Saturday, December 25, 2010


Laurie Penny expresses her abhorrence of sectarianism in her characteristic witty and aphoristic style:

Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker.



It's true the left/communists=cockroaches image is a bit tattered and tired, not even freshly retro since it's become a Glenn Beck favourite, but this doesn't significantly detract from Penny's bracing, piercing, mind-expanding brilliance of insight and analysis when she applies her theoretical powertools to received ideas. According to Penny, it is not necessarily, as the standard wisdom would have it, high income high net worth white baby boomers who commit acts of vandalism during street protests and throw rocks at mounted police. No in fact her investigations have uncovered that teens from the most materially deprived communities who come from social spheres saturated with violence are in fact the culprits.

Every sentence is a work of staggeringly original, brave and courageous thought of this type.

As for the cockroaches, one can only hope one day for them to adopt a sense of humour about themselves and learn to read in a less egoist and paranoid style:

Jennifer Izaakson-Jones Laurie, if you have political disagreements with democratic centralism and essentially, Leninism, then write political analysis about it...but that's not what you did. You compared SWP members to cockroaches. Maybe I missed the joke.

Laurie Penny I didn't compare you to cockroaches! The only similarity is you'll still be around after the nuclear holocaust. I'll be disappointed if not. Say anything about the SWP, your tenacity is endearing.
Friday at 2:53pm


Of course the official SWP line now is that Jenny and Laurie, being both female, have no subjective dimension at all, no moral, rational or egoic agency after years of self-commodification. They're putes hawking more than a nasty dirty newspaper as they walk the streets. Also they cannot converse with one another in a non-hostile manner on any topic other than their boyfriends, babies, vibrators or cosmetics. Perhaps Izaakson-Jones was constrained by this dictate to rebuke Penny rather than congratulate her with appropriate gushing on another brain-meltingly enlightening column.

If you come within a yard of these folks' prose, sarcasm just invades and overwhelms you.

Apart from reminding us that reds are roaches - which Guardian readers have surely not forgotten - Laurie Penny's article might give the impression that what she defines as the networked youth movement without organization has achieved something beyond media attention.

It put me in mind of an unofficial visit paid to a Vico seminar I attended at University by the great Umberto Eco. He was lamenting then the fading of certain interpersonal levelling or democratisation that had been adopted in American higher education over the sixties and seventies and the return of the daily rituals and customs of traditional hierarchy. Today we see all this podium use and speaker/authority addressing polite and attentive auditors established and reproducing the hierarchies of unmerited authority even more intensely and effectively than before the disruption. That is, the typical scene of pedagogy in the 50s university was more democratic and egalitarian than the scene today, with a slavish deference afforded to mere celebrity and the podium's status alone. I was also reminded of Zadie Smith complaining to Charlie Rose about how her American students at Harvard - not elementary school kids, but undergraduates - addressed her as Zadie not Miss Smith, and how she found this disconcerting. This last feeble vestige of a (then judged highly compromised by the military-indutrial complex) mildly democratic culture irked her as informal and disrespectful, denying her the emotional benefits of her ("earned", I suppose) superiority. She made this observation even while performing her self-abnegation as a beginner, mere apprentice in her profession, etc.. - that is, her desire to sneer down the ladder was accompanied by a display of eagerness to grovel up. This startlingly reactionary posture was apparently invisible to its producer, its critique imaginable of course but only as a familiar blurr in the course of being waved by with the stanchly self-satisfied liberal's yes, but. It is impossible to imagine earlier literary wunderkind behaving quite like this, but White Teeth had hit chick lit level sales and a mini-series adaptation. Smith's politics, small scale and large, harmonize perfectly with her wealth and the status of such wealth in this historical moment (a moment of historically low capital gains tax and asset bubbles guaranteeing the rapid growth of such fortunes and the rapid immiseration of those without them, supplying those with them with an environment of fawning and servility).

It is difficult no doubt for those Laurie Penny's age to grasp what a profoundly democratic culture and democratic social interactions are really like, and so they mistake mere disorganization and the loose assemblages of "fans of" (what those who sell to them call "markets") for something both excitingly new and in itself democratizing, egalitarian, "revolutionary". Even a shallow thinker taking the question serious can see this is not at all the case, and the most comical aspect of Laurie Penny is how contentedly ignorant she is of how old a cliché her delusion is.

To supply the lack of negotiated goals and strategy for achieving them, a belief in the efficacy of some mystical unity of purpose is to suffice to ensure the success of the release of benevolent energies. The swarm is passionate and good and therefore must succeed in overcoming evil. The disgust for the Socialist Worker expresses not only age old liberal revulsion at those Reds, infestations of tenacious vermin whom even Nazis can't seem to exterminate, but a newly ferocious loathing of newspapers because they suggest that this adoreable naïve passion and goodness is not enough, that dancing and crying in the streets and tweeting about it is only a small part of the struggle to overthrow the ruling class and transform the society into one of cooperation providing justice, liberty, security and abundance. Laurie Penny works at her liberal msm publications to undo what remains of the press' function as historical record, a function still performed by an older generation (Monbiot, Younge for example) but which is not being replaced by youth. She is one of many young pundits working under the direction of savvy planners to transform these publications into stages for the entertaining self-display of personalities like blogs and facebook which distill the pleasures of Friends and Sienfeld, settings for the striking of rhetorical postures justified, if at all, by the shortest possible term efficiency (wouldn't it be more fun and entertaining and better for our brands if we just salute 'Violence' instead of trying to explain a complex thing like the difference between repressive and liberatory action? Doesn't my column seem edgier if I play up the proximity of tough boys and exaggerate their menace rather than be boringly accurate and decline to exploit all that delicious energy of racism available for use with such subtlety one has not the least obligation to avow it?) and utterly indifferent to accuracy, depth, coherence and all the criteria by which once judged both reportage and opinion journalism.

Laurie Penny has no conception of how doggedly traditional and hierarchical her milieu is, an environment in which the capitalist mass media has all the power to shape and prioritize, because she is an historical ignoramus. But her publishers understand this, and she is chosen for her suitability to their plans. What she thinks she is doing or wants to do could not be less relevant to the effects of her product.

She is on the one hand an exemplar, the youth colmumnist. She has a position then comparable to the one which began Naomi Klein's career in Toronto. The comparison is instructive. While reporting on youth and campus based politics for the Globe and Mail, Klein wrote No Logo which chronicled an evolution in student activism in Canada and the US mainly from the identity politics skewed toward issues of recognition and representation to altermondialist challenges to the power of expanding private tyrannies that are the multinationals. This turned out in fact to be a tale of an internationalisation and a convergence of student and academia-dominated cultural politics in the imperial core with international struggles against exploitation and expropriation by the same blocks of capital that were issuing that spectacle which so absorbed the attention of the dissident elites working in culture industries. Klein discovered and analysed patterns of organisation, strategy and tactics and how they reflected the developing political analyses and convictions of altermondialist militants.

As the voice and observer of dissident youth and now youth in revolt, Penny is like a degraded facsimile of Klein, borrowing a lot and mixing it with bits of intellectual roach poison, fan gushings for cocaculture shit, throwback gender discourses, blithely self-satisfied white solipsism, etc.. And in place of Klein's somewhat subtle and empirically scrupulous representation of altermondialist activism, Penny is engaged in embarassing exaggerations for self-dramatization and childishly fetishises the absence of an infrastructure binding the tweeted flashmobs into a militant movement and of collectively legitimized authorities which allow her to seize for herself a position of prominence and insert herself between the militants she is observing and the msm audience. In part she is celebrating as a revolutionary feature an absence of social relations around human nodes which is only an artifact of the recentness of this coordination of people. But to display this pedestal-perched improvisation in the Guardian as a value distinguishing "youth" who don't read newspapers (she doesn't seem to understand this is due to brain damage from new media - the same brain damage, or mind damage at least, which accounts for her own inability to grasp the difference between the celebrity of the protests and their success) from an old left of vermin whom the most advanced weapons devised by science for capitalists have yet to eradicate, is work in the service of an ever intensifying liberal media effort to obstruct and prevent radicalisation of imperial core populations as the transformation to neo-feudal plutocracy accelerates. The bourgeoisie really does worry about a resurgent revolutionary communist humanity; they believe, with reason, that the success of any vast social movement will require the participation of strata of political, culture and telecom indusry professionals. They consequently zealously promote perky pundits who will stir hatred in youth for the greedy fat pampered "baby boomers" with their nearly paid off mortgages, their pensions and winter heat subsidies and christmas turkeys and yearly holidays in Ibiza, all things too luxurious for sinful humanity. There's not enough suffering in the world! To divert the fury of downwardly mobile populations the liberal msms will sow divisions of every kind but especially seek to vilify and defame the possessors of the fruits of popular victories and the knowledge of struggle founded in success. To this end they will promote pundits who see in the successful struggles and their protagonists and participants rivals rather than models, competitors rather than comrades. They will promote new "feminist critics of feminism" to denounce feminism as encouraging women to lead a "race to the bottom" with men leading to everyone's ruin. They will promote the prophets of post-racial society who declare the entire working class, apart from white men, enemies and dividers of the working class and betrayers of their own struggle whose victories are defeats in disguise. And they will naturally love pundits who explain it was through the wicked sacrificng of their own babies to the devil that those fat greedy vibrator addict "baby-boomers" got their lazy retirement and their heated rooms in winter, their dvds and their days of rest, their malt on the weekends and their comfy chairs, and all the vile self-indulgences their shallow depraved natures covet. If instead of organizing they had networked and tweeted, they wouldn't be so soft and warm today, so secure and sure of their health care and their morphine to ease their way out of life, such fat parasites!

171 comments:

  1. Wait, first you praise Penny and then basically treat her as history's greatest monster? How schizophrenic of you. If you're in fact being sarcastic, please feel free to correct me.

    ReplyDelete
  2. With that said, what is that you want from a left activist? Who is your ideal image, so to speak?

    ReplyDelete
  3. sarcastic yes. a wonder "applying her theoretical powertools to received ideas" didn't tip you off.

    i assuime "history's greatest monster" isn't just a severe misreading?

    i didn't say she was history's greatest anything or a monster, but typical of the newly domùinant form of punditry in the liberal media. Punditry in the liberal msm is not really activism but some people have used the platforms consistently for progressive ends, at the Guardian, as I mentioned, Younge and Monbiot for example. Seamus Milne also. If you are asking who are my idea of good activist journalists, I'd mention Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill and of course Al Giordano and others at Narco News, Glen Ford and others at Black Agenda Report, Eva Golinger a skilled investigator and excellent advocate for the Bolivarian Revolution and Chavez, Greg Wilpert, Mike Weisbrot is a good commentator who is published in the Guardian sometimes, Ali Abunimah and others at electronic intifada, Jeb Sprague and others at HaitiAnalysis... Bill Fletcher, Bill Quigley, Margaret Kimberley, Laura Flanders, Carl Bloice, Paul Street, Time Wise..oh one could go on and on.

    I assume you would not place Laurie Penny in this company. And its instructive to make thaty little sketch of what activist journalism is the better to see her, her publications and their function.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is really a sign of the times: Callinicos is so ashamed to be a Marxist he feels the need to pour ridiculous flattery on a know-nothing brat parading her "anger" as a virtue and her lack of knowledge, wisdom and strategy as a sign of her purity, whom the activists she exploits and misrepresents loathe, instead of rebuking her for her idiotic and malicious red-baiting. He's grovelling to her Guardian access plain and simple. And doing so he becomes a particularly embarrassing (and for Guardian readers gratifying) spectacle of masochism and self-hatred, intimidated by every adolescent sneer into grovelling to vacuous petty bourgeois wingbags, the lowest most inconsequential servants of capital, for approval and acceptance. It's painful to see him applying for the position of courtier to the most infantile exhibitionist of CiF, even more passionately ready to serve after receiving the gratuitous attack lamenting - humorously! because it's very funny after all - the difficulty the bourgeoisie is still having completing the extermination of communists. He's there to concede, as spokesman for communbists everywhere, that's it's just a joke, a good joke, they're just a joke, and what he wants more than anything is to be friends with and enjoy the approval of the lowestrung of petty bourgeois liberal ideologues and propagandists.

    incredible.

