Headscarves and binary choices

c.

Though I suppose, and I don't like it, but it can become a class issue if it's employers imposing it. I didn't particularly like the christian BA woman who wanted to wear a crucifix but i suppose we should support workers' being able to wear want they want to work.

Women have been sacked in the UK for wearing full face masks, niqabs, but it's hard to see how some could be allowed to work - one was a teacher to kids who couldn't understand what she was saying, for example.

The binary choice thing seems common amongst platformist types - the WSM and rise, for example. I'm assuming they would have no trouble saying they don't support kerry or bush, or Tory or Labour, but instead working class action; but when it comes to other countries like Venezuela or Ireland they seem to forget this and say that the working class option is "purist" and doesn't fit the real world. Which is exactly what Trots say to anarchists about my first two examples.

c
Its a conflict between two sets of values, neither of which have any correspondance with working class interests.

I think it's maybe a mistake to think that approval or disapproval in the absence of any specific action amounts to more than a hill of beans.

That aside, I can't personally imagine supporting a state-imposed ban on anything - as far as I'm concerned secularism is the right to wear a cross, a niqab or a Darth Vader helmet if it really matters to you, without fear of penalty. Obviously if there are practical considerations, like a lollipop lady wearing a Darth Vader helmet then they should be taken into account, but it seems that the teacher/niqab hooha is not really about that.

I've been experimenting holding a thin piece of material in front of my face and shouting at my co-workers, and they seems to be able to understand me perfectly well. In fact it's difficult to imagine the practise having continued for so long if it made communication impossible.

Of course, the net effect of all of the media to-do about this is if anything to increase the potentcy of these religious symbols, which is probably the semi-covert point of it all.

a.

I think that it becomes a class issue the minute a boss can discriminate against an employee for deciding to wear a scarf, just like when the matter is their religion, or gender, or sexual orientation, or species ().

It's not as big an issue as the others I've mentioned, but it still pertains to class struggle.

It tells you things about someone's affective state I suppose. I can't see that it's necessary, and I would never dream of forcing someone to reveal their face a la Jack Straw, just so I can scrutinise their facial expression.

Empirically speaking I've found talking with the face hidden to have much more communicative potential than grimacing wordlessly at people.

so you've met Jack then?

The problem is that communists are not advocates of liberal tolerance, we're people involved in a constant critique of the existing order and its effect on those around us (and yes, that critique has its anchor in class struggle). So it is important to oppose the veil in our own capacity, not only its ideological baggage that is a marker of gender roles, but also the historical emergence of the various veils (for instance the burqa-ing of Afghanistan during the 1990s). This might take the form of 'I'm with you in your freedom to wear that veil, but why the fuck are you wearing it in the first place?'

er i would go with sphinx's d) option

I mean is it not a class issue that

that girls and young women are being 'forced out of education.
Dev your analysis is so fixated on the 'workplace' you see no struggle as possible anywhere else. I think it's possible to a nauced and principled position here. I am not sure that it would have much resonance with large numbers of people, but that's never bothered left commies before (well not since 1945)

a. (And for what it's worth, I don't think b. defends principles of 'secularism', since that is to do with state neutrality on religion. I can see how you might say it defends some sort of anti-sexist/atheist/humanism, though I'm not sure whether I agree.)

Anyway, a. doesn't meant that it's clever to campaign for this principle to be upheld, given that you've presumably got other things to do. Nor is the principle absolute - I'd support, for example, an institution banning clothing with fascist insignia. And headscarves don't raise anything approaching the issues of full facial coverings.

OK, to try and help me understand in what sense you think this is possible, a few questions;

1. Are you accepting that one of a. or b. may be right, but think that it's too difficult to tell which to make a call? Perhaps because the difference in outcomes is marginal, and complicated by the unpredictability of the consequences each would have.

2. Would you agree that it's either true that 'x' or 'not-x' in general (the 'law of the excluded middle' being one of the key axioms of formal logic)?

3. Is it the case that individual communists can have true private views about whether a. or b. would be best, but there is something about the political/historical role of communists that makes it irresponsible/innapropriate for (i) them to ever make their views known to any others or (ii) make their views known through communist organisations/parties, such as EKS?

"Mr Straw, who made the comments in the Lancashire Telegraph, said he had asked women wearing the niqab to remove it when they visited his constituency surgery because face-to-face conversations were of 'greater value'."

Obviously he didn't just leap up and tear it off them, but I'm not sure were I in that situation I would feel I was being given a lot of choice.

4. Or is this more about denying there's no system of value which doesn't relate to the historical movement of the working class? (Even though either a. or b. may more adversely impact more working class people.)

if we're going to get syllogistic about it, if x = option a, 'not-x' is a set consisting of b,c,d ... which doesn't really help us

as for my opinion ... i'm fairly apathetic, people should generally be able to wear what they like i guess, and a headscarf is no more an ideological symbol than a union badge (just for you Dev ), or a red and black star or whatever. so i guess i'm with sphinx:

Edit: however, Voltaire can suck my balls, i'm not going to defend anyone's rights to wear the headscalf to the death.

c.
There's no good reason to wear one, but it's not our issue.

It doesn't strike you that there's a power relationship here, between a female constituent and a male cabinet minister, that might imply a degree of compulsion?

