works, in theory

fat acceptance and political theory

2011-06-22T12:07:00.000-02:30

Okay! This is the text of an email I sent to my supervisor outlining literally all of my thoughts on approaching the Fat Acceptance movement as a question of critical political theory. Obviously this is a work in progress (I have yet to hear back from him telling me I'm full of shit, etc.) so the way this topic gets discussed is subject to change (I'll be really surprised if I can keep all the 'wacky' Lacanian theory in there). But I personally think it's pretty good, at least as a really broad outline based on reading 1.5 books, haha.
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The subject of 'fat acceptance' is an increasingly prevalent question within identity politics circles and I think it definitely warrants some attention from the field of political theory. Is this really just a question of healthcare policy and the administration of a public health crisis, or does it really make sense to think of fat people as a social group subject to its own oppressions and in need of some particular political or legal protections?

I feel like this is the foundational question for any investigation into the subject.

First, I feel like it is important to address the question of whether or not obesity is a 'disease' (that is, accepting it as a medical condition/problem), or whether fatness should be considered as just one other largely aesthetic difference between human bodies. Obviously where one falls on this question will play a major part in determining how political theory can deal with the fat acceptance movement.

Gard and Wright (2008) provide an excellent overview of this question. They have a very comprehensive survey of the established empirical research on the relationship between obesity, weight loss, physical activity, and overall health; based on their overview[1], the current state of obesity science is, at best, significantly more ambiguous, inconclusive, and generally counter-intuitive than the layperson might assume and, at worst, a (Foucauldian) discourse perforated with unfounded normative and aesthetic biases.

According to Gard and Wright, while there is a connection between general well-being and physical activity, the relationship between these two factors and obesity is generally overblown; while obesity does correlate with the presence of heart disease, diabetes, and other medical problems, there is little or no evidence to indicate that obesity is a causal factor for these diseases (that is, 'obesity' is a spurious variable). Empirically, there are no conclusive links between physical activity (or lack thereof) and obesity/weight loss, nor between obesity and overeating; moreover, the risk of mortality associated with obesity appears to be minimal at best. In all, their research would indicate that the medical concern over obesity is substantially overblown, and that instead our popular thinking about the 'obesity epidemic' is ultimately just a moral panic. Based on their work, 'obesity' appears to be as much a pathological disease as shortness or homosexuality.

While Gard's and Wrights' conclusions are important to the discussion on whether or not fat people (as a social group) suffer discrimination, I think the best way to proceed with elaborating this argument is to return to this later and instead focus on exactly how fatness could be an identity in the political sense. Specifically, this will fall back on a more abstract discussion on the very nature of identity (especially when conceived socio-politically), human subjectivity and what 'identity politics' might entail from a critical perspective.

In particular (off the top of my head), I will be engaging with Iris Young's definition of a social group (from Justice and the Politics of Difference, 1990), as well as the Lacanian-Marxist conceptions of human agency and subjectivity made famous by Slavoj Zizek. Although coming from very different intellectual backgrounds, it is my wager that there is substantial common ground between the critical strain of Anglo-American political philosophy and the critical Continental traditions of psychoanalysis and Marxist social thought, and that establishing this intellectual dialogue is one of the urgent tasks of contemporary political philosophy. Above all, I believe that both these overarching conceptual apparatuses bring useful intellectual tools for thinking about fatness as an identity, and in elaborating the theoretical and practical consequences of this position.

At the outset, I think 'fat people' as a social group is a tenable position – it fits Young's criteria (ontologically prior to an individual in a way which 'defines' parts of that individual to a greater or lesser extent, an effect of social relations, subject to a calculus of privilege/oppression, etc.)[2]. Not only that, but 'fatness' as a social identity intersects with other loaded forms of social identity – particularly gender and class – to add new dimensions to already existing forms of oppression[3].

Obviously, the discussion won't be quite so straightforward when it is actually put together. In order to elucidate both the foundational theory of identity and each particular form of oppression being discussed, and to connect both into a very tight understanding of the totality of the issue, I will need to build on everything dialectically. Having first outlined how fatness can be conceptualised as a social identity (as opposed to being 'diseased'), the first logical step is to define oppression, and how a social group can be oppressed. Young (1990) again provides a good starting point here with a very systematic and rigorous definition of oppression; from the perspective of the fat acceptance movement, there is definitely an element of marginalisation (e.g. Schwartz et al. (2003) confirm a prevalence of both implicit and explicit “weight prejudice” among many health professionals, etc.), some 'lighter' forms of violence[4] as she defines it (verbal abuse, etc.), and what she calls 'cultural imperialism' (although the colloquial term 'shaming' might fit better in this particular case) in the sense of being subjected to cultural norms that are demeaning or otherwise damaging or oppressive, etc. There is also definitely a case to be made for something resembling exploitation as Young (following Marx) defines it, but with a specifically Lacanian twist; that is, the manipulation of jouissance (Enjoyment), driven by the processes of the accumulation of Capital. This last argument is fairly complex, and in order to get to that point I will have to steadily build up to it, starting first by analyzing the most well-documented case of fat prejudice: the intersection of fatness and femininity.

There is (comparatively) an extensive literature on the stigmatization of fatness as a feminist issue. Indeed, most of the forms of oppression related to fatness have traditionally been almost primarily borne by fat women (although increasingly men are also beginning to experience many of the same problems). A major theme here is the way stigmatizing fatness is one of the most effective means of policing (or disciplining, in the Foucauldian sense) the feminine body; and, considering the scientific categorization of fatness qua 'obesity epidemic', this disciplinary power is only expanding. So both the liberal (body image, self-respect, etc.) and radical (obesity science as a Foucauldian discourse for reproducing sexist social norms, etc.) feminist critiques will be engaged here.

I think there is room here also to discuss these feminist critiques in light of the particular focus on childhood obesity, as it serves as a good illustration for many of the arguments introduced up to now. First and foremost, the survey of the literature provided by Gard and Wright (2008) indicates a tendency among many academic researchers (as well as popular authors) to pin responsibility for this 'health crisis' on parents – specifically, mothers (the 'single working mother' is the target of a number of polemics against childhood obesity), which is the touchstone of a number of feminist critiques. Moreover, many anti-obesity measures enacted in schools ('public weighings' during physical education classes, barring obese students from purchasing food at the cafeteria, etc.) have particularly perverse effects; not only are larger students alienated from their peers, but it serves to integrate young children (especially girls) into the disciplinary practice of policing the body[5].

