Monthly Archives: March 2022

Monday

History Makers

Join Linda Hirshman for a virtual discussion of her book The Color of Abolition: How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation. Hirshman explores the roles of Frederick Douglass, printer William Lloyd Garrison, and Boston socialite Maria Weston Chapman in the fight for abolition. 6 p.m. Free. Register at americanancestors.org.

Thursday

Swift, Reimagined

Fans of Taylor Swift, this ones for you. Student musicians and dancers will perform the singer-songwriters hits for Great American Songbook: Fearless The Music of Taylor Swift at the Berklee Performance Center. Performances will include the songs Shake It Off, You Belong With Me, and Blank Space. 8 p.m. Tickets from $20, with discounts for Berklee ID-holders. berklee.edu/events

Opens Friday

Art and Innovation

The Harvard Art Museums highlight dozens of cutting-edge artists in Prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives: Creative Communities. Brandywine, a Philadelphia-based organization, was established to foster innovation and diversity in the arts. $20 for adults; free on Sundays and for students, youth, and other groups. Through July 31. Reservations required at harvardartmuseums.org.

Friday and Saturday

Gods and Mortals

Head to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams for the world premiere of Yemandja, a musical starring Grammy Award-winner Anglique Kidjo. The work is reminiscent of a Greek tragedy and explores love, betrayal, honor, and the terrors of slavery. Tickets for Fridays show, at 8 p.m., start at $20. Saturday includes 4 p.m. performance and Mass MoCA benefit events, from $250. massmoca.org

Saturday

Colorful Celebrations

Immerse yourself in the sounds of Red Baraat, which fuses North Indian bhangra with hip-hop and punk, as the band rocks out for Holi, a Hindu festival celebrating spring, at the Somerville Theatre. Harini Rini Raghavan and Radha open. Tickets from $28. 8 p.m. globalartslive.org

Share your event news. Send information on Boston-area happenings at least three weeks in advance to week@globe.com.

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Five things to do in and around Boston, Feb. 28 - March 6 - The Boston Globe

An Erdington byelection special four-page wrap-around with the Socialist issue 1169

Voting for more of the same will only get us more of the same. And, when that same means soaring energy bills for us and soaring energy profits for them we cant take any more of the same! Cuts to public services hit us hard, while billionaires get even richer.

A vote for Labour or the Tories will be seen by Boris Johnson, or Sir Keir Starmer, as support for their approach: to carry on privatising our NHS, letting the bosses get away with fire and rehire, saddling our young people with tens of thousands of pounds of student debt, and so on.

At best, there will be a discussion on how working-class people should pay for the crisis we didnt cause. No party in Westminster says make the billionaires pay instead because working-class people dont have our own political voice, our own party.

Dave Nellist, a member of the Socialist Party, is standing as the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) candidate so we can use our vote to send a message to Westminster that we have had enough and want an alternative to their same old, same old.

Dave will be a voice for us instead. He has a record of being a workers MP who only took a workers wage and as a fighter for working-class people. The result in this by-election wont change the government, but a vote for Dave can shake up the establishment. Daves campaign is also part of the fight to build a powerful voice for the working class a new mass workers party.

Youth clubs, home care, school budgets, swimming pools, libraries many have disappeared, and more have been cut beyond recognition, privatised by profiteering corner-cutting companies, or now carry hefty charges. The decent public services needed for dignity, support and a start in life are being destroyed.

These attacks represent political choices about which part of society should foot the bill which class. The Tories made their position clear from the get-go in 2010, with the slashing of 40 billion of funding for councils in the years since. In that period, the amount paid by FTSE 100 companies in dividends to shareholders doubled to a record 110 billion in 2019. This is still the fifth-richest country on the planet.

Birmingham City Council, like all the Labour-led councils across the country, has dutifully accepted the Tory line and cut over 770 million from services since 2010. Over 13,000 jobs have been slashed. Birmingham Labour council has closed 43 youth centres, 12 nurseries, 21 childrens centres, five childrens homes, four libraries and countless community and leisure facilities. And then privatised or sold off most of whats left, as its trying to do with Short Heath playing fields too.

Labour cuts

The Labour candidate for Erdington, Paulette Hamilton, was a council cabinet member in 2018 when Birmingham care workers in Unison took strike action against the council plan to cut their hours. Some workers faced a cut from 37 hours to just 14 hours a week! Their 20-month strike defeated the plan, and the new rota was dropped. Unite and Unison refuse workers were also forced to strike against cuts in 2019.

Paulette has no defence, as she told LabourList: Ive had that portfolio for over seven years they can only name two disputes. I have managed a budget of over 354 million. I have also managed the public health budget each year of over 100 million. And they have highlighted two disputes that happened over five years ago, when we were looking at how we could upgrade a service. We had cross-party agreement when it was all decided. Thats cross-party with the Tories by the way

In Coventry, the Labour council is brutally attacking the trade unions trying to defend services and jobs. That council is refusing to pay bin drivers the rate for the job. But even worse, it is paying outside workers twice the going rate to do the work of their own workforce, spending over 2 million in an attempt to break the strike in defence of fair pay.

The socialist-led Liverpool Labour council in the 1980s provides a lesson of what a fighting council could do if it chose to represent and mobilise the working class. Its legacy is undeniable. It includes 4,800 houses and bungalows built; six new nursery classes built and opened; five new sports centres, one with a leisure pool attached; three new parks built; and rents frozen for five years.

The council defeated Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, winning 60 million for Liverpool. It was achieved on the basis of workers and young people taking a democratic part in the decision process. That was in the form of mass meetings but also mass demonstrations and strike action to fight for what had been agreed in the council chamber.

Councils today have a lot of power to fight back against Tory attacks. Councils in England, for example, are responsible for over one fifth of all public spending. If they were to use their reserves and borrowing powers to produce budgets based on whats needed, and combine this with a Liverpool-style struggle, a mass movement could be inspired and built to end Tory austerity and kick them out.

New mass workers party

Today this type of struggle against the Tories is necessary but it is impossible in Starmers New Labour. As we go to press, Labour councillors who say they might vote against this years cuts face being expelled; Jeremy Corbyn is not allowed to sit as a Labour MP; and Starmer takes the side of Coventry council against the workers. The lesson is that cuts can be fought but we require councillors and a party with a no-cuts programme. Labour is not that. A new party must be built.

That can start now. Elections are taking place on 5 May with over 6,000 council seats up. In its existence since 2010, thousands of working-class fighters have stood as no-cuts candidates for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) trade unionists, socialists, community campaigners, student activists people with a record of standing up to the bosses and campaigning for their community and pledged to vote against cuts.

Standing no-cuts candidates has meant theres a real choice on the ballot paper in those areas. This can also help spread the idea of building a new mass workers party. It can also be an effective way of putting pressure on councillors they dont like a challenge to what they see as their right to rule. So why not be part of that?

See http://www.tusc.org.uk for info.

Birminghams unemployment rate of 12.6% is the highest of any major British city. Now Erdingtons GKN plant is set to close with the loss of 500-plus skilled jobs. Johnsons Tory government could have intervened, nationalised and saved GKN, but instead it let it go to the wall. The Socialist Party fights for the nationalisation of GKN under democratic workers control and management.

Boris Johnson claimed the Tories wanted Brexit to level up working-class communities, but their Brexit is about freedom for the bosses to exploit us. Dave, in contrast, led one of the three national campaigns to leave the EU, explaining it is Thatcherism on a continental scale which limits a governments ability to defend working-class interests for example to nationalise plants threatened with closure.

