Minority Rule (2025)

Book Review from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

Pathfinders: Without distinction of race or sex (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the USA, Trump’s MAGA gang is ruthlessly savaging everything they don’t like, including climate science, Ivy League universities which they see as being hotbeds of radical leftism, and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI). Their DEI bête noire is what’s called ‘affirmative action’, which they take to mean promoting ethnic candidates over more talented white ones, in defiance of the principle of meritocracy.

This presupposes that a white-dominated ‘meritocracy’ is ever genuinely capable of being ‘colour blind’, in the sense that it doesn’t notice whether a person is white or black. Critical race theory, which the MAGA gang also loath, mocks this self-serving pretension and argues that disadvantaged groups will never get a fair shake unless a little positive discrimination is introduced into the mix. As things stand, the system will always promote whites over more talented ethnic candidates.

Logically speaking, discrimination is not in the interests of employers, if through their own prejudice they are reducing the pool of talent they can draw from. But prejudice is not logical. Moreover, economically disadvantaged whites may not see or admit that there is a racism problem in the first place. To them, any positive discrimination in favour of other disadvantaged groups, together with talk of ‘white privilege’, will seem like a wholesale liberal attack on their ‘rights’. Populists like Trump are experts in exploiting such concerns.

During the USA’s infamous Jim Crow era, segregation required race-defining laws to determine who was black and who was white. The concept of ‘race’ has no scientific basis, so the laws were inevitably arbitrary, leaving some white-appearing people designated black, and vice versa. This legal nonsense imposed an artificial binary categorisation on what in reality is a spectrum, in order to enforce an iniquitous social oppression.

Constitutional lawyers teach that ‘parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman’. In its judgement last month the UK Supreme Court seemed to agree but they were making a purely legal ruling. They were not seeking to reflect the scientific view which is much more nuanced.

‘Most traits ascribed to males and females fall along a spectrum that has two peaks. One is the average for females. The other is the average for males […] But almost nobody fits in the peak for their sex on all of those measures.’.

As molecular evolutionary biologist Nathan Lents puts it, ‘How we define sex really depends on what we’re talking about. We want this to be a nice, neat, two-bucket category system where there’s no grey area, but unfortunately biology doesn’t traffic in binaries very often’. He describes a huge range of sex-related cardiovascular functions, hormone levels, blood, liver and brain conditions and disease dispositions, which don’t necessarily correspond to the external visible anatomy, or what’s called the phenotype. ‘While it’s very understandable to want to collapse all of this diversity into very simple categories, it really misses a lot of important biology. Life is complicated, life is messy, life is multi-dimensional’ .

He goes on: ‘We have anatomy all throughout our body that shows sex differences, but those differences are overlapping, and the variation within the sexes is larger than the difference between them’.

He concludes: ‘We’ve invented categories such as male and female, we invented these words, we invented these labels and we created the definitions, which means that they’re not necessarily a biological reality’.

For instance, women typically have two X chromosomes, and men have an X and a Y chromosome. But this is far from being universal. Around 1.7 percent of babies are born as ‘intersex’ or as having ‘differences of sexual development’ (DSDs), meaning they have traits of both sexes. This is about the same proportion as those who have red hair, or globally, around 110 million people. 1 in 650 newborns assigned male at birth have two or more X chromosomes and one Y (Klinefelter syndrome). 1 in 1000 newborns assigned female have just one X chromosome (Trisomy). In some cases, the SRY gene, important for male sex development, jumps out of the Y chromosome and bonds to an X instead. In others, X and Y have genes which prevent bodies from responding to testosterone and other male sex hormones (androgens), so that their bodies develop as female while having testes inside their abdomens.

Stigma surrounding such conditions often led to surgery at birth that was kept secret by the child’s parents, leading to severe mental health problems for the child later in life, in particular gender dysphoria, in which the person’s perceived gender does not align with their assigned sex.

Some of us may have mismatched sexual traits and not even know about it. In 2014, a 70-year-old father of four seeking treatment for a ‘hernia’ turned out to have a uterus with fallopian tubes (youtu.be/kT0HJkr1jj4).

The Supreme Court ruling is likely to have heartrending repercussions for transgender women, and will no doubt be contested. It’s a political ruling that will allow one large oppressed group to feel a measure of protection at the cost of another, far smaller one. But it is not based on science, which has nothing to say on wider questions about sports or hospital beds or prisons. And it allows politicians to ‘dodge responsibility over one of the most contentious and toxic debates of our age’.

In socialism, ‘legal’ definitions will be irrelevant. Equality doesn’t mean we all have to look or be the same. What it does mean is that we will cooperate, practically, ethically, and creatively, to build a post-capitalist society of common ownership for the emancipation of the whole of humanity, in the words of clause 4 of our Declaration of Principles, ‘without distinction of race or sex’.

Paddy Shannon

Proper Gander: Lessons from Adolescence (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A little over a year since Mr Bates vs The Post Office reminded us that TV drama can still have an impact, Netflix’s Adolescence has also shaped debate in Parliament, online, in the media and round the proverbial water cooler at work. Adolescence has been particularly resonant because the issue of violence from young males which it raises feels both more emotive and widespread. The story centres on a 13-year-old boy who is accused of stabbing a girl from his school. Each episode covers an hour at intervals after the murder, with the first showing Jamie’s arrest at his home. Episode two follows the police’s initial visit to the children’s school, the third is a conversation between Jamie and a psychologist some months afterwards and the last episode looks at how the rest of his family are managing over a year later. The performances from Owen Cooper as Jamie and Stephen Graham as his father Eddie are particularly gripping, with Graham also co-creating and co-writing the series. Impressively, each episode was filmed in one continuous take, which must have involved intricately structuring and choreographing the scenes to get the camera and the actors in the right places at the right times.

