TheRat posted:

https://twitter.com/LibDemPress/status/832016867246104577

It has a certain ring to it

quote:

What strikes me about conversations on social media regarding brexit is that there are three diffrent categories of contribution- not strands of commentary, but comments- the Entrenched Lexiteer, the Moral Remainer and the Exhausted and Confused Naive Appeal to Unity. 3 different comments being repeated over and over again with almost no capacity for nuance or development and with almost no exceptions.

I won't identify their content now because that's just an oportunity to return to the leftist death spiral that is the hideous 'debate' on this and every other topic which presently divides us. I want to try and find a way to pull us out of that death spiral. The decision to boycott the anti-Trump demonstration called principally by forces from the traditional far left and the subsequent decision by those forces to set up an alternative campaign is an extemely alarming sign of deterioration at what may be the most crucial momment in recent history.

Some people may take the attitude that the root issue is simply the history of abuse in the SWP. I don't buy that. I don't believe the SWP was the only target of sentiment to exclude forces involved in the formation of that demonstration and if it was, boycotting a demonstration would be an utterly unprecedented response in this country and one which doesn't measure rationally up against the war crimes, political butchery and authoritarianism actively participated in by the Labour Party and the communist Party for generations- with loud and vicious denunciations being carried out against these organisations ON demonstrations significant figures of these groups were visibly leading.

It also shows that the schism is not unique to the question of Brexit, and that the various schisms contribute to eachother and begin to draw a broader picture of an underlying rupture in the left- which itself suggests a still more fundemental rupture in the reality from which politics emerges. I thought perhaps thinking about the social media debate as a symptom of our condition, rather than taking the attitude that social media, or etiquette or even the ideas expessed are the sickness itself, might be a way to help understand the crisis oft the left.

Although they are utterly at odds with eachother it's become possible to identify some broad features the diffrence types of commentary have in common. They ALL claim that every other strand of opinion is bullying and abusive. They ALL claim that the left is inward looking and isolated. They ALL claim to be speaking in defence of principles of internationalism and anti-racism. Apart from the specific arguments being made, what really separates the two strands of argument- which extends also to the response to the Syrian war- is that the lexit left tends to claim the monopoly on revolutionary politics and the remainers tend to claim moral authority. Both sides claim the other is not in touch with the working class. This ironically is the key, but I'll come back to that in a momment.

Not much can be learned from this apart from that the arguments are rife with contradictions and inconsistencies and above all characature- and I say this very delibrately- NOT straw-figures. Straw figuring is creating a false enemy you can defeat, what has been going on in these bust ups is more a tendency to amplify the biggest problems of the other side in general, which is interesting because the main effect seems to be to construct a more rational system of ideas in the opposing contributions than is actually identifiable. The destructiveness of these debates emerges, I think, from the urgency we feel to actually understand the rupture itself and our deep unpreparedness to do so. Its reasuring to impute on your opponent a straightforward ideological break with our tradition or principles because it converesly reassures us that we know where WE are and where WE are going, but these charactures are not accurate, they conceal the disorientation.This is surely because of a lack of an intelligence of the class and it's condition.

The cheap bullshit version of this argument is that leftists are all just unbearably middle class and dont do proper working class jobs anymore or arent sufficiently northern. This is nonsense. Im not even going to bother to refute it. Even were it true Fredrick Engels was the poshest motherfucker ever to ponder equality while a domestic servant scrubbed the skid marks out of his kecks, but he still managed to do some of the most insightful work of patient documentation of the material and social conditions of the working class ever seen. Regardless, posing the issue in this way is to massively underestimate it. We're confronted with a class which has had its traditions of self consciousness brutally smashed. However working class leftists are, what does it matter if the class doesn't know itself?

After the split with the SWP it's various diaspora seemed to, separately, agree that this was a thing and that major work was needed to overcome this lack of an adequate theory of the present. That work has been stumbled through with various momments of insight, but ultimately with little that really seemed to answer the vast dirth of real understanding. The catch 22 of it all is that understanding doesn't emerge in the abstract, just through thinking about it really hard, but through the active theorising of workers experiences of struggle- and struggle has been thin. Progressively less thin, and the sparks begining to fly in new sectors of the economy have been exciting and promising- but with the advent of the referendum and Trump's victory and the aftermath of the Arab spring, events have over taken us.

So to return to the original question, what I'm tentatively suggesting is that this un-inteligence of the class is what is producing the grinding, dispiriting schisms in the left. In the absence of a class that is achieving self consciousness, and that retains almost no sustaining memory of its emergence in previous struggles, the left is resorting too two broad strategies to cope with the rapidly accelerating pace of existential threats.

On the one hand there is resort to achieving a kind of nihilistic moral purity, epitomised by attitudes to the Syrian dissaster. The heart of this lies in the sense of the likelyhood of defeat- not of an abandonment of the class as the agent of change, but a very real recognition that they are not consciously leading the struggle and thus logically struggles will be defeated. Battles are defensive. Cross class alliances and appeals to institutions are more paletable with this rational because the immediate battle to preserve conditions, to save specific identifiable lives, is not only sacrosanct but is all that is imaginable.

