The Importance of Professor Priyamvada Gopal

by Brian Bamford

EDITORIAL NOTE:

COLONIALISM in my experience corrupts both the colonialists and the people being colonised. I recognised that while working in Gibraltar. Hence it should not surprise us that someone like Prof. Priyamvada Gopal should herself show signs demanding entitlement and making claims to privillege about her status at Cambridge. She is clearly a creature of the caste system* which is a 'defining feature of Hinduism' which is part of her own culture.

'"Untouchability" and Segregation

* 'India's caste system is perhaps the world's longest surviving social hierarchy. A defining feature of Hinduism, caste encompasses a complex ordering of social groups on the basis of ritual purity. A person is considered a member of the caste into which he or she is born and remains within that caste until death, although the particular ranking of that caste may vary among regions and over time. Differences in status are traditionally justified by the religious doctrine of karma, a belief that one's place in life is determined by one's deeds in previous lifetimes.

COLOUR COMPLEXIONS ON THE INDIAN SUB-CONTINENT

ON June 25th, this year, the CAMBRIDGE VARSITY website announced that the controversal academic Priyamvada Gopal, Churchill fellow and academic in postcolonial literature in the English Faculty, had been promoted to full Professorial Chair despite a petition on change.org which called for her removal from the University. This comes following news that she was briefly suspended from Facebook and Twitter after sharing some of the messages of the hateful abuse she has received by a campaign launched on a 4chan forum encouraging users to contact the University to call for Gopal’s removal.

The Cambridge University professor Gopal had taken to Twitter to write: 'I'll say it again. White Lives Don't Matter. As white lives'

She argues that whiteness is primarily a cultural category, not a biological one, and is useful for explaining how western societies work in terms of how society is structured, and how such structures determine power relations between dominant and non-dominant groups.

These remarks came as India's multibillion-dollar skin lightening industry is under fire as Indians seek whiter shade of pale, and India's Bollywood actor, Abhay Deol, said: 'You have to stop buying into the idea that a particular shade is better than others,' Abhay Deol, an actor famous for playing offbeat roles, said on his Facebook page.

Deol had lambasted his Bollywood peers - including Shah Rukh Khan, John Abraham, Shahid Kapur and Deepika Padukone - for endorsing so-called fairness brands and urged them to stop using their popularity to peddle products he called racist.

Meanwhile in India, where Gopal received a BA from the University of Delhi in 1989 and an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, controversy around 'fairness' products has raged for decades, with darker skin shades variously described as "dusky" and "wheatish", and lighter tones sold as more attractive.

The market - which includes creams, face washes, deodorants, even a vaginal whitener - is estimated to be worth about 270 billion rupees ($4 billion) and is growing at a steady clip.

The World Health Organization banned the active ingredients – hydroquinone and mercury – from unregulated skin products.

Research firm Centre for Science and Environment said in a 2014 study that nearly half the creams it tested in India contained mercury, which is "completely illegal and unlawful".

CASTE at the ROOT of RACISM

SOME activists link the bias to an entrenched caste system, where higher-caste Brahmins generally have lighter skin.

In a country where arranged marriages are still the norm, matrimonial ads consistently describe a woman's complexion, and dark-skinned women often pay a higher dowry, activists say.

Bullying and taunting of dark-skinned girls and women is common, while dark-skinned actors complain of fewer roles.

Advertising campaigns for various brands have typically depicted women - and increasingly men - as winning better jobs and partners, thanks to the fairness creams.

But Kiran Khalap, co-founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll in Mumbai, said the adverts were not to blame.

"Our obsession with fair skin didn't come from HUL or Emami: it's a deep-seated cultural bias that equates being fair with being superior," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

So when we examine Prof Gopal's background on the Indian sub-continent we can perhaps better understand her anxieties about 'blackness', 'whiteness' and colour in general which may make her a bit touchy

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Cambridge University dumps proposal it be 'respectful' of all views

THE GUARDIAN Ben Quinn @BenQuinn75

Wed 9 Dec 2020 19.26 GMT

Proposals requiring Cambridge University staff and students to be “respectful” of differing views under a freedom of speech policy have been overwhelmingly rejected in a vote by its governing body.

The policy will instead emphasise “tolerance” of differing views after an amendment put forward by those concerned about the impact on academic freedom was carried by a landslide majority (86.9%).

Cambridge alumni including Stephen Fry had been among those who had opposed elements of the new policy, which the actor and writer had described as “muddled”.

Visitors to the university would also have been asked to be “respectful” of the views and “diverse identities” of others.

It was subject to a ballot in recent weeks among members of the institution’s Regent House, its official governing body, which is largely comprised of academic and senior administrative staff.

There are also implications for the issue of “no platforming” as a result of the support for three amendments, elements of which stress that those invited to speak at the university “must not be stopped from doing so” as long as they remain within the law.

The vote was welcomed by Cambridge’s vice-chancellor, Prof Stephen Toope, as “an emphatic reaffirmation of free speech in our university”.

He added: “Freedom of speech is a right that sits at the heart of the university. This statement is a robust defence of that right.

“The university will always be a place where anyone can express new ideas and controversial or unpopular opinions, and where those views can be robustly challenged. The statement also makes it clear that it is unacceptable to censor, or disinvite, speakers whose views are lawful but may be seen as controversial.

“Rigorous debate is fundamental to the pursuit of academic excellence and the University of Cambridge will always be a place where freedom of speech is not only protected, but strongly encouraged.”

The new policy reads: “In exercising their right to freedom of expression, the university expects its staff, students and visitors to be tolerant of the differing opinions of others, in line with the university’s core value of freedom of expression.

“The university also expects its staff, students and visitors to be tolerant of the diverse identities of others, in line with the university’s core value of freedom from discrimination.”

