Mad Paul Mason
- Thread starter Proper Tidy
- Start date
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Respect to Mason for delivering this utterly foul piss with a straight face.
I wonder what the angle is here? A job with Starmer? Better column opportunities as an insider? A book on ‘where now for Labour‘
I wonder what the angle is here? A job with Starmer? Better column opportunities as an insider? A book on ‘where now for Labour‘
josef1878 2.0
Well-Known Member
He should walk the streets and talk to the people of the town where he grew up (without a camera crew) every day like I do and he might actually realise there weren't many remain voters for Labour to lose there. There's less now they voted Tory for the first time in 90 years.
Here's their new MP
www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk
Here's their new MP
Tory MP for Leigh apologies over video of him 'flashing genitals' in pub
Video has emerged which shows the Tory MP for Leigh dropping his trousers before he embarked on political career
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steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
Mason’s intellectual and political gymnastics are really something.
A vacuous, posturing charlatan without any scruple.
A vacuous, posturing charlatan without any scruple.
SpineyNorman
Inappropriate content removed
I'm just glad I never had any respect for him to begin with.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Fact:
Intellectual analysis:
Intellectual analysis:
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Fact:
Working class public intellectual analysis:
Working class public intellectual analysis:
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Five years and he'll be where Cohen and Aaronovitch were in '97
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
no doubt, and like Aaronovitch he sees phantom Stalinists everywhere when called out on it.
ska invita
back on the other side
I’m on a public webinar with Katja Kipping and Jagmeet Singh. Katja’s the leader of the Left party’s 69-strong fraction in the Bundestag; Jagmeet heads the Canadian NDP; but there’s only one person people want to hear about - Keir Starmer. Starmer, whose leadership campaign I worked on, has dragged Labour’s polling average up by eight points during the lockdown and his own personal approval ratings are now 12 points positive (compared to Corbyn’s minus 50 on election day). Surely everyone is happy, ask the people on the call? Thanks to WhatsApp, and Twitter, I know that parts of what was once Corbynism are not happy. Each time Starmer steps up to the wicket, calmly batting away calls for him to abolish the police force or support the desecration of monuments, I get a flurry of messages and subtweets. ‘Is this centrism or actual Blairism?’ asks one comrade. A homeopath from Birmingham tells me that, due to my support for Keir, I am a ‘State & Intelligence Agency propagandist play-acting being a plastic communist’. A left-wing journalist from Germany suggests that Starmer is ‘a traitor who serves the 1 per cent’, directing me to his own seven-part series on Keir’s links with Israel and the Trilateral Commission. I do wonder if, when we all see each other in person at the next Labour conference, I’m expected to smile weakly at my online detractors over a stale ham sandwich, or whether the lockdown is actually suppressing a civil war inside the party.
The Labour Together election review makes grim reading. Unless Labour can take back a large part of Scotland, it needs a swing in England so large that it takes Jacob Rees-Mogg’s seat in Somerset. We’ll have to take back not only the Red Wall but the Blue Fen. Realistically, the report says, there are three routes back to power: drop social liberalism and bring out the anti-immigration mugs; tack to the centre on economic policy while talking loudly about patriotism; or try to unite a culturally divided working-class base around a radical economic offer that is ‘credible and morally essential’. That third option is effectively the strategy Starmer stood on, but the report also reveals levels of incompetence in the party that will take months to fix. But with goodwill and a united shadow cabinet, it feels like we’re making progress…
At 3.26 p.m. on Thursday Starmer sacks Rebecca Long-Bailey. For my wing of the left, who want to play a constructive role in Starmer’s project, it’s a disaster. Long-Bailey is a competent and engaging politician whose membership of the shadow cabinet was seen by many of us as an insurance policy against the inevitable attempts to pull Starmer to the right. A story emerges of press-imposed deadlines vs unanswered phone calls. Starmer’s people sound flabbergasted that Long-Bailey refused to delete her offensive tweet — and that’s the substance: you can’t have a shadow cabinet member refusing a direct order. Long-Bailey’s people claim it’s all about her support for the teachers’ unions over lockdown. She has to go — but it looks like bad party management. For a few hours, the left talks of open rebellion. There are calls for left-wingers to quit the front bench. But the tweet was offensive, Maxine Peake has apologised; so in the end nobody resigns. It’s a taste of what’s to come. Large parts of the left don’t yet realise how different the party has to look and sound to win back power, even while being committed to radical economic change.
