Monthly Archives: July 2022

Prophecies are really about now. In science fiction its always about now. What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.

Margaret Atwood

There is no need to explain why Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale has gone from reading like a warning of the near-future to an allegory of the present after the U.S. Supreme Courts ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization. Atwoods story revolves around the fictional Republic of Gilead, which takes over the U.S. after a fertility crisis decimates the population. Overnight, the fundamentalist Christian theocracy divides women into two broad classes Handmaids: chattel who perform the labor of forced birth through forced conception; and the infertile who prop up the patriarchal ruling class as wives, overseers, or slave labor in the polluted colonies.

Its a bleak tale, a story far less about heroism than the TV series based on the book would have viewerswho havent read itbelieve. (The 5th season, slated for this July, seems to have been delayed until September without explanation.) Why should we readThe Handmaids Tale? Because it is not only a work of dystopian futurism, but also a narrativized account of what has already happened to women around the world throughout history to the present. The novel is a prism through which to view the ways women have been oppressed through reproductive slavery without the sci-fi scenario of a precipitous loss of human fertility.

As Atwood has explained, when I wrote The HandmaidsTale, nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time. Some of the worst offenses were not well-known. Female genital mutilation was taking place, says Atwood, but if I had put it in 1985 [when the novel was written] probably people wouldnt have known what I was talking about. They do now. But we can still choose to overlook the information. Ignoring isnt the same as ignorance, Atwood says in the novel, you have to work at it. The quote opens the 2018 TED-Ed lesson by Naomi Mercer above on Atwoods book, walking us through its sources in history.

The Handmaids Tale, the lesson points out, is an example of Speculative Fiction, a form of writing concerned with possible futures. This theme unites both utopian and dystopian novels. Atwoods books trade in the latter, but any reader of the genre will tell you how quickly a more perfect fictional union becomes a nightmare. The Canadian writer has offered this literary inevitability as an explanation for the multiple crises of American democracy:

The real reason people expect so much of America in modern times is that it set out to be a utopia. That didnt last very long. Nathaniel Hawthorne nailed it when he said the first thing they did when they got to America was build a scaffold and a prison.

What Atwood doesnt mention, as many critics have pointed out, are the slave pens and auction houses, or the fact that Gilead closely resembles the slave-holding American South in its theocratic patriarchal Christian hierarchy and ultimate control of womens bodies. And yet, the novel completely sidesteps race by having the Republic of Gilead ship all of the countrys Black people to the Midwest (presumably for forced labor). They are never heard from again by the reader.

This tactic has seemed irresponsible to many critics, as has the shows sidestepping through colorblind casting, and the wearing of red cloaks and white bonnets in imitation of the book and show as a means of protest. When we rely too heavily on The Handmaids Tale, which ignores the presence of race and racism, says activist Alicia Sanchez Gill, it really dehumanizes and dismisses our collective experiences of reproductive trauma. Atwoods possible future pillages slaverys past and conveniently gets rid of its descendants.

The trauma Gill references includes rape and forced birth, as well as the forced sterilizations of the eugenics movement, carried out with the imprimatur of the Supreme Court(and continuing in recent cases).Kelli Midgley, who founded Handmaids Army DC, offers one explanation for using The Handmaids Tale as a protest symbol. Though she agrees to leave the costumes at home if asked by organizers, she says we are trying to reach a broader audience for people who need this message. We dont need to tell Black women that their rights are endangered. They always have been.

Maybe a new message after Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organizationis that an assault on anyones rights threatens everyone. Or as Atwood wrote in aCanadian Globe and Mail op-ed in 2018, depriving women of contraceptive information, reproductive rights, a living wage, and prenatal and maternal care as some states in the US want to do is practically a death sentence, and is a contravention of basic human rights. But Gilead, being totalitarian, does not respect universal human rights.

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Read a book, you might learn something.

New Left historian Carl Parrini to a generation of students at Northern Illinois University

Fuck your fireworks, fuck your Court, fuck its decisions, and fuck your Fourth.

The author, somewhere in downtown Chicago, today

Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence (DOI) and the American revolution it signified should be taken with a ton of salt. The (DOI) articulated the revolutionary notion that the people have the right to dissolve a government that no longer serves their interests and the common good.But who were the people in the early U.S. republic? White male owners of substantive property holdings. This left out: Blacks, most of whom were branded and ruthlessly exploited as chattel slaves in the new republic; Native Americans, reviled as savages (more on who the real savages were below); women of all races; much of the white population, which was considered too poor to be trusted with citizenship (though they were welcome to give their lives to fight the British).

Silent Profits: Jeffersons Nail Factory

Thomas Jefferson, whose face is carved into a South Dakota mountain stolen from the great Sioux Nation, is a chilling national icon. Henry Wienceks justly heralded volume,Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves(2012), dug into previously overlooked evidence in Jeffersons papers and new archaeological work at Jeffersons Monticello site to discover Jeffersons morally stunted, penny-pinching world.As one reviewer rightly notes:

Wienceks Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the silent profits gained from his slaves and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought hed vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jeffersons grocery bills. Parents are divided from children in his ledgers Slaves are bought, sold, given as gifts, and used as collateral for the loan that pays for Monticellos constructionwhile Jefferson composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what he himself called the execrable commerce. Many people saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had become deeply corrupted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich.

A Revolution Driven by Fear of Domestic Insurrections

Jeffersons American revolution was a national independence movement led by wealthy landowners, slaveowners, merchants, and elite politicos who feared uprisings from below. These North American exploiters and rulers wanted more breathing space what Hitler would later call Lebensraum to preserve and develop further systems of racial oppression, territorial conquest, and class rule.

Look at this curious, rarely noted line in the Declaration of Independences (DOIs) list of grievances against King George: He hasexcited domestic insurrections amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. Here the royal brute was accused of advancing social upheaval from the bottom up (domestic insurrection) in the New World an instructive complaint, symptomatic of the American Revolutions counter-revolutionary nature.

Interesting, no? a revolutionary document that complains about its enemy exciting domestic insurrection! A revolution driven by fear of domestic insurrection!!

Photo by Paul Street.

Merciless Savages

The inhabitants of our frontiers would that be the original Indigenous First Nations people who the white un-settlers from the British Isles and Europe ethnically cleansed from British North America and the early US republics eastern seaboard before the national break-off? It was not a pretty story. Jeffersons description of North Americas original inhabitants as merciless Indian savagesanticipated Orwell by projecting onto Native Americans the genocidal practices that white settlers exhibited from day one. Consider the celebrated progressive historianEric Foners textbook descriptionof the grisly and religiously infused Mystic River Massacre of 1637:

A force of Connecticut and Massachusetts soldiers, augmented by Narraganset allies, surrounded the main Pequot fortified village at Mystic and set it ablaze, killing those who tried to escape. Over 500 men, women, and children lost their lives in the massacre. By the end of the war [of New England settlers on the once powerful Pequot tribe], most of the Pequots had been exterminated or sold into Caribbean slavery. The treat that restored peace decreed that their name should be wiped from the historical recordThe colonists ferocity shocked their Indian allies, who considered European military practices barbaric. A few Puritans agreed. It was a fearful sight to see them frying in the fire, the Pilgrim leaders William Bradford wrote of the raid on Mystic. But to most Puritans, including Bradford, the defeat of a barbarous nation by the sword of the Lord offered further proof that they were on a sacred mission and that Indians were unworthy of sharing New England with the visible saints of the church.

