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

[rekil]

I would have listened properly but was too busy having breakfast and getting some of the housework out of the way.

You didn't miss anything. Just the usual ignorant spoofing. Something about slutwalks and surprise surprise, the suffragettes. Good game good game.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

Emily Davison was from my home town, I have more in common with her than LP! But they both went to Oxford so maybe not.

Yeah, Ladies wearing sashes and that.

It's a pity so many working class women who were a part of such struggle (and as socialists) still remain in obscurity.

 

[Captain Hurrah]

Update:

I did get a reply.

"No one wants to 7 am to do Labour for someone else for the privilege of eating"

"I did. I liked working hard all week for money to spend."

"What did you lika about working hard all week for money to spend?"

"Working with people, collectively. Sense of jobs well-done. Tasks as ends in themselves. That and money to blow on the weekend and buy nice stuff for tea"

"None of these things require wage labour to exist. Wage labour probably makes them harder. Did you actually enjoy the part where you had to sell your labour or run out of money?"

Etc. Theory, theory, theory. And there's the disconnect. Lads I worked with in factories didn't give a fuck about the concept of selling your labour, who owns the means of production, identity politics, kyriarchy, othering, man/white/left/black/worksplaining. Thinking that something was a bit rotten they they put a load of hours in getting mucky for £250 a week while the boss drove a Morgan didn't stop us all oohing and aahing over the thing in the factory car park. Having a decent wedge in your pocket on a Friday to go down the boozer with and up the football Saturday didn't stop anyone moaning about the tax paid out of our wages nor did it stop us being happy with how it helped. And knowing the factory QA who did fuck-all earned twice as much as most of us didn't stop us being proud, sometimes, of the job(s) we did. It's all very well speaking in terms of pure theory about what people should feel about their labour being exploited but it's not just as simple as reading out of a textbook, is it?

Sorry if I've not made myself clear, like; I never went to university and I only read fiction and biographies and that.

I put tins of corned beef on a shelf most nights, but still like a bit of theory.

 

[Steel Icarus]

I put tins of corned beef on a shelf most nights, but still like a bit of theory.

Aye, but not to the exclusion of all other matters and I expect you'd agree it's not really cognitively dissonant to both rail against the capitalist system and be pleased with having done a good job and having a few quid for it*.

*I have checked my privilege and sincerely hope I am not coming across worksplaining to you

 

[Firky]

I didn't catch LP on Radio 4, too busy bathing with my rubber duck.

It's a pity so many working class women who were a part of such struggle (and as socialists) still remain in obscurity.

It's not just limited to that though, there's Ada Lovelace, all the women at Bletchley Park (who's names are so unfamiliar I don't know any) etc.

I'd rather starve than subject myself to corned beef!

 

[Captain Hurrah]

I didn't catch LP on Radio 4, too busy bathing with my rubber duck.



It's not just limited to that though, there's Ada Lovelace, all the women at Bletchley Park (who's names are so unfamiliar I don't know any) etc.

I'd rather starve than subject myself to corned beef!

Corned beef is more attractive than part-time purgatory, or workfare.

And I was on about women literally at the bottom, and what they fought for, at great risk to themselves and their families. Not what the uppers are supposed to have done on their behalf.

 

[Favelado]

I didn't catch LP on Radio 4, too busy bathing with my rubber duck.

I notice that "u" and "i" are close enough on the keyboard to facilitate typos.

 

[weepiper]

And I was on about women literally at the bottom, and what they fought for, at great risk to themselves and their families. Not what the uppers are supposed to have done on their behalf.

like this

http://www.keele.ac.uk/history/currentundergraduates/tltp/WOMEN/SUMMERFI/TEXT/SUMER29B.HTM

But you hear all about the suffragettes and nothing about working class women's action

 

[Captain Hurrah]

I remember a good book on textile workers in Lancashire: One Hand Tied Behind Us - The Rise of the Women's Suffrage Movement.

 

[butchersapron]

BRHG did a great pamphlet Votes for Ladies: The Suffragette Movement 1903-1914 (brief summary here) - have a look at the slides here (pdf).