However, other academics at the university have expressed concern about the changes to the original policy statement, while the Cambridge branch of the Universities and Colleges Union has said that it and the amendments are not “fit for purpose”.

Prof Priyamvada Gopal, an academic at the university, tweeted: “There is no ‘free speech row’ at Cambridge. There is the university scrambling to follow government orders based on false moral panic, there are the poor students trying to make it less draconian, & there are the Freeze Peach brigade trying to stop the right to protest.”

The controversy has played out against the backdrop of increasingly fraught debates on campuses and elsewhere about the limits of freedom of speech.

Students at Cambridge University called earlier this year for a porter at Clare College to be suspended from his job after he resigned from his role on the city council in protest over a motion in support of transgender rights.

Opposition to the original freedom of speech policy proposal was spearheaded by a number of people at the university including Dr Arif Ahmed, who is a reader in philosophy there.

He told The Times last week: “A lot of people feel as if they’re living in an atmosphere where there are witch-hunts going on, a sort of academic version of Salem in the 17th century or the McCarthyite era.”

• This article was amended on 10 December 2020 to add Gopal’s title as a professor, to give Dr Ahmed his correct honorific and to describe him as a reader in philosophy rather than a philosophy professor.

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An academic version of McCarthyism?

by Brian Bamford

A CAMBRIDGE philosophy professor has branded as 'woke' the constraints on freedom of speech in higher education an academic version of McCarthyism.

Dr Arif Ahmed has spoken out as his university is being balloted today to approve a policy requiring students, staff and visitors to be 'respectful' of different views and opinions.

Last Saturday in the Financial Times, Camillia Cavendish wrote a piece entitled 'Mandating "respect" for other people's opinions hurts free speech' in which she said: 'The university's governing body, the Regent House, is voting... on a new code of conduct which demands that staff, students and visitors be "respectful" of different opinions [and that this] harmless-soundng clause is meant to support free speech.' Ms Cavendish claims: '"Respect" is a soft-edged word that means different things to different people', and it 'can easily morph into a prohibition against giving offence.' Arif Ahmed who is leading the academic rebellion against the 'Respect' code said: 'There's no limit to how far this can go'! adding: 'Did the Charlie Hebro catoons respect Islam?' or 'Was [18th-century Scottish philosopher]David Hulme a respecter of religion?' He concluded: 'Who decides? A word like "respect" is worse than useless.' And the result would end with people sliding 'all the way from civility to a kind of deference which would refrain from attacking Islam, Christianity or Judaism.' Ms. Cavendish argues: 'The Cambrige row shows how hard it is for institutions to keep their footing in this new world of outrage. Twenty years ago, English universities felt little responsibility towards students beyond the lecture hall. Today, they are beset by activism for censorship from the political left and right.'

As a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Mr Ahmed is leading the Campaign for Cambridge Freedom, which wants to amend the policy to require differences of opinion to be 'tolerated' rather than 'respected'.

'A lot of people feel as if they're living in an atmosphere where there are witch-hunts going on, a sort of academic version of Salem in the 17th century or the McCarthyite era,' he told The Times.

Arguing that the notion of 'respect' is 'dangerously vague and open-ended', he urged his fellow academics to back his amendment requiring 'tolerance' as they vote to approve the new policy.

'The more long-term danger is that this language will be weaponised so that we will be subject to discipline if we try to invite someone who's disrespectful or if we ourselves speak in a disrespectful way,' he said.

'If a view is idiotic we should be quite free to say a view is idiotic. If a religious or political or other position is a tissue of bigotry and superstition, then we should be free to say those things without fear that somebody would find it disrespectful.'

Cambridge Professor, Ross Anderson told Ms. Cavendish: 'If the respect agenda becomes entrenched in disiplinary and grievance proceedures, and arguements which used used to be sorted out by people saying "grow up and stop being silly" fall to intervention by HR busybodies, that will mean the end of academic academic tenure as we know it".'

Ms. Cavendish says though such claims may be 'exaggerated' the Cabridge 'fudge' is dangerous, and she asks 'Do we really want to risk returning to a world where enquiring minds huddle together in secret, debating bann4ed works and wondering if they dare say what they believe?'

Let's see what happens in the Cambridge vote later today.

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'Wild West' Approach to Apprenticeships in the UK

by Brian Bamford

CAMILLA CAVENDISH writing in the FT on 4th, October, wrote: 'The gulf between academic and vocational education in the UK has depressed productivity and exacerbated skills shortages.' She added that: 'Many of the largest shortages reported by employers are in sectors such as construction, health and IT.'

Meanwhile, in the UK only one one in ten adults hold a higher technical qualification as their highest qualification compared to about one in five in Germany and one in three in Canada. Camilla Cavendish estimates that 'as much as 20% of the UK workforce will be significantly under-skilled for their jobs by 2030'.

In this country the government wants to bridge the gap, and according to Ms. Cavendish 'create a "world-class, German-style further education system".' The government has promised a 'lifetime skills guarantee' with the offer of free further education courses to adults without A-levels or the equivalent. Yet Ms. Cavendish insists 'The challenge [for the government] is to make them good enough ans to offer people who didn't enjoy school something better the second time around' and she says: 'Until now, the UK has not done this well.' And she argues that in the 'UK ministers must fight their urge to centralise'.

The trouble is that anyone in the UK can set-up as a joiner without any qualifications. Yet in Germany you can't be a carpenter or plumber unless you have mastered a trade doing an apprenticeship of about three years, often followed by evening classes. The handwerk curriculum is also guided by master craftsmen who know the job, and not what Ms. Cavendish calls: 'pseudo-academics'.

She viciously compares the two systems saying: 'In contrast, vocational training in the UK is a Wild West. There are a bewildering array of more than 12,000 different qualifications. Students are often jammed through courses in which "competition", not actual learning, commands the fee. Sub-contracting is rife, making it hard to monitor quality. There are some excellent courses; but also mis-selling. Good further education courses have also been denuded of funding with their teachers paid less, on average, than their counterparts in schools.'

