Month: September 2019

The sex worker rights movement has grown significantly over the past two decades. Sex workers have organised to demand recognition of sexual labour as labour; challenge stigma, discrimination, and all forms of violence, including by law enforcement; improve working conditions; lobby for full human, social, and labour rights; advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work; and provide peer-based support and services. Many sex worker organisations also organise and support migrant sex workers in an effort to address the specific challenges they confront, such as racism and xenophobia, precarity due to their im/migration status, lack of access to health and other services, vulnerability to exploitation and violence, and the risk of detention and deportation.

Since the 1990s, sex workers have also had to contend with the expansion of the global ‘anti-trafficking industry’ with its strong anti-sex work, criminal justice, and border control agendas. Sex worker organisations in Spain, Thailand, and India, for example, pointed out in a recent report from the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women that trafficking was “an issue that was introduced [or indeed imposed] from outside the industry itself, propelled by a moralistic agenda, that organisations have felt obliged to understand, in order to counter the harmful effects of conceptually conflating trafficking and sex work.” In many countries, anti-trafficking policies and interventions have targeted sex workers with highly detrimental impact.

This has taken the form of greater police surveillance of the sex industry; raids on sex work establishments; forced detention in rehabilitation centres; arrests and prosecutions of sex workers as traffickers; and deportations of migrant sex workers. All of these undermine and ignore sex workers’ agency as well as their legitimate demands for better working conditions and human, social, and labour rights.

Further, the crucial role of sex worker organisations in promoting the rights, safety, and security of sex workers and addressing working conditions in the industry has largely gone unrecognised by national and international policymakers, donors, and some non-governmental organisations. The ideologies, assumptions, and agendas that fuel the anti-trafficking industry have also resulted in the exclusion and silencing of sex workers when it comes to the development of policies that directly affect their lives and work. Over the last ten years, this trend has certainly been evident in countries where governments have enacted laws that criminalise the purchase of sexual services.

#20yrsFailingSexWorkers

Twenty years ago, in 1999, Sweden became the first country in the world to criminalise the purchase – but not the sale – of sexual services. The policy was based on an ideological conceptualisation of prostitution as violence against women and an obstacle to gender equality. It was initially introduced with the aim of reducing prostitution by targeting men’s demand for commercial sexual services. However, with the adoption of the UN Trafficking Protocol in 2000, and the last-minute insertion of Art. 9(5) that calls on states to “discourage the demand that fosters all forms of exploitation of persons, especially women and children, that leads to trafficking”, the Swedish model has been promoted as a way to prevent trafficking in the sex industry. Despite the lack of conclusive evidence that it has managed to reduce sex work or prevent trafficking in Sweden, it has been packaged as a mechanism to promote gender equality, protect the vulnerable, and prevent trafficking in the sex industry. As a result, sex purchase bans have been adopted in Norway and Iceland (2009), Canada (2014), Northern Ireland (2015), France (2016), the Republic of Ireland (2017), and Israel (2018).

Over the same period, there has been mounting evidence that the Swedish model exacerbates the stigma against sex workers, forcing them to engage in more dangerous activities and increasing their risk to violence. Evidence for this has come from academics, UN agencies, human rights organisations, medical professionals, LGBTI+ organisations, anti-trafficking organisations, and, of course, sex workers themselves. As a result, many of these groups have vocalised their support for the decriminalisation of sex work.

So why does the Swedish model continue to gain steam? We propose that it is part of a larger global trend towards social conservatism, overreliance on punitive responses to address social issues, and what has come to be termed post-truth politics, where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Sex work in a post-truth world

The archives of the Anti-Trafficking Review contain many articles documenting the simplistic images and narratives used to describe migrant and trafficked women in the sex industry, and the lack of evidence behind many anti-trafficking policies and interventions. In 2016, Andrijasevic and Mai noted that “[t]he stereotypical image of the victim is of a young, innocent, foreign woman tricked into prostitution abroad. She is battered and kept under continuous surveillance so that her only hope is police rescue.” In 2017, Harkins observed that “evidence has not been prioritised within the anti-trafficking sector.” Instead, the processes that have introduced the Swedish model to other countries have been driven more by highly emotive images and stories of victims than by any other type of evidence.

In Northern Ireland, for example, Lord Morrow from the Democratic Unionist Party, the sponsor of the 2015 Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Criminal Justice and Support for Victims) Act, stated that, “I always said that additional research was unnecessary”. A member of the Justice Committee concurred: “[s]ome of us do not need any research or evidence.” For this reason, research from the Department of Justice indicating that most sex workers in Northern Ireland were not trafficked, that the legislation would be hard to enforce, and that it would be detrimental to sex workers was dismissed. Instead, proponents of the law “relied heavily on the personal accounts of a small number of survivors of prostitution, who described the sex industry as inherently violent and supported the ban.”

In France, a survey conducted with 500 sex workers in 2015 prior to the implementation of the 2016 sex purchase ban showed that 98% of respondents opposed the law and that around 7% could have been victims of trafficking, but these findings were similarly ignored. Furthermore, while organisations and individuals supporting the law were involved throughout the process of its development, sex workers and other opponents’ testimonies were largely disregarded, and “MPs already knew they would not be convincing.” Similarly for the Republic of Ireland, it has been argued that “by the time the Committee [tasked with developing a law on sex work]’s work began, the political debate was, in fact, all but over” and that “oppositional views [were rendered] vulnerable to accusations of ‘pimp thinking’: of being an apologist for pimps, brothel owners and the exploitation of women and children.”

Scholars have documented how at the parliamentary hearings on Canada’s Bill C-36, The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act (PCEPA), which introduced the Swedish-style client criminalisation in 2014, more individuals and organisations supportive of PCEPA were invited to present testimony than those opposing it. Furthermore, committee members were positively biased toward those in agreement with the proposed legislation and at times highly disrespectful to those in opposition to it. Kerry Porth wrote after testifying that “from the very first day, current and former sex workers who spoke out against Bill C-36 have been dismissed, ridiculed, subjected to hostile questioning, and heckled … Remarkable Canadian academics …, who have researched the sex industry in Canada for many years, were regarded as people who are trying to ‘make it easier for pimps and johns to operate openly in communities across Canada’ … [T]hose who supported the bill were lauded for their courage in coming forward.”

What we see time and time again is that the introduction of a sex purchase ban was made possible largely through the forging of powerful alliances among ruling conservative parties, faith-based groups, and prostitution prohibitionist and carceral feminists. What they share is a highly gendered and racialised understanding of sex work and trafficking. Despite this coordinated attack on sex workers’ rights, the dismissal of academic and community-based research on sex workers’ lives and work, and the exclusion of sex worker perspectives from policy development in a post-truth environment, the global sex worker rights movement is growing and making itself heard.

This week’s series

The articles on Beyond Trafficking and Slavery this week are shortened versions of some of the pieces found in the Anti-Trafficking Review’s new special issue on sex work. If you find them of interest, we warmly invite you to read the complete issue online.

