SWP expulsions and squabbles

[oskarsdrum]

Oh let's not go over that again. Where's the news!!

 

[oskarsdrum]

Little theoretical appraisal before bedtime. So the SWP has often sold itself as being the one with the big cheese 110% dialectical theorists, from Kidron and Barker to Callinicos, Rees and Harman. Now Rees aside the other 4 produced some good work now and then. But it all fed into the studenty appeal and misappropriation of "workerism" as an insult. Looking back though, the view of women's oppression is rightly in tatters and the StW/Respect popular frontist era went totally unexamined. The rank-and-file idea hasn't changed since the fertile but distant 70s. Another big ticket gap is that even its proponents long ago owned up to how the "permanent arms economy" delivered merely a couple of partial insights at best (being rebadged "military Keynesianism" analysis basically). It's plainly an inadequate explanation of the whole post-war economic dynamic: and there's little else in the locker.

It's true that good approaches to that topic are in short supply, for me personally the most persuasive framework is that national welfare regimes went a long way towards mediating capitalism's productive-reproductive contradictions but this precarious achievement of crisis-management was blown away by growing global economic integration, and by the power of the working class that it helped create the conditions for. But there's hardly a last word on the matter. Well, I thought I'd throw that out there to pass time while we're delivering some slow-moving last rites.

 

[leyton96]

Looks like Richard Seymour has landed himself into some hot water with the intersectionalistas!

http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/01/23/live-by-intersectionality-die-by-intersectionality/

There are screen grabs of a thread from Tim Nelson's facebook in the link. It's utterly demented.
I'm not at all ashamed to say I find the monstering he's getting delicious. However, I'll have to ask the landlord to keep a big box of tissues and a mop handy for Apology Bhoy when he reads it.

 

[belboid]

Looks like Richard Seymour has landed himself into some hot water with the intersectionalistas!

http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/01/23/live-by-intersectionality-die-by-intersectionality/

There are screen grabs of a thread from Tim Nelson's facebook in the link. It's utterly demented.
I'm not at all ashamed to say I find the monstering he's getting delicious. However, I'll have to ask the landlord to keep a big box of tissues and a mop handy for Apology Bhoy when he reads it.

pah, they didn't even get the right thread! It's the one that inspired Tims initial post on hat where Seeless made the complete tit of himself

 

[articul8]

^ link?

 

[butchersapron]

I think that autophagiac dynamic (yes!) was always been there and more experienced people spotted it early on -in a way i reckon it's one reason a lot of people did stay in the SWP - or just drop out completely. I mean look at the stuff on that argument - it's reached the absurd position of calling white people crackers on an anti-racist principle. Juvenile nonsense. This stuff might be just what the SWP want.

 

[treelover]

so apt, though this frenzy is all at a time when vulnerable people are killing themselves due to ATOS, sanctions, etc, unforgivable.

 

[J Ed]

I wonder if Seymour wishes he could put the genie back in the bottle.

 

[treelover]

I was growing to like SEYMOUR! or at least his writings on CIF, etc, even forgiving his Stalinist about turn on the refinery strike/protests.

 

[Mustn't grumble]

IS Network peeps still haven't been told who has resigned since November, not least those who were on the Steering Cttee., & how many have gone. But I guess transparency always has its limits.

I noticed things becoming more opaque as time goes by. The strangely named Politics Conf. in October had no attendance figure, unlike the two previous National General Meetings (86 at founding in April, then 50 in June).

The minutes of SC mtgs. now don't even say who attended, & how many were there. And the minutes are politically useless coz contributions by individuals are not attributed. Of course it's progress to tell the public ('the class') that something is going on - unlike the secret CC of the SWP - but please be transparent, to both fellow ISN members if not 'the class': your political reputation is at stake. Remember, the Bolsheviks (& the Mensheviks) never, ever had an internal bulletin. Never. That institution only came about in 1921 - as the civil war was ending. The Solidarity [USA] member Bustelo made all this explicit last March in his 'Lenin Was Not a Leninist':
http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=7727

What's particularly troubling is that there's no evidence any ISN member cares. But it is, after all, a network, just like a soccer supporters' club. There's never been an attempt to instigate any collective discipline. Peeps just get together to do whatever, be they as women or disabled, or to make a podcast (worth listening to: Oliver Cromwell Cox in the current one; Cox is all there, but after 1 hr the last 15mins is missing). And if the women's group want to tell anyone else what's happening they do, but there's no requirement upon them, or any other fraction of 'the unity'. Likewise about any branch activity. (Surprisingly there has never been a strategy, with milestones, on branch-building.) It's organisational neoliberalism: laissez-faire, let's act. That's really learning from the class enemy.

From the ISN's report of last Saturday's unity mtg. with SocRes, ACI & Wkrs. Pwr. it seems those on top are Tim & Kris, & Tom's left having private chats with Terry. In fact no-one knows if Tom, the Principal, & Me Olde, let alone anyone else, are even still members.

So it goes.