It may be argued that the German guild system is a bit 'inflexible', and it could opperate a bit like closed shops. Also in the rapidly shifting situation even a gold standard apprenticeship may not last a lifetime. Yet surely it offers a better set-up than we've got now with all kinds of chancers and scallwags passing themselves-off as tradesmen in this country. This decline in workmanship was brought forward with Margaret Thatcher's attack on the trade unions in the 1970s and 80s, and the replacement of the one-to-one traing on the job with the 'pseudo-academics' and the prioritisation of classroom learning.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was clearly aware of this vast gulf between practical know-how on the job and speculative classroom efforts to solve problems when he remarked to his student Maurice Drury: 'You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go out to a "flick" every night.'

Based on his own building site experiences and observations, Wittgenstein noted the language games employed by building workers giving orders and obeying them in building a wall: such as for example shouting 'brick' and not 'bring me a brick' and so forth to his mate (see his Philosophical Investigations). Classroom learning creates a completely different language game which somehow lacks the quality of the practical situation. In Wittgenstein's terms they are two distinct 'forms of life' and two different 'language games'.

The snobbery of the middle class will naturally continue to prefer the full time graduate degree as the ideal. But it will still not help when we want to get the roof fixed.

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A Gradely Book for Gradely Folk!

BOOK REVIEW by Christopher Draper

FOR anyone who imagines Sir Keir Starmer, a sharp-suited, Cambridge-educated lawyer and Knight of the Realm, is the embodiment of Socialism, Paul Salveson’s newly published evocation of the writings and cultural milieu of a pioneering Bolton socialist will prove a revelation.

“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” celebrates, revisits and re-enacts a classic text (“Moorland & Memories”) published a century ago by Allen Clarke (1863-1935), an astonishingly prolific and wide-ranging radical journalist familiar to his contemporaries as the proprietor, editor and chief writer of such popular Northern newspapers as, “Teddy Ashton’s Journal – a Gradely Paper for Gradely Folk”. Clarke wrote poetry, short stories, social and political commentaries and philosophical essays. Although he was an exceptional talent, the popularity of Clarke’s writings with working folk is indicative of the vivacity and cultural diversity of the North’s pioneering socialist and labour movement before it fell beneath the wheels of electioneering and concentrated on getting careerists and snake oil salesmen into Parliament.

Salveson describes Clarke’s politics as, “Libertarian Socialist” but notes that “quite a big part of him leant towards anarchism of the non-violent Tolstoyan sort”. That’s how I first came across Clarke, whilst researching the street-level origins of British anarchism and John Tamlyn, a Burnley-based libertarian whose stories were published in “Teddy Ashton’s Journal”. Much of this very warp and weft of the everyday lives, political networks and cultural milieu of pioneering Northern socialists is still missed by London-centric historians and ivory-towered academics. In contrast Salveson digs down into his home turf and maintains living links with the people, places and politics he writes about. Through a hundred and eighty pages and twenty-eight profusely illustrated chapters, “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” meanders around Clarke’s Lancashire homeland on foot, by bike and rail, teasing out the many and varied threads running through Clarke’s original 1920 volume. (If only Salveson had included an index readers would be spared page-turning meanderings in attempting to locate particular topics!).

Firstly we get an introduction to the man himself. Clarke was the son of cotton workers and he joined them as a “little piecer” employed in the mill when he was only eleven but the family were far from passive, ignorant victims of poverty. His father was a union activist, blacklisted for his beliefs and the family were avid readers interested in a range of intellectual topics. Appalled by the working conditions he experienced in the factories Allen turned to writing. Employed as a journalist by a series of Northern newspapers he also experimented as a newspaper proprietor and with publication of “Teddy Ashton’s Journal” hit upon a winning formula, which at its peak in the 1890’s attracted a readership of 50,000 every week.

The paper’s letters column, bulging with missives from weavers, minders and railwaymen, shows his readership was overwhelmingly working class. Clarke considered himself part of that great Northern industrial working class and his stories, both serious and comic, featured ordinary people’s lives in the mills, weaving sheds and mines. His political vision, though, extended way beyond the factories he thought so damaged the beloved landscape as well as workers lives. He delighted in nature and the wild places of the North. Salveson clearly shares Clarke’s wider vision of how socialism should and can offer so much more than higher wages and in tracing the threads of Clarke’s writings Salveson re-enacts some of Clarke’s original geographical and philosophical rambles.

Tolstoy, Gandhi, Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Michael Davitt all appear in “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” as well as trams, windmills and steam engines. Besides the richness of detailed local history perhaps the ultimate value of this book is as a model and inspiration to readers to dig into their own home turf and rediscover the rich radical networks of mutual aid that thrived before our political vision grew dim. As Clarke recalled in “Teddy Ashton’s Lancashire Annual (1908)”:

“I remember Pendle,

Where in days gone by

Crowds of comrades gathered

‘Neath the moor top sky;

Oh the friendly greetings,

When our hearts were jolly bowls

With fellowship o’er flowing,

And the vision in our souls!”

(“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” – priced £21 – is available at all good bookshops and WH Smith, or direct from the author at paul.salveson@myphone.coop)

STUART CHRISTIE DIES! Intro. by Brian Bamford

PART ONE - THE AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION:

Stuart Christie: a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher. Who when aged 18, Christie was arrested in Madrid while carrying explosives to assassinate the Spanish caudillo, General Francisco Franco. He was later alleged to be a member of the Angry Brigade, but was acquitted of related charges.