On the other hand there is an attempt to inoculate the left against bleeding in of reactionary ideas from outside. It's a focus that looks to defend political gains in limited sectors of the working class and is more focused on a long game of achieving something out of the present crisis of the system, hoping for a spontaneous re-emergence of class struggle from within that crisis precisely because the left doesn't have the kind of penetration or numbers to foster it. This kind of thinking tends to over emphasise any signs of life from the class and, caught in an unpopular holding pattern, is constantly trying to justify itself.

To be frank, both these perspectives are producing a distorted picture of the underlying reality.

I don't have some magic third alternative perspective to offer that suggests ways to overcome the weakness of both these probably quite poorly charactrised mentalitys, as I said what is at their root is is a historic decline in class consciousness and intelligence of its present condition. I know much better equipped minds than mine from all sides of The debate are working tirelessly on the nature of the period. Thinking this through though I do have a couple of concrete suggestions:

The old left has to accept the changed circumstances. They can't control things, their significance is declining. Let go, evolve and win the arguments if you can. Don't form your own alternative coalitions that's loving dumb.

People working in the new left need to learn to tell the diffrence between excited, emergent new people with liberal ideas and toxic liberal reactionaries, and that goes for both sides of the debate. The ultrareds need to stop hissing at 'liberals' and get their head around who their audience is and the kind of gap we need to close with them.

The moralists need to stop it. Seriously just give it a rest, unless you are a Syrian or a migrant personally actually yourself, in which case fair play we all need to hear you and you have a right to just be so loving mad with everyone.

And this is no solution to anything, but everyone needs to shutup with the sense of embattlment and abusiveness of the other side. You must grasp how loving hypocritical that is. If you don't, take take a break from fb.

Tesseraction posted:

Nifty. Where's this from?

Tesseraction posted:

Well, it's a good piece. Out of interest is the author an Entrenched Lex or a Moral Remainer?

Fangz posted:

I will point out that people who propose never to put their friends first at all over comparable strangers tend to have few friends. That too is a consequence.

Guavanaut posted:

Hi mean they all make their money through capital returns on the houses and shops they own.

(I have no idea if that's the case, but it would be amusing if so.)

Pochoclo posted:

In 5 years each and every single politician in the UK will be running on a "rejoin the EU" platform anyway, just wait and see.

Pissflaps posted:

https://twitter.com/NCPoliticsUK/status/833052888851156993

Ugh...I can't.

ThomasPaine posted:

I don't think there's much crossover between 'charismatic people' and 'economists' tbqh

TinTower posted:

Pochoclo posted:

Most of Europe is white as gently caress though so it kind of begs the question, are the racist brexiteers going to be happy once they realise that most of the immigrants they didn't want actually come from outside the EU?

Oberleutnant posted:

This isn't really relative to any discussion going on just now, but one of Malatesta's letters keeps doing laps in the back of my mind, and I wanted to share it with the thread because it's interesting:

OwlFancier posted:

Mm, there was that great BNP pamplet that someone looked up and it turns out they used a picture of a Polish spitfire for the cover.

HJB posted:

People don't hate immigrants (at least, they didn't and they wouldn't), they hate the negative impact of the sheer number of immigrants on their lives. People want immigration reduced and controlled for the betterment of their own lives, not to spite immigrants. Yes, there are people who are violent and aggressive towards them, but that sort of person will always exist, there will always be racial hatred regardless.

Paul.Power posted:

A policeman?

Guavanaut posted:

A clay golem policeman might be the only thing that could ever seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing.

Paxman posted:

She sees the idea that Labour were actually poo poo when they were last in government nationally as a weapon she can use to convince people they would also be poo poo if they won the mayoral elections in May. This is one of the reasons it's important to challenge the idea that the last Labour government was bad. As well as being untrue, it helps the Tories.

Comrade Cheggorsky posted:

can you name a more iconic duo?

Pissflaps posted:

'Who?' -Jeremy Corbyn

Comrade Cheggorsky posted:

John Major good?

Paxman posted:

Really if I drink wine not beer and have a la di da accent and listen to the Archers and read the Grauniad and go to work in a suit with a white shirt and tie and sit at a desk and earn what sounds like a lot of money to most people and call myself working class I'm either going to get laughed at or a smack in the mouth

Namtab posted:

What's false consciousness, I feel like this might be false consciousness

hakimashou posted:

A danger of having a far left mad dog like Corbyn is that you risk putting people onto a dilemma between the far left and the far right. If people lean just a little bit to the right, then the far right gets them.

Vs a contest between the center and the far right, where the center is closer to right leaning people than the extreme.

Breath Ray posted:

How familiar are you with maslow's hierarchy of needs

hakimashou posted:

I'm sure the next general election will go swimmingly if Labour just come out and say "vote for us and we will confiscate your property. Don't like it? Vote for the tories, you scumbag. You piece of poo poo."