The drama gives less emphasis to the details of the murder than to the circumstances around it, gradually bringing out the combination of reasons behind Jamie’s actions. His family isn’t portrayed as dysfunctional apart from his father’s anger, described as a generational trauma passed on to Jamie. His own anger is shown sparingly and as being fuelled by online culture. The ‘manosphere’ to which Jamie is drawn, of emojis, incels, influencers and abusive messages has led him to a view of women which leads to his crime. The script tends to understate the causes: Jamie is outwardly ‘normal’ rather than obviously aggressive. Online discourse isn’t explored in detail, other than several brief scenes where aspects of the ‘manosphere’ are mentioned, hinting at its links with far-right ideology. The meanings behind kidney bean emojis and ‘taking the red pill’ explained by the teenage characters would have been new to many viewers. An effect of this is to tell parents that they may not have understood the nature of online cultures their children are being tempted into, and how this can almost casually slide them into violence. In some ways, this is a modern version of past moral panics about the influence of horror comics, video nasties and computer games on young people, although this feels more serious, given today’s climate with the rise in knife crime and misogyny.

Much of the discussion sparked by Adolescence has concentrated on ‘toxic masculinity’, rather than another factor in what influenced Jamie. His school is depicted as a grim and tense place for children to learn in, taking into account that the scenes there are set only a few days after the murder. The teachers are depicted as policing behaviour more than teaching, while the regimented routines and drab walls aren’t much different from those of the police station or detention centre seen in other episodes. Our society’s institutions and environments encourage and reinforce alienation, with Jamie representing its extremes.

Adolescence isn’t a case study, although because it’s fiction perhaps it can be spoken about more openly than real cases. Its release was certainly timed well to contribute to a broader debate. In the same month, former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate, giving the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, said that today’s young men need more wholesome role models rather than ‘callous, manipulative and toxic influencers’ online. Also in March, the Centre of Social Justice published its Lost Boys report which describes an increasing divergence between the future prospects of boys and girls, with girls now more likely to later have higher qualifications and higher-paid employment.

Various right-wing vloggers (and Elon Musk) opined that Adolescence is liberal-lefty propaganda which demonises white males and distracts from the proportion of stabbings committed by black youths. Their dislike of the drama is presumably due in part to its criticisms of the ‘manosphere’ they represent. Right-wing commentators were also more likely than those on the left to say that it is being used by the government to justify legislation about regulating online activity. The Online Safety Act 2023 passed into law under the previous Conservative government, and its implementation is still in progress under Labour’s regime. The Prime Minister met with the series’ creators and backed MP Anneliese Midgley’s call for it to be screened in schools with the aim of helping to deter teenage boys from misogyny and aggression. Secondary schools are already obliged to include ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ on their curriculum and updated guidance to cover sexual violence is being planned. Even if the state’s approach of embracing the programme and saying they are taking action over the issues it raises is sincere rather than cynical, it’s still a better PR move than ignoring or disputing the drama.

Adolescence has, at least for a few weeks, connected together various attempts to address concerns about some young males. But to what extent can tightening up legislation about online activity or showing the series in schools or promoting different role models counter misogynistic violence? The context of the problem remains. Titling the drama ‘Adolescence’ points towards the root of the issue being with younger people, especially boys. However, the real cause is found with the social conditions which shape adolescence. Therefore deeper social change is needed, although this risks being ignored among the piecemeal reforms and proposals.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Mr Bates vs The Post Office was reviewed in the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: The polarisation of politics (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The polarisation of politics

The dialectic taking place among political opponents at the present time is that there is a polarisation and a narrowing of political thought taking place in the UK. Put simply, we are seeing a decrease in compromise and increased partisanship. Will this lead to a more tribalised political system as some political commentators have suggested?

In the UK since Brexit there has no doubt taken place a fragmentation of politics and right wing populist views taking charge of the narrative.

Mr Farage has been the main proponent of a populist free market economy encouraging the idea that we should engage in a society of competitive individuals vying for a higher proportion of the goods available in the land. Some kind of anarchic free for all society that ignores the welfare of the people and encourages fierce competition with no moral arbiters.

With the rise of marginal parties that, in my view only offer a very short lifespan, it is a grim foreboding for the future. Socialism seems to have taken a back seat at the present time. With the arrival of revisionist Keir Starmer, the Labour party lacks the bravery to attack free enterprise head on. Public ownership is still very fragmented and piecemeal.

Farage and his cohorts continue to feed the electorate with misinformation, racial prejudice and bigotry. They continue to foster the political agenda with an attack on the use of rules in a free market economy as it, in their opinion limits among other things the freedom of speech. Ignoring the facts that rules act as a protective cocoon for the collective and limit greedy individuals from appropriating all that is available.

There is also a view from liberal commentators that there is an oligarchy taking shape. And this oligarchy with all its wealth, power and influence will eventually threaten democracy.

Is this however just another example of pop up populist fear mongering? I think so. In the UK Nigel Farage, the so called ‘Man of the People,’ the messiah in waiting is without doubt a dangerous opponent of socialism. Although a racist and fear monger, he is no political slouch. An educated raconteur with plenty of political muscle. He is very persuasive in that ‘boyish’ tone of innocence he portrays to the gallery.

But his reform party in my view is an enigma. It will not last the distance. It has no real substance. It can be viewed as some kind of short fix that will only satisfy the electorate for a short while.

The impulse will stutter and die out. It just does not have the bedrock of support to be a lasting political party. It is no tour de force.

But having said that, they are perversely a real and present danger. The narrative in the political cauldron at the moment is change and not for the better. The right wing is attempting to batter doors

down.

The rich and powerful would have us believe that ruthless competition is the way forward. Jim Ratcliffe, a part shareholder in Manchester United in is search for that ultra-competitive spirit is tearing the club apart by ignoring the needs of the workforce. Socialism needs to be more aggressive in its defence of equality and fairness.

