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

[frogwoman]

i'm currently working in a private college mostly for international students and i'm just finding the whole thing quite depressing to be honest. there are a fair few entitled little shits but there are some who plainly have extremely dysfunctional family setups despite (or probably because of) their parents massive wealth.

 

[articul8]

Penny/Orwell makes an interesting (if flattering, for her) comparison.

 

[sihhi]

There was a lot more to Strummer and The Clash than that. And JS had humility, he didn't always just want to talk about himself. They can't help the background they come from - it's what they do with it that matters. It's a bit of a bizarre comparison if you ask me.

The Clash weren't journalists, reporters and intellectuals - and definitely not part of today's set. There's lots that could be said about them and about 70s and 80s music and class.
What is the argument being made - does it apply to people like Michael Mansfield was at Highgate and part of its Cadet Force? Plenty of left-wing and pro bono left lawyers had/have rich mums and dads.
Is all that's being done - just picking out the birth and childhood classes of declared left individuals? Is content/nuance of their adult output not examined at all on this thread?

Lenin's father was an OFSTED chief for the whole of Simbirsk province, attended the most privileged school in his area Simbirsk Gimanzia where Feodor Kerensky, father of the pro-war liberal Kerensky, was headteacher. He managed to still get to Kazan University, if Lenin had been a muzhik peasant and was at peasant school he would a) never had anything more than primary school and b) even if he had by rare chance gone to secondary school, any relation to a narodnik assassin would mean he would have been barred from all universities. Hence ignore and deride every aspect of him.
Is this level Lenin should be discussed, with zero reference to people's adult behaviour?

 

[sihhi]

Note the aggressive forcing of the argument that "that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school" into the mouths of all who think it may tell us something about how privilege works in this country, something she clearly doesn't yet get given the multitude of sins covered up by her odious 'lucky'.

It's a very odd paragraph:

"In the world of inherited wealth and privilege which people like Michael Gove exist to defend, money and class are more important than ideology, and everyone is divided up into warring tribes based roughly on how much money their parents have. It follows that whatever your professed values, if you come from a fortunate background, you must secretly wish to further the interests of the class in which you were born. The idea that nobody can really be a socialist if they were lucky enough to go to a private school is wilful stupidity – and yet, and yet, and yet."

I think LP thinks that Michael Gove is saying something which he isn't saying - Gove wants an atomised declassed society not warring tribes - the bedrock of capitalist firms will mean the rich will stay rich in his free school academy choice and competition meritocratic ideal.

 

[weepiper]

I've been struggling to remember who Malcy Harris reminds me of.

Then it dawned on me it's Artie Ziff from The Simpsons.

uncanny.

 

[butchersapron]

I think LP thinks that Michael Gove is saying something which he isn't saying - Gove wants an atomised declassed society not warring tribes - the bedrock of capitalist firms will mean the rich will stay rich in his free school academy choice and competition meritocratic ideal.

Absolutely, and this is something that really annoys me, the idea that the tories and he faction of capital they represent want some sort of private army mad max society with a very clear outside policed by them to keep those who understand and act on their collective interests at bay - this type of stuff totally misunderstands what they are trying to do - they don't want even a hint of wider collective interests, expressed in whatever fashion. It's a very old-fashioned (and not in the good way) of trying to grasp their motivations and their initiatives - not helpful whoever it's coming from.

 

[el-ahrairah]

That would probably work well as a performance piece. And it's a damn sight better than Amanda Palmer's A Poem for Dzokhar, which is worthy of the great Rik The People's Poet himself:

http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77087877.html

I used to be quite keen on Amanda P. What was I thinking?

holy shit, what the fuck drugs is she doing these days?

 

[sihhi]

The New Statesman where LP is an editor is all over the place on private education.

Hence this kind of lunacy


Another columnist says "Private schools are becoming antisocial enclaves for the super rich" becoming.

I don't think it's too complicated.

For everyone: send your own and encourage others to (and defend) local non-selective schools and the comprehensive approach at all times.
For those of the wrong class: If you were 'born' with a family containing capitalist wealth/elements and went to private school - relinquish all the physical capital: extra land/shares/houses/money for the good of the movement - the 'social capital' will get dissipated in due course as a result, and based on your adult decision to aggressively defend comprehensive education.

What you shouldn't do is :- after having retained your social capital to land a position at the Independent quote positively from your old live-in headmaster at your private boarding school as offering anything sensible to say about curriculum issues:

"Studying the empire is important, because it is an international story, but we have to look at it from the perspective of those who were colonised as well as from the British perspective," said the historian and political biographer Anthony Seldon, who is also Master of Wellington College. "We live in an interconnected world, and one has to balance learning about British history with learning about other cultures."
The ways in which schools and governments structure and promote stories about a country's past, the crimes they conceal and the truths they twist, have a lasting effect on young minds. It is not for nothing that the most fearsome dictators of the 20th century, from Hitler to Chairman Mao, altered their school history curriculums as a matter of national urgency.

Tip to LP (I think still reading this, win all the fame and money you want, but get it right) Anthony Seldon is the person whose distortions of history matter more in the struggle against Gove than Mao's and Hitler's. Hitler's syllabuses ended in 1945 and Mao's ended in 1972 and were comprehensively buried in 1980 with the rehabilitation of Confucius, the liberal Western missionaries and Sun Yat Sen.