The Puritans wept with joy and thanked God for helping them flame-broil Indian women and children who stood on ground the settlers would turn into a heavenly City on the Hill. A glorious moment in the unfolding of the great democratic Saxon ideal that American historians before Frederick Jackson Turner considered to be the distinctive genius of the United States and its British-colonist forbearers! After a cruel campaign of genocidal removal (at the conclusion of King Phillips War) in which the white (un-) settlers pushed most of the last Indians they had not killed out of New England in the mid-1670s, the image of Indians as bloodthirsty savages, Foner writes, became firmly entrenched in the New England mind.

The United States first and heralded president, the father of the country, George Washington was a determined and vicious killer of Native Americans known to the Iroquois as Conoctocaurious, meaning Town Taker, Burner of Towns, Village Destroyer, and Town Destroyer. In 1779, during the American War for Independence, Washington ordered and organizedthe Sullivan Campaign, which carried out the genocidal destruction of 40 Iroquois villages in New York. Hes up on Mount Rushmore, along with the Master of the Mountain. So is the warmongering Bull Moose Teddy Roosevelt, who wrote this about the ethnic cleansing of North Americas Native people:

The settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages.The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhumanLet the sentimentalist say what they will, the man who puts the soil to use must of right dispossess the man who does not [put the soil to use understood to mean enclosing the earthly commons, fencing it off as private property and exploiting natural resources and human labor power P.S.]. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori, in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty peopleIt is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races

Hitler would certainly have approved of those Social Darwinian passages from Roosevelts muti-volume study The Winning of the West. Indeed, Hitler may well have been familiar with them: he was a great fan of US-American frontier fascism (Greg Grandins phrase), drawing significant inspiration from US Indian Removal and Jim Crow.

Slaveowner Lebensraum

But lets dig in further. The reactionary reality of the DOI emerges more clearly when you realize what many of the leading North American colonists hoped to do with the land they wanted to seize from Jeffersons merciless Indian savages. As the prolific historian Gerald Horne suggests in his 2014 bookThe Counter-Revolution of 1776:Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (New York, 2014), the (seemingly minor) line in the DOI quoted above reflects a central, fundamentally counter-revolutionary motivation behind the fateful decision to break off from England: a sense that the slave system on which North American fortunes depended could not survive except through secession from the British Empire.

As Horne shows, the expansion of a largely slave-based colonial economy across the New World during the 17th and 18th centuries had caused a serious problem for England, Spain, and France. Slaves came to outnumber Europeans in the colonial world. Africans in the Americas took notice of their demographic preponderance and recurrently revolted against their masters, forcing Old World authorities to invest ever-rising resources in repression. The colonizers tried to lure and (mainly through impressment) force enough Europeans to the colonies to sustain a balance of racial power and terror that would suppress slave rebellion. They failed.

To make matters worse from the Europeans perspective, Africans in the New World were empowered by increasing rivalry between the colonial empires. Great conflicts in Europe developed between the colonizers: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763). These wars became global affairs in which colonial holdings switched hands between the great powers. They could not be waged in the Caribbean and South America without giving weapons to Blacks, and Black soldiers had to be freed if they were going to bear arms in European wars.

By the mid-18th century, as intra-European warfare further eroded the profitability of colonial enterprises, the colonial powers were looking for ways to accommodate their Black populations. In the Caribbean, Blacks were incorporated into colonial regimes. European rivalry had given rise to a new class of free Black Africans eager and equipped to fight in well-ordered military units against slavery and its remnants wherever they could be found. Hard-line resident British planters in Barbados shut down their operations and moved to North America, where the white/black ratio was less threatening.

White North American slave-owners and northern merchants who profited from the lucrative slave economy were not pleased with these developments. They experienced numerous slave revolts even in their less concentrated and volatile part of the British Empire. Examples included major Black rebellions in Manhattan (1712, 1741) and South Carolina (the Stono Uprising, a mass 1739 uprising in which dozens of white settlers were killed) only the best-known incidents. Eighteenth Century North American colonists reported numerous instances of slaves quite understandably poisoning their masters, plotting insurrections, taking over ships, and setting fires. Black insurrectionists were commonly said to be in league with the hated imperial rivals France and Spain. Horne notes that one historian has observed as early as the 1760s that every white person in the eastern counties [of Virginia] knew of a free person that had been killed by a slave [and that]individual whites had nightmares about waking up amid slaves or feeling the first spasms of a stomach contorted by poison (Horne,The Counter-Revolution of 1776, p. 237). Between 1756 and 1763, the white settlers of North America endured a remarkable spate of slave plots driven by the flux brought by the Seven Years War (Horne, 237).

Lord Dunmore as U.S. Founding Father

The settlement of that war played a pivotal role putting the US colonist-Founders on the road to secession (Independence). After its victory over France following a war in which London made extensive use of armed Africans in the New World (Horne, 187) the British government decreed a limit to the colonists territorial expansion on the North American mainland. The royal Proclamation of 1763 conflicted with the colonists insatiable lust for fertile land to plant and harvest cash crops with Black slaves land inhabited by Jeffersons merciless Indian Savages. Had the settlers been forced to remain within Englands confines, they feared, Black population growth would generate a Caribbean situation in North America. Their dread of Black rebellion was enhanced by the constant influx into North America of Black slaves infected with the Caribbean virus (resistance) this thanks to the liberalization and dramatic expansion of the global slave trade in the 18th century.

There followed two further great steps on the path to the North American slaveholders secession to American Independence. In the June 1772Somersetcase (Somerset v Lewisof 1772, 98 ER 499), the British high court ruled that chattel slavery violated English common law. The application ofSomersetto the thirteen British colonies would have meant an end to the slave machine that fed the coffers of the Yankee mercantile elite and fueled the wealth of New England while it created a wealthy landed aristocracy in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The British judge responsible for the decision (William Murray Mansfield) tellingly became a special political target of British colonial North Americas southern white colonists over the next four years.

The next landmark came in November 1775, when Lord Dunmore, the royal Governor of Virginia, offered to liberate and arm North American slaves to squash the anti-colonial rebellion under way since the Tea Act of 1773. With this action, Dunmore entered a pre-existing maelstrom of [colonial] insecurity about slavery and Londons intentions (Horne, 222). Across the future US South in the spring of 1775, elite colonists were consumed with fears of a slave insurrection allied with the British, Spanish, and/or Native Americans. Lord Dunmores proclamation effectively barred any possibility of rebel reconciliation with London (Horne, 234) as the colonists now confronted Africans armed by London (Horne, 237).

TheSomersetdecision and Dunmores edict joined London with Abolition in the minds of the white colonists. The latter provided the decisive white rallying point for what historian Thelma Wills Foote accurately called a white settler revolt and the white American War for Independence fought in no small measure to preserve and expand Black chattel slavery. Independence emerged from the state of the mind of the rebels who already by early 1775 coming to believe that a London-African combine was mounting against them, leavingsecession a unilateral Declaration of Independence as the only way out (Horne, 227, emphasis added). Two months before Dunmore issued his proclamation, rebels in South Carolina hung and cremated a free black man, Thomas Jeremiah, for saying that if England sent troops to repress the colonists, he would join them. Over the objections of South Carolinas royal colonial governor, Jeremiah was tried and found guilty of exciting the Negroes to an insurrection (Horne, 226). Even before the Dunmore proclamation, Horne shows, colonists were up in arms in light of alleged attempts by the crown to incite the Africans against them.

When Dunmore issued his edict, there was no turning back from white independence, leading Horne to ironically call Lord Dunmore a leading US Founding Father.

