Going Around in Circles

A post inspired by yet another person blaming the entire Left for what they see as the transgender debacle.

People need to stop doing the Right’s job for it by using gender issues as a stick to beat the entire Left with. Americans need to realise that the Left elsewhere in the world is a very different thing from the modern, liberal wing of an essentially Right-wing party of empire.  

In very broad (and simplistic) terms, Neo-liberal capitalism’s (NLC) ideologues and commentariat attacked Red Left theory and praxis. The resulting dominance of NLC ideology had the effect of pulling the political fulcrum point to the right, making centrism appear to be “leftist”.

The left of NLC,  the White Left, abandoned the old Red Left’s class-based theory and praxis.

Many of the White Left did so nicely out of NLC’s hyper-commodification and its creation of a well-remunerated “buffer class”, they either didn’t notice, or chose to ignore the fact that identity politics in general and the transgender orthodoxy in particular, are essentially individualistic and individualising. 

As such they pose/d no threat to NLC, and in fact they created a load of ideological and market opportunities.  

As NLC economic policies pushed a lot of the western working class into forms and degrees of economic and social “precarity” that they’d never experienced, but with which their ancestors were well acquainted, some of them were easily persuaded by the Right into blaming it all on some designated “other”, and to cleave to apparently “powerful” leaders, etc etc.  

While the majority of people did not drift to the Far Right, in the absence of any sort of unifying political-economic theory and accompanying forms of mass organisation on the broad Left, they remained easily diverted and divided.

The utility to the Right-wing of identity-focussed politics and praxis in general, and the transgender orthodoxy in particular, lies in its capacity to both divert and to divide. 

For the Left-liberals who remain/ed attached to the idea of some sort of opposition to capitalism or to the “establishment”, IP provided a theoretical focus and a rallying point – with a load of slogans, tropes, mantras and memes to put in place of solid theory and action. 

It made them feel that they were doing something tangible even though, as I have said elsewhere, it’s like a bunch of people on a train with a maniac at the controls driving it towards a cliff, arguing about who gets to sit in first class. 

It’s all complicated by some, on what we used to call the Ultra-Left, having gone full circle to meet up with the Far Right. 

Identity politics, and its most divisive manifestation, transgenderism, was possibly not created by the Right other than in the sense of someone rolling an ideological snowball down a steep mountainside, but the Right has been quick to take full advantage of the ensuing social, political avalanche, which now puts a mass of wider social advances at risk of being swept away.

If we can’t agree on anything at least let’s agree on the utility to those who hold the reins of power, of the old maxim, “divide and rule”. Just as with older forms of left sectarianism, splits and divisions among any oppressed sector only ever benefit the powerful.