“a working woman's movement is of no value; working women are the weakest position of the sex; how could it be otherwise? Their lives are too hard, their education too meager to equip them for the contest. Surely it is a mistake to use the weakest for the struggle. We want picked women, the very strongest and the most intelligent.”

 

[smokedout]

Aye, but not to the exclusion of all other matters and I expect you'd agree it's not really cognitively dissonant to both rail against the capitalist system and be pleased with having done a good job and having a few quid for it*.

*I have checked my privilege and sincerely hope I am not coming across worksplaining to you

in fairness to a lot of younger kids the idea of having done a good job and got a decent few quid for it is now missing one vital component

 

[rekil]

Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30

It's really fucking bad.

 

[Bakunin]

It's not just limited to that though, there's Ada Lovelace, all the women at Bletchley Park (who's names are so unfamiliar I don't know any) etc.

Let's have, in all seriousness, a mention for the female field agents of the Special Operations Executive, who did (and did as well as anybody) a job which a lot of people (male or female) would have run a country mile away from.

 

[rosecore]

Laurie was on Novara Radio (Aaron Peters and James Butler) discussing class and journalism. I''m sure it will posted on their Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/NovaraMedia/404716342902872

 

[nino_savatte]

Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30

It's really fucking bad.

Aye, it was a shocker. LP sounded like one of those irritating squeaky toys you give your dog to chew on.

 

[not-bono-ever]

like this

http://www.keele.ac.uk/history/currentundergraduates/tltp/WOMEN/SUMMERFI/TEXT/SUMER29B.HTM

But you hear all about the suffragettes and nothing about working class women's action

yup - another part of British ( Scots ) history, along with the entire red Clydeside period that seems pretty much airbrushed from most textbooks on teh great War era

 

[equationgirl]

yup - another part of British ( Scots ) history, along with the entire red Clydeside period that seems pretty much airbrushed from most textbooks on teh great War era

Along with everything to do with Ireland pre-second World War.

Even the Clydebank blitz is barely mentioned - the whole town bar a few tenement blocks destroyed, leveled.

 

[smokedout]

Laurie was on Novara Radio (Aaron Peters and James Butler) discussing class and journalism. I''m sure it will posted on their Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/NovaraMedia/404716342902872

up at: http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...ters/audio-new-media-and-british-commentariat

couldn't listen to more than ten minutes, like listening to a load of full of themselves posh arsewipes talking too loudly on the table next to you in the chandos after a demo

 

[8ball]

Laura and tory woman: 15:30 - 23:30

It's really fucking bad.

I don't think it reflects well on her that she fucks off before the cookery bit.

 

[Steel Icarus]

Laurie was on Novara Radio (Aaron Peters and James Butler) discussing class and journalism. I''m sure it will posted on their Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/NovaraMedia/404716342902872

16 minutes in and there have been a couple of allusions to journalism-as-privilege where you can hear wor Penny "um-umming" as though a question about her privileged background and meteoric career is about to be dropped on her...which has as yet not been asked.

 

[Steel Icarus]

30 minutes in and there's some fantastic hole-digging about championing the Lib Dems because she was "angry at Labour for starting the attack on welfare". But then "I actually voted Labour myself". And another reference to living in a house where "we" were all affected by the changes to benefits.

And a whole load of shite about "I've been growing and maturing so of COURSE I've had tons of different political standpoints and been in lots of different movements" etc etc. Most people DON'T get paid for political writing while they're figuring out which pot to shit in, though.

This is vaguely interesting stuff, but with execrable chin-stroking. Pretend intellectuals impressing each other with their pretend intellectualism. And all mates, as is revealed in the course of the cosy chat.

 

[butchersapron]

The idea that the lib-dem support was a flash-in-the-pan moment of anger at labour party attacks on the welfare state falls down on a number of levels (supporting the party that you think needed to be electorally punished for example) but the most relevant one would be that the call to lib-dem arms was published on the sunday before the election, alone it could be taken as evidence of a passing anger rectified on the thursday of the election - however, when placed alongside this (hideous*) piece from two months before that i think some questions can be honestly asked:

I will not be taking part directly, because I’m already planning to use my own vote to assist one of the liberal PPCs in Leyton and Wanstead.

