Monthly Archives: February 2020

Danielle Wightman-Stone|Friday, 21 February 2020

Outland Denim, billed as the worlds most humanitarian denim, hasreceived the global Thomson Reuters 2020 Stop Slavery Enterprise Award forsmall and medium-sized companies, for their efforts to eradicate forcedlabour.

The award recognises companies around the world that have takenconcrete steps to eradicate forced labour from their supply chains andbusiness operations and Outland Denim, which employs survivors andvulnerable women in Cambodia, was praised for its wide-ranging approach tohelping staff.

James Bartle, founding chief executive of Outland Denim, said in astatement: It's time for small, medium and large business to stand andstop accepting slavery as part of our products or services. It is time forus to stop turning a blind eye or hoping it doesnt exist; we need toactively look for it.

Outland Denim jeans are crafted in the labels stand-alone productionand finishing facilities in Cambodia, which was founded to offer holisticsupport, training and employment to young women who have experiencedexploitation, human trafficking and other human rights violations.

The company was praised for providing its staff with a living wage andeducation, as well as offering each of its seamstresses training across allaspects of garment making.

The award came as the Australian-based brand prepares to launch inNordstrom and Bloomingdales.

Image: courtesy of Outland Denim

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Outland Denim wins Stop Slavery Award - FashionUnited UK

New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones spent Monday taking a tour of Charlottesvilles Confederate monuments and visiting Monticello before speaking to two crowds about a major project she leads.

Speaking first at the University of Virginia Rotunda, and later downtown at The Haven, Hannah-Jones discussed the 1619 Project and answered questions from UVa President Jim Ryan, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and community members.

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative of The New York Times Magazine that began as a special issue that was published last August, around the time of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans in Virginia.

I wanted to force an acknowledgement of this day, as much as I could, to not allow it to be erased or diminished, but also not just acknowledgement of the day, because a lot of organizations did commemorations, Hannah-Jones said. I wanted to force that acknowledgement of what slavery brought, and the centrality of slavery and that this was not going to be a history. We were going to look at the ongoing, everyday legacy that we all live with.

This project is not about making white people feel guilty for something that you did not personally do, but you have to acknowledge that you are beneficiaries of the system, she said. If there is guilt to be felt, it should be about the ways that you continue to uphold these systems and actively partake in these systems.

Hannah-Jones said it was fitting to have the conversation in Charlottesville and at UVa, specifically in the Rotunda.

In some ways, its the perfect place to have this conversation because I feel like all of the hypocrisies and ideas that the project tries to lay bare, much of that begins right here, she said.

When Ryan asked what her recommendations are for universities grappling with their own history, Hannah-Jones said that the least UVa should do is give free tuition to descendants of the enslaved people who built the university.

If youre really uncomfortable with that notion, you really have to ask yourself why, she said. You really have to ask why you think it is a problem that the people who were forced to build this, their ancestors, because just as wealth is passed down, so is this legacy.

Ryan did not respond on the matter.

When asked about those who have criticized the project, Hannah-Jones said their criticism was not legitimate, and she did not sit down one day and decide to make things up, and has sources to back up the questions from historians.

It has also been said that the project is too pessimistic.

Thats a different perspective that you can have when all of this wasnt built on the back of the oppression of your people, she said. I cant have that view.

During a question and answer period, Myra Anderson asked how she can get her voice heard as a descendant of an enslaved laborer at UVa.

I often feel like I dont even have a seat at the table, or my voice doesnt count, she said.

Hannah-Jones said she was not an activist or community organizer, but that Anderson speaking out, like she was doing at the discussion, was a way to get things accomplished.

I also believe that being publicly shamed is the only way that powerful people are motivated to do the right thing, she said.

UVa student and local activist Zyahna Bryant asked how people can stop universities from exploiting black students, such as asking them to appear in photographs, while not supporting them.

Im going to have her hand the mic back to you, and you tell the university what to do, Hannah-Jones said.

Bryant said the university needs to fund the Office of African-American Affairs, have a real conversation about race, support black faculty and support UVas low-wage workers.

If were not going to really do things fully and to the standard of excellence that we like to claim about being the good and great university, then we can just stop it altogether, because in my opinion it does not help to do things halfway, she said.

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1619 Project leader calls for UVa to take real action to amend for slavery's legacy - The Daily Progress

Abraham Lincoln repeatedly tops polls as our greatest and most revered president. But few people thought so on March 4, 1865, when he took the oath of office for the second time.

On that day, America was still mired in the terrible war that the Republicans had been determined to wage. The refusal of Southern states to accept his election in 1860and Lincolns stubborn insistence that they do so, lest the American system of representative government fall aparthad cost some 750,000 lives by early 1865. Those who think the ferocity of todays partisanship is unprecedented would find the record of history sobering.

Lincoln had survived reelection in November 1864, but in early 1865, even as the North steadily dismantled the Souths ability to fight, Lincoln was getting it from all sides.

