This is the second of three posts dealing with Laurie Penny’s New Statesman piece on the student movement and how said student movement relates to journalists. Part one is here.
Outside of my anger at having private words twisted and served up to suit an agenda I don’t subscribe to, which I’ll happily admit is a relatively small issue, there are other political problems with the one-size-fits-all style of the piece, which while emphasising our lack of leaders, airbrushes problems and dissent. There’s an uncomfortable sentence at the beginning where the UCL occupation is labelled “the unofficial London headquarters of a national youth movement”. This is pretty unhelpful, as well as chiming oddly with the no leaders claim; UCL got so much media attention, due to a convenient location and a good media team, that if I was from another occupation I’d be pretty hacked off with it by now. Not all occupations were like us, in activist make-up, ideas, organisation or anything else. It’s interesting to look at UCL promotion in relation to the politics Laurie espouses. We conveniently fit, in some senses, the model of new, young, non-Trotskyist activists, whereas other occupations don’t; their political make-up reflected tensions more clearly, in a way that’s harder to airbrush out (see, for example, Leeds).
It’s true then, when Laurie says Ben is “one of a minority of student protesters with a background in far-left politics”. But only if far-left politics means ‘organised revolutionary socialist groups’. But it doesn’t. The hard work of building and maintaining an activist presence on campus when nothing so high-profile was going on, laying the foundations that made occupation possible, was the work of a group of UCL activists who I think would very much consider themselves to be hard-left: socialists, anarchists, radical greens. And some of them, some of us, are the people who are coming up against this generational, consensus-based, romantic vision the hardest. But we’re not here. None of the disagreement is here.
Some apparent agreement, which didn’t take place, is though. There was no vote on banning ‘sex in the toilets’, not that I saw or heard of. If sex was raised, it may have been to remind people that having sex while we’re all in such close quarters would be a bit anti-social. But there was no common line of ‘straight edged sexual abstinence’. Who cares how we conducted our sex lives in occupation anyway? Why is it any of the New Statesman’s readership’s business? It strikes me as creepy, and unfortunately provides the ridiculous title: ‘No drugs. No sex. And no leaders’. I don’t have much to say on this, because I literally just. don’t. get. it. Is having sex meant to be shorthand for wild hedonism (ooh, edgy) and our apparent rejection of it supposed to figure as a mark of our seriousness? We’re all adults, yeah, we are allowed to have sex lives. In private. Away from occupiers and journalists. Weird…
Then there’s the gender issue. Apparently in occupation meetings ‘the voices of women and younger pupils [were] given priority’. This simply isn’t true. There was real anger at various points over facilitation styles, the tone of speeches, people talking for too long, etc. putting off women and less experienced activists (there’s some interesting overlap here). I’m not claiming this is only a problem of consensus decision-making (you might argue it’s a failure to do it properly, and it’s an issue the whole left suffers from), and maybe a critique of it wouldn’t fit here. But even so, there was no need to explicitly state that it wasn’t a problem. That lets people who behaved badly, or who didn’t notice, off the hook – we should all be thinking about this stuff, not being smugly self-satisfied that we’re inclusive. Given the sidelining of women is such a common problem in all movements it’s odd to see a feminist writer glibly decide it wasn’t going on with us.
The same strange failure to probe more deeply, on feminist grounds, is evident in the profile of Sarah versus the profiles of Ben and Aaron. Laurie rightly says Sarah did lots of the shit, boring drudgery of political life – “organising meetings, making sure the younger ones are listened to”, to which I’d add security shifts, legal work, facilitating, cleaning up – but concludes this means she’s ‘really running the show’, compared to the ‘dramatic male activists’. There’s a massive problem for feminists with women being stuck doing so much of the daily reprodutive, even domestic, work of occupation. But it’s not explored here. Instead the image is uncomfortably close to the old sexist stereotype of this domestic labour giving women real power, the “who runs the home runs the world” bollocks. Actually we’d love to be able to stomp around being demagogic on flash mobs, or even just sit around talking ideas more, but the burden of this labour, which women more often feel responsible for, prevents us. You don’t run the occupation from the kitchen – you’re excluded from it, from setting the agenda and participating in the politics, in large part.
