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Re: outburst in defence of Martin Johnston
"So the dockers who supported Enoch Powell were petit
bourgeois, and all
those Marxist academics are horny-handed sons of toil?
Could have fooled
me.."
Enoch Powell was not a fascist, just a Tory racist(not
much different to Jack Straw and Tony Blair,
actually), but I think there is evidence to suggest
that Mosley, who was a bona fide fascist, did have a
measure of working class suport in the early 30s,
particularly in the East End of London, where the
petit-bourgeoisie were mostly Jewish. However most
sociologists hang onto the idea of fascism as mainly a
petit-bourgeois phenomenon, in Europe at least.
Incidentally, there is a strong fascist movement in
Fiji today, calls itself Taukei,has been heavily
involved in the turmoil there, which is almost
certainly led by the petit-bourgeoisie.
Very few 'Marxist' academics become members of Marxist
organisations. In the period that I was thinking
about, the first half of the century, the Communist
parties of the English-speaking world actively
discriminated against academics, discouraged them from
joining.
It is worth noting, though, that most academics fit
the bill for membership of the working class...
"People who get their kicks from breaking up meetings
maybe have a lot in
common with the far right."
Most times the far left shuts down meetings it does it
non-violently, or relatively non-violently. In Aussie,
for instance, thousands of people, led by the far
left, blocked the entrances to halls in Melbourne and
Sydney to stop the far right One Nation Party of
Pauline Hanson from meeting. On at least one occasion
mounted police charged the anti-Hansonites, who just
stood there and took it and held their ground and
closed the meeting.
I've been involved in violent clashes with fascists
twice - it's an interesting experience, you learn the
functional value of a skinhead haircut...
"But this discussion is probably pointless. The words
socialism and fascism
are so vague in their application (everyone has his or
her own private
definition) that using them to argue with is like
juggling with jelly,
unless one is talking within a very specific
historical context."
But that just makes it more interesting!It's like
discussing 'poetry'. It just means we have to be
careful with the generalisations, I guess.
Cheers
Scott
=====
"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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