jacobian
New Member
Sure no need to deal with the critique, just call the author limited - that's how politics should be done.
Urban v's the Commentariat
- Thread starter Belushi
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Sure no need to deal with the critique, just call the author limited - that's how politics should be done.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
In my experience he's well meaning and far from stupid, although obviously I often think that he's wrong.
Limerick Red
Мы вас похороним!
.
barney_pig
Po-cha-na-quar-hip
i have had no time for the WSM, not since the darlington branch didnt reply to a single one of those letters i sent them!
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
you'll get what you want. as the late great paul daniels said, you'll like it but not a lot.
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
New Statesman run a fluff piece where writers explain where they were wrong. Conspicuous by her absence is, of course, our old friend Laurie.
http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2013/12/power-changing-your-mind
an odd piece, but i guess a necessary one. after all, most of us are open to changing our minds in the face of better evidence. i certainly have, thanks to posters here in part, growing older and having more experience of things, reading more books by clever people etc.
http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2013/12/power-changing-your-mind
an odd piece, but i guess a necessary one. after all, most of us are open to changing our minds in the face of better evidence. i certainly have, thanks to posters here in part, growing older and having more experience of things, reading more books by clever people etc.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Fuck me, even being wrong is a way to be right and better than others for these people.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Can i just ask who has the workers birch btw? We need it early jan, so check your sheds/under the stairs (and any sheds under the stairs)/spare rooms etc
8ball
Decolonise colons!
Not sure about "most", but fortunately some are.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
according to the internal evidence in your blog, you were about 27 when you moved to ireland and 29 when the traumatic 2007 election took place. your belief in the possibilities of change through the ballot box was strengthened by the stv system used in ireland as opposed to the american procedure. yet you seem more interested in the system, more persuaded of its possibilities, but utterly ignorant (and frankly seemingly unwilling to learn about) the history of the political parties in ireland. some basic understanding of the origins of ff, fg, labour etc might have tempered your enthusiasm for the ballot box. you say stv made ireland more democratic. but any intelligent critique of democracy would not take the method of counting as its starting point, but the location of power, the tendencies which built and reinforced the existing system, the utter lack of democracy outside a narrow 'political' space. where is the point of electing a politician if a) s/he can be bought by the boss class, or b) they already identify with the boss class and therefore don't need to be bought? and almost all politicians in ireland as in the uk can be bought or nudged into line.
once you began to identify with the wsm - and frankly your 'conversion narrative' is far from convincing - i would have expected a phase of political education, reading about the history of anarchism in general or irish anarchism in particular. jack white's book for example... but you seem to have been as politically shallow after as you note you were before. no anarchist worth their salt, no anarchist who'd looked into anarchist history and encountered kronstadt or spain, would describe leninist or trotskyist organisations as their 'sister organisations'. this can't be taken as a pop at you as a politically naive 29 or 30 year old as you wrote the blog at the age of c.35. in all honesty the account you give of your path to anarchism leaves a great deal to be desired as you skimp on important details like what your father was doing in central asia in 1992, what you did between age 16 and age 27, and - importantly - what attracted you to anarchism, beyond some inchoate nonsense about working outside the electoral system when you seem really rather enamoured of some electoral systems. i'll return to this when i've finished work.
rekil
to menny cranks
Anthony "Legend!" Seldon's piece on WW1 public schoolboys is a hoot.
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/real-eton-rifles
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/12/real-eton-rifles
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
The ledge speaks - i wonder how he got a piece in the new statesman?
The workers birch is on its way.
The workers birch is on its way.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Note the ledge doesn't give actual numbers - just proportions of those who died. So 5000 dead private school boys = or is better than a million dead w/c men.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
I read that on Saturday, but couldn't bring myself to post about it because the semi-deification of a minority of soldiers because of their places of education and the milieu they existed within frankly revolted me. They led men like my great-grandad (who ended up in the BEF because mobilisation started 4 months before the end of his reserve service, and saw him recalled to active duty) to their deaths.
Seldon should top himself for writing such a nauseating apologia.
jacobian
New Member
On what evidence do you base this claim? I've read widely on the history of anarchism and anarchist theory. I've read Black Flame, Anarchy's Cossack, The Slow Burning Fuse, many books on the Spanish Civil War, the Especifismo tradition, virtually everything by Kropotkin, works by Proudhon, Luigi Fabbri (who I still think is cool), Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Berkman, Rudolph Rocker, Malatesta, de Paepe, Cafiero, Bakunin, Abraham Guillen and many others.
