April-23-12
10:59 AM
My daughter took offence to a scene in the film "Zookeeper," which suggests that women who are treated like dirt by a prospective mate tend to respond positively. Here is the reaction comic that she drew in response, which she asked, rather forcefully I might add, that I put up on my blog.
Girls Like Jerks Equals False
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By John Taylor; 2011 Feb 08, Mulk 02, 167 BE
The following I wrote a few years ago and a friend has asked to see it. So I am reposting it, slightly revised. It is my take on one of the most frequently asked questions we get, why no women on the UHJ?
Why, why are only men allowed on the Universal House of Justice? Why, why, are only men obliged to go on pilgrimage in the Baha'i Faith? What is the wisdom of this apparent skew towards the male element?
In August of 2005 I found an article in Time Magazine about a Christian minister in the States who has taken upon himself a personal "mission to the men." He pointed out that over sixty percent of the membership rolls of Protestant churches, and something like eighty or ninety percent of their active membership, are female. In those conservative sects where women clergy were suddenly allowed, the number of female leaders shot up from zero to, again, ninety percent or more in only a few years.
He said that male church members who do turn up complain about the artsy-fartsy services chosen by the gals, singing, dancing and lovey-dovey sentiment. All that good ol' rootin' tootin' hell, damnation and brimstone are a thing of the past. To my surprise, this pastor with the mission to the men negatively compared female-dominated Christianity to Islam, the world's fastest growing religion, which gives a bigger place -- to say the least -- to men.
I cannot say that I found this man of God's approach to attracting males to religion all that interesting. Taken to an extreme, he would be hiring wrestling announcers as preachers and staging mini-football games behind the pulpit to keep the fleeting interest of male congregants from flagging.
Nonetheless, he has a point about men in religion generally. This is driven home every time I attend Feast here in Haldimand. While we have one or two other men who turn up sporadically (depending, I suppose, upon the NHL hockey schedule), usually in a roomful of women the only males are myself, Ron, and my six-year old son, Tomaso. This imbalance is not obvious in communities with a Persian element, since they resemble Muslims in that men tend to be as active, or more, than women. A male exodus, it seems, is characteristically Western.
So, suppose that in setting up ground rules for male involvement in religion Baha'u'llah was not trying to maintain the last bastions of a rotten, patriarchic, male-dominated old order. Was He rather looking to the new Order? Was He pointing a divine finger at the face of men in developed lands, saying:
"Do your duty to God. You have a responsibility not to lose yourselves in freedoms to indulge in wine, women and sports. Do not blow energy on selfish pleasure. You must take a positive role in society, religion, and particularly in family life. Yours must be a partnership with women but also take on a leadership stake in the family. That is why you are the nominal head, so that you will keep your family name going through many generations, at whatever cost to you personally. By inclination men are selfish and altruism comes harder. So fight your inclination to flee family life. Join in not because you are forced to do so or for personal power but because this is the best moral course for you. The mark of male maturity is that ability to plan restrained, consultative initiatives; this is also the best impetus for spiritual progress. The balance of virility of family as an institution depends upon you, and hence of politics and democracy generally."
And what exemplar do you have, men? Well, there is the Master for one. One novel insight came to me reading Myron Phelps’ book, the first ever written in English about `Abdu'l-Baha, called The Master in Akka. It has a mini-history of the Faith not in `Abdu'l-Baha's words but His sister Bahiyyih Khanum's words. She gives a female perspective, but Western men especially should read this eyewitness account in its entirety (I would like to make a video of it, with my daughter Silvie as narrator). Here is what I gleaned from what she said about `Abdu'l-Baha as paterfamilias:
His charitable initiatives did not go unnoticed in family circles. He gave prodigious amounts of money to the poor and indigent at times when the family was by no means prosperous. This, it seems, was especially galling in the female "andarun", mothers, daughters and sisters. I had imagined the Master's "extreme charity" might have provoked grumbling but it was the first time I saw it mentioned in print.
What does this mean?
Our Exemplar was unstinting, even at the price of family prosperity, on behalf of the poor. His leadership was unrelenting, tough, but not -- God forbid! -- in the sense of male oppression. Quite the reverse, this was the reverse, the much harder path of relieving poverty and ending oppression.
So, men, if you want to do your duty, turn all your money and energy to ending poverty and indigence locally and in the world. Turn off the Stupid Bowl and the Sadley Cup for a while, and act, plan, for an end to oppression and tyranny. When they are stamped out, then you can think about a watching rather than playing a sport, but not before.
Bahiyyih Khanum also tells the story of the Master as father. Like most parents in an age before antibiotics, He and the Holy Mother Munirih Khanum underwent the unimaginable trauma of losing five of nine children, most at a young age. Only four offspring survived, all girls. Long story short, tremendous pressure by the believers was brought to bear upon Father and Son to bear a male heir. The Covenant, the Prophetic succession, the future of the Faith itself hung upon primogeniture, the eldest boy taking over leadership. And only girls were making it through childhood.
Surprisingly for many (for me, at least), Baha'u'llah did not stand in the way of a second spouse for His Son, `Abdu'l-Baha; that would have meant more chances for a male heir, and the Kitab-i-Aqdas did not forbid taking on a second wife. According to Bahiyyih Khanum, Baha'u'llah stood back and intentionally did not forbid `Abdu'l-Baha from marrying, saying in effect, "If He wishes He may do so, nothing stands in His way." The Master, having the decision left to Himself alone, interpreted the clause in the Aqdas allowing two wives max as effectively enjoining monogamy since it had stipulated that a second marriage was conditional upon justice, peace and harmony, and that is impossible in a ménage-a-trois.
