Epic Fail

I posted this rant on someone's Facebook page. I’m posting it here also because I am getting so annoyed by the mindless divisiveness of this debate.

 "I've been attacked by right-wing men for over fifty years for being a socialist and a feminist and, over the past half-decade or so, I've encountered a lot of the same old rank misogyny from men who claim to be on the Left but who are almost all united by one thing – no real commitment to structural change. 

This may be why they are so comfortable with the diversionary and divisive potential of identity politics in general, and the essentially reactionary nature of aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy, which seeks to privilege an essentially individualistic and individualising notion of the aspirational SELF, over wider biological and social realities and which, IMO, is doing harm to the cause of women's and trans and wider LGB rights. 

It's D grade politics:

Divert into what's obviously a political and critical cul-de-sac, and instead of getting the hell out of it, declare it to be the moral and political high ground on which the Left must make its stand;

Demonise heretics - in this instance the heretics are mainly women, so it's great cover for some men's unexamined misogyny;

Disseminate Dogma -because it's so much easier to chant a variety of off the shelf slogans and bite sized bits of low grade agitprop than it is to engage with the complex underlying political issues;

Divide into smaller and smaller groups, each loosely orbiting some relatively insignificant point of Difference thus Detracting from what binds people together and Distracting people away from the massive global issues confronting all of us.

D grade  – no, I'll go one better and give it an F for being a faddish, false-hearted, fabricated, fanatical, fracturing, fragmenting, fallacious, fucking fiasco.

Not to put too fine a point on it."

The Woke Wars

In this Twitter thread, publication of which coincided with Trump’s overblown appeals to what all sensible people see as the worst in US culture – the writer strives to defend the freedoms of capitalism, the neutrality of money and the infallibility of science – by attacking what he calls the “Woke war on merit”.

“Woke” has been ripped from its roots in the African-American vernacular and is applied by the Right to the pretty much anything it wants to belittle or to demonise in order to protect or advance its political and economic interests. 

The term has replaced “political correctness” – which morphed into the once ubiquitous “PC madness” – a phrase so beloved of the right-wing when in hot pursuit of political advantage in the 1980s and 90s. 

 

The Woke – inasmuch as it can be said to be a definable 'thing' – is especially aligned with identity politics and critical social justice theory and praxis, much like political correctness before it was aligned with interest group politics. 

 

For the person who wrote the Twitter thread, the “woke war on merit” is actually an attack on “equality” -– by which he means "liberal equality” – by which he means, as far as I can ascertain, equality of employment opportunity which, because of the existence of innate differences in ability, results in “winners and losers". 

 

Liberal equality both enables and rewards merit, which is a real and measurable thing. The more liberal equality we have, the more merit becomes an important determinant, i.e, winners are more meritorious than losers and are therefore more deserving of tangible and status rewards.

 

People who are comfortably ensconced in secure positions in the academic, corporate, bureaucratic, technocratic sectors of the buffer class are obviously pretty happy with the neo-liberal status quo and will often defend that position by insisting they got there and deserve to stay there – entirely or mostly – on their own merit. Their success is due to their innate ability and hard work and is objectively demonstrated by such things as having a doctorate, getting published, and rewarded by being employed and well paid.

 

He cites examples of liberal equality that have been discovered and lauded by folk like him. 

 

First up we have capitalism, which he sees as a system that enables people to rise on their own merit – a sort of socio-economic helium that inflates them and allows them to rise above, and be distinguished from, the less meritorious. 

 

He fudges what capitalism is – especially the finance and the commodity-fixated corporate capitalism that dominates the world today – and just says it’s the “freedom to use one's property to one's own profit as one will” which sidesteps some mega issues, like private property, but okay, it is Twitter.

 

Nor does he comment on why it is that corporate capitalism has commodified equality and diversity and is busily making profits from selling it, and saving profits by using it to avoid engaging with genuine economic equality. The diversity industry may have been kickstarted by the left but it didn't turn it into a multi-billion dollar global market.

 

Second up is money; because currency is “a neutral and universal form of capital"  which doesn’t care who you are and, as such, it’s a major driver of fairness, equality and justice. In fact, he goes as far as to say that “Neutral currency is genuinely anti-racist” i.e. with liberal equality, a genuinely meritorious person of colour will receive lots of it, which will serve to eradicate racism.

 

He does acknowledge that it’s all far from perfect but all we need is more opportunity for money to do its neutral, natural thing i.e. by some mysterious alchemy of market forces and individual merit – gravitate towards the inherently worthy, and it will abolish racism by the simple mechanism of making some black people rich. 

