Dear Rothamsted Research,

Re: Take the flour back! Public day of action

Many thanks for your letter dated 27th April.

We would welcome the opportunity to engage with you in a public debate over the forth-coming weeks, so that both sides of the debate have an equal chance to hear and understand each others’ perspectives. To this end we invite you to join us on neutral ground, with a neutral chairperson, for an open exchange of opinions and concerns.

We are pleased that you are calling for rigorous evidence-backed discussion and are therefore somewhat bemused to note your insistence that aphid-resistant GM wheat will decrease pesticide use. This often- repeated biotech industry claim has been widely discredited. (1) On the contrary, findings in the US, Canada and India, show that weeds and predators rapidly develop immunity to GM strategies, resulting in the use of ever increasing amounts of herbicides and pesticides. (2) The concern that the GM Cadenza wheat you are trialling could lead to an increase, rather than a reduction in pesticides, was raised by a geneticist from EcoNexus in her submission to DEFRA, as well as by GM Freeze.

In your letter you make no mention of the serious issue of the antibiotic- resistant marker gene. You assert that “all plants in all types of agriculture are genetically modified to serve humanity’s needs”, suggesting that selective breeding is a similar science to genetic modification, which is both false and misleading. You are openly releasing a synthetic version of a compound that can not be regarded as “substantially equivalent”, and has had no long-term health safety tests whatsoever for human consumption, or for its impacts on non-target species. This practice does not therefore adhere to the EU’s precautionary principle.

In the last few weeks Swiss scientists have published data demonstrating that the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin Cry1Ab emitted as a pesticide by genetically modified (GM) Bt maize increases mortality in young ladybird larvae. (3) This is just another example of how a non-target organism can end up being inadvertently harmed by unforeseen problems with GM technologies. Again, this fails to show regard for the precautionary principle on which sound and responsible science should be based.

You confuse our description of GM crops as not being “properly tested”, i.e. not being part of long-term detailed tests, as mentioned above, with the idea that you should be able to conduct tests in the open air without the aforementioned tests carried out first, putting our farming industry and our environment at risk.

You state “we have pledged that our results will not be patented and will not be owned by any private company” yet you suggested in an interview in Farmers Weekly only a month ago that “companies are very interested and they are keeping a watching brief”. (4) Which is it? We are of course aware of Professor Moloney’s former presidency of SemBioSys Genetics Inc (5) (of whom Dow Agro Science were investors). (6 & 7) We note that he developed the first transgenic oilseed rape plants using canola, which served as the basis for Monsanto’s Roundup Ready and Bayer’s Liberty Link canola products. (8) Furthermore, the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), who are funding this trial using public money, include a consultant for Dow Agro Science and a Non-Executive Director of Syngenta on their council. (9) If this trial is successful, only a large agrochemical company would have the infrastructure to make the GM wheat commercially available.

We are particularly concerned about ensuring the protection of what is probably the world’s oldest classical grassland experiment. We are appalled that you are jeopardizing the integrity of this scientific inheritance by planting GM wheat metres away from it. We believe your recklessness in planting GM in the adjacent field seriously undermines your institution’s scientific credibility.

You say that to “suggest that we have used a ‘cow gene’ and that our wheat is somehow part-cow betrays a misunderstanding which…has no basis in scientific reality.” Yet the description of the gene you have synthetised as being “not found naturally” and having “most similarity to that from cow” is taken directly from own your application to DEFRA. (10)

Many groups challenging GMOs do so in the full knowledge and direct experience that agro-ecological farming practices are more productive than GM and industrial agriculture, and that they ensure the health of humans, ecosystems, livelihoods and food security. The value of their work to revive seed diversity, farmers’ rights, indigenous knowledge, organic agriculture techniques, and local markets was confirmed at the highest levels by the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). The largest-ever assessment of global agriculture, it involved more than 400 scientists and 30 governments, and was dismissive of GM’s potential to address global hunger. (11) Instead it recognised that the only way to ensure future food, farming and ecosystems was through a wholesale emphasis on agro- ecological practices. (12)

We are not in a minority with our fears over this trial and the potential commercial introduction of GM wheat that could follow. Recent EU surveys show that the majority of the public still don’t trust GM food. (13) Leading figures from the bread industry have also come out in strong opposition. Last week the ‘Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union’, and the ‘Real
Bread Campaign’ submitted a pledge to DEFRA refusing to use GM wheat, signed by over 350 bakers, millers, farmers and consumers. In planting the GM wheat, you have shown total disregard for the reasonable concerns of the public at large, who say they don’t want to eat GM, and do not want to be treated as guinea pigs.

By pressing ahead with these plans you threaten the future livelihoods of the farming community. Via your close connections to North America you know that cross-contamination can and does happen, and that farmers have lost millions in exports as a result.
You ask us not to pull up the GM wheat. We ask you not to recklessly endanger livelihoods and our food supply by letting it remain in the open air. We do not believe that it should be lawful for you to spread contamination in this way. If the government, through its close bio-tech industry ties, (14) refuses to take responsibility for this problem, then we are left with no other choice.

We are aware that you have been in receipt of many expressions of concern in regard to this trial. You have shown that you will not listen.

(When a powerful minority threatens democratically expressed wishes of the majority, direct action becomes necessary. The suffragettes’ campaign of direct action helped women get the vote. The vast numbers of people who pulled up crops when the bio-tech industry tried to introduce GM into this country 15 years ago is the reason why our countryside has not been contaminated.)

We invite anyone who is worried about the impact of genetically modified crops on our health, our farming industry, and our environment to join us on 27th May in showing our opposition to this trial. We will come together to ‘take the flour back’, celebrating the thriving wheat industry we already have in the UK, with bakers, farmers, bee keepers, allotment holders, and other bread-lovers.

Yours sincerely,

Take the Flour Back

References

1. Independent reports from the US show that since 1996, GM corn, soybean and cotton have led to an increase in pesticide use of 122 million pounds (55 million Kilos). http://www.foei.org/publications/pdfs/gmcrops2006execsummary.pdf

2. www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/who_benefits.pdf

3. http://www.enveurope.com/content/24/1/10

4. Phillip Case, ‘GM wheat trial begins amid high security’, Farmers Weekly, 28 March 2012 http://www.fwi.co.uk/Articles/28/03/2012/132176/GM-wheat-trial-begins- amid-high-security.htm

5. http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/PersonDetails.php?Who=136661

6. http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/articles/391586/from-seeds-pharmaceuticals

7. http://www.seedquest.com/News/releases/2004/may/8632.htm

8. http://www.rothamsted.ac.uk/PersonDetails.php?Who=136661

9. BBSRC Council, Register of Members’ Declared Interests – http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/web/FILES/Conflicts/council_conflicts.pdf

10. http://archive.defra.gov.uk/environment/quality/gm/regulation/documents/ 11-r8-01-app-a.pdf

11. IAASTD, Executive summary p8

12. IAASTD, ‘Towards Multifunctional agriculture for Social, Environmental and Economic Sustainability’, p1

13. British Science Association GM Survey conducted 17-26 February 2012 by Populus http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/web/News/BritishScienceAssociat ionNews/_GMpoll2012Results.htm

14. Richard Pendlebury, ‘Special investigation: Do government’s GM- friendly plans make former biotech lobbyist Caroline Spelman Minister for Conflicting Interests’, Daily Mail, 15 June 2010. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286012/Do-governments-GM- friendly-plans-make-biotech-lobbyist-Caroline-Spelman-Minister- Conflicting-Interests.html

________

Take the Flour Back are campaigners against genetically modified crops.  You can find out more here

| Michael Shuman |

A $3 Trillion Gold Mine

A group of scholars at the University of Wisconsin recently counted nearly 30,000 cooperatives in the United States operating at 73,000 locations. The vast majority are consumer cooperatives, with 343 million memberships (many people belong to multiple co-ops, hence the number of memberships exceeds the U.S. population). Another 7 million memberships can be found in producer and purchasing cooperatives. Credit unions, which are essentially banking cooperatives, have 92 million members. Electrical utility co-ops reach 42 million Americans. Agricultural cooperatives have three million members.

The cooperative sector owns $3 trillion in assets, generates half a trillion dollars a year in revenue, and pays 856,000 people $25 billion in annual wages. Their multiplier impact on the economy supports more than two million jobs nationally. In Minnesota, which is not only the Land of 10,000 Lakes but also the state with 1,000 co-ops, another survey of just a third of them found they were contributing seventy-nine thousand jobs in the state and more than $600 million in state and local tax revenues.

Cooperatives can now be found in business services, child care, hardware, telecommunications, and insurance. In 2009, as Congress was debating whether to include a “public option” in health-care reform legislation, a compromise was seriously considered that would have prioritized the creation of state-based health-care cooperatives—underscoring the increasing importance and bipartisan appeal of these models. More recently Congress has been considering transforming the two home-mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, into a nationwide securitization cooperative owned by member banks and credit unions.

An underappreciated characteristic of co-ops is that nearly all of them fit our definition of locally owned—that is, probably 99.9 percent are connected to a particular place and owned by geographically proximate members. Even large co-ops that sprawl across the country have many of the characteristics of local businesses. National producers co-ops, like Land O’Lakes and Organic Valley, represent small farmers around the country who are eager to sell, process, and distribute their products regionally. Adam Schwartz, vice president for public affairs and member services for the National Cooperative Business Association (NCBA), says, “No matter how large a cooperative is, because it is owned by the individual farmers or individual consumers or small businesses, I feel very comfortable making a case that co-ops in any form support local business.”

David Thompson, a cooperative innovator based in Northern California, contends that cooperatives are critically important builders of community economies. “I’ve often thought about how my local Davis Food Co-op employs about 160 people. At the co-op they have their own accounting, marketing, membership, and personnel department, all of the management is local, buyers are local, the monthly newsletter is printed locally, we advertise in the local paper (Trader Joe’s doesn’t), the books are done by a regional accounting firm, the lawyers are a regional firm. The two Safeways in town each employ about fifty workers, have no buyers on the spot, the administration, advertising and accounting are all done from Oakland, and all of its money at the end of the day is funneled off to Oakland, where the administrative expenses occur. There’s another side of it, too, which is that cooperatives will never move to another town, state, or country because it’s cheaper. Their owners wouldn’t allow it.”

