Anarchic update news all over the world - 19.10.2018

Today's Topics:

   
1.  France, Alternative Libertaire AL #287 - Theater: Wild !
      (fr, it, pt)[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
2.  Britain, anarchist communist group ACG: MEETING: How did
      World War 1 really end? (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
3.  Russia, Fighter anarchist: Violations of the election.
      Protests in Primorye [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
4.  Britain, solfed: "Zero hours" contracts in Higher Education:
      the zero option...? (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
   
5.  vrije bond: [Amsterdam] Info and discussion night: 18 years
      of militarism in Venezuela (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)


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Message: 1





" Sung Theater and Tribal Poetry ", The Bite is a crossroads in history. Between farce and 
darkness, this account of our world after the colonies opens another way to memory than 
denial, complacency or flogging. Inspired by the work of Paul Blanchet (1865-1947), known 
as " Le Sauvage des Alpilles ", "the first punk in history ", the show intertwines 
Provencal tiles with Senegalese baobabs ... ---- By the company the Inn of Aunt Pino ; in 
first creation: ---- October 17, Marseille to Ostau dau Pais Marselhès / Lo Festenau dei 3 
Lunas, Comedy Theater, 107a Jeanne d'Arc Boulevard (V e district) ; € 5 / € 10 / € 20 ---- 
October 18, Aix-en-Provence at the Atelier-Galerie d'Images and Research, 60 rue Célony ; 
free entry. ---- Excerpts from The Bite's Rehearsals : Aunt Pino's Inn / You
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH4ll9Cvy2o

http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Theatre-Sauvage

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Message: 2






LEICESTER PUBLIC MEETING - 2pm Saturday 10th November 2018
With this year marking the 100th anniversary of the ending of the First World War, 
Leicester ACG will be holding a public meeting to look at what really brought the Great 
War to an end. In schools, the ruling class history curriculum teaches schoolchildren the 
reasons World War 1 started - forgetting the part about imperialist thieves falling out 
and fighting over markets for various national capitalist interests. School history 
lessons generally shy away from remembering what actually ended the war. This meeting 
explains why. --- Venue: Upstairs at the Regent Club, 102 Regent Rd, Leicester LE1 7DA - 
ask at the bar downstairs for the "Libsoc" meeting
https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2018/10/10/meeting-how-did-world-war-1-really-end/

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Message: 3





The second day continues unauthorized protests in the Primorsky Territory, arrogantly 
caused, even by Russian standards, by the manipulation of the elections of the head of the 
region. ---- Recall, on September 16, the second round of elections took place, according 
to the results of which, up to the counting of 99% of the votes, the Communist Party's 
protest, opposition candidate from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Andrei 
Ishchenko was the leader "flew Vladimir Putin). ---- However, upon reaching this 
percentage, the data on the website of the regional election commission ceased to be 
updated for several hours. When the result was published, United Russia Tarasenko won. And 
his competitor Ischenko even worsened his performance. The turnout percentage for some 
polling stations has also changed, reaching 100%.

September 17, residents of Vladivostok and nearby cities began to gather in the square in 
front of the administration building. Also held a rally in Ussuriysk. The failed governor 
called on fellow citizens for an indefinite protest ("We must all unite and stand on this 
square until the CEC decides to cancel the election results!") And even went on a hunger 
strike.

However, in the evening of that day, he refused to go on hunger strike and organize a 
perpetual tent camp (at the request of Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov), and 
instead offered to gather in the square every evening until the results are revised. And 
also he continued the so beloved Communist Party of the Russian Federation since the time 
of the 90s the song "we have gathered facts about violations and will go to court", which 
did not lead to anything earlier and could hardly bring about any significant changes now.

Such behavior of pseudo-opposition is not a surprise for us, and, we hope, will open the 
eyes of those who still maintain faith in the current political system and pseudo-democracy.

