We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt, the Power of Defiant Goodwill, and the Art of Beginning Afresh

By Maria Popova

March 17, 2024

Source: The Marginalian

Hannah Arendt

“We speak of four fundamental forces,” a physicist recently said to me, “but I believe there are only two: good and evil” — a startling assertion coming from a scientist. Beneath it pulsates the sensitive recognition that it is precisely because free will is so uncomfortably at odds with everything we know about the nature of the universe that the experience of freedom — which is different from the fact of freedom — is fundamental to our humanity; it is precisely because we were forged by these impartial forces, these handmaidens of chance, that our choices — which always have a moral valence — give meaning to reality.

Whether our cosmic helplessness paralyzes or mobilizes us depends largely on how we orient to freedom and what we make of agency. “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

Arendt’s rigorously reasoned, boundlessly mobilizing defiance of helplessness and “the stubborn humanity of her fierce and complex creativity” come abloom in We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience (public library) — Lyndsey Stonebridge’s erudite and passionate celebration of what Arendt modeled for generations and goes on modeling for us: “determined and splendid goodwill, refusing to accept the compromised terms upon which modern freedom is offered and holding out for something new.”

Stonebridge, who has been studying Arendt for three decades, writes:

Hannah Arendt is a creative and complex thinker; she writes about power and terror, war and revolution, exile and love, and, above all, about freedom. Reading her is never just an intellectual exercise, it is an experience.

[…]

She loved the human condition for what it was: terrible, beautiful, perplexing, amazing, and above all, exquisitely precious. And she never stopped believing in a politics that might be true to that condition. Her writing has much to tell us about how we got to this point in our history, about the madness of modern politics and about the awful, empty thoughtlessness of contemporary political violence. But she also teaches that it is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

She too lived in a “post-truth era,” she too watched the fragmentation of reality in a shared world, and she saw with uncommon lucidity that the only path to freedom is the free mind. Whether she was writing about love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss or about lying in politics, she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: The Life of the Mind.

In consonance with George Saunders’s lovely case for the courage of uncertainty and his insistence that possibility is a matter of trying to “remain permanently confused,” Stonebridge writes:

Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.

Having “escaped from the black heart of fascist Europe and its crumbling nation states,” having witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust and the rise of totalitarian regimes around the world, Arendt never stopped thinking and writing about what it means to be human — an example of what she considered the “unanswerable questions” feeding our “capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

Celebrating Arendt as a “conservationist” who “traveled back into the traditions of political and philosophical thought in search of new creative pathways to the present,” Stonebridge reflects:

Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point. How can we think straight amidst cynicism and mendacity? What is there left to love, to cherish, to fight for? How can we act to best secure it? What fences and bridges do we need to build to protect freedom and which walls do we need to destroy?

In my own longtime immersion in Arendt’s world, I have often shuddered at how perfectly her indictment of political oppression applies to the tyranny of consumerist society, although Arendt did not overtly address that. In this passage from Stonebridge, one could easily replace “Nazism,” “totalitarianism,” and “the Holocaust” with “late-stage capitalism” and feel the same sting of truth:

Nazism was undoubtedly tyrannical, and self-evidently fascist in its gray-black glamour, racist mythology, and disregard for the rule of law. However, Arendt argued that modern dictatorship had an important new feature. Its power reached everywhere: not a person, an institution, a mind, or a private dream was left untouched. It squeezed people together, crushing out spaces for thought, spontaneity, creativity — defiance. Totalitarianism was not just a new system of oppression, it seemed to have altered the texture of human experience itself.

[…]

The moral obscenity of the Holocaust had to be recognized, put on trial, grieved, and addressed. But it could not be made right with existing methods and ideologies… You cannot simply will this evil off the face of the earth with a few good ideas, let alone with the old ones that allowed it to flourish in the first place. You have to start anew.

This belief that “we are free to change the world and to start something new in it” animated Arendt’s life — a freedom she located not in what she termed reckless optimism (the divested shadow side of Rebecca Solnit’s notion of hope as an act of defiance), but in action as the crux of the pursuit of happiness — what Stonebridge so astutely perceives as “the determination to exist as a fully living and thinking person in a world among others.” She writes:

Freedom cannot be forced; it can only be experienced in the world and alongside others. It is on this condition that we are free to change the world and start something new in it.

Echoing Albert Camus’s insistence that “real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” she adds:

Learning to love the world means that you cannot be pleasantly indifferent about its future. But there is a wisdom in knowing that change has come before and, what is more, that it will keep on coming, often when you least expect it; unplanned, spontaneous, and sometimes, even just in time. That, for Hannah Arendt, is the human condition.

Couple We Are Free to Change the World — a superb read in its entirety — with James Baldwin on the paradox of freedom, John O’Donohue on the transcendent terror of new beginnings, and Bertrand Russell on the key to a free mind, then revisit Arendt on how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world, the power of being an outsider, and what forgiveness really means.

Haiti, Honduras, and US Hegemony

By Amy Goodman, Denis Moynihan 

March 17, 2024

Source: Democracy Now!




Haiti and Honduras have made headlines in the last few weeks. Honduras’ former president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was just convicted in a US court of drug trafficking. He faces life in prison. Haiti is a nation without a government, as armed groups have united against the US-backed, unelected Prime Minister installed after the assassination of their president in 2021. In both cases, what is missing from mainstream news coverage is the role of US intervention that brought them to this point.

“The crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism,” University of British Columbia Professor Jemima Pierre, a Haitian American scholar, explained on the Democracy Now! news hour. In her NACLA Report article headlined, Haiti as Empire’s Laboratory, she describes her home country as “the site of the longest and most brutal neocolonial experiment in the modern world.”

