Monthly Archives: May 2020

This July, it will be twenty-five years since Ernest Mandel passed away. A life-long socialist thinker and activist, Mandel played a crucial role in founding the IIRE. During the coming months, we will publish on our website texts by Mandel that were previously unavailable online. In the following essay from 1985, Mandel summarized his view on what socialism means, and why it is possible.

This paper first appeared in a collection of essays from the Cavtat Conference in Yugoslavia, Socialism on the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century, Milos Nicolic, ed., London 1985. We previously published Mandels essay Material, social and ideological preconditions for the Nazi genocide.

The Actuality of Socialism

1. What is Socialism?

According to the tradition established by Marx and Engels, socialism means the first and lower stage of communist society. It means a society of associated producers that is characterized by collective ownership of the means of production, the immediately social nature of labor and the planning o fproduction to satisfy needs (production of use-values and not commodities). It means a classless society without a state, without, that is, special organs or apparatuses for administrative, managerial or joint decision-making purposes that are divorced from the mass of citizens.

Such a society can exist only if it is managed by the producers, citizens (and consumers) themselves and only if it takes its destiny into its own hands. It must free itself from the tyranny of the ''laws of the market" (the law of value), from the tyranny of despotic authorities, and from that of the state. Priorities for the use of available resources and social labor-time must be decided on the basis of a choice between structured and coherent proposals. This is why socialism must be based upon political pluralism in the true sense of the word and not upon a one-party state or a single "remote-control" apparatus. True pluralism implies a coherent choice between alternative national (and international) priorities. It does not preclude a large number of decentralizing mechanisms at the local, regional, and neighborhood levels and in the various branches of social and economic activity, nor of organs in which democratic choices can be made at the base.

Given the uneven development of the socio-political balance of power at the international level, the construction of such a socialist society may begin at the national level But socialism can only be fully realized on a world scale; it must, that is, encompass the main countries in the world.

Defined in these terms, socialism means neither an earthly paradise, the fulfilment of millenarian dreams, nor the establishment of a perfect harmony between the individual and society or between man and nature. It means neither the "end of history" nor the end of the contradictions that characterize human existence. The aim pursued by the supporters of socialism is more modest: to resolve six or seven contradictions which have for centuries caused human suffering on a mass scale. There must be an end to man's exploitation and oppression of man and to wars and large-scale violence between human beings. Hunger and inequality must be banished forever. There must be an end to institutionalized and systematic discrimination against women and against races, ethnic groups, and national or religious minorities, which are regarded as being "inferior." There must be no more economic or ecological crises.

As a socialist, I am convinced that the resolution of these contradictions would represent a great leap forward in terms of progress and emancipation, both for our species as a whole and for the individuals who make it up. It would be as great a leap forward as the abolition of cannibalism and slavery. I am convinced that such progress is possible only if private property, commodities, and money are abolished. Their abolition is a precondition for the withering away of social classes and the state. But I am also convinced that the alternative to the withering away of classes and the state, and to the emergence of a worldwide socialist federation, is not simply maintenance of the status quo. The alternative is the possible collapse of human civilization or even the extinction of the human race as a result of increasingly unbridled competition and increasingly violent conflicts.

2. Socialism is Necessary

The areas in which self-destructive tendencies are most obvious are the race to acquire nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and the threats hanging over the ecological balance. This is not the place to enumerate the countless scientific sources which show how current trends may lead to the destruction of human life on earth. In these areas, the alternative is no longer "socialism or barbarism." It is "socialism or death."

The threat of pauperization and famine in the least privileged zones of the "Third World" and the possibility that a considerable proportion of the population of the imperialist metropolis will be transformed into marginalized or semi-marginalized strata are scarcely less threatening. If we accept as realistic that there will be forty million unemployed in the imperialist countries by 1985-87, and if we also take into account their families, short-time workers, the women "expelled from the labor market" and the young people who have never had access to it, we find that one hundred million men and women in the so-called "rich" countries are already suffering from material, intellectual, and moral poverty. And this represents only the first phase of a crisis which is far from having reached its apogee. If the bourgeoisie succeeds in establishing a "dual society," that figure will have to be at least doubled.

The illusion that things can go on as they are for a long time without having too catastrophic an effect is based upon the hypothesis that the capitalist market economy is infinitely flexible and that the so-called "self-regulating mechanisms" are all-powerful. It is also fostered by the fact that crises, wars, and catastrophes have not replaced the normal routine of ''business as usual," hut simply interrupt it periodically. One has to be blind not to see that these periodic ruptures are becoming more extensive and more serious decade by decade. Anyone who argues that this is not the case is guilty of making a very partial reading of the history of our century.

The First World War cost ten million Jives; the Second eighty million. How many will the Third World War cost? Between the World Wars, there were a score or so of "local wars." Since the Second World War there have been about fifty. The figure is rising year by year, if not month by month.

In the inter-war period, some thirty million people died of famine in Asia and Africa. That figure could easily be multiplied by at least ten for the period beginning in 1945. As we can see from the tragedy of Ethiopia, the real catastrophes are just beginning in this area. Between the two wars, torture gradually spread to twenty countries; it is now endemic, even institutionalized, in at least sixty or seventy. The only good point is that there bas not been another Auschwitz or another Hiroshima since 1945. But who would be so bold as to guarantee that we will be able to say the same thing in twenty years' time?

In the first half of the century, desertification and deadly pollution of water and of the atmosphere were marginal and restricted to a few areas of the planet. But now we suddenly learn that, quite apart from the catastrophes affecting Amazonia and the Sahel, half the forests in Germany are dying.

If it is irresponsible to underestimate these cumulative effects, it is equally so to conclude that we have already reached the point of no return. That pessimistic argument is simply a rationalization of fear, disappointment, and anxiety. It serves to discourage people and not to mobilize them. It is not based upon any scientific argument. It strongly resembles a deliberate abdication of reason.

All living species have an instinct for self-preservation, and they all cling dearly to life. Mankind is no exception. And that is why attempts to prevent catastrophes and to put out the fire if there is still time will always prevail. That is why the struggle for socialism will continue. It can still finally prevail in the face of defeatist and fatalist views of the future of mankind.

The thesis that we are inevitably heading towards the abyss is based upon a false diagnosis of the causes of the apocalypse that threatens us. Our self-destructive tendencies do not derive from our ''hereditary capital" or from some "congenital flaw" (the terms may be biological, but the underlying notion looks suspiciously like "original sin"), from "male aggression" or from the inevitable results of science and technology (a belief which, yet again, is suspiciously reminiscent of the Biblical warning not to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge). The catastrophes that threaten us are not the result of too much reason or too much science, but of too little of both.

Modem technology may have caused some disasters, hut only because we know too little about its side effects. Increased knowledge and new advances in the natural sciences would increase rather than decrease our ability to prevent catastrophes. The real problem lies elsewhere. Progress in the natural sciences and man's increased control over nature have gone hand in hand with - it might in fact be more accurate to say that they have been paid for or insured by - an almost total lack of control over mankind's "second nature," in other words, our social environment, the evolution of social structures and the determination of our social behavior. That is the real source of the catastrophes that threaten us.

One of the great insights of Marxism is the realization that science and technology are socially determined. Increasingly, the majority of non-Marxist scientists are also taking that view. The history of science and technology does of course have its own logic. It makes demands that are intrinsic to each particular discipline, hut which are also closely related to developments in "adjacent" disciplines. But the major developments reflect an overall social logic and derive from new questions and new mental structures which, in their turn, relate to specific social needs and interests.

In that sense, the nuclear arms race is not the inevitable outcome of quantum physics. Developments in synthetic chemistry do not inevitably result in the pollution of the oceans. Desertification is not the inevitable outcome of attempts to increase the productivity of agricultural labor. All these threats and disasters result from the subordination of technological and scientific developments to the tyranny of capital, to the logic whereby each firm seeks to maximize its own profits, regardless of the long-term consequences for the labor force, for society as a whole or for the ecological balance, because it is subject to the implacable imperatives of competition and capital accumulation.

It is not the inevitable fragmentation of knowledge that produces political, ecological, and economic catastrophes. It is the determination of investment decisions by fragmented short- and medium-term interests that leads to crisis and wars because the overall or longterm effects are not taken into account. It is there and there alone that we have to look for the origins of the ever-more explosive combination of partial rationality and overall irrationality which characterizes the tendential development of bourgeois society.

This brings us to the heart of the problem. Socialism is necessary because the logic of bourgeois society, the logic of private property and the market economy, the logic of the quest for private wealth and, above all, the mechanisms of universal competition that they stimulate in every area of individual and social behavior, are feeding an infernal dynamic which is leading us to disaster. Investments are placed anywhere and everywhere, even if they result in debts totalling $7 trillion and unemployment for hundreds of millions of people (taking the metropolis and the "Third World" together). Manufacturing goes on at any cost, regardless of the natural resources it destroys. We go on constructing nuclear bombs capable of killing the population of the world ten, twenty, or even forty times over, regardless of the monstrous absurdity of "overkill."

In the modem world, this dynamic is increasingly out of control. It applies both to the capitalist part of the world and to the division of the world into "two camps" (but unfortunately both "camps" are part of the same geographical and biological world). It can still be blocked, halted, reversed, or done away with by the victory of internationalism socialism. Mankind's acquisition of sovereignty over the way in which political, social, economic, and material existence is organized has become a matter of life and death. Mankind must gain control over the forces of nature. It is only insofar as the forces of nature are not mastered that they can kill. Nature can be controlled and used to give the vast majority of the men and women who live on this planet a better and happier life.

No purely mechanical force and no "inevitable chain of events" could prevent a worldwide association of 750 million producers from putting an immediate and permanent end to the manufacture of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons - or even all heavy weaponry - from destroying existing weapon stocks or from taking supervisory and coercive measures to ensure that its decisions are respected. They would simply have to be the masters of their own factories and run them collectively. If 750 million wage eamers became associated producers, no "objective economic law'' and no "iron laws" could prevent them from sharing out the total labor time needed to produce the goods and services they required to meet their rational needs, provided that they immediately introduced a twenty-five- or twenty-hour working week rather than dividing mankind into two groups: the men and women who slave away for forty-eight or fifty-six hours a week and the men and women who no longer perform any socially recognized labor and accordingly receive less and less reward for doing so.

3. Socialism is Possible

The productive forces have developed to such an extent that they have now created the preconditions for the abolition of penury and commodity production on a world basis. This would, of course, require a radical redistribution of resources and the elimination of the underutilization or wasteful use of resources (arms production, products harmful to health, etc.). It would also require a redeployment of investments in order to prioritize the satisfaction of basic needs on the basis of the democratically-determined preferences of producers and consumers, and not on the basis of arbitrary or technocratic diktats.

I am, however, convinced that existing resources would make it possible to resolve these problems within a reasonably short space of time. There is no reason to suppose that poverty is inevitable and that there are not sufficient goods and services to cover basic needs in terms of food, clothing, reasonably comfortable housing, culture, leisure, and public transport. It is not utopian to speak of the abolition of commodity production. lt is certainly possible to feed all the men and women who live on our planet without destroying the ecological balance, provided that population growth is controlled on a worldwide basis, and the indications are that it is starting to be controlled. The currently available scientific data show no ground for fears that energy or mineral resources will inevitably be exhausted.i

A worldwide redistribution of the resources and net products required to eliminate famine and poverty does not necessarily imply a fall in the standard of living enjoyed by the average producer in the northern hemisphere. Redistribution could to a large extent be achieved using resources which are now wasted or make no contribution to living standards. Two figures are sufficient to demonstrate this.

