As I mentioned in my last blog, I have recently started working as a teaching assistant. This has simultaneously been one of the most rewarding and most frustrating decisions of my life to date. Obviously, I could use this opportunity to go off on one about how fucking awesome it is to teach a kid how to use commas properly (surprisingly awesome) or to rail against the iniquities of an education system that insists that at age 11, all children - whether they can read and write or not - should be able to identitify a metaphor as opposed to a similie (rail rail) but I'm not going to (or at least, not very much.) This blog is actually about a thought experiment. It is aimed at those who believe that the human race are inherently slavish followers of their given authorities and that because of this a society which is organised around the interests of the people who live in it rather than a disproportionately influential - and therefore priveliged - group of financial and political power-mongers.
Think back to when you were at secondary school.* Do you remember how many hours of every day were spent arguing with your teachers about the rights and wrongs of every un-written homework assignment, every incident of name-calling, every time you tried to throw a chair at another student and accidentally broke a window? Do you remember how many times the scary kid (his name was Bradley. It's always fucking Bradley) at the back of the class got up and marched out because he quite fairly believed that it really wasn't necessary for him to know the date of the invention of the Spinning Jenny?* Do you remember how loudly he slammed the door? Or, for the more studious amongst us - do you remember how many times you forged a sicknote excusing you from P.E? Do you remember when you told your physics teacher that you'd spent two an a half hours finding your way back to the science block from your violin lesson? Do you remember bribing the kid in the NUS office at sixth form college to lie about your age on your student ID? Do you remember traipsing an hour and a half across town in the rain because you had £8.25 and you needed £7.50 of it to get an ISIC card with said fake d.o.b proudly emblazoned across it?
Course you do.
I'm not trying to say that the model society would look anything like a modern secondary school (I did write the bit about the iniquities of the education system, right?) But - and here's the thought experiment - imagine if all that energy - that sheer bloody-minded teenage tenacity - was directed at the people who were *really* trying to screw you over. Imagine if, when the HR guy at your work comes round to inform you that, because you're only in the first six months of your employment, you're not going to get paid for the day you had off sick - oh, and also that the free-lance work that you did for us is now part of your job descriptiona and you won't be getting the six hundred quid that you thought you were. Imagine if you could summon that level of pure ballsy not giving a shit-ness next time you're working in a café where they take all of the credit card tips and half of the cash ones and stick it in the till at the end of the day. Imagine if you could bust it out every time you saw The Times Weekend Magazine.
Imagine if you could get that angry at the people who wrote this year's budget. And I think I know why it doesn't happen. It doesn't happen because the people who you see, face to face, aren't responsible for it, are they? Of course not. But imagine if instead of letting that anger dissipate, you simply asked - as politely as you knew how - to see the person who was responsible. Or at least the person who's next in line. And when you worked your way back through the H.R managers and the C.E.O.s and the junior ministers and the cabinet secretaries and finally got to George Osborne and he said 'there's no one there. There is no one behind me, yet I am not responsible: the system is to blame' you were allowed to say 'Fine. You have said that you are not responsible. I will be responsible for this. Me and the thousands of other poor fuckers who can't pay their heating bills any more. But that means you need to fuck off. And also, you're in detention until you die.'
*This may not work if you went to a fee-paying school.
*1764.
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Friday, 15 October 2010
University fees and other major questions that have occured to me in the past six months.
K, I haven't been on line for about six months. I'll talk about that at some point, but not right now. Right now, I felt it was important to talk about some of the things that I've learnt about the world and the way that it's organised since I started working as a teaching assistant.
Oh, wait. Ok, I am definitely going to do this, but not right now. I will do this tomorrow instead.
Sorry to get you all excited.
Oh, wait. Ok, I am definitely going to do this, but not right now. I will do this tomorrow instead.
Sorry to get you all excited.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
ships in the night....
So, this is my first experience of an international crisis as a half-committed politico. I got a text message mid-morning last Sunday, urgently calling Sheffield activists to gather at the town-hall at noon to protest against the Israeli boarding - by force - of five aid ships attempting to deliver aid to Gaza. I did have reservations about this - the protests that I've been to in the past (particularly ones pertaining to the Middle East)have proved depressingly simplistic and one-sided, and besides, I've never felt terribly comfortable shouting slogans and waving flags unless I feel that I can defend my position with an intelligent, informed and sceptical interlocuter for at least fifteen minutes afterwards. I went, in the end - even (more or less) observing the fifteen minute silence proposed - perhaps rather ill-advisedly - by the organisers*. Whether this gesture did any good to the world is something that I'd like to explore in the course of this blog.
My first reservation - after the initial shock of the evident brutality used by Israeli forces - was the creeping sense that the outrage being expressed about the course of events was somewhat misplaced. I don't pretend to know a huge amount about the situation in Gaza, but even I'm aware that had an incident such as the violence on the Mavi Marmara taken place on land and been directed at Palestinians, it would have been, if not exactly routine, then certainly not an international news story: in all honestly, probably not much more than a ripple on the back-pages of the Guardian. Even the main speaker at our impromptu protest tacitly acknowledged that when she asked us to get in touch with our local MPs: 'we need to stress that there are British civilians on those boats... of course, *we* care equally about all the suffering, but parliament will do nothing unless it's in the British interest.'** I was quite impressed that she could acknowledge the protectionist impulse, even if by attributing it only to Westminster she rather begged the question of the motivations of most of the people in the crowd. Ultimately, it's an impossible conclusion to avoid: the cause of the furore was not violence, but rather the people against whom the violence was directed.
