WILKO. … Here’s one. In the first episode Holmes and Watson, in an open field, are laying in their sleeping bags looking up at the stars and Holmes asks Watson what seeing the stars says to him. Watson replies:

 

“The infinity of space. The insignificance of each individual. The natural wonder of life. The beauty of each star. The weaving systems and patterns that contain each life. What does it say to you Holmes?”

“That someone has stolen our tent, Watson.”
 

R.S.J. … Hysterical. Love it. Look forward to it. Thanks Wilko. Same time next week. After the break, social media commentator Vanessa Jones.

 
 

R.S.J. … Welcome Vanessa. How are you?

VANESSA … Not great. Lots of negative things happening around the world.

 

R.S.J. … No need to get all hysterical on me. 

VANESSA … Me?! Hysterical?!

 

R.S.J. … Yes. You. Hysterical.

 

VANESSA … Me?

 

R.S.J. ... Yes. I can’t stand it when people are hysterical. I’m cutting this interview now.

 

read more: https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/radio-shock-jock-and-the-hysterical-woman,9257

 

 

January 2010...

by Michael Connellan

Mohandas Gandhi, whose death anniversary falls on (Saturday) [30 January 1948], was an amazing human being. He led his country to freedom and helped destroy the British Empire. Little wonder India worshipped him, and still worships him, as the Mahatma – "Great Soul". In the west he is viewed as a near-perfect combination of compassion, bravery and wisdom.

But Gandhi was also a puritan and a misogynist who helped ensure that India remains one of the most sexually repressed nations on earth – and, by and large, a dreadful place to be born female. George Orwell, in his 1949 essay Reflections on Gandhi, said that "saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent". If only.

Gandhi despised his own sexual desires, and despised sex in any context except for procreation. He preached that the failure to control carnal urges led to complaints including constipation. He believed that sex was bad for the health of an individual, and that sexual freedom would lead Indians to failure as a people. He sought to consign his nation to what Martin Luther called "the hell of celibacy". He took his own celibacy vow unilaterally, without consulting his wife.

Both Gandhi and his hagiographers claimed he viewed women as equal to men, pointing to his inclusion of women in India's independence struggle. He celebrated non-violent protest as a "feminine" principle, neutralising the masculine brutality of British rule. But his sexual hang-ups caused him to carry monstrously sexist views. His view of the female body was warped. As accounted by Rita Banerji, in her book Sex and Power, "he believed menstruation was a manifestation of the distortion of a woman's soul by her sexuality".

During Gandhi's time as a dissident in South Africa, he discovered a male youth had been harassing two of his female followers. Gandhi responded by personally cutting the girls' hair off, to ensure the "sinner's eye" was "sterilised". Gandhi boasted of the incident in his writings, pushing the message to all Indians that women should carry responsibility for sexual attacks upon them. Such a legacy still lingers. In the summer of 2009, colleges in north India reacted to a spate of sexual harassment cases by banning women from wearing jeans, as western-style dress was too "provocative" for the males on campus.

Gandhi believed Indian women who were raped lost their value as human beings. He argued that fathers could be justified in killing daughters who had been sexually assaulted for the sake of family and community honour. He moderated his views towards the end of his life. But the damage was done, and the legacy lingers in every present-day Indian press report of a rape victim who commits suicide out of "shame". Gandhi also waged a war against contraceptives, labelling Indian women who used them as whores.

Like all men who wage a doomed war with their own sexual desires, Gandhi's behaviour around females would eventually become very, very odd. He took to sleeping with naked young women, including his own great-niece, in order to "test" his commitment to celibacy. The habit caused shock and outrage among his supporters. God knows how his wife felt.

Gandhi cemented, for another generation, the attitude that women were simply creatures that could bring either pride or shame to the men who owned them. Again, the legacy lingers. India today, according to the World Economic Forum, finds itself towards the very bottom of the gender equality index. Indian social campaigners battle heroically against such patriarchy. They battle dowry deaths. They battle the honour killings of teenage lovers. They battle Aids. They battle female foeticide and the abandonment of new-born girls.

In the words of the Indian writer Khushwant Singh, "nine-tenths of the violence and unhappiness in this country derives from sexual repression". Gandhi isn't singularly to blame for India's deeply problematic attitudes to sex and female sexuality. But he fought, and succeeded, to ensure the country would never experience sexual freedom while his legend persevered. Gandhi's genius was to realise the great power of non-violent political revolution. But the violence of his thoughts towards women has contributed to countless honour killings and immeasurable suffering.

