WFTM

July 29th in The Guardian
By Nina Power

In 1972 Selma James, founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and, more recently, Global Women’s Strike, wrote the following: “We demand the right to work less.” Her reasoning was clear – when women work for a wage for 40 hours a week and still carry the weight of childcare and housework, what is the moral value in expecting them to toil away at the cost of their health and happiness? Why should anyone, male or female, work more than 20 hours a week?

Thirty-seven years later a new campaign has been launched, backed by a host of trade unions, including the UCU, PCS, CWU, RMT, NUJ and NUT, under the name Right to Work. What has happened to our understanding of work in the decades between James’s slogan and new forms of opposition? In the middle of a recession in which jobs are being slashed with alacrity, should we be clinging on to employment at any cost, or should we instead be reconsidering what it means to work at all?

The campaign is not, of course, about holding on to any job, no matter how exploitative. It aims instead to bring together all of those who want to organise against coalition attacks on jobs and public services. It is about resisting the so-called austerity measures – pay cuts, worsening conditions and pension reform.

Source: ABC News (Australia)
Published: Friday, July 30, 2010 12:16 AEST

This week in the magazine, Elif Batuman writes about the Turkish chef Musa Dağdeviren and his restaurant Çiya Sofrasi. “Tapping into a powerful vein of collective food memory, Çiya was producing the kind of Turkish cuisine that Turkey itself, racing toward the West and the future, seemed to have abandoned,” Batuman writes. Here she describes her reaction to Dağdeviren’s dishes and her memories of her Turkish family. Photographs by Carolyn Drake.

plsj:

“Take Kafka: in his novels and short stories he reveals himself to be obsessed with what, by now, we should see as a three-way stand-off, or ménage à trois, between man, technology and writing. “In the Penal Colony”, an account of a cruel punishment ritual in some (perhaps not so) far-away land, sees a condemned man strapped into a giant mechanical apparatus that, with an incising harrow guided by a scrolling punchcard-script, inscribes the law into his very skin.

[…]

Technology and melancholia: an odd coupling, you might think. Yet it’s one that has deep conceptual roots. For Freud, all technology is a prosthesis: the telephone (originally conceived as a hearing aid) an artificial ear, the camera an artificial eye, and so on. Strapping his prosthetic organs on, as Freud writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, man becomes magnificent, “a kind of god with artificial limbs” – “but” (he continues) “those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times”. To put it another way: each technological appendage, to a large degree, embodies an absence, a loss. As the literary critic Laurence Rickels paraphrases it, laying particular emphasis (as Kafka does) on communication technology: “every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial”.”