Why the sidestepping? Why was polygamy not just directly forbidden in the Book? Clearly, there is a lesson here, one especially aimed at men as fathers and heads of families. Our exemplar had His chance, a decision on His shoulders alone, and He made it. It is well known that He had had a personal dislike of privilege and inequality from His earliest days. Though He could have taken a second spouse legally and answered expediency with a chance at a male heir, He freely elected not to and was no doubt upbraided by some of those concerned.
So, now the legal system in the West has swung around to give men a similar choice. We all know that for most men most of the time voluntary responsibility is not a real choice at all. Pick out a ball and chain behind curtain number one, or take free sex without moral strings behind curtain number two. Given that freedom, who can be surprised when pews empty out and sports bleachers and porn websites are packed to the brim? Not surprising then that the indicators of men shirking unpleasant duty are everywhere, from top to bottom.
One example on top is especially hard to ignore right now. Decades after Shoghi Effendi talked about an "age of responsibility," "The Baha'i era is ... the age of individual responsibility." (Shoghi Effendi, Messages to the Indian Subcontinent, p. 118) A certain American president started his administration by paying lip service to a "culture of responsibility," yet he ignored cheap and simple preventive measures that would have averted the flooding of New Orleans. A city that was poor and largely Black, an unpleasant burden ignored by the slacker "father" of the world's wealthiest nation. Meanwhile every time a privileged hand was extended to him, he could not say no, to the extent that the national debt has expanded to the point where there is talk of economic collapse in the world's wealthiest nation.
Male lack of responsibility extends all the way down the totem pole. Now most young men regard higher learning as "uncool," and are staying away from universities in droves. Same way, mounting debt, both personal and national, is putting our future in hock. The next generation will also have to clean up the pollution and greenhouse gases resulting from flagrantly irresponsible decisions made by largely male leaders. This is the reverse of the model of virility and manliness in the cause of doing good that was shown by the Exemplar.
As Baha'is we believe that the only thing that will ever shake us out of our stupor is a crisis. Men of the next generation will pay for this blasé attitude about the way to make a better future for ourselves.
"Nothing but a fiery ordeal, out of which humanity will emerge, chastened and prepared, can succeed in implanting that sense of responsibility which the leaders of a new-born age must arise to shoulder." (Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha'u'llah, p. 46)
We men need a palm to the forehead to suddenly remind us of our responsibilities, to get us to renounce our blind adherence to the cult of elite sports and get us to serve humanity with all our force. What better body can do this than an all-male Universal House of Justice?
"Men in the House, Revisited Again"; written 19 September, 2005; revised June 11, 2006 and Feb 08, 2011
By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 08, Qudrat 05, 167 BE
Homemakers, the First Generalists
For millennia women were blocked from the workplace and public life; in that sense they were oppressed and could not live up to their full potential. However, it would be unjust to depict women in history as helpless victims incapable of contributing to those around them. Quite the reverse. We often forget that women as homemakers in the traditional extended family had a complex and extremely responsible management position.
A famous passage in the 31st Chapter of the Book of Proverbs pays high tribute to homemakers in the ancient world. It points out that her well-run household made a decisive contribution to the success of culture, and -- to use modern language -- it made women prime drivers of human evolution.
"Who can find a worthy woman? For her price is far above rubies. The heart of her husband trusts in her. He shall have no lack of gain. ... She is like the merchant ships. She brings her bread from afar. She rises also while it is yet night, gives food to her household, and their task to her servant girls. She considers a field, and buys it. With the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard. She girds her loins with strength, and makes her arms strong. ... She looks well to the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness." (Proverbs, 31:10-16, WEB)
In that age, women were generalists; they had a hand in every phase of economic activity, from clothing manufacture to import and export. But more than that, a homemaker played a leadership role, making major economic decisions all down the line. She managed the entire work of agriculture, from seed to field to dinner plate. Another passage mentions the superior generosity of women in helping the poor. "She stretches out her hand to the poor; Yes, she reaches forth her hands to the needy." (Proverbs, 31:20, WEB) That tendency persists among women, married or not, and has been confirmed by many studies comparing men and women's charitable donations.
Female managers were involved in every phase of manufacture, which enabled them to appreciate the world holistically. This gives a good sense of why so many cultures personify wisdom as a woman. For example, for the Hellenes wisdom was Sophia, who embodied the "female" attributes of the Godhead, such as kindness and compassion. A woman, therefore, could "open her mouth with wisdom,"
"Strength and dignity are her clothing. She laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom. Instruction of faithfulness is on her tongue. Her children rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also praises her: `Many women do noble things, but you excel them all.' Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain; But a woman who fears Yahweh, she shall be praised. Give her of the fruit of her hands; let her works praise her in the gates." (Proverbs, 31:25-31, WEB)
A wife and mother had to be a wise manager, since she had discretion over the well being of several people, what they ate, how they dressed and, no doubt, even their happiness. A wife or mother just had to look into the faces of her charges to see how diet and lifestyle were affecting their condition. She was fully in charge of putting food on the table, and could adjust diet, meal times and eating habits according to what she saw. She could respond to subtle dips in health. She made substantive decisions about what plants were grown, indeed whatever went into the mouths of her family.
