Colston: Correcting some misunderstandings

 (This is an old Reddit post, with slight edits and a little extra at the start)

It's a year since the Colston statue was toppled, starting a transatlantic iconoclast movement that, some argue, went a bit nuts. (At one point someone even started a petition against a statue of Ghandi ffs!) I would like to set the record straight as to how it all started, because a lot of people now describe this movement as some kind of ultra-woke, cancel culture nonsense, when in fact, it started as a VERY good thing indeed.

In many ways, this was a very local affair. Here in Bristol, England, half the city is named after Colston - streets, schools, even pubs and office towers... And the man was a horrible shit. A mass murderer who ran a corporation called The Royal African Company - a company which trafficked in human misery and made fortunes out of mass murder and slavery, a man whose crimes rival those of any Nazi - but which he gets away with because he did it long ago. OK, he did it long ago, does that mean we have to deify the bastard?

Local businessmen had erected the statue and made him into a city father over a century after his death - and continued to defend him well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Year after year you'd hear these bloated borgeous scumbags defending a man who belonged in an unmarked grave following execution, not on a plinth in the centre of town. The council did nothing to address the widely held issues people had with the guy, and eventually, local people took matters into their own hands.

You can't understand the Colston affair without understanding Bristol's local politics. The city has a sizeable black community and a long history of inter-racial solidarity dating back to World War 2, and the powers that be, from the Merchant Venturers (dodgy local freemason types who kept bits of Colstons' corpse around to worship) to our useless centrist council, did sod all about it. To understand what Colston meant to black people, it was as if they'd kept a statue of Eichmann up in the middle of Warsaw "because history".

Bristol was in many ways built on slavery and black people know this. It's part of local black culture to curse our status as a "slave port" - especially Afro-Carribeans, the literal descendants of those enslaved by Colston. There has been the bare minimum of official acknowlegments of the citys' part in this crime against humanity, until recently the only acknowlegements of it were: a tiny plaque in an out of the way part of the Docks, a mural nobody noticed, and a footbridge patronizingly named after some bastards' house slave - this in a country that is obsessed with history!

I backed the toppling of Colston and still do. It was a great moment for my city, where people came together in solidarity to do something that had needed to be done for a long, long time. This wasn't "cancel culture", this was grass roots, democracy at work. People had tried everything, and nobody did anything about it. And then one day... they did.

This isn't America (thank God). Colston wasn't George Washington, he was a grubby, nasty piece of shit who would be hunted down like a dog if he did what he did today. He didn't deserve a statue, he deserves to be used as a toilet. Yeeting him into the docks was the best thing that Bristol did in a long time. Nothing "stupidpol" about it - quite the opposite, that day there was an incredible atmosphere of solidarity and love, I haven't seen anything like it before or since. Please don't assume we're as stupid and ahistorical as Americans - we know exactly what we're doing.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Leftist failings and the possibility of Anarcho-Social Democracy

Some problems and a possible solution

OK, I know I'm always going on about this, but really...

WHY ARE OUR GUYS SO DUMB?

Take this article for example. Let me show you why it is a stupid article.

1. She allows herself to be photographed looking like she has just been sucking on a delicious lemon.

This really is a beginner's mistake. Presentation is vital; would you read anything written by someone who constantly scowls disapprovingly at you?

2. She mistakes privileges for rights and rights for privileges.

The title says it all (and yes, I have said the same thing on this very blog). But that is wrong. It is bad framing. Being alive should never be considered a privilege, and as soon as you do so, you lose.

Is there such a thing as "white privilege"? Well, yes, you could put it that way, perhaps, although it is grammatically incorrect, at least in white-majority countries. 

But it is not helpful to frame it in this way, especially when you are speaking in terms of life and death. I repeat: Being alive should never be considered a privilege; modern juristictions and successful activists speak instead of "human rights". This article mentions the phrase "privilege" 11 times. It mentions "rights" not at all. Although at the bottom of the page, it says "all rights reserved."

Perhaps it was  bad interview. If someone had printed an interview with me and it came accross like that, with its sour portrait and its endless scolding of an entire group of people, I would ask to have it taken down. If they refused, I would then approach a lawyer.