World military expenditure totals at least $700 billion a year. Over the last ten years, underutilization of industrial and agricultural productive capacity in the imperialist countries and the dependent semi-industrialized countries has averaged twenty percent. The total cost is twice that of military expenditure. The proportion of labor time which is not used for productive purposes (the time during which existing plant and workers produce nothing) is at least as high in the USSR and Eastern Europe, where an eight-hour working day is considered "normal." (Andropov once stated that thirty-three percent of all hours worked in industry were wasted annually.) If we add these figures together, we get some idea of our potential ability to meet mankind's basic needs, even if we do have to take into account the need for prudence in the use of what, on the basis of our current knowledge, are considered non-renewable natural resources.

Commodity production will obviously not disappear all at once. Nor will it disappear simply because some authority decrees that it should do so, even if that authority is the expression of a majority democratic decision verified in free pluralist elections. It will be in the interests of the associated producers who control the means of production to economize their productive effort as much as possible. That, together with the need to extend consumption to more than elementary needs, will create socio-economic tensions. The optimal way (and not merely one possible way) to resolve those tensions will be to maintain a commodity and monetary sector - essentially restricted to "superfluous" products-alongside the non-commodity and non-monetary sector in which the principle of distribution in accordance with need applies. The coexistence of the two sectors means that there can be no sudden leap from the present organization of the economy in the capitalist and so-called socialist countries to the truly socialist economy envisaged by Marx and Engels. There will have to be a transition period. That period has already begun in the so-called socialist countries, hut it is far from over.

The historical logic of the transition period is to ensure the gradual disappearance both of commodity production and of any determination or distribution of the surplus social product other than in accordance with the free and democratically determined wishes of the majority of producers. It will at the same time ensure the disappearance of social inequality and of the underlying material conditions which divide society into a managerial and a "managed" sector. These conditions include the length of the working day and modes of access to knowledge and data which mean that only part of society is in a position to manage and that the rest of society is relegated to productive activities. The disappearance of commodity production is therefore bound up with the withering away of social classes and of the state.

The principal aspects of the third technological revolution, which has now entered the phase of gradual generalization and ''vulgarization," mean that in material terms it is quite possible to introduce these radical transformations. As semi-automation evolves toward robotization and full automation, the reduction of the working day by half in no way implies a fall in material production as a whole. Micro-electronics now mean that all men and women can have full democratic access to data and knowledge. All this is technically possible and relatively easy to achieve. The problem is political and social: how are we to ensure that the enormous possibilities opened up by modern technology do not lead to new catastrophes, new abuses, new privileges, and new monopolies enjoyed by minorities? There is only one answer: they must be subject to open democratic control by a collective organization of producer-consumers.

Historical experience, including that of the so-called socialist countries, definitely shows that the survival of a market economy, except in absolutely marginal terms, inevitably implies the survival of competition for access to the means of consumption and exchange (and at least certain means of production), to the survival of a tendency towards the private accumulation of wealth and therefore to the survival of the socio-economic motivations that lie behind them. Far from being an "innate part of human nature," these motivations did not exist for hundreds of thousands of years. Until very recently, they did not exist in the village and tribal communities in which the majority of mankind lived. But once commodity production expands (or, which amounts to the same thing, when its abolition applies to only certain areas of socio-economic activity), "socialist propaganda," "education," and "totalitarian indoctrination" can do nothing to prevent the spread of such motivations.

Socialism will finally become a new consolidated social system capable of reproducing itself automatically and without external constraints - and this includes constraints exercised by the state - when cooperation and solidarity between producer-consumers replace the selfish urge to acquire private wealth. Cooperation and solidarity were hegemonic in primitive society and must eventually become universal human characteristics. It is not utopian to speak of cooperation replacing selfishness, as both have anthropological roots. The abolition of penury and of the "struggle for life" it generates will provide the material basis for the change.

But the change in social climate and the psychological revolution required if this is to take place imply more than the development of the productive forces and more than a mere "implosion" of material wealth and well-being. They imply a revolution in the relations of production and exchange which will make cooperation and solidarity between producer-consumers the motor force behind economic activity. That revolution will have to be reflected in everyday life and the abolition of material and social privileges will have to be visible to all. None of this can be realized unless commodity production and the competition it generates disappear.

It is not my intention to describe the various stages that will lead to the disappearance of commodity production or the world that will emerge from the general overthrow of capitalism and from the achievements of the so-called socialist countries. I will not even raise the question of whether those stages are "universal" or whether it might not be preferable, given the current state of our knowledge, to restrict the de bate to a pragmatic analysis of the major problems that will have to be solved in terms of democratic planning and self-management, of the problems that arise and will continue to arise from the real process of the socialist revolution and from the bureaucratic deformations which have until now marred all such revolutions. It is precisely because these problems are so vital for the problematic of socialism that I intend to raise them in very genera! historical terms.

4. Which Socio-Political Forces Can Establish Socialism?

Scientific socialism is based upon the thesis that a classless society cannot come about through Aufklrung alone; it will not result from education and "rationalist" propaganda, "science," a "desire for emancipation" or a noble (or ethical) desire to ensure the greatest possible good for the greatest number of people. Like Marx and Engels, socialist militants do of course have such motives, and they are essential if there is to be any sustained and lasting socialist activity. No socialist society can emerge without socialist theory (Engels even explicitly used the term "socialist science") or without a deep desire for emancipation.

But although these motives and impulses are necessary, the victory of socialism requires a social force whose material interests coincide with the abolition of class divisions within society. Socialism can result only from the real movement of a real class capableii of overcoming the obstacles that the bourgeois system and the remaining vestiges of pre-bourgeois society have placed on the road to classless society. Private ownership of the means of production is the major obstacle, hut it is far from being the only one.

Marx's greatest contribution to the socialist cause, to the producers' struggle for their emancipation and, more generally, to the human race, was to provide a material basis for the old socialist project, which is in fact as old as the division of society into classes. Mankind has never accepted class divisions as inevitable and has rebelled against them throughout the ages, regardless of the relative success or failure of its rebellions. Marx's contribution helped the effective and consciously assumed organization of the working class (which is much older than Marxism) to merge into the socialist project. The fusion of the two reached its high point in the first third of this century, in the period between 1905 and 1932. Since then, it has been affected by a latent crisis. The crisis has at times taken the explosive or catastrophic form of historical defeats (Hitler, Stalin). The question is: are these conjunctural and historically transient crises which the real class movement can overcome? Or are they structural and historically irreversible crises? In political-strategic terms, it might be reformulated as: do the culminating points of the proletarian revolution which Marx and Engels outlined on the basis of their historical analysis of the class struggle in the latter part of the nineteenth century lie ahead of us or behind us?

The problem can be subdivided into three questions:

1. Once capitalist society has reached a given threshold of industrialization, does the proletariat actually have the economic, social, psychological, and moral resources needed to wage a victorious struggle against the bourgeoisie, and can it at the same time begin to construct a classless society with at least some chance of success?

2. Can it preserve those resources once capitalism reaches the limits of its world development and the system enters into a period of crisis? Or are those resources beginning to disintegrate as a concomitant of the break-up of capitalist "civilization" itself?

3. Are we faced with an exceptional historical impasse? Could it be that the proletariat is still economically (materially) capable of leading the world to socialism, but that the moral, psychological and social obstacles -in other words, the subjective obstacles -are now insurmountable? One of the obstacles, which is most obvious at the political level, is the division of the proletariat itself. (The sectional interest of professional, industrial, regional, national, and ethnic groups are fostered by the segmentation of the labor market under capitalism, and can lead to very wide wage differentials.) Then there is the relative autonomy of the "leadership" factor, which in its turn reflects the discontinuity between the political activities of different strata within the proletariat, between their different levels of consciousness and organization, and the appearance of bureaucratic apparatuses within working-class organizations. Such apparatuses are relatively autonomous from the masses (bureaucratization) and acquire privileges which lead to the tendency to substitute the defense of the material privileges and the monopoly of organizational and political power upon which they are based for the interests of the class as a whole.

The first question is the easiest to answer in the light of the empirical data. The history of the growth and expansion of capitalism on an international scale since the industrial revolution and since the moment when Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto is also the history of the growth and expansion of the working class, of the self-organization of the working class and of the working-class struggle that inevitably accompanies it. None of Marx's predictions bas been more startlingly confirmed by history. In the 1840s, there were no more than one or two hundred trade unionists in the whole world. There are now more than two hundred million. Wherever capitalism opens a port, a workshop, a factory, or a bank - be it on a distant Pacific island or in a remote village in Amazonia or the tropical forests of Africa-sooner or later the wage earners it brings together will unite to challenge the bourgeois division of the net product into wages and profit.

Whatever birds of ill omen and pessimists may say, the mass of urban wage earners (and workers in the so-called socialist countries must of course be included in the total) continues to grow throughout the world. Even in the midst of a crisis, the number of wage earners has now reached the unprecedented figure of 750 million, which far surpasses the figures for 1914, 1940, or 1968. If agricultural wage earners are also included, the total figure is over one billion. The figure continues to rise, both in absolute terms, and as a proportion of the active population. In countries like the USA, Sweden, and Great Britain, wage earners now make up ninety percent of the active population. The number of countries in which that is the case is likely to rise. More than ever before, these colossal masses are objectively capable of taking control of the means of production and exchange they set in motion every day and of managing them in accordance with freely and consciously chosen criteria and priorities.

When we speak of "freely and consciously chosen" criteria, we emphasize one exceptional aspect of the socialist revolution and of the construction of socialism. The feature that distinguishes it from all previous social revolutions in history is the key role of the subjective or "consciousness" factor, and, therefore, of the political factor. This is why the first question is in part related to the third.

To be more accurate, this is why we have to make a distinction between the objective, socio-economic preconditions for socialism and its subjective, socio-political preconditions. And that is why our first question has to be reformulated. Socialism does not automatically or inevitably result from the development and the crisis of capitalism or from the class struggles they generate. It is only one of two outcomes: the other, as Engels pointed out when he drew a parallel with the fate of the slave society of the ancient world, being the parallel breakup of the two basic social classes. The correct way to formulate our first question is thus: have the development and crisis of capitalism created and maintained a revolutionary potential within the proletariat that will periodically allow the real movement to place the construction of a classless society on the agenda (when the subjective obstacles can be momentarily overcome).

History's answer to this question is positive. And history goes on giving it a positive answer. The most recent and most obvious manifestations of the "real class movement" -May 1968 in France, the "Hot Autumn" of 1969 in Italy, the Portuguese revolution of 1974-75 and the rise of Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980-81 - are enough to show that the historic potential is still there, even though the organized labor movement has been in crisis for the last fifty years. (In world terms, the crisis is obvious, hut that does not mean that there have not been national victories, such as that of the Yugoslav revolution, which has been strengthened by the movement towards workers' self-management. Such victories are, however, partial, limited, and contradictory, in that they take place within the framework of the general crisis.)

The answer to the second question is more debatable. In my view, however, it is quite obvious and is based, not upon some dogmatic "faith," hut upon a sound analysis of the facts as a whole. It depends largely upon the definition of the proletariat and of the nature of its "revolutionary potential," in other words, its capacity to transcend bourgeois society.

