Joti Brar | Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)
Where is the obsession with ‘identity’ leading us and why is it so inimical to the class struggle?[1]
I. LIBERALISM OR SOCIALISM?
1. Liberalism: the ideology of the bourgeoisie
The hub of modern social life is the class struggle. In the course of this struggle each class is guided by its own ideology. The bourgeoisie has its own ideology―so-called liberalism. The proletariat also has its own ideology―this, as is well known, is socialism.
With these words Josef Stalin opened his 1907 pamphlet Anarchism or Socialism?, and they serve as an excellent starting point also for our discussion. Liberalism was the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie.
The revolutionary origin of liberalism (whose main content is an emphasis on the rights of the individual) was seen in the struggle against feudalism. Wherever the bourgeoisie fought to overthrow serfdom, wherever it fought against landed aristocracies and absolute monarchies, it did so under the slogan of the liberty and equality of all men.
On coming to power, however, the limits of this slogan were revealed. As the new rulers made haste to secure their position and to disarm the workers who had supported them, it became clear that liberty and equality were not to be extended to the unpropertied masses, nor to women, slaves or colonised peoples. As a minority ruling class, the capitalists, like the feudal and slave-owning exploiters before them, set about modifying their ideals in order to fit them to their new position as masters of society―most importantly as an exploiting class whose wealth and power came from monopolising the wealth produced by the exploited masses.
In its quest to control nature and expand profitable enterprise, the bourgeoisie opened up the entire world to scientific investigation. But as discoveries of science began to come into conflict with the goal of preserving bourgeois class rule and the capitalist system of production, scientific investigation itself came under attack. Well-funded branches of pseudoscience were established to justify the hierarchy of exploited and exploiter, the second-class status accorded to women, the inhuman treatment meted out to colonised and enslaved peoples, etc―and to try to ‘prove’ the eternal nature of capitalist production relations.
As the great Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov noted in 1907:
Marx very truly said that the greater the development of the contradiction between the growing productive forces and the existing social order, the more does the ideology of the master class become imbued with hypocrisy. The more the falseness of this ideology is revealed by life, the more elevated and virtuous does the language of that class become.[2]
And as Lenin observed in 1908:
There is a well-known saying that if geometrical axioms affected human interests, attempts would certainly be made to refute them. Theories of natural history [ie, Darwin’s theory of evolution] which conflicted with the old prejudices of theology provoked, and still provoke, the most rabid opposition.
No wonder, therefore, that the Marxian doctrine, which directly serves to enlighten and organise the advanced class in modern society, indicates the tasks facing this class and demonstrates the inevitable replacement (by virtue of economic development) of the present system by a new order―no wonder that this doctrine has had to fight for every step forward in the course of its life. (Our emphasis)[3]
Bourgeois liberalism long ago ceased to have any revolutionary or progressive content―ceased in fact to be more than empty rhetoric used to cover actions by our rulers that are completely contradictory even to their own professed ideals. Today, when a tiny parasitic bourgeoisie presides over the vicious death throes of decaying monopoly capitalism (imperialism), the role of liberalism is entirely reactionary and utterly hypocritical.
While claiming to care about the rights of the individual, liberal ideologues justify the most obscene crimes against the vast masses of humanity―a mass made up of hundreds of millions of individuals, whose individuality is never remembered by the bourgeoisie until such time as it suits their latest agenda.
Hence the ‘rights’ of Syrians to live in a country that doesn‘t have a secret police or any machinery of repression was suddenly discovered to be a priority by the bourgeois liberals at precisely the moment when imperialism was fomenting its forces for proxy war and regime change in Syria.
The fact that every state (being an organ of class rule) has a machinery of repression, including secret police, was not mentioned by the promoters of this liberally-blessed war. The right of the Syrian masses to live free from the fear of terrorising bombs and atrocities was equally absent from the freedom-loving liberal narrative, as was their right to choose their government and their political system.
