The Corporation

Burqa or no burqa?

There is a huge debate going on in France at the moment over the burqa, the Islamic headdress which covers women from head to toe, and which conceals the face behind a mesh screen. Should it be banned by the state, or not ?

On one side there's the majority of French people who, in the name of freedom, women's rights and laïcité (the strict separation between religion and the state) argue that the burqa should be banned in public places.
On the other there are a number of Muslims—mostly the women who wear the burqa themselves—who claim that they are exercising their freedom by choosing to wear this garment and that any legislation banning it would be an infringement on their right to practise their religion.
What is interesting is that it has emerged that most of the burqa-wearers are in fact French converts to Islam ; not immigrant Muslims or second-generation "immigrants". In fact several moderate Muslims have argued against its use.
In an important speech in front of parliament this afternoon, Sarkozy proclaimed his opposition to the wearing of the burqa and anounced that he would set up a committee to decide which measures—if any—should be taken to deal with it.

I believe that the burqa is one of the biggest (and worst) symbols of the oppression of women ; of course extremist Islam does not hold a monopoly on the ill-treatment of women, but that's no excuse. Advocates of the burqa have said that it protects women and "liberates" them by preventing men from seeing them as objects. Yet it seems to me that wearing such a garment is just as dehumanising as selling one's body by working as a porn actor or as a prostitute. Just as sex workers and women in the porn industry are exploited—consciously or not—so it is with the wearers of the burqa. And even if some women wear the burqa willingly, by choice, who is to say how many are brain-washed, frightened or even coerced into wearing it? I don't think it's a sign of "cultural imperialism" or Western arrogance to be against the wearing of the burqa. I don't mind the wearing of the hijab (the "headscarf"). It's not something I agree with but I can understand it. But the burqa? That's simply going too far.

Yet, having said that, I'm not sure that banning the burqa is such a good idea. Perhaps for minors, but not for adults. For one thing, on a pragmatic level, I don't think it's a very good strategy. It would almost certainly further alienate the Muslim community. It could foster a siege mentality, and push even more young men and women into the arms of the wahhabists. Besides, if the government wants to fight the rise of religious extremism, it should work hard at addressing one of the root causes of this radicalisation : poverty, ghettoisation and feelings of alienation because of the fact that our consumerist society has only the latest Ipod to offer as an answer to life's questions.
But I'm also not in favour of the ban for another reason : I believe that too much legislating isn't a good thing ; I don't like the idea of a bureaucratic state encroaching on individual freedoms. It isn't its business. I don't have any answers to the problem, but I don't think that creating more laws is the solution.

Sexism, Strength and Dominance: Masculinity in Disney Films

This short video ties in with what I was talking about in my Fey Pride post. I don't want to pick on Disney in particular—it has become something of a cliché to say that Disney conveys right-wing values (racism, sexism, consumerism, etc). But it's nevertheless true that entertainment and the media have a huge influence on the development of children. Sometimes it's done in a deliberate way, (ads are used to make sure children become model consumers) sometimes not (for example depictions of violence are probably a reflection of society and are broadcast because, well, violence sells, more than being a conscious attempt at promoting violent lifestyles). It's certainly the same for gender roles, as this short video clearly demonstrates.

I'm working on my dissertation a lot these days—about evangelicals and their attitude to power—and I found out that the first American evangelicals were actually very progressive. In the 18th century, they were opposed to slavery, women could vote in church meetings and preach, they were pacifists and were in favour of social justice. This changed in the South of the USA when evangelicals grew in power, at the beginning of the 19th century. Evangelicalism became the religion of the elites, used as an opiate of the masses to keep the slaves and the poor in check and to support the slave-system. Evangelicalism was stripped of its more radical aspects. Women and young people were no longer allowed to preach. Blacks were set aside. Pacifism was ridiculed. A rhetoric of war began to be used : a real "Southern male" was to be manly, dominant, physically strong, and if possible own slaves. Because a century later the South of the US would have a tremendous influence on evangelicalism, both in America and worldwide, this conception of masculinity would prevail among many evangelicals. You still find it today. If only conservative evangelicals would reclaim their progressive roots, what a change it would make to the world!

"This crisis of capitalism is not all bad news"

If the video doesn't work, you can watch it here.