The "revolutionary potential" of the modern proletariat is basically determined by its ability to create the objective conditions for the cooperative concentration and socialization of labor and to channel its mass organizational and cooperative capacities in the direction of self-emancipation through active, conscious, and voluntary solidarity within the organs and struggles it develops to defend its interest. The corollary of all this is the proletariat's objective ability to paralyze all the economic and social mechanisms of the modern world and then to set them to work under its own leadership and in accordance with its own ends.

If we analyze these conditions, it immediately becomes apparent that they are not specific to industrial manual workers (which is not to deny that industrial concentration obviously creates the most favorable conditions for the development of the above qualities). The important point is that they apply to wage earners or, to use the classic Marxist definition, to those individuals who are economically obliged to sell their labor power. (All such individuals belong to the proletarian class.)

Wage levels are in themselves irrelevant, provided that the economic obligation is reproduced (provided, that is, that wages do not reach such a level as to allow a large amount to be set aside for the acquisition of means of production or even for the accumulation of capital). The nature of the labor involved (manual or intellectual, "productive" or non-productive of surplus value) is equally irrelevant, especially as the historical tendency is towards concentration (large-scale unionization of assistants in department stores, clerical workers in insurance, etc.). Workers in power stations, telecommunications, and banks are as capable of paralyzing bourgeois society as workers in the steel or motor industries.

Leaving aside the question of the relative weight of the industrial manual proletariat (whether it is rising or falling in world terms is, at the moment, uncertain), the proletariat as a whole, as defined above, is definitely increasing, despite the long depression we are going through. The depression and the mutations it causes are in fact helping to increase the size of the proletariat. We are not witnessing the beginnings of a "post-industrial society." We are witnessing the gradual industrialization and mechanization of both the service sector and the industrial sector, thanks largely to microelectronics and computerization. All long-term statistics contradict the argument that this will lead to a huge deconcentration of labor (or even to a deconcentration of both capital and labor via the expansion of small-scale family firms). Given the innovatory and experimental role played by small firms and individual entrepreneurs, deconcentration in the "leading sectors" is a classically transient phenomenon. Once success is assured, concentration is inevitable, as the home computer sector has found to its cost in the USA, Great Britain, and Japan.

For the moment, the capitalist crisis is unlikely to lead to the break up of the proletariat. It is, however, likely to lead to increased possibilities of a division between those who keep their jobs and those who lose them, hut that problem is as old as capitalism itself, and the labor movement can and must respond to it by fighting for a new and radical reduction in the working week. The proletariat is still the "anticapitalist subject" and the "socialist subject" par excellence. Marx analyzes the conditions which predispose the proletariat towards socialism in the first volume of Capital; history is now reproducing them within the "new" proletarian strata, sometimes with disconcerting rapidity.

The real problematic centers, then, upon the third question. It is no coincidence that that should be the case. By far the most difficult thing to achieve is the creation of the subjective preconditions for the construction of socialism, both before and after the overthrow of capitalism.

There is nothing surprising about that statement in itself. The proletarian social revolution is the first revolution in history to place the fate of society in the hands of a class which, until the day of its political victory (and for a long period afterwards), remains economically and culturally dependent and exploited (oppressed). Whereas all previous social revolutions have resulted in the transfer of power to classes which have already achieved economic hegemony and the ideological hegemony that goes with it, it would be quite utopian to imagine that the proletariat could seize economic power within capitalist society. It would be even more utopian to imagine that it could achieve an ideological hegemony while it is still exploited and dependent in economic terms.

The consequences of its economic and ideological dependency currently restrict a potential for self-organization, cooperation, and class solidarity which, in other terms, results from the proletariat's conditions of existence within bourgeois society. The clash between these two tendencies gives rise both to the daily routine of proletarian life, with its "realism" or tendency to adapt, and to the periodic emergence of large-scale class conflicts (mass strikes, general strikes, political crises, pre-revolutionary crises, revolutionary situations) during which the overthrow of capitalism suddenly becomes possible in the short term.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the major cycles of the proletarian class struggle have been based upon this dialectic, which is itself governed by a deeper dialectic between "subjective and objective factors in history." The cycles may have varied from region to region and even from country to country, but the overall historical tendencies they represent can still be identified.

The first general upswing led to the revolution of 1848 and then to its defeat. this was followed by a long period of decline and then a slow recovery interrupted by the victory and defeat of the Paris Commune. A second general upswing beginning in the 1890s culminated in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The defeat of the revolution in Central Europe in 1919-23 then "overdetermined" the fate of the Russian Revolution itself. This new upswing then gave way to a period of decline and to a series of increasingly severe defeats (Japan, Germany, and Spain) culminating in the Second World War and the spread of fascism throughout almost the whole of the continent of Europe, from Gibraltar to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. The Resistance and the re-emergence of the revolutionary struggle produced a new upsurge which reached its high point with the victories of the Chinese and Yugoslav revolutions. This phase was, however, also marked by heavy defeats in Western Europe, the USA, and Japan (stabilization of capitalism, McCarthyism, and the Cold War).

This time, the decline of the revolutionary struggle was not worldwide. Nourished by the anti-imperialist liberation movement, the revolution spread to Indochina, Cuba, and Nicaragua. But for at least two decades, there was a real decline in revolutionary activity in the northern hemisphere, and it lasted until the new upsurge of 1968. Even so, the absence of revolutionary victories in the northern hemisphere bas had a negative effect on the world balance of power, as was the long-standing passivity of the American and Russian proletariats.

The dialectic between daily routine and periodic revolutionary breakthroughs relates in its turn to the dialectic between "mass and leadership" or, more accurately, between the real class movement and its political expression. The fact that we have to recognize that the proletariat can periodically overcome the subjective obstacles that bar the road to socialism does not detract from the need to recognize that one of the main features of the last fifty years bas been the crisis within the practice of the organized labor movement (both its social-democratic and its Stalinist branches). This crisis weighs heavily upon the possibility of ensuring the worldwide victory of socialism in the late twentieth century.

This is all the more serious in that the crisis in the labor movement is increasingly bound up with the crisis affecting the "construction of socialism" in those countries which have abolished capitalism. The models of economic, political, cultural, and social management provided by those countries are themselves in crisis. The crisis in the construction of socialism combined with the capitalist crisis and with the crisis in the practice of the organized labor movement to sow objective doubts, scepticism, and demoralization in the minds of the exploited and the oppressed, not only in terms of which "socialist models" to follow, but also in terms of the historical ability of wage earners to emancipate themselves. These now obstacles can only be overcome by life itself and by new historical experiences (though theoretical contributions may have a decisive role to play in paving the way for them). Fortunately, the "real movement" inevitably produces "new models," as during May 1968 and as with Solidarnosc.

Insofar as it continues to gather strength and to gain experience from daily life (economic strikes, electoral movements, struggles for democratic reforms, etc.), the real class movement will continue to give rise to periodic explosive crises in bourgeois society and to the possibility of radical breakthroughs. As Marx and Engels always pointed out, socialists must prepare themselves for these crises and breakthroughs, and they must prepare the masses for them by taking the opportunity to demonstrate the audacity and the decisive role of revolutionary initiatives. In world terms, this is more feasible than it has ever been. In its initial phases, it may in fact be inevitable. History will teach those who believe that the "cycle of revolutions" is over the negative lesson they deserve. In 1905, the twentieth century began under the sign of revolution and counter-revolution. The twentieth century will end and the twenty-first will begin under the same sign.

The proletariat has two great allies. The first is the super-exploited peasantry of the "Third World," which is often motivated by powerful anti-imperialist liberation movements; the worker-peasant alliance was the motor force behind the victories of the Yugoslav, Chinese, Indochinese, Cuban, and Nicaraguan revolutions. It also finds new allies in the new social movements born of mass revolts against the nuclear and ecological catastrophes that threaten us, and against acute situations of oppression (the women's liberation movement). All these movements affect broad strata outside the proletariat itself. As we can see from an analysis of the conditions which make "socialism or death" such a very real dilemma, they have within them an extremely powerful anticapitalist and progressive potential. But that potential can only be realized if the labor movement succeeds in uniting them around clear anticapitalist aims, without trying to deprive them of their individual vitality, without denying their autonomy and without turning them into mere backup forces in an attempt to pressurize capitalism into "adapting."

The victory of socialism will not come about as the result of a world war (a monstrous absurdity) or because the socialist camp is obviously economically superior to the capitalist camp (an eventuality which is hard to imagine in the foreseeable future). It will come about in the manner forecast by Marx and Engels: through the transformation of the movement for the emancipation of wage eamers in the major countries of the world into an association of producers that can take control of the means of production and exchange by establishing a system of political pluralism and democratically planned self-management. That transformation will result from a succession and combination of political, social, and economic crises produced by bourgeois society itself. It will be articulated with the movement for the emancipation of producers in the so-called socialist countries as it moves towards real workers' self-management (planning and distribution of the social product under workers' control and management) and political pluralism (the exercise of democratic political power by the productive masses; without this, workers' self-management can have no real content).

In other words, socialism is still a possibility. The stakes are enormously high. The difficulties should not be underestimated. But, more than ever before, devoting one's life to the emancipation of all exploited and oppressed peoples and to the creation of a classless society is the only ambition worthy of the human race.

Endnotes:

iOver the last twenty-five years, agricultural production has in fact risen faster than the population of the world. than the population of the world. Discoveries of new sources of natural energy (including oil) have risen faster than energy consumption. In bath cases, the ratio of one to the other is two to one.

iiThe concept of the "real movement for the emancipation of the real proletariat" is to be found in the works of Marx and Engels. The concept of"real socialism" is not. That concept is reductionist ("socialism = the abolition of private property," if that), dogmatic and idealist. It is arrived at "by definition," independently of the way in which the producers see their own situation and independently of their actual reactions to it (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, China, Poland...). It then becomes an essentially apologetic concept and is actually opposed to the real movement for the emancipation of the real class. This is no accident. According to Marx and Engels, socialism is inconceivable unless the working class emancipates itself. And, unlike Molire's Monsieur Jourdain, who wrote prose without realizing it, the working class cannot emancipate itself unless it realizes what it is doing.

Originally posted here:

1985: Mandel on the necessity and possibility of socialism - International Institute fro Research and Education

The youth theatre sector is where the actors, playwrights and directors of the future first learn their craft, and where a love of the performing arts is instilled in audiences who may well grow up to become the next generation of theatre company subscribers.

That future is now under threat following the Australia Councils decision to defund a range of companies who are collectively classified as theatre for young people (TYP).

Companies as storied and respected as Barking Gecko (which celebrated its 30th anniversary last year), St Martins Youth Arts Centre, Polyglot, Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) and Shopfront Theatre for Young People have consequently had their core funding drastically impacted, threating both their viability and their work with young people across the nation.

Read: Sector in shock as Australia Council 4-year funding announced

While our core earned revenue is through a paid workshop program, the programs that we run to support disadvantaged young people, marginalized young people, people from diverse backgrounds are central to the companys philosophy. Those programs are subsidized by the company in order for them to run, explained Fraser Corfield, Artistic Director of the Sydney-based ATYP.

And so one of the things that were examining is, if we lose a significant proportion of our operational funding, then we do not have the capacity to support the disadvantaged and marginalised communities that the company has been committed to supporting for so many years, and there are significant issues with that.

In Melbourne, the loss of organisational funding means St Martins capacity to create work with young people will also be significantly reduced, according to Artistic Director and Co-CEO Nadja Kostich.

