Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

What should we do about Google, Facebook, and Amazon? So far, however, relatively few answers have come from the socialist left. At least in the United States, the cutting edge of the platform regulation conversation is dominated by liberal antitrust advocates, perhaps best represented by the Open Markets Institute.

They have some good ideas, and theyre serious about confronting corporate power. But they come from the Brandeisian reform tradition. Their horizon is a less consolidated capitalism: more competitive markets, smaller firms, and widely dispersed property ownership.

For those of us with our eye on a different horizon, one beyond capitalism, this approach isnt particularly satisfying. There are elements of the antitrust toolkit that can be very constructively applied to the task of reducing the power of Big Tech and restoring a degree of democratic control over our digital infrastructures. But the antitrusters want to make markets work better. By contrast, a left tech policy should aim to make markets control less of our lives to make them less central to our survival and flourishing.

This is typically referred to as decommodification, and its closely related to another core principle, democratization. Capitalism is driven by continuous accumulation, and continuous accumulation requires the commodification of as many things and activities as possible. Decommodification tries to roll this process back, by taking certain things and activities off the market.

This lets us do two things: the first is to give everybody the resources (material and otherwise) that they need to survive and to flourish as a matter of right, not as a commodity. People get what they need, not just what they can afford. The second is to give everybody the power to participate in the decisions that impact them. When we remove certain spheres of life from the market, we can come up with different ways to determine how the resources associated with them are allocated.

These principles offer a useful starting point for thinking about a left tech policy. Still, theyre pretty abstract. What might they look like in practice?

First, the easy part.

A portion of the internet is devoted to shuttling packets of data from one place to another. It consists of a lot of physical stuff: fiber optic cables, switches, routers, internet exchange points, and so on. It also consists of firms large and small (mostly large) who manage all this stuff, from the broadband providers that sell you your home internet service to the backbone providers who handle the internets deeper plumbing.

This entire system is a good candidate for public ownership. Depending on the circumstance, it might make sense to have a different kind ofpublic entity own different pieces of the system: municipally owned broadband in coordination with a nationally owned backbone, for instance.

But the pipes of the internet should be fairly straightforward to run as a publicly owned utility, since the basic mechanics arent all that different from gas or water. This was one of the points I made in a recent piece for Tribune about the Labour Partys newly announced plan to roll out a publicly owned network and offer free broadband to everybody in the UK. Its good politics and, even better, it works.

Publicly owned networks can provide better service at a lower cost. They can also prioritize social imperatives, like improving service for underconnected poor and rural communities. For a deep dive into one of the more successful experiments in municipal broadband in the United States, I highly recommend Evan Malmgrens piece The New Sewer Socialists from Logic.

Further up the stack are the so-called platforms. This is where most of the power is, and where most of the public discussion is centered. Its also where we run into the most difficulty when thinking about how to decommodify and democratize.

Part of the problem is the name: platform. None of our metaphors are perfect, but I think it might be time to give this one up. Its not only self-serving it enables a service like Facebook to project a misleading impression of openness and neutrality, as Tarleton Gillespie argues its imprecise. There is no meaningful single thing called a platform. We cant figure out what to do about the platforms because platforms dont exist.

Before we can begin toput together a left tech policy, then, we need to come up with a better taxonomy for the things were trying to decommodify and democratize. We might start by analyzing some of the services that are currently called platforms and trying to discern the principal features that distinguish them from one another:

One could think of more types of platforms. And I might quibble with some of Srniceks category choices do Uber and Airbnb really belong in the same bucket? But if were looking to differentiate services by function, this list is a good place to start.

We could spend a lot more time tweaking our taxonomy. But lets leave it there, and return to the question of how we might decommodify and democratize our digital infrastructures. Given the wide range of services were talking about, it follows thatthe methods we use to decommodify and democratize them will also vary. The purpose of developing a reasonably accurate taxonomy is to help inform which methods we might use for each kind of service.

This is the logic behind Jason Prados argument in the latest edition of his Venture Commune newsletter, Taxonomizing Platforms to Scale Regulation. Prado argues that we should be differentiating services by the number of users they have, and then implementing different regulations at different sizes. At 05 million users, for instance, a service should only be subject to basic privacy regulations. At 2050 million, they should be required to publish transparency reports about what data is collected and exactly how it is used. At 100+ million, a service becomes indistinguishable from the state and therefore needs to be democratically governed, perhaps by a governing board made up of owners, elected officials, platform developers/workers, and users.

I like this basic approach, but I would expand it. Size is an important consideration, but not the only one. The services function and the kind ofpower it exercises are also significant factors. We could map each feature (size, function, and kind of power) to an axis x, y, and z and then plot each service as a point somewhere along those three axes. Then, depending on where the service sits in our three-dimensional space (or n-dimensional, if we refine our taxonomy by increasing our number of features), we could select a method of decommodification and democratization that is particularly well suited to the service.

What are some of those possiblemethods? Here are four:

In this case, a state entity takes responsibility for operating a service. These entities can be structured in all sorts of ways, and exist at different levels, from the municipal to the national. Services that exercise transmission power (Rahman) or those that involve the cloud (Srnicek) are especially good candidates for such an approach. Along these lines, Jimi Cullen wrote an interesting proposal for a publicly owned cloud provider last year calledWe Need a State-Owned Platform for the Modern Internet. Public ownership is also probably best suited for services of a certain scale. At the largest size, however, governance can no longer be achieved at the level of the nation-state at which point we need to think about transnational forms of public ownership.

Public entities can also be in the business of managing assets rather than operating a service. For example, they might take the form of data trusts or data commons, holding a particular pool of data and enforcing certain terms of access when other entities want to process that data: mandating privacy rules, say, or charging a fee. Rosie Collington has written an interesting report about how such an arrangement might work for data already held by the public sector called Digital Public Assets: Rethinking Value, Access, and Control of Public Sector Data in the Platform Age.

This involves running services on a cooperative basis, owned and operated by some combination of workers and users. The platform cooperativism community has been conducting experiments in this vein for years, with some interesting results.

What Srnicek calls lean services would lend themselves to cooperativization. A worker-owned Uber would be very feasible, for example. And there are all sorts of policy instruments that governments could use to encourage the formation of such cooperatives: grants, loans, public contracts, preferential tax treatment, municipal regulatory codes that only permit ride-sharing by worker-owned firms. Its possible that cooperatives work best at a smaller scale, however you might want a bunch of city-specific Ubers rather than a national Uber in which case the antitrust toolkit might come in handy, since we would need to break up a big firm before cooperativizing its constituent parts.

We could also think of data trusts or data commons as being cooperatively owned rather than publicly owned. This is what Evan Malmgren recommends in his piece Socialized Media: a cooperatively owned data trust that issues voting shares to its members, who in turn elect a leadership that is empowered to negotiate over the terms of data use with other entities.

In some cases, services dont have to be owned at all. Rather, their functions can be performed by free and open-source software.

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of open source as an ideology Wendy Lius Freedom Isnt Free is essential reading on this front but free software does have decommodifying potential, even if that potential is suppressed at present by its near-complete capture by corporate interests.

This is another realm in which the antitrust toolkit could be helpful. In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against AT&T. As part of the settlement seven years later, the firm was forced to open up its patent vault and license its patents to all interested parties. We could imagine doing something similar with tech giants, making them open-source their code so people can develop free alternatives to their services. Prado suggests that a services code repositories should be forced open within six months of hitting 50100 million users.

In addition to bigger services, Id also argue that services whose business model is advertising (Srnicek) and those that exercise gatekeeping power (Rahman) would make good candidates for open-sourcing. One could imagine free and open-source alternatives to Google Search, for instance, or existing social media services.

Another useful idea drawn from the antitrust toolkit that could help promote open-sourcing is enforced interoperability. Matt Stoller and Barry Lynn from the Open Markets Institute have called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to make Facebook adopt open and transparent standards. This would make it possible for open-source alternatives to work interoperably with Facebook. It doesnt get our data off of Facebooks servers, but it starts to erode the companys power by giving people various (ad-free) clients that can access that data and present it differently. If these interfaces caught on, Facebook would no longer be able to sell ads and its business would eventually collapse. At which point it could be refashioned into a publicly owned or cooperatively owned data trust that furnishes data to a variety of open-source social media services, themselves perhaps federated on the model of Mastodon.

Certain services shouldnt be decommodified and democratized, but abolished altogether.

Governments deploy a range of automated systems for the purposes of social control. These include carceral technologies like predictive policing algorithms that intensify policing of working-class communities of color. (This is also an example of what Rahman calls scoring power.) Scholars like Ruha Benjamin and community organizations like the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are applying the abolitionist framework to these kinds of technologies, calling for their outright elimination: in her new book Race After Technology, Benjamin talks about the need to develop abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code.

Another set of systems worthy of elimination are the forms of algorithmic austerity documented by Virginia Eubanks in her book Automating Inequality. In the United States and around the world, public officials are using software to shrink the welfare state. This deprives people of dignity and self-determination in a way thats fundamentally incompatible with democratic values.

Theres also facial recognition, which can be deployed by public or private entities. The growing movement to ban facial recognition, a demand advanced by a range of organizations and now embraced by Bernie Sanders, is a good example of abolition in action.

One final note worth mentioning: while the goal of a left tech policy should be to strike at the root of private power by transforming how our digital infrastructures are owned, we will also need legislative and administrative rulemaking to govern how those infrastructures are allowed to operate. This might take the form of General Data Protection Regulationstyle restrictions on data collection and processing, measures aimed at reducing right-wing radicalization, or various algorithmic accountability mandates. These rules should apply across the board, no matter how the entity is owned and organized.

The above is a provisional sketch. It has lots of holes and rough edges. Plotting all the major services along three axes according to their features may ultimately be impossible and even if it can be done, it runs the risk of locking us into an excessively rigid model for making policy. More broadly, there are severe limits to this sort ofprogrammatic thinking, which can too easily tilt in a technocratic direction.

Still, I hope these thoughts can help develop a left tech policy that takes the basic principles of decommodification and democratization and tries to apply them to our actuallyexisting digital sphere. At the moment, there is relatively little political space for such an agenda in the United States, but there may come a time when more space is available. It would be good to be ready.

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A Socialist Plan to Fix the Internet - Jacobin magazine

The Original Monster Raving Loony Party is a strange staple of British politics.

Its been around since 1983 and members bring a light-hearted touch to debates and questioning, bouncing in on space hoppers and calling for ingenious and ridiculous proposals such as a 99p coin.

But are they just a big joke?

Despite the partys satirical nature, highlighting the real-life absurdities of British politics, some of the things featured in the Loony manicfesto have actually become law.

These include passports for pets, the abolition of dog licenses and all-day pub opening hours.

So whats next?

Jason Chinners Chinnery is the Joint Deputy Leader of the party and is standing for election in Kingston and Surbiton.

The Local Democracy Reporting Service caught up with him to learn more about the party, and why it is standing candidates in such an important election when the party hasnt won a single parliamentary seat since its foundation.

He may be clad in a leopard print suit and top-hat, but Chinners wasnt always the kooky character he is now known as.

Back in the day he was a civil servant, working in the payroll department at the treasury. A very serious job indeed.