It is hardly surprising that North American slaves identified the cause of Freedom with London, not the rebels. Tens of thousands of those slaves and a large number of free blacks naturally joined the redcoats (Horne, 246).

Independence as a Disaster for Nonwhites

The American revolution was a disaster for North American nonwhites. The colonists triumph over London brought about the reassertion of slaveowner control over the enslaved black population in the new republic (Thelma Wills Foote, quoted in Horne, 244). The North American slave system tightened and expanded in subsequent years. The color line between white and black was drawn with harsher lines than ever before in the land of liberty. Horne reflects on immediate and long-term consequences that mock the dominant national sense (shared even by many left historians) of the American Revolution as a democratic, forward-leaning development:

there is a disjuncture between the supposed progressive and avant-guard import of 1776 and the worsening of conditions of Africans and the indigenous that followed upon the triumph of the rebels. Moreover, despite the alleged revolutionary and progressive impulse of 1776, the victors went on from there to crush indigenous politics, then moved overseas to do something similar in Hawaii, Cuba, and the Philippines, then unleashed its counter-revolutionary force in 20th-century Guatemala, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Angola, South Africa, Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua and other tortured sites too numerous to mention (Horne, 248).

The white North American settlers counter-revolution was a great slavery success at least until the Civil War, when another white secession and military necessity compelled Abraham Lincoln to follow in Lord Dunmores footsteps by liberating and arming black slaves.

The American Paradox

The American paradox (US historian Edmund Morgans term), whereby the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery, was not limited to colonial North America and the United States. As the historian Greg Grandin reminds us, the paradox can be applied to all of the Americas, North and SouthWhat was true for Richmond [Virginia] was no less true for Buenos Aires and Lima thatwhat many meant by freedom was the freedom to buy and sell Black people as property (Greg Grandin,Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World,New York, 2014, emphasis added).

Still, of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage to the New World, two-thirds ended up in Brazil or the West Indies. But by 1860, approximately two thirds of all New World slaves lived in the US South. In the US alone among the new Western Hemisphere Republics of the 19th century, Black chattel slavery flourished rather than faded until its destruction in the Civil War.

Part of the explanation for that disjuncture is the natural reproduction of slaves under the paternalist regime of the US South. Another aspect is the remarkable expansion of cotton slavery across the US South in the first half of the 19th century, critical backdrop for the early industrial revolution in England and Europe. A final piece was the 1776 counter-revolution: the North American break-off slayed the specter of British Abolition and opened vast new swaths of land for genocidal theft from the continents original inhabitants and the deployment of new slave cash-crop production armies.

In his remarkable 1976 volume American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, the historian Edmund S. Morgan argued that Black chattel slavery was part of why bourgeois freedom and democracy rhetoric of the kind that produced the famous Virginian Jeffersons famous and stirring Declaration of Independence was so pronounced in revolutionary North America. In making their case for revolution and equality against the slavery imposed on them by the British crown and British merchants, the tobacco planters of Virginia and their publicists took bourgeois-republican rhetoric to new egalitarian-sounding heights in part because they could. They did not have to worry about a vast artisan, yeoman, servant, and proletarian class that might take such rhetoric and turn it against their rulers in the ways that English and French lower and working classes did in the late 18th and 19th Century Age of Revolution, Chartism, and early socialism. The planters had slayed that menace in advance by turning their southern workforce into chattel slaves branded by their skin color and stripped of all basic human and civil rights by people utterly without rights. This was their response to Bacons Rebellion, a great 1676 interracial uprising of Virginias indentured servants, ex-servants, workers, poor farmers, and even slaves. Ironically enough, the slave system and its Black Codes helped make Virginia a leading global bastion of liberty talk since there was no free working class there to wield republican and democratic rhetoric against ruling classes from the bottom up.

Crimes Which Would Disgrace a Nation of Savages

Seventy-six years after the DOI, the great Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered perhaps the greatest oration in U.S. history, titled What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? By the reckoning of Douglass, himself an escaped slave, the great national holiday was a day that reveals to [the slave], more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. Further:

To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hourGo where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

War Capitalism

To ground Douglasss eloquent fury in harsh historical-material circumstance, I can recommend no academic text more strongly than Edward Baptists Bancroft Prize-winning 2014 study The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism. Baptist eviscerates the mainstream tendency to see slavery as a quaint and archaic pre-modern institution that had nothing really to do with the United States rise to wealth and power.In this tendency, slavery becomes something outside of US history, even an antiquated drag on that history. That tendency replicates a fundamental misunderstanding curiously shared by anti-slavery abolitionists and slavery advocates before the Civil War. While the two sides of the slavery debate differed on the systems morality, they both saw slavery as an inherently unprofitable and static system that was out of touch with the pace of industrialization and the profit requirements of modern capitalist business enterprise. Nothing, Baptist shows, could have been further from the truth. Unlike what many abolitionists thought, the savagery and torture perpetrated against slaves in the South was about much more than sadism and psychopathy on the part of slave traders, owners, and drivers. Slavery, Baptist demonstrates was an incredibly cost-efficient method for extracting surplus value from human beings, far superior in that regard to free (wage) labor in the onerous work of planting and harvesting cotton. It was an especially brutal form of capitalism, driven by ruthless yet economically rational torture along with a dehumanizing ideology of racism.

The Half Has Never Been Toldshows that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich decades before the Civil War. Capitalist cotton slavery was how United Statesseized control of the lucrative the world market for cotton, the critical raw material for the Industrial Revolution, emerging thereby as a nation to be reckoned with in the world capitalist system by the second third of the 19thcentury.

But the biggest parasitic profiteers of chattel slavery employed wage labor on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. North American cotton slavery was the historical-material taproot for the British industrial revolution, whose capitalist owners benefitted from the American revolution since US independence meant they could import chattel-generated cotton that would not have been available if the colonies had stayed under the control of a British empire that had outlawed slavery. American independence was a big win for the textile lords of Manchester. Historian Sven Beckerts magisterial study Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Vintage, 2014) shows how utterly dependent English and European textile manufacturers were on the expanding frontier of coerced gang slave labor in the Antebellum South. The rise of supposedly free market British and European industrial capitalism depended on two critical dimensions of what Beckert calls war capitalism: the warlike expropriation of native peoples from North American lands and the brutal enforcement of coerced labor in North American cotton fields, where wage labor was not viable.

The returns were wrung through soul-numbing exploitation overlaid with savage racist torture. Chronicling the astonishingly horrifying violence and terror inflicted on millions of Black Americans who suffered in bondage over the eight decades between US national independence (1783) and the US Civil War (1861-1865), Baptist documents how the southern slave engine of American capitalist accumulation murdered Blacks in huge numbersand stole everything from surviving slaves through the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire Over a generation, The Half Has Never Been Toldshows, the infant US South grew from a thin coastal belt of burnt-out tobacco plantations into a giant continental Empire of Cotton. This remarkable expansion was rooted in regular and ferocious white violence. The brutality and bloodshed included mass-murderous Indian Removal (cotton slavery required constant westward territorial extension), forced slave migrations, the endemic fracturing of slave families, and he ubiquitous and systematic torture of Black slaves. As Baptist observes:

In the sources that document the expansion of cotton production, you can find at one point or another almost every product sold in New Orleans stores converted into an instrument of torture [used on slaves]: carpenters tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs.Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in stress positions, burning, even waterboardingdescriptions of runaways posted by enslavers were festooned with descriptions of scars, burns, mutilations, brands, and wounds.

