IWCA - playground lefties

[cockneyrebel]

I don't want to get into this whole debate but just one question. Given that the IWCA know there will be certain reactions to the use of the word swamp, including the kinda reactions on here then what are the positive reasons for using it? Surely it just detracts from the message trying to be put across? Criticisms of the divisive and anti-working class nature of liberal multiculturalism can easily be made without using the word swamp.

Now granted as louis mac has said language is not the be all and end all by any means, but why not avoid all this kinda thing by not using the word, it's not like it adds anything much to the article.

 

[Sue]

Sue, why are you exasperated?

Not exasperated, just a sense of deja vu...

 

[tarannau]

Exactly. And with it appearing in both the headline and sign off of that article, it's clumsy, emotive and unnecessary. I'd add calculating as well, but I suspect it's more little more careless that that.

 

[if6were9]

Lastly: I wouldn't be too scared of words. I used to be (being a student in a department of cultural and community studies in the late 80s early 90s it was a bit hard to avoid!), but increasingly it seems to me that we have moved a long way from the late 20th century concern with the determining effects of language.

Maybe because this is wrong.

Concern with the determining effects of language is not a late 20th century phenomenon, the effectiveness of Powell's rhetoric is partly the result of having studied Aristotle under A.E. Housman.

IWCA wanted to come on to a bulletin board and argue for the validity of their whole, rather academic, polemic - seem exasperated, as is often the case that people have picked up on the 'wrong' bits and taken bits 'out of context.'

Unfortunately this is the way language and polemic, poliitical polemic, works, always has.

When Powell made the 1968 'rivers of blood' speech he cleverly ( and I really, genuinely encourage IWCA to read it properly - because its, formally, a small masterpiece of rhetoric ) he consciously mixed his high style Oxbridge classical tropes with a letter to the Wolverhampton Post to the rhetorical flourish of the "tiber flowing with blood" at the end.

When someone constructs something like that you know what will stick in the mind and becoming, strictly speaking, ideological ( if we understand the definition of "ideology" as ideas as levers, working on and changing the material conditions out of which they seem to be generated )

Powell knew he was constructing something which seemed to both have an internal coherence and be rousing and populist as something like a speech out of Henry V, something, that a Gary Bushell might get misty eyed about as "encaspulating" bully beef England while staying inside his "working class roots."

If Louis Macnice went to CCCS in the 80s he should have read Stuart Hall on Powellism and should be less naive and dismissive of ideology. If the IWCA want to fire up working class voters to defend their class interests they should be more dismissive of wordy and "impotent" ( butchersapron ) sociological verbage and more alive, like Powell, Shakespeare and ( in his dreams ) Gary Bushell to the suppleness and beauty of the English language as an agent of ideological change.

( OK, I know I'll get flacked down So Ill fuck off the thread But have a look at what you're writing and saying. It has more effect than you think. )

 

[butchersapron]

I don't want to get into this whole debate but just one question. Given that the IWCA know there will be certain reactions to the use of the word swamp, including the kinda reactions on here then what are the positive reasons for using it? Surely it just detracts from the message trying to be put across? Criticisms of the divisive and anti-working class nature of liberal multiculturalism can easily be made without using the word swamp.

Now granted as louis mac has said language is not the be all and end all by any means, but why not avoid all this kinda thing by not using the word, it's not like it adds anything much to the article.

Let's try this another way then - why do you think the word was used in the article?

 

[Sue]

And also the fact you say stupid things that you don't like people picking you up on?

What's the 'absolute' opposite of racism again? Here's a tip; it ain't criticising segregation? It's the unapologetic, careless nature of your hyperbolic, inaccurate nonsense that I object to.

Oh dear, you do sound upset. When I say life is too short... This has been done to death on loads of other threads and I'm not sure there's much to be gained by going through it all again, especially (as I said upthread before I got dragged back into this) when people far more articulate than me have tried and failed to get these points across -- generally it must be said to people who don't want to 'get' the points that are being made.

As to my 'hyperbolic, inaccurate nonsense' -- I'm sorry you're offended. Maybe you should re-read Louis Mac's post with an open mind. You'll understand though why I feel offended when people imply I'm a racist.

Anyway, on that note...

 

[tarannau]

The only thing I'm vaguely 'upset' about is the foolish tone of this article, the fact that certain IWCA favouring posters keep mentioning it and keep denying any reason why it may raise hackles.

And why should it be necessary for someone to keep explaining the points. Can't you just write a decent, convincing and compelling argument in the first place? Isn't effective communication vital if the IWCA are to break out of the little infighting circle of left-leaning politicos? Love the way you imply that it's people not wanting to 'get' the points rather than admitting any culpability or contribution to this saga btw. Nice...