The structure of co-ops can vary widely. Most are built around consumers. But some are structured around purchasing and producer members (themselves typically local businesses), some around workers, and some around combinations of all these categories. What they have in common is adherence to principles enunciated in England in 1844 by the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, which was put together by a group of unemployed weavers who had lost their jobs because of the industrialization of the textile industry. Among the key tenets: Anyone who wishes to join a consumer cooperative can. Profits must be split among members according to their “patronage,” which refers to their use of the cooperative, not the amount of their investment in it. Members elect a board that oversees the management. Unlike most U.S. companies, where voting power is based on the principle of “one dollar, one vote,” cooperatives are based on the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Co-ops are deeply democratic. And while many are committed to pleasing as many members as possible, few rigidly adhere to the consensus practices that made my experience in Stanford’s co-ops so exasperating. If anything, co-ops transcend political ideology. As Schwartz observes, “For conservatives, cooperatives mean self-help, people doing for themselves what needs to be done. For liberals and progressives, it’s social progress, people doing what the community needs.”

Even though most cooperatives start very modestly, some have grown spectacularly. Familiar co-op brands include Nationwide (a mutual insurance cooperative), AgriBank (a Minnesota-based farm-credit cooperative with $36.6 billion in assets), Recreational Equipment Inc. (better known as REI, the Seattle-based sporting goods company), and the Associated Press (a newspaper cooperative). Some cooperatives have scaled up to become significant engines of economic development within their communities. The Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, based in New Hampshire and Vermont, has twenty-eight thousand members. According to its treasurer, Donald Kreis: “We have a vibrant local ag sector, and one of the reasons is that it’s anchored by our big co-op. Our co-op is a $70-million-a-year business, and it buys a ton of locally produced products. Our co-op offers these vendors favorable payment terms. In doing that, the co-op makes sacrifices, which make it less profitable. The theory is that we can go to the twenty-eight thousand households that own the business and say, you know what, we are going to return a little less to you, because we know we all want to have a vibrant local ag sector.”

Another Rochdale principle is to assist other co-ops or groups who wish to start their own co-ops. Kreis tells the story of a small town north of Hanover called Littleton, an hour-plus drive away: “They came to us at one point and said, ‘We love your co-op, we’re members of it, and we’d like you to open a branch store in Littleton.’ Well, Littleton is really a little too far away for our co-op, but we said to them that we’ll help you start your own co-op. You guys can raise money in your community, and we’ll assist you. The people in Littleton didn’t get it at first that we were serious about totally cooperating with them and not treating them as a rival or competitor in any way. Every shred of expertise we had we were willing to share with them: Our merchandising people went up there and helped them start the store; we gave them one of our store managers who was retiring and he became their founding manager; we even subsidized his salary for a while. What was really cool was that we didn’t just help this community start a co-op, we helped educate and raise the consciousness of people in the community about what cooperation really means.”

The Littleton story illustrates that the capital that members put into a co-op not only supports that co-op itself but also the proliferation of other cooperatives and other local businesses. The National Cooperative Business Association is also facilitating the creation of a patient capital fund. (The term patient capital generally means that investors are expected to keep their money in the fund for a long time.) Co-ops like Kreis’s lend their surplus capital to NCBA, and NCBA in turn lends it out to new or expanding co-ops. The Cooperative Fund of New England, another lender to start-up co-ops, gets its capital from socially responsible institutions like the Episcopal Diocese of Hartford, Connecticut.

There’s a tendency for those unfamiliar with cooperatives to look down on them as the leftovers of the mainstream economy, implying that if these ideologically driven people simply reorganized themselves into “normal” private companies, they would be more efficient and productive. In fact, just the opposite is true: Cooperatives often enter into economic activities that private businesses will not take on. The most fertile period of cooperative growth was during the Great Depression. Rural electric cooperatives spread across the American plains when it became clear that other investor-owned and municipally owned utilities were uninterested in wiring up sparsely populated regions. Credit unions, as we’ll soon explore, have seen an upsurge during the recent financial crisis.

One economic argument, for consumer cooperatives especially, is that putting consumers in the driver’s seat helps to keep prices low. The information flow from consumers to producers is direct and immediate. Outrageous executive compensation, debt-inducing acquisitions, unjustifiable dividends to lure weary shareholders, irrational price inflation and discrimination—all the crazy behavior of conventional corporations—can effectively be banned by mindful consumers in co-ops. “Members naturally have trust and confidence in a co-op,” argues Kreis, “because they own it. And that has both social capital and real capital bound up in it. There’s real business value in being able to look your customers in the eye and say, You can trust us, because you own us, and we’re in business to do nothing other than act in your best interest.”

Funerals may seem like an odd place to see the competitive advantage of co-ops, but wherever there are stratospheric profits and monopolistic practices, consumer cooperatives can bring prices back to Earth. “Pomp and circumstance are for royalty,” jokes John Eric Rolfstad, executive director of the People’s Memorial funeral cooperative in Seattle, “[whereas] Baby Boomers want good value, simplicity, and convenience.” His cooperative has eighty thousand members and performs more than a thousand funerals per year. The cost of an open-casket burial is $3,299—less than half of what the average American pays. Mindful of the huge environmental footprint of cemeteries, People’s Memorial encourages members to choose cremation for $649. “Simple final arrangements focus more on the spiritual and existential aspects of life and death, rather than on ostentatious materialism,” says the co-op’s website. In 2009 it issued $164,000 in dividends to its members, partially through patronage payments and partially through price cuts.

A second economic argument for cooperatives is that worker participation in running the business (which is certainly the case for worker cooperatives but also is a common feature of consumer cooperatives) increases labor productivity. One study comparing plywood companies in the Pacific Northwest found that cooperatives were 13.5 percent more productive than equivalent unionized plants, noting that cooperative workers could have gone on vacation an extra seven weeks and produced as much as their private-sector counterparts. The efficiencies occurred because management, by involving workers, made smarter decisions about raw materials, machinery, and production methods. Another study of the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain (elaborated below), by Henry Levin of Columbia University, showed that with only 25 percent of the capital per worker as the nation’s largest five hundred private firms, they were able to add 88 percent to the value of products per worker. That’s triple the productivity!

A third economic argument is especially important for local living economies: Cooperatives can help local businesses compete more effectively. An inefficient small business can team up with others through a purchasing or producer cooperative to achieve economies of scale. To put it another way, there is no economy of scale local businesses cannot achieve as long as they are willing to work together through a cooperative. Sunkist, a co-op of citrus growers, enables member growers to deploy a common brand and undertake first-class, well-financed marketing campaigns. Furniture First, headquartered in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, undertakes collective purchasing on behalf of the small furniture dealers it represents around the country, delivering bulk discounts and volume savings that would not be possible without the collaborative platform. In rural Wisconsin, a purchasing cooperative has boosted the local food movement.

“Local food is good medicine for everyone,” says Stephen Ronstrom, CEO of Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “It preserves and expands family farms, provides jobs in production and processing, and keeps money in our community.” To bring local food cost-effectively into the nonprofit hospital, Ronstrom’s staff teamed up with local farmers to create the Producers and Buyers Cooperative. No one farmer can provide the volume needed for the twenty-six hundred meals a day the hospital must serve. But by putting together dozens of farmers, processors, distributors, and institutional purchasers into a single cooperative, the entire system performs like an exquisite ballet. Other hospitals have since joined, and the cooperative anticipates attracting more institutions in the region like public schools, universities, nursing homes, and business commissaries.

The savings from collaboration are apparent in the bulk purchasing done by the Lakes Country Service Cooperative (LCSC) in Minnesota. In 1976, the state created eight regional purchasing cooperatives to provide affordable health insurance to its school districts. These have since expanded their memberships to include local governments and nonprofits and are now bulk-purchasing everything from paper to cars. Mark Sievert, city administrator for Fergus Falls, a fourteen-thousand-person town that belongs to the co-op, says the city’s $250 annual membership has led to hundreds of thousands of dollars of savings. In 2009 the co-op purchased $25 million of goods and services for its members, saving them $3.5 million.

For communities struggling to create jobs, cooperatives offer an affordable way to pool capital and to start up new businesses. In most states, co-op memberships are exempt from securities registration requirements. And under federal law, cooperative memberships generally are not considered securities. Therefore, all the expensive federal and state registration requirements necessary for unaccredited investors to launch, say, a private grocery store can often be dispensed with if the store is a consumer cooperative soliciting members.

But how exactly can a cooperative become an investment vehicle? In a typical consumer cooperative, a new member invests in, say, a $100 share, and then gets discounts on goods and services, and perhaps a patronage refund at the end of the year. If you become a member of dozens of co-ops, covering each of your basic needs like banking, insurance, energy, food, and health care, your capital investment may add up to several thousand dollars. Usually when members leave a cooperative, they can get back their member capital. If that $100 invested in the co-op allows a member to enjoy $10 of discounts or patronage benefits each year, the rate of return is 10 percent—more than double what a typical stock fund will deliver.

In the 1975 case of United Housing Foundation v. Forman, the U.S. Supreme Court established that memberships in a co-op, when purchased primarily for the benefits of membership and not primarily for a financial return, are not securities under federal law. Moreover, patronage distributions from co-ops that provide personal, living, or family items are exempt from federal taxation. But state law is more complicated. Whether your specific cooperative membership is or isn’t a security, whether it’s exempt from state blue-sky filings, how it is taxed, how much of a financial return members can realize—everything turns on your state’s exact co-op statutes and tax and other securities laws. And the rules are inconsistent across the country. Every state has at least one co-op statute, and many states have different statutes governing different types of co-ops. Minnesota has seven!

But if a cooperative keeps its members and business within a state, then at least all it needs to worry about is state law. Jenny Kassan, my colleague in Cutting Edge Capital, explains: “The minute you cross state lines, if you solicit investors in more than one state, federal law comes into play . . . In Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts, and several other states, cooperative memberships are exempt from the state securities law registration requirements. They can go out, solicit the public to buy memberships in their co-op, and not have to worry about the usual requirement to file a registration with the state regulators.” Cooperative memberships then can open a spigot to other local-investment opportunities.

