German DiEM25 activists take Amazon’s perverse labour practices head-on
For several years, Germany’s second-biggest labour union “ver.di” has been trying to advance collective agreements for workers of Amazon’s labour force. The US online-shopping giant has established almost slave-like working conditions. Besides precarious contracts and unreasonably low wages, workers are subjected to extreme physical strain – like having to walk some 20 kilometres during their shifts, as ordered by an electronic device. And yet, Amazon refuses to even negotiate with labour unions.
The outcome of this struggle will decide who sets Amazon’s working conditions: the company on its own, or its management in negotiation with the workers’ representatives.
Amazon is a perfect symbol of a new era of slave-labour under surveillance capitalism. Past strikes have been unsuccessful, especially because Amazon resorts to dumping its capacities to Poland and the Czech Republic, where workers are subjected to even lower wages. As a result, most consumers often are not even aware that there have been strikes in Amazon factories in Germany, or the workers’ struggle!
This year, various political groups and activists are organising around the #MakeAmazonPay campaign to bring public awareness and stand behind Amazon’s workers. And DiEM25 activists in Germany are joining them.
This is not about just Amazon or its abusive practices in Germany, Europe and indeed elsewhere, but also about a larger struggle in defence of the value of labour and restoring workers rights globally.
DiEM25’s manifesto spells out the need to tackle many issues at international level to move-past the current neoliberal trend, through sensible policies like our European New Deal. And while our movement will constructively forward its values for a more democratic Union everywhere, as well as at the ballots, we ought to join other forces’ efforts to bring awareness, and, if necessary, take the Establishment head on.
So help us expose what this new form of serfdom, driven by corporations relentless appetite for profits, means for us all.
Join us in this exercise of solidarity however you can:
- spread the #MakeAmazonPay message via social media (follow our DiEM25-Leipzig Twitter account for more info)
- come to the solidarity demonstration if you are in Leipzig – tomorrow, November 24 at 9.30am!
- join your nearest DiEM25 local group and help us develop policy, campaigns and actions to empower our Progressive Agenda for Europe…
- join DiEM25 if haven’t already!
We’re counting on you!
Not all quiet on the Eastern front…
The joint endeavour of Diemers from Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia working on the Eastern European platform has already been publicised in this article. This was just to present a cornerstone for future actions, opening up the space for other Diemers from Eastern Europe to join in. Anyone sensible rejects facile comparison, but we need to admit that this part of Europe “needs different treatment”.
Subsequently we have decided that our main goals and aims are the following: one – to tell the story that introduces members from non-Eastern European countries to the troubles and strife of Eastern European countries: and second – to demonstrate conclusively that it is crucial for the future of Europe to implement DiEM 25 pillars in these countries too, whether or not they are members of the EU.
Let us not forget the words of Julian Assange concerning Serbia: “a country in-between, a pivotal, pioneering place where the future happens first.” Of course, the same can be said about the whole of the region. Sometimes, and not seldom, local symptoms at the “periphery” reveal serious diseases or malaises at the core. Europe is and should be a living body, therefore the rest of our European brothers living in the South, North or the West of our continent clearly cannot look away when they see people evicted from their homes for minor debts, their goods confiscated; impoverished, downtrodden workers thrown out of their jobs; governments ruled by billionaires presiding over shrivelling economies, rising xenophobia and racism, militarism, tribalism; crushing defeats and leftwing and progressive forces the objects of derision in elections – all of which is actually happening right now in half of the European continent.
It is crucial to learn from the example of Eastern Europe if we don’t want to see the whole of Europe collapsing in this way. We are for the time being collecting new materials with the aim of thoroughly working through the items already outlined in our article.
Since democracy is the foundation for all other efforts, we have decided to start with it. So this will be the subject of our next paper. It gives us pleasure to invite you to to read and to contribute to our debates group. There are no local problems, but only local understandings, and we are here to bridge the gaps. Watch this space.
Carpe DiEM!
Bogdan is a member of DSC Bucharest, but also a humble engineer living in Munich. His main points of interest are socio-political issues of South-East Europe, as well as promoting DiEM25 there.
