Iranian Trade Unionist To Be Hanged Today – Your Urgent Help

Farzad Kamangar, a teacher in Iran, is about to be executed by the Iranian state for his union activities. Short of armed rescue, there is little to be done. Won’t you please help us do just that little bit? You can click on the links in the message (from Eric Lee of LabourStart) below, but they are currently a bit overwhelmed. Try the additional links after the quoted section if that is the case. Thanks.

This morning I received news that jailed Iranian teacher union activist Farzad Kamangar may be hanged within the next few hours.

According to the Education International, he has been taken from his cell in Tehran’s Evin prison in preparation for execution. The guards have told him he is about to be executed and they are making fun of him, calling him a martyr.

According to the Education International, he has been taken from his cell in Tehran’s Evin prison in preparation for execution. The guards have told him he is about to be executed and they are making fun of him, calling him a martyr.

We need your help and we need it right now.

Send off your message to the Iranian president:

http://www.labourstart.org/farzad

Pass on the this message to everyone you know who might support this campaign.

We may only have a few hours left.

I know that I can count on your help. Thank you.

Eric Lee

Related Link: http://www.labourstart.org/farzad

via Iranian Trade Unionist To Be Hanged Today – Your Urgent Help – Anarkismo

More information, and a currently functional link to send a letter to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad here at Education International.

A letter from Farzad, via the Canadian Coalition.

Link Dump – Anthropology, Labor, &c. for O20

Man, it’s a good thing that we all have such different work styles. My relative silence these last few weeks means that I’ve been working. Max, on the other hand, has been pumping out more and more interesting posts, from descriptions on his first foray into electoralism to notes on cosmopolitanism, to a clarion call for academics and activists to think more closely about violence, a much-needed call that has been poorly thought through since our fetishism of supposedly non-violent change.

From YourMonkeyCalled (basically a snarky twitter site, but something I adore), this gem:

This story is tucked inside Adam Gopnik’s great survey of John Stuart Mill’s thought:

[Mill] helped to save the American Union. Few Americans learn that the cotton spinners of Lancashire were among the heroes of the Civil War. Out of work and starving, because of the Union blockade of cotton imports from the Confederacy, the workers nevertheless supported the Union out of pure anti-slavery principles. Had England recognized the South, and acted to end the blockade, as nearly happened several times, the Union would have lost, no matter what Grant or Lincoln did. It didn’t happen, because the Lancashire workers were so against it; when the great American historian John Jay Chapman listed the English liberals whose words were most responsible for the workers’ resistance to slavery, he placed first the name of John Stuart Mill.

(Mostly) Southeast Asian Link Dump

• “Thai democracy is in a state of immolation.” via New Mandala
• Wall Street Journal Asia has an editorial on current events in Bangkok. Here, via Bangkok Pundit
• Geoffrey Cain in Asia Times, on how Cambodia’s muslims are geopolitical pawns. Really? Or a lot of hoo-hah about nothing? Chanroeun Pa has reprinted an article by Antonio Graceffo which is slightly more thoughtful.
• The Phnom Penh Post has a few articles of interest, on the resurgence of tensions on the border with Thailand, nothing that this tension has increased enlistments in the Cambodian military, and an article lavishing praise on the  System of Rice Intensification (SRI).
• One of Cambodia’s awesome three independent unions, the Cambodian Independent Teachers’ Association (CITA), issued a forceful statement on World Teachers’ Day which attempts to use the (hilarious) rectangular strategy as a rhetorical strategy to demand increases to the salaries of teachers (which are unbelievably low). Via the Mirror.
• PBS’ Frontline has released a short, well-done, documentary on Burma’s Saffron Revolution, pointed out by New Mandala. Very worth checking out.
• Here’s a post which is not strictly Southeast Asian, but comes to us from the land of Nepal. This landscape, of human-created rice terraces, is nothing short of astonishing. Via the agricultural biodiversity weblog

Dying Right Here Is Strictly Prohibited.

Mind if I move over there first, then? [From an article on death by overwork in a Japanese engineering department of Toyota]

MAY DAY!

My May Day celebratory post apparently never made it up to the blog. So here it is, half a month late.

The best day of the entire year. From Peter Linebaugh’s famous article on May Day, “The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day,”:

Nationally, May First 1886 was important because a couple of years earlier the Federation of Organized Trade and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, “RESOLVED… that eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labor, from and after May 1, 1886.

On 4 May 1886 several thousand people gathered near Haymarket Square to hear what August Spies, a newspaperman, had to say about the shootings at the McCormick works. Albert Parsons, a typographer and labor leader spoke net. Later, at his trial, he said, “What is Socialism or Anarchism? Briefly stated it is the right of the toilers to the free and equal use of the tools of production and the right of the producers to their product.” He was followed by “Good-Natured Sam” Fielden who as a child had worked in the textile factories of Lancashire, England. He was a Methodist preacher and labor organizer. He got done speaking at 10:30 PM. At that time 176 policemen charged the crowd that had dwindled to about 200. An unknown hand threw a stick of dynamite, the first time that Alfred Nobel’s invention was used in class battle.