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Michael H. Shuman is an economist, attorney, author, and entrepreneur, and Director of Research and Marketing for Cutting Edge Capital. He has authored, coauthored, or edited eight books. He helped co-found BALLE, which represents 22,000 local businesses in North America in 80 communities, and is now a Fellow there.

This excerpt is from the book Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Move Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity. It is reprinted here with permission by Chelsea Green Publishing. For more information about this book, visit www.chelseagreen.com.

| Gabriel Kuhn |

As the internet seems unstoppable as an ever broader publishing forum, more and more innovative radical projects appear online. One of the latest is Stir, which describes itself as “a community-building online magazine”. Alpine Anarchist spoke to the editor Jonny Gordon-Farleigh about publishing between print and HTML tags and the future of it all.

Alpine Anarchist: Where did the idea for Stir Magazine come from?

STIR: One of the animating principles behind the creation of Stir was the realization that the reportage tradition of political journalism has generally failed. This is not to say that exposé journalism has achieved little or that the progress it made in people’s lives should go unappreciated. However, the prevailing belief that ‘so long as the general public is informed about governmental and corporate abuses, we will automatically act on it and this will eventually lead to a set of social and political reforms’ just hasn’t worked out. And, of course, when this doesn’t happen we get all of the predictable accusations of apathy from academics, and journalism becomes, at its worst, only a constant reminder of how we are being screwed over.

Starting from this analysis, we realised we don’t have to convince people we are in a mess — that’s like explaining exploitation to the exploited. Instead, Stir promotes the organisations that create new infrastructures for providing education, producing energy, growing food, managing resources, sharing creative works, and other things that have an impact on our lives because if politics, as Nathan Schneider wrote in The Nation, is not about “choosing from among what we are offered”, then it has to be about creating new options. To explain this, Alain Badiou’s response to the claim that political action begins in disappointment is very helpful: “I think that we can have negative feelings, negative experiences concerning injustice, the horrors of the world, terrible wars and so on. But all great movements in the political and historical field have been created, have been provoked not by that sort of negative feeling but always by a local victory. If we appreciate, for example, why we have during two years the great revolt of the slaves in the Roman Empire, under the leadership of Spartacus, it is not because slaves have the feeling of injustice…Because they always have that, it is their experience day after day. It is rather because in one small place, a small group of slaves finds new means, finally to create a victory.”

Stir is about promoting these “new means” and strategies in the hope that other communities will say, “if it works there, why can’t we do it here?”

AA: Why did you decide to publish online?

S: To begin with, it was question of pure practicality — it would obviously be an understatement to say that publishing is a capital-intensive industry. Another attraction to online publishing is that it’s a return to the D.I.Y. ethic that meant that we could publish before we received lots of ‘yes’s’ from funders and directors.

We also publish under a Creative Commons license that means anyone can reproduce our content noncommercially and only if they give proper attribution to the magazine and its respective author. This idea specifically grew out of online publishing and the sharing of creative works and code (Linux), and it is something that most publishing houses are not traditionally friendly to (even though it is something they should take seriously).

Another great thing about having an online presence is that it opens a wide range of possibility for a more robust and interactive use of online infrastructures. The ability to bring together a wide-ranging and diverse group of people without the need for everyone to physically ‘be there’ is really exciting. We have plans to host webinars and set up online forums to debate ideas and build on the conversations happening around independent publishing, food, farming, and other community-building strategies.

The internet is also an incredibly useful organising tool. Whether organising a large group of people to converge on a certain day and time, or garnering a network of support for a campaign in action (like during the recent Occupy Wall Street where anyone from anywhere could order a pizza for the occupiers online!), organising has never been as immediate, effective and accessible.

Another great use of this tool is for fund raising, and specifically for crowdfunding campaigns to build support for social projects. Crowdfunding allows millions of people worldwide to become social investors without needing to be incredibly wealthy themselves. Online projects such as Avaaz are able to appeal to their millions of members to quickly fund political campaigns. Stir is presently in the process of creating a crowdfunding campaign of its own with the strategy group smartMeme.

AA: Do you have any plans for print publishing with Stir?

S:While we are currently an online-only magazine, we also have a strong interest in printing. I am not quite sure how this will work at the moment — perhaps publishing monthly online and quarterly in print? Or maybe having a pre-paid subscriber-only print run that acts as a reader-owned co-op? However, we are open to offers from anyone with better ideas…

AA: What kind of future do you see for print publications?

S: Well, there has already been a radical shift from the old model of warehousing books. One simple response to this has been print-on-demand such as the likes of Harvard’s Paige M. Gutenborg book robot. There has also been a big increase in self-publishing where authors publish online or even assume their own printing costs. There are also more and more cases of authors self-pirating their creations and also the evidence to show that ‘free access often means increased sales’.

One member of the Wu Ming Foundation, long-time advocates of Copyleft and Creative Common licenses, gives an illuminating example of this in the case of the revolutionary project initiated by sci-fi writer Eric Flint: “He (Eric) persuaded his publisher, Baen Books, to build a free-of-charge virtual library containing many novels from Baen’s catalogue, all of them still on the market. People could log on www.baen.com and download dozens of novels in electronic form, each of them available in five formats. One might think it was going to be a suicide, for each downloaded text would correspond to one unsold copy of the book. That’s what market analysts on the payroll of corporate record labels keep telling us every day. Well, any ‘ideological’ prejudice was swept away by an inconfutable proof: from the moment their books appeared on the shelves of Eric Flint’s virtual library, most authors have witnessed an increase in sales. One example above all: Mother of Demons, by Eric Flint himself, sold 9,694 copies from September 1997 to the end of 2000. In the following eighteen months, while the text was freely downloadable from the website, the book doubled its sales: 18,500 copies.”

Another thing that publishers have to consider, as Nik Gorecki talked about in the last issue of Stir, is turning the book into an art object. When I interviewed McKenzie Wark, who had just published The Beach Beneath the Streets, he told me that his new book was one of the top ‘illegal’ downloads. His publisher, Verso, have responded to this by attempting to close down aaaaarg (a major ‘illegal’ download website that is reincarnated as often as its closed down), but also, and more innovatively, by making the front cover of his book an unfolding map that showed the Situationists’ activities in Paris. This gave people more reasons to buy the book in its physical form than the simple text that can be easily and infinitely copied on that great copying machine: the Internet.

Another option available to authors and also an innovation that leads to increased collaboration with small publishers is a franchise. This model has been used, if not pioneered, by The Onion magazine. It works like this: The Onion produces its magazine content over which it retains all creative control. The small publisher assumes all of the printing and distribution costs, but is compensated by receiving all of the advertising revenue of which it can potentially receive more than it usually would because of the popularity of The Onion.

AA: What are your hopes for Stir, in the context of politically conscious, community-building publishing overall?

S: The hope is for Stir to be a relentlessly practical resource for those who have a desire to transform their communities. We quite consciously decided not to do ‘commentary’ for the reasons that I explained in the answer to the first question. So, if a contributor talks about a problem and its history — unjust food system, commercialization of sports, privatization of education, exploitation of resources — they also have to present the reader with the examples of communities and projects who are already creating new models and systems to replace the current ones. So, we want Stir to become a living archive of practical ideas for those who want to form community trusts for their football teams, take cooperative ownership of their local pub, establish self-directed educational centres, initiate community-supported agriculture, and all the other aspects which are essential to our lives.

Ultimately, we want to organise training sessions and workshops where people can learn practical skills such as designing successful outreach campaigns, community building, cooperative financing strategies, and other relevant skills which they can take back to the places they live and start their own initiatives. So what is implied by the articles can be applied in the world!

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This was originally published at Alpine Anarchist Productions

visionOntv volunteers at work doing interviews using a “pop-up” TV studio at the 2011Mozilla Festival Media, Freedom and the Web in London

It’s a pig to get going as a journalist. Despite reporters’ enduring reputations as sub-pond-life types, plenty of people are eager to join them in writing, filming or photographing the news. Supply way outstrips the commercial demand, making it hard to earn any sort of living.

For all the wannabe hacks, there aren’t that many places for them to go. Of those at the mainstream media groups, their news output does a generally terrible job of holding our governors to account or examining the various crises facing our societies today. The few journalists who land regular jobs must balance their journalistic zeal and ideals with holding down their positions.

There are reasons for this, more or less obvious to regular journalists themselves. Whether they realise it or not, the stories they tell each day are bound to who pays for them. That means media owners and their advertisers have massive, if subtle, effects on how our news is packaged. Their agendas, not ours, influence which stories run, which don’t and how facts in each are ordered top to bottom. The same effect is true of state broadcasters, even though the ways it happens are different.

I was blind to that starting out as a journalist more than 20 years ago. Back then, I was a believer in mainstream media as a force for good — my big concern being how to get a job. Once I began to see more clearly, I was well set as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, now Thomson Reuters.

The organisation has offices dotted around the world, its stories feeding into any big brand media outlet you could mention, and straight onto financial trading screens. For the budding foreign reporter I was, there seemed nowhere better to work. I finally got in at the fourth time of asking.

When I quit 11 years later the veneer had long since gone. I was frustrated with doing superficial journalism that skated over how governments fail to serve their people’s best interests. That recurring story didn’t interest my editors, certainly not as the fundamental thrust of our news file. The effects of rampant financial speculation, serially torpedoed climate talks or resolutely corporate-friendly trade rules barely figured on their radars. The time allowed for such marginal issues was nothing compared with the hours we spent grinding out stories intended to help rich people get richer.

Once I’d left, it took me time to pick out the thread of failed governance running through these different issues, to see the essential charade of modern “democracy”. From local to global levels, our influence drains away, making occasional votes in national elections largely meaningless. True power lies with globally mobile capital and corporations.

I tell this personal cautionary tale as an introduction to activist journalism, the far more optimistic part of this piece. Getting a clearer-eyed view of our intertwined political systems let me see how we journalists face the constant risk of being mere foghorns for power. We have to understand that reality before exploring how things might be radically improved.