I would take Thomas Moore’s pragmatic view of socialism which would be based on the practical considerations of socialism and as Marx stated, with the rise of technological development’s the modes of production change over time creating new and revolutionary structures.

In the UK we have a truly diverse culture and I would hope that this will produce a profound cultural shift and a more progressive society which will see the disappearance of class divisions. As a last thought could AI have a dramatic effect on the conditions of our social relations.

Barry Watts, 

Dover

Reply:

You make a lot of separate points so we can’t really address all of them. It’s undoubtedly true that in the US and Europe the political pendulum has swung towards the right in recent years, as rocketing prices and unaffordable housing have put a squeeze on workers, which together with wars and climate change don’t offer young people much hope for the future.

In such dire times, it’s common to think less about progressive ideas and more about loss aversion, and never mind other problems. Ably assisted by social media, the right has amplified the general unease into a clickbait hysteria of xenophobia, anti-wokism and conspiracy yarns which drowns out adult debate and promotes gleeful mediocrities like Farage who know how to exploit it. They don’t need arguments as long as they get attention. And having no coherent political or ideological theory is not a weakness but an advantage for such ‘pop-up populists’, because it means they can rebrand any time they like.

The left is in a state of despair and disrepair. Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn were unable to turn back the capitalist clock with their supposedly radical state-ownership programmes. Anti or post-capitalists, overlooked since Occupy, fail to be heard above the noise.

But the right is also fragmented and confused. Some hanker for a ruthless, stateless Adam Smith parody that never could feasibly exist. Many want a return to 19th century protectionism. Trump meanwhile is going in contradictory directions with new isolationist tariffs combined with expansionist rhetoric, prompting dark forebodings of a future global war.

Is the new oligarchy threatening democracy, you ask, as if ‘democracy’ is what we’ve got? The rich do seem to be enjoying a new Gilded Age, but just look how they bend the knee to Trump, to Putin, to Xi. That’s not the act of invincible plutocrats. They fear the state’s power to break them if it chooses. And they need the state’s power to maintain order, without which they can’t continue to profit.

Is all this bad for socialism’s prospects? The barrage of soundbite and counter-soundbite is certainly a source of general confusion, but workers’ collective interest remains crystal clear for anyone to see. You hint that future technology might create new structures through which to challenge the system. Possibly so, but it doesn’t take technology to make a revolution. Only we workers can do that. – Editors.

What the heck is Cultural Marxism? (2024)

Wojak Karl Marx

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

You may have seen it on a clumsy wojak speech bubble via a Facebook group or on Twitter, more than likely in a 4chan meme, but the buzz phrase ‘Cultural Marxism’ has entered the political lexicon. A term rooted in the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School, which sought to apply Marxist theory to culture, it has also been appropriated to denote a sinister conspiracy theory. That is to say, it initially referred to Marxist critiques of culture but has been adopted by some right-wing and far-right groups to describe perceived threats from progressive social reforms. Members of the Jewish community and anti-racist groups hold that using this term perpetuated antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In 2019 the Guardian, referring to Suella Braverman, reported ‘Tory MP Criticized for Using Antisemitic Term “Cultural Marxism”.’ Other Tory MPs have been criticised for this including the Croydon South MP and multi-millionaire landlord Chris Philp (tinyurl.com/skkrr33e). Somehow he retained his seat in this constituency that has large parts among the country’s lowest twenty percent deprived areas.

This portrayal of Marxism is a misrepresentation that conflates a broad and complex set of ideas into a monolithic threat. As a party with a strong basis in Marx’s actual writings, we can easily dismiss this definition as not only inherently incorrect but also because the term serves not as analysis but as a dog whistle for any type of racist, misogynist or bigoted behaviour.

In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition or for avoidance of true understanding. Much like ‘woke mind virus’ and ‘social justice warrior’, what ‘Cultural Marxism’ means isn’t as important as who it is being used against and who’s listening.

Cultural Marxism 1.0

‘Cultural Marxism’ initially referred to the work of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist theorists established in the 20th century, intellectuals like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, who aimed to expand on Marx’s work by applying Marxism to cultural and social phenomena. The goal was to understand why capitalist societies had not yet collapsed despite the inherent contradictions that Marx had drawn attention to.

The Frankfurt School theorists argued that culture, ideology, and mass media play significant roles in maintaining the status quo by shaping public consciousness and discouraging revolutionary thought. They explored concepts such as the ‘culture industry,’ which describes how popular culture is mass produced to reinforce consumerism and passive acceptance of the capitalist system. These ideas were not about destroying ‘First World culture’ but about critiquing how cultural forms are manipulated to maintain the capitalist dominance.

Gramsci contributed to this school of thought with his concept of ‘cultural hegemony’. He posited that the capitalist class maintains control not just through force or economic power, but by dominating cultural norms and values, peddling the capitalist worldview as common sense. This notion emphasized the need for a counter-hegemonic culture to challenge and replace the dominant capitalist ideology with socialist ideas.

Appropriation and distortion by the far-right

In the cold dead claws of the alt-right, Cultural Marxism loses its meaning as a critical theory and is presented as a pejorative term engineered to invoke the conspiracy theory that Marxists are covertly campaigning to subvert ‘White’ culture by accepting the value of equality between race, genders and sexuality. The distorted view accuses these socially progressive changes as part of a coordinated effort to destroy ‘White’ culture. Popping another red pill and through fash-tainted glasses, this conspiracy theory goes on that Cultural Marxists are waging a war against traditional and Christian values to weaken the West from within. This reframing is a gift to the alt-right fash, reformed to paint itself as the victim of a red terror and saviour of Western civilization against a perceived cultural invasion.

