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

[Buckaroo]

I feel a bit conscious of just posting it on this forum because I don't want to make it too easy to match things up to my identity. I'm not exactly anonymous on here or my blog or my Twitter feed etc but they all contain... different aspects of me I guess? When I finish the blog post I'll probably link to it on Twitter and PM it people etc. I know I sound really paranoid/dodgy for no reason but it would make my life difficult if certain people married up my various internet profiles to who I am.

For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Have you a disability?

I reckon I can self-define - suffered from depression so that ought to do it. Though I might use my status as a recovering heroin addict to self-define, just to see confused fear on the faces of intersectionalists who aren't convinced that's a legitimate disability

 

[SpineyNorman]

Spiney you should run on a Proletarian Democracy ticket

That's actually not such a bad idea - did you see how popular the inanimate carbon rod was? And he nicked our idea - the workers bomb. I might run on a platform of support for the workers bomb and opposition to plagiarism in student election campaigns!

 

[SpineyNorman]

For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.

Young woman, you big misogynist you

 

[Buckaroo]

Young woman, you big misogynist you

Oops apologies!

 

[muscovyduck]

For a seventeen year old you're an articulate and accomplished young man. Blogs and Twitter feeds and the rest coming out of your arse. Well done. Keep it up.

Look I'm not going to lie it's not a very good blog, and as most of you probably noticed my Twitter feed isn't exactly revolutionary. My blog was set up just as a place to put things really, I don't update it consistently, but it's better to have something than nothing. As posts stack up, followers and hits do, motivation goes up, quality goes up, themes will be established, and so on. I've been blogging since I was about 13 but I had the habit of just deleting and starting from scratch, so I know that doesn't work. My hope is that it'll get better over time. This post will be the first serious one in a while, and it'll take the longest time to research and to collect sources. That means any subsequent posts will seem easier than I would've found them beforehand.

Anyway yeah. WOMAN.

 

[J Ed]

That's actually not such a bad idea - did you see how popular the inanimate carbon rod was? And he nicked our idea - the workers bomb. I might run on a platform of support for the workers bomb and opposition to plagiarism in student election campaigns!

I was just thinking about this a bit more when I was supposed to be doing work, unlike most stoodent politicans I think you could do a lot of good. There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't link up the Unite Community Union with the Student Union, there are a lot of people who are political that would be happy to help out and the SU already has a decent base of mostly non-political volunteers who would be happy to do some good works in Sheffield if they didn't appear to be heavily political.

When discussion on food banks came up before you said you were thinking about developing something in Barnsley, but there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't do the same at the SU. There are already plans to set up a food collection point for one of the Trussel Trust food banks but how much better would it be if there was something independent of the Tories' trojan horse' charities!

 

[SpineyNorman]

I was just thinking about this a bit more when I was supposed to be doing work, unlike most stoodent politicans I think you could do a lot of good. There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't link up the Unite Community Union with the Student Union, there are a lot of people who are political that would be happy to help out and the SU already has a decent base of mostly non-political volunteers who would be happy to do some good works in Sheffield if they didn't appear to be heavily political.

When discussion on food banks came up before you said you were thinking about developing something in Barnsley, but there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't do the same at the SU. There are already plans to set up a food collection point for one of the Trussel Trust food banks but how much better would it be if there was something independent of the Tories' trojan horse' charities!

That's a good idea - I was also thinking about seeing what could be done to open up university facilities for local kids to use - sports stuff but maybe other stuff too - maybe linking it with the various leisure orientated societies to see if they can lead sessions (you know, football training, stuff like that).

Definitely worth some serious thought is that.

 

[fractionMan]

That's a good idea - I was also thinking about seeing what could be done to open up university facilities for local kids to use - sports stuff but maybe other stuff too - maybe linking it with the various leisure orientated societies to see if they can lead sessions (you know, football training, stuff like that).

Definitely worth some serious thought is that.

bath uni already do this - run football etc

 

[muscovyduck]

That's a good idea - I was also thinking about seeing what could be done to open up university facilities for local kids to use - sports stuff but maybe other stuff too - maybe linking it with the various leisure orientated societies to see if they can lead sessions (you know, football training, stuff like that).

Definitely worth some serious thought is that.

