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.”
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