In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.

James Madison, co-author, The Constitution and The Federalist Papers

In 1786, a Massachusetts tax protest revealed our central government lacked authority when it took a private state militia to put an end to Shays Rebellion. This demonstrated the need for reforming our central government. James Madison and George Washington reacted by scheduling a meeting with founders to update the Articles of Confederation. They mutually realized updating the Articles would not be easy and called the colonies to send delegates to Philadelphia Hall to deliberate the rewriting of the Articles. And this was the defining moment that would change the course of history.

James Madison, a lawyer and a philosopher, was our most theoretical founder and is the primary author of our Constitution. He spent years analyzing past democracies in order to gain the insight to write a document that would protect the independent states and create a central government. He studied the past democracies of Rome and Athens to draft a constitution that sheltered us from the fate that brought down past republics. He concluded: the recurring theme that destroyed every past democracy was that each succumbed to demagoguery from misfits, and crumbled from mob rule.

Madison learned that ambitious politicians persuaded Athenians to protest debt and rebel against law and order. He said renegade assemblymen encouraged mob violence and forced Solon to cancel debt and debase the currency. Shays Rebellion convinced him America would fall prey to mob rule if it had a government similar to Athens. He told other founders: When a band of debtors can force the abolition of debt, and equal division of property, a mob can destroy the government by populist rage. If Madisons view of history is discriminative, America is proving history does repeat itself.

Madisons ideal government was a representative republic rather than a pure democracy to protect us from mob rule. By keeping the mischief of factions from distorting public policy, he believed that a conclave of enlightened delegates, chosen by the people, would serve us best. Since these wise and patriotic men would be our voice, this would prevent misfits from disrupting the governing of our nation. The people would therefore carefully choose who would work in their best interests.

In a republic, a majority of the whole cannot disrupt or invade the rights of another.

James Madison

During the first Congress, the devices our founders created to prevent coalitions of majorities from disrupting government didnt work. Their greatest failure was not anticipating the development of political parties. By the early 1800s, the Electoral College became a rubber stamp for candidates that political parties wanted; not the people. Politicians undermined true Constitutional objectives with populist reforms. These included the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, direct primaries and party caucuses dictating law that favored their party but violated the rights of others.

Madison feared that Congress would be the most dangerous branch of the federal government.

Since Congress wrote the republics laws, it could easily over-power the other branches if citizens did not prudently manage those they elected. But by the 20th Century, not only did Madisons worst nightmare come true, the Supreme Court had become politically divided too. The court struck down federal laws only twice in its first six decades. Since then theyve nullified more than 250 laws. The Supreme Court is no longer the guardian of the Constitution. Its known as the court of last resort.

If we consider todays dysfunctional Congress, with a House filled with combative socialists and leftist progressives, is there any hope of returning to Madisons majority rule for the people rather than political passion? Dont hold your breath.

Avenging political self-sorting has produced voters and politicians who support the party line at all costs. The defining congressional achievements of Barack Obamas Obamacare and Donald Trumps tax cuts were passed with nary a vote from the minority parties.

People are tired of seeing politicians as all talk and no action.

Donald Trump

Perhaps it is an irony that James Madison once said: For the people to rule wisely, they must be free to think and speak without fear of reprisal. The Internet has allowed geographically dispersed citizens to isolate themselves into parallel factions and communicate with like-minded proletariats. This enables them to contravene political demagoguery and support mutinous politicians who share their dissenting beliefs. The once information highway that educated people on everything from A to Z has turned into a forum that spreads misinformation and fosters turbulent political partisanship.

The passions of split-second-decision hyper-partisanship and mob rule that Madison feared from direct democracy is exponentially greater today than ever in our history. Agitated groups of political bird dogs praise the actions of renegade members of Congress on a national social stage. And this encourages those hell-bent on destroying every rule of law and order in our Constitution to spout ludicrously nonsensical rhetoric.

The core structure within America and the entire Department of Homeland Security are huge threats to American civil liberties.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

A recent Emerson law study examined the impact of social media on democracy. They noted the most salient problem with these sites is the clickbait postings. Sensational captions are used to lure users to open up headlines that have nothing to do with the content of the article in question. Over 90% of these got yas are never read past the headlines. But the damage has been done as Facebook addicts share them along with their conspicuous comments. These rumors quickly turn into social media fact. This mischief of factions has made Madisons greatest nightmare a reality.

Federalism continues to be the most robust equalizer in Madisons democratic equation. It steadily promotes ideological diversity; both good and bad. Currently, the combination of low voter turnout and political extremism has favored very liberal candidates. Those who say the most un-American things and are least qualified for public service end up as candidates by default. The safe districts created by geographic political self-sorting allow these extremists to easily win the general election.

Democratic socialists have begun a political revolution to transform America.

Bernie Sanders

Madison wrote, We need a plan of education that embraces every citizen. The only way to return to Madisons ideal republic is to fix public education. Madison identified constitutional education as the most important element in maintaining true republicanism. He told us when past republics quit teaching citizens about the dangerous encroachments on public liberty by ambitious politicians, the people allowed politicians to run government instead of them. And thats what caused it to fail.

The future of America depends on public education. If we do not return to teaching our youth about the dangers of political radicalism and the merits of republicanism, the efforts of Madison and other founders that gave us the liberties we enjoy today will become lost chapters in history. Our republic is at a dangerous crossroads. If we dont make the right turn, James Madisons greatest nightmare will forever haunt us.

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

James Madison

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Op-Ed: James Madison's nightmare is becoming a reality - The Center Square

Married as teenagers, and jealously possessive till her death decades later

Gandhi and Kasturbaboth born in 1869were married in 1883. Back then, it was a five-day bullock-cart journey to cover the 300kms between Rajkot, where he lived, and Porbandar, the wedding venue. Gandhi and Kasturba were married for 61 years, and he often describes himself as a jealous and possessive husband. She died in 1944 at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune, where she was imprisoned with Gandhi from 1942 onwards for participating in the Quit India movement.

London calling, and the experience of life on a broader canvas

In 1888, Gandhi moved to London to study law, convincing his mother and brother that his religious values would not be compromised. This was a period of exposure not just to bad weather and worse food, but also to ideas and people who would influence his personality. He tried French, dancing and violin lessons, worked on his English and etiquette, attended meetings on Christianity, and started his experiments with truth, diet, religion and value-based living.

Life hack for the overseas student is simple: live the simple life

Money is always short for a student abroad, and it was no different for Gandhi. After his initial indulgences in efforts to be an English gentleman", he buckled down and started counting pennies, feeling the guilt of having to ask his brother for money. He moved to cheaper lodgings, began cooking for himself, and kept careful account of expenses, a habit that would continue all his life even when lakhs passed through his hands as part of the freedom movement.

Finding religion again, in a foreign land

Oddly reminiscent of NRIs today, Gandhi rediscovered Hinduism abroad, in London. His faith had largely been prescribed by customuntil he read Sir Edwin Arnolds translation of the Gita, The Song Celestial. He later met Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, who inspired him to read more on Hinduism. He also spent his time with Christian friends, understanding their books, and reading on Islam, exposure to all of which led to a syncretic way of thought.

An unenthusiastic vegetarian finds his vegetarianism bible

Early in his London years, Gandhi came across Henry Stephens Salts A Plea for Vegetarianism in one of the few vegetarian restaurants in the city (hed been subsisting on bread). From the date of reading this book, I may claim to have become a vegetarian by choice," wrote Gandhi in his autobiography. Later, his obsession with vegetarianism, purity and the rather harsh language with which he describes meat-eating earned him bitter critics.

The rebirth of Gandhi as the researcher of multiple diets

Until he went to London, Gandhi was a reluctant vegetarian, kept to the path only by the dictates of his father and vows extracted by his mother. As a teenager, hed eaten meat for a year on the sly, wishing he could one day do so freely and openly". In London, often hungry, he managed to find and sign up with the Vegetarian Society. This was the beginning of his experimenting with dietfruitarian, veganism, intermittent fasting, and more.

A lawyer at last and back in India, but without the skills to practise Indian law

Two days after he was called to the Bar in 1891, and three busy and educative years in London later, Gandhi sailed for India and tried to establish a practice. It was a long haul as he hadnt practised or apprenticed in Britain. He was well-versed in Roman law, which helped him later on in South Africa, but in court in India, he found himself at a loss. He was painfully shy and afraid, said Gandhi, and unfamiliar with Indian laws, having studied in England. He tried setting up a practice in Bombay, but eventually gave up and moved to Rajkot where his familys connections helped him secure work such as drafting memos and documents.

The doctor who fired up a leader and funded the freedom fighter

Dr. Pranjivandas Mehta was the reader" to whom Gandhi addressed his sermons in Hind Swaraj", based on a conversation the two had in London in 1909. Mehta, who shaped Gandhis ideas and backed him financially, was a doctor, lawyer and diamond merchant in Rangoon. They met when Gandhi was a student in London. More than a decade before the Dandi March in 1930, Mehta wrote to him about the need for action against repressive tax laws. Mehta died in 1932.

THE SOUTH AFRICA YEARS

A new continent, a chance for a new beginning, yet some old failings

When an opportunity to work for Durban-based businessman Abdulla Sheth came up, Gandhi saw it as a chance to see the world. The jobhelping Sheths lawyerwas for a year and the pay, first-class return fare and 105. Gandhi moved to Durban in May 1893. There, too, his fear of public speaking kept him from going to court, but he built up a successful practice drawing up documents and working for rich businessmen of the region.

Getting on board the train to fight racial discrimination

After he was famously thrown off a train for refusing to move to a third-class carriage in 1893 at Pietermaritzburg railway station, Gandhi began closely observing the entrenched racial discrimination. Over the next few years in South Africa, he met more Indians from all classes and communities, learnt what it meant to be a coolie", and began petitioning the government for rights and peacefully protesting against unfair taxes.

A farewell party 19 years too early turns into a struggle for Indians rights

Gandhi was set to return home when a newspaper article caught his eyea Bill before the House proposed to deprive Indians of their right to elect representatives to Natal Legislative Assembly. When he realized Indians knew little about this and didnt plan to oppose it, he decided to stay. And his farewell party turned into a working committee meeting for the new resistance. Gandhis year-long stay in South Africa would turn into a 20-year one.

Organizing the local community

He founded the Natal Indian Congress in 1894, worked for the rights of indentured labourers, protested against the system of passes for Indians and organized the local Indian community, both rich and poor, into a force for passive resistance. It was in these movements that Gandhi learnt his first lessons in community building and peaceful protest, besides opening his eyes to the deeply entrenched inequality, both in South Africa and India.

In a sign of the times, petition collects 10,000 signatures

To begin their protest against the proposed disenfranchisement of the Indian community, Gandhi sent telegrams to House representatives asking them to postpone the Bill. Overnight, he drafted a petition to be presented before the House, and volunteers wrote up multiple copies. The Indian community crisscrossed the city and collected 10,000 signatures. The Bill was disallowed then, but reintroduced and passed into law in 1896.

Crushed under the substantial weight of the 3 tax on Indians

In 1894, the Natal government proposed an annual 3 tax on Indian indentured labourers and their family members. The genesis of the tax, says Gandhi, was in the fear Europeans had of Indians, many of whom came as indentured labourers, served their tenure, bought land and made a success of themselves. It was a long battle against the levywith 10,000 jailed and many killed in police firingwhich they lost. It was only 20 years later that the tax was rolled back.

The importance of public support and the art of managing public institutions

Perhaps this holds true today as well. Based on his experiences in South Africa, Gandhi wrote: It has become my firm conviction that it is not good to run public institutions on permanent funds. A permanent fund carries in itself the seed of the moral fall of the institution... Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion The institution that fails to win public support has no right to exist as such (The satyagraha in South Africa extended) over six years, was carried on without permanent funds though lakhs of rupees were necessary for it."

An unread man, perhaps, but a very good reader of men

Abdulla Sheth, or Dada Abdulla, wrote Gandhi, was practically unlettered" but had an acute intellect and was conscious of it". The shipowner ran the biggest Indian firm in Africa at the time, having made his fortune selling gold from South Africa to India. Abdulla, who hated racism, quickly saw the young man hed hired was a sharp organizer and supported Gandhis many campaigns. It was in Abdullas house that the Natal Indian Congress was launched on 22 May 1894.

An Indian holiday, and Europeans see red about the green pamphlet

In 1896, Gandhi returned to India for six months, where he met a number of newspaper editors, Congressmen and influential citizens and explained the plight of Indians in South Africa. A pamphlet on The Grievances of British Indians in South Africa", better known as the Green Pamphlet", got picked up by news agencies around the world. This didnt go down so well back in Durban, and Europeans there began a campaign against Gandhis return.

The return, a hostile welcome, an exemplary act of forgiveness

When the ship with Gandhi and his family reached the port of Durban on 18-19 December 1896, it was not given permission to berthmuch like migrant boats that often remain at sea today as they try to enter European waters. Finally, on 13 January 1897, he was allowed to come ashore but was met by a mob that assaulted him. Friends in both civil society and the police helped him escape. He decided not to prosecute his assailants although the police were willing to support him.

