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The least of these…

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Massed graves.

A State in which it is estimated that “8,000  non-combatants had vanished from army custody in a state the size of Ireland – four times more than disappeared under Pinochet in Chile.”

A place where hundreds of soldiers accused of rape, murder, torture- and not one single case has made it to court.

A state in which Human Rights Watch suggest torture is an endemic, systematic tool of government. Methods included branding, electric shocks, simulated drowning, striping flesh with razor blades and piping petrol into anuses.

A place where citizens are dealt with using a ‘Public Safety Act’, under which they can be jailed, preventively, for two years, if deemed likely to commit subversive acts in the future, with an estimated 20,000 detained, according to Human Rights Watch.

Cities and towns where children are regularly shot in the streets during public demonstrations.

A place where in 2008 a lawyer to make a terrible discovery. While surveying disappearance cases in villages he was shown a hitherto unknown network of unmarked and mass graves: muddy pits and mossy mounds, pock-marking pine forests and orchards. According to eyewitnesses, all had been dug under the gaze of the security forces and all contained the bodies of local men. Some were fresh, others decayed, hinting at a covert slaughter that went back many years. The lawyer widened his search, mapping almost 1,000 locations. This has since risen to 2700. He has continued at direct threat of his life- losing many friends along the way. He was awarded  the Ludovic-Trarieux International Human Rights Prize, first given to Nelson Mandela, he was unable to accept it in person as his government declined to issue him a passport.

Were is this terrible place?

Can you guess?

Why are we, the agents of the Kingdom of God, not scandalised? Why are we not using what we can to raise awareness, and to demand our government speaks on our behalf against such abuse?l

By the way, the country where the events above are happening is India. Kashmir to be precise. A beautiful mountainous Indian ruled majority Muslim province on the embattled frontier with Pakistan. Check out this article for a fuller account of the things described above.

Perhaps the list of events are not a surprise to you- either because you are better read than me in relation to international events- but I think that most of us will know very little about the conditions that Kashmiris live under. Beyond the stories about the dreadful earthquake a couple of years ago (in which over 70,000 people died) and the odd account of shellfire across the border, Kashmir is ignored by our media.

I wonder why? Is it because India is on ‘our side’? A democratic free market economy, in which things like this can not take place? Is it because the other side of the border lies Pakistan, with its military dictators, and Muslim extreme views? Or is it because it is simply so far away, and involving people who are not really like us- they are a different colour and creed…

Whatever the reason, shame on us.

If you want to read more, then check out some of these links;

KashmirWatch.

Channel 4’s up coming documentary Kashmir’s Torture Trail.

Human Rights Watch.

Leaderless organisations…

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I have been thinking about leadership again of late. This is in part because the group I belong to Aoradh has had to tackle some thorny issues without a ‘leader’ as such recently and we are not part of a wider network from which external advise/encouragement might be sought.

The way Aoradh has stumbled upon doing leadership is something like this;

  1. We started out very task centred – we were promoting a festival – for which an organising committee was more than enough. We asked one of our members to take leadership of this committee, as we were a disparate group and there was a need for clear communication with media/professional clergy/local authorities.
  2. There was a process of chaotic competition of ideas and principles concerning what we were about. Some people left, and the ones left were mostly in the process of considerable change- and this was reflected in what Aoradh was becoming. The group was small enough not to need ‘a leader’ and there was general resistance to formality and structure.
  3. Aoradh progressed from task focus towards an increasing community focus. More people joined, some left. There was a real sense of freedom to do things differently, which was highly valued in particular with people who had been part of hierarchical and even oppressive church structures. Because of this, despite a general feeling that leadership was an issue, we just decided to defer it.
  4. So we entered a period in which leadership was mitigated according to specific tasks or events. We met regularly to decide business collectively, and different people either took or were asked to take leadership for specific things. For example, Michaela is a natural organiser, so tends to circulate dates, and keep us on track. I am a dreamer, so always have my eyes on the next thing, the coming horizon. Andy is practical and technical and so will always want to roll his sleeves up etc etc. And for the most part, it works with very little conflict, and only a little confusion.
  5. There are of course different levels of comfort with this process however. It can be messy and frustrating, particularly for those more structurally-minded. The best we can say now is that leadership is still a work in progress.

