Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The top 1 percent in the U.S … had a combined net worth of $49.2 trillion by the end of 2024. The combined value of almost 100 million U.S. homes during the same time was $49.7 trillion. 

(Newsweek)

‘Woke’ is not a precise, scientific term. But it typically refers to the attempt to combat forms of oppression – like racism and sexism – on the basis of identity politics, through means like quotas, changes to language, and raising awareness … ‘woke’ policies seek to ‘fight’ oppression on an individualistic basis, whilst completely jettisoning any idea of class struggle, or seeing oppression as being rooted in capitalist society. 

(The Communist)

Trucks carrying commercial goods, which are later sold in Gaza, are charged at least $20,000…while aid trucks are also subject to extortion before crossing to the enclave. Organi is a Sinai businessman, politician and tribal leader allied with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Organi’s name has become synonymous with unofficial profits made out of the suffocating Gaza blockade, particularly from desperate Palestinians attempting to flee the fighting. MEE last year revealed that Organi made at least $2m daily from Palestinians who left the Gaza Strip via the border crossing point with Egypt . . . 

(MEE)

While his crackdowns provoked outrage around the globe, Duterte and his brand of politics remained popular at home even after he left office. His daughter… riding on her family name, was elected Vice President in 2022 in a landslide victory alongside President Marcos Jr, himself the son of a former dictator who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. 

(Time)

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately. An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

(MEE)

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men. 

(The Conversation)

The preconditions for a communist or socialist society are (1) the development of a productive potential sufficient to support the reasonable needs of the population and (2) a clear majority who want such a society and understand what it entails. The SPGB’s position is that precondition (1) has been met a long time ago, but we are a long way off from meeting precondition (2). If and when we do have a class-consciousness socialist majority, there is nothing to prevent us from immediately implementing the new society. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to linger on with one or another form of capitalism a moment longer.

(Letter in Weekly Worker)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view).

Class matters (2024)

Book Review from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radical Chains. Why Class Matters. By Chris Nineham. Zero Books, 2023.197pp.

Recent times have seen much talk of identity politics and sectionalism. Gender, race, and ethnicity among other ‘sectional’ interests create what the author of this book sees as divisions and diversions from the common interest we have in establishing a different kind of society from the existing one. The view he forcefully expresses is that to regard these as groups with different interests has the effect of diverting attention from the shared working-class issue of wage and salary work and the insecurity it brings.

The book’s sub-title, ‘Why Class Matters’ is an uncompromising expression of the Marxist view that there are two main classes in capitalist society, the tiny minority class that owns and controls the Earth’s resources (the capitalist class) and the vast majority (the working class) who, in order to survive, need to sell their labour-power for a wage or salary to that minority. It argues this proposition with informed and incontrovertible clarity and powerfully insists that the effect of ‘identity politics’ is to cause muddle and confusion, nor does it make any sense to split wage and salary earners into a series of different sub-classes (eg, ‘middle class’, ‘upper class, ‘professional class’) with somehow different interests from one another. He dismisses ‘the various attempts to downplay class’ as ‘completely misleading’ and illustrates effectively that, whatever their line of work, all those who live on a wage or salary are fundamentally in the same subordinate position with regard to the system and the class that owns it (ie, the capitalist class).

This message is then connected, in a wide-ranging survey, to the various conflicts, large and small, that have arisen across the globe between subjects and their masters over the last two centuries. Yet here it somewhat loses its way and focus in seeking to see in these conflicts conscious attempts to establish new forms of society rather than largely desperate reactions by downtrodden people against oppression or powerlessness. It starts with the nineteenth-century movements for political change in France and Germany before going on to Russia’s 1905 revolution, and then the taking of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the civil war that followed, with reflection on these events as analysed mainly by Trotsky, Gramsci and Lukacs.

The author then moves on to the Second World War and its aftermath, and later, in a section entitled ‘Dreams deferred’, he takes us through revolts and uprisings in China, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, and Latin America as well as the ‘Arab Spring’ before moving back to Europe with the ‘events’ of May 1968 in France, the opposition to Thatcherism in Britain and the reactions to the ‘neoliberalism’ which it heralded. A broad sweep indeed in which historical development is often encapsulated with verve and economy (eg, the First World War defined as ‘the catastrophic climax of mounting international competition for markets and resources’) but which is tainted by an over-enthusiastic tendency to see events as more driven by class-conscious motives than they were in reality.

Having gone through this history of revolt and struggle, the author’s main message for today is that we must struggle against the current ‘neoliberalism’, which he sees as a new and increasingly exploitative form of capitalism causing ‘an epidemic of workplace insecurity’. He peppers his book with references to it, seeming to consider it as something qualitatively different from the capitalism that existed before over the past two centuries. But is it that much different from capitalism’s business as usual? It’s true that, in the post-Second World War years, free-market capitalism (previously called ‘laissez-faire’) gave way to a new variation widely practised by governments, whereby the state would intervene in the economy more readily than before to try and get the system back working in a less crisis-ridden way (often called ‘Keynesianism’).

But as capitalism went on its merry way creating, as the author himself quoting Marx says, ‘uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions’, the state intervention method was found to be no more effective in ‘taming’ capitalism than what preceded it. It became discredited therefore and governments went back to favouring so-called ‘free markets’ and the relaxation of controls: an old way of running things in fact, even if its critics have attached to it the new label of ‘neoliberalism’. The fact is that governments do not – cannot – control the way the capitalist economy works. It’s the other way round. It’s the operation of capitalism that constrains governments. In fact they can do little more than react to what it throws at them. And the system remains fundamentally the same – something the writer himself, despite his focus on ‘neoliberalism’ seems also to accept when he writes ‘the production of commodities through exploitation remains …the driving force of the system’ and ‘it is still a system with the exploitation of workers at its heart’.

But what is the form of struggle he advocates that we engage in to transcend the capitalist system and establish socialism? At one point he quotes Marx’s view of socialism as being the ‘abolition of the wages system’, talks about ‘liberating society as a whole’ and ‘dissolving classes altogether’ and seems to agree that this should be the ambition of those who oppose capitalism and have a clear view of the class system that characterises it regardless of attempts at obfuscation. And that is very much to his credit.

