So, in other words, you're just another one who doesn't want to hear, or is psychologically inpable of accepting, the bad news. Never mind.
If the discussion is so boring, what are you doing here?
What's 'a failed lefty'?
During the biggest crisis of capitalism of our generation, why is the UK anarcho-left not growing?
- Thread starter Random
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So, in other words, you're just another one who doesn't want to hear, or is psychologically inpable of accepting, the bad news. Never mind.
If the discussion is so boring, what are you doing here?
What's 'a failed lefty'?
This is what's so tiresome, like we're all a bunch of naive little boys clinging on to our mad deluded theories, but thankfully you're here to give us the benefit of your wisdom, which is "everything's shit ner ner" repeated ad nauseum. It's incredibly condescending.
And if anyone disagree's with your position, you can just go "you can't handle the truth man" because by picking the most negative possible scenario possible in any given situation, you can just hide beneath a veil of being the most realistic, of being the most brutally honest, and so on. There's plenty more people on this thread who's contributions have been realistic and insightful, whereas you've just contributed a load of self-indulgent doom-mongering, that has only a passing resemblence to the world I and the rest of humanity lives in, presumably because it gives you a stiffy. I don't think what you're saying is right either, there's loads of holes you can pick in your arguments, but anyone who bothers to do that is just going to get the same old tired response of "you're just another one who doesn't want to hear, or is psychologically inpable of accepting, the bad news."
What's the point in trying to have a grown up discussion with someone who's just going to dismiss anything you say, regardless of it's merit, in that way? It's like trying to argue with a sulky teenage goth who thinks everything is shit - you can't win.
No the discussion is fine, it's you that's boring.
I really don't mind if anybody thinks there are holes in my argument, but as usual, rather than addressing these, the response is to merely get angry and/or sulky, to start writing about my supposed shortcomings, and/or to argue against things I either haven't said or that you'd prefer me to have said.
Yeah there are loads of holes in your arguments, but I know exactly what'll happen if I tried in good faith to make those points to you, it'd be dismissed straight away as " you're just another one who doesn't want to hear, or is psychologically inpable of accepting, the bad news." This is the get-out clause that's in-built in all your arguments, and it's so obvious you get a buzz out of saying it, so lets be honest that's what it's all about to you, not trying to hold a mature discussion.
so I don't see any point in bothering to try and get a proper discussion going. I don't think that's what you're after to be honest. Seems to me like you just want a place on the internet where you can broadcast just how shit everything is, and how you're the only one brave and honest and trailblazing enough to point this out.
So that's three or four posts now where you've moaned at me for saying something and then gone on to say why it's not worth bothering with.
Interesting.
Maybe later, I've got a few things on atm. There's some points where he's right, and I share a pessimistic view, but there's other points where he's stretching that as far as he can so he can enjoy being a prophet of doom.
How do you know that I enjoy it*-and why would it be a problem if I did?
* I don't-it's a terrible burden fate has given me to shoulder. But I do it with good cheer and a sense of duty.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
And blasters. What's the use of having a personal jetpack if you can't shoot coherent light bolts at people while you fly above them?
You may have noticed that I've already deplored the usual tendency to write about me instead of what I've said.
I think people like Delroy are reluctant to address the kind of thing I'm saying because all they have is the usual jaded leftism, which stands on very shaky ground and is easily refuted.
Pingu
Credo
tis true
Random
Ethnic nalgocrat
I've flipped around, and there's nothing better on.
Random
Ethnic nalgocrat
I used to waste time being annoyed at his attutude too.
Hackneyed? Come on man, the only thing hackneyed here is this miserablism that you're indulging in. You're old enough to be my dad*, yet I'm somehow the out of touch leftist clinging onto my party line like it was a comfort blanket, and your the maverick renegade blowing my dogmatic leftist preconceptions apart with your incisive analysis of "don't bother, everything's shit".