The merciless system that survived and then took off across the future slave Confederacy (which would carry out a second great slaveholders secession in 1861) under the Cross of Cotton was a monument to racist sadism in profitable service to unbridled capitalist accumulation.

Beyond Patience with a MessyDemocracy Thats Been the Envy of the World

Read a book, the New Left historian diplomatic (imperialism) historian Carl Parrini told a generation of students at Northern Illinois University, you might learn something. Go to the library and get lost in the stacks and sources. Maybe the current US president or his speechwriters need to follow Parrinis advice. Heres what soon-to-be President Elect Joe Nothing Will Fundamentally Change Biden said two nights after Election Day 2020 while Trump and his minions were moving ahead with their well-telegraphed campaign to legally and (if necessary) violently overthrow the outcome: Democracys sometimes messy. It sometimes requires a little patience as well. But that patience has been rewarded now for more than 240 years with a system of governance thats been the envy of the world. (New York Times, November 6, 2020, A1)

That was some serious gaslighting. What democracy was Sleepwalking (through a nightmare) Joe talking about? As Joe Nothing Will Fundamentally Change Biden sputtered out those clueless words of self-destructive calm, a vast empirical literature documents the abject cancellation and trumping of majority U.S. public opinion by concentrated wealth and power on key social and policy issue after another. US- American democracy is so messy it doesnt exist. Heres some reading on that: Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong (University of Chicago, 2017); Ron Formisano, American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (University of Illinois, 2017); Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer (Simon and Schuster, 2011); Paul Street, They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Routledge, 2014); Paul Street, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (Routledge, 2021)

Patience rewarded for 240 years? Joe might want to read Baptists The Half Has Never Been Told and Douglasss July 4th speech and reflect on how that oration was delivered exactly 76 years after the American revolution. The speech is available as a book and so now is historian David Blights Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the Douglass, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon and Schuster, 2018). Blights latest volume is a must read. So is Deborah Gray Whites brilliant and highly readable volume Arent I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South.

The 1857 Supreme Courts Dred Scott decision, which explicitly denied the humanity of Black people, came down 81 years after the American revolution. It helped precipitate a Civil War in which Black chattel slavery was only ended through an epic struggle that killed off nearly 3 percent of the nations population. Blacks were still legally segregated and disenfranchised in the US South a century after the conclusion of that war. Women did not win the franchise (vote) until 1920! They still havent passed an Equal Rights Amendment! Meanwhile, numerous civil, human, and voting rights (including the right of Black people to choose their own Congressional representatives) have been getting away chipped away at for many years and the nations neo-Taney Court just re-imposed the female enslavement of forced motherhood across half the nation in one fell swoop with its horrific June 24th, 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision.

Envy of the world really? Ever try to explain numerous key authoritarian aspects of the US political order, crafted by slave-owning Founders for whom democracy was the ultimate nightmare the undemocratically ludicrous Electoral College, the absurdly powerful and malapportioned Senate, the pathetically gerrymandered House of Representatives, reactionary federalist states rights, campaign finance rules that turn US elections into a wealth primary, the unelected Supreme Court to someone from another country? The thoroughly proper response youll get: Wait, your leaders call this democracy, indeed the greatest democracy in the world?! What a farce!

Heres a good book for Joe and his dismal Dem friends on our holy system of governance: Daniel Lazare, Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Paralyzes Democracy (1997).

Patience? It has just been shat upon with Christian-fascist glee by the highest judicial body in the worlds most powerful state. After a little mess he and his mealy-mouthed Attorney General dont really want to properly clean up the 2021 fascist assault on bourgeois democracy and rule of law carried out by Trump, Meadows, Flynn, Eastman, Bannon et al and documented at length by the US House January 6th Committee Biden inherited a Supreme Court stocked with absurdly revanchist super-majority Christian- and fossil-fascists. That Trump Court just wiped out womens fifty year constitutional right to an abortion, rolled back the legal civil rights of arrested people, rolled back gun safety, slashed Indian Countrys right to run its own legal affairs, and prosecute non-Indigenous criminals, eviscerated Black voting rights in Louisiana, and crippled the Environmental Protection Agencys power to regulate carbon emissions this last as the planet tips further into terminal environmental collapse with the United States stands in the eco-cidal vanguard of this and many other planetary crimes.

Hey, Joe, its like the Revolutionary Communist Party leader Bob Avakian says: your Shining City on a Hill is full of fascists. Fascists in high places. Basic bourgeois-democratic voting rights and safe elections now face massive reactionary white-nationalist/neofascist assault across the nation. The fascist Court has just agreed to hear a case arguing the formerly fringe, far-right independent legislature theory. The fact that the Court agreed to hear this insane argument basically for letting Red states cancel popular presidential votes as the basis for their Electoral College slates in 2024 is the tell. (The decision to take Dobbs in May of 2021 was the signaling of intent.) The Trump-Alito Court will likely permit Red State legislatures to guarantee election outcomes matched to their Amerikaner world view.

What People Will Quietly Submit to

Patience is recommended with the US system of governance? Really? Biden might want to read Howard Zinns justly famous Peoples History of the United States, which details repeated instances in which human rights and social justice progress recurrently depended precisely on masses rejecting patience and trust in the supposedly benevolent US system of governance. Zinns best-selling volume was of course inspired by the wisdom of Douglass, who wrote this on the eve of the Civil War: Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to, and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, used to reflect, the silence of many if not most of the good and decent people is just as problematic as, if not more disturbing than the viciousness and fascism of the bad. The bestlack all conviction, while the worst, Yeats wrote, are full of passionate intensity (wise words even if he appears to have identified with the fascist enemy). Its not fair, but the quiet, privatism, shelter, individualism that so many of us crave can easily become complicity. It ultimately proves disastrous. When we play the passive role of bystanders watching the game of social and political oppression and resistance from the sidelines, we should not be surprised when the game leaps up off the field to swallow up our lives.

There are limits to focusing just on the noisy and explicit evil of the most obvious and ugly culprits. The oppressor, Simone de Beauvoir once wrote, would not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed.

In the end, King once wrote, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.

Note to Elie Mystal: Look to the People to Stop the Courts

But why on Earth am I making reading recommendations for Joe Biden and his ilk? Our 21st Century Bertrand Russell-plus, the legendary left intellectual Noam Chomsky rightly dismisses the longtime left maxim speak truth to power. As Chomsky says, power knows the truth already, and is busy concealing it. And distorting it, I might add. It is the oppressed who need to discover the truth, not the oppressors.

Complicity and silence can take deceptively vocal forms. Listen to the liberal Nations legal correspondent Elie Mystal talking to Chris Hayes on MSNBC about how depressed he feels over Bidens failure to take on a Christian fascist (my description not Mystals though I wouldnt be surprised if he agrees with the characterization) that no longer cares about any of the practical realities and facts that used to concern Republican Supreme Court justices:

The Court has no money. It has no power to tax. And it has no army. The person who can stop the courts is the executive of the United States, the President of the United States. But right now, I dont want to say I am angry at Biden right nowI am sad [about Biden]. I am sad that right now, cuz you know who remembers 30 years ago [when the pre-fascist Supreme Court still cared about the practical realities involved in issues like climate change and abortion P.S.]? Joe Biden. Joe Biden remembers the hokey past of bipartisanship, where he could reach out to conservatives who were concerned about practical governance. Those people dont exist now, but Joe Biden never got the memo. And so, Im sad that in this crucial moment, we have a president who is unwilling, who is so ossified in his past thinking, that he wont stand with his people at this critical moment to take power back. Not for himself, because he doesnt matter, but to take power back for the American people from the unelected, unaccountable judges.