But the main thing he seems to offer in terms of action is support for ‘struggles over pay and conditions by trade unions’, which, it is claimed ‘have a capacity to generalise into a political conflict between different class organisations’ and ‘at the same time developing the revolutionary consciousness and combativity of all those involved’. We have of course heard this kind of thing many times before from the Trotskyist left and we continue to argue that it’s no substitute for a movement whose aim should be to develop majority consciousness among workers of the need to use democratic means to establish a classless, stateless, marketless, free-access society of democratic cooperation, mutual aid and economic equality based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need.

Howard Moss

It’s class that counts (2024)

Book Review from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other. By Rhys Wildermuth. Repeater. £12.99.

The idea behind the title is that monsters were once seen as signs that something was wrong in the world, but also as messengers pointing to a solution. However, this aspect of the book is not very convincing, so we will not deal with it here.

The book is basically a critique of ‘social justice identity politics’, a set of ideas that employs the concept of intersectionality. So a black woman is oppressed in two ways, by being a woman and by being black. The real oppressor is then, apparently, the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gender man, who subjugates anyone who is black, gay, disabled, transgender or a woman. Wildermuth argues that class has no position in such a system, and that introducing class would in fact undermine the entire framework. A man who matches all the above criteria but is homeless and jobless has little in common with a capitalist who has the same traits. And a black woman millionaire has equally little in common with a black woman struggling to pay the rent and feed her children. Intersectional social justice, he says, is perfectly compatible with the continuation of capitalism, and having more black women CEOs would not alter capitalism at all.

The concept of class employed here is however not entirely clear. There are references to the professional-managerial class, who supposedly ‘share and reproduce the cultural values of the capitalists’ and are ‘guardians of the social order’. They are part of the working class, though are paid more than most, and at one point are roughly identified with white-collar workers. The author is correct to say that both rural and urban workers belong to the same class and are exploited, but more needs to be said on how class is defined.

Wildermuth states that it is unfortunately all too easy for some on the left to dismiss any contrary view to theirs in very strong terms, such as the feminist academic Judith Butler, who considers as fascist the anti-gender movement in parts of eastern Europe (Guardian 23/10/21).

The account is enlivened by the author recounting some of his personal experiences, such as the time a black man in a cafe shouted at him, ‘The only good white person is the one who knows he should be shot and killed because he is incapable of not harming others.’ The book contains a lot of interesting points on how identity politics fails to address the real issues of poverty and exploitation, but (despite the sub-title) says disappointingly little about the real way to fight capitalism. There is a reference to how Lenin’s vanguardism was quite different from the views of Marx and Engels, but nothing about the abolition of the wages system. Wildermuth says at one point that the left had given up on trying to change material circumstances and instead ‘settled for symbolic struggles with no clear end goal’. Sadly, there is little here on end goals, either.

Paul Bennett

Missing Class (2023)

Book Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Politics But Class Politics. By Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr. Edited by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora. Eris £20.

This volume consists of a number of essays written individually by the two authors over the period from 1997 to 2020, together with a foreword by the editors and a conclusion by the authors. There are also four interviews of the authors, conducted by the editors.

The main argument presented is that focus on inequality in terms of ‘race’ distracts attention from the more general inequality that exists. As economic inequality in general increases, so (it seems) does the enthusiasm for addressing every non-economic kind of inequality. The US is less racist, sexist and homophobic than it was several decades ago, but it is also more unequal. Neoliberalism, the dominant capitalist ideology, is opposed to discrimination but perfectly happy with economic inequality. Equality of opportunity, while good for business, justifies inequality. Equality of race and gender is in no way contradictory to inequality of class.

Most white people are badly off, with sixty million white Americans having basically no wealth at all. Would it really benefit black people if roughly one in eight of the top one per cent were black, in keeping with the proportion of black people in the whole population? Gains for a few do not help the many, but are part of a system that hurts the many. Universities have become more diverse as far as students are concerned, though Latinos and Latinas are underrepresented, and poorer students struggle to get accepted. Professors are also more diversified, but increasingly teaching is being done by people who do not have full-time or ‘permanent’ contracts (adjunct faculty, as they are known). Adjunct staff are not so diversified, but the problem lies really in their low pay and poor working conditions.

The authors are of course not against resistance to discrimination in terms of ‘race’ or gender, and they give a good account of racism; rather, they see this as less fundamental than struggle against inequality and for a world where nobody lives below the poverty line. The problem with the book, however, is that not much at all is said about the class politics mentioned in the title, in terms of what the classes are or what its aim should be. There are a number of vague references to particular classes, such as ‘the black professional-managerial class’, an ‘upper-class professor’ and an ‘upper middle class’, and to the one percent. It is all very well saying that ‘class matters more than race or sex’ (in the context of personal care aides, who are very badly paid and are mostly women of colour), but more needs to be said in terms of how class is defined and what classes exist under capitalism. As is said, fighting exploitation is a way of fighting the effects of discrimination, but fighting discrimination is not a way of fighting exploitation: ‘if nobody were the victim of racism or sexism, lots of people would still be poor’. A reference to Marx’s solution of abolishing (private) property is not enough to show the kind of system the authors stand for.

So an interesting text, though it does not quite deliver what might be expected.

Paul Bennett

Bird’s Eye View: Chris Hedges (2023)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the April 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chris Hedges

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister, occasionally hits the mark:

‘The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier’ (Scheerpost, 5 February).

Richard Dawkins

We often disagree with this professor too, but cannot fault him here:

‘“The only possible response is contemptuous ridicule,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words. I am a professional user of the English language. It is my native language. I am not going to be told by some teenage version of Mrs Grundy which words of my native language I may or may not use.”

