Kayfabe is dead. Or, I was a manic pixie teenage wrestling fan. posted by Richard Seymour

You are about to witness some quality geeking out.

You young people, with your internet, don't know what geeking out is. You think you do, but you don't. Oh yeah, I hear you, geek is the new sexy; you're so geek you're almost socially awkward. Yeah yeah yeah. You don't know shit about being a geek. It's too easy now to find your heterotopias; you don't have to wait and yearn and save and hope.

Allow me to, at some length, explain. Who can say why anyone catches a wrestling show one day, and is subsequently hooked? Maybe one of the personalities reminds you of an ego-ideal. Maybe the idea of 'wrestling' resonates with you because it dramatises your own inner conflicts. Maybe it's those tumescent bodies in tights. Or maybe you just want to watch some arrogant, nasty motherfucker get the fuck knocked out of them, even if it is all for show.

Whatever the case, it clearly isn't violence in the abstract that is appealing, but rather the violent resolution of some sort of contrived drama. British boxing briefly understood this when Chris Eubank was drawing heat* with his incomparably stylish heel* turn. The show was not, "here are two adults who are going to seriously hurt one another," but "here is a likeable person who has been badly treated by some despicable rogue, and he or she is going to kick the ever-loving shit out of them."

Now, those of us who liked this stuff and were old enough to be a little embarrassed by it, wanted it to be at least credible if not 'real'. We hated the constant recycling of cheap and obvious gimmicks - pituitary cases in gaudy costumes, pretending to be crooks, foreigners, tax men, Jews, or whatever else would get the crowd booing if they were heels*, or patriots, macho men, blue collar tough guys, or whatever would appear sympathetic if they were babyfaces*. We hated the lumbering, awful performers who moved slowly, never connected a convincing blow, and sounded like fucking idiots whenever they opened their mouths. We disdained the circus freaks such as Giant Gonzales and Doink the Clown whose gimmicks were far more important than anything they did in the ring - although, bizarrely in that light, everyone reserved a serious respect for The Undertaker, whose gimmick was that he was impervious to pain, and essentially immortal. Something about that absurd idea, and its embodiment by Mark Calloway, was mesmerising. All the rest of it was embarrassing shit, we scoffed, while still watching it all, every second of it.

So, what was the solution? Stop watching, and go back to viewing Jean-Claude Van Damme videos over and over? No. It was to go deeper into the rabbit-hole. One Saturday morning, in a Ballymena newsagents, I picked up an unofficial wrestling publication, and began flicking through its badly printed pages. Superstars of Wrestling. The centre-fold story was about 'Sabu', a wrestler I had never heard of, from a promotion I had never heard of, 'Extreme Championship Wrestling' (ECW). And there, in glorious colour, were pictures of unbelievably outlandish yet realistic violence. In every picture, Sabu was drenched in his own blood. It turned out that in all of his matches, where he displayed a gymnastic prowess rare in the WWF/WWE, he was either being cut open on a barbed wire mesh that surrounded the ring, or injuring himself by somersaulting onto a hapless victim spreadeagled on a table, or wielding or being battered with a baseball bat, or some such.

Christ, I thought: this is Channel Four on a Friday night. This is the password-protected Sky channels. This is gore porn. No more clown costumes. No more flag-waving bullshit. I've just been admitted to the adults section. I collected a copy of every wrestling publication I could find on the shelf and spent all my money on the lot. I blew my wad.

It took some time to find a way of actually getting footage of some of these promotions in the darkest corners of Northern Ireland. But I gradually acquired a working knowledge of a subculture, a cultural space with many divisions and subdivisions. Aside from the Philadelphia-based ECW, there were a couple of old-fashioned southern promotions such as USWA and Smoky Mountain Wrestling (SMW), where the emphasis was on traditional 'rassling' and less on gimmicks and plot-lines.

And beyond the US, there were astonishing promotions in Mexico and Japan. In Mexico, Asistencia Asesoría y Administración (AAA) leaned toward a highly athletic, gymnastic form of wrestling. In Japan,  Frontier Martial Arts Wrestling (FMW) delivered ECW-style gore, while New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), All Japan Pro-Wrestling (AJPW), and All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling (AJWPW) were given to martial arts-inflected acrobatics. The cultural differences were huge.

In any American promotion, the selling of punches, the suplexes and arm drags, and even the blood and injuries, were at most fifty percent of what was going on. Apart from the violence, staged more or less plausibly, what made a match work was how effectively the performers, the match commentators, the 'managers', and the referees, all worked the audience. In the ring, the babyface would play up some supposed admirable characteristic like patriotism, inhuman strength, or vulnerability; the heel would strut, or cheat, or display cowardice. If there had to be a storyline for a match and the wrestlers were too boring to sell it, a colourful, verbally gifted manager like Jim Cornette might cheerfully give himself an aneurysm trying to sell it for them. If a blow wasn't sold very well, a commentator would explain it away.

