Category Archives: Wage Slavery

The government estimates the problem of modern slavery is higher than expected and Anti-slavery International claims the business is "thriving" throughout the UK.

An investigation by Lincolnshire police led to the conviction today, August 11, of 11 people for being part of a modern slavery ring which targeted victims that were vulnerable and homeless - one person was held for 26 years.

The group are set to be sentenced on September 7, 8, 11 and 12 at Nottingham Crown Court for the crime.

What is modern slavery?

In the UK the common form of modern slavery sees people trafficked into forced labour for very little pay.

This applies to a variety of industries but is most commonly seen in agriculture, hospitality, car washes, and manufacturing.

Women may also be trafficked for sex.

Children can also be forced to commit crimes such as petty theft or cannabis production.

Horrific stories of victims held as slaves that helped police snare notorious travellers revealed

Who are victims of modern slavery?

Anyone can be a victim of slavery but people who are classed as vulnerable are often targeted. This also includes those who are from a minority and socially excluded groups can also be targeted.

The Government says that two-thirds of victims of modern slavery are women and one in four victims is a child.

A variety of things can contribute to someone being a victim of modern slavery this can include lack of education, poverty and limited opportunities at home.

How are people targeted?

Generally someone is offered what seems like a decent job but then when they start the job the conditions are completely different.

Violence can also be used against the victim once they have started work.

How common is slavery in the UK?

Anti-Slavery International claims it is much more common than people think with around 13,000 being exploited in the UK alone.

But the National Crime Agency have said it's just the tip of the iceberg and there are lots more people up and down the country who are being kept as slaves, but their cases have never come to light.

How can you spot modern slavery?

There are a variety of signs to look out for which may mean that someone is a victim of modern slavery. A person may have false identity.

Director of Anti-slavery International, Aidan McQuade, said: "In terms of observations if you see people living in crowded conditions, they are not using proper work clothes, they are not mixing with other communities, and are driven around from one house to the next.

"If you get a sense they are a slave you need to find out if their identity documents have been taken off them."

He added people also have to find out whether they are paid minimum wage.

To report modern slavery call the government's hot line on 0800 0121 700.

Operation Pottery, which led to the conviction of eleven people in Nottingham Crown Court, was one of the largest investigations of its kind in the country.

It probed the group - largely from the same family of travellers - who targeted victims because they were "vulnerable and homeless".

Some of the victims had learning disabilities or mental health issues, while others were dependent on alcohol or drugs. Some were forced to sign over their homes.

Officers carried out seven raids across Lincolnshire, Nottingham and London simultaneously on September 22, 2014 to smash the slavery ring.

Mr McQuade added it is good news the gang has been convicted.

He said: "The fact this has been going on is not a surprise - it's shocking, but it's not a surprise.

"It's positive that they've been prosecuted and the police have stopped cruelty and it has raised awareness of the issue.

"It does highlight a problem we need to face."

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What is modern slavery and how big is the problem in the UK? - LincolnshireLive

For seventy years, Ella Reeve Mother Bloor was a union organizer and womens rights activist in left-wing political parties in the United States. Peripatetic in her search for the organizational path to socialism, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution and World War I, she joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). In the 1920s and 1930s, Bloor became the partys most prominent female leader.

Largely forgotten today due to Americas ongoing anticommunist crusade, Bloor remained committed to womens equality and uplifting working people both of which she believed only could happen by advancing beyond capitalism. Her life story is as fascinating as it is educational.

Ella Reeve was born on Staten Island in 1862 during the Civil War. She grew up in middle-class suburbs but when her mother died during her twelfth childbirth, the seventeen-year-old Ella took over the care of her four youngest siblings. Bloor first became interested in political reform as a teenager, influenced by her great-uncle, who was an abolitionist, freethinker, and Unitarian.

While studying at the University of Pennsylvania, she read Marx and Engels and witnessed the brutal lives of Philadelphias working-class women and men, who struggled to survive while a small group at the top lived in aristocratic opulence. (Another future CPUSA leader, William Z. Foster, grew up in nearby South Philadelphia, where in 1895 he learned about class struggle by building barricades in solidarity with striking transit workers.)

She first married at twenty and had seven children, though three died in infancy a tragic if common reality in her time. Then, one day in the late 1880s, as she wrote in her autobiography, I suddenly realized that in spite of all the things I planned to do I was well on the way to become just a household drudge.

She explored suffrage, prohibition, and, more generally, womens rights while searching for something to believe in. She spoke at her Unitarian church and joined the reformist Womens Christian Temperance Union, a leading advocate for both prohibition and womens suffrage. In 1896, she divorced, moved to New York, and to help support herself authored the childrens books Three Little Lovers of Nature (1895) and Talks About Authors and Their Work (1899).

During this era, she married Louis Cohen, who shared her commitment to socialism. With him, Bloor had two more children before divorcing again in 1905. She chose to remain single supporting herself and six children until, in 1930, marrying one last time, to a communist farmer on the High Plains.

As Bloor later wrote, she increasingly identified the political and economic inequalities of women with the oppression of the working masses and came to see socialism as the solution to these twinned problems.

In 1897 Bloor became a founding member of the Social Democracy of America, established by her friends Eugene V. Debs, then the nations most famous labor leader, and Victor Berger, who later became the first Socialist ever elected to Congress.

When Debs founded a paper called the Social Democrat, he requested Bloor write its childrens column, which she did. Demonstrating an ever more militant streak, she soon joined the rival Socialist Labor Party (SLP), led by Daniel De Leon. While many, past and present, considered De Leon a divisive ultra-leftist, there was no dominant left party in the late 1890s. As Bloor recalled, The Socialist Labor Party was a revolutionary party in those days and De Leon, its leader, was a brilliant theoretician and speaker, a courageous fighter against capitalism.

She worked for its New York Labor News Company, publisher of revolutionary books and pamphlets. The Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, the SLP trade union affiliate, elected her to its general executive board and assigned her to organize streetcar workers in New Jersey and Philadelphia. The SLP contained members of the old Knights of Labor and, in 1905, folded itself into the newly created Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), though this merger was short-lived, as the groups split in 1908. By this time, Bloors commitment to radical unionism and a political path to socialism appeared set, though her specific allegiances continued to shift.

In 1902, she joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA), in which she spent eighteen years organizing unions. She led strikes of hatters, miners, needle-workers, and steelworkers all while raising six children. She also worked for both the SPA and various womens organizations as a paid organizer on state and national campaigns for womens suffrage. In 1910, she introduced an amendment at the Socialist Partys congress in support of womens suffrage.

When author and fellow socialist Upton Sinclair started researching wage slavery in the Chicago stockyards, she traveled there with another socialist, Richard Bloor, to assist in this investigation. They posed as a married couple so she used his last name, which for unknown reasons, stuck. In 1906, Sinclair published his best-selling, enormously influential novel The Jungle. In the 1910s, people started calling her Mother, a common honorific for older women, and, henceforth, she became known as Mother Bloor.

In 1913-14, Bloor traveled to Calumet, in Michigans Upper Peninsula, during a major copper miners strike to help the strikers and their families. Her later account of the shocking deaths of seventy-three strikers and their family members, called the Italian Hall tragedy, later became the basis of a famous Woody Guthrie song, 1913 Massacre. Given her importance as an organizer, it is unsurprising that she also was present in 1914 when Colorado National Guardsmen brutally shot and killed at least thirty-six men (striking coalminers), women, and children in the Ludlow massacre, about which Guthrie also wrote.

During World War I, Bloor continued to organize for unions and womens suffrage while opposing the war. During what now is called the First Red Scare, civil liberties increasingly came under assault, so Bloor raised money for and spoke on behalf of those arrested for opposing the war. Part of the left-wing of the SPA, she ran for lieutenant governor of New York.

In 1919, as the SPA split over Bolshevism, Bloor helped found the Communist Labor Party that soon joined the CPUSA. Like millions the world over, the Bolshevik Revolution inspired her to believe that a society prioritizing people rather than profit not only was preferable but possible. In 1921 and 1922 she traveled to Moscow for international gatherings. Back in the US, Bloor worked as a CPUSA organizer, riding the rails with working stiffs while writing articles for Communist papers, including the Daily Worker and Working Woman. She served on the partys Central Committee from 1932 to 1948. In all these capacities, she made a point to highlight womens issues.