Absent too was any reference to the fact that the state of emergency under which Syrians lived for decades, and which of necessity made the state machinery of repression more prominent in their lives, was necessitated by constant imperialist attempts to destroy the country’s independence, which had been ongoing ever since Syria emerged from the grip of colonial France, and an ongoing state of war with zionist Israel, imperialism’s stooge regime in the middle east, which has been illegally occupying part of Syria (the Golan Heights) since 1967, and never ceases to infiltrate the country with saboteurs and spies.
Something similar was seen in Britain during World War Two. The very real threat of invasion by Germany meant that Britain’s state machinery was put onto an emergency footing. Potential spies (along with many innocent civilians) were rounded up and imprisoned; citizens were told to be watchful for any unusual activities that could indicate active sympathy for the enemy.
How would British workers have felt about a foreign power―the USA, for example―using that state of emergency as a justification for bombing their government out of existence? Would they have been more or less likely to support the government in such a situation? Would the destruction of their schools, roads, power stations, water supplies, factories, farms and hospitals by an invading force have been more palatable because it was supposedly motivated by a desire to free them from the abuses of their autocratic leaders?
Of course, this comparison is flawed because the British government is an imperialist one, while the Syrian government is anti-imperialist, and therefore it is on the same side as its people in the struggle for independence from imperialism.
All the same, it serves to illustrate the nonsensical and hypocritical nature of the justifications given by liberals for imperialist war. Closer examination reveals that the only ‘right’ these ‘humanitarians’ really respect is the right of the exploiters to exploit. In the eyes of the liberals, resistance to the domination of the imperialists; attempts, whether by individuals, by mass movements or by whole nations, to take control of resources and use them for the benefit of the masses rather than for the profit of a few, must be ruthlessly crushed.
Liberalism’s role in this process is to prettify it with slogans about peace, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
This example is one of thousands we could offer to make the same point: bourgeois liberalism long ago lost the right to be judged by its words; it must be judged by its actions, and by the outcomes of its actions. Bourgeois liberals may wax lyrical on the subject of ‘universal’ rights and equality, but these words are unfailingly a cover for actions that preserve the right of a tiny minority to maintain its political and economic grip over the vast masses of humanity, pushing them into ever deeper poverty while amassing vast wealth to itself.
Bourgeois liberalism is the enemy of the working class and oppressed peoples; the enemy of the struggle for socialism, which is a struggle for meaningful rights and meaningful equality for all.
2. The liberal myth of rights and freedoms for all
In capitalist society, bourgeois liberalism is infused into our veins from birth. It is drip-fed through the stories we read, through school and college curriculums, through newspapers, radio and television. It teaches us to put ourselves―our individual freedom―first, in order that we might achieve happiness and fulfilment.
We are told endlessly about our ‘rights’―our right to choose how and where we live; our right to choose what we do for a living; our right to choose whom to marry, or whether or not to have children; our right to ‘follow our dreams’.
Entirely missing from all this discussion over our theoretical ‘freedoms’, ‘rights’ and ‘choices’ is the way that all these are in practice curtailed more or less completely by the conditions in which people actually find themselves. What choice does a child have about what kind of housing or education he is provided with if he is born into a poor family? What choice does a woman have about whether or not to have a child if she has no money and no family or community support? What choice does a worker have about where to live or how to eat if he has no job and no money? What choice does a sixth-former have about career paths if she has no ability to pay for training?
Bourgeois liberalism tells individuals they are free to choose―and then puts the blame on them if their ‘choices’ don‘t lead to happiness and fulfilment. But capitalist society sees to it that in practice many of these apparent choices are either extremely limited or entirely non-existent.
Meanwhile, capitalist production leads inexorably to a society where communal and familial bonds are increasingly severed and all that is left between individuals is what Marx called the ‘cash nexus’.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’.
