The Reds V the Whites

Where to begin? At the beginning is always a good place for a logical thinker like me. 

A while back, a fairly high profile, privileged young Marxist railed on Twitter against the  “cunts” who oppose identity politics – arguing that they should get involved in the movements and make the case for a materialist, class-based theory and praxis.

My feeling at the time was, “Back at you, Bub; social media polemics aside, what more could you have done to give the dying left wing a much needed political and critical blood transfusion?”

There’s no doubt that neoliberalism has wiped the floor with the left, ideologically and strategically. It has managed to discredit Marxist economics and historical materialism, and replaced it with the incoherent muddle of monetarism and post modernism. 

It has routed the old red left and replaced it with a politically and theoretically anaemic doppelgänger – dubbed by the Chinese as the white left, which I suspect is not about race, but about the traditional political enmity between the Reds and the Whites.

The white left is not "left" in any traditional sense of the term which is precisely what the drivers of anti-Marxism and anti-collectivism wanted. 

Having been infected with a form of pernicious political anaemia which renders it incapable of mounting a serious opposition to the corporate-driven status quo, be that ideologically or politically, all the white left can manage is support of issues which, objectively, pose no real threat to that SQ.

Neoliberalism tolerates, even promotes, the white left and its political theory and praxis, for the simple reason that its political and critical essence is so diluted, it does not remotely threaten NL hegemony; quite the reverse, it strengthens it by appearing to be an opposition. Its usefulness lies in helping maintain the illusion that there is a political opposition, the existence of which is vital to the maintenance of the appearance of democracy. 

In the US,  there is literally very little to choose between the blue and red parties. The Democrats in the old South were the party of racism and reactionary politics; Democrat administrations and Presidents at best have merely tinkered with peripherals and at worst have matched the GOP's imperialist misadventures. It was a Democrat President who signed the order to drop nuclear bombs on civilian targets.

it's the same elsewhere. The bellicose CEO of NATO Inc is a Labour politician. A key player in the destruction of Iraq was a British Labour PM in league with a US Republican President. Jacinda Ardern is not a traditional socialist, and labelling her as a Marxist is an ideological meme created by the right.

Many people on the right who describe identity-based politics as  left wing, or even “Marxist”, do so because they haven’t a clue what either actually are.  

They are told by right wing ideologues and commentators that a movement, which is based on an empirically unprovable and individualist sense of a gendered self, is Marxist, and not knowing any better, they believe it. It  would be funny if it wasn’t so serious in its outcomes.

In essence, the white left is largely middle class, numerically dominated by white men, and in terms of theory and praxis, dominated by a form of identity politics which grants an apparent hegemony to people of colour, and the ever-expanding and increasingly meaningless LGBT+ aggregation.

The key words are apparent hegemony. Let those communities combine and adopt a class-based analysis of, and opposition to the corporate elite, and start calling for structural political and economic change, and watch the iron-fisted essence emerge from the rainbow-hued velvet glove.

The professional-managerial strata from which the WL draws most of its members and support, has expanded as a result of, and benefitted from the Neo-liberal "reforms" of the past 50 years.  

A lot of people who are described as being left wing these days are not left wing in any meaningful sense of the term – they’re simply not overtly right wing, in other words, they’re centrists. What is more, a lot of them are the sort of political flip floppers who will fall whichever way the political wind blows or the tax cut and pay rise flows.

That the coordinating class objectively adds little value to the lives of the mass of people  is well-known to the more politically astute of them, which may be why so many of them flock to the virtual barricades in defence of trans rights. It makes them feel better about their essentially parasitic existences, and helps them to ignore and to justify ignoring the vast and growing mass of those who have already fallen into the abyss, or are teetering on the edge of it. 

Identity politics – as it is currently framed inside the imperial bubble – pretty much does Neo-liberalism's bidding by largely ignoring class and stripping sex and race down to the level of the individual, and it abides by Neo-liberalism's rules that only those re-aggregations (in the form of interest groups) which serve its purpose are allowed.

We all know that if the current iterations of identity politics posed any sort of real threat to the economic SQ, they’d be destroyed in a heartbeat. Instead, they’ve served a useful ideological and tactical purpose in these increasingly dangerous times, in not just dividing and diverting the broad left, but when it suits the suits, they will be used to demonise it. 

We can already see how transgenderism is being used in parts of the US – and is being used, typically less overtly, here in NZ – to fuel a moral panic among social conservatives, including women. 

