The Working Day

Animal Labour ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 181-206
Author(s):  
Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Main Site ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Working Day ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
A Site ◽  
Alliance Building ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Labour Time

In Chapter 10 of Capital Vol. 1—‘The Working Day’—Karl Marx reveals at least one central concern within his project: namely the relationship between labour time and free time as a site of antagonism under capitalism. In this chapter I offer a perspective on the politics of animal labour that takes the working day as a main site of problematization and contestation. I argue that while a concept of a ‘working day’ is applicable to some animal labourers, a defining characteristic of most animals labour under capitalism—particularly that of animals in intensive forms of agriculture—is the reality that the working day never stops: all time is labour time for these animals. I further argue that a focus on labour time offers a different and productive base for pro-animal politics, and for alliance building. At least one curious set of resonances here are the strong demands being made by other social movements—such as environmental justice movements—to ‘slow down capitalism’ through reduced work, reduced production, and reduced consumption.

Capitalism

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic World ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Historical Capitalism ◽  
A Site ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

As a conceptual apparatus for the analysis of complex historical phenomena, “capitalism” has been a powerful tool for historians of the Atlantic World. Capitalism, used as a concept in the sense derived from the work of Karl Marx, generates analyses that integrate the processes of production, consumption, and exchange with the historical development of consciousness and social systems. It is a critique, rather than simply an alternative form, of political economy. How exactly to conduct such critical analysis has been a matter of prolific and sophisticated argument for over a century, and specific definitions of capitalism as an object of historical study vary as functions of that debate. Indeed, debates about the precise formulation and usefulness of capitalism as a concept, and about its geographical and temporal scope as a historical object, have run on similar though by no means parallel lines to debates over the “Atlantic World.” These discourses intersect most vibrantly in the study of Atlantic slavery. From the 19th to the 21st centuries, the relationship of slavery to capitalism has remained a site of intense conceptual struggle. All serious contributions to such debates, and to the study of historical capitalism generally, have relied to some extent on the evidence and analysis of scholars who were not themselves engaged in that study. This bibliography, however, will deal for the most part only with work that deploys the term “capitalism,” signifying a more or less conscious engagement with the tradition and debates that derive from Marx’s work.

Colonialism and the Highland Clearances

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Mackinnon
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Indigenous Research ◽  
Internal Colonialism ◽  
New Approach ◽  
A Site ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Imperial State ◽  
Late Modern

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although this article does not reject the comparative approach, it seeks to avoid criticisms that this approach can be misleading by demonstrating that promoters and managers of projects involving land use change, territorial dispossession and industrial development in the late modern Gàidhealtachd consistently conceived of their work as projects of colonization. It further argues that the new social, cultural and political structures these projects imposed on the area's indigenous population correspond to those found in other colonial situations, and that racist and racialist attitudes towards Gaels of the time are typical of those in colonial situations during the period. The article concludes that the late modern Gàidhealtachd has been a site of internal colonization where the relationship of domination between colonizer and colonized is complex, longstanding and occurring within the imperial state. In doing so it demonstrates that the history and present of the Gaels of Scotland belongs within the ambit of an emerging indigenous research paradigm.

ECOLOGICAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE JONAH NARRATIVE – HAVE THEY SUCCEEDED IN OVERCOMING ANTHROPOCENTRISM?

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Willie Van Heerden
Keyword(s):  
Biblical Text ◽  
Biblical Hermeneutics ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
The Relationship

A central concern of ecological biblical hermeneutics is to overcome the anthropocentric bias we are likely to find both in interpretations of the biblical texts and in the biblical text itself. One of the consequences of anthropocentrism has been described as a sense of distance, separation, and otherness in the relationship between humans and other members of the Earth community. This article is an attempt to determine whether extant ecological interpretations of the Jonah narrative have successfully addressed this sense of estrangement. The article focuses on the work of Ernst M. Conradie (2005), Raymond F. Person (2008), Yael Shemesh (2010), Brent A. Strawn (2012), and Phyllis Trible (1994, 1996).