Dom Traynor
Tino Pai
Excellent post. Totally agree.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
From
How did the first world war actually end?
to
you can’t have a shadow cabinet member refusing a direct order.
How did the first world war actually end?
to
you can’t have a shadow cabinet member refusing a direct order.
phillm
Trolling through Life (TM)
Personally I'm looking forward to when he does his stint on Strictly followed by Now Get Me Out Here where he either radicalises the z-listers to overthrow the autocracy of Ant & Dec or ends up being consumed by the mob. I probably wrongly imagine that there may be the touch of the creepy Galloways if he goes down that route.
When is a door to freedom not a door to freedom?
When it's a Paul Mason jar.
I'll get my flat cap and Michael Foot duffel coat before it kicks off everywhere.
When is a door to freedom not a door to freedom?
When it's a Paul Mason jar.
I'll get my flat cap and Michael Foot duffel coat before it kicks off everywhere.
Spot on.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
He put out a long read recently which I thought about posting here. But essentially Mason’s entire repertoire can be boiled down to:
1. Providing, intellectually ineffective, left cover for the Starmer project.
2. Support for popular frontism
3. Denigration of the working class proper and privileging an imaginary progressive majority.
All performed by a 60 year old bloke desperate to be down with the middle class left cool kids.
I can’t even be arsed to mock him anymore.
1. Providing, intellectually ineffective, left cover for the Starmer project.
2. Support for popular frontism
3. Denigration of the working class proper and privileging an imaginary progressive majority.
All performed by a 60 year old bloke desperate to be down with the middle class left cool kids.
I can’t even be arsed to mock him anymore.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Just bumping this up in preparedness for his searing class analysis based ‘hot take’
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
Working Title: 'That's what I call leadership 2020'
dylanredefined
Not a house elf a tiger
Can we just point and shout. Getting weapons and ammunition is a total mare. Probably quicker and easier to smuggle it in from eastern Europe than go through the system tbh.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
I realise Mason ‘jumped the shark’ sometime ago. I also admit I lacked the will to plough through all of this seemingly unending stream of half baked guff.
Mason now calls for an extension of his popular front and a formal alliance with the state and neoliberalism as the only method to prevent fascism - “we, the left, need to build from below a movement for democratic culture and values, no matter how cynical we are about their content under people like Clinton, Obama and Biden.”
I know he’s got a book to sell on ‘how to prevent fascism’ but fuck me...still it gives shilling for Starmer an ‘intellectual’ veneer I suppose...
medium.com
Mason now calls for an extension of his popular front and a formal alliance with the state and neoliberalism as the only method to prevent fascism - “we, the left, need to build from below a movement for democratic culture and values, no matter how cynical we are about their content under people like Clinton, Obama and Biden.”
I know he’s got a book to sell on ‘how to prevent fascism’ but fuck me...still it gives shilling for Starmer an ‘intellectual’ veneer I suppose...
The Trump Insurrection: a Marxist analysis
Whether planned or stochastic, it was still a coup
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Someone remind me what happened in Spain in 1936.Mason" said:
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
Quite. But, and to be fair Mason is at the wilder end of the spectrum on this, there is a wider disorientation at present. One where serious attempts to restore the authority of the state and the neo-liberal orthodoxy - thereby recreating or deepening existing conditions that give oxygen to the far right in the first place - are being perceived as some sort of, if not a victory, then some kind of step forward.
I realise Mason ‘jumped the shark’ sometime ago. I also admit I lacked the will to plough through all of this seemingly unending stream of half baked guff.
Mason now calls for an extension of his popular front and a formal alliance with the state and neoliberalism as the only method to prevent fascism - “we, the left, need to build from below a movement for democratic culture and values, no matter how cynical we are about their content under people like Clinton, Obama and Biden.”
I know he’s got a book to sell on ‘how to prevent fascism’ but fuck me...still it gives shilling for Starmer an ‘intellectual’ veneer I suppose...
The Trump Insurrection: a Marxist analysis
Whether planned or stochastic, it was still a coup
Just a little thing but it bugs me - I thought he had said he wasn't a Marxist anymore.
Smokeandsteam
Working Class First
I thought the opposite. I thought he was insistent that his was a ‘serious’ Marxist analysis?
I'm sure I saw him in an interview (perhaps on Newsnight) defending the right of Marxists to be in the Labour Party while saying that he is no longer a Marxist himself. I don't follow him very closely mind.
ska invita
back on the other side
To me to be A Marxist is very different from drawing on Marx for analysis.
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