leaving today

I want to be a part of it: Beijing,

Beijing

Last night I walked along Wangfujing street, a shopping district just a stone’s throw away from Tiananmen square. More than 100 international brand stores line the street to feed the appetite of the growing base of Chinese consumers. I asked myself: would Mao – lying not far away from here – be proud of this?

Last summer China overtook Japan as the number two global economy. While the whole world is still sluggishly recovering from the financial crisis, it registered 10 per cent growth in 2010. Not even the almighty Communist Party of China can doctor these economic statistics – the usual Stalinist practice in the past – when the Chinese economy is already so immersed in the world trade.

But China is not stopping there. By 2025 it is projected to surpass the U.S. according to the World Bank, Goldman Sachs, and many others. It is true that its GDP per capita is only one tenth that of Japan. However given where it started, once “a sick man of Asia,” China has climbed over – no, demolished would be more correct – the wall separating the third world from the first.

With two recent world exhibitions, the 2008 Olympics and the 2010 World Expo, China is flexing its muscles, showcasing its achievements to the world, as if to say, “Look at me!” And people pay attention as it grows by leaps and bounds, even in the deepest recession. China alone carries the whole world economy as others slump.

How could China rise at such maddening pace? It couldn’t be just because of the knock-offs and cheap labour. Indonesia, India, and Cambodia – to name a few – are also notorious for their sweatshops, yet they are far behind China in almost all respects.

If there is one difference, it is that China underwent a socialist revolution in 1949 that brought about a planned economy, albeit a deformed one, and one far from the conception put forward by Marx. The remnants of this planned economy can still be seen in China’s economic policy: the pegged Yuan and the way China runs its state bank have caused the ire of many U.S. law- and policymakers. These are remnants because China is now a capitalist country, but it still carries marks of the origins from which it was born.

China is not a paradise. There are many social contradictions inside this behemoth. Here we have a so-called socialist country that treats its workers no better than many capitalist countries, where the ruling party cannot yet openly abandon socialist rhetoric and embrace capitalism like their counterparts in Russia. “Hold high the banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” proclaimed Hu Jintao at the party’s 17th Congress; this is when multi-million-dollar capitalists are being born each second in the country.

The world is a different place now, for us in the West, and also for the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants who for the first time see the glimmering light of Beijing and are then immediately stuffed by the thousands into Dickensian factories. We are quickly moving from one epoch to the other, one filled with turbulence just like the bustling streets of Beijing.

But if you can make it here in Beijing, you can make it anywhere.

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Ted Sprague is currently in China. You can follow his adventure through this column or his blog www.redstaroverasia.wordpress.com.

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I have decided: a man’s life is worth 1,000 rupiah (10 cents). It is not 2,000, it is not 10,000, and it is definitely not priceless, as some moralists would like us to believe. The law of supply and demand – the most absolute law in this society – dictates it to be worth that much. Let me tell you how I came to that conclusion.

I’ve always known that life is never worth much. One must be able to put a tangible value on it. But how much is it worth? I learned the exact value of life when I took the inner-city train in Jakarta, from Pasar Minggu to Jakarta Kota.

A non-air-conditioned economy train costs 1,000 rupiah. You feel the rumble of the moving train under your feet, and you also hear the sound of footsteps from the ceiling – the top seat is reserved for the bold ones who enjoy a panoramic view of the city.

There is no door. A long time ago, someone decided to take it out, so that passengers could get on and off more easily. That stroke of genius has saved countless wasted hours of waiting for doors to open and close. In a packed train with no air conditioner and broken fans, the no-door policy also serves as natural ventilation. The more adventurous often take the liberty to enjoy the wind hitting their face, hanging off the sides of the train and creating extra space for the elderly who don’t have the strength to be so daring.

For the millions who have to flock to Jakarta to sell their labour, the train is a daily fact of life. One thousand rupiah is how much the free market values their life. There are just too many lives crawling around. Wolf Larsen of The Sea Wolf put it aptly: “Why, if there is anything in supply and demand, life is the cheapest thing in the world. There is only so much water, so much earth, so much air; but the life that is demanding to be born is limitless.”

Too many workers, too few factories; too many poor people dying for a crust of bread, too few who care enough to share what little bread they have. You put all these numbers in the grand equation of supply and demand, hit enter, and 1,000 rupiah is the number you get when you query the price of life.