A proposal for a European Constituent Assembly
On October 1, the first national assembly of DiEM25 activists in Italy took place in Naples. The result was a proposal for a campaign on the European Constituent Assembly, below.
This proposal is aimed at all Italian DiEM25 DSCs (local groups) and activists, as a basis for a national campaign of DiEM25 in Italy. We also ask DSCs and DiEM25 activists of throughout Europe to discuss this proposal and share their thoughts, with a view to this gaining widespread support within the movement and ultimately becoming official DiEM25 policy.
Meanwhile, we’ll continue to develop this proposal, together with the Italian thematic committee on the European Constitution, open to all DiEM25 activists interested. We encourage all European activists interested in the issue to create thematic committees on it, including at national level, and to share with the movement their conclusions.
DiEM25’s Manifesto foresees, as a mid-term goal (two years’ time), the convening of a pan-European Constituent Assembly ‘empowered to decide on a future democratic constitution that will replace all existing European Treaties within a decade’.
As DiEM25 Italy, we believe that creating a united, democratic, federal Europe by 2025 is the core of the political project of our movement, as the very name Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 illustrates. Capturing the citizens’ drive, in all the countries of the Union, to have their say, and believing that we cannot leave referendums in the hands of reactionary and nationalist forces, we therefore propose that DiEM25 launch a pan-European campaign to hold a non-binding referendum for the whole continent. The goal: to ask the Europeans to elect a Constituent Assembly for the EU together with the 2024 European elections. This Assembly would then write a democratic constitution that would replace all existing European Treaties.
To achieve this, DiEM25 should contact all local, regional and national representatives and institutions, so they can share our cause and host the electoral ballots on the day of the referendum. DiEM25 should also engage with associations, movements, trade unions and social forces spread on the continent so that they can support the cause of the referendum and share their buildings to host the electoral ballots, should the institutions be unwilling to cooperate.
To increase participation – especially in those territories where it might be impossible to install electoral ballots – we should develop an electronic voting system guaranteeing safe and non-manipulated casting of votes. We believe DiEM25 should tap into the 2019 European election campaign to launch the proposal for the referendum – to be held approximately by the end of 2019 – and that, should the results be in favour of the Constituent Assembly, the European Parliament should hold the elections of the Constituent Assembly together with the 2024 European elections.
Should DiEM25 decide to establish its own ‘electoral wing’ and candidate it to the 2019 European elections, we ask that the proposal for the referendum become the key point of that electoral campaign, together with the European New Deal, and that DiEM25 employ its MEPs to support the referendum and its results.
From now on, until 2019, DiEM25 should engage with local institutions and representatives, social, political forces, and trade unions, so that, when the 2019 electoral campaign starts, the proposal of the referendum will have solid bases to rely upon.
This should be the core campaign for DiEM25: a campaign that has the capacity to unite the movement at the local, national and European level in order to achieve what DiEM25 was born for – because Europe will be democratised, or it will disintegrate!
Income inequality is getting worse. It’s time to address it.
November was an interesting month for people like us who are fighting inequalities, especially around income. A scientific study argued that inequality is deeply rooted in our history, appearing as soon as the first agricultural developments occurred… with Europeans developing harsher inequalities than native American populations.
Meanwhile, the recent Paradise Papers leak showed that, despite the progress of western civilisation, inequality is as pronounced as ever. And another report suggests that this severe income inequality is on the rise, boosted by the economic crisis.
How can anyone find it acceptable that this long-term problem is as bad as ever, and getting worse? That the planet’s richest 1% hold over 50% of its wealth, while millions of people in Africa, India and Europe live below the absolute poverty level?
The proposals in DiEM25’s European New Deal aim to address this, and bring about a fairer and and more just distribution of income. Accumulation of money, record-low investments, understaffed social services and governments that don’t represent people’s interests are different sides of the same problem: lack of democratic control. We need to organise, demand our rights, fix the democracy gap and make the European New Deal policy.
Want to be part of it? Start here!
Aris is a member and volunteer of the DiEM25 movement.
May 2019, here we come!
Dear DiEM25 Member,
This is a good time to be a DiEMer.