I admire the fact that Professor Ghosh, even though she claims that the current recession is "much bigger and more extensive" than the Great Depression, manages to be optimistic about the future, and denies that the crisis will necessarily lead to fascism as it did in the 1930s. I appreciated the way she started out, arguing that the current market/financial/banking needs to be changed to lead to more social justice and better care of the environment. But I was disappointed about her conclusions : she wants to reform capitalism, not do away with it. It's similar to Nicolas Sarkozy who on one hand says that "laissez-faire capitalism is over" and denounces the "dictatorship of the market" and on the other hand declares that he wants to "restructure capitalism". Now I don't know if they are being hypocritical or if they are just naïve. But reforming or restructuring capitalism just ain't possible. Controlled capitalism is an oxymoron. Welfare capitalism is a myth. Capitalism isn't evil : it can't be, it's not a person. But capitalism, by its very nature, has to expand to exist. If it stops growing, it collapses. It feeds on growth. If we really want the world to be a more just, ethical, sustainable place, we can't just reform the capitalist system, we have to pull out of it. What to set up in its place is a matter of great debate, and I don't believe that an alternative system will solve all of the world's problems, but that doesn't change the fact that capitalism has to be done away with.

no more

Fey Pride

This post may be a good deal more personal than usual, but it’s something that has been on my mind for quite some time now. So here goes.

This is the 21st century.
But if a guy doesn’t follow certain cultural conventions, supposed to be traditional masculine norms, he is depicted or perceived as being gay. (This is actually another stereotype. As if all gays were effeminate… But that’s another story, for another time.)
For example : traditionally, masculinity is associated with : being into sports (especially team sports), preferring beer or strong liquor to wine and cocktails, being aloof and reticent or reluctant to express one’s emotions, appreciating depictions of violence in literature, cinema, etc, being reluctant to commit or to start a family, being homosocial rather than heterosocial (ie preferring the company of men to the company of women, in a non-sexual way), being less sensitive, talkative, romantic and moody than women, caring less about one’s own outward appearance (though admittedly that is due to the fact that there is far more pressure on women to conform to certain norms of physical attractiveness ; however that is changing, as it has been reported that more and more men are starting to feel the pressure too.), being attracted to certain colours, not caring about interior design, not being interested in cooking or gastronomy, liking meat etc… This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many such conventions. They may vary slightly from one country to another, but most of them are firmly engrained in Western culture.

But they just don’t reflect reality.

I know heterosexual women who love beer, team sports, gory horror films, who are reticent, heterosocial and decidedly unromantic. But they’re still heterosexual and they’re still women.
I myself don’t eat meat, I can't stand graphically violent or gory films and am nonplussed by action films, I actually like some “chick flicks” (of the “intelligent” kind), I’m not into team sports (mostly because I hate competition ; playing for “funsies” is okay), I like the colours pink and purple, I hate confrontation, I’m over-sensitive (nooot a good thing), I think cooking is fun, I’m a bit mushy (in a tasteful manner, I like to think. Inasmuch as mushy can be tasteful), I think most beer is overrated (I did say most), I like things fey, I’d like to have kids someday… okay I’m not going to type out all my likes and dislikes and characteristics, and I’m not submitting them to anyone’s moral judgement. I’m just trying to prove a point here. These attributes are rarely considered ‘masculine’ in mainstream Western culture, yet last time I checked I was still a man, and to quote Stuart Murdoch “I’m straight to the point of boring myself” – “even when I feel like a girl”. And by the way, my mannerisms aren’t considered to be effeminate, as far as I know.

I don’t want to be seen as overreacting or as whining – it’s just that such stereotyping can be annoying on the long term. I have more or less come to terms with this ‘altermasculinity’ now, but it took time. Interestingly it’s usually not something that women have a problem with. Women have other battles to fight, they are probably aware of the dangers of stereotyping as they themselves are constantly subjected to stereotyping in this patriarchal society. And not all men are guilty of this reactionary behaviour. (I’ve had mates who felt more or less the same way as I did.) But many are. Religious people, and in my experience conservative Christians, are among the worst, and often tend to misapply misinterpreted verses from Scripture .

