Today's Topics:
1. International Week of Agitation and Active Memory | A year
after the disappearance and murder of Santiago Maldonado By ANA
(pt) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. Bangladesh Anarcho Syndicalist Federation: Women's work and
capital's use of childhood (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. Slovania, masari - Federation of Anarchist Organizations
(FAO) - Defense Committees and Revolution July 19, 1936
(Barcelona, Spain) [machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. Bangladesh Anarcho Syndicalist Federation Revolting
kitchens: a worker's perspective on the food industry - Red Chef
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. Autonomous Match Meeting in Acheloos, Messochora, Trikala,
9-14 August 2018 by dwarf horse [APO] (gr) [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
6. wsm.ie: Jordan Peterson & Sam Harris - what brings them
together for a tour and why do they attract the far-right.
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
25 July to 1 August ---- International Week of Agitation and Active Memory. ---- A year
after the disappearance and murder of Santiago Maldonado. ---- With the certainty that it
was the state. ---- All states are terrorists! ---- Santiago , or Lettuce for some, and
the Brujo for others ... He was nomadic and anarchist. Yes, anarchist. He fought against
political parties, the state, against wage labor, among other things. It has always been
in solidarity with the most genuine causes: those who defend the land have always been
against the most evil causes: those who try to destroy them have always been against those
who attack life. It was a person who chose another way of living, who did not tolerate the
tax imposed by society, someone who broke with the structures, because there was no
structure that could fit it. ---- We do not forget nor forgive!
Santiago present, now and always!!!
anarchist-ana news agency
------------------------------
Message: 2
An account of working at a daycare center. How privatized childcare both changed and
preserved gender roles, how childhood makes alienation normal- and what was the real
structural function of all the damn creepy propaganda in the halls? ---- This past summer,
I was a cook at a daycare center in the northeast US. Ultimately, it wasn't viable to
stay, and I became homeless, quit, and relocated south, where I found a better housing
situation. But for several months, I had the chance to observe the industry of
reproductive and caring labor. Though I haven't yet studied the sector as much as I'd like
to, which Marxist and anarchist feminists pioneered the understanding of, I'd like to
contribute reflections on my own experiences earlier this year.
I'd show up in the morning, five days a week, to the small kitchen where I spent my shift
mostly alone and unobserved by management or other workers. I was the only cook, and my
job consisted of preparing highly processed, grossly unhealthy substances to be fed to the
sixty-odd children enrolled. I'd clock out about five hours later, and would have left
even sooner if I didn't stretch out the time with extended bathroom breaks and busywork on
the occasions when a manager came back to the kitchen for a minute. The most time
consuming work was dishwashing.
The kids were all dropped off before I got there, and some of them stayed after I was
gone. But some parents would come back for their children during my shift, and I became
familiar with their faces- the mother who wore the long, flowered headscarves, the
off-duty cop who came in plainclothes but still always carried his gun.
The center was a franchise, part of a nation-wide chain. The daily workforce, consisting
of two managers, a mix of teachers and floaters, and myself, was entirely female. I'm not
sure of the composition of the cleaning and maintenance crew who didn't work the same
hours as me, except that there was at least one male maintenance-person who came in once
to fix some cabinets. I don't know if the applicants for our positions were mostly women,
or if men also applied but weren't hired, but in any case, we were a cheaper workforce
than a center full of men would be.
The teachers and floaters were tasked with calming the kids down enough to get them
through a full curriculum while their parents were at work- the company prided itself on
its emphasis on early-childhood teaching of math, reading and sign language. I'd love to
learn sign language but I also wish that children could organize to resist incursions into
what's usually been a pre-structured-education time in life, the way workers have often
resisted capital's incursions into weekends and other leisure time.