Starting in the mid-Twentieth Century, women started to swing away from anchoring the home. They entered universities and took on full time jobs outside the home. At that time, obesity rates began to climb until now in North America the majority of the population is obese. This is happening around the world as the Western diet takes over, in both poor and wealthy nations. At the same time, women lost the control they once had over diet. Powerful corporations, whose primary concern was not welfare but profit, took over food production, preparation and service.
Their power was bolstered by corrupt science, Homemakers and children were inundated with propaganda, confused by a succession of fad diets and news of miracle ingredients in certain foods, from antioxidants to low fat yogurt. Industry reaped tremendous short-term profit, but the incidence of chronic diseases rose alarmingly with each decade that passed. We need but glance at a crowd of average people to see how many fat, flaccid bodies are among us, and how necessary the oversight of a competent homemaker once was for our health.
Work in Worker's Palaces
Flora Tristan planned her worker's palaces as a way to do the reverse of the trend that is now going on. They would be amplifiers of female leadership, not rivals or replacements. Far from exploiting human vulnerability, worker's palaces would be not-for-profit organizations located at the heart of each neighbourhood.
Flora Tristan proposed that worker's palaces particularly emphasize the equality of women vocationally, by allowing girls to enter their schools in equal numbers with boys, as well as industrially, by subjecting housework to the economies of scale that even in the 19th Century were commonplace in industry. Its kitchens would feed residents, and kitchen gardens could also grow vegetables. They could also deliver hot meals to households all around, reducing the cooking burden of local homemakers. Their prominent, central location in the neighbourhood would make quick, on-time delivery possible. They might also send out cleaning crews to area homes, as needed, at a low enough cost that everyone could afford it.
As mentioned before, the palace would make every effort to include and gain the support of everyone in the community. Children from rich families would study along with orphans and pupils from poor families. For residents of the worker's palace, and students in their schools, the daily schedule,
"would still permit time to give him proper care for his teeth, hair, and feet. His body would be strengthened through appropriate work, and he would be given food best suited to his temperament. Various diets would have to be followed: meat and wine for some; vegetables, fruit, and water for others. The Union offers such great advantages that everything seemingly impossible to us in our individual households becomes simple in such a vast organization." (Worker's Union, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, para 65, p. 122)
In this way palaces would lighten the burden of household tasks and free women to participate as much or as little as they chose in the workplace, the home or the local community. These palaces of labour would give women the chance to devote their entire life to a career or, alternatively, to follow in the old homemaker's footsteps by overseeing the entire food preparation process, from planting to serving dinner, without the drudgery (or, alternatively, the array of servants) that was needed for pre-modern household management. Similarly, a palace might enable them to oversee the design and production of clothing in its textile workshop.
Needless to say, erecting such palaces in every neighbourhood would be an expensive proposition. But since it would also house workshops for members of every trade and profession in the area, they, as part of her Worker's Union, would contribute from their wages and pension plans to the palace's expenses. Other sources of funding come from every level of society, as well as part of the profits from productive work done by residents of the palaces themselves. As hinted at last time, the cost of building palaces would be a sensible way to spend the vast reparations fund that the global financial system owes to women as compensation for centuries of exclusion from most professions.
Flora Tristan envisaged worker's palaces as a way permanently to end indigence, that is, what we now call homelessness and unemployment. Everything they do is dedicated to encouraging full employment and universal participation in the workplace, either as a volunteer or a professional. This is because, like many previous thinkers, notably Plato and Comenius, she saw the origin of corruption in the failure of society to involve everybody in some form of productive work.
As part of this project, palace schools would introduce every child, rich or poor, to labour, both skilled and manual. Applying the latest educational theories, they would train each student in no fewer than two manual trades. But the emphasis would be on following their own interests, not forcing them to work.
"As for vocational training, each child would choose the trade he feels the most suited for. Besides all the other work, he would have to do, upon leaving the palace he will have to be a competent worker in at least two trades." (Worker's Union, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 122)
Although established in adult education, her idea that children too should be allowed to choose their own course of studies is rarely allowed by mainstream schools, even today.
Another reform Flora Tristan put forward was profit sharing, even for children learning and working in the Palace's vocational school. This is rare enough even for adults -- or at least it is outside of Europe, where cooperative companies are among the largest employers, especially in Holland and Spain. Furthermore, Tristan suggested that profits from their work be used to motivate the
vocational training of children at a very early age.
"In order for him to become interested in work, as of the age of ten the child will be eligible to share in the profits produced by the work in the establishment. This amount will increase every year until his departure at the age of eighteen. Half will be given to him as a trousseau made in the establishment and the other half in money." (Worker's Union, p. 122)
Writing before child labour laws, she suggested between the ages of six and ten that students would begin to be paid out of their share of the profits of their work. She also suggested that palaces maintain a steady flow of adult guests and boarders from diverse backgrounds. In this way young people would not grow up parochial or prejudiced as a result of having friends and acquaintances from a single mould. This also is a reform rarely attempted today, where age segregation throughout schooling is all but universal. By fearfully "protecting" children from contact with friends and co-workers of many ages and cultural backgrounds, we deprive the entire society of the benefits of wisdom, and we stunt the development of democracy.