 

As we say down here in the roaring forties, "Yeah, right".

 

The Woke, who are opposed to liberal equality, are trying to destroy this neutral, value free currency, and replace it with the devilish device of social currency – an example of which is, if you are “cancelled”,  the Woke banks will refuse to take your business and deny you access to currency. 

 

If he means actual banks, there is no questioning of course as to why banks have been able to position themselves as the controllers and dispensers of this apparently politically neutral and universal form of capital, or in what absurdist universe, the banks are controlled by the left, let alone the Woke section of the left.

 

The Woke also apparently hate science because science deals in facts which, according to the tweeter, are entirely unproblematic in terms of their universality and their application. There can be no dispute about scientific facts.

 

Merit counts a lot in science because, “no-one’s pet theory is special”. 

Ideologically motivated doubters may point to the regularity with which science prostitutes itself to militarism, national interest and to corporate capitalism but that’d just be more Woke anti-science, or the exception to the rule that the scientific method is incorruptible and the universality of its results is its foundation and its validity. 

All hail the god of corporately-funded science.

 

And finally, there is the equality in the truth which is true because it’s the truth and the truth is true.

 

Apparently the Woke hate the truth, especially objective truths like test scores, demonstrated competence, having money, producing results, or  the "reasonable person" standards in law.

The tweeter loves them because he’s good at all that stuff, he relates to it, he’s paid lots of it and it reinforces his idea of what equality is i.e. – it’s what that lets people like him rise to the top.

And no doubt he can very easily answer all those awkward questions about what tests actually measure and why; how competence and results are measured and to what end; how it is that so much of that neutral, naturally levelling currency happens to gravitate towards persons who are demonstrably not meritorious, and by-passes others who demonstrably are; and how many times in history the reasonable person standard in law has fallen flat on its face – or if he can’t, well, he’s also pretty good at taking the piss.

In fact, he made quite a name for himself by somewhat unfairly taking the piss out of the Woke in American academia. IOW he enhanced his own merit by seeking to reduce the merit of others –not by means of utilising the neutral, infallible scientific standard that he lauds but by means of a hoax.

 

He and his collaborators in this hoax were not interested in, and hence did not tackle the reasons why some sectors of the social sciences, especially in the USA, have been channelled into a cul-de-sac of navel-gazing, individualising nonsense, nor whose interests that ultimately serves. 

I suspect at the heart of that little enterprise was nothing more scientific and academically defensible than enjoying taking a swing at a very soft target. 

 

Get Stuffed

I was about to subscribe to Stuff NZ when I read a highly subjective opinion piece by Stuff reporter /columnist, Kylie Klein-Nixon, and I put my credit card back in my wallet. 

 

Klein-Nixon's primary target was another Stuff OP published in the Manawatu Standard, by communications lecturer Steve Elers, in which he expressed his bewilderment over the array of preferred, newly constructed pronouns.

 

Now, I suspect Elers' motives for entering this current round of the language wars are not the same as mine, and I'd take issue with aspects of his rather light-weight analysis but Klein-Nixon doesn't do that, she just wants to indulge herself in a bit of a rant and thus does the issues a grave disservice – in my opinion. 

 

She attacks people like Elers for "being scared of words" (i.e. pronouns), in defence of people who she assumes are scared of being harmed by words like those written by "small-minded, mean-spirited, ignorant", "ill-informed drop-kicks". 

 

She manages the currently obligatory segue into what "uber-Karen, JK Rowling" has to say about the intersections between sex and gender generally, and the current protocols for treating trans kids in particular, and culminates her piece with a tub-thumping, rhetorical flourish:

 "...when a person who is dangerously impacted by the thing you’re selfishly, ignorantly, yapping about, tells you you’re hurting them, you don’t bash on regardless. You shut your fool mouth, sit the hell down and listen."

 

Klein-Nixon would do well to take note of, and address the political implications of the growing number of women who feel dangerously impacted by what they see as a heedless, ideologically motivated conflation of sex and gender, so I strongly urge her to take her own advice before putting fingers to keyboard next time.

And if Stuff wants my money, it had better sharpen up its act, i.e. more insight, less ideology.

 

Suiting the Suits

This post is apropos of not very much. Some time back, while drinking my third cup of coffee of the day, I read yet another piece about "Megabit" – a contribution to the dumb-down, divide, and divert war being waged by the mass media in the service of – well, we all know who the vast bulk of the mass media serves, (protestations about them being "dominated by the left", notwithstanding). 