Many liberal Republicans found Lincoln weak and vacillating, too prone to calibrate his actions to the faltering pace of public opinion. They feared that this tendency would work against punishing the Souths establishment and risk not extending full civil rights to African-Americans, which they saw as the ultimate purpose of the war.

Frederick Douglass was among those who believed Lincoln had moved too slowly against slavery. When there was any shadow of a hope that a man of a more decided anti-slavery conviction and policy could be elected, I was not for Mr. Lincoln, Douglass wrote.

Northern Democrats, meanwhile, argued that Lincoln had done permanent damage to the nation and its Constitution with what they saw as his incompetent management of a disastrously prolonged war, his jailing of newspaper editors and other enemies of the administration, his arming of former slaves , and his massive expansion of the powers of the federal government.

Many from both parties, and the South, found Lincolns smutty frontier jokes and cackling enjoyment of lowbrow humor grotesquely unpresidentialnever mind his uncombable hair and tendency to throw one leg over an arm of his chair.

In the capital of the Confederacy, the Richmond Daily Dispatch found it appalling that the people of the supposedly civilized North had reelected a vulgar tyrant . . . whose career has been one of unlimited and unmitigated disaster; whose personal qualities are those of a low buffoon, and whose most noteworthy conversation is a medley of profane jests and obscene anecdotesa creature who has squandered the lives of millions without remorse and without even the decency of pretending to feel for their misfortunes; who still cries for blood and for money in the pursuit of his atrocious designs.

Healing a nation consumed by such hatred was a task as monumental as destroying the Souths resistance to Republican majority rule.

How Lincoln went about it is fascinating. He used his second inaugural address in a manner that would seem entirely alien to other politicians, including many today.

Lincoln did not try to elevate his popularity by boasting of his success in breaking the South. Nor did he denounce his enemieseven in the slaveholding statesas his moral inferiors. In sharp contrast to typical politicians, he did not insult his political opponents or accuse them of despicable, deplorable, cruel, and unpatriotic motives. He even eschewed the opportunity to wave the flag.

Rather, in a five-minute speech of about 700 words, short enough to run in a single column of a newspaper, he argued that all AmericansNorth and Southshared culpability for the unimaginable horrors the nation had endured. This war of unexpected duration and ferocity, he posited, may have been Gods judgment on all of America for the evil of slavery.

In overwhelmingly Christian America, North and South prayed to the same God, and both sides tended to interpret the results of the wars ebb and flow as evidence of Gods will. Southerners had difficulty understanding how God could support the Norths cruel, unjust and wicked war of invasion of states that merely wished to form their own nation. In the North, such preachers as Henry Ward Beecher denounced the ambitious, educated, plotting leaders of the South and promised that God would punish them severely for shedding an ocean of blood.

Lincoln was almost alone in seeing the wars suffering as a verdict on both sides. Perhaps it might be deemed an act of Gods justice, he argued, even if all the wealth piled up by 250 years of unrequited toil by the enslaved should be sunk into the war, and even if every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.

Lincolns most resonant line was his plea to Americans to finish the war and seek a lasting peace, With malice toward none, with charity for all. His refusal to condemn the South alone gave that phrase great resonance, particularly after his assassination, when he became a hallowed martyr to the cause of healing the nation.

Few politicians today seem to be following his example. Lincoln, with his rare ability to step outside of the emotions that we all feel when we are attacked, believed that harsh words and acts of revenge rarely pay off; that we are all flawed human beings, all bringing our own motives and complicated understanding of the world to politics.

But, without attacking others, he managed to implant in that great speech an interpretation of the war that has enduredthat, for all its evils and horrors, the Civil War was ultimately an act of justice because it destroyed the curse of slavery.

Frederick Douglass, who had long argued that the wars meaning was defeating slavery, stood in the mud outside the Capitol, listening to Lincoln deliver his speech. That night, despite being forcibly removed by guards because he was a black man, Douglass managed to get into the White House to shake Lincolns hand at a public reception.

Here comes my friend Douglass, Lincoln said, and he urged his former political foe to tell him what he thought of the speech.

Mr. Lincoln, that was a sacred effort, Douglass said.

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Abraham Lincoln Healed a Divided Nation. We Should Heed His Words Today. - TIME

Alain Mingam/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)Louis Althusser in his study, Paris, France, April 26, 1978

The singular hackneyed biographical detail about Louis Althusser (19181990) is his notoriety as the French Marxist philosopher who, in 1980, killed his wife, the sociologist Hlne Rytmann, and got off with being committed to a psychiatric hospital. The horror of his crime cannot be overstated, and there were those at the time who insisted Althusser stand trial for murder, but the French Penal Code allowed for a judgment of juridical-legal non-responsibility, attested to in Althussers case by three psychiatrists. Althusser was confined to a psychiatric institution for three years, one of several such hospitalizations, including treatment that had led to his absence during the events of May 1968. The tragic event of Rytmanns death serves to obscure his real significance from the early 1960s until the present, as his version of Structuralism-tinged Marxism became part of a dominant school in the academy: French Theory.