Laurie’s feminism and my feminism are different, and we’ve clashed over it before, but I think we can all agree that any feminism needs to be taken into whatever movement we’re in, whichever struggle we’re conducting, and kept sharp as a critical tool in all activism. I can’t see that here, and this isn’t whataboutery – oh you didn’t mention my ism! – it’s another example of the lack of reflection, the attempt to portray the movement as unified and holistic and romantic where it’s actually fractured and complicated and political. And all the better for being so.
This brings us back to the question of subjective political reporting, of journalists immersing themselves in a movement and reflecting back their own ideas rather than a fair picture of what’s actually happening on the ground. Subjectivity here seems to be used as a defence of selective reporting. From the collection of articles Laurie has produced on the student movement – notably ‘Out with the old politics’ for the Guardian – it’s clear that she has a particular political line on what the movement looks like and where it should and shouldn’t go. Rejection of the ‘old order’ (Organised groups and trade unions), non-hierarchal networks (or so they seem…), young versus old and pragmatism over ideology are the order of the day. The piece finishes with a claim for the plurality of the movement:
We have never spoken in just one voice. We speak in hundreds of thousands of voices – voices that are being raised across Europe, not in unison but in harmony.
The New Statesman piece doesn’t have these voices – as we’ve seen, there’s no dissent, no problematics, no arguments, just the romantic energy of angry youth. The desire to push this viewpoint, to portray the UCL occupation as the ideal-type of Laurie’s ‘new politics’ stretches even to the point of changing ‘quotes’ to fit her subjective political view of the movement.
It’s possible to conclude this doesn’t matter. After all, Laurie’s journalism is just one voice in the ‘hundreds of thousands’. But it’s necessary to look at the power relations here. Acknowledging the existence of multiple voices and networks and viewpoints is meaningless while one voice – the journalist’s – gets to report on, define and give edges to the supposedly amorphous and pluralistic movement. This isn’t a particular problem of Laurie Penny’s journalism. It’s a problem for political journalism as a whole, even more so for those hacks who really genuinely feel they’re on our side. Laurie defends her right to be subjective, to take a political stance, in her introductory piece, following it with:
It is, nonetheless, important for liberal writers to retain distance where corporate flunkies refuse to, lest our romanticism – and left-wing politics are, at heart, always romantic – be mistaken for propaganda.
Laurie anticipates here the critique from the right – “you’re not objective enough, your piece is just propaganda” – but fails to imagine a critique from the movement itself: perhaps ‘liberal’ writers ought to retain distance to avoid promoting their own idea of what a movement is or should be, at the expense of other ideas and currents. The introductory piece is insufficient as an exploration of subjectivity, truth and journalist power – exemplified by the claims it makes for the movement (‘deeply romantic’ and ‘desperately idealistic’) which are themselves political and non-objective, and fit right into this ‘new politics’ argument.
Again there’s a the problem of an imagined binary – inside/outside the movement – being applied here. ‘The movement’ as a united, discernable, whole entity doesn’t exist. Which facets, or people, of the disparate collection of anti-cuts initiatives and groups you choose to focus on necessarily colours your interpretation of what the politics of it are. If Laurie had spent two weeks with the RMT, or a community anti-cuts campaign, or the working-class kids out in force for the demonstration days, the sense of our ‘movement’ (s?) would be very different. As it is, she embedded herself with the UCL occupation; it should be starkly obviously to anyone, let alone an activist, that a group of mostly middle-class students at an elite university aren’t representative of any political movement in its entirety, or even in significant part.
