Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags

[phildwyer]

So really we should demanding the return of feudalism?

Not necessarily.

But we should abandon the ancient Socialist myth that the rise of capitalism was in any sense a progressive development or an advance on what had been before. It was an unmitigated disaster.

 

[LLETSA]

Excellent bit of derailing through sheer force of pub bore holding court from LLETSA.

You've all been entirely free to resume wanking over little Laura at any point.

 

[butchersapron]

I do look forwards to LLETSA's holidays. Got a week of this to look forward to.

 

[rekil]

I'm sure she'll write something atrocious to bring it right back on track soon enough

Like this.

In a capitalist world, smoking is a little sub-economy of communism. You share cigarettes, matches, lighters, papers. When strangers come up to you in the street and ask you for a cigarette, you give them one, because you understand. I once gave a homeless man half a Lucky Strike out of my own mouth, even though he was wearing a Libertarian T-shirt.

 

[Greebo]

Yes I do. It really works. Just watch--Hocus Eye won't be back to bother us in a hurry.

"Us"? Sweetie, have you lapsed into using the royal "We"?

 

[LLETSA]

What often surprises me about reading what people say on here is the widespread assumption among 'radicals' that this society and its culture (for want of a better word) is basically sound, and that the only real problem is that the wrong people are in power with the wrong set of priorities. Surely it goes without saying that one reinforces the other and that to radically change the power stuctures in society would (or ought to) result in a radically different type of society?

So we have the situation where there is a failure to distinguish between real working class culture (difficult to define nowadays admittedly and different than, say, my own experience in the kind of working class communities referred to above), and a commercially-driven, exploitative kind of plebianism (sp?) designed to keep the working class atomised, tame and cowed and drag everybody down to the same level-and all this while creating a phoney aspirational culture (the desire for fame and wealth gained by it doesn't matter what method; the expansion of higher education by creating more and more pointless areas of study, loading everybody down with debt in the process, which will ensure that people are tame and cowed as soon as they enter working life) and fake social solidarity (football patriotism etc). Much of this is reflected in the utter pointlessness and downright stupidity of much of what preoccupies society (tattoos and piercings, chasing after the latest model of this or that consumer product whether you need it or not or just because your mates are doing it etc etc.)

 

[LLETSA]

I do look forwards to LLETSA's holidays. Got a week of this to look forward to.

Two weeks, Butchers. Two. But don't worry, I'm looking at flight options even as we speak.

 

[gosub]

Like this.

Do that in Cuba and they nick your lighter

 

[butchersapron]

Like this.

In a capitalist world, smoking is a little sub-economy of communism.

You can't have communism in capitalist society. You can't have an economy in communism. And these fags produce themselves don't they. That's how it works for Laurie and her like - others produce things for us (.i,e her and hers) to share out. It's Beatrice Webb.

Going back to before all this bullshit yesterday, some people were suggesting that in 10 years she's have dropped her current views and be writing more openly right wing stuff. I don't think she will for a number of reasons: firstly, all good careerists and parasites know that what they're selling is their ability to play a role, and you'd have to be pretty inept not to know that you've sold yourself as the voice of a new left - ditching that = out of a job. Secondly, she does genuinely believe all this warmed up fabian crap, all this confused shit she spouts and so do a whole lot of other bacially decent people. Thirdly the papers need this sort of voice to demonstrate their openness to to what they believe people believe are dissenting non-mainstream views (leaving aside that we know this is bullshit both in terms of who they recruits and the content of what they say).

Now, i wonder if anyone could ever possibly connect that up with the production of voices, of the projection of images, the construction of common sense, and the defence and extension of privilege that this is based on?

 

[butchersapron]

Two weeks, Butchers. Two. But don't worry, I'm looking at flight options even as we speak.

I fucking knew it!

 

[LLETSA]

Like this.

All the homeless round here seem to be wearing Libertarian t-shirts lately.

 

[Fedayn]

Not necessarily.

But we should abandon the ancient Socialist myth that the rise of capitalism was in any sense a progressive development or an advance on what had been before. It was an unmitigated disaster.

He says writing on his computer.

Lletsa is bang on re this, capitalism has been both good and bad. It developed the productiove forces to the extwent thast it allowed, it was an advance on previous systems as it provided-upto a limit-real, genuione material advances by and for the working-class. That it cannot doasnything otehr than take us on a downward spiral now-as Lletsa says in his doom laden way-does not invalidate the real advances it made previously.

 

[DotCommunist]

for one thing, it created the solicitor class.

 

[Fedayn]

What often surprises me about reading what people say on here is the widespread assumption among 'radicals' that this society and its culture (for want of a better word) is basically sound, and that the only real problem is that the wrong people are in power with the wrong set of priorities. Surely it goes without saying that one reinforces the other and that to radically change the power stuctures in society would (or ought to) result in a radically different type of society?