Getting on the same track as the ordinary citizen

Gandhi spent a year in India from October 1901. He attended a Congress session in Calcutta, and spent a month with his mentor, Gopal Krishna Gokhale. He travelled home to Rajkot in a third-class compartment the start of a lifelong habit. He described the compartments as filthy, crowded and uncomfortable, and compared them unfavourably with third-class carriages abroad. It was train travel that made Gandhi aware of the travails of ordinary citizens.

An Indian with a defined opinion on equality and human rights

Gandhi continued to mobilize Indians to agitate against discriminatory policies and laws, and enrolled in the Transvaal Supreme Court as an attorney in 1903. He also launched Indian Opinion, a weekly paper, to spread the message of civil rights. The paper highlighted the poor conditions under which indentured labourers worked. Indian Opinion formed the basis for Gandhis later publications, Navjivan and Harijan, to build on themes of equality and freedom.

Divided loyalties during the Second Boer War

Gandhi raised an Ambulance Corps during the Second Boer War. Though he sympathized with the Dutch, he backed Britain. This was before Gandhis ideas about resistance to imperialism took shape. He believed that if Indians demanded rights as British citizens, it was also their duty to participate in the defence of the Empire. It was this reasoning that made him volunteer the services of Indians during the World Wars as well.

The influential Parsi backer who opened up purse and home, and then kept on giving

Rustomjee Jivanji Gorkoodhoo, or Parsee Rustomjee, was a prominent businessman and a supporter of Gandhi. His house in Durban was a centre of public activity and a resting place for strangers from India", writes Gandhis friend Albert West. In 1893, Rustomjee helped collect 10,000 signatures for a petition against the bill to deprive Indians of their vote. Income from trusts he set up continued to fund Indian schools in South Africa as well as famine relief and other causes Gandhi took up after his return to India in 1915.

JAN Smuts finds out that he has some very big shoes to fill

From the early 1900s till he returned to India for good, Gandhi faced off against Jan Smuts, the then colonial secretary. As with most of the people he went up against, Gandhi earned Smutss grudging respect. Gandhi presented him with a pair of sandals he had made, which Smuts would use, return on his 70th birthday, and remark I have worn these sandals for many a summer...even though I may feel that I am not worthy to stand in the shoes of so great a man."

Hind Swaraj and criticism of imperialism, technology, railways

In 1909, while travelling from London to South Africa, Gandhi wrote in one sitting Hind Swaraja manifesto for self rule that was especially critical of Western civilisation, modern education, international trade, and the role of the railways in enslaving populations. The British banned it as seditious. Many years later, he explained that his comments in Hind Swaraj related to imperialism and exploitation and the role the railways had played in it.

The true Tamil tiger in the form of Thambi Naidoo

Among the first satyagrahis between 1906 and 1914 in South Africa were C.K. Thambi Naidoo and his familyincluding his wife Veerammal, their seven children and his mother-in-law. He was a cartage contractor and the owner of a fodder store, but jail time left him in penury. The family eventually moved to Tolstoy Farm, where he was in charge of sanitation and Veerammal was the cook. He continued on the path of passive resistance until his death in 1933.

Clothing as a symbol and a tool for policy

In London and South Africa, Gandhi was fastidious about how he dressed. In Volksrust prison in 1908, he sewed the caps black prisoners worewhat we know today as the Gandhi capand took to wearing it. In 1912, he adopted the clothes Tamil indentured labourers, whose interests he represented, wore. Once back in India, he went back to wearing Gujarati clothes, but in 1931 adopted the loincloth and shawl. Clothes, for Gandhi, were also a tool of political strategy.

Reaching a settlement on the Indian question

It took till 1914, and many protests, much violence, deaths of satyagrahis and long jail terms before Gandhi and Smuts reached an agreement on the Indian Question". This led to the passing of the Indian Relief Bill that gave in to all the demands of the South African Indian community: the 3 annual tax was abolished, marriages considered legal in India became legal in South Africa as well, and the domicile certificate became sufficient right to enter India.

The great march in South Africa before the great march in India

A precursor to the Dandi March was Gandhis Great March in South Africa in 1913 to protest against the tax on indentured labourers and a Hindu-Muslim marriage ban. On 15 October 1913, Gandhi, Kasturba and 15 others left the Phoenix settlement for the Natal border with Transvaal, with 3,000 workers joining them en route. Police beat up, detained and killed many but they pressed on, making world headlines and forcing the government to look into their demands.

Architect, sponsor, follower, soulmate, dissenter: a man of many parts

A wealthy architect, Hermann Kallenbach owned the 1,000-acre Tolstoy Farm, where Gandhi launched his first satyagraha in 1910. Influenced by Gandhi, he became a vegetarian and participated in experiments in cooperative living, diet and politics. Gandhi described Kallenbach as his soulmate". He went on to become a Zionistpolitics that they disagreed onbut the respect remained. He visited Gandhi at Sevagram before moving to Israel, where he died in 1945.

Secretary, loyalist, treasurer, editor, teacher: a woman of many parts

Sonja Schlesin was Gandhis efficient, outspoken and committed secretary in South Africa. She drew much praise from Gandhi, his clients and fellow satyagrahis. Schlesin started working for Gandhi at the age of 17, and not only managed his law practice but also the satyagraha campaign and the Transvaal Indian Womens Association. She kept track of donations, edited Indian Opinion, visited satyagrahis in prison and was one of the trustees of Phoenix Settlement. After Gandhi left South Africa, she went back to university, and in 1920, became a high school Latin teachera position she held for 23 years. She died in 1956.

A return delayed by world war i, but back to India for good in 1915

Gandhi finally left South Africa after more than 20 years, and arrived in India in January 1915, having been delayed by the outbreak of war in Europe. Gandhi and Kasturba looked for a place to settle their Phoenix family". They had reached India before him and were staying at Santiniketan. Gopal Krishna Gokhale promised to cover all the expenses for a new ashram, and Gandhi felt great relief that hed not only be freed of the stress of fund raising but would also have a guide.

Fighting the good fight but also knowing when to give ground

Be it dealing with Smuts in South Africa, the Kheda and Champaran satyagrahas, leading the Dandi March or a fast to secure the rights of mill workers, Gandhi knew how to yield before people were spent by hardship and the patience of the authorities wore thin. In Kheda, he gave in when he saw farmers wavering and a landowner presented a compromise. The farmers had been awakened politically, he said, and a campaign was worthy" only if satyagrahis emerged stronger.

From phoenix to Sevagram via Kochrab and Sabarmati, the rise of the ashram

The idea of a community with a common goal was central to Gandhis ideals. After experiments at Tolstoy Farm and Phoenix Settlement in South Africa, he set up his first Indian ashram in Kochrab in May 1915, where he settled followers who had come with him to India. However, the plague broke out two years later and the ashram was shifted to Sabarmati, from where he led the Dandi March in 1930. In 1936, he moved to Wardha, set up Sevagram, and made it his headquarters.

A first-hand experience of poverty in the villages of Bihar

In Bihar, Gandhi and a team of volunteers that included Acharya J.B. Kripalani and Maulana Mazharul Haque, opened primary schools in six villages. It was also among his early experiences of coming face to face with dire poverty. When he got his wife to ask a woman why she did not wash her clothes daily, the woman replied, The sari I am wearing is the only one I have. Tell Mahatmaji to get me another one and I shall bathe and put on clean clothes everyday."

The Cantabrigian as a firm apostle of Indians

A close friend of both Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, C.F. Andrews was a priest from Cambridge who came to Delhi in 1904 to teach at St Stephens College. Over time, he came to identify closely with the problems of Indians around the world, became a critic of imperialism, and wrote prolifically on the problems faced by Indian indentured labourers. Gandhis nickname for him was Christs Faithful Apostle, taken from his initials. He died in 1940 in Kolkata.

Before discovery of India, a rediscovery of India

After returning to India in January 1915, Gandhi and Kasturba spent close to a year taking the train around India and Burma, third-class all the way, as he wanted to reacquaint himself with people. They travelled to Poona, Porbandar, Rajkot, Delhi, Wadhwan, Burdwan, Shantiniketan, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Mathura, Vrindavan, Madras, Rangoon and more, talking about their struggle in South Africa and the gains made by the Indian community there.

One of those rare occasions where great minds did not think alike

An industrialist with diverse interests, Ghanshyam Das Birla first met Gandhi in 1916, and was influenced by his sincerity and search for truth". The two had differences of opinionBirla being a pragmatic businessman and Gandhi an avowed dissenterbut were close and Birla played the role of an unofficial emissary between Gandhi and the British. Birla supported Gandhi for over three decades, and was the founding president of the Harijan Sevak Sangh.

POLITICAL LIFE IN INDIA

The start of active politics and his first arrest in his homeland

Gandhi became president of the All India Home Rule League in 1920. A year later, when the Prince of Wales visited India in 1921, people emptied out of the streets and boycotted him after Gandhis call. Gandhi addressed a meeting in a mill in Bombay and lit a massive bonfire of foreign-made cloth. But what was to be a peaceful meeting ended in riots with 59 dead. In 1922, Gandhi was arrested in India for the first time for sedition over three articles he wrote in Young India, and was released in 1924.

Indias very own version of the roaring twenties

Throughout the 1920s, Gandhi led the Congress to adopt Purna Swaraj" as its goal and the path of non-violence as the means. At the 1924 Belgaum Congress session, he was elected party president and served for a year. Under him, civil disobedience intensified, he led the boycott of the Simon Commission, demanded restitution for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, and an apology for the Khilafat movement. He also founded Gujarat Vidyapith at Ahmedabad.

The Mahatama Gandhi national rural employment scheme 1.0

The slow movement would certainly have appealed to Gandhi who wrote that when production and consumption become localized, the temptation to speed up production indefinitely and at any price disappears". Following this line of thought, he advocated a revival of village industries, such as ginning, spinning, oil extraction, husking and grinding, because there is no other way of giving employment to the millions of villagers".

A time to connect and reconnect with friends

After the Salt Satyagraha of 1930, Gandhi and over 100,000 others were jailed, and released a year later. For him, the Second Round Table Conference in London in 1931 was a time of serious business as well as a chance to meet friends hed left behind years ago. He also met the mill workers of Lancashire. On his return, he was arrested and began a fast unto death" in jail for the abolition of separate electorates for Harijans, a demand that was granted.

Duty as the bridge between the concept of ahimsa and war

Gandhi preached non-violence and peace yet mobilized Indians to support the British in the Boer War, World War I and World War II. He was in London when World War I broke out, and volunteered Indians for service. When friends mentioned ahimsa, he said participation in war is against ahimsa but fulfilling ones duty is paramount. A votary of ahimsa remains true to his faith if the spring of all his actions is compassion," hed write in explanation later.

A statement of retirement but no retirement from activism

In 1934, he announced his decision to retire from politics and resigned from the Congress to focus on the development of village industries, Harijan service and vocational and skill-based education, and moved to Sevagram. Despite his announcement, he continued to meet British and Indian leaders, and go on fasts to draw attention to rights abuses. He was in and out of prison throughout the 1930s, and toured Orissa on foot, talking of the need to abolish untouchability.

The curious case of the libran who fell under the sway of Leo

Leo Tolstoys writings and ideas about renunciation as a means of opposition and a force impressed Gandhi and were akin to his own. He had read Tolstoys The Kingdom of God is Within You in 1894 in London, which started him on the path of the search for truth and non-violence. In prison in South Africa in 1908, he reread the Russian writers works and began writing letters to Tolstoy the next year. Tolstoy confirmed that passive resistance was crucial not just for Indians but for the world. He described in it the struggle of the Transvaal Indians, and the two corresponded till Tolstoys death in 1910.

The millowner Gandhi took on, but their ties didnt unravel

Industrialist and textile merchant Ambalal Sarabhai supported Gandhi financially on his return from South Africa. He made a generous but quiet donation of 13,000 to save the Satyagraha Ashram at Kochrab, which was foundering as funds had dried up after Gandhi took in a family of so-called untouchables. During the Ahmedabad labour strike of 1918, led by Ambalals sister Anasuya, Gandhi went on his first political fast and got Sarabhai, the head of the millowners association, to give workers the benefits they had been demanding.

THE QUIT INDIA YEARS

Do or die, and years spent in prison after a call for the British to leave

Do or die" is now a pop slogan, but its Gandhis call for the final push for freedom, Quit India". After the failure of the Cripps Mission, which was to discuss devolution of powers but didnt give space to Indians demands, Gandhi called on people to demonstrate peacefully and persistently for withdrawal of the British, who were embroiled in World War II. Most Congress leaders were arrested, and jailed till the end of the war. Strikes continued and thousands were jailed.

The loss of a close friend and a life partner in the span of two years

In 1942, Gandhi, Kasturba and their followers were arrested for their role in the Quit India movement, and interned at the Aga Khan Palace in Pune. Gandhis friend and personal secretary for 25 years, Mahadev Desai died in prison less than a week after they were arrested. Desai and his wife Durgabehn joined Gandhi in 1917, and worked closely with him, translating his work and doing every task Gandhi asked him to. In 1944, Kasturba also had a heart attack and died in the palace.