We begin with Sharmila Parmanand’s article on the disastrous impact of the Philippine war on drugs for sex workers. Already a stigmatised community, they are now at extremely high risk of abuse by the police. Some of her interviewees having suffered harassment, arrest, jail time, and loss of partners due to police corruption and extrajudicial killings.

Leo Bernardo Villar uses the Unacceptable Forms of Work (UFW) Framework, developed by the International Labour Organization to address ‘non-standard’ forms of employment, to analyse the working conditions in the sex and entertainment sector in Thailand. Based on interviews with sex workers, social service providers, and government officials, Villar demonstrates that many indicators of UFW are present in the sector, and argues that this framework could be used by sex worker advocates to push for inclusion of the sector within national labour laws and protections.

Alexandra Lutnick reflects on the process of developing the ‘Prioritizing safety for sex workers’ policy in San Francisco in 2016. This policy guarantees that sex workers will not be arrested or prosecuted for involvement in illicit activities when they report violent crimes, including trafficking, committed against them. While not without its challenges, the creation and adoption of the policy was made possible through the forging of an alliance comprised of sex workers, anti-trafficking organisations, service providers, women’s rights policy makers, and law enforcement. Their point of departure was the recognition that no one wants people in the sex industry to experience violence. The policy, then, provides a unique example of how stakeholders who may hold very different ideological positions on sex work can work together towards a common goal.

We end with a plea to funders from Nadia van der Linde, the coordinator of the Red Umbrella Fund. She argues that while there have been some advances made in terms of funding the sex worker rights movement globally, only $11 million in grants were made available in 2013 and much more donor support is needed. Van der Linde makes a passionate argument that donors cannot ‘stay neutral’ on the issue of sex worker rights and need to commit to investing more funds in sex worker organisations and initiatives.

In the face of mounting and incontrovertible evidence, these and the other articles of the special issue gesture toward the conclusion that, like the donors that Nadia van der Linde challenges, no one can claim ‘neutrality’ on the issue of sex workers’ rights anymore. Given the intersectional diversity of sex workers – along the lines of gender, sexuality, racial, ethnic, and class background, im/migration status, etc. – and the differing working conditions in which sex workers labour, it is imperative that more cross-movement alliances be cultivated and forged. In other words, in light of the multiple and complex social and labour dimensions that need to be addressed, organisations that advocate for the rights of women, LGBTI+ people, formal and informal workers, migrants, and trafficked persons, as well as movements that work for social, economic, and racial justice need to join in the struggle for sex workers’ rights and the decriminalisation of sex work.

A longer version of this article first appeared in Anti-Trafficking Review, issue 12.

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Once treated as a pointlessly utopian fantasy, the demand for a guaranteed basic income is now being debated across multiple forums, from mainstream and alternative media sites to more academic venues.

There are many different proposals that travel under this label. The version I want to defend is a minimal liveable income regularly remitted as a social wage, paid unconditionally to residents regardless of citizenship status, regardless of their family or household membership, and regardless of past, present, or future employment status. Waged work would not be replaced by such a social wage, but the link between work and income would be relaxed.

I support this form of basic income because of its feminist potential to loosen the constraints our current system places on all of us but particularly on women. It is a tool that, if deployed correctly, would enable waged work, marriage contracts, and childrearing to be more a matter of choice than they are at present, where all three are subjected to a relentless, strict, and miserly economic calculus.

My case in favour of the basic income demand is deeply informed by the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s, which advocated for a social wage to be paid to women for the uncompensated reproductive labour they perform. Many lessons for the basic income movement can be found in this earlier campaign, two of which I want to focus on here. The first lesson is that the wage system is wholly inadequate as a method for distributing income. The second is that because the wage system is inadequate, many people and especially women have little choice but to enter into families in precarious positions of inequality. Basic income has a chance to ameliorate, but will not in itself correct, both these wrongs.

The blind spots of the wage system

Artwork by Carys Boughton. All rights reserved.

The thinkers behind the Wages for Housework campaign insisted that we needed a broader understanding of the economy and of what counts as an economic relation in order to account for all of the productive effort involved in the creation of value. Their main focus was on showing how unpaid reproductive work acts as a subsidy for companies that boosts their profit margins. A capitalist society needs reproductive work to happen so that workers are fed and dressed, so that new workers replace old ones, and so that products are bought and consumed. They argued that since reproduction is not separate from the system of economic production but an indispensable part of it, those reproductive contributions should be recognised and remunerated.

But this is not how the wage economy currently functions. Wages, capitalism’s primary mechanism for transferring wealth back down the chain, are only given to a narrow subset of all those people engaged in maintaining a capitalist society: those who are employed. The wage system doesn’t come close to compensating all the people working for all the value they are producing; its blind spots are legion.

We can make a strong case for basic income if we update this argument to include other areas of activity from which a capitalist society derives value yet the wage system fails to reward. For example, employers make use of but do not remunerate the educational efforts that develop a worker’s general skills and aptitudes. Neither do they compensate for all the time a worker dedicates to developing communicative capacities, aesthetic embodiments, and even social networks. This is no small matter in the present moment. The employment system is currently being restructured around the ideal of the independent, entrepreneurial worker who has invested heavily in their own human capital and future employability, often through the accrual of household debt. This would-be worker is expected to assume all the risk and costs of rendering themselves employable and for landing a series of job contracts while employers are largely off the hook for these expenses.

Employers also make use of social infrastructures produced through collective efforts over generations, commons reclassified as ‘natural resources’, assets accumulated through slavery and colonialism, and technologies first developed by governments. They appropriate the materials that create and add value to goods and services, including forms of scientific, communicative, technical, and social knowledge. Then, of course, there is prison labour, various forms of unwaged digital labour used to create data and algorithms, as well as old-fashioned wage theft. Neither wages nor taxes come close to compensating for all of this. The fear that there will be free riders who will receive a basic income is laughable given the truly massive levels of free riding on unremunerated labour, stolen property, and privatised commons for which companies are given a free pass.

In addition to all these types of unremunerated value creation, we must also remember that large, arguably enormous, numbers of people are excluded from or marginalised within the wage system because they do not conform to the model of the ideal waged worker. How many of us really possess the full list of capacities needed to devote 40 hours to intensively focused effort over the course of a five-day week? What about those of us with cognitive, emotional, neurological, or physical differences that mean we cannot always, or sometimes ever, work in the ways or for the durations that are expected? How can we be expected to work a lifetime without more than – and this is of course the best-case scenario – a little vacation time and a few sick days? The family is supposed to be our safety net, but for many it’s a last resort rather than a first option. Too many of us have nothing or little in the way of support when our bodies or our minds are rendered disabled by the standard forms of waged work.

A fundamental lesson of the Wages for Housework campaign is that that wage system does not account for all our contributions to economic production and excludes too many of us to function as a credible mechanism of income allocation. The already rather spectacular mis-accounting of productive activity they identified in the 1970s is arguably much more dramatic today, and the exclusions enacted by the wage system possibly even more damning.

