here is a blog post about important world news not related to michael jackson. understandably with terrible media practices infecting virtually all forms of global news coverage it is very hard to gain any kind of coherent picture of what is actually happening in iran outside of whatever western partisan talking points exist.
to remedy this, i have here a piece by slovenian philosopher slavoj zizek who is a smart guy who says a lot of really smart things. read it!!
This piece is copyright-free. Please distribute widely.
WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN?
Slavoj Zizek
When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down…
In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now?
There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western “reform movement” along the lines of the “orange” revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. – a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let’s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq.
Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country’s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority – this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh – a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation – up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left.
Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests.
The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution’s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution.
There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of crumbs to the poor should not deceive us: behind him are not only organs of police repression and a very Westernized PR apparatus, but also a strong new rich class, the result of the regime’s corruption (Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is not a working class militia, but a mega-corporation, the strongest center of wealth in the country).
Second, one should draw a clear difference between the two main candidates opposed to Ahmadinejad, Mehdi Karroubi and Mousavi. Karroubi effectively is a reformist, basically proposing the Iranian version of identity politics, promising favors to all particular groups.Mousavi is something entirely different: his name stands for the genuine resuscitation of the popular dream which sustained the Khomeini revolution. Even if this dream was a utopia, one should recognize in it the genuine utopia of the revolution itself. What this means is that the 1979 Khomeini revolution cannot be reduced to a hard line Islamist takeover – it was much more. Now is the time to remember the incredible effervescence of the first year after the revolution, with the breath-taking explosion of political and social creativity, organizational experiments and debates among students and ordinary people. The very fact that this explosion had to be stifled demonstrates that the Khomeini revolution was an authentic political event, a momentary opening that unleashed unheard-of forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” What followed was a gradual closing through the take-over of political control by the Islam establishment. To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the “return of the repressed” of the Khomeini revolution.
And, last but not least, what this means is that there is a genuine liberating potential in Islam – to find a “good” Islam, one doesn’t have to go back to the 10th century, we have it right here, in front of our eyes.
The future is uncertain – in all probability, those in power will contain the popular explosion, and the cat will not fall into the precipice, but regain ground. However, it will no longer be the same regime, but just one corrupted authoritarian rule among others. Whatever the outcome, it is vitally important to keep in mind that we are witnessing a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit the frame of the struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If our cynical pragmatism will make us lose the capacity to recognize this emancipatory dimension, then we in the West are effectively entering a post-democratic era, getting ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.
http://supportiran.blogspot.com/2009/06/slavoj-zizeks-new-text-on-iran.html
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Friday, June 5, 2009
queer theory & speaking truth to power
Preface
As many of you may or may not know (either from discerning it yourselves or from actual conversations we may have shared), I consider myself a radical feminist. How this term is interpreted, of course, will all depend on the current state of your rhizomatic relation to the concepts involved - I'm not especially interested in discussing all the nuances inherent in that position (maybe another time). Suffice it to say, as a white heterosexual male of petty bourgeois origins, feminist praxis - like any radical philosophical commitment - involves constant re-evaluation and contemplation of behaviours, thoughts, etc. to ensure that I can avoid the pitfalls of that insidious sexism inherent in popular life. (That sentence may or may not make sense to anyone - I don't particularly care.) The road out of ignorance is winding and uphill. C'est la vie.
But I feel that one of my biggest blind spots in the area is in the area of queer theory - that is, it is one thing to recognise the social construction of gender et al., but what of sexuality? This is a bit of a complicated issue, since sexuality is (as Freud accurately observed) a matter of great personal and psychological distress for all of us in some way or another; questioning the construction and malleability of your own sexuality is daunting at best and agonising at worst even for the hardiest of souls, let alone contemplating it as yet another way in which oppressive social forces act to constrain our common humanity. I, myself am not homosexual - but I feel as though I can appreciate it as an equally valid and beautiful expression of physical human relationships. But is it enough to 'accept' (even this term smacks of pretension!) homosexuality in a society that (either implicitly or explicitly) condemns and marginalises it?
My current thinking on the matter suggests to me that it is not. For the same reasons I feel that anti-capitalism and anti-sexism are philosophical compulsions - how can I truly be free if any one of my brothers or sisters are in chains? - I feel that homophobia (i.e., heteronormativity) must be constantly opposed at all levels as well. Shouldn't sexuality - the cornerstone of a healthy life! - be totally liberated?
To this end I am putting up this introduction to critical queer theory I found in my travels across the internet. I didn't write it (I possess hardly any of the intellectual equipment needed in this field, I am still very much pre-occupied with the question of human agency in the last instance, i.e., in the socio-economic realm), but it was written by another layperson in the area so I found it extremely accessible and a great way to ease into what may be for many a foreign and intimidating topic.
Obviously the essence (and implications) of queer theory extend far beyond this meagre introduction, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But what a journey it is! The search for the Real, the efforts to grasp the tools for exploding the social facade that separates us from one another; this I believe is of the utmost importance, and it is this end which all radical critiques should serve.
So what are you waiting for?
-------------------------------------------------------------
HEY QUEER! - not your dads' sexual criticism
What is queer theory?
In its purest form, it is a set of critical ideas and philosophies that can be applied to a text to reveal its attitudes and prejudices toward non-normative sexuality (disclaimer - i consider one's concept of gender to be part and parcel with one's view of sexuality, which is not to say one determines the other, but that they inhabit the same general space. for simplicity's sake i tend to shorten queer concepts of sexuality and gender to just "sexuality" but this is just my personal habit). Drawing on lessons from feminism about the construction of gender, the goal is to unveil the fact that the way we define ourselves sexually is the product of a heteronormative culture which seeks to eliminate all non-normative sexual expression.
So you mean like homosexuality?
Homosexuality is a singular orientation. It describes people who have come to identify as men or women who have sexual relationships with those they also identify as either a man or a woman. That is not the totality of queer theory.
Queer theory encompasses all those who question the links between sex and gender, gender and orientation, orientation and acts, acts and meanings, meanings and significance, so on, and have come to internalize those questions and their answers into a personalized identity. Queerness is not defined by a proclivity for any certain kind of sexual/gender identity or act, it is defined by an opposition to the heteronormative ideals of sexual and gender expression.
Okay but what is heteronormativity?
Heteronormativity encompasses all the issues that surround sexuality - object choice, sex, gender, so on - and normalizes those which are most acceptable by the dominant (straight white Christian male) culture, which is to say, provide the most benefit to society. The best example of this in our culture is the primacy of marriage: the institution of marriage rewards a person for accepting normalized ideals of gender and sexuality by granting them legal benefits as well as social legitimacy.
Heteronormativity proscribes that:
This manifests itself in a desire that gay people (and other sexual dilettantes) who question those orders simply not be:
It is a common mistake to think that this is undertaken because homosexuality is considered bad. It is undertaken because heterosexuality is good. Heterosexuality produces children, and the unique construct of heterosexuality established by the dominant culture also assures those kids grow up obedient to authority and ready to serve.