    ReplyDelete
  5. "Penny's polemic was uncharacteristically ungenerous, "

    Her failure of generosity is of course a problem for Callinicos and others who have now decided they can survive only on the largesse of Penny and those like her.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I dunno, I didn't see much wrong with her initial piece, glad to see she's supporting the protesters and all that. I may disagree with her on Nina Power(who basically says what Bell Hooks says much more clearly here: http://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/11/08/bell-hooks-women-at-work/#more-615), but saying it's red-baiting is way over the top. Sorry.

    ReplyDelete
  7. " I didn't see much wrong with her initial piece, glad to see she's supporting the protesters and all that."

    It's redbaiting, believe me. Like "children's crusade" is creepy christosupremacist ick. Nobody, not even laurie penny, is so sheltered not to know that crusades were about killing muslims and conquering the middle east, and cockroaches are things people need to exterminate.

    the oh! i never meant it that way! is part of the routine - she's just a girl after all, she can't really mean anything. that's what's so interesting and good abougt her writing -it really doesn't mean anything.


    i haven't seen anything in Nina Power that resembles the hooks, unless you are saying the mention of women and work in the same paragraph is a notable similarity. Power subscribes to the negri virno discourse of "immaterial labour" and all its goofy pseudohistory and idealism in the fashionable style.


    hooks says: " If contemporary feminist movement had never taken place masses of women would still have entered the workforce, but it is unlikely that we would have the rights we have, had feminists not challenged gender discrimination.Women are wrong to “blame” feminism for making it so they have to work, which is what many women think. "

    power says: "We think of women's mass entry into the workforce as a positive thing because we believe it allows women to have greater political and social power.... Yet if the kind of work that women are doing is actually removing them from the possibility of having social and political power, which would be one of the long term ambitions of feminism in relation to work, i.e. by paying them incredibly badly for long hours, forcing them to rely on the exploitation of other often poor immigrant women to care for their children so they themselves can go out to work, by not allowing them to join unions and so on, then the emancipatory dream of feminism that sees work as the solution to the shackles of patriarchy is utterly incomplete, if that work is yet another form of oppression. We do not resolve or take apart the model of the patriarchal breadwinner by adding women to the roster, making both partners in the couple work for the same or less money than would have been the case decades ago with the single breadwinner. If there is indeed a so-called mancession taking place in the US at least -- that is the idea that more men are being laid off then women -- it is not simply because the kind of work that men and women tend to do have been disproportionately affected by the economic downturn. This is the argument: that for example building work slows massively as the housing market collapses and this disproportionately affects men because men are more likely to be builders and that sort of thing. It's also in part because employers know they can pay women less, particularly if they don't have pesky European things like maternity pay to worry about.... This is not emancipation for anyone! Clearly it is a race to the bottom in which everyone loses."


    Very different viewpoints and concerns. The "race to the bottom" and the "mancession" are of course fabrications.

    ReplyDelete
  8. hooks says: "While much feminist scholarship tells us about the role of women in the workforce today and how it changes their sense of self and their role in the home, we do not have many studies which tell us whether more women working has positively changed male domination. Many men blame women working for unemployment, for their loss of the stable identity being seen as patriarchal providers gave them, even if it was or is only a fiction. An important feminist agenda for the future has to be to realistically inform men about the nature of women and work so that they can see that women in the workforce are not their enemies."

    But Pow<er says working women _are_ the enemies of men, leading a race to the bottom by _asking_ for _less_ money, demanding less, "self-exploiting", etc.. Unlike hooks, she does bnot recvognise male domination as a preoblem but rather is concerned with the way women harm men or avoid malke efforts to help us: "What Walter and others miss is the fact that the old categories we used to try to explain the oppression of women: misogyny, patriarchy, objectification and so on, do not exactly capture the more complex logic of self-exploitation." "The flipside of the so-called "mancession" in the U.S. (the idea that men are losing their jobs at a faster rate than women) is the possibility that employers have realized they can pay women less for the same work and are therefore more likely to keep them on, whilst making no concessions to the difficulties of childcare for either men or women." "Women can't be friends under capitalism. Any possible motivating cause for solidarity has been assimilated effortlessly into the perky slipstream of passive-aggressive aspiration and self-indulgent consumerism. It turns out women are really good at capitalism - 'you want it all - you can have it all!' It won't be pretty, but then you can cope. Besides, there's always chocolate, bubble baths, girly films, white wine-induced cirrhosis, your rampant rabbit, clothes-induced credit card debt and a new haircut to fill a life. You go, girl!

    You can either bitch about other women, or you can fuck each other (for better or worse), but there is no neutrality, no real affection. It's heart-breaking.

    It's a shame. It's structural. In practice it looks like this: a) the conspiratorial commitment/belief in some sort of 'other of the other'-type gaze. It's not the male gaze, exactly (whatever that is), but the necessarily confusing, 'male gaze that men don't have', i.e. the hyper-feminised (i.e. void) pure form of judgement that results (practically) in ... nothing - other than perpetual anxiety. It's a sort of big female other...There's nothing worse than 'the judgement of women'. And it's everywhere...what is she wearing? Look at her make-up! Stop talking to my boyfriend! Who does she think she is?

    Somewhere, a woman is enjoying herself, Good God...her suspicious laughter resonates round the hollow echo-chamber of female capitalist reason. And everyone feels bad."

    ReplyDelete
  9. " women’s entry into the workforce has corresponded with the depressing of men’s wages ... the young woman that sells herself, using whatever means she has, is merely behaving rationally in a world where jobs are scarce, where employment is ‘flexible’ to the point of insanity and where another perky young thing is just around the corner to take your position."

    the "perky young thing" is a woman. she is a predatory competitor. as anodyne lite noted here, working and seeking work is "salacious and sinister", indecent and unscrupulous, when women do it: "It seems to me not implausible that the techniques that women might have used in a similarly pragmatic vein to ‘get a man’ and thus secure some sort of economic stability are now used, in a rather more limitless way, to ‘get a job’.... We should not be ‘blaming’ women for their complicity in such a logic, as if blame were ever a useful political category, but try better to understand it. "


    so superficiallhy there is some overlap of topics between power and hooks but its even a stretch to note common issues addressed since power's universe is really fictitious, a world she has seen on tv basically with some additions from her own narrow experience of being treated with suspicion for peroxide use, eyelash batting and performance of a certain abject and disesteemed femininity designed to please men.

    ReplyDelete
  10. here's more penny

    http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/laurie-penny/2010/12/deregulating-resistance

    the usual Sorkinisms. you almost expect her to say 'did you see what i did there?'

    of copurse there's a little auster in her sofrkin too:

    " We had hours yet before the police would let us free, and nothing left to burn, and as we watched the embers fade away with mounting panic, a young man approached and asked if any of us would like to buy a copy of the Socialist Worker.

    We rounded on him in desperation. None of us had any money, but we were all freezing, and we needed paper - not to read, but to burn. We begged him to give us even one paper, and join us at the fire. A slew of emotions chased across the SWP seller's face as he considered this dilemma. Finally, he agreed to give us two copies, if, and only if, any of us could sing at least two verses of the Internationale.So we did - me, some NEETs and schoolkids from the slums of London - our voices shaking a little from the chill. He handed over the papers with a smile and shuffled into the circle to warm up.

    Ultimately I'm not interested in whether you're a Leninist or a Liberal or a Blairite or a Brownite or an Anarchist or a concerned member of the public with no time for ideological flim-flammery. I'm interested in whether or not you're going to join me at the fire. I want to know if you're up for a fight. I want to know if you are prepared to put your body on the line to battle social oppression and fight the machinations of a dissembling government working to protect profit at the expense of the people.

    Because this is the future, not some cultish Petrograd-enactment society where we all dress up as revolutionaries and shout at each other for hours and then go home before anyone gets hurt."

    this publication should be designed to fold into a little bag with a plastic odor-containing liner.

    ReplyDelete
  11. One only sees after a few years how influential hit shows are, when people who watched them at an impressionable age start advancing what they suppose are their own very personal, considered ideas.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJd37-rU2qY

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpcBWA1K9Xw&feature=related

    ReplyDelete
  12. Snipe. Check. Snark. Check. gratuitous attack on Nina Power (always helps if you can use a 'woman of colour' to back your snipes). Check. Where's Zizek today? We're getting bored of him - let's throw in Callinicos, and his 'jaw dropping, incredible' failure to pass the Qlipoth revolution exams.

    'Literary review' of those who dare to call themselves left-wing but... don't happen to be you? Of course, we must assume that television or MSM has had NO EFFECT on you whatsoever.

    Going by your contacts, history and modus operandi; I must ask - what are your connections to the security services? (verification word: "outher")

    I'm not holding my breath to see this comment posted.

    ReplyDelete
  13. 1. Encourage discussion of conspiracy theories. Even if true, definition as such encourages arguments and mutual discrediting among the left. Also helps MSM define you - or anyone engaging with your arguments - as crazy if you keep pushing the theory. You can also accuse non-believers of being MSM-brainwashed dupes who are only concerned with music and movies really (unlike yourself of course - you go to OPERA). With a bit of luck it can become an adaptable meme to divert attention from the stuff that's goes on at the end of our noses (your wealth may keep you away from that, though). We can waste years expecting the CIA, big oil etc. to tell us 'the truth', or present ourselves look like dim misogynists/racists/media puppets if we say you're talking horseshit.

    2. Raise snark levels among the left. Waste everyones' time arguing about opportunistic columnists, kid's movies, overrated cop shows, rent-a-quote academics, and bloggers who do't amount to a hundred printed pages. Behave as though THEY are out to discredit your 'cause'. Keep the Lenin's Tomb comments box up all night with similar nonsense - at least the Big Other knows where everyone is.

    3. Focus on a certain country (ie. the UK), from a mysterious location (France? Noo Yawk?) and assume a jaded critical distance (you MUST be American). Attempt to undermine any connections to affiliated groups or 'fellow travellers', however flimsy. Use terms like "it beggars belief" when quoting their exchanges (those silly children!).

    4. Remain anonymous and use anonymity as a shield if anyone tries to discredit YOU. Well, you have to protect your identity - you're working on a REAL revolution, right? It also helps if you only post comments from ranting stalkers like Patrick Mullins (gotta keep that 'network' looking crazy! That's what they're paying me for!). It also helps that he invariably brings the conversation to genitalia.

    5. Sweet. Now you've got a picture of the british left as infighting, Zizek-worshipping, self-loathing, self-promoting racistsexisthomophobes who are so dumb that they'd believe Dick Cheney.

    6. Hand over you're badge. You're off the case McNulty.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I think Richard Seymour does a good job at getting to Power's argument in this paragraph:
    "
    Still, despite the potential for emancipation that work can offer, the persistence of oppression reflected in such features as structural wage inequality suggests that it has definite limits. These limits express themselves in a number of ways. First of all, as insecurity, and the way in which this is turned into a virtue ('flexibility', etc). Secondly, as occupational typecasting, in which women are encouraged to take roles that involve emotional labour, 'caring' and 'nurturing' jobs, jobs requiring communication skills, and so on. Thirdly, as the sexualisation of labour, in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional'. Employers don't expect to have to shout at their female employees to dress nicely; they expect women to come prepared, knowing the drill, internalising such requisites as part of their own career mission. And this applies outside work as much in the workplace, ie in social networking sites, which employers and recruitment agencies regularly check to dig up information on CV submissions. Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves. And finally, perhaps, as a conflict between production and reproduction, in which women are expected to manage child birth and rearing in ways that don't burden the employers. This is just one more way in which women are expected to augment the exploitation process by pre-emptively exploiting themselves, by assuming extra hours of labour, by accepting deductions from their income to pay for childcare. The 'labourisation of women', as Power puts it, is a process that has intensified exploitation and reinvented gender oppression. That it doesn't have to be that way, and that the organisation of women in trade unions offers the beginnings of a way out of this deadlock, suggests that these limits arise in part because of a particular organisation of work, perhaps because of the individualisation of work in the neoliberal phase of accumulation, but more broadly because it's capitalism, and capitalism is most efficient when it is most exploitative, and when that exploitation is augmented by oppression."