The alt-rights use of ‘Cultural Marxism’ as a catch-all term for everything it opposes — feminist, multiculturalist, LGBTQ+, atheists, even the vegans — serves to rally the right and reactionaries against imaginary bogeymen (but usually minorities) and anyone really. This approach allows them to cosplay as the last line of defence against an existential cultural threat. As Slavoj Žižek noted in The Sublime Object of Ideology, ‘The more we discuss the impact of political correctness, the more we lose sight of the actual economic struggles’. This diversion helps the alt-right avoid engaging with tangible issues of capitalist exploitation and economic hardship and racial inequality. Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism added ‘The conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism” is an attempt to reduce complex social phenomena into simplistic and unfounded narratives.’

Let’s make sense of the frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric.

From a socialist perspective the appropriation of Cultural Marxism is a deliberate calculated distraction from hardships and truths facing workers. By focusing on cultural battles it serves the interests of the ruling class by preventing the working class from recognizing its own power. Meanwhile, the capitalist class continues to exploit labour, accumulate wealth, and consolidate power, largely unchallenged by a fragmented and tired populace.

Rosa Luxemburg argued that ‘the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening’. Thus we argue that the real struggle is not over culture or identity but over who controls the wealth generated by the working class. The focus should not be on fighting imaginary cultural enemies of fictional conspiracies but on the working class organizing to liquidate the capitalist system that exploits them.

This alt-right myth is a convenient albeit dangerous tool for the ruling class to attack the working class, keeping us divided and distracted. By promoting fear of cultural change, the capitalist class can avoid accountability for the economic exploitation and inequality that capitalism perpetuates.

Who smears wins

The tactics used by the alt-right in promoting the Cultural Marxism narrative is a direct lift from the 20th century fascist propaganda tactic of scapegoating with fear-mongering. Smears and vitriol, less blood and soil, more shite and bile. Fascist states thrived on dread and fear of the external enemy — whether it be other nations, communists, a minority, or immigrants — this all served to unify their base and justify extreme political violence. By positioning themselves as defenders of traditional ‘White’ values against a supposed cultural onslaught of the unknowable hordes and heathens, they seek to rally disaffected individuals around a nationalist identity and exclusionary vision.

In The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in Europe, Paul Hanebrink, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, points out that ‘for much of the twentieth century, Europe was haunted by a threat of Judeo-Bolshevism myth’. He examines the unfounded and damaging narrative that falsely connects Judaism with Bolshevism. This myth emerged in early 20th century Europe and falsely claimed that Jewish people were behind the rise of Russian ‘communism’. The conspiracy theory was employed as a propaganda tool to justify antisemitic policies and actions, contributing to the persecution of Jewish communities and supporting authoritarian regimes. He underscores the myth’s impact on European politics and society, demonstrating how such harmful narratives can distort public perception and fuel discrimination.

Fascism relies on an us-versus-them mentality, which is why the alt-right’s use of ‘Cultural Marxism’ as a bogeyman is so effective. It allows them to present themselves as the last line of defence against a cultural apocalypse, even as they promote intolerance, exclusion, and violence. As political theorist Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The essence of totalitarianism is not merely a system of government but a state of mind that relies on fear and hate to unite and control’. The alt-right’s approach is not new; it’s a recycled form of demagoguery used to maintain control through division and fear.

This approach ultimately serves the interests of the capitalist class as by promoting cultural conflict, it enables them to continue to exploit labour and amass wealth without facing unity of resistance.

Socialism offers a world where the wealth we create together is used to meet our needs, not to enrich a privileged few. It’s about a future society where we work cooperatively, where resources are shared equitably.

Socialists have a clear-eyed understanding of the challenge we face and reject the false narratives peddled by the alt-right, other bad faith actors and their allies. It’s essential to recognize that the real struggle is not over culture but over economic power and control. By dismantling the capitalist system, we create a society where cultural diversity is celebrated and where all people have the opportunity to participate fully in shaping the world around them.

A. T.

Proper Gander: Presenting the past (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

How accurate do we expect or want historical dramas on TV and film to be? Fiction, by definition, isn’t factual, and even when a story is based on real events, it can’t be an exact recreation. There will always be liberties taken to fit the events into the drama’s running time and conventions about plot and character development. Depictions of the past are always infused with the mores of the time when they were made. A drama produced in the 1970s and set in the 1870s has 1970s interpretations of Victorian styles of dress and furnishings, as well as of the attitudes and motivations of the characters. Anyone watching Upstairs Downstairs, for example, would instantly know whether they were watching the 1970s or the 2010s version.

One prominent trend in recent years is to place more emphasis on diversity in how historical dramas are produced. Previously, the media has been guilty of neglecting non-white people’s experiences and perpetuating negative stereotypes. A notorious example is the 1915 film Birth of a Nation for its racist depiction of black people in 19th-century America, while 1939’s Gone with the Wind, set in the same period, gave a distorted impression of relations between black and white people. Of course, many historical dramas have aimed to bring attention to issues affecting black people and communities by recreating what happened as realistically as possible, two examples being Roots (1977, 2016) and BBC One’s Small Axe (2020). Authenticity hasn’t been a priority for Netflix’s ratings hit Bridgerton, which revolves around an aristocratic black family in early 19th-century London. Series creator Chris Van Dusen acknowledges the unlikeliness of this scenario, saying that Bridgerton ‘is a reimagined world, we’re not a history lesson, it’s not a documentary. What we’re really doing with the show is marrying history and fantasy in what I think is a very exciting way. One approach that we took to that is our approach to race’ (tinyurl.com/56xwdv8h).