This emphasis on the control, monitoring, and disciplining of the fat body leads to the next discussion about the political economy of Enjoyment and desire in the liberal democracies of late capitalism. This is a lot to unpack, but necessary to understand all the implications of considering fatness politically; ultimately, I will argue that it is the link between the current 'obesity epidemic' mania and the (Capital-structured) administration of Enjoyment that elevates fatness from being just another contingent, “identifying” feature of a human being (e.g. baldness, height, etc.) to a fully politicized social identity.

Much of the discursive practices surrounding fat people (women, in particular) centres on notions of enjoyment; most people intuitively 'know' that obesity is the result of 'over-indulgence', a fat person is seen to have 'let themselves go', etc. Correspondingly, much of the more 'orthodox' liberal strain of fat activism is dedicated to fighting the negative stereotypes of fat people as lazy, gluttonous, unhygienic, etc.; for some, the message of fat acceptance is 'accept those of us who are trying to lose weight/'live a healthy lifestyle' – who do not enjoy their fatness – but for whatever reason (genetics, etc.) cannot.'[6]

Framing this all in terms of the politics of jouissance highlights that this is a pathological position to adopt; subdividing 'fat people' into 'good' and 'bad' only perpetuates the cycles of oppression described earlier – it leads to an acceptance of 'fat people' insofar as they are not responsible for their fatness and, if given the opportunity, would not be fat. In this way, the normative and aesthetic bias against the fat body is actually reinforced; following Alain Badiou (2001), if fat acceptance is to mean anything at all (hence my preference for the term 'liberation' above 'acceptance'), it must include the acceptance of those who do explicitly Enjoy their fatness in contravention of social norms.

This leads into a broader discussion about the ways jouissance is ordered and structured through social relations in the parliamentary democracies of late modern capitalism. This will entail a discussion of the way in which Slavoj Zizek has meshed 'traditional' Marxist political economy with Lacanian psychoanalysis in a way that allows us to outline the general theory of a dialectical relationship between human subjectivity and the accumulation of Capital.

The policing of the fat body has its own role(s) to play in the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The elevation of fatness into an object of significant libidinal investment for many people (possibly the vast majority, at least among women) subjects the individuals to the logic of the 'superego injunction to enjoy', generating not only vast amounts of anxiety but also an endless pursuit of some way – any way – to successfully lose or keep off weight that is an increasingly lucrative market[7]. Moreover, there is an established link between fatness and social class; most empirical studies demonstrate that more affluent individuals are thinner and that obesity rates are higher among the working class[8]. The larger implications of this intersection of fatness and class is something that warrants an investigation, particularly in this discussion on the role of fat stigma in the reproduction of capitalism.

This would basically wrap up the discussion on oppression. By this point I will hope to have established a firm ontology of the human subject and the logic of identification, as well as a thorough social ontology for life in late capitalism. I also hope that this theory will demonstrate that analytic and Continental political philosophy are basically commensurable, and that establishing this connection produces invaluable new ways of conceptualizing political problems.

I would like at this point to address some of those problems, and start thinking about some solutions. This section is sort of ambiguous now, but I imagine that once I spend some time extensively thinking about the problems, some sense of practical policy should emerge. Already there are a few off the top of my head (including weight/size in anti-discrimination legislation, cultural/aesthetic movements to show the fat body in a positive light, etc.) and I am confident that after a more thorough review of the literature there will be something a little more concrete here.

In all, this is the rough outline of my thoughts on this topic going forward. I think 'fat liberation' definitely works as a good, practical political problem which can be addressed concisely by political theory; I believe a convincing case can be made that this involves instances of legitimate oppression and affronts to justice and liberty. Obviously while the specific details of the argument remain to be hammered out, I think the general thrust I have outlined here is a good rough guide for writing this thesis.

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Notes:

[1] The primary sources of which will admittedly need to be verified, but methodologically their book is sound, they are both academics working in the field of health science and human kinetics, and it is extremely well-sourced.
[2] And I feel the impact of these points are all better elucidated through recourse to Lacanian psychoanalysis...
[3] The intersection of fatness and gender is already well documented by a number of feminists, for instance.
[4] A recourse to Zizek (2006) here is useful. He highlights three distinct forms violence can take: subjective, objective, and symbolic. For the purposes of this discussion, we would be mostly dealing with the latter two.
[5] It is worth noting here that a recent study of young students in Taiwan found that almost 16% of children aged 10-12 had used self-induced vomiting as a weight loss method (Mei Liou, 2011).
[6] This is presumably to address the criticism that 'fat acceptance' represents a social danger – encouraging people to live unhealthy/'unfulfilled' lives, etc.
[7] Paul Campos (2003) estimates the value of the diet industry to be in the ballpark of $40 billion (US) a year in the United States alone; it is worth noting also that a lot of research in the field of obesity science is funded by companies with a vested interest in the weight-loss industry. This, of course, is to say nothing of the rise in increasingly invasive (and dangerous) private weight-loss surgeries...
[8] Again, the 'single working parent [mother] and her [neglected] obese children' emerges as a demonized figure here.

a rose by any other name

2011-06-03T12:34:00.002-02:30

okay! so by now you've probably noticed that i have changed the name of the blog from one bad piece of wordplay to another (in the event anyone reads this blog (they don't)). the reason for the change is pretty simple; i want to turn this blog away from an overtly 'political' blog into one about things way more abstract and boring like the latest development in FREUDO-MARXIST THEORY as it applies to the lower churchill falls deal or whatever, and maybe about how I am going to try and build an intellectual reputation for myself by writing about 'weight discrimination' as an identity rights issue through a variety of critical conceptual lenses. i know, i'm excited too.

besides, political writing is always best done as part of a collective (1 organisational step below commune, obv.), and there were some very talented individuals i wanted to work with, so look out for us posting some ridiculous political interventions in the next little while.

c'est tout

the times, they are-a changin'

2011-05-22T21:52:00.000-02:30

this thing will probably get a makeover in the next couple of days. stayed tuned for fun things and the life of the world to come

deal or no deal?

2011-05-20T14:07:00.001-02:30

Whenever a major, contentious issues comes up in politics, it doesn't take long for people to start providing a very common refrain: "Who are you to criticise something if you offer no positive vision or alternative yourself?"

This proposition has always bothered me on a number of levels.

First and foremost, we should always ruthlessly critique any political or economic proposition presented to us by a sitting government that involves our money (which is everything!). And this goes doubly when something doesn't bode well about it - the current fiasco around Muskrat Falls testifies to the necessity of this fact, given that the government's entire defense of the project amounts to 'don't look this clean-energy gift horse in the mouth!'