Born: July 10, 1946, Partick, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Died: August 15, 2020

Movies: The Angry Brigade: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Britain’s First Urban Guerilla Group Organizations founded: Anarchist Black Cross Federation, Cienfuegos Press

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BEYOND an OBITUARY!:

STUART Christie was an anarchist who had quality and consistency as well as quantity and a prolific output. From the early 1960s when he first engaged with Bobby Lynn and the Glasgow anarchists to his death bed listening to 'Pennies from Heaven' Stuart sternly stuck to his beliefs dedicated to a classical version of anarchism.

My last contact with Stuart was an unusually brief e-mail from him last November in which he wrote: 'Bearing up, Brian. Hope you are too. Un abrazo!.'

However I must offer a health warning, as in the 56 years since we first became acquainted in Paris in 1964, our paths have been very different. His commitment was to internationalist view while mine since the 1960s when I lived and worked in Spain has been mostly more parochial. My engagement with the anarchist movement in Spain and later Gibraltar was very different from that of Stuart even though we were functioning in the same organisation: the FIJL (DI). My role was purely one of propaganda and intelligence, and at no time was I involved in the violent activist deeds which were designed to discourage tourism or strike at General Franco.

My task and that of my then wife, Joan, was the much more humdrum; in my case one of working on the tools as an electrician, and delivering Butane Gas to the villages on the Cabo San Antonio in Alicante. Much more boring than 'daring-do' and prison life, but a way of soaking-up Spanish culture and everyday life as it was lived by many young Spaniards at that time who migrated to the coast from places like Albacete and Andalucia: working a six day week and paid 750 pesetas. Meanwhile, our FIJL campaign against Spanish tourism clearly failed, yet fortunately less tragically than Stuart's failed mission to kill Franco.

Among the many obituaries published on Stuart the most perceptive that I have yet seen has been that of the historian Julián Casanova in El País 'El escocés de la FAI que trató de matar a Franco' Casanova argues that Stuart Christie believed that 'a fusion of different forms of resistance such as the workers, the students, the greens into the language of political anarchism. Just as Bakunin, thought it was possible to harmonise individualism with the socialist collectivism.' Casanova writes: 'He [Stuart] liked the men of action, but in reality he [Stuart] and his wife Brenda went on to propagate forms of idelogy with various cultural manifestations, which demonstrated the force of culture with ideas.'

'

Stuart's wife Brenda died last year aged 70 years, from cancer. Casanova writes: 'The obituaries now record that his prime intention was to kill Franco. Yet he was a committed anarchist using his pen and the engaged in cultural aggitation, in times when the revolutionaries with "consciences" have past into history. Anarchist solidarity, that reflects on the concequences of industrial capilalism, nuclear disarmament, and abuses by the State. He was a Scot who would have loved to live in the golden epoch of Spanish anarchism.'

Julián Casanova knew Stuart Christie from when he met him at Queen Mary College, London, in the Autumn of 1985. At that event were other hispanistas like Ronald Fraser, and he speaks warmly of the seminars, dinners and debates over the Spanish Civil War, Franco, the monarchy, Juan Carlos and the transistion.

It strikes me that Casanova understood Stuart better than most of us.

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Slavery, Fitzwilliam College & Dr. Starkey

VARSITY 3rd, July 2020*

IN an interview with Reasoned on Tuesday, the controversial historian Dr. David Starkey argued, “Slavery was not genocide, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many damn blacks in Africa or in Britain would there?”

Since then Cambridge's Fitzwilliam College has announced it will discuss Dr David Starkey’s Honorary Fellowship at a Governing Body meeting on Wednesday, following widespread condemnation of “racist” comments by the historian.

Dr. Starkey has argued:  “You cannot decolonise the curriculum because you, Black Lives Matter, are wholly and entirely a product of white colonisation. You are not culturally Black Africans. You would die in seconds if you were dumped back in black Africa.”  He went on to say, “Of course, slavery was not the same as the Holocaust.”

In response Fitzwilliam College said:  “We support and promote freedom of speech in our academic community, but we have zero tolerance of racism. Dr David Starkey’s recent comments on slavery are indefensible.”

Varsity understands that it is “almost certain” that his fellowship will be revoked.

Meanwhile Fitzwilliam College has issued the following statement:
'Fitzwilliam College does not tolerate racism.

We support and promote freedom of speech in our academic community, but we have zero tolerance of racism. Dr David Starkey’s recent comments on slavery are indefensible.
Fitzwilliam was founded upon values of fairness and mutual respect and we are proud of the College’s inclusive and diverse membership.
The matter of Dr Starkey’s Honorary Fellowship will be considered by the Governing Body at its meeting next Wednesday.'

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*  Varsity is the independent newspaper for the University of Cambridge, established in its current form in 1947. In order to maintain our editorial independence, our newspaper and news website receives no funding from the University of Cambridge or its constituent Colleges.
We are therefore almost entirely reliant on advertising for funding, and during this unprecedented global crisis, we have a tough few weeks and months ahead.
In spite of this situation, we are going to look at inventive ways to look at serving our readership with digital content for the time being.
Therefore we are asking our readers, if they wish, to make a donation from as little as £1, to help with our running cost at least until we hopefully return to print on 2nd October 2020.
Many thanks, all of us here at Varsity would like to wish you, your friends, families and all of your loved ones a safe and healthy few months ahead.

The Cambridge Professor & the Burnley Welder

'WHITE LIVES DON'T MATTER'

by Les May

I HAVE been writing pieces for Northern Voices for about five years.  Everything I write I try to make sure is factually accurate and if possible provide links to where further information can be found so that anyone reading what I write can decide for themselves whether I am ‘cherry picking’, rather than presenting a full picture.  I do not guarantee that what I am writing now is factually accurate; however I will try.

The reason for my scepticism is that it involves things being posted on Twitter.   

Looking through these Twitter posts and trying to decide who is attacking or supporting who, has all the allure of wading in a slurry pit in open toed sandals.