The charkha at the centre of swadeshi, self-sufficiency and freedom

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The Gandhi you know, and the one you dont - Livemint

By Adam Vaughan

Ian Miles-Flashpoint Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo

This month, the NHS signed its first deals with Google. Five NHS trusts have agreed contracts with Google Health, after it swallowed up its UK sister firm DeepMind Health, nearly a year after signalling its intention to do so.

New Scientist first revealedthe extent of DeepMinds access to the sensitive data of more than a million National Health Service patients back in 2016, in a deal that the UKs data watchdog later found breached the law. The partnership has yielded interesting research,including using artificial intelligence to detect eye disease from scans with an accuracy that matches or exceeds human experts.

But is there a material difference now the deals are with the US tech giant rather than DeepMind, and should people who use the NHS be concerned at the change?

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Five trusts, including the Royal Free Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital, have transferred their contracts over to Google Health. Taunton and Somerset NHS trust is among them, but will not use the companys Streams app, which helps keep track of patients test results. Yeovil District Hospital NHS trust chose instead to end its contract, saying it didnt find the app necessary.

We dont know exactly what data sharing is occurring with Google Health, but the Royal Frees old deal with DeepMind included anonymised data such as treatment dates, medical history, diagnoses, ethnic origin and religion.

Transparency is paramount here. Is Google Health going to be as transparent as DeepMind was? asks Phil Booth of campaign group MedConfidential. DeepMind took the unusual step of publishing its contracts, but Google Health has not. It says the public can access the documents by asking individual NHS trusts.

Dominic King of Google Health says: There are very minimal changes to the contracts as they moved over. The updates have been about changes related to the GDPR [EU data law], which wasnt in force when some of the contracts were done a couple of years ago.

David Maguire of The Kings Fund think tank questions why the contracts arent being published. It creates an unnecessary uncertainty, which isnt great for assuaging peoples fears. Theres a legitimate thing about people feeling nervous about how their data is used.

One change is the data is no longer being stored by a third party contracted by Google. It is now on Googles cloud infrastructure, which NHS guidelines allow for, stored on servers in the UK, and backed up elsewhere in the EU.

Another shift is the abolition of the independent ethics panel that DeepMind established, but that Google Health says doesnt fit with its international scope. Booth says that although the panel was a damp squib, it provided a level of reassurance on oversight. King says the firm is heavily scrutinised by its executive board, its partners and regulators.

While patients can opt out of their data being shared with Google, under the NHSs national data opt-out, hospitals dont have to be compliant with the opt-out until next year.

Some observers also have concerns over potential cultural changes during the switchover to Google Health.

Previously the DeepMind Health leadership involved in the actual work in London were well known on the internet scene in the UK as being very ethically minded, says Tom Loosemore of consultancy Public Digital. They have now left, because of Google Health taking over.

However, King says: The same team that I led in DeepMind Health is the same team that will be working with our partners going forward.

Whether patients at the five NHS trusts should be worried is ultimately hard to say. The problem is: how can I know?says Loosemore. Would I personally trust Google? No I damn well wouldnt, Id want that transparency.

We have corrected the research attributed to the partnership between DeepMind and the NHS.

More on these topics:

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Google is taking over DeepMind's NHS contracts should we be worried? - New Scientist News

GENEVA, Sep 27 2019 (IPS) Six years after initiating my term as Special Rapporteur, it is sobering to say that the way to freedom from slavery remains long in spite of the legal abolition of slavery worldwide, said UN expert on contemporary forms of slavery, Urmila Bhoola.

Clearly, preventing and addressing slavery is not as simple as declaring it to be illegal but much more can and must be done to end slavery by 2030.

According to the International Labour Organization, over 40 million are enslaved around the world. While presenting her latest report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Bhoola pointed out that servitude will likely increase as the world faces rapid changes in the workplace, environmental degradation, migration and demographic shifts.

Slavery is economically clearly unprofitable; it leads to broader public health costs, productivity losses, negative environmental externalities and lost income,Urmila Bhoola, UN expert on contemporary forms of slavery

She further indicated that over 64 percent of those enslaved work in the private sector, a quarter of global servitude is of children, and a chocking 98 percent of enslaved women and girls have endured sexual violence.

People in the informal sector, which represents 90 percent of the workforce in developing countries, are at higher risk of being exploited or enslaved, Bhoola added.

By 2030, some 85 percent of the more than 25 million young people entering the labour force globally will be in developing and emerging countries. Their perspectives to access jobs offering decent work will determine their level of vulnerability to exploitation, including slavery, Bhoola said.

The figures she presented were a wake-up call for countries to prepare themselves to tackle slavery more effectively as 10,000 would need to be freed each day if we are to eradicate contemporary forms of slavery by 2030, she added quoting recent figures from the NGO Walk Free.

Bhoola said that some States had already elected to exclude from public contracts suppliers whose supply chain presented risks of slavery. Other Governments were using anti-money laundering systems to encourage companies to prevent proceeds of slavery from entering the financial system.

The expert regretted, however, that efforts to end slavery had been insufficient. She pointed out that convictions against perpetrators and their risk to face justice remain minimal.

Slavery is economically clearly unprofitable; it leads to broader public health costs, productivity losses, negative environmental externalities and lost income, Bhoola stressed, proposing a new approach against slavery that is systematic, scientific, strategic, sustainable, survivor-informed and smart.

Bhoola urged States to commit more resources to end slavery, and adopt and implement public policies that effectively address that scourge.

This story wasoriginally publishedby the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

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10,000 People a Day Must be Freed to End Slavery by 2030 - Pressenza, International Press Agency

From the archive of the World Socialist Web SiteEighty-two years since the victory of the Flint sit-down strike By Jerry White 1 October 2019

With 48,000 General Motors workers engaged in the longest nationwide auto strike in nearly a half century, it is valuable to study the heroic struggle by GM workers during the 1936-37 sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan. February 11, 2019 marked the 82nd anniversary of the victory of the strike, which was a major turning point in the long fight for the industrial organization of workers in the US.

Below we repost the two-part article, which originally appeared on the WSWS in February 2017, marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the strike.

***

February 11 marked the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Flint sit-down strike. The 44-day battle by autoworkers lasted from December 29, 1936, to February 11, 1937. It forced General Motors, then the largest industrial enterprise on the planet, to recognize the recently founded United Auto Workers union.

The revolt, which no bureaucracy could contain, was spearheaded by new peoplethe young mass production workers, the new young militants whom nobody had ever heard of, wrote American Trotskyist James P. Cannon about the strike. This revolt of the men from nowhere, Cannon said, was driven by the bitter and irreconcilable grievances of the workers: their protest against mistreatment, speedup, insecurity; the revolt of the pariahs against their pariah status.

The workers who were the real creators of the new mass industrial unions, Cannon added, had to split with the conservative labor fakers of the AFL before they could consolidate unions of their own.

Long known as the strike heard around the world, the Flint sit-down was led by socialists and left-wing militants who understood the irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the working classwhose collective labor produces societys wealthand the capitalist owners whose profits are based on the exploitation of labor. The most politically conscious also understood that both the Democrats and Republicans were capitalist parties that would employ violence to defend the property and profits of the ruling class.

Todays autoworkers and other workers have been largely cut off from this history due to the decades-long efforts by the UAW to eradicate any semblance of class consciousness, let alone socialist opposition to capitalism. UAW officials endlessly promote the sickly gospel of labor-management partnership, which denies that workers have any interests apart from and antagonistic to the capitalists. This goes hand-in-hand with the UAWs support for the pro-capitalist Democratic Party and its promotion of nationalism to divide US workers from their class brothers and sisters around the world.

Marking the anniversary, UAW President Dennis Williams said, There are many lessons to draw from the Flint Sit-Down Strike, but the biggest one is that worker solidarity is how we keep our seat at the bargaining table. Such comments would make the original sit-downers roll over in their graves.

The UAW has kept its seat at the table by colluding with the auto bosses to destroy everything an earlier generation of workers fought for. It has collaborated in the closure of hundreds of factories and the decimation of entire cities, including Flint, dividing workers against each other with multi-tier wage and benefit systems. With the help of the UAW, GM has created a largely disposable temporary workforce that has as little job security as the workers GM hired and fired at will before the sit-down strike.

The UAW does have a seat, however, on GMs board of directors, which voted last month to increase its multi-billion-dollar payout to rich investors while it wipes out the jobs of 3,300 GM workers, including 1,300 at the GM Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant next month. After decades of degeneration, the UAW has become a businesscomplete with ownership of the largest block of GM shares. A new generation must build genuine fighting organizations, rank-and-file factory committees, to wage a fight to defend their jobs, living standards and social rights.

The fledgling UAW in 1936, however, was a very different organization. It had a level of internal debate and rank-and-file democracy, including active socialist factions, that would be unrecognizable to any union member now. That year, delegates to its national convention voted to support the formation of a Labor Party, independent of the two capitalist parties.

What were the conditions GM workers faced in 1936-37?

Fifty thousand of GMs 150,000 hourly workers labored in Flinta company town where GM controlled the police, the judges, the politicians and the news media. Workers were essentially day laborers with no job security who were subjected to brutal speed-up. As one witness described, The men worked like fiends, their jaws set and eyes on fire. Nothing in the world exists for them except the line chassis bearing down on them relentlessly. In July 1936, when temperatures soared over 100 degrees, deaths in Michigans auto plants rose into the hundreds.

The average worker took home $900 a year, at a time when the government reported that $1,600 was needed as the minimum income for a family of four to live decently. Workers had no guarantee that they would be rehired after the annual change-over from the old to the new models, which would last for three to five months with no unemployment insurance. Instead, they would be forced to take loans from the company that they would be forced to pay back if rehired, resulting in a de facto 10 percent wage cut.

As an original sit-downer, Ken Malone, told the Bulletin, one of the forerunners of the World Socialist Web Site, in 1986, workers also faced terrible extortion under the foreman system. To keep your job you did anything the foreman asked. If you went hunting you brought him a piece of venison; if you went fishing, he got the largest fish; if you had a garden, he always got a basket of vegetables from it. And women, the foremen chased after your own wife, and if you wanted a job you let him.

Malone continued, We were worse than a chattel slave because I know from what I read about them they had at least a barn to sleep in. There was mass unemployment. Not only was there hunger, but people wore badly torn shoes, with no coats. They were wearing rags. There was no unemployment insurance. There was no such thing as pension funds or welfare, and no one heard anything about someone retiring.

GM was determined to oppose unionization, which its top executives Alfred Sloan and William Knudsen saw as a threat to private property and management rights. The company hired hundreds of management spies, spending $839,000 on detective work in 1934 alone. GM also used the services of the Black Legion, a split-off from the Ku Klux Klan, whose black-robbed thugs beat, tarred and feathered, and murdered suspected unionists and socialists. The company controlled the Flint Journal, which continuously railed against reds.

The business owners did everything they could to sow ethnic and racial divisions among the workforce, which included native-born whites and blacks from the southern US states, along with large numbers of immigrants who did not speak English from Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Italy and other countries. Of the 12,000 workers employed by Chevrolet, only 400 were black, and they were confined to the foundry at Buick and to janitorial work, with no hope of getting a raise or promotion. The socialists fought against racial prejudice and nativism, issuing leaflets in many languages to fight for the unity of the working class.

The 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed led to mass unemployment and poverty, with GM laying off half of its workforce between 1928 and 1932. An uptick in employment in 1934 led to growing worker militancy. There were general strikes in Toledo, Ohio; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and San Francisco, which were led by left-wing workers in the Communist and Socialist parties, and, in the case of the Minneapolis truckers strike, by Trotskyists. By the time of Flint, sit-down strikes had occurred in Akron, Ohio; Detroit and South Bend, Indiana, and in France and other European countries.

Among the key leaders in Flint were Wyndham Mortimer, a Cleveland autoworker and a supporter of the Communist Party, and Socialist Party members Sol Dollinger, Kermit Johnson and his 23-year-old wife, Genora (see BBC video). The latter three were influenced by the writings of Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution and opponent of Stalinism. In 1938 they joined the Socialist Workers Party, the Trotskyist movement in the US. Walter Reuther, who also called himself a socialist and would become the president of the UAW in 1946, played a marginal role.

In an October 6, 1936, Mortimer wrote an open letter to Flint workers, saying:

ALL THE EXPLOITERS OF LABOR HANG TOGETHER. THEY ARE CLASS CONSCIOUS. They are aware of the fact that the interests of their CLASS is involved, and all the patriotic blah blah is for the consumption of fools, and they are hoping we are fools. We as workers must too become aware of CLASS INTEREST. It is only in this way we may get the true picture and understand all the move[s] being made on our political and economic checker board. Under our present economic system, we as workers can only improve our condition by improving the condition of the entire working class.

The sit-down strike began less than three months later.

On December 29, 1936, the day after Cleveland GM workers began a sit-down strike, workers in Flint sat down in the plant after five union leaders at GMs Flint Fisher Body Plant Number Two were fired and management tried to move critical equipment to other plants. With the strike spreading to other GM plants in Detroit and elsewhere, 200 UAW delegates convened in Flint, elected a board of strategy headed by Kermit Johnson, and issued their demands. These included: union recognition and a signed contract; abolition of piecework; the 30-hour-week and six-hour day; time and a half for overtime; minimum pay rates; reinstatement of victimized workers; sole collective bargaining rights for the UAW; and union participation in regulating the rate of the assembly line.

