World Cup
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I hope we can all agree. World Cup gives joy to millions, and WSM (with honourable exceptions) takes opportunity to declare from on high that it’s a circus and we should not be distracted from class struggle. As if this argument will persuade anyone. I’m off to see a film – oh, hang on it’s all bread and circuses. I’m off to a concert – oh hang on it’s all bread and circuses. I’ll just read a book – oh hang on it’s not a biography of Marx. According to some here, the working class isn’t allowed any fun because that would distract us from The Party Case. I submit that it’s frankly ridiculous to suggest that enjoying the World Cup football tournament renders millions oblivious to socialism. I’m concerned that a class conscious worker coming here might get the impression that WSM believes that you can’t be a socialist if you’re enjoying the World Cup.
PaulaHear hear, Paula. Some matches have been brilliant and you can’t beat it for drama (though I do like Shakespeare too). May the team that plays the best footie win, I don’t really care where they come from. But please not on penalties.
And it gives us a chance to boo arch capitalists Mr Pres and Mr Fifa for their skulduggery. Of course in a socialist society there would be no international football but as it’s there why not enjoy it. And there’s nothing to say that it wouldn’t be replaced by some kind of inter-regional competition where the regions are more or less equivalent to countries. Unlikely maybe but we just don’t know.Sir Tom
I was tortured at school when the teachers at the school full of East end of Newcastle nutters I was part of decided that we would all benefit from them teaching us classical music and starting an orchestra.
As Congreve said, they thought “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,”. Well it fecking didn’t.
It just gave the 10% psychopaths amongst the teachers and pupils that were part of the school additional means to beat the living crap out of us.
The teachers had the excuse to beat us cos we didn’t have a note in our bodies.
The school psychos beat us up if you showed any interest in playing instruments, as it ended up with those who played becaming complicit in the torture of the rest of the school, as everyone was forced to attend one of the appalling school concerts that followed.
To be fair they had a point.
That doesn’t mean that I would decry classical music.
There are lots of things I find boring, but that’s up to them. I don’t go off pontificating about what they do and try to claim the moral high ground because I don’t enjoy their enthusiasm.
Some people enjoy growing prize vegetables, some people enjoy musical theatre (😱), some people enjoy football and some people even enjoy wearing wearing strange clothes and hitting small balls around golf courses.
Please don’t try and pin your particular dislikes on to the flag of revolutionary socialism, it does socialism a great disservice.
I hope a Socialist Society would be part of a great flowering of human interest and creativity, that may be in the arts, in science, in literature and even in sport. Any attempt to stifle is in my mind anti socialist
For once I agree with you.
I was bullied by the music teacher. Another music teacher grabbed a handful of a little boy’s hair and ripped it out.
To be fair, Sir Tom, I was going to leave your comment about music teachers as final note, but, perhaps I should add a little bit more.
I wasn’t going to mention that the fact that your comment that childhood experiences of music were similar to your comments about your experiences regarding football and sport. It made me think, if you were alienated from sport as a result of your early experiences, so why not music?
Is it because you only wish to ape the standards of those who you ostensibly despise, the ruling class? You seem to never resist the chance to demonstrate your class obsequiousness when cultural matters are raised. Sport is for the proles, popular drama is mindless, anything less than bowing and scraping of the gods of the ruling classes’ cultural icons is to be admonished. You are nothing but a lick spittle to the culture of the ruling class.
Marx wrote that “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology. You seem to be the most excellent example of this concept. You are nothing more than a lick spittle to the dominant ideas, culture and concepts of the ruling class.
Anna Freud wrote in The Ego and the Mechanisms of the defence mechanism, identification of the oppressor, whereby a person facing an external threat, such as disapproval or criticism from an authority figure (or ruling class culture), identifies with the source of the threat, either by appropriating the aggression or else by adopting other attributes of the threatening figure.
The culture of the ruling classes has entered the soul of your being, man; you cannot look beyond the cultural prison that your public school encased you. You talk about how hard it was, but in the same breath any culture which is not within your narrow ruling class curriculum is to be despised and mocked.Steve Biko made the point that if the culture of black people in South Africa during Apartheid was continually denigrated and reduced to ridicule it would become powerless. Only the culture of the ruling white minority could be lauded and embraced. Challenging the cultural assumptions of a ruling class becomes a part of revolutionary thinking. Glorying in the culture of the ruling class like you do leaves workers in the thrall of the false cultural gods of the Capitalist Class
Sadly, you and people like you, whilst ostensibly pretending to be revolutionaries are really nothing more than cultural cheerleaders for the ruling class. If a person doesn’t follow the cultural signage that the ruling class sets out, they are a barbarian, if they think of books as nothing but a physical entity to assist the development of ideas, they are a neanderthal, if they like football they are a hooligan, if they speak in dialect, they are a fool.
