Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

America has spent years fighting communism outside its borders, but now a Marxist threat is growing from within the country, Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez says.

Gonzalez, author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, says the Black Lives Matter organization has encouraged Americans, especially young people, to embrace communist ideology.

In 2020, there were 633 riots according to the U.S. Crisis Monitor run out of Princeton [University], and 95% of those riots in which we know the identity of the perpetrator Black Lives Matter members were included, Gonzalez says.

Through his book, Gonzalez hopes to open peoples eyes to the true nature of Black Lives Matter.

Gonzalez joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the book and why hes standing against the communist influences in our culture today.

Also on todays show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a New Jersey community that is going above and beyond to make sure all returning military personnel receive the welcome and thank you they deserve.

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript.

Virginia Allen: I am so pleased to be joined by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez. Mike is the author of the brand new book BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. Mike, the book is out today, congratulations.

Mike Gonzalez: Thank you, Virginia. Yes, Im very happy.

Allen: You really didnt mince words with the title of this book: BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. Thats pretty straightforward. But I do want to begin with defining some terms. What exactly do you mean by new Marxist revolution?

Gonzalez: When we talk about Marxists, were talking about communists. They have tried to take over America for many decades, for many centuries, really. They have always seen America as a rich country, the world leader, at least since World War I. They want to see us as a top target, but they failed miserably.

In all the years as a Soviet Union, they tried to infiltrate us or tried to influence Americans and they failed. This time through Black Lives Matterand I can get into whyMarxism and Marxist communists have come very close, the closest theyve ever come, to changing our way of life and that is what is happening right now.

Allen: I found it really fascinating that as youre going through the book, youre explaining that very thing, this changing culture and how the Black Lives Matter organization has an agenda. You actually started the book by talking about Frederick Douglass. That fascinated me. Why did you feel the need to give that historical perspective and talk about a figure like Frederick Douglass before diving into this larger conversation about Black Lives Matter?

Gonzalez: Yeah, Chapter 1 starts with Frederick Douglass, the introduction obviously starts with Jan. 6. I explain my understanding of Jan. 6, but I start the book proper on Frederick Douglass because Frederick Douglass really is the best known abolitionist in U.S. history. He was a man of noble character. He was a man of courage. I started with his fight with a sadistic master to whom he had been loaned and how he said he became a man by beating this man who owned them on loan.

I started with him because throughout his life, he was anti-socialist. I describe in the book a meeting in which he spoke and there was a socialist. One of the quirky, weird, odd things about communists and socialists, by the way, [Karl] Marx and [Friedrich] Engels never established a difference between socialism and communism, but they used the terms interchangeably. The socialist speaking with Frederick Douglass really was not putting an emphasis on the abolition of slavery. He was putting an emphasis on the abolition of wage labor.

Communists believed that wage laborin other words, what we all dois a continuation of slavery, which is crazy, just as communism is crazy. Frederick Douglass could not stand that this man was saying these things.

To Frederick Douglass, abolition was about one thing: It was about ending slavery, ending this blight upon our country. To communists, abolition is a completely separate thing. They want to abolish the family, the state, and all the institutions. In 1848, when this meeting takes place, Frederick Douglass understood that what we needed to abolish was slavery.

Allen: Yeah. That historical context is so critical for this broader conversation. I loved in the introduction, you really clearly lay out the mission for the book. You say, This book exists to fill the void in public awareness. You go on to say, If journalists will not report on the real nature of the Black Lives Matter organizations and their leaders and if the federal government cannot gather information on First Amendment-protected activities, this book will attempt to correct the record and analyze all the aspects of what transpired in 2020, as well as the historical forces that led up to those events.

So what then is that real nature of the Black Lives Matter organization and their leaders?

Gonzalez: First of all, I want to make it very clear that I agree with demand on the federal government not being able to collect information on First Amendment-protected activities. Im saddened by the fact that journalists did not vet, in fact, refuse to vet and did not cover the Black Lives Matter movement.

They covered for them. They de-emphasize or deny the Marxism of their foundersPatrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and also Melina Abdullaheven though they themselves are quite open about it and make videos saying, Yeah, Im a Marxist and Ive being trained as a Marxist.

They say this all the time and journalists, when they report on itwhich is very, very seldomthey say, I think I quote a PolitiFact fact check, in which he said, Well, Marxism these days, its really considering life through an economic lens.

No, it isnt. Marxism is what it is, what it says it is. Its communism. It is getting rid of the market economy, getting rid of capitalism, which Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors say they want to do. They want to get rid of free markets. They want to get rid of our ability to own property and sell that property or sell our labor for a wage. They dont even like our system of representative democracy.

Opal Tometi has been very praiseful of the Chavismo in Venezuela. She was photographed with Nicolas Maduro. She believes in this type of direct democracy, which is not a democracy at all. Its just a dictatorship of one party.

So this is what they want to do. They want to abolish the family. In fact, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation had it on their website that they wanted to really make deep changes to the family system.

I wrote about it with my colleague, Andrew Olivastro, in a piece that was read by over a million people. Within a month, they did what all Stalinists do: They airbrushed that out of their website. All of a sudden that was gone, except that it is in other parts of the literature. They cannot hide this. They want to abolish the American way of life. This is what theyre about.

They hide themselves behind a very good slogan: Black lives matter. Who could be against that? If you dont think that black lives matter, I dont even want to talk to you. They hide themselves. If they call themselves Red Ideas Matter, it would be much more representative of who they are, but of course, like all communists, they hide themselves behind these noble sentiments, like black lives matter.

Allen: Thats really helpful context, Mike. I know you talk about the fact that, for so long, and during the Cold War, America was fighting the Soviet Union and we were fighting communism from afar, but now what we see is that were fighting it within our own borders, were fighting it from within.

Talk a little bit about how the organization Black Lives Matter is responsible. Are they responsible? Should we blame them for what we see now in this new interest that we see young people having in socialism and in new fascination with communism? Is Black Lives Matter really to blame for that?

Gonzalez: Yeah, let me put it together. First of all, its a really sad irony that as we celebrate this year, the 30th anniversary of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, that were seeing communist ideas gain such currency in our system.

We spent all these resources, all this time and energy and lives fighting socialism, fighting communism, fighting what [former President Ronald] Reagan called the evil empire, the Soviet Union, which was finally dissolved on Christmas Day 1991. The significance of the day is underlining the noble and moral character of our crusade against communism.

It is because of what happened in 2020, the year of turmoil and the riots. There were 633 riots, by the way, at least according to the U.S. Crisis Monitor run out of Princeton. And 95% of those riots in which we know the identity of the perpetrator, Black Lives Matter members were included.

It is because of this that critical race theory all of a sudden jumps the university walls and enters K-12 in full force. Were seeing as a result of last year, our classrooms completely change and teachers. It was happening before, but it really enters into full force.

We see also critical race theory entering the military, the houses of worship. And corporate America has completely surrendered to this ideology. Sports and every aspect of our lives is because of this. It is because of what happened last year.

The manipulation of the tragedy of George Floyds death, which is a tragedy, the manipulation of this into making people believe the leaders of all our key institutions that we are systemically racist and that our criminal justice system is systemically racistthey threw in the towel and accepted all of this.

And were telling our soldiers to read critical race theory texts, which say that the Constitution is illegitimate. These are people who volunteered to defend the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic, and yet, were telling them to read Kendi and all these other writers, Ibram X. Kendi, who say the Constitution is an illegitimate document.

This is happening because of the year of unrest that we had the riots and demonstrations, the upheaval, that people want to forget. Nobody wants to talk about it, but we cannot forget what we had after May 2020 for many, many, many months. Ive written the book just to shine a light on this and say, We cannot give in.

In fact, youve seen resistance from the American people. Ive crossed the country and speak to groups from coast to coast and I get hundreds of people, Im not that electrifying a speaker, and people turn out because they demand information about critical race theory. They want to know whats going on. They want to have it explained to them.

The resistance is now coming from the grassroots. The American people are standing up and saying, No, I dont want these things taught to my children. I dont want to be trained and go through these reeducation camps at my place of work. This is a form of workplace harassment, so theyre fighting against what Verizon is trying to do, what American Express is trying to do, and even The Salvation Army has these training programs.

Allen: Well, Mike, I really appreciate the research that you have done on critical race theory. You really are the expert at Heritage on that subject. I encourage all of our listeners, if you want to read Mikes pieces on this, you can check him out on The Heritage Foundation website.

Mike, you mentioned the riots last year that obviously took the nation by storm and really changed so much in our country. I was fascinated that in the book, you mentioned how Antifa in some ways became a distraction from Black Lives Matter. I was really, really interested in that point. Talk a little bit about that.

Gonzalez: I say that in a way to castigate politicians. Politicians from both parties are not courageous or as courageous as they should be. They dont want to talk about Black Lives Matter because black lives matter, because of the slogan. They are very shy to talk about these organizations, which are distinct from the concept.

Antifa, which is a much more white phenomenon, these are anarchists. Theyre violent anarchists. As I see it, they dont have a thought-out academic discipline, like Black Lives Matter has critical race theory behind it. Theyre all practitioners of critical race theory. Antifa doesnt have that. Antifa is anarchism and its just pure violence, almost for the sake of violence. I think they have goals like overthrowing the state, but they dont have a well-thought-out program.

Black Lives Matter has bills in Congress. Black Lives Matter has a curriculum that is being taught in many of our childrens schools already. Black Lives Matter has a foreign policy. They came out and supported the communist government of Cuba. As the communist government was rounding up protesters, beating them up, and putting them into prison through kangaroo trials, BLM came out and supported them. BLM came out in support against Israel as Israel was fighting the terrorist group Hamas earlier this year.

So Black Lives Matter has a foreign policy and it has a gazillion dollars. They raised $10 millionwell, no, sorry, they raised $100 million last year. It has all these assets that Antifa does not have.

