MD: All those accounts contain a share of truth, except of course that no particular individual can be credited as the architect or even the main organiser of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). OWS was made possible by the intersection of four factors. First, the return of revolution as a powerful idea that has circulated across national borders through the global media sphere and the bodies of migrants who bring this imaginary into various national contexts. Second, Adbusters’ adaptation of this ‘ideoscape’ to the North American context. Even if Adbusters didn’t play any organisational role in OWS, the idea of launching a permanent occupation of Wall Street beginning 17 September and the PR campaign associated with it were brilliant. I am thinking not only of the well-known poster image of the ballerina hovering on top of the Wall Street bull sculpture, but of another, less known image of a mass of protesters brandishing shoes in front of the stock exchange building covered with Adbusters’ corporate flag. In this image the symbol of Iraqi resistance against US occupation was adapted to the US context by prefiguring a mass revolt against the corporate occupation of American democracy. The caption complements the force of this image by asking a simple question: ‘Is America Ripe for a Tahir Moment?’ This is culture jamming at its best, a strategy that doesn’t limit itself to debunking power’s narratives but sets a new narrative in motion.

Of course, the aesthetic-political adaptation of the Arab Spring to the US context would never have generated a mobilisation on the ground if activists hadn’t decided to take up the call and organise in New York City. And here the terrain was already fertile. Beginning 14 June, a few dozen New Yorkers had set up a permanent camp around City Hall to oppose city budget cuts to libraries, schools and other social services. Although it was by and large ignored by the media the experience of ‘Bloombergville’, which went on for three weeks, contained all the seeds of OWS. What Bloombergville lacked was a global dimension, or the understanding that any protest in New York has the potential to become a global mobilisation if it is framed as such. Thus, the third factor was the existence of an informal organisational structure on the ground that lent a body to the meme ‘Occupy Wall Street’. It was New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts—the main group behind Bloombergville—that called for the first general assembly at the bull statue on 2 August  to discuss Adbusters’ call.

Finally, the intellectual diaspora from the Mediterranean region also played a significant role. Since May, many Spaniards residing in New York had created DemocraciaRealYa NYC, a Facebook group and a series of meetings to discuss how to import and translate the M-15 movement to New York. Also, 16 Beaver has always been an important convergence point for artists and intellectuals from different countries. The first general assemblies at the bull and in Tompkins Square Park in August saw the participation of a number of activists from Spain, Greece, Palestine, Tunisia and Italy who knew each other, in some cases, through 16 Beaver. The core group of organisers was still relatively small (between 40 and 70), and nothing guaranteed the success of the occupation at that point. It was a mix of factors, including the luck of finding a square open to the public 24/7, and the mobilisation of several student groups from the Columbia University system and other colleges that allowed the occupation to survive the first weekend, when many expected it to be dispersed or suppressed with mass arrests.

JD: The first day of the action, 17 September, didn’t seem a harbinger of the movement it would open up. Watching the live feed, I saw some people doing yoga in the street and a schedule of events that included various discussions and crafts. It seemed like a kind of New Age-y or left alternative hippie be-in, with a bit of an anti-Wall Street political edge. The turnout for the protest was far short of the 20,000 predicted. Yet people stayed, they really occupied, and this perseverance, so remarkable in the US setting of the fast and easy, ruptured the veneer of futility and cynicism that coats many on the US Left.

There wasn’t a lot of mainstream media attention that first week, but reports, images and videos kept building, along with the occupation itself, so that by the end of the first week, several hundred people were sleeping regularly in the park. Even more were attending general assemblies and thousands were joining the marches, rappers and celebrities were stopping by to lend support, and thousands more were watching the live feed at Global Revolution or AnonOps. Mainstream media coverage was helped along by the brutality and aggression of the NYPD, especially police corralling protesters in orange net and pepper spraying them. The 22 September convergence of a march from Occupy Wall Street with the much larger march protesting Georgia’s execution of Troy Davis was also important: this convergence indicated the malleability of the movement, the openness of the OWS signifier and the array of concerns that could be linked together under its name.

The real turning point was the arrest of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge or, to be more precise, getting that extra surge of people to come out in support of the occupation in the first place, which was accomplished by spreading the rumour that Radiohead was going to play in the park. All these events, especially when combined with the support of ever growing numbers of unions, added momentum so that by the end of its third week it was clear the movement had changed the American political terrain. It was at that point that mainstream commentary started to ask: Who are these people? What do they want? What are their demands?

The first question was answered—and continues to be answered—by endless first person accounts of people who ‘lost their jobs but found an occupation’, people who had lost their houses and, with nothing else to lose, headed for Zuccotti Park; as well as stories of recent college graduates with massive debt and no prospects. Particularly powerful in this regard is the moving Tumblr photo archive, ‘We are the 99%’.

The second and third questions remain enormously fraught and controversial, going to the heart of the movement. We should recall the initial announcement from Adbusters: once the occupation of Wall Street is set up, ‘We shall incessantly repeat one demand in a plurality of voices’. Not only was there to be one demand, but Adbusters already had a suggestion for what it should be: ‘democracy not corporatocracy’. Not only has OWS not agreed on or issued a demand, but the very notion of demands is hotly contested, with some saying that we need practical demands, some urging impossible demands, some saying that it’s too early to make demands, some saying that simply being there is itself the demand, and some saying that the plurality of views and the absence of demands is a strength.

MD: Adbusters’ call to issue one demand was doomed to fail in the US situation, which is not comparable to that of Middle Eastern countries, where the single demand is ‘this regime must go’. What puzzles me the most in media accounts of OWS is that they often treat the movement’s inability to agree upon demands and no common political line as a conscious strategic choice. Anyone who is familiar with the internal dynamics of this movement knows this is not the case.

JD: Some commentators write as if the absence of demands was a choice—almost as if there had already been deliberation and consensus in the General Assembly over demands and, after thoughtful reflection, several thousand people concurred that the time was not right to issue a demand. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even as some occupations (Chicago, specifically) have come up with demands, the entire question is bitterly contested in New York. And the way it is being contested not only puts the lie to the illusion that ‘no demands’ is a tactical answer but also puts into sharp relief some of the organisational problems plaguing OWS.

We have open and transparent working groups. The benefit of these groups is that anyone can join. The burden is that anyone can join. So the composition of groups, changes, with relatively high frequency, which means it’s always unclear at any meeting or conversation whether all or most members are participating. The movement from the start has opposed a politics of representation and supported a vision of direct democracy in terms of decisions being made by whoever shows up. The problem is that it becomes very difficult for working groups’ past decisions to have any staying power. People who missed one meeting show up at another and treat previous decisions as violations, almost as usurpations of their democratic right to participate.

The openness of the movement, which many hold as a strength, means that there is no ideological core, not even a relatively loose one. The absence of demands isn’t a strength. And it is ill-informed to say that it is ‘too soon’ for demands—as if political events unfolded according to a proper timetable rather than they themselves pushing and changing the temporalities of action. We have no demands because at this point OWS does not yet name a ‘we’. It names a movement oriented around a tactic, an occupation, motivated by an anger and frustration that has been building for years. The real tactical question is whether the painful, difficult process of generating demands is an important one now, important for further growth of the movement (people know what they are joining) and for building courage, confidence, and solidarity among its members (in part because those who disagree will leave) or whether the message of occupation (we belong, this is our space) and the struggle it requires to maintain these occupations (particularly in the face of increasing political push back and police violence) is enough.

MD: There are several groups who have been trying to open up a political discussion on the general objectives of this movement. These groups have been running into two major obstacles, which concern both the current organisational form of OWS and the difficult work of mediating among the different political souls of OWS. On a first level, it’s obvious that OWS lacks a context to articulate a political discussion in general terms. At this stage, this is not necessarily a bad thing as the movement has so many chapters that its plural composition is undoubtedly a resource. Yet I am convinced that in the long run OWS’s most important political task will be to find and create a common ground. Even if we limit our analysis to the local level, it is clear that the current mode of functioning of a general assembly doesn’t lend itself to the articulation of complex political discussions. General Assemblies deliberate, by and large, on daily management issues, whereas broader questions regarding demands, objectives, alliances, the relationship between tactics and strategies, are confined to myriad working groups, committees, caucuses, listservs and so on. But these groups have no deliberative power and a very limited influence over the General Assembly. The paradox is that groups and individuals whose approach aspires to be general and strategic can exist only insofar as they accept their inability to represent anyone other than themselves.