The lie that the media is left wing is shot from a trusty old cannon fired by the corporate-adjacent right.

 

The piece which energised my tired old brain that morning was a claim that Meghan – I don't use titles as a matter of principle – is a "feminist", AND what is more, so is her husband, Harry.

 

What sort of feminist this writer thinks they might feasibly be, may be gleaned from the following :

“Like many millennial feminists, we want to approach the idea of taking down the system with evangelical zeal: tossing a lit match and strutting away from a slow-motion explosion just like Rihanna. Yet sometimes the most feminist thing to do – and smartest – is remove yourself from the system completely. Especially when that system is cooked.”

Note there is no explication of what "the system" is, let alone any hint as to what “we” might want to replace it with. 

 

The specific system that this writer is referring to Meghan removing herself from is, of course, the still obscenely rich and powerful remnants of the British ancien régime. The wider system she talks about taking down is not corporate capitalism as, like Meghan, she’s unlikely to want to blow up the goose (1) that lays the golden eggs for the privileged ones who inhabit the buffer zone of the coordinator and celebrity classes. So, I'm having to guess "the system" is The Patriarchy.

 

Meghan's pre-royal fame rested on the TV series Suits which I hadn't seen until recently – or at least I thought I hadn't but watching it again after a conversation with some friends – I realised I had seen the pilot years ago and clearly had decided ce n'était pour moi. 

 

But, in the spirit of scholarly inquiry I watched a few episodes – fast forwarding through all the annoying, linky bits. 

 

Corporate law – superficially glossy, essentially sleazy, overtly corrupt or skirting the edges of it – is the quintessence of the coordinator class, helping prop up and shield the worst excesses of the bloated, wasteful and exploitative system that feeds it. 

 

The series pays lip service to equality;  a mercilessly ambitious black woman is the managing partner having got there by shafting her nemesis, the other named partner who is Jewish. The other character who we are invited to hate is also Jewish, and the fact of him being Jewish is much more front and centre and comes way too close to embodying some anti-Semitic stereotypes for my liking. 

 

MM plays a sexy paralegal with exam block; the privileged daughter of a successful black lawyer father and an invisible white mother. There's a black associate lawyer and a few black clients, but the stories hinge around a cabal of white men whose standing is signalled by the cost of their suits, haircuts, and manicures and the rampancy of their ambition. 

The women – almost without exception – are heavily sexualised in appearance, tottering around in bum revealing tight skirts on improbably high heels (think one step away from stripper shoes) with occasional glimpses of deep cleavage.

 

The contrast between the men and the women is stark; the message is that women who want to succeed in this towering bastion of male privilege have to be at least as predatory, driven, and duplicitous as their male counterparts – and be decorative in a style and manner that owes far more to the phallocracy than it is does to feminism.

 

As for the character who is MM's love interest (and who somewhat resembles Harry prior to the onset of male pattern baldness) we are expected to believe that someone who never went to law school and hasn't passed the bar somehow – due to having the sort of photographic memory usually only found in people with autism, and the protection of the lead sleaze-bag – gets a job in a prestigious corporate law firm which only employs Harvard graduates.

 

As we say in Aotearoa-New Zealand, "yeah right".

 

 Notes:

1.  I am of course using "goose'" in the generic sense of a bird of the family of Anatidae, not wishing to impose a cis-normative binary on the proverb.

 

Another Polemic on Identity Politics

The post war years saw a massive surge in liberation and equal rights movements: anti-colonialist and national liberation in countries within various European empires; the women's and gay liberation movements;  movements to advance workers', students, prisoners', indigenous peoples’ and black and minority ethnic rights; the anti-nuclear, peace, anti-psychiatry and the environmentalist movements.

 

There was a cold war raging and the Non-Aligned Movement was emerging as a massive third political force in the world. 

 

In response and as always, capitalism wielded a range of ideological weapons as well as overt, sometimes brutal, force and coercion. 

 

An alliance of major capitalist nations led by the USA crushed emergent left wing movements and overthrew or killed left leaning or secular leaders of international liberation movements, eg. the  overthrow of Mossaddegh in Iran; the US backed overthrow of Sukarno and the slaughter of a million Indonesian communists by the army and Islamists;  assassinations of important black leaders like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo; the wars in South East Asia …..on and on and on.