Allen: You mentioned the money and you have a whole chapter in the book specifically titled Following the Money, what did you discover as you looked at the money coming into and out of the Black Lives Matter organization?

Gonzalez: There are all these corporations that have gone woke. There are many reasons being given why.

Vivek Ramaswamy, a colleague, he does a lot of [anti-critical race theory] work, has another book out in which he talks about how this is really easy for the CEOs to go woke. This is costless to them, but were seeing all these foundations raising money.

A lot of times, as I point out in the chapter devoted to this, these foundations have links, longstanding links, to Marxist groups, such as the Sandinistas. One of these groups is a [pro-Peoples Republic of China], pro-Maoism group in San Francisco, the Chinese Progressive Association, which is the financial sponsor of two of the Black Lives Matter affiliates.

The Chinese Progressive Association in San Francisco was founded to support the Peoples Republic of China against mainland China, against Taiwan. It was founded in the 70s for that reason.

Allen: In your writing of this book, in the research that youve done on the Black Lives Matter organization and critical race theory, ultimately, in your assessment, whats the end goal for Black Lives Matter? What are they aiming for? You say that they have public policy, they have bills in Congress. Whats their end-all, be-all?

Gonzalez: Their goal is what Alicia Garza said in 2019, when she was visiting a group of Maine leftists. She said, What we want to do is dismantle the organizing principle of society. She said that, and thats what they want. They want to dismantle the way were organized. They want to dismantle the American system.

They say that were systemically, structurally, institutionally racist, because they want to pull out all the institutions and want to change all the institutions, all the structures in the very system of America. That is their goal and they hide behind this good slogan that black lives do matter in order to pursue the complete overhaul of the United States.

Look, we have problems, problems that we need to solve, obviously, but were still the fairest, most prosperous country in the world where real human flourishing can take place. Thats the reason why people fall from airplanes out of the sky to come to this country, and theres no line of people leaving to get out.

Theres a very, very long line of people coming to get in because they see, they understand that America is the land of hope for the working man and woman of the world, of any race. These are people coming of all races. If we were a racist country, systemically racist country, we wouldnt have so many people of all races wanting to come in here and succeeding here and thank God for that.

Allen: This might be a naive question, but why? Youre saying that they want to fundamentally change America, they want to unravel the traditional structure of the family, of capitalism. Why?

Gonzalez: Well, on the family itself, it was Marx and Engels who put that in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 that they wanted to abolish the family.

I dont think anyone embraces evil qua evil. I think that they do believe that this is an oppressive system. Critical race theorists, just like critical legal theorists, just like critical theorists in the 1930s and 20s, believe that the West has a superstructure that is oppressive. They admit that capitalism produces the goods, but they say thats whats bad about capitalism, because it produces material well-being and that it perpetuates a very oppressive system.

They are crazy, and Im not a psychologist, but you have to believe that Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Melina Abdullah believe that we live in an oppressive society. Obviously, they havent traveled, or they havent traveled extensively outside of the U.S.

I have lived in at least seven countries, at least a year, as a foreign correspondent. I lived in Kabul for a month. And I can tell you that compared to the rest of the world, not only are we not oppressive, but were pretty, pretty good.

Allen: Where do we go from here then and what is really your hope as readers read the book, what do you want them to take from it?

Gonzalez: I want to open peoples eyes. I want to convince people who are either ambivalent about Black Lives Matter or actually believe that this is a noble endeavor and noble organizations, as a concept, of course its noble, but as organizations, no theyre not. And I want to convince people of that.

I also want to stiffen up the resolve of the American people that, no, we shouldnt allow this here. The American people are exceptionally attached to liberty. We have always been. This is something that has been remarked upon by social scientists and foreign visitors for centuriesG. K. Chesterton and before him, Alexis de Tocqueville and Herbert Marcuse, who hated it.

I want the people who already are suspicious of the BLM organizations to stiffen their spine against this and make sure that this does not take hold. I also want to reach out to people who do believe that these are good organizations, who have been misinformed, who have been manipulated into believing that we live in an oppressive system with systemic racism.

Allen: So critical. Well, the book is BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution. You can get it on Amazon. Mike, final words, anything youd like to add before I let you go?

Gonzalez: Yes. As I said, America, I dont want to pretend that we do not have our faults. No system ever is going to be perfect on earth because its dealing with flawed individuals, right? Man is flawed, but this is a good country. I traveled the country, I go everywhere. Americans are good people. We have a good system. So before we think about completely overhauling and pulling out the foundations, we should really think hard: Is this really what we want to do?

Allen: Critical. BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution, get it on Amazon. Mike, thank you so much for being here.

Gonzalez: Thank you, Virginia.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email[emailprotected]and well consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular We Hear You feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

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Marxist Nature of Black Lives Matter Exposed in New Book - Daily Signal

London, UK: The government has recognised industry calls to deal with the driver shortage with plans to speed HGV driver licence tests.

Up to 50,000 more HGV driving tests will be made available each year by shortening the application process and the tests themselves, the government said.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said in a written statement to the House of Commons, the government would now overhaul regulations to boost capacity so drivers will be able to get a licence to drive a maximum weight articulated truck without first getting licences for lower weight categories.

This is expected to make around 20,000 more HGV driving tests available every year. Shapps said the changes, which still need to be approved by parliament, will generate additional test capacity very rapidly.

These changes will not change the standard of driving required to drive an HGV, with road safety continuing to be of paramount importance.

The industry is sceptical about the plans, hinted at earlier this week, reiterating calls for temporary work visas to woo back around 20,000 EU drivers who have left the industry something the government has rejected.

Richard Burnett of the Road Haulage Association said the industry was losing 600 drivers a week and it would take nearly two years to fill the net shortfall.

Logistics UK welcomed the increase in testingcapacity but said these promises need to be implemented quickly if they are to make significant difference to the currentshortagein time forChristmas.

Elizabeth de Jong, policy director, Logistics UK said the impact of todays measures is unlikely to make a significant difference on the driver shortage if they cannot be implemented in time for the industrys Christmas peak, with DVSA, DVLA and the wider training industry needingtime to apply the changes and adapt theiroperations.

She also warned of safety implications of the change. Logistics UK had strongly voiced our concerns about the proposed abolition of the B+E driver category, as this could pose a risk to road safety.

This is a sensible move but its not enough to fix the problem, Paul Jackson, managing director, Chiltern Distribution, told the BBC on Thursday.

We dont put newly-qualified drivers straight behind the wheel on their own. We buddy them up with experienced drivers for the first eight to 10 weeks and the insurance costs for new drivers are also much higher.

We desperately need to put HGV drivers on the list of skilled workers we can bring in from abroad, Jackson said.

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Government reacts to driver shortage: 50000 more tests promised - Tina Massey

In the summer of 1870, an African American family from New Bedford rented a cottage in Oak Bluffs for the summer. They enjoyed their time here so much that they returned the following year, bought the cottage, and became regular summer residents. The Rev. William Jackson is the subject of a new exhibit in the Cox Gallery of the Marthas Vineyard Museum. His story illuminates some of the early history of the Oak Bluffs summer community, as well as the larger history of the times through his involvement with the Underground Railroad, the abolition movement, and in the Civil War.

Jackson and his wife Jane lived in tumultuous and difficult times. William Jackson was born free to manumitted parents in Norfolk, Va., in 1818. His father and grandfather were river pilots, and at age 9 William went to work on steamboats between Norfolk and Baltimore. There he would have seen heavy traffic of enslaved people along the river, being sent down South. I think that was one of the things that made an impression on him, says his great-great-granddaughter, Valerie Craigwell White, who works to preserve her familys history and to bring the significance of Jacksons life to light.

Around the time of Nat Turners rebellion in 1831, the family moved to Philadelphia because life was becoming increasingly difficult for free Black people in the South. William continued to work and to educate himself, and in 1842 he was ordained a Baptist minister.

Jackson led churches in Philadelphia, New Bedford, and other cities, where he was active as an abolitionist and as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. In 1850, he led a group of his parishioners to free one of the first men who had been captured under the new Fugitive Slave Act, and helped to see that the formerly enslaved man reached safety in Canada. Pastor Jackson was also arrested at the time, and although he was released, Philadelphia had become too unsafe for him, as a well-known opponent of the Fugitive Slave Act. He accepted a one-year appointment to a church in New Bedford, while his wife Jane and their children remained in Philadelphia. He and his wife regularly wrote letters to one another, and many of her letters to him have been preserved, one of which is on display in the exhibit at the M.V. Museum. The letter comes from a difficult time in their lives: Over the course of six months, while they were living apart, three of their five children died. Jackson was unable to travel back to Philadelphia to see his family because he had smallpox, so their only means of communication was through letters.

By the mid-1850s, the entire family had moved to New Bedford, where Jackson remained for most of the rest of his life, and where some of their descendants still live. He was the minister of a Baptist church there, and in 1863 he ministered to the 54th Regiment as camp chaplain and was commissioned chaplain of the 55th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, making him the first Black officer in the Union Army. After the war, back in his pulpit in New Bedford, he took a vacation to the Island. He and his wife kept working while they were on the Island she took in boarders, and he worked part-time as a town crier but it was a relatively quiet time in their remarkable lives. They also entertained friends here, including the renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

Valerie Craigwell White was born in her great-great-grandfathers house in New Bedford, but as a child she lived in many different places because her father was in the military. She developed a keen interest in history, and on visits back to see her aunts and uncles, she listened to their family stories. One such story was from her uncle, who said that Jackson was always sure to be back from the Vineyard by Thanksgiving during his retirement years. They would say, Grandpa didnt have a good season on the Vineyard, so were going to have Taunton turkey for Thanksgiving. (Taunton turkey was herring.) In later years, she learned that her famous ancestor wasnt so well-known outside of her family and the local African American community, so she has worked to preserve those family stories and bring them to the larger public while delving deeper into the historical records and setting them in their larger context. Her academic background is in the field of intercultural communications, and she is an experienced university teacher and speaker. She is currently working on a book about the Rev. William Jacksons life, which will be coming out some time next year.

