Organising in the time of COVID19

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief the deep structural  problems affecting 'non-white', racialized workers in the core and  periphery. Yet, many social scientific analyses of the global political  economy, at least in the pre-COVID era, have been race neutral or  wilfully indifferent to the persistent racial pattern of global  inequalities.

In this interview, David Austin, author of Dread Poetry and Freedom:  Linton Kwesi Johnson and the Unfinished Revolution, Fear of a Black  Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal, talks with Zophia  Edwards, Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at  Providence College, Rhode Island US and author of a brilliant analysis  of Racial Capitalism and COVID-19  (https://monthlyreview.org/2021/03/01/racial-capitalism-and-covid-19/)  about the unremitting super-exploitation of Black and other non-white  racialized labor in the core and the periphery that has persisted  throughout the COVID-19 crisis, viewed from the lens of Black radical  scholarship on racism and capitalism.

I speak with Eurig Scandrett & Ros Walker, both active trade unionists in Scotland, UK.

Eurig talks about the pandemic reaching Britain whilst UCU was in a  national dispute over pay and equalities, in the context of neoliberal  commercialisation and new public management throughout higher education.  During the national dispute, the relationship between local branch  issues and national collective bargaining became a significant point of  contention (we don’t need to go into this in too much detail). At Queen  Margaret University, a well organised union branch, good inter-union  cooperation, and an enlightened approach by the Principal ensured that  UCU and other trade unions were brought into decision making very  quickly, unlike in many other universities (and at QMU only one year  ago). We, along with our sister unions, have been able to raise issues  of workload, impacts on contract researchers, health and safety,  implementation by middle managers, spreading strike pay deductions to  avoid hardship, and workers in outsourced companies. This has changed  the way in which the university has responded to the crisis, and what it  has demonstrated is, where the university is treated as a public  service, with unions as partners, representing staff, achievements can  be made. In most universities we have seen senior managers excluding  unions, putting the commercial business of the university before the  welfare of the staff and students, and pushing through cost-cutting,  unsafe and punitive actions against staff. This would be by way of an  introduction, handled by Eurig.

The relatively positive industrial relations at QMU, has also enabled  us to organise on behalf of the employees of outsourced companies, many  of whom are on low wages, insecure contracts and little leverage with  their employers, even though they provide essential services for the  university. We are in the process of escalating this campaign from the  local to the national level. This would be the significant portion of  the webinar, handled by Ross, hopefully with input from outsourced  worker.

The COVID-19 pandemic will be a major challenge to the future of the  university sector, as with all areas of economic life, and this will put  further pressures on industrial relations. There is a risk that  post-pandemic shutdown will lead to a renewed commitment to austerity,  and further cuts and commercialisation of higher education. But it  possibly also brings opportunities to ‘re-boot’ the economy in a  transformative way, to end the process of outsourcing and bring workers  in house, and to transform universities to a more collegiate,  cooperative form of governance with employees organised by trade unions,  in partnership with senior administrators committed to the public  service ethos, to the delivery of higher education as a public good.

I speak to Gacheke Gachihi from the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Gacheke spoke to us a couple of weeks ago, and we go back to catch up on news about the coercion and repression being used against people in the time of Covid-19

I speak to Joël E. Vorbe from Haiti. He is a member of the National Council for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled (CONARHAN), an entity which reflects on the problem of people living with disabilities in order to make proposals for public policies to improve their living conditions. This fan of Fidel Castro, of Nelson Mandela, is also a member of the board of the Fanmi Lavalas party of ex-president Jean Bertrand Aristide. In 1995, he said he had “eyes open on politics”. “If you want real change, you have to commit,” says Joel Vorbe, deploring the pressures on the family of those who engage in politics. On Jean Bertrand Aristide, the most popular politician of the last few years, adulated and hated, Joël Vorbe is sharp in his answer: “Aristide, the man who wants and fights for the change of his country has not changed . He has a role to play in changing Haiti. ” With another breath, he emphatically emphasizes “that a single man cannot change a country”. 

Nick Dearden talks about a debt jubilee. As director, Nick Dearden  manages the staff team and resources on behalf of Global Justice Now’s  members. He is also the public face of the organisation. Nick started  his career at War on Want where he became a senior campaigner. He went  on to be corporates campaign manager at Amnesty International UK. As  director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign, he built strong relationships  with campaigners in the global south. He helped win a new law to stop  Vulture Funds from using UK courts to squeeze huge debt payments out of  poor countries. Nick joined Global Justice Now in September 2013.