Haiti was the world’s first Black republic, founded in 1804 following a slave revolt. France demanded Haiti pay reparations, for the loss of slave labor when Haiti’s enslaved people freed themselves. For more than a century, Haiti’s debt payments to France, then later to the US, hobbled its economy. The United States refused to recognize Haiti for decades, until 1862, fearful that the example of a slave uprising would inspire the same in the US.

In 1915, the US invaded Haiti, occupying it until 1934. The U.S. also backed the brutal Duvalier dictatorships from 1957 to 1986. Jean-Bertand Aristide became Haiti’s first democratically-elected president in 1991, only to be ousted in a violent coup eight months later. The coup was supported by President George H.W. Bush and later by President Bill Clinton. Public pressure forced Clinton to allow Aristide’s return in 1994, to finish his presidential term in 1996. Aristide was reelected in 2001.“In 2004…the U.S., France and Canada got together and backed a coup d’état against the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,” Jemima Pierre continued. “The U.S. Marines…put him on a plane with his security officials, his wife and aide, and flew them to the Central African Republic.”

Democracy Now! traveled to C.A.R. in 2004 covering a delegation led by Transafrica founder Randall Robinson and U.S. Congressmember Maxine Waters who defied US policy and escorted the Aristides back to the Western Hemisphere. Aristide confirmed to Democracy Now! then that he had been ousted in a coup d’état backed by the United States. Aristide then went to live in exile in South Africa for the next seven years.

In response to allegations that gangs are currently controlling Haiti, Professor Pierre said, “The so-called gang violence is actually not the main problem in Haiti. The main problem in Haiti is the constant interference of the international community, and the international community here is, very explicitly, the U.S., France and Canada.”

The Biden administration is reportedly now considering the transfer of Haitian asylum seekers to the controversial U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – a repeat of some of the worst U.S. policies in its long history of exploitation of Haitians.

Honduras, meanwhile, currently has a democratically-elected president, Xiomara Castro. Her husband, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, was elected president in 2006, then ousted in a US-backed coup in 2009. In the following years, Honduras descended into a narco-state, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee violence, seeking asylum in the United States and elsewhere.

In 2013, Juan Orlando Hernández was elected president amidst allegations of campaign finance violations, then again in 2017 in an election widely considered fraudulent. Shortly thereafter, his brother Juan Antonio Hernández was arrested in Miami for drug trafficking. Then, following Xiomara Castro’s election, Juan Orlando Hernández himself was arrested and extradited to the US for cocaine trafficking. On March 8th, he was convicted in US federal court, and is currently awaiting sentencing.

“The evidence was chilling,” history professor Dana Frank, who was in the courtroom, said on Democracy Now! “This litany of assassinations of prosecutors, assassinations of journalists, corruption of the police, the military, politicians, the president, his brother, you name it. And it was like the curtain was drawn back, and you could see the day-to-day workings of this tremendous violent, corrupt mechanism that was the Juan Orlando Hernández administration…this was what happened after the 2009 coup that opened the door for the destruction of the rule of law in Honduras.”

US intervention in Haiti, Honduras and other countries is one of the principal drivers of people seeking asylum in the United States, as they flee violence, poverty and persecution at home. This point is almost never mentioned in the US press. To understand and ultimately solve the “immigration crisis,” Americans need to understand what their government has long done in their name, with their tax dollars–arming and propping up brutal regimes abroad.

PragerU’s Moral Case for Capitalism Is Terrible

Megapopular right-wing YouTube channel PragerU’s “moral case for capitalism” fails to address capitalism’s massive defects — its injustice, exploitation, and instability. Instead, it offers a glib pep talk about why modern society is better than feudalism.

By Ben Burgis

March 17, 2024

Source: Jacobin


Daniel Hannan, the British politician who starred in PragerU's "moral case for capitalism" video.

Prager University has no classrooms. It has no dormitories or cafeterias or students running around playing frisbee on sunny days. It is not a university at all, though it does have a lot of lectures.

To date, PragerU has uploaded 3,200 videos. The channel, which has been built up with lavish support from billionaire donors, has 3.22 million subscribers. That’s over half a million more than CNBC. Several states have recently moved to approve PragerU videos for use in their public schools.

All of this is concerning not just because the avowed purpose of the “U” is right-wing indoctrination, but also because anyone who sits through much of the curriculum may actually get worse at critical thinking as a result. Take one of their most recent videos, titled “A Moral Case for Capitalism,” narrated by British conservative Daniel Hannan.

Hannan is a high-ranking member of the Conservative Party in the House of Lords — none of which is mentioned in the video. He’s identified only as the author of a book called Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.

As the video starts, Hannan makes a bold promise. While many people will grant that capitalism is a highly efficient economic system, he says, he’ll do something more unusual: he’ll make a “moral” case for it.

You would think, then, that the meat of his video would be taken up in addressing and refuting the standard reasons given by capitalism’s critics for thinking the system is unjust. Instead, Hannan pretends those criticisms don’t exist.

Hint: Capitalism’s Critics Don’t Typically Support Feudalism

Hannan never defines “capitalism” but he seems to vaguely identify that word with the existence of markets, liberal political institutions and the rule of law, or perhaps some vague combination of the two. But neither of these is enough to differentiate capitalism from alternative systems. Markets have existed in a variety of noncapitalist societies. They might well persist under some version of market socialism. And democratic socialists make political institutions that respect individual rights central to our conception of a desirable postcapitalist society.