Remember, there's no such thing as a saint.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jan/27/mohandas-gandhi-women-india

 

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Henry VIII was a vile sociopathic misogynist who used religion as a means to rule and to get rid off his wife to marry another woman, while having affairs on the side. He killed 2 of his own wives. He had six. The fates of the wives can be remembered as "Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived."

 

Henry VIII's first wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon, who had been contracted to Henry's brother Arthur before his death, gave him a daughter, who was to become Queen Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary, for the number of Protestant executions in her reign. While married to Catherine, the King fell in love with Anne Boleyn to the point of obsession, which resulted in his desire to obtain a divorce. The Pope and the Catholic Church would not grant it, which resulted in King Henry VIII breaking from the church of Rome — in one swoop England became a protestant country; it is due to this one factor that the Anglican church, or Church of England, exists. 

Henry VIII's second wife, Queen Anne Boleyn, gave birth to a daughter, who would later become Queen Elizabeth I, arguably the strongest and most successful monarch, King or Queen, in the history of Britain. The King still desired a male heir, a crown prince, and Anne Boleyn's contrary nature was wearing on the King. Anne Boleyn also had enemies at court, who helped bring about her downfall; accused of adultery and plotting to kill the king, and thus treason, there was no way for Anne to go, but to the headsman's block. The King had already begun to court one of the ladies of the court, Jane Seymour, whom he married shortly after.

Henry VIII's third wife, Queen Jane Seymour succeeded in giving birth to an heir to the crown — Prince Edward, who later succeeded his father to the English throne as King Edward VI. Unfortunately, the Queen died a few days after childbirth from an infection.

 

The King's advisors, mainly Thomas Cromwell, suggested a match for him with Anne of Cleves, but it appears Holbein's portrait of Anne was more flattering than the reality. Anne became Henry VIII's fourth wife, but the King was not attracted to her (and there are stories that one of the reasons was her pervasive body odour), and the marriage quickly resulted in divorce. Anne stayed in England, however, and remained in good relations with the King and all three of his children, as well as with his future queens.

King Henry VIII's fifth wife was Catherine Howard. An attractive young lady, she had been pushed into the marriage by her own ambition, as well as the pressure of her powerful family. King Henry VIII, however, was no longer a young man; he had become corpulent, and an old wound in his leg had never healed but remained an oozing sore — hardly the romantic ideal for a young woman. Further, the King had become irascible; long gone were the days of courtly love, when he wrote love letters to Anne Boleyn. Catherine soon started fooling around with young courtiers, and was eventually caught: chopping block for her. 

King Henry VIII's sixth and last wife was Queen Katherine Parr. A well-educated lady, an excellent writer with a keen intelligence and solid moral fiber, Katherine Parr was the Queen to outlast the intrigues of court, the bad temper of the King, and the general rigors of court life. She was a sweet-tempered, kind person, and the children of King Henry VIII loved her. 

http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/sixwives.htm

I’m sick of conversations about the tax on tampons being shut down by claims that there are more important issues to worry about. Of course there are. There are always more important “things” to worry about. But this is – despite what you’ve been told – an issue of vital importance. An issue that illustrates in lurid detail the lack of consideration given to women’s health and wellbeing.

It is, as New York governor Andrew Cuomo noted upon repealing the state sales tax on menstruation products last week, a “matter of social and economic justice”. It’s also a matter of equality.

Women already pay more for haircuts, clothes, razors, mortgages and car insurance, and pretty much any other product that can be feminised. And we pay the GST on most of those higher-priced products. The fact we are also charged a tax on what amounts to a medical product is an outrage.

It feels obscene to remind people that these are products women have to buy every month. It’s not a choice. We could, I suppose, choose not to buy menstrual products and use tree bark instead but the impacts on our health would be disastrous if we did (they’re called “sanitary” or “hygiene” products for a reason).

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/25/the-tampon-tax-is-not-a-marginal-issue-its-the-force-of-structural-sexism-at-work

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30270

In a recent broadside in National Review against “ill-informed critics of Churchill,” Ben Shapiro mocks his opponents by reminding them that they “would be speaking German if he (Churchill) had not led the fight against Hitler.” If that’s the worse that would have happened had the Third Reich prevailed, it would have been an exceedingly small price to pay for such an outcome. 