    So even if women can work, there are still sexist expectations we ought to overcome which is also something Hooks brings up. And what the hell's wrong with Penny trying to unite anarchists and leftists? Sounds like she's more annoyed at sectarianism than anything.

    ReplyDelete
  15. If I may, I think Richard Seymour got to the heart of Power's argument:
    "Still, despite the potential for emancipation that work can offer, the persistence of oppression reflected in such features as structural wage inequality suggests that it has definite limits. These limits express themselves in a number of ways. First of all, as insecurity, and the way in which this is turned into a virtue ('flexibility', etc). Secondly, as occupational typecasting, in which women are encouraged to take roles that involve emotional labour, 'caring' and 'nurturing' jobs, jobs requiring communication skills, and so on. Thirdly, as the sexualisation of labour, in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional'. Employers don't expect to have to shout at their female employees to dress nicely; they expect women to come prepared, knowing the drill, internalising such requisites as part of their own career mission. And this applies outside work as much in the workplace, ie in social networking sites, which employers and recruitment agencies regularly check to dig up information on CV submissions. Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves. And finally, perhaps, as a conflict between production and reproduction, in which women are expected to manage child birth and rearing in ways that don't burden the employers. This is just one more way in which women are expected to augment the exploitation process by pre-emptively exploiting themselves, by assuming extra hours of labour, by accepting deductions from their income to pay for childcare. The 'labourisation of women', as Power puts it, is a process that has intensified exploitation and reinvented gender oppression. That it doesn't have to be that way, and that the organisation of women in trade unions offers the beginnings of a way out of this deadlock, suggests that these limits arise in part because of a particular organisation of work, perhaps because of the individualisation of work in the neoliberal phase of accumulation, but more broadly because it's capitalism, and capitalism is most efficient when it is most exploitative, and when that exploitation is augmented by oppression."

    (cont.)

    ReplyDelete
  16. Hooks brings this up too actually and I didn't read Penny as red-baiting, it's more of a rallying against sectarianism. What's wrong with anarchists and leftists coming together to fight cuts?

    ReplyDelete
  17. Madame Q has a big problem with them 'coming together' - see above.

    ReplyDelete
  18. JM I think its besty to quote Power herself as evidence of Power's ideas, not Richard Seymour or bell hooks. I'm not surprised by your reluctance to allow Power to speak and write for herself. But I don't think Seymour wants to be responsible for everything Power has written, so you probazbly oughtn't treat them as interchangeable.

    ReplyDelete
  19. "Sounds like she's more annoyed at sectarianism than anything."

    the sour faced cockroaches who sell the SW being the sectarians that annoy her, in your interpretation?

    ReplyDelete
  20. "d I didn't read Penny as red-baiting"

    well do you think it's racist to drive a Roma family from their home shouting "zig raus" and "death to the gypsies"? If you do or you don't, there are people on the left who will disagree and it would no doubt be sectarian to argue about it either way. But even for the sake of harmony with all the left, one can't always resist expressing a view.

    ReplyDelete
  21. And JM, if you find Power's own texts and sentences so abhorrent that you can't even bear to touch them except with the glove of Richard Seymour's much sanitized and strageically vague paraphrase, although if you wished to comment on her actual product legnthy quotes have been supplied for your convenience right here in the comments, what is your motive for bringing it up?

    ReplyDelete
  22. "What's wrong with anarchists and leftists coming together to fight cuts?"

    You tell me! Aren't sour faced cockroaches welcome too?

    ReplyDelete
  23. "
    well do you think it's racist to drive a Roma family from their home shouting "zig raus" and "death to the gypsies"? If you do or you don't, there are people on the left who will disagree and it would no doubt be sectarian to argue about it either way. But even for the sake of harmony with all the left, one can't always resist expressing a view."

    Oh for fuck's sake, she was using a metaphor- a goddamn metaphor and you're comparing it to support of terrorizing Roman gypsies? Really? Are we sinking to that level now?

    ReplyDelete
  24. Well Ms Edge! It's parodying someone but I'm not sure it's me. But

    " Keep the Lenin's Tomb comments box up all night with similar nonsense "

    that's not fair you know. I have had some legnthy arguments there, about Haiti, the Katrina propaganda, and Rwanda/Congo, and one long long about Zizek. And that's it. I participated in long discussions of batman and freud and nietzsche and other culture stuff, with many other people who posted more frequently than I, and I didn't start them. And everything I was accused of paranoia and "horseshit" over regarding the financial metltdown has since been verified by the msm. Never brought up nonsense at LT. And Richard Seymour has lately been accuseed of "peddling conspiracy theory" much more often than I just ebcause he has grasped ruling class capacities and praxis.

    ReplyDelete
  25. I'm just annoyed at your character assassination of Laurie Penny; I don't agree with everything she says(in fact, I'm more on Valenti's side of the debate), but taking a biting comment of hers to imply any type of actual murderous hatred on the level of the bigoted mistreatment of Roman gypsies is fucking ridiculous. What happened to A) not taking everything literally and B) respecting viewpoints?

    ReplyDelete
  26. " you're comparing it to support of terrorizing Roman gypsies? "

    I wasn't comparing them! But the New Statesman publishes people who do both, so there is that in common.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Debate at Qlipoth Towers:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzDbebV4Wk

    Now pick a funny name and save the world...

    ReplyDelete
  28. "What happened to A) not taking everything literally and B) respecting viewpoints?"

    I don't respect all viewpoints and neither do you.

    ReplyDelete
  29. "I'm just annoyed at your character assassination of Laurie Penny"

    Well be annoyed! Do you want a prize?

    ReplyDelete
  30. 1. Just because Batman, Toy Story, The Wire, Zizek etc. make shitloads of money doesn't necessarily mean they're worthy of endless 'debate', at least not among adults who claim to be working for a better world.

    2. Maybe there's more to political commentary than picking apart what Nina Power thinks of irritating office girls on the tube (a fixation getting as stalker-esque as those Cultural Parody creeps).

    3. Who needs to deconstruct Laurie Penny's schtick anyway? One look at that ridiculous 'mad as hell and not taking it anymore' photo would suffice (just as Zizek's drooling and sniffing tells me all I need to know).

    4. I still think you've got at least one foot in the security services.

    ReplyDelete
  31. "I'm just annoyed at your character assassination of Laurie Penny"

    So you say, yes, you make a good show of sympathy and sisterhood, but as Richard Seymour or someone explained you really just want to destroy her and go back to your chocolate and vibrator.

    ReplyDelete
  32. As for 'Sorkinisms' - how about if I brought up (a) a generation of boys brought up on secret gangs (spies, cold war superheroes etc.) bickering about how to save the world, and (b) a generation of girls brought up on stories of female sorcerer guardians with secret powers and graceful hearts of gold ("who's gonna speak up for the goblins?").

    If you want to dismiss an ENTIRE GENERATION (I couldn't give a fart about Penny - she'd be interviewing Jesus and Mary Chain and calling them revolutionary if it was 1985) for its media influences, it may help to look at the nonsense that energised the New (Old) Left 1968 - 1993. It's ad hominen bullshit to act like you're coming from a higher level.

    ReplyDelete
  33. "a metaphor" a metaphor as a logical form must have a content. And the content is extermination.

    The canonical version of this defense is, "It's just a joke." Which seems to have been the original motive.

    The humor would depend on just how you feel about metaphorically equating people with vermin.


    Excuse me for what may strike some as rhetorical hyperbole, but I can think of one modern Central European political movement that employed those equations as stock-in-trade. All I want to suggest is that for that reason alone, I find them repellent.

    ReplyDelete
  34. ". Just because Batman, Toy Story, The Wire, Zizek etc. make shitloads of money doesn't necessarily mean they're worthy of endless 'debate', at least not among adults who claim to be working for a better world."

    I never said anything about Toy Story but I also could have mistaken Richard's piece for me. It sounded just like me! Weird.

    The Wire deserved no discussion until it began being used in Universities as ethnographic evidence and being received as it was as a key element of a resurgent racist discourse serving kety function in the Tea Party and that is inextricable from the plunder of African Americans in the housing bust and things like the Sherrod saga. This is a very serious matter and that is why it, unlike all this other crap it resembles, is worth exposing. It really is a serious matter, not because it was so profitable -for the type of thing it is, it wasn't especially.

    Zizek is called by the BBC the world's most influential Marxist. Versobooks website boasts constantly of his influence and clout. It's finally in decline - he was tgaken of democracy now's front page and his lecture won't be broadcast there i think - but that was as a result of people like me doing what I do. He had a very pernicious influence and was a key part of the racist resurgence in the US. You may think this is unimportant, perhaps you even welcome it; well nobody is stopping you from promoting Zizek if you wish and if you go to slovenia with a chainsaw you will probably be allowed to terrorise some Roms if that's how you think you can make a better world. But there will always be others to oppose you.

    "2. Maybe there's more to political commentary than picking apart what Nina Power thinks of irritating office girls on the tube (a fixation getting as stalker-esque as those Cultural Parody creeps)."

    no doubt but i'm not a member of the political commentariat. I assume that's your job. I blog sometimes about white supremacism that infuriates me and about frivolities that irk me and one of them is the public defamation of Marxism and its misrepresentation. If Nina Power ceases to call herself a Marxist I will never mention her again.

    " Who needs to deconstruct Laurie Penny's schtick anyway? One look at that ridiculous 'mad as hell and not taking it anymore' photo would suffice (just as Zizek's drooling and sniffing tells me all I need to know)."

    on the blog its inconsequential and i never mention it. However the Guardian, the New Statesman and the New Left Review matter; they really do influence how people think. They really do successfully drum up support for example for US aggression in Yugo and Congo; they really do perform almost alone, with the BBC and the Nation and Harpers and a few other publications, the public pedgagy which establishes the majkority's conception of leftism, socialism, communism and communists and socialists. Zizek really was replacing Chomsky, Zinn and Alice Walker as American's vision of a person of the left. And he was becoling the poster boy for "Marxism", it was horrible. It can't be allowed to resume, I think. Anyway why should you mind if I spend my time on that?

    "4. I still think you've got at least one foot in the security services."

    oh no now I'll get fired.

    ReplyDelete
  35. "It's ad hominen bullshit to act like you're coming from a higher level."

    I wish I'd created the West Wing. It's not higher or lower that's in question here - that stuff is the victorious propaganda of the ruling class. I wish I owned it. But even if I did I wouldn't be able to not see what it is.

    ReplyDelete
  36. "All I want to suggest is that for that reason alone, I find them repellent."

    exactly .

    ReplyDelete
  37. "As for 'Sorkinisms' - how about if I brought up (a) a generation of boys brought up on secret gangs (spies, cold war superheroes etc.) bickering about how to save the world, and (b) a generation of girls brought up on stories of female sorcerer guardians with secret powers and graceful hearts of gold ("who's gonna speak up for the goblins?"). "

    that's interesting. in romance novels, vampire heroes are out evidently and angels are in.

    ReplyDelete
  38. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  39. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  40. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  41. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  42. "So you say, yes, you make a good show of sympathy and sisterhood, but as Richard Seymour or someone explained you really just want to destroy her and go back to your chocolate and vibrator."

    No I fucking don't. Why are you getting so worked up about one columnist? And you still didn't answer my question of why her labeling socialist review people as cockroaches is the equivalent to disparaging Roman gypsies. Fucking Christ, what do young activists have to do to win your approval?