Johnsons plan for Brexit is the same as the EUs: giving big employers more liberty to attack workers pay, rights and conditions and to sell off our NHS to US private health companies. We need an MP to cut through both Tory and Labour Brexit jargon and put workers first.

Ben Robinson, an organiser of Youth March for Jobs

Dave Nellist has been a longstanding campaigner for young peoples rights. As an MP in the 1980s, Daves maiden speech was against Thatchers Youth Training Scheme forcing young people into low-paid work, and helping to build the movement against it.

Just over a decade ago, I was one of the Youth Fight for Jobs marchers who walked through Coventry on the way from Jarrow to London, following in the footsteps of the 1936 Jarrow march for jobs. In the aftermath of the 2007-8 financial crash, politicians and big business were asking working-class people to pay the price. Youth unemployment shot up to around a million 16 to 24-year-olds.

Again, Dave was one of our biggest supporters, joining us early in the march and helping to organise a rally and protest in Coventry, where he was a Socialist Party councillor. As we marched through the streets, local young people joined us and cheered as we spoke about fighting the Labour councils attacks, including to the local college, and the need for a socialist fightback.

These are just a few examples of Daves record. With fresh attacks on education, and low pay and job insecurity still rife for young people, we need a fightback. Dave has proven time and again that he is a fighter for young people and the working class, and will use any position to build that fightback. Vote for a fighter, vote Nellist!

Adam Powell-Davies, Socialist Students

Every year, hundreds of thousands of students leave university into a world of low pay and temporary contracts, owing the government close to 30,000. The moment we graduate, this figure starts growing. And thats just to cover tuition, leaving aside loans to cover the cost of rent and food.

However, there is no question that the wealth exists in society for education to be run as a free public service, available to all. After all, billionaires wealth has increased by $5 trillion to $13.8 trillion since March 2021. The question is: who owns and controls this wealth, and how is it used?

Free education is entirely possible. After all, university tuition fees were not introduced in Britain until 1998, under newly elected New Labour prime minister Tony Blair. In contrast, as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn showed the huge support for free higher education when students, young people and workers joined mass rallies in the run up to the 2017 general election. The 2019 election manifesto grey book estimated the cost of abolishing tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants for full-time and part-time students at 13.6 billion. The obstacle is the profit system and the defenders of capitalism.

Corbyns anti-austerity programme was met with disdain by Tory and right-wing Labour MPs, who claimed there is no magic money tree. Yet the same Tory government has shown that the money can be found when the capitalist system they defend is under threat spending over 400 billion since Covid struck, including the 37 billion set aside for the botched test-and-trace system.

The current tuition fee system leaves university graduates saddled with debt for much of our working lives. In fact, the government predicts that only 25% of current undergraduates will have paid off their debt by the time they retire. The situation is only set to worsen following the Tories announcement that the student loan debt repayment window will be extended from 30 to 40 years and the repayment threshold lowered.

Alongside free education, we need institutions that are fully funded by government, and controlled by students, workers and the wider working class. This would bring to an end the university managements vicious attacks on the conditions of staff in the name of balancing the books.

But who will launch the fight for free education? Under Keir Starmer, the Labour Party has taken a clear rightward turn to the side of big business. As of yet, the current Labour leader has not officially renounced his 2020 campaign pledge to support the abolition of tuition fees. But he has retreated from nationalising utilities, suspended Jeremy and introduced rule changes designed to lock out the left from taking the leadership again.

And where was Starmer when students were organising rent strikes last year? When Young Labour urged him to back the rent strikes, he did not respond. A Labour spokesperson refused to confirm the partys position. Starmers right-wing machine has even gone as far as prohibiting access to Young Labour social media accounts, in an attempt to censor Labours official youth wing. Starmer is hell-bent on completing Labours reconfiguration into a safe pair of hands for British capitalism. It is difficult to imagine him ever demanding the super-rich pay for education.

This is why it is time for students to build a new mass movement, starting with campus-wide rallies of students and university workers already on strike, to discuss the next steps to fight cuts and marketisation.

But without a political alternative outside the Labour Party, students would be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. A mass movement of students fighting for free education would be strengthened by representatives in Westminster like Dave Nellist, fighting on our side against the bosses.

Even just a modest tax or levy on the vast wealth of the super-rich would be enough to provide free education and reinstate maintenance grants. But why should the capitalists maintain their control over our education, and over the economy and the rest of society?

Socialists fight for the wealth and resources to be owned and controlled by the majority, the working class. By nationalising the banks and big business to be run under democratic workers control and management, a socialist government could plan production to meet everyones needs. Only such socialist measures, coordinated with socialist movements internationally, could guarantee a flourishing, free education system on a permanent basis.

Ian Hodson, President Bakers, Food and Allied Workers Union: As a founder and funder, and after 119 years of support for the Labour Party, our members decided that they could no longer be supportive of a political organisation riven by factionalism, and more interested in securing positions in its own ranks than dealing with the huge inequalities and hardship so many in our society face.

We have witnessed in recent weeks the actions of Labour in power with its treatment of its bin workers. They are no different to those of the Tory party. We need a fresh start, and Erdington offers an opportunity to send a real shot across the bows of the Westminster elite. By electing Dave Nellist, the people of Erdington will be sending one of their own someone who will be a powerful voice for ending the hardship we see daily in our society. Be it food, energy or housing poverty, it is a political choice by voting Dave Nellist you will be saying its time for change, and time for a better society for all.

Pete Randall, Unite rep for Coventry bin strikers: Dave stands on the side of workers, the community and is honest. So honest, he pledges to take a workers wage! This isnt about greed, its about delivering for the people. Hes done it before, hell do it again.

Chris Williamson, ex-Labour MP and Resist: I have known Dave Nellist for over 30 years. He is a real community champion. No other candidate can match his track record. By contrast, the Labour Party ignores the interests of local people and Labours response to the cost of living crisis is almost identical to the Conservatives.

Joe Simpson, Deputy General Secretary of the Prison Officers Association: I support Dave Nellist simply because of who he is. Dave is a sincere, genuine working-class man who will speak up for his constituents in Erdington and will protect them from the devastating cuts which will come in the next few years. No other candidate is speaking up for the people of Erdington and giving them a voice in parliament they will just take the money, sit on their hands and vote in favour of the party they belong to.

That is the exact opposite of what Dave will deliver, he will deliver a working-class voice on a working-class wage with a working-class agenda.

Naomi Byron, Unison NEC (personal capacity) and NHS worker: If Dave is elected to Parliament again he will be a real workers representative there. I know Dave will always fight to defend the NHS and for its renationalisation. He stands with health workers and outsourced workers. He fought against the Private Finance Initiative when New Labour introduced it, he is fighting against the Health and Care Bill, for proper NHS funding, and a proper pay rise for all.

Hugo Pierre, Unison NEC (personal capacity) and school worker: I am confident, that if elected, Dave would make a great MP for Erdington. Dave knows the West Midlands and has fought against the drop in workers living standards as formerly skilled, well-paid jobs have been replaced with low-paid precarious work.

He supported and gave solidarity to the Birmingham bin and home care workers who were attacked by the Labour council.

As a trade unionist, support for your struggle is the key. Im backing Dave in Erdington because he will have your backs. But workers across the country will also have a principled and determined socialist fighting for our cause.