Though that’s hardly news for Stir readers, it took me ages to get it. In the process I came across both the Transition Network and the video activists of visionOntv. As Rob Hopkins explains in this issue, transitioners have identified the combined threat of climate change and peak oil and are resolutely focused on locally grown responses. visionOntv’s idea of training people to make media with the tools in their pockets grew out of Undercurrents, which made and shared activist media long before the mass public internet.

The networking effects of Transition and the citizen journalism techniques from the likes of visionOntv suggest powerful possibilities. The same synergies could bring public-focused journalism to other global networks, illustrating local responses to a problem as the way to finding global ones. Potential networks might be those tackling poor-country debt, abusive global trade rules, corporate tax dodging, rampant militarism and the effects of untrammelled financial speculation.

For all the complications and challenges of scale, the basic tools are accessible and relatively cheap. visionOntv’s mobile templates, explain how one or two individuals can make audio visual reports or interviews for rapid upload to the internet.

I first saw the potential directly last October, when the group’s full-time staff and volunteers covered the Rebellious Media Conference in London, their prodigious output belying their tiny budget. It was possible thanks to a combination of no-edit mobile phone reports for instant upload to the internet and a clever “pop-up” video studio made up of two cameras, a microphone and a laptop.

It’s not just a question of cheaper technologies. visionOntv’s real cuteness is in its commitment to as-live shooting of reports. That cuts out time and expense from the process of getting work out to audiences. It also keeps reports short, fully aware of today’s butterfly attention spans and the limitations of streaming video to mobile devices.

There is huge potential for doing decent-quality journalism that does the job our mainstream media fail to do. Its exploration has only just begun. My own efforts so far included covering the recent London Human Rights Watch Film Festival, working with fellow volunteer Glenn McMahon. Over several days, we interviewed film makers on subjects ranging from sex trafficking, Italian police brutality at the Genoa G8 and Paraguayan peasant farmers being forced off their land by industrial agriculture.

The DIY approach opens the portals of journalism to a far wider public, just as well given the current state of our media. Rather than wait for our governors and their chroniclers to hand down solutions from on high, we can get on with finding ones for ourselves and sharing those stories with others. The good news about our bad news is that it risks becoming yesterday’s news. Don’t say no one told you.

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Patrick Chalmers is a journalist and author of Fraudcast News — How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.  You can listen to him talking about Fraudcast News in a “pop-up” interview from last year’s Rebellious Media Conference.

Spreading the word — a visionOntv media training for London Transition Initiatives: Training in making effective video reports with the kit people have.  Read more here.

| Will Simpson |

‘Who’ is easy enough. The Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls are an amateur sports club based in inner city Bristol. We haven’t got our own ground and most people wouldn’t have heard of us. But over the years we have done some interesting things, most of which are included in a book I’ve co-written about the club that’s due to be published this summer.

The club ‘became’ the Cowboys sometime around the early summer of 1992. Its birthplace lies at Baptist Mills primary school playing field in Easton. It was here that, from the late ’80s onwards, various punks, hippies and general ne’er do wells (as well as the odd talented youngster) congregated for a regular Sunday afternoon kickaround. These were generally a lighthearted way to sweat out the previous night’s alcohol, but over time they gradually developed a more serious intent. After one session in May that year it was mooted that we might join one of the local Sunday leagues for season 1992/93. Our country music-obsessed secretary suggested that we call ourselves the Easton Cowboys. Geographically certain and pitched perfectly between self-deprecation and swagger, it wasn’t a bad choice.

Our first season didn’t go too badly — we finished in mid table. But then at the end of the season came an event that changed the whole direction of the club. We had been invited to a tournament in Stuttgart in Germany. What we found when we arrived there was something we had never encountered before — a football ‘festival’ that included music, socialising between the teams and an easy going inclusive atmosphere. We discovered that the German teams who had organised it — ASV and Neckerstrasse — were very much like us, in that they were both from the left, explicitly anti-racist and anti-fascist, and in no particular order liked punk rock, beer and football. We returned to Bristol vowing to organise our own international football festival the following year.

This we achieved in August 1994, on a piece of council-owned land tucked inside a park in suburban Bristol. We returned to Stuttgart again the following year and put on further tournaments in 1995 and 1996. More teams started to come to these events and gradually a European network began to coalesce around these annual shindigs, including clubs from Belgium, Poland and Lithuania as well as others from England and Germany.

In 1998 we held our most ambitious event yet, a three day 20-team extravaganza called ‘The Alternative World Cup’. For this we raised money to bring over a team of youngsters from the Diepkloof area of Soweto in South Africa, who duly ended up winning the tournament. The media started sniffing around our team. The whole event was filmed by Sky, who put it on their regular Football Mondiale programme.

Gaining confidence, our next adventure led west. A couple of activists who had been to the Alternative World Cup asked us whether we’d be interested in travelling to Mexico to play a series of games in the Zapatista-held communities of Chiapas. Needless to say we jumped at the chance. So moved were we by what we saw out there that a number of Cowboys and Cowgirls decided to raise funds to provide fresh water systems for the Zapatista villages. Some even got their hands dirty and worked constructing the systems themselves. A separate entity Kiptik (‘inner strength’ in the indigenous language tzetzal) is created for the purposes of this project. In the last 10 years it has raised over £100,000.

The success of the Mexico tour broadened our horizons further. The following year a Cowboys cricket side ventured to California and played a two day test match against the Compton Homies and Popz, an inner city team based in South Central LA that diverts young kids away from gang culture via the medium of cricket. A couple of years later the football team went out to Morocco to play a series of games. In 2007 a solidarity tour was organised that saw us become the first UK football team to tour the Palestinian Occupied Territories and in 2009 we ventured to Brazil. We had now played sport on five continents. Not bad for a bunch of cash-strapped punks.

By Mark Sands

The club expanded further. A Cowgirls football team is set up in 2002, then in 2004 a group of local netball players who had been going under the name ‘the Easton Crack Whores’ join forces with us and become the Cowgirls netball team. Meanwhile the last ten years has seen the men’s football team go from strength to strength, expanding to three Saturday teams, a Sunday team and two veterans teams. They’ve even won some trophies in that time.

That’s the history — the hows and the whats. But what of the whys? Aside from detailing the adventures we’ve had over the last two decades, Freedom Through Football tries to pin down the principles and ethics of the club, which aren’t quite as simple as you might first think.

The club has its roots in the punk and post-punk scenes of the 1980s and their attendant ethics of self-sufficiency and internationalism have informed the club from its earliest days. Added to this is a commitment to democracy — the club has regular mass assemblies and, unlike other set-ups where very often the same old blokes end up running the show, the Cowboys have always rotated positions of responsibility and encouraged new people to take on these posts — and inclusivity. This last element does not just include creating a non-prejudicial atmosphere in terms of race, sexuality and gender. There has never been a fixed membership of the Cowboys. It has always included supporters, partners, children, friends, in fact anyone who has participated, no matter how small their role.

In addition to this there is something that is perhaps harder to pin down — a dash of irreverence and a lot of free-spirited absurdism. The story of the Cowboys and Cowgirls is as much about the naked penalty shoot outs and fundraising parties with bizarre fancy dress themes as it is about grinding out results on a Sunday. The club has always provided a welcome home for unusual ideas, from buying a boat and sailing it to Jamaica to play football and cricket (this was seriously discussed at one club meeting in the ’90s) to the Mexico tours. These, after all, we’re sold to the club not as some dull n’ worthy exercise in solidarity but because playing football in the jungles of South East Chiapas sounded like a right laugh.

This standing for something even-if-it-is-impossible-to-pin-down has been a source of great strength down the years. We know some teams that have identified themselves specifically as ‘socialist’ or ‘anarchist’. The Cowboys has never had a set agenda or manifesto that you have to sign up to when you join. Doing such a thing would be so prescriptive, so deathly and so, well, un-Cowboyish.

Instead it’s probably better to see the club as a vehicle through which things (some of which are explicitly political) can be achieved — the solidarity tours to Mexico and Palestine being just two examples. But the club hasn’t just been engaged in struggles in glamorous far off places. In the middle of last decade we got in involved in a campaign to save an Easton playing field that a local Academy school tried to fence off. We organised a series of Community Fun Days on the field, lent our support to a scheme to protect it by converting it into a Town Green and a number of Cowboys tried to galvanise opposition to the Academy’s proposals, right down to knocking on doors and proffering petitions — local politics at its most mundane.

It’s fair to say that being a Cowboy has lead some of us down a few unexpected paths. When we first formed as the Cowboys in the early ’90s there was no intention to form a ‘sports team with a political dimension’. Many of the original team had been active politically in the ’80s, from anti-fascist work to the Anti Poll Tax movement, to more obscure local campaigns. Some were getting exhausted and playing football thus provided some relief from the self-imposed burdens of the activist lifestyle. But the mere fact that many of us had been activists in some shape or form meant that at some point the political meme that the Cowboys have always carried was likely to be activated at some point in the future. And so it proved.

The Easton Cowboys go West to play the Zapatistas, 1999.  Courtesy of R.S. Grove.

At first this found expression in simple internationalism. Inviting a bunch of teams from around the world to our tournaments may not seem a terribly daring left-field thing to do, but in the context of the late ’80s and early ’90s, an era when Little Englander attitudes were still prevalent, it very much seemed so. Bringing together a team of South African kids from Soweto and a load of German and Belgian punks to a tiny village in Dorset was a statement in itself. Later of course we (or rather some people within the club) flexed that political strand more explicitly.

Over the years we’ve developed a fine intuition about what suits the club. A year or two back a local Oxfam representative tried to interest us in their ‘Don’t Drop The Ball On Aid’ campaign whereby football stars performed keepy uppies in support of writing off Third World debt. We decided to turn that one down. Getting involved with large NGOs has never felt right to us. Neither has getting involved with big business of any description. On our first Palestine tour of 2007 we were offered the chance to play a televised game against a side from Hebron in the city’s new football stadium. It might have been a great opportunity but when we found out the game would be sponsored by a major telecoms firm the team decided to turn it down, albeit after a long and meticulous debate.