In this respect the General Assembly seems to function as the perfect incarnation of Jacques Alain Miler’s definition of democracy—‘the master signifier that says that there is no master signifier … that every master signifier has to insert itself wisely among others’. It is argued that because it is a framework that enables anyone to speak and be heard, it can keep functioning as such only insofar as no one is able to bend its neutrality to a specific political agenda. But if this is the case, then OWS is just recreating from below institutional forms and modes of deliberation that are essentially liberal.

In your recent work you have been arguing that the Left’s insistence on democracy arises from the loss of communism as a shared vocabulary and horizon, a way of envisioning a common large-scale solution. In my understanding, your criticism is pointed at the liberal illusion that participation in the social web—and the related emphasis on conversation, collaboration and process—are in and of themselves means of achieving substantial political change. Would you extend this criticism to OWS, or do you think that the embodied and public dimension of this movement marks a discontinuity with the ideology of ‘participationism’? And do you think the current organisational structure of OWS is adequate to undertake the large-scale transformation that the radical components of OWS seem to evoke every time the word ‘revolution’ is mentioned?

JD: My sense is that the loose, horizontal, consensus approach of OWS demonstrates the impotence of participation as an ideal—and the very reason that participation has become such a banal refrain: it stands for activity for its own sake, activity that is primarily that of a single individual doing their individual thing, that is, an individual that in no way comes into contact with others with whom they have to work. So in this respect, the horizontal, consensus basis of OWS repeats the worst aspects of participationism: individuals just ‘participate’, stop by, say something, do their thing, and move on. Unfortunately, this mobility subverts the achievement of duration so central to occupation as a tactic.

This problem of mobile membership combines with the problem of unrepresentability. In the movement ideology of direct democracy no one speaks for another, no one has any more right than anyone else to participate in the deliberations of a group. In practice, this isn’t quite the case. People now speak in terms of their dedication to the movement: ‘I’ve slept in the park for a month’ or ‘I’ve been to every GA meeting’ or (differently) ‘I spoke to a lot of people about this’ or ‘I consulted with four different union groups’. Any of these ways of backing one’s claim is good. The problem comes in the dis-organisational practices that invalidate the claims, again, under the heading of ‘no one can speak for any other’.

MD: You’re right, the tensions that arise among occupiers on the basis of experience-based claims are very hard to manage. Further, the claim to radical unrepresentability is mobilised not only between individuals but also between groups. Recently, the General Assembly introduced a new body called the Spokes Council whose function is to ensure that groups can begin working together. Each working group, caucus and thematic group nominates a spokesperson who is the only one entitled to speak at a Spokes Council meeting. Spokes are mandated to rotate at every meeting and everyone can attend a council as a listener. In my opinion this is an important ‘constitutional reform’ because it recognises for the first time that the General Assembly can’t simultaneously address everybody’s concerns without holding endless sessions that wear everybody out. It also recognises that individuals have too much power within the GA as anyone, including newcomers, can block a proposal that may have been elaborated through collective work for weeks.

JD: So we’ve moved from the success of the occupation movement, its openness and adaptability, the way occupation as a form enables what it enjoins, to some of the problems this very form creates for political organisation. Perhaps it makes sense to end by attending to the physical, spatial, embodied dimensions of occupation. Some of the anarchists connected with the movement (I’m thinking of David Graeber here) present the focus on the logistical challenges of lots of people living together out of doors in urban settings, and the patience required for face-to-face deliberation among thousands of people who may not yet have much in common, as a specifically anarchist contribution. In other words, anarchist attunement to the basic elements of living together, to the ethical practice of revolution, has benefits that a communist focus on strategy not only lacks but tends to foreclose. I have to admit that I have been mightily taken up by the changes that occupation effects on those who occupy, how it reconfigures our ways of being together. One can’t rush, one can’t force. Decisions take immense time and this is crucial to the reformation of subjectivity—it remakes individuals into a collective.

MD: Yes, but at the same time we should not idealise communal forms of living, in the same way as we should not idealise the General Assembly. As OWS encampments grow into villages with their semi-permanent dwellers and structures, the occupiers tend to focus on internal dynamics and increasingly perceive non-residents as outsiders. This creates a gap and a specific division of labour between full-time occupiers and part-time activists that makes it difficult for OWS to think of itself as a movement for the general transformation of society.

And there are different political sensibilities within the movement that are objectively difficult to bridge. For instance, neo-Keynesians and socialists focus on economic demands such as higher taxes on financial rent, national jobs programs with direct government employment, and a single-payer health care system. Liberals and progressives typically demand a tighter regulation of the banking system, a ban on corporate donations to political candidates, and so on. The anarchists, as you say, direct their attention mostly to internal democracy, while the environmentalists focus on sustainable forms of living. But there is little discussion on how to link the struggle for social justice to that for real democracy and a sustainable economy. In particular, it is not clear how self-governing bodies such as the General Assembly or Spokes Council can facilitate these broad discussions. These issues keep being discussed in separate working groups as there is no strategic vision of how to link them.

Some of these demands are objectively in contradiction with one another. For instance, demanding a national jobs program with direct government employment means to demand de facto an expansion of the federal government—something anarchists and libertarians would never accept. The demand for reducing or eliminating the influence of corporate power on politics relies on the notion that that there is such a thing as a democratic capitalism. Likewise, the demand for reducing carbon emissions relies on the fantasy that there is such a thing as sustainable capitalism. In my view, all these demands can be articulated only by acknowledging that the world we live in has limited natural resources and that if we want to use them we also have to learn how to manage them in common.

So at this point, OWS faces some fundamental questions. How do we ensure that the emerging institutions of the movement take up the challenge of managing the resources they use in common? The commons is a finite resource whose mode of disposition and usage is determined by its users. In this respect, the movement is trying to develop communal ways of managing resources such as limited public space, limited time for discussion, food, shelter, donations. At the same time, we have to acknowledge that the vast majority of the resources we rely on in this society have already been privatised. Additionally, how do we expand the existing commons or create new ones when the law is designed to protect private property? And, if the movement learns to reproduce itself as a commons, what are the strategic resources it needs to secure to make this process durable and sustainable? Can, for example, the Food Committee strike a long-term agreement with community supported agriculture  and urban farms? Can the Town Planning Committee come up with ideas to expand the commons in urban and rural settings? Relatedly, how can we develop a communication infrastructure that is managed in common? If we think that education should not be treated as a commodity but as a commons, how do we link the campaign to cancel student debt to the struggle to defend public education? Is it possible to think of a system of education that is free, whose physical infrastructure is managed by the state, but whose cultural production is managed in common by students and faculty?

By Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean is Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York.
She blogs at <http://jdeanicite.typepad.com> and is currently finishing a manuscript entitled
The Communist Horizon (Verso).

Marco Deseriis is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Eugene Lang College, New School for Liberal Arts in
New York City.

In recent years the WSF has been strongly criticised both from without and within. From without, conservatives have lambasted the event as a pointless, rudderless, leaderless talkfest. The criticism fits the outlook of the New Right closely, who champion the populist heroism of the man or woman of deeds not words.

Problems with the WSF highlighted by the Left are more important. Following WSF Nairobi held in 2007, Firoze Manji wrote,

This event had all the features of a trade fair—those with greater wealth had more events in the calendar, larger (and more comfortable) spaces, more propaganda—and therefore a larger voice. Thus the usual gaggle of quasi-donor and international NGOs claimed a greater presence than national organisations—not because what they had to say was more important or more relevant to the theme of the WSF, but because, essentially, they had greater budgets at their command.

I thus went to Dakar with mixed expectations. WSF 2011 was meant to be different, but in part due to decisions made by Senegalese officials, what transpired in Dakar was largely unproductive chaos. There has been some defensiveness from the Left and relative silence from the WSF itself about what took place. As a sympathetic observer of the WSF for several years and participant in WSF 2011, I believe that a robust debate is needed, if the global justice movement is to clearly articulate its message and show us a way forward to the alternatives it seeks.

