The 14th Amendment is divided into five sections, all aimed at protecting civil rights in the wake of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Section 2 states:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The first sentence will, at least in its principle, be familiar to many: It ensured that apportionment in the House of Representatives would fully count the recently emancipated black Americans, thus supplanting the provision in the original constitutional text that counted enslaved persons as three-fifths of a person. But most Americansindeed, even most American lawyers and judgeshave no familiarity with the second sentence of Section 2 that would penalize those states that abridge or deny the right to vote. It may well be the Constitutions most important lost provision.

The Radical Republicans who crafted the 14th Amendment thought Section 2s second sentence was quite importantcritical, in fact, to ensuring the rest of the amendments guarantee of equality would become a reality, especially in the face of states sure to resist implementation of its guarantees. The Amendments framers worried, in particular, that recalcitrant states would respond to the formal expansion of the vote by devising new ways to abridge that vote. Section 2s second sentence would be a powerful threat, saying that, should a state dare to try that, it would have to reduce its number of representatives in the House proportional to the vote infringement carried out by that state. Call it the Constitutions reduction clause, punishing infringement of voting rights with the stiff penalty of a reduction in representation.

Lets be clear: The reduction clause fell considerably short of what, today, wed consider appropriate and just, or even what should have been deemed appropriate and just in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified. First, the reduction clauses insistence on voters being male inhabitants perpetuated the Constitutions original denial of the vote to women, an inequity partially corrected by the 19th Amendment and more fully addressed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Second, the clauses focus on voters twenty-one years of age and older became out of step after passage of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18. And, third, the clauses entrenchment of felon disenfranchisement looks increasingly anachronistic today, especially in light of Floridas landmark restoration of voting rights to felons by referendum in 2018.

All told, the reduction clause was far from a modern marvel. But it did add much-needed oomph to the dramatic, if incomplete, step forward that the 14th Amendment representedor at least thats what the clause was supposed to do. If the reduction clause were intended as a loaded gun to be wielded against those states that might infringe on voting rights, its never been firedor even pointed in their direction in earnest. Somewhere along the way, these 110 words of our Constitution got lost.

***

Its natural at this point to wonder why the American people havent heard of lawsuits seeking to enforce the reduction clause, given its potential. A key reason is that the clause doesnt make clear how it is to be enforcedincluding, critically, by whom. This ambiguity has left Congress, the executive branch and the courts all uncertain about what role they can and should play in enforcing the clause, and thus generally backing away from trying to do so.

Overall, it appears the reduction clauses framers expected Congress, rather than the judiciary, to be the primary enforcer of the rule. And that includes determining when voting infringement has occurred, responding by depriving disenfranchising states of the level of representation in Congress, and, finally, figuring out when that representation should be restored. According to legal scholars Richard Re and Christopher Re, that responsibility is reflected in the original congressional discussions and debates over the clause and, ultimately, in the fact that apportioning House representation overall is a responsibility assigned to Congress, leaving Congress the natural entity to adjust that apportionment as needed. So, where has Congress been for the past century and a half, and how did it let this potent threat dwindle and effectively disappear?

Scholars like Michael Kent Curtis have told the story of the basic historical trajectory, which saw the massive discriminatory voter suppression that occurred in the post-Civil War South overwhelm whatever potential the clause held and thus contribute to its retreatin other words, the problem became so vast, so fast that it wasnt clear how to assess it and then respond with this novel, uncertain tool.

Boiled down, the biggest flaw in the reduction clause might have been this one: The clause failed to specify how Congress was to obtain the data that could serve as a first step in pursuing a punitive reduction in representation.

This proved a serious obstacle when, in the 1870s, Congress made its one serious push to impose the penalty of diminished representation. That push was a response to widespread post-Civil War disenfranchisement, ranging from states imposition of poll taxes to their failure to address outright violence to deter black voters. A select committee of the House of Representatives focused on administering the countrys ninth census made a list of state laws that the committee regarded as infringing on voting. Then the committee decided to ask census respondents nationwide whether their right to vote had been denied or abridged on constitutionally impermissible grounds. So, the committee reported out a bill that would have the secretary of the Interiorthen responsible for administering the censusdetermine where and how much voting infringement was occurring and, in turn, proportionally reduce any offending states representation in the House.

This proposal elicited an objection that the Interior secretary was being made the final arbiter of a responsibility entrusted by the reduction clause to Congress itself. And the bills sponsor eventually backed down, hoping to address the matter in a separate bill and noting that the 15th Amendmentthen being ratified by the stateswould offer protection against voting infringement. An attempt in the Senate to pass a bill directing the Interior secretary to make good on the reduction clause also failed.

But the matter didnt end there. The Interior secretary directed those taking the census to list adult male citizens whose votes had been denied or abridged anyway. However, the numbers of such citizens provided to the House of Representatives by the secretary were so trifling, as one scholar put it, as to cast doubt on the accuracy and reliability of what he reported. With House members calling the reporting utterly inaccurate, the effort at proportional reduction stalled and eventually died, leaving as a trace only an unenforceable new statutory provision affirming that the reduction clause existed. No Congress has asked for a similar census report since.

The silence from Congress has led some to look to the courts to invoke the reduction clause.

Victor Sharrow was a criminal defendant accused of refusing to provide answers to the 1960 census. Creativelyperhaps too creativelyhe looked to the reduction clause as a defense. In particular, he argued that the Census Act under which hed been charged was unconstitutional because it failed to include a question about voting abridgments or denials as required (in Sharrows view) to fulfill the terms of the reduction clause. Without this question on the census, his argument went, there was no way to know if states should have their congressional representation reduced; and so, he continued, he shouldnt have to participate in a constitutionally deficient census.

Sharrow lost in the trial, and he lost again in the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld his conviction. The court concluded that, whatever the reduction clause meant, it didnt require Congress to seek, as part of the constitutionally mandated decennial census, information relative to disenfranchisement. What the clause might, in fact, demand of Congress was a question left for another day.

Others who chose to go to court to invoke the reduction clause have also fared poorly. Almost 20 years before Sharrow invoked the clause in a failed attempt to stave off criminal prosecution, a Virginia citizen named Henry Saunders sued Virginias secretary of state, Ralph Wilkins. Saunders wanted to run for the U.S. House of Representatives as an at-large candidate, and Wilkins refused to certify his candidacy on the grounds that Virginia didnt have an at-large position in its congressional delegation. So Saunders sued Wilkins, arguing that, because Virginia had infringed its citizens right to vote, the reduction clause required that Virginias nine representatives be reduced to no more than four who, in turn, would have to be elected as at-large candidates. Both the trial court and the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Saunders challenge, with the latter deeming his grievance a political question unsuited for resolution in the courts.

Indeed, two legal scholars, Richard Re and Christopher Re, argue that, in the eyes of its framers, the reduction clauses apportionment penalty [was] not viewed as justiciable, meaning suitable for enforcement in court. That characterization of a wholly congressional responsibility devoid of any possible judicial involvement may overstate the views of key framers, however, especially as they continued to reflect on the matter.

In 1966, a different pair of federal courts provided a rather more nuanced take on the possibility of going to court to enforce the reduction clause. That year, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed with a lower courts dismissal of a challenge brought by voters seeking a court order requiring the Census Bureau to count abridgments of the right to vote so as to enforce the reduction clause. The court ducked the question, indicating that the newly enacted Voting Rights Act should be given time to serve its intended function and perhaps render unnecessary this type of lawsuit. But, intriguingly, the court also threw a bone to the challengers, noting that, in telling appellants that events have made their complaint unsuitable for judicial disposition at this time, we think it also premature to conclude that Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not mean what it appears to say.

Perhaps encouraged by that language, Victor Sharrowyes, the same Sharrow whod tried to raise the reduction clause to fend off criminal prosecutiondecided to try again. This time, he initiated the litigation, suing the Census Bureaus director for failing to count the number of voters disenfranchised in states other than New York, on the theory that such a count would decrease the disenfranchising states representation in Congress and increase New Yorks, thus boosting his political influence as a New York voter. In 1971, the 2nd Circuit handed him another defeat, holding that he failed to show the particularized harm to his own voting rights to allow him to pursue his claim in court.

At the same time, the judges who dispensed of Sharrows 1971 challenge identified a difficult question even if they ducked in providing an answer: Even if the Census Bureau collected the disenfranchisement data what, precisely, would happen next?

The judges were right that figuring out how to realize the lost promise of the reduction clause, especially through litigation, implicates a host of complicated, interrelated questions. To begin with, what exactly qualifies as a disenfranchisement for these purposes, anywayfor example, does a voter ID law count? And how much disenfranchisement would have to be foundthat is, how many voting-eligible citizens would such a voter ID law need to affect? Measured how, exactly?

Then who would strip the disenfranchising states of the right number of representatives: Congress or a federal court? Would the states immediately need to redistrict to reflect their reduced number of representatives and vote for that number of House members in newly formed districts? Or would representatives in those states all become, at least temporarily, at-large members, as Saunders argued in his lawsuit?

And what would happen to the slots in the House of Representatives now taken from the disenfranchising states: Would they be allocated to other states so that the total number of House members would remain at 435, as most scholars agree would be required? If so, which onesby giving (loaning?) them to the states already closest, in population terms, to having additional House members anyway or through some other method (such as reallocating them to the states performing best in ensuring voting rights, perhaps)?

And how long would this punishment last? The clauses text gives no sense of how a disenfranchising state can make amends and earn back its lost representation. Does a disenfranchising state automatically get back, at the next set of federal elections, the full slate of House members it would otherwise have? Or must data collected from that state show that disenfranchisement has now ceased? And who makes that call: Congress, or a federal court?

Even to those passionate about resurrecting a portion of our Constitution intended to vindicate the full promise of the Reconstruction amendments, these are hard questions raised by any attempt to enforce the reduction clause. And the text of the clause itself doesnt provide the answers.

***

As creative litigants continue to rethink their strategies for judicial enforcement, we should also look to Congress, as the clauses framers anticipated, to make good on the clauses now-forgotten promise.

But what went wrong in the 1870sa failure to figure out what data to collect, how to collect it and how to analyze ithas remained a major obstacle to realizing the promise of the reduction clause. Recall that Congress has relatively limited practical ability to gather data on its own. Congress does, of course, hold hearings that can yield voluminous factual records that, in turn, can inform the laws that Congress proposes (and, once in a while, even enacts), as well as the oversight that Congress conducts. But thats indirect data-gathering: Congress is generally reliant on witnesses, apart from its exceedingly small staff of investigators who conduct their own analysis on particularly important (and often sensitive) issues.

So, utilizing the reduction clause demands data that Congress has a hard time obtaining on its own. But Congress can require the executive branch to go out and get that data. And thats the most immediate way to revitalize this lost provision of the Constitution.

In particular, Congress should require by federal law that the Census Bureau survey Americans regarding voting infringement. This would be the first word, not the last word: Self-reporting surely would demand follow-up investigation rather than serving, on its own, as the basis for calculating the proportion of a states citizensnow to include all of its voting-eligible citizenswhose right to vote has been infringed. But itd be a start, and an important one. And its probably what the clauses framers anticipated, given that, at the time, the decennial census asked about a wider range of information than it does today, likely leading the clauses framers to view it as natural for questions about voting infringement to be added.

Congress must make sure of something else, too: that the Census Bureau pursues this work not through the decennial census but through the American Communities Survey that the bureau conducts on an ongoing basis. The decennial census has a single goal assigned to it by the Constitution: to achieve an actual Enumeration of all of those present in the United States. Thats why Congress has required the Census Bureau to stick to that goal and demanded that it pursue other interesting, important data through other means, such as the ACS. This issue was at the heart of the recent fight over the Trump administrations effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, with opponents emphasizing that any question that could detract from achieving an actual enumeration should not be added.

But the ACS serves broader goals by gathering information from 3.5 million households each year on an ongoing basis. And asking about voting infringement seems like an eminently sensible addition to the ACS. How, exactly, the ACS should ask about voter infringement in a way that elicits the most useful answers for further study is the type of challenge the Census Bureau tackles all of the time; and the bureaus experts would be well placed to engage in extensive testing and sampling to refine what series of questions, phrased in particular ways, would yield the information most helpful for reduction clause enforcement, including data on known forms of voter discrimination as well as the identification of new forms. (Theres also a lot to be learned here from the work of Yale Law Schools dean, Heather Gerken, in developing a democracy index.) All told, as a first step towardfinallyliving up to its reduction clause responsibilities, Congress should require that question be added to the ACS for analysis by the Census Bureau and Justice Department Voting Rights Section, including over a presidential veto if necessary.

Theres historical precedent that shows the executive branch to be more than capable of carrying out this type of work successfully. Investigating voter suppression and intimidation is precisely what a team at the Justice Departments Voting Rights Section did to important effect for decadesuntil the Supreme Court, in its 2013 Shelby County decision, gutted the law it was enforcing. Its work provides a road map for how reduction clause investigations could proceed. Those investigators often would begin with self-reported voter suppression, as well as with proactive efforts to scan for problems. They would then interview local election officials, key advocates and ordinary voters to determine whether voting was infringed by, for example, proposed changes to polling locations or proposed alterations to the hours such locations would be open on election day. And then the investigators would analyze what they heard to determine whether an intended change would rise to the level of an infringement on voting. Nothing this complex can ever be reduced to a formula of mathematical precision, of course, but that doesnt make it impossible to achieve through rigorous research and structured analysis. And, to maximize revitalization of the reduction clause, the Census Bureau and the Justice Departments Voting Rights Section should be ordered, by statute, to collaborate on this work.

***

Even as we wait for Congress to act, the reduction clause neednt remain totally fallow. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is a central provision of landmark anti-discrimination legislation. It prohibits discriminatory voting practices or procedures. And, when a legal challenge to Section 2 went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1980, the court upheld it on the grounds that Congress had authority to enact it under the 15th Amendmentthe Reconstruction amendment focused on protecting voting rights.

That was a narrow victory for voting rights, delivered by a four-justice plurality of the court bolstered by two justices who concurred in the result but declined to join the plurality opinion. With the court having subsequently gutted a different provision of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and given the courts increasingly right-leaning composition, its not hard to imagine a legal challenge revisiting the 1980 decision making its way to the court.