Claudia Rankine clearly isn't a stupid person. I am sure they don't hand out PhDs to morons. But intellectuals, especially American intellectuals, seem especially prone to behaving like idiots. It's as if their intelligence works against itsself; they get so wrapped up in signifiers and concocting new forms of jargon that have to be explained at length, that they forget that their function as activists isn't to show everyone how clever they are and flex their intellectual muscles, it's to help with "the work", to stop these horrific human rights abuses in their tracks.

Again, America is a huge part of the problem. Americans have a really hard time understanding the concept of universal rights, "the Commons" - something we all share and all have as a birthright. Even though universal human rights were supposedly enshrined in their Constitution, that document is the oldest that I know of that confuses rights with privileges - notoriously, the right to have a gun is enshrined before the right to a fair trial, the right not to be enslaved, the right to vote, the rights of women to vote, the right to life itsself, and even the right to your own property, practically a religion over there, is not considered as important as the right to bear arms. Everywhere else in the world, having a gun is like having a car, it's a dangerous weapon and in the wrong hands can kill even the person who owns it, so they are subject to stringent controls and licensing. Not so in the USA.

Americans also don't understand the concept of wealth held in common, even abstract concepts such as human rights, because to them everything is private. They think that if one person gains, another must lose. Everything is a zero-sum game to them. So that explains that- the capitalistic culture of the US is a form of ideology, in the Slavoj Zizek sense, which tends to taint everything a person does. To use the language of the Social Justice activists, the problem is systemic and unconcious.

But that doesn't explain why the Left has been so stupid in the past.

I've been either a left-wing activist or a keen supporter or at least a sympathetic observer of the Left for thirty years. I went to my first protest in 1990; I went to my last protest in 2019.

Since then I've seen big wins - like the Poll Tax campaign, gay rights, and local victories for squatters and the homeless - morph into terrible, horrible losses.

I've watched the Left, or as they were then, the environmental movement, screw up in the 1990s. As a result, the environment is fucked.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-war movement in the 2000s. As a result, the government can basically bomb the shit out of anyone they feel like.

I've watched the Left screw up the anti-capitalist movement in the late noughties and early 2010s. As a result, capitalism has, as Umair Haque puts it, gone full Soviet - the government spends endless amounts of cash propping up the stock market and big business while the people literally go hungry on breadlines.

Now the Left are screwing up on human rights and ethnic minority issues, as a result, the American police are a literal death squad and racist attitudes are entrenched at all levels of society, and not just in the USA. The news is grim for sexual minorities as well; even many Leftists of the previous generation are openly hostile to Transgender people, including people whom I know personally.

This isn't just an American problem - I've watched all this happen in the UK as well. I've watched as black activists framed their cause in terms of resentment for whites, I've seen anti-capitalism degenerate into a pointless conspiracy theory jerk-off, I've observed the anti-war movement rapidly turn into an anti-Semitic bandwagon of sympathy for terrorists, and I've been there when environmentalists sat around and got stoned, got in peoples' way, or just smashed things up for the cameras.

It has driven me to despair. I no longer believe the Left will be relevant in my lifetime except as a straw man for the Right to knock down, a sort of controlled opposition.

I think the only hopeful strategy remaining is to elect social-democratic and liberal parties (which the Left also oppose unless they're in charge of them). We can then leverage our protests to get what we want from them, as they are more likely to resort to reform than the Right (who simply repress protest with brutal violence).

ANARCHO-SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

This is the meaning of Anarcho-Social Democracy. "Anarcho-", which means "going to demonstrations, drinking a lot, listening to punk rock and dressing all in black", means you're not confined to any particular leftwing party or ideology. This decentralization has disadvantages, but the great advantage is that it is hard for any one group or party to monopolize power. It also means that anyone, anywhere, can join in, from liberals to socialists to sympathetic capitalists (depending on the issue of course). Anarchism is, generally speaking, inclusive.

Social democracy, because, well, you have a vote, it's the only formal power you have, so you might as well use it to elect a somewhat more sympathetic government than we would have otherwise. It's not much, granted, but it exists and you'd be stupid not to excercise this right.