I'm not convinced that this is a terrible thing, in itself. The organisers of the flotilla had said explicitly that the mission had been arranged to call attention to the blockade, and, at the risk of sounding cynical, it worked. My principal concern is that the focus on the international questions raised leaves issues about the nationalistic tenor of the discussions surrounding Palestine and Israel unanswered. The violence is situated in a debate about the right to national self-determination, which, as far as I can see, doesn't address the central problems that Palestinians - and Israelis - have to deal with on an everyday basis: ie, how to get through a day - a week - a whole life - without going cold or hungry or being shot at. Although a loosening of Israel's stranglehold on the people of Gaza would undoubtedly improve their lives, the discussions posit these problems as something that can be resolved through the framework of national and international politics, rather than national politics being their cause. This is disingenuous: it is hard to imagine that the same bitter disputes would be taking place if we lived in a world where the notions of 'nationality' and 'the nation state' didn't have as much purchase on our psyche as they do at the moment.
That argument, however - convincing though I find it - doesn't really give us much to *do* with the situation as it now stands. It's more of an issue that it's well to be aware of than an incitement to - erm - do nothing. It seems to me that if enough international pressure is applied, then there might be an opportunity to achieve something positive - the lifting or at least the lightening of the blockade - out of a particularly brutish set of circumstances. If this is in part facilated by a wave of popular protests, then it has a double advantage: firstly, it might - and it's a puny and tremulous 'might', because it's *never* very sensible to be optimistic about anything in politics - make the lives of some people who have been shat on from a great height a bit easier. It also might - with the same caveats - draw attention to the fact that popular protest can and will have an effect. And I am coming to the conclusion that anything that lessens the sense of popular impotence in the face of injustice is a good thing. A huge part of that, obviously, is because such an awareness would give injustice in general a slightly less easy ride. But I think I mean something more than that. I have spent most of my life feeling in one way or another weak and impotent. My own experience has taught me that in such circumstances, it's in many ways easier to ignore suffering than it is to confront your own powerlessness to change it. This leads to apathy of a particularly insidious kind: the kind of apathy that is generated by a wilful shutting down of your own powers of empathy, a semi-conscious decision to become even less conscious. Ulitmately, powerlessness and impotence make you feel - make you act - less like a human being. So I suppose, overall, that I'm glad that I did make it to that protest - although next time, I'd prefer it if we could have fifteen minutes of noise rather than fifteen minutes of silence.
*A word to the wise, protesters: A hush descending on a crowd of people can be very effective, but not when there's only about a hundred of you and you weren't being terribly noisy in the first place, in which case, the effect is more one of embarrassed silence than overwhelming moral authority.
**I'm paraphrasing here, so - whoever you are, activist lady - I'm sorry if I've misquoted. In my defence: I thought taking notes at a protest would get me some funny looks, or possibly an accusation of spooking.
My first reservation - after the initial shock of the evident brutality used by Israeli forces - was the creeping sense that the outrage being expressed about the course of events was somewhat misplaced. I don't pretend to know a huge amount about the situation in Gaza, but even I'm aware that had an incident such as the violence on the Mavi Marmara taken place on land and been directed at Palestinians, it would have been, if not exactly routine, then certainly not an international news story: in all honestly, probably not much more than a ripple on the back-pages of the Guardian. Even the main speaker at our impromptu protest tacitly acknowledged that when she asked us to get in touch with our local MPs: 'we need to stress that there are British civilians on those boats... of course, *we* care equally about all the suffering, but parliament will do nothing unless it's in the British interest.'** I was quite impressed that she could acknowledge the protectionist impulse, even if by attributing it only to Westminster she rather begged the question of the motivations of most of the people in the crowd. Ultimately, it's an impossible conclusion to avoid: the cause of the furore was not violence, but rather the people against whom the violence was directed.
I'm not convinced that this is a terrible thing, in itself. The organisers of the flotilla had said explicitly that the mission had been arranged to call attention to the blockade, and, at the risk of sounding cynical, it worked. My principal concern is that the focus on the international questions raised leaves issues about the nationalistic tenor of the discussions surrounding Palestine and Israel unanswered. The violence is situated in a debate about the right to national self-determination, which, as far as I can see, doesn't address the central problems that Palestinians - and Israelis - have to deal with on an everyday basis: ie, how to get through a day - a week - a whole life - without going cold or hungry or being shot at. Although a loosening of Israel's stranglehold on the people of Gaza would undoubtedly improve their lives, the discussions posit these problems as something that can be resolved through the framework of national and international politics, rather than national politics being their cause. This is disingenuous: it is hard to imagine that the same bitter disputes would be taking place if we lived in a world where the notions of 'nationality' and 'the nation state' didn't have as much purchase on our psyche as they do at the moment.