Tosh McDonald, retired President of ASLEF the train drivers union and former councillor for Doncaster Town ward: By voting for Dave Nellist, the voters of Erdington have the chance to make a real change to Britains political landscape. With no real difference between Westminsters main parties and their careerist politicians, Dave is a refreshing breath of fresh air. Taking a workers wage instead of lining his own pocket, standing up for people instead of big business, Dave is a real peoples politician. A vote for Dave is a vote to change politics in Birmingham and beyond.

The Socialist Party is part of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, working with trade unions and others to stand no-cuts, fighting candidates, and take those first necessary steps towards building the new mass workers party we so urgently need.

Within the campaign for working-class political representation, the Socialist Party fights for a bold socialist programme that shows how we can really transform things. The first step is nationalisation of the biggest 150 banks and corporations that dominate the economy, under democratic working-class control and management. This would put the levers for the first steps towards a socialist planned economy, democratically run to meet the needs of all, into workers hands not those of the bosses.

The pandemic revealed the potential power of workers many times, forcing bosses to take safety measures they didnt want to take. What could the six-and-a-half million members of the trade unions do if we acted together? Combine that with those not yet in a union, linked up with young people, and communities!

Key to bringing that potential power to bear is the mass organisation of workers, including building a workers political voice. It also means strengthening the trade unions, the main workers organisations in the workplaces, where workers confront the bosses in the struggles over safety, pay, and conditions.

But it also means joining the Socialist Party. We stand firm for socialism come what may standing up against the bosses, the Tories, and the Labour Blairites, charting a way forward to build the maximum unity of the working class in the struggle for socialist change.

Fighting for a socialist alternative to war, poverty and inequality is an international struggle against an international capitalist system. The Socialist Party is affiliated to the Committee for a Workers International (CWI) to build a worldwide struggle for socialism.

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Erdington byelection - Working-class people need a voice - Socialist Party

Political talent is in short supply. So is a willingness to step up and take the burdens and the blows of office. The leader of Newcastle city council, Nick Forbes, has been toppled as a result of destructive tribal shenanigans, likely to deter others from giving up most of their life to become councillors. All political careers end in failure, goes the old dictum, and its usually so.

But Forbess career has been no failure. As leader of the council for 11 years, he steered his city through the lost decades savage cuts, protecting vulnerable people where he could and upholding Newcastles pride with ingenuity and political imagination.

One of a generation of outstanding Labour council leaders, he was deselected from his seat in Arthurs Hill ward, which he represented for 22 years, after an ambush this month. His deselection is reported to have been the result of a clash with the former Labour chief whip, local MP Nick Brown. Rules may have been breached in the process, and the party will investigate, ChronicleLive reports. But Forbes prefers to walk away with his dignity intact, he tells me, not fight over rulebooks. Whats more, his tenure in office shouldnt be defined by the petty factionalism that ended it, but by the hard task of preserving his city in an age of austerity, against vicious odds.

Does his downfall show he was a failure? Financially, some might say: at 48, he received total pay of 27,600 a year, with no pension, for the past 11 years for heavy responsibilities. But he walks away reflecting on how he navigated killer cuts of 40% of Westminster funding. Labour leaders are trapped by the Tories gleeful ploy to devolve the axe, forcing local authorities to make agonising choices with shrunken budgets, taking the full blast of local blame. Right from 2010, Labour cities the poorest places took the hardest hit, Tory shires the least. Now with levelling up, funds again are diverted to Tory towns often not the poorest rather than the most deprived cities.

What should they do? Protest, certainly. But they still have to carry out the cuts, find clever ways to raise funds and try to protect the weakest. Thats our tightrope, Forbes tells me, to highlight the hardship of cuts without damaging the citys reputation. At election time, despite the blows, they still have to proclaim achievements and Newcastle still dazzles its visitors.

Survival meant dealing with the enemy: he struck an early city deal with central government, he tells me, allowing Newcastle to keep business rates fixed for 25 years and to borrow to build. He also claims that they have built more council housing in the last 10 years than in the previous 30. Aggressively pursuing vacant owners, hundreds of empty properties have been brought back into use.

Defending families against the monstrous bedroom tax, they built homes with a hobby room rather than a spare bedroom. With the 2011 abolition of the education maintenance allowance, which supported poor children staying on in sixth forms, they found 15 a week for the neediest.

Newcastle council had a living wage long before the rest of the UK. Partnerships with the private sector have been key: that includes a good work pledge, where hundreds of employers agree union representation, pensions and no zero-hours contracts. The government dismantled the welfare state, so we had to create our own. Of course, it was slender protection against tidal waves of poverty from the 37bn national benefit cuts, money that was taken from pockets of the poor and from the citys economy. When a large number of Englands 3,500 Sure Starts were lost, Newcastle kept them for 30% of the poorest. Only when Forbes cut the arts did national celebs protest, not about lost nurseries and youth clubs. Newcastle is a city of sanctuary for asylum seekers and unaccompanied refugee children, despite far-right marches and demos outside mosques. Its Labour councillors were mainly male and white, now half are women, with more ethnic minority members, including the UKs first Roma councillor. As an LGBTQ+ leader, Forbes has taken shedloads of homophobic abuse.

He grumbles that London-based journalists rock up in Newcastle, hear his list of the citys thriving inward investments and jobs created but then go home to write only about grinding poverty, featuring grim up north scenes from Byker and Benwell. I plead partly guilty, because theres no escaping the brutal effects of Westminster-induced hardship, though I reported on the Forbes administrations enterprise and inventiveness too.

His detractors accused him of spending too long out of his ward but those against moderates resented his place attending moderate Keir Starmers shadow cabinet. Each shadow minister now has a local Labour leader as part of their team, at last drawing on Labours formidable local strengths. Forbes will be gone from there, no longer chairing the Convention of the North and sitting as a member of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership.

Forbes should be remembered not for his fall amid red-on-red factionalism, but for his public service, even in the harshest years and against the odds. What a pointless and destructive waste.

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Look at the fall of a brilliant Labour leader and see why so many shun public service - The Guardian

Stella Creasy, the Labour MP, is on a one-woman crusade to make the House of Commons more "family friendly".You may remember her from the row over whether or not babies should be allowed in the Chamber.

Yesterday morning saw her take up the cudgels on this point once again. Tweeting in the early hours, she wrote:

Me and kid2 finally leaving parliament after the votes for the policing bill went on until 1am - tell me again this system is family friendly

There is no doubt that making parliamentary life kinder on MPs with families is a worthwhile enterprise. Life in the Westminster goldfish bowl can definitely take its toll; the divorce rate for MPs is consistently higher than the national average.

But the challenge is to find a way to do it for all Members. Unfortunately, the vision of a "family-friendly" Parliament held up by Creasy benefits only the select few and undermines the actual business of Parliament too.

Why? Because the idea that Westminster could be "family-friendly"on a day-to-day basis only makes sense if youre a London MP, or at least have your family in London even if your constituency is elsewhere.

Acts of performative parenthood, as when Louise Mensch walked out of a select committee in 2013 to go and pick up her children, only ever occur in this context; nobody has yet cited the school run to justify hopping on a train up to Manchester or Scotland before the weeks work is done.

The truth is that when New Labour started to oversee cuts to Parliaments sitting hours in the name of being "family friendly", most MPs knew it was basically just a cut in their hours and voted for it on that basis. The diary of Chris Mullin, one Labour MP who opposed the changes, chronicles it in detail.