Much of Hannan’s airtime is devoted to painting a grim picture of life before capitalism. This part is mostly accurate, with one glaring and hugely consequential omission: Hannan starts the clock at the agricultural revolution

Hannan presents capitalism simply as an outgrowth of “human nature.” This narrative would have been severely undermined if Hannan had acknowledged the existence of the long phase of human history that Karl Marx calls “primitive communism.” Humans were organized into hunter-gatherer tribes with communal property relations for the vast majority of our history as a species, and these societies were necessarily classless. There simply wasn’t enough food to go around to support a ruling class that wasn’t hunting or gathering.

How is it that the earliest human societies and the ones that lasted the longest were at odds with our alleged nature as a species? Instead of grappling with this contradiction, as Marxists do, Hannan sets an arbitrary start date. About “twelve thousand years ago,” he says, “one of our ancestors made a world-changing discovery.” If you “left seeds in fertile soil, plants would grow from them.” Sadly, it “didn’t take long for someone to make the next discovery,” which was that you could use coercion to force others to grow food for you.

Compressing everything between then and “roughly the end of the seventeenth century and the birth of modern liberal capitalism,” Hannan says that “almost everyone on the planet . . . lived in servitude” and that every society previous to “modern liberal capitalism” was “based on systematized oppression.”

That much is more or less true — at least if we start our story, as he does, at the beginning of class society. Slavery and feudalism are very bad systems. This is a point on which hardcore Marxists can agree with hardcore defenders of “modern liberal capitalism.”

But it’s hard to tell how this video is meant to function as a defense of capitalism against it’s most prominent nineteenth-, twentieth-, or twenty-first-century critics. Capitalism’s critics don’t long for a return to feudalism. We think the transition from feudalism to capitalism was a long step in the right direction. We just don’t think it goes far enough. In short, Hannah’s video doesn’t engage with our actual views enough to refute them.

Hannan is right to say that capitalism has very efficiently developed the productive capacities of our society, thus creating a level of material abundance unimaginable to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, as well as our feudal ones. But right now those capacities are controlled undemocratically by a small minority of the population and the resulting abundance is distributed in a grotesquely equal way. That’s what socialists seek to change.

“Status to Contract”

Quoting “the great Victorian jurist Henry Maine,” Hannan summarizes the move from feudalism to capitalism (or, in Hannan’s formulation, “the move to modern liberty”) with the phrase “status to contract.” In other words, rather than being born as either serfs or lords, people under capitalism are free to buy whatever they can afford and enter into employment contracts as they see fit.

The problem with this isn’t that he isn’t talking about something real and important. It’s that he’s not talking about a subject on which he disagrees with socialists, and nothing he says is relevant to where defenders of capitalism actually clash with capitalism’s critics.

The socialist philosopher G. A. Cohen talked about three different conceptions of “equality of opportunity” in his book Why Not Socialism?. “Bourgeois equality of opportunity” means eliminating all legal impediments to anyone who can getting ahead in society. Achieving this kind of equality is certainly important. But is it the only kind of equality worth wanting? A libertarian dystopia where all schools were privatized and poor children went to work in coal mines as soon as they could walk, after all, would still have this kind of equal opportunity, as long as there were no laws against upward mobility.

Cohen’s second-level conception of equality, “left-liberal equality of opportunity,” involves trying to remove social impediments to people getting ahead, like substandard schools in impoverished areas. Efforts made by various welfare states to move in the direction of left-liberal equal opportunity certainly represent an improvement over bare-bones bourgeois equal opportunity.

But Cohen holds out as the real ideal that we should use to evaluate social progress how closely they approximate “socialist equality of opportunity” — the idea that all inequalities are unjust if they’re outside of the control of whoever ends up with the short end of the stick. It’s one thing for one person to have more than another because they worked longer hours or agreed to do a particularly demanding job others didn’t want, and quite another for a wealthy capitalist to simply inherit a business from his father the way kings inherit their thrones. Or even for some people to end up with significantly better lives than others depending on whether they had to work menial jobs or they happened to be born with the set of skills that helps them climb the ladder of middle-class upward mobility.

Cohen’s “socialist equality of opportunity” principle forces us to think about whether, and why, people who do socially necessary but “unskilled” labor deserve worse lives than lawyers or accountants. Such questions don’t seem to arise in Hannan’s worldview. He seems to think people who work long hours for low wages should just shut up and be grateful that they weren’t born as serfs or slaves.
Contracts, Status, and Class

The most important critic of capitalism in the system’s history, whose name doesn’t appear in Hannan’s video, is Karl Marx, whose masterpiece Capital is precisely devoted to analyzing what a society where production is organized around “contract” rather than formally codified “status” actually works. One of the central arguments of that book is that capitalism is a class society too, even if the way that ruling classes extract the “surplus” created by the laboring population is different than the way it works in feudal and slave systems.

Marx proposed that in all of these systems the “immediate producers” (whether serfs, slaves, or modern workers) divide their time between the hours when they’re working to meet their own needs and the hours when they’re working to enrich slave owners or feudal aristocrats, or capitalists. Under feudalism, it all happens right out in the open. The serf is allowed to farm his own little plot of land for a certain number of weeks a year and legally required to farm his lord’s land during other weeks. Under both slavery and capitalism, Marx says, the division is disguised, though in opposite ways.

Slaves appear to spend all of their working hours working to enrich their owners, but this is misleading, since the resources owners spend feeding and clothing them are themselves produced by slave labor — whether directly or through the slaves making products that the owner sold and used to buy the food and clothing. Under capitalism, by contrast, workers are officially paid for every hour of their labor, but in practice they make goods or services equivalent to what they get back in their paychecks during part of the day, and during the rest they’re producing profits for the boss. If a worker produces $400 in goods over the course of an eight-hour day, and only gets back $200 in wages, then in effect they’ve spent four hours working for themselves and four hours doing unpaid labor on behalf of the boss.