That argument, however - convincing though I find it - doesn't really give us much to *do* with the situation as it now stands. It's more of an issue that it's well to be aware of than an incitement to - erm - do nothing. It seems to me that if enough international pressure is applied, then there might be an opportunity to achieve something positive - the lifting or at least the lightening of the blockade - out of a particularly brutish set of circumstances. If this is in part facilated by a wave of popular protests, then it has a double advantage: firstly, it might - and it's a puny and tremulous 'might', because it's *never* very sensible to be optimistic about anything in politics - make the lives of some people who have been shat on from a great height a bit easier. It also might - with the same caveats - draw attention to the fact that popular protest can and will have an effect. And I am coming to the conclusion that anything that lessens the sense of popular impotence in the face of injustice is a good thing. A huge part of that, obviously, is because such an awareness would give injustice in general a slightly less easy ride. But I think I mean something more than that. I have spent most of my life feeling in one way or another weak and impotent. My own experience has taught me that in such circumstances, it's in many ways easier to ignore suffering than it is to confront your own powerlessness to change it. This leads to apathy of a particularly insidious kind: the kind of apathy that is generated by a wilful shutting down of your own powers of empathy, a semi-conscious decision to become even less conscious. Ulitmately, powerlessness and impotence make you feel - make you act - less like a human being. So I suppose, overall, that I'm glad that I did make it to that protest - although next time, I'd prefer it if we could have fifteen minutes of noise rather than fifteen minutes of silence.
*A word to the wise, protesters: A hush descending on a crowd of people can be very effective, but not when there's only about a hundred of you and you weren't being terribly noisy in the first place, in which case, the effect is more one of embarrassed silence than overwhelming moral authority.
**I'm paraphrasing here, so - whoever you are, activist lady - I'm sorry if I've misquoted. In my defence: I thought taking notes at a protest would get me some funny looks, or possibly an accusation of spooking.
Friday, 14 May 2010
New Politics
So, having said in an earlier post that I don't find parliamentary politics or the goings-on at Westminster compelling per se, I have found the horse-trading and king-making of the last few weeks pretty interesting, particularly this notion of the 'new politics' that Cameron and Clegg are bandying around. It has to be acknowleged, I think, that the past few weeks has generated an exceptional level of interest amongst people who don't normally care that much about politics. As an example of this - a few weeks ago, I went for a Friday night drink in a Sheffield pub, and was drawn by a total stranger - a middle-aged father of two - into a conversation about the election, which eventually extended to include everybody on our side of the bar - 15 or 20 people, almost all of them total strangers to each other. Even the nine year old had an opinion about it. I've never experienced anything quite like that before. And when Clegg says, of the coalition government, that it is:
"new politics, where the national interest is more important than the party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength".
I think that is the mood that he is invoking - a tangible if temporary shift in the way people engage in the decisions they make about their own lives. That said, this change is patently not a product of the electioneering of the main political parties: it is the simple but largely unspoken fact that for once we were faced with an election in which the outcome was uncertain. When was the last time that happened? '92, probably - when I was seven years old. In every election that I can recall with anything approaching an adult consciousness, the outcome has always been assured - usually whole electoral terms before. How can it be that in a so-called democracy, the belief that the future is not yet determined is something that we experience for a few weeks once in a generation? In Cameron's inaugeral speech (can I call it that?) he claimed:
People last Thursday in the ballot box told us politicians that they didn't think any party deserved an outright majority. so the only way you can create stability is by creating a government, a coalition government, which lasts.
Quite apart from the fact that I don't recall their being an option for 'no outright majority' on the ballot paper (there certainly wasn't on the one I defaced), Cameron has jumped the gun here - fetishised without any justification this notion of stability - and all the stagnation that this entails. 'Uncertainty' is a peculiarly British bete noir - mandarin-speak for job-losses, deprivation, social unrest - a code word for a plan that has gone wrong. That seems to me to be a terrible dereliction of the political function. Politics and politicians should never be certain. Cameron has attempted to capitalise on both by hybridising a hope for some indeterminate but profound change with an ideological and political commitment to the status quo (which is, after all, what 'Conservative' actually means'.) As a starry eyed idealist who's had the benefit of a congenial conversation in the pub, I reject this commitment to stability with every screed of energy available to me. We should acknowlege not just the danger and the possibilities of uncertainty, not only that mutability is an undeniable fact of the universe, but that as human beings - animals able to make conscious decisions - uncertainty and instability are essential parts of our make-up. It is this fact that make us properly people.
"new politics, where the national interest is more important than the party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength".
I think that is the mood that he is invoking - a tangible if temporary shift in the way people engage in the decisions they make about their own lives. That said, this change is patently not a product of the electioneering of the main political parties: it is the simple but largely unspoken fact that for once we were faced with an election in which the outcome was uncertain. When was the last time that happened? '92, probably - when I was seven years old. In every election that I can recall with anything approaching an adult consciousness, the outcome has always been assured - usually whole electoral terms before. How can it be that in a so-called democracy, the belief that the future is not yet determined is something that we experience for a few weeks once in a generation? In Cameron's inaugeral speech (can I call it that?) he claimed:
People last Thursday in the ballot box told us politicians that they didn't think any party deserved an outright majority. so the only way you can create stability is by creating a government, a coalition government, which lasts.