I offer this comment as someone who grew up speaking German and who still regards it as his second mother tongue. According to Shapiro, those who dare criticize Churchill are mostly “a variety of groups ranging from Indians to Sudanese to Asian tribes.” These quibblers, he writes, are fixated on Churchill’s “racial comment” which “have taken out of context to slander his achievements.” Supposedly those who dwell on Churchill’s imperialist ideas or slurs about lesser breeds are uniformly on the left and mistakenly believe that “an ounce of sin washes away a lifetime of heroism.” 

But Shapiro never demonstrates that Churchill spent his entire life engaged in heroic action. He properly recognizes his heroism in standing up to Nazi Germany; and he notes that Churchill “successfully led Great Britain through the most dangerous time in her history.” But was this a more dangerous period than when Churchill’s ancestor the Duke of Marlborough opposed the expansive despotism of Louis XIV, which threatened both England and the European continent in the early 18th century? What about the heroism of William Pitt the Younger, Britain’s very young prime minister who kept his country fighting on against Napoleon and his empire after other countries had deserted the cause?

It’s also not clear in what way we attack the West “by savaging the civilizational history” that Churchill embodied. Are we not allowed to write critically about someone whom Shapiro, and presumably National Review, want us to admire for his presumed “lifetime of heroism”?

Unfortunately there was a lot in Churchill’s life that was not particularly heroic—it’s striking that our current conservative establishment is willing to “contextualize” away “bigoted” statements made by Churchill, while ranting against Churchill contemporary H.L. Mencken, when he made his own. But then Mencken supposedly took the wrong side in World War One, in which he was effusively pro-German, while Churchill did everything in his power to poison Anglo-German relations before that cataclysm, which he regarded as inevitable. This came after Churchill helped foment the Boer War in South Africa, which enabled the British Empire to swallow up the Transvaal and other parts of South Africa. Later as First Lord of the Admiralty, he imposed on Imperial Germany a starvation blockade that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. This blockade wasn’t lifted until several months after the hostilities had ended. In the Second World War Churchill supported the terror bombing of German cities, at a time when these population centers could no longer defend themselves and when the war was all but lost.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/time-to-foreclose-on-the-churchill-cult/

 

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The modern philosopher is not far from being a bit like Randy. Randy is a puppet. We could leave this deep thought at that, but our overseas readers may not be able to link to his profound ramblings...

Randy has been creating havoc on Australian screens (mostly the ABC) for a while now. He is quite badly stitched, but he always leaves us in stitches. Enjoy. And whatever is said by the blurb about his "gratuitous arm movements", they are quite restrained compared to our porkying polliticians — and Randy's arm are more expressive than those of a magician on Penn and Teller. 

 

 

Randy teams up with a typewriter in this hilarious new hour of spoken word and gratuitous arm movements. Watch as Randy reads excerpts from his unpublished novel while getting distracted by his own hate-filled ramblings.

 

See it all at:

https://iview.abc.net.au/show/randy-writes-a-novel/video/ZW1795A001S00

 

Randy Feltface, commonly referred to as merely Randy, or on occasion Randy the Purple Puppet, is an Australian puppet comedian voiced and operated by Heath McIvor. Randy is a permanent fixture on the international stand-up circuit,[1] and makes regular guest appearances on Australian television.[2] He also performs as one half of the musical comedy duo "Sammy Jand Randy", who made their television sitcom debut in 2015 with Sammy J & Randy in Ricketts Lane on ABC in Australia, for which Randy is credited as co-writer and lead actor.

Read more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Feltface

 

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...

What about baseball? Baseball is not widely played in Norway. In fact, it is not played in Norway at all. And of all the American sports, baseball turns out to be the one I remain utterly incapable of understanding. To give you an idea of my ignorance, I will confess that for a long time I thought the pitcher was on the same team as the guy with the bat. To me, then, the baseball connection simply signalled that there was something "American" about Cavell's book.

But there was more. For after mentioning music, baseball and vending, Cavell writes that the pitch of philosophy speaks "not darkly, of a determined but temporary habitation and of an unsettling motion that befit the state of philosophy as a cultural fact always somewhat at odds with philosophy on its institutional guard." To me, this suggests not just pitching a ball (the unsettling motion), but the pitching of a tent (the temporary habitation). Cavell was telling me that the kind of philosophy he cared about was on the move, looking to escape the institutional inertia that always threatened to pin it down. This was the kind of philosophy I ― who was not a philosopher at all ― could respond to.

Philosophy, identity and autobiography

So much for the pitch. But what got me hooked? On the first page of the book's "Overture" I read that philosophy and autobiography are dimensions of one another. That philosophers don't know anything others do not know; that an education in philosophy is one that prepares us to recognise that "we live lives simultaneously of absolute separateness and endless commonness, of banality and sublimity."