Heteronormative culture attempts to control people through their understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. Dominant culture will co-opt and utilize all modes of self-expression to maintain its hegemonic control over discourse, including how we structure our physical contact with other people. One of the primary goals of queer theory is to establish sexuality as not just a factory for the production of pleasure but a theater for a genuine mode of discourse. One of the most potent tools of heteronormativity in removing the discursive power of sexuality is to neuter its meaning and significance. What meaning is left in sex (pursuit of pleasure) is then easily directed toward a goal that benefits said power. Queer-feminist texts elucidate on this idea incredibly well:
One gay liberation manifesto paints a much less constrained image of what sex should be.
Think of sex as literature. It is a theater in which ideas of relations of meaning and power and so on are expressed. It should also be of no surprise that the dominant culture will attempt to structure expression in this mode of discourse to inherently support and affirm its power. This is evidenced by the fact that sex has been constructed to embody little more than the production of pleasure, as embodied in the orgasm. This pleasure is further directed to another benefit for that dominant culture: the production of children, a future workforce for the capitalist power.
So how do BDSM and leather daddies fit into this?
The effect of alternate views of sexuality - such as BDSM - is to provide alternate models for sexual expression that are not in the interest of the dominant heteronormative culture. Why do you think conservatives hate the Folsom Street Fair?
The sexuality on display at the Folsom Street fair attacks heteronormative sexuality from every angle. Sexuality is infused with meaning and symbolism, which empowers its participants. Pleasure is not the unquestioned goal, as many willingly seek pain, which negates the ideology of production often found in sex. Classical constructions of gender and sexuality are put on display as a kind of burlesque satire. The masculine and effeminate is crossed, magnified, muted, obfuscated, and generally just fucked around with. Nothing makes sense, as nothing damn well should make sense.
Many conservative upholders of heteronormativity ask "Would you want your children to see this?" Of course what they really mean being "We don't want your children to grow up and do this." When people are found to not only be exploring but enjoying sexuality with symbolism, meaning, and intent outside of what has been prescribed as healthy for society, heteronormies boil over with disgust.
BDSM is not the only avenue for exploring non-heteronormative sexuality, but as its symbols and practices have become widely disseminated through the culture, it is the most immediate and best example.
That sounds great, but what does looking at sex critically accomplish?
Using the critical methods developed by queer theory to unravel the extant symbols and meanings within sexuality, a person can begin to understand the use of sexuality not only in its practice, but in its representation. It is like being able to critically read a newspaper. When you read a paper critically, you aren't only examining the content. You are asking: Who is providing this information, who is being provided to, and to what end is it being provided?
The same questions can be asked any time you come upon a representation of sexuality. Who is providing this representation, who is it being provided to, and to what end is it being demonstrated? For example, you open a children's book and see a short story where Johnny meets Jane and they go out for a date and at the end Johnny gets a little kiss on the cheek. This constitutes an image of sexuality that has been provided by a supporter of the heteronormative order, for the benefit of impressionable and developing children, with the intent that it will push the child toward an understanding of sexuality that is acceptable and beneficial to the provider of the information.
I have seen queer readings of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal which made an interesting argument about the way the United States government posits the Arab body as naturally receptive to torture. Queer readings have been applied to politics to question how the focus on the future - the embodiment of which being the child - shapes political discourse.
If you are not GLBT, or even interested in ropes, it would benefit you to understand how the construction of sex is formed and used in culture as it will allow you to question power, which is fun.
But aren't gay people becoming more and more accepted?
You could say that, or you could say that they are becoming more assimilated. One criticism of the gay rights movement is that its goal has often been to demonstrate that its goals are not at odds with those of the heteronormative culture: Hey! We can be responsible and raise kids to be obedient and straight just like you guys!! Many gays think it is hypocritical to criticize straight institutions, then to fight for access to them.
So is queer theory all about questioning power as embodied by the heteronormative male?
In my opinion yeah but I could be drastically wrong. I'm just one guy. I am trying not to make the introduction too long or cover too many topics to leave room open for more discussion and opinions from other people who probably understand this a lot better than I do.
--------------------------------------------
Thoughts?
--------------------------------------------
Post-Script [5:35 PM]
For those other voracious readers: that study alluded to in the piece re: Abu Ghraib is apparently an excerpt from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar.
Here's Amazon's description:
Cool!
As many of you may or may not know (either from discerning it yourselves or from actual conversations we may have shared), I consider myself a radical feminist. How this term is interpreted, of course, will all depend on the current state of your rhizomatic relation to the concepts involved - I'm not especially interested in discussing all the nuances inherent in that position (maybe another time). Suffice it to say, as a white heterosexual male of petty bourgeois origins, feminist praxis - like any radical philosophical commitment - involves constant re-evaluation and contemplation of behaviours, thoughts, etc. to ensure that I can avoid the pitfalls of that insidious sexism inherent in popular life. (That sentence may or may not make sense to anyone - I don't particularly care.) The road out of ignorance is winding and uphill. C'est la vie.
But I feel that one of my biggest blind spots in the area is in the area of queer theory - that is, it is one thing to recognise the social construction of gender et al., but what of sexuality? This is a bit of a complicated issue, since sexuality is (as Freud accurately observed) a matter of great personal and psychological distress for all of us in some way or another; questioning the construction and malleability of your own sexuality is daunting at best and agonising at worst even for the hardiest of souls, let alone contemplating it as yet another way in which oppressive social forces act to constrain our common humanity. I, myself am not homosexual - but I feel as though I can appreciate it as an equally valid and beautiful expression of physical human relationships. But is it enough to 'accept' (even this term smacks of pretension!) homosexuality in a society that (either implicitly or explicitly) condemns and marginalises it?
My current thinking on the matter suggests to me that it is not. For the same reasons I feel that anti-capitalism and anti-sexism are philosophical compulsions - how can I truly be free if any one of my brothers or sisters are in chains? - I feel that homophobia (i.e., heteronormativity) must be constantly opposed at all levels as well. Shouldn't sexuality - the cornerstone of a healthy life! - be totally liberated?
To this end I am putting up this introduction to critical queer theory I found in my travels across the internet. I didn't write it (I possess hardly any of the intellectual equipment needed in this field, I am still very much pre-occupied with the question of human agency in the last instance, i.e., in the socio-economic realm), but it was written by another layperson in the area so I found it extremely accessible and a great way to ease into what may be for many a foreign and intimidating topic.
Obviously the essence (and implications) of queer theory extend far beyond this meagre introduction, but the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But what a journey it is! The search for the Real, the efforts to grasp the tools for exploding the social facade that separates us from one another; this I believe is of the utmost importance, and it is this end which all radical critiques should serve.
So what are you waiting for?
-------------------------------------------------------------
HEY QUEER! - not your dads' sexual criticism
"[Homosexuality] is pretty bad, and I don't think they should be around to influence children ... I don't think they should be hurt by society or anything like that - especially in New York. You have them that are into leather and stuff like that. I mean, I think that is really sick, and I think maybe they should be put away."
