Middle-class, resentment and ideology

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The most successful indoctrination to the mainstream ideology, is when an individual feels that has overcome ideologies—in most cases, this means that the individual in question, has internalised the dominant ideology, whatever that may be. This is what seems to be going on across the middle classes of Europe. I cannot authoritatively talk about the whole of Europe, but as far as Cyprus and England is concerned, I have quite a strong opinion.

The middle class that I am talking about, is the urban white-collar middle-class worker, like a bank clerk, an accountant, a lawyer, a civil worker and so on; workers whose income is enough to differentiate them from what was traditionally understood as the proletariat. These are the people who live by the measures of value, merit and wealth that have been institutionalised by the class above them. These are the people who will talk about “the poor working class”, or the “uneducated workers” with an air of superiority. The “urban white-collar middle-class worker” has the ability to get a taste of the luxuries of the upper-class, yet does not have the chance to actually experience those luxuries. As such, s/he is in constant condition of misplacement.

Two sentiments arise by this condition: (i) the individual constantly feels that s/he does not belong here, whether ‘here’ is the socialisation with the proletariat, or the upper-class; or (ii) that everything is ‘here’ and that the norm is his/her place, and all others have deviated from that place, either by going up or by going down. Sometimes, these two sentiments are combined, and the individual feels that s/he is in a place that feels comfortable, but not quite right, since the disparities are obvious enough, but not quite prominent in his/her everyday life.

Our individual socialises with people of his/her own class, and sometimes with people of the upper class, but rarely with people of the ‘proletariat’. As such, his/her socialisation within the urban environment makes him/her unable to understand the conditions, the variations, or the magnitude of the ‘proletariat’. This is why our individual engages in a ‘monkey-see-monkey-do’ business, even though s/he lack the ability to actually ‘do’; that is, s/he lacks the ability to become upper-class, and goes through life with an aspiration and a resentment towards them, which in turn produces a resentment towards his/her fellow “urban white-collar middle-class workers” but most importantly towards the ‘proletariat’.

In short, our individual, although s/he understands the concept of ‘class’, s/he interprets the class hierarchy as a deviation rather than as a social fact and a product of inequality. As such, s/he has no claims in the name of his/her class, and this is reflected in the continuously diminishing labour conditions that s/he experiences. How many such white-collar workers do you know that have long office-hours, often extending up to 8-9pm? How many times did you hear about “the busy season”, especially from accountants who consider the deprivation of time outside work a rational demand on behalf of their employer?

Greek elections, racism and Golden Dawn

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I have a comment to make about the Greek elections, which I have trouble communicating within twitter’s 140 character limit.

It is about the entrance of the Nazist party, called Golden Dawn, into the Greek parliament. The elections brought to our notice something that we already knew; namely, that roughly one in every ten Greeks is a racist. Nothing new here. What is new, is that the racists managed to organise themselves into a political party. Is this necessarily bad? If we consider that Hitler came to power in a likewise manner through a small and irrelevant party it surely seems worrying.

There is another interpretation though, which challenges the dominant narrative that wants the phenomenon of racism to be something new. What is new, is that these people, the racists, abandoned the existing political parties in favour of Golden Dawn; an organisation which became a formal political party only three years ago. Where were these racists before? Golden Dawn is roughly thirty years old, yet it was never as popular as it is now, and it is not the only political party that supports and promotes racism. Before the rise of the Golden Dawn, the main advocates of racism in Greek politics were the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS), who lost most of its supporters after they joined the last coalition government of Lucas Papademos, accepting and supporting the austerity measures of the troika (EU, IMF, ECB). Most of LAOS supporters, were former New Democracy (ND) voters and active members. The close ties between the two were evident in the parliament, were they supported each other’s policies, especially on hot matters like immigration and border control.

Racism in Greece is not something that existed in void prior to yesterday. All recent governments institutionally enforced racism through the use of the police, a phenomenon that unfortunately is not exclusive to the right-wing parties. The Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), under the former Prime Minister George Papandreou has either orchestrated, or to say the least tolerated, various incidents of police violence against immigrants. Moreover, outside the parliament, in the mainstream media, racism is as prevalent as ever. Newspapers and TV stations are eager to stress the problems arising by the increase of immigration, even at periods were immigration is actually declining. Moreover, there is a tendency to overemphasise the ethnicity of an individual only if he or she committed a wrong-doing, and only if that person is not Greek.

Another source of racism is the educational curriculum, which promotes a static version of Greekness, one that derives directly from the Ancient Greeks and is based on notions of superiority and authenticity, promoting exclusion and suspicion against anyone that is not Greek in this narrow and restrictive sense. The Greek Orthodox Church has played a leading role in this process, since they frequently support racist views, or advocate for racist policies, both at the civil and at the institutional level. One example off the top of my head is the case of non-Greek students that score the highest marks in Greek high schools. These students are denied (by some schools) the right to hold the Greek flag (a customary right for the top students of each Greek-speaking high school). What is ironic that in some cases, the children who were denied this right, are Greek nationals born and raised in Greece, who are denied the right to hold the flag because their parents have a dual nationality and are hence not Greek in the ‘proper’ sense of the word.