Jacksons letters and other effects are now preserved at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The Marthas Vineyard Museums exhibit features documents and a hat on loan from the Whaling Museum, as well as Jacksons Bbible, which comes from the familys collections. White will be giving a talk in conjunction with the exhibit, which promises to enrich our understanding of this extraordinary life story. The talk will be held on Friday, Sept. 10, at 4 pm via Zoom. It will be pay what you will, with a suggested donation of $5.

For more information about the exhibit and Whites talk, visit mvmuseum.org/white.

Originally posted here:

From river pilot to reverend - Martha's Vineyard Times

This is a joint op-ed co-authored by the U.S. Ambassadors and Charg dAffaires, a.i. to Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Zimbabwe.

The story of the United States of America is the story of its workers, whose enduring contributions we recognize annually on the first Monday of September. Throughout our history, the American worker has labored not only to erect buildings and cities but also to raise the standards of workers worldwide. Through protests and picket lines, by organizing and raising their voices together, workers have won small and large victories that have pushed the United States closer to ensuring safer and healthier workplaces for all.

The Biden-Harris Administration supports labor rights at home and abroad, including the freedom of association, the right to collective bargaining, the abolition of forced labor and child labor, acceptable conditions at work, and freedom from discrimination. The administrations foreign policy promotes broad-based, equitable growth where all workers can work safely, assemble freely, and earn a fair wage. Labor policy is key to implementing our shared vision of a democratic and prosperous Southern Africa centered on a growing middle class. And workers and trade unions are critical pillars to making this happen.

The Biden-Harris Administration believes that unions across the Southern African region play a significant role in addressing income inequality and creating a more equitable and democratic economy key ingredients to establishing the cornerstones of middle-class security. When unionized workers are compared with their nonunionized counterparts, studies show that union wages are usually significantly higher. Union participation has also been shown to help address the gender pay gap: Hourly wages for women represented by unions are significantly higher than for nonunionized women.

The United States bolsters workers rights across the region through technical assistance. In Lesotho, for example, the U.S. Department of Labors Better Work project partnered with export apparel factories, trade unions, the government and others to boostfactories compliance with labor law. For workers, this meant better compensation and improvements in contracts, occupational safety andhealth and work hours.

Through its worker-centered trade policy, the Biden-Harris Administration seeks to deliver equitable growth and shared prosperity to all workers and communities in Africa. It also supports worker rights through U.S. trade preference programs, such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program. That is, for countries to remain eligible for the benefits of the AGOA and GSP program, they must establish or make continual progress establishing protection of internationally recognized worker rights. Through AGOA engagement, the U.S. government has worked with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to prompt action tackling a variety of labor issues, including the recruitment and use of child soldiers, trafficking in persons, and capacity-building of the labor inspectorate. This contributed towards the DRCs ultimate reinstatement into the AGOA preference program in 2021, and the U.S. Department of Labor will soon be launching a technical assistance project in the DRC to further support progress on international labor standards.

African laborers form the backbone of the Southern African economy and for far too long African women have worked in environments that failed to protect them from harassment and violence. They deserve a better economic present and future that is free of violence and harassment. We stand in solidarity with the many trade unions and worker associations in their call for action on this issue, taking into account the provisions of ILO Convention C. 190.

As the United States works with its African partners to stand up for workers, we are especially committed to protecting the most vulnerable workers, including child laborers. Every year the U.S. Department of Labor issues its Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor report, which highlights key child labor challenges in countries around the world, including our partners in Southern Africa. The report also spotlights efforts these countries are undertaking to eliminate child labor through legal protections, enforcement, policies, and social programs and makes recommendation for further action. Namibia, for one, saw significant advancement in the 2019 report, including its enactment of the Child Care and Protection Act.

We also provide technical assistance to support our African partners in their efforts to combat child labor. In Zambia, for example, the U.S. Department of Labors EMPOWER program provided entrepreneurship and leadership training to more than 1,400 adolescent girls at risk for child labor, many of whom went on to start their own businesses, generating income and avoiding child labor. And in Madagascar, the U.S. Department of Labor is providing funding to reduce child labor in mica-producing communities, including support to increase the capacity of government officials to address child labor in the mica supply chain. Additionally, partnerships between USAID Madagascar and U.S. and local businesses in vanilla, cocoa, and aquaculture that are focused on improving livelihoods and conserving biodiversity, have clauses banning child labor and monitoring systems to ensure the ban is enforced throughout the supply chain.

Our commitment to the worlds children stems from our belief that all children should have the opportunity to grow and learn and that economies are stronger when labor rights and human rights are protected. We recognize the important contributions governments, companies, unions, and civil society have made to eliminating all forms of child labor and look forward to strengthening our partnerships across the region to ensure that child labor is eradicated.

The U.S. similarly protects additional vulnerable worker populations through the U.S. Agency for International Developments (USAIDs) Global Labor Program (GLP). In South Africa, for example, USAID through GLP supports farm workers, domestic workers, and migrant workers to overcome long-standing exclusion from core labor rights and protections, while building the capacity of committed representatives of these populations to become union leaders.

Nowhere is the spirit of partnership between our countries stronger than in our joint efforts to combat COVID-19. Since the pandemics outbreak, the United States has worked hand-in-hand with health professionals across the region to prevent, detect, and respond to COVID-19. Weve contributed approximately $125 million USD in COVID-19 specific funding and have provided almost 11 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the 12 countries where we serve as representatives of the United States , which has helped to ensure vulnerable workers are protected and can do their jobs safely. This is in addition to our $4 billion USD contribution to Gavi in support of COVAX.

Even in the United States we still have work to do. The dreams and goals of our current labor movement remain unfinished and unrealized by many. As much as we hope to impart, we also have even more to learn and gain from our partners. We understand that while workers across the region may share similar challenges, the African continents narrative is multidimensional and diverse. U.S. engagement in the region is based on a shared hope and belief that the prosperity narrative led by African workers is one we can build together by building a partnership of equals. When African workers can work in greater prosperity, harmony, freedom, and dignity, the United States and the world is better off.

By U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe | 6 September, 2021 | Topics: News, Press Releases | Tags: OP-ed

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Labor Day Message to Workers and Trade Unions - US Embassy in Zimbabwe

Under the first three presidents, various ways to make the free market economy more efficient were proposed. During this period, there has been no true political opposition in the Republic of Armenia, Melkonian states, which could deal with the deeper problems of the economy. The opposition parties were similarly supporters of neoliberalism, implying privatization of public property, cutbacks in state provision of healthcare, education, public transportation, and removal of environmental and other regulations. The overall effect, Melkonian said, in Armenia as elsewhere, has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

The reason, he concludes, is that successive administrations have been dominated by cliques that have in common the fact that they own and control a large part of the countrys productive wealth. In other words, he said, a class that comprises a tiny minority of the population has come to wield a near-monopoly on economic and political power. In turn, these plutocrats use public institutions to advance their own interests and power.

Shrill nationalist rhetoric of groups like Sasna Tsrer, he stresses, is not an alternative to neolibleralism but too often camouflage for the same ideas.

Velvet Revolution Merely a Change in Administration

Melkonian does not find the Velvet Revolution to be a true revolution, as it did not bring a new economic class to power. He exclaimed in 2018: What has taken place in Armenia since [Serzh] Sargsyans resignation was neither a revolution nor a counterrevolution; it was just a change of administration, and predicted that primarily stylistic changes would be made.

In his books introduction, written a year or two later, Melkonian quotes Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan in January 2019 assuring businessmen in Zurich that Armenian citizens do not want more redistribution of income. They have seen enough of that. He observed, But Pashinyan has turned reality upside down, since in Armenia, as elsewhere, redistribution has not taken place from the rich to the poor; on the contrary, in the past decades the wealthiest minority has massively expropriated the poor and working-class majority. Armenia has become one of the most unequal countries on earth during its period of independence. Consequently, he sarcastically points out, Armenians have indeed seen enough of such redistribution.

Pashinyan, he concludes, is prescribing the same neoliberal policies of his predecessors, the results of which are plain to see.

How to Improve Economic and Political Conditions

The only broad solution to these woes that Melkonian offers is to organize resistance to free market reforms which hurt the majority of the population. He cites the resistance in the US to the attempts of politicians such as Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin as an encouraging example. Traditional constituencies with independent organizational presence, like labor unions, played an important role in this, he adds, just as in the past popular resistance led to the abolition of child labor, the eight-hour work week, universal suffrage, consumer safety legislation, and many other achievements.

In a chapter written prior to the Velvet Revolution, he said, the best counterforce against the ongoing abuses by Armenias plutocrats is resistance from the bottom from the streets, social media, offices, factories, and public squares. The next step would be to build a common vision and a common organization to fight against plutocracy altogether and to fight for workers power. Melkonian finds that militant unions and a party of labor is necessary to force the ruling class to give up state power. A mass-based democratic opposition that has built a sustainable institutional presence on the ground and that presents a realistic way forward is necessary.

Instead of the market model of democracy that ratifies the existing control of Armenia by wealthy oligarchs, Melkonian proposes deliberative democracy, through which open discussion and debate transform personal preferences, creating new conceptions of the greater good.

He hoped for a generation of working-class Armenians who will break with the delusions of their parents and grandparents as thoroughly as the counterrevolutionary generation twenty-five years ago blotted the lives and hopes of their Soviet Armenian predecessors. His ultimate goal is the replacement of capitalist rule by socialism, or workers power.