Other experts also branded the alternatives “absurd” and argued they could cause confusion in scientific fields. They also pointed out that the terms “egg producing” and “sperm producing” were simply synonyms for male and female, and continued to confirm that sex is binary.”… The EEB Language Project, which was launched in this month’s Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal, is compiling a repository of “problematic words” that have been identified by US and Canadian scientists as harmful and it suggests alternatives. For example, participants have flagged the term “citizen science” saying it could be “harmful to people who do not have a nation state”‘ (15 February).

Workers have no country

But some so-called socialists, woke or not, insist otherwise:

‘Instead of seeing the world as being composed solely of geopolitical camps, socialist internationalists must evaluate every conflict based on the interests of working people and their struggle for freedom and equality. The revolutionary Leon Trotsky once wrote that, hypothetically, if fascist Italy pursuing their interests had supported the anti-colonial uprising in Algeria against democratic France, the internationalists should have supported the Italian arming of the rebels. It sounds quite right, and this did not stop him from being an anti-fascist. Vietnam’s struggle did not just benefit Vietnam; the defeat of the United States there had a significant (if temporary) deterrent effect on American imperialism’ (’Freedom Socialist Party’, February ).

More nonsense. this time from the horse’s mouth:

‘Through carrying out the Renewal process, the Party has drawn five great lessons from its experience, which can also be considered five fundamental theoretical issues of the present-day Vietnamese revolution. Among the lessons, the Party emphasises the need to comprehensively, synchronously, and regularly implement the Party building and rectification work, place people at the centre of the Renewal process, and build a synchronous development institution in order to serve the goal of rapid and sustainable development of the country, with a focus on the socialist-oriented market economy institution’ (Voice of Vietnam, 2 February.)

Even in the ‘socialist republic’, some are more equal than others as this headline attests: ‘Vietnamese tourist in Thailand reunited with his lost $194,000 Richard Mille watch’ (Yahoo, 3 February, ).

Dave Allen

The late, great and far from woke comedian may well have regarded that tourist as suitable material for a future sketch. One recent news item would almost certainly have attracted his attention:

‘Some Taliban fighters are sick of the 9 to 5 grind, complaining they’ve been sucked into urban life by working desk jobs to run Afghanistan’ (Business Insider, 10 February ).

Abdul Salam, 26, a farmer who fought for the Taliban several times, is on record as stating:

‘There is a proverb in our area that money is like a shackle. Now, if we complain, or don’t come to work, or disobey the rules, they cut our salary.’

Welcome to wage slavery, sucker! Allen famously observed:

‘You wake to the clock, you go to work to the clock, you clock-in to the clock, you clock out to the clock, you come home to the clock, you eat to the clock, you drink to the clock, you go to bed to the clock, you get up to the clock, you go back to work to the clock… You do that for forty years of your life and you retire — what do they fucking give you? A clock!’

Woke readers who are shocked, quite possibly offended, by our use of the term slavery should study the writings of a former slave:

‘The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slave-holder, and the former belongs to ALL the slave-holders, collectively. The white slave has taken from him, by indirection, what the black slave had taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers’ (Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855 ).

Workers of the world, woke or not, wake up!

These plunderers are found throughout the world- yes, in all the aforementioned countries too! ‘The typical CEO of a company listed on the S&P 500—a stock market index with 500 large publicly traded corporations – earned $18.8 million last year. That’s up roughly 21% from 2021, even though the S&P 500 index was down 20%’ (Time, 16 February ). Warren Buffett, whose 100 billion dollar fortune makes him the 6th richest person on Earth, was not joking when he said: ‘there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning’ (New York Times, 26 November 2006 ). Winning worldwide.

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

Letter: Working Class Self-Organisation (2021)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following email from the Anarchist Communist Group on our review of their pamphlet in last month’s Socialist Standard.

We thank you for what is a mostly positive review of our pamphlet, The Politics of Division. We are heartened to see that the areas we agree on are many and substantive.

There are some differences, of course, and we are happy to reply to these. Your reviewer takes issue with our support for autonomous groups. As you know, we support working class self-organisation, and our support for autonomous groups is primarily based on two principles. First, these groups come from within the class and are organised on a class struggle basis. Secondly, it cannot be denied that in the past, revolutionary organisations have often been tone deaf to the voices of other oppressed groups within the working class. This is a failing on the part of revolutionary organisations for which we are not prepared to await the outcome of the revolution to address. Our criticism of such organisations attempting to operate without a clear class analysis remains.

Your reviewer also takes issue with our anti-parliamentarism. This must indeed be tangential, since we do not directly address it in the pamphlet. However, it is true that, as anti-parliamentary communists, we do not believe there is a parliamentary road to socialism. In the words of Kropotkin, “The representative system was organised by the bourgeoisie to ensure their domination, and it will disappear with them”.

Many in the early Labour Party said capitalism and the laws in place to sustain it could be legislated away once enough working-class parliamentary seats had been won. This didn’t work. They were co-opted into the system. We believe that genuine liberation can only come about through the revolutionary self-activity of the working class. Direct action is the political and social intervention of the working class in solving their problems without external mediation. Only this self-organisation, arising out of the social conditions, can end the present social arrangements. This is the social revolution. The current system and its institutions will not facilitate it. Parliament is structurally incapable of representing our interests; it is designed to represent the interests of capital.

For us, this is both a theoretical and operational issue. It is our praxis to continue to encourage and facilitate working class self-activity, and we will work with other anti-authoritarian socialists in furthering this aim whenever interests coincide.

Our Reply:

Since our differences with anarchists have tended to centre on the matter of the use of parliament, it was difficult for our reviewer not to make a connection between the support voiced in your pamphlet for ‘autonomous groups’, whose activities are distinctly reformist rather than revolutionary, and the rejection by most anarchists of what we see as the most likely path to achieving a liberated society of voluntary association and free access to all goods and services, i.e. by a class conscious majority voting for it democratically.

You mention the early Labour Party as an example of the failure to achieve socialism through parliament, but the fact is that that was never the aim or intention of those involved in that party. Far from being ‘co-opted into the system’, they were from the very beginning an integral part of the capitalist system – an alternative team to run it – and even the most militant among them never thought of abolishing that system and replacing it with a moneyless, wageless society of free access. At best they thought to try to make capitalism operate in the interests of workers – an impossibility of course.