What is queer theory?
In its purest form, it is a set of critical ideas and philosophies that can be applied to a text to reveal its attitudes and prejudices toward non-normative sexuality (disclaimer - i consider one's concept of gender to be part and parcel with one's view of sexuality, which is not to say one determines the other, but that they inhabit the same general space. for simplicity's sake i tend to shorten queer concepts of sexuality and gender to just "sexuality" but this is just my personal habit). Drawing on lessons from feminism about the construction of gender, the goal is to unveil the fact that the way we define ourselves sexually is the product of a heteronormative culture which seeks to eliminate all non-normative sexual expression.
So you mean like homosexuality?
Homosexuality is a singular orientation. It describes people who have come to identify as men or women who have sexual relationships with those they also identify as either a man or a woman. That is not the totality of queer theory.
Queer theory encompasses all those who question the links between sex and gender, gender and orientation, orientation and acts, acts and meanings, meanings and significance, so on, and have come to internalize those questions and their answers into a personalized identity. Queerness is not defined by a proclivity for any certain kind of sexual/gender identity or act, it is defined by an opposition to the heteronormative ideals of sexual and gender expression.
Okay but what is heteronormativity?
Heteronormativity encompasses all the issues that surround sexuality - object choice, sex, gender, so on - and normalizes those which are most acceptable by the dominant (straight white Christian male) culture, which is to say, provide the most benefit to society. The best example of this in our culture is the primacy of marriage: the institution of marriage rewards a person for accepting normalized ideals of gender and sexuality by granting them legal benefits as well as social legitimacy.
Heteronormativity proscribes that:
- Gender is a product of biological sex, and is immutable.
- Men are attracted to women, and women are attracted to men.
- Sex is an expression of love between men and women.
- Sex exists to produce pleasure for the man and woman, and to produce children for the future.
This manifests itself in a desire that gay people (and other sexual dilettantes) who question those orders simply not be:
The presiding asymmetry of value assignment between hetero and homo goes unchallenged everywhere: advice on how to help your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think. On the other hand, the scope of institutions whose programmatic undertaking is to prevent the development of gay people is unimaginatively large. There is no major institutionalized discourse that offers a firm resistance to that undertaking: in the United States, at any rate, most sites of the state, the military, education, law, penal institutions, the church, medicine, and mass culture enforce it all but unquestioningly, and with little hesitation at even the recourse to invasive violence
"How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay", Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
It is a common mistake to think that this is undertaken because homosexuality is considered bad. It is undertaken because heterosexuality is good. Heterosexuality produces children, and the unique construct of heterosexuality established by the dominant culture also assures those kids grow up obedient to authority and ready to serve.
Heteronormative culture attempts to control people through their understandings of gender, sex, and sexuality. Dominant culture will co-opt and utilize all modes of self-expression to maintain its hegemonic control over discourse, including how we structure our physical contact with other people. One of the primary goals of queer theory is to establish sexuality as not just a factory for the production of pleasure but a theater for a genuine mode of discourse. One of the most potent tools of heteronormativity in removing the discursive power of sexuality is to neuter its meaning and significance. What meaning is left in sex (pursuit of pleasure) is then easily directed toward a goal that benefits said power. Queer-feminist texts elucidate on this idea incredibly well:
Sex is an institution. In an oppressive society like Amerika, it reflects the same ideology as other major institutions. It is goal-oriented, profit and productivity oriented. It is a prescribed system, with a series of correct and building sensations aimed toward the production of a single goal: climax.
"Smash Phallic Imperalism" - Katz
One gay liberation manifesto paints a much less constrained image of what sex should be.
WHAT SEX IS: Sex is both creative expression and communication: good when it is either, and better when it is both.
...
I like to think of good sex in terms of playing the violin-(on one level) with both people seeing the other's body as an object of producing beauty as long as they play it well; and on another level the players communicating through the mutual production and appreciation of a thing of beauty. As all good music, you get totally into it-and coming back out of that state of consciousness is like finishing a work of art, or coming back from an episode of an acid or mescaline trip. And to press the analogy further: the variety of music is infinite and varied, depending on the capabilities of the players, both as subjects and as objects. Solos, duets, quartets (symphonies, even, if you happen to dig Romantic music) are possible. And the variations in gender, response, and bodies are like different instruments. And perhaps what we have called sexual "orientation" probably just means that we have learned to play certain kinds of music well, and have not yet other music.
Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto
Think of sex as literature. It is a theater in which ideas of relations of meaning and power and so on are expressed. It should also be of no surprise that the dominant culture will attempt to structure expression in this mode of discourse to inherently support and affirm its power. This is evidenced by the fact that sex has been constructed to embody little more than the production of pleasure, as embodied in the orgasm. This pleasure is further directed to another benefit for that dominant culture: the production of children, a future workforce for the capitalist power.
So how do BDSM and leather daddies fit into this?
The effect of alternate views of sexuality - such as BDSM - is to provide alternate models for sexual expression that are not in the interest of the dominant heteronormative culture. Why do you think conservatives hate the Folsom Street Fair?
The sexuality on display at the Folsom Street fair attacks heteronormative sexuality from every angle. Sexuality is infused with meaning and symbolism, which empowers its participants. Pleasure is not the unquestioned goal, as many willingly seek pain, which negates the ideology of production often found in sex. Classical constructions of gender and sexuality are put on display as a kind of burlesque satire. The masculine and effeminate is crossed, magnified, muted, obfuscated, and generally just fucked around with. Nothing makes sense, as nothing damn well should make sense.
Many conservative upholders of heteronormativity ask "Would you want your children to see this?" Of course what they really mean being "We don't want your children to grow up and do this." When people are found to not only be exploring but enjoying sexuality with symbolism, meaning, and intent outside of what has been prescribed as healthy for society, heteronormies boil over with disgust.
BDSM is not the only avenue for exploring non-heteronormative sexuality, but as its symbols and practices have become widely disseminated through the culture, it is the most immediate and best example.
That sounds great, but what does looking at sex critically accomplish?
Using the critical methods developed by queer theory to unravel the extant symbols and meanings within sexuality, a person can begin to understand the use of sexuality not only in its practice, but in its representation. It is like being able to critically read a newspaper. When you read a paper critically, you aren't only examining the content. You are asking: Who is providing this information, who is being provided to, and to what end is it being provided?
The same questions can be asked any time you come upon a representation of sexuality. Who is providing this representation, who is it being provided to, and to what end is it being demonstrated? For example, you open a children's book and see a short story where Johnny meets Jane and they go out for a date and at the end Johnny gets a little kiss on the cheek. This constitutes an image of sexuality that has been provided by a supporter of the heteronormative order, for the benefit of impressionable and developing children, with the intent that it will push the child toward an understanding of sexuality that is acceptable and beneficial to the provider of the information.
I have seen queer readings of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal which made an interesting argument about the way the United States government posits the Arab body as naturally receptive to torture. Queer readings have been applied to politics to question how the focus on the future - the embodiment of which being the child - shapes political discourse.