I talk with Coumba Toure and Lamin Mohammed about Covid19 in Senegal and in Africa.

Coumba is, writer, story-teller, member of the African Feminist Forum  and the Per Ankh collective. She is a board member of TrustAfrica and  an Ambassador of Africans Rising for peace justice and dignity.  She has  serve on the board of urgent action fund for women Africa. She is as an  advisor to the Global Fund for Women and to International Development  Exchange. She is a mother, a sister, and a daughter to many.

Lamin is a Gambian Human Rights Activist and is the coordinator of  Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. He was instrumental in  organising widespread protests in 2017 leading to Gambian dictator Yahya  Jammeh’s downfall. He leads the emerging pan-African movement, Africans  Rising for Justice, Peace, and Dignity. Muhammed Lamin has a track  record in youth capacity development. He is someone with Pan-African  vision, experience, and energy to steward a youth lead movement.  Saidykhan was involved in numerous campaigns and is no stranger to  mobilizing people in the streets and online especially during the  #GambiaHasDecided popular mobilization. He also served as Co-Chair of  ActionAid International’s Youth Working Group and as a lead Coordinator  of the youth-led Activista initiative.

I interview Cesare Ottolini, global Coordinator International  Alliance of Inhabitants, Italy, is a former squatter, engaged since 1977  in global / local struggles for the right to housing and the city, he  was also the secretary of a Trade Union of the building, former world  coordinator of Habitat International Coalition, also a member of  UN-HABITAT Advisory Group on Forced Evictions. He is a member of the  National Unione Inquilini Secretariat, the largest tenant organization  in Italy that organizes every year the Zero Evictions Days in dozens of  cities. He is a member of the International Council of the World Social  Forum, co-founder and global coordinator of the International Alliance  of Inhabitants. He is a co-founder and lives in a housing cooperative of  collective ownership, the Coralli Cooperative, with migrants and  Italians.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, Researcher and Professor of Sociology at  Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Autónoma de  Puebla. She has done research about indigenous movements in Latin  American and more recently about the feminist struggles. She has  participated deeply in those struggles she writes and thinks about.  Rhythms of the Pachakuti: Indigenous Uprising and State Power in Bolivia   was published by Duke University Press in 2014.

John Holloway is a lawyer, Marxist-oriented sociologist and  philosopher, whose work is closely associated with the Zapatista  movement in Mexico, his home since 1991. He has published many books  including Change the World without Taking Power, Crack Capitalism, We  are the crisis of capital; In, Against and Beyond Capitalism

I talk to Silvia Ribero about the role that industrial food systems  give rise to viruses such as swine flu, Covid19 etc.  What are the  processes involved that lead to this happening? Who are the corporations  involved? How wide spread has this become? What is being done to  challenge these kind of food systems? Why is corporate media so silent  on this upstream problem? What is AMLO doing about it? What are the  constraints his government faces?

Silvia Ribeiro, born in Uruguay and resident in Mexico, is the Latin  American Director of ETC Group (Action Group on Erosion, Technology and  Concentration). For more than two decades, she has studied the impact on  new technologies, specially on biodiversity, rural livelihoods and  indigenous peoples. She is a well-known lecturer, writer and educator.  She writes for the daily La Jornada in Mexico and other Latin American  papers and electronic magazines. The ETC Group works to protect cultural  and biological diversity and human rights through research and  dissemination of information, and it monitors the social and  environmental impacts caused by new technologies and the corporations  involved in their research, development and deployment. Sylvia has been  working on the industrial food systems more or less followed since the  swine flu started in Mexico.

I spoke with Boaventura Monjane on the situation in Mozambique. He  has a degree in journalism (Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo). His  journalistic – and analysis – work was published in Mozambique, South  Africa, Brazil, Spain, France and Portugal. He was the Portuguese editor  of Pambazuka News. He is now pursuing a PhD at the University of  Coimbra (Portugal). His research areas include land, the agrarian  questions and social movements.