And who's implied you're a racist? And where? Is this another BA style strawman and inaccuracy?

 

[LLETSA]

No, but your paucity of argument and unapologetic, careless use of language suggests that I'd be sadly disappointed in more arguments on the IWCA website. I've certainly been disappointed in the vast majority of the articles I've read on there so far, and with the unapologetic, blinkered defences of them by some of the IWCA-favouring posters on this board.

It's probably fortunate for all concerned that articles on the IWCA site are not aimed, primarily, at people like you and the other astute critics of their strategy in this thread.

 

[LLETSA]

An amusing anecdote that proves my point exactly. You say 'some fascists'...how many students are on your campus? 5,000 ? 10, 000??more???

says it all really about the state of you that a few nazi dolts feel confident enough to come into your domain and do something so deliberatly provocative

perhaps if you had actually done something rather than "discuss race relations" these AFA types you are so disparaging of may not have felt a need to intrude onto your campus in the first place, no?

Don't go thinking that this actually happened.

 

[cockneyrebel]

Fair play to the post above that LLETSA quotes, missed that earlier.

Let's try this another way then - why do you think the word was used in the article?

I don't know, I don't suppose there is any significant reason (certainly don't think it was for any racist reason and I hope no-one else is implying that). All I'm saying is that I don't think it added anything to the article and if anything took away from it because it's an emotive word and you end up with all this kinda thing.

Do you think it added anything to the article?

 

[butchersapron]

Fair play to the post above that LLETSA quotes, missed that earlier.


I don't know, I don't suppose there is any significant reason (certainly don't think it was for any racist reason and I hope no-one else is implying that). All I'm saying is that I don't think it added anything to the article and if anything took away from it because it's an emotive word and you end up with all this kinda thing.

Do you think it added anything to the article?

Have you read it?

It's an expansion on or a reply to an article by a muslim writer about the existence and political function of what he himself termed 'the swamp' - how do you suggest they disscuss this in any detail without mentioning the authors central idea?

 

[poster342002]

I must admit, I do think they could have avoided the term "swamp" (with all it's unfortunate associations and connotations), as instead of discussing the "meat" of the article, too much of the debate is focussing on one word.

 

[tarannau]

But the meat of the article is pretty poor too if you ask me. No stats, a lot of conjecture and taking the most extreme manifestation of multiculturalism from one culture (which I'd strongly argue is to do with fundamentalist religion instead) to try and argue against the wider idea. It's unbalanced, ridiculously simplistic and clearly designed to lead the reader to think in a certain way

I think it's a pretty lousy and reductive piece of writing all in all, complete with an unpleasant, emotive headline and sign off. It's a mystery why people keep linking to it as if it has merit.

 

[liberty123]

Hey 'Liberty Boy'-you're still around!

In fairness the "aging" anti-fascist only said that these fascists had invaded the union bar and wrote swastikas on the chalk board used by the dart players. We have only his word on that. He was very keen- this being 1992 and the BNP had scored some electoral vote in london in that year's general election, that we smash the party while "they were still small". Arguably he was just trying to drum up militant anti-fascism. At that point I knew nothing about leftwing factions and to me AFA and the socialist worker " smash the BNP by all means necessary" were one and the same. I only realise in retrospect the paradox of AFA fly posting the student bogs with invocations for students to inform them of where "fascists" lived so they could go and give a good kicking. I mean I thought AFA were supposed to have no time for student campuses!

Anyway me being a poncey theory boy student
at the time I did- having noticed these pleasant posters while having my pee, raise the issue, when i was back with my friends in the bar of what specifically constituted giving someone a good "kicking". Does it mean you or just give them a few slaps and lecture them on how they should better perceive britain's rapid transition to a multi-racial society and see rather its postive advantages and effects on the native population, or do you just batter the "fascist" with iron bars and forsake any cogent debate...or what? Do you knock them unconscious and then continue to batter them while they're on the ground or do oyu break their ribs or knock their teeth out or what? What I'm getting at, is when do you actually decide they've taken sufficient punishment for their dessension ...?

 

[audiotech]

All credit to John Stonehouse for having had the insight to perceive that, and the courage to say it.[/I]

The very same "courageous" Labour MP, John Stonehouse, who faked his own death and attempted to disappear in Australia.

 

[cockneyrebel]

It's an expansion on or a reply to an article by a muslim writer about the existence and political function of what he himself termed 'the swamp' - how do you suggest they disscuss this in any detail without mentioning the authors central idea?