That is good, very quotable on Biden. But this is Joe Nothing Would Fundamentally Change Biden, the deeply conservative right-wing neoliberal warmonger that we on the left have known about forever. Why be sad about President Corn Pop being the rusty old pool chain we know he is? Lets How about just be properly disgusted and then move on to make some Douglass-Zinn Peoples History. Would MSNBC like to join or at least give a shout out to Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and RU4AR ally and civil disobedience hero Guido Reichstatder (who sat atop Washington DCs Frederick Douglass Bridge, shutting down traffic there for more than 27 hours on the day that the illegitimate fascist Court stripped away womens constitutional abortion rights) and to many other groups of people in DC and across the country who are not simply begging Sleepytime Joe and the dismal Weimar Dems to be something they arent and who are taking to the streets and public squares and putting their bodies on the line to force change through mass and direct citizen action? Dear Elie Mystal: only the people can stop the Court.

Something, some collection of outrages must break through this silence, this lack of conviction, this passivity, this complicity with the oppressor. Many have broken with surrender, but far too few. Patience and over-reliance on misleaders like Joe Drill Baby Drill Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton is our potentially terminal downfall.

An American Revolution is a Great Idea

The phrase American Revolution reminds me of what Gandhi said when a reporter asked him what he thought of Western civilization: I think it would be a good idea.

There theres a part of the 1776 document that still resonates if we expand our concept of the people to include persons of all genders, races, classes, cultures, and sexual orientations, etc.:

Governments deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governedWhenever any Form of Government becomes destructive [of human rights, life, liberty, and happiness] it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Theres a dangerous idea the right to revolution on behalf of the masses that merits respect along with update for new circumstances.

American revolution? We need one without quote marks a real and actual revolution. So foul a sky, wrote Shakespeare five generations before the Master of the Mountain was born, clears not without a storm.

In the meantime, I recommend proper respect for and attention to good books, like the many ones quoted, cited, and hyperlinked in this essay. Its not for nothing that Red State Amerikaners banning tons of books. Burning them is the next stage, followed perhaps by the flaming of authors. Those who ignore the crimes of the past have been known to repeat them.

Read more:

Happy July Farce: An American Revolution Would be a Good Idea - CounterPunch

Universities have been urged to be on high alert for human trafficking after suspected victims brought to Britain on student visas vanished from their courses and were found working in exploitative conditions hundreds of miles away.

In a recent case, Indian students at Greenwich, Chester and Teesside universities stopped attending lectures shortly after arriving in the UK, according to a report by the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) seen by the Observer.

They were later found in the care sector in Wales, where they were living in squalid conditions with up to 12 people to a three-bed flat, and were working up to 80 hours a week, sometimes double-shifting, for way below minimum wage.

[The students] attendance at university was low or nonexistent and in some cases other persons were logging on for them at lectures to give the impression they were in attendance, the report said.

It comes after an Observer investigation uncovered widespread labour exploitation in care homes across Britain, with workers from India, the Philippines and countries in Africa found to have been charged up to 18,000 in illegal recruitment fees, and in some cases forced to work in conditions akin to debt bondage to repay money owed, with their wages intercepted and passports withheld.

In those cases, many of the suspected victims had come to Britain on legitimate skilled worker visas brought in by the Home Office to help plug shortages in the care sector.

The new evidence sheds light on other routes being exploited by traffickers and rogue agents in response to increased demand for cheap workers amid a worsening UK labour shortage.

In the case identified by the GLAA, the workers are understood to have had just 16 hours of online training and in most cases had not undergone criminal background checks, raising concerns about potential risks to elderly and disabled residents. The care homes that hired them were reportedly unaware of their backgrounds because false information was provided to them by the suspected exploiters, who ran a staff agency.

In another case, students were found living in a property in Birmingham where they had had their passports confiscated and were forced to work in exploitative conditions, according to Unseen UK, which runs a modern slavery helpline.

The students, who also came from India and reportedly spoke little English, were allegedly forced to work 24-hour shifts without breaks and paid so little that they could not afford to eat, according to the charity. The case was referred to police.

Meri hlberg, research manager at Focus on Labour Exploitation, said abuse of people on student visas was a growing concern in Britain because of labour shortages. There have been students whove been pressured to work in ways that do not comply with their visa and that makes them really vulnerable to exploitation because they can be told by their employer that theyre going to be reported to immigration enforcement or lose their right to be in the country, she said.

The findings have led to calls for increased monitoring of student visas and warnings for universities to be on alert, with the GLAA saying they should monitor student applications, attendance and payment of fees to identify signs of modern slavery.

The University of Nottingham Rights Lab, the worlds largest group of modern slavery researchers, has also described international student recruitment as an area of high risk at British universities. and warned in a recent report on campuses that student visas could be used to facilitate human trafficking.

Despite the increased risks, it said there was limited recognition of vulnerable students, with only 7.7% of universities it examined providing specific training to staff in pastoral roles. It has drawn up a blueprint to help universities tackle modern slavery, with recommendations including improved staff training and dedicated working groups.

International students are a key source of income for universities, with an estimated 605,130 in the UK in 2020-21, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency with three-quarters of them coming from outside the EU. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that fees from international students make up about 17% of the total income of the sector.

Universities with a licence can sponsor students to come to the UK provided they have an offer of a place on a course, with applicants generally required to have enough money to support themselves and cover their fees and good English language skills. After they arrive in the UK, the university sponsoring them is required to monitor their attendance, engagement and absences.

Universities UK, which represents 140 universities, said there were very low levels of abuse in the student system and that many of its members go beyond what is formally required by the Home Office to prevent students being exploited. Extra steps it recommends universities take to prevent abuses include introducing pre-application screening calls to ensure the credibility of applicants and increased deposit requirements.

Teesside University said it took a rigorous approach to the safety and welfare of students. Attendance was monitored and there were channels for students to seek support.

A recent compliance inspection from the Home Office, which involved a Higher Education Assurance Team Audit, resulted in the universitys processes being deemed compliant with the necessary standards, a spokesman said. Chester and Greenwich universities were contacted for comment.

The Home Office said: Criminals who force people into modern slavery for commercial gain will be tracked down and brought to justice. We have given law enforcement bodies the powers and resources to take action where exploitation is found.

Read the original post:

Human traffickers using UK universities as cover - The Guardian

By David Purucker

On June 24, the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade. In a 5-4 ruling, the courts conservative majority ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee a right to an abortion. The decision will now be pushed to the states, 13 of which have trigger laws to immediately place draconian regulations on abortion, including heavy fines and long jail sentences for people who receive abortions and for those who assist them.

The conservative movement is now, predictably, calling for a national ban on abortion. But not just abortion in a concurring opinion to the ruling, Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the legal basis of past court decisions could also be invalidated, including rulings that established a right to privacy and contraception, sexual freedom, and same-sex marriage.

In the face of this sweeping legal attack on our freedoms, how should liberals and progressives respond?

Popular opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the courts hard-right turn. Eighty-five percent of American voters think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances, 78 percent consider birth control to be a basic part of womens health care, and 70 percent support the right of same-sex couples to get married, according to surveys from Gallup and Power to Decide. But indifference to the public is nothing new for the Supreme Court.

For most of American history, court justices have acted to inhibit democratic reforms and protect privilege. The Lochner Court of the early 20th century applied the 14th Amendments due process clause to invalidate state and federal laws to regulate child labor, limit the length of the workday, and establish a minimum wage. In the 1930s, the court acted to strike down or weaken key parts of FDRs enormously popular New Deal agenda, until the president threatened to add five more justices to the bench. More recently, in Bush v. Gore (2000), the court stole the presidential election for George W. Bush by stopping a statewide recount of ballots in Florida, which (as later analysis indicated) would have revealed a victory for Democratic candidate Al Gore.