Among her many assignments, she wrote for the Labor Defender, the organ of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a civil liberties organization affiliated with the Communist Internationals Red Aid network. Most famously the ILD helped save the lives of the Scottsboro Boys nine African-American boys and men wrongly convicted of raping a white woman from a legal lynching in Alabama in 1931. Bloors writings and activism inspired other women, such as the Red Angel, Elaine Black Yoneda, who quoted Bloor on the need to protect those wrongly accused: We must not fail these fighters, our defenders, those who go to the front.

In 1929 the CPUSA dispatched Bloor, then sixty-seven, to work with struggling farmers in the Great Plains. In South Dakota, she worked as an organizer for the United Farmers League fighting bank foreclosures and organizing mass demonstrations, during which time she met and married Andrew Omholt. With her oldest son (also a communist), she promoted the Farmers Holiday Association, which engineered the Iowa Milk Strike of 1932. In 1934, while protesting on behalf of striking female chicken pluckers in Loup City, Nebraska, Bloor was arrested one of more than thirty such arrests. After appeals failed, the seventy-three-year-old served most of her thirty-day jail sentence.

In 1937 Bloor made her fourth visit to the Soviet Union, this time to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Upon her return, she published Women in the Soviet Union (1938), a pamphlet praising the Soviet system of child care. In the 1930s and 1940s, the party began to celebrate her birthday and even hosted Mother Bloor picnics, further raising her status beyond the party.

Its fair to ask whether Bloor had doubts about the Soviet Union, the then-leader of the communist project, and communism more generally. By the 1930s, Stalin had demonstrated an utter lack of concern for democracy or human rights, imprisoning and killing millions of his own people. Stalin, and Lenin before him, had also sought to destroy anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, Trotskyists, and other on the Left who questioned Soviet policy, most notoriously in crushing the Kronstadt rebellion.

However, in the 1930s, the Soviet Union and Communist Parties around the world embraced the Popular Front. In the United States, the CPUSA seemed to act quite independently of the Soviet Union and attracted a great many to its ranks and countless more fellow travelers with its bold commitment to working peoples struggles during the Great Depression. Moreover, as demonstrated in the Scottsboro case, American Communists, white and black, boldly led the fight for racial equality and industrial unionism. Bloor, who referred to the CPUSA as her family, was hardly alone in excusing Soviet crimes in the hope that socialism was just around the corner.

In 1940, at the age of seventy-eight, she published her autobiography, We Are Many. In the books introduction, fellow Communist (and former IWW) leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote:

We love and honor this extraordinary American woman as a symbol of militant American farmer and working class, of the forward sweep of women in the class struggle and in our Party, as an example to young and old of what an American Bolshevik should be.

Bloors book also inspired Woody Guthrie to pen songs about rapacious capitalists willing to murder innocent women and children to defeat strikes in the nations copper and coal mines. Mother Bloors outsized role resulted in radical American soldiers writing letters to her from overseas during WWII.

In her autobiography, Bloor touchingly recalled how she knew Walt Whitman as a child, a product of regular visits to an aunt in Camden, New Jersey, discussing her love of riding the ferry between Camden and Philadelphia (decades before a bridge spanned the Delaware River). As she wrote, Perhaps it was on those ferry-boat rides that the course of my life was determined, and that Whitman somehow transferred to me, without words, his own great longing to establish everywhere on earth the institution of the dear love of comrades.

Despite her nickname, which may seem dated and essentialist, Bloor lived a modern feminist life. She divorced several men who didnt bring her happiness and desired something better. She married several times for intellectual and political companions. She supported herself and her children. She fought for suffrage, the premier womens rights cause of the 1890s, until women won the right to vote in 1920. She became a union organizer and socialist, getting to know every prominent leftist of her time and countless ordinary ones too.

By the 1890s, she concluded that womens oppression included both patriarchy and capitalism. Committed to revolutionary change, she believed unions necessary to achieve her long-term goals as well as to improve the immediate lives of workers, women and men. Truly, she predicted the rise of socialist feminism in the 1970s.

Though some might indict such views for being restricted to middle-class white women as Barbara Ehrenreich said in 1975, the term socialist feminism is much too short for what is, after all, really socialist, internationalist, anti-racist, anti-heterosexist feminism Bloors life remains a signpost for all: fight for equality and expect as much in ones own life. Support unions and get others to do so. Strike, as needed. Take risks, even if that means getting arrested. Join the struggle while you can.

Ella Reeve Bloor died on this day in 1951 in Richlandtown, Pennsylvania and was buried in Camden, New Jersey. In tribute, Langston Hughes, the legendary African-American poet, declared, Mother Bloor was in person as sweet and full of sunshine as could be yet she battled the capitalists tooth and nail for seventy years.

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She Battled the Capitalists Tooth and Nail - Jacobin magazine

The group said its hotline will enable employees to raise concerns confidentially, without fear of repercussion about colleagues or suppliers. The hotline will be promoted during inductions, on wage slips, in worker handbooks and on noticeboards around its sites across the country.

Trained telephone operators will categorise each call on severity, alerting the appropriate level of management, or Cordants HR, legal or compliance teams, to investigate or respond to the concerns raised. Cordants compliance team will monitor all responses and report back to the groups senior leaders weekly.

Additionally, following the lead of PMP Recruitment, other Cordant brands have committed to becoming Stronger Together business partners.The campaign requires organisations to upload evidence to publicly demonstrate their commitment to tackling hidden labour exploitation.

Yesterday the BBC reported on a warning from the National Crime Agency claiming modern slavery and human trafficking in the UK is "far more prevalent than previously thought," with the NCA estimating there were tens of thousands of victims of modern slavery with cases affecting "every large town and city in the country". The agency added that it has more than 300 live policing operations.

Continued here:

Cordant hotline allows employees to raise slavery and trafficking concerns - Recruiter

In the past ten years, the world has taken notice in Chinas growing interest for trade and investment in Latin America.

As a major import country for consumer food products, such as cereals, legumes, cattle and processed foods, as well as mineral raw materials and energy, its inevitable for China to focus on resource-rich Latin America. This comes with multiple facets of how each will benefit from building a relationship.

Take note: With China having a GDP value of over 18 percent of the worlds economy, and a 6.9 percent growth in Q1 and Q2 2017, it is without question how great the Chinese economy impacts global markets. In addition, Chinas population is over 1.38 billion, which makes it the most populous country in the world its more than double the total population of all Latin America and more than four times the population of the United States.

On the other hand, Latin America has half the GDP and nearly half the population as China. China is also the third largest exporter and second largest import partner for Latin American goods, including commodities due to the regions arable, agricultural, and resource rich lands. While it is a supplier of raw materials, its lack of industrial manufacturing makes it a prime buyer for Chinas products, such as toys, household goods, clothing, appliances, technologies and more.

Given this information, and since Chinas arable land is less than 13 percent, in the context of a desertification process that has not proved possible to stop, the country has understandably very high levels of demand, and thereby has become a major importer, for raw materials and food, and exporter for consumer products.

In the 2000s, this demand has contributed to growth and economic resilience in Latin America, but the regions slight deceleration due to global economic trends and political transitions in recent years has had a very negative impact on the region and its economic projections.

Furthermore, given its energy needs, China is convinced that it must innovate and lead the way in the search for alternatives to oil. However, since China will continue to rely on oil and raw energy resources until alternatives have been fully developed, its investment in the industry and relationship with Latin America has not faltered, despite losses for Latin American exporters due to a decline in crude oil and iron ore prices. For example, China has committed $65 billion USD for 500,000 barrels of oil per day from the reduced production capacity of PDVSA, a Venezuelan state oil company this is in addition to a number of infrastructure investment projects and a greater quantity of exports to the South American country.

As an exporter for consumer products, Chinas labor force has seen a major influx in industrial jobs. This has caused nearly 400 million Chinese citizens to move from rural areas to urban centers since the end of the 1970s. However, given that supply has not been able to keep up with demand, many of these factory jobs were met with inhumane conditions and dismal wages between 15 and 20 times lower than international averages since inception (aka labor slavery). Currently, although the wage differential gap has lessened, China continues to produce goods at costs well below those of other countries. From this perspective, Chinas huge industrial base, supported by an exploited labor has allowed for the industrial powerhouse to monopolize the market and expand globally, even when the quality of its products is constantly subject to criticism. This issue of labor and humane standards has been the source of endless disputes and negotiations within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Under pressure from their trade unions, several G8 countries have demanded wage homologation to ensure fair trade terms.

In the container import sector, the U.S. reigns with receiving over 20 percent of its goods from China, amounting to 4 percent of the U.S. GDP. This has caused a domino effect for the U.S. originated, number one retail giant in the world, Walmart, to import nearly 80 percent of its consumer goods from China. As low-cost manufacturing and middle-class wealth has expanded in the country, China has also become an important market for many North American companies.