More than this, though, is the wishy-washy position this implies; there is a special place in hell reserved for people who aggressively sit on fenceposts. While obviously reserving judgement or outright picking sides isn't an outright evil (and it is indeed always warranted!), it is certainly no virtue either. In this case, the starting point of any positive vision or alternative to the Muskrat Falls project must begin with criticising what exactly is wrong with the current proposal - and there is much to say, and it has been said by others, elsewhere, with greater depth than I.

To just shrug and say "maybe it's not a great deal, but how can you criticise if you can't come up with a better one?" is an awful approach to the politics of mega-projects, given the history of this province. I mean, if it has done nothing else, the 40 years of wailing and gnashing of teeth since the Upper Churchill was signed should indicate that, as a worst-case scenario, no deal (for the time being!) might - just maybe! - be better than a raw one.

everything remains as it never was

2011-05-17T17:46:00.000-02:30

Old habits die hard, but here I am attempting to break the old habit of "never writing anything, ever".

Anyways, it's basically summer. My coursework for my graduate degree are all currently finished (although I am hoping to sit in on some courses the fall, but that's neither here nor there), so I'm left with a little over a year to churn out a thesis. I have a general idea for a topic but I should probably nail something down - originally I wanted to go with something to do with the rights of transgendered people in Canada, but now it's drifting more towards something like multiculturalism (a topic I'm feeling surprisingly comfortable approaching)... both of which increasingly seem to hinge on more abstract questions, like the nature of the political subject, and the political implications of adopting different stances towards conceptualising the human subject. Really exciting, I know, and sure to thrill people who were vaguely interested in my honours thesis on Newfoundland politics.

But I am interested in pursuing obtuse theoretical debates! I just don't want to detach myself completely from real life. I'm hoping that with the upcoming provincial election in 2011 I will be able to immerse myself in some actual concrete matters (I guess this could have applied during the recent federal election, but I honestly don't care that much about federal politics aside from a purely analytical perspective... as a Newfoundlander I have accepted that federal politics is generally more something that happens to me than something I effect, haha). Danny Williams has since retired from provincial politics so our hilariously inept government no longer seems invincible - it's nice. The Muskrat Falls thing seems like a fiasco in the making, so it might be worth keeping on top of. At any rate, I feel like the provincial scene is lacking a good 'critical' voice - not just in the sense of opposition to the sitting government, but to the systemic totality of it all. Haha, I'm such a douchebag.

Meanwhile, though, it is all about the intellectual labour (and finding a paying job so I can eat in the meantime). I've got a small selection of books I want to work my way through in the next month or so - specifically, Alain Badiou's Ethics - An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference. I feel reading these two books together will be a good exercise, because Young seems to set the stage for contemporary debates in political theory around questions of justice related to subjectivity from a post-modern/critical perspective, while Badiou apparently sets out to obliterate both Young's (not explicitly, of course) position and the Anglo-American liberal mainstream she sets herself up against. Naturally, I'm much more interested in Badiou, but reading both should give me enough material to form a really wicked research question that might get me into a good PhD program. This would probably also be easier if my supervisor wasn't in Ontario for the summer, but it's all good.

But other than thesis work, I don't have much planned for the summer. Taking in a couple concerts/festivals (Supertramp in June, Salmon Fest and Osheaga in July) should be deadly, doing some writing with Sondi, helping out the provincial Liberals (I am, after all, a committed Smallwoodist), and generally trying to improve my cooking skills/get outside more. I'm literally anticipating the highlight of my summer being a visit to the Maoist bookstore in Montreal. Yes, I will be paying for everything in cash, thanks.

Sprung Falls

2011-05-17T11:28:00.002-02:30

I'll keep it brief - the Muskrat Falls project will not be subjected to scrutiny by the PUB, which normally can assess an electricity project and determine whether it is the cheapest option for providing power to the consumers.

Personally, I'm not aware of any instance where the provincial government has invested vast sums of money in a project not subjected to outside scrutiny in order to generate miraculous benefits vis-a-vis job growth and economic development that has ever gone wrong, ever, in the history of Newfoundland and Labrador.

..Suddenly, I've got an overwhelming craving for cucumbers.

some thoughts on newfoundland nationalism

2010-05-27T13:20:00.005-02:30

"...[N]ational heritage [is] a kind of ideological fossil created retroactively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its present antagonism." - Slavoj Zizek

There is definitely some weight to this idea. If I recall correctly most of the literature on the genesis of nationalism as an ideological phenomenon indicates it tends to form as economic development in a given society progresses from a primarily "feudal"/heavily agricultural/subsistence economic arrangement into modernity, and it almost always originates among the educated (read: well-off) classes. This is why I would suspect we didn't see the meaningful appearance of [political] nationalist sentiment in Newfoundland until the late 1960s/early 1970s; it was only then that the province had enough people well-off enough to give a shit about 'standing up for Newfoundland' (I don't think the Anti-Confederate campaign in the late 1940s was ever fundamentally motivated by nationalism [although it was obviously present, ideologically] - it was primarily a question of economic and political power for the business/political class in St. John's and the pulp-and-paper corporate fiefdoms of Grand Falls and Corner Brook. Confederation meant a loss of control by local [commercial, political, clerical] elites over taxation, economic regulation, etc etc etc.)

More importantly I think this particular idea - nationalism as ideology being a retroactive construction in order to mask a present social antagonism - is a good way to begin an analysis of the way nationalism has played a role in provincial politics since the beginning of the Williams administration. Presumably anyone reading this would be familiar with the way the provincial government has been shutting down political opposition (not just the Official Opposition in the House of Assembly, but wider media scrutiny and citizen dissent) by appealing to the Nation - recall the Premier answering Yvonne Jones' questions about the Abitibi expropriation (or the legal dealings with Quebec, or [political issue of the day]...) by implying she was a traitor!

The real question in this situation is to try and determine what social antagonisms nationalist ideology in its present manifestation is blurring. While I'm sure there are many, a few in particular grab my immediate attention - the 'conflict' between 'rural' and 'urban' Newfoundland ('rural' being primarily working-class, "traditional" economy of fishing, agriculture, manual labour, etc. with 'urban' being primarily the oil/gas industry, finance and commerce, etc.), and, as always, the broader class antagonism in this province that is beyond being pinned down to a matter of geographical location; I'm sure any of the unions who've run afoul of the provincial government could testify to this point.