On 22 June a recently appointed Cambridge professor, Priyamvada Gopal, posted a ‘tweet’ which said “I’ll say it again.  White Lives Don’t Matter.   As white lives”.  It has been claimed that she did this in response to a banner flown over a football stadium that read "White lives matter Burnley". Following this, abusive messages directed at her, including death threats and rape, were posted on Twitter.  Having read some of these I can only say that you will meet nicer turds in a slurry pit.

A somewhat more rational response has come from those signing an online petition at Change.org which reads:

"Cambridge must move to immediately discontinue their relationship with Ms Gopal in the best interest of all students and the community at large.”
“Her statements are racist and hateful and must not be tolerated by Cambridge University leadership.  Cambridge must move to immediately discontinue their relationship with Ms. Gopal in the best interest of all students and the community at large.”

Her employers, Cambridge University, responded by saying;  ‘The University defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions which others might find controversial and deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks.   These attacks are totally unacceptable and must cease.’
So what happened to the person behind the airborne banner?  Did his employers rush to issue a statement supporting his right to express his lawful opinion? Not quite!   Jake Hepple was dismissed from his job as a welder by Paradigm Precision.  His girlfriend Megan Rambadt, was also sacked from her job as beautician.  If he is in a union will he get support from that quarter?  I wouldn’t count on it.

One reason I write for Northern Voices is that it makes an effort to implement what George Orwell said:  ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear’.  As I accept this dictum I cannot support either the petition to have this woman dismissed, nor the actions of Paradigm Precision in sacking this man. 
 
What this shows is that privilege in our society is not about what colour your skin happens to be, it manifests itself in what position you hold, what you earn, where you live and who respects your views.  I’ll let you figure out who I think is the privileged one in this case.  Why is it acceptable for Jake to join the ranks of the unemployed and not Priya? 
 
I have already made clear my opinion of the people who are attacking her, rather than attacking her opinions.   But if she is daft, or naive, enough to post deliberately inflammatory comments on Twitter I’m afraid my sympathy for her is not very great and overall she does not come over as a very nice lady.

According to the website below, “she has earlier called for the persecution of Hindus and branded them sickos”.

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/cambridge-professor-priyamvada-gopal-tweets-white-lives-dont-matter-follows-it-up-with-abolish-brahmins-and-upper-castes

But for me the icing on the cake was an item in the Deccan Chronicle from July 2018 which mentioned that she had tweeted that she would no longer supervise students at King’s College because the porters did not address her as ‘Doctor’. Isn’t that what you call a ‘snob’?

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Derek Pattison on class & delusion

I THINK both Wallace and David Selbourne would do well to read Orwell's 'Politics and the English language'.  Much of what Wallace has written here along with the quotes from Selbourne, would be barely comprehensible to most people. It is pretentious academic verbiage that doesn't illuminate at all.

The cloth cap Tory or the Tory in clogs, is a well known archetype within the English working class and I meet them frequently. We've always known there were plenty of Tory voters who lived in council houses and why do you think the Irish socialist, Robert Tressell called his famous book the 'Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist'? You can't read Tressell's book without being fully aware that his socialist character, Owen, (Tressell himself), is largely contemptuous of many of his fellow workers for their political ignorance and apathy, their conservative outlook and the fact that they acquiesce, in their own exploitation. "They were the enemy" Tressell wrote, they not only "submitted like so many cattle to the existing state of things, but defended it, and opposed and ridiculed any suggestion to alter it."

It is often said of the book that you can identify many of the characters with people you know and that is perfectly true.  The same arguments that you find Tressell's working men having between themselves, you can still hear played out to this very day.

However, it would be a great mistake to tar all the working class with the same brush as middle-class academics, who write about them,are inclined to do. Anyone who has been involved in English left politics, will know, that most of the participants are middle-class university types, the sort who make up the bulk of the Labour Party membership today.

Yet, the people who most influenced me politically, were not academics like Dave Selbourne, who I knew as a student, but ordinary working-class people, like the anarchist copytaker, Jim Pinkerton, from Ashton-under-Lyne and the opera buff, Jack Macpherson, who lived in a council house with his wife Margaret, in Dukinfield. Both these men were representative of what I would call, the class conscious working-class, politically savvy, as well as highly cultured.

I think Brexit is a big mistake, for a variety of reasons, and though it seems to have politicised many working class people, who previously may have been indifferent or apathetic to politics and felt powerless, I suspect it will be economically damaging to many of the Brexiteers in the long run. Yet, one can't deny, that with Brexit, the worm has turned; the working-class voter has found a voice and far from feeling impotent and powerless as they used to do, they now know they have some influence and can make a difference. Now the genie is out of the bottle it might be difficult to put it back.

The Working Class & Leftist Delusion

 by Andrew Wallace

LEFTISM gets itself into bogged down into certain delusional mythologies, one of which concerns the romanticisation of the working work, the heroic proletarian toilers and tillers of the earth,  preordained by Marxist gospel to act as the historical revolutionary agent to overthrow capitalism.  Marx had been pretty disparaging about peasants and 'rural idiocy', instead he and his fellow 19th century socialists felt that a newly emergent class of industrial labourers would shape up as the critical agents of modernity.

Alas some 140 years after Marx's death the working classes across the globe remain as distant from this pre-ordained enterprise as they ever were.  Indeed it seems quite the converse; the working class as hitherto constituted has played a most passive if indeed not reactionary role.

Leftist pretensions to scientific rigour can no longer disguise the romantic fallacy and cognitive bias of 'The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed'. As Bertrand Russell tartly observed 'Marx was the Wordsworth of the proletariat; its Freud is still to come."

