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

[nino_savatte]

Have you ever read Telegraph comments? Their commentators can turn the comments section of something as innocuous as rhubarb crumble recipes into a forum for the discussion of the conspiracy of BBC-led Judeo-Marxist-Feminism to inundate Britain with immigrants just waiting to harvest the brains of heterosexual Christian children to stop them growing up into UKIP voters.

I hate to say it, but I read them all the time. They're truly nuts but highly entertaining.

 

[nino_savatte]

also werent irish people also sold as slaves?

Yes and Highlanders too iirc.

 

[Idris2002]

Yes and Highlanders too iirc.

There can be only one.

 

[butchersapron]

There can be only one.

 

[nino_savatte]

There can be only one.

This one?

 

[treelover]

I've just been to a Latin American country where many politicised students see it as their duty to pass on political and other forms of knowledge to people who don't have the chance to go to university. Some continue doing so after university. It is quite a significant force in organising. They see a role for themselves based on their good fortune in getting an education. i.e. based on a recognition of their position being different from that of the working masses (so to speak).
The political situation is different here and I'm not saying we can copy it. But I feel like, partly because the price of being an idiot is quite low here, many people allow theory to dominate their worldview and never even look at their own position and surrounding landscape, which would be the first step in creating a politics that would be relevant to the people around them.

I think this was quite common amongst a number of university educated people in the 80's not all left wing either, it seemed to die away after the poll tax, the rise of NL, and in a number of cases the move to hedonism/drug culture for the next generation.

 

[treelover]

Well, Penny Dreadful hasn't exactly been prolific on disability issues, welfare reform and so on. Not enough professional advantage to be gained, I suppose, although her particular brand of cack-handed, credibility-free cobblers would probably do as much to harm the cause of disabled claimants as ATOS and the DWP so we should be grateful for small mercies.

Actually she wrote about her ex partner and the petty brutalities of the welfare system a couple of years ago and has returned to it since, but yes, its not her priority, identity politics is and it sells...

 

[J Ed]

I think this was quite common amongst a number of university educated people in the 80's not all left wing either, it seemed to die away after the poll tax, the rise of NL, and in a number of cases the move to hedonism/drug culture for the next generation.

New Labour just coopted it though, didn't they?

 

[treelover]

Good things By taking funding from Barclay's and HSBC the same people who caused the problems in the first, with the obvious proviso that the funders will receive no criticism or additional burden, instead a generalised "uncaring" society (ie ordinary people) are blamed.

Also lying




Young neglected criminals have smaller brains - not actually true, who cares LOL!

stiff suits left and right, person of colour in centre

Unite Community took money from Barclays to fund their Community centre in Tower Hamlets


oops, already noted..

 

[treelover]

is that made up or an event?

 

[treelover]

Isn't this precisely the same kind of mindset as people who blame all Muslims for 9/11, or use dodgy crime statistics to make out black people are all criminals?

Mirror image racism IMO

How did the poor in UK benefit from slavery?, I known people like Bamber Gascoine's family did in Liverpool from where they soon fucked off, but most people there died in penury, genuine question,

 

[SpineyNorman]

How did the poor in UK benefit from slavery?, I known people like Bamber Gascoine's family did in Liverpool from where they soon fucked off, but most people there died in penury, genuine question,

They didn't.

 

[treelover]

there is a argument they now had 'access to sugar' and of course someone manned the slave ships, etc, but I wonder how they were treated

 

[Firky]

I think some slavers used some of their money to build schools, public spaces, soup kitchens and that kind of thing for the poor. Lord Armstrong did something similar with the blood money he made selling arms to both sides during the Boer war.

 

[nino_savatte]

The Tate libraries were built with money made from sugar and slavery.

 

[Firky]

The Tate libraries were built with money made from sugar and slavery.

Sweet!

 

[toggle]

How did the poor in UK benefit from slavery?, I known people like Bamber Gascoine's family did in Liverpool from where they soon fucked off, but most people there died in penury, genuine question,

only in that the industry changed society and provided the money for a large number of philanthropic and commercial ventures. the idea of slavery profits directly funding commercial ventures in Britain is debatable though. the effect was more about the money purchasing large quantities of goods.

there's also an argument that access to sugar made tea palatable, and tea was a major factor in the lives of the poor, it acted as an antibacterial and protected in a small way from the effects of living in the urban slums.

the effects of anti slavery were possibly more significant through, being one of the major drives in increasing the territory controlled by the empire.

 

[toggle]

there is a argument they now had 'access to sugar' and of course someone manned the slave ships, etc, but I wonder how they were treated

it was noted at the time that cruelty bred cruelty and slave ship masters acted little better towards their crew than their cargo. that isn't to say the crew behaved well towards the slaves, far from it.