WSF Dakar 2011 was kicked off on the Sunday of a five-day event with a massive, peaceful street march through Dakar. Around 70,000 activists from over 150 countries marched four kilometres from the headquarters of the Senegalese national broadcaster to the UCAD site. But from early the next day it became apparent that there was a major problem: university holidays had been cancelled and classes were being held across the campus. Why this occurred is not clear. One rumour suggested that Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade had demanded the university withdraw its support for the event, while also withdrawing three-quarters of promised funding, in a fit of pique at the organisers’ refusal to allow him to open proceedings. Alternatively, Immanuel Wallerstein, seeing it in the light of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, suggested that the Senegalese establishment wanted to ‘sabotage’ the WSF while keeping face with the numerous foreign dignitaries in attendance, such as ‘Lula of Brazil, Morales of Bolivia, and numerous African presidents’. This explanation was given some credibility by the President’s public pronouncement that he supported market-based development solutions over those offered by ‘ineffective social movements’. Wallerstein reported the firing of the rector of the university four days before the WSF’s opening and the installation of a new rector, ‘who promptly reversed the decision of the previous rector to suspend classes during the WSF so that meeting rooms [would have been] available’.

Regardless of what exactly happened, the WSF was thrown into utter chaos, for which the organising committee was in no way prepared. The whole episode, and the committee’s response, casts considerable doubt on the WSF’s philosophy of ‘self-organisation’, ‘centrelessness’, and its being a ‘network of networks’ and an ‘assembly of assemblies’. Given the heavy internal criticisms of Nairobi 2007, a worse outcome for Dakar 2011 could not have been imagined. Instead of classrooms and lecture theatres, the event was staged in tents in the open. By Tuesday afternoon a program of sorts was distributed, without tent allocations. By Wednesday morning it seemed every street hawker in West Africa had arrived, putting paid to the ideals of Fair Trade and non-exploitation. A number of mobile sound systems—massive speaker banks strapped to the back of utilities—also turned up, making it almost impossible to hear or be heard. This created an amplification Arms Race of sorts among participant groups. No WSF organisers were on hand to ask that volumes be turned down, with the result that even if one did locate a particular seminar tent, it was possible that discussion would be drowned out by amplified music, or indeed the amplified discussion of a better-resourced group in an adjacent tent.

The Dakar event raises a number of questions. Why was there no contingency plan? Why was there no protocol in place requiring groups that relocated seminars due to noise (to a quieter place on campus or, in the case of the wealthy Northern NGOs, to conference centres and hotel lobbies in the city) to alert others the change? Why were there no childcare facilities? And why was the event held on such a massive campus totally remote from the city centre in such an expensive city? If the idea was to hold the event in the South to facilitate more involvement from African groups, why didn’t someone read the ubiquitous Lonely Planet guidebook, which categorically states that Dakar is definitely not a city for the budget-minded traveller? Why was there no provision for drinking water sanitation, only plastic bottled water? The sight every morning of massive piles of waste gathered from across campus, and overflowing sewage from the very limited public toilets also prompts one to ask: why invite 70,000 people to a place with such a chronic lack of infrastructure?

While I personally had the mixed fortunes of being put up in Le Novotel, adjacent to the French Concession (a gated community in the city centre), from where I could comfortably soirée with French Party Socialistes, European Greens, Jubilee USA and a huge contingent of allegedly taxpayer-funded Brazilian trade union delegates (who incidentally appeared more interested in shopping and clubbing), most delegates were camped in hostel-type

accommodation with intermittent power and water supplies, ten to fifteen kilometres from the city, and often still further from UCAD. Worse, I know of a number of people from African and South-East Asian organisations and more than a few Northerners who were gazumped by those willing to pay higher prices for a bed and so were left without accommodation or internet access at all for the first few days. As South African activist Patrick Bond noted, the ‘debilitating logistical mess’ at Dakar meant, once again, that ‘well-networked middle-class NGO professionals regrouped quickly’ while the lowest income groups, such as the African women who in many cases had travelled hundreds of kilometres by bus, ‘didn’t have cellphones and were most victimized’.

Following Nairobi 2007, and now since Dakar 2011, calls for the WSF to adopt an explicitly political program have increased. Demands have been made that the WSF issue common statements of purpose or manifestos. I don’t feel qualified to argue that what happened at Dakar justifies a radical reorientation of the WSF away from being a focal point for global justice movement networking towards becoming a front of sorts for a global political movement. I do, however, feel that WSF organisers seem to be operating from within some kind of high theoretical plane (the obsession with being a multitude of multitudes, network of networks, an assembly of assemblies) in a way that ignores the fact that untrammelled power fills the vacuum left by such abstract relativism.

Only the strong, rich and lucky could get something out of Dakar; that is, those already well connected into so-called open networks. This said, even relatively well-funded researchers and activists from Australia and other affluent nations were unable to locate seminars, meetings and plenaries. Poignantly, on late Thursday afternoon, I found the activist-author Naomi Klein wandering in the dust, wind and sun, looking forlorn among the mass of half-collapsed tents and garbage that had been the impromptu Climate Justice ‘site’, half-heartedly tapping her mobile in what seemed to be an attempt to reach a node in this network of networks.

In light of Dakar, I think that the WSF should reject its seemingly all-consuming adherence to abstract relativism and, at a minimum, adopt a set of protocols and procedures that participating organisations agree to uphold, including contingency plans. This is not a call for a manifesto (indeed my point may seem mundane given the WSF’s overall success as a focal point for globalising the politics of social justice), but rather a call for agreement on how best to uphold all that is good about open networks and discursive space while at the same time formalising some things with the aim of defending the weakest in the network. For a start, an agreement might include the above-mentioned—and to my mind essential—conditions for discussion: adequate accommodation and transport, childcare, adequate sanitation and water provision, adequate notification of changes to programs and contingency plans that apply equally to all participants.

Dakar also suggests the need for well-informed WSF volunteers placed in strategic locations across the site to help and direct people, and for a well-organised ‘orientation’ site, the latter concerned to not only to orient participants in a physical sense but also socially and historically, and serve as a HQ for organising the translators. Perhaps most importantly, there is a need to question the wisdom of imposing upwards of 70,000 people upon an already stressed and stretched society. Debating these on-the-ground operational issues is necessary if the WSF is to respond to its sympathetic critics, sustaining not only the view that another world is possible but also practically serving as a foundation for long-term debate and action around what that world should look like.

By Andy Scerri

Andy Scerri is a research fellow in the Global Cities Institute, RMIT University. While the trip described in this article was funded by an Australian government research grant, the views expressed are the author’s own and do not relate to the research project itself.

The Australian curriculum, as it is called, has essentially imitated the national collaborative curriculum of the early 1990s, repeating the same process and making the same mistakes. The most significant difference is that it has scrapped outcomes in favour of standards, which is to say that for the better students it will call progress success and for the lesser students it will replace progress with failure. In the 1990s version, students in a given age grade were shown to be on a continuum of progressive outcomes stretching over several age grades. In the present version, students in each age grade will be ranked from A to E with glowing descriptions attached to A grades and sympathetic urgings to E.

This is a major and destructive change, blithely justified by the PM’s favourite educational term, ‘transparency’. Other differences from the 1990s version are either obvious to any authority wanting to bring its curriculum up to date, or in cat-on-the-mat territory. Generally, in structure (overly complex) and in language (often impenetrable), it is like any number of curricula around the states or around the world. However, it does call into question, especially in view of its possible rejection by influential states, the processes and the often sorry consequences of Commonwealth intervention in schooling.

Committees appointed to devise national curricula (I was deputy chair of the previous one) start with what’s called a mapping exercise. The current committee, ACARA, did this, as we did. The exercise is to examine state curricula to see what they have in common and where they differ. Once they have the map, the committee is then faced with deciding what to do. In both the 1990s and now this was not a serious question. It had already been decided that a new curriculum would be written in toto―the mapping exercise was simply grist to that mill. Yet in another committee at another time, the mapping exercise could have been the basis for making different decisions; it could be used to indicate what could be left alone and what might profit from some re-thinking and perhaps intervention. It is, for instance, quite likely that the teaching of literacy is as consistent across the country as it can reasonably be, given the lively state of debate on the subject. Further, the high standing of Australia on international scales of comparison in reading suggests that it is successful. It is extremely unlikely that it needs a dose of the cat on the mat, or indeed any other of the newcomers to the ‘basics’, such as grammar, however desirable that might be for other reasons. Still on the basics, it is also unlikely that a brand new version of the maths syllabus would differ much from what is around already, nationally and internationally, or that it would improve our currently good standing in international maths tests.

