Bob from Brockley has kindly allowed me to join in with the five words meme.
See here abouts –
http://brockley.blogspot.com/2009/07/five-word-meme.html
and so.....
Toon - Which always means that gaping wound in my mental balance, Newcastle United. Having not been born of the greatness that is the North East, excluding the red and white bits, I was bewitched by the pure audacity of the 92-93 side. Coming off possibly slipping into the third tier of footballing competition, such pacy wing play and central midfield brilliance from Peter Beardsley was instantly addictive. I found my (spherical) drug. One might call me a John Hall fan, only there for the fireworks. But how I have continued to suffer for the glory days. For every 5-0 thrashing of Man Utd, there is Birmingham thrashing us in the cup. For every Tino goal against Barcelona, there is Kieran Dyer and Beast Bowyer's public disagreement, those fucking accursed twelve points and Jermaine Jenus deciding to be fancy with penalties.
The great periods of Newcastle as a footballing side during the seventeen years of my addiction, the Keegan sides of 93-97 and Sir Bobby's of 2000-2004 seemed to be borrowed on credit, on the never never. How I marvelled at the joyous skill, revelled in 'Andrew' Cole in his pomp, the much under appreciated Lee Clark, Albert's lob, Sir Les, Ginola, Fox, Beresford's unlikely brace in Kiev, Sainted and holy Alan's conveyor belt of gravity defying volleys, Robert's rockets, Woodgate off the injury table, Kieran Dyer and Craig Bellemy being, not just good, but great. The memories are many. And one can see now that they were karmically brought. We paid up with Gullit's 'sexy' football and Silvio Maric, the sourness of Souness and the beginnings of the endlessly humiliating Owen saga, the flashes of hope with Roeder and stability and Keegan's return. In Fat Sam serving up tripe and calling it progress and Fat Ashley....oh, the vile corners to be yet reached. We paid and it seems continue to pay. I wish now I was a fair weather fan, I wish I could walk away. Too late now, damn it, much too late. PS. Fuck off Ashley.....just fuck off
Freedom - I consider freedom as a Janus faced concept. There is a freedom to kill anyone you fancy or to raped the shit out of them or burn their house down. The formulations created by Liberal thought about the limits of freedoms has been mostly correct. But the choice of which are inviolate is, of course, partial. Negative and Positive types of freedom seemed to be a false dilettante division. Freedom is at its most essential when it involves the lifting of chains, chains of bondage, of legal discrimination and state control, of stigma over choice, of hunger and squalor. What freedom means is thus: to be as full as human being as possible, untempered by the reductionism of materialist constraints and the cod-meaning and super temporality of Idealist schemas. If a human being can be the happy consuming shitting fucking machine that they are and then realise and freely appreciate the thunderous cosmoplastic qualities they are gifted with, at peace and at will, there is a certain and precious freedom within that.
Chartism - One has to be awe of the millions who marched, organised and campaigned for the Charter. They did so in times of great and cruel distress, in a time before telegrams or mass railways, when the main traditional bases of such a cause were in near terminal decline. The General Unions had been broken in the most part, the old clubs of the Radicals were dying. You have to remember too that the Political Unions of the 1830s, seeking a similar political solution, had been a cynical con, carried on the masses who had given them a power to threaten the system.
One under researched element of the movement, only touched upon by the culturalists, is that the Whig reforming state had erupted into areas of life untouched by the previous 'Old Corruption'. Be it the poorhouse, exclusion from borough and parish government or the moves against popular 'messy' festivals, these 'innovations' aligned with a general and crippling crisis in the economy created a nomic crisis for the poor. As the church failed to keep up with the explosion in urban population and relief without the gulag conditions of the workhouse disappeared, the Charter was transformed.
In its political demands were a longing for a more equitable and less ruthless past and a brighter and 'progressive' future. Within the carnival of the movement, the realisation of the moral power of the crowd and the rhetoric, we can detect a attempt to break out of a time of misery into a meaningful time of hope and change. The movement that pushed self-education and self awareness, probably doing more for mass literacy that anything till the public schools of 1870, could create experiments in collective living, in ground upwards politics. Blessed with the belief in the moral case for the charter, the movement was able to become a transformative revitalisation movement. As a reaction to the crisis of modernity, such a formation is common. However, this mass movement, unlike Fascism or Bolshevik Communism, had no cult of struggle, of dying or killing. It's internal discussions over Moral versus Physical power showed a remarkable maure level of understanding on the dangers of volence to the cause and the subsequent corruption of their ends.
This maturity, noted by Marx, combined with its moral power and willingness to openly discuss and challenge show a sparkling precedent for the left. How one could see Hamas or the CCP 'progressive' after learning of the ragged millions joyfully declaring their liberty and their rights is beyond my fuzzy headed imagination.