However, as previously noted, inhumane treatment and internal labor pressures is among the most controversial issues for electoral debate in the U.S. and G8 partners.

The rise of China as a great importer and exporter adds to its financial power. To fully convey the tenacious and tremendous climb of their economy to become a main rival of U.S. trade and financial markets, it would take more than the limited space that this article allows. Furthermore, Chinas capacity for buying, selling and financial investment resources has permitted the country to become a systemic and significant player in the Latin American marketplace.

Due to their growing trade relations, Chinese President Xi Jinping developed an ambitious five-year plan from 2015-2019 for exchange with Latin America that includes: $500 billion USD in trade and $250 billion USD in foreign direct investment over its course. This has been more than fulfilled already and China is gaining greater economic influence in the region than the U.S. on a daily basis.

The Chinese model is clearly mercantilist, not political a B2B, you-do-you, I-do-me approach. For example, the Sino-Venezuelan cooperation model previously described has provided the Chvez and Maduro governments with weapons and financial aid, and in turn with a pragmatic silence regarding violations of human rights, political freedoms, and the prevalent hunger and disease that exists in the country. The two countries offer each other mutual voting support in the various multilateral global organizations every time the community of democratic nations tries to demand compliance with international law or human rights.

The big question is how are the benefits of closer relations with China shared? The answer, in most cases, is that the big beneficiary has been China. In Latin America, it has found a secure flow of raw materials, fundamental for its expansion, at prices below the world average. In the case of Mexico, some of the products that it exports to the North American market have been affected by unfair Chinese competition in the form of goods produced with very low-cost workers.

Furthermore, many economists argue that trade with China hinders the process of regional industrialization. This is due to when demand for raw materials increases in price and in effect strengthens local currencies, importing products finished or manufactured from China as opposed to manufacturing it in the home region is economically more attractive. Consequently, another question is if building China relations are perpetuating a dependence on exporting raw materials making Latin American economies more reliant and vulnerable?

As a larger trading partner with China in Latin America, the case of Venezuela is most eloquent in this regard: it shows that China is a ferocious negotiator, especially if it meets with an interlocutor like the governments of Chavez and Maduro, who have sold oil at giveaway prices in exchange for receiving loan payments in advance. In fact, the terms of successive agreements between the two governments, which total almost 500 from 1999 to date, are not publicly known. Diplomats and experts have pointed out that the commitments made by Venezuela violate its own laws, including the authorization of Chinese companies to ignore the Labor Law that prevails for other companies in their relations with Venezuelan workers.

Finally, another issue where China works without limitations is that of corruption. Unlike the U.S., European Union and the United Kingdom, where laws prohibit and penalize companies and citizens for corrupt practices when conducting business in foreign countries, Chinese businesses are able to execute their plans in America Latina free from any oversight in the matter of corruption. It is precisely these aspects of relations with China that are causing alarm, inside and outside Latin America.

Growing relations between Latin America and China is multifaceted. Beyond the short- and medium-term benefits that can be generated by building economic relationship with the Asian giant, commitments and dependencies are being created. In many ways, these are contrary to human rights, labor rights and, finally, the institutional and economic development of our countries. Above all, China-Latin America relations are not projected to change in the coming years despite political transitions and economic changes. Business is business.

In light of this increasing Chinese presence in Latin America, with the issues associated to the same, one question emerges for United States policy makers and business leaders: Shouldn't we strategically increase and prioritize our engagement and partnerships with our neighbors in the Western hemisphere? The answer is obviously yes, but there has been little action. Plus, it might be too late when we start.

Leopoldo Martnez Nucete tweets @lecumberry.

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China in Latin America - HuffPost

UNPAID wages, concerns over a lack of drinking water and conditions described as close to modern day slavery has led to a cargo ship being detained at Sharpness Docks.

Complaints that the crew of five Turks, two Indians and two Georgians has not been paid for three months, with the Indians not being paid since joining in September and October, were raised.

Following an inspection of the Panamanian-flagged vessel by Cardiff-based Maritime and Coastguard Agency officials, 12 deficiencies were identified including wages resulting in it being detained on June 2.

Owned by Turkish shipping firm Voda Denizcilik, Tahsinis still being held at Sharpness Docks for over two months and will not be released until inspectors are happy that all regulations are met.

Its crew is being supported by the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), and a spokesman described conditions aboard the vessel as a culture close to modern day slavery.

ITF inspector Darren Proctor said: The vessel entered Sharpness on May 31 and was detained by the MCA after a complaint was received regarding outstanding wages and drinking water.

None of them [the crew] had been paid for three months, but the Indian crew had not been paid since joining in September and October 2016, and had to pay to even get the jobs.

Following ITF intervention seven of the nine crew (the master still remains onboard and the cook only recently joined) were repatriated and paid in full.

There were many findings onboard, including evidence of the crew drinking seawater as there was no potable water on the ship for over ten days, out of date food, non-operational galley equipment and a genuine concern over the labour practices.

The master thought it was acceptable to pay the crew every three months and not keep wage accounts.

The vessel has since been revisited by the MCA and issued with a further list of deficiencies.

An MCA spokesman confirmed that they had detained the Tahsin on June 2 after inspectors found 12 deficiencies including a number of missing charts and documents and wages not meeting the Seafarers Employment Agreement. Eight of these were deemed to be grounds for detention.

No date has been set for the Tahsins release.

Voda Denizcilik did not respond to the Gazettes request for a comment

Originally posted here:

Cargo ship detained at Sharpness Docks for two months over ... - Gazette Series

Sami Rahamim is a rising senior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Ravil Ashirov is a junior at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Sami is against BDS, while Ravil is a supporter. We asked them to debate the merits and demerits of BDS. Sami got us started.

Kurt Hoffman

SR: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply complex. Yet, one basic truth holds: Israelis arent going anywhere, Palestinians arent going anywhere, and it is in both of their best interests to come together and work to arrive at a solution that peacefully ends the conflict.

For decades, the framework of this solution has involved the creation of an independent Palestinian state beside a secure Israel. This is the dream of a majority of Israelis and many of Israels supporters around the globe, myself included.

One of several disturbing facets of the BDS movement is that it deceptively simplifies this conflict to exclusively assign the Palestinians the role of perpetual victims and Israel as oppressors. While this may fit a convenient narrative for pro-Palestinian activists, it distorts reality to the detriment of both Israelis and Palestinians.

I understand that we both care deeply about this conflict, but there must be a more productive way forward. When will we move in that direction?

RA: BDS is a set of tactics which seeks to put a cost on Israel for maintaining the occupation, an occupation it has been able to maintain relatively cost free, in order to compel it to recognize Palestinian sovereignty and human rights.

For BDS to have legitimacy, it must uphold two burdens. The first burden is prudence; BDS has to show gains in the achievement of Palestinian human rights or the potential to make gains. The second burden is that BDS must be able to refute the moral criticisms against it by the opposition, or otherwise point out their irrelevancy. These are burdens which can be upheld.

SR: Before we examine the burdens you mentioned, neither of which can be upheld in my opinion, I think its important to define some key terms so we can both understand the meaning behind the terms we are using.

What does occupation mean as you use it? Is it just the West Bank? Jerusalem? Tel Aviv? The founders and leaders of the BDS movement have intentionally refused to make this distinction.

RA: Occupation means what it has always meant those territories that Israel occupied after June 1967. I understand where you are getting at: BDS wants to destroy Israel. Its a point I will answer fully when upholding the moral burden. But first Id like to go into the burden of prudence, since its the basis of all tactical action within activism and the more immediate imperative.

In understanding the rationale of these tactics, we have to discuss the history of previous tactics used by Palestinians to end the occupation, and how they stand in relation to BDS. Before BDS, Palestinians mostly used diplomacy and armed struggle to further their goals.

The historical record shows diplomacy in and of itself is not a viable means of resolving the conflict, even though the PLO and the Arab world adopted what is now considered the international consensus on resolving the conflict back in the 1970s. These include the right of national self determination for the Israeli and Palestinian people, a return to pre-June 1967 borders with mutual modifications and security guarantees, as well as a just resolution to the problem of Palestinian refugees in other words, the Two State Solution.

But Israel rejected a long list of resolutions put forth by the PLO and the Arab states, with the help of a UN Security council veto from the United States. Arab initiatives continued, evoking from Israel consistent alarm and rejection. The voting record in the UN over the past 25 years has the same results every year. 165 countries vote for the Two State Solution, while the same six countries always oppose it: the United States, Israel, the Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, Palau, and either Australia or Canada.

