We published the original Prison Island report in August 2018. We then released an updated second edition in January 2019.

Download the report here:

• Low Resolution – Prison Island 2021 (877kb)
• High Resolution – Prison Island 2021 (4.5mb)

Grassroots groups are welcome to request printed copies of the report for free by emailing contact@corporatewatch.org

Order a copy of the report

Order a physical copy of the report via our store here: https://corporatewatch.org/prisonisland

Each copy includes the original Prison Island report published in 2018.

The post New Publication: Prison Island Winter 2021 Update appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Tech: A guide to the politics and philosophy of technology by Corporate Watch
– book review by John de Plume

In ways that are not always immediately obvious, technology has come to be a defining feature of life today and indeed has begun to define the possible forms our future may or may not take. Corporate Watch’s Tech is an essential introduction to the topic, exploring a range of critiques and debates around technology, its dangers, and, nonetheless, its emancipatory potential.

2021’s proposed ‘Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill’ has been met across the county with mass mobilisations committed to ‘kill the bill’ and its draconian capacities. Anger towards the bill concerns its authoritarian character, which reveals the authoritarian tendency lurking inherent within Tory governmental ideology and neoliberal statecraft generally. But this authoritarian drift could never be realised through the police baton or the judge’s hammer alone; it is necessarily a high-tech issue too. Be it through the cameras everywhere in our streets or those that are worn on the jackets of the police, or through the data we willingly sign away to the algorithms and AI of Facebook, Google, et al, the so-called UK is already among the most technologically surveilled places on the planet. Today, a drift towards a real authoritarianism is made possible by and remains contingent on the development of technological apparatuses by big-tech corporations. These corporations, in turn, have themselves, famously, concentrated more wealth than has ever before been achieved in human history.

When today the forces of production are so well developed and the microelectronics revolution might offer so much in terms of automation of labour, how, we still ask, can it be that there exists a global crisis of wealth distribution with human need remaining so often unmet? As we are seeing so often, it is tech created in the interests of the market that has facilitated simultaneously the corporate concentration of hyper-wealth and, equally, the state toolkit necessary to defend that wealth from an ever-increasing mass of dispossessed surplus populations. As we move closer towards environmental catastrophe, moreover, the irrational impasse of this situation becomes evermore urgent. Addressing the issues around technology in view of real struggle today, then, is what makes the guidance and overview found in Corporate Watch’s Tech so useful.

The question of who it is that creates tech – in whose interests and for what purpose – is central throughout the analysis in Tech. Quite blatantly, technology does not exist in the world without application and, under the logic of the market, it is the pursuit of profit that governs its creation. However, ‘The dominant view presented in society’, as Corporate Watch note, ‘is that technology is apolitical and inevitable, that it represents human progress and makes our lives easier, more fulfilling, or just ‘better” (page 12). Tech represents an intervention into this dominant view, addressing the dynamics between technological production and its socio-political applications and consequence. Of particular concern is the environmental cost of tech production and its unsustainability; as is examining currently existing and future potential, alternative approaches to tech that might redeploy technological advancement in the direct interests of human need. Possibilities for open source and DIY design and utilisation of tech are explored, as are questions of how an environmentalist engagement with tech might supercede the individualist and anthropocentric world-views inherent to tech creation under the logic of the market.

Accordingly, the book collates varied analyses and critiques from such sources as Bookchin and Marx on the social dominance and application of tech; Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and her feminist cybernetics; Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory; postcapitalist formations of tech from communisation journal Endnotes, and speculative thinkers exploring the future imaginary of technology such as sc-fi writers Ursula le Guin or Philip K Dick. In laying out such ideas and discussions and in mapping the reality of the situation today, Corporate Watch address the immediate necessity for us to respond to these questions now and to take concrete action. They observe, ‘if the digital world is regarded as another terrain of struggle and effective strategies adopted, it could shift the balance of power towards those who seek liberatory change rather than those seeking to control and exploit’ (page 100). Deliberately avoiding obfuscating language and presentation, Corporate Watch’s publications are always clear and concise, working to illuminate the problematics of contemporary life in such a way as to make participation in the debate accessible and to provide resource for action and radical change.

Participation in struggle has never been more urgent. Today, from the ways in which we conduct our social lives online, to the ways in which we are surveilled and policed, from the methods by which high-tech capitalist extractivism ravages the environment and which automated capitalist exploitation diminishes our working conditions, technology has become fundamental to neoliberal hegemony, and to its emerging authoritarian drift. ‘We are’, as Corporate Watch observe, ‘at a unique moment in human history – an ecological precipice, perhaps a social tipping point’ (page 12). We ignore this and the expanding corporate, state and technological nexus at our peril.