Society’s conscience is disturbed by this number, so it has to invent the so-called “sacredness” of life. A truism is therefore plucked from the sky: life is sacred and intrinsically valuable.
Later, I flew to Saigon. As I walked past the luxurious first-class seats on my way to the back row, I wondered how much people paid for these seats. Some lives are just more expensive than others. It is true that the only value a life has is what that life places upon itself, but some people are freer to overestimate their own worth, naturally, with all the prejudices in their favour. The rest – and there are plenty of them – shove a dime through the ticket booth and that’s what they are worth.

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Ted Sprague is currently in South East Asia. You can follow his adventure through this column or his blog www.redstaroverasia.wordpress.com

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For decades, the Chinese minority in Indonesia has been socially and politically discriminated against. In 1998, anti-Chinese riots broke out across Indonesia. Thousands of people were killed and hundreds of Chinese women were gang-raped. It is true that the riots were orchestrated by the army loyal to Suharto, a Mubarak-Ben-Ali-type dictator who ruled Indonesia for 32 years, to sow fear and chaos in order to discredit the movement that later ousted him. But the riots wouldn’t have become such a widespread phenomenon if there hadn’t been anti-Chinese sentiment to start with.

However, I am not here to talk and complain about the marginalization of the Chinese minority in Indonesia. I am here to confront an old demon that has been bothering me as a member of this community, by default and not by choice, that we Chinese are racist. We are not merely passive victims of racism. We are also a active agents that perpetuate this problem.

“I don’t like that place, too many huana,” said my Chinese friend when I told her I was at Trisakti University, a native-dominated school. I cringed at her statement. Huana is one of the two “N-words” that the Chinese-Indonesians use to refer to the natives here. It means people with no manners. Another “N-word” for the Indonesian native is tiko, which is far more demeaning. It literally means “black pig.” Most Chinese use these degrading words, knowing full well what they mean.

The Chinese think very poorly of the native population here. But we also think lowly of every race. “White people,” said my father, “are lazy. All they do is sit at a cafe and chat aimlessly.” He always harps on the prime virtue of the Chinese race: hard working. With the ascendancy of China, his pride – or arrogance depending on how you look at it – as a Chinese man is at an all time high. There are few groups who were once colonized who think that they are better than anyone else. Our bodies might be colonized, but our minds never have been.

The younger generation is without a doubt more open-minded than their parents. But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. A racist attitude is still prevalent amongst many young Chinese.

As someone who dreams of liberating Indonesians, be they native or Chinese, from the clutch of capital, I often have to grapple with this uncomfortable fact. The majority of Indonesians look at the colour of my skin as a sign of ill-gotten privilege, while my own “kind” treats the rest of Indonesians as lesser beings. The latter distresses me more than anything else. “Workers of the world, unite!” seems to be the only solace that I can find, the only rudder that helps me navigate through this thorny situation I have been thrown into.

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Ted Sprague is currently in South East Asia. You can follow his adventure through this column or his blog redstaroverasia.wordpress.com.

The post Being “too Chinese” appeared first on The McGill Daily.

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Ted Sprague is currently in Southeast Asia. You can follow his adventure through this column or his blog redstaroverasia.wordpress.com.

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And if you stop and think about it, almost everything about North Korea is questionable. No one seems to know what’s really happening in this hermit kingdom.

There are so many “unknown unknowns,” but this is exactly the “unknown unknown” every ruler needs to maintain a siege mentality over their population. Pyongyang needs the narrative that every country in the world is out to get them. Western democracies need a caricatural form of communism. We have here a mutualistic relationship where the only losers are the regular Joes and Janes and their Korean counterparts.

North Korea’s military might is highly exaggerated. If Western powers intended to take North Korea out, they could do so easily. In any war between two countries, the one with higher productive capacity will always be the victor. The brilliance of this or that general might play a role, but only within the confines of what’s possible. With this in mind, then for the longest time, North Korea – a country plagued with famine and dependent on the UN to feed its population – has not been a real threat to the far superior South Korea. Of course, the game changes when the conflict on the Korean peninsula becomes a proxy war between different superpowers. In that case, we’re no longer talking merely about the respective military power of the North or the South.

However, the Cold War having ended more than twenty years ago, China has less and less interest in defending North Korea. According to a leaked cable, Chun Yung-woo, national security adviser to President Lee Myung-Bak, confided to the U.S. ambassador to South Korea that China “would be comfortable with a reunified Korea controlled by Seoul and anchored to the U.S. in a ‘benign alliance’ as long as Korea was not hostile towards China.”

Others will argue that the advent of nuclear capabilities has changed the war game; that now, even a small poor country, as long as it possesses a nuclear warhead, can pose the same threat as a superpower with hundreds of them. However, this view does not take into account the fact that there’s a common understanding that the use of nuclear missiles would mean mutually assured destruction. Since the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings in 1945, many wars have been fought without these horrifying weapons. The stockpiled nuclear warheads have instead become an economic burden, and hence they’re continuously being dismantled.

