The new Labour left is composed of three main forces: a segment of ambitious and perhaps precarious professionals who feel that according to their educated status they should have more say in society. They also want a good life for ‘the working class’, but their approach is technocratic: learned people and progressive experts are supposed to decide how things are run, not the bankers and the parasitic elite. They form an alliance with the second main force, the union bureaucracy. The union apparatus allows the new professionals to speak in the name of the workers and the union bosses can extend their power into the political class.
This. Another middle class vanguard not different enough to the neolib blairite ones before it.
Yeah I thought that paragraph was bang on too - Angry Workers of the World always have sound analysis but this is particularly clinical, great economy of language, just laying it out… it’s the sort of political writing I’d love to see more of (and be able to write myself tbh)
Like, you can be absolutely deadly in your criticism without exaggerating or devolving into that ‘social media outrage’ style and tone that is so much noise these days. For example:
Materially the new left intelligentsia reproduces itself as the ‘neoliberal self’ that they pretend to criticise: hardly any of them are ‘organic intellectuals’ forged in working class existence and struggle, most of them survive by creating a social media and academic persona whose opinion is valued on the marketplace. Whether you read the “Alternative Models of Ownership” by the Labour party advisers, Bastani’s ‘luxury communism’ or Srnicek’s ‘Inventing the Future’, the prime agent is always the figure of the well-educated and networked activist. Unfortunately this forces our intellectual democratic socialist comrades to chase their own tails. There is a big blank space when it comes to the question of how their well-meaning ideas will be enforced and implemented. Who will enforce workers’ participation if workers are seen as people who are only able to engage in political discourse during election times? The absence of a strategy rooted in the working class then leads to the creation of a trite and kitsch icon of ‘the people’ – a mass of honest victims who need cultural belonging and political leadership.
Fucking Nailed It
Love it. For me it explains the view the new left (Sarkar, Bastini, Jones) have of the working class. There was a clear divide between these metropolitan ‘educated’ professional activist types, and regular working class people. Like even during peak Corbynism people from my estate (the ‘left behind’ working class in a deindustrialised dead zone) tended not to vote, not to engage. They failed to break down those walls. To them people like me are victims being ravaged by Tory austerity, who the Labour party need to save. It’s a dead end. And demeaning. I’d rather we empower ourselves on our estates and build on our already existing mutual aid to bring about change.
Some of you are young so here’s the deal: the NYPD has overseas operations thanks to shit like the Patriot Act. A metropolitan police force operates in foreign countries.
This article includes a pretty thorough summary of trans exclusionary feminist ties to anti-choice conservatives. Here are some highlights of these connections (emphasis mine), but the article as a whole is worth the read:
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WoLF has made no bones about partnering with misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in order to oppose the livelihoods of trans people to the Supreme Court. […] WoLF’s relationship with ADF extends beyond just filing briefs in key cases. LGBTQNation reported in fiscal year 2017, the most recent year for which the feminist group’s financial records are available, WoLF applied for and accepted a $15,000 grant from the ultraconservative group. The LGBTQNation report additionally revealed in 2017 that WoLF contracted with Imperial Independent Mediafor help with fundraising, promising a 20 percent commission. At the time, IIM was run by Zachary Freeman, who made a name for himself over a lawsuit to leak abortion clinic employee names to the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-choice group known for propagating heavily doctored videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood profiting off the sale of fetal tissue.
[…]
Though it’s unknown who funds another prominent gender critical group, Hands Across the Aisle, one of its co-founders is Kaeley Triller-Haver, an anti-choice conservative who has reportedly admitted to committing statutory rape of a teenage boy when she was a youth counselor. What’s interesting about Hands Across the Aisle is how many journalists are seemingly involved with the activist group. A web archive from June 2018 suggested that former New Statesman editor Helen Lewis, recently hired as a writer for the Atlantic, as well as ultraconservative outlets the Federalist, the Daily Caller, and the Daily Signal are associated with the group.
[…]
During the Irish referendum on abortion rights in 2018, some British gender critical feminists withheld support for pro-choice campaigners citing the trans supportive attitudes of Irish feminism, going so far as to schedule an anti-trans meeting in Dublin at the height of the campaign season.
[…]
In February, the conservative Heritage Foundation held an event in Washington, DC, featuring prominent British anti-trans feminists Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull (also known as “Posie Parker”) and Julia Long, who came together to denounce the trans rights movement at large as well as a medical community that’s increasingly becoming more open to supporting trans children. The next day, the anti-trans feminists, who had allegedly been flown to the US on Heritage’s dime, stormed a Capitol Hill office where Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Sarah McBride had just concluded a meeting between parents of trans children and legislators. They filmed themselves yelling and taunting McBride with their personal gripes with the trans movement, accusing her of not caring about “lesbian girls.” McBride, to her credit, didn’t take the bait, remaining stone-faced and focused on her computer screen while a coworker attempted to de-escalate the situation.
[…]
In the US, Baltimore gender critical feminist Julia Beck has made a name for herself in conservative circles, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News and testifying before the House against trans inclusions in the Violence Against Women Act and the Equality Act.
[…]
Just this month, gender critical feminists who have been banned from Twitter for extensive transphobic harassment have recently organized under alt-right message board Gab to form “Spinster,” a social media platform for TERFs. It remains to be seen whether British message board Mumsnet will remain the epicenter for gender critical messaging, but the movement’s growing connections with anti-choice and violent misogynist movements should concern both cisgender and transgender women.
[…]
Conservative groups, in turn, have made a conscious decision to use feminist language and framing to oppose trans rights, which is how we ended up with some of the most vehemently anti-woman politicians in the House voting against the Violence Against Women’s Act in the name of “protecting women and girls.”
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
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