Here I don't think it's hard to see why nationalism works so well as an ideology in the 'Zizekian' sense - what better way to override the actual antagonism between 'have' and 'have not' (to use the popular terminology) than to have us live within a conceptual framework where we are all 'Newfoundlanders and Labradorians', all of us united as a 'nation' with an illustrious historical narrative united against the Other[s] (the federal government, Big Oil/Pulp and Paper/Greenpeace, Quebec, etc). The provincial government here especially likes to make a full identification with nationalist ideology; the House of Assembly is where we are politically represented, and the governing party has an extraordinarily strong mandate (they control roughly 90% of the seats) with an extraordinarily strong executive branch - which leaves us with the bizarre political configuration where the Premier [on his own or through his cabinet] can effectively (if the opinion polls are to be believed) declare that "Le Nation, c'est l'Etat.. et l'Etat, c'est moi."

Obviously this is a very rough sketch of an ideological critique of the present political climate in this province. I think it's a good foundation at least, and if nothing else, some food for thought. But I definitely would consider it as something worth a bit of concerted research.

State of the Union according to J. M. Coetzee

2010-04-16T16:24:00.001-02:30

"There is no longer a left worth speaking of, and a language of the left. The language of politics, with its new economistic bent, is even more repellent than it was fifteen years ago."

He's right.

So the next question is: what is the left going to do about it?

Stay tuned...

the cutest child abuse ads you'll ever see

2009-11-03T11:31:00.004-03:30

all kudos to the sick genius(es) who came up with these - they're almost as brilliant as the car dealership billboard i spotted on kenmount road in july (that has regrettably since vanished) that read "10 billion Hibernia deal and you're still glum? maybe you're driving the wrong car."

will the cat above the precipice fall down? slavoj zizek on the iranian situation

2009-06-26T17:45:00.002-02:30

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

attn: nerds and other technophiles

2009-06-24T13:52:00.006-02:30

queer theory & speaking truth to power

2009-06-05T13:57:00.002-02:30

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?
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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.
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Thoughts?
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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!

What's wrong with a 30-hour work week?

2009-06-01T14:06:00.002-02:30

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!

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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.

Mr. Smallwood Goes to St. John's

2009-03-31T09:12:00.005-02:30

[The following is an excerpt from my honours thesis dealing with Confederation in 1949. As the paper is an investigation of the relationship between class, ideology and state intervention in Newfoundland and Labrador's economic development in the twentieth century, it is less concerned with the specific political wranglings of Confederation and moreso with its overarching significance with regards to the class relations that existed in Newfoundland's politics at the time. Normally I wouldn't have posted this but considering the significance of these two days in our province's history I wanted to share my understanding of the matter with an appreciative audience. Hopefully my account of the Confederation referendum - though brief! - will be stimulating. Footnotes were omitted from this blog posting simply because it would be a pain in the ass to reformat them. - D.]
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The political wranglings that led to Confederation with Canada were won almost solely through the efforts of Joseph Smallwood - efforts which played off the silent class tensions that bubbled just beneath the surface of Newfoundland society since the days of William Coaker.

When the National Convention opened in 1946, almost two thirds of the delegates were solidly anti-Confederate, including the entire bloc from St. John's. After his motion to send a delegation to Ottawa to discuss terms of union with Canada was defeated in late 1946, Smallwood came to the conclusion that if the crusade for Confederation was to be won, it would have to be taken out of the Colonial Building in St. John's and directly to the people themselves.

His opportunity to do so came when the Commission of Government decided to record the Convention's proceedings, and then have them played over the radio every evening. Smallwood, a former radio personality, took full advantage of this development and turned the Convention into a spectacle. Solidifying the position of the pro-Confederation movement among the populace, Smallwood responded to anti-Confederate attempts to remove the microphones by stating that “to despise these microphones is to despise the people of Newfoundland.” [Peter Cashin would later label Smallwood "a communist."] Smallwood's motion to send a delegation to Ottawa eventually passed at the Convention on March 1 1947, and it was the negotiations that occurred at that time which formed the basic terms of union to be voted on as the Confederation option.

With preliminary negotiations in Ottawa on the Confederation question completed, it was now left to the National Convention to decide on Newfoundland's fate. A few days before the final vote, Smallwood made another populist plea to the microphones in the Colonial Building:

...this is not 1869. This time the people are going to know the truth. They are not going to be smothered with the lies and propaganda of 1869. It was easy enough in 1869 to bluff the people [...] but this time the anticonfederates are not going to get away with it, not even if every millionaire, half-millionaire and quarter-millionaire in the country rallies to the side of the anticonfederates. The day is gone when their money-bags will tell our people how to vote. That day is gone, and we live in a different age. Our people are no longer in the mood to bow down and worship a man just because he has somehow or other to make a great fortune for himself. They no longer measure a man's patriotism or his loyal heart by the money he has in the bank. When we say we have a stake in the country we no longer mean how much money a man has, but how many children he has, what is the size of his family, what is his love for the country. When we talk of “men of substance” today, we mean something more than money. Our people are on the march in the tens of thousands. They have formed great trade unions and co-operative societies, and cannot so easily be bluffed anymore. They have learned alot over the past few years, and they ask questions, questions they never dared ask in the bad old days. They ask questions about our vicious system of taxation. They ask questions about the cruel and oppressive cost of living. They ask questions about a system of taxation and of government that has held them down and made it impossible for a working man to live decently and rear a family by his honest earnings. Yes, our people are in the mood to ask many questions today that they never asked before. They are not so easy to bluff as our forefathers were in 1869, and our anticonfederates are going to find that out in 1948 when the referendum takes place.

But Smallwood's efforts were largely wasted on the delegates at the National Convention. The Confederation question was defeated on the floor by a vote of 29-16 the last day the Convention sat, and on January 29 1948 it was promptly dissolved. Undaunted, two days later Confederate magnate Gordon Bradley took to the airwaves with a speech written by Smallwood that damned the Convention politicians who had “thwarted the peoples' right to decide [on Confederation] for themselves,” and urged people in the outports to make their will known via a mass petition. When the petition (containing almost 50,000 names) was collected and sent to London, the British government announced on March 10 that “it would not be right to deprive the people of the opportunity of considering the matter,” and a popular referendum on Confederation was scheduled for June 3, 1948. [For their own part, the British were extremely eager to do whatever it took to get Newfoundland off its hands.]