Last week we “seized the day” and plunged ourselves into a challenging, perilous, but also exciting new phase for our young movement: Yes, we will go for it!
May 2019, here we come!
Our internal vote was decisive: 73% of verified members voted and of those 93% voted “yes”. Even before DiEM25’s second anniversary comes and goes, we shall begin working tirelessly to take our European New Deal, our Progressive Agenda for Europe, to ballot boxed across Europe in the May 2019 European Parliament election.
Whatever happens in the end, this is a historic moment: Never before has a movement tried to present a SINGLE comprehensive policy agenda to ALL Europeans on the basis of ONE party list across our divided and fragmenting Union.
We are in it to win. But our notion of victory is very, very different. Victory for us means putting on the agenda, everywhere, our progressive, moderate, but also radical policy framework. It means doing so in a manner that shows Europeans that a transnational European democracy is not only possible but also that it is already here – in embryonic form within the ranks of DiEM25. It means giving birth to a new politics, a new ethos in the face of elections, a new spirit of electoral engagement by activists who detest ‘authority’ but who contest elections to restore sovereignty to persons, collectives, cities, regions, peoples and Parliaments.
From today, we begin discussions in every country, in every city with civil society and with political actors whose politics is close to our Manifesto and whose policies are consistent with our Progressive Agenda for Europe and our European New Deal. The aim? To prepare, in good time, the SINGLE comprehensive policy agenda to be presented in May 2019 to voters everywhere. Our members, DSCs, National Collectives, the Coordinating Collective, all of us must prepare for this Grand Dialogue across Europe. Let’s begin!
What can you do?
In the recent vote we decided, amongst other things, to create thematic DSCs. Now is the time for you to form such Thematic DSCs and use them to help build up our SINGLE comprehensive policy agenda. In collaboration with existing DSCs. These Thematic DSCs could take these themes and topical issues out into discussions in the wider community to create the political buzz, awareness and literacy that we shall need, as part of the urgent process of producing recommendations to the rest of the movement, regarding the following areas of DiEM25’s May 2019 electoral program:
- Green Investment and Ecological Transition Across the Whole of Europe
- Public/Private Debt management for the Eurozone
- A Pan-European Anti-Poverty Program
- Post-capitalism (E.g. Universal Basic Dividend, changes to property rights over capital etc.)
- Labour
- A humane, efficient plan for Migration & Refugees
- European Foreign Policy and Defence
- Closure of tax heavens
- Regulating Big Tech
- Regulating Big Pharma
- A European Charter for the Commons
- European municipalism (plan for greater autonomy for cities)
- A different kind of European trade treaties
- Toward a Democratic European Constitution (A constitutional assembly process leading to the drafting of a constitution by which to replace all the Treaties)
- Anti-fascism
- Feminism
The list of priorities may change as we firm up our political alliances and new issues emerge in this multivalent process, which we will share with our DiEM25 members as we proceed.
What National Collectives must do?
Help us, in collaboration with DSCs, to map the political situation (with upcoming elections, possible allies, etc.) in each nation-state ahead of the European parliament elections in 2019. Consider the legal issues relating to putting up candidates in your country, propose to the CC potential partners in your country, work on ways in which our European New Deal can be developed (i.e. deepened) for your country.
The Coordinating Collective’s role
Commence the discussions with potential partners across Europe, in collaboration with PNCs, DSCs etc., and coordinate the authoring of the pan European SINGLE comprehensive policy agenda that will be presented to voters in May 2019.
And that’s just the beginning.
Our path to May 2019 is, undoubtedly, strewn with many issues, problems, dangers. Some of our members were reluctant to endorse our Not Just Another Political Party proposal for this reason. We take their warnings seriously. We are particularly mindful of the importance of maintaining DiEM25 as a movement while keeping our ‘electoral wing’ as an instrument – rather than a driver of what we do. Lest we forget, the deepening of our internal democracy is essential to the democratization of Europe.
Nevertheless, while keeping these concerns firmly in our mind, it is also crucial that we allow ourselves a few minutes to celebrate the moment we seized the day. This is a truly exciting moment. We may fail. But it will be tremendous fun trying. And if we do our best, without taking ourselves too seriously, we shall succeed. Why? Because what DiEM25 is about, and our latest endeavour, is precisely what this moment in history demands.
