For the Christian world, January 1st is New Years' Day but for many religious communities it is not a particularly auspicious day because religious calendars differ and, consequently, different religions celebrate the beginning of their New Year on different dates. The difference in religious calendars is just one way in which religions disagree about the nature of time. Some, notably Christianity, Judaism and Islam think it is linear; that time began at the moment of creation and is leading us to the End. However, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs believe that time is cyclical; that it goes round in an unceasing circle of birth, death and re-incarnation. Does it matter? And does what we believe about time affect the way we live our lives? Joining Ernie Rea to discuss differing concepts of Time in religious traditions are Eleanor Nesbitt, Professor Emeritus in the Religions and Education Research Unit at the University of Warwick; Shayk Soheeb Saeed, an Academic and Quran scholar at the University of Edinburgh where he is also the Muslim Chaplain; and Dr Andrew Crome, Lecturer in Early Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University. Ernie also talks to Richard D Lewis - the author of 'When Cultures Collide' - who talks about the novel approach to time keeping held by the people of Madagascar.
8 January 2018
Jacobin Magazine: Work It
This isn’t a view confined to liberals, and it crops up in some exchanges I’ve had with Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman. In a response to me, Ackerman makes a similar argument: “there is . . . an impulse to resent those with ‘undeserved’ advantages in the distribution of work,” and therefore “there will always be this social demand for the equal liability of all to work.” Thus he insists that “emancipation from wage-work should happen through the reduction of working-time along the intensive margin,” i.e., through a reduction in working hours among the employed. Alex Gourevitch, meanwhile, makes a somewhat different case, celebrating the value of “discipline” and the “renunciation of desire” against what he perceives as the embrace of pure hedonism and immediacy by anti-work writers.
The problem that crops up in all discussions of this kind, however, is the ambiguity of the term “work,” particularly in a capitalist society. It has at least three distinct meanings that are relevant. One, it can mean activity that is necessary for the continuation of human civilization, what Engels called “the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life.” Two, it can mean the activity that people undertake in exchange for money, in order to secure the means of continued existence. Three, it can mean what Gourevitch is talking about, an activity that requires some kind of discipline and deferred gratification in pursuit of an eventual goal. [...]
Meanwhile, some of the things people do work very hard to get paid for are of dubious social utility. The people who design high frequency trading algorithms are undoubtedly hard-working and ingenious. But it’s hard to justify what they do even within the parameters of a capitalist economy, which is why calls for a financial transactions tax are so appealing. And the things in this category aren’t necessarily bad things — professional sports aren’t necessary for social reproduction either, even though they’re well paid and are acknowledged to be “hard work” in the third sense of work given above. [...]
Allowing people to opt out of labor is a far more uncertain, potentially destabilizing thing than simply reducing the length of the waged work week. But that is what makes it so important. What we need is not just less work — though we do need that — but a rethinking of the substantive content of work beyond the abstraction of wage labor. That will mean both surfacing invisible unpaid labor and devaluing certain kinds of destructive waged work. But merely saying that we should improve the quality of existing work and reduce its duration doesn’t allow us to raise the question of whether the work needs to exist at all. To use Albert Hirschman’s terms, giving workers voice within the institution of wage labor can never fundamentally call the premises of that institution into question. For that, you need the real right of Exit, not just from particular jobs but from the labor market as a whole.
Al Jazeera: Causes behind Iran's protests: A preliminary account
Since March 2016, Iran has seen 1,700 social protests, according to the Islamic Revolution Devotees Society (Jamiyat-e Isargara-e Enqelab-e Eslami), a conservative party of which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a founding member. Over the course of 2017, hundreds of protests took place by workers, pensioners, teachers, and students. Labour protests continued due to unpaid salaries, neoliberal economic policies and resistance towards labour organising, which were confronted with harsh repression by security forces and sanctioned by arbitrary layoffs. [...]
