Category Archives: Wage Slavery

The muse for this story is a humble piece of stone, no more than an inch square. Sometime in the mid-19th century, it had been fashioned into a gunflintan object that, when triggered to strike a piece of steel, could spark a small explosion of black powder and propel a lead ball from the muzzle of a gun with mortal velocity.

Archaeologists often come across gunflints. Thats because during the 19th century, firearms were considered mundane items, owned by rich and poor alike. Gunflints, like shell casings now, were their disposable remnants.

But this gunflint is special.

In 2008, my students and I, working with nearby residents, unearthed this unassuming little artifact during an archaeological dig in a little Pennsylvania village known as Christiana. We found it located in what today is a nondescript corn field, where a small stone house once stood.

For a few hours in 1851, that modest residence served as a flashpoint in Americas struggle over slavery. There, an African American tenant farmer named William Parker led a skirmish that became a crucial flareup in the nations long-smoldering conflict over slavery.

Its been 160 years since the uprising, which for most of its history was known as the Christiana Riot, but is now more often referred to as the Christiana Resistance, Christiana Tragedy, or Christiana Incident. In taking up arms, Parker and the small band of men and women he led proved that African Americans were willing to fight for their liberation and challenge the federal governments position on slavery. Finding a broken and discarded flint offers a tangible piece of evidence of their struggle, evoking memories of a time when the end of slavery was still but a hope, and the guarantee of individual liberty for all people merely a dream.

The events at Christiana were a consequence of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, federal legislation passed in the wake of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. California, a key part of territory seized by the U.S. following that conflict, had rejected slavery in its constitutional convention in 1849 and sought entry to the Union as a free state. To placate white Southerners who wanted to establish a slave state in Southern California, Congress forged the Compromise of 1850. The Fugitive Slave Act, its cornerstone legislation, forced all citizens to assist in the capture of anyone accused of being a fugitive in any state or territory. A person could be arrested merely on the strength of a signed affidavit and could not even testify in their own defense. Any person found guilty of harboring or supporting an accused fugitive could be imprisoned for up to six months and fined $1,000, nearly 100 times the average monthly wage of a Pennsylvania farm hand in 1850.

In some places, alarmed citizens began pushing back against what they perceived to be an overreach of federal power. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, however, the new law began fanning racial tension. Many whites in the area resented the movement of formerly enslaved people across the southern border, perceiving it as an invasion of destitute illegals that would depress wages in factory and field. Others were simply negro haters, as William Parker himself put it, all too happy to assist federal agents in sending African Americans back across the border. Some unscrupulous Pennsylvanians profited from illegally trafficking free African American men, women, and children south into slavery. A new and insidious slave trade blossomed in the border states. The price of an enslaved person in nearby Maryland, for instance, jumped an estimated 35 percent following the passage of the law, which made kidnapping free people increasingly profitable and common. One infamous Philadelphia kidnapper named George Alberti was indicted twice for selling free people into slavery, and eventually admitted to kidnapping some 100 people over the course of his notorious career. The governor of Pennsylvania would pardon Alberti after he served less than a year of a 10-year sentence for kidnapping an infant.

With white Pennsylvania ambivalent at best about the fate of African Americans, it wasnt shocking that someone decided to tell Maryland farmer Edward Gorsuch that two men who had escaped from his land two years before, Samuel Thompson and Joshua Kite, were hiding in William Parkers rented house near Christiana.

William Parker, a 30-year-old tenant farmer born in Maryland, had escaped slavery just a few years prior, and had found refuge, if not full acceptance, in this quiet corner of Pennsylvania. Despite encountering sympathy from the Quaker community, Parker still feared for his safety. He joined other African Americans in the area to form mutual aid societies to defend against kidnapping, and established networks of lookouts to keep track of the movements of known kidnappers and their allies. One such network tipped off Parker that Gorsuch and a small band of relatives and supporters, accompanied by a notorious Philadelphia constable named Henry Kline who had been deputized as a U.S. marshal for the occasion, were hunting for Thompson and Kite. The black community of Christiana was on high alert.

Gorsuchs armed posse crept through the rising mist at dawn on the morning of September 11, 1851, as Parker and his men waited at the house. Informed that kidnappers were about, but not knowing where they would strike, black neighbors for several miles around nervously waited for a distress signal calling out for help against the intruders.

Not knowing they had lost the element of surprise, Gorsuch and Kline attempted to storm the Parkers small stone house, only to be driven back down a narrow, winding stairway by armed defenders. Next they tried to reason with Parker, who, barricaded in on the second floor, spoke for the group. Parker refused to acknowledge Klines right to apprehend the men, dismissing his federal warrant as a meaningless piece of paper. As tensions mounted, Eliza Parker, Williams wife, took up a trumpet-like horn, and blasted a note out of an upstairs window. Startled by the piercing sound, the Gorsuch party opened fire at the window, hoping either to incapacitate Eliza with a bullet wound or frighten her into silence. Despite the danger, she continued sounding the alarm, which reportedly could be heard for several miles around.

Within half an hour, at least two dozen African American men and women, armed with pistols, shotguns, corn cutters and scythes, arrived to assist the Parkers. Several white Quaker neighbors also appeared at the scene, hoping to prevent a violent confrontation. Favored now by the strength of numbers, Parker, Kite, and Thompson emerged from the house to convince Gorsuch and Kline to withdraw. Kline, recognizing the futility of the situation, quickly abandoned his comrades and retreated. But an enraged Gorsuch confronted Thompsonwho struck Gorsuch over the head with the butt of his gun. Shots rang out. Within minutes, Gorsuch lay dead on the ground, his body riddled with bullets and lacerated by corn knives. His posse did their best to flee. Son Dickinson Gorsuch had taken a shotgun blast to the chest at close range, barely had the strength to crawl from the scene, and was coughing up blood. Thomas Pearce, a nephew, was shot at least five times. Joshua Gorsuch, an aging cousin, had been beaten on the head, and stumbled away, dazed. Gorsuchs body was carried to a local tavern, where it became the object of a coroners inquest. Despite their serious wounds, the rest of his party survived.

Retribution was swift. In the days that followed, every black man in the environs of Christiana was arrested on treason charges, as were the three white bystanders who had tried to convince Gorsuch to withdraw. The subsequent treason trial of Castner Hanway, one of the white bystanders, resulted in an acquittal. Despite the fury of both pro-slavery and compromise-favoring politicians, the prosecution, led by U.S. Attorney John Ashmead, moved to dismiss all charges against the other defendants, who were soon released. No one was ever arrested or tried on murder charges for the death of Edward Gorsuch, including the known principles at the Parker HouseKite, Thompson, Parker, Eliza and their familywho fled north to Canada and remained free men.

Over time, the black community of Lancaster County grew to remember the Christiana Riot as a tragic victory. The events significance was more complicated for the white community. In the short term, many Lancastrians followed the pro-slavery lead of James Buchanan, who lived in the community and was elected U.S. president in 1856. Thaddeus Stevens, an abolitionist politician who represented Lancaster in the U.S. House of Representatives and had assisted in the defense of the accused, lost his seat to a member of his own Whig party in 1852, spurned by constituents who could not tolerate his liberal views on racial justice. But after Buchanans election, Stevens was soon buoyed by growing anti-slavery sentiment and returned to Congress, and with the outbreak of the Civil War, Lancastrians both black and white rallied fully to the Union cause.

