SINGAPORE

4 Tasmanian devils from Australia make Night Safari their home

The endangered animals will make Singapore their permanent home, acting as animal ambassadors for the plight of their counterparts in the wild.

ST PHOTO: DESMOND WEE

Gena Soh
PUBLISHED
NOV 15, 2022, 7

SINGAPORE - Hardly the cantankerous, dust storm-kicking Looney Tunes beasts, four tasmanian devils from Australia, each about the size of a shiba inu dog, have now made their home at the Night Safari.

Making their debut in a new exhibit on Tuesday, these endangered animals will make Singapore their permanent home, acting as animal ambassadors for the plight of their counterparts in the wild.

The four animals are managed by Australia’s Save the Tasmanian Devil Programme (STDP).

It was introduced in response to an infectious cancer that led to a significant decline of tasmanian devil numbers in the wild, said Mr David Schaap, senior wildlife officer from the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania.

Spread from one tasmanian devil to another through skin-to-skin and sexual contact, the devil facial tumour disease causes large facial tumours to grow around their mouths, making eating hard for the animals.

Most devils that catch the disease die of starvation.

With more than 80 per cent of the wild population of tasmanian devils succumbing since 1996, Mr Schaap said the STDP seeds these animals in zoos globally to build insurance colonies as a crucial response to the threat the species faces as a result of the disease.

Insurance colonies for threatened animals in captivity ensure they do not go extinct through conservation and breeding programmes.

The effort to bring the animals here from an insurance colony started in 2018, and much preparation was required before the zoo was ready to receive them, said Dr Luis Carlos Neves, vice-president of animal care at Mandai Wildlife Group.

Tasmanian devils have unique vocalisations such as growls, screams and screeches when feeding or during confrontations, and live in dark confined environments such as caves and burrows.

Dr Neves said the animal care team had to work closely with their counterparts in Australia to design a suitable habitat for the animals in Singapore and upskill the zoo’s animal care team to care for the endangered marsupials.

In 2019, the team travelled to Tasmania to undergo training and learn the biology of the animals, as well as how to safely manage, restrain them for medical procedures, and feed them properly.

During the pandemic in 2020, a video tour of the new exhibit here was filmed, so experts in Australia could verify that the facilities suited the animals’ needs.

After four years of preparation, Crumpet, Snickers, Jesse and Panini – as the four female marsupials are called – finally arrived in Singapore on Oct 7.

After the month-long mandatory quarantine, they now live in two expansive habitats with indoor dens and outdoor yards, which give them space to roam and explore, as well as a den that allows the nocturnal creatures to rest during the day.

The habitats in the Night Safari’s Wallaby Trail also feature eucalyptus trees and red flowered silky oak shrubs to simulate the devils’ native dry shrubland habitat.

Mr Razak Jaffar, assistant curator for marsupials at Mandai Wildlife Group, said that though the four female animals look similar, their personalities are quite distinct.

“Crumpet is a confident individual with a more dominant personality... Snickers, on the other hand, is much more reserved, preferring to hide in her nest box when Crumpet expresses her dominance,” said Mr Jaffar.

He added that Jesse and Panini have also formed a bond despite a rocky start, which involved hostile caterwauling and occasional squabbles.

“The pair now thoroughly enjoy each other’s company, preferring to sleep in the same nest box and appearing restless when they are not together,” Mr Jaffar said.

At the launch of the new exhibit, Mr Mike Barclay, group chief executive of Mandai Wildlife Group, said tasmanian devils will join many other native Australian species in the zoo.

He added: “We remain committed to ensuring the highest standards of welfare for all the ambassador animals under our care... and protecting threatened species and their native habitats.

“Crumpet, Snickers, Panini and Jesse will raise awareness regarding the threats that tasmanian devils face in the wild.”

EU countries have relocated just 117 asylum seekers out of 8,000 pledges

The European Union-wide relocation system was introduced in June, but despite the total of 8,000 pledges, EU countries have relocated only 117 asylum seekers up to this point.

November 16, 2022

© diema | Pixabay

“We’re working very closely with all member states to ensure that we have in place a common solution. I know this number doesn’t seem like a lot but we need to keep in mind that we have 8,000 pledges as such,” a European Commission spokesperson pointed out in this regard, according to Euronews report.

The same reveals that relations between France and Italy have worsened due to the disembarkation of the Ocean Viking, a ship that authorities in Rome did not allow to disembark despite its obligation under international law, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

Italy’s actions have been considered inhumane and incomprehensible by the French Interior Minister, Gerald Darmanin who stressed that the vessel was in Italian waters and thus was required to disembark somewhere in Italy.

At the same time, Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, pointed out that she was struck by the aggressive reaction from France’s capital which she deemed incomprehensible.

French Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, soon after the Ocean Viking incident, pointed out that nine European countries had committed to hosting about two-thirds of the migrants rescued with the remaining third staying in France.

“France introduced a call of solidarity to EU Member States and others have responded positively. This is working. And we will ensure that we put all efforts into the voluntary solidarity mechanism,” a Commission spokesperson pointed out in this regard.

Italy and France are continuously receiving a large number of asylum seekers. According to the figures provided previously by the General Directorate for Immigration and Integration Policies of Italy, on June 30, 2020, there were registered a total of 15,959 unaccompanied minors in this country, which means a 99.9 per cent increase.

The notable increase in the number of unaccompanied minors was mainly a result of the war in Ukraine, according to local media reports.

At the same time, in August this year, France welcomed the first group of asylum seekers following the European Union’s Migration Mechanism.

Back then, it was reported that 38 asylum seekers who were going from Italy to France became the first group relocated, following the EU’s voluntary solidarity mechanism. Based on the EU’s mechanism, Italy and France are among the European countries that have agreed to take in migrants as well as refugees from other countries who are dealing with an increased number of arrivals.

Leaders Told To Put ‘Kids First’ at COP27

By Paul Virgo

Credit: Parents for Future UK

ROME, Nov 15 2022 (IPS) - Lea is a three-year-old from Mexico who loves ladybirds. Siddhiksha, a six-year-old from India, has a passion for trees and wild animals. Rachelle is a 12-year-old Tanzanian who is wise beyond her years. They are smart and adorable and they are among the stars of a short film that is aiming to remind the leaders taking part in the COP27 UN Climate Conference that they have a duty of care towards young and future generations.

“My biggest anguish is literally not knowing what the world is going to be like,” says Cora, 13, from Brazil, in the film.

“I’m afraid the world could suck, with a lot of species not being able to survive 50 years from now”.

Meera, a 15-year-old from Chennai, India, says she sees the effects of the climate crisis every day.

“Lately, I’ve noticed that it’s very hot in Chennai and there are many unseasonal floods in Bangalore.

Parents for Future Global’s demands for COP27 are that nations must agree to no new coal, oil and gas projects and to stop subsidising existing fossil-fuel projects and that they pledge to start paying for loss and damage

“There are forest fires all over the world almost every day.

“This is actually becoming scary and serious”.

The video was produced by the Our Kids’ Climate and Parents For Future Global networks to send the message that it’s time to put ‘Kids First’ and deliver real climate action.

“The aim was to create a film that the kids could identify with, using a kids’ perspectives, making kids feel empowered and recognised,” Sandra Freij, the photographer and filmmaker who directed and produced the short, told IPS.
“We wanted to put kids’ voices before the decision-makers at COP because their voices need to be heard and they have so much to say”.