Anti-Stalinism - Anti-Stalinism is a misnomer. Whilst Stalin might have slightly changed the mantras of Lenin, his theory of government and the structures he adapted come directly from Lenin's revision of Marx and the ideological chaos that came from the October seizure of power. The Vanguard model creates the cult of personality, it is a coy version of the Fuhrerprinzip. Lenin's clear heritage to the 'Burn it all down' Nihilism of the original 'What is to be done?'. In Rakhmetov, the glacial upturner of worlds, Lenin found his model. Stalin merely added some extra Nietzsche to the mix.
Similarly Lenin's confusion after the seizure of power lead him and Trotsky to seek to emulate the military dictatorship of Hindenburg in Germany. Trotsky by the end of the civil war believe that the entire population should be placed into the military, a vast army commanded to 'socialism'. Stalin was to continue this tradition after the NEP, hurling 'brigades of labour' into crash industrialisation. Stalin never ceased to be a Leninist.
As such, anti-Stalinism is the refutation of the Leninist revision of Marx and indeed its root, Necheavian volunteerism. It could well be Marxist or non-Marxist (Odd that it has to be said but Marxism is merely a subset of socialism), it could be anarchist, radical, liberal, nationalist or Tory. Like anti-fascism, it is the realisation that there is a variable element of terrifying instability, the sheer threat of a descent, past the everyday inhumanity to something yet bloodier. Just as anti-fascism has created the oddest of bed-fellows, so too with anti-Stalinism.
Stalinism, out and out five years plans and such seems like Carlism and Saint-Simonism to be dead. The more canny and evasive Vanguardism remains. In the UK, barely able to bother with the mundane ins and outs of actually representing and struggling for the poorest, instead it moves to the moralistic cases of 'anti-imperialism'. Here the clear cut is in abundance, here sexy resistance is readily available in high-def and well out of range of possible stray rounds. Here is the toxin that poisons the left, in that vicarious 'Burn it all down'. We can do without it.
anti-Americanism - America, as in the United states of America as in the (other) Great Republic is the most successful democracy ever seen full stop. Even during an existential crisis in 1864, it still held an bitterly contested election. That record of 43 peaceful transfers of power based on a increasingly widening franchise deserves credit as does being the leading though flawed exponents of free-speech, to the people and the founders. America demonstrates the constant possibility of democratic advance, the slow movement of progress. It is, no doubt, a maddening and hypocritical place. The pure idiocy of the debates over Healthcare recently and the snideness of American exceptionalism, a proto-form of moral relativity , for example, might cause gagging when consumed in excessive amounts. Yet, America remains a historic example of a democracy, experimenting, evolving and questioning itself.
Further yet, America is damned. Damned above and beyond its multitude of sins, of commission, omission or otherwise. This damning goes further, to its citizens, beyond the mild xeno-bigotry of loose stereotypes, to a vicious hatred. Americans are not just stupid, they revel in their stupidity, they are barely sentient. Not only are they fat, they attain hogarthian levels of decadent corpulence. They are not just religious, they are fanatics, would be crusaders, coy theocrats, all of them. Culturally, they are Pygmies, wallowing in a pseud-atmosphere of guns, neon and trainers. They are not just racists, but the very worst, loathsome bigots, only waiting to whip out the white sheets.
I smell catharsis, displacement and realising that this is one xenophobia target free of condemnation. One might understand the root of the bitterness if it was political i.e. America is super bad capitalist or if it came from disappointment i.e. 'but, but, but....you said you were a shining city on a hill....yet quite clearly you're in a valley'. But no. The fury of the ol' imperial Tories or the most cynical of rhetoric rejecters joins the choir. The reason is that the US cannot really be bother with such opinions. They simply don't show up of their radar. It is a tremendous insult to the Ushaters. They are condemned by and actually reinforce the insularity of America. Its the Chinese finger trap of discourse.
I will add that the few truthers over here that I have had the unpleasure to meet are convinced that it is the bovine like stupidity of the American public that allowed the 'conspiracy' to occur. The paradox of the loud and uncensored voices of America's own brand of nutter having given the truther narrative its shape is lost on them.
See here abouts –
http://brockley.blogspot.com/2009/07/five-word-meme.html
and so.....
Toon - Which always means that gaping wound in my mental balance, Newcastle United. Having not been born of the greatness that is the North East, excluding the red and white bits, I was bewitched by the pure audacity of the 92-93 side. Coming off possibly slipping into the third tier of footballing competition, such pacy wing play and central midfield brilliance from Peter Beardsley was instantly addictive. I found my (spherical) drug. One might call me a John Hall fan, only there for the fireworks. But how I have continued to suffer for the glory days. For every 5-0 thrashing of Man Utd, there is Birmingham thrashing us in the cup. For every Tino goal against Barcelona, there is Kieran Dyer and Beast Bowyer's public disagreement, those fucking accursed twelve points and Jermaine Jenus deciding to be fancy with penalties.