Along the way I have found some ideas useful to inform our debate;

Grace

Jonny described a similar process as ours that Grace went through. They too decided to ‘defer’ the leadership question- and did so for years it seems. Eventually however, a structure did emerge in the form of a leadership group that rotated annually, and had the task of ensuring that the principles of the Grace were upheld and protected.

The common table

I read an article by Mark Stavlund, who is part of a community called ‘The common table‘, describing a kind of process that he called ‘negative space’. I wrote about this here. Mark describes a process of leadership in small groups that very much fits our current model.

There is an old idea about leaderlessness based around the idea of a starfish. If you cut off any limb of a starfish, it can operate independently. It has a separate nervous system. Translated to a small group of idividuals this might suggest that a group of people can connect together without formal leadership, and indeed, like the starfish, flourish without a head because all of its limbs are independent from the control of a central nervous system. Cut off a limb and it survives.

However.

And it is quite a big however.

Back in 1970, American feminist activist Jo Freeman wrote a paper called The Tyranny of Structureless Groups. It seems that each new generation of activism makes similar mistakes around leadership. A couple of quotes might illustrate the point;

…The term ‘structureless’ group is as useful and as deceptive, as to aim at an ‘objective’ news story, ‘value-free’ social science or a ‘free’ economy. A ‘laissez-faire’ group is about as realistic as a ‘laissez faire’ soc iety; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can easily be established because the idea of ‘structurelessness’ does not prevent the formation of informal structures, but only formal ones…

…Thus ‘structurelessness’ becomes a way of masking power, and within the women’s movement it is usually most strongly advocated by those who are the most powerful (whether they are conscious of their power or not). The rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few and awareness of power is curtailed by those who know the rules, as long as the structure of the group is informal. Those who do not know the rules and are not chosen for initiation must remain in confusion, or suffer from paranoid delusions that something is happening of which they are not quite aware…

A group without a leader can easily become a group in which leadership takes place in dishonest, even underhand ways. Just to say that decisions are taken in common does not mean that actually happens. It does not mean that everyone is encouraged to participate, or facilitated to use their own skills talents and abilities.

There is a difference then between not having a leader, and not having a structure through which leadership functions are mitigated.

For everyone to have the opportunity to be involved in a given group and to participate in its activities the structure must be explicit, not implicit. The rules of decision-making must be openand available to everyone, and this can only happen if they are formalised. This is not to say that normalisation of a group structure will destroy the informal structure. It usually doesn’t. But it does hinder the informal structure from having predominant control and makes available some means ofattacking it.

Which brings us back to leadership.

Small groups like ours should really be measured by the degree to which we hold, serve, love, encourage, facilitate. The kind of leadership that might achieve this will be of a very different nature to that of a factory or a political party (even if we might need to use some of theses skills too at times.) I think that the best fit for small missional groups is a kind of leadership that seeks to make creative nurturing space, and to keep it safe.

This will include making a space to make inclusive and safe decisions. Deciding how to do this well is an essential developmental step, and (if you are anything like us) will need to be constantly revisited.

It is possible to achieve this without a ‘leader’, but not without ‘leadership’.

Higgs boson?

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I’ve been idly following all this talk about the so called ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson.

Not really my field, particle physics, but it all sounds very impressive- perhaps the building block of the universe, a tiny thing that only has a lifespan of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a second. I have been struggling to get my head around what the Higgs boson is all about- perhaps I blinked and missed it.

Thanks then, as ever, go the Guardian, one of my preferred windows on the Universe. They produced this wee guide;

For people you’re trying to impress: “The Higgs boson is an elementary scalar particle first posited in 1962, as a potential byproduct of the mechanism by which a hypothetical, ubiquitous quantum field – the so-called Higgs field – gives mass to elementary particles. More specifically, in the standard model of particle physics, the existence of the Higgs boson explains how spontaneous breaking of electroweak symmetry takes place in nature.”

For harassed, sleep-deprived parents: “If the constituent parts of matter were sticky-faced toddlers, then the Higgs field would be like one of those ball pits they have in the children’s play area at IKEA. Each coloured plastic ball represents a Higgs boson: collectively they provide the essential drag that stops your toddler/electron falling to the bottom of the universe, where all the snakes and hypodermic needles are.”