Socialism

Melkonian sketches out how he sees a possible non-capitalist state with workers in power as a class controlling the state. Economic planning exists in any state today, but if workers are in control it will benefit the poor, and those in the middle instead of just a small minority of the rich. The means of production do not have to be owned by the state, he explains, to have a socialist system. Private ownership by self-employed workers is possible, but some large sectors like energy, transportation, mining, banking, finance and insurance should be socialized. Eventually production for the market will decrease and be replaced by production for use value. Land also should be removed gradually from private ownership. He wants a multiparty representative democracy within the workers state. Cuba is one of the states which Melkonian holds up to Armenians as a socialist example despite decades of US obstruction and embargo.

Rare for an American-born Armenian, Melkonian remains a staunch defender of the early period of Soviet communism, though a critic of its many flaws in its later decades. On the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917, Melkonian penned an article of praise on its spurring of workers rebellions, ending Russian participation in World War I. Its heirs, he observes, hastened the end of colonial regimes, liberated women, defeated fascism, fed the hungry, extended lifespans, pioneered scientific and technological research, and so forth. He defends Lenin against blame for Stalins brutalities. Melkonian looks to the revolution as a source of inspiration for the future, stating: Perhaps the best and brightest of a rising generation will reclaim the vibrant spirit of the October Revolution.

Foreign Policy Issues

While primarily focusing on domestic Armenian politics and economics, Melkonian occasionally touches on foreign policy issues. He notes that Foreign aid is an instrument of foreign policy, and gives the examples of the large roles played by USAID and Western-funded NGOs in Armenia. Furthermore, he finds the promotion of civil societya distraction from the struggle for freedom.

He warns of US intervention with financial aid to strengthen trust in the Armenian electoral process through new technical processes, pointing out that many American voters themselves do not trust the American electoral system. He wrote about the US embassys announcement about its program, stating that it is not really about improving Armenias electoral system. We know that it is just another propaganda stunt, a tit-for-tat against Moscow, another lesson in obedience for the instruction of the natives. Melkonian also in a separate chapter wrote about US intervention in the elections of other countries, including in the run-up to the 1996 presidential election in Russia in support of Boris Yeltsin.

Melkonian presents the destruction wreaked in Iraq and Syria since 1990 by the US, which also largely destroyed the local Armenian communities, turning most Armenians there into refugees. In fact, he notes that among the 30,000 Iraqi Armenians uprooted, some had fled to Syria, where they were made refugees a second time. He then criticizes Armenia for sending its own soldiers as part of the Coalition of the Willing, thus giving some additional legitimacy to the plans of American neoconservatives to destroy the armies of Syria and Iraq, despite their harmful results for Armenians. Ominously for Armenia, Melkonian wrote, Iran was the next country in the sights of the US neocons.

For the Republic of Armenia too, Melkonian finds that the growing Russophobia in the Armenian opposition prior to the Velvet Revolution, was contrary to Armenias vital security interests, while the US agrees in general with Turkey that Armenia and the rest of the South Caucasus should be integrated into the dominant imperialist system as Melkonian calls it, within Ankaras sphere of interest. He warns readers of the old dangerous fantasy of Uncle Sam as Armenias savior.

While many readers may not agree with Melkonians admiration of the early Soviet Union and Cuba, or his ultimate goal of socialism, they still can benefit from his revealing analysis of the effects of the practice of neoliberalism in Armenia. Understandably, there is a bit of repetition in the books chapters, which after all were initially written as independent articles, and the language could use additional minor editing.

The English edition is available from Abril Bookstore in Glendale and various online vendors, while an Armenian-language edition, . (2021) is available from Zangak Publishing House (www.zangak.am) in Yerevan.

Read more from the original source:

Woes of Capitalism in Armenia Exposed in Markar Melkonian's Book The Wrong Train - The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

Its been 31 years since the release of Gender Trouble. What were you aiming to achieve with the book?

It was meant to be a critique of heterosexual assumptions within feminism, but it turned out to be more about gender categories. For instance, what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way. Politically, securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of women to include those new possibilities. The historical meaning of gender can change as its norms are re-enacted, refused or recreated.

So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women. And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of men.

Lets talk about Gender Troubles central idea of performativity. This remains a controversial view of how gender works, so what did you have in mind?

At the time I was interested in a set of debates in the academy about speech acts. Performative speech acts are the kind that make something happen or seek to create a new reality. When a judge declares a sentence, for instance, they produce a new reality, and they usually have the authority to make that happen. But do we say that the judge is all-powerful? Or is the judge citing a set of conventions, following a set of procedures? If it is the latter, then the judge is invoking a power that does not belong to them as a person, but as a designated authority. Their act becomes a citation they repeat an established protocol.

How does that relate to gender?

I suggested more than 30 years ago that people are, consciously or not, citing conventions of gender when they claim to be expressing their own interior reality or even when they say they are creating themselves anew. It seemed to me that none of us totally escape cultural norms.

At the same time, none of us are totally determined by cultural norms. Gender then becomes a negotiation, a struggle, a way of dealing with historical constraints and making new realities. When we are girled, we are entered into a realm of girldom that has been built up over a long time a series of conventions, sometimes conflicting, that establish girlness within society. We dont just choose it. And it is not just imposed on us. But that social reality can, and does, change.

Todays queers often talk about gender being assigned at birth. But your meaning here seems pretty different?

Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to assign gender to us. The powers that do that are part of an apparatus of gender that assigns and reassigns norms to bodies, organises them socially, but also animates them in directions contrary to those norms.

Perhaps we should think of gender as something that is imposed at birth, through sex assignment and all the cultural assumptions that usually go along with that. Yet gender is also what is made along the way we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.

Arguments around identity have become central to much of our politics these days. As someone who is sceptical of stable identity categories, what do you make of that?

I think it matters a great deal how we understand that centrality. My own political view is that identity ought not to be the foundation for politics. Alliance, coalition and solidarity are the key terms for an expanding left. And we need to know what we are fighting against and for, and keep that focus.

It is imperative that we work across differences and that we build complex accounts of social power. Accounts that help us to build links among the poor, the precarious, the dispossessed, LGBTQI+ peoples, workers and all those subject to racism and colonial subjugation. These are not always separate groups or identities, but overlapping and interconnected forms of subjugation that oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia but also capitalism and its destructions, including the destruction of the Earth and indigenous ways of life.

Theorists such as Asad Haider have adopted your theory to address racial divides in the United States. Haider emphasises your view of identity formation as restless and always uprooted. But dont the right wing usually score victories by pushing a much more fixed vision of identity?

The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as identity politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom or against sexual violence as concerned only with identity. In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should mean. In this way, they are essential to any radical democratic movement, so we should reject those caricatures.

So what does that mean for the left? If we base our viewpoints only on particular identities, I am not sure we can grasp the complexity of our social and economic worlds or build the kind of analysis or alliance needed to realise ideals of radical justice, equality and freedom. At the same time, marking identity is a way of making clear how coalitions must change to be more responsive to interlinked oppressions.

Today we often hear about the importance of listening to those with a lived experience of oppression. Political philosopher Olfmi O Tw has warned that noble intentions to decentre privileged perspectives can easily backfire.

Yes, it is important to acknowledge that, while a white person cannot claim to represent Black experience, that is no reason for white people to be paralyzed on matters on race, refusing to intervene at all. No one needs to represent all Black experience in order to track, expose and oppose systemic racism and to call upon others to do the same.

If white people become exclusively preoccupied with our own privilege, we risk becoming self-absorbed. We definitely dont need more white people making everything about themselves: that just re-centralizes whiteness and refuses to do the work of anti-racism.

How has your own gender identity informed your political theory?

My sense is that my gender identity whatever that is was delivered to me first by my family as well as a variety of school and medical authorities. It was with some difficulty that I found a way of occupying the language used to define and defeat me.

I still rather think that pronouns come to me from others, which I find interesting, since I receive an array of them so I am always somewhat surprised and impressed when people decide their own pronouns or even when they ask me what pronouns I prefer. I dont have an easy answer, though I am enjoying the world of they. When I wrote Gender Trouble, there was no category for nonbinary but now I dont see how I cannot be in that category.

You have often been the target of protesters across the world. In 2014, anti-gay marriage protesters in France marched on the streets denouncing thorie du genre gender theory. In 2017, you were burnt in effigy by evangelical Christian protesters in Brazil chanting take your ideology to hell. What do you make of that?

The anti-gender ideology movement, a global movement, insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained, and that gender is a destructive fiction, taking down both man and civilization and God. Anti-gender politics have been bolstered by the Vatican and the more conservative evangelical and apostolic churches on several continents, but also by neoliberals in France and elsewhere who need the normative family to absorb the decimation of social welfare.

This movement is at once anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic, opposing both reproductive freedom and trans rights. It seeks to censor gender studies programs, to take gender out of public education a topic so important for young people to discuss. And to reverse major legal and legislative successes for sexual freedom, gender equality and laws against gender discrimination and sexual violence.

Youve always stressed that your gender theory is not only informed by scholarly debate but also your own years participating in lesbian and gay communities. Since the early 1990s youve become a uniquely influential thinker within these circles. How much has changed since you came out?

Oh, I never came out. I was outed by my parents at the age of 14. So, Ive been identified variously as butch, queer, trans* for over 50 years.

I was certainly affected by the gay and lesbian bars I frequented too often in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I was concerned then as well with the challenges faced by bisexuals to gain acceptance. I met with intersex groups to understand their struggle with the medical establishment and eventually came to think more carefully about the difference between drag, transgender and gender in general. Ive always been involved in non-academic activist groups, and that is an ongoing part of my life.

What kind of issues were being addressed by radical gay and lesbian politics before the word queer emerged?