It's a product of the failure of the left of the 80's and 90's, the fall of soviet communism and the "end of history" era where a whole generation of critical left had some wild existential crisis, and either ended up in total agreement with the right wing (Bredan O'Neill et al), or gave up entirely, leaving only the most belligerant true believers still involved in the movement. I'm not really a part of that generation or political culture so it's weird for me looking at how people who got involved more recently interact with the older generation who went through this. This kind of shit is the political culture that younger people who have come into the movement have been subject too. Maybe this is a factor why the radical left hasn't grown perhaps? When I first got started in politics around the time of the Iraq war one of the things that struck me was that, considering I was a handsome, articulate, intelligent teenager with masses of potential as a demogogue sect-builder (and humble with it, naturally
), no-one ever tried to encourage me or give me and my mates any hope that what we were doing was something worthwhile, something that led somewhere. That's what's so tiresome and boring about your posts LLETSA, because you say this sort of thing like it's new to everyone, but it's been fashionable on the left for as long as I've been involved to be relentlessly cynical and disapproving of anything whatsoever. I remember at the iraq war, I ran around the classrooms like a bull in a china shop and tried getting everyone to come out for the anti-war march in town, and when one class emptied and the kids saw that teachers weren't stopping them it became a mass exodus. I managed to convince maybe 30 or 40 from my school who went to go to an anti-war meeting hosted by the Stop the War Co-alition at a coffee shop in town, and there were batches of kids who'd done the exact same thing from pratically every school in the region. The room was packed And the reaction to this? Mainly disparaging comments about how it's a waste of time and how it'll all come to nowt from most of the people who were involved in left politics, with the exception of the swappie paper sellers who were desperately running around flogging papers and trying to get people to sign up, not really doing much to organise this vast contingent of youth. But at least they were supportive in their own confused way. Out of that group of kids I'm probably the only one still involved in any way in political stuff, and I hardly do owt these days outside of anti-fascism. And I've seen that same situation happen numerous times now, with student protests and strikes and anti-EDL stuff. The left doesn't have a problem attracting people to get involved, there's loads of people who are interested, it's more a problem in getting them to stay after the first few meetings.Anyway just so you know I'm not a total troll, I'll make one point about something you said regarding the media. And I actually agree with you on it for the most part.
You're absolutely correct, there no way to create an alternative to capitalisn, there's no way to open up the space where that sort of thing could be done, whilst the mass media is corporate owned and part of the ruling class, to put it crudely. However, you've got to have a really short-term view of working class history if you think that calls of the sort of damaging pessimism you're indulging in. This isn't new at all y'know. It's not like Toni Gramsci, Noam Chomsky and Walter Benjamin were the first to figure it out. I'm up to my neck reading all the working class social history stuff at the moment, like EP Thompson, Asa Briggs, Christopher Hill, and people knew that back in the early 19th century at the start of the socialist movement. During the chartists, they knew they had to be their own media, and so set up newspapers like the Northern Star, The Poor Man's Guardian, The True Sun, The London Mercury (see here) that had big circulations that could actually rival the capitalist press. This was ordinary working men and women who by their thousands joined committee's and editorial teams and became citizen journalists 170 years before the internet, and built a movement. They did this at a time when a large percentage of the working population was barely literate, against a government that in the previous 50 years ruthlessly suppressed any radical groups by hanging and deportation (Jacobins, London Corresponding Society, Luddites, Swing Rioters, Plug Riots, Peterloo, Toldpuddle etc) in conditions un-imaginably harsher than they are today. And yet you're saying we should be pessimistic? I think we've got it easy.
* Probably
Hackneyed? Come on man, the only thing hackneyed here is this miserablism that you're indulging in. You're old enough to be my dad*, yet I'm somehow the out of touch leftist clinging onto my party line like it was a comfort blanket, and your the maverick renegade blowing my dogmatic leftist preconceptions apart with your incisive analysis of "don't bother, everything's shit".
It's a product of the failure of the left of the 80's and 90's, the fall of soviet communism and the "end of history" era where a whole generation of critical left had some wild existential crisis, and either ended up in total agreement with the right wing (Bredan O'Neill et al), or gave up entirely, leaving only the most belligerant true believers still involved in the movement. I'm not really a part of that generation or political culture so it's weird for me looking at how people who got involved more recently interact with the older generation who went through this. This kind of shit is the political culture that younger people who have come into the movement have been subject too. Maybe this is a factor why the radical left hasn't grown perhaps? When I first got started in politics around the time of the Iraq war one of the things that struck me was that, considering I was a handsome, articulate, intelligent teenager with masses of potential as a demogogue sect-builder (and humble with it, naturally
* Probably
I have never said anything like 'Don't bother, everything's shit' although for some reason people like to continually accuse me of doing so. Here's a clue: saying what you think will happen, or pouring cold water on somebody's political nostrum, is not the same thing as saying 'Don't bother, everything's shit.'