So what would a truly useful, engaged piece of journalism look like? You might take the line, the extremely tempting line, from the Free School; hostility to the press, or at least strict guidelines – no collective communication except via the website, all conversations at the school off-the-record, no legitimacy for one person to speak for all. But it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. In retrospect, this is a conversation we should have had at the UCL occupation, and the Free School have it partly right, I think. It should be a case of deciding how we want journalists to behave, and telling them, rather than deciding how we, as activists, will engage with them, the press.
So for the final part of this critique, I’m going to look at some of the potential ethics activists might suggest to left-wing journalists looking to report on our movements/groups/actions.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
I agree with most of the issues raised in this piece and would love talking about them in private.
On a seperate issue I do think UCL’s media strategy was infinitely better than the Free School’s…indeed this is the first piece to focus on personalities instead of policies and politics (almost always a bad thing). Individuals should do what they can but always sticking to a coherent message that deals with politics of issues. If you were invited onto HardTalk with Stephen Sackur I would fully trust you and anyone else at UCL occ (look at how we elected Gabriel for Newsnight) to do a first class job.
There are huge collective action issues with the free school’s way of doing things and I think ultimately it can stifle getting a message across (occupying legit. squatting legit. neo-liberalism and property speculation bad).
We were twelve MPS away from turning over a large parliamentary majority!
Comment by aaron peters — January 31, 2011 @ 3:09 pm
[...] a link to the site, here’s a link to the first part of the article in question, and here’s the second part. Go take a look – much more intelligent and interesting than anything I have [...]
Pingback by more on penny / politics / grub street… but not from me « ads without products — January 31, 2011 @ 3:46 pm
Excellent points about women taking on a disproportionate amount of drudge work and how this is NOT empowering. The 2nd wave feminist movement was born out of a similar situation – women in radical groups questioning why they were expected to do the crap jobs.
Comment by Gwen — January 31, 2011 @ 4:13 pm
[...] that surfaces quite often in Laurie’s writing, and it’s one which was picked up this week in a series of critical pieces on Zetkin, the blog of a former UCL [...]
Pingback by On Laurie Penny’s account of the “Old Left” « the red rock — February 2, 2011 @ 8:44 pm
What have the December protests achieved? And how far does Penny think ‘romaniticism’ will get the students in a contest with an unsentimental plutocratic elite?
Romanticism is useless.
Comment by ovaut — February 2, 2011 @ 11:45 pm
And plus:
IT ALWAYS DEGENERATES INTO BINARIES
Comment by ovaut — February 2, 2011 @ 11:48 pm
The other main problem with Penny’s article is the historical egotism. All this guff about how we’re “redefining” this or that, and how it’s “different” this time, “unlike before” etc etc. Shocking lack of historical awareness.
Comment by a shop steward — February 3, 2011 @ 12:53 pm
Hi Sofie,
It’s always a pleasure to read your blog. And I agree with most of it. I think the UCL occupation has been far too focused on the press, to the detriment of other working groups and in a way that has elevated certain people on an individual, rather than a collective level. What is great about the RFS’s media policy is that it prevents “getting in the news” from disrupting the project. There are a lot of activists out there who would like to organize and get shit done without a camera in their face.
B
Comment by Shenanigans — February 4, 2011 @ 9:29 pm
Romanticism and somewhat over the top statements are the only thing that can draw people to social movements in an age of slick advertising. We’re have to grab people where they’re at, not just shove our own protests in our potential recruits faces, by debranding the whole thing.
On the sex side, I think it was good that the occupation I was part of managed to stay mostly asexual (we had a “no heavy petting” rule writ large on the walls along with no alcohol/drugs, so Penny’s words ring true with myself). First, there was work to be done. Second, there was image. Third, there’s the inevitable cliquery that comes from intimacy – we couldn’t all be friends if half of us were sleeping with each other. Fourth – it shows that something has changed since 1969 – we’re not a sexual revolution mascerading (even to some of our proponents) as some egalitarian force for good.