This time, in defending Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, litigants shouldnt rely only on the 15th Amendmentthey should look to the reduction clause, as well. Properly understood, the clauses capacious language penalizing infringements that in any way abridged voting rights means that the subsequent Voting Rights Act should not be limited to banning only abridgment by intent. To the contrary, as Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California, has explained, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment justifies any law that prevent states from unduly circumscribing the electorate, regardless of intent, and it provides ample constitutional support for section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Thats true, as Tolson has further elaborated, even if the Congress that enacted the Voting Rights Act didnt explicitly invoke the reduction clause at the time as a constitutional basis for the law.

In the here and now, the reduction clause can and should be used in court to protect and defend a vital provision of the Voting Rights Acteven as the clause bides its time for full utilization in Congress.

Over 50 years ago, attorney Eugene Sidney Bayer called the reduction clause a neglected weapon for defense of the voting rights of southern negroes. So it remains today.

Its time to resurrect these 110 words of the most important amendment to the worlds most important constitution. The authors of those words looked to Congress to ensure that the most fundamental aspect of American democracythe right to votewould be upheld. Today, with the closure of polling locations, spread of voter identification laws, and purging of voter rolls, the right to vote is, yet again, under siege.

Perhaps, a skeptical reader might say, Congress will never actually strip a state of its representatives in the House, and perhaps a court will never actually order that penalty to be imposed. Perhaps. But that neither excuses nor counsels against the House from taking the first step by demanding, by law, the data on how much voting infringement is actually occurring around the country. We deserve to know that, as a nation. Whats more, taking the first step toward making good on the penalty authorized by the reduction clause can serve as at least something of the powerful deterrent the clauses framers anticipateda deterrent we so desperately need right now to vindicate, once again, the promise of the Reconstruction amendments: the promise of the right to vote.

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The Lost 110 Words of Our Constitution - POLITICO

One of the countrys leading newspaper columnists has laid into government plans to abolish Section 21 the means landlords have of claiming back properties without having to give a reason.

Charles Moore, writing in the Telegraph under the headline Why take a tenant if you cannot evict them, says that abolishing Section 21 will create sitting tenants.

He says that along with sitting tenants, rent controls will have to be created, while the property itself could halve in value.

Moore, a former editor of the Telegraph, says that landlords let houses not so much for rental income The profits are not large because the costs are high but because the property is a store of value and a hedge against inflation.

If the opportunity for profit disappears, they will stop offering homes for rent, and new landlords will not come forward to replace them.

Moore warns that if Section 21 is abolished, the landlord will be stuck with the tenant and the prospect of lower returns.

He also warns: If it is abolished, so that no notice to quit can ever be served, the incentive to let disappears.

The value of the property thus encumbered drops, sometimes halves.

Besides, sitting tenancies require rent controls to work.

He concludes: An unmovable tenant creates, over time, an unworkable business. And while ministers might see the abolition of Section 21 as a levelling up of rights, Moore concludes: Actually, it is more like closing down.

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Abolishing Section 21 'will create sitting tenancies and rent controls' warning - Property Industry Eye

There was a time when police and their advocates had relentless resistance from anti-cop social justice warriors that have a significantly various, in fact ridiculous, sight of police and the criminal justice system much of which does not entail applying the legislation. In reality, it commonly particularly implies not applying the legislation.

Their sight of just how policing must be done exists just in their rose-colored minds where every police telephone call, regardless of just how vibrant, unsafe, or terrible, constantly exercises completely according to their distorted criteria. And they appear to think there is a slick, serene remedy to every surly suspect. In various other words, a romantic.

But as poor and anti-cop as these individuals are, at the very least they recognize the police exist so for them to despise. Now, there is a recently invigorated political press afoot to eliminate the police Recently, an university professor, George Ciccariello-Maher, required the abolition of police.

Before wishing to eliminate the police, this professor came to be well known after tweeting on Christmas Eve 2016, All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide. I understand what youre assuming What a captivating person. I desire him educating my children

EVEN MORE INFORMATION: Ilhan Omar blasts Meghan McCain, implicates her of being a hypocrite for calling out Sanders advocates

Ironically, after allowing the globe understand he would certainly such as Santa to bring him sack lots of Caucasian remains, he surrendered his setting at Drexel University as a result of await it fatality risks. I do not want the asshole academician any kind of damage, however what did he anticipate?

Hes just one amongst numerous extreme leftist academicians that are so damned clever, they constantly outmaneuver themselves. There was a time we might reject his rubbish. But with todays ideologically secured and intolerant academic community, a professor discharging this type of twaddle, abolishing the police officers, obtains a significant hearing. It likewise brings in followers in Democrat and socialist national politics, conventional information media, and popular culture.

It all audios so excellent theoretically not!

Thus, abolishing the police has actually been obtaining grip as an extreme leftist suggestion, and currently its acquiring despite some in the UNITED STATECongress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just recently supported doing away with jails. How a lot of a stretch to think she would certainly sustain the exact same for police? After all, that places crooks in the jails she desires eliminated?

Everyone recognizes just how tough it gets on todays law enforcement agent to respond to anti-cop pressures, which multiply like vermin. Politicians, area teams, academic community, and the media are all amongst the police officers long-lasting doubters. They hold police officers to difficult criteria while establishing their very own honesty bars quite damned reduced.

The require abolishing the police has an expanding listing of advocates. Former Black Panther partner and Marxist Professor Angela Davis has actually required abolishing the police (and jails). She did so while speaking with a team started by Black Lives Matter (BLM) founder PatrisseCullors As an intro, Cullors really feels the First Amendment does not secure hate speech.

Cullors likewise claimed President Trumps base is, David Duke and the white supremacists, entirely overlooking the head of state has actually repudiated David Duke and white supremacists. According to Real Clear Politics, President Trump claimed unquestionably, Im not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.

BLM, unsurprisingly, which has actually made its reject for police popular, is likewise asking for abolishing the police. With fizzled clichs and drooping chatting factors, advocates use absolutely nothing in the means of concrete suggestions that would in fact boost culture.

Ciccariello-Maher recommends family, friends, and neighbors change the police. What a charming concept. It may collaborate with uniform, indigenous cultures, however not with numerous individuals, particularly in melting-pot countries like the UNITED STATE Shouldn t this be user-friendly also to the dimmest light bulb?

Using family members, buddies, and next-door neighbors, the abolish-the-police motion wishes to concentrate extra on conflict resolution. Really? Maybe in civil legislation, labor relationships, or summertime day camp. But just how does that search in the real life where some individuals do not wish to fix dispute civilly? In reality, dispute is what these individuals do best.

As with advertising socialism, the profoundly stopped working financial system (I understand, AOC, you and your ilk would certainly do it right this time around), these anti-cop enthusiasts suggest ridiculous sights such as the police offer just the abundant Well, talking for myself, I invested little time in rich areas and a great deal of time in poor areas.

How can anti-police individuals implicate the police officers of all at once policing largely for the abundant while over-policing the bad? They claim the bad are regularly sufferers of the police officers instead of the recipients of their solutions. Give me a break. Anyone that claims that betrays their cop-hating program. They never ever indicate unbiased realities to support those ridiculous insurance claims. Thats due to the fact that there arent any kind of. But thats what occurs with unpredictable ideologues.

Abolishing the police is an extreme suggestion held by leftist malcontents that present these antisocial suggestions to assist in falling down the society. They wish to, as President Obama notoriously claimed, essentially change the United States of America.

EVEN MORE INFORMATION: Challenger DeAn na Lorraine billing hard versus Nancy Pelosi

We have actually currently experienced where the leftist push has actually obtained us. An open boundary, offering unlawful aliens privileges, and the spreading of no-bail launch of terrible crooks would certainly not have actually been taken seriously also a years back. Now, mainstream Democrats are making use of these sorts of problems as a base test for their political prospects.

Another push towards civil discontent has actually been the considerable damages done to the police line of work by also conventional Democrat political leaders. Constantly promoting supposed police reform. What takes place when you attempt to take care of something that isnt damaged? You break it. This is taking place in numerous territories in our country. Society does not require to eliminate the police; culture requires to sustain the police. Nothing works in a serene culture without durable police.

And even if I claim the police are not damaged and do not require the reform the left claims it does, does not imply I think the police must not take care of troubles as they take place and can not boost. They should, and they can. But to recommend police stores must shut is past unreasonable. Unfortunately, nowadays, with the anxious engineering of academic community and the media, absurd is no obstacle for the extreme left.

This item initially showed up in LifeZette and is utilized by consent.

Read extra at LifeZette: Trump and Barr draw a timeless disadvantage on DemocratsCher comes unglued insurance claims Trump is mosting likely to fire somebody in New York CitySomali area leader validates Ilhan Omar wed her very own sibling

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Professor Advocates For Abolishing The Police, And He's Not Alone - The Union Journal

Indias vast occupational diversity is framed around socio-historical categories and deeply embedded layers bounded by hierarchal social systems, such as skilled/unskilled, purity/pollution, stigmatised/dignified, touchable/untouchable that keep reproducing themselves in various socio-economic spheres to this very day. Humiliating occupation like manual scavenging are caste-based and religiously sanctioned either by tradition, birth or descent. Those who are boxed into these occupations are often brutally subjected to social exclusion whilst persistently having to bear the added burden and brunt of an all-pervasive socio-psychological humiliation.

Out of the multiple, often dehumanising caste occupations leaving people lingering half livinghalf dead in societys periphery and keeping them perennially dependent on dominant caste groups, the scavenging communities remain by any measure the most unfairly included and socially deprived. Occupying the lowest position in the caste hierarchy, they are, without any doubt, the most marginalised within the marginalised caste communities in Indian society.

Manual scavenging is caste-based hereditary occupation and predominantly linked with forced labour. It involves physical and manual removal of human excreta from dry latrines and sewers (using basic tools such as thin boards, buckets and baskets lined with sacking) and then having to carry the collected excreta on their heads for disposal.

In India and other caste-affected countries within South Asia, the term scavenger is being considered untouchable or polluting to other higher ups in the ascending order of castes. Such is the undignified nature and conditions of scavenging, that the United Nations Special Rapporteur was forced to note that

the degrading nature of this work is an extreme case and is very much tied up with the inequalities of a deeply ingrained caste system and the lack of choice in finding other types of work.1

Recent scholarly endeavours attempting to challenge this static nature of the notions of manual scavenging have begun to interrogate aspects such as human dignity or dignity oflabour and have raised fundamental questions. They opine that however much the struggle is against the caste-based occupation, the same seems not to be able to make any headway in the light of the complete absence of economic and social equality in India; these characteristics being the predominant nature of Indian society. Barbara Harriss-White (India Working: Essays on Society and Economy), Ashwini Deshpande (The Grammar of Caste: Economic Discrimination in Contemporary India) and S K Thorat (Blocked by Caste) have shown in their research as to how there is a high concentration of Dalits in menial, unclean and what is called in economic terminology as dead-end jobs, where 90% of such jobs are generally reserved for the Dalits.

Construction of Manual Scavenging Communities

Many theorists engaging with the subject of manual scavenging identify old sacred scriptures as the source of the practice. Bindeshwar Pathak (2000) and Gita Ramaswamy (2011) trace the origin of manual scavenging to the Narada Samhita, which mentions the disposal of human excreta as one of the 15 duties assigned to the slaves. Similarly, in Vajasaneyi Samhita, the authors state, Chandals and Paulkas have been referred to as slaves for the disposal of human excreta.

Scavengers, sweepers or safai karmacharis as an occupational category are historically known by different caste names in different parts of the country. However, the removers of night soil and the cleaner of latrines belong to well-defined social groups and have been included under the general nomenclature of Bhangi in India today (Shyamlal 1992: 11).

R E Enthovens (1920: 105) anthropological accounts of The Tribes and Castes of Bombay suggest that Bhangis were found almost in every district of the Bombay Presidency. However, many resided in Bombay (now Mumbai), Poona (now Pune), Ahmedabad, Surat and Kathiawar. He opines that theories concerning the origin of Bhangi points to broken or outcaste people and as a caste of scavengers and sweepers. They are conceived as the dregs of Hindu society and contain an admixture of outcastes who have fallen to this level, owing to offences against the social code of higher castes. While different Hindu texts identify them as the descendants of a Brahmin sage, the other reference is to them being offsprings of a Shudra father by a Brahmin widow.

It is posited that the term Bhangi is derived from the Sanskrit word Bhang, meaning hemp, and the habit of Bhangi to take Bhang (Stephen 1981; Shyamlal 1992; Srivastava 1997). Others trace its meaning to the word broken.

Another common name in usage throughout north India for night-soil removers is Mehta meaning prince or leader. The name, according to Shyamlal (1992: 11), is derived fromPersian Mehtarprincewhich may have been applied to ridicule them. Writing on the dynamics of caste among scavengers in Central Provinces, Russel and Lal (1916) note that the Mehtar were the sweeper caste in the Central Provinces that were made up of diverse elements. They pointed out that the Ghasia, Mahar and Dom castes who also engaged in sweepers work are amalgamated with the Mehtars.

Another name in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh is Valmiki. This designation was adopted to supposedly gain some respect as the followers of Valmiki Rishi, the author of the epic Ramayana. The religion is centred around the worship of two saints, Lalbeg or Bale Shah and Balmiki or Valmiki. Russel and Lal (1916: 22526) point out that

Balmiki was originally a low caste hunter called Ratnakar, however, he could not find any animals to hunt and started to rob and kill travelers. One day he met Brahma and wished to kill him but Brahma convinced him of his sins and directed him to repeat the name of Rama until he is purified of his sins. Ratnakar repeated the words Ram, Ram sixty thousand years at the same spot till Brahma returns. Brahma named him as Valmiki (from valmik, an ant-hill) and told him to compose Ramayana in seven parts, containing the deeds and exploits of Rama.

The saint Lalbeg is widely worshipped in Punjab by the sweepers. The religion of Lalbegis appear to resemble that of the Kabirpanthis and other reforming sects. The objective is toacquire a status that may elevate them from the utter degradation of their caste (Russel and Lal 1916: 22627).

