Posts Tagged ‘feminism’
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters”*…
From Álvaro García Linera, a provocative essay on the times in which we live, which he begins with a quote from the World Bank (March, 2023):
“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading.”
Linera continues…
For 35 years, from 1980 to 2005, the moral and labour order of much of the world was governed by a set of basic principles. These principles encouraged an imagined and inevitable destiny for the course of societies. They underpinned the personal and family efforts with which individuals justified their daily activities, their sacrifices and their everyday strategies.
The free market was perceived as a “natural” mechanism for allocating resources, offering individuals a “niche of opportunity” for entrepreneurial ventures. Globalisation was seen as the path to a universalised humanity, where the prosperity and welfare of the world’s affluent would eventually percolate down to everyone, commensurate with their efforts. The minimalist state would liberate social energy and reduce taxation. The goal of zero fiscal deficit would shape the nation into a homestead austere in collective rights but auspicious in rewarding the competitive and successful. These guiding emblems served as perceived imperative destinies. Most governments, businesses, journalists, opinion “leaders”, social leaders, renowned academics, and families aligned their expectations of a bright future and their feasible possibilities for development and modernity with these principles.
It was the prevailing spirit of a world with a sense of direction. Societies anticipated an inevitable future. Families, a certainty of epochal proportions. Individuals saw an outlook, a predictive horizon under which they would shape their daily strategies. The distance to these goals did not matter, nor was it demoralising to face numerous failures or disruptions along the way or to consider the uneven odds of success. These were powerful ideas, part of a shared imagination, equipped with the tacit certainty of common sense, which made it possible to organise the fragmented patchwork of daily life towards a destiny of success and greatness.
“That’s just the way the world is, and that’s how one must be in the world”, nearly everyone said. The arrow of time was hurtling towards this optimistic future, and no one, unless utterly out of step with the times or the world, could claim otherwise.
The first early signs of the decay of this global order emerged from the peripheries of the capitalist world at the start of the 21st century. Latin America began experimenting with alternatives to the prevailing economic and political systems, implementing hybrid policies that combined sovereignty, expanded rights and free trade, followed by the global financial crisis of 2008. Then, there was a shift towards a semi-protectionist form of neoliberalism, exemplified by Donald Trump in the United States and Brexit in the United Kingdom. This shift led to the “geoeconomic fragmentation” of the global order into regional blocs that traded based on political alliances and geographical closeness. [1] Overall, we are witnessing the slow and melancholic disintegration of the old free market order and the nascent rise of various alternative models, none of which has secured a definitive foothold yet. This scenario gives rise to a chaotic world, characterised by fleeting trajectories, still unable to discern a new order that, if established, could endure for another 40 to 50 years…
[Linera review the last 150 years, and the economic and political phases that have characterized them…]
We are witnessing the decline of the global accumulation model that has dominated for the past 40 years. The world will not revert to its former state, where globalism was the shared and enthusiastic language across societies. However, this shift does not mean the disappearance of neoliberalism, nor does it indicate that a new model is ready to take its place. Instead, we observe a landscape of global confusion characterised by contradictory economic directions. While globalism is still advocated in certain areas, fervent protectionism prevails in others.
We are witnessing the decline of the global accumulation model that has dominated for the past 40 years. The world will not revert to its former state, where globalism was the shared and enthusiastic language across societies. However, this shift does not mean the disappearance of neoliberalism, nor does it indicate that a new model is ready to take its place. Instead, we observe a landscape of global confusion characterised by contradictory economic directions. While globalism is still advocated in certain areas, fervent protectionism prevails in others.
It is as though the meaning of history has dissipated, overtaken by the immediacy of a world that appears devoid of destiny or promise. We have been left with only the burden of an endless and aimless present.
It is a peculiar foyer of historical times where everyone knows their origins, yet no one has the slightest collective vision of the future. We are in a liminal epoch, a threshold separating an exhausted neoliberal era—with no active people’s consensus, persisting solely by inertia, kind of like a zombie—from an anticipated historical period that paradoxically fails to materialise and remains unannounced, undefined and unexpected. This enigmatic historical moment seems non-existent, plunging the world into the solitude of an unfathomable abyss without name or boundary…
[Linera characterizes this liminal moment…]
In the coming decade, social stupor and unease must swiftly give way to a period of cognitive readiness—an imperative shift to discard old beliefs and embrace new ones where solutions to prevailing anxieties and needs are viable. This will mark the moment for the crystallisation of a new belief system, one that will restore direction to historical time and rejuvenate the passage of social time with clear objectives. A century ago, Durkheim discussed such periods as “moments of creative effervescence”—times when new ideals emerge to guide humanity. This transition basically involves the formation of a new model of legitimisation and domination. This model must either be based on or adapted to a new paradigm of economic accumulation.