Every sportsperson or sports fan believes that their club is ‘different’, but from my own personal experience I have yet to encounter another sports club quite like the Cowboys and Cowgirls. There are some with which we share similar ethics, but aren’t as heterogeneous in terms of their social makeup. There are some we feel a kinship with, but don’t have as large a membership. Many of us older Cowpeople wonder about what the future holds for the club. Can that elusive Cowboys spirit be preserved and passed on to a new generation? All I know is that for a voluntary group to keep growing, maintain a sense of purpose and preserve their spirit and ethics after 20 years is extraordinary. Most groups of individuals would have burned out by now, their initial energy long since dissipated. But year after year life in the Cowboys never gets any less interesting. Long may that continue.

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Will Simpson is one of the founding members of The Easton Cowboys.  He is author of Freedom Through Football: The Story Of The Easton Cowboys and Cowgirls which will be published by Tangent Books this summer

You can find out more about The Cowboys here.

| Jonny Gordon-Farleigh |

How can philosophy be used to advance the struggle for a better world?  How can people participate in discussions that cut through both the fog of opinion and the barrier of “expertise”? Radio Free Everybody consists of conversations between the host, Mat Callahan and guests who want to share their specialized knowledge in the arts and sciences. 

Episode 1. Intellectual Property, Copyright, Patent and the Law with guest Dr. Alan Story, lawyer and teacher at the University of Kent

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Q&A with Radio Free Everybody host Mat Callahan

With the launch of Radio Free Everybody, can you talk about what inspired the idea for the radio show?

A DJ on a community radio station in Bern, Switzerland got me started.  I’d been a guest on his music program promoting a concert my band was playing.  Instead of the five minute announcement he’d originally invited me to deliver, we ended up talking most of the hour-long show.  A few days later this DJ called me up and urged me to consider hosting a series that would offer an alternative to the kind of programming most common today.  In other words, silly sound bytes selling stupidity as a tonic for mental illness. What was needed was in-depth discussion of contemporary themes, deliberately avoiding “opinion” by inviting people who’ve seriously studied their subjects.  But more than just a “panel of experts” the show brings a philosophical approach to art, science and politics which poses questions and challenges conventional wisdom.

You originally designed the shows for terrestrial broadcast in Switzerland, and are now broadcasting (monthly) online at Stir. What changed?  And what are the advantages of broadcasting to an online audience?

I started with people I knew personally.  I wasn’t looking for celebrity guests, I was thinking of people who’d devoted years of study to certain disciplines and were engaged in concrete practices based on their expertise.  This led me to, for example, Alan Story, a lecturer in copyright law at the University of Kent.  Alan is a good friend but he’s also made a thorough critique of intellectual property law, offering a radical perspective that cuts through the nonsense generated by self-interested defenders of the status quo.  Another example is my friend Cesare Silvi, a nuclear engineer who once worked for the Italian government. Cesare came to the realization that nuclear energy was a disaster and, instead, we should be devoting our efforts to uses of the sun.  Cesare’s insights and suggested solutions are based on many years of research and collaboration with scientists and activists worldwide.  Other guests include Nina Power discussing politics and philosophy; Paolo Knill discussing interconnections between music, science and education; and Hans Martin Frey discussing science, global warming and the anti-nuclear movement.  The main objective here is to include listeners in informed discussion that will stimulate further inquiry. Not only about the particular subjects under discussion but about the media landscape, on the one hand, and the usefulness of philosophy in combatting ignorance and apathy, on the other.

Can we look forward to a second series?

I plan to continue but it will depend to a certain extent on the response to this round. I will be in San Francisco for a month and plan to conduct at least two interviews there for later broadcast. This brings us back to your earlier question about why Stir. I’m optimistic about the show’s chances because the magazine is already attracting a readership that will appreciate what the show’s trying to accomplish.  Hopefully, this will be of mutual benefit encouraging more inquiry and more active participation in changing the world.

There is no more conservative nation on earth than the British when it comes to money.  Let me correct that.  The Scots are great money innovators in history.  They gave us Michael Linton who invented LETS and John Law who ruined the French government in 1716 by monetising their national debt. No, it’s the English who are so financially conservative.

When Barings Bank collapsed in 1995 because of the activities of one trader, Nick Leeson — who lost $827 million in Singapore betting on currency futures — it turned out that his London bosses had no idea what he was doing.  They didn’t really understand the derivatives market that he was trading in.  I was also told firmly some years ago by the Washington editor of a UK national newspaper that money was all based on gold — which hasn’t been the case in the UK since 1931.

The truth is that the English still believe that their bank manager is at his desk, drinking sherry, umming and aahing about their overdrafts.  In fact, he has long since been replaced by risk software.  That’s our national failing.  It is endearing in a way, but it’s also dreadfully frustrating.  Because it means we’re stuck in the oldest fantasy about money that there is.  We imagine that it’s real.  And in some ways, this is the source of the crisis in the euro-zone as well.  In England, our politicians never argue about this issue — who creates money, where it comes from, what it means — for the reasons I say.  But in America, it’s always been the heart of political debate.

Perhaps this isn’t surprising.  The question of whether or not they could create their own money — printing it, like Benjamin Franklin — was one of the issues that caused the division with the British.  But a century or more ago, the kind of money they should use was absolutely central to the debate.  It was the main plank of the now defunct Populist Party, which managed to link Southern and Midwestern farmers, together with the big cities of the Mid West, in a campaign for money based on silver, rather than the less plentiful gold.

The party’s tenets were put together in Omaha in 1892 by a man called Ignatius Donnelly.   This was a man who had previously devoted his life to the discovery of Atlantis and proving that Shakespeare never existed.  This is Donnelly in his Omaha Declaration:

“The newspapers are largely subsidised or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrate, our homes covered with mortgages, labour impoverished and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right of organisation for self-protection… a hireling standing army, unrecognised by our laws, is established to shoot them down, and they are rapidly disintegrating to European conditions.”

It’s enough to send a shiver down the spine — European conditions. Ugh.

I mention the Populists because one of their most enthusiastic activists was an unsuccessful Chicago journalist called Frank Baum.  Baum may have been an unsuccessful journalist, but he was a very successful promoter of spectacle, largely on behalf of the department stores of Chicago.  He knew there was a difference between what was real and what wasn’t.  So it isn’t surprising that it was Baum who gave us the Wizard of Oz.

As you may know, the Wizard of Oz is supposed to have been a coded diatribe against money based on gold.  OZ is, of course, the way we designate weight in gold.  You may remember that Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East’s magic Silver Shoes — changed to red in the Judy Garland film.  Nobody understands the power of these shoes:  “All you have to do is knock the heels together three times and command the shoes to carry you wherever you wish to go,” she is told.

The poor residents of Oz have to wear green-tinted glasses fastened by golden buckles.  That is important, for reasons I will come back to.  And in the end the Wonderful Wizard, the personification of the gold standard, is revealed as a fraud, hiding behind a curtain, desperately twiddling with levers.  This was also Baum himself, the impresario behind the great shows that illuminated the Chicago World Fair.

The message of the Wizard is that it is all fake.  It is a show designed to make us believe in the awesome reality of gold.  My message is the reverse; we don’t have to dig it up to get rich.  We can make our own.  The Populists didn’t succeed. They were undermined by the adoption of Free Silver by the Democrats in the person of the great orator William Jennings Bryan — who incidentally ended his life as prosecutor at the Tennessee Monkey Trial in 1925.

At the 1896 Democratic Convention, Bryan brought his acceptance speech to a crescendo by raising his arms above his head and then slowly down into the shape of a cross, with the words: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”  Bryan lost the 1896 election, and twice more — which must be some kind of record.  But this was also a speech that inspired a generation of radicals, portraying gold as an instrument of torture, weighting us down, the very basis of sin.  He described it as an object of veneration that’s turned against us because there simply isn’t enough money for life.

Now, my parents live in a little village in England called Nether Wallop.  It is quite easy to picture: thatched roofs, retired major-generals, Labradors.  A generation ago, it managed to host two shops, a greengrocers, a post office, two pubs, a butchers, a village policeman, a doctor and district nurse, and a railway station — connected to a massive local rail network — only a couple of miles away.  That was during the impoverished years of the 1940s. Now, when we are incomparably ‘richer’, all that’s left is one pub and a very occasional bus.

The conventional reasons for this — low taxes, over-regulation, fat cat salaries — don’t really explain why, despite unprecedented prosperity, it seems so hard to afford the simplest public services, health, post and education, general stores and the life that goes with them.  Perhaps the real question beyond that is, in twenty years time or so, can we afford what we need to make our society civilised?  Because if we can’t, I don’t think it’s enough to throw our hands up in despair and give up.  I’m not prepared for my children to live less civilised lives than me.

Why aren’t politicians asking about this?

Part of the problem is that, if you just printed more money now, there would be a rush of wind, like the Wicked Witch of the East, and it would shoot into the City of London and Wall Street and Frankfurt.  But there still wouldn’t be enough where it’s really needed.  The second reason is that those who run the world prefer us to believe that money is real, because they are as much in thrall to the gold mind-set as they ever were.  And because of that, we are all as much in awe of money as Dorothy ever was as she approached the Emerald City.

Of course the euro isn’t the Gold Standard, but it sometimes sounds a bit like it. It is about stability of value, about strong money.  It makes the same mistake as the Wizard of Oz — it really believes in objective values, and that somehow these values can be reflected everywhere the currency circulates.  The fundamental problem at the heart of the euro, and any single currency based on the idea of objective value like gold, is this.  Single currencies tend to favour the rich and impoverish the poor.  They do so because changing the value of your currency, and varying your interest rate for example, is the way that disadvantaged places are able to make their goods more affordable.  When you stop them from doing that, you trap whole cities and regions — the poorest people in the poorest places — without being able to trade their way out.

Of course even Britain has a single currency and it doesn’t work very well either.  We have interest rates (or we used to) set to suit the City of London, while the manufacturing regions of the north struggle as best they can. Across Europe, the effects are similar, as we can see from the plight of Greece.  Nor is it just different communities.  There are different kinds of economy, and big currencies don’t suit them all very accurately.  Take the sheer diversity of London.   We, all of us — nurses and currency traders — have to get by using the one currency, the value of which is decided by tens of thousands of youthful traders in braces in Wall Street, Frankfurt and the City.