Scavenging Communities during Mughal and Colonial Rule

In Punjab, the scavengers are known as Chuhra, derived from their work of chura jharna (to sweep scraps). The real construction of identity and its contestation began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For instance, Chuhra, the untouchable caste, used multiple strategies to seek freedom from subjugation. The Chuhras were reported as both the scavengers and agriculturists in British records (Prashad 2000: 28). Vijay Prashad further expounds that in the last decades of the 19th century, the Chamars and Chuhra had lost access to customary rights and could not be retained as village servants (Prashad 2000: 33). The Chuhra community, in particular, attempted two paths for their liberation: conversion to Christianity and migration to cities. Christians in Punjab, during this period, increased by 400%, mostly among the Chuhras who migrated to cities, such as Delhi, Shimla, Jalandhar, Amritsar, and Lahore. The statutory identification of Chuhra with sanitation as sweepers was evident during the colonial period. They migrated as workers, but remained sweepers through their services.

During the 1931 Census, J H Hutton clubbed the Bhangi, Chuhra, Halalkhors, Mehtars and Lalbegi under Scavengers. They inhabited different provinces and presidencies of British India. N R Malkani (1965) observes that urban scavenging has resulted in the creation of a Bhangi Caste which is untouchable, unseeable and unapproachable. Augmenting his argument, he states The Bhangi is essentially a recent product of urban life, first created as an occupation by Moslems and later in British rule made into a hereditary caste. Ramswamy (2011) also makes similar observation, emphasising that manual scavenging expanded phenomenally under the British rule, particularly in the mid-18th century that marked the beginning of industrialisation and urbanisation in the subcontinent. Enthoven (1920) affirmed the above arguments, noting that

Many Bhangis in the northern part of the Presidency appear to be immigrants from the United Provinces. It seems probable that in many cases Bhangis originally came to this Presidency as camp followers with the armies from the north.

Pertaining to the historical concretising of separate caste, Srivastava (1997: 1718) asserts that others feel that the practice of sweeping and scavenging disposal of human excreta byhumans entered India with the advent of Muslims (Mughals). It is stated that the system of bucket privies was designed and constructed during the Mughal era for their women in purdah (veil) as they were not allowed to go in the open for defecation, and thus, the war captives were forced to clean the bucket privies. These captives were not accepted into their own caste of origin and by the larger society and thus formed a separate caste.

Another dimension brought into the debates was posited by Russel and Lal (1916: 76) who state that

It can only be definitely shown in a few instances that the existing impure occupational castes were directly derived from the indigenous tribes. The Chamar and Kori, and the Chuhra and Bhangi, or sweepers and scavengers of the Punjab and United Provinces, are purely occupational castes and their original tribal affinities have entirely disappeared.

Conservative perspective: The whole attempt by the conservatives was to portray Muslims as villains and Hindus as saviours of the Dalits, while also avoiding subdivisions and disunity among Hindus.

The Arya Samaj founded by Dayanand Saraswati underlined the linguistic and racial purity of the Aryans and described the Samaj as a society of the Aryan race (upper castes). The Dalits were excluded from this, but were later offered to improve their caste status through shuddhi or purification (Thapar 2008: 4041). Similarly, different factions such as the All Indian Achutuddhar Committee, Shraddhananda Dalitudhar Sabha began working for spiritual well-being, religious protection and socio-economic upliftment of the depressed classes. Thus, the attempts by the Hindu organisations were fundamentally political, but under the guise of religion. By the 1920s, the movements claiming the status of aboriginal inhabitants of the land emerged among the Dalits. There were attempts to enumerate themselves in the 1931 Census as ad-dharmis, Adi-Hindu, Adi-Dravida, etc. They argued that the Dalits were the original inhabitants of this land and were conquered by the Aryans who enslaved the Dalits. The ad-dharmis in Punjab under the leadership of Mangoo Ram protested against the attempt of Arya Samajis to retain them as Hindus and asserted against them (Omvedt 1994; Mani 2005; Prashad 2000).

In the 1930s, B R Ambedkar clashed with M K Gandhi and his Congress over the separate electorate for Dalits. The ad-dharmi Mandal and Balmiki Sabha (Chuhras) of Jalandhar sent their signature in blood to London in support of Ambedkar as their leader and affirmed his statement that Dalits were a separate entity cast out by Hindu society (Prashad 2000: 87).

Reformist perspective: The Chuhras began to call themselves Valmikis and by the 1930s had conflicts with Chamars over the caste heritages. The Chamars were the followers of Ravidas, while the Chuhras claimed Valmiki as their guru. The clash was around the status and precedence of the guru (Prashad 2000: 90). These differences were cashed upon by the Arya Samajis to win over the Chuhras to Hinduism. Valmiki Prakash written by Ami Chand in 1936 became a staple track of the Balmiki community. The track highlighted conversation between Ram Sevak and Balmiki man and carried sustained attacks on the ad-dharmi movement and their leaders who were accused of separating the Dalits from the Hindus. It was enforced upon the Chuhras that Brahmins did not allow others to read the Vedas, whereas Ramayana was open for all, from Brahmins to Chandalas, and hence, Valmiki was chosen as a guru by the community. Even Thakkar and Harijan Sevak Sangh were involved in this politics (Prashad 2000: 9293). Thus, some Dalits succumbed to Arya Samajis and their political manipulation of the situation.

Prashad (2000: 8788) noted that in a meeting of Dalits and Arya Samaj, the Arya Samaj updeshak (missionary) sought pardon from Dalits and sought friendship with them. This meeting was presided over by Mangoo Ram at Shimla. In response, the Dalits asserted that they would not be swayed by hollow promises and occasional dramatics. In response,N L Varma, an Arya Samaj follower, said that he carried refuse from the latrines before the meeting, to which Chunni Lal, one of the ad-dharmi Dalit retorted, stating he cannot accomplish the work fully well unless he does it for at least 10 or 15 days.

The recent campaign on Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA) is the classic example for the reproduction of such an attitude within the reformist framework. While paying no heed to the rights of being of the traditional sanitation workers (safai karmacharis), technicalities of sanitation are instead given priority, plus the health of workers being noted as an important component within its framework. In the perspective of the SBA, more toilets equals cleanliness and more healthy workers equals clean India. Prashad, in as late as 1998, calls such approaches reformist, where a policy is posited in such strategic ways as to make the inhuman and poor working conditions of the scanvengers/safai karmacharis more tolerable rather than destroying the very system that generates it.

Abolitionist perspective: Ambedkar, however, has a different position pertaining to the same. His was a more fundamental argument that points out to the basis of social life itself, rather than drawing the same conclusions as the aforementioned authors. His arguments, often observed in tumultuous debates with Gandhi who he viewed as a mere reformist, asserted,

You (Gandhi) appeal to the scavengers pride and vanity in order to induce him and him only to keep on to scavenging by telling him that scavenging is a noble profession and that he need not be ashamed of it. (Ambedkar 1990a: 29293)

Yet, such glorification of manual scavenging was inhuman, unfounded and, not to say the least, laced with lethal repercussions. Reformism, in the perspective of Ambedkar, was nothing more than a sanitised conception of sanitation itself, strategically framed to obscure the controversial nature of manual scavenging and the very problematics of untouchability.

Bhagwan Das (1996: 10), in his seminal work Main Bhangi Hun reiterates this argument that

From the primitive time, I am the original inhabitant of Bharat land and did not accept the slavery and fought against the invaders. I did not bow down before the kings and Purohits nor did I worship their gods. I am part of the social group that safeguarded this freedom of the natives. My story starts from that day when the Aryan kings attacked the pious country like Bharat and made us slaves by removing crown from my head and forced upon my head the basket of refuse.

The abolitionist perspective challenges the confinement of scavengers in a system in which institutionalised inequality is legitimised by religious scriptures and whose fundamentalinforming principles are premised on the forms of reciprocal repulsion. The perspective instead presents struggle and resistance against manual scavenging as a means out of historical degradation and caste subjugation.

Profile of Castes Engaged in Manual Scavenging

The Government of Maharashtra in 2005 sanctioned a research project to study the prevalence, extent and nature of practice of manual scavenging in the state, under the Mahatma Phule Backward Class Development Corporation (MPBCDC). The data presented in this paper is based on a study carried out by the author under the aegis of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. The study covered all the districts and talukas, urban local bodies (ULBs) (municipal corporations, municipal councils) and places whose population is 10,000 and above. Aiming to ascertain the numbers of dry latrines and manual scavengers, the study covered 2,753 households identified as engaging in manual scavenging with 4,182 individuals who are directly involved in different forms of manual scavenging.

The scavengers in Maharashtra are known as the Mehtar, Bhangi, Balmiki, Rukhi, Lalbegi in local and regional languages and, as aswaccha (unclean) safai kamgars or manual scavengers into a bureaucratic parlance. Of the total 59 castes listed as Scheduled Castes (scs) by the Census of Maharashtra, Mahar (Neo-Buddhists), Mang/Matang, Bhambi (Chambhar/Chamar) and Bhangi, these four together constitute almost 92% of the total sc population in the state.2 Mahars are numerically the largest SC with 57.5%, followed by Mang/Matang 20.3% and Bhambi (Chambhar) 12.5% of the SC population of the state, whereas the Bhangis with nearly 2% (1,86,776) are the fourth largest SC population of the state. Under the entry Bhangi there are 10 subgroups. They are namelyBhangi, Mehtars, Olgana, Rukhi, Malkana, Halalkhor, Lalbegi, Balmiki, Korar and Zadmalli (the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders [Amendment] Act, 1976, provided by the Registrar General of India.) The population of Bhangi is highly urbanised, accounting for nearly 92.7% in the said area. They are employed by both public and private/informal sectors in the state, such as the cantonment boards, municipal corporations, municipal councils, railways, airports, government/private hospitals, private housing societies/chawls and commercial establishments. The members of these castes are traditionally known as untouchables or outcastes and form the lowest stratum of the society. Their traditional occupations revolves specifically around the removal of dead animals, handling dead bodies on funeral ground, drum beating, cleaning/sweeping road/lanes in villages/towns and the manual removal and cleaning of human excreta.

Unlike other scs, such as the Mahar (Neo-Buddhists), Mang/Matang and Chambhar, Bhangis, being a moving population were not the part of traditional Maharashtrian village structure. However, being migrants from various parts of India initially brought by the Britishers, they have settled down in relatively urban areas of the state in the first half of the 20th century.

Demographic Profile and Migration Patterns

In Maharashtra, the untouchable groups (Mahar, Matang, Chambhar, Dhor, etc) had never performed the task of manual removal of human excreta. However, it is believed that during the pre-independence period, the native MuslimMehtar or Bhangi was the only (religious) group engaged in manual scavenging. As the British laid the foundation of railways and developed certain areas as cantonment towns (Mumbai, Deolali-Nashik, Ahmadnagar, Pune, Aurangabad and Kamtee-Nagpur-cantonment towns having military bases), the Bhangi/Mehtar or Valmiki, especially from northern parts of India, migrated to Maharashtra and to other southern parts of the country and settled in urban and semi-urban trading centres, including these cantonment towns. The Bhangis, Rukhis, Vankars and Meghwals from Gujarat migrated to Mumbai, Pune and Nashik in Maharashtra. All these castes are the migrants from Rajasthan, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.

According to field observations and data collected through focus group discussions (FGDs), the earliest migration into Maharashtra is that of Gujaratis (Meghwals and Vankars). This first wave of migration dates back to the mid-19th century (the famous Chappania Akal, the famine of 1856) and early 20th century. Meghwals are numerically strong untouchable caste spread all over Gujarat. They were also known as Dhed, Mayavanshi and Vankar. They were never traditional scavenging communities, but in the absence of other scavenging castes in some villages they were expected to perform this task also. During the same period, Bombay was rapidly becoming the centre of trading activities of British. With the establishment of Board of Conservancy in Bombay in 1845, a process of systematic solid Waste Management and recruitment of Scavengers/Halalkhors has begun. Due to close proximity to Bombay, the Meghwals, Vankars and Rukhis who migrated to the city were employed as conservancy workers. They also migrated to nearby cities, such as Nashik, Pune and Aurangabad. Since then, they have settled in the state and are engaged in various forms of scavenging.

Other scavenging communities migrated from North India, especially from Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Punjab, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh in large numbers. They have significant presence in various cities/towns of Maharashtra. Though they are known by different names in their respective states as Mehtar, Bhangi, Chuhra, however, they prefer toidentify themselves as Balmiki/Valmiki and have also been notified as such in states like Maharashtra.

The Valmiki, unlike other untouchable groups, occupied a very low place in a traditional caste hierarchy in their place of origin. They performed the most obnoxious traditional occupation in the historical-caste structure. They were mainly engaged in polluted, inhuman occupations at the landlords houses in the village. Being at the bottom of the hierarchy without any access to land, education or any other dignified occupation, they were made completely dependent on theirpatron-landlords for their livelihood. As a result, they were subjected to a greater degree of humiliation and subjugation by the caste Hindus. In this context, migration perhaps was apreferred option as a means to escape the caste-based exclusion. Nonetheless, manual scavenging remains largely a caste-based or descent-based occupation even in urban areas and while migration has freed them from the immediate clutches of the landlord, yet, it has not helped them much in ridding themselves of caste-based discrimination.

Zone-wise Concentration by Caste and Category

An important component of the study reveals an important facet of the dimensions of manual scavenging. It was found that not only SC, but other groups such as Scheduled Tribe (ST), Denotified Tribe (DNT)/Nomadic Tribe (NT), Other Backward Classes (OBC) and General are found engaged in manual scavenging, although their percentage is very low or negligible. Hoping to provide a deeper understanding into the said subject, I present below some data that unravels specific social categories that are engaged in this occupation.

Scheduled Castes: According to the study, of the total identified sample of 2,753, a total of 87.7% belong to SCs. Zone wise, the Konkan region accounts for more than one-fourth that is 29.6%, followed by Pune 17.2%, Aurangabad 16.1%, Amravati 13.8%, Nagpur 13.0%, and Nashik standing at 10.1%.

Scheduled Tribes, Denotified and Nomadic Tribes: Among the ST/DNT/NT data reveals that only 0.9% ST households are found engaged in scavenging. More than half (58.3%) of them are in the Konkan region followed by one-fourth (25.0%) in Amravati. This is perhaps because of their high population in these regions. To be more specific, they belong to theMahadev Koli, Gond, Kolam and Katakari tribes. Besides these communities, there are a few who may fall into the DNT, NT category such as Kunchi Karve, Bhoi, Kaikadi and Vanjari. The traditional occupation of these STs, denotified and NTs are not scavenging; however, the likelihood of their own socio-economic marginalisation (conceived as a possible push factor), and the easy access to urban settings and employment opportunities available (conceive as pull factor), can perhaps be accounted as reasons for these communities to join these occupations.