The women I worked with varied widely in age and education level. I spent much of my shift
alone in the kitchen, but they'd come in to get snacks or cleaning supplies, and I'd stay
in their classrooms for a minute after bringing in lunch sometimes. Some of them were
still living in their parents' homes, some talked about plans to specialize more in the
teaching field and move beyond these low-wage jobs, about frustrations with partners
they'd been hoping to move in with, about getting away from the east coat. Others were
older and told me about grandchildren of their own, talked about retirement hopefully or
nervously.
There wasn't all that much tension that I saw between my coworkers and the two managers.
It was “corporate” that wrote rules and budgets, that set the limits that we all had to
deal with. The franchise's managers made general hiring decisions, though they had to get
their decisions approved by corporate, which set the wages.
The managers weren't strict about lateness or breaks, their situation wasn't all that
different. They generally let the teachers and floaters decide when to combine their
student groups into each other's classrooms, so they could work together to relieve
fatigue or boredom.
My ability to relate to my coworkers was often curtailed by how they treated the kids. I
understood that they were also tired and overworked- their normally eight-or-less hour
shifts sometimes stretching out to ten or twelve when someone else needed to be covered or
when they themselves needed the extra money. But the pleas of, “Why won't you be good? I
know you can be,” and “Why can't they all be like her?” grated on me along with implicit
gender-policing and boundary-fuckery, and overall the experience reminded me sharply of my
own early reasons for radicalization.
The whole environment made me disgusted at what I was doing. The morning and afternoon
snacks I served the children were typically empty carbs- cookies or crackers- and a juice
concentrate cut with artificial fillers. Lunch itself was more filler carbs and animal
proteins- burgers, macaroni and “cheese,” frozen pre-made scrambled eggs- with nominal
produce on the side. The only fruits and vegetables ever served were from cans, which the
kids usually didn't eat anyway. Somehow, this was all supposedly made “safe” by insuring
that I wore rubber gloves at all times.
Anyone whose body was being flooded with such chemical-filled non-foods could be expected
to be in a pretty bad mood, but I also question the idea that better nutrition will fix
children's “mental health,” when the latter is defined as accepting a constantly-policed
life in which one has the status of property.
The art projects in the hallways reminded me of this when I didn't tune them out. A wall
of paper butterflies surrounded a sign reading, “After reading about the life cycle of
butterflies, we had SO MUCH FUN making our own.”
A wall of thank-you notes to the staff read with a similarly forced tone. “Thank you for
taking such good care of me even when I'm cranky,” said one, given away by the adult
handwriting even if the thoughts weren't so obviously those of a parent, expressing
feelings a young child truly can't have, while another said, “[name of a student] loves
[name of center] because of all the loving and caring teachers.” In all the overinflated
sentiment I heard an ever-present undertone of “or else.”
I saw this forced emotional performance again when some of my coworkers put on a fake
cheerfulness that, as far as I could tell, benefited no one at all- punctuated with anger
and accusations that children were being “manipulative” whenever they cried or asserted
their own personhood as distinct in any way from this fiction. There were some women there
who were more real with the kids, who I could relate to more, and became closer with
though I didn't have the time to get to know them that well.
I understand some jobs demand this kind of affective labor- I've experienced it myself as
a cashier and know it's commonly forced on lower-ranking healthcare workers- but no one
was making my coworkers do this, or making them demand the same of the children. The
managers were usually away in the front of the building, there was no other supervision
and the fakeness never seemed to make the kids themselves any happier or more cooperative.
Why was this all happening? In these notes, I tried to break down and better understand
the context I was working in.
Parental Work Conditions
Parents send their pre-school-aged kids off for supervision and education, in- it is
important to note- the only 'wealthy nation' besides Australia with no federal standards
for paid parental leave. Most other wealthy nations give parents around a combined year of
unpaid leave- or, six months for which both parents can take off. A combined two years is
not uncommon. The average for combined paid leave- when employers have to keep giving both
parents full wages- ranges from three months to a year.