Armed struggle and has likewise proved futile for resolving the conflict. I dont seek to dispute the moral and legal right of Palestinian armed resistance against occupation; such a right is ingrained in international law under the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples and the Fourth Geneva Convention. But I believe armed struggle has shown itself not to be prudent in achieving Palestinian freedom.

In the face of these failures, the present day requires a new set of tactics, and BDS offers itself as just that. In the face of the exhaustion of those methods, BDS stands as a legitimate, non-violent, and forceful alternative to compel Israel to accept a just resolution to the conflict.

In its short time of practice, BDSs gains have been significant. Boycotts and divestments are growing, with material consequences compounding as such actions continue to expand.

The political consequences have been even more significant. People are becoming more educated about the conflict, which is correlated with dropping support for Israel, not least of which is occurring among American Jews. Israel is increasingly becoming a pariah state, with the reactionary responses against BDS from its government not helping it in this regard; these include investing millions into reactionary propaganda campaigns such as BrandIsrael to combat these trends, banning activists from entering the country, and banning international NGOs such as HRW from conducting their operations there.

SR: There is a lot to respond to here. First and foremost, perhaps occupation has always meant territories captured in 1967 to you, but that is simply not how BDS is practiced by its founders and leaders. If BDSs goal is to end occupation, and you define occupation as limited to the 1967 territories, how is that at all consistent with boycotting academics from Tel Aviv University? Or the demands that artists not perform anywhere within Israel?

BDSs co-founder, Omar Barghouti, has stated that the BDS movement oppose[s] a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. He insists that no Palestinian, rational Palestinian, not a sell-out Palestinian, will ever accept a Jewish state in Palestine. This is the essence of BDS activism, and it represents the same shameful rejectionism as the Palestinian leadership that predates BDS, predates the occupation, and predates Israel.

Palestinian leaders have had numerous opportunities to make a deal with Israel and bring a state into being, but the result has always been the same: they walked away. Why? How? Because of the ingrained lie that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel.

By labeling Jews colonists and imperialists, when in fact we have longed for Zion and maintained a Jewish presence there for two millennia, this lie is able to spread like a virus and is compounded by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, like the Jewish plot to control the world detailed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The chant I hear most often from BDS activists on my campus is chilling: From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. This dangerous fantasy, of a judenfrei Palestine, tells Palestinians that the Zionist enemy will either go back home or agree to dismantle their country and become a binational state. Rhetoric that denies Jewish historical ties to the land of Israel and refuses to acknowledge the Jewish peoples right to national self-determination promotes a toxic environment on campuses here in the US and has lead to violence in Israel.

I can assure you that these attacks economic, physical, or otherwise will do nothing to improve Palestinians quality of life, rendering your burden of prudency invalid.

I can also assure you that attempts to coerce Israel into making decisions that will compromise its security will fail, not only because Israel will not be bullied by those who seek its destruction, but because foreign investments in Israel have nearly tripled since 2005, when BDS activities began.

Peace is possible, but only through negotiation. It will most certainly not be imposed by international bodies, like the UN, which for decades has been used as a tool by Arab states to create an obsession with Israel unparalleled with any other country in the world. With UN agencies undermining Jewish ties to its holy sites, and the Human Rights Council condemning Israel at every meeting while staying silent on Syria, Iran, North Korea and the plethora of other human rights travesties, how could the UN ever be used to find a solution that serves both sides?

In the meantime, there is much Israel, the United States, and the rest of the world can do to improve the quality of life for the Palestinian people, beginning with positive investment in areas like education, economic stability, and healthcare.

RA: You bring up a lot of common criticisms regarding BDS, so I want to take to take the time to hit upon all of them as succinctly as possible. This likewise will transition to arguments which uphold the moral burden of BDS.

It is a common claim against BDS that it is out to destroy Israel. The basis of it lies in the assumption that those who support BDS demand the right of return of all 6-7 million Palestinian refugees under a single democratic state as a means to resolve the conflict, and that such a resolution will destroy Israels Jewish character.

Firstly, to reiterate the most important point I could possibly stress, BDS is a set of tactics, not an ideology or a vision of a particular political resolution. These tactics are meant to force the negotiation of meaningful resolutions by putting a cost on the occupation. The ultimate details of such resolutions can only be decided by the relevant Israeli and Palestinian actors. It would be foolish and paternalistic for international activists to assert specific resolutions.

That said, the vast majority of organizations represented on the BDS movements steering group and collective leadership explicitly support a Two State Solution along the lines of the international consensus. The fact of What Barghouti said in relation to the above facts is irrelevant.

Secondly, and this ties in with the first point, from the perspective of international activists, the assertion of the right of return is a statement of legal fact. It does not entail a pressing of that fact as a political demand, nor does it exclude its pressing either. Weather the relevant Palestinian actors will press that legal right, and to what degree they will press it, will largely depend on how serious Israel is in accepting the international consensus. If Israeli rejectionism continues to the point where a Two State settlement along the lines of the international consensus becomes impossible, a point which many say has already been reached, then pressing for the right of return is the only way Palestinians will ever attain their basic human rights.

As it regards academic boycott, theres really one question we need to ask: Is Tel Aviv University an ideological tool in the hands of the Israeli state or a bastion of free thought and speech? The facts point to the former. Think of the plethora of false historical narratives by academics justifying the occupation, the persecution of Israels new historians, and the Israeli-house intelligentsias role in crushing the post-Zionist movement in Israel. All of these things reinforce the occupation, either through apologetics or blatant academic coercion.

Even if it were not the case that Tel Aviv University is used as an ideological apparatus for the state of Israel, the University is inextricably part of the Israeli economy. BDS hopes to target all sectors of the Israeli economy that it is possible to influence. That is because its a pragmatic set of tactics, which aims to force the Israeli government to cooperate and agree to negotiations.

The cultural boycott functions in the same fashion, to treat Israel as a pariah state until it is willing to negotiate a just resolution to the conflict. The Israeli foreign ministry is a main proponent of promoting foreign artists to come perform in Israel as a way to avoid confronting the reality of the occupation.

The last point I seek to address is your point that Peace is possible, but only through negotiation. The historical record adequately debunks the fact that such a path would lead to anything but further Israeli intransigence, but lets take a closer look nonetheless. That the UN is biased toward Israel this isnt really an argument more than it is a statement, one which passively accepts Israeli atrocities against Palestinians. The assertion that the Human Rights Council stays silent on Syria, Iran, and North Korea is not even a sincere fabrication.

There is a very simple heuristic one can use to dismantle this and other similar singling out tropes. If one takes a look at Apartheid South Africa, the whole world singled it out, despite other conflicts transpiring around the world, in order to bring down that regime.

If Israelis consider people devoting their time to organizing around Palestinian human rights illegitimate due to singling out, they must likewise consider the boycotts that facilitated the collapse of Apartheid South Africa as illegitimate, or concede that singling out isnt an issue at hand. If Israels government is doing something immoral, then it ought not to matter that it is the focus of international attention. The fact of the matter is that the government is committing atrocities.

SR: You again claim that BDS is a set of tactics detached from any particular ideology. This is a fantasy. Denying that BDS is committed to Israels elimination may make it more palatable to a broader audience, but it is an intellectually dishonest rendering of the movements roots, tactics, and ultimate objective.

The claim that most Palestinians support a Two State Solution is tragically misleading at best. In examining 400 surveys carried out by five Palestinian research centers, Daniel Polisar found that in fourteen of the sixteen times a hypothetical Two State Solution was presented to respondents, a majority of Palestinians rejected the deal.

You casually dismissed Barghoutis proclamation that BDS demands all of Palestine as irrelevant, but, sadly, it cuts straight to the core of the issue. On all sixteen occasions when Palestinians were asked if they would be willing to adopt [a] school curriculum in the Palestinian state that recognizes Israel and teach school children to demand return of all of Palestine to Palestinians, the overwhelming majority, an average of 88 percent, said no.

The rhetorical question you ask in regards to Tel Aviv University can be answered with facts very simply. The co-founder of the BDS movement, Omar Barghouti, once again makes for a great Exhibit A. While steadfastly calling for the same boycotts you support, he himself obtained a masters degree in philosophy from Tel Aviv University. So while I would love to understand how Barghouti would effectively boycott himself, the disturbing reality is that economic boycotts often end up hurting Palestinians more than they could ever hurt Israelis, upending your first burden to prove.