Other Backward Classes: Of the total identified sample, 1.8% of the OBCs were found engaged in this occupation. Their presence was more prominent in the Konkan zone (nearly three-fourths). Whereas, their percentage is negligible in other zones. It is important to note that the Konkan division includes Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) and has as many as six municipal corporations. The OBCs were mainly absorbed as employees in these ULBs, hospitals and the railways. They come from OBCs, such as Teli, Mali, Kunabi, Kumbhar, Sonar and Dhangar. While their traditional occupation was never scavenging, yet, according to the data collected, it was found that significant numbers of people from this category are getting into this occupation and their percentage is slightly high in urban settings, especially in MMR and other big cities. One reason for this could be the cut-throat competition for government jobs among the educated unemployed across the sections. As a result, many Shudra castes falling under the OBC category are attracted to such government jobs. Second, the relativeaccesses for this category into the administration of these institutions entering as a safai kamgar/sweeper could also be a means to finally get absorbed into other (dignified) departments and/or in due course be promoted as supervisor through their political connections and influence.

General category: Of the total identified sample, 9.6% of the aswachha safai kamgars/scavengers fall under general category. Within them, 81.5% are Muslims, 0.4% are Christians and 18.1% are Hindus other than SC, ST and OBC. The important point here is that even the Muslims have been included in the list of general category, which is a controversial issue. As per the Constitution, only Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist religions qualify to be included into the SC list, whereas, Muslim and Christian are not. However, field observations suggest that the Muslims have been performing this occupation since time immemorial, and a majority of them are even more backward than their Hindu counterparts. Another important aspect is that within MuslimMehtars, Lalbegi and Sheik are two distinct endogamous groups and intermarriages between these two are not allowed. Among Lalbegi, some are still Hindu and others have embraced Islam. Although they form a most significant part of the underprivileged section of our society, they are still deprived of many government programmes meant for the upliftment of the scavengers.

Among the Hindu general category, people use their political influence at the local level to grab a few posts of safai kamgar generally meant for the communities traditionally performing these occupations. It is observed that the general category persons entering this profession never perform these filthy tasks. They rather prefer to work as supervisors or sanitary inspectors and then try to become clerks or simply sub-contract out their task to somebody else from the scavenging castes. Advancement in technology and government measures to completely abolish the dry latrines (at least from urban and semi-urban areas) has brought some positive changes in the nature of this occupation. As a result, persons from general category seem not to mind joining as a safai karmachari and, thus, sweep roads for a few days and then switch over to some other tasks within the same department in due course of time.

Dimensions of Scavenging: Nature, Extent and Form

Manual scavengers in Maharashtra are engaged in five major activities of manual scavenging. Water-based latrine from amongst other scavenging activities in Maharashtra is the largest practice of manual scavenging where 43.4% (1,800) of the scavengers are manually cleaning excreta. Open defecation (as a part of community toilet block or roadside) is prevalent in 29.80% (1,239) cases. Open gutters/drains account for 24.7% (1,025). Manholes, which account for 1.5% (63) cases, are prevalent mainly in cities such as Mumbai and Pune. Only in a very few instances of 0.9% (55) dry latrines/Topli Sandas are in practice. Incidentally, large share of this belongs to the Aurangabad zone or region, especially the Cantonment area, with 89.09% (49) of the cases.

The nature of manual scavenging has changed over the years. In Maharashtra, the existence of dry latrine/dabba latrine is found only in a few areas of Marathwada region, namely Aurangabad, Jalna and Beed. However, the community/public toilet blocks or the water-based/latrines provided by ULBs in certain localities in semi-urban and urban areas are not adequate and not properly maintained. The practice of defecating in the open, alongside roads, open gutters, drainages, in the open space, and around toilet blocks has been found prevalent. This requires the manual scavenger as an employee of the ULBs or any other government organisation to manually remove/clean and dispose of human excreta and other waste.

The practice of scavenging and employment of manual scavengers by the local government authorities and private households has been banned under the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993. This act was enacted in Maharashtra from 26 January 1997. The act declared the employment of manual scavengers engaged in manually removing human excreta an offence, and thus, banned the construction of dry latrines, advocating in the process the conversion of existing dry latrines into water-seal latrines. The study revealed that only 36% of the respondents are aware about this act. Not a single case is registered under the act till the government brought in a new legislation Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act in 2013. This clearly reflects the apathy of the state in the implementation of this act.

Further, as a strategy to eradicate this practice, it is identified as important to liberate and rehabilitate the manual scavengers into other dignified occupations. This resulted in the government launching the National Scheme of Liberation and Rehabilitation of Scavengers and their Dependents in March 1992. However, the lukewarm implementation and the complete lack of coordination between the training and the financial organisation under the scheme hardly bore any fruit; instead, it rendered the scavengers unemployed and marginalised them even further. According to the data from the study, only 28% of the respondents are aware, and only 8% have benefited from this scheme in Maharashtra.

The Indian Scenario: Current Status

Around 60% of all open defecation in the world takes place in India (News 18 2012). To address this problem, the government of India had launched a programme called the Total Sanitation Campaign in 1999. The campaign became only partially successful and was restructured to make it more people-centric and was renamed Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (NBA) with a goal of eradicating the practice of open defecation itself by 2022. Maharashtra, along with Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, is on its way to achieve the goal of open defecation free state in the next two years. However, all such programmes seem to have been unable to effectively tackle the problem of providing adequate sanitation to the masses at large, which is directly responsible for the prevalence of the practice of manual scavenging in the country. The Census of India 2011 data on the type of latrine facility within households reveals that there are over 7.4 lakh households across the country where night soil is removed by humans. This does not include the households where night soil is disposed into open drain (over 12.33 lakh households) and night soil is serviced by animals (over 4.93 lakh) that are most likely to engage manual scavenging services subsequently. About 25 lakh households are still using dry (non-flush) latrines, employing manual scavengers directly or indirectly. Chandigarh, Sikkim, Goa and Lakshadweep are the only regions in the country that do not have a single instance of manual scavenging.

The census figures only throw light on various types of latrines and the modes in which human excreta is removed (by human) or serviced (by animal); however, it does not give the exact numbers of manual scavengers in each state. For the population of manual scavengers, we have to rely on Census 2011 and the data given by various ministries of the central government. According to Annual Report 200910, the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India, the population of manual scavengers in Maharashtra is 64,785. Of these, 19,086 are rehabilitated and about 45,699 scavengers are yet to be rehabilitated.

The Census of India 2011 data with regard to sanitation facility in Maharashtra is equally important and relevant in this context. Although it does not give exact population of manual scavengers in Maharashtra, however, it does provide the magnitude of the problem of sanitation facility and manual scavenging in the state. Table 1 reveals the condition of sanitation in both rural and urban areas in the state with types of latrines. If viewed carefully, except the latrines connected to piped water system, all other types of latrines invariably need to be cleaned/removed and disposed off by humans. In the light of this, the problem of manual scavenging therefore persists.

The population of the set of castes engaged in manual scavenging profession in Maharashtra is highly urbanised (92.7%). With the process of rapid urbanisation in the state, the problem of manual scavenging seems to be more aggravated in urban and semi-urban areas rather than in rural areas where villagers prefer open fields for defecation. The circular issued by the Social Justice and Special Assistance Department, Government of Maharashtra on 4 March 2013 with regard to survey of insanitary latrines reveals that there are 1,71,688 households spread out in 256 towns/cities. The data is based on Census 2011 and mainly includes the statutory towns in Maharashtra.

However, the Census 2011 data on sanitation reveals the challenges that rural Maharashtra has to face. It indicates that only 38% of households in rural Maharashtra have latrinefacility within the premises. The remaining 62% households have no latrine facility and, therefore, have to resort to alternative sources, namely using public latrine accounting for 10% and open field accounting for 90%. The most striking fact that has emerged from this data is that there are 4,291 households where night soil is removed by a human. In addition to this, there are 12,528 households where night soil is serviced by animals. The presence of both these categories, in other words, also suggests an engagement of manual scavengers for cleaning/removing and disposing off human excreta.

Conclusions

Seeking as I do to uncover the prevalence, nature and extent of manual scavenging in Maharashtra, and in the process, complicate and destabilise a historically embedded social notion formulated around an occupation, I consider it imperative to assert that time is ripe for theorising fundamental questions pertaining to the said subject. The urgency felt is much propounded in the light of a series of promulgation of acts and policies by the state to confront and rid caste-based manual scavenging from India. Having stated the above thought, it is also important to note that however noteworthy the states acts and policies, much remains desired in the implementation of the said policies that would directly affect peoples lives. Beginning with the Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 and the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 and schemes such as the National Scheme for Liberation and Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers and their Dependents (NSLRM), Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), National Safai Karmachari Finance and Development Corporation, Nirmal Gram Puraskar Yojana, Self-employment Scheme for Rehabilitation of Manual Scavengers and SBA, etc, the acts and programmes of the Government of India, in general, and of different states, in particular, remain nondescript. In many ways, they seem to have miserably failed to eradicate the inhuman practice of cleaning toilets and lifting human excreta by hand assigned mostly to some caste groups.

On this front, one of the arguments which I want to propose is that these occupations have always been caste/descent-based and are performed predominantly by members of Dalitcommunities. While government officials, politicians and judiciary (predominantly upper caste) have rarely shown any genuine commitment to its eradication beyond loud policy pronouncement when cornered by facts and figures, there is however a perennial denial of its social existence among those who wish to free themselves from the responsibility of their daily excreta produce. Several studies and reports emerging from civil society organisations and institutions have pointed to one single factthat the governments (central and states) have been the largest employer of manual scavengers and thus remain the biggest perpetrators of this crime. This is often viewed as fundamentally violating basic human rights of these voiceless citizens of the country. In an interesting report by Malakani Committee (1969) in the wake of Gandhi Centenary Year, the Bhangi Kashtha Mukti programme was launched by providing scavengers with wheelbarrows, subsidy to households to convert dry latrines into flush-out latrines, etc. The policy that informed the programme purported to address the issue of indignity, stigma associated with scavenging, and the consequent practice of untouchability against manual scavengers by eradicating unsanitary conditions around them. Most of such welfare policies/programmes of the state are informed by a belief that the inhuman state of manual scavengers and safai karmacharis are likely due to physical and unhygienic conditions, rather than sociocultural or ritual impurity imposed on their lives by the caste system.

Slavoj iek in his book The Plague of Fantasies, argues that In everyday life, ideology is at work especially in the apparently innocent reference to pure utility. He substantiates this by giving the example of toilet construction in three nations, namely United Kingdom, France and Germany and how it reflects the ideology of the nation. Similarly, the toilet system in india is of dry and open toilets. There is no concept of the flush in the Indian system. The inherent ideology of the system is that someone will clean the excreta. The Indian toilet ideology is rooted in the notion of the caste system. This, in turn, informs caste-based occupation and vice versa. Thus, manual scavenging becomes an essential element of the Indian toilet system as it provides labour to clean the excreta and creates a system of social obligation on the person doing the job of manual scavenging.

The state and central governments for a long time were even reluctant to redefine the term manual scavengers. This was because they feared the fact that they would have to bring these workers into the ambit of similar forms/practices of work, such as sewerage workers, sanitation workers in railways and hospitals, morgue workers and garbage loaders, who work in most hazardous and inhuman conditions. Manual scavengers, who risk their life to keep towns and cities clean, are, thus, in turn, constantly denied their fundamental entitlements such as housing, healthcare, education, social and economic security by the state. In fact, in India, even for the larger civilised society, such practices are considered as normal occupations and as the Dalits social obligations and contribution to the larger society.

Although many leaders have called it a national shame and demand for its immediate eradication, unfortunate as it may sound, political parties and civil society alike have rarely shown or considered the issue serious enough to warrant drastic action on the matter. Imbued and deeply rooted in caste, manual scavenging keeps persisting. This is one of the main reasons for the inability to secure any theoretical advancement that can provide superior insights and stimulate change in the said reality. Nonetheless, this should not be the reason for not attempting to raise the debate about manual scavenging to a valid place in both the moral and political discourse.

To finally conclude, the production of factual numbers that unravels the prevalence and extent of manual scavenging is imperative. However, in our context, when we transcend numbers and enter the more complex realm of lived experience, we are confronted in every sphere either by state lethargy, caste arrogance or even peoples wilful acceptance of the said occupation.

We live in a society soaked in caste, where societal solidarity is predicated and structured around forms of coercive equilibrium rather than consensual equilibrium. The social attitude that stems from such surreptitious premises often suffers from an epistemic blindness that binds caste groups into rigid silos. In such realities, whilst one has a clear view and perception of oneself, yet, one is blind to the realities of others. The interplay of such conjunctions often manifests more starkly in the public realm of social duties and political responsibilities as citizens. While those higher up in the caste hierarchy consider the production of waste their natural right and privilege, yet, the same caste feels no need to take the responsibility for the waste generated once the same is conceptually transformed into dirt. So pervasive is this cocooned attitude among the privileged caste that ones generated waste is often conceived not as ones own, but as the responsibility of other castes. The repercussions of such an attitude have been at the heart of the production and reproduction of the practice of untouchability, the essence of which can be articulated as, Whereas it is my God designed natural duty to produce waste, it is however the religiously ordained responsibility of the untouchable to clean the dirt. In this context, I opine that unless we address the fundamental mechanics of this basic conception, no policy nor campaign, however liberatory it may purport to seem, can fundamentally alter the lives and livelihoods of manual scavengers.

Notes

1 The Good Practice Book On the Right Track released by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Water and Sanitation (Lisbon, February 2012).

2 http://censusindia.gov.in/Tables_Published/SCST/dh_sc_maha.pdf.

References

Ambedkar, B R (1987): The Triumph of Brahmanism, BAWS, published by Government of Maharashtra, Vol 3, pp 26669.

(1990): What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to Untouchables, BAWS, published by Government of Maharashtra, Vol 9, pp 29293.

Das, Bhagwan (1996): Main Bhangi Hun, New Delhi: Gautam Book Center.

Enthoven, E R (1920): The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Delhi: Cosmo Publications, Vol I.

Malkani, N R (1965): Clean People Unclean Country, Harijan Sevak Sangh, New Delhi.