In the US, federal laws protect parents from being fired for only 24 weeks combined, or
three months if both parents are taking off. But it's all unpaid leave, so many families
can't afford to use it. So, while around half of two-parent families take care of their
young children themselves or through networks of relatives, over a quarter rely on daycare
centers. Where I worked, the company's many corporate partners subsidize daycare at the
chain. So, lots of the parents were workers at those companies who sent their kids there
because their bosses payed part of the cost.
Gender And Reproductive Labor
Women are still burdened with more work within the family unit than men. In the waged work
that takes place outside the family, we are paid less per hour and are less likely to be
promoted to higher positions. This is the entrenched face of patriarchy, possibly the
oldest form of alienation and class oppression in the world.
In feudalism, women were excluded from property inheritance and forced to depend on men.
The Church killed women as witches to stop them from practicing medicine or wielding
collective power. Men passed property on to their sons, while their wives were forced into
fidelity to ensure an uncompromised line of male heirs.
When feudalism gave way to capitalism, countless people, dispossessed of their land and
commons, were forced into precarious work in rapidly-expanding cities. One of the biggest
changes was that lots of work that had previously been done within family units wound up
being done outside, on mass-produced industrial scale. Women, at a worse position than men
inside families, were also at a worse position to negotiate as workers with the new
capitalist order.
The new “standard” family- actively encouraged by State policy when it found the working
class in an unmanageable chaos- centered around a male and female wage-worker, the woman
earning significantly less, or just a male wage-worker in the higher-paid stratum. In
either case, women were burdened with more of the unwaged work inside the family,
including childcare. And the waged work available to them tilted heavily towards the
“caring” and “domestic” professions- teaching, cleaning, sewing, nursing.
Childhood In Class Society
Childhood is artificially extended to 18, by law and because you need to be a full-time
student until then, to get decent social prospects in highly-developed nations. That's
much different from the early period of dependency, when we're not yet developed enough to
fend for ourselves, which can be outgrown much earlier.
Children have the basic status of parental property, but this arrangement depends on the
parents, usually workers, training their children to grown into the same role of good
subjects. If the state, regulating this relationship through schools and social agencies,
finds that the parents don't fill this role- either giving children too much freedom, or
being violent to the threshold that social struggle has forced the law to recognize as
abuse- they can step in and declare the children wards of the state, making them directly
state-controlled through foster agencies, rather than indirectly through families.
This version of childhood, the status we're all initially shaped by, is one of artificial
dependency. It is both conditioning- normalizing the subservience we'll be expected to act
out in adulthood- and something people inevitably rebel against. But because we're taught
that this rebellion is itself a sign of “immaturity,” the stage when it's “natural” to be
the most powerless, many of us shy away from attacking the institution directly, and spend
our entire lives fighting to prove that it's not what we are anymore- wielding whatever
banal power we get over others even as we're still not free ourselves. This is the trap
that keeps the cycle going for the next generation.
When I was growing up, I wondered, confused, why childhood needed to be misrepresented so
grossly by adults. Everyone my age hated going to school, but were we destined to wind up
just like the adults around us- betraying our former selves, and becoming convinced that
what made us suffer was the best thing for the next generation of kids?
I was more confused when, around age nine, I started reading more books meant for adults.
I couldn't understand how the authors, when narrating from the viewpoint of a child, came
to consistently skew the experience so badly. Didn't they remember that it was never like
that?
I can understand it a bit more, now. Looking at my own writing from even just a few years
back, I'm glad I took notes because otherwise, I would misremember how I was thinking back
then. So, yes, it can be hard to recall what our past mental and emotional states were
like. But there's something else going on here.
I have lately been thinking that policing childhood is one of the most central lynchpins
of capitalism. I don't know if other class-war militants have studied and written about it
from this perspective, if they have, I would welcome their words.
Beyond “All Against All”
Though the women's liberation movement made huge strides in advancing reproductive
justice, we are still coming out of a long time of male ownership over female lives. We
are still living with the cultural norms and inherited traumas of women being forced into
reproduction.