Oh hold on there was a campaign around here years ago to open school facilities to the public on weekends and holdays. Might be related to Every Child Matters? I was really young and can't remember it well. But at least there is/was stuff out there that might be worth linking up with.

 

[SpineyNorman]

bath uni already do this - run football etc

Yeah that's the kind of thing I'm thinking of - but also maybe other stuff too for kids who aren't sporty (I wasn't as a kid). There must be all kinds of interesting stuff you could do for kids with the kind of facilities there are at a place like Sheffield Uni. There's a fucking cinema in the student union. Then there's stuff like astronomy - I'd have jumped at the chance to have a go at that with people who know what they're doing and all the right equipment.

I think the IWCA in Oxford arranged something similar with sports facilities - I might go and start a thread about it when I've got time to find out what people know about these kinds of schemes - they may even be doing some of it at Sheffield already, I don't know. Cos even if I don't go for SU president there's no reason why I shouldn't start a campaign around this kind of stuff - really make a difference to a lot of working class kids and it's the kind of thing that you could get non-lefty types to support and help with too. And as Unite Community grows (it's started to already with the bedroom tax stuff) a link between that and the SU could provide us with the contacts we need to actually make sure people in these communities know about it and think it's 'for them' rather than being some kind of worthy student charity case type thing.

Definitely beats the usual student politics anyway - and could be a way of breaking some of the better students out of the bubble and building real links and a sense of shared interests, bonds of solidarity etc with ordinary people in the communities that surround them (sorry for the wanky language but I can't think of a better way of putting it).

I would also be very fucking funny seeing an intersectionalist lead a bunch of kids from Parson's Cross in an under-16s footy training session

 

[butchersapron]

Intersectionalism is for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.

 

[J Ed]

I've spent a bit of time at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and when I was there I thought to myself how much better integrated the university and the surrounding community were there than Sheffield in spite of the class divide which is weird because you'd think that it would be the other way around. To take one example, lots of people I met there volunteered there in schools with working-class, mostly Hispanic kids to help them with university applications and so on. A bit of that goes on here through departmental initatives but nothing like on the scale there.

I think if the SU were to head in that sort of direction it might help restore my faith in humanity a bit

 

[SpineyNorman]

Intersectionalism is for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.

Is that a reply to my post? If so I don't understand

 

[butchersapron]

Is that a reply to my post? If so I don't understand

Of course it isn't.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Of course it isn't.

Ah, just read it again - I didn't see the 'is' so I read it as, 'Intersectionalism for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.' - thought maybe you were making a cryptic point about my ideas being somehow analogous to intersectionality or something.

Apologies - as you were

 

[butchersapron]

Ah, just read it again - I didn't see the 'is' so I read it as, 'Intersectionalism for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.' - thought maybe you were making a cryptic point or something.

Apologies - as you were

Trust me norm. Just trust.

 

[Pickman's model]

Is that a reply to my post? If so I don't understand

oh dear

 

[SpineyNorman]

oh dear

Head up arse moment. Let us never speak of this again!

 

[sihhi]

Multi-layers of intersectionality.

Has the circle reached the point of no return?

A sample safer spaces protocol in a student occupation in Glasgow Jan-Feb 2011 I think

One from a US radical anti-sexual chauvinism/'queer liberation' action and social centre

Is this too harsh?/ Almost like heading towards ... ?
So many spokes they're coming off the damn wheels - the only way for anyone to actually improve the collective human condition with an analysis like this is to rely on individual charity/mobility from people privileged in one sphere to assist someone non-privileged in another sphere who might be able to assist someone else non-privileged in another sphere. All the while everyone checking their privilege and others' privilege ("It is everyone's responsibility to challenge prejudice") once every 2-3 minutes when not talking, but doing so at a rate of a dozen or so checks every minute whilst they themselves are talking. So that they don't make any assumptions or tough assertions about anyone which might mean infringing the growing pockets of safe spaces that are slowly, steadily going to envelop the world as radicals occupy from the octopus.

 

[Hocus Eye.]

Can someone summarise this thread please?

Yes, it goes: fight, fight, fight, fight.

 

[sihhi]

Intersectionalism is for career minded people who ain't integrated/deny integration. Heavy emphasis on the latter.