Knudsen denounced the strikers as trespassers and said there would be no talks until the plants were vacated. GM obtained an injunction from County Judge Edward Black, but it was revealed that the judge owned 3,365 shares of GM stock worth $219,000. Since Michigan law prohibited a judge from presiding over a case in which he had an interest, the injunction became invalid.

On January 11, 1937, the Battle of the Running Bulls (aka Battle of Bulls Run) took place after GM shut off the heat and sent guards and police to block supporters from delivering food to the strikers inside. Other workers then charged, overwhelming the cops, i.e., bulls, and opening the way for the delivery of food. After several police counter-attacks were repulsed by workers inside the plant firing bolts, car hinges and other metal missiles, plus freezing water from a fire hose, the cops retreated.

Afterwards, however, Michigans supposedly pro-labor Democratic governor dispatched 1,300 National Guardsmen to Flint, with machineguns and 37-inch howitzers. He then restarted negotiations, reaching a deal with UAW President Homer Martin to pull the workers out of the plant for 15 days, while negotiations took place, during which time, GM would not try to operate the plant. The deal fell through, however, when a telegram was discovered from GM to the right-wing vigilante group Flint Alliance, which indicated that it would recognize both the Alliances company union and the UAW as representatives.

Workers refused to leave the plant and devised a plan to seize Plant Number Four, the engine assembly plant that supplied Chevrolet operations all over the country. Well aware that GM would have spies everywhere, they leaked information instead that they had planned to seize Plant Nine. After hundreds of guards descended on Plant Nine to accost the strikers there, workers in the real target seized the engine plant, bringing GMs empire to a halt.

As historian Robert Conot wrote, There was a widespread conviction that Americas 1917 was at hand For Sloan and Knudsen, the coup represented Bolshevism unbridled. The UAW had taken over by force the property of General Motors. If this were not a revolution, then it was the prelude to a revolution. Most liberals, while backing the workers, were almost as horrified as management by the sit-downs and, especially, by the seizure of the plant. AFL President Green thought it outrageous. President Roosevelt was shocked. Governor Murphy regarded it as a betrayal of his own studied impartiality. Furious he told union leaders that if they did not order the men out, he would order the National Guard in.

As the deadline approached, the sit-downers issued a defiant statement in the face of another violent attack. But they were defended by workers who poured into the city. All roads into Flint were jammed with cars loaded with unionists from Detroit, Lansing, Pontiac and Toledo, wrote Art Preis. More than a thousand veterans of the Toledo Auto Lite and Chevrolet strikers were on hand. Rubber workers from Akron and coal miners from the Pittsburgh area rallied to defend the Flint strikers.

We threatened to burn the plant if the National Guard came in, Malone said. At Plant No. 8, the National Guard tried to bulldoze the back door. We used slingshots, monkey wrenches and clubs, anything we could use. Our feelings toward the Democratic Party were the same as for the Republicans. They were both for big business.

On February 11, after a week of continual maneuvering and bargaining, a six-month agreement was signed. GM would not recognize or deal with any other organization in the 17 plants closed by the UAW; all unionists and strikers would be rehired; unionism could be discussed on company property during lunch and rest periods; and negotiations would proceed at once on wages, hours, production speed-up, and other issues.

The workers elected the only black sit-downer in the Flint strikes, Roscoe Van Zandt of Plant 4, to lead them out of the occupied plants in a victory parade.

The ruling class made a tactical retreat. Roosevelt had asked GM to bargain with the UAW to end the strike and the governor wired county sheriffs to take no action against strikers.

What we did was the seizure of private property, the cardinal sin of society, Malone said. Roosevelt saw the danger of losing capitalism and like any skilled driver, he threw out a bone. He saved capitalism. I dont believe he was pro-labor. You can go back as far as you want, the Democrats and Republicans have always been a tool of the ruling class.

Roosevelt had facilitated legal recognition of the unions when he signed the Wagner Act into law in 1935. He then worked with leaders of the new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions, like John L. Lewis, to convince workers that a revolution and socialism were not necessary because their grievances would be addressed through the vehicle of the trade unions, the Democratic Party and American capitalist democracy. For the government to openly side with the corporations and violently crush the new unions would discredit the entire political system and radicalize workers even further.

The workers marching in Flint were determined they would not be pushed back into the ranks of the economic dropouts, Conot wrote. To fire on them, and on a man of Lewiss stature, would be to push America to the brink of revolutiona revolution not of scattered bands of farmers, but of tens of thousands of workers under organized leadership in key industrial centers. As in Spain, or Italy, or Germany, the consequence might well be the division of the country between the extreme right and the far left.

The ruling class never forgave the Flint strikers. Thirty-five years later in a 1970 interview with historian Studs Terkel, Charles Steward Mottlong-time GM board member and three-time Flint mayorbitterly complained that Governor Murphy didnt do his job during the sit-down strikes. He didnt protect our property. They should have said [to the strikers], Stop that thing. Move on, or well shoot. And if they didnt, they should have been shot.

The victory at Flint was an enormous breakthrough for the American working class, which had been fighting for the elementary right to organize for nearly a century. An immense impulse to this achievement was the first workers revolution in Russia in 1917, which served as an inspiration for the most class-conscious workers. It was the specter of Americas 1917 that convinced the ruling class to adopt, at least temporarily, a policy of class compromise and social reform based on the immense wealth accumulated by American capitalism.

The rise of the CIO unions demonstrated the revolutionary tendencies in the American working class, its tenacity and self-sacrifice. But the great weakness of this heroic movement was its politics and political program.

If the class struggle is not to be crushed, replaced by demoralization, Trotsky wrote in a letter to his supporters in the Socialist Workers Party in 1938, then the movement must find a new channel, and this channel is political. On this basis, the SWP fought against the efforts of the CIO leaders and the Stalinists to subordinate the new unions to the Democratic Party by calling for the building of a Labor Party based on socialist policies to fight for the perspective of socialist internationalism among American workers.

Lewis, Walter Reuther and other CIO leaders fervently opposed a Labor Party and tied the working class to the capitalist Democratic Party and the national and international interests of the US corporations. This included the unions collaboration with American imperialisms intervention in World War II and drive for global domination.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Reuther carried out a purge of the socialists who played the leading role in building the UAW. In 1954 he would declare that there was no need for a labor party because unlike Europe, America did not have a rigid class structure and in the US, the unions could work within the two-party system to bring about a fundamental realignment of basic political forces. The next year, Reuther would engineer the merger of the AFL and CIO unions based on Cold War anti-communism and the integration of the unions into the apparatus of the national-security state.

The anti-socialist purges in the unions paved the way for their decades-long degeneration and transformation into direct instruments of the corporations and the state. The pro-capitalist unions had no answer when the ruling class, entering a long period of economic decline and facing the rise of powerful competitors, returned to its traditional policy of class warfare in the late 1970s and 1980s. In the face of the globalization of capitalist production the unions in the US and around the world, hostile to an international socialist policy, joined with their own capitalists to stamp out working-class resistance and force workers into a race to the bottom.

A new generation of autoworkers, along with every other section of workers, is being thrust into rebellion once more as the global corporations and the Trump administration move to roll back every achievement won by the working class in over a century of struggle. To prepare the coming battles of the working class it is necessary to assimilate the political lessons of history, including the great Flint sit-down strike 80 years ago.

The author also recommends:

What is the UAW? [11 September 2015]

Walter Reuther and the rise and fall of the UAW [24 September 2019]

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Eighty-two years since the victory of the Flint sit-down strike - World Socialist Web Site

Integration processes within the Eurasian Union have the most favorable effect on the growth of the economies of the participating countries and contribute to improving the living standards of our citizens, said Russian President Vladimir Putin Tuesday at a meeting of the Supreme Eurasian Economic Council in Yerevan.

According to him, the aggregate GDP of the EAEU states continues to grow, and industrial and agricultural production increases.

At the same time, our association faces new large-scale tasks. Special attention should be paid to systematic work to remove barriers to trade in goods and services, and in various sectors of the market. The introduction of all-Union regulation in the financial sector is among the priorities. Based on the results of the current meeting, it is intended to approve the Concept for the formation of the EEU common financial market, he said.

This document will become a road map for the development and approval of universal rules for the provision of banking and insurance services, operations with securities. Implementation of the measures stipulated by the road map will simplify the access of citizens of our countries to financial instruments and make this market segment unified and transparent, the Russian president noted.

According to him, the process of improving the Union legislation in the energy sector is at a good pace. In the near future, agreements will come into force on the formation of a single EAEU electricity market. A common electric power space should be formed simultaneously with the creation of the allied markets for gas, oil and oil products in 2025. First of all, it is necessary to complete the process of unification of the laws of the Member States in the field of gas supply and transportation.

We attach great importance to the speedy implementation of the agreement on the traceability of goods imported into the customs territory of the EEU. The Eurasian Economic Commission, according to our decision today, will receive corresponding additional powers.

It is important to ensure transparency in the circulation of products on the Union market, therefore, it is necessary to establish a full exchange of legally relevant electronic accompanying goods documents, as well as more vigorously introduce electronic labeling of goods. By the way, a pilot project on labeling a number of products confirmed the effectiveness of this measure in the fight against counterfeit products, and increased tax revenues, he noted.

Putin said that an interim agreement will come into force late October for the formation of a free trade zone between the EEU and Iran.

Its implementation will lead to a significant reduction in import tariffs, the abolition of other restrictions that impede the movement of goods flows. All this will undoubtedly contribute to the growth of mutual trade and investment, he said. In general, the geography of contacts of our Union is constantly expanding. The association is conducting substantive talks on cooperation with 13 countries and over 20 international structures and organizations such as Serbia, Israel, and Egypt. Soon, similar negotiations will begin on a free trade zone with India with its colossal, huge market. A fast-growing economy, today it is the number one in the world in terms of pace.

Putin noted that the EEU has long and fruitfully expanded its interaction with the dynamic economies of the Asia-Pacific region. It is necessary to further establish close ties between the Eurasian Union and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and ASEAN, and work in favor of a large Eurasian partnership.

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Putin: Agreements will come into force on formation of single Eurasian Union electricity market - Information-Analytic Agency NEWS.am

KUALA LUMPUR: The Malaysian Youth Council (MBM) expressed hope that the government, through the 2020 Budget which will be tabled on Oct 11, will provide incentives to youth who are involved in agriculture, similar to the ones previously practiced by the federal land development authority (Felda).

MBM secretary-general Hasnul Haniff Harun said among the proposals was a more organised and efficient housing system similar to the one implemented by FELDA.

Government reserve land should also be gazetted for agricultural purposes for the youth to work on, as this will facilitate the process of land exploration by the youth without having to go through the complicated bureaucratic process, he told Bernama recently.

Apart from that, MBM also proposed for the abolition of road tax and the reduction of car prices through the removal of the import duty on cars.

He said from the youths perspective, the people were burdened with rising cost of transportation, coupled with the toll charges which contributed to the overall cost of living.

MBM understands that the elimination of toll charges is impossible to do, but the cost of using vehicles by the youth should also be reduced at least through the abolition of road tax, he said.

In terms of prices of cars which are now a necessity, it could be reduced by removing import duty on cars which could lead to lower price of local car.

Despite the fact that the move would be detrimental to the local car industry, the benefit would be felt by the people, especially the youth, with the reduction of car monthly instalment to as low as RM250, he said, adding that car prices in Malaysia were among the most expensive in the Southeast Asia region.

At the same time, Hasnul said the government should also reduce the bureaucratic hurdles, particularly, in the process of building affordable housing projects by appointing the Public Works Department (PWD) as the main contractor to help reduce house prices that currently seen as high.

The cost of managing the housing project can be handled more transparently through the PWD and the cost of the contractors can also be reduced, he said.

At the same time MBM, as the parent body coordinating 41 youth organisations in the country, also hoped that the government not to cut the funding for youth organisations programmes and operations as that would only impede the development of the group.

Understanding that the country currently facing major debt crisis, Hasnul said the reduction in allocation would lead to the reduction in social programmes and activities for the youth who were the backbone of the countrys future.

Through the 2020 Budget, MBM also hoped that the development allocation for youth organisations in rural areas would be increased especially in the east coast states as well as in Sabah and Sarawak as they were lagging behind in terms of youth programme development.

In an effort to identify the potentials and needs of youth, a systematic and comprehensive profile should be developed to keep up-to-date with the latest information on youth and problems they faced, apart from a citizen card could also be created to keep records of government aid such as zakat (tithe), MySalam and i-Suri, he said. Bernama

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Govt urged to provide incentives to youth in agriculture | Borneo Post Online - The Borneo Post

These are heady days for political junkies, what with Supreme Court rulings, the hasty return of MPs to Westminster and, through it all, the spectacle of party conference season.

The Tory party conference is up in the air since MPs decided yesterday not to allow for a mini-recess that would let the Tories gather in Manchester, but the Labour conference in Brighton last week offered us some real treats.