Despite the gaps he admitted to in his reading of philosophy, Althusser, who was a member of the French Communist Party (PCF) from 1948, effected a revolution in Marxism, positing that there had been an epistemological break in Marxs thought in 18451846 that placed his Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844stained with idealist aspirations, in Althussers wordsoutside what should properly be considered Marxism. That philosophy, Althusser believed, was most clearly articulated in Capital, the founding moment of a new discipline, the founding moment of a science. Marxism, he wrote, is, in a single movement and by virtue of the unique epistemological rupture which established it, an anti-humanism and an anti-historicism.

Althussers anti-humanism was a reaction to different camps within Marxism he believed had deviated into socialist humanism, which he described not only as a critique of the contradictions of bourgeois humanism, but also and above all as the consummation of its noblest aspirations. This drive to combine socialism and humanism was of dubious theoretical value, he reasoned, for the concept socialism is a scientific concept, but the concept humanism is no more than an ideological one. The unevenness between the two made them incompatible.

Rosa Luxemburg, George Lukacs, and Antonio Gramsci, as well as dissident Marxists like Karl Korsch, were prominent figures of one camp of what he considered Marxist humanists. In his own time, such left-humanists could be found in the Frankfurt School and the Yugoslavian Praxis Group, but also in certain tendencies within the USSR. In the mid-1970s, more threatening still for Althusser was the social-democratizing trend in the Western European Communist movement known as Eurocommunism, which opposed smashing the state and favored the electoral road, while stripping communism of the embarrassing notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

As French Theory incorporated Althussers ideas, one important aspect was left behind: his involvement in the issues confronting the French left and specifically the PCF in the late 1970s. The positions he took in the life of the PCF were a continuation of the theoretical work that can be found in his essential early works, Reading Capital and For Marx. For Althusser, the jettisoning by the Communist Parties of Spain, Italy, and France, the core of Eurocommunism, of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was unacceptable, for, he wrote, this dictatorship was central to Marxism in the realm of theory, and in practice was at least partially necessary if the revolution is not to get bogged down and come to grief.

Althusser was not just a Marxist philosopher, he was a Communist philosopher, which isnt necessarily the same thing. As he wrote in 1976, [W]hat defines the Party is not so much simply the class character of its membership or its scientific theory alone, but the fusion of these two things in the class struggle. In the English-speaking world, Althussers specifically Communist commitments took a back seat during his heyday. The absence of a serious working-class movement in the US and the UK led to Althussers ideas becoming chiefly a subject for academic study and abstruse intra-left debate, rather than a motor for action.

In France, though, he was very much present on the left, where his refusal to accept any softening of Marxism bridged the Sino-Soviet split in the Communist movement. He even wrote (anonymously) for the journal of the Maoist Union de la Jeunesse Communiste Marxiste Lniniste, a group that included the cream of the intellectual far left in France, most of them students of Althussers at the most elite of Frances universities, the cole Normale Suprieure. (Later, when illusions about the Cultural Revolution, Mao, and revolution in general crumbled, many of these Althusserian Maoists would form the basis for the anti-Marxist school of New Philosophers.)

For Althusser, philosophy was not a matter of abstract intellectual inquiry but a guide to actionand an action in itself: the demystifying of capitalism (as the excerpt below shows). His idiosyncratic canon included Lenin and Mao every bit as much as those classical thinkers usually taught in university classrooms. For Althusser, these two revolutionary leaders, normally viewed solely as political actors, were, thanks to their intellectual rigor, true philosophers. Even more, they fulfilled a central tenet of Marxism: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

Mitchell Abidor

Thus it is that the capitalist is born. He is, at the outset, an independent petty producer who, thanks to his labour and his merits and his moral virtues, has succeeded in producing enough to sell enough to buy a few more tools, just what it takes to employ a few unfortunates who dont have anything to eat, because theres no room left on earth (which is round, that is, finite, limited, as Kant magnificently puts it) and because they werent able to become independent petty producers; he renders them the magnanimous service of giving them wages in exchange for their work. What generosity! But generosity too is in human nature. The fact that all this goes sour later, that the wage-workers have the bad grace to find that the work-day is too long and that their wages are too short, is also in human nature, which has its bad sides, just as it is in human nature that certain capitalistic independent petty producers take unfair advantage (evil sorts that they are!) of their wage-workers or, still worse, play tricks in their fashion, dirty tricks, on the other independent petty producers whom they regard (just imagine!) as their competitors and treat mercilessly on the market. These things ought not to exist, but there are not only good people in this world: one has to bear the cross of human wickedness or thoughtlessness. For if they only knew!