At the end of the day, both sides – the North and the South with their allies – are not looking to duke it out. If anything, North Korean officials are looking forward to opening themselves and even reunification. They look at their Chinese “comrades-in-arms,” many of whom have converted themselves into successful, prosperous bureaucrats and tycoons by auctioning off their subjects’ cheap labour – and the North Koreans aspire to that. It’s true that these North Korean officials are already living lavishly compared to millions of their hungry fellow citizens, but their desire knows no bounds.

These so-called “communists” seek to reunify with capitalist South Korea and to participate in the global market on their own terms, with their privileges secured – and improved. They have to do so without causing social turmoil because, for decades, they have indoctrinated their people with the concept of Juche, of self-sufficiency, of the-whole-world-is-out-to-get-us.

Can the people of North Korea break this spell? Yes, but not by themselves, because their fate is tied to their Southern siblings, and certainly not through secret dealings and diplomacy.

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—Karl Marx

Peter is the minister of a small evangelical church, the majority of whose congregation comes from working-class slums. Nadia, a labour organizer, is a devout Muslim. I myself am a committed atheist. What do the three of us have in common? Other than having assumed names here, what we share is a faith in Marxism. How do we reconcile our religious faith – or lack thereof – with a materialist doctrine that rejects the existence of a divine being?
Whether one believes in God or not doesn’t change the fact that there is injustice in this world. Whether there is a heaven above or a hell below doesn’t change the fact that the majority of people are living a hellish life, and thus religiously seek heaven hereafter. I don’t believe in prayers, but as you read this line, millions of people are on their knees praying to keep their jobs, homes, or just to know when they’ll eat next. These material facts bind us together: an evangelical minister, a Muslim woman, and an unflinching atheist.

As a Marxist, I am a man of faith. What separates me from other people of faith is that while they believe in the inevitability of the coming of the messiah, we Marxists believe in the inevitability of socialism. While the former zealously prepares the masses for the eventual second coming by shepherding them to the house of God every week, Marxists prepare our working-class brothers and sisters by organizing them into unions and parties. They have mass prayers; we have general assemblies. In a lot of instances, mass prayers quickly turn into general assemblies as the people get tired of kneeling and praying.

It is heaven on earth that we seek; this is our faith. While Marxism as a philosophy provides us with a method to understand the world we’re living in, one needs a leap of faith to go from merely understanding to attempting to change the world. It’s easy to criticize capitalism and all its illnesses, but it’s another thing to take up the cause when the odds are against you.

Marxism is often likened to a religion – with Capital as its holy bible – and I think to a certain extent we stand guilty as charged. Capitalism has created a world full of want, material and spiritual. It crushes people. It leads people to a blind alley. Religion, then, becomes a source of solace in this world of want. Religion is a symptom of a society riddled with misery.

But Marxists do not clasp our hands together praying for a saviour from on high to save us. We don’t wait for that pie-in-the-sky. We clench our fists and rally our class brothers and sisters to be their own agents of change, with a faith so firm that millions of times over we have been lined up against the wall for our beliefs. Yet we’ll keep on believing until we’ve found that promised land and wrestle it – forcefully if need be – from the few who own it now. In that sense, there’s no contradiction in a preacher, a believer and a non-believer all embracing Marxism.

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I always respect Brendan Steven, the writer of “Right Minded.” He never hides his politics and this makes him a worthy political foe. In his recent article (“In defence of George W. Bush,” the Tribune, Opinion, November 15), he defends Bush even after many of his right-wing colleagues have abandoned the poor Texan – much like I still defend Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky even if this means going against the stream even among leftists. However, Stevens, we will never be “capable of objectively assessing George W. Bush’s presidency” because his policy is a class policy. It stood for one class – the capitalist – and against the other – the working class. He will always be praised by the class he represents, and reviled by the opposing class. This is a fact. I’m sure deep down, you are very well aware of this – that we live in a class society and the two of us stand on opposite sides.

Vicky Tobianah, on the other hand, in her latest piece (“Learning to network,” the Tribune, Opinion, November 15) is a typical representative of a layer of youth that is eager to be successful in society by being in “a picture with politicians,” by knowing how to “shake hands and make small talk” with people in power – in other words, by rubbing shoulders with the upper class. It’s a sad society we’re living in where the working principle among the youth is: “If we can’t sell ourselves, we won’t be even considered.” Tobianah, you don’t have to sell yourself – your soul and your mind – to the highest bidder. We can choose not to be a commodity, but this will require more perseverance, determination, and confidence than we can even imagine if we limit ourselves to the aforementioned sell-yourself principle.