Turning away from politically inclined persons, we want to say that even though we, as 
anarchists, do not consider "fair" elections as a remedy for society's diseases , we fully 
support the self-organized protests of people without regard to power and permission.

And we can only hope that in the course of this struggle people realize that the only way 
to achieve social progress in modern Russia is revolutionary . And that it is necessary to 
fight not for "fair" elections, but for the complete breakdown of the existing system of 
oppression and the transition to a genuine - direct democracy.

https://bo-ak.org/index.php/ru/1/81-narusheniya-na-vyborakh-protesty-v-primore

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Message: 4






education zero hours contract High Education EWN university Bank contract ---- Five years 
ago, "zero hours" contracts came to the attention of the national media. While there is no 
one type of "zero hours" contract,  in all cases workers receive no guaranteed weekly 
hours or income. Workers are paid only for the actual hours worked, and the employer is 
under no obligation to provide any work. Their use by employers in very many sectors of 
the British economy has mushroomed in recent years. In 2006, possibly 0.5% of the 
workforce had "zero hours" contracts (130,000). According to the Labour Force Survey, 
901,000 people (representing 2.8% of all workers) were on contracts that do not guarantee 
work in December 2017.
While some workers do favour the flexibility that some types of "zero hours" contracts 
offer them, there is no doubt that they bring the bosses' far greater gains. In general, 
workers on "zero hours" contracts receive lower gross weekly pay. They work fewer hours on 
average than those on proper contracts and are more likely to want to work more hours. 
Workers on "zero hours" contracts tend to be younger and less likely to be educated beyond 
sixteen. Workplaces where "zero hours" contracts proliferate have higher proportions of 
workers on low pay, and of non-British nationals. They are used by bosses as a means of 
reducing wages and avoiding paying workers their legal entitlements in terms of holiday 
pay, enhanced sick pay, maternity pay, pensions, and other benefits and rights ordinarily 
enjoyed by workers on proper contracts such as provision of duties to avoid redundancy, 
redundancy payments and unfair dismissal claims. As their use has boomed, so have their 
more exploitative aspects. "Zero hours" contract workers have complained of, for example, 
being prevented from working for other employers; not being given sufficient notice of 
work being either available or being cancelled; not being offered work when there is work 
available and not having a real choice about accepting work (or fearing being given no 
more work if they turn some work down).

Though more prevalent in the private sector, parts of the public sector have increasingly 
adopted "zero hours" contracts. The use of "zero hours" contracts in the Education sector 
has grown by more than ten times since 2004. They are certainly now well established in 
Higher Education (HE). According to the University and College Union (UCU), in September 
2018 46% of universities and 60% of colleges use zero hours contracts. The specifics of 
which institutions are currently the worst offenders are impossible to determine as many 
simply refused to disclose their data on who is doing the teaching and on what terms and 
conditions.

While some institutions have tried, belatedly, to reduce or eliminate "zero hours" 
contracts in the light of the national outcry in 2013 (or at least they claimed to be 
doing so), the figures gained at that time by UCU make sobering reading. Half of HE 
institutions then used "zero hours" contracts, employing at least 25,000 workers in 
teaching, research or admin roles. The total number employed on "zero hours" contracts in 
any single institution varied from a handful to, in five cases, literally thousands of 
people. Almost 90% of these are employed to teach, and they constituted almost a half of 
all ‘teaching only' staff, and 16% of all staff who do some teaching. "Zero hours" workers 
who were employed to teach or research constituted almost 13% of all academic staff. Many 
more (again, the numbers varied considerably between institutions) had "zero hours" 
contracts but were not given any work to actually do. Crucially, for all their apparent 
popularity with HE employers, now over half of HE institutions do not use them at all. 
This begs the question of why the rest have seen fit to travel -in some cases, it seems, 
very far- down the path of casualisation.

