8 ms·

Performative radicalism that freaks out wider society instead of slow steady progress has led to the near complete irrelevance of the left in the west, especial

Performative radicalism that freaks out wider society instead of slow steady progress has led to the near complete irrelevance of the left in the west, especially the anglosphere. I mean, UK Labor is a centrist pro-capital party now. It's over.

worik 1y ago
"Performative radicalism" is a problem left and right Look at UKIP, blaming the cluster fuck of the Brittish economy on immigrants, who are weak, other and easy to blame for damage caused by making taxpayers pay for banker's misfortune and Brexit I am in New Zealand and we have the same problems, on the left and the right.
- mhh__ 1y ago
  Given that UKIP don't really exist anymore as a major party may I gently contend that it may be slightly more complicated than you imagine
  - lostlogin 1y ago
    Reform: UKIP lite. The Russian money and dog whistles remain.
    - overboard2 1y ago
      How do you feel about WWI era Germans funding the Bolsheviks in Russia?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - cafard 1y ago
        Short-term or long-term?
      - reitzensteinm 1y ago
        It's too early to tell.
      - lostlogin 1y ago
        Short term it was effective. It backfired though.
        badpun 1y ago
        It got the Bolsheviks to take over, and one of their main goals on international stage was to estabilish Communism in Germany. They didn't get to it only because they were defeated by Poland in 1920, and you can't get to Germany without conquering Poland first. So, Germans funded a party that nearly started a war with their own country. That's a hell of a gamble.
        lostlogin 1y ago
        The story doesn’t end there though. After that, what the Bolsheviks created utterly destroyed Germany then occupied it for 40+ years.
  - worik 1y ago
    Pedant Quite obvious what I mean
    - mhh__ 1y ago
      Yes and you're wrong but I was being polite
  - stuaxo 1y ago
    Reform is continuation UKIP its fair enough for someone to confuse the two.
    - mhh__ 1y ago
      UKIP still exists, I reserve the right to judge someone who wants to comment but someone hasn't noticed this now almost decade old change
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 1y ago
Labour has been "Blairite" ("centrist pro-capital," or just say neoliberal) since the SDP sabotage and the endless, worthless reign of Kinnock. This happened at the same time the New Democrats were stomping the Rainbow Coalition into the ground to finalize the transformation of the US Democrats into the exact same thing. UK Labour has been a "centrist, pro-capital party" for probably your entire life (or at least most of it.) The only reason Corbyn even ended up in front is that a bunch of centrists nominated him as a joke candidate, and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party. Of course the membership voted for Corbyn, everybody else was garbage. Same reason why Trump won the Republican primary in the US - the Tea Party had forced the voting process to be democratic. Unlike the Democratic party, which doesn't even have a vaguely democratic process, culminating in them having absolutely no process in the last election. I still insist that if Sanders had run as a Republican in 2016, he would have been president.
- mhh__ 1y ago
  The last time Labour wasn't like this we had waiting lists to get a telephone!
  - FridayoLeary 1y ago
    To be fair that wasn't because it was so long ago, just all the telephone operators were on strike:)
  - halo 1y ago
    That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity. It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.
    - Lio 1y ago
      If the Tory government hadn’t reserved the market for cable TV exclusively for two US companies, NTL and Telewest, BT would have rolled out fibre to the home in 1990. I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests. At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.
watwut 1y ago
Sure fascism is getting some power, but not because of left radicalism. It got powerful because millionaire CEO sponsored them, due to them loving the idea of techno feudalism. And by being enabled by those who said "ignore them they are just trolls". And by support from Russia.
- wahnfrieden 1y ago
  If you say "loving the idea of network states" instead of "techno fuedalism" you'll get more upvotes
tbrownaw 1y ago
Or maybe something unrelated happened (business becoming more capital-intensive perhaps?), and everyone except the most radical moved on to other things?
mc32 1y ago
Naive idealism mixed with immaturity leads to these things. Wishing for things to be so doesn’t make them so. Someone somewhere has to work for things to happen. To me it feels like when a parasite finds a weak host. Neither will survive long. The relationship can be symbiotic but that requires effort as well as conscientiousness on both sides. The place was not running at break even but they wanted more despite that. They wouldn’t even accept cuts in staffing… They bled it to death with idealism.
- bruce511 1y ago
  Business is hard. It's hard enough to "start a bookshop". And while I admire folk who have a bigger vision, the whole thing rests on the business being successful. Given the right priorities, it can work. A business can be profitable, and also embody progressive principles. It can be both an income, and socially responsible. But most businesses fail. 90% or so don't survive 5 years. That's before adding externalities. So starting a business with goals orthogonal to successful business is twice as hard. I was struck by the demand by employees to be a collective. Thats an unusual request. It suggests that, even hired, that was floated as a path. It suggests the owner wanted employees to be "part of the family". So suddenly getting decisions from on high was jarring for them. Unionising is a strange response. (Even the union was surprised.) Frankly the writing was on the wall at that point. A more experienced business person would just have closed then and there. Obviously the employees thought that they could have succeeded had they just got the stock for free. I suspect not. They wanted more pay, would have had no incoming monthly investment, and would be short at least 1 worker (enough was likely doing a lot of work.) Doesn't sound like a solid business plan to me. So yes, idealism is fine, but it doesn't make the business work. And I agree, in this case it killed it. But frankly, starting a bookshop these days is a pretty doomed approach. A (good) coffee shop (with some books) may have had a chance.
analog31 1y ago
What I wonder is how this didn't also happen to the right.
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
  Having a set of beliefs tethered to reality probably. Also as a general principle the right/centre don't believe the job of the government is to interfere in every aspect of peoples lives. This at least limits their ability to reproduce the empty gestures and moral lecturing of the left.
  - rjbwork 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - nomdep 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - shortrounddev2 1y ago
        [flagged]
      - nomdep 1y ago
        That reminds me, yesterday a friend told me she believed the Trump assassination attempt was staged to make him look good: that the shooter had missed on purpose and the ear wound was fake. I mean… it’s not impossible. I just don’t think Trump is that smart, though.
        stogot 1y ago
        I’ve heard people making this up to. Yet their instagram and twitter is full of people praising assassinations, but then when they are attempted they claim “hoax”.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
regularization 1y ago
Not really. Don't know about what really happened here, but if a place is performative, and mostly unneeded and irrelevant, it tends to blow itself up, and then the problem clears itself away. Movements that stick around and achieve things have their vicissitudes as well, but they get through them.
easyThrowaway 1y ago
The extremely effective general strike that happened in Italy of a few days ago didn't start from academia, but dock workers in Genoa. Grumpy, robust, very left-wing dock workers. The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you. Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals. I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  AOC does not come from a working-class background. Her father was an architect and the family owned a house in Westchester.
  - easyThrowaway 1y ago
    But she worked as bartender[1] - which is one of those jobs that teaches you how "Fuck Around, Find Out" works in real life, very quickly. Again, it's not matter of social or economic status, but coming to understand extremely diverse social dynamics outside of the academic field. Both her and the dock workers were pretty effective in their causes because they have experienced first-hand how going for an half-assed or whimsical approach even in everyday politics bites you hard. [1]Also wikipedia says that her mother was a house cleaner and school bus driver?
    - _9ptr 1y ago
      Bartending does not give you a "working-class background"
    - 1y ago