I have in the past tried to conform to more traditional, conventional masculine gender roles, but on most occasions it was an absolute disaster. (I actually enrolled in a football club and practised every week for a year in 1998, because I thought that was the thing boys were meant to do. I was so bad at it that I wasn’t even allowed to play one single game for the team. I’ve tried to watch gory movies but was either bored to death or just disgusted. And I’m not even going to talk about my short and disastrous experience with the boy scouts…)

It’s an issue which has sometimes been addressed in ‘out-of-the-mainstream’ literature, music and cinema, but very little in popular culture. There are, however, signs that things are slowly changing. A character like “JD” (Zach Braff) in the TV show Scrubs, while not always being depicted in an altogether positive light, allows the idea that a man can flout certain perceived masculine norms without necessarily being gay. This is also the case, but to a lesser extent, with character Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) in sitcom How I Met your Mother. It’s nice to see main characters like that on mainstream, widely popular, prime-time TV shows. It wouldn’t surprise me if there were many men out there who feel forced to conform to norms of conventional masculinity.

Now I’m not suggesting that all conventional masculine norms be traded for feminine ones or unconventional ones. Everyone is different. It’s just that people should cut us some slack and let us be who we are.

End of rant.

Pink Elephants

Here in Reims, the Socialist Congress is currently taking place. It is part of a process during which members of the French Parti Socialiste have to agree on a new party secretary. This is a tricky task as they need someone popular enough to unite the whole Party. During a preliminary vote, Ségolène Royal, failed candidate of the last presidential election, came out with the highest number of votes — but only by a small margin. She is reasonably popular in France, but she is rather pro-free market and authoritarian, more a social democrat than a socialist. In fact, some believe that if she had become president, the only thing which would have been different from Sarkozy would have been the rhetoric. Which is probably true. But several big names in the Socialist Party are uniting against her : several candidates continue to fight for the leadership. When members of the Socialist Party actually manage to secure positions of power in their party, they stay there. Forever. (Because of this the French media nicknames them "the elephants"). And that's the major problem with the French Socialist Party. They spend so much time bickering that they don't concentrate on opposing the government — not in a responsible, constructive way. Which means that many left-leaning French people are sick of the party.

What are the alternatives? The Communist Party, which abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat several years ago, is what the French Socialist Party was a few decades ago : truely Socialist and reformist. But their popularity hit an all-time low during the 2002 elections and they never quite recovered. Perhaps it's because they are perceived as not being very young and dynamic.
A truely popular figure among French leftists is Olivier Besancenot, a trotskyist postman and leader of the Revolutionary Communist League. He was one of the candidates for the French presidency last year and I went to see him speak one evening when he was in Reims. He was small, dressed in jeans and a jumper, without a tie, but he was the most charismatic of all the candidates. Man, he knew how to talk. He is known for his speeches —he never uses any notes, he just memorises them entirely or makes it up as he goes along! He is especially popular among young people, because of his youth and passion. I like many of his ideas, but frankly, they are really very utopian. But what really bothers me, however, is the fact that his party hasn't given up the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat and revolutionary struggle. Even if they never put it into practise, it's still in their manifesto, and I can't condone any party or politician who sees violence as a solution.
On the same line, there's the trotskyist Lutte Ouvrière ("Worker's Struggle") a party whose leader Arlette Laguillers is a running joke, partly because she's been steadily leading the party since the 1970s. She's a friendly wee granny now, but it's harder to pull off being a revolutionary at that age. And besides, the party has the reputation of working a bit like a cult or a Masonic lodge, because of its watertight hierarchy system.
That leaves no other real party to oppose capitalism and Sarkozy's increasingly thatcherist-gaullist politics. Well, there's the Greens, which I have a soft spot for, but they're not "watermelon" enough for me : plenty of green, but not enough red. It's hard to see to which extent they care about the people. They have a reputation of being a party for upper-middle-class bohemians...

It's hard not to be left disappointed by the Left.

What France needs is not so much a party as a movement, grassroots if possible, a sort of united popular front which would bring a viable alternative to capitalism. The French are good at protesting. Well, that's a first step, and "bravo" for that. But opposing is not enough. Creating, imagining, building and offering alternatives is the only way forward if the Left doesn't want to be left in the sidelines.

Anarchism : the next scapegoat?

