It might not have been for the right reasons, but almost by accident, the UK government has at least dropped a planned law that would effectively have reintroduced prison terms for soliciting.
The ending of the term “common prostitute”, another element that has been dropped from the bill, would have been a small positive, but from what I’ve read it is now seldom if ever used, so somewhat academic.
Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? Is a book that’s been recommended to me from several Green quarters recently, so being on holidays and fortified by that (having suffered several weeks of depression after reading Lovelock‘s Revenge of Gaia recently), I decided to take the plunge.
And, possibly more than I was expected, I found quite a lot with which I agreed, and learnt some new ways of looking at things that I haven’t encountered before. I entirely agreed with him about the suspicion with which Heidegger should be regarded in view of his Nazism, found his definition of the dialectical as “the bringing together of different points of view for the purposes of argument” (rather than the Hegelian binary of thesis and antithesis), and found him very interesting on the scientific aspects of entropy: “the struggle of life against entropy does not deny the Second Law because living creatures are anything but closed systems. … life is constantly taking in low-entropy energy to sustain its form.” (p. 103.)
And I liked his focus on sufficiency and realisation: “We should not seek to become larger… but more realized. Bach did not quantitatively expand music, making it louder and more insistent like forms of techno-rock music that mirror capitalist relations… Sufficiency makes more sense, building a world where nobody is hungry or cold or lacks healthcare or succour in old age.” (p. 228)
But there are two things that he really, to my mind, doesn’t get. One is gender. Which isn’t to say that he doesn’t try very, very hard on that – his heart is in the right place as he quotes Rosa Luxemburg in prison watching a buffalo being beaten and feeling its pain, and notes that this is a traditional female approach, but one available to all, and one greatly downgraded in our society.
But what he doesn’t get — and he left me feeling very philosophically radical feminist here — is the place of the family as a source of repression. He runs, without any evidence at all, the foundation of patriarchy and all subsequent repressions, in the age of the hunter gatherer (drawing all sorts of conclusion about the division of labour in societies tens of thousands of years ago on which we have no evidence at all). But after that there was apparently some golden age…
So he blames 21st century capitalism for a supposed explosion in the sex trade, and “the general rise of rape and spousal abuse as concomitants of a disintegrating social order so far gone that a recent UNICEF report indicates that nearly half the world’s women come under attack by those closest to them”.
Why is it that so many men (and some women) don’t get that there’s noting new about any of this? It was ever thus (if you read between the lines of women’s memoirs and fiction through the ages) – it is only now that at least (and you have to give the current conditions some credit here) that these things are being recognised as crimes, being given pejorative labels that women can apply to them.
He also greatly romanticises China and India as somehow living more in harmony with nature than the Christian West – certainly not the case in regard to China, which regarded nature as savage and something to be tamed, rather more if anything than did the West through most of the current millennium.
And then there’s the socialism. I’m not a socialist, in part because I think it makes no sense at all to adopt such a tainted word. True, as he might say, pretty well everywhere to which that label has been applied has been nothing of the sort, but tainted it still is.
But more fundamentally, if you hand over the means of production to the workers, what happens to those who fall, in one way or another outside that definition? You have to make the definition very, very broad indeed to cover everyone, and somehow I doubt that would happen. Producing children is undoubtedly work, but you can’t “own” them. And even among the workers, some will do well, some badly…would you prefer to “own” a garbage truck or a spa? I can’t see any way that you don’t slide into corruption and disadvantage.
But I do like his return to the term usufructuary – potentially a much more useful concept than ownership. “A usufructuary relationship is where one uses, enjoys and through that improves — another’s property, as for instance, community groups would use, enjoy and improve an abandoned city lot by turning it into a garden.” (p.268)
(Or, I add, the way allotments in England are let for a peppercorn rent on the condition that they are productively used.) A much better idea than ownership – access and productive enjoyment that simply ends when the individual moves on to other things or other places.
And he pretty thoroughly fudges, in a couple of pages, how we get from where we are now, with capitalism destroying the world’s ecosystem, to where he wants to be. He points to Gaviotas, the Zapatistas, the adoption by the ANC of the world’s most advanced constitution, and pretty well leaves it at that. Not that I have any answers here – except that really I’m with the discussion at the Green Party conference – all we can do now is work very hard to rein in and control capitalism, since we don’t know how to get to anything better and less damaging.
I was doing a favour and flicking around the feminist blogosphere and found there seems to be surprisingly little on the Archbishop of Canterbury and his suggestion that the UK introduce aspects of sharia law. I suspect that may be because the whole thing is so obviously horrifying that it is hard to say anything about it.
No, I’m not falling for the “he means stoning and the chopping off of hands” of the tabloids; Rowan Williams is talking about family law, but just how you could consider introducing a law that allows men to divorce just with a few words, but makes it exceedingly hard for women, that simply shows women far less respect?
One of the lines being run by the “I’m being terribly reasonable” commentators is that a similar system with the Jewish community, known as Beth Din, works fine – except of course it doesn’t, forcing Jewish women who wish to remain within their faith community into horrendous situation, making many of them what are known as “chained women”, and forcing the secular law into complicate wriggles in an attempt to extract them.
Religious laws are misogynous. They were designed to keep women repressed under patriarchy. They do not belong in the 21st century.
Simple, and obvious, but I fear that it must be said – and said loudly and often.
From Colin Tudge, whose address I unfortunately largely missed at yesterday’s Green Economics Conference (love to know what happened to the 8.56 from Paddington to Oxford…), a couple of nice thoughts/facts:
There are more people in jail in America than working on the land.
The reality is ecology, the market is mere fantasy. (As a suggested response who say “we can’t do this because of the market.”)
I also learnt about a fascinating scheme in Alaska, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which takes about an eighth of the state’s oil revenues and invests them for the benefit of all, with residents being paid a dividend each year that makes a small basic income for all.
And that basic income is an idea taking off in parts of the developing world, including South Africa, Namibia and Mozambique.
There was a lot more excellent stuff, including an interesting outline of the state of trafficking law – about enter big changes now that the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against the Trafficking has come into force (which it did on Feb1, with sufficient countries ratifying it), and the UK government has promised to ratify it by the end of the year.
I was also introduced to the Women’s Budget Group, which to quote from its website: “brings together feminist economists, researchers, policy experts and activists to work towards our vision of a gender equal society in which women’s financial independence gives them greater autonomy at work, home, and in civil society”. Definitely needs doing!
Spent this evening at a highly successful Abortion Rights protest against the anti-abortion roadshow of Ann Widdecome and Lord David Alton. More than 300 people gathered on a dark, coldish London evening.
There were banners and reps (of the ones I saw – it was a rather cramped space), from SOAS, Glosmiths, PCS Defra London, TUC London, South East and Eastern Region, SWP, Feminist Fightback, and of course Abortion Rights (lovely banner).
So Jim picked an opportune time to post my piece on the abortion motion at the Green Party conference in a guest post on The Daily (Maybe).
There will be future similar events in Liverpool, Cardiff and Coventry – do join them if you can.
Lewine was assigned to the White House in 1956 to cover the activities of first ladies and the Washington social scene. But in 1965 she became the AP’s first full-time female White House correspondent….
Lewine moved to the newly created Cable News Network — at age 60 — as an assignment producer and field producer.
“When President Reagan was shot, I walked over to CNN that day and asked to help,” Lewine said in a 2005 article in a newsletter for Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. “My claim to fame was, I found out what type of gun was used. They paid me $80 for my work.”
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