Yanis Varoufakis
>>DiEM25 co-founder and member of the Coordinating Collective
Can DiEM25 become the first transnational party?
By Giacomo Russo Spena
Last week members of DiEM25 voted on whether the movement should be able to compete in elections. An overwhelming 92% chose YES, favouring the decision to set up an electoral wing. The Italian magazine MicroMega spoke to Lorenzo Marsili, founder of European Alternatives, about what this actually means, and the movement’s roadmap for transforming Europe. Political Critique translated the interview.
Giacomo Russo Spena: Let’s talk about the organisation of DiEM25. How many members does it have now? How many branches are there across Europe?
Lorenzo Marsili: There are nearly 70,000 members and more than a hundred local groups across Europe, as well as a coordinating collective made up of 12 elected members. Soon there will also be a number of national collectives which will also be elected by the members.
Where do the finances come from?
DiEM25 is made up of volunteers that make a living working elsewhere, putting in nights and weekends to further an idea they believe in. The funds there are come entirely from voluntary monthly donations, and these allow us to take on a minimal staff. It’s all accounted for online, both revenue and expenses.
So DiEM25 will become a party. What’s the ‘road map’ to really make it happen?
In the coming months two things will happen. First DiEM25 will be registered as a political movement in a number of European countries. And at the same time it will sit down with political forces and social movements to build a larger alliance. The ambitious objective is to launch an electoral campaign by Spring 2018, exactly one year before the elections for the European Parliament. This would allow real citizen participation and transform a simple campaign into a moment of political reawakening across the continent.
2019 is the first test then?
The situation in Europe is extremely serious. It is unthinkable that the European elections should be used once again simply as a kind of mid-term survey for national parties. For the first time in the history of our continent we need a proposal – from Portugal to Poland, from Ireland to Italy – which will mobilise and warm hearts around a clear programme of change. In this sense the European elections are an excuse, a device. There is little interest in sending a dozen people to a heavily restrictive parliament. The aim is rather to ‘hack’ the elections, to transform them into a continental political campaign: a kind of ‘Sanders moment’ for Europe.
What does it mean to be the first pan-European party? You’re going against the tide of sovereigntist impulses that seem to be returning…
Such impulses are the – wrong – response to a failing Europe. Moreover they’re made in concentric circles: we cannot manage to govern globalisation, we cannot govern the disaster that today’s Europe has become, and so we recoil to the nation-state. Then we realise that the state is victim to the very same oligarchies of power, so we try to close ourselves up in regional identities or call for new micro nations. If we go on like this we’ll all end up alone, each one of us behind a personal wall, pointing our fingers at anything foreign. It will be the world of Hobbes, where life is “solitary, poor, brutish and short.” This drift has to be stopped.
You recently wrote a book with Yanis Varoufakis called ‘The Third Space’ (Italian: Laterza) and you are preparing another, also about Europe, in which you explain why nationalism and neoliberalism are two sides of the same coin. Do you really think Europe is still capable of reform?
We need to take Europe back. By doing this we will take back our states, our regions and our cities. Because there are big issues, out there, that we have to govern. Tax evasion by multinationals, migration, climate change, the transformation of an economic model of neoliberal globalisation that is clearly unjust and ineffective. Can things change? In reality everything is changing around us! It makes me laugh when people complain that “Europe cannot change” as the world transforms in front of our eyes!
It would be a historic disaster to leave Xi Jinping’s China to redraw the new terms of globalisation alone. Instead we need to put control of the future in the hands of citizens. In order to do this we have to understand that there is no longer an easy separation between European, national and local politics. There is just politics, in a continuum that traverses all these spaces. We need to be in a position to govern this reality, with a proposal and an organised force that from the municipal to the European level is in a position to present and fight for an alternative.
What parties is DiEM trying to make relationships with around Europe? Podemos in Spain, Mélenchon in France etc?
