I'm not from America, I have no intention of ever going to America, I don't have any friends in America, and I don't have friends who are American or know friends in America. I'm second generation Turkish in Britain - .
I only found out about rhizzone as a result of this article about the New Inquiry. http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/
I'm wondering if you could point me towards any other examples in the US of left or popular movements being manipulated/abused by careerists and middle-class monopolisers.
If you ask this question on RevLeft, you get a bunch of peep accusing party X or grouplet Y of doing this followed by cross-accusations, and there's confusion - plus not all people seem to be telling the accurate truth.
Second, does anyone know anything about Verso's operations in the US. What are their procedures like? Who controls them, how do they judge what books to publish and what books to reject?
I'm just an ordinary observer here, if you can signpost me, do so.
Thank you,
i am american, upper middle-class, white, genderfuck, and will be ur friend. any questions?
dalston posted:Hello all,
I'm not from America, I have no intention of ever going to America, I don't have any friends in America, and I don't have friends who are American or know friends in America. I'm second generation Turkish in Britain - .
I only found out about rhizzone as a result of this article about the New Inquiry. http://www.rhizzone.net/article/2012/09/29/fuck-new-inquiry-and-other-tales/
I'm wondering if you could point me towards any other examples in the US of left or popular movements being manipulated/abused by careerists and middle-class monopolisers.
If you ask this question on RevLeft, you get a bunch of peep accusing party X or grouplet Y of doing this followed by cross-accusations, and there's confusion - plus not all people seem to be telling the accurate truth.
Second, does anyone know anything about Verso's operations in the US. What are their procedures like? Who controls them, how do they judge what books to publish and what books to reject?
I'm just an ordinary observer here, if you can signpost me, do so.
Thank you,
Do you mean left as in, revolutionary-left distribute-kalashnikovs-to-the-peasants-left, or do you mean, the gay marriage & microlending left? Either way, the answer is all of them, ever.
WElcum 2 tHa FoLd dalston
deadken posted:i imagine that when verso decide which books to publish they do it on the basis of things like Is It Good and Is It Going to Sell A Lot of Copies and so on, because they are a publishing house and that is what they do
Well yeh, but how do they decide on what markets to sell to. How do they segment this stuff. What countries they want to push into. It's as far I can see all decided in Brooklyn, not London back when it was New Left Books.
I ask this because they are doing new translations of their 'philosophy' type classics (not my thing) into Turkish and they are using mainstream distributors instead of established radical ones. And Metis - the publisher that does their Verso stuff - is becoming increasingly 'gentrified' as a result of their influence. I don't live there it's just what people from there tell me.
Metis has for years not done agricultural history, less on labour history, less on current problems, more philosophy and esoteric 'philosophy'.
Middle class academia abandoning everything dangerous to host events at somewhere that is super-expensive, it's close to academic venues but not where people (anyone non-student or non-rich) lives in central London - hence totally impractical for any evening activity that is not full of the usual types - academics + students, authors + arts people, full timers of standard Trotskyist organisations, a tiny sprinkling of teachers and civil servants, maybe a scientist/engineer if you're lucky.
http://fireboxlondon.net/
It's a symptom of a wider trend of degeneration.
The only American I know of is someone on a Kennedy programme scholarship, appeared to be sound, came from a US organisation Labor Notes in Chicago. A student at a London prestigious university I got in contact with him + his friend, over some of them coming to stay with activists in the 'poorer regions' over the summer - avoid paying hall fees and help with organising especially over housing/benefits (you call it welfare). At first really eager, but then no response, now seeing him he's become like a celebrity as a US leftist on British campus.
(No disrespect to anyone).
deadken posted:o rite. well the likelihood is that they have consultants who come in and talk about revenue stream and economies of scale and market share and so on, and they justify it to themselves with the thought that more proletarians will get to read about the transcendent object of desire. maybe im wrong tho, maybe they all wear military fatigues and when they receive a communique from one of their agents in the third world about the growing strength of local labour movements they fire up the choppa and airdrop thousands of weaponised copies of alain badiou's pocket pantheon onto the presidential palace
I get the sense this place is 'irony-heavy'.
