Category Archives: New Utopia

"This Building Belongs to the People": Cape Verdes New Centre for Art, Crafts and Design

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There are two ways to get to Cape Verde, by sea or sky. Either way, we are surprised by the landscape of immense rocky masses sprouting from the Atlantics navel before setting foot on land. Unpopulated until the middle of the 15th century, the volcanic archipelago is made up of ten islands, nine of which are currently inhabited, with unique characteristics in each one of them some more touristy, like Sal, others more rural, like Santo Anto and a version of Kriolu Kabuverdianu, which is not the official language (Portuguese occupies this place), but which is by far the most widely spoken.

So Vicente is the second most populous island in the country and makes up the northern insular group called Sotavento, along with Santo Anto, Santa Luzia, So Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista. Its largest city, Mindelo, has a port vocation and has historically been the point of departure and arrival for people and goods. Marked by traffic, the city is a place of passage and intense cultural exchanges. It is also home to the first museum built in the country, the National Centre for Art, Crafts and Design CNAD.

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Opened at the end of July, the new CNAD is the result of a long process that had the support of the Ministry of Culture and Creative Industries of Cape Verde and the Federal Government. In addition to the new museum built from scratch, designed by the local firm Ramos Castellano Arquitectos, the project also includes the rehabilitation of Casa Senador Vera-Cruz, one of the oldest buildings in Mindelo, started in 2019.

The project was entirely financed by the Government of Cape Verde and cost 120 million Cape Verdean escudos (about US$1.1 million). With a collection area, exhibition rooms, library, and space for artistic residencies, the National Centre for Art, Crafts and Design seeks to become a reference as a platform for sustainable cultural development and promotion. We sowed utopia to reap a brand new verse, says Irlando Ferreira, Director General of CNAD, after years of work managing the demands and needs of government bodies, artists and artisans.

If today the institution extends its arms over arts and design, it keeps its feet firmly planted on crafts. It was created from it, in 1976, as Cooperativa Resistncia, a group formed by artists and teachers led by Manuel Figueira, Lusa Queirs and Bela Duarte. The group was dedicated to the experimentation, investigation and promotion of Cape Verdean handicrafts, in particular weaving, seeking in traditional and popular knowledge transmitted by master artisans, such as Nh Griga and Nh Damsio bases to foster the development of new artisans and artists.

Bonding with the population is embedded in the origin of CNAD. The reason of this building is to belong to the people, being close to them, comments the architect Eloisa Ramos. In other words, we wanted to break down all possible barriers, allowing people to move around here at will, without distancing themselves. The result is this building that, despite being imposing, does not create distance, she concludes. Eloisa, born in Santo Anto Island, is one of the architects responsible for the rehabilitation of the old Casa Senador Vera-Cruz and for the design of the new CNAD building, together with the Italian Moreno Castellano. Together they form the Ramos Castellano Arquitectos studio, based in Mindelo, which has in its portfolio Terra Lodge Hotel and Casa Celestina, both in the same city, and Aquiles Eco Hotel, in So Pedro.

For the CNAD project, they sought inspiration from a material that is common in everyday life on the islands of Cape Verde: the bidons, or cylindrical drums made of metal or plastic. Almost all the goods that arrive on the islands, sent by relatives of residents who went to look for better economic conditions in other countries, arrive inside these drums. With 560,000 inhabitants living in the archipelago and almost a million living outside it, it is conceivable that the influx of drums is quite voluminous.

After traveling the sea bringing goods from other continents mainly Europe and North America, but also South America and Asia these metal containers are recycled and incorporated into the daily lives of residents in a variety of ways. It is not unusual to find tin houses made with the metal plate of the drums, or pans and other tools made from parts of them. There are countless uses, and we find traces of drums everywhere, especially in communities far from urban centers.

The drums end up revealing a social, cultural, and economic dimension of the country, comments Irlando Ferreira, and here they were re-signified to constitute the second skin of the building. The lid and the circular bottom of the drums were used to compose a mosaic that envelops the new building. Set about a meter away from the glass faade that encloses the internal spaces, and accessed by a narrow service corridor, this skin works as a screen against the strong Sahelian sun. An elaborate manual mechanism allows the drums to be rotated, controlling the level of brightness and insolation in the interiors. There is no air conditioning, the environmental comfort systems are all passive, reveals Eloisa.

What stands out the most, however, are the colors of the building. Each of the hundreds of lids is given a color, and in this palette is encoded a musical score composed by the Cape Verdean multi-instrumentalist and conductor Vasco Martins. A color for each note (the intervals are also painted) and the rhythm of the faade is literally given by the music. In front of this score, the Casa Senador Vera-Cruz, now without walls, opens up to the city. Between the buildings, a rectangular square provides additional space for the CNAD program and connects the side streets, serving as a shortcut through the urban fabric of Mindelo.

Open to the people, the city and the world, looking at the past and the present, the new CNAD stands in Mindelo as a dream for the future. But not just any future, a future that brings us the past, being diaspora and island, comments Abrao Anibal Barbosa Vicente, Minister of Culture and Creative Industries. Indeed, the National Centre for Art, Crafts and Design seeks to honor the institutions past as a promoter of popular knowledge the exhibition Cape Verdean Creation: Routes, curated jointly by Irlando Ferreira and Adlia Borges, bears witness to this. However, it avoids sinking into nostalgia, and keeps its focus firmly on the development of young artisans and artists.

The fulfillment of a project of this importance in a country with just over half a million inhabitants is an admirable achievement; program maintenance, in turn, will continue to be a challenge. It's a utopia, adds Irlando.

But Cape Verdeans are no strangers to this: I grew up listening to my father, who was a farmer, talking about waiting for the rain. You put the seed in the ground and wait for the water, and then you ought to have faith, because you believe the rain will fall. You have to believe in order to survive, Eloisa told me. It hadn't rained on the island of So Vicente for four years and the arid landscape testified to that. We have an expression here that says sow in the dust, adds Irlando, because the earth is so dry that it has already turned to dust and, even so, you put the seed inside waiting for it to sprout. I no longer knew whether he was talking about plantations in the countryside or the arduous work made by the institution he directs, but I felt that, after the sowing was done, we all myself included believed that the harvest was, at long last, possible.

