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

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DotCommunist said:
Is it worth the time? fuck off. Its the best thing he ever laid pen to paper and produced. I'd sing the praises of his other works but you can buy them as well.

do take the time to read. I've done all of his works and it still ranks as his best imo. And I am well versed in skiffy/fantasy. Its really good
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Yes, I have bought and read all his books. I don't even like fantasy - but I started buying because I knew him at uni. Now I would buy no matter what. Even UnLundun
 
"I don't think a denunciation of other left organisations including Labour is any way forward at all" Chris Nineham

What?
 
"I broke the story in the mainstream news". And then goes on to suggest many SWP members were phoning her up.
 
More wilful confusion from Molly Crabapple on VICE 'home of interviews with the EDL' magazine:


I told the festival coordinator that we needed a radical redistribution of senses of entitlement.

My own sense of entitlement served me well. I got my first job at a candy store when I was 14. I worked in the stockroom. I would open a box, take out a smaller box, put a rubber band around the smaller box, and put it back inside the big one. I lasted two days. This job, I remember thinking, does not make use of my intellectual abilities. When I did need work, I went straight into the naked-girl industry. Honest employment was a treadmill. It's extreme privilege to believe your life is too valuable to waste.

Every dollar I clawed, whether it was from modeling or an early gig drawing cocks for Playgirl, served to amplify my advantages. Art is sometimes seen as gnostic freedom. But being an artist means you're in thrall to cash.

My last art show would have been impossible without the money and network of contacts I'd built. I never could have hauled massive slabs of wood up to my old fifth-floor walk-up—never could have painted them in the lightless room I once shared with three roommates. Without an assistant, I never would have had the time to paint my show. Without sponsorships, I never could have afforded the paint. Sometimes, curators look at the work, and say, "Why didn't you ever paint like that before?" I'd answer, "Because no one gave me enough money to be able to."
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The fact that there is "assistant" and "artist" is indicative of a large division even in this anti-corporate monetisation effort.


For my friends and I who fought our way to moderate financial success, money came from transgressing society's norms. It might have been fucking rich dude after rich dude you met on Seeking Arrangements. It might have been stabbing your stomach each morning with a syringe of hormones, in order to sell your genetically desirable eggs. With much luck, it required doing the ambitious work everyone said you weren't ready for, then getting mocked and rejected for it, until, slowly, the wall began to crack. You could never do what you were supposed to, never stay quietly in your place.
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butchersapron said:
Why is he not doing it now then? There are plenty of opportunities to do more than posture.
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It might be irony because he also says

Playing "who would I have been in X historical situation judging by my current relative position" is useful for keeping you grounded.
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I can never quite tell. He is a situationist so people taking the idea as reality rather than irony might say something about society in a complex situationist experiment.
 
sihhi said:
It might be irony because he also says



I can never quite tell. He is a situationist so people taking the idea as reality rather than irony might say something about society in a complex situationist experiment.
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I think the situationists would have happily spat in his face. Debord certainly would. At least he took Lebovici's money and kept his mouth shut about it /spent it all on wine rather than shouting about how his pimpery was trangression ( that point is more relevant to Molly i suppose).
 
butchersapron said:
Amazing being a pimp is now painted as transgression not as functional for the system you claim that you're challenging.
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THIS. FUCKING THIS.

what is it with these people who continue to see pimping (metaphorical or literal) as some sort of fucking anti-capitalist fuck you to the system rather than capitalism at its most purest fucking state. at what point did we lose even the ability to definite basic terms. it's like that fucking weirdos on other threads who keep saying anti-semitic stuff and claiming it isn't anti-semitic. do they believe this, does Molly genuinely think, as she appropriates and profits from the exploited labour (or bodies) of others, that what she is doing is ok, is anti-capitalist? surely not - i can understand why the mainstream media are happy to position her thus, but why do parts of the left still not run her out of town with flaming torches?

and breathe.
 
butchersapron said:
I think the situationists would have happily spat in his face. Debord certainly would. At least he took Lebovici's money and kept his mouth shut about it /spent it all on wine rather than shouting about how his pimpery was trangression ( that point is more relevance to Molly i suppose).
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He's not just a situationist, I suppose, and the two, Molly and Malcolm, are different.

However he does use situationism in odd ways - like examining the relevance of rap lyrics:


Gucci’s delusion is that he can bridge the traumatic rift between exchange and use values by returning to the point of separation — purchase. But this is a repetition of disappointment, as Guy Debord reminds in The Society of The Spectacle: “The object that is glamorous in the spectacle becomes vulgar the moment it enters the consumer’s home.” Shiny new buys fade quickly into a consumer’s total collected “stuff,” “crap,” or “shit.” Vulgar indeed. Consumers must be self-sacrificing lovers; in order for Homo Economicus to function properly, s/he must desire money not for what it can bring, but truly for itself, and then let it go circulate. The impossible urge to reconcile the two drives brings on a spiral of disgust and renunciation, leaving nothing but the temporary relief of trips to the store, to be repeated unto death. As Gucci puts it tragically:

I need another hoe/my old hoe was the truth
I had to let her go/she kept naggin’ bout my goons
I been saggin’ to the floor/told her pack her shit and move
Now I’m single once again/looking for me something new
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But also, at the same time, feels situationists have been overlooked in their political economic arguments:

https://twitter.com/BigMeanInternet/statuses/337282528572481536


Guy Debord does a lot more political economy than he gets credit for.
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