If you are not GLBT, or even interested in ropes, it would benefit you to understand how the construction of sex is formed and used in culture as it will allow you to question power, which is fun.
But aren't gay people becoming more and more accepted?
You could say that, or you could say that they are becoming more assimilated. One criticism of the gay rights movement is that its goal has often been to demonstrate that its goals are not at odds with those of the heteronormative culture: Hey! We can be responsible and raise kids to be obedient and straight just like you guys!! Many gays think it is hypocritical to criticize straight institutions, then to fight for access to them.
So is queer theory all about questioning power as embodied by the heteronormative male?
In my opinion yeah but I could be drastically wrong. I'm just one guy. I am trying not to make the introduction too long or cover too many topics to leave room open for more discussion and opinions from other people who probably understand this a lot better than I do.
--------------------------------------------
Thoughts?
--------------------------------------------
Post-Script [5:35 PM]
For those other voracious readers: that study alluded to in the piece re: Abu Ghraib is apparently an excerpt from Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times by Jasbir K. Puar.
Here's Amazon's description:
In this pathbreaking work, Jasbir K. Puar argues that configurations of sexuality, race, gender, nation, class, and ethnicity are realigning in relation to contemporary forces of securitization, counterterrorism, and nationalism. She examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. These incorporations have shifted many queers from their construction as figures of death (via the AIDS epidemic) to subjects tied to ideas of life and productivity (gay marriage and reproductive kinship). Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. These "homonationalisms" are deployed to distinguish upright "properly hetero," and now "properly homo," U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes--especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs--who are cordoned off for detention and deportation.
Puar combines transnational feminist and queer theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian philosophy, and technoscience criticism, and draws from an extraordinary range of sources, including governmental texts, legal decisions, films, television, ethnographic data, queer media, and activist organizing materials and manifestos. Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlightstroublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court's "Lawrence" decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, and in what Puar argues is a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing.
Cool!
Monday, June 1, 2009
What's wrong with a 30-hour work week?
Here's a bit of food for thought I stumbled across while trolling the internet on this beautiful Monday afternoon. It's very American-centric, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find people in Canada who would turn down a shorter work week!
-------------------
What’s wrong with a 30-hour work week?
By Don Fitz
May 30, 2009 -- With millions of jobs lost during the first part of 2009, who is calling for a shorter work week to spread the work around? Not the Republicans. Not even the Democrats. But why is there nary a peep from unions?
In the US, the vehicle industry sets the pace for organised labour. The only discussion at the top levels of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) is how quickly the gains won during the last 50 years can be given back. Does the UAW have no memory of the 1930s and 1940s when a shorter work week was at centre of organising demands?
The gross domestic product is plummeting at the same time that jobs are disappearing. Why should there be any connection between the two? If society produces 10% less, why don’t we all just work 10% less? Didn’t things work like that for hundreds of thousands of years of human existence? When people figured out easier ways to get what they needed, they spent less time doing it.
It’s called “leisure”. Leisure is essential for a democratic society involving people in all aspects of self-government. Instead of working frenetically to produce “stuff” that we don’t have the time to enjoy, wouldn’t we be better off with less “stuff” and more time of our own? Research repeatedly shows that, once important needs are met, additional belongings bring no additional happiness.[1] Yet work is strongly related to stress.[2]
A labour-environment connection?
It’s more than stress to the human nervous system. Manufacturing too much stuff stresses every aspect of the environment. The voracious appetite of corporate growth destroys homes of the wolf and bear in North America. Swiftly disappearing are the last refuges of chimpanzees in Africa and orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. Mangrove forests give way to beach resorts as long-line fishing kills 100 sea animals for every fish eaten by a human.
Vastly more creatures fall prey to the 80,000–100,000 chemicals spewed into the air, water and land. Countless molecules of chlorine and fluorine go into pesticides and plastics that destroy immune and reproductive systems. Elemental structures of lead, mercury and, of course, radioactive particles are an enemy to living systems.
The most frequent building block of toxins is oil. With more than 40 hours of labour contained in each gallon, oil is the closest thing to free energy that humanity has ever discovered.[3] A substance that should be used sparingly so that many future generations could use if for medical and other essential products, oil is being squandered at an exponential rate by a corporate culture determined that its descendants will despise it.
The only way that corporate America knows to shield itself from loathing by its progeny is working overtime to prevent those generations from existing. As climate change changes from “if/when” to “How rapidly is it increasing?” corporations befuddle our senses with a dazzling array of green gadgets, each of which pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere during its manufacture and distribution.
Nevertheless, corporate media propagandises non-stop that we must be unhappy from the economic downturn and pray for a quick return to the normal rate of planetary extermination. So it’s time to ask why another set of voices is not demanding a shorter work week. Why do the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Federation and a host of other Washington lobby groups fail to point out that an economic slowdown with a fair distribution of jobs would be the treatment of choice for a sick environment?
Centuries of struggle for the working day
Some of the most insightful writing on hours of labour is in Karl Marx’s Capital. While most of it reflects the analytical style of 19th century economic writing, Chapter X on “The Working-Day” reveals Marx’s passionate outrage at what long hours do to workers’ health. The problem started as infant capitalism found the hours of labour under feudalism to be insufficient to satisfy its urges for expansion.
In response to a shortage of labour due to the plague, England’s 1349 Statute of Labourers sought to ensure that the working day was sufficiently long. An Elizabethan statute of 1562 lengthened the working day by reducing the time for meals. Emphasising that it took capitalism centuries to lengthen the working day to 12 hours, Marx noted that one of the milestones was the elimination of church holidays by protestantism.[4]
By the 19th century, some had work weeks of 15 hours per day for six days per week plus 8–10 hours on Sunday.[5] At the same time that many were organising to reduce their hours to 12 per day, the Chartist movement made the 10 hour day “their political, election cry”.[6, 7]
The high point of US labour organising during the 19th century was on May 1, 1886, when 300,000 workers went on strike for the eight-hour day. The brutal repression that came down in Chicago with the Haymarket arrests and executions sparked the international celebration of May Day.[8]
In his classic description of the fervor for an eight hour day that began in 1884 and increased in pitch through 1886, Jeremy Brecher made observations that are still relevant.
First, the leadership of the dominant labour organisation of the day, the Knights of Labour, attempted to put brakes on the eight-hour-day movement. It was often the grassroots that pushed forward, dragging the leaders behind them in city after city.
Second, the 1886 strike wave, far more than previous labour actions, “became above all strikes for power”.[9] The 1886 demands were for control over work hours, hiring and firing, and the organisation of work.
Third, and most important, the struggle for the eight-hour day did not wait until the 10-hour day had been won. Unbelievably long hours were still common. Successful strikes meant that, in many industries, workers “of all kinds have reduced their hours of labor from 15 to 12 and 10”.[10] Workers who only a few years earlier had 12–15 hours per day jobs were now demanding the eight-hour day. Marx similarly wrote that the Chartist movement for the 10-hour day was popular amongst those with a work week of up to 100 hours.