The series was inspired by the largely debunked claim that Queen Charlotte (1744 – 1818) recognisably had some black African ancestry. In 2023 spin-off Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, she is played by India Amarteifio, who has part-black African heritage. Channel 5’s 2021 miniseries Anne Boleyn has Jodie Turner-Smith, of Jamaican heritage, cast as Henry VIII’s second wife. These are examples of one of the bugbears of right-wing online commentators, which they would call ‘race-swapping’. Criticisms of the casting in Netflix’s 2023 docudrama Queen Cleopatra weren’t only limited to social media posts, though. Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a stern statement that Adele James, of Jamaican and British heritage, portraying the Egyptian queen was a falsification of history in that she actually had ‘white skin and Hellenistic characteristics’ (tinyurl.com/62rapzjw).

The reverse was more common in old dramas, with white actors often playing non-white historical figures. As recently as 2014, director Ridley Scott said that he cast white actors in his Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings because ‘I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such’ (tinyurl.com/2xnkkj2v). While the landscape has changed a lot even since Exodus, what has remained the same is that those working in the media have to follow whichever approach will attract the most investment and viewers, who also represent income. The recent emphasis on diversity and inclusion is hoped to fit in with the values of those (mainly younger) people in the target market. This is shown most clearly in the increase of non-white people in TV adverts. A more diverse cast is intended to reach a more diverse audience, to attract a more diverse range of people to part with their money to make profits for the elite.

Another motivation is that films need to be made by or cast a set proportion of people from hitherto under-represented groups to be considered for some Academy Awards and BAFTAs. Awards don’t just give recognition for talent; they also confer financial advantage in being another advert for the film, and award-winning artistes can attract more revenue.

So, the emphasis on diversity on TV and in film has economic explanations, alongside sincere attempts to improve the profile and opportunities of groups of people who have traditionally been disadvantaged. This disadvantage has itself stemmed from economic circumstances, when non-white people have been seen as less attractive in the labour market.

Right-wing commentators on social media have been particularly vocal with their view that representations of ethnicity on TV and film demonstrate that ‘woke’ leftists have infiltrated the industry. This discussion generates attention, and therefore more publicity. Hardly anyone would have heard of Channel 5’s Anne Boleyn series if it hadn’t provoked blather about its lead actor. Predictably, much of the left and right’s discourse is bitter and combative in tone, casting aspersions and fuelling division.

Does it matter if the past is depicted on our screens in a way which doesn’t accurately reflect what it was like? A drama showing non-white characters in improbable positions of status for the time risks dismissing the actual societal restrictions which have been imposed on some groups. While there were a small number of privileged black people in Regency era Britain, such as Ignatius Sancho and Dido Elizabeth Belle, a black family wouldn’t have been as wealthy and powerful among the English elite of the early 1800s as the fictional Bridgertons. Their lifestyles would bear no relation to those of the people from Africa still trapped in the slave trade at the time. Another drama set in the same era which gives a misleading impression is 2022’s The Woman King. This film retells the story of the Agojie, a female warrior unit of the West African kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin), as an example of empowered black women, downplaying the patriarchal and slave-based system of which they were part. The inaccuracies undermine the strength which the messages of emancipation or equality aim for.

An important distinction between these dramas is in how they are pitched. With Bridgerton, Exodus: Gods and Kings and Anne Boleyn, there’s a stated or unstated understanding that what’s on screen is not historically accurate, with this looseness giving a wider range of actors the chance to explore roles. With Queen Cleopatra, Queen Charlotte and The Woman King, there are some claims for authenticity, which invite more scrutiny. Unfortunately, the way the ‘culture war’ over historical dramas is usually fought online distracts from recognising the economic context in which the debate has arisen.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Small Axe was reviewed in the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Vague and Vacuous (2024)

Book Review from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Values, Voice and Virtue: the New British Politics. By Matthew Goodwin. Penguin £10.99.

Goodwin was co-author of National Populism, reviewed in the March 2019 Socialist Standard, which was largely an unconvincing and unpleasant defence of a xenophobic form of nationalism. His latest book is no better.

The basic argument is that, since the 1970s, there has been a revolution or re-alignment in British society and politics. Thatcher supposedly emphasised family values and individual responsibility, but also ‘ushered in the new era of hyper-globalization’, as if this was government policy rather than part of the way that capitalism works; this involved, for instance, selling off ‘many of Britain’s assets’. The former ruling class of industrialists and landowners was replaced by ‘a new middle-class graduate elite’. The latter attended top universities, and were not just journalists, politicians and broadcasters, but also academics, doctors and architects. They have allegedly made it much harder for white boys from a manual working-class background to get into university. They control Britain’s main institutions, and a third of MPs have postgraduate degrees. Many of the elite are radical ‘woke’ progressives, a group that apparently constitutes about one in six of the population.

It is noted that Britain has become more unequal, and there are some passing references to very wealthy people, such as the ‘international jet-setting elites’ who have homes in London but also in New York and so on. Yet overall the author has not the slightest idea of how capitalism operates, of the division between a tiny minority who own and control the planet’s resources, and the rest, who have to work for them. The decline in manual jobs is noted, and much is made of the geographical divide between London and the rest of the country. But in London a quarter of the population live in poverty and one in fifty are homeless, though the reader would not gather this from Goodwin’s treatment.

It is correct to say that choice was reduced in politics as Tories and Labour grew closer together. However, the book’s focus is very much on England, with no discussion of parties such as Plaid Cymru or the SNP. The claimed counter-revolution against the new rulers involved three revolts: populism, Brexit and Boris Johnson. Brexit, we are told, was intended to reduce immigration and ‘restore Britain’s national sovereignty’ (whatever that is). Despite his privileged background, Johnson was ‘a renegade member of the elite’ and became leader of the non-graduate majority who supported the counter-revolution. But Partygate derailed this, and Truss’s ‘small-state, low-tax’ vision of Brexit failed as it had little popular support (nothing to do with market reactions, then).