Much the same could be said of other areas of the curriculum around the country: they are either very similar already or their differences don’t matter much. What a national effort ought to be directed towards are obvious gaps, misconceptions and unjustifiable inconsistencies. Further, this needs to be done with some political prudence. There is no gain in trampling on understandably territorial state authorities, putting teachers and their organisations offside, or feeding the idiocies of politicians on questions of history and national values. There are fine lines to tread, which are in danger of being obliterated by grandiose revisions of everything.

In the 1990s there seemed to have been a general acceptance that a consistent national curriculum would be a good thing, even though many disliked the actual curriculum presented for approval. The states that turned it down in fact adopted its framework and re-badged much of it as their own. The same position seems to apply also to today’s model, though whether it will stimulate much change in the states seems unlikely, judging from their reactions to drafts. Oddly, the apparent acceptance in principle of the idea blinds our central government to the fact that federations (like Canada, which performs better than we do) usually do not have national curricula. In practice, accepting the principle does not extend to its realisation. It may be an impossible idea. Or is there a problem perhaps in the reasons commonly offered for a full scale re-write?

One persistent reason offered has been the need to provide for mobile families―the armed services are often mentioned. Unfortunately for its promoters, this is a fantasy. No curriculum would remove the differences in textbooks or required clothing among schools and none would compensate for the major differences among selective schools, streamed schools, comprehensive schools, private schools and schools at the bottom of the My School tables.

The other reason commonly offered is that a national curriculum naturally would be of superior quality given the resources that can be put into it and the accumulated wisdom of its writers. The quality argument, however, is dangerous because it can easily backfire, obviously because it will be written by much the same writers as its state counterparts, but more subtly because throughout the years it takes to develop a full-scale curriculum, the implication that existing curricula are of inadequate quality has to be maintained.

Although the 1990s’ committee took it for granted that their curriculum would probably be superior to its state counterparts, the point was not flogged. Consistency was put up as a self-evident good and an outcomes approach was presented as both new and beneficial. In contrast, the drafts of 2010 are more conservative in structure and are being sold as of superior quality. Inevitably the claim to superior quality is often rejected: the English draft is said to be poorly structured, the history draft biased, the maths and science too soft, and so on. These are mainly predictable complaints from predictable sources, usually obscure to the public but good for predictable headlines. Yet worse still are the headline-seeking politicians, the shadow ministers who parody a perfectly sound history draft or the ministers who represent a serious, if somewhat crowded, English draft as a ‘back to basics’ curriculum, basics in this case being ludicrous appeals to the imagined virtues of phonics and grammar. The sensible comments on the limited usefulness of grammar by the chair of the English drafting committee, Peter Freebody, can no more compete with reports of the cat on the mat than the measured defences of the history draft can drown out Coalition appeals to Empire.

The cat on the mat goes along with heaps of garbage about transparency and accountability, represented pointedly by the My School exercise but extended to imply that standards in schools and teaching are not up to scratch, and to assert that shallow statistics, narrow testing and wholesale revision of the curriculum will straighten teachers out. Of course they won’t. The most they’ll do is accelerate choice and selection of schools, and drag down the reputation of teachers. Needless to say, government schools and teachers will suffer most. Independent schools are quarantined from suspicions about their quality, Catholic schools maintain their caring image, and both are probably considered exempt from official curricula anyway if they so choose.

Whatever its faults, the idea of a national curriculum, and especially how to achieve one, deserves serious debate. Much of its own promotion is preventing this, as is the perennial shallowness of the media on the subject of education. How the present attempt ultimately fares will depend not on its merits but on its political usefulness to a variety of interests. If the Coalition wants to turn it against Labor it will be buried (probably to await a resurrection in much the same form). If they see in it a chance to push selection further and weaken government schooling, they’ll accept it for its usefulness in complementing the My School agenda. Even then they will still have to find a way through Australia’s particular federal arrangements―and there the omens are not and never have been good.

By Bill Hannan

Bill Hannan is a Melbourne writer who writes about art and school curriculum. He taught English and languages and was magazine editor for the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association. Later he became Chair of Victoria’s State Board of Education and Assistant Chief General Manager of the Education Department of Victoria.

What is less well-known is that Barack Obama’s mother and grandparents also hailed from the Old West, in fact from the rustic town of Wichita, Kansas, not far from Dodge City, the legendary home of Old West hero Wyatt Earp. While the childhood of President Obama was marked by a rich variety of international experiences, he was also deeply influenced by the traditional culture and values of his mother and grandparents, obviously more so than that of his Kenyan father, whom he hardly knew. The high volume of racist chatter from figures like Donald Trump and the ‘birthers’ has tended to obscure the fact that Barack Obama has been every bit as ‘Western’ and ‘realistic’ in his foreign policy as George W. Bush, who failed to make good on his promise to gun down bin Laden.

In Oklahoma, where I grew up, and where Obama’s mother spent a good part of her childhood, there remains great admiration today for Old West lawmen like Wyatt Earp, who were highly skilled at exterminating vicious killers on the plains of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. In Kevin Costner’s film Wyatt Earp, in which Costner plays the title role, Earp’s father (played by Gene Hackman) tells his son that it is certain he will one day meet up with some bad men who are irredeemably ‘vicious’. ‘You’ll know what to do when the time comes’, he says. Earp’s father, who is an Arkansas lawyer, makes clear that there is only one thing that can be done with such men. The first time that the young Earp meets up with a vicious outlaw, he is unarmed and does not want to fight. In fact, he risks the reputation of a coward. But when he realises he has no choice, Earp hurls a pool ball at the outlaw with lightening speed, knocking the vicious criminal off his feet before he even knows what has happened.

Earp’s lightening strike is quick, clean and effective. Previously, the cowboys, ruffians and soiled doves in the saloon had imagined that Wyatt Earp was inconsequential and possibly a coward. Now, they know the real truth: Earp had not sought trouble―in truth he did everything he could to avoid it―but when trouble came to him he knew exactly what to do. He had been well coached by his father.

I thought of the legend of Wyatt Earp when I first read the details of the killing of bin Laden. It seemed to me a telling allegory of how bin Laden’s death would be greeted in the United States, especially in the ‘red states’, where media attacks on Obama have been the ugliest and most racist. It is no accident that only a week after bin Laden’s brutal killing, Mike Huckabee, one of the Republican front-runners, decided to withdraw his candidacy for US president. An old Arkansas boy himself, Huckabee knew that the game was up. Later, Trump followed suit, unmasked for the empty braggart that he is. Barring some bizarre catastrophe, Obama has sealed his re-election with the killing of bin Laden. Even in the more reactionary ‘red states’, with the exception of a few incorrigible racists, Obama’s actions have proven that he is ‘one of us’. He has earned his spurs.

The killing of bin Laden has also reaffirmed the views of many ‘red state’ Americans that the United States is in no way, shape or form bound by any conventions of international law. (As a matter of fact, it is common to see billboards in states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas that read, ‘Get US out of the UN’.) In the United States and elsewhere, the troubling question of the US violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty was nullified by the fact that bin Laden was caught hiding in plain sight, undoubtedly with official Pakistani assistance. This, coupled with bin Laden’s notorious contempt for international law, made the claim of one of bin Laden’s sons―who stated that the United States had violated international law in killing his father―seem laughably hypocritical, if not fodder for late-night comedians.

The rest of the Wyatt Earp story is more troubling; if my allegory is apt, Obama may be headed for rocky times. As Earp’s career as a lawman progressed, as his reputation became more legendary, Earp himself became increasingly heartless and cruel. The question inevitably arose: did Earp become vicious himself, playing the dangerous game of the vicious killer? Earp also ended up getting a lot of people gunned down in cold blood, including his own closest family members. (I thought of that too when I heard that Obama’s Kenyan grandmother has recently received death threats from al Qaeda.) In the United States, Earp eventually became a symbol of how things used to be, before the Wild West was finally civilised. Earp himself became an anachronism and an ambivalent figure.