A number of key events over 2017 led popular disillusion with the regime as a whole to reach a new level. In May, after a deadly mine explosion in northern Iran, the miners' rage descended upon President Rouhani, when angry workers attacked his armoured vehicle when he wanted to visit the site. In mid-November the heavy earthquakes shaking the country had demonstrated to all Iranians the regime's utter neglect for their most vital needs - from the social housing, built under corrupt circumstances during the Ahmadinejad years, which had abruptly collapsed burying innumerous people under their rubble until the Rouhani administration's hesitant reaction to provide aid to the victims that left many literally in the cold. [...]
Over the last summer, Iranians became enraged about the elite's nepotism, mainly in the reformist camp. The outcry was provoked by a 20 July interview in which the son of the leading reformist politician Mohammad-Reza Aref credited his "good genes" for his professional success. On social media, Iranians identified more cases of such "Aqazadeh" whose lucrative jobs were due to their father's position in the system. On the one hand, this further undermined the tarnished reputation of the reformists, making clear that they were clearly part of the ruling elite and not on the side of the people they pretended to represent. On the other, the structuring wall erected after the revolution between regime insiders (khodi), who enjoyed access to state resources and privileges, and outsiders (qeyr-e khodi), seemed to be insurmountable for most Iranians. [...]
Structurally, the ongoing social misery, as well as the political system's autocratic and repressive nature, have long formed the dual and intertwined core of a regime who had monopolised economic and political power in its own hands. Today, almost half of the Iranian population persevere around the poverty line - which tellingly stands above the official minimum wage. Officially, every eighth is unemployed; among the youth one in four also is - in reality, the real figures should be much higher. It was precisely this impoverished youth in their 20s who were the drivers of the uprising. According to estimates, 40 percent of the youth are unemployed.
The Guardian: Behind the veil: Iranian women cast off their hijabs – in pictures
For her project My Stealthy Freedom, Amsterdam-based photographer Marinka Masséus travelled to Iran, where it is mandatory for women to wear the hijab. The series, in which women defiantly throw their veils in the air, was created in a Tehran apartment with the windows covered in tinfoil to conceal the flash. “I applaud the right for any woman to wear the hijab as she chooses,” says Masséus. “But many Iranian women hate compulsory hijab – they see it as a symbol of oppression.” She was struck by the contrast between the oppressive regime and the independent, modern women she met there. “They all told me the same thing: we have two faces, one for the outside world to stay safe and one for inside.”
Quartz: One of Europe’s largest meat companies is betting big on cell-cultured, vegan chicken
The partnership between Tel Aviv-based SuperMeat and the German poultry company PHW Group marks a important milestone for the nascent clean meat industry. It is also the latest sign that global meat industry players—well aware of a growing interest among consumers for alternative protein sources—are prepared to coalesce around new food technologies to get cost-competitive cell-cultured meat out of the laboratory and into the grocery store.
Cell-cultured “clean” meat is grown by extracting cells from an animal and then growing those cells in a bioreactor filled with a high-tech nutrient-dense liquid. The cells feed on the liquid and proliferate, producing chicken meat that’s molecularly identical to conventional meat without having ever slaughtered an animal. Some early research has shown that, theoretically, clean meat operations could release 98% less greenhouse gas than conventional farming. They would also use 99% less land and 96% less water. [...]
To be sure, there are a lot of complex questions to answer as clean meat makers prepare to get a product ready for the commercial marketplace, including figuring out which government agencies will regulate its safety and how it will be labeled. Dairy producers in the US and Europe have complained that soy, cashew, and almond companies label their liquid products as “milk.” It’s anticipated by some that clean meat might face similar complaints from certain corners of the meat industry, particularly from farmers and ranchers.
Al Jazeera: Can Mohammed bin Salman break the Saudi-Wahhabi pact?
These comments are remarkable for two reasons: first, because they acknowledge that moderation is lacking in the interpretation of Islam that the Saudi state has followed; second, because they reflect the notion that the religious system currently in place hinders socioeconomic development and is not compatible with the demands of the young generation. [...]
