Jeremy Corbyn

firefinga

Well-known member
I am digressing, but there were definitley a lot of leftists applauding Khomeini ousting the Shah, due to the fact he had close ties with the USA. The very same people hadn't much to say about Khomeini and his gang exectuing and hunting down (secular) Iranian communists immediately after seizing power.
 

droid

Well-known member
Can you provide some evidence to this assertion? IIRC the secular Western left were extremely hesitant to endorse the Iranian revolution due to Islamist elements, in fact the only prominent left thinker to uncritically support it was Foucault who was lambasted by the left as a result.
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Can you provide some evidence to this assertion? IIRC the secular Western left were extremely hesitant to endorse the Iranian revolution due to Islamist elements, in fact the only prominent left thinker to uncritically support it was Foucault who was lambasted by the left as a result.

Only in german in my old "Der Spiegel" copies from 1979 - 81. "Der Spiegel" = a german "Time magazine" - most prominent one to endorse Khomeini was later German foreign minister Josef Fischer.
 
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Leo

Well-known member
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligence...n-jeremy-corbyn-face-of-the-new-new-left.html

long but good Andrew Sullivan piece in New York magazine. written for US readers, so includes lots you already know but draws interesting parallels between him and trump, and concludes with how pulling a "corbyn" might be the best/only way for democrats to win back the White House in 2020.

Still, Corbyn’s shocking viability reveals one thing: This moment rewards boldness and political risk. It requires a set of policies that address stagnant wages, economic inequality, and health-care insecurity; and a leader who is sincere, unpackaged, real. The last thing the party needs is calculation, let alone an emphasis on “electability.” These are radical times. The crisis in capitalism has opened up new avenues for politics that were once unthinkable, a fact that the American right has not hesitated to grasp. I can’t say I agree with the positions of Labour, especially in foreign policy, and I suspect its economic policy could be disastrous if combined with an ugly crash out of the EU. But it’s impossible not to see the logic and power behind Labour’s rediscovery of ambitious socialism in the wake of capitalist failure.

The line between radicalism and extremism is fine. Corbyn’s Labour has failed to rein in its bigots and haters and illiberal opportunists. But the success of his broader message has an obvious lesson for the Democrats: Forget the obsession with Trump. Do not make the next elections about him. Simply make the case for a radical break from the recent past, for a new and more ambitious equality. Dare to raise taxes on the wealthy and lower them on the middle class, dare to bring Wall Street to heel, guarantee universal access to health care, rally the next generation, and abandon pretensions to policing the world. And do this with passion and integrity. You may find new voters, young voters, angry voters, previously invisible voters, minority voters, turning up in numbers you never expected. As America’s liberal democracy teeters under a far-right cult, we’ll need every single one of them.
 

droid

Well-known member
Hes an absolute prick, but one thing he's right about. The key to leftist victory is not about gaining swing voters at the centre, its mobilising the non-voters.
 

luka

Well-known member
Funny little essay I'm reading...

One of Jeremy Corbyn’s most attractive qualities amongst his supporters is his political consistency. Any aspersions cast upon his character by detractors are often batted away with documentation of his political activism and voting record, finding him to be on the “right side of history” for decades. He’s not some post-Soviet tyrannical Marxist hangover, as Boris Johnson and Donald Trump want the country to think, but a principled man who has consistently stood against the policies of a deepening culture of neoliberalism since 1983. Whether protesting Apartheid, the War in Iraq or contemporary austerity, he has always been a supporter of the downtrodden, the powerless and the under-represented.

What he represents today, then, for so many, is a leftist continuum that has been smothered by neoliberalism for decades. He’s proof that the left weren’t all collectively insane and melancholic post-Thatcher. They simply didn’t have a democratic representative. Years were lost to Blairite centrism as a radical left went underground, and this dip below the political waterline notably occurred in tandem with rave’s own sociopolitical smothering. But, just as hardcore never died, neither have the principled politics of Jeremy Corbyn.

This is to say that Corbyn gives this intergenerational confluence of lost leftists a voice. He represents an always present but consistently undermined current of political energy that has never before had a democratic outlet. (Whether or not it has been looking for one is a separate issue.)

In this sense, Corbyn starts to resemble something of a post-rave candidate for Britain’s political left, and if there is any desirable instantiation of an Acid Corbynism, I think it has to be one that recognises the resonance between the Corbyn Continuum and the Hardcore Continuum.

Here we might turn to Simon Reynolds’ 1990s series of essays on ‘Ardkore for The Wire in which he defines the hardcore continuum as...

https://xenogothic.com/2019/11/10/the-corbyn-continuum/amp/?__twitter_impression=true
 

luka

Well-known member
Hello. Don't get disheartened if people are rude about your taste in music. It's a school playground.
 

xenogoth

looking for an exit
is a forum still a forum if you can't rip each other's music tastes to shreds? i thought that's why they were invented?!
 

Leo

Well-known member
is a forum still a forum if you can't rip each other's music tastes to shreds? i thought that's why they were invented?!

we're beyond such pettiness, operating from the knowledge imparted by luka that music is now useless, over. some of it, such as funk, is actually cancelled.

welcome.
 
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