Minority Rule. Adventures in the Culture War. By Ash Sarkar, Bloomsbury, 2025. 310pp.
This is a book that takes down with panache and enthusiasm the myths of race, nation and gender that are used to divide the class of wage and salary earners, the vast majority in society. Blending personal anecdote and lived experience with hard and well-documented fact, Ash Sarkar, journalist, broadcaster and social and political commentator, exposes the multiple ways in which the so-called ‘culture wars’ have been stoked and fostered by those with retrograde views who have been successful in spreading false notions about how groups such as anti-racists, immigrants, trans-activists and ‘Marxists’ are taking over the public platform, preventing free speech and thereby oppressing and silencing the majority.
She is clear that the system we live under (capitalism) is ’a product of economic interests, not abstract ideas’ and that this divides society into two main classes — workers (the vast majority) and capitalists (the tiny minority) – whose interests are diametrically opposed. She explores how this tiny minority (‘the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations’), who have control over ‘a planet-spanning and tightly interconnected system’, are, via the media and others with influence, happy to engage in a ‘misdirection of blame’, inflating minor issues and distracting workers from the real causes of the poverty, inequality, insecurity and lack of community that keep the majority divided among themselves. She is scathing about how ‘identity’ causes (race, gender, climate change, etc.) are blown up and labelled ‘culture wars’, putting barriers in the way of ‘a united working class’. This, she goes on, works ‘to inhibit, splinter and weaken class consciousness based on economic status and steer resentment instead towards an extreme fixation on culture and identity’. It makes scapegoats of minorities and directs ‘horizontally and downwards’ the anger of those ‘who have to live off wages and not asset wealth’. It thus encourages a view of the world as competing interests among groups of workers rather than in terms of a collective class interest. As she puts it, ‘division among identity lines is more useful to the ruling class – it keeps people from recognising their majority class status and shared material interests’. All this, she insists, serves the purpose of ‘keeping us divided and competing against one another’ and of ‘preserving an economic system that is destroying your well-being, your community and the very planet you live on’.
She is scathing too in her characterisation of some of the aspects of that system. She paints pictures such as ‘rough sleepers (…) curled up against storefronts, unsheltered and freezing on some of the most valuable real estate in the world’ and condemns the dehumanisation of asylum seekers whipped up by ‘press and political collusion’, causing ‘a frenzy of racist and indiscriminate loathing’. She reserves particular condemnation for social media and its effects, which she sees as part of the way in which ‘capitalism, in commodifying every aspect of our waking lives, has managed to come up with a form of leisure that’s even more alienating than labour’. And, as a media ‘insider’, she puts particular emphasis on what she sees as the media’s noxious role and, in particular, on its most recent iteration, social media. In a chapter entitled ‘Talk is Cheap’, she condemns, with a plethora of examples, the absurdly inflated focus on the ‘microevent’ (eg, a well-known actor slapping a well-known comedian at the 2022 Academy Awards), the misleading nature of many news headlines calculated to spread xenophobia, and social media’s ‘infinity pool of people posting nuts things’ where real news often gives way to ‘trivial, identity-driven controversies’. ‘The media machine that drives Minority Rule’, she concludes, ‘works by turning citizen against citizen; we’re more inclined to mistrust someone who shares our material conditions, than those who are in charge of shaping them’.
Overall this book, written with wit and brio, offers a sound, wide-ranging and well-informed analysis of the wrongs of capitalism, of the ongoing inability of the majority class in that society to see how they are being manipulated and of their failure to come together to do something about it. But it also has a disappointing aspect. The author calls herself a Marxist and her class analysis based on relationship to the means of production is consonant with Marxism. But her proposed solution for removing the minority class’s stranglehold over society strays far from this. She presents herself rather as a left Labourite critical of Keir Starmer’s current Labour government and its way of running capitalism but favourable to Jeremy Corbyn’s kind of Labourism, which, after the result of the 2017 General Election, she tells us she thought might herald a new era of Labour coming to power and bringing in massive pro-worker reforms. But if she is a Marxist, she should know that reforms any government can bring in are limited by the needs of capitalism and anyway are not capable of seriously redistributing wealth and bringing about economic equality – this is what the followers of Corbyn would have found if he had come to power. After all, in Marx’s own formulation, the state is the executive committee of the ruling class. Only the moneyless, stateless, classless society of free access based on from each according to ability to each according to need can achieve the economic equality which to be fair to Ash Sarkar is no doubt what she would like to see. But it is an illusion to think it can be achieved outside of such a society.
Howard Moss
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