Like no other event in recent memory, the killing of bin Laden serves as a reminder that the realm of international politics remains lawless, and that the United States believes it is fully entitled to assume the role of the world’s sheriff, in this case with Obama in the role of Wyatt Earp. Furthermore, the sheriff is authorised to determine the identity of all those who may be legally killed in acts that are not construed as murder, but mere politics. As a lawman, Wyatt Earp was accountable to no one, and neither is President Obama. He follows his predecessor in assuming the role of the unilateral and executive ‘decider’.

During the siege of Fallujah, a US sharp shooter was installed upon a tower that overlooked the town, so he might more easily assassinate all those Fallujah holdouts appearing within the scope of his rifle. In an interview with a journalist in The New York Times, the sharp shooter stated that he hoped to become a high school basketball coach at the end of his two-year stint as an assassin. What was striking about his response was how obviously untroubled he was about the ethics of his job. The US public today also enjoys a completely clean conscience over bin Laden’s death. The decider from the Left has assuaged the conscience of all but the most radical pacifists.

Some in the Middle East, like the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have suggested that the killing of bin Laden now renders the US mission in Afghanistan null and void. ‘There is no further justification for the US presence in Afghanistan’, some have said, ‘since they have finally done what they came to do’. One can be certain that this argument will gain no traction in the United States. The killing of bin Laden has instead fully restored US confidence in its own invincibility and in the imagined necessity to play sheriff in a world where the only law is the law of Samuel Colt.

The dilemma that this killing poses to the Left is that it reveals the dearth of coherent conceptions of sovereignty in most progressive analyses of US foreign policy in the Middle East. In his book Rogues (2002), Jacques Derrida rightly noted this shortcoming in the work of Noam Chomsky. We are a long way from inhabiting a planet where anything like Kant’s dream of ‘perpetual peace’ may be said to prevail. Until that great day comes, the appeal to idealist ethic principles, like those of philosophers like Chomsky, will continue to remain ineffectual in dealing with concrete dilemmas like the killing of bin Laden. ‘Deciders’ like Wyatt Earp, Bush and Obama will continue to make ‘hard’ decisions, not because their decisions are in any way ethically justifiable but because they are deemed politically necessary.

Obama is an imposing figure because he has revealed himself to be a leftist decider, a ‘progressive’ leader who will act decisively in the absence of ethical certainties. What remains to be seen is if Obama’s supporters on the Left, especially the far Left, will continue to recognise him as one of their own. It is probably in the Left’s interests to do so, but not because the killing of bin Laden is in any way ethically justifiable. Any effort to justify this calculated assassination is destined to fail, which doesn’t mean that Obama should not have acted as he did. It does mean, however, that appeals to ethical principles are mere alibis and idle chatter when it comes to the killing of any human being, even an infamous outlaw like Osama bin Laden.

By Christopher Wise

Christopher Wise is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Western Washington University. His most recent book is Chomsky and Deconstruction: The Politics of Unconscious Knowledge (2011).

The truly remarkable political achievement of the Coalition has been to divert attention from the true causes of insecurity to a populist grab-bag of groups, people and issues that make easy targets: Indigenous people, refugees, ‘elites’, unions, political correctness, law and order, the ABC. It should be obvious that none of these groups or issues should play any substantial role in causing insecurity. Only an already insecure society is vulnerable to believing that a few thousand desperate refugees arriving by boat pose any threat to anyone.

The difficulty the Gillard government faces in selling the need for a price on pollution also stems, at least partly, from this widespread insecurity. Some of that is a result of the insecurity that arises from an uncertain, diffuse threat that is difficult for many to understand, and, paradoxically, while potentially catastrophic, is not currently pressing in most people’s lives.

Partly through careful political manipulation by Abbott, the price on carbon has become a lightning rod for broader fears about cost-of-living increases. The reason such fears are so potent is, once again, because of insecurity. One source of this is the recent near-death experience of the Global Financial Crisis: news emanating from Greece, Ireland, the United States reminds us that there but for the grace of God (or China and a whole lot of government spending) go we. In addition, the unsustainable increase in Australian house prices has led to a greater level of household mortgage indebtedness than ever before, and a chronic fear of interest rate rises. The recent levelling off in price growth and home lending surely indicates some rudimentary awareness that the whole Ponzi scheme of house price inflation will come to an end at some stage―a rather frightening thought for all those heavily geared folk who bought into the market at the wrong end.

But a seldom considered, although extremely important, source of insecurity in contemporary Australia is precarious employment. One of the reasons you don’t hear much about this is because the Coalition and its backers in big business and the corporate media don’t want you to hear about it: it is in their interests to prolong the situation whereby 40 per cent of Australian workers do not have the protection of the National Employment Standards. Consider these facts:

- Over 2.1 million Australian workers do not have access to paid leave entitlements because they are casual or engaged as independent contractors (often in sham contracting arrangements).

-  More than one million workers have been employed casually in their current job for more than five years.

- A third of a million workers are employed on fixed term contracts.

- Over one million workers are independent contractors, and 43 per cent of them have no authority over the work they do―that is, they are employed in sham contracting arrangements.

- Casualisation has contaminated all sectors of the economy: 60 per cent of the waterfront workforce is casual; there are 67,000 casuals teaching in Australian universities, and more than 50 per cent of teaching is done by them.

Precarious work has grown rapidly in Australia in the last twenty years, and much quicker than almost any other comparable country. Employers―big and small―have, with the encouragement and assistance of governments of both stripes, shifted economic risk from businesses and government to individual workers to an extent comparable only with the 19th century. Precarious work means lack of control over hours, uncertainty about the source or size of the next pay cheque, lack of holidays, lack of sick and family leave, no long service leave, no career progression, no training, difficulty in getting bank loans, and worries about household budgets.

It is no coincidence that the growth in precarious work has paralleled the decline in union membership―both as cause and symptom. Unions are crucial to the maintenance of good jobs, with decent terms and conditions; and unions find it difficult to recruit and maintain members among precariously employed workers (the undermining of unions is, of course, one of the key motivations behind casualisation: casuals who join unions or stand up for themselves simply lose their shifts).

Of course the argument is frequently made that a ‘flexible labour market’ has enabled Australia to have a low unemployment rate. There is little evidence of this, especially when one takes into account the level of under-employment, and especially when one takes a long-term view: the Australian unemployment level was about a third of its current rate during the 1960s when there were far fewer casual, part-time and contract employees. Do the proponents of the flexible labour market really mean that there are only two choices: tenuous jobs with no leave entitlements or unemployment? Is that the best we can do in 21st-century Australia?

If the Gillard government wants to get back on the front foot and reclaim its natural support base, it would do well to start talking about the scandal of precarious work, and its connection with insecurity. It would enable the government to focus attention on the real causes of insecurity and away from the diversions that the Coalition has exploited so successfully―refugees and cost-of-living increases in particular.

But that would require Labor to come to terms with its own complicity in fostering the world of precarious work through the abandonment of employees to ruthless market forces in the determination of their pay and conditions. It would require Labor to acknowledge the victims as well as the successes of its own grand restructuring efforts of the 1980s―the unskilled, the former industrial working class, regional cities. It is from these wellsprings that climate change denialism issues, from people who remember only too well what happened to them the last time a government decided the Australian economy needed to be restructured for the benefit of the future.

Doing something about the scourge of precarious work would enable the Labor government to reclaim a social justice vision, a vision much more likely to grab voters’ attention than its current mantra of returning the budget to surplus―hardly the light on the hill. Since insecurity is the oxygen of the Coalition―those who talk most about security (law and order, border protection) have the most interest in undermining it―restoring a sense of security through improved employment standards for all workers would enable the government to conduct real, necessary reforms, like dealing with climate change, without the distraction of a Coalition preying on people’s insecurity.

It would also sheet home the blame for precarious employment―and insecurity more generally―to where it really belongs: big business and its voices in parliament.

By Colin Long

Colin Long is the Victorian Secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union.

The High Court’s decision called into question whether Australia’s obligations to asylum seekers could be guaranteed in any of the offshore locations that have formed part of its Pacific Solution over the last decade, or any of those proposed for the future. Despite calls from Labor’s Left to draw a line in the sand on the policy of offshore processing, the government is attempting to amend the Migration Act in order to circumvent the High Court decision. The Opposition has stated its intention to refuse to pass the amendments, unless they include accession to the Refugee Convention as the baseline for any potential offshore processing countries. This would remove Malaysia from the list of potential partners, and make Nauru a viable option—an outcome that would serve the political interests of the Opposition well.