In the face of this reactionary judiciary, todays Democrats tell us, yet again, to vote harder, so that maybe a Democratic president will get a chance to replace multiple justices and reestablish a liberal court majority. But if we have to wait for this generation of justices to die or retire, we may be stuck waiting for a long time.

Venerating these institutions will get us nowhere. What is instead needed is a political attack on the court itself. What would that look like? As Princeton historian Matt Karp recently argued in Jacobin magazine, we can learn something from the radicalism of Abraham Lincoln and the early Republican Party.

The courts infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford held that Black Americans had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the federal government could do nothing to restrict the expansion of slavery into new states on the frontier. The antislavery Republicans immediately denounced, not only this decision but the very idea that judges could decide burning political questions in this way.

As Abraham Lincoln put it in his 1860 inaugural address:

[I]f the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made . . . the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

The Republicans, once in power, moved quickly to reform the judiciary. But more importantly, perhaps, Lincoln and his party simply ignored the court. In 1862, the Republicans passed legislation to ban slavery in federal territories, and Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed slaves in secessionist Confederate states. Both directly repudiated the Dred Scott decision and left the court intimidated and politically weak through the era of emancipation and Reconstruction the greatest democratic expansion in US political history, as Karp notes.

Today, we hear calls to donate to abortion funds, struggle in blue state legislatures for laws to protect abortion, and engage in civil disobedience to protect those seeking abortions in red states. All are necessary. But at the national level, our freedoms will continue to be endangered until we challenge the institutions that are eroding them.

Voting isnt enough. To protect abortion, and our democracy, we must confront the unaccountable power of the Supreme Court.

David Purucker is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oregon.

Go here to read the rest:

After Dobbs, We Have to Make the Court Political Again - Eugene Weekly

Australia is facing serious labour and skills shortages both now and in the longer term. The immediate priority is to help employers fill current vacancies. In the longer term, the government needs to ensure its investments in education and training prepare Australia for future skill needs and opportunities arising from rapid technological change and other grand challenges like climate change.

The new minister for skills and training in the Albanese government, Brendan OConnor, is faced with competing calls to increase the skilled migrant intake and to invest in education and training to meet the demand for skilled workers.

Decisions are typically framed in an either-or way in largely Western, Anglo-Saxon societies such as Australia. Polarisation becomes the norm. We see this in the portrayal of Australias employment and skills problems in the media and by various interest groups.

On one side is the call for more immigrants, whether temporary or permanent, by the main industry and employer groups. Based on Australias experience over the past couple of decades, migrants will generally be the quicker and cheaper option to ease the shortages employers are facing now. However, many of these are general shortages of workers who may be unskilled or semi-skilled.

Relying on migrants to solve skills or labour shortages may only be a quick fix. It also serves to reinforce current practices and problems. And that doesnt position Australia well for future industries.

On the other hand, the trade unions, Reserve Bank and Grattan Institute have argued that going back to the previous migration settings may only reinforce the negative effects of minimal real wage growth for Australian workers. Its also likely to reinforce the exploitation and underemployment of migrants.

For example, the federal parliamentary inquiry into a modern slavery act found certain industries (like horticulture) exploited temporary migrants, backpackers and international students through wage theft. This happened when profit margins were squeezed and Australian workers were reluctant to do those jobs.

Read more: Migration is a quick fix for skills shortages. Building on Australians' skills is better

And research shows an over-reliance on migration risks entrenching outdated industries and slowing Australias economic transition as part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This revolution is being driven by technology becoming embedded in societies through the fusion of multiple technologies into what are known as cyber-physical systems.

But investing in education, skills and training can take years to deliver a significant return. Typical apprenticeships already take up to four years. The move towards higher apprenticeships to foster skills in advanced industries may take even longer.

Research has found many employers, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, lack the resources or resilience to survive external shocks for very long. And they no longer have government COVID-19 support schemes like JobKeeper to keep them afloat.

The former Coalition government planned to throw money at the skills problem. Its 2022 budget allocated more than A$2.5 billion to vocational education and training (VET) policies to help fill skills gaps.

Its unclear how much the new Labor government is prepared to stick to those plans or even to bring forward investments that were mostly back-loaded until after 2023-24. A large budget deficit and inflation are compounding the difficulties.

Immigration may have been an effective solution in the past. Today, things may not be that simple.

For one thing, migrant source countries like China are still restricting international travel by their citizens due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. Many of Australias traditional source countries have long delays in issuing travel documents.

Australia also faces increased competition from other developed countries like the Unite States, United Kingdom and Canada, which have made themselves more attractive for migrants. These countries were less restrictive during the pandemic, giving them a head-start on Australia, which closed its borders.

Read more: International student numbers hit record highs in Canada, UK and US as falls continue in Australia and NZ

As both the Business Council of Australia and O'Connor have recognised, Australia doesnt have the luxury of adopting a binary approach migration or training. Both are necessary.

First, it needs to attract migrants and make it easier to enter Australia to reverse the outflow caused by issues like the lack of JobKeeper support for temporary migrant workers.

Second, it must invest urgently in education, skills and training for growth industries of the future. These include renewables, healthcare and Industry 4.0. The latter is the result of the cyber-physical transformation of manufacturing for example, 3D printing needs advanced materials with internet-linked printers, which are increasingly intelligent and autonomous.

Read more: 'I will never come to Australia again': new research reveals the suffering of temporary migrants during the COVID-19 crisis

Other stakeholders should work together to design and invest in education and training solutions too. These stakeholders include major employers, state and territory governments, trade unions, vocational education and university providers.

Besides streamlining the migration process, federal, state and territory governments need to quickly refresh their National Agreement for Skills and Workforce Development.

Industry, vocational education and university providers should collaborate on micro-credentialled offerings These short courses are a way to rapidly upskill both domestic and international workers. This can help fill current gaps without the long lag effects associated with traditional educational qualifications.

Read more: Microcredentials: what are they, and will they really revolutionise education and improve job prospects?

Employers may also need to change their mindsets. Instead of employing only fully qualified employees they may have to take on ones who require ongoing support for lifelong learning.

Finally, while there may be good opportunities in the current job market in so-called traditional industries, potential employees should not take the easy route of stereotypical careers. Younger people should explore and invest in training and education for careers that will be opened up by disruptive technologies. Examples include automation, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and digitalisation.

Australia has to take a more creative approach. We need to use the post-COVID and post-election opportunities to overcome current shortages and make sure the economy can respond to future challenges.

Read more: If you're preparing students for 21st century jobs, you're behind the times

See the original post here:

Migration offers an urgent fix for the skills we need right now, but education and training will set us up for the future - The Conversation

Says South African satirist Conrad Koch

Comedys power is its licence to say the unsayable. It should be the freest speech there is, but in many ways it isnt.

As a white political comedian in post-apartheid South Africa I have grappled with comedys relationship with racism and power for my entire career.

History is written by the victor, and comedians are part of it. As comedians we have a say in how society understands racism, apartheid, colonialism and slavery. But because power in a society also dictates what is sayable we are constrained by what our audiences and bookers can cope with. Hannah Gadbsy alludes to it in that searing special: artists are closely associated with power. The pressure to make it safe is often economically and mentally insurmountable.