Wo says it's just a case of change who's in charge? Just like a nationalised industry with a Michael Edwardes in charge didn't change that industry in any real sens, the samwe with a socialist society. A different society would of course alter the way that society sees things and the culutres it develops and creates. It would be a fundamental re-structuring of that society and what flows out of it socially and culturally.

So we have the situation where there is a failure to distinguish between real working class culture (difficult to define nowadays admittedly and different than, say, my own experience in the kind of working class communities referred to above), and a

But were all those things that happened in your working-class community acceptable or worth defending? Casual sexism and racism? The idea that women have a defined and gender assigned role? Whilst I will regret saying it tattoos were also part opf that culture, smaller and less obvious but there nonetheless. Your idea of what a working-class community would also be radically changed if we lived in a society where the working-class controlled the means of production.

commercially-driven, exploitative kind of plebianism (sp?) designed to keep the working class atomised, tame and cowed and drag everybody down to the same level-and all this while creating a phoney aspirational culture (the desire for fame and wealth gained by it doesn't matter what method; the expansion of higher education by creating more and more pointless areas of study, loading everybody down with debt in the process, which will ensure that people are tame and cowed as soon as they enter working life) and fake social solidarity (football patriotism etc). Much of this is reflected in the utter pointlessness and downright stupidity of much of what preoccupies society (tattoos and piercings, chasing after the latest model of this or that consumer product whether you need it or not or just because your mates are doing it etc etc.)

Supporting a team just because your mates do it etc etc. liking music just because your ma5tes are doing it etc etc.... It's nothing new at all.

I agree with the points re HE and the drive to almost 'educate' out' working class jobs. Jobs that had a sense of pride and respect now deemed not good enough.
I don't think society is pre-occupied with tattoos, it's still a minority, not one to worry about.

 

[love detective]

Going back to before all this bullshit yesterday, some people were suggesting that in 10 years she's have dropped her current views and be writing more openly right wing stuff. I don't think she will for a number of reasons: firstly, all good careerists and parasites know that what they're selling is their ability to play a role, and you'd have to be pretty inept not to know that you've sold yourself as the voice of a new left - ditching that = out of a job. Secondly, she does genuinely believe all this warmed up fabian crap, all this confused shit she spouts and so do a whole lot of other bacially decent people. Thirdly the papers need this sort of voice to demonstrate their openness to to what they believe people believe are dissenting non-mainstream views (leaving aside that we know this is bullshit both in terms of who they recruits and the content of what they say).

Thing is in ten years time she won't be able to sell herself as the voice of the new left in the way she is able to at the moment - she'll be the cobwebed dinosaur by then. And if she is a good careerist and not inept she'll know that to keep some kind of role in the limelight she'll need to reposition herself.

In ten years time she'll be nowhere near squats and living a very comfortable life embedded in the established media , hosting newsnight review and the like and increasingly out of touch with what she thinks she represents now. Whether she genuinely believe all the crap she spouts now or not, in ten years time I can't see it figuring as prominently as it does now, either because she was never as committed as she makes out to be or because her established/entrenched position forces it to be played down.

One thing's for sure though, you can't make a career out of progressive politics and at some point she will have to make the choice between career and progressive politics, and I think we all know which one it will be

 

[butchersapron]

She'll be Jon snow, Toynbee (maybe not with the two kids at Westminster for28 grand plus year though) etc as she hasn't got the brains to be an Ali or one of those types, but there'll be another penny behind her.

edit: or you could always go the US and write progressive pap in the nation or mother jones or one of the other mags like that they have over there.

 

[LLETSA]

Wo says it's just a case of change who's in charge? Just like a nationalised industry with a Michael Edwardes in charge didn't change that industry in any real sens, the samwe with a socialist society. A different society would of course alter the way that society sees things and the culutres it develops and creates. It would be a fundamental re-structuring of that society and what flows out of it socially and culturally.



But were all those things that happened in your working-class community acceptable or worth defending? Casual sexism and racism? The idea that women have a defined and gender assigned role? Whilst I will regret saying it tattoos were also part opf that culture, smaller and less obvious but there nonetheless. Your idea of what a working-class community would also be radically changed if we lived in a society where the working-class controlled the means of production.



Supporting a team just because your mates do it etc etc. liking music just because your ma5tes are doing it etc etc.... It's nothing new at all.

I agree with the points re HE and the drive to almost 'educate' out' working class jobs. Jobs that had a sense of pride and respect now deemed not good enough.
I don't think society is pre-occupied with tattoos, it's still a minority, not one to worry about.