DiEM25 is sitting around the table with a variety of European forces to arrive at a common programme and a shared strategy. In Poland it’s Razem, a new party similar in composition to Podemos. In Denmark with The Alternative, which is another new party founded by artists and social movements, but already the third most important political force in the country. In the Czech Republic, the Pirates who took 10% in the elections a few weeks ago and are members of DiEM25. In France, Benoit Hamon has publicly asked for a meeting to align his new movement with DiEM25: but clearly the space here is much more open… I’m thinking for example of PCF and the Greens. In Spain DiEM25 is working with the mayor of Barcelona Ada Colau who in fact was among the first members. And more – DiEM25 also speaks about the need for a progressive alliance, which includes diverse political families from the left to the greens, from social democrats to grassroots movements. But beyond parties we can never forget that there are the citizens. And in Europe there is a new generation that lives the European space and which believes the time has come to take control of it.
Will DiEM25 be a left wing party?
I was twelve years old when I first heard the word ‘left wing.’ My mother woke me up excited to tell me that for the first time in the history of the republic the left was in government. It was in 1996 and Romani Prodi’s centre-left coalition had just won elections. From that point on the left was the thing that privatised, that precariatised work, and gave an open book to the financial sector. So personally I don’t have a great emotional attachment to the word. But I know that many others feel close to it. People talk about a world of solidarity, justice and passion, but I can only see it in history books: the Bertolucci of ‘Before the Revolution’, the extraordinary period between ‘68-’77 in Italy.
Who does DiEM25 aim to speak to?
The task today is to speak to everyone. Including those who have never asked themselves what ‘left wing’ means, or who perhaps do not feel themselves to be on the left at all. But who feel instinctively that a system in which eight people control half of global wealth while we are told there isn’t enough money for welfare; that a system which takes it out on migrants instead of locking up the managers of big multinationals that launder money in Panama; that a system like this is a failed one, morally and economically bankrupt, and needs to be overhauled.
This interview is an edited version of that which appeared on MicroMega (10 November). It was translated from Italian by Jamie Mackay.
Photo credit: European Alternatives.
Technological progress should not simply serve capitalism
Andrew Ng, an AI expert, made several interesting observations and proposals during a recent conference in the US. Ng knows well how technological progress and automation can threaten jobs. Yet he is against a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and instead suggests a “New Deal” so that people get free access to education. In other words, a Universal Basic Education Fund.
At DiEM25, our proposed alternative to UBI is a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD), which expands on the concept of UBI to allow people to directly benefit from the profits of companies that they themselves have funded through their taxes. Whether or not this is via an Education Fund, as Ng suggests, debating these proposals is something we should all be doing .
Whatever the model, we should also ensure that it is not designed to simply serve capitalism: people should be able to use the money in an education field they choose, not something that is dictated by their company’s capital interest. Such money should be distributed to address social inequalities, not make them worse. That should happen in an evolving society; as Ng put it “we need to train them for the new jobs”.
Technological progress should help improve people’s lives, not simply serve capitalism, as our European New Deal spells out. Join us and let’s make it policy!
Aris is a member and volunteer of the DiEM25 movement.
A European-level proposal for dealing with Catalonia and similar crises
On Wednesday, at a press conference in Barcelona, our co-founder Yanis Varoufakis presented his proposal for a European response to the current crisis in Catalonia, and for similar crises in the EU.
Here’s a video of the press conference in case you missed it:
Yanis’ proposal – which you can see in summary form here – puts forward a progressive pan-European policy framework for issues of independence in European regions. Today we’re releasing the full version of that proposal, to trigger a discussion across DiEM25’s membership, on the way to forming an official DiEM25 position on this issue as part of our Progressive Agenda. See below for the link!
Download Proposal
"BREXIT: What must be avoided and what must be done, now!" – speech at The Royal Society
No venue is better suited for a detoxifying discussion on Brexit than The Royal Society, whose motto (Nullius In Verba – On No One’s Word) ought to be the foundation of all rational debate. I was, thus, moved and deeply honoured by the EEF’s (*) invitation to deliver their annual lecture on Brexit in The Royal Society.
To listen to the talk, which I delivered in the evening on 7th November 2017, click media player below.
(*) Britain’s Manufacturers’ Association