When so many people have been born into this, as children created not by people who really
wanted them, but by women who men demanded heirs from, it becomes part of the social
bedrock for understanding our own personhood. Many more couples have decided to have
children because they both felt it was expected of them, with neither party choosing
parenthood with conscious intent.
And when people have more power to decide if they want children, they often still don't
have the time or money to raise them. So, the kids are handed off to precarious workers.
And we fall into this work along gendered lines, being expected to nurture children
because it's “natural”- an excuse for the lower wages we inherit in the private sector,
along with the baggage of emotional performance we're expected to carry over from the
unwaged domestic sector.
The family structure, as integrated into class society, has worked so well because it's
been a micro-version of larger hierarchies. It has its sanctioned violence, usually male,
with women as involuntary caretakers, whose compensation was authority over children. So
when women's liberation advanced, throwing off the chains of forced wife-and-motherhood,
the reactionary backlash stirred up fears of social chaos, essentially resting on the
line, “No one will take care of you.”
And when people have confronted dehumanizing means of raising children, they have often-
as in the “attachment parenting” school of thought- fallen back on undertones of shaming
women for not being more self-sacrificing.
[A brief edit: There is much that I see of value in the attachment parenting philosophy,
but unless explicitly paired with a feminist intervention into gendered oppression, the
fully-valid point of refocusing on children's neglected emotional needs can easily slip
into calling on women to be more nurturing, accusing them of ruining childhood if they
don't. Men should have equal responsibility in forming healthy relationships with kids
under their care. And the fact that the ideals of attachment parenting are often
impossible for low-income families to put into practice makes the issue more, not less,
important-- as resistance movements should incorporate demands that make better home
situations for more children more viable.]
It's true that we are mammals who need caretakers at the beginning of our lives, and
throughout them- but the horrible idea is that without trapping and subjugating people, we
would not have any. It's the old trap of people at the bottom of the pile being forced
into conflict with each other. In both familial and privatized settings, the disempowered
are paid in smiles from the even-more powerless. The unwanted subjects must be quiet,
“good.” Angels, not people. Thus the talk of “love” all around when it's most distasteful
and unrealistic. I don't have a full set of answers, but to fight against alienation is to
fight for re-humanization. And I believe that in our daily practice as radicals, we can
prefigure the relationships of a free society, where we have room to see each other as
full people.
http://www.bangladeshasf.org/news/womens-work-and-capitals-use-of-childhood/
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Message: 3
What were the defense committees? ---- Defense Committees (Comités de Defensa) as an
intelligence-fighting group existed in some versions as the protection of workers during
the pistoler (1919-1923), the period when employers paid criminals to kill prominent trade
unionists of the National Labor Conference (CNT). Therefore, there was a need to keep
workers' protests and strikes by volunteers from the CNT and the Iberian Anarchist
Federation (FAI). The cadres of the 1930s are formalizing, so the CNT's unemployed members
on a rotating basis are taken to the defense staff to have monthly income and to get more
workers informed of self-defense. These groups were under the wing of the CNT, from where
the finances, the people, and the frameworks of activity were received.
Defense Committees also participated in organizing resistance to workers 'oppression,
financially supporting workers' families in times of illness and unemployment, and
preventing speculation and artificially raising food prices by traders. What they did to
organic revolutionaries was their origin, defense committees were deployed by quarters, so
members of a single quart would make up the workers who lived there and knew best the
social circumstances of their environment.
It was precisely the defense committees that were a supporting structure that opposed the
fascist military coup in July 1936 in Barcelona and took a temporary victory over the
nationalists. At that moment, groups that take parallel care of the formation of military
anarchist columns and the sending of militants to the front, as well as the supply of
national cuisines, the formation of hospitals, schools and social centers, become groups.
In this way, we discover a mode of work in which defense committees must be able to
mobilize secondary groups, which, in turn, are able to mobilize the entire population in
the event of a workers' uprising.