That is fine for the international economy and the financial services sector.  But there’s another economy in every city which feeds off the pickings from the rich table above it, but isn’t necessarily part of it.  Most of us live in this economy and it has nothing to do with financial services.  About $4 trillion goes through the global computers every day, and 95 per cent of that is speculation — mainly foreign exchange speculation.  The remaining five per cent is the money for goods and services that we use.

Worse, London’s rich economy threatens to drive out this five per cent economy completely.  You can see the same thing happen in offshore financial centres where financial services have priced everything else into oblivion.  Because nobody but bankers can afford to live and work there. The problem is that there is no single measure that can sum up all these different kinds of economy at all these different levels.  In fact, big currencies don’t measure very well.  What they miss out gets ignored. Then it gets forgotten.

Big currencies are gold-standard thinking.  They condemn us all to walk around, like the people in the Emerald City, in the Wizard of Oz, wearing tinted glasses which can only recognise what Wall Street says is important.  Currencies are not just measuring systems then, they are eyeglasses. They are the way we see the world. If our currencies don’t value things, we just don’t see them.  Then they disappear. If you only measure GDP, then the environment, human dignity, community, family all in the end get driven out.  That is what faulty measuring rods do, and currencies are measuring rods.

Michael Linton on Open Money, LETS.  Courtesy of Josh Bancroft.  CC NY-NC.

Monoculture money systems drive out other cultures, other species, other languages, other opinions, other forms of wealth. We need new kinds of money that don’t drive out life, or we face what John Maynard Keynes called “a perigrination in the catacombs, with a guttering candle.”  And that’s why I say this failure of measurement, this blindness, is the real problem of money. Different people need different kinds of money, which behave in different ways and value different assets.

But we also all need different kinds of money for different aspects of our lives.  If we don’t get that, some parts of our cities will be rich and some poor. And some parts of our lives will be rich and some poor.  The problem with conventional money isn’t that it is valueless (though it is).  Or that it’s based on debt (which it also is).  Or even really that it doesn’t measure well (which it certainly doesn’t).  It is that no one kind of money can possibly work for the sheer diversity of life.  We have to escape from the old idea that money is one, indivisible, totemic, semi-divine, golden truth issued from on high and handed down to a grateful populace.

Yet the attitudes lying behind the Wizard of Oz linger on: As if the debts that are weighing down the eurozone were real, not a human construct; as if the mechanisms of economics were laid down by God some time on the sixth day of the creation of the world.  New kinds of money, on the other hand, can reveal to us that, even in the poorest places, there are vast living assets — ideas, skills, time, love even — that can turn our ideas of scarcity on their heads.

The Populists put their faith in silver money that only a government could provide, but I think it’s the self-help message that’s really at the heart of the Wizard of Oz.  When the people of Emerald City take their golden glasses off, they find the place isn’t green at all, but it’s still full of riches they just hadn’t seen before.  In the end, the Wizard very cleverly makes everyone think he provided them with brains, courage and heart when they actually did it for themselves.

“How can I help being a humbug when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done,” says the Wizard. “It was easy to make the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Woodman happy, because they imagined I could do anything.”

And there lies the conundrum. When it comes to tackling globalisation or currencies, it’s just like the Wizard of Oz.  We can make the world the way we want it, but not if we wait around for some wizard to fool us.  We have to remember that we are doing something ourselves.  It all depends where you think the wealth lies.  Out there, in the vaults or the trading floors.  Or here, with us, in every community.

Keynes put it like this:

“London is one of the richest cities in the history of civilisation, but it cannot ‘afford’ the highest standards of achievement of which its own living citizens are capable, because they do not ‘pay’. If I had the power today, I would surely set out to endow our capital cities with all the appurtenances of art and civilisation on the highest standards … convinced that what I could create I could afford — and believing that money thus spent would not only be better than any dole, but would make unnecessary any dole. For what we have spent on the dole in England since the war we could have made our cities the greatest works of man in the world.”

We HAVE the wealth. It doesn’t mean borrowing more, as Keynes set out, or even denominating it using the same unit of value.  But it does mean monetising our wealth in other ways.

This is part one of a two part series from the New Economic Foundation’s David Boyle on money and other ways of monetising our wealth.  In our June issue he will be writing on alternative and complementary currencies.  Subscribe today to receive the next issue in your inbox.

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 David Boyle is the author of a range of books about history, social change, politics and the future including Money Matters: Putting the Eco Back Into Economics and Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash.  He has been editor of a number of publications including Town & Country Planning, Community Network, New Economics, Liberal Democrat News and Radical Economics.  He is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation.

| Lizzy Willmington |

Photo Courtesy of Craftivism Wellington.

Craftivism is about reclaiming craft and breaking it out of the domicile environment and into the streets, parks, railings, and pretty much anywhere you can attach a cable tie on.  The process takes thought; the skills take time and subjects are about long term issues.   It’s about the return of craft and a resistance to mass production; a celebration of the individual and an encouragement to participate.  There is an appreciation for craft and for making something with your own hands, for the time it takes, for individual productivity and for the common goals that the optimistic craftivists hope to achieve.

While speaking at a book signing in Wellington last month, Germaine Greer said you’ve got to write the agenda.  If you want to change the conversation you have to create the opportunity for discussion.  This is what craftivism is doing: shedding the preconceptions and expectations of politics and art and bringing them into the open and public sphere.  The visual form is very powerful and has been used throughout history for social change and to facilitate dialogue.  By yarn bombing, for example, a seemingly innocent and harmless craft, the multi-layered form of protest can begin to unfold.  At first instance there is a visual recognition, there is something out of its usual environment which causes people to stop and take notice.  Curiosity is stirred.  After further investigation, begins an appreciation for what has been made; the colours, textures and materials, the time it takes, the effort that has been taken to actually create and further more to decorate an otherwise ugly road sign post.  The discussion around handmade versus mass production is raised, the death of craft, the rebirth of craft.  It puts some colour and texture into the urban mundane, creating social challenge.   It gives the viewer a little kick out of a subtle rebellion.  The power of the individual is displayed.

The name of this online magazine can help sum up the concept. ‘Stir to Action‘: a gradual understanding of the complexity and multitude of issues to which craftivism challenges.  It isn’t as overt as a protest or confrontational as a debate, rather craftivism inspires to slowly and individually go about providing a creative vehicle for politically and socially inspired change.  It is about personal engagement and exchange, and the idea that the journey is as important as the end result.  Seemingly harmless and innocent materials are not what they first appear and encourage viewers to re-evaluate what they see and the meaning behind it.  It is quietly stubborn and optimistically persistent, with a cheeky grin.

Craftivism is part of a wider ‘Slow Design’ movement; an extension from the Slow Food movement (opposed to fast food).  The movement shares notions of local sourcing and production and a soporific approach to consumption.  It also focuses on ‘an expanded state of awareness, accountability for daily actions, and the potential for a richer spectrum of experience for individuals and communities.’*  By encouraging these principles into an public space, a space which is now receiving a lot of attention through movements such as the Arab Spring and the Global Occupy Movement, it provides opposition to the dominant hegemony.  This has been made all the more possible through social media, and allowed the movement to connect globally.   It is a nonthreatening approach to gradual and lasting change; who can be threatened by cross stitching?!  One approach which is particularly well received is sharing free cupcakes.  It is a very simple and powerful way to engage with people.  It encourages a sense of community and openness, a generous approach to life which are fundamental principles of the movement.  The Wellington Craftivist Collective supports Occupy Wellington by performing this act during the weekends.  With a stall covered with vegan and politically decorated cupcakes and ‘free cupcakes’ cross stitch sign the members of the collective were set up.  They engaged with people and promoted free trade, dairy free and the power of personal creativity and rejection of the pre-made, whether it be through the act of baking, decorating the baked goods.

Courtesy of Craftivism Wellington

These are the shared kaupapa (principles) of The Wellington Craftivism Collective and used as guidelines for all the work the collective does.  The outline of the collective is quite simple really, politically and socially motivated people who are using a creative vehicle for change.  Over the summer and with an alignment with the Occupy movement in Wellington there have been many opportunities to engage with a wider audience, most noticeably through workshops.  The focus of the workshops has been to make individual patches to come together for the purpose of forming to make a blanket.  At Kiwiburn (the New Zealand offshoot of Burning Man) two members of the collective ran a patch making workshop.  Granted it was the prime audience for the task, but it was really successful — they recruited me!  People were intrigued by what we were doing and keen for something to do but nervous thinking they wouldn’t be good enough.  Many people popped the cross stitching cherry, some had never sewn before.  The biggest barrier tends to be lack of confidence, but when you get a workshop going apprehensions are dropped with each stitch made.

Down through the bunny hole,

Around the big tree,

Up pops the bunny,

And off goes she!**

Once they were set up with a few simple stitches and some templates they were off; the silence of concentration and the genuine joy that they were learning something new and would produce something for their efforts was clear.  Guidance was offered when needed but mostly people had an idea and were eager to watch it materialise.  The project allows the individual to articulate their ideologies and beliefs through creative means.  It gives them the time, a focus and an activity which is often essential to helping people cultivate and define their opinions.  The idea behind the blanket is to support the Global Occupy Movement, with individuals creating a patch in relation to the issues surrounding the movement.  Another workshop was put on at the launch of Occupy your Ears, a CD with local musicians in support of the movement.  The subject matter of each individual’s patch is broad and personalised — one person did a patch to address ginger rights (an issue very special to her).  The notion that there is no right or wrong answer is often very relieving and can break down the barrier of expectation.  The blanket is made up of four smaller blankets; one of the quarters is traveling around Europe at the moment, with a companion to facilitate discussions and workshops surrounding the principles of the Global Occupy Movement.  There have also been a large number of patches posted to us in New Zealand from around the world, emphasising this is a global movement for global change.  The collective is built on the notion of community; an environment of shared ideals and common goals where people can take time for the craft and contribute to the agenda.  This can happen by sitting together in a physical space but also by connecting internationally, via social media and the internet.  Through the internet a wider audience can be reached, and it can encourage people to form collectives in their own physical space and encourage the conversation with their friends and family.