All hell broke lose, many were killed, and the rest is history.

“Make the raids first and look up the law afterwards,” was the Sheriff’s dictum. It was followed religiously across the country. Newspaper screamed for blood, homes were ransacked, and suspects were subjected to the “third degree.” Eight men were railroaded in Chicago at a farcical trial. Four men hanged on “Black Friday,” 11 November 1887.

“There will come a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today,” said Spies before he choked.

INDEED.

Cambodge Soir reborn?

According to Radio Free Asia, the francophone newspaper Cambodge Soir will begin publishing again in early September. This, after a lengthy hiatus following an editors strike connected with the publication of excerpts of the Global Witness report that caused such a fuss a few months back, striking directly at the ruling families of Cambodia and linking them to the destruction of the Cambodian commons.

Mariarosa Dalla Costa

Few voices have been as consistent and eloquent in speaking out about the importance – indeed the centrality – of domains and spheres of labor that are presented to us as peripheral, as Mariarosa Dalla Costa. In her first essay (one of three in the latest issue of the wonderful journal The Commoner), she begins

I began to pose to myself the issue of the land as a crucial question at the end of the eighties, on the heels of a trajectory which, during the end of the sixties and seventies, had as its crux the factory as the space of waged labour and then the home as the space of unwaged labour within which the former finds its roots. The labour, therefore, involved in the production of commodities and that of the reproduction of labour power, the labour of the factory worker and the labour of the housewife within the Fordist organization of society. At that time we said that the employer with one paycheck in reality bought two people, the worker and the woman behind him. Agricultural labor, or the labour of the land, which reproduced life for everybody, remained in the shadows however.

I love reading Dalla Costa because of her ability to so concisely illuminate the interconnectedness and mutual penetration of different domains of oppression. Read the above again and note how she indicates that the exploitation of waged labour depends on the ability to further exploit unwaged labour. Capitalism depends, in that instance, on the further oppression of women by men, and farms that oppression out to male workers, some of whom accept the charge.

Similarly, in the industrial age, the focus on factory production has allowed the rulers to present agricultural production as a peripheral activity, rather than that which makes everything else possible. The regimes of monoculture which decimate local food security and render entire regions vulnerable to price shocks – followed by demands from the World Bank and others to engage in Structural Adjustment Programs and then to actually take over a country’s economic policy – oppress the farmers. The oppression of farmers, in turn, depends on the oppression of the land, and what I think of as theft from the future.

Economic News

Two pieces of economic news from Cambodia do little to assuage my nerves. A recent article in the Industrial Worker discusses the state of union activity and the challenges to the textile industry in Cambodia, after the demise of the Multi-Fiber (Trade) Arrangement (MFA or MFTA, depending on your acronymic preference). It’s a timely article for the paper, which has rarely covered Cambodian news, since we are now finally starting to see a serious and possibly devastating drop-off in textile exports from the textile industry. Early predictions of doom were staved off, strangely enough, by the Tsunami, which spared Cambodia and resulted in a region-wide US quota that preserved some of the existing arrangements even after the demise of the MFA.

It is common to claim that agriculture and textiles are the two most important sectors of Cambodian industry. However, this fact obscures that the Cambodian government is not truly dependent on these productive industries for its tax base. Although, as the IW article points out, “The only tax revenue for countries like Cambodia is income tax on the worker’s meagre wages,” the government relies much more heavily on non-productive sources of revenue, like foreign aid and loans. This is a vital piece of the analysis, since it is through these forms of income that the government is increasingly insulated from union and worker demands for organizing protection, and indicates the level of complicity between the givers and the takers of aid. As for the loans, we should remember what Cambodians know very clearly: debt equals a loss of sovereignty, such that the national government is not capable of calling the important shots. The price of regaining that sovereignty is likely to be too high for the future generations to ever pay off.

Not that any of this really matters to the people – within and without Cambodia – making the real economic decisions. For details on how they’re spending the largesse of their cronies in the international aid economies (one is tempted to write “the patron-client networks of the Foreign Aid-Industrial Complex, but see also John Perkins for a less fanciful take on the issue), check out Details are Sketchy.

Rice Planting Photos

Ah, it’s rice planting season. Hard, backbreaking work. And, in spite of myself, I find it aesthetically gorgeous, and deeply satisfying to see. Check it out.

Videos on the page

I finally figured out how to embed videos on my blog (apparently I needed a plugin). So, in honor of this, let me present to you the first chapter of one of the finest movies ever filmed in Cambodia, The Rice People (neak sre), filmed by Rithy Pan.