 

[Idris2002]

This one?

View attachment 33185

 

[frogwoman]

there is a argument they now had 'access to sugar' and of course someone manned the slave ships, etc, but I wonder how they were treated

They never benefited from slavery.

 

[frogwoman]

The Tate libraries were built with money made from sugar and slavery.

Not exactly the poor benefiting from slavery though was it (apart from maybe the people who built them)? And philanthropic foundations etc were usually just a sticking plaster like they are now.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Not exactly the poor benefiting from slavery though was it (apart from maybe the people who built them)? And philanthropic foundations etc were usually just a sticking plaster like they are now.

And were more often than not part of a wider system of social control.

Slavery was an integral part of the capitalist system back then - it supported the same structures that led to the decline of the handloom weavers (where people starved - there's examples of kids setting up sort of friendly societies at sunday school where they'd put a penny in when they could to pay for their funeral when they starved). The same system that put people in the work house.

It's an insult to the paupers and the working poor of Britain to suggest this somehow benefited them.

Were it not for that system there wouldn't have been any need for the services provided by philanthropic organisations - which always came at a price anyway.

Once again, when class is ignored you get a very twisted picture of when went on, who was exploiting who and so on.

 

[frogwoman]

 

[toggle]

Once again, when class is ignored you get a very twisted picture of when went on, who was exploiting who and so on.

tehre are interpretations that claim slavery was beneficial to black americans.


but you can find small tangental benefits from anyhting if you really try hard enough, assume you've looked at the 'standard of living debate'. EP Thompson's analysis of that was spot on IMO, you can exhaustively calculate a few small trickledown effects and claim an increased access to some goods is a sign of an increase in spending power and standard of living. but these create a smokescreen that completely ignores the overall picture; a very slight increace from fuck all is still not very different from fuck all.

 

[Delroy Booth]

And were more often than not part of a wider system of social control.

Slavery was an integral part of the capitalist system back then - it supported the same structures that led to the decline of the handloom weavers (where people starved - there's examples of kids setting up sort of friendly societies at sunday school where they'd put a penny in when they could to pay for their funeral when they starved). The same system that put people in the work house.

It's an insult to the paupers and the working poor of Britain to suggest this somehow benefited them.

Were it not for that system there wouldn't have been any need for the services provided by philanthropic organisations - which always came at a price anyway.

Once again, when class is ignored you get a very twisted picture of when went on, who was exploiting who and so on.

Well said. This wasn't lost on the weavers themselves either. They understood where the cotton they worked with came from. The Industrial Revolution was inextricably linked and produced through the colonial state. Marx. That period of the late 18th and early 19th century, which saw the introduction of the factory system and capitalist labour discipline here in Britain, was accompanied and directly linked to the intensification of American slavery. Dominic Losurdo Liberalism: A Counter-history is a good read on this, he points out how slavery reached it's most advanced and cruel state in the years after 1776, it wasn't some fuedal hangover that gradually withered away as people turned against it, it got much more comprehensive as the demand for raw materials from the booming textiles industry in Britain increased at the beginning of 19th century. He goes on to mention how during the arguments over the abolition of slavery, British anti-slavery people like Wilberforce and your philanthropic Tory types regularly had their hypocrisy pointed out to them by pro-slavery Americans, for the conditions in the workhouses and in the urban parts of the country. It's not just about cruelty of working conditions for those who ended up in workhouses, the system actually resembles slavery in the sense that the individual loses their legal persona, they're the excess population, the Other, the Living Dead (say it in a Zizek-voice.) This is a good quote from Losurdo that I was going to paraphrase but I'll type it out in full:

But however, poverty and degradation were not the most significant aspect of workhouses. At the start of the eigteenth century, Defoe favourably mentioned the example of the workhouse in Bristol, which "has been such a Terror to the Beggars that none of [them] will come near the City." In fact, the workhouse was subsequently described by Engels as a total institution: "Paupers wear the uniform of the house and are subject to the will of the director without any protection whatsoever." So that the "morally degenerate parents cannot influence their children, families are seperated; the man is sent to one wing, the woman to another, the children to a third". Families were broken up, but for the rest, all were amassed sometimes to the tune of twelve or sixteen, in a single room. Any kind of violence was inflicted on them, not even sparing the elderly and children, and involving particular attention to women. In practice, the inmates of the workhouses were treated as "objects of disgust and horror placed outside the law and human community". Thus was explained the fact, underscored by Engels, that in order to escape the "Poor Law Bastille's" (as they were popularly named), "many indigents or work houses preferred to die of hunger and illness rather than subject themselves to a workhouse"

It really isn't hyperbole to describe this kind of existence as a form of slavery. I'm not suggesting there were much evidence for political solidarity between those in the workhouses and factories and mines of Britain and slavery in America, just that it's foolish to presume that the people of this time were too ignorant to recognise how their own slavery and the American slave system were linked.