Cultural expressions which do not follow the formulae set by the ruling class are vulgar and uneducated, not worthy of consideration. Your Socialism is a paper tiger to the ruling class.
Instead of reading and grovelling to the tomes set by your public-school persecutors you might attempt to read from a more diverse canon, not blessed and approved by the bourgeoisie. Get of your knees and stop bowing before your oppressor.
Have a read through the work of Sid Chaplin, Jack Common (Orwell wished said he could write like Jack Common), Alan Silitoe, Barry Hines, Jack Hilton, Alistair Gray and recently the work of Douglas Stewart. Listen to the anarchic musical legacy that people like Tommy Armstrong “The Pitman Poet” or Joe Wilson have left. You might even try the incredible humour of Leonard Barras. Look at the history of The Rugby Football League where working people took on the might of the sporting establishment and created their own sport in defiance of the rules of the “sporting gentlemen” and literally beat them at their own game.Get off your cultural knees and your mental development might become broad enough to appreciate that the beauty of a Cruyff Turn, is in its own terms as beautiful and as significant as a ballet move, that the Archie Gemmill’s run was a moment of sheer genius, a game of cribbage can be as complex and fiendish as a hand of bridge.
Hopefully a socialist society will banish your view of culture to the historical footnotes
You may feel a momentary feeling of superiority when you attempt to stylise football fans as hooligans, you may even develop a transient feeling of self worth when you deride the culture of those who don’t follow the lead of the ruling elite, but sadly your words and comments (such as the posting you placed above) show that you are nothing but a sad little snob, acting like a cultural puppy, licking the boots of the elite that whipped you.
You haven’t even got the wit to make up your own jokes, you have to rely on cutting and pasting videos of other people. To me your lack of creativity demonstrates that your surrender to the master class is complete, you haven’t got an original thought in your head.
😀 It seems you are the one restricting the definition of working class in accordance with bourgeois prejudice.
What makes you think there is no genuine love for classical music, classical literature and art, but that it is all bogus and feigned, like in the case of the snazzily-dressed snoots who ooze bogus appreciation as they sneer at the waiters bringing them their champagne?
Historically it has been what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat that has always been the most reactionary and the most patriotic and supportive of the bourgeoisie. Self-educated workers are looked at askance.
Unlike the majority, who walk past the homeless, pretending they see no one, I stop and talk with several homeless people. I was also made to attend “jobclubs” as one of “the great unwashed” and unemployed. I noticed and notice that the people who are the poorest are the most militaristic, the most punitive, the most patriotic and the most conservative I have ever spoken with. Surely not all, but definitely those I have spoken with.
TM – So what you are saying is that any body who is interested in cultural activities that are not in line with the cultural mandate set by your cultural overlords can be defined as being part of the lumpenproletariat? What you appear to be saying is that art produced by the people I quoted (Sid Chaplin, Jack Common, Alan Silitoe, Barry Hines, Jack Hilton, Alistair Gray, Douglas Stewart, Tommy Armstrong, Joe Wilson and Leonard Barras) can be comfortably ignored because they fit into your definition of the lumpenproletariat. Your just making yourself looking even more foolish and elitist (which to be fair is pretty difficult thing to do).
I would also suggest that you should go back to the school you were educated in and see if you can get some of the money back, it appears that you are unable to undertake a basic comprehension exercise. I have at no point did I say “What makes you think there is no genuine love for classical music, classical literature and art, but that it is all bogus and feigned“. Where in your elitist fever dream did I say that?
What I was saying is that by elevating the cultural activities of the bourgeoisie to the level of fetishism whilst simultaneously denigrating cultural activities that are enjoyed and developed outside of that cultural elite, by castigating those who enjoy things that are not within your boot licking agenda, you are complicit in the domination of the master class.
” Hopefully a socialist society will banish your view of culture to the historical footnotes.”
So much for classical literature, love of books etc., then, when they are banished to the historical footnotes.
TM “The moment men try to open conversation with football talk, that’s my cue to buzz off.” As this Forum Topic was titled “The World Cup” and is clearly a discussion about football, why did you not take the cue and *^@?ed off. Is it that you could resist the temptation to attempt to boost your sense of self importance by demonstrating to all just how refined and discerning you are by explaining in detail how boorish and lumpen anyone who has other views.
You even post a video on a party website stating that you have identified me (a fellow comrade) and that I am as Peter Cook describes “A convicted football hooligan” you also by posting that imply that my long standing interest in football is based on a desire to commit assaults on other football fans, even though, as far as I know you have not met me, you know very little about me and my life. Some could actually argue that your post was possibly libelous.
That crude characterisation is not funny, it exposes you for what you are.
” Hopefully a socialist society will banish your view of culture to the historical footnotes.”
So much for classical literature, love of books etc., then, when they are banished to the historical footnotes.
Another example of your failings in basic comprehension. I did not say that the culture would be banished, read it again properly. “your VIEW of culture to the historical footnotes”
3/10 must try harder!
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