It was also he who pointed out (very unfashionably) that the result would simply be leaving the great majority of his colleagues in London several nights a week with no parliamentary business to engage them, and that this might create a highly social environment and, well, pressure on marriages.

The abolition of late sittings has also had an inevitable effect on the actual work of Parliament too, especially by giving rise to the awful programme motion. This is where the amount of time for any debate is fixed in advance, and is why you so often see the Speaker cutting speeches by MPs to four minutes three minutes two minutes

Suffice to say, such constraints are not conducive to genuine intellectual engagement and exchange, and produce a system wherein MPs are too often basically reading things into Hansard or creating clips for social media.

Little wonder that in recent years the House of Lords, which does often sit late, has been picking up more of the slack when it comes to the detailed work of legislation.

Any debate over making the House of Commons "family friendly"ought to start by acknowledging that there are limits to how much that can or should be done. Being an MP is a job, and doing that job properly has time and energy commitments that cannot be infinitely adapted to an individual's preferred work/life balance.

It should also take as an explicit starting point the need to treat all MPs equitably: it is not "anti-family" to expect Creasy to sit late and vote if the alternative is just that other MPs, also mothers, would be stuck in a hotel rather than home with their own children.

With those as our starting points, a real "family-friendly"policy might actually be a step backwards, away from some of New Labours misguided reforms.

Return the House to late sittings three nights a week, Monday through Wednesday. Use the extra time not only to ease controls on debate, but also to scrap the Friday morning sitting altogether.

That would allow every MP to return to their constituency on Thursday night, and spend three days near their families.

Excerpt from:

Stella Creasy's vision of a 'family friendly' Parliament would be a disaster - The Telegraph

The Long Peace was not inevitable. Like other examples of human progress, it was the dividend of particular brainchildren: ideas and institutions designed to mitigate the tragedies of the human condition.

Get Weekend Reads from IdeasA weekly newsletter from the Boston Globe Ideas section, forged at the intersection of 'what if' and 'why not.'

Of the contributors to peace identified in Better Angels, three of them interstate trade, membership in global organizations, and the United Nations outlawry of wars of aggression applied to Russia but failed to inhibit it. Two others did not apply to Russia in the first place.

One was democracy. Russia is an electoral autocracy, lacking the checks and balances that can inhibit a leader from dragging his country into stupid wars. The framers of democracy designed these checks as a safeguard against tyrants. Today we might diagnose them as malignant narcissists, with a grandiose craving for glory, a lack of empathy, and a petulant sensitivity to affronts.

The other irenic force is Enlightenment humanism: the conviction that the ultimate good is the life, liberty, and happiness of individuals, with governments instituted as social contracts to secure these rights. Putin cleaves instead to romantic nationalism, in which the ultimate good is the prestige of ethnic nations. Governments and strong leaders are their embodiments, and they struggle to stake out spheres of influence and rectify historic humiliations.

A week into this anachronistic war, obviously no one knows whether it will reverse the Long Peace and send the world back to an age of warring civilizations. Maybe but maybe not.

The refusal of the United States and European Union to send its armies to meet Russias on the battlefield, very different from the responses that launched the world wars, means that the other zeroes that defined the Long Peace no nuclear war, no great-power war, no wars between rich countries (Ukraine being the poorest in Europe) will probably continue.

And the pacifying restraints may yet kick in. Russia is enmeshed with the global economy and will feel the pain of sanctions that were swifter and severer than predicted. It is being booted out of a wide swath of organizations it wants to belong to, from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to the Eurovision Song Contest. And Putins middle-fingering of the norm against wars of aggression is earning him the reputation not as a great man in history but as a deranged thug.

Can shunning by the community of nations make a difference? Though populist nationalists pretend that globalization is a passing fad, our irreversibly interconnected world is likely to punish any country that tries to go it alone. Many of a nations challenges dont respect lines on a map, and membership in an international problem-solving community will be necessary to deal with them. They include trade, technology, pandemics, terrorism, climate, piracy, cybercrime, and migrants, together with the desire of its citizens to work, study, and travel abroad and to enjoy the pleasures of world culture.

Also unlikely to go into reverse is the ongoing humanitarian revolution and its decimation of barbaric customs. Past centuries saw the abolition of human sacrifice, heretic-burning, torture-executions, chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and the legal rape of wives by their husbands. In the decade since Better Angels was published, the data show continuing declines of other violent practices, including child abuse, female genital mutilation, forced marriage, capital and corporal punishment, land mines, and the criminalization of homosexuality.

Yet another of these barbaric customs is war. The valuation of human well-being over norms of conformity and authority will make it harder for any leader to turn his populace into cannon fodder to indulge his dreams of historical grandeur.

For these and other reasons, even when countries have breached the Long Peace, the invasions have seldom gone well for the invader.

History is not cyclical, but it is jerky. After the biblical Israelites abandoned human sacrifice, they kept having to take measures to prevent backsliding into the pastime. France has the dubious distinction of abolishing slavery twice, the second time after Napoleon had reintroduced it. Yet the second or third or nth time was the charm: We no longer have slave auctions. Nor do we have a need for laws against burning children as an offering to Moloch.

Could Putins new altar of human sacrifice also turn out to be a temporary backsliding in the obsolescence of interstate war? Lets hope so, but it wont happen by itself. It will require that we continue to promote the forces of enlightenment that have sent violence into decline, including the valuation of human life and the norms and institutions of global cooperation.

Steven Pinker is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

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Is Russias war with Ukraine the end of the Long Peace? - The Boston Globe

Only one clip of Meena speaking flickering, faded, just a few minutes long survives today, and it sounds like a prophecy. It is 1981. She is 24, in a pale blue turtleneck and a dark blue dotted pinafore, her wavy hair cropped short.

Meena had just delivered a speech in Valence, where she was invited by the new French Socialist government to represent the Afghan resistance movement at a party congress. Her speech so angered the Soviet delegation the USSR had invaded Afghanistan two years earlier, and she spoke forcefully against the occupation that they stalked out, glowering, as she raised a victory sign in the air.

In the clip, a snippet from an interview with a Belgian news channel, she predicts calmly, sombrely, pen in hand the victory of anti-Soviet forces. But she also warns of its cost: that the anti-democratic, misogynistic factions of the mujahideen being valorised by the West in their fight against the Soviets would, in turn, devour Afghanistan.

Amid the clumsy binaries of war, Meena was treading a tricky path.

Meena was born in 1956, in the final decades of Mohammed Zahir Shahs reign. The modernist king had nudged along a number of firsts for women: female voices on Afghan radio, voluntary abolition of the chadar, and ratification of the constitution by a Loya Jirga a grand legal assembly that included women.

She attended one of Kabuls best schools the Lycee Malalai, named after a beloved folk heroine who rallied flailing Afghan forces to victory against the British in 1880 but in her middle-class home, she saw her father periodically beat her two mothers.

Uncommonly alert to injustice her relatives casual mistreatment of Hazara servants, of the educational disparities between her architect father and her unlettered mother teenage Meena became increasingly fixated on the inferior status of women.

How men saw women and how women saw themselves as individuals with their own hopes and dreams, rather than in perpetual service to the family, the tribe, and the nation would not be transformed by state mandates alone. These roles would have to be renegotiated, Meena knew, by Afghan women themselves, from within the most fundamental unit of society, the family.

It is 1976. Three years earlier, the old king had been overthrown by his cousin, and the 225-year-old monarchy was replaced with an autocratic one-party state. Kabul University, where Meena is now studying law, is a microcosm of the forces buffeting Afghanistan: Marxists and Maoists, monarchists and Islamic revivalists.