As for the role of parliament, we would not dispute that, under capitalism, it is there, as you say, ‘to represent the interests of capital’, but that does not mean that it could not be used by a class-conscious majority of workers to democratically vote capital out of existence and thereby bring about the social revolution you refer to. This is in fact the only kind of ‘direct action’ that can bring about the qualitative change in social relations that we all agree is necessary, the only truly ‘revolutionary activity of the working class’.

And if not this, what other kind of ‘direct action’ could bring about that change? A mass insurrection of some kind? We would hope not, since it would be likely to provoke considerable violence – which is capitalism’s stock-in-trade – and would be doomed to failure, since governments have a monopoly on the means of violence. But using parliament tackles the problem ‘from the inside’ so to speak and gives a majority who vote their socialist delegates to parliament an automatic ‘legal’ right to take over the state machine in the name of the great majority of the population and then to abolish the state itself along with those coercive powers and agencies necessary to the maintenance of class society but superfluous in socialism. Would the capitalist class then attempt some kind of coup d’etat? Could they really do this against an organised class-conscious, determined majority committed to establishing socialism once there had been a democratic mandate via the ballot box for the changeover to socialism? We would argue not and we would strongly recommend anarchists and others who share our aim but may be sceptical of our views on parliament to read our short pamphlet on this subject, ‘What’s Wrong With Using Parliament? The cases for and against the revolutionary use of Parliament’, which can be found on our website. Especially relevant to the matter at issue here is the chapter in that pamphlet entitled ‘Anti-Parliamentarian and Anarchist Objections

Editors

Misidentity (2021)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Division. An Engagement with Identity Politics. Anarchist Communist Group. ACG/Stormy Petrel, 2021. 26pp.

The introduction to this short pamphlet states: ‘We want to create a society in which exploitation is abolished and all resources are held in common. We also struggle for a society without a State and in which no group oppresses another: a society without hierarchies. We envisage a society of co-operation, mutual aid, equality and freedom.’ This clear expression of the Anarchist Communist Group’s aim mirrors very closely the kind of society we seek to see established. We are also in agreement with what ACG have to say about the system we currently live under, capitalism, in which ‘only a few own and control the earth’s resources’ and the vast majority (ie, the working class) ‘need to sell their labour power in order to survive’, with the explanation that they ‘use the term working class to include all those of us who cannot live on the proceeds of their property or capital’.

And the point of this pamphlet is to explain how, if progress is to be made towards establishing that completely new society, the common interest of that vast majority must override the divisions and diversions that are constantly arising within it associated with race, gender, disability or any other type of so-called ‘identity politics’. It gives a readable account of how capitalism has, in its development, used those divisions to its advantage and how, even today, ‘identity politics sets us against each other’ and divides us as a class. It points out how ‘cultural diversity’ is used to divert attention from the shared working-class issue of wage slavery and insecurity and to divide workers from one another, when, in a different kind of cooperative, materially secure, tolerant society, diversity between different people or peoples would be a cause for interest and celebration among everyone. The pamphlet sums up the situation well: ‘Class is the fundamental division in our society, not because it is more important in terms of affecting people’s lives than oppressions such as racism or sexism, but because it is the one thing that unites us into a potential revolutionary movement.’

It follows from this that it is in the interest of the class of wage and salary workers (ie, the vast majority of us) to be as free as possible to spread the idea of a revolutionary change of society, not to be hampered by fear of the kind of censorship that seeks to silence discussion in case it may offend a certain identity group. This is an argument summed up in a section of the pamphlet entitled ‘Identity politics kills freedom of expression and suppresses debate’, which then however goes on to say that ‘a more effective approach is to support the self-organisation of oppressed groups into autonomous groups’. And it is here, in its closing pages, that the pamphlet somewhat loses its way.

Its attempt to argue that ‘autonomous groups’ are less of a diversion from the united interests of workers than identity groups, because the latter focus ‘only on the oppression of the group’, while in the former ‘there is no anti-capitalist perspective that may see other workers as the enemy’ is far from convincing, drifting as it does into discussion of how these autonomous groups might go about influencing, for example, trade unions or the operation of professions, such as the legal one. A far cry this from the earlier call for ‘a completely new society’.

This drift into a focus on relatively minor details of how the capitalist system operates flows, one suspects, from a refusal, endemic among anarchists (even those who share our ambition of a stateless, world society without frontiers, without leaders and led, without money and buying and selling, and based on free access to all goods and services), to contemplate using parliament and the ballot box as democratic revolutionary instruments. The fact is that, as socialists, we cannot reasonably see any other way of achieving the end that both we and many anarcho-communists envisage and we fear that the anarcho-communist rejection of the ballot box marks them out as a tendency which misunderstands an important element of how capitalism works and thus removes credibility from their arguments about how socialism (or anarcho-communism) can be achieved. Our basic point is that the ballot box is a sort of genie that has been let out of the bottle and, though currently used to run and bolster capitalism, once socialist consciousness is widespread, it cannot be put back in but instead can be the tool for getting rid of capitalism, ‘legally’ so to speak.

Howard Moss

Identity and the politics of scarcity (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are living in a society which even its supporters admit is based on ‘scarcity’ even if their definition of scarcity is rather eccentric (the absence of ‘sheer abundance’, as their economics textbooks define it). Scarcity does exist in the normal sense in that not enough is being produced of the things, services and amenities that people need to lead a healthy and satisfying life.

It is a society of artificial scarcity as far as the vast majority is concerned. Society has the means to produce enough for all, in fact more than enough. Enough food, decent housing, a good all-round education, a good health service. Enough for everybody could be produced but isn’t and can’t be as it’s not profitable. So, people are put in a position of having to compete for what there is; and where the rule is that the more money you have the more (and better) you get. People are in effect rationed by the amount of money they have or can get. For most people there is not much choice about this. To get money, you can beg, steal or work for an employer. Working for wages is the basic way most people get the money to buy what they need. But it means that what people can get is rationed by what they are paid.