Bodies and Being One

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Schechter
Keyword(s):  
Self Awareness ◽  
Single Object ◽  
Split Brain ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter concerns the relationship between the split-brain case and the non-split case. In the first half of the chapter, I consider arguments to the effect that if split-brain subjects have two minds apiece, then so do non-split subjects. Sometimes these arguments have taken the form of a reductio against the 2-thinkers claim for split-brain subjects. These arguments do not work: that a split-brain subject has two minds does not mean that I have two minds, although it does mean that I could. The second half of the chapter offers my own proposal for the respect in which R’s and L’s co-embodiment as one animal, S, makes a split-brain subject one of us: I argue that S must be the single object of both R’s and L’s implicit bodily self-awareness.

Legitimacy

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
International Courts ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
State Legitimacy ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Supranational Institutions

This collection brings together scholars of jurisprudence and political theory to probe the question of ‘legitimacy’. It offers discussions that interrogate the nature of legitimacy, how legitimacy is intertwined with notions of statehood, and how legitimacy reaches beyond the state into supranational institutions and international law. Chapter I considers benefit-based, merit-based, and will-based theories of state legitimacy. Chapter II examines the relationship between expertise and legitimate political authority. Chapter III attempts to make sense of John Rawls’s account of legitimacy in his later work. Chapter IV observes that state sovereignty persists, since no alternative is available, and that the success of the assortment of international organizations that challenge state sovereignty depends on their ability to attract loyalty. Chapter V argues that, to be complete, an account of a state’s legitimacy must evaluate not only its powers and its institutions, but also its officials. Chapter VI covers the rule of law and state legitimacy. Chapter VII considers the legitimation of the nation state in a post-national world. Chapter VIII contends that legitimacy beyond the state should be understood as a subject-conferred attribute of specific norms that generates no more than a duty to respect those norms. Chapter IX is a reply to critics of attempts to ground the legitimacy of suprastate institutions in constitutionalism. Chapter X examines Joseph Raz’s perfectionist liberalism. Chapter XI attempts to bring some order to debates about the legitimacy of international courts.

The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison James
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Current Events ◽  
Twentieth Century French Literature ◽  
A Site ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book studies the documentary impulse that plays a central role in twentieth-century French literature. Focusing on nonfiction narratives, it analyzes the use of documents—pieces of textual or visual evidence incorporated into the literary work to relay and interrogate reality. It traces the emergence of an enduring concern with factual reference in texts that engage with current events or the historical archive. Writers idealize the document as a fragment of raw reality, but also reveal its constructed and mediated nature and integrate it as a voice within a larger composition. This ambivalent documentary imagination, present in works by Gide, Breton, Aragon, Yourcenar, Duras, and Modiano (among others), shapes the relationship of literature to visual media, testimonial discourses, and self-representation. Far from turning away from realism in the twentieth century, French literature often turns to the document as a site of both modernist experiment and engagement with the world.

Humanism and the Human

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Winters
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Working Through ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

This chapter engages humanism and its fundamental assumptions by working through critical theory, black feminism, and black studies. It contends that there is a tension at the heart of humanism—while the ideal human appears to be the most widespread and available category, it has been constructed over and against certain qualities, beings, and threats. To elaborate on this tension, this chapter revisits the work of authors like Karl Marx and Michel Foucault. Marx acknowledges that the human is a site of conflict and antagonism even as his thought betrays a lingering commitment to progress and humanism. Foucault goes further than Marx by underscoring the fabricated quality of man and the ways in which racism functions to draw lines between those who must live and those who must die. In response to Marx and Foucault’s tendency to privilege Europe, this chapter engages black feminism and Afro-pessimism—Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Frank Wilderson—who show how the figure of the human within humanism is defined in opposition to blackness.