He describes his role as the person responsible for putting the money in the Prime Ministers bank account, and says he enjoyed working in the Civil Service, but that it also opened his eyes to the world of politics seeing how things did or did not happen.

He said the Loony Party grabbed his attention when the partys founder, Lord Sutch, worked towards giving 18-year-olds the vote.

But now the party wants to go even further:

Were setting our sights a bit lower this time, were campaigning to give five-year-olds the vote. They all act like five-year-olds in the Houses of Parliament so you might as well let five-year-olds have the vote.

It can often be difficult to work out when Chinners is joking.

When asked about his role asMinister for Spinning, Bouncing and Points, Chinners explains that everyone in the Loony party is automatically a minister of whatever department they want.

Mine was borne out of Alastair Campbells thing where he wasnt an MP or anything but had so much power spinning all these lines, so I thought right, Im going to be in charge of spinning, said Chinners.

And the bouncing things refers to space hoppers. I am currently the partys space-hopper champion.

Kingston has obviously had loads of cycle lanes put everywhere, but every time I see them theyre hardly being used so I am thinking of converting them to space hopper lanes.

Other candidates include a member who wants to save the dodo, and another who wants to abolish gravity.

Its absurd, but when you pry deeper, it seems that Chinners sees himself as more than just a joke candidate.

He genuinely seems to care about the importance of each and every vote.

Speaking about his interactions with incumbent MP, Ed Davey, Chinners says they get on like a house on fire, and that he was even invited to Eds victory party in 2017.

Hes alright actually. I get on with all the candidates. Thats our role. Not to offend or get into slanging matches we leave that to them lot.

Chinners goes on to talk about his practice polling booth, set up in a local pub.

Im always after people that dont normally vote, because so many people dont, and you know, people died for the right to vote, he said.

I say to people, even if you dont want to vote for me, or want to vote to stop me getting in, go down and use your vote. The polling booth, the idea was to show people just how easy it is. Its two minutes of your time. All youve got to do is tick a box, its not painful.

Its quite frightening how many people I bump into who say, I didnt know I could vote, or I dont want to vote.

Most of it is apathy. People are just fed up with politicians, and Brexit as well, people are sick and tired of that. People think their vote wont make a difference, but the only wasted vote is one that isnt used.

After a brief serious moment Chinners goes back to his usual jokey self:

At a General Election about 60 per cent of people vote, if youre lucky. Thats about 40 per cent potential voters that if they all went out and voted for us, thered be a Loony Mudslide.

It is a ridiculous thing to imagine, but that is the point, as Chinners explains:

The good thing is if we got one person in, or close to getting someone in, it might make the other parties look at themselves and think look this cant go on if this lot are getting in. It might make them pull their socks up, he said.

While a lot of the partys policies come from people in the pub, Chinners claims that fielding candidates and managing a campaign can also be educational for those who dont usually get involved in politics.

Speaking about one occasionwhen he fielded nine Loony candidates against each other, he said:They actually got quite an interest in it all seeing how the process worked and then actually attending the count, they all said This is real proper stuff. It was good.

Names, signatures, it shows them the amount of work you have to do in a campaign.

Its often with ten locals in the pub Im there explaining why we have to do this or that, he said.

Ive just had my form through to get my counting agents in order. I always try and get five people whove never been involved before, so they get the chance to experience what its like.

He is very very unlikely to win, but Chinners is keen to get as many people involved in the election in Kingston and Surbtion as possible.

With a whopping eight candidates to choose from, it will be an important choice for residents to make.

The other candidates standing in Kingston and Surbtion are Ed Davey (Liberal Democrat), Aphra Brandreth (Conservative), Leanne Werner (Labour), Sharron Sumner (Green), Scott Holman (The Brexit Party), James Giles (Independent) and Roger Glencross (UKIP).

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Here is what you need to know about the Original Monster Raving Loony Party - Surrey Comet

The National Theatre of Scotland is to confront the country's slave trade past with two major new shows as part of its 2020 programme.

Theatre-goers will be led on a new guided tour of Glasgow which will see their mobile phones become "a window to meet the ghosts of the city's painful past and its effect on the present."

Immersive theatre project Ghosts, which will be staged next November, will see striking images exploring the city's "often unspoken history" projected onto the walls of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), to reflect how it was built as a home for tobacco and sugar merchant William Cunninghame.

A separate show will explore the little-known true story of Joseph Knight, an African man sold as a slave in Jamaica to a wealthy Scottish plantation owner, John Wedderburn, and brought back to work on his Perthshire estate.

The show will recall how Knight would go on to be the key figure in a landmark legal case which challenged his status as a slave in Scotland and paved the way for the abolition of slavery in Britain.

NTS unveiled plans for the two shows today in the wake of growing awareness and acknowledgement of Scotland's long and profitable links with the international slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Last year it emerged that Glasgow University had agreed to pay 20 million in reparations in recognition of the financial support it had received from people whose wealth was partly built on slavery.

The city council is also exploring proposals to create a slavery museum in Glasgow to reflect the role the slave trade had in its development, particularly the Merchant City, and its links to thoroughfares like Buchanan Street.

Glasgow-based actor, writer and director Adura Onashile, who is creating Ghosts for NTS, also been cast in the lead role of Medea for a revival of Liz Lochheads acclaimed adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy, which will be staged at next years Edinburgh International Festival.

Ghosts will use the latest augmented reality technology to tell the story of a young boy fleeing through the streets of 18th century Glasgow.

Onashile, who has spent about seven years researching Glasgow's slave trade past, said: "I really want to say something about the scale of it and how many lives were affected, which often gets forgotten about. People don't have any idea of how much the city prospered from slavery.

"We want to treat Glasgow as a character that is nudging its inhabitants to remember something they would rather ignore. There is a sense that because it was such a fundamental part of Glasgow's history the fact we don't know enough about it can't be be doing us any favours or the city any favours."

"People will be able to download an augmented reality app on their mobile which will allow them to follow a young boy through the Merchant City as he hides in various spaces and tries not to be found.

"When you point your phone at certain locations your phone will become animated and at other locations you will walk through a doorway to step into a complete world to hopefully look at the idea of excavating some locations.

"As we find out about his history we also find out also about the city's history. But we also want to move it from being a historical guide to Glasgow to bring it right to date and look at where the money trail from slavery ended up today.

"The walk will talk an hour and there will also be a 15-minute show projected onto the walls of GOMA, which will hopefully be pretty spectacular and will be able to be seen by people who are just walking through the Merchant City.

"In my mind, Glasgow will feel like a completely different city once you have finished the journey and the audience we will also feel different themselves. It will hopefully be the classic thing of 'once you see it you cannot unsee it."

Pitlochry Festival Theatre is hosting the premiere of Enough of Him, Edinburgh-born writer May Sumbwanyambe's play about the complex relationships between Joseph Knight, John Wedderburn and his wife, and Annie Thompson, their servant that Knight fell in love with and married.

NTS has billed Enough of Him, which will tour to Perth Theatre and the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh next autumn, as a "compelling domestic drama focusing on the power dynamics at play between slaves and free men, servants and masters, and husbands and wives."

The play, which is is being brought to the stage by NTS after a radio play based on Knight's story by Sumbwanyambe was broadcast on Radio 4 last year, will have clear echoes with the debates around Brexit, according to the writer.

Sumbwanyambe said: "There is a real indictment about not knowing our own history in Scotland - it's really because we've not been taught it at all.

"But there is a big push in the academic world at the moment to shake Scotland out of its amnesia.

"I've always been fascinating by the history of black people in Scotland but when I started working on this project it actually shocked me how little I knew about the story of Joseph Knight.

"There is actually a myth that black people have only been part of this country for a short very short of period time.

"The only way we can contend with that in the arts and make a contribution that is really relevant and impactful is actually find these black people, who had significant lives and played a significant role in the culture and development of society, and write plays about them.

"The really fascinating thing when I discovered during my research is that when Joseph Knight was fighting for his freedom there were arguments being made that Scotland would be inundated with immigrants who would come here and pollute the country's genetics.

"There really is something about the way history repeats itself if we don't know our own history."

Other highlights of the NTS programme include an adaptation of An Enemy of the People, the 19th century play by Norwegian writer Henrik Ibsen, by award-winning Glasgow playwright Kieran Hurley.

The Enemy will relocate Ibsen's story to a "once great Scottish town," will explore what happens when a dangerous secret emerges over a major new development which promise to transform the local community's fortunes. The show, which will star Gabriel Quigley, will go on tour to Lanark, Clydebank, Darvel, Dunoon, and Dumfries.

Maverick theatre-maker Rob Drummond's next Edinburgh Festival Fringe show - Who Killed Katie? - will explore the growing public fascination for true crime stories by asking the audience to deliver their verdict on a gruesome case.

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National Theatre to tackle Scotland's slave trade history as 2020 programme is revealed - The Scotsman

In old money this constituency is mostly central and south Co Armagh which slices into Newry as far as the old boundary on the Clanrye river as it heads for Carlingford Lough but it leaves most of the more Protestant/Unionist northern part of the historic county within neighbouring Upper Bann.

The population is younger than most other constituencies, which comes with a large housing need amongst that lower aged cohort. Even so theres been a massive expansion of house building the area to the west of Newry which is creating a light conurbation that stretches almost as far Crossmaglen.

The economy has been transformed through focused community initiatives like Work In Newry (WIN) by exploiting the European Single Market Act after the abolition of lengthy customs stops from 1992 and the IRAs ceasefire which that ended its economic war just two years later.

The net effect of splitting the old county constituency up has been to create a stable nationalist majority, with Sinn Fin regularly holding three Assembly seats since the 2007 election. On the nationalist side, the SDLP has struggled badly ever since Seamus Mallon stepped back in 2005.

After that election, Conor Murphy put his definitive stamp on the post. For a time he was MP, MLA and Minister for Regional Development, from which one of the most tangible products was brining Newry one of the most slick and modern railway stations in Northern Ireland.

However, the stations continued disconnection from the Belfast suburban line means that whilenine trains leave Portadown and arrive in Belfast city centre at or before 9.30 am only one leaves Newry in time. The new Belfast Regional City Deal is being driven locally by the council, not the Assembly.

After double jobbing legislation came Murphy stepped down and the personable and well-liked Mickey Brady stepped in for the 2015 election, easily holding Murphys vote total. Despite being low profile compared with Murphy, in 2017 he boosted his percentage by a handy 6.8%.

His main advantage is that there is no obvious challenger. Because the Catholic/Protestant split is roughly 70/30, the only likely long term change lies almost entirely within the nationalist camp. Last time out, however, local sitting SDLP MLA Justin McNulty ceded further ground to the Sinn Fin man.

This time they are running a young, gay councillor from Crossmaglen Pete Byrne who won a council seat on Newry, Mourne and Down District Council in May. This will be a test, not so much to see if hes a future MP, so much as to whether he has potential as a second assembly candidate.

Local MLA William Irwin easily should top the Unionist poll for the DUP after he completely took the wind out of Sam Nicholson (UUP)s sails in 2017, with Jackie Coade (Alliance) and Martin Kelly (Aont) bringing up the rear from a long way back

Likely winner: Mickey Brady. Everyone else is approximately nowhere.