Quite apart from the fact that I don't recall their being an option for 'no outright majority' on the ballot paper (there certainly wasn't on the one I defaced), Cameron has jumped the gun here - fetishised without any justification this notion of stability - and all the stagnation that this entails. 'Uncertainty' is a peculiarly British bete noir - mandarin-speak for job-losses, deprivation, social unrest - a code word for a plan that has gone wrong. That seems to me to be a terrible dereliction of the political function. Politics and politicians should never be certain. Cameron has attempted to capitalise on both by hybridising a hope for some indeterminate but profound change with an ideological and political commitment to the status quo (which is, after all, what 'Conservative' actually means'.) As a starry eyed idealist who's had the benefit of a congenial conversation in the pub, I reject this commitment to stability with every screed of energy available to me. We should acknowlege not just the danger and the possibilities of uncertainty, not only that mutability is an undeniable fact of the universe, but that as human beings - animals able to make conscious decisions - uncertainty and instability are essential parts of our make-up. It is this fact that make us properly people.
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Do Anarchists Dream of Electoral Sheep?
So, given that this blog is meant to be about all politics and that, it seems appropriate to write - erm - something - about, you know, voting. This is not something on which my thoughts have settled, as of yet. On the one hand, I have no truck with the notion that if a citizen forfeits their right to vote, they also forfeit their right to comment on their own political situation. I've got every right to comment on any political situation I damn well like, whether that be the regularity of the bin collection in Meersbrook, Sheffield, or the fraught relationship between South Africa and Zimbabwe with regards to immigration control and, erm, well, mainly the fact that the Zimbabwean people don't have any food to eat right now, yeah? Provided, of course, that I've bothered to inform myself to any degree about it. Which, actually, I haven't, and this is why I'm refraining from commenting about either bin collection in Meersbrook (it seems to happen) or the situation in Harare (pretty fucking terrible, I'd have thought.) But I *have* thought a bit about the ethics of voting vs abstention, and you, dear readers, are going to get the benefit of it.
As far as I understand it, if you don't have much truck with the political elite as represented by Westminster - by which I mean that if you don't find the goings on in the corridors of power entertaining in the same way that you find a soap opera entertaining - then the reasons for votiing are as follows:
1) You think that a vote for the party that you want to win/find least objectionable will make an appreciable difference to your own life and to the lives of people you care about.
2) You think that voting for a specific party upholds or extends a part of your own identity.
3) You have a genuine respect for one of the candidates put forward to represent your own area.
4) You think that if you use your vote to support a minority party, this will somehow contribute to a critical mass of opinion-formation that may in time change the whole tenor of the political establishment.
5) You don't think 4) at all, but you're going to use your vote to protest against the fact that you don't see any of the current viable options as, well, viable.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the most significant ones for my purposes. As it happens, I'm not of the opinion that voting for a minority party - whether this party finds some representation in parliament or no - will significantly change the character of mainstream politics in this country. I simply don't believe that this is the case. Even if by some miraculous, miraculous occurence the Green party romped home (home? No.) to power by a comfortable margin, I don't believe that they could effect a genuine change in the way that people in this country organise themselves. It wouldn't change the way that we think, because, you know, we're the ones that need to do that. And besides, they won't win. They probably won't win a single seat. The BNP is obviously a far more frightening proposition, and in fact offer the most compelling reason that I can think of for voting so far. If I felt that they were genuinely within reach of becoming a serious force to be reckoned with in British politics, I would turn out and vote Labour without a shadow of a doubt.
I suppose there is an argument to say that even if far right parties like the BNP aren't currently a serious cause for concern, refusing to vote allows them an opportunity to gain ground that should be denied to them. That's a relatively compelling argument, as is the idea that you should vote in the forthcoming election because, say, a Labour victory would probably mean a slightly more clement set of cutbacks in the public sector and therefore maybe a few more nursery schools and dialysis machines staying open. I'll ignore for now the fact that I live in an extremely safe Labour seat so essentially whatever I choose to do will be meaningless because I think that's a copout of an argument. So yeah, two relatively convincing arguments there. Essentially, then, the question of whether to vote or not hinges - like the last post - on a question of compromise. Do I believe that it's better to knuckle down and vote for a party that I find comtemptible - for its deceptions in the war in Iraq, for its continuing commitment to the introduction of prviate finance into the public sector (did you know that in some Sheffield primary schools kids are now being sent home adverts for private companies selling school equiptment along with their dinner order forms?) for the ugliness of its private smear campaigns, for the Hutton enquiry, for the cash for questions, for their sheer, petty, incompetent, humiliating lack of imagination - which as far as I can understand it rests either on a total inability to appreciate what it's like to be alive and a human being, or else a wilful ignorance of this state of affairs - in order to secure a slightly less shaky future for certain public services that I genuinely believe are useful and worthwhile.
