ON CONSCIOUSNESS AND IDENTITY

IN DEFENCE OF ASH SARKER'S "MINORITY RULE" AND LEO LEOPOLD'S "WAR ON WALL STREET."

Watching Novera Media, recently, I was impressed by Ash Sarker promoting her new book, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture Wars. I’m fairly sure that I’ve met Ash before, at one of the Media Reform Coalition events that I attend annually but was immediately struck by what she had to say about the Left’s embrace of identity politics as a substitute for the politics of class warfare. Although she didn’t reference the roots of this in Stalinism she did portray it as a symptom of the disconnection between a largely middle class and culture fixated Left and the core of the working class itself. More especially, she seemed to grasp how the use of the popular front-ist strategy Gramsci’s “war of position” has been far more effectively appropriated by the new fascism than by the left itself and is in fact the key to its success and a big part of why the new fascism seems to be winning at this time.

Although the present situation is both depressing and, in Ash’s words “scary,” the fact that someone with no lived experience of the class warfare I remember, from the 1980s, or the struggle against Stalinism prior to its demise, who was never in a democratic centralist party or Anti Fascist Action, is coming to the same conclusion as people like the crusty and embittered 61 year old former Trotskyist writing these very words. I was even more impressed when I read Les Leopold’s piece on his War on Wall Street site, making a similar argument and then responding positively to my own comments. Despite (and maybe because of) the dire historical consequences in which we find ourselves, the Left is finally wising up to the challenge.

The key issue both in Leo’s article and in Ash’s pod-cast and book concerns the sheer poverty of identity politics as against the need to raise class consciousness, which is in fact the key historical and political issue of our time. In the 1980s, particularly but not exclusively due to the defeat of the miners’ strike and political labour movement in the UK, an alienated, defeated and demoralised working class became disconnected from its own history of struggle. This paved the way (via the collapse of the USSR which was mis-recognised as a failure of socialism) for the Age of the Spectacle as predicted by De Bord. We now live in the age of the weaponised Spectacle and this is key to the rise of the new fascism at this time.

For Marx the distinction between a class against capital (identity) and a class for itself (class consciousness) was crucial, as exemplified in the Paris Manuscripts of 1944 as well as the Grundrisse. This explains why the issue of alienation (repudiated by Stalinists since Althusser) was so crucial to Marx’s unfinished project, as recognised by the Frankfurt School and De Bord.

For Trotsky, writing in 1938, the crisis of humanity was concentrated in the crisis of leadership of the working class because millions of workers regarded themselves as revolutionary communists. This is to say that there was a revolutionary crisis that is sadly lacking today. Nowadays, as Hillel Ticktin anticipated, the crisis of humanity is concentrated in the crisis of working class consciousness. This explains how the New Fascism is on the rise, occupying territory and layers of the working class who SHOULD be a natural constituency for revolutionary Marxism. It further builds on the defeats of the 1980s, the legacy and failure of the dead hand of Stalinism and the final failure of neo-liberal capitalism in absence of a strong revolutionary alternative, now that there is insufficient surplus value to sustain accumulation and the whole stinking edifice of capitalism has finally run out of road.

Meanwhile, as both Ash and Leo seem to grasp, it wasn't the new fascists who made a fetish of identity politics at the expense of the politics of class but a Stalinised Left that had inherited the failed strategy of the popular front. In particular, they had inherited from Gramsci the bankrupt notion of the war of position and the perverse idea (pushed by Althusser and Foucault) that factors other than political economy feed the superstructure. What we’ve since seen, since the Greek Syriza government capitulated on austerity, is that the new fascism is far more adept at the war of position than a well meaning layer of soft-left social liberals living in middle class Hanpstead, that is increasingly the sociological constituency of the middle class Left in the UK.

We have already seen this with the BREXIT vote, irrespective of the manipulations exposed e.g. by Carole Cadwalladr and that I have referenced in previous more detailed sub-stack posts. We saw it with the rehearsal for the new fascism that was Trump Mark One as well as in the coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Now, as Carole Cadwalladr tells us, we’ve seen a real and more effective fascist coup in the US enabling similar trends throughout Europe, including Britain, and the barbarians are well and truly at the gate.

A core issue, clearly identified by both Ash and Leo, is that a well meaning but increasingly middle class Left appears (or can be made to appear) indifferent to the concerns of the core of the working class, particularly the white, male, heterosexual working class, as framed by the Spectacle and the new rules of the manufacture of consent. It is this fact, grotesque that it is, that enables vile populist millionaires from Farage to Le Pen and Trump, and the still more dangerous Tech Oligarchs (like Musk) who provide their real social base, to project the myth that they represent "the common man."

Does that mean that we start to adapt to a fascist agenda, like Starmer and Cooper, framing immigrants and small boats as a problem category, defending or enacting racist immigration policies or even claiming that there are "legitimate" concerns about immigration (when there are no?) In my view, absolutely not! Nor do we abandon women's rights, such as those to abortion and the rights of gays, trans-people and other vulnerable layers of society. However, rather than framing this as elitist middle class "woke," we need to link it to core issues of class, the crisis of capitalism, and the historical necessity (as referenced by Rosa Luxembourg) for the class to conquer state power and lay the foundation for socialism through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

As an example, the struggle against fascism is without doubt the most important issue of our time and will require the formation of anti-fascist militia linked to councils of action backed by the trade unions as in the General Strike in France in 1968. These must draw in other important layers of resistance including environmental activists and squatters movements and come to form a parallel state along the lines of a Workers Government as envisaged by Leon Trotsky in 1968. But this will only be possible if we engage with a housing crisis that is not caused by immigrants and small boats but by the capitalist property market and property ladder that must be abolished, the whole property and building sector nationalised (without compensation) and a ban on private house building until social housing is available for all.

Then we'll see how much the Farage's of this world and the paedophile rapist who is Adolf Hitler's stunt double, currently residing in the White House, actually speak up for the "common man."

Minority Rule by Ash Sarker is published by Bloomsbury and has been praised by Naomi Klein (among others).