everyday social democracy

The organisation I help run - Compass Youth held a highly successful workshop and debate at the Progressive London Conference. Over fifty people took part and the results of the 'progressive future' ideas and campaigns will be announced shortly.

Compass Youth Obama Campaign Workshop

Obama won the Democratic nomination and then the American Presidency on the back of inspiring and innovative campaigning. Not only did he offer a refreshingly optimistic and hopeful message, but he harnassed technology in new ways to communicate with and mobilise his supporters.

There is much the progressive left can learn from his campaigning techniques, and with that in mind Compass Youth has organised a campaign workshop with three excellent speakers:

Matthew McGregor worked for internet strategy company Blue State Digital for three months during the Obama campaign, and has now set up Blue State Digital's London office. He also ran Jon Cruddas' deputy leadership campaign, winner of Channel 4's 'Political Campaign of the Year' award. He will talk about what set the Obama campaign apart, and what we can learn from it in the UK.

Tom Miller from Compass Youth has blogged for a number of years, now doing so on several platforms, including his own; newerlabour, and LabourList, the newly launched website which aims to provide a space for Labour-based debate. He will discuss the current use of technology in British politics and where things are heading.

Max Freedman is a Parliamentary researcher and the Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Kingston and Surbiton. He helped canvass in Ohio during the Obama campaign, and will about how the field campaign operated so effectivly.

For more information or to book a place please contact youthchair@compassonline.org.uk or join the facebook event here.

"The crisis changes nothing"

The crisis of global capital and the lefts reaction to globalisation; a Compass Youth think-piece - Adrian Bua-Roberts:

"...if the left reverts to the comfort zone it naturally finds within statist discourse it is surrendering its chance to influence the reformation of the transnational state structures within which capital is continually entrenching its dominance.

It is of crucial importance that progressives and the left realise this. Organized labour, acting within the nation state framework, has proved structurally incapable of combating the increased transnational coordination of capital. Improvements in communication and technology have enabled capital to tap into reserve armies of poverty stricken workers around the world, pitching their governments against each other to become more "competitive" in what amounts to a regulatory race to the bottom. In the West, this has began to dissolve the myriad of rights gained through centuries of class struggles and has created a huge downward pressure of wages. Stagnating wages led to increased debt, feeding the capitalist systems' fetish for consumption, laying much of the groundwork for the present crisis."

Read the full article on the compass website.

Finally a word from our friends:

On the tenth day, we went to Swaziland to visit "Swaziland for Positive Living". SWAPOL was started in 2001 for female AIDS survivors and now also focusing on orphans and vulnerable children.

Parents are dying very young which means they cannot be taught family values. Ophans cannot access food and get out abused as so many of them are out of school. In fact, as disheartening as it sounds, education is only free if they can provide the death certificate of their parents and their own birth certificates. Given those conditions are so hard to meet, school registration isn’t very common. So the Friends of Swaziland Trust provide around £40 per child each year, supported by Unite the Union in the UK.

However, on top of that, if the wife is HIV positive, she won’t get the husband’s inheritance, so instead it goes to his brother. So SWAPOL have established law clinics and mobilised widows and orphans to reclaim their homes.

The challenge is incredible for SWAPOL. There are two nurses with one car looking after 365 chiefdoms. So they negotiated with the government to buy medication, supported by the Stephen Lewis Foundation.

On International Women’s Day, they created awareness on grandmother’s programmes, HIV/AIDS, raped young girls and the judiciary, notably pushing the Deputy Prime Minister to make a commitment about the issue of grandmothers. This reminds me of an organisation called Grandparents Plus and the transformational impact that an ageing population can have.

SWAPOL want to work with other players – to raise awareness to companies who own water to improve access, to trade unions to develop their HIV/AIDs programs and spearhead democratisation in Swaziland.

We met with Stephen, who works for Skills Share Development supporting SCCCO. This is a coalition which brings together trade unions, employers, churches and lawyers at the highest level of civil society. It lobbies government on democracy and human rights and uses high level advocacy through the media (including a BBC documentary), which is especially difficult as cannot attack traditional authorities.

Citizenship in most countries is a difficult subject to engage people beyond knowing the difference between institutions. In Swaziland it’s critical to change the culture. SSD provide civic education on how it feels to be a citizen and not a subject. They train around 40 young people and send them to the rural areas they each come from. They empower people to make up their own minds.