I dunno, basically. Maybe I'm just a bit too proud to put my name to that shit. Maybe I feel that the whole sordid business debases what I think politics should be about - trying to work out what's right and fair and to balance that with what's possible - because I've never believed that it's right to demand the impossible. Seems like a waste of energy. But I do believe that it's important to think about what you're signing up to before you put your name to something, and I believe that voting is probably amongst the most important forms of signature that you'll ever make (birth certificates and rent-books notwithstanding) and if you don't think that there's an option there which represents you enough - which isn't too much of a compromise - then there's no shame in withholding it. So to be brutally honest, it looks like the option that I've plumped for is on the surface of it the most superficial one at all. I don't want to vote because to do so would damage my sense of who I am, of my integrity as a person.
Yeah, sure. I know, I know, big drama, right? Get over yourself and all that. But the thing is that my sense of identity gets bashed about on a bi-hourly basis anyway. Most people's do, I think. I'm in no hurry to make it worse, and certainly not for the sake of a myth of intelligent participation invented principally to legitimate the power that has been held in the same hands for generations and generations. Fuck 'em. They can do without me, to be honest. Not that they'll care much anyway, and not that my staying at home on May 5th - in my strong Labour seat - will make a ha'porth of difference anyway.
Next week: voting, part 2. So, I'm not voting in this election. But is it wrong to vote per se?
As far as I understand it, if you don't have much truck with the political elite as represented by Westminster - by which I mean that if you don't find the goings on in the corridors of power entertaining in the same way that you find a soap opera entertaining - then the reasons for votiing are as follows:
1) You think that a vote for the party that you want to win/find least objectionable will make an appreciable difference to your own life and to the lives of people you care about.
2) You think that voting for a specific party upholds or extends a part of your own identity.
3) You have a genuine respect for one of the candidates put forward to represent your own area.
4) You think that if you use your vote to support a minority party, this will somehow contribute to a critical mass of opinion-formation that may in time change the whole tenor of the political establishment.
5) You don't think 4) at all, but you're going to use your vote to protest against the fact that you don't see any of the current viable options as, well, viable.
I'm sure there are others, but those are the most significant ones for my purposes. As it happens, I'm not of the opinion that voting for a minority party - whether this party finds some representation in parliament or no - will significantly change the character of mainstream politics in this country. I simply don't believe that this is the case. Even if by some miraculous, miraculous occurence the Green party romped home (home? No.) to power by a comfortable margin, I don't believe that they could effect a genuine change in the way that people in this country organise themselves. It wouldn't change the way that we think, because, you know, we're the ones that need to do that. And besides, they won't win. They probably won't win a single seat. The BNP is obviously a far more frightening proposition, and in fact offer the most compelling reason that I can think of for voting so far. If I felt that they were genuinely within reach of becoming a serious force to be reckoned with in British politics, I would turn out and vote Labour without a shadow of a doubt.
I suppose there is an argument to say that even if far right parties like the BNP aren't currently a serious cause for concern, refusing to vote allows them an opportunity to gain ground that should be denied to them. That's a relatively compelling argument, as is the idea that you should vote in the forthcoming election because, say, a Labour victory would probably mean a slightly more clement set of cutbacks in the public sector and therefore maybe a few more nursery schools and dialysis machines staying open. I'll ignore for now the fact that I live in an extremely safe Labour seat so essentially whatever I choose to do will be meaningless because I think that's a copout of an argument. So yeah, two relatively convincing arguments there. Essentially, then, the question of whether to vote or not hinges - like the last post - on a question of compromise. Do I believe that it's better to knuckle down and vote for a party that I find comtemptible - for its deceptions in the war in Iraq, for its continuing commitment to the introduction of prviate finance into the public sector (did you know that in some Sheffield primary schools kids are now being sent home adverts for private companies selling school equiptment along with their dinner order forms?) for the ugliness of its private smear campaigns, for the Hutton enquiry, for the cash for questions, for their sheer, petty, incompetent, humiliating lack of imagination - which as far as I can understand it rests either on a total inability to appreciate what it's like to be alive and a human being, or else a wilful ignorance of this state of affairs - in order to secure a slightly less shaky future for certain public services that I genuinely believe are useful and worthwhile.
I dunno, basically. Maybe I'm just a bit too proud to put my name to that shit. Maybe I feel that the whole sordid business debases what I think politics should be about - trying to work out what's right and fair and to balance that with what's possible - because I've never believed that it's right to demand the impossible. Seems like a waste of energy. But I do believe that it's important to think about what you're signing up to before you put your name to something, and I believe that voting is probably amongst the most important forms of signature that you'll ever make (birth certificates and rent-books notwithstanding) and if you don't think that there's an option there which represents you enough - which isn't too much of a compromise - then there's no shame in withholding it. So to be brutally honest, it looks like the option that I've plumped for is on the surface of it the most superficial one at all. I don't want to vote because to do so would damage my sense of who I am, of my integrity as a person.
Yeah, sure. I know, I know, big drama, right? Get over yourself and all that. But the thing is that my sense of identity gets bashed about on a bi-hourly basis anyway. Most people's do, I think. I'm in no hurry to make it worse, and certainly not for the sake of a myth of intelligent participation invented principally to legitimate the power that has been held in the same hands for generations and generations. Fuck 'em. They can do without me, to be honest. Not that they'll care much anyway, and not that my staying at home on May 5th - in my strong Labour seat - will make a ha'porth of difference anyway.
Next week: voting, part 2. So, I'm not voting in this election. But is it wrong to vote per se?
