The Great Moving Right Show II: The Kirsty and Phil Years

polytechnic anti-hippy left in the early 80s as IT rode (relatively) high in media terms

I can only think in terms of Pop about this. Gang of Four and Wire as opposed to erm Zounds and Crass?

the citylimits- and redwedge-ification of nme in the mid-80s i guess

i'm not claiming that as "key" for the entire world,m just key for the world i lived in (haha ie the nme)

anyway like i say i have to focus my mind elsewhere a bit for now -- BYEEE!

"the legacy of Shelley and Blake, Carlyle and Ruskin, Morris and Wilde, Wells and Shaw"

this is eagleton ripping off raymond williams, after shitting on him in the '70s.

Oh, and Southall: if you don't like the thread, push off.
But don't be surprised to learn that the vast majority of the decisions that shape the world are predicated on discussions such as this one. Your attitude -- "stop thinking and just do" -- is what makes the world safe for fascism.

-- Nitsuh, Monday, 23 July 2001 01:00 (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

Taking Sides: Objective vs. Subjective

i think nick had just read sokal and bricmont!

ha sokal is bad man! but old ilx did seem to take a lot of critical-theory uncritically but i may only think that cos my ilx life was concurent with a degree in analytic philosophy where sokal is thrown at yr head if you say "i am interested in that french stuff".

the french theory stuff (that eagleton ate up) was part of the first Great Moving Right Show, though it didn't think it was. it's kind of ingrained now, but hells lot of its rhetoric is against things that were part of the old activist political left. i imagine it had its uses but now you get second-generation types like esther leslie saying that walt benjamin was a "political revolutionary" and so on, so they obviously feel the need for a "doing" left but their heroes are all theorists.

but I think we're a nation of Reaganomic crypto-Tory shitbags, rather than a nation of Thatcherite ones.

i must be missing a joke here or something... i don't see much daylight btw reaganism and thatcherism.

there is a difference -- our middle-class pinched puritanism vs yr mental evangelicals -- but i'm not sure what dom means here.

NRQ Richard Rorty wrote good stuff on the abandonment of New Deal / Unionist Left in America for the "Critical Left". I think the joke is that we aren't exactly being activists here y know. Relativism does seem important though cos it doesn't seem to free minds or whatever but make kids more lazily nasty. It's OK to say anything! Outcomes a world of Clarkson not Bill Hicks, Peep Show not Brass Eye! Who'd have guessed?!

"Peep Show" guys (partly) write "The Thick of It"? Or have I got that wrong?

given how wrong eagleton gets most french theory and how his guides to it were the coles notes for most students, it must BY LOGIC be his politics which drove GMRS pt1!

(pt2 = the repressive return of universalist "anti-pomo" imperialism obv) (CONTROVERSIAL)

(i have no intention of defending either of these points)

pragmatism = gettin deep into the weeds of how things actually get done, ie activism
theory is mostly gussied up moralism

there is a difference -- our middle-class pinched puritanism vs yr mental evangelicals -- but i'm not sure what dom means here.

I mean, if said somewhat clumsily, that the people we're talking about here aren't your classic British right-wingers, they're taking their queues from an American style of conservatism.

"Peep Show" guys (partly) write "The Thick of It"? Or have I got that wrong?

-- Tom D., Friday, August 17, 2007 4:35 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

one of them does -- but not exclusively, there are about 4-5 writers.

the "mental evangelicals" weren't such a constitutive force of the american right back then, i don't think of them as a major leg of reaganism anyway, which = deregulatory fervor & unceasing hawkishness wrapped up in a national renewal set of mythemes = basically a def of either thather OR reagan, which is why i don't get what dom was trying to say.

xp see that doesn't clarify things much either dom, esp as american style conservatism is undergoing some serious implosion of late along its usual fault lines. i don't get what you're trying to shorthand here.

"usual" = "already understood"? not being very clear myself, sry

Would you not agree that, to take a random example, Jeremy Clarkson has more in common with the classic American right than the classic British right?

Seems like everybody be hatin' on "Peep Show" these days while biggin' up "TToI" (xxp)

(pt2 = the repressive return of universalist "anti-pomo" imperialism obv) (CONTROVERSIAL)

within the academy part two is "saint paul = lenin" stuff, i think. which may be the same thing.

mark, what is moralism, or how is having "moral" scruples/sensibilities bad? or conversely how can your politics *not* have a moral component?

Peep Show: yeh. hmmm. they're probably not evil or nowt but it's a lot harder to mis-interpret than the thick of it. maybe. do people mis-interpret or is it just playing to the gallery now?

What is the Passantino "classic righ-winger"? Heseltine? Macmillan? Portillo? Boris???

"american conservatism" and "american right" not really (uncomplicatedly) the same thing, dom

ps THE THING:

http://www.celluloiddreams.co.uk/images/thething2.jpg

Would you not agree that, to take a random example, Jeremy Clarkson has more in common with the classic American right than the classic British right?

-- Dom Passantino, Friday, August 17, 2007 4:42 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Link

yeah but thatcher wasn't part of the classic british right (at least at the top level of The Thing).

I don't know that Thatcher was that different, when was "Selsdon Man"?