It means, in the end, less contact with our young people, less ability to develop their voices. These are the people that we need to be developing and spending more on more time, more resources. Yes, theyre future artists. Yes, theyre future art lovers. But we also work with young people in exploration of their world view, in them as humanitarians, as creative thinkers in the world and thats whats at stake because of this new OzCo model, she told ArtsHub.

Kostich added: But we also have to remember that what it also means is less resources. Because keeping the doors open and making new work is carried on the backs of people - and real people burn out.

- Nadja Kostich, St Martins

Defunding a swathe of youth companies also threatens future artists and arts workers in a direct and damaging way, said Luke Kerridge, the Artistic Director of Perths Barking Gecko Theatre.

My entire career pathway has been through Shopfront, ATYP and St. Martins, and now Barking Gecko. To see those companies defunded in one fell swoop was gut-wrenching on a personal level. So I think of all the artists who specialise in this space, whose expertise revolves around creating art for and with children, and what pathways will be available to them in the future pathways that are at risk of being lost, he said.

The slow but persistent erosion of the youth arts sector has to be acknowledged, Kerridge continued.

It sends a message to children, and the artists that create theatre for and with them, that they are dispensable in our shrinking arts ecology If you look at the messages the adult world sends to young people it's often about maintaining hierarchy and discouraging any sense of overt activism or opinion. Children are routinely underestimated by the adult world. Yet the same system expects them to then turn up at 18 as fully formed citizens ready to partake in adult life.

I cant help but see an imprint of that paradigm playing out in our arts ecology an underestimation of young audiences and of what it is we do in the youth sector, whilst still expecting the next generation of artists and audiences to turn up fully formed, he said.

A DAMAGING HISTORY

This is not the first time that theatre for young people has borne the brunt of the Australia Councils reduced capacity. As ArtsHub has previously reported, the sector has been hard-hit by successive funding blows, including in December 2015 when only three of 13 youth performing arts organisations were successful in applying for 2016 project funding.

As Corfield explained: Its an old statistic now, but in 2007 we had 21 federally funded youth arts companies. By 2022, well have three. We currently have five.

While many might assume the Brandis intervention of 2015 was the chief cause of calamity, according to Corfield the problem began much earlier, when the Australia Council abolished the dedicated Youth Arts Program Fund

The Australia Council had designated that the Youth Arts Program Fund was to be closed when the programs were revised by the Australia Council in 2014, I think it was. Ever since that announcement was first made, the youth sector has been flagging very strongly that this would have a terrible impact on the sector. And thats been played out, he said.

Whats devastating to see is that not only has that loss of the Youth Arts Program Fund seen so many of the smaller companies lose funding, but its now obviously extended to the largest companies also, Corfield added.

- Fraser Corfield, ATYP

Kostich also questioned the Australia Councils decision to abolish the Youth Arts Program Fund and force companies making work with and for young people to compete on the same footing as theatre companies for adults.

In addition, she raised the question of conscious or unconscious bias towards the work of companies such as St Martins, Barking Gecko and ATYP.

Is there an actual oversight that means people are looking at our work as less important, or is there just an unconscious prejudice or judgment about work made with young people? Because since the abolition of the Youth Arts category at OzCo before that we were on a level playing field and that is absolutely no longer the case, she said.

Kerridge believes that the current situation highlights what appears to be a lack of respect for the agency and creativity of young people and their value as an audience.

We now have three federally funded theatre companies making work for young audiences in a country of 4.7 million children. The numbers just dont add up. Why are children so under-served as an audience? Why are they not a priority? he asked.

We know the impact that quality theatre for young audiences can have on children there is incredible research out there that demonstrates how regular attendance at the theatre develops childrens imaginative skill sets, and that as theyapply those skill sets to their own lives they imagine theirfutures differently.Going to the theatre actually inspires hope in children, and right now I can think of no greater gift we could be giving them.

So whichever way you look at it, whether as cultural citizens and deserving audiences of right now or audiences of tomorrow, there is a real urgency there, and a window of possibility that is being overlooked and it is children that are losing out, Kerridge said.

WHATS TO BE DONE?

Fraser Corfield believes that historically, the Australia Council has been good at recognising when there is a clear need in the sector as well as finding ways to address that need. Now is a time for such decisive intervention, he argues.

What is really clear and what the Australia Council has always been effective at doing is when a clear need within the industry is demonstrated, then the Australia Council and the Ministry for the Arts have moved to address that need, Corfield said.

Weve seen it through producers initiatives, weve seen it through Indigenous program initiatives. Its really clear that whats happened through the funding structures since the 2008 "Make It New" process began, of everyone needing to utterly justify their existence every three or four years, that the youth arts sector has been disadvantaged and its been left behind.

The result of this most recent four-year funding round, Corfield continued, has been to effectively defund the research and development arm of Australias performing arts.

Read: Defunding the sectors R&D arm sounds a warning note for the future

Weve defunded the sector that builds future audiences, that builds future artists, that showcases emerging artists and gives them spaces to try, experiment and fail. And the result of that is going to have long term impacts on the whole industry and the whole of Australian society, if something is not done to intervene sometime soon, he said.

So I think theres a really strong case to be made at this point that there needs to be special initiative funding from the Ministry for the Arts and the Australia Council to ensure that opportunities exist for young people to be participating in professionally run arts experiences and for emerging artists to have spaces where they can showcase and test their skills.

Kostich is in fervent agreement. There is an urgent need for looking into some kind of initiative or incentive that can now give a lifeline to youth arts companies because not only do our young people need it, but our world needs it. We need this in Australia. We need young people to feel regarded at this time. We need their voices heard, she concluded.

Read more:

Slamming shut a window of possibility: youth theatre in crisis - ArtsHub

TAOISEACH Leo Varadkar has set out a plan for Ireland to start to reopen over 15 weeks from May 18 but until then most of the current restrictions will remain in place.

r Varadkar said thousands of lives have been saved and Covid-19 infections prevented by the sacrifices people have made.

He said: "Let's finish what we started".

Mr Varadkar added: "While there is still so much that we do not know. Tonight there is hope.

"Hope will drive us forward as we plan to emerge safely from this crisis."

Mr Varadkar said that the coronavirus crisis has been "dispiriting", there has been the "frustration" of living with the restrictions and "uncertainty" of when life will return to normal.

He said there's also been fear of the virus itself, people are lonely in isolation and many have lost their jobs.

He said many fear losing businesses.

And he said many people have lost their lives.

He said: "I yearn for the day when it stops."

But he explained why the decision has been taken to leave most of the current restrictions in place.

He also confirmed that schools wont re-open until September.

It means the only students who may return to classrooms in the next few months will be Leaving Cert candidates.

Education Minister Joe McHugh is still hoping to bring Leaving Cert students back in July subject to adequate planning and public health advice in order to do the State exam in July and August, his spokesman said.

Planning for the Leaving Cert is still being discussed, including through the Advisory Group set up by the Department involving education stakeholders, the spokesman said. It is still hoped to bring just Leaving Cert students back in July, subject to adequate planning and public health advice.

Higher and further education colleges will also remain closed until the autumn, Mr Varadkar confirmed, but there is no surprise about that as the academic year is coming to a close.

Schools and colleges have been closed since March 12.

Schools were concerned about the practicalities of reopening in May or June.

In explaining why most restrictions will remain in place until then Mr Varadkar said "we have not yet won this fight"

He added: "every day we have too many new cases... and every day we have too many deaths".

He said that scientists and doctors have said that if restrictions are relaxed too soon the health service could be overwhelmed and "everything we've achieve could be lost".

"We must go on for a short time more," he added.

He said there is a plan to ease lock-down from May 18 but two more weeks of "tight restrictions" are needed to "weaken the virus further so it doesn't have the strength to come back".

He said the plan is to reopen the country in a "slow, staged way" of three week intervals, with the fifth phase beginning on August 10.

Mr Varadkar warned that the risk of a second wave of the virus is "ever present" and the country can only move from one phase to the next if the virus stays under control.

In the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment hygiene procedures and social distancing must be maintained.

He said "it will take some time for our lives to get back to normal, a new normal".

Mr Varadkar also said: "not long from now on some summer night we will see our friends again".

The first phase of easing restrictions will begin on May 18, when open air workers, such as builders, landscapers and roofers, will return to work in two weeks time under new plans being discussed by the Cabinet.

Among the measures that could take place then - depending on progress in fighting the spread of the virus - would be the reopening of construction sites.

Garden centres and hardware stores could also reopen on that date.

Social distancing would have to be practised at such businesses.

That date could also see people being allowed outside in groups of four including being able to meet up with non-family members.

Outdoor activities like fishing may also be allowed.

The second phase of easing restrictions will begin on June 8 when some retail outlets, marts and libraries are due to reopen.

Weddings may once again be able to take place in mid August under the governments plan for reopening the country.

Larger social gatherings, including weddings, will provisionally be permitted in the fifth phase of the lockdown exit strategy.

Garden centres, hardware stores, construction sites and other outdoor workplaces are to reopen in the first phase on May 18.

Meanwhile, older people who have been 'cocooning' are advised they can take exercise away from their homes under proposed new coronavirus regulations being discussed at Cabinet.

Over 70s will be told there is a low risk to their health if they exercise from next week but they will be urged to stay in their homes as much as possible.

And the 2km limit on travel and exercise for the wider population will be extended to 5km from next Tuesday.

The previous coronavirus restrictions were due to expire next Tuesday, May 5.

The chairman of NPHET, Mr Holohan said that if there is continued progress in suppressing the virus the group has a "high degree of confidence" restrictions can start being eased on May 18.

Health Minister Simon Harris said the "indicative roadmap" may be varied depending on the progress in fighting the disease.

"If it's possible to move more quickly of course we will," he said.

He confirmed that under the plan people won't be able to visit family who live more than 20km away until the phase that's due to begin in July.

But he suggested that some children will be able to visit grandparents who are over-70 from phase two which begins on June 8.

Mr Holohan was asked about small weddings, which are due to be allowed in August.

He declined to specify how many people would fall into the definition of a small wedding, saying: "it will depend on the progress we're making."

Mr Harris said: "We are not going to leave one restriction in place longer than it takes to save people's lives."

He confirmed that he is to sign an order tonight to extend the powers of garda to enforce restrictions until May 18.

Mr Holohan was asked about use of face coverings by the public.

He said medical-grade face masks must be reserved for health workers and patients.

But he said face coverings for the general public in certain circumstances he said they have been recommended in other countries and may form "an important part in easing restrictions" here.

He said the advice may be to use them on public transport and in certain retail settings where social distancing is difficult.

Mr Holohan said work would continue on developing guidance for face coverings in the next two weeks.

He said: "We're not saying rush out and start using them now."

Meanwhile, a number of universities have released details of their re-opening arrangements in the autumn, running into November for first years, eight weeks later than usual.

Dublin City University (DCU) will re-open for continuing students and new postgraduate taught students on Monday October 5.

DCU said the start date for incoming first years remained unclear, but it would be November at the earliest - that is based on the Leaving Cert kicking off on July 29, which is subject to public health advice.

The university said it would bring students and staff physically onto campus only when, and in a manner, that is safe to do so and would continue to be guided by the HSE and the Department of Health.

DCU has also announced that it is planning for dual-mode delivery of teaching, involving both online and face-to-face delivery as appropriate, which will involve revisions to the academic calendar, changes to programme structures, and new approaches to the use of space on campus.

And, in anticipation of social distancing requirements operating through the rest of 2020 and into 2021, DCU said it was unlikely to be able to run any large-group, campus-based activities in the first semester at the very least.