    "I don't respect all viewpoints and neither do you."

    Fine, but must you use ad hominem attacks?

    ReplyDelete
  43. Qlipoth:

    I was talkning about baby boomers, not kids who read Twilight.

    I agree the West Wing is ruling class horseshit, the Wire is racist etc. etc. But surely attention makes this all seem more 'significant' than it is? Cult stud is getting like discussing sport results for the left - pseudo-passionate muzak, quickly forgotten.

    I have no intention of promoting the beast of Slovenia (a short-lived fad for 30somethings trying to shop for the - ahem - 'new'). As for Power - knowing what I do about relatively uninformed academics on the make, its an old career path to take up a label and throw on some 'post'-seasoning.

    My main beef/suspicion is the wilful sectarianism, snark (yep, I agree Zizek had it coming) and worse, the sly way you seem to attack your strawmen via those who may give them the time of day, like Callinicos, or Seymour - a well-known MI5 tactic...


    Patrick J Rabbit Mutilator:

    I'm not k-punk (Ultravox SUCK, and I actually ENJOY getting laid).

    You and your pal should take your hackneyed queer theory film reviews (sooo '94 darling), blog-stalking circle jerks, Owen hatherley anus fantasies and erotophobia (mommy must have run a real number on you, Patsy) to the proverbial Russia, "and see how you like it there". I'm sure you'd last a long time, you fucking mollusc. Maybe you can set up a blog making up naughty names for the mafia.

    Or maybe you'll just bitch to each other, to the absolute indifference of everyone else.

    Tell Leopold I said Hi, Loeb.

    ReplyDelete
  44. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  45. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  46. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  47. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  48. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  49. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  50. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  51. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  52. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  53. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  54. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  55. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  56. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  57. "why her labeling socialist review people as cockroaches is the equivalent to disparaging Roman gypsies"

    Will you allow me to try again?

    Because this device has a well-established place in the political practice of the the reactionary
    European right.

    That practice attacks in the same terms certain ethnic and national groups as well as the political left.

    It also attacks these targets directly, physically.

    The relationship of the verbal violence to the physical violence is not one of equivalence.

    In rhetorical terms, you could call the connection 'metaphorical,' specifically the pars pro toto, the part for the whole.

    Using one weapon from the arsenal is the one part which evokes by association the entire arsenal.

    Once we have opened the arsenal, we see the other weapons stored there for the same purposes.

    ReplyDelete
  58. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  59. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  60. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  61. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  62. Are you both the same person? Because you're both being pretty misogynist and homophobic right now. And clearly, you're gonna keep being hostile about people who disagree with you. So what's the use?

    ReplyDelete
  63. "No I fucking don't"

    just a joke! what i meant is just that if one leaves chocolate lying around one is bound to attract cockroaches and you.

    i mean it in the nicest way!

    ReplyDelete
  64. "Fine, but must you use ad hominem attacks?"

    Do you know whaty an ad hominem attack is?

    ReplyDelete
  65. " But surely attention makes this all seem more 'significant' than it is? "

    the attention from Qlipth's 200 readers is excessive for this HBO programme distributed worldwide and now studied at Harvard as both data and theory for the understanding of "black on black violence" and for which the creator won a MacArthur? Qlipoth put it over the edge into too much attention?

    I have tried to show how it is functioning with things of definite importance that receive too little agttention, and how it helps to ensuire that continuation of too little - narcotraffick, the prison industrial complex. It is offered as a pedagogical tool for the spreading of ruling class ideology - I try to expropriate it and show how it works and why it, though a flop with the audience, recieved such tenacious promotion and is so beloved of a certain class of dissident bourgeois culture producers.

    You are complaining of maybe a dozen posts on an obscure blog as too much attentiuon and resources devoted to this endeavour of showing how this fiction entertainment commodity, put forward as historical truth and its explanation and critique combined, is functitioning within the resurgent practises of white supremacy and the propagation of ruling class ideology.

    ReplyDelete
  66. "Callinicos, or Seymour - a well-known MI5 tactic..."

    I admire both Callinicos and Seymour though Callinicos should, with his experience and stature, find the spine to object to something as unequivocal as apologies for pogroms and Seymour is hypocritical at times, for example the cry of sectarian when someone does object to apologies for pogroms or these "my favourite nigger" stories is matched with campaigning to get a columnist fired from the LRB for an image linking baboons and Zimbabwean refugees. There is no consistent application of principle. Which is not itself condemnable - one has allies and enemies and in the real world one defends one's friends even when they err and worse. But the defence of the allies flagrantly racist symbolic violence and praxis - I include the bell hooks "ain't I a comminist?" jokes and the "call me nigger" stories and the crazy Malcolm X as Hegel's African stuff - can evolve into pretty harsh and unfair and dishonest abuse of those who do object to what is plainly objectionable and call it by its name.

    Which of course is his prerogative but he and this posse have no special right to not be sassed back. Which is their constant complaint. Power writes a book she calls "qan attack" on named individuals, rivals of hers as she sees them. She is vicious and the misogyny is over the top, borrowed in part from AA Gill, kpunk, Jacques Alain Miller, Badiou - just rank misogynist abuse. Her attackls are unprovoked. Then there is the pouting and crying and acting hurt at any and all replies short of the lavish hype praise she gets from friends and people her friends badger to help her. The same with Owen Hatherley. He writes in a serious pub what he calls "a kicking". It's unscrupulous, wholly unfair and biased attack, and culminates in racist innuendo. His attack in unprovoked, ad hominem, fuill of falsehoods and poorly written.And then he wails about persecution when all this is answered. Both of these people's thought is positively childish, though Hatherley has aspy data command. Their whole routine is tossing around insults and snarks and declarations of their own virtue. They're vile little puritans. fine. But there's no reason anyone shouldn't say anything they care to about this crap includiong "what crap! what white solipsist infantile shit! what creepy anti-semitic winky winky! what nasty misogyny and daddy stroking!"

    its true that any serious attention to them when they just wrote their little blogs in their corners would be not nice. But the Guardian, the New Left Review - these publications are not pathetic little fanzines and what's in them is rightly open to rebuttal and response of any kind people wish to offer.

    ReplyDelete
  67. re - "Willful sectarianism"


    if you mean I am setting out to sever the association and tghe link between Marxist, communist leftists and certain professional bourgeois dissident entertainers like Zizek and his protégés, that I want to clarify that they are not friends, not comrades, but enemies, purusinhg a politics inimical to the left and as lackeys of capital, then yes. You are right to detetc the willful sectarianism. I would like to see Zizek and Power relabelled right wing and many of the Badiouvian and Negri-ite hipsters identified as belonging to a specific petty bourgeois idealist tradition that also includes much fascism and is deeply informed by reactionary thought and is incompatible with Marxism.

    Marxism was once strong and clear, a specific conception of the world and a specific commitment to change it and a specific way of analysing human affairts for that purpose. In recent decades in the imperial core, a confusion and muddying has occured, and I think its worth trying to clear it up. There are a fair number of intellectuals outside the academy and in who agree - that Peter Thomas is trying to clarify Gramsci for people, a recovery effort from the catastrophe wrought by bourgheois dissident fashions in academia - there are some others. But really accomplishing this goal of reviving Marxism will require giving up childish things, and really even taking up a position of hostility toward bourgeois ideology, toward the pseudo left which has presided over the solidifcation of class power and helped the ruling class get where it is today. Humaniuty doesn'tr have many chances left to get out of this. I think the champions of humanity should be less worried about being smeared as sectarians if they dare offend the bourgeoise and their servants. nietzscheans, foucault, wendy brown's odd mix, all this will have to be repudiatyed and denounced before an intellectual class , renegades and class traitors wishing to be revolutionists or offer something to revolutionists, can begin to contribute anything to global humanity's efforts to liberate itself.

    "Shock Doctrine" should be the model of the sort of thing intellectuals can produce to help people. It's really been useful in overcoming certain ideological obstacles to intelligent discussion of elite praxis. It's a shortcut to get around accusations of "conspiracy" and all those insinuations that go with it. It helps people see reality and clears away this fog of crude psychologizing, this "they're in the grup of neoliberal ideology!" fable that is the limit of critique allowed in the NYT and the like.

    This will mean severing intelelctuals from the bouirgeois decoy product that is out to discredit Klein and the like, to make that work seem "too simple", to make reality invulnerable to determined organized political human action, to make capitalism mysical and supernatural, and endlesslyt unknownable mystery and to eroticise that pseudo "complexity" that lacanian or hegelian woowoo whose main thing is to make it seem impossible to grasp the totality, to "cognitively map", well enough to overthrow the capitalist class and create socialism.

    ReplyDelete
  68. A succinct summary of your position, much of which I agree with. But it's still straw men you're baiting mostly. Any number of immature, bourgeouis poptastic pundits have written for NLR and the Guardian. A rather young academic who is obviously still finding her intellectual feet on CIF is nowhere near as offensive as the boyfriend of a Tory minister getting a regular lead column in the main section. There's clear and present powerful danger (ie. the kind that's made me unemployed and unable to pay my rent) and a very small group of people who have minimal influence outside their immediate circle (and a 'virtual' circle at that).

    Its clear the generation you attack are mainly influenced by 80s/90s music journalism, if anything (although most of them have dreadful taste in music). Its punditry, not research, philosophy or even basic journalism. And immature, yes. This is clear by what they're likely to get misty-eyed about. Hatherley isn't a 'Marxist' anyway - he's Bevanite (I'm Marxist cos I actually grew up in the type of concrete monstrosity he eulogises). I initially thought K - Punk was in the RCP/Spiked. They are bloggers after all - not the best forum for consistency or measured thought. Their lack of recent posts shows they're already running out of things to say (except occasional self-promotion, but that's 21st century ideology for you).

    And who the hell has been trying to discredit Klein in these circles? Shock Doctrine is common currency now (and extracted in the Guardian).

    There's also the big sense of frustration with the SWP - one which I share. Despite my deep admiration for many of its members, the sneaking sense that its been 'retarding' the left (tactically at least - they were a shambles during the Blair years) for the past couple of decades won't go away. Maybe it is time for them to listen to 'fellow travellers' occasionally - its not like they're the most intellectually malleable of activists anyway. The cultural hobby-horses of said travellers are largely irrelevant. I'm sure the actual dispossessed couldn't give a shit about David Simon or HP Lovecraft, or indeed the latest rant from Zero books. 'Bourgeouis decoys' have always been with us. What do you think the Labour Party was/is? Or indeed academic philosophy? Revolution comes from decisive violence enacted by the working class majority, as led by them. Not blogs, courses and pamphlets - they're more useful for making friends in this very lonely country.

    ReplyDelete
  69. good reading;

    http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6927/

    Here's it straight

    the american left was destroyed by petty bourgeois white racism, sexism and anticommunism

    now revisionists come along to say no the left was destroyed by divisive feminists and black particularist nationalists

    these fables are racist, sexist and negationist.

    now along comes WBM and Zizek and Nina Power and Alberto Toscano not only peddling this revisionism but relabelling it Marxism, and selling it along with all the vile enticemlents and titillation of the oldest styles of misogynist pillories and racist degradation and annihilation

    its not anything anyone should be kind and gentle to.

    ReplyDelete
  70. "A rather young academic who is obviously still finding her intellectual feet on CIF is nowhere near as offensive as the boyfriend of a Tory minister getting a regular lead column in the main section. "

    Not if she called herself a Tory or a fascist.

    and she's not 25. She has the mannerisms of a little girtl but she is in her thirties.

    Her intellectual feet? She is illiterate but she has studied and learned this style of equivocation and deliberate vagueness that is like the textual inkblot. There is a chapter in her book where I think 90% of the sentences are in the passive voice and consists of a parade of clichés. It's a technique. The endless use of the construction "if, then" with no logical connection, the "if" an equivocation, etc..