The whole book is a fantasy, with no arguments to show how the supposed former ruling class have been replaced by the graduate elite, and no understanding of how politics under capitalism is driven by economic interests and the need for profit.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: Radio Ga-Ga (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Switch over from TV current affairs programmes to those on DAB radio, and you’ll notice quite a shift in tone. The telly’s news bulletins and shows like the BBC’s Question Time or Newsnight appear airbrushed and staid when compared with the more blunt discussions found on the commercial talk radio stations.

With nearly three million listeners each week, the heavyweight in the market is LBC, which as the London Broadcasting Company was the first licenced commercial radio station, back in 1973. It became more widely known after relaunching nationally on the DAB platform in 2014 with the self-aggrandising boast of ‘Leading Britain’s Conversation’. In 2017 the station gained further publicity from its interview with Diane Abbott MP when she made a hash of explaining Labour’s funding plans for the police, and also when it ditched Katie Hopkins as a presenter for advocating a ‘final solution’ following the Manchester Arena bombing. Not all of LBC’s hosts are poisonous rent-a-gobs like Hopkins or Nigel Farage, whose regular programme was dropped a few months ago. James O’Brien’s phone-in slot often shows up racists and xenophobes for what they are, and he wearily ran rings around Jacob Rees-Mogg when interviewing him about the practicalities of leaving the European Union. Frosty conversations are a hallmark of LBC.

Less popular, but more populist is TalkRADIO. This station, relaunched on DAB in 2016, follows a similar format of having phone-in discussion programmes helmed by opinionated hosts wearing headphones. While LBC presenters are more likely to try and catch out their interviewees, TalkRADIO hosts tend to bring in guests who reinforce their own opinions, which are invariably of the patriotic, right wing libertarian variety. This stance reflects who ultimately owns the station: along with Virgin Radio, Times Radio and Talksport, it’s part of Wireless Group, which is part of News Corp, owned by pro-Trump Rupert Murdoch.

Among TalkRADIO’s regular presenters is Mike Graham, who refers to the station as being ‘the home of common sense’ for the ‘silent majority’. He lays out his trade when he says on one show ‘we don’t need any lessons in history from the Guardian reading yoghurt knitting lentil munching morons who think that there’s something wrong with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. As well as presenting The Independent Republic of Mike Graham, he chairs Plank of the Week, where he sits with a couple of other pundits to slag off people recently in the public eye. One ‘plank of the week’ was Banksy for his efforts in arranging a boat to rescue migrants at risk in the Mediterranean Sea.

Another frequent target is ‘woke’ culture, which the station associates with transgender activists, Black Lives Matter (‘a ghastly, horrible organisation that would like to see the destruction of everything that is good about Britain’, according to Mike Graham) and Extinction Rebellion (‘pathetic’, so says another presenter, Mike Parry). The station particularly focuses on its rival the BBC’s emphasis on diversity. For instance, Ian Collins in his show called the BBC directive about training its staff in avoiding racial bias ‘absolute cast-iron bonkers’ and other presenter Dan Wootton slated the BBC for being obsessed with ‘vile, toxic, tribal identity politics’.

The ‘wokeness’ of the BBC is also criticised because having a ‘liberal London groupthink’ means that it isn’t as impartial as it is supposed to be. On one of Mike Graham’s shows, regular guest and TV presenter Neil Oliver says that news is expected to be neutral, ‘a magnolia paint colour version of events’, and that the BBC gives this impression to disguise its left-leaning bias. On one of his shows, Ian Collins adds that BBC presenters should leave their political opinions on subjects such as Black Lives Matter outside the studio. But he, and the other TalkRADIO presenters, aren’t shy to inflict their own views on us. They simultaneously berate the BBC for being biased while making the most of their own biased broadcasting.

Whether or not the BBC is partial in the way TalkRADIO accuses, it’s right to point out that the BBC isn’t impartial. And it can’t be impartial, because it is part of the establishment, and therefore reflects the ideology which maintains the status quo. It’s partial towards acceptance of the system overall. TalkRADIO is the same, just in a more extreme and in-your-face way.

While the BBC has to stick to stricter editorial rules than TalkRADIO or LBC, all news broadcasters have to follow Ofcom’s code of guidance about ‘due impartiality’, which means that alternative views should be considered. Earlier in the year, TalkRADIO was found not to have done this and was fined £75,000 after former presenter George Galloway discussed allegations of antisemitism in the Labour Party and the role of the Russian state in the Salisbury poisonings. When the station’s presenters do cite different opinions or interview activists, it’s invariably with a dismissive, sneering tone.

TalkRADIO’s preoccupations are shown by how it repeatedly latches on to the same kind of subject in the same kind of way. Its recent fixations have included dance troupe Diversity’s Black Lives Matter routine on Britain’s Got Talent and the possibility of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ being removed from the Proms because of associations with colonialism. While these and any topic should be discussed, TalkRADIO doesn’t scrutinise, for example, Donald Trump or Sky News. Nor does it have programmes about poverty or exploitation or environmental threats or war. The subjects the channel doesn’t cover tell us as much about its stance as those which it does.

TalkRADIO’s critique (if it can be called that) of left-wing ideology would be of interest, but it’s based on a caricature, and it comes from a cynical, cold place. A distorted worldview. Listen to TalkRADIO for too long, and you’d think Britain is divided only into ‘lentil munching morons’ infatuated with diversity quotas, and the Union Jack-waving ‘silent majority’ fed up with ‘political correctness gone mad’.

Mike Foster

Really That Dominant? (2022)

Book Review from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

How Woke Won: the Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. By Joanna Williams: Spiked. £9.99.

According to one definition, a woke person is someone who is ‘very aware of social and political unfairness’ (Collins English Dictionary). Joanna Williams, however, uses the term in a very negative way, to refer to those who are obsessed with race and gender, and support cancel culture. Woke values supposedly ‘dominate every aspect of our lives’ and, while there is no grand conspiracy, the ‘cultural elite’ accept woke thinking as common sense. The woke project is described as an attack on the working class (not defined, but probably manual workers).