Political parties aren’t recognised. To stand for election, you’re invited to stand by the chief who is appointed (and can be expelled) by the king. However, for the elections coming up, by the time SADC and AU observers come, only the loyalists will be in place.

Civil society is riven by rivalries and NGOs are trying to achieve their own ends. The UNDP won’t support the coalition as could be perceived as anti-government. We could argue that they won’t know what civil society needs until they begin that conversation.

Swaziland is in a dire situation. It is second to Zimbabwe in the most unhappiest countries in the world. There has been six years of drought due to the manipulation of access to water. Women and children do not have the right to self-determination. Government spends more on foreign travel than on education. The government has built the country like a rooster, all it would take is a fox to break in.

Go on http://swazimedia.blogspot.com and http://swazisolidaritynetwork.blogspot.com.

A big question for me is how can civic society coalitions campaign on issues (which by definition would criticise government in oppressed states) and be eligible to get international funding? In practice, we know the answer is they can’t as it’s seen as political, but surely it doesn’t make sense and we should be lobbying those international institutions to confront them with this reality?

We need to apply pressure on the EU for how they fund and understand civil society needs in oppressed states. They have done so in the past, for example in Northern Ireland, asking them firstly what the local needs are, then fund projects to help tackle those needs. We need to get the European Union to apply their “peacebuilding” model used in EU member states, to countries outside, particularly in politically oppressed countries.

Where Zimbabwe goes, Swaziland will follow, if we don’t stop this now.

• Trade, socio-political and environmental justice
• Working class solidarity
• Capacity building

• strategic analysis of the world: what are the balance forces?

• practical projects: solidarity on human rights, health and education – focusing on Burma, Cuba, Nigeria, Palestine, Swaziland, TImor and Zimbabwe

They described how social security reform is currently based on the industrialised version – the assumption of full employment which is why no income support exists. In fact, in South Africa, over 7 million people of working age have no visible forms of income.

Although the government is trying to support to entrepreneurs, it is difficult to identify markets for locally produced goods. Similarly, given the important role women have in the informal economy, when they join government welfare-to-work programmes, when the programme finishes, they are displaced from that informal economy. This brought home to me the question of how can people or groups organise in the informal economy?

With South Africa based on monopolies of social and economic elites, the current macro-economic policy in the country focuses on GDP rather than GIA and therefore reducing state expenditure, resulting in “jobless growth” and a “dual labour market” with increases in shareholder profits as people unemployed (especially young people with 40% out of work).

Indeed, the wider relationship between citizens and the state has dramatically changed. While the shadow of the state threatened the corners of every street in the apartheid years – symbolised through the casspir – nowadays, the shadow of the state is no longer threatening by its presence but in many ways by its absence, especially in the townships.

All of this is happening in the context of growing violence and deteriorating mental health and wellbeing of the population, partly from the lasting effects of the dehumanisation from the apartheid era, but also from the striking inequalities.

There were interesting parallels between the strength of the civil society and the vacuum of provision of public services in townships, but also between that granite strength of the Constitution around socio-economic rights and the anarchic unpredictability in implementing those rights, such as access to water and housing.

As such, there is a feeling by civil society of deep betrayal by the government.

But even civil society is dominated by monopolies, partly through the historic need to centralise to unite against apartheid. They warned that NGOs should be thinking about working themselves out of a job, especially as many of them are from the middle classes and don’t live in the townships. Their understanding of social reality is distanced from where they live themselves.

However, there are exciting groups organising such as the Centre for Policy Development, VITS EPU and the Global Campaign for Education. In terms of policy development, previously this got made at the ANC Congress, but more and more it is about lobbying groups getting their slice of the cake rather than building relationships with individuals and community groups.

They did warn that as long as the ruling class didn’t give a dam, you need a crisis in society for them to react. The commitments are there from the government, but not much has been done.

They argued that as much as they were a campaigning thinktank, it was important they weren’t gatekeepers. They were trying to create spaces for interaction while pushing issues to the top of the agenda, like

• campaigning for the government to use its 3% budget surplus to introduce comprehensive social security

• capping higher wages and introducing a living wage

Sounds familiar?

On the seventh day of the South African trip, We met a member of the NEC of the ANC Youth League. I have always had a lot of respect for their struggles and achievement in defeating apartheid. I was keen on finding out how they involve young members in shaping policy, especially in areas of deprivation. I was also interesting in working out how they work with campaigning groups who don’t belong to parties – “the progressive coalition”.