    "Its clear the generation you attack are mainly influenced by 80s/90s music journalism,"

    I do not attack a generation. I honour many people people 20 and 35, Jeb Sprague has done incredible things, I don't think Jeremy Scahill is much older than that, Eva Golinger, Brownfemipower, I honour young academics like Dayo Gore, some people who post here anonymously, some culture studies or lit bloggers for example I think AmericanStranger is really smart, Adswithoutproducts as well, Christian Thorne, despite the foucaultianism i like some books of queer theory people who write about art like jennifer doyle and that crowd.

    "Despite my deep admiration for many of its members, the sneaking sense that its been 'retarding' the left (tactically at least - they were a shambles during the Blair years) for the past couple of decades won't go away. "

    well i dunno. I'm american. Their discipline seems cumbersome but then compare to what they do manage to get going to say the ISO in the US. I don't think they can have been retarding the left; their flaws may reflect the left's retardation due rather to ruling class success.

    Owen Hatherley is not Marxist true. I thought the comparisons to Carlyle were pretty apt. He's kind a Fabian type. I don't mind him really. What I don't like about him is how he is representative of this facebooky thing, the self made authority. Authority is bad, but self made ones like this, celebrity through self promoting and aping the mannerisms of erudition, are no better than institutionally created ones. Like Nina Power, ge lambastes Nicholas Bourriaud for supposedly insufficient acquaintaince or understanding of the theorists he references, but he himself poses as having deep knowledge of these russian formalists and benjamin and have acuqired mysteriously without managing to pick up the meaning of words like "syntax". Is that possoibke? He's a bullshit artist, but sincere in his adoration of the kinds of buildings that pay for their architect's visionary satisfactions in broken teeth and bones of their inhabitants. He's also a creepy nationalist who really is in denial about Britain's imperial history and racist history, and romanticises the labour governments, unable to balance his perfectly justified appreciation for the domestic achievements of the UK working class and the labour party as its representative to a point with a consciousness of what labour governments were doing off the island. in other words his writing is imbued with white supremacism, and this is also reflected in his attraction to explanations for contemporary politics that tend to evoke brown people as alien to europe and also his fixation on "britishness" and these cheesy discourses of national character...

    ReplyDelete
  71. That's a narrative I'm familiar with, and I'd concede your point about revisionist myths. Black people, women, gays, the poor and the left made far more meaningful progress from 1945 to 89 than they have since (the proof is in the pudding).

    I'd also add that the discursive negation of class was a huge factor (or at least re-framing it in racist terms - like the Wire or MSM news). A US tactic that's gained traction here among right, liberal and 'soft' left alike. The unemployed are basically treated as a troublesome 'race' now - a handy way to dehumanise/disregard them as they swell rapidly in number.

    I'm always suspicious of any self-appointed 'vanguard' or indeed academic credentials (seriously, FUCK the philosophy department); and still think you accord Power etc. with more influence than they have (her blog was always devoid of content considering how many others linked to it), or are likely to. Hatherley will probably do well because of his wisely chosen 'niche'. Fisher has found his forte in music reviews. Laurie Penny is already regarded as something of a joke. Zizek's numerous TV appearances and op-eds (a good marker of what their agenda really is) just bring to mind this guy:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X4Ob5_eEGA&feature=related

    However, I still think that Zizek had some uses regarding that slippery subject ideology (as did Fisher - he really did capture our ideological mutations for a while there, until predictable hubris kicked in). But no-one's immune to ideology, and too many fail to see that a self-promoting white boys' club is a self-promoting white boys' club after all is said and (not) done.

    ReplyDelete
  72. " I'm sure the actual dispossessed couldn't give a shit about David Simon"

    I don't know, in the US it has gotten to the point where the "shoot up black people" spectacle is really seeming to feed further the brutalisation as entertainments fed the lynching culture called fascism by leftists in the early-mid 20th century - and people do see a connection with this demonisation in reality tv and drama both and the tasing, the hurting and terrorising, the breaking down doors, the cheapness of black life.

    there is a strong case to be made for a connection betwee simon's vision of savagely dangerous and murderous black children and the way black people are treated in the US by authority.

    its not just cops killing a little girl because they are so hyped up from the reality tv cameras following them. its the naturalisation of this brutality, the normalisation of this violence. COPS first and perhaps more important, wider audience but at least everyone understood it was shit and racist; now the wire represents a ruling class achievement to which COPS contributed. It took a long time. The portrayal of a black schoolgirl as this wild dangerous animal...teaching a white audience how it can feel self righteous with its thrill over this, is creating the world in which people can be tased and beaten and indeed killed because they are seen as animals, vicious, dangerous, lackjing self control, amoral, impulsive, that hapless cops can't control and need to be able to protect themsevles from.

    ReplyDelete
  73. i don't overestimate Power's individual nfluience. if I did, I might, as power and seymour and toscano have done when they have judged a text racist, write to her employer and demand her firing. instead i just point it out here and invite my readers to deplore her and kvetch with me.

    ReplyDelete
  74. OK -I actually thought Power was about 25 (due to her narrow historical perspective and assumption of saying something 'new' rather than her mannerisms). Yes, there is a strange streak of nostalgia going on that loses sight of context, but the sense of what's been 'lost' in the UK runs very deep (however distorted this mourning becomes, as with Hatherley etc.).

    The 'generation' you positively cite are all American, no? I expect the British SWP has a different 'emotional' character than it does in the US (when I hung out with some as a student it did often appear an 'emotional' enterprise rather than a 'political' one). May also be the case with academia (in my experience, the most culturally/politically illiterate and impressionable of my circle was the one who went furthest in academia. Go figure). What you critique may be more due to the limits of our media/academic discourse. Whatever their jobs or education, the Zero books 'crew' are all autodidacts really - and I have no problem with that per se. There may be class aspects to that autodidacticism which you don't see (not least the rather 'British' resentments, and neuroses, that motivate it).

    I think what we may be arguing about here are peculiar traits of 'Britishness'. I also detect this as a recurring theme of this blog - which veers towards American chauvinism too often (you have more barbed comments about the Guardian or New Statesman than New York Times or The Nation, for example). There is such a thing as national ideology, but that's an argument that could go on forever.

    ReplyDelete
  75. PS. The only reason I ever heard of you in the first place was from your extended critique of the Wire (which I agree with), but all anglo-American cop narratives (fictional or otherwise) are racist/fascist now. That's probably their appeal - whether it's James Ellroy, The Wire or the endless 'documentaries' of police omnipotence vs. the subhuman poor.

    ReplyDelete
  76. Also, what's the big problem with Foucault? I haven't read him for a long time, but I find myself more in agreement with him than I did then (if memory serves).

    ReplyDelete
  77. The problems with foucault are legion. For a start, I think colin wilson gets at a few here

    http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=431&issue=118

    but i'll answer more completely shortly.

    ReplyDelete
  78. A fotnote on the distribution of The Wire. Johns Hopkins has also created a course using the series as fodder. Taking perverse advamtage of thier location,they complemnt the series with compulsory volunteer work in Baltimore neighborhoods.

    ReplyDelete
  79. http://www.abc2news.com/dpp/news/education/hopkins-offers-class-on-%22the-wire%22

    ReplyDelete
  80. interesting that the UK academy legitimized the Wire and the US "liberal establishment" reimported it with this stamp of ideologiucal approval it had won with UK audiences. At first it was really rejected by the US audience - because it was so crude and racist and cliché and just clunky, just poorly written and derivative and wooden.

    (again compare the writing, symbolic layering and dramatic construction of the source chess lesson in Fresh

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qiyfu1MuG2w&feature=related


    to the copy,

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1HUlTKvDUI

    its just as graceless and crass as teen fanfiction. The characters are just avatars, action figures for this winky referency communicatioins between Simon and audience.)

    The UK and European academy and culture industries is serving a bit as this source for the revival of the kind of racist (and sexist) discourses and ideology that was successfully fought back in the US by its victims.



    1977 in Scotland.


    1977! It's startling.


    Anyway we see that there is class politics there in the radical cultural politics, now that its vcictories are being reversed one can more clearly see how important some of this work was.

    ReplyDelete
  81. 1977? In a lot of small towns and villages we still have that ("It's tradition!").

    "The characters are just avatars, action figures for this winky referency communicatioins between Simon and audience."

    Half-assed pseuds love the Wire for the same reason they love Kraftwerk, J.G. Ballard or David Lynch - the supposedly 'challenging' concept and 'theory' is laid on with a trowel by the makers, obvious for all to see with the trick of flattering your 'critical skills' for reading the bloody obvious.

    You could write essays based on a quick glance at the trailer/movie poster/book blurb/track listing. That's why we increasingly see intellectual hacks write about these 2-D CGI spectacles. It's lazy, easy, and everyone else is talking about it. Nice way to get accidentally googled too.

    ReplyDelete
  82. That last image makes me want to mention an image I can't link. But the library last week added two, unrelated volumes of photgraphs from reservations in Oklahoma, one late-19th/early 20th cenury. One more contemporary.

    I believe it was in the earlier images, a group on Indian youth at the Indian school dressed up as Pilgrims for the thanksgiving pageant.

    ReplyDelete
  83. "the supposedly 'challenging' concept and 'theory' is laid on with a trowel by the makers, "

    there is the appeal of the toy. like instead of Incvanhoe, you have justan Ivanhoe paper dolls set. this was loveable for the little girl who had read Ivanhoe and loved it and wanted to trigger the memproes and think about and interact with it. Cocaculture commodities are all derivative from a basic set of stories and references, they don't have to be Ivanhoe or any specific work - but eberything is a lot like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or the cgi Beowulf or this paramount fantasy Stardust. That last is really an erxample - its just a mishmash of triggers of moods and traditions. Sopranos is the same. Butr I noticed there are Wire fans who don't even know that "its just business" is from the Godfather and that it worked its way gto the Wire through a lot of copies and homages and parodies, etc; they don't need the reference they can just play with the paper dolls because all the references are kind of in one big toybox. stuff is familiar, distilled, shards, fragments, of the mass culture is familiar without anyone having to have consumed the works whole.

    Stardust is empty, weirdly, just a series of faintly familiar scenes, faintly familiar tropes, strung together. But I remember when it was in developùent the studio kept saying it was a fairytale for adults and compared it to Princess Bride.

    It's actually an interesting contrast. Stardust belongs with Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It's like fanfic, it's facsimile, not pomo pastiche the way The Quincunx is, but like an Ivanhoe colouring book wityh ^paper dolls. Maybe with godzilla too. The Pirates of the Carribean movies belong in the group too.

    Princess Bride belongs to the older universe still, though one can see a certain element that was going to open the door to Pirates of the Carribean.

    the issue is superficiality, but its a kind of superficiality that did not exist before recent advances in visual technology. but it still has at the core the quality of the paper doll set, or the lunchbox - the thing that is a token of something else.

    Now why this is even more interestying has to do with art I think, value, commodity, and the token. Someone, a famous art critic, who was it? a philosopher. An english philosopher, wrote that wonderful essay in the sixties about minimal art and azvant garde where he is trying to get at fine art's definition, through its conception "work" in "work of art", and the problem of reproducibility. Form and its tokens. He talked about the problem arising with Duchamp's Fountain that the exact thing, other examples of the identical materrial thing;, were not post original, chronologically. That is, there were identical urinals that would have been made before the original, the one that was the artwork.

    now i have to go dig up that essay...to finish my point...i wish i could remember who wrote it. english philosopher last name begins with W.

    ReplyDelete
  84. the essay starts off explaining why the blank page can't be a poem by Mallarmé about the poet's terror of the failure of his language etc.

    ReplyDelete
  85. wollheim; my brain is really disintegrating today.