So lets be clear on the status quo. I live in what the World Bank officially described as the most unequal society on earth. Most South Africans live on 2 a day or less (the upper bound poverty line). In Cape Town there are families who live in shacks in the freezing cold of our rainy winters, and the only toilets are a bucket next to the bed or a public toilet around corner, which you use at the risk of rape.

In 2012 the South African government shot down 34 striking miners who worked for an English-owned platinum mine called Lonmin and were striking for a living wage, for the right to feed their kids, at a place called Marikana. Apartheid and colonialism didnt end, they just changed tactics.

The truth is the advantages of the West, from the NHS to a functioning justice system, were for the most part paid for by the extracted land, labour and mineral wealth of the Global South,by the deliberate destruction of the Indian economy to our advantage, by the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the genocide of native Australians, Americans, etc. Its not a coincidence that this inequality exists, Cecil John Rhodesand the like literally planned it, and its still happening.

But remarkably you will seldom hear any mainstream or even alternative comedy about this, because the truth is comedy that gets profile and prestige is almost entirely dictated by who Netflix and Co know pay their subscriptions: rich (and, in the West, mainly white) people. Netflix doesnt care about anyone living in shacks. Economic power almost entirely dictates what comedians say, to the degree that we stop even seeing that we are doing it.

In global terms, I dont see there being a culture war between the left and right, and some people in the middle. There are literally billions of colonised Others who have almost no say in this conversation and a tiny sliver of humanity with wealth, many of them living on ill-gotten privilege.

This shapes what we see as good comedy. Comedy is a very privileged activity. It requires people with money to see it or stream it. For example, the Edinburgh Festival could not happen in South Africa. We lack the massive middle class needed for anything of that size. And the truth is that what we like, what we see as tasteful is a product of shared social norms and agreements that are backed up by economic power. If you only see comedy of a certain type, you will eventually develop a taste for it. What is seen as good comedy internationally is a product of a racist, classist and sexist global economy. Are impoverished Africans getting a say? No, theyre not.

Currently in comedy we are obsessed with a freedom of speech debate around wokeness, but from my perspective the entire system is racist. So the politically aware ones on the left will rightly be enraged at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus racist blackface party outfits, but you will never hear mention of the Canadian mining companies with operations in Africa leaving a fraction of their profits (sometimes less than 2 per cent) in Africa. Neo-colonialism leaves millions of Africans impoverished, and is by far the bigger crime, but makes for less trendy tweets. To some degree we are all in on this racist scam.

Its not just about saying the unsayable, its about creating work that is more than just a ritual of rebellion, as they call it in anthropology. Lightly poking at the King to let off some social catharsis, as most TV satire does doesnt disrupt the status quo, it enforces it (Im a TV satirist, and am blaming myself here too). We need to be doing comedy that drags the murder of 34 striking South African miners to the front of the global conversation. We need to be asking how the IMF still lends wealth stolen from Africa and Asia back to them? We need to be asking why we have not had reparations for apartheid, slavery and colonialism? But who would pay to see such comedy? Exactly.

Yes, we have more diversity in what comedians we see on TV, and have a long way to go in even that, but just because a Black comic is speaking doesnt mean they are free to speak, or that they will say what must be said. I live in a country where the party of Nelson Mandela, the ANC, has in many ways itself been subsumed by colonial wealth. As long as the taste-makers of comedy, and its most powerful markets are rich and white creating work that truly confronts this unjust status quo is close to impossible.

What does this mean for comedians? The usual response from white people when we hear this type of thing is fragility and outrage. We think we are being blamed. Its not blame, its just a description of the status quo. Its unfair to think comedy can fix the whole of western societys evils, but at the very least we should not be fooling ourselves about how racism has shaped our industry.

Conrad Kochs White Noise will be at the Pleasance Courtyard at 9.45pm from August 3 to 29.

Published: 4 Jul 2022

Link:

Racism is inherent in comedy - we need to acknowledge that : Correspondents 2022 - Chortle

When Tung Chee-hwa met reporters from local and international media on July 2, 1997 the day after being sworn in as the first chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region he was asked what the Handover of the former British colony to China meant for Filipino domestic workers in the city.

The Filipino domestic help is very much part of our community and I hope they will be here for a long, long time to come, Tung responded.

One of the more than 150,000 Filipino migrant domestic workers in the city in 1997, activist Eman Villanueva, recalled feelings of uncertainty preceding that historical moment. There was a lot of talk about possible changes after the Handover, he told HKFP.

But as it turned out in the context of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, there was really not much change after that, said Villanueva, who arrived in the city in 1991 and is the spokesperson of the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body (AMCB), a coalition of migrant worker groups and unions.

Most of the problems we faced post-1997 were already there.

Many of those issues remain in 2022. And without a vibrant activist movement, migrant domestic workers rights in Hong Kong might have slid into reverse.

The two-week rule, for example, its been there since the 80s, Villaneuva said, referring to a policy introduced in 1987 that requires migrant domestic workers to find a new job within 14 days of their employment contract ending or being terminated, or leave the city.

Responding to an enquiry from HKFP, a spokesperson for the Labour Department described the two-week rule as necessary for maintaining effective immigration control and helps prevent FDHs [foreign domestic helpers] from job-hopping frequently and working illegally after premature contract termination. However, its main purpose, the department said, was to allow sufficient time for FDHs to prepare for their departure.

Also unchanged since before the Handover is a law barring migrant domestic workers from the right of abode in the city. The only difference, Villaneuva said, between then and now, was a 2013 Court of Final Appeal ruling, which made it a more definite legal decision.

In March that year Hong Kongs highest court sided with the government to overturn a High Court judgement from 2011 that described the law excluding migrant domestic workers from residency as unconstitutional, essentially ending years of campaigning on the matter.

The live-in rule, which mandates that migrant domestic workers reside with their employers, has always existed, but it has become a more stringent requirement. In a 2003 Legislative Council (LegCo) document, then-chief secretary Donald Tsang laid out his recommendations to improve the existing mechanism for admitting FDHs [foreign domestic helpers] and to prevent exploitation of the migrant workers, among them strict enforcement of the live-in policy.

The Labour Departments spokesperson said that the live-in rule underpins the long-established Government policy that priority in employment should be given to the local workforce It is along this policy objective that live-in FDHs have been imported since the 1970s to meet the shortage of local live-in domestic helpers.

Allowing migrant domestic workers to live out from their employers would be contrary to that policy and would directly expose local domestic helpers to the competition of FDHs, the department said, adding that the requirement was laid out in migrant domestic workers standard employment contracts (SEC). In other words, FDHs are fully aware of the live-in requirement before signing the SEC and that they are admitted to Hong Kong on such basis.

According to Villaneuva, however, the requirement does nothing to prevent exploitation as Tsang suggested, rather the live-in rule is actually a policy that promotes modern-day slavery. Despite decades of organising against the policy, it was upheld by the Court of Final Appeal in 2020.

Junko Asano, a PhD candidate at Oxford researching migrant workers, told HKFP that in spite of the incredible advocacy of migrant domestic worker unions, labour associations and NGOs since the 1980s, migrant domestic worker rights have remained stagnant because the Hong Kong government relies on cheap labour of migrant domestic workers to reduce the burden of care work on local women and to enable them to enter the workforce.

Although the migrant domestic worker movement has struggled to fundamentally change the foreign domestic helper scheme in Hong Kong, it has been successful in preventing the backsliding of migrant domestic workers existing rights, Asano said.