I eat McDonalds. I drink Coca Cola. I use Motorola. And I don’t use Apple, just because I’m hooked on Microsoft. With such criteria, I’m one of the activists that causes Adrian Kaats to “barf in [his] mouth a bit” (“Apple, Ikea, Motorola…”, Commentary, November 15). I am well aware of all those companies’ exploitations – labour and environmental. The problem isn’t that there’s a bad capitalist and there’s a good capitalist. The problem is, in this era of finance capital, that they’re all in the same boat, connected directly or indirectly. The problem is not consumption: the problem is production.

We cannot choose to boycott some companies, and it’s even more ridiculous to attempt to boycott capitalism altogether. Regular Joes and Janes, the workers who live hand-to-mouth, cannot afford to boycott capitalism. They have to overthrow capitalism; which, in the last analysis, entails the expropriation of these major companies and the banks by the workers. “Sacredness of private property!” cry the owners. Who can better guarantee the sacredness of property other than its creators, the working class? While people crave jobs, the owners shut down factories. While people need roofs over their heads, houses are being foreclosed and left empty in the name of the sacredness of private property.

There go my jabs. I almost threw a left hook there near the end, but it was a feint. Watch out for my real left hook next time.

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Last Sunday, the Burmese headed to polling stations. It has been twenty years since the last election in Burma, the results of which were annulled by the ruling military junta because Ang Suu Kyi’s party won overwhelmingly. However, there is nothing to expect from this bayonet-led election, an exercise the junta has dubbed a “discipline-flourishing democracy.” Ahead of the election, ten political parties had been dissolved by the government. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed “concern” over this act, and he will continue to express his concern, while the junta will continue to ignore him.

Anyone in their right mind knows that this election was a sham from the very beginning. A quarter of the parliament has been reserved for military personnel appointed by the Commander-in-Chief, Than Shwe. The army will legally be able to dissolve the new “civilian” government – as if they needed a legality to do something they are already expert at.

By the White House’s standards, Burma should have been occupied long ago for the sake of democracy. But to them, the junta poses no harm, though they act like mad dogs. Despite economic sanctions, there’s still a lot of good business to be done in Burma. Western oil companies like Total SA and Chevron continue to operate there. Every good capitalist knows that profits don’t take democracy into account.

The military junta is now building what they call the Fourth Empire. History is rewritten. New museums are erected to educate the people about the central role of the junta throughout Burma’s history, so that it can place itself as the worthy heir of the Burma’s three past emperors. Like every ruler, the junta is hungry for grandeur. They have constructed a new capital, known as Naypyidaw, or “Abode of Kings,” out of a wasteland. With massive sterile structures, Naypyidaw has a large pagoda at the centre of it, named the “Peace Pagoda” – as if to mock the people suffering under this dictatorship.

But this abode will fall like a house of cards. It is not a question of when, or even how, but where it will go from here. With such an acute oppression of the minorities, the national question in this land will tear Burma apart if not dealt with carefully. Let’s not hope for UN intervention here. The people of Burma need no saviour from without, especially one that comes from such an impotent institution.

They also don’t need John Rambo to come rescue them with his .50-calibre machine gun, disemboweling the Burmese army. The last time Rambo helped liberate a country, it turned into a backward state led by a group of misogynistic men who misuse the Koran to justify their rule. Yes, I’m talking about Rambo III, where hand-in-hand with Mujahideen forces, the precursor of Taliban, Rambo helps topple a progressive government in Afghanistan which had given women equal rights.

The November 7 election won’t offer a glimmer of change despite some pundits’ hope. It’s merely another brick in the foundation of Myanmar’s Fourth Empire, another step in the junta’s illusory quest to immortalize themselves. Maybe the Red Shirt pro-democracy movement in Thailand has reminded them of their own mortality.

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Here you can get on your soap box and shout out loud your opposition to the government. As long as no one takes notice and you’re on the fringe, you will be granted your freedom. But when your idea is dangerous, when it starts to gain the ear of the masses, your freedom will be snatched away.

The recent removal of AGSEM’s posters per Provost Anthony Masi’s directions serves as a reminder to us about the true value of democracy in this society. The poster in question calls for the unionization of course lecturers – a right guaranteed to all workers. However, this unionization drive constitutes a real threat, not only to the University’s pockets, but also to the administration’s political domination on campus. It will cost the administration tens of millions of dollars to bring part-time teachers’ working conditions up to standard. Aside from that, unionized teachers will have real leverage to challenge the way our education is managed. Because of this, the administration cannot afford to grant the union freedom of speech.