The demonstrations in my youth were certainly about the right to come out, the struggle against discrimination and pathologization and violence, both domestic and public. We fought against psychiatric pathologization and its carceral consequences. But also we fought for a collective right to live ones body in public without fear of violence, the right to grieve openly over lives and loves that were lost. And this struggle took a very dramatic shape once HIV arrived and Act Up emerged.

Queer was, for me, never an identity, but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia. It began as a movement opposed to the policing of identity opposing the police, in fact.

These protests focused on rights to healthcare, education, public freedoms and opposing discrimination and violence we wanted to live in a world where one could breathe and move and love more easily. But we also imagined and created new forms of kinship, community and solidarity, however fractious they tended to be.

I went to dyke demonstrations but also worked on international human rights, understanding what those limits were. And I came to understand that broader coalitions equally opposed to racism, economic injustice and colonialism were essential for any queer politics. We see how this works now in queer Marxism groups, Queers for Economic and Racial Justice, queers against apartheid, alQaws, the Palestinian group against both occupation and homophobia.

How does political life today compare?

Today I appreciate especially queer and feminist movements that are dedicated to healthcare and education as public goods, that are anti-capitalist, committed to the struggle for racial justice, disability rights, Palestinian political freedoms, and which oppose the destruction of the Earth and indigenous lifeworlds as evident in the work of Jasbir Puar, Sara Ahmed, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis the work of Ni Una Menos and abolition feminism. There is now a broader vision, even though this is a time of great despair as we see global economic inequalities intensify under the pandemic.

Many gender theorists have written on your works direct impact on them, from Julia Seranos sheepish recounting of your attending a poetry reading that included the line Fuck Judith Butler!, to Jordy Rosenbergs immersive reflection Gender Trouble on Mothers Day. What has becoming an intellectual celebrity felt like for you personally?

I have found a way to live to the side of my name. That has proven to be very helpful. I know that many queer and trans folks feel strongly about their names and I respect that. But my survival probably depends on my ability to live at a distance from my name.

Jules Joanne Gleeson is a queer historian. She is also the co-editor of Transgender Marxism

This article was amended on 7 September 2021. One section of the Q&A was removed by editors because the interview and preparation of the article for publication occurred before new facts emerged regarding an incident at Wi Spa in Los Angeles. The consequent lack of reference in the relevant question to this development, in which an arrest was made for alleged indecent exposure at the spa, risked misleading readers and for that reason the section was removed. This footnote was expanded on 9 September 2021 to provide a fuller explanation.

The rest is here:

Judith Butler: We need to rethink the category of woman - The Guardian

Chuck Culhane is traveling to Attica Prison Thursday to participate in a vigil honoring those who lost their lives 50 years ago within the prisons walls.

He does not believe the vigil will garner any headlines.

That's emblematic of the attitude towards prisoners, he said. Towards people inside, that they don't exist. They weren't killed. And so a few of us are going to go out there and just read the names of individuals at the prison. The names of all the people, including the guards.

What is the lasting legacy of Attica a landmark event that encapsulates a generation of social progression, yet an event that also left at least 43 incarcerated persons and prison guards dead? On the 50th anniversary of the uprising, the conversation around its legacy is varied.

Culhane serves as a Prison Task Force Coordinator at the Western New York Peace Center:

I was back in prison, he says. I was sent to a maximum security place and it was, I recall, low grade terror. I did quite a few years inside. I never experienced anything like that. I mean, people were just terrorizing and really ways every day, and it was very dispiriting to see that kind of behavior with the guards.

Culhane said lessons regarding the rights of incarcerated people have yet to be learned.

And unfortunately, the vast majority of the changes have been for the worse, not for the better, he said.

The prison population has shrunk to just under 32,000 in New York State in the last 50 years, but the conditions the men living within the walls of Attica advocated for improvements to food and medical care, religious freedom and wages were abandoned in Atticas aftermath, said Soffiyah Elijah, executive director of Alliance of Families for Justice.

Sadly though, most, if not all of those improvements have now disappeared, she said. So the concerns and the demands that the men raised 50 years ago are still major concerns today.

Elijah was formerly the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York. Her insight on the plight of incarcerated people leaves her believing more can be done to rehabilitate and reintegrate them into society.

I would say when it comes to incarcerated people, we can clearly see that we're not living in a more enlightened society, she said.

Elijah points to how hard it has been to get incarcerated people supplies to fight against contracting COVID-19 as an example of how little attention is paid to their welfare.

From not giving them PPE, from not giving them tests, not providing for vaccines," she said, "advocates had to work day and night to push for those things, advocates and family members of incarcerated people.

And racism within a prison system where a majority of the incarcerated are non-white is a problem.

The racism amongst staff, the virtual lack of any Black and brown staff members and most of the Upstate prisons, Elijah said. That was a problem back in 1971 and remains a problem to this day.

One lasting legacy of Attica that both Culhane and Elijah agree on is growing prison reform and prison abolition movements in the state.

The advocacy groups on the outside have been somewhat successful, Elijah said, and reaching out to elected officials to bring these concerns to their attention so that more members of the New York State Legislature are aware and have been using their role as legislators to visit the prisons, to inquire, to question and to challenge what's happening inside the prisons.

A recent example of the success of these movements is the signing of the HALT bill by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in April. The bill bans long-term solitary confinement in prisons and jails across the state.

Culhane said the push towards rehabilitation programs and restorative justice practices within the prison system are ways to keep people out of prison for good.

Well in New York, he said. I would say, yeah, just in numbers, getting people out, you know, not sending them to prison for offenses that are not, you know, particularly nonviolent and where there's alternatives like restorative justice programs that do something for victims of crime and do something for society instead of this punishment ethic thats insane.

Elijah still believes the prison system as a whole is rotten and must be abolished.

I don't believe at this point you can do this form any more than slavery could be formed, she said. I think it has to be completely destroyed. I think it is incumbent upon all of us in society to figure out a much more people-centered approach to addressing aberrant behavior by human beings.

In a society still separated by the haves and have-nots, Elijah said these issues can be solved if we all worked together.

If we can put human beings on the moon and other planets, she said. Then we can figure out how to level the playing field so that everybody's dreams and aspirations has a fair chance of being realized.

The legacy of the Attica uprising has given us many teachable moments to reflect and improve on.

Go here to see the original:

50 years later: The legacy of the Attica uprising - WXXI News

Contemporary art has always been at the forefront of artistic practices that venture to replace aesthetic narratives with social activism. In this text, however, we will examine the theaters rejection of its own aesthetic methods and expressive idioms in the name of direct democracy, as well as the sociopolitical and artistic effects of these experiments. Has the notorious sacrifice of dramatization (i.e., the theatrical episteme per se) in postdramatic theatrical practices proven politically effective and aesthetically radical?

Researchers have argued that there were two motivations for the postdramatic turn in the theater. One was post-disciplinaritys dissolution in direct-democracy practices. The other was the attempt to borrow the performative poetics of contemporary art, which, as theater researchers falsely imagined, was based on the artists direct, living, nonsymbolic presence in the performative process. This is what differentiated the artist from the actor, who was immersed in the temporality of role-playing and staged repetition. Theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte defined this presence as autopoetic, as opposed to mimetic. This nondramatic, non-staged presence on stage has come to be called postdramatic in almost all critical theater studies.

It is important to deal with two erroneous assumptions made by the postdramatic theater. First, what the theatrical gaze sees as the living presence in art performance is not alive. Second, spontaneous behavior, liberated from the discipline of acting and theatrical staging, is not identical to emancipating citizen and society.

In her book The Transformative Power of Performance, Fischer-Lichte encourages theater workers to borrow the anthropology of real presence from contemporary performance art. The same appeal runs through Hans-Thies Lehmanns Postdramatic Theater. In a similar vein, the choreography theorist Andr Lepecki calls for immersion in the authentic present instead of the fictitious narrative depiction that occurs in ballet choreography and classical music. Only in this way, he argues in Exhausting Dance, can we rid ourselves of the authoritarianism of discipline in the performing arts. All three works argue that the score (the original text) and the rehearsal aspect of theater and choreography are rudiments of Western European modernity. Lepecki believes that the compressed time of the performing arts is an allegory of Western Europes colonial geopolitics, which has been reflected in the performing arts in the form of drilling (military science) and commands (promulgation of laws).

Lepecki shows that the composed and choreographed temporality of dance (and therefore of music and the theater) is based on the transient eventfulness of the present moment; that is, the performing arts were shaped to pursue this lost moment of the beautiful present and mourn it. Although Lepecki does not mention it, we would do well to recall the Orphic genealogy of the performing arts and the theater in particular. After all, Orpheuss loss of Eurydice is the lost present moment to which we shall have to return endlessly, repeating it because it is impossible to compensate for. This original grief has molded music, the theater, and later, choreography. Lepecki argues that, given this constellation, the present moment inevitably turns out to be a lost past, a past we never cease pursuing. That is why the classical performing arts are kinetic and involve perfecting the configuration of this kinetics. After all, what matters in this case is clutching at the beautiful as it escapes, hence the kineticism: the work is constructed as a series of such beautiful but passing moments.

Modernitys aesthetic context is thus based on the pursuit of a lost object. That is why the kinetic body must be artificial, disciplinary, sculptured, and architectonicin music, in the theater, and in choreography. Western European modernitys performative paradigm is orchestrated in such a way that the body must acquire impossible abilities and exist in impossible conditions, because every moment that we lose irretrievably in a time-dependent work must be perfectly beautiful. Performance should consist of these fleeting moments, whose disappearance is compensated for by the fact that every moment is a perfect monument to its own disappearance, with the viewer observing the ideals retroactive progress. The work of art, whether theatrical or musical, is composed of extreme moments that drop out of the chronicle of time: the work is thus opposed to the chronic present.