Tech: A guide to the politics and philosophy of technology is available now from Corporate Watch. Corporate Watch is a not-for-profit co-operative providing critical information on the social and environmental impacts of corporations and capitalism. Alongside Tech, there is an extensive back catalogue of Corporate Watch’s previous publications available here.

The post Tech Book Review appeared first on Corporate Watch.

But how does it function?

How does it affect us?

Who does it serve?

Can it support radical social change towards free and equal societies living in harmony with nature?

Are humans fated to wind up as pets for hyper-intelligent robot hamsters?

These are -mainly- important questions. However, the dominant view is that technology is apolitical and inevitable, that it represents human progress, making our lives easier, more fulfilling, or just ‘better’. Let’s dig a little deeper.

We are at a unique moment in human history – an ecological precipice, perhaps a social tipping point. Whatever path we take, unravelling technology and the dilemmas it presents will give us a clearer view of the horizon ahead of us.

This book is a brief introduction to the politics and philosophy of technology – a simple guide to how interacts with society and the world around us. We hope you find it useful.

“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections — and it matters which ones get made and unmade.” Donna J. Haraway

Click here to download a copy for free

Click here to read it online

Click here to buy a hard copy

The post Out Now: TECH, our new book on technology appeared first on Corporate Watch.

This brings together Corporate Watch’s recent research on the “hostile environment” against migrants in the UK, and the companies that profit from it. It also includes a lot of new research and analysis, and looks at the history of recent migration struggles in the UK, asking what has been effective.

You can download it for free here. And you can order paper copies here in our online shop. (It will be in bookshops soon too).

We will be glad to send copies for free to asylum seekers and other people without papers. For other people and groups fighting the border regime, we can send at cost price or whatever you can afford to donate. Email us on contact[AT]corporatewatch.org.

The UK Border Regime

Throughout history, human beings have migrated. To escape war, oppression and poverty, to make a better life, to follow their own dreams. But since the start of the 20^th century, modern governments have found ever more vicious ways to stop people moving freely.

The UK border regime includes the razor wire fences at Calais, the limbo of the asylum system, and the open violence of raids and deportations. Alongside the Home Office, it includes the companies running databases and detention centres, the media pushing hate speech, and the politicians posturing to win votes. It keeps on escalating, through Tony Blair’s war on refugees to Theresa May’s “hostile environment”, spreading fear and division.

This book describes and analyses the UK’s system of immigration controls. It looks at how it has developed through recent history, the different actors involved, and how people resist. The aim is to help understand the border regime, and ask how we can fight it effectively.

You can read the introduction and summary of the book here.

And see the full table of contents below.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Acknowledgements, Summary

Part One: Background
1. A brief history of the UK border regime
2. The Home Office: an overview
3. Sorting people
4. What is the border regime?

Part Two: Control
5. In limbo: reporting, dispersal, destitution
6. Immigration raids
7. Detention
8. Deportation
9. Calais (the ultimate “hostile environment”)
10. The “hostile environment”: making a nation of border cops
11. Hostile data
12. The logic of hostility: how collaboration works
13. Does immigration control work? The deterrent dogma

Part Three: Consent
14. Public opinion: target publics
15. Media: communication power
16. Politicians
17. Corporate power
18. Agitators
19. Anxiety engine

Part Four: How can we fight it?
20. Fighting the border regime

Annexes

Annex 1. Border profiteers: list of major Home Office immigration contracts
Annex 2. Border profiteers: company mini-profiles (G4S, Serco, Mitie, GEO, Carlson Wagonlit, Titan Airways)
Further reading

The post OUT NOW: The UK Border Regime appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Throughout history, human beings have migrated. People move for many reasons: to escape war, oppression and poverty, to make a better life, to follow their own dreams. But since the start of the 20^th century, modern governments have found ever more vicious ways to stop people moving freely.

The border regime is a name for the overall system that tries to control people’s ability to move and live, depending on our immigration status. That fixes our chances in life depending on what “papers” we have, on where we had the luck to be born, on our wealth or education, on the colour of our skin.

The UK border regime includes the state’s external borders, where people are checked coming through passport control, and patrol boats and sniffer dogs search for those trying to enter unseen. It also works inside the country, through the bureaucratic nightmare of visa and asylum applications, or the open violence of workplace raids, detention and deportation flights.