Basic income, as a universal and unconditional social wage, offers a more rational and more equitable way to distribute income and reward forms of productivity.

Freedom to choose a family

A second key insight from the Wages for Housework movement regards the way the wage system interacts with the institution of the family to trap many, especially women, into dangerous situations and also benefits from the unwaged labour that takes place under its auspices.

The heteropatriarchal family may function as a haven in a heartless world for some; for others it is a sad and dangerous site. A 2018 UN report, which found that more than half of female homicides around the world were committed by intimate partners or relatives, was released with a headline that named the home as “the most dangerous place for women.” The statistics on domestic violence, including intimate partner violence, together with child and elder abuse are by any metric staggering. Without adequate means to support oneself and one’s dependents it can be difficult and sometimes impossible to leave such a situation.

The family is also where the majority of the labour necessary to reproduce workers on a daily and generational basis takes place. It is an institution that distributes income earned from waged work to others in a household and that allocates domestic tasks to its members along gendered lines. Enormous amount of time, skill, and energy are devoted to childcare, eldercare, the care of the ill, the care of the disabled, self-care, and community care. Without this work whatever you want to delimit as the economic system would not exist, and it is provided disproportionally by women, free of charge, regardless of whether they also work for wages.

Wages for Housework advocates extended their critical examination of the family as a satellite of the system of production to the question of childbearing as well. They demanded wages so that they could, among other things, “decide if, when and under what conditions to have children”. Deciding not to have children because one does not have the money or time to raise them does not count as true reproductive choice: “As long as we have no money of our own because we work for nothing at home and for crumbs outside the home, none of us can choose whether or not to have children, and all of us face sterilization even if our tubes are not cut”.

A basic income, like wages for housework, cannot in itself create the conditions for truly meaningful choices about whether to raise children or not, or whether or not to enter into a household or form a family. It would, however, better enable individuals to make choices about whether to enter into a particular household division of domestic labour, as well as serve as a resource for exiting a physically or otherwise abusive household relationship. It would also give people a greater measure of economic freedom to either engage in or opt out of childrearing as they choose. As such, it is material support for the possibility of cultivating more sustaining and sustainable relationships of caring and sharing.

Demanding a basic income comes with risk

Critics of a basic income have come up with many reasons why it is a fool’s errand, some more spurious than others. Now I will turn to what I see as most compelling critique, the challenge to the demand that I think should give everyone pause and that may well dissuade some from their support.

The problem as I see it is tactical: The danger is that, if a basic income is won at all, it probably won’t be first instituted just as we want it. Most likely it will be initially granted at a low level that serves to subsidise low wage employers by offering their workers a small supplement.

This means that the initial form a basic income programme takes, and whether or not we can then win it in the form we want, will depend on the power and endurance of the political forces behind its advocacy. Despite its appearance as a punctual event, as a win or a loss, the politics of a basic income will involve a longer process of winning it on our terms, as an unconditional, universal, livable wage. This makes it an undeniably risky endeavor. Whether this “foot in the door” incremental approach to political change is worth the risk is an important question, perhaps the critical question.

Here we might recall the feminist struggles about whether to pursue passage of the 15th amendment and the 50-year wait for the 19th, or think about whether the Affordable Care Act will or will not serve as a step towards Medicare For All. The foot in the door can serve as a wedge to help pry it open further or it can get broken off. The only thing of which I feel certain is at the heart of another insight from Wages for Housework: “Feminism must start from what women need, not from what it might be easier to gain."

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This debate was financially supported by a grant from Humanity United.

Were the Moscow City Council elections a success for the opposition? Several commentators are inclined to say no. The ruling United Russia party still managed to retain its majority in the city council, and this means that it can continue its quiet verification of mayor Sergey Sobyanin’s initiatives. Moreover, with a few exceptions, 20 seats went to representatives of Russia’s “systemic opposition” parties, whom we cannot expect to engage in full-on confrontation with the city executive. And independent candidates – who went out and collected thousands of signatures to register their candidacies – didn’t end up on the ballot papers. It’s clear that we won’t be seeing the Moscow City Council instantly transform into a parliament capable of drilling a hole into the very heart of Russia’s authoritarian regime.

Still, these elections have given us three fundamental political results. First, the election was a victory of grassroots mobilisation over “administrative resources”. Public officials at local prefectures worked hard over the past six months to ensure the victory of pro-regime candidates in the city – taking part in candidates’ courtyard meetings with residents, carrying out new improvements to public buildings against planning permission, forcing street sweepers to hand out leaflets and agitprop, removing election notices from competitors and so on. It was very important to public officials that candidates who had been approved by the Mayor’s Office made it through the elections. But Muscovites came to the ballot box and broke the back-room agreements of the city elite. In conditions of total civic apathy and depoliticisation, this is an invaluable experience.

Moreover, this experience will be a lesson to those who hope to enter the City Council against the electorate’s will, via secret agreements. The Moscow head of the Just Russia party, a systemic opposition force, looks particularly comic in this respect. Alexander Romanovich lost in a constituency that had been prepared especially for him. Not only that, Romanovich was forced to appear in a photograph with Alexander Solovyev, a spoiler candidate from his own party in another constituency – all in service of confirming that Solovyev, who had not engaged in any campaigning whatsoever, actually existed. Indeed, Solovyev-the-spoiler candidate won off the back of a consolidated protest vote, and against the plans of the mayor’s office.

Administrative candidates are used to taking an absolute majority, which has given Moscow public officials a reason to feel comfortable. An apparent “majority” of Muscovites approves their work, the story goes, and the only people who protest are a bunch of marginals. Now it’s clear that this isn’t the case. If we look at the numbers, we can see that administrative candidates took 555,000 votes against 586,000 votes for candidates with a protest agenda. This message from voters has a clear meaning: people demand representation, they’ve had enough of public officials making decisions for them about how and where they can live. You ignore a petition with 2,500 signatures against property development at Bitsa park in south Moscow, fine, but we’ll come to the next election and you’ll lose your seat. You tell us that our opinion over the fate of a local maternity hospital doesn’t matter, that’s great – we’ll put you in your place and remind you who’s boss.

Second, the end of United Russia is no longer a prognosis, but a reality. Even with all the electoral falsifications, access to administrative resources and the shortcomings of the independent candidates, they still lose. In Moscow, United Russia is now a minority party, and one that is losing masses of its pliable electorate and revealing its own disintegration. This process has long-term consequences, which we’ll see in two years’ time at the parliamentary elections.

Third, the system parties which won at the city council elections might not survive what comes next – their existence in its current form relies on a fatal contradiction. On the one hand, they need to perform the role of the opposition and respond to people’s desire for an anti-elite protest vote. On the other, they need to remain under Kremlin control and not exceed the limits of the permissible. These parties are completely at home when they take second place and below on election day, but when they start taking first place, disaffection emerges internally. A significant chunk of the Communist Party are politicians with real ambition who want to take power when the system begins to collapse. Another section of the Communists, which is more influential, maintains its stance of complete refusal of that ambition and the same-old backroom alliances with the Kremlin. The first group are happy at the new council seats and are strengthening their positions, while the arrival of new council members is a headache for the second group.