 

And domestically – that same mix of coercion and brute force (worst if you happened to be advancing indigenous and B&ME rights). In the USA, ranging from agents of the state firing on students, to the complicity of the state in the assassinations of important black leaders and the imposition of life time sentences and the mass incarceration of black men, which signalled the rise of what Angela Davis calls the prison-industrial complex. 

 

Few other states (South Africa was an ignoble exception) were as brutally and openly coercive as the US which created and orchestrated the game plan. The treatment in the 1960s of Paul Robeson – scholar, athlete, artist, communist and unapologetic radical advocate for black and working class rights and arguably the first and greatest of the "black Messiahs" that white racist America so hated and feared – showed the Anglo Alliance at work. (1)

 

But ideological means are far preferable to coercive, and on the ideological front, one of the best ideas the right wing ideologues ever had was to promote the factionalising and fracturing potential of interest group politics – i.e. people combining around a particular set of specific interests broadly flowing from sex, race/ethnicity or sexual orientation, and in opposition to harmful prejudices in popular lore and unfair discrimination in formal law. 

 

The traditional left had failed to engage sufficiently or at all with issues of sex and race as the two huge elephants in the corner of the political room, and initially IGP found its natural home within the left and the labour movement and drew on that for its wider strength, eg the emergence of specific sections within left wing political parties, trade unions etc.

 

Capitalism dug in and initially threw all it could into resisting even basic demands; every small advance had to be fought for – especially workers' rights to decent pay and conditions and to workplace health and safety. (2)

 

In the late 70s and early 80s, as the ideologues geared up for the neo-liberal revolution with its monetarist economic doctrine, the gloves came off with the working class and an ideological onslaught was unleashed – portraying militant unions as the "enemy within",  in cohorts with the "enemy without" – communism. 

Militant (in the sense of uncompromising in their demands) women's liberationists were portrayed as hairy legged, boiler suited men haters; black and minority ethnic people were portrayed as disaffected, feckless, criminally minded or potential terrorists; environmentalists – first branded as well-meaning but stupid tree huggers, became eco-terrorists. 

 

The biggest coup however was a far more subtle ideological move – one that parts of the left enthusiastically embraced – the emergence of identity politics for which second wave feminism had inadvertently laid the groundwork with its distinction between biological sex and social gender with its emphasis on how we are made or learn to be women, which flowed smoothly into the ideas of gender as performance, and to the idea that not just sex roles but biological sex itself is socially constructed, and as a result, is able to be deconstructed.

 

The most recent and divisive manifestation of identity politics – gender identity – moves away from the material reality of biological sex and of social stratification as the basis of male power (with patriarchal authority as an illusory compensation given to otherwise powerless men), and into ideas about the essentialism of individual identity. Political action was about shifting alliances between groups of people with same or similar  identities, and adding a swathe of categories to the hierarchy of oppression. 

 

The great organising principles of the material reality of class-based economic exploitation and of the hyper exploitation of women, both as workers and as producers of new generations of workers, whose unpaid domestic and reproductive labour enabled greater profits; the hyper-exploitation of people of colour within capitalism enabled by the ideology of race, and all the multiple layers of overt and covert, interlinked forms of oppression heaped upon and wrapped around people to facilitate economic exploitation – have all but been all drowned by a tsunami of agitprop and academic waffle proclaiming the end of history, the end of class, the end of sex. 

In its place is the rise of the aspirational individual and his/her/their bespoke, unique identity whose very existence we are told, will bring about an end to oppression – conceptualised as whatever unpleasantness looms largest on any individual's personal horizon.

 

That capitalism's drive to obscure – not just the nature of class but its very existence– is being enabled by the left, is an irony of cosmic proportions.

 

This new form of identity politics was of course best able to be conceptualised and expressed from within the relative safety and affluence of the buffer zone that exists between the mass of increasingly impoverished, marginalised people, and the true elites. An important part of this buffer zone is the coordinator class, that group of public and private sector managers, technocrats, specialists, consultants etc who, by organising, systematising and arranging, serve to both obscure and protect and ultimately serve the interests of the hyper-rich.

 

Identity politics does its bit to help keep open the flood gates for an era of unprecedented wealth accumulation and extreme plundering of, and harm to the natural world, and the reconsolidation of gross disparities between rich and poor – and as such it is a regressive, reactionary movement. 