For English undergraduates: “The Higgs boson (pronounced “boatswain”) is a type of subatomic punctuation with a weight somewhere between a tiny semicolon and an invisible comma. Without it the universe would be a meaningless cloud of gibberish – a bit like The Da Vinci Code, if you read that.”

For teenagers studying A-level physics: “No, I know it’s not an atom. I didn’t say it was. Well, I meant a particle. Yes, I do know what electromagnetism is, thank you very much – unified forces, Einstein, blah blah blah, mass unaccounted for, yadda yadda, quarks, Higgs boson, the end. It was a long time ago, and I’m tired. Change the channel – we’re missing Come Dine With Me.”

For a member of the Taxpayers’ Alliance: “Its discovery is a colossal, unprecedented, almost infinite waste of money.”

For a child in the back seat of a car: “It’s a particle that some scientists have been looking for. Because they knew that without it the universe would be impossible. Because without it, the other particles in the universe wouldn’t have mass. Because they would all continue to travel at the speed of light, just like photons do. Because I just said they would, and if you ask ‘Why?’ one more time we’re not stopping at Burger King.”

For religious fundamentalists: “There is no Higgs boson.”

And here is my favourite Higgs bosun joke;

A Higgs boson walks into a church, according to one joke which did the rounds.

“We don’t allow Higgs bosons in here!” shouts the priest.

“But without me, how can you have mass?” asks the particle.

It works on a few different levesl!

The new rise of Communism?

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I am interested in ideas. I think they can change everything and that perhaps above all, we live in a time when ideas are desperately needed otherwise how will anything change?

The Bible is the best selling book of all time- we all know that. But how about the second best selling book? It might surprise you to know that it is this one;

There is an irony in measuring the success of political or theological ideas by the sales of their sacred texts, but nevertheless the permeation of these ideas into the consciousness of modernity has been in no small part due to the  information revolution of a former age- the printing press.

Communism.

Socialism.

I am aware that to many (particularly those who read this blog on the other side of the Atlantic) these words are something close to being taboo. They are regarded as dangerous, evil words. They are also perhaps regarded as defeated words- finally overcome by the rise of the forces of light and truth (revealed in the holy form of democratic capitalism.)

This is less the case in the UK, where socialism is a political term divorced from it’s original meaning as painted by Marx and Engels. This from here;

 Socialism is defined as a mode of production where the criterion for economic production is use-value, and is based on direct production for use coordinated through conscious economic planning, where the law of value no longer directs economic activity, and thus monetary relations in the form of exchange-value, profit, interest and wage labour no longer operate. Income would be distributed according to individual contribution. The social relations of socialism are characterized by the working-class effectively controlling the means of production and the means of their livelihood either through cooperative enterprises or public ownership and self management, so that the social surplus would accrue to the working class or society as a whole.

Marx saw socialism as the inevitable consequence of greed, oppression and unfair distribution of the power and assets within post agricultural societies. He thought that the tensions created were so great that change was inevitable.

Except that it did not quite work out like that did it?

However the story of Communism is not over. There is a fascinating article in the Guardian entitled ‘The return of Communism’;

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China’s) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. “The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation,” says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. “Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today’s.”

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx’s masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse.

We stand on the brink of something new.

What shapes this new thing will be an amalgam of political and economic vested interests, expediency and (just perhaps) the power of the idea. Ideas of course can be dangerous and Communism, with its appeal to the highest moral human purpose, might well be the most dangerous of all. But much of what is in there might be regarded as a natural progression of the teachings of Jesus. C S Lewis called Communism ‘a Christian heresy’ after all.

But what form might these ideas have to carry us forward?

One of the ‘full stops’ to any debate about Communism that I have heard is this one- it can never work, because of basic human nature. We will only work for our own advantage. Without the possibility of the accumulation of individual wealth, even at the cost of others, human society will naturally degenerate and wither into unproductivity.

This is such a depressing idea- that despite the odd individual expression of selfless altruism, humanity is essentially greedy, self serving and only motivated by gaining ascendency over the other. Jesus had a few words to say about this I think.

What other forms of human productivity and exchange might form the currency between us? The Zeitgeist movement have had considerable discussions already about the possibilities of societies without money. However, some of the Communist analysis of the economic processes that have fuelled our current crisis has centred around the ‘Law of Value’;

In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we’re enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between “use value” and “exchange value”.