Jeremy Corbyn is obsessed with party democracy, in the way that old socialists so often are. Nothing thrills them quite like a contested floor-vote or a packed local meeting of activists quibbling over the branch constitution. In this spirit he vowed to let party members determine party policy.

But who are these members?

Youll have seen them on the news, chanting Corbyns name and reaching to touch him as he walks past.

In a bid to understand them, YouGov surveyed the Labour membership in the run up to their conference and heres what we know: 62 per cent of them would do away with the monarchy, 43 per cent are ashamed of Britains past, 70 per cent support nuclear disarmament, a serious chunk of them remain sympathetic to the IRA and almost half agree that nations should remove all borders. You get the picture.

Having given these people the power to shape Labours next manifesto (and so potentially the country) its little surprise that vote after vote in Brighton committed the party to such nuanced and considered policies as the abolition of private education, the closure of all immigration detention centres, the expansion of free movement and the ruinously (almost hilariously) expensive policy of achieving zero carbon emissions by 2030.

Labours conference did not reveal a government in waiting. Instead it revealed a self-indulgent student union masquerading as a government in waiting. It was farcical, funny and frightening.

Jacques Chirac leaves a colourful and varied legacy. Taking France into the euro, opposing the Iraq war and, of course, corruption scandals.

I have a lawyer friend who, through the course of his work on a particular case, identified a luxurious north African retreat where the former French President would stay and (allegedly) conduct some lucrative extra-curricular activities.

My friend was so taken with this hideaway that he booked it for his honeymoon.

Congratulations to my friend Mervyn Metcalf, founder of boutique investment bank Dean Street Advisers, who on Thursday celebrated 25 years of working in the City.

To mark the occasion he took his team for a long lunch at the Ned but had started the day with a client briefing on the potential impact of a future Corbyn government.

So it was a case of strong drinks at breakfast followed by champagne to revive the spirits over lunch. Sounds like not much has changed in Mervyns 25 years.

Nobody comes out well from the debate over language currently gripping Westminster.

The PM was crass in response to concerns raised about threats sent to female MPs and he should be held to a higher standard.

However, its a bit late in the day for Labour to realise that words have consequences. John McDonnell once praised the bombs and the bullets of the IRA and infamously joked about lynching the b**ch Esther McVey.

He vows to jail Tories once hes in office, has openly fantasised about killing Margaret Thatcher and has accused the Tories of social murder.

Anyone whos ever braved the hard left protesters outside a Tory party conference will know that some people feed off such comments.

Labours Jess Phillips, so vocal on this issue, once declared that she would knife Corbyn in the front.

Each side is capable of whipping up their supporters and they do so deliberately. There is very little room on the moral high ground for all the MPs currently seeking to occupy it.

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The Labour party is unfit for anything but protest - City A.M.

The Duchess of Sussex has deployed some clever fashion diplomacy on her and Prince Harrys royal tour of Southern Africa. The 10-day tour is a plum chance for the couple to reinforce their desired image as hard-working, hands-on game changers (to borrow the concept of Meghans recent British Vogue issue), and theyre making the most of it.

Meghans two-year couture streak peaked last weekend with a $13,200 bejewelled tulle Valentino gown for designer Misha Nonoos wedding (though she paired it with $6 flea-market earrings). But the mandate for this tour wardrobe is clearly affordable, casual and approachable, with nods to ethical production and sustainability, including multiple reworn looks. All the better to keep the focus on the messaging, drawing eyeballs to the pressing social issues of Southern Africa and the organizations working to create positive change.

Still, theres plenty to say about the duchesss outfits. Right out of the gate, she chose a black-and-white printed wrap dress by Mayamiko to discuss the urgent topic of femicide with women of The Justice Desk in Nyanga township, known as South Africas murder capital. The dress checked every possible box: It was made by a collective of artisans in Malawi who hand-dye and manufacture small-batch collections in solar-powered facilities, and it costs about $115. She accessorized with a favourite pair of $130 cloth wedge espadrilles from Spanish brand Castaner.

On day three, Meghan colour co-ordinated with her boys to meet Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Prince Harry wore a slim blue suit and skinny tie;baby Archie was in blue-striped overalls from H&M; and Meghans floaty $380 Club Monaco dress winked toward batik with its abstract navy and white print. The silk dress is one of those brilliant solution items we all need in our travel wardrobes: It would work day through night, it reads as elegant and relaxed at the same time, it looks wrinkle-resistant and probably packs down to nothing. (Not that royals have the same suitcase size and weight restrictions as the rest of us, even when they fly commercial.)

Then there are the repeat pieces. There was the sustainably produced Everlane jumpsuit Meghan wore on a solo visit to Woodstock Exchange, a members club for creative types such as photographers, filmmakers and writers. She was there to meet with female entrepreneurs, as her stated aim this trip is to highlight womens issues. Markle previously wore the jumpsuit in a social media video for the launch of her British Vogue issue; this time she glammed it up with gold statement earrings and Manolo Blahnik pumps. Is there anyone who hasnt looked up the sleek $160 piece and thought, I need that?

Two more re-wears were first seen on the couples first royal tour to Oceania in 2018, when Markle was pregnanthows that for getting more wear out of your maternity wardrobe? Theres the sky-blue Veronica Beard wrap dress, first worn in Tonga, and the striped Martin Grant maxi-dress that we saw on the beach in Sydney. That tour featured much more designer fashion, complete with finery for state dinners, as did the glitzy Givenchy, Dior and Carolina-Herrera-filled Morocco tour. This time out, the pair are reserving most evenings for bed and bath time with Archie.

Meghan, who described herself as a fellow woman of colour in her speech on day one, and who views the world through an American lens, seems especially keen to avoid any hint of colonialism. Clothing can help her do that.

Theyre also working hard to blend in. The two items that really stand out on this trip are wardrobe staples notable because they are rarely seen on a royal. The first was the Madewell jean jacket Meghan wore to meet with Waves for Change, a group of surfers addressing violence among youth with sport and mindfulness practices. Shes had this classic piece since back when she was an actress off-duty in Toronto, not yet dating a prince. For this outing, she paired it with black Mother skinny jeans, an Oxford shirt tucked just-so at the waist, and huarache flats designed by Canada-raised cool girl Aurora James for her African-artisan-made accessories brand Brother Vellies (because sand, and there was dancing to be done).

The other piece that will define this tour was the soft beige headscarf she wore to visit the Auwal Mosque in Bo-Kaap, a predominantly Muslim Cape Town neighbourhood known for its joyfully coloured houses, which have been painted in bright colours since the abolition of slavery in the mid-1850s, prior to which the homes were mandated white. Meghans hair was down, and the scarf tucked just so, framing her face. More importantly, it was a gesture of respect as the couple met with religious leaders.

One accessory we havent seen on this tour is Meghans engagement ring, which features a centre diamond from her late mother-in-law Dianas jewellery collection and two flanking diamonds from Botswana, a country Harry will visit this weekend. The $225,000 ring has been a no-show because, so the rumour in the tabloids goes, Meghan wanted to keep things low-keyshe actually subbed it out for a delicate Jennifer Meyer gold and turquoise stacking ring. And yes, waving around a sparkler of that wattage in poverty-stricken countries would feel show-offy. But then, the ring is as famous as she is, and leaving it at home might be considered a bit insulting.

Meghan and Harry have been using their voices plenty on this this trip, but still, royals chiefly communicate through photographs and actions rather than words, and there is a lot you can say with your clothes. And the stakes are high here. At a time when trade ties and cultural exchange among nations are being thwarted by nationalist populismnot to mention the always-present threat of small-r republican, as in anti-royal, sentimentthe Sussexes have been dispatched by the Queen to shore up ties and pave a new, modern relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth nations, an organization based on colonial ties.

Meghan, who described herself as a fellow woman of colour in her speech on Day one, and who views the world through an American lens, seems especially keen to avoid any hint of colonialism. Clothing can help her do that. After all, one of the strongest ways in which classes and cultures have historically been delineated is by costume. Think of the pith helmet and white safari jacket Melania Trump wore on her own ambassadorial visit to Africa in 2018. That ham-handed choice hailed back to the days of big game hunters, white masters and Black servants, or slaves.

In the end, what is most appealing about Meghans style for this tour, is how normal she looks. She looks like herself, the way she used to before she joined the royal family, hanging out in her neighbourhood with a yoga bag slung over her shoulder and her hair up in a ponytail.

Markle has a hairstylist with her on this tripat the couples own expensewho seems mostly to be doing hard-working buns and relaxed waves. Her makeup has been simple and neutral, but the main beauty message is a healthy glow and a big smile. This is clearly what she likes to do best: talk with real people in a setting where there are no curtsies and first names only.

Leaving the tiara collection at home this time seems to be hitting exactly the mark that was intended. Shes just wearing clothes, regular clothes, and the classic shapes and comfort-forward pieces are giving us mere mortals some great outfit inspo for our own next vacation.

All of Meghan Markle's Africa Tour Looks

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What Meghan Markle Is Saying with Fashion on the Africa Royal Tour - The Kit

The Abolition of Work

Bob Black

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd 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 doesn't 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 child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't 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 Marx's wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists -- except that I'm not kidding -- I favor full *un*employment. 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. They'll 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 don't 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 I'm joking or serious. I'm joking *and* serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesn't have to be frivolous, although frivolity isn't triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. I'd like life to be a game -- but a game with high stakes. I want to play *for* *keeps*.

The alternative to work isn't just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, it's 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, it's 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 of "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 some*thing*) 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 don't 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 don't) 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 didn't 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 it's 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; that's 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 Huizinga's 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 aren't 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 aren't 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 other's control techniques. A worker is a par-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 I've 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 it's 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 you'll 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, they'll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. They're used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we can't 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.

Let's pretend for a moment that work doesn't turn people into stultified submissives. Let's pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And let's pretend that work isn't 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 out watches. The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't 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 don't do that. Lathes and typewriters don't 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 150-200 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 *ancien* *regime* wrested substantial time back from their landlord's work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants' calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanov's 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 -- who'd 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 Schiller's 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 Maslow's 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 -- it's 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 George's *England* In* *Transition* and Peter Burke's *Popular* *Culture* *in* *Early* *Modern* *Europe*. Also pertinent is Daniel Bell's 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 Bell's 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 Smith's 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 1970's and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEW's 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 don't 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 don't 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 50's. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you aren't 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, won't 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 don't even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What I've 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 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 shouldn't 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 don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't 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. That's why you can't 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 hasn't 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, we've 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 Mom's 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 they're 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 haven't 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 they'll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps they'll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldn't care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I don't what 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 haven't saved a moment's 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, let's 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 won't 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 don't want coerced students and I don't 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 they'd 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 they're 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 don't 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 don't have to take today's 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. It's 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 there's no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything it's just the opposite. We shouldn't 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 Vaneigem's *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 worker's 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 debater's 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 other's 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*!

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The Abolition of Work--Bob Black - Primitivism

This 1795 farm house, with a barn added in 1858, was a site where history was both made and then artistically documented. In 1833, Joseph and George Corson were two of the founders of the Plymouth Meeting Anti-Slavery Society. Until the Civil War George's farm, with the support of this quiet old Quaker community, served as a major station, on the Underground Railroad that conveyed African Americans escaping slavery further north. In 1858, Corson built the barn, known as "Abolition Hall," where local anti-slavery advocates met to plan strategy and rally support.

George Corson's daughter, Helen, was a talented artist who painted cats, birds, dogs, and other animals for their owners in the Philadelphia area. In 1881, she married well-known artist Thomas Hovenden. Born in Dunmanway, County Cork, Ireland, in 1840, Hovenden was only six when his parents died during the infamous potato famine.

Death of Elaine, by Thomas Hovenden, 1882.

In 1863, Hovenden moved to New York City, and then to Baltimore, where the prominent art collector William Walters sponsored him and then sent him to France. From 1874 to 1880, he lived in the artists' colony at Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he painted scenes from peasant life and two well-received images of farmers who resisted the tyranny of the French Revolution "The Vendean Volunteer" (1878) and "In Hoc Signo Vinces" [In This Sign Conquer] (1880) where the cross appears to the revolting peasants. The latter work made him famous and when he returned that year to the United States collectors clamored for him to execute historical works. There, too, he met Helen Corson.

In 1881 Hovenden moved into his father-in-law's house in Plymouth Meeting, where he converted Abolition Hall into his studio. Claiming to hear "the voice of [abolitionists] Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and many other famous people within its solid walls time and again," [Philadelphia Times, Feb. 23, 1891], he turned to painting scenes from American history. A modest man who lived simply and embraced his in-laws' Quaker faith, Hovenden became one of the nation's most famous artists. "The Last Moments of John Brown" (1884) which he spent two years researching for accuracy"In The Hands of the Enemy" (1889) -showing a Union family carefully tending the Confederate wounded at Gettysburg - and

Breaking Home Ties, by Thomas Hovendon.