I spoke with Lyn Ossome, Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere  Institute of Social Research (MISR), Makerere University, in Uganda. She  received her PhD in Political Studies from Wits University. Her  specializations and taught courses are in the fields of feminist  political economy and feminist political theory, with particular  research interests in land and agrarian studies, gendered labour, queer  feminist histories and the political economy of gendered violence. She  is the author of Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions  to Democracy: States of Violence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Nathan Banda heads the health and safety project of the Zimbabwe  Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU). The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions  is the primary trade union federation in Zimbabwe. Currently Mr Japhet  Moyo is the Sectratary General and Mr Peter Gift Mutasa is the  President.The former General Secretary was Morgan Tsvangirai. Nathan  discusses the challenges of developing a strategy for organising under  conditions of COVID-19

Ruth Nyambura is a feminist political ecologist and activist from  Kenya working on the intersections of gender, economy and ecological  justice. Ruth is a founding member and the convener of the African  Ecofeminists Collective and also works with several regional agrarian  and climate justice movements to track and challenge the privatization  of the agrarian commons. She describes her  work and activism that uses a  feminist political ecology lens to critically engage with the  continent’s and global food systems, challenging neoliberal models of  agrarian transformation and amplifying the revolutionary work of  small-holder farmers of Africa—the majority of whom are women—as well as  rural agrarian movements offering concrete anti-capitalist alternatives  to the ecological, economic and democratic crisis facing the continent.

She discusses Kenya with an eco-feminist analysis on the challenges  women are experiencing and on the lessons to be drawn from this period

Rob Wallace, is author of Big Farms Make Big Flu (Monthly Review  Press, 2016). He is an evolutionary biologist and a visiting scholar at  the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Minnesota. This  discussion will look into how viruses such as the new coronavirus get  generated. We also discuss the extent to which, despite the virus being  lethal, people are dying because of the failure / inadequacies / absence  of health care.

I talk with Andries du Toit: Director: Institute for Poverty,  Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of Western Cape. Food in  the time of the Coronavirus: Why we should be very, very afraid. We talk  about why we should be “very, very afraid”.

Today  (Saturday April 4, 2020) I spoke with Alexssandro Robalo from Cabo Verde, an island country spanning an archipelago of 10  volcanic islands in the central Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of  Mauritania & Senegal. It was colonised by the Portuguese and became a  major source of wealth from The Atlantic slave trade. As a result of  the mass organising of the liberation movement PAIGC, led by Amilcar  Cabral, it achieved independence in 1975, precipitating the downfall of  the fascist regime in Portugal. Cabo Verde split with Guinea Bissau.

I spoke with Elimane Kane, Founder and Chairman of LEGS-Africa  (www.legs-africa.org), a pan African think tank based in Dakar. Elimane  is a Governance and Development analyst and contributor to the  Alternative report on Africa (AROA).

The Alternative Report on Africa is a structuring initiative for new  milestones towards the complete decolonization of our minds, our  economies and regaining our sovereignty. … Its purpose will be to  inform, generate and share knowledge, and to motivate those who want to  transform Africa. They recently issued a report Declaration for a sovereign African response to the Covid-19 pandemic criticizing the WHO and UN for their exaggeration of the scale of the problem faced in Africa.

We as the Women’s League of Abahlali baseMjondolo see the need to  express our pain and fear, and our deep disappointment and anger at the  eThekwini municipality. We need to issue a clear warning that we will  not continue to accept oppression.

Abahlali as a movement teaches respect. Men must respect women.  People of different generations must respect each other. People who are  born in different countries and people who speak different languages at  home must respect each other. We have struggled for years in our  movement to ensure that poor people are treated with respect. In this  crisis caused by the corona virus we have respected the President’s call  to stay indoors even though this is very difficult when there are many  people living in one shack, and even though this is very difficult when  we don’t get paid when we don’t work.

We discuss the impact of the COVID19 epidemic on the Algerian uprisings  with Hamza Hamouchene, a London-based Algerian scholar-activist,  commentator, researcher, and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity  Campaign (ASC), and Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA).

Sally Kane talks about the role of community radio stations in the USA.  Sally Kane is Chief Executive of the US National Federation of Community  Broadcasters. She has twenty years of experience in the field of  community radio. Based on her travels across the USA, she will speak  about the conditions facing people in rural USA

S'bu Zikode, founder and former president of Abahlali base Mjondolo, the shackdwellers movement in South Africa, speaks to Firoze Manji about the challenges of organising amongst shack-dwellere in South Africa in a time when there are attacks by police on settlements of shackdwellers and in the time of lockdown in the face of COVID19

An enlightening discussion with Gacheke Gachi from the Mathare Social  Justice Centre in Nairobi, Kenya, about the situation facing  shack-dwellers in the face of COVID-19.