The ANC Youth League is the largest youth organisation in South Africa and historically have always tried to radicalise the ANC. Historically, its most influential leaders have included Oliver Tambo and Nelson Mandela, who in 1962 developed a youth manifesto called the “Programme of Action” that started the civil disobedience campaign that led to Mandela’s imprisonment. The turning point was the Soweto uprising in 1976, where they fought against the government and many were killed. However, this was a watershed for the population that South Africa had to change.

Since the start of the new democracy, they proposed to have a Youth Month every June. This is personified in the Youth Day which commemorates the Soweto uprising on 16^th June 1976, but more importantly celebrates the role that young people can play in society. During this day and amongst other youth leaders, the President of the ANC Youth makes a televised address – indeed according to the person we met, they “call the shots in this country”…

The key strategies for the ANC Youth League include

• Healthy living campaign: encourage young people to delay having sex and to protect themselves, lobbying institutions to find vaccines as well as targeting alcoholism and drug abuse

• Nation building: building dialogue with other races in South Africa to consolidate a multicultural society

• Higher education: helping people pay their tuition fees and campaigning for higher education to be free

• Political education: work with youth leagues in other countries for better democratisation of the society

• Democratisation: campaign for democratising the judiciary and economy

One of their policies has been to ensure uncompromising gender equity, where 50% of every executive – from NEC to local branch – has to be composed of females. If branches decide otherwise, their elections are nullified. The story behind this is that during the apartheid era, women were discriminated against in a very patriarchal society.

We then proceeded to meet a director of the Department of Constitutional Affairs. Albeit being a senior civil servant, he was dressed in a tshirt and blazer, which really relaxed the atmosphere. He was bombarded with questions about the “skills race” and was true to form. He described how the universities were created to serve the apartheid system before 1994.

When democracy came, a program was created to massify further education. This has narrowed the gap in participation rates between blacks (doubling from 21-43%) and whites (60%), with also 53% women and about 20% of students coming from the wider Southern African region.

Racism is still a determinant and although government don’t want to tamper with high performing universities, a commission has recently been charged with investigating social cohesion in higher education. This is also linked to the gap between teacher and research-based universities. The government encourage differentiation of what services students get from universities, but this has led to universities becoming autonomous, tuition fees varying from £7000 to £20000 rand a year.

Having made those positive inroads into greater equality at HE level, they now want to incentivise greater collaboration with employers, other governments and with SASU. Indeed many students study abroad. For example they are working with Carnegie where students are provided tuition fees on the condition of working in South Africa for the next four years. A good way to tackle the “brain drain”.

However, the state recognises that many private universities – which recruit around 20% of students, mainly people who don’t pass sixth form - don’t make the standard and are particularly keen to improve regulation for foreign universities in setting up local campuses in South Africa. So, they have introduced a skills employment levy, whereby 1% of a company’s profit goes to the levy and a “cola” fund for apprenticeships.

Not being a thorough expert of all things FE and HE, how does this compare with the UK?

Wouldn’t it have been better to employ local employees to paint and use their skills to develop their own trade?

Should the orphans be lodged in an orphanage so isolated from the local community or should they live with the extended family where they can create networks of trust and build social capital – where they would have the opportunity to find a job in the future?

We then visited a Coca Cola factory. Maybe aware that the majority of youth and student leaders sat around their boardroom were more interested in workers’ rights than profit margins, they started off by telling us about freedom of association and collective bargaining. 71% of their associates are union members, they have a recognition agreement with the main union, they have full-time shop stewards and they hold annual wage negotiations. All permanent associates are entitled to transport allowance and study assistance to further their education which is covered by the company. As well as their company wellbeing program, their HIV/AIDS service provision benefits the “associate” plus one partner and up to 3 children under the age of 21.

So what we found is that the staff benefits were fairly good, but this didn’t cover neither agency nor temporary workers…sounds familiar?

Many of you will be aware of the scandal involving Coca Cola in Colombia. The company itself argued that it was working with the International Labour Organisation on child labour and had developed a guide and principles for suppliers to ensure the supply chain was ethical – something Compass has been campaigning on when lobbying on the Companies Act.

How do we engage constructively with corporate social responsibility projects by companies who we want to hold to account? Do we accept their “goodwill”? Do we refuse contact?

Do we need to engage young people more on corporate social responsibility and how they can play a role in this debate?