(Should have added that it is to the ISN's credit to alert its website readers that an opposition has arisen during the ISO's pre-conference period. Those who think it a mistake to mention what's happening in the ISO really have a truncated appreciation of what participatory discussion (& decision-making) is all about. If they could read Russian they would be astonished at what went on in the pages of Pravda pre-1928. Yes, ISN members came out of the SWP, but they live in a quite developed liberal democracy. Learn from the class enemy: open discussion is pretty innocuous, it takes a lot more than talk to upset the regime. But open discussion is essential in any healthy organisation: only the rulers need fear openness - & even in groups of 40 people there are rulers, albeit sometimes subject to re-call.)

. . . SEYMOUR . . . his Stalinist about turn on the refinery strike/protests.

I'm interested, what do you think was Stalinist about it?

 

[Das Uberdog]

Tim Nelson is a disgrace of a National Secretary.

 

[Brechin Sprout]

.

 

[butchersapron]

I didn't realise he was Nat sec. Silly silly move.

 

[belboid]

I didn't realise he was Nat sec. Silly silly move.

why? his politics are better than most (I know!).

A substantial group within the ISN only want it to hold together for the sake of the 'unity' offensive, as soon as the merger goes ahead, they'll have nowt to do with the group (or they'll just leave if the merger doesnt go ahead). As for the rest...plenty of good people, but the politics are all over the shop and there is no attempt to seriously try and find out if there are any politics the group does actually agree on. Just a host of individual thoughts, and it doesnt matter if no one else agrees.

Doomed unless something changes sharpish.

 

[butchersapron]

why? his politics are better than most (I know!).

A substantial group within the ISN only want it to hold together for the sake of the 'unity' offensive, as soon as the merger goes ahead, they'll have nowt to do with the group (or they'll just leave if the merger doesnt go ahead). As for the rest...plenty of good people, but the politics are all over the shop and there is no attempt to seriously try and find out if there are any politics the group does actually agree on. Just a host of individual thoughts, and it doesnt matter if no one else agrees.

Doomed unless something changes sharpish.

My personal interactions with him (presuming its the bristol lad that is) were not very promising - he seemed overly concerned with himself and making sure that things flowed through him as well being at this point (this was in the period leading up the last wave of student occupations in 2010) very hacky and party-patriotic.

 

[belboid]

I think he got over the party patriotism when they expelled him

 

[butchersapron]

I think he got over the party patriotism when they expelled him

Precisely why i'd be very wary of him - to jump straight from that sort of shit into berating people for racist 'mansplaining' and effectively setting up a circular firing squad/network is pretty revealing i think.

 

[belboid]

he's overwhelmingly avoided such tosh before (and got grief for it from the real intersectionalista's), but I think the anti-seymourism has gotten too much now. any old stick to beat the eejit with

 

[comrade spurski]

Looks like Richard Seymour has landed himself into some hot water with the intersectionalistas!

http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/01/23/live-by-intersectionality-die-by-intersectionality/

There are screen grabs of a thread from Tim Nelson's facebook in the link. It's utterly demented.
I'm not at all ashamed to say I find the monstering he's getting delicious. However, I'll have to ask the landlord to keep a big box of tissues and a mop handy for Apology Bhoy when he reads it.

sorry for the ignorance but what is race play? the screen shot keeps referring to it

 

[butchersapron]

sorry for the ignorance but what is race play? the screen shot keeps referring to it

Have a read of this - 'racialized sexual situations' basically.

A bitchy white woman belittling her black maid. A Latino man being tied up and called racial slurs. A black woman being offered for sale at a slave auction. All of these are awful in reality, but for people who are into race-play — or racialized sexual situations — they can be extremely hot. I talked to two people familiar with such situations about how the worst parts of racial prejudice can be explored — and even exorcised — through sex.

 

[frogwoman]

Have a read of this - 'racialized sexual situations' basically.

 

[Idris2002]

Have a read of this - 'racialized sexual situations' basically.

The imbecility of "exorcising" racial prejudice through bedroom role play.

This is where "be the change you want to see in the world" gets you.

 

[DotCommunist]

I've heard it all now

 

[comrade spurski]

I might be wrong but this sounds like fantasy bedroom role play between consenting adults who want to participate... why has it been turned into a political argument?

 

[Das Uberdog]

i lived with Tim for a year, whilst he was still Delta's party lap dog. he's never made a personal political risk in his life, has not an iota of a moral compass. lives primarily off the rush he gets from anaethematizing his latest political opponents... see his long running dispute with Ed Maltby of the AWL

 

[Idris2002]

... why has it been turned into a political argument?

Because these people are a bunch of %$*%*(())%^$#$

 

[belboid]

Have a read of this - 'racialized sexual situations' basically.

and it isnt racist, apparently. Altho 'race play play' is

 

[belboid]

I might be wrong but this sounds like fantasy bedroom role play between consenting adults who want to participate... why has it been turned into a political argument?

came from a rather crass comment on a pic in the daily mail. That kicked off the initial 200+ post thread, which I think has now been deleted, altho its all gone on in almost exactly the same way on the post posted above

 

[belboid]

i lived with Tim for a year, whilst he was still Delta's party lap dog. he's never made a personal political risk in his life,

until the one that got him kicked out of the party...

 

[butchersapron]

I might be wrong but this sounds like fantasy bedroom role play between consenting adults who want to participate... why has it been turned into a political argument?

God knows, i found that 'debate' linked to above almost impossible to follow - and i suspect this is not entirely unwelcome to a lot of the participants.