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

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I agree that it's out there, but it seems (to me) to be confined (so far) to academia/students/occupy & activists that choose (for example) occupy over more structured class based work.

I think you are broadly right about the (narrow) demographics who have started to adopt this stuff, but I don't think that there's a wall between them and the rest of the left. And there certainly isn't a wall between them and the people who end up in left groups and activist circles eventually.
 
I think you are broadly right about the (narrow) demographics who have started to adopt this stuff, but I don't think that there's a wall between them and the rest of the left. And there certainly isn't a wall between them and the people who end up in left groups and activist circles eventually.
Do you mean that the (undefined) left will gradually adopt this language and way of looking at What's Going On by something similar to osmosis? If so, yes I'd probably agree with that if the left (1) aren't alert to it; and (2) don't identify it as a form of identity politics and reject it.
 
Do you mean that the (undefined) left will gradually adopt this language and way of looking at What's Going On by something similar to osmosis? If so, yes I'd probably agree with that if the left (1) aren't alert to it; and (2) don't identify it as a form of identity politics and reject it.

Yes, pretty much. I think that with individual leftists knocking about on twitter or tumblr, or participating in certain studenty stuff, there can be a sort of adoption by osmosis. And then they bring those assumptions with them into their groups or when they join something. And so far, I think that groups have tended to either ignore it (most of them) or actively started to adapt to it. Slowly trimming your sails to what seems popular with radical subsections of "the kids" is an old tradition on the left.
 
What do people think of this article?

Particularly this bit

3. There is no future in attempting to collapse anti-racism into anti-austerity struggles. Such attempts represent a strain of workerism, and have emerged from some surprising quarters – including Alexis Tsipras. Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity. Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on. And certainly, the struggles over the capitalist crisis and its resolution has a relationship to the struggle over racism: this means that initiatives such as Left Unity and the People's Assembly should take anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy. But to understand the relationship between racism, economic crisis and emerging political subjectivities requires an analysis light years ahead of the lingering "capitalist crisis = hard times = racism" model.
 
What do people think of this article?

Particularly this bit

Well it seems to me that these two sentences contradict one another:

Racism does not simply emerge as a displaced form of despair over deprivation or insecurity. Its development and spread may be accelerated by profound political crisis, the breakdown of authority, crises of overproduction, financial collapses, and so on.
How does racism emerge from crises of overproduction, breakdown of authority, financial collapses if it isn't by creating despair over deprivation and insecurity?

What he's doing is trying to promote the kind of politics he's always subscribed to by disguising his incoherent arguments with fancy language. Like articul8.

Just looking through that article though, there is absolutely nothing in it that could mark him out as a Marxist - it's post-modernist bollocks isn't it? And even on that basis it doesn't make much sense.
 
He's basically just caricaturing the arguments of others, to make out they're economic determinists, so that he can then present his brand of liberal anti-racism as the only sensible approach.

I mean, nobody serious believes

capitalist crisis = hard times = racism
any more than anyone sensible believes

capitalist crisis = hard times = revolution
 
He's basically just caricaturing the arguments of others, to make out they're economic determinists, so that he can then present his brand of liberal anti-racism as the only sensible approach.

I mean, nobody serious believes

any more than anyone sensible believes

If I understand "autonomous" properly.
It assumes there is a backbone left in migrant communities' organisations that will be able to lead this autonomist anti-racist unity fight - in fact there's a series of disparate atrophied organisations.

30 or 20 years ago there might have been but many have become either shells or charities often reliant on local state grants even as these are being cut and hence are less willing to stick neck outs to struggle for some large indistinct goal.

Contrary to the imagination of certain liberals, "autonomous" immigrants have do not act as a bloc of 'POC' and most do not have similar experiences to one another to be able to cohere together as a sensible autonomous component part in left things that take "anti-racism seriously as a semi-autonomous component of their broader strategy"
 
Are you thinking stuff like the Asian Youth Movement here sihhi? If so I've been meaning to read up on them for a while - anyone have any recommendations/links?

All the earlier community-defined ones yes but also the inter-'community' efforts specifically about racial profiling for instance United Black Youth League in Bradford, Sheffield Defence in your area, or the Broadwater Three Campaign here in the late 1980s.
I mentioned the example of Meral Ece earlier in this thread who came from a NUPE immigrant section action is now a Lib Dem Lord, Shahnaz Ali from the UBYL is now a NHS senior manager. Linda Bellos from the Labour Party Black Sections struggle is now chair of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Practitioners and has her own business as such.