Anyway, they run programmes right across South Africa which begs me to wonder what image does the Council represent to a community with such a dark history of colonialism?

The workshop they had prepared for us was truly amazing. The theory that underpins this is experience, reflect, theorise, experience, but enough of the words here comes the action. We were asked to think of an animal and introduce ourselves as that...animal. It was like a zoo, we had eagles, ostriches, cameleons, tortoises, hares and elephants – that's my people.

For example, the tortoise felt they weren't as politically aware as everyone else, but they'll get there in the end with the rest. The elephant felt part of a matriarchal society and wanted to get people to new pastures. The zebra was attached to her cultural identity as black and white and was happy to work it out in the background.

We were then encourage to think about what excited us and what got us angry. Slightly perplexed, we did the “dance of equals” - would love to show you how it goes, but we were all too embarassed to capture it on tape.

Something I was thinking about around youth leadership, which may sound controversial, is how we can we mobilise gang leaders – who are trusted by their peers and reference points in the community – to turn on the social change?

Well, the discussion brought out that we should make it comfortable for young people to join in and use their energies, but also acknowledge and invite the gang leaders to the workshops. One of the facilitators related how in Tennessee, they identified gangs and encouraged them to develop their own security companies – creating something for them to do that mobilises their skills and enthusiasm.

“Energies create realities so let's zoom into the positive and ignite the flames of positive change.” was what I head one of the participants say...

At the end of the day, it's about creating the spaces to listen and let people open up and explore their insecurities which may be crystallised through prejudice, such as racism, sexism or ageism.

I met Regis, a Zimbabwean who coordinates TAC's campaigns. Treatment for Action Campaign started around 10 years to mark the 60^th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, but importantly to ensure dignity and human rights are respected, especially for HIV survivors. They use the Constitution to ensure those rights are respected.

They argue that government isn't doing enough to provide access to treatment. Due to how expensive treatment is and how difficult it is to get hold of, it's proving very difficult to make access easier. They want to see generics as part of government tendarers. They lobby government on develop plans on how they are going to put their good words into practice. When this doesn't work, they take them the court as well as the pharmaceuticals, and particularly people like Dr Rath over peddling fake medicines.

What I found most inspiring is how they get people on the streets involved in mass demonstrations. To do this, members go into their communities to organise. One member of the six provinces they work in won a prize for distributing 20000 condoms, but the overall congratulations go to Isaac the “Condom King” who has distributed over 1 million condoms. They also use mobiles to send people info on aids and flashmobs to get as many activists to demonstrate outside police stations against the xenophobic attacks.

They are true pioneers in educating their members on how to understand treatment (including the side-effects, other illnesses that maybe affecting it, fighting the stigma). They train treatment literacy practitioners. This is particularly vital in a country where even the Prime Minister Mbeki claimed he did not know anyone who had died of Aids and the Health Minister believing that beetrot was the cure to it, stronger action is needed.

TAC also work in Botswana, Mozambique and Swaziland as part of the Southern Africa Access to Treatment Coalition.

They have also been involved bringing 200 volunteers to the refugee camps during the xenophobic attacks, especially where no community halls have been opened for them by the Cape Town City Council. For them, this is not out only out of kindness, but a public health issue – everyone is at risk. It's not about cutting taxes, it's how about how you use taxes. It's about people to people solidarity. Today it's Zimbabwe, tomorrow it could be you.

In the evening we met with Dennis Goldberg, who had invited us to a barbecue he had organised with a community group called Courage & Friendship. It was great just meeting people like us who were doing their thing in the community. The conversation did focus on the issue of the moment – the xenophobic attacks.

For Dennis, the experience of feeling rejected is common everywhere, whether in apartheid South Africa, Nazi Germany, the “stop & search” (SUS) in Brixton and in the refugee camps in Cape Town. He really epitomised for me the struggle of being born free and equal.

It was strangely wonderful that the barbeque he organised brought together community organisers from local townships and ourselves from the UK, or to put it more simply, getting people from different backgrounds to be able to share stories, laughs and good food together without feeling the chains of inequality and inferiority.

This type of begign event on a winter's night (our summer!) was what he had.dreamt about all these years ago. It's what kept him going from when he started as a political activist through to the famous Rivonia trial and through the mind crushing years in prison.