Arrangements across the higher education sector are expected to be broadly similar.

The University of Limerick (UL) also expects to welcome its first years at the beginning of November, but said it would depend on a number of factors including when the Leaving Cert takes place and the CAO offer/acceptance process.

Most other UL undergraduate and postgraduate students will begin on September 28, although some programmes, such as education and health will have different dates.

UL is also planning for a blended approach to teaching and learning, with a combination of online and face to face, such as for laboratory c lasses, studio time and some seminars and tutorials.

This will be limited in order to insure the health and safety of our community and to work within the government restrictions. Any planned approach will need to take account of the possibility that future full or partial closures may well be called for at short notice, the university stated.

UL has also announced that Erasmus and Non EU Exchange mobility programmes will be suspended for the first semester and alternative programmes will be put in place for those students who had been scheduled to study abroad for their autumn semester.

NUI Galway has also pencilled in September 28 as the start state for returning students.

The government has been cautioning all week that changes - if any - to the extraordinary limits on everyday life will be minimal amid continuing concern over the numbers of people still contracting the virus.

With many restrictions on public movement to remain in place, the Cabinet is also agreeing to extend two social welfare measures that were due to expire on May 9.

The enhanced Covid-19 illness benefit of 350 paid to people diagnosed with the disease or who are a suspected case will now be paid until June 19.

The temporary abolition of the three-day waiting period for jobseekers' benefits has also been extended until the same date.

Ministers have been informed that the extension of illness benefit by further seven weeks will cost the exchequer "in the region of" 30 million and the waiving of the waiting period for jobseekers will cost approximately 2.7m. The money for both will be drawn from the social insurance fund.

The Cabinet was informed that the temporary wage subsidy scheme is due to expire on June 19, while the special pandemic unemployment payment is due to expire a week earlier. Ministers expect that both schemes will have to be extended with some adjustments given the ongoing emergency.

Online Editors

Read the original post:

Leo Varadkar Announcement: Country will start to slowly reopen on May 18 but schools wont return until September - Independent.ie

ROCKS will melt in the sun before I allow tuition fees to be imposed on Scotlands students. So said the former First Minister, Alex Salmond, before the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections. Well, theyre not exactly melting, but the rocks of Scottish higher education are looking decidedly squiffy.

The coronavirus has hit Scottish higher education deep in the finances. Vice-chancellors are begging anyone who will listen to pop a million or 10 into their outstretched mortar boards. They say theyre about to lose half a billion through the loss of international student fees, commercial activities and events like the Edinburgh Festival (nearly half of all Fringe shows are in Edinburgh University venues)

Actually, that figure of 500 million is on the optimistic side. Reform Scotland estimates that Scotlands universities are in the hole for around 1bn, more than a quarter of their annual income. Vice-chancellors are said to be trying to downplay the truth of their finances so as not to frighten the politicians. Unlike big American universities, Scottish academic institutions do not have wealthy endowments to fall back on.

This Covid crisis could not come at a worse time. University bosses have been awarding themselves telephone salaries. The Office for National Statistics said recently that half of Scottish graduates are working in jobs that do not require university degrees. Josephine Public just hears stories of students and staff stamping out freedom of speech and ostracising academics who still think biological sex exists.

This is unfair, of course. Universities do a lot of valuable research, as the Covid-19 crisis has confirmed. But Scotlands universities have done a poor job in recent years of demonstrating their relevance. As a former Rector of Edinburgh University, I am only too aware of how insular many academics have become.

But that experience also made clear to me just how valuable our universities are. Higher education is one of the few things Scotland still does very well. We have at least five world-class universities that produce some of the best academic research in the world. Scotlands 19 universities are an 11 billion chunk of the Scottish economy and employ 140,000 people.

But St Andrews University says it is facing a 25m black hole. At least six others are running out of cash. This comes at a time when all sectors of the economy are requiring bail-outs at the same time. The Treasury is spending hundreds of billions on replacing lost incomes and trying to save small businesses.

Westminster has told the universities that theyre on their own. The Scottish Government is trying to put together a package of support, but it faces an unprecedented funding crisis of its own, post-pandemic. Tax revenues are shredded, public services are impoverished following a decade of austerity, the Barnett Formula is being squeezed. Are universities going to be saved at the expense of social care, hospitals or schools?

Universities are clearly better able to cope than primary and secondary schools with social distancing. The Open University showed the way to distance learning half a century ago, and universities have managed to move relatively seamlessly to internet learning during the current crisis.

Truth be told, theres not much formal teaching going on in humanities departments at the best of times. A handful of lectures and seminars a week is all the actual contact time that many students receive. Students do most of their work in libraries, and while that is problem right now, it should be possible to put a lot of course material online very soon.

There is of course a lot more to universities than lectures. Higher learning is a collective activity, and there is no substitute for face-to-face encounters with leading academics. Isolation was a problem for students before coronavirus came a long, and now it threatens to seriously damage their mental health.

Anyway, putting lectures online isnt going to address the funding crisis. Staff still have to be paid and science and medical degrees are very costly because of the advanced equipment they need. Teaching is a relatively small part of a modern universitys work. Over the last couple of decades, theyve have been judged largely on their research.

So what is to be done? Most vice-chancellors opposed the abolition of tuition fees, and there are many who believe free higher education is now a luxury Scotland cannot afford. But restoration is not on the cards for two reasons.

Free tuition is one of the SNPs signature policies and helped it win the 2011 landslide. More importantly, fees would not stave off the financial crisis. Students dont start paying fees until they graduate, and only then when they are earning over 25,000. The universities need cash now, not in four or five years.

There will likely be mergers, redundancies, the loss of some departments. Universities specialising in what they do best rather than offering the whole nine yards. Theyve been doing this anyway over the past few years. Many temporary staff will be quietly sacked.

Eventually someone is going to ask if a small country like Scotland can justify 19 universities, twice as many as comparable countries like Denmark and Norway. Moreover, it has become increasingly clear that the higher education sector in Scotland has neglected vocational education.

Germany, which has demonstrated its strengths during the Covid crisis, doesnt generally rate elite higher education. It focuses much more on jobs-led science and technical colleges and has a much more diverse and less centralised educational landscape. It has also phased out tuition fees

But whatever happens, it seems likely that universities will lose much of their autonomy as a consequence of whatever bailout is arranged. The Scottish Government will want assurances on equal access for less-well-off students, more courses that lead to proper jobs and the retention of graduates in Scotland. Many leave Scotland as soon as they graduate because the pay is better in the south or abroad.

In recent years, universities have liked to style themselves as private companies, even calling vice-chancellors CEOs. Theyve been paying themselves private sector salaries too. Well, they are about to discover that, unlike the banks, they are not too big to fail.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.

Read more: Adults need a timetable for normality, not indefinite house arrest

More:

Opinion: Iain Macwhirter: Our universities will learn that they're not too big to fail - HeraldScotland

Ministers have failed for more than a year to publish a report they commissioned into the barriers facing disabled people who want to achieve elected office.

The report by two leading academics includes a series of recommendations on how to tackle and reduce the barriers disabled people face when trying to become local councillors and MPs.

The governments failure to publish the document will add to concerns that ministers have no interest in reducing those barriers and increasing the number of disabled politicians.

Disability News Service (DNS) has learned that the report, co-authored by Dr Elizabeth Evans, of Goldsmiths, University of London, and Dr Stefanie Reher, of the University of Strathclyde, was delivered to the Government Equalities Office (GEO) in April 2019.

The government has so far failed to publish the report, which is believed to contain damning evidence about the barriers facing disabled politicians.

In an email sent earlier this month to Mary Griffiths-Clarke (pictured), a disabled politician who fought the north Wales seat of Arfon for Labour at the 2017 general election, Evans said: To update you on the progress of the report we submitted it to the GEO last April and we have been waiting since then (!) for them to publish it.

Obviously things got delayed with Brexit, the election and now Covid-19.

When it first announced that Evans and Reher had been commissioned to carry out the research, Goldsmiths said they would be interviewing disabled candidates, activists and elected politicians across all parties, as well as independents.

After being contacted by DNS, GEO and Dr Evans said the report was a draft version and that they had continued to work on it after April, and that its publication was delayed by Decembers general election.

Only two months ago, DNS learned that successive chairs of the Conservative party snubbed a request from their own equalities minister, after she asked them to explain how they intended to support more disabled people to become MPs and councillors.

And earlier this month, DNS revealed that GEO had permanently closed the temporary EnAble fund that was set up following the closure of the short-lived Access to Elected Office fund to support disabled people with the extra costs they faced in running for office.

Griffiths-Clarke said there was no excuse for the delay in publishing the report, which showed that empowering disabled candidates was not a priority.

She said: If the report does indeed contain damming evidence of systemic barriers such as lack of adjustments and bullying of disabled candidates, why not do something about it?

If the government is genuinely serious about tackling barriers to public office and to empower a diverse range of candidates to become elected representatives, so parliament is reflective of society, then they need to be taking action.

Sadly, by looking at what is being done as opposed to what is being promised, the UK has a long way to go before barriers to inclusion are removed for disabled people.

Without supporting more disabled people to become candidates and empowering them to win at the ballot box, disability will never be truly understood in parliament.

She added: From the abolition of Access to Elected Office to the stubborn refusal to publish this report and take action on the many barriers faced by disabled politicians and activists, it reveals the government and political parties are in charge of the biggest barrier of all: that disabled people are viewed with contempt and [as being] incapable of becoming leaders, therefore they are not worth the investment.

Whilst disability continues to be perceived as a weakness, not a difference, such barriers will remain.

This is something that needs to be addressed not just within government but within society, as an electorate.

Deborah King, co-founder ofDisability Politics UK, said: The delay in ensuring disabled people have better access to elected political office seems deliberate.

It is as though disabled people are, in the eyes of elected politicians, the least important group to be entitled to get fair representation.

She said the COVID-19 crisis showed that different ways of working are possible, and that if online voting for MPs in the House of Commons which is currently being tested was combined with the right to job share in elected political office, more disabled people could become paid politicians.

A GEO spokesperson said the version of the report that was delivered in April 2019 was a first draft and that GEO policy officials and academics had continued to work on it until a final version was completed in December.

She said: The report was commissioned alongside an evaluation of the EnAble Fund, and we intend to publish the two documents in due course.

She declined to say when the evaluation report on the EnAble Fund was sent to GEO.

In a statement, Evans said: We presented an early version of the report to the GEO in April 2019.

Following feedback, we worked on a revised version while awaiting information on a likely publication date.

We were originally told the completed report would be published in December 2019, but this wasnt possible because of the pre-election period.

Im very grateful to all those who contributed to this research and I am looking forward to sharing the findings with them once the report is published.

A note from the editor:

Please consider making a voluntary financial contribution to support the work of DNS and allow it to continue producing independent, carefully-researched news stories that focus on the lives and rights of disabled people and their user-led organisations.

Please do not contribute if you cannot afford to do so, and please note that DNS is not a charity. It is run and owned by disabled journalist John Pring and has been from its launch in April 2009.

Thank you for anything you can do to support the work of DNS

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Ministers have sat for months on elected office report, government admits - Disability News Service

Of course, selective enforcement of the Constitution was not exactly new in the 1920s. The 11 states in the old Confederacy had essentially voided the 14th and 15th amendments through Jim Crow laws and state-sanctioned terrorism by white supremacists. The 14th Amendments right to equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendments abolition of whites-only voting laws were little more than cruel jokes in the South and in other states as well.