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"This Building Belongs to the People": Cape Verde's New Centre for Art, Crafts and Design - ArchDaily

So, its over. Stop the clocks. Cut off the telephone. Prevent the hoards from nicking the pink pastel thrones. Notorious woman-centric members club and co-working space The Wing is dead.

Once billed by its co-founder and entrepreneurial it-girl Audrey Gelman as a womens utopia, and your throne away from home, The Wing opened in 2016 to a flurry of fanfare and media attention. On the surface, the concept was simple: charge professional women between 170 and 240 a month for access to luxurious, maximalist, millennial-pink spaces where they could work, network, and eat poached egg dishes called Fork the Patriarchy. Its first outpost was located in New Yorks Flatiron district, in the historic stretch known as Ladies Mile its where well-off women shopped in the 19th century. Within weeks, it had found its place among the Lena Dunham-adjacent coterie of New York City, counting Alexa Chung, Tavi Gevinson, Emilia Clarke and Cara and Poppy Delevingne among its founding members. By the end of 2019, The Wing had 11 locations, including a five-storey townhouse in Londons Fitzrovia.

For The Wings members, the end came abruptly. An email sent out on Tuesday (30 August) announced that all Wing locations would be closing permanently, blaming an inability to recover financially from the Covid pandemic and increasing global economic challenges. Members access halted with immediate effect. Within hours of the closure being made public, the company appeared to have deleted Instagram comments from members asking about previously booked commitments at Wing locations. Then it locked comments on its photos altogether. At the time of writing, there has been no acknowledgement on the platform of the shutdown its most recent grid post is from a fortnight ago, urging ladies of luxury, leisure and well-heeled creative labour to treat [themselves] to a personalised tour of The Wing and stay the day! What a difference two weeks makes.

Yet, for those looking in from the outside, The Wings demise didnt feel so sudden. Indeed, when the announcement came, it seemed inevitable. Even overdue The Wings kitsch corporate playgrounds had already begun to look like fossils from a bygone era. Turmeric lattes. Egg chairs. Colour-coordinated bookcases. All now as distinctly late 2010s as inflatable furniture is to the late 1990s.

In retrospect, The Wing seemed to neatly express the micro-epoch in which it was founded encapsulating both the fetishes and deficiencies of girlboss feminism. The writing was always on the wall, attached as securely as the portraits of Hillary Clinton, Mary Beard, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Amal Clooney and other #inspirational industry leaders and feminist pin-ups that lined The Wings hallways. Truly, The Wing simultaneously slamming the locks on its Instagram comments and the clubhouse doors is too perfect an emblem for the last nails being hammered into the coffin of the girlboss. And so, let the next round of discourse proclaim: The Wing died doing what it loved, a neat symbol until the end.

Its funny, the things that come to represent certain cultural landscapes and pockets of time. The Wing always garnered undue levels of attention, given at its peak it hosted just 12,000 members across its 11 locations. A not insignificant number, but last year Soho House another notorious, overdesigned, expensive and exclusive club for like-minded creative thinkers comparatively had 119,000 members across 27 houses in 10 countries. Even when it comes to cold hard cash, The Wing wasnt an outlier. Membership to its London Soho outpost cost roughly the same as its nearby club competitor, with an annual fee of 1,836 to Soho Houses 1,300. Plus the 400 registration fee. Though it was practically budget when held up against the 3,250 annual rate (plus 1,750 joining fee) for Mayfairs Marie-Antoinette-cum-British-colonial-soft-play club Annabels. Supposedly the only nightclub the Queen has ever stepped foot in, Annabels proves that, when it comes to girlbosses, there are more rungs to be climbed than the average Lean In/Goop/Glossier/Lululemon/Lena Dunham/ But Her Emails cap-wearing girl could ever dream of.

But it was never really just about the money. The thing that distinguished The Wing and launched a thousand column inches and cemented its status as a millennial burlesque was the very public nature of a supposedly private members club, and its worthiness. At heart, both amounted to hypocrisy.

Audrey Gelman interviews Jennifer Lawrence at New Yorks The Wing Soho in 2018

(Monica Schipper/Getty for The Wing)

The Wing was founded on a paradox. Its business aped one of societys most elitist institutions the private members club while its brand was steeped in the language of feminist emancipation and empowerment. Theyve tried to make it mean a million different things, said Scarlett Curtis, Wing member and editor of Feminists Dont Wear Pink (And Other Lies), in 2019. There were mums with side hustles, and journalists, coders and people in tech. Curtis claimed that The Wings ethos was more of a political stance. They are left wing: very pro-diversity, pro-inclusivity. Its very intersectional feminism.

Except, of course, it absolutely wasnt. How could it be? Exclusivity was as essential to The Wing as the marble chips in its terrazzo tables. When a racist incident at The Wings West Hollywood location came to light in 2019, it set off a spiral of revelations about the company that, while not exactly surprising, undermined its intersectional feminist ethos to the point it was unrecoverable. Asha Grant, the director of the Free Black Womens Library of Los Angeles, reported that she had arrived at the groups Hollywood location only to encounter an angry white woman in the parking lot, upset that Grant had snagged a spot she felt belonged to her. Grant alleged that the woman a guest at The Wing followed her inside yelling insults and threats. She also added that, after the harassment, Wing staff didnt ask the white woman to leave, telling her they didnt feel empowered to do so. It was another example of White womens comfort prioritised over Black womens pain, Grant said.

Yet, while this is plainly and evidently true, there turned out to be some further truth in the claim that Wing staff didnt feel empowered. Indeed, many subsequently reported that the companys working culture was rooted in fear and exploitation that working class, immigrant and Black staff were disrespected, underpaid and used for marketing clout. In June 2020, Gelman resigned from her role as CEO. Shortly after, staff organised a digital walkout in protest over The Wings prioritisation of public appearance over working practice. Roxanne Fequiere, who took part in the digital walkout before resigning from the company, said that The Wings response was at once affirmative and lacklustre, as though our leadership couldnt be bothered to convincingly feign any more enthusiasm for accountability.

The Wings closure hasnt changed this pattern. Naydeline Mejia is assistant editor at Womens Health but previously worked for The Wing. The morning after members received the shutdown email, Mejia tweeted that she was just thinking about all the immigrant, non-rich & non-white women who ran that place that are now without jobs. Women who had been working for the company quickly replied to Mejia, thanking her for acknowledging them. One said that, after Tuesday nights email, she found herself randomly unemployed without a plan. Again, a neat symbol until the end now of malpractice and the avoidance of accountability.

