Sumários

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2 Dezembro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa

9 students at zoom session

Students present their group work open to discussion and close the course.

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25 Novembro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa

zoom session for 7 students.

Students present their group work open to discussion

ZOOM WITH 7 STUDENTS
Being a female is a very deep personal and social classification: perhaps the most profound imaginable. It is also a subject of women social movements and gender public policies of higher importance, before and after World War II.
In Iran, Afghanistan, more recently in Turkey, and in other parts of the world, women´s rights are under attack from the authorities. Power shares with men the task of subordinating women. Also in parts of Europe, as in Russia or Poland or Hungary, the women´s social status is minimized, stigmatized, used for political purposes.
Gender policies in the EU are a political mark related to human rights, to the rights of women and children. However, it is separate from the rights of immigrants and their families or first peoples, especially Roma, but also from the rights of all nation-states´ subordinate peoples. The rights of women and children appear to be on the rise, the rights of immigrants and ethnic groups are at a loss.
Gender policies represent, at the same time, the human reaction to patriarchal modes of social organization and the reaction of elites to denountiation movements against discrimination, by one hand, the use of sex to promote gender divisions, demarcating "primitive society" as "modern civilization", by other hand. History and politics show advances and setbacks in cultures and processes of dignifying and discriminating female gender. It is a complex long run dance.
The importance of gender social classification for inheritance policies can be important (only men can inherit) or minimized or abolished (women can also inherit). Although discrimination can favor the accumulation of capital, the latter does not depend only on sexual discrimination. Other forms of discrimination also help to maintain an accumulating elite in the face of populations who do not share the opportunities or risks of capital accumulation. The alliances between societies and the dominant powers (the modern states), however, maintain the memory of the effectiveness of the use of sexual discrimination for the purposes of social hierarchy and its naturalization. Even the most liberal societies for women continue not to abolish discrimination against women, even where discrimination is prohibited by law. The struggles to re-establish the same sexual discrimination that were in use a few decades ago exist and are being felt more strongly in recent years in the West. Regardless of what happened in non western countries, such as those mentioned above.
It is the naturalization of discrimination and stigmas against those who may be more fragile, such as ethnic groups, foreigners, the poor, women, children, the elderly, which made it necessary and useful to develop special rights for women. Women's rights are human rights. That is, human rights have been interpreted to exclude women (and other groups of people) as if they are not human. Then, against this reality, declarations of human rights were created according to the Muslim tradition, special rights for women, children, immigrants, first peoples. Thus, it seeks to reconcile persistent social discrimination and a perspective of the unification of humanity, beyond the recurrent reproduction of discrimination.

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11 Novembro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa

Globalization was a project of free mobility for capital (money), goods (trade), and people. The idea was to take a new step in development.

After World War II, the United States and the United Nations launched the idea of aid: the most developed countries will help countries in need (such as Japan and Germany that had lost the war, through the Marshall plan). During the Cold War, 3 worlds were created: the developed (western) world, the second (communist) world, and the Third World, the "developing" countries world., that is, countries that are indebted to the richest countries. The Third World was constituted by the new states that emerged from decolonization and the colonizing countries continued to derive profits from there (royalties). In the 1970s, relations soured between the oil countries (they wanted to sell oil at a higher price) and the consuming (developed) countries. Internally to developed countries, opposition to war and the lack of freedoms (of students, women) have gained ground. Neoliberalism and globalization are revenge policies against the causes of stress in the richest countries: the project to abolish borders as much as possible, as a way of increasing economic activity (being able to buy and sell everywhere), reduce costs (through competition), and give equal opportunities to all people all over the world, regardless of the country in which they were born. The end of the Soviet Union made this idea even more powerful, as it became possible to organize the 3 worlds in one, with a single law (the World Trade Organization free trade agreements). China was insistently invited to join. Finally, China joined and the middle classes in developed countries began to feel the competition: their wages stopped increasing. All growth of revenue has been taken by richest classes; none goes to working classes.

Globalization was a project to democratize development and the Western way of life, turning the Earth insufficient in resources to be able to respond to so many people with consumerist ways of life, destroying the environment. At the same time, modern social lifts, such as schools and professions, have proved to be insufficient to prevent the increase in inequality. (Probably neither schools were social lifts, nor did the increase in inequalities start only with neoliberalism - there is a distortion of reality, an apologetic discourse in favour of what we have, carried out by the social sciences. We must discount to understand reality): the brotherhood that one wants to make of humanity, through religion or human rights, is a field of wars.