But Smiths defiance of the 18th Amendment was of another order, in part because there was greater national support for Prohibition than there was for equal rights for African Americans, and in part because of who he wasa child of the city, a Roman Catholic, and the grandson of immigrants at a time when the country was about to close the country to most immigrants. A newspaper in upstate Auburn said of Smiths flouting of federal law, The opening gun at Fort Sumter did not echo a more outright defiance.

Smiths decision to flout a government order he despised transformed him from a regional curiosity to a national figure just as he was beginning to prepare for the 1924 presidential campaign. He would seek the White House three timesin 1924, 1928 and 1932and while he never won the prize, he became a beloved symbol of the new America that was taking shape in the nations cities as the children of Ellis Island came of age, politically and culturally, in the 1920s. Breaking the rules worked for Smith.

***

The 18th Amendment, which outlawed the manufacture, transportation and salebut not consumptionof intoxicating spirits, was ratified in January 1919 and took effect the following January. Congress then passed the federal Volstead Act, which gave Washington the power to enforce the amendment and set penalties for those caught in the act, and it defined intoxicating spirits as any beverage containing more than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. It became law over Woodrow Wilsons veto in October 1919.

After Republicans took control of Albany in the Warren Harding landslide of 1920, they passed several bills that mimicked most aspects of the federal Volstead Act, empowering police in New York to enforce Prohibition. Many considered the statute unnecessary, but the dry forces in New York were intent on making a statement, and indeed included even tougher language than the federal law. For example, the New York enforcement bills, known collectively at the Mullan-Gage Act, declared that possession of a hip flask containing booze was the equivalent of carrying an unlicensed handgun.

The legislation pleased the powerful Anti-Saloon League and rural portions of upstate New York, where evangelical voters and the Ku Klux Klan looked askance (to put it mildly) at the growing power of Catholics and Jews in the states urban areas, particularly New York City. The dry forces associated drinking with foreign cultures. Prohibition, they argued, would help Americanize these alien peoples.

Suffice it to say, this didnt sit well with people like Al Smith, who embraced city life and all its racial, ethnic and religious complexities. He recaptured the governors office in 1922 after losing reelection two years earlier, and his fellow Democratsmany of whom were Catholics and Jews from the citieswon control of the Legislature, thanks in part to urban opposition to Prohibition.

Lawmakers did not waste time. A bill to repeal Mullan-Gage was introduced on January 3, 1923, as the new session was beginning and on the same day that the newly elected governor of Connecticut, Charles Templeton, declared that Prohibition was one of the greatest sociological experiments ever undertaken by any nation.

The repeal bill passed the Legislature in early Maythe Senates back-slapping majority leader, Jimmy Walker, helped win over some crucial but wavering votes in his chamberand was dispatched to Smiths desk. And thats when the eyes of the nation turned to the governors second-floor office in New Yorks state Capitol.

Smith despised Prohibitionhe continued to serve cocktails in his office in the state Capitoland resented the self-righteousness of its advocates. Passage of the Mullan-Gage repeal would have sent a signal far and wide that New York would no longer enforce laws it detested.

But thats precisely what worried Smith. Smith was a consensus-seeker who, as governor, found ways to work with Republican majorities in the Legislature. But there was no room for splitting the difference now. A Tennessee newspaper compared New Yorks attitude toward Prohibition to South Carolinas assertion in the early 1830s that it could void federal lawsmore specifically, tariffsit didnt like. The bitter nullification crisis was a precursor to South Carolina secession in 1860, and most Americans knew how that ended. While nobody was predicting that Smiths decision would lead to civil war, some feared repeal of Mullan-Gage would lead to more widespread defiance of the Volstead Act, leading to the kinds of bitter divisions Smith preferred to bridge rather than exacerbate.

There was another complication as well. Smith intended to run for president in 1924, and he would need support from the Democratic Partys dry-as-dust factions in the South and West to win the nomination. Then again, his base in the cities of the Northeast and the Midwest expected him to sign the repeal. If he failed to stand up for those who saw him as their champion, theyd be unlikely to stand up for him at the convention.

There was little question that he wanted to sign, but hed have to think it over.

During a month of deliberation, the national press focused intently on the looming rebellion in Albany, and some of the countrys leading political figures warned Smith of the stakes in play.

This disposition of the Mullan-Gage repeal bill will show the mettle of the man, Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter wrote to Smiths closest political adviser, Belle Moskowitz. If he vetoes the repeal, he will be damned for a comparatively brief time if he signs it, he would be damned for good.

Franklin Roosevelt, who would one day succeed Smith as governor and would, as president, appoint Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, was more sympathetic to Smiths dilemma. He wrote: Frankly, it is going to hurt you nationally a whole lot to sign the Repealer Bill. On the other hand I well realize that the vote in all the cities of this state will shriek to heaven if you were to veto the Bill.

Ultimately, Smith took the advice of his political mentor, Tammany Hall boss Charles Francis Murphy, a saloonkeeper by tradebefore, that is, his trade was declared illegal. Al, Murphy said at a summit meeting with the governor on Long Island, you must sign this bill. Murphy was a taciturn sorthe saw no reason to explain his reasoning because it was obvious. The people who put Smith back in the governors office knew they were voting for the wettest of the wet, and they expected him to act accordingly, the presidency be damned.

Smith went through the motions of holding a public hearing in the state Assembly chamber in Albany. The dry forces packed the house, some of them bringing along sandwiches and beveragessoft, of courseas they settled in for the political equivalent of a revival meeting. One of the many anti-liquor speakers said the governor had to choose between the Star-Spangled Banner and The Sidewalks of New Yorka song celebrating New York City that was long associated with Smith.

Toward the end, though, a prominent Republican, Thomas Douglas Robinson, a nephew of Theodore Roosevelt, delivered an impassioned speech denouncing the Prohibitionists as bigots who claimed to have a 100 percent mortgage on law and order and Americanism. He had voted in favor of repeal, Robinson said, and did so as an American. Robinsons rebuke was noteworthy given his lineage, for he was saying that the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who dominated the dry movement had no monopoly on the countrys values and culture.

Less than 24 hours later, on June 1, 1923, Al Smith signed the repeal bill. It contained the caveat that New York police would cooperate with federal agents if requested to do so, but officers would no longer enforce Prohibition on their own. In cities across the state, drinkers tripped the light fantastic long into the night. In the heartland, however, New Yorks defiance inspired fear and resentmentlaw, order and the very foundations of what made America great were breaking down in the nations immigrant-filled cities. Smith, thundered the Kansas City Star, had done an anarchistic thing.

William Jennings Bryan, the spiritual leader of the Democratic Partys influential evangelical faction, took to the pages of the New York Times to pronounce his judgment of Smith and his ilk in the cities he had made a career denouncing. Smith, Bryan said, should expect resistance from the defenders of the home, the school and the Church.

Smith had been uncharacteristically silent in the face of the onslaught from beyond the Hudson River, but he couldnt resist taking Bryans bait. He issued a statement condemning the narrow and bigoted dry agenda, and then took note of Bryans three failed attempts at the presidency. Whenever the so-called Great Commoner presented himself to voters, Smith wrote, a wise and discriminating electorate usually takes care to see that Mr. Bryan stays at home.

Frankfurters bleak assessment of Smiths future proved incorrectfor the most part anyway. While Smith did not become the Democratic Partys presidential nominee in 1924, he was reelected as governor in a landslide over Theodore Roosevelt Jr. that year. And four years later, he won the prize that eluded him in 1924, becoming the first Catholic to win a major partys presidential nomination. Herbert Hoover trounced him in the general election, but it was Smiths religion more than his position on Mullan-Gage that became a defining issue of the campaign. Then again, urban Catholicism and defiance of the 18th Amendment were considered variations on the same un-American theme, at least in some portions of the country.

Smith is remembered today not only through the annual charity dinner in his name, but as one of the great governors of the 20th century, never mind that he was assailed as a virtual secessionist in 1923. The current governor, more than most of his predecessors, has kept Smiths memory aliveand not just through a virtual shrine in his inner office.

During his decade in Albany, Andrew Cuomo has overhauled New Yorks archaic restrictions on alcohol sales and production, leading to a tripling in the number of wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries in the state.

And when he issued his stay-at-home orders last month, Cuomo not only declared liquor stores an essential business, but he allowed bars to serve drinks to go.

Al Smith would have signed that one, too.

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The Time a New York Governor Disobeyed the Federal Government - POLITICO

I know a lot of people who are consumed with anxiety about whether they, their family, America, and the world will be ruined by the Pandemic Panic. I don't blame them. Our politicians, both Donks and Pachys, terrify me, too, by their ignorance of what works. They are flirting with creating a new Dark Ages.

I've seen this before, back in the 1970s. Have they learned nothing?

There are countless examples of how smart leaders have taken a country from ruin to sustained prosperity. I've written about or alluded to some here , hereand here. There's lots more. Generating prosperity is simple. So, it's up to us. Email your Congressperson and tell them how!

Step up and help guide our officials' footsteps onto the Paths of Righteousness. And Affluence? Because, you know, I cannot do it alone. (Believe me, I've tried.) Let's together exercise our Citizen Superpower and rescue America from its leaders. The good news? I actually know how. During my lifetime America tentupled (if that's a word) the size of its real economy. I was watching! Apparently our pols missed it.

The St. Louis Fed's chart from around the time I was born, 1952, shows that then real GDP was around $2 trilliongrowing to over $21 trillionin 2019. (Not adjusted for population, which has about doubled, yet quintupling per capita GDP.)

From 1980 my team, the Supply-Siders, drove world GDP up from $11 trillion to $88 trillion(anoctupling.)The Dow soared from 814 on the day in 1979 Reagan declared for the presidency to >20,000 today. Twenty-sixtupling in nominal terms.

Back in 1986 I founded the Prosperity Caucus. Last year I co-authored The Capitalist Manifesto and co-founded The Capitalist League and the Prosperity Coalition. So we know how to pull the economy out of its tailspin. Not only do we know. We've done it. Let's do it again.

If you'd like to see America rescued from economic ruin and hear the economy roar again it's all up to us to get our leaders to embrace the Ten Commandments of Capitalism. Find the Big Ten all here. I've written about the First here, the Secondand Third.

Today: the Fourth: "No gift, estate, or inheritance tax shall have a top rate of more than 10% and no such tax shall be imposed on any such transfers of $10 million or less, annually adjusted for inflation."

This is one of my personal favorites because it is the antithesis of the Third Commandment of The Communist Manifesto which calls, verbatim, for the "Abolition of all rights of inheritance." I'm an old school anti-Communist. I fought in the Cold War. USA! USA! USA!

And, also, because I despise grave robbery.

Another reason is that I, a constitutional lawyer, consider the death tax unconstitutional. I once pointed out its unconstitutionality to the late, great, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on a flight we shared from Albany N.Y. to D.C. Moynihan professed interest. Nothing came of it.

I never give up.

The most obscure provision in the U.S. Constitution states that "The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood." Only legal history geeks like me know what "Corruption of Blood" is.

Per lawstack exchange, "In English law during the late Medieval and early modern period it was possible for Parliament to pass a "Bill Of Attainder."This declared a person guilty of a crime, often treason, by legislative act, without any trial or other legal process. Often a Bill of Attainder confiscated the convicted person's property, preventing his (or rarely her) heirs from inheriting"

The statesmen who wrote the Constitution believed that preventing heirs from inheriting their ancestor's property was so heinous that they prohibited it even as a punishment for the most vile crime they knew: high treason. Yet Congress now can ghoulishly hijack as much of our life savings as it likes currently up to 40%,but 77% between 1941 and 1976 merely for the offense of having lived the American dream and grown wealthy.

