Selling Out: Where is the line crossed?

[DotCommunist]

what about using private healthcare if it is provided free with your job?

Shit, if its part of the perks its ppart of the perks. If you had a company merc would you drive an astra hatchback out of principle, lordy no. Rag it like its rented.

 

[campanula]

On a recent picnic, the Steiner mums were most definitely separate from hoi polloi such as myself and daughter...with a distinct sneeriness. I heard the term 'those people' several times, referring to the ragamuffin bunch in our group and there was no intermingling of children. Made us feel a tad uncomfortable and examine some of our deeper prejudices at least...Horses for courses I guess

 

[littlebabyjesus]

On a recent picnic, the Steiner mums were most definitely separate from hoi polloi such as myself and daughter...with a distinct sneeriness. I heard the term 'those people' several times, referring to the ragamuffin bunch in our group and there was no intermingling of children. Made us feel a tad uncomfortable and examine some of our deeper prejudices at least...Horses for courses I guess

Isn't this going to be a problem with parents of private-school kids in general? Many of them send their kids private in order to keep them separate. They pay good money to keep their kids apart from others in what are often not necessarily great schools.

 

[chilango]

Isn't this going to be a problem with parents of private-school kids in general? Many of them send their kids private in order to keep them separate. They pay good money to keep their kids apart from others in what are often not necessarily great schools.

Absolutely.

That is IME the prime reason.

Who their kids are schooled with.

And who they're not schooled with.

 

[Pickman's model]

On a recent picnic, the Steiner mums were most definitely separate from hoi polloi such as myself and daughter...with a distinct sneeriness. I heard the term 'those people' several times, referring to the ragamuffin bunch in our group and there was no intermingling of children. Made us feel a tad uncomfortable and examine some of our deeper prejudices at least...Horses for courses I guess

yeh. but if i were you i wouldn't want to mingle with the likes of anthrosophists.

 

[Orang Utan]

What about working in them?

I have.

You got a problem with that?

(I know we've had this discussion before so feel free to pass!)

I have a problem with working in them, but not with other people.
State schools and faith schools are bad enough I suppose. Subvert from within.

 

[chilango]

I have a problem with working in them, but not with other people.
State schools and faith schools are bad enough I suppose. Subvert from within.

Fair enough.

 

[killer b]

Isn't this going to be a problem with parents of private-school kids in general? Many of them send their kids private in order to keep them separate. They pay good money to keep their kids apart from others in what are often not necessarily great schools.

of course. I expect the effects of Steiner education are more to do with being schooled with a cohort of middle class liberal hippie kids than the teaching itself...

 

[chilango]

...be interesting to see how many of these lines we've crossed or are likely to cross. Almost put a poll in.

 

[mod]

Claiming to be a socialist and anti-capitalist whilst sitting in your 3 bed house in chiswick paid for from the huge amount of money you made selling your old council house which is now privately let to a family who can't afford the astronomical rent therefore relying on housing benefits to live there.

 

[Pickman's model]

...be interesting to see how many of these lines we've crossed or are likely to cross. Almost put a poll in.

i've crossed my talking to anyone line

 

[brogdale]

Oh dear.

 

[killer b]

That's a fairly specific example.

I dont think a three-bed house is really the pinnacle of selling out is it? Even in Chiswick?

 

[Orang Utan]

If library books aren't organised in strict accordance with the Dewey Decimal system, it's not my revolution...

The Dewey Decimal system is far from perfect. I'd scrap it if I was brave enough. But that would be like scrapping the QWERTY keyboard.

 

[brogdale]

Err...if it's confessional time...I own a campervan that (theoretically) sleeps 4.

 

[Pickman's model]

The Dewey Decimal system is far from perfect. I'd scrap it if I was brave enough. But that would be like scrapping the QWERTY keyboard.

no, it wouldn't. senate house library in london has no fewer than seven classification schemes, while something like library of congress more common certainly than bliss and maybe more common than dewey in academick libraries.

 

[butchersapron]

I wouldn't normally post this on this thread, but i do know chilango is acquainted with this scene:

Woland, an ex-member of Blaumachen and Sic, after having spent some odd years devising odd theories about the “era of riots” and the rise of the new revolutionary (non-)subject, has now found something more profitable to do: discarding his nom de guerre he has become Syriza’s Secretary General of the Ministry of Economy, Infrastructure, Maritime Affairs and Tourism, Director of the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank and Alternate Governor of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, under his real name Manousos Manousakis. And all this movement of de-communisation in just over a year.

