Performative radicalism that freaks out wider society instead of slow steady progress has led to the near complete irrelevance of the left in the west, especially the anglosphere. I mean, UK Labor is a centrist pro-capital party now. It's over.
The extremely effective general strike that happened in Italy of a few days ago didn't start from academia, but dock workers in Genoa. Grumpy, robust, very left-wing dock workers.
The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you.
Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals.
I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
People who enjoyed this may also enjoy the Blocked and Reported podcast's episode about Glasgow's Pink Peacock cafe, "the only queer Yiddish anarchist vegan pay-what-you-can café in the world". If I remember it right, it closed among similar drama, also specifically involving issues with the building's toilet.
I have to admit to finding these things hugely entertaining. But for balance I'll point out that Housmans has been open since 1945 and Freedom since 1886. It's not the inevitable fate of radical bookshops to implode like this.
1. Those who intuitively understand power dynamics and endeavor towards a "don't kill, and don't be killed[0]" mentality, even if they understand that the radical change they want is generational
2. People who want to wear the boot
To be clear, every organization and movement has #2. Libertarian conservatives are chock full of Trump bootlickers, neoliberals were basically completely coopted by corporate bootlickers, Free Software activists have an unsavory habit of falling in with whatever RMS says, anarchists have to deal with people who want to break windows for fun, socialists have "tankies" that just want Soviet Russia to invade and oppress, etc.
The book "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" covers this tendency if you want to read more.
> To Parker’s mind, for a project started with the aim of platforming sex workers [...] to have reached such a point was mortifying. How had things gotten so bad?
I’m intentionally omitting all the objectives that actually make sense for a book store to have, in order to highlight what apparently was the main one...
This was a remarkable story. I’m sensing a pattern. When people of certain ideologies band together under ostensibly noble causes (cue all the aims previously omitted above) they tend to implode rather quick. Often, the objectors feel as though it's the responsibility of the other side (usually the leadership) to afford them with some sort of power of their own.
Also I'm a bit let down it never disclosed how Blaise Agüera y Arcas wound up there. If a Google employee is introduced in the beginning of a story it must be explained as to why. But if I was watching my competitors face legal issues for supposed illicit processing of intellectual property, I’d definitely send my guys out to embattled book stores to get their stock for the cheap.
> Often, the objectors feel as though it's the responsibility of the other side (usually the leadership) to afford them with some sort of power of their own.
reading this story, it sounds like leadership was also just bad. The toilet story is just odd!
> Keen to thwart any further opportunistic toilet-users, Scarlett had a new policy. Staff were to personally escort anyone who asked to use the toilet to ensure they didn’t steal any stock or snoop around the staff area.
Like this just is weird, right?
A lot of these stories (and stories like what happened with DHH and basecamp a couple years back) seem to have an important crux: leadership who might be lacking certain management abilities. These fights end up getting framed as "about politics" but "management making me babysit people who go to the toilet" feels just like more basic of an issue.
To me a more competent manager would just say "toilet's not for customers" and be done with it.
These frequently happen among these people. I'm reminded of the Current Affairs episode and my favorite since it was so irrelevant: Matt Yglesias getting lambasted because he dared suggest hiring cleaners for the Vox office.
> Since opening, the Scarlett Letters hadn’t made a month-by-month profit, but had been kept afloat by savings and a monthly donation of £10,000 from an anonymous “angel investor”.
Sounds like it wasn't so much a business as a piece of performance art.
This is insane overhead if you want to try and run a "leftist" business. It sounds like Scarlett is a trust fund baby with more money than sense.
I've been running a retail business with similar inventory costs for a couple years. I have one employee and I pay them generously. I personally chip in about 20-30k annually to keep the whole thing afloat. It's definitely possible if you keep things small.
Edit to add: 10k in inventory just doesn't add up. In retail you need to turn over inventory multiple times annually to cover your fixed expenses like staff, rent, etc. if you only have 10k worth of inventory and you're burning >10k a month that means you're selling everything in the store every couple weeks. I don't think books move that quickly, although I could be corrected. Usually the retail standard is turning over inventory 4-5 times annually.
I'm very much on the left, from an economic perspective at least, and a bibliophile, but I found the selection underwhelming. There weren't that many shelves and I just don't read much gender stuff, which was very much the focus.