Marx says that the extraction of these hours of unpaid labor is involuntary, even if under capitalism they’re being extracted not by direct coercion, as in earlier forms of class society, but by the “mute compulsion” of economic necessity. The vast majority of people born into the working class — which is to say, the vast majority of society — have no realistic way of making a living except to sell their working hours to a capitalist. That means that to put food on the table and pay rent they have no acceptable choice except to sign an employment contract in which they agree to give up much of their autonomy for eight hours of each day, and to give up a massive share of what they produce to the capitalist.

In Marx’s phrase, workers under capitalism are “doubly free” — both legally “free” to make employment contracts with any capitalist who will have them, and “free” from any alternative way of making ends meet. In other words, they’re forced to sign contracts that confer a subordinate status.

Socialists seek to change that through some form of collective ownership. Those of us who advocate democratic forms of socialism think that workers and communities should control productive resources and decide together how to use them. So, for example, Amazon, the business Hannan uses as an example, could either be converted into a worker cooperative or nationalized by a democratic state, or worker and state representatives could run it together in some combination of the two models. The point from a democratic socialist perspective is that, in a phrase popularized by political theorist Michael Walzer, “what touches all” should be “decided by all.”

Other than few desultory references to authoritarian regimes like North Korea — hardly the model that any socialist in his own society advocates — the only sentence of the video that even acknowledges the possibility that the move from feudalism to capitalism could be a step toward something better than capitalism (rather than humanity’s final economic destination) is one where he says that “socialism replaces our natural human relations with state control.” But he doesn’t tell us why working-class people making decisions collectively and democratically about, for example, how the package-shipping industry should work is less “natural” than warehouse workers taking orders from Jeff Bezos.
Why is PragerU Afraid of the Free Exchange of Ideas?

If Hannan acknowledged that any of these critiques existed, he might argue that mute compulsion isn’t real compulsion and that it’s not the job of social and political institutions to guarantee that everyone’s needs are met, only to protect everyone’s rights. He repeatedly celebrates capitalism as the only system that he doesn’t see as resting on “coercion.”

This defense would be step up from Hannan’s weak offering. But it would still fall flat. The material conditions that produce the mute compulsion are upheld by direct coercion. Any system for distributing scarce resources relies on coercion. A letter from the IRS saying you still owe back taxes, or a letter from a socialist government telling you that your business has been nationalized, certainly carries with it at least an implied threat of force — but so does a “No Trespassing” sign on private property. The enforcement of property rights is by definition the use of coercion to ensure that some people and not others have access to limited resources.

If he was willing to engage with the ideas of anti-capitalist writers and thinkers, Hannan would be forced to explain why coercion to protect Bezos’s wealth hoarding isn’t “real” coercion like nationalizing Amazon. It would be interesting to see how he’d try to do that.

But he doesn’t engage with those ideas. Instead, he just gives a pep talk about markets and why modern society is better than feudalism that completely elides the points in contention in real debates about capitalism and socialism. So, for example, he brings up Amazon as an example of how market exchanges benefit both parties. Bezos becomes “fractionally richer,” but consumers get the things they need. Meanwhile, Amazon workers disappear entirely in this picture.

Indeed, the closest Hannan comes to acknowledging the existence of class distinctions within capitalist societies — never mind mounting a defense of those distinctions — is when he quotes the economist Joseph Schumpeter saying that the “capitalist achievement” consists not in providing more “silk stockings for queens” but in making those silk stockings cheap enough to put them in the reach of “factory girls.”

An attentive viewer might ask, “Wait, what’s that about factory girls? That sounds like a class division! Why don’t you say more about that?” But that’s exactly the kind of conversation the PragerU propagandists run screaming away from having.

Real universities, at their best, expose students to a wide variety of perspectives and sharpen their critical thinking skills so they’ll be better equipped to decide for themselves what they think. PragerU is only interested in telling people what to think.

If you let the “factory girls” and their equivalents in contemporary shipping warehouses think for themselves, after all, they might start questioning their status. And who knows where that could lead?

State Lawmakers Are Quietly Rolling Back Child Labor Protections

In January alone, eight states introduced or took new action on rolling back child labor protections.

By Lisa Kwon

March 17, 2024

Source: Truthout




Ryan Scanlan dreads any passage of Indiana’s House Bill 1093. The new bill would remove provisions that protected children between 14 and 17 years old who work year-round. For some students in the high school English teacher’s class at North Central High School in Indianapolis, some of those provisions safeguarded them from working more than nine hours in a day and between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

“If I already have high school seniors who are already working until 10 o’clock or 11 o’clock at night, then there are no protections for them with these new policies,” Scalan said. “And then these new laws might make things even worse for me as a teacher.”

In January alone, eight states introduced or took new action on rolling back child labor protections by eliminating work hour time limits and minimum age restrictions. In response, advocacy groups and policy analysts are prioritizing civic engagement around an underreported pervasive issue that intersects with other public health issues. The challenge lies in cutting through the noise during election season now that 28 states have quietly introduced bills to weaken protections since 2021.

In response to situations like Scanlan’s where child labor issues creep into public education, a new Campaign to End U.S. Child Labor emphasizes how issues surrounding minor workers are not discrete from other issues that Americans will consider during the elections. The campaign launched on Feb. 20 with a shared agenda written and signed by nonprofit organizations, trade unions, and academic institutions that work in the fields of child labor and exploitation. Recommendations include wage increases, protection of immigration statuses, and children’s right to an attorney and access to general assistance programs.

“If your children are working, you can’t actually achieve education for all, you will never have the health outcomes that you want, you will forever have a large segment of your population living in poverty, and you will continue to have malnutrition,” said Anjali Kochar, the executive director of the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to eradicating child exploitation and advocating for the protection of children in national and international policies. “This is a cyclical problem. Child labor is not this thing that stands alone. It is so interconnected with so many issues in any country.”