Four days before this, Clegg gave his infamous Why I admire Margaret Thatcher interview:

'I'm 43 now. I was at university at the height of the Thatcher revolution and I recognise now something I did not at the time: that her victory over a vested interest, the trade unions, was immensely significant.
'I don't want to be churlish, that was an immensely important visceral battle for how Britain is governed.'

And articles like this from the following month demonstrating pretty embarrassing:

Britain's first televised leaders' debate has irrevocably altered both the terms and the style of British politics. The debate, which was broadcast last night a mere fifty years after American audiences first got the chance to watch their prospective leaders tear each other into elegant shreds on air, shone a spotlight on the languishing art of British political rhetoric, with Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg trouncing his opponents in the tradition of our most dazzling Enlightenment speakers.

...

But Nick Clegg risked and gained the most, setting the bar for a return of studied rhetoric and oratory to the British political arena.

In electoral debates, the political issues at stake take second place to mastery of the format, and Clegg understood this instinctually. Aristotelian formations were embedded into his populist dialectic, and Clegg also used those favourite constructions of neo-Sorkinite American progressive oratory, the tricolon and the repeated refrain, answering one question with no less than five imprecations not to let "the youngsters of today become the hardened criminals of tomorrow." Throughout his performance, Clegg's eyes were fixed on the viewers at home, the only audience who mattered. Burke would not have been wholly disappointed.

For the record, I think it's fine to admit that you voted for the lib-dems, that you were mugged by them (and by yourself) if you recognise that this is what took place - if you've looked at the logic that you offered to yourself and others when you urged people to vote for them or defended voting for them and worked out where you went wrong and why - that's not a ground to attack someone. Refusal to do the above - sure.

____________________________________________
*

suffrage is the pivotal right. If you opt out of the one effort that makes you a relevant civic entity, you have forfeited your right to complain about anything the government does, and you have betrayed all the other young people who do want the right to be heard. Generations of suffragettes, civil rights protesters and trades unionists did not fight and die so that you could sit on the sofa thinking about how the government never listens to you.

 

[Brixton Hatter]

Perhaps ******* is a "yunnie" Young Urban Narcissist

According to the DSM-IV, a person with “narcissistic personality disorder” is characterized by exhibiting at least five of the following:

1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance—i.e. grandiosity (exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)​

2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love​

3. Believes he is “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)​

4. Requires excessive admiration​

5. Has a sense of entitlement​

6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends​

7. Lacks empathy​

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him​

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes​

http://www.williamsburgobserver.org/2012/09/25/spiritual-home-of-the-yunnie/

I read this somewhere else.....and for some reason it made me think of this thread

 

[Firky]

when placed alongside this (hideous*)

Out of interest how many people here heard of this? First I have.

 

[butchersapron]

Out of interest how many people here heard of this? First I have.

The Give your Vote campaign or the intention to vote lib-dem in march?

 

[Firky]

The campaign, I followed the link in that article and I see that it has all kinds of media logos to make it look like it's a big thing, but when you press it there's only half a dozen links.

Since people here are quite informed and follow such things I was wondering if I was alone in being totally ignorant of it.

 

[Firky]

The GYVC Facebook group:

People Talking About This
2

Haha. Question answered,

 

[butchersapron]

The campaign, I followed the link in that article and I see that it has all kinds of media logos to make it look like it's a big thing, but when you press it there's only half a dozen links.

Since people here are quite informed and follow such things I was wondering if I was alone in being totally ignorant of it.

Never heard of it outside of that link myself - i suspect it's a rip-off my my sell your vote campaign from 97 (iirc).

 

[Firky]

the most mind-boggling, most potentially revolutionary ideas [GYVC] to come out of the internet age in Britain so

There's one of those Willy Wonka sarcasm memes in there.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Aye, it was a shocker. LP sounded like one of those irritating squeaky toys you give your dog to chew on.

So, she sounds like Michael Gove, then?