The Parker House, abandoned after the family fled for Canada, became a place of pilgrimage after the Union victory. Curious visitors from around the region sought out the abandoned Riot House and took pieces of it away with them as souvenirs. By the late 1890s the farmer who owned the land perceived the Parker House as a dangerous nuisance, and had it knocked down and plowed over. In the years to come, it became hidden in time, presenting as nothing more than a scatter of stone and debris in an otherwise unremarkable field.

That was how we found it when we visited the cornfield at the invitation of a group of community volunteers who were interested in rebuilding the house as a memorial to William Parkers struggle. Black and white descendants of the participants in the uprising joined us at the excavation, spellbound when we uncovered the first fragment of foundation wall, a remnant of a place that resonated with the power of ancestors who had risked their lives to prevent neighbors from being kidnapped into slavery.

Archaeologists know that communities create and preserve deep knowledge of their local history. Often, stories of the past help communities create an identity of which they can be proud. This was certainly the case at Christiana.

We can say with some confidence that the small, square piece of stone recovered during the excavation is an artifact of the famous conflict. The gunflint was discovered nestled into the cellar stairs, right below the window where Eliza Parker sounded her alarm. We know that Gorsuchs men fired at her from virtually this same spot, and that men in the house returned fire. By 1851, flintlocks were old-fashioned weapons, widely replaced by more modern and efficient firearms, but we know from records of the treason trial that the weapons William Parker and his associates wielded were old muskets. That suggests the flint we found may have fallen from one of their outdated guns.

The artifact gives us pause. The gunflint reminds us of the progress we have made in overcoming racial injustice in the United States, but also that the work to reconcile with the violent legacies of slavery is far from over. It reminds us that the cost of liberty is often steep, and that the events that have secured that liberty are often quickly forgotten. American stories like this one lie everywhere around us. They wait, mute, to be reconsidered, pointing to the past, and prodding us to tackle what yet is left to do.

James Delle is an archaeologist at Millersville University, in Millersville, Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom.

This story was originally published on Zocalo Public Square.

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In 1851, a Maryland Farmer Tried to Kidnap Free Blacks in Pennsylvania. He Wasn't Expecting the Neighborhood to Fight Back - Smithsonian.com

The New York Times' 1619 Project is forcing a rethinking of accepted U.S. history, placing the experience of slavery at the center of our story as a country. Here, a diagram of a slave ship shows the confined torture experienced by Africans on the Middle Passage, overlain by the flag of 1776. | Graphics public domain / Illustration PW

For generations, American schoolchildren have been taught tales of the heroic revolutionaries of 1776. The Founding Fathers, motivated by the ideals of freedom and independence, stood up to British colonialism and established a system premised on the principle that all men are created equal. The 1619 Project, initiated by the New York Times Magazine last August, is challenging this traditional origin story.

Instead of 1776, the projects contributors argue we must look to 1619 to really understand the history of the United States. Thats the year 20 African slaves were brought ashore in Virginia, initiating centuries of forced labor, oppression, and racism for Black people on this continent.

The project, which was launched and anchored by Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, upends the longstanding narrative that has portrayed slavery and the socioeconomic oppression and exploitation of Black people as merely regrettable episodes in an otherwise positive story of progress.

It consists of a series of essays, articles, and podcasts on a range of topicsfrom the myths surrounding U.S. independence and the slave plantation roots of modern American capitalism to theories about pseudo-scientific racial differences that still infect medical practice today and how the legacy of segregation continues to clog the streets of our cities with traffic jams, and more.

The common thread running through the contributions, which by design are written mostly by African Americans, is that they each place the Black experienceparticularly of slaveryas the core around which the story of the United States really unfolded. As the projects introduction states, No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

Since its launch in August, the project has set off a tidal wave of public discussion and debate, forcing millions to reconsider what they thought they knew about American history. With educational materials based on the essays of the 1619 Project being prepared and distributed to schools for use in their K-12 curricula, there is the potential that it could radically transform the way that the pastand presentis taught and understood in this country. Washington, D.C., Chicago, Newark, N.J., Brooklyn, and Buffalo, N.Y., are among the districts that have already signed on.

Many educators, journalists, and public figures have praised the project and its authors for prompting a mass re-thinking of not just the events of old, but the racial injustices of today, such as mass incarceration, unequal prosecution rates, poverty, health discrimination, and the still widening wealth and wage gap.

But the 1619 Project has not been without its detractors. From conservative quarters came charges that Hannah-Jones and others were out to delegitimize America, as argued by Benjamin Weingarten of the The Federalist magazine. The Wall Street Journal published an essay by conservative Black commentator Robert Woodson that claimed the Times series actually hurt Blacks because it wallows in victimhood and ignores success. A group of five white historians wrote a joint letter to the Times complaining about what they portrayed as an attempt to offer a new version of American history in which slavery and white supremacy become the dominant organizing themes.

The latter have been joined and supported by writers at an outfit that calls itself the World Socialist Web Site, an ultra-left page that has long peddled in sectarianism and proclaims itself the organ of the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International. The WSWS, employing a crude, pseudo-Marxist lens, argues that the 1619 Project is a racialist morality tale that leaves out the history of the working class.

From this class reductionist viewpoint, to place the experience of slavery at the center of U.S. history amounts to toxic identity politics, an unwitting advocacy of race war, and a distraction from the struggle of wage labor against capital. Minimized to the point of non-existence are any notions of multiple layers and forms of exploitation beyond (and in conjunction with) the labor-capital relation. No attention is given to the concept of super-exploitation that has been pioneered by other, less dogmatic, Marxists.

Cynically, the whole project is denounced as one component of a deliberate effort by the Democratic Party to inject racial politics into the heart of the 2020 elections and foment divisions among the working class. In this shallow and absurd analysis, the viewpoints of 1619 Project contributors are even said to bear a disturbing resemblance to the race-based world view of the Nazis.

Conservative ideologues, establishment historians, and ultra-left sectariansit seems criticism of the 1619 Project has made for some strange bedfellows. Theyve coalesced to trash the project as a whole, but one statement by reporter Hannah-Jones seemed to galvanize all of them. In the introductory Times essay, she wrote:

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.

For all the critics, challenging the accepted notion of why the American Revolution happenedand to argue that preserving slavery was a key factor for the establishment of the United Stateswas too much.

But one radical historian saw it coming. Dr. Gerald Horne says he was unsurprised that the Wall Street Journal, certain Ivy League scholars, and certain ultra-leftists seemingly burst a blood vessel in their brains when the 1619 Project was unveiled.Horne is the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

He says the re-examination of the American Revolution is part of a trend of second looks being given to past social transformations, starting with the Russian Revolution of just over a century ago.

It was inevitable, Horne says, that the sharp reappraisals of revolutionary processes, most notably in the USA and focusing particularly on October 1917, would lead to a reappraisal of 1776.