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/stanley-cavell-philosophy-and-autobiogra...

 

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Toril Moi is James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies and Professor of English, Philosophy and Theatre Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophyand, most recently, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell

Note:  Duke University was created in 1924, an expansion of what was then Trinity College. Duke's primary religious affiliation is with the United Methodist Church, but the school officially is non-denominational.

Tony McNamara is tipped to become the first Australian to win a best original screenplay Oscar for co-writing The Favourite — a period drama about English royalty that features some very colourful language.

McNamara has written a number of well-loved Australian television shows, including The Secret Life of Us, Puberty Blues, Doctor Doctor and Love My Way.

The Favourite is set in the early 18th century court of England's Queen Anne, who is enmeshed in a lesbian love tryst with her ladies-in-waiting.

It's a kingdom where public formalities contrast sharply with the Queen's inner sanctum, which is awash with hanky-panky and dirty words.

The Queen, played by Olivia Colman, and her courtiers, including actors Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, hurl around "c**t", "cock", "f**k" — even "vajayjay" gets an airing.

"[Period films] can be too polite, too bogged down in the history, the details," McNamara said. 

"We never wanted to view the characters as historical, we made a decision early on that we wanted them to be like contemporary characters.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-22/tony-mcnamara-tipped-to-win-scree...

 

Read from top about Aphra Behn.

 

As a philosopher who is attuned to the poetic cadences and emotional ground of life, Landauer exults, Buber belongs to the spiritual family of the feminine.

Parenthetically, it was precisely this quality of Buber's thought that his philosophical and ideological adversaries held against him. Both Walter Benjamin and Yeshayahu Leibowitz derisively dismissed him as a "lady's philosopher." In a culture that cultivated in body and spirit a masculine ethos as the basis of the New Jew, a "feminine" thinker such as Buber was bound to be treated with suspicion, as alien to the perceived muscular imperatives of the Zionist cultural and political project. Yet, to paraphrase Landauer's depiction of the culture of his day, at least some contemporary Israelis find the masculine political culture of the country as dissipated and manifestly inappropriate to confront the exigent social and political challenges facing the State of Israel.

As inflected by a "feminine sensibility," dialogue is an act of compassion, rachmanut in Hebrew, which significantly is derived from the Hebrew term for womb (rechem). Rachmanut thus connotes the intense umbilical identification of a mother with the pain and sorrow of her child. Biblical Hebrew has yet another term for compassion, chemlah, which denotes feeling the actual pain and anguish of the other, what in German is called Mitleid. It also connotes identifying with the inner world of the other such that it becomes one's own. It thus enjoins one to action on behalf of the other (and not just feeling the other's pain). Chemlah accordingly has a dimension of love. This is what is implied by the prophet Isaiah, who relates that "in all [of Israel's] affliction [the Lord himself] was afflicted; [Hence] in His love and chemlah he redeemed them" (63:9). Buber himself was wont to cite the Hasidic master, Rabbi Moshe Leib: "To love one's fellow men means to feel their need and to bear their suffering."

As an act of promoting chemlah, dialogue — as indeed love — first and foremost requires learning how to listen to the other, to hear not only his or her words but the inner, muted voice behind the words. This foundational principle of Buber's teaching of dialogue is expressed with elegant simplicity in an anonymous graffiti I came across on a visit to Chania, Crete: "You should first understand the silence before you try to understand the words." Alas, Buber bemoaned, "real listening has become rare in our time."

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/martin-buber-as-outsider-and-prophet/108...

 

 

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...

Rather than remain as dissidents, Heller and her husband the philosopher Ferenc Fehér, along with many other members of the core group of the School, chose exile in Australia in 1977.

Career abroad[edit]

Heller and Fehér encountered what they regarded as the sterility of local culture and lived in relative suburban obscurity close to La Trobe University in Melbourne, and they assisted in the transformation of Thesis Eleven from a labourist journal to a leading Australian journal of social theory before its subsequent conversion to "American civilization" (Tormey 4–18)(Grumley 5–15).

As described by Tormey, Heller's mature thought during this time period was based on the tenets that can be attributed to her personal history and experience as a member of the Budapest School, focusing on the stress on the individual as agent; the hostility to the justification of the state of affairs by reference to non-moral or non-ethical criteria; the belief in "human substance" as the origin of everything that is good or worthwhile; and the hostility to forms of theorizing and political practice that deny equality, rationality and self-determination in the name of "our" interests and needs, however defined.