This way, palaces would provide essential social services at the most local level possible. Their robust, face-to-face social services would endow homes, the neighbourhood, city blocks and wider districts with more prominence than we do now. Today, centers of wealth and power hide beyond the horizon, usually hundreds of kilometres away. The principle that it is most efficient and for social services to be done as close as possible to those who run and benefit from them is called subsidiarity, which we shall discuss in greater detail next time. Worker's palaces in every locality and region would give the body politic ballast, allowing a balance between the personal and the public, and local and global policymaking.
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Flora Tristan, IV
Reparations for Women
By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 03, Ilm 19, 167 BE
I picked out Flora Tristan for many of the same reasons I chose in this book John Amos Comenius. Both at first glance seem old fashioned but upon further examination turn out to be ahead not only of their own time but of our time as well. We have looked in this way at Flora Tristan as an early socialist; far from being a footnote to history, good only for trivia questions, her contribution is as yet unappreciated. If socialists had followed her lead rather than that of the Marxist rebels who followed, our economy would be infinitely further advanced than it is today.
The same is true of Tristan as a feminist.
In the English speaking world modern feminists -- when they have heard of her at all -- honour Flora Tristan's status as a pioneer of equality for women. However, the actual content of her message tends to grate. They find it humiliating, for example, that she did not address other women but on the whole spoke to men, as power brokers, workers, husbands and fathers. Worse, she called not only for equality for women but also for a special "moralizing mission" for women.
Contemporary feminism did not follow this path. Why should women have any more concern for morality than men? Why, indeed. Flora Tristan would have been shocked that any woman would ask such a question. She would have young women actively trying to stamp out practices like imbibing alcohol or swearing, not exercising "equality" by drinking and cussing as much as young men do. Feminism tried this approach for a while but gradually learned to narrow the focus onto specific barriers to equality, for example, gaining votes for women, breaking the glass ceiling and enforcing wage equity laws.
Now that education is open to women and these goals have been attained, at least in wealthy countries, feminism in the public mind has receded into the background noise of a thousand other special interest lobbies. This is a serious problem, since an advocate for women is not promoting a special interest, she is defending the majority of the human race. Every bit as much as the modern socialist, feminists should be looking back at Flora Tristan and asking,
"Could it be that she had the right idea all along?"
As I write, for example, the news is full of a major study on the ill effects of various drugs and addictions. On a damage scale for individuals and society, where one hundred is the most harm and zero is no harm at all, alcohol scored a 60 while heroine, the next most noxious substance, heroine, scored only 40. Tobacco scored .... After almost two centuries Flora Tristan is still not far wrong in pointing to alcohol as a barrier to women's rights. She admonished working class men who fled their homes and spent their leisure drinking in the local tavern, then coming home drunk and embittered, and entering into a cycle of violence in the home. Today's solution is for women to join men in the bars, which only raises the place of alcohol on the damage scale. Although the link between inebriation and domestic violence is well established by social science research, activists concentrate only on the attacks on women, leaving them open to accusations of being anti-male.
The answer is for feminists to get off the ethical fence and do what Flora Tristan (and most of her contemporary feminists as well) suggested, push for abstinence, or at least temperance, from all addictive substances. Bereft of a broader moralizing mission, the rights of women sinks in the same truculence, parochialism and in-fighting that broke socialism.
However, Flora Tristan was far more radical than merely advocating the platform of the Women's Temperance League. Consider this prediction, which she made in The Worker's Union,
"By a very simple calculation it is obvious that wealth will increase indefinitely when women (half of the human race) are summoned to bring into social service their intelligence, strength, and ability. This is as easy to understand as that two is double one." (Flora Tristan, "A Passage From Flora Tristan's l'Union Ouvriere," Translated by Doris and Paul Beik, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/at/tristan_text.html)
Tristan was quite correct in this prophesy. The amount of wealth in the world exploded right around the same time when women gained access to higher education and entered the workplace in droves. Nonetheless, women continue to own only a tiny percentage of land and capital, and almost all wealth continues to funnel into the hands of an ever smaller, mostly male, minority.
If the money is being produced by women in the first place, this raises a question that I had never thought of until I read her prediction. What about compensation? Tristan believed that women had been robbed over many centuries of their right to at least half of the world's wealth. How can humanity repay such a huge debt? In any court of law it would be found that this wealth disparity between men and women is no accident; undoubtedly, women were intentionally kept back. Surely, this is a great wrong, and they do have a right to reparations. What is more, today's economy is benefitting from a massive influx of money thanks to the full and equal participation of women in the workplace. Now is the time to start discussing this issue.
But what sort of reparations are in order? Even if, as is no doubt the case, the rise of women is only part of the reason why this wealth came into being, it would still be the right thing to do to redirect at least some of the massive profits being made back into the pockets of women, especially to those who remain in an oppressed, downtrodden condition.
It is not difficult to point at sources of revenue for a women's compensation fund. A Tobin tax on currency speculation, for example, would immediately cause an influx of trillions of dollars a year for the fund, while at the same time reducing the volatility of markets by dampening speculation. Taxes on international sales of weaponry, drugs, alcohol and even sugar would also introduce major revenue streams while benefitting humankind as a whole.
Needless to say, such a fund would have to be enforced and administered by a world government, and it would need to leave specific spending decisions to poor women themselves, on as local a level as possible.