David Selbourne has dissected this fallacious intellectual cul-de-sac as:

'prodigies of useless intellectual labour, whose largely metaphysical character is determined  by the metaphysical nature of the problems to which they seek a solution At the lowest political level, however masked by intellectual sophistication, they can descend to disappointed abuse of the working class for having failed to live up to middle-class socialist expectation. Theories, as we have seen, of 'consumerism', of the 'deferential' working class, of the 'long catalepsy' of the British working-class movement, of a class consciousness 'subordinate' in its very 'texture' to the 'hegemony of the bourgeois', all have silently inscribed within them the figure of a politically defective proletarian who is the obverse of the archetypally active class hero of socialist romance, first cousin to Dyden's noble savage.'

A truth which can still barely be alighted upon in progressive circles, 'socialism' is a not a product of the working class worldview, instead it is a quixotic interloper of sorts, a radical import of déclassé intellectuals who had reason to take issue with the corrosive workings and hardships of industrial capitalism. The wage labourers of course bore the brunt of the exploitative economics that coerced them to work in the most degrading of conditions and had active interests in agitating for improvements in their lot. However 'labourism' isn't 'socialism', whereby the former is to be realised in seeking redress to particular grievances and privations rather than the latter politically undefined and radical goal of usurping the settlement of the day.  Conservatism presented itself in the passivity of the general population and the consequent isolation and containment of dangerous radicals and agitators who threatened to bring anarchy to social order.

Marxism has had the unenviable task of confronting this conspicuous turd in a swimming pool with a battery of impressive rationalisations. Chief amongst these is the infamous idea of false consciousness which has been taken as an unfortunate slur on character in the same way ignorance as a descriptor is taken as an insult even though a concise definition isn't morally pejorative.

Marxists have also proved adept at accounting for a multitude of countervailing tendencies that militate against economic immiseration, such as the co-opting of 'bourgeois' sociology's 'embourgeoisment thesis' of middle class expansion, thereby muddying the waters of class conflict via a bought off 'aristocracy of labour'.

Leftist intellectuals then have erred in projecting a radical telos onto the working class arena, ignoring the utilitarian and individualistic basis to labour politics and the voluntarist and anti-statist ethos that marked these communities. They have also been oblivious to the deep structural incorporation of working class material resources into the capitalist system through mortgage and hire purchase.

However other sociologists have attempted to sidestep the theoretical travails of working class conservatism and the 'deviant' class voter by pointing out the not unsurprising reality of hegemony by way of the deep state ancien regime of a living museum pageantry (monarchy, parliament, church, armed forces, public schools, civil service, BBC) which naturally defaults us all to the dominant culture. Ironically this confinement to functionalist observation and impotent commentary rather nullifies Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach which implored for more action and less philosophical windbaggery!

It's the culture, stupid

The class voting sociology (Marxism ‘lite’) of the post war years is now having to contend with the other belated but uncontroversial driver of voting behaviour - culture!  As analysists are now recognising, voters are motivated by cultural issues which may not easily be subsumed within an economic paradigm and furthermore may actually be oppositional to the traditional material class interests.  Bourdieu's ideas on social and cultural capital have helped to redress the balance by giving due prominence to education and the cognitive repertoire that help to constitute social class in the modern era.

Many left revisionists had already discerned that traditional class based politics were becoming problematic with declining working class vote share from the 1960s onwards alongside a new counter cultural zeitgeist. With deindustrialisation poised to pulp much of manufacturing and decimate organised labour, Hobsbawm and Gorz wrote in unflinching terms of the likely recalibration of socialist politics. Gorz talked of moving away from class politics in favour of the 'new social movements'. This turn to identity and culture politics followed in the wake of disenchantment with the 'backward' working class. However such doubling down on the new politics exacerbated the cultural and intellectual chasm between the liberal campus radicals and the more socially conservative blue collar workers, leading to a further breakdown of the previous broad based social alliances between the classes.

Working class Hobbesian attitudes to the Welfare State

Fern Brady writing for The Guardian was taken aback by the distinctive authoritarian attitudes towards benefit claimants, particularly the unemployed and disabled.  Those without obvious physical markers of disability were often the target of an inglorious brutalism unveiled in her interviewees who amply demonstrated

(an) 'internalised...Thatcherite every-man-for-himself mentality, wanting benefits for themselves but resenting anyone else getting a handout...it went in a circle, anger constantly directed at other victims of the coalition government's Welfare Reform  Act instead of the politicians and policymakers responsible.'

Houtman et al drawing on Bourdieu’s work discerned the recourse to a 'deserving/undeserving' criteria in relationship to limited social capital and associated authoritarian attitudes which also were marked by penalising attitudes for 'out-groups' and fringe communities.

So ought we really to be surprised at this abundance of working class authoritarianism?  Again Selbourne is illuminative on precisely this point:

‘...any form of illiberalism in the human-as worker can come to be discounted or recycled as an aberration from the norm of a supposedly instinctive or class, predilection for progressive, fraternal and democratic solutions to social and economic problems. That history does not reveal the latter unequivocally, to put it mildly, is inconvenient. Indeed, illiberalism is as much an ideological choice of direction as any other and more explicable, in conditions of insecurity or fear of unemployment, than many’

In critically disabusing leftism of its ludicrous 'salt of the earth' workerism, it is not my intention to deny the very real and toxic nature of capitalism and I continue to desire even if without much hope that a saner politics emerge to reign in the excesses of our times.  However we need to face up to the increasing intellectual bankruptcy of the left.  We are now very much at the whims of the political right who continue to exploit the post liberal environment in their canny take on working class sensitivities.  'White van conservatism' and Boris's new 'Workers' Party' are set to run the show into the distant future.