Israeli companies employ roughly 36,000 Palestinians over the Green Line. These companies are a real-life model of coexistence, where Jewish and Palestinian workers operate side-by-side, getting to know one another, growing their compassion and seeing the humanity in people their societies often tell them are fundamentally different. Palestinians receive full benefits and earn equal pay to their Israeli coworkers which on average is three times the median salary their neighbors who work for Palestinian companies earn.

And what happens when your boycotts do make an impact, as in the famous case of SodaStream? Israeli companies will simply move inside the Green Line, and the only losers are the Palestinian workers you claim to support. It is also highly instructive that even after SodaStream moved to the other side of the Green Line, the boycotts continued. This too proves that to BDS proponents, the conflict is not really about 1967 at all. It is about Israels very existence.

So while BDS has proven to be woefully ineffective in shifting Israeli policy to the benefit of the Palestinians, the question remains as to what you and others would consider a just resolution to the conflict. This is the true impasse. From what I can gather, like most other BDS supporters, for you, a just resolution to the conflict means the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This is simply a non-starter for the basis of negotiations.

Your assertion that granting the right of return is the only way for Palestinians to attain their human rights, uses people as pawns in the decades-old attempt to end Jewish sovereignty in our historic homeland. Palestinians are the only people on earth whose descendants are considered refugees for infinite generations. The number of Palestinians alive today who fled their homes in 1948-49 (as a result of a war launched by invading Arab armies, lest we forget, that the Arabs lost) is very few. Israel has been open to compensating them as part of a final status agreement. But the notion that their decedents, who may even live here in the United States, are entitled to anything from Israel is a prime example of a double standard employed against Israel that no other country faces. And once again, the result is a losing scenario for Palestinians living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, victims of Arab cynicism, as they continue to discriminated against by those governments and blocked from upward social mobility.

We seem to agree that peace is possible, but it will require pro-Palestinian advocates to accept the truth I laid out when we began the discussion: Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and they will need to work together to find solutions that are in both of their interests. Treating the conflict as a zero-sum game, as BDS does, will fail to move us forward at all. Thus, the question remains: When will we move forward?

RA: The fact is that BDS holds widespread support among Palestinian workers and unions. Palestinians get less than minimum wage working for Israeli companies. Their support for BDS shows that they are willing to forfeit an occupiers wage slavery for the achievement of basic human rights.

Your surveys misrepresent reality; most Palestinians support organizations and parties which endorse the Two State Solution. But regardless of these Palestinian initiatives to compromise, facts are facts: Israel has and will continuously reject reasonable initiatives for peace. Therefore, BDS is justified both morally and pragmatically in compelling Israel to recognize Palestinian basic human rights.

Sami Rahamim is a rising senior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Ravil Ashirov is a junior at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward.

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We Asked Two College Kids to Debate BDS. Here's What Happened ... - Forward

Progressive organizers should pay more attention to small acts of rebellion, says the Portland author of 'Guerrillas of Desire'

HBO is currently catching criticism for rolling out a new show called Confederate an alternative history where slavery never ended because the Confederacy won the Civil War. Widespread criticism may very well end the show before it begins; last December, A&E was forced to cancel a show called Generation KKK a series that promised in-depth profiles of Klan families after it was revealed that the crew had made cash payments to Klansmen.

To put the creative work at HBO into perspective, it helps to remember that there are ways in which the Confederates already won the Civil War starting with the permitted rise of the KKK and the terrorism that instituted Jim Crow. According to historian James Loewen, the history thats been taught to Americans in school is largely the one promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy one that goes out of its way to hide widespread resistance to slavery and undermines continued efforts at liberation.

Another possible reason Americans dont think about this resistance is that we typically dont talk about social change unless we see it happening on a grand scale. Rebellion and revolution catch everyones attention; the small acts that made them possible typically do not.

Its only in recent years that these small acts have begun to get their due. In 1985, James C. Scott coined the phrase everyday resistance in his book Weapons of the Weak Everyday Acts of Peasant Resistance. One method of resistance uncovered by Scott was the simple act of running away a tactic used repeatedly by slaves in the Americas.

Now, local activist and scholar Kevin Van Meter has made an original contribution to this study in Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible, published by AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Part history and part theory, Guerrillas of Desire brings together moments as diverse as the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, to wildcat factory strikes in Michigan, to peasant rebellions in Europe to the feminist revolt against housework. All of these struggles, Van Meter said, are joined by their efforts to resist imposed work, and in doing so, they fight to create more time for all the things the world actually needs including the ability to thoughtfully care for each other.

Street Roots sat down with Van Meter who will speak at 7:30 p.m.Aug. 10 at Powells Books, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., Portland to discuss his thoughts on everyday resistance and why hes convinced that progressive organizers should pay more attention to it.

Stephen Quirke: Your book describes capitalism as a structure that imposes work and shows the various ways work can be refused in different contexts. Why is it important to think about capitalism and resistance to it in this specific way?

Kevin Van Meter: In Guerrillas of Desire, I argue that the central operating mechanism in a capitalist society is the imposition of work, both in its waged form, as we usually think of it, but also in its unwaged form as unwaged housework that is, reproducing workers ability to work and social reproduction meaning, the work of reproducing the larger society. We will spend more time working in our lives than doing any other activity besides sleeping, and if you combine the time working and the time recovering from working, there is nothing else that we will spend more time doing between birth and death.

As it turns out, what most people do all day is pretty terrible, or unnecessary, or not fulfilling, or not conducive to creating a just and equitable society. When looking at the last 500 years of capitalism of chattel slavery, those employed in the agricultural sector, and those working in fields, factories, workshops as well as bedrooms, kitchens, classrooms, and now offices and the larger service economy Ive found a ceaseless, unending refusal of work. If we live in a society that honors work, that sees work and our working lives as definite factors in our self-understanding and self-worth, then why are so many people refusing the imposition of work in small ways stealing office supplies, taking longer breaks, feigning illness, slacking off, finding quicker ways to accomplish work tasks as to make the work easier or more enjoyable? I think this is an important question to answer.

S.Q.: How does this relate to the title, Guerrillas of Desire?

K.V.M.: Human beings desire all sorts of things, from human touch and companionship, to contributing to society and being productive with friends and neighbors to seeing themselves as part of something larger than themselves and their immediate family. I see these desires as a striving for more than the contemporary society can provide. Because we live in a class-based capitalist society, how many people are forced to work at crummy jobs that shouldnt exist rather than contribute their passions and real talents to the world? How many people are too busy working at crummy jobs to contribute to the larger political, social, civil, and cultural society? I believe no, I am convinced that the desires that emerge from human beings speak to a world beyond this one.

S.Q.: Why do you encourage readers to think about small and discrete acts, as opposed to self-conscious rebellion?

K.V.M.: I ask readers to think about small and discrete acts rather than larger social movements or rebellions since these are common, everyday and taking place all the time. Actually, everyday acts of resistance outnumber self-conscious rebellious acts a thousand or possibly a million fold. Self-conscious rebellious acts and uprisings are exceedingly rare, especially in a society so rife with domination and control. The question I always ask is not why are people rebelling, but why are people not rebelling more. And when we start to look at everyday life, we begin to see how all sorts of people, in all kinds of jobs, in all areas of life are rebelling and trying to create a world of their own making.

S.Q.: You argue that a generalized revolt against work already exists. How is this occurring?

K.V.M.: We live in a society where everyone must work. If you dont work to obtain a wage you starve, and you arent granted clothing or shelter. And, of course, we know from research conducted that many unhoused people are in fact working but just dont make enough money to afford rent. So in a society that forces most of its members to work at jobs that arent fulfilling, that arent democratic, that dont speak to their needs and talents and abilities and their possibility to grow, or when they are fulfilling we dont have much control over them and the work process, we shouldnt be surprised that there are those of us who refuse this regime of work. And looking at both the historical record and contemporary society, we find that it is the norm more common than not that there is a generalized revolt against the imposition of work at a particular job and to the idea that in order to live, to survive, we must work at jobs that are neither fulfilling for the individual nor beneficial for the larger society.

S.Q.: You suggest that organizers on the left need to practice reading the struggles and circulating them. What does that look like in practice?

K.V.M.: While I believe that left organizers can contribute to the creation of a better world, I think that we fool ourselves into thinking we are the catalyst or main progenitor of this new world. When we inquire into the actually existing needs and desires of working and poor peoples and discover the struggles taking place around survival and creating a life worth living, then we are grounded in how people are rather than what we want them to be. We need to listen to and record these struggles. Then by circulating them through stories, cultural products, political essays and presentations, we can begin to amplify and intervene in a new society, a new social order that is more just and fair then the one we now inhabit, as it emerges.