Make social conservatives anxious, especially about what they believe to be universal absolutes, and they are more likely to move towards the open arms of the political right which is better organised, funded, and armed than the left.

How are we to mount an effective opposition to the emergence of these counter-extremes, which common sense suggests will not stop with those tiny areas of gender identity that have butted heads with women’s sex-based rights?

I keep using the analogy of a political and critical cul-de-sac in which the left has allowed itself to be kettled. The simple answer is, unless we ALL turn around, break out, and realign along lines our economic masters desperately don’t want us to, we’re all toast.

The End Point

In chemistry the “end point” is the point in a titration at which a reaction is complete – often marked by some sort of visible change. 

In social chemistry, sex self-ID may be seen as the end point of the hyper-individualisation and the denaturing that sits at the very heart of capitalism. 

To me, the “identity over material reality” issue is an outflow of an essentially individualist and individualising ideology which – in the service of globalised corporate capital –  is aimed primarily at destroying left wing collectivism. Not the interest-based politics of the white left, with its inherently unstable coalitions, but the class based interests of the red left. That remains capitalism’s main enemy. 

Capitalism is essentially malign; it deforms and destroys; it shoves people into straitjackets, it is chewing up the entire planet faster and excreting more shit than ever, and it has learned how to defend itself by turning its opponents against each other. 

This has never been more clear than in this current iteration of divide and rule.

The ruling class have long known how easy it is to use ideology to divide and dominate any opposition, and social media has made their job easier than ever. 

The ideology is the velvet glove; inside it remains the iron fist of the state machine working in the interests of the ruling class, aided these days, by the coercive agencies of the deep state, and by private militias. 

From the acorn of interest group politics, the tree of identity politics grew, protected and fertilised by various agents and agencies that don’t give a toss about the ever-proliferating groups clustering around various forms of identity.  

They want, above all else, to divide in order to continue to rule. 

To that end, they want any nascent opposition to be, from its embryonic form, already primed to break into competing interest groups. 

If those interest groups are in pursuit of something which also creates markets, so much the better. 

If, by pushing for sectional interests, these groups encroach on others’ interests, and thereby create divisions between natural allies, even better. 

“There is no society, there is only the individual and the family” – thus spake Thatcher in advancement of Neo-liberalism, tacking the family on as a sop to religious interests. 

The whole idea of the “self” – the stand-alone individual and her/his social and legal rights – was a product of capitalism. And like other aspects of capitalism, there is some good in it.  But humans are ineluctably social, and stripped of natural community, we either fall into an utterly dysfunctional and harmful isolationism, or we create our own communities. 

In the modern era, inside the imperial bubble, that’s now often a virtual community, sometimes centred around a subjective, empirically unverifiable, and shifting, sense of self. 

It’s a spin doctor’s / agent provocateur’s wet dream. 

The aims of the ruling class first were to destroy the dream – ie the very belief in the possibility of structural/systemic change – and one of the main planks in that strategy was to attack and discredit Marxism and all that was informed by it. 

Post modernism was not just tolerated by the agents of the ruling class, it was actively promoted for its capacity to undermine Marxism.

At the same time, they sought to destroy the means by which the dream of a better world could be effected, ie the mass collectives which are the only way the powerless can wrest power from the ruling class.

They have done so, and continue to do so both by undermining and discrediting any collectives which look like becoming mass movements – left wing parties, trade unions, and other anti-capitalist collectives; and by promoting hyper-individualist and individualising ideologies which spawn inherently competitive factions.  

This has never been more clear than in this current iteration of divide and rule.

Sex self-ID is not a coherent, overarching conspiracy; it’s the result of a set of ruling class, interest-based objectives. Sometimes those interests overlap and coalesce and cooperate with each other.

The individualist identity interests of billionaire cross-dressers and trans-humanists co-exist for the moment with those of the US-centred global military-industrial complex, but they would be sacrificed in a heartbeat if the real power saw a financial or a strategic advantage in, for example, fully unleashing the pit bulls of the far-right.

What those feminists who argue that sex self-ID is the preeminent issue confronting women, need to realise is, the pit bulls won’t stop with trans people. Trans people may become the first victims but they sure as hell won’t be the last. 

The far more wide reaching danger is that sometimes the handlers underestimate the pit bulls’ capacity to turn on them.  When that happens, we see the full horror of barbarism. 

There is only one line of defence in the world today, and that’s the old Red Left. It’s also why it remains the primary target.