Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor at Novara Media, has this year published her first book, Minority Rule, with the provocative subheading “Adventures in the Culture Wars”. Novara Media was founded in 2011 and rose to prominence in the wake of the student movement as an outlet for news and political analysis with an autonomist slant.⁽¹⁾ However, their profile rose considerably during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour Party (2015-2020) as they threw themselves enthusiastically behind his leadership and became some of his most vocal supporters. Since Corbyn’s resignation from the role five years ago, Sarkar and her Novara colleagues have resumed a more critical stance on the party, but have never really recovered politically from their opportunist years. Sarkar describes her politics as “libertarian communist” and her analytical framework as “Marxist”, and is perhaps best known for her irritated outburst on Good Morning Britain in which she declared herself a “communist” and Piers Morgan an idiot.⁽²⁾ In Minority Rule, Sarkar analyses the role of the media over the past few decades in manufacturing and channelling popular outrage, to pit us all against each other and distract us from the real issues at hand. Inevitably, the politics of identity – in both their left and right wing incarnations – play a key role in this history, and this forms a central theme in Sarkar’s investigation.

Identity Politics of the Left

Sarkar’s starting point is a critique of “the left”, which she argues has distorted what she presents as the revolutionary essence of identity politics into a liberal aberration, resulting in a counter-productive, individualist turn in recent years. Sarkar recalls various experiences in the leftist milieu where attempts at organising were derailed by “oppression olympics”, and presents a general trend that the obsession with personal experience and victimhood have played an actively destructive role in collective projects; this she contrasts with groups like the Combahee River Collective (CRC) and the Black Panther Party (BPP).⁽³⁾ Returning to the CRC statement (written in 1974, published in 1977) which coined the term “identity politics”, Sarkar argues that their original intention was collective, socialist, and revolutionary. Comparing this to the identity politics of the left today, Sarkar draws out three key noxious ideas prevalent in the latter: the primacy of “lived experiences”, the insistence on “irreducible difference”, and the undisputed assumption of “competing interests” (p.32). The ideas that our interests are at odds with each other on the basis of our various identity categories, and that our differences matter more than that which we have in common as workers, are indeed destructive to solidarity, and Sarkar is obviously quite right to point this out. What’s more, as Sarkar notes, the favouring of “lived experience” as pre-eminent has led to the creation of “social capital out of suffering”, creating “a perverse incentive to hold onto our victimhood, rather than change the conditions that created it” (p.65).

However, Sarkar’s claim that these tendencies represent a deviation from what she considers to be the revolutionary kernel of identity politics is on far shakier ground. In the case of the CRC, that this was their intention may be true enough, as they write about the necessity of “the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy”.⁽⁴⁾ They “often [found] it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression” because for black women at the time, these were “most often experienced simultaneously”. Hence they draw on the “political contribution[s]” of the feminist and anti-racist movements, maybe most significantly the idea that “the personal is political”. As assertions of the primacy of individual experience go, this is pretty unambiguous; they “spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression” and thus these experiences became the main basis of their politics. What’s more, somewhat bafflingly for a self-described “Marxist”, Sarkar allows the CRC’s claim that Marx and Engels’ writing “conceive[d] of the working class as ‘merely raceless, sexless workers’” to go unchallenged. The need to address the particular ways in which certain sections of the working class are oppressed is paramount, and obvious enough; indeed, Marx and Engels themselves recognised this in their own analysis, as they repeatedly indicated the specific ways in which women or migrants were exploited in their time, and the dynamics of this within the wider working class.⁽⁵⁾

And within Marxism, we find theoretical tools far more apt to the task of opposing these oppressions than the fairly basic idea of “simultaneity”; we understand that these oppressions are not just coincident with one another, but products of the same historic process: the development of class society. Sarkar addresses this to a certain extent later on but only with respect to the concept of race, which she describes as a “technology” developed for the express purpose of justifying slavery and colonialism, and later perpetuated for the purpose of dividing the working class (p.237).