Does anyone work for less than 40 hours?
While interviewing Spanish longshoremen [wharf labourers] in 1989, I spent hours talking to Juan Madrid in Barcelona. Every summer he and his wife had the problem of making sure that they had the same month for vacation. “Do American workers really get off less than a month?”, he asked me incredulously.
“Two weeks is the most common; some only get one week; and, many get no paid vacation at all”, I let him know. Factoring in longer vacations, he had an average work week considerably shorter than the typical US worker. This is the rule, and not the exception, in Europe.
Reducing the work week below 40 hours has preoccupied many labour organisations. In the 1930s, the American Federation of Labour lobbied for a six-hour day.[11] In 1990 BMWs plant in Regensburg adopted a 36 hour week. German Volkswagen employees accepted a 10% pay cut to achieve a 28.8 hour work week. The Digital corporation had 530 employees who opted for a 4-day week with a 7% pay cut so that 90 jobs could be saved.[12]
Victories for shorter work weeks may only be temporary. Tim Kaminski told me that he loved the extra free time he gained from winning a seven-hour day (with no loss in pay) at the St. Louis Chrysler mini-van plant in 1992. But the contract stipulated that it would last only until another plant reopened, which happened two years later.[13]
It is not unknown for politicians to champion the cause of fewer hours. Before joining the Supreme Court, as a US Senator Hugo Black introduced legislation for a 30-hour work week in 1933.[14] More recently, the French Senate looked into a 33-hour week.[15]
One of the least-known flirtations with the 30-hour work week was by the cereal giant, W.K. Kellogg Company. In 1930, the company announced that most of its 1500 employees would go from an eight-hour to a six-hour work day, which would provide 300 new jobs in Battle Creek. Though the shorter work week involved a pay cut, the overwhelming majority of workers preferred having increased leisure time to spend with their families and community.[16]
New managers who began running Kellogg had no enthusiasm for the shorter work day. They polled workers in 1946 and found that 77% of men and 87% of women would choose a 30-hour week even if it meant lower wages. Disappointed, management began examining which work groups liked money more than leisure and began offering the 40-hour week on a department-by-department basis.
How long did it take them to get rid of the 30-hour week? Almost 40 years! The desire to have more time to themselves was so strong that it was not until 1985 that Kellogg was able to eliminate the 30-hour work week in the last department.
The experience at Kellogg indicates that it is absolutely false to say that all workers all of the time crave more stuff and will sacrifice anything to get it. Karl Marx made a similar observation when writing about “The Working-Day”. Quoting results of a poll of those who had laboured excruciating hours at a Lancashire factory, “They would much prefer working 10 hours for less wages…” [17]
Why would any progressive criticise a 30-hour work week?
Despite all of this, there is something problematic with advocating a 30-hour work week at the beginning of the 21st century: a 30-hour work week is not short enough! There is mushrooming unemployment amidst mountains of useless products. An hour of labour now produces more goods than has ever been the case in the history of humanity. Combining these means that there is no reason for anyone to work more than 20 hours per week.
Every year, clever folks figure out how to churn out more stuff with fewer hours of labour. Jeffrey Kaplan observed that “By 1991, the amount for goods and services produced for each hour of labour was double what it had been in 1948”.[18] This was a doubling of labour productivity in only 43 years. Jon Bekken calculates a more rapid rate: “Automation and other innovations result in our productivity (output per work hour) doubling every 25 years or so”.[19]
In other words, the amount that people produce during an hour of labour doubles every 33 years [give or take 10 years]. We have the ability to produce twice as much during the work day or cut the work day in half and produce the same amount.
Arthur Dahlberg, a consultant to both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, wrote that capitalism was already capable of satisfying basic human needs with a four-hour work day.[20] He maintained that such a drastic cut in working hours “was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic”.[21]
The issue was revisited in 1991 by Harvard economist Juliet Schor, who concluded that it would be possible to have a four-hour work day with no decline in the standard of living.[22] Similarly, J.W. Smith argued that “over 50% of our industrial capacity has nothing to do with producing for consumer needs”.[23] Years before issues of climate change and peak oil grabbed the public, Smith forecast:
We’re facing an ecological nightmare as we push to the brink the earth’s ability to support us. We could eliminate much industrial pollution and conserve our precious, dwindling resources by eliminating the 50% of industry that is producing nothing useful for society.[24]
In a more recent analysis, Smith sifts through the US economy sector by sector to conclude that “we could all work 2.3 days per week with no drop in our living standard”.[25]
It’s a rare economist who is capable of realising that there is no reason to constantly scramble for the possession of more objects that fall apart more rapidly. British philosopher Bertrand Russell also thought that four hours of work per day should be plenty to supply the necessities of life.[26]
Russell was thinking similarly to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more than 200 years ago:
…if every Man and Woman would work for four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessities and Comforts of Life, Want and Misery would be banished out of the World, and the rest of the 24 hours might be Leisure and Pleasure.[27]
Labour has become vastly more productive since Ben Franklin contemplated the work day. However, total output grows even faster than labour productivity. By including population growth and people seeking to live the lifestyle of the English-speaking rich, Ted Trainer ciphers that “by 2070 given 3% economic growth, total world economic output every year would then be 60 times as great as it is now.[28]
This would be a 6000% increase in stuff in 63 years — not exactly healthy for forests, oceans, wildlife and humans. If we want our children to be able to live on this planet, the single most important environmental legislation may be restricting people from working more than 20 hours per week.
What’s stopping a shorter work week?
One factor which is not standing in the way of fewer work hours is “human nature”. Marshall Sahlins estimated that hunter and gatherer societies probably spent 15–20 hours per week obtaining the necessities to survive.[29] Each of us can look inside of ourselves to see the real obstacles to cutting the work week in half: fear that we will lose medical care, pensions, and related survival necessities.
Virtually every working family in the United States is one medical catastrophe away from bankruptcy. Countless people would gleefully shift to a 20-hour work week if it would not cause them to lose their health insurance.
Pensions pose a similar roadblock. As they approach retirement, millions of Americans become acutely aware that pensions are based on factors like the average salary of the last three years. Working part time would cut pension payments during uncertain years.
It is not a well kept secret that employers often give workers less than 40 hours to deny them benefits. A similar effect occurs from forced overtime. Even though there may be a higher rate of pay for overtime, a company may save money if it does not pay for the health care and pensions that putting more people on the payroll would require.
Every environmentalist who wants to stop coal companies from blowing the top off of sacred mountains should be on those mountains screaming that private health insurance and pension plans must be replaced by single payer health care and a social security system with at least a four-fold expansion of payments. In case the environmental significance is not clear…
1. Halting the cancerous growth of useless fall-apart junk production requires a drastic shortening of the work week; and,
2. Cutting the work week can only happen if people are not terrified that fewer hours means they will lose health insurance and pension plans.