Saturday, 27 March 2010
Some of the things I've been reading recently:
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/asfuck.php
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/infighting.php
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/07/evangelical-atheism.html
http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/atoz/infighting.php
http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2008/07/evangelical-atheism.html
Feeling the Fear
OK, you know how I mentioned that I used to hang out with Tories when I was university? I've just done something a little rash, and invited two of them to come and stay with me in Sheffield for a few days next month. On Tuesday I got a message from the more - erm, committed - of them on facebook. I reproduce in full:
Alright, a quick survey of friends attached to your recent photo albums reveals that most if not all have 'Nobody Likes A Tory' badge attached to their respective Fbook pages, as though this were something every thoughtful, halfway decent human being ought to brandish before breakfast. I beg (emphatically) to differ, and am much looking foward to an encounter with this gaggle of collectivists of yours come the early part of next month.
Can't wait to see you again, I hasten to add, and advise that I am practicing a special pie in honour of the occasion.
PS: no need to worry about protection rackets. Frankly, not sure Armstrong's whiff of gentrified Buttskillism is going to be much of a softener. More like blood in the shark's tank. But what the hey: it will, at the very least, be an enlivening culture clash.
Love
So, I'm mainly writing about this because the point of this blog is exploration. And for this to have any meaning, this has to be real exploration, not just the kind where you spend half an hour every day on the internet reading the Daily Mash and a bunch of blogs about how it's probably ok to watch pornography because, actually, like, everything's sexist really, yeah?* Which means proper conflict, which means putting people whose opinions I respect in the same room for a little while and seeing who comes off with fewer chunks missing. I just wish that it was possible for this to happen without feeling as if I genuinely might be risking a few relationships that I value hugely and possibly alienating people who I not only respect but love. And the love that I feel for people that I don't agree with - Anarchists, Trots, Neo-Liberals, Catholics** - has always been a reason not to involve myself in politics. And I suppose that this post is actually asking: is it right to love somebody whose political commitments you feel range from misguided to actively insidious?*** Because even if you believe that this commitment stems from their own good faith, and even if you know for certain that such people are vastly more inteligent - and vastly better read - than you are on almost any topic you care to mention, isn't it the case that your relationship with them is predicated on the unspoken agreement that for much of the time you are covering your metaphorical eyes with your metaphorical hands and singing 'LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA' at the top of your metaphorical voice?
But then you have to ask yourself at what point you think that this stops. Isn't any political organisation essentially a group of people who have decided together what is an acceptable level of LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA? It strikes me that the Left in particular would benefit from a bit more of this, and a bit less in the way of in-fighting and bitchery. But that's always been a problem for idealists - by definition, they don't like compromise. Which is one of the very things that makes them attractive. But essentially, the thing that makes me *want* to commit to some form of leftist politics - the point at which it diverges from policymaking and electioneering - is that in almost all its forms it is based on trying to make the world an easier place to love other people in. You can call yourself a Marxist, and claim that you seek a world in which the worker owns the means of production, or you can call yourself an Anarchist and say that you want to live in a world free from the oppressive power of a faceless governmental beaurocracy - and also that you want to Smash Shit Up - but essentially, what you mean is that you want to live in a world where the relationships that you form on a daily basis aren't tainted - or, god, at least - are less tainted - by the everpresent facts of competition, cruelty, jealousy and exploitation. That holds not just for broad, overarching structural analyses - you know, the kind that deserve capital letters, like Anarchism and Communism - but also movements that allow a large number of less radical participants, like the Woman's Lib or the Civil Rights Movement. What I find unattractive about the Left is that in practice this does not happen - vitriol is as much an ingredient of early 21st century politcal practice as cloak-and-dagger terrorism and propaganda by the deed was in the late C19th. And Ben, I think, is quite right to criticise the impulse to join the 'No One Likes A Tory' club on Facebook. I don't think that in all good conscience I can truly belong to any movement that mainly likes to combat its opponents through the medium of facebook and name-calling. And I know that this isn't solely a problem of the left - I've seen the EDL graffiti off London Road in Sheffield - but this is kind of the point. We're meant to be better that. Or at least, anything that I want to belong to has to be better than that.
* I will probably have to make up my mind about this at some point. Patience, patience!
**I'm a slut like that.
***Have just re-read the sentence, and should probably note that I am aware of the fact that 'misguided' and 'actively insidious' aren't ever more than a succesful election campaign apart from one another.****
**** Ooops, sorry, said 'election'. Must try harder.
Alright, a quick survey of friends attached to your recent photo albums reveals that most if not all have 'Nobody Likes A Tory' badge attached to their respective Fbook pages, as though this were something every thoughtful, halfway decent human being ought to brandish before breakfast. I beg (emphatically) to differ, and am much looking foward to an encounter with this gaggle of collectivists of yours come the early part of next month.
Can't wait to see you again, I hasten to add, and advise that I am practicing a special pie in honour of the occasion.
PS: no need to worry about protection rackets. Frankly, not sure Armstrong's whiff of gentrified Buttskillism is going to be much of a softener. More like blood in the shark's tank. But what the hey: it will, at the very least, be an enlivening culture clash.