Seinsbegegnung

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-274
Author(s):  
Katrin Felgenhauer
Keyword(s):  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Epistemic Relation ◽  
Ontological Question ◽  
Realist Analysis ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Realist Ontology

AbstractThe contemporary realist turn in philosophy can be seen as a reaction to a merely constructivist understanding of being. The formulation of a realist ontology was already the central concern of Nicolai Hartmann’s philosophy. Hartmann argues that in order to pose the ontological question critically, a realist analysis of the cognitive relation must precede posing the question of being. From the critical analysis, it follows that the cognitive relation is embedded in the relationship of being. Thus, the epistemic relation becomes understandable in the sense of beings encountering and touching one another. In this respect, some proponents of the contemporary realist turn emphasize that there is a philosophically relevant experience of being that can be understood as resistance. Beyond this statement, Hartmann’s analysis of the encounter with being is able to take into account the fact that different kinds of being touch us differently.

Appropriation redux: Re-reading George Ryga through Jeannette Armstrong

2020 ◽  
pp. 002198942097099
Author(s):  
Kit Dobson
Keyword(s):  
The People ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Jeannette Armstrong ◽  
George Ryga ◽  
Alliance Building ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Indigenous Voices ◽  
Literary Circles

This article considers ways in which solidarity across social locations might play a role in fostering resistance to vulnerability. My case study consists of the interplay between writer George Ryga’s 1967 play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, and Okanagan Syilx writer and scholar Jeannette Armstrong’s 1985 novel Slash. While these important and compelling texts have received considerable critical attention, the relationship between them is less known. I am interested in the ways in which these works both hail and offer critique to one another. In the contemporary moment, in which questions of appropriation of voice have gained renewed urgency within Indigenous literary circles in Canada and beyond, the relationship between these texts speaks to a historical instance of appropriation, but also of complicated processes of alliance-building. These texts demonstrate how agency resides across multiple locations. I read Ryga’s Ecstasy in the context of Jeannette Armstrong’s engagement with the play within her novel Slash in order to witness the ways in which Ryga’s text, in the first instance, appropriates Indigenous voices into an anti-capitalist critique. In the second instance, I read these works in order to witness how they might simultaneously provide a compelling analysis of the vulnerability of the people who are the subject of both works. I compare the interplay between Armstrong and Ryga’s texts to contemporary debates around appropriation in order to argue for the historical and ongoing importance of these two works as precursors to the crucial interventions made by contemporary Indigenous critics and writers.

Perceptions of time at work

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aristides Isidoro Ferreira ◽  
Joana Diniz Esteves
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Internet Use ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Phone Calls ◽  
Working Day ◽  
The Relationship

Purpose – Activities such as making personal phone calls, surfing on the internet, booking personal appointments or chatting with colleagues may or may not deviate attentions from work. With this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine gender differences and motivations behind personal activities employees do at work, as well as individuals’ perception of the time they spend doing these activities. Design/methodology/approach – Data were obtained from 35 individuals (M age=37.06 years; SD=7.80) from a Portuguese information technology company through an ethnographic method including a five-day non-participant direct observation (n=175 observations) and a questionnaire with open-ended questions. Findings – Results revealed that during a five-working-day period of eight hours per day, individuals spent around 58 minutes doing personal activities. During this time, individuals engaged mainly in socializing through conversation, internet use, smoking and taking coffee breaks. Results revealed that employees did not perceive the time they spent on non-work realted activities accurately, as the values of these perceptions were lower than the actual time. Moreover, through HLM, the findings showed that the time spent on conversation and internet use was moderated by the relationship between gender and the leisure vs home-related motivations associated with each personal activity developed at work. Originality/value – This study contributes to the literature on human resource management because it reveals how employees often perceive the time they spend on non-work related activities performed at work inaccurately. This study highlights the importance of including individual motivations when studying gender differences and personal activities performed at work. The current research discusses implications for practitioners and outlines suggestions for future studies.

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