Although he argue that South Africa wasn't a rainbow nation...yet, but more a nation of diverse cultures, I felt both awkward and inspired throughout the trip at how everytime you turn round, someone is there to take your rubbish, fill up your cup of coffee, lend you a hand. It's that genuine sense of solidarity and fraternity, put simply neighbourliness that we so miss in this country.

On the third day of my South African trip, I met Joyce from the Rape Crisis Centre, who had arrived at the centre as a volunteer and was now coordinating volunteers. She had joined to develop training for women. Coming from a rural area in East Cape where there was no electricity nor water, she knew more than anyone that equality starts at home.

The Rape Crisis Centre was established in 1976 during apartheid by Anne who is a survivor herself. She started the centre in her own house with other friends. The work built momentum while they were very involved in the struggle for human rights and supported by students of the University of Cape Town. The students started reaching out to others beyond UCT itself, going to other towns to set up local groups. Most of the funding to the Centre came from overseas through trade agreements. Since these are coming to an end, there is a big struggle to resource their amazing work.

Cape Town has moved from being divided from racial demographics during the apartheid to class apartheid in 2008, betraying the view that South Africa is the “land of milk and honey”. The lack of transport and the distance exacerbates the inequalities in access to services such as the centre.

The contributing factors of rape in South Africa are increasingly linked to a vicious streak in multiple violent attacks including rape, but also torture and murder. In the last ten years, from femicide happening one in every six days, it now occurs one in every six hours.

The statistics across the country are striking. While one in nine survivors report rape to the police, only seven in 100 perpetrators are convicted, due to a mixture of justice backlog, intimidation and 60% of survivors withdrawing their reports. The centre do have an educational impact on judges, lawyers and the police to tackle some of the myths but unfortunately they are under-resourced and this has led to an increase in vigilantism. People ask “is there really justice?”

But many people don't want to engage with the concept of rape. It's not the kind of thing you want to talk about around the table. The cultural attitude is to keep it quiet in the family, especially if the perpetrator is the breadwinner. But it is about how safe people feel, and surely that's something people can relate to. How do we change those mindset?

Nowadays, 90% of the crisis centre is staffed by volunteers, paid an hourly rate that they rely on for their own families. Recruit volunteers is a really demanding process. They screen men and women who go through a 12 week intensive programme, where they learn different dynamics - “you need to know about yourself before being able to know about others”. They then go through a 6 month probation period.

Their key principles are motivation, availability and visibility. The centre deeply encourages and supports its volunteers to use their work as a platform for skills development. Indeed, volunteers often start local groups afterwards.

Many survivors who arrive at the centre discover they were HIV positive before they were raped – a double trauma not only for them but for the counsellors too. This is why the centre enables them to meet psychologists to discuss the impact the work is having on them.

Women are often seen as being exclusively responsibility for their own safety. This is not enough, we need collective as well as individual responsibility. Rape also takes power away from you, so you need to take that power back. This is why the centre's projects start from the community to work out those issues. The different issues in different communities create the need for specific projects. In one township, being able to get to the centre was the biggest issue due to bad transport links. In another, being able to go the centre without others noticing it was a rape crisis centre was more important. So, some of the centres have signage so people are aware of the support provided, others don't so the survivors aren't stigmatised.

They facilitate one-to-one sessions with the survivor and do work with their families separately to protect their confidentiality. However, if the survivor is keen to have a joint session, that can be arranged.

Survivors have recently developed a media awareness project called “Speak Out” as for some they find sharing the experiences with the press can be a healing process. There is also a need in parliament to lobby as even the female MPs aren't outspoken enough on gender rights.

One of their most successful campaigns was “Stop the Bus”. As their resources are particularly limited to build new centres, when the bus comes through, communities can identify it clearly and talk to volunteers.

They get involved at high school level. They find that more and more teenagers don't know how to dream. This is compounded by the pressures of teachers taking advantages of them and sex education not being part of the curriculum in every school. If it was taken more seriously by teachers and parents, it would be taken seriously by the kids – that's the “catch 22”. However, its the schools themselves that ask the centre to come in.

However, they have youth clinics and organise “birds and bees” camps where they encourage young people to come together and learn. This is crucial, especially people can only have a legal abortion at 12 weeks (and 24 if raped). Indeed, we saw a lot of back-street abortion clinics on our trip.

How easy is it to change cultural attitudes in close-knit communities through this kind of outreach work?

• “Do you have a bright idea?
• “Do you want further information?”
• “What can you/we do to change the injustice in the world?”