    ReplyDelete
  86. I think the Sopranos is much better than you may be giving it credit for. Despite its pastiche and cheap thrills (shared by other 'hot' shows like Deadwood or Mad Men - watching Great White Superbastards in action, in defiance of their encroaching extinction - a luxury denied to The Wire's black characters). Despite that, it still always came back to the recurring theme of the cannibalistic violence of American wealth, family and capitalism (and arguably 'whiteness'). But then I'm a huge fan of the Godfather - even though I share David Thomson's contention that its a very right-wing film.

    The children's films you cite - I've seen em all, but find them unmemorable to an uncanny degree. I could distinguish Randolph Scott b-westerns easier than Stardust, Caribbean, or any Tim Burton movie since Pee-Wee within an hour of viewing them. This isn't the case with kiddie movies for adults/adult movies for kiddies - Blade, Dark Knight etc. which although sharing that paper doll aspect, have ritualistic ultra-violence to keep us awake.

    The Dark Knight was far more interesting for the bizarre levels of intense discourse it generated - manipulated by its cynical, juvenile mishmash of certain tropes. Like many other spectators, I ended up discussing Batman more in my 30s than I did as a 8-year old comic geek (it was like a conversational stand-in for the world-wide collapse of an economic system). But that's more about the infantilisation of 'adult' entertainment coupled with the brutalisation of children's entertainment. Both angles serve neoliberal ideology all too well.

    ReplyDelete
  87. i thought sopranos was like skits teen godfather fans would do in basements in jericho long island. by fans i mean those who say leave the gun take the canoli a lot.

    i love the godfather also - i have seen I and II at least a hundred times each.

    " the infantilisation of 'adult' entertainment"

    yes, fairytales for adults, with the injection of some blood and guys to make them seem suitazble for the age group. Pan's Labyrinth. Schindler's List. Then the paper dolls book of the fairytales with fascist flavoring in novels - Everything is Illuminated. Histoyr of Love.

    " Zizek had some uses regarding that slippery subject ideology"

    He's wrong, like all the earlier fascists he regurgitates were wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  88. "The Dark Knight was far more interesting for the bizarre levels of intense discourse it generated"

    I heard the latest film inception is a movie boasting about how hard it is not to just manipulate an audience by steering but really put ideas in their heads they feel they've produced.

    ReplyDelete
  89. Tell me someting- do you lot enjoy any kind of art at all? Is there something that you consider not faux or prepackaged?

    ReplyDelete
  90. P.S. I rarely agree with him, but Proyect makes a good argument in Penny's defense:
    http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/the-laurie-penny-swp-dispute/

    ReplyDelete
  91. "Tell me someting- do you lot enjoy any kind of art at all? Is there something that you consider not faux or prepackaged?"*

    you tried this already with the journalists. Naturally you ignored my reply. Sad that as far as you know I have just dismissed every artwork ever created - the sopra nos, batman, schidler's list, are we forgetting anything? Is that all the art?

    ReplyDelete
  92. "I rarely agree with him,"

    jeez is there any communist blogger you don't want to have gassed?

    ReplyDelete
  93. Inception was so bad, deadening even, that it put me off entering a cinema since July. It had some interest in its depiction of the emotional 'struggles' of the ruling class (the arrogance that assumes we care about their tired oedipal dramas as they float above society, a theme of so many movies these days), but as science fiction, drama or even IMAX spectacle it was total FAIL. It was hard to contain condescension towards anyone who liked it.

    Do you not concede Zizek's point that Schindler's List (another ruling class fantasy - nazi industrialist as Moses to his slave labourers) was just Jurassic Park in different costumes, then?

    Liking this 'paper doll' idea of modern narrative though (related to Tea Party in my mind). Slowly warming to this blog, despite reservations.

    ReplyDelete
  94. "Do you not concede Zizek's point that Schindler's List (another ruling class fantasy - nazi industrialist as Moses to his slave labourers) was just Jurassic Park in different costumes, then?"

    I think everyone conceded this years before it was zizek's point.

    http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC39folder/schindlersList.html

    Because of the influence of the auteur theory (the director as author) on film criticism and Hollywood production, comparisons of SCHINDLER'S LIST to Spielberg's other movies cannot he overlooked. Schindler does come off like a super-human Indiana Jones or the archaeologists in Jurassic Park. The Nazis can he compared to the dinosaurs running loose in JURASSIC PARK or to the shark in JAWS: nature that cannot be wholly controlled, but nature that can be explained as primitive. The Jews-the pitiful Jews showing fear — represent the child in us, like the Indian children rescued by Indiana Jones or the children scared by dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK.

    just one of the millions of people who noticed.



    Like the toilet national chatacters which i first heard in 1982.

    ReplyDelete
  95. that's
    Schindler's List
    My father is a Schindler Jew

    by Les White

    from Jump Cut, no. 39, June 1994, pp. 3-6

    Schindler does come off like a super-human Indiana Jones or the archaeologists in Jurassic Park. The Nazis can he compared to the dinosaurs running loose in JURASSIC PARK or to the shark in JAWS: nature that cannot be wholly controlled, but nature that can be explained as primitive. The Jews-the pitiful Jews showing fear — represent the child in us, like the Indian children rescued by Indiana Jones or the children scared by dinosaurs in JURASSIC PARK.

    here's zizz, 2006, twelve years later;

    Schindler's List is, at the most basic level, a remake of Jurassic Park (and, if anything, worse than the original), with the Nazis as the dinosaur monsters, Schindler as (at the film's beginning) the cynical-profiteering and opportunistic parental figure, and the ghetto Jews as threatened children (their infantilization in the film is eye-striking)

    ReplyDelete
  96. "Slowly warming to this blog, despite reservations."

    thanks for the open mind. it's a group blog by the way, so not everything here is me.

    ReplyDelete
  97. " nazi industrialist as Moses to his slave labourers"

    yes it was very much about clinton too...he's bill clinton. it was very much this yugo propaganda and this "the list us life" - we capitalistsz are kind and offer you refuge in the skave labour camp. also that fascists are evil because they don't care about progfit - they care about insane mystical nuttiness. they are greedy but not carying about profit. but in schindler profit is blessed because it saves life. the proifitable slave labour factoriy is life. passion goes even further to make profit into God and the film is about tearing a human body to piecesz for profit and how that's holy. profit is holy period, it has no humanist justification, indeed humanity must be sacrificed to it and tortured for it.

    I wrote a long thing about schindler's list and the passion of the christ on another blog but it was deleted.

    there was a gfood new yorkler piece on it by art speigelman.

    ReplyDelete
  98. (passion of the christ goes further)

    ReplyDelete
  99. That criticism of Schindler's List isn't new either: Kubrick said it was a movie about people who lived while the holocaust was about people who died.
    And I don't want Proyect gassed for fuck's sake, why the hell are you so paranoid? Ironically one commenter to his post proclaimed Penny and Klein to be cut from the same cloth:
    "In fact, one of the symptoms of the weakness of the Days of Action movement in Ontario in the 90s was that the trade union bureaucracy so totally dominated the movement that they prevented the formulation of any demands (beyond abstract nonsense like “Take Back Ontario”). So, we had a general strike movement that had no demands! Naomi Klein or Laurie Penny’s “swarm” (as Klein called the anti-globalization movement) was unable to challenge the institutionalized power of the trade union bureaucrats. That doesn’t imply that only a revolutionary party could have risen to that challenge but it does point to the need for an alternative locus of democratically accountable leadership that is clear on some of these questions. And within that a revolutionary party can play an important role. It certainly doesn’t have to be a role like the US-SWP played."

    ReplyDelete
  100. new yorker piece on schindler by speigelman where he explains all the antisemitic tropes.

    but its interesting also how "the crowd" appears - in schindler, helpless rabvble, victims, associated with the child in red coat - this is the yugo crowd. bosnians. gfood. need rescue

    then passion ofg the christ, the crowd is a smite rebvellious shoutingf rabblen, a bad crowd, in palestine. intifada. they'rte palestinians - the images are right off the news of the time of shooting. this is the reinvasion of palestine.

    both of these movies were headline exploitation slightly disguised.

    ReplyDelete
  101. "That criticism of Schindler's List isn't new either: Kubrick said it was a movie about people who lived while the holocaust was about people who died."

    duh.

    that's not about laurie penny as far as i can tell Jenny. try again.

    ReplyDelete
  102. "And I don't want Proyect gassed for fuck's sake, why the hell are you so paranoid?"

    jeez is there anyone you don't want given shock treatments and in a straight jacket? Anyone you feel is competent to be released from your gulag on their own reconnaissance? any restaurant where you didn't get food poisoning? any holocaust you liked?

    ReplyDelete
  103. "Ironically one commenter to his post proclaimed Penny and Klein to be cut from the same cloth:"

    is there anything you don't find ironic?

    ReplyDelete
  104. At least,this questin, "Do you know what an ad hominem attack is?" is answered:

    11.There’s a rather psychotic rebuttal to her points here:
    http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2010/12/laurie-penny-expresses-her-abhorrence.html

    Comment by Jenny — December 28, 2010 @ 10:35 pm

    The answer is "Yes."

    ReplyDelete
  105. Well, comparing someone's disagreement with the old left to supporting the violent extermination of Roman Gypsies is a sign of slightly psychotic troll logic,yes.

    ReplyDelete
  106. I read that Spiegelman piece way back. Good polemicist, but probably the most overrated cartoonist of the 20th century (Maus had serious racist flaws, and ended up treating holocaust as a struggle of the neurotic artist).

    OK Zizek's a plagiarist too. Goes back to your statement of intent several dozen comments back - you're doing your job in discrediting him I guess.

    I actually liked Passion of Christ for the exactly the same reasons that made it so offensive, but I have perverse tastes at times.

    Re: the Hollywood Clinton narrative. Was always intruiged how much the he was a movie hero in the 90s - romantic lead, kicking terrorist ass with his own feet, joining the airforce fighting aliens etc. Kennedy came close to this (and there were all those villainous Nixon stand-ins of the mid-70s), but the Clinton thing was just plain weird. The great redeemer and unifier, bearer of neoliberal light and sanctimonious bullshit. Another Morning in America, with the faint whiff of last night's joint:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDtw62Ah2zY

    He felt our pain (and breasts, to quote the Onion). I may write about it elsewhere (won't link to prevent ad hominem attacks on the integrity of my comments!). There were a lot of crazy pop culture notions during the 'end of history'.

    ReplyDelete
  107. ... and why does my 'tracking warning' flash like mad when I comment on this site? No wonder I suspected CIA skullduggery...

    ReplyDelete
  108. "I actually liked Passion of Christ for the exactly the same reasons that made it so offensive, but I have perverse tastes at times."

    Um, you enjoy watching Jews get bashed? Please explain.

    ReplyDelete
  109. chuckie, jenny's that obl autograph hound from LT. a great promoter of qlipoth, leaving links all over. "Roman Gypsies" isn't a typo or an error, it's a faux blooper like George W Bush used or these badly spelt tea party placards. There's somle kind of responde waitinf prepared, and I'm curious but I resist. Maybe he'll tell us without our having to ask.

    ReplyDelete
  110. my 'tracking warning' flash like mad when I comment on this site?

    perhaps because of our efficacy against the zizzy psyop?

    "OK Zizek's a plagiarist too."

    You said it I didn't. The content is too obvious really to be plaigiarism; I can't think of anyone who didn't notice the similarity since these were nearly simultaneous releases. Funny zizek has to add the idiotic gratuitous revisionism - he has to get his historical facts wrong - with "remake" - they were both 1993. He just can't help himself.

    ReplyDelete
  111. Re: The Passion. It was unashamed medieval catholiscism, no? The torture, anti-semitism, misogyny (Satan was female!), the general contempt for the audience itself. I didn't say it was any GOOD. Exploitation movie kicks.

    Not unlike my occasional enjoyment of Clint Eastwood, for all his confederate racism (he even had Iwo Jima as the night they drove Dixie down).

    ReplyDelete
  112. "e Hollywood Clinton narrative. Was always intruiged how much the he was a movie hero in the 90s - "

    my favourite was Jeremy Northam's Clinton figure in Wilde's An Ideal Husband.