Meena, 20, is married to a doctor 11 years older, the only man her family could find who fit her criteria: no bride price, no second wife, no objection to school or work. He is the leader of a Maoist group. Meena also leans left, but she is not interested in being relegated to the womens wing of a political outfit. She seeks an organisation that centres the liberation of Afghan women.

There is none, so she starts one herself. It is called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA).

In the beginning, there were five. A year later, 11. They were not even all known to each other and rarely met all together. Once, when they did meet, they sat in a room partitioned by curtains so they could hear the rest but could not see more than three others. Years before the Taliban first took over Afghanistan, at a time when women had the right to education, were such extraordinary measures necessary?

RAWA was not plotting the downfall of the state. At first, it was organising adult literacy classes, a preliminary step in Meenas vision towards helping women from strict patriarchal families develop a sense of self. But in a stubbornly gendered society, where the only women with any real power tended to be mothers-in-law, the organisers knew their work would be perceived as a threat: it would, in Dari, be mushti dar dahan a fist in the mouth of patriarchy.

In 1978, on the heels of a violent coup, a new Soviet-backed government began rolling out reforms across Afghanistan. Land was redistributed, the tricolour flag turned a solid communist red, bride prices reduced, and marriage before the age of 18 outlawed. Afghan society bristled at these changes particularly, scholars have since noted, the changes concerning women. RAWA baulked, too: if the fight for their rights became associated with imperial power, it was Afghan women who would bear the brunt of the backlash. And so, it expanded its mandate, becoming, in Meenas words, an organisation of women struggling for the liberation of Afghanistan and of women. One could not be achieved without the other.

Anti-Soviet resistance mounted across Afghanistan, first percolating in the countryside, then spreading to the cities. The crackdown by the Soviet-backed government also intensified. Political prisoners in Afghan jails tribal leaders, clergy, public intellectuals, students tripled within six months. Executions were a daily occurrence. Many others vanished into thin air. Meena began visiting the families of the jailed and the disappeared, asking after them.

This is how many women joined RAWA. They were struck by the fact that Meena cared. Bereft of male protection but also male authority for the first time, they heeded her call to channel their rage and despair into a disciplined resistance.

In December 1979, Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan. RAWA members took part in popular demonstrations, surreptitiously distributing political pamphlets (shabnameh, literally translating to night missives, circulated under cover of dark), started Payam-e-Zan (Womens Message), a polemical magazine that they assembled by hand, and supported secular factions of the mujahideen on the war front, where they dispensed medical aid and learned to use and clean guns.

Melody Ermachild Chavis, author of a RAWA-authorised biography of Meena, recalls story after story of Meenas doggedness: disguised in an old burqa, she would visit women from dawn to dusk, talking for hours, returning every week.

That is the closest to a critique of Meena that Chavis who channelled 20 years of experience as a private investigator preparing death-row appeals in California into reconstructing Meenas life heard from RAWA members. Some of the older women would tell her, youve got to rest, youve got to protect yourself more. They told me how shed periodically collapse: from dehydration, exhaustion, malnourishment, sometimes pregnancy, she says.

And sometimes from grief. Once, thousands of women went to meet jailed family members being released under a general amnesty when only 120 were released, the women stormed the prison and found piles of dead bodies.

Meena, returning home from one of her prison visits, collapsed, unable to process what she had witnessed the screams of a mother whose son was killed in prison. That night, she shook in her sleep.

The first issue of Payam-e-Zan, published in 1981, shortly before Meenas trip to Europe, features an unsigned poem.

The midnight screams of bereaved mothers still resonate in my ears

Ive seen barefoot, wandering and homeless children,

Ive seen giant henna-handed brides with mourning clothes,

Ive seen the giant walls of prisons swallow freedom in their ravenous stomach,

Im the woman who has awoken,

Ive found my path and will never turn back

The poem was penned by Meena. By the time she returned from Europe, a number of RAWA members and supporters had been imprisoned. Her husband, after being jailed and tortured, had fled to Pakistan. As a political activist opposing the Soviet occupation who had garnered international attention, Meenas photos were being circulated at checkpoints across Kabul, so she too crossed the border, alongside millions of other Afghans seeking refuge from war.

Ultimately, she set up a base in the Pakistani city of Quetta, where RAWA began opening schools, clinics and orphanages for fellow refugees.

In 1986, Meenas husband was murdered in Peshawar by mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyars Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin an armed group said to have received more CIA funding than any other mujahideen group during the Soviet war.

Three months later, Meena went missing in Quetta. In August 1987, her body was unearthed from the compound of an abandoned house, identifiable only by her wedding band. She had been strangled to death, betrayed by a male RAWA supporter. Originally arrested for driving a truck filled with explosives into Pakistan, the two men who confessed to her murder had ties to KHAD, the Afghan secret police allied with the Soviets. In 2002, 15 years after her death, they were hurriedly executed by the Pakistani state. Afterwards, RAWA released a statement reiterating its opposition to capital punishment.

More than 10 years after Meenas assassination, scholar Anne E Brodsky recounts viewing that clip of Meena alongside young RAWA members in Pakistan. Watching their martyred leader predict a future they had lived through but one she did not live to see, the young women were moved to tears. Most of them had never met her, Brodsky writes in With All Our Strength (2003), her book-length account of RAWA, but they had heard the stories and they felt that the only reason they were where they were educated, safe, and with a deep purpose in life and a community of love and caring to support their struggle was the efforts of this woman.

Brodsky, a community psychologist, interviewed more than 100 RAWA members and supporters in the early 2000s. Time and again, women spoke of how RAWA gave them meaning amid the chaos of war. They chanted the slogans that were stuck in my throat; they spoke the words that I didnt dare speak, one member told Brodsky. Another, a premed student forced to stay home when the Taliban came to power in 1996, was able to claw her way out of depression through involvement with RAWA: I even forgot I didnt have rights and couldnt continue my studies because I was always busy.

RAWAs response to Meenas murder had been to double down on her lifes work. On both sides of the Durand Line the British-drawn boundary between Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan RAWA established schools and orphanages for Afghan boys and girls, literacy programmes for older women, health clinics and income-generating programmes.

In Afghanistan, then as now, most of these operations remained underground. In areas of Pakistan where it was relatively safer to operate for RAWA, many people remember Meenas visage having pride of place. Jennifer L Fluri, a feminist political geographer at the University of Colorado, recalls in the early 2000s nearly every room in an openly RAWA-run school or orphanage in Pakistan featuring Meenas portrait. She was very much a living presence, she says.

Meena remained the face of RAWA for another reason, too: after her assassination, the organisation became entirely anonymous, operating as a single, undifferentiated front. At the same time, it became even more decentralised, a collection of committees spread across Afghanistan and Pakistan that exchanged information on a need-to-know basis.

Chavis estimates that there were approximately 2,000 members in the mid-2000s membership is limited to Afghan women living in Afghanistan or Pakistan, while men and other women can join as supporters but there was no real way of ascertaining the actual number. For security reasons, RAWA did not maintain a consolidated list.

In 1997, a year into Taliban rule, they launched a website, helping them find international supporters and donors. It exists today, too, stuck in a 90s design warp, an ode to Meena as well as meticulous documentation of the conditions of Afghan women at large. Trigger warnings abound, followed by an unapologetic reminder: this is the reality for many.