Furthermore, as we’ve seen over the past century or so, assimilation of minority groups has become as key a tool as marginalisation in the ruling class’ survival kit. Though the experience of marginalisation can push someone to adopt revolutionary perspectives, by itself there is nothing inherently revolutionary in being of a minority identity. So today, it is quite possible to be, for example, both a black lesbian and a CEO. It is for this reason that the argument from identity leads naturally to reformist dead-ends (single issue campaigns, demands for representation, etc.); and it is for this reason that any attempt to rescue “identity politics” from reformism is fundamentally misguided. The individualist, reformist, essentially the bourgeois, development of identity politics is then no aberration from the essence of identity politics, but its logical conclusion. And it is for these reasons that the basis for addressing the specific oppression and exploitation to which various sections of the working class are subjected can only be that of independent working class politics; not some pluralist, opportunist concession to cross-class and sectional politics whose aim is assimilation and reform.

Imperialism

Given this inherent tendency towards reformism, it is inevitable that the logical endpoint for identity politics should be its adoption by the capitalist class to legitimise its rule, and although (as we will soon see) Sarkar’s analysis of why this happens falls short, she is right to point out the capitalist hypocrisy here. She refers to the examples of Coca Cola and the CIA, among others, embracing intersectionality in their training and marketing, and points out the irony of Coca Cola acknowledging the ongoing lack of clean water in Flint, Michigan while profiting from the same problem in Chiapas, Mexico; of the CIA advertising itself as anti-discriminatory while the US and its client states drop bombs indiscriminately on their geopolitical opponents. This problem Sarkar names imperialism, and she is not wrong to do so.

However, Sarkar’s, or at least this book’s, understanding of “imperialism” reads as limited to the imperialist policy of the UK and US and their allies. Imperialism though is not just the policy of one state or bloc of states; it is the phase of the world capitalist system within which all states have had to operate for over a century now, and the inexorable motive force of all foreign policy of states on all sides. It would be foolish and not a little patronising to presume that Sarkar, a veteran of the left since the student movement and self-described Marxist, is unaware of the methodology elaborated by Marx and Engels, and later developed into the theory of imperialism by Bukharin and Lenin.⁽⁶⁾ But this makes their omission from Minority Rule’s criticism of imperialism all the more frustrating, because it would explain far more satisfactorily a lot of the problems she identifies.

For example, the current tendency wherein the means of production and distribution are being concentrated and centralised in the hands of fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger organisations (like Amazon, Google, Meta and so on) is described as a “feudalistic turn” (à la Varoufakis) towards “[not] privatisation [but] enclosure” (pp.258-60). But this tendency towards monopoly ownership with increasing financialisation, speculation, and involvement of the state are not obscure to Marxists; it is exactly what has defined capitalist’s imperialist epoch for more than a century. It bears insisting upon not for the sake of dogmatism, but because it is crucial to our understanding of how the forces that immiserate and oppress the working class are the selfsame forces propelling the global drive to war. This more complete definition of “imperialism” reveals those economic developments to be not a regression in terms of the mode of production, but a step forward, further into the abyss to which this system condemns us.

Identity Politics of the Right

But criticism of “the left” is not where Minority Rule ends – nor indeed is it what makes up most of the book. Instead, having dealt with the inadequacy of the left’s response to the media’s culture wars, Sarkar then traces the issue back to how the right wing of capital concocts them in the first place through both “legacy media” and social media. From here she segues into an examination of the illusions and fallacies underlying various right wing talking points and why they have gained so much traction among the general populace. Contrary to the way it has been marketed (something over which Sarkar’s control is obviously limited), this actually takes up most of the body of Minority Rule, and, without the first chapter, would have much broader relevance in its analysis and message (though the language and humour of social media ‘discourse’ Sarkar frequently adopts can be off-putting). Besides the odd diversity and inclusiveness training, broadened to many workplaces and with increasingly perplexing content, most working class people do not come into anywhere near as much contact with the debates around intersectionality as with the right wing talking points that, as Sarkar shows competently, flood our consciousness on a continual basis.

Sarkar’s second central thesis then amounts to this: the culture wars are a product of the media, orchestrated by the capitalist class, and in particular its right wing, to channel our discontent down blind alleys and convince us that the problem is each other, not them and their system. As she has put it in various promo clips and interviews, we are being ruled by an elite minority – just not the one we’ve been told about. Sarkar sketches out the experience of the working class in the UK over the past forty years or so – the defeat of the wave of class struggle, the dismantling of British heavy industry and the welfare state, the gradual shift towards small-scale ownership of property and businesses, etc. – and charts how capitalists, but particularly the right wing of capital and its media (in power as they have been for the majority of this time, though here she understates the role that capital’s left wing has played) have orchestrated this process to suit their economic and political interests. This has resulted in an exponentially fractured working class resentful and suspicious of each other.