In recent years it has been creeping into ever more areas of everyday life: for example, “right to work” and “right to rent” rules, immigration checks in NHS hospitals, or the Schools Census collecting immigration data from children. This move has escalated with Theresa May’s “hostile environment” policy, but was already well under way with the previous Labour governments.

The Home Office is the main government department responsible for immigration control. But there are many other players involved too. For example, private security companies running detention centres, or IT firms developing new surveillance tools. Or the media pumping out anti-migrant propaganda, and ambitious politicians posturing to look “tough on immigration”.

And the border regime also relies on millions of other people collaborating in small ways, sometimes without even knowing. For example, healthcare or council workers, “just doing their jobs”, pass on personal information that may lead to someone being detained and deported. Or any of us who just walk on by when we see someone being stopped or raided. The border regime cannot exist without our consent.

What, and who, is this book for?

The aim of this book is to provide information and ideas to help understand how the border regime works, and to think about how we can fight it effectively.

Our research group, Corporate Watch, has been studying the UK border regime for ten years now. We have produced many articles and reports investigating parts of it, and in particular the private companies that make money from it. We work closely with people fighting the system, and are active in these struggles ourselves. In this book, for the first time, we bring this research together in one place.

The book isn’t about why the border regime is a problem. It says little about the human cost of borders – the deaths in the seas and deserts, the torture camps our government helps fund in Libya, the routine abuse and destitution faced by refugees who make it to the UK.

It is written for people who are angry about these things and want to stop them happening. For people directly affected by immigration controls, or those involved in groups fighting for free movement, or other people who support these struggles.

The book talks a little bit about how border controls are connected to other forms of oppression and exploitation – about the roles they play in capitalism, colonialism, nationalism and racism. We believe that the fight against borders is tied to struggles against all these structures, and more. But there is a lot more to say on this than can fit in this book.

One crucial point. Migrants, and above all people “without papers”, are on the cutting edge of this struggle. But the border regime affects all of us. The rich and powerful use it to spread fear and division, to stop people working together to make a world where everyone can live a decent life. As such, it can only be defeated with solidarity, by people both with and without papers fighting side by side.

What’s in this book (and what isn’t)?

This book contains:

• detailed profiles of different parts of the border regime and how they function, from databases and detention to media propaganda;
• information on border profiteers and their contracts, from security giants like G4S to data gatherers like Experian;
• some thoughts on how the system works together as a whole;
• examples of resistance over the last 20 years, looking at why actions have been effective, with a few thoughts on strategy.

We certainly don’t cover everything. Except for Calais, we don’t look much at the UK’s frontier controls. We don’t say much about how the UK works with the European Union to help build a “Fortress Europe” against Africa and Asia. There is lots more to investigate about how the UK, like other European states, tries to “externalise” its borders by making deals with ex-colonial countries. We barely scratch the surface of the connections between the border regime and the global economy. Also, at this point any comment on how Brexit will affect all this would just be speculation, so we say little about that.

All of these are crucial topics, but this book is pretty big and heavy as it is.

Summary

We have tried to divide the book up into self-contained sections so that you can skip to the parts you need. Here we’ll give a quick run-through of the main points of the book.

In addition, the final Annex to the book contains further information on border profiteers: a list of major Home Office contracts, and then mini-profiles of six companies. These are detention managers G4S, Mitie, Serco and GEO Group; plus deportation contractors Carlson Wagonlit Travel and Titan Airways. You can also find more detailed company profiles, and updates, on the Corporate Watch website.

Part One: Background

We start by looking at the history of the UK border regime. Attacks on migrants go back at least to the Middle Ages, but the idea of systematic border controls really kicked off with newspaper campaigns against Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, which led to a 1905 law called the Aliens Act. More recently, the border regime has grown in three main phases, each involving both new laws and increased resources such as guards and detention centres. In each case we see a common pattern: media push scare stories targeting new scapegoat groups, politicians respond with clampdowns. In the 1970s, the targets were Black and Asian workers from Britain’s old empire; in the 2000s, asylum seekers from the wars in the Balkans and the Middle East; most recently, so-called “illegals”.

Chapter 2 takes a quick glimpse at the Home Office, its structures and resources. In Chapter 3, we look at how the border regime relies on identifying people and sorting us into categories: citizens vs. migrants, refugees vs. “economic migrants”, “genuine” vs. “bogus” asylum-seekers, “legal” vs. “illegal”. Some of these labels come from official definitions, such as the various “tiers” of the visa system, or the asylum process. Others are more informal. For example, there is actually no legal definition of an “illegal immigrant” – this label is the creation of newspapers and political speeches.

