggression since the downfall of Ben Ali, Nidaa has taken up space for a secular-based "Doustourian" (constitutional) party with the popular recognition and networks to electorally challenge Ennahda outright, unlike the two secular troika partners, the CPR and social-democrat Ettakatol.

Two representatives of the CPR in the CA, Dhamir Manai and Abdelaziz Kotti, said they had joined Nidaa on August 23, joining members of the 17 different parties formed out of Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD).

The left alternative

However, the left has also made steps to challenge both poles of the mainstream political spectrum and follow through on the demands of the Jasmine revolution.

The Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT), which holds three seats in the CA and has some of the best recognition of any of the far-left parties, made the decision to rename itself the Tunisian Workers Party (POT) in July.

Party spokesperson Mohamed Mzam told Tunisia Live on July 11 that the party aimed to "avoid the stereotype most Tunisians think of when hearing the word 'communist'", and that people should instead "focus on what a political party is committed to offer them on political, social and economic levels."

The decision came after a long process of discussion and a general referendum within the party. Discussion had begun immediately after the overthrow of Ben Ali, but was postponed for the CA elections last October. This may have accounted for PCOT's inability to win serious space in the CA.

POT has also participated in the reformation of the national January 14 Front, which was active immediately after the overthrow of Ben Ali to push for further democratisation, but quickly broke apart. Negotiations to re-form the alliance began in July, and on August 13 a first agreement was announced between 12 left parties from a variety of Marxist, Nasserist, Baathist, Green and other backgrounds, alongside independent revolutionaries.

Mohamed Brahmi, of the Nasserist Movement of the People party, said the front was formed "following the example of the December 17 Front set up in Sidi Bouzid".

POT's chairperson Hamma Hammami described the coalition as "a political front and not essentially electoral. It will work for the realisation of the objectives of the revolution."

The reformation of the front is an important step forward for strengthening the democratic struggle. The spectre of a "second insurrection" may well prove a possibility before new elections are due in next year.

Please read Kefteji's posts on the battle for media freedom and the debate over Constitutional Article 27 for more information on those topics. Tunisian Girl has also written an update on the appointment of Lofti Touati to Dar Assabah, including a protest that took place as my original article went to print, and the call for a general stike on September 11 in protest.

Arab Spring Meeting Notes #4 - What We Aren't Being Told

This is the fourth in my series of meeting talk notes, which started here. Feel free to use these in whatever way, and let me know if there's anything I've gotten wrong or missed out on important pieces of the puzzle.

I've got 10 minutes, which is not enough time to talk about full history of the Arab Spring, and not even really enough time to talk about my experiences in the region in any depth. Instead, I want to highlight the key things that we aren’t being told about the Arab uprisings by the powers that be. I feel they help us to see the most important things about this period of struggle.

One is what these uprisings were about – this is the first and foremost western media distortion, that the youth of the Arab world just wanted the West’s liberal democratic rights to go with their iPhones. This is lmost completely untrue.

The Arab Spring began with immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in the city of Sidi Bouzid, in Tunisia's underdeveloped interior which had suffered under the IMF policy splitting the country up into three economic zones based on how easy it was to get goods from those areas to the ports. His situation was created not just by police intimidation, but by the political repression going hand in hand with the economics of third world neocolonialism.

The first few days of wild protests throughout the interior region, especially in the mining cities like Ghasserine, Gafsa, etc which had previously risen up in 08, were not "Facebook" revolutions – which is another western media mistruth. But the internet did prove hugely important - several brave bloggers, inc Slim Amamou and Azyz Amami of the Tunisian Pirate Party & Lina Ben Mhenni of Tunisian Girl / nearly nobel prize fame travelled out to the region rising up, documented bodies in hospital, and spread word to the networks of activists in the big coastal cities of Sfax, Sousse, Tunis; the first two got arrested for this.

So the internet was a tool, but if there weren’t a layer of youth in the region that had been radicalised by a decade of growing struggle – student activism, democratic activism like the 05 election campaign in Egypt, the mini uprisings of 2008 in Egypt & Tunisia – a layer of youth ready to fight the regime in Sidi Bouzid, then these revolutions wouldn’t have happened just because there was Twitter or Facebook.

In fact, when I visited Tahrir square between September and November of last year, the majority of protesters there didn’t even have smart phones. Certainly there are some better-off students and others who are part of the movement who do, but the vast majority of the protesters come from the urban poor population.

