Next week I am off to the New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland. The Institute opens today, but I will be arriving a few days late. As I review the events of this week at Deliberately Considered, I am anticipating my work at the Institute, which will be reflected in upcoming posts. The last two posts, on Iran and on American identity, in fact, were informed by Democracy and Diversity experience.

In the most mundane way, the Institute is like many other international summer schools. Students from many different countries, this year Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Italy, Poland, and the USA, among others, come together to study a set of problems from a number of different academic perspectives. As usual, in my judgment, the topics are particularly interesting, this year, each addressing the theme of the year The World in Crisis: “Gender in Crisis? Strengths and Weaknesses in the Strategy of Emergency” (Prof. Ann Snitow), “Media and News in a Time of Crisis” (Prof. Jeffrey Goldfarb and Prof. Daniel Dayan), “Romancing Violence: Theories and Practices of Political Violence” (Prof. Elzbieta Matynia), and “‘We the People’: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Belonging” (Prof. Sharika Thiranagama).  Still there are many summer schools that offer interesting programs with talented students such as we have. Yet, there is something special about this Institute that makes it different than most summer programs, linked to its history.

In terms of my student’s observations and reflection on Iran this week, our institute is in a sense, paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, a not so lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition. He observed how freedom was experienced in the days before and after the 2009 elections in his country, and noted how even in the face of extreme repression, the ability of independent people to speak and act in each other’s presence is still consequential, apparently preventing the execution of Habibollah Latifi. But the real significance of the free politics, before the elections of 2009 and through the Facebook mediated protest against Latifi’s execution, is not so much determined by the results, as important as those are, the failure of the elections, the small victory of the prevented execution.  The very act of people with common principles meeting each other, speaking freely to each other and developing a capacity to act in concert, i.e. Arendt’s definition of free public action, is where the real significance is, and it has lasting results. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is a case in point.

The Institute has a heroic past, based in the resistance to Polish Totalitarianism and linked with the New School’s University in Exile, two instances of free creative public action. The University in Exile was established by Alvin Johnson, President of the New School and one of the co editors of the first Encyclopedia of Social Science. In 1933, he worked to establish a special institution of higher education, helping to rescue social science scholars at risk in Nazi Europe, leading to a distinctive academic program that joined European and American social science and philosophy in a creative dialogue.

In 1984, during a special ceremony marking the 50^th anniversary of the University in Exile (formally founded in 1934), the New School granted Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident and historian, an honorary doctorate, along with other human rights activists from around the world. He was in jail at the time of the ceremony. Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize winning poet, accepted the degree for Michnik, reading an excerpt from his famous letter to General Kiszczak, in which Michnik in no uncertain terms denounces the oppressive ruling order and the logic of its Minister of the Interior. A few months later Michnik was released from prison and I went with the President of the New School, Jonathan Fanton, to present Michnik his degree. I spent time with Michnik the week following the official ceremony. We discussed working together to establish a semi-clandestine international seminar on totalitarianism and democracy. Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism was the first work that was discussed together in Budapest, Warsaw and New York. Maintaining such an activity before the World Wide Web was extremely difficult, particularly given the nature of the regimes of the former Soviet bloc. There were plans to work also with colleagues in Czechoslovakia, but this couldn’t be fully developed. The history of the seminar has not been fully told. I have written some about it, as has Elzbieta Matynia. But what is truly significant is that the history informs our present activities.

Matynia moved the New School from the commitment to this unofficial underground activity to the full development of what is now our Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and our Democracy and Diversity Institute. What brought the German scholars to the New School and what led to the development of the Democracy Seminar animates the Democracy and Diversity Institute.

I am not being sentimental about this. It is a result of ongoing practices, ongoing meetings of people speaking and acting together freely, taking part in a conversation through time, as people do so on Facebook in Iran and in other repressive contexts. Thus, this year’s program includes Ann Snitow’s course on gender. She has been teaching in the Institute for most of its history, underscoring the important connection between gender justice and democratic constitution. Now this not something very controversial, but in the early years of the program it was not easily accepted by many of students from the region. She organized the important Network of East West Women, and in the Institute, she taught problems of gender, and she continues doing this in the transformed global context.  As problems of nationalism emerged in the region, we discussed it and we continue to do so, broadening our comparative focus. As violence, and not just dialogue, determines political fate, we critically examine it.  And as public life is more and more defined through new media forms, we critically examine them. The Democracy Seminar and the University in Exile live in our not narrowly academic activities.

The problematic future of the nation state, its link with exclusionary practices, violence, patriarchy and the like, is one of the topics that we have been discussing at the Democracy and Diversity Institute for years. Last year, Tim Rosenkrantz took part in those discussions in Wroclaw. I am pretty sure that those discussions informed his telling reflections on the recent public action of Jose Antonio Vargas in his post this week. Rosenkrantz is sympathetic with Vargas’s claim to citizenship, but points out the uncomfortable radical implications. I look forward to discussing this in my class in Wroclaw and analyzing the media form Vargas has used to make his public intervention. It’s a long way from the Democracy Seminar, but the media is not the message, the free public action is.

Last week, the legislation known as the “Domestic Workers Bill of Rights” took effect in New York State, having been signed on August 31 by Governor David Paterson. The existence and passage of this bill is due primarily to several years of organizing by Domestic Workers United (DWU), an organization of nannies and housecleaners in New York City.