With a marked increase in the oppression of a range of peoples of color in the Western Hemisphere in the aftermath of the U.S. break from Britain, Horne says its difficult not to question the motivations of the founders of the new country. The dispossession of indigenes and the enslavement of Africans increased after the formation of the USA, he points out. Indeed, as an example, Horne draws attention to the fact that as early as the 1790s the U.S. had replaced Spain as the major carrier of enslaved labor to Cuba. Within 50 years, it was ditto for the largest market [for slave labor] of all:Brazil.

In fact, Horne has for some time been advocating a re-appraisal of the American Revolution not too dissimilar from that now being pursued by the 1619 Project. In one of his books published a few years ago, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, Horne makes the argument that in the years before the Declaration of Independence, Americas founders feared the clock was already ticking for slavery. Talk of abolition was advancing rapidly among policymakers in London, the imperial capital, but the even greater threat to the slaveholding colonial ruling elite was the danger of slave rebellion. It had already happened elsewhere in North America and the Caribbean.

Horne says that the widely feared possibility of a revolt by African slaves, coupled with external invasion, was the primary motivation for the colonial desire to break from Britain. Thus, in his viewpoint, 1776 amounted to a counter-revolution to preserve the right to enslave others.

If we want to understand how that conservative impulse to save slavery affects U.S. society today, Horne convincingly argues that we only need look at the legacy of white supremacy and anti-black racism that still persistson the job, in the courts, in the jails, in the schools, at the cashiers desk, on the streets, and everywhere else.

The debate over the nature of 1776 is thus not simply a matter of historians squabbling over what motivated George Washington or Thomas Jefferson to start a new country. It is a struggle to comprehendand changethe present by understanding how our society today is a product of those events and struggles of the past.

The 1619 Project is not just a story of how slavery shaped America; it is also the story of how the resistance and fights for liberation by Black Americans helped push the whole of U.S. society down freedom road. Reconstruction; fighting for desegregation in the armed forces, schools, businesses, and trade unions of the nation; the victories of the Civil Rights Movement, the protection of voting rightsjust a few moments among many.

The truth is, Hannah-Jones wrote, that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. The Founding Fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, she says, but black people did.

This key takeaway from the 1619 Projectthat the Black freedom struggle has been a driving force for the expansion of U.S. democracyis the one that its critics cannot accept. The reaction of the conservative guardians of the status quo is predictable. Any suggestion that there is something illegitimate about the prevailing capitalist and racist power structures is beyond the pale for them.

The attacks of the ultra-left writers of the World Socialist Web Site, formulated on the grounds of a faulty and narrow version of Marxism, are perhaps more regrettableespecially because they distort an analytical approach that holds the potential for better understanding and changing the world in which we live. The legacy of Black advocates of socialism whose work was characterized by an understanding of how the dynamics of race oppression were central to the functioning of capitalismfigures like W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Claudia Jones, William L. Patterson, Angela Davis, and many moreis lost or twisted in these sectarian screeds.

Its indeed true that the 1619 Project is not a fully formed socialist analysis of U.S. history or the political economy of chattel slavery. The projects value is found in the way it has forcefully reminded millions of Americans of (or, more likely, introduced many of us to) the reality that the past we share is not necessarily what we thought it was.

It is time to stop hiding from our sins and confront them, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote. And then in confronting them, it is time to make them right. The new understanding of our story as a country being pushed along by the Times series will now become a shaper of future struggles and of the history that is yet to be written.

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Rewriting the United States' past (and future): The 1619 Project and its critics - People's World

For years, people of African descent have been discriminated against and barred from jobs, schools, beauty pageants, modeling even from working in the army simply for how they choose to style their hair. Just think about that for a second. If you havent experienced it yourself, imagine losing a job, not being offered a job, or getting kicked out of school for wearing the hair that naturally grows from your scalp? Natural hair and natural hairstyles like locks, twists, or braids in other worse, black hairstyles have been considered unprofessional for years. This is why states like California, New York, and New Jersey have passed hair bans protecting the black community from hair discrimination and it looks like Baltimore might be next.

The city of Baltimore is around 63% African American and yet hair discrimination is still a norm. For many that discrimination looks like being pressured to straighten their hair which often means chemically relaxing in order to conform to more European standards of beauty, which is not only problematic on a number of levels but requires money and maintenance.

We might have made a lot of progress when it comes to embracing natural hair but the discrimination is still very much an issue. Just this past October, an 8-year-old black girl from Jackson, Michigan was forbidden from taking part in her school picture for having extensions in her hair. Lets not forget about the teenage black wrestler from New Jersey who was forced right on the spot by a white referee to either have his dreadlocks cut right there and then or forfeit his match. Gabrielle Union was even reportedly fired from NBC for being too vocal about the work environment but also because her hairstyles were deemed too black.

But like California, New York, and New Jersey, it appears that Baltimore is the next to take action. Baltimores Office of Civil Rights and Wage Enforcement is currently collecting data on the hair-related discrimination complaints the city has been receiving in the past decade.

Once its codified into law, people will be better informed and start adjusting the cultural norms, Director of Baltimores Office of Civil Rights and Wage Enforcement, Darnell Ingram told NBC News. Will it end it full stop? Thatll take some time.

Just last month, lawmakers in Montgomery County passed legislation that prohibits discrimination against natural hairstyles, including braids, locks, Afros, curls, and twists. In fact, discrimination against these hairstyles can be fined up to $5,000 and upwards for violating the law. The bill would also add hair texture and style to the citys hair ban and would apply to everything from schools, workplaces, and even housing.

Black hair discrimination has been going on for centuries and dates back to slavery. Black people have been dealing with discrimination and various forms of microaggressions associated with the color of their skin, their hair and for just being black for as long as theyve been in the Americas and its toxic and harmful on so many levels. I cant wait for the day that the hair ban is passed in every single state in this country! Everyone deserves to be treated with kindness, respect, and basic human decency regardless of the color of their skin, the texture of their hair, or how they choose to wear their hair.

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Baltimore Is the Latest to Look to Ban Hair Discrimination and its Very Necessary - hiplatina.com

Its true, there have been happier new years. We are just two weeks into the new decade and the world has already witnessed climate emergencies in Australia and Indonesia where wildfires and floods have destroyed lives and livelihoods. Weve watched in horror as the threat of conflict between Iran and the United States threatens to engulf the wider region, while mourning the 176 people killed in the Tehran plane crash. And in Kenya, Somalia, Burkina Faso and Nigeria scores of lives have been devastated in terror attacks.

Workers and their communities are on the frontlines of these crises. As we plan for 2020 its important to look at what we have learned from 2019, and to see where we can channel the despair and anger felt in many parts of the world into concrete steps to change the world for the better. Unions have been demanding this change and we are proud of our union members on the frontlines battling for peace, democracy and a new social contract in the face of increasing authoritarianism, corporate power, inequality and the climate crisis.