The great periods of Newcastle as a footballing side during the seventeen years of my addiction, the Keegan sides of 93-97 and Sir Bobby's of 2000-2004 seemed to be borrowed on credit, on the never never. How I marvelled at the joyous skill, revelled in 'Andrew' Cole in his pomp, the much under appreciated Lee Clark, Albert's lob, Sir Les, Ginola, Fox, Beresford's unlikely brace in Kiev, Sainted and holy Alan's conveyor belt of gravity defying volleys, Robert's rockets, Woodgate off the injury table, Kieran Dyer and Craig Bellemy being, not just good, but great. The memories are many. And one can see now that they were karmically brought. We paid up with Gullit's 'sexy' football and Silvio Maric, the sourness of Souness and the beginnings of the endlessly humiliating Owen saga, the flashes of hope with Roeder and stability and Keegan's return. In Fat Sam serving up tripe and calling it progress and Fat Ashley....oh, the vile corners to be yet reached. We paid and it seems continue to pay. I wish now I was a fair weather fan, I wish I could walk away. Too late now, damn it, much too late. PS. Fuck off Ashley.....just fuck off
Freedom - I consider freedom as a Janus faced concept. There is a freedom to kill anyone you fancy or to raped the shit out of them or burn their house down. The formulations created by Liberal thought about the limits of freedoms has been mostly correct. But the choice of which are inviolate is, of course, partial. Negative and Positive types of freedom seemed to be a false dilettante division. Freedom is at its most essential when it involves the lifting of chains, chains of bondage, of legal discrimination and state control, of stigma over choice, of hunger and squalor. What freedom means is thus: to be as full as human being as possible, untempered by the reductionism of materialist constraints and the cod-meaning and super temporality of Idealist schemas. If a human being can be the happy consuming shitting fucking machine that they are and then realise and freely appreciate the thunderous cosmoplastic qualities they are gifted with, at peace and at will, there is a certain and precious freedom within that.
Chartism - One has to be awe of the millions who marched, organised and campaigned for the Charter. They did so in times of great and cruel distress, in a time before telegrams or mass railways, when the main traditional bases of such a cause were in near terminal decline. The General Unions had been broken in the most part, the old clubs of the Radicals were dying. You have to remember too that the Political Unions of the 1830s, seeking a similar political solution, had been a cynical con, carried on the masses who had given them a power to threaten the system.
One under researched element of the movement, only touched upon by the culturalists, is that the Whig reforming state had erupted into areas of life untouched by the previous 'Old Corruption'. Be it the poorhouse, exclusion from borough and parish government or the moves against popular 'messy' festivals, these 'innovations' aligned with a general and crippling crisis in the economy created a nomic crisis for the poor. As the church failed to keep up with the explosion in urban population and relief without the gulag conditions of the workhouse disappeared, the Charter was transformed.
In its political demands were a longing for a more equitable and less ruthless past and a brighter and 'progressive' future. Within the carnival of the movement, the realisation of the moral power of the crowd and the rhetoric, we can detect a attempt to break out of a time of misery into a meaningful time of hope and change. The movement that pushed self-education and self awareness, probably doing more for mass literacy that anything till the public schools of 1870, could create experiments in collective living, in ground upwards politics. Blessed with the belief in the moral case for the charter, the movement was able to become a transformative revitalisation movement. As a reaction to the crisis of modernity, such a formation is common. However, this mass movement, unlike Fascism or Bolshevik Communism, had no cult of struggle, of dying or killing. It's internal discussions over Moral versus Physical power showed a remarkable maure level of understanding on the dangers of volence to the cause and the subsequent corruption of their ends.
This maturity, noted by Marx, combined with its moral power and willingness to openly discuss and challenge show a sparkling precedent for the left. How one could see Hamas or the CCP 'progressive' after learning of the ragged millions joyfully declaring their liberty and their rights is beyond my fuzzy headed imagination.
Anti-Stalinism - Anti-Stalinism is a misnomer. Whilst Stalin might have slightly changed the mantras of Lenin, his theory of government and the structures he adapted come directly from Lenin's revision of Marx and the ideological chaos that came from the October seizure of power. The Vanguard model creates the cult of personality, it is a coy version of the Fuhrerprinzip. Lenin's clear heritage to the 'Burn it all down' Nihilism of the original 'What is to be done?'. In Rakhmetov, the glacial upturner of worlds, Lenin found his model. Stalin merely added some extra Nietzsche to the mix.