It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom―Free Trade.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.[4]
This process has accelerated greatly even since Marx’s day, and the result of the breaking of all social bonds is isolation and misery for vast swathes of the masses, who are increasingly bereft of meaningful social contact or support. Thus the mass of workers find themselves left alone to sink or swim as best they can in a world where nothing can be obtained without money, no matter how necessary it is for existence, and people are valued by their earnings and possessions, no matter what their personal qualities may be―all while they are endlessly assured that their trammelled and stressful existences are somehow the result of their own ‘life choices’.
Liberalism’s emphasis on the ‘rights’ and ‘choices’ of the individual in such a situation simply provides a cover for the workings of the capitalist system, which is just as social as any other, but whose ideological representatives refuse to recognise the social relationships underpinning the creation of our rulers’ wealth. Capital is a social relation―a relation between people―first and foremost, but its ideologues push instead the idea that the poor are poor through their own personal failings and bad life choices, rather than through the workings of the capitalist system of production for profit.
Socialism, on the other hand, recognises that man is first and foremost a collective, social animal. Nothing in society is achieved by individuals; we are all of us reliant on one other, and all of us are happiest when we are working together towards a common aim. And not only does humankind need social contact and a sense of community to stay sane and healthy, but the tremendous means of production that capitalism has called into being demand social action on a massive scale.
In order to harness society’s productive power to the full; in order to unlock its true potential to provide a decent, cultured and ever-rising standard of living to the entire human race, we must not only act collectively at work, but in all spheres of life―and we must do so consciously, rather than unknowingly, as at present.
In order to resolve the contradictions of capitalist production (social labour, private appropriation) and create the conditions for the development of a new, higher and truly human civilisation, we must think and act as a collective.
Socialism therefore puts the needs of the collective above the needs or desires of any single individual. But in doing so, it creates the conditions in which individuals (all individuals and not just a privileged few) are truly able to flourish and express themselves―supported and valued by their community.
3. Left liberalism: a (petty) bourgeois conscience
Liberalism must not be regarded as something whole and indivisible: it is subdivided into different trends, corresponding to the different strata of the bourgeoisie.
So wrote Stalin in Anarchism or Socialism? So far we have looked at liberalism as a whole. The particular trend within liberalism that we are interested in here is left liberalism. Left liberals, like all liberals, wish to maintain the rule of the bourgeoisie, but they believe that the best way to ensure capitalism’s survival is to try to reform the system’s worst aspects and give it a friendlier face―very often dressed up in socialist terminology in order to make it more acceptable to the working class.
The left and right wings of liberalism in Britain share the same programme, which can be summed up in three words: Save British imperialism. Where their proponents differ is on tactics. The right-wing liberals’ arrogance towards the oppressed workers at home and abroad upsets the left wingers, who have been affected by the progress of the movements for socialism and national liberation of the last century just enough to be embarrassed by such blatantly chauvinist attitudes.
Left liberalism is infused with concepts of guilt and privilege, and puts forward in practice a programme of conscience-salving activities. It is particularly characteristic of a certain section of the labour aristocracy (better-off, more privileged workers), some of the more altruistic members of the petty bourgeoisie and even a miniscule section of the bourgeoisie―that is, of those among the privileged classes who have become aware of the fact that the unequal distribution of wealth in society has in some way benefited them (by giving them a better education, for example, and access to well-paid jobs and better housing), and who wish somehow that amends could be made (so long, of course, as such restitution doesn‘t affect their own elevated position).
Left liberalism informs the ideology of a minority of the Labour party―its left wing―and of left Labour’s various ‘left’ hangers-on such as the Trotskyites and revisionists. From the left-liberal standpoint, it is entirely respectable to criticise the worst aspects and abuses of capitalist imperialism, but only if the solutions on offer (if any are offered at all) are those which do not threaten the system of capitalist production. Any attempt to look beyond capitalism’s limits is absolutely out of bounds, as is any serious suggestion that those limits are anything but inevitable and eternal.
Trotskyism may have begun its life as a variant of socialism, but it degenerated very rapidly into a tool of the bourgeoisie for promoting imperialist ideas and goals under the guise of seemingly Marxist phraseology. Today it represents merely the extreme left wing of the bourgeois political spectrum at best, and a state-sponsored provocation at worst.