In addition to their social work, RAWA also began documenting Taliban atrocities at a time when Afghanistan had been largely forgotten by the world. In 1999, members smuggled a camera into a football stadium in Kabul to film the public execution of Zarmina, a mother of seven accused of killing her husband. When RAWA approached Western media outlets with the video, most declined to air it it was too shocking, they said, for their viewers.

Then 9/11 happened. RAWAs footage of Zarminas execution, despite being two years old, began playing on a loop on CNN. Before dropping bombs on Afghanistan, US warplanes first dropped flyers over the country making the case for military action. Some of the pamphlets featured images of Taliban crimes plucked from RAWAs website. RAWA was appalled, says Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Womens Mission, a US-based non-profit established in 2000 by RAWA supporters. To them, it was such a betrayal and a huge danger to be inadvertently associated with a US invasion that they staunchly opposed. The US never asked for their permission to use those images.

In her role as a RAWA ally, facilitating its advocacy work abroad, Kolhatkar had a front-row seat to Western liberal feminisms encounter with RAWA.

Prior to 9/11, some members came to the US for the first time on a speaking tour sponsored by a prominent womens organisation. The organisation sold these little pins with squares of mesh cloth on them, similar to what youd find on a burqa, Kolhatkar recounted. And one condition of the invitation was that at every event featuring RAWA, they would first have to play a five-minute video, produced by the organisation, highlighting the plight of Afghan women and after 9/11, they [RAWA] were dismissed by Western feminists as being too Western. This, to me, was the most infuriating part: to have their work co-opted and their legacy questioned by Western feminists.

The activists who came to the US, writes Brodsky, were also frustrated by Western attempts to individualise them, needling them for their personal stories, rather than engaging with RAWAs institutional message.

When a RAWA representative explained her role on RAWAs foreign affairs committee to the Western women in the room, Brodsky recalls the meeting room lapsing into baffled silence. The other women in the room appeared to strain to integrate this piece of information into their mental picture of this young woman and her grassroots organization, she writes in With All Our Strength. Finally someone responded, A Foreign Affairs Committee, isnt that organized of you?!

For RAWA, these experiences abroad were a vindication of Meenas fierce commitment to independence and her refusal to let the organisations mission be subsumed into a broader political project, whether at home or abroad. Her legacy remains really central to RAWA, especially with regard to independence, secular democracy, and the complete rejection of foreign intervention except when it comes to people-to-people solidarity, says Kolhatkar.

Fluri, as a geographer, was particularly interested in examining how RAWA negotiated power closer to home in Pakistan. She recalls spending time in a refugee camp in Peshawar in the early 2000s, where RAWA wielded great influence so much so that when a woman complained of her husband continually hitting her, they worked with male allies to have the man kicked out of the camp. It was almost like they had their own mini nation there, says Fluri. The camp was a microcosm of their vision of Afghanistan feminist, multiethnic, she says. I remember thinking, oh wow, they really are kind of creating this there.

Many of the major refugee camps in Pakistan were disbanded in the mid-2000s. As Afghan men and women returned to their homeland often involuntarily, hounded out by an increasingly hostile host country RAWAs activities in Pakistan began to dissipate. In Afghanistan, its work continues but remains underground: a mix of home-based schools and feminist study circles, rural health services, and income-generating projects for women, such as poultry farms.

RAWA did not respond to requests for an interview.

Much of RAWAs work today depends on donations from international supporters and is therefore especially susceptible to the fleeting attention span of the West. The situation right now inside Afghanistan is worse than it was last summer [when US forces withdrew]. But theres less attention being paid, and so its harder to raise funds and getting the money to RAWA has also become nearly impossible because of US banking sanctions, says Kolhatkar.

Still, RAWA soldiers on. Last December, they marked International Human Rights Day with a protest against the Taliban, concealing their identities by wearing masks of slain Afghan activists. In the absence of freedom and democracy, their placards proclaimed, human rights have no meaning!

Meenas legacy extends beyond RAWA, too. Years after that refugee camp in Peshawar was shut down, not too far away, another young Pashtun would become famous for demanding her right to education so famous that she too would be known by her first name alone. In 2014, asked about her childhood memories of reading, Malala responded: One of the first books I read is called Meena, about a girl who stood up for womens rights in Afghanistan.

Excerpt from:

The Afghan revolutionary who took on the Soviets and patriarchy - Al Jazeera English

Billionaires are making regular trips to space for a reason: they want to harness the potential economic payoff. We need to come up with a framework for property rights in space that will benefit all of humanity, not just the super rich, argues Rebecca Lowe.Under her proposal - inspired by philosopher John Locke - people could earn the right for the exclusive use of plots of moon land, as long as this advances certain moral aims.

Revisiting the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that bans any appropriation of planetary or lunar land might be worth doing, writes Tony Milligan. But using John Lockes 17th century framework is not the way to think about property rights in space. The Solar System is a very different place from Earth, and a whole new type of economy would need to be invented for it.

In two separate articles, Rebecca Lowe and Tony Milligan put forward their arguments on how we should think about property rights in space.

Rebecca Lowe

Privatising the moon is a meme, or at least a caricature. Its used to emphasise the unrelenting greed of capitalists: Theyd sell off the moon if they could!. Cowboys on Earth. Cowboys in space. And fair enough, rocket-man billionaires arerarely out of the newsthese days.

Nonetheless, these billionaires give us good reasons to think hard about property rights in space. Firstly, its not enough just to state that doing something even as outlandish sounding as privatising the moon is wrong. You need to be able to explain why. What if humankind needed to escape Earth? Would it be fundamentally impermissible to try to inhabit the moon, in such a situation? Wed struggle without any recourse to private property.

Beyond that, itd be nice to think that these billionaires are spending their money on rocketships solely for the intrinsic value of knowing more about our universe. But presumably a large part of them taking on the serious financial and reputational costs of space exploration is a massive potential payoff. And that payoff is something that could be harnessed for the good of all humankind.

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The more you think about it, the clearer it seems that a morally-justified system for assigning and governing property rights in space could present vast benefits.

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The more you think about it, the clearer it seems that a morally-justified system for assigning and governing property rights in space in land, in other resources, even in the vacuum itself could present vast benefits. These potential benefits extend far beyond financial rewards for people becoming owners under such a system, and the other direct and indirect beneficiaries of these ownerships. They also relate to the provision of incentives for the responsible stewardship of space, as well as opportunities for new scientific discovery and democratised space exploration.

Of course, this doesnt mean that we shouldnt consider potential costs. Debate rages about property-related injustice and unfairness on Earth: not least regarding the decisions and actions of our forebears, relating to the acquisition of property rights, the distribution of access to natural resources, and the colonisation of areas already serving as the livelihood and homes of indigenous peoples. Debate continues about the future of Earth, too: about how we should act now if we are to conserve our planet appropriately, for its own sake, and for future generations. All this reminds us of the serious costs that property-rights regimes can impose, and the importance of ensuring that legal claims to ownership are morally justified.

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The ways in which human beings meet some of their most urgent everyday needs involves something thats hard not to see, in a basic sense, as individual ownership.

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Nonetheless, most people see property as a basic human need, the focus of a natural human practice, an inevitable part of life. And private property in the sense of individual ownership is typically deemed not only to improve standards of human welfare, but also the condition of many objects of ownership. Theres a vast multi-disciplinary literature describing private propertys instrumental value. This focuses on the stability thatclear and secure property-rights regimestypically engender. It also addresses the crucial roleprivate property plays within exchange and trade, which, themselves, have helped to driveglobal progress in domains including education and healthcare.