What’s the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. “It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people.”

Is it really possible to value products by the labour that goes into making them?

And can we really disentangle the financial system that appears to have taken on a life of it’s own, a bit like Frankenstein?

Whatever the horrors that ideas like Communism may have unleashed in the past, I still hope that ideas will emerge that  will be a path that people can travel again.

Pottery workshops, Sgath an Tighe…

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Last night Michaela and Pauline led the first workshop in the pottery in the cellar of our house.

It is really exciting to see this space coming alive- and to see beautiful objects being shaped out of what are essentially lumps of mud. Last night people spent some time at the potters wheel, and also made a slip decorated cake plate. Results were very impressive for first time potters!

Over the next few months we intend to spend time developing part of the old house into Bed and Breakfast, but already we have self catering accommodation available in our cosy annex.

If you are considering a break in Scotland, perhaps it might be worth combining this with some potting? We can tailor a residential potting experience!

If you contact us via our website, mention this blog and you will be eligible for a discount!

For locals, there are details of Michaela and Pauline’s craft courses here.

A few more photos from last night;

A Very British Tale…

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My mate Mark has written a book…

Mark and I were student housemates together back in the 1980’s but he lives in the Rhondda valley in Wales, a long way from Scotland, so we have not been able to see much of each other over recent times. It has been great to meet up at Greenbelt festival recently though.

Back to his book. If you like fantasy fiction, and are a bit of a royalist then this might be the one for you (Audrey!) Here is Mark’s blurb-

Come on a journey that will take you to the very heart of a secret adventure. An adventure so secret it should not be made public. ‘A Very British Tale’ brings together ancient folklore, a thousand year old Royal Family and mystical magic; and sets it all firmly in the 21st Century.
This story tells of how Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, hides a dark family curse that turns her into a strange flying creature. In order to break the curse Prince William and Prince Harry must face an adventure that will take them to the four corners of the United Kingdom. This heroic tale involves princes and knights and trolls and dragons – even the Loch Ness Monster makes an appearance. Secret Agents, King Arthur and a Welsh Rock Star all play their part in helping the young princes in their quest to break the age old curse.

Mad!

Fun though…

Time, almost always on our side…

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Or at least it was today.

We have had a busy weekend- yesterday we took William to play in the finals of a Gaelic school football competition in Fort William. This involved a 2-3 hour drive through Argyll and into the big mountains. It was a wet day yesterday, and the clouds boiling around the high rock walls of Glen Coe were stunning. Will’s side did OK, but football is not his sport really.

Today we spent the morning in the garden, the afternoon playing cricket and the evening walking the beach. Mmmmm.

But back to the time thing- Michaela and I were talking about all the busyness that we are in the middle of- creating a new income, keeping all the family things going and planning new things with Aoradh. Practically speaking, there is far too much to do.

We hear it everywhere- busy busy busy. This is partly because in our society everything does go so fast- we are conditioned to run hard on the hamster wheel. However I think it is also because we are caught in the trap of believing that the only valuable time involves stress. This is revealed in the fact that it is almost a thing of shame to admit we are NOT busy. All this frenetic activity in the service of- what?

There is no life without stress. But there is much stress without purpose.

I have this theory about time- less about physics, more to do with the human condition. I am convinced that time can be stretched into the shape of what you really love. There are of course limits to the elasticity – eventually the break may come – but on the whole we always have time to chose to do those things that we love.

And there is no shame in learning how to be a human be-ing.

When does concern about immigration become racism?

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Today, the Limp Lettuce Leaf that heads up the opposition in our parliament spoke out.

Not against injustice, overconsumption, unsustainable lifestyles- he spoke about immigration.

In an interview with the Guardian, he concedes that immigration is being discussed in “every kitchen” and that the Labour party has been too quick to dismisses the concerns of ordinary people as “prejudice”.

He says the government should strengthen the law so that employment agencies cannot – even informally – favour foreign workers.

He was at pains to suggest that the former labour government had got it wrong on immigration- that it had ‘let too many people in’. This from the son of an immigrant- his mother, Marion Kozak (a human rights campaigner and early CND member) survived the Holocaust thanks to being protected by Roman Catholic Poles. His father, Ralph Miliband, was a Belgian-born Marxist academic, who fled with his parents to England during World War II.