This kind of peremptory tactic is not limited to McGill. A couple weeks ago, the CBC ran a documentary about PROFUNC, a top-secret government plan, maintained from 1950 to 1983, to arrest more than 16,000 communists and 50,000 communist sympathizers without trial, and lock them up in various internment camps.

The top-secret plan stipulated that in times when the Canadian government is in danger – i.e. when communism starts to penetrate the mind of the masses – the government would proceed to arrest prominent communists and leftists nationwide. Quebec also used to have the so-called padlock law, which gave the government the right to “padlock” any building thought to propagate communism or bolshevism in any way whatsoever.

Masi’s removal of AGSEM’s posters and the draconian PROFUNC plan might not seem comparable in scale. However, the danger posed by AGSEM today and the communists in that period is also different in its scale, and this dictates the extent to which the establishment reacts.

So, while we go about our business happily, thinking that we live in a nation that champions democracy, there is a disclaimer that we fail to read: our democracy is a conditional democracy. Our democracy ceases to exist when it becomes a threat to the establishment. This capitalist democracy is a fragile plant that flourishes only in the fertile soil of economic prosperity, fertilized by the sweat and blood of our brothers and sisters from the Third World. The relative comfort that most of us enjoy brings with it the curse of servility and resignation, and drowns dissenting voices into harmless chatter.

But what comes about must end. The age of austerity is dawning upon us. We are returning to a pre-Bismarckian era where it is increasingly being made clear to us that we will have to work until we drop dead. People will start to question the status quo, first in whispers, then in hushed tone, and before we know it we will all be thumping our desks and raising our fists. It is then that we will feel the wrath of state repression, for our democracy doesn’t sit well with the ruling one.

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What has our society become when we begin to bestow the highest distinction in peacemaking to warmongers? Eager to rectify their mistake of giving last year’s Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, who just signed a $60-billion war funding bill this summer, the Norwegian “Minipax” moved heaven and earth to find a winner who won’t embarrass them this time around.

Their choice fell upon Liu Xiaobo, a well-known Chinese dissident who was thrown in jail for co-signing Charter 08, a manifesto signed by Chinese intellectuals that demands democratic reforms in China. The Nobel Peace Prize committee thought they had it all figured out. Liu doesn’t have the power to send troops to “troubled” regions. His signature cannot declare war. Little did they know, this seemingly harmless, mild-mannered dissident turns out to be a staunch militarist.

While millions of Americans filled the streets to protest the invasion of Iraq, Liu argued in an open letter (“American attack on Iraq,” Shi ji sha long lun tan, 2003) that the war was good for humankind, as were all other wars fought by the U.S., with the sole exception of the Vietnam War. This apostle of peace and democracy carries the torch of American patriotism even further than many homegrown, flag-waving Republicans.

Trying to emulate Martin Luther King, Jr., Liu talked about “counter[ing] the hostility of the regime with the best intentions, and defus[ing] hate with love.” (“I have no enemies,” Foreign Policy, December 23, 2009). This liberal democrat likes to cloak himself with non-violent messages while handing out guns to average Joes and Janes and encouraging them to ship out to spread democracy. Liu’s fellow liberal dissident, Jiao Guobiao, even wrote a poem about how much he wanted to fight in Iraq:
If not this life I want to be an American soldier in my next life
I would like to join and I wish to die
Shoot me! Shoot me!
In 1988, when interviewed by a Hong Kong journalist, Liu declared that China would have been better under colonial rule for 300 years: “In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would take 300 years of colonialism for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.” Suffice it to say, he is parroting the colonial ideology that the savages of the third world need to be civilized with whips and chains.

The likes of Liu have been put in the spotlight by the Western media as the leaders of China’s democratic movement. There’s no doubt that China needs deeper democracy. However, these liberals cannot be trusted to lead the movement. They are notoriously timorous, inconsistent, and half-hearted. Their democracy is the democracy of the propertied class.

Charter 08, despite its pleasant democratic phraseology, is in reality calling for more privatization and an expansion of the free market. Prominent economist Mao Yushi, the third signatory of the charter, claimed that “the minimum wage is meaningless and not beneficial for the poor” and that “only by protecting the interests of the rich preferentially can we make the poor rich.”

This doesn’t mean that China is a worker-friendly state. Far from it: China is moving rapidly toward the free market and is privatizing public sectors left and right. However, it wants to do so on its own terms. While liberals like Liu cause a massive headache to Chinese officials because of their international popularity, the real threat to the Chinese government lies in the growing strikes by millions of workers who are thrown into factories by the thousands and there learn the true meaning of socialism.