These are called “social wages”. Social wages also include mass public transportation, clean water, breathable air, uncontaminated land and something which is becoming increasingly rare: the right to quality free public education which is coordinated by representatives directly elected by citizens. These social wages are as important environmentally as medical care and pensions.
The right to a home with electricity and heat is part of the same pattern. People who are not fearful of being thrown out of their home or losing their utilities have much less incentive to work long hours.
There remains an enormous problem that permeates every other barrier to shortening the working day. As long as production is based on the maximisation of profit, each corporation is pushed to extend working hours as long as possible for fear the competition will do it first. As Marx described with clarity:
The prolongation of the working-day, beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, … quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production.[30]
In the 21st century, we should update this to say that capital feeds with two fangs: one to suck the blood of labour and the other fang to drain life from Mother Earth. Can the 20-hour work week become a wooden stake held by the environmental movement as it is pounded by labour? Maybe; but not necessarily. A stake that is driven too shallow will allow the demon to awaken with renewed strength.
When US workers struck for the eight-hour work day in 1886, they were going beyond pay issues and demanding that labour have a role in controlling the process of production. Today, we need a progressive alliance to challenge not only how many hours we work, but the quality, durability and even the necessity of goods we produce. Drastically cutting the hours we work will help save the Earth’s ecology only if it is part of an overarching goal to improve the quality of our lives while reducing the grand mass of manufactured objects.
[Don Fitz has been surviving on less than 20 hours work per week since he was forced to retire in 2006. He is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is published for members of the Greens/Green Party USA and can be reached at fitzdon [at] aol.com.]
Notes
1. Diener, E., & Seligman,M.E.P. (2004). ``Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being’’. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 1–31.
2. Holmes, T.H., & Rahe, R.H. (1967). ``The Social Readjustment Rating Scale’’. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11, 213–218.
3. Heinberg, R. (2003). The party’s over: Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 272.
4. Marx, K. (1974). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers (first published in 1887), 264.
5. Capital, 252.
6. Capital, 267.
7. According to labour activist David Macaray, parallel efforts happened in the US, with an 1835 textile strike to shorten the work week to six days of 11 hours and a Boston carpenter strike for a 10-hour day. Personal communication. April 25, 2009.
8. Roediger, D. (1998). Haymarket incident. In M.J. Buhle, P. Buhle & D Georgakas (Eds.) Encyclopedia of the American left (296–297). New York: Oxford University Press.
9. Brecher, J. (1972). Strike! Boston: South End Press, 32.
10. Strike! 42.
11. Jon Bekken (2000, Arguments for a four-hour day. http://www.iww.org/en/node/758) also notes that New York City electricians won a 25-hour work week (with obligatory overtime) in 1962; in the 1980s German metal workers struck for a 35-hour week; and Danish “private sector” workers went on strike in 1998 for a six-hour day.
12. Bush, K. (1994).`` Work less and everyone works’’. In Context: A Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture, 37, 42. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/Bush2.htm
13. Kaminski, T. Personal communication. May 16, 2009.
14. Kaplan, J. (2008). The gospel of consumption: And the better future we left behind. Orion Magazine., May/June. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index....es/article/2962
15. Bush, 42.
16. Kaplan’s description of the Kellogg experience is based on Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt’s (1996) Kellogg's Six-Hour Day. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
17. Capital, 270. This was in response to owners violating a 10 hour statute by forcing a 12- to 15-hour day with higher pay.
18. Kaplan, 4.
19. Bekken.
20. ``A.O. Dahlberg, 91, Economist and Inventor’’. New York Times (October 2, 1989), D12. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/02/o...d-inventor.html
21. Kaplan, 3.
22. Schor, J.B. (1991). The overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure. New York: Basic Books.
23. Smith, J.W. (1989). The world’s wasted wealth. Kalispell, MT: New Worlds Press, xv.
24. Smith (1989) Book jacket.
25. Smith, J.W. (1994). ``Wasted time, wasted wealth’’. In Context: A Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture, 37, 18. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/Smith.htm
26. Russell, B. (1959). The prospects of industrial civilisation, 2nd edition. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 40.
27. Benjamin Franklin, Quoted in Campbell, J. (1999). Recovering Benjamin Franklin. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 228.
28. Trainer, T. (2007). Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society. The Netherlands: Springer, 2.
29. Sahlins, M. (1974). Stone age economics. London: Tavistock Publications.
30. Capital, 245.
-------------------
What’s wrong with a 30-hour work week?
By Don Fitz
May 30, 2009 -- With millions of jobs lost during the first part of 2009, who is calling for a shorter work week to spread the work around? Not the Republicans. Not even the Democrats. But why is there nary a peep from unions?
In the US, the vehicle industry sets the pace for organised labour. The only discussion at the top levels of the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) is how quickly the gains won during the last 50 years can be given back. Does the UAW have no memory of the 1930s and 1940s when a shorter work week was at centre of organising demands?
The gross domestic product is plummeting at the same time that jobs are disappearing. Why should there be any connection between the two? If society produces 10% less, why don’t we all just work 10% less? Didn’t things work like that for hundreds of thousands of years of human existence? When people figured out easier ways to get what they needed, they spent less time doing it.
It’s called “leisure”. Leisure is essential for a democratic society involving people in all aspects of self-government. Instead of working frenetically to produce “stuff” that we don’t have the time to enjoy, wouldn’t we be better off with less “stuff” and more time of our own? Research repeatedly shows that, once important needs are met, additional belongings bring no additional happiness.[1] Yet work is strongly related to stress.[2]
A labour-environment connection?
It’s more than stress to the human nervous system. Manufacturing too much stuff stresses every aspect of the environment. The voracious appetite of corporate growth destroys homes of the wolf and bear in North America. Swiftly disappearing are the last refuges of chimpanzees in Africa and orangutans in Borneo and Sumatra. Mangrove forests give way to beach resorts as long-line fishing kills 100 sea animals for every fish eaten by a human.
Vastly more creatures fall prey to the 80,000–100,000 chemicals spewed into the air, water and land. Countless molecules of chlorine and fluorine go into pesticides and plastics that destroy immune and reproductive systems. Elemental structures of lead, mercury and, of course, radioactive particles are an enemy to living systems.
The most frequent building block of toxins is oil. With more than 40 hours of labour contained in each gallon, oil is the closest thing to free energy that humanity has ever discovered.[3] A substance that should be used sparingly so that many future generations could use if for medical and other essential products, oil is being squandered at an exponential rate by a corporate culture determined that its descendants will despise it.
The only way that corporate America knows to shield itself from loathing by its progeny is working overtime to prevent those generations from existing. As climate change changes from “if/when” to “How rapidly is it increasing?” corporations befuddle our senses with a dazzling array of green gadgets, each of which pumps more CO2 into the atmosphere during its manufacture and distribution.
Nevertheless, corporate media propagandises non-stop that we must be unhappy from the economic downturn and pray for a quick return to the normal rate of planetary extermination. So it’s time to ask why another set of voices is not demanding a shorter work week. Why do the Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Federation and a host of other Washington lobby groups fail to point out that an economic slowdown with a fair distribution of jobs would be the treatment of choice for a sick environment?