What Anthony Seldon has been doing ever since The Heath Government, 1970-1974: A Reappraisal and probably a lot longer is offering Heathist Seldonism alongside revisionist Croslandite Labour as the decent sensible way forward hacked away by a tacit alliance of horrid ultras on both sides. Vicious re-writing and moulding the past for very dangerous purposes (supporting New Labour)


Do you agree Lo Siento. or am I getting it all wrong?

What Seldon is trying to do is rescue British capitalism - securing contracts for British firms in the subcontinent and Africa needs some nuance, subtlety and cultural awareness otherwise the PRC will continue to win.

That's what

We live in an interconnected world, and one has to balance learning about British history with learning about other cultures.

this means

 

[Idris2002]

holy shit, what the fuck drugs is she doing these days?

Laxatives. "And then this house will become a shrine, and all the punks and skins and rastas will gather and say - how can Rik be dead when we still have his poetry?"

 

[Frances Lengel]

holy shit, what the fuck drugs is she doing these days?

You don't know what drugs she's doing.

 

[el-ahrairah]

You don't know what drugs she's doing.

no, i don't. you can tell because i asked what drugs she was doing/

 

[Frances Lengel]

no, i don't. you can tell because i asked what drugs she was doing/

Yeah but....oh, never mind.

 

[el-ahrairah]

oh wait, i get it now. very good

short-term memory not what it was

 

[Blagsta]

Pollution
All around
Sometimes up
And sometimes down
But always
Around

Pollution are you coming to my town
Or am I coming to yours
We're on two different buses pollution
But we're both using petrol!

 

[butchersapron]

...

 

[phildwyer]

Hence this kind of lunacy

I think you've missed the point.

 

[Lo Siento.]

Do you agree Lo Siento. or am I getting it all wrong?

What Seldon is trying to do is rescue British capitalism - securing contracts for British firms in the subcontinent and Africa needs some nuance, subtlety and cultural awareness otherwise the PRC will continue to win.

Not read him, so you're on firmer ground than I am. Wasn't Seldon an enthusiastic Blairite though?

 

[Steel Icarus]

Delroy Booth

http://melissa-fix.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/privileged-problems.html?spref=tw

 

[butchersapron]

Morons - and not morons looking for a collective way out of the various social cleavages that exist, but rather in using them for their own personal leverage.

 

[Steel Icarus]

As I've said before that's my main problem with intersectionality and privilege checking/obsession, it's focusing on what makes us different rather than finding out what we share, descending into one-upmanship and points scoring and navel gazing.

 

[Steel Icarus]

That and the fact it's fuck-all use to most people and designed to be clique-friendly.

 

[J Ed]

What drives me crazy about privilege theory is that privilege theory types seem to think that an idea or an argument put forward by one person can be considered incorrect, but the same idea put forward by someone else who is considered less privileged can be correct.

I've had someone argue one point with me one day, and then take the opposite extreme the next (which I also disagreed with). When I asked why they had done that, they told me it was because they were corrected by someone who was 'less privileged' than me. The whole experience was utterly bewildering since they knew absolutely nothing about my own socioeconomic background and I knew nothing about the person who had corrected the privilege theory type, so I couldn't even try and play oppression olympics with them!

 

[agricola]

Morons - and not morons looking for a collective way out of the various social cleavages that exist, but rather in using them for their own personal leverage.

 

[Favelado]

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed

1min​

I can't stop thinking about that mission to mars. It's a one-way ticket to set up a new colony. Would you take it? I might...

 

[frogwoman]

I was thinking about applying for that

 

[love detective]

On Penny's behalf?

 

[frogwoman]

nah, it was an idea id like half entertained as in "oh it would be quite cool" sort of thing

i might apply on her behalf though

 

[J Ed]

I was thinking about applying for that

It could be a reality TV show or a film or something - Laurie Penny Goes to Mars: In Space No One Can Hear Your Privilege Checking

 

[Favelado]

I was thinking about applying for that

We could have a go at some kind of U75 project where we build a spacecraft ourselves - people always have scrap lying around and they always say the Apollo missions got to the moon on a computer with about 8k of memory. Someone must have a Spectrum in the garage still. We can have a whip-round for petrol or liquid oxygen or whatever fuel you need too. I reckon we could at least get you out of orbit and then you could take it from there - see what happens.

 

[Casually Red]

What drives me crazy about privilege theory is that privilege theory types seem to think that an idea or an argument put forward by one person can be considered incorrect, but the same idea put forward by someone else who is considered less privileged can be correct.

I've had someone argue one point with me one day, and then take the opposite extreme the next (which I also disagreed with). When I asked why they had done that, they told me it was because they were corrected by someone who was 'less privileged' than me. The whole experience was utterly bewildering since they knew absolutely nothing about my own socioeconomic background and I knew nothing about the person who had corrected the privilege theory type, so I couldn't even try and play oppression olympics with them!

as someone who isnt priviliged id like to suggest that anyone who believes in that wanky shite should be kicked around the pavement until they stop coming out with it .