Westminster Bridge, London by Arran Bee is licensed under CC BY

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty

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#GE2019 profile: Newry and Armagh has a young growing population, but is politically stagnant - Slugger O'Toole

With the general election on 12 December, each of the main political parties has outlined its plans for the country, including for the property market.

Here, we highlight some of the key housing policies that theyve announced, particularly those affecting landlords.

They range from introducing a lifetime deposit that moves with a tenant, to making open-ended tenancies available.

The Conservatives have promised to continue with their target to build 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s.

The party has also promised to review new ways to support home ownership following Help to Buys completion in 2023.

Perhaps more directly applicable to landlords is the abolition of no fault evictions for tenants, and only requiring one lifetime deposit that moves with a tenant.

Theres a mention of banning the sale of new leasehold homes and restricting ground rents to a peppercorn rent (a very low token rent).

This could be welcome news for any landlords owning a leasehold property although the detail has yet to be fully outlined.

Read the Conservative and Unionist Party manifesto for the 2019 UK general election.

The central housing policy announced by Labour has been a promise to build an extra 150,000 council and social homes a year, with 100,000 of these built by councils for social rent.

The party has announced a range of measures that would see a significant expansion of tenants rights, including open-ended tenancies, government-funded renters unions, and the abolition of current rules that require landlords to check peoples immigration status.

It also wants to introduce rent controls and give councils powers and funding to buy back homes from private landlords, although details havent been given about how this would work.

Read the Labour Party manifesto for the 2019 UK general election.

The Liberal Democrats would like to see 300,000 homes built every year by 2024, 100,000 of which would be social homes.

It would also allow local authorities to increase council tax up to 500 per cent where properties are being bought as second homes.

The party plans on introducing a new rent to own model for social housing where rent payments give tenants an increasing stake in the property, owning it outright after 30 years.

Other housing policies directly affecting landlords include mandatory landlord licensing and increasing minimum efficiency standards for privately rented properties.

Read the Liberal Democrats manifesto for the 2019 UK general election.

The Green Party is focused on making sure that every home in the country is insulated properly.

It would also like to see 100,000 new council homes a year.

Read the Green Party manifesto for the 2019 UK general election.

The SNP has announced restoring housing support for 18 to 21 year olds across Britain. It also intends on encouraging councils and individuals in rural areas to bring empty homes into use, making them available to rent or buy.

Read the SNP manifesto for the 2019 UK general election.

The Brexit Party has announced a range of housing policies, including simplifying planning consents for brownfield sites.

However, it has not specifically mentioned landlords or the rental sector.

Read the Brexit Party manifesto for the 2019 UK general election.

What do you think 2020 has in store for landlords? Let us know in the comments below.

Over 200,000 UK landlord policies, a 9/10 customer rating and claims handled by an award-winning team. Looking to switch or start a new policy? Run a quick landlord insurance quote today.

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UK general election 2019: what landlords should know - Simply Business knowledge

When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no mythAn interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times 1619 Project By Tom Mackaman 28 November 2019

Gordon Wood is professor emeritus at Brown University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, as well as Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 17891815, and dozens of other books and articles on the colonial period, the American Revolution and the early republic.

Historian Gordan Wood speaks with WSWS about American Revolution and the NYT 1619 Project

Q. Let me begin by asking you your initial reaction to the 1619 Project. When did you learn about it?

A. Well, I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I had no warning about this. I read the first essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which alleges that the Revolution occurred primarily because of the Americans desire to save their slaves. She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldnt believe this.

I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since its going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways.

Q. I want to return to the question of slavery and the American Revolution, but first I wanted to follow up, because you said you were not approached. Yet you are certainly one of the foremost authorities on the American Revolution, which the 1619 Project trains much of its fire on.

A. Yes, no one ever approached me. None of the leading scholars of the whole period from the Revolution to the Civil War, as far I know, have been consulted. I read the Jim McPherson interview and he was just as surprised as I was.

Q. Can you discuss the relationship between the American Revolution and the institution of slavery?

A. One of the things that I have emphasized in my writing is how many southerners and northerners in 1776 thought slavery was on its last legs and that it would naturally die away. You can find quotation after quotation from people seriously thinking that slavery was going to wither away in several decades. Now we know they couldnt have been more wrong. But they lived with illusions and were so wrong about so many things. We may be living with illusions too. One of the big lessons of history is to realize how the past doesnt know its future. We know how the story turned out, and we somehow assume they should know what we know, but they dont, of course. They dont know their future any more than we know our future, and so many of them thought that slavery would die away, and at first there was considerable evidence that that was indeed the case.

At the time of the Revolution, the Virginians had more slaves than they knew what to do with, so they were eager to end the international slave trade. But the Georgians and the South Carolinians werent ready to do that yet. That was one of the compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention. The Deep South was given 20 years to import more slaves, but most Americans were confident that the despicable transatlantic slave trade was definitely going to end in 1808.

Q. Under the Jefferson administration?

A. Yes, it was set in the Constitution at 20 years, but everyone knew this would be ended because nearly everyone knew that this was a barbaric thing, importing people and so on. Many thought that ending the slave trade would set slavery itself on the road to extinction. Of course, they were wrong.

I think the important point to make about slavery is that it had existed for thousands of years without substantial criticism, and it existed all over the New World. It also existed elsewhere in the world. Western Europe had already more or less done away with slavery. Perhaps there was nothing elsewhere comparable to the plantation slavery that existed in the New World, but slavery was widely prevalent in Africa and Asia. There is still slavery today in the world.

And it existed in all of these places without substantial criticism. Then suddenly in the middle of the 18th century you begin to get some isolated Quakers coming out against it. But its the American Revolution that makes it a problem for the world. And the first real anti-slave movement takes place in North America. So this is whats missed by these essays in the 1619 Project.

Q. The claim made by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the 1619 Project that the Revolution was really about founding a slavocracy seems to be coming from arguments made elsewhere that it was really Great Britain that was the progressive contestant in the conflict, and that the American Revolution was, in fact, a counterrevolution, basically a conspiracy to defend slavery.

A. Its been argued by some historians, people other than Hannah-Jones, that some planters in colonial Virginia were worried about what the British might do about slavery. Certainly, Dunmores proclamation in 1775, which promised the slaves freedom if they joined the Crowns cause, provoked many hesitant Virginia planters to become patriots. There may have been individuals who were worried about their slaves in 1776, but to see the whole revolution in those terms is to miss the complexity.

In 1776, Britain, despite the Somerset decision, was certainly not the great champion of antislavery that the Project 1619 suggests. Indeed, it is the northern states in 1776 that are the worlds leaders in the antislavery cause. The first anti-slavery meeting in the history of the world takes place in Philadelphia in 1775. That coincidence I think is important. I would have liked to have asked Hannah-Jones, how would she explain the fact that in 1791 in Virginia at the College of William and Mary, the Board of Visitors, the board of trustees, who were big slaveholding planters, awarded an honorary degree to Granville Sharp, who was the leading British abolitionist of the day. Thats the kind of question that should provoke historical curiosity. You ask yourself what were these slaveholding planters thinking? Its the kind of question, the kind of seeming anomaly, that should provoke a historian into research.

The idea that the Revolution occurred as a means of protecting slaveryI just dont think there is much evidence for it, and in fact the contrary is more true to what happened. The Revolution unleashed antislavery sentiments that led to the first abolition movements in the history of the world.

Q. In fact, those who claim that the American Revolution was a counterrevolution to protect slavery focus on the timing of the Somerset ruling of 1772, which held that slavery wasnt supported by English common law, and Dunmores promise to free slaves who escape their masters.

A. To go from these few facts to create such an enormous argument is a problem. The Somerset decision was limited to England, where there were very few slaves, and it didnt apply to the Caribbean. The British dont get around to freeing the slaves in the West Indies until 1833, and if the Revolution hadnt occurred, might never have done so then, because all of the southern colonies would have been opposed. So supposing the Americans hadnt broken away, there would have been a larger number of slaveholders in the greater British world who might have been able to prolong slavery longer than 1833. The West Indies planters were too weak in the end to resist abolition. They did try to, but if they had had all those planters in the South still being part of the British Empire with them, that would have made it more difficult for the British Parliament to move toward abolition.

Q. Hannah-Jones refers to Americas founding documents as its founding myths

A. Of course, there are great ironies in our history, but the men and the documents transcend their time. That Jefferson, a slaveholding aristocrat, has beenuntil recentlyour spokesman for democracy, declaring that all men are created equal, is probably the greatest irony in American history. But the document he wrote and his confidence in the capacities of ordinary people are real, and not myths.

Jefferson was a very complicated figure. He took a stand against slavery as a young man in Virginia. He spoke out against it. He couldnt get his colleagues to go along, but he was certainly courageous in voicing his opposition to slavery. Despite his outspokenness on slavery and other enlightened matters, his colleagues respected him enough to keep elevating him to positions in the state. His colleagues could have, as we say today, cancelled him if they didnt have some sympathy for what he was saying.

Q. And after the Revolution?

A. American leaders think slavery is dying, but they couldnt have been more wrong. Slavery grows stronger after the Revolution, but its concentrated in the South. North of the Mason-Dixon line, in every northern state by 1804, slavery is legally put on the road to extinction. Now, theres certain grandfathering in, and so you do have slaves in New Jersey as late as the eve of the Civil War. But in the northern states, the massive movement against slavery was unprecedented in the history of the world. So to somehow turn this around and make the Revolution a means of preserving slavery is strange and contrary to the evidence.

As a result of the Revolution, slavery is confined to the South, and that puts the southern planters on the defensive. For the first time they have to defend the institution. If you go into the colonial records and look at the writings and diary of someone like William Byrd, whos a very distinguished and learned personhes a member of the Royal Societyyoull find no expressions of guilt whatsoever about slavery. He took his slaveholding for granted. But after the Revolution thats no longer true. Southerners began to feel this anti-slave pressure now. They react to it by trying to give a positive defense of slavery. They had no need to defend slavery earlier because it was taken for granted as a natural part of a hierarchical society.

We should understand that slavery in the colonial period seemed to be simply the most base status in a whole hierarchy of dependencies and degrees of unfreedom. Indentured servitude was prevalent everywhere. Half the population that came to the colonies in the 18th century came as bonded servants. Servitude, of course, was not slavery, but it was a form of dependency and unfreedom that tended to obscure the uniqueness of racial slavery. Servants were bound over to masters for five or seven years. They couldnt marry. They couldnt own property. They belonged to their masters, who could sell them. Servitude was not life-time and was not racially-based, but it was a form of dependency and unfreedom. The Revolution attacked bonded servitude and by 1800 it scarcely existed anywhere in the US.

The elimination of servitude suddenly made slavery more conspicuous than it had been in a world of degrees of unfreedom. The antislavery movements arose out of these circumstances. As far as most northerners were concerned, this most base and despicable form of unfreedom must be eliminated along with all the other forms of unfreedom. These dependencies were simply incompatible with the meaning of the Revolution.