Abominable! Griswold vs. Connecticut found penumbras to Constitutional rights. The prohibition against Corruption of Blood surely deserves its own penumbra.

The Fourth Capitalist Commandment honors the letter and spirit of the U.S. Constitution and gives a Big Diss to Marx and Engels by severely constraining the estate tax. Admittedly, I don't much care for trust fund prep school princelings. Yet the right to leave your estate to your overprivileged suburban monster children is a small price to pay for prosperity for the rest of us.

To regain prosperity all we have to do is take our elected officials by the ear and teach them the Ten Commandments of Capitalism. End the Death Tax!

Ralph Benko, co-author of"The Capitalist Manifesto"and chairman and co-founder of"The Capitalist League,"is the founder of The Prosperity Caucus and is an original Kemp-era member of the Supply Side revolution that propelled the Dow from 814 to its current heights and world GDP from $11T to $83T. He served as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House, has worked closely with the Congress and two cabinet agencies, and has published over a million words on politics and policy in the mainstream media, as a distinguished professional blogger, and as the author of the internationally award-winning cult classic book "The Websters' Dictionary: How to Use the Web to Transform the World." He has served as senior adviser, economics, to APIA as an advocate of the gold standard, senior counselor to the Chamber of Digital Commerce and serves as general counsel toFrax.finance, a stablecoin venture. Read Ralph Benko's reports More Here.

2020 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Use Capitalism to Stop the Grave Robbers, End the Pandemic Panic - Newsmax

Americans are paying dearly as they suffer through the coronavirus epidemic. The costs of inadequate testing, poor medical care and even death in isolation are only compounded by the nations staggering economy, mounting unemployment rate and uncertainty of recovery. Making matters worse, there has been an increase in domestic violence.

My husband wont let me leave the house, a victim of domestic violence told a representative for the National Domestic Violence Hotline (NDVH). Hes had flu-like symptoms and blames keeping me here on not wanting to infect others or bringing something like COVID-19 home. But I feel like its just an attempt to isolate me. The NDVH representative notes that a growing number of callers say that their abusers are using COVID-19 as a means of further isolating them from their friends and family.

I spoke to the [NY] state police this morning and there is a reported uptick in domestic violence cases, Melissa DeRosa, Gov. Andrew Cuomos top aide stated at a recent press briefing. Some reports are as high as 15 to 20 percent. Its unacceptable on any day. I want people to know that every single case that is reported, the state police is going to investigate fully.

This assessment was confirmed by Cecile Noel, commissioner of New York Citys Office to End Domestic Violence and Gender-Based Violence (ENDGBV). COVID-19 puts into sharp focus the vulnerabilities that many people in our city face every day, especially gender-based violence survivors, she said. And added, it highlights the barriers and challenges that we know keep people from seeking help and finding safety.

The same story is playing out in San Francisco. Shortly after shelter-in-place was implemented, the SF district attorneys office reported an initial 60 percent increase in referrals to its Victim Services Division, compared to the same week last year. Mayor London Nicole Breedand DA Chesa Boudin announced that the city has secured 20 furnished apartments for survivors of domestic violence.

Kathy Black, executive director, La Casa De Las Madres, pointed out that one of the most common battering tactics is to isolate somebody from their support network friends, family, coworkers, agencies where they may go to get assistance or support. Going further, she noted, So being locked in with your abuser is, as I have called it, kind of a perfect storm.

Domestic abuse or intimate partner violence is an endemic feature of American social life, one example of the all-pervasive sexual or gender violence. A recent report on domestic violence from the National Center for Biotechnology Informationpaints a grim picture:

Family and domestic violence (including child abuse, intimate partner abuse, and elder abuse) is a common problem in the United States. Family and domestic health violence are estimated to affect 10 million people in the United States every year. It is a national public health problem

Under conditions of the Corvid-19 plague, the number of incidents of domestic violence appears on the uptick.

HuffPost reports that between March 27 to April 2, as shelter-in-place laws spread to nearly every state, there were at least 19 murder-suicides, including four attempted ones. As it states, almost all of the incidents involved a man killing his wife or child before taking his own life.

***

A new book, The Feminist and the Sex Offender: Confronting Harm, Ending State Violence, by Judith Levine and Erica R. Meiners (Verso), provides a valuable overview analysis to better understand interpersonal violence and offers a progressive approach to addressing this deep-seated problem. The authors advance a radical critique that reframes the current debate about sex offenders, including domestic abusers. However, they raise a simple, cautionary note: Experts agree that most sexual and gender violence is not reported. In fact, almost 80 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to the police, according to a 2016 analysis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The authors take a clear, uncompromising stand as to what constitutes sexual abuse, especially rape. As far as we are concerned, if it is not consensual, it is rape, they write. If all partners are able to consent, and do consent, it is not rape.

However, the authors decry what they identify as the sex offense legal regime. They note that in 2007, sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein coined the term carceral feminism to denote the commitment of feminist activists to a law and order agenda. The consequence of this was a drift from the welfare state to the carceral state as the enforcement apparatus for feminist goals.

Levine and Meiners identify this as an expression of neoliberalism. It reflects a logic that blames social problems on individuals rather than on larger economic forces and systemic racial, gender, or geographic inequities and privatizes formerly public, tax-funded institutions and services, leading to their underfunding and deterioration.

The authors reconceive the debate among feminists and other elements of the womens movement between those who want to put abusers and rapists in prison and those who want to abolish prisons and find nonpunitive, nonviolent responses to harm. The former made adoption of punitive legislation, exemplified by the Violence Against Women Act, their priority; the latter, the abolitionist feminists, are engaged in practices of restorative and transformative justice.

For Meiners and Levine, these two movements also stand, for the most part, on two sides of a racial divide. They remind readers that women of color, poor women, people with disabilities, and queer, gender-nonconforming, and transgender people experience higher rates of sexual and gender violence than their cisgender, white counterparts. Digging deeper, they note that entire categories of sexual assault were invisible. No statute recognized marital rape; sex on demand was a husbands prerogative and a wifes duty. There were few indictments, much less convictions, for sexual violence.

The authors, like many commentators on the prison system, reminder readers that among the biggest predictors of interpersonal violence is male underemployment a social, not a personal, deficit, and one that is exacerbated by neoliberal austerity. This is a condition made even worse today under conditions of shelter-in-place.

Nevertheless, they point out that in the U.S., the carceral state imprisons more of its population than any other nation in the world, including those with far higher murder rates. More troubling, they argue that the US carceral state, which imprisons more of its population than any other nation in the world, including those with far higher murder rates.

They note that the number of names and photos on federal, state, and territorial sex offender registries approaches 900,000. Those with a sex-related offense may be prohibited from working as a retail clerk, fishing in a public park, volunteering at a polling place, putting up Halloween decorations, or (as recently happened in Tennessee) living with his own children.

In addition, punishment of the 20th-century sex offender recalls Nathaniel Hawthornes1850 tale of the Puritan colonies, The Scarlet Letter. Under theInternational Megans Law (2017), the State Department marks the passport of registered offender with a unique identifier. The U.S. has come a long way to end up where it began.

***

In 1961, Pres. Dwight Eisenhower made his legendary farewell address warning of the military industrial complex:

[the] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence economic, political, even spiritual is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. [W]e must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

A decade later, Pres. Richard Nixon launched the war on drugs in response to an alleged increase in drug use in the U.S. This led to an enormous increase in arrests, longer sentences and the swelling of the U.S. prison population. The led to increase the number of jails and prisons throughout the country and the privatization of a once public institution, incarceration.

In 79, Congress passed Prison-Industries Act establishing the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program (PIECP or PIE), incorporating the private sector into the prison system. PIE was originally promoted to help prison inmates to earn wages in private sector jobs. More telling, it enabled private companies to sell and transportation commercial goods across state lines.

In 1999, Angela Davis published her landmark study, ThePrison Industrial Complex. Drawing from her own prison experience and that of friends and comrades, she revealed that deep links between capitalism, racism and the prison system. Now, two decades later, the prison system plays a parallel role to the military system in U.S. society. The scope and scale of the nations systems of confinement is staggering. The Prison Policy Institute (PPI) summarizes the system in 2020 accordingly:

The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

The PPI estimate this system of mass incarceration cost Americas $182 billion in 2020. The PPI makes clear one often overlooked factor: The criminal justice system is overwhelmingly a public system, with private prison companies acting only as extensions of the public system. The government payroll for corrections employees is over 100 times higher than the private prison industrys profits.

The value of Levine and Meinerss timely book, The Feminist and the Sex Offender, is to point a way out the tyranny of the prison-industrial complex. They rightfully argue, we need paradigm shifts: from justice as retribution to justice as healing, from conviction to accountability, punishment to repair, and rehabilitation to transformation. They advocate for what they call abolition feminism, a melding of anti-racist prison abolitionismwhich is part of the Black radical traditionand feminism.

The mounting levels of infections and deaths in prisons due to the coronavirus makes clear that the old way of American (in)justice doesnt work. The authors examination of sex offenders needs to be extended to a larger critique of the entire mass incarceration state, one in which restorative justice replaces punitive punishment.

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Coronavirus and the Increase in Domestic Violence - CounterPunch

On April 15, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued a detailed notification outlining the conditions under which economic activities could be restarted in non-containment zones.

The order imposed a string of mandatory dos and donts such as social distancing, the arrangement of private transportation for workers and medical insurance. The violation of any of these directives, the order noted, could attract severe penalties including imprisonment under the National Disaster Management Act, 2005 (NDMA).

Two days before that, on April 13, Indias central trade unions (CTUs) sent a letter to the Union labour minister that expressed their opposition to a proposal that would amend the Factories Act, 1948 (FA), a move which was reportedly being considered by the Centre.

The alleged amendment would have allowed companies to extend a factory workers daily shift to 12 hours per day, six days a week (72 hours) from the existing eight hours per day, six days a week (48 hours).

This move is controversial, because 48 hours per week is what is mandated by global and ILO norms. In fact, the first convention that ILO adopted was the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 (No. 1) which India ratified in 1921 and it proclaimed 48 hours of work in a week.

While the Centre hasnt yet amended the FA, at least four state governments Rajasthan (April 11), Gujarat (April 17), Punjab (April 20) and Himachal Pradesh (April 21) have issued notifications in the last few days to increase the working hours as mentioned above.

Incidentally, this has become the most popular strategy of carrying out labour law reforms in India both historically and recently.

Labour market reforms at the national level are often opposed stridently by a rather united trade union movement through massive strikes involving crores of workers and in the tripartite forum also. These are supported, on-and-off, by opportunistic opposition political parties. Reforms such as easy hire-and-fire rules create negative outcomes like unemployment, which have adverse electoral costs for ruling parties. This is why core labour law reforms at the national level then becomes problematic for the Centre. What, then, becomes the way out for the Union government? Since the subject of labour figures in the Concurrent List, the Central government allows willing state governments to adopt these reforms and the presidents assent, which is in essence a Union Cabinet decision, is granted for them.

Thus, the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition Act, 1970 was liberalised by the then united Andhra Pradesh in 2003, by Maharashtra in 2017 and by Rajasthan in 2014. Chapter V-B was also liberalised by the Rajasthan government to make it applicable to industrial establishments employing 300 workers in place of 100 in 2014, following which others like Jharkhand did it in in 2016.