Those HE institutions that have embraced the casualisation option often use "zero hours" 
contracts of the "bank" type. This means that workers on them are part of a "bank" of 
individuals who the University can call on to deliver specific duties (teaching, for the 
most part).  But, as in the private sector, "bank" contracts offer employers a way of 
saving a lot of money. They allow universities to offer teaching at undergraduate and 
postgraduate levels that costs a small fraction of the equivalent teaching if done by a 
lecturer on a proper contract (either permanent or fixed term). Staff on "bank" contracts 
not only deliver support teaching -for example, running student seminars that are led by 
full-time staff members who deliver the lectures- they also devise and run their own 
modules, being responsible for delivering all lectures and associated seminars/tutorials, 
as well as essay marking and exam setting and marking. Essentially, they can do everything 
in terms of teaching that a full time-member of staff does but on a small fraction of the 
pay. As well as being cheaper, "bank" contract workers are much less ‘problematic'. 
European employment legislation entitles any worker on four successive years of short-term 
contracts to a permanent contract from that employer. The same counts for "bank" 
contracts; the only problem is that a "permanent" "bank" contract is worthless; the 
employer is under no obligation to offer any work under its terms.

"Bank" contract" staff are not, unlike their full-time colleagues, paid for any research 
and writing time, even though most universities now claim that they place "research-led" 
(or "research informed") teaching at the centre of their "missions". The "bank" contract 
worker is expected to do all their research and publishing in their own spare time, and 
for free even though (as far as the University authorities are concerned) the 
research-active tutor is necessarily superior in terms of designing and delivering 
teaching to the tutor who makes no research effort/is not research active. "Bank" contract 
workers are worse off even than those staff on teaching fellowships, who enjoy a 
significant proportion of their paid time to keep up with the key developments in their 
field and, in any case, get paid massively more. Again, keeping up with developments in 
the field is a basic necessity for anyone expected to deliver high-quality 
research-informed teaching at undergraduate level or higher. But, yet again, the "bank" 
contract worker is expected to do this in their own time, and unpaid.

Worse still, "bank" contract teaching is paid at an ungenerous rate in terms of hours of 
preparation deemed requisite to deliver a given amount of teaching. For example, three 
hours pay is allocated to deliver one lecture; two hours to prepare and one to actually 
deliver. This is reasonable if a pre-existing lecture only requires minimal revision to be 
delivered again, but it discourages any major innovations in teaching unless the tutor 
concerned is prepared to invest all the extra effort required in re-vamping a module from 
their free time; this is, of course, while also having to keep up with reading the latest 
literature and pursuing their own research and publishing agenda.

To write a lecture in the humanities or social sciences for a new module from scratch, 
supported with a well-planned and entertaining (nicely illustrated) PowerPoint 
presentation can take anything up to five full days' work. The "bank" worker still gets 
paid the same two hours preparation for what could be forty hours work. On one occasion I 
was fortunate enough to be asked to deliver a pre-existing module with ready-prepared 
slides, some lecture notes and even some of the lectures recorded. I still spent some days 
(unpaid, of course) working on each of the majority of the lectures; I wanted to improve 
their content and structure, to make them ‘mine' and not to cut corners in any way; that 
would be to short-change the students. This kind of behaviour is actively discouraged by 
the conditions of "bank" contracts; though of course it is also simultaneously expected 
from us by our employers.

Of course, the "bank" contract worker might think that, if they give their time freely 
now, to re-cast a module and make it work much better, gain improved student feedback and 
so forth, that a proper contract might be offered them by a grateful employer in the 
future. Personal experience suggests this is an illusion for, while the platitudes of the 
vice-chancellors regarding the importance of quality teaching are generally repeated, with 
greater or lesser actual conviction, by ordinary staff, in practice the over-riding aim 
tends to be merely ensuring that sufficient modules run to keep the students happy. Thus, 
relatively long-standing "zero hours" tutors have little or no bargaining power; if they 
are unhappy with being asked to deliver (and improve) the same modules repeatedly with no 
chance of an improved contract, there are always plenty more people, fresh from doing 
their PhDs and desperate for some teaching experience, who can (and will) replace them. In 
all cases, "bank" contract tutors are not paid to develop new modules to teach; that, too, 
is expected to  be voluntary work, as far as the university is concerned.

