From you know where…
Joining the Green party was a quiet, private moment. It was unusual for quite a loud politico like me, habituated to citizenship as a way of intervening, a mission to make a difference.
Yes, my understanding is filling in some forms is not generally accompanied by Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.
It was a rather innocent gesture. Signing up. Some meetings maybe, some leafleting, some learning – as a non-geek, Green stuff carried the allure of rocket science and the promise of new enlightenment. And it satisfied a pleasure in politics, a longing to be more than myself, to be a participant citizen, which you can only be in a throng, not so much a street crowd but a collectivity that shares insight and making strategy.
Oh, this is gonna be good…
Behind the gesture it was a familiarity with some Green scholars – Rachel Carson is a heroine – and some Green politicians and thinking they were splendid; tracking Green party policy and thinking it was appropriate – the Green New Deal is a radical and realistic as it gets in British politics today.
Rachel Carson was a complete arsehole. Yes, complete, full sphincter and a side of rectum thrown in.
I’d voted Green, probably in the way that many activists of my generation, who’d felt so busy and alert in the last quarter of the 20th century, had voted Liberal Democrat, Green, Respect sometimes, always to dissent from New Labour’s combination of abject and authoritarian populism. My friends and family are typically left of centre: some vote Labour because they hate the Tories, some don’t vote because they don’t see the point, most sign up to something.
Lib Dem, Green and Respect? Respect! Fucking Hell!
People started to invigilate my virtue – how much recycling did I really do; what was the Green perspective on law and order? Those fond challenges were all appropriate; they concerned the necessity and also the limits of personal responsibility. The answers to those questions showed Green politics to be a social justice politics as much a climate agenda: environmental and social sustainability.
There was a time when “virtue” meant something other than washing trash and sorting it into different coloured boxes to be land-filled in China.
That’s why it is so attractive. The Green critique of modernity’s Faustian recklessness helps to make sense not only of capitalism but also the tragedies of state socialisms. For progressives, whose politics hover between the centre and the far left, this is decisive.
Look, Bea, just go fuck off and live in a yurt or something… Actually, no stay… You are doing more for my case by continuing to spout shite and I can ever do by shouting spite.
The communist states of the 20th century did for socialism. I was a dynastic communist – my parents were British Bolsheviks, they were good citizens, and became better when Khrushchev gave permission to criticise Stalinism. All that crashed with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. They could not relinquish the Soviet Union, and thereafter our family rows were on the terrain of Russia. The worst insult my father could hurl was: “You’re just a social democrat!”
Oh, deary me! That is beyond fucking comprehension.
I remained a communist until 1989, when it was all over. I was part of the anti-Stalinist, Euro-communist wing. We were clever, caused trouble, caught the imagination, but we lost. Or maybe we failed.
Lots of people remained communised until 1989 and then something happened. I can’t for the life of me recall what it was… Oh, yeah it was the collapse of one of the greatest tyrannies in human history. Oh and from a Green perspective a World-Champion destroyer of the environment. Bea, got Google? Try “East German Brown Coal”, “Chernobyl” and “Aral Sea” for starters.
So you lost (or maybe failed) despite being clever? Maybe Bea you weren’t that clever. Or maybe you were just wrong. Oddly enough the bolded bit carries echoes of J Danforth Quayle, “If we do not succeed we run the risk of failure”. And he was certainly not the sharpest pencil in the Republican box now was he?
But it was feminism that clarified the unsustainability of state communism. Macho, manic productionism relies on force, it valorises conquest of nature and other humans. It marginalises the means of reproduction – how societies sustain themselves, breathe, give birth, grow and rest, clean up; how people take care, give pleasure and co-operate. Barbara Taylor’s revelatory book, Eve and the New Jerusalem, published on the crest of women’s liberation, told the story of industrialisation and socialist politics, utopianism and the co-operative movement. And it tells the story of these radical movements’ defeat – by working men organised in their own interests as men.