I did buy a few books, none of them particularly good. The vibe there was also a bit odd, now I reflect on it.
I can definitely recommend Bookmarks off Tottenham Court Road for this sort of stuff. Great range, friendly staff, some nice merch. Got my prized Jeremy Corbyn tea towel there.
This played out much like many coffee shops that I’ve seen in my city and others [0]. Basically some leftist with a little money and little to no business acumen opens a low margin business and hires far-left employees. Those employees, dissatisfied with their low wages - they are, after all, baristas at coffee shops that are barely profitable, if at all - form a union. When the owner tells them they can’t pay more and offer benefits because they are literally losing money, the employees then take to social media, destroying what little customer base the business had. The business closes, and the employees are now unemployed, having destroyed their own livelihood and a place they actually liked working, because they had this absurd idea that their queer/trans owner that was scraping by was some maniacal oligarch that deserved to be crushed by the workers.
The real lesson is that if you’re opening a small coffee shop or bookshop or similar small business, you have to work full time and not hire people unless absolutely necessary. And if you do hire others, avoid the communists.
It seems that this business was incorporated as a community interest company (CIC) [0]. The Wikipedia article for CIC [1] talks about more the concept of "asset lock":
> The articles of a CIC must also provide that its assets cannot be used except for the benefit of the community. This is known as the asset lock.
It sounds like this is why the employees believed they had a right to the books. But it seems hard to say without knowing what the specific articles for this company.
Of course, I know little of UK law, perhaps someone who is more familiar can chime in?
This kind of thing would only work as a co-operative or non-profit passion project where everyone has equal standing. Either you all want to put equal effort into running the non-profitable enterprise or you want fair pay, rights etc. in which case it needs to be profitable - and that's pretty much impossible for something like this. And in fact the employees clearly recognised it needed to be a co-operative)
There are a lot of comments linking this to 'left politics' but in reality this community bookshop was setup and only functioned by taking advantage of the 'employees' wanting to contribute something good to society. They come out of this looking bad but in reality their good nature was taken advantage of because if you can only run a 'business' on zero hours contracts and no sick pay (keeping in mind workers rights in the UK are much higher than in the US where a lot of readers may be from) you're taking advantage of people who are either desperate or too idealistic (to their own detriment).
Take this paragraph for example:
>>Trying to create a space like this in advanced capitalism is extremely difficult,” it read.
If the 'advanced capitalism' they're talking about is capitalism where workers have rights...good.
>> “The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.”
Wonderful. That's what founders do. They work hard and suck it up hopefully for some sort of pay off later on. Struggling as a founder does not give you any right to take advantage of your employees.
While I very much appreciate the story, I wish it was written in a more straightforward style. The cross-paragraph callbacks from a Google employee to someone living in a basement... well, that's fine for fiction (although I'd still find it tiring) but for this I found it needlessly difficult to follow.
But maybe that's just me. I appreciate this is a stylistic complaint, so I doubt everyone will agree. Still, for a factual piece that I expected to read more like reportage, I found this article fiddly to process.
Thought it was going to be about Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley, Whitechapel, but thankfully that seems to be alive and well[0]!
Being "the oldest and largest specialist anarchist bookshop in Britain" without succumbing to internecine bickering and factionalisation is pretty darn radical, I would have thought.
in seattle's pike market, left bank books has been a collective operation for over fifty years now. it doubles as an event space and community center. and it's not just a static group of old comrades, many young people are involved.
I know this is a tangent, but I just want to share this oddity. I am 38 years old, and I have been trying to buy Neuromancer since 1999. I have been in Santiago, Rome, London, Miami, Madrid, Bogota, live, in situ looking for the book on mainstream bookshops and I have never found a copy to buy. I know Neuromancer by heart but I have never been able to buy a copy of it. 38 Years.
It just seems on the surface that none of the parties here thought ahead more than one step ahead.
> They were simply too kind, too feminine, too British: “You are all extremely nice, assigned female at birth, in customer service, mostly British etc., and all of this sometimes doesn’t lend itself to ‘no,’” the WhatsApp message explained.
That's like throwing a molotov cocktail into a fireworks storage warehouse. What did they expect the response to that would be? It's just tremendous lack self-awareness at play here.