She is not at all clear as to who comprises this cultural elite. It is a ‘manifestation of the state’, it includes non-governing elites and even a sub-elite. It consists of the ‘professional-managerial class’, and runs business, academia, the church, mainstream and social media; its members work in HR departments and the cultural industry, and as doctors and teachers. It is hard to take seriously this depiction of a group which is allegedly so powerful but is characterised in such a vague way.

Having said that, there are some good points here. The kind of threats made against JK Rowling and others for saying that trans women are not women are indeed indefensible. This is not a matter of disagreement or argument but of intolerance and intimidation. Students can sometimes be unwilling to accept the expression of views they dislike. ‘Woke capitalism’ can promote gender inclusivity, for instance, as a way of selling razor blades or deodorant.

Yet there is also much that is objectionable, sometimes a matter of the omission of obviously relevant points. Williams mentions that journalist Suzanne Moore resigned from the Guardian after being bullied by colleagues, presumably for not expressing acceptably woke views, but does not say that Jeremy Hardy and John Pilger were barred from the paper for being too ‘radical’. In other cases, what is said is inconsistent. For instance, it is claimed that the supposed existence of institutional racism in the police moves policing ‘into the realm of politics’. Yet a few pages later it is said that the police now have new ways of pursuing old goals, effectively defending the interests of the ruling class (which is also political, after all).

Woke is allegedly a counter-revolution to the populism of Brexit. The election of Trump in 2016 is said to have shown the rejection of woke values in the US: as if voting for a racist, sexist, lying bully was an endorsement of tolerance and reason. The ‘political consensus’ is also said to be challenged by the internet publication Spiked (spiked-online.com), which Williams writes for, and also by the TV and radio channel GB News, which is largely a forum for such as Nigel Farage.

Overall, Williams says nothing about the lack of democracy under capitalism, and is just arguing for one establishment view against another that is to a large extent manufactured by its opponents.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Growing up with Jordan Peterson (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A darling of the ‘alt-light’ (that’s ‘alt-right’ without the swastikas) is clinical psychologist and self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose YouTube videos and podcasts have been blowing up in recent years. To call him a divisive figure is an understatement. He is deplored and denigrated by some as a misogynist, even fascist ideologue bent on spreading hate. He is adored and promulgated by others as an articulate warrior against identity politics, post-modernism and ‘cultural Marxism’, popular if vague dog whistles that Peterson and his fans have no problem conflating into one toxic conspiracy bundle.

Not surprisingly, his grasp of Marxism is non-existent – Stalin and Mao killed millions, end of. He likes big ideas designed to shock, but without fussing over details. So he argues that order is male and chaos is female, and that chaos is currently winning. This has produced a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in which men are being turned into feminised weaklings who need to stop being man-children and grow the hell up. At the same time, women who want to get ahead in the world and stop playing second fiddle to men in terms of jobs and pay, should learn to overcome their built-in tendency to please and appease. The world is a hierarchy based on competence, not on discrimination, and the sooner you quit whingeing about how unfair it all is, the sooner you’ll start changing your life for the better.

His runaway success has come as a surprise to many who must have thought society had moved beyond caveman capitalism but who, it is argued, have ‘underestimated the fury being inspired by modern preoccupations like white privilege and cultural appropriation, and by the marginalization, shouting down or outright cancellation of other viewpoints in polite society’s institutions’ (bit.ly/3C2rU8j).

To all this, he offers a simple antidote, indeed alibi. Instead of having to fit in with your socially aware friends and pretend you care deeply about the hard lives of underprivileged foreigners you’re never going to meet, how much easier it is to say ‘Screw them if they can’t keep up’. Instead of going to the effort of listening to other perspectives and honestly evaluating criticisms of your own behaviour, what a relief to say ‘Go kiss a leper, loser’. Peterson absolves you of all guilt and concern for others. You never have to feel inadequate. You never have to empathise. You never have to doubt. Don’t ask, just take. That’s what real empowerment looks like, buddy. And what’s more, it’s the natural order of things, as explained by Science.

The problem his opponents frequently have is that they share, or at least don’t question, the assumptions that underpin his own worldview, so their attempts at criticism start off wide of the mark and stay there. Instead they pick away at him guerrilla-fashion, attempting to bury him in moral indignation or truculent fact-checking. It offends them to think he’s right, but they can’t see how to argue with him.

A socialist would see through Jordan Peterson in 10 seconds.

It’s the circularity of the argument. Suppose you find yourself in a savage kill-or-be-killed environment, and you’re unhappy about behaving in a savage kill-or-be-killed way. Your life coach tells you that your sub-optimal behaviour is the problem, and advises you to stop being such a pussy and get out there with guns blazing. He doesn’t ask or care why society is savage and kill-or-be-killed. He’s a psychologist, not some woke social justice warrior or cultural Marxist. If you suggest that the psychologist and his advice might be the very factors helping to perpetuate the savage kill-or-be-killed society which drove you to seek his advice in the first place, he will accuse you of refusing to take personal responsibility and tell you to grow the hell up.

If you have bought into the capitalist mindset, people like Peterson make a kind of terrifying sense, however uncomfortable that makes you feel. And if it makes sense today, it must have made sense yesterday, and for all previous days. Thus the circularity appears timeless. This is probably why he permits himself to justify human hierarchies by pointing, not to some historical event or near genetic cousin, but of all things, to lobsters. Lobsters, he says, are tyrannical hierarchs, and because we share some lobster genes inherited from our remote past, we are surely programmed to act the same way.

But you could apply this argument to anything. On this logic, all men should be rapists because, well, just look at ducks. For infanticide, see lions. For cannibalism, check out chimpanzees, hamsters and even hippos. But lobsters? No ‘proof’ can elude someone who is willing to go back so far along the evolutionary chain they’re no longer in the same genus, family, order, class or phylum. The term ‘logical fallacy’ barely does justice to this kind of thinking.