Mani, Braj Ranjan (2005): Debrahmanising History: Dominance and Resistance in Indian History, New Delhi: Manohar.

News 18 (2012): India Is Worlds Capital for Open Defecation: Ramesh, 12 July.

Omvedt, Gail (1994): Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India, Sage Publications, New Delhi.

Pathak, Bindeshwar (2000): Road to Freedom: A Sociological Study on the Abolition of Scavenging in India, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, (new edition).

Prashad, Vijay (2000): Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of Dalit Community, New Delhi: OUP.

Ramaswamy, Gita (2011): India Stinking: Manual Scavengers in Andhra Pradesh and Their Work, Navayana Publisher.

Russel, R V and Hira Lal (1916): Tribes and Castes of Central Provinces of India, Delhi: Publications, Vol IV.

Shyamlal (1992): The Bhangi: A Sweeper Caste, Its Socio-economic Portraits, Sangam Books.

Srivastava, B N (1997): Manual Scavenging in India: A Disgrace to the Country, Concept Publishing Company, New Delhi.

Stephen, Fuchs (1981): At the Bottom of Indian Society: The Harijan and Other Low Castes, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi

Thapar, Romila (2008): The Aryan: Recasting Constructs, New Delhi: Three Essays Collective.

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The Complexities of Liberation from Caste : Manual Scavenging in Maharashtra - Economic and Political Weekly

The all-volunteer force has been one of Americas great success stories over the past five decades. In 1973, the United States eliminated the draft, creating the military as it is today. While far from perfect, the U.S. armed forces have never been more professional, educated, or capable. With such willing and able volunteers, it should come as no surprise that most Americans consistently oppose military conscription.

After two decades at war, however, a group of prominent defense critics now argue the all-volunteer force is unfair, inefficient, and unsustainable. They argue that it contributes to the nations civil-military gap and threatens the social fabric of our democracy. Congress has even chartered a national commission to consider and develop recommendations concerning the need for a military draft.

The United States should maintain the all-volunteer force, however, despite this criticism. While the civil-military divide is large and growing, reinstating conscription will not address the problem. Moreover, short of an existential threat to the nation, a draft is not politically feasible, publicly acceptable, or militarily suitable. The success of the all-volunteer is due to the lasting impact and enduring influence of the Presidents Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force (or Gates Commission), which presented its final report to President Richard Nixon in February 1970 fifty years ago this month. This history of the commission and how it reached its conclusions offers lessons for the present day, and should inform our understanding of the U.S. military.

Nixons Campaign Promise

With a strong commission chair, an inclusive information-gathering process, and a coherent political strategy, the Gates Commission (named for its chairman, former Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates) helped bring an end to conscription in the United States and usher in the all-volunteer force. The commission included cabinet secretaries, politicians, retired generals, captains of industry, seasoned educators, civil rights activists, famed economists, and even a law student. It convincingly argued that military conscription amounted to an unjust government tax with inequitable human, cultural, social, and economic costs for a generation of draftees, and unanimously recommended an end to the draft. The commissions final report also recommended a more generous compensation and benefits package to recruit and retain servicemembers in a competitive market-based economy. Taken together, the Gates Commission is arguably the most successful blue-ribbon defense commission in U.S. history.

Throughout the 1960s, opponents of selective service openly criticized the draft as individuals found various ways to avoid conscription through delays, exemptions, and deferments. The deferment system was a particular source of angst for many Americans, as the public widely viewed it as exacerbating socioeconomic inequalities between rich and poor: The upper class went to college while the working class went to war. And the American war effort in Vietnam continued to escalate with no end in sight. By late 1968, nearly 37,000 U.S. troops had died in the war. According to the New York Times, the Pentagon estimated that roughly 33 percent of Americans killed in combat were draftees.

Meanwhile, domestic opposition to the war reached a crescendo at home. This opposition manifested itself through draft-resistance movements, widespread protests, and outright political disillusionment. For instance, a retrospective in the Washington Post described a massive, three-day protest outside the Pentagon in October 1967 as a cultural touchstone of the decade [and] defining moment of American history. Protests continued across the country, contributing to the nations divisive cultural and political climate and to President Lyndon Johnsons decision not to seek re-election in 1968.

In late 1966, Nixon was in the early stages of his own campaign for the White House. The former vice president began by forming an inner circle of like-minded advisers including Columbia University professor Martin Anderson, an economist by training to counsel him on all matters of public policy. At a March 1967 campaign meeting in Manhattan, Anderson recommended that candidate Nixon reverse his longstanding position favoring conscription and come out publicly against the draft. Asking for time to study the issue before eventually presenting his findings to the group, Anderson proposed, What if I could show you how we could end the draft completely and increase our military power at the same time?

After weeks of research, Anderson submitted a position paper to Nixon for review. In his memo, Anderson argued that the draft constitutes two years of involuntary servitude to the State and eliminating it would actually strengthen our security. Though Nixon expressed initial interest in the idea, several months passed without so much as a formal discussion or campaign meeting on the topic. But on Nov. 17, 1967, a young reporter from the New York Times asked Nixon for his thoughts on the draft. Anderson recalled, Nixon smiled and replied evenly, I think we should eliminate the draft and move to an all-volunteer force. The next day, the Times published an article titled, Nixon Backs Eventual End of Draft. With that, Nixon became the countrys most prominent public champion for the creation of an all-volunteer force. One year later, the American people elected him the 37th president of the United States.

In January 1969, Arthur Burns, a member of the Nixon campaign team, sent the president-elect a report outlining suggestions for early action, reminding him that one of your strongest pledges during the campaign was the eventual abolition of the draft. Burns recommended Nixon appoint a special Commission charged with the task of developing a detailed plan of action for ending the draft. Living up to his campaign promise, Nixon announced the commission by proclaiming, I have directed the Commission to develop a comprehensive plan for eliminating conscription and moving toward an all-volunteer armed force. The Commission will study a broad range of possibilities including increased pay, benefits, recruitment incentives, and other practicable measures to make military careers more attractive to young men. With that, Nixon set the slow wheels of government in motion.

Beyond staff, office space, and an operating budget, a blue-ribbon defense commission of this caliber would also require a cadre of prominent private citizens and former public officials to serve as commissioners and give this massive undertaking the public attention and credibility it deserved. Anderson recalled, The members of the commission were carefully chosen. It is relatively easy to select members of a commission so that the result is predetermined. We deliberately at some risk chose not to do that. Instead, we decided to appoint five people who were for the idea, five who were against it, and five who, while they had no clear position, were men and women of integrity. With this strategy in mind, the president asked former Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates, an all-volunteer force skeptic, to lead the commission. To his credit, Nixon knew that without a strong and well-respected commission chairman in the lead, any report recommending the transition to an all-volunteer force would be dead-on-arrival in Washington.

A Strong Chair at the Helm

An Ivy Leaguer, investment banker, and Navy veteran, Thomas Gates held several senior positions in the Eisenhower administration, including undersecretary of the Navy, secretary of the Navy, deputy secretary of defense, and secretary of defense. With an unparalleled Pentagon rsum, Gates was larger than life and highly respected among defense insiders. He enjoyed the gravitas necessary to lead such a consequential commission because he had been widely credited with major management innovations within the Department of Defense.

As chairman, Gates fostered a collegial commission environment where dissent was welcome. For instance, fellow commissioner Crawford Greenwalt asked Gates whether the Commission was obligated to recommend an all-volunteer force plan since his only concern was that he be free to reject the all-volunteer solution. Gates told him that it was not necessary for the Commission members to assume at the outset that an all-volunteer force solution was either feasible or desirable. According to Stephen Herbits, one of the last surviving commissioners who agreed to an interview for this research, We asked ourselves whether an all-volunteer force was both desirable and doable. Skeptics raised the question as to whether it was desirable. Proponents were not afraid to explore the question because they never doubted the wisdom of an all-volunteer force.

Reflecting on Gates leadership, famed economist and fellow commissioner Milton Friedman recalled, Tom Gates was a splendid, open-minded, even-handed chairman, who gradually shifted his position to become a convinced supporter of an all-volunteer army. Similarly, Herbits recalled, Everyone in the room respected Gates. He was thoughtful and never raised his voice. He never ruled with an iron hand and when he wanted to move on to another topic, everyone agreed. His sheer personal charisma and authority moved the process along. Clearly, Gates was the perfect choice to chair Nixons commission.

An Inclusive Information-Gathering Process Meets a Coherent Political Strategy

With less than a year to report his findings, Gates decided not to hold any public hearings on the commissions work. However, he did demand an otherwise exhaustive information-gathering process. This included briefings from senior Pentagon bureaucrats, meetings with the service chiefs and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visits to Capitol Hill, and thorough analyses from the commission staff. Beyond defense officials, the Gates Commission also heard private testimony from prominent veterans organizations like the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. Indeed, the commission understood the implications of its work for the American people, designing its final report to be a persuasive public document which presented the economic, social, and political arguments for a volunteer force and a rebuttal to the arguments against a volunteer force. Of course, this final report would not have come to pass were it not for the commissions preceding staff reports and studies. The staff director, William Meckling, organized the commissions research under directors responsible for total force manpower requirements; supply of officers; supply of enlisted personnel; and historical, political, and social research.

On Dec. 20, 1969, after months of study and debate, the commissioners unanimously concluded that an all-volunteer force was the most desirable solution, but not without some remaining internal differences. On Jan. 9, 1970, the commissioners met one last time to address their lingering disagreements. Gates facilitated a tense discussion wherein the commission argued over the wording and the feasibility of the [all-volunteer force] at particular force levels. This internal tension also stemmed from a debate over the war in Vietnam. Herbits, a Georgetown Law student at the time, objected to a draft version of the commissions final report, which included language supporting the Vietnam War. Herbits, usually deferential to the elder statesmen on the commission, spoke up in defiant opposition to the other commissioners. After arguing that the ongoing conflict was beyond the scope of the commissions work, Herbits threatened to vote against the final report as drafted. He recalled exclaiming, Do you really want the youngest member of this commission telling the country he doesnt agree with its report? In search of unanimity, Gates brokered a deal between the quarrelling commissioners by conceding Herbits point and omitting language supporting the war.

With a unanimous agreement secured, Gates shifted his attention to combating opposition to the final report. According to Gus Lee and Geoffrey Parker, Mr. Gates thought it was essential that the commission squarely face all major objections to the volunteer force, and eventually a complete section of the report was set aside to refute common criticisms of the volunteer force concept. As such, the commissioners socialized their final recommendations over dinner with key stakeholders, including Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor. Bernard Rostker writes, As the Gates Commission proceeded to prebrief the services on their emerging recommendations, it became clear that the commissioners views were different from those prevailing in the Pentagon.

The next morning, Resor attended the commissions meeting to formally deliver the Armys official response to the reports findings and recommendations. Throughout the meeting, Resor frequently referred to would-be volunteers as mercenaries. According to Martin Anderson, At some point, [Milton] Friedman couldnt take it anymore and responded to Resor, Look, lets make an agreement. If you promise to stop calling my volunteers mercenaries, I will promise to stop calling your draftees slaves. To that end, the commissioners argued conscription imposed social and human costs by distorting the personal lives and career plans of the young and by forcing society to deal with such difficult problems. Volunteers, on the other hand, would maintain a high quality force that is more experienced, better motivated, and has higher morale. Tensions remained high as the commission prepared to publicly issue its final report. To get ahead of any Pentagon misinformation campaign, Gates went out of his way to visit the Senate Armed Services Committee and allay lingering congressional concerns. By engaging Washington stakeholders throughout the process, Gates clearly understood his central role in ensuring the commissions success.

In close consultation with the White House, the commission published its final report through the Government Printing Office and Macmillan Company. The Nixon administration would ensure maximum public exposure of the Gates Commission report by printing 5,000 hardcover books and another 100,000 paperback copies by March 1970. This proved to be a smart and wildly successful public information campaign. Gates showed remarkable leadership in the final stretch as he led the commission to settle its remaining differences and eventually persuaded all members to sign without a single dissenting opinion. The importance of the commissions unanimity on an all-volunteer force cannot be overstated. The commissioners, representing a veritable cross-section of society, signaled to the defense establishment that the American people were ready to embrace a historic policy change by replacing conscription with an all-volunteer force.

Keep the All-Volunteer Force

The inequitable human, cultural, social, and economic costs of conscription during the Vietnam War robbed a generation of draftees of their youth. The Gates Commission deserves a great deal of credit for helping to end military conscription in the United States and laying the intellectual foundation for the advent of the all-volunteer force three years later. Ultimately, the Gates Commission succeeded because Gates led an inclusive information-gathering process, satisfying stakeholders, and employed a coherent political strategy, overcoming opposition.

Indeed, the all-volunteer force is the cornerstone of the modern American military. The U.S. military today is a more effective, just, equitable, and meritorious institution, thanks in large measure to the commissions foundational work 50 years ago.

Like conscription, however, the all-volunteer force has come at a significant cost. While the Gates Commission asserted that conscription offers the general public an opportunity to impose a disproportionate share of defense costs on a minority of the population, the same could be said for the all-volunteer force today. In fact, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates illustrated this point during a 2010 lecture: Yet even as we appreciate, and sometimes marvel at, the performance of this all-volunteer force, I think it important at this time to recognize that this success has come at significant cost. Above all, the human cost, for the troops and their families. But also cultural, social, and financial costs in terms of the relationship between those in uniform and the wider society they have sworn to protect. After two decades at war, the 50th anniversary of the Gates Commission serves as a timely reminder that military service is a costly endeavor, for volunteers and their families alike.

Maj. Brandon J. Archuleta, Ph.D. is a strategic planner in the Army war plans division and author of the forthcoming book, Twenty Years of Service: The Politics of Military Pension Policy and the Long Road to Reform. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of the U.S. Army, Department of Defense, or U.S. government.

Image: U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion Oklahoma City (Photo by Amber Osei)

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Fifty Years After the President's Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force - War on the Rocks

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It's widely known by this point that several members of the royal family reportedly watch The Crown, although most haven't admitted to it publicly. But there's another current royal TV series which is reportedly very popular at the palaceand it's a lot cheekier than anything Peter Morgan has written.

The Windsors, which began airing on the UK's Channel 4 in 2016, reimagines the lives of the royals as a satirical soap opera. Critics have called the show "a riotous parody," and according to the Daily Mail's royal correspondent Rebecca English, the Windsors themselves (or at least the people who work for them) agree.

