Jacobin Magazine: No Scrubs

One of the most positive features of state socialism, Ghodsee argues, is that it gave women economic independence from men. In the former Soviet countries, women may not have been able to take part in free elections or find a diversity of consumer goods, but they were guaranteed public education, jobs, housing, health care, maternity leave, child allowances, child care, and more. Not only did this arrangement liberate women and men alike from the anxieties and pressures of sink-or-swim capitalism; it also meant that women were much less likely to rely on male partners for the fulfillment of basic needs. This in turn meant that heterosexual women’s romantic relationships with men were more optional, less constrained by economic considerations, and often more egalitarian. As Ghodsee writes in her book: [...]

State socialist feminists — and I should put the term “feminist” in quotes, because really they were women’s activists — understood women to have different needs from men, and sought to implement policies to meet those needs. We’re not talking about gender or sexual equality in exactly the way that it was articulated by Western feminists in the second wave. The idea was instead that men and women were both making valuable contributions to society, but doing so in different ways. Women’s role as mothers was often assumed. To that end, there were many state policies put in place to deal with the work-family balance issues that women are still dealing with today in the West. [...]

There were brilliant socialist feminists in the seventies, people like Silvia Federici and others, who were making the case that large structural changes would reorganize relationships between men and women. What happened is that, as Nancy Fraser has written about, feminism was largely co-opted by neoliberal capitalism. So we ended up getting a kind of Sheryl Sandberg-style “lean in” feminism, which is all about individual success and creating conditions for a handful of women to be as filthy rich as a handful of men are. [...]

The countries in the world with the fastest-shrinking populations are in Eastern Europe, partially because women aren’t having children — because there’s no economy to support a family — and partially because of out-migration. In the absence of economic security, women are using the tools they have to make a better life, including commodifying their relationships with men. That’s why when you type in “Ukrainian women” on Google the first thing that comes up is ads for mail-order brides.

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Jacobin Magazine: We’re With the Rebels

The people who are mobilizing in the gilets jaunes movement are the people of peripheral France: those who come not from large urban centers but from smaller towns and rural areas. A part of the country that is not usually seen is today rising up. To make itself visible it wears the flourescent yellow vest, a reflective garment every driver has to keep in their car. They came together, and organized, on social media — a few weeks ago groups started being created for each département (small administrative units of France) — and sometimes they held a few preparatory meetings before they took to the streets on dawn of Saturday 17. [...]

This feeling of exasperation is the result of years of fiscal and social policies that have gradually strangled the low and middle classes, including in terms of the tax take. Immediately upon reaching office, Macron abolished the Solidarity Wealth Tax (ISF), giving €4 billion to the richest; and has strengthened the Tax Credit for Solidarity and Employment (CICE), a tax cut and exemption program transferring €41 billion a year to French companies, including multinationals. Shortly afterwards, with the 2018 budget bill, Macron established a flat tax that allowed a lowering of taxation on capital, handing another €10 billion to the richest. [...]

The movement is not limited to mainland France, but has also reached France’s “ex”-colonies in the overseas territories and in particular the island of Réunion. In a territory where unemployment is sky-high and 42 percent of people live under the poverty line, the prices of petrol, gas, and electricity have also continued to increase. As in rural and peripheral France, such territories have particularly suffered the degradation of public services over the last decade or more, as governments close the hospitals, courts, and train stations taxes are meant to pay for. The social contract crumbles, and gives way to anger. [...]

Some doubts are legitimate. Ecologists and the defenders of nature have been, to say the least, disconcerted by the hubbub around a movement that basically asks to be able to burn more fuel at a lower price and that seemed initially uninterested in the government’s at least explicit intention to use this “carbon tax” to fund the ecological transition.

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Foreign Policy: Iran and the United States Can be Friends

Top figures such as Rouhani or Zarif who dare question this orthodoxy face severe censure from inside the regime. When Rouhani was in New York in September to attend the United Nations General Assembly, his entourage went to great lengths to avoid even an accidental meeting between Rouhani and Trump. It was likewise clear from Rouhani’s Sept. 25 U.N. speech that he was fixed on one thing only: reassuring his hard-line rivals in Tehran that he had no intention of courting an American president whose administration has put forward a list of 12 concessions Tehran would have to make before sanctions can be removed. [...]

