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

[DrRingDing]

So the system working relies on a cadre of trained facilitators to make it work?

Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.

 

[Random]

Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.

Managed fairness. Engineered fairness. And these facilitators' skill sets just happen to be the things that middle and upper class people are good at...

 

[Casually Red]

Dont mean to be pessimistic but the more of this stuff i read the more i start to think the methodology used is academic . Theres far far too many wankers out there embedded in or attracted to these left wing groups to permit me to have a shred of confidence, much less interest in, whatever decision or plan it is they eventually arrive at as a result of all their jazz handing and white man hating .
I can just imagine my factory colleagues reactions to this stuff if they were ever confronted with it . Its pitiful .
i dont mean to tar everyone on the left with that brush but the ships way too top heavy with self hating arseholes to go anywhere

 

[butchersapron]

Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.

...and all the people who turned up, saw this and thought, nah and just walked away

 

[Casually Red]

Knowing a handful of hand signals isn't a big ask to go over at a start of a meeting for the order, fairness and lack of stress it gives.

it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .

 

[Treacle Toes]

it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people .

Normal people? Seriously?

 

[J Ed]

it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .

Exactly.

It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness

 

[DrRingDing]

it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .

How does the meetings you attend organise....and more importantly how does it make you look?

 

[Treacle Toes]

Exactly.

It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness

Wow. How many here have actually attended any style of large group meeting that has used hand signals?

Cult like? Seriously, lots of people only use the raising of hand signal anyway...hardly WACO in the making.

 

[Casually Red]

Exactly.

It's almost as if these groups are using these cult-like theatre school mannerisms to filter out people with any sense of self-awareness

spot on

if youd so little self respect to go along with that shit youd go along with anything . I dont need a psychology degree to figure that out . But chances are the cunts who came up with it have one .

 

[Random]

By all means, groups can decide to use hand signals. But an open group that's supposed to be democratic should place the least possible restrictions on people who want to get involved, rather than just assuming they want all this organisational baggage.

 

[butchersapron]

Wow. How many here have actually attended any style of large group meeting that has used hand signals?

None i bet. Not a one

 

[DrRingDing]

...and all the people who turned up, saw this and thought, nah and just walked away

So, what's your.....

.....proposal then?

 

[sihhi]

yeah how can anyone who's a feminist think that's ok?

*You've just committed some patriarchal chauvinism and a little racism, frogwoman.*

Remember WoC privilege theory anti-racists have already explained, you ought to have "curb[ed] your compulsion to police the feminist expressions of a WoC" [Beyonce], since this policing can be "slightly less benevolent" namely "patriarchal and a little racist" instead you should "have a seat" ie be silent and consider who to discuss on the basis of their skin colour not their sexist and capitalist actions.

You can have privilege without power! Fight all oppression!

 

[DotCommunist]

it discriminates against the arthritic who won't be able to throw shapes as quick as others and will there fore be alienated or as it shall henceforth be known 'destacked'

 

[DrRingDing]

it discriminates against the arthritic who won't be able to throw shapes as quick as others and will there fore be alienated or as it shall henceforth be known 'destacked'

I think Laurie Penny's got a Workers Girder article in that.

 

[Idris2002]

Just to chip in my two cents' worth.

This "anti-jazz hands" thing for expressing disagreement with (I presume?) a speaker: it seems to me to be a very passive-aggressive means of channelling the kinds of disputes and disagreements that inevitably happen in any human gathering into a form that can't really allow the person disagreeing to really register that disagreement with any real force.

I mean, look at the kind of criticisms sihhi and frogwoman just made of those Beyonce lyrics. Some obscure hand signals would hardly substitute for that kind of thing.

 

[Random]

it discriminates against the arthritic who won't be able to throw shapes as quick as others and will there fore be alienated or as it shall henceforth be known 'destacked'

"Comrade Rykov was not seen at the annual Central Working Group ceilidh last night. Sources close to the CeWoG say that he may have been destacked for his dissenting views."

 

[SpineyNorman]

If you look people have been equatting hand signals with progessive stacks as mentioned more than once.

Not really, though both make the group appear like a cult to the causal observer.

 

[Idris2002]

it makes everyone look like a bunch of complete wankers It is completely offputting for normal people . Can you grasp that .

Feast your eyes:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/types-of-hipster-you-encounter-in-london

 

[Casually Red]

Normal people? Seriously?

yes, normal people . Normal people dont go around doing this shit . They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male, and they dont signal their approval like the chorus line from the black and white fucking minstrels .

 

[Thora]

I went to some meetings at the Bristol anarchist bookfair recently and realised I must be getting old, because I was dressed like a normal person and irritated by the smell

 

[chilango]

That was it, and a phrase in the article sums up exactly what I was talking about "there was also a group of about 200 people who we didn’t have facilitators for". Oh noes! We didn't have facilitators for them! So many of the anrchoid events around that time were inspired by raves and other events and unfortunately often had a similar producer/consumer divide. The producers would organise the fun games, the public would turn up and participate.

I was also there at the Sheffield event that they say was an inspiration. That was based on several tiny groups who all knew each otehr and who all made on the spot decisions. It was what chilango wants, i suppose. But then in the heaving industrial metropolis of Manchester on May 1st, the same model didn't work.