The referendum campaigns of 1948 saw the class tensions in Newfoundland come to a head as the Confederation question was polarised between two blocs - Smallwood and the Confederates, who campaigned tirelessly across the island and appealed directly to the fishermen and other workers in the outports in a radically (by Newfoundland's standards) grassroots fashion; and the anti-Confederates, who consisted of “almost the entire business and professional class of St. John's,” as well as the Island's two pulp-and-paper companies in Grand Falls and Corner Brook (who feared an end to corporate tax exemptions should Confederation pass). Echoing Newfoundland's oldest home-grown revolutionary Sir William Coaker, Smallwood declared prior to the first referendum that “we don't expect the support of the merchant class, but we can do without them.” The Confederation debate was in many ways an open class conflict.

Unfortunately for both sides, the June 3 referendum failed to produce any clear decision, and the vote breakdown revealed just how polarising the Confederation question was:

• Responsible Government - 69,400

• Confederation - 64,006

• Commission of Government - 22,311

Following the stalemate, Commission of Government was dropped from the ballot, and a second referendum was slated for July 22, 1948. For another seven weeks the campaigns raged on (now with Newfoundland's perennial sectarian conflict between [anti-Confederate] Catholics and [Confederate] Protestants mixed into the fray), but with a turnout of 84.89%, Newfoundlanders and Labradorians at the end of July delivered the final results:

• Confederation - 78,323 [57.24%]

• Responsible Government - 71,334 [47.76%]

Confederation had barely squeaked by, but the referendum results were officially accepted by both the Canadian and British governments. Much to the dismay of the Newfoundland merchant class and Catholic nationalists in St. John's, the independent state of Newfoundland vanished forever and on April Fools' Day, 1949, Newfoundland formally became Canada's tenth province. It was one of the few instances in the island's history that the popular classes had beaten the merchants at their own political game.

As for Joey Smallwood, the man behind Confederation's curtain, biographer Richard Gwyn frames his position in the immediate aftermath of the July referendum:

Virtually single-handed, [Smallwood] had dragged Newfoundland into the twentieth century. The crazy radical had become, as Ewart Young had predicted, “the hero of the hour and of Newfoundland history.” He had also become the most powerful man on the island. Those who had once laughed at Smallwood as a “crazy radical” would have to turn to him now for patronage, position, and prestige.

This “crazy radical” would remain Newfoundland's Premier for 23 years. By the time he would leave office in 1972, so many boats had been burned under his watch that Newfoundland was unrecognisable.

The Parable of the Failed State

2009-02-01T13:37:00.005-03:30

The thing that has been - it is what will be again, and that which has been done is that which will be done again; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it may be said, See, this is new? It has already been, in the vast ages of time which were before us. - Ecclesiastes 1:9-10

At this time [the year 1908 – D.], Canadian financial interests joined forces with the Reid Newfoundland Company in an effort to manipulate Newfoundland into confederation. Their instrument was E.P. Morris, Bond’s minister of justice, who left the Liberals and formed his own party in 1907. The new People’s party was drawn from a growing middle class of small businessmen, lawyers, journalists, and newly prosperous outport merchants, not all of whom were aware of Morris’ secret corporate backing. The party was marked by a reversion to the late nineteenth-century policy of adventurism. Morris capitalised on recent industrial development and prospering fisheries to announce a programme of extensive national development encompassing agriculture, mining, local manufacturing, and the fisheries; its keystone the construction of several costly branch railways. Succumbing to Morris’ promises of “something for everyone,” Newfoundlanders ignored the lessons of 1894 [a bank crash/depression that devastated the country – D.], becoming caught up in a euphoria that the revenue was ultimately incapable of supporting. They ousted the cautious Bond from power.

In the process, political life underwent a substantial change. During the Whiteway era, parties had been organised on the basis of rival views of Newfoundland’s destiny. After 1900, only Bond’s party maintained a coherent vision of the future, but his Liberalism was as much identified with his hostility to the Reid interests as it was with his nationalistic fisheries policy. Morris’ party was no more than a fraud, a vehicle to be used by its leaders to buy their way into office and further their ambitions. It represented cooperation with the Reids, and for the rank-and-file it became an efficient channel for patronage and profit. Confederation was shelved. Uninspired by a national vision, politicians contented themselves with extracting a living from the system, and reduced politics to the supervision of an unwieldy and inadequate administrative structure. Parties evaded fundamental economic and social issues and as a result became the expression not of ideas, but of violent personality conflicts. [Emphasis added – D.]

_{From Ian D.H. McDonald’s “To Each His Own”: William Coaker and the Fishermen’s Protective Union in Newfoundland Politics, 1908-1925, pg. 3}

And yet, over 58 million people still voted Republican

2009-01-25T15:01:00.001-03:30

I'm trying not to get caught up too much in the Obama-mania - I mean yeah he's super cool and all but whatever, he's still just a career politician - but every now and then I remember why we love the guy so much.

Remember the guy he replaced? From the Washington Post comes this early piece on the Bush legacy:

Guantanamo Case Files in Disarray

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

mmmmmmmmmm yes i love it tell me more about how the american government shit all over human rights in the name of freedom, as a disaffected twenty-something leftist irony is my lifeblood

although i'm sure administration officials had a really good reason to do something like that!

But other former officials took issue with the criticism and suggested that the new team has begun to appreciate the complexity and dangers of the issue and is looking for excuses.

After promising quick solutions, one former senior official said, the Obama administration is now "backpedaling and trying to buy time" by blaming its predecessor. Unless political appointees decide to overrule the recommendations of the career bureaucrats handling the issue under both administrations, he predicted, the new review will reach the same conclusion as the last: that most of the detainees can be neither released nor easily tried in this country.

"All but about 60 who have been approved for release," assuming countries can be found to accept them, "are either high-level al-Qaeda people responsible for 9/11 or bombings, or were high-level Taliban or al-Qaeda facilitators or money people," said the former official who, like others, insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters about such matters. He acknowledged that he relied on Pentagon assurances that the files were comprehensive and in order rather than reading them himself.

i literally can't even add commentary to this it's like an immaculate satire, like bush created a parody so perfect it self-actualised

"are you crazy we can't release them, they're terrorist leaders! what? no i haven't actually seen any physical evidence that would indicate anything i'm saying is even remotely true but the army told me they did and i'm a big gullible idiot"

Obama officials said they want to make their own judgments.

"The consensus among almost everyone is that the current system is not in our national interest and not sustainable," another senior official said. But "it's clear that we can't clear up this issue overnight" partly because the files "are not comprehensive."

Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases. Threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee were often required, he said, to persuade the CIA to "cough up a sentence or two."

A second former Pentagon official said most individual files are heavily summarized dossiers that do not contain the kind of background and investigative work that would be put together by a federal prosecution team. He described "regular food fights" among different parts of the government over information-sharing on the detainees.