In a Japanese promotion, by contrast, the promos and commentary were strikingly subdued, but the costumes were extravagant, and the manoeuvres more so. The characters and thematics were drawn more from myth and anime - one major Japanese wrestler is literally named Beast-God Lion-Tiger (Jushin Liger) - than from current social stereotypes. And few heels were so bad that they couldn't behave in a sportsmanlike way. They didn't scream at each other like Jerry Springer cast-offs; they just staged imaginative, graceful, competitive violence, using their bodies to create the drama.


There was no way, at any rate, to get any of this stuff through the high street. If you wanted anything other than WWF/WWE's cartoon soap opera, or WCW's pale imitation of same, you had to scour the classified section of the magazines for contacts. And save money. It was like fucking contraband.

And once you did get hold of some samizdat footage, to really understand what you were seeing, and why it worked, you also needed commentary that broke kayfabe*. And you couldn't get that without subscribing to black and white, xeroxed newsletters like Dave Meltzer's Wrestling Observer Newsletter, which generally had good inside information and knew what the outcomes of important matches would be, or Rob Butcher's Suckerpunch, which was mostly sarcastic fan commentary from the south of England.

Being on the tape-trading and newsletter circuit meant being inducted into the smallest yet snottiest subdivision of the subculture. It meant becoming 'hardcore'. And everyone who wasn't 'hardcore' - who was a fan without knowing or caring that the business was fixed, or who only watched a big American promotion, or who didn't know the names of Rey Misterio, Manami Toyota, and Sabu alongside the more familiar Bret Harts and Hulk Hogans, or who knew nothing of the shoot tapes of Jim Cornette, or had never seen an Eighties classic from the NWA, or had no idea that Joey Styles and Bob Caudle were among the best ring commentators in the business - was a 'mark'.

Being 'hardcore' was being in the know, arguing intensely over the finer points of something everyone knew was staged, and yet being magnetically drawn to anything that seemed remotely real. Being 'hardcore' was being part of a miniscule world of people who were fans of something that they disdained; obsessed with a world they emphatically didn't believe in. Being 'hardcore' was somehow being both snobbish about the business and vehemently defensive of it. If you were 'hardcore', one almost believed, the promoters and wrestlers should roll out the red carpet and induct you into the hall of fame already. The 'marks' were so undeserving, so uncultured, yet everything was done for them. We, who mysteriously cared so much about the scene, were constantly frustrated.

Over time, however, the category of 'hardcore' has utterly lost any meaning it had. This happened in part as the WWF/WWE slowly adapted to the rise of the regional promotions like ECW by adopting their ideas and 'adult' content, and imported Japanese wrestlers. It also happened as forms of shoot material were increasingly built into the WWF/WWE spectacle. Jim Cornette's incredibly fluent, witty shoot commentary was given programme space in a promotion that had never before even tried to fake sincerity. Vince McMahon, previously a babyface commentator who tended to obscure his own role as the company boss, used real life situations to turn heel and sell himself as a bad guy who oppressed the wrestlers.

Daesh in Libya posted by Richard Seymour

It seems likely that Daesh affiliates are behind the attack in Belgium last week. Of course, this provoked the usual run of really dreadful commentary, about which I said all I need to say here. However, one thing that is surprisingly omitted in much of the reporting is the way in which Daesh are actually finding new territorial possessions in superficially surprising ways. I say, 'superficially surprising' - no one who understands the underlying dynamic here would be surprised to find that Daesh now has territory in Libya, as well as Syria and Iraq.

Of course, some of the preconditions for Daesh's spread to Libya were provided by the particular nature of the US-led intervention intended to pilot a narrow, pro-US sector of the opposition to power. But the jihadists have particularly benefited in Libya from an Egyptian foreign policy intervention aimed at crushing the Muslim Brothers. For the full background on that, I direct you to my broadcast for TeleSur recently, reviewing the media coverage of Libya and exploring the pretexts for a renewed war in the country:

They don't want Labour to win posted by Richard Seymour

It's important to keep this in mind about Corbyn's back bench baiters. They don't want Labour to win. Not like this. Not with a left-wing leadership. Blair was refreshingly candid about this in the run up to the leadership election: even if a left-wing agenda was the route to electoral victory, he would not take it.

But we must go further. The Labour Right would rather crash the party, humiliate it, drag it through the gutter every single day in the news media, than see it win from the Left. They would rather watch the Tories crush the party every day, until its activists finally say 'uncle' and let the professionals take over again. When Labour MPs anonymously brief Blairite insider Dan Hodges to the effect that they want Labour to lose the London mayoral contest in order not to strengthen Corbyn's hand, they are not expressing an extreme point of view - this is what a significant chunk of the back bench belligerati actually want.

That is not stupid or self-defeating on their part, at least in the short-term. The Labour Right has always thrived on defeat and the demoralisation it inculcates among members and activists. They may not have liked the SDP split, but they knew then that it would strengthen their hand against the Bennites and Militant. And while a split would be unavailing today, they certainly want a swift, merciless punishment of the activists and members who dared to put a radical in charge. They want the grassroots to be begging for salvation, pleading for someone, anyone of arguable charisma - and the bar is set astonishingly low at the moment, with Dan Jarvis and Jess Phillips being the cherished candidates - to take control and restore 'electability'.