Here's my response:

Note the Vibe Watchers in pink arm bands in the second safer spaces chart - who are taking part in the banner making or benefit night etc but also controlling the emotional atmosphere so no one is upset emotionally scarred. Presumably there will be a meeting with a progressive stack to determine who steps up and steps back in taking on these kinds of roles and in the meetings to determine who should or shouldn't be suitable for that role.

That's not tokenism or waffle - a Vibe Watcher would have helped out Ashok 'honky feminists' Kumar's problems at the feminist fightback party in Tower Hamlets.
The Vibe Watcher would have made the policy clear on who chooses the music in a non-offensive manner, having bits of your favourite genre called misogynistic is a big blow if you are an immigrant. But what intersection would they represent? - ideally a (working-class, lesbian or bisexual, intensively (British) colonized origins:[Bangladesh OK, Tibet not], with irregular immigration papers, medium colour to be equidistant between dark Asian and white (although what happens with use of skin colour-softening over the years) Asian woman to sort out all the issues and keep the space safe for all.

It was clearly not safe for this guy so much so that he had to insinuate to 1,200 others that these women were racists whilst calling them "honkey feminists", although today we see that it was - at heart - just a form of acceptable psychotherapy from his particular intersection.

there are about a million comments on this thread and there's no point going back and forth about the night's events cuz we'll prolly never agree. its cool that you all recognize the systemic racism in our political culture and want to do stuff about it, the point of the post was to: try to point out some of the racism i found in the white left, to highlight some of my thoughts from the night regarding generalizing about hip hop and misogyny but mostly, ill admit for me, it was using facebook as a form of psychotherapy, and it's refreshing to see so many down comments from my honkey comrades, let's end it at that

A problem given that this person uses public insinuations of racism as a form of psychotherapy is the mental disability intersection surely there should have been at least a partially mentally disabled Vibe Watcher?

I think broadly, these middle-class immigrants make it difficult for working-class immigrants to talk about class-based relations both in their origin and destination society.

Perhaps this is too presumptive, but middle-class immigrants nearly often set 'the immigrant agenda'. I don't know too much about all immigration but a bit on Turkish Kurdish Iranian Cypriot and just reading on the others.
To grossly generalise about this middle-class stamped and formed 'immigrant agenda', it is based around trying to prove to host society that the same (class) contours of society will be imposed upon the migrated society. And that affiliation or identification with overseas working-class people, your relatives back home - will only be in terms of sending them money.
So the agenda is equal representation in the structures of capitalist society: business, judges, parliaments and teaching staff. And to speed/smooth this passage positive action in the form of business grants, early promotion of black councillors to prospective MPs, black mentoring and pupillage schemes for the professions to be funded by the state or self-created.
Basically (better or worse) forms of affirmative action from the state, alongside building up social capital on a self-help basis - often in the long-term to help achieve those changes in affirmative action (more spending power in the immigrant business, better qualifications).

It's often there in the formal aswell as informal networks. The restaurant owners fund the Saturday schools, the philanthropic organisations asking the government for help to train up a new cadre of community liaison and youth work to cut down on estrangement or total separation, Gurdwara foundations, Chinese Associations, the overseas PNP and Congress branches of an earlier era, even the ostensibly progressive organisations the IWAs and Stalinoid cultural left.
(However much the rhetoric for back home Kurdistan, Tamil Eelam, Turkish M-L or Iranian M-Ls is guerilla action, for here it is strictly stagist, hence dominated by the culturally left middle-class immigrant layer)

It's not all bad - not all of the middle-class feminist agenda is bad: 50/50 boardrooms would eventually bring tangible improvements, grants for women to sort out their childcare whilst they work would be better than what we've got now, new laws against forced marriages are a sensible thing etc.

But we shouldn't let the middle-class immigrant account - 'immigrants have been held back from doing well because they are playing catch up to indigenous people' (note: the race will go on being run) - merge with justifiable indignation at the real instances of overt racism [employers straight away ignoring foreign names on CVs, the swearing at burqas, the night-time post-shift racial attacks, police profiling/swamping of black gang areas first, anti-Muslim newspaper headlines] alongside ongoing misunderstandings or misperceptions of different cultures (people seeing rap music as demeaning towards black women) etc to produce a hyper form of immigrant liberation, which this 'honky' business seems to be about.