In 1886, Hovenden succeeded Thomas Eakins as the principal painting instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts after the latter was forced to resign for inappropriate use of nude models. The Academy had no worries with Hovenden, for he opposed the impressionist and modern art that did not have the morally edifying purpose he expected in art. Hovenden died suddenly in 1895, when he was run over by a train at Germantown while trying to rescue a small girl who had wandered onto the tracks. After his death, art critics and collectors for decades dismissed his work as old-fashioned. Only in 1995, the centenary of his death, did an exhibition and catalogue appear of the artist who, with fellow Pennsylvanian Peter Frederick Rothermel, was regarded the United States' best-known painter of heroic scenes in the Civil War era.

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Abolition Hall - Behind the Marker - ExplorePAHistory.com

Granville Sharp was a civil servant and political reformer. He was one of the 12 men who, in 1787, formed the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and was the first chairman of the Society. His interest in the issue, however, went back much further.

At a time when most abolitionists argued that the Slave Trade was wrong because of the terrible conditions in whichenslaved peoplewere kept, he (along with Anthony Benezet) went further, arguing that the very nature of slavery itself was evil.

He also used his skills to fight a series of legal battles to preventenslaved peoplebeing taken out of England by force. Many black people resisted enlavement and many escaped from their owners'. However, whether they had escaped, been abandonedor had always been free, they were in constant danger of capture or recapture by slave-hunters'.

In 1767,Granville Sharp and his brother William (a surgeon) helped a badly injured man, Jonathan Strong, whohad been brought to London from Barbados by a plantation owner named David Lisle. Strong had been thrown onto the streets after being beaten about the head with a pistol. He was so badly injured that he was nearly blind and he could hardly walk. They took him to St. Bartholomew's Hospital. After he regained his health, they helped him to find work as a messenger.

Quite by chance, the man that had assaulted him, saw him and, without capturing him, sold him for 30 to a Jamaican planter. Two slave hunters kidnapped and imprisoned Strong while they waited for a ship to take him to the Caribbean. Strong enlisted Granville Sharp's help. Sharp demanded that Strong be taken before the Lord Mayor, who declared him a free man.

In 1769, Sharp published his findings in a pamphlet: 'A representation of the injustice and dangerous tendency of tolerating slavery in England'. Sharp devoted himself to fighting the notion that an enslaved personremained, in law, the property of his master, even on English soil. He did this both by his writings and in the courts of law.

He became the leading defender ofAfrican people in London and saved manyAfrican people from being sent back to slavery in the West Indies, often at his own expense. In 1771 a slave, James Somerset, who had been brought from Jamaica to Britain, ran away. He was recaptured and put on a ship bound for Jamaica. Sharp intervened and put the case before Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice of England. Sharp hoped this case would finally settle whether it was lawful to hold people as slaves in England and Wales. After many months of legal argument, Mansfield finally decided that a master had no right to force an enslaved person to return to a foreign country. Somerset was freed.

Although this judgment did not actually state that slavery was illegal in England, it laid down the important notion that an enslaved personcould not be forcibly removed fromEngland. London's African community celebrated this important victory; they had followed the case closely and made sure that there was always an Africandelegation in court.

Sharp was also involved in other legal cases, such as the slave ship Zong(seeThe Middle Passage).Cases such as this help to raise public awareness of the horrors of slavery and started to turn public opinion against the slave trade. In May 1787, he joined with Thomas Clarkson and nine Quakers, to form the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade and continued to work for abolition until the act was passed in 1807. However, Granville Sharp was not to see the final abolition of slavery in the British Colonies, as he died on 6th July, 1813.

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Granville Sharp (1735-1813): The Civil Servant: The ...

The Indian indenture system was a system of Indentured servitude, by which 2 million Indians[1] were transported to labour in European colonies, as a substitute for slave labour, following the abolition of the trade in the early 19th century. The system expanded after the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 in the British Empire in 1833[2], and in the French Colonies in 1848, and continued until the 1920s. This resulted in the development of a large Indian diaspora in the Caribbean[3], Natal, Runion, Mauritius, Sri Lanka,[4] Malaysia[5], Myanmar, to Fiji, as well as the growth of Indo-Caribbean and Indo-African populations.

On 18 January 1826, the Government of the French Indian Ocean island of Runion laid down terms for the introduction of Indian labourers to the colony. Each man was required to appear before a magistrate and declare that he was going voluntarily. This agreement is known as girmit[6] and it outlined a period of five years labour in the colonies with pay of 8 (11US) per month and rations, provided labourers had been transported from Pondicherry and Karaikal.

The first attempt at importing Indian labour into Mauritius, in 1829, ended in failure, but by 1838, 25,000 Indian labourers had been shipped to Mauritius.

The Indian indenture system was put in place initially at the behest of sugar planters in colonial territories, who hoped the system would provide reliable cheap labour similar to the conditions under slavery[7]. The new system was expected to demonstrate the superiority of "free" over slave labour in the production of tropical products for imperial markets.[8]

The East India Company's Regulations of 1837 laid down specific conditions for the dispatch of Indian labour from Calcutta. The would-be emigrant and his emigration agent were required to appear before an officer designated by the Government of British India, with a written statement of the terms of the contract[9]. The length of service was to be five years, renewable for further five-year terms. The emigrant was to be returned at the end of his service to the port of departure. Each emigrant vessel was required to conform to certain standards of space, diet etc. and to carry a medical officer. In 1837 this scheme was extended to Madras.

As soon as the new system of emigration of labour became known, a campaign similar to the anti-slavery campaign sprang up in Britain and India. On 1 August 1838, a committee was appointed to inquire into the export of Indian labour. It heard reports of abuses of the new system. On 29 May 1839, overseas manual labour was prohibited and any person effecting such emigration was liable to a 200 Rupee fine or three months in jail. After prohibition, a few Indian labourers continued to be sent Mauritius via Pondicherry (a French enclave in South India).[citation needed]

The planters in Mauritius and the Caribbean worked hard to overturn the ban, while the anti-slavery committee worked just as hard to uphold the ban. The Government of the East India Company finally capitulated under intense pressure from planters and their supporters: On 2 December 1842, the Indian Government permitted emigration from Calcutta, Bombay and Madras to Mauritius. Emigration Agents were appointed at each departure point. There were penalties for abuse of the system. Return passage had to be provided at any time after five years when claimed. After the lifting of the ban, the first ship left Calcutta for Mauritius on 23 January 1843. The Protector of the Immigrants in Mauritius reported that a ship arrived every few days with a human consignment and the large number of immigrants was causing a backlog in processing and he asked for help. During 1843, 30,218 male and 4,307 female indentured immigrants entered Mauritius. The first ship from Madras arrived in Mauritius on 21 April 1843.

The existing regulations failed to stamp out abuses of the system, which continued, including recruitment by false pretences and consequently, in 1843 the Government of Bengal, was forced to restrict emigration from Calcutta, only permitting departure after the signing of a certificate from the Agent and countersigned by the Protector. Migration to Mauritius continued, with 9,709 male Hill Coolies (Dhangars), and 1,840 female wives and daughters trasported in 1844.

The repatriation of Indians who had completed indenture remained a problem with a high death rate and investigations revealed that regulations for the return voyages were not being satisfactorily followed.

Without enough recruits from Calcutta to satisfy the demands of Mauritius planters, permission was granted in 1847 to reopen emigration from Madras with the first ship leaving Madras for Mauritius in 1850.

There were also Company officials stationed in colonies that hosted Indian immigrants. For example, when the Danish plantation owners began recruiting Indians, the British representative - also considered a consul - to the Danish West Indies was called the Protector of Immigrants.[10] This official oversaw the welfare of the workers and ensured that the terms of the agreement they signed were implemented.

After the end of slavery, the West Indian sugar colonies tried the use of emancipated slaves, families from Ireland, Germany and Malta and Portuguese from Madeira. All these efforts failed to satisfy the labour needs of the colonies due to high mortality of the new arrivals and their reluctance to continue working at the end of their indenture. On 16 November 1844, the British Indian Government legalised emigration to Jamaica, Trinidad and Demerara (Guyana). The first ship, the Whitby, sailed from Port Calcutta for British Guiana on 13 January 1838, and arrived in Berbice on 5 May 1838. Transportation to the Caribbean stopped in 1848 due to problems in the sugar industry and resumed in Demerara and Trinidad in 1851 and Jamaica in 1860.

Importing labour became viable for plantation owners because newly emancipated slaves refused to work for low wages. This is demonstrated in the sheer number of freed slaves in colonies that imported Indian workers. Jamaica had 322,000 while British Guiana and Barbados had about 90,000 and 82,000 freed slaves, respectively.[11] There was also a political incentive to the British import of foreign workers. The influx of docile and manageable Indian workers diminished the competitive leverage and bargaining power of the freed slaves, marginalizing their position within the so-called plantocracy system persisting in the British colonies.[12]

The planters pressed consistently for longer indentures. In an effort to persuade labourers to stay on, the Mauritius Government, in 1847, offered a gratuity of 2 to each labourer who decided to remain in Mauritius and renounce his claim to a free passage. The Mauritius Government also wanted to discontinue the return passage and finally on 3 August 1852, the Government of India agreed to change the conditions whereby if a passage was not claimed within six months of entitlement, it would be forfeited, but with safeguards for the sick and poor. A further change in 1852 stipulated that labourers could return after five years (contributing $35 towards the return passage) but would qualify for a free return passage after 10 years. This had a negative effect on recruitment as few wanted to sign up for 10 years and a sum of $35 was prohibitive and the change was discontinued after 1858.

It was also considered that if the labourers had a family life in the colonies they would be more likely to stay on. The proportion of women in early migration to Mauritius was small and the first effort to correct this imbalance was when, on 18 March 1856, the Secretary for the Colonies sent a dispatch to the Governor of Demerara that stated that for the season 18567 women must form 25 percent of the total and in the following years males must not exceed three times the number of females dispatched. It was more difficult to induce women from North India to go overseas than those from South India but the Colonial Office persisted and on 30 July 1868 instructions were issued that the proportion of 40 women to 100 men should be adhered to. It remained in force of the rest of the indenture period.

Trinidad followed a different trend where the Government offered the labourers a stake in the colony by providing real inducements to settle when their indentures had expired. From 1851 10 was paid to all those who forfeited their return passages. This was replaced by a land grant and in 1873 further incentives were provided in the form of 5 acres (20,000m2) of land plus 5 cash. Furthermore, Trinidad adopted an ordinance in 1870 by which new immigrants were not allotted to plantations where the death rate exceeded 7 percent

The success of the Indian indenture system for the British did not remain unnoticed. Other European plantation owners began setting up agents in India to recruit manpower. For instance, French sugar colonies hired labour via the French ports in India without knowledge of the British authorities. By 1856, the number of labourers in Runion is estimated to have reached 37,694. It was not until 25 July 1860 that France was officially permitted by the British authorities to recruit labour for Reunion at a rate of 6,000 annually. This was extended on 1 July 1861 with permission to import free labourers into the French colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana (Cayenne). Indenture was for a period of five years (longer than British colonies at the time), return passage was provided at the end of indenture. (Not after ten as in British colonies) and Governor-General was empowered to suspend emigration to any French colony if any abuse was detected in the system.

Danish plantation owners also began importing Indian workers to St. Croix.[13] This indenture system, however, did not last.

Following introduction of labour laws acceptable to the Government of India, transportation was extended to the smaller British Caribbean islands; Grenada in 1856, St Lucia in 1858 and St Kitts and St Vincent in 1860. Emigration to Natal was approved on 7 August 1860, and the first ship from Madras arrived in Durban on 16 November 1860, forming the basis of the Indian South African community. The recruits were employed on three-year contracts. The British Government permitted transportation to the Danish colonies in 1862. There was a high mortality rate in the one ship load sent to St Croix, and following adverse reports from the British Consul on the treatment of indentured labourers, further emigration was stopped. The survivors returned to India in 1868, leaving about eighty Indians behind. Permission was granted for emigration to Queensland in 1864, but no Indians were transported under the indenture system to this part of Australia.

There were a lot of discrepancies between systems used for indentured Colonial British Indian labour to various colonies. Colonial British Government regulations of 1864 made general provisions for recruitment of Indian labour in an attempt to minimise abuse of the system. These included the appearance of the recruit before a magistrate in the district of recruitment and not the port of embarkation, licensing of recruiters and penalties to recruiters for not observing rules for recruitment, legally defined rules for the Protector of Emigrants, rules for the depots, payment for agents to be by salary and not commission, the treatment of emigrants on board ships and the proportion of females to males were set uniformly to 25 females to 100 males. Despite this the sugar colonies were able to devise labour laws that were disadvantageous to the immigrants. For example, in Demerara an ordinance in 1864 made it a crime for a labourer to be absent from work, misbehaving or not completing five tasks each week. New labour laws in Mauritius in 1867 made it impossible for time-expired labourers to shake free of the estate economy. They were required to carry passes, which showed their occupation and district and anyone found outside his district was liable to arrest and dispatched Immigration Depot. If he was found to be without employment he was deemed a vagrant.

Transportation of Indian labour to Surinam began under an agreement that has been declared as Imperial. In return for Dutch rights to recruit Indian labour, the Dutch transferred some old forts (remnants of slave trade) in West Africa to the British and also bargained for an end to British claims in Sumatra. Labourers were signed up for five years and were provided with a return passage at the end of this term, but were to be subject to Dutch law. The first ship carrying Indian indentured labourers arrived in Surinam in June 1873 followed by six more ships during the same year.