I have drawn on the following essays/books/articles during the writing of this article:

• The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed, (1937) Bertrand Russell
• Against Socialist Illusion (1985), David Selbourne
• http://www.leninology.co.uk/2010/10/working-class-tory-is-something-to-be.html
• Working Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance (1967), Frank Parkin
• Social Class in the 21^st Century (2015), Mike Savage
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/12/anti-welfare-rhetoric-families
• https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9966722/Welfare-reform-Its-class-war-but-not-in-the-way-youd-expect.html
• Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (2008), Houtman, Achterberg & Derks
• The Forward March of Labour Halted? (1978) Eric Hobsbawm
• Farewell to the Working Class (1980), Andre Gorz
• National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (2018), Matthew Goodwin

'Fuck May 1968'.& Anthropological Illiteracy

by Brian Bamford
THE distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor once wrote that he was a vain rather than ambitious historian. Radical historians, one would have thought would be vain rather than ambitious, yet my dealings with the radical historians recently suggests that they are both vain and ambitious. My review below reflects upon how the new wave radical historians may have become corrupted in their own studies to a degree in which they are now becoming part of the problem:

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ACADEMIC righteousness prevails most among those of us to whom the truth is revealed.  So many PhD's doing papers on this and that, so many historians in receipt of grants and bursaries. Vernon Richards, the former editor of Freedom - 'the anarchist weekly', once called for exporting the PhD's.

Ian Gwinn, who was organising the event Liverpool on the 8th, June which was rather coyly entitled 'F*ck May 1968, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Past from 1968 to Today', welcomed participants at the CASA Club. The first session was 'History is a Weapon' addressed by Christopher Garland on 'Circumnavigating the past, foreclosing the future: commemoration of the radical past in the amnesiac present'. The title of the event, I learnt, was based on a bit of graffiti from Athens in 2008.

In his book 'DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE: A history of Anarchism', Peter Marshall talked of graffiti on the walls of Paris in 1968 declaring: 'NEITHER GODS NOR MASTERS; THE MORE YOU CONSUME THE LESS YOU LIVE; ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION; IT IS FORBIDDEN TO FORBID; BE REALISTIC DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE.'

Marshall claimed that unlike other French revolutions, which had been mainly concerned with overcoming economic scarcity, 'the French revolutionaries in a society of abundance [in 1968] were preoccupied with the transformation of everyday life.'

As General De Gaulle correctly noted, they were 'in revolt against modern society, against consumer society, against technological society, whether communist in the East or capitalist in the West'.

The then editor of The Times, William Rees Mogg, came to the same conclusions in his editorials at that time, and had supported the Rolling Stones, who according to Keith Richards, would have been destroyed at the height of their notoriety more than 40 years ago if The Times under William Rees Mogg had not not launched its famous attack on their jail sentences for drugs offences.'

The program for the Liverpool event quotes Walter Benjamin’s maxim that ‘nothing that has ever happened can be regarded as lost for history...’.  With in Spain the ‘Memoria Historico’ movement drawing on evidence from the Spanish Civil War that the families of victims of that war are still trying to recover.

Eric Azera from Barcelona talked about the recent threats to squatting in Catalonia and elsewhere. Tim Briedis addressed the 1994 National University occupations in Australia, and student radicalism which had developed beyond the 1960s.

Piotr Paszynski and Joaquin Armanet spoke on Jacques Ranciere’s concept of ‘Radical History and Proletarian Experience’. Jacques Ranciere was a student of the Marxist thinker Althusser, but clashed with his teacher over the events of May ’68. While Althusser and other Marxists were asserting the importance of Marxist academia in the French student revolts, Ranciere began to break away from this traditional mode of thought. Marxist intellectuals accused the revolts of being bourgeois and undisciplined. To which Ranciere accused Marxists of being a bunch of little shits.

From a criticism of Althusser and orthodox Marxism, Ranciere’s message soon became ‘Philosophy – it’s a big bag of dicks.’ Writing Hatred of Democracy, Ranciere attacks the Platonic tradition and ties it to practically every Marxist philosopher. He argues that everyone in the Western tradition, from Plato to Marx, wants to become a philosopher king to shovel Truth into the mouths of the blind ignorant masses. Ranciere carries this line of thought to his other books such as “Disagreement” where he accuses every theorists of democracy of being a Platonic saboteur.

Hannah Arendt in an essay entitled ‘Communicative Power’ wrote: ‘We have recently witnessed how it did not take more than a the relatively harmless, essentially nonviolent French students’ rebellion to reveal the vulnerability of the whole political system, which rapidly disintegrated before the astonished eyes of the young rebels…. they intended only only to challenge the ossified university system of government power, together with that of the huge party bureaucracies - ‘une sorte de desintergration de toutes les hierarchies”. It was a text-book case of a revolutionary situation.’

Roger Ball of the Bristol Radical History Group seems to be always trying to turn history into agitprop, and capture the headlines. His latest offering is based on an old theme: Unseating the local influence of the Society of Merchant Venturers and pointing to their trade in slavery: ‘Kick over the statues: using history as a weapon’. More recently their efforts have led to a ‘Countering Colston campaign’ in Bristol, which in turn has inevitably resulted in a doctoral paper ‘IS IT WRONG TO TOPPLE STATUES & RENAME SCHOOLS?’ by - Dr. Joanna Burch-Brown* Perhaps radical history has now itself become an industry from which various academic hangers-on are now profiting: even my friend Roger Ball a pioneer of radical history has now been anointed Dr. Roger Ball, and is currently employed as a Research Fellow at Sussex University.

Kerrie McGiveron discussed the part played by the New Left and the rise of Big Flame in the early 1970s, with particular reference to the Kirby Rent Strike (1972-73). She gave an ethographic account of the Rent Strike with the help of a film documentary produced by Nicholas Broomfield. At one point in the film a woman interviewee between puffs on her cigarette in the setting of what appeared to be her front-room, said:

‘

You can take your film, but the position of the working class won’t change’

To which the interviewer responded: ‘Why do you think I’m making this?’

She then said: ‘Just for your personal satisfaction!’