Exclusive, while preaching inclusivity. Sermonising about the value of womens work, while practising workplace exploitation. Claiming intersectionality, while allowing racism to go unchecked. The Wing modelled itself on Britains elite, old-money hang-outs, while also declaring itself an antidote to old boys networks and the politics of Trump; it wanted community and equality and to always, above all, be market-friendly; it was a confused, hypocritical recipe doomed to fail.

Gelman often told The Wings origin story roughly as follows: she was working as a press secretary, and later as an aide to Hillary Clintons election campaign, dashing from city to city and between meetings and parties. It was a lifestyle that supposedly forced her to change her clothes in the bathrooms of Starbucks and train stations, places she said she found semi-degrading. She dreamt of having a more dignified place to go, where like-minded women could find one another, get changed and charge their phones in peace.

Its a story that also reveals the roots of The Wings downfall, and the essential nastiness behind the glossy be kind facade of girlboss feminism. Today, Starbucks workers in the United States are fighting to unionise, while labour movements on both sides of the pond are reinvigorated. Yet here we have a story about a centrist it-girl on her way to a political party, detecting degrading conditions in Starbucks bathrooms and other public spaces mainly utilised by the working classes. Her big solution? To create an untouchable haven for herself and her social circle that would be as far removed from them as possible. What could be less radical, progressive or intersectional than that?

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The girlbosses who girlbossed too close to the sun: The demise of womens utopia The Wing was long overdue - The Independent

Bjrk has shared the lead single from her forthcoming album, Fossora. Directed by Viar Logi, the Atopos video takes place in a fungal underworld, where a masked Bjrk, a bass clarinet sextet, and Gabber Modus Operandis DJ Kasimyn gear up for a rave showdown. Watch it happen below.

Bjrk wrote on Twitter yesterday that the track is kinda like Fossoras passport. The album, out September 30, was partly inspired by the pandemic experience and lockdown raves. Its title is a word that Bjrk made upthe feminine of fossore, which means digger, delver, ditcher, as she put it in press materials.

Fossora is the follow-up to 2017s Utopia. Bjrk recently launched a podcast called Bjrk: Sonic Symbolism. The first three episodes document Debut, Post, and Homogenic.

Check out Revisiting Bjrks First Film, The Juniper Tree, In Honor of Its Restoration over on the Pitch.

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

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Bjrk Parties at a Mushroom Rave in Video for New Song Atopos: Watch - Pitchfork

J. Bradford DeLong is an economist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley, and served in the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. He is the author of multiple books, including the just-published Slouching Toward Utopia, an economic history of the twentieth century. Observer executive editor James Ledbetter recently interviewed DeLong; this transcript has been edited of length and clarity.Economist J. Bradford DeLong (courtesy Basic Books)

Observer: So youve written a lot of books, most of them shorter than this one. What made you take on a topic this sweeping?

DeLong: It was a book I wanted to read and no one else was writing it. So I decided I should. I wrote a draft chapter or two, and then Tim Sullivan of Basic came along and said, why dont we put you under contract to do this? And then about every three years, theyd call me up and say, where is it?

How long was this?

One of my roommates claims he read a full first draft 30 years ago, but hes a liar. I wrote a chapter in 1998. And then maybe there was an outline in 2004. And there was maybe a semi-draft in 2012.

Give us a summary of your grand narrative.

Its mostly a Karl Polanyi narrative, its that in 1870, all of a sudden everything changed. For the first time technological progress became fast enough that there was actually a possibility that humanity could bake a big enough economic pie so that everyone could have enough. And that governance could be actually focused on making a truly human world, rather than governance being figuring out how to run a force-and-fraud machine on everyone else so that it alone could have enough. And indeed from 1870 to today, technological progress has been absolutely wonderful. By the scale of any previous century, they would say you have much more than enough for utopia. But while we have done a superb job at solving the problem of baking a sufficiently large economic pie, the problems of properly slicing and then tasting the pie, of making sure everyone actually does have enough and utilizing our wealth to allow us to lead lives in which we are healthy, safe, secure, and happy, that continues to totally flummox us.

What specifically happens in 1870 that causes this tremendous technological transformation?

In 1870, we get the coming of the industrial research lab, which allows us to discover and develop technologies at a very high rate; of the modern corporation that allows us to develop and deploy technologies; and then with full globalization, the opportunity to deploy and then to diffuse as other people copy what youve done becomes so vastly attractive. Someone like Nikola Tesla, who was borderline socially dysfunctional, but also knew better than anyone else how to make electrons get up and dance and advanced us all by himself at least a decade in terms of developing electric power, wouldve been totally useless without George Westinghouse to create the industrial research lab and smooth the ruffled feathers of everyone else working there and also the Westinghouse corporation to then take and deploy the stuff. And then the copycats Edison and elsewhere, and the financing from JP Morgan and George Fisherthose change Tesla from being someone who is not a big net gain to society to someone who moves one-tenth of the economy forward by 10 years. And since 1870 human technological prowess has at least doubled every 30 years. That means enormous amounts of Schumpeterian creative destruction: immense wealth, new industries, occupations, etcbut old industries, occupations, incomes, communities vanish.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that while the events and the trends that it discusses are relatively familiar, there are just constant surprises. For example, I wouldve imagined that most people attribute the strong and steady growth that Western Europe enjoyed after World War II to the Marshall Plan. But you argue that the Marshall Plan was kind of small potatoes.

Its one percent of US GDP, three percent of European GDP. Even if you say we get a 30% rate of return on these investments, as opposed to a normal seven, five or three percent return, thats just 0.3% per year on the growth rate.

So if it wasnt the Marshall Plan that led to those glorious years, what was it?

In some respects, it was what happened in Eastern Europe after 1990. Lots of people saying we see the future and its to our west. We dont care about what the political ideology is. We want to become a lot more like America. We want to do it now because theyve got it, and we dont.And that at least gives society and government a substantial direction. Plus the fact that the right had clung to Nazism for much too long and the far left was tied to Joseph Stalin and could not untie itself.

