butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Look, you need to say that it's happening to show how shit anarchism is - you like saying they are anarchists.
Alex Callinicos/SWP vs Laurie Penny/New Statesman Facebook handbags
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cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Nothing like this seems to have rushed in behind Galloway's departure here, but I might not be getting a feel for it. Not seen or heard anything and nobody mentions it in chit chat whatever. Not really a topic of conversation in politics terms or day to day life.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I don't care what your rising tide of the stuff on the internet means.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
All dicking around aside, the "far leftists" I've heard it from have been 80% anarchists, 15% ex-SWP, 5% other. I got a lot less smug about it after I encountered my first SP member / intersectionalista. While I might poke fun about class struggle anarchists converting, with good reason, it seems that it's in the water generally when it comes to new recruits to socialist politics.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
No one my mother would even recognise. Who owns her, sold to a uk company to clean ferry paid, 12 months paid, them another 12 months in brum, where the fuck are here white tears?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Stop hanging around with them.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Jesus, I don't hang around with these people.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
100% trot all the way.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
This stuff just gets a roll of the eyes and some fun poked at it.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Can I take it from this that you've had a good evening?
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Sure, but it's obviously not being taken that lightly everywhere.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
But where though? You're happy enough to join with the shit slinging of class struggle anarchists who actually do jump on bloody identity politics, which seems to have passed you by right under your nose.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
It's clearly taken seriously by the Anarchist Federation's women's group and by the WSM. Personally, I've noticed a lot of it on twitter, coming from people who I'd have expected better from. As for taking the piss out of class struggle anarchists about it, that really is the part of the far left I've mostly heard it echoed in, and I'm mocking precisely because I was expecting some serious resistance to it in those quarters.
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Edit (less grouchy):
Their serious resistance is more likely to be focused elsewhere butchersapron
Bring back hanging
You can now take it that i wish i hadn't.
For those of us who were either kids or a glint in the milkman's eye in the 1980s, could somebody explain exactly what happened with identity politics in the 80s, or recommend something (ideally quite brief) to read about it? I've seen this referenced a few times in the thread, but I have no clue about what people are referring to.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
From something i writted elsewhere:
The Scarman Report was commissioned by the Thatcher government to investigate the causes behind the Brixton 1981 riots but soon became recognised as actually concerning the national picture. Conservative commentators were surprised to discover that the report actually accepted a number of the starting points of the ‘social deprivation’ and ‘powerlessness and alienation’ theses - whilst still maintaining that a ‘law and order’ type response was necessary in the short term. One of his key findings was that “The lack of formal political representation at local and national government level of ethnic minorities created a sense of ‘political insecurity and rejection’ amongst these groups”. Essentially, he was arguing that if the state did not want a replay of the events of the early 1980s a mechanism had better be found that was able to both offer some incitement into the mainstream fold and deliver something tangible to those who decided to participate in or work towards this incorporation. The creation of a black stake in formal politics was needed to ensure ‘community cohesion’ in inner city politics, or at least to ensure that any fires were damped down and stayed within those communities. What these communities were and what they were supposed to represent we shall see shortly.
Around the same time as Scarman reported, the left-inside-the labour-party had embarked on a program of opposition to the thatcherite neo-liberal agenda of widespread cuts to a range of national and local services and so on from within local councils around the country. As part of this program they adopted a strategy of opening up the councils to what they saw as community interests - that is ethnic communities, religious communities, national communities and so on - in short, different cultures (There is significant debate over just how far this was actually a conscious pre-planned strategy, but even if it was not planned in any formal way it still spoke very clearly of how this section of the left viewed society as mix of competing cultures at that point in time). These were externally identified and authenticated by a mutually beneficial process of the ‘leaders‘ demands for recognition and the councils willing/planned recognition of them . Further ‘cultures’ were invited to constitute themselves, and then to identify their own leadership representatives from with the community. The community leaders, now fully authorised to speak for the people and culture it had been decided they represented, were placed on a range of public bodies, were given a default position as consultative for any initiative that was planned within ‘their’ communities. Race relations boards, equal opportunities units, police liaison committees and so on were set up and these community leaders played a key role in their functioning. This centrality helped reinforce their local power base which was then further consolidated when grants were handed out on the basis of community competition for funds. What then developed at that point was a form of clientelism in which community leaders received funds for their pet projects on behalf of their communities from the councils on the basis of the councils recognition of the authenticity of their culture, and then another layer of potential leaders received their funding from the existing leaders.
