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

[rekil]

That's probably the best talk I've ever heard her give to be fair. Admittedly the competition isn't very stiff because I've not heard her speak much at all and what I have heard has been crap but it's really not bad.

Different prattle for different parties. Flitting between identities at will. China Mieville was there I see.

 

[DotCommunist]

video has been removed by the user

 

[rekil]

video has been removed by the user

Try this.



In this one she says "she comes from a tradition of socialist and anarchist thinking which is at odds with the party structure, which is autonomism. [...] I'm an internet journalist which sits very very badly indeed with any party format right now."

Lies.

 

[butchersapron]

WOW on so so so many levels.

 

[Bakunin]

Try this.



In this one she says "she comes from a tradition of socialist and anarchist thinking which is at odds with the party structure, which is autonomism. [...] I'm an internet journalist which sits very very badly indeed with any party format right now."

Lies.

More 'Prada-Meinhof'- style fakery aimed at enhancing the 'rebel sell' brand, I see.

 

[frogwoman]

that's just putting random words together

 

[butchersapron]

This is why the SWP went on an on and on about their daft version of autonomism - so they could situate muppets like this within it and say look at these twats, steer well clear, and now the muppets are mug enough to don the robes themselves.

 

[butchersapron]

I wonder what aspects of the autonomist (or anarchist for that matter) tradition she feels that she is coming from?

 

[love detective]

Laurie Penny ‏@PennyRed
Just finished an angry column about the benefits cap. It's a pure PR exercise which will cause untold pain, and we shouldn't stand for it.

Penny's poor choice of grammar inadvertently ends up delivering a spot on analysis of herself and her work

 

[ViolentPanda]

Advice for the rest of us as recommended by LP:

https://twitter.com/PennyRed/status/357149485119442946

http://sunnydrake.wordpress.com/2013/07/14/racism-is-to-white-people-as-wind-is-to-the-sky


LP doesn't do this, nor should you:

"When I have failed to take the time to consider how I could make sure people of colour and Indigenous people are central in the decision making of groups I’m a part of."

"When I have spent more time reading white people’s opinions on racism than people of colour’s and Indigenous people’s opinions and lived experiences."

"When I have gotten acquaintances who are people of colour confused with each other. It doesn’t matter that I also frequently can’t recognise white people who I don’t know very well – this is where context matters. In the context of a racist world that makes invisible and dehumanises people of colour, my actions are racist."

The whole blog post is over 2,250 words about from this middle-class performance artist.

If I assume that the essayist is a self-regarding emotional dwarf who has less right to be alive than a Tory MP, does that make me prejudiced?

 

[butchersapron]

Penny's poor choice of grammar inadvertently ends up delivering a spot on analysis of herself and her work

I like the way she feels that we need to be told that it's an angry column. I wonder how it can be both a pure PR exercise i.e not meaning or changing anything but peoples perceptions and also cause untold pain. More clunkiness.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Also it assumes that the only racism that matters is the one based on skin colour. What about Catholics v Protestants in Northern Ireland? Or people not being served in pubs because they "look like pikeys"? Where are these fools intersectional analyses of that?

That doesn't matter. The victims are white, and therefore can't be victims.

Makes you want to sharpen your axe, doesn't it?

 

[agricola]

Makes you want to sharpen your axe, doesn't it?

Axes - tools of into-sectionality that everyone can agree on.

 

[rekil]

I wonder what aspects of the autonomist (or anarchist for that matter) tradition she feels that she is coming from?

All of them but mainly Terry Pratchett.

That's not a gag.

if you locked me in a room for a month and told me I was only allowed to read the works of one author, I'd probably go for the entire works of Terry Pratchett

 

[Delroy Booth]

I wonder what aspects of the autonomist (or anarchist for that matter) tradition she feels that she is coming from?

Voting Liberal Democrat?

 

[JimW]

Heard she was influenced by a very early speech by Negri, along the lines of "I won't come home for my tea mum, we're still playing football."

 

[butchersapron]

Voting Liberal Democrat?

That would be the Comrade p45 section of the lib-dems.

 

[frogwoman]

That doesn't matter. The victims are white, and therefore can't be victims.

Makes you want to sharpen your axe, doesn't it?

and what about say, Muslims from the Balkans?