Children from 16 different countries feature in the film, speaking about their dreams and fears for the future.
Freij had the tough task of selecting them from contributions from almost 100 children sent in by parents from all over the world.

“It was super important for us to make sure we did not put words into their mouths. When we invited them to speak about their dreams we encouraged them to speak about simple things like football or rainbows,” she said.

“I never imagined we’d receive messages of such a grown-up nature.

“It was an emotional few months receiving message after message from kids that have connected the dots and who experience grief and fear about what the future holds”.

Our Kids’ Climate and Parents For Future Global are among several groups of people who are channelling their concerns about the impact the climate crisis will have on their children into action to bring about positive change.

Other groups include India’s Warrior Moms, who focus on the need to fight air pollution, and Britain’s Mothers Rise Up.

The latter group hit the headlines in June when they staged a spectacular song-and-dance protest outside the headquarters of Lloyd’s of London, inspired by the Let’s Go Fly a Kite scene in Mary Poppins, to tell the insurance giant to stop underwriting the fossil-fuel projects that endanger our children’s future.

Parents For Future is a network of independent national groups from countries both in the Global South and North.
The national and local groups take action that is most fitting to their contexts.

Parents for Future Italia, for example, prepared an ‘eco-manifesto’ outlining the policies the country needs to adopt to deliver climate action ahead of Italy’s general election in September.

Then these groups join forces at the global level.

Among other things, Parents for Future Global has been working hard to support the campaign for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. What makes this cooperation between different national groups possible is the recognition by all involved that you cannot solve the climate crisis unless you tackle the injustices that cause it.

And that means the countries of the Global North owning up to being largely to blame and taking action to remedy that via, among other things, loss-and-damage compensation.

Parents for Future Global’s demands for COP27 are that nations must agree to no new coal, oil and gas projects and to stop subsidising existing fossil-fuel projects and that they pledge to start paying for loss and damage.

The actions of these determined parents have not gone unnoticed.

“World leaders better watch out,” Dr Maria Neira of the World Health Organization said at the launch of the #KidsFirst film at COP27. “There is nothing worse or better than a mom fighting for the health of her children. “Now I have a lot of hope. This battle will be the one that we are going to win.”

ANTI-BOLSHEVIK

Rosa Luxemburg Was the Great Theorist of Democratic Revolution

The latest volume of her Complete Works provides a unique perspective on her political thought


AUTHOR
Peter Hudis


Generations of socialist thinkers and activists have grappled with the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg. Yet there are many surprises still in store for those interested in her legacy, as seen in the recent publication of Volume Four of the English-language Complete Works. Along with the previously published Volume Three, the new collection brings together her writings on the 1905 Russian Revolution, one of the most important social upheavals of modern times.

Peter Hudis is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College and the General Editor of the Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg.

This article first appeared in Jacobin.

Luxemburg’s analysis of 1905 in her pamphlet The Mass Strike, the Political Party, and the Trade Unions is already well-known (and appears in Volume Four in a new translation). However, more than four-fifths of the material in the new volume, covering the period from 1906 to 1909, is appearing in English for the first time. Most of her writings that were originally composed in Polish — about half of the volume’s 550 pages — have never appeared in any other language.
Learning to Speak Russian

Luxemburg, like most Marxists of her generation (as well as Karl Marx himself) held that a democratic republic with universal suffrage was the formation best suited for waging the class struggle to a successful conclusion. Like many of her contemporaries in the Second International, she saw no contradiction between fighting for democratic reforms within capitalism while reaching for a revolutionary transformation that would abolish capitalism — even as she relentlessly battled those who separated the two.

In doing so, Luxemburg distinguished between forms of struggle employed in “peaceful” as against those used in revolutionary periods. The aim in both scenarios was to enhance the consciousness and power of the working class. However, “in peacetime, this struggle takes place within the framework of the rule of the bourgeoisie”, which required that the movement operate “within the bounds of the existing laws governing elections, assemblies, the press”, trade unions, etc.

Luxemburg referred to this as “a sort of iron cage in which the class struggle of the proletariat must take place”. Hence, mass struggles in such periods “only very seldom attain positive results”. A revolutionary phase was very different, she argued:


Times of revolution rend the cage of “legality” open like pent-up steam splitting its kettle, letting class struggle break out into the open, naked and unencumbered ... the consciousness and political power [of the proletariat] emerge during revolution without having been warped by, tied down to, and overpowered by the “laws” of bourgeois society.

For Luxemburg, the activity and reason of the masses during the 1905 Revolution, in which millions engaged in mass strikes aimed at bringing down the tsarist regime, was a clear example of such a moment. As she wrote in early 1906: “With the Russian Revolution, the almost-sixty-year period of quiet parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie comes to a close.” The time had come for the socialist movement in Western Europe to begin to “speak Russian” by incorporating the mass strike into its political and organizational perspectives:


Social Democratic tactics, as employed by the working class in Germany today and to which we owe our victories up until now, is oriented primarily toward parliamentary struggle, it is designed for the context of bourgeois parliamentarianism. Russian Social Democracy is the first to whom the hard but honourable lot has fallen of using the foundations of Marx’s teaching, not in a time of the correct, calm parliamentary course of state life, but in a tumultuous revolutionary period.
Immediate Tasks

In the years since Luxemburg penned these words, numerous commentators have praised her efforts to push the rather staid social democratic parties in a more revolutionary direction, while others have criticized Luxemburg’s perspective on the grounds that it downplays the stark differences between the absolutist regime in Russia and Western liberal democracies. There are several points worth noting in this context.

Firstly, Luxemburg held that the mass strike “is and will remain a powerful weapon of workers’ struggle”, but went on to stress that it was “only that, a weapon, whose use and effectiveness always depend on the environment, the given conditions, and the moment of struggle”. Secondly, she held that the Russian proletariat was “not setting itself utopian or unreachable goals, like the immediate realization of socialism: the only possible and historically necessary goal is to establish a democratic republic and an eight-hour workday”.

In Luxemburg’s view, socialism could not be on the immediate agenda in Russia for two main reasons: the working class at the time constituted only a small minority of the populace of the Russian Empire (less than 15 percent), and it was impossible for socialism to exist in a single country:


The socialist revolution can only be a result of international revolution, and the results that the proletariat in Russia will be able to achieve in the current revolution will depend, to say nothing of the level of social development in Russia, on the level and form of development that class relations and proletarian operations in other capitalist countries will have achieved by that time.

In a lengthy essay addressed to the Polish workers’ movement, she further developed this point:


In its current state, the working class is not yet ready to accomplish the great tasks that await it. The working class of all capitalist countries must first internalize the aspiration to socialism; an enormous number of people have yet to arrive at an awareness of their class interests ... When Social Democracy has a majority of the working people behind it in all the largest capitalist countries, the final hour of capitalism will have struck.
A Workers’ Revolution

However, this did not mean that the Russian Revolution would be confined to a liberal or bourgeois framework. Much like Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik current — and in direct opposition to their Menshevik rivals — Luxemburg held that the immediate task facing revolutionaries in the Russian Empire was the formation of a democratic republic under the control of the working class. Since the liberal bourgeoise was too weak and compromised to lead the revolution, “the proletariat had to become the only fighter and defender of the democratic forms of a bourgeois state”.