worik 1y ago

"Performative radicalism" is a problem left and right Look at UKIP, blaming the cluster fuck of the Brittish economy on immigrants, who are weak, other and easy to blame for damage caused by making taxpayers pay for banker's misfortune and Brexit I am in New Zealand and we have the same problems, on the left and the right.

mhh__ 1y ago
Given that UKIP don't really exist anymore as a major party may I gently contend that it may be slightly more complicated than you imagine
- lostlogin 1y ago
  Reform: UKIP lite. The Russian money and dog whistles remain.
  - overboard2 1y ago
    How do you feel about WWI era Germans funding the Bolsheviks in Russia?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - cafard 1y ago
      Short-term or long-term?
    - reitzensteinm 1y ago
      It's too early to tell.
    - lostlogin 1y ago
      Short term it was effective. It backfired though.
      - badpun 1y ago
        It got the Bolsheviks to take over, and one of their main goals on international stage was to estabilish Communism in Germany. They didn't get to it only because they were defeated by Poland in 1920, and you can't get to Germany without conquering Poland first. So, Germans funded a party that nearly started a war with their own country. That's a hell of a gamble.
        lostlogin 1y ago
        The story doesn’t end there though. After that, what the Bolsheviks created utterly destroyed Germany then occupied it for 40+ years.
- worik 1y ago
  Pedant Quite obvious what I mean
  - mhh__ 1y ago
    Yes and you're wrong but I was being polite
- stuaxo 1y ago
  Reform is continuation UKIP its fair enough for someone to confuse the two.
  - mhh__ 1y ago
    UKIP still exists, I reserve the right to judge someone who wants to comment but someone hasn't noticed this now almost decade old change
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

pessimizer 1y ago

Labour has been "Blairite" ("centrist pro-capital," or just say neoliberal) since the SDP sabotage and the endless, worthless reign of Kinnock. This happened at the same time the New Democrats were stomping the Rainbow Coalition into the ground to finalize the transformation of the US Democrats into the exact same thing. UK Labour has been a "centrist, pro-capital party" for probably your entire life (or at least most of it.) The only reason Corbyn even ended up in front is that a bunch of centrists nominated him as a joke candidate, and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party. Of course the membership voted for Corbyn, everybody else was garbage. Same reason why Trump won the Republican primary in the US - the Tea Party had forced the voting process to be democratic. Unlike the Democratic party, which doesn't even have a vaguely democratic process, culminating in them having absolutely no process in the last election. I still insist that if Sanders had run as a Republican in 2016, he would have been president.