DWU offers computer literacy and child care training to its members, helps protect workers against abusive employers, and has produced a report on domestic employment, “Home is Where the Work Is,” based on original research. Their main policy effort, however, has been campaigning for the passage of this bill, which will affect over 200,000 workers in the state.

The law includes the following provisions: The right to overtime pay (at time-and-a-half) after 40 hours of work in a week, or 44 hours for workers who live in their employer’s home; a day of rest (24 hours) every seven days, or overtime pay if the worker agrees to work on that day; three paid days of rest each year after one year of work for the same employer; protection under New York State Human Rights Law, and the creation of a special cause of action for domestic workers who suffer sexual or racial harassment.

Although these demands are not especially radical (more controversial provisions, such as paid holidays and two weeks notice prior to termination, were removed from the final version), this law will materially influence the lives of many workers. Perhaps equally important, the law is symbolically significant, for a number of reasons. First, domestic workers have traditionally been excluded from labor legislation, beginning with the New Deal laws covering collective bargaining and minimum wage and hour regulations.

Although over the years some laws (such as those covering the minimum wage) have been extended to apply to domestic workers, their work remains largely unregulated. Thus the bill, which also mandated investigation into the feasibility of granting collective bargaining rights to these workers, is a step toward establishing nannies and housecleaners as “real” workers who deserve recognition and protection from the state.

Second, but related, domestic employees differ from other workers in multiple ways: they work in private homes rather than in public workplaces, they usually work alone, and they are employed directly by their own clients. Furthermore, they are almost always women of color, often undocumented immigrants. For these reasons they are especially vulnerable to mistreatment by their employers. Typically the conditions of employment are determined informally between worker and employer, and clear communication is often lacking. The mere existence of the law encourages the formalization of these implicit agreements and takes a step toward recognizing that the “private” sphere is also a paid workplace for many women.

Beyond making paid domestic labor more visible, this legislation also brings to light the continuing dilemma over housework and child care that many families face.  This dilemma has several causes, including: the continuing refusal of men to share the “second shift,” especially when it comes to housecleaning, which leads their wives to pay other women to do it; the extremely long hours worked by professionals in the corporate world; and the absence of state supports, such as day care centers, for working families.

In the absence of cultural and policy shifts that would create more support for the professionals who employ these workers, domestic workers pick up the slack. As DWU often points out, the labor of these workers frees their employers to work in law firms, finance, academia, and elsewhere, and as such is critical to local and even global economies.

Finally, domestic work is a function of high income-inequality in the U.S., which has been shown to be correlated to increasing employment of household workers, and of continued economic pressures in other countries, which lead women to leave behind their own families to immigrate to the U.S. and take care of ours.

Thus domestic labor is tied into social issues such as immigration, work hours, differential remuneration of men and women, and state labor regulation, as well as the intimate (but no less political) question of the gender division of labor in the home. This law, I hope, will contribute to more open public conversation about both.

Fact sheets on the law and the report on collective bargaining

Even as we are bombarded by crazy assertions that the American President is not an American citizen and that he is a secret Muslim, we need to recall that this sort of paranoia is reactionary.  It’s a response to an American triumph, the American people elected an African American, Barack Hussein Obama, to be President of the United States.  Even as his popularity waxes and wanes, he is our President.  We elected him by not succumbing to fears and hatreds, revealing our better selves.  This triumph goes beyond our evaluation of President Obama’s job performance.  It stands as a challenge to those who work to revive a politics of fear of the different.  It challenges those who speak about “taking their country back.”

I came to know the dimensions of the triumph, along with my fellow citizens, on the night of the Iowa Caucuses and the day after.  Obama won in an overwhelmingly white state.  The previously excluded was chosen, and the seriousness of Obama’s candidacy was clearly revealed.

The next day when I went for a swim at the Theodore Young Community Center (link), I saw how my African American friends, the whole gang, but especially the center of the social circle, Beverly McCoy, finally came to believe that I wasn’t crazy in thinking that Obama had a chance.  In our community center, we started thinking differently about our country.  I stopped being the naïve Jewish Professor.  Perhaps, I was instead a realist.  Together, we realized that we may live in a better country than we had imagined the day before.   I think that we started looking at each other differently.  We more openly spoke about race, about our fears and hopes, about being black and white, Jewish and Christian, in America.  During the past two years, we have talked about lots of troubling developments, but we talked about it in ways that were not possible before Americans revealed that they could act beyond fear and hatred.

I realized the breadth and depth of the achievement when talking to my mother by phone on the night of the caucuses.  She was very happy, as was all of my extended family.  And then she said to me in tears: “You know Jeffrey, maybe a Jewish person can become President.”  This may seem strange if you think about America exclusively in black and white.  But what my mother perceived was that the election of Obama was a triumph of the previously excluded, of all who were not “typical Americans,” a victory of understanding over suspicion. Suddenly she sensed that we were more fully American citizens, more insiders than outsiders, we, along with blacks and browns, Asians and Latinos, women as well as men, gays as well as straights.

My mother is not a person particularly engaged in politics and political analysis, not even a news junky, but she understood that the paranoia of race was defeated in Iowa, and later in the general election.  A different America appeared, or at least the potential of a different America.  A significant battle was won, that night and the night of Obama’s election.  Now the crazies are fighting back. But I don’t think that they will get to take the country back.