In its announcement, the Campaign to End U.S. Child Labor cites recent alarms from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, which reported an 88% increase in the number of children employed in violation of child labor laws since 2019. On Oct. 19, 2023, the division’s 740 inspectors were working on more than 800 child labor investigations.

“We have less than 800 inspectors for 11 million workplaces. How is that possible?” Kochar asked. “But these violations have been going on. We just haven’t known about it because enforcement has really stepped up in the last several years.”

Many of the state-level rollbacks coincide with immigration restrictions in states like Florida, which have historically relied on migrant workers and undocumented families to source labor. According to Thomas Kennedy, an organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition and a child of undocumented Argentine parents, the state currently looks to minor workers as a response to a worker shortage exacerbated by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial changes to immigration laws that are affecting the state’s demographics. Most recently, Florida lawmakers have been working to pass House Bill 49, which would allow employers to schedule 16- and 17-year-olds for unlimited hours and eliminate their meal and rest breaks.

“[DeSantis’ immigration policies] created a push factor for migrants to leave the state, so we see Florida farmworker towns become ghost towns,” Kennedy said. “A lot of seasonal agricultural workers that come for specific parts of the harvest process are just avoiding the state … You’re starting to see some of that develop in Florida, and what was their answer? They said, ‘Let’s put teenagers to work.’”

For policy analysts, activating the American public around child labor legislation reversals comes with bringing attention to the language that bills use to seem like protections. Dustin Pugel, a policy director at Kentucky Center for Economic Policy (KCEP), points to the rapid passage of the state’s House Bill 255, which went through the state’s House of Representatives on Feb. 22, as an example of when co-opted language tricks the public into thinking that such rollbacks are positive. According to Pugel, whose work lies in “digging into these bills, understanding what the implications are, and then being able to put that in plain language for lawmakers, media, and general audiences,” HB 255 would repeal state-specific restrictions on employment for children between 14 and 18 years old and allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work all night and during school hours—all without the state’s population fully understanding these ramifications.

“This bill takes some of the language that was in our regulations, which it eliminates, and puts it back into the statute,” he said. “So it seems as though there are some protections, but it leaves out quite a few … For example, in our current regulations, 14- and 15-year-olds can’t operate a mower or a cutter for landscaping, but the sponsor owns a landscaping company, so he left that language out of this new bill.”

KCEP also raises awareness around some of the biggest groups that push for reversals, including the Foundation for Government Accountability. Founded and based in Naples, Florida, the conservative public policy think tank is behind some of the current reversals of child labor legislation across the country, including in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Florida.

Recent bills cite state-wide worker shortages as reasons to reverse existing provisions around child labor. Various advocates challenge this framing, such as Jessica Heldman, an associate professor in child’s rights at the University of San Diego’s School of Law. The University of San Diego’s Children’s Advocacy Institute also signed onto the Campaign to End U.S. Child Labor.

“Everything that I have looked at indicates, clear as day, that it is the most vulnerable children who are being exploited, and these include children of low-income families and children who are coming into this country,” she said. “When children come from other countries, they may need to support their sponsors that are housing them and may not have the funds to actually care for them. There’s pressure on those children to earn money … They [may also] have the desire or obligation to support their families back home.”

Heading into the elections, the fight against child labor rollbacks is also an exercise in teaching the public how child labor affects other parts of their livelihoods. Groups like the Florida Immigrant Coalition say there are more appropriate and actionable solutions to worker shortages.

“One thing that could be done is expediting work permits for adults who are seeking asylum in this country and coming here to work,” Kennedy said. “And then holistically speaking, wages just need to be better. We need to increase wages, we need to enact better labor protections, we need to make sure people have a union and that they can actually make a living off of [their jobs].”

As for tangible, actionable steps that Americans can take, Pugel emphasizes the democratic power that one has on a state level, especially in smaller states like Kentucky, West Virginia, and Iowa. There is power in demanding increased wages and immigration protections to keep the target off unaccompanied minors and children securing a future in America.

“State representatives are elected by only a few thousand votes, which means that constituent concerns really do make a much bigger difference at the state level than at the federal level,” he said. “I always recommend that folks reach out to their legislator because even just a dozen or so complaints about a particular policy

Striking While the Iron’s Hot: Unprecedented Strikes in the North of Ireland But Can They Lead to Something More?

By Bridget Meehan

March 16, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.



Throughout 2023 and into 2024, the North of Ireland [1] has witnessed the largest and most sustained public sector strikes in all of its jaundiced, gerrymandered 100-year history.

The strikes are about pay for public sector workers. For several years now, public sector pay in the North has not kept pace with inflation. Real pay, adjusted for inflation, fell by 4% between 2021 and 2022, and fell a further 7% between 2022 and 2023. Public sector workers finally reached breaking point and decided their only recourse was to strike.

The most significant day of action took place on 18th January when 16 public sector unions decided to go on a 24-hour strike to demand pay increases. Around 150,000 public sector workers went on strike that day. That’s a whopping 66% of all public sector workers in the North, and included nurses, doctors and other health and social care workers; teachers; further education lecturers; cleaners; refuse collectors; police; public transport workers; civil servants; and forestry and road service workers. Schools were shut and buses and trains were canceled. A skeleton health service operated with scheduled appointments postponed and emergency-only cases treated. Icy roads went ungritted, courts and tribunals offered limited services. The level of solidarity on 18th January among public sector unions and workers was unparalleled. Many of these workers were striking for the first time ever in their careers; many of these professions such as junior doctors were striking for the first time ever in their existence in the North. And though many didn’t want to strike, they felt they’d been left with no choice.