One of this ex-communiser’s many duties is to find the right government policy proportion of commons to privatizations, workers’ rights to capitalist investments.The fact that he is also vice president of the two-thirds privatised Greece Telecom as well as the guy Syriza has put in charge of Telecommunications is already becoming a bit of a scandal in Greece’s mainstream media – “a conflict of interests” as the pretension to State neutrality phrases it. But – it seems – it’s neither a scandal nor a “conflict of interests” amongst the ultra-lefthargic communisers of Sic and Blaumachen, whose silence on this subject is as deafening as the sound of a leaf falling during the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

 

[chilango]

I wouldn't normally post this on this thread, but i do know chilango is acquainted with this scene:

Woland, an ex-member of Blaumachen and Sic, after having spent some odd years devising odd theories about the “era of riots” and the rise of the new revolutionary (non-)subject, has now found something more profitable to do: discarding his nom de guerre he has become Syriza’s Secretary General of the Ministry of Economy, Infrastructure, Maritime Affairs and Tourism, Director of the Black Sea Trade and Development Bank and Alternate Governor of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, under his real name Manousos Manousakis. And all this movement of de-communisation in just over a year.

One of this ex-communiser’s many duties is to find the right government policy proportion of commons to privatizations, workers’ rights to capitalist investments.The fact that he is also vice president of the two-thirds privatised Greece Telecom as well as the guy Syriza has put in charge of Telecommunications is already becoming a bit of a scandal in Greece’s mainstream media – “a conflict of interests” as the pretension to State neutrality phrases it. But – it seems – it’s neither a scandal nor a “conflict of interests” amongst the ultra-lefthargic communisers of Sic and Blaumachen, whose silence on this subject is as deafening as the sound of a leaf falling during the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

Wow that's gonna be pretty hard to beat!

 

[danny la rouge]

A guy I knew in the 80s who was in Class War went on to become a Benefits Inspector.

Line crossed.

 

[SpookyFrank]

My father's red lines:

Buy our council house.
Supervise any fellow worker outside a democratically controlled workplace.
Own a car (excessively individualistic, undermines the case for public transport)
Private healthcare (a theoretical objection as he could barely afford new bootlaces never mind botox)
Private education (compensated for this by making me and my sister do about 6 hours of homework every night)
Never buy anything on credit or have a bank account. (There was also some doctrinal issue with insurance but my mother nagged him into submission on that.)
Never went in a bookies, and very rarely into a pub as he thought gambling and alcohol attenuated class militancy.

You can't not have a bank account these days, not if you want a job or a place to live.

And buying stuff on credit cards isn't selling out, it's just a really bad idea.

 

[SpookyFrank]

Isn't this going to be a problem with parents of private-school kids in general? Many of them send their kids private in order to keep them separate. They pay good money to keep their kids apart from others in what are often not necessarily great schools.

And when those kids grow up and enter the adult world their lack of social skills and basic human decency will continue keep them separate from the hoi polloi. I don't know if this is a deliberate policy or a happy accident, but I suspect the former.

Happy, well-adjusted young people do not have the arrogance or lack of empathy needed to be a corporate boss or a politician; better to teach your kids to be arseholes so that the rest of society rejects them, as this will help foster the kind of contempt for mankind that you need to really do well in life.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

You can't not have a bank account these days, not if you want a job or a place to live.

And buying stuff on credit cards isn't selling out, it's just a really bad idea.

That was very much a list from another generation, one that could assume that a lot more of the commons was going to be held in collective hands.

As for picking and choosing which unions to support based on lazy prejudice?

 

[BigTom]

what about using private healthcare if it is provided free with your job?

I wouldn't

I've got a mate who is a Jobcentre Advisor. I've worked on switchboards and in mailrooms at Jobcentres. There are plenty of cunts but there are also a few who try to help people as much as they can. I was in there one day chatting to a mate and one of the advisors almost went for another for the shit way he treated someone.


We have a spare room and have considered letting a friend live in it. There is no way she would live there without paying rent. Pride and shit.