But even as we face the challenges of the coming year, including new technologies and the future of work, we must celebrate some the victories in which workers and their unions played a pivotal role:

Lula is now free after 580 days in prison. Now we will fight with Brazilian trade unions to clear the name of the former Brazilian president. Indeed, from Fiji to Zimbabwe global solidarity has helped free a number of trade union leaders imprisoned around the world, although many of our comrades, like Erlan Baltabay of the Independent Oil and Energy Workers Union in Kazakhstan, remain behind bars.

Following years of campaigning and ahead of the 2022 World Cup, Qatar will abolish its kafala system of slavery. Migrant workers will no longer be tied to the sponsorship of their employers, and the Gulf state has also announced plans to introduce a minimum wage a first in the region.

The Global Centre for Sports and Human Rights has been established and is working with all stakeholders to work for human and labour rights in all major sporting events.

After years of worker abuse and the ruthless treatment of workers who attempt to organise themselves in the face of dismissals, lock-outs and the threat of deportation for migrant workers, Samsung has publicly declared a commitment to freedom of association.

The historic Convention on the Elimination of Violence and Harassment (C190) was negotiated and adopted at the Centenary Conference of the International Labour Organization (ILO). The world now has a comprehensive new standard to which governments and employers around the world can be held accountable for sexual harassment and violence in the world of work. Now we will focus our efforts on campaigning for its ratification.

The ILO Centenary Declaration on the Future of Work was also negotiated at the ILO Conference in June 2019. if implemented, it will go a long way to securing a New Social Contract with a labour protection floor and social protection for all workers, just transition for climate action and technological changes, a transformative agenda for women and much more. A New Social Contract will be a major ambition for this year in every country and as a basis for multilateralism which puts people and the planet before profit.

The ILO Committee on Application of Standards gave us leverage in some of the countries with the worst violations of rights: the Committee requested Algeria to immediately register independent trade unions and allow them to operate without exposing workers to retaliation. The Philippines was also asked to undertake full investigations into the violence and murders against activists and to punish perpetrators to end impunity in the country. We will continue to pursue social justice in these nations.

Minimum wages have been significantly increased in Nigeria, Ghana, Malaysia, Senegal, Bulgaria and El Salvador, and minimum wages have been established in South Africa with the promise of such in Ethiopia, along with a commitment to a minimum wage directive in Europe.

At the age of 34, Sanna Marin became the worlds youngest serving prime minister after a two-week nationwide strike led by postal workers brought down the government Antti Rinne. Marins coalition government was formed with women at the head of all five parties, and she is already discussing plans to introduce a four-day work week.

The Time for 8 campaign has successfully raised awareness about the importance of holding governments to account for realising the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 8 which focuses on decent work and economic growth.

43 countries have now ratified the ILO Protocol on Forced Labour which aims to eradicate all forms of modern slavery.

And, following the United Nations Secretary-Generals Climate Summit in September, 46 countries have signed up to the Climate Action for Jobs initiative a roadmap to boost climate action with just transition plans, spearheaded by the ILO.

As we look to the next decade, we certainly have our work cut out. We have just 10 years to stabilise the planet for our own survival. We know that the pathway to high ambition is just transition and trade unions can take credit for the broad recognition of this demand. Now the challenge is to make it universal in every sector with the social dialogue structures to make it possible. It is vital that governments raise ambition with national development plans that ensure just transition and rise above corporate interests that will continue to put the planet at risk.

As it has been already emphasised, a New Social Contract is non-negotiable, and the implementation of the ILO Centenary Declaration negotiated last year would go a long way to make this possible. A labour protection floor including just wages for all workers with universal social protection, a transformative agenda for women, just transition and vital public services would help us realise this as a basis for achieving SDG 8. We will hold governments to account for these measures and the promised binding UN treaty on business and human rights.

And we need to see reform of our democracies to ensure that all elected governments are accountable for the rights and the living standards of people as well as protection for the environment that we live in. With so much disaffection and apathy towards politics in all corners of the world, we need to see the birth of a living democracy that engages people beyond the ballot box. And most importantly, governments must put the values of peace and human rights above aggression and threats of war.

And so, the struggle continues. The ITUC thanks you for your courageous efforts in 2019 and stands with you in solidarity as we face the struggles of 2020 together.

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Let's remember our union wins as we gear up in 2020 for the fight of our lives - Equal Times

On winter nights, young Josie Kalipeni could be found assembling puzzles of the Wonders of the World. Kalipeni always had a knack for seeing the bigger picture. With it, she brings an aptitude for finding and connecting disparate parts to make those visions real.

Today, the 38-year-old Malawian immigrant is piecing together an ambitious American ideal thats not yet entered the policy mainstream: universal family care.

Kalipeni is director of policy and federal affairs for Caring Across Generations, a national campaign reimagining the long-term care system thats an offshoot of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Jobs With Justice. Universal care accounts would function like a multipurpose Social Security insurance fund: One pays directly into it over a lifetime ideally, in Kalipenis mind, with the government matching contributions and could draw from it to pay for child care, take time off work to care for ill parents or pay a home health care worker to support a relative with disabilities.

[Caregivers] dont want to have to choose between a paycheck and caring for a loved one.

Josie Kalipeni

Universal family care is designed to address pain points of a sandwich generation under ballooning pressure: those caring for an aging parent, raising their children and working full time. The care burden weighs heavier on working women of color in the U.S., whove been caregivers by cultural tradition and through the infrastructure of slavery, while facing an acute wage gap and less intergenerational wealth. But its a problem that touches all demographics: An estimated 41 million people gave 34 billion hours of unpaid care to adult loved ones in 2017, spending roughly $7,000 on caregiving costs like transportation and home modifications, according to recent AARP research. Family caregivers make it very clear that they dont want to have to choose between a paycheck and caring for a loved one, says Kalipeni. But they must navigate a fragmented safety net of programs, like parental leave or medical leave, depending on what their state or employer offers.

Paid family and medical leave are generating bipartisan support, while proposals deemed more radical like Universal Basic Income or Medicare for All have oxygen on the Democratic campaign trail. In her role, Kalipeni writes draft bills for Congress and state legislatures Hawaii and Washington have already implemented programs while cultivating allies for the cause. Its a steep climb, but Kalipeni is invigorated by the question shes chosen to chase: How would we design long-term care if we were starting from scratch?

Her answers are shaped by life experience. Kalipenis family came to America when she was 8, settling in Illinois. Josie was a natural caretaker as the oldest of six, says her mother, Fattima Kalipeni, who has worked as a domestic worker and nurse. (Kalipenis father worked in academia.) Both parents put in long hours and Josie was accustomed to pulling people together, Fattima says. Her favorite book was about a boy in Malawi who built a car out of scrap metal, and she begged for puzzles at garage sales she always wanted to be a connector.

Holding the wealth of America [and] at the same time holding the deep poverty of Malawi caused and causes a constant rustle in me, Kalipeni says. She watched as relatives in both countries faced similar challenges to sustain their families, find employment and create dignified lives. The University of Illinois graduate wasted no time getting into rooms where she could unpack these questions: Kalipeni supported hard-to-adopt youth in the foster care system during her first internship, organized for an Illinois health care campaign and worked for the D.C.-based advocacy organization, Families USA. After the Affordable Care Acts Medicaid expansion started to roll out across the country, she sought the next burgeoning care issue.