Centuries of struggle for the working day
Some of the most insightful writing on hours of labour is in Karl Marx’s Capital. While most of it reflects the analytical style of 19th century economic writing, Chapter X on “The Working-Day” reveals Marx’s passionate outrage at what long hours do to workers’ health. The problem started as infant capitalism found the hours of labour under feudalism to be insufficient to satisfy its urges for expansion.
In response to a shortage of labour due to the plague, England’s 1349 Statute of Labourers sought to ensure that the working day was sufficiently long. An Elizabethan statute of 1562 lengthened the working day by reducing the time for meals. Emphasising that it took capitalism centuries to lengthen the working day to 12 hours, Marx noted that one of the milestones was the elimination of church holidays by protestantism.[4]
By the 19th century, some had work weeks of 15 hours per day for six days per week plus 8–10 hours on Sunday.[5] At the same time that many were organising to reduce their hours to 12 per day, the Chartist movement made the 10 hour day “their political, election cry”.[6, 7]
The high point of US labour organising during the 19th century was on May 1, 1886, when 300,000 workers went on strike for the eight-hour day. The brutal repression that came down in Chicago with the Haymarket arrests and executions sparked the international celebration of May Day.[8]
In his classic description of the fervor for an eight hour day that began in 1884 and increased in pitch through 1886, Jeremy Brecher made observations that are still relevant.
First, the leadership of the dominant labour organisation of the day, the Knights of Labour, attempted to put brakes on the eight-hour-day movement. It was often the grassroots that pushed forward, dragging the leaders behind them in city after city.
Second, the 1886 strike wave, far more than previous labour actions, “became above all strikes for power”.[9] The 1886 demands were for control over work hours, hiring and firing, and the organisation of work.
Third, and most important, the struggle for the eight-hour day did not wait until the 10-hour day had been won. Unbelievably long hours were still common. Successful strikes meant that, in many industries, workers “of all kinds have reduced their hours of labor from 15 to 12 and 10”.[10] Workers who only a few years earlier had 12–15 hours per day jobs were now demanding the eight-hour day. Marx similarly wrote that the Chartist movement for the 10-hour day was popular amongst those with a work week of up to 100 hours.
Does anyone work for less than 40 hours?
While interviewing Spanish longshoremen [wharf labourers] in 1989, I spent hours talking to Juan Madrid in Barcelona. Every summer he and his wife had the problem of making sure that they had the same month for vacation. “Do American workers really get off less than a month?”, he asked me incredulously.
“Two weeks is the most common; some only get one week; and, many get no paid vacation at all”, I let him know. Factoring in longer vacations, he had an average work week considerably shorter than the typical US worker. This is the rule, and not the exception, in Europe.
Reducing the work week below 40 hours has preoccupied many labour organisations. In the 1930s, the American Federation of Labour lobbied for a six-hour day.[11] In 1990 BMWs plant in Regensburg adopted a 36 hour week. German Volkswagen employees accepted a 10% pay cut to achieve a 28.8 hour work week. The Digital corporation had 530 employees who opted for a 4-day week with a 7% pay cut so that 90 jobs could be saved.[12]
Victories for shorter work weeks may only be temporary. Tim Kaminski told me that he loved the extra free time he gained from winning a seven-hour day (with no loss in pay) at the St. Louis Chrysler mini-van plant in 1992. But the contract stipulated that it would last only until another plant reopened, which happened two years later.[13]
It is not unknown for politicians to champion the cause of fewer hours. Before joining the Supreme Court, as a US Senator Hugo Black introduced legislation for a 30-hour work week in 1933.[14] More recently, the French Senate looked into a 33-hour week.[15]
One of the least-known flirtations with the 30-hour work week was by the cereal giant, W.K. Kellogg Company. In 1930, the company announced that most of its 1500 employees would go from an eight-hour to a six-hour work day, which would provide 300 new jobs in Battle Creek. Though the shorter work week involved a pay cut, the overwhelming majority of workers preferred having increased leisure time to spend with their families and community.[16]
New managers who began running Kellogg had no enthusiasm for the shorter work day. They polled workers in 1946 and found that 77% of men and 87% of women would choose a 30-hour week even if it meant lower wages. Disappointed, management began examining which work groups liked money more than leisure and began offering the 40-hour week on a department-by-department basis.
How long did it take them to get rid of the 30-hour week? Almost 40 years! The desire to have more time to themselves was so strong that it was not until 1985 that Kellogg was able to eliminate the 30-hour work week in the last department.
The experience at Kellogg indicates that it is absolutely false to say that all workers all of the time crave more stuff and will sacrifice anything to get it. Karl Marx made a similar observation when writing about “The Working-Day”. Quoting results of a poll of those who had laboured excruciating hours at a Lancashire factory, “They would much prefer working 10 hours for less wages…” [17]
Why would any progressive criticise a 30-hour work week?
Despite all of this, there is something problematic with advocating a 30-hour work week at the beginning of the 21st century: a 30-hour work week is not short enough! There is mushrooming unemployment amidst mountains of useless products. An hour of labour now produces more goods than has ever been the case in the history of humanity. Combining these means that there is no reason for anyone to work more than 20 hours per week.
Every year, clever folks figure out how to churn out more stuff with fewer hours of labour. Jeffrey Kaplan observed that “By 1991, the amount for goods and services produced for each hour of labour was double what it had been in 1948”.[18] This was a doubling of labour productivity in only 43 years. Jon Bekken calculates a more rapid rate: “Automation and other innovations result in our productivity (output per work hour) doubling every 25 years or so”.[19]
In other words, the amount that people produce during an hour of labour doubles every 33 years [give or take 10 years]. We have the ability to produce twice as much during the work day or cut the work day in half and produce the same amount.
Arthur Dahlberg, a consultant to both the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations, wrote that capitalism was already capable of satisfying basic human needs with a four-hour work day.[20] He maintained that such a drastic cut in working hours “was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic”.[21]
The issue was revisited in 1991 by Harvard economist Juliet Schor, who concluded that it would be possible to have a four-hour work day with no decline in the standard of living.[22] Similarly, J.W. Smith argued that “over 50% of our industrial capacity has nothing to do with producing for consumer needs”.[23] Years before issues of climate change and peak oil grabbed the public, Smith forecast:
We’re facing an ecological nightmare as we push to the brink the earth’s ability to support us. We could eliminate much industrial pollution and conserve our precious, dwindling resources by eliminating the 50% of industry that is producing nothing useful for society.[24]
In a more recent analysis, Smith sifts through the US economy sector by sector to conclude that “we could all work 2.3 days per week with no drop in our living standard”.[25]
It’s a rare economist who is capable of realising that there is no reason to constantly scramble for the possession of more objects that fall apart more rapidly. British philosopher Bertrand Russell also thought that four hours of work per day should be plenty to supply the necessities of life.[26]
Russell was thinking similarly to Benjamin Franklin, who wrote more than 200 years ago:
…if every Man and Woman would work for four Hours each Day on something useful, that Labour would produce sufficient to procure all the Necessities and Comforts of Life, Want and Misery would be banished out of the World, and the rest of the 24 hours might be Leisure and Pleasure.[27]
Labour has become vastly more productive since Ben Franklin contemplated the work day. However, total output grows even faster than labour productivity. By including population growth and people seeking to live the lifestyle of the English-speaking rich, Ted Trainer ciphers that “by 2070 given 3% economic growth, total world economic output every year would then be 60 times as great as it is now.[28]
This would be a 6000% increase in stuff in 63 years — not exactly healthy for forests, oceans, wildlife and humans. If we want our children to be able to live on this planet, the single most important environmental legislation may be restricting people from working more than 20 hours per week.