That is the point of the ongoing pseudo-controversy mill. To create a constant air of crisis, so that the leadership is always wasting its effort responding to some trivial, or confected outrage, and so that the belligerents can claim to be ongoingly exasperated by the party's humiliation - which, insofar as that is taking place, they are co-authors of. As it happens, and against all odds, Labour is actually recovering slowly in the polls. Notwithstanding the histrionics of the Right, most polls now that Labour has now almost eradicated 5-10 percent lead which the Tories have held since May, so that Labour now either draws level, has a slight lead, or is at most two points behind. One hesitates to credit all of this to Corbyn, particularly since the Tories are scoring a number of own goals at the moment, and I am the last person to underestimate the obstacles facing any left-wing political leadership in the UK. But he must be doing a lot more right than his critics give him credit for. After all, we were told to expect a polling meltdown. We were told that Oldham would go Ukip. We were told that Labour under Corbyn would slump to a quarter of the vote. Not a bit of it, thus far. In fact, as Corbyn steadfastly refuses to triangulate on issues like welfare - in stark contrast to previous leaderships - he is actually landing some blows, and shifting the ideological agenda moderately to the left.

The latest such squabble is therefore coming at a time when Corbyn's position, still unassailable among Labour members, is improving among voters. It concerns a leaked list, classifying Labour MPs by reference to their supposed loyalty - or lack thereof - to Corbyn. Whatever its merits, whoever its authors happen to be, it has been siezed upon by a handful of Labour backbenchers to amplify their demand that Corbyn "stand down". As if. The most vocal of these was John Woodcock MP, a fairly standard Blairite MP who represents a constituency whose local economy depends on British Aerospace, and who has been nurtured at the teat of the Ministry of Defence. He was given space in the Mirror to claim that the party was being embarrassed by a dreadful leadership. This is rather typical of the modus operandi of the Labour Right. They don't know who authored the list, but they know enough to say it must be Corbyn's fault.

So then, let me tell you a story about Woodcock.  I had the chance to meet and debate the man at QMUL a while ago, about the bombing of Daesh in Syria. He lost the vote at the end of the debate, and would have lost it by a wider margin were it not for the Labour First people in the room. But what struck me about him, beyond his pat politician's way of trying very hard not to be detestable and his passive-aggressive whining about Corbyn, was that he didn't know what he was talking about. He had done no preparation, he made no reference to any of the facts about Daesh or Syria, and he was singularly unable to cope with the argument on its own level. Now I know that MPs don't, as a rule, know what they're talking about. But if you come to a debate to argue for bombing a country, you have to incline in favour of appearing to know something about it. Or, if not that, you have to at least be able to offer red meat to your supporters, show signs of being able to draw blood. Woodcock is not the sort of politician who can draw blood.

Only at one point did he find the slightest wind in his sails. I had commented on the futility of attempting to match Daesh's brutality with spectacular displays of violence - at one point the Pentagon claimed to be killing a thousand Daesh fighters a month, but the elevated rate of recruitment just meant that the number of Daesh fighters was growing, while its territorial footprint mutated and spread to Libya. Woodcock, presumably hoping to rouse a smattering of applause, professed himself aghast and 'offended' that I would compare the RAF to Daesh. I interrupted his pitch with a sharp, loud cackle. He looked crestfallen, and muttered, "well... if that's the tone... I think your books are probably... on the wrong shelf." Alas, the expected applause didn't materialise.

The point of this anecdote is not just that Woodcock is not a substantial person. He, of course, is not: but he isn't unique in the parliamentary Labour Party in that respect, as the ongoing search for a suitable anti-Corbyn figurehead repeatedly demonstrates. It is that, I don't think these people know how to conduct a political fight in this era. I question not just their ideas and principles, but their competence. In a more efficiently managed political and media climate, they would look and sound more convincing than they do. In the echo chamber of Westminster and the broadcast and print media, what they say would be so often repeated, and so broadly across the permissible political spectrum, that it would sound like it made sense. It wouldn't sound as vapid as it does.

But this isn't the 1990s. The traditional ideological monopoly of the major parties and their media auxiliaries is breaking down. The political master-narrative of neoliberalism and its verities - "there is no alternative", "the market works best", etc - no longer summon the same type of deference. Generational transformations, no doubt in part linked to the antiwar and pro-Palestine movements of the last decade, also mean that the comforting certainties of a certain kind of Cold War militarism are no longer as effective as they were. You can't fight and win a political battle from the centre-right merely by re-stating what would sound uncontroversial to mandarins, party managers, or hacks, because they don't rule the roost any more. Woodcock and his yappy little confederates may be annoying, but they are to be gently patronised and otherwise ignored, not worried about. They won't persuade Labour members, and they probably won't win much sympathy from the wider public.

The people to worry about are the ones who keep their powder dry, their knives whistle-clean, their voices low and courteous. The ones who at least sound like they 'get it', and are able to roll with it, patiently, for the time being. One such is implausibly listed among the 'core group plus' of loyalists on the leaked list. His name is Tom Watson MP.