You can get together with others to try to get a better deal. Socialists have always argued that all those who have to work for wages should join together to get as much as they can and eventually as a class – the appropriately named ‘working class’ – to get rid of the present competitive economic system and replace it with one organised on the basis of the common ownership of productive resources.

Unfortunately, this hasn’t got very far, and has never even been attempted, apart from ill-conceived and misnamed projects such as in Russia and by Labour governments, which failed. Partly because of these failures people, including activists, have come to think and act as if there is no alternative to the present system, and that the most that can be done is to get a better deal within the system, whether as an individual (or family) or as a member of some group other than as an economic class.

As a result, practical politics is ‘scarcity politics’ where individuals and groups compete to get the most they can out of what has been made available. Identity politicians seek to create a new grouping and work to organise their target group as another competing unit. This brings them into conflict with socialists who want all workers, including those in the targeted groups, to organise on a class basis. The identity politicians, if they succeed, will only make a bad situation worse by further dividing people, splitting them into more competing groups than there currently are.

Legitimate grievances

Having said that, the targeted groups generally have a legitimate grievance – they have and still do suffer discrimination purely on the basis of being who they are. The demand to be considered of equal worth, with the same treatment, as any other human being is a perfectly legitimate demand which socialists endorse and practise. There should be no discrimination against anyone on the basis of gender, skin colour, language or even religion. Every human being, whoever they are, is of equal worth and should be treated as such.

‘Black Lives Matter’ is a good example. This slogan is an elementary declaration that all lives are of equal worth. But then the question arises of how to put this into practice. Most countries (with the notable exceptions of those that practise sharia law) recognise the legal equality of men and women. In Britain there is complete legal equality between them and in fact between ‘whites’ and, to borrow a term from apartheid-era South Africa, ‘non-whites’. The only people living here who suffer from legal disabilities are non-citizens (a reminder that so-called ‘nations’ are identity groups too).

Legal equality, though important, does not end other forms of unequal treatment that arise from being poor and its consequences in terms of worse housing, worse education, worse health and inferior health care. This is where the identity politician jumps up and adds extra demands to the simple demand for respect and equal consideration such as the ‘Black Lives Matter’ slogan. They demand more money be allocated to their target group to improve housing, education and health care services for its members.

The trouble is that, in the context of the politics of scarcity, this will tend to be at the expense of other groups. Capitalist states only spend on social reforms that improve people’s lot if there is also some benefit to the capitalist interest in terms, for instance, of a more educated or fitter workforce. Even then the amount they spend is limited – since they have to pay for these through taxes that fall, directly or indirectly, on their profits. Spending too much undermines their competitiveness and the whole profit motive that drives the system. So artificial scarcity is never going to be ended under capitalism. It can’t be as it’s built into the system.

Zero-sum game

That we are dealing with a more or less zero-sum situation is explicitly recognised when claims for ‘quotas’ and ‘positive discrimination’ are raised. Here, more for one group means less for some other group. What is that other group expected to do? Given that neither group sees any alternative to the present system and accepts that the only politics is the politics of scarcity, they are not going to accept this lying down but will push back and resist, to try to keep what they’ve got (or think they’ve got). Identity politics on one side encourages identity politics on another, making the overall political situation worse.

In some cases this is deliberate, as with racists and nativists, but also those who talk of ‘white privilege’ which implies that all whites have an unfair privilege which should be taken away. The result is that the basic conflict in society is seen as a scramble between different identity groups rather than between those who monopolise the means of life and the excluded majority forced to work for wages.

In-system activists

Peter Joseph of Zeitgeist has coined a useful term to describe the well-meaning people who seek a solution to discrimination and poverty within the present system of artificial scarcity – ‘in-system activists’. But what do they envisage as success? If they reject, either explicitly or in practice, a different system of society (common not class ownership, production for needs not profit), what will things be like if they achieve their aim of eliminating any discrimination against their own target group within capitalism?

Logically this could mean, for instance, governments, parliaments, boards of directors, even the top military brass, composed of 50 percent women and 50 percent men. Or that the percentage of university students from their target group be exactly equal to their percentage in the general population. From the opposite angle, that the same percentage of the majority population should be living in bad housing or in poverty or in prison as their percentage in the population. If that’s 90 percent then 90 percent of those in bad housing, poverty or prison should be from the majority group instead of whatever lesser figure it is now. A redistribution of poverty to benefit the target group. That’s not going to get them very far.

In-system activists may regard this as a caricature of their position but it is a logical conclusion that stems from them trying to obtain more for a particular group within the context of artificial scarcity. They may protest that what they want is more resources to be devoted to improving all sections of the population, even if proportionately more for their target group. That, for instance, the percentage of them going to university could be increased without reducing the number of others going there, by increasing the total number of university places.

They are correct that the resources do exist to improve things for everyone – across the board and not just in education. However, the structure and operation of the capitalist economic system prevents this being done. Using existing resources for this purpose can only be achieved in a quite different system where the aim can be human welfare, not profit, and where artificial scarcity can be replaced by plenty for everyone.

Not communities

Identity politics assumes that all in the target group constitute a ‘community’. To describe some group as a ‘community’ there must be some overriding common interest which binds the group together. But, whatever else they have in common, the identity politicians’ target groups don’t share a common economic – ie. survival – interest. They are divided into classes, into owners and non-owners, rich and poor, with antagonistic, in fact irreconcilable, interests since the wealth of the wealthy is dependent on the past and present labour of the excluded majority.

There are plenty of rich women, gays and non-whites. Those from the excluded majority have a different economic interest from the wealthy members of their supposed communities. Their material needs are not fully met, not because they are gay, non-white etc. but because they are part of the excluded majority forced to work for wages to live. And so they have more in common with others who are in the same economic position as them. Which is why socialists urge them not to identify themselves with the rich people within their proposed identity group but with their economic class.