What I mean is, she wasn't that different from other Tory right wingers

by "moralism" i guess i mean judging politics/culture in ref.behaviour -- in respect of a chart of good and bad -- rather than in.ref outcomes

(that is very compressed) (e.p.thompson's "against theory" begins an argt against marx's notorious, rigorous anti-moralism which i THINK is a kind of morris-esque "the good is the beautiful or the useful" kind of an argt, transfrred from making chairs to making movements)

(ie the "good" of the outcome was not -- as marx somewhat tended to argue -- "in step with the marhc of history" so much as, "social good, we are humans and we know it when we're in it")

but Thatcher had to be seen to be in some sense classic for her schtick to have played right? then again she was the "grocer's daughter from grantham" which doesn't figure with the sloaney '80s as well as it might. who were Thatcher's biggest fans, the aristos or the people who were allowed to buy their council houses?

xp

karl and will led kind of sheltered lives, maybe...

haha THE THING looks like clarkson

And Ted Heath was actually nicknamed The Grocer, wasn't he? (xxp)

the "grocer's daughter from grantham"

is why she wasn't classic british right (at the top level anyways). obviously the sloanes and yuppies didn't add up to a whole lot of her vote come election day.

selsdon man was c. 1971 and heath was indeed a bit 'ech' so far as tories were concerned. i guess he was the almost-there prototype.

ok that's YOU setting off rightwards henry!

but Thatcher had to be seen to be in some sense classic for her schtick to have played right?

She pushed on the Churchillian Right buttons on the top of the desk, while pushing the Keith Joseph Looney Right ones under it

i think i posted abt this before -- ps i finished filling in the form -- but i once saw some ancient tory grandee on TV saying of heath, "of course, his AWFUL cockney accent!"

!

haha allow me to toss this grenade in here:

Maybe also worth mentioning an irony in the larger issue: 'Chavs' (sorta kinda UK rednecks) are way closer to the Iggy Pop school than the loserist manifestoes would have it. They're confident, unapologetic, fun-loving, substance abusing and a distinctly post-Thatcher phenomenon, arising from the onslaught against the feudal-socialist axis when Britain briefly had a 'neoliberal' (pro-capitalist) government in the 1980s. It was Thatcher who sparked the emergence of the 'barrow-boy' money dealer, shaking up the previously 'toff' controlled financial industry by opening opportunities based on merit. Of course, that was all far too American to last, so the left made sure the guilt-based 'progressive' public school types (epitomized by the BBC and other major media) restored as much of the natural (feudal-socialist) order as possible. Now we're back to the good old days, with the proles expected to know their place and whine about how unfair it all is to their lip-trembling paternalistic masters.
[N1ck L4nd, off his blog] | 07.18.07 - 2:44 am | #

but i once saw some ancient tory grandee on TV saying of heath, "of course, his AWFUL cockney accent!"

LOL. Gorblimey!

Still plenty of barrow boys in the City, believe me, I've met 'em

i think the term "classic conservative" becomes very extremely confused if yr trying to micro-apply it across extended times of highly complex largescale social re-organisation (as viz the UK since let's 1925)

nick land is a total fucking retard

"the natural (feudal-socialist) order" = wtf!

how is judging the good by outcomes more or less right-wing than the opposite?

ept in that book argues that marx *was* a moralist -- as does lucio colletti, a thoroughly kantian marxist... till he stopped being a marxist -- how else to explain what he was doing? i don't think he was notoriously anti-moralist at all.

xpost hell

Who is Nick Land?

Who was dude that was going to be Prime Minister (or at least leader of the Tories in the 70s) before he did this big speech arguing for eugenics? The one who Thatcher took most of her schtick for? Was this guy looked at as a Cameron-esque "moderniser" at the time, or was he just seen as a new Heath?

the anti-moralist thing was tied up in naturalist theories of historical development that got appended to marxism, no? and then got regurgitated as scientific marxism -- natch there was no place for moralism in a scientific marxism.

keith joseph

xpost. very much a moderniser but not a la cameron. more a la... pinochet.

Are you kidding, Keith Joseph would never have been PM, he was a scary weirdo!

And slightly to the right of Pinochet!

That "Tory Tory Tory" documentary seemed to suggest that Joseph as Conservative leader was pretty much a foregone conclusion before he overstepped the mark by basically arguing for the killing of poor people.

i don't think i said judging by outcomes was more OR less rightwing, it depdns on the outcomes you favour presumably -- i think yr bein rightwing if yr arguin that "social good: we are humans and we know it when we're in it" is a coddled delusion

doesn't ept argue marx is like secretly a moralist despite often and loudly denouncing "moralism" -- he doesn't however state what the moral basis is; i *think* ept is making a kind of morris-ist argt abt what that basis must be, if it isn't to be "idealist" (another thing marx wasn't)

he is somewhat rescuing marx from aft-times "scientific marxsism" yes, but also i think rescuing him from the consequences of his own rhetoric in particular tactical debates at the time (it's an age since i read it, and i am reaching for the morrisism based on a book by ept I HAVE NEVER READ)

What did Macmillan say about Keith Joseph? Something like "the only boring Jew I ever met in my life".

This is all very interesting (really), but how are you going to transmit it to all the apolitical, complacent suits-in-the-making, who, after all, will have some degree of control over this country's social future?

this is amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SvRqVvctQk

https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/746169256727953408