No, speaking as a line manager I've done a couple of things I've not liked and refused to do many things that are pretty shitty. Quite often they still happen. There are 2 possibly 3 people who still have their jobs because I fought their corner. Doesn't make me any less of a cunt but most of those likely to take the job if I left would not only do what I wouldn't but some would fuck other people over for the hell of it. Whatever it takes to sleep at night I guess.

JCP - see below

I don't think letting a room is crossing a line, nor do I think line management is, though like you say, there may be times where you do things/refuse stuff that are shit. I also don't think that saying worse people would do it if you didn't is a good argument. It's about your relationship to capital, and whether you are, as part of your job, seeking to create/ensure the maximum extraction of surplus value from your (company's) staff. Being a good manager, likewise being a good landlord, doesn't change that relationship.

I know and have worked with a lot of DWP staff since I've been a TU rep and there are a lot of good, fair and caring staff in job centres, DWP call centres and other DWP workplaces. There are staff facing disciplinary action for failing to impose sanctions on people and for speaking out against ATOS and Universal Credit.

To tar them with the same brush as the police is disgusting.

I should have said JCP staff, management too (even more so tbf), not just advisors. I said JCP intentionally though, not DWP, DWP does far, far more stuff than just the JCP. I'd bracket people who work on ESA tests here too though, and I'd guess DLA/PIP tests too, but it's JCP that I personally know.

JCP used to be about helping people find jobs. Now it's about sanctioning them, pushing them off benefits, stopping them from getting the money they need to eat and stuff. I know JCP staff too, good ones, who help us when we have a sanction we need to appeal or when they have info that'll be useful to us, and they are all on disciplinary action because they're not sanctioning people. They'll be sacked or will leave sooner or later, and they will be replaced with people who are happy to sanction, to take the food off the plates of claimants. In case anyone asks, yes I've told them what I think to their face, (I've talked at a public meeting on a strike day where it was mostly PCS staff and said what I think the JCP is becoming, this was 2 or 3 years ago now, so I wasn't as forceful, warning of the future to come, which we're further into now), we work together because there are more important things, and because I don't think they're scum for being there, I just think they should leave.

My experience, both first and second hand, is that the majority, and an increasing majority, are not fair or caring. They have a workload that prevents this because they have too much to do, and the culture being put in place (which I think started when JSA was introduced in 1994 but has gone off the scale with this government) is one in which it is believed that taking away the money people need to live is doing them a favour, a good thing, they deserve it - and it's increasingly believed and bought into by JCP staff. Targets for sanctions ffs, jobcentre near me gave easter eggs as a reward to the staff who sanctioned the most people a couple of years back. The stories I've heard or read about why people are sanctioned and that doesn't include all the ones which I heard in person and helped get overturned.

The bad ones pick on people with poor language skills, mental health problems, anything that means that they know they won't challenge it. They chase their targets dilligently and look for every opportunity to sanction someone, no matter how stupid the reason is, setup increasingly complex and stupid demands on claimants and try to trip them up. Maximum sanction length is now 3 years. No money for 3 years because your JCP manager needs to get another sanction to meet their targets or be put on disciplinary action.

Anybody who works as a JCP advisor does so knowing that they will either have to stop the money people need to eat, or they will have to leave the job (and ultimately they'll get sacked even if they don't choose to leave and refuse to sanction people).

Police can kill us, beat us up, lock us up. Screws can keep us locked up. Bailiffs can take away our stuff. JCP advisers can take away our food, warmth and clothing and force people to work for free. And they all do those things, every single day. Well, the JCP advisors don't, christmas, weekends and that, but every working day they do, thousands of people.

I think the comparison is fair. JCP is still transitioning though, so there's still that part of it that they are gradually pushing out. That is the past. This shit, these attacks, the violence and misery - that is the future.

 

[equationgirl]

no, it wouldn't. senate house library in london has no fewer than seven classification schemes, while something like library of congress more common certainly than bliss and maybe more common than dewey in academick libraries.

I know one academic library with it's own hybrid variant on the LOC scheme. Apparently the Librarian was a bit bored one summer and decided to invent his own system.

Finding anything was a minor achievement.

 

[CNT36]

I wouldn't



JCP - see below

I don't think letting a room is crossing a line, nor do I think line management is, though like you say, there may be times where you do things/refuse stuff that are shit. I also don't think that saying worse people would do it if you didn't is a good argument. It's about your relationship to capital, and whether you are, as part of your job, seeking to create/ensure the maximum extraction of surplus value from your (company's) staff. Being a good manager, likewise being a good landlord, doesn't change that relationship.