Chapter 4 looks a bit deeper at “what is the border regime”. This is the most theoretical bit of the book, introducing the idea of a system of control. To make the theory more real, we illustrate it with a diagram: a picture of a kind of Frankenstein’s Monster. The border regime is a monster, it has teeth and does real harm to people’s lives. But it is not unstoppable. It is made up of many parts, many of which are weak or rusty, many of which don’t work well together. When we can identify its joints and weak points, we can see where it is vulnerable and can be beaten.

Part Two: Control

This is the biggest part of the book, with nine chapters. The first seven look in detail at different parts of the border regime. These are:

• In limbo: the reporting and asylum dispersal systems.
• Raids: the work of the 19 Immigration Enforcement raid squads, looking particularly at workplace raids.
• Detention: an overview of the immigration detention system and the private companies that run most of them.
• Deportations: the “removal” system, with a particular focus on mass deportations using charter flights.
• Calais: the ultimate hostile environment on the UK-France border.
• Hostile Environment: a run-through of 12 main anti-migrant measures introduced under Theresa May’s recent hostile environment approach.
• Hostile data: how the Home Office tracks people with its current databases – and how it wants to expand them into One Big Datasphere.

In each chapter, we also look at how people are fighting back – and at the impacts of this resistance. From the revolts that forced the government to scale down its detention plans, and the countless cases of people beating deportations, to the legal and political battles that have ended charter flight routes and blocked or delayed recent hostile environment policies.

Chapter 12 looks deeper at how the border regime relies on the collaboration of many people outside the Home Office, from landlords and banks to nurses and teachers. It investigates the different ways the government tries to persuade people to collaborate. For example, not just threatening fines and prison sentences, but also seeking to shift the culture inside institutions like the NHS.

In Chapter 13 we ask: so what do all these attacks on migrants actually achieve? The border regime certainly makes many people’s lives a misery. But it doesn’t come close to achieving the official goal of “controlling immigration”. Since the 2000s, many policies have been based on the deterrent dogma: the idea that tough measures will persuade people to leave the UK, or not come in the first place. But the evidence suggests this doesn’t work. Indeed, the government’s own figures show “voluntary returns” have been going down since the start of the new hostile environment approach. The one factor that has actually affected immigration numbers is not a Home Office policy, but the Brexit vote scaring off investment and European workers.

In fact, we argue, the border regime will never succeed in effectively controlling immigration. At least, not so long as the UK remains a democratic state with limits on the use of visible violence, and a capitalist economy that demands migrant labour. This leads us to the question: so what are tough immigration policies really for?

Part Three: Consent

This part of the book digs a level deeper, to look at the forces that drive the border regime.

We suggest that hostile policies aren’t really about controlling immigration. They are shows, spectacles that “strike a pose” of control. Whipped up by media campaigns, politicians use new laws and clampdowns to pose at being tough.

Who is the show for? Politicians, from both left and right, often say they have to be tough on immigration to satisfy “public opinion”. But what does that actually mean? There is no one public opinion about migration: there are millions of different people, with very different views.

In Chapter 14, we look at the evidence from polling surveys on British people’s attitudes. In particular, an anxious minority of about 20% of the population say immigration is an important political issue. These are largely older, white people. Some are well-off pensioners living far from any actual immigrants. Others are working class people living in deprived areas, including the dispersal zones where asylum seekers are dumped. Crucially, both these demographic groupings are often key voters chased by politicians in election battles. They are the main target audiences for anti-immigration policies.

These target publics have quite different economic situations and experiences, but they share a sense of alienation and anxiety that is pumped up by media propaganda. Chapter 15 looks at how that works. Summarising several valuable studies, we see how media spread the story of migration as a threat – although specific scapegoats shift over the years. And we ask what motivates journalists and media bosses to do this dirty work.

Chapter 16 turns to politicians. We start with election strategy, seeing how politicians court target voter groups. Next we see how a run of Home Office ministers have built their careers posturing as tough on migrants. Finally, we look at how politicians exist in a closed bubble or “ecology of ideas” with the media – the two feed off each other in a vicious spiralling of bad ideas.

Chapter 17 gets to business. Some capitalists directly profit from the border regime. But most, from farmers to the City banks, rely on a constant supply of migrant labour. All major business lobby groups are pro-migration (in this narrow sense). This is why immigration policies never really try to close the borders to all migrants. Instead, policies target smaller scapegoat groups such as asylum seekers or “illegals”, who are seen as economically “low value”.

