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

[el-ahrairah]

Good lord.

some of us still get the hot chick jobs

 

[Dillinger4]

Why is this important? Its just people arguing on the internet? I dont understand why this has to become a major issue of the day.

I don't get it it either. I have been trying.

 

[DotCommunist]

Storm in a Starbucks' teacup, anyone?

Agitators all round

 

[frogwoman]

Imagine seeing this headline at the front page of the guardian: "Butchers slates articul8 in multi-thread forum "auto-labourism" debacle"

It would never happen would it! But they're quite happy to report their own twitter spats as if they are news ffs

 

[Firky]

I make no comment. I merely link you to this guardian story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/11/green-sex-activists-documentary?INTCMP=SRCH

That's what happens when hippies or left alone - they go feral.

 

[killer b]

Why is this important? Its just people arguing on the internet? I dont understand why this has to become a major issue of the day.

it isn't important. but it's a vaguely interesting look into their world. and the lewis / penny / david allen green / moran etc axis of tweeters has far more than just tens of followers, hence why it's blown up.

one thing: looks to me that lewis is desperately trying to alter the narrative of this bollocks to her being driven off twitter for writing an article mildly critical of intersectionality or whatever, rather than that of her misrepresenting some kid and being called out on it, then throwing her toys out of the pram - the moran tweet (Registering my strongest possible unhappiness that Helen Lewis has been screamed off Twitter for writing this: http://helenlewiswrites.tumblr.com/private/47859091039/tumblr_ml72547vSl1rpijql…) has been retweeted by pretty much all the usual suspects - and as you can see from this thread, it seems to have been accepted by most casual observers.

 

[sihhi]

Good lord.

don't want to push it too far but there is a nasty undertone to this comment of hers to another poster on a comment thread about 'Girls Gone Wild' payment (comments are confusing - hard to follow - but she is the one posting here - comment seems to be cut off halfway through):

And if a smart chick does show her boobs to GGW or make out with her best friend for attention? So what! It doesn't take away from her IQ or ability to get shit done. Sexiness (even tanned, Maxim sexiness) is not incompatable with smarts. The only people who are negatively affected by this are women too dumb to monetize their hotness or cultivate anything about themselves besides being hot. Most women (like most men) are never going to be astrophysicists. It's more productive to give financial and media support to articulate, brilliant

 

[J Ed]

don't want to push it too far but there is a nasty undertone to this comment of hers to another poster on a comment thread about 'Girls Gone Wild' payment (comments are confusing - hard to follow - but she is the one posting here - comment seems to be cut off halfway through):

This is just awful. "Monetize their hotness"? This isn't left-wing politics, this is Thatcherism with brothels.

 

[butchersapron]

The only people who are negatively affected by this are women too dumb to monetize their hotness or cultivate anything about themselves besides being hot

 

[Spoon decker]

La plus ca change...

From 1978: EP Thompson's "Poverty of Theory" attacking Althusser for, in effect, reducing Marxism to a self-indulgent brand of cultural criticism...

I can understand why one might see the following as retaining contemporary relevance:

[Althusserian/Critical Theory]....has now lodged itself in a a particular social couche, the bourgeois lumpen-intelligentsia: aspirant intellectuals, whose amateurish intellectual preparation disarms them before manifest absurdities and elementary philosophical blunders, and whose innocence in intellectual practice leaves them paralyzed in the first web of scholastic argument which they encounter; and bourgeois, because while many of them would like to be 'revolutionaries,' they themselves are the products of a particular 'conjuncture' which has broken the circuits between intellectuality and practical experience (both in real political movements and in the actual segregation imposed by contemporary institutional structures), and hence they are able to perform imaginary revolutionary psycho-dramas (in which each outbids the other in adopting ferocious verbal postures) while in fact falling back upon a very old tradition of bourgeois elitism....
http://home.ku.edu.tr/~mbaker/CSHS503/ThompsonPovertyofTheory.pdf pp3/4




Although Ms Penny and her milieu represent a particularly egregious and nauseating example of pseudo-radical dilettantism, there's nothing new about them. They are simply the most recent incarnation of the phenomenon. Each generation distinguishes itself by a) outdoing their forebears in the extremity of their radicalism b) denouncing said forebears as bourgeois useful idiots. Helen Lewis (didn't her name have two barrels once?) seems to have been recast as 'middle-aged', out of the loop and an unwitting stooge of the patriarchy...which seems a bit unfair tbh. Not that she didn't have it coming...so fuck her. Who the fuck is she anyway? A while back she was writing breathless bollocks about video games...and, now, all of a sudden, she's a political analyst and leftish stalwart?