 

 

Notes:

1. After a suicidal breakdown thought by his son to have been induced by a psychotropic drug slipped into his drink by the FBI, Robeson was eventually hospitalised in the UK where for two years he was subjected to 54 ECT sessions and kept on a regime of powerful barbiturate drugs with no psychotherapy until his family had him released and took him to a clinic in the GDR where he recovered somewhat but was never able to appear in public again.

2. The women's movement in the US has still never achieved an equal rights amendment for example; abortion remained in the crimes act here in NZ until this year; denial of equal pay is a crime in only one country, elsewhere it's a civil issue; the principle of equal pay for work of equal value has never really been engaged with even where there is legislation that enables its and in fact - with a loss of collective bargaining, individualised contracts, low wages, zero hours etc, women workers are arguably worse off in 2020,  even with the formal right to pay equity.

 

A Rant on Rowling

JK Rowling is a billionaire and a very powerful, mature, white woman and I don’t feel the need to spend much time feeling sorry for her because she felt unhappy in her skin as a child, was once in an abusive marriage, and like many women, suffered a sexual assault. But I do applaud her decision to write about something private and painful in order to speak up for and to women – as a sex – as a time when the very concept of woman as a sex is under attack.

 

There’s probably an army of people who advise Jo Rowling because JK Rowling is not just a woman, she’s a huge brand; she doesn’t just make a lot of money for herself – she makes a lot of money for a lot of other people who will have a vested interest  in protecting the JKR brand and who will have weighed up the advantages and disadvantages  of publishing this essay, at this point in time.

 

Some people have questioned the timing of it – how sensitive was it for a white billionaire celebrity with a massive social media presence to say #MeToo in the midst of one of the most passionate outpourings of outrage over systemic racism and police violence that the western world has seen in a very long time.

 

Maybe the initial toe dipping tweets about the sex versus gender identity debate were her own decision, as maybe her anti-Corbyn tweets prior to the last UK election were also her own decision, but I suspect this essay and maybe even the timing of it were calculated – and I suspect she and her advisors think the gender identity tide is turning.

 

A lot of women who feel like the fight against the gender identity tide has taken over their lives are euphoric because such a massive celebrity has come out in support of them.

 

People who are on the political right who once thought JKR was “too liberal by far”, have elevated her to virtual sainthood, while liberals who once worshipped her as a genius and lauded her liberality now declare her to be a fascist and a literal killer of trans people. 

 

Many of those who now cast JK Rowling as the devil incarnate, once idolised her and those who grew up with her books now call for them to be burned or banned. Some have set to and constructed partial, one-sided, inaccurate analyses of her argument, accusing her of being partial, one-sided and inaccurate, and/or a coloniser. 

 

Others are combing her works for examples of other forms of wrong-think, and some are hurling insults that are threatening and often – in an irony seemingly lost on many of the would-be-woke brigade – crudely phallocentric and viciously misogynistic. The latter approach is especially popular among the less articulate of the misogynists and the many types of troll that are busy obfuscating the issues and fomenting divisions.

 

People who would claim to unequivocally support the #MeToo movement and deplore violence against women have declared Rowling’s disclosure of her own experience of sexual and domestic abuse to be untrue, exaggerated for effect, manipulative, or even evidence of narcissism and any right to sympathy or acknowledgement or solidarity is countervailed by her “transphobia”.

 

The line seems to be – “we deplore violence against women – except TERFs who deserve to be kerb-stomped.”

 

The Sun came to the party with its trademark cynicism – its Union Jack bedecked front page had screamer headlines about Rowling’s abusive ex-husband.

 

This exploitation and trivialisation of domestic violence, whilst claiming to care about it, is a classic Murdoch gutter press tactic and is being deplored by a wide range of people, including journalist Owen Jones, whose outrage over this is somewhat undermined by never having previously spoken out about – indeed has contributed to – the demonisation of other gender critical women who don’t have Rowling’s massive buffer of wealth and power.

 

Rowling's essay has served to harden the edges of this most polarised and polarising of debates – one in which there are fervently held views on either side and a lot of apathy, confusion, misinformation, and ignorance in between.

 

For me, the idea that an amorphous collection of disparate individuals declaring biological sex is a spectrum and performatively bending the gender binary back on itself will somehow end Patriarchy, is a stupid one.

 

Even more stupid is the belief that once Patriarchy has been de-binaried and people acknowledge there are at least six sexes, all the myriad oppressive structures, processes, and relationships which have flowed from Patriarchy will also go “Pouf” and be replaced with …um …..on that rather important subject most of them are as curiously silent as they are about how Patriarchy came into being in the first place.