Socialism, on the other hand, is not a part of this spectrum at all. Marxism―scientific socialism―is the political ideology of the proletariat (propertyless wage-workers), the class whose interests are entirely opposed to those of the bourgeoisie.[5]
Socialism is based on historical and economic science, and is guided by materialist philosophy―an understanding that matter is primary, and that our ideas are a reflection of material reality, which exists outside of and irrespective of our imagination. Left liberalism, to the extent that it puts forward any programme of action to its followers, is based on emotion and individualism, and is guided by idealist philosophy―the belief that ideas are primary and that material reality exists only in so far as we believe in it.
As the ideology of the rising class―the class that is destined to take over the running of society in the interests of all humanity―Marxism is the ideology of the future, filled with energy and optimism, and infused with an unshakeable conviction that workers have the ability to conquer all challenges and raise humanity out of the filth and degradation that has been the inevitable by-product of all advance during the period of class societies.
Left liberalism, on the other hand, has no faith in the workers and only the most depressed vision of humanity’s future. It is pessimistic through and through and believes the venality and corruption of bourgeois society to be an expression of base human nature, rather than an inevitable product of a particular social system.[6]
Left liberalism (usually characterised by Marxists as opportunism: the ditching of the long-term aims of the working class for real or imagined short-term gains), is in its own way also grounded in material reality―namely, in the privileges that its representatives draw from the continued existence of imperialism; in the superprofits made by the imperialist ruling class. The fundamental programme of these opportunists―that capitalism can be reformed to become ‘fairer’ and more equitable―is pure idealism (ie, it is entirely imaginary).
In order to present a programme that seems to be plausible, however, left liberals promote the idea that the job of political activists is first and foremost to change the attitudes of individuals. Socialists, on the other hand, strive to change the economic and social system that creates and shapes those attitudes.
It is left-liberal opportunism that people have in mind when they think of a ‘leftie’―a (probably vegan) do-gooder who combines a patronising attitude towards those less enlightened than himself with a desire to ‘fix’ the system through a combination of lecturing, hectoring, charitable works and reforms.
With the development of monopoly capitalism and the ever-increasing concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands, the ruling class is becoming an ever-tinier minority of the population. This being the case, it must work hard to keep devising ways to divide the working class against itself so as to maintain its rule.
Its agents in the working-class movement and in the universities work incessantly to corrupt Marxism―the principal weapon of the working class in organising against capitalist rule―and to both denude it of its revolutionary content and separate it entirely from the mass of the workers.
The ruling class knows, as the workers do not, just what a threat their organisation under the banner of Marxist science would represent to decaying capitalist rule.
Identity politics have provided some of the principal levers used by the bourgeoisie over the last four decades to effect divisions within the working class and undermine the movement for socialism.
The aims of identity politics do not transcend the boundaries of capitalism. Instead of fighting against the system that creates inequality, the root cause of most of our problems, the petty-bourgeois elements in the ‘left-wing’ movement are forever directing workers’ energies into the harmless channels of obsession with various one-point programmes. Having gone through bourgeois feminism and black separatism, their latest obsession is to promote the ideology of ‘LGBT+’. Left-liberal opportunists might see and even criticise the excesses and obscenities of moribund capitalist imperialism, but their limited horizons interpret these not as systemic failings, but as mere unfairness, which must be addressed first and foremost by somehow ‘levelling the playing field’.
The fact that this goal (if it were really to apply to everyone) is entirely unreachable within capitalist society does not persuade the exponents of ‘fair play’ to think again. The demand for ‘equal rights’ within capitalism shows the absolute limit of the left-liberal mindset. An inability either to understand the roots of the present economic system, or to really imagine anything beyond it stops such people from understanding what is blindingly obvious to any right-thinking worker: the capitalist system is not capable of treating people equally.
For every person who does well, there will always be a hundred or a thousand or a hundred thousand who do not―not because of any intrinsic weakness in their character, or lack of application or natural ability, but because the opportunity is simply not there in a competitive anarchic system of production for profit.