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Well, you’re not too far from the truth, yet you’re not close to it either. “Red star over Asia” will be a column about things in the process of becoming, rather than things in a state of being. This column will tell of the endless transformations of history, not in a cyclical, but a spiral motion moving ever higher, in a line punctuated by leaps and bounds.

Empires rise and fall. Revolutions and counter-revolutions take turns in a never-ending tug of war, pushing our civilization into uncharted waters. Asia abounds with such stories: the 1949 Chinese Revolution, the bloody India-Pakistan-Bangladesh partition, the 1965 Indonesian anti-communist massacres, the Vietnam war, the Korean war, the Khmer Rouge’s madness, and so on. Asia’s story is a tale of human struggles of epic proportion, of sudden lurches and setbacks as it impatiently seeks to break through the hold of its ancient past.

This is why I choose Asia as a point of reference for my column, because it’s a land that never rests and it’s still changing quickly as we speak. China, once “the sick man of Asia,” is now a major power poised to overtake U.S. economy in around 2025. With India and Indonesia, these three countries carried the weight of the world during the recent recession. The centre of the world is shifting to Asia. Just like the sun finally set on the British Empire, the time has come too for the Western powers to step down from their pedestal.

All that is solid melts into air. This is the underlying theme of this column. It is an all-embracing axiom that runs throughout our history. This axiom applies just as well in the small microcosm we call McGill. Heather Munroe-Blum paraphrased this axiom vividly in her May 2010 budget letter: “Let me be clear: we cannot continue business as usual.” Indeed, McGill cannot continue to do business as usual any longer. It is not immune to the worldwide epidemic of deficit and the resulting austerity measures.

The first blow has been struck with the closure of the Arch Café. Mendelson will not back down on this, since in 2007, he was embarrassingly forced to backtrack on the first closure. Shutting down the Arch Café is a political statement from the administration that they can, and will, execute their plans regardless of the opposition they face, because they have a whole slew of hard-to-swallow changes to push through – all of which revolve around McGill’s 2010-2011 budget.

The world is a-changin’. Asia is a-changin’. McGill is a-changin’. Sarkozy, Charest, Harper, Cameron, Merkel, Wen Jiabao, and Munroe-Blum have readied themselves for this change and are well-armed to impose it on us. The status quo is no longer tenable. We can no longer just resist the changes forced upon us. We need to define – and fight for – the changes we want to see.

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Peter Shyba was not wrong when he wrote that “microfinance has become one of the biggest buzzwords of this decade” (“Small loans, big results,” Health & Education, September 30). Microfinance has indeed been touted as a magic bullet with real potential to solve that nagging question of poverty. Stories have been recounted, repackaged, and retold to convince the whole world of their success. So-and-so obtains such micro loan, and within X number of months, she’s saved Y amount of money and builds a house of her own. The story is easy to digest, thus its success in convincing people: provide the poor needed capital, and they’ll climb out of their wretched lives.

In and of itself, the idea seems benign and noble. However, we don’t live in a vacuum. If only we could just fit the whole world into our neat little idea, but this is not the case. Microfinance is now dominated by big financial institutions. It has turned into a macro-racket: a $30-billion market, with big players like Crédit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, the French insurance group AXA, and the Blackstone and Carlyle groups, just to name a few. The microfinance industry’s high average portfolio yield – 22.3 per cent annually, according to one study – coupled with the appearance of helping the poor has attracted these multinationals. For them, microfinance is a goldmine.

One might reply: “What’s the problem? It’s alright for big businesses to make a lot of profit if it means more capital is available for the poor.” This is akin to saying that it’s all right for businesses to build sweatshops in poor countries if it means providing jobs. This mentality is the exploiter’s; it takes advantage of the desperation of the unemployed poor.

The penniless poor, eager to improve their life but lacking means, gracefully accept the loans only to taste their bitterness when the installments are due. Most of us here don’t even read the small-print clauses of loan agreements. It’s no surprise Bangladeshis living in mud huts don’t either.

Microcredit is a “new kind of debt trap,” as Bangladeshi philosopher and activist Vandana Shiva says. It scoops up hundreds of millions of people who have so far been out of reach from the snare of the capital and forcefully – with tricks and sugarcoated loan packages – ties them to the system. It sucks people into a permanent dependence on credit.