It is just this exaggerated shaping of time in the theater, music, and choreography that Lepecki sees as evidence of violence against time, the body, and societya violence that attempts to generate perfect essences and forms that are not equivalent to life. Therefore, instead of this exaggerated form of time, Lepecki advocates an expanded, democratized, and anti-kinetic durationa present without past and future that does not trigger memory and bid mournful farewells to the transient present. This implies a return to contemplative and solipsistic nonaction, to natural behavior and the bodys presence in the here and nowthat is, to the same living presence that Fischer-Lichte also advocates, mistakenly expecting that it can be found in contemporary performance art. In this disposition, instead of representing events and deeds, radically dramatizing them, and conveying the metanoia in the individuals life, both the body and time should unlearn these modes. Accordingly, they should liberate themselves from the practice of repeated rehearsals in order to find a realm where they can simply be with all the naturalness and intimacy of dissolving into duration, rather than performing something. If this liberation succeeds, there will be no need for the fulfillment of performanceno need to perform and materialize components that materialize even as they disappear.

As Lepeckis analysis shows, it is not only a matter of rejecting dramatization, but also of rejecting the special temporalizing of the work, thus added to the chronic time of existence. Most practitioners and theorists of the theater and modern dance argue that the rejection of all forms of fine-tuned, rehearsed, fictitious performativeness democratizes both the performing process itself and, consequently, the types of presence in public space. Moreover, it enables two milieuxtheatrical action and social discussion, the stage and the agora (agonistic pluralism, to borrow Chantal Mouffes term)to interpenetrate. Not only does democratized postdramatic action seemingly come down to earth and infiltrate the public space, but civic discussion, by rejecting dramatization, also takes to the stage to allow simple forms of conviviality and the controversial compatibility of bodies to find a voice and be presented publicly.

Theater curator Florian Malzacher argues that one can politicize the theater by removing the disciplinary figures of the actor, the dramatic role, the director, and the event from the action, since these components only reproduce a particular social problem, rather than revealing ways to solve it. Instead of fictionally sublimating the event, merely residing in a real social or existential situation is a much more effective way of understanding its essence. The same stance made Lehmann insist much earlier, in 1998, that the theater should rely more on its phenomenological structure, in which the transmission of signals and their reception occur in the same common space and time. (I do not agree with this stance and will explain why below.)

According to Malzacher, if dramatic fictitiousness were abandoned, the theater could focus not merely on certain political issues, but could be the very site of politics, becoming a kind of public parliament within the theatrical institution. The representative model of the theater, based on actors performance of roles, is also socially outmoded. In a truly civil democratic society, a member of the middle class would not portray a poor person, a resident of the rich European north would have no right to speak for an oppressed southerner or a refugee, and a white person would not play a person of color. That is why one should simply be who one is in a particular context, rather than playing the role of someone else, and those who are not involved in the institutional theater should be authorized to appear on the stage both as agents of the performance and as debaters, thus turning the theater into the site of Mouffes agonistic pluralism.

***

In the discussions I have named, contemporary art, in which the individuals or the bodys intervention in public space is one of the most important tropes, has become a model of direct political participation for the theater. However, there is more than meets the eye in the naive interpretation of contemporary arts living (as opposed to rehearsed) presence, as promoted by the adherents of the postdramatic turn.

Interestingly, when Fischer-Lichte, Lepecki, and Malzacher call for the radicalization of theater and choreography, they often cite textbook examples of contemporary performance art: for example, the performances of Marina Abramovi (cited by Fischer-Lichte) and Bruce Nauman (cited by Lepecki), and the political ready-mades of Jonas Staal (cited by Malzacher). They identify these performances with post-choreographic or postdramatic practices in the theater and choreography, such as the post-choreographic performances of Xavier le Roy, the productions of Boris Charmatz, and the performances of Maria La Ribot. But try as the abovementioned theorists might, and despite the frequent use of these postdramatic practices in museums and exhibitions, they have nothing to do with contemporary art. For Fischer-Lichte, Abramovi embodies the rejection of the fictitious image of pain in the theater and the autopoetic rejection of theatrical mimesis. For Lepecki, Nauman illustrates the destruction of composed temporality, the end of the choreographic score, and the discovery of a new form of solipsistic intimacy. For Malzacher, Jonas Staals 2012 project New World Summit (2012) is a specimen of agonistic pluralism. The project was presented in theaters as a real ready-made of a congress of unrecognized states, confirming that direct democracy is possible within the walls of the theater, and this is exactly what the repertory theater lacks.

Now let us return to the two abovementioned assumptions made by the postdramatic theater and recall what their fallacies were.

1. What the theatrical gaze sees as a living presence in contemporary performance art is, in fact, not.

2. Democratic liberation from the discipline of acting and the framework of theatrical production does not lead to the emancipation of citizen and society, but only reproduces the mantra of emancipation formally.

Why is the comparison of contemporary performance art to the postdramatic theater a gross aesthetic and epistemological mistake? Because performance art is not and has never been a living presence that is perceived and described phenomenologically. Performance art, even as collective action, is neither a civic act nor direct democratic action. In the performances of Abramovi, Francis Als, Valie Export, and many others, it is vital that the artists body or their actions are transformed into a materialized conceptualized exhibitin a sense, into the embodiment of an abstract concept. They therefore have little connection with the autopoetic freedom of expression about which Fischer-Lichte writes. What the postdramatic theater theorists imagine as the phenomenologically registrable, immediate, and nondramatic presence in performance art is situated outside the dramatic and postdramatic. Why? Because, while the theater, by way of renewing itself, still employs early twentieth-century methods, thus merely demonstrating or deconstructing the medium, art has completely abolished itself as art in order to finally rid itself of all dependence on the audience and establish itself as an institution that references its own emptiness, its own nonexistence. Again, even when the theater explores its own thresholds and tries to introduce self-reflection into the performance, it remains at the level of merely critiquing itself as a medium. The theater has never committed total self-abolition. That is why it prioritizes reception and observation and the need for an audience, despite sometimes engaging in radical experiments that can be difficult to digest. This happens because only the medium-related components of the theater are conceptualized or abolished, while the phenomenological structure itself, which involves observing and registering the action, is not sublated. In other words, the contemporary theater employs various experiments: it dabbles with the absence of action, attempts to be immersive, or tries to rid itself of the actor and other disciplinary theatrical epistemes.

The same thing has been happening in dance, which has been trying to rid itself of choreography and the dancer. Generally, both contemporary theater and contemporary dance have been trying to remove mimetic constructions, showing the viewer the very process of their own disintegration. Nevertheless, both still need an audience on hand to observe their deconstruction. Contemporary art and performance art have no such need because of modern arts absolute self-abolition. Malevichs Black Square (1915) and, later, Duchamps Fountain (1917) devastated the institution of art to such an extent that it became an ideal concept that no longer had any need whatsoever for observation or spectators. That is, the institution of art had to abolish itself totally in order to establish the new institution of contemporary art.

That is why each disciplinetheater, dance, cinemahas its own theory. But the difference between the theory of art and the theories of theater, literature, cinema, and choreography is that contemporary art itself is already theory, as it were: it does not need a theory describing it. That is, as a result of arts self-abolition, that institution has no aesthetics. It has no autonomous phenomenology, only theory. Despite its modernization, the theater has not undergone the complete eradication of its substance, the abolition of the perceptual context of the discipline itself. Consequently, the substance of the theater has not completely left it, although many people would like this substance to be similar to artto become more defamiliarized, more socially engaged, and therefore more appealing to todays progressive viewer.

During a discussion after the premiere of a dance performance of hers, choreographer Alexandra Konnikova, explaining the ethics and poetics of contemporary dance, actually voiced all the postulates outlined above in connection with Lepeckis critique of ballet choreography. In contemporary dance, the body is anti-acrobatic: it strives to naturalize space and time and the modes of existing within them. Our being in this milieu should not be excessive: rather, it should involve self-therapy and self-observation of the bodys internal biorhythms (thus recalling Lepeckis protracted present tense and his defense of self-observation and solipsism). We see such bodies in productions by choreographers such as Charmatz, La Ribot, Le Roy, Constanza Macras, and Jrme Bel, among others. But lets compare these postulates about the bodys naturalization with Grotowskis and Artauds fundamental and opposite demand for supreme excess, for pushing the actors body and mind to the brink. Artauds principal metaphor is athleticism, acrobaticism. For Grotowski as well, the body must be raised to a superhuman sensitivity to become spirit. The bodys acrobatic and athletic excess produces, as it were, an acrobatic amplitude of consciousness, soul, and spirit that endows one with the physical and spiritual abilities to take action. In other words, acting is not so much a profession as a specific psychophysical training that prepares one to perform deeds. This body is neither individual nor solipsistic: it is ideal and therefore universal. Even the Brechtian acting method, which postdramatic theorists often consider the forerunner of post-disciplinary theater practices, does not so much upset the discipline as toughens it, supplementing the actors training with critical civic meta-reflection. In this case, the avant-gardes criticism of repertory theater contradicts critiques of academic theater found in so-called contemporary postdramatic theater. Avant-garde theater criticized mainstream repertory because it weakened the excessive components of theatrical performancethat is, because it lacked purely performative, radical, truly dramatic components. On the contrary, current adherents of the postdramatic aesthetic (Fischer-Lichte, Lepecki, Malzacher) criticize mainstream repertory theater (in which there is nothing left of the rigor of the dramatic genre) for its excessively rigid discipline.