 

[killer b]

jesus. that's like something drews girlfriend would say.

 

[weepiper]

What a horrible piece of work she is.

 

[Firky]

jesus. that's like something drews girlfriend would say.

Have you not read it? It's really ugly:

the other ladies are interchangeable bleached blondes with fake tits or empty-headed brunettes with long, flowing hair.

 

[phildwyer]

I tried to monetize my hotness once, didn't work though.

 

[killer b]

ah, that's what that picture was about. i get it now.

 

[JimW]

I tried to monetize my hotness once, didn't work though.

Both turned out to be illusions by your analysis was it, Phil?

 

[phildwyer]

Both turned out to be illusions by your analysis was it, Phil?

I'll monetize it yet so I will.

 

[JimW]

I'll monetize it yet so I will.

There's a joke about interest in here somewhere but I'm failing to come up with it.

 

[Thora]

So what did Helen Lewis actually write that got her into trouble?

 

[sihhi]

Have you not read it? It's really ugly:

That's not her that's Jezebel's Jessica G.

But the "monetize hotness" (sorry) thing is something that MC started doing 2006 onwards see here NSFW some images there


Then an Obama supporter in 2007/2008

But then started adapting harder left imagery from 2008 onwards

even whilst receiving sponsorship from Whitelines (like the US version of Daler Rowney - major art-paper manufacturing firm).

Heavy use of the DDR Latin American guerila Tamara / SLA Patty Hearst black beret - but with a personalised art school business badge

Straight through to outright anarcho-syndicalist features in lots of details - with lots of borrowings from protest movements 'Live Your Greece in Myth' again (see earlier posts)

 

[Greebo]

I'll monetize it yet so I will.

In your dreams.

 

[frogwoman]

bit fash

 

[Balbi]

Is that an actual thing?

 

[Spoon decker]

bit fash

Not really. Even the fash can spell "propaganda"
Bit of a fail for a 'political artist'.

 

[J Ed]

I know it's obviously not as bad but this Molly Crabapple stuff is like socialist blackface isn't it?

 

[weepiper]

I know it's obviously not as bad but this Molly Crabapple stuff is like socialist blackface isn't it?

Yes. Taking the piss out of us by dressing up as us for lols and money.

 

[JimW]

Why the misspelling of propaganda? It's not like some pun on prop works better with "propoganda". Inquiring minds really couldn't give a fuck, tho.

 

[andysays]

So how do you orgainse a spontaneous act, exactly?

 

[weepiper]

Why the misspelling of propaganda? It's not like some pun on prop works better with "propoganda". Inquiring minds really couldn't give a fuck, tho.

I think she's just not very good at spelling. See 'organziing' above

 

[sihhi]

I know it's obviously not as bad but this Molly Crabapple stuff is like socialist blackface isn't it?

But MC is vehemently opposed to those who take 'art' (slogans, graffiti art, illustrations, symbols and metaphors) from working-class traditions to re-package it for other middle-class consumers.

See here in full flow

I can never get behind Lichtenstein. It's just cultural appropriation of comic art, that's lauded by the same people who dismiss illustrators as talentless hacks. If the people who he stole his images from were getting the applause and credit, that would be great. However, taking something that working class, underpaid people who were often stripped of their copyright did, and recontextualizing it to sell it to the same people who sneer at them is just crap.

I dislike Roy Lichtenstein intensely, but it's not just cultural appropriation of comic art - the "copies" are specific limp-liberal anti-war transformations of the very worst militarist jingoistic bilge e.g. DC Comics' All-American Men of War is carefully changed into Whaam! in 1962 and other works too- he does the comic book stuff for around 5 years from 1960-1965. What's the argument that comic book illustrators should also receive payment for his sales?

Goodness knows but it's clear that MC is following the exact same formula of the very worst of the pop artists in trying to create an artist brand in all areas of cultural reproduction (high art - the Laurie Penny tableau, murals, all sorts of textiles, pop up books, sketching books, colouring-in books, copiable prints, videos of producing the art, life drawing classes, meeting the artist or an offshoot in the shape of a "booth babe", bottle design, nightclub sets, pins, badges, trinkets all the way up to fake money and named artist-focused performance art):

The aim is to create an artist-led Empire

with a stylised trademark - bubbles for joining or ending discrete objects, smooth curvy shapes for human form, squiggly lettering or snail spiral squiggles - that can then be sold for $50 a pop

or cartoon versions of animals at $225 a pop - reduced price