mhh__ 1y ago
The last time Labour wasn't like this we had waiting lists to get a telephone!
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
  To be fair that wasn't because it was so long ago, just all the telephone operators were on strike:)
- halo 1y ago
  That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity. It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.
  - Lio 1y ago
    If the Tory government hadn’t reserved the market for cable TV exclusively for two US companies, NTL and Telewest, BT would have rolled out fibre to the home in 1990. I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests. At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.

watwut 1y ago

Sure fascism is getting some power, but not because of left radicalism. It got powerful because millionaire CEO sponsored them, due to them loving the idea of techno feudalism. And by being enabled by those who said "ignore them they are just trolls". And by support from Russia.

wahnfrieden 1y ago
If you say "loving the idea of network states" instead of "techno fuedalism" you'll get more upvotes

tbrownaw 1y ago

Or maybe something unrelated happened (business becoming more capital-intensive perhaps?), and everyone except the most radical moved on to other things?

mc32 1y ago

Naive idealism mixed with immaturity leads to these things. Wishing for things to be so doesn’t make them so. Someone somewhere has to work for things to happen. To me it feels like when a parasite finds a weak host. Neither will survive long. The relationship can be symbiotic but that requires effort as well as conscientiousness on both sides. The place was not running at break even but they wanted more despite that. They wouldn’t even accept cuts in staffing… They bled it to death with idealism.

bruce511 1y ago
Business is hard. It's hard enough to "start a bookshop". And while I admire folk who have a bigger vision, the whole thing rests on the business being successful. Given the right priorities, it can work. A business can be profitable, and also embody progressive principles. It can be both an income, and socially responsible. But most businesses fail. 90% or so don't survive 5 years. That's before adding externalities. So starting a business with goals orthogonal to successful business is twice as hard. I was struck by the demand by employees to be a collective. Thats an unusual request. It suggests that, even hired, that was floated as a path. It suggests the owner wanted employees to be "part of the family". So suddenly getting decisions from on high was jarring for them. Unionising is a strange response. (Even the union was surprised.) Frankly the writing was on the wall at that point. A more experienced business person would just have closed then and there. Obviously the employees thought that they could have succeeded had they just got the stock for free. I suspect not. They wanted more pay, would have had no incoming monthly investment, and would be short at least 1 worker (enough was likely doing a lot of work.) Doesn't sound like a solid business plan to me. So yes, idealism is fine, but it doesn't make the business work. And I agree, in this case it killed it. But frankly, starting a bookshop these days is a pretty doomed approach. A (good) coffee shop (with some books) may have had a chance.

analog31 1y ago

What I wonder is how this didn't also happen to the right.

FridayoLeary 1y ago
Having a set of beliefs tethered to reality probably. Also as a general principle the right/centre don't believe the job of the government is to interfere in every aspect of peoples lives. This at least limits their ability to reproduce the empty gestures and moral lecturing of the left.
- rjbwork 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - nomdep 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - shortrounddev2 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - nomdep 1y ago
      That reminds me, yesterday a friend told me she believed the Trump assassination attempt was staged to make him look good: that the shooter had missed on purpose and the ear wound was fake. I mean… it’s not impossible. I just don’t think Trump is that smart, though.
      - stogot 1y ago
        I’ve heard people making this up to. Yet their instagram and twitter is full of people praising assassinations, but then when they are attempted they claim “hoax”.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

regularization 1y ago

Not really. Don't know about what really happened here, but if a place is performative, and mostly unneeded and irrelevant, it tends to blow itself up, and then the problem clears itself away. Movements that stick around and achieve things have their vicissitudes as well, but they get through them.

easyThrowaway 1y ago

The extremely effective general strike that happened in Italy of a few days ago didn't start from academia, but dock workers in Genoa. Grumpy, robust, very left-wing dock workers. The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you. Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals. I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.

School-Cotton 1y ago
AOC does not come from a working-class background. Her father was an architect and the family owned a house in Westchester.
- easyThrowaway 1y ago
  But she worked as bartender[1] - which is one of those jobs that teaches you how "Fuck Around, Find Out" works in real life, very quickly. Again, it's not matter of social or economic status, but coming to understand extremely diverse social dynamics outside of the academic field. Both her and the dock workers were pretty effective in their causes because they have experienced first-hand how going for an half-assed or whimsical approach even in everyday politics bites you hard. [1]Also wikipedia says that her mother was a house cleaner and school bus driver?
  - _9ptr 1y ago
    Bartending does not give you a "working-class background"
  - 1y ago