If they knew, they would know what we have just said: that there exists one natural mode of production and just one, the mercantile mode of production, constituted by independent petty producers with families, who produce in order to sell either their surplus or everything they produce, working alone with their little family or employing wretches without house or home whom they provide, out of love for their fellow man, with the bread of a wage, thus becoming, quite naturally, capitalists, who can get bigger, if the God of Calvin, who rewards good works, bestows that grace on them.

Thus it is that the mercantile mode of production or the mode of mercantile productionbased on the existence of independent petty producers who started out as subsistence farmers but were naturally destined to become merchants, part-time and then full-time merchants, and then merchants relying on wage-based (capitalist) productionis, for bourgeois ideology, the only mode of production there is.

There is no other. The others are just deviations or aberrations, conceived on the basis of this one and only mode: aberrations due to the fact that the Enlightenment had not penetrated peoples minds with its self-evident truths in these times of darkness and obscurantism. This explains the scandalous horror of slavery: people did not know at the time that all men are free (= have a right to human nature = can be independent petty producers). This explains the horror of feudalism: people did not know at the time that the feudal independent petty producer, the serf, was capable of leaving his land, taking up residence elsewhere and trading his products for other products, like every man on earthinstead of remaining confined to the horrid closed circle of bare subsistence, merely attenuated by that other horror, the corve for the lord and tithe for the Church.

Since the mercantile mode of production is perfectly mythical, an invention of the ideological imaginary, and since the act of foundation depends on the same imaginary, we have, on the one hand, the fact of the existence of the capitalist mode of production, which is terribly real, and, on the other, its theory, its essence, furnished us by the mythical, founding construction of the mercantile mode of production. The result of this act of imaginary foundation is as follows:

1). The capitalist mode of production, which exists, is the only one that can exist, the only one that exists, the only one that has a right to existence. The fact that it has not always existed (and even that must be qualified, for when we look into the matter in detail, we always find this reality, which is natural, everywhere: independent petty producers), or that it has not always visibly existed, obscured as it was by horrid realitiesthis is merely an accident of history. It should have existed from all eternity and, thank God, it exists today, having carried the day against obscurantism, and we may be sure that nature having finally vanquished non-nature, light having finally triumphed over darkness, nature and light, that is, the capitalist mode of production, can be sure of existing for all eternity. It has finally been recognized!

2). This guarantee having been obtained at last, the essence having at last attained to existence, we can, at last, understand everything. If we want to understand what the capitalist mode of production is, it is enough to go have a look at its origin, that is, its essence, the mercantile mode of production: we will find men, the independent petty producers, their families and all the tra-la-la.

3). We have at last arrived at existence and since what has arrived at existence is the essence, we have everything we need: existence, murmuring with satisfaction, and the essence that allows us to understand it. That way everyone is happy.

That way, in other words, bourgeois ideology has reached its goal: representing the capitalist mode of production as the development of an imaginary mercantile mode of production, and the genesis of the capitalist mode of production as the result of the work of deserving independent petty producers who became capitalists only because they really deserved to. It remains only to strike up the universal anthem of humanitys gratitude to free enterprise.

*

Give yourself, for starters, a capitalist honest enough to answer your questions and admit that he is driven to increase his fortune indefinitely, without pause and without respite. Ask him why he yields to this irresistible tendency. You will receive, in this order (disorder would be another order, the same order) the following answers:

1). The psychological capitalist will tell you: Im greedy and bent on acquiring wealth. My nature is such that I thirst for gold and my thirst is such that it makes me thirsty even when its slaked. Everyone knows the story about the sea: Why doesnt it overflow? Answer: because there is a goodly number of fish in the sea, and they drink a tremendous amount of water; since the waters salty, theyre always thirsty. We can only conclude that gold too is salty, since it makes a man thirsty all the time (thirsty for gold). Enough joking. Psychology, which always keeps philosophy and religion in the corner of its eye, answers: its in the nature of things and in human nature too; man is a creature of desire and is therefore insatiable, for desire is infinite. Whatever the world contains in the way of philosophers knows this, from Aristotle talking about Chrematistics down to Pascal and countless others: it is because man is finite that he is condemned to desires bad infinity (Hegel). There you have the reason that the capitalist enriches himself without end, to the point of losing sleep and desirehuman natures to blame.