Political backdrop

While these strikes have been going on, a bit of political theatre has been playing. The North is governed by Stormont, an administration devolved from the British parliament in Westminster. Stormont has no fiscal or any other decision-making powers of any importance. It can raise very limited revenue and depends predominately on a block grant from Westminster for pretty much all of its public funding. Stormont went into suspension in February 2022. I won’t bore you with the details of why other than to say that the Democratic Unionist Party, a conservative and British party, threw their dummy out of the pram because they didn’t like how the Brexit trade protocol was shaping up. The power-sharing feature of Stormont meant that their withdrawal brought the administration down.

No amount of cajoling or seducing on the part of the Tory government in Westminster could coax them to return to Stormont. So, the Tories did what the Tories do best: they fought dirty. They decided to use public sector pay as a political bargaining chip, or more accurately as a form of blackmail, by claiming they were powerless to increase pay and that only Stormont could make such a decision. That, of course, is one huge pile of horse manure and even the dogs on the street know it. All the money in Stormont comes from Westminster. With the stroke of a pen, the Tories could’ve increased wages. But they stubbornly refused any such move. Instead, they offered £600m for the wage increases as part of a bigger financial package, if and only if Stormont was restored. The legalities of such action, that of denying workers their rights in order to play political games, are dubious to say the least.

Again, I won’t bore you with the tedious details of how the DUP eventually capitulated but suffice to say that the Stormont Assembly resumed in February 2024.

Despite that, there is yet no resolution to the public sector pay problem. Since coming into post, the new finance minister has offered pay deals to civil servants and health staff and to public transport workers. The new education minister has made an offer to teachers. The transport workers have rejected the offer and will continue to strike. The civil servants and health staff are still considering their offer, as are the teachers.

Social costs

The strikes have strong support from the public. Most people recognise why the workers are striking, they see it as only right that these workers get fair pay, and they accept that the workers don’t want to strike but see no other way. The strikes are causing disruption to public services and to the local economy. The media of course have focused less on the plight of the workers and more on the negative impacts, such as the suspension of cancer treatment during the strikes and the impact on trade for the retail and hospitality sectors. Certainly, the negatives are real. I, myself, talked to an employee in the hospitality sector who said she supported the strikers but with there being no buses it meant she struggled to get to work, and either had to pay for taxis or miss her shifts altogether. The fact is the whole point of striking is to create disruption and to raise the social costs. The irony is that it’s the most vulnerable in society or just average people who feel those costs most, and that can create animosity instead of solidarity, especially the longer the strikes go on.

I can’t help thinking about Yemen’s Ansarallah and their current blockade of maritime traffic connected to Israel that is traveling through the Red Sea. While the ideal would be the existence of no such campaign, of no genocide in Gaza, of no war anywhere, we are far from the ideal and Ansarallah are operating within the sad realities of our corrupted world. The Ansarallah goal is to force Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. Their blockade targets Israeli economic interests, not human life; the blockade goes after ships associated with Israel, no other ships; the blockade doesn’t sink or seize ships, but diverts them from their course. Ansarallah’s blockade is about raising the social costs to those in power, hitting them where it hurts most. And while they haven’t yet achieved their goal of ending the genocide, they’re certainly causing damage to the Israeli economy, costing it billions of dollars and disrupting supply chains.

I wonder if we can learn from Ansarallah and pinpoint ways of raising the social costs to those with power as we travel the road of radical change. It’s a thought and I’m not advocating that we buy helicopters and start commandeering ships. I’m using the Ansarallah campaign as an example of an intelligent and efficient use of resources to achieve an end goal.

But back to the North of Ireland and to the strikes here. What action can be taken by those seeking social change to minimises the social costs to the average person who’s just trying to make a living, while maximising the social costs to those who have the power to implement the change sought? And now that there are hundreds of thousands of people here energised and taking action, what can be done to maximise and prolong the potential of that activism?

Solidarity, vision and strategy

To my mind, this is where solidarity, vision and strategy enter the fray. Widespread solidarity and overarching vision and strategy are often missing from this kind of brave activism. Yet greater solidarity and greater unity in a common vision and strategy would go a long way to resolving the problem of who suffers most from raising the social costs.

Let’s first look at solidarity. The public sector workers in the North have essentially formed a powerful workers’ movement. The North already has several movements, some large and vibrant, others more muted and embryonic. There’s the grassroots movement to promote and protect the Irish language, An Dream Dearg (Red Dream). In the summer of 2022, they held a rally in Belfast that was attended by nearly 17,000 people who filled the streets around City Hall. There’s also a large pro-Palestinian / anti-war movement. This has become increasingly active since October 2023 and Israel’s most recent onslaught on Palestine, and people have been turning out in their thousands, week after week, to protest. There’s a Black Lives Matter movement here, brought into existence in 2020 following the callous murder of George Floyd. The Pride movement has also grown in popularity over recent years and energetic, carnival-style rallies take place every summer in major urban areas across the North.

These movements have members in common. An Dream Dearg have declared support for Palestine. Several of the trade unions involved in the public sector strikes openly support Palestine. Their members and leaders have joined the pro-Palestinian protests and spoken out against the genocide. There’s even a Trade Union Friends of Palestine group. Many of those involved in the pro-Palestinian / anti-war movement are also involved in the public sector strikes and An Dream Dearg. It’s stating the obvious that public sector workers can be gay, black, support Palestine or want to protect the Irish language. And on and on go the many permutations of interrelationships between them all.

What they have in common is their desire for social change of one sort or another, although some struggle to get enough support to achieve the social change they want. They could reach greater success if they were in solidarity with the other movements. In fact, they would all benefit by having the support of each other. The other movements could, right now, join the public sector workers and support them in their efforts to win pay increases. Such solidarity would bolster the striking workers but would also send a loud message to politicians and decision-makers that better pay for public sectors workers is important to more than just the workers, it’s important to wider society too.

