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

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Speaking of Palo Alto, The Onion two days ago.

WASHINGTON—Declaring that every affluent child in America has the right to a well-balanced brunch, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the launch of a $40 million school brunch program aimed at distributing brioche french toast and smoked salmon to the nation’s richest school districts.

“We found that 70 percent of students in wealthy communities were not receiving their recommended allowance of eggs Benedict and fresh-squeezed orange juice,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters Friday. “Quite simply, we believe all children of privilege deserve a proper, well-composed brunch plate with complimentary jalapeno cornbread mini muffins and honey butter on the side. With this new program, we can finally begin to offer the superior culinary experience that until now has been sorely missing in school cafeterias from Greenwich, CT to Palo Alto, CA.”

Department officials said that if its brunch program proves successful, they remain open to the possibility of spending an additional $80 million annually to add live jazz music.
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frogwoman said:
I've put somethign on the blog now if anyone wants to have a look. Bit rushed though and not as in depth as I'd like but I was sick of writing/thinking about these people :D
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I've taken a look but this is way out there crazy -

"I have said before that if these people – the people who present the public face of political protest but in reality do very little except alienate everyone around them – were around in the 1930s the vitality and action they saw in Germany and Italy would lead them to become liberal, bohemian apologists for fascism. Mussolini’s theory about the “proletarian nation” oppressed by other “imperalist” nations would appeal to them, it would make them feel like they were fighting against “oppression”. Not happy with how Italian trade unionists and communists or German Jews are being treated? Well check your privilege as you’re not in the “proletarian nation” and you “need to have your wrongness shown the hell up”! This may sound extreme, but the occupy movement and its jet-setting spawn seem to embody the worst, most reactionary aspects of the left in many ways"

There were no bohemian apologists for Nazism, were there - can you name a single one? Nazism destroyed Communists, bohemians and then independent or SPD minded trade unionists very quickly.
Even with Italy, how are these people like the small number of "liberals" who voted for Mussolini taking exceptional powers in 1922 (helping him ease his election) in 1924?
These people aren't Third World anti-imperialists and they aren't racists - they are middle-class progressives.

There were a few middle-class and/or celebrity leftists in the 1930s in the USA and Britain - people like Prof Haldane - Old Etonian respected scientist becoming a Marxist in 1937 then a CPGBer in 1942 or Harold Laski in Britain or the Dorothy Parkers and Spanish Orphans Fund people in the USA.
The French celebrity types the Malrauxs etc also around in the 1930s. The middle-class progressives in Italy and Germany where either imprisoned or exterminated. The parallel is wrong.
 
sihhi said:
I've taken a look but this is way out there crazy -

"I have said before that if these people – the people who present the public face of political protest but in reality do very little except alienate everyone around them – were around in the 1930s the vitality and action they saw in Germany and Italy would lead them to become liberal, bohemian apologists for fascism. Mussolini’s theory about the “proletarian nation” oppressed by other “imperalist” nations would appeal to them, it would make them feel like they were fighting against “oppression”. Not happy with how Italian trade unionists and communists or German Jews are being treated? Well check your privilege as you’re not in the “proletarian nation” and you “need to have your wrongness shown the hell up”! This may sound extreme, but the occupy movement and its jet-setting spawn seem to embody the worst, most reactionary aspects of the left in many ways"

There were no bohemian apologists for Nazism, were there - can you name a single one? Nazism destroyed Communists, bohemians and then independent or SPD minded trade unionists very quickly.
Even with Italy, how are these people like the small number of "liberals" who voted for Mussolini taking exceptional powers in 1922 (helping him ease his election) in 1924?
These people aren't Third World anti-imperialists and they aren't racists - they are middle-class progressives.

There were a few middle-class and/or celebrity leftists in the 1930s in the USA and Britain - people like Prof Haldane - Old Etonian respected scientist becoming a Marxist in 1937 then a CPGBer in 1942 or Harold Laski in Britain or the Dorothy Parkers and Spanish Orphans Fund people in the USA.
The French celebrity types the Malrauxs etc also around in the 1930s. The middle-class progressives in Italy and Germany where either imprisoned or exterminated. The parallel is wrong.
Click to expand...