Love
So, I'm mainly writing about this because the point of this blog is exploration. And for this to have any meaning, this has to be real exploration, not just the kind where you spend half an hour every day on the internet reading the Daily Mash and a bunch of blogs about how it's probably ok to watch pornography because, actually, like, everything's sexist really, yeah?* Which means proper conflict, which means putting people whose opinions I respect in the same room for a little while and seeing who comes off with fewer chunks missing. I just wish that it was possible for this to happen without feeling as if I genuinely might be risking a few relationships that I value hugely and possibly alienating people who I not only respect but love. And the love that I feel for people that I don't agree with - Anarchists, Trots, Neo-Liberals, Catholics** - has always been a reason not to involve myself in politics. And I suppose that this post is actually asking: is it right to love somebody whose political commitments you feel range from misguided to actively insidious?*** Because even if you believe that this commitment stems from their own good faith, and even if you know for certain that such people are vastly more inteligent - and vastly better read - than you are on almost any topic you care to mention, isn't it the case that your relationship with them is predicated on the unspoken agreement that for much of the time you are covering your metaphorical eyes with your metaphorical hands and singing 'LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA' at the top of your metaphorical voice?
But then you have to ask yourself at what point you think that this stops. Isn't any political organisation essentially a group of people who have decided together what is an acceptable level of LALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALALA? It strikes me that the Left in particular would benefit from a bit more of this, and a bit less in the way of in-fighting and bitchery. But that's always been a problem for idealists - by definition, they don't like compromise. Which is one of the very things that makes them attractive. But essentially, the thing that makes me *want* to commit to some form of leftist politics - the point at which it diverges from policymaking and electioneering - is that in almost all its forms it is based on trying to make the world an easier place to love other people in. You can call yourself a Marxist, and claim that you seek a world in which the worker owns the means of production, or you can call yourself an Anarchist and say that you want to live in a world free from the oppressive power of a faceless governmental beaurocracy - and also that you want to Smash Shit Up - but essentially, what you mean is that you want to live in a world where the relationships that you form on a daily basis aren't tainted - or, god, at least - are less tainted - by the everpresent facts of competition, cruelty, jealousy and exploitation. That holds not just for broad, overarching structural analyses - you know, the kind that deserve capital letters, like Anarchism and Communism - but also movements that allow a large number of less radical participants, like the Woman's Lib or the Civil Rights Movement. What I find unattractive about the Left is that in practice this does not happen - vitriol is as much an ingredient of early 21st century politcal practice as cloak-and-dagger terrorism and propaganda by the deed was in the late C19th. And Ben, I think, is quite right to criticise the impulse to join the 'No One Likes A Tory' club on Facebook. I don't think that in all good conscience I can truly belong to any movement that mainly likes to combat its opponents through the medium of facebook and name-calling. And I know that this isn't solely a problem of the left - I've seen the EDL graffiti off London Road in Sheffield - but this is kind of the point. We're meant to be better that. Or at least, anything that I want to belong to has to be better than that.
* I will probably have to make up my mind about this at some point. Patience, patience!
**I'm a slut like that.
***Have just re-read the sentence, and should probably note that I am aware of the fact that 'misguided' and 'actively insidious' aren't ever more than a succesful election campaign apart from one another.****
**** Ooops, sorry, said 'election'. Must try harder.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010
The Manifesto
Right, this is the idea: I am 24 years old. A brief sixth-form flirtation with socialism aside, I have always been apolitical. Resolutely so, in fact. To illustrate - a brief resumé:
WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TORIES:
At university I spent most of my time hanging out with other-worldly would be academics who sported tweed jackets sans irony and were conservative without having to think about it. Thinking about it, 'hanging out' might be too strong a phrase. During this period in my life, I was known as 'the ill-informed but well meaning Guardian reading one'. This appelation is still more or less accurate...
WHEN GEO MOVED TO SHEFFIELD:
...but has been attenuated by the fact that I now live in Sheffield, where it is mandatory that you want Thatcher dead and were arrested during the miner's strike. This even holds for people who are undergraduates here. Generally speaking, the character of the city is slightly to the left of Trotsky.
WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TROTS:
When I first moved, I shared a house with two members of a Marxist organisation called the Allianc for Worker's Liberty. I went to their meetings occasionally until one of their members told me that he'd advised the organiser of the branch against attempting to recruit me because he had 'met more left-wing policemen.' Also, I accidentally slept with this guy's mate, and then I felt a bit embarrassed. Anyway, after that:
WHEN GEO WENT GREEN AND BASICALLY SLEPT IN A PLANT:
I kind of fell in with this crowd of unbelievably beautiful eco-hipsters who ate paté out of bins a lot and introduced me to the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones and allotments. About this time, I started to neurote about turning the heating on and eating sea-food. I still did it, though. In fact, my only concessions to the political convictions of my social circle that I've made thus far are a) that I now feel self-conscious consuming diet-coke in company and b) I bought a bike. So anyway, that pretty much brings me up to around last October...
WHEN GEO STARTED SLEEPING WITH AN ANARCHIST:
Does what it says on the tin, really. I started seeing this guy who's an anarchist. Only it wasn't just that I started seeing the guy: I actually started listening to him. And now I'm going to reading groups and can make cracks about doctrinaire Marxists without having to surreptitiously check the terminology that I've written on the back of my hand first. I'm not going to vote in the coming election, and I've even worked out why.