Even if every single person in capitalist society had an equally fantastic education, including valuable work experience, cultural development and postgraduate training, there would still be an army of unemployed workers―only now this army would be a well-educated one, and new excuses would have to be found for its existence.
If every single person in capitalist society took their fantastic education and a pot of money in order to start a small business, only one in a thousand would be able to get that business off the ground even for a year, never mind making it profitable in the long term―again, not because of any intrinsic weakness in their character, or lack of application or natural ability, but because the possibility for every business to succeed is simply not there. Not only are there not business opportunities for all, there are not even employment opportunities for all―the pool of the unemployed being as fundamental to the workings of capitalism as workers and bosses; as capital itself.[7]
In a world where jobs and opportunities are rationed―a world where workers are forced into constant competition with one another―every advantage of birth, education, gender, skin colour, etc can play its part in the outcome for any individual. It is this luck-of-the-draw randomness in the allocation of life chances under capitalism that is so uncomfortable for workers of all backgrounds to live with. The enormous part played by chance in determining our place in the social hierarchy often sits especially uneasily with those who happen to have fallen on the ‘lucky’ side.
While claiming (and perhaps even believing) to be acting in a most ‘democratic’ and ‘socialist’ way, the petty-bourgeois opportunists are only falling into the trap that has been laid for them by the bourgeoisie. It is perfectly right, of course, to oppose institutional discrimination on grounds of race, sex, nationality, religion, age or sexual orientation. Such discrimination offends against our humanitarian feelings precisely because it creates unnecessary divisions in the working class and prevents it from uniting against its common enemy. But it is thoroughly reactionary to elevate this opposition into a one-point programme that trumps all other questions and serves only to further exacerbate the divisions between workers.
For those who have been born into more than their ‘fair share’ of the world’s wealth and resources, there are three main responses to the situation in which they find themselves. They can either:
1. Deny that luck is involved at all, and come up with other justifications for their good fortune in life. This is what leads to the assertion that we live in a ‘meritocracy’, for example (an argument favoured by those whose superior education and family connections gives them access to the best-paid jobs). It also leads to the commonly expressed view of the upper classes (usually, but not always, in private) that the mass of poorer workers are by nature simply not fit for anything other than menial work.
2. Feel guilty and find some conscience-salving activity to engage in: charitable or other ‘good works’, campaigns for political reform, etc.
3. Recognise that there is no solution to the problem within capitalism and join the movement for socialist revolution, knowing that while we cannot choose what we are born into, we can certainly choose what we do with the start we have been given and with whatever resources we have access to.
4. How did we get here?
As Black Agenda Report’s Bruce A Dixon pointed out in his three-part series on the dead end of so-called ‘intersectionalism’ (the fashionable academic term for identity politics):
If we‘re not asking and answering the question how can we take power, we‘re wasting our own and other people’s time and energy.[8]
For the bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeois identity politics have proven extremely useful. Under the cover of Marxian phraseology, they have been smuggled into the working-class movement, taking advantage of the ideological retreat of socialism that came with the triumph and advance of revisionism.
As the communist movement lost its theoretical foundations and firm leadership (from 1953 onwards, following the death of Stalin and the takeover of the Soviet and international communist leadership by revisionists), it retreated―slowly at first but then in complete disarray (from 1991, following the complete collapse of the revisionist Soviet Union), so that petty-bourgeois left-liberal trends such as Trotskyism, anarchism and identity politics found fertile ground on which to grow, and have joined forces to the extent that, as far as the masses are concerned, there appears to be a total consensus on ‘the left’ about the correctness of taking an individual approach to key social questions such as racism and women’s oppression, and of taking a lead from bourgeois academia in framing our understanding of these issues.