At the time when the Grand Mosque seizure took place, the Saudi monarchy was facing a spate of instability. Four years earlier, King Faisal (ruled 1964-1975), who had pushed for modernisation of the kingdom, launching the first television broadcast, implementing soicioeconomic reforms and promoting public education (including girls' schools), had been assassinated by one of his nephews. Most of Saudi's religious establishment had not welcomed these modernisation initiatives. [...]
The House of Saud's response to the crisis was to roll back King Faisal's modernisation initiatives and empower the religious authorities. The government began enforcing a strict religious code, the police cracked down on businesses not closing for the five prayers and women were virtually excluded again from public life. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, commonly known as the religious police, visibly benefitted from the injections of government cash and took on a more prominent role in monitoring the lives of ordinary Saudis. [...]
However, the most monumental shifts are yet to take place in the Saudi power structure. The country's legal system operates within Islamic law, which is the ultimate source of legislation in Saudi Arabia. Strictly abiding by traditional interpretations of Islamic law is a crucial element of the worldview Abd al-Wahhab introduced. This is why, in simplified terms, breaking the Saudi-Wahhabi pact would mean breaking up with this traditional interpretation and potentially codifying law rather than relying on judges to interpret it.
Political Critique: Corbyn can kick off a revolution among Europe’s political elites – an interview with Michael Hartmann
How many people make up the elite of a country?
About 2000 people.
How accessible is the elite?
It really depends on which elite-branch and country we are talking about. For instance, in Germany, 75% of the chief economic officers who are part of the economic elite stem from the richest 4% of the population. Among German political elites, on the other hand, the figure drops down to 50%. In France the numbers are slightly different and rise to 90 and 60%, respectively. This implies, on the one hand, that the economic elite is more exclusive than the political one, generally speaking. On the other hand, it tells us that France has more “exclusive” features compared with Germany. [...]
We observed the last significant turn within elites when Thatcher took power in the UK. More specifically, at that time within the British Conservative Party the neoliberal paradigm gained traction. The transition was accompanied by a fully fledged shift in the composition of the Government’s staff. If, before Thatcher, the Labour government featured 30% of people stemming from the upper bourgeoisie, that same number reached the staggering proportion of 80%. From an ideological point of view, all other European countries subsequently followed that paradigm shift. [...]
Brexit is a symptom of the poor cohesion within the British economic elite. If compared to other economic elites in Europe, the former is the only one that has undergone a massive process of internationalisation. This dynamic created a gap between the economic elite and the conservative political ruling class. [...]
First of all, it makes no sense to talk about a crisis within Die Linke. Secondarily, the point is that the left has to live with a substantial mutation of its electorate. Leftist parties attract young people with high levels of education, not the victims of the economic system. This truth holds for anyone: Die Linke, Sanders in the US, or Corbyn in the UK. And it creates disruptions.
Haaretz: BDS Blacklist: Sadly, Now Might Be the Time for Jews to Boycott Israel
There’s an intriguing irony here. Jewish BDS activists are now barred from visiting. But under Israel’s Law of Return, as Jews, they can still immigrate and even receive financial support from the government for doing so. Though it’s an interesting twist, these activists are unlikely to take up the opportunity, since one of their targets is in fact - the Law of Return.
Palestine solidarity activists often point to what they see as an unfair juxtaposition between an Israeli law granting immigration rights to any Jew worldwide, and the barring, by Israel, of the return of Palestinian refugees who were exiled in the 1948 war. This juxtaposition is what underlies JVP’s "Return the Birthright" campaign, whose subtitle is: "Because Palestinians can’t return to their homes." [...]
And here is the most important point about whether BDS activists deserve to be banned: At all its ports of entry, Israel does not only gate-keep for its own sovereign territory and its own citizens. Palestinian controlled-areas and the millions of Palestinians there who are not Israeli citizens are still subject to the decisions of Israeli authorities about who gets in - and who gets out. [...]
This also means that Israel continues to inch away from its self-declared commitment to being a democracy. And sadly, perhaps, it means that if ever there was a time for BDS, this may be it.
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