The power is in the collective of the individual; the notion of productivity and the individual contribution to a wider, global movement.  Craftivism is one method, one vehicle, but there are many other vehicles taking the same journey, more than willing to take hitchhikers and car shares along the way.  There are many local and global movements to investigate and be part of.  In order to progress for the kind of change you want participation is key – however you feel is effective.

* http://www.slowlab.net/ideas.html

**A rhyme to teach how to knit

 _______

 Lizzy Willmington is a member of Craftivism Wellington

Find out more at Wellington Craftivism Collective, at Craftivism, at Counter-Craft, or at SlowLab.

“I find no other solution, now, than a dignified end before I start searching through the trash for food.” Dimitris Christoulas, 4 April 2012, Athens, Greece

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Martin Luther King, Jr. 4 April 1967

I picked up the phone as I waited for my 4th April flight from Chicago to San Francisco. It was Nick Cooper, a Food Not Bombs volunteer, calling with news from Houston. “We lost. City council voted to restrict our meals.” Houston joins a growing list of cities banning or restricting the sharing of food outside. These laws will force people to seek food from the garbage.

Then came the news that retired pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas shot himself in the head outside the Greek parliament at Syntagma Square, Athens. His suicide was a protest against the growing sense of despair felt by millions, as wealthy corporate rulers confiscate more riches from their workers.  Dimitris left a note that should be etched into the hearts of those leaders cruel enough to vote for laws against sharing meals with the hungry in public: “I find no other solution, now, than a dignified end before I start searching through the trash for food.”

Dimitris Christoulas ended his life in protest on 4th April. His death is a bookend to that of Tunisian produce vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in protest of those same policies sparking the Arab Spring and the wave of occupations and uprisings that continue to this day.

Across the USA, a national network of community policing groups are working as the eyes and ears of the police in a campaign to drive the homeless and hungry out of sight and out of the national debate. The policies adopted in Houston and other communities like Sanford, Florida, that ban the sharing of food from the public started under President Reagan, have become increasingly harsh under Obama. Some speculate that the visibility of so many people needing help is disrupting the Democratic Party’s claim that they are responsible for improving the economy. Others have told me that they think the new wave of laws against sharing food with the hungry outside are designed to stop the kitchens at occupations. There is evidence to support both claims.

It appeared in early January that a national coordinated campaign to hide the hungry had started in earnest. People were reporting that their local police had stopped them from handing out food to the homeless. The officers would often claim that feeding the hungry was illegal, suggesting that anyone providing food could be jailed and fined. I started receiving emails and calls about petitions to have these policies changed. On 2oth January I received an email from Kathy Mitro calling on the Speaker of the House to change the laws that criminalize individuals feeding hungry individuals.  A day before I was asked to sign Kathy’s online petition, I received a call from Monique of VegFund, followed by her email saying they were having problems distributing even prepackaged food on the sidewalk.

Kathy soon found another petition posted by Amanda Foreman-Stromquist to “The City of Dallas: Stop threatening people for feeding the homeless.” Amanda wrote, “My sister’s brother-in-law bought a sandwich for a homeless man and was told if it happens again he would be fined $150 per person and jailed for a minimum of 24 hours. He wasn’t even allowed to give him the sandwich he had just bought for him. Why is feeding someone less fortunate against a city ordinance? This has to be stopped.” Another petition, “Allow Food Not Bombs Myrtle Beach to Feed the Hungry,” was followed by news that the City of Santa Monica was about to pass a law requiring Food Not Bombs to request a permit each week to share meals downtown. Philadelphia Food Not Bombs also found themselves struggling to stop a law banning their meals.

A few days later Nick called from Houston. He woke to read a commentary in the 2nd March Houston Chronicle: “Rules needed to protect homeless, property owners.” The article claimed that groups shouldn’t provide meals to the hungry outside. It was signed by Stephen Williams, Director, Houston Department of Health and Human Services and chair of the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County; Rudy Rasmus, pastor, St. John’s Downtown; Hank Rush, president and CEO, Star of Hope Mission; and Bob Eury, executive director, Downtown District.

On 14th March 2012 the city of Philadelphia announced that it would attempt to stop people from sharing food with the hungry outside. While local governments are claiming they are seeking to protect the poor from unsafe food, they are not able to point to one case where someone was made ill. Many of those dependent on these meals will be forced to eat out of the garbage if the city is able to close these meals. Food Not Bombs provides some of the healthiest meals shared with the hungry. The food is often organic and is always low in salt, sugar and fats. Isaiah Thompson writes in his article Hunger Games, ‘The Board of Health hasn’t mentioned a single instance of food borne illness in those who receive meals from these volunteers. The mayor has characterized his move as “increasing the health, safety, dignity and support for those vulnerable individuals” who, “regardless of their station in life, should be able to sit down at a table to a meal — inside”.’

Many in the City of Brotherly Love are opposed to all laws restricting the sharing of meals in public. Caroline Steinberg of the North Philly chapter of Food Not Bombs pointed out at a recent public hearing that it was crazy for a city suffering extreme budget cuts to stop programs that “doesn’t cost [the city] a dime.” Yet, city governments have been asking their local government-funded homeless service agencies to sign on to a commentary against sharing food outdoors. Philadelphia asked service providers like Mary Scullion, Executive Director of the cities’ Project H.O.M.E, to express support for the ban on outdoor food sharing. In 1988, Reverend Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church stood next to the mayor of San Francisco and spoke out against the sharing of meals to the hungry outside in city parks. He held his annual chicken dinner at the Pan Handle Park a few weeks after telling the media it was disrespectful to feed the hungry in parks. Is it only a matter of time before we see announcements for an outdoor meal sponsored by Project H.O.M.E.? Their meal might not be in the newly gentrified area of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway where the new Barnes Museum is set to open on 19 May 2012. Even Project H.O.M.E.’s Sister Mary Scullion, who stood next to the mayor when he announced the policy, told City Paper, “Of course this is totally about the Barnes”.

I was among 24 people arrested in Orlando, Florida, in June 2011 for sharing meals with more than 24 people, which violates Orlando’s large group feeding law. I was held for 17 days on my second arrest and I fined $1,000 for my efforts. Many more people may be arrested and fined for helping the hungry and seeking to find long-term solutions to America’s poverty unless the public is able to pressure city governments into abandoning their outdoor meal suppression efforts.

The Orlando Sentinel published a commentary, “Beyond Public Park Feedings”, on 19 June 2011 expressing the same argument made in the Houston Chronicle op-ed from March. It claimed that “meal service is available to anyone in the community in need of food”, but from experience this didn’t ring true. A few days before this article was published a young man who hadn’t eaten in five days rushed up to the end of the line of those waiting to eat at Food Not Bombs at Lake Eola. He explained that he was new to Orlando and by the time he made it to the other meal programs they had already run out of food.  We weren’t the only organization with direct experience showing that not everyone had access to food. Statistics taken from the website foodbankcentralflorida.org paints this picture:

• 42% of the soup kitchens reported that 50 or more additional meals are needed weekly. This represents a 100% increase from 2006.
• For shelters, this increase is 400%.
• 76.1% of the pantries, 70% of the kitchens and 48.8% of the shelters indicate that they serve more clients now than they did in 2006.
• 20.7% of the pantries, 10.1% of the kitchens and 33.0% of the shelters responded that they turned away clients during the past year.
• 47% of the members of households served by Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida are children. This number is up nearly 100% from 2006.

The Sentinel commentary went on to say meal service is not just for residents of homeless shelters and “[that] is why we firmly believe that feeding in public places, such as Lake Eola, is a duplication of services, services that are available just blocks from Lake Eola.”

Even if the soup kitchens and shelters included enough food for everyone that arrived to eat, Food Not Bombs still is not a “duplication of services”. By organizing to change society so no one needs to stand in line to eat at a food program, Food Not Bombs is really addressing the much larger issues that other services only claim to address. Unlike the programs that signed the commentary saying that “solving homelessness involves more than a warm meal and a place to sleep”, Food Not Bombs is actually working to end the policies that divert nearly half of our tax dollars from education and universal healthcare and other social services to the military. Remaining quiet on this issue is not a real solution, and supporting local laws designed to silence this debate is one sure way to increase the numbers of people forced to eat at soup kitchens.

The Orlando agencies receiving government funding claimed that “such public feedings may well contribute to homelessness and actually keep the homeless from the essential services necessary to get back on the road to self-sufficiency. One of the vital keys to assisting these men, women and families is providing comprehensive case-management services. This includes access to the tools needed to attain independence, truly giving them a ‘hand up’ to a better life.” The ‘vital keys’ to ‘attain independence’ can be found by understanding that we don’t need a ‘hand up to a better life’, but instead we need to change the economic and political system.  In the short run, by inviting those who need to eat at Food Not Bombs to participate in the decision-making process of our movement, by taking their ideas and desires seriously, and by realizing that they already have the tools they need to attain independence is a much more dignified and realistic solution to their condition than the path to a low-wage job with a transnational corporation.

The Orlando Sentinel noted that the column “Beyond Public Park Feedings” was a collaboration of Renee Alivento, president, Christian Service Center for Central Florida; Allen Harden, president/CEO, Orlando Union Rescue Mission; Maj. Andrew Kelly, area commander, The Salvation Army, Orlando Metropolitan Area Command; Ray Larsen, executive director, Central Florida Commission on Homelessness; and Brent A. Trotter, president/CEO, Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida. What the Orlando Sentinel did not mention was that the commentary was part of a well-financed and detailed campaign designed to blame the victims of capitalism and reduce pressure to fund a world where everyone has the food, housing, education, healthcare and dignity that is their right. After all, those of us living in poverty are the ones who have toiled to build our society.

Some cities have a gentler path towards banning people from providing food in public: by “offering” permits. Permits that they intend to withhold in the future. Houston is trying this tactic today, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this.  In 1988, the city of San Francisco gave Food Not Bombs a permit to share our food and literature behind a tall stand of bushes in Golden Gate Park. Not one person passed by our table in twelve months who was not hungry and seeking a meal. The hungry already understand what we are talking about and know that there are thousands of people that need to eat at soup kitchens.