Following the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, it was again abolished in the French colonial empire in 1848, and the U.S. abolished slavery in 1865 with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Between 1842 and 1870 a total of 525,482 Indians emigrated to the British and French Colonies. Of these, 351,401 went to Mauritius, 76,691 went to Demerara, 42,519 went to Trinidad, 15,169 went to Jamaica, 6,448 went to Natal, 15,005 went to Runion and 16,341 went to the other French colonies. This figure does not include the 30,000 who went to Mauritius earlier, labourers who went to Ceylon or Malaya and illegal recruitment to the French colonies. Thus by 1870 the indenture system, transporting Indian labour to the colonies, was an established system of providing labour for European colonial plantations and when, in 1879, Fiji became a recipient of Indian labour it was this same system with a few minor modifications.

The following is the indenture agreement of 1912:

The Indian indenture system was finally banned in 1917.[14] According to The Economist, "When the Imperial Legislative Council finally ended indenture because of pressure from Indian nationalists and declining profitability, rather than from humanitarian concerns."[14]

See more here:

Indian indenture system - Wikipedia

The abolitionist movement called for the end of the institution of slavery and had existed in one form or another since colonial times; the early case had been stated most consistently by the Quakers. Most Northern states abolished the institution after the War for Independence, reacting to moral concerns and economic unfeasibility.

The movement gained new momentum in the early 19th century as many critics of slavery hardened their views and rejected their previous advocacy of gradualism (the slow and steady progress towards the goal of freedom for slaves) and colonization (finding land in Africa for former slaves). As the movement grew and became more formally organized, it sparked opposition in both the North and the South; Northern mill owners depended upon slave-produced cotton every bit as much as the Southern plantation owners.

Undeterred, many abolitionists defied the original Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, as well as the later Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and actively sought to assist runaway slaves in their quest for freedom, most notably through the auspices of the Underground Railroad.

Abolitionist leaders included such figures as William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and William Lloyd Still.

Garrison adopted a militant tone which differed strikingly from the more timid proposals of prior abolitionists, who generally favored "colonization" of blacks away from white society. Garrison demanded the immediate end of slavery without compensation to slaveowners and equal rights within mainstream society for everyone, regardless of race.

Garrison`s efforts led to the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. He wrote its initial declaration, which appeared on December 14, 1833, reading in part:

Within five years, the society had 1,350 local chapters. The success of the abolition movement in the North, and the large amount of propaganda that it generated, enraged the South. South Carolina took the step of declaring that

They further petitioned the federal government to have the post office stop the distribution of abolitionist literature. Congress decided that this would be unconstitutional, but in practice it was not unusual for Southern postmasters to prevent the delivery of offending material.

After the Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, editor of an Abolitionist newspaper in St. Louis, moved it in 1836 to Alton, Illinois, the citizens of Alton destroyed in on three occasions. On the fourth, on November 7, 1837, the mob murdered Lovejoy. His associate Edward Beecher, brother of Henry Ward Beecher, wrote in the narrative of the Alton riots, which appeared in 1838, "The true spirit of intolerance now stood exposed. Events were so ordered by the Providence of God as to strip off every disguise. It now became plain that all attempts to conciliate and to discuss were vain; and nothing remained but to resist or to submit."

One of the early leaders of the Abolitionist movement was Theodore Weld, who helped organize the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and whose 1839 work, Slavery As It Is, inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom`s Cabin.

Although some in the Abolitionist Movement, especially Garrison, felt that women should play a prominent role, that position was resented by many. When in 1840, Garrison and his followers elected a woman to the American Anti-Slavery Society`s business committee, a split in the organizations resulted. The departing members explained themselves:

It is interesting to note that abolitionists anticipated an argument later used by the Confederacy. Just as Southerners eventually concluded that their institution of slavery could not be protected under the Constitution while the number of free states grew, abolitionists argued that since slavery could not be abolished under the existing Constitution, it was the obligation of the north to secede! In 1843, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society endorsed disunion by a vote of 59 to 21. They argued that no principled abolitionist could either vote or hold office under the Constitution as it then existed. In 1845, the group published a pamphlet to that effect with an introduction by Wendell Phillips.

---- Selected Quotes ----

Quotes regarding Abolitionism.

By Stephen A. DouglasAbolitionism proposes to destroy the right and extinguish the principle of self-government for which our forefathers waged a seven years' bloody war, and upon which our whole system of free government is founded. Speech in the U.S. Senate, March 3, 1854By Susan B. AnthonyMany Abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights. Written in her journal, 1860By John C. CalhounAbolition and the Union cannot exist. As the friend of the Union, I openly proclaim it, and the sooner it is known the better. The former may now be controlled, but in a short time it will be beyond the power of man to arrest the course of events.Senate Speech in 1837By Jefferson DavisDo they find in the history of St. Domingo, and in the present condition of Jamaica, under the recent experiments which have been made upon the institution of slavery in the liberation of the blacks, before God, in his wisdom, designed it should be done do they there find anything to stimulate them to future exertion in the cause of abolition ? Or should they not find there satisfactory evidence that their past course was founded in error? 1850 speech

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Abolitionism - u-s-history.com

DateJurisdictionDescription1800United StatesAmerican citizens banned from investment and employment in the international slave trade in an additional Slave Trade Act.1802FranceNapoleon re-introduces slavery in sugarcane-growing colonies.[66] OhioState constitution abolishes slavery.1803Denmark-NorwayAbolition of transatlantic slave trade takes effect on January 1.1804New JerseyAll the Northern states abolished slavery; New Jersey in 1804 was the last to act. None of the Southern or border states abolished slavery before the American Civil War.[67]HaitiHaiti declares independence and abolishes slavery.[48]18041813 SerbiaLocal slaves emancipated.1805United KingdomA bill for abolition passes in House of Commons but is rejected in the House of Lords.1806United StatesIn a message to Congress, Thomas Jefferson calls for criminalizing the international slave trade, asking Congress to "withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which the morality, the reputation, and the best of our country have long been eager to proscribe."1807United StatesInternational slave trade made a felony in Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves; this act takes effect on 1 January 1808, the earliest date permitted under the Constitution.[68]United KingdomAbolition of the Slave Trade Act abolishes slave trading in British Empire. Captains fined 120 per slave transported. Patrols sent to the African coast to arrest slaving vessels. The West Africa Squadron (Royal Navy) is established to suppress slave trading; by 1865, nearly 150,000 people freed by anti-slavery operations.[69] WarsawConstitution abolishes serfdom.[70]PrussiaThe Stein-Hardenberg Reforms abolish serfdom.[70] Michigan TerritoryJudge Augustus Woodward denies the return of two slaves owned by a man in Windsor, Upper Canada. Woodward declares that any man "coming into this Territory is by law of the land a freeman."[71]1808United StatesImportation and exportation of slaves made a crime.[72]1810 New SpainIndependence leader Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla demands the abolition of slavery.1811United KingdomSlave trading made a felony punishable by transportation for both British subjects and foreigners.SpainThe Cdiz Cortes abolish the last remaining seigneurial rights.[43]East India CompanyThe Company issued regulations 10 of 1811, prohibiting the transport of slaves into Company territory, adding to the 1774 restrictions.[46]ChileThe First National Congress approves a proposal of Manuel de Salas that declares Freedom of Wombs, freeing the children of slaves born in Chilean territory, regardless of their parents' condition. The slave trade is banned and the slaves who stay for more than six months in Chilean territory are automatically declared freedmen.1812SpainThe Cdiz Constitution gives citizenship and equal rights to all residents in Spain and her territories, excluding slaves. Deputies Jos Miguel Guridi y Alcocer and Agustn Argelles argue for the abolition of slavery unsuccessfully.[43]1813 New SpainIndependence leader Jos Mara Morelos y Pavn declares slavery abolished in the documents Sentimientos de la Nacin. La PlataLaw of Wombs passed by the Assembly of Year XIII. Slaves born after 31 January 1813 will be granted freedom when they are married, or on their 16th birthday for women and 20th for men, and upon their manumission will be given land and tools to work it.[73]1814 La PlataAfter the occupation of Montevideo, all slaves born in modern Uruguayan territory are declared free.NetherlandsSlave trade abolished.1815PortugalSlave trade banned north of the Equator in return for a 750,000 payment by Britain.[74] FloridaBritish withdrawing after the War of 1812 leave a fully armed fort in the hands of maroons, escaped slaves and their descendents, and their Seminole allies. Becomes known as Negro Fort.United KingdomPortugal Sweden-NorwayFrance AustriaRussiaSpainPrussiaThe Congress of Vienna declares its opposition to slavery.[75]1816 EstoniaSerfdom abolished. FloridaNegro Fort destroyed in the Battle of Negro Fort by U.S. forces under the command of General Andrew Jackson. AlgeriaAlgiers bombarded by the British and Dutch navies in an attempt to end North African piracy and slave raiding in the Mediterranean. 3,000 slaves freed.1817 CourlandSerfdom abolished.SpainFerdinand VII signs a cedula banning the importation of slaves in Spanish possessions beginning in 1820,[43] in return for a 400,000 payment from Britain.[74] However, some slaves are still smuggled in after this date. VenezuelaSimon Bolivar calls for the abolition of slavery.[43] New York4 July 1827 set as date to free all ex-slaves from indenture.[76] La PlataConstitution supports the abolition of slavery, but does not ban it.[43]1818United KingdomSpainBilateral treaty abolishing the slave trade.[77]United KingdomPortugalBilateral treaty abolishing the slave trade.[77]FranceSlave trade banned.United KingdomNetherlandsBilateral treaty taking additional measures to enforce the 1814 ban on slave trading.[77]1819 LivoniaSerfdom abolished. Upper CanadaAttorney-General John Robinson declares all black residents free.HawaiiThe ancient Hawaiian kapu system is abolished during the Ai Noa, and with it the distinction between the kauw slave class and the makainana (commoners).[78]1820United StatesThe Compromise of 1820 bans slavery north of the 36 30' line; the Act to Protect the Commerce of the United States and Punish the Crime of Piracy is amended to consider the maritime slave trade as piracy, making it punishable with death. IndianaThe supreme court orders almost all slaves in the state to be freed in Polly v. Lasselle.SpainThe 1817 abolition of the slave trade takes effect.[79]1821 MexicoThe Plan of Iguala frees the slaves born in Mexico.[43]United StatesSpainIn accordance with AdamsOns Treaty of 1819, Florida becomes a territory of the United States. A main reason was Spain's inability or unwillingness to capture and return escaped slaves. PeruAbolition of slave trade and implementation of a plan to gradually end slavery.[43]Gran ColombiaEmancipation for sons and daughters born to slave mothers, program for compensated emancipation set.[80]1822 HaitiJean Pierre Boyer annexes Spanish Haiti and abolishes slavery there. LiberiaFounded by the American Colonization Society as a colony for emancipated slaves. GreeceSlavery abolished with independence.1823ChileSlavery abolished.[48]United KingdomThe Anti-Slavery Society is founded.1824MexicoThe new constitution effectively abolishes slavery. Central AmericaSlavery abolished.1825 UruguayImportation of slaves banned. HaitiFrance, with warships at the ready, demanded Haiti compensate France for its loss of slaves and its slave colony1827United Kingdom Sweden-NorwayBilateral treaty abolishing the slave trade.[77] New YorkLast vestiges of slavery abolished. Children born between 1799 and 1827 are indentured until age 25 (females) or age 28 (males).[81]1828IllinoisIn Phoebe v. Jay, the Illinois Supreme Court rules that indentured servants in Illinois cannot be treated as chattel and bequeathing them by will is illegal.[82]1829MexicoLast slaves freed just as the first president of partial African ancestry (Vicente Guerrero) is elected.[48]

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Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom - Wikipedia

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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.

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The Abolition of Work | The Base

The Welfare Reform and Act 2016 legislated for the abolition of the Work-Related Activity Component (WRAC)of ESA for new claimants from 3 April 2017. This equates to a reduction of 29.05 a week for claimants in the Work-Related Activity Group (WRAG). Alongside this, the Government announced "new funding for additional support to help claimants return to work"

ESA is an "income replacement" benefitfor people who have a health condition or disability which limits their ability to work. As ofMay 2016 there were just under 2.4 million ESA claimants in Great Britain, including429,000 in the Work-Related Activity Group.

There are two forms of ESA:

Income-related ESA will eventually be replaced by Universal Credit; contributory ESA will remain as a separate benefit. The Government currently expects the introduction of Universal Credit to be fully complete by 2022.

A person must undergo a Work Capability Assessment to be eligible for ESA. There are three possible outcomes of a Work Capability Assessment:

Following the assessment, successful ESA claimants receive a standard rate plus an additional amount.

The standard rate of ESA is currently 73.10 a week, plus either:

These additions are known as the Support Component and the Work-Related Activity Component, respectively.

In Summer Budget 2015, it was announced that the Work-Related Activity Component paid to those in the WRAG would be abolished for new claims from April 2017. The equivalent element in Universal Credit will also be abolished. This will involve a reduction of 29.05 a week (2017-18 rates) and aligns the rate of payment with those claiming Jobseekers Allowance (73.10 a week). Existing claimants will not be affected, while there will be protections for those who may move into the WRAG or Universal Credit equivalent from the Support Group.