She stressed that conditions in Russia today were not like those existing in nineteenth-century France:


The Russian proletariat fights first for bourgeois freedom, for universal suffrage, the republic, the law of associations, freedom of the press, etc., but it does not fight with the illusions that filled the [French] proletariat of 1848. It fights for [such] liberties in order to instrumentalize them as a weapon against the bourgeoisie.

She further expanded on this point elsewhere:


The bourgeois revolution in Russia and Poland is not the work of the bourgeoisie, as in Germany and France in days gone by, but the working class, and a class already highly conscious of its labour interests at that — a working class that seeks political freedoms not so that the bourgeoisie may benefit, but just the opposite, so that the working class may resolve its class struggle with the bourgeoisie and thereby hasten the victory of socialism. That is why the current revolution is simultaneously a workers’ revolution. That is also why, in this revolution, the battle against absolutism goes hand in hand — must go hand in hand — with the battle against capital, with exploitation. And why economic strikes are in fact quite nearly inseparable in this revolution from political strikes.

Luxemburg consistently upheld the need for majority support from the exploited masses in achieving any transition to socialism, including those pertaining to freedom struggles in the technologically developed capitalist lands. As she later wrote in December 1918, on behalf of the group she led during the German Revolution: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat’s conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League.”
One Step Forward

Luxemburg’s perspective on the 1905 Russian Revolution raises a host of questions, which relate to the problems faced by revolutionary regimes in the non-Western world in the decades following her death. How can the working class maintain power in a democratic republic after the overthrow of the old regime if it represents only a minority of the populace? How can it do so if, as she claims, “Social Democracy finds only the autonomous class politics of the proletariat to be reliable” — since the hunger of the peasants for landed private property presumably puts them at odds with it? And how is it possible for such a democratic republic under the control of the proletariat to be sustained if revolutions do not occur in other countries that can come to its aid?

Luxemburg addressed these questions in a remarkable essay written in Polish in 1908, “Lessons of the Three Dumas,” which has never previously appeared in English. By 1908, the situation in Russia had radically changed since the revolution was by then defeated. She surveyed the course of its development, encouraging Marxists to “redouble their commitment to subjecting every detail of their tactics to rigorous self-criticism.” She did so by evaluating the history of the three Dumas — the parliamentary bodies established in the Russian Empire from 1906 as a concession to the revolution, with a restricted franchise that became progressively more biased in favour of the upper classes:


The Third Duma has shown — and from this flow its enormous political significance — that a parliamentary system that has not first overthrown the government, that has not achieved political power through revolution, not only cannot defeat the old power (a belief the First Duma vainly held), not only cannot hold its own against that power as an instrument of opposition (as the Second Duma tried to do), but can and must become, on the contrary, an instrument of the counterrevolution.

She proceeded to look ahead in thinking about the possible fate of a future revolution that, unlike the one in 1905, did succeed in overthrowing the old regime:


If the revolutionary proletariat in Russia were to gain political power, however temporarily, that would provide enormous encouragement to the international class struggle. That is why the working class in Poland and in Russia can and must strive to seize power with full consciousness. Because once workers have power, they can not only carry out the tasks of the current revolution directly — realizing political freedom across the Russian state — but also establish the eight-hour workday, upend agrarian relations, and in a word, materialize every aspect of their program, delivering the heaviest blows they can to bourgeois rule and in this way hastening its international overthrow.
Revolutionary Realism

Yet the question remained: How could the workers maintain themselves in power in a democratic republic over the long haul if they constituted a minority of the populace? Luxemburg’s answer was that they could not — and yet the effort would still be worth it:


The revolution’s bourgeois character finds expression in the inability of the proletariat to stay in power, in the inevitable removal of the proletariat from power by a counterrevolutionary operation of the bourgeoisie, the rural landowners, the petty bourgeoisie, and the greater part of the peasantry. It may be that in the end, after the proletariat is overthrown, the republic will disappear and be followed by the long rule of a highly restrained constitutional monarchy. It may very well be. But the relations of classes in Russia are now such that the path to even a moderate monarchical constitution leads through revolutionary action and the dictatorship of a republican proletariat.

Shortly before writing this, in an address to a Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, she made the following remarks:


I find that it is a poor leader and a pitiful army that only goes into battle when victory is already in the bag. To the contrary, not only do I not mean to promise the Russian proletariat a sequence of certain victories; I think, rather, that if the working class, being faithful to its historical duty, continues to grow and execute its tactics of struggle consistent with the unfolding contradictions and the ever-broader horizons of the revolution, then it could wind up in quite complicated and difficult circumstances ... But I think that the Russian proletariat must have the courage and resolve to face everything prepared for it by historical developments, that it should, if it has to, even at the cost of sacrifices, play the role of the vanguard in this revolution in relation to the global army of the proletariat, the vanguard that discloses new contradictions, new tasks, and new paths for class struggle, as the French proletariat did in the nineteenth century.

She did not shy away from acknowledging the implications of this argument:


Revolution in this conception would bring the proletariat losses as well as victories. Yet by no other road can the entire international proletariat march to its final victory. We must propose the socialist revolution not as a sudden leap, finished in twenty-four hours, but as a historical period, perhaps long, of turbulent class struggle, with breaks both brief and extended.

This was a remarkable expression of revolutionary realism. Luxemburg was fully aware that even a democratic republic under the control of the working class — which is how she as well as Marx understood “the dictatorship of the proletariat” — was bound to be forced from power in the absence of an international revolution, especially in a country where the working class constituted a minority. And yet, even though the revolution would therefore have “failed” from at least one point of view, it would have produced important social transformations, providing the intellectual sediment from which a future uprooting of capitalism could arise.

In short, Luxemburg did not think that it made sense to sacrifice democracy for the sake of staying in power, since the political form required to achieve the transition to socialism was “thoroughgoing democracy”. If a nondemocratic regime stayed in power, the transition to socialism would become impossible, since the working class would be left without the means and training to exercise power on its own behalf. Yet on the other hand, if a proletarian democracy existed even for a brief period of time, it could help inspire a later transition to socialism.
Self-Examination

This argument speaks to what would unfold a decade later, when tsarism was finally overthrown in the February 1917 Revolution, followed in short order by the Bolshevik seizure of power in October of the same year. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were fully aware at the time that the material conditions did not permit the immediate creation of a socialist society, even as they proclaimed the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This was why Lenin worked so hard to foster proletarian revolutions in Western Europe.

However, two fundamental issues separated Lenin’s approach from that of Luxemburg. Firstly, his regime did not take the form of a democratic republic, as seen in its suppression of political liberties — a development that Luxemburg sharply opposed in her 1918 critique of the Russian Revolution. Secondly, Lenin held that once the Bolsheviks seized power, they intended to keep it — permanently. This was very different from Luxemburg’s statement that “the inability of the proletariat to stay in power” would not be the worst outcome, so long as the vision of liberation projected to the world through its creation of a democratic society based on the rule of the working class inspired others to take up the fight against capitalism.

Luxemburg’s position is especially striking because she was fully aware that the bourgeoisie would always resort to violent suppression in the aftermath of a defeated revolution. Indeed, she lost her own life following the defeat of the January 1919 Spartacus League uprising in Berlin, which she initially opposed on the grounds that it lacked sufficient mass support. However, Luxemburg was equally aware that any effort to forge a transition to socialism through nondemocratic means was doomed to fail. In this sense, she anticipated the tragic outcome of many revolutions in the decades following her death.