A reciprocal network of responsibilities to not act in ways that would be see as challenging the ‘communities’ stability - as defined by the council and leaders - was constructed, alongside a clear pathway into political influence for those prepared to ‘follow the rules’ was slowly developed. If you broke the rules your funding was cut, if the people you were supposed to represent got out of hand, your funding was cut.
Previously, individuals from ethnic communities had been able to advance - against significant hurdles - through participation in existing institutions - the labour party and the unions for example, but they had to participate on the basis of the already existing culture and practice of those institutions - the end result was individuals moving upwards on the basis of acceptance of existing wider mainstream‘culture’ but now it appeared that there was room for upward mobility for people on the basis of their own ‘culture’, and the beneficiaries of this mobility were then able to portray their individual mobility as that of their collective ‘ethnic community’ or culture.
So there was a mutually reinforcing dynamic of community incorporation and community construction at the same time - where issues that had formerly been seen as cross community questions, as general social or political issues - class issues - slowly transformed themselves into cultural questions, as questions could only be dealt with by the officially recognised cultures, and more clearly, by their leaders. Political issues were racialised but under the guise of culture and equality. A politics developed out of common experience of school, work, leisure, family and area was derailed onto a territory of competing cultural experiences and expectations with the result that attacks that struck at the working class as whole - whether as wage-labour, as potential labour-power, as claimants etc faced a disunited opposition, and even had the door opened to them to offer enticements to one cultural community or another to participate in these attacks. The ground for class re-alignment, for actively recognising or constructing shared class interests was made that much less firm, whilst already existing cross-community networks were placed under severe pressure.
This generally remained a local level strategy but was adopted by ‘new labour’ on the national level (see the aufheben article on the construction of the Muslim community or recent work by Kenan Malik etc). Essentially a layer of mediators was constructed between the national/local state and the ‘communities’ who had the largesse to offer opportunities (or the appearance of opportunities) to members of that community. What formal politics that existed existed only through these mediators on the basis of their top-down legitimacy - rather than acting as bottom-up expressions of the local communities interests they developed as transmission belts in the opposite direction. (of course, it would be too simplistic to pretend that this is the whole picture - the state does actually have to maintain its ideological dominance through meeting genuine social needs, increasingly so as it encloses may previously collective non-state functions). Top-down official multi-culturalism according to Kenan Malik developed into a “top-down bureaucratic social management deployed in capitalist economies which import labour from abroad.”.
An example of one outcome of this mechanism is given by Malik:
The Scarman Report was commissioned by the Thatcher government to investigate the causes behind the Brixton 1981 riots but soon became recognised as actually concerning the national picture. Conservative commentators were surprised to discover that the report actually accepted a number of the starting points of the ‘social deprivation’ and ‘powerlessness and alienation’ theses - whilst still maintaining that a ‘law and order’ type response was necessary in the short term. One of his key findings was that “The lack of formal political representation at local and national government level of ethnic minorities created a sense of ‘political insecurity and rejection’ amongst these groups”. Essentially, he was arguing that if the state did not want a replay of the events of the early 1980s a mechanism had better be found that was able to both offer some incitement into the mainstream fold and deliver something tangible to those who decided to participate in or work towards this incorporation. The creation of a black stake in formal politics was needed to ensure ‘community cohesion’ in inner city politics, or at least to ensure that any fires were damped down and stayed within those communities. What these communities were and what they were supposed to represent we shall see shortly.
Around the same time as Scarman reported, the left-inside-the labour-party had embarked on a program of opposition to the thatcherite neo-liberal agenda of widespread cuts to a range of national and local services and so on from within local councils around the country. As part of this program they adopted a strategy of opening up the councils to what they saw as community interests - that is ethnic communities, religious communities, national communities and so on - in short, different cultures (There is significant debate over just how far this was actually a conscious pre-planned strategy, but even if it was not planned in any formal way it still spoke very clearly of how this section of the left viewed society as mix of competing cultures at that point in time). These were externally identified and authenticated by a mutually beneficial process of the ‘leaders‘ demands for recognition and the councils willing/planned recognition of them . Further ‘cultures’ were invited to constitute themselves, and then to identify their own leadership representatives from with the community. The community leaders, now fully authorised to speak for the people and culture it had been decided they represented, were placed on a range of public bodies, were given a default position as consultative for any initiative that was planned within ‘their’ communities. Race relations boards, equal opportunities units, police liaison committees and so on were set up and these community leaders played a key role in their functioning. This centrality helped reinforce their local power base which was then further consolidated when grants were handed out on the basis of community competition for funds. What then developed at that point was a form of clientelism in which community leaders received funds for their pet projects on behalf of their communities from the councils on the basis of the councils recognition of the authenticity of their culture, and then another layer of potential leaders received their funding from the existing leaders.