The changes were introduced to remove the financial incentives that could otherwise discourage claimants from taking steps back to work. 640 million a year of savings were initially forecast by 2020-21; this was later revised to 450 million a year.

The changes were widely criticised by disability charities. The idea that the WRAC incentivises claimants to not look for work has been particularly disputed.

The proposals were opposed by opposition parties. Amendments to retain the component (and equivalent in Universal Credit) were tabled and agreed at the Lords Report Stage of the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. The Lords vote followed the publication ofa review initiated by Members of the House of Lords and supported by disability charities; the "Halving the Gap?" review. The review recommended that theGovernment should not proceed with the removal of the Work-Related ActivityComponent.

These amendmentswere overturned by the Commons. A further amendment requiring the Government to provide analysis of the impact of the changes before introducing them was also proposed by the Lords, and subsequently overturned by the Commons.

Alongside the changes to the WRAC was an announcement to provide new funding for additional support to help claimants return to work. The Government has since announced a series of measures and funding to deliver this, including 60 million per year rising to 100 million per year for practical employment support, including an additional 15 million in 2017-18 directed at the local Jobcentre PlusFlexible Support Fund, to be set asidespecifically forthose with limited capability to work.

Further detail of the additional employment support has been set out in the Government's October 2016 Green Paper, Improving Lives. This was published instead of a previously announced White Paper.

In its report on theDisability employment gap published on 31 January, the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee said that if the DWP is to press ahead with the ESA cut, it must first set out a clear plan for identifying where claimants have additional, unavoidable living costs relating to their conditions, and how it will ensure that these costs are covered. The Committee expects the Government to respond to its report before the lower rate of ESA is due to take effect in April and, if it intends to proceed with the reduction, to explain how this will not be detrimental to its target of halving the disability employment gap.

Originally posted here:

Abolition of the ESA Work-Related Activity Component ...

(This article has been reprinted with permission from the author)

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the 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, aludicrevolution. By play I mean also festivity, creativity, 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 [will] want [to] act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of 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.Curiouslymaybe notall 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 LafargueI support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealistsexcept that Im not kiddingI favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution.I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate workand not only because they plan to make other people do theirsthey 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 jokingandserious. 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 playplay 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 non-work 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 vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at 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 minimun definition of work isforced 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.

Usuallyand this is even more true in communist than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employeework 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 Nicaragua or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastionsMexico, India, Brazil, Turkeytemporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millennia, 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. Allindustrial (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 whoby 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 workplacesurveillance, 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 tators 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. 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-govemed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travelthese practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can beplayed withat 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 the 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 de-Stalinized 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 a 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 orbetter stillindustrialism, 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 hierarchy 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 hierarchy 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 labelled 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 industrialismbut 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 wouldstillmake 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 as 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 Westem 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. Mondaythus establishing ade factofive-day week 150-200 years before its legal consecrationwas 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 theancien regimewrested 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 Russiahardly a progressive societylikewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploitedmuzhikswould 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 raged 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 govemment 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 lifein North America, particularlybut 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 West Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest versionthe Thomas Huxley versionof Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his bookMutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientistgeographerwhod 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 intemmittent, 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 animalworkswhen deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and itplayswhen the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity. (A modern versiondubiously 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 GeorgesEngland in Transitionand Peter BurkesPopular 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 signalled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (inPolitical 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 metaindustrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquillity of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith inThe 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 modem 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 hamess, the one identified in HEWs reportWork 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 economistMilton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posnerbecause, in their terms, as they used to say onStar Trek, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist tum, 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 occuptional 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 coalmining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question.What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have their lifespans shortened by workwhich 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 sixfigure 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 beforeReaganand 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 makes 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 its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire. Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively thatas antebellum slavery apologists insistedfactory 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 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 the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departurewe 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 themlessenticing 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 per cent of the work then being donepresumably the figure, if accurate, is lower nowwould 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, stockbrockers, 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 economyimplodes.

Forty per cent 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 yourtime, 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 last fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorantand above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model T might be all right, but the autoeroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend 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 tohousewivesdoing housework and childrearing.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 campscalled 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 makesitnecessary. 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 should 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 laborsaving 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 technophilesSaint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B.F. Skinnerhave always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than skeptical about the promises of the computer mystics.Theywork 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 airconditioned 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 awhile, 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 Morrisand even a hint, here and there, in Marxthere are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothersCommunitasis 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 situationistsas represented by VaneigemsRevolution of Everyday Lifeand in theSituationist International Anthologyare 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 co-extensive with the consumption of delightful play activity. Life will become a game, or rather many games, but notas it is nowa 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 rest here:

The Abolition of Work, by Bob Black - Abolish Work

The prison abolition movement is a loose network of groups and activists that seek to reduce or eliminate prisons and the prison system, and replace them with systems of rehabilitation that do not place a focus on punishment and government institutionalization[1].

It is distinct from conventional prison reform, which is the attempt to improve conditions inside prisons; however, relying on prisons less could improve their conditions by reducing overcrowding.[2]:3

Supporters for prison abolition work toward non-reformist reforms[3], such as ending solitary confinement and the death penalty, stopping construction of new prisons, and the eradication of cash bail.[4] Some organizations such as the Anarchist Black Cross seek total abolishment of the prison system, not intending to replace it with other government-controlled systems. Many anarchist organizations believe that the best form of justice arises naturally out of social contracts or restorative justice.

Prominent social activist Angela Davis, outspoken critic of the prison-industrial complex, openly supports prison abolition.[5] In her work, she writes: "Mass incarceration is not a solution to unemployment, nor is it a solution to the vast array of social problems that are hidden away in a rapidly growing network of prisons and jails. However, the great majority of people have been tricked into believing in the efficacy of imprisonment, even though the historical record clearly demonstrates that prisons do not work."[6] Her relevancy in this movement is attested by her close involvement with groups moving to abolish the Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC).[7]

Critical Resistance, co-founded by Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, is an American organization working towards an "international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe."[8] Other similarly motivated groups such as the Prison Activist Resource Center (PARC), a group "committed to exposing and challenging all forms of institutionalized racism, sexism, able-ism, heterosexism, and classism, specifically within the Prison Industrial Complex," [9] and Black & Pink, an abolitionist organization that focuses around LGBTQ rights, all broadly advocate for prison abolition.[10] Furthermore, names such as the Human Rights Coalition, a 2001 group that aims to abolish prisons,[11][12] and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, a grassroots organization dedicated to dismantling the PIC,[13] can all be added to the long list of organizations that desire a different form of justice system.[14]

Every other year after Ruth Morris organized the first one in Toronto in 1983,[15] The International Conference on Penal Abolition (ICOPA) gathers activists, academics, journalists, and "others from across the world who are working towards the abolition of imprisonment, the penal system, carceral controls and the prison industrial complex (PIC),"[16] to discuss three important questions surrounding the reality of prison abolition ICOPA was one of the first penal abolitionist conference movements, similar to Critical Resistance in America, but "with an explicitly international scope and agenda-setting ambition."[17]

Anarchists wish to eliminate all forms of state control, of which imprisonment is seen as one of the more obvious examples. Anarchists also oppose prisons because a significant number of inmates are non-violent offenders[18]. Numbers show incarceration rates affect mainly poor people and ethnic minorities, and do not generally rehabilitate criminals, in many cases making them worse.[19] As a result, the prison abolition movement often is associated with humanistic socialism, anarchism and anti-authoritarianism.

In October 2015, members at a plenary session of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) released and adopted a resolution in favor of prison abolition.[20][21]

Proposals for prison reform and alternatives to prisons differ significantly depending on the political beliefs behind them. Proposals and tactics often include:

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published a series of handbooks on criminal justice. Among them is Alternatives to Imprisonment which identifies how the overuse of imprisonment impacts fundamental human rights, especially those convicted for lesser crimes.

Social justice and advocacy organizations such as Students Against Mass Incarceration (SAMI) at the University of California, San Diego often look to Scandinavian countries Sweden and Norway for guidance in regards to successful prison reform because both countries have an emphasis on rehabilitation rather than punishment.[22] According to Sweden's Prison and Probation Service Director-General, Nils berg, this emphasis is made popular among the Swedish because the act of imprisonment is considered punishment enough.[23] This focus on rehabilitation includes an emphasis on promoting normalcy for inmates, a charge lead by experienced criminologists and psychologists.[24] In Norway a focus on preparation for societal re-entry has yielded "one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world at 20%, [while] the US has one of the highest: 76.6% of [Americans] prisoners are re-arrested within five years".[25] The Scandinavian method of incarceration seems to be successful: the Swedish incarceration rate decreased by 6% between 2011 and 2012.[26]

In place of prisons, some abolitionists propose community-controlled courts, councils, or assemblies to control the problem of social crime.[27] They argue that with the destruction of capitalism, and the self-management of production by workers and communities, property crimes would largely vanish. A large part of the problem, according to some, is the way the judicial system deals with prisoners, people, and capital. They argue that there would be fewer prisoners if society treated people more fairly, regardless of gender, color, ethnic background, sexual orientation, education, etc. This is evidenced by the creation of private prisons in America and corporations like CoreCivic, formerly known as Correction Corporation of America (CCA). Its shareholders benefit from the expansion of prisons and tougher laws on crime. More prisoners is seen as beneficial for business.[28]

Many organizations and abolitionists in the United States advocate community accountability practices an alternative to the criminal justice system. Organizations such as INCITE! and Sista II Sista that support women of color who are survivors of interpersonal violence argue that the criminal justice system does not protect marginalized people who are victims in violent relationships. Instead, victims, especially those who are poor, people of color, or trans or gender non-conforming, can experience additional violence at the hands of the state.[29] Instead of relying on the criminal justice system, these organizations work to implement community accountability practices, which often involve collectively-run processes of intervention initiated by a survivor of violence to try to hold the person who committed violence accountable by working to meet a set of demands.[30]

Prison abolitionists such as Amanda Pustlinik take issue with the fact that prisons are used as a "default asylum" for many individuals with mental illness.[31] One question that is often asked by some prison abolitionists is:

"Why do governmental units choose to spend billions of dollars a year to concentrate people with serious illnesses in a system designed to punish intentional lawbreaking, when doing so matches neither the putative purposes of that system nor most effectively addresses the issues posed by that population?" [31]

This question is often one of the major pieces of evidence that prison abolitionist claim highlights the depravity of the penal system. Many of these prison abolitionists often state that mentally ill offenders, violent and non-violent, should be treated in mental hospitals not prisons.[32] In the United States, there are more people with mental illness in prisons than in psychiatric hospitals.[33] By keeping the mentally ill in prisons they claim that rehabilitation cannot occur because prisons are not the correct environment to deal with deep seated psychological problems and facilitate rehabilitative practices.[32] Individuals with mental illnesses that have led them to commit any crime have a much higher chance of committing suicide while in prison because of the lack of proper medical attention.[34] The increased risk of suicide is said to be because there is much stigma around mental illness and lack of adequate treatments within hospitals.[34] The whole point of the penal system is to rehabilitate and reform individuals who have willingly transgressed on the law. According to many prison abolitionists however, when mentally ill persons, often for reasons outside of their cognitive control, commit illegal acts prisons are not the best place for them to receive the help necessary for their rehabilitation.[32] For many prison abolitionists, if for no other reason than the fact that mentally ill individuals will not be receiving the same potential for rehabilitation as the non-mentally ill prison population, prisons are considered to be unjust and therefore violate their Sixth Amendment and Fifth Amendment Rights, in the U.S., and their chance to rehabilitate and function outside of the prison.[31][31][32][35] In America, by violating an individual's rights as a citizen, prison abolitionists see no reason for prisons to exist, and again, offer another reason people within the movement demand for the abolition of prisons.[31][32][35]

After the Attica prison massacre, the inmates of Walpole prison formed a prisoners' union to protect themselves from guards, end behavioural modification programs, more visitation rights, work assignments and the ability to send money to their families and advocate for the prisoner's right for education and healthcare. The union also ended race-related violence within the prison, creating a general truce between ethnic truce and an agreement to kill any inmate who broke said truce. During the black prisoner's Kwanzaa celebration, the black prisoner's were placed under lockdown, angering the whole facility and leading to a general strike. Prisoners refused to work or leave their cells for three months, leading to the guards beating prisoners, putting prisoners in solitary confinement, denying prisoners medical care and food.[36]

The strike ended in the prisoners' favour as the superintendent of the prison resigned. The prisoners were granted more visitation rights and work programs. Angered by this, the prison guards went on strike and abandoned the prison, hoping that this would create chaos and violence throughout the prison. But the prisoners were able to create an anarchist community where recidivism dropped dramatically and murders and rapes fell to zero. The guards retook the prison after two months, leading to many prison administrators and bureaucrats quitting their jobs and embracing the prison abolition movement.[37]

Opponents of the abolition argue that none of the arguments above address the protection of non-criminal population from the effects of crime, and from particularly violent criminals.

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Prison abolition movement - Wikipedia