    ReplyDelete
  113. I suppose I cuolod have been clearer.
    "jenny's that obl autograph hound from LT" si what I was trying to say.
    Or, in other words, there is nothing (more) to say.

    ReplyDelete
  114. oops sorry - i was really like talking to you out loud for benfit of jenny and our new friend.

    i read callinicos at LT. He (and Richard sadly too) has the very strong flavour of Obama's obsession with compromise and bi-partisanship. Laurie Penny writes another vacuous piece of uninformed blather with a gratuitous affront to socialists using the swp as her bogey. Nothing about her journalism advances the campaign against the cuts, in fact she has alienated and annoyed many activists with her fictionalizations of events and her false claims to have witnessed violent criminal acts committed by the socially weakest and most vulnerable participants in the demos. But Callinicos and Seymour seem to understand their duty in this situation as to facilitate her and protect her from any criticism that might diminish the power of her piece to demean and discredit them and all Marxists and indeed all socialists, and to do so effectively by entertaining Guardian readers as it does so. So they are hastening to assist Penny in the project to disseminate the impression that they - and everyone who may be like them or appear like them, revolutionary socialists - are reactionary pernicious parasites on a new generation who is all purity and creativity and multidood potentia. Their foremost concern appears to be to block criticism of Penny and protect this message of hers from any serious loss of legitimacy and especially to protect it as unassailable in the matter of factuality. Their energy is directed toward assuring those who read their sites and pages that what she says cannot be seen as untrue, or dishonest, or indicative of a conflict seperating the interests to which she is attached and those to which the SWP claims allegiance, but only ungenerously worded, unkindly or impolitely harsh and hurtful. As the truth unadorned may often be.

    ReplyDelete
  115. sectarian now means for them any efforts that are not springing from consumer preferences of the majority. if the pollsters and market researchers define the working class as white as say it is racist, then to be antiracist is sectarian. if the market research says the working class likes Avatar, then to criticise it is sectarian. In place fo the working class in struggle, the reality from which sectarians go off into the clouds is the conception of a population as consumers and "fans" of various products of cocacultre etc.

    ReplyDelete
  116. They are indeed wasting their time/credibility giving this chancer the time of day. Callinicos and Seymour should know better (and Proyject, now in on the 'debate').

    "sectarian now means for them any efforts that are not springing from consumer preferences of the majority. if the pollsters and market researchers define the working class as white as say it is racist, then to be antiracist is sectarian. if the market research says the working class likes Avatar, then to criticise it is sectarian. "

    Sorry but that final comment was hogwash. I can't help but see this as yet another barbed reference to Nina Power (were you not accused of 'sectarianism' regarding her?). As a regular reader of LT (and from personal experience), I see no evidence of 'bi-partisanship' there. If that's their agenda, why is the UK SWP so cack-handed in sustaining interest and involvement when it 'reaches out' on the back of widely-publicised campaigns? Or so vigorous in show-trialing its percieved 'mensheviks'?

    Hang out with UK SWP for a few weeks, say your piece, and then its lockdown according to the gospel of T. Cliff (not Trotsky). They may get more 'undecided' students looking at LT, but any comment outside the rulebook and they'll be trolled out of further participation.

    ReplyDelete
  117. "were you not accused of 'sectarianism' regarding her?"

    i think it was regarding my criticism of Linda Melvern and Phil Gourevich.

    ReplyDelete
  118. " I see no evidence of 'bi-partisanship' there."

    true - there will be no making nice with any substantial, talented, sincere hostile party like Johann Hari, just with the ditzy infotainers and clowns.

    ReplyDelete
  119. "i think it was regarding my criticism of Linda Melvern and Phil Gourevich."

    or wendy brown maybe

    ReplyDelete
  120. it was this

    http://tinyurl.com/2uj8mjb

    ReplyDelete
  121. I believe it was here (although I couldn't be bothered reading through all of it again, and I may have your aliases mixed up):

    http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/07/women-and-labour.html

    ReplyDelete
  122. he's calling somebody else sectarian there, but he's using it to mean splitter, not petty bourgeois utopian

    ReplyDelete
  123. oh no you are right - it is I chabert who is being called a splitter and ungenerous reader

    ReplyDelete
  124. And Johann Hari, like any other 'left' hack who cheered the War On Terror's invasions (repentant or otherwise) is a fucking arsehole, not to be trusted in any shape or form. If they'll believe neoconservatives, they're not just idiots but a threat to humanity.

    I don't see the distinction between him and the other journos you cite. Maybe it is just personal.

    ReplyDelete
  125. "s a fucking arsehole, not to be trusted in any shape or form"

    he's a fucking arsehole I am sure - mentor of Laurie Penny? - and a terrible pundit and imperial propagandist, but a good reporter.

    ReplyDelete
  126. " If they'll believe neoconservatives, they're not just idiots but a threat to humanity. "

    Well but Lenin in thje thread I link chamioned Linda Melvern and Phil Gourevich. Gourevich is the borhter in law of James Rubnin and definitely an intelligence agent. Melvern is a very active propagandist for imperial aggression. But unlike Hari, neither of these people are honest or valuable as reporters.

    The way things are, one does have to rely for information on people with bad politics. But some have some integrity and some don't. At least about some stories, Richard prefers those who don't.

    ReplyDelete
  127. "I don't see the distinction between him and the other journos you cite. Maybe it is just personal."

    It's not a very big difference admittedly. But its of some significance I think. In any case, he says the same kinds of things about the swp that Penny does, and she probably in fact picked it up from him. So that was the point of comparing, because Richard very effectively takes him apart without the constant reminder that they are "on the same side." Hari is pretty active about the cuts and reporting the demos in the states without all this mythology of "violence" that is coming from the BBC on one side and Penny and Power on the other.

    ReplyDelete
  128. Hari and Zizz were like a team on Iraq - Hari said there are these beautiful soul leftists who know that the invasion woll liberate Iraqis and be a wonderful thing for them but who just can't stand to see the US' might used for good because they don't think the US deserves to be a hero. And Zizz performed this role - he said we know that the invasion will liebrate Iraqis and be wonderful but I as a radical leftist feel the US hasn't earned the right to be the saviour it could be. So Hari caricatured and slandered an imaginary left and Zizek impersonated it

    ReplyDelete
  129. OK point taken. I have my own issues with Seymour (not as much as the UK SWP, who I expect will find a way to dwindle into irrelevance despite/because of our current right-wing junta. They managed to start and implode a political party that didn't last as long as its internal feuds.

    The whole Penny thing is a worrying sign of the direction they're taking. Ironic considering that I have to change my alias every time I comment on LT - in order to be acknowledged by Seymour and his permanent 'Richard's right again' committee. They fall for it every time...

    ReplyDelete
  130. just kind of by the way, Penny's best stuff was actually also what she picked up from Hari - what was actually her summary of his critique of Niall Ferguson was basically her one non-obnoxious article that I read.

    As I said I respect Richard, and I don't in princple have any objection to party discipline that means he's not always speaking his mind. But I do think there is this problem in general with the left feeling so defensive that self assertion is unimaginable. Prime worry is how will this look in the media? Just easily intimidated. And infiltration of left intellectual circles by left-loathing and this Alex Keratonism that has just created shame, leftists ashamed to be seen as humourless or foegy, all these tactics used to intimidate feminists and antiracists, now leftists afraid of not being liked by bourgeois liberal pundits. Servility, preemptive surrender, smiling at every insult and gushing with gratitude for even destructive notice, abuse is welcome as publicity.

    Timpanaro really diagnosed it. But its worse now, leftists afraid to "dismiss" fascism basically, to say nietzsche was wrong and crazy and schmitt was stupid and childish and repulsive and consumerism and complicity talk is all petty bourgeois moralising and "saint" paul was fucked up and none of this has to do with our tradition. now that would be "sectarian".

    ReplyDelete
  131. I think Proyect has seized on Penny as a pretext. He does this quite often - not really reading xwhzt she says or considering the issue of the routine commiebashing in the paper issue of the Guardian or looking into kind of widespread complaints about her fazbulizing, but just taking one thing and making az case he wanted to make indpendently with it. I think his movie reviews do this frequently - he has an incredible capacity to ignore what is inconvenient to his poiont. The world is an illustration of something he wanted to say.

    Not with his discussions of political struggles.

    ReplyDelete
  132. I liked his recent 'review' of the horros perpetrated by Texas Rangers and Quadrill's Raiders. I had to scroll back to the top to realise it was a post on a Coen brothers movie.

    With regards to left media paranoia - British class deference can wriggle into all kinds of unexpected spheres - even if its a 'class divide' between papers sold inside airports and papers sold outside tube stations.

    ReplyDelete
  133. So you both hate? Richard and Penny? What the hell's your actual stance on all this then?

    ReplyDelete
  134. Some of this disposition comes from a tradition of mild opportunism too.

    In groups like the SWP it's like the Trotskyist's version of the Popular Front.

    Sympathizers, associates and fellow travelers get a free ride. Like way back with Dewey, and Hook's assimilation of his pragmatism.
    rom this distance, Nina Power sure looks like she's within the degree of consanguinity that exempts you from criticism.

    Penny seems more like a potential partner. Or at least representative of folks you will have to deal with.

    And, what allows Louis to seize on her, her criticisms of SWP modus operandi are not totally baseless.

    In terms of ostensible strategic potential and its discrepancy with and any actual politics, the way she is getting treated isn't all that different from the way U.S. union leaders get discussed, and not just publically, by the less than totally dogmatic labor-left here.

    ReplyDelete
  135. My stance is actually a long-standing respect for Richard Seymour, despite his limits within the ongoing tactical blunders of the SWP.

    I never even heard of 'Penny Red' until the grown-ups started worrying about what she had to say. She's not a 'fellow traveller' - she insulted them in print with cliched 'new punk rock' bullshit. It's the like getting a facebook 'poke' from her, and responding with an international conference.

    ReplyDelete
  136. I knew I was forgetting something.

    Zizek. He will appear on the stage at events organizid by Trotskyists. His celebrity helps promote the event. Ergo, free ride.

    No Penny is more like a U.S. union bureaucrat. No interest in the socialist left. Active dislike actually. But make a lukewarm statement about why a war should not be launched at this moment, and all kinds of potential is read into an innocuous liberal criticism.

    But symbolizes the ideal collective agency we want to engage for our side.

    ReplyDelete
  137. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  138. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  139. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  140. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  141. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  142. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  143. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  144. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  145. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  146. Amusing thread, though. I thoroughly enjoyed its total inanity.

    ReplyDelete
  147. Now wasn't that nice of ole Gentleman Tim? He's stored them away fer ye when ye need them, though.

    ReplyDelete
  148. mr edge two of my dearest friends were once rent boys. the work doesn't require any kind of debased personality.



    "Zizek. He will appear on the stage at events organizid by Trotskyists. His celebrity helps promote the event. Ergo, free ride."

    a groundswell finally...check out LT today. The wriggling is bare minimum - the one odd thing is Richard's changing Zizek's charge that the Strojan family's main income was from "stolen cars" - a very live slander in Slovenia, he's trying to really incite violence, state and vigilante, against them - to a charge of "living off stolen calfs [sic]" a fairytalish image which sounds possibly metaphoric that would be less alarming to his urban audience.

    I tried to correct it but I think I have been banned from commenting there.

    ReplyDelete
  149. "My stance is actually a long-standing respect for Richard Seymour, despite his limits within the ongoing tactical blunders of the SWP."


    yes, me too, despite my disagreements and strong dislike of the fasho flavoured clique he coddles i think LT is great, indispensible, and his articles and book very good too and getting better all the time.

    ReplyDelete
  150. Particularly how he adresses the HERE AND NOW without nostalgia or sci-fi fantasy, like some in his 'fasho flavoured clique'. Although he does manage a delicate balancing act of drawing in those who may be that way inclined, without losing (much) integrity.