Yeah I have read it! I get the above, but don't see that just because a muslim writer (to be honest I couldn't care whether the original writer was muslim or not) used the word swamp that doesn't mean the IWCA then has to. It didn't add anything to the article and if anything takes away from the point they're trying to make. Historically it is obviously a very loaded term.

Can everyone just ignore liberty 123, it's obvious what he/she is about.

 

[Divisive Cotton]

Can everyone just ignore liberty 123, it's obvious what he/she is about.

What do you think Liberty123 is "about" cockney?

 

[cockneyrebel]

There were lots of ethnic students from africa and elsewhere who were only to happy to discuss race relations in britain with open minded native students

Well if that's not the sentence of either a fascist troll or someone on a general wind up then I'm not sure what it.

 

[liberty123]

Well if that's not the sentence of either a fascist troll or someone on a general wind up then I'm not sure what it.

No it's just the sentence of honesty. I know political sites on the web of either left or right can't deal with that concept. That is just testiment to the shitness of the web when it comes to political debate- fit in with our box or you're barred at ISP.

 

[liberty123]

Yeah I have read it! I get the above, but don't see that just because a muslim writer (to be honest I couldn't care whether the original writer was muslim or not) used the word swamp that doesn't mean the IWCA then has to. It didn't add anything to the article and if anything takes away from the point they're trying to make. Historically it is obviously a very loaded term.

Can everyone just ignore liberty 123, it's obvious what he/she is about.

Why do you ignore someone that is relating to you nothing more than an event of experience in circa 1992. What the the hell more honesty do you want?

It's not obvious what I'm about because even i don't know.

 

[Bodmass]

I thought people might be interested to know that the IWCA and Greens are getting on a lot better these days - co sponsoring motions to Council and the like. Which I think is positive and constructive.

Hi Matt

Just out of interest, do IWCA and Greens stand against each other in elections?

 

[Fisher_Gate]

Hi Matt

Just out of interest, do IWCA and Greens stand against each other in elections?

Greens contest every ward in Oxford, so they stand against IWCA (and Respect). Greens also stood against IWCA in Oxford East in the General Election 2005 and against Socialist Alliance in 2001.

Since the Greens were first on the electoral scene in Oxford, I suppose it is reasonable to say that it is IWCA and Respect/Socialist Alliance who are standing against them.

Oxford was one of the first places the Green Party ever stood - Antony Cheke stood for the "Oxford Ecology Movement" in the 1979 general election for Oxford, with a respectable vote of 887, though Tory John Patten narrowly defeated Labour by 1,497 (hard to remember a time when Oxford had a Tory MP, but I must confess I did vote Labour rather than for Antony in that election as did most of the left, some of whom are now in the Green Party, eg County Council group leader Larry Sanders). The "Oxford Ecology Movement" was really the Oxford Branch of the Ecology Party and they started contesting local elections during the 1980s and in due course became the Green Party and established a substantial base when Labour swung to the right after the 1990s.

Standing in every ward in local government areas where they have established a base, appears to be a Green Party de facto policy and they seem most unwilling to stand down when another left wing alternative want to stand or are in a better position. The worry is that the reason that they stand everywhere is to appear more like a conventional party than for any tactical electoral reasons or willingness to work with other forces electorally. They argue it is giving Green voters the right to vote for them, but since they don't have a monopoly on green policies and given the first past the post system, it has the danger of holding back advancing positions they support and letting the mainstream parties in when they might be seriously challenged.

 

[The Black Hand]

Maybe because this is wrong.

Concern with the determining effects of language is not a late 20th century phenomenon, the effectiveness of Powell's rhetoric is partly the result of having studied Aristotle under A.E. Housman.

IWCA wanted to come on to a bulletin board and argue for the validity of their whole, rather academic, polemic - seem exasperated, as is often the case that people have picked up on the 'wrong' bits and taken bits 'out of context.'

Unfortunately this is the way language and polemic, poliitical polemic, works, always has.

When Powell made the 1968 'rivers of blood' speech he cleverly ( and I really, genuinely encourage IWCA to read it properly - because its, formally, a small masterpiece of rhetoric ) he consciously mixed his high style Oxbridge classical tropes with a letter to the Wolverhampton Post to the rhetorical flourish of the "tiber flowing with blood" at the end.

When someone constructs something like that you know what will stick in the mind and becoming, strictly speaking, ideological ( if we understand the definition of "ideology" as ideas as levers, working on and changing the material conditions out of which they seem to be generated )

Powell knew he was constructing something which seemed to both have an internal coherence and be rousing and populist as something like a speech out of Henry V, something, that a Gary Bushell might get misty eyed about as "encaspulating" bully beef England while staying inside his "working class roots."