The secret to microfinance’s high portfolio yield lies in its interest rates – 20 to 25 per cent. This interest casts a heavy shadow upon borrowers’ household. To meet their instalment payments, they are compelled to work from dawn to dusk, dragging along their whole family – spouses, children, old parents, siblings – to engage in feverish production. Because most borrowers depend on voluntary family labour, there aren’t any labour standards. Workers’ safety, restrictions on child labour, overtime pay, holidays, and minimum wage are concepts alien to this system. This is the only way a household could produce enough to meet the payments. At the end of the day, microcredit is creating micro-sweatshops.

Muhammad Yunus might have been sincere in his endeavour, but I am not interested in a psychological analysis. Good intentions are not enough to justify folly. Microcredit, like other buzzwords such as “sustainability,” has been co-opted by the very system that it wishes to redress. It’s a band-aid solution that has become a new tool of exploitation.

I can already hear someone replying: “It’s better than nothing.” But there is another option. We don’t have to reconcile ourselves to choosing between false solutions and nothing. We can, and we need to, move beyond capitalism. I don’t have the space to lay out my ideas about what needs to be done. But let’s at least take the first step of thinking beyond capitalism. That would suffice for now.

Ted Sprague is the pseudonym of a Masters II Chemical Engineering student. He can be reached at ted_sprague@yahoo.com.

CORRECTION
Due to an editorial error, an earlier version of this article stated that Vandana Shiva is Bangladeshi. She is in fact Indian.

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McGill ranks as one of the top 25 universities in the world. To be more exact, it sits in 19th place. However, it pays its course lecturers – there are around 1,500 of them – much less than most other Quebec universities, by almost 30 per cent. Course lecturers at McGill receive $5,000 per course that they teach. Concordia pays them $7,770, UQAM $7,563, Laval $7,737, and – get this – at Chicoutimi, they’re paid $8,257.

How do we reconcile these two facts: that McGill is one of the best schools in the world, yet pays its lecturers a pittance? In an ideal world, a prestigious university – a title McGill likes to claim for itself – would pay its teachers a handsome salary, or at least one on par with other universities. But we don’t live in an ideal world. In our society, if an employer can get away with paying their workers pennies while extracting the maximum amount of surplus value, they will. It is only through the vigilance of workers and their unions that we have prevented employers from bringing us back to a Dickensian way of doing things.

Course lecturers in all Quebec universities – except McGill – are unionized, and thus they can bargain for not only a better salary, but also better working conditions. That situation should be a slap in the face of people opposed to unionization. Facts are concrete – they have a way of smacking one in the face rather hard.

With such a disturbingly low salary for course lecturers, a union for them is long overdue. As I write, there is a unionization campaign underway. This movement will be the biggest concern for the administration – far more important than the 400 students who protested the closure of the Arch Café. Imagine this: 1,500 course lecturers, if they get paid on par with those at Concordia, will cost the University at least $4 million a semester. This is assuming that each course lecturer only teach one course. Furthermore, that figure only accounts for their base salary.

McGill has been able to get away with underpaying course lecturers for more than a decade because they lack a union. One course lecturer I met confided to me that a decade or so ago, he and a group of course lecturers did think about unionizing. However, they decided not to – at that time, they weren’t doing so badly, compared to their counterparts at other universities. This is a classic case of not having your umbrella before it rains.

Politically, this would also be another big blow to an administration known to be rabidly anti-union. More than 3,000 casual workers and 150 invigilators have recently been unionized. Once the part-time teachers are too, there might be a chance that the full-time teachers will demand the same thing. A unionized workforce will mean that the administration cannot do whatever its heart desires without engaging in real discussion – not sham ones, like Town Hall meetings – with its workers. The administration, therefore, will resort to any means to stop the campaign and neutralize the union behind it – the Association of Graduate Students Employed at McGill.

For anyone who has been seriously involved in the union movement, we know all too well how far an employer will go to stop the workers from exercising their rights. They will resort to intimidation, openly or behind closed doors, and they will attempt to bend the law with their army of lawyers. They will capitalize on the workers’ instincts to preserve their jobs and keep their heads down: “I don’t want to cause trouble.” “I don’t want to jeopardize my career.” “I don’t want to lose my job.”

It is at this very moment that the course lecturers need the utmost solidarity from students. A simple gesture of support from us will go a long way in convincing course lecturers that their cause is just and worth fighting for – that they are not alone. At the end of the day, both students and teachers are facing the same cuts in education, resulting in ever-increasing tuition fees and worsening working conditions.

Ted Sprague is the pseudonym of a Masters II Chemical Engineering student. He can be reached at ted_sprague@yahoo.com.

CORRECTION
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the number of recently unionized casual workers at McGill as 300.