After the Revolution, Virginia had no vested interest in the international slave trade. Quite the contrary. Virginians began to grow wheat in place of tobacco. Washington does this, and he comes to see himself as more a farmer than a planter. He and other farmers begin renting out their slaves to people in Norfolk and Richmond, where they are paid wages. And many people thought that this might be the first step toward the eventual elimination of slavery. These anti-slave sentiments dont last long in Virginia, but for a moment it seemed that Virginia, which dominated the country as no other state ever has, might abolish slavery as the northern states were doing. In fact, there were lots of manumissions and other anti-slave moves in Virginia in the 1780s.

But the black rebellion in Saint-Dominguethe Haitian Revolutionscares the bejesus out of the southerners. Many of the white Frenchmen fled to North Americato Louisiana, to Charleston, and they brought their fears of slave uprisings with them. Then, with Gabriels Rebellion in Virginia in 1800, most of the optimism that Virginians had in 17761790 is gone.

Of course, I think the ultimate turning point for both sections is the Missouri crisis of 18191820. Up to that point, both sections lived with illusions. The Missouri crisis causes the scales to fall away from the eyes of both northerners and southerners. Northerners come to realize that the South really intended to perpetuate slavery and extend it into the West. And southerners come to realize that the North is so opposed to slavery that it will attempt to block them from extending it into the West. From that moment on I think the Civil War became inevitable.

Q. Theres the famous quote from Jefferson that the Missouri crisis awakened him like a fire bell in the night and that in it he perceived the death of the union...

A. Right. Hes absolutely panicked by whats happening, and these last years of his life leading up to 1826 are really quite sad because hes saying these things. Reading his writings between 1819 and his death in 1826 makes you wince because he so often sounds like a southern fire-eater of the 1850s. Whereas his friend Madison has a much more balanced view of things, Jefferson becomes a furious and frightened defender of the South. He sees a catastrophe in the works, and he cant do anything about it.

His friend Adams was, of course, opposed to slavery from the beginning, and this is something that Hannah-Jones should have been aware of. John Adams is the leading advocate in the Continental Congress for independence. Hes never been a slaveowner. He hates slavery and he has no vested interest in it. By 18191820, however, he more or less takes the view that the Virginians have a serious problem with slavery and they are going to have to work it out for themselves. Hes not going to preach to them. Thats essentially what he says to Jefferson.

By the early nineteenth century, Jefferson had what Annette Gordon-Reed calls New England envy. His granddaughter marries a New Englander and moves there, and she tells him how everythings flourishing in Connecticut. The farms are all neat, clean and green, and there are no slaves. He envies the town meetings of New England, those little ward republics. And he just yearns for something like that for Virginia.

Q. How it is that the American Revolution raises the dignity of labor? Because it seems to me that this concept certainly becomes a burning issue by the time of the Civil War.

A. Its a good question. Central to the middle class revolution was an unprecedented celebration of work, especially manual labor, including the working for money. For centuries going back to the ancient Greeks, work with ones hands had been held in contempt. Aristotle had said that those who worked with their hands and especially those who worked for money lacked the capacity for virtue. This remained the common view until the American Revolution changed everything.

The northern celebration of work made the slaveholding South seem even more anomalous than it was. Assuming that work was despicable and mean was what justified slavery. Scorn for work and slavery were two sides of the same coin. Now the middle-class northernersclerks, petty merchants, farmers, etc.began attacking the leisured gentry as parasites living off the work of others. That was the gist of the writings of William Manning, the obscure Massachusetts farmer, writing in the 1790s. This celebration of work, of course, forced the slaveholding planters to be even more defensive and they began celebrating leisure as the source of high culture in contrast with the money-grubbing North.

Slavery required a culture that held labor in contempt. The North, with its celebration of labor, especially working for money, became even more different from the lazy, slaveholding South. By the 1850s, the two sections, though both American, possessed two different cultures.

Q. In my discussion with James Oakes, he made the point about the emergence of the Democratic Party in the 1820s, that in the North it cant do what the southern slave owners really want it to do, which is to say slaves are property, but what they do instead is to begin to promote racism.

A. Thats right. When you have a republican society, its based on equality of all citizens; and now many whites found that difficult to accept. And they had to justify the segregation and the inferior status of the freed blacks by saying blacks were an inferior race. As I said earlier, in the Colonial period whites didnt have to mount any racist arguments to justify the lowly status of blacks. In a hierarchical society with many degrees of unfreedom, you dont bother with trying to explain or justify slavery or the unequal treatment of anyone. Someone like William Byrd never tries to justify slavery. He never argues that blacks are inferior. He doesnt need to do that because he takes his whole world of inequality and hierarchy for granted. Racism develops in the decades following the Revolution because in a free republican society, whites needed a new justification for keeping blacks in an inferior and segregated place. And it became even more complicated when freed blacks with the suffrage tended to vote for the doomed parties of the Federalists and the Whigs.

Q. The 1619 Project claims basically that nothing has ever gotten any better. That its as bad now as it was during slavery, and instead what youre describing is a very changed world...

A. Imagine the inequalities that existed before the Revolution. Not just in wealthI mean, we have that nowbut in the way in which people were treated. Consider the huge number of people who were servants of some kind. I just think that people need to know just how bad the Ancin Regime was. In France, we always had this Charles Dickens Tale of Two Cities view of the society, with a nobleman riding through the village and running over children and so on. But similar kinds of brutalities and cruelties existed in the English-speaking world in the way common people were treated. In England, there must have been 200 capital crimes on the books. Consequently, juries became somewhat reluctant to convict to hanging a person for stealing a handkerchief. So the convict was sent as a bonded servant to the colonies, 50,000 of them. And then when the American Revolution occurs, Australia becomes the replacement.

I dont think people realize just what a cruel and brutal world existed in the Ancin Regime, in the premodern societies of the West, not just for slaves, but for lots of people who were considered the mean or lowly sort. And they dont appreciate what a radical message is involved in declaring that all men are created equal and what that message means for our obsession with education, and the implications of that for our society.

Q. You spoke of the consensus school on American history before, from the 1950s, that saw the Revolution, I think, as essentially a conservative event. And one of the things that they stressed was that there was no aristocracy, no native aristocracy, in America, but you find, if I recall your argument in The Radicalism of the American Revolution, that though aristocracy was not strong, it was something that was still a powerful factor.

A. Theres no European-type aristocracy, the kind of rich, hereditary aristocracy of the sort that existed in Englandgreat landholders living off the rents of their tenants. But we had an aristocracy of sorts. The southern slaveholding planters certainly came closest to the English model, but even in the more egalitarian North there was an aristocracy of sorts. Men of wealth and distinction that we would label elites sought to make the title of gentlemen equal some kind of aristocracy. Gentleman was a legal distinction, and such gentlemen were treated differently in the society because of that distinction. With the Revolution, all this came under assault.

Its interesting to look at the debates that occur in the New York ratifying convention in 1788. The leading Anti-Federalist, Melancton Smith, a very smart guy but a middling sort and with no college graduate degree, gives the highly educated Alexander Hamilton and Robert Livingston a run for their money. He calls Hamilton and Livingston aristocrats and charges that the proposed Constitution was designed to give more power to the likes of them. Hamilton, who certainly felt superior to Smith, denied he was an aristocrat. There were no aristocrats in America, he said; they existed only in Europe. That kind of concession was multiplied ten thousand-fold in the following decades in the North, and this denial of obvious social superiority in the face of middling criticism is denied even today. You see politicians wanting to play down their distinctiveness, their elite status. I can have a beer with Joe Six-pack, they say, denying their social superiority. That was already present in the late 1780s. Thats what I mean by radicalism. Its a middle-class revolution, and it is essentially confined to the North.

Q. You were speaking earlier of the despair of Madison, Adams and Jefferson late in life. And it just occurred to me that they lived to see Martin Van Buren.

A. Thats right. Van Buren is probably the first real politician in America elected to the presidency. Unlike his predecessors, he never did anything great; he never made a great speech, he never wrote a great document, he never won a great battle. He simply was the most politically astute operator that the United States had ever seen. He organized a party in New York that was the basis of his success.

Van Buren regarded the founding fathers as pass. He told his fellow Americans, look, we dont need to pay too much attention to those guys. They were aristocrats, he said. Were Democratsmeaning both small d and also capital D. Those aristocrats dont have much to say to us.

Did you know that the founding fathers in the antebellum period are not Jefferson and Madison and Washington and Hamilton? In the antebellum period when most Americans referred to the founders, they meant John Smith, William Penn, William Bradford, John Winthrop and so on, the founders of the seventeenth century. Theres a good book on this subject by Wesley Frank Craven [ The Legend of the Founding Fathers (1956)].

Its Lincoln who rescues the eighteenth-century founders for us. From the Civil War on, the founders become the ones we celebrate today, the revolutionary leaders. Lincoln makes Jefferson the great hero of America. All honor to Jefferson, he says. Only because of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson didnt have anything to do with the Constitution, and so Lincoln makes the Declaration the most important document in American history, which I think is true.

Q. For our readership, perhaps you could discuss something of the world-historical significance of the Revolution. Of course, we are under no illusion that it represented a socialist transformation. Yet it was a powerful revolution in its time.

A. It was very important that the American colonial crisis, the imperial crisis, occurred right at the height of what we call the Enlightenment, where Western Europe was full of new ideas and was confident that culturewhat people believed and thoughtwas man-made and thus could be changed. The Old World, the Ancin Regime, could be transformed and made anew. It was an age of revolution, and its not surprising that the French Revolution and other revolutions occur in in the wake of the American Revolution.

The notion of equality was really crucial. When the Declaration says that all men are created equal, that is no myth. It is the most powerful statement ever made in our history, and it lies behind almost everything we Americans believe in and attempt to do. What that statement meant is that we are all born equal and the all the differences that we see among us as adults are due solely to our differing educations, differing upbringings and differing environments. The Declaration is an Enlightenment document because it repudiated the Ancin Regime assumption that all men are created unequal and that nothing much could be done about it. Thats what it meant to be a subject in the old society. You were born a patrician or a plebeian and that was your fate.

Q. One of the ironies of this Project 1619 is that they are saying the same things about the Declaration of Independence as the fire-eating proponents of slavery saidthat its a fraud. Meanwhile, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass upheld it and said were going to make this all men are created equal real.

A. That points up the problem with the whole project. Its too bad that its going out into the schools with the authority of the New York Times behind it. Thats sad because it will color the views of all these youngsters who will receive the message of the 1619 Project.

The author also recommends:

Interview with Gordon Wood on the American Revolution[3 March 2015]

2019 has been a year of mass social upheaval. We need you to help the WSWS and ICFI make 2020 the year of international socialist revival. We must expand our work and our influence in the international working class. If you agree, donate today. Thank you.

Read more from the original source:

An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times' 1619 Project - World Socialist Web Site

Recently, the Kartarpur Corridor was officially opened, allowing Indian Sikhs rare visa-free access to visit their place of worship. The opening of the Corridor was favourably timed with the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanaks 550th birth anniversary.

The Corridor is a 4.5-kilometre border linking India and Pakistan, connecting two of the most revered Sikh shrines the Dera Baba Nanak Sahib in India, and the Kartarpur Sahib Gurdwara in Pakistan. This initially began as a proposal in 1999 but was finally opened on November 9, marking an unprecedented historic moment for the two otherwise hostile neighbouring nations.