Whatever one makes of Luxemburg’s reflection on these issues, one thing is clear: she developed a distinctive, though rarely discussed, conception of the transition to socialism (especially for developing societies, which is what the Russian Empire was at the time) that has received far too little attention. The publication of these writings in English will hopefully remedy that neglect.

Although many of Luxemburg’s ideas speak to issues that democratic socialists, anti-imperialists, and feminists are grappling with today, on at least one critical issue, her perspective has not stood the test of time. It is to be found in her oft-repeated insistence: “When the sale of workers’ labour to private exploiters is abolished, the source of all today’s social inequalities will disappear.”

Luxemburg’s contention that the abolition of private ownership of the means of production would provide the basis for ending “every inequality in human society” was not hers alone. Virtually every tendency and theorist of revolutionary social democracy in the Second International shared it, including Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, and many others. Yet it is hardly possible to maintain this view today.

Neither the social-democratic welfare states, which sought to limit private property rights, nor the regimes in the USSR, China, and elsewhere in the developing world, which abolished them through the nationalization of property, succeeded in developing a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. A much deeper social transformation that targets not alone private property and “free” markets but most of all the alienated form of human relations that define capitalist modernity is clearly needed.

That is a task for our generation, which can be much aided by returning with new eyes to the humanist implications of Marx’s critique of the logic of capital. This entails a critical re-evaluation of the meaning of socialism that may not have been on the agenda in Luxemburg’s time, but which the overall spirit of her work surely encourages. As she wrote in 1906:

Self-examination — that is, making oneself aware at every step of the direction, logic, and basis for the class movement itself — is that store from which the working mass draws its strength, again and again, to struggle anew, and by which it understands its own hesitation and defeats as so many proofs of its strength and inevitable future victory.

Contesting Cannibal Capitalism

Nancy Fraser on the destructive nature of our system, the need for transformative critique, and new forms of class struggle

November 2022

https://www.rosalux.de/en

What would you call the times we are living in? Are we in a crisis, in multiple crises, in a catastrophe?

I would call this an epochal crisis — for two reasons. First, it’s not merely sectoral but general, a crisis of the entire social order. It’s not “only” economic, nor “only” ecological, nor “only” a political crisis or a crisis of care, but it’s all those things at once, converging with and exacerbating one another.

General crises of this sort are quite rare. In the course of roughly 500 years of capitalist history, we’ve only had four such crises, where the entire social order has been widely experienced as unviable.

The second reason for thinking our crisis is epochal is that it is systemic. The massive irrationalities and injustices we experience are not accidental — they’re deeply rooted in the structure and dynamics of our social order. And that is, of course, a capitalist social order — although a historically specific form of capitalism, of course.
You describe our contemporary form of capitalism as “cannibal capitalism”. What do you mean by that?

Capitalist economies have a built-in tendency to devour their own background conditions. They are structurally primed to gobble up nature and the wealth and health of racialized peoples, to guzzle our capacities for care work and public action. That’s why capitalist crises are not “merely” economic, but also social, political, and ecological. And it’s also why the system’s contradictions are not “only” located within a given realm, like the “falling rate of profit” described by Marx, which is internal to the economy.

Rather, capitalism also harbours inter-realm contradictions, such as those analysed by that other great theorist of capitalist crisis, Karl Polanyi. Polanyi diagnosed crisis tendencies grounded in clashes between the system’s economic value logic, on the one hand, and the logics of natural and social reproduction, on the other hand.

Those trans-economic contradictions of capitalism are the drivers of the trans-economic aspects of our current crisis — its social, political and ecological aspects. To get a full understanding of this crisis, as well as of previous general crises, you need to integrate insights from both Marx and Polanyi. Through that lens, we can see that capitalism not only exploits free proletarians in factories, but also consumes the “non-economic” supports that make such exploitation possible: the families that produce and sustain “labour power”, the states that maintain property rights and supply essential infrastructure and pubic goods, the natural processes that sustain life-enabling ecosystems and “raw materials”.

This dynamic, which I consider a form of cannibalism, is built into every form of capitalism. Every form is primed to cannibalize nature, to cannibalize care work and social reproduction, to cannibalize the wealth and health of semi-free workers, especially but not only that of racialized populations, and, lastly, to cannibalize the political realm, the public powers we need to address all these problems.

It is the cannibal nature of capitalism, then, that inclines the system to multi-dimensional crises and multiple forms of injustice: crises of ecology and politics as well as economics, injustices of gender/sex and of race/ethnicity/empire as well as of class in the traditional sense.
Why then has capitalism itself not fallen victim to these internal self-eroding dynamics?

Capitalism’s history amounts to a sequence in which periods of general crisis, when the system is unravelling, alternate with periods of structural reform, when its design gets overhauled. Each overhaul responds to the previous crisis — the new design is aimed at softening the system’s contradictory cannibalistic dynamics.

A good example is so-called social-democratic or New Deal capitalism, the form that immediately preceded our current, neoliberal phase. This adaptation was a direct reaction to the crisis of liberal/colonial industrial capitalism manifest in the severe depressions and world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. That crisis was rooted in capital’s gluttonous free-riding on all resources to which it helped itself freely but failed to replenish or repair.

The social-democratic “fix” involved the use of state power to restrain capital “for its own good” through regulation, social service provision, demand management, etc. These policies worked for a few decades, albeit better for some people than for others, but the resulting regime was neither truly just nor truly sustainable. So, it comes as no surprise that it began to unravel in the 1970s and 1980s, leading to another systemic adaption in the 1990s, which brought the neoliberal globalized capitalism we have today.
What is specific about the form of capitalism that we experience today?

It is particularly vicious and predatory. Neoliberal capitalism liberates the system’s inherent cannibalistic tendencies from the restraints imposed by the previous regime. So, it relentlessly eats away our capacities for care and solidarity, at our infrastructures and political spaces, at our living and working conditions, at nature’s capacities to replenish and reproduce itself.

We can see this very clearly in the COVID-19 pandemic, which lays bare the full extent of the system’s perversity, its multiple irrationalities and injustices. To my mind, COVID is a revelatory x-ray of our social order. In it, we see how neoliberalism has sharpened all of cannibal capitalism’s contradictions to a fever pitch. So, how would I describe our current situation? We’re in a very hot mess, all around.
What are the effects of this situation on people living through this historic time?

Living under the terrible pressure of this acute general crisis, many people are defecting from the prevailing common sense that previously more or less held things together. They no longer believe that free markets are the solution to their problems, that governments need only “remove all the red tape” and let the market do its magic. They are turning away from entrenched elites and mainstream political parties.

This adds a new dimension to the crisis, which now includes what Antonio Gramsci called a “crisis of hegemony”. People are looking for new, out-of-the-box solutions. On the one hand, this represents an opening for emancipatory left-wing projects, but it also has a dark side: many gravitate to authoritarian strong men who engage in vicious scapegoating of minorities. Every country has its own version of this, be it the alt-right white supremacy movement in the United States or the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.
But there are also more progressive answers, aren’t there?

Yes, we can also see a lot of left-wing energy: proliferating protests, attempts to form new parties, and a growing hunger for emancipatory engagement. But so far all this activism remains dispersed and fragmented — it doesn’t rise to the level of a counterhegemony, let alone converge on a shared project.