"I cant tell you how funny this programme is," English tweeted alongside an announcement for the show's season three premiere. "Very sharp and well-researched. All of the depictions are side-splittingly funny (Princess Anne is a hoot). Well worth a watch and a giggle. Its very popular at the palace too."

Given how irreverent the show is, its popularity at the palace is something of a surprise, but demonstrates that (some of) the royals really aren't afraid to laugh at themselves. Storylines on the show range from gleefully absurdPrince Charles's identical twin brother, Chuck, is discovered in an atticto soapya jealous Pippa Middleton tries to poison Meghan Markle ahead of her wedding to Harryto somewhat pointed satirea disillusioned William calls for a referendum on the abolition of the monarchy.

Significantly, the Queen and Prince Philip do not appear at all in the show, although they're mentioned often.

If all this sounds intriguing to you, the good news is that the first two seasons of The Windsors are available to stream Stateside courtesy of Netflix.

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The Windsors TV Show on Netflix is "Very Popular" At Buckingham Palace - TownandCountrymag.com

There are a host of important, even vital ideas behind All the Dead Ones, a hybrid period piece addressing Brazils unresolved legacy of slavery and the imprint its had on an all-too-often downplayed contemporary racism of malignant toxicity. Set largely in 1899, 11 years after the abolition of slavery but designed so modern So Paulo increasingly bleeds into the picture, the films worthy goals are hampered by an obviousness that favors exposition over subtlety: Having a character express her colonialist guilt by seeing the ghosts of dead slaves feels far too stale when presented with such Freudian hysteria. Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, collaborating as directors for the first time, channel the artificiality of late Manoel de Oliveira but without the enticing mystery, hampered by an understandable earnestness that yearns for a more subtle approach. International prospects are uncertain at best.

It doesnt help that the character one instantly bonds with dies after the first few minutes. Josefina (Alade Costa) is an old servant to the Soares family, an aristocratic coffee plantation clan whose waning power hasnt affected their sense of entitlement. When Josefinas no more, matriarch Isabel (Thaia Perez) bemoans the fact that theres no longer anyone to wash her feet, let alone make a decent cup of java.

Isabel keeps a tight rein on daughter Ana (Carolina Bianchi), whose loosened hair and air of barely contained hysteria speak of both madness and a dangerously uncontrolled sexuality. Her sister Maria (Clarissa Kiste), a nun whod prefer a cloistered existence, is concerned by Anas constant references to their former plantation, which the women left five years earlier with the understanding theyd only temporarily be in So Paulo.

The trio of white women is representative everyone in the film is representative of three different approaches that came with the loss of status as wealthy land and slave owners. Isabel simply refuses to live any other way, her reduction in circumstances resulting in painful psychosomatic ailments. Anas neuroses are less genteel, and shes begun to imagine she sees some of their dead former slaves, not in a menacing way, just present. Marias response to their fall from grace was to enter the convent, where shed prefer to remain permanently away from the world that betrayed her, were it not that shes the sole family member with her head together. Hoping for some help, she journeys to see her father Baron Jorge (Luciano Chirolli) at their former plantation, now owned by rich Italians, but hes not especially interested in shaking up a life with decreasing responsibilities.

With Josefina gone, the family needs household help so upper-class neighbor Romilda (frequent Oliveira actress Leonor Silveira) loans her servant Carolina (Andra Marquee), whos less than satisfactory. Meanwhile, Romildas nephew Eduardo (Thoms Aquino) is proposed as a suitable suitor for Anas hand; though carrying the taint of being mixed race, at least hes willing to woo Isabels daughter, whos not merely beyond the dew of youth but also demonstrably nuts. Eduardo naturally is a representative of another kind of figure: elegant, highly cultured and sensitive to the enchantment of poetry and music, hes designed as a man trapped between the expectations of race and class, plus hes had a same-sex affair that adds another label to a character already over-burdened with signifiers.

Ana begins to obsess on the need to find their former slave In (Mawusi Tulani), wife of Josefinas grandson Antnio (Rogrio Brito), believing she can fill the role of servant as well as work some Candombl magic to heal Isabel. When Maria makes her unproductive trip to see her father, she also locates In, whos suppressed her Angolan faith in recent years knowing that adherence to African religions will harm her ability to fit into the realities of a deeply divided post-slavery Brazil. Though unwilling to return to the Soares family circle, she agrees to briefly help Maria, largely because she hopes to find her missing husband. The ceremony she stages in their home in the city revives pride in her faith, and she stays in So Paulo with her young son Joo (Agyei Augusto), connecting with a community of co-religionists as she searches for Antnio.

In their similarly female-centric previous films, directors Caetano Gotardo (The Moving Creatures) and Marco Dutra (Good Manners) also used characters as stand-ins for societal ills, but with All the Dead Ones, theyve added a hermeticism that blocks emotional involvement, not helped by the obviously calculated construction of each role. Even Antnio, a relatively minor figure, is made to stand for something when he becomes a street lighter, making him not just a symbol of modernity but also someone bringing light into the darkness. Unquestionably, the issues Gotardo and Dutra are grappling with deserve to have more light shone on them, especially the way the ruling class and the Church suppressed African spirituality, yet the film feels so predetermined that the message, never so urgent as now with the Bolsonaro government in power, is weakened.

Even the potentially interesting idea of gradually introducing elements of modern So Paulo feel somehow unremarkable. Its first noticed in music of uncertain date that plays over some early conversations, then more as a building is glimpsed going up near the Soares home. Soon the sound of fireworks is heard (in the daytime), construction noises invade the houses quiet interiors, a wall of graffiti is seen, and then finally the whole modern city is laid out before In and Joo as they picnic on a bluff. Its an interesting conceit, yet like the characters themselves, so calculatedly designed to point out the continuity of racism and class divide in contemporary Brazil that it becomes yet another concept to identify and catalog in ones head before moving on.

Visuals from the always welcome DP Hlne Louvart (Invisible Life, Happy as Lazzaro) are handsomely composed, keeping a tight rein on what can be seen outside the Soares mansion until gradually more and more is glimpsed as their world splinters and reality intrudes. The film is divided into chapters, which helps with the construction.

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All the Dead Ones: Film Review - Variety

Banks will stay closed from Eight to 15 March. There are Sundays on March 8, the birthday of Hazrat Ali on 9, Holi on 10, bankers' strike on 11, 12 and 13, the second on 14 and Sunday on 15. Due to this individuals could need to face problem. Checks price crores of rupees can get caught. Various companies akin to mortgage disbursements might be affected.

->Cash deposit and withdrawal wont be doable. Due to long-term financial institution closure, the quantity in ATMs may also be exhausted. However, its not a lot of an issue for these doing digital transactions, as a result of money disaster, the colours of Holi dont fade, so do the vital work beforehand.

So strike

According to Amardeep Kaushik, the official of the Joint Forum of Bank Associations (UFBU) in Agra, the Indian Banks Association has proposed a 12.5 % improve in salaries, which isnt acceptable.

Bank staff will go on strike for 3 days from March 11 to 13, after negotiations with the Indian Banks Association failed on pay revision.

The financial institution union calls for that the wage be elevated by no less than 20 %, banks have a five-day workday, merger of particular allowances in primary pay, abolition of NPS, pension updation and so forth.

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Banks will probably be closed for Eight consecutive days in March, deal with all of your work beforehand - Sahiwal Tv

Armed with machetes and pitchforks and uttering chants of Freedom or Death, hundreds of men and women made their way along a 26-mile route along the River Parishes of Louisiana.

The spectacle which I witnessed in November 2019 in St. John the Baptist Parish, in the heartland of Louisianas sugar cane and oil industries was a reenactment of what historians believe was the largest slave rebellion in United States history, the 1811 German Coast Uprising.

That winter, along the east bank of the Mississippi River, Charles Deslondes, an enslaved man believed to have arrived in Louisiana from Haiti, led a group of about 30 enslaved people in an uprising at a plantation owned by Manuel Andry. They killed Andrys son, Gilbert, and then set out to establish a black state along the banks of the Mississippi. As the movement continued, the uprising grew to about 500 people headed for New Orleans.

In real life, a group of 100 armed bounty hunters put the uprising down. Dozens of the rebels were subjected to a monstrous public punishment that included torture and execution. Many were decapitated their heads placed on spiked poles along a 60-mile stretch of the Mississippi River in a message meant to frighten other enslaved people who might have dared to resist.

In the reenactment, which artist Dread Scott is making into a documentary film that is set to be released in October 2020, the revolt ends in victory.

As a scholar who studies race and how historical events are represented and remembered, I see Scotts forthcoming film as an opportunity to correct a glaring problem with the way that slavery is taught or not taught in U.S. schools. And that is, the history of slavery in America is often either excluded or taught in ways that humiliate students and sympathize with slaveholders.

The history of slavery is also usually not taught as something that was created by white supremacy, and protected and sanctioned by the Constitution.

Scotts film which is being produced with a US$1 million budget deliberately reimagines the outcome for one of several slave revolts an aspect of slavery that scholars believe has not gotten its due.

Though some might criticize this cinematic interpretation as historically inaccurate, I believe the reenactment can generate important classroom discussions about historical memory and the history of slavery.

What does it mean, for instance, to imagine freedom as something that happened instead of something that was destroyed for those who participated in slave revolts? What does it mean to transform their death and public punishment into an uplifting narrative of hope and freedom?

How to confront the histories and afterlives of slavery is a central concern for Dread Scott, whose artist name pays homage to the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court case that ruled against an enslaved mans bid for freedom.

Scott says it was an ethical decision to refuse to replicate a massacre of black people at the hands of white bounty hunters who would earn money from their deaths.

As Scott has stated, the reenactment is interrupting the historic timeline.

Scott is not a historian but an artist who calls upon the public to imagine speculative histories. In this respect, I believe that his work examines freedom struggles and abolition across time. Scotts endeavor contributes significantly to a much-needed conversation about slavery and the violence that it entailed. It leaves open the challenge of how to reimagine art for arts sake, and to instead use art for the sake of social action.

Revisiting histories like the history of slavery is a painstaking and painful task. The difficulties are not only about asking the nation to confront the legacy of racial supremacy. Rather, the 1811 Slave Rebellion Reenactment is also about creating new political futures.

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Slave revolt film revisits history often omitted from textbooks - The Conversation US

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On Jan. 13, the nominations for the 92nd Academy Awards were announced. With six nominations, Parasite was the movie that shook the world. The movie received great reviews since its premiere at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, with a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and praise from critics like Stephanie Zacharek of Time magazine, who said, It tells a story you could probably follow without subtitles, or any dialogue at all: the faces of these actors show with piercing clarity how it feels to be outsiders in a world of wealth and privilege.

The film delivers messages that are easily understood by people across different cultures, regardless of language, which is precisely why it smashed barriers and continues to thrive nearly a year after it premiered. Bong Joon-hos masterpiece is one of the best films of 2019.

Parasite is not only a work of art; it is a dark commentary on society and social stratification.

The winning streak of Parasite began when it became the first South Korean film to win Palme dOr at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, but the beginning of 2020 seems to be the time for Parasite to shine as it continues to break into the mainstream. In early January, director Bong Joon-ho and his team earned South Koreas first ever Golden Globe for best foreign language film.

Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films, said Bong Joon-ho through his interpreter Sharon Choi as he accepted the award. Bong Joon-hos Golden Globe acceptance speech reflects how the mainstream Hollywood media remains stuck in only two categories: movies in English and movies not in English. In the one-minute speech, Bong Joon-ho managed to criticize the movie industry for its outdated structure, and he encouraged people to engage more with foreign language films.

The film didnt stop there. Following its Golden Globe win, Parasite continued. It was the first foreign language film to take home the SAG Award in the prestigious best cast in a motion picture category.

During the backstage interview after the award show, Choi Woo-shik, who played Kim Ki-woo, shared how he hopes that there will be more appreciation for foreign movies following the success of Parasite. Destroying boundaries and making history seems to be a mission for the Parasite team.

For the past 92 years of Academy Awards history, there have only been 11 foreign language films nominated for best picture. Evidently, it remains difficult for foreign films to break the English language barrier that leads to awards in Hollywood. Despite numerous accusations of lacking diversity and systematic racism, award shows kept their barricades up high.

In the 2019 Oscars, Alfonso Cuarns Roma had the public hopeful, as it was nominated for a total of 10 categories. Unfortunately for foreign moviegoers, Roma was placed in the foreign language film category while Green Book pocketed the award for best picture.

Yet, Parasite, against all odds, managed to snatch the grand prize and become the first non-English language film to win best picture at the Oscars. The film acquired four awards out of six nominations, including best director, best foreign language film, best original screenplay and best picture. However, its not the numbers that matter. The movies victory matters because it signifies a new era, a post-Parasite era, in which foreign films can easily be recognized and awarded.

At the interview after the show, Bong Joon-ho expressed his opinion on the universality of Parasite, stating, Perhaps the deeper I delve into things that are around me, the broader the story can become, the more appeal it can have to an international audience. Although the details of the story are based off of South Koreas class system, the message resonates with anyone who lives in a world that continually separates the rich from the poor, the haves from the have-nots.

The film is a metaphor for the mainstream movie industry: English-language films are the haves and foreign-language films are the have-nots. The haves seem to have endless achievements, fed with a silver spoon. They are continually awarded for the things they have done. Whereas the have-nots work tirelessly, only to get awarded when they can unambiguously surpass the same standards as the privileged.

The best picture win for Parasite is merely a start to the abolition of the archaic concept that detaches the haves from the have-nots. As the films co-writer, Han Jin-won says, To win best picture means that this film was voted by the members of the Academy and I realized that will signal the beginning of a different kind of change for international cinema, not just for Korea.

When asked to give a message to Hollywood actors of Asian descent, director Bong Joon-ho stated that he doesnt think that we should be emphasizing borders or divisions, whether its the U.S., Europe or Asia, as long as we focus on the beauty of cinema. He emphasized that we are all just making movies, implying that where one creator came from does not matter more than what the creator makes.

The movies Oscars moment is historical because of its impact. The historical win marks the beginning of a post-Parasite era that accepts diversity and appreciates a work of art regardless of its origin. The general public has entered this new era with the help of new technologies and ever-growing streaming services; it is the industry that needs to catch up. The one-inch-tall subtitles should not be the reason for us not to enjoy a piece of work.