The moment was monumental for the Indian Sikhs. Since partition, they have borne a heavy heart at the separation of one of their most revered places of worship. Although there had been a lot of speculation about the ulterior political and economic motives of the move, and much criticism had been raised about the $20 fee, it is interesting to analyse the symbolic significance of the event itself.

By opening the corridor, both countries fulfilled a long-standing wish of the Sikhs whilst simultaneously making their travels easier and cheaper. The name Kartarpur means a place of God. Here, all people irrespective of religion or caste lived together in peace, representing the first Sikh commune, before partition. This context is ironic when you notice the far-from-favourable treatment of minorities in both Pakistan and India. Media outlets were, therefore, quick to label this as an event that would create momentum for better treatment of minorities in both countries.

It is also interesting to think that the shrine was built to commemorate the site where Guru Nanak spent the last 18 years of his life, spreading the message of peace. Pakistan and India have a long, muddied history. The tension at the borders was exacerbated in August following the abolition of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution that granted the disputed territories of Jammu and Kashmir partial autonomy. The opening of the corridor, hence, is a testament to the fact that bridges can be built in seemingly incurable situations. Not only can its symbolic significance be applied to our political situation, but it can also act as a metaphor, translating into our daily lives.

Moreover, the event proved that territorial divisions among people of a shared heritage do not extinguish the colossal transformational power they possess. It made us believe in the collective power of goodwill; that people on either side of a conflict can triumph over political struggles.

In opening the Kartarpur Corridor, Pakistan and India have allowed us to believe that borders dont need to be seen as constraints when there is a shared momentum for peace.

It is tough to say whether this will really be a stepping stone for greater good in the future, but it is not entirely unrealistic to hope that a gesture such as this one will be a catalyst for larger breakthroughs. As Prime Minister Imran Khan said at a ceremony marking the construction of this work on the Pakistani side, We will only progress when we free ourselves from the chains of our past!

Read more here:

Beyond the Corridor - The News on Sunday

For people looking in from outside of Cornwall, Camborne and Redruth would, on the face of it, be considered a working-class constituency which might be expected to be traditionally aligned to Labour.

But since the constituency was first formed in 2010 after boundary changes it has returned a Conservative MP at each of the three general elections it has voted in.

While the heart of the constituency is based around the urban areas of Camborne, Pool and Redruth it also stretches to the north and south coasts, taking in areas such as Constantine and Gweek.

Camborne is home to one of the biggest foodbanks in Cornwall which gives out 16,000 meals a month - an increase of 20% since 2018.

But, at the other end of the scale, there is Constantine where the average house price, according to Zoopla, stands at just under 350,000.

And there is also a large student population due to the Falmouth University and University of Exeter accommodation on the shared Penryn campus being within the constituency with around 1,800 students. Because of this there is a chance that the student vote could be significant on December 12.

At the last election in 2017 Conservative George Eustice was re-elected with a majority of 1,577. That represented a drop in his majority just two years earlier when he was returned with a healthier majority of just over 7,000.

The last two elections have seen Labour taking runner-up spot but when the newly-formed constituency was first contested in 2010 it was the Liberal Democrats who were second.

Julia Goldsworthy, who had served as MP for the former Falmouth and Camborne constituency from 2005 to 2010, lost out to George Eustice by just 66 votes.

Then, five years later, she found herself trailing far behind in fourth place behind the Tories, Labour and UKIP with just 12.4% of the vote compared to 37.4% in 2010.

The Lib Dem vote in this area did not recover and at the last election finished third with just 2,979 votes, a measly 6.1% of the overall vote.

But what do the candidates seeking your votes on December 12 think are the main issues in Camborne and Redruth and what have they heard on the doorstep?

Green Party candidate Karen La Borde said that it had been "mixed" but there were clear priorities.

"It is the NHS, people are struggling to get doctors' appointments, they can't get dentists, surgeries are closing,"she says. "Social care is also mentioned a lot as we have an ageing population that I wasn't aware of.

"People are struggling to get social care for their parents who they are having to look after and those who work in social care are not being paid enough."

Public transport, low wage economy and education have also been raised when the Green candidate has been out canvassing.

She adds: "I have met people who are running two or three jobs at a time just to keep afloat. And in education I have met teachers who say that children are turning up to school without having been fed, so they are having to feed them before they can start teaching.

"We in the Green Party say that we want to focus on the climate emergency but also social justice - the two things go together. We want to create a universal basic income that would really help people in this area."

But Karen highlights the differences in the constituency areas saying that in Constantine people are more keen to talk about second homes - "something you don't have in the town areas".

She says: "There is extraordinary wealth over there. It is embarrassing compared to what there is elsewhere in the constituency."

The Green candidate said she was pleased that climate change has taken a higher profile in this election but she was still finding people who "don't care" but said that mostly people were interested and want to make a change.

For Liberal Party candidate Paul Holmes there is only really one issue at this election - Brexit.

"The Liberal Party is, unlike the Liberal Democrats, in favour of leaving Europe - we should have left by now," he says, "we are a Brexit party."

He says that housing and homelessness had been raised a lot and the priority should be in building council and social housing.

And Mr Holmes praised Don Gardner for the work he does at the local food bank, saying "he deserves a medal, it's fantastic".

But he adds: "I help to raise money for it by holding concerts, but we shouldn't need to. We shouldn't need to have food banks."

The Liberal Party candidate also mentioned the plans for lithium mining in Cornwall which he supports but says should be used to build an industry in the county.

"All the work that is involved with it should be in Cornwall, we should have all the jobs not be shipping it all out of here to be used elsewhere.

"What is wrong with building factories down here to make batteries?"

Mr Holmes said the low wage economy was a factor in Camborne and Redruth and there was a big gap between the national average wage and those earned in Cornwall.

The impact of this spreads to the provision of affordable housing which, Mr Holmes said, means that the way affordable housing rates are calculated put it out of reach for locals.

"The word affordable should not be used in Cornwall because it doesn't exist."

The Liberal Party also has plans to reinstate the Milk Marketing Board which Mr Holmes said would be important to help the dairy industry in Cornwall.

He recalled the days when there were four major dairies in Cornwall and said that a Milk Marketing Board would help bring about a return of a thriving dairy industry.

But when all is said and done the Liberal Party is basing its campaign around its desire to see Brexit happen.

"We haven't had government of this country for three years," said Mr Holmes. "It has been stagnant, it has been locked in a place we don't want to be, locked by people trying to thwart something the people of this country wanted.

"Once out of Europe we can get back to doing things like helping schools and hospitals and planning for new businesses. But nothing is happening now."

Describing himself as a monarchist he said that if the UK remained in Europe it would end up being "an offshore island in the United States of Europe and would lead to the abolition of the monarchy".

George Eustice, who is defending his place as Conservative MP for Camborne and Redruth, has always been a leave supporter having previously been a member of UKIP.

And it is Brexit which he has been encountering on the doorstep when campaigning in this election.

He said: "There is exasperation at the national situation and the faliure to deliver Brexit. There is a desire to have a government that can just sort the Brexit thing out and get on with the job. That is what I have heard from all sorts of people including former Labour voters."

But he is keen to state that he doesn't think it is the only issue in Camborne and Redruth.

"It would be wrong to say it is the number one issue in terms of what matters to people here, but it is number one in terms of the fact that we need to get it out of the way in order to address the things that people do care about.

"It is a logjam and we're not going to be able to move on to the issues that matter to them."

The other issues include the NHS - "our pledge to continue increasing funding for the NHS has been welcomed" - and the need for higher paid jobs in the area.

Mr Eustice said he had seen that there had been more people indicating support for the Lib Dems "in the villages" but he had been seeing "generally a positive reaction".

He said the issues in Camborne and Redruth around low wages and deprivation could be helped by the Conservatives highlighting plans to increase the living wage and to take more people out of the income tax and National Insurance threshold.

But he said there was also some optimism in the area with a number of better paid jobs being created in recent years with creative and technology companies which had been formed by students from the university who have remained in Cornwall.

Labour candidate Paul Farmer is clear what the main priority is for the people he has met in Camborne and Redruth - public services.

He said: "That covers a lot of things, whether it is people with long-term illnesses or dependents with special needs, we have areas of financial deprivation and there are concerns about the NHS.

"We have the biggest food bank in the UK - it is an issue that we are very concerned about and it is evidence of the situation that we are in."

Mr Farmer says that he has experienced poverty himself which he says gives him much more insight into the plight of those affected than other politicians.

"I have lived in Cornwall for a long time and I was self-employed, I brought up my children on a low income and qualified for tax credits. I have lived most of my life in council housing and know exactly what the pressures are that people face and what it is like to feel like you life is falling apart."

But what would he do to try to help those affected? "We need big investment in Cornwall and specifically in our area.

"The low wages here are a real problem - a lot of the people using the foodbank are in full-time work, but they can't afford to live.

"The Labour green industrial revolution will help to create the better quality jobs that will help people in these areas."

However the Labour candidate says he has not really encountered many people wanting to talk about the one issue that many believe has caused this election - Brexit.

"I don't think people feel that we are moving on, but they are just fed up of people talking about it. When I knock on doors I ask if people have a particular issue and the main response is 'everything really'.

"People don't think it has been resolved but there is this stasis associated with it. But whether it will be an issue at the ballot box remains to be seen. It baffles me really that I haven't had more people talking about it - it is just not something people want to talk about and is usually me who brings it up."

He adds: "What I try and talk about is a future that is better than where we are now.

"Housing is something that is a big issue and something that needs to be addressed everywhere - we need much more social housing and affordable housing.

"If you live in our constituency it is harder to qualify for a council house due to the competition for them - it is 50% harder to qualify in this area, you need to be 50% poorer to get a house here than anywhere else in Cornwall.

"That kind of situation makes people less optimistic about the future and especially when you talk to people who have to use the food bank.

"It is stark for those people - many of them are on limited zero-hours contracts and not earning enough to live on. I want to make sure there is more help for them and a better benefits system for people."

Liberal Democrat candidate Florence MacDonald says she has had a lot of people talking to her about the issues which affect everybody's daily lives.

"There are a lot of families that don't have the security and stability that they would like and need. Whether that is job security or a secure home.

"There is a lack of affordable housing and long-term tenancies and there are the problems with Universal Credit.

"The way that Universal Credit works means that if you have flexible working or zero-hours contract there is a mismatch between your income and benefits which mean you can find yourself short and unable to pay things like rent.

"That will not only affect your financial situation but also your mental health and wellbeing of your children. These all link into a number of different areas which affect a lot of people."

Florence said the Lib Dems would look to make changes to Universal Credit which would make it better to fit with the circumstances that people find themselves in and to help those who may not have fixed contracts or are self-employed.

Changes to workers' rights would give people the right to a fixed-term contract after 12 months of working.

She said: "There are some advantages to having flexible hours but at the moment the advantages are for the employer and not the individual.

"We also need more jobs in this area and the green industrial revolution will create opportunities, especially here in Cornwall."

Housing is also a key issue for her and she talks about the need to give people longer tenancies which would provide more stability for people and improving rights for tenants.

And when it comes to Brexit she is clear how people in Camborne and Redruth feel: "On the doorstep the main reaction is that people are completely fed up of it, beyond belief fed up.

"I have had a lot of people saying they don't trust any politicians anymore, a lot of people saying they won't vote this time or that they just don't know how they will vote.