One reason is that capitalism in general, and our capitalism in particular, present an enormous complexity of life conditions. Not everyone experiences the crisis in the same way. There’s a lot to protest and movements often grab the one aspect that they perceive as especially pressing. For some, this is police shootings. For others, it’s low wages or precarious work. For still others, it’s rising sea levels, extreme heat, and wildfires or the unavailability of high-quality affordable childcare.

In other words, people are in motion in many places around many issues. All of these are real issues. Efforts to solve them through democratic collective action are not only rational but can lead to more expansive solidarities and to broader, more radical projects. For that to happen, however, it’s necessary to for people to connect the dots — to see that all the various problems generating dispersed protest are grounded in one and the same social system: namely, the especially predatory, cannibalistic present form of capitalism. We need to make visible the connections between different struggles that are too often obscured.
How can we overcome the obscuring of these connections ? What kinds of demands and framings could bring people together instead?

I think the first step — and I’m now speaking both as a critical theorist and as an activist — is to disclose the interconnections of these phenomena. To give people a map that connects the dots, enabling protests movements to locate themselves in relation to others, to find potential allies and eventually join forces. I don’t mean this in a Leninist sense — it’s not about subordinating some supposedly “secondary” issues to allegedly more important ones. It’s rather about reformulating one’s claims in ways that open the door to cooperation and encourage broader projects.

Through this type of process, it might be possible to win over at least some, maybe even many, people who now gravitate to right-wing populism. I don’t mean the committed authoritarians or “principled” racists — they are unreachable and not worth the breath. But they don’t exhaust the populist ranks. There are also lots of people who haven’t been exposed to credible left alternatives, and absent such exposure, when there’s no one offering a good class-line that speaks to them, they end up voting for right-wing parties. We should change that by offering them something better.
Is it our task as socialists to show those looking for connections the bigger picture?

Absolutely. Look, whether it’s the Trumpists in the US or the AfD in Germany, these guys have a narrative. Of course, their narrative does not embrace everybody — on the contrary, it embraces some precisely buy excluding others. Unfortunately, a lot of people find it quite convincing.

What we need is something that can compete effectively with that — that can be even more powerful and convincing. Progressive neoliberalism (with its stress on breaking glass ceilings and “putting black faces in high places”) is not the answer. Everybody can see that it’s a failure. With this in disrepute, there’s an opening for developing forms of feminism, anti-racism, eco-politics, and democratic politics that are oriented to an expanded understanding of the working class and pivotal change.
What would a viable left alternative that could make a difference look like?

We need an alliance of feminist, anti-racist, pro-democracy, environmental, and labour movements. Such an alliance could be powerful if each of the participating groups saw its specific problems as stemming from the same perverse social system as the others’, and converged on the aim of transforming that system.

This doesn’t require that they merge their differences in some abstract universalism. On the contrary, each element of the coalition can and should maintain and develop its specific political identity, while sharing a diagnosis of the status quo.

The concept of “intersectionality” aims to capture this sort of practice, insofar as it points to multiple problems that intersect yet share a common cause. When it comes to change and transformation, however, intersectionality might not suffice. What we rather need is a stronger sense of solidarity, something we can share.
Does this also imply a new understanding of the revolutionary subject of today — the working class?

Yes, that’s exactly what I was just hinting at. We need to turn away from the traditional understanding of the working class, which focused on free proletarians who perform industrialized labour in return for a wage. Certainly, that’s an important face of capitalist labour, but not the whole story.

Capitalism also depends on unfree or dependent workers, whose labour is expropriated, as opposed to exploited, and who are racialized and constructed as violable. These workers, too, belong to the working class, as does another major group of capitalism’s workers: those gendered care workers, unpaid or underpaid, on whom capital also free-rides.

Both racialized sub-work and gendered care work are essential to capital accumulation. Without them, there could be no exploited workers, no raw materials, no commodity production, surplus value, or capital. So, capitalism relies on not one, but three different faces of labour, functionally interconnected in one and the same social system, and these faces of labour are transforming today.

Much traditional manufacturing work has been offshored to semi-peripheral regions, where labour rights are weak and unions are non-existent. Much social reproductive work now takes the form of low-wage service work, performed in public institutions and for-profit firms by deportable migrants, with no secure residency rights. In both cases, the labour is “semi-free”, as the workers lack actionable rights and political protections.

The conclusion I draw is that we need to develop an enlarged view of the “working class”, one that encompasses all three faces of capitalist labour in their mutual intersections. Such a view could provide the basis for an enlarged coalition, one with the political heft and breadth of vision to become an emancipatory counterhegemonic bloc.
How exactly can movements make use of this concept and why is it crucial for their success today?

Every movement, whatever its focus, should be class-sensitive in the expanded sense I just outlined. Feminism, for example, should become a “feminism of the 99%”, as opposed to the corporate feminism aimed at “cracking the glass ceiling”. Likewise, eco-politics should become trans-environmental, linked to other emancipatory claims and struggles — single-issue versions are really “environmentalisms of the rich.” Labour movements must incorporate both “#MeToo” claims for a workplace free of harassment and assault and the claims of sub-workers and care workers.

These are only two examples for what is needed in constructing a counter-hegemonic block. The climate-labour turn is another great example. Looking at two sectors from a mutually connecting perspective has helped to overcome this deeply mistaken idea of ecology being a single-issue movement or something that pertains only to those in relatively secure situations.

By connecting labour struggles with social reproduction, ecology, and democracy, we gain the chance to attract a broad popular base. A Left that implements this sort of strategy has the chance could give the other forces in play a real run for their money. It could go toe-to-toe with right-wing populists, on the one hand, and corporate liberals, on the other.
Many people have been mobilized by the idea that “another world is possible”. This appears somewhat diminished in the face of the urgency of the climate crisis.

Of course, the timeframe of the ecological crisis requires major forms of transformative action. Some might become passive and discouraged by the fact that there’s not much time, but we’re also seeing a real sense of urgency, and a lot of energy, trying to rise to the occasion.

I’m heartened by the amount of engagement and the rise of new generations of young activists. In some respect, this reminds me of the late 1960s when I became a radical left activist. Nowadays, as a professor, I’m encountering tremendous demand among students who want to learn about eco-Marxism and socialism — subjects that weren’t particularly popular in previous decades.
So you see reason to be optimistic about the future?

What I see is an enormous interest in making connections. We’re past the moment in which young radicals were focused on constituting a separate voice. People now feel that the urgency not to separate but to connect. The popularity of intersectionality, eco-Marxism, and social-reproduction feminism are symptoms of that desire for connection. I see a lot of creativity and energy among those who trying to develop new radical frameworks that can make these connections. It’s a good time to be an intellectual.


The interview was conducted by Nathalie Steinert.

Transforming Slovenia, One Step at a Time

Luka Mesec on the Slovenian Left’s rise from student protests to a party of government

AUTHORS
Luka Mesec, Joseph Beswick

Luka Mesec, Deputy Prime Minister of Slovenia, at a government press 

conference in October 2022.

Photo: Flickr/Vlada Republike Slovenije

During the democratic socialist wave that swept Western Europe in the 2010s, most international attention was focused on the big names in the big countries: Pablo Iglesias in Spain, Jeremy Corbyn in Great Britiain, and Jean-Luc Melénchon in France, to name a few. The rise of new left-wing formations and their success in shifting political debates in their countries to the Left inspired millions and gave many the impression that history was once again on socialism’s side.

