dweenlander
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Okay, my son is eager to play Minecraft with me, so I will limit this post to its essentials. I have been pretty patient with your ludicrous line of assertion (because it certainly wouldn’t make the grade as argument), but the remark “Benn is as anti-working class as Thatcher” is utterly moronic. This off-shoot of the thread we are in is clearly going nowhere. Your blunt historical and political illiteracy is not something I can argue with. So you win. The world is just as you say it is. You can now back to shouting at the wind. Cheers.
In post #90 in the last line of the penultimate paragraph you wrote “Benn is the equal of Thatcher”. Take a look. It’s there. You wrote it.
ALB,Yes, it really is. It relates primarily to the work of post-war Marxist theorists and their often dismissive attitudes towards post-war Marxist historiography which challenged their notion of a revolutionary working class. E.P Thompson’s Poverty of Theory was a particularly bad-tempered, although brilliant, jeremiad aimed at theoreticians in this debate. I am eager to move my analysis and understanding in this area forward, and I would be hugely appreciative of future discussions on this and other areas of theory with you and other comrades.
Steve Colborn,You did actually write it. That is the argument you were making. Sorry if that is inconvenient for you.
Steve Colborn,What you appear to be doing is “trying to… show to people on the left, that Benn was not the affable friend of the workers they and he, seem to be purporting him to be” by taking actions by Labour in power for which the best you could claim for Benn was his guilt by virtue of collective cabinet responsibility. Okay, you can go down that road. I think it is intellectually and historically flawed; but okay, if that’s the argument you want to make, fine. What you actually write is that Benn is the equal of Thatcher, and you just can’t get there without making hopelessly sweeping generalizations that lose all intellectual force and coherence.This was the quickest instance I could locate of Benn’s vocal and public support for the strike taken from a speech he gave at the 1984 Militant conference at Wembley: “We meet together in the middle of a titanic and momentous struggle to defend basic trade union and democratic rights and civil liberties. For that is what the miners’ strike is all about.” He marched with miners, miners’ wives and spoke at about 300 gatherings and demonstrations, where he described Thatcher as a “brutal woman… trying to follows policies of barbarism.” His ire was also aimed at both the Labour Party and the TUC for not supporting a strike he felt could have been won.
Thanks for that alanjjohnstone. Indeed it was Benn who had piloted through parliament the legislation arming that constabulary. The instance referred to in The Times was a combination of ministerial ineptitude and civil service machinations. Benn was prevailed upon to use armed units to get liquid nitrogen across the picket line as the power plant was in danger of melt-down. Rather than checking with non-civil service sources, he swallowed what turned out to be a lie and sent in armed units. While your point is well made, he’s still not exactly Thatcher.As to Alex Woodrow, I’m afraid I really don’t know how to engage with such juvenile ranting from a comrade. You are entitled to your opinion, and to the tone in which you choose to express it; but I would urge you to grow up: red-faced invective is neither big nor clever. Passion is great, but without intellectual engagement you just come across as a little bit of a thug.
Steve Colborn,Could you tell me where in the public record I can find the documents that will tell me how Tony Benn set up the SPG while he was Postmaster General; or how he used the SPG to snatch strikers while he was Secretary of State for Industry or Energy? I would think not. However, you would be able to find documents in the public record showing Thatcher ordering her ministers to unleash the forces of the state on the miners; or of pursuing economic policies, questionable even within the narrow confines of orthodox bourgeois economic theory, which she knew would create mass unemployment and probably very little else.Benn for you is the same as Thatcher because of the system they were both a part of. That is a perfectly legitimate position to take. It’s a rather blunt analysis, and not one particularly well designed to influence the opinions of others (something I thought we, as socialists, should be eager to do), but fair enough. However, making Benn the personification of a particularly skewed and factually flawed history of the post-war Labour Party so that you can cite “evidence” of him being equal to Thatcher is either lazy or intellectually dishonest. By the way, your question about my political affiliations didn’t upset me at all. I just didn’t really see what relevance it bore to the subject of my post. I am an autonomist by inclination, and somebody struggling to find common ground between post-Marx Marxist theory and the history of working class practice by intellectual predilection.