Private property is about more than efficiently meeting wants and needs, however. Theres also the intrinsic value of individual ownership reflected in the security and belonging that derive particularly from home and land ownership, not least within a community. Individual ownership enables human beings to exercise their basic capabilities, and live in accordance with human dignity. Of course, there are other valuable types of property arrangement. But the ways in which human beings meet some of their most urgent everyday needs not least the need to eat things involves something thats hard not to see, in a basic sense, as individual ownership.

The minimal conception of individual ownership Im interested in for current purposes, therefore, is the relation that a particular person has with a particular thing, of which a necessary condition is that this owner/owned-thing relation is exclusive and exclusionary. And, on which, this relations exclusive and exclusionary nature is protected by a moral right. If you believe that individual cavemen and cavewomen had some kind of obligation-generating claim to the particular bits of land they lived and depended on (which meant there were certain things that only they, exclusively, could do in relation to that land, to the exclusion of others), then you believe in this kind of non-legal, moral, property right. Now, none of this prevents an owner from choosing to open up an ownership relation by offering a slice of their apple to a friend, for instance. It does however, I think, get to the heart of the idea of private property.

To return to extra-planetary matters then, what might a justifiable space property-rights regime look like, on this narrow conception of ownership? What can we learn from the mistakes of the past to get matters of property right, this time, whilst with regard to space land we still have the chance to start pretty much from scratch? A recent think-tankpaperI wrote addressed these questions.

If youve read any of the surprisingly extensivepress coveragearound my paper, however or had some of this coveragetweeted into your timeline by Bernie Sanders then you might be disappointed to learn that I didnt actually propose selling off the moon. For a start, premised in the framework I set out at the end of the paper is the idea that nobody, morally, owns the moon. I also discuss the way in which, whilst much relevant space law is interpreted in competing ways, it seems clear that nobody legally owns the moon, either. Despite various nations attempts to press for change, the national appropriation and by effect, the individual appropriation of at least thephysical domain of space, remains outlawed bylong-standing treaty.

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If youre hoping my framework will help you to acquire the whole moon to hold in perpetuity for your mega-corporation, youll be disappointed.

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What I try to do in my paper, however, is look past the current legal situation, and consider what might be a morally justified way of governing individual access to space land, on a rights-based liberal account. This is not least because theres a convincing egalitarian argument that the arbitrary oppression of opportunity that some individuals already face simply by being born in, or otherwise inhabiting, particular countries shouldnt be entrenched further through a nation-focused approach to the governance of space opportunities.

The primary problem I address, therefore, is how to avoid the perils of first come first served. This is the problem regarding the way in which it seems wrong (and a missed opportunity, all round) to prevent individuals from realising any right they hold to acquire property. But that it also seems wrong if their doing so precludes others from ever being able to do so themselves. Of course, theres also that serious problem of how we get to the point of individuals being legally able to acquire space stuff in the first place. But whilst I discuss some relevant options, Im happy largely to set that problem aside for lawyers.

To get to practicalities, however, if youre hoping my framework will help you to acquire the whole moon to hold in perpetuity for your mega-corporation, then again, youll be disappointed. Rather, I set out a highly conditional Georgist-type system to enable the temporary rental of plots of moonland. Basically, individuals compete for the exclusive and exclusionary use of these plots, through a market-based competition consisting in the payment of rent. The term rent isnt quite right, however, because as above, I conclude that nobody owns the moon. Rather, renters pay their rent into a fund that is used to enable other individuals to compete against them for plots on the grounds that everyone has an equally strong potential claim, but only a tiny number of highly-privileged people would currently be able to realise this potential.

The size of the plots, and the rate of the rent, is variable dependent on supply and demand. Thanks toHenry George, renters own in full the profit they make from the use of their rented land. And they can use it for any morally-justified purpose. However, certain stringent conditions apply, relating particularly to the concerns of spoilage and urgent need concerns that betraythe Lockean theoryunderpinning the papers approach. Now, the rent is paid into a fund that, as above, generally serves to enable an increasing number of individuals to compete for plots of moonland, whilst partly through a rebate system helping to meet current urgent need, and to conserve land (on the moon and Earth).

On my system, therefore, Elon and Jeff will only be able to access moon plots in an exclusive and exclusionary manner if their payments, minimally: a) help to alleviate urgent human need; b) help to conserve land; and c) effectively ensure that increasing numbers of people gain the opportunity to compete against them for the use of these plots. Moreover, as part of the spoilage condition, renters must not destroy or remove parts of moon land, or the natural resources that form other parts of the moon or are found on the moon.

So, Im afraid my paper isnt truly about privatising the moon,and I dont do anything like estimating the financial value of owning space stuff. I do point out, however, that thinking about space in this way couldhelp us to assess the adequacy of ongoing approaches to property on Earth. Therefore, whilst I dont expect the peoplemaking fun of my paper on social mediato have read it, I think that if they did, they might find it less friendly towards the current economic order than they presume.

Tony Milligan

For several years now, there has been a phantom conflict going on between two political legacies of the 20th century, each trying to make headway within discussions about space futures. On the one hand, there are fierce opponents of private sector activity in space. Particularly when it is associated with billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. On the other hand, there are free marketeers who see space as an opportunity to base democracy around the free market, rather than treating the market as one democratic institution among many.

Both tend to radically over-estimate the role of the space private sector compared to the role of national space agencies which remain the primary players. The contrast is not even close. Neither Elon Musk nor Jeff Bezos are ever likely to be in a position to compete with the Chinese state. Nonetheless, the conflict goes on. One of the latest installments is the Adam Smith Institute paper Space Invaders: Property Rights on the Moon by Rebecca Lowe. This is more interesting than many of the routine contributions because it focuses upon the very idea of property rights in space, and the kinds of ethical and political principles that might underpin any replacement for the Outer Space Treaty (1967) which treats space as the common heritage of humanity, and currently outlaws the appropriation of planetary or lunar real estate. As a point of international law, nobody can own the moon.

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We fall into a trap if we think of lunar resources as analogous to the kinds of resource that Locke was typically concerned with.

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What we get in Lowes paper, as the way forward from the OST, is an application of John Lockes 17th century political theory to a partitioning of the lunar surface. Or, at least, the application of a version of Lockes account of how private property arises, is transferred and operates to the benefit of society at large. Lowes belief is that a clear, morally-justified, and efficient system for assigning and governing property rights in space in land, in other resources, in the vacuum itself, and in anything else that might be found -would present vast benefits. I have no particular opposition to private property rights, but believe that we cannot run plausible arguments about the distribution of space resources independently of a more detailed understanding of the resources in question.

We fall into a trap if we think of lunar resources as analogous to the kinds of resource that Locke was typically concerned with. The lunar resources that matter most are not laid out like large tracts of open and unworked land that might be divided up fairly among settler farmers whose claim will then be reinforced by their working of the land. Strategic lunar resources tend, instead, to be far more concentrated.

Here, we might think of lunar concentrations of Thorium, Uranium or Helium 3 for use in fusion reactors. Or we might think of the Peaks of Eternal Light. Highly concentrated resources in the South Polar Region, with raised crater rims sitting in near constant sunlight (useful for solar power), possibly shading frozen water and volatiles. An ideal combination, but heavily localized. A good-sized peak will be equivalent only to a narrow strip a few meters wide across a regulation-sized football field. It is no coincidence that the majority of lunar missions planned for the present decade are disproportionately targeting the South Lunar Pole rather than spread across the lunar surface.