Rouhani—understanding both pressures—is looking for ways to take the America issue off the table. Rather than blaming the United States for the poor state of relations between the two countries, he has called on Trump not to be misled by the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Iranian opposition in exile. The subtext is clear: Third-party actors are spoiling relations between Tehran and Washington. It might seem like a cop-out, and it is, but it is also an overture of sorts. In fact, Rouhani and other first-generation Islamist revolutionary leaders who are guilty of having deliberately manufactured an American boogeyman are best placed to start looking for ways to break this spell. [...]

But one week later, it appears that all the goodwill was lost. Pro-Khomeini militiamen returned to the U.S. Embassy not as the rescuers, but now joining forces with the assailants. The attack had little to do with dogma; if the presence of the United States in Tehran was doctrinally anathema, it makes little sense that the Islamists would have waited almost 10 months after the shah had left Iran before storming, and this time holding on to, the U.S. Embassy. Rather than ideology, it was growing competition for power in Tehran that paved the way for this event. [...]

At the time, three benefits stood out. First, the hostage crisis predictably led to the resignation and later marginalization of the “liberal” Islamists who surrounded Bazargan and were more loyal to him than the supreme leader. Second, the seizure suddenly put the United States on the defensive and forced it to reckon with Khomeini as the Shah’s only true successor. Third, the bulk of the radical leftist youth initially supported the take-over of the embassy, allowing Khomeini to peel off support from rival revolutionary factions.

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The Economist: How could veganism change the world?

Interest in vegan food and its associated health benefits has been booming across the rich world. A global retreat from meat could have a far-reaching environmental impact.

By 2050 the world's population could approach 10 billion - and around 60% more food could be needed to feed everyone. The environmental impacts of the food system are daunting its responsible for about a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions and uses about 70% of all freshwater resources, and it occupies about 40% of the Earth's land surface.

Food rated emissions could increase to 50 percent by 2050 and fill up the total emissions budget that we have in order to avoid dangerous levels of climate change.

Interest in vegan food has been booming across the rich world. A major study has put the diet to the test - analyzing an imagined scenario in which the world goes vegan by 2050. If everybody went vegan by 2050 we estimated that food-related greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by 3/4.

Cows are the biggest emission contributors. Bugs in their digestive system produce methane and deforestation for their pasture releases carbon dioxide - these gases warm the planet. If cows were a country, they'd be the third largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Quartz: Italian is the fastest dying language in the US

From 2001 to 2017, the number of Americans speaking Italian at home dropped from almost 900,000 to just over 550,000, an incredible 38% reduction in just 16 years. Among languages with at least 100,000 US speakers in 2001, no language saw a larger decrease, in either absolute or percentage terms—though Hungarian was close by percentage. The data is from the US Census. [...]

The first one is very simple. There are many fewer Italian-born residents of the US today. The population fell from about 530,000 in 2001 to under 400,000 in 2017. This explains about 40% of the fall in Italian speakers. The lack of migration to the US is largely due to the increasing prosperity of Italy across second half of the 20th century—while US GDP per person was almost double that of Italy in 1960, it is only about 50% greater today. [...]

The other 60% of the fall is mostly accounted for by assimilation. From 1930 to 1970, there were more foreign-born residents of the US from Italy than any other country. As these immigrants die and their descendants start families in which they speak primarily English, the number of Italian speakers dwindles further. The number of German speakers in the US is falling for similar reasons.

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Quartz: A small-town businessman’s quest to protect India’s elephants, one photo at a time

This region of West Bengal has for long been part of the migratory route for elephants, but as the Birsa Munda Halt railway platform shows, human interventions are increasingly challenging the survival of the species.

“…if this platform was built 100 metres in other direction, then the elephant corridor would’ve been saved,” Hazra told Quartz. “…it’s a platform in the middle of the forest, and one train passes through it without stopping… at the ticket counter, the fans, electricity wire, switches, everything has been nicked. Even the gate is missing. Only the platform remains.” [...]