And she watches her work spill over into her own future. Fattima cares for Kalipenis father in his declining health, but when she fell ill, the six siblings scrambled to patch together a care schedule. And ever since a surgery left Kalipeni bedridden for three months, she has worried about who will care for her as she ages, as a single woman without children.

She isnt alone in these worries. Family caregivers must sacrifice their jobs, their time or both trade-offs that people universally experience but are socialized to internalize on their own with shame, says Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of the advocacy organization Family Values @ Work. The reality is that this is a systemic failure, not a personal failure, Chun-Hoon says. And we can solve for this.

Its easy to envision a political constituency given high voter turnout among women of color and baby boomers, but a large new government benefit would face opposition from Republicans and has not gotten attention amid the fierce debate over Medicare for All in the Democratic presidential primary. The states offer possible test cases, but logistical questions linger.Hawaii gives family caregivers working at least 30 hours a week outside the home up to $70 per day in benefits through revenue in the states general fund. A payroll tax funds Washingtons Long-Term Care Trust Act, which will provide a lifetime benefit of $36,500 adjusted for inflation. Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan are exploring different public and private plans, while a group in California might pursue a ballot initiative.

Were having the conversations in Congress now to really socialize this idea, says Kalipeni. Something that would have taken 20 years to have credibility has a much more truncated [timeline].

And she thinks her charge suitsthis dynamic political moment:People are excited about big ideas.

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Universal Family Care: Behind the Latest 'For All' Designed to Rethink Aging - OZY

Labour rights violations in ASEAN are among the negative effects of an increase in production due to the United States (US)-China trade war which has resulted in a shift of some production from China to this part of the world. While the region is embarking on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, numerous industries in ASEAN still rely on labour-intensive factories. Unable or unwilling to invest in technological advances that would automate production and ease workloads, many factories across Southeast Asia are filled with migrant workers who have appeared in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Featuring more prominently in the headlines though is the US-China trade war which has seen the US and China impose tariffs on each others goods worth US$360 billion in 2018, slowing global growth and creating uncertainty in markets worldwide.

China is officially looking to move away from low-level manufacturing towards innovation and consumption, and while the worlds second largest economy will retain much of its manufacturing footprint in the coming years, brands will continue to diversify their supply chains and seek sourcing and production in new (cheaper) markets.

Shifting production

Supply chain auditing firm QIMA conducted a year end survey of more than 100 businesses across the globe last year. They found as many as three-quarter of them had already started sourcing suppliers in new countries as a result of tariff increases many citing ASEAN countries as alternative markets. Most companies already sourced ASEAN countries in the textile and apparel industry, but rising tariffs have accelerated this process as the uncertainty is making ASEAN a more attractive destination.

However, ASEAN is also an attractive destination for migrant workers - the influx has led to a wide range of labour rights violations being documented with numerous stories of overworked workers being underpaid and mistreated. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), among the most common labour rights violations include unsafe workplaces, excessive working hours, lack of overtime pay, wage theft and lack of freedom of association.

Speaking exclusively to The ASEAN Post, QIMAs CEO and founder Sbastien Breteau said that there has been an increase in workers rights violations in ASEAN countries that have seen shifts in production from China.

In many of the countries that employ migrant labour, such as Malaysia and Thailand, an uptick in instances of modern slavery that coincides with the sourcing shift has been observed, said Breteau. Generally speaking, most of the factories in ASEAN countries score lower in ethical compliance than those in China and have suffered more cases of critical non-compliance. As the number of audits being performed increases in the region, the issue is being amplified, he added.

It is important to note that ethical compliance issues were prevalent in ASEAN even before the shift and many of the recent high-profile modern slavery cases such as in Top Glove (Malaysia) and Bangkok Rubber (Thailand) were identified before the trade war. Breteau noted that factory compliance remains an issue across markets. Vietnam and Indonesia, for example, saw their average factory scores deteriorate by -5.1 percent and -3.2 percent year-on-year, respectively according to QIMAs Q1 2019 data.

With key consumer markets such as the US, UK, Australia and the Netherlands proactively passing legislation which holds companies accountable for cases of modern slavery within their supply chain, ASEAN will have to adjust accordingly to ensure their industries maintain ethical production standards and eliminate labour rights violations.

While the increase in Western buyers switching to new sourcing countries will have a positive impact on workers rights in the long term, in the short term, the shift does have some negative implications as rapid growth often does.

If you look back at China 20 years ago in regard to workers rights, you saw similar issues to what you are seeing in ASEAN. Thanks to the pressure to meet global trade requirements, working conditions in China have improved dramatically and we expect to see similar improvement in ASEAN countries over time, said Breteau.

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Labour rights abuse on the rise - The ASEAN Post

New Jersey mom of two Amanda was looking for a child care solution when she settled on hiring an au pair. An Italian-American who studied abroad in Italy, Amanda selected a woman from Milan as her first au pair in hopes of introducing Italian culture to her children.

Amanda says it was a great decision. Her au pair arrived with limited English skills but quickly picked up the language through daily interactions and immersion in an English-speaking culture. She watched Amandas kids, driving them to and from school, and performed light housekeeping tasks. After 12 months with her, Amanda says she feels like the Milanese woman will be part of their family forever.

Au pairs can seem like an elegant solution to the thorny problem of child care and often times they are. The cost of an au pair is relatively low: the minimum stipend is just under $200 a week, a bargain compared to the high cost of a full-time nanny or even most major metro area daycares. An au pair in America lives with the family, meaning theyre available in the off-hours when parents need the help most. Families hosting au pairs are encouraged to include them in activities. Its defined as a cultural exchange, not a job, so it seems less like childcare and more like having a cousin on an extended visit from overseas helping out with your kids.

But as with everything that seems too good to be true, issues can arise with au pairs. News reports and nonprofit investigations that quote au pairs comparing their treatment to slavery drain a lot of warmth and fuzziness out of the job description. In 2013, Bernie Sanders denounced the au pair program as a scam. Following a 2014 class action lawsuit from au pairs alleging wage theft, the Washington Post reported on an au pair whose host family forced her to work more than 60 hours a week. A 2017 Politico investigation found that host families refused to buy their au pairs staple foods like bread and that au pairs complaints routinely disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole. Shortchanged, a 2018 report authored by American Universitys International Human Rights Law Clinic and immigration and labor rights groups, found that structural deficiencies in the au pair program foster labor rights abuses.

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Not stressful at all. We make the best of it

Sometimes they are, sometimes they arent. Depends on the circumstance.

Extremely stressful. Its hard to entertain them

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Most recently, in December 2019, a federal court ruled that Massachusetts labor laws protect au pairs. With the states $11 hourly minimum wage, host families had to pay about $17,000 more a year than before. Many opted to withdraw from the program.

Au pair supporters call the criticism overblown, saying it unfairly tarnishes a beneficial program. But civil rights advocates say the system can make even well-meaning families unwitting exploiters of vulnerable workers.

I tried to be clear that theyre here to do a job but also going to be part of our family and enjoy life and I want you to find that balance, Amanda says. Were very humane with au pairs. Other moms asked me if I paid our au pair to do more hours than the 45. I said absolutely not. Thats not part of the program. Thats not how it works.