Therefore to say that racism is a recent phenomenon in Greece, or that it is merely a response to the austerity measures is plainly wrong. Racism is an integral part of the Greek society. The question that remains is whether the concentration of the racist votes to the Golden Dawn means that other parties will have the chance to promote less nationalist policies. Does the rise of the Golden Dawn mean that the traditional conservative party, New Democracy, will become less racist in the absence of these extreme members, or that it will become more racist in order to get them back. In short, are the mainstream parties (whatever that means anymore), cleaner now that they lost the racist vote?

I don’t have an answer but something that is often discussed in twitter worries me: there is a debate about a possible coalition of non-extreme parties. In this coalition, LAOS, is considered a non-extreme party, and the Golden Dawn, is considered extreme, exactly like the Greek Communist Party (KKE). The KKE is anachronistic and archaic in many respects, yet it is most definitely not an extreme party. In fact, it would not be far fetched to call it conservative. This worries me because it demonstrates a potential of legitimisation of the Golden Dawn. As I said, I don’t have answers to these pressing matters, as it would require quite a bit of guess work. My prediction would be that if (and this is a big if) a government is formed, especially a coalition headed by ND, everything will return to business as usual.

Multiculturalism contra Ethnicity: the case of Cyprus

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In late June, I will be presenting a paper titled ‘Multiculturalism contra Ethnicity: the case of Cyprus’ at a conference organised by Surrey’s Center of Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism and UCL’s Migration Research Unit, called The Future of Multiculturalism: Structures, Integration Policies and Practices.

This is the abstract of my paper:

This paper will use the post-conflict and post-colonial multicultural challenges that exist in Cyprus to assess the use of ethnicity as a marker for cultural identification. It will be demonstrated that ethnocultural identification can become a source of social, political and linguistic oppression and as such should not be uncritically adopted in defence of group-differentiated citizenship. This hypothesis will be assessed through the example of Cyprus, where the British colonialists divided the various religious groups of the island into two ethno-national minorities, reducing the rest into religious collectives without substantial political rights. The case of Cyprus will demonstrate: (i) how the concept of ethnicity as an ‘imagined community’ can be utilised as a pretext for assimilation or social isolation; (ii) how ethnicity prioritises the continuation of the collective imaginary values over than the needs of the individual cultural members; and (iii) how ethnicity can be utilised in making religious groups socially invisible. The marginalisation of the Maronite, Latin, Armenian and Roma cultures in Cyprus demonstrates the problematic relation of ethnicity and multiculturalism since the former can be used to deny cultural and linguistic recognition to non-dominant or non-ethnic minorities and religious groups.

Living in a post- age

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I am very uncomfortable with the usage of the term post-something. We live in the post-secular age, Habermas argues, or “we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological” Žižek says in a recent article. This seems to suggest that we have indeed dealt with the challenges of the era that we have now left behind, in these cases the secular and ideological era, as if classes have become irrelevant and religion has either disappeared or became comfortably confined to the private sphere of the liberal state.

The post- classification is in itself ideological. It attempts to shift the debate in favour of one or the other side of the existing disagreement. The post-secular example is maybe the most illuminating. Saying that we live in such an era, it is to say that the state has indeed become secular and that religious groups do not have claims for preferential treatment. In the extreme case that they do, these claims are assessed on the merit of freedom of religion and equality of treatment, making sure that all of these voluntary associations receive the same treatment by the institutions of the liberal state.

This position seems to take two things for granted.

  1. The state is (or at some recent point has been) secular.
  2. All religions are treated equally.

Both of these assumptions are problematic. (1) is problematic because the state is considered neutral after it internalised the norms of the dominant culture, which is, at least in the European context, based on the values of Christianity. Nietzsche in Gay Science makes a much better argument that I could ever do in support of the former. (2) is problematic, because (1) is false and because some religions, beside the dominant one, are treated as inferior, even in comparison to other minority religions. The terrorisation of Islam is the example that I have in mind.

My motivation derives from my disagreement with (1). I am amazed by the fact that we have yet to establish a common framework of deliberation upon which we can make sense of each other. For example, if one reads how western commentators try to make sense of non-western cultures, s/he would be amazed. Foreign meanings are assigned to familiar concepts, which misrepresent the ‘others’, hence resulting in homogenising caricatures of what the others are, eliminating the possibility of actually understanding what other people are saying, or most importantly, understanding what other people claim in the name of their culture. Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract and Charles W. Mills’s Racial Contract, leads us to the realisation of a further, Cultural and Religious Contract that underpins any public justification within the realm of the liberal state.

This is why a moral basis for recognition, prior (as Honneth suggests) to deliberation is necessary, if we are to claim that we live in states where each individual is equal (let us not enter into the debate of in respect to what? please, life is too short).

One of the people who dedicated his life to the importance of recognition is Charles Taylor. There is a very interesting website with the audio proceedings of an international conference organised in his honour at the Univeristy of Montreal. This is a great way to celebrate one’s eightieth birthday.