The cosmopolitan classes´ freedom of movement corresponds to a trap for immigrants coming from former colonized and subordinate countries, such as African and Latin American countries. They provide illegal immigrants who die on dangerous trips to enter developed countries and when then reach these countries they are criminalized. Borders turned into walls and prisons. Human rights are violated and created multitudes of "illegal" immigrants who work clandestinely for lower wages and in jobs that locals do not accept.

The empire, a very old blueprint of organization. Its applications expanded and the empire way of organizing democratizes. Post-colonial states and international corporations are post-war imperial organizations.

Empires are targets of retaliation by those who feel harmed by it. People do not like empires when they do not protect people. The empire learned to retaliate against those who fight it, in order to survive.

Imperial organizations learned many ways to divide their oppositions and rule. It retaliates against the weakest people. This intimidates all other people. Empire distinguishes the strongest, urging them to serve empire organizations, taking advantage of the empire. Immigrants, and other vulnerable people, become scapegoats for imperial elites, for globalization, and for the inability of states and international organizations to deliver on their promises of free movement of people. Immigrants are used scapegoat class and exploited, and powerless clandestine people. They are presented as threats to the working and middle classes. These late classes are encouraged to replace the revenge feeling against the empire (and the elites) for revenge against immigrants.

The empire's retaliation against immigrants is not because the empire organizations do not want to use their workforce, or because immigrants threaten power. Retaliation against immigrants, because they are weaker workers, aims to save the cost of welfare state and, at the same time, blaming them (not elites) for that.

Selective criminalization reinforces this method of diverging retaliation from elites to immigrants: it serves to distract societies from the organization's retaliation against the empire.

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4 Novembro 2020, 09:00 • Rita Sousa

11 students at zoom

Three thousand people singing hope for peace, in English, Arabic, and Hebrew, have a close relationship with the subject of our course: globalization, social justice, and human rights.
Globalization was imagined as being the end of ideologies and the end of history by Fukuyama. The end of wars and the associated miseries was hoped. In reality, new wars were organized folowing the end of the Cold War, such as war against Islamic terrorism, against the oil countries (Iraq, Iran, Venezuela) and, again, against former comunist Russia and China.
Social justice resulting from the right to equal treatment, human rights referring to the affirmation of the human dignity of all human beings, are statements that contrast with what is our common experience: nice names contrast with the accumulation of wealth, the growing social inequalities, with the reproduction of castes, such as elites, middle classes and stigmatized groups (in Günther Jacobs' saying, the enemy's Law develop three castes: the impune caste, the caste of those subject to penal codes, and the caste of those to whom the protection of law do not apply).
How to explain the difference between what is said and sung, as an apparently inconsequential prayer, and the realities of hunger, misery, torture, hatred, before which we feel powerless?
To explain the growing popularity of neo-Nazi-fascists in politics in a way that is difficult for now a day´s social sciences, politologists, opinion polls, one has to strongly consider to abandon social sciences theories. The 1930s´ and the post-war´s professionalization of the social workers, using university courses, are called to be useful for the social integration of people in a society that exploits the Earth and its resources, including human resources, including professionals. Today, each one of us is torn between the sacrifice of working for those who need someone capable of fulfill professional tasks, and the evidence that our collective work is unsustainable, it is destroying the environment. The pandemic has shown how most people, especially the least protected, yearn to return to normal, despite this normal being unsustainable from an ecological and financial point of view. It is not just the elites who are exploiting the Earth. It is the elites and those who work for them, namely the professionals and also the other people who do it to have money to eat, we all work together.
Part of the explanation for what is happening is the emergence of the imperial spirit, a few millennia ago. The use of languages to discriminate (divide and rule) allows the maintenance of elites, above the social control of the masses. To perpetuating leaders as elites they just have to find someone to blame when things go wrong, avoiding responsibilities. Blaming stigmatized groups, external or internal enemies, elites find their allies in the masses. This is what is called politics. Discriminate to produce elites, alienating the evidence by creating real or imagined enimies, and states of war.
Wars between states are reproduced, at different scales, in companies, in professions, in schools. For example, in the social sciences schools, there is an opposition between academic theories and critical theories. What this "war" conceals is the servility of the professionalized social sciences towards the elites and, in particular, the national states, which finances social workers, as professionals. Such a professionalization program occurs at the same time that social theories agree to deny one of the main goals of the social sciences: to become full sciences, to fulfill the rest of the path between philosophy and science.
Schools, as well as schools of social sciences, have become part of the problem and not part of the solution, given the increase in hunger and misery, and the irreversibility of the destruction of the environment. The emergence of explicit hatred in politics is also facilitated by policies against violence and in favor of the law. This is proposed by the social sciences, remaining uncritically inconsequential, such as the song of hope or the declarations of human rights with which we start our class.