I'm not saying that people openly say this but that it's implied in everybody's readiness to leap in to indignantly defend even the slightest criticism of the commercially-driven pleb culture that's been imposed on us.

And I'm not saying that everything in the old working class culture was positive, just that its pretty much disappeared leaving atomisation and disorientation in its wake (which makes the idea of 'the working class owning the means of production' all but redundant.)

And again-the hideous, over-the-top tattooing craze of today is not a major issue but, as I said, a symptom of a wider malaise.

 

[Fedayn]

I'm not saying that people openly say this but that it's implied in everybody's readiness to leap in to indignantly defend even the slightest criticism of the commercially-driven pleb culture that's been imposed on us.

And I'm not saying that everything in the old working class culture was positive, just that its pretty much disappeared leaving atomisation and disorientation in its wake (which makes the idea of 'the working class owning the means of production' all but redundant.)

And again-the hideous, over-the-top tattooing craze of today is not a major issue but, as I said, a symptom of a wider malaise.

I'm not sure they do, they are just able to seperate the perfectly unusual fact that some people like tattoos and those people get tattoos for a whole variety of reasons. It's perhaps also because of your eagerness to refer to people as disfigured and brainless not out of any reasoned thinking but out of your own personal antipathy towards the size of their tattoo. It's the skull readers all over again. Tattooed = stupid.... It's ridiculous and you know it.

I'd agree with much of that yes. The destruction of the traditional indurtries has clearly had a wider social, effect and that includes on the notions of w/c solidarity.

Again, that's your opinion.

 

[LLETSA]

I'm not sure they do, they are just able to seperate the perfectly unusual fact that some people like tattoos and those people get tattoos for a whole variety of reasons. It's perhaps also because of your eagerness to refer to people as disfigured and brainless not out of any reasoned thinking but out of your own personal antipathy towards the size of their tattoo. It's the skull readers all over again. Tattooed = stupid.... It's ridiculous and you know it.

I'd agree with much of that yes. The destruction of the traditional indurtries has clearly had a wider social, effect and that includes on the notions of w/c solidarity.

Again, that's your opinion.

It happens on here time and time again, not just on the issue of tattooing/piercing. As I said, I find it quite strange that people seem to see no wider significance in the fact that whereas a small minority of people might once have had large, garish tattoos, they have now moved into the mainstream and in a grotesque and overblown fashion. What goes through the mind of an individual who has no long association with a subculture like yours but who thinks that repeatedly having pictures painted on him/herself, covering ever wider areas of the body, is some kind of answer to something? A growing purposelessness and sheeplike stupidity seems to have seized the stage at the moment when technology has transformed our world but the socio-economic system on which it rests has begun to eat itself.

Maybe it's just what happens when, physically, life has never been softer but all sense of direction and purpose has been lost and a converging glut of insoluble crises moves into view. A widespread, unacknowledged sense of unease prevails, and pure irrationality seizes the reins.

 

[Fruitloop]

I'm quite liking the new Robert Bly theme to these rants

 

[LLETSA]

Who's ranting? And who is Robert Bly?

 

[articul8]

Thing is in ten years time she won't be able to sell herself as the voice of the new left in the way she is able to at the moment - she'll be the cobwebed dinosaur by then. And if she is a good careerist and not inept she'll know that to keep some kind of role in the limelight she'll need to reposition herself.

She'll be all "my generation were furious idealists, but now we're thirty/fortysomethings we haven't lost this but we know how you need to be pragmatic to make change happen"

 

[Fruitloop]

1) You, but in a good way.

2) American poet and author of The Sibling Society. Not the Mutiny on the Bounty one.

 

[butchersapron]

She'll be all "my generation were furious idealists, but now we're thirty/fortysomethings we haven't lost this but we know how you need to be pragmatic to make change happen"

So she'll be you? No wonder they say there's no future for this generation.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

 

[LLETSA]

1) You, but in a good way.

2) American poet and author of The Sibling Society. Not the Mutiny on the Bounty one.

I don't want to be Robert Bly; I want to be Michel Houellebecq.

 

[JimW]

I don't want to be Robert Bly; I want to be Michel Houellebecq.

Or one of his Houellebecq girls.

 

[Fruitloop]

Frotty French Trans-Humanism? Doesn't really seem your style.

 

[Idris2002]

FWIW, most of the people with visible tattooes I see around here are mid-30s to early 40s, meaning they grew up under the GDR. Their tats would be a bit of post-1989 euphoria.

Seeing the wee girl in my building with her septum pierced did bring out my inner LLETSA, though.

 

[articul8]

So she'll be you? No wonder they say there's no future for this generation.

She doesn't have the talent, brains, or fantastic good looks to be me