People turned up and there wasn't enough facilitators for them! I was one of those excess people, and we were fairly successful as a 200 strong crowd. People have to know ways of organising as a large crowd, instead of just backing away and deciding it's not your thing.

Yeah.

I think it was at that crux where people were wanting to move away from the conspiratorial path that the direct action scene was being pushed down post Newbury and into something more based upon mass participation, but still heavily influenced by idea of the "action". Challenge Anarchy was a good example of how the two didn't always make a neat match. It did work on a number of occasions the big M41 RTS being a good example.

FWIW I don't recall any mention of the Sheffield thing in the planning meetings, but I could easily have missed that. My idea was even worse for the record. But I'll claim responsibility for the poster/logo...

It was a key time for EF! Et al in trying to figure out where to go next. Underground with the ELF, summit hopping, annual spectaculars, community organising etc. we're all in the mix and whilst some of the more obvious pitfalls were avoided the movement did start to wither pretty quickly with it's loss of direction.

You can see its influence on occupy and so on though, but they seem to have taken some of the weaknesses as a starting point (the mass happening, and the whole consensus,hand signal thing being discussed here too).

But, yet again, I'm digressing, we need some hand signal emotes to shut me up...

 

[sihhi]

Another point: what's to stop white middle-class activists successfully channeling and employing their 'social capital' resources to bulk up on privilege theory and how best to progressive stack (without it becoming oppression olympics) and facilitating manners so they can teach others below them how it should be done? Couldn't this skew the noble intent?

• Isn't there a danger that the privilege theorising can turn into something of a game as to who is better at having checked their privilege?

• Won't at least some of the 'minorities' (immigrants, disabled people and women though equals are marginalised under capitalism) feel like they are being used as a football by others? Isn't this a possibility at all?

 

[ViolentPanda]

The background to all this of course is that the reason these groups have to theorize participation in this way is precisely because they aren't predominantly led by the marginalized. Groups that coalesce around ideas rather than shared experience are inevitably going to be cross-class, and for a variety of reasons will tend towards dominance by the people who are more dominant in society as a whole. There's a reason why the Quakers are cited as the model here (religion is also a question of ideals that can be held by anyone), and not any other of the variety of forms of working-class direct democracy that have emerged over the past 2 centuries.

Since working-class democratic assemblies are based on the experience of marginalization, firstly the need for re-ordering everyone's privilege is less of an issue and secondly, the organic emergence of group leaders from within the marginalized group is not necessarily a bad thing (certainly not in the same way that middle class domination of socialist and protest groups is). That's why the Quakers are the example and not say trade union democracy or revolutionary democracy, both of which are generally variations of the elected chair/small assembly/vote by show of hands or ballot /mandated delegates model.

The whole thing just seems like yet another way of dealing with a fundamental contradiction. If you're middle class you should be peripheral in any important social movement, but no-one likes to be peripheral to something they feel strongly about. So you invent a way to make yourself central by being the guardian of the "inclusivity" rules.

I'd like to stick a spikey fist up the arse of their inclusivity rules, the pathetic bastards.

 

[Treacle Toes]

yes, normal people . Normal people dont go around doing this shit . They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male, and they dont signal their approval like the chorus line from the black and white fucking minstrels .

Eh? Normal people don't use hand signals? Normal people don't raise their hands, clap, wave, thumbs up etc?

What has this particular set of hand signals got to do with 'They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male....'

 

[Casually Red]

Feast your eyes:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/types-of-hipster-you-encounter-in-london

jesus i hate hipsters

 

[frogwoman]

*You've just committed some patriarchal chauvinism and a little racism, frogwoman.*

Remember WoC privilege theory anti-racists have already explained, you ought to have "curb[ed] your compulsion to police the feminist expressions of a WoC" [Beyonce], since this policing can be "slightly less benevolent" namely "patriarchal and a little racist" instead you should "have a seat" ie be silent and consider who to discuss on the basis of their skin colour not their sexist and capitalist actions.

You can have privilege without power! Fight all oppression!

Somebody who's earning billions of pounds isn't allowed to have their privilege checked because they're black, great

 

[chilango]

Another point: what's to stop white middle-class activists successfully channeling and employing their 'social capital' resources to bulk up on privilege theory and how best to progressive stack (without it becoming oppression olympics) and facilitating manners so they can teach others below them how it should be done? Couldn't this skew the noble intent?

• Isn't there a danger that the privilege theorising can turn into something of a game as to who is better at having checked their privilege?

• Won't at least some of the 'minorities' (immigrants, disabled people and women though equals are marginalised under capitalism) feel like they are being used as a football by others? Isn't this a possibility at all?

...and again,the purpose of meeting needs consideration.

Is it a discussion/talking shop? Is it organisational? Internal? External? Surely the relevance of what a speaker has to say to the goal of meeting should be taken into account.

I'm often quiet in meetings where I haven't anything constructive to add or lack the knowledge/experience to make a useful point. What's the point in shutting more relevant speakers up to force me to say " yeah, er, well, dunno really"?

 

[chilango]

Eh? Normal people don't use hand signals? Normal people don't raise their hands, clap, wave, thumbs up etc?

What has this particular set of hand signals got to do with 'They dont hate themselves because theyre white and male....'

So people already have a set of commonly understood hand signals? Why not just stick with them then?