As Sarkar shows, by systematically undermining the working class’ solidarity amongst itself, the capitalist class have sown the seeds of distraction which they now reap in abundance in the form of culture wars between the identity politics of the right and the left. To illustrate this, Sarkar takes us on a whistlestop tour of recent moral panics on issues such as migration and gender identity. She also lays bare the mainstream media’s shift wherein British working class people, once derided and dismissed as “chavs”, now make up the “white working class” to be defended from made-up threats (migrants, trans people, etc.). Having drawn back the curtain to expose the charlatans pulling furiously at the multiplex levers of their illusion machine, Sarkar rightly emphasises that it is the working class as a whole, on both sides of the invented divides of these moral panics, who are worse off for being divided against each other. Attacks on pay and conditions introduced against migrant workers first are then spread to encompass white British workers too; attacks on healthcare dressed up as combatting “gender ideology” inevitably impact healthcare for cis and trans people alike.

Sarkar also notes how new technological developments in social media have been instrumental in this process in recent years in the way that they have monopolised our attention and thoughts to an unprecedented degree. Since Marx and Engels noted that, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”, the nature of the capitalist class’ enduring dominance over our very thoughts has evolved significantly. In Marx and Engels’ day, this dominance was attributable in no small part to the fact that basic literacy among the poor and working class was a relatively recent phenomenon, and any education above that was the more or less exclusive preserve of the wealthy. In the 180 intervening years, literacy rates have risen across the globe, and mass media has proliferated, first in the form of syndicated journalism, then in the form of social media. The latter, Sarkar writes, has “partially, but dramatically, democratised the public sphere”, and the effects of this have been “both wondrous and deeply depressing” (p.83). Yet the fact that this “democratisation” has occurred within the framework of capitalism is crucial, because like with any capitalist “democratisation”, the promise of equal participation in the social sphere is at odds with the reality of how the interests of capital are constantly manipulating the weight of various participants’ influence.

Capitalist Crisis

Again, though, the nature of the crisis inherent to capitalism’s functioning is missing from Sarkar’s explanation, and it means we are largely left with the impression that these policies and tactics find their origins in the ill will of successive right wing and centrist governments. But again, this is consistent with the laws of motion of capitalism: as profit rates decline, the capitalist class must come up with ways to offset this tendency while shifting as much of the cost onto the working class as possible, in both economic and consequently social terms. Periodic economic crises involving unemployment, impoverishment and misery for the working class are an inevitable part of capitalism’s existence. In capitalism’s imperialist phase the wholesale destruction of capital infrastructure required to kickstart new cycles of accumulation has ultimately demanded war: world war. Today we are living at the tail-end of capitalism’s third global accumulation cycle. Hence heavy industry has been dismantled in capitalist centres and shifted abroad to its peripheries where wage-labour is cheaper (and organic composition of capital lower); hence the downward pressure on wages relative to inflation everywhere; hence the scaling back of social support for working class people at the same time that wages contract and jobs disappear. That is not to say that those governments’ policies and tactics have had no hand to play, but that they have been an expression of capitalist crisis rather than its cause. Just once, in the introduction, does Sarkar acknowledge that capitalism tends towards crisis at all, where she describes this tendency as “an insatiable need for new markets” (p.7). But this need for new markets, certainly a feature of capitalism’s in-built crisis, is not its core motive force. As Marx and Engels identified, most notably in the third volume of Capital, this motive force is the tendential fall in the rate of profit, of which capital’s never-ending search for “new markets” is a symptom, not a synonym. If this sounds pedantic, its consequences are significant for our understanding of how the capitalist system functions, and what the remedy for this crisis is.

For example, Sarkar rightly identifies the nostalgia for the period following the Second World War, the hey-day of British Social Democracy, as a pernicious illusion. But elsewhere she describes the problem of “class inequalities between rich and poor” as “quite straightforward to solve” – and then rattles off a list of suggestions with no perceptible distinction from the Keynesianism that defined that era (“if you’re willing to tax wealth, fund welfare and public services, squeeze profits and drive up wages”, p.198). Little more than a throwaway comment, it is nevertheless a telling moment, not because this is what Sarkar means by “communism” (we assume it is not), but because it betrays a cart-before-horse misconception of how and why any kind of concessionary reforms are introduced, and indeed how and why the left wing parties that promise them are selected to govern, in the first place.