Similarly Lenin's confusion after the seizure of power lead him and Trotsky to seek to emulate the military dictatorship of Hindenburg in Germany. Trotsky by the end of the civil war believe that the entire population should be placed into the military, a vast army commanded to 'socialism'. Stalin was to continue this tradition after the NEP, hurling 'brigades of labour' into crash industrialisation. Stalin never ceased to be a Leninist.
As such, anti-Stalinism is the refutation of the Leninist revision of Marx and indeed its root, Necheavian volunteerism. It could well be Marxist or non-Marxist (Odd that it has to be said but Marxism is merely a subset of socialism), it could be anarchist, radical, liberal, nationalist or Tory. Like anti-fascism, it is the realisation that there is a variable element of terrifying instability, the sheer threat of a descent, past the everyday inhumanity to something yet bloodier. Just as anti-fascism has created the oddest of bed-fellows, so too with anti-Stalinism.
Stalinism, out and out five years plans and such seems like Carlism and Saint-Simonism to be dead. The more canny and evasive Vanguardism remains. In the UK, barely able to bother with the mundane ins and outs of actually representing and struggling for the poorest, instead it moves to the moralistic cases of 'anti-imperialism'. Here the clear cut is in abundance, here sexy resistance is readily available in high-def and well out of range of possible stray rounds. Here is the toxin that poisons the left, in that vicarious 'Burn it all down'. We can do without it.
anti-Americanism - America, as in the United states of America as in the (other) Great Republic is the most successful democracy ever seen full stop. Even during an existential crisis in 1864, it still held an bitterly contested election. That record of 43 peaceful transfers of power based on a increasingly widening franchise deserves credit as does being the leading though flawed exponents of free-speech, to the people and the founders. America demonstrates the constant possibility of democratic advance, the slow movement of progress. It is, no doubt, a maddening and hypocritical place. The pure idiocy of the debates over Healthcare recently and the snideness of American exceptionalism, a proto-form of moral relativity , for example, might cause gagging when consumed in excessive amounts. Yet, America remains a historic example of a democracy, experimenting, evolving and questioning itself.
Further yet, America is damned. Damned above and beyond its multitude of sins, of commission, omission or otherwise. This damning goes further, to its citizens, beyond the mild xeno-bigotry of loose stereotypes, to a vicious hatred. Americans are not just stupid, they revel in their stupidity, they are barely sentient. Not only are they fat, they attain hogarthian levels of decadent corpulence. They are not just religious, they are fanatics, would be crusaders, coy theocrats, all of them. Culturally, they are Pygmies, wallowing in a pseud-atmosphere of guns, neon and trainers. They are not just racists, but the very worst, loathsome bigots, only waiting to whip out the white sheets.
I smell catharsis, displacement and realising that this is one xenophobia target free of condemnation. One might understand the root of the bitterness if it was political i.e. America is super bad capitalist or if it came from disappointment i.e. 'but, but, but....you said you were a shining city on a hill....yet quite clearly you're in a valley'. But no. The fury of the ol' imperial Tories or the most cynical of rhetoric rejecters joins the choir. The reason is that the US cannot really be bother with such opinions. They simply don't show up of their radar. It is a tremendous insult to the Ushaters. They are condemned by and actually reinforce the insularity of America. Its the Chinese finger trap of discourse.
I will add that the few truthers over here that I have had the unpleasure to meet are convinced that it is the bovine like stupidity of the American public that allowed the 'conspiracy' to occur. The paradox of the loud and uncensored voices of America's own brand of nutter having given the truther narrative its shape is lost on them.
Who wants words!
6 comments:
what sources are you drawing on in your definition of anti-Stalinism and how similiar Stalin was to Lenin?
I'm taking from Figes, Applebaum, Kevin McDermott, Bernice Rosenthal's work on Stalin and the the Kautsky/Luxembourg line, with added literary flourishes from Solzhenitsyn.
I am rather partial to a bit of Rosa and Karl.
Thanks for the additional reading recs!
interesting you mention Kautsky, I recently wrote a paper on the development of racism, Xenophobia, and what might be called "orientalism" in German society towards Russia between 1914 and 1933 and how i argue it contributed to Third Reich propaganda of Russians as the "asian enemy", and I talk a bit about his writings in Terrorismus und Kommunismus: Ein Beitrag zur Naturgeschichte der Revolution, namely his attempt to blame Lenin's terror on his Kalmuk roots.
Not that I would defend racial essentialism but it did pollute discourse all over during high modernity. Consider the evil teuton stereotypes thrown about by the Kadets or the inherent anti-Semitism of 'Loot the looters'.
What a great response comrade!
Writer's block indeed!
A way with words, that piece on anti-Americanism should be replicated as a full post :)
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