Regardless of the outcome, the broader point to be noted here is that both Labor and the Opposition have rejected the spirit of the High Court’s finding—that is, that the protection standards owed to asylum seekers under the Refugee Convention are not best served by the offshore strategy, regardless of whether states like Nauru are signed up to the Convention or not. A signature does not count for much if the legal, administrative and political wherewithal does not exist to make protection standards realisable in practice. It is this practical element of refugee protection that both sides of politics seem willing to disregard in the version of Migration Act amendments each is suggesting it would pass.

Even if the government could muster the numbers to amend the Migration Act and even if the offshore strategy withstood further legal challenge, would it do what the government wants it to do? Would a revived Malaysia Solution or a similar ‘solution’ elsewhere remove the product people smugglers are able to sell? The product being sold, of course, is the prospect of security. Does the offshore strategy take that prospect out of the hands of smugglers?

The offshore strategy may stop the boats for a period of time if asylum seekers and smugglers alike find that there is little to be gained from a journey across the sea. But the ‘little’ to be gained is crucial. Ultimately, the boats come because conditions in countries of origin, and prospects in transit countries, are riskier and less hopeful than the slim chance of security that a smuggled journey to Australia entails. Unless and until those conditions and prospects change, asylum seekers will continue to risk their lives moving to safer ground.

There is another way. The alternative starts by acknowledging that many people are forced to cross borders in order to escape persecution, that it is frequently impossible to obtain the relevant documents in advance, and that the legality of seeking asylum under those conditions is upheld by principles of international law. The alternative comes, in turn, from inter-governmental collaboration at regional and global levels that starts from the basis of protection for such people, rather than the basis of border defences against them.

The architecture for such an approach already exists. The Bali Process is the shorthand term for an Asia-Pacific consultative process tasked with finding co-ordinated regional responses to people smuggling, trafficking in persons and related transnational crime. Established in 2002, the Bali Process was undoubtedly framed from the outset around border defence against the irregular movement of people. More recently, however, meetings of representatives from thirty-eight source, transit and destination states have provided forums for the promotion of a Regional Cooperation Framework (RCF) around refugee protection, proposed by the UN’s refugee agency, the UNHCR. Tabled in late 2010, the UNHCR’s discussion paper on an RCF was endorsed at the most recent Ministerial Conference of the Bali Process in March of this year. An RCF has also been endorsed by regional civil society networks, concerned with refugee rights, as a step in the right direction.

The UNHCR proposes the harmonisation of protection standards in the Asia-Pacific region. This means more than encouraging accession to the Refugee Convention for countries in the region, though this is an important dimension. An RCF would require that Convention principles are realisable in practice. Across the region, this would mean addressing disparities in treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and establishing standard access to work rights, healthcare and education. Importantly, those standards would be legally enforceable.

Clearly, countries like Malaysia have a long way to go in this regard. But standardisation would also imply, for instance, that Australia’s mandatory detention policy, for which there is no international equivalent, is out of step with international best practice. Recent research has shown that alternatives to immigration detention generate better outcomes. Community-based options are workable, cost-efficient, and improve compliance with the outcomes of status determination decisions, regardless of whether those decisions are in asylum seekers’ favour or not.

An RCF would also involve the collaborative resourcing of an effective and timely status determination procedure as well as case management of applicants for refugee status. This may well involve a regional processing centre, but one that links to realistic and sustainable options for resettlement and integration in the region. The process would shift the burden for refugee protection away from countries such as Thailand and Malaysia—which currently host tens of thousands of Burmese refugees—and redistribute costs, administration and resettlement options more fairly and according to capacity. While at present Australia is one of the few countries in the region adequately resourced to play a major role in processing and resettlement, the longer term goal would be to have processing and resettlement available, resourced and implementable region-wide.

If asylum seekers felt that fair treatment and a fair hearing of their claims to protection were available to them, wherever they were in the region, and that at the end of it all there were genuine prospects either for resettlement in a variety of countries or a dignified return to their country of origin, then they would be much less inclined to hire a smuggler and get on a boat to Australia or anywhere else. Only then would the potential to lose one’s life when a boat capsizes at sea be averted. Both sides of politics continue to insist that such loss of life is one of their chief concerns.

The comprehensive framework proposed by the UNHCR is a far cry from the bilateral arrangements that Australia has negotiated with various Pacific and Asian countries, including Malaysia and Nauru, over the last decade. We should be wary of proposals such as a revived Nauru or Malaysian solution, not only on account of their failure to uphold human rights standards, but also because they fail the test of a genuinely regional approach. These proposals in fact take little account of regional burden-sharing and do not offer sustainable ways forward on enduring questions of forced migration and protection of human rights.

In terms of a genuinely regional approach, one aspect of the Malaysia Solution was laudable. The fact that Australia promised to accept 4000 refugees for resettlement from Malaysia, in addition to its existing humanitarian quota, signalled that Australia was willing to increase its share of responsibility for long-term refugee protection in the region. In the fall-out from the High Court decision, however, the government raised the prospect of subtracting the 4000 from the existing quota. This sends quite a different message to its regional and potential ‘protection’ partners—that when push comes to shove, Australia’s commitment to burden-sharing comes second to political expediency. This makes it all the more difficult to argue the case that countries in the region should act any differently, which sets us back, in turn, from establishing solid baselines for an RCF such as mandatory accession to the Refugee Convention.

Civil society across the region is willing to work with governments to develop the legal, administrative, and social infrastructure necessary for comprehensive protection and settlement options. When will an Australian government show leadership on this issue and break the cycle of poll-driven, short-term policy that compromises on human rights? When will it credit the Australian public with the intelligence and compassion to respond to an enlightened, long-term and sustainable response to the ongoing reality of forced migration, provided that response is explained without fear and hyperbole?

For steps in the right direction see:

UNHCR, ‘Regional Cooperative Approach to Address Refugees, Asylum-Seekers and Irregular Movement’, discussion paper for the Bali Process Ad Hoc Group Workshop, Manila, 22–23 November 2010, <www.baliprocess.net>.

International Detention Coalition, There Are Alternatives: A Handbook for Preventing Unnecessary Immigration Detention’ <www.idcoalition.org/cap>.

J. Menadue, A. Keski-Nummi and K. Gauthier, A New Approach: Breaking the Stalemate on Refugees and Asylum Seekers, Centre for Policy Development, August 2011, <www.cpd.org.au>.

Author: Anne McNevin

Bio: Anne McNevin is a lecturer in International Studies at RMIT University and associate editor of the journal Citizenship Studies. She is author of Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political (Columbia University Press, 2011).

 

The generalist nature of the M-15 manifesto has enabled it to gain widespread support, with a poll in El Pais newspaper finding that 79 per cent of people support its demands. The rapid growth of the movement is in part related to the economic and political crisis affecting much of Europe. It is a response not only to harsh austerity programs, but also the feeling that something has gone wrong with the democratic system. Elected officials no longer seem to represent the people they serve, and social and economic policies are determined by the market, rather than by the community.

In Spain the situation is dire. Unemployment stands at 21.3 per cent, political corruption is rife, basic services are being cut, and the political system is dominated by two very similar major parties. In this context, the success of the 15 May demonstrations prompted a small group of 100 protesters to spontaneously start an occupation of la Plaza del Sol, Madrid’s main square. In the early hours of the morning they were violently evicted by police, with several arrests and injuries, but the police brutality only strengthened the protesters’ resolve, and a call to retake the square spread rapidly across the internet. The next day thousands of protesters returned and the la Plaza de Sol was recaptured. I arrived late that night when the camp was still under construction, with tarps, megaphones, chairs and beds arriving out of nowhere to form an anarchic structure in the centre of the city.

Over the next week a radical transformation took place; the space became a kind of liberated zone and its own world. Every day more people joined the occupation and the camp continued to grow, with between five and fifty thousand people occupying the square at any one times. The mainstream media began referring to it as ‘the republic of Sol’ and the ‘Spanish Revolution’. Kitchens were set up to distribute free food, the main billboard was covered in the words ‘Europe Rise Up!’, and ‘peoples’ assemblies’ were held regularly to decide on the actions to be taken. The government directed the police not to intervene, due to the backlash from the previous eviction, and the protests expanded to nearby plazas. In other squares there were political theatre workshops running or people blockading banks. Within a few days, similar occupations sprang up in over twenty Spanish cities.