Beyond that, the question they might well ask (considering her astonishing economic genius) is how to spend these trillions of dollars in a way that is in the spirit of Flora Tristan? I think that Flora Tristan would have had this money spent supporting women as householders. The home was and still remains the domain of women, though less exclusively now than then. Equalization payments could, therefore, go to introducing automation into domestic affairs, for instance by jump starting a domestic robot industry. This would reduce the menial labour needed for running a home and allow mothers to take on higher level tasks, such as early childhood education.
Of course, the drawback with this course of action is that it would redirect money away from unproductive dead ends of the global economy and towards the most productive root and branch of growth, the homes of the poor. Worse, high technology would stop flowing into the weapons industry and start flowing into homes. As better educators of the next generation, money will be redirected from short term to long term economic stimulus.
The probable result? The poor will get richer and more educated, creating yet more wealth, breaking all past records for prosperity. This might then lead to a realization that women deserve an even higher percentage of the world's goods. Demands for the women's reparation fund would soar higher, perhaps even to the heights that Flora Tristan contemplated: fifty percent of all capital assets. Of course, that just another relic of old fashioned feminism.
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The Real Enemy of the People
By John Taylor; 2010 Nov 02, Ilm 18, 167 BE
Extremes and extremism divide and conquer efficiently, whereas Flora Tristan's message of moderation was too kind, too womanly and far too conciliatory. She called for a union of workers, not a violent slave revolt. She called for constructive cooperatives, not forced equalization. She believed in God, whereas Marx and Engel were atheists. Worst of all, Flora Tristan believed that the real enemy of the working class is poverty and ignorance.
She declared that in this fight all can participate. Workers, as the main victims, have the primary responsibility to advance their own lot, but Flora Tristan would have every level of society invested in their liberation. Since it was only war in a metaphorical sense, nobody died, no blood was spilled and everybody won. Victory would come of group study and by putting the manual skills of workers to work constructing what she called worker's palaces, cooperative social service enterprises in every locality. Tristan actively sought contributions for worker's palaces not only from laborers themselves but also the king, the nobility, intellectuals, artists, the church and business leaders. A large part of her manifesto, The Worker's Union, consists of letters of petition asking for moral and financial support from the various elements of society.
In light of subsequent events, outlined last time, the ruling classes would have been wise to heed her appeals and let workers share power. It would have been far cheaper to build palaces to manual labor than to soak workers until revolt soaked the streets in blood. Had she lived long enough to forge a Worker's Union and enlist the entire society in building palaces, there would have been no bitter aftertaste, no class war, no endless struggle, no chains to throw off.
Casting Off the Chain Paradigm
By contrast, the Communist Manifesto made the insulting assumption that workers are slaves, and, worse, that their only way forward is to think more slavishly than before. Workers can only liberate themselves by violent overthrow of the government, as the slaves of Haiti had done, and by forced appropriation of the means of production, as was later done in the Soviet Union. All-too-typical males, Marx and Engels stripped Tristan's plea for cooperative activism and religiously inspired socialism of its essence, an all loving God. They promoted a specious but stultifying and reductionist belief that capitalist exploiters care nothing for their fellow man. Human nature is greedy for material goods, and hates mankind, body and soul. As it went viral, it became a self fulfilling prophesy that the elite will do what nature intended, enter into an endless death struggle of oppressed proletarians pitted against their vicious oppressors, the bourgeoisie.
Flora Tristan treated workers as free men and women, capable of learning, of carrying their own weight and building up social support mechanisms on their own. Her religious convictions taught that the way to brighten a dark room is by "shining your light before men." Ignorance, iniquity and sharp class differences vanish as soon as laborers gain the knowledge and wealth to become entrepreneurs and owners themselves. As they learn to share in natural resources and run the means of production, ownership and profits will be distributed equitably, without violent struggle or confrontation.
For Flora Tristan, slaves, including wage slaves, are liberated by knowledge, especially by educating their own children. She would have had the schools housed in Worker's Palaces run by the best teachers, so that parents from the business class and the nobility would have wanted their own children enrolled there too. In this way, increased education would cast off workers' poverty and indigence in a generation or two. The lot of girls and women would have improved even more, and their influence would increase. The home is where educated homemakers tend to have the most benefit to society, as Tristan herself pointed out.
"Woman is everything in the life of the workers. She is their sole providence. If she fails them, everything fails them. Consequently it is said: `It is the woman who makes or unmakes the household,' and this is the exact truth; that is why a proverb has been made of it. But what education, what teaching, what direction, what moral or physical development does the woman of the common people receive? None." (Translated by Doris and Paul Beik, http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/rschwart/hist255/at/tristan_text.html)
Recent statistical studies have confirmed Tristan's intuition in this respect. As soon as potential mothers become literate, in whatever nation, economy or culture they may live, there is a strong echo effect through several subsequent generations, improving everything from child mortality to income to social mobility. In spite of this clear benefit, Tristan's complaint that homemakers are left on their own is still largely true today.
Class Struggle As Red Herring
An unnoticed effect of radical Marxism was the elbowing out of family and religion. Traditionally faith groups and extended households took on many responsibilities for social support, such as educating children and caring for the aged. Communism and the threat of it set worker and owner at each other's throats; this distracted public attention and allowed a power vacuum to form. Opportunistic nationalist dictators, of whom Louis Napoleon of France was only the first, centralized power while ingratiating themselves by doling out what the people had before done for themselves. Slowly, the full range of social services were appropriated by a monolithic state. Even in parliamentary democracies the role of nanny shifted to large, faceless professional bureaucracies.