The chapter on inclusion is really important for the slouching part of your title. In other words, by the middle of the 20th century, the global economy has figured out how to provide a very good standard of living for a huge number of people. But definitely not everybody, not even in the most developed countries. Why didnt that happen?

The hope after World War II was John Maynard Keynes saying, put my technocratic students in charge of the macro economy. Everyone will have a job and labor will have substantial social power. Wages will be reasonable. And with a full employment policy, interest rates will be low, which means that returns on capital will be low, which means that if plutocrats want to exercise their social power, the only way they can do so is they spending down their capital. Hence they cease to be plutocrats. Hence there may be a lot of wealth inequality, but theres not a lot of income inequality. And so maldistribution is not an incredibly huge thingand have full employment, programs that redistribute income and wealth, progressive tax system, heavy inheritance tax, a lot of public provision of commodities, taking them out of the markets as well and provide parks and schools and roads and poolsthen you do have something that looks like a proper road to utopia. The he problem is this fails its sustainability test in the 1970s. Go and talk to Paul Krugman about it, he says if only we hadnt had the inflation.

Im going to come back to that. Related to the idea of inclusion or exclusion is North/South divide; one of the points you make is that something important happened around 1990.

The African retardation ends. The post-World War II decolonization two decades are good for literacy and good for public health in Africa, but absolutely horrible for production. There are a lot of people who say that it really was 400 years of slavery and the resulting destruction of social trust at a very basic level. You could actually run an industrializing economy and a primary product exporting economy, as long as you could borrow your colonizers market network and trust that contracts will be obeyed. And that bureaucrats will be honest. But once they withdraw leaving nothing, then you have to try to build up the social division of labor nearly from zero in an environment in which governments with late 20th century means of coercion are able to exploit and corrupt a great deal.

That in Africa seems to come to an end in the 1990s. From the year 2100s perspective, people will say that neoliberalism and the global south actually unlocked a great deal of things that had been frozen in stasis in the post-World War II generation, under the influence of really existing socialism to various degreesnationalism and bureaucratization and so forth. Thats, I think, an important issue and not one I spend enough time on.

You obviously started this book well before the current bout of inflation that a lot of countries are experiencing right now. But what you say about inflation in the 1970s and how it spawned this political and intellectual reaction seems highly relevant right now.

When aggregate demand is too low, you have a lot of people who lost their jobs and cant find new ones and you have people who dont dare ask for a raise because then they think theyll be first on the block to be fired if something bad should happen. And those are relatively small groups of people, unless its a Great Depression. But with inflation, pretty much everyone finds they cant buy things at the prices that they expected. So the market economy has disappointed their expectations, and has done so in a way thats got to be the fault of the rulers. And thats a principal sign that we need a different group of rulers.

I recognize that your use of utopia is at least a little ironic. But its interesting that the period and the very developments that you credit are exactly the same period and developments that a lot of people would say is exactly when humanity went on the wrong path, that put civilization on a carbon-based path of global destruction. You talk about the environment a little bit in some places, but I wonder how you think people should think about the tradeoffs between economic growth and climate change.

Economic growth in renewables is politically, and Id say also humanly, kind of the only way to keep from cooking the planet. Technology is about the only thing that can potentially save us here. A carbon tax would be best and fairest, but large-scale public subsidies for renewables are a good second best. And we need to move there as fast as possible. As for the coal-based road to industrialization, thats the only way that we get from being limited by human and horse muscles to actually being able to use more power. I think if you dont do that, you will never get economic growth fast enough to outrun Malthusian pressures. And as long as you have a world of patriarchy in which women only have durable social power if theyre the mothers of surviving sons, you really need to get a lot of economic growth very quickly in order to get people rich enough for infant mortality to fall low enough for people to say, Gee, maybe we dont need to try for nine children in order to have two that survive. Without coal, you have a Malthusian world of medieval poverty. Unless you a figure out a way to get rid of patriarchy, which is a difficult thing to do.

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Technology Is the Only Thing That Can Potentially Save Us: A Conversation with Brad DeLong - Observer

If Purdy does not have a very detailed plan, he has at least a plan for a plan. He wants to transform American life through mass participation in engaged and shared decision-making, of the sort presaged by Zuccotti Park. To get where we need to go, he argues forcefully for a reformed Supreme Court and a new Constitutional Convention every three decades, to rewrite the whole damn thing.

The familiar parts of Purdys polemic have familiar rejoinders. Occupy Wall Street was a marginal, not a mass, movement, never gaining popular support, and Sanders ran twice and lost twice. Purdy blames market colonization for the Supreme Courts reactionary decision-making, but the Courts most reactionary decisions have little to do with the desires of capitalism or, anyway, of capitalists: the Goldman Sachs crowd is fine with womens autonomy, being significantly composed of liberal women, and would prefer fewer gun massacres. And though the struggle to maintain democratic institutions within a capitalist society has been intense, the struggle to maintain democratic institutions in anti-capitalist countries has been catastrophic. We do poorly, but the Chinese Communist Party does infinitely worse, even when it tilts toward some version of capitalism.

For that matter, would our democratic life really be improved by a new Constitutional Conventionto which Alex Joness followers, demanding to know where the U.F.O.s are being kept, are as likely to show up as Elizabeth Warrens followers, demanding that corporations be made to pay their fair share of taxes? The U.S. Constitution, undemocratic though it is, is surely an additive to the problem, not the problem itself. Parliamentary systems, like Canadas, have also been buffeted by populist and illiberal politics, while Brexit, a bit of rough-hewn majoritarian politics in a country without a written constitution, shows the dangers of relying on a one-night plebiscite.

Purdys basic political position seems to be that politics would be better if everyone shared his. Those of us who share his politics might agree, but perhaps with the proviso that the kind of sharing he is cheering for has more to do with the poetics of protest than with politics as generally understood. Politics, as he conceives it, is a way of getting all the people who agree with you to act in unison. This is a big part of democratic societies. Forming coalitions, assembling multitudes, encouraging action on urgent issues: these are all essential to a healthy country, even more than the business of filling in the circle next to a name you have just encountered for an office you know nothing about.