EVERYTHING IS CHANGING:
Essentially, EVERYTHING IS CHANGING. And I'm not entirely sure I like it. Sure, I was a wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal before, but at least I was my wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal. So this is what this blog is here to do, really: a sort of ebb and flow chart of my thoughts about what I've heard, said and read over the past six months, and what I will be reading, hearing, saying and thinking in the future. This will almost certainly be sloppy, ill-thought out and badly researched half of the time, if not more - I'm only a beginner at this game, remember. But it represents my attempt - long delayed but I guess necessary - to work out what I think is wrong with the Way that Things Are Currently Organised - and to try and decide what, realistically, I can do about it. I'm not on here to proselytise or even particularly to justify my apathy - because I am apathetic a great deal of the time, I know - but because I find those blank white MS Word documents desperately daunting and I think that putting my thoughts into a public forum might help me to keep thinking them. I'd like to hear about the conclusions that other people have come to: whether you're an embittered old bastard with a gin problem and only a handful of rusty red star badges and a divorce to show for twenty year's devotion to the cause, or a fully-fledged eco-anarchist with twenty-six partners who's recently given birth to a tree. Tell me what you've been reading, and what you thought about it. Tell me how many fights you've been in recently. Tell me about this really great forgotten post-punk outfit who've developed the knack of neatly constructing damning critiques of 20th century consumer capitalism in two and a half minutes, complete with glitteringly jangling guitars. Fuck it, man. I'm ready. Bring it on.
And, on that note: I might go and read about anarchy for a little while. Laters.
WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TORIES:
At university I spent most of my time hanging out with other-worldly would be academics who sported tweed jackets sans irony and were conservative without having to think about it. Thinking about it, 'hanging out' might be too strong a phrase. During this period in my life, I was known as 'the ill-informed but well meaning Guardian reading one'. This appelation is still more or less accurate...
WHEN GEO MOVED TO SHEFFIELD:
...but has been attenuated by the fact that I now live in Sheffield, where it is mandatory that you want Thatcher dead and were arrested during the miner's strike. This even holds for people who are undergraduates here. Generally speaking, the character of the city is slightly to the left of Trotsky.
WHEN GEO HUNG OUT WITH THE TROTS:
When I first moved, I shared a house with two members of a Marxist organisation called the Allianc for Worker's Liberty. I went to their meetings occasionally until one of their members told me that he'd advised the organiser of the branch against attempting to recruit me because he had 'met more left-wing policemen.' Also, I accidentally slept with this guy's mate, and then I felt a bit embarrassed. Anyway, after that:
WHEN GEO WENT GREEN AND BASICALLY SLEPT IN A PLANT:
I kind of fell in with this crowd of unbelievably beautiful eco-hipsters who ate paté out of bins a lot and introduced me to the idea of Temporary Autonomous Zones and allotments. About this time, I started to neurote about turning the heating on and eating sea-food. I still did it, though. In fact, my only concessions to the political convictions of my social circle that I've made thus far are a) that I now feel self-conscious consuming diet-coke in company and b) I bought a bike. So anyway, that pretty much brings me up to around last October...
WHEN GEO STARTED SLEEPING WITH AN ANARCHIST:
Does what it says on the tin, really. I started seeing this guy who's an anarchist. Only it wasn't just that I started seeing the guy: I actually started listening to him. And now I'm going to reading groups and can make cracks about doctrinaire Marxists without having to surreptitiously check the terminology that I've written on the back of my hand first. I'm not going to vote in the coming election, and I've even worked out why.
EVERYTHING IS CHANGING:
Essentially, EVERYTHING IS CHANGING. And I'm not entirely sure I like it. Sure, I was a wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal before, but at least I was my wooly, ill-informed, Guardian-reading liberal. So this is what this blog is here to do, really: a sort of ebb and flow chart of my thoughts about what I've heard, said and read over the past six months, and what I will be reading, hearing, saying and thinking in the future. This will almost certainly be sloppy, ill-thought out and badly researched half of the time, if not more - I'm only a beginner at this game, remember. But it represents my attempt - long delayed but I guess necessary - to work out what I think is wrong with the Way that Things Are Currently Organised - and to try and decide what, realistically, I can do about it. I'm not on here to proselytise or even particularly to justify my apathy - because I am apathetic a great deal of the time, I know - but because I find those blank white MS Word documents desperately daunting and I think that putting my thoughts into a public forum might help me to keep thinking them. I'd like to hear about the conclusions that other people have come to: whether you're an embittered old bastard with a gin problem and only a handful of rusty red star badges and a divorce to show for twenty year's devotion to the cause, or a fully-fledged eco-anarchist with twenty-six partners who's recently given birth to a tree. Tell me what you've been reading, and what you thought about it. Tell me how many fights you've been in recently. Tell me about this really great forgotten post-punk outfit who've developed the knack of neatly constructing damning critiques of 20th century consumer capitalism in two and a half minutes, complete with glitteringly jangling guitars. Fuck it, man. I'm ready. Bring it on.
And, on that note: I might go and read about anarchy for a little while. Laters.
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