The impact of the Food Not Bombs project is based on the concept that a diversity of people will pass by our table, see our banner saying ‘Food Not Bombs’ and stop to enjoy our food, read some of our flyers and engage in conversation with people they may rarely have had a chance to know otherwise. The impact of this experience will be strong, deep and personal. People who might not have thought about why we live in a world of abundance yet so many live without will be moved to seek change. And those who have walked up to our table after seeing our banner already believing that no one would have to eat at a soup kitchen if money was diverted from military spending to education, healthcare and other social services will find they are not alone.

The effectiveness of our strategy concerns the authorities. In the fall of 2009, two U.S. State Department officials in a lecture at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy compared Al-Qaeda and the “group sharing free vegan meals on the streets”, claiming that the vegans were more dangerous. They explained that after 30 years of sharing meals and ideas with the public, our message was resonating and could cause the public to insist that their resources be diverted from the military to programs that would build real security through domestic spending. The authorities have been able to minimize our impact by discouraging our volunteers from bringing literature and a banner to the meals. Worried about being arrested, our volunteers will comply and before long people believe the meal they are walking past has been organized by a local church. The public no longer questions that our resources are being diverted from domestic programs towards the military and corporate interests.

The programs in Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, Houston and other cities might seem innocent enough: bring the homeless inside for a meal — but really the plan is to hide the hungry so housed taxpayers won’t see them. They pretend to be concerned about the safety of organic vegan meals shared outside, but really the focus is to reduce pressure to change society so that the banks, corporations and their political supporters can claim the economic system works and no one needs to worry about poverty. Keep on spending billions of the military and drive the victims of the economic crisis out of sight.

The outdoor meals also provide other benefits that indoor food programs don’t offer. We provide meals to many people that have been banned from other meals. In some areas like Florida you must show a valid Florida ID to eat at many indoor soup kitchens. Many mothers tell us they prefer to eat outside because the noise and turmoil at indoor programs frightens their children. The parks and plazas are a safer location for many. Many are introduced to the other programs through the groups sharing food outside since the first place a person is likely to visit is a group providing food in public. Yet for me the most important reason to share meals outside is to encourage as many people as possible to help change society so one is forced to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen and everyone has a place to sleep with dignity. One in two Americans is struggling to survive. That is a crime when billions is spent on war.

My friends and I are calling for an end to all laws restricting acts of compassion.  Our campaign started on Sunday, 1st April 2012 when volunteers were asked to organize celebrations in support of our right to share food. We will need your participation if cities start to make arrests. You don’t have to risk arrest yourself. We need cooks and support people. Consider organizing a local affinity group of your friends and family to provide a foundation of support. Print out our “Bill of Rights to recognize that sharing food with the hungry is an unregulated act of kindness.” Ask your community to sign the petition and introduce it to your local officials. Build support in your community for an end to all laws restricting the sharing of food. You are encouraged to organize a celebration and share free food to the hungry in your community on Friday, 1 June. Please endorse our campaign and email the details of your celebration to menu@foodnotbombs.net

________

Keith McHenry is an artist and author who helped start Food Not Bombs in Massachusetts in 1980. He has recovered, cooked and shared food with the hungry for over 30 years. He has been arrested for his involvement with Food Not Bombs, spending over 500 nights in jail and at one point faced life in prison. He has traveled all over the world speaking at colleges, books stores and cafes while sharing free vegan meals with many of the over 1,000 Food Not Bombs groups active around the world. When he isn’t on the road Keith lives in Taos, New Mexico, tending to his garden, writing, painting and helping coordinate logistics for the Food Not Bombs movement.

Hungry for Peace – the new book can help you start a Food Not Bombs group in your community.

“What we publish is the point — not how”

As part of Stir’s series on radical publishing and bookselling, I’ve been invited to add my thoughts on the future of radical publishing. This is a personal response, not intended to represent either the publisher I work for, or the community of radical publishing, however defined, as a whole.

A brief background and full disclosure: I’m currently one of the directors of Pluto Press, which itself is one of a small but determined group of avowedly political, independent publishers still committed to the notion of creating and sustaining a space for the dissemination of progressive political ideas and debates.

Pluto began life as the publishing arm of what was then the International Socialists, now more familiar as the SWP. Despite the occasional misconception, that particular connection ceased to exist more than a quarter of a century ago: Pluto today is on the left but unaligned — resolutely broad church, but unashamedly committed to a progressive political agenda.

We’re immensely proud to have survived, and to have continued the spirit of political thinking that inspired the company’s original founders. And we’re determined to weather the changes we are all now facing. Partly because those changes affect not what we deliver, but how we do so. I’ll come back to this point.

Over the years, change has always been seen as a threat in the deeply conservative world of publishing — from the abandonment of the net book agreement (retail price maintenance to most of us) to innovations in print technology to the advent of ebooks and online retailing.

But is our present situation that precarious? Like Nik, I’m tempted to focus on the positives — not out of a sense of false optimism or because I’m dangerously deluded, but because I genuinely believe that these could be auspicious times for publishers like ourselves, who have a clearer sense of who their readers are, and a surer grasp of the importance of addressing key issues and uncomfortable truths.

In the unreal world of publishing punditry, much ink (or should that be toner?) has been spilt on the imminent demise of publishers in our virtually digital world. As a species, it seems, we are doomed. We’re irrelevant. As the big boys, the dark stars of Amazon, Facebook and Google, conspire to colonise our every waking moment (and much of our disposable income), when everything’s available on-line and most of it for free, when anyone can blog and when self-publishing is as easy as uploading a pdf — why bother with intermediaries?

Well, call me old-fashioned (I’d prefer vintage, as it happens), but I would argue that the sheer volume of that all-pervasive communications ‘traffic’ nowadays, whether on blogs, ebooks, email, whatever, threatens to drown out the prospect of real communication. It certainly makes it harder to hear the voices that deserve to be heard, and that we need to hear. The voices that can make a difference.  It’s a curious irony that, as ‘communication’ becomes ever easier, we run the risk of hearing and learning less and less.

This, I argue, is where a publisher can make a difference, and where radical publishers can and should help to sustain and enliven the culture of the printed word — whether on a tablet, in an ebook or online. Certainly, publishing is undergoing a period of immense change, but to say that publishing itself is no longer relevant, or has no future, is quite literally to confuse the medium with the message. What we publish is the point — not how.

Words, arguments, ideas need the space — the luxury, if you like — of a studied, fixed, linear form (at the moment, mostly, the ‘printed’ page, however it is delivered) to allow a reader to absorb and engage with the ideas those words express — and even to disagree with them.

By whichever means those ideas reach the reader, the message remains the point. And that message is a deliberated one, the result of a genuine collaboration between a publisher and an author, in which a manuscript is revised, edited, rewritten — made better, clearer, more readable, more coherent, in other words. Made more powerful, more forceful and more central to our ways of thinking. And promoted to as many constituencies as possible, using all of the marketing skills we can muster. No small task in a congested media world. Getting stuff out is not the problem — it’s ensuring that potential readers know about it that’s the hard part. That much is common to all publishing.

In the challenging circumstances we face, however, surely we don’t need just polished prose and a slick marketing campaign. Aren’t we offering an alternative to the bland offerings of the majors — the latest celebrity biog, the TV chef’s reheated seasonal cookbook, the self-help guru’s warmed-over platitudes? We need counter arguments, information, not disinformation, fresh thinking, new ideas — which is absolutely where radical publishers come right back into play.

Is the threat of digitisation exaggerated or underestimated?

Because we’re close to many of the communities we publish for, we’re quick to hear new ideas (maybe not always quick enough), and receptive to fresh voices — and because we’re committed to a progressive agenda, we see it as part of our function to encourage critical writing and independent thinking, to foster and develop writers in whose work we believe, to provide the appropriate platforms and forums and to publish as professionally and as competently as we can, in the belief that what we do when we edit, typeset, manufacture, promote and market a book — along with the myriad other logistical skills we have acquired over the years — adds real value.

Whether we do that with ebooks or with paperbacks is not the issue. The issue, rather, is that we remain as nimble and as agile as we can, to provide the space that’s needed for alternative arguments to be developed and brought to the attention of as many interested readers as possible — rather than left to drift in the undifferentiated thickets of the blogosphere, competing against the thousands of other voices vying for attention.

Which is why, having learned how to survive for more than forty years, we’re well equipped to deal with change — and better positioned than many major trade publishers to carve out a space for our authors to flourish.

What all of us on the radical independent left are learning very quickly, however, is that our old publishing models are no longer sufficient. We need new variations, new combinations, smart moves on a mix of media: short-form, long-form, download only, ebook and hard copy cocktails. The potential is bewildering, and it’s difficult at the moment to see a clear path forward.

Readers themselves send mixed messages: students still enjoy the luxury of spreading out four or five textbooks in front of them when they’re studying, rather than juggling with not yet adequate tablets; readers like the sheer convenience of reading some texts (business studies, ‘motivational’ guides and some genre fiction are apparently among the most popular) on tablets or ereaders, but continue to find plenty of shelf-space for bound books, and don’t always enthuse over the ebook ‘reading experience’.

Nik’s comments about the the importance, for radical booksellers, of a physical space embodied in a bricks and mortar bookshop, providing a focus around which communities and campaigns could literally coalesce, rang very true. For publishers, those same bookshops showcase our wares in a way that online retailers never can — but we all have to work together to ensure that those showcases remain open. There is an unbreakable symbiosis between radical booksellers and publishers that becomes more important, not less, in the twenty-first century, which is why the new initiatives forging closer links between radical publishers and booksellers are so important.  At a time when the major high street book-selling chains are almost moribund, learning to love your local indie bookseller may be one way of ensuring you have a bookshop of any sort to go to.

So: map reading the future of publishing, particularly radical publishing, just got a whole lot more difficult. But one way or another — in one shape or form — we’ll be around for many more years to come.

Dear readers: stay with us!

______

Anne Beech is managing director at Pluto Books.

The radical publishing and bookselling series continues with Kika Sro-Miller of Zed Books in our June issue.