This hyper anti-racism is the opposite of sober analysis of society's economic make-up. Let's be clear: the reason why 'unemployment amongst immigrants' is rising 'at a quicker rate than whites', why working-class immigrants aren't breaking through the glass ceiling etc is not increasing levels of racism imprinted on a coloniser 'pig' mindset etched into the British DNA for 500 years ever since Cabot left Bristol.
It is the results of capitalists tightening up their capitalist system with austerity and neoliberalism, working-class immigrants (alongside the rest of the w/c) experience the consequences.

Since the ratio of middle-class to working-class is lower for most immigrant groups this can be seen - on the surface - as tightening up of race war heading to the old days, sus is back, apartheid is returning. These things are inevitable police consequences of economic trends which can be fought effectively by economic power, combined working-class or independent trade union and community power - ie some form of united action.

They can be fought delusionally in terms of 'separate' black action overthrowing white power - leading to fear, mutual suspicion, clampdown and restriction for the immigrant working-class. Not blaming the French actions of 2005 and 2007 or the ones here in 2011 they are inevitable - wholly inevitable - given the society we have. I can only understand antagonising 'honkey feminists' as part of this delusional - almost fantasy struggle.

Race-based battles for funding or trading insults will never be to the advantage of immigrant working-class - these battles will fragment and split along new chauvinist lines (but the class dynamic will remain), even if the immigrant society becomes as 'successful' as the host society overall.

 

[butchersapron]

*

 

[frogwoman]

A platform of intersectionality? really? really?

have i read this right or are people trying to get elected on the basis of what race they are - oh, sorry "identify as" because they might not even be that race??

Peoples experience of racism etc might help them help others in the same position, but to be honest i doubt the people standing on these platforms trying to be elected have experienced much racism or other hardship at all. If they did they would understand that its not a game of "oppression bingo" and neither do you get over it by "managing tensions" (have you ever heard of a more revolting phrase to basically fob people off over the presence of far-right activists), its a very serious problem and it has to be fought politically not by boasting about how oppressed they are.

I can understand the idea of having safe spaces but surely that's just the idea of being respectful of people, and from my brief foray's into this weird "intersectional" world a lot of people within it are very very far from being respectful of anyone from outside that milieu.

 

[cesare]

butchersapron Did you say a few pages back that you haven't seen any of this stuff irl yet? I haven't either but I've haven't been out and about much. I was wondering if it's mainly in the universities and on-line (blogs and twitter etc) ... anyone else seen it (apart from unis)?

 

[smokedout]

is intelligence a privilege?

(is a question I want to ask whoever did the wheel diagram just to see what they say)

 

[frogwoman]

I dont understand the mindset. Experiencing racism and homophobia (i'm in a straight relationship now but anyway) was probably the most important thing that made me an anti-fascist (if a pretty confused one at times lol) and eventually a marxist. These people dont have the slightest interest in fighting racism they just want to build their own careers, theres nothing about what theyre going to do actually to take practical steps to fight racism, there's nothing about any of their other policies, what they are doing to fight for example cuts in the university, what their position is about disputes with university staff etc, let alone any of the "dogshit" politics that so many of these politicians ignore

 

[butchersapron]

butchersapron Did you say a few pages back that you haven't seen any of this stuff irl yet? I haven't either but I've haven't been out and about much. I was wondering if it's mainly in the universities and on-line (blogs and twitter etc) ... anyone else seen it (apart from unis)?

Never seen it. And in politics terms meet studes, never no nay never. Nothing here

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Never seen it. And in politics terms meet studes, never no nay never. Nothing here

I've encountered an ever rising tide of the stuff on the internet, by which I mean British and/or Irish bits of the internet. But I haven't yet encountered it at a political meeting, or had someone I know for non-political reasons start talking about it. Then again, the meetings I go to are probably not representative of "left" meetings in general. You don't tend to get much of this stuff at SP meetings or at household tax meetings etc.

 

[Nigel Irritable]

Actually come to think of it, I'd love to hear someone give an "intersectionality/privilege" speech at a household tax meeting. It would be even better than a then SWP fulltimer / now charity worker's speech to a suburban bin tax meeting about the European Social Forum, all those years ago.