S.Q.: You really focus on the idea of self-liberation in your book. In the section on American slavery ,you emphasize that slaves in America were always in the process of liberating themselves, and this led to other people supporting them in various ways.

K.V.M.: Yes and the historical research on this not only undermined the dominant narrative about Africans in the United States, historically and present, but it also undermined the narrative that there needed to be some party or leadership or union structure. Slaves, peasants and workers historically have really liberated themselves. The great failure of the contemporary union movement is the assumption that youre waiting for union leadership or a union organizer for people to resist on the job. People are not waiting for revolutionary consciousness. Theyre not waiting for the left. People understand their situations and people are organized, just in order to survive in this terrible society that we live in. And we should honor them. And, arguably, that is the largest wellspring of any other form of resistance.

Nat Turner talks about this in his confessions that what led him to rebellion was running away, and stealing, breaking tools, all these other acts. And he didnt need any scholar or union bureaucrat to tell him to do that. He developed those leadership skills out of those processes of self-reflection, self-activity, and self-liberation.

S.Q.: You also write that the slave revolts led to the struggle for the eight-hour work-day. Can you explain this in more detail? Did waged workers learn about slave resistance and think we can do that too"?

K.V.M.: I think we can certainly point to that in a couple of places. But I also dont want to separate these into separate categories of workers. We want to see people as more dynamic. Theres a circulation of struggle thats constantly taking place. And we dont want to separate the slave as a figure and the worker as the figure, because very often its the same figure. Their strongest form of resistance was running away. But that figure could then be re-enslaved. That figure could then become a semi-waged worker. We want to see the complexity of the dynamics and not focus on just these categorical identities.

S.Q.: You argue that the run-up to the American Civil War was in many ways a revolutionary situation. What are the implications of this? Why dont we talk about the war this way?

K.V.M.: First and foremost, I think it is important to emphasize again that the slaves freed themselves. The mass exodus of slaves from the plantations into marooned communities, and north via the Underground Railroad forced the federal government to respond with the Fugitive Slave Act. Innumerable thefts and the illicit economy, in which both blacks and whites participated, forced local governments and vigilantes to raid grog shops and publicly punish pilferers and their accomplices. The palpable fear felt by the white slaveholding class, not just economically but for their very lives, was the direct result of slave rebellions nearly 250 actual or attempted rebellions took place during American slavery. And this fear pushed the South toward war. As with ever major economic and political crisis in the U.S. since, compromise was reached chattel slaves were provided limited freedom as wage slaves under Jim Crow, blacks were granted civil rights. Both were compromises to prevent the emergence of a strong black community and a directly democratic society based in racial equality. In this way, I and other scholars would argue that the black freedom struggle that began under slavery was then, and is now, revolutionary. And we dont talk about the Civil War in this way because our telling of the story in the present has actual, real political implications today.

S.Q.: You talk about organizing all the way down. Is this a way of saying that people are already resisting, and we need to find out how thats happening, and identify with it do that kind of imaginative work?

K.V.M.: Thats exactly what Im trying to say. I want to redefine the role of the organizer as someone whos circulating struggles, whos not the central figure. Because whats most important is the existing struggles that are taking place. The underlying assumption of left radical organizing is that people are uneducated, unagitated, unorganized. I think Ive shown over the last 500 years of struggle against capitalism that that assumption is empirically wrong.

S.Q.: Do you think the abandonment of Reconstruction hurt the workers movement?

K.V.M.: If you can take a good sector out of the working class and immiserate them, then it decreases the overall classs ability to fight back. Thats been the struggle against white racism for so long until everyone is free, none of us is free. That is materially and actually correct.

The argument I want to make is that capital and the state respond to our overt and everyday forms of struggle. Theyre responding to us; were the primary figure. They need to capture our work. They need to make sure that were constantly reproducing these gender and racial hierarchies. And as long as the system functions, it will continue to impose these things upon us.

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Kevin Van Meter celebrates the revolutionary heart behind everyday resistance - Street Roots News

Though precise figures are difficult to find, likely about half of the 1.3 million incarcerated workers do labor that maintains prison institutions themselves. Without this labor, prisons could not function, yet they are poorly paid and often don't amount to serious employment. (Photo: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

High school students typically learn at least one "fact" about slavery: The 13thAmendment did away with it all. As usual, school history teaches a half truth. Like most promises of freedom, the 13thAmendment came with a catch, an exclusion clause that permitted both slavery and involuntary servitude "as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."

This "exception clause" drew considerable attention in anti-slavery circles in the decades immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation but then largely faded into the background. Even through the last several decades of mass incarceration, few people other than a handful of scholars have paid much attention to what historian Dennis Childscallsthe "constitutional sanctioning of state-borne prison-industrial genocide."

However, in the past year, abolishing the slavery clause of the 13thhas become a cause clbre. Theprison labor strikeof fall 2016 brought the issue to the fore. Led by members of the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) inside Holman prison, this action sparked a withdrawal of labor that someanalystssay spread to as many as 29 prisons in 12 states. Kinetik Justice, the most prominent leader of FAM,explainedthe motivation of the strike: "We understand the prison system is a continuation of the slave system. The 13thAmendment abolished slavery supposedly but createdit again in thenext breath, because it birthedthe criminal justice system the institution of slavery with a $1,000 suit on."

Since the FAM-led strike,resistancein several prisons has kept questions of labor behind the walls in the public eye. Moreover, work stoppages and hunger strikes have occurred in a number of immigration jails in theNorthwestandSouthwest.

Like the FAM-led strike, much of this resistance in immigration detention centers has focused on exploitation of labor. In an interesting twist on the exception-clause argument, those detained while awaiting results of an immigration proceeding reason that they cannot be compelled to work because they have not been convicted of any crime, thereby absolving them from any application of the 13thamendment.

In 2014, a suit against this practice was filed on behalf of nine individuals detained at the immigration facility in Aurora, Colorado, owned by the private prison company GEO Group. In March of this year, a Denver judgeupgradedthe suitto class action status. It now includes some 60,000 men and women held at Aurora over the years. The litigation claims those detained were subjected to "forced labor" when they were selected for a daily roster to carry out cleaning duties at the facility and paid $1 per day. The argument holds that this amounts tovirtual slavery underTrafficking Victims Protection Act. GEO Group's argument held that the labor fell under ICE'sVoluntary Work Program, and people signed up of their own volition.

Apart from actions behind bars, the highly acclaimed film,13th,has brought the exclusion clause to the attention of millions of activists and ordinary people. The film, directed by Ava DuVernay and nominated for an Academy Award, traces the historical roots of mass incarceration back to the period of chattel slavery.

The focus on the 13thAmendment will once again take center stage in the "Millions for Prisoners Human Rights March" in Washington, DC, on August 19. Nonprofit human rights organizationIamWEand a long list of co-sponsors are the organizers. Thecore demandof the marchers is a congressional hearing focused on the 13thamendment and its "direct links" to various aspects of mass incarceration, including exploitation of labor, profiteering by private prison operators, the implementation of quotas for immigration detention, and racial disparities in prison populations and police violence.

Mallah-Divine Mallah, a member of the national organizing committee for the march, says the action intends to "galvanize" the movement at a national level. He told Truthout that there are lots of local struggles but nothing putting the light on the "diabolical aspect" of the prison system across the country, including labor exploitation.

Prison Labor: A Case of Superexploitation

Without a doubt, prison pay rates are appallingly low. A recentstudyof prison wages by Prison Policy Initiative's Wendy Sawyer revealed that prison pay levels have actually declined nationally since 2001. She found that the average minimum daily wage paid to incarcerated workers for those who do basic maintenance work in the prison is now 86 cents, down from the 93 cents reported in 2001, with maximum daily wages falling from $4.73 in 2001 to $3.45 today. Moreover, six states -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas -- pay no wage at all for basic maintenance work. Louisiana, Missouri and West Virginia pay many such workers less than five cents an hour. Heather Ann Thompson, author of the prize-winning tale of the Attica prison rebellion,Blood in the Water,viewsthese wage levels much like Kinetik Justice, saying, "It's absolutely fair to characterize it as slave labor, since constitutionally that is the only exception made for keeping people in a state of slavery."