Why is that women get upset when I ask them if they would mind showing me their boobies? After all, I'm only asking.

I agree.

The way I see it, it's simple.People should be allowed to wear what ever the fuck they like as long as it is not properly offensive.One of the problems is ,however, religion.Some christians in this country care more about their religion than human rights and freedom and so are against hijabs etc.The other stance seems to be:if we have to behave in a certain way in a muslim country why should we put up with their culture?Again a very shit and fundamentalist point.

I think that Devrim has posed this question in the right way - as an illustration of how the bourgeoisie constantly tries to get us caught up in false debates. This issue was raised in exactly the same way by the French state, and the choice was: the right to wear the hijab versus the secular state, or religion versus democracy, etc. The point being that both are false choices for the working class - like Labour versus Tory or democracy versus fascism...It's true as some people have said that in some circumstances this could be related to class questions, but it can go either way. In Turkey or France workers could object to their comrades not being allowed to come to work in a hijab; in Iraq or Iran workers might object to being compelled to wear it. In such cases the issue isn't the hijab, but whether the bosses can get away with interfering with workers' private lives.

C. seems appropriate for the the reasons given but its worth pointing out that option A is being exploited predomiantly by Islamists intent on drawing lines in the sand and B by closet chauvinists/racists.

I'm guessing EKS would have been opposed to the banning of headscarves in France on the basis that it was little more than a barely concealed racist attack meant to distract from class issues and would only serve to further marginalise muslims and scapegoat them for the failings of the "Great Republic"?

well i don't understand exactly what a group like EKS or Organise! could do to oppose the ban beyond written articles and if we did have that kind of influence and power i'd doubt we'd be too worried about it.

I'm guessing you mean that you wouldn't be out marching against it alongside Mullahs and the like? I'm not to sure what I think about that issue as on one hand i'd be abit wary of marching behind islamists but surely if you oppose it on paper and recognise it is a reactionary/divisive manoveure by the French state that only serves to scapegoat muslims whilst also strengthening the grip of reactionaries within the marginalised communities then you are not taking a side but putting forward your own opposition?

If a colleague in my workplace was facing disciplining for wearing the headscarve I would support her, I don't see how it's any different if the state is pushing it?

Well surely the problem with C - "This is not a class issue" - is that it falls for the liberal trap of viewing state authority as 'neutral'.

The extension of state authority is a 'class' issue, in that it further consolidates the disempowerment of social groups outside of the state.

Also Devrim the banning on the Headscarf just represents a flipside of Islamic patriachy and just serves to put many muslim women under the double oppression of Patri and Republic and I sure as hell like to think we would support muslim women marching against forced Hijab wearing, or is this too not on the tiny little strip of "working class terrain"?

Actually the more I think about it, the more i'm baffled by your position. I mean surely a barely concealed racist attack is an attack on the working class and as such is working class terrain, i mean this has actual concrete effects on young muslim womens ability to get an education and job? Furthermore the fact the hypocritical French state was actually backing single faith schools would only create more segregation by pushing many muslims out of state education.

i'd also like to make it clear i am discussing this in relation to the French states ban and not the Turkish one.

I think we can agree that anything that comes out of the mouth of Jack Straw, the Swappies or their allies amongst the supposed leaders of the Muslim community is probably in pretty bad faith.

It still bothers me from a libertarian perspective that it's seen as acceptable to impute some kind of victimhood to all members of a certain group, and then to use that to de-legitimize practices that they engage in. If you must have a state, then the foundation of relations between state and individual has to be the notion of an independent rational subject that is capable of making their own decisions, whatever the state's representatives might feel to be the case. It's a fictitious entity, for sure, just like the fictional entity of a legal subject that is fully cognizant of the law, but it's one that the state has to maintain in its dealings with citizens, which is undeniably what's happening in an MPs surgery.

Proof that this is the case followed hard on the heels of Straw's comments as the 'veil debate' repidly moved onto issues that threatened the employment of women who choose rightly or wrongly to wear a niqab, provided they need to communicate with other people in order to do their job (which let's face it is pretty much everybody). There's a pragmatic issue as well; if the hypothetical woman talkng to Jack Straw had removed her veil and felt uncomfortable, or the niqab-wearing teacher gets the sack, how much has the cause of Muslim women really been advanced?

I also feel pretty strongly that regardless of what you might think about the superiority of face-to-face communication (and such a judgement can never be more than a simple preference), my face is mine to hide or reveal, not yours that you can demand to see it.

I think there was a slightly better point to the flippant remark about breasts than the one you got. Breasts on display is seen as perfectly normal in plenty of cultures, and indeed has been in western culture in days gone by, but to ask for a peek these days would be seen as sexual harrasment in most circumstances. It's clearly not alright to request whatever you like on the grounds that the other person can always refuse, as we're not on a level playing field even with a man asking a woman, and even less so if the man in question is in a position of significant power.

the extension of state authority is by definition anti-anarchist though, isn't it? I mean, in this example, you advocate state coercion, rather than the propagation of notions of mutual voluntary respect between people, as a means to enforce traffic rules. Won't this increase dependence upon some kind of centralized strong authority, and reinforce people's faith in the state as the means through which social order/change is to come about.

This is a bad thing, no?

of sweet christ not again