Steve Colborn,The main crux, as you put it, of Alex Woodrow’s argument was that Obama is as bad as Hitler, and that Benn is as bad as Thatcher – they were his exact words. His post made no mention of whether any of them put the interests of the working class first. Had he made that argument he would have been on firm ground and I would have left his comment/argument alone.By the way, my post has been flagged as offensive. You are clearly more experienced on this site than I am, would you happen to know why that might be?Also, in view of my post, as you put it, which merely calls for a little intellectual engagment before sweeping statements are made, what do you think my political affiliations are? As your question rather implies you already have a view.
Alex Woodrow,Obama’s abject failure, even within the context of the bourgeois liberalism he embodied as a candidate, has been tragic; but to equate his presidency with Hitler’s dictatorship is either obscene or dumb. As to equating Benn with Thatcher on the basis of his role in the failure of the Wilson/Callaghan governments to defend “King Coal” versus her government’s (and her personal) desire to crush extra-parliamentary working class opposition through the use of paramilitary police operations and the promotion of mass unemployment, I hardly know where to begin, except to say that I do see an entirely consistent pattern to the views you have expressed.The Blair-Churchill one I’ll happily give you, at least from the perspective that neither of them, as human beings or as politicians, appear to have had any interest in the lives of the poor and the working class beyond the abilities of those groups to generate surplus value. I can’t really do much with your comments on Britain and Germany during the ‘30s except to note that your utopian-counterfactualism is a poor substitute for a genuine historical argument. This is a rather sad irony, as your passionate socialism makes you part of a broad movement which has been responsible for the creation of an awesome and powerful historiographical tradition. You appear to be operating, as I noted above, within an entirely consistent pattern of argument. Essentially, you appear to be an autonomist operating within an entirely black-and-white intellectual and moral framework; your view being that anybody who has ever held an elite position within the capitalist system is the same as any other individual who has ever held a similar position, and that their actions are entirely and perfectly equatable. I take some heart from John Holloway’s remarks that anti-capitalist opposition is “and must be polymorphous, polyvocal, polylogical, necessarily discordant”, but I fear that your current intellectually closed-off arguments are going to make for very sterile debates as you get older.
Alex Woodrow wrote:So dweenlander you are a reformist then?No, just capable of nuance. And if you are going to make the transition from being a socialist purely by instinct to being one by instinct and intellect, it is something you too will have to embrace.I genuinely admire you zeal, but you need to engage your critical faculties. I would suggest that you think about your post and either accept that your remarks were, at best, ill chosen, or explain how you have come to those determinations.
I’m sorry, and I know this post is off the topic as set, but Alex Woodrow, no. Just, no. I hope it is just your zeal getting the better of sound judgement, but “Obama is as bad as Hitler, Benn is as bad as Thatcher”? Take a breath and get a grip of yourself. There is no meaningful comparison to be made between Obama and Hitler or Benn and Thatcher, and if you believe there is I suggest you start a thread on these topics, cite your evidence and we can debate. We shouldn’t have to, because I always hoped such judgments were the exclusive preserve of SWP undergrads, but we can.
I followed this thread to see how long it would take Hrothgar to get down to a variant of the old "I wouldn't want my kids playing with…" position – several posts more than I thought, as it turned out. But one thing I have always been able to rely on with racists: in the end, dull predictability.
I would recommend jumping straight in… but with the aid of some well-chosen water wings.Capital Vol. 1 is very long, dull as dishwater in parts, but is one of the most rewarding books I have ever read. The water wings come in the form of David Harvey’s excellent Companion to Marx’s Capital (the companion to Vol. 2 comes out in September) and his free online lectures which cover the same ground. In addition I would recommend Michael Heinrich’s An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital – which focuses largely on Vol. 1 and contains some marvellous stuff on the labour theory of value.