One constituency

The loss of United Russia candidate Sergey Zverev could prove particularly telling in terms of the above. Zverev was in charge of urban planning at the Moscow City Council, and his constituency (the districts of North Chertanovo, Nagornyi and eastern half of Zyuzino) is hardly opposition-minded. In Northern Chertanovo and Nagornyi, the district councils are run by United Russia, and in Zyuzino (where I am a municipal deputy) they have half of the seats. Zverev, who’s been in the city council since 2009, has a weight administrative and party career behind him. He’s worked in the Moscow government since the 1990s and has even been a department chief. Now he’s the deputy secretary of the political department in the Moscow branch of United Russia, and head of Dmitry Medvedev’s public reception office in the city.

After the forced removal of independent candidate Konstantin Yankauskas, the only real competitor for Zverev could have been the Communist candidate, Lyubov Nikitina. She has no background in local politics, and she appeared in the constituency as a party functionary only six months ago, during a campaign to save a local maternity hospital. The Communists have never had a high rating in this constituency, and at the last elections to the Moscow City Council, their candidate took second place by one percent of the vote, against a challenger from the liberal Yabloko party.

By election day, we were left with a battle between a powerful United Russia incumbent with ties to the Moscow elite and a hardly-known “second place candidate” from the Communists, who no one believed had any ambition. But in the end, Nikitina took more votes than Zverev (44% against 29%), even though at the last election he’d had the best result in Moscow – more than 50% of the turnout.

This result became possible thanks to several factors typical of Moscow. First, the overall drop in approval for United Russia, which was visible at the regional elections a year ago. This had to be followed by an organic loss of votes for pro-regime candidates, which is exactly what happened with Zverev, who lost nearly half his previous votes. Political technologists connected to the Mayor’s Office were prepared for this: they made all United Russia candidates run as independents, collecting signatures for registration in order to weaken their association with the increasing unpopular party.

This trick with the “pseudo-independent” candidates failed for two reasons. First, they didn’t carry out any real signature collection. Thus, agitators and signature collectors from Konstantin Yankauskas spent the whole of June “in the field”, while Zverev’s election team imitated signature collection in several public places. The fake signatures in support of Zverev quickly became public knowledge, but this didn’t stop the electoral commission from registering him. By that time, it was impossible to sell Zverev as an independent to local voters. Second, the politically active section of the local electorate was angry right from the beginning that the former United Russia candidate was trying to hide his party allegiance. In response, a genuinely popular campaign emerged to inform local people of the truth, with people putting stickers (“Be careful! This is a United Russia candidate”) on Zverev’s posters around the neighbourhood.

The second decisive factor in Zverev’s defeat was the work of Yankausksas’ team in mobilising people to participate in the “Smart Voting” programme – voting for the second candidate in order to displace the favourite from the Mayor’s Office.

Yankauskas, a local politician with experience and team of local supporters, collected the necessary number of supporting signatures to register as an independent candidate, which purely at a technical level could not fail to raise his visibility in the constituency. But then came a mass refusal to register independent candidates, which lead to a city-wide protest. As a result, Yankauskas himself spent 26 days under arrest for participating in city rallies and was released only at the end of August. In that time, his team started campaigning for a consolidated protest vote. For several weeks, his team called on his supporters to vote for Communist candidate Lyubov Nikitina. After release, Yankauskas himself publicly supported this move.

The third factor was the campaign of Nikitina herself. In the majority of constituencies, the Communists ran weak campaigns – clearly, they weren’t counting on winning. Nikitina’s team saw that the mood was changing and took the initiative, and went far enough to provoke an administrative response. In the last weeks of the election campaign, a black PR campaign against Nikitina tried linking her to Alexey Navalny, or presenting her as a “wealthy adventurer”. Street sweepers removed her posters and leaflets, and provocateurs started turning up to her public meetings. Nikitina’s team responded by increasing their campaign and directly accusing Zverev of not playing by the rules. As a result, the Communists risked leaving the comfort zone of a controlled opposition party, coming into conflict with the local party branch. This is a valuable political lesson for the Communists, and a telling example of the contradictions of Russia’s systemic opposition.

Observation rules

Last but not least, election observers played a decisive role on election night. Given all the above, it was clear that the United Russia candidate, Zverev, was at risk of losing the election and only falsifications at the vote count could save him. The electoral commissions themselves are drawn from public officials – employees of public committees and prefectures – and they are based in the same buildings as official institutions.

In this situation, coordinating election observers was critical. A large number of independent observers has come together in this constituency, which have already defended against falsifications at the ballot box. This time, there were only two ways of authorising observers at polling stations – approval from candidates or political parties. And the only candidate who agreed to approve local observers was Nikitina, as it was clearly in her interests.

When the first vote counts began to come out on the evening of 8 September, it was clear that our expectations were right. Zverev was losing, and the electoral commissions began drawing out the process of entering the results into the digital voting system, where it is impossible to rewrite the numbers. All independent candidates were ready for this development and forced electoral commission members to follow procedure until morning. There are no doubts that without observers present, at least a third of the polling station committees would have been able to rewrite the vote count sheets and change the election results. But the satisfaction of collective political action, which election observers definitely experienced this time, will have no less a powerful effect than the joy of voters at having burst into the backroom deals of the Moscow elite.

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To sustain the natural basis of our life, we must slow down. We have to reduce the amount of extraction, pollution, and waste throughout our economy. This implies less production, less consumption, and probably also less work.

The responsibility to do so must lie mainly on the rich, who currently enjoy a disproportionate share of our resources. But we should also do things differently, as much of today's economic activity is of little benefit to human wellbeing. Imagine what could be if we organized democratically to produce what we actually need, distributed those resources fairly, and shared them in common. This, in a nutshell, is the vision of degrowth: a good life for all within planetary boundaries. And while this might seem utopian, there are already concrete policy ideas to start such a transformation.

In a recent article, Leigh Phillips argues that this is a delusion. He brings forth three main critiques: degrowth is (1) not necessary, (2) unjust, and (3) marks the end of progress. He suggests that we should “take over the machine, not turn it off”, expressing his concern that an end to growth would mean an end to all the things that makes our lives so rich, like for example fridges. This reminds him of the likes of Malthus or Thatcher, whose ideologies have supported the imposition of unjust limits onto the poorer parts of society.

In this response, we want to investigate the world-view behind Phillips’s critique and argue that degrowth is, in fact, very different than what he claims it is. This is not the first time that this debate has been had (see here, here, or here). Our aim is not to create further division. Instead, we want to point towards common values that degrowth shares with socialist perspectives. We claim that Phillips employs an inordinate optimism about technological possibilities, and discuss how his views are framed by a rather narrow and liberal conception of freedom and progress. We argue that an increase in social value does not depend on economic growth, allowing for further human flourishing within limits.

