The Ideology of Gender and Identity Politics

It’s hard to know where to begin with this. It’s wrong and it’s basically the old ‘plague on both your houses’ style of politics.

 

The way I see it is this: gender is an ideology that is used as a weapon of oppressive social control by those who rule – which is mostly men.

 

It is used to oppress others in order to control and exploit them. For women, that oppression, prior to capitalism, was primarily centred on their reproductive capacity.  

 

At the heart of the ideology of gender is the far greater role the female plays in species and group reproduction – due to humans’ long gestation, the production of mostly single and utterly dependent offspring etc. What many who live in the insular bubbles of westernised affluence forget is that this is still the reality for the vast majority of humans.

 

That foundational material reality also created and demanded high levels of sociability; the things which mark us out as a species are that we're ineluctably social, and highly adaptable.

 

The ideology of gender arose once humans moved beyond subsistence into the production of surpluses – and it was accompanied by another great ideology – which enshrined the right, by virtue of belligerence or birth, to oppress and economically exploit, others. 

 

The ideology of an essential, god-given, gender difference and of the innate superiority of the male over the female was a compensation to otherwise powerless men. Patriarchal authority in the domestic and personal sphere served to mask the reality of a lack of power in the public sphere.

 

In capitalism, things changed. The market rules. People are nominally "free" to enter the labour market, ie to "sell" their labour as free agents. The value of that labour and the scope of civil and legal rights became and remain points of tension between the buyer and the seller and the various bodies which represent the interests of each.

 

The reproduction of labour – both in terms of the new generation of workers and in terms of the provision of domestic services – remained the province of women.

 

The capitalist ideology of gender drew on more ancient beliefs of women’s role with its innate attributes and essential inferiority, to justify both the hyper-exploitation of women within paid employment, and, where it suited the market, to confine women to the – unpaid – domestic sphere. 

 

This made her and her children dependent on a male wage and in turn made men less able to withhold or withdraw their labour, which was their only weapon in the negotiation of the wage contract.

 

Win, win for capitalism. Lose, lose for women, and for poor women especially.

 

The world is still a phallocracy – not simply because of capitalism but because of the millennia of societies dominated by hierarchical, patriarchal religion, mostly monotheistic – which capitalism emerged from, and built on.

 

Capitalism used and still does use, the ideologies of gender and class. The latter was extended from the right to exploit acquired by belligerence or birth, to a right accrued on the basis of "merit".

 

Capitalism also created another powerful ideology – that of race and of inherent racial difference - to justify the hyper-exploitation of people of colour, and most especially of black people, and the vicious forms of oppression that were used to achieve and maintain that hyper-exploitation.

 

It also extended to poor white people – men and women – the illusory compensation of their racial superiority over people of colour. Capitalism added the hierarchy of race to the hierarchy of class and the notion of an innate, god-given superiority of the male over the female. 

 

The quintessence of all this is divide and rule through the promotion of religious and political sectarianism, gender and racial difference.

 

Fast forward to the modern era – to the most rampant and dangerous form of capitalism – which has not, as Marx anticipated, created the conditions of its own demise through its inherent contradictions, but has created the conditions of the entire species’ demise, possibly the entire planet as we know it.

 

And what has this era of massive contradictions and hyper-exploitation of peoples and the natural world also seen? The greatest extension of formal rights and the creation of a large and highly privileged buffer class positioned between the reducing numbers of a super-rich elite and the growing number of a super-poor – many of whom are surplus to the system's requirements.

 

The trans rights issue is the logical outflow of identity politics – which is essentially accommodative and poses no direct threat to the economic status quo. It is another divide and rule tactic based on the promise and the delivery of formal rights and lifestyle choices to all but which have most meaning to those who are in a position to exercise rights and access choices, i.e., mostly those in the buffer class.

 

This gives the BC a stake in an obviously iniquitous, highly dangerous, unstable and unsustainable economic status quo; it blinds many to both the system’s faults and to the possibility of an alternative, and it offers a life belt to those in the mass who haven’t yet lost any hope of being saved.

 

The Left needs to stop falling into the divide and rule trap. Sectarianism, factionalism and dogmatism are all enemies of the Left and therefore are enemies of the powerless.

 

Social fragmentation – especially fragmentation into competing clumps held together by some vague notion of personal identity – is the enemy of all. When the illusions of freedom and choice, proffered by a profoundly and inherently flawed economic order, become people’s reality, we have a problem.

 

We must of course keep fighting for the rights that neoliberal governments extend but never let that create divisions and divert us away from the ever more pressing issues of a world which is literally teetering on the brink of disaster.