Now let us ask ourselves a question. Can a body that limits itself to a mere natural existence in a particular enduring present, a body for which its own natural solipsistic precarity suffices, really be political? Is not freedom and social activism replaced in this case by the mere demonstration of ones lifestyle, of ones trauma? Consequently, isnt what we observe only the promiscuous admission of all arbitrary forms of behavior into the social and artistic space, rather than a rebellion on the part of these forms? The allusion to contemporary performance art is irrelevant here, because in performance art, the body and its presenceonly simple and unrehearsed at first glanceare in fact rigidly conceptualized and theorized, and turned into an art exhibit, as argued above. In the contemporary postdramatic theater and contemporary dance, however, we observe an endless stream of individualistic and solipsistic self-expression instead of conceptualized ready-mades. As a result, instead of the dimension of the general or universal in postdramatic practices, we observe a sociality that appears, rather, in the image of a panopticon of hybridized individuals, whose unification is possible in the sense that each of them is provided with a mini-arena for demonstrating their everyday identity. Democratization is reduced to this demonstration. Intense forms of emancipation emerge, however, when the individual seeks the dimension of the general in their identity, and not when they are limited to the individual right to everyday life and the narcissistic demonstration of this right.

Post-disciplinary democratic performativity consists in everyones being allowed not to make an extraordinary effort, as if any extraordinary effort can only be the Big Others authoritarian imperative, rather than an ethical, civic, or creative achievement.

In The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler accurately describes the type of socialization intrinsic to the post-disciplinary society, in which gender freedom is not the social horizon of universal emancipation, but that minimal area of bare life that might escape the regulatory apparatus. In this context, gender identityas a type of social emancipationis empowered only within the realm of the clinic. In other words, gender freedom and other representations of identity freedom are realized in the capsule of the clinic, in the mode of freedom from society, rather than freedom for society (that is, for the universal). Liberal democracy in the broad sense is a democracy of individuals free from society, united in a quasi-community similarly free from society. This motif runs like a dotted line through Foucaults analytical critique of post-disciplinary neoliberal society.

Paradoxically, the openness of the public sphere does not involve the dimension of the universal, but a democratic consensus about each individuals freedom from the commons, from society, because the universal is associated with coercion and excessive methods of creative work. In addition, under capitalism, work itself is so excessive and exhausting that creativity must suspend all species of coercion and regulation. On the contrary, all manners of anarchic and perverse everyday life are permitted in the solipsistic quasi-clinical capsule.

Underpinned by this rationale, the theater director or playwright thinks that if they equate the artwork with the everyday flow of time, they will manifest their equality with ordinary citizens who do not have the opportunity to do art and thus incarnate democratic emancipation. In fact, such an approach demonstrates only the middle classs snobbery towards societys unprivileged strata. For the director or playwright should take into account the fact that simple life is not reducible to the mundane flow of time. The everyday working life of ordinary people and their hopes can be much more excessive, ecstatic, musical, and poetic than imagined by progressive intellectuals convinced that liberation from artistic intensities and canons would be liberating and democratic for ordinary people. Artists such as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier never stop showing and proving the opposite. They depict how, in ordinary life, an excessive or a heroic act happens to be theatrical, so that an ordinary person becomes a performer of the most excessive gestures undermining daily life. In Hanekes film Cach (2005), for example, it is the destitute Arab who proves capable of a radical, deadly performative act in the name of truth and justice.

Based on the arguments above, we can provisionally divide existing practices of theater and performativity into five paradigms:

1. Contemporary performance art. This includes only those practices that have gone down in the history of modern art as conceptualized exhibits, regardless of their processual and temporal structure.

2. Dramatic repertory theater. Most theatrical practices in the world adhere to this paradigm. Claiming to be connected with tradition, such theater has actually forfeited this connection, retaining only formal corporate characteristics and turning into a form of urban leisure. Most performances in such theaters around the worldin Moscow, Petersburg, Berlin, and London resemble staged TV series featuring unpretentious narratives, watered down with current social problems.

3. Postdramatic theater practices. This includes both performative ready-mades that compete with performance art and, generally, all experiments involving so-called direct, non-fictitious presence. The Rimini Protokoll troupe, the director Hannah Hurtzig, the Zentrum fr Politische Schnheit (Center for Political Beauty), the early Milo Rau, and Lotte van der Berg have worked in this vein. The contemporary dance performers that should be mentioned in this context include Xavier Le Roy, Maria La Ribot, and Jrme Bel, among others.

4. Art practices that borrow performing practicesdance, the theater, musicwhile remaining contemporary art, by way of incorporating dramatic, fictitious narratives into the works. This group of practitioners includes the Israeli artist Roee Rosen, with his opera parodies, the German artist Anne Imhof, who uses all the performing arts in her performative canvases (e.g., Faust, 2017), the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who employs pop and light orchestral music in his performances, and the Petersburg art group Chto Delat.

5. Finally, the fifth paradigm is the theater of theater. This is theater that, on the one hand, has intellectualized itself, disengaged from the discipline, incorporated self-observation of its own methods, along with self-reflection and defamiliarization, abandoned narrative, and also formally gone postdramatic in a sense. In reality, however, these steps towards generalization and self-reflection were made only to strengthen dramatization, so that the actor in such a performance would not just play a role, but become a pathfinder, blazing a trail to the event. Christoph Marthaler, Anatoly Vasiliev, Boris Yukhananov, Heiner Goebbels, Theodoros Terzopoulos, the early Sasha Waltz, and the visual artist Victor Alimpiev (in the play Were Talking About Music, 2007) have engaged in making such theater.

I would like to dwell in more detail on the potential of this fifth performative paradigm. To begin with, the fusions mentioned before between theater and contemporary art have occurred because the theater is sick of its nontheoretical, nonphilosophical nature. What it lacks is knowledge of the world and a meta-position, so it is not surprising that it imitates contemporary art. Contemporary art, on the other hand, is weary of its own severity, its theoreticalness and conceptuality: it wants vitality, eroticism, history, narrative, and to a certain extent, an audience. This essay barely touches on contemporary art itself, focusing instead on how the abovementioned directors have succeeded, without abandoning the discipline of theatrical performance, in being metaphysical, philosophical, and conceptual, in defamiliarizing their methodssometimes by invoking elements of performance artwhile deepening dramatization and, simultaneously, not imitating contemporary art. They have proven that the theater is impossible without a sensual journey to an event that cannot be understood, named, defined, and remembered outside the process of acting and performing. In this performance, the actor is no less important than the director. Or rather, not only is the director an artist and maestro, but so too is the actor; without the actor, the way to the event is impossible. Gilles Deleuze wrote that acting is not a profession, but the acquired ability to traverse an event and repeat it. That is why the actor is a medium of emancipation and a vehicle of painful intuition. According to Deleuze, the actor performs a change of the will, a sort of leaping in place of the whole body which exchanges its organic will for a spiritual will. Grotowski defined this actorly practice as dangerous exposure. Hence the field of sacredness (secular rather than religious) on which all the above directors insist.

In the repertory theater, an actor is schooled like a parrot that has been obliged to play-act and dissemble, while the actor in postdramatic projects is an average joe who holds forth on the stage as if they were standing on an imaginary agora. But for the theater not to become whispered staging, as Artaud feared, the dramatic work must be treated not as a text, but as the score of a performance that has already taken place, for the playwright who has written it down has already performed it as an imaginary actor, rather than as a writer.

These theatrical experiments do not need to recode the discipline of the theater in the idiom of an instantly recognizable democratic mundaneness (so often confused with an analysis of modern life). On the contrary, they often resort to ancient mythology and poetry, to generalized philosophical treatises and music, thus accentuating the declamatory and prosodic components of speech. Their rejection of plotted narrative is aimed not at de-dramatizing what has occurred, but at conceptually and sensually intensifying it to clear a way to the event exclusively in the newspeak of hyperdramatized theatrical performance. Employing the compositional tools of this modespeech, psychophysics, movement, vocal resonance, musical timbre, and poetryit is important that the theatrical performance, no matter what event or issue it deals with, should not present a narrative construction of the event, but rather an aphoristic and poetically philosophical reaction to it. Neither genuine drama nor acting is possible in the absence of a philosophical or provisionally metaphysical perspective. The philosophical dimension generates the distance from the event that enables us to generalize the situation and the problem. Performing is impossible without such generalization, because without it, speech would be bogged down in the prosaic thickets of narration. That is why it is impossible to watch most of whats produced by the repertory theater: speech there becomes an endless prose recitation. In other words, the repertory theater is anti-philosophical and, hence, not modern: it contains no generalized knowledge of the world. Contemporary art has such knowledge, and it is theoretical and philosophical, but its conceptual and philosophical constructions are spatial. By definition, these constructions are neither temporal nor performative, even when it comes to performance art.

Unfortunately, the postdramatic theater, as it imitates contemporary art, cannot even acknowledge arts theoretical-philosophical and absurdist codes. So the former has borrowed only the discourse of social engagement from the latter, along with what we have described above as the living phenomenological presence in the mundane present. In the theater, however, the philosophical dimension should not figure as analytical description, as in theory, nor as absurdist paradox, as in contemporary conceptual art. The philosophical, aphoristic, and poetic dimension should appear in the theater inductively, as Yukhananov has often arguedas inductive (rather than denotative) speech.

Inductivity means that the performative and prosodic process of speech overlaps with the generation of an idea. Paradoxically, this can only happen in the mode of repetitionthat is, in the mode of the actors emitting this idea not from themself, but as it were on behalf of an imaginary someone. This is the most important theatrical performance syndrome, in which the sentence (uttered by the actor) does not narrate, but repeats/performs something over and above what has happened. Outwardly, it might resemble nonsense, glossolalia, or babble, but this does not prevent such speech from constructing a philosophical dimension vis--vis the event. Becketts characters can utter nominally meaningless phrases, but these phrases are simultaneously actorly, theatrical, poetic, and philosophical. When Hamlet utters the phrase To be or not to be, he similarly expresses the most profound philosophical idea in a seemingly unphilosophical or nontheoretical manner. It is a philosophical phrase, but it is simultaneously playful, sarcastic, actorly, and poetic, and it is uttered seemingly on behalf of another performing subjectthat is, the phrase To be or not to be is repetitive. Thus, the loss of the dramatic (the ludic) is fraught not so much with the rejection of plot, fictitiousness, and roles, as with the loss, first of all, of the theaters philosophical (metaphysical) dimension. That is why the repertory theater, the postdramatic theater, and the democratic theater are often stupid, anti-intellectual, unethical, and unmusical. Not to mention the fact that theatrical and cinematic education today trains an actor not as a thinker and an artist, but as a show-business employee.