The United States au pair program was founded in 1986 as a cultural exchange program intended to promote diplomacy and friendly international relations. Because au pairs are classified as cultural exchanges, they fall under the State Departments J-1 Visa program. While the program issues hundreds of thousands of visas to temporary foreign workers each year, it only has 30 employees far too few, critics say, to oversee the 18,000 people who travel to America each year to work as au pairs. Despite the general familiarity of the concept, the au pair programs relatively small in scale: the number of au pairs in America never exceed 20,000 and is largely clustered in New York, California, New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts.

Author and consultant Celia Harquail ran the blog and online resource Au Pair Mom for more than 10 years until stepping away from in October, 2019. Through the site, she connected with au pair host families and potential host families from across the country.

I say as a person who had 11 over the course of my kids childhood, having an Au pair can be really fun and joyful, she says.

Harquail says its gratifying to see au pairs learn about America through cultural immersion. We had these young adult women coming into our family with great enthusiasm about being in the United States and great excitement about learning English, she says.

According to State Dept. regulations, au pairs have to be between 18 and 26 years old. au pair placement agencies like Cultural Care have recruiting centers across the globe trying to entice people who are interested in new countries and new cultures. Harquil said that while theyre away from their families and countries of origins, au pairs often find comfort in their connection to their host families.

Generally, theres a lot of enthusiasm around making a connection with your kids as a big sister or a cousin and feeling part of your family, she says, adding that the family connection can make exploring a new country seem less daunting.

Amanda likens choosing an au pair from her service to using a car search or dating website. You can choose whatever criteria you want, she says. You say, I want this country, I want this language or I want someone thats this age, then you do all sorts of searches and search criteria and then you narrow down the field and you say, these few sound good.

When her au pair started, Amandas kids were in school full-time. As Amanda and her husband were both working in jobs requiring regular travel, the flexibility offered by a live-in au pair was invaluable.

Just having an adult there in my house is very helpful, she says. But theres also the flexibility in terms of hours. For the first three years, we had a nanny who would come to the house each day, but then she had to leave and I had to rush home at a certain time.

Still, the program comes with its fair share of scrutiny. In early 2019, a federal court ordered 15 au pair agencies to pay $65 million to 100,000 former au pairs in a class action suit brought on by about a dozen former au pairs accusing agencies of colluding to suppress wages and prevent them from seeking better working conditions.

Harquail, however, questions the suits findings, saying the cases central narrative doesnt accurately represent the au pair system.

There are always going to be people who abuse the system and take advantage of people, she says. But the idea that there are 17,000 families in the United States that are withholding food or not giving au pairs private bedrooms or not giving them time off or making them work 50 or 60 hours a week is to me almost absurd. Are there some people who do that? Im sure there are. Are they the norm? Absolutely not.

Harquail says the case elides the bad behavior that au pairs can engage in.

And what you dont hear about the au pairs who take the family car without permission and drive across state lines to go visit some guy that they met on Tinder, she says. You dont hear about the au pair who leaves in the middle of the night and then you go clean out her room and her closets full of Jagermeister bottles. And what you dont hear about is the au pair who leaves the kid in daycare and simply disappears.

Harquail adds: So I personally felt that the lawsuit was very ginned up and very, very unrepresentative of the program and how it works for au pairs or for host parents.

David Seligman, director of Towards Justice, a nonprofit Colorado-based law firm that represented the au pairs in the settlement, believes his clients experience was more the rule than the exception. The lawsuit began in 2014 when an au pair approached Towards Justice with complaints about her employer.

We investigated the issue and ended up determining that this really wasnt just about sort of this sort of one off mistreatment, but about broader systemic problems with the industry, Seligman says.

Seligman says the problems were driven principally by the sponsor agencies that place prospective au pairs with host families. Fifteen for-profit companies are designated as sponsor agencies by the State Dept. The sponsor agencies typically charge families for connecting them with au pairs and also collect a recruitment fee ranging from $500 to $3,000 from the au pairs.

The lawsuit accused the sponsor companies of working together to fix wages for au pairs they recruited. Host families are required to pay au pairs a minimum weekly stipend of $195.75 but, Seligman says, the stipend was often mischaracterized as a maximum.

au pairs can ask to be placed with different families but Seligman says the agencies make it difficult to be reassigned. As a result, theyre deprived of one of the most important tools that workers have to protect themselves in the labor market: the threat to find work elsewhere. And once you take that away, like you really like workers become, become quite vulnerable, Seligman says.

In several news stories, au pairs say agencies misled them about the responsibilities theyd have in their American jobs. They arrive believing theyre cultural ambassadors whod be able to travel and explore America and are shocked at the childcare expectations.

Sharon, a mother of two from Connecticut, hosted two au pairs and was disappointed by what she saw as a disconnection between the job what the agencies told families and prospective au pairs about the job. Both of her au pairs were frustrated that her central Connecticut town was much further from New York City than they expected.

I imagine that the girls who are placed in cities do the recruiting and tell tales of wild weekends of fun, she says.

Seligman says that many families inadvertently skirt laws regarding au pairs after being misled by au pair agencies. Historically, they have been deceived into assuming that the stipend for au pair was actually the maximum allowable wage and that there wasnt a free market in which au pairs could shop for better wages or treatment, Seligman said.

Seligman says the collusion between the sponsor agencies led many host families to unwittingly short their au pairs wages.

There are many stories of families who are seriously mistreating au pairs, but there are also families who are acting in good faith and are doing what their sponsor agencies tell them to do and think that theyre complying with the law and that theyre treating their au pair well, Seligman says.

The nature of the system, per Seligman, often obscures the employer-employee relationship between families and au pairs. I think that some families are led to believe that this isnt really isnt a work program, that this is merely a cultural exchange and that this person becomes a member of your family, he says.

Its crucial for families to understand the agreement. For Seligman, the confusion over whether an au pair is an employee or temporary family member creates a dangerous situation for both families and the au pairs.

I think the one key point is to recognize that this is a work program and that youre bringing someone into your home to work for you to be your employee, as a childcare worker, he says. And just like any other employee, these workers are allowed to negotiate for higher wages or for better treatment.

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Au Pairs: The Pros and Cons of Hiring One For Your Family - Fatherly

I'll cut right to the chase: Our food system in this country is brokenfor many, many reasons.

For starters, it is built on government subsidies on five crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. These monocrops provide an abundance of the wrong type of calories (sugar, starch, and refined oils) and form the building blocks of ultraprocessed foods that contribute to chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, dementia, cancer, depression, sexual dysfunction, and more. Foods like these are responsible for an estimated 11 million deaths a year around the world.

The present food system doesn't just pollute our bodies. It pollutes our land, water, and air with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers and contributes massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions every step of the way. Glyphosate, anyone? Or how about a burger raised on antibiotics, hormones, and chicken poop? No thanks.

