Socialism in an age of stockbroking. posted by Richard Seymour

Socialism in an Age of Waiting . The very words alone are enough to inspire dread among the pseudo-Left, to which I proudly adhere. It isn't because of the eloquence and didactic beauty of their posts, and it isn't even that they sling mud. No. They're much more like monkeys in a zoo, throwing shit at bemused audiences.

I suggested a while ago that all of the incessant and increasingly tedious attempts by pro-war Leftists to assassinate the reputations of their opponents were motivated by panic about the utterly disastrous failure of their war and occupation. But in SIAW's case, there seems to be another factor, and that is an unwillingness to face up to their own flaws. So, when they appear in the comments thread at this post by a Debsian Socialist and bestow on the author the charming epithet "wanker", then follow it up by accusing the author of "playground name-calling" and advise him to "Get back to us when you've grown up a bit", a suspicious eyebrow might twitch. Add to that the history of playground name-calling at their site and elsewhere (in which another blogger is a "wanker", Marc Mulholland is a "fearless proletarian hero" and I am a devotee of the Rev Ian Paisley and Josef Geobbels) and you really might be on to something.

Mark the sequel. In the same comments thread, these dissertation-producing, blogging, idle-minded fantasists attempt to mock the antiwar-Left thus: "with your blogs and your dissertations, and your infantile fantasies, you can make a new world!" Hmmm. "Projection", I whispered. The riposte was crushing. I had resorted to a "stupid misuse of a term from bourgeois pyschology" (by which they mean Freudian psychiatry - a radically anti-bourgeois system of thought for those in the know). There are different definitions of the term, but one of them refers to a defense mechanism in which one projects one's undesirable qualities onto someone else. The following sentence, from their savage attack on International Rooksbyism (savage in the Monty Python sense: "I'll bite yer leg off!"), is not, of course, a "stupid misuse of a term from bourgeois psychology":

"Like Serge, some of us happen to be a lot more interested in the majority of human beings, and what they want, need, believe, etc., than in the cognitive dissonance of the majority/plurality of the left, which in the 1930s favoured, or failed to oppose, Stalinism..." [Emphasis added]

I wouldn't actually bore you with the entire sentence. What they mean by cognitive dissonance is for you to guess (the only way that sentence would make sense would be if they replaced the term with something like "confusion" or "apologetics"), but for anyone really interested in the term, it refers to the tension between what one already knows and a new cognition that threatens that existing knowledge.

I'll whisper it again: projection.

There may also be something to be said about a collection of individuals who describe themselves as "non-sectarian" but who seem embarrassingly interested in dispensing feckless insults at the expense of their opponents while remaining stoically impervious to argument. Or, indeed, who expend large amounts of intellectual effort (if I may speak loosely) describing their opponents as "pseudo-Left" while they are not totally free from the cogs of capital. Their site is registered to a Dr Graham Field who runs a firm called AQ Research , which gives advice to stockbroking and investment banking firms. He could, of course, merely have registered the site and have nothing else to do with it. I couldn't possibly comment.

Update: To my delight, SIAW have churned out this wonderful effort at self-satire. I am glad to say that they have not wasted their time with feeble, low-grade invective, dilute rhetorical jibes or half-arsed smears based on deliberate misrepresentation. Or I should say, they haven't wasted much time. However long it took was too long, though, and I certainly won't shift off my lazy arse to vend any considered reply. It would be like smashing a fly with a nuclear weapon.