With this in mind, perhaps we might take a moment to reflect on the fact that in the middle of just about every renewal and innovation in our society has always been the incomer- the outsider seeking to make good. At the middle of industry, and at the centre of our professional groups.

Also of course, doing all the jobs we do not want to do, and in times of economic success, refuse to do.

To be fair to the Leaf, if and when he does speak out on issues of justice no one listens, but when he speaks out like this he is at the top of every news bulletin.

But our kitchen has hosted no debates over immigrant labour of late- has yours?

If it did however, I might find myself suggesting that the reason why so many Eastern European people, or so many Asian people, come to this country is very simple- economics. Our lifestyle is based in the need to sustain huge inequality, some of which was enforced at the point of an imperialist bayonet. The shadow this casts is over a dozen generations or more.

In the Eastern European case however, the opening up of the borders in the European Union did indeed cause a large movement of migrant workers far beyond what was expected. Working people in some cases were simply priced out of the market as workers from the East were cheaper, and willing to work long hours.

In the past this would not have been possible, because of something called Trade Unions. But we more or less neutralised them in the name of free market economics.

So- when does concern about immigration become racism? Remember the famous spat between Gordon Brown and the redoubtable Gillian Duffy? Was she a bigot as he famously was heard calling her?

The answer of course, is probably not- but at the same time, maybe we have to acknowledge there is something about our society that is instinctively hostile to the outsider, or the other. When this becomes part of our politics, it gets ugly very quickly and the victims are usually those with the least power.

Particularly during an economic downturn- when we have the need for a scapegoat.

If the Leaf should visit our Kitchen, we can discuss it in more detail.

Bob Holman and the rejected MBE…

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I have written before about this man- who has been a bit of a hero of mine since my student days, because he seemed to have found a way of combining many of the things I valued- Christianity, socialism, social action, community work, radicalism in the service of social justice.

You can watch a short clip of him telling his story on Greenbelt TV– and if you look carefully you will see me in the audience!

Today I heard that he had been nominated for an honour in the Queens list – an MBE – but he turned it down. In this article he explains why;

The honours are bestowed by the monarchy. As a democrat, I am opposed to a queen and other royals who wield great public influence in spite of never having been elected. Yes, the queen has displayed dignity and upheld certain moral values, but the one who succeeds her because of biological inheritance may be very different.

The nature of the royal influence is rarely questioned. The princes usually enlist in the armed forces and so identify with Britain’s aggressive wars. It is unthinkable for any member of the royal family to be a pacifist.

The royals possess enormous riches. The queen’s personal fortune is estimated at £310m, plus possessions valued in billions. The state supports her with an annual £32m. Yet at the very time her jubilee is being celebrated at huge cost, the poor are getting poorer, the unemployed more numerous, the gap between those at the bottom and those at the top wider. Every week, theTrussell Trust opens more centres to distribute food parcels. I have met several families who can no longer afford to send their children on holiday.

The unelected monarchy reinforces and sanctions inequality. The BBC and most of the press pour undiluted praise on the royals while imposing a virtual gag on the views of republicans. No senior politician has the courage to question the continuation of the monarchy. Taking a gong or title is an expression of support for the royals.

My proposed MBE was “for services to the community in Easterhouse, Glasgow”. Last week, I was at a community project called Family Action in Rogerfield & Easterhouse (Fare), which I helped to start 22 years ago. Serving at the cafe was a man who has been a volunteer since the start. He cannot manage paid employment but his loyalty is such that he has been elected to Fare’s board of directors. Another long-term helper works six days a week as a security guard on minimum wage. He takes one holiday a year and joins the under-canvas camp where he toils as a cook. Fare’s grants have been cut – so much for the “big society” – and three staff were to be made redundant. The rest of the workers, nearly all local residents, agreed to a 7% cut in their own modest incomes so that the three could be kept on. And many more. Why should I get a royal reward for services to Easterhouse and not them?

I am an egalitarian. I believe that a socially and materially equal society is more united, content and just. The royal honours system is designed to promote differences of status. It is made clear that those who are made knights or dames are socially superior to those given CBEs, OBEs or MBEs. But all are socially above those without honours. These imposed differences hinder the co-operation, interaction and fellowship, which are the characteristics of equality. Refusing a royal honour is a small step but one in the right direction.