Mallah, who spent over a decade behind bars himself, adds a further dimension to the nature of enslavement behind bars: coercion. He notes that prison authorities have various forms of leverage to force people to work. Refusing to report to a job may land a person in solitary confinement; result in the elimination of their access to commissary, phones and visiting; and potentially adding time to their sentence.

Lacino Hamilton, a captive in the Michigan State Department of Corrections for 23 years, agrees, "The motive for work in prison is seldom induced by reward, but by threat of certain punishment: Not working results in mind-numbing and humiliating restrictions, in an already restrictive environment."

The coercion element has heightened in recent years as people are increasingly charged for services. Incarcerated people are now often charged co-pays for health care, eyeglasses and wheelchairs, and they are also contending with decreases in clothing and food allocations that force them to buy overpriced goods through the commissary. Moreover, restitution and crime victims' funds often garnish a considerable share of prison wages. Sawyer says, in some instances these deductions from paychecks reach as high as 80 percent.

While money is central in this equation, Hamilton maintains that prison labor exploitation is also about the politics of power. He told Truthout via email that "prison work is designed to train and prepare imprisoned people for the unrewarding work awaiting most of them (us) upon release. It's designed to condition imprisoned men and women to accept the official or societal view that they are meant to be the permanent underclass. So, when the department requires that all prisoners maintain a 'routine work assignment,' it's to program prisoners to become someone whose energy and labor is always at the disposal of higher ups."

The fall in wages has also gone hand-in-hand with slashing the budgets of education and other activities. Political prisoner David Gilbert, who has spent over 30 years in New York state prisons, wrote to Truthout about how in the past there was a "range of activities where prisoners could feel like they were accomplishing something, feel good about themselves." These have for the most part disappeared, along with what he calls "the program which is by far the most beneficial -- college." Nationally, the number of in-prison college programs has dropped from over 350 in the early 1990s to less than a hundred today. Astudyby the New York State Bar Association showed that the number of college degrees awarded to people in the state's prisons fell from 1,078 in 1991 to 141 in 2011.

This reshaping of the prison landscape has gradually eliminated most of the rehabilitation-oriented programs, leaving menial jobs and dead time. As Gilbert put it, "For the vast majority there's a tremendous amount of idleness, at times combined with the demeaning treatment from staff."

Changing the 13th Amendment: Implications

For the moment, a key question is, to what extent the removal of the exception clause would address these issues. There is a wide range of views on this matter. Mobilizationmaterialsdistributed by organizers state, "At a minimum, we expect to have an immediate impact on mass incarceration laws." Azzurra Crispino, who was a major spokesperson for supporters of the 2016 FAM strike and currently heads Prison Abolition Prisoner Support, believes such impact would be decisive and swift. She told Truthout that the removal of the exception clause would force prison authorities to respect the whole gamut of labor laws they are now free to ignore -- minimum wage, pensions, health and safety regulations. "This would immediately make the prison system unaffordable," she contends. She predicted that within a year the prison population could shrink by up to 70 percent.

Though less optimistic than Crispino, Mallah also sees the potential in modifying the amendment. "The captured market aspect would be changed." In his view, there would be an "impact on the quality of interaction between the people who are incarcerated and those they work for." He sees altering the amendment as a way to "galvanize people," to address the reality that "nobody cares about slaves, nobody cares about prisoners."

However, some activists, legal scholars and economists are more skeptical about the impact of removing the exclusion clause. While the clause constitutes the major overarching framework enabling authorities to exempt incarcerated people from labor laws, other legal measures also facilitate prison slave labor. Court decisions and legislation have also excluded people in prison from categorization as employees. A number ofcasespertaining to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) have upheld this exclusion. In one instance, a claim for coverage under FLSA argued that if Congress wanted to exempt people in prison from the terms of the act, they would have specifically mentioned them. The Seventh Circuit court'sexplanationin denying the appealwas that "the reason the FLSA contains no express exception for prisoners is probably that the idea was too outlandish to occur to anyone when the legislation was under consideration by Congress." While not employing exactly the same logic, a number of cases have upheld the right of government and nonprofit sector employers to hire interns without paying them a wage, largely under thetheorythat an internship is volunteer work, not requiring payment.

Section 26 U.S.C. 3306(c)(21)of the tax code reiterates the FLSA decisions, noting that any service performed in a penal institution isn't considered employment. Chandra Bozelko, who spent seven years in prison,emphasizesthat, like the 13thAmendment, these laws are yet another way in which people in prison are dehumanized by the labor regime: "this definition is much more dehumanizing than any low wage," sheclaimedin a recent article in National Review, "This law tells an inmate that what she does at her prison job doesn't matter, regardless of what she's paid. It's one thing to be devalued; it's another to be denied outright."

Moreover, Steven Pitts, the associate chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, sees a reflection of the increasingly precarious nature of work in prison labor regimes. In his view, the 13th Amendment is not "the legal vehicle that keeps people from being classified as an employee." Rather, he contends that over the past 40 years, the line between employer and employee has become less and less clear, with many employees being redefined as consultants or independent contractors. At present, he maintains there is "always a problem applying basic labor law that assumes a clear line between employer and employee." The blurring of this line has enabled employers to hire "workers" or "associates" for a flat rate and exclude them from benefits like retirement pay, paid holidays and job security.

Who Do People in Prison Work For?

Assessing the application of the exclusion clause raises the question of who actually employs people in prison. Despite popularnotionsthat incarcerated workers primarily generate profits for major corporations, less than 1 percent of those in prison are under contract to private companies. According to federal law, any firm contracting for prison labor to produce goods to be sold to the public must register with the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP). According to the PIECP's first quarterreportfor 2017, 5,588 incarcerated individuals were under contract to companies, most of them small firms. These are generally the best-paid jobs in prisons and according to the letter of the law, are supposed to pay the legal minimum wage. For economist Tom Petersik, who has been studying prison labor for nearly two decades, these workers who do jobs resembling production work on the streets, hold the key to resolving prison labor issues. He recommends applying the overall rules of the labor market to this cohort but not to all workers in prison. Moreover, he further cautioned in correspondence with Truthout that the Amendment only applies to people who have been convicted, exempting those awaiting trial, but also opening the door to applying the clause to individuals who have completed prison or jail terms.

Two other categories of work occupy the vast majority of those employed in prison. According to Sawyer, about 6 percent of people in prison produce goods and services for government entities. This ranges from the stereotypical license-plate-making to building communications boxes for the Department of Defense to producing mattresses or uniforms for prisons. Several states along with the Federal government have separate entities that oversee these enterprises. The federal government's prison industrial overseer, Federal Prison Industries, Inc., (also known as UNICOR)reportsthat its largest single production item in 2015 was office furniture, most of which went to government buildings.

While much prison labor may be akin to factory work outside prison, a significant portion of prison workers are engaged in agriculture. Prison farms, highly reminiscent of plantations from the chattel slavery days, complete with armed guards on horseback, are mostly located in the South. Prisons like Mississippi's Parchman Farms (made famous in asongby blues legend Bukka White) and Angola in Louisiana have gained notoriety for oppressive conditions in agricultural fields. Holman in Alabama, the focal point of the Free Alabama Movement, also has considerable agricultural production. While most of this produce ends up being consumed in prison dining halls, more recently stricter immigration laws that reduced the flow of migrant farm laborers have led to thedeploymentof people in prison in Georgia and Idaho to harvest crops for commercial farms.

Though precise figures are difficult to find, likely about half of the 1.3 million incarcerated workers do labor that maintains prison institutions themselves. This includes cleaning, cooking, general maintenance and a variety of office tasks. These are the most poorly paid jobs. Without this labor, prisons could not function. As Crispino points out, if Departments of Corrections had to pay these workers a minimum wage with basic benefits, they would go broke in a hurry. Yet, as Sawyer notes, few of these jobs really amount to serious employment. They might involve sweeping floors for an hour a day or serving food for a couple of hours. Even for those who do work, the days are far from full.

Moreover, Hamilton stresses that rather than physically grueling labor routines, the "real harm" lying in these jobs is that the "prisoner's sense of self and sense of possession become alienated from his or her work capacity. That's what's really at stake here."

Lastly, there is an entire layer of people in prison who do not work at all. This includes theroughly90,000people in solitary confinement, virtually all of the nation's political prisoners, as well as those who are disabled or beyond working age. Former political prisoner Cisco Torres sees mobilization around eliminating the exclusion clause as viable but thinks political energy could be better spent on issues like sentencing or reducing financing for local police. He fears that even if the exclusion clause is removed, "they will come up with different methods of incarceration."