There is a related fourth aspect of the "bank" contract worker's plight. As they are paid 
only to prepare and deliver certain specific hours, there is no incentive to be around a 
department apart from when actually delivering ‘contact' hours (in class with the 
students). Those who need to do other jobs to make ends meet at the time when they are not 
scheduled to teach cannot come into their departments unpaid even if they wanted to. This 
means the "bank" contract worker is ordinarily left isolated from their fellow workers, 
making it difficult to find out who is on similar terms to themselves and, indeed, not 
really knowing who most of their colleagues actually are. This anonymity can sometimes be 
useful; in the recent round of UCU strikes I had no pay deducted even though I supported 
all strikes as I had not been asked if I was striking by the head of department. Even 
though I was leading a module, my profile was so low that I had simply gone unnoticed.

Of course, if you're hoping to make a good impression through your teaching with the aim 
of securing a better contract, this kind of anonymity has its problems. That I was not 
noticed was just as well in my case as my UCU branch had no provision in place for 
providing strike pay for "bank" contract workers. Theoretically, the "bank" contract 
worker stands to lose a lot more, proportionately, if a strike falls on a day when they 
were timetabled to deliver teaching. But this isolation and invisibility necessarily makes 
the "bank" tutor a usually more compliant worker, rendered highly unlikely to act against 
possible bullying or harassment for fear of losing their very precarious hold on any kind 
of work in the sector at all. In short, raised above the parapet, a "bank" worker's head 
is particularly easy to shoot. They do not need to be sacked; they are simply offered no 
more work.

In terms of relations with the students, "bank" contract workers tend to get the teaching 
no one else in a department wants; so they get offered, for example, the same "pack ‘em 
in" mass first year modules (and, in my department, the strangely despised ‘research 
methods' modules...). While they might, if they are diligent, be able to develop a good 
working rapport with their students over the year, "bank" tutors very rarely get the 
chance to continue this working relationship, as they are again offered the same first 
year modules the following year. When asked by a keen first year who has evidently enjoyed 
the teaching delivered them at a knock-down price "what might you be teaching next 
year...?", the "bank" contract tutor can only answer honestly; "I haven't the faintest 
idea, but probably this module again..."

It can be amusing to get the students in a humanities or social science class, especially 
(with their very low numbers of contact hours), to work out just how much the class is 
costing each of them, and how much they are paying collectively to be there. Then tell 
them what you're getting paid to do deliver it. You might then ask them where the rest of 
the money (the vast bulk of it) goes... Unsurprisingly, many soon start saying they have 
had a change of heart in terms of their career paths. The plans to be a corporate lawyer 
or a city trader go out of the window; they now all want to be university 
vice-chancellors... The rapport with the students is such that "bank" contract workers are 
often asked for references by their students. This happens to me quite frequently. The 
students identify you as the member of staff who best knows them and their work and 
(rightly) expect a reference from you. It's not in my job description, so it ends up being 
another form of unpaid work the "bank" tutor does for the university, out of feeling a 
sense of obligation towards the unsuspecting students.

Of course, this teaching can still be very rewarding and it does, if the module is led by 
a full-time member of staff, mean that the "bank" contract worker has little or no 
administrative responsibility, nor responsibility for the overall success or failure of 
the module. As noted above, there are also chances to design and lead modules, but here 
the "bank" contract worker can get quite resentful. They are then doing exactly what their 
permanent colleagues are doing (and some diligent "bank" workers, in terms of students' 
ratings, sometimes do rather better than many of their tenured colleagues), but for 
comparative peanuts. All of this can only happen in the first place as the competition for 
the precious few proper contracts in many parts of the HE is such that there are tens and 
quite possibly even hundreds prepared to replace the disgruntled "bank" contract worker 
with but a moment's notice.