Degrowth is necessary

Phillips acknowledges that we need to stay within planetary boundaries. But as an ecomodernist, he believes that all environmental problems can be solved by a shift in technology. All we need to do is become more efficient. This version of post-environmentalism has received a lot of support, as it aligns well with existing powerful interests in the economy. But it is problematic for many reasons.

First, there is no evidence for this claim. The potential of our current technology is limited. And the potential of future innovation is uncertain. As Phillips acknowledges himself, it will take considerable time until new technology arrives. We should not gamble away our future on ideas with such a low (if even known at all) probability of success.

Let us illustrate this in relation to climate change. The latest IPCC report to limit global warming to 1.5° presents four scenarios. Three of them strongly depend on negative emission technologies, which are highly controversial as they have not been proven to work at the required scale and represent an “unjust and high-stakes gamble”. The IPCC also provides a fourth scenario that does not rely on negative emissions, but which notably requires that “global material production and consumption declines significantly”.

Some demand reduction could be achieved through efficiency improvements. But these might be less effective than they appear. As long as we keep pursuing growth, such improvements will be used for further expansion. This can counteract possible environmental gains. Simply put, efficiency improvements make things cheaper and therefore push up consumption. Such a rebound effect has been found both in different countries and industries.

What is more, technological shifts always come at an environmental cost. Every sector of our economy is still based on some form of extraction, pollution, and waste. And all of them depend on carbon. Renewable energy, in particular, requires a great amount of rare minerals and land-use. The same goes for nuclear energy, which demands considerable resources in order to mine uranium, construct power plants, and deal with its waste. Even digital technology has environmental impacts.

Phillips tries to argue against this by pointing at past solutions to environmental problems, like the ozone layer or deforestation. However, he does acknowledge that those examples do not compare well to a bigger challenge like climate change. Some of those challenges were solvable because they only affected a single sector and an easy technological replacement was available.

Additionally, many past environmental challenges have not been overcome, but have simply been reshaped and displaced. Philips points towards the fact that net deforestation ceases in rich countries. But this is mainly because agricultural production is outsourced to poorer ones. The study he uses to show the increase in global tree-cover also shows an alarming reduction in tropical areas. The recent Amazon fires in Brazil, for example, are connected to increased deforestation efforts for agricultural expansion in the territory of the world’s 22nd largest export economy. The total amount of environmental degradation caused by our economy remains coupled to economic activity.

Finally, it is important to understand that environmental issues are all interrelated. Even the successful ozone depletion is nowadays under threat as climate change could reverse the recovery of the ozone layer. The deforestation study mentioned above shows that climate change has contributed to both increases and decreases of vegetation in different parts of the world. Mass extinction is another serious threat that our planet is experiencing at the moment, which is also connected to deforestation. And we know that most mass extinctions of the past “had something to do with rapid climate changes”.

All this means that it is hard to see a way around a reduction of economic activity. Of course it is theoretically possible that we could grow and produce more within our limits if technology improves. But so far this hasn’t happened, there is little to show that it will, and as long as it doesn’t, we need a practical plan. The logic of eco-modernism – to blindly bet on future innovation – has already caused us to delay action for more than thirty years, and there is simply no time left. We need to act now, and within our current technological means.

Degrowth should be just

A central question of degrowth is how to achieve this necessary decline in a way that is equitable. This is a serious question as there already are extreme inequalities and injustices all around the world. We should therefore focus efforts on reducing what is less useful to human wellbeing and more harmful to the environment. For this to be a just transformation, the direction of this focus needs to be a democratic decision, building on direct participation and local autonomy.

Phillips is concerned with austerity. And he is right in the sense that a lack of expansion in our current economy leads to disaster. We are systematically dependent on both economic growth and inequality. Without it, we face unemployment, investment bubbles, and competitive disadvantages, sliding into another economic depression. But austerity is, contrary to Phillips’s belief, a measure taken in order to achieve growth. Take Greece, where such measures were taken in order to return to previous growth levels. The Greek government as well as international financial institutions and analysts regularly portrayed the suffering of austerity as a necessary sacrifice of the present in order to arrive at a more abundant future. Instead of more, we should care about leaving our children something that is better and, notably, an environment that can sustain human life.

It is time to get rid of this dependency on economic growth. We must restructure our economic system so that an end to growth does not create further injustice. Essential to this are policies that reduce financial speculation and redistribute the immense amount of material wealth that has accumulated in the hands of a few. Like Phillips, many degrowth proponents are excited about a comprehensive ecological reform, and have contributed to the recently proposed Green New Deal for Europe. There are also economic models that examine how a post-growth economy would work in detail (see here or here), although more work is needed on that end.

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Without such a transformation, there can also be no equitable mitigation of climate change. Phillips claims that efforts so far have failed because they were market-based. And degrowth advocates agree with his critique of the free market ideology. But existing carbon prices have been ineffective simply because they are too low. And Phillips’s best example of a planned intervention – France's reduction of emissions by 4.5% through a shift to nuclear power – also proves little about effectiveness on the magnitude that is needed. As stated above, the only IPCC scenario without technological speculation requires a reduction of demand. This remains true independent of the policy instrument that is used to achieve mitigation. And as long as we are systematically dependent on growth, such a reduction will likely lead to another crisis.

But the most important perspective of justice might be that of global inequalities. A full length response to Leigh Phillips on this perspective has been published here. Essentially, the riches of the wealthy part of the world are based on the exploitation of both nature and people in poorer countries. This is why the responsibility of reducing economic activity should lie upon the wealthy part of the world. If we want to share our cake equally, rich countries must reduce their disproportionate share. This would pay back ecological debt, giving poorer countries the possibility to produce what they need and have more autonomy over their resources.

Finally, Phillips argues that green goods should be cheaper so that all people can afford them. On a similar note, he is worried that income would be too low for a good life, i.e. be stuck at 5500$ if we assume current global wages to be equalized (there is already a response to this argument here). But wages could not be higher (or prices lower) than what would give people the power to consume more than what is possible within natural limits. All we can do is distribute our resources fairly and try to produce what is needed within natural limits. Technological innovation can help us with that. But, as argued above, its potential is uncertain. This is why degrowth envisions a type of human flourishing that does not depend on better technology, although it includes innovation.

Degrowth marks a different kind of progress

Will natural limits put a limit to freedom and progress? That mainly depends on what is meant by these words. For Phillips, progress refers to the expansion of freedom through the domination of nature through technological advance, allowing “each one of us to become the master of our fate”. This is a notably liberal view, as it imagines freedom as being a full emancipation from any toil, care labor, and suffering. But life must involve work – caring for others, caring for the vulnerable, sharing not only our joys but also our suffering. Marx said: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”. This describes a relation between toiling, connected human creatures. He didn’t say “from each to each more and more, with robots doing the work”.

We also need to be careful with the notion of progress as the ultimate, unquestionable project for human freedom. This has often been used to justify action for the higher cause of ‘humanity’ against the opinion of people affected. Prime examples for this are western colonialism or the mass dispossessions and environmental harm in the name of development.