Additionally, Torres stresses that decarceration without allocating additional resources to oppressed communities condemns people released from prison to live at the absolute margins of survival. "Even if we let them go, where do these people go?" he says. His views also highlight the fact that amending the 13thcould lead to some relief for people in prison but may do very little for the millions of loved ones of incarcerated people, overwhelmingly women and children, who have also been critically impacted by mass incarceration. For the moment, Torres favors mobilizing behind "tangible goals," like the treatment of incarcerated people or the recognition of political prisoners. For him, the central problem is "American capitalism and how we fight it," not merely amending the Constitution.

Hamilton agrees with Torres' assessment:"Such a demand may be a great way to raise awareness about interlinked systems of marginalization, policing and imprisonment, but it would not prevent imprisonment from being the primary mode of state-inflicted punishment. Not one prisoner would go free."

Linking the 13thAmendment to Other Issues

Despite the complexity of assessing its impact, building a movement to abolish the exclusion clause would be a major step in changing public attitudes about incarcerated people. Moreover, the broadening of the demands to include the elimination of immigration detention quotas acknowledges that forced labor is a carceral reality well beyond the boundaries of the plantation-style farms of Holman and Parchman.

In addition, as Mallah has stressed, it would reshape consciousness and relations at the coalface of prison yard relations. He regards the march and the focus on the 13thas an effort to capture the "synergy of both national coalition and local" efforts as a key moment in the search to find the balance between marching, advocacy and education that is central to building a movement to end mass incarceration.

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Will Altering the 13th Amendment Bring Liberation to the Incarcerated 2.3 Million? - Truth-Out

This week is sandwiched between two celebrations of freedom: freedom of individual Jamaicans from chattel slavery (August 1) and freedom of the Jamaican State from colonial domination (August 6). If we want to take an optimistic view, we can say that both remain a work in progress, for we have not really achieved either.

If we want to be pessimistic (and maybe more realistic), we can say that all that has happened over the last two centuries is that we have swapped one master for another.

Jamaican slave owners gave up their valuable property under duress. Only children under six years old (who could not work) were emancipated immediately in 1834. The slave owners demanded six years more of free work from field slaves and four more years from house slaves (eventually reduced to four years for both) before they were to become fully free; and after decades of stolen forced labour, they also demanded to be financially compensated for the loss of their human property, as well as future labour.

The former slave owners still controlled the Jamaican colonial state through the Jamaica House of Assembly, and they did all they could to force their former slaves to work for low wages, ensuring they never became more than second-class citizens. Without the right to vote or to stand for election, and without reparations in terms of land and education, Jamaica became the land of their oppression under wage slavery.

The 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and the 1938 riots and labour unrest had a lot in common with Sam Sharpe's 1831-1832 slave revolt, because Emancipation did not bring the freedom that had been expected. Even today - 183 years after Emancipation and 179 years after full freedom - and 73 years after being allowed to vote - the majority of the descendants of the enslaved still suffer high levels of illiteracy, educational underachievement, unemployment and underemployment. Somehow, the celebration of Emancipation by descendants of Jamaica's former slaves seems a little hollow.

I would have expected Jamaicans to celebrate our personal freedom, and to eschew anything resembling what Bob Marley (following Sidney Moxsy and Marcus Garvey) called "mental slavery". So many of us, though, misuse our freedom by choosing slavery to fad and fashion: like skin bleaching, tattooing, and body piercing, to name a few. Is using one's freedom to follow the crowd really freedom? Or is it a new kind of slavery?

We have misused our freedom - hard won by Sam Sharpe, Wilberforce and Knibb. Instead of choosing education and ethnic pride as the road to self-respect, many have chosen to ape their white oppressors, and to mutilate their bodies. Emancipation is very much a work in progress.

Jamaica could not prosper under colonialism. British policy demanded that nothing should be manufactured in Jamaica that could provide employment for British labour at home; if they could have shipped freshly cut sugar cane to Britain for processing by British labour, it would have been illegal to locally manufacture brown sugar and rum. Even today, we do not refine white sugar locally. Some countries that cannot grow cocoa are famous for their chocolate confections; and we, with some of the best cocoa in the world, can't make a success of manufacturing chocolates.

The spirit of colonialism is still with us! And this is because at Independence in 1962, all we did was change white colonial masters for brown local ones.

In 1962, the bad, bad British bequeathed us a national debt of zero pounds sterling, and in 50 years of independence, a series of PNP and JLP governments borrowed billions to bequeath to this generation of Jamaicans one of the highest debt-to-GDP ratios in the world.

Political Independence promised liberation from colonial oppression. It has led to garrison communities, political corruption, and the deepening of Jamaica's oppressive colour-class divisions through an apartheid education system.

'We're out to build a New Jamaica' might have been the slogan, but those who jockeyed to put themselves in charge of the Jamaica Independence Project have not delivered. We have ended up much the same, under a different rubric. The political freedoms gained through political Independence have been misused to enrich the political class and their cronies. Independence is very much still a work in progress.

We may celebrate freedom this week and next, but there are many of us who will mute our celebrations until we are a little farther along.

-Peter Espeut is a sociologist and rural development scientist. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.

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Peter Espeut | Swapping one slave master for the next ... - Jamaica Gleaner

By Pedro Campos

A better world is possible, if it is Socialist. Foto: dakarparada.blogspot.com

HAVANA TIMES Recent events in Venezuela have served to expose this State-Stalinist Left which, entrenched in anti-US imperialism and its alleged attack on the revolutionary process in Venezuela, have turned their back on the struggle of the masses to uphold the democracy that was built under Chavezs government.

At the head of this movement, we find the Castro dictatorship, its followers and this whole group of communists and socialists who continue to, essentially, believe that socialism was built from the State in Latin America and Europe. A state led by an erudite elite who knows what needs to be done, starting off with nationalizing large, medium and small-sized companies, controlling the market, creating a new man and destroying the bourgeois state to build a new socialist one.

There have been two more significant features of these Communists ideas:

1- The concentration of property and State control of the economy, at the expense of free, private and associated modes of production and capitalist models.

2- The substitution of a democracy which they call bourgeois by another so-called dictatorship which is apparently proletarian, the only class within capitalism who has never held power and then has been kept under the chains of wage slavery, but for the State, in its name. Making a perfect base for the authoritarian system.

What does this have to do with collectivization, freedom and emanicipation, Socialisms great catchphrases?

This Left who sit in meeting rooms and drink capuccino coffees have never understood a single word of Marxism. They have never understood that for Socialism to exist, first you need a social-economic base where free, private or associates modes of production need to dominate, like Classic theorists have pointed at time and time again, which can be never replaced by paid work, nor can it ever be built from the top nor from outside the nation.

This Left has never read Marxs Capital, where it explains how in the previous capitalist system which was defined by wage labor as its mode of production, other forms of production are born, grow and develop, on the back of free work, especially associated work, which can be seen in cooperatives. How societies make up the first form of breaking down capitalism with their actions is exposed within this book.

These communists dont understand the fact that it is only via the greater democratization and freedoms which are possible within capitalism that a new post-capitalist, socialist, or whatever you want to call it society, can be born. And thats because full democracy and freedoms, especially the free market, are what allow the unobstructed progress of free and associated work, a phenomenon which has seen progress in high and medium developed capitalist countries.

In previous writings, I showed that the concept of the Left was intimately linked to the birth of democracy, of power being given to the people and their representatives, in the struggle against the King, during the French Revolution and then with what has always been linked to power and the wellbeing of the masses. Therefore, it is wrong to think that there can be Left-wing dictatorships. As a matter of principle, etymologically-speaking, all dictatorships are Right-wing.

Its simple: a government like Maduros can neither be considered Left-wing nor democratic, which is trying to ignore a large popular election in favor of a National Assembly, because its controlled by the opposition, which manipulates the election of a Supreme Court; which strangles the private economy financially-speaking; which puts power in the hands of a few bureaucrats; which violates the democratic Constitution voted in during Chavezs government; which is refusing to call for a referendum which is recognized by this Constitution and to hold elections for mayors and governors and, on top of this, wants to revoke this democratic constitution and impose another constitution in true Castro-Stalin style by fire and blood, violently repressing those who defend it.

Today, Venezuela is the showcase which defines who is and isnt the Left. Go there, put your credentials under it and you will be able to identify yourself. Good Luck.

The Left is always democratic or it isnt the Left.

Notes.

1-1- Capital, Volume 3 (Chapter XXVII The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production)

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The Left is Democratic Otherwise it isn't the Left - Havana Times