I should have said JCP staff, management too (even more so tbf), not just advisors. I said JCP intentionally though, not DWP, DWP does far, far more stuff than just the JCP. I'd bracket people who work on ESA tests here too though, and I'd guess DLA/PIP tests too, but it's JCP that I personally know.

JCP used to be about helping people find jobs. Now it's about sanctioning them, pushing them off benefits, stopping them from getting the money they need to eat and stuff. I know JCP staff too, good ones, who help us when we have a sanction we need to appeal or when they have info that'll be useful to us, and they are all on disciplinary action because they're not sanctioning people. They'll be sacked or will leave sooner or later, and they will be replaced with people who are happy to sanction, to take the food off the plates of claimants. In case anyone asks, yes I've told them what I think to their face, (I've talked at a public meeting on a strike day where it was mostly PCS staff and said what I think the JCP is becoming, this was 2 or 3 years ago now, so I wasn't as forceful, warning of the future to come, which we're further into now), we work together because there are more important things, and because I don't think they're scum for being there, I just think they should leave.

My experience, both first and second hand, is that the majority, and an increasing majority, are not fair or caring. They have a workload that prevents this because they have too much to do, and the culture being put in place (which I think started when JSA was introduced in 1994 but has gone off the scale with this government) is one in which it is believed that taking away the money people need to live is doing them a favour, a good thing, they deserve it - and it's increasingly believed and bought into by JCP staff. Targets for sanctions ffs, jobcentre near me gave easter eggs as a reward to the staff who sanctioned the most people a couple of years back. The stories I've heard or read about why people are sanctioned and that doesn't include all the ones which I heard in person and helped get overturned.

The bad ones pick on people with poor language skills, mental health problems, anything that means that they know they won't challenge it. They chase their targets dilligently and look for every opportunity to sanction someone, no matter how stupid the reason is, setup increasingly complex and stupid demands on claimants and try to trip them up. Maximum sanction length is now 3 years. No money for 3 years because your JCP manager needs to get another sanction to meet their targets or be put on disciplinary action.

Anybody who works as a JCP advisor does so knowing that they will either have to stop the money people need to eat, or they will have to leave the job (and ultimately they'll get sacked even if they don't choose to leave and refuse to sanction people).

Police can kill us, beat us up, lock us up. Screws can keep us locked up. Bailiffs can take away our stuff. JCP advisers can take away our food, warmth and clothing and force people to work for free. And they all do those things, every single day. Well, the JCP advisors don't, christmas, weekends and that, but every working day they do, thousands of people.

I think the comparison is fair. JCP is still transitioning though, so there's still that part of it that they are gradually pushing out. That is the past. This shit, these attacks, the violence and misery - that is the future.

As I said it doesn't make me any less of a cunt.

 

[sleaterkinney]

When you sing Barbie Girl:

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I wouldn't normally post this on this thread

Sure it didn't mean to, but that really came across as superior!

 

[ViolentPanda]

I'm not convinced that "where is the line crossed?" is a worthwhile question. It assumes that there's a fixed point which shouldn't be transgressed, but there isn't. There is no "line in the sand".
The "line in the sand" doesn't just differ from person to person, but from event to event,and from context to context, and unless we're benevolent enough to actually judge each case on its merits, then all we do is act as self-righteous, sententious pontificators cheerleading our own opinions.

 

[William of Walworth]

Err...if it's confessional time...I own a campervan that (theoretically) sleeps 4.

How dare you suggest owning a campervan is ideological deviationism??

Have the people I know take vans to fests. And we've just joined that oppressive class

 

[William of Walworth]

Things I would never do :

Not be veggie (albeit I'm been wandering around the horrendously inconsistent/'hypocritical' wing of that all my life)
Buy the council flat I used to have (illegally subletting for a short period after I'd left, to a rampantly evasive non-payer, doesn't count --the council got the keys back rather than me have to deal with him any more. Rentier is not among my 'skillz')
Private health in any form -- and I've been much dependent on the NHS in my time.
Be a boss or supervisor -- the most manangement I've ever done is with a 2 day a week part timer. Easy line not to cross for someone unpromotable -- in any organisation I've ever worked for anyway
Refuse to join a Union. Even worse, actually leave a Union while still working there
Dodge taxes (except by being paid very minor levels of wage)