Disney Consumer Products once again ranked as the No. 1 global licensor reporting $28.6 billion in retail sales of licensed merchandise worldwide in 2010, up from $27. As of October 2, 2017, MyWay Email will be shut down. If you are a MyWay Email account holder, please log in and save all information you wish to save. Sounds bad, right? The media thought so, and many ate the dramatic prediction up uncritically, with headlines declaring that climate change will turn you into an. Parents Forced to Say Goodbye to Terminally Ill 10-Month-Old Baby as Courts Decide to Take Him Off Life Support. Exiting the Vampire Castle. This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself drifting through social networks, feeling my depression and exhaustion increasing. Earlier this year, there were some high- profile twitterstorms, in which particular left- identifying figures were . What these figures had said was sometimes objectionable; but nevertheless, the way in which they were personally vilified and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch- hunting moralism. The reason I didn’t speak out on any of these incidents, I’m ashamed to say, was fear. This summer, I seriously considered withdrawing from any involvement in politics. Exhausted through overwork, incapable of productive activity, I found myself. Hearst Magazines and Hearst Digital Media are divisions of Hearst Communications, Inc. The bullies were in another part of the playground. I didn’t want to attract their attention to me. The open savagery of these exchanges was accompanied by something more pervasive, and for that reason perhaps more debilitating: an atmosphere of snarky resentment. The most frequent object of this resentment is Owen Jones, and the attacks on Jones – the person most responsible for raising class consciousness in the UK in the last few years – were one of the reasons I was so dejected. If this is what happens to a left- winger who is actually succeeding in taking the struggle to the centre ground of British life, why would anyone want to follow him into the mainstream? Is the only way to avoid this drip- feed of abuse to remain in a position of impotent marginality? One of the things that broke me out of this depressive stupor was going to the People’s Assembly in Ipswich, near where I live. The People’s Assembly had been greeted with the usual sneers and snarks. This was, we were told, a useless stunt, in which media leftists, including Jones, were aggrandising themselves in yet another display of top- down celebrity culture. What actually happened at the Assembly in Ipswich was very different to this caricature. The first half of the evening – culminating in a rousing speech by Owen Jones – was certainly led by the top- table speakers. But the second half of the meeting saw working class activists from all over Suffolk talking to each other, supporting one another, sharing experiences and strategies. Far from being another example of hierarchical leftism, the People’s Assembly was an example of how the vertical can be combined with the horizontal: media power and charisma could draw people who hadn’t previously been to a political meeting into the room, where they could talk and strategise with seasoned activists. The atmosphere was anti- racist and anti- sexist, but refreshingly free of the paralysing feeling of guilt and suspicion which hangs over left- wing twitter like an acrid, stifling fog. Then there was Russell Brand. I’ve long been an admirer of Brand – one of the few big- name comedians on the current scene to come from a working class background. Over the last few years, there has been a gradual but remorseless embourgeoisement of television comedy, with preposterous ultra- posh nincompoop Michael Mc. Intyre and a dreary drizzle of bland graduate chancers dominating the stage. The day before Brand’s now famous interview with Jeremy Paxman was broadcast on Newsnight, I had seen Brand’s stand- up show the Messiah Complex in Ipswich. The show was defiantly pro- immigrant, pro- communist, anti- homophobic, saturated with working class intelligence and not afraid to show it, and queer in the way that popular culture used to be (i. Malcolm X, Che, politics as a psychedelic dismantling of existing reality: this was communism as something cool, sexy and proletarian, instead of a finger- wagging sermon. The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take- down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class . This wasn’t Johnny Rotten swearing at Bill Grundy – an act of antagonism which confirmed rather than challenged class stereotypes. Brand had outwitted Paxman – and the use of humour was what separated Brand from the dourness of so much . Brand makes people feel good about themselves; whereas the moralising left specialises in making people feed bad, and is not happy until their heads are bent in guilt and self- loathing. The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media . In the febrile Mc. Carthyite atmosphere fermented by the moralising left, remarks that could be construed as sexist mean that Brand is a sexist, which also meant that he is a misogynist. Cut and dried, finished, condemned. It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good- humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like . And I for one was inspired. Where a few months before, I would have stayed silent as the Posh. Left moralisers subjected Brand to their kangaroo courts and character assassinations – with . The response to Brand quickly became as significant as the Paxman exchange itself. As Laura Oldfield Ford pointed out, this was a clarifying moment. And one of the things that was clarified for me was the way in which, in recent years, so much of the self- styled . The petit bourgeoisie which dominates the academy and the culture industry has all kinds of subtle deflections and pre- emptions which prevent the topic even coming up, and then, if it does come up, they make one think it is a terrible impertinence, a breach of etiquette, to raise it. I’ve been speaking now at left- wing, anti- capitalist events for years, but I’ve rarely talked – or been asked to talk – about class in public. But, once class had re- appeared, it was impossible not to see it everywhere in the response to the Brand affair. Brand was quickly judged and- or questioned by at least three ex- private school people on the left. Others told us that Brand couldn’t really be working class, because he was a millionaire. It’s alarming how many . I don’t know the individual who wrote it, and I wouldn’t wish to name them. What’s important is that the post was symptomatic of a set of snobbish and condescending attitudes that it is apparently alright to exhibit while still classifying oneself as left wing. The whole tone was horrifyingly high- handed, as if they were a schoolteacher marking a child’s work, or a psychiatrist assessing a patient. Brand, apparently, is . There’s also a shocking but revealing aside where the individual casually refers to Brand’s ! The CIA has had the ability to turn routers and network access points into surveillance devices for years, according to secret documents published by WikiLeaks on.This isn’t some colonial bureaucrat writing about his attempts to teach some ? It is first of all necessary to identify the features of the discourses and the desires which have led us to this grim and demoralising pass, where class has disappeared, but moralism is everywhere, where solidarity is impossible, but guilt and fear are omnipresent – and not because we are terrorised by the right, but because we have allowed bourgeois modes of subjectivity to contaminate our movement. I think there are two libidinal- discursive configurations which have brought this situation about. They call themselves left wing, but – as the Brand episode has made clear – they are many ways a sign that the left – defined as an agent in a class struggle – has all but disappeared. Inside the Vampires’ Castle. The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic- pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in- crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois- liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have . But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi- camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self- consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group. I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection- disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt- mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is .
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