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Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘working class’

How students turned on the working class – UnHerd

Posted by M. C. on November 26, 2022

And supporters argue that this change is driven by students themselves. But it’s less universally well-supported by ordinary Britons outside rarefied social and political circles. When, last week, Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy loudly applauded a Cambridge Union vote in favour of Britain paying reparations for past imperial depredations, the response from the general public was cynical. At the more polite end were accusations that “a prominent subset of the elite want to take money away from working Britons and give it to governments who openly hate us”. At the less polite end, responses were more along the lines of …

https://unherd.com/2022/11/how-students-betrayed-the-working-class/

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

Every idealistic student dreams of changing the world. In 1848, they actually succeeded. In urban capitals across Europe, revolutions broke out that year — with students playing a key role in many uprisings. That year launched a political alliance that has held for many subsequent social transformations: between young, radical bourgeois intellectuals — whether still studying or recently-graduated — and the industrial working class.

But that alliance is now faltering, and the search is on for a new one between young radical intellectuals and the wider masses. And whatever form it takes, it’s far from clear that it will follow the progressive lines that have characterised youth politics for the last two centuries.

The politics of students, and of that ambiguous class of 20-somethings whose lifestyle remains studenty even after graduation, has been a meaningful force for change ever since young people began flocking to higher education. For a new wave of higher-education institutions was, as historian Sheldon Rothblatt argues, inseparable from the class politics that emerged with that era.

In France, for example, the grandes écoles were founded after the French Revolution, and sought to shape a post-revolutionary elite to govern the country according to Enlightenment principles. These were the youth whose presence on the streets in 1848 was so conspicuous. In Prussia, meanwhile, a newly-powerful industrial bourgeoisie saw education as a key means of constructing a widespread national identity, which would serve their interests against the entrenched Prussian aristocracy.

Such institutions served as crucibles of national identity, finishing schools for the bourgeoisie — and also as a stretch of time in which young, idealistic, middle-class youth absorb high-minded ideas while remaining relatively free of economic and political obligations. It should come as no surprise, then, that such young people have often used that time to develop utopian visions, which they then seek to realise in the wider world.

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The Western Leftwing Preaches Hatred of the Working Class – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on July 4, 2019

Oxford University, formerly a member of the world’s best, has announced a policy of lowering its standards so that unqualified students can pass, thus advancing equality.

A leftwing that lives in such myths is totally useless. 

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/07/03/the-western-leftwing-preaches-hatred-of-the-working-class/

Paul Craig Roberts

Considering the American rightwing’s adsorption in war and hatred of Muslims, worship of capitalism whose operatives have sent American middle class jobs abroad, and blind support of Israel, a racist country, Americans desperately need a real leftwing.  All we have is a fake leftwing.

I sometimes think the last American leftist was British born Alex Cockburn, whose mother was a British aristocrat and whose father was a muckraking journalist.  I knew Alex.  He was a gentleman leftist, but more or less a real leftist.

Today’s leftists are into hate, not the hate of the capitalist exploiter, who most likely has bought them off, but the hate of white people, especially straight white males.  The American left is into Identity Politics and Antifa.  Identity Politics damns the working class as the “Trump deplorables.”  The working class is no longer a favored victim group.  Indeed, it is a victimizer. The official victim groups are “racial minorities,” who actually are huge majorities in the world, females, homosexuals and lesbians, and the “transgendered.”  Anyone can become transgendered simply by declaring themselves to be the opposite gender from what they are.

The working class is under attack for being “white supremacists.”  This is the way to shut them up, while sympathy is directed to the poor male who has declared himself transgendered into a woman and just won a woman’s sport event.  Normal people (soon a crime) have criticized letting a man win a women’s sport contest, and the leftwing comes down on these normal people for being ‘transgender phobic.”

Alex Cockburn’s creation, CounterPunch, with his death has become a forum for Laura Carlsen and other such haters of white males to demonize the endangered core populations of the Western world. According to Laura, we face the “threat of rightwing terrorism.”

Laura goes on to define “white nationalist” as “Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead, and Christian Identity.” The ignorance Laura displays in these associations is astounding, but ignorance is the leading characteristic of America’s fake left

Laura goes on to define “White” as “the racism directed at all non-white peoples and nations.”  Nationalism “refers to the territorial aspirations of the movement and the goal of a nation or homeland.”  Is Laura talking about Israel?  She wouldn’t dare…

Universities, like corporations and media, are working to “correct an implicit gender bias.”  In the UK “only 41% of scientists and engineers are women.” In Germany only 33% are women. Therefore, reverse discrimination is employed to correct a fabricated gender bias in order to make the female the family provider. The fabricated attack on males ignores that the natural function of women is to raise the next generation.

In the UK and the US, and little doubt elsewhere in the Western world, universities, once centers of learning, are being destroyed in order to abide by “political correctness” and gender and racial balance. For example, the University of Nottingham had a philosophy department that had a world rank.The value of the degree to graduates was destroyed when the university put in office a chairman who drove off the white males whose scholarship had made the university notable. In the place of scholars, the department hired “quota hires,” the correct gender and race, but absent the scholarship.  Consequently, the University of Nottingham  Ph.D. in Philosophy lost its ranking, and the degree declined in value.  All recent graduates with the degree are harmed. But women have the positions of the men who were jettisoned by the university.  In the British university system, this constitutes progress.

Oxford University, formerly a member of the world’s best, has announced a policy of lowering its standards so that unqualified students can pass, thus advancing equality.

There is no way to avoid the fact that in the Western world the white male is portrayed as the enemy that must be demonized and defeated. Here is Laura’s wrap-up description of white nationalists: “toxic blend of totalitarianism, white male violence driven by collective entitlement and frustration, and manifestations of extreme racism, sexism, xenophobia and homicidal gun-adoration.”

Imagine the uproar  if a white male spoke this way about a preferred minority.

Obviously, a socially dominant class could not be spoken of in this way.  Yet Laura presents the white male as an absolute ruler that must be overthrown.  How come only the allegedly “socially dominant” can be demonized and mistreated with hurtful words?  Why isn’t the “socially dominant” class protected by hate speech prohibitions?  Why do the allegedly “victim groups” have all the rights?

A leftwing that lives in such myths is totally useless.

“Beyond White Nationalism (militarist, racist, patriarchal, capitalist)” by Laura Carlsen, CounterPunch, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2019.

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Antifa BTFO as police allow violence at FMI event ...

How Antifa protests violence.

 

 

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