Well you mention badiou and Metis has 4 of his books some in several editions
http://www.metiskitap.com/Catalog/Book/4556
And it sort of starts in 2004 onward with that particular author.
aerdil posted:hello dalston and welcome to the rhizzone
Hi I am working-class by birth, my very first passport has the phrase 'Isci Ailesi' stamped in it - meaning from the family of a worker' (true). Now I am middle-class by social profession teaching english to immigrants (ESL), but working-class in economic behaviour - frugal and saving minded (bad traits maybe), fewer paying jobs gaps since 2010. I am white too, I don't know what genderfuck is, but I am male.
Some questions for you or anyone at all:
1. Are you feeling the effects of the recession in a major way as someone middle-class?
2. Is 'privilege politics' and 'political correctness' re-emerging in American left groups? Men and women organising separately sort of thing. Or is it just media fluff?
3. Is someone like Doug Henwood - mentioned in the TNI piece - treated with respect by leftist organisation?
4. Is the US left 'Ivy League' dominated?
5. Is there any coherence to the idea that people leave their home communities to do leftism/lifestylism in big cities only - leaving small towns unorganised and undefended.
deadken posted:yeah but how do you fix this apart from clicking your fingers and wishing for a return to trade union radicalism. the philosophical turn is symptomatic of the decline of the organised left rather than a cause of it imo
Well yes. I don't know. If I knew I would be doing it. All I can say is that superficially non-trade unionism activism appears more successful because people come to a meeting about housing benefit and how to get more, and you get a few people non-activists helping out sharing the burdens.
But union organising especially cross-sector is very tough. I work in two places - one is public sector union is there but pitiful attendance little effort, there's been no 'victory' in over 15 years maybe 20 years since early 90s is my guess. Private sector has 2 people trying to speak to people in private after work - not knowing who you can trust or not. Very segregated workplaces... lots of different job titles, hours worked, positions, meeting privileges... trainee student teachers...
Same even in a company like U.P.S. - private package distribution - (Securicor) distribution centre I worked in before, so no union there either.
Micro-lending here in Britain is associated with liberal Greens.
None of the armed stuff has ever been even remotely popular here, like ever, not since 1840 at least.
OK. What about the immigrant rights' movement in USA for 'illegals' is it being dominated by middle-class people?
And the kind of people involved in support for say the Chicago teachers strike?
And the people who try to stop those new prisons being built and whatnot?
deadken posted:lol thats not true there were radical leftists in and around the labour party into the 90s
I lived through the 90s, these people - labour lefts - tried to sabotage and control everything useful that other people did, far worse than any trotskyist or maoist group - but they get let off because they're democrats.
the op was asking about 'arm the peasants' that's only happened in the physical force chartists and the rebecca riots with overpowered garrisons and muskets handed out.
1916-1921 is crucial but ireland, not britain as in english, welsh, scottish.
1919 was dangerous, but not at the point of an arming for action like austria, ottoman empire, hungary, macedonia, germany, finland, lithuania - soldiers kept weapons and ammunition to fight against or in some cases for the old order.
1919 had a triple union strike in britain threat, bought off smartly and a mutiny in .
it had two separate localised police strikes but the army took over!
1919 sees a wave of violence against chinese sailors in port towns, the last major anti-jewish riot, riots against colonial black people almost simultaneously starting in june all over liverpool, newcastle, all over london, cardiff
1919 has always been mythology in britain, like 1926.
back then there was real deference to monarchy etc not like know.
but yes overall 1919 is the closest point of old revolution on the russian style.
anyway the point of this was that there's no group engaged in or considering armed activity. it's only the irish nationalist - republican ira splinters that are doing that by cell-based urban guerrilla means.
I was very briefly involved with UNITE HERE in Chicago, and they are organizing women of color in the hospitality industry, making some headway. They were started by two Yale students, if that gives you any indication of the state of the left in the US. the Ivy League indeed has a rather nefarious influence, for example, the two Yale students split their organization spectacularly in 2009: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNITE_HERE#Split_and_reaffiliation_with_AFL-CIO
my short time with them was spent phonebanking businesses, trade associations, etc in order to pressure/guilt them into breaking off their (expensive) contracts and boycotting Hyatt hotels. the union itself seemed to be of middle class substance, some working class overtones maybe..
http://rashidmod.com/
Isn't Verso just the publishing company of the new left review? So really any problems they have are problems the NLR has, which are the same problems that marxists.org has and the intellectual left in general has: they were kept afloat by Trotskyists. that doesn't make them worthless, half my books are Verso and marxists.org is one of the greatest intellectual resources in history, but it is important to remember why they exist.
but it is important to remember why they exist.
trotskyism is the worst possible form of government. it just creates an awkward situation where there are people willing to have a revolution but don't want to because they're counting on the nominally left government elected into power. like in venezeula.
i can't even understand why i was ever a trotskyist anymore, it totally negates the purpose of revolution.