"It feels more up in the air than I would have expected - generally people feel furstrated at what has happened."

Other issues which have come up on the doorstep for the teacher have been funding for services in Cornwall, the NHS and education.

"Infrastructure has been a huge one. People see a lot of development going on but there is no infrastructure to go with it. People can't get GP appointments and then wonder where all these other people will go. The same applies to school places."

But she says there is a frustration among people that Brexit has distracted from the issues that matter.

"I feel, myself, that this election is not going to solve those problems. We are in an awful situation because David Cameron called a referendum on something he wasn't prepared to carry out.

"That has created big divisions and has messed up the political picture. I don't feel confident that this election will produce a majority or a strong majority which will sort it out.

"We have had three successive governments that have not been stable and I am not sure that will be solved with this election."

On the campaign trail she is keen to ensure people know she is listening.

"I go out there and talk to everybody but not telling them what is right or wrong. I want to hear what they have to say.

"The anger at Brexit is also an anger about a lot of other things. I will be completely honest about my stance so that people know what choice they are making when they vote."

Continued here:

Camborne and Redruth constituency is where students could decide next MP in General Election - Cornwall Live

Interesting choice of words by the PM in parliament in the debate over his phone call to the NSW Police Commissioner - when referring to the Opposition he said: "On the next day they sought to trump up something else." Freudian slip? Was there a quid pro quo? - Peter Paige, Moss Vale

With Morrison increasingly copying his pal Trump, surely it cant be long until the PM starts demanding a wall somewhere. - Nick Andrews, Bellevue Hill

One can only presume that it is the success and popularity of Clover Moores style of politics, free from the influence and pressure of party-political operatives and back-room vested interest groups and lobbyists, that even as an independent mayor of a local council in NSW she is seen by a minister in the federal government as a "political opponent" and becomes a target for "an impossible claim" ("Morrisons judgment failed him and now hes totally exposed", November 28). - Harvey Sanders, Paddington

The former immigration minister who wouldnt reveal on-water matters now, as PM, wont reveal off-water matters either. So much for transparency in government. - Merilyn McClung, Forestville

I think it's about time the rest of Australia woke up to how Quiet Australia works. When the most powerful politician in the land makes a quiet call to the state's most powerful police officer, the nature of that call should remain just that - quiet. Enough of these quite frankly disrespectful questions. Next thing a certain kind of nosey Australian will be demanding to be told about the government's policies on energy, the drought, bushfires and climate change. As we hurtle towards the summer holidays let's get on with the Christmas shopping, the Test and say a quiet prayer for Australia. - Nick Franklin, Katoomba

Morrison is just like any other average bloke, right? What quiet Australian wouldnt have a quiet chat to the police commissioner if their colleague was under investigation? - Mark Pearce, Richmond

That reminds me; I must call the NSW Police Commissioner to discuss my recent speeding fine. - David Farrell, Erskineville

Clive James, an Australian icon and iconoclast has departed, stage right (''Clive James: Literary and TV giant dead at 80'', November 28).

Much more than the Kid from Kogarah, his sharp wit and verbal skills flourished in foreign soil and he held up a mirror not only to the pretentiousness of much of the manners and morals he found abroad but he was ever aware, like the true artist, of his own fragility and limitations.

We are fortunate not only for the memories of this great raconteur but for the rich vein of profound thoughts he left us in his memoirs and poems. - Eugene OConnor, Terara

There were many highlights, and James himself noted, some regrets. He executed the craft of wit with his unique style. A stand-out from my youth was watching on New Years Eve his take on the years people and happenings.

Handing out awards, as often was the case, the recipient was not present in the studio. Straight-faced, James would announce they were unable to be there. Now as the tributes flow Clive James will loom large as he accepts the recognition deserved. - Allan Gibson, Cherrybrook

Poet, memoirist, literary critic, chat show host and tango enthusiast: just some of the attributes of the Kid from Kogarah. With his gravelly voice and crinkly eyes, he beguiled his audiences and his sparkling prose left his admirers wanting more. He and I were born just weeks apart and I would have been grateful for a third of his talent. - Joan Brown, Orange

One of Clive James's greatest achievements was translating the 500-odd page medieval Italian text by Dante, The Divine Comedy, from its original Tuscan dialect into English. He did this for his wife, a Dante scholar. The result is breathtaking; one of the greatest translations of Dante that we have. - Dale Bailey, Five Dock

James was one of Australia's most brilliant and prolific writers, yet not one of his books or poems are prescribed texts in the NSW HSC English curriculum. It is a sign of the greatness of the man that he saw the funny side of his exclusion, as he had the ability to extract humour from the most unlikely of places. - Tony Letford, Wentworth Falls

I have an abiding memory of James one late summers afternoon at the Quay, sitting at his favourite restaurant observing the passing parade, a quizzical look on his face, thoroughly in the moment but apart at the same time. - Diane Hughan, Woolgoolga

He shone so brightly to the last, and then was gone. Vale Clive James. - Meredith Williams, Dee Why

A group of eminent climate scientists has issued another warning that the world faces a "cascade" of climatic "tipping points" when change becomes irreversible unless emergency action is taken to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are directly or indirectly caused by humans ("Tipping points 'dangerously close'", November 28). Unless we can avoid these tipping points, sea levels could rise as much as seven metres, and temperatures could become unbearable in coming decades. These events could in turn cause mass migration from low-lying regions.

Despite such warnings, the Prime Minister and his disciples stubbornly refuse to listen. They persist with their welded-on support of coal, the dirty rock that began the era of global warming when global temperatures were headed towards another ice age and is still the chief culprit behind an increasingly uncomfortable and dangerous climate. - Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin, ACT

I always felt that climate change would one day undo the Coalition. It's all a big joke to them. But no amount of marketing from the Prime Minister can undo facts. The country is on fire in spring, and now the tipping point climate scientists warned of could be closer than imagined. What a national farce these fossils are to claim only they can "keep Australians safe" and only they can be trusted to run our economy. - Sue Young, Bensville

Climate tipping points are like stones thrown at an icefield: they seem irrelevant until the mountain descends onto the valley. This isn't nonsense, greenie panic or black humour. This is present reality. Tomorrow will be too late. Far, far too late. - David Neilson, Invergowrie

Pru Goward is right ("Here's a way to make health insurance more affordable for all", November 28). We need much more government investment into keeping well, rather than always throwing money at the pointy end of the health spectrum.

For far too long acute hospitals have been seen as the face of health. It is actually primary and extended care with a preventative and all-encompassing community health-wellness focus which carries the flag always under resourced and vastly undervalued. It's this sector which can free up hospital beds for those who really need them by keeping us healthy and at home rather than clogging up the system. Lack of whistles and machines that go "ping" doesn't seem to win votes though. - Judy Finch, Cedar Party

I agree that young people are being belted for taking up private health insurance ("Young, healthy and bled dry", November 28). However, when you are older there is the huge financial penalty for not having taken up private insurance by the age of 30. For my partner and I, when I looked into the costs in 2012 we were to be penalised by a 70 per cent premium, resulting in a $5000 yearly fee.Based on my investigation we decided to self insure and in the last seven years have saved approximately $40,000.

I would strongly advise any youngsters to forget about private health insurance and take up advice to commence a salary sacrifice into investments to the same amount. You will be amazed at how much you amass with time. - Graham Lawson, Birchgrove

Large and unplanned-for population growth is a huge concern for many but the "debate" is going nowhere as your correspondent points out (Letters, November 28). To call for a reduction in the largest single factor, immigration, elicits cries of racism which it's definitely not.

But the inescapable consequences of the mathematical laws of compound growth tells you that it can't keep going on. Someday, population has to stabilise. The only questions are when and at what level. Soon, and about the same number of people as now, would be good answers. What to do, when the political "leaders" will do nothing? - John Burman, Port Macquarie

Stephen Bartholomeusz frets about the "loss of corporate memory and experience" should there be further loss of Westpac directors ("Bank's fate should make all big company directors nervous", November 28). Directors and management in many large companies have placed little value on these factors in recent years as they retrench experienced staff and outsource key activities. - Jane Wilkie, Gymea

Congratulations to Warwick Farm Public School for creating a culture of high expectations for their students with the resultant improvement in their academic achievement and attitude to school in general ("Expectations great as a pupil aid", November 28). Good teachers know that students will stretch themselves with positive encouragement and demands which are not necessarily comfortable but always reasonable. A little stress is sometimes a requirement for meaningful and rewarding progress. - Max Redmayne, Russell Lea

We've already lost great chunks of the Sydney Domain, Parramatta Park, Penrith's Weir Reserve, and no doubt many other public parks to vested interests. Now Tempe Reserve is again under threat ("Sydney FC revisit plans for training base", November 28). To maintain some sort of balance, surely it's now time to return the Moore Park Stadium site to public parkland. - Kevin Eadie, Drummoyne

The "hidden disaster" of children lost to education will persist as long as governments accommodate a binary education system public and private and cannot ideologically accept that the operation and funding of the public system is the prime responsibility of any just system ("50,000 children missing school at any one time", November 28).

Of course there is a role for the private system but as long as its entitlements are skewed to the extent of folly the "missing children" problem will not be addressed. - Gus Plater, Saratoga

Yes, the cold water that comes out of the shower head before the hot water comes through is very collectable (Letters, November 28).

I collect five litres of cold water in a bucket each time I use the shower, and then use it to water my garden. Or flush the toilet. With a household of four people, that's 20 litres a day. - Mia David, Wollongong

Its time for the International Maritime Organisation to push for the abolition of noisy diesel powered ships. Not only will this improve air quality around the world, it seems noiseless electric powered ships will enhance the love life of migrating hump back whales (''Boat noise puts kibosh on whales romance'', November 28). - Cornelius van der Weyden, Balmain East

Growing up in a Catholic household in the '60s and having been taught by nuns for 13 years, the term ''modesty'' became a term that wrapped itself around the core of my being ("Modesty blazes a new fashion trail", November 28). However, for the first time in my life, I have bought a dress that gives me cleavage. Am I game enough to wear it? - Genevieve Milton, Newtown

When it is lighter for longer at the end of the working day due to daylight saving, conceivably this could encourage more people to go out and about in fossil-fuel emitting machines after they get home from work, increasing fossil fuel emissions (Letters, November 28).But increased fossil fuel emissions due to daylight saving are unlikely to have an impact on your curtains, if you keep the windows closed. - Max Hopwood, Zetland

More here:

PM's need to appear 'tough' exposes his key weakness - Sydney Morning Herald

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil youd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesnt mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than childs play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isnt passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act. Oblomovism and Stakhanovism are two sides of the same debased coin.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for reality, the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. Curiously or maybe not all the old ideologies are conservative because they believe in work. Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marxs wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists except that Im not kidding I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry. But if all the ideologues (as they do) advocate work and not only because they plan to make other people do theirs they are strangely reluctant to say so. They will carry on endlessly about wages, hours, working conditions, exploitation, productivity, profitability. Theyll gladly talk about anything but work itself. These experts who offer to do our thinking for us rarely share their conclusions about work, for all its saliency in the lives of all of us. Among themselves they quibble over the details. Unions and management agree that we ought to sell the time of our lives in exchange for survival, although they haggle over the price. Marxists think we should be bossed by bureaucrats. Libertarians think we should be bossed by businessmen. Feminists dont care which form bossing takes so long as the bosses are women. Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working.