Now you can take a much longer view of history and point that over many decades after the 1850's, as the working-class became incorporated constitutionally into the bargaining power of the state, and started winning small improvements in their political rights and working conditions, they became structurally integrated into imperialism, that the ruling class shares the fruits of neo-imperialism more equitably amongst the first-world working clas, and you don't have to be a hardened Maoist to see this certainly true to some extent. It's also true though that the poorest section of working people in this country are systematically exploited by the same ruling class that dominates other countries and enforces that global exploition, just with certain political and economic concessions (ones that were not always there and are looking increasingly perilous. But going "white privilege" and posting pictures of slave ships on twitter doesn't really make that point very well. The problem I think is that all this historical detail is swept aside so that someone can squeeze into a 140 character soundbite a crude ahistorical binary "Oppressed/Privileged" message. Which is harmless enough when it's just tweets (reality check - it's just a tweet) a bit more problematic when that same reductionist mentality gets applied to more serious concerns. Mix that with an obssession with the purity of their own jargon, loads of in-group posturing, in-jokes and memes and other barriers based on cultural capital, and you end up with a right mess.

 

[SpineyNorman]

tehre are interpretations that claim slavery was beneficial to black americans.


but you can find small tangental benefits from anyhting if you really try hard enough, assume you've looked at the 'standard of living debate'. EP Thompson's analysis of that was spot on IMO, you can exhaustively calculate a few small trickledown effects and claim an increased access to some goods is a sign of an increase in spending power and standard of living. but these create a smokescreen that completely ignores the overall picture; a very slight increace from fuck all is still not very different from fuck all.

Also ignores the loss of control over their own lives, whether it be in the labour process (shift from 'formal' to 'real' domination of capital) or in everyday life (the way social policy was used to 'civilise' the working class, etc.)

And of course the 'benefits' all depend on what counterfactual you're measuring it against. If it's assumed that those same capitalist relations were in place, and the same rate of profit maintained, then sure, people would have been worse off without slavery. This is the counterfactual implicitly used by those who claimed the English w/c benefited. But since that counterfactual would have been utterly impossible in practice their arguments are somewhat dubious IMO.

 

[SpineyNorman]

Great post Delroy Booth

 

[butchersapron]

The book: Liberalism: A Counter-history

 

[toggle]

Well said. This wasn't lost on the weavers themselves either. They understood where the cotton they worked with came from. The Industrial Revolution was inextricably linked and produced through the colonial state. Marx. That period of the late 18th and early 19th century, which saw the introduction of the factory system and capitalist labour discipline here in Britain, was accompanied and directly linked to the intensification of American slavery. Dominic Losurdo Liberalism: A Counter-history is a good read on this, he points out how slavery reached it's most advanced and cruel state in the years after 1776, it wasn't some fuedal hangover that gradually withered away as people turned against it, it got much more comprehensive as the demand for raw materials from the booming textiles industry in Britain increased at the beginning of 19th century. He goes on to mention how during the arguments over the abolition of slavery, British anti-slavery people like Wilberforce and your philanthropic Tory types regularly had their hypocrisy pointed out to them by pro-slavery Americans, for the conditions in the workhouses and in the urban parts of the country. It's not just about cruelty of working conditions for those who ended up in workhouses, the system actually resembles slavery in the sense that the individual loses their legal persona, they're the excess population, the Other, the Living Dead (say it in a Zizek-voice.) This is a good quote from Losurdo that I was going to paraphrase but I'll type it out in full:

.

that criticism was present in Britain as well. Cobbett's comment on leaving Britain was that at least there were no Wilberforces in the US. but anti slavery became the national moral crusade, beside which all else was unimportant. and under which just about anything could be justified.

 

[SpineyNorman]

tehre are interpretations that claim slavery was beneficial to black americans.

Are you thinking of Time on the Cross? I read that a bit back for a course I was doing on historiography - they used 'cliometrics' which was supposedly a scientific means of analysing history (sounds like dianetics and is about as scientifically rigorous) by looking exclusively at quantitative data in specific and narrow cases, then using that to generalise across time and space. That mental American poster who ruins any thread in world politics that talks about either slavery or the US civil war (deluded microbe or something) appears to have been heavily influenced by it, either directly or indirectly.