Chapter 18 looks at right-wing agitators. Far right parties, more respectable think-tanks like Migration Watch, and the new “alt-right” or “alt-light” internet propagandists, all work to push mainstream politics further against migrants. (Shifting the “Overton window” of what is politically acceptable.) Currently only about 20% of the UK population is strongly anti-migrant. But if these people have their way, the hatred will grow.

Finally, Chapter 19 digs deeper into the nature of anti-migrant propaganda. It is rooted in fear, part of the politics of anxiety that shapes many aspects of our culture today. What does this mean for those who want to fight these ideas?

Part 4: Fighting Back

People are fighting the border regime every day – and winning. Yet there’s no denying we’re swimming against a strong tide. It’s more urgent than ever not just to fight the border regime, but to work out how to fight it effectively.

In Chapter 20 we look back over examples of successful resistance, and think about what makes them successful. Actions and campaigns win when they hit the border regime at its limits: from tight budgets and institutional failings, through legal and political constraints, to the ultimate limits of people’s consent.

We note that political action – that is, campaigning to get politicians to change policies – is rarely successful in UK migration struggles. To shift the politics of the border regime we need to shift the wider culture in which millions of people give it their consent. This requires building active movements from the grassroots up: taking effective action, spreading victories, inspiring each other.

But while migrants are on the front line of this struggle, they cannot win it alone. We really start to threaten the border regime when people with and without papers come together in common struggles.

The post The UK Border Regime: book introduction and summary appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Our guide to Green Capitalism, explaining the dangers of this new manifestation of capitalism and exploring the real ecological alternatives.

Capitalism thrives on crisis, and the multiple global environmental crises, including climate change and habitat and biodiversity loss, are creating new markets from which to generate profit. Those promoting green capitalism argue that if nature was valued correctly it will not only be protected, but even enhanced, along with the health of the economy and well-being in society.

However, it is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is fundamentally exploitative of people and the natural world, it is not and cannot be ‘green’. Green capitalism involves various institutions, including governments, corporations, think tanks, charities and NGOs, implementing policies, practices and processes to incorporate nature into capitalist market systems. It takes the same capitalist ideas and values that create environmental crises – i.e. continual economic growth, private property, profit and ‘free’ markets – and applies them to the natural world as a way to solve those crises. It serves to maintain capitalism’s dominance, both through finding new ways to generate profit, and as a way of protecting it from criticism of being environmentally destructive.

This guide is intended as an introduction to the ideas surrounding green capitalism as well as the alternatives to it. We hope it will support attempts to resist the threat of green capitalism and create space for real ecological alternatives.

Buy the book or download it for free here.

The post An A-Z of Green Capitalism appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Kurdistan is currently divided between four countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. In each of the parts of Kurdistan, Kurdish identities and cultures have been repressed for generations. This book, by Eliza Egret and Tom Anderson, gathers together first-hand accounts of the struggles for a new society taking place in Bakur and Rojava – the parts of Kurdistan within the borders of Turkey and Syria.

The setting up of local assemblies and co-operatives, as well as radical women’s and ecological movements, are rapidly gathering momentum in Kurdistan. The book gives a simple introduction to democratic confederalism, the idea that has inspired many of those involved in these movements.

The book also compiles accounts from Kurdish people who are oppressed by the state of Turkey and profiles some of the companies that are complicit in their repression. The interviews give suggestions of how people outside of Kurdistan can act in solidarity.

Buy the book or click here to download this book for free.

The post Struggles for autonomy in Kurdistan appeared first on Corporate Watch.

The post Apartheid in the fields: From occupied Palestine to UK Supermarkets appeared first on Corporate Watch.

Corporate Watch’s new publication, ‘Capitalism, What is it and how can we destroy it?’ provides an accessible introduction to capitalism and explores how we might bring about its ending:

What is capitalism? An economic system built on private property, markets, exploitation and profit, enforced by state violence. But also, digging deeper, a culture of fear and passivity, in which we learn to see the natural world, other people, and even ourselves, as objects to be owned and managed, bought and sold.

The first part of this book gives an introduction to capitalist economics in accessible, non-specialist language. It covers: the basics of economic systems; financial markets; the global economy and shifting world power; the roles of the state; crisis. The second part delves into how capitalism shapes our values and desires. Finally, it turns to resistance and rebellion. So how can we destroy this poisonous system, and start to create new worlds of freedom?

The book is available from our shop for £5 or you can download it for free, click here

The post How can we destroy capitalism? appeared first on Corporate Watch.