thirdform

pass the sick bucket
a lot of thinking posits on this idea that we vote and then we can move people to the left or to say radical things. Incidentally k-punk and @shiels biggest error - a detestable habit to consider separately culture from the feeding of the stomach - I.E: culture does not ever need to express the truth about itself so long as it rationalises post-hoc, @luka is write that in a rave context that a lot of it relies on running with bogus mythology. The left is no exception, as an authentocrat British culture - hence why Joe Muggs is able to claim post-punk is uniquely English, something Mark also bought into. But the actual economic conditions in their totality are not considered. The parties are given some kind of theological will to speak truth to power, rather than mundane cogs in the state machine. This is an interesting grounds for analysis but last time I tried to make it temper tantrum ensued - I know it's not a game, I'm precisely asking you to throw away the monopoly set. Then what? Either you become a believer in politics, in which case you just invert the game, don't subvert it, or you penetrate deeper. And to become a believer in politics just secularises traditional religiosity. Instead of salvation being in the celestial spheres salvation is sought in the profane. In which case, you cannot claim to oppose tradition.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Seems so unthinkable and unnatural to me, like denouncing your own mother. Politics is such a tribal thing to me I can't conceive of switching sides. I've got no interest in any arguments or anything. To me, it's just the team you play for and that's that.
This strikes me as a depressingly stupid attitude. It's the attitude of Sartre sticking up for Stalin and Mao, because they were on "Team Left" and therefore the good guys.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
you can renounce people in your own "side" without having to change your own position.

The big example of this for me is how many people in the British left are openly TERFs, I hate them all
Well yeah, you *can* denounce the monsters, but not everyone *does*, is my point. It's related to the fallacy of my-enemy's-enemy, so that - to take your example - you can get TERFs siding with Evangelical Christians.

Not that this a problem exclusive to the left, obviously. America armed the mujahideen, and look how that turned out.
 

luka

Well-known member
This strikes me as a depressingly stupid attitude. It's the attitude of Sartre sticking up for Stalin and Mao, because they were on "Team Left" and therefore the good guys.
you've read that wrong. BoxedJoy is right. He's usually right so just listen to him and stay out of it!
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
you've read that wrong. BoxedJoy is right. He's usually right so just listen to him and stay out of it!
It's the political equivalent of screaming that the ref is a blind wanker just because he's made a ruling that goes against your team, even though it's obviously a fair and correct decision. I've got no interest in that at all.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Trump supporters demanding that to "save democracy" (make Trump win), the vote count should be stopped in the states where he was ahead but carry on in the states where he was losing.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
I think people generally position themselves on the left or on the right like it's a simple binary, and not a spectrum where positions shift depending on the issue. "Switching sides" is an interesting choice of language here - I think of my personal politics as being more of a perspective than anything else and that can (and should!) change with experience etc.

I think @Mr. Tea is right that a lot of people fall into the fallacy of my-enemy's-enemy but I also think that if you look at how the left, on a global ideological scale as much as any practical or concrete organisation, is tearing itself apart internally in many different ways in the past few years - you can see that it's not as clearcut as that.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
actually terfism is just but one logical consequence of leftism. Not the only one, granted, before people at me, but one that can logically be derived. Which is one reason why I'm not a leftist because I find terf ideology despicable in the extreme.
 

luka

Well-known member
You have to steer conversation away from people's personal hobby horses. Otherwise we all end up doing our 'bit' and we don't find any new thing to say.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
the left is tearing itself apart because it was victorious. The left served as the ideological justification for the worldwide transformation of peasants into workers. That's why its surplus to requirements now.


The Left has not failed. And that is one of the greatest disasters ever to befall the working class.
Most people think that the Left is the movement of the working class for socialism (albeit riven by opportunism and muddle-headed interpretations on the part of many in its ranks).
Nothing could be further from the truth.
We in Subversion (and the wider movement of which we are a part) believe that left-wing politics are simply an updated version of the bourgeois democratic politics of the French revolution, supplemented by a state capitalist economic programme.
Consider:
In the French revolution, the up and coming capitalist class were confronted not only by the old order, but also by a large and growing urban plebeian population (the working class in formation, artisans, petty traders and the like), who had their own genuine aspirations for freedom from oppression, however incoherent.
Bourgeois democracy was the device that enabled the capitalist class to disguise their own aspirations for power as the liberation of everyone outside the feudal power structure.
The notion of the People (as though different classes, exploiters and exploited, could be reduced to a single entity) was thus born.
The notion of Equality and the notion of Rights possessed by all presented a fictitious view of society as a mass of individuals involved who all stood in the same relations to the law – completely ignoring the difference between the property owners and those whose labour they exploit.
And, above all, the notion of the Nation – that the oppressed class should identify with those of their oppressors who live in the same geographical area or speak the same language, and see as alien those of our class who are on the other side of "national borders".
By means of this imaginary view of society, capitalism was able to dominate the consciousness of the newly forming working class. Bourgeois democracy is the biggest con in history.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I'm still really cautious about this narrative. I was only born in 1988 so I was obviously not around for it, but my own experience of raving and access to that world is that there's still an element of privilege that you need to be part of that world. You need a lack of responsibility or a fearlessness of consequence to really get into it, something which a lot of people simply don't have.
I remember naively thinking that the changes in social relations that you saw in raving would manifest in some kind of wider politic change. I was young but fucking hell, I can't believe I believe that. It seems so dumb.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Then again, reading a biography of Attlee at the moment, he sincerely believed after WW1 in the dawn of socialism, the possibility of one world govt. I guess we can believe all kinds of things when they're around us, in the water.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
never said terfism is the only path leftists can travel. Just said its not an aberration. But hobby horse lmfao.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
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You might like this book Version. It's about the dilemma you describe. It's from the moment when 70s sociologists started smoking week and doing acid. It catches a different moment.
 

boxedjoy

Well-known member
the thing that always struck me was people being all "we were all under one roof raving" and talking about people of all races and backgrounds and sexualities etc coming together. Apart from the fact that I don't believe that was really that true, it's kinda embarassing that for a lot of people this was the extent of their encounters with people unlike themselves, and that they found it exciting. Like... we're out here, we always have been, we always will be, you don't need pills and a breakbeat to to listen to us.
 
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