It’s worth considering what happens when a movement makes progress towards achieving its goals. If, for instance, the striking public sector workers win their pay increases, will they disband? Say the teachers take a pay deal but the health workers don’t – will the teachers abandon the strikes and go meekly back into their trenches, leaving the others to continue alone? If they all take pay deals and end their strikes, where will that energy and momentum go? Will it disappear like smoke on the wind?

Which brings us to vision and strategy. Given the commonalities among these movements, would there be any possibility they could unite to create and then work towards a common vision and strategy? Could the energy and momentum be harnessed and prolonged to achieve not just a one-off reform but multiple non-reformist reforms? The public sector workers are striking for a single demand to meet their own needs. But what if that demand was one goal within a broader strategy to achieve a widely accepted vision for radical transformation?

What if the striking workers didn’t stop at achieving their pay rise? Because wages across society are way short of equitable, what if the strikes were seen as just one tactic along the way for fairer wages? What if instead the public sector workers continued campaigning, this time for a living wage for all workers in the North, where we understand a living wage to be a fair wage that increases based on the cost of living. What if they were joined by the other movements in doing so? And joined too by the hundreds of thousands of non-public sector workers living on poverty wages, who are denied wage increases, who were hardest hit by the bus and train strikes?

What if, in continuing this sustained and augmented strike action, all of these movements took measures to minimise the social costs to the regular people who are normally hit hardest by strikes? So, a strike by health workers would keep enough staff in place to treat emergency cases and provide critical care (I should point out that during the current strikes, health workers did take such measures). A strike by teachers would provide alternative day care for the children of those who stand to lose income if they miss work because of a strike. A public transport strike would offer a skeleton service to get people to and from work. Since all of these movements are united, a mega-strike could be organised to occur simultaneously across sectors so everybody is on strike rather than having to be at their place of work.

Putting such mitigating measures in place is certainly a challenge and they’re rare applied. But going the extra mile to reduce the social costs to the people you don’t want to hurt would serve to create greater solidarity. And having a movement of movements in itself would give strikers access to additional resources which in turn would make implementing the mitigating measure more plausible.

While all of that holds true, there’s more at stake than a battle for wages. What if this movement of movements in the North decided that wages were merely the beginning and that once better wages were won, the next step was to achieve better working conditions such as secure jobs, a 4-day work week, subsidised childcare, participatory workplaces, or worker ownership altogether?

What if the united vision and strategy didn’t limit itself to workers’ pay and conditions? What if it was expanded to reach so much more? What if it included participatory budgeting where the people would have a say in how public budgets were to be spent; a universal basic income; meaningful rights and equality for minority groups; mutual banking to retain local wealth and use it for the benefit of people and planet rather than the benefit of the global finance system; tax justice and progressive taxation; social and co-operative housing; a properly funded health service and education system; community- and publically-owned renewable energy to create energy independence and move away from fossil fuels; sustainable farming and food production; a demand for fiscal control or even better, independence from Britain and a return to the EU; the implementation of a local Green New Deal and a genuine and just transition to a post-capitalist society? What if the post-capitalist society in this united vision and strategy was to be a participatory society, free from racism, sexism, patriarchy, classism and authoritarianism and where there would be an alternative to the inadequate democratic system and existing family and cultural institutions? And what if this united vision and strategy was joined with international movements, forging alliances that could bring about radical transformation beyond Ireland?

What if indeed?

END NOTE

[1] Ireland was an English/British colony for over 800 years before it won partial independence in 1921, at which time it was partitioned into two jurisdictions: 1) the North or “Northern Ireland”, made up of 6 counties with a majority Protestant population that remained under British rule (and remains so today); and 2) the South or “Republic of Ireland”, made up of 26 counties and with a majority Catholic population that gained freedom from Britain. The North is governed by the British government at Westminster and has a devolved administration called Stormont. The 6 counties of the North were cherry-picked to ensure it would have a majority pro-British population, i.e. majority Protestant. Through gerrymandering and other policies e.g. denying civil rights to the largely Catholic Irish-identifying population, forcing them to emigrate for work, the North maintained its Protestant hegemony. That has changed in recent years, however, and today the Catholic and Protestant populations are almost equal in size.

Bridget Meehan is a writer and activist based in Ireland. She is co-founder of the Northern Mutual bank campaign and member of Collaboration for Change (CfC), a grassroots activists’ network promoting collective activism across Ireland. Bridget believes non-reformist projects like CfC can be the foundation for the participatory society of the future. As an advocate for a participatory society, she is a member of Real Utopia, an organisation dedicated to advancing participatory society.

Confronting The American School System’s Perverted Bathroom Police State

BY NICKY REID

 MARCH 18, 2024
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Image by Alexandra Tran.

Nex Benedict was kind of a weird kid. I know because the moment that I first learned who Nex was I also knew that we would have been friends. Like Nex, at 16, I was a pissed off metalhead with a weird sense of humor and a bad temper who ferociously defended the few outsiders I could count as friends. I was also an androgynous trans kid at a conservative high school who was no stranger to getting my ass kicked simply because I stubbornly refused to bow down to someone else’s conventions and thus much like so many other trans people in this country today, I find myself looking at the details of Nex Bennedict’s tragic death and saying, “That could have been me.”

For those of you who don’t know, Nex was a 16-year-old non-binary student at a suburban Oklahoma high school who was murdered for being a Queer kid in the wrong bathroom in a state that has gone out of its way to make that distinction downright dangerous. Nex, who used he/him pronouns, had been brutally bullied for the past year over his and his friend’s gender identities before the incident even occurred and after standing up for his friends one last time in the girl’s bathroom, he was violently assaulted by three older girls who pinned him down and beat him until he blacked out. The school nurse suggested that Nex undergo further medical examination for obvious head injuries, but the school simply sent him home with a two-week suspension for defending himself instead.