Wasn't Wyndham Lewis Unsound on the Blackshirts, even if not an outright Hitler fan?

Then there's this Orwell quote:

The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted un-thinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that. Still more unfortunately, it includes—-so much so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of—-the kind of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat. The ordinary decent person, who is in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means business. Worse, he is driven to the cynical conclusion that Socialism is a kind of doom which is probably coming but must be staved off as long as possible. Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or disagreeable person. ‘Socialism’ is pictured as a state of affairs in which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does great harm to the cause. The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.
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The non-underlined bit in bold italics (my emphasis) sounds like the sort of thing Frogwoman's talking about.

Also in Jessica Mitford's memoirs, she quotes some public school boy friend of her first husband who starts out interested in Fascism and Communism alike, and only shuns the coloured shirt after being physically ejected from a BUF meeting.
 
sihhi said:
I've taken a look but this is way out there crazy -

"I have said before that if these people – the people who present the public face of political protest but in reality do very little except alienate everyone around them – were around in the 1930s the vitality and action they saw in Germany and Italy would lead them to become liberal, bohemian apologists for fascism. Mussolini’s theory about the “proletarian nation” oppressed by other “imperalist” nations would appeal to them, it would make them feel like they were fighting against “oppression”. Not happy with how Italian trade unionists and communists or German Jews are being treated? Well check your privilege as you’re not in the “proletarian nation” and you “need to have your wrongness shown the hell up”! This may sound extreme, but the occupy movement and its jet-setting spawn seem to embody the worst, most reactionary aspects of the left in many ways"

There were no bohemian apologists for Nazism, were there - can you name a single one? Nazism destroyed Communists, bohemians and then independent or SPD minded trade unionists very quickly.
Even with Italy, how are these people like the small number of "liberals" who voted for Mussolini taking exceptional powers in 1922 (helping him ease his election) in 1924?
These people aren't Third World anti-imperialists and they aren't racists - they are middle-class progressives.

There were a few middle-class and/or celebrity leftists in the 1930s in the USA and Britain - people like Prof Haldane - Old Etonian respected scientist becoming a Marxist in 1937 then a CPGBer in 1942 or Harold Laski in Britain or the Dorothy Parkers and Spanish Orphans Fund people in the USA.
The French celebrity types the Malrauxs etc also around in the 1930s. The middle-class progressives in Italy and Germany where either imprisoned or exterminated. The parallel is wrong.
Click to expand...

I dunno I could imagine Malcolm Harris types digging futurism and from there into fascism. L
 
The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight.
Click to expand...

About offering things to people too passive to do anything for themselves - whether Orwell's socialism or Left Book Club socialism.
The CPGB changes things anyway. We're in a time where there is no such pole of obvious attraction - "a mass workers' party" and trade union movement is thoroughly incorporated. Had they been around at the time they might well have been CPGBers or Labour Party or something but not fascists.

Idris2002 said:
Also in Jessica Mitford's memoirs, she quotes some public school boy friend of her first husband who starts out interested in Fascism and Communism alike, and only shuns the coloured shirt after being physically ejected from a BUF meeting.
Click to expand...

But this isn't frogwoman's parallel in the blog post. There were upper class BUFers sure - but what's that do with the middle-class progressives fw is talking about?
 
sihhi said:
About offering things to people too passive to do anything for themselves - whether Orwell's socialism or Left Book Club socialism.
The CPGB changes things anyway. We're in a time where there is no such pole of obvious attraction - "a mass workers' party" and trade union movement is thoroughly incorporated. Had they been around at the time they might well have been CPGBers or Labour Party or something but not fascists.



But this isn't frogwoman's parallel in the blog post. There were upper class BUFers sure - but what's that do with the middle-class progressives fw is talking about?
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Aren't Penny and her ilk more akin to a modern version of that public-school layer Mitford was referring to, than to middle-class progressives?
 
Idris2002 said:
Wasn't Wyndham Lewis Unsound on the Blackshirts, even if not an outright Hitler fan?