Worst of all, in spite of all the squabbling the rights of workers have still not caught up with Tristan's vision.
To this day, a single workplace constitution has yet to be officially adopted. Many workplaces are unionized but there is no overall union of all workers, as Tristan envisaged. Employees still rarely have a say in who leads them, or in how their company is run. They are laid off without accountability. Workers in wealthy nations compete with prison labor in authoritarian economies. While these workers are treated relatively well, on a global level the vast majority of workers are if anything worse off than in Tristan's time. Bosses exploit and bully them with impunity. In a pinch corporations can escape responsibilities simply by crossing the border, taking the jobs along with them. Wage gaps and concentration of ownership have worsened. At the same time, the basic right of humans to own and manage the planet's resources has been blocked for decades by a tiny elite with hegemony over the lion's share of the world's wealth.
If Flora Tristan's vision had caught the public imagination, everyone would be on the same side. Workers and owners would earn a fair share of the profits in whatever workplace they serve, and both would have a say in decision making. Eventually, everyone would become a worker, and for that matter everyone would become an owner and manager too. Rich and poor would be trained at a palace elementary school, and taught a skilled trade by local journey-persons from early adolescence. Young people who demonstrate a desire and ability to enter a profession could then pay for their continued education with wages from their original trade, without getting into debt. This would leave no room for rebellion or forced equalization -- basic characteristics of Marxism.
Tristan's palaces would be located in the center of the local scene. Families, religion and every community group would both contribute to and benefit from them. Financed and run by workers themselves, workers palaces would stand as prominent declarations that everybody works and all benefit from the right and obligation to be employed. Local people would be directly involved in palace service projects in a variety of roles, and at every stage of life. Each neighborhood would display a palace as its badge of honor. As cooperative, not-for-profit institutions, they would avoid bureaucracy, buffer the economy in bad times and gently spread the wealth around. The widening gulf between worker, owner and manager, would start to narrow and disappear.
In spite of all this, Flora Tristan was no economist. She believed that women are at the heart of the issue. They have been called upon to moralize the world, and it is up them to make this vast project of reconstruction possible. Let us talk about this in detail next time.
Flora Tristan's Plan
By John Taylor; 2010 Oct 31, Ilm 16, 167 BE
Living conditions of workers in the 1840's were degraded to the point of desperation. Sadly, ignorance and poverty were worsened by open strife among themselves. Workers' guilds in Flora Tristan's time were fraternal groups whose interests were seen as restricted to a given trade. The idea of solidarity among all workers was a foreign one. Guilds were plagued by bitter rivalries among trades; it was not unknown for fights to escalate to rioting in the street. They sponsored graduating apprentices on a cross country junket called a "French tour." Unfortunately, this involved more carousing than professional development.
The year after completing her "Worker's Union", Flora Tristan followed the example of the workers she wanted to help by starting her own "French tour," a speaking tour promoting broader solidarity. "Worker's Union" was her suggested plan of action for organizing guilds and other workers groups across the country. In the spring of 1844 she officially started her Tour de France, leaving Paris on the 12th of April. She took her mission very seriously, fighting ill health, giving public addresses in each town, pleading with the proletariat to build worker's palaces.
Her diary of this tour recorded details of working class life that no other writer noticed, making it a valuable document for historians today. On her first stop, Auterre, she wrote in her diary that "I felt in me something like a divine grace enveloping, magnetizing, and transporting me into another life." (Le Tour, P. 38, cited in Workers' Union, Translator's Introduction, xv) After six months of travel her illness worsened and she had to stop. Bedridden, she died in a hotel room soon afterwards.
Flora Tristan held that workers can advance their own lot through effort and study. Nobody else was going to do that for them. As a fervent Christian, she believed that faith, knowledge and love are the true liberators; in Christ's words, "the truth shall set you free." She did not believe that conflict between classes was needed, much less inevitable. The mere fact that they were in the majority was sufficient for ultimate victory. As they educate themselves and exercise their rights, the representatives of her proposed Worker's Union could enter government. Soon, they would gain the same amount of influence in government as had the bourgeoisie. The democratic process would then kick in, workers would dominate elections and their interests would prevail on their own.
Nonetheless, she was not naive. With great prescience Flora Tristan anticipated the chief objection that would be raised against unity among workers,
"This demand, no matter how just and legal, will be considered an attack on property per se (land, houses and capital). And labor organization will be considered an attack on private enterprise. And, since those who lead the governmental machine are land and capital owners, it is obvious they will never agree to grant such rights to the working class." (Tristan, Flora, The Worker's Union, Translated by Beverly Livingston, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 55)
After Flora Tristan's death in 1844, extremism and radicalism took over. Revolt, violence and reaction made an ever more volatile mix. As conditions for workers worsened a series of revolutions broke out across Europe, lasting until about 1847. All failed. Nonetheless, the radical model of socialism took over. After a decade of Louis Napoleon's dictatorial regime, a spontaneous bloody uprising in Paris known as the Paris Commune broke out as soon as his restraints toppled. Idealistic socialism gave way to communists fomenting open rebellion. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their famous Communist Manifesto. Inspired by Flora Tristan's example of martyrdom on behalf of workers, they agreed with her that the poverty-stricken, exploited workers of the world had to take their fate into their own hands.