Heller and Fehér left Australia in 1986 to take up positions in The New School in New York City, where Heller held the position of Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Studies Program. Her contribution to the field of philosophy was recognized by the many awards that she received (such as the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Philosophy, Bremen, 1995) and the Szechenyi National Prize in Hungary, 1995[citation needed]and the various academic societies that she served on, including the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2006 she visited China for a week for the first time.

Heller researched and wrote prolifically on ethics, Shakespeare, aesthetics, political theory, modernity, and the role of Central Europe in historical events. From 1990, Heller was more interested in the issues of aesthetics in The Concept of The Beautiful (1998), Time Is Out of Joint (2002), and Immortal Comedy (2005).

In 2006, she was the recipient of the Sonning Prize, in 2010 she received the Goethe Medal.[citation needed]

In 2010, Heller, with 26 other well known and successful Hungarian women, joined the campaign for a referendum for a female quota in the Hungarian legislature.[6]

Heller published internationally renowned works, including republications of her previous works in English, all of which are internationally revered by scholars such as Lydia Goehr (on Heller's The Concept of the Beautiful), Richard Wolin (on Heller's republication of A Theory of Feelings), Dmitri Nikulin (on comedy and ethics), John Grumley (whose own work focuses on Heller in Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History), John Rundell (on Heller's aesthetics and theory of modernity), Preben Kaarsholm (on Heller's A Short History of My Philosophy), among others.

 

Rrad more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ágnes_Heller

 

Agnes Heller died Died 19 July 2019 (aged 90)

Balatonalmádi, Hungary

 

---------------------

about Hungary by Agnes Heller... (the disturbance of philosophy)

 

However, the government uses all kinds of reforms to rattle the nerves of intellectuals who are sensitive to the respect of rights. For example, by systematically eliminating institutional countervailing powers, by concentrating powers, by nationalizing contributions to private pension funds, by limiting the central bank's independence, introducing and enforcing laws with retroactive effect, and other measures. The "liberal" economists and political scientists become the allies of philosophers.

These are the motives that may underlie this anti-philosophical offensive. But to lead it, it was necessary to convince the Hungarian readership of "truths" that have no credibility. It was necessary to play on certain strings, to which a large number are sensitive. To arouse envy, resentment, anti-Semitism. Uneducated people are made to believe that "philosophers" are, by definition, useless individuals, waste money, for futile projects, that should have been their money in the first instance. On this, three photographs are published, "representing by the greatest of chances", three Jewish personalities.

There is still a reason for satisfaction in this sombre affair. The solidarity shown to us by philosophers around the world and by intellectuals, freethinkers in general, comforts us. The echo was wider than one could have imagined. Petitions and letters of protest flocked from all over the world, from all over Europe. Everywhere, the press has mobilized itself.

 

Finally, it seems that freedom of expression, freedom of opinion, freedom of thought are concepts that do not know borders. And that philosophy, finally, did not become an old toothless lion either.

 

Translated by Jules Letambour

 

Read more:

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2011/03/12/la-philosophie-qui-deran...

 

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Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/35987

 

 How Orangeism Paved the Way for British Capital

 

By Mark Hackett

 

 

They built the world as we know it, all the systems you traverse.

Thus sang The Fall’s Mark E. Smith on the Manchester band’s 1988 record, I Am Kurious Oranj, written for a ballet based on the 300th anniversary of William of Orange’s ascension to the English throne. While some of the credits Smith bestowed on King William III warrant closer inspection—having “paved the way for the atom bomb” and “inventing birth control,” for instance—what the revolution of 1688 did pave the way for was the radical transformation of Britain’s socioeconomic order in favor of capitalist accumulation. With William’s rise to power, the country’s emergent bourgeoisie secured the political hegemony needed to bend the apparatus of the state to their collective will, smashing up the existent feudal and familial alliances that characterized the pre-capitalist economy, enabling the mass appropriation of common land by industrial agriculture, and forcing the newly dispossessed peasantry to take up the mantle of wage labor. Often styled the “Glorious” or “Bloodless” Revolution, 1688 enshrined the conditions by which state power became an instrument for subordinating land and labor to the demands of capital.