You may be wondering if Im joking or serious. Im joking and serious. To be ludic is not to be ludicrous. Play doesnt have to be frivolous, although frivolity isnt triviality: very often we ought to take frivolity seriously. Id like life to be a game but a game with high stakes. I want to play for keeps.

The alternative to work isnt just idleness. To be ludic is not to be quaaludic. As much as I treasure the pleasure of torpor, its never more rewarding than when it punctuates other pleasures and pastimes. Nor am I promoting the managed time-disciplined safety-valve called leisure; far from it. Leisure is nonwork for the sake of work. Leisure is the time spent recovering from work and in the frenzied but hopeless attempt to forget about work. Many people return from vacation so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation.

I am not playing definitional games with anybody. When I say I want to abolish work, I mean just what I say, but I want to say what I mean by defining my terms in non-idiosyncratic ways. My minimum definition of work is forced labor, that is, compulsory production. Both elements are essential. Work is production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick. (The carrot is just the stick by other means.) But not all creation is work. Work is never done for its own sake, its done on account of some product or output that the worker (or, more often, somebody else) gets out of it. This is what work necessarily is. To define it is to despise it. But work is usually even worse than its definition decrees. The dynamic of domination intrinsic to work tends over time toward elaboration. In advanced work-riddled societies, including all industrial societies whether capitalist or Communist, work invariably acquires other attributes which accentuate its obnoxiousness.

Usually and this is even more true in Communist than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. Thus 95% of Americans who work, work for somebody (or something) else. In the USSR or Cuba or Yugoslavia or any other alternative model which might be adduced, the corresponding figure approaches 100%. Only the embattled Third World peasant bastions Mexico, India, Brazil, Turkey temporarily shelter significant concentrations of agriculturists who perpetuate the traditional arrangement of most laborers in the last several millenia, the payment of taxes (= ransom) to the state or rent to parasitic landlords in return for being otherwise left alone. Even this raw deal is beginning to look good. All industrial (and office) workers are employees and under the sort of surveillance which ensures servility.

But modern work has worse implications. People dont just work, they have jobs. One person does one productive task all the time on an or-else basis. Even if the task has a quantum of intrinsic interest (as increasingly many jobs dont) the monotony of its obligatory exclusivity drains its ludic potential. A job that might engage the energies of some people, for a reasonably limited time, for the fun of it, is just a burden on those who have to do it for forty hours a week with no say in how it should be done, for the profit of owners who contribute nothing to the project, and with no opportunity for sharing tasks or spreading the work among those who actually have to do it. This is the real world of work: a world of bureaucratic blundering, of sexual harassment and discrimination, of bonehead bosses exploiting and scapegoating their subordinates who by any rational-technical criteria should be calling the shots. But capitalism in the real world subordinates the rational maximization of productivity and profit to the exigencies of organizational control.

The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as discipline. Foucault has complexified this phenomenon but it is simple enough. Discipline consists of the totality of totalitarian controls at the workplace surveillance, rotework, imposed work tempos, production quotas, punching -in and -out, etc. Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital. It is something historically original and horrible. It was beyond the capacities of such demonic dictators of yore as Nero and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible. For all their bad intentions they just didnt have the machinery to control their subjects as thoroughly as modern despots do. Discipline is the distinctively diabolical modern mode of control, it is an innovative intrusion which must be interdicted at the earliest opportunity.

Such is work. Play is just the opposite. Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if its forced. This is axiomatic. Bernie de Koven has defined play as the suspension of consequences. This is unacceptable if it implies that play is inconsequential. The point is not that play is without consequences. This is to demean play. The point is that the consequences, if any, are gratuitous. Playing and giving are closely related, they are the behavioral and transactional facets of the same impulse, the play-instinct. They share an aristocratic disdain for results. The player gets something out of playing; thats why he plays. But the core reward is the experience of the activity itself (whatever it is). Some otherwise attentive students of play, like Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens), define it as game-playing or following rules. I respect Huizingas erudition but emphatically reject his constraints. There are many good games (chess, baseball, Monopoly, bridge) which are rule-governed but there is much more to play than game-playing. Conversation, sex, dancing, travel these practices arent rule-governed but they are surely play if anything is. And rules can be played with at least as readily as anything else.

Work makes a mockery of freedom. The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who arent free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or-else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smaller details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent and disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing.

And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace. The liberals and conservatives and libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phonies and hypocrites. There is more freedom in any moderately deStalinized dictatorship than there is in the ordinary American workplace. You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or monastery. In fact, as Foucault and others have shown, prisons and factories came in at about the same time, and their operators consciously borrowed from each others control techniques. A worker is a part time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called insubordination, just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. Without necessarily endorsing it for them either, it is noteworthy that children at home and in school receive much the same treatment, justified in their case by their supposed immaturity. What does this say about their parents and teachers who work?

The demeaning system of domination Ive described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes its not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or better still industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are free is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are youll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias. Their obedience training at work carries over into the families they start, thus reproducing the system in more ways than one, and into politics, culture and everything else. Once you drain the vitality from people at work, theyll likely submit to heirarchy and expertise in everything. Theyre used to it.

We are so close to the world of work that we cant see what it does to us. We have to rely on outside observers from other times or other cultures to appreciate the extremity and the pathology of our present position. There was a time in our own past when the work ethic would have been incomprehensible, and perhaps Weber was on to something when he tied its appearance to a religion, Calvinism, which if it emerged today instead of four centuries ago would immediately and appropriately be labeled a cult. Be that as it may, we have only to draw upon the wisdom of antiquity to put work in perspective. The ancients saw work for what it is, and their view prevailed, the Calvinist cranks notwithstanding, until overthrown by industrialism but not before receiving the endorsement of its prophets.

Lets pretend for a moment that work doesnt turn people into stultified submissives. Lets pretend, in defiance of any plausible psychology and the ideology of its boosters, that it has no effect on the formation of character. And lets pretend that work isnt as boring and tiring and humiliating as we all know it really is. Even then, work would still make a mockery of all humanistic and democratic aspirations, just because it usurps so much of our time. Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing free about so-called free time is that it doesnt cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair. Coal and steel dont do that. Lathes and typewriters dont do that. But workers do. No wonder Edward G. Robinson in one of his gangster movies exclaimed, Work is for saps!

Both Plato and Xenophon attribute to Socrates and obviously share with him an awareness of the destructive effects of work on the worker as a citizen and a human being. Herodotus identified contempt for work as an attribute of the classical Greeks at the zenith of their culture. To take only one Roman example, Cicero said that whoever gives his labor for money sells himself and puts himself in the rank of slaves. His candor is now rare, but contemporary primitive societies which we are wont to look down upon have provided spokesmen who have enlightened Western anthropologists. The Kapauku of West Irian, according to Posposil, have a conception of balance in life and accordingly work only every other day, the day of rest designed to regain the lost power and health. Our ancestors, even as late as the eighteenth century when they were far along the path to our present predicament, at least were aware of what we have forgotten, the underside of industrialization. Their religious devotion to St. Monday thus establishing a de facto five-day week 150200 years before its legal consecration was the despair of the earliest factory owners. They took a long time in submitting to the tyranny of the bell, predecessor of the time clock. In fact it was necessary for a generation or two to replace adult males with women accustomed to obedience and children who could be molded to fit industrial needs. Even the exploited peasants of the ancient regime wrested substantial time back from their landlords work. According to Lafargue, a fourth of the French peasants calendar was devoted to Sundays and holidays, and Chayanovs figures from villages in Czarist Russia hardly a progressive society likewise show a fourth or fifth of peasants days devoted to repose. Controlling for productivity, we are obviously far behind these backward societies. The exploited muzhiks would wonder why any of us are working at all. So should we.

To grasp the full enormity of our deterioration, however, consider the earliest condition of humanity, without government or property, when we wandered as hunter-gatherers. Hobbes surmised that life was then nasty, brutish and short. Others assume that life was a desperate unremitting struggle for subsistence, a war waged against a harsh Nature with death and disaster awaiting the unlucky or anyone who was unequal to the challenge of the struggle for existence. Actually, that was all a projection of fears for the collapse of government authority over communities unaccustomed to doing without it, like the England of Hobbes during the Civil War. Hobbes compatriots had already encountered alternative forms of society which illustrated other ways of life in North America, particularly but already these were too remote from their experience to be understandable. (The lower orders, closer to the condition of the Indians, understood it better and often found it attractive. Throughout the seventeenth century, English settlers defected to Indian tribes or, captured in war, refused to return. But the Indians no more defected to white settlements than Germans climb the Berlin Wall from the west.) The survival of the fittest version the Thomas Huxley version of Darwinism was a better account of economic conditions in Victorian England than it was of natural selection, as the anarchist Kropotkin showed in his book Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution. (Kropotkin was a scientist a geographer whod had ample involuntary opportunity for fieldwork whilst exiled in Siberia: he knew what he was talking about.) Like most social and political theory, the story Hobbes and his successors told was really unacknowledged autobiography.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled The Original Affluent Society. They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society. They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were working at all. Their labor, as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schillers definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full play to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling. As he put it: The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is this mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulus to activity. (A modern version dubiously developmental is Abraham Maslows counterposition of deficiency and growth motivation.) Play and freedom are, as regards production, coextensive. Even Marx, who belongs (for all his good intentions) in the productivist pantheon, observed that the realm of freedom does not commence until the point is passed where labor under the compulsion of necessity and external utility is required. He never could quite bring himself to identify this happy circumstance as what it is, the abolition of work its rather anomalous, after all, to be pro-worker and anti-work but we can.

The aspiration to go backwards or forwards to a life without work is evident in every serious social or cultural history of pre-industrial Europe, among them M. Dorothy Georges England In Transition and Peter Burkes Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Also pertinent is Daniel Bells essay, Work and its Discontents, the first text, I believe, to refer to the revolt against work in so many words and, had it been understood, an important correction to the complacency ordinarily associated with the volume in which it was collected, The End of Ideology. Neither critics nor celebrants have noticed that Bells end-of-ideology thesis signaled not the end of social unrest but the beginning of a new, uncharted phase unconstrained and uninformed by ideology. It was Seymour Lipset (in Political Man), not Bell, who announced at the same time that the fundamental problems of the Industrial Revolution have been solved, only a few years before the post- or meta-industrial discontents of college students drove Lipset from UC Berkeley to the relative (and temporary) tranquility of Harvard.

As Bell notes, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, for all his enthusiasm for the market and the division of labor, was more alert to (and more honest about) the seamy side of work than Ayn Rand or the Chicago economists or any of Smiths modern epigones. As Smith observed: The understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. Here, in a few blunt words, is my critique of work. Bell, writing in 1956, the Golden Age of Eisenhower imbecility and American self-satisfaction, identified the unorganized, unorganizable malaise of the 1970s and since, the one no political tendency is able to harness, the one identified in HEWs report Work in America, the one which cannot be exploited and so is ignored. That problem is the revolt against work. It does not figure in any text by any laissez-faire economist Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Richard Posner because, in their terms, as they used to say on Star Trek, it does not compute.