The strive for human flourishing should include all people, and it cannot be thought of apart from nature. That doesn’t reduce the human capacity to be free. But freedom here does not mean freedom from any and every limit, but freedom to choose our limits and care for one another and for non-human beings. This simply confirms that humans are not alone in our march to freedom, and that its pursuit has effects upon others and our environment. It also won’t stop innovation, but rather channel it into a direction that is actually useful (unlike this). That does not always need to be high-end technology. Progress could also come in the form of social innovations that adapt society’s institutions to the challenges of abrupt environmental changes, such as the Native American ‘seasonal round’.

Phillips’s claim that there can be no progress without economic growth and no good life without high wages shows a failure of imagination. If we free our imagination from the liberal idea that well-being is best measured by the amount of stuff that we consume, we may discover that a good life could also be materially light. This is the idea of voluntary sufficiency. If we manage to decide collectively and democratically what is necessary and enough for a good life, then we could have plenty.

In that sense, degrowth has also been called a theory of radical abundance, not scarcity. Scarcity represents the problem of limited resources in the face of unlimited ends, and is the driving force of capitalism. Degrowth, in contrast, talks about a conscious and democratic limitation of ends, making resources abundant in turn. This is the critical difference between the ideas of degrowth and Malthus, who essentially was a proponent of growth. This is not about ‘Thatcherite’ limits forced upon people from the top, but about a social choice of self-limitation.

But what if it is not enough? What if what we want is not ecologically feasible to produce? In that case, the desires that capitalism has convinced us that we have are simply not compatible with the planet that we live on. The objective should then be to focus on what we actually need – to find more sustainable ways of reaching for a good life. If we cannot be happy without weekend trips to Thailand, than we might as well reflect about what actual desires are fulfilled by such a trip and try to satisfy them with other kinds of activities.

But what if it is the most basic needs that we cannot cover? A recent study has found that this might be a possibility. In that case, Phillips is right that the dilemma in front of us is difficult. However, this alone does not make the technological innovation at the scale he imagines possible, even if it would be necessary. Degrowth proponents believe that there is a lot of potential for social innovation that could improve our wellbeing and sustainability at the same time. Many people in rich countries currently live with unnecessary excess (while many of them lack basic needs at the same time). There is a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, so to say, before we can declare that there is not enough to satisfy everyone’s basic needs with a sustainable amount of energy and resources.

Let us illustrate that with Phillips’s example of fridges. He claims that forbidding more fridges holds back the global south from vital access to fresh food and the global north from access to better nutrition and reduced food waste. Under a degrowth scenario, fridges would not be forbidden where they are needed (remember that degrowth calls for democracy and autonomy). But consider the global North: in Britain, people consume and throw away more food than half a century ago when just two per cent of households owned a fridge. Supermarkets have removed doors from fridges to boost sales of frozen food that often travels across the planet and replaces local agriculture. Most energy that wealthy countries put into refrigeration is unnecessarily wasted. Even less energy would be needed if we consider communal use like the solidarity fridges in Spain and communal fridges in Berlin.

The same goes with health, transport, diets – you name it. We don’t need an abundance of unnecessary waste. In contrast to Phillips’s claim, degrowth does not impose what has social value or not. It rather calls for more reflection on, and more democratic ways of deciding, what is important to produce and how, and then to focus production on that. This is a much more promising conception of freedom for a socialist project than that of Phillips. In this sense, degrowth both supports and entitles many alternative proposals and sustainable practices with a potential to increase human well-being. Among them are the ideas of shared ownership, not-for-profit cooperatives, cohousing, community gardens, open software, repair cafés, community-supported agriculture, and solidarity economy networks.

A decline in economic activity would further give us back what might be one of the most important ingredients of a good life: time. By having to work less, we could focus our energy on conviviality and care, ending the age of loneliness. We could have more freedom to pursue our personal ambitions. And the time that we spend at work, as well, could be more fulfilling if we know that it actually serves a meaningful purpose.

Degrowth, in this sense, is about the opportunity to improve our lives without increasing our use of resources. It therefore represents a feasible way of expanding human freedom within current technological and ecological means. This is not so different from Phillips’s own description of socialist growth: an “increase in the creation of new value that does not undermine the ecosystem services upon which human flourishing depends”. What is important, though, is to disentangle the idea of social value from that of economic growth.

How to move forward

To conclude, we want to emphasize the need for different progressive movements to work together. A critique on growth is complementary to other critical perspectives, especially those of socialism. As Giorgos Kallis puts it in his discussion on socialism and growth: “there is nothing intrinsic in socialism that will make it pursue degrowth and a steady-state economy or throughput. Yet, unlike capitalism there is nothing that makes a socialist economy unstable without growth”.

Both degrowth and socialism center around the idea of sharing. Based on the same fundamental values, we could have much more interesting debates about what is truly important. We don’t need growth to reach a good life for all. What we do need is a genuinely democratic and radical transformation of our economy.

The biggest threat to freedom in the world today is economic destitution. We need universal basic income (UBI) because destitute people are unfree to sleep undisturbed, unfree to urinate, unfree to wash themselves, and unfree to use the resources of the world to meet their own needs. Being unfree in these ways makes them unfree in all their economic relationships.

The destitute are unfree in the most basic sense of the word. The destitute are not unable to wash themselves and they are not unable to use the resources of the world to meet their needs: they are unfree to do these things. Because our governments enforce a property rights system in which some people control natural resources and other people do not, someone will interfere with them if they try to do these things that they are very capable of doing.

Poverty is not a fact of nature. Poverty is the result of the way our societies have chosen to distribute property rights to natural resources. For millions of years no one interfered with our ancestors as they used the resources of the world to meet their needs. No one failed to wash because they were too lazy to find a stream. No one urinated in a common thoroughfare because they were too lazy to find a secluded place to do so. Everyone was free to hunt and gather and make their camp for the night as they pleased.

No one had to follow the orders of a boss to earn the right to make their living. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors were not rich, but they were not in poverty as we know it today. Our laws today make it illegal for some people to satisfy their most natural and simple bodily needs, and our laws make homelessness such a fact of life that we can believably pretend that it’s all their own fault. There are billions of people today who are more poorly nourished than their hunter-gatherer ancestors. It cannot be simply their own fault. We have chosen one way to distribute rights to natural resources; we can just as easily choose a system that does not create poverty as a side effect.

We have created the threat of economic destitution, and we have used it as a ‘work incentive’. In doing so, we have made virtually everyone dependent on their employers or on the government or private charities for which they might be eligible. This policy allows a few privileged people to dictate the terms of employment to virtually everybody.

We need to stop judging people and restore the freedom people had before governments took away their direct access to the world’s recourses.

UBI: Something for nothing?

The most common objection to UBI labels it as something for nothing, and declares that something for nothing unacceptable. They say people have a moral obligation to ‘work’. Lazy people who will not work should not be rewarded with anything. Therefore, supposedly, any social benefits should be conditional on at least the willingness to accept employment.