Those in-system activists who stand for equal treatment for their target group within the artificial scarcity of capitalism could protest against the criticism that logically their ideal must be strict proportionality in the distribution of both benefits and disadvantages amongst all groups. They could say that what they want is not that, but that nobody should be discriminated against because they are a woman, gay, black, or whatever; that everybody should be treated as an equal human being.

Precisely. So they should. But dividing people into separate identity groups is not the way to treat them as equal.

Even if equal treatment of women, gays, black people is achieved under capitalism – and there is no reason why in principle it could not be, even if in practice there are historically-inherited obstacles to this – those in these groups who are not wealthy owners of means of production would still face discrimination: as members of the excluded majority who have to work for wages. They will remain victims of what might be called ‘classism’. This is the one discrimination that cannot be ended within capitalism as it is built into the system; in fact, capitalism, as an exploitative class-divided society, is based on it.

Those who want a better deal for some particular group should not be promoting ‘identity politics’ within a system that imposes artificial scarcity. They should be working for an end to artificial scarcity; which is not possible in a society based on class ownership and production for profit.

‘Classist’ discrimination can only be ended in a classless society based on the common ownership of productive resources where everyone has a chance to have an equal say in the way things are run and the same access to what they need to live and enjoy life. In short, where the old socialist principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” applies. Everybody accorded equal consideration irrespective of what they are. And nobody discriminated against as regards access to material goods, services or amenities.

Adam Buick

Cultures, multi and otherwise (2021)

From the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back in 2011, in a speech at a security conference, then Prime Minister David Cameron discussed extremism and Islamist terrorism. He noted that Islam and extremism were not the same, and saw the issue of identity as crucial to why some young Muslims were drawn to extremist views:

 ‘In the UK, some young men find it hard to identify with the traditional Islam practised at home by their parents, whose customs can seem staid when transplanted to modern Western countries. But these young men also find it hard to identify with Britain too, because we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity. Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and apart from the mainstream’.

State multiculturalism was thus seen as implying separation, with people from different cultures living in their own distinct ways, perhaps with little integration with those from other cultures. Society, Cameron went on, should not just be passively tolerant; rather it should pursue ‘a much more active, muscular liberalism’, promoting freedom of speech, the rule of law, equal rights and so on. What was needed, he claimed, was ‘a clear sense of shared national identity that is open to everyone.’

But just what is multiculturalism (state or otherwise)? And how do politicians and others use this concept to construct arguments and policies? And what might a shared national identity consist of?

In Keywords, Raymond Williams describes culture as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’, due to both its complex history (related to cultivation, among others) and its variety of current uses. On the one hand, it involves such activities as cinema, theatre, museums, music, and so on. But also it can refer to the kind of topics studied in cultural or social anthropology: a way of living, covering religion, language, kinship and family structure, work and production, food and diet, rural vs urban, and customs in some general sense. It is this last meaning which the idea of multiculturalism takes up: the position that a society consists of a number of different cultures, and it would be preferable if that were not the case or the differences were much reduced.

A detailed critique of multiculturalism is found in The British Dream by David Goodhart. The concept, he says, ‘has come to refer to the arrival of non-European, “visible” immigrants in western countries in recent decades and their political and social interaction with the majority society’, but apparently it ‘also implies a favourable and accommodating attitude to the arrival on the part of the majority society’. There are two versions: liberal multiculturalism expects immigrants to integrate into mainstream society, while the separatist version ‘privileges minority identities over common citizenship’ and thus slows down integration. The separatist variety in particular states that immigrants do not need to adapt, other than in relatively minor ways, to the society they now live in. As usual in such accounts, immigrants are not just those who have themselves migrated but their children and grandchildren at least too (second- and third-generation immigrants).

Opponents of multiculturalism, of whichever version, usually emphasise the lack of integration by immigrants and their descendants. At one level, this encompasses support, or at least toleration, for practices such as forced marriage and female genital mutilation. It can also extend to segregation in terms of residence, with towns such as Bradford and Oldham being highly segregated, with immigrant populations living in particular areas where most of the residents are immigrants from the same region, Pakistan and Kashmir serving as examples. Eric Kaufmann (nationalreview.com, 6 February, 2019) identified a supposed contradiction at the heart of multiculturalism: ‘White majorities are compelled to be cosmopolitan, urged to supersede their ascribed identity. Minorities are enjoined to do the reverse.’ Multiculturalism was thus asymmetric, making different demands on ‘natives’ and immigrants, with the latter getting an easier ride. This is seen as one of the main reasons behind the rise of populism, which often views immigrants as not truly part of ‘the people’.

According to the Fabian Society, Blair’s Labour government from 1997 was the most multicultural in Britain, if not in Europe, introducing faith schools, bringing Muslims into governance and passing the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, seen as a positive step. This made it illegal to discriminate in immigration matters on grounds of race or colour but, as Maya Goodfellow points out in Hostile Environment, it permitted discrimination on grounds of nationality or ethnic origin. New Labour, she says, also dehumanised asylum seekers, and all in all their policies and rhetoric ‘helped to embed anti-immigration ideas into British politics’. So the 2000 Act and Labour’s policies more generally were by no means all their supporters claimed them to be.

Opponents of multiculturalism seldom identify specifically what counts as British culture. Perhaps it is such things as having a sense of fair play, keeping a stiff upper lip and not pushing in at the front of a queue. Or football, the pub, Christmas shopping, holidaying in Spain, a Chinese or Indian takeaway, talking about the weather, and so on.

The socialist view is that multiculturalism is a misplaced and irrelevant idea, that being for or against it really misses the point. Putting people into categories (Muslim, immigrant, whatever) ignores the fact that people have far more in common than these labels suggest. We are all human beings, and under capitalism most of us are members of the working class, forced to work for a wage or dependent on someone who does so. Thus we are all subject to the exploitation of capitalism, and to varying degrees to its inequalities and discrimination. People differ of course: gender, sexual orientation, abilities, interests, but allotting people to pigeon-holes disguises what brings us together. Nations are artificial entities, and the ‘shared national identity’ mentioned by Cameron would have to be invented and constantly reinforced by propaganda.

