For those who read this blog - all ten of you - and in case you hadn't yet worked it out, I'm left wing and have been for over half a century. For me, being left wing is more than thinking the state should provide health and education safety nets for the poor and marginalised, and/or belonging to a trade union - you can be and/or want all those things and be ideologically right-wing.
If you claim to be a leftist but cannot or will not describe yourself as a socialist, you’re not actually left-wing. You may be centrist or on the soft right – ie those who want to maintain the economic and social status quo but make it less obviously exploitative and oppressive - but you’re not left-wing.
Being left wing means being committed to bringing about foundational - structural - change as well as attitudinal change and seeing each as being essential to achieving and maintaining the other.
To those who say, “the Left has forgotten the working class”, I say the true Left has never forgotten the working class but, in the neoliberal era there is a mass of obfuscation about what the working class is - usually involving a high degree of disregard of the global context. This results in a lot of people claiming to be on the left, or who are assumed to be so by others, or who are assigned to the left by people who want to disparage and/or divide it.
The outcome has been confusion and diversion and a loss of a belief in the possibilities for genuine, sustainable change. That loss has no immediate effect on the many layers of the buffer zone that is maintained between those who have too much and those who have too little - especially not the well remunerated members of the coordinator class - but it leaves the mass abandoned and isolated.
“The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate and the poor woman and her children? Who cares?”
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Since the 1960s, the broad left in the developed world has come to be dominated by two powerful political trends : interest group politics and identity politics. (1)
These encompass a variety of ideologies and praxis, which prioritise, in varying ways and degrees, issues related to sex/gender, race/ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation etc.
Interest group politics differs from identity politics in that it sought to organise collectively (often within the wider left-wing and labour movements) to counter ideological and material conditions which adversely affect people who share commonalities of sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability etc, while identity politics tries to draw together people who have a shared sense of one or more aspects of individual identity - sense of self.
The latest and arguably most successful (especially relative to the numbers affected) manifestation of identity politics is gender identity.
Interest group politics grew out of attempts to counter-balance the sexism and eurocentrism that dominated both theory and praxis in some left-wing political movements and working class collectives.
Identity politics, which draws heavily on queer theory and has hijacked the concept of intersectionality, is an almost complete capitulation to the aspirational individualism that underpins and fuels neoliberal capitalist ideology.
Both can cut across the traditional left-right political divide but both find their most comfortable political home within the broad Left which, in the era of neoliberalism, seems to have lost both its mojo and its compass.
These fractionalising movements have become (in the case of identity politics, arguably always were) divorced from the class struggle - the broad aim of which is to abolish class as the base of economic exploitation, and the forms of oppression that facilitate exploitation.
In its current form, identity politics has become a kind of political cuckoo in the left-wing nest, diverting time and energy away from both class and interest group politics and, as has happened in the UK Labour Party, turfing them right out of the nest and by so doing, helping to serve up a humiliating electoral defeat at the hands of a Tory party whose class interests have never more starkly apparent.
In most advanced economies, the capitalist class and the state have been prepared to concede to some demands that arose from interest group politics but never without a struggle, and it is noteworthy that they have embraced, and indeed actively promoted, demands that have come out of identity politics.
As long as a social or political movement's demands and methods of organisation do not threaten the overarching economic status quo, (which is still largely white and phallocratic) and if there is the added bonus of the development of new markets or growth of existing markets, many states that broadly support and act to protect and advance the interests of global corporate capitalism have been happy to acquiesce to a range of demands that have arisen as a result of identity politics - even when these have the potential to alienate sectors of the wider population.
It’s not too far-fetched to see, in this acquiescence, the capacity for the counter-emergence of a broad coalition of socially, religiously and politically conservative groups.
The extraordinary range of concessions to, and adoptions of aspects of identity politics, and the speed with which these have been achieved, should be juxtaposed against the swingeing attacks on working class standards of living, rights and collectives across the developed world, which has been accompanied by the movement of capital to parts of the globe where its controllers can hyper-exploit labour and more freely plunder natural resources.
Logically, the reasons for this should be a matter of all-consuming interest to those on the Left. Yet - strangely - many who claim to be on the left or who are assigned to the left, have immersed themselves so fully in identity politics, they seem to have lost sight of the relevance or the very existence of one or more of the two main axes of oppression – sex and race - which, within capitalism, are deployed, singly and in concert, to enable the economic exploitation of all working people and the heedless plunder of the natural world that inevitably accompanies it.
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Part of the explanation for this may lie in the fact that those who are most deeply immersed in identity politics are at risk of political and critical hypoxia.
These people, most of whom conduct their organisational and political lives on various forms of digital media - are now referred to as the woke left.
The term woke has been lifted out of the African-American vernacular stay woke or be woke - meaning having an awareness of the origins and effects of racial, social and economic inequality.
As with many other African-American vernacular sayings, it has been appropriated, repurposed and stretched to cover a wide range of issues that can loosely be aggregated under the umbrella of identity politics. In the process, the term woke has lost much of its historical, political and social specificity and, by being stretched so thin, has become easily mocked and misapplied. Just like political correctness before it.
Woke has replaced political correctness or PCness in the political lexicon of the right-wing – but with an added twist. The woke left, aka the far-left, the neo-radical left, is deemed to be as bad as or worse than the far-right because their political demands are declared to be anti-democratic and anti-free speech. Thus, the antics of sections of Antifa in the US, are claimed to be as bad as those of the heavily armed, white supremacist, misogynistic alt-right, which Antifa opposes.
There is a special brand of 21st century absurdism in the sight of lesbians and radical feminists, concerned about the impacts on women's sex-based rights, of transgender ideology and demands, who - because Antifa is seen as a hotbed of transgender activism - effectively allying themselves with far-right, racist, misogynistic groups on the basis of the politically infantile notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
This absurdity is compounded by equally infantile responses from transactivists and their earnest, but often appallingly badly informed or politically myopic allies, which consists largely of aggressive posturing and belligerent expressions of anti-TERFism on social media platforms – mostly Twitter.
On the one side there are leftish (often way more ish than left it must be said) and liberal people who defend the principles espoused and demands made by the transgender movement, which has massively widened in scope over the past decade and as a result has become more numerous but also more critically and politically amorphous; and on the other, a collection of rather odd bedfellows comprising radical feminists, lesbians, left-wingers and various sorts of social and political conservatives.
Here in Aotearoa-NZ, in the midst of the pandemic crisis with all its massive implications for the most economically marginalised, we have the bizarre spectacle of highly intelligent and influential people who would, if they were prepared to clamber down off their virtual barricades or to stop posing on top of their small-c celebrity columns, have to accept that they agree on far more than they disagree on.
Yet there they are – flinging virtual shit at each other on social media as we all face a crisis which, however you come at it, is very likely to fundamentally change the world we live in, most probably - because of the disarray on the Left - by the construction of an even more oppressive and coercive superstructure on the solid foundations already laid by the neoliberal world order.
How much more absurdist can this get? It seems there are no limits.
(1) The latter is sometimes inaccurately referred to as being identitarian - which is a far-right, white supremacist, misogynistic political ideology aimed at cementing white and phallocratic power.