Each quartet group was organized in six, the secretary being responsible for communicating
with other groups and creating new groups and reports, another militant was tasked with
tracking people in the neighborhood who were at risk of CNT, the third for buildings in
which the neighborhood has had to be familiar with strategically and tactically important
sites such as bridges, underground tunnels, roads, courtyards, auxiliary exits from
buildings etc. The fifth was tasked with observing public services such as lighting,
water, garage, transport routes and their vulnerability to sabotage, and the sixth that is
in charge of potential locations from which resources for revolution (weapons, groceries,
banks) can be obtained.
Source: 8. number of newsletters of the Anarchist Network # Society of Opportunities
https://masari.noblogs.org/obrambeni-komiteti-i-revolucija-19-srpnja-1936-barcelona-spanjolska/
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Message: 4
An account of working life in restaurant kitchens by the Red Chef, a member of the
Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement. ---- It seems that over the last few years the chef
has become a rather in vogue character following the rise of some notorious TV chefs like
Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsey, Marco White and others. Here in New Zealand the weekly show
Masterchef displays the extent to which many individuals would love the ‘opportunity' to
enter the hospitality industry and work in kitchens. Having worked in hospitality for many
years now, and more recently as a chef in a trendy Wellington restaurant, I am writing
this article in order to clear up some misconceptions about the supposedly glamorous life
of the chef that the celebrity bigwigs would like us to believe. The reality of life
working in kitchens is one of brutal exploitation, pure and simple.
The entire structure of work in a kitchen has clearly been conditioned by many years of
attacks on the conditions of the chefs who work there, so that now the first thing a
person needs to be able to do when they begin working in kitchens is multi-task or, in
other words, do multiple people's jobs all at once. This is because, like in many other
industries, the workforce is kept as lean as possible. So, in my case, I might be chopping
some vegetables, roasting some food off in my oven, frying some food on my grill, all
while constantly making toast and keeping an eye on the new dockets which are always
coming in.
We only get an hour to do our prep work before the kitchen opens for service. This is
never enough time so the result is that we must be constantly prepping throughout the day
in order to avoid being stuck in the kitchen for a long time after close.
The kitchen itself is far, far too small to accomodate the work that needs to be done. For
me the most stressful times of the day are the times when I need to take trays out of my
oven, because once I put them on my bench to cool I am left with a space of roughly 50cm
by 70cm on which to prepare food. If at that time I have some large rounds coming through
where I have to plate up 7 or more different dishes at once then the lack of space can
become an absolute nightmare. Chronic lack of space is a feature of many kitchens because
the employers prefer to reserve as much room as possible for paying guests in order to
maximise their profits. Exploitation is built into the physical structure of the modern
restaurant.
My shifts are 11-12 hours long and I can honestly say that even that is barely enough time
to complete all of my work; for this reason on a busy day I will work upwards of 12 hours
straight without taking a single break. On days when I do get to take a ‘lunch break' all
that means is that I will stop doing prep for 10 minutes while I crouch down and eat a
sandwhich so that I am out of sight of the customers. We jokingly call this the ‘staff
room'. If any orders come through while I am eating I will have to stand up and get them
ready before returning to my meal. On a busy day, however, I might not eat a single thing
for the entirety of my shift. This can be particularly torturous when I have to spend my
entire day preparing food for other people.
The only way a person can get a few breaks throughout the day is if they are a smoker, as
it is generally accepted that a smoker should be able to go out for at least 2-3 cigarette
breaks during their shift. It is for this reason that I took up smoking quite heavily when
I began working in kitchens; despite the terrible effects it had on my physical health it
was a godsend for my mental stability. I have since kicked smoking as it was having a very
negative impact on my physical fitness; however the price of looking after my health is
that I don't really get regular breaks any more. I think that one of the first concrete
steps kitchen workers should take to improve their solidarity and sense of unity is to all
go out for a break when the smokers step out for a cigarette. We will sometimes do this,
however it is still not a regular feature of the workday unfortunately.