Food is also a social injustice issue. Many of the over 20 million food and farmworkers in the U.S. are peopleof color who struggle to make a living wage while performing dangerous work. They're subject to harsh working and living conditions and exposed to toxic agricultural chemicals but lack adequate health care. In extreme cases, they can face modern forms of slavery, sexual harassment, and abuse.

While these are complex issues that won't be solved overnight, I believe that a healthier, cleaner, smarter food system starts at the end of your fork. All you have to do is make a few simple conscious decisions about what you put on it.

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5 Ways To Help Fix The Food System Every Time You Grocery Shop - mindbodygreen.com

Throughout the United States, resisters pushed back on a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.

Some states made their point by holding out until the 2000s to establish a holiday signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

Other local governments found creative ways to minimize King by generalizing the holiday, so as not to name him, or creating a dual holiday, so the honor wouldnt be his exclusively.

Texas eventually got around to it, but it also has a Confederate Heroes Day that this year falls one day before MLKs.

San Antonio leaders wisely chose a different path, and San Antonio activists, ever resourceful, have overcompensated for the sins of others.

So, on Monday the city will put on one of the largest MLK marches in the country. Its the highlight of more than 1,000 events from Jan. 10-26 that are part of DreamWeek. Each day offers experiences that nudge us out of our comfort zones.

An event tonight will showcase a talk on wage equity thats listed as a demand, Pay Her What Shes Worth. The discussion is from 7 to 9 p.m. at the YWCA Olga Madrid Center on the West Side. Another event features a discussion of Kings legacy of resistance and what we can do when laws and law enforcement practices stifle protest. Its from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Travis Park Church downtown. Both events are free.

National holidays, when theyre relevant, give us a multitude of teaching moments and opportunities to cross self-imposed borders and meet people unlike us. Thats Kings legacy, too.

But the Student Leadership Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio gets the prize for its Civil Rights and Social Justice Experience, a bus tour of civil rights landmarks in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

At its most powerful, the tour drew a line from slavery to mass incarceration. Now in its ninth year, the tour ended by challenging a group of 45 students to connect what they learned on the trip to their leadership aspirations.

It was no coincidence the tour paid homage to the journeys of young Freedom Riders who in the 1960s boarded buses to Southern states, sat at whites-only lunch counters and faced violence from police and white mobs.

The bus got back Saturday. On Sunday, two of the students 21-year-old juniors Sydney Brown and Christopher Garcia met me at a coffee shop near the UTSA campus to digest their experiences.

It was Browns second trip and her first as a facilitator and part of the faculty. The return visit brought new experiences, especially at the Equal Justice Institute in Montgomery, Ala.

The institute has been much in the news thanks to a new movie, Just Mercy, that tells the story of its founder, Bryan Stevenson, and his work on mass incarceration. The group saw the movie there on opening day in an auditorium that was all their own.

Its also where the group visited one of the nations most compelling new monuments, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, dedicated to the victims of white supremacy. The memorial features 800 massive steel blocks that are suspended from the ceiling, each etched with the name of a county in which African Americans were lynched, and if known, the names of the victims.

Brown was moved by an exhibit at the Equal Justice Initiatives Legacy Museum, where people can pick up phones and hear the original testimony of the initiatives clients. She met Kuntrell Jackson there. At 14, he received a life sentence for a murder he didnt commit. The initiative won his release.

Garcia, a history major who wants to teach high school social studies, sought out the trip because he wanted to learn more about civil rights than what can be found in books.

He was struck by an exhibit of segregated classrooms and a sign that that read, No Blacks, No Dogs, No Mexicans from 1939 El Paso. He stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., where marchers were beat up in whats known as Bloody Sunday.

Garcia took dozens of photos to document his experience. But at the 18th-century Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, he stopped clicking. The silence startled him.

A guide showed them various sites, including rusty cells used first for slave auctions and later to hold convicts and a memorial to slaves who participated in an 1811 revolt. Many of the slaves who were caught were executed and beheaded. The memorial depicts rows of decapitated ceramic heads mounted on steel rods burrowed into the ground.

There, Garcia stopped taking pictures, partly out of respect. It was also awe because what was meant as a warning to slaves didnt end the rebellions. For the future teacher, its a lesson that will stay with him for future lectures and future MLK Days.

Elaine Ayala is a columnist covering San Antonio and Bexar County. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | eayala@express-news.net | Twitter: @ElaineAyala

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Ayala: San Antonio overcompensates for the sins of others with its MLK events - San Antonio Express-News

Image Source: Griffiths, Samuel, editor of The London Iron Trade Exchange

Preamble

In Capital, Marx defined two ways of creating a surplus from exploiting the labor of others. The first is the extraction of absolute surplus value. Extracting absolute surplus value means profiting from the labor of others by making them work longer or harder or getting more of them to work. This economic model comes up against predictable limits: people die from overwork, you cant get enough of them, they cost too much to keep healthy, and so on. The second way of creating a profit is to make improvements to the organisation of their tasks, and to introduce machinery to enable labor time to be more productive. This second way is called the extraction of relative surplus value and it is the prime motor of capital-ism. The profits available from this second way of doing things are dependent not upon absolutes like the number of workers or the availability of a resource but upon the entrepreneurs ability to innovate production, supply and distribution methods so that profits go up relative to other factors that remain constant or that might even be reduced. New methods or machinery, for example and as we all know, may mean less workers are needed.

By-the-way, I am annoyingly hyphenating the word capitalism throughout this piece in order to stress the fact that having capital means one intentionally builds funds for making future investments in industry. Capital is not just money under the bed, it is profit that is specifically to be used to go back into the further production of wealth.

History as a Good Soldier

There is a single-frame cartoon I saw on the Internet a while ago which depicts a middle-aged couple in a bedroom in a medieval setting. One of them is looking out at the glorious sun rising over the hills and exclaims to the other, Thank goodness! Look dear! At last the Reformation has arrived!

This cartoon which I find hilarious, but that could just be me says everything I have ever wanted to say about the tendency we have to view the past as if it is always waiting for the future. This is a narrative of history that academics call teleological meaning that the present is the purpose of the history leading to it. But even though they have a term for it many academics lazily go along with the idea that history is something like a conscious spirit in society struggling for a higher good. It is no coincidence that this idea was expressed in the midst of Europes technological irruption by the philosopher Hegel, who argued that the absolute rational final goal of the world is the transcendent synthesis of the plan of divine Providence with reason. We are, it seems, locked into the progressivist notion that history, despite being a bumpy ride (Hegel suggested that it could be even regarded as a slaughtering block of sacrifices for the future), is a narrative that ultimately shows how humans are becoming more intelligent. True there are the grumpy folk who pine on myopically about the past of their youth being better than now, unaware that their parents also complained, and their parents before them but generally most of us would still agree that todays society is the peak of progress so far, only to be eclipsed by the next big technological shift. (Well, a lot of us suspect that instead of a future of flying cars we are now fast-tracked to ecological Armageddon, but thats for another piece.)

The Reformation joke is premised on the fact that we tend to think of people in the past as just waiting for things to get better. In the same vein, we have the common idea that people who lived in caves must have been simply desperate for improvements to their lives between being chased by sabre-toothed tigers. Something key to these interpretations of the past is that humans then are thought of as just like us now, as if we were suddenly transported back 100,000 years.