The shop is closing so we'll just ... occupy it? And then what, the owner will give them shares of ownership as a reward?
This randomly reminded me of Slavoj Žižek's when he said he would have liked to see "V for Vendeta -- The Sequel". This is probably what it would be -- the winners would be fighting over clogged toilets, starting campaigns on Instagram and occupying each other's offices and making deals with locksmiths to be there at 4am to break in to take back their space.
This article makes it seem like the whole thing is over and nothing came of it, but The People's Letters have a X account that they're doing updates on[0], and the new location opens on October 1st (this Wednesday)[1].
I'm not entirely sure why the article didn't talk about this.
"A newly launched account said they were in “open dispute” with their employer over the threats to fire staff and the failure to meet all its demands. “The workers are queer, trans, racialised, disabled, sex workers and students,” it argued. “Their identities have been used to advertise and fundraise for the bookshop as a radical space whilst their voices are not listened to.” As might be expected, there was an outraged response online. Responses on Instagram accused the bookshop of being a “marketing campaign” as well as “colonial”.
Eight days later, Scarlett fired back on the shop’s Instagram, claiming they had attempted to, or were in the process of meeting, almost all the union’s demands. “Trying to create a space like this in advanced capitalism is extremely difficult,” it read. “The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.”
And all the above is a good summary of why for all the deep nuttiness of MAGA-level conservatives, the deep left is just as fucking off the deep end.
34 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 51.1 ms ] threadhttps://www.the-londoner.co.uk/karl-marxs-labubus/
Karl Marx’s Labubus - The memeification of the communist grandee’s final resting place
The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you.
Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals.
I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
https://x.com/narrenhut/status/1970884747833585690
I have to admit to finding these things hugely entertaining. But for balance I'll point out that Housmans has been open since 1945 and Freedom since 1886. It's not the inevitable fate of radical bookshops to implode like this.
1. Those who intuitively understand power dynamics and endeavor towards a "don't kill, and don't be killed[0]" mentality, even if they understand that the radical change they want is generational
2. People who want to wear the boot
To be clear, every organization and movement has #2. Libertarian conservatives are chock full of Trump bootlickers, neoliberals were basically completely coopted by corporate bootlickers, Free Software activists have an unsavory habit of falling in with whatever RMS says, anarchists have to deal with people who want to break windows for fun, socialists have "tankies" that just want Soviet Russia to invade and oppress, etc.
The book "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" covers this tendency if you want to read more.
[0] There are a lot of Floweys out there.
[0] - https://pinkpeacock.gay/
I’m intentionally omitting all the objectives that actually make sense for a book store to have, in order to highlight what apparently was the main one...
This was a remarkable story. I’m sensing a pattern. When people of certain ideologies band together under ostensibly noble causes (cue all the aims previously omitted above) they tend to implode rather quick. Often, the objectors feel as though it's the responsibility of the other side (usually the leadership) to afford them with some sort of power of their own.
Also I'm a bit let down it never disclosed how Blaise Agüera y Arcas wound up there. If a Google employee is introduced in the beginning of a story it must be explained as to why. But if I was watching my competitors face legal issues for supposed illicit processing of intellectual property, I’d definitely send my guys out to embattled book stores to get their stock for the cheap.
reading this story, it sounds like leadership was also just bad. The toilet story is just odd!
> Keen to thwart any further opportunistic toilet-users, Scarlett had a new policy. Staff were to personally escort anyone who asked to use the toilet to ensure they didn’t steal any stock or snoop around the staff area.
Like this just is weird, right?
A lot of these stories (and stories like what happened with DHH and basecamp a couple years back) seem to have an important crux: leadership who might be lacking certain management abilities. These fights end up getting framed as "about politics" but "management making me babysit people who go to the toilet" feels just like more basic of an issue.
To me a more competent manager would just say "toilet's not for customers" and be done with it.
Sounds like it wasn't so much a business as a piece of performance art.
kinda a weird headline for a store open less than a year in the end? Or am I misunderstanding something
I've been running a retail business with similar inventory costs for a couple years. I have one employee and I pay them generously. I personally chip in about 20-30k annually to keep the whole thing afloat. It's definitely possible if you keep things small.