From our premise about the philosophical and metaphysical dimension necessary to the theater, it follows that this meta-position enables one not merely to mimetically depict so-called life, but also to play a game. What does this mean? That, in all the experiments cited as exemplifying the fifth performative paradigm (the works of Marthaler, Vasiliev, Terzopoulos, and so forth), the theater ends up with exactly the event that has been jettisoned from life and has already become non-mundane, super-existential, excessive, and irremediable. Among such events thrown out of life in theatrical mythology, the stories of Oedipus and Orpheus are the most programmatic. Orpheuss journey to Hades is therefore a metaphor, in a sense, for all truly theatrical action and theatrical processualism. The main event is that the hero has been forced to exit life, but also been forced to perform. (After all, when Orpheus loses Eurydice, he descends into repetition syndrome, speechifying and singing as the only way he can compensate for his loss.) Later, this same performance syndrome is acted out in the theater. That is, the tragedy of Orpheus has to do both with the loss of a loved one, and also with the fact that he is destined never to stop, constantly and syndromatically resuming his lamentations and mourninga performance whose repetition is, in fact, the theater. The story is theatrical because its hero acts out grief, not because he possesses some kind of grief. It is not merely someones grief that informs the theater and the actors craft, but the grief of the one who acts out grief. We thus obtain the formula for the performing of performing, the theater of theater.

Wasnt this also Shakespeares mantra about the theater of theater? After all, only what proved to be theater in his life made it into his plays. Consequently, the theater played the theater. That is why Shakespeares claim that all the worlds a stage is no metaphor at all, but rather a statement of the fact there are realms of life that drop out of life into theatricality, and it is such realms that the theater repeats, reproduces, and adopts. Therefore, the real theater is theater about the theater, not in the modernist sense of art about art, but in the sense of theatrically performing what has proved more intense than life about life itself, of playing the part of life that has proved to be theatrical. This motif manifests in Yukhananovs staging of Andrei Vishnevskys play Pinocchio (2019). Like Orpheus, Pinocchio goes on a journey through the inferno, because this is the only way he can find the beautiful Rose (Eurydice?). But this life journey proves to be a journey through the circles of the theatrical for the puppet (the actor, the poet). The theater is the place where the hero literally drops out of everyday life. The only way to cope with this theatrical withdrawal from existence is with the theaters help.

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The Postdramatic Theater's Misadventures in the Age of Contemporary Art - Journal #120 September 2021 - E-Flux

The triple lock is the most high-profile and contested area of pensions policy. It is also the most misunderstood. The lock, which ensures state pensions rise annually by the highest of average earnings growth, inflation or 2.5%, is almost always discussed in terms of the trade-off between pensioner benefits and working-age benefits. But to frame it simply like this is an error.

Thrse Coffey has today announced the suspension of the triple lock. It will be welcomed by those who believe we need to rebalance public spending from the old to the young. However, despite many arguments to the contrary, young people are in fact among the main beneficiaries of the triple lock. They would actually suffer from its removal.

The idea that scrapping the triple lock would be in the interests of intergenerational fairness rests on a false presumption that if we spend more money on one group of people, we must spend less on another. Yet we can and should spend more on social security for young and old people alike. More important, because the triple lock will have been in operation for decades by the time younger people reach retirement, they will benefit from pensions that are far greater than those of todays retirees such is the power of compound growth over time.

To believe that a Conservative government would invest what it saves by removing the triple lock on todays young people requires some magical thinking. In practice, by reducing the state pension accrual rate (the entitlements we build up in return for paying national insurance), scrapping the triple lock would effectively amount to a significant tax hike on young people. Thats because the tax they pay now would entitle them to a lower income in retirement than previously anticipated.

George Osborne introduced the triple lock in 2010 in order to reward the Conservatives ageing support base. But the right policy introduced for the wrong reasons is still the right policy. The value of the UK state pension is already one of the lowest in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (worth less than in any EU country). This was exacerbated by the then coalition governments abolition of the state second pension (creating a single state pension benefit) which, of course, harms todays young people the most, because they will spend most or all of their working life entitled to only the new state pension, rather than the more generous previous system.

Some argue that the UK system is fairly unique because it spends more on subsidising private pensions through pensions tax relief (which costs about 20bn a year). But tax relief does not work as a saving incentive, and its benefits are concentrated on the wealthiest savers. There remains no credible case against the state simply investing these billions in its own state pension system, given its unrivalled capacity to manage very long-term financial risks arising from economic downturns and demographic change.

It is clear that todays young people saddled with student debt and facing astronomical housing costs are unlikely to accumulate wealth at the same rate as the baby boomers. Yet this does not mean that the rather meagre state pension should not continue to increase. If the government really wants to alleviate intergenerational inequality then it should tax some of the wealth that older generations have accumulated. It is worth remembering that the recently and soon-to-be retired have already seen large cuts to their lifetime state pension income due to increases in state pension age which impact most unjustly upon poorer groups with lower life expectancy.

The bleak prospects facing many young people are all the more reason to boost the value of the state pension, so they can look forward to higher financial security in retirement. Doing it gradually (in other words, using the triple lock or something similar) is the best way of ensuring the benefits of increasing the state pension accrue mainly to the young.

This doesnt mean there can be a cast-iron guarantee that the triple lock will remain in place in perpetuity. But the case for increasing the value of the state pension, whether by maintaining the triple lock or another similar measure, is overwhelming. The best way of directing state pension expenditure towards younger generations would, of course, be a steep, one-off increase in its value as these people approach retirement. But increasing the state pension gradually is much more likely to be feasible, politically, than the prospect of a more radical increase at some undefined future point. This is precisely because of the way the triple lock benefits todays retirees a bit, while it will stealthily benefit tomorrows retirees a lot.

The more we raise the state pension now, the harder it will be to cut it back in future. And even if it were the case that the triple lock is intergenerationally unfair now, it would be a small price to pay if steadily increasing the state pension eventually reduces younger cohorts reliance on private options as the old world of occupational pensions crumbles.

It is worth noting, finally, that the present debate around state pension indexation is not really focused on the triple lock at all. The third lock in the current policy is the 2.5% bit, but the state pension had been due to rise sharply by 8% due to the second lock, that is, earnings growth as a result of the peculiar way in which the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the UK labour market. Some see this as policy failure; I see it as a silver lining. It was the Thatcher government that removed the state pension earning link in 1980, leading to an avalanche of pensioner poverty, and its restoration rightly became an article of faith on the left. If we cannot support all benefits rising in line with living standards, without exception, then we cannot make the case for any benefits doing so.

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Suspending the pensions triple lock is bad news for young people - The Guardian

NO SURPRISE that the Democratic Unionist Party leader chose the day the EUs key Brexit person was in town to issue his latest big threat: collapsing power sharing if the Norths special trade status is not changed in a big way.

ut Jeffrey Donaldson also spent a lot of time couching this threat in as much reasonable language as possible.

And he notably did not shut any door on potential compromise, seeking major change to the so-called Northern Ireland EU Brexit Protocol but not its abolition.

The EUs representative, the unflappable Commissioner Maros Sefcovic who is spending two days meeting all concerned by Brexit in the North, urged everyone to talk less and work more.

Lets dial down the political rhetoric, lets bring calm and focus on what is our task to accomplish, the Slovakian Commissioner said after meeting business people in Newry.

Mr Donaldson has been in trouble since he took over as DUP leader in late June. An opinion poll at the end of last month put his party on less than half its vote take in their last electoral outing, and in joint fourth place on level terms with the nationalist SDLP and cross-community Alliance Party.

The two other unionist parties, the more moderate Ulster Unionist Party, which was eclipsed by the DUP in 2004, and the more hardline True Unionist Voice, are both ahead of Mr Donaldsons party.

Internally, his own partys activists have been adding to the pressure by urging him to stand up to Dublin, the EU, Sinn Fin and the SDLP.

But he is also boxed in as any move for elections in the North earlier than those scheduled for next May would spell disaster given those opinion poll ratings.

So, he announced the withdrawal from North-South government co-operation bodies something that is half-happening already all the while pledging to continue health and anti-Covid co-operation to stave off allegations of irresponsibility.

The DUP leaders speech was long and nuanced, taking half an hour to deliver. In essence he said if the protocol was not changed,then the DUP would have to quit power-sharing, and this would become clear over the coming weeks

TaoiseachMichel Martinsaid the DUP leaders statement posed new challenges. But after meeting also with Mr Sefcovic Mr Martin said the EU was willing to make the necessary compromises if met in the proper spirit by the UK negotiators.

The deadlock has remained the same since the start of the year. The UK Government signed up to a political deal in late 2019, reinforced by a trade deal in 2020, which prevented a renewed visible north-south border in Ireland after Brexit.

But to protect the EUs single market there must be checks on some goods coming from Britain into the North. The UK originally sought to deny and downplay the importance of these checks. But more recently Boris Johnsons government has taken up the cudgels on behalf of the Northern unionists and claimed these checks are tougher and more widespread than originally understood to be happening.

The EU has flatly refused UK demands to reopen the Northern Ireland Protocol but is open to talks aimed at smoothing out implementation difficulties.

Northern Ireland business people have signalled their preference for some kind of compromise arguing that the bigger trade picture is best served in this way.

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DUP: As Jeffrey Donaldson issues threat over power sharing, DUP leader takes care not to shut door on Brexit deal - Independent.ie