What’s stopping a shorter work week?
One factor which is not standing in the way of fewer work hours is “human nature”. Marshall Sahlins estimated that hunter and gatherer societies probably spent 15–20 hours per week obtaining the necessities to survive.[29] Each of us can look inside of ourselves to see the real obstacles to cutting the work week in half: fear that we will lose medical care, pensions, and related survival necessities.
Virtually every working family in the United States is one medical catastrophe away from bankruptcy. Countless people would gleefully shift to a 20-hour work week if it would not cause them to lose their health insurance.
Pensions pose a similar roadblock. As they approach retirement, millions of Americans become acutely aware that pensions are based on factors like the average salary of the last three years. Working part time would cut pension payments during uncertain years.
It is not a well kept secret that employers often give workers less than 40 hours to deny them benefits. A similar effect occurs from forced overtime. Even though there may be a higher rate of pay for overtime, a company may save money if it does not pay for the health care and pensions that putting more people on the payroll would require.
Every environmentalist who wants to stop coal companies from blowing the top off of sacred mountains should be on those mountains screaming that private health insurance and pension plans must be replaced by single payer health care and a social security system with at least a four-fold expansion of payments. In case the environmental significance is not clear…
1. Halting the cancerous growth of useless fall-apart junk production requires a drastic shortening of the work week; and,
2. Cutting the work week can only happen if people are not terrified that fewer hours means they will lose health insurance and pension plans.
These are called “social wages”. Social wages also include mass public transportation, clean water, breathable air, uncontaminated land and something which is becoming increasingly rare: the right to quality free public education which is coordinated by representatives directly elected by citizens. These social wages are as important environmentally as medical care and pensions.
The right to a home with electricity and heat is part of the same pattern. People who are not fearful of being thrown out of their home or losing their utilities have much less incentive to work long hours.
There remains an enormous problem that permeates every other barrier to shortening the working day. As long as production is based on the maximisation of profit, each corporation is pushed to extend working hours as long as possible for fear the competition will do it first. As Marx described with clarity:
The prolongation of the working-day, beyond the limits of the natural day, into the night, … quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour. To appropriate labour during all 24 hours of the day is, therefore, the inherent tendency of capitalist production.[30]
In the 21st century, we should update this to say that capital feeds with two fangs: one to suck the blood of labour and the other fang to drain life from Mother Earth. Can the 20-hour work week become a wooden stake held by the environmental movement as it is pounded by labour? Maybe; but not necessarily. A stake that is driven too shallow will allow the demon to awaken with renewed strength.
When US workers struck for the eight-hour work day in 1886, they were going beyond pay issues and demanding that labour have a role in controlling the process of production. Today, we need a progressive alliance to challenge not only how many hours we work, but the quality, durability and even the necessity of goods we produce. Drastically cutting the hours we work will help save the Earth’s ecology only if it is part of an overarching goal to improve the quality of our lives while reducing the grand mass of manufactured objects.
[Don Fitz has been surviving on less than 20 hours work per week since he was forced to retire in 2006. He is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is published for members of the Greens/Green Party USA and can be reached at fitzdon [at] aol.com.]
Notes
1. Diener, E., & Seligman,M.E.P. (2004). ``Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being’’. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 1–31.
2. Holmes, T.H., & Rahe, R.H. (1967). ``The Social Readjustment Rating Scale’’. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11, 213–218.
3. Heinberg, R. (2003). The party’s over: Oil, war and the fate of industrial societies. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 272.
4. Marx, K. (1974). Capital: A critical analysis of capitalist production, Volume 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers (first published in 1887), 264.
5. Capital, 252.
6. Capital, 267.
7. According to labour activist David Macaray, parallel efforts happened in the US, with an 1835 textile strike to shorten the work week to six days of 11 hours and a Boston carpenter strike for a 10-hour day. Personal communication. April 25, 2009.
8. Roediger, D. (1998). Haymarket incident. In M.J. Buhle, P. Buhle & D Georgakas (Eds.) Encyclopedia of the American left (296–297). New York: Oxford University Press.
9. Brecher, J. (1972). Strike! Boston: South End Press, 32.
10. Strike! 42.
11. Jon Bekken (2000, Arguments for a four-hour day. http://www.iww.org/en/node/758) also notes that New York City electricians won a 25-hour work week (with obligatory overtime) in 1962; in the 1980s German metal workers struck for a 35-hour week; and Danish “private sector” workers went on strike in 1998 for a six-hour day.
12. Bush, K. (1994).`` Work less and everyone works’’. In Context: A Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture, 37, 42. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/Bush2.htm
13. Kaminski, T. Personal communication. May 16, 2009.
14. Kaplan, J. (2008). The gospel of consumption: And the better future we left behind. Orion Magazine., May/June. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index....es/article/2962
15. Bush, 42.
16. Kaplan’s description of the Kellogg experience is based on Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt’s (1996) Kellogg's Six-Hour Day. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
17. Capital, 270. This was in response to owners violating a 10 hour statute by forcing a 12- to 15-hour day with higher pay.
18. Kaplan, 4.
19. Bekken.
20. ``A.O. Dahlberg, 91, Economist and Inventor’’. New York Times (October 2, 1989), D12. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/02/o...d-inventor.html
21. Kaplan, 3.
22. Schor, J.B. (1991). The overworked American: The unexpected decline of leisure. New York: Basic Books.
23. Smith, J.W. (1989). The world’s wasted wealth. Kalispell, MT: New Worlds Press, xv.
24. Smith (1989) Book jacket.
25. Smith, J.W. (1994). ``Wasted time, wasted wealth’’. In Context: A Journal of Humane Sustainable Culture, 37, 18. http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC37/Smith.htm
26. Russell, B. (1959). The prospects of industrial civilisation, 2nd edition. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 40.
27. Benjamin Franklin, Quoted in Campbell, J. (1999). Recovering Benjamin Franklin. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 228.
28. Trainer, T. (2007). Renewable energy cannot sustain a consumer society. The Netherlands: Springer, 2.
29. Sahlins, M. (1974). Stone age economics. London: Tavistock Publications.
30. Capital, 245.
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