Ms. McGiveron, when questioned about this exchange in which it was suggested that the woman was displaying ‘apathy’ and a claim to ‘privacy’, claimed to have background information in which it was suggested that the interviewee was a member of a far-left party and was in fact very active. Ms. McGiveron had already made clear she was conscious of the dangers of post-facto rationalisation in doing this research. So can we take this special claim to background knowledge seriously?

Terry Wragg of Leeds Animation Workshop showed an animated film which was designed to portrayed male sexism. What began with building site banter, randy pestering and innuendo, concluding with more full-on approaches of the #Me Too variety. What was important here about the animated film was that a picture of reality is much more powerful than saying something; that’s why a docu-drama film like ‘Three Girls’ about the grooming scandal in Rochdale was so effective. But while one can do a feminist-take on predatory men in a social context, it would be just as anthropologically appropriate to do an animated film on ‘Pancake Tuesday’ and the initiation ceremonies, the ritual ‘de-bagging's’ and ‘ball greasing’ of apprentices, that were indulged in widely in the factories and mills in the North of England by both working-men and women in the last two

centuries. But when we talk about radical history in this context we are really, I suspect, joining the bandwagon of the fashionable addicts and the politically correct crowd.

The case of Geoff Brown who took part in the Round-table discussion ‘Remembering 1968 & After’ is significant in this respect. Geoff claims he is ‘active as a historian of Manchester “from below” ’, a softly-spoken Southerner and someone who moved up North in 1972. The jury must still be out over his claim to be a historian ‘working from below’. His publication record as presented in the program for the Liverpool event is rather sparse, he has written something for International Socialism entitled ‘John Tocher and the limits of commitment’ for the North West History Journal (2017/2018); ‘Il Principe, a handbook for career-makers in further education’ and ‘Pakistan, failing state or neoliberalism in crisis’ in International Socialism.

What we are getting here in the sphere of the fad for radical history is something like what Proust showed us in Sodome et Gomorrhe, and what Wyndham Lewis described in ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ as ‘an analysis of the powerful instinctive freemasonery of the pederast’. Dr. Ball wants us to kick over the statues to cleanse the architecture of Bristol and beyond of former historical adventurers, Penguin Random House want to diversify to the nth degree to take care of talented minorities such as the trans community this year, and, who knows, perhaps the necrophiliacs next year.

* Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Bristol.

Anarcha-feminism & all things exotic

In contrast to the ideas of Bailey Lamon on everyday struggles of poor folk today, Loughborough University is hosting a conference below on something more exotic:  'Anarcha-feminism & queer theory'.  Readers must judge on whether it might be better to save your money and to stop at home and listen to The Archers.

Loughborough University, U.K. – 14-16 September 2016

Central theme: Anarcha-feminism

Call for Papers and Sessions : 

The global resistance faces turbulent times, as the balance of hope teeters between inspiring mobilisation and reactionary retrenchment. In Rojava, Kurdish communities are implementing libertarian socialism and feminist leadership on a scale unseen since the Spanish civil war, while world powers bomb the democratic Syrian opposition alongside ISIS. The mobilisation of African Americans against police brutality goes beyond liberal platitudes to highlight systemic racism, while competitors for the Republican candidacy outdo one another in barefaced bigotry and misogyny. And while anarchists were encouraged by the resurgence of popular protest in the wake of the global financial crisis, much of that energy has been absorbed by electoral initiatives from Greece and Spain to the UK and US, vindicating longstanding concerns about the co-optation of movements who expect too much of the state. In these uncertain days, the elaboration of anarchist analysis which bridges theory and practice and speaks to the needs of social movements assumes increasing importance

The 4th International Conference of the Anarchist Studies Network will be held at Loughborough University between 14-16 September 2016. Proposals are welcome for individual papers, panels, and streams of several panels. We especially encourage panel proposals, to include 3-4 presentations drawn together around a common theme, although individual paper proposals are of course also welcome.

Contributions from both within and outside the official academic sphere are invited from any scholarly discipline(s), on any topic relevant to the study of anarchism.

The central theme for the conference is anarcha-feminism. The purposes are twofold: to stimulate discussion of a form of oppression that anarchists oppose but which continues to be felt in anarchist organising; and to welcome individuals, groups and communities who have not previously participated in ASN events. By recognising the legacy of anarcha-feminists/anarchist feminism and women's activism in anarchism we want to strengthen the ties between contemporary anarchists and feminists in the struggle against oppression and use the recognition of misogynist practices and hierarchical gender structures to open up the event to other marginalised peoples. We therefore particularly encourage submissions from women, trans and non-binary people, queer activists, collectives, people of colour, people with disabilities and we strongly encourage panel and panel stream organizers to overcome exclusion. We are also especially interested in presentations that are concerned with anarchism and one/more of the following:

· Anarcha-feminist and queer theory

· Anarcha-feminist critiques of the state

· Anarcha-feminist histories

· Ecofeminism, individualist anarcha-feminism, anarcho-primitivist feminism, posthuman, cyborg and sci-fi anarcho-feminism

· Feminist critiques of anarchism and anarchist engagement with feminism

· Intersections between gender, sexuality, race, class, abilities and anarchism

· Local anarcho-feminist struggles / experiences

· Love, sex, relationships (or resistance to)

· Masculine and feminine representations and the movement between them

· Sex work and reproductive rights

· The role of women and non-binary people in the struggle against capitalism

In addition, we welcome contributions on any other topic relevant to the study of anarchism, with or without connection to anarcha-feminism.

ASN conferences aim to breach new frontiers in anarchist scholarship, and encourage cross-pollination between disciplines. As well as submissions that bridge the gap between ‘academic’ and other forms of knowledge, we also welcome proposals for workshops, art events/performances and experimental pieces and are happy to discuss ideas that you might have.

Please send abstracts of up to 250 words per paper (multiply for panel/stream proposals) to ASN Co-convenor Uri Gordon at  u.gordon@lboro.ac.uk by 14 March 2016

Anarchist Studies Network:  http://anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/