I’m fairly sure that isn’t Barbara Taylor Bradford’s book but beyond that I’m beginning to struggle. What a load of utterly sexist hogwash though! As though women never designed or built anything. Sheesh sister you ought to be ashamed. And the breathing thing - it’s to do with lungs, and the diaphragm. Put a GCSE biology book on your Amazon wish-list. You will discover it contains answers to many questions.
The sexism – and destructiveness – of modernity was not evolutionary, it was a bitter political struggle. The outcome: men’s movements masquerading as egalitarian and socialist.
Oh sweet mother of fuck! Evolution is a struggle. Darwin knew that. Best add the A-level text to the Amazon wish-list. And that last line. It makes it sound like Keir Hardy addressed meetings in drag.
Green ideology represents the reconciliation of production and reproduction – that is what yields sustainability.
Huh?
Suddenly one day, an email did the rounds inviting Greens in Camden (where I vote) to stand for every council seat. “Go on then,” said my partner. And then the party said stand for parliament. “Go on then,” she said.
I just knew she had a “partner” and not a husband, boyfriend or girlfriend. And “suddenly one day” as an opener is sub-GCSE.
It was, to tell the truth, the last thing I’d ever expected to do. This autumn I was selected to stand in Hampstead and Kilburn.
It feels almost too late, and not a moment too soon.
I bet she pleasured herself for hours with a FairTrade organic kumquat over the deep sophistication of that final line.
That is without any doubt the most self-serving bilge I have read for quite some time. The connection of feminism with Green is just boggling. It’s men you see who like make shit and stuff and it’s women who nurture. Oh my eyes! And the bizarre Communist almost apologia is… If she was as clever as she stated then why was she taken in for so long by this terrible masculinist plot?
H/T - Commentator RAB who parses CiF so the rest of us don’t have to.
I liked the comments on there asking her about her views on ritual abuse. That dangerous garbage appears to have been put in a Orwellian memory hole that is her mind.
Does anyone else remember the Channel 4 documentary she did on that subject perhaps in the early 90’s ? From memory she stood in a small playing field in the middle of Nottingham and described how 30 or 40 MEN had ritually abused children there right in the centre of the city. She explained how nothing was done since everyone in power was a MAN and how we all cover up for each over.
She is of course quite barking but that documentary should have been enough for the men in white coats to visit her.
Yes, I to read that article. I’m still shaking my head in disbelief of that fatuous, ignorant, self serving, righteous, article.
Oh well. We have to have some loons standing for parliament.
I seem to recall all the last-ditch apologists for the Soviet Union back in the ’80s banging on endlessly about how marvellously equal wimmin were in the workers’ paradise (which was probably true; they starved to death or got sent to the salt mines just like anyone else). So now that it’s apparent to even the dimmest bulb that the whole enterprise was an abject failure, not to mention an authoritarian dictatorship, it turns out to have been down to the blokes. Again.
And as I said over at Mr.E.’s, even allowing for the inexplicable respectability of people who “remained a communist until 1989” (rather like, as he says, remaining a Nazi until 1945), promotion of the “satanic abuse” witch-hunt should put anyone completely beyond the pale.
Of course women were so equal…
Last week I read a piece saying in The Times saying that women had failed to benefit from the fall of the wall. One pieve of evidence it cited was that abortion had been “normalized” in the Eastern block.
This is apparently better than in the West where a social stigma was attached.
Oh, do fuck off! Regardless of one’s view on abortion per-se the easy access to effecctive contraception in the West was better than that.
Crap contraception so loads of abortions so the sisterhood could sing about the “normalization” of what should be a very rare procedure at best?
Oh, be still my splitting sides! Which of those East European women would have traded their dementedly liberal abortion rights for access to decent contraception?
None. It was bizarre beyond belief that the pro-abortion movement could claim this as a good thing.
Surely they want as few women as possible to have abortions? Yes, maybe, but not if the reverse is politically useful.