In the aforementioned 2003 LegCo document, Tsang endorsed a HK$400 levy for the employment of FDHs to be paid by their employers, and a HK$400 pay cut for migrant domestic workers minimum monthly wage of HK$3,670 to take effect on April 1, 2003. The pay cut would reflect downward adjustments in various economic indices, Tsang wrote.

The amount of the levy was exactly the same amount as the HK$400 monthly pay cut. So we say that its actually the domestic workers who subsidise the employers with their levy, Villaneuva said.

The proposals sparked mass protests, with several thousand migrant domestic workers taking to the streets over several weekends, but to no avail. In late February, Tsang announced that the government would proceed with both the levy and the wage cut.

It was at this moment that the AMCB decided to shift its focus, Villanueva said. We decided we should no longer be on the defensive side. We had been under attack for so long, we should now be on the offensive side. And so we shifted the campaign to wage increase now.

From 2005 to 2008, and from 2011 to 2019, migrant domestic workers minimum monthly salary increased incrementally. Of course, it took us several years to recover the HK$400 lost, Villanueva said.

For Eni Lestari, the founder of the Association of Indonesian Migrant Workers in Hong Kong (AKTI-HK) and chairperson of the International Migrants Alliance, this was a successful shift. The wage has gradually increased, Lestari told HKFP on the phone from her family home in Indonesia, which she was visiting for the first time in three years.

Lestari discovered activism after leaving her first employer in Hong Kong, in 2000. I was underpaid no day off, I was maltreated I did not have a phone, she said. She negotiated one day off a month in exchange for a HK$100 pay cut to her monthly salary of HK$1,800 significantly below the minimum monthly wage of HK$3,670 and after seven months ran away to the Mission for Migrant Workers.

Thats when I learned about rights, empowerment, organising from other nationalities. Thats how I became an activist myself, she said. She founded AKTI-HK in October 2000 and set about campaigning against the systemic underpayment of Indonesian domestic workers and the high agency fees they faced.

For Indonesians, since 2000, our focus has been on empowerment, awareness, empowerment, awareness, Lestari said.

But of course there were other campaigns with AMCB. We were fighting against the two-week rule, the live-in policy, long working hours, and then physical abuse, and different types of abuse. Even [though] we have our own problems, we have common problems.

As one of five migrant domestic workers who challenged the HK$400 levy in the courts, Lestari was integral to fighting against what she has called a discriminatory tax on migrant domestic workers. Despite losing their appeal, the levy was suspended in 2008 and scrapped in 2013. Lestari considers its withdrawal one of the big achievements of the migrant movement in Hong Kong.

Other milestone moments in the movement emerged from moments of crisis. Sringatin, the chairperson of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union, pointed to the case involving Erwiana Sulistyaningsih, who was abused at the hands of her Hong Kong employer, Law Wan-tung.

The case made international headlines when images of a bruised and battered Sulistyaningsih emerged in 2014. Law was given a six-year sentence after depriving Sulistyaningsih of food, forcing her to sleep on the floor, burning her with an iron and beating her with mops, a ruler and a clothes hanger, leaving her scarred for life.

Sulistyaningsih went on to become the face of a movement advocating reform for Hong Kongs migrant domestic workers, and Sringatin, Lestari and Villanueva agreed waking Hongkongers up to their exploitation.

Until Erwianas case happened, and it became public, there was really no more debate about modern-day slavery happening in Hong Kong, Villanueva said.

When there is a big case, public opinion changes, Sringatin said. But it really depends on us [to keep the momentum going]. How we deliver the message, how we can make them understand what we are doing in Hong Kong and our situation, said Sringatin, who came to Hong Kong from Indonesia in 2002 and like Lestari was a victim of injustice.

Even the way people address migrant domestic workers carries meaning, Sringatin said. I think this can really change the perspective, she said, adding that the term helper which is still used by the government and many employers in the city makes it seem like you dont have any skills, you dont have value because you just help.

Domestic worker its [about] respect, and [acknowledging that] you have rights as a worker so this is very important to educate the public.

Since Beijing implemented national security legislation in Hong Kong in June 2020, at least 57 civil society organisations including unions, churches, media groups, and political parties have disbanded, including several that aligned with the migrant movement.

Recalling his early days with United Filipinos in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, Villanueva said: Every time there was a campaign or a protest we would go to the office of the HKCTU [Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions] and they would allow us to use the rooftop of their office in Yau Ma Tei, and that is where we would make our placards, our banners.

And even as the migrant movement became more established, we continued to have that solidarity. They were always in support of our campaigns. However, there were also struggles, Villaneuva added, saying that some members were caught in an identity crisis as unionists and as employers of migrant domestic workers. But the leadership of the unions were very supportive.

The solidarity went both ways, with migrant domestic workers supporting the Union of Hong Kong Dockers during their 40-day strike in 2003. When they held several weeks of strikes, migrant workers were there to Kwai Chung, in the port area, and we delivered food, water, drinks to those who were striking, Villanueva said.

Some of the workers were crying because we were apologising, saying we can only give you this, we dont have much money, but at least we want to stand in solidarity with you.

Villaneuva said that support continued until very recently.

Those who were very supportive of the migrant cause, weve lost many of them in the legislature, and then of course, some of the groups that used to express solidarity with the migrant workers, they no longer exist, he said.

It has affected activists ability to lobby the Hong Kong government, Villanueva said. Its more difficult now.

Sringatin echoed him, calling engagement with the government very formal. We just send a letter, a petition. [To have] dialogue is a little bit difficult.

Lestari is more explicit. The Labour Department doesnt entertain any requests. It will invite us only once a year, during the MAW [monthly allowable wage] review, and thats all. Either they dont respond or they use Covid as an excuse. They have closed the door, she said.

The Labour Department spokesperson told HKFP that The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government attaches great importance to safeguarding the rights of foreign domestic helpers in Hong Kong and maintaining Hong Kong as an attractive place for them to work, adding that FDHs enjoy equal protection and entitlements as local workers.

Villanueva acknowledged that the Covid-19 pandemic had impacted both lobbying efforts and the ability to stage protest actions.

We dont know if after Covid, once we go back to the streets and much more active engagement with the government, we really dont know how it will look, he said.However, Asano said that she expected the movement to continue. I doubt that migrant domestic workers organising efforts going forward would be significantly impacted, she said.

Even though its now challenging to gather in big groups, migrant domestic worker activists can still meet in small groups and relay their concerns to the government through press conferences, dialogues, petitions and other means.

Regardless of how the movement looks in months or years to come, Villanueva, Lestari and Sringatin as well as countless migrant domestic workers and activists in Hong Kong will continue to fight for their rights and their welfare. Thats the only way to do social transformation, Lestari said. If we want to change we have to rely on ourselves and find ways to change things from the ground up.

In Hong Kong, were just strangers, Sringatin said. We need friends who can support us.

Villanueva said he believed that there was significant public support for migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, and I think the proof of that was during the fifth wave of Covid.

After stories emerged of Covid-positive migrant domestic workers being denied treatment and being forced to sleep on the streets stories that echo those told during the SARS outbreak in 2003 migrant workers groups launched an emergency response appeal.

We were so overwhelmed with the outpouring of support, Villanueva said, clearly emotional. Our combined fundraising was able to reach probably more than HK$2 million. Thats why I can confidently say that there are many people in Hong Kong who are supportive of migrant workers. And because of that, we dont lose hope.

He added: The issues we had before, they are the same if not more than we are facing now. We just have to continue. Stopping is really not an option.

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Hong Kong 25: Migrant domestic workers have long fought against reversals of their rights. They're not stopping - Hong Kong Free Press