2). The philosophical capitalist (a notch more sophisticated), versed in Hobbes and Hegel, will tell you: but my dear fellow, nature only reveals itself in its sublation! This desire that you think you bring to bear on mere things, such as goods, wealth or power (power is merely a means of procuring goods, or the men who procure goods) reaches infinitely higher! For example, if so-and-so chases after gold, it is less to satisfy a need (or desire) for wealth or power (for in these matters everything has its limits, and if mans desire is infinite, man isnt) than because he is seeking an altogether different good: the esteem of his peers, that which Hobbes calls glory and Hegel calls recognition. Thus the race for wealth and the race for power (the means of attaining wealth) are merely the obligatory detour that a law takes in order to impose itself on human individuals. In fact, look! The rich man always enriches himself at another mans expense; the powerful man always becomes powerful at a third partys expense. Universal competition rules the world and men are merely its puppets. Not competition for property and power: no, whoa! Competition is a more mysterious, more sophisticated desire: the desire for glory and recognition. Man wants only to be esteemed and recognized for what he is: more deserving than the others (Hobbes) or simply free (Hegel), by way of the figures of the master and slave. Thus, competition for goods and power is simply the means of, and a pretext for, competition of another kind, in which every man expects recognition of his glory or freedom from those he dominates. The insatiable thirst for riches thereby becomes an altogether spiritual affair, in which man can stand tall and proud for being endowed with a nature so dignified that it puts him a hundred feet above the base passions that were attributed to him. One may well be a bourgeois, one still has ones sense of honor.

3). The realistic capitalist (a notch more sophisticated theoretically), better versed in Hobbes, will tell you: the quest for glory is one thing! What matters is something else: the law that forces all men to seek glory, without sparing a one. For how is it that men are brought to engage in this frantic quest, by what power? To be sure, they all start out by desiring goods and, later, glory; but the fact that they all desire them with so equal a desire that this desire surpasses and governs them, and the fact that they are all, without exception, enrolled in the racethat is what calls for explanation. The reason is that, when the time comes, they unleash, unawares, the power of a law that annuls its origin: universal war, the war of all against all. The whole mystery of the matter resides in this conversion: individuals desiring goods, each for [his own] petty ends, and suddenly all of them together are thrown into a war so universal that it becomes a State of War. That is, a State of relations such that the war can flare up at any moment and anywhere (its like bad weather, Hobbes writes: it doesnt rain every day or everywhere, but it could rain anytime, anywhere at all) should someone attack someone else. With the establishment of this State of Universal Competition, aptly called the State of War and a War of All Against All, that is to say, a war of the first person who happens along against the second, things are converted a second time. Fear of being attacked makes men make the first move and war reveals itself for what it is: the essence of war is to be preventive.

With that, the portrait of competition is complete.

However, when we take a closer look at this preventive war that the capitalists wage on each other, it turns out to be a singular war! It pits the combatants against each other, of course, like every war, even the war of all against all. But the combatants, that is, the capitalists, do not really confront each other, since they spend their time protecting themselves against attack by taking preventive measures. In Hobbess war, we might suppose that it is a question of real attacks and that the parties preventively carry out real attacks so as not to be attacked. The same holds here: but rather than preventively launching real attacks, one simply beefs up ones forces, preventively, so as not to fall. To be sure, there are victims, bankruptcies, people left by the wayside. Yet, overall, the capitalists as a group come off rather well, so much so that Marx says of competition that it is ordinarily their friendly society: it is less the rule of the war they wage on each other than that of the war that they dont. Can we therefore say that this State of War is a State of Peace? My word, as far as the capitalist class as a whole is concerned, yes.

But then where is the war? Elsewhere: between the capitalists and their workers. By means of competition, the capitalist class adjusts its accounts rather than settling thembut behind competition, which Marx calls an illusion, the capitalist class wages a veritable war on the working class. For, ultimately, taken at its word, this theory of preventive war shows that prevention, well conducted, spares the capitalists war against other capitalists; it shows that the working class bears the full brunt of prevention, that prevention of the pseudo-war between capitalists is a permanent war against the working class. In that, the war is not at all universal, a war of all against all, as Hobbes claims; it is a war of the capitalist class against the working class. Thus the war that the capitalist class wages on the working class simply allows the capitalists to live in peace. We had been mixing up our wars. We had mistaken competition for a war. We had forgotten the class struggle.

This essay is adapted from Louis Althussers Book on Imperialism, which appears in History and Imperialism: Writings, 19631986, previously unpublished work translated and edited by G.M. Goshgarian, and published by Polity Press.

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Louis Althusser's Class Warfare - The New York Review of Books

In Parshat Mishpatim (Shmot 22:20) we are commanded You must not abuse or oppress the ger, stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Rashi explains that we should not verbally abuse the stranger and we should not rob him of his money. Rashi adds that the word ger refers to a person who was not born in that country but came from another land to reside there.

The Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat 228:2 teaches that we must be careful how we treat strangers as we are warned over and over about this mitzvah to show how severe it is. Rabbi Eliezer HaGadol points out that there are 33 places in the Torah that remind us to treat the ger properly. Malbim counts 36.

As the Jewish people experienced being the other for so many years, starting from when Avraham arrived in the land of Cnaan followed by Yitzchaks visit to Grar, Yaakovs time in Aram and Bnai Yisraels sojourn and slavery in Egypt, one would think that it would be obvious that we would know to treat strangers properly. As well, when the Jewish people were exiled of after the destruction of the First and Second Temples, we became strangers once again and we were persecuted throughout the ages. One would think that we would have learned our lesson.