Rather than dividing up tracts of land in the manner of the New World, we might do better to think of dividing up an art gallery. Someone will get bits of carpet from the stairwell, someone will get a cupboard, and someone will get a Picasso or a Cezanne. Lockes world is an obvious go-to reference point for transitioning from no-property to property, because it makes it seem like there is some clear, morally justified grounding for the resulting distributions. In the case of the Moon, nothing is so clear or readily justified.

An oddity here is that it is not at all obvious that private property is a great concern for prospective space miners. Those involved in Planetary Resources before its demise in 2020 were concerned more with security of tenure than individual property rights, i.e. is being able to complete licensed extraction projects. What matters for any actual mining operations is always likely to be the licensing system, rather than Lockean self-realization through property. This is also the way that space law is going, with extraction rights being put into law in the US back in 2015, and other countries such as Luxembourg, Japan and India following suit. The legislation and direction of travel is also flagged up in Lowes paper.

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Lockes world is an obvious go-to reference point for transitioning from no-property to property, because it makes it seem like there is some clear, morally justified grounding for the resulting distributions. But in the case of the Moon, nothing is clear or readily justified.

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The result is that when we drill down into the detail of the paper what we find is that the status of the property-right-holder amounts more to the status of a renter than the status of a full owner. John Locke will not be going into space any time soon. Instead, the rhetoric of property boils down instead to something other than actual property because Lowe gets the point about the obvious benefits of licensing over property. But the paper does not come to terms with the implications of licensing, and its larger departure from the moral universe of Locke. Two implications suggest a large departure.

Firstly, licensing is better adapted to a multi-player environment rather than a binary world of states and individual property owners, driven by much the same human nature. There are multiple, legitimate claims that may be made in relation to the Moon, by agents whose primary concern is science, environmental protection, state presence, political equilibrium between competing powers, and yes, private financial concerns. Trying to flatten out this uneven terrain of claims by appeal to any single institution (such as property or quasi-property) looks unrealistic.

Secondly, accessible space resources are finite, not infinite. It is far from obvious that we will ever be able to access resources beyond the Solar System. And, for practical purposes, it is also a closed system. Little, if anything, comes from the outside. This Solar System is everything that we and future generations may ever have to work with. And much of it is made up of gas giants whose gravity wells may be too deep for us to use in any large-scale manner. We have far less to work with than is sometimes imagined. One Moon, one Mars, a few smaller bodies and the asteroids.

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The kind of economy need for space is something to be invented, rather than transplanted from the past and John Lockes theory of property.

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The upshot, and a core point set out by Martin Elvis and myself in our 2019 paper How much of the Solar System should we leave as wilderness? is that the trajectory for a space economy will include either a dangerous exhaustion of new resources, or an eventual transition to a steady-state economy. Not a 20th century market economy geared to indefinite expansion, but a different kind of economy. One within which various sorts of regulated but extensive markets will no doubt operate, but without reliance upon an imagined endless stream of new resources, or new places where settler owners might be set down. Given the sheer unevenness of the distribution of strategic resources in space, a steady-state economy of this sort would have to have different sets of entitlements, spread across multiple sorts of players who relate to the finite resources of the Solar System in a variety of ways. This kind of economy is something to be invented, rather than transplanted from the past and John Lockes theory of property.

Recognition of the ultimate need for such an economy is not new. Almost all of the great classical political economists got the point. David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith all recognized that there were physical limits to growth. Economic expansion, under capitalism or anything else, would eventually end. Locke never quite came to terms with the problem. Nor did Marx. Both envisaged endless worlds to conquer. We do not have such worlds. And so varied are the ones that we can access, that a single fundamental grounding norm concerning property or its abolition makes little sense. We cannot even apply a single metric to tell how close we are to resource exhaustion. On planets, surface area will sometimes be a good measure of resource use. But not at any icy poles, where multiple systems may be needed. In the asteroid belt, mass will be a better measure, but it will not work on Ceres or Vesta where surface again is crucial.

No one measure will work, much less a single norm for claims and use. Plurality is our best option. It comes close to being our only option. And when it comes to the Moon, we would be wise to start as we mean to go on, by recognizing a plurality of claims upon the same resources and the need to protect as well as use.

Originally posted here:

Who owns the moon? | Rebecca Lowe, Tony Milligan - IAI

Late on Tuesday, US President Joe Biden was preparing to address a joint session of Congress, Supreme Court justices and dignitaries including specially invited guests as narrative devices.

The annual State of the Union address has no serious equal in our young republic; the Presidents Speech the reincarnated Throne Speech warms over the administrations manifesto. It rarely makes a full pronouncement on the state of the government at the point of delivery.

Over the years, we have had occasional report cards and propagandist paraphernalia trucked out in election campaigns but never a formal accounting to Parliament on the performance of the government. Budget speeches, once important set pieces in the fiscal calendar, have been relegated to the status of occasional footnotes since the introduction of value added tax.

But what Barbadians need to hear is not triumphalism, posturing or a blame game. They deserve more than an ersatz copy of an American State of the Union or Throne Speech in new garb. After two long and painful years of the worst economic and social crisis of the century, we should expect to see the administrations blueprint for reconstruction.

A standard Throne Speech ahem, Presidents Speech following Labours electoral triumph might soothe the party faithful and a few parliamentary traditionalists. But we have yet to know exactly how the Government plans to recover the lost years of 2020 and 2021.

The same timetable for reform, reconstruction and renovation that one would expect to follow a category five hurricane should be created to rescue Barbados from the doldrums of disease, death and dormancy.

We have had our hurricane. More than 300 people have died as a pandemic has become endemic. The response to the coronavirus has shifted to autopilot as vaccination rates stagnate.

We are chiefly concerned with the state of education, the spearhead of national development. The resumption of physical classes has not taken into account the incredible learning deficit that a generation of young Barbadians has experienced.

While ordering civil servants back to work, a great many students are restricted to no more than two or three days of instruction. On their days home, children as young as single digits are expected to engage in self-directed study, preferably under the watchful gaze of parents who are either unemployed, on sick leave or fortunate enough to work from home under a nebuious flexitime plan.

In addition to this, or perhaps, more aptly, in subtraction of, their schooling, classes are dismissed a full hour to 90 minutes early. And all this must continue during a school year that has not been lengthened by a day, despite the extraordinary situation in which our children find themselves.

As for those who are expected to enter secondary school this year, they are still to matriculate by means of the same examination whose imminent abolition had been declared in the first Mottley administration. The methodology for the reorganization of high schools, the timetable for this activity and the implications for students under unprecedented strain all remain unanswered. This cannot long continue.

The resumption of physical instruction seems to have had done nothing more than fill parents with dread for their childrens educational prospects. So a few parents who have weathered COVIDs economic storms will fork out large sums of cash for teachers to moonlight as private tutors. The lessons business not only thrives but has been given a new lease on life while the government to whom we hand over hundreds of millions of tax dollars apparently fumbles with undeclared certitude.

This sorry stasis is emblematic of the gaping hole where a recovery policy ought to be in vast swathes of national life agriculture, energy, culture, technology, health, law and order, constitutional reform. As Biden ascended the dais to speak on the State of Union, his troubled Build Back Better agenda lay on the operating table as politicians, including those in his own party, wield a rough scalpel.

At least there is a reconstruction agenda on the table of that republic. But where is ours?

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#BTEditorial - What, then, is the state of our nation? - Barbados Today