The cognitive opening of society follows no predetermined path and has no set timeline. It is not merely a rhetorical flourish or a simple result of top-down negotiations. Instead, it represents a volatile moment in which new modes of future sociality are forged. This opening can veer in conservative directions, such as post-fascist variants, or it may take reformist or revolutionary paths. The political struggle inherent to this moment—determined by how political forces respond to society’s cognitive openness—will define the nature of the new cycle of legitimation and accumulation.
In fact, we are witnessing the early symptoms of this impending battle across various parts of the world, albeit in local, peripheral, partial and ephemeral forms. Economically, this is seen in the experimentation with hybrid models that blend free trade and protectionism, especially in critical areas such as energy transition, telecommunications, microprocessors and modern industrialism. We also see the regional contraction of strategic product value chains through friend-shoring, aimed at reducing dependency on countries like China, or a revival of archaic neoliberal practices, now draped in authoritarianism.
Despite time-related limitations and their current inability to establish enduring and influential hegemonies, these initiatives serve as laboratories for exploring potential future actions. Alongside other emerging options that may overcome these initial constraints, these possible lines of action will contend on a global scale for the monopoly of new, powerful ideas. They aim to foster a new global common sense, one that captivates societal hopes and imaginations for the decades ahead, thereby initiating a new cycle of global accumulation and domination…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The age of uncertainty- liminal time,” in Metapolis. (TotH to Dewayne Hendricks)
* Antonio Gramsci
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As we fumble with the future, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to a man whose thinking both contributed to our current fix and may offer help in finding a way out: John Stuart Mill; he was born on this date in 1806. A philosopher, political economist, politician, and civil servant, Mill was the most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism, he contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and thinking about political economy.
Mill reputedly learned Greek at the age of three, Latin and arithmetic at eight, and logic at twelve. He studied with Jeremy Bentham, and followed Bentham’s Utilitarian lead, though Mill both extended and deviated from his mentor’s thinking. He was a member of the Liberal Party and author of the early feminist work The Subjection of Women (and was the second member of Parliament to call for women’s suffrage after Henry Hunt in 1832).
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has called him “the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century.”
Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.
– John Stuart Mill
“There is nothing nicer than a kitchen really made for a cook. Things that are designed to be used always have an innate beauty.”*…
In an earlier (R)D, we looked at Lillian Gilbreth‘s hugely influential design for “The Kitchen Practical.” At roughly the same time, a similar, but interestingly different design was debuted in Frankfurt. 99% Invisible has the story…
After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive housing effort was, in many ways, eye-poppingly impressive, with all new construction and sleek, cutting edge architecture. But one room in these new housing units was far and away the most lauded and influential: and that was the kitchen.
Many consider the Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen. [It did pre-date Gilbreth’s creation by a couple of years, though it’s unclear whether Gilbreth knew of it.] A few of these kitchens still exist, some in museums. And it’s strange to see one there, because to modern eyes, it doesn’t appear to be high art. It just looks like a kitchen.
But so many things that we totally take for granted now as standard kitchen features were pretty unheard of before they showed up in the Frankfurt Kitchen. Things like a cookstove that wasn’t also your house’s heat source; well-planned storage to stash your plates and glasses; a way to wash dishes that didn’t involve hauling a heavy tub of water into the house; and slatted racks for drying dishes over the countertops.
Standardization ruled this design. Before, for example, there weren’t long surfaces that were uniform in height. Most kitchens just had whatever random assortment of tables you could throw in them. The Frankfurt Kitchen, countertops and all, was mass-produced off-site — which was a totally new phenomenon. It was designed to fit in relatively small apartments. So, here is perhaps the most visibly striking thing about the kitchen: it is super compact.
To the woman who designed it, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the Frankfurt Kitchen was a revolution. Not just because it was part of a huge effort to get people housed, but because of its wildly efficient layout. It was designed to fit, and to bring modern appliances and architecture to the masses — but it was also designed to conserve the user’s energy. To make cooking as fast and easy as possible. And to Schütte-Lihotzky, that ease was political…
Schutte-Lihotzky was methodical and scientific in her planning. She studied how women used their kitchens, and mapped out their movements like football plays or complex dance steps, with little lines across the floor, and streamlined accordingly, until she came up with this very design – a kitchen in which no single step or reach of the arm was unnecessary.
From the 1920s into the present, many architects and home cooks celebrated, even revered the Frankfurt Kitchen. And the echoes of her design are still everywhere. But Schütte-Lihotzky’s feminist legacy is a bit more complicated. She was revolutionary in that she paid attention to the kitchen, a space that had historically been neglected by architects and designers. She laid everything out with the goal of lessening the burden of housework for women. But by the time Schütte-Lihotzky designed this revolutionary kitchen, many feminists had already been questioning whether private kitchens could ever be designed to liberate women. Or whether they were irredeemable, and needed to be abolished. And their stories show just how much design can accomplish… and how much it can’t…
The instructive story of “The Frankfurt Kitchen,” from @99piorg.