Then there's this Orwell quote:


The non-underlined bit in bold italics (my emphasis) sounds like the sort of thing Frogwoman's talking about.

Also in Jessica Mitford's memoirs, she quotes some public school boy friend of her first husband who starts out interested in Fascism and Communism alike, and only shuns the coloured shirt after being physically ejected from a BUF meeting.
Click to expand...

sihhi i was thinking about this sort of thing and some of the middle/upper class supporters of the blackshirts many of whom were journalists and were attracted by some of the successes of fascism for example in this documentary:



and how they originally came from that sort of background.

I'll change it though if I've got it wrong. Sorry.
 
On Wyndham Lewis:
A complex affair: the critical understatement is finely judged, because complex affairs are invariably those that tend to get simplified, especially when emotions run high. In the case of Wyndham Lewis’s politics, the process has been particularly straightforward because, self-evidently, the situation is unambiguous and the important details are well-known and provocative. Early in 1931 Lewis published a series of articles in Time and Tide in which – following a brief visit to Berlin in November 1930 – he set out to understand the workings of the National Socialist party in Germany and, in particular, the political philosophy of its leader, Adolf Hitler. The book from which the articles were extracted, called simply Hitler, described its subject as ‘a man of peace’ and dismissed the judenfräge as ‘a racial redherring’.http://www.urban75.net/forums/#_edn1 When it was followed by two ‘peace-pamphlets’, Left Wings Over Europe (1936) and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! (1937), together with an article in the inaugural issue of the relaunched British Union Quarterly, Lewis’s reputation as a fascist, ‘protofascist’, or fascist sympathiser, was sealed.[ii] His future status as the great pantomime villain of critical discourse, the Emperor Dalek of Modernism, was assured. The broad scope and substance of his political writings – D.G. Bridson counts fourteen books [iii] – has scarcely been allowed to trouble this easy caricature, and any possibility that the finer details of his ‘bad’ books might reveal something other than crass Hitlerian sympathies continues to be unthinkable.

http://www.urban75.net/forums/#_ednref1 Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), p. 32, p. 44, p.43. Hereafter H. Lewis also uses the ‘Man of Peace’ phrase as a chapter heading.
[ii] Wyndham Lewis, Left Wings Over Europe: or, How to Make a War About Nothing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936); Wyndham Lewis, Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! or A New War in the Making (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937); Wyndham Lewis, ‘“Left Wings” and the C3 Mind’, in The British Union Quarterly, 1 (January-April 1937), pp. 22-34. Hereafter LWE, CYD and LWC. The ‘protofascist’ reading of Lewis’s inter-war politics originates in Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 14-15. Hereafter FA.
[iii] D.G. Bridson, The Filibuster: A Study of the Political Ideas of Wyndham Lewis (London: Cassell, 1972), p. 3. Hereafter F. Bridson’s inventory runs from The Lion and the Fox (1927, but written before 1926’s The Art of Being Ruled) to Rotting Hill (1951). His tally only relates, of course, to the ‘primarily political works’ in the canon of Lewis’s literary output. It does not include the ‘political sidelights’ in his other written work (notably novels such as The Revenge for Love (1937) and The Vulgar Streak (1941)), or – for that matter – in his visual artwork.
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"Emperor Dalek of Modernism" - brilliant.

http://www.academia.edu/1169080/In_His_Bad_Books_Wyndham_Lewis_and_Fascism
 
I like how in 'The Eagle Has Landed' the only collab person is an embittered saffa widow who still hasn't forgiven the british for the boer war.

Why don't they make good war films anymore.
 
DotCommunist said:
well mr. proffesor perhaps you can source a thing of ungooglable confusion for me. I once read aristo hitler lovers from britain referred to as 'junker allies'


any idea wtf that is about.
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Ah, I think what this refers to is Hitler's overestimation of the political influence of the layer of the UK landed gentry that (for example) the Mitford sisters' came from, and whom Adolf thought he could cultivate as part of the pro-appeasement faction in UK politics. After Lloyd George's reforms to the House of Lords in early 1910s, that influence was heavily diluted. It certainly wasn't equivalent to the power of Prussian Junker nobility, who had remained a force in Germany even after the creation of the Weimar republic. In fact their continuing power was one reason why Weimar went up in smoke in the end (though butchersapron can tell you more about that, I reckon).