But the greatest service of politics isnt to enable the mobilization of people who have the same views; its to enable people to live together when their views differ. Politics is a way of getting our ideas to brawl in place of our persons. Though democracy is practiced when people march on Washington and assemble in parkswhen they feel that they have found a common voicepolitics is practiced when the shouting turns to swapping. Politics was Disraeli getting one over on the nineteenth-century Liberal Party by leaping to electoral reform for the working classes, thereby trying to gain their confidence; politics was Mandela making a deal with de Klerk to respect the white minority in exchange for a peaceful transition to majority rule. Politics is Biden courting and coaxing Manchin (whose replacement would be incomparably farther to the right) to make a green deal so long as it was no longer colored green. The difficulty with the Athenian synecdoche is that getting the part to act as the whole presupposes an agreement among the whole. There is no such agreement. Trumpism and Obamaism are not two expressions of one will for collective action; they are radically incommensurable views about whats needed.

Purdys faith in collective rationality as the spur to common actionhis less mystical version of Rousseaus general willleaves him not entirely immune to what could be called the Munchkinland theory of politics. This is the belief that although the majority population of any place might be intimidated and silenced by an oppressive forcecapitalism or special interests or the Churchthey would, given the chance, sing ding-dong in unison and celebrate their liberation. They just need a house dropped on their witch.

The perennial temptation of leftist politics is to suppose that opposition to its policies among the rank and file must be rooted in plutocratic manipulation, and therefore curable by the reassertion of the popular will. The evidence suggests, alas, that very often what looks like plutocratic manipulation really is the popular will. Many Munchkins like the witch, or at least work for the witch out of dislike for some other ascendant group of Munchkins. (Readers of the later L.Frank Baum books will recall that Munchkin Country is full of diverse and sometimes discordant groupings.) The awkward truth is that Thatcher and Reagan were free to give the plutocrats what they wanted because they were giving the people what they wanted: in one case, release from what had come to seem a stifling, union-heavy statist system; in the other, a spirit of national, call it tribal, self-affirmation. One can deplore these positions, but to deny that they were popular is to pretend that a two-decade Tory reign, in many ways not yet completed, and a forty-nine-state sweep in 1984 were mass delusions. Although pro-witch Munchkins may be called collaborators after their liberation, they persist in their ways, and resent their liberators quite as much as they ever feared the witch. Of course, I never liked all those scary messages she wrote in the sky with her broom, they whisper among themselves. But at least she got things done. Look at this place now. The bricks are all turning yellow.

Purdys vision of democracy would, of course, omit the bugs in the Athenian model: the misogyny, the slavery, the silver mines. But what if the original sin of the democratic vision lies right therewhat if, by the time we got to Athens, democratic practice was already fallen and hopelessly corrupted, with the slaves and the silver mines and the imperialism inherent to the Athenian model? This is the hair-raising thesis advanced by the illustrious Japanese philosopher Kjin Karatani. In his book Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy, Athenian democracy is exposed as a false idol. He does not see this from some Straussian point of view, in which Platos secret compact of liars is a better form of government than the rabble throwing stones at Socrates. On the contrary, he is a staunch egalitarian, who believes that democracy actually exemplifies the basic oppressive rhythm of ruler and ruled. His ideal is, instead, isonomia, the condition of a society in which equal speaks to equal as equal, with none ruled or ruling, and he believes that such an order existed around the Ionian Islands of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., before the rise of Athens.

If Purdy is susceptible to the Munchkinland theory of social change, Karatani is tempted by what might be called the Atlantis theory of political history. Once upon a time, there was a great, good place where life was beautiful, thought was free, and everyone was treated fairly. This good place was destroyed by some kind of earthquakeperhaps visited from outside, perhaps produced by an internal shaking of its own platesand vanished into the sea, though memories of it remain. The Atlantis in question may be Platos original idealized island, or it may be the pre-patriarchal society of Europe, or the annual meeting of Viking peasants in nightless Iceland. In every case, there was once a better place than this one, and our path to renewal lies in renewing its tenets.

Karatanis Atlantean view is plausibly detailed. The settlement around the Ionian Islands in the centuries after Homer (but before the imperial ascent of Athens) was marked by an escape from clan society; the islands welcomed immigrants of all kinds. Free of caste connections and tribal ties, the Ionians were able to engineer a new kind of equality. They didnt become hunter-gatherers, but they recuperated nomadism by the practice of foreign trade and manufacturing. Like fourteenth-century Venice or seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Ionia was a place where there wasnt much land to till, let alone a landed aristocracy to own and exploit the terrain and its tillers, and so people had to earn a living making and trading things. As a result, they were open in ways that mainland Greece was not.

A key point, in Karatanis account, is that Ionian trade wasnt captured by a state monopoly but conducted through networks of makers and traders. The earnings of trade, under those conditions, were more evenly distributed, and the freedom of movement put a limit on abusive political arrangements. The reason class divisions multiplied under the money economy in Athens was that from the outset political power was held by a land-owning nobility, he writes. That kind of inequality, and ruler-ruled relation, did not arise in Ionia. That is to say, isonomia obtained. If in a given polis such inequality and ruler-ruled relation did arise, people could simply move to another place.

For Karatani, working in a Marxian tradition, ideas tend to mirror the economic exigencies of their contexts, and he thinks that in Ionia they did. The line of philosophers who came of age around the islands, usually called the pre-Socratics, were notably unconcerned with hierarchy or with religious mysticism. They imagined the universe as governed by material, transactional exchanges. Thales, who lived in the Ionian city of Miletus and thought that everything was made of water, was making an essentially empirical attempt to understand the world without recourse to fate or divine supervision. (So, for Karatani, was Heraclitus, a century later, who thought everything was made of fire.) Karatani insists that the pre-Socratic physics is inseparable from an Ionian political ideology. Ionian physics posited an equilibrium of forces, not a hierarchy of them with a mystical overseer. Anaximander, Thales protg, introduced the principle of justice (or dik) as the law governing the natural world. The play of forces in the physical world, fluid and forever in exchange, mimicked and governed the forces in the social world. Isonomia was at the root of it all.

Isonomia in Ioniait has therhythm of a song lyric. One feels again the shape of a familiar and accurate historical meme: trading and manufacturing centers tend to be markedly more egalitarian than landholding ones. Democratic practices of one kind or anotherthough limited and oligarchic in Venice, bloodied by sporadic religious warfare in Hollandusually take root in such places, only to be trampled as power consolidates and an lite takes hold.