Unfortunately, after all of the difficulties that we have experienced as a nation, we have still not learned our lesson. In Israel today, there are many foreign workers who are brought in to care for the elderly and to work in agriculture and construction. Many of these workers earn minimum wage and do not receive all of the same benefits as Israeli workers.

In the past, there were Israelis who complained that we should not bring in foreign workers as they are taking jobs away from Israelis who were unemployed. Because of these accusations, there was an experiment done to see if Israelis could handle these jobs which require a lot of manual labor. The Israelis who tried working as caregivers, as well as in the fields and in construction could not even last one day due to the taxing work. They begged to have a foreign worker take over for them.

Yet there are politicians who are trying to make it more difficult for the foreign workers by trying to take away their benefits or by taxing the owners of the fields who hire foreign workers. Instead of appreciating the fact that the foreign workers are filling a void, they are often being mistreated.

We must review the mitzvot pertaining to treating the stranger with respect and show our appreciation for those who dutifully care for our elderly residents, those who risk their lives to pick vegetables under constant threats of rocket fire and those who are endangered by difficult working conditions while trying to help us build up the State of Israel.

Sharona holds a BA in Judaic Studies from Stern College and an MS in Jewish Education from Azrieli Graduate School, Yeshiva University. Sharona was the first Congregational Intern and Madricha Ruchanit at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, NY. After making aliya in 2004, Sharona founded Torat Reva Yerushalayim, a non profit organization based in Jerusalem which provides Torah study groups for students of all ages and backgrounds.

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Treating foreigners with respect | Sharona Margolin Halickman - The Times of Israel

When the woman suffrage movement first began in the mid-19th century, its champions had all become human-rights activists in the searing fires of the abolitionist movement. In 1838, Angelina Grimk, renegade daughter of South Carolina slave owners, laid down the basics of womens rights, in her book, Letters to Catherine Beecher: Whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights.

In the aftermath of Civil War, emancipation and the constitutional enfranchisement of African American men, this expansive alliance on behalf of human rights tragically faltered. Enraged at the exclusion of women from enfranchisement in the 15th Amendment, Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted that, if political rights were not to be accorded to all citizens, then educated women, descendants of the Founding Fathers, should take precedence. Betraying her underlying elitism, she wrote in the womens rights periodical The Revolution, in December 1868, If woman find it hard to bear the oppressive laws of a few Saxon Fathers, of the best orders of manhood, what may she not be called to endure when all the lower orders, native and foreigners, Dutch, Irish, Chinese and African, legislate for her and her daughters?

From that point on, for the next 50 years, the major suffrage organizations and their most prominent leaders were white, middle-class women and their arguments rested on the allegedly lofty characteristics of women-as-women rather than on universal human rights. Yet by the turn of the century, national woman suffrage had still not been secured, and political realities were making the constitutional enfranchisement of women a distant dream.

The demand for woman suffrage could not succeed unless it came from a mass movement, reflecting the voices of a diverse and large portion of the nations women. Luckily for the generations of American women who followed, even during the frustrating decades when the previous, exclusionary formulation ruled, American suffragism had grown far beyond its origins.

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Certainly, once one looks past the top tiers of national suffrage leadership, the suffrage movement was not uniformly white. The determined, eager suffragism of African American women is impressive. The battle that had been fought to win and increasingly to protect the voting rights of African American men had affected them deeply. As early as 1874, African American activist Mary Ann Shadd Cary presented her case, as recorded in the official record of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee: The colored women of this country though heretofore silent, in great measure upon the question of the right to vote have neither been indifferent to their own just claims nor to their demand for political representation.

By the late 19th century, just two generations out of slavery, and despite Jim Crow-era racist violence and segregation, many more African American women were realizing that political rights were crucial to their ability to protect their communities and to advance themselves as women. If white American women, with all their natural and acquired advantages, need the ballot, explained, Adele Hunt Logan of Alabama, in the pages of the Colored American Magazine in 1905, how much more do Black Americans, male and female need the strong defense of the vote to help secure them their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? At the national level, the southern-controlled Democratic Party was totally closed to African Americans. However, at the state level in the North and West, wherever African Americans had standing in local Republican parties, black women were well organized and politically sophisticated participants in the battle for the vote.

Nor was the movement solely the realm of wealthy, educated women. In the early 20th century, white immigrant working-class women also turned to the suffrage movement in great numbers. Working in factories, joining trade unions, moving freely through major cities, they helped to turn 20th century woman suffragism into a mass movement. First and second-generation Italian, Irish and Eastern European Jewish women were especially prominent in the ranks of the great suffrage parades of the 1910s in New York City; Chicago; San Francisco; Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.