Replacements can come from the growing numbers of Ph.D. students desperate to get some 
teaching experience (so desperate in fact that there have been cases of some departments 
effectively getting their Ph.D. students to literally teach for free, albeit in 
un-credited modules...). I also know of at least one casualised worker who IS willing to 
work for free: I keep telling him not to give his employers any ideas...! Then there are 
the growing numbers of those with Ph.D.s who cannot get proper contracts but who live in 
hope, using "bank" contract work to keep their heads above water until the promised land 
of a tenured position comes along. If often doesn't. If you're in this category then 
you're really in trouble if you want a proper future in the academy. Finally, in my 
institution, at least, there are a few retired former teachers and professionals who do 
this work for fun. As they have their pensions already sorted, they can afford the 
conditions and are not subject to the same pressures as the rest of us, as their careers 
are behind them. The quality of the teaching they deliver can also vary quite 
considerably. Some seem able to get away with all kinds of student-unfriendly behaviour 
almost with impunity. The colossal slagging they get in student feedback at the end of 
each academic year seems to have no impact on their methods the following year, nor does 
it seem to prevent them from being invited once again to teach on the same modules... 
While there is an army of potential replacements out there waiting for their chance, it is 
easier to simply retain certain people who know the modules concerned back-to-front; 
especially people who won't even think about protesting about their contractual status 
(they don't need to...)

The tide might be on the turn in terms of casualisation in HE, though, thanks to many 
University's preference for opacity over transparency it is not entirely clear that this 
IS the case... Currently, there remains in the British HE sector the spectre of students 
paying increasingly vast sums of money to attend (with university fees having risen to the 
top limit of £9,000 in very many institutions) being taught by people who are subject to 
the peculiar pressures and problems that working on "zero hours" contracts entail. The 
growing contradictions of this situation must surely become untenable, and the recent 
initiatives by various types of casualised staff in HE to form together and try to exert 
pressure on University hierarchies are a very encouraging sign that perhaps, through 
organisation and solidarity, all the various forms of casualised working can in the future 
be eliminated from the sector altogether.

http://www.solfed.org.uk/ewn/zero-hours-contracts-in-higher-education-the-zero-option

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Message: 5






NieuwLand - Pieter Nieuwlandstraat 93 -- Amsterdam -- Venezuelan anarchist speak out; 
disappointing lessons from the sudamerican left. ---- This night we take a zoom into the 
legacy of Hugo Chavez, involving issues like corruption, oil incomes, economic crisis, 
prosecution of dissidents, ideological control and militarism. After a presentation, there 
will be time for questions and discussion. ---- Almost two decades passed for the 
so-called "Bolivarian revolution". The legacy of Hugo Chavez is nowadays, beyond telesur 
and rusiatoday propaganda, an execrable economic disaster which has lead to the biggest 
exodus of Venezuelan people in the whole history of the country. A totalitarian state that 
has taken over the economy by the hand of the military cast to prosecute dissidence to 
prison and taking advantage from mineral extractivism (oil, gold, gas) to settle with 
China and Russia the most neoliberal measures to keep Nicolas Maduro on the presidential 
chair.

Military budget is on the rise; huge privileges are given to the military cast. 
Ideological control and submission to a dead leader. The 1984 Orwellian stories taken as a 
user manual.

Join our rounded table tonight. There will be Venezuelan food sharing.

Location: NieuwLand, Pieter Nieuwlandstraat 93, Amsterdam
Date: Friday 19 November, 19.00 - 23.00

info-avond, Nieuwland, venezuela

Vrije Bond Secretariaat

https://www.vrijebond.org/amsterdam-info-and-discussion-night-18-years-of-militarism-in-venezuela/

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