You said it. I heard it. Theres no taking it back, Harold!

Cartoon by David Sipress

Was Karatanis Atlantis, that utopia of isonomia, actually anything like this? Early on, he cheerfully admits that there are almost no historical or archaeological materials to give us an idea of what Ionian cities were really like. But he suggests that we can argue by indirect evidence and by drawing inferences in world history from cases that resemble Ionia. These turn out to include medieval Iceland, also a refuge for exiles, with its famous ingvellir, or meeting place, and pre-Revolutionary New England, settled by refugees as well, and marked by its isonomic townships and town meetings.

It is an odd way to argue history and has odd results. In Iceland, you can visit the ingvellir, where the Viking democrats gatheredand the next thing you are shown is the drowning pool, where women were executed. The drowning pool came into use later, to be sure, but is part of a similar social inheritance. Rough justice, the sagas make plain, is as much an Icelandic tradition as shared goods are. And one has only to read Hawthorne to have a very different view of life in those New England townships, especially for people who did not quite fit the pattern.

Karatanis historical approachprojecting his ideals upon an idealized pasthas other confounding consequences. What are we to make, for instance, of his insistence that the poems of Homer, the bard of Ionia, are not aristocratic? In truth, the force of the occasional protests against aristocratic practices in Homer are moving because of their rarity, rather like the cries of the peasants in King Lear. Blood will tell is pretty much the motto on every inspired page. But Karatani needs Homer to be isonomic and will make him so. More practically, how did Ionians resolve the perpetual fact of political conflict? Perpetual secession seems to be the answer; when things get bad, simply go to another island. (The old liberal huff Im moving to Canada! is more serious when Canada is just a rowboat ride away.) This is not always ridiculous advicea series of successive secessions in New England is how we got Rhode Islandbut it doesnt seem like much of a plan for settled modern countries.

Greek islands before the rise of Athens, chilly and isolated medieval Iceland, the New England townships of the Colonial era: these sound like oddly sparse and remote spots to build a dream on. Perhaps all such dreams can be built only so. Reading Karatanis account of ancient Ionia, one recalls the parallel dream of ancient Sparta, the militaristic state that so inspired authoritarians from Plato to Hitler. An isonomic Ionia is infinitely preferable to an authoritarian Sparta but seems of the same imaginative kind. We cant build back better from a place that didnt really exist. Certainly, from what little we do know, the Ionians seem not to have been egalitarian at all in the sense we mean and have gone far toward achievingthe aim of equality between the sexes, or among religious groups, or among ethnicities or sexualities. Yet the basic inquiry into the possibility of human relationships that Karatani undertakes is moving, even inspiring. Though he doesnt cite them, his Ionians most resemble the classic anarchists, of the Mikhail Bakunin or Emma Goldman kind: repudiating all power relations, ruler to ruled, in a way that shames more timid liberal imaginations.

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Cant We Come Up with Something Better Than Liberal Democracy? - The New Yorker

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Imagine living in a perfect world where people treat each other with kindness and every single space remains accessible to everyone? One can get a glimpse of this utopia through Nainas Inclusive Duniya, an Instagram-based comic that is created by Gurugram-based non-profit organisation The Sarvodya Collectivethey aim to raise awareness about persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities in India. Scroll through their page (@inclusiveduniya) and you will come across several posts featuring a five-year-old Naina who goes to an inclusive school, and talks about various developmental disabilitiessuch as cerebral palsy, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and the importance of acceptance in an effortless manner.

Founded by Gurugram-resident Pooja Sharma in January last year, Nainas Inclusive Duniya tries to bring issues around learning disabilities to the mainstream. All my life, I have seen how under-served this area [community of those with developmental disabilities]was. Amid the lockdown, with the learning lapses, I realised the impact on the community, shares Sharma who grew up with her brother who had an intellectual disability.

Vision for a better world

The stigma associated with disability is gradually being addressed and shattered. However, we still have a long way to go, with several lapses to be filled. In fact, when Sharma decided to direct attention towards development disability during the pandemic, she realised that several middle-aged professionals had little or no knowledge about the same. I realised there is a need to have an ongoing campaign to raise awareness about this community, shares the 42-year-old.

Through Nainas Inclusive Duniya, Sharma and her teaman illustrator and a writertry to endeavour to offer answers to the questions about developmental disabilities that they receive from people. The team picks one aspect of the disability and helps the audience understand how they can become an ally. Be it something as basic as what is autism, questions about sensory overload, or how to create a safe spacewe just want to show how, in little ways and without really spending much money, one can be a friend and an ally, explains Sharma.

By means of comics, the team is able to reach out to numerous people and, in the process, also talk about other concepts such as menstrual health, gender fluidity, etc. Our target audience is the entire world because we need to get these stories out there. Even though these topics are very difficult to deal with, we try to make them light and easy to communicate, says Arundhati Deshmukh (29), a Bhopal-based illustrator of the comic.

Taking conversations ahead

Along with the ongoing comic series, the team has also been organising sessions with students, teachers as well as parents to strike conversations about disability acceptance. We got great responses from students and parents alike. In order to scale the programme, I thought we could facilitate such conversations in groups to take the idea forward, shares Sharma. The organisation has conducted several such sessions across various states including Bhopal, Chennai, Bengaluru, etc.

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Reimagining an inclusive universe - The New Indian Express

The anti-Israel industry and anti-Zionists the world over are obsessed with nothing so much as South Africa. Their relentless invocation of that countrys now defunct system of racial segregationapartheidin their attacks on Israel has reached the point at which one often feels compelled to ask whether it might be more sensible to simply leave Israel aside and discuss South Africa. It is, after all, the only thing they seem to want to talk about.

I will leave aside the issue of the obvious inaccuracy of the apartheid libel, as many others have dealt with and discredited it at length. It is worth asking, however, why South Africa has become the object of such an obsession.

There are several reasons why, but the first and most obvious is that it is easy. For good reason, there now exists a global consensus that apartheid was a monstrous system that violated the most elementary human rights of black South Africans, and that it died a well-deserved death. In short, more or less everyone agrees that apartheid South Africa was an evil regime.