Amongst chefs it is common to work extremely long hours, often during periods of the day
and the week when most other people are not at work. I think this can have a destructive
effect on a person's social life and is probably part of the reason why drug and alcohol
abuse is so common in the hospitality industry. A friend of mine who works at a different
local restaurant recently told me that one of his co-workers worked through the entirety
of the weekend. By that I don't mean he worked normal shifts Saturday and Sunday; I mean
he literally worked for the entire weekend. He began at 5am on Saturday morning and worked
through until service finished at around 1am the next morning. He then ‘hit the crack
pipe' (smoked some meth-amphetamine) and cleaned the entire kitchen before beginning work
again at 5am Sunday and working through until close at 1am Monday. Another chef told me
that when he was younger his shifts would start at 9am one day and finish at 1am the day.
Unfortunately there is a somewhat macho tendency amongst many chefs and it is clear that
some take a large degree of pride in their ability to work these absurd hours. I consider
this tendency to be idiotic and self-defeating as it hampers our ability to fight for our
class interests.
The pay rate for hospitality workers tends to be pretty low. For many years I was on
minimum wage at my previous jobs and now that I'm a chef I've moved up to $16.00, which is
relatively high for a hospitality worker. The higher pay rate for chefs to a certain
degree reflects the higher degree of skill necessary to work in a professional kitchen;
however I think it also reflects the fact my employer has had problems maintaining
long-term employees in such a brutal environment. A chef who has spent many years
mastering their trade may earn around $20 an hour, however the only real long-term pay off
for a chef would be if they were to open their own restaurant. It is for this reason that
many chefs seem to think of themselves as members of the petit-bourgeoisie, despite the
fact that the vast majority of them are proletarians who will spend their entire lives
working in kitchens they don't actually own.
I think that if militancy and self-organisation were to take hold amongst chefs it would
most likely begin with those who are most transient and for whom the life of the small
business owner is not really a serious option. For example, this would include the many
migrant workers whose conditions are even more inhuman than those experienced by a New
Zealand citizen like myself. There are also many young people who are not particularly
attached to life in the kitchen and are constantly plotting their escape, either by
studying or looking for other work. Those higher up in the kitchen hierarchy tend to want
to defend their reputations, part of which involves their ability to endure terrible
working conditions, so I think it is inevitable that the more senior chefs would drag
their feet and perhaps even side with the employers.
I don't think that a union is likely to come to our aid any time soon as it would be
incredibly difficult for one union to organise in such a vast array of small businesses
and then negotiate contracts with many different employers. I think this is why unions
like Unite have had most of their success organising in larger chains like McDonalds and
Starbucks, since it makes the entire organising and negotiating process much more
straightforward for them. However, in the short term, I think that hospitality workers who
are working for small businesses should support the struggles of unionised workers in
larger chains, since a victory for them can set a positive precedent for the rest of us.
What astonishes me about the people I have met and worked with in kitchens is the degree
to which many of them maintain a totally genuine passion for their craft despite the
brutal conditions in which they are forced to work. Working in a kitchen requires a lot of
skill and I am constantly amazed by the abilities of some of my more seasoned co-workers.
Nevertheless it remains the case that under capitalism our work is alien to us and comes
to dominate us, even when it is work we are passionate about. I hope that, in the short
term, hospitality workers will begin looking for ways to defend their human needs, despite
the odds which are stacked against us.
When I feel like there's no escaping the prison of the modern kitchen I remind myself of
George Orwell's observations upon visiting revolutionary Barcelona:
"It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the
saddle... every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle... every church had been
gutted... every shop and cafe had an inscription saying it had been collectivised...
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the eye and treated you as an equal. Nobody said
‘Senor' or ‘Don'; everyone called everyone else ‘comrade' or ‘thou'.... Almost my first
experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. Down
the Ramblas... the loud speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into
the night."
