In a world of echo-chamber opinion-forming, it's always important to keep up with What The Other Side Thinks. My go-to for what is sometimes called the 'Movement Left'** is Novara Media, a fairly businesslike collective containing its rag-bag share of humourless, mulish identitarians but also some very intelligent people, occasionally with sufficient of an empirical bent to pay attention when it really becomes obvious they are barking up the wrong tree, doctrine or no doctrine. The recent US election can have that effect on people.
By way of an end-of-year review, their three leading lights (Bastani, Sarkar & Walker) put out this video which I commend to you. Note in particular the second main section - "Did 'Woke' Die in 2024?" - starting around 25 minutes in. It contains some pretty trenchant critique of a lot of stuff their general political tendencies would have strongly inclined them towards fairly unreflectively in the past, as they pretty much admit. Marks the (grudging) acknowledgement of a lost battle in the culture war, I'd say.
The best critiques of those baleful leftist manifestations often come from the more intelligent & reflective corners of the Left itself. I can also suggest Brian Leiter and Adolph Reed (both American) for more of the same. Self-professed Marxists all - but smart with it, and contemptuous of what richly deserves contempt. (Kathleen Stock ditto, but I'm not sure she's a Marxist.)
ND
UPDATE - here's an infinitely more verbose capitulation from the same stable. Much less honest (1,000 fancy words on "well, of course I never fell for it"), and much funnier, albeit unintentional. But boy, some of these lefties can't half go on. You'll pick up some new words, too - if you can struggle through it.
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** Roughly speaking, comfortably elitist middle-class leftists outside of regular party politics, mostly youngish & protest-oriented, generally woke and prone to 'language-/ thought-policing' - and thus also inevitably further left than anything as boring as Labour itself.
8 comments:
Thanks Nick, a bit late but one of the most valuable Christmas pressies…
Ms. Stock. When still in situ at Sussex, I suggested that the only way to exorcise woke from Academia was to defund any institution that pushed it. In those days, it was pretty much just the Humanities, but now of course STEM as well. They have been thorough, that's for sure.
No, no, she replied. Academia will be able to fix it.
Asked her again after they cancelled her.
No response.
A gotcha, I'd have to say.
Pull the funding plug and voila!
When I was a fresher I found that Marxists came in two types. (i) People dim enough to accept Marx's axioms but clever enough to argue logically from them. (ii) Just plain dim and nasty, incapable of grasping anything much. I remember particularly a chap who sang the praises of Brazil developing an iron and steel industry and then complained "But what do you think they do with the steel? They make cars, the bastards."
I must say, however, that the Marxists were collectively less dim than the stupidest group of all, the republicans, none of whom seemed to have any notion of what a coherent argument might look like.
Jolly educational, going to university - you meet the oddest types.
OT, but I was wondering (looking at the Musk "let-em-all-in" immigration posts)
a) if Trump/Musk are about to pull a Boris/Rishi on immigration - lots of H1Bs and a green card stapled to every foreign US graduation certificate
b) if Musk's price for supporting Farage is something similar here.
I keep thinking of the Pakistani guy who did a "degree in project management" and found out people weren't rushing to employ him, so worked as a security guard.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13756869/hero-security-guard-leicester-square-stabbing-migrant.html
I commend you ND for watching & reading this dross. I gave up as it provided me no insight outside of what I already knew - Leftists are the ruin of the world.
Slogged through the essay linked in the update. I am almost impressed by the intellectual gymnastics on display.
Given my own support for privatisation and the shambles of Thames Water, I can understand the urge not to face up to downsides of our own positions.
All part of the service, Matt
HNY!
Thank you for the link to the video. Very interesting discussion, and hugely encouraging that the intelligent left is thinking this way.
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