    ReplyDelete
  151. I am not banned, sorry.

    Yes here and now. Great articvle about US response to Haiti earthquake in the US socialistworker, for example;

    ReplyDelete
  152. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  153. https://twitter.com/#!/praxisblog/status/29662104066

    ReplyDelete
  154. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  155. On Callinicos' facebook wall:

    Alex Callinicos Thanks for your comments, Ali. [to Alizadeh who apparently is willing to second Zizek's charges against the Strojans without feeling any responsibility to bring forward evidence or even name the guy who was supposedly killed at their house.] I'm sure you're right that Zizek isn't a racist or a closet rightist and that the problem is his 'shock doctrine', but he really does need to get out of it. It's a problem not just with racism. Zizek is constantly trying to shock liberal sensibilities about sexism and in the process crosses the line: he was really offensive to the woman chair of the debate between him, Holloway, and me at Marxism 2010. He doesn't seem to grasp the basic Leninist point that giving priority to the class antagonism doesn't mean dismissing other antagonisms (racial and sexual oppression, for example) but rather understanding their interconnection and becoming the 'tribune of the people' in the struggle against all forms of oppression.

    How chivalrous of Callinicos. But its interesting that he assumes Zizek abused a woman in order to perform healthful épatering the bourgeoisie (wild and crazy guy that he is) and to pursue sincere class sttruggle and not because he's a sleazy misogynist creep.

    ReplyDelete
  156. http://www.facebook.com/alex.callinicos/posts/134968009896375

    you will say I'm MI5 but at this point only people with strong fascist leanings can be defending him.

    Only.
    Fascists.

    ReplyDelete
  157. Oops. Were my comments objectionable?

    ReplyDelete
  158. Qlipoth: Could you explain your reason for removing the posts between 1.48 am & your last comment?

    Ha! Word verification: rehooker

    ReplyDelete
  159. "Could you explain your reason for removing the posts between 1.48 am & your last comment? "

    you asked me to delete your comment if your email was visible. so i clicked your profile, and found i was blocked from seeing it. this does not mean everyone is blocked, so i couldn't know if your email was visible. safe rather than sorry.

    i removed the posts quoting the public twitter conversation you had regarding my post and its content that you had tweeted because you seemed to object to seeing it quoted here - "spooky" you said. Well your tweets are being broadcast to hundreds of millions of people, and you did link to my post calling my specific attention to that seriees of exchanges, but if the etiquette is one should act as if eavesdropping when reading twitter, then so it is. I was not aware.

    I can imagine some of my remarks on your comments may have been seen as ignoring you had i known you were in fact reading here, but i didn't know that. I was only commenting on what you had published and what others had published in response to you. I also was remarking on how your experience is not unique, but seemed a good recent example of something of a theme of this blog. I know from many years of trying to respond to zizek's racism, and seeing many other people, all but four being women, (four feminist communist men), mostly African-Americans or African-Canadians, trying to do the same, and receiving the same responses of which you complain, that there is more to the zizek phenomenon than any single one of his objectionable interventions.

    here -

    http://tinyurl.com/25rq8c9

    and in the comments here -

    http://leninology.blogspot.com/2007/01/cultural-learnings-for-make-benefit.html

    you can see some of the most frequently used tactics of intimidation which protected zizek from criticism.

    the ferocity and absurdity of the defences of zizek, i said, suggested the repression of knowledge of his racism and fascism, and the disavowed pleasure and guilt if afforded his fans.

    bat is especially interesting;

    bat020
    Hmm, well Richard Rorty is ever so careful to avoid Eurocentrism, would certainly never tell racist jokes about black men's penises and scrupulously steers clear of contrarianism... but Zizek's politics, whatever their aporias and occasional idiocies, are way to the left of Rorty's tedious liberalism.




    zizek's only actual politics, as bat knew, was with the slovene lib dems, the client of the US and German finance, privatisers and ethnic seperatists engaged in a nationalist embezzlement racket and an administrative ethnic cleansing of roms and muslims. Not a milimeter to the lefty of Rorty. But bat tried to insinate, as I said, that zizz had been last seen shooting romanovs in a cellar in ekateringburg.

    I would have left most of this stuff from the comments up if i could just edit them to remove your tweetes and the tweets of your interlocutor, but the system is too crude here for that . so i just removed the posts in my haste for my holiday wine and charlottes.

    anyway, wishing you new years joy and all that.

    ReplyDelete
  160. in other words, no your comments were not in the least objectionable, but there are just limits of my ability to edit here to assure provision of the desired privacy etc

    ReplyDelete
  161. Ahh... I only hoped you would delete my email address as for the other comments it was just a shock to realise that dialogue had been noticed & quoted.
    Having trawled through the comments section over at LT I do see in operation a deliberate disavowal of Zizek’s misogyny & racism combined with an attempt to write off your criticisms as being somewhat deranged. Given that you back up your contribution with actual quotes it does highlight the points you raised about the dismissal of my observations about Zizek’s racism based on my misunderstanding and perceived illiteracy.

    The “sophistic trick” being to present his arguments as a critique of far right thinking, and then to say, he is not going to say the politically correct thing because they are a valid response to real fears that white working class people experience is, I think, essentially why it passes the critical faculties of those on the left you would hope knew better. The Birkbeck lecture being a very good example of this. Here he says he will not criticise the racist mob who terrorised the Roma family because he “understands” those guys.

    I am not sure how his description of how to make friends with big black American guys by alluding to their big penises or making up Chomsky quotes about Obama addresses those fears. Suffice to say a really existing “big black guy” I put this to was not convinced by Zizek’s claims that this was how you could really make friends with him and there are a variety of responses with which a black man would respond to that, including violent ones, so Zizek is right to warn his white audiences that this is a risky strategy.

    When I have raised Zizek’s racism in his journalistic pieces I have been told that he is criticising that kind of thinking. As for Bat’s comments I am not sure how he can justify his claims but I am no expert on Rorty & my area of familiarity is the old enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Hegel whose misogyny & racism also concern me. However, Zizek’s connections to the Slovene Lib Dem party does make his project clearer. Thanks for drawing my attention to this and for your critique which for me, at least, is crystal clear.

    Happy New year, peace and love to you too.

    ReplyDelete
  162. thanks vitoria - yes, i have set myself the task of exposing this racism in zizek and his followers - which you would think would not be that hard after decades of cuoltural politics devoted to developing the exegetical tools and discursive mechanisms for explaining, characterising, identifying - and have been called deranged, monomaniac, pâranoid, obsessed, and even stalker. I started just criticising his msm pieces when theyu came out, but after the all white Idea of Commuinism caper, and that racist gag "alternative" in reply to objections, and then zizek going on the BBC to report from the conference as one of the "delegates", as if it were a comintern emergency meeting, to say the lefty is pathetic and legalistic and moralising and just wants tio outlaw racism, i really got angry ands started really loathing the perpetrators
    of what can only be described as a white supremacist anticomminist aggression.

    I aml relieved to see what's happening now that Seymour has put his foot down and had enough, but his loyal fans are still battling and nobody even picks up on the main hypocrisies that are the white supremacist exceptionalism, the core routines - that while sneeringly bringing forth his sock puppet liberal who blames history and society for the violent and murderous roma way of life - romantricising thesde criminal huiman vermin from whom the state should protect the landowners of Ambrus - zizek and they themselves perform this alibi for the ambrus landowerns, the genocidal and lynching slovene way of life is the result of the failures of "the left" and liberal multiculturalism's own racism and so the roma should "open themselves more" to the Ambrus landowner lynchmob. this symmetry is the core feature of Zizek's revival of aryanism and white supremacism - and he is dogged about it - white racism is good, right, true, potent, justified by Hegelian history. The he invents the "reverse" racisms encouraged by "multiculturalism" which are deplorable and degraded and despicable and contemptible...

    "the liberals want the third world people to sing some some [sneer] some African song" says he with contempt. He revives this laughable but also dangerous and vile and aggressive fable of how the white intellect touched black Haitians and liberated them. ...

    ReplyDelete
  163. ...The historical revisionism is as fraudulent and ridiculous and mythical as niall ferguson's, as smugly ignorant, but he sells it wrapped in his declaration that this is the real leftist radicalism, the real antiracism and antiimperialism, and his fans eagerly buy this. They can see through the pose of course but they want the white supremacism but also feel guilt, and repress their consciousness of what attracts them, and thus react very emotionally and viciously when he is critised, aghast. He himself can call Laclau fascist, taunt Butler as a Jew and S. Ahmed as as Muslim, call Critchley complicit with Bush, and not be scolded for crossing a line. But this fans get very politically correct and sensitive defending him - they champion his racist and sexist attacks but if you make fun of his presentation, the spitting, the snotting on his hands and running them through his hair, the bile diahhrea colored gulag underwear costume, or his Slovitzian wild and crazy persona, they throw fits of genteel intolerance for such un-pc insensitivity. As if criticising this entertainment commodity "Marxist", pull the string and it wails 'Hitler wasn't violent enough!' and 'I love secret police, informers and firing squads!' and 'There is no exploitation, there is just self-induglence and permissiveness, women having cats lick their genitals, immigrants retaining their backward ways - there needs to be tyranny and terror!' is ableist.


    anyway, a little rant for the new year! I started off calmer about this but something snapped with that "ain't I a communist" gag. American feminists and antiracists were criticised in recent decades for having spent too much time in culture wars, in building that accomplsihment that drove the right so nuts that it shreiked about the pc gestapo, and the myth was that this work was somehow responsible for ruling class victories in the class war since 1980 or so. And now to see all that destroyed by these faux leftists, and these outbursts of misogynist and racist bile unchecked and going in disguise as "the real left", these explosions of ressentiment, these bullish pushing to centre stage and grabbing microphones and podia to lambaste feminism and antiracism, to vilify the achievements as injuries to this suddenly appeared, suddenly staged mythical "white working class", and all this fascism 2.0, flexible and hipster, makes me sad and sick.

    ReplyDelete
  164. I would like all my comments addressed to PJ Mullins removed, if possible.

    ReplyDelete
  165. i think i got them all.

    ReplyDelete
  166. Thanks. As a resolution, I should apply the same rule to comments boxes as i would for picking up the car keys...

    ReplyDelete
  167. i think ms edge as you have a blogger id, you should be able to delete these comments yourself, that little trashcan that appears under yours but not others is for that purpose.

    you just can'rt make all traces vanish, as can someone with the blog password.

    ReplyDelete
  168. there is a furious twitter debate going on about zizz and LT's post, the usual tactics of defence (just assertions and discrediting the critic as illiterate and biased and insane), but it really make me want to cry. Because its amazing how people can take it this far, where he is justifying terrorising these kids, where he is demonising these kids as vermin and justifying driving them with terror from their homes, the sleep outside in ther woods threatened with being crucified and burnt by an armed mob of hundredsd of people, and these defenders are just all worried about is this multimillionaire celebrity scumbag being treated deferentially enough. I mean, even if he "really doesn't mean it" and doesn't want to be such a antisemite, gypsyhating, racist fascist cracker but just can't help himself - who the fuck cares? I lean these people get all freaked out fearing someone is "dismissing zizek" without reading his every printed page, or dismissing nietzsche and schmitt hiedegger, this is what they care about, not that these kids were driven from their home in the middle of the night to sleep in the woods while menaced by an armed mob of racist maniacs threatening to mutilate them.

    Really what is wrong with these pepople? But this is what Zizz is all about, contempt for the soft "liberals", his mission to "brutalize thought" like trhe Nazis, as schroder had it, brutalize thought and impair moral feeling, to perform this barbarisingf, this de-civilisation, and normalise this vilification and racist and sexist contempt, this bullying and endless derision, and pump up white male resentment and arrogance..;that's his mission the success of which he boasted to amy goodman. And in Slovenia, the pogrom against the Strojans is also evidence of his success, because he is a major ideologue there, doing this work of making that possible.

    ReplyDelete