One day, after the exploited of this world have risen against their masters and the great
settling of accounts has been finished with, we'll be able to build a world in which the
people who prepare and serve us our food are treated with the respect and solidarity they
deserve.
http://www.bangladeshasf.org/news/revolting-kitchens-a-workers-perspective-on-the-food-industry-red-chef/
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Message: 5
AGAINST "GREEN" DEVELOPMENT, BANKS AND DISCUSSION AUTONOMOUS RACE MEETING IN ACHELO ---- -
landing on the river- ---- Messochora, Trikala, August 9 - 14, 2018 ---- Against
anti-social policies and state and capital plans, the looting of the natural world, the
centralization and commercialization of water and natural resources in general, the
cheating, manipulation and control of societies and their needs. ---- AGAINST THE NATURE
OF THE GAME OF LOVE FOR GREEN AND FREEDOM ---- to break down the dam, to live the village,
free to run the water forever ... ---- 10-13 August ---- Social and cultural events,
discussions and video projections in the central square of the village. Exhibition of
photo and printed material from competitions for the natural world. River trips and
hiking. ---- Sunday 12 August, 12am ---- CONCENTRATION ---- IN Mesochora Square
DISCUSSION at the coronation of the dam
SELF-LIFTING MEETING: Fighting Initiative for Earth and Freedom / Athens, Anarchist Team
Dysenny Equus and Comrades / Patras, Anarchist Collaboration Kiatra / Arta,
axeloosasa.squat.gr | axel.asa@hotmail.com
------------------------------
Message: 6
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian scholar who rose to prominence after his statements
concerning a bill passed in Canada (C-16) to prevent trans people from being targeted by
hate propaganda and from being denied services, employment or accommodation on the basis
of their gender expression and identity. Peterson's stance consisted in a slippery slope
argument whereby this kind of law would supposedly lead to people being fined or
imprisoned for not using a trans person's preferred pronouns. By framing the law as an
attack on free speech, Peterson may have mislead many people into thinking that this
fantasy of his was actually what the content of the bill was about. Indeed the Canadian
Bar Association made a lengthy public reply to his concerns (though without naming
Peterson), clearly stating that the bill had been grossly misunderstood.
As it turns out, Jordan Peterson believes that hierarchies of class, gender and race are
ordained by nature. As a direct outcome of this, he denies the existence of white
privilege or patriarchy and is known to believe, along with many fascist organisations,
that ideologies which contradict this perspective are part of a marxist conspiracy
(‘'cultural marxism'') to undermine western values and bring about totalitarianism. With
no sense or irony whatsoever, Peterson suggested that kindergarten educators who
supposedly target children with "postmodern marxist ideologies" should be tried for treason.
Peterson is often perceived as a very original, refreshing and fascinating thinker. This
probably has to do with the fact that instead on relying on the relevant and most up to
date research when talking about a topic, Jordan Peterson's lack of investigation leads
him to resort to a patchwork of heterogeneous references including Christian mythology,
long discredited ideas developed by Jung, irrelevant ethology involving lobsters, and
racist pseudoscience from the previous century. In many ways, he resembles someone who'd
be trying to make a quiche but hasn't been shopping in a long time and so ends up
haphazardly replacing the ingredients with whatever can be scraped from under the fridge.
In this analogy, the quiche stands for any conservative viewpoint Peterson is trying to
defend.
Besides his ubiquitous presence in the media, what makes Peterson a serious threat lies in
the fact that a lot of young disenfranchised white men have found his self-help
best-selling book "12 Rules for Life" quite useful. Far from providing a radical critique
of capitalist society and of structural changes worth collectively fighting for to improve
life in general, Peterson provides individualist tricks, quick fixes which conveniently
create the illusion that anyone can go a long way without really challenging the status
quo. But the marginal improvements experienced by following Peterson's 12 rules for life
may convince his followers that he is onto something, that there may be some truth to his
extremely conservative politics. The ingredients are there for a generation of young white
men to develop a sense of identity, the feeling that they belong to a group whose
potential and whose true nature are stifled by "political correctness" and "identity
politics". A group who may, like Peterson, come to believe that women long for domination,
that ‘'lone wolf'' violence will be fixed by compulsory monogamy, and that the
liberalization of divorce laws was a mistake.
