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Work and Taliban, Race and Class
Aug. 28th, 2021 07:20 pmThis afternoon I was deeply honoured to chair a presentation by Dr Jo Birch of the University of Melbourne Herbarium, which has plant and fungi collections items from 1770, a really wonderful opportunity. Kinda-related had a pretty good meeting with my MHEd supervisor on Wednesday, much of which had to do with the economics of value. I am getting the impression (rather like work) that my supervisor (manager) had decided that I don't actually really require supervision due to levels of intrinsic motivation, which must be part of my madness. Apart from that, I've had the fairly dull (but important) job of updating training documentation, I also took the opportunity in my spare time to write in my copious spare time thoughts on the "Rise and Fall of the Taliban". which was reviewed by some of my favourite individuals who have close contact with said events. It is pretty rough to acknowledge that mere days after I published the piece that the extremist Taliban and the even more extremist ISIL-K are already in deadly conflict. It's one thing to say that it looks like such conflict to occur, it's painful to witness such predictions coming true. Needless to say, I remain dedicated, universally, to societies that are liberal, secular, and democratic on an institutional level regardless of cultural differences ("cultures" can be traditional and conservative and yet still respect that their constraints are chosen due to their own dedication or beliefs).
Consideration of these topics and personal experiences has led me to delve into my own mind about issues about race and class. The former is a powerful product of ideology, which suggests that historical and contextual cultural differences between members of our species somehow are reflective of biological morphology. It is scientifically incorrect to state there is even such a thing as human "races" within the species (something I have argued since the 1990s when it was still unpopular to do so, as the public record will show). The human species is simply too young and too prone to admixture between groups for anything close to sub-species or breeds to occur. Racism, however, is a politically grounded reality motivated by these harmful pseudoscientific beliefs. In contrast, "class" is an element of political economy that traditionally refers to a source of ownership (land, labour, and capital), associated income (rent, wages, and interest), and by which power of political decision making is vested first in the owners of land, then capital, then labour, and here's a fun fact: people can belong to all classes simultaneously (e.g., they own some land, some capital, but their main source of wealth is their labour) or even none at all (e.g., the argument for a "welfare class"). Excluding people from political power and sources of wealth through ideology and embodied in law is a primary objective of those that have power and is a concrete and institutional manifestation of racism and sexism (e.g., prohibition of property ownership, prevention of voting rights).
Consideration of these topics and personal experiences has led me to delve into my own mind about issues about race and class. The former is a powerful product of ideology, which suggests that historical and contextual cultural differences between members of our species somehow are reflective of biological morphology. It is scientifically incorrect to state there is even such a thing as human "races" within the species (something I have argued since the 1990s when it was still unpopular to do so, as the public record will show). The human species is simply too young and too prone to admixture between groups for anything close to sub-species or breeds to occur. Racism, however, is a politically grounded reality motivated by these harmful pseudoscientific beliefs. In contrast, "class" is an element of political economy that traditionally refers to a source of ownership (land, labour, and capital), associated income (rent, wages, and interest), and by which power of political decision making is vested first in the owners of land, then capital, then labour, and here's a fun fact: people can belong to all classes simultaneously (e.g., they own some land, some capital, but their main source of wealth is their labour) or even none at all (e.g., the argument for a "welfare class"). Excluding people from political power and sources of wealth through ideology and embodied in law is a primary objective of those that have power and is a concrete and institutional manifestation of racism and sexism (e.g., prohibition of property ownership, prevention of voting rights).