There are four problems with this view. The first is that if we think that uncivilised humans struggled to survive, then how come they did so for at least 200,000 years before the rise of the first States?

The second problem is that if it was so hard for humans to survive without civilisation then how do other animals survive now? Is life for them really a daily unrelenting struggle? Maybe we might argue that they do not have the consciousness that would tell them that their lives are brutish and short but then how did conscious humans cope with 200,000 years of the knowledge that their lives were terrible, and how do present day uncivilised tribes cope? These people must have been constantly beset by depression and suicide! Of course, they werent. And the only reason tribespeoples and Indigenous peoples of today suffer from depression and suicide is because they have been dragged into civilisation and have had everything they once had taken away. As mile Durkheim noted in 1893, one of the gifts of modern civilisation is the suicide of sadness.

The third problem with this notion is that it mixes in unsavoury depictions of the past such as in the Middle Ages in Europe, and the beginnings of Industrialisation as if it was always like this. In his book, Better Angels, Steven Pinker, for example, snobbishly objects to the Middle Ages in Europe on the grounds that habits of refinement, self-control, and consideration that are second nature to us had to be acquired, and that people then, were, in a word, gross. How we all lol-ed at that clever quip during the university cocktail party. Although we can look back on aspects of the hardships of civilisations and be thankful that we dont have to endure particular rigours now, should we paint the whole of the past in that way?

The fourth problem is that by looking at the past like this we are forced to logically conclude that all previous societies were a little misguided about things, or simply a bit stupid. The flip side of such a self-congratulatory view of our towering present-day wisdom is a dangerously pejorative judgement of those uncontacted tribes who live without civilisation. Think Bolsanaro.

The Mistake of Civilisation

Instead of viewing the story of humanity as a continuous narrative with progress as the underlying motor I would argue that there are two world-significant physical events that happened in the past that are crucial to understanding present-day human society. These events were both misfortunes, as tienne de La Botie wrote in 1553 of the first one. The first was the emergence of hierarchy and exploitation that is expressed in the formation of a State or civilisation an environment where people submit to voluntary servitude, as La Botie observed. The second was the emergence of capital-ism as the globally dominant economic form. It is this second one that I want to elaborate on.

We all probably have a vague idea of what capital-ism is: private or State ownership of the means of production, wage labor, money economy, alienation, consumer society, supply and demand, and so on. But capital-ism did not always exist, something specific brought it into existence, and we can sense that capital-ism is different to all previous economic forms because of the remarkable phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly three hundred years ago the scene was set for going from handloom to power-loom weaving, to trains, cars, to splitting atoms, to computers, and smart phones.

The Industrial Revolution was NOT the natural culmination of five thousand years of the rise and fall of civilisations since Mesopotamia, it was NOT the result of a growing intelligence in humanity that enabled individuals to master what we call science and technology, it was the coming together of the weaving industry, dominated by work-ethic oriented Protestants; gold from the Americas; and the Atlantic Slave Trade.

But the key factor was the new profit-making strategy developed by the weaving entrepreneurs. These merchants set up efficient supply and distribution networks around the core productive unit of the woollen weaver who worked at home, and crucially they ensured their weavers had efficient handlooms to enable higher productivity. The gold and the slavery, and the Protestantism, only helped support the new economic method and ensure that it had the space and time to spread to other ventures and become universally successful. The new economic method was the extraction of relative surplus value, as Marx termed it. The method fitted in perfectly with the emergent work ethic of the Protestant movement in Europe and the gold and the slavery buoyed up the new environment until it was fully established. But it was the extraction of relative surplus value in a word, capital-ism that ultimately and essentially triggered the Industrial Revolution.

Jairus Banaji in his book, Theory as History, which examines agrarian societies prior to their being fully capital-ist, particularly in 19th century India, argues, as does Marx, that whether workers are slaves or peasants or hired labour is not the issue for defining a capital-ist enterprise it is the fact that profits are used to generate even greater profits by investing in improved production methods, and that money is not left idle.

Mining Humanity

In capital-ism people became a special type of resource in an enterprise one that can be eternally adapted to work at different rhythms, in new situations, with new machinery and processes this happened because entrepreneurs realised that humans were adaptable and could learn new skills. The historian EP Thompson has written extensively, by the way, on worker resistance to the new forms of labor, and how these resistances were broken down by factory discipline. By the time the European working class emerged from the 19th century, even though many dreamed of a better world, they had all absorbed the work ethic promoted by the ruling classes. Slaves and newly colonized peoples who had perhaps been warriors and suchlike in their previous lives often simply died from the incessant work they were forced to do.

So, what about the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath? The social organization and astonishing technology we see in the world around us is less the invention of bright people who have been well-educated and more the product of the imperative to increase relative surplus value, the particularly capital-ist way of increasing profits. The appearance of the steam engine owes more to the strategy of acquiring relative surplus value than it does to the acclaimed genius of James Watt. The consequences of the emergence of the systematic acquisition of relative surplus value were increased monetary wealth for a whole class who, crucially, knew that to stay rich they had to keep innovating and investing. The emergence of the science we have today was not the culmination of eons of human ingenuity it was the result of this same particular method of pursuing wealth, as it still is.

It was only during the great watershed of the sixteenth century, as Banaji writes, that it became apparent that capital-ist production had become the dominant economic mode in western Europe. It is only in a fully capital-ist mode of production that the whole of society is geared towards, as well as determined by, the raising of the relative productivity of each worker. This is the motive for technological innovation. It is why today, when capital-ism has become part of our very DNA, we witness a proliferation of James Watts.

So, the enormous technological achievements during and after the Industrial Revolution are not some magical culmination of human history they are the specific result of a society that emerged by organising itself on the principle of being able to extract an infinite sum of profit from the ever-adaptable resource of the human being.

References.

Anderson, S. 2009, The Two Lives of Narcisse Pelletier, in Pelletier: The Forgotten Castaway of Cape York, Stephanie Anderson (ed. and trans.), Melbourne Books, Australia.

Banaji, J. 2011, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, Haymarket Books, Chicago.

Botie, . de La, 2008 [1553], The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Harry Kurz (trans.), Ludwig von Mises Institute, Auburn.

Durkheim, E. 1997 [1893], The Division of Labour in Society, W. D. Halls (trans.), The Free Press, New York.

Hegel, G. W. F. 2011, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Ruben Alvaredo (trans.), Wordbridge Publishing, Aalten.

Mandel, E. 1976, Introduction, in Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, Ben Fowkes (trans.), Penguin Books, London

Marx, K. 1976, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Volume I, Ben Fowkes (trans.), Penguin Books, London

Pinker, S. 2012, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes, Penguin Books, New York.

Survival International, survivalinternational.org

Thompson, E. P. 1967, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, in Past and Present, No. 38. (Dec., 1967), pp. 56-97.

Weber, M. 2003 [1904-5/1920], The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcot Parsons (trans.), Dover Publications, New York.

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The Wonders of Modern Life Briefly Explained: An Anthropology of the Industrial Revolution - CounterPunch