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However, if we confine ourselves just to this elementary truth, then we are doomed. We will be stuck endlessly debating among ourselves how to prioritize the scraps of funding that we receive in post-secondary education – should McGill be research-oriented or undergraduate-oriented? Should the part-time teachers – low-paid as they are – get a raise at our expense? At the end of the day, we are pitted against each other: undergraduate versus graduate, student versus faculty, et cetera. We are fighting over the crumbs that fall from the table, putting our heads down, nibbling what’s on the floor for so long that we fail to see the feast laid on the table.

There are actually enough resources in our society to ensure free, quality, accessible education. There is no reason that we should choose between those three qualities. It can be free, ensuring that everyone regardless of their economic status can enjoy an education, and at the same time it can be of high quality and coupled with top-notch research. With this clear goal of free education, we don’t need to argue about how affordable affordable is, occupying ourselves with bargaining over the appropriate amount of tuition fees. Is it $2,000? Is it $2,500?
The money is there; we just have to take it. It is there, but spent on the war in Afghanistan. It is there, but spent to bail out the banks during the last recession. It is there, but given away as tax breaks for big corporations. This is where we have to look: in the banks and the corporations, in the pockets of the rich, not those of the poor.

For those who argue that education is a privilege and should thus bear a price tag, we should just leave them be. If they want to pay for it, we will take their money as a private donation to the University. In the meantime, there is a viable option for all of us, but choosing this path is not free, because it has to be fought for. Opting to set free education as our fundamental principle requires the greatest sense of sacrifice from the students, which is to engage politically and mobilize. It is a sacrifice today for gains tomorrow.

The sceptics will howl that this is an impossible dream. Let them wallow in their own cynicism while we will continue to dream of a better society, one that can provide every person with an education. Hasn’t our society always been built upon great dreams and the struggle to realize them?
Education can be free. It can be of high quality and accessible. This principle, however, doesn’t preclude us from the immediate struggle to stop the increases in tuition fees proposed right now. But we cannot be on the defensive all the time; it is high time to be on the offensive. When they say they want to unfreeze the fees, let them thaw altogether and we will flush them down the drain.

Ted Sprague is the pseudonym of a Masters II student in Chemical Engineering. He can be reached at ted_sprague@yahoo.com.

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And the wave of unionization is not stopping here. Word on the ground is that research assistants and course lecturers (or sessional lecturers) are now moving to form their own unions. After 18 years of inactivity on the union front, McGill has now has two new ones – formed within a year – and two more on the way. This trend is evidence, the kind that abounds in history, that events do not always move in a straight line – that they can move in leaps and bounds.

The rapidity of unionization at McGill does not mean that the process itself was easy. It was a long, arduous process that took countless hours. However, without playing down the sacrifice made by volunteers, the main factor in this rapid unionization was the pent-up anger and dissatisfaction of McGill workers over their working conditions. Invigilators, for example, have been making $10 an hour for the past nine years. McGill course lecturers only make $5,500 per course, while their counterparts at UQAM and Laval earn $7,500. This doesn’t even include the benefits the McGill course lecturers lack.

Therefore it is no wonder that the workers want to form unions. It is not a communist conspiracy. The reason is simple: McGill’s administration, like any other employer, has failed to take care of its workers. And it is not due to some oversight on their part, where all we need to do is to sit down with the employers, notify them of their mistakes, and cross our fingers that they will listen to us. The conduct of the employers, in the last analysis, is governed by one and only force: the profit motive. To make greater profits, the employers have to keep the workers’ wages down. This is the ABC of capitalist economy.

Formation of unions, in and of itself, is not enough. The union, once formed, has to be strengthened by the active participation of its members. At the end of the day, the union is only as good as its members. The union is not an end: it is a means to an end. It is a tool for the workers to fight for their interests and realize their own strength. Thus, the next step is clear: strengthen the union and move forward to collective bargaining with full force.

As for the administration, their pants – and skirts – are on fire now. They are restless and desperate. They will try to pit the students against the workers with the same old argument: better working conditions for the workers mean tuition fee increases for the students. We should reject this argument by saying: the wealth is there; show it to us! In 2008, the Canadian government handed out $75 billion to bail the banks and credit market out. In that same year, it gave $50 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest corporations. This is what has created the chronic underfunding in our education. Heather Munroe-Blum and Tony Masi seem to be quiet about this.

So workers of McGill, don’t sulk over your working condition. You have an individual responsibility to take collective action with your fellow workers. Look around you! You are not alone.

Ted Sprague is a Master’s I Chemical Engineering student’s pseudonym. Write him at ted_sprague@yahoo.com.

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