Inspired by the spirit of Progressive Era social change, aware of new protective labor and housing laws, these working-class women recognized the importance of making their own political presence felt and influencing how these laws would be shaped and enforced. In researching my new book, Suffrage: Womens Long Battle for the Vote, I discovered this forceful 1907 statement by a British-born garment worker speaking before the New York legislature: Gentlemen, we need every help in the battle of life . To be left out by the State just sets up a prejudice against us. Bosses think and women come to think themselves that they dont count for so much as men.

The most famous womens labor event of these years, the Triangle Shirtwaist Strike of 1910-1911, highlighted the importance of working-class womens suffrage activism. New York City garment workers wore suffrage pins when they picketed their factories and noted that, if they had the right to vote, police would not be so quick to harass and arrest them. The famous heroine of the strike, garment worker Clara Lemlich, issued this challenge to New York legislatures: We are here Senators. We are 800,000 strong in New York State alone. The name of the organization behind the pamphlet that circulated her words is telling: the Wage Earners Suffrage League.

In the final years of the suffrage movement, this power of this unprecedented mass movement was clear. Though sometimes separated in their own organizations, black and white, rich and poor women were unified by their common exclusion from the political affairs of the nation. When the U.S. Constitution was finally amended to prohibit states from political discrimination on the grounds of sex, all celebrated their victory. Speaking before the final convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1920, its leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, declared that the suffragists of this country in the last half century, more than any other group of people in this land, have kept the flying flag of the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the principles of the constitution, and have held them before the people of this country.

However, looking back at the victory of the suffrage movement in her 1933 book, Women in the Twentieth Century, sociologist Sophonsiba Breckenridge insightfully observed that, much like at the end of the World War, the demobilization that began after 1920 was followed by the development of a diversification of aims and interest among and between those who had been united in the attack upon a common enemy.

As women of different politics, races and classes sought to make use of their new voting power, their differences reemerged. Many of those divisions are still an important factor in American politics a century later but they have been overcome before, and may be again. After all, the history of woman suffrage is not yet over.

Ellen Carol DuBois is the author of Suffrage: Womens Long Battle for the Vote, available Feb. 25 from Simon & Schuster.

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American Women Won the Right to Vote After the Suffrage Movement Became More Diverse. Thats No Coincidence - TIME

Key takeaways:

The United Nations is calling on the fashion industry to help it achieve its Sustainable Development Goals, which include relevant topics like ending poverty and climate action.

In addition to lessening its impact, fashion is positioned to serve as an awareness platform for the public, the UN says.

At the core of fashions connection to the SDGs is the promotion of sustainable consumption, which involves moving away from selling more to consumers.

The evening before New York Fashion Week kicked off in February, guests gathered at an art space in Manhattan for an event unrelated to the runway shows. The art exhibition Arcadia Earth and the UN Office for Partnerships hosted representatives from Gucci, Theory and Mara Hoffman, along with influencers like Sierra Quitiquit and Marina Testino to discuss the connections between fashion and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The UNs main message: Fashion has a responsibility and the creative leadership to help it achieve its sustainability goals, which were laid out in 2015 to benefit the planet and its inhabitants. Also known as the Global Goals or SDGs, they cover areas like ocean health, gender equality and sustainable consumption. While nonprofits and developmental agencies are closely tied to these goals, achieving what the UN has laid out will be impossible without participation from the private sector. Fashion ranks high among the industries that need to take action given its size and impact.

To Arcadia Earth founder Valentino Vettori, who spent two decades in fashion, the many touch points between fashion and the UNs goals are loud and clear. Should we talk about womens rights? Its obviously connected to that. Should we talk about slavery? Its obviously connected to that, he says. The industrys consumption and pollution of water might be the most conspicuous of all. It will become the most precious thing ever and we use 2,000 gallons of it to make a pair of jeans? I dont think so.

Fashion can improve its practices in all these areas, the UN believes, and it can also be a platform to reach more people regarding the substance of these challenges.

The UN is offering resources as it calls on fashion to do its part, through a combination of brand-specific efforts, cross-industry alliances and public service, to transform production habits while also putting the onus on consumers to make informed and responsible choices.

The fashion industry has incredible potential for us for advocacy, education, creativity. We need to better tell the UNs story on sustainability, and fashion is a great platform, says Lucie Brigham, chief of office, the UN Office for Partnerships. We need to engage the creative industry to help us educate customers.

Established to steer progress toward the UNs 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and designed to build on, and fill in gaps left by, the Millennium Development Goals, the SDGs are made up of calls for action like ending poverty, ocean conservation, climate change mitigation and ensuring quality education and clean water for all. Fashion is arguably most directly related to the no poverty; gender equality; decent work and economic growth; sustainable development and consumption; climate action; and partnerships goals.

The goals have helped some fashion and related companies set their priorities. A Kering spokesperson says the company used the SDGs when developing its 2025 strategy to ensure it was addressing the full suite of global challenges, from climate change to employees wellbeing. Textile Exchange, a nonprofit that works with brands and suppliers to shift to more sustainable fibres, has used the Global Goals as a framework for promoting organic and lower-impact fibres since 2016, saying they can serve not only as a risk management tool but also to drive innovation, and that investors and businesses are increasingly incorporating them into their risk and materiality assessments.