What you've said about being the only one among your peers from the (predictably failed) anti-war movement still involved only goes to illustrate what I'm saying about the nature of the times we live in. As I said, if anybody disagrees, fine.
The only poster in the latter part of this thread who seems to fully understand the way things are is JHE.
Anyway just so you know I'm not a total troll, I'll make one point about something you said regarding the media. And I actually agree with you on it for the most part.
You're absolutely correct, there no way to create an alternative to capitalisn, there's no way to open up the space where that sort of thing could be done, whilst the mass media is corporate owned and part of the ruling class, to put it crudely. However, you've got to have a really short-term view of working class history if you think that calls of the sort of damaging pessimism you're indulging in. This isn't new at all y'know. It's not like Toni Gramsci, Noam Chomsky and Walter Benjamin were the first to figure it out. I'm up to my neck reading all the working class social history stuff at the moment, like EP Thompson, Asa Briggs, Christopher Hill, and people knew that back in the early 19th century at the start of the socialist movement. During the chartists, they knew they had to be their own media, and so set up newspapers like the Northern Star, The Poor Man's Guardian, The True Sun, The London Mercury (see here) that had big circulations that could actually rival the capitalist press. This was ordinary working men and women who by their thousands joined committee's and editorial teams and became citizen journalists 170 years before the internet, and built a movement. They did this at a time when a large percentage of the working population was barely literate, against a government that in the previous 50 years ruthlessly suppressed any radical groups by hanging and deportation (Jacobins, London Corresponding Society, Luddites, Swing Rioters, Plug Riots, Peterloo, Toldpuddle etc) in conditions un-imaginably harsher than they are today. And yet you're saying we should be pessimistic? I think we've got it easy.
On another slightly related note, I want to compare anarchist and trot sectarianismFuck it I'll spare you this post's long enough
* Probably
Those conditions were nonetheless far more favourable to working class solidarity than our own. Social atomisation, and wall-to-wall media drivel and (subtle) propaganda, is our undoing.
Well personally I'd take wall-to-wall media drivel over being hung drawn and quartered for having a left-wing meeting, but each to their own.
we are all sheeple
Yet again-that is not what I'm saying. Address the point by all means but don't just make things up.
So would I. But it still doesn't alter what I'm saying.
The difference between now and then is that nowadays nobody's listening. An unprecedented level of access to information creates a generalised babble. Nobody listens to anybody else. Even on here.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
You must have been made up when they invented the internet and you could finally retire the sandwich board and handbell
Good, stay retired then, you think the game's up, but I think being rid of a load of cynical old duffers who can't get over the fall of the berlin wall is a deliverance for this generation.
love detective
there's no love too small
Generally agree with most of what you've said on this thread (and agree it's amusing watching people falling over themselves to misrepresent your position), but I think you're setting up a false dichotomy with what you say above. For socialism/communism/whatever to be a valid alternative to capitalism, it had to be a product off it
You can't really think about any kind of viable socialism/communism in a context that didn't involve capitalism preceding, and thus producing the conditions for, it. Capitalism was the potential midwife for socialism, it brought into being all the conditions for it, both in the negative sense in terms of the need to negate the exploitation of labour by capital etc.. but also in the positive sense of the revolutionising of labour productivity that once made the concept of communism a viable one. Without the substantial development of labour productivity that capitalism brought about, the material basis for communism would have never existed
So just because communism is rightly seen as a product of capitalism, it doesn't theoretically or practically take away it's legitimacy/validity as an alternative to it
That it ultimately failed and there is no sign that it will ever get as close as it did in the late 19th & early 20th century (despite being in the biggest crisis of capitalism not just in our generation, but possibly of every generation that has ever existed under capitalism) is a different matter however - capitalism will still go on to produce its eventual successor, it just won't be as nice as the previous one.
love detective
there's no love too small
SP
Fair enough. But what I was getting at was thatbeing the product of capitalism, it shared most of its assumptions. I think this is what the social democrats came to realise when they decided they could fulfil most of their aims without the bloodshed and turmoil involved in overthrowing capitalism. What they don't seem to have taken into account was the way that capitalism would immediately set to work on clawing back all the concessions it was forced to make-not hesitating to shed plenty of blood where necessary.
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