If these objections, informed by the love of liberty, fail to persuade humanists of a utilitarian or even paternalist turn, there are others which they cannot disregard. Work is hazardous to your health, to borrow a book title. In fact, work is mass murder or genocide. Directly or indirectly, work will kill most of the people who read these words. Between 14,000 and 25,000 workers are killed annually in this country on the job. Over two million are disabled. Twenty to twenty-five million are injured every year. And these figures are based on a very conservative estimation of what constitutes a work-related injury. Thus they dont count the half million cases of occupational disease every year. I looked at one medical textbook on occupational diseases which was 1,200 pages long. Even this barely scratches the surface. The available statistics count the obvious cases like the 100,000 miners who have black lung disease, of whom 4,000 die every year, a much higher fatality rate than for AIDS, for instance, which gets so much media attention. This reflects the unvoiced assumption that AIDS afflicts perverts who could control their depravity whereas coal-mining is a sacrosanct activity beyond question. What the statistics dont show is that tens of millions of people have heir lifespans shortened by work which is all that homicide means, after all. Consider the doctors who work themselves to death in their 50s. Consider all the other workaholics.

Even if you arent killed or crippled while actually working, you very well might be while going to work, coming from work, looking for work, or trying to forget about work. The vast majority of victims of the automobile are either doing one of these work-obligatory activities or else fall afoul of those who do them. To this augmented body-count must be added the victims of auto-industrial pollution and work-induced alcoholism and drug addiction. Both cancer and heart disease are modern afflictions normally traceable, directly, or indirectly, to work.

Work, then, institutionalizes homicide as a way of life. People think the Cambodians were crazy for exterminating themselves, but are we any different? The Pol Pot regime at least had a vision, however blurred, of an egalitarian society. We kill people in the six-figure range (at least) in order to sell Big Macs and Cadillacs to the survivors. Our forty or fifty thousand annual highway fatalities are victims, not martyrs. They died for nothing or rather, they died for work. But work is nothing to die for.

Bad news for liberals: regulatory tinkering is useless in this life-and-death context. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration was designed to police the core part of the problem, workplace safety. Even before Reagan and the Supreme Court stifled it, OSHA was a farce. At previous and (by current standards) generous Carter-era funding levels, a workplace could expect a random visit from an OSHA inspector once every 46 years.

State control of the economy is no solution. Work is, if anything, more dangerous in the state-socialist countries than it is here. Thousands of Russian workers were killed or injured building the Moscow subway. Stories reverberate about covered-up Soviet nuclear disasters which make Times Beach and Three-Mile Island look like elementary-school air-raid drills. On the other hand, deregulation, currently fashionable, wont help and will probably hurt. From a health and safety standpoint, among others, work was at its worst in the days when the economy most closely approximated laissez-faire.

Historians like Eugene Genovese have argued persuasively that as antebellum slavery apologists insisted factory wage-workers in the Northern American states and in Europe were worse off than Southern plantation slaves. No rearrangement of relations among bureaucrats and businessmen seems to make much difference at the point of production. Serious enforcement of even the rather vague standards enforceable in theory by OSHA would probably bring the economy to a standstill. The enforcers apparently appreciate this, since they dont even try to crack down on most malefactors.

What Ive said so far ought not to be controversial. Many workers are fed up with work. There are high and rising rates of absenteeism, turnover, employee theft and sabotage, wildcat strikes, and overall goldbricking on the job. There may be some movement toward a conscious and not just visceral rejection of work. And yet the prevalent feeling, universal among bosses and their agents and also widespread among workers themselves is that work itself is inevitable and necessary.

I disagree. It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldnt make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.

I dont suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isnt worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkeys and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes.

Forty percent of the workforce are white-collar workers, most of whom have some of the most tedious and idiotic jobs ever concocted. Entire industries, insurance and banking and real estate for instance, consist of nothing but useless paper-shuffling. It is no accident that the tertiary sector, the service sector, is growing while the secondary sector (industry) stagnates and the primary sector (agriculture) nearly disappears. Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. Thats why you cant go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasnt the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?

Next we can take a meat-cleaver to production work itself. No more war production, nuclear power, junk food, feminine hygiene deodorant and above all, no more auto industry to speak of. An occasional Stanley Steamer or Model-T might be all right, but the auto-eroticism on which such pestholes as Detroit and Los Angeles depend on is out of the question. Already, without even trying, weve virtually solved the energy crisis, the environmental crisis and assorted other insoluble social problems.

Finally, we must do away with far and away the largest occupation, the one with the longest hours, the lowest pay and some of the most tedious tasks around. I refer to housewives doing housework and child-rearing. By abolishing wage-labor and achieving full unemployment we undermine the sexual division of labor. The nuclear family as we know it is an inevitable adaptation to the division of labor imposed by modern wage-work. Like it or not, as things have been for the last century or two it is economically rational for the man to bring home the bacon, for the woman to do the shitwork to provide him with a haven in a heartless world, and for the children to be marched off to youth concentration camps called schools, primarily to keep them out of Moms hair but still under control, but incidentally to acquire the habits of obedience and punctuality so necessary for workers. If you would be rid of patriarchy, get rid of the nuclear family whose unpaid shadow work, as Ivan Illich says, makes possible the work-system that makes it necessary. Bound up with this no-nukes strategy is the abolition of childhood and the closing of the schools. There are more full-time students than full-time workers in this country. We need children as teachers, not students. They have a lot to contribute to the ludic revolution because theyre better at playing than grown-ups are. Adults and children are not identical but they will become equal through interdependence. Only play can bridge the generation gap.

I havent as yet even mentioned the possibility of cutting way down on the little work that remains by automating and cybernizing it. All the scientists and engineers and technicians freed from bothering with war research and planned obsolescence would have a good time devising means to eliminate fatigue and tedium and danger from activities like mining. Undoubtedly theyll find other projects to amuse themselves with. Perhaps theyll set up world-wide all-inclusive multi-media communications systems or found space colonies. Perhaps. I myself am no gadget freak. I wouldnt care to live in a pushbutton paradise. I dont want robot slaves to do everything; I want to do things myself. There is, I think, a place for labor-saving technology, but a modest place. The historical and pre-historical record is not encouraging. When productive technology went from hunting-gathering to agriculture and on to industry, work increased while skills and self-determination diminished. The further evolution of industrialism has accentuated what Harry Braverman called the degradation of work. Intelligent observers have always been aware of this. John Stuart Mill wrote that all the labor-saving inventions ever devised havent saved a moments labor. Karl Marx wrote that it would be possible to write a history of the inventions, made since 1830, for the sole purpose of supplying capital with weapons against the revolts of the working class. The enthusiastic technophiles Saint-Simon, Comte, Lenin, B. F. Skinner have always been unabashed authoritarians also; which is to say, technocrats. We should be more than sceptical about the promises of the computer mystics. They work like dogs; chances are, if they have their way, so will the rest of us. But if they have any particularized contributions more readily subordinated to human purposes than the run of high tech, lets give them a hearing.

What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a job and an occupation. Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There wont be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them.

The secret of turning work into play, as Charles Fourier demonstrated, is to arrange useful activities to take advantage of whatever it is that various people at various times in fact enjoy doing. To make it possible for some people to do the things they could enjoy it will be enough just to eradicate the irrationalities and distortions which afflict these activities when they are reduced to work. I, for instance, would enjoy doing some (not too much) teaching, but I dont want coerced students and I dont care to suck up to pathetic pedants for tenure.

Second, there are some things that people like to do from time to time, but not for too long, and certainly not all the time. You might enjoy baby-sitting for a few hours in order to share the company of kids, but not as much as their parents do. The parents meanwhile, profoundly appreciate the time to themselves that you free up for them, although theyd get fretful if parted from their progeny for too long. These differences among individuals are what make a life of free play possible. The same principle applies to many other areas of activity, especially the primal ones. Thus many people enjoy cooking when they can practice it seriously at their leisure, but not when theyre just fueling up human bodies for work.

Third other things being equal some things that are unsatisfying if done by yourself or in unpleasant surroundings or at the orders of an overlord are enjoyable, at least for a while, if these circumstances are changed. This is probably true, to some extent, of all work. People deploy their otherwise wasted ingenuity to make a game of the least inviting drudge-jobs as best they can. Activities that appeal to some people dont always appeal to all others, but everyone at least potentially has a variety of interests and an interest in variety. As the saying goes, anything once. Fourier was the master at speculating how aberrant and perverse penchants could be put to use in post-civilized society, what he called Harmony. He thought the Emperor Nero would have turned out all right if as a child he could have indulged his taste for bloodshed by working in a slaughterhouse. Small children who notoriously relish wallowing in filth could be organized in Little Hordes to clean toilets and empty the garbage, with medals awarded to the outstanding. I am not arguing for these precise examples but for the underlying principle, which I think makes perfect sense as one dimension of an overall revolutionary transformation. Bear in mind that we dont have to take todays work just as we find it and match it up with the proper people, some of whom would have to be perverse indeed. If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation. To some extent we may want to return to handicrafts, which William Morris considered a probable and desirable upshot of communist revolution. Art would be taken back from the snobs and collectors, abolished as a specialized department catering to an elite audience, and its qualities of beauty and creation restored to integral life from which they were stolen by work. Its a sobering thought that the grecian urns we write odes about and showcase in museums were used in their own time to store olive oil. I doubt our everyday artifacts will fare as well in the future, if there is one. The point is that theres no such thing as progress in the world of work; if anything its just the opposite. We shouldnt hesitate to pilfer the past for what it has to offer, the ancients lose nothing yet we are enriched.

The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps. There is, it is true, more suggestive speculation than most people suspect. Besides Fourier and Morris and even a hint, here and there, in Marx there are the writings of Kropotkin, the syndicalists Pataud and Pouget, anarcho-communists old (Berkman) and new (Bookchin). The Goodman brothers Communitas is exemplary for illustrating what forms follow from given functions (purposes), and there is something to be gleaned from the often hazy heralds of alternative/appropriate/intermediate/convivial technology, like Schumacher and especially Illich, once you disconnect their fog machines. The situationists as represented by Vaneigems Revolution of Daily Life and in the Situationist International Anthology are so ruthlessly lucid as to be exhilarating, even if they never did quite square the endorsement of the rule of the workers councils with the abolition of work. Better their incongruity, though than any extant version of leftism, whose devotees look to be the last champions of work, for if there were no work there would be no workers, and without workers, who would the left have to organize?

So the abolitionists would be largely on their own. No one can say what would result from unleashing the creative power stultified by work. Anything can happen. The tiresome debaters problem of freedom vs. necessity, with its theological overtones, resolves itself practically once the production of use-values is coextensive with the consumption of delightful play-activity.

Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not as it is now a zero/sum game. An optimal sexual encounter is the paradigm of productive play, The participants potentiate each others pleasures, nobody keeps score, and everybody wins. The more you give, the more you get. In the ludic life, the best of sex will diffuse into the better part of daily life. Generalized play leads to the libidinization of life. Sex, in turn, can become less urgent and desperate, more playful. If we play our cards right, we can all get more out of life than we put into it; but only if we play for keeps.

No one should ever work. Workers of the world... relax!

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The Abolition of Work | The Anarchist Library