Jordan Peterson’s worldview is essentially a snapshot of the world right now, made to look immortal and unchanging. He doesn’t care that it’s ahistorical and if anything untypical of human behaviour in deep time, as many anthropologists would be at pains to point out. Indeed he dismisses anthropologists as being infected by the disease of postmodernist cultural Marxism, as indeed are the faculties of sociology, English literature, and ethnic, race and women’s studies, all of which, like the equally infected and spurious science of global warming, should be defunded immediately in his view.

Like any snake-oil salesman, he doesn’t consider the downstream consequences of the Randian product he is pushing. With the profit-driven frenzy of capitalism already burning the Earth and causing the sixth mass extinction of species, he is quite happy to advise emulating the same behaviour, in order to cash in on gullible people who think their failure is somehow because they weren’t ruthless enough.

On the plus side, Jordan Peterson does admit that his popularity is mainly on YouTube and that the YouTube audience is 80 percent young males. Once these young men have had a dose of trying to behave like the callous psychopaths he advises them to be, and finding that it makes them lonely rather than rich, they will perhaps start listening to wiser counsel. But we can’t wait that long. We need them to realise, right now, that capitalism is a gigantic and destructive social problem to which the only possible solution is gigantic and constructive social cooperation. That’s what growing up really means.

Paddy Shannon

Blue Labour (2021)

Book Review from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despised. Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class. Paul Embery, (Polity, 2021)

This is a relatively short book but halfway through it I wondered if I could bear reading any more. Why? Well, it’s certainly not badly written or hard going. In fact it’s written in a congenially informal style that makes it easy to read and understand. But the trouble (or one of its troubles) is that it’s endlessly repetitive, simply going over the same ground time and time again, repeating the same polemic and even using the same words to express it.

What does it actually argue? Basically that the Labour Party is finished if it doesn’t manage to bring back to its fold the so-called ‘red wall’ of voters who deserted it in the Brexit referendum and in the 2019 General Election. These are the voters the author identifies as the ‘working class’ (defined as those who do ‘physical labour or work in blue-collar industries, factories, call centres, retail or frontline public services’) who have traditionally been the backbone of Labour’s support in urban Britain and from which background, as he frequently reminds us, he himself comes.

These people, Embery contends, have moved away from Labour because it has become a Party dominated by a middle-class elite hostile to traditional working-class values and favourable to globalisation, mass immigration and identity politics. According to the author, it needs to move back to embrace and represent those working-class values and only by so doing will it win back that core of traditional support and again become an electoral force. The words he uses to describe those ‘values’ are among those repeated over and over again throughout, giving this book its tiresomely repetitive feel: patriotism, tradition, custom, order, stability, flag, family, faith, identity, community, belonging.

Almost equally countless are his repetitions of a particular set of tired, hackneyed terms often used by those on the right of the capitalist political spectrum to seek to vilify their opponents: liberal wokedom, virtue signalling, identity politics, woke left, cosmopolitan elite, progressivism – or more or less any combination of these words. These are the terms he uses to denote forces he sees as standing in the way of those traditional working-class values.

Yet this book is a funny mixture. Its writer is ‘a firefighter and trade union activist’ and an adherent of so-called ‘blue Labour’. He proclaims himself ‘left-wing’ and makes it clear that he is on the side of the workers in their endeavours to improve pay and conditions. So it can be said that he recognises the struggle for a bigger share of the cake that the capitalist system creates between those who own most of the wealth and those who own little but their ability to work. But his solution is for workers to be represented by a Party, a reformed Labour Party, that tilts things in their direction and opposes the encroachments of global capital on their economic wellbeing. He proclaims himself fiercely pro-Brexit, seeing that vote as an indication that the working class (in his definition) was fed up with the ‘shackles of the EU’, with the ‘woke’ culture of Labour’s political elite, with the Party’s failure to respect workers’ traditional culture and values (patriotism, etc.) and with its embrace of ‘progressivism’, globalisation and ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies.

Some of this could be seen as well meaning, but it asks all the wrong questions and buys into a whole range of myths about class, race, the nature of government and much else. Above all it entirely misses the point about the struggle between workers and capitalists. It makes no sense to qualify as working class only those who do manual work or are in lower paid jobs. The reality, as even at one point the author comes close to recognising (but then dismisses), is that all those who sell their energies for a wage or salary are workers. They are all in the same basic position vis-à-vis their employer and all susceptible to losing their employment and so their means of living if the market determines it. No government, left, right or centre, can do much about that even if they would like to, for in the final analysis governments exist to administer the buying and selling system on behalf of the owners of capital and, even if they are able to take over some aspects of it (as suggested by Embery), they cannot control it, as has been shown time and time again by the continuous ups and downs brought about by what Marx called ‘the anarchy of the market’.

So though the author calls himself ‘a democratic socialist’ and says he wants ‘to address the injustices of the world’, his conception of how society should be run is a contradictory mishmash. He advocates a ‘strengthening of the nation state’, state control of utilities and such like, a government policy of ‘jobs for everyone’ and economic protectionism, yet at the same time he calls for internationalism, for a ‘flourishing private sector’ and insists that markets are ‘essential to the functioning of a free and democratic society’.

The author proclaims himself a socialist but would do better to look at a more meaningful conception of socialism, one that aims for a world without the market system, without buying and selling, without money or wages, and based on voluntary work, common ownership and democratic control. In such a society the narrow ‘cultural’ and class differences he sees as fundamental between people of one kind of background and another, between people of one country of origin or another, will disappear and give way to positive cultural diversity and real economic equality based on a system of from each according to ability, to each according to need.

Howard Moss