 

As for me – I have my materialist, Marxist views on that, and as a result of which I’m interested in what's BEHIND the profoundly individualistic, essentially superficial and strongly aspirational gender identity movement which claims to be challenging the status quo at a foundational level but actually is doing no such thing. 

 

What it is doing helping to divide and divert and turn natural allies into sworn enemies. I wonder who might benefit from that?

 

Overall, excluding Trumpist basket-case USA, the zeitgeist in the western world at least is broadly pro-transgender rights, especially here in NZ – despite hyperbolic claims to the contrary and despite the term transgender now covering a wide and increasingly eclectic range of gender identities that have seeped out beyond transwoman and transman into non-binary and further. 

 

Unlike movements for national liberation, civil and human rights, against racism, and the peace and environmental movements – all of which have been surveilled, infiltrated, repressed, vilified, and demonised to varying degrees – the trans rights movement actually enjoys very high levels of corporate, governmental, institutional, and media support. 

 

Almost every major charity, trade union and professional association is fully supportive – on paper at least; all major political parties fully and openly support trans rights as defined by the current transgender orthodoxy, or at least say nothing critical or oppositional; all government departments and almost the entire media are on message.

 

This signals a degree of institutional capture that is unheard of for any other movement for progressive social change, and it cannot be explained away by the internet effect or the trans movement standing on the shoulders of all those who went before.

 

This is what interests me – along with how and why this has become the most divisive and polarising issues on the left – ever.

 

Women had to fight inside the trade union and labour movement and the left more widely for recognition of the need to fight for women’s rights and on women’s issues; black people had to also fight in the left and in the women’s movement for recognition of the need to fight for black and minority ethic women’s rights and issues – but there was never this amount of polarisation, division and diversion away from pressing issues and common interests. 

 

Never.

 

Anyone with any real commitment to the left and to progressive politics more widely who is not engaging with that is either on the wrong side of the barricade, is in the grip of Overactive Amygdala Syndrome – or is a shitty little misogynist using trans rights as an excuse to attack dissenting women.

 

Frankly, I’m sick of the pile-ons and the social media ping pong. I’m appalled by the abusive and the crudely sexist insults that get tossed around like so much confetti, but I’m more offended by the politically infantile calls from the would-be woke for the righteous to prove their righteousness by combing through their Twitter followers and Facebook friends looking for "mutuals" with JK Rowling so they can block or unfriend them. #GTFU

 

I’m fed up with the logical and ethical contortions performed by some people who claim to be on the left to justify some pseudonymous plank, very likely a troll, calling a young lesbian a “terf cunt who needs to be learn to cope with cock” because her vagina essentialism, transphobia and TERF rhetoric literally kills trans people.

 

But I’m also fed up with some of the extremists on the other side – the actual biological determinists who deploy their own forms of harmful reductionism and lines of crude and hurtful abuse – including rejecting transwomen who have stood as allies with women. 

 

However, I’ve said this before – I’ve been watching this movement for years now and the ugly misogyny came out first and hardest. If anyone is reacting – if anyone has the excuse of having been provoked – it is gender critical women. And frankly, compare the worst a so-called TERF says about trans people with the worst that’s lobbed the other way – and the trans rights regiment win the abuse stakes by a country mile.

 

A self-serving opportunist on Twitter lectured all who could bear to read the interminable thread, about the awfulness of Rowling’s essay; he cited a tweet by Magdalen Berns – a feisty little left wing, radical feminist, lesbian Londoner who – fed up with being told transwomen are literally women even if they still have a penis and testicles and that trans women who fancy women are lesbians– retorted with some abuse of her own. Even dying tragically young from brain cancer and being left wing and lesbian – doesn’t count when the scales of righteousness are being deployed by the trans rights regiment of the would-be-woke brigade.

 

For the WBWB even the suspicion of being a TERF, even being “TERF adjacent” (yes, there is such a thing) weighs so much – it doesn’t matter who you are, what you’ve done, what else you believe in, or how good a person you are – the weight of the TERF label is such that the scales of righteousness tip all the way against you. 

 

And what’s more, they will stay there despite anything else you might do or achieve or demonstrate – the only way out of the resulting blanket condemnation is to publicly renounce the TERF heresy but even that might not be enough for some of the truly fervent – for the label leaves a stain and once branded, forever suspect. 

 

On the Politically Infantile

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 – i.e. 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 which 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 which 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.