The Undelivered Promise of Employment: a take on unpaid work schemes

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The case of unpaid work schemes is getting out of hand in the UK. Many graduates are working for free, on 6-month internships, without having the slightest clue as to whether they will land at a paid job once their internship expires. As such, they are investing time and money on the idea of a job.

Three years of university education in the UK means 27,000GBP on university fees, and approximately extra 30,000GBP on living expenses. This is roughly 60,000GBP for a Bachelors degree. The future worker makes this enormous investment based on the implicit assumption of employment. It is therefore preposterous to demand that the worker pays to get a chance on employment. Such demands, I argue, are signals of an ideological shift in work ethics.

Work schemes are based upon the premise that it is acceptable to expect that the cost of “prior experience” is transferred to the worker, even if the demand for “prior experience” is one advanced on behalf of the employer. Those who make this demand, I suggest, should be expected to pay for its cost, since the requirement of prior-experience in a starter-job is logically incoherent. If a company makes such a demand, then the company should be expected to bear the associated cost. Currently, “prior experience” is a pre-condition to employment, which is rather odd considering that employment is the source of work experience. In other words, I think it should be illegal to ask for “prior experience” without paying a higher salary to the employee with past experience. I realise that the logistics of this suggestion are somewhat complicated, but once we agree on the principle, we can work our way up.

At the moment, employers treat workers like trial versions of computer applications. The internship regime considers the young graduates as things, which can be either purchased or uninstalled. Internships are schemes where the worker pays to work. They are not free since the worker still has to eat and sleep. Therefore, the internship regime degrades and disembodies the worker ignoring basic human needs like food and shelter, which are necessary for the worker’s survival. Unpaid work schemes suggest that there isn’t a charge in the relationship between employer-employee and obscure away from the fact that the worker is now expected to pay for what would normally be covered by a salary. Therefore, the internship regime separates salary from labour and disembodies the individual.

The most outrageous aspect of this process is that this exploitation gradually becomes embedded in the contemporary work ethics. This is what happened with undergraduate university education, which resulted from being a universal right to becoming a commodity. Today, we are not worried about the right that has been taken away from us. Instead, we struggle against increases in the cost of the commodity. For example, many middle class families are now delighted on the announcement of the Labour party that it would decrease university fees from 9 to 6,000GBP should it be elected to power. This clearly demonstrates the adoption of the new ideology of ‘education-as-commodity’ that has succeeded the prior ideology of ‘education-as-a-right for all’. The ideological shift that took place within education norms is happening with work ethics as well. Salary and labour are disassociated and the worker is disembodied from his and her needs.

Therefore, we should be very much aware of the ideology underpinning the concept of unpaid work, even if this is expressed as a way to get a paid job. At the same time we should be very careful with the government-issued statistics for unemployment, since all these workers who pay to work might qualify as employed. A further consideration of the unpaid work scheme regime is that it proliferates the debt crisis that Western countries face. The more the worker has to pay, the more dependent he or she becomes on bank loans and the more people are eventually unable to repay their debt. The unpaid work scheme regime is a self-defeating approach to employment since thousands of indebted graduates are exploited for the often undelivered promise of employment.

My first conference presentation on Saturday

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On Saturday I will be presenting a paper at Warwick’s Graduate Conference in Political Theory. My paper will be on multiculturalism; specifically, how the proclamations that multiculturalism is dead (or irrelevant or morally wrong) are mistaken. The principal claim will be that one cannot talk about “multiculturalism” or about “multiculturalists” as if they are a coherent group.

I will use Wittgenstein’s family-resemblance (following Tully and Modood) to make my case. I will briefly outline Kymlicka’s theory of multicultural citizenship and criticise some of its aspects, challenging his conception of culture (based predominantly on the feminist critiques) and then move on to address his selection of ethnic nationality as the marker for cultural membership. This section will take the most part of the presentation.

In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that disagreements over a theory of multiculturalism are mostly disagreements about the underlying ideological assumptions of individual theorists. My aim is to explain that one should be extra cautious towards holistic dismissals of multiculturalism since multiculturalism is not a discipline and therefore cannot be dismissed altogether. I will suggests that what is refereed to as “multiculturalism” is a series of theories, which although they share some similar attributes, none are consistent across all (or most) of them.

In my introductory slide I have two quotes, one from Brian Barry and another one from David Cameron where they both attack multiculturalism as a unified set of policies/theories. Obviously Cameron and Barry share almost nothing else in common; the first is the representative of the political right in the UK and the other is one of the most important British political philosophers of the 20th century, and one of the most prominent figures of the academic left. This is to show that people with different backgrounds and motives can use similar arguments to advance their agendas.

I am currently working on the presentation. I decided to a powerpoint presentation rather than give them a double-sided sheet of paper. I am a bit stressed, but not too much. I hope to get a lot of feedback as the paper is on its very initial stages.

I decided not to read out loud parts of the paper but rather talk them through the powerpoint presentation. I don’t know how that will go, as I am not a native English speaker. I have written down what I’ll say just in case.