Goodhart identifies a trend he terms ‘post-nationalism’, which he ascribes to George Monbiot and Danny Dorling: a view which supposedly rejects all national borders and emphasises universalism and support of the interests of everyone globally, not just those of one nationality. We need not concern ourselves with how accurately this reflects the actual views of Monbiot and Dorling, just point out that in this sense socialists are post-nationalists. Socialism will be a global society, with no countries or borders or passports, where the whole idea of migration, if it exists at all, will be purely geographic. As for culture, it will be up to people in socialism to organise their lives as they wish. We cannot predict now, but there are likely to still be differences such as language, diet, sport and so on. This of course does not mean permitting such barbaric practices as FGM. Aspects of climate will result in differences in how people live, with some finding ways to pass the long winter nights while others will spend far more time outdoors, with some places perhaps having siestas.

In the words of the Chinese saying, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’. Though later hijacked by Mao Zedong, this expresses well the idea that people in a socialist world will be able to live as they wish, as long as it does not infringe on the freedom of others.

Paul Bennett

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

No Outsiders: Class Inclusivity (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two Birmingham primary schools starting the new autumn term will see the reinstatement of the ‘No Outsiders’ programme, dedicated to teaching LGBT rights and earlier suspended after being strongly opposed as non-age-appropriate by Muslim parents, an opposition widely interpreted as homophobic (BBC News, 3 July – bbc.in/2xrzTZZ).

The ‘No Outsiders’ programme presupposes that children have to be taught to accept diversity, whereas in reality the opposite is true. Outside the grip of parental or social indoctrination, children have no natural reason to be intolerant of others. Children have to be taught to be racist, sexist, or anti-gay. They are loaded with prejudice like a gun is loaded with bullets.

Muslims in Britain suffer their own share of discrimination, so you might imagine that such a marginalised group would be more sympathetic and respectful of other groups in the same situation (in the jargon, ‘intersectional’) and so less likely to dish out discrimination of their own. But you’d be wrong.

For example, racism is notorious in the gay community. For ‘a glaring personification of the lack of intersectionality that exists within broader gay culture’ see ‘Gay bars can be mind-bogglingly racist’ (LINK).

Gender surrender

Then there is the trans-terf war, which has ripped the LGBT community apart to the point where dialogue and compromise have become well-nigh impossible. This is partly a product of post-modernist ‘queer’ (LGBT) studies, in which the concept of gender as being socially constructed has moved the emphasis away from simply ‘owning’ identity towards ‘performing’ it, thus disappearing Alice-like down the rabbit hole to a Wonderland where anyone can identify as anything and any attempt to deny this is an oppressive act.

The fuss isn’t so much about women self-identifying as trans-men, it’s mainly the other way round. Many women are furious at what they see as a new form of male colonialism, in which men, accustomed to getting their way on everything else, now attempt to hijack womanhood itself. Others see it as an existential threat, a sinister plan to ‘deconstruct’ that womanhood out of existence. You can’t fight for equal rights if you don’t even exist.

Here is a domain where common sense has no sway. Is it reasonable for a man self-identifying as a woman to be allowed to swim in the women’s swimming areas of Hampstead Heath in London? No, you say? Yes, according to new rules from the City of London Corporation (Evening Standard, 23 May – LINK). If a man self-identifies as a woman, should s/he be entitled to enter women’s refuges? You might call that crazy, yet Women’s Aid has indeed caved into this very demand and changed their entry policy accordingly (LINK). Some situations you simply can’t win. An attempt to combat the colossal rate of violence against and rapes of trans-women in male prisons resulted in one trans-prisoner being admitted to a women’s prison and then committing several sex offences against women inmates (LINK).

Lesbians meanwhile are proposing to quit the LGBT collective (‘Get the L out’) in protest at the idea that someone with a penis must be accepted as an authentic lesbian, with the further implication that if they refuse to have sex with such a ‘lesbian’ they are being somehow oppressive.

Such protestors in turn are pejoratively labelled TERFs (Trans-Excluding Radical Feminist) by transgender activists. Do most trans-women really expect to speak for all women? Do they really have a male colonial agenda? Do they really expect lesbians to accept them as ‘dykes with dicks’? Almost certainly not. Most trans-women would just like to get through the day without being spat on or hospitalised. They are rejected as men, obviously, but women are also slamming the door on them as women. So they are treated as sideshow freaks, as something less than human, as a perfect target for violence and murder (‘Transgender hate crimes recorded by police go up 81%’, BBC News, 27 June – bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48756370).

Why has this situation blown up now? It’s partly a matter of technology. Successful transitioning from one sex to the other has not been possible until comparatively recently, so society has never really had to deal with this debate before. It raises all sorts of new questions about what we mean by gender, and whether we can continue to see things in binary categorisations (male/female, straight/gay) or whether in fact these are more like shades on a spectrum. And academic LGBT theory is running far ahead of the herd. Capitalism has only very recently started to normalise homosexuality, and then only in some places, and that has an ancient pedigree. There is really no precedent for people changing biological sex, and that is a challenge too far for those brainwashed with gender stereotypes and looking for someone easy to punch.

Now even anarchist and class-war political groups have waded in and taken up mutually hostile and hard-line positions. Liberals wanting to do the right thing are utterly perplexed. Express an opinion at your peril.

This is the war of all against all, the political nightmare of identity politics, a world of echo chambers and mutual rage, a world where everyone shouts and no one listens, where class consciousness evaporates and the working class eats itself alive. Who’s right, in all this? That’s just the point – everybody and nobody. Identity politics is never a battle of right versus wrong, it is always a tragedy of right versus right. In the multiple pile-up of discriminations capitalism engenders, nobody escapes completely innocent or unscathed.

So much for gurus

You might at least expect the Dalai Lama to rise above it all. But this widely-revered guru and living saint (and self-declared feminist), again caused a furore recently by reiterating his 2015 remarks that any female Dalai Lama ‘must be attractive, otherwise it is not much use’ and ‘[If not] people, I think prefer, not see her, that face’ (Telegraph, 2 July – LINK).