Going back an article I think: the organised far left is the SWP, SP etc. As an anarchist, I reject any suggestion that I’m in this category, and in some senses anarchism transcends this stupid out-dated concept. People wondering “what the correct left-wing response” might be need to be given the elbow – these are the people who make up groups like the SWP, and they do our movement harm. Left-wing is a term imposed upon us by those who wish to band us with the authoritarians.
What the student movement has unwittingly done extremely well is to restore the possibility of change happening, at the expense of those who had privately given up hope. Or perhaps you reject the existence of hope or the need for human emotion vs the markets?
Your points on feminism are actually the only bit of this I agree with in any way.
Comment by Graham — February 7, 2011 @ 10:12 am
[...] this is part of the Laurie Penny narrative according to which young people have no truck with old-fashioned notions that social workers and [...]
Pingback by The February Theses | The Great Unrest — February 7, 2011 @ 11:17 am
Gosh.
This blogpost is so turgid as to render it unreadable.
I wondered what the fuss was about regarding my NS colleague Laurie. I have now tried to read this post twice, and I do not have a clue what much of it means.
Whatever else you contend about Laurie, she certainly writes a lot better than you.
And there’s a third part? Dear god.
Comment by David Allen Green — February 10, 2011 @ 6:16 pm
Why am I not surprised David Allen Green (love the triple barreled semi-aristo name btw) calls this piece, with its clear analysis and take down of Penny’s so-call journalism, ‘turgid’. That Laurie is the NS’s new poster child just reinforces the absolute irrelevance of NS and its ilk. David, give it up, your re-heated brand of Keynesian liberalism isn’t coming back. Part of the problem with the continuance of zombie liberalism in the NS / Polly Toynbee mode is that, unlike in the movies, you’re not allowed to just kill them off.
Comment by nic — February 21, 2011 @ 4:48 pm
I should be writing satire but I got sucked into this as I was one of the many Private Eye readers who followed Johan Hari’s descent right from the beginning.
However, I ended up feeling sorry for Laurie Penny and agree largely with her colleague David Allen Green.
I know nothing about Occupy beyond media – from blogs like this to mainstream coverage.
The stuff that I have read wreaks of outrageous levels of self importance and issues more related to a self serving cult than a political movement.
That said, I am sure that I could find many things to agree about with those on the protests. The idea that this is something new or important is far more problematic.
Also as a former hack, I think it is entirely reasonable to write up conversations afterwards. Notepads disrupt observance and if you are doing a brushstrokes piece then it is OK.
Sounds to me like an honest error has been made and you are making a mountain out of it – especially as you were not named.
Comment by The Newsfox — April 17, 2012 @ 11:23 am
@Nic
Just seen your comment. Am from working class background, not an aristo.
And I am certainly not a Keynesian, or a particular fan of Toynbee, or even an uncritical fan of Laurie
Comment by David Allen Green — April 17, 2012 @ 1:01 pm
Further to my comment above, I apologise for the rudeness. I did find the post difficult to follow, but there was a more graceful way for me to say so.
Sorry, Sophie.
Comment by David Allen Green — April 17, 2012 @ 2:01 pm
An interesting, thoughtful piece that touches on some vague reservations I’ve had about her work. I say reservations rather than criticisms because she’s clearly a provocative and intelligent writer but her style is not for me. I don’t enjoy polemics, little of her zeal resonates with me and the sense of excitement when, for example, a protest gets out of hand I find very off putting. I agree that she’s too close to her subject and dismisses objectivity wrongly.
Comment by Ben — April 18, 2012 @ 12:57 pm
Ignore David Green. Your post is perfectly clear and if he genuinely couldn’t follow it I can only assume he’s been pretending to read and understand legal cases.
Perhaps he just objects to paragraphs longer than a sentence.
You do have a very different style to Laurie though. It’s only personal preference and no criticism of her but I find your more considered approach a lot easier to digest. I struggle to get through her work.
Comment by Ben — April 18, 2012 @ 1:02 pm