But over the last few years, many of those new left parties have beaten hasty retreats. Some leaders have resigned, others find themselves on the defensive. In the small Southeast European country of Slovenia, however, the Left seems to be hanging on. The democratic socialist party Levica (Slovenian for “the Left”), which emerged out of anti-austerity protests in the country one decade earlier, is now a part of the new government and pushing forward its policies in several key ministries.

Party leader and Slovenian Deputy Prime Minister Luka Mesec was recently in the UK for the World Transformed Festival, where he spoke with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Joe Beswick about the party’s trajectory, its plans for government, and how socialism can go mainstream in Slovenia and across Europe.

Levica has existed as a party since 2017, but its history dates back further, and is of course closely related to Slovenian politics since the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Can you give us a brief overview of how politics in Slovenia has developed over the last three decades?

Luka Mesec is Deputy Prime Minister of Slovenia and Minister of Family, Labour, and Social Affairs. He has lead the Slovenian socialist party Levica since its founding in 2017.

I would divide those three decades into three periods. The first period was the transition, from 1991 until accession to the EU or adoption of the euro, which happened in 2004 and 2007. In those years, Slovenia was the only former socialist country in Europe that decided not to go “all-in” with the shock doctrine, but instead established a welfare state according to the Austrian or German model. It was quite successful — we were the most successful Eastern European economy, and the welfare state is still alive and well. In terms of purchasing power, the bottom half of the Slovenian population lives better than their counterparts in England or the US.

However, the next 15 years were much more troubled. Those were basically the times of crisis. After the financial collapse in 2008, Slovenia suffered like all of the southern European economies. There was a debt crisis, and a lot of big firms and banks went bankrupt. The banks were nationalized, followed by austerity measures. Then, the crises accumulated — first the austerity measures, then fierce political polarization, and the migrant crisis, which of course caused new political fights, and then, at the end, COVID.

Now I think we are in a new period. The centre-left is in power again after 15 years, ruled by a new party called Svoboda, the Freedom Party. The prime minister, Robert Golub, turned out to have left-leaning inclinations. We are removing the barbed wire from our border with Croatia, the tax reform looks progressive for now, and Levica entered the government for the first time. We control the Ministry for Labour, Family, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities as well as the Ministry for Culture. We will also invent a new system of social housing.

At least for the moment, it seems that the crises of the past decades are over. New crises are looming, but for now, the government and the coalition looks stable.

Can you tell us more about the origins of Levica? Who formed it, what were the main constituencies behind, and how did you yourself come to be a part of it?

Levica is basically the child of the crisis that I was describing in the last decade. We were born out of a student movement in 2011. Back then, I was a 25-year-old activist. When I was 27, we formed the party, and I entered the parliament for the first time in 2014. Since then, we have built up the party as a political force.

Levica began as a party with Marxist tendencies, but increasingly I’m more interested in post-Keynesian policies. We’re not only a “social” party — we are also an environmental party and a party that strongly defended democracy against the previous government. We contributed a lot to the fall of that government, which is how we gained the legitimacy to be part of the current government.

We have to think about how to embed socialist ideas in the present liberal environment, because the default ideology is liberalism everywhere in Europe.

I decided to go into activism because when I started university in 2007, it seemed like the world was collapsing — our generation would not get decent jobs, the housing crisis was looming, and the future looked grim. We decided that we have to change something and formed various activist movements. We tried direct democracy, we tried to influence politics via protest movements, and so on. Ultimately, we decided that a party was the way to go.

Back then I was 27, and I had to get used to being a public persona that was warmly greeted by one part of the Slovenian public, but quite hated by others. I got used to it after eight years, but now, as deputy prime minister, the pressure is ten times greater than before. We are leading our ministries with competence and public opinion agrees with what we are doing on a political level, but I worry about our society.

When Guy Debord wrote The Society of Spectacle, I don’t think he imagined what scope this spectacle would take on 60 years later. What I’m most afraid of right now is that regardless of what we do in terms of policies, there is a narrative that is completely detached from it. I have to battle spin cycles and false accusations all the time. It’s similar to the smears Jeremy Corbyn faced when he was close to power.

Speaking of challenges Corbyn faced, what about Levica’s social base? Is it fair to say that your constituency is largely urban, educated, left-wing people? And what success have you had building a coalition with the traditional industrial working class?

It is challenging, because the right wing has the same agenda everywhere. They say that the future will be a fight between globalists and nationalists, and they focus their fire on the capital cities. They say “they are for Ljubljana, we are for Slovenia”. And their narrative is quite successful.

In Ljubljana, we can get maybe 20 percent, and in other bigger cities we can get 10 or 15 percent, but the Right dominates in the countryside. We are looking for ways to break their hold, and I believe the government is a position that can help. When you hold a ministerial position, you’re welcome everywhere, no matter what political party you’re from. Mayors and local authorities welcome you because they don’t want to have bad relations with the state. I’m using that to try to present a different picture than what is being depicted by right-wing propaganda.

We have to tackle those fears. When people are not afraid anymore, we can start talking about what future we want to build together.

It sounds like the Left in the Balkans went from a protest movement to an electoral formation, a path the Left has taken in many parts of the world over the last decade. What were some of the main challenges in that process?

When a movement transforms into a political party and enters parliament but stays in the opposition, its role is not very different from what it was before. Being an opposition member of parliament is still an activist position. They might try to push you to moderate your tone, but you can still say whatever you want and try to pull the Overton window to the left.

Once you’re in government, it becomes more complicated, because the arithmetic of power is much more complicated. I figured out very quickly that from now on, every word that I say can cause a media frenzy. But it’s not just the media that you have to be careful about. There are lots of sensitive relations between members of the coalition, various ministries in the government, opposition, the public, and so on. You have to calculate all the time how to pitch your agenda without sparking too much of a backlash.

Speaking of backlash, when the new government was first announced, you were slated to head a new “Ministry for Solidarity-Based Futures”. Recently, it was announced that the ministry would not be created after all. Was that a political battle that Levica lost?

When we formed the government, we decided to create new ministries: a Ministry for Climate, a Ministry for the Protection of Natural Resources, a Ministry for Digitalization, and the Ministry for a Solidarity-Based Future. The right wing, which is of course allergic to Levica, decided to call for a national referendum against the Ministry for Solidarity-Based Futures.


Whether it’s Corbyn, Podemos, or Levica — there is space for socialist interventions. The question is whether a new variant of socialism can become the predominant force in national politics.

I’m currently the Minister of Labour and the Welfare State, and we decided that we could just expand this ministry to include housing, long-term care, and economic democracy and rename it. It’s mostly a question of semantics, but that was publicly very well accepted because it showed that we’re willing to do smart compromises.

Electoral politics is always about compromise and building coalitions, which can sometimes mean a de-radicalization of politics. You said that Levica went from a Marxist background to a more post-Keynesian approach. Do you think that’s been a price worth paying? Has the party made real change in government?

Yes, I believe so. We focused our agenda on issues that can be moved to the left or where new social systems could even be established. For instance, we cancelled an arms deal signed by the previous government that was worth 400 million euro, which is a lot of money for the Slovenian budget, nearly 1 percent of GDP. We also removed the barbed wire from the border with Croatia, which was unimaginable a year ago.