A CIA spokesman denied that the agency had not been "forthcoming" with detainee information, saying that such suggestions were "simply wrong" and that "we have worked very closely with other agencies to share what we know" about the prisoners. While denying there had been problems, one intelligence official said the Defense Department was far more likely to be responsible for any information lapses, since it had initially detained and interrogated most of the prisoners and had been in charge of them at the prison.

cia spokesman then denied grass is green, existence of cia

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said that the Defense Department would cooperate fully in the review.

"Fundamentally, we believe that the individual files on each detainee are comprehensive and sufficiently organized," Morrell said. He added that "in many cases, there will be thousands of pages of documents . . . which makes a comprehensive assessment a time-consuming endeavor."

"Not all the documents are physically located in one place," Morrell said, but most are available through a database.

"The main point here is that there are lots of records, and we are prepared to make them available to anybody who needs to see them as part of this review."

pretend this sentence is a witty crack about the term "military intelligence"

There have been indications from within and outside the government for some time, however, that evidence and other materials on the Guantanamo prisoners were in disarray, even though most of the detainees have been held for years.

Justice Department lawyers responding in federal courts to defense challenges over the past six months have said repeatedly that the government was overwhelmed by the sudden need to assemble material after Supreme Court rulings giving detainees habeas corpus and other rights.

activist judges are ruining america. (republicans believe that statement is true fyi)

In one federal filing, the Justice Department said that "the record . . . is not simply a collection of papers sitting in a box at the Defense Department. It is a massive undertaking just to produce the record in this one case." In another filing, the department said that "defending these cases requires an intense, inter-agency coordination of efforts. None of the relevant agencies, however, was prepared to handle this volume of habeas cases on an expedited basis."

Evidence gathered for military commission trials is in disarray, according to some former officials, who said military lawyers lacked the trial experience to prosecute complex international terrorism cases.

In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was "strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks."

He said he once accidentally found "crucial physical evidence" that "had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten."

hahaha awesome

I think the absolute best part of the Obama administration will be all the great things it will teach us about just how staggeringly incompetent and absurd the Bush era actually was.

It's really weird living in a post-Bush world.

A Financial Katrina

2009-01-07T16:25:00.004-03:30

This is a lecture given by Dr. David Harvey of the City University of New York on the global financial crisis we're currently embroiled in.

Harvey has been studying and teaching Marx's Kapital for roughly four decades (his lessons are actually available for free on his site) so his interpretation is definitely unorthodox but it's a very interesting perspective on how/why all of this is occurring and what it actually means for ordinary individuals.

And don't worry, he's not just spewing a bunch of academic Marxian jargon - it's all in the plain English of high finance, so it shouldn't be any less comprehensible than ROBTV or CNN's market coverage/investment advice.

~link

----
_{This lecture was delivered on October 29 2008 at the panel discussion for The Disruption: Left Interpretations of the Financial Crisis at the CUNY Graduate Centre.}

The Special Case That is Israel

2009-01-05T00:48:00.005-03:30

This is an interesting piece from 24-year old Danish Socialist MP Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen on the current humanitarian crisis in Gaza that pretty much says everything that I would have to say on the topic.

The rhetoric could be toned down a little bit in a few places, but other than that it's spot on.

What do you think?

------------------------------

The Special Case That Is Israel
Johannes Schmidt-Nielsen

On Saturday Israel initiated the most violent attack on Palestinian territory in several years. With the help of high-tech F16 jets and Apache helicopters Israel bombed the densely populated Gaza Strip, where 1.5 million people live in total slums. The area is roughly the size of Langeland island.

It is nothing new that Israeli policies kill Palestinians, the horrible attack on Saturday simply marks another "high point". In the previous months Gaza has been subject to what the Palestinians call silent deaths. The two-year-old Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip means that hundreds of Palestinians have lost their lives. Cause of death: Lack of basic medicines such as insulin, combined with massive food shortages. Especially the old and sick have buckled under the blockade.

According to the Israeli government, Saturday's attack is simply a defensive reaction meant to force HAMAS and other Palestinian militant groups to cease their rocket attacks directed at southern Israeli cities, that have barely hit anything. While the Palestinian attacks are described as inhumane acts of terrorism, the much deadlier Israeli attacks are portrayed as attempts to establish peace and quiet. It is a strange form of reverse logic: An occupied people is labelled terorists, whereas the occupiers are categorized as democratic peacemakers.

And this sort of logic is only given the time of day because the West has awarded Israel a unique status. While other occupying forces have been subject to both sanctions and invasions from the international community, Israel has been able to keep up their occupation of Palestinian territory for 40 years. Not even Israel's intentional and well-planned colonization of Palestinian lands through hundreds of settlements has been seriously condemned by the international community. On the contrary Israel is given special treatment, for example in terms of trade—and now the EU is planning to strengthen cooperation with Israel.

The West's double standard and disregard for the Palestinians' basic rights are not just a tragedy for the Palestinians. It is a tragedy for the world. The continued occupation and constant humiliation of the Palestinians is without a doubt one of the most effective methods of creating support for reactionary, Islamist HAMAS and terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda. They can rightly refer to the hollowness of the West's talk of democracy and human rights, and thereby co-opt the despair that is so widespread in the Arab world.

The most tragic thing is that a permanent peace in reality requires only a few, small gestures on Israel's behalf. A large majority of Palestinians have given up the claim to their original homeland and now only demand that Israel give back the areas occupied since 1967, as well as a solution for Palestinian refugees.

Israel is 100% reliant on American military and economic support and trade with the EU. Therefore, a lasting peace (favouring both Palestinians and Israelis!) could be obtained the day there was political will to pressure Israel economically. For some reason that just doesn't happen—for the special case that is Israel.

Status of Women Canada can suck my dick

2008-12-08T13:10:00.003-03:30

No, really.

If the recent activities of Status of Women Canada are any indication, then the branch of Canada’s government officially devoted to fighting misogyny has fallen so far from their aims that my fellow patriarchs may as well assume the position.

For those out of the loop when it comes to the struggle of the fairer sex against society’s residual sexism, last month Status of Women Minister Helena Guergis handed out the 2008 Governor General’s Awards in Commemoration of the Persons Case to six people who the Government of Canada recognises as tirelessly working towards the “full participation of women in the social, economic and democratic life of Canada." The occasion, of course, is to commemorate that fateful day in 1929 when, after some brutal legal acrobatics, five Canadian women managed to convince a white male judge that they were, in fact, people.