This argument is filled with problems. I’ll just discuss two. The first problem with it is that UBI is the farthest thing from something-for-nothing. All societies impose many rules on every individual. Consider the discussion of homelessness above. Why can’t homeless people build their own shelter and their own latrine? Why can’t they drink out of a clean river? Why can’t they hunt, gather, or plant and harvest their own food? They cannot do these things because governments have made rules saying they don’t have the right to do these things.

Governments divided the Earth into ‘property’. The wealthy got a share, while most people got nothing but the opportunity to ask the wealthy for a job. Those of us who somehow managed to get a share of the Earth’s natural resources benefit every day from the state’s interference with virtually everybody else (i.e. the people who didn’t get a share). We pay them no compensation, no reparation, nothing to restore the freedom you get from the ability to work for yourself with no boss, no client, and no caseworkers. A state without UBI is the state that has something for nothing.

The wealthy got control of resources without paying their real cost, and control of resources gives them effective control over the labour of virtually everybody. UBI is not, and should never be seen as, something for nothing. It is the just compensation for all the one-sided rules of property and property regulations society inherently imposes on individuals.

The second problem with the work obligation argument against UBI is that it conflates two different senses of the word ‘work’ – one that means toil and one that means employment or time spent making money. In the toil sense, work simply means to apply effort regardless of whether it is for one’s own benefit or for someone else’s. In the employment sense work means to work for someone else – such as a client or a boss. Anyone with access to resources can meet their needs by working only for themselves or with others of their choosing. But people without access to resources have no other choice but to work for someone else. Furthermore, they have to work for the same group of people whose control over resources makes it impossible for the propertyless to work only for themselves.

Working for someone else entails the acceptance of rules, terms, and subordination, all of which are things that a reasonable person might object to. There is nothing wrong with working for someone else and accepting the conditions of work as long as the individual chooses to do so. But there is something wrong with a society that puts one group of people in the position where they do not have the power to say no to the jobs offered them by more privileged people.

When we take away access to the Earth’s resources and make no reparation, we are not forcing people to work, but to work for at least one of the people controlling the Earth’s resources. When we do this, we create a mandatory participation economy the makes people unfree, vulnerable, and miserable.

The evidence is found in every sweatshop, in every ‘trafficked’ person, in every on-the-job instance of sexual harassment, in every homeless shelter, and in every worker who can’t afford any basic necessity of life.

The solution is to create a voluntary participation economy based on truly free trade. In this sort of economy, each person would pay for the parts of the Earth they use and each would receive a share of the payment for the parts other people use. This principle is the basis of UBI. With a sufficient UBI to draw on, each person would have the power to say no to a bad job offer, and the power decide for themselves whether the offers in the job market are good enough to deserve their participation. And that’s what it means to enter the job market as a free person. Nothing protects a worker better than the power to refuse a job. This power will protect not only the poor and marginal but all of us.

This debate was financially supported by a grant from Humanity United.

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Yesterday I met Salim. He was kicking some rocks around in the middle of the forest near his temporary migrant camp in Dunkirk, France. Around him, all that was left of what had been his home for the last two weeks was an extinguished fireplace, a can of beans thrown on the floor, empty bottles of water, and clothes hanging to dry on trees.

On Tuesday morning, French riot police had surrounded the camps, evicted the 700 people living there and made some arrests. Scared, Salim ran away with other dispossessed people, deeper into the woods. All he had in the world…a few beans he'd been cooking for his breakfast trampled into the earth. His only shelter from the sun, the flies, the dirt and the wind…a tent…gone who knows where?

Salim is only 14. He’s from Iraq. A country scared by decades of war.

He’s one of the unaccompanied minors that live in the informal settlements of Dunkirk. There are many small settlements in the area: empty corners of land among the trees where people pitch their tents and cook food together. Salim's settlement had been there for months before the eviction.

When I met him with the rest of Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde) team, we’d gone to the camp to assess the situation and health needs. That morning, the state-run camp of Grande-Synthe had been evicted. We’d heard some of the asylum seekers might have escaped the eviction (which meant being moved to far away parts of France) by joining a makeshift camp in the forest.

We were not prepared for what we saw. The people living in the forest had been cleared out too. A man told us about the violence used against them forcing them to abandon their camp. Salim and these other young men, fifteen in all, were afraid that the police might come back. They had run out of water and food but were too scared that the police would reappear to venture beyond the edge of the forest. Charities would be distributing food later that evening. But these frightened people didn't want to risk it. It took a lot of persuasion for us to reassure them and make sure they’d have basic provisions to see them through the night.

We took Salim with us. As a child, he’s entitled to special protection. We contacted another charity to make sure he’d be safe and cared for. But what if yesterday he had refused to tell us his age? Often, children like Salim are nervous of strangers, too afraid to speak.

According to international law, people on the move should enjoy the fundamental rights afforded to all persons regardless of their legal status in a state (see the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Human Rights Committee, The Position of Aliens Under the Covenant).

If we truly believe in the duty to eliminate discrimination, then legal status should not matter in relation to human rights. But this is often not translated into practice.

The situation in the camps of Dunkirk and Calais is so dire, and so far removed from what international human right norms deem acceptable, that the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants said in 2018:

“Migrants, regardless of their status, are entitled to human rights without discrimination, including access to adequate housing, education, healthcare, water and sanitation as well as access to justice and medicines. By depriving them of their rights or making access increasingly difficult, France is violating its international human rights norms.”

Doctors of the World is an international medical charity. We work to ensure that everyone has access to healthcare by providing care, bearing witness, and supporting social change. We have been in this area of France supporting people on the move for years, and what we are seeing is incredibly concerning.

The evictions we witnessed yesterday in the camps of Dunkirk are just an example of what our patients face every day. In the informal settlements of Calais, young men are regularly displaced by the police, their belongings are taken (often including their tents and phones) and people have reported instances of physical violence and arrests. This constant displacement is also without purpose: people are simply moved a bit further away, and if they are taken to the centres in other areas of France, they will often face risks and dangers to be able to come back to the forests and settlements in Dunkirk to try once more to cross the Channel.

Long walks in the forests and highways, nights sleeping outside without shelter, little food and water mean we regularly see patients with damaged feet, bruises and cuts from barbed wire, skin conditions, fevers and chest infections. The stress and lack of medicines means that pre-existing conditions often will go untreated and worsen. Yesterday, we met a man from Iran who kept repeating the name of his medicine to us. He suffered from heart palpitations and was feeling sick. He knew what medicine would have helped but didn’t know how to get a hold of it.

We help the people stuck here see a doctor and access the medicines they need, together with informing them about their right to go to a hospital and access care for free. However, the prolonged life in camps and the looming danger of the police at every corner means that many of them are just too afraid to go to the hospital if they need it, and too desperate and depressed to seek care.

