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Review of Sidney Mintz: Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
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Gyakorlati válaszok a gondoskodási válságra
The starting point of our paper is that the capitalist socioeconomic system treats life-reproducing reproductive work and one of its forms, care as free resources, as individual responsibilities, placing their costs on families and households, especially women. The low level of state engagement and the emergence of for-profit market services further exacerbate the crisis of care as well as inequalities in care. In the paper, we first introduce grassroots cooperatives and initiatives in the field of elderly care and child care that revalue and reorganize care in a participatory, democratic and solidarity-based way in order to strengthen carers as well as those with care needs, and to improve the quality of their lives. These include workers’ (carers’) cooperatives, users’ cooperatives (cooperatives of people with care needs), multistakeholder cooperatives and mothers’ centers, the communities of women with small children. We then introduce political movements struggling for the systemic transformation of reproductive work and care. We argue that the institutions of care should be owned and controlled by communities, while the state should continue to play a coordinating, funding and regulatory role in meeting needs and recognizing care work.
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One of the significant figures of the “domestic-labour debate” in the United States of the 1970s was Wally Seccombe, who was among the firsts to understand the centrality of housewives’ labour to capitalism through Marxist terminology. He consistently applied the value theory of labour to the reproduction of labour itself, challenging both Marxist and bourgeois economic approaches which did not consider domestic labour as a structural part of the capitalist mode of production, and therefore participated in making the labour and position of housewives ‘invisible’. For Seccombe, the fundamental and unsolved duality of domestic labour is that while it constantly creates value through the reproduction of commodified labour, it is not recognized as productive labour since it is not directly related to capital and does not produce surplus value. Therefore, domestic 258 FORDULAT 24 labour is not renumerated by any wage, which has important consequences for the social position, conscience and possibilities of the housewife. Reproductive work necessary for the sustainment of her husband, her children and herself is presented as a natural female obligation and charity, masking the fundamental deception of capitalism that wage is in fact not meant to be for labour, but for the reproduction of the labour force. Domestic labour signifies her total material dependence from her husband and her isolation from the public sphere, which together limit her possibilities to represent her own interests and to take part in collective resistance. Between the industrial and the domestic domain lies therefore the most remarkable fault line of the working class, which turns members of the same household silently against each other and excludes housewives from the sphere of collective organization and struggle.
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In the last decades the Capitalocene discourse was emerging in the Marxist ecological thinking. This approach offers a sociohistorical explanation to the current ecological crisis by questioning the historical narrative of the Anthropocene discourse. Authors of Capitalocene are arguing that climate change and ecological crisis was not caused by the collective and homogenous humanity (predetermined by the human nature). According them capitalism’s accumulative and expropriative socioeconomic relations are responsible for climate crisis.This paper analysis how Capitalocene-arguments are applying the Marxist critique of capitalism, especially the labour theory of value and its contemporary expansions and corrections in the understanding of the current ecological crisis. The first two subchapters are summarizing World-Ecology theory of Jason W. Moore, than I interpret the debate of Moore with the Metabolic Rift school (John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Andreas Malm and others), and finally I analyse the possible normative ecopolitics from the theoretical perspective of Capitalocene.In the last decades the so-called Capitalocene discourse was emerging in the Marxist ecological thinking. This approach offers a sociohistorical explanation of the current ecological crisis by questioning the historical narrative of the Anthropocene discourse. Authors of Capitalocene are arguing that climate change and ecological crisis were not caused by the collective and homogenous humanity (predetermined by the human nature) in general. According them capitalism’s accumulative and expropriative socioeconomic relations are responsible for climate crisis.This paper analysis how Capitalocene-arguments are applying the Marxist critique of capitalism, especially the labour theory of value and its contemporary expansions and corrections in the understanding of the current ecological crisis. The first two subsections are summarizing World-Ecology theory of Jason W. Moore, than the paper interprets the debate of Moore with the Metabolic Rift school (John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett, Andreas Malm and others), and finally it analyses the possible normative ecopolitics from the theoretical perspective of Capitalocene.
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This article focuses on the emergence of the paradigm of solidarity economy and of the commons in the field of professional cultural production. We unfold the possible mutual cooperation of cultural producers and commoning social movements by examining the case studies of the Resonate music streaming co-op and of the Dutch Stad in de Maak housing-initiative. The case of the Resonate exemplifies how cultural producers can reorganize their industry in a cooperative way to hinder capitalist value extraction. Another type of encounter takes place between culture and commons when cultural producers utilize their knowledge and skills in various solidarity economy projects. We demonstrate this possibility through the case of the Rotterdam-based Stad in the Maak, where the artist-architect founders launched a long-term community housing initiative.
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Bérlői lakásszövetkezetek Magyarországon?
Since the crisis of 2008, housing is yet again and increasingly becoming a form of profitable financial investment. This tends to dominate over the claim that each person has the need and the right to access affordable, good quality housing. Across the globe this tendency is intensified by state policies as well. However, bottom-up initiatives organizing themselves for collective housing solutions are also gaining ground. These self-organized, „self-help” models open the possibility for economically vulnerable social groups to support each other in finding solutions for their housing problems, and also to collectively access resources that would individually be impossible to reach. This paper presents such an alternative housing solution, notably the model of rental-based housing cooperatives. Rental housing cooperatives are institutions organized in a bottom-up manner with the aim of providing affordable, good quality and stable housing for their members. We discuss two examples from Germany and from Uruguay for successful rental housing cooperative networks, which have existed for several decades. Finally, we present the steps which have been taken in the past years in Hungary and in the Eastern European region towards the establishment of such a model.