A reciprocal network of responsibilities to not act in ways that would be see as challenging the ‘communities’ stability - as defined by the council and leaders - was constructed, alongside a clear pathway into political influence for those prepared to ‘follow the rules’ was slowly developed. If you broke the rules your funding was cut, if the people you were supposed to represent got out of hand, your funding was cut.
Previously, individuals from ethnic communities had been able to advance - against significant hurdles - through participation in existing institutions - the labour party and the unions for example, but they had to participate on the basis of the already existing culture and practice of those institutions - the end result was individuals moving upwards on the basis of acceptance of existing wider mainstream‘culture’ but now it appeared that there was room for upward mobility for people on the basis of their own ‘culture’, and the beneficiaries of this mobility were then able to portray their individual mobility as that of their collective ‘ethnic community’ or culture.
So there was a mutually reinforcing dynamic of community incorporation and community construction at the same time - where issues that had formerly been seen as cross community questions, as general social or political issues - class issues - slowly transformed themselves into cultural questions, as questions could only be dealt with by the officially recognised cultures, and more clearly, by their leaders. Political issues were racialised but under the guise of culture and equality. A politics developed out of common experience of school, work, leisure, family and area was derailed onto a territory of competing cultural experiences and expectations with the result that attacks that struck at the working class as whole - whether as wage-labour, as potential labour-power, as claimants etc faced a disunited opposition, and even had the door opened to them to offer enticements to one cultural community or another to participate in these attacks. The ground for class re-alignment, for actively recognising or constructing shared class interests was made that much less firm, whilst already existing cross-community networks were placed under severe pressure.
This generally remained a local level strategy but was adopted by ‘new labour’ on the national level (see the aufheben article on the construction of the Muslim community or recent work by Kenan Malik etc). Essentially a layer of mediators was constructed between the national/local state and the ‘communities’ who had the largesse to offer opportunities (or the appearance of opportunities) to members of that community. What formal politics that existed existed only through these mediators on the basis of their top-down legitimacy - rather than acting as bottom-up expressions of the local communities interests they developed as transmission belts in the opposite direction. (of course, it would be too simplistic to pretend that this is the whole picture - the state does actually have to maintain its ideological dominance through meeting genuine social needs, increasingly so as it encloses may previously collective non-state functions). Top-down official multi-culturalism according to Kenan Malik developed into a “top-down bureaucratic social management deployed in capitalist economies which import labour from abroad.”.
An example of one outcome of this mechanism is given by Malik:
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
pt2
The mixed riot of 1985, based on common frustrations etc of 1985 was replaced 20 years later by two nights of rioting between the black and asian communities based on the rapid-fire spread of a rumour that a young black girl had been gang raped by 19 asian men. Two people were killed during the disturbances. In the aftermath, the explanations offered by people from both communities mirrored some of the mainstream frameworks mentioned above and demonstrated how a deracialised ‘race and disorder’ approach had taken root even in those communities whose actions it had originally developed to condemn. They’re taking over all the shops, they treat us like thieves when we go in there, they won’t touch our hands when they give us change on one side and they steal from us, they disrespect our families, they don’t want to work or get on together. The local media catering for each community gave wind to these cultural explanations of how large elements of two groups who had fought together in the past came to view each other as enemies today. The age of those involved significantly seemed to come from those who had grown up with the above mentioned multi-cultural policy as the norm. Class identity was often replaced with ethnic identity.
Multi-culturalism then, sought to divide the working class into competing factions by encouraging people with common cultural backgounds to construct themselves into communities and then produce their own leaders. This tended to be outside the workplace though, it acted more on the territorial level, and with the ongoing loss of the sort of work that had formerly been the backbone for internal discipline and socialisation of young people in these areas there was a consequent rise in people identifying as part of the muslim community or the Sikh community etc - and the path offered into a role in local institutions etc proved inviting for many. This was far cry from groups such as the Asian Youth movements of the late 70s and early 80s who had formed on explicitly secular non-sectarian grounds and recognised their actions and their aims as part of a wider class struggle. The sheer amount of effort required just to stay on the paths offered by the local councils was itself a drag on the activity these groups had been set up for:
The wider, longer term undermining of previously taken for granted class perspective and the spread of internal division was summed up very well by Mukhtar Dar one of the Sheffield AYMs long term activists:
The mixed riot of 1985, based on common frustrations etc of 1985 was replaced 20 years later by two nights of rioting between the black and asian communities based on the rapid-fire spread of a rumour that a young black girl had been gang raped by 19 asian men. Two people were killed during the disturbances. In the aftermath, the explanations offered by people from both communities mirrored some of the mainstream frameworks mentioned above and demonstrated how a deracialised ‘race and disorder’ approach had taken root even in those communities whose actions it had originally developed to condemn. They’re taking over all the shops, they treat us like thieves when we go in there, they won’t touch our hands when they give us change on one side and they steal from us, they disrespect our families, they don’t want to work or get on together. The local media catering for each community gave wind to these cultural explanations of how large elements of two groups who had fought together in the past came to view each other as enemies today. The age of those involved significantly seemed to come from those who had grown up with the above mentioned multi-cultural policy as the norm. Class identity was often replaced with ethnic identity.