The juggernaut of heavyweight labour law reforms therefore moves forward as states dared to effect hard labour law reforms that the Union government otherwise shies away from. The Centre then typically expresses its helplessness by saying that the state governments are well placed to effect these reforms and nothing can be done about it.

A similar strategy has been adopted here with respect to increasing the hours of work during the COVID-19 context.

Legal defects

But there are a few issues with these notifications. Firstly, the legal justifications given for pushing through a 12-hour shift come with their own defects. Section 51 of Factories Act, 1948 (FA) stipulates that no adult worker should work for more than 48 hours in a week and within this framework no worker should be allowed for more than nine hours a day (S.54). In addition to this, the total spread-over time inclusive of rests should not be more than 10.5 hours a day (S.56) and subject to S.51 and S.54, more hours worked will be paid at the rate twice the ordinary wage rate (S.59).

The reasons given by these governments for extending working hours include labour shortage due to curfews because of the pandemic, specifically trying to reduce manpower requirement by 33% and limiting worker movement (Rajasthan) and for safety and social-distancing (Gujarat). In the meanwhile, several industry leaders have been complaining of labour shortages. Himachal Pradesh has not mentioned any reason for the extension in its notification.

Also read: The Streets Are Empty. How Are Hawkers Surviving This Lockdown?

While all of them have increased the maximum working hours to 12 hours a day and 72 hours a week, Rajasthan and Punjab have provided for overtime (OT) pay Punjabs notification specifically mentions that OT pay will be double the normal wage rate as per Section 59 of FA.

Gujarats notification however says, wages shall be in proportion of the existing wages. This means, as the notification points out, that if wages for eight hours are Rs 80, then the proportionate wages for 12 hours will be Rs 120. Thus, the OT wages provided for by Gujarat is less than what is stipulated by S.59 of FA and to that extent it is legally deficient.

While Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh governments have exercised the powers conferred by S.5 and the Punjab government S.65 of FA, Rajasthan did not specify any provision at all. The exercise of S.5 by Gujarat is also questionable as it empowers the state governments on the grounds of public emergency to exempt factories from all or any of the provisions of FA save S.67 (which deals with prohibition of employment of children).

Public emergency means a grave emergency whereby the security of India or any part of the territory thereof is threatened, whether by war or external aggression or internal disturbances (introduced with effect from 26/10-1976). The crisis due to COVID-19 is for biological health hazards and surely is not covered by the definition of public emergency under S.5 of FA even under internal disturbances grounds which must affect security of India.

S.65(2) (3) empower the state governments to amend Sections 51-52, 54 and 56 subject to conditions, viz. (a) the total number of hours of work in any day shall not exceed 12; (b) the spread-over, inclusive of rest intervals, shall not exceed 13, (c) the total number of work-hours in any week, including OT, shall not exceed 60. Punjab only has correctly exercised S.65. However, all the government notifications provide for a total of 72 hours in a week, which is questionable.

Worker health, productivity and employmentopportunity

Apart from these legal issues, serious industrial relations concerns exist.

Shortage of labour and social distancing principles legitimise the extension of working hours as it optimises the deployment of existing workforce and thus partly tackles the extra costs involved in complying with the MHAs order.

But is the extension of working hours needed for all industries? Why arent the existing provisions in the FA adequate to be used to tackle contingencies mentioned above?

After all, where necessary, employers and unions (wherever they exist) could together determine the labour shortage, extra workload and accordingly calculate the over-time that would be required. The issues arising out of labour deployment will differ across industries and cannot be generalised for the manufacturing sector as a whole, which is what these amendments assume.

What is important to remember is that a 12-hour shift effectively reduces the demand for labour. In the absence of company-worker dialogue, employers may unilaterally take calls, and hence provide room for discrimination regarding employee choices and income distribution among workers. These issues may lead to labour unrest. To be sure, social dialogue could mitigate any adverse effects of a 12-hour shift.

Beyond this, there are several practical issues that affect factory workers. Increased hours of work, especially when the tasks are repetitive and mechanical, will raise fatigue and work stress, hence affecting productivity adversely. In cases where workers thanks to social distancing are performing multiple though related tasks, the possibilities of work-related stress will be much higher. It is also plausible that errors could occur, with even accidents at the workplace cannot be ruled out.

Also read: Treat Sanitation Workers Like Health Workers, Pay Them At Least Rs 20,000 Per Month

The most serious setback arising out of a 12-hour workday, though, is that it will place women workers at a disadvantage thanks to their multiple roles in the workplace and homes, and womens employment might be reduced. Women workers are more unlikely to prefer employment which requires them to stay at the workplace, and 12 hours plus travel time will mean less time for family life. Hence, they are least likely to self-select and their economic capacities will be affected.

All these have adverse gender implications. Even for male employees, being away for 12 hours plus travel time in case of travel-based work, scheduling their work-life balance will be affected. Alternatively, in cases of shelter-based work scheduling, their absence from home at a stretch might affect their emotional state, assuming that they will be provided home-like shelter and food.

Also, these notifications will greatly reduce the employment opportunities of precarious workers as when there is a likelihood of non-employment of some regular workers, the question of precarious workers does not arise. However, given the labour flexibility drive of employers, it may be that some cost-optimising employers may prefer these precarious workers.

Taking one step back though, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic slowdown has thrown up a wide range of questions that have grave implications for Indias blue-collar factory workforce.

Also read: Is India Neglecting Its Migrant Workers Abroad?

For instance, what if non-employed workers do not get full wages even if they are ready to offer their services or should they be paid lay-off compensation? Is a pandemic a legally valid clause for lay-offs? Even assuming that lay-offs are legally allowed, as per Chapter V-A of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947 workers employed in factories employing 50 or more workers only are eligible for it. One may argue that factories employing less than 50 workers may not start production at all, as some reports indicate.

But as a legal principle, how will the non-employed workers be compensated, whether for eight hours or 12 hours of work? All these could be left to social dialogue at the firm level. Issuance of legally defective and macro-based notifications are ill-advised and should be withdrawn. In these sensitive circumstances, talk of labour law reforms in terms of introduction of labour codes will be injudicious and even counter-productive.

The first socio-economic task is to balance lives and livelihoods. There are better state interventions to consider, like wage subsidies.

The vexatious question is: Why is there not greater engagement with trade unions at this troubling time? This might help with governance of the world of work and the crises brewing in it.

K.R. Shyam Sundar is Professor, XLRI, Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur. He can be contacted at krshyams@xlri.ac.in

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Factory Workers Can Now Legally Be Asked to Work 12-Hour Shifts. How Will this Change Things? - The Wire

Written by Arjun Ram Meghwal | Updated: May 1, 2020 9:36:27 am The proposed change in work culture through adaptability, efficiency, inclusiveness, opportunity and universalism will open up more avenues for workers to build New India. (File Photo)

International Labour Day is celebrated on May 1 to honour workers. Labour has an undeniable role in shaping the nations fortune. Since the times immemorial, the working class has struggled and sacrificed for greater causes first for Independence and then building the nation brick by brick. The ongoing fight against COVID-19 has brought temporary hardship for everyone, including workers. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi has weighed life as being greater than livelihood and has now provided a blueprint for turning this crisis into opportunity in the post-corona world. The proposed change in work culture through adaptability, efficiency, inclusiveness, opportunity and universalism will open up more avenues for workers to build New India.

Many leaders have been a beacon for workers and B R Ambedkar was one among them. As the representative of the Depressed Classes in the Round Table Conference, Ambedkar forcefully pleaded for living wages, decent working conditions and the freedom of peasants from the clutches of cruel landlords. He also fought for the removal of social evils that blighted the lives of the downtrodden.

He went on to form the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1936 with a comprehensive programme to meet the needs and grievances of the landless, poor tenants, agriculturists, and workers. In the polls held in 1937, the first election under the newly enacted Government of India Act of 1935, the ILP achieved spectacular success by winning 15 of the 17 seats it had contested for the Bombay Legislative Assembly. On September 17, 1937, during the Poona session of the Bombay Assembly, he introduced a bill to abolish the Khoti system of land tenure in Konkan. He opposed the introduction of Industrial Disputes Bill, 1937 because it removed the workers right to strike.

His profound knowledge of labour matters was universally acknowledged and demonstrated during his term as Labour member of the Viceroys Executive Council from 1942 to 1946. When the world order was in flux during World War II, Ambedkar was guiding Indian labour. The changing economy provided opportunities for the expansion of industries. While entrepreneurs and managers could hope for prosperity, labour was not given its due share. Ambedkar piloted and introduced measures for labour welfare by laying the foundation for the basic structure for the governments labour policy. He tackled the knotty problems and won esteem and respect from employees and employers alike. The Indian Trade Union (Amendment) Bill, introduced by Ambedkar on November 8, 1943, compelled the employers to acknowledge trade unions.

On February 8, 1944, in the legislative assembly during the debate on the Lifting of Ban on Employment of Women on Underground Work in Coal Mines, Ambedkar said: It is for the first time that I think in any industry the principle has been established of equal pay for equal work irrespective of the sex. It was a historic moment. Through the Mines Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill 1943, he empowered women workers with maternity benefits.

Addressing the Indian Labour Conference held in New Delhi on November 26, 1945, Ambedkar emphasised the urgent need to bring progressive labour welfare legislation: Labour may well say that the fact that the British took 100 years to have a proper code of labour legislation is no argument that we should also in India take 100 years. History is not always an example. More often it is a warning.

Ambedkar did not accept the Marxist position that the abolition of private property would bring an end to poverty and suffering. In Buddha or Karl Marx, he writes: Can the Communists say that in achieving their valuable end they have not destroyed other valuable ends? They have destroyed private property. Assuming that this is a valuable end, can the Communists say that they have not destroyed other valuable end in the process of achieving it? How many people have they killed for achieving their end? Has human life no value? Could they not have taken property without taking the life of the owner?

Inspired by Ambedkar, the current government has taken steps to improve the quality of life of workers. For example, the Pradhan Mantri Shram Yogi Maan-Dhan Yojna was launched in February 2019 to ensure protection of unorganised workers in their old age. Through technological interventions like Shram Suvidha Portal, transparency and accountability are ensured in the enforcement of labour law. The government is working to simplify, amalgamate and rationalise the provisions of the existing central labour laws into four labour codes Labour Code on Wages, on Industrial Relations, on Social Security & Welfare and on Occupational Safety, Health & Working Conditions.

In the extraordinary circumstances brought on by the COVID pandemic, the labour fraternity deserves a special salute. During his Mann ki Baat broadcast on March 29, the PM apologised for the inconvenience: I extend a heartfelt apology to all countrymen. And I strongly feel from the core of my heart that you will forgive me since certain decisions had to be taken, resulting in myriad hardships for you. And when it comes to my underprivileged brothers and sisters, they must be wondering on the kind of Prime Minister they have, who has pushed them to the brink! My wholehearted apologies, especially to them. PM Modi has championed the fight against the pandemic and been acclaimed globally. Much of the credit for this goes to the perseverance of the labour fraternity.

As we recall the innumerable contribution of the countless labourers in nation-building, with an ever-increasing spirit of Shramev Jayate, we must remember the contributions of Ambedkar.

This article was first published in the print by the title Labours leader. The writer is Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises. He is the Lok Sabha MP for Bikaner

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B R Ambedkar laid the foundation for workers rights, social security in India - The Indian Express