My career as an academic was flushed down the toilet in 1934 or thereabouts. The phone rang at 9.03 on a Friday morning asking if I wanted to do an MA in Italian Literature. I declined saying that I wanted to spend a few more months on the dole. This will surprise those of you who’ve heard my flawless spoken Italian and French but it did happen.
Since then I’ve not attended any sort of academic event until this evening. I went down to King’s College London to listen to Stathis Kouvelakis (King’s College London), Philippe Marliere (University College London) and Jim Wolfreys (King’s College London) talking at a forum on the French presidential elections. They were all very interesting, well informed and polite and you could not disagree with much of what they said. They commented on the swing between left and right governments, remarked on how low wages are in France, how unstable the political system is. It was all genuinely very informative. They did keep referring to how the “French radical left” had blown its chances by being so disunited and you cannot deny that this is true.
After they finished the forum was opened for questions. Being a university there were several students present. They asked some intelligent questions. I stuck my hand up and said I’d like to make a couple of observations. So I pointed out that everyone in France knew yesterday was May Day because the place shut down. That struggles there are big but come in fits and starts so slowing down the process of political recomposition. I remarked that the French “radical left” is ever so slightly more successful than the British radical left and that the LCR did not want to support a candidate who would go into coalition with Royal. (Here at Chateau Mac Uaid we have French TV. I’ve just watched Royal saying that she’s willing to negotiate with the “social partners” about the 35 hour week. You know what that means.) Being as diplomatic as I am I made no contrast between Besancenot and the priapic self-publicist in this constituency.
Chris Harman spoke shortly after. He developed the comparison between Sarkozy and Thatcher very effectively, reminding the audience of the divisions that Thatcher opened up in the Conservative Party and the strikes and struggles that took place during her regime suggesting that France too will see something similar. That’s not wrong.
A French woman spoke taking issue with something Jim Wolfreys had said about Bayrou. She was wrong but she was saying what she thought. The man behind me, who’d arrived almost an hour into the forum, tried to shout her down. For reasons I didn’t appreciate at the time the chair chose not to shut him up. “Maybe that’s what these academics do” I thought.
Rather than being asked to leave the shouter was asked to speak. Alex Callinicos gave such a persuasive impression of a ranting demagogue who hadn’t attended his anger management sessions that I was convinced for a moment that he was one. He made the point that by not having a united left candidate the French radical left was opening the door to something so dreadful that it hadn’t happened since the 1950s. That was his only point. He chose not to develop the contrast between the LCR’s current position and that of the British radical left. But the genuinely horrible spectacle was his assumption that by shouting loudly and seeming erudite he would convince the audience. It was a first class display of intellectual thuggery.
Liam redux 
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