I don't know people. What is this all about anyway?

That's my philosophy

life is great.

It's only us mugs that don't have a hell of a lot really, isn't it? And that's the majority - the vast, vast majority.

According to Shallow Hal's dad anyway.

then he threw a 3/4 full can of dr. pepper at me.

personal change is not a bad thing necessarily - but bcz achievable it can become a palliative

we throw ourselves into the small things, and the big things stay the same?

almost all political tactic and strategy (that i can think of) (during the course of writing this post) was invented at some point in the struggle for the consumer society to overthrow feudalism

fetishising of the details of said tactic and strategy = crucial distraction from "big picture"?

fetishising of the details of said tactic and strategy = crucial distraction from "big picture"?

surely a lot of it was about getting rid of liberalism, too, as in 1848. liberalism initially, and especially in the 1840s, produced incredible suffering, actually lowered people's real wages and living standards due to the cycle of crashes inherent in free market capitalism. (UK responses to this tended to look back to feudalism as an Good Thing?)

the 'problem' viz inventing big-picture tactics is that in the west the problem of starvation-level poverty has gone, hence the 'end of history'.

anyway (acc.edward thompson) the tactic of working class self-organisation round eg pamphleteering and newspapers was pioneered as a tactic in the radical middle-classes in the mid 18th-c, w.rather difft purpose

(and the godwinites were pretty top-down when it came to thinkin abt the good of the masses)

re 1848 and europe i know v.little: but bismarckism surely trumped all attempts at social democratic politicking until after ww1?

i'm not sure that 'internationalism" has ever discovered its best tactics: demos and pamphleteering and local organisation round eg the workplace seems incredibly prey to being distorted towards chauvinist parochialism

but i think working-class movements became aware at this point that getting rid of feudalism wasn't enough. (most working-class movements did indeed support the empire and the 1st world war, so you're right in that internationalization didn't or hasn't produced a troo International)

Re: Shaun Ryder and Bez in homophobia shocker in NME whereupon middle class marxist journalist and readers all wet their pants in finding out that lads raised on the rough side of Manchester might also have developed prejudices not uncommon to their upbringing.

Although in my experience I have to stress that I've never met one that is not. Am I now going to be shot down for being honest? How many people posting here come from a working class background?

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I've also met upper class racists and middle class bigots BTW.

(the reverse movement = d.h.lawrence?) (haha instinctively i think this is true but i think i wd REALLY have to work hard to prove it) (the lawrentian pop-cult move is "kitchen sink drama"/angry young men)

*"non-straight" is a bit evasive i know but "gay" seems to me to be a bit anachronistic: there would have been working-class men putting out to help them escape the conditions of their social imprionment who'd actually probbly rather not have been; but also - of course - the majority of gay ppl at any given time belong to the most numerous class (ie the lowest being the largest)

crossclass homophobia can easily (even the same person) accompany intra-class tolerance and even fondness (cf eg huge music-hall era love of transvestites, campness etc)

a good novel on some of this is pat barker's "the eye in the door"

I'd love to see a gay person walk through the gorbels in Glasgow and get out the other end in one piece.

of course there is tension between middleclass socialism and working-class socialism: socialism is (among other things) the declaration that the interests of the middleclass ARE NOT the interests of the working classes, so the perspectives are bound to clash all the time

i would hesitate to describe happy mondays as taking an intrinsically working-class form, in terms of social organisation: the pop group (i would say) is, as a kind of micro-party politically, a tactic which evolved before the working-class struggle got into gear

but then the fall away from the interesting aspect into stupid fights about how he is the only person honest enough ever to have [whatever] and everyone else either laughing at him or chucking rocks

he has a real hurt-person's instinct for the raw spot, though

Now I bet if I said the idea of having sex with a guy made me want to puke (and it does BTW) you'd say I was a homophobe.

Genius.

I would if I thought I could get a few laffs out of it

(xxpost)

a TREMENDOUS amount of the social panic abt homosexuality pre-1967 seems to deepen out fears about classes mixing too freely and easily. there's a lovely quote from Christopher Isherwood in the early 40s: “It has always seemed to me that there is in fact only one Turkish Bath – an enormous subterranean world, a delicious purgatory, a naked democracy in which the only class distinctions are anatomical. And that this underworld merely has a number of different entrances and vestibules in all the cities of the earth. You could enter it in Sydney and emerge from it to find yourself in Jermyn Street.”

and i think it basically still does, despite the overgrouding of the gay lifestyle: it speaks to a fear of control-by-outsider-through-sex, or something

if yr thinkin abt it enough to start makin yrself sick then [insert obvious conclusion here]