The new tax reform is interesting because it shifts the priorities of our social system, which was drifting towards precarization. We’ve made regular employment cheaper for young people under the age of 29, so we are transitioning more young people into regular employment. We are also establishing a mechanism of workers’ ownership, and some firms are already interested in it. So, we will basically relaunch the cooperative movement in Slovenia.

The other thing I’m really enthusiastic about is that we are starting a public housing policy — basically from zero. Those are all policies that would not happen without Levica in government, and I believe that if we do all of that in the next year or two, we will have a lot of good examples.

That all sounds very exciting. You mentioned “relaunching the cooperative movement” in Slovenia. On that note, what role does the legacy of Yugoslavian socialism play for Levica and for politics in Slovenia?

The legacy of Yugoslavia in Slovenia is not comparable to the legacy of the Soviet Union. In Slovenia there was a degree of free speech and things were in fact quite democratic, so people are not so negative towards Yugoslavia. If you ask Slovenians, about 70 percent say that Tito was a positive figure.

In that sense, socialism doesn’t scare people when talking about history, but it’s different when we’re talking about the present. At least among some parts of the public, they understand socialism as nationalizing small- and medium-sized businesses, or that we want to stop anyone from earning more than 3,000 euro per month, and so on. So, we have to think about how to embed socialist ideas in the present liberal environment, because the default ideology is liberalism everywhere in Europe.

But as I believe all of our examples show, whether it’s Corbyn, Podemos, or Levica — there is space for socialist interventions. The question is whether a new variant of socialism can become the predominant force in national politics. That’s why I believe it was worth going into government, because every attempt is a test that will reveal both mistakes and successes.




BOOK | 07/2021The New Balkan Left

A new volume from the RLS takes stock of its struggles, successes, and failures

M FOR MISOGYNISTS 

'They will vote to ruin your life': MAGA Republicans blame single women for the 2022 midterms

Tiffany Terrell
November 15, 2022

Women are voting — and the GOP is terrified

In an article published by The Bulwark on November 14, Never Trump libertarian and conservative journalist Cathy Young slammed MAGA Republicans who are blaming single women for the outcome of the 2022 midterms.

After a disappointing election, many Republican pundits have taken to blaming unmarried women and young voters for the lack of the “red wave” they were expecting.

A viral example of this type of thinking came from conservative FOX news host Jesse Waters discussing the exit polls following the midterms. Watch below:

After the heavily predicted "red wave" in the 2022 midterm elections turned out to be an illusion, it was really no mystery why Republicans failed to capitalize on the political tailwinds that — according to conventional wisdom and political history — should have given them much bigger wins.

Blame Donald Trump and Justice Samuel Alito, for the one-two punch of inciting an insurrection (which was wildly unpopular) and overturning the right to abortion (which was highly popular). Americans, it turns out, are protective of democracy and their basic human rights and turned out in huge numbers to vote for Democrats or, more precisely, to vote against Republicans, who are a threat to both.

The smart thing for Republicans to do is clear enough: Stop stoking Trump's election lies and scale back the tsunami of racism, sexism and homophobia currently fueling their party.

But there's no chance that will happen, of course. Let's remember that Republicans also flirted with moderating their message after losing the 2012 election, only to go in precisely the opposite direction by nominating Donald Trump in 2016. Looking inward and engaging in self-reflection is the antithesis of everything the modern GOP stands for. So instead, the right is looking outward for someone besides themselves to blame, and they've landed on a favorite scapegoat: Single women. Worse, in blaming single women for their own political failure, conservatives are wallowing in a ludicrous conspiracy theory based on the premise that having an "F" on your driver's license renders you incapable of autonomous thought.

Yes, it's true: Republicans are big mad that single women voted for Democrats, and their explanation for this is that Democrats of brainwashing those hapless, unfortunate women who don't have husbands to make their decisions for them.

Fox News host Jesse Watters, in the most viral example of this talking point, said that "Democrat policies are designed to keep women single" and implored male viewers to get the ladies under control: "Guys, go put a ring on it." How male Fox News viewers are supposed to talk these unruly Democratic-voting women into marrying them was left unexplained, although Watters has previously hinted at the usefulness of coercion when it comes to romance.

While Republican politicians have generally been a bit more circumspect in their language, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri tipped his hand on a not-that-subtle endorsement of this conspiracy theory, retweeting conservative sociologist Brad Wilcox — who prominently drew attention to single women's Democratic leanings — complaining that "fewer adults are opening their hearts, lives, and minds to marriage and children."

In the real world, of course, what's going on is painfully simple. Single women are a constituency that benefits enormously from equal pay, equal education and reproductive rights. (Married women benefit from these things, too, but a lot of them are cross-pressured to keep the peace with Republican husbands, and/or are voting their resentments toward their single counterparts.) Understanding that they have a built-in advantage with single women, Democrats have constructed a platform designed to appeal to them.

But accepting that straightforward narrative means accepting the radical notion that women have minds of their own. That will clearly never do in the GOP universe. So a nefarious and unnecessarily complicated conspiracy theory must be created that reimagines basic constituent appeal as manipulation and brainwashing.

As with most accusations made by Republicans, the claims that Democrats somehow "control" women are pure psychological projection. It's pretty obvious that Republicans are the ones who want to control women, and when they start talking about "incentivizing" marriage, what they really mean is various forms of coercion. Stripping women of reproductive rights and economic equality is about trying to create a society where women feel they have to get married in order to survive, or at least to have any financial security. As a not-so-hidden bonus, a woman who is financially dependent on her husband is likely to feel even less room to disagree with him politically or vote her own conscience.

In fact, the theory that Democrats are brainwashing women into staying single is directly linked to the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, a white supremacist fiction proposing that liberal "elites" are somehow "importing" people of color to "replace" white conservatives. In both cases, the presumption that people who are not white men are lesser beings, incapable of independent thought.

As with the Big Lie, this is all about Republicans telling themselves that entire groups of Americans are not legitimate voters or citizens, and don't deserve a say in government. Conservatives' bitter retreat into this conspiracy theory after their disappointing midterm results strongly suggests that the Republican Party has no inclination to moderate anything about its policies or messaging. Instead, we can expect the right to double down on the fascistic assumption that people like them are the only real Americans, and nobody else gets to vote.

Lab-grown meat cleared for human consumption by U.S. regulator

REUTERS 
17 November, 2022

The world's first lab-grown beef burger is seen after it was cooked at a launch event in west London August 5, 2013. REUTERS/David Parry/pool

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time cleared a meat product grown from animal cells for human consumption, the agency announced on Wednesday.

UPSIDE Foods, a company that makes cell-cultured chicken by harvesting cells from live animals and using the cells to grow meat in stainless-steel tanks, will be able to bring its products to market once it has been inspected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), said a release from the FDA.

“The world is experiencing a food revolution and the (FDA) is committed to supporting innovation in the food supply,” said FDA Commissioner Robert M. Califf and Susan Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in a statement.

The FDA said in documents released on Wednesday that it had reviewed data from the company and had no further questions about the company’s conclusion that its product is safe for humans to eat.

“We are thrilled at FDA’s announcement,” said David Kay, UPSIDE’s director of communications, in an email. “This historic step paves the way for our path to market.”

The review is not technically an approval and applies only to UPSIDE products, though the agency is ready to work with other firms developing cultured animal cell food, the FDA said in a release.