The Junkers still controlled large areas of agricultural land in what is now the former GDR and Poland - and unlike in UK where the agrarian question had been settled via enclosures and clearances in the 18th and 19th century, they still held sway over a large (and potentially disgruntled) peasantry. Hence their social and political position was not strictly analogous to that of, for example, Diana and Unity Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale.

The grown-ups thing was just a throwaway dig, disregard it if you like.

Oh, and I'm not actually a professor.
 
DotCommunist said:
well mr. proffesor perhaps you can source a thing of ungooglable confusion for me. I once read aristo hitler lovers from britain referred to as 'junker allies'


any idea wtf that is about.
Click to expand...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker

Junker was the term for Prussian Aristocracy before WWII. Their land was redistributed by the Communists. Hitler didn't love the junkers as such though, he pretty much ignored them.
 
I would also argue that making creepy remarks like "keeping your daughters off the cam is like keeping them off the pole" and quoting approvingly from Hakim Bey and the like is pretty much the exact opposite of progressive.
 
Idris2002 said:
Ah, I think what this refers to is Hitler's overestimation of the political influence of the layer of the UK landed gentry that (for example) the Mitford sisters' came from, and whom Adolf thought he could cultivate as part of the pro-appeasement faction in UK politics. After Lloyd George's reforms to the House of Lords in early 1910s, that influence was heavily diluted. It certainly wasn't equivalent to the power of Prussian Junker nobility, who had remained a force in Germany even after the creation of the Weimar republic. In fact their continuing power was one reason why Weimar went up in smoke in the end (though butchersapron can tell you more about that, I reckon).

The Junkers still controlled large areas of agricultural land in what is now the former GDR and Poland - and unlike in UK where the agrarian question had been settled via enclosures and clearances in the 18th and 19th century, they still held sway over a large (and potentially disgruntled) peasantry. Hence their social and political position was not strictly analogous to that of, for example, Diana and Unity Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale.

The grown-ups thing was just a throwaway dig, disregard it if you like.

Oh, and I'm not actually a professor.
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oh I knew that, wasn't getting the hump prof

cheers for the explanation though, its fucking infuriating in the age of google to not be able to hunt down half remembered stuff and fit meaning to it.
 
Actually, reading some more of that Wyndham Lewis essay, his various bloviations on matters politically don't sound that different in their inanity to the wibblings of this "Malcolm Harris".

Though to give sihhi his due, Lewis wasn't exactly representative of the bohemian intelligentsia of the time.
 
Yeah. There was someone else I'm thinking of, a middle class communist supporter turned fash in the 30s, name completely escapes me though.
 
Idris2002 said:
Actually, reading some more of that Wyndham Lewis essay, his various bloviations on matters politically don't sound that different in their inanity to the wibblings of this "Malcolm Harris".

Though to give sihhi his due, Lewis wasn't exactly representative of the bohemian intelligentsia of the time.
Click to expand...

Yeah I think Sihhi is right in some ways and I was probably exaggerating a bit, I don't actually recall the names of the people in the documentary but one guy IIRC talks about his mum who started off a liberal journalist and ended up like that, actually moving to germany if i remember right.
 
To be fair to her has LP publically disassociated herself from Harris? have any of them?or were they not aware of what he was saying?
 
Idris2002 said:
Wasn't Wyndham Lewis Unsound on the Blackshirts, even if not an outright Hitler fan?

Then there's this Orwell quote:
Click to expand...

That is absolutely spot on.

Malcolm Harris should have that quote tattooed on prominent parts of his person.

He strikes me as exactly the sort of upper-middle-class self-declared progressive who, with his ignorance and barely concealed dislike/fear of the working classes, would easily make the leap from self-serving faux-radicalism to some form of authoritarian rightism, as long as he didn't think it would impinge on the freedom of his immediate group to continue their "literary" circle-jerking.
 
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