The difference was that Marx and Engels prescribed war instead of construction. A recent reader of the Manifesto pointed out that it is difficult to read this stirring tract without wanting to go out and shoot a businessman. Whereas Flora Tristan in Worker's Union addressed everyone involved, businessmen, politicians, women and men, as well as workers, the Manifesto is addressed to the victims of exploitation alone and ends with the famous admonition, "Workers of the world unite, the only thing you have to lose are your chains." Flora Tristan would have pointed out that this is, at the very least, a lie. The right to life is crucial. Workers can easily lose their lives, their families, their homes and their wages, and they do every day. In rebellions they invariably suffered the most. Even if they really had nothing to lose, perpetual class struggle would doom everybody to the loss of a clean, peaceful world and a harmonious future.
As atheists, Marx and Engels did not agree with Tristan that truth alone is enough to liberate workers. They firmly believed that conflict not only cannot be avoided, but also that it should not be avoided. The misery of most of mankind is its fate and our only choice is who will be the miserable class. Their ideas eventually led to the Soviet Union, a spectacularly failed experiment in forced equality that lasted most of the 20th Century.
The Chains of Haiti
The historical model that Marx and Engels called to mind when they spoke of "chains," was a singular series of events that took place about fifty years earlier in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. There, for the first time since Moses, a successful slave revolt took place. After a long series of bloody slave uprisings, the slaves really did lose their chains. The victorious former slaves named the French side of the island of Hispaniola "Haiti." This event, where slaves won out, sent a chill down the back of the ownership class, especially in France and America. In spite of the rhetoric of the French Revolution about freedom and brotherhood, French gunboats were sent to Haiti, but even that failed to put down the rebels.
The model of self-liberating slaves that Marx and Engels chose was an unfortunate one. With only two known exceptions, all slave revolts in history were crushed. Moses' slave revolt, we should recall, was aided by divine miracles. Even then it took a full generation for the Israelites to see the promised land. The modern abolition of official slavery came from top-down legislation by the British parliament, which banned slavery throughout its Empire. In the United States the Emancipation Declaration was also top down, and made only after slavers had dragged the country into civil war.
For better or worse, the bottom-up triumph of the Haitian slaves was unique, a Pyrrhic victory, and remains so today. It provoked a united reaction by the entire ownership class, which then as now, is highly class conscious and refuses to respect national borders. It pushed the French government to incur on Haiti a huge reparation payment to compensate for "stolen property," that is, their human chattel. Haiti had indeed been a plum target, by far the wealthiest colony in the Americas. The sum they arrived at for reparations padded their budget for over a century. Several times during the 19th Century the leaders in Haiti tried to default on the unjust debt. Other western powers, including Canada, America and England, supported France in recouping their "compensation" for lost slaves.
After several attempted defaults, Haiti finally paid off the debt in the late Twentieth Century, leaving its infrastructure devastated. To this day, Haiti remains a pariah state, anathema to capital, isolated, chaotic and, though technically independent, it is still enslaved to drugs, debt and corruption. From the richest it sank to the poorest nation in the Americas, one of the poorest on the planet. In spite of all our political correctness today, and even after a devastating earthquake levelled Port au Prince in 2010, France still refused to recognize pleas by activists to return the mulcted money to Haiti.
A slave rebellion was hardly an auspicious model for the workers to adopt! The Communist Manifesto plunked the worker's movement right into a no-man's-land between owners of capital and government. The more militant workers got the more fearful owners became. It is no longer possible to crucify revolting slaves alongside public highways as a grisly warning as was done in Roman times after Spartacus's revolt, but the elected leader of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was still quietly exiled to South Africa, to mention only one instance. Owners do anything to protect against threatened loss of their wealth, legitimate or otherwise. Such is the dominance of the male element and the unpopularity of religion today that the name "Karl Marx" continues to remembered by every educated person today, while the name "Flora Tristan" remains buried in obscurity.
Next time, let us talk about what for Flora Tristan was the real enemy we should be fighting.
Flora Tristan's Worker's Union
By John Taylor; 2010 Oct 29, Ilm 14, 167 BE
Some of the most insightful thinkers about citizens as local planners have been women. Among them are Jane Jacobs and, much earlier, Flora Tristan (1804-1844). In 1843 Tristan launched an early initiative to persuade the impoverished workers of France to come together in their own interest. Flora Tristan was part of a movement among writers called "Christian humanitarianism," and was influenced by Utopian socialists and the emerging idea of scientific socialism. She got the idea that she was destined for a personal mission on behalf of workers when in England, on a visit to Bedlam, the insane asylum. Here she met a French inmate who proclaimed that she [Tristan] had been sent by God on a special mission. Tristan was persuaded that she was a "modern female savior committed to rescuing the working poor from their intolerable circumstances." At least five years before Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto, she set out to liberate the workers of the world.
Long before there was welfare state, Tristan suggested that workers set up their own self-governing co-operatives, which she called "communities of human unity." An early feminist, Flora Tristan also hoped that these communities would advance the lot of women if they set down legal provisions to allow them to enter their schools and trades as equals of working men. At the same time, in the face of objections from men, she urged the males to emancipate themselves from their traditional thraldom to the bottle.
Tristan had noticed that the poverty and iniquity suffered by workers was wrapped up in an extreme imbalance between the sexes. Uneducated women became sullen baby-making machines, while their husbands fled for solace to the local tavern.