The timing of the protests was a key factor. One week before regional elections, the movement called for changes to electoral laws that would, in theory, end the dominance of the two major parties. The slogans were ‘No nos representa’ (‘You don’t represent us’), ‘La luchaesta en la calle’ (‘The struggle is in street’) and ‘Democracia real ya’ (‘Real democracy now’). The protest movement, which developed as a direct challenge to the electoral campaign, had its desired effect. An Age headline on 22May hit the nail on the head: ‘Huge Spanish Protests Overshadow Election’.

From the beginning, the M-15 movement practised direct democracy. People’s assemblies became the main forum for making decisions, organising actions and formulating demands. Assemblies were crucial to giving shape to a movement that started with only a very general manifesto and no formal political organisation. Demands were passionately debated and agreed upon in the streets. The Madrid occupation had some twenty-two commissions, which met almost constantly. One night I stumbled across the Commission for the Economy—two hundred people had gathered at 3 am to debate the best way to nationalise the banking system. All commissions reported to the General Assembly, the highest decision-making body and platform for discussing the most important issues. The assemblies and commissions used a mix of consensus and majority rules voting, and had a very horizontal structure, with no leaders and rotating spokespeople.

After four days the Madrid occupation was declared illegal and ordered to disband. A general assembly of thousands, however, decided unanimously to ignore the ban. Every day the camp became bigger and more complex. A library and childcare centre were set up, solar panels were installed and ‘respect officers’ were trained to provide conflict resolution. The degree of organisation and infrastructure needed to run the occupation was incredible—by this stage it had become the size of a small town. The movement was also faced with the practical reality of up to thirty thousand people gathered together in a public space. How could they all be fed? Where would they go to the toilet? What was the best way to resolve problems in a community with no police? The occupation became the functioning example of the alternative world the protesters wanted to create and, largely, it worked. Everything was free and it was proudly pronounced that money had been abolished in ‘the republic of Sol’.

On 27 May the occupation in Barcelona was violently evicted by riot police and fifteen people were injured. The level of police brutality is exemplified in pictures taken of a riot officer breaking a protester’s wheelchair. This potent image, along with the twitter hash tag #Bcnsinmiedo (Barcelona without fear), spread rapidly through the internet. Within hours, solidarity protests were planned in every city across the country under the banner ‘We are all Barcelona’. I went to a demonstration organised in the small university city of Salamanca, where more than 500 people came to show their solidarity. In Barcelona 35,000 people returned that night to retake the main square and begin to rebuild the occupation. These events showed not only the strength of the movement, but also the importance of the internet in organising it. From the beginning Facebook and Twitter were crucial organising tools; by 10 June the Real Democracy Now Facebook group had 400,000 members.

On 15 June the protesters blockaded the regional Parliament, which was set to pass measures to drastically cut spending to social services. The demonstration started in the early hours of the morning. Several thousand people created a human chain and barricades were constructed, blocking all entrances to the building. After hours of tense stand-offs the riot police dispersed protesters by force. Protesters ominously chanted the Death March from Star Wars as politicians, surrounded by riot police, entered the parliament. Sporadic outbreaks of violence erupted as protesters started to create moving barricades. These were so effective that twenty-five politicians had to be transported by helicopter, including the President of the Chamber, Artur Mas.

Although the large-scale occupations of main squares continued throughout Spain for a month, after about two weeks the initial energy and spirit waned slightly. The media stopped reporting on the protests and the movement began to discuss the need to change tactics and continue to expand. The first idea was to strengthen the movement at the grassroots level through the establishment of ‘assemblies of the suburbs’. In Madrid more than forty separate local assemblies have been set up, holding weekly meetings in public spaces to deal with local problems. The next strategy is to try and achieve small yet concrete changes. This has manifested in anti-eviction and immigrant support actions. At the time of writing, the movement is working with the Platform of People Affected by Mortgages and has already stopped banks from repossessing forty-seven houses by creating human chains at evictions. The third tactic is continued mobilisation. On 19 June, the protesters took to the streets again in an international day of action to protest against the ‘Euro pact’—neo-liberal austerity measures being imposed all over Europe. El Pais reported that more than 200,000 people participated in protests across the country; 100,000 people marched in Barcelona alone. Significantly, these rallies coincided with the end of many of the large-scale occupations and showed that the movement was not diminishing, but rather changing.

The M-15 movement has had a profound impact on the political situation in Spain. Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets and created a new model of democratic participation. It is a beacon of resistance to the harsh austerity measures that are stripping away people’s rights across Europe. The ruling elite has started to pay attention—on 21 June the Spanish parliament unanimously passed a motion to undertake a study of the protesters’ demands. I do not know whether this movement will be strong enough to achieve the radical changes it seeks, but what is certain is that a new and powerful social force has been born here in Spain and it will continue. As I write this, 20,000 people have again retaken the main square in Madrid and are holding an alternative state of the nation debate.

For the M-15 Movement’s manifesto, see <www.european-citizens-network.eu/civil-en/spip.php?article42> and for regular updates on the M-15 and other social movements in Europe see <www.europeanrevolution.net>.

So who are the international community? The term itself leads us to believe that it is the community of countries that make up our world. But is this really so? The UN Security Council, where the Libya resolution passed by a slim margin, only represents fifteen out of the 192 member states of the UN. India, China, Brazil and Russia did not support the Libyan intervention. India expressed regret at the allied force’s air strikes on Libyan targets. China affirmed its support for Libya’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the intervention, calling it a ‘crusade’. And we never even heard how a rally in Moscow demanded President Obama relinquish his Nobel Peace Prize due to the war in Libya—a sentiment echoed by Bolivian President Evo Morales; or how protestors in Philippines burned a US flag over the issue; or even how the African Union had spoken out against the bombardment.

Indeed the vast majority of the countries of the world, representing the vast majority of the peoples of the world, were not in favour of enforcing the ‘no fly zone’. So they could not have been ‘getting their act together’, so to speak. The international community we keep hearing about must then just mean the United States, United Kingdom, France and the Arab League (of dictators). And even within the Arab League, support came only from those most sycophantic despots who owe their rule over their own populations to US dominance in the region.

How can this be considered an international community then, if it excludes countries consisting of around 90 per cent of the world’s population?

Are we justified in excluding these countries because some, like China, are not democracies and therefore the views of their governments do not represent the views of their people? Not really. Even in democratic countries, governments’ decisions on foreign policy are often out of line with the wishes of their people. A case-in-point being the decision by the US, UK and Australian governments to invade Iraq despite the majority of their populations being opposed. In fact, around 50 per cent of the US population is thought to be against the current Libyan intervention, despite 95 per cent of the US media seemingly in support of it. Even if we accept the democracy argument, it does not justify the exclusion of countries like India, Brazil and many others in the developing world that have strong democratic credentials.

It would seem that the only criteria for being considered part of this exclusive club is that one must be a Western nation—or at the very least agree with Western nations on the issue at hand.

The Libyan crisis, however, has seen the corrupting of the term rise to new heights. The Western media morphs the international community into different groupings at different times, depending on the argument being put forth. When it is seen to be taking action or making big decisions, the international community consists of Western nations who have some kind of unstated moral authority.

Yet when it is instructed to act, the international community becomes a more amorphous mass whose membership is unclear. It is this permutation of the international community that is lectured on how it must not ‘fail’ to act on Libya. But in whose view is it a failure? Nations decide what action they take based on their own interests, assessments and beliefs. The mere fact that a nation does not do what certain others want it to do does not mean that it ‘fails’. To suggest so reveals an omnipresent ‘Western gaze’ whereby all international issues are assumed from the perspective of a handful of countries.

One media commentator stated early on in the Libya crisis that the United States may be pressured to act in support of the rebels by the international community. Here the international community has been morphed into an even more exclusive club, this time consisting of only those who support the views of the particular media outlet making the comments—even the US government has not made the grade.