While the five women awarded (one of whom is Newfoundland’s very own Frances Ennis) more than deserve the recognition for their work, it’s the sixth recipient that’s giving me a bit of trouble. Ben Barry, a modelling agent from Ottawa, was the first man ever recognised by this award on the basis that by lobbying for the inclusion of bigger girls in the modelling industry he is battling the stereotypical notions of female beauty. For such progressive endeavours, Mr. Barry is being recognised by the Crown as a champion of women’s rights.

This is revolting.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s thrilling that there is an individual out there who is advocating on behalf of all the beautiful women above 130 lbs, but the idea that its some kind of great achievement in the history of women’s rights is laughable at best and insulting at worst.

The modelling industry by its very nature is a fundamentally sexist institution – models are commodities, they are tools used to sell other products or services, and their worth is determined by their physical appearance. As a business it sits at the apex of the patriarchy; an industry where individuals (men and women, although the latter suffers far more for it) are objectified, commoditised, and exploited for profit until their physical appearance no longer fits the product or service they’re selling, at which point they are discarded for fresh meat. It is, by its own internal logic, violently anti-feminist.

While it’s laudable that Mr. Barry is devoting his efforts to showing that bigger women are just as beautiful as their slender counterparts, the idea that he is somehow advancing the cause of women in Canadian society by working to integrate more of them into the dehumanising machinery of the modelling industry is ridiculous. Worst of all, by officially sanctioning it as “progressive,” Status of Women Canada is not only showing that it has no idea who it’s supposed to be lobbying for, but it’s sending a very regressive message to society at large, and women in particular. It doesn’t matter if you’re carrying a little extra weight – you too can be objectified and packaged as a commodity! Girl power!

In handing this award out to Ben Barry, Status of Women Canada and Minister Guergis have shown how painfully out of touch they are with the issue of women’s rights and the very notion of ‘equality’. Actually, the very fact that a more thorough feminist critique of the award process can be provided by a college-educated white male – primary beneficiary and perpetuator of the patriarchy – than by Minister Guergis herself might say more about the sorry state of Status of Women under the Harper administration and the insidious persistence of misogyny across Canadian society than is really comfortable.

But then again, maybe life’s just a bitch.

Buyer's Remorse

2008-12-02T12:33:00.003-03:30

This coalition government business is totally insane, and yet it’s totally legitimate.

That’s insane.

In the midst of an economic crisis heavily affected (and largely sustained) by speculation – and certainly not amicable to any unplanned turbulence among its superstructural elements – parliament’s three opposition parties, soundly defeated in an election eight weeks ago, are seeking to usurp the rights of their vanquisher to his prize.

The current Prime Minister of Canada, a man whose party received the largest plurality of votes in the last election – and who had (until last week) been believed by both friends and detractors to be a brilliant and shrewd political mastermind - will soon see the crowning achievement of his life torn away from him. Instead of being the architects of a new Conservative political order, his party will be forever remembered as one which destroyed its own government through spite and hubris at a speed unprecedented in Canadian history.

Meanwhile, the new coalition government of Canada will be headed by a man who recently resigned from the leadership of its most successful political party (after leading them to their worst electoral performance in the history of Confederation), and his steps towards restoring stability to the country’s economy will be largely charted by a man whose party made braking what are perceived to be its largest engines of growth a key platform in the last election. The lifespan of this government continues only as long as it retains the precipitous support of a man whose party believes the existence of the country it governs to be illegitimate.

No one in the last election who cast a ballot ever imagined this government appearing – much less voted for or against it – but yet in an ironic twist it’s somehow more “democratic” than the government it’s replacing.

Above all, this is entirely by the book. The hockey game we bought tickets for is actually going to be a rugby match, but according to the stadium’s management, that’s okay. Buyer beware: the athletes whose salaries you pay are going to play whatever game they want – regardless of whether or not you’d like, hate, or even ask to see it. The inmates, it turns out, have full run of their asylum.

Whether or not you sympathise with the Conservative government that brought this on itself or prefer the alternative of Danny Williams’ dream team “Anyone But Conservative” government, this situation should give you some pause for thought. Forget everything you thought you knew about politics – literally anything can happen. Once you cast your vote, the ball is entirely in the politicians’ court to play whatever crazy power games they want.

If this idea – that you don’t really have that much say in how your country is run – doesn’t bother you on at least some fundamental level, then you might be too emotionally invested in this partisan shell game for your own good.

As for the rest of us, it may actually be time to start asking about where exactly the peoples’ authority in this supposed democracy actually has gone, and what it’s going to take to start getting it back.

Otherwise, we may all soon wind up going off the rails on this crazy train.

*solos*

canadian political history; a pictorama

2008-12-01T19:25:00.004-03:30

an authentic photograph of stephen harper reading this article earlier today

welp, looks like harper just got diowned

(a pm who lose the confidence of he own parliament..

a shameful pm)

as an aside canada now almost resembles a grownup democracy like ~~italy~~austria or some crazy bullshit, hooray

this has been a presentation by a member of memorial university's political science honours class of 2009; for more of this kind of insightful commentary, please continue to support publicly funded post-secondary education with your tax dollars

An addendum

2008-11-21T17:07:00.002-03:30

The earlier entry really didn’t sit well with me after I posted it – it felt sloppy and even a little intellectually dirty – and sure enough, within moments University of Calgary PhD candidate Herb Simms took me (back) to school on, well, everything.

When the markets collapsed in the 30s governments responded with protectionism which made the situation far far worse. People also tend to forget the last 6+ years of a bull market made people a lot of money. Markets correct, that's life. While free trade is certainly no panacea for the current market situation, reactionary protectionism will certainly make it worse.

Also comparing banking deregulation-such as the revoking of the Glasman Stengal act done as Clinton left office-to opening up more markets is the worst kind of a red-herring. Apples and oranges.

The idea of a viral pandemic in capitalism is a position, not a fact. Many espousing such an idea don't like what they call capitalism when everyone is making money, they don't like it when people are losing money. They are simply antagonistic to what they see as an exploitive system. This is seems to be the far more ideological position; it never changes. However, so far the alternatives to people making their own investment and purchasing choices suck.

Free market, like democracy is an ideal never really actualized in reality and means many things to different people. So it is hard to take much of the hysterical criticism seriously.

I hadn’t meant to suggest protectionism was a solution – I only hold mercantilist positions ironically. That said, the idea I was working with – the vacuous notion of “fair trade” – reveals itself to be so nebulous it borders on meaninglessness after it's given 30 seconds of thought. Who knew! I guess this is what I get for trying to pass for a wishy-washy pseudo-leftist by critiquing APEC trade policy before my morning ~~irish~~ coffee.