“Earlier they used to migrate to West Bengal and then return (to Jharkhand). But over a period of time, maybe over the last 10 years, the return is not happening for various reasons,” Mohanty told Quartz. Chief among them are the construction of a canal system, mining and other industrial activities, besides expanded human settlements and cultivation. As a result, Mohanty says, the feeding habits of elephants have also evolved, and they now like to eat the cash crops of sugarcane and potatoes grown year-round by the farmers in the region.

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CityLab: Spain Wants to Ban Cars in Dozens of Cities, and the Public’s on Board

That’s sure to be welcome news to Spain’s current government as it drafts a law on that matter. It’s an effort that could ban all but zero-emissions vehicles in the center of any town of over 50,000 residents by 2025, a ruling that would apply to 138 cities across the country. The first of those zones has in fact just arrived: On Friday, central Madrid became an ultra-low emissions zone, protected against pollution and congestion by the toughest restrictions on cars in place on a large scale in any major European city.

These restrictions will transform the way Madrileños get around their city, and will no doubt require some public readjustment. They are nonetheless popular, with 64 percent of people in the city supporting the move, on par with Catalonia’s 65 percent favorability of such restrictions. Galicia’s even higher rates could be boosted by the demonstrated success of pedestrianization in the city of Pontevedra. [...]

One single square kilometer at the heart of Madrid’s new car-free zone is home to almost 45,000 people, almost three times as many residents as in the most densely populated square kilometer of Oslo. Spanish suburbs, meanwhile, are often denser than many North American downtowns, with large numbers of people living in taller buildings and more likely to be exposed to road traffic. The issue of pollution in dense urban areas is thus a central one to a large section of the population. It may not be a coincidence that the only major European city to have something similar to Madrid’s ultra-low emissions zone is Paris, the only other European metropolis to match Spain’s urban densities. And while Paris’s restrictions on more heavily polluting vehicles have come to be accepted as normal, its restrictions on car access to some central streets has proved extremely contentious.

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CityLab: How to Create Safer Public Housing Projects

Scenes like the one Mata describes also form the prevailing media image of low-income housing developments. But a new study of San Antonio suggests that, despite its fearsome reputation, most low-income housing isn’t dangerous at all, either to residents or neighbors who live nearby. The great majority of crime in the city’s projects is concentrated in just a few high-risk developments.

When researchers Marie Skubak Tillyer and Rebecca Walter looked at data from the San Antonio Housing Authority, they found that 72 percent of violent crime, 87 percent of drug crime, and 72 percent of property crime occurred at just 5 percent of all properties, the study, published by Crime and Delinquency, reports. “It’s not the case that they’re all sort of equally dangerous,” Tillyer told me. “A small proportion of places account for an overwhelming majority of crime.”

These findings are consistent with a wide range of previous research on crime and place. It turns out that low-income housing developments that are “hot spots” for crime tend to share certain characteristics. Some are large-scale, structural factors, like concentrated disadvantage and residential instability in the properties’ surrounding neighborhoods. But others are smaller-scale—and more easily fixable—matters of place, like a lack of basic security and design features. The study looked at the presence of practical (if depressingly carceral-seeming) features like secured entrances, strongly enforced visitor policies, bars or lattices on the windows, surveillance cameras, and routine patrols. The safer developments were equipped with more of them; the more dangerous ones had fewer.

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The Calvert Journal: Karol Palka

Edifice by Polish photographer Karol Palka is a visual journey through the interiors of communist-era buildings in Poland, Slovakia and East Germany. It includes shots of the Polana Hotel, an example of Socialist Realist architecture once owned by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and visited by Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, now a disused office building for the management of the Nowa Huta Steelworks. The series tells a story about power and its impermanence; an edifice which once provided shelter, security and a feeling of strength reveals itself to be illusory, its power transitory. The spectre of its downfall is always near, lurking just around the corner, behind the cold walls of grandiose ideas.

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