What about the other speaker? Sam Harris is an American Islamophobic and imperialist
ideologue known for justifying the United State's wars of aggression in the Middle-East.
He embraces the racist and colonialist discourse according to which the West has a moral
duty to bring democracy to the Middle-East and liberate middle-eastern women. He does so
by painting muslims with a single brush with little regard for political or geopolitical
context and little care for muslim voices and research that contradicts his narrative.
He has argued in favour of torture for counter-terrorism purposes, suggested the racial
profiling of muslims at airports and embraced the same "great replacement" theory as the
far-right saying that "With a few exceptions, the only public figures who have had the
courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European societies seem
to be fascist.". He has argued in favour of limiting the number of muslims in the United
States and has acknowledged that his view is one neo-nazi Richard Spencer would agree with.
Sam Harris also used his popular podcast "waking Up" to amplify and condone the voice of
author Charles Murray, whose 1994 book "The Bell Curve" suggests that blacks and hispanics
are biologically inferior to white people. It is worth saying that Jordan Peterson also
endorsed this long discredited book in an exchange with right-wing YouTuber Stefan
Molyneux . The Bell Curve draws a lot of its content from research financed by the Pioneer
Fund, a white supremacist organisation created in 1937 for "the improvement of the white
race" and led by Richard Lynn, a race psychologist who gave feedback to the authors of The
Bell Curve before publication.
In line with his beliefs on race, Sam Harris also claimed that most of what is said by the
Black Lives Matter movement is "dangerously and offensively irrational". Reducing the
Black Lives Matter movement to the question of police shootings, he went on to claim that
99% of police killings of black people in the United States is a legitimate use of force
and that shootings of innocents are largely due to the fact "people don't understand how
to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe".
As is often the case when it comes to conservative ideology, Harris downplays the role of
imperialism, slavery, segregation and colonisation when discussing race, preferring to
focus on biological factors as well as on a very simplistic understanding of culture. Just
like Peterson, Sam Harris knows how to convey the feeling that his views are moderate and
nuanced, that they represent the scientific consensus. But at the end of the day, he and
Peterson's contribution has been to bring far-right ideas into the mainstream, ideas that
pose a direct threat to the safety of most of us in society.
Finally Douglas Murray, the "moderator" of the debate, is a British journalist who rejects
the concept of Islamophobia and wrote a book entitled "The strange Death of Europe:
Immigration, Identity, Islam". The title says it all.
By accepting to host such a panel, the multinational telecommunication company Three is
profiting off of the spread of deeply racist and misogynistic ideologies. Since it was
created, the 3arena had exclusively hosted concerts. Whether Three was merely guided by a
profit motive or by an actual complacency toward the views of the panel is something the
company should be pressured to clarify.
Some will argue that this is a matter of free speech, that even if the panel is entirely
right wing and even if it is the only time this venue has ever been used for a political
debate, the fact Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and Douglas Murray are able to invest such a
stage is surely proof that their ideas are superior and legitimately becoming mainstream.
On the contrary, it should be argued that this is a telling sign that the liberal
marketplace of ideas is no less corrupt than the free-market is as a means to allocate
goods and resources.
In the face of rising fascism across the globe, it is high time for liberals to come to
terms with the fact that the ideologies that spread best aren't necessarily the ones
backed with the best arguments, but often ones that are backed with money, conveniently
elude context, offer simple explanations and use fear and hatred as a currency.
This piece was originally published with a review of the Dublin Harris v Peterson debate
Sources:
https://wsm.ie/c/jordan-peterson-sam-harris-attraction-alt-right
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