Such exclusive, limiting uses of the term international community, adapted to suit the purposes of the speaker, are dangerous and misleading. Western publics are presented with a false picture of the international world—one based in the twentieth century where the great decisions of war and peace are solely in the hands of a few Eurocentric powers. The present reality is much different. The sleeping giants of Asia are awakening and, for the first time in 500 years, they’re starting to throw their weight around. China and India have independent foreign policies and hold their own views on many global issues. Western publics need to be aware of this. Discussion of any ‘international community’ that excludes them is dangerous fiction. In the real world of international relations, Western governments are already realising this and attempting to adapt to the new realities. The Western media, however, has a lot of catching up to do.

Chaz Dias has worked in international organisations for a number of years and is currently undertaking a doctorate.

The most frightening thing for the scientists and engineers was not knowing the cause of the trouble. There were guesses at the meetings as to how long it would take to find out what had gone wrong inside the bowels of the reactor. Some figured it would take a year, if all went well …

The article suggests that after a serious malfunction the risk of such a dangerous situation is in fact intrinsic to a wide variety of reactor types. The danger is evident: not knowing exactly what has gone wrong, and being unable to find out, the responsible staff cannot know what is likely to happen next, and what protective measures are called for. And a disabled nuclear reactor cannot be stripped down and analysed like a car engine.

Mr Broinowski clearly rejects any such pattern of deficient knowledge as sketched above. He points rather to the ‘authoritative account’ by Dr Mathias Braun, ‘released on the web by the French nuclear conglomerate AREVA (of all companies)’. (‘Of all companies’? Perhaps Mr Broinowski missed the addresses given for Dr Braun on page 2: Matthias Braun PEPA4-G, AREVA–NP GmbH, and Matthias.Braun@AREVA.com.) He counterposes the AREVA account (dated 27 March) to my assertion that ‘no clear description’ of the Fukushima events yet existed. But almost immediately he undermines this usage: ‘And we now have the news that there has been a full-scale melt-down in at least one of the reactor cores’. His ‘now’ is 13 May—over two months after the crisis started! How adequate to the engineers’ needs was that early ‘authoritative account’ when they did not know all this time that ‘a full-scale melt-down’ had occurred?

And of course this was only one trickle in a steady stream of ‘news’ announcements that went on for months and may not have stopped yet. It was June—nearly three months after the earthquake—before the most ominous news of all arrived: ‘fuel rods in reactors No 1, 2 and 3 had probably not only melted, but also breached their inner containment vessels and accumulated in the outer steel containment vessels’.

Mathias Braun cannot be justly blamed for his early report. Rather, direct any blame at the fantastic notion that the course of a serious nuclear accident, with the reactor’s internal state known poorly or not at all, is routine and predictable from the outset; it isn’t. Breakdowns have often included a ‘side effect’: a no-go zone, in which the strength of radiation is too lethal to permit human life.  It was only in Chernobyl that people went about their jobs despite the radiation intensity. Some thirty of them died, mostly from radiation burns and/or acute radiation sickness.

This might make a nuclear reactor unique among technical devices: when it breaks down seriously, it can forbid on pain of death any close study (at least if non-robotic) that would detect what exactly is the device’s internal state, and what to expect next. Surely this repellent quality deserves wider recognition. It is hardly surprising that AREVA’s account does not publicise this ‘unapproachability’—it is in the business of selling, both rhetorically and literally, the nuclear production of electricity; the property under discussion is not a particularly good selling point, to put it mildly. But why is it featured so little by nuclear opponents?

Mr Broinowski’s letter might offer an answer. It does not show anywhere that he recognises the phenomenon of the no-go zone, or the way it seriously constrains access to information just when it is most needed. Thus the answer might be that people simply don’t know about it.

I think my views on nuclear power are fairly evident in my article—which ends for example with a reminder of that ‘packed energy which, given the chance, can metamorphose into flame and (far more damaging) into radioactive particles to send around the world’—and in the final words, ‘It is extraordinary that such a monstrous companion could be wished on us, as a rational way to get a kettle of water boiled.’

Yet Mr Broinowski found it a ‘bemused’ article with a ‘lack of conviction’. I don’t know why.

Alan Roberts is a former advisory member of the Nuclear Safety Committee of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency.

In the midst of the News of the World scandal and the long-overdue recognition that there is a problem with the way the media interacts with politics and democracy, Windschuttle’s article really shows those who still doubted the bias of Australia’s media. Interestingly, this is something Windschuttle and I agree on. Needless to say, our shared understanding stops there. The Quadrant editor feels it of utmost importance to denounce the scavenging tactics of the ‘left-wing commentariat’ who ‘exploit’ ‘the terrible news of the mass murder in Norway’ ‘for political capital’. This vocabulary, used in the sub-heading of the article, should suffice to undermine the whole piece, was it not published by Windschuttle in The Australian. What can we learn from someone as influential as Windschuttle, an ABC board member, and his unashamed populist attacks?

First, that the most outrageous claims can be made in the Australian media. Windschuttle states that ‘it took just two days’ for the Left to viciously attack the Right, defender of ‘the concepts of free speech, the rule of law, equality of women and freedom of religion’. Just two days? That is how long it took for the Left to regroup. In that case, Windschuttle should not worry too much. After all, how long did it take for so many in politics and the media to assume the attacks were part of an Islamist terrorist plot? When it appeared Breivik was part of the Christian Right, how long did it take for the conservative media to render this attack the deeds of a madman rather than a political or religious fanatic, like Muslim suicide bombers for example? Finally, how many European newspapers have published the comments of the extreme right denouncing the attacks and demanding that no link be made between their organisations and the ‘mad man’, sometimes even threatening to sue? Come on, Keith, let’s not jump on our high horses; your firepower is a lot more potent than that of the Left and it would be silly to believe otherwise.

Yet Windschuttle finds it fitting to turn the Left into a caricature, even at a time when the Right has been made to face its extreme. Note how the word ‘commentariat’ takes us back to the Soviet regime. Are we to think that writers like Aron Paul or Guy Rundle want the gulags to return? Were I to write an article on a couple of conservative writers expressing their concern about the rise of Islam in the world and tagged them part of the ‘Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda’, I doubt it would be long before I was sued for defamation. Yet Paul and Rundle ‘exploit’ the news and the murder of many innocent Norwegians. Something conservative commentators would never do; after all, for Windschuttle, ‘the quality that stands out in the work of most conservative writers today is restraint’. For someone who ‘reads Bolt regularly’, it seems grotesque at best to make such claims. Since Windschuttle uses his own self to push his point, allow me to do likewise. I was once exposed by Andrew Bolt—whose specialism in French politics I had somehow ignored—on ‘the most-read political blog in Australia’, and needless to say his comments on French youth (as well as myself incidentally) expressed very little restraint.

Having dedicated the past four years to studying the extreme right and its impact on mainstream politics, it is clear that the ‘vocabulary wars’ which began in the 1980s in most of the western world have intensified the growing sense of insecurity and played a part in creating the atmosphere which led to the attacks on Norway. However, it is wrong to jump to unwarranted conclusions such as those of both Paul and Windschuttle. I do not believe for example that Blainey was for the return of the White Australia Policy. However, he clearly played, perhaps unwillingly at first, a part in legitimising a discourse which later led to the growth of ethno-exclusivism in our countries and to the growing irrational fear of the ‘Other’. Blainey, like Bolt, Windschuttle and others, is of course not responsible for the attacks on Norwegian soil. These were the act of an individual who pushed his beliefs to the extreme. However, while such acts are at present uncommon, the beliefs held by Anders Behring Breivik were allowed to gain prominence over the past three decades, and to be accepted as a normal part of our daily political life. The stigmatisation of the entire Muslim population after the 9/11 attacks has been a useful decoy in a world which had lost its nemesis after the fall of the USSR. The creation of the Muslim ‘other’ offered a scapegoat to those who increasingly feared the system was not delivering them with what it had promised.

It is in this context that a profound reflection on the role of the media is not only overdue, but vital for the wellbeing of our democracy. In times of crisis it has always proved easy to rally people with the use of exclusion and racist or neo-racist trickery. As our world is currently facing a multitude of crises, be they real or fantasised, it is indeed vital that our media provides us with news which will allow us to make an educated decision about our future. As it stands, the future is not so bright.

Author: Aurélien Mondon teaches politics and history at the University of Melbourne and Victoria University. He is the co-founder of the Melbourne Free University. His research focuses on populism and racism and their impact on democracy, and some of his work can be found on <www.briefandfalseadvertising.net>.