Some questions for you or anyone at all:
1. Are you feeling the effects of the recession in a major way as someone middle-class?
I'm feeling the effects in that my class (labor aristocratic-middle class is a meaningless term) are being re-proletarianized. There are plenty of jobs thanks to Obama, they all just happen to be part-time, seasonal/temp, and without benefits. As someone with a degree who works with the black and hispanic underclass in a menial service job, this is the future of American labour. Unless you sell your soul and work for the state department or the military or whatever, but that's only because the DC area will be one of the last to adapt to the new reality.
2. Is 'privilege politics' and 'political correctness' re-emerging in American left groups? Men and women organising separately sort of thing. Or is it just media fluff?
All of this shit basically exists on the internet, there are a million feminist and SJW blogs and websites which have led to a change in internet culture. Of course, what serious revolutionary groups exist outside the internet in America at the moment. I will say that both occupy and the PSL were infected with privilege politics and liberalism (still both more good than bad though); I'll leave it up to you whether they are serious.
3. Is someone like Doug Henwood - mentioned in the TNI piece - treated with respect by leftist organisation?
I don't think the Nation, or CounterPunch, or DemocracyNow, or Glenn Greenwald, or whatever have any influence at all.
4. Is the US left 'Ivy League' dominated?
Depends what you mean by the left. It is quite troubling that there is almost no labour organization in the South while the left in California seems to be separate from the hispanic labour movement, but these are problems going back to reconstruction.
5. Is there any coherence to the idea that people leave their home communities to do leftism/lifestylism in big cities only - leaving small towns unorganised and undefended.
Yes absolutely, this is the most important lesson to take away from Occupy. Occupy was strongest in New York and as you left that geographical area it became more deformed. Occupy was great there, Occupy DC was a shadow of NY and had no presence outside McPhearson Square, and Occupy Frederick (during the G8) was a loose collection of punk kids and crazy aging hippies. I can't even imagine how bad occupy Shelbyville, Tennessee was.
Crow posted:What about Oakland
I really don't know what to feel about Oakland tbh. It seemed primarily to be a continuation of local anarchist politics, and it's not clear how effective the port strike was. DC was largely pre-existing anti-war groups who hijacked the organization and the brand, in fact there were multiple occupies running because some people didn't like this. Oakland seems to be the same: a combination of the anti-police movement, the local anarchist scene, and various riffraff from WDDP.
One of the problems with Occupy was all the information about it was propaganda, but since it had no central committee or party structure no one bothered to actually get real, somber information about it. I would like to be proven wrong by someone who was there, from what I can tell all the intellectual advances, all the tactical directives, and the lingering effects a year later are in New York.
dalston posted:Some questions for you or anyone at all:
1. Are you feeling the effects of the recession in a major way as someone middle-class?
2. Is 'privilege politics' and 'political correctness' re-emerging in American left groups? Men and women organising separately sort of thing. Or is it just media fluff?
3. Is someone like Doug Henwood - mentioned in the TNI piece - treated with respect by leftist organisation?
4. Is the US left 'Ivy League' dominated?
5. Is there any coherence to the idea that people leave their home communities to do leftism/lifestylism in big cities only - leaving small towns unorganised and undefended.
1. no
2. yes, yes, and yes
3. no
4. yes
5. by leaving a small regiment of Tier 1 units behind near your mineral patches, you can prevent early-game raids on your gatherers that would otherwise cripple your economy
babyhueypnewton posted:One of the problems with Occupy was all the information about it was propaganda, but since it had no central committee or party structure no one bothered to actually get real, somber information about it. I would like to be proven wrong by someone who was there, from what I can tell all the intellectual advances, all the tactical directives, and the lingering effects a year later are in New York.
the problem with Occupy was that with all modern post-Chomsky liberal activists, they think that "awareness" alone will magically solve problems, and refuse to acknowledge that the entire purpose of protests is to promote public outrage in all the dumb middle America poors sitting at home watching tv