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'Parasite' Is Winning Awards and Destroying Barriers - Study Breaks

John Beatty submit or be crushed

by James A. Bacon

Loudoun public school officials thought it would be a good idea to provide cultural competency and sensitivity training to teachers, administrators and school board members. As described by LoudounNow, the county rolled out a workshop series designed to push participants outside their comfort zone and question their belief systems. In particular, participants were forced to grapple with the benefits afforded them from generations of white privilege, stretching back to Americas earlier days.

Last week, board member John Beatty made the mistake of actually participating in the conversation. He made the observation that in the Jim Crow era following Reconstruction former slaves were worse off than they had been during slavery because they lacked the patronage of a master. The comment was meant to be an indictment of Jim Crow, not an endorsement of slavery, but it ignited a firestorm.

Minority Student Achievement Advisory Committee Chairwoman Katrece Nolen and Executive Board member Wande Oshode found his observation so heinous that they called for him to be removed from two school board committees and asked the full board to condemn his comments.

Most people in the civilized world recognize this statement as being rooted in the very racist, inhumane and oppressive institution of slavery. To justify any aspect of slavery only 66 years after Brown versus Board of Ed eliminated inequities in the public school systems, and only a year after LCPS made national news about racially-insensitive lessons and conduct by administrators, is absolutely inexcusable, Oshode said. No parent of minority children should feel comfortable with Mr. Beatty remaining on the school board.

Ill get to the substance of Beattys remarks in just a moment. But theres a more immediate issue at stake. Since when is it justifiable to spend public funds to provide ideological indoctrination of teachers, administrators and elected officials? Make no mistake, these workshops are not about having an open dialogue about race. Theyre about propagating a leftist view of race and American history and brow-beating people into submission. In the supposed land of the free, these workshops are nothing less than political re-education sessions.

In an email response to Nolen and Oshode, Nolen responded that his comments were misconstrued. He does not support slavery, he said. I abhor slavery and all the injustices that have occurred since then. He continued:

In reading the quote out of context, I agree that it is offensive. However, the point I was making was not, as I was speaking to the issue of being deliberate and thoughtful before taking any actions. As elected officials, we have an obligation to consider all sides of any question and to carefully consider the ramifications of any actions we take. History teaches us that if we fail to do so, our actions can have far-reaching negative consequences. I referenced the Jim Crow laws as a particularly egregious example of this, as the laws made it impossible for the recently freed slaves to support their families. To avoid making similar mistakes, we must always consider all sides of any question and think carefully about the impact of our actions. And as I have just learned, we must also guard our words to make sure that when quoted out of context, they cannot cause offense.

Beattys argument in a nutshell: You took my quote out of context.

Thats the safe argument. If I were in his shoes, I would make a very different argument. I would argue that Oshodes comment was offensive indeed that the entire workshop series was offensive. I would criticize the expenditure of public funds to engage in political indoctrination.

By way of preface, let me state the obvious so the enforcers of PC rectitude dont accuse me of what they accused Beatty of. Im not defending slavery. Slavery was a moral abomination. As practiced in the United States, the institution expropriated the value of the slaves labor, sexually exploited slave women, broke up the families, subjected them to mistreatment and brutality, and inflicted a multitude of other harms. Slavery was a hideous stain on American history. There is no moral defense of slavery. None.

But it appears from their comments that Beattys critics have no interest achieving a dispassionate understanding of the peculiar institution. Their apparent intent is to portray slavery not only as a moral evil but as an unadulterated evil in every aspect. Their political goal is to maximize white guilt. Thus, they find offensive any observation that could be construed (in their minds) as diminishing African-American victimhood and white guilt, thus reducing their moral leverage in contemporary debate.

It is not defending slavery, however, to contend that American slavery was not in the same league as the Holocaust in its severity, as some have suggested it was. (The slaving wars in Africa and the middle passage in which slaves were packed into slaving vessels and transported to the Western hemisphere were a different matter; millions of people died.) It is not defending slavery to note that, following the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the slave population in the United States flourished demographically. To Beattys point, it is not defending slavery to observe that, as abusive as many were, white slave owners had a material incentive to protect the value of their property by keeping their slaves in good health while Jim Crow-era landowners had no comparable incentive to look out for their sharecroppers. It is not defending slavery to consider the possibility that, from a purely material perspective (food, shelter, other basic material needs), African-American slaves might have been better off than, say, penniless Irish immigrants stepping off the ship in New York harbor.

But the leftist cultural competency and sensitivity crowd isnt interested in the complexity and nuance of history. Their starting position is maximizing white guilt, and they work backwards through history from there. They have no interest in dialogue they lecture, others must listen. They have no tolerance for dissent. Rather than engage in rational discussion, pointing out the errors in his thinking and inviting him to adopt another view, Beattys critics seek to cast him into outer darkness.

Oshode and Nolen are entitled, of course, to their own opinions. They are entitled to criticize any elected official they want. And they are free to organize any kind of event they want on their own dime. But Loudoun County has no business using public funds to organize political indoctrination sessions, compel public employees to attend them, and encourage participants to question their belief systems. Virginians should condemn such a use of taxpayer dollars.

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From Diversity Training Sessions to Political Re-Education Camp - Bacon's Rebellion

KUALA LUMPUR (Feb 27): Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had refused to remain as Prime Minister of the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government and to commit to fulfilling and delivering the PH General Election Manifesto at a Feb 25 meeting in the Prime Ministers Office, according to DAP Secretary-General and Bagan MP Lim Guan Eng.

In a statement today, Lim, who was Finance Minister during the PH administration, said the PH governing coalition comprising PKR, Amanah, DAP and Bersatu that won the mandate may have different ideologies and aspirations, but made common ground and was bound by the General Election Manifesto agreed to by all.

He said over the last 21 months, the PH government had worked hard to fulfil and deliver the manifesto promise progressively.

Amongst them [are] the reduction in toll rates for the North South Highway by 18% for private vehicles with no toll hikes for the remainder of the concession period, the MySalam project offering monetary assistance ranging from RM4,000 to RM8,000 for those suffering from 45 critical illnesses, the abolition of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) with Sales and Service Tax and repaying GST refunds amounting to RM19.4 billion.

The retention of our international credit ratings despite having to pay tens of billions for 1Malaysia Development Bhd, Tabung Haji and other related scandals, revival of major infrastructure projects following savings of over RM50 billion from renegotiation and rationalization of previous government projects, speeding up digitalisation through promoting e-wallets, creating 350,000 jobs for those unemployed who cannot get jobs through the RM6.5 billion Malaysian @ Work programme and many other initiatives, he said.

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Dr M refused to be PM of Pakatan Harapan govt Guan Eng - The Edge Markets MY

A unique conference is being held in Wisbech to explore Cambridgeshire's ongoing fight against slavery.

The town, which is where the first English anti-slavery researcher and campaigner Thomas Clarkson was brought up has been central to the battle to abolish slavery and people-trafficking for more than 200 years.

Next month Wisbech is hosting a conference with key national and international activists to look at how far abolition still has to go, and how slavery in its many modern forms can be tackled today in the light of what's been achieved so far.

It is inspired by Thomas Clarkson's campaign chest which has pride of place in the Wisbech and Fenland Museum. Clarkson's research and lifelong campaign led finally to the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.

Local people with an interest are invited to attend Cambridgeshire's Abolitionists, a one- day event, at St Peter's Church Hall in Wisbech on Saturday, March 14 as long as they book a place before March 2.

Local speaker and manager of the Rosmini Centre Anita Grodkiewicz will talk about the centre's 18-month Government-funded project partnered with Fenland District Council to research modern-day slavery in the area.

She said: Exploitation of vulnerable people modern slavery is happening in Fenland. It's a hidden crime and as such the statistics vary depending on who's reporting them you can't get reliable figures.

For the project we trained more than 150 local people who might come across victims in the course of their work to look for the signs and to report what they find.

What I'm sure of is that more agencies need this training. We've got to raise awareness further and fight modern-day slavery, because it's not going to go away on its own.

Victims can be in your workplace, the place where you get your car washed or your nails done. They may be building a wall in your garden or tarmacking your drive.

Other speakers at the conference include Jakub Sobik of Anti-Slavery International which was founded by Thomas Clarkson in 1839, Ruth Dearnley, CEO of Stop the Traffik, and historian Rebecca Nelson of the Wilberforce Institute's Usable Past Project,

who will present her recent research.

Find more details and book a free ticket to the conference including free refreshments and lunch through Wisbech and Fenland Museum website via this link: https://www.wisbechmuseum.org.uk/whats-on/2020-03-14

Cambridgeshire's Abolitionists is part of Articles for Change, a project funded by the Museum Association's Esme Fairbairn Collections Fund and is supported by Cambridgeshire

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Wisbech is venue for conference on anti-slavery - Fenland Citizen

A wave of green change is sweeping across the corporate landscape and they have profound consequences for the way in which all of us will be employed and how we will consume, writes Joe Gill.

No one should underestimate the power of large institutional investment firms as they react to the mega theme of environmental change.

Over the past two years, in the investment business in which I work, we have noted a sharp step-up in the focus being given to all things linked to sustainability and climate change.

This has come from the top as board directors and senior executives have chosen to shift gears in how they deploy capital.

Increasingly, if as a company you want to attract debt or equity finance, you will have to prove at a minimum that you have started a journey towards sustainability.

The power of money will have a greater effect on behaviour and investment decisions than any amount of protesting.

Companies worldwide are recognising the need to change tack, encouraged no doubt by consumers and employees advocating the need for change.

The corporate response is multifaceted.

Individual companies can start by converting their own internal business operations.

A switch to 100% electric cars, the abolition of single-use plastics, full recycling of all waste and a reliance on renewable energy are ways in which industry can move the dial.

At another level, companies can change their product suite to incorporate environmental priorities.

Packing products in fully reusable boxes instead of plastic is one option.

Another is to change whatever is being produced in to a 100% recyclable product.

Other companies are being created to fully exploit the sustainability agenda.

Power companies that rely completely on renewable energy are a good example of that.

Food companies that manufacture food in ways that do not damage the environment are another.

The trends are only going to grow and expand in the months and years ahead.

The investment community does not expect companies to convert overnight.

Instead, they look for boards and management teams that commit to a journey of change.

Once a detailed plan is put in place, and authority is given at a senior level to an accountable post holder who reports to the board, investment firms are supportive.

This explains, for example, why large asset managers are staying supportive of a fossil fuel company like BP because it has laid out concrete plans to move to a zero-emission footprint within a determined number of years.

Every private company and public sector employer will have to respond in kind.

Politicians and regulators will add pressure too but it is those who supply finance that has the greatest influence on how businesses and civil servants react.

If a bank or an investor provides money at a discount to those who pursue true climate change strategies it has a major impact.

Equally, if those providers decide to charge a premium for access to finance if companies do not change their behaviour it has the same result.

In recent weeks, amid a string of negative news stories, there was a fantastic development in the South Atlantic.

Researchers found there 55 thriving blue whales.

For decades the number of whales in that area had collapsed to single figures as whale hunting had driven the species close to extinction.

Moreover, the numbers suggest the oceans continue to have the health needed to sustain these creatures.

It was politicians and money providers that put a stop to whale hunting and look now at what impact that has.

Ignore those who tell you responding to environmental damage is worthless.

A huge amount of change is now kicking off and if everyone supports it climate change can be addressed and tackled appropriately.

--Joe Gill is director for origination and corporate broking with Goodbody Stockbrokers, His views are personal.

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Joe Gill: Wall of money ready to drive climate change projects - Irish Examiner

What are we dealing with?

Indias numerous public pronouncements that Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJ&K) and Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B) belonged to it must not be ignored. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself has reiterated this stance.

Talking to soldiers in Kashmir on the occasion of Holi in the aftermath of the abolition of Article 370, he stated that Pakistan illegally occupied parts of Kashmir, which, according to him, still stings. The BJP president and other senior BJP leaders, including Federal Home Minister Amit Shah and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, have repeated the same stance on different occasions.

Moreover, we should be aware of the fact that as far back as in 1994, the Indian parliament had passed a unanimous resolution stating that the aforementioned places lawfully belonged to India. A recent statement by the Indian army chief stating that if instructed by the parliament, the armed forces will take appropriate action, should be a cause of concern for Pakistan.

For Islamabad, in order to ward off any such move from India in the near to medium term, it must urgently focus on the following areas:

Make sure that people, especially those dealing with India, have the right understanding of everything that is going on in Modi-led India. For example, despite all the news reports and opinions published on the subject in Pakistans print media, it appears that a very few among us have got a clear understanding of the idea and meaning of Hindutva.

How many of us have actually read Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar? We need to encourage ourselves to read the relevant texts so as to be in a better position to deal with it. Similarly, there is a lot of talk in Pakistan about the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, but very few among us appear to have a clear idea of what exactly this amendment is all about, because many of us have not read the Citizenship Act of 1955 itself, which has been amended.

The same seems to be true about our lack of understanding of the UN resolutions concerning India and Pakistan, and so on. Therefore, one area in which more homework needs to be done, so as to make sound policies towards India, is to read more and more about the country, and read original documents.

Indias position on the aforementioned regions is not new. The question which needs to be addressed is: why does it feel confident to raise it now? It appears that one factor that has led to more aggressive posture on the part of New Delhi is the fact that several of the important roads which are part of the China Pakistan Economic Corridor pass through Gilgit-Baltistan. The US and India make no secret of their opposition to the China-led Belt and Road Initiative.

We know that the containment of China is a stated policy of the US under the Trump administration. It is an open secret that India is as much interested in containing China, if not more, as the US is. Therefore, Pakistans diplomatic troubles needs to be understood in the context of a complex interplay between international developments, and must be handled accordingly.

Policymakers in Pakistan need to do some soul searching and find out why the US, and even some Muslim Arab countries do not appear to be forthcoming in Pakistans support. Therefore, Pakistan needs to take the requisite measures to urgently repair its relationships with these countries and seek their diplomatic support in dealing with New Delhi.

The third element, closely connected with the second, is that of the state of the economy. One of the main reasons as to why the world is more inclined to work with India is its vibrant economy, with an impressive growth over the past three decades. For any country to be taken seriously, it needs to have a dynamic economy, one in which other countries have economic stakes. Therefore, Pakistan needs to make itself economically attractive. This is a medium to long-term objective. But work on it can begin immediately so as the world knows that it is serious in correcting course.