Nex’s grandmother and adoptive mother, Sue Bennedict, was reasonably incensed by the school’s total nonchalance towards an obvious hate crime and took her battered child to a nearby hospital where she also summoned the local police who informed Sue that if Nex filed charges against his attackers he could be expected to be charged as well just for fighting back. They declined and Nex was released. The next day, Nex Benedict collapsed in his home before being rushed back to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

The local police department claims that the autopsy results indicate injuries sustained during the beating did not directly lead to Nex’s death, but the exact cause of death remains strangely undetermined a month after the incident occurred and everyone who knows anything about Oklahoma’s toxic police culture is calling for an independent investigation. While the Federal Government’s Education Department has announced their own investigation, I’m not exactly relieved. Oklahoma has been violating the rights of Queer kids for years and the Federal Government has done exactly jack shit about it.

Oklahoma is one of dozens of states across the Bible Belt that has essentially declared open war on kids who refuse to comply with the gender identity on their birth certificates. This war has included laws barring minors from access to gender-affirming care proven over the decades to have fewer side effects than antidepressants. This war has included investigating the few parents actually willing to take their children at their word by affirming their gender identity as child abusers. And this war includes barring kids like Nex Bennedict from access to safe bathrooms.

Oklahoma is one of 11 states that currently bans students from using bathrooms that don’t align with their biological sex and Nex’s death is precisely the kind of violence that these policies make inevitable. However, the officials behind these policies remain shamelessly unapologetic for the bloodshed. Ryan Walters, the Oklahoma State Schools Superintendent that helped push through his state’s bathroom apartheid bill with support from Governor Keven Stiff has been quoted pontificating over Nex Bennedict’s dead body that “There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.” before vowing to “continue to fight for parents and never back down to the woke mob.”

And that’s about the size of the problem right there. Shitheads like Walters and the lobbyists of the so-called “Parent’s Rights Movement” don’t give one fuck about the rights of the kids they pretend to protect. They only care about the right for certain parents to police everyone’s kids like cattle so they can segregate the normies from the weird kids who might taint them with the perversion of free expression.

Laws like these are aimed at erasing Queer youth by making their existence too unbearable to sustain outside of the closet without a noose around their necks. But once again there is an even bigger issue at play here that I feel is getting lost in the usual partisan shuffle of the culture wars, a question that no one else but me seems to be asking. Why the hell would anyone afford a bunch of poorly trained and virtually unsupervised adult public servants the right to police their children’s basic right to use a goddamn toilet?

Seriously! Let’s stop mincing words right here and put it all on the table. We are talking about segregating children based solely on the contents of their genitalia and carefully policing when, where, and how they shit, piss, and bleed, and somehow, I’m the fucking pervert? This is way bigger than gender. This is about the basic right to bodily autonomy. Why should any child have to use a facility where they feel unsafe? Why should any human being be reduced to the humiliating position of having to beg an authority figure for the “privilege” of being able to relieve themselves?

Labor laws state that employers must allow their workers free and unfettered access to bathroom facilities, so why not children? Children’s needs derive from the biology of their bodies, and nothing makes them feel less safe than having those needs systemically disregarded. There is a reason why so many adults suffer from anxiety related to public restrooms and it isn’t just trans people.

The excuse typically given for the American school systems perverted bathroom police state is the usual rigamarole about law and order. Kids can’t be trusted with basic human rights because of smoking or vaping or whatever the fuck the monster of the week happens to be right now but what this really all comes down to is something far more insidious.

Like most factors of America’s compulsory school system, the notion of bathroom privileges is a tool for social engineering and social control. Using the bathroom is a very basic human need like breathing or eating and basic bodily needs are what drives human behavior. Therefore, the ultimate form of social control is to afford only certain designated authority figures with the ability to sustain those bodily needs.

I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell people how sick this is. It is precisely this line of thinking that allows children to be so easily abused by adults and it is precisely this line of thinking that allows individuals to be so easily abused by authoritarian institutions. We are quite literally house broken as kids to be good citizens and the “radical gender ideology” of freaky people like me and rebellious kids like Nex Bennedict is a direct threat to this conspiracy because it returns young people to the notion that it’s their goddamn body and no one has the right to define it but them.

I’m proud of this ideology and not just because I am a trans person. I’m proud because I am an anarchist, I’m proud because I am a survivor of child abuse, and I’m proud because the people who abused me were authority figures who used heavily policed school bathrooms to get away with it. This whole system belongs in the shitter and kids have the power to flush it.

The solution to the creepy police state that jumped-up Jesus freaks have turned public bathrooms into isn’t more laws and regulations. It’s unlearning them and teaching young people to do the same. Every single trans bathroom law on the books is totally unenforceable. The money and manpower that it would take to regulate them would bankrupt the whole damn system.

Like most laws, their power rests largely in the illusion of control. The kind of illusions they need to drive into children at a tender age with fear and humiliation. But kids can take that power back and they can take it back by simply refusing to comply in mass. Suppose everyone decides collectively to use whatever bathroom they need whenever they need to use it. In that case, the whole system collapses into nothing but a tightly coiled pile of meaningless words and edicts spewed from the incontinent holes of asses like Ryan Walters.

I have to believe that Nex would have gotten a kick out of this kind of revenge. I know I would have at his age.

Nicky Reid is an agoraphobic anarcho-genderqueer gonzo blogger from Central Pennsylvania and assistant editor for Attack the System. You can find her online at Exile in Happy Valley.