 

[ViolentPanda]

that's just putting random words together

When it gets plaudits, it's Laura's journalism. When people say "that's a load of random crap!", Laura blames the subbies.

 

[rekil]

That's probably the best talk I've ever heard her give to be fair. Admittedly the competition isn't very stiff because I've not heard her speak much at all and what I have heard has been crap but it's really not bad.

Something Must Be Done.

 

[frogwoman]

the typewriters/monkeys school of journalism

 

[ViolentPanda]

Heard she was influenced by a very early speech by Negri, along the lines of "I won't come home for my tea mum, we're still playing football."

And also influenced by Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name Of...", I suspect.

 

[caleb]

Articles a year old, but I've been meaning to bring this up because it makes me laugh.

A new generation of feminists is discovering James's work. Academic Nina Power and writer and blogger Laurie Penny, for example, both cite her as an influence.

"I saw the state close up. It was an enormous education. Almost all of them were awful. It is the ambition, it makes people awful." By the time she left, she had "had enough of the middle class, of the intelligentsia. I thought, I am going to be with working-class people from now on."

"Politics, if it is fuelled by a great will to change the world, rather than by personal ambition, offers a chance to know the world, and to be more self-conscious of the actual life you are living rather than being taken over by what you are told you should feel: a chance to live, in other words, an authentic life. Such politics are a unique enrichment, not a sacrifice."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james

This is the same 'ambition' Penny wears as a badge of honour.

 

[ViolentPanda]

and what about say, Muslims from the Balkans?

Well quite.
Intersectional analysis can be a good tool, when properly used, but when deployed piecemeal to make poseur-ish clunky political points about the evils of whiteness that are basically appeals to the oppressed to "love me, I'm on your side!", then it's fucking worthless liberal guilt-tripping and class snobbery (because the liberal is always looking to condescend to the ignorant constituency that is the working class).

 

[Louis MacNeice]

Articles a year old, but I've been meaning to bring this up because it makes me laugh.







http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james

This is the same 'ambition' Penny wears as a badge of honour.

Perhaps it's gendered ambition that's bad; stripped of its ugly ,violent, grabbing maleness it can blossom into a beautiful, caring and sharing good?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[caleb]

Perhaps it's gendered ambition that's bad; stripped of its ugly ,violent, grabbing maleness it can blossom into a beautiful, caring and sharing good?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

James talks about ambition elsewhere, including "ambitious feminism", so no, I don't think it's gendered at all. She never seeks to reclaim a 'positive' ambition, she sees it as negative in all cases.

 

[butchersapron]

Articles a year old, but I've been meaning to bring this up because it makes me laugh.







http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/08/life-in-writing-selma-james

This is the same 'ambition' Penny wears as a badge of honour.

Wonderful interview that:

She arrived back in London in 1969, just as the women's liberation movement invented itself. The British feminist, Bea Campbell – no friend of James – remembers it as "a torrid, marvellous time, with groups being formed suddenly, and everywhere". Campbell was 22, and recalls a movement as "full of women in their 20s". Enter James: "She was 40, fully-formed, fortified," says Campbell. "She knew how to do battle. A small Trotskyist sect formed her, and she has remained schismatic ever since. Schismatic, sectarian, polarising: Selma got on women's nerves."

That's not how James remembers it. The schism was not about age, she insists, but class: "I brought a reality to the movement they didn't want to acknowledge: that there is a struggle going on, and we have to decide whose side we're on." And all that talk of liberation through work! James had spent years working a double day in a factory and as a housewife: she knew what working-class women felt about factory work: "They walk in, they run out." Too many women in the movement simply "didn't know anything about the world".

There's a fantastic one she did last year too - def recommend the 50 minutes or so listen.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

James talks about ambition elsewhere, including "ambitious feminism", so no, I don't think it's gendered at all. She never seeks to reclaim a 'positive' ambition, she sees it as negative in all cases.

Sorry I should've included an irony smiley!

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[J Ed]

and what about say, Muslims from the Balkans?

After spending a while asking questions like this I've come to the conclusion that the answer is usually that they don't know as they haven't thought about it that much and if they have then they don't care.

 

[J Ed]

When it gets plaudits, it's Laura's journalism. When people say "that's a load of random crap!", Laura blames the subbies.

Plaudits for the commentariat, coffee runs and abuse for the intern subeditors...