Not Stupid, Just Wrong
A lot of people are pretty insulting about Richard Seymour. In one sense, this is understandable, because his political commitments are juvenile (I mean that literally: the SWP espouse the kind of politics one should have gotten over by the time Freshers’ week finishes at university).
But the suggestion that he is stupid – which crops up mainly in blog commentary – is completely absurd. He just isn’t. This post, for example, is an extremely good analysis of the situation confronting the far-Left in Britain in the present day.
Of course, people love to belittle their political opponents. But to be effective, the rhetoric has to have at least some resonance. Calling John Game ‘stupid’ works, because the overwhelming majority of his public utterances support this view (though not all of them, he wrote good stuff on Iran); calling Yoshie Furuhashi a ‘frothing Ahmadinejad shill’ kind of makes sense, because one does get the impression that Yoshie would like to bed the Iranian leader; but suggesting that Seymour is unintelligent is just so far wide of the mark as to be ridiculous.
Plus it smacks of intellectual jealousy.
His writing style, though – now that is ripe for parody.
Category: Politics 5 comments »
December 1st, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Spoilsport! OK, meet you half-way: he’s ‘pretentious’ rather than ‘stupid.’
December 1st, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Yes, he is pretentious. But actually his style will be familiar to anybody who has sat through too many graduate seminars. Oddly enough, it’s normally born of lack of confidence, though in his case, one wonders!
By my reckoning he’s the smartest SWP’er around.
He’s also absolutely wrong about most stuff.
December 2nd, 2009 at 4:58 am
It’s true, he is not stupid, I think people point that epithet at him because they know it will sting (he is obviously intellectually vain). His style is preposterous, though. I reckon I could shorten any article he writes by at least a third without losing any meaning at all. Sometimes it reads as if Barbara Cartland had just been to a meeting of the second international. ‘Overwrought’, doesn’t do it justice.
December 2nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
Thing is, though, John, I don’t think the “stupid” epithet will sting. I don’t think it has enough that is true about it to have any real impact.
When Tony Blair first became leader of the Labour Party, The Sun newspaper tried to demean him by calling him “Bambi”. It didn’t work because the insult had no resonance: it was arbitrary. “Bliar” works much better because… well arguably there is some truth to it. It’s the same with Seymour: “stupid” is too far wide of the mark to be effective.
Yeah, his style. It’s an odd thing. It does occur to me that it might be ironic. Not in the sense that he doesn’t believe what he writes, but rather that he knows it irritates his political enemies – so he teases them with it. So kind of like an ironic peacock display.
But who knows. Psychologising to motive is tricky, obviously.
December 30th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Jeremy – these postcolonial leftists are so stuck with their “working class” and “dialectical materialism” notions, unable to think or see outside their very tight box, that they remind me of religious fanatics who will believe any nonsense that their sect or cult demands.
Marxism is a good example of “secular religion”. When will these believers come to realize that?