I don't think the 2010s is the same 1980s and "struggling against Tory racism" then isn't the same as now.
The loss of productive industry being an important change which has (if you take the liberal ideas seriously) certainly driven many sections of the white working-class to become an oppressed minority - fitfully unemployed, no secure jobs, half-unwanted.
Yet there is no equal demand (which there should be under liberal ideas) for former shipyard or power plant or car factory working-class only (no middle-class) to have autonomous sections for them. So the whole thing is now a mess and hard to rebalance.
There are many more mixed heritage people who don't see their immigrant side as an important one often with British or Irish names, there are more middle-class and professional immigrant people, thinking in London in particular there are more tensions and divisions within non-white heritage younger adults within the poorer of the working-class immigrant areas.
So it's not an easy thing to reconstruct an autonomous immigrant anti-racist model, in fact you might as well go for the IWCA working-class rule in working-class areas model.

It's also possible that the same things that went wrong with autonomous anti-racist struggle in the 1980s, might go wrong again now.
 
It's the similar in the Bradford AYM: Anwar Qadir became a consultant for Bradford Council's youth service helping calm down the 1995 and 2001 riots. Marsha Singh used to be known as Manjit Singh basically set up the Bradford AYM in 1977, he became Labour MP for Bradford West eventually. Several others became Labour councillors. Something 'Labour' was the end result in spite of the positive secularist stance it took against the Bradford Council of Mosques and the agitation for separate schools and Quran lessons etc etc.
 
Jack Buckby on Laurie Penny.

Jack Buckby ‏@JackBuckby 22m
@Nationalist_UK @Edward_Flashman Wouldn't go near that cow [Laurie Penny] if she was the last creature on earth...she's no woman!

He's nothing but RW flotsam on twitter but there's a bit of barely concealed misogyny going on there.

Been poking fun at him and he's too stupid to realise it :facepalm:
 
Actually this is off the point entirely, but does anyone know if the gentrification of Hoxton has now traveled North of Hoxton Square, ie into the main historical Hoxton area? Back 13 or so years ago, there was a kind of invisible barrier just past the Square which divided the gentrifying, hipster, part from the working class, in large part immigrant, old core of the area.
Worth a thread in itself perhaps (gentrification). There's been quite a lot of housing redevelopment - but not much change to businesses apart from the immediate vicinity of stations on the Overground. I don't have any particular reason to go there (Hoxton and Haggerston) although Shoreditch/Hoxton is properly gentrified now. Old Street has loads of bars/cafes and a street food market. There's a pincer effect from south and west and east (much redevelopment in Hackney/London Fields). Dalston is more prosperous. No design agencies springing up, those are still mainly Shoreditch/ south Hoxton. You'll get a much better feel for it if you ask the question in the General forum, I think, plus people will describe what's happened south (London Bridge to Tower Bridge) and south west (Brixton and surrounds) of the river.
 
If you get your privilege checked by a POC it's ok. When we did it, not so cool - just jealousy :D

It's not just "okay", mate. It's, like, a badge of honour! "Hey, look at me, I had my privilege checked by a PoC, because I talked with a PoC!! I'm so wiberal!!!". :facepalm:

Kill 'em all. Let their liberal deity sort the wheat from the chaff.
 
Especially as this thread could be interpreted as a call out for Laurie to check her class privilege.

Why is class exempt from this kind of stuff by the way? Why can Laurie trample on our oppression but not that of POCs (btw - coloured was offensive when I was a kid, when did it become PC again?)

As I spent a couple of dozen posts explaining to Johnny Canuck earlier this year, "black" was the major self-descriptor used by most of our non-white ethnic minority communities in the '80s and '90s. "Person of Colour" was seen as NAACP liberal bullshit imported from the US, and "coloured" was (as you say) just downright rude.
This is (partly) about the privilege checkers attempting to "own" a vocabulary and thus establish a discourse whereby their vocabulary becomes the dominant one (and, of course, they're in a position to do so because of their own unchecked privilege!).

Why is class exempt? Because it's something so basic, so overarching, that the intersectionalistas can never own it in the way they attempt to with their race and gender-based vocabularies. Therefore, they either ignore it or decry it in coded rhetoric about "the white working class".

Illiberal liberal scumsuckers. Same as always. Many of 'em will be on the right in a decade or so. Happens with every generation of wanna-be social vanguardists.
 
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tommy-robinson-edl-laurie-penny-interview No idea mate but the original article is here

The man who drives us out to a steakhouse on the outskirts of Luton, claiming that he’ll get beaten up if he shows his face anywhere else, is irritable and erratic and keeps glancing over his shoulder for the enemies he says are waiting for him. He orders the most expensive steak on the menu, with an enormous plate of cheesy potato skins, and chuckles that this is why he likes to meet left-wing journalists: so he can have dinner on their dollar.
 
It's not implied that it's an expensive restaurant is it, though? Just that he orders "the most expensive state on the menu". Could be anywhere.
 
I wonder what Naomi Klein thinks of the re-emergence of identity politics, in her books she often talks about these issues as the main ones on campus(apart from Latin American issues) when she was a student, etc, she clearly doesn't write much about them now, concentrating on concrete subjects.
 
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