As such, the invocation of apartheid serves more or less the same purpose as the invocation of Nazism. It is simply another name for the devil, and it is the moral obligation of any decent person to strike down the devil. This relieves the anti-Israel industry of the need to delve into the moral ambiguities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It can simply invoke South Africa and be done with it. This is a lazy tactic but often a rhetorically effective one.

There is a darker motivation behind the exploitation of apartheid as a totem of evil, however. Put simply, apartheid South Africalike French Algeria or the Confederate States of Americais one of the few historical examples of a regime that was utterly destroyed with the general approval of the world. For those who want to see Israel destroyed, that global consensus is invaluable. In most cases, the desire to see a nation destroyed is considered monstrous, but if the equation to apartheid can be successfully made, this is turned on its head, and the desire to see a nation survive becomes monstrous.

The moral implications of this are enormous because it means that the apartheid libel has become, in effect, a warrant for genocide. It holds that the destruction of the Jewish nation would not be a horrific crime, but an actual positive good. As a result, genocidists can wrap themselves in the halo of moral rectitude. All sinsincluding terrorism and ethnic cleansingare absolved, and murder becomes Gods work.

There are also historical reasons behind the South Africa obsession, particularly in regard to anti-Israel leftists, because the end of apartheid was essentially the lefts last real political victory. For most of the past few decades, the left has won its confrontations with the right almost entirely in the realm of culture. In the world of practical politics, they have been consistently defeated.

Among other things, Soviet communism collapsed; former President Ronald Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher forged a neoliberal consensus across the West that still survives today; China abandoned Maoism in favor of authoritarian capitalism; Cuba remains a basket case; attempts at leftist revivals in countries like Venezuela proved disastrous; and even the 2008 financial crisis failed to bring the socialist left back to power. If the near-collapse of the global financial system could not bring about a left-wing revival and revolution, it is safe to say that nothing will. The left is not stupid, and they are well aware of this.

As such, to turn back to the last great victory in hopes of repeating it is probably inevitable. Hatred of Israel carries with it the possibility (among some, the surety) of returning to the glory days in which the global left could count itself a powerful and potent force. In other words, it gives the left hope, and at the moment, hope is desperately needed.

This is ironic, however, given that the lefts view of the end of apartheid is something of a fantasy. Yes, apartheid was a terrible and immoral system. Its a good thing that it died. But the lefts dream of what would replace it has proven to be precisely thata dream. South Africa has not become the multiracial and multicultural paradise the left envisioned. It has become just another country, with all the attendant problems and moral compromises inherent in practical, quotidian politics. For the left, to see its dreams of a paradisiacal post-apartheid South Africa smash against the wall of the real world must be a source of constant anguish.

Some other messianic fantasy, then, must be sought in its place, and for the true believers, this is the great hope of destroying Israel. Out of the ashes of the evil Zionist entity, they believe, a new utopia will emerge in the form of a liberated Palestine, in which all conflicts will be resolved and peace will spread inexorably across a violent and unstable region. The root cause of war and terror will be uprooted, historical justice will be done at last and the Palestinians, along with the rest of us, will finally be happy.

But not all of us would be happy. What the apartheid libel conceals with malice aforethought is that the Jews would not be happyand for very good reason. Apartheid fell because it was a terrible injustice to black South Africans. But the end of Israel would be a terrible injustice to the Jews. And this is the dark shadow of the apartheid libel: It seeks not to liberate, but to enslave; not to bring life, but to bring death.

We should remember, however, that fantasies of slavery and death are powerful, and we must not underestimate the enormous energies they can release. Our enemies may be driven by the most demonic of forces, but the devil has not inconsiderable power. Thus, to defeat the apartheid libel, it is not enough to simply refute or debunk it. We must also point out that it is an indefensible evil, the work of the devil, and ought to be treated accordingly.

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The Anti-Israel Industry's Obsession with South Africa - The Jewish Press - JewishPress.com

The movement to encourage more companies to make a long-term commitment to environmental and social goals stands at a crossroads. The direction taken could determine how companies and wider society evolve over the next 10 years.

As I laid out for a recent panel organised by the charity A Blueprint for Better Business, in one direction lies a path to an increasingly dystopian decade, as the idea persists that purpose is somehow a soft alternative to profitmaking.

In this vision, woke-washing by companies superficially committed to purpose-driven strategies launders the colour out of the idea. Environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment strategies become so blurred as to lose meaning. Big consultancies chase the purpose-branding opportunity and crush smaller non-profits, whose voices drown each other out or simply go unheard.

In the utopian outcome, positive change encourages fence-sitters to follow suit

As the good is sacrificed to the expedient, cynicism overwhelms the impulse to make change. Pandemic, global warming and war come to be seen as intractable problems, against which corporate purpose and company values are ineffective, or an outright distraction. Business leaders, under economic pressure, grab again at the pursuit of short-term profit, using staff as disposable mercenaries or pawns.

Then there is a utopian outcome, which becomes more likely as evidence of positive change at companies that have fully committed to a purpose-led approach encourages fence-sitters to follow suit. In this future, leaders recognise purpose as a virtue, not virtue-signalling. They see it as a prerequisite for attracting young talent. Companies reassert their original human centre, from the Latin cum panis, as places where companions break bread. Society and business prosper. The efficacy of purpose-led strategies is recognised in academic research and financial results, leading to eudaemonia the Aristotelian ideal, beloved of management thinker Charles Handy among others, of human flourishing and greater sustainability in its widest sense.

You may believe that we are further down one road or the other. If you are sceptical about corporate purpose, you may even think I have the utopian and dystopian labels the wrong way round. Either way, neither path will be straight. Companies, like societies, do not move in a predictable, linear way. They sometimes stumble, or reverse course.

Isaac Getz of ESCP Business School understands this. The French academics latest book, LEntreprise Altruiste, goes beyond purpose-led, conscious or inclusive capitalism, where companies balance purpose and profit. He and co-author Laurent Marbacher sought out altruistic enterprises that take unconditional care of staff, suppliers, customers and communities, and assume that financial success will follow.

Such companies were well placed when coronavirus hit in 2020, Getz and Marbacher wrote in an article for Strategy+Business journal: Sterimed, a French maker of sterile packaging, imported masks from China, selling them on at cost plus transport fees; MAIF, an insurance mutual refunded to customers the surplus accumulated during the first lockdown because of a drop in car accident claims.