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This essay employs contemporary peasant mobilizing discourses and practices to evaluate the terms in which we understand agrarian movements today, through an exercise of historical specification. First, it considers why the terms of the original agrarian question no longer apply to agrarian change today. The shift in the terms corresponds to the movement from the late‐nineteenth century and twentieth century, when states were the organizing principle of political‐economy, to the twenty‐first century, when capital has become the organizing principle. Second, and related, agrarian mobilizations are viewed here as barometers of contemporary political‐economic relations. In politicizing the socio‐ecological crisis of neoliberalism, they problematize extant categories of political and sociological analysis, re‐centring agriculture and food as key to democratic and sustainable relations of social production.
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The most common way of articulating educational problems and questions is by speaking the language of social sciences, and using the grammar of political logics. What is the proportion of disadvantaged students? Does this and that project for inclusion appear to be effective? Since when has the school been reproducing inequalities? And so on. What I would like to discuss here is that it is possible to talk about education educationally and along educational logics. While the logic of the political refers to the way the social is born, the logic of the educational signifies the way birth becomes social – namely, our collective and political attitude toward the fact that newcomers are constantly coming into our common and old world. I will present four educational logics characteristic of our epoch, which are discussed in depth by the proponents of an experimentative critical pedagogy. They do understand these logics of the educational in a radically different, twisted way if compared to the mainstream educational discourse, thus laying the groundwork for a new kind of radical left-wing pedagogy. In agreement with them, I want to argue here that pedagogy is not the praxis of the future, but of the present, in which it is more important not to know certain things than to want to know everything, because this is how we can break the chains of the prevailing order here and now: by putting gods and masters into brackets, and ignoring the expectations of the society, as well as the hopes of yesterday which constantly defer revolution.
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The case of Albania – a new NATO member and an aspiring EU state – reflects that of many Western Balkans countries which have seen their citizens, largely from Muslim-majority areas, join extremist organizations in the Middle East since the 2011 outset of the Syrian conflict. The number of foreign fighters hailing from Albania and the rest of the region peaked when Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, the alleged leader of the so-called Islamic State (ISIL), declared the formation of a new “caliphate” in 2014, in territories in Syria and Iraq, and called on Muslims from around the world to migrate there. Security and intelligence services in the region quickly took action against homegrown extremist cells that recruited and facilitated the travel of citizens in response to Al-Baghdadi’s call. However, questions remain over what motivated citizens from Albania to join extremist organizations and the pattern of their radicalization. [...]
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With some hundred or more Albanian citizens having now joined the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), radicalization has become a salient issue in both policy and scholarly domains in Albania. Given the Albanian tradition of religious tolerance and moderation, the quest to understand and explain the foreign fighter phenomenon has sparked extensive debate – in media, among the public, and within academia. Explanations for this trend have focused mainly on the socioeconomic factors affecting certain local communities and individuals, and on the failure of state institutions in some sectors, including in security, intelligence, and education. In general, academic researchers and pundits alike argue in favor of a more robust response by the government. [...]
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Od kilku lat w najpopularniejszych polskich filmach można zauważyć nowy trend: eksplorowanie ekranowej przemocy. Mamy dziś do czynienia z nadprodukcją obrazów gwałtu, cierpienia i zabijania; konstruowaniem fabuł wokół sadyzmu, masochizmu i innych sposobów zadawania bólu.
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The inter-communal violence that happened in the Western state of Gujarat in 2002 has been one of the deadliest communal violence happened in post-millennia India. Amitava Kumar’s political novel Husband of a Fanatic (2004), delineates the lives of survivors living in the government relief camps in the aftermath of communal violence. The paper argues that through the employment of grotesque images and figures in the narratives, the author manages to draw horror and revulsion to the readers wherein these figures construe as ‘abject’ (Ilott 2014, 664). Drawing upon the theory of ‘abjection’ by Julia Kristeva (1980), the paper analyzes the figures of abjection employed in the narratives of the novel that crudely depicts the survivor’s physical viscera and camp life in the aftermath of the violence. Furthermore, the paper analyzes how the sufferings and trauma caused by the communal violence opens up the debate on extremism and subalternity in the novel. Through the close reading methodology, the article provides a fresh analysis into the postcolonial literary trajectories of abjection, extremism and subalternity.
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The aim of the article is to evaluate Israel’s security perceptions about the Arab Spring. The study argues that The Arab Spring is the reshuffling of the Middle East by realigned U.S.-Turkish common policies. For Israel the devil you know is more acceptable than the unknown future. Bearing in mind all the results of the surveys showing that Arabs can easily fall into radical Islam, Israel prefers not to enter such a dangerous and risky game for toppling down the old dictators and establishing new regimes. Israel could resist such a change and force U.S. to postpone or cancel their new policies if it were a decade ago, but today she is extremely isolated in international arena thanks to Bibi’s government. On the other hand, Israel struggles to counter the Turkish offenses in diplomacy, has to avoid the ―Iranian Trap‖ that is being set by Iran slowly and carefully for the past few years, and also domestically facing serious crises. All those dynamics are forcing Israel to remain silent unless it breaks the isolation that it fell, and watch carefully the games played by U.S., Turkey and Iran in the Middle East.
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Bulgarian lawmakers ban women from wearing the burqa and niqab in public; those who do will be fined and lose their social benefits.
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Some worry about cooperation of extremists with the police to patrol city streets.
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Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were dubbed the worst three EU countries for sexual minorities in newly released ranking, while Azerbaijan came in last in Europe.
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Disruption appears to be work of far-right extremists acting against a symbol of an alternative lifestyle.
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