Attendees at Arcadia Earth's New York Fashion Week event in February 2020.

Arcadia Earth

Guidance from the UN can also help brands to set more ambitious goals, rather than simply meet the bare minimum. For brands already focused on issues covered by the goals, looking to the SDGs can help them solidify their priorities or shed light on areas they havent prioritised before.

UK bag and accessories brand Bottletop, founded in 2002, started exploring natural rubber as a material, says co-founder Cameron Saul, in pursuit of meeting Sustainable Development Goal 15: preserve life on land. The brand was chosen last year by the UN to produce bracelets to represent a larger public awareness campaign.

The UN came to us and said, Listen, were not going to achieve these goals unless people on the street are aware and empowered to deliver them, he recalls. According to Saul, the campaign has sold 55,000 bracelets, which are made out of upcycled illegal firearms and ocean plastic, and resulted in 900 million social impressions.

Saul argues that while awareness doesnt necessarily translate into action, it does represent the first step. The industry has enormous impacts on the planet. If you can transform that, were talking about a seismic impact on people and planet, but also fashion can be the cheerleader. It can carry people and voice in a way that nothing else can. We all relate to fashion.

#TOGETHERBAND (the bracelet that works with the UN to further advancing towards the global goals).

Bottletop

The Global Goals are also prompting companies to form partnerships to work collaboratively on an issue. The UN launched its Alliance for Sustainable Fashion last year to promote and coordinate such efforts from within the UN. The UN Office for Partnerships is trying to work with other organisations and sectors of the industry to increase these efforts, recognising that they wont necessarily happen on their own.

One initiative the UN has backed is One X One, led by Swarovski and the Slow Factory Foundation with support from the UN Office for Partnerships, which matches designers with scientists or advocates to explore solutions for various challenges; New York designer Mara Hoffman, for example, is working with workforce development programme Custom Collaborative to build a training programme for renewing garments.

The goals also raise areas to attention where the least progress is getting done. For Ayesha Barenblat, founder of the California nonprofit Remake, gender equality and opportunities for safe and inclusive employment with fair wages for all is where the fashion industry falls most short. Whether youre looking at aspiring designers or garment workers, its very unusual for an industry to be made up predominantly of women but run by men, she says. Were talking about a $3 trillion industry, but for the most part its built on degradation and poverty wages.

These issues have been documented. But Barenblat says large companies typically address them with little more than training sessions, which she calls window dressing rather than substantial change. Its more claiming the empowerment of women rather than getting to the structural issues, says Barenblat.

Some brands, though, are exploring ways to effectively address these issues, which are covered in the UN goals of gender equality, no poverty, and decent work and economic growth. US apparel and footwear brands Able and Nisolo have partnered on a campaign, the Lowest Wage Challenge, to encourage brands to share their lowest wages to boost transparency. Nudie Jeans has committed to paying workers a living wage, while apparel brand Alta Gracia runs a factory in the Dominican Republic certified by the Worker Rights Consortium to pay a living wage.

Ultimately, changing customer behaviour is necessary for many of the other efforts to succeed. Kevin Moss, global director of the nonprofit World Resources Institutes Business Center, says the goal of sustainable consumption sits at the intersection of nearly all the others. That to me is at the nexus of what people do, what people buy and the environment.

The UN describes sustainable consumption as filling peoples basic needs and improving quality of life while minimising emissions, waste, toxic materials and the use of natural resources in order to protect future generations. Its an issue that has been left out of many sustainability and development initiatives in the past. According to the international agency, worldwide material consumption reached 92.1 billion tons in 2017 a 254 per cent jump from 27 billion tons in 1970.

Jode Rodrigo de Araujo aka The Rubber Doctor in #TOGETHERBAND Voices, created by Andrew Morgan.

Andrew Morgan

The solution, he says, lies in finding models of growth that provide jobs and economic wellbeing that dont depend on selling more stuff to more people. That may include sales of more services rather than material goods; and more brands getting into resale and abandoning the model of selling only new items. Such steps will also require behaviour change on the part of consumers, but he thinks thats not unreasonable to expect, with some effort.

I don't think its innate human behaviour to want to possess more and more and more stuff. I think its been brands and industry [pushing] to make us want more, he says. Companies can play a role in shifting consumer behaviour to reverse that mentality while figuring out the business models to accommodate. If you change the model but not the behaviour, it can fail. If you change behaviour but not the business model, youll drive customers elsewhere. The trick for businesses is to be doing both at the same time. Not waiting though theyve got to do it now.

Correction: This article has been updated to reflect that Arcadia Earth is for-profit art exhibition, rather than a non-profit.

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The UN set 17 sustainability goals. It needs fashion's help meeting them - Vogue Business