What would happen to the identity debate in socialism, a world of free association and free access, where nobody has power over anyone? There are no gurus to guide us there either. Nobody knows how gender and sexuality may evolve when society has stopped making war against itself. Perhaps there will be a continued trend towards post-humanism, as organic and machine technology converge in symbiosis. Maybe more people will want to change sex, or live as multiple sexes, whatever that means. Conversely it’s possible that the current preoccupation with sexual and gender identity will come to be seen as irrelevant, an obsessive hang-up among many others typical of the capitalist age. From our barred window looking out from the current madhouse, we can’t even say for sure what sanity looks like.

What is likely though is that people will adopt the practical limitation of freedom not licence. What this means is that you are free to do anything you like but you do not have licence to impose on the freedom of others. Anyone who objects to this is free to style themselves as an ‘oppressed minority’, however in a democracy there are always minorities, and not getting your way on everything is not the same thing as oppression.

Divided we fall

Returning to the present, the 2014 film Pride told the true story of lesbian and gay activists making common cause with striking Welsh miners who, for their part, had to confront their own entrenched homophobic attitudes. The film’s feel-good message was unequivocal – if we are workers, whether we’re gay, straight or whatever, we’re on the same side in the class war, and fighting the bosses is what brings us together. Class consciousness transcends all and unites all.

The problem is, this consciousness of being part of a class prevails best when the external class threat is felt urgently and equally by all affected workers, as in the case of a strike or a lockout. But it’s rare for a threat to be that localised and acute. The class war is not just a street battle or a strike, as the Left romanticise it. Class is really the dynamic expression of minority ownership of the means of living. We, the overwhelming majority excluded from and by this ownership, feel its force whenever we have to get up for work, tolerate our boss, pay our bills, swallow our dignity and accept our limitations.

Some workers face additional problems that come at them in different ways depending on who, when and where they are. Some of these forms may be just annoyances, but others can spell deadly danger. Sometimes they come from the police and the state, but often they come from other workers who are angry and ignorant and ready to lash out at somebody vulnerable and within reach. If you belong 100 percent to what society calls ‘normal’ then you won’t be especially vulnerable or exposed, and you might be tempted to downplay these effects as trivial, or even imaginary. But if you are exposed, they can loom so large that they fill your horizons and eclipse all other things. And here is why class consciousness begins to fracture and fall apart. When you suffer as a victim, you don’t care if you’re helping to victimise others. If you’re a battered wife, you don’t care if you’re also a racist. If you’re a male with your head under the boss’s foot, you don’t care about your attitude to women. If you’re attacked as an Asian, you don’t care if you’re also homophobic. Individual identities become locked into silos, and communication is cut off. Class consciousness is dead. Game over.

Hijacking at the intersection

If you don’t want the capitalist class to win, you have to force people out of these silos by offering a generalised view of discrimination they can all relate to. Intersectionality was an attempt to do this, by creating a common framework of overlapping or ‘intersecting’ discriminations, but which has largely been taken out of context and distorted.

The trouble is, some people are too fired up to focus on common frameworks, and will seize any excuse to promote their unique victimhood (the ‘I’m more oppressed than you’ game). As soon as you accept the idea that people really do have different experiences of discrimination, and you try to understand these differences in order to work together, they will twist this into a promotion of their own agenda.

This is not a reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater, however. If your class consciousness is strong and coherent, then acknowledging as workers your different lived experiences will only make you stronger. And make no mistake, it is vital to acknowledge these different experiences, because in the past what has passed for class politics on the left has too often been the uni-dimensional preserve of a dominant identity group while other groups were ignored, marginalised or even excluded. In practice this leads to a self-perpetuating cycle in which like attracts like and the circle never widens. It’s no good if you’re attracting one person but putting off nineteen or twenty others because they fear they won’t fit in. Class consciousness, properly understood, is more than just being against capitalism and bosses, it is also about ending minority ownership and all discrimination, and it requires some positive attributes too, like inclusivity, empathy, the ability to listen and share, to criticise honestly and to be open to criticism in the same way. This is the class consciousness socialists need to create, because it’s the only kind strong enough to defeat capitalism, and that means including all workers, with nobody left outside.

Paddy Shannon

Blame Game (2018)

Book Review from the April 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass'. By Darren McGarvey. (Luath Press. £7.99)

McGarvey was brought up in the Pollok area of Glasgow. His mother (who had been raped when young) drank heavily, was violent and ran up a massive drug debt, so he had a dysfunctional home life. One consequence was that he felt a deep sense of grievance against anyone he considered well-off and he blamed the ‘middle class’ (the capitalists don’t feature here at all). 

A large part of his book attacks the ‘poverty industry’, where people make a good living from dealing with problems; not solving everything but leaving some sort of ‘legacy’, with enough problems still remaining for the industry to continue growing. Outside organisations that address poverty encourage dependency rather then self-sufficiency, and if you are poor it is best not to offend such organisations and those who work for them. In Scotland, ‘the poverty industry is dominated by a left-leaning, liberal, middle class’. In contrast, the poor, McGarvey says, need to become ‘more active, engaged and resilient’. Identity politics has supposedly replaced class issues, but again is just another means for the socially mobile (which often is equivalent in these pages to middle class) to dominate public discussion. But, considering how unclear his own views on class are, this is not very convincing.

It is odd that he emphasises the importance of taking personal responsibility and not just blaming others while at the same time writing eloquently on the lifelong consequences of childhood poverty and the crucial role played by emotional stress in influencing people’s health and social mobility. Many of those who end up in prison have experienced violence or other forms of abuse while children. Child abuse itself is driven by social deprivation.

As may have been gathered by now, McGarvey’s own views are not at all well explained. He sees Socialism in completely anodyne terms, as ‘about providing a decent quality of life for everyone in society’. He is now the father of a young son and as such is frightened by the thought of a revolution: but he does not say why, or what such a revolution would involve. Moreover, there is nothing at all here on what the underlying causes of poverty might be. So, if his book has an overall message, it is left very unclear. 

Paul Bennett