I missed this when it appeared on The Daily Politics back in April. What's interesting (or not) about the discussion between Paul and the eternal general secretary is how they talk past one another. Peter puts forward the arguments he's repeated for the last 52 years, and Paul trots out (forgive the useless pun) his networky/counterpower/Negri stuff and neither engages with the position of the other. If the left can't even properly talk to itself, how does it expect to persuade larger numbers to rally around its politics?
All mediated by the eternal middle class BBC presenter who when it comes to issues facing working class people may as well be a potato.
ReplyDeleteI have 2 problems with Mason,
1) Rather than thinking menial tasks should be shared out so everyone has to do it, he thinks menial tasks can simply be replaced by machines. A classic Middle Class utopia.
2) His view of change isn't so much the working class taking power but that the movers and shakers coming to the eureka moment that the working class do not need to exist!
That's everyone's utopia. It's there in The Jetsons, Iain Banks' Culture, the Land of Cockaigne, the writings of 19th Century socialists and anarchists... the only people who have historically objected are Puritans and Calvinists.
ReplyDeleteNot my utopia at all. My first job was as a nursing auxiliary, washing bedpans and urine bottles, cleaning up incontinent old men, etc. I never saw the work itself as objectionable. What I disliked about the job was the oppressive and demeaning way I was treated by colleagues who were slightly higher in the pecking order. A Socialist society should enhance the status of such jobs, not attempt to automate them. Would you want your arse wiped by a robot?
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