It's not the case that I don't find the strategic vision credible because I don't know what it is. I think the continual attempt to raise tactical questions up to the level of principle is a very primitive attempt at theory and is ultimately unconvincing, yet it is a virtually constant feature of anarchism. Again, you've resorted to attacking me personally and my supposed ignorance rather than dealing with the problems I discuss.
In my opinion:
a) anarchists are wrong about decentralisation
b) they are wrong about the idea that horizontalism can be absolutely universally applied
c) they are wrong that structural questions of democracy can take the place of politics
d) the syndicalists, dual-organisationalisalists, anti-organisationalists and unitary-political-economic (SolFed, AAUD/E) are all fundamentally wrong in dispensing with the mass *political* party approach.
e) they are wrong to blanket condemn the use of elections
f) they are wrong in the obsession with direct action while virtually ignoring the importance of soft power
Now sometimes anarchists are right about these things, but in so far as you are arguing with anarchists it's a constant battle to just have a reasonable position on them, whereas with most socialists it's not such a hard slog making the orthodoxy of anarchism inherently stultifying.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
But of course. They were better people by dint of their class and education! They must have been better people, because it's hardly possible, for example, that any of them were there to escape the consequences of actions at home. I'm sure the 17-year old upper class wanker who raped my paternal great-grandmother when she worked as a maid at a public school, and who joined the arny soon after, was an isolated case, and the rest were as noble as lions.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
You've read some books! Good for you!!!
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
I'm surprised Seldon managed to write that article mashing the keyboard with his great donkey hoofs
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
If you mean my great-gran's story, yeah. It's pretty grim, although not all bad, as my nan was the result. Fortunately for his family and my great-grandmother, the rapist died at Etaples during the Great War.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
jacobian
New Member
It's simply in response to the claim that my conversion story was dubious and that I should have gotten to know about anarchism.
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
Bakunin
I am Noodle's bitch.
Perhaps he dictated it to an amanuensis - perhaps Ms. Penny?
Will she be claiming to have served on the Somme as well?
Actually, France and Belgium aren't trendy enough. It'll probably be her memories of the Gallipoli campaign and complaining that a unscheduled mortar barrage wrecked the wifi-enabled Starbucks.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Well, that was kind of the point of my mild sarcasm - that we can read until our eyes bleed, and assimilate recorded knowledge until our brains fart, but "getting to know" usually also includes "doing anarchism" too, beyond "sitting around with beardies and blackhatters, chatting politics". I've met many soi-disant anarchists over the decades (although fortunately not Laurie Penny, he added) who weren't really up-to-speed on the "doing" front, and while I acknowledge that there aren't quite as many venues for action as we had in the '70s and '80s, I hate to think of anyone missing out on actual anarchist practice!
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
If she claimed to have served in France, she'd probably traduce Edith Cavell by claiming that Edith took credit (and a bullet) for Laurie's work.
el-ahrairah
forward communism, forward gerbils!
ok, i'm reading this article and he writes "A public school education provided young officers with many of the qualities required to survive the horror of the trenches" but also that "They died at nearly twice the rate of other British soldiers who fought in the First World War"
i would suggest that, if we take the case of the second statement to be true, then the first almost certainly isn't.
i would also suggest that this piece is based more on a desire to try to get people to be sympathetic towards the poor maligned ruling classes and to sell a book than on any attempt to right a so-called historical wrong.
and the new statesman publishes this as if it wasn't a thinly veiled attack on the working classes via the medium of belittling the historical achievements thereof.
i mean, seriously fuck the new statesman for that.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
you may recall that when i asked you what the limitations of anarchism are you directed me to a blog post. i am responding to that blog post, and as it contains a lot of stuff about your claimed political trajectory i have referred to such. i was expecting a list such as you've provided here. but - as magnus magnusson said - i've started so i'll finish. i don't consider your conversion narrative convincing as a) you don't really say what you were converted from; b) pretty much everyone i've met who became an anarchist became an anarchist in their teens or early 20s. octave mirbeau shows there are exceptions to this rule, but nonetheless it is, to say the least, rare ime for someone to become an anarchist as you outline your experience; c) it has been an emotional rather than a deliberate conversion for people in my experience. as for your reading, you had not referred to it throughout the portion of your blog i have thus far responded to. all i can say is your blog showed imo scant signs of an awareness of anarchist theory so far. back to the blog.
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