Barriers to Capital Before 1688

The wealth of the English bourgeoisie—loosely made up of merchants, manufacturers, financiers, and landed capitalists—accumulated rapidly in the century leading up to revolution, as the country’s manufacturing and commercial enterprises experienced rapid development. Such prosperity was assisted in no small part by England’s lucrative stake in the Atlantic Slave Trade: between 1676 and 1726 the number of enslaved people transported by British traders from Africa to North America increased from 243,300 to 490,500. Such was the expansion of Britain’s involvement in global trade that by 1688 its commercial and industrial enterprises were generating over a third of the national income. But for the profits accruing to the bourgeoisie to continue unchecked, it was vital that their economic power translate into the political influence capable of uprooting the legal barriers to monopolization. These barriers consisted largely of property rights preventing the commercialization of common land and the transferring of funds from the countryside to the city. Historian Geoffrey Hodgson explains that “at the beginning of the eighteenth century about one quarter of arable land in England was held in commons, where villagers shared rights to the use of pastures, water sources or woods. This common land could not be sold or mortgaged.” Such restrictions posed an intolerable legal obstacle to the appropriation of arable land for large-scale industrial farming—an obstacle that the architects of the 1688 Revolution were intent on shattering from behind a royal mask.

The Destruction of Property Rights

The Dutch-led invasion brought with it an influx of Dutch financiers and businessmen who, with their relatively sophisticated knowledge of public and private finance, helped remodel England’s financial and administrative institutions to facilitate the bourgeoisie’s political hegemony. This came about in a series of Acts—beginning with the 1689 Declaration of Rights—which succeeded in eroding the legal protections concerning the sale of common land, entails, and “strict settlements.” Such acts also succeeded in hobbling the prestige of the nobility and landed gentry, whose vested interest in the feudal nature of property rights was sorely affected by the government selling off land for industrial farming. But as the state became increasingly dependent on the bourgeois class to fund the country’s various European wars (funding which increased from £2,000,000 per year before 1688 to £6,000,000 between 1689 and 1702), so it became increasingly receptive to their demands for deregulation and the privatization of common land.

Accumulation by Dispossession

The impact of this institutional shakeup on the majority of the population offers an object lesson in the art of what David Harvey refers to as
“accumulation by dispossession.” The rural peasantry was swept of the newly privatized land to make way for sheep farming and large landed estates. The traditional agrarian communities were broken up and the mass of displaced people, with little option but to sell their labor power in the new urban industries, were forced into the ranks of the proletariat. As Karl Marx observed, this forcible alienation of the rural populace from their land produced “a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, their transformation into mercenaries, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital.”

The Highland Clearances provide a stark example of the kind of systematic theft of communal property, and the attendant forced evictions, that were made possible under the reorganized state. The Clearances involved the forcible transformation of the property of the Highland clans—common land on which the rural communities of northern Scotland made their living—into the private property of English nobles who coveted the land for pasturage. With the aid of the English military, the families who for centuries had lived in this region were systematically expelled and exterminated to make room for sheep and cattle farms; their villages razed and homes burned. Sporadic resistance to eviction was met with brutal reprisals, terrorism, and executions. Most of the newly appropriated land was subdivided into large sheep farms, mostly occupied by English farm-laborers paying rent to an absentee lord. In the case of the one-million-acre estate she seized, the Countess of Sutherland was “generous” enough to sell 6,000 acres of barren rock back to the 15,000 men, women, and children evicted from their homes.

Creating the Laboring Poor

This type of terroristic landgrab, which continued well into the nineteenth century, succeeded in pushing swathes of people into abject poverty just as they were separated from their homes and their means of sustaining themselves. The state’s response to this newly immiserated class is one that should be familiar to us today: it dehumanized them, branded them thieves and vagabonds, punished them with systemic oppression, and threw them in jail. Such punitive measures were aimed at socializing the dispossessed into accepting the disciplinary apparatus of capital and their new situation as the laboring poor. The overt violence unleashed during the initial stages of proletarization was followed by the softer powers of the state to preserve this new economic hegemony: education, policing, and laws inhibiting collective organization. As Marx reflected on the disenfranchisement of the rural populace, “Thus were the agricultural folk first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesquely terroristic laws into accepting the discipline necessary for wage-labour.”

This is not to say that the social order displaced by the revolution’s expansion of capitalist accumulation was some halcyon age, the “Merrie England” mourned in Thomas Gray’s Elegy, and of course many went happily from the countryside to the new industrial centers in hopes of a better standard of living and improved working conditions. Yet, the institutional reforms dreamed up by the architects of William’s rise to power brought new means of exploitation and expropriation, by which the assets and rights of the common people were eroded and a massive concentration of wealth at the top end of the scale enabled.

https://mronline.org/2024/07/29/how-orangeism-paved-the-way-for-british-capital/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.