And yes, upon further consideration equating financial deregulation with lowering trade barriers is blatantly disingenuous and I’m actually really embarrassed it happened. Open mouth, insert foot, etc. They’re not even close to the same thing; one pertains to the regulatory framework governing activity within one particular market the other relates to the actual creation of a market to regulate (or not, whatever floats your boat). It was low-hanging fruit and I took it, yuck.

Using ‘ideological’ in the vulgate sense that is being bandied about by CBC/CTV pundits is another mistake. It’s true that my personal perspective – I’d self-identify as a ‘critic’ of capitalism but in all honesty ‘antagonistic’ fits just as well – is ideological, but only inasmuch as anyone’s perspective on social phenomena is ideological. Neo-liberal thought is only a component element in the diverse branches of thought within the fundamental ideology of capitalism and everything associated with it. And obviously I’ve spent too much time in an ideological echo chamber – the only real way to gain any semblance of ‘objective truth’ about any situation is to have a dialogue and debate between conflicting ideological viewpoints.

In this sense, my issues with free trade and all related points of contention is less with Neo-liberalism vs. Protectionism in policy decisions and more with the fundamental underpinnings of capitalism and all that jazz. Which is probably worth an elucidation but that will be in another post I think, this is kind of long.

But your last point is probably the most spot on – it is hard to take hysterical criticism of anything seriously. I suppose then that I should take this opportunity to stop the hysterics and start thinking/writing more analytically and reasonably.

And I guess also stopping by the department to talk with Herb Simms more often, apparently!

Whatever doesn't kill you...

2008-11-21T11:12:00.010-03:30

[hey this is a p. bad post but fortunately this might be a lot more readable!!]

As it turns out, Prime Minister Harper will be in Peru today promoting free trade at the APEC summit this weekend.

Quoth the raven,

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is expected to tout free trade as an antidote to the global economic crisis when he attends the 21-nation Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Peru this weekend.

Free and open markets are the best way to ensure the global economy rebounds quickly, according to Harper, who departs for Lima on Friday morning.

Of course! The best cure for a global crisis brought on by unregulated markets is to deregulate more markets, naturally.

It’s good to see the Conservatives are still as ideological as ever – I was beginning to worry they might respond to our economic stress in a way that made sense.

Fortunately Tom d’Aquino of the completely non-biased Canadian Council of Chief Executives is setting the record straight:

Tom d'Aquino, president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, said APEC leaders must push hard to keep markets open.

"The worst thing in the world at a time of great difficulty would be if people would try to build up barriers and fortresses against direct foreign investment or the openness of international trade," d'Aquino said.

He’s right, the worst thing a small nation could do right now would be to take steps to maximise their right to economic self-determination and use what little control they have over their economic destiny to try and inoculate themselves against what is essentially a viral pandemic in neo-liberal capitalism.

You would think that if anyone gleaned anything from watching the evolution of the current financial quagmire, it would be that any advice coming from an organisation made up of CEOs should probably be immediately discarded.

Maybe instead someone should try listening to these guys for once.

"History has shown that crises on this scale lead to social and political instability with unpredictable and often tragic results. Working families have an enormous stake in the response to this crisis. Already, for more than two decades social cohesion has been under stress as a result of growing inequality in most countries. Today, those who are losing homes, jobs and pensions as a result of the financial crisis, for which they bear no responsibility, as taxpayers are being called on to bail-out those who are responsible. The G20 governments [they're not talking APEC in this context, but the same principles apply - ed.] must acknowledge the urgent need to begin work on a more inclusive, just and democratic system for the governance of global markets."

"Have" status is an illusion

2008-11-20T12:39:00.005-03:30

[an op-ed I recently submitted to Memorial University's student paper, reprinted here because, hell, why not inject it into the blogosphere too?]

Friends, Newfoundland Labradorians, countrymen; lend me your ears.

I come with the Honourable Premier Williams today to bury the old, impoverished, “have-not” Newfoundland, not to appeal to it nostalgically and wring my hands in the air screaming “we have prosperity, but at what cost?” as you might expect to hear from our troglodytes and cultural reactionaries. No longer is Newfoundland and Labrador the poor cousin of Confederation; as Brian Peckford opportunistically prophesised so long ago, the sun now shines over Newfoundland and Labrador. Have-not is no more.

Nevermind that the Aboriginal peoples of Northern Labrador are so impoverished by centuries of political and social repression, and that even in the face of “generous” food subsidies the price of a box of Kraft Dinner is still so high that many people are now resorting to scavenging in landfills for scraps of food in order to avoid starvation in the year 2008; Danny Williams says we have achieved prosperity, and Danny Williams is an Honourable man.

Pay no attention to the dying gasps of rural Newfoundland and its rotting wharves, to the towns full of homes adorned with satellite dish gargoyles connected to one another by dilapidated roads, to the crowded midday taverns surrounded by Ford trucks freshly purchased with Albertan blood money for a funeral procession to mark the death of community. Danny Williams tell us things are different now, and Danny Williams is an Honourable man.

Ignore the devastated health care sector, so crippled by blatant mismanagement that nurses and doctors are leaving in droves while patients are left to linger and die within a bloated and Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy. Ignore the Diaspora of young Newfoundlanders and Labradorians who take their skills, passions and talents on a reluctant exodus to the mainland in order to pay off the crushing debt they incurred at an institution originally established to freely educate the people of this province. Ignore the government’s refusal to negotiate with unions representing the chronically underfunded workers in this province, a refusal that springs from the same miserly instincts that coursed through the veins of the Water Street merchants who rode roughshod on the backs of the outports a century ago.

Ignore every last social grievance that permeates the lives of you and everyone you care about: Danny Williams stood before a crowded 500-dollar-a-plate gala, held a glass of champagne aloft and proclaimed that we can hold our heads high, because we are a have province.

And who will disagree with the optimism brought on by our new prosperity? Danny Williams is an Honourable man, and it is the work of this Honourable man that has brought us to where we are today:
A have province, full of have-nots.

Opening Salvo

2008-11-19T15:26:00.003-03:30

Case in point, this is what happened the last time I got it into my head to be a smartass on the internet:

2008-11-19T14:31:00.003-03:30

The other day while on my way to help the president of Fair Vote NL play a game of good cop/bad cop with Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dave Denine re: how much he knows about democracy, I ran into Simon Lono.

He advised me that I should start blogging.

Everything that follows is his fault.