* Julia Child
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As we save steps, we might spare a thought for M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher; she died on this date in 1992. A food writer and founder of the Napa Valley Wine Library, she published 27 books (including a translation of The Physiology of Taste by Brillat-Savarin) and hundreds of essays and reviews. Of her work, W. H. Auden once remarked, “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.”
“I like boring things”*…
What’s not to like?…
A Youtube video titled “THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE (Microsoft Word tutorial, 1989) has accrued over 1.5 million views despite its self-proclaimed boringness. The video, an hour and forty-seven-minute computer tutorial, appears to have been recorded in one long take. It’s a time capsule to the early days of home computers and despite the monotonous, sleep-inducing narration, the instructions are quite thorough. In the video’s comments, viewers point out the mind-blowing drama at minute 59 and the charming quote “no ‘command m’ for ‘miracle.'”
“1989 Microsoft Word tutorial is ‘the most boring video ever made’,” from Annie Rauwerda @BoingBoing
Pair with this 1984 video of Stanley Kubrick discussing his favorite software manuals:
* Andy Warhol
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As we take on tedium, we might send qualified birthday greetings to Edward William Bok; he was born on this date in 1863. An editor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, he is best remembered for his 30-year stewardship of the Ladies’ Home Journal.
Bok’s overall concern was to promote his socially conservative vision of the ideal American household, with the wife as homemaker and child-rearer. At the Ladies Home Journal, Bok authored more than twenty articles opposed to women’s suffrage, women working outside the home, woman’s clubs, and education for women. He wrote that feminism would lead women to divorce, ill health, and even death. Bok viewed suffragists as traitors to their sex, saying “there is no greater enemy of woman than woman herself.”
(See here for a glimpse at his ambitions and impact.)
“My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.”*…
Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose that the drop in labor participation rate of young men is a result of a combination of factors: (i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure, (ii) increases in both the availability and (iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and (iv) a decrease in the marginal signalling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners.
At the macro level, this results in sub-optimal production, as firms are unable to satisfy their demand for labor via the usual mechanism of increasing wages. If you believe that economic productivity and growth are good, this presents a challenge when attempting to design stimulus policy, because subsidies or increases to the minimum wage would yield the same non-result as firms increasing wages. We discuss the potential efficacy of the somewhat radical idea of a tax on human attention or time spent consuming entertainment media as a way to stimulate productivity…
Somewhat radical, indeed… Economics for the Leisure State: Andrew Kortina (co-founder of Venmo and fin.com; @kortina) and Namrata Patel (Product at Airbnb and former VP, Product + Design at Minted; @namratalpatel) on “Kinky Labor Supply and the Attention Tax.”
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we sample soma, we might send inclusively-calculated birthday greetings to Barbara Bergmann; she was born on this date in 1927. An economist, she was a trailblazer in the development of feminist economics, contributing important work on topics that ranged from childcare and gender issues to poverty and Social Security. She was co-founder and President of the International Association for Feminist Economics and a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security.
“There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake”*…
Harriet Martineau c1834, by Richard Evans. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Harriet Martineau was a social reformer, novelist, and children’s author, the author of over over 50 books. (Early in her career, she was outselling Dickens.) An abolitionist, she was also a feminist and sociologist– before those terms had been invented. And she was one of the first women journalists, who published nearly 2,000 articles and columns in the leading newspapers and magazines of her day. Throughout a career devoted to “understanding how society works,” she strove to give the unheard– women, the poor– a voice… even as, for most of her life, Harriet was herself deaf.
Martineau had broken the mould by making complex ideas accessible to a wider readership via entertaining stories that connected grand theories with personal circumstances. While her delight in creating characters and human narratives gradually waned in favour of more direct campaigning for her favourite causes, she never lost her preference for example over theory, or (until her health gave out in 1855) for visiting places in person, so that she could see things for herself. What makes her career so remarkable was the number of times she made a fresh start on a new topic by mastering it for herself, from whatever information she could find to hand, and constantly updating her expertise so that her interventions might offer some practical support. Inevitably, some of these fields dated faster than others, but after a century of critical neglect, Martineau is now being widely reclaimed as a forthright thinker with a distinctive voice…
A campaigning journalist and an early feminist, Harriet Martineau humanized economic theory through Dickensian storytelling: “Mistress of All Trades.”
* Theodore Roosevelt
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As we celebrate curiosity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970, on the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which had effectively given women the right to vote, that 50,000 women in New York City (and thousands more around the country and the world) marched down 5th Avenue to Bryant Park in protest of the lack of progress in securing equal rights for women. Organized by Betty Friedan and sponsored by NOW, it was known as the Women’s Strike for Equality.
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