Multi-culturalism then, sought to divide the working class into competing factions by encouraging people with common cultural backgounds to construct themselves into communities and then produce their own leaders. This tended to be outside the workplace though, it acted more on the territorial level, and with the ongoing loss of the sort of work that had formerly been the backbone for internal discipline and socialisation of young people in these areas there was a consequent rise in people identifying as part of the muslim community or the Sikh community etc - and the path offered into a role in local institutions etc proved inviting for many. This was far cry from groups such as the Asian Youth movements of the late 70s and early 80s who had formed on explicitly secular non-sectarian grounds and recognised their actions and their aims as part of a wider class struggle. The sheer amount of effort required just to stay on the paths offered by the local councils was itself a drag on the activity these groups had been set up for:
The wider, longer term undermining of previously taken for granted class perspective and the spread of internal division was summed up very well by Mukhtar Dar one of the Sheffield AYMs long term activists:
I think this is a great idea, it will really expose identity politics for what it is, i'm sure their are other urbs at college who would join in..
btw, some of the lecturers who work in access would actually be sympathetic..
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
RImbaud I think it's a massive topic I think my perception of it is probably jaundiced because there is no coherent objective analysis so many things interact what comes to mind is: - effects of Thatcherism, the blanket protests and republican prisoners, the Labour sections struggle, Women Against the Pit Closures, Lesbians and gays support the miners, rate capping, the 2 Asians burnt to death by accident in the riots in Handsworth, Blue Star and the fracture in Indian immigrant politics, 'apartheid cannot be dismantled without social revolution', Sandinista not Zapatista coffee, the tabloids and the 'loony left', GLC and Ken Livingstone, Sam Bond, Derek Hatton, lesbian-feminist squatting, what age of male sons are acceptable in domestic violence shelters?, disputes over street prostitution in King's Cross, Bernie Grant, Ted Knight, David Blunkett, Margaret Hodge, Racism awareness training and courses, disabled/women/racial audits, council decentralisation and cuts, Race Today, the IRR, charities and charity commissioners. Someone around at the time needs to do something proper on it.
It was good because it asserted 'these are people's identities, give people space to be themselves, don't railroad over them' but it did also come with a dose of judgementalism or careerism.
I'd like a heavy detailed analysis too.
It was good because it asserted 'these are people's identities, give people space to be themselves, don't railroad over them' but it did also come with a dose of judgementalism or careerism.
I'd like a heavy detailed analysis too.
will self. i thought we'd got rid of you years ago.
was that mystery guest?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
wtf is male-identified?
Limerick Red
Мы вас похороним!
Possibly could or could not be worth mentioning in regards to this, the AFA article "The Trojan Horse of Multiculturalism" from the Fighting talk magazine I havent read this in about 10 years, and cant read it now, as my work computer wont open the PDF, but if it is as I remember makes some
points worth including in this conversation.
Anyways heres the link
http://afaarchive.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/fighting-talk-issue-25.pdf
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
It includes transgender f-t-m males, intersex people who tick male on forms, and those born male (ie male genitalia) - so you count make your views known:
1 who is your role model for masculinity now?
2 who was your role model for masculinity in the past?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Jesus. To even unpack the spectacular assumptions in those questions!
I think i may need to go on richard and judy.
Limerick Red
Мы вас похороним!
Isnt this the kind of shit John Waters has been makin a livin out for for the past 20 years, with the odd interlude to write counter-revolutionary eurovison songs.
sihhi
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered
Jesus. To even unpack the spectacular assumptions in those questions!
If the left doesn't make its views known, the right in the form of Malcolm Rifkind's son will:
https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/334317923546042369
"I suppose I did quite badly want to be Luke Skywalker for a while."
>> The white straight left (that phrase must burn you to a cinder) don't want to analyse intersectionality and identity, but the right do, the right will win - up your game, sorry not sorry.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I can feel the future at my back and my white tears rolling under the fridge 
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