Disproportion gave rise to an either/or mentality and widened the artificial gap between worker and owner. Tristan did not see this as inevitable. She dreamed of human progress based upon economic cooperation, male temperance and conscious advancement of the lot of women.
In her 1843 manifesto, "The Worker's Union," Tristan pointed out that the 1789 French Revolution, although it pretended to uphold universal human rights, really was a revolt of the business class (the bourgeoisie) defending their own interests against kings and aristocrats. While they had pretensions to universality, in practice they utterly ignored the rights of women and the welfare of the working class, the better to exploit the degradation of both. A union of workers, she hoped, would refuse to imitate such precedents.
Once organized, workers in every locality (department) of France should found institutions to take care of their own, the old, disabled, sick and vulnerable.
"I come to you to propose a general union among working men and women, regardless of trade, who reside in the same region -- a union which would have as its goal the CONSOLIDATION OF THE WORKING CLASS and the construction of several establishments (Workers' Union palaces), distributed evenly throughout France. Children of both sexes six to eighteen would be raised there; and sick or disabled workers as well as the elderly would be admitted. Listen to the numbers and you will have an idea of what can be done with the union." (Flora Tristan, The Worker's Union, Translated by Beverly Livingston, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, pp. 38-39)
The union of workers would express the solidarity of workers, who now were engaged in fights among the trades. Meanwhile the buildings, which she called workers' palaces, in which the union is housed, would have symbolic as well as functional value. Just as kings and magnates build palaces as public statements, as gilded showpieces of prestige, wealth and power, so should the Worker's Union.
Work has great dignity since it is the source of the power of which the elite boast. So why should not the proletariat build palaces too? The palaces of the workers can be visible declarations in every locality of the fact that workers are what she called the "most numerous and useful class." Unlike their antecedents, Tristan had faith that since their interests are identical, the leadership of a workers union would be congenial to the equality of women.
"Workers, perhaps in three or four years you will have your first palace, ready to admit six hundred old persons and six hundred children. Well! Proclaim through your statutes, which will become your charter, the rights of women for equality. Let it be written in your charter that an equal number of girls and boys will be admitted to the Workers' Union palace to receive intellectual and vocational training." (The Workers' Union, p. 88)
In the workplace, in the workers' palaces and their subsidiary institutions, the rules should "recognize, in principle, the legal equality of men and women as being the only means of constituting the unity of humanity." She had this faith because in her travels Tristan had observed that cooperative institutions like Robert Owen's New Lanark tended to be structurally more open to the social skills and inclinations of girls and women. Small, local co-ops tend to be friendlier to the concerns of women. They allow for greater equality than the hierarchical structure of larger institutions.
Flora Tristan thought that it was important that worker's palaces be largely -- but not exclusively -- supported by the workers' own money. Government should neither regulate or fund them. She set about the daunting task of persuading workers to pass the hat among themselves in order to build the first palace on their own. Once it is built, they should agree permanently to deduct a portion of their admittedly meagre wages to maintain its social service institutions. She calculated that a small portion of their wages, if all workers were involved, could easily keep the palace's school, the orphanage and old age home going.
In addition, workers should form reader's circles, raising their consciousness by discussing reports of the lot of workers around the world, and sharing the expense of the books they read by pooling money among themselves. Once their children are being educated as well, they could seek out representation in the highest circles of power. Here her proposal resembles in some ways that put forward much earlier by John Amos Comenius. In a nine bullet point summary of the proposals in Worker's Union, Tristan put as number two:
"Representation of the working class before the nation by a defender chosen and paid for by the Worker's Union, so that the working class's need to exist and the other class's need to accept it become evident." (Worker's Union, p. 128)
Once workers had a toehold on power, their representative could assert the right to work for adults, the right to education for children and the right of women for equality of opportunity. In order to address the workers' lack of ownership -- in comparison to the business class and the nobility -- this representative would seek official recognition of workers' hands as "property." This is how she reasoned it out:
Every right derives from the right to life. Although established before, the right to life had not, unfortunately, been guaranteed in France's 1830 Charter. It was crucial to re-introduce it, and its consequence, the right to work. Workers were so destitute that the loss of a job was effectively a death sentence, so the two, life and work, had to go together. Their own two hands were all that most workers possessed. This ownership, this ability to work, was the cornerstone of all property rights. In this sense, the right to work gives workers ownership of the means of production too. Therefore, she reasoned, workers have another fundamental right, the right to organize themselves.
Since workers were by far the majority of the population, democracy alone is enough for their rights to prevail. No need for struggle or conflict, just by making their rights known by a single representative, workers should prevail. All workers need, therefore, is to advance the democratic process --although, strangely, Tristan saw nothing wrong with the union openly purchasing votes! Nonetheless, her faith in democracy was such that she made the following statement, which I think every elector should read over before casting a ballot.
"Let us adopt a humanitarian point of view, and since we are looking for men of love and intelligence, let us not consider their religious and political opinions." (Flora Tristan, The Worker's Union, Translated by Beverly Livingston, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1983, p. 59)
Once there is democracy in politics, there soon would be democracy in the workplace. This would further lead to economic equity. Gradually the tendency to concentrate money into the hands of a few will reverse itself and wealth will flow the other way, into the hands of the many. Hence her belief that the use of their hands is all that workers need.
Next time, let us look at the provenance and the fate of Tristan's plan.
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