And, finally, putting ones own house in order is what needs to be focused on. Internal political and social instability weakens the polity and gives leeway to external powers to promote their agendas. Credible political and electoral processes, coupled with rule of law, strengthen state, society, and economy overall and enable it to safeguard its interests with confidence.

Therefore, in order to strengthen its hands externally, Pakistan needs to pay attention to its internal political and social stability. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had once famously said thus: Peace at home, peace in the world. That perfectly applies to every country.

And last, though not the least, enhancing hardcore defence capabilities is what deters adversaries from committing misadventures. Although it is hard to see Pakistan matching Indias defence capabilities in the conventional domain in the foreseeable future, Pakistans nuclear capabilities need to be in order and projected with caution and sobriety. Referring to the same too frequently on different forums, reduces, rather than enhances, the deterrence value of such weapons.

The writer is research analyst at theInstitute of Regional Studies,Islamabad. Views are personal.

Email: [emailprotected]

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What are we dealing with? - The News International

Background picture. Lady Rhondda, George Grantham Bain Collection, (Library of Congress). Pubic domain.

Sarah Tanburn

Rocking the Boat is a delightful read for the professional and amateur historian alike. Angela V John, honorary professor at Swansea University, has a sterling academic record and these essays are thoroughly referenced and researched. Here we have six engaging short biographies of Welsh women who campaigned for justice.

Published last year, the book has received well-deserved plaudits in many distinguished circles. From feminist historian Sheila Rowbotham to poet and essayist John Barnie, critics have found much to praise. Jones explores not only the lives of her subjects but the way biography itself works. She does so in lucid, involving language illustrating the challenges of their times.

In her introduction, Jones tells us these women demonstrate different perspectives and ambiguous relationships to Wales as well as divergent models of nationhood. The same applies to their relationships with womanhood itself. Despite those differences, there are a number of common themes straddling this century and a half of activist women.

Discussing the novelist Menna Gallie, Jones puts these connections into context. She reminds us that another way of understanding [Gallies desire for the good community is] as an integral part of the broader meaning of political, a meaning which had a particular resonance for women.

Jones recycles the 1970s womens liberation insight that the personal is political, to recall the profound impact of recognising that all our lives are political, happen in ways which are shaped by our society. If we believe that life can be better, we need to change not only the political icing but the social cake.

The women Jones discusses: Frances Hoggan, Margaret Wynne Nevinson, Edith Picton-Turnbull, the Rhs sisters Myfanwy and Olwyn, Lady Rhondda and Gaillie, all knew this. Lady Rhonddas campaign for peeresses in their own right to sit in the House of Lords was only won in 1963; that success had global significance, removing the final obstacle to the UKs signature of the UNs Convention on the Political Rights of Women. Others were formidable campaigners for the vote. Less constitutional yet just as politically constructed were the Rhss war work, Picton-Turnbulls struggles against underage sex trafficking (then called Mui Tsai), the sideways, socialist wit of Gaillie, and much education activity.

Looking outwards

Whether extending existing political structures or working far beyond them, internationalism is a key strand. It is remarkable to see these women campaigning to improve conditions in India and Malaya, reporting on the conflicts of Northern Ireland or connecting with Black activists for civil rights in the United States.

These concerns were sometimes rooted in religion and Empire. Despite her preaching, Picton-Turnbull developed a wide range of badly needed services in India. Much as Wilberforce, the lionised champion of abolition, was fundamentally a missionary, such women improved the lives of many even while supporting the overall machinery of colonialism.

With this caveat, the evidence of Rocking the Cradle gives the lie to claims that first or second wave feminists were unconcerned with matters beyond their own class and colour. From 1919-1920 Myfanwy Rhs worked with war victims in remote Serbia. Alongside her pioneering career as a doctor, Hoggan was close to W. E. B. Dubois and was closely involved in improving race relations at home and abroad. Nevinson organised London dairymaids and was a Poor Law Guardian for decades. There are many other examples throughout these histories.

Such experiences also emphasise the internationalism of many Welsh families at that time. Of course, most of those overseas adventures had been military and male, but such women carved out their own connections.

Education, education, education

Education is as important in these histories as the vote itself. For all these women, access to education was itself a challenge, alongside a commitment to improving education for other women. Hoggan had to gain her medical licence in Dublin, and practiced in Prague and Paris before returning to London to work alongside Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She also played a significant role in creating a pyramid of school opportunities for Welsh girls, not least to encourage better teaching.

Olwen Rhs was an early assessor for the Central Welsh Board of Education, which created secondary schools in Wales some years before a state system was introduced in England. She and her sister Myfanwy, despite prize-winning work, could not receive degrees as Cambridge University denied them to female graduates until 1948.

It is a shocking reminder to see how recently these changes came about and emphasises the importance of fighting to defend such victories. Today the UN recognises girls education as a fundamental development goal. We still have a long way to go but in this country we enjoy the basics of a universal system, available as much to girls as boys. Our inheritance owes much to women such as these.

Welshness

Not all these women were born in Wales and only three of them spoke the language. Welsh itself does not appear central to their self-conception, though Jones quotes Gallie, who published in English, saying I wrote and spoke with a Welsh accent.

The accent is pervasive whatever language and stage we examine, although their Welshness, their essential roles in our history and the role of Wales in their lives, is drawn elsewhere. Affinity (the Celtic passion for pedigree as Jones quotes Myfanwy Rhs), hiraeth, roots all count for more for these women. Their self-assertion and campaigns for social justice are both born of their conception of themselves as Welsh women, and influences the battles they pick.

I found this reassuring, as a Welsh learner. The importance and position of Wales comes from multiple sources and can be strong in different arenas, just as feminism centres women but not all feminists have the same priorities.

The women who rocked the boat were unapologetic, determined and unyielding in their commitment to fight for women, social justice and their beliefs. All of them did good in Wales and far beyond. When historians look back from the mid-21st century, what will they say about the Wales we are making today?

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Review: Rocking the Boat - Welsh Women who championed equality 1840 to 1990 - Nation.Cymru

Advertised as a series of 15 sessions, designed to help couples 'invest on their relationship and build a strong marriage the course is open to those who are married and those who are yet to tie the knot. The target age group is 18 to 65 years.

The course, among other issues, teaches the following: 'What is Marriage', 'Understanding Mantra', 'Why Marriage', 'Anger Management', 'Rules and Responsibilities', 'Mistakes by Husbands', 'Basic Needs of Wife', 'Dos and Donts by Husbands', 'How Can You be an Ideal Husband', 'Happiness Mantra, 'Foolish Expectations', 'How Can You be an Ideal Wife', How to Win Your Husband', and 'Home Management and Decisions Impact'.

Lessons will be delivered through video conferencing or as audio lessons, lasting 60 minutes each. These lessons are offered in Hindi and English. The Institute lists its aims as: 'Helping all to achieve healthy, fulfilling, loving long-term intimate relationships', 'Reducing the divorce rate India', 'Improving the emotional health of the families that children grow up in', and 'Unleash a wave of health in intimate relationships for future generations'.

It also has a focused list of those it would ideally like to help. These include singles who are having difficulty developing intimate relationships, couples currently in an intimate relationship which is characterised by ongoing conflict, distance and/or lack of satisfaction in relationship, and parents experiencing problems, difficulties and concerns raising children of any age.

Ilyas Shamsi, founder of the Institute told THE WEEK, "Our courses are based on the belief that prevention is better than cure. So we equip people with the skills to deal with marriage and family better. We do not believe in counselling or taking medication to control problems in and because of relationships"

Shamsi holds a bachelors degree in science, but believes that his two decades as a social activist have given him the requisite expertise to teach people how to navigate relationships better. He claims to have been closely associated with the demand for the abolition of Triple Talaq as well.

"These modules have been developed by me based on experience. We do not have the staff to conduct classroom based training, so it is over phones or video chats", he said.

The courses, he said, are open to people of all faiths and are based on a 'donation model'. "Even if you donate just one rupee to the course, you are eligible to take it", he said, and added that he is yet to come across a dissatisfied client.

However, Lucknow-based clinical psychologist Dr Krishna Dutt dismissed the advertised course as a money making gimmick.

The advertisement uses superfluous words. For instance, how do you win your husband as marriage is not about winning or losing. What are the mantras which are being offered? It seems to be completely unscientific. There is use of some psychological jargon for a project management based approach to marriage and family life.

Dutt likened the course to the numerous personality development courses which are currently the rage. Many of these courses are about teaching how to decorate homes or speak English, neither of which has any bearing on the development of an individuals personality. This course too seems to be the work of amateurs, he said.

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An institute in Hyderabad is offering Dulha Dulhan course to ensure a happy married life - THE WEEK

ALL PHOTOS RBC: the Advisory Council under the CEC abolished following criticism of voting on amendments to the ConstitutionAGN Moscow / Sergey Vedyashkin According to the CEC head Ella Pamfilova, the CEC concluded that the current form of the independent experts (NES) for us was totally unacceptable, calling it an absolute anachronismAGN Moscow / Sergey Vedyashkin of the Scientific expert Council under the Central election Commission (CEC) was abolished. The decision was taken unanimously at the meeting of CECAGN Moscow / Sergey Vedyashkin

the Scientific expert Council under the Central election Commission (CEC) was abolished. The decision was taken unanimously at a meeting of the CEC, the correspondent of RBC.

According to the CEC head Ella Pamfilova, in Ccentrizbirkom came to the conclusion that the current form of the independent experts (NES) for us was totally unacceptable, calling it an absolute anachronism. According to her, 10 Mar everyone experts can come to the CEC and to discuss the work of the expert platform. Pamfilova also said that the abolition of the expert group of four people under the Chairman of the CEC.

the Decision on liquidation of the R / V was made after one of the members of the Council, Boris Nadezhdin, has prepared a letter criticizing a nationwide vote on amendments to the Constitution and a proposal to hold a special meeting of the CEC on this topic. This became known in the presidential administration, after which Pamfilova held a unpleasant conversation with officials of the Kremlin. Nadezhdin himself said that the idea of CEC it eventually dissuaded colleagues on the Council.

the Day before Pamfilova held a meeting of the Council, which invited members to consider changing the format of the work. We intend to create a more effective interaction with the experts. But now we are not satisfied neither, nor you. Therefore, we would like to consult with you and find the right shape, she said.

RBC Previously reported that CEC pereformuliruem the Council because of claims of the Kremlin to his work. Claims are that the R / V there is no work plan, its members do not hold regular activities, the Council is not divided into working groups. One of the interlocutors RBC stressed that it is just about the reformatting, however, the composition of the Board changed much, and it will decrease.

Now in NES consists of several dozen people, including political scientists Yevgeny Minchenko, Valery Solovey and Dmitry Oreshkin, representatives of the largest polling agencies, editors-in-chief of Moskovsky Komsomolets and echo of Moscow Pavel Gusev and Alexei Venediktov, as well as the leader of Patriots of the great Fatherland Nikolai Starikov, and the President of the Institute of Middle East Yevgeny SATAray. Since the formation of the Council in 2018, he met three times. Several times the meeting had to be cancelled because most members of the NES did not.

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RBC: the Advisory Council under the CEC abolished following criticism of voting on amendments to the Constitution - The KXAN 36 News

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesnt mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than childs play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for reality, the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously or maybe not all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists except that Im not kidding I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. Theyll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists dont care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if Im joking or serious. Im joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called leisure; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, its done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or Communist, work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually and this is even more true in Communist than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People dont just work, they have jobs. One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs dont) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A job that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who by any rational-technical criteria should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as discipline. Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didnt have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is work. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if its forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the suspension of consequences. This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; thats why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizingas erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel these practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who arent free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each others control techniques. A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called insubordination, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination Ive described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes its not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are free is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are youll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, theyll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the work ethic would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Lets pretend for a moment that work doesnt turn people into stultified submissives. Lets pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And lets pretend that work isnt as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing free about so-called free time is that it doesnt cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel dont do that. Lathes and typewriters dont do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, Work is for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves. His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed to regain the lost power and health. Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to St. Monday thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanovs figures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life in North America, particularly but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest version the Thomas Huxley version of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist a geographer whod had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled The Original Affluent Society. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were working at all. Their labor, as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schillers definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full play to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity. (A modern version dubiously developmental is Abraham Maslows counterposition of deficiency and growth motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work its rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy Georges England In Transition and Peter Burkes Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bells essay, Work and its Discontents, the first text, I believe, to refer to the revolt against work in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bells end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved, only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smiths modern epigones. As Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEWs report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, wont help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that as antebellum slavery apologists insisted factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they dont even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldnt make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I dont suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isnt worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the tertiary sector, the service sector, is growing while the secondary sector (industry) stagnates and the primary sector (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. Thats why you cant go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasnt the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, weve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called schools, primarily to keep them out of Moms hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid shadow work, as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because theyre better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly theyll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps theyll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldnt care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I dont want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised havent saved a moments labor. Karl Marx wrote that it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class. The enthusiastic technophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, lets give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a job and an occupation. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There wont be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I dont want coerced students and I dont care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although theyd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when theyre just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third other things being equal some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people dont always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, anything once. Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in Little Hordes to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we dont have to take todays work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. Its a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything its just the opposite. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris and even a hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists as represented by Vaneigems Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debaters problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not as it is now a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each others pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!

See the article here:

The Abolition of Work | The Anarchist Library

The Abolition of Work is an essay written by Bob Black in 1985. It was part of Blacks first book, an anthology of essays entitled The Abolition of Work and Other Essays published by Loompanics Unlimited. It is an exposition of Blacks type 3 anarchism a blend of post-Situationist theory and individualist anarchism focusing on a critique of the work ethic.

Although The Abolition of Work has most often been reprinted by anarchist publishers and Black is well known as an anarchist, the essays argument is not explicitly anarchist. Black argues that the abolition of work is as important as the abolition of the state.

The essay, which is based on a 1981 speech at the Gorilla Grotto in San Francisco, is informal and without academic references, but Blacks mentions some sources such as the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, the unconventional Marxists Paul Lafargue and William Morris, anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin and Paul Goodman, and anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee.

Please come to discuss this great text!

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work

Friday, March 28th, 6:00 pm

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