The street protests of the January 25 uprising in Egypt were called online by the April 6 Youth Movement and We Are All Khaled Said, inspired by Ben Ali's downfall in Tunisia but responding to the growing anger over the death of Khaled Said in June of 2010, drew the biggest numbers of any protest in 50 years - tens of thousands. However this only took on critical mass after the police attacked Tahrir square and broke up the protests; bridges, main routes were all occupied by police, so many activists took refuge in the homes in neighbouring suburbs - and ordinary people with no access to internet, only state TV, who had heard about and were excited about but unsure of the protests, were won over. On the 28th, there were hundreds of thousands in Tahrir. Those kinds of numbers, combined with a general strike in the second week of Feb, forced the military regime to abandon their support for the figurehead of Mubarak as the elites of Tunisia had done with Ben Ali only weeks earlier.

The fact that these revolutions were as much about demands for a change in economic policies as political freedoms can be seen from the importance of the involvement of the urban & rural poor, and also from the fact that an essential component of them has been labour activity – strikes across private & public sector industries. This is something the western media also consistently fails to mention – as it did for the four years prior to them while strikes and labour protests exploded across the region. And workers continue to press for economic justice. Some Egyptian hospitals have been taken over by the doctors, nurses and caretakers and are being run democratically. In every level, workers are winning demands for better pay, conditions, more democracy at work and to get rid of Mubarak & Ben-Ali-era cronies. How? Not by accepting the power of the new parliament, but by struggling for it themselves.

This brings us onto the next western media angle, also adopted by the post-dictator governments: that the uprisings were great, they won their demands for an elected parliament, now there’s some instability but it’s time the people of the region to get back to work and get on with building their country. This is consistently the attitude of not only the Western press but also our politicians and those of the successor regimes in the middle-east, so it’s perhaps the most crucial mistruth to see through.

When I bumped into her by chance in a café in Tunis where lefty blogger types tend to congregate, Lina Ben Mhenni summed up the most salient response to this that I've heard when she said:

“The revolution did not finish on January 14 (the day Ben Ali was overthrown) — it started on January 14! Ben Ali left the country, but he is just the head of the system.

Every day I am more and more convinced that the whole system is still there. The police are back to committing violence, there are more and more limitations on freedom of speech.

The media is still manipulated by government and political parties — and bloggers and cyber activists continue to play that role of citizen journalists.”

The fact that there has been relatively free elections in Tunisia & Egypt (in some ways even more free in Tunisia than here in Australia – with strictly regulated media & public advertising equally set aside for each candidate) and in lots of other countries through the region in response to the uprisings is a big win for the revolutionary movements. But these revolutionary movements are far from fulfilled. The fundamental economic questions, and even the fundamental political ones, remain to be addressed. The newly elected regimes of Egypt & Tunisia, comprised of Islamist majorities working with “liberal” pro-capitalist forces – ie those who had money or influence before the uprisings began – have both committed to the neoliberal Washington consensus of more IMF loans conditional on restructuring, privatisation, ending subsidies sharpening inequality, etc. They’ve both re-affirmed their roles as team players in the regional geopolitical status, against the wishes of their people – as can be seen from the protests which stormed the Israeli embassy in Egypt on September 9 (again an angle; the major protests in Tahrir, at courts and govt offices earlier in the day were ignored in the mainstream reportage). So the heads have changed, their base of power may have shifted, but there has been little real change; as such, the revolutionary movements are still growing, and still fighting.

Some of the wins of the Arab Spring, though, can be seen in other things; the upsurge in women’s rights activism in Tunisia, for example, or community organisation amongst the poorer villages, suburbs and informal slums surrounding Cairo. These struggles going forward, whether again the government or on different issues like feminism or solidarity organised with those suffering in the frozen interior in Tunisia through the winter, are coming out of the fact that there is a huge new layer of young, inspired, revolutionary youth, who are debating politics in the cafes and streets, and who are convinced they can change the world

The responsibility of us as people wanting a better world here in the west is primarily to learn from the Arab Spring, and secondarily to show solidarity to it. Above all, we should take the spirit which has come to define the era of the Arab Spring – that another world is possible, an alternative to this system is possible, if we fight for it – and make it a reality here in Australia.

Shout out to Teachers for Palestine

So a friend of mine who volunteers in Palestine mentioned me on her blog. For the record, I haven't been able to spend as much time and energy on Palestine solidarity work since I returned to Australia as I'd like; however, stay posted for info on a Nakba day demonstration, and I've got my fingers crossed for a travel article about harvesting olives to be published in a local paper. So I guess I've been keeping busy :)

I decided I'd give a little shout out to Caseceso and another one of my friends still volunteering in Palestine, E, who have been doing some amazing work with the English language teaching project Teach for Palestine for nearly a year now. They've both also been writing blogs about their experiences and adventures in occupied Palestine, constantly reminding me of how much I wish I could have stayed there longer, and putting together a great wealth of information about Palestinian society and culture and how it's impacted by the occupation. E in particular has written about women's issues in Palestine without buying into orientalist superiority narratives at all - figures, coming from a human geographer ;) Well worth reading.