Edit to add: 10k in inventory just doesn't add up. In retail you need to turn over inventory multiple times annually to cover your fixed expenses like staff, rent, etc. if you only have 10k worth of inventory and you're burning >10k a month that means you're selling everything in the store every couple weeks. I don't think books move that quickly, although I could be corrected. Usually the retail standard is turning over inventory 4-5 times annually.
I'm very much on the left, from an economic perspective at least, and a bibliophile, but I found the selection underwhelming. There weren't that many shelves and I just don't read much gender stuff, which was very much the focus.
I did buy a few books, none of them particularly good. The vibe there was also a bit odd, now I reflect on it.
I can definitely recommend Bookmarks off Tottenham Court Road for this sort of stuff. Great range, friendly staff, some nice merch. Got my prized Jeremy Corbyn tea towel there.
The real lesson is that if you’re opening a small coffee shop or bookshop or similar small business, you have to work full time and not hire people unless absolutely necessary. And if you do hire others, avoid the communists.
0. https://www.34st.com/article/2022/08/minas-world-lgbtq-coffe...
> The articles of a CIC must also provide that its assets cannot be used except for the benefit of the community. This is known as the asset lock.
It sounds like this is why the employees believed they had a right to the books. But it seems hard to say without knowing what the specific articles for this company.
Of course, I know little of UK law, perhaps someone who is more familiar can chime in?
0: https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_interest_company
There are a lot of comments linking this to 'left politics' but in reality this community bookshop was setup and only functioned by taking advantage of the 'employees' wanting to contribute something good to society. They come out of this looking bad but in reality their good nature was taken advantage of because if you can only run a 'business' on zero hours contracts and no sick pay (keeping in mind workers rights in the UK are much higher than in the US where a lot of readers may be from) you're taking advantage of people who are either desperate or too idealistic (to their own detriment).
Take this paragraph for example:
>>Trying to create a space like this in advanced capitalism is extremely difficult,” it read.
If the 'advanced capitalism' they're talking about is capitalism where workers have rights...good.
>> “The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.”
Wonderful. That's what founders do. They work hard and suck it up hopefully for some sort of pay off later on. Struggling as a founder does not give you any right to take advantage of your employees.
But maybe that's just me. I appreciate this is a stylistic complaint, so I doubt everyone will agree. Still, for a factual piece that I expected to read more like reportage, I found this article fiddly to process.
Why was that person there?
Being "the oldest and largest specialist anarchist bookshop in Britain" without succumbing to internecine bickering and factionalisation is pretty darn radical, I would have thought.
0: https://freedompress.org.uk/about-freedom/
in seattle's pike market, left bank books has been a collective operation for over fifty years now. it doubles as an event space and community center. and it's not just a static group of old comrades, many young people are involved.
It just seems on the surface that none of the parties here thought ahead more than one step ahead.
> They were simply too kind, too feminine, too British: “You are all extremely nice, assigned female at birth, in customer service, mostly British etc., and all of this sometimes doesn’t lend itself to ‘no,’” the WhatsApp message explained.
That's like throwing a molotov cocktail into a fireworks storage warehouse. What did they expect the response to that would be? It's just tremendous lack self-awareness at play here.
The shop is closing so we'll just ... occupy it? And then what, the owner will give them shares of ownership as a reward?
This randomly reminded me of Slavoj Žižek's when he said he would have liked to see "V for Vendeta -- The Sequel". This is probably what it would be -- the winners would be fighting over clogged toilets, starting campaigns on Instagram and occupying each other's offices and making deals with locksmiths to be there at 4am to break in to take back their space.
There’s a failure-mode of liberal open mindedness, where your mind is so open your brain falls out.
I'm not entirely sure why the article didn't talk about this.
[0] https://x.com/PeoplesLetters
[1] https://x.com/PeoplesLetters/status/1971482419502198960
Eight days later, Scarlett fired back on the shop’s Instagram, claiming they had attempted to, or were in the process of meeting, almost all the union’s demands. “Trying to create a space like this in advanced capitalism is extremely difficult,” it read. “The management targeted by this dispute is not a faceless collective of executives in boardrooms. It is one person, who is multiply marginalised, a known member of the community and for the past year has been working for six or seven days a week for the fraction of the salary offered to the booksellers.”
And all the above is a good summary of why for all the deep nuttiness of MAGA-level conservatives, the deep left is just as fucking off the deep end.