If Louis Macnice went to CCCS in the 80s he should have read Stuart Hall on Powellism and should be less naive and dismissive of ideology. If the IWCA want to fire up working class voters to defend their class interests they should be more dismissive of wordy and "impotent" ( butchersapron ) sociological verbage and more alive, like Powell, Shakespeare and ( in his dreams ) Gary Bushell to the suppleness and beauty of the English language as an agent of ideological change.

( OK, I know I'll get flacked down So Ill fuck off the thread But have a look at what you're writing and saying. It has more effect than you think. )

I'm gonna big up this post after the fact cos it is good, a lot better than some of the crap you read anyway.

 

[The39thStep]

Ir seems to me that the IWCA actually go out and ask people what they see the problems and work on what they can do about them rather than impose some revolutionary programme from the library of socialism or from the trestle table of anarchism.

 

[nino_savatte]

If Louis Macnice went to CCCS in the 80s he should have read Stuart Hall on Powellism and should be less naive and dismissive of ideology

He went to CCCS? That's a real surprise. It doesn't show, that's for sure.

 

[treelover]

Actually Stuart Hall has recanted on some of the stuff he used to lecture on at CCCS

 

[nino_savatte]

What? He's taken back what he wrote about cultures of resistance? How about identity? Encoding/decoding?

I doubt that.

 

[Louis MacNeice]

He went to CCCS? That's a real surprise. It doesn't show, that's for sure.

John Clarke, one time stalwart of CCCS, was the external examiner for my PhD (on the discursive construction of Madness and the potentials for/limits to resistance afforded by three very different citizenships), which he described as one of only two PhDs he'd examined that he had actually enjoyed reading (and he's read a few). My thesis passed with only typographical corrections.

More seriously my position isn't to dismiss the determining effects of discursive, linguistic or ideological practices, but rather to take several steps back from the apparently ultra pervasive power these effects came to be afforded in certain quarters. Birmingham's CCCS, the OU's Social Policy Group (where Clarke went after Birmingham) and Sussex University's School of Cultural and Community Studies (where I was an undergraduate....coincidentally with Stuart Hall's daughter) all provided examples of this 'ultra' position.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice

 

[cockneyrebel]

John Clarke, one time stalwart of CCCS, was the external examiner for my PhD (on the discursive construction of Madness and the potentials for/limits to resistance afforded by three very different citizenships), which he described as one of only two PhDs he'd examined that he had actually enjoyed reading (and he's read a few). My thesis passed with only typographical corrections.

More seriously my position isn't to dismiss the determining effects of discursive, linguistic or ideological practices, but rather to take several steps back from the apparently ultra pervasive power these effects came to be afforded in certain quarters. Birmingham's CCCS, the OU's Social Policy Group (where Clarke went after Birmingham) and Sussex University's School of Cultural and Community Studies (where I was an undergraduate....coincidentally with Stuart Hall's daughter) all provided examples of this 'ultra' position.

 

[Nigel]

Greens contest every ward in Oxford, so they stand against IWCA (and Respect). Greens also stood against IWCA in Oxford East in the General Election 2005 and against Socialist Alliance in 2001.

Since the Greens were first on the electoral scene in Oxford, I suppose it is reasonable to say that it is IWCA and Respect/Socialist Alliance who are standing against them.

Oxford was one of the first places the Green Party ever stood - Antony Cheke stood for the "Oxford Ecology Movement" in the 1979 general election for Oxford, with a respectable vote of 887, though Tory John Patten narrowly defeated Labour by 1,497 (hard to remember a time when Oxford had a Tory MP, but I must confess I did vote Labour rather than for Antony in that election as did most of the left, some of whom are now in the Green Party, eg County Council group leader Larry Sanders). The "Oxford Ecology Movement" was really the Oxford Branch of the Ecology Party and they started contesting local elections during the 1980s and in due course became the Green Party and established a substantial base when Labour swung to the right after the 1990s.

Standing in every ward in local government areas where they have established a base, appears to be a Green Party de facto policy and they seem most unwilling to stand down when another left wing alternative want to stand or are in a better position. The worry is that the reason that they stand everywhere is to appear more like a conventional party than for any tactical electoral reasons or willingness to work with other forces electorally. They argue it is giving Green voters the right to vote for them, but since they don't have a monopoly on green policies and given the first past the post system, it has the danger of holding back advancing positions they support and letting the mainstream parties in when they might be seriously challenged.

On the issue surrounding GP tactics in Oxford, anything around the closure of social club and possbly East Oxford Community Centre as a whole. Possible conflicts of interest maybe, & policy with liasing with South Midlands Constabury.

While we're on Oxford, whats IWCA's 'official' policy on Piers School becoming an acadamy