Precisely because they divert workers away from the struggle for state power, the founders of our party have been fighting identity politics―along with other bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas in the working-class movement―ever since they came to Marxism back in the late 1960s. At the same time as fighting pro-imperialist Trotskyism in the anti-Vietnam war movement, and pro-imperialist revisionism in the communist movement, these comrades fought pro-capitalist bourgeois feminism in the then newly emerging women’s movement. From the 1970s onwards, while continuing the fight against revisionism and Trotskyism, they fought against pro-imperialist black nationalism and fake ‘antifascism’ in the anti-racist movement.
The histories of some of these struggles are documented in the books Marxism and the Emancipation of Women (Ed Ella Rule, 2000) and Bourgeois Nationalism or Proletarian Internationalism? (Harpal Brar, 1998), both of which are essential reading for all comrades who are serious about mastering the theory and tactics of the struggle for socialism.
Notes
[1] Quick definitions:
Identity politics: a political approach based on prioritising issues perceived as most relevant to a restricted racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, social, cultural or other identity, and forming political alliances with others on this basis and irrespective of social class.
Class politics: the politics of working people, based on a recognition of the individual’s underlying social relationship with the means of production irrespective of their racial, religious, ethnic, sexual, social, cultural or other identity.
* Workers, at the mercy of their employers, have a common class interest, and struggle for better conditions of life and employment within the capitalist system. They also struggle to end exploitative class society altogether and replace it with socialism, which will abolish private ownership of the means of production, thereby doing away with class antagonisms and exploitation.
Hence the Marxist slogan: ‘Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to win!’
[2] GV Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism, Section XV, 1907.
[3] ‘Marxism and revisionism’ by VI Lenin, April 1908, Collected Works, Volume 15.
[4] K Marx and F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848.
[5] There is much confusion these days about what it means to be ‘propertyless’. The ruling class has deliberately promoted the idea that having a few shares in British Gas or owning their own home (with or without an onerous mortgage) gives someone a ‘stake in the system’ and counts as ‘property’. But in the Marxist sense, property means wealth someone is able to use as capital in order to live by exploiting others. A home someone lives in, even if they nominally ‘own’ it, is certainly not ‘property’ in this sense!
In essence, a proletarian is a wage-worker who must sell himself by the hour, day, week etc in order to get money for survival and who has no other means of support.
[6] The concept of ‘human nature’ is another one that has been the subject of much obfuscation by the ruling class. It is endlessly repeated, for example, that socialism is impossible because it ‘goes against human nature’―humans ‘self-evidently’ being selfish and greedy.
The Marxist understanding of human nature is that man’s beliefs about what is ‘natural’ for humans has changed with every change in the mode of production. While primitive communist tribes considered it to be human nature that people should share and cooperate, class societies have all in various ways described human nature as being something quite different.
It is unsurprising that for many people born into and shaped by an economic system that rewards sociopathic behaviours, it should indeed appear ‘self-evident’ that humans are inherently selfish and must therefore be unsuitable material out of which to build a communistic society.
The truth, however, is that we are shaped as much by our environment as by our genetics. Indeed, our genetics themselves are responsive to our environment. The experience of the USSR and other socialist countries has been that the behaviours which people routinely exhibit (and which therefore appear to reflect their ‘nature’) change very quickly once their environment has been changed. Without the insecurity and competition of life under capitalism, the true extent of our innate selfishness is seen to be far less than has been traditionally supposed by upholders of the ‘capitalism is merely a reflection of human nature’ theory.
Our true essence as human beings, that which remains no matter what society we are part of, will only become clear when we are freed from the fetters of class hierarchies and exploitation. But that the humans of the future are more likely to resemble those of our primitive communistic past (whose existence accounts for the overwhelming majority of human history) can perhaps by deduced from the plethora of mental and physical illness that plagues people in western societies in which all bonds of community and meaningful human connection are breaking down. No amount of cash and no mountain of stuff, it appears, can satisfy the basic human need for a social place and social meaning.
[7] See K Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 1867, Chapter 25.
[8] ‘Are intersectionalism or Afro-pessimism paths to power? Probably not’ by BA Dixon, Black Agenda Report, 16 February 2018.