Some traditional companies also found ways to help suppliers and customers. For Getz, though, the decisions by Sterimed, MAIF and others were not one-off acts of altruism but products of unconditionally caring cultures.

He is clear-eyed, though, about the likelihood of such radicalism quickly becoming mainstream. An earlier movement for liberated companies, which empower front-line staff to take decisions, took off in France 11 years ago, after Getz and others rallied like-minded leaders to spread the word. Companies such as tyremaker Michelin have tried rolling the management style out worldwide.

Businesses designed to create value for society are also good businesses that manage to sustain themselves during crises

Whether management change sticks, though, depends on whether the company has the right kind of leadership. And individual leaders change. When new chief executives are appointed, they often take the opportunity to roll back the radical changes their predecessors championed.

In a forthcoming study, Getz looked at 60 liberated companies, seven of which reverted to a more traditional hierarchy. Some saw performance suffer, although data are scarce. In other cases, liberated staff persuaded initially sceptical new bosses to continue the programme.

Sarah Gillard, chief executive of A Blueprint for Better Business, says that for purpose to become embedded, the assumption that people are only motivated by money, status and power must change. Leaders must recognise that businesses designed to create value for society are also good businesses that manage to sustain themselves during crises. In other words, it may be necessary for leaders to reframe purpose as an indispensable way of improving resilience, as altruistic enterprises did during the pandemic.

Utopia, though, is still a way off. Drawing a historical parallel, Getz says that in terms of adopting more radical management models, businesses are only at the beginning of the 19th century. Democracies are very fragile and the pressure is to get back not to a constitutional monarchy [but] to monarchy, period.

Andrew Hill is the FTs senior business writer

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Why the future of ESG is at a crossroads - Financial Times

As we head back to work after celebrating Labor Day, lets put in proper perspective the current predicament of Colorados workers. Americans have continued to set the international standard for work ethic and ingenuity rising from bed, kissing loved ones goodbye and punching the clock like we always have all while government actions and market reactions out of workers control have disrupted the very foundation upon which we all pursue the American Dream.

What a year its been for the family farmer on the Eastern Plains, the trucker in Walsenburg and the single parent who drives delivery at dinnertime for extra cash in Northglenn.

A year ago at this time, many everyday Coloradans of myriad demographic groups got their first taste of generational inflation once a fleeting far-away idea lost to Econ 101 textbooks until it smacked our wallets silly starting last autumn.

Due to unprecedented government spending and market intervention undertaken in an attempt to ease financial burdens and halt viral spread through the COVID-19 era, the cost of daily living skyrocketed.

It uprooted commonly-held notions of what it takes to financially make it in America.

As inflation has eaten into every household budget further and further, month after month, workers have felt firsthand what shortsighted monetary policy means for the creators of our country. Those, especially with lower incomes, have seen the curtain pulled back on the promise of the $15-an-hour minimum wage touted just a few years ago.

Rather than solving everyones problems and ushering in a utopia of decreased personal debt, homeownership and overall quality of life, market realities mangled by demand-side principles have manifested just the opposite as minimum wage soars beyond $17 per hour.

American workers have also had to wrestle with other workplace variables. How many average Joes and Jills ever uttered the term supply chain just three years ago?

But with a government keen on capitalizing on a new normal, workers in certain make-the-world-go-round trades such as janitorial work, bus driving and even lifeguarding have been stretched thin by the supply-chain woes all while many other able-bodied adults are jaded from joining the workforce.

Its created, on top of supply-chain choke points, a labor shortage not only for such service gigs as firefighters, police officers and teachers, but such jobs as delivery drivers in an increasingly online consumption world.

Many of these same blue-collar workers, particularly in Colorados cities, also have to be cautious of lawless elements out to harm them and their customers ask your local police department how many car thefts are of delivery drivers.

All thats to say, hats off to the workers out there who, like Americans always have, ground through one hurdle after another to continue to produce in our marketplace.

These are the people who, in spite of disheartening economic trends, subscribe to Elon Musks simple COVID-era notion, If you dont make stuff, there is no stuff.

Its these people, these workers these creators who with their ethic and ethos will help Colorado persevere through a recession and beyond.

The Gazette Editorial Board, Sept. 5

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(Opinion) Other Voices: Working Coloradans carry the weight - Greeley Tribune

These may be actors on the political fringe, and the tech-driven aspects of this terror campaign have sometimes been interpreted to minimize its real-world impact. But the narrative of LGBTQ rights being cover for child abuse is not just fodder for the far-right clout-chasers of social media like Raichik and Posobiec; it has been weaponized by the right against their opponents in elections from school boards to state legislatures. It has been amplified and legitimized by lawmakers like Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in August introduced a sweeping bill that would ban gender-affirming care, and by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose threats to ban gender-affirming care have prompted some hospitals in the state to end treatment for minors. And it has resulted in threats and acts of violence, scapegoating LGBTQ communities as corrupt and demonic foes.

Its possible, though, that months of these tactics have sharpened the response from LGBTQ communities and allies. After the board of the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District in Texas voted in August to prohibit discussion of what it defined as gender fluidity, essentially a Dont Say Trans ban, over 100 students walked out in one district school in protest. When an anti-LGBTQ rally was organized to protest a Planned Parenthood in Modesto, California, the handful of people who showed up were outnumbered by counterprotesters, including anti-fascists and abortion and LGBTQ rights defenders. And in the Dallas suburbs, at an end-of-summer, family-friendly drag brunch, when members of the Proud Boys and militia groups tried to intimidate people from attending, they were met by members of the Elm Fork John Brown Club, who showed up to provide armed security for the business and those attending the event, as Steven Monacelli reported, with performer Trisha Delisha thanking them for keeping us safe.

As much as this looks like a backlash, thats not all it is. The anti-LGBTQ right doesnt want to go back to some other time of idealized hetero-utopia. They are more simply satisfying their own desire to punish people, a desire that never changed even as the times did. They seek retribution against defenders of LGBTQ communities too. The need to interrupt this escalation by the right is urgent, more than it was in the Trump years when people may have been more attuned to such threats. It is clearer than ever that such threats cannot be met by appealing to courts to protect us. So while its true they are out there looking for a fight, fighting is what is still left.

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Libs of TikTok and the Rights Embrace of Anti-LGBTQ Violence - The New Republic