Last week the SNCF (French national railway company) complained about several acts of sabotage which took place on its railway network. None of them put anyone's life in danger, and they apparently weren't done with the aim of derailing trains, but they had the potential of causing a lot of damage.
Just a day or two after the news hit the headlines, the French government anounced that they had already arrested a number of "suspected terrorists" : a group of "ultra-leftist autonomist anarchists".
What struck me (and a lot of French people) was that the government seemed to have moved very quickly... too quickly? Suspiciously quickly, at any rate.
Now all the newspapers are talking of the anarchist movement as if it's the next big terrorist threat. The people who were arrested were residents of an anarchist commune towards the South of France. According to Le Monde (the only newspaper which seems to have been unbiased in its coverage of the incident), there is absolutely no material evidence that they are in any way linked to the acts of sabotage. Which means that they are being detained only because of their political beliefs, under legislation which allows suspected terrorists to be detained up to four days without seeing a lawyer.
What really angered me is that Libération, which is supposed to be a centre-left newspaper, used the government's own terminology ("autonomist-anarchist movement") indiscriminately, tarring all anarchists with the same brush... as if anarchism was a single, monolithic movement, and a violent one at that. There is anarcho-syndicalism, pacifist anarchism, green anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, christian anarchism, anarcha-feminism... the list goes on and on. Lumping all those different ideologies and belief systems together is very unwise, and intellectually dishonest.
France has quite a strong leftist heritage, but not of a libertarian socialist kind... More of an authoritarian, statist type of leftism. The state is very centralised here, and it has been very strong for centuries : France has never had a strong parliamentarian tradition like in the UK or Germany. So I suppose that any ideology which attacks centralisation of power and a strong state is under threat of being targeted. And Sarkozy, although he is by no means a socialist, is firmly statist. Historians say he wields more power in France than Charles de Gaulle did back in the 1950s-1960s...
Is anarchism going to be France's next scapegoat? Only time will tell.

The Jungle

I finished Upton Sinclair's The Jungle just a few days ago. It's about a family of Lithuanians that has immigrated to the USA in the early 1900s, lured by the American Dream's promises of wealth and happiness, only to end up working in the infamous factories of the Beef Trust in "Packingtown", Chicago.

I was looking forward to the novel as I expected it to be a bit like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath : both authors were investigative journalists and Socialists. Unfortunately Sinclair isn't as skilled a novelist as Steinbeck is : his characters are rather flat, so when the book's working-class hero, Jurgis Rudkus, loses everything, it doesn't move you as much as when Tom Joad sees his family disintegrate. The plot isn't very solid, but it serves the author's purpose : to expose the gritty reality of life for the American underclass. And it's shocking : some of the things Sinclair describes are so horrible that he couldn't have made them up. He saw them during his investigations.

His muckraking novel shocked the nation, but not in the way Sinclair hoped for. Instead of striving to improve working people's conditions, all that the readers cared for were the parts in the books which dealt with the terrible lack of hygiene in the meat factories. (The public outcry actually led to a Pure Food Act)."I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach", Sinclair lamented.

But what interested me the most about the Jungle was the fact that it's a Socialist book, written by a dedicated Socialist in 1906, just a decade before the Russian Revolution. It's a socialism that hasn't yet discovered the excesses it would lead to under Soviet rule, and yet you can already detect some of the seeds of this future state-socialism. For example, the ''people" are always referred to in a very paternalistic, patronising manner.
Yet Sinclair isn't completely utopian either; he very honestly states that Socialism won't solve all of the world's problems, that there will still be conflict, but he argues that it would be a better alternative to capitalism.

In the last chapters, once Jurgis has seen the light (Socialism is clearly described as a new "dispensation", a new "revelation"), he witnesses several discussions between Socialists with very different ideas : for example a debate about religion between a Swedish professor and anarchist and an American ex-minister. The latter argues, in Tolstoyan fashion, that Christianity has been distorted by the institutional church and that Christ's message of peace, love and social justice has been forgotten. (It is worth noting that Upton Sinclair was himself some sort of a Christian socialist.) Something which was true in Sinclair's time, and which is equally true in Western christianity today, where the Church-body has become the church-institution, where spiritual and material salvation are seperated and where man-made rules become more important than compassion and love.

I'll finish with a quotation from the novel. Referring to a bunch of rich christians trying to evangelise the starving poor, the narrator exclaims:

"They were trying to save their souls- and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?"

A Really Inconvenient Truth

A Really Inconvenient Truth is an analysis of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and a critique of capitalism by American eco-socialist Joel Kovel, who ran against Ralph Nader for the Green Party's Presidential nomination in 2000 .
If you're a hardened capitalist, you'll probably hate this video. Otherwise you should have a look.



The main point Kovel makes is that you can't try to stop environmental crisis and the thrashing of our planet without challenging the capitalist system, and all that it entails.
I really appreciated the fact that Kovel makes it clear that we, as individuals, have to change our lifestyle of unabashed consumerism. Too many socialists are busy attacking capitalism (which is a good thing in itself) but aren't ready to change any of their own habits.