USDA and FDA together regulate cell-cultured meat under a 2019 agreement between the two agencies. USDA will oversee the processing and labeling of cell-cultured meat products.

Demand for alternatives to farmed meat has grown alongside awareness of the high greenhouse gas emissions of raising livestock. Cultivated chicken was served to attendees at this year’s COP27 climate conference in Egypt.

These companies ran an experiment: Pay workers their full salary to work fewer days


November 15, 2022
PADDY HIRSCH

NPR


Pixabay

Companies in the United Kingdom are about to complete the biggest trial of a four-day work week ever undertaken, anywhere in the world. The program's thesis was a provocative one: that for six months, these companies would reduce their workers' hours by 20%, to 32 hours a week, but continue to pay them 100% of their pay.

Charlotte Lockhart, the founder of Four Day Week, the organization behind the pilot program, says company leaders usually have a visceral reaction when they hear the idea of cutting hours without cutting pay. Something like, "That'll never work in my business. That'll never work in my industry. That'll never work in my country. That'll never work in the world."

PLANET MONEY
Nice work week, if you can get it

Fortunately, she found 73 companies to give it a shot. They include financial firms, recruiters, consultants, health care companies and even a fish and chip shop (this is Britain, after all). And while the data on the study hasn't been released yet, the anecdotal feedback from these firms appears to be positive. Fully 86% said they will likely continue the four-day workweek policy. The same pay for less time at work? Sign us up!

Reframing the workplace

From the moment the ive-day week was adopted as the industry standard, about a century ago, we've been talking about spending less time at work. John Maynard Keynes declared in the early 1930s that technological advancement would bring the work week down to 15 hours within a century. A U.S. Senate subcommittee doubled down on this in 1965, predicting we'd only be working 14 hours by the year 2000.

But, over the last few years, the idea of shortening the work week has been given new impetus by the pandemic, which threw workplaces into disarray. That created a unique opening for reformers like Charlotte Lockhart. "The opportunity we have here is to completely reframe the workplace," she says.


NATIONAL
What is 'quiet quitting,' and how it may be a misnomer for setting boundaries at work

To get companies on board, she is using the holy grail of increased productivity as a lure. That's a particularly tantalizing enticement for companies in the UK, where productivity has languished for more than a decade, and where, she says, workers are on average productive for just three hours a day.

"There is clear evidence around the world that if you reduce work time, you increase productivity," she says, pointing to findings from studies done in Iceland, New Zealand, the UK, Belgium and Japan.

The data produced by these studies tends to be a little squishy: There are not a lot of hard numbers in them that allow readers to gauge productivity gains or losses in material terms. But managers and workers have generally reported being equally or more productive in a shortened week. They reported improved health and general wellbeing, as well as reduced stress and burnout. One big finding was that people who work fewer hours in the week tend to get more sleep, which almost everyone in the scientific community agrees is key to productivity.

Laura Giurge, a professor of behavioral science who studies wellbeing at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics, says happier, better rested workers are likely to be more productive, and less likely to burn out or churn out. And a shortened week can drive productivity in other ways.

"It forces people to prioritize better and really focus on completing their core work," she says. "It is almost like a removal of bullshit tasks or tasks that seem important but aren't."

She notes that companies often waste resources by keeping employees idle between meetings and tasks. "These idle hours not only fragment employees' attention — and therefore productivity — but can also cost companies up to $100 billion a year in lost wages," she says.


TECHNOLOGY
It's the end of the boom times in tech, as layoffs keep mounting

A shorter week can also go a long way to dealing with one of the biggest impairments to corporate productivity: employees taking time off to go to the doctor or recover from an illness. Giurge quotes research done in the U.S. estimating that 5 to 8% of annual health care costs are associated with and may be attributable to workplace stressors such as long hours.

And in Britain?

"We know that one in four of our workforce in the UK are not working productively because they have a workplace or mental health issue," Charlotte Lockhart says. "The UK loses nearly 8 million worker days from workplace stress and overwork a year. So that's about $43 billion lost from the economy because I've taken a sick day."
Less is more

Esme Terry of the Digital Futures at Work Research Center in the UK is in full agreement that, for most people, long work days and weeks impair productivity. But she's not entirely convinced that a four-day work week is the way to go. For one thing, there's some disagreement over what a four-day week actually means.

"There are multiple different models that are termed a four-day week," she points out. "For example, some organizations have condensed hours, so the number of working hours isn't actually reduced. They're condensed into fewer days with extended hours during those days." That's a model that could increase stress and burnout, rather than reduce it.

THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY
Could foreign workers unlock America's tight labor market?

There's also some question about how a four-day work week could fit the overall workforce because of the difference in the way people work in different types of jobs, Terry says. She points to the difference between knowledge work and physical labor as an example.

"The work week for one of those employees is very different to the other employee in terms of their productivity," she says. "Knowledge work at, say, an advertising agency where your employer has you around five days a week, nine to five, because they're going to have meetings and they're paying you to be in that space so that they can use you, doesn't necessarily mean that you're being productive while you're in that space. Whereas if you're a delivery driver for Amazon, every moment that you're working, you are being productive."

She also notes that, paradoxically, while a four-day work week does free up time for workers, it's also a constraint, one that might not work for a lot of people.

"Workers have different preferences; different ways of working," she says. "Some people like to have prescribed hours; very set hours. They know exactly what they're doing when they're doing it, and they find that productive. Other people like to be able to work when they feel they're most productive. and that might not be in core working hours."

One size doesn't fit all

Her caution was reflected in a small and very random poll conducted by NPR on the streets of London recently. All the British workers we spoke to said they liked the idea of more time off, but they all expressed doubts that the four-day week model would fit easily with their sectors. They also raised the question of whether a week with fewer working hours would benefit the kind of workers who make up an increasingly large part of the British workforce.

"You're talking about differences between the knowledge economy and the platform and gig economies," Terry says. "Work is precarious, and generally people lack security and are self-employed in most instances. They're tied to a company but technically work for themselves." Given that the corporate trend is generally in the direction of companies hiring workers on more exploitative terms, rather than less, fewer hours for the same pay seems like a tough sell.


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What Terry says the workplace really needs — along with the workers who work in it — is to become more flexible. That could mean a four-day week for some workers, while others might want to stick to five days, or even extend to six or seven, but working in shorter bursts over those days. The point, she says, is that there is no one formula for increased productivity (not to mention wellbeing). To make employees truly productive, employers need to adopt a variety of workplace models.

"If employers can be less prescriptive about working hours and potentially place more trust in their employees to manage their own working time, then that's likely to have benefits," she says.

Managers trusting their workers? That wouldn't just be a reframing; more like a reimagining. But as Nicolas Bloom of Stanford University told our own Greg Rosalsky recently, we may be realizing that dream right now, thanks to the pandemic and a widespread shift to remote work that companies have been forced to embrace.

"Tons of firms I've spoken to have discovered you have to use output management to manage remote workers, which means beefing up HR systems, which means more training, more 360 reviews, performance reviews," Bloom says. "If you're an employee, that's good news for you because it means your boss, rather than saying you gotta be chained to your desk 50 hours a week at these strict times, they just say, 'Get your report done, make your sales figures, achieve your targets, and kind of manage yourself.'"

And once you're managing yourself, of course, it's you who gets to decide whether you work four hours a day for five days a week, or eight hours for three days. Or even — imagine! — no days at all.

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