The failure of Corbynism casts a long shadow for this reason, and although her criticism of Starmer’s Labour government and Blair’s before it is fairly uncompromising, Sarkar’s analysis of the Corbyn movement’s demise is largely limited to errors of strategy and insurmountable opposition by the rest of the political spectrum. And although Sarkar all but admits that she and her Novara colleagues pursued a fundamentally opportunist strategy during these years, her evaluation of this period is limited to the fact that it was naïve and ultimately unsuccessful. But then, it would seem equally naïve on our part to expect any honest reckoning from Sarkar and Novara with the role they have played and continue to play in reinforcing confusions and illusions in the capitalist left.

It is hardly surprising then that Minority Rule is no break from leftism; that is, from reformism. For all Sarkar has described herself at various times throughout the book (and her career) as a “communist”, she scarcely offers any specific idea of what this means or could be done about the real problems she has identified. And while in Minority Rule Sarkar does seem to attempt to pose the problem as one of the capitalist system as such, the actual political content of her arguments lead inevitably back down the blind alley of reform. The importance of struggles to improve the conditions of our life is not nil. The defence and improvement of our living conditions is of course important; it is through these struggles that the working class must relearn and rediscover its collective power, to understand and express its common interest as a class by defending itself against capitalist attacks, and eventually move from the defensive to the offensive. But it is an error to see these struggles as ends in and of themselves, when, as history from distant to recent has shown, the capitalist class will revoke these reforms as easily as they grant them, as their interests dictate. Today their interests more and more clearly indicate that arms spending is to take priority over wages and welfare. It is in these experiences of struggle that the working class comes to understand its position in capitalist society, and the historic mission that this unique position affords it; namely, that of the gravediggers of the capitalist system itself.

With the context of those aforementioned illusions in the left wing of capital, it is understandable that Sarkar would complain that politics has “become a spectator sport” (p.12). But the fact is, all “democracy” within the scope of the capitalist system is no more nor less than “democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich”, as Lenin aptly put it in The State and Revolution, and involves the working class delegating away our power to people, and to bodies, which claim to represent us, but which in fact work in the interests of that class which exploits us, the capitalist class. So if we are to speak positively of “democracy”, we must be explicit and precise about proletarian democracy, which has nothing in common with the bourgeois pantomime. We must mean the working class exercising power actively and directly through its own independent organs of class rule, historically discovered within the experience of self-organised mass class struggle – mass assemblies, strike committees, and ultimately workers’ councils (or soviets).

As a brief history of manufactured outrage in modern media, the kernel of Minority Rule contains little to disagree with. This stands too for her argument that the solution is not to wade into the culture war to try to beat the right at their own game, but to reject their talking points and set our own agenda based on our common interests, and to combat division not with more division but with solidarity. Unfortunately, its merits are inextricable from its weaknesses because the whole point of the book is the politics and strategy of “the left”. As communists, we are not part of the “left”, but rather part of the working class; more specifically, we are part of that minority of the class which has come to understand the need for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society and the class which rules it, and the construction of a new society free of classes, states and money in its stead. This society we call communism, and it has nothing in common with the state capitalist monstrosities of the USSR, China, nor any other nation state that has built up its edifice on the blood and sweat of the working class in the name of our liberation. This society, brought about by revolutionary means, must ultimately encompass the whole world or else it is doomed to fail. And so this revolution must be led by the working class, organised by our own self-initiative and on our own independent terrain, united across the arbitrary lines of difference drawn by our exploiters – race, gender, sexuality, religion and every other one they come up with – to pit us against each other.

Notes:

(1) The name Novara comes from the Italian city in the Piedmont region, the setting of the 1971 film The Working Class Goes to Heaven, directed by Elio Petri.

(2) Though we may disagree on the meaning of “communism”, we concur with the latter claim.

(3) A similar argument was put forward by Asad Haider in his 2018 book Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, which we reviewed at the time, criticising the legacy of Stalinism that hangs over the CRC and BPP. leftcom.org

(4) The CRC statement is available here: americanstudies.yale.edu

(5) See for example the comments on black slavery and Irish migrants in Marx’s Capital and Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England. For an analysis of the historical roots of women’s oppression, see Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

(6) See Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy and Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.