Being constantly moved, losing your tent, lack of privacy, always hiding, having nothing to look forward to but a desperate journey to the UK means that many of our patients are struggling with their mental health. They are exhausted, stressed, frustrated and tired, and often they have pre-existing trauma from what they faced back in their home country which drove them here in the first place. Our volunteer doctors and nurses try to support them through counselling. We run psychosocial activities to further help them. However, the reality they wake up to every day does little to comfort them.

The people in Calais and Dunkirk often ask about Brexit. They have families and communities in the UK they want to be reunited with. Some are their parents, children, and loved ones; others are their neighbours and relatives. Each of these women, men and children have a history, a life, and a desire to move on – to reach a safe place where they can restart their lives.

The UK government must do more to guarantee safe and legal routes for people seeking asylum in the UK. Humanitarian needs must always be the highest priority, and more must be done to support people in these desperate circumstances.

Britain has a proud history of providing safety to those in need. We shouldn't turn our backs on boys like Salim.

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Mount Ida (Kaz Dağları) in North-Western Turkey is near to the historical site of Troy. Currently only 2.4 km² of Mount Ida are protected by Kaz Dağı National Park. Turkish authorities have allowed the Canadian company Alamos Gold to prospect for gold in the area, which has resulted in the removal of up to 195,000 trees, four times more than the limit specified. Alamos Gold has claimed that ‘politically-motivated misinformation’ is behind the environmental protests against the project which began in July against the deforestation and the use of cyanide, which protesters claim could contaminate the nearby water supply.

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Mount Ida is known in Greek mythology as ‘Mountain of the Goddess’, and both the Cretan and Anatolian Mount Ida are associated with a mother goddess predating the Greek pantheon. The Anatolian Ida is associated with the Phrygian goddess Cybele, and is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad. This cultural pedigree may provide some background to understand why the destruction of the mountain’s ecosystem has provoked so much protest.

Alamos’ Chief Executive John McCluskey has claimed that his company has already paid for the reforestation of the area, and blamed the deforestation on government authorities. "It is a very cynical thing to say”, McCluskey reportedly said, “but I believe that this whole attack is essentially just an environmental cloak that is being put over what is really a deep political agenda". Without specifying what political ends the environmental protesters hope to achieve, this statement does indeed sound not just cynical but conspiratorial.

Ekrem Akgül, the chairperson of the Ida Solidarity Association told Bianet that as well as Alamos’ Kirazlı project and another nearby mining project already initiated, 29 more mining projects were under consideration which could result in the destruction of 4 million trees. Akgül also noted that the gold content of the area was said to be quite low compared to the volume of gold usually necessary to make a gold mining project viable. This would seem at odds with Alamos’ statement on their own website that,

“Our Kirazlı Gold Project in Turkey represents a significant near term source of low cost production growth. With its low capital and operating costs, Kirazli is one of the highest return, undeveloped gold projects in any gold price environment.”

However, it seems that Alamos may not have factored in the costs of the terrible PR they have attracted for the way they have gone about the project. Public anger at the company rose when images were released showing the extent of the destruction of trees on the mountain in July. In August, thousands of people came to the nearby town of Kirazli to protest

If it is true that that the responsibility for cutting down so many trees lies with the Turkish authorities rather than Alamos, then this raises further questions that should be answered by the General Directorate of Forestry, part of the Turkish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, who said that only 13,400 trees were cut down. BBC Turkish reported that the environmental evaluation report, which is a requirement for the company to operate the mine, said that the number of trees cut down was around 45,000.

Although it was the visual destruction of the forest that first prompted a public outcry, an official of Çanakkale municipality told BBC Turkish that the main concern was for the water supply. Although Alamos Gold CEO McCluskey told press that a cyanide spill in Kirazli was not possible due to the way the company operates, Alamos Gold has a poor track record in this respect, with their two mines in Mexico reportedly causing both cyanide contamination and a preventable landslide which saw the company reported to Mexico’s Human Rights Commission.

Alamos Gold’s Turkish subsidiary, Doğu Biga, seems to have previously been a Turkish company, but is now foreign-owned. The company employs contractors who have worked in mining projects in Turkey which have been criticised for causing deaths linked to arsenic poisoning. After the coup attempt in 2016, President Erdogan’s AKP government pushed laws designed to help mining companies like Doğu Biga, and it seems that the company received funding as part of the government’s promotion of the mining sector.

In particular, the government has supported the use of cyanide to process and separate gold from ore in Turkey. According to some reports, cyanide spills have already taken place at other mining sites in Turkey, where local municipalities have attempted to cover up the fact that people were poisoned by drinking cyanide-contaminated drinking water. It’s no secret that the AKP government has long been heavily involved in construction and industrial sectors, and that their goal of developing the Turkish economy has often come at the cost of environmental and human resources. This can be seen in the long running Ilisu Dam project, which aroused protests in the UK in the early 2000s for the involvement of British construction company Balfour Beatty, and is still controversial today, as it will eventually result in the flooding of the town of Hasankeyf.

The protests against Alamos and Dogu Biga certainly seem to have disturbed some government officials, like the AKP’s Sevda Güner who described the protesters as ‘supporters of a foreign power’, a favourite and clichéd accusation of disloyalty often aimed at those who criticise the actions of the government.

Considering that Turkey suffered its worst ever mining disaster in 2014 at Soma, which is just 120km away from Mount Ida and resulted in the deaths of 301 people, it’s understandable that opposition politicians and environmental groups in Turkey should be so concerned about the potential for disaster at Mount Ida. The Turkish state has made it clear over the last few decades that its goal of economic development takes precedence over other concerns. When a metro line under the Bosphorus was completed in 2013, Erdogan expressed frustration that construction was delayed due to archaeological finds: “First [they said] there was archaeological stuff, then it was clay pots, then this, then that. Is any of this stuff more important than people?”

This quest for development, with its numerous high profile projects aiming for completion by the centenary of the Turkish Republic in 2023 comes with potential liabilities. The newly opened Istanbul airport is the biggest hub in Europe, but comes at a time when the Turkish economy has been suffering currency depreciation and inflation, making it more expensive for Turks to go on holiday abroad. The over-reliance on big construction projects as a marker of progress comes at the cost of good municipal design, the environment, historical sites like Hasankeyf, and the safety of citizens and workers.

The Turkish government will be well aware that protests over particular issues, such as the attempt to remove the public Gezi Park in Istanbul, have led to more widespread demonstrations against the government before. By the start of September, the media outrage about Mount Ida seems to have died down, with government supporters accusing those who amplified the protests of manufacturing outrage for political purposes.

On August 18th, Turkish pianist Fazil Say played a concert at Kaz Dagi, and even Johnny Depp raised the issue of the destruction of Mount Ida on his Instagram in August. However, it’s uncertain now where the protests are going. There is not much that local opposition politicians can do about the continued exploitation of the mountain, and protesters will have to be inventive to dominate the news again in the way in which the story broke in July and August. "Why did you come this late?” a local man demanded of a reporter from Ahval news, “The mountains were sold off 25 years ago!"